For more and more Americans, the other side isn’t merely misguided in the extreme. It’s
evil in the absolute, and virtue is measured by the starkness with which that evil is labeled
and reviled. There are emotional satisfactions to this. There is also a terrible price.
Liars always become very touchy when confronted with their falsehoods. They will inevitably attack there accusers with more
lies to make them look bad. This is a fundamental reflex all liars respond to critics with. "I'm not lying, you are!" Those who
want to believe the real liar love this response, because it gives them an excuse not to investigate if the accuser may be right.
Then they can just turn on the accuser and blame them for false accusation – without the slightest proof, of course.
The capacity to disseminate misinformation, in order to paint the
opposition in wildly negative light, suppressing any rebuttal is now standard tactic of US MSM. It allows sharp polarization of the electorate,
the classic "divide and conquer" strategy.
Over the past decade in
particular, the internet and social media have changed the game. They speed people to like-minded
warriors and give them the impression of broader company or sturdier validation than really exist.
The fervor of those in the anti-vaccine movement exemplifies this.
Admirers can now coalesce quickly (like was the case during Sanders run), but
the same is true for the opposite side. The Web becomes worldwide Hyde Park, where everyone shows up with his/her personal opinions,
convictions, and, of course, truth.
But Web sites with forums of likeminded people create echo camera effect, “create a whole new
permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once unthinkable...” If
words can inspire, then they can also incite or debase. As the result, people are surrendering
restraint and a socially important thing called tact. And this "verbal extremism" guarantees to
widen the divisions between us.
That’s true whether those words are spoken from the right or from the
left, and the monetization of partisan combat spans the ideological spectrum.
George Orwell’s “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” said that for him, “history stopped in 1936,” because it was there, in Spain,
that he discovered for the first time “newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts.”
It was there that he sensed that “the very concept of objective truth,” ruined by propaganda. more modern form including
"mathiness" -- miring the obvious in a miasma of charts and graphs
Another interesting effect of Web is that now it is not necessary to suppress somebody opinion expressed say in the article on
the Web. now it is enough to remove it from Google and couple of other popular search engines.
Also valid, valuable opinions became diluted in tremendous amount of "junk" - irrelevant or clearly erroneous information
generated on the Web. If one read attentively Guardian forums (which are one of the most high quality forums on the Web), one
can state that there is 5% or less commenters who really know the subject they are talking about; often better/deeper then the
author of the article they discuss. But to find them one need to browse pages of irrelevant comments.
Discrediting the opponent as a favorite tactic of neoliberals
Whataboutismis a nickname MSM have given that dirty the tactic of discrediting the
opponent, when the opponent questions the USA objectivity because it committed similar or worse
crimes in the past. Which, of course, if nor deprive, but greatly diminish the USA status as an
objective judge.
Neoliberal channels are ready to come up with numerous conspiracy theories, painting the
opponent, especially Russia, as ruthless canning opportunists, devoid of any moral principles. But, unfortunately, this is true about the USA too.
The key idea of this cynical post-modern media strategy, perfected by neoliberal political technologists
is to block/suppress/dilute all opposing views in the "neoliberal noise" (like air dominance in war
the US MSM practice full airwave dominance). That's why Putin interview is edited in such a wya as
to hide any substantial criticism of the US policy. And not only Putin. This is a universal
strategy of deciet. Its
goal of the US MSM is to confuse what’s true with what’s not, to the point that the truth vanishes. What it
undeniable is that over the past year neoliberals created an artificial reality that matches or
exceed the one that existed in the USSR. Along with demonization Russia they also greatly succeeded
in demonization of Trump.
This color revolution that Clinton and their supporters in several intelligence agencies launched
against Trump in election would be painfully familiar to one who observed , for example, Ukrainian
Orange revolution. Templates are identical. just the goals are different (in case of Orange
revolution delegitimization of elections to the extent that new elections were called; in case of
anti-Trump color revolution the appointment of the Special Prosecutor (aka Grand Inquisitor)
was the goal.
The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's
reuse of the Merkel "quote."
This one detail tells us so much about how propaganda works, and about how it can be defeated. Successful propaganda both depends
upon and seeks to accelerate the erasure of historical memory. This is because its truths are always changing to suit the immediate
needs of the state. None of its truths can be understood historically.
B makes the connection between the documented but forgotten
past "truth" of Merkel's quote and its present reincarnation in the Guardian, and this is really all he *needs* to do.
What b points
out is something quite simple; yet the ability to do this very simple thing is becoming increasingly rare and its exercise increasingly
difficult to achieve. It is for me the virtue that makes b's analysis uniquely indispensable.
Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined
as follows:
"Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has
asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect
our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?"
Whataboutism seems to proclaim that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present,
or future asserted truth.
This is what must be done by free thinkers if they are to counter and reverse the collectivist
nightmare of neoliberalism.
Try to avoid false trick of "shaming" under some artificial labels like communist or
racist: Social justice relies on shaming tactics, usually by slandering
an opponent with a label that does not really apply to him, in order to control his arguments and
behavior. If you don’t care about being called a bigot, a racist, a sexist, a misogynist, a homophobe,
etc., then there is not really much that they can do to you.
Do not self-censor: This does not mean you should go out of your way to be antagonistic
or act like an ass, but the thought police have power only if you give power to them. Say what you
want to say when you want to say it, and do it with a smile. Let the PC police froth and scream until
they have an aneurism. neoliberals are generally weaklings. They avoid physical confrontation like
they avoid logic, so why fear them?
Demand facts to back claims: neoliberals tend to argue on the basis of opinion
rather than fact. Present facts to counter their claims, and demand facts and evidence in return.
Opinions are irrelevant if the person is not willing to present supporting facts when asked.
Do not play the game of "unconscious bias": If social justice cultists can't
counter your position with facts or logic, they will invariably turn to the old standby that you
are limited in your insight because you have not lived in the shoes of a - (insert victim group here).
I agree. In fact, I would point out that this reality of limited perception also applies to
THEM as well. They have not lived in my shoes, therefore they are in no position to claim I
enjoy "privilege" while they do not. This is why facts and evidence are so important, and why
anecdotal evidence and personal feelings are irrelevant where cultural Marxism is concerned.
Let neoliberals know their fears and feelings do not matter: No one is entitled
to have their feelings addressed by others. And, a person’s fears are ultimately unimportant. Whether
the issue is the nonexistent “rape culture” or the contempt neoliberals feel over private gun ownership,
their irrational fears are not our concern. Why should any individual relinquish his liberties in
the name of placating frightened nobodies?
Demand that banksters respect your inherent individual rights: Banksters message is that there is no such thing as inherent rights or liberties and that all rights
are arbitrary and subject to the whims of the group or the state. This is false.
I have
written extensively in the past on inherent rights, inborn psychological contents and natural
law, referencing diverse luminaries, scientists and thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, Carl Gustave
Jung, Steven Pinker, etc., and I welcome readers to study my many articles on individualism.
Freedom is an inborn conception with universally understood aspects. Period. No group or collective
is more important than individual liberty. No artificial society has preeminence over the individuals
within that society. As long as a person is not directly impeding the life, liberty, prosperity and
privacy of another person, he should be left alone.
Maintain your rights as long as they do not hurt other people: PC cultists will invariably
argue that every person, whether he knows it or not, is indirectly harming others with his attitude,
his beliefs, his refusal to associate, even his very breathing. "We live in a society", they
say, "and everything we do affects everyone else...". Don’t take such accusations seriously;
these people do not understand how freedom works.
Say, for instance, hypothetically, that I refuse to bake a gay wedding cake for a couple and I
am accused of violating their rights in the name of preserving my own. I would immediately point
out that no one is entitled to a gay wedding cake, baked by me or anyone else and I have every right
to choose my associations based on whatever criteria I see fit. Now, a corrupt government entity
may claim I do not have that right. But the fact is I do, and no one — not even government — can
force me to bake a cake if I don’t want to. Also, I would point out that the gay couple in question
has every right in a free society to bake their OWN damn cake or open their own cake shop to compete
with mine. This is how freedom works. It is not based on collective entitlement; it is based on personal
responsibility.
Refuse to deny the scientific fact of biological gender: Gender is first and
foremost a genetic imperative. Society only partially determine gender roles; nature does the
most. A man who chops
up his body and takes hormone pills to look like a woman is not and will never be a woman. A woman
who tapes down her breasts and gets a short haircut will never be a man. There is no such thing as
“transgendered” people. No amount of social justice or wishful thinking will ever allow them to reverse
their genetic proclivities. Their psychological and sexual leanings do not change their inborn biological
reality.
By extension, we should refuse to play along with this nonsense. I will never refer to a man in
a wig and dress as a “woman.” I will never refer to a woman with identity issues as “transgendered.”
They are what nature made them, and we should not police our pronouns just to falsely reassure them
that they can deny nature.
Deny both neoliberal idea of "greed is good" and the illusion of Utopian equality:
"Greed is good" proved to be an effective instrument of destruction of the USA society in just 35
years. Now we have "Dis-united States of America." Not the "United States of America." Like
traffic light regulation perform a vital fuinction and removing vital regulations inflict a heavy
price of the society. Opposite is also true: too much regulations also inflict a price.
There is no such thing as pure social equality. It was never achieved in societies that try it,
such as early the USSR. Society is not a homogeneous entity, it is an abstraction built
around a group of unique individuals. Individuals can be naturally gifted, or naturally
challenged. But there will always be some people who are more apt towards success than
others and the success of the society depends of promoting such people to more important
roles. Financial remuneration actually can pray here secondary role, but different in status is
unavoidable. Primates-related concept of 'alpha male" is a precursor to social differentiation in
human societies.
I have no problem whatsoever with the idea of equality of opportunity, which is exactly what we
have in this country (except in the world of elitist finance which is purely driven by nepotism).
I do have a problem with the lie of universal equality through engineered means.
Standards of success should not be lowered in order to accommodate the least skilled people to
facilitate artificial parity. For example, I constantly hear the argument that more people
with victim group status should be given greater representation in positions of influence and regard
within our culture, from science and engineering, to media, to business CEO's, to politics, etc.
The key word here is "given", rather than "earned". There is nothing wrong with one group of
people excelling in a field more than another group, and there is nothing wrong with inequality when
it comes to individual achievement. We must begin refusing to reward people for mediocrity
and punishing success simply because the winners are not part of a designated victim group.
If you are a man, embrace your role: I am a man and cannot claim to know what
specific solutions women should take to counter cultural Marxism. I would love to read an article
written on the subject by a woman in the Liberty Movement. I will say that men in particular
have a considerable task ahead in terms of their personal endeavors if they hope to repair the destruction
of social justice.
For thousands of years, men have been the primary industrial force behind human progress. Today,
they are relegated to cubicles and customer service, to video games and Web fantasies, to drug addictions
and a lack of responsibility. If we have any chance of undoing the damage of cultural Marxism, modern
men must take on their original roles as producers, inventors, entrepreneurs, protectors, builders
and warriors once again. They should do this for their own benefit, and not for the validation of
others.
You don’t have to prove to anyone you do "manly things", just go out and do them. Most importantly,
become dangerous. Men are meant to be dangerous beings. That does not mean we are meant to be indiscriminately
violent (just as women aren’t meant to be indiscriminately violent), but we are supposed to be threatening
to those who would threaten us. Modern society has NOT removed the need for masculinity and I believe
people will begin realizing this the more our culture sinks into economic despair. Train in martial
arts, learn tactical firearms handling, go hunting and don’t take lip from people. In my opinion,
every man should know how to kill things, even if he never plans on using those abilities.
Resist neoliberal brainwashing of your children: It’s simple, if you don’t want your kids propagandized,
if you truly want them to be free from collectivist conditioning, then you will make the sacrifice
and extract them from public schooling. With the introduction of Common Core into U.S. schools in
particular, there is no other recourse but home schooling to prevent the brainwashing of cultural
Marxism. If you do not do this, you are relying on the hope that your children will escape with their
critical thinking abilities intact. Some do, and some don’t. Others turn into mindless social justice
zombies. You can give them an advantage by removing them from a poisonous environment, and that is
what matters.
The insane lie that neoliberals seem to have conned themselves and others into believing is that
their “activism” is somehow anti-establishment. In fact, social justice is constantly coddled
and supported by the establishment.
From politicians to judges to media pundits to the blogosphere, the overwhelming majority of
people in positions of traditional power (even in supposedly conservative circles) have been more
than happy to become the enforcers of the neoliberal agenda (including "fake democratization"
agenda). There is no establishment for the army of enforces of political correctness to
fight; the establishment bias works vastly more in favor of their ideology than any other. Neoliberals ARE the establishment.
Henry Kissinger has said, not unreasonably, that we are in "the foothills" of a cold war
with China. And Vladimir Putin, who nurses an unassuageable grudge about the way the Cold
War ended, seems uninterested in Russia reconciling itself to a role as a normal nation
without gratuitous resorts to mendacity. It is, therefore, well to notice how, day by day,
in all of the globe's time zones, civilized nations are, in word and deed, taking small but
cumulatively consequential measures that serve deterrence.
If arrogance were a deadly disease, George Will would be dead.
George Will has been an
ass clown since I first had the displeasure of watching him in the 1970s. Age has not brought
an ounce of wisdom. Nevertheless, this total lack of self reflection and ability to project
American sins on others is unfortunately not unique to our man George. It seems a habit
throughout the entire US political spectrum. The ability to view, for example, the invasion
of Iraq as perfectly normal behavior, while viewing any resistance to US/Israeli dominance as
beyond the pale is the character of the decaying American superpower. George Will is but one
manifestation of it. It was once infuriating. But now it's simply like listening to the
ravings of a schizophrenic. More pathetic than anything else.
What do you expect from George Swill? He is a pathetic, disoriented refugee from his home in
Victorian England, when barbarism never set for a single instant on the British Empire.
There's a way to get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from the
mainstream news media. Just look at their propaganda and ask yourself, "Why do they want me
to believe this particular lie?" If you can figure that you, you will have the truth.
Well, you know, the white man's burden...
The funny thing is that they seriously consider themselves a "superior race", while behaving
like wild barbarians.
Such opinions/articles of "Western civilized people" cause only a condescending smile,
nothing more. So let's let George Will entertain us.
I find it pretty bizzarre how western media obsessively try to portray the Defender
incident as a some sort of "victory" for "civilized nations".
What exactly is the victory here? The fact that Russia only resorted to warning fire and
didn't blow up the ship?
Decades of propaganda masquerading as news has led most "educated" Americans into a Matrix
of false narratives. Should you dare mention election fraud or question the safety of COVID
vaccines in the presences of anyone who considers the NY Times and Wash Post as the "papers
of record", they will be happy to inform you that you are "captured" by false news. Dialogue
with these true believers has become almost impossible. We are the indispensable, civilized
nation, don't you understand basic facts?
My sister, who is truly a good-hearted person, unfortunately keeps CNN and MSNBC on most
of the day in her small apartment, and lives for The NY Times, which she pours over,
especially the weekend edition. She knows that Putin is evil and Russia is a bad place to
live, etc etc. I got rid of my TV ten years ago and started looking elsewhere for my
information. I live in a rural area of a Red state, she lives in Manhattan. We have to stick
to topics that revolve around museums, gardening, and food.
This is precisely the type of arrogance that has led to US leaving Afghanistan with their
pants down - having spent untold Trillions of dollars and having nothing to show for it. And
soon, leaving Iraq and Syria too. It reminds me of how the US left Vietnam and Cambodia.
The 'White' establishment in Washington and across the US military industrial complex, has
an air of superiority and always seem to feel that they can subjugate via throwing money at
people! This in effect turns everyone they deal with into Whores (yes, prostitutes). Its
fundamentally humiliating, and sews the seeds of corruption - both economic and moral. Then,
they are shocked that there's a back clash!
The Taliban succeeded not with arms - but by projecting a completely different narrative
of "Morality (i.e. non-corruption), honor, and even intermingled nationalism with their
narrative". They projected a story that suggested that new Afghan daughters would not turn
into Britney Spears or porn stars.
And, believe it or not, the Chinese see themselves as having been fundamentally humiliated
by the West and couch their efforts as a struggle for their civilization (its not ideological
or even economic) - they are fighting for honor and respect.
Western Civilization (and western elite) on the left and right are fundamentally
materialistic. They worship money, and simply don't understand it when others don't. When
they talk about superiority, they are basically saying the worship of money rules supreme.
You sort of become dignified in the west if you have a lot of wealth. They want to turn the
whole world into prostitutes. Policy and laws are driven by material considerations.
Now, I am not saying that spirituality or religion is good; and in fact, the Chinese are
not driven by religious zeal (they are, on the whole, non-religious). What I am saying is
that - no matter how its expressed - be it through religion, through culture, through
rhetoric, etc. - all this back clash is really a struggle for respect, 'honor' and thus a
push back to Western Arrogance, and the humiliation it has caused. The West simply doesn't
understand that there are societies - especially in the east, that value honor over other
things.
When Trump calls other people losers, he is basically saying he is richer, they are
poorer. In his mind, winning, is all about money. When people write articles about the
superiority of a civilization - they are implicitly putting other people down. That's not
just arrogant, its rude and disrespectful. Its basically like a teenager judging their
parents. How dare a newly formed nation (the US), judge or differentiate or even pretend to
be superior to the Chinese, Persians etc.?
Our foreign policy (and rhetoric) in the West has to completely change. We have to be
really careful, because, (honestly), it won't be very long before these other (inferior)
civilizations actually take over global leadership. Then how will we want to be treated?
Don't for a second think these folks can't build great gadgets that go to Mars! Oh, did China
just do that? Does Iran have a space program? Did they just make their own vaccines? Once
they start trading among themselves without using the USD greenback, we are finished.
Some notable recent achievements of 'civilised' nations include:
-Illegal invasion and bombing of multiple non-aggressor nations
-Overthrowing of democratically elected Governments
-Support of extremist and oppressive regimes
-Sponsoring of terrorism, including weapon sales to ISIS
-Corruption of once trusted institutions like the UN and OPCW
...when all she did was offer slight resistance to Western aggression? The key event was
the August 2013 false-flag
gas attack and massacre of hostages in Ghouta in Damascus.
What really angered the West was the Russian
fleet in the Mediterranean that prevented the NATO attack on Syria. (You will not find a
single word of this in Western media.) This is why Crimea needed to be captured by the West.
As revenge and deterrence against the Russian agression.
The standoff was first described by Israel Shamir in
October 2013:
"The most dramatic event of September 2013 was the high-noon stand-off near the Levantine
shore, with five US destroyers pointing their Tomahawks towards Damascus and facing them -
the Russian flotilla of eleven ships led by the carrier-killer Missile Cruiser Moskva and
supported by Chinese warships.
Apparently, two missiles were launched towards the Syrian coast, and both failed to
reach their destination."
A longer description was published by Australianvoice in
2015:
"So why didn't the US and France attack Syria? It seems obvious that the Russians and
Chinese simply explained that an attack on Syria by US and French forces would be met by a
Russian/Chinese attack on US and French warships. Obama wisely decided not to start WW III
in September 2013." Can Russia Block Regime Change In Syria Again?
In my own comments from 2013 I tried to understand the mission of the Russian fleet. This
is what I believed Putin's orders to the fleet were:
To sink any NATO ship involved in illegal aggression against Syria.
You have the authority to use tactical nuclear weapons in self-defense.
I am sure NATO admirals understood the situation the same way. I am not sure of the
American leadership in Washington.
Insulting language aside, the narrative they are trying to create is that there is an
anti-Russia, anti-China trend developing and that those sitting on the fence would be wise to
join the bandwagon.
This will be particularly effective on the majority of folks who barely scan headlines and
skim articles. Falun Gong/CIA mouthpiece Epoch Times is on board with this, based on recent
headlines.
Wikipedia has a list of reliable
and unreliable sources . "Reliable" are those sources that are under the direct control
of the US regime. Any degree of independence from the regime makes the source "unreliable."
WaPo and NYT are at the top of the list of reliable sources.
This is the diametric opposite of how Wikispooks defines reliability.
Reliability of sources is directly proportional to their distance *from* power.
At A Closer Look on Syria (ACLOS) we only trust primary sources.
Makes me remember the cornerstone work from former Argentine president DF Sarmiento, who
dealt with "Civilization or Barbarism" in his book "Facundo". Of course, his position was the
"civilized" one.
Those "civilized" succeeded in creating a country submitted to the British rule, selling
cheap crops and getting expensive manufactures, with a privileged minority living lavishly
and a great majority, in misery.
Also, their "civilized" methods to impose their project was the bloody "Police War"
This article is fundamentally about propaganda and "soft power".
Soft power in foreign policy is usually defined when other countries defer to your
judgement without threat of punishment or promise of gain.
In other words, if other countries support your country without a "carrot or stick"
approach, you have soft power.
For years, the US simply assumed other "civilized" of the western world would dutifully
follow along in US footsteps due to unshakeable trust in America's moral authority. The
western media played a crucial role by suppressing news regarding any atrocities the western
powers committed and amplifying any perceived threats or aggressions from "enemies".
Now, with the age of the internet, western audiences can read news from all over the world
and that has been a catastrophe for western powers. We can now see real-time debunking of
propaganda.
In the past, the British would have easily passed off the recent destroyer provocation as
pure Russian aggression and could expect outrage from all western aligned countries. The EU
and US populations could have easily been whipped into a frenzy and DEMANDED reprisals
against Russia if not outright war. Something similar to a "Gulf of Tonkin" moment.
But, that did not happen. People all over the world now know NOTHING from the US or
British press is to be trusted. People also now know NATO routinely try to stir up trouble
and provoke Russia.
So, Americans and even British citizens displayed no widespread outrage because they
simply did not believe their own government's and compliant media's side of the story.
US and British "soft power" are long gone. No one trusts them. No one wants to follow them
into anymore disastrous wars of aggression.
Western media still do not understand this and cannot figure out why so many refuse
western vaccines or support the newest color revolutions.
They cast Germany as a victim or potential victim of foreign aggressors, as a peace-loving
nation forced to take up arms to protect its populace or defend European civilization
against Communism.
I remember a tv history program that had interviews with German soldiers.
I recall one who had seen/participated in going from village to village in the USSR
hanging local communist leaders. He said they had been taught that by doing this
they were "protecting civilization".
Arrogance is not a deadly disease or even a hindrance for mainstream presstitutes; it is a
job qualification, making them all the more manipulable and manipulative. And so, as with
Michael Gordon, Judith Miller, Brett Stephens and David Sanger (essentially all of them
pulling double duty for the apartheid state), people will die from their propaganda, but they
will advance.
Name a leader with moral courage and integrity among suzerainties (private plantations).
Nations without integrity and filled with Orcs (individuals without conscience), can't be
civilized. They're EVIL vassals of Saruman & Sauron, manipulated by Wormtongue.
"The true equation is 'democracy' = government by world financiers."
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Henry Kissinger, in his interview with Chatham House stated, "the United States is in a
CRISIS of confidence... America has committed great moral wrongs." What are U$A's core
values?
According to a CFR member :
"How lucky I am that my mother studied with JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis and WH Auden and that
she passed on to me a command of language that permits me to "tell the story" of the world
economy in plain English. She would have been delighted that I managed to show that the evil
Gollum from Tolkien's tales lives above the doorway in the Oval Office, which he
certainly does. I saw him there myself. He may have found a new perch over at The Federal
Reserve Bank as well."
– Excerpt From, Signals: The Breakdown of the Social Contract and the Rise of
Geopolitics by Dr Philippa Malmgren
The Financial Empire has ran out of LUCK. "In God We Trust"
I thought moral superiority was the official position of NATO. The explicit intent is to
weaponize human rights and democracy . So it is not merely the mundane 'our group is better'
or the somewhat nostalgic western form of moral superiority, it's weaponized moral
superiority.
George Will looking good I tellya. Anybody know who does his embalming?
Doesn't Will's article reek of Nazi propaganda against the Russians as a mongrel Asiatic
uncivilized people? Of course to attack the Chinese as uncivilized? China uncivilized? 5,000
years of continuous culture? The Russians and Chinese must join up with civilization.
Unfortunately at least in the West race is only about skin color. It certainly wasn't the
case with the original Nazis. Will's piece is blatantly racist out of the tradition of
Nazism.
Oxford and the Ivy League. The training grounds for the Anglo American deep state and the
cheerleaders of the empire. Expect nothing more of these deeply under educated sudo
intellectuals.
Plenty of people who work for the MIC and in various policy circles/think tanks have
plenty "to show for it" where all these wars are concerned. Many billions of dollars were
siphoned upwards and outwards into the bank accounts and expensive homes of the managerial
and executive classes (even the hazard pay folks who actually went to the places "we" were
bombing) not just at Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen, etc. but plenty of lesser known
"socioeconomically disadvantaged" Small Businesses (proper noun in this context) companies
who utilized the services of an army of consultants to glom onto the war machine. In most
cases of the larger firms, Wall Street handled the IPOs long ago, and these companies have
entire (much less profitable) divisions dedicated to state and local governments to
"diversify" their business portfolios in case the people finally get sick of war. But that
rarely happens in any real sense because the corporate establishment "legacy media" makes
sure that there's always an uncivilized country to bomb or threaten....and that means the
"defense" department needs loads of services, weapons, and process improvement consultants
all the time. War is a racket; always has been, always will be.
Unfortunately, it seems that truly large segments of the population in the developed
western countries and especially in the Anglo-sphere believe the propaganda emanating from
the imperial mouthpieces. The US citizenry is a case study in manipulating the public.
Indeed, the DNC liberals are effectively the vanguard of the pro-war movement, espouse
racist Rusophobia and conitnue Trump's hostility to China. The so-cslled conservatives follow
their own tradition of imperial mobilization behind the Washington regime: Chin,Latin
America, the very people who berated the 'Deep State' now paise its subversive activities
against the targeted left-wing governments.
As for the moribund left - it would be better described as leftovers - it is often taken
for a ride as long as the imperial messaging is promoted by the liberal media. The excuses
for imperialism are a constant for many of them (even as they call themselves
anti-imperialists) and the beleaguered voicesfor the truth are far and few. The latter often
face silencing campaigns not just from the establishment hacks, but from their own supposed
ideological comrades, who are, of course, in truth nothing of the sort.
All in all, despite the consistent record of manipulative propaganda and utter criminality
the imperial regime never loses the support of the critical masss of the citizenry.
All in all, despite the consistent record of manipulative propaganda and utter criminality
the imperial regime never loses the support of the critical masss of the citizenry.
Maybe 50% of the people here bother to vote, in IMPORTANT elections. Can be a lot less if
the election is not important. The only people still engaged politically here at all are the
people with good jobs. The American people have given up. And there are a lot of angry people
running around, with guns. Claiming the citizenry here support the government is imperial
propaganda. Why do you think they like mercenaries and proxies so much? And this is all in
great contrast to when I was young 50 years ago.
Looks like the most interesting publications are marked as unreliable and "fake news"
consortium of neoliberal MSM (often controlled by intelligence agencies) was labeled as reliable.
Below is small initial fragment that gives pretty good understanding on neoliberal bias of the
Wikipedia brass and Wikipedia controllers. .
112 Ukraine was deprecated following a 2019 RfC, which showed overwhelming consensus
for the deprecation of a slew of sources associated with Russian disinformation in Ukraine.
It was pointed out later in a 2020 RfC that 112 Ukraine had not been explicitly discussed
in that first discussion prior to its blacklisting request. Further discussion established
a rough consensus that the source is generally unreliable, but did not form a consensus for
deprecation or blacklisting. The prior blacklisting was reversed as out of process.
There is consensus that Ad Fontes Media and their Media Bias Chart should not be used
in article space in reference to sources' political leaning or reliability. Editors
consider it a self-published source and have questioned
its methodology.
Agence France-Presse is a news agency . There is consensus that
Agence France-Presse is generally reliable. Syndicated reports from Agence
France-Presse that are published in other sources are also considered generally
reliable.
Al Jazeera is considered a generally reliable news organization . Editors perceive
Al Jazeera
English (and Aljazeera.com ) to be more reliable than
Al Jazeera's Arabic-language news reporting. Some editors say that Al Jazeera, particularly
its Arabic-language media, is a partisan source with respect to the
Arab–Israeli
conflict . Al Jazeera's news blogs should be handled with
the corresponding policy.
There is consensus that AlterNet is generally unreliable. Editors consider AlterNet a
partisan
source , and its statements should be attributed . AlterNet's syndicated content
should be evaluated by the reliability of its original publisher, and the citation should
preferably point to the original publisher.
User reviews on Amazon are anonymous, self-published , and unverifiable,
and should not be used at all. Amazon is a reliable source for basic information about a
work (such as release date, ISBN, etc.), although it is unnecessary to cite Amazon when the
work itself may serve as a source for that information (e.g., authors' names and ISBNs).
Future release dates may be unreliable.
There is consensus that The American Conservative is a usable source for
attributed
opinions . As TAC is published by the American Ideas Institute, an advocacy
organization, TAC is considered biased or opinionated .
There is consensus that An Phoblacht is generally unreliable for news reporting,
as it is a publication of Sinn Féin . Under the conditions of
WP:ABOUTSELF , An Phoblacht
is usable for attributed statements from Sinn
Féin and some editors believe that the publication may also be used for attributed
statements from the Provisional Irish
Republican Army (IRA).
The 2019 RfC established no consensus on the reliability of Anadolu Agency.
Well-established news outlets are normally considered reliable for statements of fact.
However, Anadolu Agency is frequently described as a mouthpiece of the Turkish government
that engages in propaganda, owing to its state-run status. See also:
Anadolu Agency (controversial topics, international politics) .
In the 2019 RfC, editors generally agreed that Anadolu Agency is generally unreliable
for topics that are controversial or related to international politics. See also:
Anadolu Agency (general topics) .
Ancestry.com is a genealogy site that hosts a database of
primary
source documents including marriage and census records. Some of these sources may be
usable under WP:BLPPRIMARY , but secondary
sources, where available, are usually preferred. Ancestry.com also hosts user-generated content , which is
unreliable.
Answers.com (previously known as WikiAnswers) is a Q&A site that incorporates user-generated content . In
the past, Answers.com republished excerpts and summaries of tertiary sources , including
D&B Hoovers
, Gale , and
HighBeam
Research . Citations of republished content on Answers.com should point to the original
source, with a note that the source was accessed "via Answers.com". Answers.com also
previously served as a Wikipedia mirror ; using republished
Wikipedia content is considered circular sourcing .
There is consensus that ADL is a generally reliable source, including for topics
related to hate groups and extremism in the U.S. There is no consensus that ADL must be
attributed in all cases, but there is consensus that the labelling of organisations and
individuals by the ADL (particularly as antisemitic) should be attributed. Some editors
consider the ADL's opinion pieces not reliable, and that they should only be used with
attribution. Some editors consider the ADL a biased source for Israel/Palestine related
topics that should be used with caution, if at all.
Speaking of always blaming Russia regardless the facts, it's now revealed that
OPCW sent its team to Germany
before Navalny made it to the hospital in Omsk:
"'How is it even possible?' Russia asks OPCW after report claims team was sent to Germany the same day Navalny fell ill in
Siberia"!!!!
"[T]he OPCW states [Link at Original] that its secretariat 'deployed a team to perform a technical assistance visit' related
to the suspected poisoning of a 'Russian citizen' at Germany's request on August 20. The problem is that on that day, Navalny
was only flying from the Russian Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow. It was on that flight that he first felt ill and was then rushed
to a hospital in another Siberian city, Omsk, following the plane's emergency landing ." [My Emphasis]
OOPS!!!! Someone must have put the Brits in charge. It will be very interesting to see how this gaff is spun.
"For the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional
media, according to data from Edelman's annual trust barometer shared exclusively with Axios.
Trust in social media has hit an all-time low of 27%."
CNN, especially, among the worst of the worst, is in a
tailspin .
The latest Novichok victims were exposed to the deadly agent as a result of a leak from a
nearby UK laboratory, authorities have confirmed.
Charlie Rowley, 45, and Dawn Sturgess, 44, fell ill at a house in Amesbury on Saturday,
after being exposed to Novichok "" the same nerve agent that poisoned ex-Russian spy Sergei
Skirpal.
Rt.com reports: Two people,
this time a British couple in their 40s with no link to Russian intelligence, were affected by
a chemical substance on Saturday. Four days later, the UK's counter-terrorism chief said the
chemical that hit them was the same that sent former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and
his daughter, Yulia, into a coma in early March.
Back then, it took mere hours for the UK government to pin the blame on Moscow and unleash a
massive diplomatic offensive together with its allies. Moscow, still waiting for compelling
evidence to be produced, has been shut out of the investigation, and it has raised a number of
questions about the poisoning "" none of which have been answered.
Linking the two poisonings "is clearly a line of enquiry" for UK investigators, but the new
incident doesn't look likely to answer any of those concerns either.
The new victims, 45-year-old Charlie Rowley and his 44-year-old girlfriend Dawn Sturgess
were discovered in Amesbury, some 12 km (7 miles) north of Salisbury. Both scenes, though, are
located around Porton Down, which houses a secretive government chemical lab.
Porton Down has been a crucial part of the Skripal case investigation. It was there that the
chemical agent was identified as Novichok in both cases. Back in March, UK officials cited this
as proof that the substance came from Russia "" only to later be contradicted by the lab's
chief executive, who said they weren't really able to verify the agent's origins.
As for the location of the new scene relative to the old one, 12 km doesn't seem like an
improbably large distance. Plus, a friend of the victims said the couple had been to Salisbury
before they fell ill. The UK Home Secretary's working theory is that the exposure was
accidental, which begs the question: how would that be possible after four months and a massive
clean-up operation? Also, why were there only two random people in the whole 12km radius that
were affected?
Curious timing
Investigators say it's unclear if the supposed Novichok came from the same batch that
poisoned the Skripals in March. But, according to experts, the nerve agents of the Novichok
family lose their potency very quickly, which makes it unlikely that a trace powerful enough
had survived for four months to strike again at this particular moment.
And the moment is significant for two reasons "" two events key to Russia's international
image. One is the hugely successful FIFA World Cup, where the English team just secured a
quarter-final spot. British fans seem to be enjoying themselves in Russia, and berating British
politicians and media for their efforts to scare them away from the event.
The other is the preparations for a summit between US President Donald Trump and Russia's
Vladimir Putin. A date and a place for the meeting "" Helsinki, Finland, July 16 "" were set
just last week, and a possible rapprochement between the two rival superpowers seems to be
keeping British officials up at night.
Nobody died, again
One of the key questions asked back in March was: why did the Skripals survive if they were
indeed exposed to a military-grade nerve agent? While UK officials peddle Novichok as a deadly
nerve agent manufactured by the Soviets, claiming its recent use was the first chemical attack
in Europe since World War Two, it appears to have a surprisingly low lethality rate.
A friend of the couple described Rowley becoming increasingly ill over the course of the
day, before finally being taken to the hospital. There, the supposedly deadly Novichok gave
doctors enough time to treat the couple for a completely different diagnosis: the medics
initially believed that the couple had taken contaminated drugs (Rowley is a registered heroin
addict). Samples from the two were only sent to Porton Down on Monday, two days after they were
admitted.
Back in March, the Skripals were similarly discovered slipping in and out of consciousness
on a park bench. They were also treated for an opioid overdose at first, before the diagnosis
switched to nerve agent poisoning. Both ultimately survived and have now been discharged from
the hospital.
Analysts have repeatedly questioned the apparent low lethality of the supposed
"military-grade nerve agent." Russian officials, as well, have said that if such a deadly
substance had indeed been used, survival would be impossible.
British officials are still investigating the incident. However, this time "" now that
Novichok has been brought up "" they seem less inclined to point fingers, even as England fans
frolic in Russia and Theresa May's handling of Brexit continues to divide the public.
So yes the bull market in news is over, finito, kaput. Not forever of course but for now.
Cable TV news ratings were mixed in
Q1, but down significantly in March as the election faded into the rearview mirror.
michael 3 hours ago What kind of business model succeeds when it basically dismisses half of
it's potential customers as villains, and only markets to the other half? The simple answer is
that the business only stands half a chance at surviving. The media was healthier when it was
much less partisan or at least appeared to be. Reply 18 1 1 reply Donald 8 hours ago People now
understand that the large majority of our media is just a propaganda machine for the Democratic
party. Now that the Dems control virtually every level of power at the national level
(Congress, presidency, 90% media, large corporations, and most unions) it's hard for the media
to whip up that frenzy of hate they achieved when Trump was in office. The outsider and rebel
(Trump) is gone and the ultimate lifetime politician (Biden) is securely in office. The iron
grip of lifetime politicians on the throat of America has been achieved. Reply 27 7 2 replies
Donald 7 hours ago The drop is because most of the media was obsessed with bringing down the
outsider (Trump). Now that an establishment man and a lifetime Democrat politician is in
control, order has been restored. People were interested in the Trump bashing articles and
reports the media generated. Now, the media cannot be outraged because their guys (Dems)
control every lever of National power. Now everything is sunshine and roses (not true of
course) which doesn't generate as much interest.
Lester 10 hours ago I laughed out loud when I read "less non-partisan". Thanks for that. Reply
23 4 2 replies Pop 10 hours ago The "Media" business model is easy, and ancient. From the days
of the Roman criers, to todays digital print. Same model for 2500 years. You twist and distort
reality to attract a targeted audience, then you blast them with advertisements from your
sponsors. The problem is there is just too much. So you have to distort and fabricate reality
more and more and more. Until you have the insane Pravda stuff we have today.
Looks like the USA neoliberal elite has serious credibility problems. Neoliberal MSM are no longer trusted by significant strata
of the US population. This looks like "Back int he USSR" situation to me.
Notable quotes:
"... There's a reason for that particular choice of words. A pattern of selective omissions in an otherwise entirely truthful presentation can easily mislead us as much as any outright lie. And under certain circumstances, such omissions may be made necessary by powerful outside forces, so that even the most well-intentioned writer is faced with the difficult choice of either excluding certain elements from his analysis or having his important work denied a proper audience. ..."
"... Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade's 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000 words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America's well-documented and lavishly funded biowarfare program. ..."
"... The same strain of the virus was found in GringoLandia as well as in Europe at earlier dates in 2019. CDC should come clean why they SHUT DOWN Fort Detrick lab in August 2019 and why they was called there in the first place. In 2019 people in the are had "mysterious vaping lung disease" which matches Covid-19. They had that exact virus there. ..."
"... WHO team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 virus is 'Not Allowed' in secret Pentagon biolabs around the world ..."
"... More likely - Developed at Fort Detrick, samples tested in Falklands and Spain in Feb, modified then sent to Wuhan using a patsy. Close Fort Detrick, blame the Chinese - Ultimate trade war weapon. ..."
"... They lied about bats, pangolins, Wuhan, masks, distancing, surface spread, asymptomatic spread, lock downs, and finally vaccines. Trust none of them. ..."
Looks like everything at Fort Detrick was up to standards.
.
'Army germ lab shut down by CDC in 2019 had several 'serious' protocol violations that year
Select agents are defined by the CDC as "biological agents and toxins that have been determined to have the potential to pose
a severe threat to public health and safety, to animal and plant health, or to animal or plant products.'
That was their own SAR's variant which caused the 'vaping crisis' absent the s1 cleavege spike protein. Still killed people,
nothing like as infectious.
As every fan of the old Perry Mason show remembers, courtroom witnesses swear "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth."
There's a reason for that particular choice of words. A pattern of selective omissions in an otherwise entirely truthful
presentation can easily mislead us as much as any outright lie. And under certain circumstances, such omissions may be made necessary
by powerful outside forces, so that even the most well-intentioned writer is faced with the difficult choice of either excluding
certain elements from his analysis or having his important work denied a proper audience.
Two months ago I [Ron Unz] published a lengthy article summarizing much of the information from the first year of the outbreak
and focusing upon the heated debate regarding the origins of the virus. This compendium of crucial research has now received a
major addition, a 11,000 word analysis of the likely origins of Covid-19 by Nicholas Wade, a distinguished former science reporter
and editor, who had spent more than four decades at the New York Times, Science, and Nature , and the author of several excellent
books dealing with anthropology and evolutionary biology.
In the case of Covid-19, Wade demonstrates that once the political barriers have been removed and we are allowed to consider
the evidence objectively, our conclusions are transformed. The scientific case for the natural origins of the virus becomes pitifully
weak, thereby automatically elevating the competing lab-leak hypothesis, which had previously been denounced and stigmatized as
a so-called "conspiracy theory."
Having now twice read Wade's long article, I can say that I find nearly all of his scientific arguments quite compelling, and
I have almost no points of significant disagreement. Yet my overall conclusions are entirely different from his.
... ... ...
Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade's 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have
produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000
words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America's well-documented and lavishly funded
biowarfare program.
sarz 10 hours ago remove link
Ann Coulter says:
Wade claims to have no preference for one theory over another" he's just laying out the facts! But it's pretty clear that
he is coming down on the side of the lab theory.
He doesn't mention that 27 of the original 41 Chinese people who contracted COVID-19 had been to the Wuhan wet market, known
the world over for its delectable porcupine anus and snake innards. Several other carriers were family members of those infected
there. By contrast, no one from the Wuhan lab appears to have been infected.
She implies this is a weakness of Wade's laboratory hypothesis. But it's actually only so for the WUHAN laboratory hypothesis.
SoDamnMad 11 hours ago
Nothing more at Ft. Detrick than not have containment plans in place with a person assigned the responsibility. This goes on
all the time in the chemical industry where spill plans must be in place for every piece of equipment and an inspection by OSHA
or CDC catches these deficiencies. A higher level of concern at a facility like Ft. Detrick.
vova_3.2018 10 hours ago remove link
Looks like everything at Fort Detrick was up to standards.
The same strain of the virus was found in GringoLandia as well as in Europe at earlier dates in 2019. CDC should come clean
why they SHUT DOWN Fort Detrick lab in August 2019 and why they was called there in the first place. In 2019 people in the are
had "mysterious vaping lung disease" which matches Covid-19. They had that exact virus there.
More likely - Developed at Fort Detrick, samples tested in Falklands and Spain in Feb, modified then sent to Wuhan using
a patsy. Close Fort Detrick, blame the Chinese - Ultimate trade war weapon.
vril PRO 11 hours ago
Faucism
boyplunger7777 12 hours ago
They lied about bats, pangolins, Wuhan, masks, distancing, surface spread, asymptomatic spread, lock downs, and finally
vaccines. Trust none of them.
Suzy Q 12 hours ago
They lied about JFK
Uri Finberg 12 hours ago
No. They KILLED JFK. The Democrats rigged the election. The Globalists wanted JFK to beat Nixon. So they rigged the election
just like Trump vs. Biden.
JFK was going to be the rock star President like Obama. He was going to be the hip Hollywood President that would lead the
youth to destruction.
Then JFK wised up. When he found out they rigged the election and he didn't actually win he started thinking about it. He was
ready to take down the Deep State, Globalists, Secret Societies whatever you want to call it. He was ready to drain the swamp
so they killed him. They killed him, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. They didn't take out Trump because
they manipulated him to push the "vaccine" depopulation agenda instead. They used Trump until they could rig the next election.
Suzy Q 12 hours ago
Yes, they killed JFK, but they also lied about JFK
Not Your Father's ZH 12 hours ago
And they're still lying . . . and many are still buying.
Suzy Q 11 hours ago (Edited)
They lied about Russia, Russia, Russia, weapons of mass destruction, throwing babies from incubators onto the cold, hard floor
in Kuwait, Bengazi, Epstein killing himself.
They lied about vaccines not causing autism, about HIV/AIDS, about the rainbow belonging to the gays.They lie about lying.
They cannot help themselves, it is their nature to lie.
EcoJoker PREMIUM 12 hours ago
I would bet it had more to do with JFK about to take the reigns on money printing. A week before he was to sign that EO, he
was shot.
keeper20 10 hours ago (Edited)
DOOD, research this:
Nixon was hired after answering a classified ad in the LA Times for auditions for the part of a politician to run for political
office. the man who bought the ad, held the interviews, and hired him was prescott walker bush. nixon was a lackey of the nazi
vril paperclip bunch.
Nimby 12 hours ago
People keep wondering when the next civil war/revolution/world war/whatever is going to start. It already has. First rule of
war: Know when you're in one.
Not Your Father's ZH 12 hours ago
All warfare is based on deception. ~ Sun Tzu
The first casualty of war is truth. ~ Aeschylus
. . . the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in
any country. ~ Herman Goering
Looks like the USA neoliberal elite has serious credibility problems. Neoliberal MSM are no longer trusted by significant strata
of the US population. This looks like "Back int he USSR" situation to me.
Notable quotes:
"... There's a reason for that particular choice of words. A pattern of selective omissions in an otherwise entirely truthful presentation can easily mislead us as much as any outright lie. And under certain circumstances, such omissions may be made necessary by powerful outside forces, so that even the most well-intentioned writer is faced with the difficult choice of either excluding certain elements from his analysis or having his important work denied a proper audience. ..."
"... Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade's 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000 words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America's well-documented and lavishly funded biowarfare program. ..."
"... The same strain of the virus was found in GringoLandia as well as in Europe at earlier dates in 2019. CDC should come clean why they SHUT DOWN Fort Detrick lab in August 2019 and why they was called there in the first place. In 2019 people in the are had "mysterious vaping lung disease" which matches Covid-19. They had that exact virus there. ..."
"... WHO team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 virus is 'Not Allowed' in secret Pentagon biolabs around the world ..."
"... More likely - Developed at Fort Detrick, samples tested in Falklands and Spain in Feb, modified then sent to Wuhan using a patsy. Close Fort Detrick, blame the Chinese - Ultimate trade war weapon. ..."
"... They lied about bats, pangolins, Wuhan, masks, distancing, surface spread, asymptomatic spread, lock downs, and finally vaccines. Trust none of them. ..."
Looks like everything at Fort Detrick was up to standards.
.
'Army germ lab shut down by CDC in 2019 had several 'serious' protocol violations that year
Select agents are defined by the CDC as "biological agents and toxins that have been determined to have the potential to pose
a severe threat to public health and safety, to animal and plant health, or to animal or plant products.'
That was their own SAR's variant which caused the 'vaping crisis' absent the s1 cleavege spike protein. Still killed people,
nothing like as infectious.
As every fan of the old Perry Mason show remembers, courtroom witnesses swear "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth."
There's a reason for that particular choice of words. A pattern of selective omissions in an otherwise entirely truthful
presentation can easily mislead us as much as any outright lie. And under certain circumstances, such omissions may be made necessary
by powerful outside forces, so that even the most well-intentioned writer is faced with the difficult choice of either excluding
certain elements from his analysis or having his important work denied a proper audience.
Two months ago I [Ron Unz] published a lengthy article summarizing much of the information from the first year of the outbreak
and focusing upon the heated debate regarding the origins of the virus. This compendium of crucial research has now received a
major addition, a 11,000 word analysis of the likely origins of Covid-19 by Nicholas Wade, a distinguished former science reporter
and editor, who had spent more than four decades at the New York Times, Science, and Nature , and the author of several excellent
books dealing with anthropology and evolutionary biology.
In the case of Covid-19, Wade demonstrates that once the political barriers have been removed and we are allowed to consider
the evidence objectively, our conclusions are transformed. The scientific case for the natural origins of the virus becomes pitifully
weak, thereby automatically elevating the competing lab-leak hypothesis, which had previously been denounced and stigmatized as
a so-called "conspiracy theory."
Having now twice read Wade's long article, I can say that I find nearly all of his scientific arguments quite compelling, and
I have almost no points of significant disagreement. Yet my overall conclusions are entirely different from his.
... ... ...
Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade's 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have
produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000
words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America's well-documented and lavishly funded
biowarfare program.
sarz 10 hours ago remove link
Ann Coulter says:
Wade claims to have no preference for one theory over another" he's just laying out the facts! But it's pretty clear that
he is coming down on the side of the lab theory.
He doesn't mention that 27 of the original 41 Chinese people who contracted COVID-19 had been to the Wuhan wet market, known
the world over for its delectable porcupine anus and snake innards. Several other carriers were family members of those infected
there. By contrast, no one from the Wuhan lab appears to have been infected.
She implies this is a weakness of Wade's laboratory hypothesis. But it's actually only so for the WUHAN laboratory hypothesis.
SoDamnMad 11 hours ago
Nothing more at Ft. Detrick than not have containment plans in place with a person assigned the responsibility. This goes on
all the time in the chemical industry where spill plans must be in place for every piece of equipment and an inspection by OSHA
or CDC catches these deficiencies. A higher level of concern at a facility like Ft. Detrick.
vova_3.2018 10 hours ago remove link
Looks like everything at Fort Detrick was up to standards.
The same strain of the virus was found in GringoLandia as well as in Europe at earlier dates in 2019. CDC should come clean
why they SHUT DOWN Fort Detrick lab in August 2019 and why they was called there in the first place. In 2019 people in the are
had "mysterious vaping lung disease" which matches Covid-19. They had that exact virus there.
More likely - Developed at Fort Detrick, samples tested in Falklands and Spain in Feb, modified then sent to Wuhan using
a patsy. Close Fort Detrick, blame the Chinese - Ultimate trade war weapon.
vril PRO 11 hours ago
Faucism
boyplunger7777 12 hours ago
They lied about bats, pangolins, Wuhan, masks, distancing, surface spread, asymptomatic spread, lock downs, and finally
vaccines. Trust none of them.
Suzy Q 12 hours ago
They lied about JFK
Uri Finberg 12 hours ago
No. They KILLED JFK. The Democrats rigged the election. The Globalists wanted JFK to beat Nixon. So they rigged the election
just like Trump vs. Biden.
JFK was going to be the rock star President like Obama. He was going to be the hip Hollywood President that would lead the
youth to destruction.
Then JFK wised up. When he found out they rigged the election and he didn't actually win he started thinking about it. He was
ready to take down the Deep State, Globalists, Secret Societies whatever you want to call it. He was ready to drain the swamp
so they killed him. They killed him, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. They didn't take out Trump because
they manipulated him to push the "vaccine" depopulation agenda instead. They used Trump until they could rig the next election.
Suzy Q 12 hours ago
Yes, they killed JFK, but they also lied about JFK
Not Your Father's ZH 12 hours ago
And they're still lying . . . and many are still buying.
Suzy Q 11 hours ago (Edited)
They lied about Russia, Russia, Russia, weapons of mass destruction, throwing babies from incubators onto the cold, hard floor
in Kuwait, Bengazi, Epstein killing himself.
They lied about vaccines not causing autism, about HIV/AIDS, about the rainbow belonging to the gays.They lie about lying.
They cannot help themselves, it is their nature to lie.
EcoJoker PREMIUM 12 hours ago
I would bet it had more to do with JFK about to take the reigns on money printing. A week before he was to sign that EO, he
was shot.
keeper20 10 hours ago (Edited)
DOOD, research this:
Nixon was hired after answering a classified ad in the LA Times for auditions for the part of a politician to run for political
office. the man who bought the ad, held the interviews, and hired him was prescott walker bush. nixon was a lackey of the nazi
vril paperclip bunch.
Nimby 12 hours ago
People keep wondering when the next civil war/revolution/world war/whatever is going to start. It already has. First rule of
war: Know when you're in one.
Not Your Father's ZH 12 hours ago
All warfare is based on deception. ~ Sun Tzu
The first casualty of war is truth. ~ Aeschylus
. . . the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in
any country. ~ Herman Goering
More Hacks, More Baseless Accusations Against Russia
In January police in various countries took down the Emotet bot-network that was at that
time the basic platform for some 25% of all cybercrimes.
Based on hearsay Wikipedia and other had falsely attributed Emotet to Russian actors.
The real people behind it were actually
Ukrainians :
The operating center of Emotet was found in the Ukraine. Today the Ukrainian national police
took control of it during a raid (video). The police found dozens of
computers, some hundred hard drives, about 50 kilogram of gold bars (current price
~$60,000/kg) and large amounts of money in multiple currencies.
Now the U.S. is accusing Russia of somehow having part in another cybercrime :
President Joe Biden said Monday that a Russia-based group was behind the ransomware attack
that forced the shutdown of the largest oil pipeline in the eastern United States.
The FBI identified the group behind the hack of Colonial Pipeline as DarkSide, a shadowy
operation that surfaced last year and attempts to lock up corporate computer systems and
force companies to pay to unfreeze them.
"So far there is no evidence ... from our intelligence people that Russia is involved,
although there is evidence that actors, ransomware is in Russia," Biden told reporters.
"They have some responsibility to deal with this," he said.
Three days after being forced to halt operations, Colonial said Monday it was moving
toward a partial reopening of its 5,500 miles (8,850 kilometers) of pipeline" the largest
fuel network between Texas and New York.
Biden however is badly informed. There is no evidence that DarkSide has anything to do with
Russia. It is, like Emotet, a commercial
'ransomware-as-a-service' criminal entity that wants to make money and does not care about
geopolitics.
Yes, a version of the DarkNet software does exclude itself from running on system with
specific
language settings :
The DarkSide malware is even built to conduct language checks on targets and to shut down if
it detects Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Armenian, Georgian, Kazakh, Turkmen, Romanian, and
other languages ...
That is a quite long list of east European languages and Russian is only one of it. Why the
authors of DarkNet do not want their software to run on machines with those language settings
is unknown. But why would a Russian actor protect machines with Ukrainian or Romanian language
settings? Both countries are hostile towards Russia. To claim that this somehow points to
Russian actors is therefore baseless.
The Kremlin has once again pointed out the importance of cooperation between Moscow and
Washington in tackling cyberthreats amid a cyber-attack on Colonial Pipeline, a US company.
"Russia has nothing to do with these hacker attacks, nor with the previous hacker attacks,"
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Preskov assured reporters on Tuesday.
"We categorically reject any accusation against us, and we can only regret that the US is
refusing to cooperate with us in any way to counter cyber-threats. We believe that such
cooperation - both international and bilateral - could indeed contribute to the common
struggle against this scourge [known as] cyber-crime," Peskov said.
The U.S. seems notoriously bad at attributing computer hacks. It claims that the recent
SolarWinds attack which intruded several government branches was also done by Russia. But that
attack
required deep insider knowledge and access to SolarWinds' computers
and processes :
The recently discovered deep intrusion into U.S. companies and government networks used a
manipulated version of the SolarWinds Orion network management software. The Washington borg
immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China. But
none of those claims were backed up by facts or known evidence.
The hack was extremely complex, well managed and resourced, and likely required insider
knowledge. To this IT professional it 'felt' neither Russian nor Chinese. It is far more
likely, as Whitney Webb finds, that
Israel was behind it .
Indeed - the programmers of an Israeli company, recently bought up by SolarWinds, had all
the necessary access for such a hack. However the U.S. sanctioned Russia over the SolarWinds
hack without providing any evidence of its involvement.
If the U.S. continues to blame Russia without any evidence for each and every hack there may
come a time when Russia stops caring and really starts to hack into or destroy important U.S.
systems. The U.S. should fear that day.
Posted by b on May 11, 2021 at 17:31 UTC |
Permalink
Thanks b. I don't think Russia is going to escalate destructive attacks any time soon.
There's no upside.
They might even be reluctant to reveal their capabilities in the Ukraine.
For the moment, mockery is the best remedy while they up their game.
@ b who ended with
"
If the U.S. continues to blame Russia without any evidence for each and every hack there may
come a time when Russia stops caring and really starts to hack into or destroy important U.S.
systems.
"
How can you write such assertions that vary from the approach that both Russia and China
are taking?....strong defense but no offense.
Now if empire tried to hack into a Russian or Chinese system/network then appropriate
takedowns of malicious systems/networks would seem logical....and I expect they know
how...but will not do it on the basis of another avenue of empire lies and deceit.
You should have titled the post "Killing Two Birds With One Stone".
This pipeline is huge, running from Texas through the Southeast and all the way up to New
England. It's condition is beyond awful with multiple leaks along the route some of which
lose more than a million gallons per month and much more than can be determined since some of
the gasoline / jet fuel went into the aquifers. These faults have been well known for decades
and although some of the areas are heavily populated no remediation was done. The local
outcry recently caught the attention of the press when kids reported a gasoline smell along
the pipeline route to the police. The locals demanded the pipeline be closed for repairs and
sought answers from state officials and Federal authorities as to why this situation was
allowed. To blame the Russians for the closure of the pipeline which results in a surge in
prices and limited availability of gas for the summer is an absolute stroke of genius.
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/ncdeq-colonial-pipeline-spill-huntersville/275-70e16fb6-c945-4634-b933-3975d0573f2e
It is odd that certain elements of the us intelligence community, along with negative
factions within the us political establishment, continue to absolutely refuse to enter into
verifiable and mutually binding international agreements on cyber security with exactly the
nation states that they accuse (without evidence) of malicious activity in the same sphere,
while at the same time operating in this field in an openly declared hostile manner under the
secrecy deemed necessary for 'national security'.
Probably it was not a false flag. First of all the state of IT security at Colonial Pipeline
was so dismal that it was strange that this did not happened before. And there might be
some truth that they try to exploit this hack to thier advantage as maintenance of the
pipeline is also is dismal shape.
Notable quotes:
"... "As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went." If you are right about the perpetrators, my guess would be that it went into the black-ops fund, two birds one stone. ..."
"... I have become so used to false flags, I am going to be shocked when a real intrusion happens! ..."
"... an in depth article researching solarwinds hack - looks like it was Israel, not a great leap to see that colonial was a false flag https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/01/investigative-reports/another-mega-group-spy-scandal-samanage-sabotage-and-the-solarwinds-hack/ ..."
"... Regarding the ownership of Colonial Pipeline: 'IFM Investors, which is owned by 27 Australian union- and employer-backed industry superannuation funds, owns a 16 per cent stake in Colonial Pipeline, which the infrastructure manager bought in 2007 for $US651 million.' ..."
"... 'The privately held Colonial Pipeline is valued at about $US8 billion, based upon the most recent sale of a 10 per cent stake to a unit of Royal Dutch Shell in 2019.' ..."
The Colonial Pipeline Co.,ransomware attack was a false flag. They wanted to blame Russian
hackers so they could derail Nordstream II
It is common knowledge that the only real hackers that are able of such sabotage is CIA
and Israeli. It's the same attack types they do to Iranian infrastructure on a regular
basis.
The Russians are not that stupid to do something they know will be blamed on them and is
of no political use to them. And could derail Nordstream2.
As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went. CEO is ultra corrupt. They
never ever invested in their infrastructure so when it went down they came up with a
profitable excuse. Just look at their financials/balance sheet over the years. No real
investment in updating and maintaining infrastructure. Great false flag. Corruption and
profiteering.
"As for the money-nobody really knows where it really went." If you are right
about the perpetrators, my guess would be that it went into the black-ops fund, two birds one
stone.
I'm not familiar with your handle - hello. IMO, it would be counterproductive for Russia
to initiate such a hack. What really affects and debilitates US oil and gas interests is low
prices, both at the pump and on the stock exchange. The hack helped jack up prices (which
were already being jacked-up despite demand still lagging behind supply) which only HELPS
those energy interests. It has long been known, the math isn't complicated, what level crude
must trade at for US domestic oil & gas operations to be profitable. Remember that just
as the pandemic was emerging Russia and Saudi Arabia once again sent the global crude market
into the depths of despair.
I do agree the hack can be interpreted in light of the desperation of US energy interests
to try to kill NS2. I have not yet read the recent articles discussing Biden's recent moves
in that regard. If these moves are a recognition that US LNG to Europe (and elsewhere) are
diametrically opposed to climate responsibility, I'd welcome those moves. As is usually the
case though, environmental responsibility is probably the least likely reason.
Regarding the ownership of Colonial Pipeline: 'IFM Investors, which is owned by 27
Australian union- and employer-backed industry superannuation funds, owns a 16 per cent stake
in Colonial Pipeline, which the infrastructure manager bought in 2007 for $US651
million.'
also
'The privately held Colonial Pipeline is valued at about $US8 billion, based upon the
most recent sale of a 10 per cent stake to a unit of Royal Dutch Shell in 2019.'
"... On one occasion, she said Sheldon Adelson , a Jewish American billionaire who supports Republicans and right-wing Israeli politicians, looked like "a naked mole rat." For this, the right branded Wilder an anti-Semite, even though she is Jewish. Now she's out of a job. ..."
"... But it would be a mistake to reduce either Wilder's firing or the persistence of Cuomo to a story about cancel culture. The phenomenon is obviously one-sided; the outrage, bogus. This is really a story about journalism and an industry that has abdicated its most basic responsibilities. ..."
"... The rules matter. They exist to protect the integrity of a news outlet and to protect the public from corruption. Instead, news outlets are failing consumers and journalists alike. They serve power rather than challenge it. The result is a weak press in a nation desperate for the truth. That's no way to serve the public. ..."
"... AP prohibits employees from openly expressing their opinions on political matters and other public issues. ..."
"... I think Don Lemon is just an actor that plays a journalist on TV. Also, where is the diversity they preach on this network? Where are the Latinx, the Asian hosts, the women? So much for following what you preach. ..."
Emily Wilder is a promising young journalist. After finishing a stint at the Arizona
Republic , the recent Stanford graduate began a job with the Associated Press on May 3
as a news associate. Wilder could have built a career at the storied wire service or, with the
experience she'd gained, leap to a major paper. Instead, the AP fired her two weeks in, days
after the Stanford College Republicans pointed a right-wing mob in Wilder's direction. Wilder,
it turns out, has political opinions: In college, she belonged to Students for Justice in
Palestine and to Jewish Voice for Peace, two groups that oppose the occupation of Palestinian
territory by Israeli forces. On one occasion, she said Sheldon
Adelson , a Jewish American billionaire who supports Republicans and right-wing Israeli
politicians, looked like "a naked mole rat." For this, the right branded Wilder an anti-Semite,
even though she is Jewish. Now she's out of a job.
Contrast Wilder's circumstances with those of
Chris Cuomo . The star CNN anchor will keep his job even though he has flouted basic
ethical standards that typically apply to other, less prominent journalists. Though CNN once
banned Cuomo from interviewing his governor brother, Andrew, it relaxed that when the pandemic
hit "and the Cuomo Brothers show soared to popularity," Margaret Sullivan
wrote at the Washington Post . That looked bad, CNN eventually conceded, and it
reinstated the ban. Behind the scenes, though, Cuomo's ethical violations continued. On
Thursday, the Post
reported that he had advised his brother on how to handle sexual harassment allegations
that threatened the elder Cuomo's popularity and career. Cuomo won't be punished, CNN said.
Nothing can stop the Cuomo Brothers show.
The Cuomos possess something Emily Wilder lacks: power. Outrage derailed Wilder's career
nearly as soon as it had begun. But real ethical violations can't kick Cuomo off the air. The
Wilder and Cuomo stories both impart something vital about cancel culture. "There's no question
I was just canceled," Wilder
told SFGate. Cuomo, meanwhile, reportedly used the phrase to discuss his brother's sexual
harassment problem. In practice, cancel culture cuts one way, against journalists like Wilder
or
Nikole Hannah-Jones , who was recently
denied tenure under pressure from conservatives
with links to the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, NC Policy Watch has
reported. Against a white, male network star or his brother the governor, cancel culture can
apparently do little.
But it would be a mistake to reduce either Wilder's firing or the persistence of Cuomo
to a story about cancel culture. The phenomenon is obviously one-sided; the outrage, bogus.
This is really a story about journalism and an industry that has abdicated its most basic
responsibilities. The Associated Press has claimed that Wilder violated its social-media
policies, though she says her bosses were unable to tell her how. In the absence of a
substantive reason to fire Wilder, another explanation presents itself: The AP capitulated to a
bad-faith political campaign. In doing so, it betrayed its very reason to exist. Wilder's
political opinions have no bearing on her ability to gather news. The AP showed it is not
impartial after all; it can be persuaded, if only from the right.
There is no evidence that Wilder is anything but what she appears to be, a talented and
committed young journalist. People don't always enter college knowing they want to be
journalists. Indeed, perhaps they shouldn't. Any definition of objectivity that requires a
journalist to pretend neutrality asks that person to lie. Journalists are not automatons. They
have opinions, and if they are not male or white or rich or straight, those opinions make them
vulnerable to the right-wing outrages that just cost Wilder her new job. The press has one
purpose, and that is to report news in the public's interest. It is not entertainment. It is
not propaganda. It is not public relations.
And that's why Chris Cuomo ought to be out of a job. CNN, too, has forgotten why it exists.
Cuomo's infractions impede his ability to cover the news. By keeping him employed, CNN says the
news does not matter and neither do the rules. CNN made a similar calculation in the past with
plagiarism, which typically ends careers "" unless a journalist happens to be Fareed Zakaria.
The current host of CNN's GPS , he is generally tasked with explaining various
foreign-policy matters to a popular audience and once lifted sections of a Jill Lepore column
for a column in Time . Though CNN briefly suspended
Zakaria in 2012 for the offense, the site Our Bad Media
uncovered further incidents in 2014. Yet Zakaria persists, with CNN's help. He still hosts
his show and will likely continue to do so unless another, bigger scandal somehow takes him
down. The network's motivations are not mysterious. It wants to keep its moneymakers and elite
influencers. To do this, it'll ignore the ethical standards that apply to everyone else. At the
same time, journalism's Emily Wilders will scrape for every bit of job security they can
find.
The rules matter. They exist to protect the integrity of a news outlet and to protect
the public from corruption. Instead, news outlets are failing consumers and journalists alike.
They serve power rather than challenge it. The result is a weak press in a nation desperate for
the truth. That's no way to serve the public.
JosephQua 11 HOURS AGO
"On one occasion, she said Sheldon Adelson, a Jewish American billionaire who supports
Republicans and right-wing Israeli politicians, looked like "a naked mole rat." For this, the
right branded Wilder an anti-Semite, even though she is Jewish. Now she's out of a job."
This is a lie.
Wilder wasn't fired for remarks she tweeted while a college student, she was fired for
tweets made in the 17 days she was employed by AP openly expressing her personal opinions on
the Israel-Palestinian conflict, in one of which she openly attacked the idea of objectivity
in journalism.
AP prohibits employees from openly expressing their opinions on political matters and
other public issues.
Wilder knows exactly what tweets git her in trouble and when she made them.
In my opinion, both Chris Cuomo and Wilder should be terminated.
hivequeen+ 17 HOURS AGO
The problem isn't that Chris Cuomo talked to his brother. The problem is that Chris Cuomo
talked to his brother AND his brother's advisors while they planned and developed a political
strategy to defend his brother against claims of sexual harassment. And you know that.
tanquerochicago 1 DAY AGO
CNN has lost all credibility as a "news organization". I can't watch any of it with a
straight face. They claim to believe in liberal views, preach the importance of diversity
(rightfully so), and claim to be a serious network but they've allowed the Cuomo clown hour
to continue.
I think Don Lemon is just an actor that plays a journalist on TV. Also, where is the
diversity they preach on this network? Where are the Latinx, the Asian hosts, the women? So
much for following what you preach.
And the Cuomos simply give Italians a bad name. They play into all of the awful
stereotypes that everyone should be fighting...the machismo, sexism, bravado....gross! Just
gross.
nibblybits 1 DAY AGO (Edited)
It's examples like Chris Cuomo not being even slapped on the wrist that gives oxygen to
accusations of the right that CNN is fake news and no better than Fox. They lose the moral
high ground against propaganda arms like Newsmax and OANN if Chris Cuomo is allowed to
perpetuate defenses of his own brother from his perch as anchor. (And let's not peddle in the
fiction that Chris is not reporting on his brother, when we know he has power in that
organization to direct coverage.)
His colleagues are furious. Jim Acosta has been wading out into pro-Trump mobs for years
trying to defend his job and his network, and Chris Cuomo just blew that up.
Embarrassing.
Worse are the partisan hypocrites on here defending Cuomo.
. . . which has caused some GOP leaders to fear alienating female Republican voters, particularly educated suburbanites
who will be key votes in the 2022 elections.
When I first met my wife, she told me women shouldn't have the right to vote. It was instant love.
A Girl In Flyover Country 59 minutes ago
[in case of Cheney] The war monger doesn't fall far from the tree.
Rise21 42 minutes ago remove link
Amazing how the liberal news outlets are now supporting a Cheney. But they know more war equals more rating
yochananmichael 51 seconds ago
its time for the republicans to rid itself of chicken hawk warmongers like Cheney.
He father disbanded there Iraqi Army which was supposed to provide security, causing an insurgency and 5000 dead American boys
and countless maimed.
vic and blood PREMIUM 4 minutes ago
Cheney's benefactors have erected massive billboards all over the state, 'thanking her for defending the Constitution.'
She has an incredible war chest, and sadly, money and advertising decides a lot of elections.
"... " 'Hate Inc.' is a book about the way the news media business has commoditized anger and division, eschewing traditional fact-based reporting and objectivity in favor of a new strategy based on telling audiences what they want to hear," Taibbi said. ..."
"Matt Taibbi's "˜Hate Inc.' Getting Turned Into Documentary by Vespucci (EXCLUSIVE)" [
Variety
].
"As a company that works closely with journalists
from around the world, we remain conscious of the evolution of media and audio-visual news,' said Vespucci co-founders Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turcan.
"Hate Inc." expertly dissects the current state of the media
landscape, and through the lens of Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent," Matt asks of us, viewers, to
hold accountable our news providers.
The timing of the book couldn't be more
critical and a documentary as an extension of Matt's commentary feels only fitting.
" 'Hate Inc.'
is a book about the way the news media business has commoditized anger and division, eschewing
traditional fact-based reporting and objectivity in favor of a new strategy based on telling
audiences what they want to hear," Taibbi said.
"˜Because
much of this transformation took place in visual and auditory media, the subject easily lends
itself to a documentary "" in fact, even as I was writing the book, I was aware it
may be a story more easily told on screen.'"
The emergence of the internet was met with hope and enthusiasm by people who understood that
the
plutocrat-controlled mainstream media were manipulating public opinion to manufacture consent for the status quo. The
democratization of information-sharing was going to give rise to a public consciousness that is
emancipated from the domination of plutocratic narrative control, thereby opening up the
possibility of revolutionary change to our society’s corrupt systems.
But it never happened. Internet use has become commonplace around the world and humanity is
able to network and share information like never before, yet we remain firmly under the thumb
of the same power structures we’ve been ruled by for generations, both
politically and psychologically. Even the dominant media institutions are somehow still the
same.
So what went wrong? Nobody’s buying newspapers anymore, and the audiences
for television and radio are dwindling. How is it possible that those same imperialist
oligarchic institutions are still controlling the way most people think about their world?
Last month a very informative interview saw the
CEO of YouTube, which is owned by Google, candidly discussing the way the platform uses
algorithms to elevate mainstream news outlets and suppress independent content.
At the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Technology Governance Summit,
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told
Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that while the platform still allows arts and entertainment
videos an equal shot at going viral and getting lots of views and subscribers, on important
areas like news media it artificially elevates “authoritative
sourcesâ€.
“What we’ve done is really fine-tune our algorithms
to be able to make sure that we are still giving the new creators the ability to be found
when it comes to music or humor or something funny,†Wojcicki said.
“But when we’re dealing with sensitive areas, we
really need to take a different approach.â€
Wojcicki said in addition to banning content deemed harmful, YouTube has also created a
category labeled “borderline content†which it algorithmically
de-boosts so that it won’t show up as a recommended video to viewers who are
interested in that topic:
“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources
that we’re recommending are authoritative news, medical science, et cetera.
And we also have created a category of more borderline content where sometimes
we’ll see people looking at content that’s lower quality
and borderline. And so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. So
that’s a content that stays on the platform but is not something that
we’re going to recommend. And so our algorithms have definitely evolved in
terms of handling all these different content types.â€
https://www.youtube.com/embed/r2ONsgx4Mxw
Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski has a good video out reacting to
Wojcicki’s comments, saying he believes his (entirely harmless) channel has
been grouped in the “borderline†category because his views and
new subscribers suddenly took a dramatic and inexplicable plunge. Kulinski reports that
overnight he went from getting tens of thousands of new subscriptions per month to maybe a
thousand.
“People went to YouTube to escape the mainstream nonsense that they see
on cable news and on TV, and now YouTube just wants to become cable news and TV,â€
Kulinski says.
“People are coming here to escape that and you’re
gonna force-feed them the stuff they’re escaping like CNN and MSNBC and
Fox News.â€
It is not terribly surprising to hear Susan Wojcicki admit to elevating the media of the
oligarchic empire to the CEO of a
neoconservative publication at the World Economic Forum. She comes from the same elite
empire management background as all the empire managers who’ve been placed
in charge of mainstream media outlets by their plutocratic owners, having
gone to Harvard after being literally raised on the campus of Stanford University as a
child. Her sister Anne is the founder of the genetic-testing company
23andMe and was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Google itself also uses algorithms to artificially boost empire media in its searches. In
2017 World Socialist Website (WSWS) began documenting the fact that
it, along with other leftist and antiwar outlets, had suddenly experienced a dramatic drop in
traffic from Google searches. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal confirmed WSWS claims , reporting that
“Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove
certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results.†In
2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to censoring WSWS at a
Senate hearing in response to one senator’s suggestion that Google only
censors right wing content.
Then you’ve got Facebook, where
a third of Americans regularly get their news. Facebook is a bit less evasive about its
status quo-enforcing censorship practices, openly enlisting the government-and-plutocrat-funded
imperialist
narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to help it determine what content to censor
and what to boost. Facebook has stated that if
its “fact checkers†like The Atlantic Council deem a page or
domain guilty of spreading false information, it will “dramatically reduce
the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on
Facebook.â€
All the algorithm stacking by the dominant news distribution giants Google and Facebook also
ensures that mainstream platforms and reporters will have far more followers than indie media
on platforms like Twitter, since an article that has been artificially amplified will receive
far more views and therefore far more clicks on their social media information. Mass media
employees tend to clique up and amplify each other on Twitter, further exacerbating the divide.
Meanwhile left and antiwar voices,
including myself , have been complaining for years that Twitter
artificially throttles their follower count.
If not for these deliberate acts of sabotage and manipulation by Silicon Valley
megacorporations , the mainstream media which have deceived us into war after war and which
manufacture consent
for an oppressive status quo would have been replaced by independent media years ago. These
tech giants are the life support system of corporate media propaganda.
* * *
My work is
entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around,
liking me on Facebook
, following my antics on Twitter , or
throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi , Patreon or Paypal . If you want to read more you can buy
my books . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,
has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else
I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. The best way to get
around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the
mailing list for at my website or
on Substack , which will
get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I
stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform,
click here .
The NYT is simply a propaganda organ of the corporate oligarchy. Whenever the US does
something bad, it is always "alleged". When opponents of US hegemony are accused of doing
something bad, it is never "alleged" - for example, you won't read about the "alleged Douma
chemical attack" in the NYT.
Just a small point about English grammar: "alleged burglar", "alleged miracle" and
"alleged conspiracy" are all correct, because "alleged" is being used here as an adjective.
"Alleged antique vase", on the other hand, is incorrect because what is being alleged is not
that the object is a vase; what is being alleged is that the vase is antique. Because it is
being used to describe an adjective (antique), it is being used adverbially: therefore the
correct usage is "allegedly antique vase".
This reminds me of John Michael Greer's formulation: the "allegedly smart phone". I use it
all the time, to imply that intensive users of mobile devices may not be quite as intelligent
as is generally believed. Note that what is being is alleged is not that it's a phone, but
that it's smart!
NYT does use "alleged" correctly. In the land of truth, one need merely state one's
statement. In the land of lies, one must insert "alleged", so that others know the statement
is truth.
Interesting that the CNN producer on the Veritas video said that global
warming will be the next big fear-inducing corporate greenwashing campaign.
Would love to know where all these "narratives" are coordinated from and
by whom.
Bellingcat is in the middle of the GRU/Czech arms depot explosion story from 2014 - now
being described as "defacto act of Russian state terrorism on a NATO soil."
It appears the GRU were following closely a movement of arms from the Czech depot to a
Bulgarian middleman, meant to be then delivered to Ukraine. The explosion is now attributed
to the GRU because of the Petrov/Boshirov ID, and their presumed signature ineffectiveness
failing to destroy the arms cache and later failing to kill the Skripals.
Written by Steven Lee Myers, the NYT 's bureau chief in Beijing, the piece is
full of false and unsupported assertions. It changes explicit Chinese statements in support
of democracy and human rights into the opposite. It is also untruthful about the sources of
its quotes:
China hopes to position itself as the main challenger to an international order, led by the
United States, that is generally guided by principles of democracy, respect for human
rights and adherence to rule of law.
Such a system "does not represent the will of the international community," China's
foreign minister, Wang Yi, told Russia's, Sergey V. Lavrov, when they met in the southern
Chinese city of Guilin.
In a joint statement, they accused the United States of bullying
and interference and urged it to "reflect on the damage it has done to global peace and
development in recent years."
There is no evidence and no quote in the piece to support the assertion that the
unilateral "international order, led by the United States" is in fact "guided by principles
of democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law." The wars the U.S. and
its allies have waged and wage in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and other countries are, in fact,
not in adherence to the rule of international law nor are they executed with respect for
human rights or the principles of democracy.
The Wang Yi quote in the second paragraph is taken completely out of context. By placing
it after his false assertions the author insinuates that Wang Yi rejected the "principles of
democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law."
Wang Yi did not do that at all. He did in fact the opposite.
Here is the original
quote from the report of Wang Yi's meeting with Russia's foreign minister Sergei
Lavrov:
Wang Yi said, the so-called "rules-based international order" by a few countries is not
clear in its meaning , as it reflects the rules of a few countries and does not represent
the will of the international community . We should uphold the universally recognized
international law.
The there is the
Joint Statement from the Lavrov-Wang Yi meeting which contradicts the New York
Times insinuation:
The world has entered a period of high turbulence and rapid change. In this context, we
call on the international community to put aside any differences and strengthen mutual
understanding and build up cooperation in the interests of global security and geopolitical
stability, to contribute to the establishment of a fairer, more democratic and rational
multipolar world order.
All human rights are universal, indivisible and interrelated. ...
Democracy is one of the achievements of humanity. ...
International law is an important condition for the further development of humanity.
...
In promoting multilateral cooperation, the international community must adhere to
principles such as openness and equality, and a non-ideological approach. ...
The Chinese Foreign Ministry report
about the issuance of the above Four Point Statement quotes Wang Yi as saying:
Today, we will issue a joint statement on several issues of current global governance,
expounding the essence of major concepts such as human rights, democracy, international
order, and multilateralism, reflecting the collective demands of the international
community, especially developing countries. We call on all countries to participate in and
improve global governance in the spirit of openness, inclusiveness and equality, abandon
zero-sum mentality and ideological prejudice, stop interfering in the internal affairs of
any country, enhance the well-being of people of all countries through dialogue and
cooperation, and jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind.
In no way has China rejected human rights, democracy or the rule of law. The New York
Times author simply construed that.
The third NYT paragraph quoted above is likewise false. The
Joint Statement did not urge the U.S. to "reflect on the damage it has done to global
peace and development in recent years." There is nothing in there that could be construed as
such. The U.S. is not even mentioned in the Joint Statement.
The quote the NYT author uses is not from the official Joint Statement, as
falsely claimed, but from a Chinese State TV's summarization of a
press conference :
Both foreign ministers said that the international community believes that the United
States should reflect on the damage it has done to global peace and development in recent
years , stop unilateral bullying, stop interfering in other countries' internal affairs,
and stop pulling "small circles" to engage in group confrontation.
Unsupported assertions about the motives of the "U.S. led" order, out of context quotes
that turn the actual statements by the Chinese foreign minister into their opposite and
missattribution of a news summary as a diplomatic statement is something that one would not
expect from a news outlet but from a propaganda organ.
That is then, obviously, what the Times has become.
Thanks b, for bringing this to light.
Without your posts, most of us - even those of us that try to dig into things more than
most people - would not be aware of these things.
Western mainstream media will, of course, never inform the public of those important
excerpts from the Lavrov-Wang Joint Statement and the Chinese Foreign Ministry that you
brought to our attention.
In our so-called "democracies", the electorates are not just deliberately kept in the
dark, but in fact shaped, not into informed voters, but disinformed voters.
-
Again to translate from the Orwellianism/Newspeak of our Western establishment news media,
when they say "international order" what they really mean is the "Western
deep-state-run order" or "Western neocon-run order."
"Generally guided by principles of democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to
rule of law" can be translated to "generally guided by hypocrisy, Orwellianism, special
interests, gangsterism, treachery, and mockery of rule of law."
fallacia non causae ut causae
Eristische Dialektik: Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten / Arthur Schopenhauer 1831
[The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument]
Steven Lee Myers, the NYT's bureau
chief in Beijing just use a really classical and poor way to manipulate.
"an international order, led by the United States, that is generally guided by principles of
democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law."
International order is not international law. LED by USA not by law. Generally (... No
comment), principe of... (again)
Yes. Really pure Propagandastaffel.
But a good news. Why is NYT in a need to manipulate?
...On a different note, i believe Steven Myers is just milling for a free ticket home and
a promotion which he'll surely get once he's expelled from China for fabricating fake
news.
Even during the worst of the cold war there were some respect and integrity on reporting
facts. MSM of today is fully weaponized and had gone full goebbels.
"that is generally guided by principles of democracy, respect for human rights and
adherence to rule of law"...
I haven't decided yet to either cry about the existence of such idiocies and such
propaganda driven Idiots and what it says about the human condition or scream because the
hypocrisy displayed continuously without shame and any twinge of self-awareness' becomes
unbearable.
Okay, then what can we infer from this lie-filed screed? I suggest that the NY Times and
its manipulators are against all the highlighted portions of this point b highlighted from
the 4 Point Joint Statement:
"Today, we will issue a joint statement on several issues of current global governance,
expounding the essence of major concepts such as human rights, democracy, international
order, and multilateralism, reflecting the collective demands of the international community,
especially developing countries . We call on all countries to participate in and
improve global governance in the spirit of openness, inclusiveness and equality, abandon
zero-sum mentality and ideological prejudice, stop interfering in the internal affairs of any
country, enhance the well-being of people of all countries through dialogue and cooperation,
and jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind ."
All the bolded text is what the Outlaw US Empire, its vassals and its propaganda organs
are against, as in opposed in a very proactive manner up to and including physical war waged
on nations that try to promote any of those bolded items. The one main feature the Outlaw US
Empire is dead set against occurring is the construction of a global community aimed at
promoting a shared, equitable future for humanity for that's a Win-Win outcome, not a
Zero-sum last man standing, winner take all outcome Neoliberalism demands. In other words,
the NY Times is serving as a sort of American Pravda by detailing what its actual
policies are without actually declaring them to be policies.
Ever notice that within US culture there's not one sport or game that has a shared outcome
between several different participants, that there's only one winner (team or individual) and
that its entire political-economy is modeled on that concept? That equality of outcomes is
always subsumed by equality of participation? That if there's not going to be any equality
overseas then there won't be any equality at home? And I can list many more. That all such
arrangements are promoting a domineering authoritarian ethos never seems to dawn on far too
many--I'm the head of the household so you must do as I say. We don't care if 80% of the
public demand universal single payer health insurance, an end to forever wars, clean water
for our communities, clean air to breathe, freedom from mass shootings, freedom from police
riots, and so forth and so on. The NY Times and its controllers don't want anything of the
sort for the US public or for anyone else on the planet. And that's the message it delivers
every time it publishes an article filled with lies, falsehoods, innuendo, fabrications,
etc., which is daily.
The NY Times ought to be called The Projector and sold with the tabloids.
Thanks b, when you wrote: "The New York Times author simply construed that."
I would change to: "The New York Times author maliciously construed that."
The "Five Eyes" countries, who just happen to all be Spawn of Perfidious Albion, seem to
be more and more infected with the virus of Orwellianism (itself an idea of Anglo culture).
Perhaps parallel to the out-of-control "Five Eyes" apparatus, or as a subset of it, there is
an unspoken out-of-control "Five Mouths" apparatus, of which the NYT is a key outlet ...
Let's hope other countries do everything they can keep that virus out of their systems,
and inoculate themselves and their populations well.
Steven Lee Myers used to work as a NYT correspondent in Moscow and Baghdad. He is the
author of the tome "The New Tsar: the Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin", the title of which
alerts you to the tone of the garbage that wasted an entire plantation of pine trees.
"Our Nairobi chief has a tremendous opportunity to dive into news and opportunity
across a wide range of countries, from the deserts of Sudan to the pirate seas of Somalia,
down through the forests of the Congo and the shores of Tanzania. It is an enormous patch of
vibrant, intense and strategically important territory with many vital story lines, including
terrorism, the scramble for resources, the global contest with China and the constant
push-and-pull of democracy versus authoritarianism.
The ideal candidate should enjoy jumping on news, be willing to cover conflict, and
also be drawn to investigative stories. There is also the chance to delight our readers with
stories of hope and the changing rhythms of life in a rapidly evolving region."
Myers certainly knows how to jump on propaganda often and hard enough to turn into
something faintly resembling ... news.
"... Steve moved to Beijing in 2016 and quickly built a portfolio that was as powerful as
it was eclectic. His old world combined with his new one when he explored Russia's fury
over China's hunger for timber. He detailed Beijing's spreading crackdown on Islam,
analyzed China's exploration of the far side of the moon and reported on Hengdian World
Studios, an outdoor movie and television lot scattered over 2,500 acres in eastern China.
He also landed a rare interview with the Chinese actress Fan Bingbing after she was
embroiled in a tax scandal.
At each stop along his journey, he has taken to heart the advice of the former executive
editor Joe Lelyveld, devouring the local literature of his new home, not just the books by
foreign correspondents. Lately, he has been reading Yan Lianke, the author of "The Day the
Sun Died," and "Lenin's Kisses." He has an equally voracious appetite for Chinese cuisine,
which he is offsetting by training for his eighth marathon ..."
And here's our own Chris Buckley who joined Myers on his arduous tour of duty in
Beijing:
"... Chris [Buckley] is our resident China expert, having spent the past 20 years reporting
on the country. He went into journalism essentially as an excuse to hang around China.
Born in Australia, he decided to abandon a law degree and went to Beijing to study
Communist Party history at the People's University of China. After a half-hearted attempt
to start an academic career, his odd jobs in teaching and translating turned into
occasional fixer work for journalists, eventually in our own Beijing bureau.
He worked for Erik Eckholm and Elisabeth Rosenthal covering corruption scandals,
political infighting, the SARS crisis and the outbreak of an AIDS epidemic in rural China.
When they left, he worked for a while under a couple of obscure correspondents, Joe Kahn
and Jim Yardley.
After a seven-year stint as a correspondent at Reuters, he returned to The Times in
2012. He spent the first three years waiting in Hong Kong for a visa, camping out at the
Harbour Plaza Hotel for reasons that are unknown. From that perch, he wrote about the rise
of Xi Jinping, his corruption campaign, his directive declaring war on liberal values, as
well as the Umbrella Revolution. Since returning to the mainland, he has been a force
behind our coverage of the crackdown on the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the country's shift
toward authoritarianism, while also taking on a more personal quest about Sichuan
food."
Do you get the impression that these fellows jumped onto these cushy jobs for the food
junkets?
"... international order, led by the United States, that is generally guided by principles of
democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law.
Such a system "does not represent the will of the international community," according to the
Chinese.
We throw this statement into spectroscope to check if there is any weasel content, phrases
that sound nice but are capacious enough to cover not so nice meaning. Would it be even
better if the much tutted "international order" was not BASED on principles, rather than
GUIDED BY principles, and even weaker, GENERALLY GUIDED? Going further on that path we can be
INSPIRED by principles, GENERALLY INSPIRED, and then we can make a bold step to VAGELY
INSPIRED. Going further, OCCASIONALLY VAGUELY INSPIRED.
Not ashamed to manipulate stuff from CCTV about migrant work in Xinjiang into "forced
labour" and "BBC findings". Typical for western "journalists" in China, mostly sitting in
their apartments quaffing cheap liquor or going to the .. erm barber shops for a da feiji
(打飞机) ..
The industry needs some good PR right now. After all, its refusal to share its vaccine
technology could end up costing millions of lives in the developing world. In addition, it
could mean trillions of dollars of lost output as countries need to shut down large segments
of their economy. But the NYT is there to help. It ran a lengthy article about the issue,
which contains much useful information, but it maintains a framing favorable to the
pharmaceutical industry. At the end of the piece, after giving the argument for broader
sharing of technology and over-riding the industry's government-granted patent monopolies,
the piece tells readers: "But governments cannot afford to sabotage companies that need
profit to survive."
If the reporters/editors had read their piece, they would know that the companies in
question had already made large profits, through being paid directly for their research and
building manufacturing facilities, as was the case with Moderna and BioNtech (Pfizer's German
partner), or with advance purchase agreements. No one is suggesting that these companies
should not make a profit, so it is not clear on what planet this assertion originated.
It is possible to make profits directly on government contracts, as major military
contractors like Lockheed and Boeing could explain to the New York Times. The advantage of
having direct contracts for biomedical research is that a requirement of the contract could
be that all findings are fully open-source so that researchers all over the world can benefit
from them. (I discuss a mechanism for direct funding in chapter 5 of Rigged [it's free].)
... ... ...
It is probably worth mentioning inequality in this piece. The NYT, like most intellectual
types, has done considerable hand-wringing over inequality in recent years, both overall and
racial inequality. It is a safe bet that giving more money to pharmaceutical companies will
mean more inequality and certainly benefit whites far more than Blacks. It might be useful if
the paper paid a little attention to the policies that create
inequality instead of just bemoaning it as an unfortunate feature of the economy.
Yes, the NYT is really good at covering the impact of policies that increase inequality
and perpetuate structural racism but avoids drawing any lines to the policies themselves --
and the politics that create these policies -- by treating the status quo as a kind of
state of nature.
Innovation in vaccine design comes from advances in fundamental science, which is funded
not by companies, but by NIH and NSF (predominantly). Pharma employs scientists trained
using federal funds, freely uses federally funded resources, open access publications and
open source software paid for through federal funds, buys up commercializable technologies
in form of startups that grow out of federal science and funded by SBIR and STTR grants,
kills most of them and overcharges taxpayers for the product. That's rarely mentioned. As
is the fact that pharma actually sucks at the only thing that they are supposed to be good
at - manufacturing. Quality problems have been plaguing AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Moderna -
something that is discussed in trade publications and FDA meetings but doesn't make it to
the NYT or TV news.
For example, Google has a simulator of "News". Many users are happy to get all the news
they need in one source! I must admit that for a while I was a happy user. But now the
simulation is quite decrepit when you stray away from the scenery selected by Google. Try
Ukraine. Several Google-worthy items per week, in roughly equal parts from Atlantic Council,
Radio FE/Sloboda and occasional items authored (I guess) in Ukraine. On April 11 there will
be a runoff election in Ecuador, and no news at all for the last month!
re Navalny: the Charite Hospital reports on his health confirmed what doctors in Omsk had
discovered and b, indeed, had reported here: the man suffers from very serious health
problems. It is a measure of the cynicism of the imperialist secret police that they have
choreographed this soap opera to end up in Navalny's death in a Russian prison. Another
Magnitsky for the Canadian House of Commons to fawn over as it licks Washington's ar
boots.
In this screenshot of his response in 2007, Mr Navalny bans somebody for being "a bugger and
a kike". Still, Jews supported him all right when told by their betters. They didn't even
mention his real anti-Jewish prejudice for they were (reasonably) afraid the Russian masses
would see it as rather a feather in his cap. The Jews are in line with the obscure real power,
and have to follow its demands, like the jesters before the king. The Covid plans for the world
reset are more important for the Masters than Jewish sentiments, and Jewish leaders recognise
that.
The Biden regime considers Russia its enemy Number One. Russia is in relatively good shape.
Russians are on their way out of Covid mass hysteria. They have begun to dismantle the Covid
measures. The rules are still there, but people sabotage them as they sabotaged Brezhnev's
rules. They also have their own vaccine Sputnik-V which is an old-style vaccine without gene
modification, as opposed to much of the Western stuff. I do not think it is necessary for
health, but it could help citizens under the spell of Covid to recover and forget the lockdown
nightmare.
Things began to move very fast after Biden was installed in the White House. After a year of
delays caused by US sanctions, on Monday 25/01/2021 the Russian pipe-laying vessel
Fortuna resumed its work off Denmark's shores on the undersea pipeline Nord Stream 2 to
sell Russian gas directly to Europe bypassing the latest US colony, the Ukraine. The US wants
Germany to stop the project and buy (more expensive) American gas instead. It would make Russia
more vulnerable. Despite the sanctions, Germany refused to stop the project. At the same time,
the Russians began to supply gas to Serbia creating a new line bypassing the Ukraine. At this
time, the Biden regime employed the Navalny card.
The return of Alexei Navalny to Russia is part of a plan to undermine Russia. The immense
power of Big Data and its social networks promoted his return as the new savior. But somehow it
didn't work. Instead of the expected tens of thousands, only one or two thousand followers
turned up at the airport, fewer than for a pop singer. He was promptly detained and arraigned
for thirty days. It was anticipated, and his people published his new Gelenjik Palace
film together with his call to demonstrate on 23/01.
The Russian internet had been saturated by YouTube pushing people to view it. The video had
been offered endlessly, time after time, and the numbers of viewers allegedly grew into the
billions. It was basically a psyops played by Google (the owner of YouTube) against Putin.
Again, it didn't work.
I witnessed the demo on Saturday 23/01, and it was not particularly impressive. Being a day
off, with a lot of people walking the streets and practically nobody carrying a poster or a
slogan, it is difficult to estimate how many were actually demonstrating, but it was in the low
thousands, as far as I could see. The police were well behaved; none of the rough justice we
see meted out in Paris or Amsterdam, let alone Washington. The Navalny activists were also
rather peaceful, excepting some marginal figures who were promptly arrested.
It seems that the Russians are not as silly as the Western planners expected them to be. In
1990 they, or their parents listened to Yeltsin's calls to throw off the privileged Communist
rulers because they, the rulers, had it so good with cars, dachas, Western goods. They paid for
this response with ten of the most awful years our generation experienced. Now they and their
children are unlikely to smash their state and their life just because their president has (or
has not) a palace. We shall see what the Russian state will do against inevitable future
assaults.
Putin is a cautious statesman. He does not want to aggravate relations with the Biden
regime, but the digital giants do not leave him many options. A Russian company gave a hand to
the Parler social network that was
deplatformed by Amazon, and it came back into being. Another Russian social network, Vkontakte , began to attract Western users. And
Russia is not alone: Turkey's Erdogan hit
Twitter , Pinterest and Periscope with advertising bans after they refused to follow
Facebook and appoint a local representative to take down contentious posts under a new law
aimed to pass the right to censure from the networks to the Turkish state. Russia plans to
follow the Turks. China has its own networks and is immune to the Big Five pressure.
My apologies if this has already been posted. Aaron Mate continues to rise in stature--
IMO-- as he keeps digging into Russiagate and exposing deeper and deeper proof of U.S. and
U.K. plots, programs and coverups regarding Russia. In this video Mate and Max Blumenthal
start by explaining how Twitter inadvertently boosted the Grayzone's explosive uncovering of
the BBC, Bellingcat and others' programs designed to do what Russiagaters accuse Putin of
doing; the difference is that Blumenthal gives evidence in the form of emails. impressive.
bottom line, "R2P""Russia bad"... the wheels are falling off.
You would think they would hire people who have some idea as to what might be plausible
when they invent these stories? It's very strange to see. There has been a long string of
these unconvincing stories aimed at Russia. The claim the supported Trump after 2016 was a
watershed too, all caution to the winds after that. Skripals, Navalny, one after another that
makes no sense. It's like they want to make a point and are failing. Or maybe propaganda is
all they have.
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the
masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen
mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our
country." -- Edward Bernays (1930). "Propaganda".
"... The information discussed is from government files which outlay various projects and from companies and -- interestingly -- from charities who make bids to run the FCO projects. All underlying files are available for download as one archive file (~80 MB). ..."
"... The budget for the various anti-Russian projects runs at dozens of millions pounds per year. The first programs were launched in 2016 and some continue through this year. ..."
"... Note that 'Russian disinformation' is whatever Britain does not like about Russia. 'Exposing' such 'disinformation' is best done by spreading one's own. These are not defensive programs but attacks on Russia. ..."
"... Many years of painstaking work of HMG through its embassies and intelligence cutouts precede a chemical attack. They create Media, CSOs and pseudo humanitarian organisations that happen to be just at the correct place and in the correct time with their cameras ready when 'suddenly' a dreadful accident 'shocks every one into action'. ..."
"... Do you believe HMG staged the 'Navalny accident' as part of some kind of a secret operation? Did HMG create Media outlets, nurture bloggers and stringers that it controlled? Did it engage Russia's youth and CSOs? Did it try to demonise Putin just like it had done with Assad by labeling them Evil Dictators who poisoned their people with forbidden chemical weapons? Do you know what all of this is needed for? They need it to delegitimise a leader of a country and convince people around the world that 'no holds should be barred to fight a mad dictator'. Can you grasp the gravity of what is going on? ..."
"... That view is not even exaggerated. The 'west' has the knives out against Russia. We previous mentioned a report from the Pentagon think tank RAND which evaluated how to best 'unbalance and overextend' Russia. ..."
"... The aims we have towards Russia are very big. We do not want anything less but regime change in Russia, which is difficult to achieve by economic pressure. ..."
"... The new documents also reveal some interesting new points on Navalny who seems to be on the British government payroll: ..."
"... By now you must have guessed the identity of one of the popular YouTubers investigating corruption. After obtaining EXPOSE Network files and examining the case studies two years ago, we didn't figure out which YouTuber the FCO supported through ZINC. We refrained from making any preliminary conclusions even when journalists discovered that Vladimir Ashurkov, a close ally of Alexei Navalny, was a part of the Integrity Initiative cluster. ..."
"... But when we saw Mr. Navalny and Bellingcat together, things started to make sense. By digging deeper, we discovered another Navalny's supporter who lives in London - some shadowy Maria Pevchikh who is promoting a system of smart voting in Russia. The Labour used a similar voting system to take the votes of the Conservatives. So, basically it is highly likely that the UK recommended the system to Mr. Navalny. ..."
"... It also turned out that Navalny began a smear campaign against the RT - one of the few media outlets in the West that allows those who disagree with the official position of western government to speak out. Note that Navalny's campaign was running in parallel with that of the Integrity Initiative. A reasonable question is - why Navalny who is mostly engaged in political battles inside Russia spends time fighting a TV network operating outside the country? ..."
"... Not only countries bordering Russia, a cell existed in Spain and it had consequences, when the new government came to power the local cell ran a campaign against the new nominee for National Security for not being tough on Russia as required, he was out of the job, and the main local newspapers were and are in bed with British intelligence dutifully reporting how bad Russia is and how good Navalny and his boys are, journalists working for the media with the largest readership in the country. ..."
"... Devinette: when was the last time a state which was not supported by the US has committed a chemical attack? ..."
"... BTW Maria Pevchikh accompanied Alexei Navalny from Omsk to Berlin. She was the one who was supposed to have gone to his hotel room in Tomsk and picked up the water bottle supposed to contain Novichok, at least until information came out that she acquired the water bottle from a vending machine at Omsk airport en route to Berlin. Pevchikh was the one person in Navalny's entourage who did not submit to questioning by Russian authorities on Navalny's poisoning. ..."
"... I recall that I first found the video below from a MofA comment, but very pertinent to this discussion and maybe it is discussing the same program: Top French Intel Boss Reveals Operation Beluga: US UK Plot to Discredit Putin and Destabilize Russia ..."
"... It gives me pause to try to understand the ethics / morals / humanity of the thousands of western bureaucrats working on these elaborate (sometimes comical) plans to destroy other nations. ..."
"... One visible thing about the complete "undermining of Russia", is that a large amount of bureaucratic planning has gone into it. The quantity of companies that have been employed and with specific duties to perform is shocking. An incidental factor is that the UK and French participants get well paid. £975 or £700 per day, in comparaison to "locally found" participants. ..."
The reporting was based on the British Integrity Initiative's internal files which some 'anonymous' organization had acquired
and published.
Data acquired from Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office by the same group
revealed large British propaganda programs in support of Jihadis in Syria as well as British influence operations designed to
undermine the security institutions of Lebanon and to secretly influence its population.
Now another large set of files has been published by the same source. These describe an extensive British government program designed
to undermine Russia by organizing and financing 'independent' Russian language media, by 'training' Russian journalists and by secretly
paying Russian influencers. It is certainly not the only British anti-Russia program but it probably has, secretly, the most public
influence.
The anonymous author has laid out the complete Undermining Russia program in four extensive parts:
One ,
two ,
three ,
four .
The information discussed is from government files which outlay various projects and from companies and -- interestingly -- from charities
who make bids to run the FCO projects. All underlying files are available for
download as one archive file (~80 MB).
The most interesting files are the bids the companies make for projects. They reveal previous projects, methods and people and
thereby create the larger picture.
The budget for the various anti-Russian projects runs at dozens of millions pounds per year. The first programs were launched
in 2016 and some continue through this year.
ENGAGE – working through the British Council to implement people-to-people activities between ethnic Russians and
local communities to develop links along the lines of 21st century skills – includes English language skills and media literacy,
social enterprises and cultural activities;
ENHANCE – supporting independent media in Russia's near abroad to bring balance and plurality to Russian language
media, in the Baltic States and Eastern Partnership countries;
EXPOSE – by debunking and exposing Russian disinformation in real time, which can be reported in mainstream media
with the goal to expose malign state disinformation in countries that are targeted by it. If you expose disinformation, it
is less likely to be impactful; therefore, the Russian State becomes less credible.
ENABLE – working with allied governments through the Government Communication Service to improve their strategic
communications to their populations.
Note that 'Russian disinformation' is whatever Britain does not like about Russia. 'Exposing' such 'disinformation' is best
done by spreading one's own. These are not defensive programs but attacks on Russia.
Projects to achieve the above were to be implemented in nearly every country that borders Russia and has a Russian speaking minority
as well as in Russia itself.
The British government does not want you to know about such projects. The 'Supplier Event' sheet says:
Security
No unauthorised disclosures of activity on this work. Contract will need to take a look at who we are working with. Basic IT
security reasonable steps should cover our requirements but the FCO may request an explanation of what steps have been taken to
ensure security and Duty of Care.
It should be noted that for security reasons, some grantees will not wish to be linked to the FCO. It should be noted that
the Programme Team would prefer the programme documents do not end up in the Russian media. We know that they are following us,
and we are expecting an expose soon.
What is the overall purpose of such secret programs? The author of the Undermining Russia series
explains that with regards
to the 'poisoning' of Alexei Navalny:
Many years of painstaking work of HMG through its embassies and intelligence cutouts precede a chemical attack. They create
Media, CSOs and pseudo humanitarian organisations that happen to be just at the correct place and in the correct time with their
cameras ready when 'suddenly' a dreadful accident 'shocks every one into action'.
Do you believe HMG staged the 'Navalny accident' as part of some kind of a secret operation? Did HMG create Media outlets,
nurture bloggers and stringers that it controlled? Did it engage Russia's youth and CSOs? Did it try to demonise Putin just like
it had done with Assad by labeling them Evil Dictators who poisoned their people with forbidden chemical weapons? Do you know
what all of this is needed for? They need it to delegitimise a leader of a country and convince people around the world that 'no
holds should be barred to fight a mad dictator'. Can you grasp the gravity of what is going on? Well, you ought to. They
are preparing us for war with the Russians and the Chinese. They are looking for casus belli, and only the truth can stop them,
because 'if wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth'. (Julian Assange)
That view is not even exaggerated. The 'west' has the knives out against Russia. We previous
mentioned a report from the Pentagon think tank RAND which evaluated how to best 'unbalance and overextend' Russia. In the
end it was clearly aimed at regime change in Russia, or if not otherwise possible, war. On Friday
Gabriel Felbermayr , the president of the Kiel
Institute for the World Economy, was asked by a German radio station about new sanctions the EU might impose on Russia. He is skeptic
that those might work
because (my translation):
The aims we have towards Russia are very big. We do not want anything less but regime change in Russia, which is difficult
to achieve by economic pressure.
The new documents also reveal some
interesting new points on
Navalny who seems to be on the British government payroll:
These self-exposing documents show that the FCO has established a network of popular YouTubers in Russia who investigate corruption
in the government, and the YouTubers get assistance from some journalists from the Baltic States. Also, the FCO has experience
of instigating protests in Russia.
By now you must have guessed the identity of one of the popular YouTubers investigating corruption. After obtaining EXPOSE
Network files and examining the case studies two years ago, we didn't figure out which YouTuber the FCO supported through ZINC.
We refrained from making any preliminary conclusions even when journalists discovered that Vladimir Ashurkov, a close ally of
Alexei Navalny, was a part of the Integrity Initiative cluster.
But when we saw Mr. Navalny and Bellingcat together, things started to make sense. By digging deeper, we discovered another
Navalny's supporter who lives in London - some shadowy Maria Pevchikh who is promoting a system of smart voting in Russia. The
Labour used a similar voting system to take the votes of the Conservatives. So, basically it is highly likely that the UK recommended
the system to Mr. Navalny.
It also turned out that Navalny began a smear campaign against the RT - one of the few media outlets in the West that allows
those who disagree with the official position of western government to speak out. Note that Navalny's campaign was running in
parallel with that of the Integrity Initiative. A reasonable question is - why Navalny who is mostly engaged in political battles
inside Russia spends time fighting a TV network operating outside the country? Was RT really such a problem for him? No, it wasn't.
It was a problem for the Western imperialists and apparently, they told Navalny to join in.
Anyway. Here are again links to the four parts of 'Undermining Russia':
One ,
two ,
three ,
four .
They give extensive insight into the methods the 'west' is using to destroy foreign countries. Knowledge that one needs to really
understand what is happening in this world.
Posted by b on February 15, 2021 at 19:24 UTC |
Permalink
Projects to achieve the above were to be implemented in nearly every country that borders Russia and has a Russian speaking
minority as well as in Russia itself.
Not only countries bordering Russia, a cell existed in Spain and it had consequences, when the new government came to power
the local cell ran a campaign against the new nominee for National Security for not being tough on Russia as required, he was
out of the job, and the main local newspapers were and are in bed with British intelligence dutifully reporting how bad Russia
is and how good Navalny and his boys are, journalists working for the media with the largest readership in the country. Some
got fired when the scandal went public, others went through the revolving door, that simple. They had a lot to do with the Assange
case, as explained in the link bellow.
Russian authorities are more sophisticated that the British, not to mention Americans. The way I see it, American flunkies tend
to make most glaring mistakes routinely, and with propaganda efforts they may get some mileage in Latin America -- not as much
as they could wish. But in Europe and Middle East, it takes the British to keep track which country is which etc.
In that vein, Russia is not so eager to clobber Navalniks with political accusations. To a larger degree than China and the
West, Russia wants to allow free access to information etc., and focuses on discrediting "Navalniks". Let them have 40 offices
around the country plus a slew of foreign ones, online TV channels etc. In the same time, Russia is copying Western methods.
For example, tagging people as "foreign agents" if they use foreign money to operate.
Converting stories "discrediting the regime" into flops, like "Putin palace".
Imposing rules that make it hard for new parties to run in elections -- copied from New York State?
Imposing rules that make it hard to run demonstrations where you want and issuing pesky penalties for violations.
In the same time, collaborating with the West puts people who do it in an unpopular box. Navalny tries to circumvent those
limitation with rank demagogy, but he still suffers by contagion, and from condemnations from less cynical followers of other
Western projects -- for accepting Russian Crimea, frowning on immigrants etc.
On the US side, the program 60 Minutes just aired a segment where president of Microsoft claimed that the Russians used 1000+
hackers for the SolarWinds flair. No wonder Microsoft produces such crap software. If the Russians could manage 1000+ engineers,
then they should be outsourced for all of DOD's software.
The Biden admin is supposedly now deciding what new sanctions or actions to take against Russia. And this psyop comes out.
Timing. All about timing. Somebody timed this.
Just confirms that the Biden regime will take the US into a shooting war with Russia just as the Brits were going toward that
if their propaganda failed to oust Putin.
Thanks b.
Skimmed through part 1.
I see you are quoted. A question (which may be answered in a later part of the same), are the connections to the "five eyes" as well as the Spanish
(re. Paco post) organised by the UK or are they joint efforts? (Anonymous doesn't think too much of the others.)
The FCO seems to be the operative, but is it really the originator? In the sense that at present the financial and "sanctions"
elements are part of US/Israel policy. They may have been suggested by the FCO discretely?
-----
I note that Corbyn was attacked for anti-semitism by the FCO and also by Israeli media. They also seem to be deeply involved in
the same setup. Were the Israelis involved in the planning?
Many things to consider given this new information. It provides extra dimensions to
Today's Crooke
essay and the
one by Tim Kirby I posted yesterday. Agent Smith tried to pooh-pooh it all by saying the international culture wars are a
side show when in reality they are the crux of the matter since at the end of the day everything boils down to First Principles--Values.
Truth, Virtue and Promotion of the Individual to Advance the Many versus Lies, Deceit and Denigration of the Individual to Advance
The Few.
@10 erelis. Noticed the paid advert on 60 minutes last nite, also. But after watching for 5 minutes, had to switch channels. Saw
b's latest write up on Solarwinds which I would tend to trust note than ms / CBS. A follow up from b would be nice.
The poisoning narratives touted by the Western oligarchies and their corporate media should be seen for what they are, hilariously
funny. As I said on a previous occasion, I laughed out loud for about half a minute when I read that Navalny had been poisoned
with a 'novichok-like substance'. In the most literal sense those stories do not pass the laugh test. From the
Litvinenko-polonium
story to the Navalny- novichok underpants story they have all been a tissue of quite absurd lies.
Worryingly, despite the absurdities and the frequent changing of details in these narratives, people who are demonstrably quite
intelligent in their daily lives appear to be buying into the anti-Russian narrative. People who can watch 'Game of Thrones' and
comprehend a fictional character's argument when he asks the question 'why would I frame myself' are seemingly incapable of applying
the argument in real life situations. Why would the FSB frame themselves? Why would they use a substance that has not yet succeeded
in killing any of the intended targets? There must be literally hundreds if not thousands of toxins that could be used and there
are countless other ways of killing a person.
Imagine a check box list of the desirable characteristics of an assassination weapon, neither 'novichok' nor polonium would
tick enough (if any) of those boxes to be considered.
So what is it about? Clearly that rubbish is not going to work on the people of the Russian Federation (at least not enough
of them to be worthwhile) That just leaves us as the target, they are quite obviously manufacturing consent. Do they actually
mean to start WW3? or is it a bluff intended to frighten the Russians into submission? Or ruin their economy with massive increases
in arms expenditure? Perhaps it is just more pressure to cancel Nordstream 2 so the US can sell their overpriced fracked gas and
delay their coming economic collapse for a short while. Only time will tell, I fear the worst.
Oligarchies usually end with arrogance, stupidity, ignorance and eventually insanity. The modern counterparts of Nero and Caligula
are running the western world. While dynasties are usually founded by exceptional people, as a rule the only exceptional thing
about their descendants is their arrogance.
Russians can, and do, watch and read western media to see firsthand how badly western press slander Putin and Russians in
general. Putin is extremely popular in Russia for saving the country from oligarchs, reuniting Crimea, shutting down western sponsored
terrorism in southern Russia and standing up to naked aggression from NATO. Western press shows Russians just how stupid western
people have become by believing the inane poisoning stories, airplane shootdowns, and Russian "invasions" such as Crimea. The
Russians only need to read western press to know the west is preparing regime change or war. Putin and the Kremlin do not need
to say a word to convince Russians the west considers them enemies.
The constant lies about Russia and threats to Europeans and Turkey are backfiring. The Germans, Turks and others are furious
over the British and Americans constantly demonizing them for making smart business deals and military purchases with Russia.
With all the "maximum pressure" campaigns and sanctions, some European and Middle East countries consider the US and UK bigger
threats than Russia.
If the west actually achieves the goal of starting war with Russia, the result will be disastrous for the west. Russia has
become so advanced militarily, there is no doubt Russia would easily crush any attacks and then counter attack. Be careful what
you wish for, Americans.
Whilst we the British people, who have no problem with the Russians, have no say in the matter.
Oh to be a fly on the wall at the next official Anglo Russian get together. That will be a 'shortest straw' gig as no British
politician will want to face Lavrov now, especially after that EU prat visit last week.
What's going on? Why this animosity towards Russia?
I'll give you my opinion.
The British leadership are VERY ambitious. The nature of their empire has changed. First, They no longer seek to become an
empire of nations, but rather an empire of national leaders - primarily Heads of State who control the domestic legal system.
Second, they are a feminist empire, with power passed from mother to daughter. They are able to do this because, while there can
be but one King, there can be multiple queens simultaneously. For example, from the death of George vi in 1952 until the death
of Mary of Teck in 1953 there were no less that three queens of the United Kingdom. Then until 2001 there were two queens. Like
chess, with two queens you always win the game.
But they can only do this while the United Kingdom exists. England alone, shorn of Scotland, loses the medieval laws and powers
that underpin this empire.
If you investigate the monarchies of Europe you will find that they all are members of the Order of the Garter (KG). This is
a sovereign order, which means that in order to join one must swear an oath to the Sovereign of the Order, Queen Elizabeth.
If you investigate the politicians of the US you will find many that have joined the Order of Bath (KB) even though it is explicitly
against the constitution for them to do so (I think it is called the Emoluments Clause, but I may have misremembered). Again,
in order to join this organization you must swear an oath to Queen Elizabeth.
It used to be that only the Republicans (Reagan, Bush, Weinberger and so on). But in January 2001 I came across a photograph
of the three Clintons "leaving Buckingham Palace following a private visit". The benefits gained by the Clintons is what has launched
the family into the big time of money and personal unrestrained power and the complete control of the Democratic Party.
This is a millennial empire. It is meant to last for a thousand years. The other great civilizations - Russia, China, Iran - are equally millennial, and are seen as a threat to the British plans
for world domination.
The other great civilizations understand all I have written. They know a fight is coming. And I think that this is the reason
that Lavrov finally took off the gloves when dealing with Borrell last week. For while he would bend over backwards to understand
the EU position in the past, the UK has now quit the EU. The only ties now to the British Empire are those personal ones to the
monarchs of Europe like, in the case of Borrell, Felipe vi and his father, juan Carlos. Both Knights of the Garter.
@ John Cleary | Feb 15 2021 22:07 utc | 19 with the description of the British empire
About that Queen thing. I can't think right now where the details are but it is my understanding that annually the Queen presents herself to the City
of London in a supplicatory manner. I agree that there is empire and that the Queen is part of the fabric of the curtain behind which are the real lever movers,
those that own global private finance.
British hostility to Russia has a long history. Indeed, we should not forget that the British Royal family supported Hitler. No
doubt this, at least in part, accounts for Neville Chamberlain's 'appeasement' Adolf Hitler, following Germany's annexation of
Sudetenland in 1938 and sequent invasion of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939.
See- A brief history of the British Royals and their alleged Nazi connections 28 Aug 2017; Link:
https://www.sbs.com.au/guide/article/2017/08/28/brief-history-british-royals-and-their-alleged-nazi-connections
Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 15 2021 21:27 utc | 14 -- "Many things to consider given this new information. It provides extra dimensions
to Today's Crooke essay and the one by Tim Kirby I posted yesterday. Agent Smith tried to pooh-pooh it all by saying the international
culture wars are a side show when in reality they are the crux of the matter since at the end of the day everything boils down
to First Principles--Values. Truth, Virtue and Promotion of the Individual to Advance the Many versus Lies, Deceit and Denigration
of the Individual to Advance The Few."
Thanks, karlof1, for yet another informative article. Saved it for study along with the Tim Kirby article.
So much to read... so much to learn.... so much to pleasure in.... first principles, eternal values, objective truth, good
governance... and did God say that the white man's burden is to go rape, pillage, rob the rest of the world?
And thanks for reminding me that his name is Agent Smith.
This is to help me remember not to engage trolls and / or idiots:
"Never again will we try to persuade a foolish person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous. In conversation with
them, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken
possession of them. They are under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in their very being.' -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters
and Papers from Prison
... These self-exposing documents show that the FCO has established a network of popular YouTubers in Russia who investigate
corruption in the government, and the YouTubers get assistance from some journalists from the Baltic States. Also, the
FCO has experience of instigating protests in Russia ...
It would be interesting to know if the Russian-language news website Meduza.io might have some connection to this assistance
to the YouTubers. Meduza.io is based in Riga, Latvia, and employs Russian-language journalists.
Kevin Rothrock , formerly of The Moscow Times (English-language
newspaper in Moscow), is editor-in-chief of Meduza.io's international version.
BTW Maria Pevchikh accompanied Alexei Navalny from Omsk to Berlin. She was the one who was supposed to have gone to his hotel
room in Tomsk and picked up the water bottle supposed to contain Novichok, at least until information came out that she acquired
the water bottle from a vending machine at Omsk airport en route to Berlin. Pevchikh was the one person in Navalny's entourage
who did not submit to questioning by Russian authorities on Navalny's poisoning.
I think we should see a bit more (in Google's English-language translation) of what Gabriel Felbermayr said to Katharina Petz
of Deutschlandfunk:
Gabriel Felbermayr : I am sceptical about [further sanctions]. The question is always what we want to achieve with
sanctions. If we really want to bring Russia to its knees economically, we would need a large coalition of countries to do so,
and Europe alone cannot do as much as is necessary. At least China on board and, best of all, India and other [Russia's] trading
partners would need it. The fact that sanctions have worked so badly in the past has to do with the fact that they are being undermined
by other countries, that is a key problem. That is why I am sceptical that putting a on it (sic) really helps now. The objectives
we have with Russia are very large. After all, we want nothing less than regime change in Russia, which is very difficult to achieve
with economic pressure ...
... I believe that we must also see who we are hitting with the sanctions. Are these really the people who are acting and
who, in the light of the sanctions, may then reconsider their actions, or is it the general population that is hit very diffusely,
each a little bit. This does not hurt enough, so to speak, to put great pressure on the regime, but it does hit the general public.
That is why I believe that a sanctions instrument that is much more adicating (sic) to individuals is more promising and does
not affect the broad mass of Russians. That already exists, we are using it in the European Union. These could be travel restrictions,
that could be the freezing of assets abroad, and this could also be sanctions against certain companies that are very close to
the Kremlin. Perhaps there is more that can be done than Europe alone, because Russian foreign assets are not in China, so to
speak, and the second residences of Russian oligarchs are not somewhere in the Third World, but in Monaco and London and Paris.
So smart sanctions are certainly what is more promising – one has to ask whether Europe has the right instruments ...
...Yes, of course, the economic impact of the sanctions is quite different. Germany suffers from the Russia sanctions that
have been in place since 2014, more than any country in the world, in absolute terms, and is also much more affected in percentage
of economic output than in France. In Germany, this costs about 0.2% of GDP, according to various estimates, and in France this
figure is much lower. There are, of course, other European countries where the level of concern is higher, [Bulgaria] for example,
or the Eastern European Member States of the European Union as a whole. This unequal concern is certainly a political dilemma.
It is also a political problem with regard to the United States of America, which, while always insisting and pushing for
sanctions, has so far drawn little economic disadvantage from it, simply because US trade with Russia is very low. That is the
core problem when it comes to forging a broad coalition that costs are too unevenly distributed. We would certainly also have
to think about compensation mechanisms within Europe or within the Western world, so that the joint fight against the violation
of human rights, for example in Russia, must be paid for economically, not only by a few countries ...
... Yes, I would agree, I think [Nordstream II shutdown] is overestimated. The question is how much billions of export revenues
Russia generates in the European Union by selling natural gas, that is the central question. And whether natural gas enters the
European Union via Ukraine or Turkey or Germany does not matter much. It may even be the case that the possibility of shutting
down or blocking such a pipeline again, or imposing conditions, means that Germany will even get a leverage over Russia that would
not otherwise have been possible.
So I also think that Nord Stream 2 is overestimated. Here again the question would have to be asked, who does it actually
cost if you do not complete the project. A great many European and German investors are also negatively affected, and with sanctions
we want to inflict pain, above all, on the Russian power apparatus and not on ourselves. I believe that Nord Stream 2 is a bad
instrument ...
So the sanctions regime against Russia is hitting the EU, and Germany and parts of Eastern Europe in particular, harder than
it's hitting Russia and the EU needs more nations on board with sanctioning Russia.
I can't imagine the US would be willing to compensate the EU for any losses it has to sustain by sanctioning Russian government
officials and businesspeople.
The UK aristocracy and their opportunists have nothing to credit themselves but ill-gotten money or the hope thereof, they have
always been forced to equate money=virtue to pretend to any merit, between themselves and their families. This is the cause of
their eternal hatred of socialism and virtue in government, and their eternal hatred of Russia, even in the post-USSR era. If
they have no one with less money to hate, they have no claim to personal merit, and must face the truth.
Of course the same is true of the upper classes anywhere, even among the poorest. For what was the purpose of their lying,
cheating, stealing and perpetual materialism, what were the values they taught their children, if money is not virtue. Virtue
is an unknown land to them, an unforgiveable sin, for that way lies the ugly truth about them.
Lots of people living in la la land - that is - in the good old times when the West subjugated the planet.
UK economic drop 2020
-10 %
EU economic drop
-7 %
Russia economic drop
-3.1 %
Moment to reach 2019 Q4 economic level:
UK beginning of 2023
EU beginning of 2023
Russia Autumn 2021
>>Gabriel Felbermayr: The aims we (EU) have towards Russia are very big. We do not want anything less but regime change in
Russia.
Yes, Gabi, it is good that you are honest. It will only warn people of your intentions, so it is preferable to talk that way.
:) Meanwhile, in the real world, lots of EU businesses and NGOs will flew out from Russia and be replaced with Asian ones. It already happening with cars, trade, energy flows, diplomatic missions and tourists. So good riddance to bad rubbish.
>>I can't imagine the US would be willing to compensate the EU for any losses it has to sustain by sanctioning Russian government
officials and businesspeople.
The place of the EU in this whole scheme was already described by Victoria Nuland. That is - "F the EU". :)
This is not a problem though, they have long experience with it.
US will not be selling any LNG to EU/Germany to compensate for loss of NS2. The fracking business is shutting down and shutting
down right now. Wells are going offline, replacements are not being drilled. No drill, no gas. Fertilizer shortages are already
in sight. As we lose ability to grow food we will not be sending feedstock material across the ocean just because it sounded good
in a strategic fantasy.
Posted by b on February 15, 2021 at 19:24 UTC | -- "They give extensive insight into the methods the 'west' is using to destroy
foreign countries."
Thanks, B, for using the light of truth to expose the insanity of western leadership. It gives me pause to try to understand the ethics / morals / humanity of the thousands of western bureaucrats working on these
elaborate (sometimes comical) plans to destroy other nations. How does a "civil" servant like that conceive such evil, then go home to teach their children how to be human beings? This banality of evil is absolutely unfathomable to ordinary people such as I.
Reminds me of the thousands of good Germans who "went along to get along" on the way into WW2. Also, the thousands of good British "planners" who war-gamed their way into WW2.
>>And whether natural gas enters the European Union via Ukraine or Turkey or Germany does not matter much.
This ignorant euro-puppet should be fired immediately.
Having a gas pipeline via Turkey increases the geopolitical weight of Turkey and it allows it to blackmail the Balkan Countries
receiving the gas.
Using the Ukrainian route means that additional billions of euros will have to be invested in repairing the old and disrepeit
Ukrainian Gas Transit Network which is from the 80s, with good amount of the money disappearing due to corruption.
The gas then may stop due to Russia-Ukrainian disputes (as it happened in the past) or "misterious" explosions may happen on
the pipeline (as it happened too).
It is also unclear for how long will Russia be interested in saving the EU from freezing (in January the EU was forced to buy
record amounts of gas due to cold temperatures), considering the rise of Asian markets.
Right now Russia is connecting the Western pipelines and the Eastern Pipelines, meaning that "EU gas" may be reserved for the
East.
Gazprom is also looking to accelerate work on the Power of Siberia 2 (PoS2) pipeline, as part of plans to unite domestic gas
transmission infrastructure across eastern and western Russia into a single system.
TASS reports Lavorv's comments after meeting Finnish Foreign
Minister revealing the lawless nature of the EU's behavior as it abets crimes against its own laws:
"The minister paid special attention to the fact that Brussels enables brazen violations of rights of Russian speakers and
attacks on the Russian language and culture in the Baltic States, Ukraine and several other states. '
Of course, we cannot
but take into account the EU condoning blatant breaches of Russian speakers, Russians and the attacks on the Russian language
and culture that we witness in the Baltic States, Ukraine and some other countries. When Russian-speaking [TV] channels are shut
down, when criminal cases are opened against Russian-speaking journalists for simply doing their jobs, when the disgraceful institute
of statelessness remains in the EU, while the European Union watches it all without any desire to change anything, I believe that
it is not Russia distancing itself from the EU, but the very EU moves away from the Russian language, Russian culture and all
things Russian, meaning that it is drifting away from the Russian Federation ,' the minister noted." [My Emphasis]
As reported earlier, Russia will finish Nord Stream 2 and continue fulfilling its commitments. But given EU co-responsibility
for the terrorism and refugee crises combined with the recent revelations, I don't see any positive developments occurring.
Thanks for that very revealing translation of Gabriel Felbermayr's words. It shows that a man can be intelligent and insane
at the same time. He speaks as if the need for destroying Russia is a given. Sounds like he is one of those thousands who go along
to get along....
"I fooled myself. I had to. I didn't want to see it, because I would then have had to think about the consequences of seeing
it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the
community." -- Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
For Psychohistorian and John Cleary, regarding the City of London...
The City was never thoroughly brought to heel by William the Conqueror with the result that it was granted a sort of autonomy
within the realm, hence its absence in the Doomsday Book, which assessed the realm's lands for taxation by the crown. Whether
or not it is part of the United Kingdom is a moot point, for its autonomy (strengthened over time) makes it, in a sense, impervious
to United Kingdom legislation that it wishes to ignore. In this regard, it is a sort of anomaly, like the Channel Islands (the
last remaining part of the Duchy of Normandy still under the British crown) and the Isle of Mann, both of which are NOT part of
the United Kingdom and were not part of the European Union, and both of which are notorious tax havens.
The peculiar status of the City of London is what has made it a great financial center, for it can regulate itself (and does,
to some extent, if only to keep the scandalmongers at bay), unlike the New York and Swiss financial centers, which are subject
to "outside" oversight, New York by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and Switzerland by the FINMA (Financial Market
Supervisory Authority).
MarkU @ 16 -- "While dynasties are usually founded by exceptional people, as a rule the only exceptional thing about their descendants
is their arrogance."
Ancient Chinese wisdom on generational wealth: First generation make money; second generation keep money; third generation
lose money. Start over.
MarkU @ 16 -- "Oligarchies usually end with arrogance, stupidity, ignorance and eventually insanity. "
Good fit for most parts of the Western (*) leadership, lying one day, reversing their own lies the next, then reverting to
their original lie, then pivoting to some other lie. Insane. They have gone past derision, gone past shame, gone past dishonour,
into insanity. Destruction cometh next.
"Now it's time to expose another intelligence cutout - BBC Media Action. Don't be surprised that the detested mainstream media
outlet BBC has its own secret firm which gets its funding from your taxes as well as from the CSSF." (Taken from part two)
One visible thing about the complete "undermining of Russia", is that a large amount of bureaucratic planning has gone into
it. The quantity of companies that have been employed and with specific duties to perform is shocking. An incidental factor is
that the UK and French participants get well paid. £975 or £700 per day, in comparaison to "locally found" participants.
Other things of note are the targeting of Russian speaking, younger age groups and the admission that the over 40's are more
difficult to change. (This is a common factor for other areas of propaganda as well.)
The "Covid story" has had an effect. No longer are " mother and daughter tea parties " with 40 participants possible.
Not a joke , but it serves to underline the thoroughness of the propaganda effort leading up to effect a "regime change".
----
About the Monarchy, and inferred connection to the "landed Gentry Aristocracy". Possible, but would rely on education in the "best"
Schools, and their production of eligible members of "secret" manipulative societies via old boy networks, as well as "ordinary"
leaders. ie Politicians, Top civil servants.
Private Schools such as Eton and Harrow have recognised "specialities" and form the basis of networks. It is not for nothing that
you have to put the names down of likely progeny almost at birth. Closed shop attitude as in a "trade Union"! ST. Johns, Leatherhead,
produces clergy for example.
The UK Monarchy was connected by intermarriage to almost all the Royalty in Europe. There are still connections (for those who
have the cash), through such goups as Bilderberg, etc.
The relation of the "Dukes" to a desire to take over Russia, is a possible source of interest. ie. The Duke of Grosvernor owns
the Square mile of the City of London. (Which is an entity in itself.) The City has the key to the finance of the UK and much
of the "dark money, and money laundering in the world.
----
all for today.
Obama, Bernie and DJT have led their flocks to nowhere. What led us to them is the establishment's desire to derail
populist Movements.
One clue (among many): Each of these so-called populists is pro-Empire.
Obama conducted covert wars and regime changes. He declined to prosecute any CIA people for rendition & torture
and dismissed privacy concerns about NSA spying. He also lied to us: 1) about a 'public option' in his healthcare plan and
2) never making the Bush tax cuts permanent (Obama participated in the 'fiscal cliff' farce that made most Bush tax cuts permanent
while cutting social programs);
Bernie , aka "Senator F35" is a closet Zionist that supports the Empire. He was Hillary's sheepdog in 2016. He then
founded "Our Revolution", a nonprofit that accepted money from large donors. Bernie folded like a tent in 2020 to support establishment
candidate Biden. Bernie put forth a bogus bill to end US involvement in the Saudi war on Yemen that would not actually end
that involvement due to an exception. And he has criticized Venezuela's Maduro as USA has been trying to overthrow him.
Trump - a billionaire conman, Clinton insider, and friend of Epstein - got in front of the Tea Party parade with
slogans like "America First". His actions show that he is a fraud who is actual "Empire First". Trump dramatically increased
spending on the military, terminated multiple peace agreements, renegged on his peace deal with North Korea, gave Israel everything
on its wish list (including killing Iranian Gen. Soleimani), militarized space, and continued the War on Whistle-blowers with
prosecution of Assange. Along the way he lied to the American people about the severity of the looming pandemic and excused
MbS's killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
Nothing will change as long as we keep falling for compromised leaders that are promoted by a compromised media.
I heard this when I was a student in London. It may be hearsay after all, as I also tried to find relevant info after your
comment. Trouble is the enormous power of the City, the Banks, and major corporations all who have a "vote" (or not) in the affairs
of the Corporation, make any detailed study next to impossible. Trusts, etc. I followed somebodies FOI request which led to .....
nothing.
Note that known Grosvenor territory (the house I had a flat in. The street belonged to them.) were part of their assets, and
in the last seven years of a 99yr lease. After which it had to be "returned in the same state as it was "sold" in the first place.
The present Duke does apparently not have much to say in the Grosvenor Family Trust. He is still rich. (according to one grovelling
article).
It does make a prime suspect for setting up the Anti-Russian saga, as those Banks/Corporations and Billionaires etc. would
be the ones to profit massively from a"regime change".
Like clockwork, the NYT begins to set a rationalization for more US imperialism in Syria. This is such a contrived article. It
doesn't come out of the blue.
These ferocious dogs never stop. The push is to rebuild the Turkish relationship, and so regain influence over Syria through 'protecting
Idlib' and its 'children.'
About Tim Kirby advises to Russia. The guy is completely delusional and really ignorant of Russia history and mental structures.Russi
is not going to metamporphose in USA or UEJohn Hermer:
http://johnhelmer.net/1000th-dance-with-bears/
But Russia is going fine with China
Thanks for your reply! I've often disagreed with Kirby; but as I wrote in my first linking to his essay, there are some suggestions
that merge with ideas we've discussed over the months here. I've written about what I see as Russia's fundamental ideology, how
it differs from the West, and fume intensely when Putin says differences with the West aren't ideological when it's so clear they
are--Putin just laid out the vast chasm in his Davos speech. Lavrov just reiterated that Russia cannot abide nations/organizations
that are pathological prevaricators. And China is the same. IMO, the First Principles of Russia and China are the ones humanity
needs to adhere to and merge with policy. They are the same as those proposed by Henry Wallace for his Century of The Common Man.
I see them as an evolutionary step forward to a Commonwealth of Humanity that would inspire a Great Leveling--which the elite
of course oppose. The most recent manifestation of the Abrahamic Religions also appeals to such an arrangement as does most Afro/Asian
philosophy.
What we have is an embattled minority trying to keep its power using every trick at its disposal. The #1 question most of us
have: Is that minority suicidal--will it see nuclear war as a way to keep its position? Putin has answered that if it does try
it will lose. And IMO, the minority knows that it currently will lose but hopes to reverse that outcome--They don't seek compromise
as they want it all. And that's where the big problem lies--How to dissuade them of their unattainable Zero-sum Fetish?
So empire (is it British, American, Jewish...) threw up Donald Trump as the attempt to gather the totally delusional around a
maniacal "strong/bully" leader to push back against the Russia/China axis and it didn't work entirely like they wanted but it
broke enough social anchors to increase the fragility/fear factors of society. When the mostly manufactured crisis does come they
trust their ability to manufacture Western outcomes that keep private finance alive and with some ongoing control over some chunk
of the world.
I don't expect to live to see private finance go entirely away anymore. I think the trajectory is set in that direction but
the timeframe will be longer than I wanted/expected. Look at the number of commenters here that still want to play whack-a-mole
bad apples games while behind the curtain the global private finance elite are continuing their species perversion through British
ways like b has shown here.
The West needs a better social system that has the broader public instead of a cult of folks as its focus or we will continue
our road to deserved extinction.
emersonreturn @ 9, I have just done the same this morning as gently as I could with family members in New Zealand. It is very
hard for them to recognize this is not all Trump's doing - especially when they are benefitting from better government themselves
as far as coping with the virus, and they remember fondly better days in the relationship with the US.
Lavrov at work, day after day. Today with Togolese Foreign Minister, a quick translation so as to induce a little smile:
Question: How do Western countries view the rapprochement between Russia and African countries?
Foreign Minister Lavrov: In different ways. Some are neutral, others, like the former US Administration, are very negative.
Former US Secretary of State M. Pompeo traveled to Africa before the end of President Trump's term and publicly urged not to cooperate
with Russia and China in the field of trade, because Moscow and Beijing allegedly proceed from geopolitical interests, trying
to benefit. The United States, on the other hand, "does it from the heart." I will not comment on this kind of position.
Recently, representatives of the new US Administration called on the Russian Sputnik V vaccine to be viewed with suspicion,
since again, this is a "Kremlin's geopolitical plan" and one must be "careful" not to become "dependent on Russia."
I think Crimea was meant to be the new homeland for Israel citizens, when the usurpator state goes down. Now they will have to save
themselves to Patagonia.
Intriguing topic.
It's anyone's guess why the Christian West's front-of-curtain leaders are training the Homeland serfs to become accustomed to
24/7 lies about remote enemies. The notion that the West can "win" a war with Russia/China is laughable. Each/both could retaliate
EFFECTIVELY if attacked. So if the bs isn't about WWIII then what is it about?
My guess is that it's nothing more sophisticated than Creative Distraction from what's been going on in AmeriKKKa and, to a
lesser extent the Rest of the West, since the Oligarchs had their own taxes slashed in the '70s, '80s and '90s. This helped to
fund the Oligarch's favourite hobby: "Privatise Every Publicly Owned Monopoly/Utility." Keeping wage-growth flat also helped to
fund the take-over.
From a country-to-country perspective the trend, whilst quite uneven, has been inexorable. And there is a notable absence of
serious debate about reversing the trend.
It doesn't matter what the ultimate goal of this social engineering may or may not be. It has to be reversed. And one way to
reverse it would be to submit every excuse Rich People use to justify their tax breaks to Public Scrutiny and laughed out of court.
In the 1950s Rich People, worldwide, paid eye-watering Taxes on all 'excess income' beyond the top marginal rate. And when
they went to Heaven their Estate was taxed on its 'excess value'. They've killed off those taxes too, by playing one country/
jurisdiction off against another - using Lawfare (high-priced lawyers whom ordinary folk can't afford).
They're too eerily inept to win a war against Russia/China. Their war is against their own countrymen. And it's aim is to prevent
as many serfs as possible from getting their grubby little mits on OUR MONEY!
Thank you, karlof1 @ 14; Crooke's essay is masterful! If only others in the West could be persuaded to read it -- the references
to Ireland and India are so persuasive, but then he doesn't stop but demonstrates how the situation today is so much worse. The
bolded quote,
"...We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance society, but we cannot have both." (Emphasis added).
has to be seen in the entirety of the article to be appreciated, and his definition of the EU as a cartel is pure genius! They
are all not even worthy of the title 'empire' -- they are all cartels!!
UK loaned 1.5b to Ukraine to build 2 warships for them...plus rebuild shipyards to re construct the navy....paratroopers are training
Ukraine forces....do they plan to go against Donbass like this....reminds me of old film a bridge too far where British forces
failed ......and Nato gonna give Black Sea a lot more trouble for Russia too.
I was just going to post the link to that transcript,
From it
much can be learned about the degree of Russian involvement in Togo and Africa as a whole; this for example:
"The Association for Economic Cooperation with the African States was created in Russia following the 2019 Sochi summit. It
includes representatives from the related departments and major Russian companies. The Russia-Africa Partnership Forum, which
is a political association, was created as well. Its secretariat is located at the Russian Foreign Ministry. We agreed to hold
the forum's annual political meetings at the foreign minister level, from Russia and the African Union Troika that is comprised
of its former, current and incoming chairpersons. In 2020, we held them via videoconference with the foreign ministers from South
Africa, Egypt and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hopefully, we'll be able to meet in person in 2021."
That's a lot of interaction that also includes Russian businesses, all of which ought to be added to China's activities. In
addition to what Paco provided, there's this closing paragraph that reveals more of the Anti-Russian nature of BidenCo:
" It wasn't long ago that representatives of the new US administration said the Russian Sputnik V vaccine should be treated
with suspicion, since it was another geopolitical plan from the Kremlin, and that one must be careful not to become dependent
on Russia . It's sad if they have nothing else to say about normal and friendly relations between countries, and if this is
the only thing that they have to say about this. We never make friends with other countries in order to oppose third countries.
If Russia and its foreign partners are mutually attracted, we have every right to develop our relations as we see fit. I hope
others will also learn their lessons and treat our ties with Africa with respect." [My Emphasis]
Russia and China act while the Outlaw US Empire focuses on fashioning a False Narrative that can easily be seen as such. However,
it seems the underlying scourge is becoming easier for English speakers to see: "All animals are equal; but some animals are more
equal than others."
Too bad the mid.ru site usually does not publish the guests comments and answers, excess of caution maybe, but it was interesting
what the Togo foreign minister had to say concerning good relations with the Soviet Union and then Russia in many countries all
over Africa, he expressed his gratitude for the many African students in Russia, students that have become high cadres in Togo
and other countries. Another interesting point was the fact that Lome is the main deep water port in all of West Africa, and therefore
the minister was talking about regional matters, Togo as a hub. Macron must have watched the press conference, after all the foreign
minister spoke in French. Russia is recovering lost presence in Africa.
Yes! Exploiting trust is the basic business plan, it's what the Internet is all about now.
Provide free services or information, attract a large audience and gain their trust, and then
exploit the heck out of it as long as they keep coming. Everybody still trusts Wikipedia,
right? Then start all over again. You can do it many times. American enterpreneurs have
hundreds of years of experience with exploiting trusting, naive people. Where do you think
our State Dept. learned all of it's clever tricks? Even our politics works the same way.
Everything is a grift. Everything is empty talk. After a while you get used to it, nothing
really means anything.
Trust does not belong at all anywhere near science. Critical thinking in relation to
science is important in evaluating an existing hypothesis and the data that goes along to
support it , but critical thinking alone is not sufficient, if the data is missing it is
not science, because there is no way to falsify the often outrageous claims (That is where we
are with "global warming" and "covid").
Also required is imagination, without imagination you cannot formulate new laws from the
information available and then you will never progress.
It boils down to being able to verify and replicate a scientific hypothesis through data
and experiments, trust has no place in it. This also why "peer review" is fundamentally
unscientific since it mostly functions as a gate-keeping mechanism defending mainstream
views.
The Essence Of
Science In 60 Seconds (Richard Feynman) If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess
is, it doesn't matter how smart who made the guess is, or what his name is. If it disagrees
with experiment, its wrong.
Transferred to journalism, a similar rule must apply. If a claim is made that cannot be
verified independently, it is not journalism.
Looks like Venezuelan scenario with Navalny as a Russian Guado...
Notable quotes:
"... we protest about "Putin murdering his own people with combat gasses" while on the other we are about to complete North Stream 2 (NS2), which we need to remain competitive; if we continue, we will lose NS2 and we will alienate Russia even further, but if we stop acting like an idiot on suicide watch, our overseas masters will make us pay. ..."
"... Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, added that "The task [of Borrell] was to carry out a public flogging, which, I think, they planned very carefully, it was a cascade of topics: talks about rallies, talks about journalists, and making [Alexey] Navalny the main theme of the discussion". According to Zakharova , this plan failed because Russia insisted on discussing the "real issues". ..."
"... Interestingly, the Russians did not expel any US diplomats (at least not yet) in spite of the fact that these officials all agreed that the origin of the PSYOP was from overseas and in spite of the quasi-certainty that US officials must have been present, at least in the Moscow and Saint Petersburg protests ..."
"... Lavrov bluntly said " We are proceeding from the assumption that the EU is not a reliable partner, at least at the current stage. I hope that in future strategic attention will be given to the EU's fundamental interest in its closest neighbours and that the talks we have held today will promote movement to a more constructive trajectory. We are ready for this". ..."
"... Translated from diplospeak into plain English, this means 1) we are fed up with you and 2) we don't need you. ..."
"... Russia does not want a constructive dialog ..."
"... In western parlance the degree of "democratism" or "authoritarianism" is solely defined by the willingness of a country to be a satrapy of the Empire. Under this definition, all sovereign countries are "dictatorships" and all AngloZionist satrapies are paragons of democracy. ..."
"... As for Navalnyi's supporters in the EU, they have decided to create a Russian government in exile . Again, this is not a joke. By the way, the "Minister of Foreign Affairs" of this "Russian Government in Exile", Leonid Volkov , initially declared that the illegal riots should be halted, only to be told otherwise by his handlers. ..."
"... We will not hold a rally next weekend The wave of protest must end at a high point. Because if we continue to decline, it will be terribly demotivating and frustrating for everyone We will prepare well and hold something big both in the spring and in the summer. We will never give up our demands ..."
"... We'll make it much trickier ..."
"... The NATO members instructed the "opposition", and in fact their agents of influence, how to continue "more cunning" to conduct subversive work. Too much money and resources have already been invested by the West in this story to wait until spring. They clearly understand: in the spring, the information campaign pumped up by Westerners will be blown away. They can no longer juggle the topic of "chemical weapons" without presenting the facts – they are pinned to the wall. So they double down. ..."
"... As for Navalnyi and his supporters, Zakarova was even more direct , saying " stop calling them opposition, they are NATO agents !". ..."
"... As I have explained many times, western politicians double down not when they feel strong, they double down when they feel weak and when they place their hopes in the willingness of the other side not to seriously further escalate. ..."
"... 'Svetlana Tikhanovskaia has appealed to the wife of Navalnyi, Iulia, to become the "she president of Russia"'. As in the case of Juan Guaido, no need for anything as old-fashioned as an election. (For obvious reasons). ..."
"... Lavrov is following Putin's line (Davos speech), ergo that Russia is ready to interact with Europe as a mutually respectful equal partner – but not with Europe as puppet of the US NWO, NeoCon , ZioGlob/CIA crowd. Hopefully the Germans are listening and can reassess their true interests. ..."
"... Israeli is changing due to massive immigration of non-Jews from Russia ..."
This latest PSYOP was apparently organized in the US last fall, while Trump was still in
power, at least nominally. This makes sense, just like the huge "Patriot Act" was carefully
prepared months, if not years before 9/11 happened. This time around, some US intelligence
agency (probably the CIA) then passed the baby to the German BND which was supposed to act as
an intermediary to give the US "plausible deniability". The big problem is that the Germans
apparently screwed things up, and the plan was a flop: the latest sacral victim failed to die
(again!). As for Putin, he used his executive power to allow Navalnyi (who was on parole) to
immediately fly to Germany for treatment as soon as the Russian medics stabilized him. From
there on, everything went south and Navalnyi's curators scrambled to save whatever could be
saved.
They produced a movie about Putin's palace in Crimea, only to have Russian reporters film
the location and prove that this movie was a total fake. Then they sent Navalnyi back to Russia
figuring that if the Russian authorities arrested him huge protests would follow or,
alternatively, if the Russians did nothing, Navalnyi would be able to create chaos during an
important election year in Russia. This resulted in another flop, not only were the crowds in
Russia small, their behavior was deeply offensive and even frightening to most Russians who
have seen enough Maidans and color revolutions to know how this stuff ends. As for Navalnyi, he
was arrested immediately upon landing, and his parole was revoked.
Of course, all this was reported very differently in what I call Zone A , but
while this made it possible for the authors of this PSYOP to conceal the magnitude of their
failure, in the rest of the world and, especially, in Russia, it was pretty clear that this
ridiculous buffoonery had failed. That outcome presented the EU headless chicken with a major
problem: on one hand, we protest about "Putin murdering his own people with combat gasses"
while on the other we are about to complete North Stream 2 (NS2), which we need to remain
competitive; if we continue, we will lose NS2 and we will alienate Russia even further, but if
we stop acting like an idiot on suicide watch, our overseas masters will make us pay. EU
leaders obviously failed agree on a plan so, just like a headless chicken, they ran in all
directions at the same time: they publicly protested, but also sent as top official, High
Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President
of the European Commission Josep Borrell, to try to appease the Russians. Borrell actually did
a decent job trying to placate the Russians, but this time something went very wrong. Not only
was Foreign Minister Lavrov very blunt in his public comments, the Russians also expelled
3 EU diplomats for participating in the demonstrations even while Borrell and Lavrov
were talking. This is when the proverbial bovine excreta hit the fan, at least in EU whose
"watchdog media" (here I use the term "watchdog" as meaning "immediately barking at anybody
daring to stray from the official propaganda line") went crazy and accused Borrell of caving in
to the Russians. Some even demanded Borrell's resignation. As for Borrell himself, he did what
all western officials do after a visit to Moscow: he changed his tune as soon as he came back
home.
Finally, Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, added that
"The task [of Borrell] was to carry out a public flogging, which, I think, they planned very
carefully, it was a cascade of topics: talks about rallies, talks about journalists, and making
[Alexey] Navalny the main theme of the discussion". According to
Zakharova , this plan failed because Russia insisted on discussing the "real
issues".
Interestingly, the Russians did not expel any US diplomats (at least not yet) in spite
of the fact that these officials all agreed that the origin of the PSYOP was from overseas and
in spite of the quasi-certainty that US officials must have been present, at least in the
Moscow and Saint Petersburg protests . To its credit, the US embassy in Moscow did
recommend to all US citizens that they stay away from illegal demonstrations. This is an
ongoing crisis and by the time this analysis is posted, things might have changed dramatically.
My purpose today is not to look at the US or the EU, but at what I believe is a major shift in
Russian policy.
At this point, we should not see the expulsions of the 3 EU diplomats as anything more than
just a "shot across the bow", a way to indicate that the winds have changed. But these
expulsions are not big enough to qualify as a real, painful, retaliation. Why?
Because the real slap in the collective face of the EU was the press conference
of Lavrov and Borrell in which Lavrov was truly uniquely direct and candid. For
example, Lavrov bluntly said " We are proceeding from the assumption that the EU is not a
reliable partner, at least at the current stage. I hope that in future strategic attention will
be given to the EU's fundamental interest in its closest neighbours and that the talks we have
held today will promote movement to a more constructive trajectory. We are ready for
this".
Translated from diplospeak into plain English, this means 1) we are fed up with you and 2)
we don't need you.
This blunt statement is what triggered all the subsequent hysterics in Brussels about
Borrell being ill treated by the Russians and Borrell's subsequent declaration that "
Russia does not want a constructive dialog " and that the EU must now decide if it
still wants to get closer to Russia or if it wants to distance itself from a country slipping
into authoritarianism.
In western parlance the degree of "democratism" or "authoritarianism" is solely defined by
the willingness of a country to be a satrapy of the Empire. Under this definition, all
sovereign countries are "dictatorships" and all AngloZionist satrapies are paragons of
democracy.
... ... ...
As for Navalnyi's supporters in the EU, they have decided to create a Russian government in exile . Again, this is
not a joke. By the way, the "Minister of Foreign Affairs" of this "Russian Government in
Exile", Leonid Volkov , initially
declared that the illegal riots should be halted, only to be told otherwise by his handlers. He
immediately made a required 180 and declared that protests will resume. This is how Maria Zakharova bluntly, and very officially, reacted on
Facebook to his "change of mind": (minimally fixed machine translation)
NATO doubles down
On February 4, 2021, Volkov declared that the protests in Russia were canceled and will
resume in the spring and summer. " We will not hold a rally next weekend The wave of
protest must end at a high point. Because if we continue to decline, it will be terribly
demotivating and frustrating for everyone We will prepare well and hold something big both in
the spring and in the summer. We will never give up our demands ." Then, on February 9,
2021, Volkov changed his mind and announced that the campaign will continue in February. "
We'll make it much trickier " he added. What happened between February 4 and 9 and
forced the "opposition" to radically change tactics? Everything is quite simple – on
February 8, 2021, an online meeting with Volkov and Ashurkov took place at the Permanent
Mission of Poland to the EU in Brussels, in which EU countries, the United States, and
Britain took part. And in fact-this was a meeting of the NATO countries.
The NATO members
instructed the "opposition", and in fact their agents of influence, how to continue "more
cunning" to conduct subversive work. Too much money and resources have already been invested
by the West in this story to wait until spring. They clearly understand: in the spring, the
information campaign pumped up by Westerners will be blown away. They can no longer juggle
the topic of "chemical weapons" without presenting the facts – they are pinned to the
wall. So they double down.
As for Navalnyi and his supporters, Zakarova was even more
direct , saying " stop calling them opposition, they are NATO agents !".
As I have explained many times, western politicians double down not when they feel strong,
they double down when they feel weak and when they place their hopes in the willingness of the
other side not to seriously further escalate.
Now comes the best part: there are a lot of signs that the EU will, again under the pious
pretext of "solidarity" follow the 3B+PU politicians and, if not recognize such a government in
exile, at least treat its members as real officials. That is also supposed to also terrify the
Kremlin, I guess. But if that is the best the EU can come up with, VVP and the people of
Russia, can sleep in peace.
America/Israel and NATO are apparently not going to change their approach despite the
shift in both hard & soft power between the neoliberal/NWO and the pro-sovereignty blocs
in the last two decades. And Europe is going to suffer worst from this...
Germany is key to Europe. The American empire ordered Germany to double its low military
spending, they said no. Trump threatened to close American military bases in Germany, polls
showed most Germans didn't care. They ordered Germany to cancel a new NatGas pipeline to
Russia, they said no. Once they oust that Neocon puppet Merkel, the empire will be in
trouble.
What is the status of the relationship between Russia and Israel ?
If it as simple as you say – and Saker himself seems to refer consistently to the
US-NATO-EU 'Anglozionist empire', then surely Russia would recognise Israel as the key
ideological opponent to its vision of a multipolar world order ?
Yet this is not what I read. Russia has deep and cordial and increasingly close ties to
Israel, even as Israeli jets illegally bomb Syria on a regular basis. This is never
explained.
'Svetlana Tikhanovskaia has appealed to the wife of Navalnyi, Iulia, to become the "she
president of Russia"'. As in the case of Juan Guaido, no need for anything as old-fashioned as an election. (For
obvious reasons).
For example, Lavrov bluntly said " We are proceeding from the assumption that the EU
is not a reliable partner, at least at the current stage. I hope that in future strategic
attention will be given to the EU's fundamental interest in its closest neighbours and that
the talks we have held today will promote movement to a more constructive trajectory. We
are ready for this".
Lavrov is following Putin's line (Davos speech), ergo that Russia is ready to
interact with Europe as a mutually respectful equal partner – but not with Europe as
puppet of the US NWO, NeoCon , ZioGlob/CIA crowd. Hopefully the Germans are listening and can
reassess their true interests.
Also the Poles, who urgently need to wake up to the fact that that they have more in
common with Putin's Russia than they do with ZioGlob NWO USA.
Russia of late indeed is becoming more assertive, most likely because it is confidant
their military capabilities have become superior to that of their adversaries. NATO and US
know that very well, but will never let on. Their provocations are nothing more than
grandstanding.
However what would Russia do in Syria if confronted with increased American
aggression in that country? That's what I like to know. Russia is deeply involved in Syria
supporting that country in defeating ISIS. Russia has a strategically important navy base
there too. Biden so it seems wants to rekindle the war in Syria supported by Israel and will
find a pretext to do so.
@cranc The
media or the Israeli state (the same entity in actuality) claims.
Most Israeli strikes are agreed before hand with Russia. The Israelis need to save face
for their cowardly fascist habit of killing civilian Palestinians. These useless strikes
against Syria are purely symbolic and are used to deceive the Israeli and US populations.
Besides, more than 60% of Israeli citizens are not Jews, let alone practicing Jews.
Israeli is changing due to massive immigration of non-Jews from Russia, and in a generation
will change from the rulers of the US to a Russian outpost and there is nothing the Zionists
can do about it.
If you go back and look at manufacturing consent, Chomsky and Ed Herman's great work on the
press, you see that the old paradigm no longer functions, that in the digital age where there
are a multiplicity of sources, the media has essentially siloed itself. It doesn't seek with
the old monopolies. Remember we used to have just one major network that the power of the New
York Times and I know because I worked for The Times for 15 years, was not the readership, the
readership wasn't ever that big, the subscription base was rarely much over a million, but it
was the power to set the agenda so that when I was overseas, all of the networks, now these
were the big kind of media stars that appeared on CBS or NBC, would actually come and knock on
my hotel room at night and ask me what it was I was filing the next morning because they knew
their editors would then send them out to do a story based on what I had reported.
That was the power of the New York Times. All of that's gone and it's been replaced by
partisan divides and it has transformed publications like The New York Times into partisan
outlets. The Pew Research Center did a poll last summer where they polled readers and viewers
so 91% of the people who read The New York Times identify as supporters of the Democratic
party, that's 87% for national public radio, 94, 95%, I can't remember, for MSNBC. Then you
have the other side of the divide where 95% of the people who watch Fox news, I hate combining
Fox with the word news, identify as supporters of the Republican party. That has been
commercially successful and even politically successful because on all of the major issues,
trade deals, endless war, wholesale surveillance, austerity programs.
I have been dumbfounded for some time by supporters of the Izzies apparent lack of concern
about the eventual consequences of this sort of behavior. But I suppose, as with Uncle Sugar,
the notion of ones own exceptional nature prevents a sensible assessment.
Israeli intel spinoffs/cutouts, US FBI/CIA and the NSA surveillance/blackmail collection
agencies and their agents; they are facets of the same worldwide "NWO" criminal Blob-Mob,
imo.
It should be obvious by now they have the power to set up one US President, and depose him
through a ham-handed domestic election fraud coup, and install an eaaily controlled
neurodegenerating corrupt puppet, and completely control and pervert the US Judicial system,
so as to essentially get away and continue with their criminal culture and crimes against
humanity unchecked.
With such a history, of course they have the means to frame Russia, as well as to destroy
any others who stand in their way to more power and autocratic control of the planet.
i've also been in various IT roles and it's funny how people ghettoize themselves...web
design/"full stack" guys were always the worst but i had a lot of server/NAS guys who had ZERO
clue about security and would use idiot passwords like that (and torrent episodes of "the wire"
and watch sports on youtube and etc etc).
as for the israelis, the cellebrite guys and probably these jackasses are good examples of
what happens when you get to sit around on stolen land and live off free money from the US.
which is funny because a lot of skilled "1337hax0rz" also come from poor-ass areas of russia
and the other former soviet areas.
Posted by: the pair | Jan 27 2021 16:45 utc |
13 @Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11
I saw that headline too.
I didn't (bother) to read it, but wondered why the MSM
would do everyone a favor and warn about this guy.
His usefulness had ended? So eke out that last drop of value from him
by sowing distrust within Proud Boys and other alternate organizations. Or (heaven's forbid!) that guy is being set up for assassination
by the Deep State as a false-flag. (Outrageous, simply outrageous,
but imagine if they did a Navalny/Skripal on him - whoa!)
Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 16:46 utc |
14 Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 16:46 utc | 14
We do seem to have some disagreements among our ruling "elites" these days, and I think that
may have something to do with it, but I really don't know and that is a good question. "Why are
they telling me this" is always a good question.
Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to warn the young these days, so I thought I'd post
it.
Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:53 utc |
15 @Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:53 utc | 15
For sure, that is the rub.
When to self-censor, when to post.
Better to post and then discuss
then simply censor.
Posted by: librul | Jan 27 2021 17:00 utc |
16 @Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11
Yep. FBI is following the time-tested "proactive" standard playbook of synthetic
terror/crime creation to support the Borg's agenda.
Some congressman a few years back got a hold of, and publically released official docs
showing that FBI was budgeting a yearly payroll for nsome >15,000 paid confidential
informants/agent provacatuers circa 2014(?).
This FBI practice goes all the way back to the 1960's and probably much earlier.
In the last 60+ years, there have been oo many FBI-created/supported domestic 'crime/terror'
groups/leaderships to list in one post here.
Likely the leadership of both BLM and US antifa is also controlled by FBI (Euro
antifa=>likely CIA). [CIA Operation Ajax/Kermit Roosevelt)was running paid *rent-a-mobs* all
the way back in the 1953 overthrowal of Iran's Mossadegh govt].
Recently I've been unable to find anything on Wikipedia that has not been corrupted to some
degree or other by lies.
What a disappointment of a once grand ideal.
Posted by: Arch Bungle | Jan 27 2021 17:21 utc |
18
I know it is OT, but, I was wondering what is happening with the Huawei Princess
in Canada since the regime change in the USA?
Posted by: Young | Jan 27 2021 17:52 utc |
19 Good report. The Wikileaks Vault 7 release clearly shows the USA has tools to create
false flag cyber warfare. To say one knows where a hack originates says more about the accuser
than the accused. Ms. Webb's reporting on the Epstein case was profound, and her follow-up
reporting on various threads has been stellar. There is no reason to doubt her reporting here.
It is no accident that most of Webb's threads lead back to Israel. When one considers the USA's
blind fealty to Israel, often alone in its support, one must consider that mass blackmailing of
political leaders going back decades is a real possibility to explain the USA's Israel-centric
foreign and domestic policy.
"The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump
attributed it to China."
Was there a better way for Trump to telegraph (or tweet, whatever) to the public that the
establishment had no idea who was behind the hack?
If Trump said that he didn't believe Russia did it that would just give the establishment
mass media ammunition to say he was Putin's puppet. After dozens of mass media products echo
the narrative off each other to amplify a weak and vague suggestion and build it into
something that the public perceives as truth, Trump crushed it all by just accusing someone
else. Rather than laboriously dismantling the accusation aimed at Russia he just cut it off
at the knees.
Unfortunately that is something only a President can do, and the current figurehead in
that position absolutely will not be doing anything that might undermine the establishment
narrative du jour. I miss Trump already for that alone.
I have no direct knowledge of SolarWinds specifically, but if Boeing hired HCL (formerly
Hindu Computer Limited) to develop software for its 737 max, I'll make a wild guess and
assume that SolarWinds too probably hired a bunch of Indian kids worth $10/hour each, who
come and go every few months.
And if that's indeed the case, then anything's possible.
Solar Winds was an Israeli penetration? Not Russia?
"As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump
campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel , not
Russia . Indeed,
many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed
collusion with Israel , yet those instances received little coverage and generated little
media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was
in fact Israelgate.
Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of
SolarWinds' acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore,
Samanage's deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both
intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange's integration with the Orion software at
the time of the back door's insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds'
Czech-based contractor. " unlimitedhangout
----------------
Pilgrims! I am suggesting or at least raising the possibility that Israel has massively
broken into American government IT systems. Hmmm. Does that mean that I am a Rooshan asset?
The sadly funny thing in this is how deaf, dumb and blind the main stream media are with
regard to any, any, any possibility that Israel does not think its interests are identical with
those of the US.
Natanyahu is quite open about his intention to bully Biden into continuing Israeli policy
aimed at a Morgenthau model for Iran.
People openly say on the TeeVee that not only must Iran give up its nuclear ambitions but it
must also accept Israeli hegemony in the region. Joltin' Jack Keane is one of the foremost
proponents of such a vision of the future Middle East. For him the Syrian military are merely
"Iranian surrogate forces." Perhaps someone should look carefully at the funding for the
Institute for the Study of War. Keane is the chairman thereof. pl
When friends and acquaintances question my apparent antipathy towards the State of Israel,
I suggest that they familiarize themselves with the circumstances regarding the attack on the
USS Liberty and the Pollard spy scandal.
I have been slogging through Jerome Slater's book 'Mythologies Without End: The US,
Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1917 - 2020.' Frankly, after getting 3/4 of the way
through this book, I gave up because Slater's narrative was so depressingly repetitive.
Slater documents Israel's repeated intransigence and refusal to make any meaningful
concessions towards a just and lasting arrangement for peace with the Palestinians.
Probably the only event that will cause a serious reassessment of the US relationship with
Israel will be the day when we can no longer find a buyer for our debt and we are forced to
live within our means. But when that day arrives, the US/Israeli relationship will probably
be the least of our problems.
......." Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the
discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the
hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication,
and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the
involvement of "Russian hackers" in that event......."
CrowdStrike ...CrowdStrike ......CrowdStrike.
Still think Trump's mention of CrowdStrike in his Ukraine phone call, that led to his
bogus impeachment ,was the real reason Democrats went apoplectic.
The echo chamber media treatment of the CrowdStrike element of the phone call as a "long
discredited conspiracy theory", without ever mentioning CrowdStrike by name, was the first
clue.
Is Israel First any worse than America First, or China First?
Certainly Netanyahu was eager to congratulate "President Elect Biden" before the Trump
body was even cold demonstrated Trump's history of special treatment and good will towards
Israel counted for nothing in their own version of their nation's real-politik.
Which is to also include our own self-serving interests, treating Israel in the same
fashion. I think we should all be prickly against each other. Real-politik. Give only
what one can afford to lose.
So Isabel Maxwell is sister to Ghislaine Maxwell of Jeffrey Epstein fame. The connecting
dots point to an ever shrinking world of espionage against the US in order to get at more
local targets. I wonder what they have on John Roberts.
I thought at the time how ironic it was that Netenyahu couldn't wait to throw Trump under
the bus even though Trump spent so much time kissing up to Israel.
I thought it was obvious to most Americans that Israel does not have the same interests
that the U.S.has.The source of Israel's influence in the U.S. is the evangelical vote which
is Protestant in nature going back to Plymouth Rock and naming their kids after OT heroes and
guilt from WW2. Nationalist Americans still fall in the trap of supporting Israel thinking we
are all in this together with them. Think about it, all senators and congressmen vote
uniformly for anything Israel wants and yet can't get a proper stimulus package thru. By the
way Israel first is worse than America first.
As someone who has dealt with the issue of American illusions about Israel for many
decades, I assure you that most Americans think Israel is the 51st state. I was the principal
liaison between US and Israeli military intelligence for seven long years.
Alex,
I'm not sure I can agree with your source of Israel influence going back to Plymouth Rock.
The Pilgrims were strongly reformed and promoted Covenant Theology, while current American
evangelicals largely accept Dispensationalism and pre-tribulation as developed by Darby in
the early 1800s and popularized by Schofield in the early 1900s.
Used tools such as Solar Winds extensively as engineer in wireless telcom industry.
There are much better tools.
Have read many accounts of this security breach and Israel being involved is much more
probable and likely explanation.
Also available evidence points that way.
Russia Russia Russia and China China China are easy talking points for those that are
lazy
In 1989, as an IBM contractor, I spent a month at a VQ2 det in the Med, helping install a
computer system, and instructing key personnel in its use. I became friends with the Chiefs,
male and female, that ran the place, walking around in their starched kakis with clipboards,
instructing the pilots and recon officers, slouching in their flight suits, their assignments
for the day. (Which of course came down from VQ2 itself, likely compiled by Chiefs there. As
Zhukov said when asked who ran the Russian Army: "The Sergeants and myself.") We both knew
several of the Liberty survivors: I from my previous Government employment; they from the
Navy. They all assured me privately that the Navy was determined never to let anything like
that happen again. There's undoubtedly been a complete turn over or two of personnel since
then, but I suspect the same determination prevails today: Once bitten, twice shy.
Given the publicly available evidence and information, there is no reason to rule out
Israel. They have the skill and motivation to pull this off. The same can be said for China
as well as Russia. North Korea and Iran are also strong contenders. Those two are
surprisingly capable. However, from our viewpoint any attribution is based on circumstantial
evidence only. True attribution needs more than that such as that laid out in the GRU 12
indictment for the DNC hack or the Dutch AIVD witnessing of the APT29 (SVR) hack of the
Pentagon in 2015. We need to see the adversary's traffic and infrastructure. Without that,
we're guessing.
Our inability to see Israel as an adversary is exasperating. As Ed Lindgren mentioned, the
USS Liberty and the Pollard spy ring should be reason enough to cause permanent suspicion.
The author brought up the case of Trump campaign collusion with Israel and Saudi Arabia. The
evidence for this was actually stronger than any Trump-Russia collusion. Yet that went
unnoticed outside a small group of researchers. Our blindspot towards Israel may prove fatal
some day.
Who contracted Solarwinds..? It was associated with "GITHUB"which was making enemys in the
Middle East..and was Involved with Jared Kushner as a Backer...according to the Wiki Write up
on "GitHub" Thats a Backdoor I would look at..
AIPAC and their friends on both sides of the aisle in Congress already has access to info
from the various federal agencies that were hacked. Would they endanger that open gateway by
a penetration of US government IT systems?
The Izzies are much more interested in hacking Iranians. Or those european signers of
JCPOA that are trying to negotiate with Iran. They hacked computers in various European
hotels that had Iranian guests. In the US Israeli hackers' target has been the BDS movement
(Boycott, Divest & Sanction) movement, plus any association or group that promotes civil
rights for Palestinians. I wouldn't doubt that they are also hacking congresswoman Rashida
Talib, the Arab American Institute, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, various
Arab-American lobbies, and the Palestinian diaspora in Detroit and other American cities.
However, there is suspicion that Israeli private individuals may at one time or another be
involved with or helped provide expertise to Cozy Bear & other cyber APTs operated mainly
out of Russia.
I know you can't go into specifics, but as a general rule of thumb did Israeli military
intelligence ever offer you any intel that you didn't already know?
Theologically, you have a point. Except that historically, virtually all the low-church
British protestants were very pro-Jewish anyway, regardless of theology. Remember: it was
Oliver Cromwell who let the Jews back into England after nearly three centuries of absence.
Why? I don't know. Maybe the Proddies thought the Jews would make good allies against Rome.
There is also the fact that they tended towards biblical literalism in those days, looking to
the Bible as though it were system of law--similar to the way the Jews did.
Yeah, right.
No, it was a one way street. It amounted to a firehose stream going one way. There were a lot
of meetings at which they gave us nothing of value, and that evidently was not enough because
they planted people all over the government to feed them stuff we did not want to give them.
Occasionally they got caught passing material and when that happened the politicians would
forbid prosecution. That was true of both US parties. Pollard was recruited for the purpose
of not having their significant assets put at risk. He was passed lists of specific documents
by his Israeli handlers. The documents were listed by serial number so that he would not
bring the wrong ones out of the US security envelope. He brought them to the team safe house
where they were copied and then he returned them to the Navy's safes. On one occasion I
decided to probe their willingness to actually cooperate with us. I told the liaison rep in
Washington that we maintained encyclopedic files on all the armed forces of the world. this
was a routine task. I told them that it was a waste of our time to collect basic data about
the IDF. That being the case, I asked them to give us the TO&E of a type IDF infantry
brigade so we would not waste analytic time. The request went to Tel Aviv and was
refused.
Israel has a long history of stealing US information over and above that which they are
given. They don't believe that we give them everything we have and so they steal what they
think we may be keeping from them. Compartmentation makes it impossible for them to be sure.
Remember Pollard? In Pollard's case the material he was directed to obtain for them often had
nothing to do with the ME, but it was good trading material.
More Cyber Crimes, Attributed To Russia, Are Shown To Have Come From Elsewhere
Earlier today police in Europe
took down the Emotet bot-network:
First discovered as a fairly run-of-the-mill banking trojan back in 2014, Emotet evolved over
the years into one of the most professional and resilient cyber crime services in the world,
and became a "go-to" solution for cyber criminals.
Its infrastructure acted as a mechanism to gain access to target systems, which was done
via an automated spam email process that delivered Emotet malware to its victims via
malicious attachments, often shipping notices, invoices and, since last spring, Covid-19
information or offers. If opened, victims would be promoted to enable macros that allowed
malicious code to run and instal Emotet.
This done, Emotet's operators then sold access on to other cyber criminal groups as a
means to infiltrate their victims, steal data, and drop malware and ransomware. The operators
of TrickBot and Ryuk were among the many users of Emotet.
Up to a quarter of all recent run of the mill cyber-crime was done through the Emotet
network. Closing it down is a great success.
Wikipedia falsely claimed
that Emotet was based in Russia:
Emotet is a malware strain and a cybercrime operation based in Russia.[1] The malware, also
known as Geodo and Mealybug, was first detected in 2014[2] and remains active, deemed one of
the most prevalent threats of 2019.[3]
However the Hindu report linked as source to the Russia claim under [1]
only says :
The malware is said to be operated from Russia, and its operator is nicknamed Ivan by cyber
security researchers.
"Is said to be operated from Russia" is quite a weak formulation and should not be used as
source for attribution claims. It is also definitely false.
The operating center of Emotet was found in the Ukraine. Today the Ukrainian national police
took control of it during a raid (video). The police found dozens of
computers, some hundred hard drives, about 50 kilogram of gold bars (current price ~$60,000/kg)
and large amounts of money in multiple currencies.
Since the 2016 publishing of internal emails of the DNC and the Clinton campaign attribution
of computer intrusions to Russia has become a standard propaganda feature. But in no case was
there shown evidence which proved that Russia was responsible for a hack.
The recently discovered deep intrusion into U.S. companies and government networks used a
manipulated version of the SolarWinds Orion network management software. The Washington borg
immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China. But
none of those claims were backed up by facts or known evidence.
The hack was extremely complex, well managed and resourced, and likely required insider
knowledge. To this IT professional it 'felt' neither Russian nor Chinese. It is far more
likely, as Whitney Webb finds, that
Israel was behind it :
The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of
SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was "compiled, signed
and delivered through the existing software patch release management system," per
reports . This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators
had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had "a high degree of familiarity with the
software." While the way the attackers gained access to Orion's code base has yet to be
determined, one possibility
being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a
SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.
...
Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that
has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in
2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first
inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms
associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government.
...
Samanage offers what it describes as "an IT Service Desk solution." It was acquired by
SolarWinds so Samanage's products could be added to SolarWinds' IT Operations Management
portfolio. Though US reporting and
SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying
that it is an American company, Samanage is actually
an Israeli firm . It was
founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously
worked for several years at MAMRAM , the Israeli military's central computing unit .
...
Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed
SolarWinds Service Desk, became
listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of
Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition's announcement in April
of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October
or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained
access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time.
Samanage's automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the
now-compromised software during that period.
The U.S. National Security Agency has ways and means to find out who was behind the
SolarWinds hack. But if Israel is the real culprit no one will be allowed to say so publicly.
Some high ranging U.-S. general or official will fly to Israel and read his counterpart the
riot act. Israel will ignore it just as it has done every time when it was caught spying on the
U.S. government.
With more then half of Washington's politicians in its pockets it has no reason to fear any
consequences.
Posted by b on January 27, 2021 at 15:32 UTC |
Permalink
I have been dumbfounded for some time by supporters of the Izzies apparent lack of concern
about the eventual consequences of this sort of behavior. But I suppose, as with Uncle Sugar,
the notion of ones own exceptional nature prevents a sensible assessment.
I have no direct knowledge of SolarWinds specifically, but if Boeing hired HCL (formerly
Hindu Computer Limited) to develop software for its 737 max, I'll make a wild guess and
assume that SolarWinds too probably hired a bunch of Indian kids worth $10/hour each, who
come and go every few months.
And if that's indeed the case, then anything's possible.
Israeli intel spinoffs/cutouts, US FBI/CIA and the NSA surveillance/blackmail collection
agencies and their agents; they are facets of the same worldwide "NWO" criminal Blob-Mob,
imo.
It should be obvious by now they have the power to set up one US President, and depose him
through a ham-handed domestic election fraud coup, and install an eaaily controlled
neurodegenerating corrupt puppet, and completely control and pervert the US Judicial system,
so as to essentially get away and continue with their criminal culture and crimes against
humanity unchecked.
With such a history, of course they have the means to frame Russia, as well as to destroy
any others who stand in their way to more power and autocratic control of the planet.
...
With more than half of Washington's politicians in its pockets ("Israel") has no reason to
fear any consequences.
Posted by b on January 27, 2021 at 15:32 UTC | Permalink
Precisely. And it's almost as bad in Oz, and even worse in the UK. Money is the only
logical explanation for the "Israel" Worship indulged in by corrupt, amoral Western political
'leaders'.
"The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump
attributed it to China."
Was there a better way for Trump to telegraph (or tweet, whatever) to the public that the
establishment had no idea who was behind the hack?
If Trump said that he didn't believe Russia did it that would just give the establishment
mass media ammunition to say he was Putin's puppet. After dozens of mass media products echo
the narrative off each other to amplify a weak and vague suggestion and build it into
something that the public perceives as truth, Trump crushed it all by just accusing someone
else. Rather than laboriously dismantling the accusation aimed at Russia he just cut it off
at the knees.
Unfortunately that is something only a President can do, and the current figurehead in
that position absolutely will not be doing anything that might undermine the establishment
narrative du jour. I miss Trump already for that alone.
b posted, "Is said to be operated from Russia" is quite a weak formulation
However, don't give the average reader of newsignorance
much credit. Even well above average readers can have a readiness for
confirmation bias.
side rant:
Human intelligence is just a tool. High intelligence does not guarantee
a dedication to a search for truth. High intelligence can give one
a developed skill at
rationalizing whatever beliefs one already holds.
-----
Privacy!
I just learned about this!
Check this out (always remember, though, "trust but verify")
And an alternative service that can rightly be trusted today
is not necessarily trustworthy tomorrow.
https://restoreprivacy.com/ lists alternative services for everything from Google Docs, iCloud, secure messengers, and
search engines.
some of the hack was semi-sophisticated ("semi" since it could have been an inside job) but
some was just a
typical PICNIC .
i've also been in various IT roles and it's funny how people ghettoize themselves...web
design/"full stack" guys were always the worst but i had a lot of server/NAS guys who had
ZERO clue about security and would use idiot passwords like that (and torrent episodes of
"the wire" and watch sports on youtube and etc etc).
as for the israelis, the cellebrite guys and probably these jackasses are good examples of
what happens when you get to sit around on stolen land and live off free money from the US.
which is funny because a lot of skilled "1337hax0rz" also come from poor-ass areas of russia
and the other former soviet areas.
@Posted by: Bemildred | Jan 27 2021 16:35 utc | 11
I saw that headline too.
I didn't (bother) to read it, but wondered why the MSM
would do everyone a favor and warn about this guy.
His usefulness had ended? So eke out that last drop of value from him
by sowing distrust within Proud Boys and other alternate organizations. Or (heaven's forbid!) that guy is being set up for assassination
by the Deep State as a false-flag. (Outrageous, simply outrageous,
but imagine if they did a Navalny/Skripal on him - whoa!)
We do seem to have some disagreements among our ruling "elites" these days, and I think
that may have something to do with it, but I really don't know and that is a good question.
"Why are they telling me this" is always a good question.
Nevertheless, I think it is a good idea to warn the young these days, so I thought I'd
post it.
Yep. FBI is following the time-tested "proactive" standard playbook of synthetic
terror/crime creation to support the Borg's agenda.
Some congressman a few years back got a hold of, and publically released official docs
showing that FBI was budgeting a yearly payroll for nsome >15,000 paid confidential
informants/agent provacatuers circa 2014(?).
This FBI practice goes all the way back to the 1960's and probably much earlier.
In the last 60+ years, there have been oo many FBI-created/supported domestic
'crime/terror' groups/leaderships to list in one post here.
Likely the leadership of both BLM and US antifa is also controlled by FBI (Euro
antifa=>likely CIA). [CIA Operation Ajax/Kermit Roosevelt)was running paid *rent-a-mobs*
all the way back in the 1953 overthrowal of Iran's Mossadegh govt].
Recently I've been unable to find anything on Wikipedia that has not been corrupted to
some degree or other by lies.
What a disappointment of a once grand ideal.
Young , Jan 27 2021 17:52 utc |
19 I know it is OT, but, I was wondering what is happening with the Huawei Princess in
Canada since the regime change in the USA?
Good report. The Wikileaks Vault 7 release clearly shows the USA has tools to create false
flag cyber warfare. To say one knows where a hack originates says more about the accuser than
the accused. Ms. Webb's reporting on the Epstein case was profound, and her follow-up
reporting on various threads has been stellar. There is no reason to doubt her reporting
here. It is no accident that most of Webb's threads lead back to Israel. When one considers
the USA's blind fealty to Israel, often alone in its support, one must consider that mass
blackmailing of political leaders going back decades is a real possibility to explain the
USA's Israel-centric foreign and domestic policy.
While US officials claim that 'far-right extremism' is one of the largest threats facing
America, the leader of the group most commonly singled out as an example - the Proud Boys -
was a 'prolific' informant for federal and local law enforcement, according to Reuters,
citing a 2014 federal court proceeding.
Enrique Tarrio repeatedly worked undercover for investigators following a 2012 arrest,
court documents reveal.
Curiously, Tarrio was ordered to stay away from Washington D.C. one day before the
January 6 Capitol riot after he was arrested on vandalism and weapons charges - upon a
request by government prosecutors that he be prohibited from attending. At least five Proud
Boys members were charged as part of the riot.
In the 2014 hearing, a federal prosecutor, an FBI agent and Tarrio's attorney describe
his undercover work - noting that the Proud Boys leader helped authorities prosecute over a
dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling, accoding to
Reuters.
In a Tuesday interview with Reuters, Tarrio denied working undercover or cooperating in
cases.
"I don't know any of this," he said, adding "I don't recall any of this."
[...]
During Tarrio's 2014 hearing, both the prosecutor and Tarrio's defense attorney asked
for a reduced prison sentence after pleading guilty in a fraud case related to the
relabeling and sale of stolen diabetes test kits. In requesting leniency for Tarrio and two
co-defendants, the prosecutor noted that Tarrio's information had resulted in the
prosecution of 13 people on federal charges in two separate cases, and helped local
authorities investigate a gambling ring.
Jailed Kremlin foe Navalny being used by West to destabilise Russia: Putin ally
By
Reuters
Staff
3 MIN READ
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny is being used by the West to try to destabilise Russia, a
prominent hardliner and ally of President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday, saying he must be held to account for
repeatedly breaking the law.
Slideshow
(
2 images )
Navalny was remanded in custody for 30 days last week after returning from Germany where he had been recovering from a
nerve agent poisoning. He could face years in jail for parole violations and other legal cases he calls trumped up.
Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council, called for Navalny to face the full force of the law in comments
that offered a glimpse into the mood inside Russia's security establishment after tens of thousands of Navalny's
supporters protested against his jailing on Saturday.
"He (Navalny), this figure, has repeatedly (and) grossly broken Russian legislation, engaging in fraud concerning large
amounts (of money). And as a citizen of Russia he must bear responsibility for his illegal activity in line with the
law," Patrushev told the Argumenty i Fakty media outlet.
"The West needs this figure to destabilise the situation in Russia, for social upheaval, strikes and new Maidans,"
Patrushev said, in a reference to the 2014 revolution in Ukraine that ousted a Moscow-backed president.
When asked about Patrushev's comments, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was up to a court to make further
decisions in the opposition politician's case and that it was not a matter for the Kremlin.
Police detained more than 3,700 people on Saturday as protesters called on the Kremlin to release Navalny. The Kremlin
said the protests were illegal.
Peskov on Tuesday said there could be no dialogue with illegal protesters, accusing them of behaving aggressively and of
using what he called unprecedented violence against the police.
He said incidences of police violence against protesters, some of which were captured on video, were far fewer and being
investigated.
In a sign that Russian authorities may crack down hard after the protests, the Kommersant newspaper on Tuesday cited
unnamed security sources as saying they may open a criminal investigation that would treat the demonstrations as "mass
unrest".
The West has called for Navalny's release, but the European Union has said it will refrain from fresh sanctions on
Russian individuals if Moscow releases Navalny after 30 days.
In this headline alone there is one information that already proves beyond all reasonable
doubt the pro-Navalny protests are just an artificial, pathetic color revolution attempt: "next
weekend".
Didn't know revolutions had to wait for weekends to happen...
I can smell the fetid aroma of the middle class and the petite bourgeoisie from thousands of
kilometers of distance - that's my gift and my curse. And I can tell you those pro-Navalny
protesters stink from that smell.
What poisoning? Hmm?? Interesting that the Skripal affair and the Navalny one (the latter
for sure a put up job from start to finish) did not end in deaths NOR were any other people
(children, ducks, restaurant workers, hospital staff, daughter of British army nurse in first
"case"; Navalny's supporters/workers what have you, hotel workers, airplane cleaners, EMS,
Omsk/Tomsk (sorry don't recall) hospital workers) affected at all – but isn't
"Novichok" supposed to be the deadliest of nerve agents no cure yet the Skrips and Navalny
survived and NO ONE else affected
And the stories about how this so-called deadliest of poisons was administered kept
changing – in part at least because not few in the public and in the none MSM kept
questioning the reality of the presented story
Re Navalny: a) why would the "Kremlin" order his killing via a nerve agent that screams
"Russia did it" unless you believe that Russia and Mr Putin are clodpolls?; b) Navalny only
has around 3% support among some of the Russian population; c) Why, after he had been saved
in Omsk/Tomsk would the Kremlin agree to his being transferred to a hospital in Germany and
that Charite Hospital in particular (known to have German govt connections) had the order for
his being "poisoned" gone out from the Russian govt?; d) Navalny had been charged and
convicted of Fraud and his prison sentence "reduced" to monthly appearances at court –
probation, essentially his five months collaborating (well the whole affair was a
collaboration, and a nicely remunerated one, no doubt) with the west in Germany meant that he
broke the terms of his probation/sentence which was why he was arrested on his return.
Don't tell me he and his Handlers didn't know precisely what they – he was –
were doing when they had him return They knew he would be arrested (as would anyone in the
west under similar judicial orders – but don't expect to hear that on NPR or the BBC
World Service, oh no all confected horror and outrage )
The devastating hack on SolarWinds was quickly pinned on Russia by US intelligence. A
more likely culprit, Samanage, a company whose software was integrated into SolarWinds'
software just as the "back door" was inserted, is deeply tied to Israeli intelligence and
intelligence-linked families such as the Maxwells.
In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies,
major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among
others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout
from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.
The hack , which
affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds , was blamed on Russia on January
5 by the US government's Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the
attackers were "
likely Russian in origin ," but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.
Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no
actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets
began reporting the intelligence community's "likely" conclusion as fact right away, with the
New York Timessubsequently
reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold
by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the "Russian hackers."
Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had
access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the
evidence-free report from US intelligence on "likely" Russian involvement, is said to be the
reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds'
contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.
Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election,
when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails
published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds
quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks
and investigating the hack.
CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and
subsequently it was central in
developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of "Russian hackers" in that
event.
There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was
collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel ,
not Russia. Indeed,
many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed
collusion with Israel , yet those instances received little coverage and generated little
media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was
in fact Israelgate.
Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of
SolarWinds' acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore,
Samanage's deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both
intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange's integration with the Orion software at
the time of the back door's insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds'
Czech-based contractor.
Orion's Fall
In the month since the hack, evidence has emerged detailing the extent of the damage, with
the Justice Department
quietly announcing , the same day as the Capitol riots (January 6), that their email system
had been breached in the hack -- a "major incident" according to the department. This
terminology means that the attack "is likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national
security interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United States or to the public
confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people,"
per NextGov .
The Justice Department was the fourth US government agency to publicly acknowledge a breach
in connection to the hack, with the others being the Departments of Commerce and Energy and the
Treasury. Yet, while only four agencies have publicly acknowledged fallout from the hack,
SolarWinds software is
also used by the Department of Defense, the State Department, NASA, the NSA, and the
Executive Office. Given that the Cyber Unified Coordination Group stated that "fewer than ten"
US government agencies had been affected, it's likely that some of these agencies were
compromised, and some press reports have asserted that the State Department and Pentagon were
affected.
In addition to government agencies, SolarWinds
Orion software was in use by the top ten US telecommunications corporations, the top five
US accounting firms, the New York Power Authority, and numerous US government contractors such
as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and the Federal Reserve. Other notable SolarWinds
clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, and several
mainstream news outlets including the Economist and the New York Times .
Based on what is officially known so far, the hackers appeared to have been highly
sophisticated, with FireEye, the cybersecurity company that first discovered the implanted code
used to conduct the hack, stating that
the hackers "routinely removed their tools, including the backdoors, once legitimate remote
access was achieved -- implying a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to
operational security." In addition, top security experts have noted that the hack was "
very very carefully
orchestrated ," leading to a consensus that the hack was state sponsored.
FireEye stated that they first identified the compromise of SolarWinds after the version of
the Orion software they were using contained a back door that was used to gain access to its
"red team" suite of hacking tools. Not long after the disclosure of the SolarWinds hack, on
December 31, the hackers were able to partially access Microsoft's source code, raising
concerns that the act was preparation for future and equally devastating attacks.
FireEye's account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is
one of FireEye's clients , and FireEye
was launched with funding from the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth
being skeptical of the " free tool " FireEye has
made available in the hack's aftermath for "spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of
systems."
In addition, Microsoft, another key source in the SolarWinds story, is a military contractor
with close ties to Israel's intelligence apparatus, especially Unit 8200, and their reports of
events also deserve scrutiny. Notably, it was Unit 8200 alumnus and executive at Israeli
cybersecurity firm Cycode, Ronen Slavin , who told Reuters
in a
widely quoted article that he "was worried by the possibility that the SolarWinds hackers
were poring over Microsoft's source code as prelude to a much more ambitious offensive." "To me
the biggest question is, 'Was this recon for the next big operation?'" Slavin stated .
Also odd about the actors involved in the response to the hack is the decision to bring on
not only the discredited firm CrowdStrike but also the new consultancy firm of Chris Krebs and
Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer of Facebook and Yahoo, to investigate
the hack. Chris Krebs is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity
and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was previously a top Microsoft executive. Krebs
was fired by Donald Trump after repeatedly and publicly challenging Trump on the issue of
election fraud in the 2020 election.
As head of CISA, Krebs gave access to networks of critical infrastructure throughout the US,
with a focus on the health-care industry, to
the CTI League , a suspicious outfit of anonymous volunteers working "for free" and led by
a former Unit 8200 officer. "We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to
assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an
industry leading secure software development company," a SolarWinds spokesperson said in an
email cited by
Reuters.
It is also worth noting that the SolarWinds hack did benefit a few actors aside from the
attackers themselves. For instance, Israeli cybersecurity firms CheckPoint and CyberArk, which
have close ties to Israeli intelligence Unit 8200, have seen
their stocks soar in the weeks since the SolarWinds compromise was announced. Notably, in
2017, CyberArk was the company that "
discovered " one of the main tactics used in an attack, a form of SAML token manipulation
called GoldenSAML. CyberArk does not specify how they discovered this method of attack and, at
the time they announced the tactic's existence, released a free tool to identify
systems vulnerable to GoldenSAML manipulation.
In addition, the other main mode of attack, a back door program nicknamed Sunburst, was
found by
Kaspersky researchers to be similar to a piece of malware called
Kazuar that was also first discovered by
another Unit 8200-linked company , Palo Alto Networks, also in 2017. The similarities
only suggest that those who developed the Sunburst backdoor may have been inspired by
Kazuar and "they may have common members between them or a shared software developer building
their malware." Kaspersky stressed that Sunburst and Kazuar are not likely to be one and the
same. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Unit 8200 is known to
have previously hacked Kaspersky and attempted to insert a back door into their products,
per Kaspersky employees.
Crowdstrike claimed that this finding confirmed "the attribution at least to Russian
intelligence," only because an allegedly Russian hacking group is believed to have used Kazuar
before. No technical evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking has yet been
presented.
Samanage and Sabotage
The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of
SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was "compiled, signed
and delivered through the existing software patch release management system," per
reports . This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had
direct access to SolarWinds code as they had "a high degree of familiarity with the software."
While the way the attackers gained access to Orion's code base has yet to be determined, one
possibility
being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a
SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.
US investigators
have been focusing on offices of SolarWinds that are based abroad, suggesting that -- in
addition to the above -- the attackers were likely working for SolarWinds or were given access
by someone working for the company. That investigation has focused on offices in eastern
Europe, allegedly because "Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted" in those
countries.
It is worth pointing out, however, that Israeli intelligence is similarly "deeply rooted" in
eastern European states both before and
after the fall of the Soviet Union, ties well illustrated by Israeli superspy and media
tycoon Robert Maxwell's frequent and
close associations with Eastern European and Russian intelligence agencies as well as the
leaders of many of those countries. Israeli intelligence operatives like Maxwell also had cozy
ties with Russian organized crime. For instance, Maxwell enabled the access of the Russian
organized crime network headed by Semion Mogilevich into the US financial system and was also
Mogilevich's
business partner . In addition, the cross-pollination between Israeli and Russian organized crime networks (networks
which also share ties to their respective intelligence agencies) and such links should be
considered if the cybercriminals due prove to be Russian in origin, as US intelligence has
claimed.
Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that
has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in
2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted,
but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with
numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government. Israel is deemed by
the NSA to be one
of the top spy threats facing US government agencies and Israel's list of espionage
scandals in the US is arguably the longest, and includes the Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS
software scandals of the 1980s to the Larry
Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2009.
Though much reporting has since been done on the recent compromise of SolarWinds Orion
software, little attention has been paid to Samanage. Samanage offers what it describes as "an
IT Service Desk solution." It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage's products could be added
to SolarWinds' IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and
SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying
that it is an American company, Samanage is actually
an Israeli firm . It was
founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked
for several years at MAMRAM , the Israeli military's central computing unit .
Samanage was SolarWinds' first acquisition of an Israeli company, and, at the time, Israeli
media reported that SolarWinds was expected to set up its first development center in Israel.
It appears, however, that SolarWinds, rather than setting up a new center, merely began using
Samanage's research and development center located in Netanya, Israel.
Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed
SolarWinds Service Desk, became
listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of
Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition's announcement in April
of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October
or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access
to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time.
Samanage's automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the
now-compromised software during that period.
Samanage appears to have had access to Orion following the announcement of the acquisition
in April 2019. Integration first began with Orion version 2019.4, the earliest version believed
to contain the malicious code that enabled the hack. In addition, the integrated Samanage
component of Orion was
responsible for "ensuring the appropriate teams are quickly notified when critical events
or performance issues [with Orion] are detected," which was meant to allow "service agents to
react faster and resolve issues before . . . employees are impacted."
In other words, the Samanage component that was integrated into Orion at the same time the
compromise took place was also responsible for Orion's alert system for critical events or
performance issues. The code that was inserted into Orion by hackers in late 2019 nevertheless
went undetected by this Samanage-made component for over a year, giving the "hackers" access to
millions of devices critical to both US government and corporate networks. Furthermore, it is
this Samanage-produced component of the affected Orion software that advises end
users to exempt the software from antivirus scans and group policy object (GPO) restrictions by
providing a warning that Orion may not work properly unless those exemptions are granted.
Samanage, Salesforce, and the World Economic Forum
Around the time of Samange's acquisition by SolarWinds, it
was reported that one of Samanage's top backers was the company Salesforce, with Salesforce
being both a major investor in Samanage as well as a partner of the company.
Salesforce is run by Marc Benioff, a billionaire who got his start at the tech giant Oracle.
Oracle was originally created as a
CIA spin-off and has
deep ties to Israel's government and the outgoing Trump administration. Salesforce also has
a large presence in Israel, with much of its global research and development
based there . Salesforce also
recently partnered with the Unit 8200-linked Israeli firm Diagnostic Robotics to
"predictively" diagnose COVID-19 cases using Artificial Intelligence.
Aside from leading Salesforce, Benioff is a member of the Vatican's Council for Inclusive Capitalism
alongside Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a
close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, and members of the Lauder family, who
have deep ties to the Mega Group and Israeli politics.
Benioff is also a prominent member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and
the inaugural
chair of the WEF's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), making him one of
the most critical players in the unfolding of the WEF-backed Great Reset. Other WEF leaders,
including the organization's founder Klaus Schwab, have openly discussed how massive cyberattacks
such as befell SolarWinds will soon result in "even more significant economic and social
implications than COVID-19."
Last year, the WEF's Centre for Cybersecurity, of which Salesforce is part, simulated a
"digital pandemic" cyberattack in an exercise entitled Cyber Polygon . Cyber Polygon's speakers
in 2020 included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail
Mishustin, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, and IBM executive Wendi Whitmore , who previously
held top posts at both Crowdstrike and a FireEye subsidiary. Notably, just months before the
COVID-19 crisis, the WEF had held Event 201, which simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that
crippled the world's economy.
In addition to Samanage's ties to WEF big shots such as Marc Benioff, the other main
investors behind Samanage's rise have ties to major Israeli espionage scandals, including the
Jonathan Pollard affair and the PROMIS software scandal. There are also ties to one of the
WEF's founding " technology pioneers ," Isabel Maxwell
(the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister of Ghislaine), who has long-standing ties to
Israel's intelligence apparatus and the country's hi-tech sector.
The Bronfmans, the Maxwells, and Viola Ventures
At the time of its acquisition by SolarWinds, Samanage's
top investor was Viola Ventures, a major Israeli venture-capital firm. Viola's investment
in Samanage, until its acquisition, was managed by Ronen Nir, who was also
on Samanage's board before it became part of SolarWinds.
Prior to working at Viola, Ronen Nir was a vice president at Verint, formerly Converse
Infosys. Verint, whose other alumni have gone on to found Israeli intelligence-front companies
such as Cybereason .
Verint has a history of
aggressively spying on US government facilities, including
the White House , and created the backdoors into all US
telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook,
on behalf of the US' NSA.
In addition to his background at Verint, Ronen Nir is an Israeli spy , having served for thirteen
years in an elite IDF intelligence unit, and he remains a lieutenant colonel on reserve duty.
His biography also notes that he worked for two years at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC,
which is fitting given his background in espionage and the major role that Israeli embassy has
played in several major espionage scandals.
As an aside, Nir has stated that "thought leader" Henry Kissinger is his "favorite
historical character." Notably, Kissinger
was instrumental in allowing Robert Maxwell, Israeli superspy and father of Ghislaine and
Isabel Maxwell, to sell software with a back door for Israeli intelligence to US national
laboratories, where it was used to spy on the US nuclear program. Kissinger had told Maxwell to
connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to US national laboratories, which
directly enabled this action, part of the larger
PROMIS software scandal .
In addition, Viola's stake was managed through a firm known
as Carmel Ventures, which is part of the Viola Group. At the time, Carmel Ventures was advised by Isabel Maxwell , whose father
had previously been
directly involved in the operation of the front company used to sell bugged software to US
national laboratories. As noted in
a previous article at Unlimited Hangout , Isabel "inherited" her father's circle of
Israeli government and intelligence contacts after his death and has been instrumental in
building the "bridge" between Israel's intelligence and military-linked hi-tech sector to
Silicon Valley.
Isabel also has ties to the Viola Group itself through Jonathan Kolber, a general partner at
Viola. Kolber previously cofounded and led the Bronfman family's private-equity fund, Claridge
Israel (based in Israel). Kolber then led Koor Industries, which he had acquired alongside the
Bronfmans via Claridge. Kolber is closely associated with Stephen Bronfman, the son of Charles
Bronfman who created Claridge and also
cofounded the Mega Group with Leslie Wexner in the early 1990s.
Kolber, like Isabel Maxwell, is a founding director of the
Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Maxwell, who used to chair the center's board, stepped down
following the Epstein scandal, though it's not exactly clear when. Other directors of the center
include Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad. Kolber's area of expertise, like that of Isabel
Maxwell, is "structuring complex, cross-border and cross industry business and financial
transactions," that is, arranging acquisitions and partnerships of Israeli firms by US
companies. Incidentally, this is also a major focus of the Peres Center.
Other connections to Isabel Maxwell, aside from her espionage ties, are worth noting, given
that she is a "technology pioneer" of the World Economic Forum. As previously mentioned,
Salesforce -- a major investor in Samanage -- is deeply involved with the WEF and its Great
Reset.
The links of Israeli intelligence and Salesforce to Samanage, and thus to SolarWinds, is
particularly relevant given the WEF's "prediction" of a coming "pandemic" of cyberattacks and
the early hints from former Unit 8200 officers that the SolarWinds hack is just the beginning.
It is also worth mentioning the Israeli government's considerable ties to the WEF over the
years, particularly last year when it joined the
Benioff-chaired C4IR and participated in the October 2020 WEF panel entitled "The Great
Reset: Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution."
Start Up Nation Central, an organization aimed at integrating Israeli start-ups with US
firms
set up by Netanyahu's longtime economic adviser Eugene Kandel and American Zionist
billionaire Paul Singer,
have asserted that Israel will serve a "key role" globally in the 4 th
Industrial Revolution following the implementation of the Great Reset.
Gemini, the BIRD Foundation, and Jonathan Pollard
In addition to Viola, another of Samange's
leading investors is Gemini Israel Ventures. Gemini is one of Israel's oldest
venture-capital firms, dating back to the Israeli government's 1993 Yozma program.
The first firm created by Yozma, Gemini was put under the control of Ed Mlavsky, who
Israel's government had chosen specifically for this position. As
previously reported by Unlimited Hangout , Mlavsky was then serving as the executive
director of the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation,
where "he was responsible for investments of $100 million in more than 300 joint projects
between US and Israeli high-tech companies."
A few years before Gemini was created, while Mlavsky still headed BIRD, the foundation
became embroiled in one of the worst espionage scandals in US history, the Jonathan Pollard
affair.
In the indictment of US citizen Pollard for espionage on Israel's behalf, it was noted that
Pollard delivered the documents he stole to agents of Israel at two locations, one of which was
an apartment owned by Harold Katz, the then legal counsel of the BIRD Foundation and an adviser
to Israel's military, which oversaw Israel's scientific intelligence-gathering agency, Lekem.
US officials
told the New York Times at the time that they believed Katz "has detailed knowledge
about the [Pollard] spy ring and could implicate senior Israeli officials."
Subsequent reporting by journalist Claudia Wright pointed the finger at the Mlavsky-run BIRD
Foundation as one of the ways Israeli intelligence funneled money to Pollard before his capture
by US authorities.
One of the first companies Gemini invested in was CommTouch (now Cyren), which was founded
by ex-IDF officers and later led by Isabel Maxwell. Under Maxwell's leadership, CommTouch
developed close ties to Microsoft, partially due to Maxwell's relationship with its
cofounder Bill Gates.
A Coming "Hack" of Microsoft?
If the SolarWinds hack is as serious as has been reported, it's difficult to understand why
a company like Samanage would not be looked into as part of a legitimate investigation into the
attack. The timing of Samanage employees gaining access to the Orion software and the company's
investors including Israeli spies and those with ties to past espionage scandals where Israel
used back doors to spy on the US and beyond raises obvious red flags. Yet, any meaningful
investigation of the incident is unlikely to take place, especially given the considerable
involvement of discredited firms like CrowdStrike, CIA fronts like FireEye and a consultancy
firm led by former Silicon Valley executives with their own government/intelligence ties.
There is also the added fact that both of the main methods used in the attack were analogous
or bore similarities to hacking tools that were both discovered by Unit 8200-linked companies
in 2017. Unit 8200-founded cybersecurity firms are among the few "winners" from the SolarWinds
hack, as their stocks have skyrocketed and demand for their services has increased
globally.
While some may argue that Unit 8200 alumni are not necessarily connected to the Israeli
intelligence apparatus, numerous
reports have pointed out the admitted fusion of Israeli military intelligence with Israel's
hi-tech sector and its tech-focused venture capital networks, with Israeli military and
intelligence officials themselves
noting that the line between the private cybersecurity sector and Israel's intelligence
apparatus is so blurred, it's difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. There is
also the Israeli government policy, formally launched in
2012 , whereby Israel's intelligence and military intelligence agencies began outsourcing
"activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber
technologies."
Samanage certainly appears to be such a company, not only because it was founded by a former
IDF officer in the military's central computing unit, but because its main investors include
spies on "reserve duty" and venture capital firms linked to the Pollard scandal as well as the
Bronfman and Maxwell families,
both of whom have been tied to espionage and sexual blackmail
scandals over the years.
Yet, as the Epstein scandal has recently indicated, major espionage scandals involving
Israel receive little coverage and investigations into these events rarely lead anywhere.
PROMIS was covered up
largely thanks to Bill Barr during his first term as Attorney General and even the Pollard
affair has all been swept under the rug with Donald Trump
allowing Pollard to move to Israel and, more recently, pardoning the Israeli spy who recruited
Pollard during his final day as President. Also under Trump, there was the
discovery of "stingray" surveillance devices placed by Israel's government throughout
Washington DC, including next to the White House, which were quickly memory holed and oddly not
investigated by authorities. Israel had
previously wiretapped the White House's phone lines during the Clinton years.
Another cover up is likely in the case of SolarWinds, particularly if the entry point was in
fact Samanage. Though a cover up would certainly be more of the same, the SolarWinds case is
different as major tech companies and cybersecurity firms with ties to US and Israeli
intelligence now insist that Microsoft is soon to be targeted in what would clearly be a much
more devastating event than SolarWinds due to the ubiquity of Microsoft's products.
On Tuesday, CIA-linked firm FireEye, which apparently has a leadership role in investigating
the hack,
claimed that the perpetrators are still gathering data from US government agencies and that
"the hackers are moving into Microsoft 365 cloud applications from physical, on-premises
servers," meaning that changes to fix Orion's vulnerabilities will not necessarily deny hacker
access to previously compromised systems as they allegedly maintain access to those systems via
Microsoft cloud applications. In addition to Microsoft's own claims that some of its source
code was accessed by the hackers, this builds the narrative that Microsoft products are poised
to be targeted in the next high-profile hack.
Microsoft's cloud security infrastructure, set to be the next target of the SolarWinds
hackers, was largely developed and later managed
by Assaf Rappaport , a former Unit 8200 officer who was most recently the head of
Microsoft's Research and Development and Security teams at its massive Israel branch. Rappaport
left Microsoft
right before the COVID-19 crisis began last year to found a new cybersecurity company
called Wiz.
Microsoft, like some of Samanage's main backers, is part of the World Economic Forum and is
an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Great Reset agenda, so much so that
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote the foreword to Klaus Schwab's book " Shaping
the Fourth Industrial Revolution ." With the WEF simulating a cyber "pandemic" and both the
WEF and Israel's head of Israel's National Cyber Directorate warning of an imminent "
cyber winter ", SolarWinds does indeed appear to be just the beginning, though perhaps a
scripted one to create the foundation for something much more severe. A cyberattack on
Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have
economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning. Yet,
if such a hack does occur, it will inevitably serve the aims of the Great Reset to "reset" and
then rebuild electronic infrastructure.
Regarding the article, certainly one takeaway would be that, though they're good at
acquiring power, they're no good at managing it.
Another way of putting this would be to say that, though they're good at infiltration,
subversion, radical ingratitude, betrayal, insane hatred, vindictive hysteria, denial,
projection, destruction and death, they're just no good at social management.
Case in point: A country they control whose social institutions are all in free fall, The
United States of America. Which, if we were to be perfectly honest, we'd be better off simply
referring to as The United States of Israel. In which case we'd have to replace each of the
50 stars on the flag with stars of David. Who knows? Maybe they will. Stranger things have
happened in history.
But that would draw too much attention to the USA's many, many social failures. Which, of
course, are always – always – the result of self-focused ,
low-character leadership .
And Character is, in this case, How we treat others .
A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global
economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the
WEF has been warning.
A gross exaggeration, but the Western MSM can be relied upon to make such a cyberattack
appear like a massive World crisis – just like they've done with COVID-19, which is
nowhere near as virulent even as Hong Kong Flu.
Gerorge Orwell famously wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the
past."
To which he should have added: Who controls the media controls the present.
For the majority, indoctrinated by the MSM, this seems sadly to be true.
The U.S. military, surveillance state, and government have willingly sold off national
security secrets and have made every American business, institution, and individual
vulnerable as a result of it.
Bill Clinton permitted technology national security secrets developed by the military,
U.S. companies, and universities, all financed by tax payers to be handed over to the CCP by
U.S. tech companies that opened factories in China which required the blue prints to the
technology in exchange for the CCP to allow them to do it.
NYC is now the new Mossad cyber front, after the NSA and US gov permitted them to all open
office in NYC managing day to day operations of US gov., US businesses, and US citizens and
residents communications systems and security.
The Negav Desert is the new home of almost every U.S. Silicon Valley company, all invited
by Israel to open fronts there, after the US gov and tax payers catapulted the Silicon Valley
Titans to unprecedented levels of wealth in world history.
The espionage perpetrated by the US government and survellance state is the primary
problem!
There is no such thing as national security as long as these these foxes are guarding the
hen house.
They really should all be tried for treason!
Cambridge Analytica was used to spy on US citizens during the 2016 election in order to
shift the burden onto another country. They frequently hire intelligence agents from foreign
countries as unofficial but frequently practiced policy.
I have noticed that spies have no loyalty to any country or institution. They often work
together with spies fro other countries. They are thieves. People spy because they are sex
offenders, thieves, intellectual property thieves, or identity thieves. There is no such
thing as an honest spy. Their entire life is a series of lies, and it has to be since what
they are doing is illegal. Then of course there is the Five Eyes apparatus strengthening
bonds in the international surveillance state.
They will sell anything to anyone, and what has happened in Ametica is 100% proof. Nothing
is off the table. Everything and everyone has a price as far they are concerned.
I'm not sure I follow the twenty years interval or the significance of the three towers
(being a 9/11 reference), but you seem to imply it's some eschatological and/or messianic
thing. Could you or someone else explain?
The only question at hand–once the electronically addicted IQistas abandon their
angle of dominating the world by means of interdependence–is that upon examining the
size of whatever as will soon lie in the dust, (be it 911 or Microsoft) whether we should
ever again allow ourselves to become so dependent upon a thing so large and vulnerable.
We did not need the computer to experience the beauty of America prior to abandoning the
gold standard, and we don't need the computer now. Yeah, rave on with all that hype Steve
Jobs gave to John Scully, ie, You want to sell sugar water all your life, or you want to come
with me and change the world?
Jobs had a good mind, yet a monolithically weak objective when it came to change. There is
nothing new under the sun. Let it crash.
"Kissinger had told Maxwell to connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to
US national laboratories, which directly enabled this action, part of the larger PROMIS
software scandal."
You can blame the two Jews for obviously being Jews but John Tower should have been
hanged, quartered and displayed in the four corners of these United States for
disloyalty.
Hope to see more articles like this instead of the good old beaten up concepts. Or
opinionated write up.
Does anyone know what kind of job Jonathan Pollard got in Israel? Chief of intelligence
collection agency.
Many years ago, on the Yahoo News message boards, after I was awakened to some hard truths
about our country , I made a prediction that this day would come – that one day it
would get pretty bad (free speech) in America, with the usual suspects behind it, and that
the closer Americans get to the truth, the worse it will get.
We're here.
This fine article by Whitney Webb indicates what might be next. Pretty scary.
Just a note – Gab is a good alternative in case Unz finally gets taken down. And
vice versa. They have a Dissenter browser that will allow you to comment on anything,
evidently.
I lurk here a lot because the comments are the best I've ever seen anywhere.
The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia
on January 5 by the US government's Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement
asserted that the attackers were "likely Russian in origin," but they failed to provide
evidence to back up that claim.
I wonder when the U.S. government last made a statement that wasn't a lie.
Democrats will never silence America. When you tell people to shut up in this country, it
just makes them MORE angry, study more, take notes, etc. Myabe Twitterbook will be open next
year maybe they won't.
I would like to see the EU Parliament taking the same stance with US and UK concerning
Assange. Until then, it is all theatre, just for the show. The danger lies in the fact that
the EU might back itself in a corner if they are not careful..
GoldFeather K0ur0i 3 hours ago 22 Jan, 2021 05:38 AM
Or maybe these politicians have shares in the much more expensive US gas!!
Augustus K0ur0i 5 hours ago 22 Jan, 2021 04:07 AM
Who does the EU Parliament think they represent? This anti-Russia narrative is illegal and
immoral.
Tom_Callan 16 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 04:41 PM
"strengthen transatlantic unity in protecting democracy and fundamental values against
authoritarian regimes," Indeed!...I'd vote against working with the authoritarian USA regime
who use fake evidence to start illegal wars and attack sovereign countries, not to mention
using politics to control energy markets to their own advantage.
Iwanasay Tom_Callan 13 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 07:51 PM
It's winter in Europe, just turn off the gas supply and see how quickly these MEPs change
their tune, the EU doesn't have sufficient LNG storage and with winter in the US it's
doubtful they could supply much, businesses in Europe that depend on gas for manufacturing
would be hit hard, Europe would have a major problem
ErgoSum Tom_Callan 13 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 07:37 PM
Translation: "Grovelling to the US so they will keep their NATO forces in Germany and prop up
our economy".
natalia555705 13 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 07:23 PM
EU parliament resolution finally revealed who is Navalny : agent of influence of western
politicians designated to make Russia of colony under anti-russian management . It is exactly
what happened in Ukraine. He does not care about Russian citizens, he cares about his
political career.
I was looking at an article in The Graud (on a musical subject and therefore possibly
reliable) when I noticed their little begging bowl bit:
"In these perilous times, a truth-seeking global news organisation like the Guardian is
essential. We have no shareholders or billionaire owner, meaning our journalism is free
from commercial and political influence – this makes us different . When it's never
been more important, our independence allows us to fearlessly investigate, challenge and
expose those in power .
In a year of unprecedented intersecting crises in 2020, we did just that, with revealing
journalism that had real-world impact: the inept handling of the Covid-19 crisis , the
Black Lives Matter protests, and the tumultuous US election."
Yes, I recall reading this "We have no ties to anyone and are fearlessly independent"
spiel before. And of course, the old "expose those in power" bit too. And note that "inept
handling of the Covid-19 crisis". Well maybe the Graud was amongst the ones who pressurised
Boris into the lockdown he was already planning anyway?
Oh what a circus, oh what a show!
Schmitz Katze , Jan 20, 2021 9:38 PM
With barricades and armed troops some sources spoke of 40 thousand soldiers who were
guarding men and women with slipping corona masks who hugged each other to me it looked more
like a new military junta than the swearing in of a democratically elected president.
Funny thing happend, as the family were watching this bizarre event on Austrian TV suddenly
the simultaneous translation into German was interrupted for less than a minute just as Biden
was talking about the importance of "truth and honesty" .
With the familiy somewhat nonplussed I ventured forth and I must have taken Biden by his word
and translated his following sentence as „
I promise many new millitary interventions around the world and many jobs transferred to
China"
I got away with it. My husband gave Biden credit for his candor only to suggest a renaming of
the USA into
Chimerica-))
image , Jan 20, 2021 9:35 PM
Like we was was telling another disillusioned bunch of people.. There is no 1st
Amendment.. There are no Amendments period. . Americas is a Corporation.. There IS NO
Democratic process .
What this means is that Navalny has deliberately decided (or was told by his handlers)
to be put in Russian jail.
If you are right about this, it wouldn't be the first time that Navalny would seem to
prefer a Russian jail to the company of his CIA "friends". When Boris Nemtsov was
assassinated, we eventually learned that Navalny had gotten himself arrested a few days
before. Perhaps he considered himself safer in Putin's hands. Maybe he is thinking the same
these days.
Thank you for that post. Strategic Culture is a good read and one is mindful that it is a
Russian source and no doubt has some affinity with the Russian Government and empathy for
Russian people's point of view. That is perfectly fine. I don't see it as a craven mouthpiece
(like the grauniad is to the UK) but rather an information source.
Alexei Navalny believes he is throwing down a gauntlet for the Kremlin either to arrest him
when he returns to Moscow from Berlin on Sunday, or to allow him to walk freely out of the
airport. Either way, from behind bars as a political prisoner or from his Moscow film
studio as an opposition candidate for regime change, Navalny and his supporters will
announce they have shown strength, the President of Russia weakness. The one outcome
Navalny hasn't counted on is that Russians will be laughing at him.
This is the strategy of Vzglyad, the Moscow online newspaper which publishes
sophisticated and accurate analysis of military, intelligence and security issues unmatched
by the English-language media. It is almost unnoticed in the west, except for those
services who believe it reflects the thinking of key figures, past and present, in the
presidential administration. Because the Russian figures don't think the way the western
services or their media organs depict them, Vzglyad hasn't drawn the attention of foreign
reporters as do state media like RT, Sputnik, the Strategic Culture Foundation, and the
Valdai Club.
Read this Helmer report it is the style and quality of commentary that you will NEVER see
in the western press.
Thank you, your accuracy is a desirable trait in reporting these matters. The west has
enough channels for their lying thieving pursuits and MoA should avoid being at their
service.
Navalny and the west's use of him is clearly a sign of their predatory ignorance and
dishonesty. I am sure they will keep up their homeside propaganda in favor of their
aggressive mendacity in the world. In fact I guess Joe Biden will have little to do but ride
on the coattails of a fool such as Navalny. That is about the sum total of the intellectual
capacity of Xerxes Biden. Off he goes to another ignominious defeat. Imagine what it will be
like after he gets sworn in!
Navalny is on parole, which was revoked the moment he fled to Germany. He was then recalled
to Russia.
Not true. His suspended sentence (not parole) was not "revoked the moment he fled to
Germany". He was given an explicit permission to be treated in Germany. The problem is that
after he was released from the hospital he was supposed to return to Russia for his regular
check-in with authorities which he had to keep doing until his suspended sentence ran out on
December 30, 2020. On December 22, 2020, Lancet has published an article where they
stated that Navalny had been released from hospital on September 20 and was completely
healthy by October 12. That's why the Moscow office of FSIN (Russia's Federal Penitentiary
Service) has publicly demanded on December 28, 2020 that Navalny immediately returns to
Russia to perform his last check-in, lest his suspended sentence is replaced with a real one.
Navalny's press secretary has replied on the same day that he won't comply with the demand.
So on January 12, 2021, FSIN has started the legal procedures to replace Navalny's suspended
sentence with a real one. What this means is that Navalny has deliberately decided (or was
told by his handlers) to be put in Russian jail.
Navalny is on parole, which was revoked the moment he fled to Germany. He was then
recalled to Russia.
I already can imagine the dialogue the BND had with Navalny: "either you become a liberal
martyr alive in a Russian prison or dead in mysterious circumstances in Germany". Navalny
must've quickly found out he was actually safer in Russia.
Here is an interesting development in the saga of Alexei Navalny since he became The Human
Headline in October last year. It concerns how the information about GRU agents tailing him
was apparently obtained.
A police officer in Samara is being investigated on suspicion of leaking information from
the country's centralized travel records, which registers all tickets bought in Russia,
linking them to passengers' passport numbers.
Samara is a large city in the center of Russia, around 1,000 kilometers east of Moscow.
It is reported that the US and UK government-funded group Bellingcat used the data in a
recent investigation into the alleged poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey
Navalny.
That's according to Moscow daily newspaper RBK, citing a source, which revealed that
authorities are clamping down on leaks from databases following the report. Bellingcat was
joined by journalists from the the Russian-language outlet The Insider, America's CNN and
Germany's Der Spiegel. Together, they were accessing the flight information of FSB agents
they allege had trailed the anti-corruption activist around the country.
RBK's source says that the accused policeman, Kirill Chuprov, is now under house arrest,
and would face up to ten years in prison if convicted. Officially, no information has been
released, but the Samara District Court's press service confirmed that he was detained on
suspicion of abuse of office.
The source revealed that Chuprov had accessed data from the country's travel database,
which contains information about who has traveled on trains and planes. In Russia, internal
flight and rail tickets are generally bought using passports, meaning that this data is
highly valuable. If he is found to be the source of the information, in a challenge to
Bellingcat's established narrative, the revelation would highlight that [Bellingcat] not
only uses open sources for its investigations, but also buys data from corrupt
officials.
According to the western state-funded outlet, leaked databases were an integral part of
its investigation, allowing its team to track the locations of eight men they believe were
part of a plot to poison Navalny. By accessing flight records, Bellingcat claimed that FSB
agents had flown around the country to the same locations as the opposition figure.
Last month, Navalny published a recording of a telephone conversation with one of the
alleged participants in the assassination attempt, a man purported to be FSB officer
Konstantin Kudryavtsev. Kudryavtsev is one of the men whose movements were leaked,
allegedly by Chuprov.
Well, well, who'd have thunk it? ... upright "citizen journalist" group Bellingcrap
sinking to the level of Christopher Steele's Orbis Intelligence organisation in buying hacked
data (which could also have been tampered with) from corrupt officials on the black
market.
Bear in mind on the basis of Navalny's supposed phone call with Kudryavtsev, Kudryavtsev's
mother-in-law was actually accosted by Navalny groupie, lawyer Lyubov Sobol, who obtained
entry into an apartment block under false pretences and then forced her way into the
mother-in-law's apartment with other people illegally wearing government agency uniforms and
took photos on her mobile phone. The mother-in-law has had to seek protection.
Consider also that Bellingcrap obtained "information" demonstrating that Russian tourists
Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov who visited Salisbury in March 2018, at the time of the
supposed poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal, were actually two GRU agents from a phone
database. In light of the news of the Russian police officer's arrest for selling hacked data
to Bellingcrap, what credibility does that organisation still have now?
Bhadrakumar sees the return of Navalny to Moscow as the opening gambit of a regime-change
operation directed at Putin. Part of this effort, he writes, will focus on the new Biden
foreign policy team working on isolating Russia from China. This is replacing the Trump
team's hopes to isolate China from Russia. Top notch strategic thinking there - just pretend
the much publicized alliance between the two doesn't exist. https://indianpunchline.com/us-makes-aggressive-opening-move-on-russian-chessboard/
But he also anticipates a period of retrenchment for US foreign adventurism, as the
domestic problems overwhelm. Note the candid admittance that the period of post Cold War
hegemony is over, made by CIA designate Burns. https://indianpunchline.com/biden-is-shifting-leftwards/
"... As an ex-fan of the Guardian, I thought it was jolly decent of the Editors to flag BS stories by omitting the Reader Comments beneath the article. It saved me a lot of time during the transition from reliable News outlet to reliable Mawkish Drivel outlet. Some of the drivel can be amusingly pointless/naif-ish. ..."
"... "The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. " ..."
I have a poorly researched theory on the Guardian to share here if i may... a mix of
interesting events reconstructed into a theoretical conspiracy of sorts... here it goes.. I
won't take any reasoned or better informed debunking personally i assure you.
-Since the Edward Snowden scandal, it appears the Guardian has experienced a
transformation of sorts. From rogue investigative journalism, to MSM / Intel Services
propaganda mouthpiece... a la WaPo, NY Times etc...
-To my knowledge, the Guardian's original independence and journalistic integrity was
facilitated by a Trust Fund of sorts which allowed it some form of editorial independence
and objectivity based on finances not entirely reliant on ad revenue/sponsorship and
various other corporate partnership/ownership deals
-I am not particularly sure about the exact timings, but in recent years this Trust Fund of
sorts began to underperform and The Guardian started running into financial trouble
-The Guardian's financial misadventures roughly coincided with significant changes in its
editorial content, key departures including Glen Greenwald himself and various other legal
disputes and misfortunes
My amateurish thesis..
Could it be that this Trust Fund of sorts was deliberately sabotaged, through toxic
Board infiltrations or deliberate bad financial advice, aimed at eroding The Guardian's
financial independence and thus its editorial independence and promotion of dissenting
narratives? Given the extent of integration between Intel/Weapons/Finance industries, a
congruence of mutual interests is not unexpected, and if this Fund was advised or run by
members of major Wall St et al. firms, it doesn't seem too far fetched to conceive of such
a possibility.
Please feel free to post any relative info or comment.
As an ex-fan of the Guardian, I thought it was jolly decent of the Editors to flag
BS stories by omitting the Reader Comments beneath the article. It saved me a lot of time
during the transition from reliable News outlet to reliable Mawkish Drivel outlet. Some of
the drivel can be amusingly pointless/naif-ish.
Guardian changed after 2014 when they published the Edward Snowden leaks. Cameron
threatened to take over the newspapers for revealing the Five Eyes' global
surveillance.
The Guardian was once a comparatively good newspaper. The Snowden episode changed
everything.
Nowadays it's just another pseudo-liberal, post-feminist, opinionated propaganda outlet. In
some way a Daily Mail for "intellectuals".
Basically half of their articles are "opinion" pieces. The only thing worth reading is the
football section (and even that gets more and more opinionated).
So the evil-doers carry out a complicated mission with many moving parts, plus a huge
monetary outlay. They wait seven years before finishing the dastardly deed, just to thicken
the plot. The Guardian says yeah, that sounds plausible. Because they know their readers
have been groomed for years to believe BS.
Reminds me of the Skripal nutty shifting narratives, or better yet Jonathon Chait's New
York Magazine piece (Trump a Russian asset since 1987).
Martin Chulov should be scolded by his Minders for not linking Russia to the plot (the
three were "joint Russian-Syrian citizens"). Maybe that will be written into the script in
the next Guardian article.
My understanding is that for years the bulk of The Fraudian's funding was subsidised by
revenues from sales of Manchester-based tabloid newspapers. I believe this continued into
the 1990s and maybe the first decade of this century. A major part of The Fraudian's income
also used to come from government employment advertisements in the pre-Internet age.
Once the connections with Manchester-based newspapers were cut by the Trust that runs
The Fraudian, and other traditional sources of funding dried up, the newspaper started
sacking editorial and other office staff. This was about the same time The Fraudian opened
offices in the US and Australia in an effort to get more readers (and more subscribers),
and also coincides with Julian Assange working with The Fraudian and other MSM papers on
releasing Wikileaks email revelations. The sackings were disguised as voluntary
redundancies or retirements and the scale was quite huge, a fair few hundred jobs were
cut.
This of course led to The Fraudian having to partner with various "media agencies" in
the Middle East, eastern Europe and other parts of the world. You can guess who funds these
other agencies The Fraudian calls its "partners".
That Martin Chulov writes an article linking the Syrian govt to last year's bomb blast
is no surprise. The news comes just before Joe Biden's inauguration. I had expected that
one of his first priorities as POTUS would be resuming the US invasion of Syria, using any
excuse. The Chulov article smacks of the same devious cherry-picking that Bellingcat
engaged in to finger and "identify" two Russian tourists in Salisbury in 2018 as GRU
agents. I would not be surprised if Chulov, like Higgins, had been told what to write and
by the same people.
Ahem... refreshing to see some content that isn't about the whole Trump
situation in the USSA.
As with other things, including, in part, the Trump thing, we're witnessing full "1984"
level shit from the media and governments. Everyone knows that the CIA and other Pentagram
offices (and MI6) have full control over what Western media publishes, but it's like they
aren't even trying anymore. Just full-on lie mode with zero accountability even when what
they print is refuted beyond any doubt.
Of course they were going to blame Syria, Iran or Venezuela. If any external government
was involved and it wasn't simply negligence by Lebanon's, then it was Israel. Period.
Jesus F*cking Christ, it's so obvious.
Guardian did a good job reporting on the Iraq War II...it was after that (2008), and in
response to its halfway decent reporting of Iraq that the ownership mechanism was
changed.
The new Guardian ownership enacted a "constitution" guaranteeing it would retain its
earlier journalistic integrity, but that was pure horseshit, as it went down hill rapidly
after the ownership change and became just another mouthpiece for
neoliberal/neoconservative propaganda.
Why Martin Chulov, the Guardian's Middle East correspondent and author of the piece, did
not do the basic diligence of checking the records or chose not to tell his readers that
such address sharing is extremely common and does not prove anything is beyond me.
If the Guardian had a proper fact checker that would defeat the purpose of the Guardian
in the first place. I'm not sure if that counts as a circular argument.
Posted by: Ghost Ship | Jan 15 2021 16:41 utc | 23
And you can get your nails and a (bikini) waxing done next door. I guess it's safer that
doing it at home.
... I recall a story how The Guardian was tamed. In the aftermath of Snowden
revelations, The Guardian was raided and the people who run it were seriously threatened.
Ever since, they diligently follow the orders which are given to them with some
sophistication (this is England after all, not Zimbabwe), hence preserving some shreds of
"leftists credibility". Apparently, unlikely as it may seem, some people still read it.
Just before I stopped reading them, they had an actually interesting series about police
shootings in USA. Criticizing local governments in USA is still allowed.
@Et Tu #8
You're thinking too hard.
Matt Taibbi has nailed it on the head: Facebook and Google's ongoing strangulation of news
via monopolization of the channel and demonetization of classified ads has forced
newspapers (and other media) to become ever more click-bait focused. This in turn has
caused them to focus ever more narrowly on "engaged" (read: made angry) groups.
The Guardian's turn is directly linked with Russiagate, not Snowden.
... my real important point about the fascist aristocrat dictatorship of the USSA. The
ruling class aristocracy is certainly not at all in the business of increasing their
profits by acquiring yet more money. That's just a very stupid notion. For all relevant
purposes they already possess all the money. Let's get real. Their sole real business is
simply to retain power. Period. And how do they do that? Easy.
They establish and constantly maintain a churnatistic society. They just keep the
commonalty spinning around in circles by constantly churning 'current events'.
They start a war, or an obviously fake election, or an economic depression, or a mass
shooting, or any outlandish disaster they can churn up to keep the masses in a constant
state of bewilderment.
And then they drop the cherry on top by publishing narratives in media such as the
Guardian that the poor serfs always know deep down make no sense at all.
Therefor no revolt is possible because the serfs are in a perpetual state of
disorientation. All fascist societies are ultimately based on churnatism.
It is unclear whether it was Russians or this is another false flag. Anatol Lieven has zero
credentials to discuss this complex subject as he has zero training in computer security and it
looks like he has zero understanding of how easy you can create a false flag in this area. Looks
like Lieven in not only incompetent but also a neocon. For example "The second entirely
appropriate response is for Washington to intensify its own existing cyber-intelligence
operations against Russia. " If this London professor thinks that GB can benefit for this, he is
deeply mistaken.
Notable quotes:
"... the only countries that have to date carried out a truly successful and destructive act of cyber-sabotage are the U.S. and Israel, through the " Stuxnet " virus, which as introduced into the Iranian nuclear system and first uncovered in 2010. ..."
The most important thing to remember in this regard is the difference between an "attack"
and an act of espionage. The SolarWinds hack has been generally described in the United States
as the former (including by incoming national security adviser
Jake Sullivan , and Biden ), but was in fact the latter.
Nobody is suggesting that the hackers in this case introduced viruses to paralyze U.S. state
systems or damage domestic infrastructure and services. This was purely an
information-gathering exercise.
This distinction is crucial. An attack on the citizens or infrastructure of another state
has traditionally been considered an act of war. Actions by the United States, Russia, Israel
and other countries in recent decades have somewhat blurred this distinction. But no one can
doubt that if another country carried out a major act of sabotage on American soil, (especially
one threatening the lives of citizens), then Washington's response would -- rightly -- be a
ferocious one.
As a matter of fact, while Russia has engaged in limited operations against Estonia and
Ukraine, the only countries that have to date carried out a truly successful and
destructive act of cyber-sabotage are the U.S. and Israel, through the " Stuxnet " virus, which as introduced into the
Iranian nuclear system and first uncovered in 2010.
Espionage by contrast is something that all states do all the time -- often to friends as
well as adversaries. We may remember the scandal under the Obama administration when U.S.
intelligence was found to have hacked
into the communications of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior leaders of NATO
countries. The hacking of a Belgian telecom company by British intelligence (" Operation Socialist ") is
another example. And I would be both shocked and deeply disappointed to learn that U.S.
intelligence is not trying to penetrate the state information systems of Russia and China.
And for each revealed act of espionage there is a well-established and calibrated set of
responses. The aggrieved country issues a formal protest and expels a given number of
"diplomats" from the country responsible. That country expels an equal number of diplomats. The
media and the writers of spy thriller writers have a party. Then everything goes back to
normal. For after all, everybody knows that there is no chance whatsoever that states will ever
give up spying.
There are, however, three aspects of cyber-espionage that make it different from and more
dangerous than traditional espionage.
Firstly, as Jake Sullivan has pointed out, unlike most forms of espionage, hacking can be
used both for spying and for sabotage, and one can form the basis for the other. A key goal of
responsible statecraft should be to establish a clear line between the two when it comes to
cyberspace: to develop a set of calibrated and limited responses to cyber-espionage, and to
make clear that cyber-sabotage will lead to a much fiercer and more damaging
retaliation.
Secondly, unlike traditional espionage, the cyber variety is an area where third parties,
uncontrolled by either side, can play a major role and cause serious damage to relations (and
of course this also gives all sides plausible deniability -- as with U.S. moves against
Iran).
For example, those behind the authors of the 2011 cyber-attack on the G20 summit in Paris
have never been identified. Several major hacks have been conducted by independent
cyber-anarchists, or even by clever teenagers, sometimes it seems simply for fun. In the
present atmosphere, however, all such hacks against the United States are likely to be blamed
on Russia and to lead to a further deterioration of relations.
Thirdly, and in part because of these blurred lines, no clear and understood international
traditions are in place concerning the response to cyber-espionage, and there is a serious risk
of overreaction leading to a spiraling escalation of tension and retaliation.
This is what the Biden administration must avoid. Apart from the immediate damage to
relations, overreaction would mean that when -- as is bound to happen someday -- Russia or
China eventually discover a cyber-espionage operation against them by U.S. intelligence, they
will not only look justified in a disproportionate and escalatory response -- they will
actually be justified.
One thing that Biden must definitely not do is to follow the suggestion that the United
States should shut Russia out of the SWIFT international bank transfer system which -- the most
damaging of all U.S. sanctions against Iran, and one that would have a disastrous effect on
Russian trade.
Last year, then Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia would regard such a
move as equivalent to an act of war and would respond accordingly. Various Russian responses
would be possible, including a definitive move into the Chinese geopolitical camp and massive
military aid to Iran. Without doubt however, one of them would be to move from cyber-espionage
to cyber-sabotage against the United States.
The most sensible response would in fact be to follow literally President-elect Biden's
statement that his administration will "respond in kind" to the attack is the most sensible --
that is to say in the cyber-field. The first step (as after any counter-intelligence failure)
must obviously be to strengthen U.S. cyber-defenses which. Amongst other things, this requires
using presidential orders to combine, streamline, and rationalize the competing plethora of
U.S. agencies currently responsible for cyber-security.
The second entirely appropriate response is for Washington to intensify its own existing
cyber-intelligence operations against Russia. That, however, is another reason not to engage in
overblown moral outrage over the latest hack. The American pot already has quite a global
reputation for calling kettles black, and there is no need to blacken it further.
Finally, the Biden administration should do everything possible to develop agreed
international restraints on state cyber-operations, including an absolute ban on
cyber-sabotage. This should involve opening new negotiations with Moscow on longstanding
Russian proposals for an international "arms control" treaty in the area of cyber-warfare, and
for a joint U.S.-Russian working group to establish mutual ground rules and confidence building
measures.
These Russian proposals cannot be accepted as they stand (above all because of Moscow's
desire to limit free flows of information); however, more than a decade ago, then- National
Security Agency Director Keith Alexander said
that "I do think that we have to establish the rules, and I think what Russia has put
forward is, perhaps, the starting point for international debate." This remains true today, and
the danger of a failure to reach international agreement has grown vastly since then.
One of the worst things about hysterical statements in the United States about
"cyber-attacks" is that unwary readers might mistakenly conclude from them that things can't
get any worse. They can get much, much worse.
"... In The Transparency Project v. Department of Justice, et al., my client asked to see records indicating whether the CIA or its Directorate of Digital Innovation, its contractors, etc. inserted Russian "fingerprints" into the metadata of the emails that were released publicly. (You can review the entire request by clicking here and reading Paragraph 11). ..."
"... In a joint report filed today , the CIA informed the court that it intends to assert a Glomar response to the request, i.e., that it "cannot confirm or deny" the existence of such records. . . . [In other words], The Central Intelligence Agency will neither confirm nor deny that it fabricated the Russian "fingerprints" in Democratic National Committee emails published in 2016 by Wikileaks and "Guccifer 2.0.", and the FBI implicitly acknowledged today that it never reviewed the contents of DNC employee Seth Rich's laptop despite gaining custody of the laptop after his murder. ..."
In The Transparency Project v. Department of Justice, et al., my client asked to see
records indicating whether the CIA or its Directorate of Digital Innovation, its contractors,
etc. inserted Russian "fingerprints" into the metadata of the emails that were released
publicly. (You can review the entire request by
clicking here and reading Paragraph 11).
In a joint
report filed today , the CIA informed the court that it intends to assert a Glomar
response to the request, i.e., that it "cannot confirm or deny" the existence of such
records. . . . [In other words], The Central Intelligence Agency will neither confirm nor
deny that it fabricated the Russian "fingerprints" in Democratic National Committee emails
published in 2016 by Wikileaks and "Guccifer 2.0.", and the FBI implicitly acknowledged today
that it never reviewed the contents of DNC employee Seth Rich's laptop despite gaining
custody of the laptop after his murder.
Full disclosure--Mr. Clevenger is a friend of mine. He writes in his article that he reached
out to me and I made some phone calls to retired friends who held senior positions at the CIA.
My friends and I agreed that a GLOMAR response to the basic question, Did you spy on Mr.
Butowsky and/or Mr. Couch was a tacit admission-yes! Ty explains this point clearly and
succinctly:
Allow me to illustrate the point. If I asked the CIA for intercepted emails from the
president of another country, the CIA would rightly issue a Glomar response, because
it would not want to confirm or deny that it has been spying on the foreign president. That's
what Glomar is for, because the CIA is in the business of secretly spying
on foreign presidents, officials, agents, etc.
My client's request, on the other hand, is more akin to asking the CIA for records showing
whether it helped Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate President John F. Kennedy. We would expect
the CIA to declare that it has no such records because it would never do such a thing.
Why would the CIA spy on Mr. Butowsky, for example. Ed Butowsky was brought into the Seth
Rich saga in December 2016 by Ellen Ratner, the sister-in-law of Julian Assange's former
lawyer. Ellen spoke with Julian in November 2016 and asked Mr. Butowsky to reach out to the
parents of Seth Rich and get them some help investigating who murdered their son.
It should come as no surprise that the CIA, the NSA and Britain's GCHQ were monitoring every
communication going in and out of Wikileaks, including all communications of all personnel
working at or associated with Wikileaks.
We know this thanks to the evidence and writings of Mr. Edward Snowden. Once Snowden made
his escape to Russia with the help of Wikileaks, Wikileaks became a number one intelligence
target.
Both the United States and the United Kingdom had ample cause to ensure that no new secrets
leaked out of Wiki and caught them unawares. In light of the comprehensive monitoring of all
Wiki communications, I believe the intel folks knew exactly the contents of Ratner's chat with
Assange, which ultimately led them to Ed (i.e, Ellen Ratner talked to Julian and then talked to
Ed to relay a request from Julian to help the Rich family).
Now that
Donald Trump has finally released FBI documents on Russiagate (I do not know if there are
any CIA documents in the pile), we shall see what the FBI had to say about Mr. Rich. Too bad
the President waited so long to do this. If he had forced the issue last year the plot to steal
the 2020 election might have been disrupted.
Posted by: downtownhaiku | Jan 14 2021 22:15 utc |
42
here is a copy of the Helmer article about Navalny which caused Helmer's website to be
attacked
BERLIN CLINICAL DATA CONFIRM ALEXEI NAVALNY HAD PANCREATITIS, DIABETES, LIVER FAILURE,
STAPHYLOCOCCAL INFECTION, MILD HEART ATTACK – NO NOVICHOK SYMPTOMS
Instead of "LOVE" on pill box, substitute POWER
On jar behind, instead of HYMEN'S, substitute MERKEL
By John Helmer, Moscow
The German laboratory test results for Alexei Navalny, published by a group of doctors at
the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin last month, reveal a surprising
number of medical symptoms, but they are not those of Novichok nerve agent poisoning as Navalny
and his supporters in western governments have alleged.
Clinical doctors, toxicologists, and pharmacology experts outside Germany believe the test
results which the Charité group released on December 22 reveal symptoms of acute
pancreatitis, diabetes, liver failure, severe dehydration, muscular rigidity, as well as a
serious bacterial infection, and a possible heart attack associated with his kidney problems.
According to the experts, these are not recognisable symptoms of a nerve agent attack.
The German medical publication reports Navalny's "laboratory values on admission", and
toxicology and pharmacology results "in blood and urine samples obtained on arrival of the
patient of the patient at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (day 3)".
Accordingly, the newly available data are evidence of the condition Navalny was in during his
two-day treatment in Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1 in Russia; and of the treatment he received
there, as well as during his six-hour flight on a German medical evacuation aircraft from Omsk
to Berlin.
The German doctors have also released a tabulation of their laboratory test results for
Navalny during 33 days of his stay in the Charité hospital, and a subsequent visit to
the hospital as an outpatient. The four data tables are described by the Germans as following
"the supposed poisoning of the patient". The doctors don't wish to sign their names to this
"supposing".
[ more]
Navalny first fell ill on the morning of August 20, during a flight from Tomsk, where he had
been on an election campaign tour, to Moscow. The flight was diverted to Omsk, and Navalny
admitted to hospital in Omsk in mid-morning local time. He was in intensive care there for 48
hours until he was released for German medical evacuation to Berlin on August 22.
The German doctors treating Navalny at the Charité were led by Kai-Uwe Eckardt, the
chief of the Charité treatment unit whom Navalny publicly thanked on October 7. Eckardt
and David Steindl are the principal authors of the December 22 report; Eckhardt is a specialist
on diabetes and kidney transplants; Steindl is a specialist on musculo-skeletal
pathologies.
In their 4-page case report, Eckardt and Steindl say "severe poisoning with a cholinesterase
inhibitor was subsequently diagnosed", not by the Charité group, but by a "laboratory of
the German armed forces"; that was the Institut für Pharmakologie und Toxikologie der
Bundeswehr (IPTB).
British toxicologists have repeatedly cautioned there can be many causes and sources for the
cholinesterase inhibition detected from metabolites in Navalny's blood and urine, and they
continue to ask the German doctors and the IPTB: "Name the compound. That would be a good
start." In their publication of Navalny's test results, Eckardt and Steindl say: "results of
toxicology analyses conducted in a special laboratory of the armed forces [IPTB] are not
included." They don't give a reason.
In the Lancet case report, there are several references to a 4-page appendix. This contains
Navalny's test results, but the appendix is not easy to find and was published separately. The
Lancet editors explain: "this appendix formed part of the original submission and has been peer
reviewed. We post it as supplied by the authors." It can be opened and read here. LINK.
ALEXEI NAVALNY'S LABORATORY TEST RESULTS ON ARRIVAL IN BERLIN
Source: LINK, Appendix S1.
A review of these data by a clinician with specialised training in pharmacology provided a
detailed interpretation of each line of data where the reported value for Navalny was either
well above or below normal.
The expert, who declines to be identified, reports that the sodium and chloride scores show
Navalny was suffering from extreme dehydration on his arrival in the Berlin hospital. How this
was possible after the German medevac flight is unknown.
The spikes in the tested creatine kinase-MB and myoglobin reveal that his muscle function
was breaking down; the visible symptom, according to the expert, should have been muscle
rigidity. According to the German doctors, they didn't see it, and neither did the Omsk
hospital doctors, or witnesses of Navalny's collapse on board the flight from Tomsk. The German
case report, quoting from the Omsk hospital "discharge report", says "the patient presented [in
Omsk on August 20] comatose with hypersalivation and increased diaphoresis [sweating]." When
Navalny reached the Charité, the doctors there reported in December, he was "deeply
comatose, with mild bradycardia hypersalivation, hypothermia (33.5C), increased diaphoresis and
small pupils not reactive to light, decreased brainstem reflexes, hyperactive deep tendon
reflexes, and pyramidal signs."
The independent expert does not know how hyperactive tendon reflexes can have produced the
abnormal MB and myoglobin test results.
The expert said the standard diagnosis which follows from the reported albumin result is
chronic disease of the liver. The high lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) score indicates metabolic
disorders commonly seen with cancerous tumours. The amylase and lipase results signify
pancreatitis, a condition which the Russian press has reported Navalny to have experienced in
the past. The results for C-reactive protein, leukocytes, neutrophils, and erythrocytes all
point to a serious bacterial infection. The German case report confirms that skin and rectal
swabs and urine samples found staphylococcus aureus and other infectious bacteria which were
treated with antibiotics, the standard procedure. How Navalny picked up the bacterial
infection, and where – in Tomsk, Omsk, in the medevac flight, or in Berlin – is
unknown.
ALEXEI NAVALNY'S LABORATORY TEST RESULTS DURING HIS BERLIN HOSPITALISATION -- EXCERPT
Source: LINK, Appendix S4. The table extends to Day 33 in hospital, and includes Day 42 when he
returned for testing as an outpatient.
The unusually high result for the urinary protein/creatinine ratio has been diagnosed by the
expert as signifying kidney failure – "clinical diabetes but not an extreme
presentation." Diabetes has been reported for Navalny in the past; his staff deny it.
The abnormally high troponin-T results reported on Days 4 and 5 at Charité are
puzzling to the independent expert because they signify a heart problem or mild heart attack,
possibly related to the reported kidney failure. Eckardt and Steindl say in their case report
that Navalny's heart was beating abnormally slowly (bradycardia – 44 beats per minute)
when tested in Omsk hospital, then 59 beats per minute during the flight to Berlin. After he
arrived at Charité the bradycardia worsened to 33 bpm.
The independent expert accepts that the unusually low test score for butyryl cholinesterase
– 0.42 on arrival in Berlin, 0.41 at Day 3 – usually signifies exposure to a
cholinesterase inhibitor. The German doctors' report says: "based on clinical and laboratory
findings, severe cholinesterase inhibition was diagnosed and the patient was started on
atropine and obidoxime Cholinergic signs returned to normal within 1 h[our] after the onset of
this antidotal therapy." The German test results do not substantiate this conclusion, neither
for troponin-T which didn't normalise until Day 7, or butyryl cholinesterase, which didn't
reach normal until Day 17.
Testing for cholinesterase inhibition is the key to the allegations of the German Army
laboratory, the German intelligence agency BND, and German officials that Navalny had been
poisoned by a Russian Novichok nerve agent. The new data disclosure falls short of proof.
Instead it reveals that in Berlin Navalny's laboratory testing revealed cholinesterase
inhibition, while in the Omsk hospital laboratory reports published in part in August, revealed
that "cholinesterase inhibitors were not detected in blood and urine"; for more details of the
earlier test data, read this
http://johnhelmer.net/brain-poisoning-by-russian-nerve-agent-alexei-navalny-infects-german-chancellery/
and this. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/09/04/highly-toxic-but-unreliable
This week the independent expert also reviewed the table of medications which testing of
Navalny revealed on his admission at Charité:
ANAESTHETIC AND ANTIDOTE DRUGS NAVALNY WAS GIVEN IN OMSK AS TESTED IN BERLIN
Source: Appendix S2. LINK
According to the source, the presence of pain relieving and anaesthetic drugs, antibiotics,
and atropine are conventional treatment. Amantadine is a neurological drug often used in
treatment of Parkinson's Disease; lithium is a psychiatric medication for treating bipolar mood
disorders and depression. Lithium, the expert says, along with the relaxant drugs recorded in
Navalny's system -- diazepam, nordazepam, oxazepam -- are commonly taken orally. If Navalny had
been comatose at Omsk hospital and then at Charité, then it is likely he took these
drugs himself in Tomsk before his flight. The Omsk hospital testing also reported that Navalny
had taken "tricyclic antidepressants" before his collapse. End+
Posted by: downtownhaiku | Jan 14 2021 23:19 utc |
50
downtownhaiku #42
Thank you for the heads up on johnhelmer. I found this just down the thread...
All last year we were hearing how Huawei is a threat to US national security. Chinese
state operatives would insert spyware into Huawei networking equipment. The software that
runs on Huawei equipment is open source and open to inspections. It is unlikely to contain
hidden threats. But similar backdoors and spy gates are sure to exist on Western
equipment.
The real threat to US "security" comes from the US not being able to install their spyware
on European networks.
It seems that a massive US spy operation has just been exposed. The US presidential
elections have overshadowed this from the news, but at the end of December this was the top
story in the US. Allegedly "Russian hackers" had infiltrated US government organizations.
According to Lou Dobbs on Fox News this was a new Pearl Harbor.
The story broke out in mid December when the cyber security company FireEye noticed that
their servers had been attacked and the code for their Red Team assessment tools had been
stolen. They soon discovered that the attack had utilized a backdoor in SolarWind's Orion IT
monitoring and management software. FireEye called it a supply-chain attack.
There are several layers of misinformation in the way the Western media reported this.
Supposedly 18,000 organizations were attacked. This is the number of users of the
SolarWinds network management software. No evidence has been presented that any of these
organizations were actually attacked.
The attackers were supposedly Russian. Cyber attribution is usually impossible. It
could as well have been the NSA or CIA acting as "Russians". Actually no technical analysis
has ever been presented that points the attack to Russia. The whole Russia story was
invented by the media or by their masters in the US Intelligence Community.
The real story not in how US government organizations were possibly attacked, but in
how the spyware found its way into the SolarWinds source code in the first place.
The spyware was part of the source code for the "BusinessLayer.dll" shared library. I find
it impossible that the spyware code was somehow inserted from Russia. It is likewise far
fetched to assume that some Russian mole was working for SolarWinds and secretly inserting
spyware into the source code. No such mole has been arrested. It is more likely that the
malware was inserted by US actors.
This "sophisticated supply chain attack" would have been impossible without US insiders in
the company. Most likely the whole software team was compromised. The attack vector must have
been part of the specification of the software. Proof of this comes from the fact that it has
taken several weeks and SolarWinds still has not fixed the problem. The spyware must be so
embedded and intertwined with the rest of the software that they would not know what to
remove. Instead, they said their "investigations are early and ongoing". They have the source
code, yet they have not published any part of it.
No links in this post. I have collected some links and
sources on my wiki.
"... Anyone now seeking national redemption by claiming to no longer support Trump must acknowledge how wrong it was... ..."
"... This narrative was intended for November 9, 2016, but Trump's upset victory foiled it. All corporate mass media in the US was primed to go all in on "Deplorable" shaming on that day in order to crush and demoralize the biggest threat to the imperial elites. Having to cross their legs and hold their shit for four years drove them mad, and now they are going to get their revenge. ..."
"... There are posters (you know who I am talking about) who insist that Trump's win in 2016 was all part of the elites' grand plan, but what have the elites gained over the last four years? Their "Project for a New American Century" has gone even more than four additional years behind schedule, on top of which the US (Elon Musk) lost Bolivia. Worse still for the elites, all of the empire's preparations for regime changes in Venezuela, Hong Kong, and Belarus have gone to waste and will likely take at least a decade to reestablish. These things take years and $billions to set up. Things have gone so poorly for the elites these last four years that many of them are now placing all of their hopes in the ridiculous fantasy of a "Great Reset" . ..."
"... As crime boss Brennan's rant makes clear the establishment's herculean task is to somehow gaslight four score millions of Americans into believing themselves to be fringe bad people in order to get them to behave as the establishment wants. Though there is some crossover, that largely doesn't include the scores of millions more who would have voted for Sanders if given the chance and who also need to be beaten into submission. ..."
A note from exCIA MobBoss John "Struggle Sessions" Brennan
https://mobile.twitter.com/JohnBrennan/status/1348051973174652928
John O. Brennan
@JohnBrennan
Anyone now seeking national redemption by claiming to no longer support Trump must
acknowledge how wrong it was to ignore & enable his corrupt, dishonest, & divisive
agenda.
Total denunciation of a despot's legacy is necessary to eradicate any remaining
malignancy
-------
When John Brennan's got yer back you just know you're on the right side of history!!
"We've all had indiscretions in our past," he said, adding neither some drug
experimentation nor activism was a non-starter. "I would not be up here if that was
disqualifying."
He proceeded to tell the story of his test.
"I froze, because I was getting so close to coming into CIA and said, 'OK, here's the
choice, John. You can deny that, and the machine is probably going to go, you know, wacko,
or I can acknowledge it and see what happens,'" Brennan said.
He said he chose to be forthcoming.
"I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to
college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I'm
not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, 'OK,' and
when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, 'Well, I'm screwed.'"
But he soon got his admission notice to the CIA and was relieved, he said, saying that
though the agency still had long strides to make in accepting gay recruits and minorities,
even then it recognized the importance of freedom.
"So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, 'I voted for the Communist Party
with Gus Hall' ... and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your
expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that's not going to be
disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government."
Well what else can you say to that other than "Gawd bless America!"
Triden @107 re: Twit by CIA crime boss " Anyone now seeking national redemption by
claiming to no longer support Trump must acknowledge how wrong it was... "
This narrative was intended for November 9, 2016, but Trump's upset victory foiled it.
All corporate mass media in the US was primed to go all in on "Deplorable" shaming on
that day in order to crush and demoralize the biggest threat to the imperial elites. Having
to cross their legs and hold their shit for four years drove them mad, and now they are going
to get their revenge.
There are posters (you know who I am talking about) who insist that Trump's win in
2016 was all part of the elites' grand plan, but what have the elites gained over the last
four years? Their "Project for a New American Century" has gone even more than four
additional years behind schedule, on top of which the US (Elon Musk) lost Bolivia. Worse
still for the elites, all of the empire's preparations for regime changes in Venezuela, Hong
Kong, and Belarus have gone to waste and will likely take at least a decade to reestablish.
These things take years and $billions to set up. Things have gone so poorly for the elites
these last four years that many of them are now placing all of their hopes in the ridiculous
fantasy of a "Great Reset" .
As crime boss Brennan's rant makes clear the establishment's herculean task is to
somehow gaslight four score millions of Americans into believing themselves to be fringe bad
people in order to get them to behave as the establishment wants. Though there is some
crossover, that largely doesn't include the scores of millions more who would have voted for
Sanders if given the chance and who also need to be beaten into submission.
The empire is losing it. When things get this dicey the elites will act like cornered dogs
and resort to the unthinkable.
The history books might portray 2020 as the calm before the storm. No matter how the
pieces land we are in interesting times.
Investigators at the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said the "backdoor" used to
compromise up to 18,000 customers of the US software maker SolarWinds closely
resembled malware tied to a hacking group known as Turla, which Estonian
authorities have said operates on behalf of Russia's FSB security service.
So, the backdoor "resembles" a tool that is only "tied to" a hacking group which "Estonian
authorities" "have said" (i.e. claim without evidence) serves the FSB.
This is not the first time The Guardian uses absurd extrapolations to create a big fat
lie. Last week, it put a criminal headline - with potentially grave consequences on public
opinion and geopolitics - stating China had refused to receive a WHO team to investigate the
origins of the SARS-CoV-2. China defused the fake news by releasing on its own MSM that they
were still making the arrangements of the visit - which will happen this Thursday -, not that
it had blocked the WHO.
What did The Guardian want to achieved with that headline? Prepare the British people for
war against China? Are they insane?
Mentioning Estonia at any time would indicate pure unmitigated BS. But mentioning BOTH
Estonia and the Grauniad in the one post is just painfully obvious that the entire story is
bollocks.
The notion "presstitute" is likely far off, in that it is still too flattering.
What kind of promiscuous garden tool variety would you deem appropriate, if I may
enquire?
"... During last year, many government buildings were taken over by Dem-sponsored BLM activists, and in not one case did the police use lethal weapons or even rush the protesters out of buildings. ..."
During last year, many government buildings were taken over by Dem-sponsored BLM
activists, and in not one case did the police use lethal weapons or even rush the protesters
out of buildings.
"Shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the locked King
Street entrance to the Capitol, chanting "Break down the door!" and "General strike!" Moments
later, police ceded control of the State Street doors and allowed the crowd to surge inside,
joining thousands who had already gathered in the Capitol to protest the votes. The area
outside the Assembly, which is scheduled to take the bill up at 11 a.m. today, was crowded
with protesters who chanted, "We're not leaving. Not this time."
Department of Administration spokesman Tim Donovan said although protesters were being
encouraged to leave, no one would be forcibly removed. Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said he had
instructed Police Chief Noble Wray not to allow his officers to participate in removing
demonstrators from the building."
Confused Ponderee - as you'll know, in the media world the Guardian is the English
equivalent of the NYT though, if that's possible, considerably more down market. So we can
ignore its use of the word "racist" as being too imprecise to mean much. In Guardian idiom
"racist" can mean anything from full bore KKK to being insufficiently ashamed of being
white.
Then we come to the main burden of the hit piece. As far as I could make out the
Guardian's chief complaint is that two of the Georgia candidates are rich.
Most successful politicians are rich. If they get to be very successful they get to be
very rich. Blair and the Clintons showed us how but the Bidens and the Merkels are coming
along handily -
Trump's unusual in that he gained his wealth partly by bribing politicians rather than
being bribed himself. I recollect a speech of his in 2016 (Phoenix Arizona, if memory serves)
in which he explained how he had to bribe them to get building permits. That's if Trump did
gain untold wealth. You never know with real estate tycoons.
In this elevated world whichever way the money flows it flows like water. The three times
Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, was the most impressive, being given a million on a golf course.
What was impressive about that was that the transaction was so trivial he forgot about it. No
one, so far, has given me a million pounds on a golf course - I don't play golf - but if they
had I sure as hell wouldn't forget it. And I don't need to remind you about feats nearly as
impressive on the German political scene.
If you're interested in the English equivalent when it comes to such corruption don't
bother. There isn't one, not to any extent. It's the mark of a loser in England for a
politician or official to take illegal bribes since the process of legally bribing is
available to all. (Cave & Rowell, "A Quiet Word ..." 2015 goes into some of it) As for
Brussels, lets leave that one alone. We haven't got all night.
So, like sex scandals, wealth scandals are lying around waiting to be used whenever the media
want to gun for this or that politician. Usually they get ignored. Doesn't mean the
politicians who are being ignored are clean. Just that they're not today's target.
The Guardian wants to gun for these politicians. It's done so. Why, at this time, would
those two Republican candidates be chosen as targets by the Guardian?
I suppose that question more or less answers itself.
Ex-AG Barr Reportedly Met With Jeffrey Epstein's Last Cellmate Attorney General William Barr speaks at the
National Religious Broadcasters Convention Feb. 26, 2020, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark
Humphrey)
By Charlie McCarthy | Tuesday, 05 January 2021 07:06 PM
Former Attorney General William Barr investigated the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, reportedly
even meeting with the multimillionaire sex offender's last cellmate.
Epstein was found hanging in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower
Manhattan early on Aug. 10, 2019. Efrain "Stone" Reyes had shared the cell with Epstein until
being transferred a day before the suicide.
Epstein's death rattled the highest levels of the Justice Department, according
to the New York Daily News on Monday.
Following Epstein's death, Reyes was pulled from a privately run jail in Queens to meet
frequently with authorities, once with the attorney general himself.
"Barr wanted to know about what was going on in [the Metropolitan Correctional Center]," a
source told the Daily News. "Barr told him, 'I owe you a favor, thank you for telling us the
truth.'
"He said [Barr] was a good guy. Barr was nice about it. He just wanted to know if [inmates]
were being mistreated. What [Reyes] believed happened. Just basically that. He told them
everything. He cooperated with Barr."
The Daily News source said he befriended Reyes when both were being held at the Queens jail,
per the Daily Mail .
A Justice Department spokesman declined comment to the Daily News.
The New York Times reported previously that a "livid" Barr was personally overseeing four
inquiries into Epstein's suicide.
Reyes caught coronavirus at the Queens Detention Facility earlier this year, was released in
April and died last month. He was 51.
The source said he and Reyes watched a documentary about Epstein, who associated with some
of the world's most powerful men while allegedly running an international child sex trafficking
scheme.
"[Reyes] was like, 'I just didn't see that from him. I didn't see that side of him. I never
pictured him being with young girls. Some guys like that are creepy,'" the source recalled. "He
said he never really got that side of Epstein -- like he was someone who took advantage of
girls. But we all have our secrets, you know? You never know."
US intelligence and
security agencies declared that the SolarWinds hack was 'likely Russian in origin,' echoing
evidence-free mainstream media claims as well as their own language in the 'assessments' about
the 2016 election.
In a joint
statement on Tuesday, the FBI, NSA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said that their investigative
work "indicates that an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor, likely Russian in
origin" was behind the compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, first revealed three weeks
ago.
"At this time, we believe this was, and continues to be, an intelligence gathering
effort. We are taking all necessary steps to understand the full scope of this campaign and
respond accordingly," the statement added.
What does "likely of Russian origin" even mean? Don't expect the mainstream media
outlets to ask – they've all been accusing Moscow for weeks, using unverifiable
assertions by anonymous sources instead of any actual evidence.
Several things in the statement jump out. One, that CISA was put in charge of "asset
response" and mitigation. This is the same agency that on November 13 hosted a statement
– attributed to it by the media, but in reality coming from two advisory committees
– declaring the 2020 US election "the most secure in American history," hastening
to add that "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed
votes, or was in any way compromised."
That was a remarkable rush to judgment, given the subsequent claims to the contrary that
seem far more credible than any assessments of "likely" Russian hacking.
Americans can surely sleep easy knowing the FBI is the "lead agency for threat
response," which is presently still collecting evidence, and analyzing it "to determine
further attribution."
This is the agency once run by James Comey and Andrew McCabe, who discussed an "insurance
policy" in case Donald Trump gets elected with senior staff like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page
and framed General Michael
Flynn over a perfectly legal and legitimate conversation with a Russian ambassador.
This is the same FBI that hastened to send 15 agents to investigate a
garage rope pulley in Talladega, but sat on Hunter Biden's laptop
for a year and did nothing with tips about the suspected Nashville RV bomber.
Again, the mainstream media will not point any of this out, but will parse the
"likely" as "definitely" and claim the statement somehow proves their claim
Russia was behind the SolarWinds breach. Just watch.
That's precisely what happened with the infamous "Intelligence Community Assessment"
published in January 2017. A handpicked group of FBI, CIA, ODNI and NSA staff was first
conflated with "all 17 US intelligence agencies" and then their "assessment"
treated as established fact. Only in November 2018, after the midterm elections, did the source
material the ICA was based on see the light of day.
It was quickly forgotten, however, as it made clear that the assessment was based on wishful
thinking about what the US spies believed was "consistent with the methods and motivations
of Russian-directed efforts." Couldn't have this frank admission interfere with the fantasy
political interests in Washington needed to believe, after all.
Note also that no one involved in the exercise in dissembling that was Russiagate ever faced
any consequences. Only one person – a FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith – has been
prosecuted for altering evidence in the Flynn case, and he got a slap on the wrist .
Meanwhile DNI James Clapper and CIA chief John Brennan got cable news sinecures, while FBI
director Comey landed lucrative book and TV deals.
McCabe, Strzok and Page went on to become media darlings and heroes of the #Resistance.
With all that in mind, it's curious that the "likely" and "believe" are doing
a lot of heavy lifting in that joining statement about the SolarWinds hack. Why should US spies
couch their claims in bureaucratic language, designed to shield the author from consequences of
being wrong, when impunity is the order of the day in Washington? Policy is based on
assessments anyway, and it's pretty obvious at this point that evidence – or lack thereof
– is an irrelevant detail to the US establishment.
But again, that's a question one shouldn't expect the mainstream media to ask.
Forget what Vice President Pence has suggested he might do this week regarding counting
the votes for president and forget President Trump's ominous military buildup near Iran, the
Sunday New York Times two-column, above-the-fold lede tells us what we should really
be worried about: "Scope of Russian Hacking Far Exceeds Initial Fears." The on-line title was
" As
Understanding of Russian Hacking Grows, So Does Alarm ."
Forget, too, that this latest NYT indictment of Russia, does not substantially
advance the story beyond the information available two weeks ago, when
"neither the actor, nor the motive, nor the damage done [was] known for certain in this
latest scare story." Although no evidence is adduced to show that Russia is behind this
latest flurry of hacking – Russia no doubt sits toward the top of a long list of
suspects. The Times ominously quotes Suzanne Spaulding, a senior cyber official during
the Obama administration, saying Russia is the foregone conclusion:
"We still don't know what Russia's strategic objectives were," she said "But we
should be concerned that part of this may go beyond reconnaissance. Their goal may be to
put themselves in a position to have leverage over the new administration, like holding a
gun to our head to deter us from acting to counter Putin."
The Sanger Sewing Machine
NYT Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger is listed first on the byline for Sunday's
story together with Nicole Perlroth and Julian Barnes. That should give us a clue, given
Sanger's record for sewing things out of whole cloth. In a word, Sanger enjoys an unenviably
checkered record for reliability. Until we are shown more in the way of evidence attributing
the recently discovered hacking to the Russians, we would do well to review his record.
Sanger's reporting on Iraq before the war was as wrong as it was consequential. Those who
were alert at the time may remember that Sanger was second only to Judith Miller in spreading
the party line on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Seldom do historians obtain documentary evidence of plans for a war of aggression, but on
May 1, 2005 the London Times published a paper (now known as the "Downing Street
Memos") that recorded what Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 (the UK counterpart to the CIA)
relayed to Prime Minister Tony Blair on July 23, 2002 about what he was told by George Tenet
at CIA headquarters on July 20, 2002. (No one has challenged the authenticity of the
minutes.)
"C (Dearlove) reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift
in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. There was little discussion
in Washington of the aftermath after military action." [Emphasis added.]
With David Sanger and his colleague Judith Miller having cried wolf on WMD so many times
over the prior two years, the Times decided it would be best to suppress the
embarrassing revelation that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
So the Times ignored it for more than six weeks, when Sanger wrote an article to put
the whole thing in perspective, so to speak.
The title of Sanger's June 13, 2005 article was "Postwar British Memo Says War Decision
Wasn't Made." Those looking for a measure of Sanger's credibility could do no better than
read this masterpiece of deceptive circumlocution. Here's the lead paragraph:
WASHINGTON, June 12 – A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet
office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made "no
political decisions" to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility
was advanced. "
And those asking how Sanger could write that with a straight face need only to read the
Downing Street Memos , which are quite succinct and clear.
One could almost sympathize with Sanger, who had co-authored a piece with Thom Shanker, on
July 29, 2002 in which WMD were flat-facted into Iraq no fewer than seven times. See: "
U.S.
Exploring Baghdad Strike As Iraq Option of July 29, 2002 ." That was about a week after
CIA Director Tenet had briefed Dearlove on the fixing of the intelligence and the facts. It
is a safe bet that Sanger's sources in the intelligence community briefed him on what line to
take on those (non-existent) WMD.
Years Later Still Drinking at the Government Trough
On July 26, 2016 , Candidate Clinton reportedly approved a "blame-Russia" plan.
According to
a letter from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to Sen. Lindsey Graham on
Sept. 29, 2020, CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama on "Russian intelligence
analysis" regarding "alleged approval by Hillary Clinton of a proposal from one of her
foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference
by Russian security services."
The Russian intelligence analysis report was deemed important enough that on Sept. 7,
2016, US intelligence officials forwarded an "investigative referral" to FBI Director James
Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding it. ( Such
a referral usually indicates that a leak has occurred about a particularly sensitive issue or
program. Thus, it is possible that the putative leaker wished to get the information out into
the open.)
But it is one thing to leak; quite another to get an Establishment journalist to write
about it without checking beforehand with the intelligence community for a nihil
obstat . There has been no additional reporting about the "investigative referral." But
if it was about a leak, the information never saw the light of day at the time.
July 26, 2016 : The exact date timing may be coincidence, but on the same day Mrs.
Clinton was alleged to have given the go-ahead for Russia-gate, Sanger co-authored
an article with Eric Schmitt titled: "Spy Agency Consensus Grows That Russia Hacked
D.N.C.":
"WASHINGTON – American intelligence agencies have told the White House they now
have 'high confidence' that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and
documents from the Democratic National Committee, according to federal officials who have
been briefed on the evidence."
There is much more that can be said about Sanger's reporting on very consequential issues.
On Iran, for example, taking Sanger's reporting at face value, one would think he never read
the National Intelligence Estimate that helped prevent a war planned by Cheney/Bush for 2008.
I refer to the November
2007 NIE the unanimous, "high-confidence" key judgment of which was that Iran had stopped
working on a nuclear weapon at the end of 2003 and had not resumed such work. That key
judgment stands, but you would never know that from Sanger's reporting.
Beware chief Washington correspondents; or at least look at their record.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as
Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily
Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).
Russia's federal prison authorities were right to jolt Alexei Navalny this week by warning
him to return immediately from Germany or else face a suspended sentence being made into jail
time.
The "professional" opposition activist claims to be convalescing in Germany after he was
allegedly poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent in August. Western news media dutifully
repeat the claim that Navalny is "recuperating" in Germany after having survived an
assassination plot by Kremlin agents. Navalny has personally accused Russia's President
Vladimir Putin of ordering the alleged hit.
Last week, a team of medics from the Berlin hospital where Navalny had been staying
published a paper in
The Lancet medical journal in which they claimed he had been poisoned with Novichok nerve
agent. Their findings are dubious because the medics acknowledged the involvement of German
military intelligence laboratories in conducting their analysis.
But one thing the German doctors did let slip was that a 55-day follow-up check on Navalny
ascertained that he had made a "near-complete recovery".
The Russian dissident figure was flown to Berlin on August 22, two days after he was treated
in a hospital in Omsk, Russia. Thus, the German medical team are indicating – no doubt
inadvertently – that Navalny's health recovered nearly two months ago, if not before
that.
That means there is no medical reason why he should remain at large in Germany. His claims
of "convalescing" and the Western media's indulgence of those claims are false, if the German
doctors are correct about his "recovery".
Despite Navalny's arrogant disdain for Russian state laws, he is nevertheless answerable to
those authorities as a citizen. While in Germany he was on probation for a suspended jail
sentence concerning a fraud conviction in 2014. His so-called Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK)
has a checkered history of shady financing, from allegations of foreign funding by the U.S.
State Department to charges of embezzling millions of dollars. Ironically, the blogger and
media activist produces slick programs accusing the Russian government of corruption.
In any case, under the laws of the Russian Federation, the 44-year-old Navalny was on
probation during the past four months of his stay in Germany. For the last two months, he is in
good health, according to his German doctors. So there are no grounds for why he should abscond
from Russian territory and evade the laws for which he is answerable.
Not only is Navalny living as if he above the law, he has also shown flagrant contempt for
the Russian authorities.
Last week, he published a video on his website claiming that he had pranked a named member
of Russia's security service, the FSB, into admitting that agents had poisoned him while he was
visiting the Siberian city of Tomsk on August 20. He was later flown in an emergency to Omsk
where he was treated after having apparently fallen ill onboard a flight to Moscow.
The FSB dismissed Navalny's prank telephone claim as a "deep fake". The Russian doctors who
treated him in Omsk – and who probably saved his life – have repeatedly stated that
their tests showed there was no poison in Navalny's body, and specifically no traces of nerve
agent. They said his illness was due to a metabolic disorder. Perhaps self-induced as a ruse to
later transfer to Germany?
The transcript of Navalny's
purported prank call to the FSB agent reads like a comic set-up. Posing as a senior member of
Russia's national security council, Navalny affects to bully the supposed agent as if he is a
pathetic stooge.
A telling segment is where the self-styled super sleuth fishes for compliments about his own
character from the purported FSB man, betraying the narcissism of a megalomaniac.
Again, incredibly, we are expected to believe that someone who had a near-death experience
with a lethal nerve poison and who is "convalescing" still in Germany somehow managed to find
the energy and mental reserves to pull off a daring 45-minute telephone sting.
If Navalny is fit enough to participate in such practical jokes – regardless of their
credibility – then he is surely fit enough to abide by Russian laws and respect his
probation terms. As the Russian Federal Prison Service stated this week: "The convicted man is
not fulfilling all of the obligations placed on him by the court, and is evading the
supervision of the Criminal Inspectorate."
One gets the unerring impression that Navalny and his foreign handlers have become so
self-intoxicated with hubris that they are blind to their own absurd implausibilities.
Why was he permitted to fly by air ambulance to Berlin in the first place if the Russian
authorities had evil designs against him?
While there, as a guest of the German government, Navalny has wildly accused President Putin
of ordering his alleged assassination. The European governments have subsequently and rashly
imposed sanctions on Russia in support of Navalny's unfounded claims. Then we have the media
activist mounting further provocations parlayed into even more outlandish accusations against
President Putin and the Kremlin.
All the while there has been no evidence of poisoning presented to support these claims,
other than unverifiable assertions by German doctors working with German military intelligence
labs, as well as two other NATO laboratories and the Organization for the Prohibition on
Chemical Weapons. All of them including the OPCW (the latter compromised over complicity in
NATO false-flag provocations in Syria) have refused to share their analytical data and samples
with Russia, and yet they are demanding that Moscow launch a criminal investigation into the
Navalny case.
The abdication by European governments of due process and of respect for Russian state laws,
its government, and its president is astounding. They are indulging a foreign-sponsored gadfly
as if he is the sovereign representative of the Russian Federation.
Navalny and his foreign allies have lost the plot in their own telling of an alleged
assassination plot.
First things first: he is a convicted felon who is answerable to Russian law. Pushing false
flags and slanderous falsehoods from abroad with the intent of damaging Russia's sovereignty is
an abuse of his rights.
Arrogant and overindulged Navalny is patently incapable of even understanding his
obligations under law as a Russian citizen. He evidently feels above the law, like many of his
Western backers. That's why Russia is right to tell him to put up or shut up.
I would have thought the ongoing saga of Alexei Navalny's poisoning by FSB agents with the
most deadly toxin known being smeared on his underpants in the 31-hour gap between going into
intensive care in the Omsk Hospital and a German air ambulance reaching the hospital and
putting a doctor by his bedside was Western intelligence at its most oxymoronic. This, coming
on top of the poison in the tea in the airport cafeteria, followed by the poison in the water
bottle picked up by Navalny's followers wearing no protective masks or gloves.
Of course with Bellingcat (founded by an unemployed ladies-underwear sales representative)
involved in the latest installment in the farce, the obsession with Navalny's underpants
becomes understandable. That phone conversation Navalny had with "Kudryavtsev" surely had to
be staged. What is it with the British obsession with underpants?
All the more disturbing then that the real Kudryavtsev's mother-in-law ended up an
indirect victim of British intel's stupidity, when her flat was invaded by one of Navalny's
idiot groupie followers.
What is it with the British obsession with underpants?
When I was a rather timid student and had a car, I took two other students and a Professor
on a journey form London to Birmingham. We stopped on the way to vist my parents house. My
mother, turning to the Professor, and asked in front of the others, "You do make sure he
changes his underpants don't you?" I had a hard job living it down. (Maybe that's why I
changed my nationality)
Navalny - don't forget that the person who was said to have carried the water bottle to
Germany was photoghaphed by CCT buying the said water bottle from a vending machine in
Germany after arrival. Obviously, the Russki FSB go around filling up machines with
poisoned water bottles. So we must expect a massive "Novachoco" at German Airports any time
now.
"... I'm still stunned that the paper did a study that confirmed what people have suspected, namely that a high cycle threshold used on PCR testing was creating the appearance of a pandemic that might have long receded. The testing mania was generating wild illusions of millions of "asymptomatic" carriers and spreaders. How severe was the problem? Read this and weep ..."
"... up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found. ..."
"... A major reason for the ongoing lockdowns are due to the pouring in of positive case numbers from massive testing. If 90% of these positive tests are false, we have a major problem. The whole basis of the panic disappears. All credit to the Times for running the article but why no follow up and why no change in its editorial stance? ..."
"... I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life -- schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned -- will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself. ..."
"... During the Covid-19 pandemic, the world is unwittingly conducting what amounts to the largest immunological experiment in history on our own children. We have been keeping children inside, relentlessly sanitizing their living spaces and their hands and largely isolating them ..."
"... in the course of social distancing to mitigate the spread, we may also be unintentionally inhibiting the proper development of children's immune systems. ..."
"... The psychological effects of loneliness are a health risk comparable with risk obesity or smoking. Anxiety and depression have spiked since lockdown orders went into effect. ..."
The paper of record in 2020 shifted dramatically to the most illiberal stance possible on
the virus, pushing for full lockdowns, and ignoring or burying any information that might
contradict the case for this unprecedented experiment in social and economic control. This
article highlights the exceptions.
...
Even within the blatant and aggressive pro-lockdown bias, and consistent with the way the
New York Times does its work, the paper has not been entirely barren of truth about Covid and
lockdowns. Below I list five times that the news section of the paper, however inadvertently
and however buried deep within the paper, actually told the truth.
I'm still stunned that the paper did a study that confirmed what people have suspected,
namely that a high cycle threshold used on PCR testing was creating the appearance of a
pandemic that might have long receded. The testing mania was generating wild illusions of
millions of "asymptomatic" carriers and spreaders. How severe was the problem? Read this and
weep:
In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in
Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried
barely any virus, a review by The Times found.
On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a
database maintained by The Times . If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New
York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to
isolate and submit to contact tracing.
The implications of this revelation are incredible. A major reason for the ongoing lockdowns
are due to the pouring in of positive case numbers from massive testing. If 90% of these
positive tests are false, we have a major problem. The whole basis of the panic disappears. All
credit to the Times for running the article but why no follow up and why no change in its
editorial stance?
Gone missing this year in public commentary has been much at all about naturally acquired
immunities from the virus, even though the immune system deserves credit for why human kind has
lasted this long even in the presence of pathogens. That the Times ran this piece was another
exception in otherwise exceptionally bad coverage. It said in part:
Scientists who have been monitoring immune responses to the virus are now starting to see
encouraging signs of strong, lasting immunity, even in people who developed only mild
symptoms of Covid-19, a flurry of new studies suggests. Disease-fighting antibodies, as well
as immune cells called B cells and T cells that are capable of recognizing the virus, appear
to persist months after infections have resolved -- an encouraging echo of the body's
enduring response to other viruses .
Researchers
have yet to
find unambiguous evidence that coronavirus reinfections are occurring, especially within
the few months that the virus has been rippling through the human population. The prospect of
immune memory "helps to explain that," Dr. Pepper said.
Data from monkeys suggests that even low levels of antibodies can prevent serious illness
from the virus, if not a re-infection. Even if circulating antibody levels are undetectable,
the body retains the memory of the pathogen. If it crosses paths with the virus again,
balloon-like cells that live in the bone marrow can mass-produce antibodies within hours.
It's still a shock that so many schools closed their doors this year, partly from disease
panic but also from compliance with orders from public health officials. Nothing like this has
happened, and the kids have been brutalized as a result, not to mention the families who found
themselves unable to cope at home. For millions of students, a whole year of schooling is gone.
And they have been taught to treat their fellow human beings as nothing more than disease
vectors. So it was amazing to read this story in the Times :
So far, schools do not seem to be stoking community transmission of the coronavirus,
according to data emerging from random testing in the United States and Britain. Elementary
schools especially seem to seed remarkably few infections.
Byline Karen Yourish, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Danielle Ivory and Mitch Smith
Another strangely missing part of mainstream coverage has been honesty about the risk
gradient in the population. It is admitted even by the World Health Organization that the case
fatality rate for Covid-19 from people under the age of 70 is 0.05%. The serious danger is for
people with low life expectancy and broken immune systems. Knowing that, as we have since
February, we should have expected the need for special protection for nursing homes. It was
incredibly obvious. Instead of doing that, some governors shoved Covid patients into nursing
homes. Astonishing. In any case, the above article (and
this one
too) was one of the few times this year that the Times actually spelled out the many thousands
times risk to the aged and sick as versus the young and healthy.
Notable Opinion
columns
The op-ed page of the paper mirrored the news coverage, with only a handful of exceptions.
Those are noted below.
I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this
near total meltdown of normal life -- schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned --
will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus
itself. The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The
unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of
the first order.
Worse, I fear our efforts will do little to contain the virus, because we have a
resource-constrained, fragmented, perennially underfunded public health system. Distributing
such limited resources so widely, so shallowly and so haphazardly is a formula for failure.
How certain are you of the best ways to protect your most vulnerable loved ones? How readily
can you get tested?
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the world is unwittingly conducting what amounts to the
largest immunological experiment in history on our own children. We have been keeping
children inside, relentlessly sanitizing their living spaces and their hands and largely
isolating them. In doing so, we have prevented large numbers of them from becoming infected
or transmitting the virus. But in the course of social distancing to mitigate the spread, we
may also be unintentionally inhibiting the proper development of children's immune
systems.
Our mental health suffers, too. The psychological effects of loneliness are a health risk
comparable with risk obesity or smoking. Anxiety and depression have spiked since lockdown
orders went into effect. The weeks immediately following them saw nearly an 18 percent jump
in overdose deaths and, as of last month, more than 40 states had reported increases. One in
four young adults age 18 to 25 reported seriously considering suicide within the 30-day
window of a recent study. Experts fear that suicides may increase; for young Americans, these
concerns are even more acute. Calls to domestic violence hotlines have soared. America's
elderly are dying from the isolation that was meant to keep them safe.
The Investigative Committee of Russia announced on Tuesday that it has launched a fresh
probe into the affairs of opposition activist Alexey Navalny, to determine whether there is
sufficient evidence to charge him with fraud. According to prosecutors , Navalny spent around 356 million
rubles ($4.8 million) of money raised for political and journalistic activities for
"personal purposes" including "an acquisition of personal property, material assets
and payment of expenses, including on trips abroad."
It alleges the funds came out of more than 588 million rubles ($5.9 million) in money given
to groups connected to the prominent activist, including the Anti-Corruption Fund and the Fund
for Organization and Coordination for Protecting Citizens' Rights. The Committee's spokesperson
describes this as evidence of "fraud on a particularly large scale."
Navalny has previously been found guilty of financial misconduct and these convictions have
hampered his attempts to stand for public office. In 2017, a Russian court refused to overturn
a judicial decision in which he was found to have embezzled funds from a state-owned timber
firm.
He had been allowed to run in the 2013 Moscow mayoral race while he appealed the verdict,
attracting around 27 percent of the votes, compared to the 51 percent won by the eventual
victor, Sergey Sobyanin.
Navalny has been in Germany since August, when he was transferred to Berlin's Charite
hospital from a Siberian clinic. He took ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, in what his
associates allege to be a poisoning with the nerve agent Novichok.
Earlier this month, the US and UK state-funded investigative outlet Bellingcat claimed to
have mobile phone data that placed state security agents within a few miles of Navalny the day
before. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists that previous similar allegations,
published in London's Sunday Times newspaper, were "bulls**t."
Earlier this week, Russia's Federal Prison Service informed Navalny that he must return to
Russia to comply with the terms of his suspended prison sentence for a previous conviction. It
argued that he is no longer receiving hospital care and, "therefore the convicted man is not
fulfilling all the obligations placed on him by the court." Earlier this month, the
activist said he would return to his home country when he could.
At his annual end-of-year press conference in December, President Vladimir Putin told
reporters that Navalny had links to "American special services" and that, if the Kremlin
had indeed wanted the opposition figure dead, the security services would have "finished the
job."
Midnight10 1 day ago 29 Dec, 2020 04:23 PM
Not to worry, Navalny is protected by Merkel, who provided a private plane to bring him to
Germany. Her toyboy just wanted to remove Putin, but in Russia, he wasn't very well known.
Merkel gave him the status of supposedly being a real rival. If he does return to Russia and
is arrested, they better watch the skies. Merkel wouldn't be above sending a helicopter in
for a jail house rescue. She evidently had fun helping to depose governments in the ME. Since
then, she has championed Guaido, from Venezuela, as well as Wong from Hong Kong. Soon she may
retire and can spend more time with "her boys". However, she will have to use her money
instead of the German citizen's money for her rescue attempts.
Count_Cash 1 day ago 29 Dec, 2020 04:01 PM
Navalny and Fraud go hand in hand, it's his stock and trade. He is the sort of criminal that
just can't stop and definitely needs a good couple of years in prison to at least punish his
continual fraud offences.
Galaxy31 Count_Cash 1 day ago 29 Dec, 2020 05:07 PM
He is a fraud and criminal for sure. Little character with big ego!
TheFishh Count_Cash 1 day ago 29 Dec, 2020 04:40 PM
I just wish Russia would stop beating around the bush and just charge navalny with sedition
and issue an arrest warrant for him.
I might have added @ 8 also that another Navalny groupie follower, Lyubov Sobol, also a
lawyer, was arrested recently for invading the apartment of supposed FSB employee Konstantin
Kudryavtsev's mother-in-law (after entering the building on false pretences) and filming
around the apartment. Sobol was accompanied by people illegally wearing
Rospotrebnadzor uniforms.
To date there's no clear evidence that Konstantin Kudryavtsev actually did speak to
Navalny on the phone and the entire phone interview (during which Navalny was told that the
FSB tried to kill him a second time by putting Novichok on his underwear) may have been a
stunt pulled by people who stole parts of a phone database and the metadata attached to phone
transactions on that database.
Der Spiegel, CNN, another media outlet and Bellingcat apparently paid Bitcoin or
cryptocurrency of some sort to access the data from sources to whom the phone database
information was "leaked".
"A study done a few years ago showed that over 2/3rds of international affairs stories in
major European newspapers were basically reprints of NYT articles"
Now we don't need a study, we can see it happening in real time on Google News. Also, which
stories are ignored or whitewashed by MSM.
What worries me a lot is how this Wurlitzer mechanism is scaling up. Partly due to
globalization media worldwide ended up working in a highly coordinated manner: something
interesting comes up they all report it in parallel. If a reputable source publishes first
the others can copy it, including all the perceptions which comes with it. Once an
organization builds up a reputation which fits into that mainstream, it can start generating
a stream of its own. With anything the NYTimes generates/pushes the content , the agenda and
the focus gets copied all over the place. A front organization like Bellingcat now has the
status to generate content which instantly feeds into this network.
You'd think globalization would increase diversity but structurally it also enhances the most
popular sources, just like everyone buying the highest rated item on amazon inflates that
item. Nassim Taleb points out that most of the book market is taken up by very few books.
The War on Fake News makes this much worse. There is a huge emphasis on reputability of
sources. As a result this network becomes rapidly more homogeneous and propagandized. Sources
are avoided because they have gotten a formal label of disreputability. Wikipedia is the
quintessential example.
A formal rule of using reputable sources is installed and enforced, mainly by agents of
major players. Take any leftist opposition voice and check the history of the wiki, look for
removal based on the argument of reputability. Chances are it is some 'operative' at work.
Meanwhile if you look at what Philip Cross does, it's constantly editing bits to massage
reputation in the desired direction. In a PR society reputation is created on demand to a
large extent. And an other part of that demand is forcing us to rely on it.
It is hard to compare with the closed situation of 50 years ago but in some ways the
current media feel more hermetic than ever.
A study done a few years ago showed that over 2/3rds of international affairs stories in
major European newspapers were basically reprints of NYT articles, tweaked lightly for
localization purposes. The major media outlets all sing from the same hymn sheet and the
CIA and other western intel operations knows that any story they feed into the system will
be reproduced around the globe and taken as 'fact' by most of the newspapers' readers.
The media's incestuous nature and its infiltration by the intelligence services really
became apparent during the Syrian Civil War and the Trump presidency. It is now clear that
the western mainstream media works with the spooks to shape and mold opinion, and
manufacture consent, rather than innocently informing its readers about world events.
The rise of the now often used insult "conspiracy theorist", which is really code for
"dissenting opinion", is closely related to this. The western liberal democracies are going
totalitarian in real time as the window of "acceptable" opinion continues to shrink and the
establishment finds new ways to censor, ban and stifle heretical thinking.
If you follow this sort of thing here, a regular occurrence, then this one comes off as
domestic, likely a nut; and lacking any government/political attempts to exploit it, nobody
is going to pay much attention unless they are affected directly.
Now that a majority of the country believes the election was fraudulent and the Supreme
Court has completely abdicated its authority the next obstacle in front of President Trump is
here.
And, as always, it comes from his complicit Secretary of State who undermines Trump with his
every move to turn the State, Defense and Intelligence apparatuses of the U.S. against
Russia.
Pompeo goes on Mark Levin's show, whose ratings are through the roof right now, to tell all
the slavering normie-conservatives that it was definitely the Russians who hacked our
government.
Without offering any evidence or specifics, Pompeo said Russia was "pretty clearly" behind
the cyberattack during an appearance on the conservative talk radio Mark Levin Show .
"I can't say much more, as we're still unpacking precisely what it is, and I'm sure some
of it will remain classified. But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a
piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of US government systems and
it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as
well," Pompeo
explained .
Notice how there is no evidence given, just the typical intelligence agency, "believe me"
line, which is your first clue that whoever it was behind this attack the one group who was
definitely NOT behind it was the Russians.
This week's cyber attack on the U.S. government was perfectly timed with the Electoral
College submitting its votes to the Congress and Joe Biden claiming he's president-elect.
The reason why the release of this 'attack' on our government was perfectly timed is because
it is a distraction from the growing unrest over the Democrats' having stolen the election and
cowering the courts into irrelevance.
This is classic CIA-level misdirection from what was more likely a Chinese or, dare I say
it, homegrown operation for the very purpose of blaming the Russians to tamp down the anger and
confuse the MAGA crowd.
And it resurrects the ghost of RussiaGate for the libs by putting Trump in a Catch-22.
If he doesn't respond to this it keeps alive the smoldering embers of the TDS crowd
watching Rachel Maddow that Trump really does have deep, covert ties to Russia.
If he does react, what possible reaction could he take to escalate the tensions with
Russia that are already one step below open warfare?
Oh, and he has to respond to this while also fighting an uphill battle against the courts
and his own bureaucracy to invoke his executive order involving outside interference into the
election. And in classic Trump fashion he did:
Provoking the exact reaction you'd expect from the BlueChecked Sneetches among the
Twitterati. RussiaGate was an embarrassment that should have died years ago but it persists
precisely because Trump refuses to formally concede and continues to give his people the
opportunity to fight the Swamp.
The only way Putin and the Russians were behind this attack on the U.S. government was as a
5-d chess move where Trump invited them to do it on his behalf to 'prove' external interference
in the election and allow Trump to cross the Rubicon, invoke the Insurrection Act and his 2018
EO on election interference.
Yeah, by the way, John Le Carre died this week, life ain't a movie and Trump isn't that
savvy a player. Ye gods, I wish he was. That we are in this mess proves he isn't.
This pronouncement by Pompeo was just good ol' fashioned swamp double talk who continues his
job of maintaining continuity of U.S. foreign policy on behalf of the Neoconservatives whose
raison d'etre is the destruction of Russia to the exclusion of nearly every other consideration
of any other human on the planet.
Don't be confused by this nonsense. Whoever was behind this attack wasn't the Russians. The
motive for this operation lies squarely with China, The Davos Crowd , the Democrats and our own
intelligence agencies trying to move the Overton Window away from the real problem, a stolen
election.
Outing Solarwinds and tying it directly to Dominion Voting Systems is your smoking gun.
But the courts, as I said at the open, have left the building.
Martin Armstrong pointed out the Supreme Court denied the 'shouting behind closed doors'
because they met via Zoom call.
But they didn't deny the substance of the charge against them, that they bowed to political
pressure thanks to the Democrats' open blackmail campaign of terror this past summer.
So, at this point there really is little hope of overturning the election. From what I've
heard on the ground in Georgia the same Dominion Voting machines are in place there for the
Senate runoffs. Those who voted didn't even get a receipt this time.
So the fix is in there too, folks.
There will be no victories in this fight. Every possible avenue of hope must be crushed if
the Great Reset of The Davos Crowd is to occur. Pompeo plays his part just like everyone else
in this pantomime, one day giving Trump supporters hope by saying he's preparing for a 2nd
term, the next using that cache to undermine him with a far bigger betrayal.
This is how the Deep State works to protect itself and we have to be smart enough to see it
for what it is: preparing the ground for the next phase of the greatest intelligence show on
earth.
Same spook time, same spook channel.
* * *
Join my Patreon if you
think Russia isn't the world's ultimate evil
President Joe Biden 1 hour ago
"
"most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American
politics"
Russia made me say it.
gzorp 51 minutes ago remove link
Nope Obama did it
itstippy 1 hour ago
The Russians made the Check Engine light come on in my car today. Now I have to deal with
that tomorrow, and it's colder than a witch's tit outside. I hate those guys.
JD Rock 1 hour ago
The incessant propaganda from the clever tribe is, so the 2 largest white nations dont
align. That would set the zionists back 500 years.
MX_DOGG 58 minutes ago
... ironic that Russia will be our allies again. They know who their enemy is.
LibertarianMenace 9 minutes ago
Set them back permanently. Complete what Rome failed to.
No work on Sunday 49 minutes ago
Americans trust Russia and Putin more then ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CIA, FBI, swamp etc. that
is a pitiful testament to how far the globalist agenda has gotten.
Doom Porn Star 55 minutes ago
"Russia SOMEHOW gained unrestricted access to all the back-doors in Microsoft enterprise
software and MUST HAVE used their access to plant bugs in sensitive systems.
Bill gates and his cronies who CREATED the software and have always had access to all the
back-doors in Microsoft enterprise software CERTAINLY DID NOT do it.
I'm the guy who told you earlier that I lie cheat and steal for a living . You can believe
me . "
tion PREMIUM 1 hour ago (Edited)
'Russia' is quite literally used as a coverup code word for Israel. Hence why they
declassified almost nothing.
Really Ezra I hope you and the QuckTard do realize that the PEAD commentary wasn't exactly
an invitation either, right.
Five_Black_Eyes_Intel_Agency 48 minutes ago (Edited)
Claiming to be playing 6D chess and keeping Pompeo on the team are mutually exclusive
events.
Anyway, by now its clear as day that the Tweedle Dee Tweedle Dum American political system
is a broken circus and not export-worthy.
On one side of the swamp, you have Team Blue, a Deep State subisdiary that pins the blame
on Russia. On the other side you have Team Red, another Deep State subsidiary that pins the
blame on China. Both however, agree fully on imperialism, fundamentalist Zionism and herding
American cattle against their own interests.
How are you meant to reform this system by "voting"?>?>?
Mr. Apotheosis 55 minutes ago
Inside job, almost certainly.
tion PREMIUM 47 minutes ago
There is an extremist cult faction within the CIA that is attached to Mossad at the
hip.
Snaffew 59 minutes ago remove link
Anyone that believes anything that comes out of the US "intelligence" agencies is part of
the problem.
TheRealBilboBaggins 2 minutes ago
My first thought was . . . "inside job". Especially how quickly Russia was blamed with
zero presentation of forensic evidence. Oh, I know, methods and sources must be protected.
That usually means government criminals must be protected.
Do you ever ask yourself why the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DHS, get so little done that matters
to Americans? Do you ever ask yourself how we possible still have organized crime, foreign
gangs, and Antifa, with all the dough wasted on these "law enforcement agencies"? I do, and
my conclusion is that these agencies are not about what they say they are. They are aimed at
attacking various Americans as it helps the agencies.
Ms No PREMIUM 10 minutes ago
"This is classic CIA-level misdirection from what was more likely a Chinese or, dare I say
it, homegrown operation"
Really?
You speak of misdirection and then go from Russia to suggesting CIA target China, because
you know Trumpers have already figured out that is wasn't Russia, but still don't know they
are manipulated in the same fashion about China?
That"s rich.
Simpson 1 minute ago
They spent 25 million 4 years on investigating the Russia hoax and came up with zero. With
Hunter Biden they hid the evidence for two years till after the election. Images with under
aged girls and smoking crack.
Democrats who sit on intelligence committees screwing a CCP Intelligence officer but
nothing to see here.
FO with your gaslighting.
BendGuyhere 12 minutes ago
DC is in dire need of an attitude adjustment, as much for its own survival as the health
of the country.
The more DC walls itself off from the rest of the country, the more likely becomes an
explosive revolution that wipes their precious stats quo off the map.
Convulsively stabbing Trump in the back will not restore them, cargo cult style, to the
glory days of Dubya, Clinton and Obama.
They've done a fabulous job impoverishing this country and enriching themselves.
With Biden's New Threats, the Russia Discourse is More Reckless and Dangerous Than Ever
The U.S. media demands inflammatory claims be accepted with no evidence, while hacking behavior routinely engaged in by
the U.S. is depicted as aberrational.
Glenn Greenwald
Dec 23
211
332
Then-Vice
President Joe Biden speaks at the Brookings Institute May 27, 2015 in Washington, DC spoke about the Russia-Ukraine
conflict (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
To justify Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss
to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies
for years competed with one another to depict what they called "Russia's interference in our elections" in the most
apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by
President Obama -- that it is a
weak
regional power
with an economy smaller than Italy's capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the U.S. -- and
instead cast Moscow as a grave, even existential, threat to U.S. democracy, with its actions tantamount to the worst
security breaches in U.S. history.
This post-2016 mania culminated with prominent liberal politicians and journalists (
as
well as John McCain
) declaring Russia's activities surrounding the 2016 to be an "act of war" which, many of them
insisted, was
comparable
to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack
-- the two most traumatic attacks in modern U.S. history which both spawned years
of savage and destructive war, among other things.
Subscribe
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
repeatedly
demanded
that Russia's 2016 "interference" be treated as "an act of war." Hillary Clinton
described
Russian
hacking as "a cyber 9/11." And here is Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on MSNBC in early February, 2018, pronouncing Russia "a
hostile foreign power" whose 2016 meddling was the "equivalent" of Pearl Harbor, "very much on par" with the
"seriousness" of the 1941 attack in Hawaii that helped prompt four years of U.S. involvement in a world war.
With the Democrats, under Joe Biden, just weeks away from assuming control of the White House and the U.S. military and
foreign policy that goes along with it, the discourse from them and their media allies about Russia is becoming even
more unhinged and dangerous. Moscow's alleged responsibility for the recently revealed, multi-pronged hack of U.S.
Government agencies and various corporate servers is asserted -- despite not a shred of evidence, literally, having yet
been presented -- as not merely proven fact, but as so obviously true that it is off-limits from doubt or questioning.
Any questioning of this claim will be instantly vilified by the Democrats' extremely militaristic media spokespeople as
virtual treason. "Now the president is not just silent on Russia and the hack. He is deliberately running defense for
the Kremlin by contradicting his own Secretary of State on Russian responsibility,"
pronounced
CNN's
national security reporter Jim Sciutto, who
last
week depicted
Trump's attempted troop withdrawal from Syria and Germany as "ceding territory" and furnishing "gifts"
to Putin. More alarmingly, both the rhetoric to describe the hack and the retaliation being threatened are rapidly
spiraling out of control.
Democrats (along with some Republicans long obsessed with The Russian Threat, such as Mitt Romney) are casting the
latest alleged hack by Moscow in the most melodramatic terms possible, ensuring that Biden will enter the White House
with tensions sky-high with Russia and facing heavy pressure to retaliate aggressively. Biden's top national security
advisers and now Biden himself have, with no evidence shown to the public, repeatedly threatened aggressive retaliation
against the country with the world's second-largest nuclear stockpile.
Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO) -- one of the pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee who earlier this
year
joined
with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY)
to block Trump's plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan --
announced
:
"this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,"
adding
:
"Our nation is under assault." The second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin (D-IL),
pronounced
:
"This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia."
Meanwhile, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has for years been casting Russia as a grave threat to the U.S. while Democrats
mocked him as a relic of the Cold War (before they copied and then surpassed him),
described
the latest hack
as "the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country." The GOP's 2012
presidential nominee also blasted Trump for his failure to be "aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking
punitive action," though -- like virtually every prominent figure demanding tough "retaliation" -- Romney failed to
specify what he had in mind that would be sufficient retaliation for "the equivalent of Russian bombers flying
undetected over the entire country."
For those keeping track at home: that's two separate "Pearl Harbors" in less than four years from Moscow (or, if you
prefer, one Pearl Harbor and one 9/11). If Democrats actually believe that, it stands to reason that they will be eager
to embrace a policy of belligerence and aggression toward Russia. Many of them are demanding this outright, mocking
Trump for failing to attack Russia -- despite no evidence that they were responsible -- while their
well-trained
liberal flock
is
suggesting
that
the
non-response
constitutes
some form of "high treason."
Indeed, the Biden team has been signalling that they intend to quickly fulfill demands for aggressive retaliation.
The
New York Times
reported
on Tuesday
that Biden "accused President Trump [] of 'irrational downplaying'" of the hack while "warning Russia
that he would not allow the intrusion to 'go unanswered' after he takes office." Biden emphasized that once the
intelligence assessment is complete, "we will respond, and probably respond in kind."
Threats and retaliation between the U.S. and Russia are always dangerous, but particularly so now. One of the key
nuclear arms agreements between the two nuclear-armed nations, the New START treaty,
will
expire in February
unless Putin and Biden can successfully negotiate a renewal: sixteen days after Biden is
scheduled to take office. "That will force Mr. Biden to strike a deal to prevent one threat -- a nuclear arms race --
while simultaneously threatening retaliation on another," observed the
Times.
This escalating rhetoric
from Washington about Russia, and the resulting climate of heightened
tensions, are dangerous in the extreme. They are also based in numerous myths, deceits and falsehoods:
First,
absolutely no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest, let alone prove, that Russia
is responsible for these hacks. It goes without saying that it is perfectly plausible that Russia could have done this:
it's the sort of thing that every large power from China and Iran to the U.S. and Russia have the capability to do and
wield against virtually every other country including one another.
But if we learned nothing else over the last several decades, we should know that accepting claims that emanate from the
U.S. intelligence community about adversaries without a shred of evidence is madness of the highest order. We just had a
glaring reminder of the importance of this rule: just weeks before the election, countless mainstream media outlets
laundered and endorsed the utterly false claim that the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop
were
"Russian disinformation,"
only for officials to acknowledge once the harm was done that there was no evidence -- zero
-- of Russian involvement.
Yet that is exactly what the overwhelming bulk of media outlets are doing again: asserting that Russia is behind these
hacks despite having no evidence of its truth.
The New York Times
' Michael Barbaro, host of the paper's
popular
The Daily
podcast,
asked
his colleague
, national security reporter David Sanger, what evidence exists to assert that Russia did this. As
Barbaro put it, even Sanger is "allowing that early conclusions could all be wrong, but that it's doubtful." Indeed,
Sanger acknowledged to Barbaro that they have no proof, asserting instead that the basis on which he is relying is that
Russia possesses the sophistication to carry out such a hack (as do several other nation-states), along with claiming
that the hack has what he calls the "markings" of Russian hackers.
But this tactic was exactly the same one
used
by former intelligence officials
, echoed by these same media outlets, to circulate the false pre-election claim that
the documents from Hunter Biden's laptop were "Russian disinformation": namely, they pronounced in lockstep, the
material from Hunter's laptop "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." This was also exactly
the same tactic used by the U.S. intelligence community in 2001
to
falsely blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks
, claiming that their chemical analysis revealed a substance that was "a
trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program."
These media outlets will, if pressed, acknowledge their lack of proof that Russia did this. Despite this admitted lack
of proof, media outlets are repeatedly stating Russian responsibility as
proven fact
.
"Scope of Russian Hacking Becomes Clear: Multiple U.S. Agencies Were Hit,"
one
New
York Times
headline
proclaimed,
and the first line of that article, co-written by Sanger, stated definitively: "The scope of a
hacking
engineered by one of Russia's
premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday."
The Washington Post
deluged
the public
with identically certain headlines:
Nobody in the government has been as definitive in asserting Russian responsibility as corporate media outlets. Even
Trump's hawkish Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, crafted his accusation against Moscow
with
caveats and uncertainty
: "
I think it's the case
that now we can say
pretty clearly
that it was the
Russians that engaged in this activity."
If actual evidence ultimately emerges demonstrating Russian responsibility, it would not alter how dangerous it is that
-- less than twenty years after the Iraq WMD debacle and less than a couple of years after media endorsement of
endless
Russiagate falsehoods
-- the most influential media outlets continue to mindlessly peddle as Truth whatever the
intelligence community feeds them, without the need to see any evidence that what they're claiming is actually true.
Even more alarmingly, large sectors of the public that venerate these outlets continue to believe that what they hear
from them must be true, no matter how many times they betray that trust. The ease with which the CIA can disseminate
whatever messaging it wants through friendly media outlets is stunning.
Second
, the very idea that this hack could be compared to rogue and wildly aberrational events such as
Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attack is utterly laughable on its face. One has to be drowning in endless amounts of
jingoistic self-delusion to believe that this hack -- or, for that matter, the 2016 "election interference" -- is a
radical departure from international norms as opposed to a perfect reflection of them.
Just as was true of 2016 fake Facebook pages and Twitter bots, it is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Government
engages in hacking attacks of this sort, and ones far more invasive, against virtually every country on the planet,
including Russia, on a weekly basis. That does not mean that this kind of hacking is either justified or unjustified. It
does mean, however, that depicting it as some particularly dastardly and incomparably immoral act that requires massive
retaliation requires a degree of irrationality and gullibility that is bewildering to behold.
The NSA reporting enabled by Edward Snowden by itself proved that the NSA spies on
virtually
anyone it can
. Indeed, after reviewing the archive back in 2013, I made the decision that I would not report on U.S.
hacks of large adversary countries such as China and Russia because it was so commonplace for all of these countries to
hack one another as aggressively and intrusively as they could that it was hardly newsworthy to report on this (the only
exception was when there was a substantial reason to view such spying as independently newsworthy, such as
Sweden's
partnering with NSA to spy on Russia
in direct violation of the denials Swedish officials voiced to their public).
Other news outlets who had access to Snowden documents, particularly
The New York Times
, were not nearly as
circumspect in exposing U.S. spying on large nation-state adversaries. As a result, there is ample proof published by
those outlets (sometimes provoking Snowden's strong objections) that the U.S. does exactly what Russia is alleged to
have done here -- and far worse.
"Even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from [China's] Huawei, classified documents
show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors -- directly into Huawei's networks,"
reported
The
New York Times
'
David
Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in 2013, adding that "the agency pried its way into the servers in Huawei's sealed
headquarters in Shenzhen, China's industrial heart."
In 2013,
the
Guardian
revealed
"an
NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to
Moscow," and added: "foreign politicians and officials who took part in two
G20
summit
meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their
British government hosts." Meanwhile, "Sweden has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia and its
leadership, Swedish television said on Thursday,"
noted
Reuters
, citing what one NSA document described as "a unique collection on high-priority Russian targets, such as
leadership, internal politics."
Other reports revealed that the U.S. had
hacked
into
the Brazilian telecommunications system to collect data on the whole population, and was
spying
on
Brazil's key leaders (including then-President Dilma Rousseff) as well as its most important companies such as
its oil giant Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy.
The Washington Post
reported
:
"The National Security Agency is gathering nearly
5 billion
records a day
on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews
with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals -- and map their
relationships -- in ways that would have been previously unimaginable." And on and on.
[One amazing though under-appreciated episode related to all this: the same
New York Times
reporter who
revealed the details about massive NSA hacking of Chinese government and industry, Nicole Perlroth, subsequently urged
(in tweets she has now deleted) that Snowden not be pardoned on the ground that, according to her, he revealed
legitimate NSA spying on U.S. adversaries. In reality, it was actually she, Perlorth, not Snowden, who chose to expose
NSA spying on China, provoking Snowden's angry objections when she did so based on his view this was a violation of the
framework he created for what should and should not be revealed; in other words, not only did Perlroth
urge the
criminal prosecution of a source on which she herself relied, an absolutely astonishing thing for any reporter to do,
but so much worse, she did so by falsely accusing that source of doing something that she, Perlroth, had done herself:
namely, reveal extensive U.S. hacking of China
].
What all of this makes demonstrably clear is that only the most deluded and uninformed person could believe that Russian
hacking of U.S. agencies and corporations -- if it happened -- is anything other than totally normal and common behavior
between these countries. Harvard Law Professor and former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, reviewing growing demands
for retaliation, wrote in
an
excellent article
last week entitled "Self-Delusion on the Russia Hack
:
The U.S. regularly hacks
foreign governmental computer systems on a massive scale":
The lack of self-awareness in these and similar reactions to the Russia breach is astounding. The U.S. government has
no principled basis to complain about the Russia hack, much less retaliate for it with military means, since the U.S.
government hacks foreign government networks on a huge scale every day. Indeed, a military response to the Russian
hack would violate international law . . . .
As the revelations from leaks of information from Edward Snowden made plain, the United States regularly penetrates
foreign governmental computer systems on a massive scale, often (as in the Russia hack) with the unwitting assistance
of the private sector, for purposes of spying. It is almost certainly the world's leader in this practice, probably
by a lot. The Snowden documents suggested as much, as does the NSA's probable budget. In 2016, after noting "problems
with cyber intrusions from Russia," Obama boasted that the United States has "more capacity than anybody
offensively" . . . .
Because of its own practices, the U.S. government has traditionally accepted the legitimacy of foreign governmental
electronic spying in U.S. government networks. After the notorious Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management
database, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said: "You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what
they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don't think we'd hesitate for a minute." The same Russian agency
that appears to have carried out the hack revealed this week also hacked into unclassified emails in the White House
and Defense and State Departments in 2014-2015. The Obama administration deemed it traditional espionage and did not
retaliate. "It was information collection, which is what nation states -- including the United States -- do," said Obama
administration cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel this week.
But over the last four years, Americans, particularly those who feed on liberal media outlets, have been drowned in so
much mythology about the U.S. and Russia that they have no capacity to critically assess the claims being made, and --
just as they were led to believe about "Russia's 2016 interference in Our Sacred Elections" -- are easily convinced that
what Russia did is some shocking and extreme crime the likes of which are rarely seen in international relations. In
reality, their own government is the undisputed world champion in perpetrating these acts, and has been for years if not
decades.
Third
, these demands for "retaliation" are so reckless because they are almost always unaccompanied by
any specifics. Even if Moscow's responsibility is demonstrated, what is the U.S. supposed to do in response? If your
answer is that they should hack Russia back, rest assured the NSA and CIA are always trying to hack Russia as much as it
possibly can, long before this event.
If the answer is more sanctions, that would be just performative and pointless, aside from wildly hypocritical. Any
reprisals more severe than that would be beyond reckless, particularly with the need to renew nuclear arms control
agreements looming. And if you are someone demanding retaliation, do you believe that Russia, China, Brazil and all the
other countries invaded by NSA hackers have the same right of retaliation against the U.S., or does the U.S. occupy a
special place with special entitlements that all other countries lack?
What we have here, yet again, is the classic operation of the intelligence community feeding serious accusations about a
nuclear-armed power to an eagerly gullible corporate media, with the media mindlessly disseminating it without evidence,
all toward ratcheting up tensions between these two nuclear-armed powers and fortifying a mythology of the U.S. as grand
victim but never perpetrator.
If you ever find yourself wondering how massive military budgets and a posture of Endless War are seemingly invulnerable
to challenge, this pathological behavior -- from a now-enduring union of the intelligence community, corporate media
outlets, and the Democratic Party -- provides one key piece of the puzzle.
Update, Dec. 24, 2020, 7:36 a.m. ET:
Although the tweets from
The New York Times
'
Nicole Perlroth referenced above were deleted by her, as indicated, an alert reader notes that
a
Politico
article
at the time
referenced part of my exchange with her, one prompted by anger from
Washington Post
reporters
over an editorial by their own paper that argued against a Snowden pardon, even though that paper reported extensively
on Snowden's documents and won a Pulitzer for doing so:
The editorial is nothing if not a good excuse for a Twitter debate. Some journalists continued to air outrage
yesterday over the editorial board's defenestration of Snowden, while others either agreed with the board's argument
or at least defended its right to take a stand that it knew would no doubt rankle many in the Post's newsroom. In one
of the more notable exchanges, New York Times reporter cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth tangled with Glenn
Greenwald, who broke the Snowden/NSA story for The Guardian.
Perlroth:
"Gotta say I agree w/ wapo. @Snowden leaked tens of thousands of docs that had nothing to
do with privacy violations."
http://bit.ly/2cLPeLY
Greenwald:
"They can start an august club: Journalists In Favor of Criminal Prosecution For Our
Sources"
http://bit.ly/2cLLIRz
That's precisely what I was referencing here. It's utterly repugnant that Perlroth advocated that her own source be
imprisoned on the ground that he leaked documents "that had nothing to do with privacy violations" when it was she,
Perlroth, who decided to reveal details of NSA spying on China, angering Snowden in the process. Clicking on the above
link to her tweet demonstrates that she since deleted it.
One last point: there is an
outstanding
op-ed in Thursday's
New
York Times
about anger over the alleged Russian hack by Paul Kolbe, who served as a senior CIA clandestine
operative for 25 years and is now director of the Intelligence Project at Harvard Kennedy School, entitled "With
Hacking, the United States Needs to Stop Playing the Victim." It details that "the United States is, of course, engaged
in the same type of operations at an even grander scale" and therefore "it's time for the United States to stop acting
surprised and stop posturing."
Greenwald is
mistaken on one point. He discusses the aggressive, outraged words by American politicians and media
about the recent spate of (allegedly) Russian hacking, and rushes to assume that it has a significant
chance of escalating to nuclear war. Biden's language about wanting to "respond in kind" makes it clear
enough that he's not going to do any sort of bombing, killing, invasion, or other equally warlike act in
response. Likewise for Mitt Romney's language. Although I like just about everything else Greenwald says
in this article, his repeated suggestions that the threats over this incident could end up going nuclear
are difficult to believe.
Greenwald's
perspective is that "Threats and retaliation between the U.S. and Russia are always dangerous" due to
their massive stocks of nuclear weapons, particularly now that nuclear treaties have been weakened. Look,
I get that escalation to nuclear war remains a serious danger, and that it would be better if the US and
Russia didn't raise tensions. But as Greenwald knows, things like one country making off with another
country's secret information are examples of the kind of aggressive action that it's very difficult to
stop major powers from doing to other countries. And when a large or small country experiences this kind
of aggressive action being done to it, isn't it inevitable that opinion leaders in that country are going
to say: We won't stand for this, this is similar to an act of war, we must retaliate somehow? Most
opinion leaders will always be upset when their own country is treated that way by another country, even
if their own country has done the same thing and worse.
Greenwald seems
to be looking for a world where opinion leaders in a major power like the US avoid encouraging
retaliation, and avoid even portraying the hacking as an act of war. Nothing could stop opinion leaders
as a group from doing that, unless maybe you could demonstrate to them that their rhetoric, and the
retaliations it leads to, is too likely to encourage escalation to nuclear war. But the continuing
pattern of major powers retaliating against each other by hacking and other relatively low-level
aggression is not something we can realistically stop. The United States and other countries have come to
accept that all major powers will carry out hacks and even low-level forms of violence directed at other
major powers, that countries will express their outrage when another country does it to them, and that
one country will retaliate at the same level when another country does these things. That's a pretty
stable pattern, and there is no sign that anyone wants to disproportionately escalate their retaliation
in a way that could lead to nuclear war. Given that, you can't reasonably convince opinion leaders to
moderate their rhetoric further. The rhetoric coming from opinion leaders on this subject isn't
particularly bloody anyway, at least by the standards of what historically leads to war. So for the short
term at least, I just accept that opinion leaders are going to talk that way -- I do have long-term hopes
of a more peaceful world, but there's no use pretending that the current less peaceful language puts us
in imminent danger of nuclear holocaust.
The main reason
why I am confident that outraged rhetoric about hacking secrets won't escalate into world war is because
modern countries, and especially the United States, are vulnerable to cyber threats that are much worse
than making off with information. It would be easy for an adversary to destroy most of American society
by acts of massively lethal hacking and cyber sabotage. American decision-makers know that they must
deter these kinds of attacks on the US by holding out the prospect of retaliating with nukes, world war,
or similarly lethal cyber attacks. Since American leaders need to be able to use the prospect of massive
retaliation to deter a cyber attack that would cause great destruction in the US, they can't risk using
this kind of massive retaliation for hacking that just steals a lot of secrets. It has already been
established that in the 21st century, countries routinely steal each other's secrets, so it's not
possible to deter or compensate for another country's secret-stealing by threatening to escalate to
bombing or killing or invasion.
Of the
politicians that Greenwald quoted, the two whose rhetoric is most heated still stopped short of the kind
of language that runs any risk of starting a nuclear war. Sen. Durbin said the hacking was "virtually a
declaration of war", using an adverb that cooled down his point and being careful to avoid declaring
himself that a war exists. The obscure Congressman Jason Crow said "Our nation is under assault" and that
the hacking "could be" a "cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor", where again his point is moderated by the
words "could be" and "cyber equivalent". Sorry, I don't see a danger of a civilization-ending war there,
nor do I see it in the corporate media's language.
Although Greenwald is right to say that politicians and the media are overhyping
threats here, Greenwald is also, in his own way, overhyping a different alleged threat, the idea that
outrage over hacking secrets will escalate to nuclear war. That said, I do think we need to do more to
prevent other pathways of escalation to nuclear war that are more realistic than the one Greenwald
alludes to here, and I agree with Greenwald's other points.
Does anyone have screenshots of the deleted hypocrtiical tweets by NY Times
reporter Nicole Perlroth that Greenwald mentioned in this article? You would normally expect him to post
screenshots, but he doesn't include them or link to them. The paragraph of Greenwald's article where he
brings up her hypocrisy shows some signs of maybe being unfinished, with awkward square brackets. He
should have also included the link to the NY Times article where Perlroth does the same thing she later
condemned -- the link for that is here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-chinese-servers-seen-as-spy-peril.html
"... the media – playing judge, jury and executioner – has leveled blame on the usual suspect. ..."
"... Did anyone actually believe that Russia would escape a major US election season without a ceremonial tarring and feathering by the media? It's almost as though frantic journalists, unable to sell the 'Trump Beats Biden with Kremlin Collusion' narrative, have dreamt up this latest work of pulp fiction to keep the ball of 'Russian villainy' bouncing into the next US administration. Heaven forbid if the media just sat by and let protracted peace break out between Washington and Moscow. ..."
"... By now it would seem that the mainstream media would use a bit more discretion before screaming 'Russia!' inside of a crowded planet every time a US computer system is hacked. After all, Russia is certainly not the only country in the world with a plethora of adventure-seeking hackers sitting around bored in their underwear, nor is it the only country in the world that may be tempted – theoretically speaking – to sneak a peek into Uncle Sam's software and, at the risk of sounding vulgar, hardware. ..."
"... Just ask Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell, who allowed himself to be lured into a honey trap by a Chinese Communist spy named – I kid you not – Fang Fang. Aside from making James Bond thrillers essential reading for all politicians, the Democrats may wish to inquire how a member of the House INTELLIGENCE Committee fell for such a scheme. More to the point, however, Swalwell was one of those deranged Democrats screaming 'Russian collusion!' at the height of the Mueller investigation, another waste of taxpayer funds that turned up zero evidence of collusion between Trump and the Kremlin ..."
As incoming nominees of a future Biden administration have
stopped short in naming a culprit in the SolarWinds hack, the media – playing judge, jury and executioner – has leveled blame on
the usual suspect.
Did anyone actually believe that Russia would escape a major US election season without a ceremonial tarring and feathering by
the media? It's almost as though frantic journalists, unable to sell the 'Trump Beats Biden with Kremlin Collusion' narrative, have
dreamt up this latest work of pulp fiction to keep the ball of 'Russian villainy' bouncing into the next US administration. Heaven
forbid if the media just sat by and let protracted peace break out between Washington and Moscow.
Indeed, when SolarWinds – a software platform that counts among its clients the Pentagon, State Department, Justice Department,
and the National Security Agency – suffered an alleged hack, the Washington Post jumped on the evil Russia connection faster than
Ian Fleming.
"The Russian hackers breached email systems,"
wrote Ellen Nakashima and Craig Timberg in the Post without offering a stitch of evidence (Timberg, readers may recall, is the
journalist who relied on a shady outfit known as PropOrNot to
report , wrongly, that some 200 news outlets were peddling Russian-inspired "fake news."). Quoting those always handy "people
who spoke on the condition of anonymity," the tag team claimed that the "scale of the Russian espionage operation appears to be
large."
Ironically, the most reliable real-life entity that Nakashima and Timberg quoted in their story comes by way of the Russian Embassy
in Washington, which called the reports of Russian hacking "baseless."
But never mind. If the Bezos-empire publication says Russia is the guilty party then who are we mere mortals to ask any questions.
So now we're off again to the 'blame Russia' races.
At this point, it must be asked: who is more responsible for writing US foreign policy, the mainstream media, with their never-ending
supply of 'anonymous sources' to substantiate their fantastic assertions, or the US government? That question seems reasonable after
listening to interviews with freshly appointed members of the Biden administration, who apparently never got the memo about 'Russian
baddies'.
Jennifer Granholm, for example, the energy secretary nominee, committed the cardinal sin of not recognizing the 'Russian bogeyman'
in an interview with ABC talking head, George Stephanopolous.
"We don't know fully what happened, the extent of it, and, quite frankly, we don't know fully for sure who did it," Granholm
said , leaving Stephanopoulos, deprived
of clickable Russophobic sound bites, looking dejected and forlorn.
Perhaps Stephanopoulos was anticipating that Granholm would simply regurgitate media talking points about Russia's unproven hack,
like the absolutely reckless one put out by Reuters.
Reporting on the SolarWinds hack, the Reuters article screamed 'Russia' from the opening gates. Yet not a single living person
is quoted from the incoming Biden administration to take responsibility for a claim that has real-life consequences, especially when
some members of Congress are calling the electronic breach an "act of war."
"President-elect Joe Biden's team will consider several options to punish Russia for its suspected role in the unprecedented
hacking of US government agencies and companies once he takes office, from new financial sanctions to cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure,
people familiar with the matter say."
The very same deplorable tactic was used in an
interview 'Face
the Nation' conducted with Ron Klain, the incoming White House chief of staff.
When pressed by the interviewer Margaret Brennan if there was "any doubt that Russia was behind [the hack]," Klain provided
an answer that Brennan was clearly not satisfied with. In other words, Klain never mentioned the perennial villain Russia as a possible
suspect.
"We should be hearing a clear and unambiguous allocation of responsibility from the White House, from the intelligence community,"
he said. "They're the ones who should be making those messages and delivering the ascertainment of responsibility."
Brennan was having none of it, however, and pushed on with the 'blame Russia' narrative.
"Well, the president-elect was pretty clear when he spoke to my colleague Stephen Colbert on CBS earlier this week, and he
was asked about Russia and he said they'll be held accountable," Brennan remarked, desperate to hear Klain pronounce the name.
"He said they'll face financial repercussions for what they did. Is that no longer the case? He no longer believes it's Russia?"
At this point, some very convenient technical problems helped to cut the pathetic excuse for journalism off the air.
By now it would seem that the mainstream media would use a bit more discretion before screaming 'Russia!' inside of a crowded
planet every time a US computer system is hacked. After all, Russia is certainly not the only country in the world with a plethora
of adventure-seeking hackers sitting around bored in their underwear, nor is it the only country in the world that may be tempted
– theoretically speaking – to sneak a peek into Uncle Sam's software and, at the risk of sounding vulgar, hardware.
Just ask Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell, who allowed himself to be lured into a honey trap by a Chinese Communist spy named
– I kid you not – Fang Fang. Aside from making James Bond thrillers essential reading for all politicians, the Democrats may wish
to inquire how a member of the House INTELLIGENCE Committee fell for such a scheme. More to the point, however, Swalwell was one
of those deranged Democrats screaming 'Russian collusion!' at the height of the Mueller investigation, another waste of taxpayer
funds that turned up zero evidence of collusion between Trump and the Kremlin.
In conclusion, it is worth noting that the timing of the purported attack on SolarWinds, coming as it does just weeks before Inauguration
Day when Joe Biden is expected to be sworn in as the 46th POTUS, is extremely suspicious in of itself. Not only is there a power
struggle going on behind the scenes for the White House, with the Trump administration claiming the election was marred by massive
fraud, but Joe Biden's own son Hunter has been accused of influence-peddling in places like Ukraine and China.
The Biden family, naturally, has rejected the claims, while the media has practically buried the story. Meanwhile, Russia, much
like in 2016 when it was accused of hacking Hillary Clinton's emails, is being dragged into another American political drama, at
the most crucial time, without rhyme or reason. At least when it comes to Russia the media can take credit for being very predictable,
albeit absolutely reckless and dangerous in its tactics. Would it kill them to take five minutes off poking the Russian bear?
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
We are dealing with compound fraud but it is not clear how anyone gains an advantage when the propaganda against Russia has saturated
the public mind.
Fenianfromcork Bill Spence 5 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 08:45 PM
Simple magicians conjuring trick. Look here while Ido something else here.
DexterMont Bill Spence 9 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 05:19 PM
It's just self delusion in the American political class. No one else is paying any attention to it.
It's me 9 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 04:54 PM
Same old Same old, we don't have to prove Russians hacked the Election, because it was hacked. It's up to Russia to prove they
didn't hack the Election.
VaimacaPiru 7 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 06:55 PM
Mr Bridge! Your title should be more accurate! 'The Transnational Corporate Class that own the media sets US foreign policy' Thank
you!
Bill Spence VaimacaPiru 7 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 07:03 PM
Right now Donald Trump and Pompeo are setting the foreign policy not the transnational corporations who have no head. Generally
the CIA and State Department set foreign policy not those corporations. The CIA has a different point of view, the national security
point of view. Many of those corporations are happy trading with China. They have reached a contradictory position.
IslandT 2 hours ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:04 AM
According to the Trump administration, Russia is one of the actor behinds the dominion incident which helps Biden won the election,
so if Trump continue in power, he might sanction Russia. And now we have this hacking incident under Trump administration, if
you say this is a hoax and it comes from Biden camp, then this will not make sense at all because Biden has already won the election
so he does not needs to use any hoax to down Trump anymore. If Russia is indeed hacking then those previous anti-Trump FBI and
CIA directors should have used this as an issue to attack Russia and Trump before the election instead of creating the Afghan
hoax which has no prove at all (did USA has proved on the hack? Nobody knows)! The present director for both FBI and CIA are all
Trump men and thus I don't think Biden team is behinds this hacking incident hoax. I read the article and know that Trump team
(especially Mike Pompeo) calls for maximum punishment on Russia, Russia needs to prepare and to avoid the worst case scenario
before Biden takes power. I think there is no sense at all for deep state to hate Russia so much because all they want is profit,
it is time for Russia to have a friendly chat with all those parties that involve in Russia-Hate campaign. You can't get blamed
by everyone forever, this need to stop!
Jeffrey Perkins 9 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 05:00 PM
pentagon propoganda money can control the media in many ways
Atilla863 1 hour ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:50 AM
Just wonder why the EU politicians haven't joined the US - chorus yet condemning the Russians.
EthanCarterIII 1 hour ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:49 AM
Maybe they should put more time and effort into increasing their security instead of blaming people? It seems every other month
there's another story about hackers getting into the systems, and frankly they need to start looking in the mirror. Oh, but then
Hillary wants to be Secretary of Defense and left a private top secret server in her bathroom hacked by anybody and everybody,
so maybe it isn't so much "hacking" as incompetence?
dangood013 30 minutes ago 22 Dec, 2020 02:05 AM
Nakashima and other do not make stuff up. They just regurgitate what their National Security sources tell them upon penalty of
" losing access " to their precious sources.
Fuzzerbear 2 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 11:40 PM
oh no - not the Russians again. They are really bad bad bad - just as bad as Iran, Iraq, Syria . . . . . . .. Such a thorn for
the USA, Israel, the 5 lies, etc. How boring will the reality be without all the fake news.
liarof1776 3 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 11:10 PM
america is having ashkenazic genetic problem: paranoia
Atilla863 1 hour ago 22 Dec, 2020 12:36 AM
Don't worry Russia is ALWAYS the convenient scapegoat. What a shame American politicians and their supporters have turned out
to be!, life is meaningless without Russian phantoms. Sad
Solecismcles 7 hours ago 21 Dec, 2020 06:41 PM
Cowhorts: Warshington & most media; though more overtly when Dem's have Executive influence. However, so much scum is entrenched
throughout the bureaucracies that their evil lurks and preys regardless of which Party controls WH.
"... the media – playing judge, jury and executioner – has leveled blame on the usual suspect. ..."
"... Did anyone actually believe that Russia would escape a major US election season without a ceremonial tarring and feathering by the media? It's almost as though frantic journalists, unable to sell the 'Trump Beats Biden with Kremlin Collusion' narrative, have dreamt up this latest work of pulp fiction to keep the ball of 'Russian villainy' bouncing into the next US administration. Heaven forbid if the media just sat by and let protracted peace break out between Washington and Moscow. ..."
As incoming nominees of a future Biden administration have
stopped short in naming a culprit in the SolarWinds hack, the media – playing judge, jury and executioner – has leveled blame on
the usual suspect.
Did anyone actually believe that Russia would escape a major US election season without a ceremonial tarring and feathering by
the media? It's almost as though frantic journalists, unable to sell the 'Trump Beats Biden with Kremlin Collusion' narrative, have
dreamt up this latest work of pulp fiction to keep the ball of 'Russian villainy' bouncing into the next US administration. Heaven
forbid if the media just sat by and let protracted peace break out between Washington and Moscow.
The only information taken that rattles US.gov is how corrupt everyone is. The fear is having that become
irrefutably public,
flyonmywall 9 hours ago
Those Russkies really kick butt. They are everywhere these days.
Unknown User 8 hours ago
The Onion puts out less ridiculous stories than the US "intelligence" agencies.
Dzerzhhinsky 6 hours ago
The Chinese are in the dark because they won't buy Australian coal, the Russian
superhackers cracked the uncrackable Tradewinds123 password, and Iran is doing something
?
It's all a diversion, don't look at me look over there.
The intensity of the disinformation is directly related to the upcoming US collapse.
yewtee 2 hours ago
Will there be civil war ?
Lee Bertin 56 minutes ago
Have you not noticed that it has been going on for four years
BGen. Jack Ripper 9 hours ago
No enemy is more terrifying than the one in our midst.
Krinkle Sach 8 hours ago
🇮🇱💩🇮🇱💩🇮🇱
Whiteman_Sachs 9 hours ago
There is another headquarters in VA, specifically Langley that's more likely the intruder.
Imagine this....The penetration of this intrusion is so vast and widespread. Access to
hundreds of companies, contractors, military, ect. I doubt the a foreign entity could get so
far inside. Imagine if our new leader ship at the Def Dept decided to shut the backdoor.
Cutoff access to the bad actors a CIA. They've already closed off operational assistance to
the CIA. The response has been so predicable....Russia Russia blah blah. I think many things
are going on behind the scene. I think Trump is kneecapping his rivals on what could be the
way out.
thezone 9 hours ago
PLEASE remember MIT Romney and all the swamp elite decried Trump for firing Chris
Krebs.
Mr. 'there's never been a more secure' election.
Now we hear that Russia has owned government systems for a full year right under his
nose.
jwoop66 8 hours ago
I just spent two hours watching this. Krebs is in it talking about all the bad actors out
there trying to subvert our elections, and that its the first thing he thinks of in the
morning, and the last thing he thinks of before he goes to bed.
yes, and then he says "perfect election" within days. f'ing frauds.
That crap of an article brought me 2 or 3 minutes closer to death.
And hell doesn't want me, Satan has a restraining order.
DurdenRae 26 minutes ago
They don't really qualify for intelligence if they all they can come up with is that kind
of malarkey...
aberfoyle_crumplehausen 7 hours ago
As an average dude, I consider my initial thoughts and reactions to things typical of most
others. When I first heard of this latest 'Russian Hack' I instantly thought "so the
transition is almost here and they launch their first psyop".
So I am obviously not alone in my intuition and this means the media is becoming laughably
irrelevant to the common folk.
Babadook 7 hours ago
See what happens when you elect incompetent, inept fools to run your government, they only
appoint incompetent, inept fools to run the country's military, FBI & intel services.
sp0rkovite 7 hours ago
Barr is a democrat now?
You_Cant_Quit_Me 8 hours ago
Has anyone considered the US was simultaneously attacked with a biological weapon known as
Covid-19 and hacked around the same time frame? Maybe the US with its constant false
allegations against Russia has forced Russia to align with China making the US the common
enemy?
Russia was not behind the hack attack despite what we are being told. It is a false flag
with someone trying to frame Russia.
Kreditanstalt 8 hours ago
The other wing of The Party has its own "CHINA! CHINA! CHINA! propaganda campaign too
JackOliver4 8 hours ago (Edited)
They hate Russia because Russia tells the TRUTH !
Everything Russia says is well thought out and makes sense !
Once the US got away with the FAKE moon landing BS - they were enabled - sad !
I caught a glimpse of a 'Who wants to be a millionaire' episode - question was 'How many
people have walked on the MOON' ?
Apparently the answer is 12 !!
The brainwashing runs DEEP !!
RKKA 8 hours ago
It's not about who breaks the networks or who attacks Nord Stream 2. The fact is that
today's situation is even more explosive than during the Cold War.
The NATO alliance already borders on Russia and all the lines that were previously "red"
are not recognized by anyone, primarily by the West.
The situation, thanks to aggressive rhetoric and the movement of military units, has
become much more dangerous than it was during the Cold War.
This is confirmed by the German Foreign Minister. Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the
confrontation between the West and Russia much more dangerous than that which took place
between NATO countries and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Five_Black_Eyes_Intel_Agency 8 hours ago (Edited)
"intelligence" agencies
LOL
This is yet more squirming by an empire that looks increasingly bloated and its own worst
enemy. Good luck clowns, but you wouldn't know what to do with it.
Xena fobe 9 hours ago
Xiden doesn't know Russia exists. No, this is not being done to persuade Xiden.
Late onset ADHD 9 hours ago (Edited)
Without the 'right' enemy, a politician is a useless appendage.
transcendent_wannabe 5 minutes ago
This youtuber gives a pretty good insider view of what has occurred. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLhk_gqYaEg
US TREASURY HACKED because of SOLARWINDS You have to watch all the way to the end to get the
full picture.
Basically its our own good-ole-boy network of insiders stealing data to sell for money.
Yeah, can you believe that our esteemed coke-addicted elite class would sell out their own
country for cash? Heh, we always wanted full transparency in government, so now the data is
exposed. I would expect the future to be sprinkled with embarrassing data revelations used to
discredit various players. There has been too much secrecy in government anyways. Let the sun
shine in on all those secrets.
Lee Bertin 52 minutes ago
This is just a distraction, just smoke and mirrors. Do not lose focus on the game that is
played in front of your wide open eyes
"While targets of the SolarWinds hack included the U.S. Treasury Department and the
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), there is no complete
list of the government departments and agencies and U.S. companies compromised in the hack.
Bloomberg reported U.S. government departments targeted included the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), the State Department, the National Institute of Health (NIH) as well as
some parts of the Department of Defense were targeted in the hack. The New York Times
reported SolarWinds products are used throughout nearly all Fortune 500 companies,
including the New York Times itself. The New York Times also reported SolarWinds is used by
the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which designs nuclear weapons, and by Boeing, a major
U.S. defense contractor.
"Following the hack, the Verge reported SolarWinds deleted a list of high profile
clients from its website, though an archived copy of the client page states 425 of the
Fortune 500 companies use their products, as well as all branches of the U.S. military, the
National Security Agency (NSA), and even the Office of the President of the United States.
The company's software is also used by all of the top five U.S. accounting firms and
hundreds of colleges and universities around the world. It is not immediately clear if
these SolarWinds clients specifically used the affected products listed."
Since it now seems that the Dominion software used in the Nov. 3 presidential election
was, contrary to law, connected to the internet, can we be sure that the election itself was
unaffected?
As Hunter Biden would say: "Probably not."
apparently 5 hours ago
this is likely false, for the lack of specifics and associated journalist hot air.
amanfromMars 6 hours ago
Muddying the waters or clearing the air and the decks? With so many crazy actors dependent
upon the continued existence of mad fields, one does have to expand one's horizons and
include the full list of players in such great games. So ..... in praise of such a
realisation and sensible development ......
Quote: "From the quality of the threat design, the range of techniques used, and the
nature of its victims, this was a nation state at work and in MO and capabilities most
likely Russia."
*
Rewrite required: "From the quality of the threat design, the range of techniques used,
and the nature of its victims, this was a nation state at work. It could have been the
NSA, GCHQ, the Russians or the Chinese. In MO most likely the NSA." ....... Anonymous
Coward
You'll upset Israel if you leave them out of the picture, AC. And they'd love you to
think they are capable of such a show of remote force even as they deny it straight to your
face. They've built a tiny disparate nation upon such foundations. [More folk live in
London than in Israel. That's how small it is]
The thing is, if it is none of the above and no nation state, is it something of an
alien attack you didn't see coming, and that makes a lot of other vital things extremely
vulnerable to similar unexpected events which can effortlessly deliver major catastrophic
crises ....... flash market stock crashes.
It can be, and most probably more likely certainly is, given the fact there is no concrete
evidence available to pin on a suspect and scapegoats, a wholly new APT Adept ACTive genre of
disruptive mischief and creative destruction at ITs Work, Rest and Play.
"... Didn't the Germans say they found the Novichok on Navalny's water bottle? Now Russians trolling Navalny said they put it in his panties. How did the Novichok get from Navalny's panties to his water bottle? ..."
"... Thanks guys, this Navalny Novichok BS keeps getting stupider and stupider. First of all, an FSB agent is so stupid as to answer the phone from someone he doesn't know and has never heard of and spill the beans about the whole plot. I'm sure that intelligence agencies must have safeguards against enemy spies spoofing and pretending to be the agency's own people. No intelligence agency is that stupid, and the FSB is one of the best. ..."
"... Next, has anyone noticed Putin's reaction. Putin basically laughed and said, "Trust me, this guy is as insignificant as an ant. He's not even worth going to the trouble of poisoning," which is what we had hypothesized all along. ..."
"... The Russians ran a huge toxin screen and found no toxins. Yet somehow the Germans run an even fancier screen that includes "Novichok," which they find. ..."
"... Also recall that a high-ranking Polish official called the Germans to ask what was up with the Navalny Novichok thing, and he was told it was a fake attack done to implicate Russia in a depraved crime (most false flags have this M.O.). As I recall, the phone call was recorded by the Russians and played on TV. ..."
"... In addition, this "attack" came mysteriously right before the negotiations were to be finalized on the final length of Nordstream in Germany, out of which much Russian gas will flow and which they US is trying frantically to stop. ..."
The Navalny "poisoning" incident is turning into low farce.
In the meantime the Russians are expected to investigate the circumstances of Navalny's
poisoning and to admit that they are responsible for Navalny falling ill on the plane and
nearly dying from at least two botched poisoning attempts. How can the Russians do so, when
the Germans refuse to hand over materials and information relevant to the investigation, and
when the story keeps changing and becomes ever more fantastical?
In the meantime the Russians are expected to investigate the circumstances of Navalny's
poisoning and to admit that they are responsible for Navalny falling ill on the plane and
nearly dying from at least two botched poisoning attempts. How can the Russians do so, when
the Germans refuse to hand over materials and information relevant to the investigation, and
when the story keeps changing and becomes ever more fantastical?
Expected by whom??? Exactly......????
If Navalny is a convicted felon..... out on parole..... Russia should put out a red notice
on him... and demand his return to Russia for the purpose of completing his sentence...
or.... destroy him in his house together with his family.... at 0200....
Didn't the Germans say they found the Novichok on Navalny's water bottle? Now Russians
trolling Navalny said they put it in his panties. How did the Novichok get from Navalny's
panties to his water bottle?
On second thought, maybe it's best not to think to deeply about that.
Thanks guys, this Navalny Novichok BS keeps getting stupider and stupider. First of all, an FSB agent is so stupid as to answer the phone from someone he doesn't
know and has never heard of and spill the beans about the whole plot. I'm sure that
intelligence agencies must have safeguards against enemy spies spoofing and pretending to be
the agency's own people. No intelligence agency is that stupid, and the FSB is one of the
best.
Next, has anyone noticed Putin's reaction. Putin basically laughed and said, "Trust me,
this guy is as insignificant as an ant. He's not even worth going to the trouble of
poisoning," which is what we had hypothesized all along.
Has anyone else ever noticed the giveaway in all of these endless NATO, US, and British
false flags against Russia, Syria, etc. (mostly Russia) is that the story keeps changing?
When something actually happens, the story doesn't usually change with the breeze. But in
these provocations, lies, and false flags, the story changes every few weeks or so.
So far, Navalny was poisoned:
1. At the breakfast table in the airport in Russia
2. On the plane
3. Next, in his water bottle in his hotel room before the flight
4. And finally now, in his underwear!
Remember the man who invented Novichok said: It was made to be lethal, as lethal as an atomic weapon. It was never used anywhere and
set aside for history. A normal dose that would always be used, is the size of a grain of
salt. It kills the victim and anyone around him within minutes.
Navalny's symptoms did not resemble those of Novichok poisoning at all. In addition, even
if Navalny had taken 1/200th of the standard dose (and no one would do that), his pupils
would have been pinpointed when he woke up in the hospital, and they were not.
The Russians ran a huge toxin screen and found no toxins. Yet somehow the Germans run an
even fancier screen that includes "Novichok," which they find.
Also recall that a high-ranking Polish official called the Germans to ask what was up with
the Navalny Novichok thing, and he was told it was a fake attack done to implicate Russia in
a depraved crime (most false flags have this M.O.). As I recall, the phone call was recorded
by the Russians and played on TV.
In addition, this "attack" came mysteriously right before the negotiations were to be
finalized on the final length of Nordstream in Germany, out of which much Russian gas will
flow and which they US is trying frantically to stop.
"... The analysis the corporate press has relied on came from the private cyber-security firm FireEye. This question should be raised: Why has a private contractor at extra taxpayer expense carried out this cyber analysis rather than the already publicly-funded National Security Agency? ..."
"... Similarly, why did the private firm CrowdStrike, rather than the FBI, analyze the Democratic National Committee servers in 2016? ..."
"... Sanger is as active in blaming the Kremlin for hacking, as he and his erstwhile NYT colleague, neocon hero Judith Miller, were in insisting on the presence of (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, helping to facilitate a major invasion with mass loss of life. ..."
"... The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT, for short) needs credible "enemies" to justify unprecedentedly huge expenditures for arms -- the more so at a time when it is clearer than ever, that that the money would be far better spent at home. (MEDIA is in all caps because it is the sine-qua-non , the cornerstone to making the MICIMATT enterprise work.) ..."
"... Wasn't Fireeye the company that faced extremes of ridicule from the global IT community for trying to engage Hillary Clinton as their keynote speaker at a Cyber Defense Summit in 2019? ..."
"... Isn't this, just perhaps, precisely the fake news construct, planted in the minds of Americans ..."
"... As alluded to in the article, no-doubt part of the reason is because of the black-eye the intel agencies got (at least outside of The Beltway) in the 2003 Iraq WMDs debacle, which caused a lot of us (at least on the left-end of the political spectrum, who were already highly skeptical of US 'intelligence') to virtually completely disregard them as credible sources ..."
"... Not only will Americans be "stupid and or crazy enough" to believe this nonsense, but they will also attack anyone who questions their belief as a Putin apologist or conspiracy theorist. ..."
"... Always with the same mouthpieces, the same backdated investigations, the unnamed "official" sources. Phooey! ..."
"... The naked fear-mongering has become the stuff of jokes. I had a good laugh with my friends (over the phone) taking apart an article in the Guardian that claimed that Putin had surrounded himself with KGB agents. The article didn't mention that the KGB (and the USSR) have not existed in over a quarter century. Foreign policy narratives are great for laughs, ridicule, and satire. Too bad most so-called journalists are too ignorant or intellectually dishonest to come clean. ..."
Neither the actor, nor the motive, nor the damage done is known for certain in this
latest scare story, write Ray McGovern and Joe Lauria.
The hyperbolic, evidence-free media reports on the "fresh outbreak" of the Russian-hacking
disease seems an obvious attempt by intelligence to handcuff President-elect Joe Biden into a
strong anti-Russian posture as he prepares to enter the White House. Biden might well need to be inoculated against the Russophobe fever.
There are obvious Biden intentions worrying the intelligence agencies, such as renewing the
Iran nuclear deal and restarting talks on strategic arms limitation with Russia. Both carry the
inherent "risk" of thawing the new Cold War.
Instead, New Cold Warriors are bent on preventing any such rapprochement with strong support
from the intelligence community's mouthpiece media. U.S. hardliners are clearly still on the
rise.
Interestingly, this latest hack story came out a day before the Electoral College formally
elected Biden, and after the intelligence community, despite numerous previous warnings, said
nothing about Russia interfering in the election. One wonders whether that would have been the
assessment had Trump won.
Instead Russia decided to hack the U.S. government.
Except there is (typically) no hard evidence pinning it on Moscow.
Uncertainties
The official
story is Russia hacked into U.S. "government networks, including in the Treasury and
Commerce Departments," as David Sanger of The New York Times
reported.
But plenty of things are uncertain. First, Sanger wrote last Sunday that "hackers have had
free rein for much of the year, though it is not clear how many email and other systems they
chose to enter."
The motive of the hack is uncertain, as well what damage may have been done.
"The motive for the attack on the agency and the Treasury Department remains elusive, two
people familiar with the matter said," Sanger reported. "One government official said it was
too soon to tell how damaging the attacks were and how much material was lost."
Sanger. (Wikimedia Commons)
On Friday, five days after the story first broke, in an
article misleadingly headlined, "Suspected Russian hack is much worse than first feared,"
NBC News admitted:
" At this stage, it's not clear what the hackers have done beyond accessing top-secret
government networks and monitoring data."
Who conducted the hack is also not certain.
NBC reported that the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency "has not said
who it thinks is the 'advanced persistent threat actor' behind the 'significant and ongoing'
campaign, but many experts are pointing to Russia."
At first Sanger was certain in his piece that Russia was behind the attack. He refers to
FireEye, "a computer security firm that first raised the alarm about the Russian campaign after
its own systems were pierced." But later in the same piece, Sanger loses his certainty: "If the Russia connection is
confirmed," he writes.
In the absence of firm evidence that damage has been done, this may well be an intrusion
into other governments' networks routinely carried out by intelligence agencies around the
world, including, if not chiefly, by the United States. It is what spies do. So neither the actor, nor the motive, nor the damage done is known for certain.
Yet across the vast networks of powerful U.S. media the story has been portrayed as a major
crisis brought on by a sinister Russian attack putting the security of the American people at
risk.
In a second piece on Wednesday, Sanger
added to the alarm by saying the hack "ranks among the greatest intelligence failures of
modern times." And on Friday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
claimed Russia was "pretty clearly" behind the cyber attacks. But he cautioned: " we're
still unpacking precisely what it is, and I'm sure some of it will remain classified." In other
words, trust us.
Ed Loomis, a former NSA technical director, believes the suspect list should extend beyond
Russia to include China, Iran, and North Korea. Loomis also says the commercial cyber-security
firms that have been studying the latest "attacks" have not been able to pinpoint the
source.
Tom Bossert (Office of U.S. Executive)
In a New York Timesop-ed , former Trump domestic security
adviser Thomas Bossert on Wednesday called on Trump to "use whatever leverage he can muster to
protect the United States and severely punish the Russians." And he said Biden "must begin his
planning to take charge of this crisis."
[On Friday, Biden talked tough. He promised there would be "costs" and said: "A good defense
isn't enough; we need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant
cyberattacks in the first place. I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber-assaults on our
nation."]
While asserting throughout his piece that, without question, Russia now "controls" U.S.
government computer networks, Bossert's confidence suddenly evaporates by slipping in at one
point, "If it is Russia."
The analysis the corporate press has relied on came from the private cyber-security firm
FireEye. This question should be raised: Why has a private contractor at extra taxpayer expense
carried out this cyber analysis rather than the already publicly-funded National Security
Agency?
Similarly, why did the private firm CrowdStrike, rather than the FBI, analyze the Democratic
National Committee servers in 2016?
Could it be to give government agencies plausible deniability if these analyses, as in the
case of CrowdStrike, and very likely in this latest case of Russian "hacking," turn out to be
wrong? This is a question someone on the intelligence committees should be asking.
Sanger is as active in blaming the Kremlin for hacking, as he and his erstwhile NYT
colleague, neocon hero Judith Miller, were in insisting on the presence of (non-existent)
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, helping to facilitate a major invasion with mass loss of
life.
The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex
(MICIMATT, for short) needs credible "enemies" to justify unprecedentedly huge expenditures for
arms -- the more so at a time when it is clearer than ever, that that the money would be far
better spent at home. (MEDIA is in all caps because it is the sine-qua-non , the
cornerstone to making the MICIMATT enterprise work.)
Bad Flashback
In this latest media flurry, Sanger and other intel leakers' favorites are including as
"flat fact" what "everybody knows": namely, that Russia hacked the infamous Hillary
Clinton-damaging emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
Sanger wrote:
" the same group of [Russian] hackers went on to invade the systems of the Democratic
National Committee and top officials in Hillary Clinton's campaign, touching off
investigations and fears that permeated both the 2016 and 2020 contests. Another, more
disruptive Russian intelligence agency, the G.R.U., is believed to be responsible for then
making public the hacked emails at the D.N.C."
That accusation was devised as a magnificent distraction after the Clinton campaign learned
that WikiLeaks was about to publish emails that showed how Clinton and the DNC had
stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders. It was an emergency solution, but it had uncommon
success.
There was no denying the authenticity of those DNC emails published by WikiLeaks . So
the Democrats mounted an artful campaign, very strongly supported by Establishment media, to
divert attention from the content of the emails. How to do that? Blame Russian
"hacking." And for good measure, persuade then Senator John McCain to call it an "act of
war."
One experienced observer, Consortium News columnist Patrick Lawrence,
saw
through the Democratic blame-Russia offensive from the start.
Artful as the blame-Russia maneuver was, many voters apparently saw through this clever and
widely successful diversion, learned enough about the emails' contents, and decided not to vote
for Hillary Clinton.
4 Years & 7 Days Ago
Henry at the International Security Forum, Vancouver, 2009.
(Hubert K, Flickr)
On Dec. 12, 2016, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) used sensitive
intelligence revealed by Edward Snowden, the expertise of former NSA technical directors, and
basic principles of physics to show that accusations that Russia hacked those embarrassing DNC
emails were fraudulent.
A year later, on Dec. 5, 2017, Shawn Henry, the head of CrowdStrike, the cyber firm hired by
the DNC to do the forensics,
testified under oath that there was no technical evidence that the emails had been
"exfiltrated"; that is, hacked from the DNC.
His testimony was kept hidden by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff until
Schiff was forced to release it on May 7, 2020. That testimony is still being kept under
wraps by Establishment media.
What VIPS wrote four years ago is worth re-reading -- particularly for those who still
believe in science and have trusted the experienced intelligence professionals of VIPS with the
group's unblemished, no-axes-to-grind record.
Most of the Memorandum
's embedded links are to TOP SECRET charts that Snowden made available -- icing on the cake --
and, as far as VIPS's former NSA technical directors were concerned, precisely what was to be
demonstrated QED .
Many Democrats unfortunately still believe–or profess to believe–the hacking and
the Trump campaign-Russia conspiracy story, the former debunked by Henry's testimony and the
latter by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Both were legally obligated to tell the truth, while
the intelligence agencies were not.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a Russian specialist and presidential briefer during
his 27 years as a CIA analyst. In retirement he co-created Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS).
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief ofConsortium Newsand a former UN
correspondent forThe Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe,
and numerous other newspapers. He was an investigative reporter for theSunday
Timesof London and began his professional career as a stringer forThe
New York Times.He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter
@unjoe .
PleaseContributeto Consortium News' 25th Anniversary Winter Fund Drive
robert e williamson jr , December 21, 2020 at 10:30
I listened as the mouth piece talked about how very good the Rouskies were at this hacking
thing.
Takes me back to the days of Bill Hamilton when the U.S. government stole his PROMIS
software during the INSLAW Octopus scandal something Bill Barr was said to be involved in
BTW.
Seems the idea of secret back doors in software that allowed the users to be monitored was
very popular. So popular in fact that our government reps from DOJ and NSA quickly allowed
the Israelis to have it. ????????????? I mean our government still trusts Lyin' BeeBEE.
?????????????
If you know nothing of this story wiki it and then start you research on the history of
what all happened and when.
The first two places to look for these hackers are inside the U.S. and Israeli
governments. Maybe this is why the intelligence community is loath to give us any real proof,
you know that computer forensics stuff.
The U.S. governments love affair with Israel is killing our democracy.
As for Putti, he is still be winning even when his shill Trump lost.
Ray, Joe great stuff and an expose' on what happens when lies go unchallenged and become
accepted as truth.
Thanks CN you must make Robert very proud.
PEACE
DH Fabian , December 21, 2020 at 09:39
Maybe we could launch a fund-raising campaign to purchase some anti-malware software for
the government's (obviously unsecured) computers. If possible, we could raise enough money to
hire a teacher to instruct them on basic computer security. (Thrifty suggestion: Hire some
local high school teens). Apparently, some kids in Russia made a hobby of hacking into the
Pentagon, itself (I know this, because I just made it up), so on Monday, we need to launch
this story on MSNBC, the official media of the New Democrat Party.
You might want to remind people that Putin had made an offer to Obama in 2009 to negotiate
a treaty to ban cyberwar, which the US rejected. See
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/world/28cyber.html , U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for
Cyberspace
Thanks for this important article! Alice Slater
zhu , December 21, 2020 at 06:38
Was there any "hack" at all?
DH Fabian , December 21, 2020 at 09:45
Hacking attempts are routine, daily, and nearly always business-related. Few succeed, but
when they do, it can be quite lucrative (until they're tracked down and arrested). Beyond
that, the US has maintained its lead in efforts to hack into security computers of foreign
countries. Of course, governments throughout history have used whatever tools they had, to
track other governments, usually for their own security against aggressor states.
Tina Weiser , December 20, 2020 at 21:28
When I first heard of this Russian hacking and the story about Trump cavorting w Russians,
I intuitively knew it was wrong and made up. It sounded too simplistic. What I can't fathom
is how the public swallowed it. I didn't and a few friends didn't, but most folks did.
Gerald , December 20, 2020 at 17:32
Maybe it was the Russians, sending a message to Uncle Joe and the Dems, quite brilliant
actually. It says, 'we own you' 'we know everything about you' and 'we can destroy you should
you want a war' The Dems and Washington generally have been living in their own child like
bubble for way too long, they need waking up and showing how far behind they are, military,
technically and of course something we've all known a long time, morally. No damage was done
during the hack (oh they could have been lots of damage) nothing was taken, or maybe not
much. It was a warning and a wake up call, that's all it needed to be. Now we proceed to the
negotiating table for START and maybe the Russians know a whole lot more than the US wishes
it did. Putins press conference was quite interesting last week, normally he is quite shy
about upsetting his 'western partners' this year he pulled no punches. When asked if it was
true that Russian could destroy America in 30 minutes he replied 'No, actually quicker' and
when goaded by the idiot BBC reporter about the farcical MI6 Navalny escapade, he said 'If
the security services wanted Navalny dead he already would be'. Times are a changing. Things
are warming up a little and the US are on the ropes in all spheres.
DH Fabian , December 21, 2020 at 09:50
No. I think most Americans today would be "outraged" to know how little interest Russia
has in today's US. They had turned to the East years ago. The "dirty little secret" is that
as the Western (US/UK) empire has been sinking for some years, most of the world has turned
its attention Eastward (China, now Russia), as the light guiding the international community
into the future.
Yes, and it seems, if anything, a large-scale effort to collect information, not to damage
anything.
Collecting information about others is what America's NSA, CIA, FBI, and other massive
agencies do around the clock. Ditto, Britain's GCHQ and MI6.
The word "attack" only puts an unduly harsh name to the matter. I think it fair to say it
is in keeping with America's now-always aggressive tone towards Russia, China, Iran, and
others.
And still, we have no information at all about who is responsible with Trump claiming
China and Pompeo claiming Russia, while neither of them has any information to support what
he is saying. Israel is just as likely as any other candidate to be responsible for this. The US intelligence community recognizes Israel in private as extremely aggressive at
collecting information.
Its name of course does not come up in our sanitized press, and if it proves true that it
is responsible, we'll never see it reported.
Meanwhile, just as in the case of Skripal or Navalny, great fun can be had with
Russia.
Realist , December 20, 2020 at 05:01
If any of Washington's designated enemies are NOT attempting to constantly monitor the
byzantine genuine operative policies of America's Deep State they are being totally remiss.
If all they had to go on were the strident public policies expressed and enacted by our
leaders they would surely feel existentially threatened and compelled to launch defensive
military actions just to preserve the continuity of their civilisations. Washington's endless
effluvia of formal pronouncements, accusations, economic sanctions and provocative troop
deployments fairly beg for the occasional miscalculation of a bellicose parry or
counterpunch. Our chosen enemies need to know our real intentions and capabilities to
PRECLUDE such eventualities. Moreover, the geeks in our cadre of spooks have been at the same
game for the same reasons rather longer than theirs. It's probably safe to say we invented
the game.
By way of example, Joe Biden constantly talks of making Russia "pay a price" for some list
of imaginary offenses against American "interests," of which Special Prosecutor Mueller could
not conjure up one example after nearly three years of investigation. If anyone "hacked the
vote" last month, it was sure not the Russians who made Sleepy Joe the most popular president
with the highest vote total ever elected. Talk about the implausible transformed into the new
reality. Take another example, Mike Morell, probably the incoming head of the CIA, has on
multiple occasions spoke of the need to "make Russians bleed" for attempting to limit the
death and chaos inflicted upon Syria by American foreign policy and its cultivated
mercenaries going by a different nom de guerre each week. JC did tell us that strange changes
will happen in the vineyard, apparently even al Qaeda can reconcile with Uncle Sam. In the
absence of detailed reliable information regarding the veracity of such narratives, President
Putin (or Xi, or Rouhani) might feel constrained to be less tolerant, more aggressive and
quicker to react against what can only be described as mostly baseless and far too numerous
hostile American provocations. The bully struts around with a chip the size of a redwood on
his shoulder. No one antagonizes him, they mostly try to give the crazy fellow a wide berth
while keeping a vigilant eye on him. What's truly unfortunate is that Stephan F. Cohen is no
longer on this Earth to keep the American public apprised of such truths, not that this
world's most informed man on these subjects got any recent media exposure in the present
climate of unhinged Russophrenia.
Tom Partridge , December 20, 2020 at 03:55
We know that governments and intelligence agencies tell us lies all the time. Lies that
have justified the instigation of wars and lies that have precipitated wars by default. All
of this is well documented in the written word and yet we continue to be fooled by the self
same lies. Shame on us, but when the Doomsday Clock strikes midnight, it will be too late,
there will be no one left to document the lies, there will be no more lies, instead there
will be, just silence.
Eileen Coles , December 20, 2020 at 00:01
Wasn't Fireeye the company that faced extremes of ridicule from the global IT community
for trying to engage Hillary Clinton as their keynote speaker at a Cyber Defense Summit in
2019?
michael888 , December 19, 2020 at 23:20
While I appreciate your article and agree with your conclusions, you are a voice crying in
the wilderness or at least in a small bubble of like-minded people.
There is a part of the brain which is based on evidence-free, faith-based beliefs, and while
religious impulses can be good (sometimes debatable), there is also a strong fear and hatred
of the Other, and Russia has been elevated by Hillary, the DNC, the Intelligence Agencies,
and the Establishment as the only acceptable Bogeyman. It is socially unacceptable to attack
Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, or Chinese (remember "Hug a Chinaman!" at the critical
juncture where Covid-19 could have been stopped by shutting borders in mid-January as Asian
countries did?), but the RUSSIANS!! are an acceptable target of vitriol (even though the
Clintons and any of our other politicians will quickly take $500,000 from Putin as the
Clintons did when Hillary was Secretary of State in 2010). Calling someone a Russian asset,
as our CIA has done repeatedly, can destroy people's careers, and minimally untrack their
criticisms.
Software generally has intentional backdoors (Ghislaine Maxwell's father made a career of
selling such software so Israel could monitor their customers). We don't get much software
from Russia! China is economically and politically a bigger threat, though like Israel
probably monitoring rather than interfering through their software (which is probably the
rule for all Intelligence Agencies). However 12 year olds can probably get into these same
program backdoors, hacking is a hobby for many.
The use of non-government companies to do to questionable work is akin to big corporations
bringing in consultants; scapegoats when things go wrong!
GMCasey , December 19, 2020 at 22:44
It's very difficult to believe a lot of what passes for news in America. For example, I
always thought that if the hacking of Hillary ever happened, it was because when she was SOS,
she refused to go into a secure room to make important calls. Instead , she stood in the
hallway, but didn't want to go into the secure room. Add to that, the use of a personal
computer at her home, keeping all kinds of her government information on it , which was also
being sent to her associate's husband's computer.
I also wondered why the Russians were blamed for poisoning spies in the UK -- - spies
traded a decade before -- especially since exchanged spies lived near where the UK's poison
center was. This was supposed to be an attempt to poison 2 Russians, and this latest Russia
news story seems just as silly. I am sure that any decent spy from any nation who decided to
poison a person -- than it would be done.
I am wondering why America seems to be living back in the 1950s when that McCarthy person
was making havoc with creating so many
untruths in major media -- it's sad that myself, and many others no longer believe a lot of
the major media news -- and that is a sad state for a in a said- to- be democratic
republic
Em Sos , December 19, 2020 at 21:39
Re: "A Pandemic of 'Russian Hacking'"
Isn't this, just perhaps, precisely the fake news construct, planted in the minds of
Americans, by Trump, to which he may now turn, as his last-ditch pretext, to protect the
National Security interests of the State; by attempting to declare Martial Law, at the last
moment, just prior to January 20th 2021?
Eddie S , December 19, 2020 at 18:43
Good article! Especially the mentioning of the VERY 'convenient' timing of the latest 'Red
Scare', vis-a-vis the upcoming transition to a new POTUS who has made vague references to
modest moves towards cooling down the Cold War II (which I have little-faith will happen
anyway, given the Biden cabinet picks). Also the excellent point about these reports
apparently coming from private organizations as opposed to the massive US intelligence
agencies (ie; the 17 agencies in the USG doing intelligence work, with the CIA & NSA
being two of the largest) -- WTF are we funding them with multi-billion dollar budgets for so
that they can quote some private start-up intel-groups??
As alluded to in the article,
no-doubt part of the reason is because of the black-eye the intel agencies got (at least
outside of The Beltway) in the 2003 Iraq WMDs debacle, which caused a lot of us (at least on
the left-end of the political spectrum, who were already highly skeptical of US
'intelligence') to virtually completely disregard them as credible sources for anything other
than a right-wing indicator.
All the major powers spy on each other, and some of the minor ones too, and sometimes it's on
putative allies (ie; recall the controversy a number of years ago when Israel was caught
spying/bugging US transmissions I don't recall any bluster about THAT being 'an act of
war!'). And I not-too-long-ago read how there are constant, daily attempts by numerous
entities (most suspected to be private scammers) attempt to hack computers & networks of
ALL users (government, business, NGO's, private parties) -- it's ongoing 'background noise'.
And while we should all be strengthening our computer defenses against these intrusions,
let's be very skeptical when someone pulls 'something' (reputedly) out of that background
noise and hysterically proclaims it to be so MAJOR EVENT.
Theo , December 20, 2020 at 09:21
I agree. There was an interesting article on the Theamericanconservative.com under the
title " The Russian Cyber Pearl Harbor that wasn't ". Some time ago in Germany the computers
of big insurance companies were hacked and huge amounts of personal data of the clients were
stolen. Big issue in Germany. Russia was the top suspect. It turned out that the bad guy was
a teenage German school boy living peacefully with his parents. He was found very quickly
because he didn't cover up his trails in the web. He didn't do it for money or political
reasons. He did it just for fun and to proof to himself: Yes I can. Now he faces a prison
term.
Eric Arnow , December 19, 2020 at 16:30
The real story here is not the latest eye roller, here-we-go-again, episode of Russo
phobia, but the likelihood that majority of the Washington Consensus, and more likely, the
American people will be stupid enough or crazy enough or both, to believe this.
David , December 21, 2020 at 10:12
Not only will Americans be "stupid and or crazy enough" to believe this nonsense, but they
will also attack anyone who questions their belief as a Putin apologist or conspiracy
theorist. I'm deeply appreciative of Ray's and Joe's insights but Michael888 is right. His
voice is a "cry in the wilderness" which is "heard only by a small bubble of like minded
people." I admire his perseverance in the face of that harsh reality. Thank you, Ray and
Joe.
Robert Emmett , December 19, 2020 at 16:19
Always with the same mouthpieces, the same backdated investigations, the unnamed
"official" sources. Phooey!
Maybe while the propaganda is being propagated & then catapulted into the public
realm, nobody in "official" media remembers to check vault 7 for the inevitable Cyrillic
fingerprints until it's too late? Oops!
And "artful maneuver"? Yeah, maybe if you mean kindergarten art. Or perhaps it's a forgery
that depends on millions of uncritical viewers' unquestioning acceptance of a fake rationale
for unbinding Biden so he can veer from a direction that he never intended to follow in the
first place?
Jonny James , December 19, 2020 at 12:01
We are thankful that CN continues the tradition of Robert Parry to debunk the New Cold War
propaganda. The Russia Hysteria (New Red Scare without "the Reds") is a pathetic and
transparent attempt to manipulate public opinion.
The naked fear-mongering has become the stuff of jokes. I had a good laugh with my friends
(over the phone) taking apart an article in the Guardian that claimed that Putin had
surrounded himself with KGB agents. The article didn't mention that the KGB (and the USSR)
have not existed in over a quarter century. Foreign policy narratives are great for laughs,
ridicule, and satire. Too bad most so-called journalists are too ignorant or intellectually
dishonest to come clean.
Russia did not want to end the ABM treaty, the INF treaty etc. etc. but of course it was
the US who shredded all the treaties. The US has engaged in massive illegal activity with
impunity: fomenting coups, meddling heavily in the affairs of other nations, war crimes etc.
The US appears now to be a desperate rogue empire, pathetically clutching at notions of Full
Spectrum Dominance. No informed person should believe this latest Russia narrative – it
is ridiculous on multiple levels, just as Mr. Lauria and McGovern have outlined.
To underline the utter silliness of the narrative: my handle has become "Jonski
Jamesovich" (a common Russian name lol) and I introduce myself as a Russian Agent. I know
it's puerile and silly but that's the level of discourse we are dealing with. This
intelligence-insulting BS has grown tiresome already. My British friends and I "take the
piss" (ridicule) the narratives: the comedy material is written for us!
Realist , December 20, 2020 at 05:53
Jonny, I think your Russian name would be Ivan. Jamesovich if your father's name is James.
Your piece is brilliant.
A great characterisation of America for what it has become during my life of 73 years: an
outlaw state. What Reagan used to call an "evil empire," by which he meant the Soviet Union.
I'm sure he thought that he and Gorbachev had achieved a lasting peace between Russia and the
US. They came within an eyelash of eliminating all nukes.
The so-called "realists" in the
deep state would not allow that, but did leave several nuclear nonproliferation treaties in
place, which our foolish contemporaries have trashed. Would he be shocked if he could be
reanimated! The first step to putting things right again would be for Europe to stop enabling
Washington's warmongering in every corner of the world and to disband NATO, the biggest
threat to world peace after the US federal government.
Relentlessly, you go to stories in the New York Times. Like a dog returning to its excrement.
Everybody knows it's an intelligence shill. Why do you bother? There are far more important
things you could be reporting on.
"... In the issue of information security generally, including cyber-security and cyber-defence, it seems that there is one rule for the US and another for everyone else ..."
"... The US knows only one thing, and that is psychopathic schoolyard bullying. To have to work together with other nations, to have to accept other nations' rights to information and security, to recognise the need for compromise and continuous negotiation: all this is beyond the US ability to understand. ..."
"... Treaties would help no doubt but the only real solution is to not put things you want kept private on the internet. The internet is to publish stuff, not to store stuff securely. ..."
"... usa is not agreement capable.. they prove this time and time again, so any proposals of an agreement in any area is not realistic.. it is unfortunate.. ..."
"... the media will continue to be the service provider for the intel agencies and say whatever they want to say.. facts are irrelevant.. it is beyond naive to think that anything that gets said in the usa msm ( russia did it and etc. etc. ) have any relevance or value... ..."
"... the Wikileaks Vault 7 materials show clearly the US has tools to pin cybercrime on its 'enemies'. One thing we know for sure and that is the US government has one enemy above all others: the truth. ..."
"... The most obvious scenario is hiding in plain sight: FireEye is an corporation selling a defective, inferior product to the USG. To cut corners, it must employ a legion of non-unionized private contractors, who are a workforce of inferior quality and much lower morale (as they receive much lower salaries). In order to cut even more corners, most of these private contractors must receive a light version of clearance process, and must be more loosely managed. ..."
"... The USA is plagued with private contractors. They were the weapon of choice of the American capitalists and the USG to kill the unions and lower the value of the American labor power. When a random American tells you he/she works for, e.g. Microsoft, chances are he/she actually works for a private contractor who works for Microsoft - it's a process I like to call "domestic outsourcing": a process where, through political and structural reforms, the capitalist class of a given nation precarizes its own national labor power without literally exporting it to another country (e.g. telemarketing to India). ..."
"... enemy #1 of humanity are the global private finance elite, not Russia , nor China. ..."
"... I know quite a bit about those outages in Venezuela. I assure you that they were very well-planned. The people who did it were Venezuelan exiles in Canada and Houston, Texas (a lot of the opposition moved to Houston in addition to Miami). ..."
"... Is any evidence offered that there was any hack at all? Is the entire thing a fully fabricated false flag, yet another, in service of taking Nord Stream 2 down? ..."
"... Also note that the providers of the software are entirely responsible for making it easy to hack. As a software engineer, I have tried in vain for decades to convince companies producing critical infrastructure equipment to not use internet administration links, because they are not only hackable, but the encryption codes all have backdoors for "security" agencies. ..."
"... So no doubt SolarWinds did just that, got hacked by anybody anywhere, and is looking for an excuse to avoid losing their contract. ..."
"... The Germans and the Americans decided that it was worth to risk the entire German SCADA business to sting Iran and later Venezuela. Because that was what those attacks, in the absence of Iranian or Venezuelan capitulation meant, harm to German bussiness for no strategic gains. ..."
"... Ultimately, making a single software product secure will only achieve limited gains: Those gains evaporate in an instant one some junior cablemonkey plugs a secure server into the public DMZ using the wrong network interface. ..."
"... Where was the firewall admin in all this? Where was the Network administrator with his routing policies? ..."
"... Why, when SolarWinds has been a gaping security hole for more than 2 decades is it now all of a sudden the gateway for a massive attack from a foreign power? Shouldn't it have been a continuous vulnerability all along? By now, every vulnerable internet facing SW installation would have been wiped out ages ago due to the frequency of automated attacks carried out against infrastructure in general. ..."
"... We all know Micro$oft, Google, FB, Whatsapp, Instagram, ... are feeding US and Zionist intelligence agencies with all type of informations. Any international treaty on cyber-security would under this conditions be obsolete from the beginning. ..."
"... But it's just naive to think that CIA, NSA, Mossad are going to respect any international agreement in any area. Stuxnet virus and it's intrusion of the Iranian nuclear facilities or sabotage of Venezuelan power-grid facilities were not made by China, Russia or North Korea. ..."
"... These large, complicated, very expensive software "management" packages are largely butt-covering, to protect management from the threat of "doing nothing" when things go wrong. Some nice kickbacks in it too. ..."
"... I remember one "configuration management" package that was practically an operating system all by itself and absolutely a waste of time. Network management even more so. ..."
"... I haven't seen this level of propaganda since the buildup to the second Iraq war. They are obviously planning more aggression against Russia and have to keep the public at a fever pitch to get away with it. ..."
December 19, 2020 To Blame Russia For Cyber-Intrusions Is
Delusional - A Treaty Is The Only Way To Prevent More Damage
The New York Times continues to provide anti-Russian propaganda and to incite against
it:
Pompeo
Says Russia Was Behind Cyberattack on U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is the first member of the Trump administration to publicly
link the Kremlin to the hacking of dozens of government and private systems.
The first paragraph:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday it was clear that Russia was behind the widespread
hacking of government systems that officials this week called "a grave risk" to the United
States.
That is a quite definite statement.
But it is very wrong. Pompous did not say "that it was clear that Russia was behind" the IT
intrusions.
The third paragraph in the NYT story, which casual readers will miss, quotes Pompous
and there he does not say what the Times opener claims:
"I think it's the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians
that engaged in this activity," Mr. Pompeo said in an interview on "The Mark Levin Show."
Merriam Webster 's definition of 'pretty' as an adverb is "in some
degree : moderately". The example it gives is "pretty cold weather". The temperature of pretty
cold weather on a July day in Cairo obviously differs from the temperature of pretty cold
weather during a December night in Siberia. "Pretty xxx" It is a relative expression, not an
assertion of absolute facts.
The first paragraph of the Times statement tries to sell a vague statement as an
factual claim.
Moreover - Pompous finds it amusing that the CIA lies, steals and cheats (vid). As a former
CIA director he has not refrained from those habits. Whenever Pompous says something about a
perceived U.S. 'enemy' it safe to assume that it he does not state the truth.
Contradicting his secretary of state and other top officials, President Donald Trump on
Saturday suggested without evidence that China -- not Russia -- may be behind the cyberattack
against the United States and tried to minimized its impact.
Trump AND Pompous both made their contradicting assertions "without evidence".
It is
inappropriate for the media to accuse Russia - or China - of the recently discovered
cyber-intrusion when there is zero evidence to support such a claim.
The Times did that at least twice without having any evidence to support the
claim:
The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for
six to nine months. The Russian S.V.R. will surely have used its access to further exploit
and gain administrative control over the networks it considered priority targets.
...
While all indicators point to the Russian government, the United States, and ideally its
allies, must publicly and formally attribute responsibility for these hacks. If it is Russia,
President Trump must make it clear to Vladimir Putin that these actions are unacceptable. The
U.S. military and intelligence community must be placed on increased alert; all elements of
national power must be placed on the table.
Where are the carriers? Man the guns! Put the nukes to Def Con 1!
The situation is developing, but the more I learn this could be our modern day, cyber
equivalent of Pearl Harbor.
This is lunatic. From all we know so far the so called 'hack' was a quite nifty
cyber-intrusion for the sole purpose of gathering information. The intrusion has, as far as we
know, not even reached any systems on the specially protected 'secret' networks. This was a
normal spying operation, not an attack. To compare it to a deadly military attack like Pearl
Harbor is
self-delusional nonsense :
The lack of self-awareness in these and similar reactions to the Russia breach is astounding.
The U.S. government has no principled basis to complain about the Russia hack, much less
retaliate for it with military means, since the U.S. government hacks foreign government
networks on a huge scale every day. Indeed, a military response to the Russian hack would
violate international law. The United States does have options, but none are terribly
attractive.
The news reports have emphasized that the Russian operation thus far appears to be purely
one of espionage -- entering systems quietly, lurking around, and exfiltrating information of
interest. Peacetime government-to-government espionage is as old as the international system
and is today widely practiced, especially via electronic surveillance. It can cause enormous
damage to national security, as the Russian hack surely does. But it does not violate
international law or norms.
...
Because of its own practices, the U.S. government has traditionally accepted the legitimacy
of foreign governmental electronic spying in U.S. government networks. After the notorious
Chinese hack of the Office of Personnel Management database, then-Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper said: "You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did.
If we had the opportunity to do that, I don't think we'd hesitate for a minute."
One can not spy on other countries and then complain when they do something similar to
oneself. Responding by waging destruction against another country's IT systems only guarantees
that there will be a response in kind. If one wants to avert cyber-espionage and cyber-attacks
there is only one way out.
We do not know if Israel, China, Russia or someone else is responsible for the recently
discovered intrusion. But it is safe to assume that Russia's SVR is working on comparable
projects just like the spy services of most other countries do.
But Russia has, in contrast to others, for years asked for bi-lateral treaties to prohibit
malicious cyber operations. In September President Putin again offered one :
One of today's major strategic challenges is the risk of a large-scale confrontation in the
digital field. A special responsibility for its prevention lies on the key players in the
field of ensuring international information security (IIS). In this regard, we would like to
once again address the US with a suggestion to agree on a comprehensive program of practical
measures to reboot our relations in the field of security in the use of information and
communication technologies (ICTs).
...
Third. To jointly develop and conclude a bilateral intergovernmental agreement on preventing
incidents in the information space similarly to the Soviet-American Agreement on the
Prevention of Incidents On and Over the High Seas in force since 25 May 1972.
...
We call on the US to greenlight the Russian-American professional expert dialogue on IIS
without making it a hostage to our political disagreements.
Even conservative U.S. lawyers agree with Putin that such a
treaty is the only way to protect the U.S. from potentially damaging operations:
Despite many tens of billions of dollars spent on cyber defense and deterrence and Defend
Forward prevention, and despite one new strategy after another, the United States has failed
miserably for decades in protecting its public and private digital networks. What it
apparently has not done is to ask itself, in a serious way, how its aggressive digital
practices abroad invite and justify digital attacks and infiltrations by our adversaries, and
whether those practices are worth the costs. Relatedly, it has not seriously considered the
traditional third option when defense and deterrence fail in the face of a foreign threat:
mutual
restraint , whereby the United States agrees to curb certain activities in foreign
networks in exchange for forbearance by our adversaries in our networks. There are many
serious hurdles to making such cooperation work, including precise agreement on each side's
restraint, and verification. But given our deep digital dependency and the persistent failure
of defense and deterrence to protect our digital systems, cooperation is at least worth
exploring.
Dreams
of being able to prevent intrusions on one's systems while insisting on intruding the
opponent's systems are just that - dreams. There is likewise no reasonable way to deter an
adversary from using such methods to gain an advantage.
To blame, without evidence, Russia for a 'hack' and to incite against it will not solve the
above problems.
The only way to prevent potentially dangerous cyber-operations is too agree with adversaries
on what is off-limits and to (verifiably) stick to that.
Posted by b on December 19, 2020 at 19:29 UTC |
Permalink
In the issue of information security generally, including cyber-security and cyber-defence,
it seems that there is one rule for the US and another for everyone else: free and unfettered
access to everyone's secrets for the US; and for everyone else, having to pay through the
nose for anything the US deigns to dole out in amounts and at times of its own choosing.
The US knows only one thing, and that is psychopathic schoolyard bullying. To have to work
together with other nations, to have to accept other nations' rights to information and
security, to recognise the need for compromise and continuous negotiation: all this is beyond
the US ability to understand.
Good post, but about this hypothetical treaty: how would you monitor and enforce that sort of thing? It seems to me the
signatories are likely to continue doing it, and, assuming enough sophistication, proving a breach of the agreement seems
virtually impossible...
When I first read this story, I thought of the power outages in Venezuela the past year.
Those attacks must have hit especially patients in hospitals or care residences that had no
stand by generation.
I think Iran has been attacked a few times in this manner.
I can see the usefulness of treaty talks to address this issue. Talks between just two states, though, would leave a lot of
would be targets, so United Nations might address the issue. If the Security Council, & United Nations generally, is supposed
to mitigate violence of warfare, addressing cyber attacks must come under UNO purview.
I wonder if Lavrov, or a counterpart in another land, would find it useful to approach the
United Nations on this.
Putin and Lavrov have pleaded for at least 5 years now going back to Obama/Biden about the
need to negotiate a Cyber Treaty, and that it include as many nations as want to participate.
But only silence is returned. It's entirely possible that this so-called series of hacks is
no more than back-splash from some NSA or CIA hacking exercise. It certainly puts more wind
in the sails for today's excursion back to the future by Pepe
Escobar that's not behind a paywall. I will say there was one quote from it that stood
out very far from the rest and is on the way to becoming reality. As the Outlaw US Empire
falls further behind its competitors:
"the US will be able to bill itself as the first great post-industrial agrarian
society."
I'm not so sure about the "great" part given our actual condition and direction.
Treaties would help no doubt but the only real solution is to not put things you want kept
private on the internet. The internet is to publish stuff, not to store stuff securely.
"The only way to prevent potentially dangerous cyber-operations is too agree with adversaries
on what is off-limits and to (verifiably) stick to that."
Really? b with all due respect was, is, will be America ever capable or can it ever be
trusted to hold to any a Treaty/ Agreement, this outlaw rogue regime in time of hypersonic
missiles still believes she is protected by two oceans. Signing a treaty with this regime is
a distasteful joke, not worth entertaining.
Mao @3, had the same thought. Like the idea but how feasible is it?
I'd also like to see a Geneva Convention for the digital space (perhaps an expansion or
update of the existing Geneva Conventions for the digital age.) So civilian cyber
infrastructure (personal PCs, smartphones, tablets, routers, etc.) and civilian cyber content
(social media, online dating profiles, forum posts, etc.) would be off-limits for state
signatories. Again, not sure how feasible this is, but would like to see this.
I dont understand why people still waste their time writing article refuting USA's claims.
Dont people understand already USA DOES NOT NEED NO STINKING EVIDENCE?
...back int he dark ages of in 1990 USA invented the story about Iraqi solders taking babies out
of incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor and sued that lie to attack Iraq
in 2001, USA immediately blamed Osam abin ALladin for the 9-11 attacks and used that like to
attack and occupy Afghanistan.
in 2003, USA said Saddam has weapons of mass distraction and used that lie to attack Iraq for
a 2nd time.
USA ALWAYS lies and uses that to do something.
Russia better prepare itself by buying a lot of lube and lube its collective asshole. It will
get an ass fucking of a life time. and Russia deserves it by allowing Putin to act as a
moronic wimp.
usa is not agreement capable.. they prove this time and time again, so any proposals of an
agreement in any area is not realistic.. it is unfortunate..
the media will continue to be the service provider for the intel agencies and say whatever
they want to say.. facts are irrelevant.. it is beyond naive to think that anything that gets
said in the usa msm ( russia did it and etc. etc. ) have any relevance or value...
it is the
exact opposite.. expect more delusional ranting from these same wingnuts..the usa lost any
integrity it had a long time ago.. getting it back is not going to happen quickly, or at
all.. in fact, it is more likely the usa has to continue in its MAX 737 nosedive on all
levels until they wake up and smell the coffee... until then - all bets are off for any light
going off in the brains of usa leadership."
@ 4 dave... indeed.. the cardinal rule - 'do unto others as you would have them do unto
you' is applicable here... for all the religious preaching from buffoons like pompous, the
words and actions don't match the reality on the ground.. thanks for a clear reminder... it
will be a long time before the usa gets its head out of its ass..
Sorry, folks, but as a practitioner in the field - the problem is systemic, not national or
even international.
Information Technology is a bloated mess. Banks, airports, utilities use software whose
programmers are literally dying of old age and which literally have not been made for a
generation.
Security is a laugh. You need $10M, ante, to have a moderately capable security program
between expertise and tools - which means 90% of the companies will never be able to afford
it.
Even among the 10% - the lack of even the most basic best practices mean that billion dollar
companies constantly get tripped up or knocked flat by extremely simplistic attacks or
accidents.
This is the real world of cyberspace: attackers are limited only by how much focus they want
to put on any particular target.
The "attack" which brought about this latest session of Russo/Sino phobia - as b researched
and documented well - did not employ any sophistication to gain entry. The subsequent
activity was more sophisticated but even then, nothing more complex that $20K paid to a moderately
capable programmer couldn't create.
Cold War 2.0 to keep US enemies front and center is so the MIC can keep sucking the people
dry. Additionally, the Wikileaks Vault 7 materials show clearly the US has tools to pin
cybercrime on its 'enemies'. One thing we know for sure and that is the US government has one
enemy above all others: the truth.
Contradicting his secretary of state and other top officials, President Donald Trump on
Saturday suggested without evidence that China -- not Russia -- may be behind the
cyberattack against the United States and tried to minimized its impact.
Called it. FireEye purposefully chose the term "nation with top-tier offensive
capabilities" so that they could please Greek and Trojans while at the same time exempting
itself from delivering a defective commodity. Trump, for obvious reasons, chose to blame
China; the establishment, for obvious reasons, chose to blame Russia. Trumpists will choose
to blame China; Democrats and centrist Republicans will choose to blame Russia.
China or Russia - you can build your own narrative now!
The most obvious scenario is hiding in plain sight: FireEye is an corporation selling a
defective, inferior product to the USG. To cut corners, it must employ a legion of
non-unionized private contractors, who are a workforce of inferior quality and much lower
morale (as they receive much lower salaries). In order to cut even more corners, most of
these private contractors must receive a light version of clearance process, and must be more
loosely managed.
Indeed, most of these smaller managers must also be private contractors themselves; maybe
showing up one or two times per week in the workplace just to see if the private contractors
workers are there and breathing. The whole thing must be a shitshow.
One of these private contractors probably sold the passwords or created a password which
could be easily brute forced; or simply committed a rookie mistake (leaked e-mail, written
password in the office's whiteboard, etc. etc.).
The USA is plagued with private contractors. They were the weapon of choice of the
American capitalists and the USG to kill the unions and lower the value of the American labor
power. When a random American tells you he/she works for, e.g. Microsoft, chances are he/she
actually works for a private contractor who works for Microsoft - it's a process I like to
call "domestic outsourcing": a process where, through political and structural reforms, the
capitalist class of a given nation precarizes its own national labor power without literally
exporting it to another country (e.g. telemarketing to India).
A treaty would stop the US doing this to others.
The US originated this. The US has every intention of doing this to many others. Those who
complain the loudest are exactly the ones who have no intention of stopping.
The USAi has been fleeced by an IT industry that is incapable of rendering a secure system!
Well blow me down. What don't system buyers get from the words 'shonky thieves'. The USAi and
its cosy bear partner UKi have perfected 'shonky thieves' as an industrial and financial
strategy so dont be surprised when the thieves pick their pocket FROM WITHIN. It is the share
sell off that is the clue - follow the money NOT the tabloids.
So far they have Russia being the most powerful IT centre on earth and the most hopeless
CBW centre on earth. With IT they go everywhere yet with CBW they can't kill a fly.
b doesn't like one liners much so he can delete my response as well to inform you that enemy
#1 of humanity are the global private finance elite, not Russia , nor China.
Re: cybercriminal or rogue state tampering with power generation / power grids -- Why
couldn't these computer systems be independent, isolated from the Internet and kept in high
security lockdown? Besides, they operated just fine without computers in the past, when
things were built to last.
These days, I wouldn't buy a new car that depends on sophisticated computer controls and
diagnostic tools, let alone exclusive dealer service. Farmers lost their right to buy parts
and service their own tractors independent of a dealer. How much would I bet the Chinese
manufacturers will eventually take over that market ...as with almost every other market for
durable goods short of proprietary military hardware? Unless of course, the Banksters prevent
it for reasons of "national security."
For years American governments have extracted profit from the US tax paying public, using the
simple trick of giving them a series of imaginary external enemy's. Requiring ever more arms
industry funding extra.
Profit from paranoia !!
But here's the thing --
America has now backed itself into a corner re geopolitics. It would not surprise me if these
cyberattacks are a joint effort by several nations. We could predict them. Just cause ya paranoid don't mean there not all out to get you.
I know quite a bit about those outages in Venezuela. I assure you that they were very
well-planned. The people who did it were Venezuelan exiles in Canada and Houston, Texas (a
lot of the opposition moved to Houston in addition to Miami). The opposition is very, very
good and they sit up there in the US plotting schemes to destroy the economy. For instance,
for a long time the fake exchange rate was being set by an opposition person in Houston who
ran his own exchange rate site. He always deliberately inflated the street exchange rate in
order to cause a currency crisis, which would devastate the economy. A lot of things caused
that exchange rate crisis, but that guy sitting in Houston sabotaging the exchange rates to
cause a monetary crisis was no small part of that.
The attacks were staged out of Canada and Houston. The people who did it had very intimate
knowledge of those systems, mostly because those systems were using software made in Canada.
The people in Canada had access to the source code of that software. Perhaps the company
itself was in on the sabotage in the same way that the voting machine companies are in on
rigging the voting machines to steal elections for Republicans. In that case, Rebuplican
operatives have taken over the voting machine companies and the election hacking is done by
those companies like E S & S themselves in coordination with people like Karl Rove and
the Bush and Romney families. All of those computer machine companies are owned by the Bush
and Romney families and Karl Rove also has a huge stake in them.
So it's quite possible that that Canadian software vendor was taken over by Venezuelan
opposition people to gain access to the source code so they could hack those systems. With
knowledge of that code, they hacked the systems from Canada and Houston. They were very good,
excellent hackers. It's not known if they had state help from the US and Canadian
governments, although I definitely would not rule it out.
Trudeau in particular has gone full fascist in his fanatical support for the Venezuelan
opposition fascists.
The Venezuelan elite are classic Latin American elite fascists, a somewhat distinct type.
Most of the elite down there has this "Latin American fascist" orientation.
It's generally not race-based, but the ruling elite tends to be lighter-skinned than the
darker masses, even in Haiti. Instead, it's more like the "rightwing authoritarianism" or
"rightwing dictatorships" that we saw so many of in the Cold War in Latin America and
elsewhere.
These regimes were found most of Central America in Guatemala after 1954 and El Salvador
and Honduras since forever, Nicaragua under the Somozas.
They were found in all of South America at one time or another. We can see them in the
generals after 1964 in Brazil, the democratic facade duopoly regimes in Venezuela in Colombia
(especially after 1947 and again in 1964, Ecuador, Peru until the generals' revolt in 1968,
Bolivia under Banzer after 1953, Paraguay under Strausser, Argentina and Uruguay under the
generals in the late 80's and early 90's, and Pinochet in Chile.
They were also seen in the Caribbean in Cuba under Bautista, the Dominican Republic under
Trujillo, and Haiti under the Duvaliers.
In Southeast Asia, they were found in Thieu in South Vietnam, Sihanouk in Cambodia, the
monarchy in Laos, the military regimes in Thailand, Suharto in Indonesia, the Sultan in
Brunei, Marcos in the Philippines, and Taiwan under Chiang Kai Chek.
In Northeast Asia, a regime of this type was found in South Korea from 1947-on.
They were found South Asia with Pakistan under Generals like Zia, in Central Asia in the
Shah of Iran, and in a sense, the Arab World with Saddam (Saddam was installed by the CIA),
King Hassan in Morocco, the Gulf monarchies, and Jordan. Earlier, they were found in the
monarchies in Libya and Egypt that were overthrown by Arab nationalists. Also, Israel played
this sort of role with a democratic facade.
We also found them in the Near East in the military regimes in Turkey (especially Turgut
Ozul) and for a while in Greece under the colonels in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
NATO formed the backbone of a "rightwing dictatorship" in the background of Western Europe
(especially Italy), where Operation Gladio NATO intelligence essentially ran most of those
countries as a Deep State behind the scenes. These regimes were found in Spain under Franco
and in Portugal under Salazar along with its colonies.
These regimes were not so much in evidence in Africa except in South Africa and Rhodesia
and most prominently, Mobutu in Zaire and Samuel Doe in Liberia.
The fascist forms of these rightwing dictatorships varied, most being nonracist fascism
but a few being racist fascists (Turkey), and others being Mussolinists (Suharto in Indonesia
with his "pangesila")
I can't say that I am a big Trump fan but I do like him for the very reason the
Borg hates him. For saying things off script.
EG:
"The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully
briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant
when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified
of....
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)"
To one who has investigated cybercrime, this appears certain to be a complete fake by the
Texas company SolarWinds. Investigating internet copyright racketeering, I found two networks
of shell corporations with dozens of websites which took orders, did payments, or passed
codes between those layers to obscure the connections. One of the prominent sites had the
absurd name "TsarMedia.com" to look Russian, but was based in – you guessed it –
Texas. Recall that the Ukraine cybercrime software routinely inserted Cyrillic characters and
Russian historical names into headers to permit crooks to claim that the source was Russia.
Texans too need all-purpose monsters on whom to blame their wrongdoing.
Note that all of the responsible US government agencies Refused to investigate those
copyright racketeering operations, even when given the evidence, and were therefore likely
involved, using hundreds of websites far outnumbering legitimate sources, offering political
works for free with one click, to deny the authors their income source.
Also note that these warmonger scammers are dependents of the military industry and secret
agencies, directly or indirectly, extreme tribalist primitives whose ideology is bullying,
tyranny, and power-grabs by foul means, who are enemies of democracy let alone sane foreign
policy, and will say anything at all to get their way.
Also note that the providers of the software are entirely responsible for making it easy
to hack. As a software engineer, I have tried in vain for decades to convince companies
producing critical infrastructure equipment to not use internet administration links, because
they are not only hackable, but the encryption codes all have backdoors for "security"
agencies. It is beyond foolishness to allow any system administrator to control anything from
anywhere. So no doubt SolarWinds did just that, got hacked by anybody anywhere, and is
looking for an excuse to avoid losing their contract. Being Texans in need of a big excuse,
that excuse could only be Russia, the all-purpose monster behind every tree.
iirc the software for the hydro station came from Canada, and ran on XP (Russian Col.
'Cassad' blog)
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov 2019:
"According to the country's legitimate government headed by President Nicolas Maduro, as well
as information from other credible sources, the electricity sector of Venezuela came under
attack from abroad on March 7 of this year We provide all necessary assistance to Venezuelan
friends on the basis of requests from the legitimate government...[this was] comprehensive
remote influence on the control and monitoring systems of the main power distribution
stations where the equipment produced in one of the Western countries has been
installed...
They and the instigators of sabotage are responsible for the deaths of people,
including of those in hospitals which were left without electricity..."
The civilian programmers are criminals, in the literal sense. When found, warrants must be
placed with Interpol for their arrest.
With regard to government employees, in line with the Nuremburg trials, they cannot say
they were acting on orders. They too, are criminally responsible. They could have refused
orders, but didn't.
With regard to elected government officials, they carry diplomatic passports, and are
immune while they do.
Lack of extradition treaties and the politicised and biased International Court of Justice
means the politicians - murderers - will escape any punishment.
Notably, Blair, responsible for illegal aggression on a sovereign state resulting in mass
murder of civilians, not only escaped any form of punishment, but has been made a very highly
paid peace advisor.
I give zero weight to these opinions that only refer to anonymous 'experts' and never present
any actual data. I get that the average NYT reader isn't an IT or cyber security expert, and
has to let someone they trust interpret for them, but there are many people out there who are
quite capable of looking at the data and drawing their own conclusions.
Reuters is now reporting a 2nd attempt of SolarWinds intrusion as described in the quote
below
"Security experts told Reuters this second effort is known as "SUPERNOVA." It is a piece of
malware that imitates SolarWinds' Orion product but it is not "digitally signed" like the
other attack, suggesting this second group of hackers did not share access to the network
management company's internal systems.
It is unclear whether SUPERNOVA has been deployed against any targets, such as customers
of SolarWinds. The malware appears to have been created in late March, based on a review of
the file's compile times.
The new finding shows how more than one sophisticated hacking group viewed SolarWinds, an
Austin, Texas-based company that was not a household name until this month, as an important
gateway to penetrate other targets."
Is any evidence offered that there was any hack at all? Is the entire thing a fully
fabricated false flag, yet another, in service of taking Nord Stream 2 down?
When Maduro coalesced as a US target and his government was declared illegitimate,
one of the first thing that happened was the destruction of the water turbines feeding the
Venezuelan grid.
The US backed opposition claimed that this was the result of the Chavez and successors
negligence
towards thee maintenance of the generation equipment.
However, the Venezuelan Govt. had renovated all the dam equipment at the tune of 15+
billions with
a German Firm in 2015.
Just as Stuxnet destroyed the Irani centrifuges, some entity derailed the governing system
and led the Venezuelan turbines to death from overspeed.
Such hacking is lauded by the think tanks of the US. Was successful in causing widespread
misery to millions.
But who gives a Flying F**k in the US about these things?
What an ugly way to run a society. Moving society to public finance and abolishing private
finance is what is needed to save our species and what we can of the world we live in. I am
with China in advocating for Ad Astra because we can see the end of our ability to live on
this planet because of historical faith-based disrespect of it.
Thank you to j. casey #38 for that question. Agreed the entire thing could be a hoax and
the insider trading sting was the fee they got for going along with it.
Regardless of that the only way to ensure security is ably described by john #30:
Also note that the providers of the software are entirely responsible for making it easy to
hack. As a software engineer, I have tried in vain for decades to convince companies
producing critical infrastructure equipment to not use internet administration links,
because they are not only hackable, but the encryption codes all have backdoors for
"security" agencies.
It is beyond foolishness to allow any system administrator to control
anything from anywhere. So no doubt SolarWinds did just that, got hacked by anybody
anywhere, and is looking for an excuse to avoid losing their contract. Being Texans in need
of a big excuse, that excuse could only be Russia, the all-purpose monster behind every
tree.
Thank you for that brevity and deadly assassination of the idiots behind this.
The Germans and the Americans decided that it was worth to risk the entire German SCADA
business to sting Iran and later Venezuela. Because that was what those attacks, in the
absence of Iranian or Venezuelan capitulation meant, harm to German bussiness for no
strategic gains.
I suspect, like so much else that comes out of the Court of the Mad King and his minions,
we are dealing with a form of Hubris: "We are the only suppliers of this type of equipment
and we can abuse our customers..."
Yesterday, DW News compiled a report on Internet Anonymity focused on TOR as the most widely
known example of anonymiser networks. They explained the mechanism by which one may access
the www via the TOR network and shed one's own identity and replace it with one created in a
TOR server, multiple times, until it becomes IMPOSSIBLE to trace the original identity.
The report was aired in the context of the current US cyber-intrusion claims and, although it
didn't name names or point fingers, it concluded that anyone who says they know who expertly
hacked their system is lying.
I thought it was jolly decent of DW to spell this out, considering all the US lap-doggish
anti-Russia tropes the German govt has endorsed recently.
That is all very well fro DW to run that doco but TOR is not a wise choice to manufacture
anonymity. There is a strong view that it is a flawed CIA construct. I am happy to be proven
wrong but over the years some wise heads have urged caution.
Sorry, folks, but as a practitioner in the field - the problem is systemic, not national or
even international.
Information Technology is a bloated mess.
Posted by: c1ue | Dec 19 2020 21:21 utc | 12
I think that this is a classic case when we can productively ask "cui bono"?
Big software companies like Google and Microsoft have goals that are against the users,
and they can do it because of monopoly powers and users do not knowing any better.
From browser side, one goal is to please advertisers by enabling takeovers of your
hardware to track you, make displays that annoy you -- but at occasion entice you to spend
money on something, freeze you computer with lame attempts to make dynamic displays and so
on.
Because this is how browsers are money cows, operating systems support those shenanigans
in an increasing variety of ways. So from security point of view we have a fortress with wide
ramparts and massive walls that are riddled with tunnels, each tunnel having a rickety gate,
and hordes of people improving padlocks on those gates with weekly security fixes. For those
unfamiliar with rickety gates, when you have a fenced facility, it is easiest to climb over
the gates, you can grab the frames, barbed wire is straight up (easier than the inclined
wires on the rest of the fence, and if you are in a hurry, just hit the gate with the front
bumper.)
Next, operating system have to be out of date in few years so you are forced to buy a new
one or to buy a new computer (Apple model). Instability of systems prevent security fixes to
be completed in the lifetime of a system.
Those are commercial motivation. Then there are deep state shenanigans, they want some
openness to Trojan horses.
Also note that the providers of the software are entirely responsible for making it easy to
hack. As a software engineer, I have tried in vain for decades to convince companies
producing critical infrastructure equipment to not use internet administration links,
because they are not only hackable, but the encryption codes all have backdoors for
"security" agencies. It is beyond foolishness to allow any system administrator to control
anything from anywhere. So no doubt SolarWinds did just that, got hacked by anybody
anywhere, and is looking for an excuse to avoid losing their contract. Being Texans in need
of a big excuse, that excuse could only be Russia, the all-purpose monster behind every
tree.
I would shift the bulk of the blame off the software manufacturers and onto the IT
departments and integrators responsible for installing those products into their
infrastructure, for the following general reasons:
- No matter how secure a software/hardware product is, its security is be easily
compromised by poor deployment into existing infrastructure. The onus is on the IT department
to ensure the software is deployed securely. If a software product happens to have
internet-facing administration interfaces with default passwords settings, then it is a sign
the IT department has not locked down the solution during the deployment phase.
- It is the duty of any IT department to ensure infrastructure is deployed securely and
continuously validated for security (by installing intrusion prevention and detection
systems, multiple layers of firewalling, DMZs, zero trust infrastructure, honeypots,
centralised authentication systems etc ...). That one could have an entire SCADA system
sitting on the internet with a management interface using a default username or password.
- Frankly, every software product or network connected equipment should be considered as
insecure as swiss cheese from the moment it's unpacked, then the work should begin to lock it
down and secure it using a multi-layered security model. That is the approach taken in many
secure enterprises that have a good security record.
Ultimately, making a single software product secure will only achieve limited gains: Those
gains evaporate in an instant one some junior cablemonkey plugs a secure server into the
public DMZ using the wrong network interface. No amount of code polishing, static analysis,
secure software design is going to make even a dent when a careless admin sets the password
to pass@123, disables TLS encryption and puts the management interface on the public network
so he can easily run operations from the cafe' down the road.
Aside: I've had an on and off relationship with SolarWinds for 20 years, while it's been
the running joke of IT admins the world over, exposing it's management interfaces to the
public is something only the most amateurish IT departments would do. No, someone failed at
the network administration layer: Where was the firewall admin in all this? Where was the
Network administrator with his routing policies? Most of all the CTO/IT Director/IT managers
clearly failed in the secure deployment and management of the product. Solarwinds doesn't put
itself on the public Internet by accident!
Nothing really adds up about this whole story anyway:
- Why, when SolarWinds has been a gaping security hole for more than 2 decades is it now
all of a sudden the gateway for a massive attack from a foreign power? Shouldn't it have been
a continuous vulnerability all along? By now, every vulnerable internet facing SW
installation would have been wiped out ages ago due to the frequency of automated attacks
carried out against infrastructure in general.
Far from looking like an issue with SolarWinds, this looks like a massive and widespread
failure in basic IT security by dozens of companies possibly connected by a single large
service provider.
The media reporting around this issue also sounds to me like extreme coverup, take this
WIRED magazine snippet:
"Over the past several years, the US has invested billions of dollars in Einstein, a
system designed to detect digital intrusions. But because the SolarWinds hack was what's
known as a "supply chain" attack, in which Russia compromised a trusted tool rather than
using known malware to break in, Einstein failed spectacularly."
Really. They can't find any actual Russian malware, so instead it's
"in which Russia compromised a trusted tool rather than using known malware to break in,"
China and Russia should conclude a cyber treaty among each other, work out the details of the
verification mechanism (which is very difficult in this sphere)
and then invite other nations to join. Most other countries would probably eventually do
that.
That wouldn't deter the USA or Israel from their maligne cyber activities, but it would
make sure that any such move which becomes publicly known would come with a diplomatic
cost.
Bernhard: "The only way to prevent potentially dangerous cyber-operations is too agree with
adversaries on what is off-limits and to (verifiably) stick to that."
One can not agree. We all know Micro$oft, Google, FB, Whatsapp, Instagram, ... are feeding
US and Zionist intelligence agencies with all type of informations. Any international treaty
on cyber-security would under this conditions be obsolete from the beginning.
Another matter is that as Bernhard correctly points out:
"One can not spy on other countries and then complain when they do something similar to
oneself. Responding by waging destruction against another country's IT systems only
guarantees that there will be a response in kind. If one wants to avert cyber-espionage and
cyber-attacks there is only one way out."
But it's just naive to think that CIA, NSA, Mossad are going to respect any international
agreement in any area. Stuxnet virus and it's intrusion of the Iranian nuclear facilities or
sabotage of Venezuelan power-grid facilities were not made by China, Russia or North Korea.
US government and Zionist Apartheid regime did those, aiming to sabotage and do harm not only
on facilities but also on humans. If we go back, the much praised (in western MSM) Stuxnet
was the operation legitimizing all similar cyber attacks to follow in the future.
ZioImperialists can not expect having free hands to physically terror other nations and not
be considered as a legitim target by them.
Another issue is that by criminalizing whistle-blowing and whistle-blowers like Snowden,
Manning et al, US government and Zionists shoot in their own knee. If the price of
whistle-blowing of criminality is too high, then the whistle-blowers doesn't go public, he or
she just provide the access to those who can cover the criminal acts from the distance.
About the "Russian", "Chinese" narrative, I admit, it's a bit strange that US government and
MSM are still insisting on them. I find it somehow positive. They know who was behind, they
blame it on someone else, this could mean: "We are not going to do anything about it!"
If this is the case, then it sound wise, who knows what is going to happen if they choose
to act aggressive against one of many enemies while one of the enemies got access to among
others the entire network of their energy security administration.
And, lets not forget that Zionists Apartheid regime put USA in the current humiliating
position in the first place.
A very constructive approach by US government would be to drop all illegal sanctions against
others, pull out of ME and focus on their own domestic business instead of servicing Zionist
Apartheid regime.
"To blame, without evidence, Russia for a 'hack' and to incite against it will not solve the
above problems."
Maybe this time it really was Russia, according to Doctorow:
"The allegations of Russian hacking made by the United States in the heat of Russia-gate
were frivolous, appropriate to toddlers in a sandbox. Leaving fingerprints all over the
supposed theft over the internet to get at Hillary's communications and tip the election in
Trump's favor. Only a fool would think that the Kremlin operates at this level. And, as we
know, there are plenty of fools in the USA, though it appears a disproportionate number of
them are in the Democratic Party and its thought leaders like Chuck Schumer of New York and
Rick Blumenthal of Connecticut.
This hacking was of a different scale and different nature entirely. It was massive. It
had no friendly or other bear tags put on by the Ukrainians. It went straight for the
jugular, the most secret and sensitive corners of the US government. And it apparently was
not destructive, did nothing that could trigger a war, just make a point: gotcha!"
Sounds reasonable to me - if the US persists in threats with devastating cyber attacks
against the RF because of those idiotic Russia Gate claims - demonstrate what the RF really
can do and prevent any planned stupidity by the USA.
Relentlessly, you go to stories in the New York Times. Like a dog returning to its excrement.
Everybody knows it's an intelligence shill. Why do you bother? There are far more important
things you could be reporting on.
Posted by: Johny Conspiranoid | Dec 20 2020 10:21 utc | 51
"It makes no sense to connect something to the internet and then expect it to remain
secret."
Indeed. And yet they have been doing it vigorously for 30 years now, making a few shallow
assholes very very rich, wasting huge quantities of natural resources, allowing many feckless
bureaucrats to pretend to do something for somebody, screwing the heck out of most everybody
else, and making everybody - and I do mean everybody - less secure. But hey, your phone can
tell you how to get to the store.
We know beyond doubt that the top shelf of our society have no regard what so ever for law
and order international or national.
They will break the law with impunity, turn a blind eye to their colleagues breaking the
rules.
They will impose the law on the public like a sledgehammer
to oppress us.
Wouldn't we just love to be a 'fly on the wall' when they get together and conspire to commit
there criminality !!
ZOOM
The soft vonrable underbelly of your criminal elite.
These large, complicated, very expensive software "management" packages are largely
butt-covering, to protect management from the threat of "doing nothing" when things go wrong.
Some nice kickbacks in it too. The usual effect is to make the sysadmins spend all their time
trying to make the package work right. Security theater and treated like it too, fancy
costumes out in front, bare wall behind the curtain. I remember one "configuration
management" package that was practically an operating system all by itself and absolutely a
waste of time. Network management even more so.
I dont understand why people still waste their time writing article refuting USA's claims.
Dont people understand already USA DOES NOT NEED NO STINKING EVIDENCE?
That is plainly obvious, yes. The criminal US regime does what it does and their claims
against other countries are almost universally without evidence. Spending energy refuting
baseless claims can even provide an impression of legitimacy around those insane and baseless
claims. The question is how to expose the lies without giving the liars legitimacy.
One thing we know for sure and that is the US government has one enemy above all others:
the truth.
Unfortunately, this is true not only for the US government, but for the "western"
governments, establishments and media in general. To them, lies are no problem but truth is a
deadly enemy. I could tell a personal story about that, but it would be off topic for this
thread so I will not. But the observation that truth is the enemy to these people is key,
even if it seems simplistic. The fact is that you cannot reason with people who have truth as
their enemy.
Is any evidence offered that there was any hack at all? Is the entire thing a fully
fabricated false flag, yet another, in service of taking Nord Stream 2 down?
That's a key question, I agree. The proper position to take is that it is all baseless lies
unless verifiable evidence that the 'hack' actually occurred is presented. Never mind the
claims of 'who did it' when there is no evidence that anything happened at all.
The situation in the west now is such that all information is centrally controlled, and
face to face communication has been severely limited. It is not a coincidence.
I haven't seen this level of propaganda since the buildup to the second Iraq war. They are
obviously planning more aggression against Russia and have to keep the public at a fever
pitch to get away with it. it serves so many purposes, not just politically for the dnc and
rnc, but for nato, the vastly overfunded intel community, etc. the domestic arm of the fake
war on terror is of course the cops, and the various federal cops. Here the propaganda seems
aimed mainly at republicans, with the "marxist blm" and "marxist fascist antifa" exciting the
republican base into a frenzy, and the main foreign "villain" is said to be china. the
propaganda aimed at the democrats focuses on russia; that product already has a proven track
record of success with the democratic base, and the lies are aimed at whitewashing biden and
harris and their abysmal records of support for police violence. nato and the us intel
community have to justify their existence by stirring up the populace against imaginary
foreign aggression, and it has succeeded spectacularly with the public in the u.s.
in short, these idiots want to take us to the edge of a major world war so they can
continue to loot and control us, and they seem to think they will do just fine in a post
nuclear war future.
From browser side, one goal is to please advertisers by enabling takeovers of your hardware
to track you, make displays that annoy you -- but at occasion entice you to spend money on
something, freeze you computer with lame attempts to make dynamic displays and so on.
You have many good points, thanks. For the time being, I would recommend the Brave Browser
https://brave.com/ as a countermove to these
issues. It is super fast, ad free (or you can choose to get paid to see ads) and generally
very good. I use it under Windows, Linux, Android and on my iPhone. As for operating systems
becoming 'obsolete' forcing you to buy a new computer: Unless you have very special
requirements, Linux Ubuntu will do all you need for free on your existing hardware. It is
easy to install, very secure and virus free (the Windows virus business model does not work
everywhere).
One thing we know for sure and that is the US government has one enemy above all others:
the truth.
Unfortunately, this is true not only for the US government, but for the "western"
governments, establishments and media in general.
It is worse even than that. The aversion to truth permeates western cultures. The obese
American looks in the mirror and sees fitness. The educated fool looks in the mirror and sees
wisdom. The boy raised to believe that being a white male is bad looks in the mirror and sees
a virtuous girl trapped in the evil enemy's body, or even worse he sees a mountain panda. The
young woman with no accomplishments but endless praise and petting of her ego looks in the
mirror and sees vague exceptionality and formless superiority. The fascist looks in the
mirror and sees a noble warrior for social justice.
The US government can get away with existing in denial because the population relies upon
denial as well.
On Reuters main webpage is a heading that reads:
"Biden's options for Russian hacking punishment: sanctions, cyber retaliation"
The accusation, investigation and trial phases are as good as done,
only the setting of the punishment phase remains.
It is for the benefit of headline readers.
In the body of the article itself Reuters used the words "suspected hack" once.
When will Reuters move the goal posts and quietly drop the word "suspected".
It is guaranteed that they will, the question is how long before they weasel it away.
The timing is certainly not dependent upon "evidence", more dependent upon how long until
they
think people won't notice the change.
(actually, there are two (fa) in the headline, Russia is guilty of hacking and Biden is
President)
A scary thought is that all this is prepping the American Sheeple for a vast shutdown of
communication ("the Russian's did it!")
in the event the Deep State is not getting it's way with stealing this election.
Norwegian@60
For those who wish to use linux from windows is there is puppylinux frugal install.
You can start from pendrive install with in 10 minutes.
Rao
i'm sure the most murderous cops look in the mirror and see noble warriors for social
justice, just as many of them did when they were slaughtering Iraqis in the street from a
helicopter or in fallujah.
This time, SolarWinds didn't blame another nation. It just stated it was
"investigating". Even for Trump's rabid anti-Sinicism, it was too much, so he toned down on his
Twitter:
...discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!). There could also have been a
hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won
big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA. @DNI_Ratcliffe
@SecPompeo
-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2020
From "it was China!" to "discussing the possibility that it may be China" there's an
abyssal distance. Trump is also backing down.
There's a clear pattern here: the American Governments and MSM initiate a very virulent
propaganda attack, based on outright fake news, against Russia and/or China. A burst of
hysteria takes over the nation. Then it quickly, almost aggressively, backs down and tones
down on the propaganda warfare.
Of course that there's an element of "bend but not break" here, as credibility is a finite
resource the MSM and the USG have to use carefully and with moderation. Plausible deniability
is a necessary tool in order to not spend your whole credibility at once and to replenish it,
while also giving the masses a credible scenario (not perfect, not dystopian: in the middle
of the road).
But there's also a nobler objective with this: to preserve the company's stock market
prices. By creating a panacea over a foreign enemy, SolarWinds/FireEye calm down the
shareholders and Wall Street, thus preserving or at least softening the blow to the
realization their product is inferior in quality, even borderline useless. It's not that the
shareholders and Wall St. don't know that, but that they are now ensured the masses won't
know that.
We have a scenario here where the American MSM and the USG are now completely fused to
Wall Street. As junior partners.
So Trump is attributing the obvious issues in the election to this hack attack? Now the
pieces begin to fall together. I would say that evidence has been uncovered (but lot yet
leaked) that the vote tabulation was altered and that is why we have suddenly been treated to
the "Foreign baddies hacked us!" media spectacle while nothing has been said of what
these hackers actually did: The public needs to be primed with the diversion before the leaks
are sprung. Basically, the manipulation of the vote counts by the "We lie, we cheat, we
steal!" gang has been uncovered and the suspicion that it was a domestic job has to be
headed off. A narrative needs to be generated and installed in the public consciousness in
which the evidence that the CIA was behind the hack was actually planted by clever
Russian/Chinese/Iranian bad guys and the CIA is innocent.
A CYA operation for the CIA? That is what it is starting to look like to me.
Posted by: William Gruff | Dec 20 2020 15:41 utc | 71
re ...Denial is how so many Americans can live with themselves....
Indeed that is workably true. More broadly for all humans, might be restated as: Automatically creating justifications is how the mind* "protects" its owner from
confronting being "wrong". *mind--whatever that is; there is much disagreement about that.
Yes, the stupid avarice at the Court of the Mad King is remarkable. It demonstrates a species of Hubris which assumes that no one can retaliate against
them.
I note here that the Russians have now full legal and financial control of their aerospace
firms and their new mid-size passenger jet does not have foreign content.
Basically, the Mad King has alerted other sovereigns in the world of their vulnerabilities
and they are proceeding to address those items - likely taking 20 or 30 years.
denial is probably the way the cops who run down protestors, or shoot them in the back, live
with themselves. and true, a lot of americans cheer those cops on, and pretend they are
justified, just as many americans cheer on the troops overseas who are also thought to be
protecting freedom, like those in the wikileaks video who shot at children in the street.
"fighting terrorism for freedom" my ass. this kind of denial is certainly a lot more
consequential than the tendency to deny one is overweight or losing their hair, and i don't
think it is the same process.
i don't know about the republican caucus in iowa, but i know what the dnc rigged the
cauces in iowa against sanders, so it's not like the process can't be interfered with,
whether by an app that doesn't work or simple old fashioned cheating like pretending to flip
a coin.
another thing about cops who are about to commit violence they can't justify; they often turn
off their body cams, or claim they forgot to turn them on, or they weren't working. that's
not denial; that's premeditation.
No, cui bono is irrelevant.
IT is a mess because despite the pace of historical change, the effects on productivity are
remarkable.
If one can improve productivity by double digits with half-assed IT efforts - why bother with
more coherent and considered planning or execution?
Now repeat this every 3 years or so. The result is an ungodly hodgepodge in very little time.
I see it now simple thus: Anglo Deep $tate cannot defeat China MIL plus Russia so it
needs them split. That's how Kissinger "won" the Vietnam war by cozying up to Mao. Quite a
Pyrrhic victory on the short (Vietnam) and the long (PR China today) run.
Any crap is being hauled up to tar Russia, from MH17, via Skripal to cyber false
flaggery.
For me, the incredible truth is that greed overcame all other emotions: patriotism? ...just a
adman's final lever; exceptionalism could have no other end other than the bonfire of the
vanities. Greed, by the very few ultra rich, the lucre flowing down to control all segments
of the society, the body now being feasted on, until there are few specs left , worthy of the
effort.
I disagree. What aggression did the Russians take? A Russian pilot flying over a US
aircraft carrier and taking pictures is intelligence gathering. A Russian bomber trying to
bomb a US aircraft carrier is an act of aggression.
By that definition, this is normal intelligence gathering. Not something that requires
killing people.
Edited to add: Of course it was legitimately signed. Solarwinds signed it and pushed it
out. That only means the software came from Solarwinds internal builds. Shame on Solarwinds
for not maintaining simple checksum chains of its object code to insure it hasn't been
overwritten. Shame on the defense department for not requiring Solarwinds to maintain secure
source control.
Shame on Solarwinds for not maintaining simple checksum chains of its object code to
insure it hasn't been overwritten. Shame on the defense department for not requiring
Solarwinds to maintain secure source control.
This is the first indication i have seen anywhere on this breach which suggests SolarWinds
could have taken basic precautions in pushing out its firmware updates. I am going to look
for articles written by Cyber people on this and ignore the press.
Yes, Tech in this current era, is neglecting the most foundational checks and balances. In
a twenty-four span, we had the SolarWinds/Microsoft 365 Hack and the Google Cloud global
failure, after having the entire world's internet stopping due to a bad mass deployed
firmware update to the switches. Therefore, I believe the Federal Government is best to
create its own proprietary system than outsourcing to Microsoft, Amazon, or Google.
Some edits would be useful, like instead of: "containing a direct back door to the Russian
military" one should have written "containing a direct back door to any knowledgeable
hacker". Something that Snowden for YEARS has complained about. And this is why HUAWEI is so
hated, because it doesn't offer backdoors to be exploited, in a handshake understanding with
US intelligence corps.
Until now all I've seen were anonymous sources claiming that it kind of feels like
those dastardly Russkies were behind it again. Did I miss the part where actual evidence was
provided?
CISA is an agency full of bureaucrats, not computer specialists. So any judgement is highly
suspect. In my view "computer security bureaucrat" is typically a parasite or a charlatan.
Traditionally computer security departments in large corporations often serve as a place to exile
incompetent wannabes. I do not think the government is different. Real high quality programmers
usually prefer to write their own software not to spend their time analyzing some obtuse malware
code. Often high level honchos in such department are so obviously incompetent that it hurts.
This is the same agency that declared Presidential election 2020 to be the most secure in
history. So their statements are not worth the electrons used to put them on the screen, so say
nothing about a ppar , if they manage to get into such rags as NYT or WaPo.
We need clear-eyed assessment from a real Windows OS specialists like for Stuxnet was
Mark
Russinovich , which is difficult in current circumstances.
The supply chain attack used to breach federal agencies and at least one private company
poses a "grave risk" to the United States, in part because the attackers likely used means
other than just the SolarWinds backdoor to penetrate networks of interest, federal officials
said on Thursday. One of those networks belongs to the National Nuclear Security
Administration, which is responsible for the Los Alamos and Sandia labs, according to a report
from
Politico .
"This adversary has demonstrated an ability to exploit software supply chains and shown
significant knowledge of Windows networks," officials with the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and
Security Agency wrote in an alert . "It is likely that the adversary
has additional initial access vectors and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that have
not yet been discovered." CISA, as the agency is abbreviated, is an arm of the Department of
Homeland Security.
Elsewhere, officials wrote: "CISA has determined that this threat poses a grave risk to the
Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical
infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations."
Reuters, meanwhile, reported that the attackers
breached a separate major technology supplier and used the compromise to get into
high-value final targets. The news services cited two people briefed on the
matter.
FURTHER READING
Premiere security firm FireEye says it was breached by nation-state hackers The attackers,
whom CISA said began their operation no later than March, managed to remain undetected until
last week when security firm FireEye reported that hackers backed by a nation-state had
penetrated deep into its network . Early this week, FireEye said that the hackers were
infecting targets using Orion, a widely used network management tool from SolarWinds. After
taking control of the Orion update mechanism, the attackers were using it to install a backdoor
that FireEye researchers are calling Sunburst. Advertisement
FURTHER READING
Russian hackers hit US government using widespread supply chain attack Sunday was also when
multiple news outlets, citing unnamed people, reported that the hackers had
used the backdoor in Orion to breach networks belonging to the Departments of Commerce,
Treasury, and possibly other agencies. The Department of Homeland Security and the National
Institutes of Health were later added to the list. Bleak assessment
Thursday's CISA alert provided an unusually bleak assessment of the hack; the threat it
poses to government agencies at the national, state, and local levels; and the skill,
persistence, and time that will be required to expel the attackers from networks they had
penetrated for months undetected.
"This APT actor has demonstrated patience, operational security, and complex tradecraft in
these intrusions," officials wrote in Thursday's alert. "CISA expects that removing this threat
actor from compromised environments will be highly complex and challenging for
organizations."
The officials went on to provide another bleak assessment: "CISA has evidence of additional
initial access vectors, other than the SolarWinds Orion platform; however, these are still
being investigated. CISA will update this Alert as new information becomes available."
The advisory didn't say what the additional vectors might be, but the officials went on to
note the skill required to infect the SolarWinds software build platform, distribute backdoors
to 18,000 customers, and then remain undetected in infected networks for months.
"This adversary has demonstrated an ability to exploit software supply chains and shown
significant knowledge of Windows networks," they wrote. "It is likely that the adversary has
additional initial access vectors and tactics, techniques, and procedures that have not yet
been discovered."
Among the many federal agencies that used SolarWinds Orion, reportedly, was the Internal
Revenue Service. On Thursday, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a
letter to IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig asking that he provide a briefing on whether
taxpayer data was compromised.
The IRS appears to have been a customer of SolarWinds as recently as 2017. Given the
extreme sensitivity of personal taxpayer information entrusted to the IRS, and the harm both
to Americans' privacy and our national security that could result from the theft and
exploitation of this data by our adversaries, it is imperative that we understand the extent
to which the IRS may have been compromised. It is also critical that we understand what
actions the IRS is taking to mitigate any potential damage, ensure that hackers do not still
have access to internal IRS systems, and prevent future hacks of taxpayer data.
IRS representatives didn't immediately return a phone call seeking comment for this
post.
The CISA alert said the key takeaways from its investigation so far are:
This is a patient, well-resourced, and focused adversary that has sustained long duration
activity on victim networks The SolarWinds Orion supply chain compromise is not the only
initial infection vector this APT actor leveraged Not all organizations that have the
backdoor delivered through SolarWinds Orion have been targeted by the adversary with
follow-on actions Organizations with suspected compromises need to be highly conscious of
operational security, including when engaging in incident response activities and planning
and implementing remediation plans
What has emerged so far is that this is an extraordinary hack whose full scope and effects
won't be known for weeks or even months. Additional shoes are likely to drop early and
often.
Until now all I've seen were anonymous sources claiming that it kind of feels like those
dastardly Russkies were behind it again. Did I miss the part where actual evidence was
provided?
The NY Times used to have an entire department focusing on selling the Iraq war. Google
"Judith Miller", who was the chief sell-Iraq-war propagandist and liar. The NY Times has a
bad record of being the "publication of record" among the corporate mainstream media.
"Your honor, you are quite right about the lack of evidence. The problem is...you
shouldn't want me to show you the evidence! That would be tantamount to revealing my
investigative techniques!"
"Well, when you put it that way..."
And of course the sources were anonymous. Don't you read the WaPo like a good citizen?
The Russian hackers, known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear, are part of that
nation's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and they breached email systems in some
cases, said the people familiar with the intrusions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because of the sensitivity of the matter
Is there any precedent for declaring pure espionage/intelligence gathering, even on a very
large scale, to be an armed attack warranting an armed response? I can't think of any.
A major breach of U.S. security calls for a robust law enforcement response and
cybersecurity measures, and arguably even for the longstanding death penalty for espionage if
the offenders are caught, but not for cries of "declaration of war," like Dick Durbin's.
That applies to the same sources "informing" us about the so-called Russian hack.
Remember when we were "informed" N. Korea hacked into Sonny's and "downloaded" an entire
movie, which was not even released?! Turned out that was an inside job by a woman who had
worked at Sonny for ten years. I smell the same BS from the likes of the NY Times.
For almost three decades, we have awaited a mythical "cyber Pearl Harbor," the harbinger of
digital doom that the U.S. cybersecurity community assumes to be inevitable. Strangely enough,
some believe this cyber Pearl Harbor already happened twice within the last two months.
Though warnings of cyber Pearl Harbor emerged as early as 1991, former defense secretary
Leon Panetta is perhaps best known for promoting the idea, warning
in 2012 of an impending "cyber-Pearl Harbor that would cause physical destruction and the loss
of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation." Such a grand event would be tough
to miss.
Last week, Sidney Powell, a one-time member of the president's legal team, continued to
promote her conspiracy theory that the Venezuelans, the Chinese, and "other countries" had
exploited voting machines to rig the election for President-elect Joe Biden. This fictitious
"attack," she
told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, amounted to nothing less than "cyber Pearl Harbor."
Apparently the rest of us just missed it.
Cybersecurity experts, including Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency who was fired by President Trump in November, have refuted these
claims. Krebs
called them "farcical" and "nonsensical." Officials have
said there was no interference with voting machines of the kind claimed by Trump supporters
and that the election was "the most secure in American history."
This week began with the news of cybersecurity breaches at a
growing list of private companies and government agencies, including the Department of
Homeland Security and even the Pentagon, perpetrated by
APT29 , the Russian SVR. Dubbed SolarWinds after the company whose software served as the
vector for the intrusions, the scope of the operation and the fact that it impacted defense and
intelligence agencies sparked an online debate as to
whether it had constituted an "attack" on the United States. Others did not wait to learn the
extent of the damage before
declaring that the United States had been "hit with 'Cyber-Pearl Harbor.'" Senator Richard
Durbin went so far as to call
the hack "virtually a declaration of war."
National Review 's Jim Geraghty implied that the
United States missed the SolarWinds intrusions because it failed to take the 2015 Office of
Personnel Management (OPM) breach at the
hands of Chinese hackers seriously enough, focusing instead on Russian disinformation in the
wake of that country's interference in the 2016 presidential election. The OPM incident, he
said, "was widely described as the 'cyber Pearl Harbor' and yet most Americans didn't
notice."
Calling any of these incidents "cyber Pearl Harbor" is inaccurate at best and inherently
dangerous. The impacts of the OPM and SolarWinds hacks in no way approximate the kind of death
and destruction most often associated with the
use of the "cyber Pearl Harbor" analogy. The whole point of a cyber Pearl Harbor is that we
would not miss the significance of such a major catastrophe since it would lead to an
inevitable reconstitution of the cyber security threat environment.
This continued use of
doomsday rhetoric is dangerous because it distorts our understanding of the cyber threats
we do face, the implications of real incidents when they occur, and our possible response
options. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
said in 2015, the OPM breach was representative of the real cyber threats we face not
because it was the fulfillment of a long-awaited "
cyber Armageddon scenario ," but because it was not. It was not an "attack," he said, but
an incident of the kind of cyber espionage we witness regularly. That the cyber domain is
dominated by
espionage and represents a wider intelligence
contest demonstrates the continuing misapplication of strategic thought surrounding cyber
security violations.
Five years later, it is still unhelpful to frame incidents like SolarWind as the arrival of
digital apocalypse instead of another major incident of
cyber espionage . Continued hyperbole surrounding every new cyber incident encourages the
kind of craven misappropriation of fears of
cyber doom by those who seek to inflate threats for political gain.
We do not know the scope of SolarWinds mainly because the domain has no conception of
measuring impact. In an arena obsessed with battle damage estimates, the Department of Defense
simply has no interest in measuring the
impact of their operations and the utility of
defend forward operations that provide little leverage against espionage operations.
The FY2021 NDAA contains
the most significant cyber security legislation to date. Helping the government organize in
order to deny operations in the cyber environment is a critical task. There are provisions for
threat hunting, organizational coordination, and more funding for cyber operations to maintain
and defend cyberspace. Yet the deeper challenge is how we defend against espionage.
The real lesson of Pearl Harbor is the desperation of Japan to preemptively eliminate the
United States as a threat to Japanese operations in the Pacific and the U.S. intelligence
failures that enabled the attack in the first place. Taking the analogy in the correct
direction suggests that the U.S. needs to seek to deny attack options to prevent infiltrations
such as the SolarWinds event. The U.S. also needs to do better of understanding the strategic
motivations of our adversaries. In this case, being distracted by the possibility of a major
hack during the 2020 election led to a comprehensive violation of almost every government
agency.
Hyperbole needs to stop and rational consideration of the impact of the SolarWind operation
will take time and sober thought, not instant hot takes. Infiltration and extracting
information is not an act of war, but evidence of the typical espionage operations that are
conducted against near peer adversaries. Denying future operations will require a sober
assessment of how to enable the defense when the attacker has many attack options. This will
likely not come solely through government action, but collaboration between industry, the
private sector, and government agencies that provide for collective defense.
Sean Lawson is associate professor of Communication at the University of Utah and
non-resident fellow at the Krulak Center at the Marine Corps University.
Brandon Valeriano is the Donald Bren Chair of Military Innovation at the Marine Corps
University located at the Krulak Center. He also serves as a senior fellow at the Cato
Institute and a senior advisor to the U.S. Cyber Solarium Commission.
Excellent article. Hyperbole is about the last thing we need at this point in time.
Unfortunately, hyperbole is standard fare these days. The result? Misinformation and
half-truths, followed by hasty (and often erroneous) conclusions, followed by incorrect
remedies which, more often than not, tend to make what are already bad situations only
worse.
Unfortunately when it comes to cyber attacks, unlike an actual Pearl Harbor, the damage is
invisible to most of us. So are the perpetrators. We can't directly see the trail of evidence
that connects the crime to the suspects, so we have to rely on the testimony of experts.
Then we have political pressure groups that are interested in up or down playing the severity
of the breach.
On top of all, we have a population that is utterly ignorant but 'been trained to distrust
experience.
As I am typing this, I am less and less optimistic.
Even worse, we have a severely alienated population that is tired of being played by elites
with constant hype about alleged foreign enemies. We have a population that sees more immediate
threat from its own elites than Russian spies. The headline reads like "Deep State has Russkies
in its Shorts Again" and la dee dah, why do I even care? Are Russkies gonna take my job, lock
me down, or cancel me? Too late, Vlad, I've already been done.
In any case the last of the friends of the United States in high places, the fifth column
in the Kremlin, are losing their last scraps of influence. Whether Russia "attacked" the US
is debatable and unlikely but there is no doubt that, once again, the US has attacked Russia.
It has closed down its last two consulates and is reducing the Embassy in Moscow to skeletal
staff. All the indications are that they are preparing for war, as are their NATO allies. The
hyenas in Ukraine and Poland are salivating over spoils of war coming their way.
As for Navalny-the indestructible kid- the only prospect of his return to Moscow is in an
American tank
In 2012 Kaspersky Russian Virus Lab detected, decrypted a unknown computer Virus which is now
named the Flame Virus. It had been written by the CIA, Mossad and used a compromised Windows
updater server to infect Windows servers globally. Kaspersky alerted the World to this
threat. The US Gov then went all-out to punish Kaspersky AV Lab forbidding them from US Gov
contracts.
A. Smith 23 hours ago 19 Dec, 2020 02:49 PM
In 2012 didn't the CIA,Mossad create the Flame computer virus using a Windows update server
to globally infect Windows servers? Wasn't Obama and Joe Biden in Office and ordered it under
the guise of attacking Iran? Its still infecting computers across US with backdoors. Now the
same folks are blaming Russia for a similar act 8 years later?
By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her
website is here and you can follow
her on Twitter @caitoz
We've landed in a world where diplomacy,
sanctions, even war can be decided by mere claims, and evidence is optional. Yet those proudly
displaying the badge of 'public trust' are the worst of the serial, politically-driven liars.
The Communist Party of China has been covertly sending arms to extremist Antifa militants in
the United States in preparation for the civil war which is expected to take place after Joe
Biden declares himself President for Life and institutes a Marxist dictatorship. The weapons
shipments include rocket launchers, directed energy weapons, nunchucks and ninja throwing
stars.
Unfortunately I cannot provide evidence for this shocking revelation as doing so would
compromise my sources and methods, but trust me it's definitely true and must be acted upon
immediately. I recommend President Trump declare martial law without a moment's hesitation and
begin planning a military response to these Chinese aggressions.
How does this make you feel? Was your first impulse to begin scanning for evidence of the
incendiary claim I made in my opening paragraph?
It would be perfectly reasonable if it was. I am, after all, some random person on the
internet whom you have probably never met, and you've no reason to accept any bold claim I
might make on blind faith. It would make sense for you to want to see some verification of my
claim, and then dismiss my claim as baseless hogwash when I failed to provide that
verification.
If you're a more regular reader, it would have also been reasonable for you to guess that I
was doing a bit. But imagine if I wasn't? Imagine if I really was claiming that the Chinese
government is arming Antifa ninja warriors to kill patriotic Americans in the coming Biden
Wars. How crazy would you have to be to believe what I was saying without my providing hard,
verifiable evidence for my claims?
Now imagine further that this is something I've made false claims about many times in the
past. If every few years I make a new claim about some naughty government arming Antifa super
soldiers in a great communist uprising, which turns out later to have been bogus.
Well you'd dismiss me as a crackpot, wouldn't you? I wouldn't blame you. That would be the
only reasonable response to such a ridiculous spectacle.
And yet if I were an employee of a US government agency making unproven incendiary claims
about a government that isn't aligned with the US-centralized power alliance, the entire
political/media class would be parroting what I said as though it's an established fact. Even
though US government agencies have an extensive and well-documented history of lying about such things.
Today we're all expected to be freaking out about Russia again because Russia hacked the
United States again right before a new president took office again, so now it's very important
that we support new cold war escalations from both the outgoing president and the incoming
president again. We're not allowed to see the evidence that this actually happened again, but
it's of utmost importance that we trust and support new aggressions against Russia anyway.
Again.
The New York Times has a viral op-ed going around titled "I Was the Homeland
Security Adviser to Trump. We're Being Hacked. " The article's author Thomas P Bossert warns
ominously that "the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are
compromised by a foreign nation" perpetrated by "the Russian intelligence agency known
as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world."
Rather than using its supreme tradecraft to interfere in the November election ensuring the
victory of the president we've been told for years is a Russian asset by outlets like The
New York Times , Bossert informs us that the SVR instead opted to hack a private American
IT company called SolarWinds whose software is widely used by the US government.
"Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which
included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim's network," Bossert
explains, saying that "The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate." Its
magnitude is so great that Bossert says Trump must "severely punish the Russians" for
perpetrating it, and cooperate with the incoming Biden team in helping to ensure that that
punishment continues seamlessly between administrations.
The problem is that, as usual, we've been given exactly zero evidence for any of this. As
Moon of Alabama
explains , the only technical analysis we've seen of the alleged hack (courtesy of
cybersecurity firm FireEye) makes no claim that Russia was responsible for it, yet the mass
media are flagrantly asserting as objective, verified fact that Russia is behind
this far-reaching intrusion into US government networks, citing only anonymous
sources if they cite anything at all.
And of course where the media class goes so too does the barely-separate political class.
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin told CNN in a recent interview
that this invisible, completely unproven cyberattack constitutes "virtually a declaration of
war by Russia on the United States." Which is always soothing language to hear as the
Russian government
announces the development of new hypersonic missiles as part of a new nuclear arms race it
attributes to US cold war escalations.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald is one of the few high-profile voices who've had the temerity to
stick his head above the parapet and point out the fact that we have seen exactly zero evidence
for these incendiary claims, for which he is of course currently being raked over the coals on
Twitter.
"I know it doesn't matter. I know it's wrong to ask the question. I know asking the
question raises grave doubts about one's loyalties and patriotism," Greenwald sarcastically
tweeted
. "But has there been any evidence publicly presented, let alone dispositive proof, that
Russia is responsible for this hack?"
"Perhaps they have information sources they can't describe without compromising sources
and methods?"chimed in Ars Technica
's Timothy B Lee in response to Greenwald's query, a textbook reply from establishment
narrative managers whenever anyone questions where the evidence is for any of these invisible
attacks on US sovereignty.
"Of course they can't show us the evidence!" proponents of establishment Russia
hysteria always say. "They'd compromise their sources and methods if they did!"
US spook agencies always say this about evidence for US spook agency claims about
governments long targeted for destruction by US spook agencies. We can't share the evidence
with you because the evidence is classified. It's secret evidence. The evidence is
invisible.
Which always works out very nicely for the US spook agencies, I must say.
Secret, invisible evidence is not evidence. If the public cannot see the evidence behind the
claims being made by the powerful, then those claims are unproven. It would never be acceptable
for anyone in power to say "This important thing with potentially world-altering
consequences definitely happened, but you'll just have to trust us because the evidence is
secret." In a post-Iraq invasion world it is orders of magnitude more unacceptable, and
should therefore be dismissed until hard, verifiable evidence is provided.
Isn't it interesting how all the Pearl Harbors and 9/11s of our day are completely
invisible to the public? We can't see cyber-intrusions for ourselves like we could see fallen
buildings and smoking naval bases; they're entirely hidden from our view. Not only are they
entirely hidden from our view, the evidence that they happened is kept secret from us as well.
And the mass media just treat this as normal and fine. Government agencies with an extensive
history of lying are allowed to make completely unsubstantiated and unverifiable claims about
governments long targeted by those same government agencies, and the institutions responsible
for informing the public about what's going on in the world simply repeat it as fact.
Sure it's possible that Russia hacked the US. It's possible that the US government has been
in contact with extraterrestrials, too. It's possible that the Chinese government is covertly
arming Antifa samurai in preparation for a civil war. But we do not imbue these things with the
power of belief until we are provided with an amount of evidence that rises to the level
required in a post-Iraq invasion world.
These people have not earned our trust, they have earned our pointed and aggressive
skepticism. We must act accordingly.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Midnight10 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 03:03 PM
The US isn't know mm for its independent thought processes. The "secret, invisible evidence"
comes right out of WADA's planbook for banning Russian athletes from the Olympics, by their
use of "disappearing positives". It would be a mistake to consider the Pentagon any smarter
then the WADA Committee. Remember Lance Armstrong was allowed to continue for seven years
without a peep from WADA, or CAS, or the US doping agency. Not a peep. Must have used magic,
like the Pentagon and WADA does now.
Frank Hood Midnight10 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 05:05 PM
Its astounding that U.S ath letes using ster.oids of some sort are not under the same rules
as Rus sian athletes. To ex clude many of the worlds best and still continue to compete
Vikiiing Midnight10 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 04:36 PM
Armstrong was cuaght doping during his first tour win, twice! UCI and other clowns bought
Drugstrongs excuse. And I mean bought 2 years later Dopestrong secretly gave the UCI over
$100,000 for fighting doping....And dont forget Armstrong stole money intended for his
charity....I'm sure he's waiting for an appropriate time to give it back....
Bill Spence 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 03:09 PM
Stealing a few secrets by hacking into US networks is very minor compared to the acts of war
that the United States has committed against Iran Russia China and North Korea. The whole
thing is boring because nothing was damaged according to the claims. Show me some damage or
be silent.
Frank Hood Bill Spence 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 05:23 PM
Even if it is minor, proof would be nice. The people are just starting to question what we
have been told for decades. Mind you Assange actually provided proof for all of us,but
regardless the world still ignored the provided proof. Allegations are the name of the game,
and a good enough reason to continue pressure on certain countries in the form of physical
and economic war since WW2. BUT, "times are a changin" folks.
MotorSlug Bill Spence 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 03:18 PM
thanks to Vault 7 and Wikileaks, we know 99% of the shots are taken by the CIA
EarthBotV2 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 03:38 PM
Here's the question well-programmed Americans never think to ask: Who gains? A coup has
occurred in the U.S.. The evidence of fraud is overwhelming. How do the coup perpetrators
plan to dispose of this evidence? -- by blaming Russia! We'll be told that Russia
manufactured the evidence, just as we were told that Russia manufactured Hunter Biden's
laptop. And those who attempt to prosecute the fraudsters will be called "Russian Agents".
shadow1369 1 day ago 19 Dec, 2020 12:13 PM
Wikileaks Vault 77 disclosures revealed that US terrorist intelligence agencies can make a
hack look like it coes from wherever they choose. Even before that, and the ease with which
CGI can make dead people talk, we were living in an entirely fake paradigm created by
corporate media.
DeathbyDissent 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 06:30 PM
If anyone doubts that the US would use this evidence-free false-flag as a pretext for
attacking Russia, just go to Youtube and search Russian, Hack, Bolton. There, you will see
John Bolton on MSNBC saying the US should "retaliate" in a many-fold worse way. Bolton is a
representative of the deep state in the US; he is a neocon, and neocons have driven our
foreign policy for over 20 years.
DeathbyDissent 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 05:34 PM
Whenever the US wants to commit crimes against other countries, it manufactures the reasons
for doing so. it's been doing this for many decades. This "hack" is nothing more than a
pretext for 1) demonizing Russia, and 2) advancing a foreign policy action in opposition to
Russia. If you don't know that the United States is the main purveyor of lies in the world by
now, you need a giant red pill.
Twills93 DeathbyDissent 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 05:43 PM
How many lies is too many?
Forgotten9 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 05:01 PM
2020 should go into genius records as the largest coincidental (propagated proxi) in the
history of the world
Forgotten9 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 04:57 PM
The greatest question is why has the left administration lied, covered up, misinforming the
american people of their global military actions? PROXI wars? Misuse of NATO assets for EU
and personal gains... Allied with Xi Jinping , striking chinese assets to stimulate the
cultural uprising that put Xi into power in 2012, turning full socialist communist in 2013,
deploying a centralized military power to enforce the territory display in the new map of
china presented December 2012, and full gov backed boycott of western goods, transitioned to
cut trade fully with the western conventional allies china allowed its economy to fully
contract... all covered up by liberal media and made public in their US conservative
opponent's administration..
Forgotten9 1 day ago 18 Dec, 2020 03:53 PM
Did the EU push NATO integration of such technologies making NATO suspect?
Our politicians blow over a trillion dollars a year on US "security" and they can't figure
out a way to keep hackers off of our hard drives? This shows you the quality of the overpaid
clowns in charge of our government. Now we can't even run an election fair and square and are
in the same class as El Salvador, maybe worse.
captain noob 2 hours ago
The problem with money is that it doesn't necessarily buy you things of value
If the Israelis spent all that time and energy to make 9/11 look like an al Qaeda plot, then
it's a piece of cake to make this hack look like the work of Russians.
I see no effort to make this hack look like a russian plot. It looks more organic. Once
the general attitude of disreputability has been established the secret services can sit back
and relax really, the antirussian mindset gets a momentum of its own and generates its own
new antirussian storylines.
I want to know why we aren't hiring the Russians for everything? They appear to be the
best, whether military equipment, spycraft, hacking, diplomacy, or global strategy. All we
have are butthurt bureaucrats, gay entertainers and loudmouthed athletes always eager to bend
a knee.
radical-extremist 3 hours ago
They were the best at honeypots too, until Swallwell fell for Fang Fang.
Dabooda 2 hours ago
Epstein and Mossad would be the gold standard for honeypots.
PrideOfMammon 2 hours ago
As I said, if Putin ran in a fair election in the USA, he would win hands down.
I get that feeling whenever I watch any current mass media programming .
Doubtless you understand it, but many people insist upon misunderstanding a crucial point
about capitalist mass media, so I will frequently comment on it to remind people:
Capitalism is all about bringing products to market and selling them for a profit. The
mass media programming that consumers are fed is not the product any more than is the
feed that is laced with chemicals and hormones and that the feed lots put in the feed bunks
for the cattle. The mass media consumers themselves are the product that is being sold.
Moreover, just as cattle that is bulked up on hormones and other crap yields a higher profit
when sold to the slaughterhouse, mass media consumers whose minds are properly conditioned
yield higher profits for the capitalists.
There is no such thing as "wholesome and organic" capitalist mass media
programming that is free of the mind control additives. All infotainment and
entertainment (yes, 100% and with no exceptions) exists to condition the viewer/consumer for
"The Market™" (hallowed be Its name).
There is a loophole. The narratives that mass media plants in people's minds are not
static. Capitalists' needs differ from time to time, from region to region, and even from
demographic to demographic. Consuming mass media that was produced for cultures radically
different from one's own and/or in times quite distant from the present should be relatively
safe, and the psychological steroids contained in it intended to steer mental development
into line with the herd might have minimal effect. After all, in this situation the consumer
is nowhere near the herd that the programming is intended to get the consumer to join,
so that programming will possibly fail.
This exception itself has an exception, though. The TV programming to sell
capitalism to American consumers back in the 1970s and 1980s ended up having a profound
impact upon Soviet citizens even though their culture was very distant from the target
audiences of the soap operas, police dramas, and sitcoms that they watched on pirated
videocassettes in makeshift mini theaters. Just thinking of how their defenseless minds were
brutally raped by high potency capitalist propaganda intended for jaded Americans with years
of built-up resistance and tolerance to that crap makes me nauseous.
Zucker – who now presides over one of the most fervently anti-Trump media outlets in
the American corporate press – hatched the idea to give then-candidate Trump a weekly
slot on CNN during a March 2016 phone call with Micheal Cohen, a lawyer for Trump at the time,
according to audio obtained by Fox News' Tucker Carlson.
Speaking with Cohen hours before the final Republican primary debate in the 2016 race,
Zucker said that while the Trump campaign had shown "great instincts, great guts and great
understanding of everything," he insisted victory would be impossible without CNN's
backing.
"Here's the thing you cannot be elected president of the United States without CNN,"
Zucker boasted. "Fox and MSNBC are irrelevant – irrelevant – in electing a
general election candidate."
When Cohen suggested the CNN chief relay his thoughts to Trump himself, Zucker demurred,
saying he is "very conscious of not putting too much in email," as Trump – "the
boss" – might go blabbing about it on the campaign trail.
You know, as fond as I am of the boss, he also has a tendency if I call him or I email
him, he then is capable of going out at his next rally and saying that we just talked, and I
can't have that, if you know what I'm saying.
Zucker soon talked himself back into contacting Trump, however, committing to "give him a
call right now" to "wish him luck in the debate tonight" – hosted by none
other than CNN – adding "I have all these proposals for him, like I want to do a
weekly show with him and all this stuff."
He went on to lavish praise on Trump, saying he had "never lost a debate" and would
do "great" during the CNN event later that night, even offering detailed advice for how
the president-to-be could deflect allegations that he is a "con man" from other
candidates.
While the source of the recording is unclear, the leak has made waves online, given that
Zucker has since made himself into Trump's "
cable news nemesis ." The network itself, meanwhile, has fielded an endless stream of
negative coverage of the president, heavily pushing the discredited 'Russiagate' conspiracy
theory for years and throwing full weight behind the Democrats' failed impeachment effort.
Some netizens have already suggested the "damning" revelation could soon result in
Zucker's ouster from his high perch at CNN.
"You think Jeff Zucker will be fired? I actually think there's a decent chance he will
be. Trying to kiss up to Trump is on par with murder in CNN world,"wrote filmmaker and
conservative pundit Robby Starbuck.
Others were less taken aback by the audio, as many pointed to the fact that Zucker and Trump
have a lengthy history together, both working on 'The Apprentice,' the hit reality show that
helped to solidify Trump's status as a pop culture icon. In 2012, Trump even hailed Zucker's
takeover as CNN president, saying the network made a
"great move," and that Zucker "was responsible for me and The Apprentice on NBC
– became #1 show!"
"Everyone knows Zucker made Trump, it's 100% true," one user said . "Trump was down and out.
Zucker pitched him a reality TV show called the Apprentice. Why? Because he likes his New
Yorkers, he likes Trump."
Ever since the man – always wrongly billed as " the Russian Opposition leader
," when in fact he polls 2% of the vote, and the actual opposition leader is a Communist who
still has mass support – took ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow, the securocratic
lobby in western countries has been primed.
Today, with the statement from the German government that Navalny is yet another victim of
'Novichok'-class chemical agents, active measures are already underway.
Former British intelligence officer Philip Ingram MBE, whom I interviewed today for my
Sputnik TV show, had to hurry me up because " the Germans have just spoken the word Novichok
and I expect to be busy with other interviews ."
Wearisome though it may be to point out the bleeding obvious, I must do so.
If the Russian state had attempted to assassinate Navalny, they would never have allowed his
stricken comatose body to be flown out of the country to Germany in the first place. He would
have died on the operating table in Russia, where nobody could "detect traces of Novichok" in a
NATO capital.
If the Russian state was responsible for trying to kill Navalny, surely the LAST weapon in
the whole world it would have chosen with which to do so would be Novichok?
A butter knife, a gun, a speeding car, a car crash – any one of a hundred methods
would surely have been preferable in the post-Skripal era. And more reliable, it would appear:
Navalny, for now mercifully, is the THIRD Russian in a row to be attacked by a DEADLY "
military-grade nerve agent " and mysteriously fail to die.
But just like with the Skripals, we come up against the question asked in every murder
mystery: Cui Bono? Who benefits?
What conceivable gain would the Kremlin stand to make in the killing by Novichok of Alexey
Navalny?
And the huge contradiction, the biggest of all, is that the West wants us to believe
Vladimir Putin is at one and the same time a dazzling Mephistopheles capable of arranging
elections in America and Britain, fixing Brexit, and fomenting separatism from Scotland to
Spain, whilst at the same time being a blithering, self-harming idiot. The cop that couldn't
shoot straight. The man who brought the whole western world down on his head through not one,
but two failed attempts to dispose of utterly harmless marginal critics – who, in the
case of Alexey Navalny, would be incapable of winning a single seat in a provincial local
authority.
I'm travelling at the moment, filming my forthcoming documentary on the strange death of Dr
David Kelly – the British weapons inspector caught up in the Blair War on Iraq –
who was found stone dead at the height of the publicity surrounding him. So I don't have my
crystal ball to consult. But I nonetheless predict that what will now happen will be the
familiar circus of diplomatic expulsions, sanctions and ostracism. Further demonisation of
Russia. Tit for tat. As the world faces a deadly pandemic and economic collapse. Just what the
doctor ordered...
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
I'll tell you who benefits. Anyone who is seeking to debase modern societies. East vs West,
Isam vs Christianity vs Judaism vs, black vs white, rich vs poor, man vs woman vs ?, left vs
right and the destruction of the family units in the West is all but complete. So if you are
person seeking to destabilize society on nearly all fronts, there's your benefactor cause
that appears to be the goal here.
Jeff_P 2 September, 2020 2 Sep, 2020 07:36 PM
Oh puleeze! It should be intuitively obvious to the most casual of observers who benefits.
The American wannabe imperium. These sort of events keep the vassal states in line and losing
their shirts on US directed sanctions to play the role of US canon fodder. And the best part
is that the US doesn't even have to come up with new excuses over and over again. We've been
telling the same old tired lies for decades and the Europeans simply aren't smart enough to
see it for what it is.
Novichok , right from Porton Down chemical weapon lab.
Skeptic 2 September, 2020 2 Sep, 2020 02:55 PM
Apparently Russians don't die of novichok! Not so deadly after all.
Doodle_Dandy 3 September, 2020 3 Sep, 2020 03:11 AM
OPCW says it is TRUE. Must be factual...
Slavko 17 September, 2020 17 Sep, 2020 11:38 AM
Western Military Industrial Complex; as called by late most celebrater US Army general and
President Eisenhower; 1% own more than 90% of western population; they own Banks, Media, The
Complex with NATO, and Politicians; The wars and sanctions are means of money making for
them!
Slavko 17 September, 2020 17 Sep, 2020 11:38 AM
Western Military Industrial Complex; as called by late most celebrater US Army general and
President Eisenhower; 1% own more than 90% of western population; they own Banks, Media, The
Complex with NATO, and Politicians; The wars and sanctions are means of money making for
them!
Rohil Koovappara 3 September, 2020 3 Sep, 2020 11:07 AM
Sure the white supremacist Alexei Navalny is an "opposition leader"!!! Please that evil
fascist polls from about 0-4% and has no support in Russia 🇷🇺 at all!!!!
"... Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires. ..."
"... Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn't done to protect democracy. It was done because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their interests. ..."
"... Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian disinformation efforts are "more problematic" than in 2016. He warned that "this time around, the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media." ..."
"... This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show on Russia-funded RT America ..."
"... Voice of America ..."
"... World Socialist Web Site, ..."
"... We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they're exercising that power. ..."
"... In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance. ..."
40
Comments on Chris Hedges: The Ruling Elite's War on Truth American political leaders
display a widening disconnect from reality intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of
power by global corporations and billionaires. By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
Joe Biden's victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party's longstanding charge that
Russia was hijacking and compromising US elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party
leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is
strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people.
But imagine if Donald Trump had been reelected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New
York Time s , CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent
four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again
haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin's
Manchurian candidate?
Trump and Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their
Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely,
Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling
elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global
corporations and billionaires.
... ... ...
The two warring factions within the ruling elite, which fight primarily over the spoils of
power while abjectly serving corporate interests, peddle alternative realities. If the deep
state and Venezuelan socialists or Russia intelligence operatives are pulling the strings no
one in power is accountable for the rage and alienation caused by the social inequality, the
unassailability of corporate power, the legalized bribery that defines our political process,
the endless wars, austerity and de-industrialization. The social breakdown is, instead, the
fault of shadowy phantom enemies manipulating groups such as Black Lives Matters or the Green
Party.
"The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the
public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of
us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal,
and mismanagement," Matt Taibbi writes.
These fictional narratives are dangerous. They erode the credibility of democratic
institutions and electoral politics. They posit that news and facts are no longer true or
false. Information is accepted or discarded based on whether it hurts or promotes one faction
over another. While outlets such as Fox News have always existed as an arm of the Republican
Party, this partisanship has now infected nearly all news organizations, including publications
such as The New York Times and The Washington Post , along with the major tech
platforms that disseminate information and news. A fragmented public with no common narrative
believes whatever it wants to believe.
... ... ...
The flagrant partisanship and discrediting of truth across the political spectrum are
swiftly fueling the rise of an authoritarian state. The credibility of democratic institutions
and electoral politics, already deeply corrupted by PACs, the electoral college, lobbyists, the
disenfranchisement of third-party candidates, gerrymandering and voter suppression, is being
eviscerated.
Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google
CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a
torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy
infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn't done to protect democracy. It was done
because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their
interests.
The press, meanwhile, has largely given up on journalism. It has retreated into competing
echo chambers that only speak to true believers. This catering exclusively to one demographic,
which it sets against another demographic, is commercially profitable. But it also guarantees
the balkanization of the United States and edges us closer and closer to fratricide.
When Trump leaves the White House millions of his enraged supports, hermetically sealed
inside hyperventilating media platforms that feed back to them their rage and hate, will see
the vote as fraudulent, the political system as rigged, and the establishment press as
propaganda. They will target, I fear, through violence, the Democratic Party politicians,
mainstream media outlets and those they demonize as conspiratorial members of the deep state,
such as Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Democratic Party is as much to blame for this disintegration as
Trump and the Republican Party.
The election of Biden is also very bad news for journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glen Ford,
Margaret Kimberley, Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey St. Clair or Robert Scheer who refuse to be
courtiers to the ruling elites. Journalists that do not spew the approved narrative of the
right-wing, or, alternatively, the approved narrative of the Democratic Party, have a
credibility the ruling elite fears.
The worse things get – and they will get worse as the pandemic leaves hundreds of
thousands dead and thrusts millions of Americans into severe economic distress –the more
those who seek to hold the ruling elites, and in particular the Democratic Party, accountable
will be targeted and censored in ways familiar to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, now in a London
prison and facing possible extradition to the United States and life imprisonment.
Barack Obama's assault on civil liberties, which included the repeated misuse of the
Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, the passage of Section 1021 of the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA) to permit the military to act as a domestic police force and the
ordering of the assassination of U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists in Yemen, was far worse
than those of George W. Bush. Biden's assault on civil liberties, I suspect, will surpass those
of the Obama administration.
The censorship was heavy handed during the campaign. Digital media platforms, including
Google, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, along with the establishment press worked shamelessly as
propaganda arms for the Biden campaign. They were determined not to make the "mistake" they
made in 2016 when they reported on the damaging emails, released by WikiLeaks, from Hillary
Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. Although the emails were genuine, papers such as The
New York Times routinely refer to the Podesta emails as "disinformation." This, no doubt,
pleases its readership, 91 percent of whom identify as Democrats according to the Pew Research
Center. But it is another example of journalistic malfeasance.
Following the election of Trump, the media outlets that cater to a Democratic Party
readership made amends. The New York Times was one of the principal platforms that amplified
Russiagate conspiracies, most of which turned out to be false. At the same time, the paper
largely ignored the plight of the disposed working class that supported Trump. When the
Russiagate story collapsed, the paper pivoted to focus on race, embodied in the 1619 Project.
The root cause of social disintegration -- the neoliberal order, austerity and
deindustrialization -- was ignored since naming it would alienate the paper's corporate
advertisers and the elites on whom the paper depends for access.
Once the 2020 election started, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets censored and
discredited information that could hurt Biden, including a tape of Joe Biden speaking with
former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which appears to be authentic. They gave
credibility to any rumor, however spurious, which was unfavorable to Trump. Twitter and
Facebook blocked access to a New York Post story about the emails allegedly found on Hunter
Biden's discarded laptop.
Twitter locked the New York Post out of its own account for over a week. Glenn Greenwald,
whose article on Hunter Biden was censored by his editors at The Intercept, which he helped
found, resigned. He released the email exchanges with his editors over his article. Ignoring
the textual evidence of censorship, editors and writers at The Intercept engaged in a public
campaign of character assassination against Greenwald. This sordid behavior by self-identified
progressive journalists is a page out of the Trump playbook and a sad commentary on the
collapse of journalistic integrity.
The censorship and manipulation of information was honed and perfected against WikiLeaks.
When WikiLeaks tries to release information, it is hit with botnets or distributed denial of
service attacks. Malware attacks WikiLeaks' domain and website. The WikiLeaks site is
routinely shut down or unable to serve its content to its readers. Attempts by WikiLeaks to
hold press conferences see the audio distorted and the visual images corrupted. Links to
WikiLeaks events are delayed or cut. Algorithms block the dissemination of WikiLeaks content.
Hosting services, including Amazon, removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Julian Assange, after
releasing the Iraqi war logs, saw his bank accounts and credit cards frozen. WikiLeaks' PayPal
accounts were disabled to cut off donations. The Freedom of the Press Foundation in December
2017 closed down the anonymous funding channel to WikiLeaks which was set up to protect the
anonymity of donors. A well-orchestrated smear campaign against Assange was amplified and given
credibility by the mass media and filmmakers such as Alex Gibney. Assange and WikiLeaks were
first. We are next.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian
disinformation efforts are "more problematic" than in 2016. He warned that "this time around,
the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to
spread their propaganda in the mainstream media."
This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious redbaiting campaign
without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show
on Russia-funded RT America is the same reason Vaclav Havel could only be heard on the
US-funded Voice of America during the communist control of Czechoslovakia. I did not
choose to leave the mainstream media. I was pushed out. And once anyone is pushed out, the
ruling elite is relentless about discrediting the few platforms left willing to give them, and
the issues they raise, a hearing.
"If the problem is 'American citizens' being cultivated as 'assets' trying to put
'interference' in the mainstream media, the logical next step is to start asking Internet
platforms to shut down accounts belonging to any American journalist with the temerity to
report material leaked by foreigners (the wrong foreigners, of course – it will continue
to be okay to report things like the 'black ledger')," writes Taibbi , who has done some of the best reporting on
the emerging censorship. "From Fox or the Daily Caller on the right
, to left-leaning outlets like Consortium or the World Socialist Web
Site, to writers like me even – we're all now clearly in range of new speech
restrictions, even if we stick to long-ago-established factual standards."
Taibbi argues that the precedent for overt censorship took place when the major digital
platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, YouTube – in a coordinated move
blacklisted the right-wing talk show host Alex Jones.
"Liberal America cheered," Taibbi told me when I interviewed him for my show, " On Contact ":
They said 'Well this is a noxious figure. This is a great thing. Finally, someone's taking
action.' What they didn't realize is that we were trading an old system of speech regulation
for a new one without any public discussion. You and I were raised in a system where you got
punished for speech if you committed libel or slander or if there was imminent incitement to
lawless action, right? That was the standard that the Supreme Court set, but that was done
through litigation. There was an open process where you had a chance to rebut charges. That
is all gone now.
Now, basically there's a handful of these tech distribution platforms that control how
people get their media.
They've been pressured by the Senate, which has called all of their CEOs in, and basically
ordered them, 'We need you to come up with a plan to prevent the sowing of discord and
spreading of misinformation.' This has finally come into fruition. You see a major reputable
news organization like the New York Post -- with a 200-year history -- locked out of its own
Twitter account.
The story [Hunter Biden's emails] has not been disproven. It's not disinformation or
misinformation. It's been suppressed as it would be suppressed in a Third World country. It's
a remarkable historic moment. The danger is that we end up with a one-party informational
system. There's going to be approved dialogue and unapproved dialogue that you can only get
through certain fringe avenues. That's the problem. We let these companies get this
monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they're exercising that power.
In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat
documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will
endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the
powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a
mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a
chance.
Chris Hedges Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who
was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years forThe New York Times,where he
served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously
worked overseas forThe Dallas Morning News,The Christian Science
Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America showOn Contact.paul eastonNOVEMBER
23, 2020 AT 10:28 AM
It seems like the masters are just as deluded as the slaves. But the situation is
unsustainable. When many millions of slaves become homeless and hungry that reality will become
unavoidable. Who will they blame? Will they attack one another or will they revolt against the
system? Soon we will see. Carolyn L ZarembaNOVEMBER
24, 2020 AT 10:30 AM
I share only alternative media since I don't trust "mainstream" media one iota. I post
articles from the World Socialist Web Site, Consortium News, the Grayzone, Caitlin Johnstone
and others all the time. I am a socialist. I was only banned from posting on FB once, for
criticizing Israel. No surprise there. But I suspect FB of shadow banning, i.e., making it look
like you've posted an article but making it invisible to others in their news feeds. I first
learned of this practice from Craig Murray, another whose articles I post regularly. paul
eastonNOVEMBER
25, 2020 AT 1:35 AM
That is a chilling thought. I was shadow banned by medium.com a few years ago. It appeared
to me that my posts and comments went in, but no one else could see them. At least with them I
could tell something was wrong because I had regular conversations with some people. With FB I
don't know if you could ever be sure. R ZwarichNOVEMBER
25, 2020 AT 5:37 AM
Mr. Easton is indeed correct. It is VERY chilling, especially if people would imagine what
THEY would do, if they had our Enemy's morally depraved motivations, and if they had the
control our Enemy has over ALL our communications switches.
There are three basic types of mass communications. One to many. Many to one. And many to
many.
The Enemy has complete access to 'one to many' communications, and complete control over
anyone's else's access to same. Many to one communications are ineffective for intrinsic
reasons. Many to many communications offer myriad methods of cunningly creative control.
If we send out group emails, for example, in simple old-fashioned list-serves, they who
control the switches could easily 'filter', to determine who among addressees gets any message,
and who doesn't.
I used to write comments in the Boston Globe, the wholly owned plaything of a VERY weird old
Billionaire and his proud and beautiful young trophy wife. (Less than half his age, of course).
At first I thought the Globe NEVER censored. I could write anything, and it would post. Ahh but
then I learned that the Globe is a HEAVY handed censor, but was clever enough to put a 'cookie'
in your browser folder to tell their server to let you see your own comments, so you would not
even know that no one else could see them. It was 'stealth censorship'.
We should try to remember that these people are morally depraved, in their constant
paroxysms of raw Greed and raw Lust. No force exists any longer in our nation to restrain them.
Anything we can 'see' that they CAN do, we can pretty much figure they already DO do, or else
sooner or later will. Carol ShapiroNOVEMBER
23, 2020 AT 1:44 PM
While I don't agree with you, Chris Hedges, all the time, I believe you are our one. true.
journalist. Thankful for your honesty. Insight. Huge intellect. Global experience. I am an
"unenrolled" voter -- an extremely disillusioned former Bernie Sanders supporter. Truly, I feel
like he would have been our closest attempt to achieving a real "citizen government". What a
laughable term that is these days. Bernie never would have had a chance running as a Democrat
– absurd. He should have walked out of that convention four years ago and taken his
supporters with him. Oh wait- you said that. NeverNOVEMBER
23, 2020 AT 2:59 PM
Don't forget that the selective coverage by the NY Times in this campaign didn't start when
Biden became the nominee. Up to that time, the Times ran one or two articles on Sanders it
seems. Whatever the number, it was miniscule. They almost completely ignored one of the most
significant campaigns in modern history, thus helping to ensure it died on the vine. And when
they did cover it one or two times, it was always negative.
US liberals more fascist than conservatives–long observed by historians/social
philosophers
"amerikans do not converse as Tocqueville wrote, amerikans entertain each other. amerikans do
not exchange ideas, they exchange images. the problem w amerikans is not Orwellian–it is
huxleyan: amerikans love their oppression: Neil Postman Stephen MorrellNOVEMBER
24, 2020 AT 1:18 AM
Glenn Greenwald's points need stressing: (i) some of the most vociferous proponents of
online censorship are mainstream and 'alternative' 'journalists' who on repeated occasions have
egged on the carriers to shut sites, pages, accounts or postings; (ii) these 'journalists'
aren't just serving the narrowest band of oligarchic media empires in history, but also are
ivy-league bourgeois brats with no interest at all in exposing the injustices or malfeasance of
bourgeois society, unlike many journalists of the past; and (iii) that it's not in the
immediate material interests of the carriers to conduct the censorship, especially in the
longterm, since it consumes resources and lowers traffic and profits. They'd much rather the
government do it and for them to be compensated at taxpayer expense.
To avoid future potential government antitrust measures or nationalisation (heaven forbid!),
Zuckerberg and his ilk have been censoring in heavyhanded and hamfisted ways that aren't so
'autonomous' but for the moment at least can be traced along the usual Democrat-controlled
thinktank and CIA/FBI lines, which of course also are beyond public scrutiny. Despite the
prospects for freedom of reach (and reach is what it's really about) apparently growing dimmer
with each senate committee appearance by the carrier oligarchs, ways and means will be found to
circumvent their draconian measures. While alternative non-censoring platforms have yet to gain
significant traction, it likely won't take much for one to catch on, perhaps sparked by an
outrageous event of suppression, that turns Facebook, Twitter, etc, into museum pieces. One
might imagine, for instance, Wikileaks-style YouTube, Facebook, Twitter equivalents that act as
true carriers, purely machine-based and devoid of human interference, that precludes them
becoming the 'moral guardians' that Twitter, Facebook etc, are quickly metamorphising into.
As increasing swathes of the population appear not to be aligning within the bourgeoisie's
preset ideological 'tribal' boundaries, there's a certain schadenfreude in seeing the rulers in
dread of the truth getting out and spreading uncontrollably. Their tailored counter-narratives
simply are too enfeebled and slight to square with the hard reality that's hitting everyone,
from the most educated and brainwashed to the least. That ivy-league stenographers are being
pressed into the service of censorship gives some indication of the desperation of the rulers.
We all know, as do they but can never admit it publicly, that censorship and repression are
frank admissions that they've lost all 'arguments' for their very existence.
To an extent, Trump has been responsible for letting the genie out of the bottle, as the
first president probably since before Andrew Jackson to have failed, repeatedly, to put
lipstick on the racist, capitalist imperial pig. The efforts by the ruling class at censorship
and naked suppression of freedom of reach and of access to sources of truthful information will
only increase in desperation as their myth-making narratives become ever more unable to
rationalise a crisis that's they're beginning to see as intractable and endangering their
rule.
"... Once you've learned a bit more you realize it's not quite happening that way. Most mainstream news reporters are not really witting propagandists – those are to be found more in plutocrat-funded think tanks and other narrative management firms, and in the opaque government agencies which feed news media outlets information designed to advance their interests. The predominant reason mainstream news reporters say things that aren't true is because in order to be hired by mainstream news outlets, you need to jack your mind into a power-serving worldview that is not based in truth. ..."
"... Mainstream establishment orthodoxy is essentially a religion, as fake and power-serving as any other, and if you want to work in mainstream politics or media you need to demonstrate that you are a member of that religion. ..."
"... That's all you're ever seeing when you notice blue-checkmarked reporters tweeting in promotion of imperialist interests and status quo politics. They are not laboring under the delusion that they are saying anything new or insightful that a hundred other people aren't saying at the exact same time; they are signaling. ..."
By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her
website is here and you can follow
her on Twitter @caitoz
People who are only just beginning to research what's wrong with the world often hold an
assumption that mainstream news reporters are just knowingly propagandizing people all the
time.
That they sit around scheming up ways to deceive their audiences into supporting war,
oligarchy and oppression for the benefit of their plutocratic masters.
Once you've learned a bit more you realize it's not quite happening that way. Most
mainstream news reporters are not really witting propagandists – those are to be found
more in plutocrat-funded think tanks and other narrative management firms, and in the opaque
government agencies which feed news media outlets information designed to advance their
interests. The predominant reason mainstream news reporters say things that aren't true is
because in order to be hired by mainstream news outlets, you need to jack your mind into a
power-serving worldview that is not based in truth.
A recent job listing for a New York
Times Russia Correspondent which was flagged by Russia-based
journalist Bryan MacDonald illustrates this dynamic perfectly. The listing reads as
follows:
"Vladimir Putin's Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world.
It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the
opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West
to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has
deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At
home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his
villa.
If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an
opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau
Chief early next year."
Does this sound like the sort of job someone with a less than hostile attitude toward the
Russian government would apply to? Is it a job listing that indicates it might welcome someone
who sees mainstream Russia hysteria as cartoonish hyperbole designed to advance the
longstanding geostrategic interests of Western power structures against a government which has
long resisted bowing to the dictates of those power structures? Someone who voices skepticism
about the
plot hole - riddled
establishment narratives of Russian election meddling and
Novichok assassinations ? Someone who, as
Moon of Alabama
notes , might point out that Putin is in fact at work in the Kremlin right now and not "hiding
out" in a "villa" ?
Of course not. In order to get a job at the New York Times, you need to demonstrate that you
subscribe to the mainstream oligarchic imperialist worldview which forms the entirety of
Western mass media output. You need to demonstrate that you have been properly indoctrinated,
and that you can be guided into toeing the imperial line with simple
attaboys and tisk-tisks from your superiors rather than being explicitly told to knowingly
lie.
Because if they did tell you to knowingly lie to the public to advance the interests of the
powerful, that would be propaganda. And propaganda is what happens in evil backwards countries
like Russia.
Mainstream establishment orthodoxy is essentially a religion, as fake and power-serving as
any other, and if you want to work in mainstream politics or media you need to demonstrate that
you are a member of that religion.
That's all you're ever seeing when you notice blue-checkmarked reporters tweeting in
promotion of imperialist interests and status quo politics. They are not laboring under the
delusion that they are saying anything new or insightful that a hundred other people aren't
saying at the exact same time; they are signaling. They are letting current and prospective
peers and employers know, "I am a believer. I am a member of the faith." This way they
are ensured the continued advancement of their careers in mainstream news media.
This is why you have labels for anyone expressing skepticism of establishment narratives
like "conspiracy theorist," "useful idiot," "Russian asset" or "Assadist" ; the
powerful people who understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world need
labels to separate the faithful from the heathens. It means the same thing as "heretic .
"
The fast and easy way to get rich and famous has always been to promote the interests of the
powerful. This is as true in every other sector as it is in media. For this reason, those who
pour their energy into criticizing existing power structures and shining a bright light on
their dynamics aren't likely to be living in fancy mansions or going to ritzy parties any time
soon, while those who do the opposite actually will. And yet when someone sets up a Substack or
a Patreon account to make criticizing the powerful their life's work, it is they who will get
called money-grubbing grifters by the propagandized.
The faces you see thrust onto screens by the plutocratic media are not spouting falsehoods
while being aware of their deception, any more than any preacher is knowingly lying when they
say you'll burn for eternity if you don't accept the gospel. Most of them believe everything they are saying ,
because they have been propagandized into becoming good acolytes and proselytizers of the
faith.
The most propagandized people on earth are those who are responsible for promulgating
propaganda.
Naughtylus 15 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 04:08 AM
Spot on article. Journalists in MSM media constantly brag about their independence,
impartiality, truthfulness, etc. and I always wanted to ask them how long they think they
would keep their job if they simply questioned the established narrative of their company.
People hired in the media these days are not hired for the job of informing or being
journalists, but to act as a mere transmission for opinion manipulation campaigns, devised by
those in real power circles.
KennethKeen 15 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 04:18 AM
Excellent explanation. I would add an additional method of climbing the career ladder. If you
do something criminal, that others in the system are aware of, then you can soar up the
ranks, as they are guaranteed the possibility of blackmailing you. That is how the house of
cards is held in place.
1justssayn 12 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 07:26 AM
Absolutely spot on. It applies to a lot of other occupations as well.
shadow1369 15 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 04:27 AM
The strange thing is that while not a single statement in the NYT summary was true of Russia,
they cvould all be applied to the us. I guess that is the point, applicants must be prepared
to simply substitute the Russia for the US whenever thery describe crimes against humanity.
So zero intelligence is required, but more importantly zero integrity either.
Fenianfromcork 12 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 07:47 AM
Sounds more like an add for joining the CIA.
Insulyn Fenianfromcork 9 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 10:11 AM
I wonder just how many who are hired either work for the CIA already or start working for the
CIA soon after? The add was possibly written with CIA direction. Embedded propagandists. The
ad just shows how journalism simply doesn't matter to the MSM, it's all narrative and spin.
Geo Graphy 12 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 07:50 AM
The fourth estate has let their ego override their common sense. They are not an elected
representation of any portion of the American or any other country's public. They are
employees of organizations that operate for profit. They do not have a public mandate to
provide their opinion as news. They are incapable of reporting news without slanting the view
they present. Since it is slanted, it is not news, it is garbage. What the media presents to
the public is pure propaganda made up by the staff and management of the so called news
organizations. If the fourth estate will not return to reporting the news, then they
rightfully belong on the trash heap of history.
PhillisStein 8 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 12:04 PM
'The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the
masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen
mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our
country.' - Edward Bernays In other words, democracy is a 'majority rules' model and, since,
in our current consciousness, you can fool most of the people most of the time, then
democracy is able to be easily manipulated, and thus is not true democracy. We cannot have
anything approaching civil society until we are able to exercise our free will with informed
consent, which requires objective information. Sadly, everything is based upon the 'victim'
model, which treats us as children - 'don't worry, we'll just do all your thinking for you
and just tell you what to think.'
bos000 11 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 08:23 AM
Propaganda for americans: "US army "heroes" are around the world to protect america,s freedom
and democracy", by killing innocents in other countries, when no one ever attack US.
Smythe_Mogg 7 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 12:38 PM
Perhaps journalists are not responsible for the content of propaganda but they are complicit
in its transmission. Journalism for the most part, if ever it was, is not a profession with
respect to practitioners upholding standards they refuse to deviate from. 'Hacks' working for
the popular press are commonly derided. These days it is those employed by 'broadsheet'
papers (and equivalent digital media) who truly merit opprobrium. The days when the Times
fielded gentlemen are long gone. Few independent thinkers are to be found among prominent
journalists. 'Broadsheet' decline has far more serious consequences than the worst the
popular press can do. The popular press always has catered for 'low brow' and 'middle brow'
readers; its lower reaches being little more than scandal sheets with titillating pictures.
These readers are not movers and shakers: they are followers. The educated class, nowadays
sadly depleted, relies on news outlets to be under editorial control capable of picking wheat
from amidst chaff of no consequence and seeking accurate reporting thereof. A concomitant is
choosing informed individuals to offer opinion pieces; top of this pile is the editorial
which at one time could shake government. Lack of a properly informed upper tier of the
population capable of challenging the self-styled political elite (and their owners) betokens
descent into oligarchy and thereby kakistocracy.
OneGenericUser Gatineau25deA 15 hours ago 22 Nov, 2020 04:50 AM
I have a somewhat cliche' opinion. I don't care Americans want their country to rule the
world, I want the world to have a choice on wether they want America as a leader, and I bet
the majority of countries don't. If you're impose your "leadership" then you're not a leader,
you're a dictator.
The winning candidate will be issued little stickies for her computer screen including
"Russian Aggression", "Annexed Crimea" and "Poisoned the Skripals"
How 'Western' Media Select Their Foreign Correspondentsgottlieb , Nov 20 2020
19:21 utc |
1
Did you ever wonder why 'western' mainstream media get stories about Russia and other
foreign countries so wrong?
It is simple. They hire the most brainwashed, biased and cynic writers they can get for
the job. Those who are corrupt enough to tell any lie required to support the world view of
their editors and media owners.
They are quite upfront about it.
Here is evidence in form of a New York Times
job description for a foreign correspondent position in Moscow:
Russia Correspondent
Job Description
Vladimir Putin's Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world.
It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the
opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the
West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It
has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its
influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president
hides out in his villa.
If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an
opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe
Bureau Chief early next year.
To be allowed to write for the Times one must see the Russian Federation as a
country that is ruled by just one man.
One must be a fervent believer in MI6 produced Novichok hogwash. One must also believe in
Russiagate and in the multiple idiocies it produced even after all of them have been
debunked.
One must know that vote counts in Russia are always wrong while U.S. vote counting is the
most reliable ever. Russian private military contractors (which one must know to be evil men)
are 'secretly deployed' to wherever the editors claim them to be. Russia's hospitals are of
cause always much worse than ours.
Even when it is easy to check that Vladimir Putin (the most evil man ever) is at work in the
Kremlin the job will require one to claim that he is hiding in a villa.
Most people writing for the Times will actually not believe the above nonsense.
But the description is not for a position that requires one to weight and report the facts.
It is for a job that requires one to lie. That the Times lists all the recent
nonsense about Russia right at the top of the job description makes it clear that only people
who support those past lies will be considered adequate to tell future lies about Russia.
No honest unbiased person will want such a job. But as it comes with social prestige, a
good paycheck and a probably nice flat in Moscow the New York Times will surely find
a number of people who are willing to sell their souls to take it.
Interestingly the job advertisement does not list Russian language capabilities as a
requirement. It only says that 'Fluency in Russian is preferred'.
'Western' mainstream media are filled with such biased, cynic and self-censoring
correspondents who have little if any knowledge of the country they are reporting from. It is
therefore not astonishing that 'western' populations as well as their politicians have often
no knowledge of what is really happening in the world.
Hilarious. Don't need no stinking
Operation Mockingbird anymore. Just put out a want-ad and plenty of brainwashed folks will
come flocking. Propaganda works.
This is such an odd job description with very few specific requirements and none detailing
how much experience or what level of knowledge or skill is required (in the form of X number
of years worked in some area requiring Russian language skills or university qualifications
obtained) that I almost wonder if this advertisement is for real.
One notices also that "Vladimir Putin's Russia" is presented as a story. Everything else
that follows in the second paragraph of the advertisement is also a story. Indeed everything
in the news media industry is a "story" as if instead of employing investigative reporters on
the beat grimly searching for hard facts like old pulp fiction detectives, the media now only
wants Hollywood script writers or graduates straight out of creative writing courses.
But then I suppose whoever gets the job at the NYT can hardly do worse than what the hack
Luke Harding did as The Fraudian's Moscow correspondent nearly 15 years ago, so much so that
the Russian govt must have suspected that he was more than just a bad paranoid plagiarist ...
he must have been a spy as well, that it would initially refuse to renew his visa. One would
like to see the job specifications for the position of The Fraudian's Moscow reporter that
Harding held for a number of years.
Incredible. What the acronym 'SMH' (shake my head) was invented for.
It's no wonder I switched off CBC radio, our national broadcaster here in Canada. Their
music programs were okay, but every hour they had a news update, and those were
stomach-turning. Superficial, biased, Empire-friendly nonsense...
Norman Solomon wrote about this problem fifteen years ago in his book "War Made Easy, How
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death"
. . .from Amazon: In War Made Easy, nationally syndicated columnist, media critic, and author
Norman Solomon cuts through the dense web of spin to probe and scrutinize the key "perception
management" techniques that have played huge rolls in the promotion of American wars in
recent decades.
p.116
. . .The attitudes of reporters covering U.S. foreign policy officials are generally
similar to the attitudes of those officials. "Most journalists who get plum foreign
assignments already accept the assumptions of empire," according to longtime foreign
correspondent Reese Erlick. He added, "I didn't meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who
disagreed with the notion that the U.S. and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraq
government by force. They disagreed only about timing, whether the action should be
unilateral, and whether a long-term occupation is practical." After decades of freelancing
for major U.S. news organizations, Erlich offered this blunt conclusion: "Money, prestige,
career options, ideological predilections--combined with the down sides of filing stories
unpopular with the government--all cast their influence on foreign correspondents. You
don't win a Pulitzer prize for challenging the basic assumptions of empire."
> social prestige, a good paycheck and a probably nice flat
The term that Paul Craig Roberts often uses, " presstitute ", comes to mind.
Echoing JimmyG. @4 and spudski @7, in Canada, our taxpayer-funded state news agency's
flagship program "The National" gives us regular Two Minutes Hate pieces currently
being churned out every two weeks or so by Moscow correspondent Chris Brown who fits this
article's description to a T.
I've lost count of how many times he and CBC The National's editors have singled out
Russia's handling of COVID-19 for criticism, when so many other countries have far worse per
capita fatality numbers than Russia.
While decrying Russia's COVID-19 deaths, they, of course, never mention the fact that
Canada has had more COVID-19 deaths per capita than Russia ...
It's absolutely pathetic.
5 years ago the truly great journalist Robert Fisk made the following observations during an
interview with the journal.ie amongst others.
Back's up everything you have pointed out about the sheer disappearance of any impartial
reportage from the NYT and printed media in general.
"Most newspapers that have lost circulation, particularly in the States, it's not because
of the internet, it's because those newspapers were simply no good. When I go to San
Francisco the coverage of the Middle East in its papers is frightened, cowardly, pathetic,
there's no serious foreign coverage at all."
"Newspapers themselves are to blame for the deterioration in their readership. I read the
New York Times when its free, period, it doesn't deserve to be paid for. It's not worth
it.
It doesn't matter whether it's online or not. If a paper's not worth buying you'll read for
free online regardless"
"Most people writing for the Times will actually not believe the above
nonsense."
Our host is much too charitable to the presstitutes. Those in the "Mockingbird"
mass media eat their own effluent like a sort of group ouroboric scatophagia. To maintain
their perverse form of "mental hygiene" they studiously avoid information sources
outside of their own circular reprocessing of yesterday's delusions into fresh steaming piles
for today's consumption. They have become so accustomed to feeding off their own delusions
that if a hint of reality were to intrude into their looped intellectual food chain their
minds would reject it like poison. They would likely exhibit physical symptoms, which
doubtless would be attributed to evil Soviet mind rays from Havana.
Stengel stated clearly that a "news cartel" of mainstream corporate media outlets had
long dominated US society, but he bemoaned that those "cartels don't have hegemony like they
used to."
Stengel made it clear that his mission is to counter the alternative perspectives given
a voice by foreign media platforms that challenge the US-dominated media landscape.
"The bad actors use journalistic objectivity against us."
Wow ...
I clicked on the New York Times job link, and journalistic objectivity and integrity are
nowhere to be found in the job descripton. But I did notice these lines that add to the ones
that b brought to our attention:
We are looking for someone who will embrace the prospect of traversing 11 time zones to
track a populace that is growing increasingly frustrated with an economy dragged down by
corruption, cronyism and excessive reliance on natural resources. This posting offers the
chance to chronicle the continuing reign of one of the world's most charismatic leaders,
President Vladimir V. Putin.
Not to mention, Putin ushered in changes to the constitution, so he will likely stay in
power for many years to come.
And, of course, we are on the cusp of a new, less Putin-friendly president in the US,
which should only raise the temperature between Washington and Moscow.
It's not Russia it's "Vladimir Putin's Russia," so that's one mandatory term checked off,
i.e. personalizing the appointed enemy. But then we read "It sends out hit squads. . ."
instead of the usual obligatory: 'The regime' . . . . .but the Times can't get everything
right.
The amount of hourly propaganda directed at and leveled at American people is
unprecedented, I had not seen it this intense in past years it reminds me of my High school
days in Shah's Iran. This kind and this intense of control on news can only be due to
instability of the regime. IMO in coming Biden Adminstration regime will impose new rules for
control of internet and access to foreign news. Currently using my Mobil cellular I can't
access any Iranian news site.
DNC PoliticalPrisoner 31
minutes ago Many wouldn't have believed there was election fraud except the media and Big
Tech keep insisting that there wasn't. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Fox News, CNN, and more giant
corporations keep screaming at us via notifications, messages, and broadcasts that there was no
election fraud. Now, we're starting to think maybe there is something fishy going on.
"... Meanwhile, the GloboCap propaganda has reached some new post-Orwellian level. After four long years of "RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION!" now, suddenly, "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ELECTION FRAUD IN THE USA!" ..."
And, of course, the most important thing is, racism in America is over again!
Yes, that's right, folks, no more racism kiss all those Confederate monuments goodbye! The
Democrats are back in the White House! According to sources, the domestic staff are already
down in the West Wing basement looking for that MLK bust that Trump
ordered removed and desecrated the moment he was sworn into office. College kids are
building pyres of racist and potentially racist books, and paintings, and films, and other
degenerate artworks. Jussie
Smollet can finally come out of hiding .
... No, this is a time for looking ahead to the Brave New Global-Capitalist
Normal , in which everyone will sit at home in their masks surfing the Internet on their
toasters with MSNBC playing in the background well, OK, not absolutely everyone. The affluent
will still need to fly around in their private jets and helicopters, and take vacations on
their yachts, and, you know, all the usual affluent stuff. But the rest of us won't have to go
anywhere or meet with anyone in person, because our lives will be one never-ending Zoom meeting
carefully monitored by official fact-checkers to ensure we're not being "misinformed" or
exposed to "dangerous conspiracy theories" which could potentially lead to the agonized deaths
(or the mild-to-moderate flu-like
illnesses ) of hundreds of millions of innocent people.
... Meanwhile, the GloboCap propaganda has reached some new post-Orwellian level. After
four long years of "RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION!" now, suddenly, "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS
ELECTION FRAUD IN THE USA!"
... Call it the "New Normal," or whatever you want. Pretend "democracy has triumphed" if you
want. Wear your mask. Mask your children. Terrorize them with pictures of "death trucks," tales
of "Russian hackers" and "white supremacist terrorists."
After four long years of "RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION!" now, suddenly, "THERE IS NO SUCH
THING AS ELECTION FRAUD IN THE USA!"
Why this is not getting more attention I do not know. It was just the other day when
Russia, Iran, and China were influence pedaling of disinformation trying to sway election
results. Facebook was censoring/deleting on a constant basis trying to stem the flow of
fraudulent information from the evil commies.
Not only has Russia been angry and frustrated over the Alexei Navalny fallout where for
months Germany, European countries, and the US have accused the Kremlin of a conspiracy to
assassinate the Putin critic via poisoning, but now Moscow is going gloves off in returning the
favor of the pressure campaign Berlin has been waging.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced Thursday plans to sanction German and
French officials as retaliation for EU punitive restrictions on Russian officials related to
the alleged Navalny poisoning.
Before the Aug.20 incident Navalny was a somewhat obscure opposition
activist (Russian officials have routinely dismissed him as a mere "blogger), but after
being emergency airlifted to a Berlin hospital became a central figure amid Western efforts to
push claims of nefarious Putin-sponsored and Russian intelligence hits on "major" opposition
voices, akin to the saga of Skripal poisoning.
Russian officials have long been angry at not being able to conduct their own investigation
or to access Navalny in Berlin. This week France and Germany rolled out with sanctions on a
who's who of top Russian
intelligence and defense officials .
Speaking of Russia's reciprocal sanctions against France and Germany, the [Kremlin]
spokesman stressed that "one couldn't have expected anything different."
"The reciprocity principle works here rather clearly, hardly anyone could have expected
that Russia would leave this without a reaction ," he explained.
In response to a question which officials from Germany and France banned from entering
Russia would correspond to the level of First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential
Administration of Russia Sergei Kiriyenko blacklisted by the West, the Kremlin representative
noted "One can hardly find Kiriyenko's equal but in any case, at least nominally, of course,
it is easy to find a corresponding title."
The Kremlin spokesperson called the allegations related to Navalny "more than dubious."
And now Germany is upset, with a government spokesman on Friday lashing out at the
"unjustified" and "inappropriate" Russian action .
For the past three or four days I have been wondering why the NY Post made this very sudden
turn to supporting Joe Biden. For months we have had brilliant articles by Miranda Devine ,
Michael Goodwin, and others all in support of Trump and the America we have known for many
years. Replies: @Realist
REPLY AGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. THIS COMMENTER THIS THREAD HIDE THREAD
For the past three or four days I have been wondering why the NY Post made this very
sudden turn to supporting Joe Biden. For years we have had brilliant articles by Miranda
Devine , Michael Goodwin, and others all in support of Trump and the America we have known
for many years, and all of a sudden the NY Post changed its views, but these columnists have
not changed. They are too knowledgable and are gifted with common sense. I look forward to
reading their columns or will the Post cancel culture them?
Any discussion of how to "work with" the Marxists is well, it just shouldn't be discussed.
You can't work with Marxists. Besides, Trump won the election. This will be proven over the
next few weeks.
"... In my view, the greatest Trump accomplishment is that in four years he did not start a single war. Now, let's compare that to Obama/Biden accomplishments: destroyed Libya, destroyed Ukraine, and illegally sent troops to Syria. The difference is stark. ..."
"... BTW, the bulk of COVID deaths happened in Dem-controlled cities. Not to mention riots by Antifa/BLM bandits, which Dems openly approved of. ..."
Frankly, I was never a fan of Trump. However, seeing how globalist media seethe with rage
against him and drip venom, I know that he is doing something good. Now I know why the scum
hated him so much. He does not play be their scenario, does not give in to fraud. Warts and
all, he is certainly better than corrupt senile nonentity and shameless scum pushing that
half-dead stuffed shirt forward.
Does it bother anyone at all that Joe Biden is implicated in taking money from communist
China through his drugged out son Hunter?
Hell no! If it bothered anyone we wouldn't be in the shit we're in. What is of interest to
Americans is who is that Masked Singer , who will win the Super Bowl and other inane
bullshit.
Election or no election, we've reached and gone past the point where communication with
the Left and Dems is pointless.
This has nothing to do with the Democrats or Republicans they are two sides of the Deep
State coin heads they win, tails you lose. Democracy in this country has been a sham for
decades.
I would not be surprised if the military high command has become fractured. I've read from
several sources that the generals, most of whom are wedded to the MIC globalists, never like
Trump in the first place, and have surreptitiously worked against him. But the colonels and
below are largely loyal to their commander-in-chief. Certainly most of the enlisted men
are.
I wonder if Trump's recent firing of Mark Esper has deepened the divide? In any case,
Zarathustra, do you have any evidence that what you say is true?
@Harold Smith emely hard to resist. Maybe Trump did resist it and I can see many of his
supporters are his supporters for that perceived war resistance, but I still highly doubt it.
He may have resisted precisely because he knew his supporters were fed up with foreign
adventurism. His statements and actions though were much more belligerent.
The assassination of Suleimani was an act of war and very nearly led to a real full-time
shooting one, for example. It turned out to be a quick battle but it was really a close
call.
We'll see how historically pro-war Biden turns out. I very much want to be optimistic, but
the anti-interventionist candidates are always blocked out early in the process. They never
come close.
@AnonFromTN /wp-content/uploads/2019/08/TheDogAndTheManAreWorkingTogether.jpg">the dog
and the man are working together
Trump's single-handed trashing of the framework of nuclear arms control and apparent
intent to deploy intermediate range nuclear missiles near Russian and Chinese borders –
is an heinous crime against humanity.
This reckless, anti-American act of infamy by Trump is "deep state" foreign policy on
steroids; there's no other way to characterize it. Other than actually "pushing the button"
itself, what greater crime against America and the world could a president do? By this one
inexcusable act alone, Trump has completely delegitimized himself.
I don't know how you can't see and appreciate this.
@Harold Smith to mention that corrupt senile Dem nominee is an affront to all sane people
in the US. Under that half-dead stuffed shirt the worst will come forward, from brinkmanship
we might slide into actual nuclear war. Judging by how late Dems started their election fraud
(the night after Nov 3), they apparently are dumb enough to believe their own lies. That's a
very dangerous sign. Not to mention that Dems massive election fraud undermines the US more
than Bin Laden or Saddam could even dream of.
So, we had a choice between two bad scenarios. Considering that virtually all US wars were
started by Dems, and that Trump did not start a single one in four years, even Trump is
preferable to what Dem puppet masters have in store for us.
@IncitatusIn my view, the greatest Trump accomplishment is that in four years he did
not start a single war. Now, let's compare that to Obama/Biden accomplishments: destroyed
Libya, destroyed Ukraine, and illegally sent troops to Syria. The difference is stark.
I know that Biden was not senile back then, just corrupt (e.g., the Ukrainian saga with
his junky son dishonorably discharged from the US military getting ~$50,000 a month at
Burisma). So, out of two turds I'd choose the least smelly one. Massive electoral fraud of
Biden puppet masters is a cherry on the cake.
BTW, the bulk of COVID deaths happened in Dem-controlled cities. Not to mention riots
by Antifa/BLM bandits, which Dems openly approved of.
Rubert's media empire was just a stepping stone for gigs like a sitting board of director
with Genie Oil. Even with that Fox News has always been neocon. If most conservative types
weren't enamored with supporting the troops, who will be just like the cops in supporting the
establishment in any civil war, then they would have known Fox News was controlled opposition
for the deep state.
Rupert Murdoch's heirs are #NeverTrump Libtards. They have been systematically
installing SJW Globalists for some time. The day-to-day programming has flipped to Fake
Stream Media propaganda. It is no surprise that they went full TDS for election coverage.
The above link will provide you with a FREE KlowdTV subscription to OAN and eleven other
channels for the remainder of 2020. Easy to do, two quick steps. DUMP FOX! Pass it on.
By the way, the NYT article on Barr's salvo reveals the Democrats and their Allied Media
shift from the no longer defendable "No evidence of voter fraud," to no evidence that the
fraud was "widespread."
In other words, "Forget about PA. We don't need it." But while their Allied Media will of
course dutifully abide, Trump pulled the lawsuit trigger yesterday. More are coming soon.
Including WI and MI.
Thus it's a mistake to think that Biden being declared the winner in AZ and GA, with the
attendant "both controlled by Republicans!" shouting, will abort the process now in
motion.
The article is specific to Reno, Nevada, but the discussion is applicable to other
states.
False Claim 4: Ballot harvesting and 'granny farming'
In August, Nevada passed AB4, which clarifies who can collect ballots. According to
language in AB4, "a person authorized by the voter may return the mail ballot on behalf of
the voter by mail or personal delivery to the county or city clerk." There are strict
regulations against any unauthorized person interfering with the return of mail-in
ballots.
Yet, there have been misleading claims from critics of mail-in ballots that this would
lead to ballot harvesting. The accusation is that dishonest people will go to assisted
living homes and manipulate grandmas into giving away their ballots for harvesting.
Lately, ballot harvesting is being talked about as a malpractice. But this has been a
common, legal practice of collecting and submitting the ballots by specified agents such as
family members, authorized legal guardians and, in some states, paid staff where harvesting
is legal, such as in California and Colorado. Some states have limitations in place on how
many ballots a paid agent can collect.
In the current political climate, politicians have painted a picture of an agent running
off with someone else's ballot or "one of the post guys" delivering a "handful of" ballots
"to some Democratic political operative," as President Trump claimed at his September rally
in Minden. Comments like these create an image of lawlessness, incompetency and chaos and
can scare law-abiding citizens. However, the checks and balances embedded in AB4 make it
nearly impossible for anyone to collect ballots without authorization.
In parts of rural and frontier Nevada, some voters have said ballot collection is a
lifeline.
And yes, The New York Times published a report in 2012 suggesting that mail-in voting would
lead to fraud. As I wrote at the time, the story quoted a former county attorney in
Florida, who was concerned about "granny farming." This is where fraudsters allegedly go
into nursing homes and "help" elderly people vote by more or less filling out their ballots
for them and mailing them in.
Related
Why Trump supports mail-in voting in Florida and not in Nevada
But the story never attempted to document this happening. In any event, it would be a
slow and laborious way to alter an election, and easily detectable by nursing home
officials who, especially in today's pandemic, ought to monitor visitors carefully.
Back then, the Times noted, mail-in voting was seen as a way to help Republicans win.
"In the 2008 general election in Florida," the story said, "47% of absentee voters were
Republicans and 36% were Democrats."
Today, President Donald Trump seems worried it will help Democrats.
The vote-by-mail bogeyman, it seems, can be a convenient tool for whichever party feels
the need to use it.
Credible evidence suggests all this is overblown. A study earlier this year by Daniel
Thompson, Jesse Yoder, Jennifer Wu and Andrew Hall of Stanford University concluded, "In
normal times, based on our data at least, vote-by-mail modestly increases participation
while not advantaging either party."
Part of that data came from Utah, one of five states that conduct all mail-in voting.
Utah has phased this in since 2012. As a Deseret News story this week suggested, the
Beehive State knows how to do it right. It has safeguards in place. No one has alleged
widespread fraud here.
It's one thing to wave hands and speculate on various forms of vote fraud. It's another to
produce actual evidence of any widespread use - and yet another to produce actual evidence
that it has happened over the last few days in this election. b has elected to not do so, but
rely on the same innuendo and speculation the Trump supporters do.
However, I do agree with the rest of b's analysis. The Biden-Harris administration will be
a nightmare just as much as Trump's was. And yes, I expect them to start a war with Iran once
Biden's fake attempt to restart the JCPOA is rejected by Iran due to demands over Iran's
ballistic missile program. And I expect "Trumpism" - as they are calling the populist
movement - to continue going forward with negative results for the country.
But it's ridiculous to start eulogizing Trump as if he wasn't the worst President in US
history - which he was. He was certainly the biggest joke President in US history. Even
Clinton's blue dress didn't rise to the level of Trump.
The NYT does not **set out** to lie, they lie, lie, lie
and then lie again; but they **set out** to serve a narrative.
If the truth serves that narrative then the NYT will tell the truth.
They did not **set out** to tell the truth, the truth just **happened** to
serve a narrative.
"What is the difference between lying and serving a narrative?" - visak
When someone serves a narrative they are not necessarily lying it might just
serve the narrative to tell the truth. When someone is lying then they are lying, period.
So how many times has Donnie said he was going to do something and then didn't follow
through? ICE raids, wall, border security, Hillbags in prison, Russiagate investigations,
etc., etc., etc.
So now Donnie is going to fight this election fraud (which BTW he created a task force in
2017 and then quickly disbanded). And you actually believe it.
LOL.
fxrxexexdxoxmx2 , 20 minutes ago
Anyone surprised the same media who protected and worked for the Biden campaign are
working with him to claim an ilegall victory?
"... Trump's campaign claimed Wednesday he still had a path to victory if he keeps Pennsylvania and somehow Arizona comes back to him. But even if Trump does lose, it may be a blessing in disguise for Republicans. ..."
"... The result has crushed Democratic expectations of a clean sweep. It wasn't a landslide win against an unpopular president, as we had been told so confidently for months. ..."
"... If Biden wins, it will be by the narrowest margin. And all the hundreds of millions spent on retaking the Senate came to nothing, with the Republicans looking to hold onto their lead. The top targets, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham, survived easily. ..."
"... The failure means that in 2022, the House is more likely to revert to Republican control, setting up a lame-duck presidency. ..."
"... Unfortunately, nothing can be done to stop a President Biden-Harris repeat of the geopolitical errors of the Obama presidency, such as appeasing China and Iran's mullahs and signing onto the Paris climate accord. But a President Biden in cognitive decline will sooner or later be replaced by his unpopular, untested vice president, Kamala Harris. Saddled with a recession and policies that will only exacerbate economic decline, the next four years will hobble Democrats. ..."
"... Whoever wins this election, the result is a humiliation for the Trump-deranged media and the tame pollsters who provide them with the justification for their dishonest political narrative. ..."
"... Whoever wins, this election has exposed the frauds and liars who pose as our elites, and half of America won't forget it. ..."
"... In a press conference in Philadelphia Wednesday, Giuliani laid out one clear anomaly in which, contrary to Pennsylvania law, Republican election observers were denied the right to oversee the counting of 120,000 ballots by being forced to stand 20 to 30 feet away from where they were being counted. ..."
"... In one case, a woman claiming to be an election volunteer in Michigan's Clark County claimed on video she had discovered a box of 500 ballots outside the counting facility from people who were not on the voter rolls. ..."
The president has every right to ensure electoral laws are enforced to prevent fraud. In
fact, he owes it to the 68 million deplorables who voted for him. Let's be real. Goliath was never going to let David breeze through the rematch .
The provinces, for whom President Trump
is an instrument, not an end in himself, were never going to have an easy time winning the 2020
election against the amassed might of the Democratic Party, the "Fake News" media and allied
pollsters, Big Tech, woke billionaires and the celebrity class, who united to stamp out the
barbarian orange emperor.
The "chumps" and "ugly folk," as Joe Biden calls them, came out in their
glorious millions from the American heartland on Election Day and now we will see if people
power prevails, if the nationalist populist movement enabled by Donald Trump, but not defined
by him, lives to fight another day against the corrupt globalists represented by the sad husk
of Biden.
It boils down to Trump's belief that the Democrats perpetrated
widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere to steal the
election.
While even those in his own party are urging him to lose gracefully, the president has every
right to ensure electoral laws are enforced to prevent fraud. In fact, he owes it to the 68 million deplorables who voted for him. To that end, Trump has turned to an old ally, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to lead a
heroic legal challenge .
In Wisconsin, 300 ballots went missing when the Willow Township municipal clerk went home
sick and no one could find her, the Washington Post reported. The ballots eventually turned up
yesterday, with 157 votes for Trump and 114 for Biden.
In Arizona -- which was called early for Biden on election night, but the Trump campaign
still says they can win -- a "data error" claimed that 95 percent of votes had been counted
yesterday when only 86 percent had been, and the remainder reportedly were from Trump-heavy
counties.
So you can see that, in such a close election, Trump's concerns are not frivolous. Fraud is corrosive, but so is claiming fraud where there is none. We will see where the
lawsuits land. In any case, Biden as much as declared victory yesterday, saying that by the time the count
is finished, "I believe I will be the winner . . . we are winning in enough
states to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency."
Trump's campaign claimed Wednesday he still had a path to victory if he keeps Pennsylvania
and somehow Arizona comes back to him. But even if Trump does lose, it may be a blessing in disguise for Republicans.
The result has crushed Democratic expectations of a clean sweep. It wasn't a landslide win
against an unpopular president, as we had been told so confidently for months.
If Biden wins, it will be by the narrowest margin. And all the hundreds of millions spent on retaking the Senate came to
nothing, with the Republicans looking to hold onto their lead. The top targets, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey Graham, survived easily.
The fatal miscalculations of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in cynically refusing to negotiate
on the latest stimulus bill have cost the Democrats dearly in the House, where they have gone
backward by at least six seats. They did not manage to get rid of a single Republican. So much
for the blue wave.
The failure means that in 2022, the House is more likely to revert to Republican control,
setting up a lame-duck presidency.
The Democrats won't be able to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College or make
DC and Puerto Rico states. They will struggle to impose the Green New Deal.
Unfortunately, nothing can be done to stop a President Biden-Harris repeat of the
geopolitical errors of the Obama presidency, such as appeasing China and Iran's mullahs and
signing onto the Paris climate accord. But a President Biden in cognitive decline will sooner or later be replaced by his
unpopular, untested vice president, Kamala Harris. Saddled with a recession and policies that will only exacerbate economic decline, the next
four years will hobble Democrats.
Their flaws and hypocrisy will be on full display, with a good chance of the 2024
presidential race being won by one of the new generation of Republican heirs to Trumpism.
Whoever wins this election, the result is a humiliation for the Trump-deranged media and the
tame pollsters who provide them with the justification for their dishonest political
narrative.
Let history record that on the Sunday before the election, the New York Times declared that
"all 15" of their columnists suffer from mandatory Trump Derangement Syndrome.
"All 15 of our columnists explain what the past four years have cost America" was the
introduction to a carnival of wokesplaining.
That's what you get when you fire opinion editors who publish conservatives. Whoever wins, this election has exposed the frauds and liars who pose as our elites, and
half of America won't forget it.
In a press conference in Philadelphia Wednesday, Giuliani
laid out one clear anomaly in which, contrary to Pennsylvania law, Republican election
observers were denied the right to oversee the counting of 120,000 ballots by being forced to
stand 20 to 30 feet away from where they were being counted.
"They were never able to see the ballot itself, never able to see if it was properly
postmarked, properly addressed, properly signed on the outside . . . this went on
for 20 hours. While all of you thought there was some kind of legitimate count going on here in
Philadelphia, it was totally illegitimate."
Giuliani's team has also launched
a lawsuit in Wisconsin , where he says that, after election observers had gone home, "at 3
or 4 in the morning about 120,000 ballots appeared . . . and they all got
counted."
The Trump campaign also filed
a lawsuit in Michigan Wednesday, with campaign manager Bill
Stepien claiming Republican observers were denied "meaningful access to numerous counting
locations to observe the opening of ballots and the counting process, as guaranteed by Michigan
law."
There are other allegations of fraud or irregularities, late-counted votes and suspected
vote harvesting being reported around the country.
In one case, a woman claiming to be an election volunteer in Michigan's Clark County claimed
on video she had discovered a box of 500 ballots outside the counting facility from people who
were not on the voter rolls.
Bullshitter supreme talking live on air from Berlin, where he is still "recovering" from
having been poisoned on Putin's orders by "Novichok", to sidekick slag Sobol in Moscow.
A walking miracle man, liar and total tosser.
Watch it if you can -- and have vomit bags close at hand:
If this is humor, this is very dark humor. The saddest thing of all in this is that very
little of Glenn's excellent article is new. One of Donald Trump's presidency greatest
accomplishment has been to show me how the main stream media 'plays' its dirty games... The
entire mainstream media collectively abandoned its integrity during the last decade.
It's beyond what Orwell could have ever possibly imagined. Targeted gaslighting on an
individual basis using social media to brainwash people into believing whatever they want you
to believe?
I just paid for an annual subscription out of a total frustration with the current
outrageous, unfair, evil and dishonest media situation in the US (and elsewhere also).
Totalitarism is approaching and I have decided to participate in the fight against the
threatening darkness. Good luck.
RNC's national spokesperson Liz Harrington battled CNN's Christiane Amanpour for
refusing to engage with allegations of corruption against Joe Biden and his family after years
of hyping unverified Trump-Russia allegations.
"Why don't you want to report this? This is one of the most powerful families in
Washington," she asked. "And you're okay with our interests being sold out to profit Joe Biden
and his family, while we're suffering during a pandemic from communist China?"
Russia is done with the European Union. At last week's Valdai Discussion Forum Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made this quite clear with this statement.
Those people in the West who are responsible for foreign policy and do not understand the
necessity of mutually respectable conversation–well, we must simply stop for a while
communicate with them. Especially since Ursula von der Leyen states that geopolitical
partnership with current Russia's leadership is impossible. If this is the way they want it,
so be it. (H/T Andrei Martyanov)
Lavrov's statements echo a number of statements made in recent months by Russian leadership
that there is no opportunity for diplomacy possible with the United States.
We can now add the European Union to that list. Pepe
Escobar's latest piece goes over Lavrov's comments about the European Union and they are
devastating, as devastating as when he and Putin described the U.S. as " Not
Agreement Capable " a few years ago.
Lavrov reiterated this with the following comments at Valdai last week.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/zV_W3b_4G50
But as badly as the U.S. has acted in recent years in international relations, unilaterally
abrogating treaty after treaty, nominally with the goal of remaking them to be more inclusive,
Lavrov's upbraiding of the current leadership of the European Union is far worse.
Because they have gone along with, if not openly assisted, every U.S.-backed provocation
against Russia for their own advantage. From Ukraine to MH-17, to Skripal to now Belarus and
the ridiculous Navalny poisoning, the EU has proved to be worse than the U.S.
Because there can be no doubt the U.S. views Russia as an antagonist. We're quite clear
about this. But Europe plays off U.S. aggression, hiding in the U.S.'s skirts while telling
Russia, usually through German Chancellor Angela Merkel, "Be patient, we are reluctantly going
along with this." But really they're happy about it.
You do not negotiate with monkeys, you treat them nicely, you make sure that they are not
abused, but you don't negotiate with them, same as you don't negotiate with toddlers. They
want to have their Navalny as their toy–let them. I call on Russia to start wrapping
economic activity up with EU for a long time. They buy Russia's hydrocarbons and hi-tech,
fine. Other than that, any other activity should be dramatically reduced and necessity of the
Iron Curtain must not be doubted anymore.
And the truth is that Russia is dealing with monkeys in the U.S. and toddlers in the EU. And
Martanyov's right that it's time Putin et.al. simply turn their backs on the West and move
forward.
Lavrov's statements at Valdai were momentous. They sent a clear signal that if Europe wants
a future relationship with Russia they will have to change how they do business.
The problem is however, that the EU is suffused with arrogance on the eve of the U.S.
election, mistakenly thinking Joe Biden will beat Trump.
Merkel has betrayed Putin at every turn since 2013. And Germany's appalling behavior over
the Alexei Navalny poisoning was the last straw.
That what was another sabotage effort to stop the Nordstream 2 pipeline and add grist to
Trump's re-election mill was given even a cursory glance by the highest levels of the German
government was insulting enough.
That Merkel allowed her Foreign Minister Heiko Maas to run his mouth on the subject, and
then throw the decision to sanction Russia (again) over this to the EU parliament and give it
any kind of political play was truly treacherous.
Germany has taken the lead in advancing "European integration" and therefore prioritizes
Eastern European member states that push for a more aggressive stance towards Russia.
Economic connectivity with Russia is no longer an instrument for building trust and
cooperation in the pan-European space, rather it was intended to strengthen Germany's
position as the center of the EU. Moscow should work with Berlin to construct Nord Stream 2,
but not forget why Nord Stream 1 was built while South Stream was blocked.
This is a point I've been making for years. Nordstream 2 is a political tool for Germany to
reroute gas coming in from Russia which Merkel can use as a political lever over Poland and the
Visegrads.
And it is the Poles who have consistently shot themselves in the foot by not reconciling
their relationship with Russia, banding together with its Eastern European brothers and
securing an independent source of Russian gas. Putin and Gazprom would happily provide it to
them, if they would but ask.
But they don't and instead turn to the U.S. to be their protectors from both Russia and
Germany, rather than conduct themselves as a sovereign nation.
That said, I think Mr. Diesen misses the larger point here. It is true Germany under Merkel
is looking to expand its control over the EU and set itself up as a superpower for the next
century. Putin himself acknowledged
that possibility at Valdai. That may be more to dig at the U.S. and warn Europe rather than
him actually believing it.
Because under Merkel and the EU Germany is losing its dynamism. And it may even lose control
over the EU if it isn't careful. If you look at the current situation from a German perspective
you realize that Germany's mighty export business is surrounded by hostile foreign powers.
Russia -- Merkel cut off the country from Russian markets. Even though some of the trade
with Russia has returned since sanctions over Crimea went into place in 2014 she hasn't
fought the U.S.'s hyper-aggressive use of sanctions to improve Germany's position.
The U.K. -- French President Emmanuel Macron looks like he's engineered a No-Deal Brexit
with Boris Johnson which will put up major export barriers for Germany into the U.K. cutting
them off from that market.
The U.S. – Trump has all but declared Germany an enemy and when he wins a second
term will tighten the screws on Merkel even tighter.
China – They know that the incoming Great Reset, which will have its Jahr Null
event in Europe likely next year, is all about consolidating power into Europe and sucking it
away from the U.S., a process Trump is dead-set against.
However, don't think for a second that the Commies that run the EU and the World Economic
Forum are teaming up with the Commies in China. Oh no, they have bigger plans than that.
And what's been pretty clear to me is Europe's delusions that it can subjugate the world
under its rubric, forcing its rules and standards on the rest of us, including China, again
allowing the U.S. to act as its proxy while it tries to maintain its standing.
I know what you're thinking. That sounds completely ludicrous.
And you're right, it is ludicrous.
But that doesn't mean it isn't true. This is clearly the mindset we're dealing with in The
Davos Crowd. They engineered a mostly-fake pandemic to accelerate their plans to remake the
world economy by burning it down.
The multi-polar world will see the fading U.S. and U.K. band together while Russia and China
continue to stitch together Asia into a coherent economic sphere. Trump is right to pull the
U.S. out of Central Asia and has gotten nothing but grief from the U.S. establishment while
Europe, through NATO, continues trying to expand to the Russian border, now with openly backing
the attempted coup in Belarus.
This was the dominant theme at Valdai and the focus of Putin's opening remarks.
"... Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of the State Duma believes that Navalny has been too outspoken: "This guy is a competely shamless fraud." And pointing out how much was done to save his unworthy ass: From the pilots who emergency-landed the plane in Tomsk; to the doctors and nurses who fought ferociously to intubate him; to the President himself who personally gave permission to fly this recidivist to a prestigious German clinic Dante should have designed a special circle in Hell for such an ingrate, who now spits on the entire Russian nation. ..."
"... Putin's Press Secretary Peskov: "We should clarify that CIA specialists are working with Navalny, and give him various instructions. And moreover, this is not the first time, either." ..."
"... Navalny was upset by Peskov's words, he blustered back saying that Peskov is skating on very thin ice [little joke there], and said he planned to sue the man for libel: "He must prove that I actually have ties with American intelligence." Well, that's easy: Just ask Pompeo. ..."
"... Akopov himself believes that Navalny is more than just a "CIA project", he is more like a "joint venture" with all the Westie agencies. And this project also includes the Russian Neo-Liberal elite and the Westernizing section of the Oligarchy. ..."
"... Everybody who has studied Navalny and Navalniada, know what is actually going on here: Navalny and his neo-Liberal kreakle supporters represent that class of bourgeois intelligentsia who came along maybe 5 or 10 years too late to participate in the Yeltsinite plundering of the Russian people. ..."
"... They are only millionaires now, but they want to be billionaires. [yalensis: Although some evil tongues claim that Navalny has actually lost his fortune somehow and is fleeing from his creditors; hence the current crisis.] Putin stands in the way of the kreakles because he (and his caste of functionaries) have somewhat curbed the openly pirate proclivities of the Russian bourgeoisie; partially nationalized them, made them go to Church, and forced them to follow certain rules. ..."
Этот Германн, --
продолжал
Томский, -- лицо
истинно
романическое: у
него профиль
Наполеона, а
душа
Мефистофеля. Я
думаю, что на
его совести по
крайней мере
три злодейства.
Как вы
побледнели!..
"This Hermann fellow," Tomsky continued, -- "a truly romantic-era personality, the profile
of a Napoleon, and the soul of Mephistopheles. I believe that on his conscience lie at least
three crimes.
Oh my, you just turned pale!" -- Pushkin, The Queen of Spades "And that's not even counting
KirovLes!" Tomsky should have added.
Dear Readers: Today concluding my review of this piece by reporter/analyst Petr Akopov.
Where we left off, we saw that Navalny may have overstepped the line (just a tad) by
directly accusing Putin of poisoning him.
According to my blog-commenter James, Navalny is now busy on the talk-show circuit, doing a
full Ginsburg on all the imperialist propaganda media.
Describing what it feels like to be poisoned – "Ow! it hurt so much!" in full
pathos.
And Westie Navalny Goes Va Banque – burghers no doubt lapping up this farce because
it's more entertaining than the circus. –Meanwhile, back in Russia, members of the
government are not very happy with Navalny's wild improvised performance.
Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of the State Duma believes that Navalny has been too
outspoken: "This guy is a competely shamless fraud." And pointing out how much was done to save
his unworthy ass: From the pilots who emergency-landed the plane in Tomsk; to the doctors and
nurses who fought ferociously to intubate him; to the President himself who personally gave
permission to fly this recidivist to a prestigious German clinic Dante should have designed a
special circle in Hell for such an ingrate, who now spits on the entire Russian
nation.
For 7 long days, Navalny lay in a fake-coma does that work for the 7 card? Furthermore, in a
no-shit kind of epiphany, Volodin opines that this whole poisoning scenario was scripted by the
Westies: "In order to create tension within Russia, and to prevent Belorussia from asserting
its sovereignty." Captain Obvious concludes with: "Navalny himself clearly works with the
special services and organs of goverments of [various] Western countries."
After such a shocking utterance, the Kremlin felt the need to clarify: Uh, it's not so much
that Navalny works for the CIA; as the CIA works for him! Uh huh, that makes perfect sense. As
comedian Yakov Smirnov might say: In America, Secret Agent works for CIA. But in Russia, CIA
works for him!
Putin's Press Secretary Peskov: "We should clarify that CIA specialists are working with
Navalny, and give him various instructions. And moreover, this is not the first time,
either."
Navalny was upset by Peskov's words, he blustered back saying that Peskov is skating on
very thin ice [little joke there], and said he planned to sue the man for libel: "He must prove
that I actually have ties with American intelligence." Well, that's easy: Just ask
Pompeo.
Akopov himself believes that Navalny is more than just a "CIA project", he is more like
a "joint venture" with all the Westie agencies. And this project also includes the Russian
Neo-Liberal elite and the Westernizing section of the Oligarchy.
They are all in this together as partners. [yalensis: And these knuckle-heads couldn't come
up with anybody better than Navalny as their Leader?] Akopov would not even want to venture a
guess, which one of these "partners" holds the "controlling interest" in Mr.
Navalny's person.
Although it is plausible that shares might be redistributed during Navalny's stay in
Germany. The question du jour is whether or not Navalny will return to Russia. Gentlemen and
Countesses, you are free to place your bets on this one. Akopov believes that, yes, Navalny not
only will, but must, return to Russia. Why? To complete his Quest. What is his Quest? To change
the internal political structure and geopolitical vector of Russia.
Here is how Navalny himself describes the pathos of the current situation: "A struggle is
taking place between those who stand for Freedom, and those who wish to push us backwards. Into
the Past, into that strange Orthodox imitation of the Soviet Union, only decorated with
Capitalism and Oligarchs." "I win!" Hm I hate to admit it, but Navalny's words actually have a
ring of truth to them, which is why, if they were to come out of the mouth of a real
freedom-fighter, then they might bear some weight.
But you know what people say: If you want to sell a lie, then you have to sprinkle it with
truth.
Everybody who has studied Navalny and Navalniada, know what is actually going on here:
Navalny and his neo-Liberal kreakle supporters represent that class of bourgeois intelligentsia
who came along maybe 5 or 10 years too late to participate in the Yeltsinite plundering of the
Russian people.
They regret this, and wish for an opportunity to make their own fortunes, on the backs of
said Russian people.
They are only millionaires now, but they want to be billionaires. [yalensis: Although
some evil tongues claim that Navalny has actually lost his fortune somehow and is fleeing from
his creditors; hence the current crisis.] Putin stands in the way of the kreakles because he
(and his caste of functionaries) have somewhat curbed the openly pirate proclivities of the
Russian bourgeoisie; partially nationalized them, made them go to Church, and forced them to
follow certain rules.
This is what drives Navalny and his ilk crazy. They want it all, and they want it now!
Putin, for his part, in his endless balancing act, trying to maintain two incompatible things,
as Pushkin might have said (=capitalism and Russian patriotism) has scrambled to win the
support of the patriotic bourgeoisie and the clergy, the two pillars of the Lost Russia he
strives to re-build.
Navalny again:
"A part of society repeats Putin's rhetoric about how the country needs to follow its own
path. They are talking about restoring a kind of monarchy, based on certain spiritual values.
And against them stand such people as myself, who consider this to be a lie and hypocrisy, and
who are convinced that Russia must develop only according to the European model."
Ah, Navalny! You had me at "monarchy" but lost me at "European model" – you wretch!
"It's curtains for you, buster!"
Akopov, it goes without saying, is one of those intellectuals whom Navalny despises as
supporting the "Putinite" model of Russian development: Rely on a strong Russian state (which
Navalny mockingly calls an "imitation of the USSR"), lean on the Church, develop one's own
geo-political vector, etc.
Navalny and his crowd regard these types as complete zombies, whose proposed model is
worthless.
But the only thing that Navalny counter-punts are equally worn-out ideas of what Lenin would
call "the highest stages of capitalism" and which would, in reality, demote Russia to the level
of an American colony.
Same as the rest of Europe! Akopov concedes, however, that Navalny's "vision", if one could
call it that, of a European Russia imbued with "democratic values" does, in fact, enjoy mass
support -- among the Muscovite intelligentsia.
This kreakle mass [Akopov does not say, but there are estimates that the Navalnyite program
enjoys as much as 30% support among the residents of Moscow, not so much in the rest of the
country] believe in exactly the same things that Navalny does.
And have been "fighting" for this program (in one way or another) for the past 30 years.
This section of the Russian bourgeois intelligentsia punts against Putin's "national
project" and now awaits eagerly for the return of their poisoned, and poisonous, hero. [THE
END]
The explosive claim comes from Lord Mark Sedwill, who until last month served as the most
senior adviser and head of the civil service in Johnson's cabinet. He held the same positions
under former prime minister Theresa May, during whose term the Salisbury affair unfolded.
Speaking to Times Radio, Sedwill
said Russia has "some vulnerabilities that we can exploit." So London's response to
the incident included not only publicly accusing Russia of being behind the attack and
expelling its diplomats, but also "a series of other discreet measures including tackling
some of the illicit money flows out of Russia, and covert measures as well, which obviously I
can't talk about," the former official said.
The Russians know that they had to pay a higher price than they had expected for that
operation.
Sedwill would not explain how stopping illicit money flowing out of Russia would hurt the
Russian government or why the UK didn't act sooner to crack down on those financial crimes.
Presumably, in his view, President Vladimir Putin's power relies on allowing crooked officials
and businessmen to siphon the Russian national wealth and the British government was content
with it as long as the UK was on the receiving end.
A different view is taken in Moscow, where officials have repeatedly accused the British
of harboring Russian criminals and welcoming illicitly gained cash.
The Times implied that the "covert measures" mentioned by Sedwill included the UK
using its cyber offensive capabilities against Russia.
The Salisbury poisoning happened in March 2018. Former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal
and his daughter were injured by what the British government described as a uniquely Russian
chemical weapon, but have since recovered. London identified two people from Russia as the
culprits, calling them agents of the Russian military intelligence.
Moscow denied any involvement in the poisoning and said London had stonewalled all attempts
to properly investigate what had happened.
Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar has called for defunding National Public Radio after the
outlet officially refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal (while happily peddling
anti-Trump rumors for years) - calling it a ' waste of
time. '
"It's time to defund @NPR. This is appalling. #DefundNPR," Gosar tweeted on Thursday.
Gosar joins a growing chorus of conservative voices who are furious over the outlet's
decision to censor perhaps the biggest political bombshell in decades .
NPR public editor Kelly McBride
published an inquiry on its website Thursday from a listener who did not understand why the
outlet was ignoring the story.
"Someone please explain why NPR has apparently not reported on the Joe Biden, Hunter Biden story in the last
week or so that Joe did know about Hunter's business connections in Europe that Joe had
previously denied having knowledge?" listener Carolyn Abbott asked.
McBride responded in saying there are "many, many red flags" in an investigation carried out
by the New York Post, which last week published reports that were sourced from the alleged
laptop hard drive. NPR then went on to repeat claims that Russia is attempting to interfere in
the election.
" Even if Russia can't be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump
associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not
been verified and seems suspect. And if that story could be verified, the NY Post did no
forensic work to convince consumers that the emails and photos that are the basis for their
report have not been altered," McBride said, adding: "But the biggest reason you haven't heard
much on NPR about the Post story is that the assertions don't amount to much."
Her response included a statement from NPR managing editor Terence Samuel.
" We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories , and we don't want
to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions. And quite
frankly, that's where we ended up, this was a politically driven event and we decided to treat
it that way," Samuel said.
The claims that the reports are part of a Russian disinformation plot were dismissed by
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.
The FBI, meanwhile, did not dispute Ratcliffe's statements earlier this week.
FBI Assistant Director Jill C. Tyson sent a letter to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of
the Senate Homeland Security Committee, in response to Johnson's request for more information
about the emails, reports around which have alleged that Hunter Biden tried to introduce a
Ukrainian businessman to his father when he served as vice president in the Obama
administration. The law enforcement agency
said it has "nothing to add at this time" to Ratcliffe's statement.
A number of conservatives and allies of President Donald Trump criticized NPR following its
decision to publish the inquiry .
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
" Wow. Foreign corruption from a major party is not considered news for taxpayer-funded
#fakenews NPR, " wrote the America First PAC on
Twitter in response.
It came as Twitter and Facebook also announced they would either block or limit the reach of
the NY Post's reports. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany's account and a Trump
campaign account were also blocked. The Senate Judiciary Committee, as a result, voted to issue
subpoenas on Thursday to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to appear
before the committee after raising concerns about censorship and election interference.
Biden's campaign has
denied that he ever met with a Ukrainian gas company official, which was allegedly revealed
in a trove of emails that purportedly were found on a laptop hard drive belonging to his son,
Hunter, who sat on the company's board while his father was the vice president. The NY Post
also obtained a hard drive containing the emails from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Other allegations have surfaced in recent reports over the days,
including from a former Hunter Biden associate who confirmed the legitimacy of an
email.
"The Attorney General of Delaware's office indicated that the FBI has 'ongoing
investigations regarding the veracity of this entire story.' And it would be unsurprising for
an investigation of a disinformation action involving Rudy Giuliani and those assisting him to
involve questions about money laundering, especially since there are other documented inquiries
into his dealings," the campaign said.
TheFederalistPapers , 22 minutes ago
I work way too hard to fund these ****ers. NPR is owned by the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting (CPB) and sneak a peek at their Board of Directors https://www.cpb.org/aboutcpb/leadership/board
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow might halt dialogue with the
European Union, during the online presentation of the report of the international discussion
club "Valdai" on Tuesday.
"Those people who are responsible for foreign policy in the West and do not understand the
need for a mutually respectful conversation, perhaps we should just stop communicating with
them for a while, especially since [President of the European Commission] Ursula von der Leyen
says that with the current Russian authorities, the geopolitical partnership does not work.
So be it, if that's what they want," said the Russian Foreign Minister
m@84 the buzz about Navalny is that he and some partners were running an anti-corruption
blackmail racket getting compromising information on various enterprises and individuals and
Navalny decided to cash out without informing or consulting with his partners. Nothing to do
with the Russian government.
m@89 I got a rather detailed explanation from a Russian friend who just spent several
weeks there. Navalny started out as an anti corruption reformer but got involved with
partners that figured out how to monetize the dirt he was digging up. This is over a period
of years, not something recent. There is no conspiracy between the Russian government and the
Germans. Navalny was not a threat to governmental power in Russia - this was strictly a
business matter. See the RT article I linked to:
Which are the dumbest false flags of recent memory?
My selections are:
#1) Journalist Arkady Babchenko - he gets every prize!
He faked his death, complete with blood soaked pictures,
and then showed up the next day alive at a news conference.
They should name a drink after him, "Noah's Ark Ark Ark"- glacier water mixed
with glacier water, stirred not shaken.
#2) Saudi Intelligence Service - they air shipped printers
with incomplete bombs in them to the US and Britain from Yemen.
The Saudi agents revealed that they kept the tracking slips of the bombs!
I'll drink to that. And the Saudis played heroes by providing the tracking
numbers to the US and Britain in the nick of time. And I'll drink to that!
#3) Just this week CrowdStrike (yes, they still enjoy "credibility" in some circles)
let us know that Iranian hackers included a video with their email threats.
And that clever video:
"The video showed the hackers' computer screen as they typed in commands to purportedly hack
a voter registration system.
Investigators noticed snippets of revealing computer code, including file paths, file names
and an internet protocol (IP) address."
How does the Saudi Intelligence service say, "Skol!"?
For all practical purposes Biden work as a well paid lobbyist for China.
Notable quotes:
"... So Navalny was "poisoned by Putin" and sent to a Berlin hospital so that conclusion could be defined ? USSR was so incompetent with bio-weapons it cannot create a lethal organophosphate poison yet US/Uk can develop VX which worked definitively on King Jong-Un's half-brother ! ..."
So Navalny was "poisoned by Putin" and sent to a Berlin hospital so that conclusion could
be defined ? USSR was so incompetent with bio-weapons it cannot create a lethal
organophosphate poison yet US/Uk can develop VX which worked definitively on King Jong-Un's
half-brother !
Then again China can develop effective bio-weapons which expose the E=West and especially
NATO armed forces as unprepared, incompetent, ineffectual and in Chinese terms "paper
tigers"
So more and more sanctions on Russia and more and more orders for PPE and other goodies
from China.
Russia is Post-Communist but China is VERY VERY Communist.
Putin apparently "interferes in US elections" but China simply buys up one of the parties
and owns the candidate and his family
"... Perhaps the plot extended beyond those who directly participated but I don't think it was a high level operation. Navalny took a gamble that his sponsors would have no choice but to follow his lead. It now makes no practical difference as to whom planned it. ..."
Alexey Navalny: It's a banned substance. I think for Putin– why– he's using
this chemical weapon to do– do both, kill me and, you know, terrify others. It's
something really scary, where the people just drop dead without– there are no gun.
There are no shots and in a couple of hours, you– you'll be dead and without any traces
on your body. It's something terrifying. And Putin is enjoying it.
So am I. It's very intriguing, the constant plot twists – Navalny is recorded live
'moaning in anguish' but he was not in any pain! Perhaps the very thought of such an amazing
human being and exceptional leader – himself, naturally – struck down in his
prime was just so sorrowful that he could not stifle his sadness.
It's 'something really scary', is it? Why? So far nearly everyone poisoned by it has
survived with no apparent medium-to-long-term damage. The deadliest toxin in the world by a
wide margin has so far managed to kill one barbag who was also a drug addict, and completely
incidentally – she was not ever a target.
According to the Russian record of its use as a murder weapon, though, on the sole known
occasion it was so used, it killed the target in just a few hours. It also killed his
secretary, who used the same phone to call an ambulance, and the pathologist who did his
autopsy.
So whoever is copying Novichok for its terror effects is not doing a very good job. Like
Porsche, there is no substitute.
The "moaning in anguish" was likely Navalny's theatrical assumption that Novichok creates
intense pain. When he learned, after his performance, that Novichok does not create intense
pain, he changed his story on the fly.
This, and a few other things, brings up an interesting conjecture. The Navalny stunt may
have been a free-lance operation done without prior knowledge of Western intelligence
agencies. He and his posse concocted the scheme betting that the the US and Germany would be
backed into a corner and had to play along. They really had no choice as they could not
abandon this asset without the entire "fearless opposition to the tyrant Putin" collapsing
into the cesspool it was built upon.
If so, it was an audacious move that only a sociopath could do. However, it does suggest
that Navalny is finished after the last bit of propaganda value is wrung out. His future
could be either termination under a convenient pretext (i.e. Putin finally got him) or to
become a professor of BS at some US University or the like. The main point is that he is too
unreliable to conduct further operations.
I think the whole thing was a carefully-concocted operation that Lyosha was fully
briefed-in on. His howls and screams would have been necessary in any case, with or without
pain, because it was imperative that all on board be convinced that a terrible event was
taking place and that emergency actions were absolutely called for. It's hard to imagine the
same dramatic effect could have been achieved by Navalny flopping out of the toilet like a
gaffed bass, and whispering to the flight attendant, "I just have this feeling that says
body, we are done". Everyone including the flight attendant would assume he was drunk or
something that was no particular cause for alarm, and maybe even for amusement. Until they
learned that the flight was being diverted so this fuckwad could get off.
I don't know and I don't care who's cuning plan this was. It's got him all the
publicity he needs and also those in the west with their standard 'no smoke without fire'
level of foreign policy 'evidence.' I think he's actually looking to sell his life story for
a Netflix series. Nothing else makes logical sense.
Yes, maybe -- apart from the fact that one of his posse is British agent who has been
controlling FBK investigations into corruption for quite a while now and apparently was stuck
to Navalny during his last foray into the provinces like shit to an army blanket.
To Mark and ME;
The Navalny show still has an ad hoc feel to it. Perhaps the plot extended beyond those
who directly participated but I don't think it was a high level operation. Navalny took a
gamble that his sponsors would have no choice but to follow his lead. It now makes no
practical difference as to whom planned it.
Navalny has complained that Trump has not condemned what happened to him
19.10.2020 | 07:59
Blogger Aleksei Navalny has expressed the opinion that US President Donald Trump should
have also condemned what happened to him, as did European politicians, TASS reports.
"I think it is especially important that everyone, including, and perhaps first and
foremost, the US president, speak out against the use of chemical weapons in the 21st
century", Navalny said.
["Я думаю, что
особенно важно,
чтобы все,
включая и,
возможно, в
первую очередь
президента США,
выступили
против
применения
химического
оружия в XXI
веке".]
On August 20, Navalny was taken to a hospital in Omsk after he had fallen ill on an
aeroplane. Omsk doctors said that the main diagnosis was metabolic disorders. Then Navalny
was transported to Germany. He was in a coma for two weeks. German doctors announced that he
had been poisoned with substances from the Novichok group. Russia has asked Berlin for more
detailed information on the test results, but has not yet received a response.
Currently, Navalny has been discharged from the hospital and is undergoing
rehabilitation.
Big gobbed gobshite shouting his big gob off -- or did his US controllers really urge him
to make that statement? Is the CIA really using him as part of the Democrats "Russiagate"
arsenal?
Got it in one; I was going to say, until I read your last couple of lines, that this is
further suggestion that Navalny is a Democratic project. The US State Department is full of
Democratic appointees. They want to get all the mileage out of him they can before interest
fades.
Miraculously, he recovered from the poison that is so dangerous people fear to mention its
name, for fear that doing so might encourage tongue cancer, and is today fit as a flea; can't
wait to return to Russia for Round Two. If they were wise, they'd kill Lyosha themselves for
his stem cells. Then world leaders could be protected against Russian assassination
attempts.
Certainly capitalizing on his new-found fame, isn't he? Now he feels comfortable telling
the US president how he ought to behave, and chiding him for not appropriately recognizing
Navalny's importance to the world. Dear God, what a swellheaded prat.
If the Chief Bullshitter really feels so concerned for the safety of his family, he will
leave them all abroad and return to Russia alone – I mean, he's not a bit afraid for
himself, he's said as much. Go on, Lyosha – go back home and rally the great restless
throng of oppressed ordinary Russians who cry out for your leadership!!
Not on your life. He's got the sweetest gig ever going on right there, newspapers beating
a path to his door to find out what he likes to eat for breakfast and whose shirts he wears,
no worries about income or housing, hobnobbing with world leaders who listen respectfully to
his opinions, and all he has to do is rant about Putin all day long. The Americans are
finally getting their money's worth out of Lyosha. Whereas what would happen if he went
home?
It would quickly become clear that his support still comes exclusively from the same group
– a few disaffected intelligentsia such as Boris Akunin, the Atlanticist liberatsi who
endlessly predict the collapse of Putin, and the angry kiddies who feel like they are part of
some great Thunberg-like global freedom movement that will bring them a comfortable life but
absolve them of responsibility for working for it – you know; the way they live in
America!
The current electoral campaign differs from that of 2016 in that the media, both
conventional and online, has realized its power and has been openly playing a major role in
what might well prove to be a victory across the board for the Democratic Party. At least that
is the expectation, bolstered by a flood of possibly suspect opinion polls that appear to make
the triumph of Joe Biden and company inevitable while at the same time denigrating President
Donald Trump and covering up for Democratic Party missteps.
Most Americans no longer trust what is being reported in the mainstream media but when they
look for "real" information they frequently turn to online resources that they believe to be
more politically objective. That has never been true, however, and what most newshounds are
actually seeking is commentary that reflects their own views. In reality, the news provided is
almost always either spun or distorted and sometimes completely blocked, note particularly the
resistance to reporting the tale of the shenanigans of Hunter Biden.
The New York Post
is claiming that a trove of emails from a laptop reveals that "Hunter Biden introduced his
father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than
a year before the elder Biden pressured
government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the
company."
The emails include a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board
of Burisma, allegedly sent Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015, about a year after Hunter joined the
oil company Burisma's board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month. "Dear Hunter, thank
you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some
time together. It's realty [sic] an honor and pleasure," the email reads. An earlier email from
May 2014 also shows Pozharskyi, reportedly Burisma's No. 3 exec, asking Hunter for "advice on
how you could use your influence" on the company's behalf.
The correspondence, if authentic, disproves Joe Biden's claim that he's "
never spoken to his son about his overseas business dealings ." One would think that the
story would be a real blockbuster, welcomed by self-respecting journalists but the reality has
been that the mainstream media is doing its best to kill it. Facebook and Twitter
have both blocked it though Twitter has since relented, and much of the rest of the liberal
media is regarding it as a hoax .
Facebook has in fact become something of a leader in reversing its self-promotion as a site
for free exchange of ideas. It has removed large numbers of users and alleged suspect sites and
has blocked any
"denial or distortion" of the so-called holocaust in response to what it regards as a surge
in anti-Semitism. It has hired a former Israeli
government official to lead the censorship effort on the site.
As Facebook and Twitter are private companies, they can legally do whatever they want to set
the rules for the use of their sites, but when the two most powerful social media companies
choose to censor a major newspaper's story about a presidential candidate's possibly corrupt
son less than three weeks before the election it suggests a more sinister agenda. They are
quite likely banking on a Democratic victory and will expect to be rewarded afterwards.
Indeed, it should be assumed that Facebook and the other social media giants are
reconfiguring themselves for the post-electoral environment in expectation that they will be
more than ever politically and economically indispensable to aspiring politicians. This
willingness to engage with politically powerful forces has led to increased involvement in the
various mostly left-wing movements that have shaken the United States over the past five
months. Television and radio stations as well as corporations and local businesses have rushed
to endorse and even fund black lives matter without considering the damage that the group has
been doing to property and persons that have had the misfortune to cross its path, not to
mention some of the group's long-term more radical objectives. Individuals identified as blm
leaders have demanded mandatory training to reprogram whites as well as punitive reparations,
to include "white people"
turning over their homes to blacks.
Some of the developments are quite dangerous, most notably the compiling of lists of
organizations and individuals that are considered to be "enemies" of the new social justice
order that intends to take over the United States. One has noted the desire for revenge
permeating many of the comments on sites like Facebook (which claims to delete "threats" from
its commentary), to include some material in recent weeks that has called for the "elimination"
of Americans who do not go along with the new normal.
One of the most invidious steps taken by any of the corporate social media is
a recent decision by Yelp to allow Antifa to compile the raw material on so-called "fascist
businesses" that will be included on a list of "Businesses Accused of Racist Behavior Alerts."
The list itself was set up to appease demands coming from the blm movement.
Yelp is a review site that provides grades and commentary on a broad range of goods and
services, to include many businesses that cater to the public. The potential for abuse is
enormous as Yelp is an information site that has no capability to investigate whether
complaints of "racism" are true or not and Antifa, which is recognized as being at least in
part behind the devastating Portland riots, is far from an objective observer. In fact, this is
what Antifa has tweeted
about its new role , which will allow group members to submit names of "non-friendly"
businesses, defined as "also known as (AKA) any company that's hanging blue lives garbage in
their store or anything else that's anti the BLM movement."
The Antifa intention is clearly to put unfriendly shops and restaurants out of business, so
it will not exactly be interested in engaging in constructive criticism or changing behavior
through negotiation. Using the intimidation provided by the "Alerts" list and direct threats of
violence from Antifa and blm, businesses will be coerced into supporting radical groups lest
they be targeted. It is somewhat reminiscent of the old Mafia protection rackets, and who can
doubt that demands for money will follow on to the verbal threats?
The rise of the internet oligarchs might indeed do more serious damage to the freedoms that
still survive in the United States than will victory by either Biden or Trump. What Americans
are allowed to think and how they perceive themselves and the world have taken a serious hit
over the past twenty years and it can only get worse.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest,
a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a
more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is[email protected] .
"It went on to target broadcasters, a ski resort, Olympic officials and sponsors of the
games in 2018. The GRU deployed data-deletion malware against the Winter Games IT systems and
targeted devices across the Republic of Korea using VPNFilter."
The Russian hackers' alleged attempt to cover their tracks included using certain
snippets of code and techniques to try to confuse investigators into think they were from
China and North Korea.
The UK's National Cyber Security Centre, a branch of GCHQ, believe Russia's aim was to
sabotage the running of the games, the Foreign Office said .
####
So as usual, nothing but the Foreign Orifice's word and they wouldn't make stuff up,
especially on order when the government is under heavy domestic pressure? No. Never.
I wonder if Tokyo has been asked for comment or given 'evidence?' Again, absence of
information gives it away.
Other outlets are putting out this FO press release with little comment, as usual.
"The Russian hackers' alleged attempt to cover their tracks included using certain
snippets of code and techniques to try to confuse investigators into think they were from
China and North Korea."
Just by the most marvelous coincidence, other bogus source codes in the Marble Framework
tickle trunk are those of China, North Korea and Iran.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dropped a bombshell on Tuesday,
warning that Russia might halt all dialogue with the European Union. Mr. Lavrov offered no
explanation for what was probably the most severe public statement on the EU of his career.
Perhaps he was reacting to extended talks he recently held with EU Foreign Minister Josep
Borrell -- talks that, by all appearances, did not go well.
Naturally, the EU will respond to his statement with great displeasure and indignation, but
Lavrov's comment was actually rooted in a process that began long before the current crisis,
all the way back to when Russian-EU relations looked positively upbeat and promising.
Common, but shaky ground
The modern Russian state and the EU came into existence at practically the same time -- the
former in late December 1991 and the latter in February 1992 -- and they soon laid the
groundwork for their mutual relations. The two parties signed a Partnership and Cooperation
Agreement in 1994 -- and ratified it in 1997 -- that made their relations so close as to be
considered "strategic" at one point.
This differs significantly from the slogan of a "Europe stretching from Lisbon to
Vladivostok" that former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev coined in 1989 to connote a common
European homeland that, in reality, had no document or agreement to back it up.
By contrast, the Russian-EU partnership was based firmly on the idea of integration. While
Brussels never offered Russia full EU membership, it offered general, though indefinite
assurances that its eastern neighbor would play a suitably substantial role in the "Greater
Europe" that was then being built.
At the core of this "Greater Europe," as it was then envisioned, was a rapidly expanding
European Union that wound up more than doubling in size from 1992 to 2007 -- and which, it was
expected, would eventually include Russia as well as other Soviet republics. A sort of
pan-European space was created, although Russia's status in that new entity was never described
or even discussed. Both sides simply assumed that Russia would be part of Europe. NEWS
EU Sanctions FSB Chief, Senior Kremlin Officials Over Navalny Poisoning READ
MORE
In hindsight, it seems that Russia and the EU understood that partnership differently.
However, they agreed at the time that everything from the structure of the state to economic
regulation should be based on the legal and regulatory framework of the EU -- which they both
considered clearly superior. Ideally, every country that was included in that European space
would have adopted European rules and regulations, after which they would either become EU
members -- some, strictly due to their size -- or else, as in the case of Russia and Ukraine,
associate members. Every newcomer was expected to bring its laws and regulations into line with
the European standard.
And in this regard, it differed fundamentally from Gorbachev's idea of a "Europe stretching
from Lisbon to Vladivostok." Although the Soviet leader did not offer any details regarding the
pan-European homeland, he clearly anticipated a partnership of equals.
The Soviet leader looked to a coming convergence, a mutual rapprochement in which each
player -- the Soviet Union, the European Community and the West as a whole -- would contribute
their strongest qualities, each somehow coming together in a whole that was more than the sum
of its parts. In was, in a word, utopia, but not a tenable plan.
Significantly, it was not former President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s who made the greatest
efforts to achieve Russia's integration into the European space based on European principles,
but President Vladimir Putin during his first term in the early 2000s.
Yeltsin had to overcome Russia's internal crisis before there could be any talk of
integrating with Europe. By the 2000s, when the state and its apparatus had stabilized and oil
revenues filled government coffers, Putin searched diligently for an opportunity to implement
the partnership with the EU and to further rapprochement. This continued from 2001 until as
late as 2006.
The honeymoon had ended
Russia's potential had grown significantly by that time, as had its expectations for the
role it would play in a partnership with the EU.
Russia rejected as illegitimate the expectation that it comply unquestionably with European
norms and felt that any partnership must be based, if not on strictly equal terms, then at
least on special conditions. However, the EU never even considered Russia a special case,
arguing that any reconsideration of its rules violated the very principles of European
integration.
For this reason, the very idea of a strategic and integration partnership between Russia and
the EU began eroding around the mid-2000s. This erosion occurred very gradually, not only
because Russia's domestic and foreign policy had begun to change significantly, but also
because the EU unexpectedly faced a crisis, one that reached full force in the early 2010s.
By that time, although the partnership agreement first drawn up in the early 1990s remained
unchanged -- as it does today -- the reality of Russia's relationship with Europe increasingly
diverged from its original configuration. Both sides' objectives and, more importantly, their
self-perceptions, grew further and further apart. NEWS EU's Navalny
Sanctions Miss the Mark READ MORE
The most striking illustration of this was the obvious disconnect between the words spoken
at the final Russia-EU Summit, held in Brussels in late January 2014, and the reality on the
ground.
The Maidan protests were raging in Kiev, only three weeks remained before Ukrainian
President Viktor Yanukovych would flee and new authorities would come to power, and relations
between Russia and the EU -- that stood on opposite sides of those barricades in Kiev -- could
not have been worse.
While President Putin and EU Commission President Manuel Barroso stood before the cameras
and repeated the very same mantras they had been uttering for years, even decades, about
partnership, a common space, road maps and so on, their faces betrayed what they were really
thinking -- namely, that nothing of the sort was going to happen.
But they had no other options on the table. Pure inertia from the process begun in the early
1990s compelled them to repeat the same tired calls for a close future partnership.
Then came the game-changing events in Ukraine, and much more besides. The long-standing
framework for Russian-EU relations turned into an anachronism overnight, giving way to heated
antagonism and competitiveness. Nevertheless, both sides continued paying lip service to
partnership, dialogue and, in general, a state of affairs that had last existed 25 years
earlier.
Fast forward to the present, and we have Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indirectly
acknowledging how bad things have actually become. In effect, he has simply stated what
everyone already knew -- namely, that the old framework for Russian-EU relations no longer
exists.
This does not mean an end to all relations, only an end to relations as they were.
The same, only different
A new framework is needed now, but it will probably be a long time in coming. And the
framework Russia might want for its relations with Europe will not materialize for the very
reasons mentioned above: present circumstances are simply too unfavorable.
Of course, no new Iron Curtain between Russia and the EU will fall from the sky. Their
mutual humanitarian and economic relations remain very strong, despite some damage from
sanctions, and cultural and even political ties remain intact. However, these are strictly
utilitarian relations, without any pretense of common goals, and they take a backseat to
Moscow's bilateral relations with individual European countries. Russia and Europe are
devolving into coolly polite neighbors that have no real interest in each other, but who are
forced to interact simply because they live next door to each other.
In fact, Russia must now focus more on its main neighbor, China. Although Russia's quarrel
with the West plays some role in this pivot eastward, it is the enormously long Russian-Chinese
border and the fact that China is rapidly becoming, if not a world hegemon, then at least one
of the two pillars of the new world order that compels Moscow to devote far more attention to
this neighbor than it is accustomed to.
More importantly, and what will cause fundamental change to Russia's relations with Europe,
is the fact that, for better or worse, the global balance is shifting towards Asia. As a
result, the focus that Russia has had on Europe and West for the past 300 years no longer
corresponds to the global reality. Russia cannot afford to treat Asia as a secondary priority,
although it often still does. If Moscow continues in this way, Russia could find itself facing
a creeping expansionism from the east.
In any case, Russia's former model of relations with the European Union has clearly ceased
to function, and one way or another, the two sides have started to acknowledge this openly.
Article 275 of the Criminal Code "High treason" certainly applies as regards the
actions of Lyosha Navalny , as does article 128.1 of the Russian Criminal Code on
"Slander"
But as I have already said more than once, if Alyosha is issued with a foreign passport
by the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, and Alyosha himself repeatedly
violates laws and remains free whilst concurrently serving two suspended sentences, this
means that someone needs him -- so much so that even these mountains of shit, which thanks to
his diligence have been poured on Russia in recent months, also do not count.
There is such a term "protest sewerage". It was born of German politicians in the '50s
of the last century as a tool to counter protests against social injustice and
militarization. And it proved to be surprisingly effective. Roughly speaking, individual
cadres were allowed a lot in exchange for their discrediting protest movements. In Russia,
Navalny has long been playing this role, whilst feathering his own nest here and there. And
as time passed, a big problem for Lyosha's curators was his close work with the CIA. And the
threat through Navalny to such a global project as Nord Stream 2 makes not only Navalny
himself, but also these very "curators" traitors to the Motherland.
Not aimed at the Russian audience, definitely not.
It serves as a pretext for more sanctions for those looking for any excuse and to force
public officials to "condemn" Russia. I am 100% sure Trump is on to the game so his decision
will be solely based on political expediency. If he believes he can win the election, he is
likely thinking that he can not jump on the bandwagon thus will not join the Putin bashing
party.
Easy to say, but I'm pretty sure if you were accused of something heinous and knew you
were not guilty, that ample evidence was available to prove it but that it was being kept
from you while the accusations went on and on that establishing your innocence would be a
priority for you. Even when your attempts fell on deaf ears. Because perhaps the hardest
thing, for a group or individual accused of something, is to know you did not do it, but keep
silent and allow your accusers a free hand.
I imagine Washington would love to declare Navalny the 'legitimate President of the
Russian Federation", and its musing on what a wonderful world it would be if Joe Biden was
President of the United States and Navalny was President of Russia might well b e a tentative
trial balloon to see what public opinion makes of it. But it is not a very realistic
possibility, for a couple of reasons. One, Washington already has a pair of
governments-in-waiting that it is supporting, to little or no effect, and adding another
risks introducing too many balls for the juggler to keep in the air, plus the resulting loss
of confidence in Washington as a game-changer that makes its own rules. Two, whatever blabber
the media generates, the real power-brokers know Navalny has no significant support at home,
and that trying to foist him on the Russian people over their clear preference for the
present leader has no hope of succeeding.
They will have to continue with the make-believe for yet awhile, and hope for an
opportunity.
These guys flying jet packs that require use of hands to point the auxiliary jets for a
modicum of control will be more vulnerable than clay pigeons. The noise alone will alert any
vessels within a few miles that they are coming.
I suppose that they could board a very large vessel at night that has been commandeered by
a few pirates without certainty of being shot down.
A far more useful application would be as part of a rescue team to bring aboard a small
vessel in distress urgently needed supplies or a trained EMT. Seems like a drone could do the
same.
Wow. You can fly in still or light airs from a carrier vessel that is right alongside
– I wonder what prospective boarding candidate is going to permit that? Added to the
criticism you have already pointed out that the 'iron man' is already quite busy controlling
his direction and altitude, and is essentially defenseless. A speed of 200 mph or less is
like an engraved invitation to a Gatling-gun style air defense system like Phalanx or
Goalkeeper, and you would not have to hit a man in a rubber suit very often with a 20mm round
to make him lose interest – Goalkeeper is a 30mm system if I remember correctly, and
consequently would be even less encouraging. For purposes of comparison, a .50 cal round that
would lift you right out of your shoes is a .127mm.
There's no denying it is interesting technology that should stimulate discussion and
ideas, but a clever new system which will revolutionize opposed boarding it is not, not yet.
There might be rescue applications as you suggested, but it does not look like the system has
enough lift to carry the operator plus average deadweight.
The Iron Man flyboys work well in sunny weather with little wind but I wonder how well
they will fare in heavier weather when visibility will be poor and landing platforms may not
be stable. Shouldn't these Iron Man pilots also have better face and eye protection against
the elements?
The US Army is developing a new cannon it claims will have a range of more than 1,000
miles, writes Popular Mechanics.
The Strategic Long Range Cannon (SLRC) is touted as potentially being able to strike targets
at up to 1,150 miles (1,850 km) away and fire 50 times farther than existing guns.
Earlier, the outlet had published leaked photos of the SLRC, touted as able to bring
about a revolutionary breakthrough in artillery warfare.
Super duper long range artillery has been tried in the past:
A 1,000 mile range would require a trajectory that would peak at hundreds of miles. The
shell must use rocket assist and include various electronics for guidance. It would required
heat shielding to resist high temperatures during reentry into the atmosphere. The shell may
leave the muzzle at a few thousand mph but need to accelerate to a much high velocity using a
rocket. If the shell weighs, say, 200 pounds, then warhead certainly could not weigh more
than 50 pounds with the balance being the rocket, heat shield, fins and actuators for
steering and guidance electronics.
You'd think they would have learned their lessons from the Zumwalt destroyer long range
gun debacle:
A grand jury in Pennsylvania indicted the six men for "conspiracy, computer hacking,
wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and false registration of a domain name," the DOJ
announced on Monday, describing them as officers in Unit 74455 of the Russian Main
Intelligence Directorate, or GRU.
The indictment identifies them as Yuriy Sergeyevich Andrienko, Sergey Vladimirovich
Detistov, Pavel Valeryevich Frolov, Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev, Artem Valeryevich
Ochichenko and Petr Nikolayevich Pliskin.
According to the charges, they used malware like KillDisk, Industroyer, NotPetya and
Olympic Destroyer to attack everything from networks in Ukraine and Georgia to the Olympics
held in PyeongChang two years ago – in which Russian athletes were not allowed to
participate under their national flag, due to doping allegations made by a disgruntled
doctor.
The six are also accused of undermining "efforts to hold Russia accountable for its use
of a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok, on foreign soil" – referring to the March
2018 claims by the British government that Russia "highly likely" used the toxin
against a former spy and his daughter, an accusation Moscow repeatedly denied.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers has
claimed that "No country has weaponized its cyber capabilities as maliciously or
irresponsibly as Russia, wantonly causing unprecedented damage to pursue small tactical
advantages and to satisfy fits of spite."
Monday's indictment is hardly a surprise, considering that NATO and US officials have
blamed the 2017 NotPetya outbreak on Moscow for years, even though the malware struck
numerous Russian companies – from the central bank to the oil giant Rosneft and
metal-maker Evraz – as well.
The October 2019 Georgia attack was "in line with Russian tactics,"declared
CrowdStrike, the same security company that was tasked with dealing with the 2016
"hack" of the Democratic National Committee. CrowdStrike's president had secretly
admitted to Congress that they had no actual evidence of the hack itself.
The indictment also accuses the "GRU officers" of trying to breach the Organisation
for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The international body faced a scandal after
whistleblowers revealed that a report blaming chemical attacks in Syria on the country's
government omitted details that did not fall in line with the narrative pushed by the US and
the UK.
In announcing the indictment, the DOJ thanked the authorities in Ukraine, Georgia, New
Zealand, South Korea, and UK "intelligence services" – as well as Google,
Facebook and Twitter – for "significant cooperation and assistance" with the
investigation.
The same "GRU unit" and Kovalev specifically were previously indicted by Special
Counsel Robert Mueller for alleged "meddling" in 2016 US elections. As with Mueller's
indictments, Monday's charges have largely symbolic value; the accused are not likely to ever
see the inside of a US courtroom. The only indictment that was actually contested in court
– against the so-called IRA troll farm – was dropped by the DOJ in
March, due to lack of evidence.
Russia's military intelligence has not gone by the name of GRU since 2010.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
And that's by design. False flags like Scripal Novichok saga are just a smoke screen over UK
problems, the ciursi of neoliberalism in the country, delegitimization of neoliberal elites and
its subservience to the USA global neoliberal empire, which wants to devour Russia like it
plundered the USSR in the past.
But why outgoing MI6 chief decided to tell us the truth? This is not in the traditions of the
agency.
After years of focusing on combating terrorism, US Special Forces are preparing to turn
their attention to the possibility of future conflict with adversaries Russia and China. The
outgoing head of MI6, the UK's clandestine intelligence service, says that the perceived threat
posed by Russia and China against the UK is overstated and distract from addressing the UK's
domestic problems. Meanwhile, his replacement insists that the threat posed by Russia and China
is real and is growing in complexity. Rick Sanchez explains. Then former US diplomat Jim Jatras
and "Going Underground" host Afshin Rattansi share their insights.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is meeting for a for a final day of deliberations before the
confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump's controversial pick for the US
Supreme Court. RT America's Faran Fronczak reports. RT America's Trinity Chavez reports on the
skyrocketing poverty across the US as coronavirus relief funds dry up and the White House
stalls on additional stimulus. RT America's John Huddy reports on the backlash against Facebook
and Twitter for their suppression of an incendiary new report about Democratic nominee Joe
Biden's son Hunter Biden and his foreign entanglements.
Fight it all you want, but there's nothing you can do. "The emails are Russian" is going to
be the official dominant narrative in mainstream political discourse, and there's nothing you
can do to stop it. Resistance is futile.
Like the Russian hacking narrative, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the Russian
bounties in Afghanistan narrative, and any other evidence-free framing of events that
simultaneously advances pre-planned cold war agendas, is politically convenient for the
Democratic party and generates clicks and ratings, the narrative that the New York Post
publication of Hunter Biden's emails is a Russian operation is going to be hammered and
hammered and hammered until it becomes the mainstream consensus. This will happen regardless of
facts and evidence, up to and including rock solid evidence that Hunter Biden's emails were not
published as a result of a Russian operation.
This is happening. It's following the same formula all the other fact-free Russia hysteria
narratives have followed. The same media tour by pundits and political operatives saying with
no evidence but very assertive voices that Russia is most certainly behind this occurrence and
we should all be very upset about it.
"To me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work," Russiagate founder
and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is heard assuring CNN's audience .
"Joe Biden – and all of us – SHOULD be furious that media outlets are spreading
what is very likely Russian propaganda," begins and eight-part thread by Democratic Senator
Chris Murphy, who claims the emails are "Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda."
"It's not really surprising at all, this was always the play, but still kind of
head-spinning to watch all the players from 2016 run exactly the same hack-leak-smear op in
2020. Even with everyone knowing exactly what's happening this time," tweets MSNBC's Chris
Hayes.
"How are you all circling the wagons instead of being embarrassed for peddling Russian ops
18 days before the election. It's not enough that you all haven't learned from your atrocious
handling of 2016 -- you are doubling down," Democratic Party think tanker Neera Tanden
tweeted in admonishment of
journalists who dare to report on or ask questions about the emails.
Virtually the entirety of the Democratic Party-aligned political/media class has streamlined
this narrative of Russian influence into the American consciousness with very little inertia,
despite the fact that neither Joe nor Hunter Biden has disputed the authenticity of the emails
and despite a complete absence of evidence for Russian involvement in their publication.
This is surely the first time, at least in recent memory, that we have ever seen such a
broad consensus within the mass media that it is the civic duty of news reporters to try and
influence the outcome of a presidential general election by withholding negative news coverage
for one candidate. There was a lot of fascinated hatred for Trump in 2016, but people still
reported on Hillary Clinton's various scandals and didn't attack one another for doing so. In
2020 that has changed, and mainstream news reporters have now largely coalesced along the
doctrine that they must avoid any reporting which might be detrimental to the Biden
campaign.
"Dem Party hacks (and many of their media allies) genuinely believe it's immoral to report
on or even discuss stories that reflect poorly on Biden. In reality, it's the responsibility of
journalists to ignore their vapid whining and ask about newsworthy stories, even about Biden,"
tweeted The Intercept 's Glenn
Greenwald recently.
"You don't even have to think the Hunter Biden materials constitute some kind of
earth-shattering story to be absolutely repulsed at the authoritarian propaganda offensive
being waged to discredit them -- primarily by journalists who behave like compliant little
trained robots ," tweeted journalist Michael
Tracey.
Last month The Spectator 's Stephen L Miller described how the consensus
formed among the mainstream press since Clinton's 2016 loss that it is their moral duty to
be uncritical of Trump's opponent.
"For almost four years now, journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over
what I will call the 'but her emails' dilemma," Miller writes. "Those who reported dutifully on
the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server and spillage of
classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids'
table. Focusing so much on what was, at the time, a considerable scandal, has been written off
by many in the media as a blunder. They believe their friends and colleagues helped put Trump
in the White House by focusing on a nothing-burger of a Clinton scandal when they should have
been highlighting Trump's foibles. It's an error no journalist wants to repeat."
So "the emails are Russian" narrative serves the interests of political convenience,
partisan media ratings, and the national security state's pre-planned agenda to continue
escalating against Russia as part of its
slow motion third world war against nations which refuse to bow to US dictates, and you've
got essentially no critical mainstream news coverage putting the brakes on any of it. This
means this narrative is going to become mainstream orthodoxy and treated as an established
fact, despite the fact that there is no actual, tangible evidence for it.
Joe Biden could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and the mainstream
press would crucify any journalist who so much as tweeted about it. Very
little journalism is going into vetting and challenging him, and a great deal of the energy
that would normally be doing so is going into ensuring that he slides right into the White
House.
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
If the mainstream news really existed to tell you the truth about what's going on, everyone
would know about every questionable decision that Joe Biden has ever made, Russiagate would
never have happened, we'd all be acutely aware of the fact that powerful forces are pushing us
into increasingly aggressive confrontations with two nuclear-armed nations, and Trump would be
grilled about
Yemen in every press conference.
But the mainstream news does not exist to tell you the truth about the world. The mainstream
news exists to advance the interests of its wealthy owners and the status quo upon which they
have built their kingdoms. That's why it's
so very, very important that we find ways to break away from it and share information with
each other that isn't tainted by corrupt and powerful interests.
* * *
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see
the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack , which will get you an email
notification for everything I publish. My work is
entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around,
liking me on Facebook
, following my antics on Twitter ,
throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet merchandise ,
buying my books Rogue Nation:
Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and
Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . For more info on who I am, where I stand, and
what I'm trying to do with this platform,
click here . Everyone, racist platforms excluded,
has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else
I've written) in any way they like free of charge.
Much of importance is emanating from Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs via Lavrov and
Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. As reported by TASS :
"The statement made by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, in which he said that the
situation around Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny does not form part of
Russian-Germany bilateral agenda is a ploy to hide Berlin's course to destroy relations with
Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said during Thursday's
briefing.
"'We consider such statements as some tactical ploy that serves to hide Germany's course
for destruction of bilateral ties. I would like to remind you that it was Berlin that used
this situation to put forward unfounded accusations, ultimatums and threats against our
country, openly disregarding its own international legal obligations on providing practical
aid to Russia in the investigation of the incident with the Russian citizen. Once again, it
is acting as the locomotive of new anti-Russian sanctions within the EU and other
multilateral structures,' Zakharova pointed out."
That followed on the heels of yesterday's activities involving FM Lavrov. I previously
linked to Lavrov's interview with several Russian radio stations, and to that I add
the joint presser following his session with Italy's FM:
"Question: In response to the European sanctions, which I believe will follow in the wake
of the 'Navalny case,' you said yesterday that Russia will have to suspend its contacts with
European foreign ministers. Does this mean that today's meeting with Luigi Di Maio may be the
last with an EU foreign minister?
"Sergey Lavrov: The EU is increasingly replacing the art of diplomacy with sanctions.
Clearly, the bad example of the United States is contagious. We see this not just as a bad
example by the Americans, but also as a result of direct US pressure on its European allies
and colleagues. Indeed, what we are saying now is that we want to understand what the EU is
trying to accomplish. But this EU policy will not remain without consequences....
"With this EU approach in mind, where it completely ignores the real state of affairs
regarding the implementation of the Minsk agreements and the fact that they have been blocked
by official Kiev, we cannot disregard the statements coming from Brussels. In particular,
President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said that Russia has adopted a
position that openly undermines EU interests, and that restoring the strategic partnership
between Russia and the EU is out of the question before Russia changes its behaviour. I have
already covered the Ukraine crisis, which is one of the key crises now, as it unfolds, and
who precisely is blocking the implementation of the peace agreements.
"We are seeing similarly unfounded accusations in the case of Mr Navalny, which you
mentioned. We hear our partners say that establishing the facts is of paramount importance.
The trouble is that the facts concerning Mr Navalny's time in Russia, on a Russian plane and
in the Omsk hospital are well known and have been established by us inasmuch as we could,
since several people involved in this incident have fled to Great Britain and Germany, and we
do not know of their whereabouts. We are asking to be granted access to these people, but no
constructive response is coming our way. We do not have the necessary facts. The West has
them, but we are denied access to them. Yesterday, during a conversation with EU High
Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, and today during talks
with Luigi Di Maio, we heard a reiteration of the need to establish the facts. First off, the
other side has no facts. Second, as we know, during a Monday meeting of the EU Foreign
Affairs Council, the participants discussed the need for imposing sanctions, but Mr
Borrell assured me that before such a decision can be made, it is imperative to study the
facts that Germany and France promised to provide as part of a certain technical group that
is now being created . We very much hope that these facts will be presented not only to a
narrow group of European countries, but also directly to the party that is being, without
proof, accused of all conceivable sins and crimes." [My Emphasis]
Today sanctions were applied without the promised examination of the facts. As reported by TASS , a partial
response was made by Zakharova:
"'We call on the German foreign minister to refrain from interfering in domestic affairs
of our union nation, either in word or in deed. We are convinced that the Belarusians need no
instructions either from Berlin or any other capital city to reach accord on socially
important matters they are concerned about,' she said. 'Aggressive interventions of the
collective West in the internal political processes in third countries only entail the
emergence of more crisis foci on the global map.'"
Thanks for posting russian official reactions to recent geopolitical issues with the EU,
so that people can understand what is happening. And what is happening is that the EU has
defined itself as enemy of Russia. Something many people could not believe it is
happening.
In connection with that, i will repost a discussion of mine from another place.
Me: "Anyone who was talking about "independent EU", or "russian-german alliance", "EU
rebellion against US", "Europe joining Russia and China", "European Army independent from
NATO" has shit for brains and does not understand politics at all, no matter what his name or
education or job was."
Commenter: "By this token, does it mean Patrick Lawrence has "sh*t for brains" for writing
this piece? (About Europe allegedly moving closer to Russia in recent days)
Me: "I actually saw that article of him before several days and i wondered whether to make
a comment on that too, as an example of an "analyst" who does not understand at all what is
happening.
Point 1: Nord Stream 2. He fails to understand that this is not a divorce with the US,
rather an old german policy to buy russian energy. For example Germany approved pipelines
from the USSR over Reagan's objections in the 80s. Did that mean that Germany was not hostile
to the Soviet Union? Was not part of the Western block? No. It was a part of NATO containment
strategies against the USSR and hoped to take over Eastern Europe after the USSR loses the
Cold War.
Not to mention that there is talk that the pipeline will only be used at half
capacity.
The fact that someone (Europe) likes money does not mean that that same someone does not
secretly hate you, and will not stab you in the back as soon as it is safe to do so.
Point 2: more and more evidence emerges that Germany organised the Novichok incident with
Navalny (see John Helmer on that).
Point 3 - failed to understand that it was Germany who pushed for sanctions on Russia
after the Ukraine affair. Not to mention that Germany was involved in the anti-russian coup
in Ukraine, as part of its old strategy of "drang nach osten" - "pressure to the east" - to
take over Eastern Europe and its labor pool and use it the way the US uses Latin America.
Point 4 - failed to understand that the biggest force behind the colour revolution in
Belarus was the EU, playing far bigger role than the US. Now, who tries to take over a
russian populated country, near Moscow, histrorically part of the Russian Empire, where
millions of russians died to stop the german invasion, a situation that will also seriously
imperil the Kaliningrad enclave? Only someone who is hostile to Russia. This is a strategic
act of hostility towards Russia.
Point 5 - failed to notice that France and Sweden recently put sanctions on aviation and
industrial equipment for Russia.
Point 6 - is not aware that anti-chinese hatred in Europe has increased to all time highs,
according to recent surveys.
Point 7 - mentions several empty statements from Merkel and Macron as a sign of
"rebellion" without mentioning many other statements countering that - such as France and
Germany saying that Russia should not be allowed back in G-7, or that Borrell (EU foreign
policy chief) called Russia an old enemy of Europe, or that the french EU minister recently
called on Europe to unite against Russia, or that the EU comission chief called for Europe to
stand up to Russia, or that the European Parliament called the russian constitution "illegal"
and called for the "democratisation of Russia" (aka colour revolution), or Germany stating
recently that no european army independent from NATO is possible or will be supported by
Germany, or the 5 german parties that begged the US not to withdraw troops from Germany.
Point 8 - has no idea of recent official russian statements on the EU, meaning that he
lives in an alternate Universe.
"France and Germany are now leading the anti-russian block within Europe".
"There will be no more business as usual between Russia and France and Germany".
"Russia will not follow EU and US rules".
"Russia will no longer be dependent on the EU".
"Europeans have delusions of grandeur".
"Those people in the West who are responsible for foreign policy and do not understand the
necessity of mutually respectable conversation--well, we must simply stop for a while
communicate with them. Especially since Ursula von der Leyen states that geopolitical
partnership with current Russia's leadership is impossible. If this is the way they want it,
so be it. "
These are all statements by Lavrov and Zacharova.
So Lawrence does not even understand that there is a decoupling between Russia and EU
taking place, and worsening of relations, instead of them getting closer, as he dreams in the
daylight.
Analysts who understood the hostility of the EU towards Russia are M. K. Bhadrakumar and
Alastair Crooke, and they wrote plenty on that recently."
One part is particularly worth keeping in mind and that is the physical condition of
Navalny before leaving for Germany is known to the Russians. Note the alchohol and the
massive internal formation of acetone in the body
Acute metabolic disorder....
- - - -
(repeat of my post on the last open thread. No. 333)
In the meantime in Omsk, where two days of blood, urine and other biomarkers were recorded
for Navalny, Alexander Sabaev issued a report on Navalny's prior medical conditions and his
biomarkers after the alleged poisoning. Sabaev is head of the acute poisoning department of
the Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1, chief toxicologist of the Omsk region and of the Siberian
Federal District.
According to Sabaev, Navalny's blood levels were "six times higher than the norm for
amylase, sugar and serum lactate; twice the normal level of leukocytosis, and the maximum
level of acetonuria. In addition, alcohol (0.2 ppm) was found in the urine ...These are the
metabolites, the substances which have been produced. These substances in large quantities
cause pathological changes." According to Sabaev, "Navalny did not suffer from diabetes, so
the tests showed that he had an acute metabolic disorder. 'An increase in the level of
lactate and lactic acid, its excessive formation makes acidification of the blood. It should
not be in such a quantity. There should be an indicator, let's say of 2; but we had an
indicator of 12, that is six times more,' he said. According to the doctor, the level of
internal acetone in Navalny's body was at maximum... Normally, acetone should be negative;
that is, it should be excreted from the body, the specialist added. 'In this case, the
carbohydrate metabolism suffered and completely different scenarios of development occurred.
The body began to destroy itself from the inside."
_________
The Germans are being trained to transport US nukes in the newest NATO exercise called
"steadfast moon". I wonder what is really going on and if the total lockdown is in
expectation to the programmed start to a False-flag.
(Striking Syria because of the upcoming White helmets chlorine FF, or somewhere else?)
"ABC's George Stephanopoulos Fails to Ask Joe Biden About Hunter Biden Emails"
Why do the Republicans go on moaning about media bias?? Are they pathologically naive??
The media are an ideological movement - who run the Democrat party as their political wing.
They don't hide it. They are totally open about it. [Since 2016, they don't even bother with
"polite formalities".]
The Republicans need to adjust themselves to reality...
C-SPAN has suspended anti-Trump debate moderator Steve Scully indefinitely after he admitted
to lying about his Twitter feed being hacked following an awkward incident in which he appeared
to accidentally tweet an intended private message to former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci.
According to
AP , Scully's suspension comes on the day he was set to moderate the now-canceled second
presidential debate , which was to be 'a career highlight for the 30-year C-SPAN veteran' (and
former Biden staffer).
After Scully tweeted "@Scaramucci should I respond to Trump," Frank Fahrenkopf, co-chairman
for the Commission on Presidential Debates relayed Scully's lie that his Twitter account was
hacked . C-SPAN similarly issued a statement , confidently claiming "Steve Scully did not
originate the tweet and believes his account has been hacked."
Shortly after
Scully's 'hack' lie was peddled across the MSM by prominent voices, former Hillary Clinton
staffer Yashar Ali noted that the C-SPAN veteran had previously blamed hacks twice before .
Scully said that when he saw his tweet had created a controversy, " I falsely claimed that
my Twitter account had been hacked. "
He had been frustrated by Trump's comments and several weeks of criticism on social media
and conservative news outlets about his role as moderator, including attacks directed at his
family, he said.
" These were both errors in judgement for which I am totally responsible for," Scully
said. "I apologize. "
Scully acknowledged that he let his C-SPAN colleagues down, along with fellow news
professionals and the debate commission.
"I ask for their forgiveness as I try to move forward in a moment of reflection and
disappointment in myself," he added.
https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-5&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1316829454182887426&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fc-span-suspends-anti-trump-debate-moderator-steve-scully-lying-about-twitter-hack&siteScreenName=zerohedge&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
C-SPAN, meanwhile, said: "He understands that he made a serious mistake," adding "We were
very saddened by this news and do not condone his actions."
In any event, who on the Trump team let this happen in the first place? Scully's anti-Trump
bias has been known for some time.
I'll join the chorus calling New York Times columnist Bret Stephens "brave" for last week's
takedown of his
newspaper's "1619 Project." But I'd also like to ask him: What took you so long?
The 100-page collection of 18 articles that infamously claimed America's "true founding"
date is not 1776, but 1619 – the year enslaved Africans were first brought to these
shores – has received withering criticism since it was published
in August 2019 .
Ten months ago some of the nation's leading historians – including Pulitzer
Prize winners Gordon Wood and James McPherson –
wrote the Times to challenge a wide array of its claims, which the newspaper and its
partner, The Pulitzer Center, were disseminating free of charge
in the nation's classrooms . The historians were especially troubled by its assertion that
the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery and the project's near total erasure of
the contributions of whites to dismantling slavery and working for freedom. Their letter
described these failings as "a displacement of historical understanding by ideology."
Their criticisms were
echoed and extended by others including
Leslie M. Harris, an African American professor of history at Northwestern University, who said
she "vigorously disputed" some central claims of the project when she helped fact-check it
before publication. "Despite my advice," she
wrote in Politico seven months ago , "the Times published the incorrect statement about the
American Revolution anyway."
Stephens' sharply written broadside breaks no new ground. What it does provide is a skillful
synthesis and endorsement of these voluminous critiques in the Times – by a Timesman.
That is significant. But his decision to write the essay so long after the project's mistruths
have been laid bare – and months after it was honored with a George Polk Award and a
Pulitzer Prize – suggests more rot at the Gray Lady and in American journalism.
As Stephens (pictured) himself suggests, the precipitating event was Phillip W. Magness'
Sept. 19 article in
Quillette , which revealed that the Times has "taken to quietly altering the published text
of the project itself after one of its claims came under intense criticism." Most significant,
the paper had scrubbed the claim that 1619 was "our true founding" from the online text without
acknowledgment.
This is not mere editing, but stealthy expurgation intended to cover up the paper's
journalistic malpractice.
This sketchy conduct, presumably approved by New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein
and others, warrants far more than a column. It demands a published response from the paper's
executive editor, Dean Baquet, that acknowledges the misdeed and states whether Baquet knew of
and/or approved the secret changes. Baquet must also detail the paper's response and explain
why the Times still stands by the project, given the need for such major corrections.
In this context, a column by someone with no authority at the Times beyond his opinion seems
part of a strategy to acknowledge a problem without fixing it. For all his bravery in writing
this piece, Stephens is the perfect foil for the Times, one that creates an escape hatch for
1619 acolytes.
It is relevant that Stephens – a conservative who came to the Times after a Pulitzer
Prize-winning stint at the Wall Street Journal – is the columnist whom so many liberal
Times subscribers love to hate. One of the few scribes at the paper who does not incessantly
preach to its woke choir, he has generated strong pushback from colleagues and readers for his
opinions on
climate change and the
Middle East . This may explain why the
New York Times Guild initially felt comfortable sending a now deleted Tweet criticizing the
editors for running Stephens' 1619 piece, which, it said, "reeks."
Stephens' standing makes it easier for many Times readers to dismiss or ignore his
devastating critique. Imagine the impact a similar piece might have had if it been written by
David Brooks or Nicholas Kristof.
Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger appears to be unconcerned by the allegations. The man who
forced editorial page editor James Bennet to resign because he ran a
controversial op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton , issued a brief statement
Sunday that ignored the journalistic and factual issues raised by Stephens and others, and
instead insisted that the 1619 Project was "a journalistic triumph" whose publication is "the
proudest accomplishment of my tenure as publisher."
[ Baquet echoed Sulzberger's
comments in a note to his staff on Oct. 13, when this column was posted. Without directly
addressing the ethical and factual issues raised, he asserted that "the project fell fully
within our standards as a news organization" and that it "fill(s) me with pride."]
The deeper issue raised by Stephens' column is that the 1619 Project is just one example of
the degree to which the Times and other mainstream news outlets have displaced traditional
journalistic practice with ideology. Informed by the tenets of social justice and
critical race theory that have long dominated the humanities departments at leading
universities, journalists have abandoned a commitment to the elusive ideal of objectivity for a
naked embrace of results-oriented activism masquerading as reportage. In this regard,
journalism is a symptom, rather than cause, of the deep-seated cultural relativism that
pervades American culture.
The essence of the 1619 Project is the idea that America is a permanently racist nation
whose founding ideals were lies. This is the capital T truth it seeks to advance. It dismisses
facts that undermine that narrative, distorting the historical record because they are seen as
roadblocks in the arc that bends toward justice. This approach relies on one of the most
dangerous engines of dishonesty in human history: the notion that the means justify the
ends.
That the Pulitzer board would bestow its prize for commentary to the lead writer of the 1619
Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, despite damning scholarly critiques, suggests how deeply this
activist approach has infected journalism.
This impulse now drives much of the coverage in the Times, the Washington Post, the New
Yorker, NPR, and other prestigious news organizations. The clearest example is reporting on
Donald Trump, whom the left sees as an existential threat. This is the capital T truth they
advance through stories that insistently eschew nuance to portray the president as a
monster.
From climate change to identity politics, examples of their tendentious coverage are legion.
But none is more thoroughgoing and dishonest than the years-long coverage claiming Trump
colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
My RealClearInvestigations colleagues are among those
who followed the leads and dug up the facts mainstream outlets refused to and, so, got the
story right. Tom Kuntz, a former Times editor who leads RCI,
detailed how the Times and the Post relied on untrustworthy anonymous sources, unfair
innuendo and cherry-picked facts to advance this narrative in a series of stories that won both
papers a Pulitzer Prize in 2018.
This effort to distort the truth continues unbowed and unabated. Last week,
New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins wrote that Christopher Steele's dossier – opposition
research paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign that claimed the Russians had been
cultivating Trump as an asset for decades – "has been neither proved nor
disproved."
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
In fact, much of it has been debunked and the key parts of it that haven't been probably
never will because you can't prove a negative – one can't ever prove that there is no
videotape showing Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on a Moscow hotel bed the Obamas had
slept in.
Shane Harris of the Washington Post encapsulated the ongoing dishonesty in an article last
week acknowledging, after a fashion, damning new intelligence tying the Clinton campaign to
Russiagate. In a single paragraph he both denied overwhelming evidence that the Clinton
campaign helped generate that now debunked scandal while also insisting that the conspiracy
theory was legitimate. Harris wrote:
"Trump allies have seized on the intelligence as evidence that Clinton was in some way
involved in ginning up an investigation of Trump to tie his campaign to Russia. The president
has consistently denied the charge as a 'hoax,' even though multiple investigations have
documented numerous instances in which his campaign sought Russian assistance in damaging
Clinton."
There is hardly any evidence that the Trump campaign "sought" such assistance. The most that
can be said is that it was receptive to offers of dirt on Clinton at the infamous
June 2016 Trump Tower meeting . Her campaign, by contrast, used people like Steele to
actively seek compromising material on Trump, which appears to have included Russian
disinformation.
Such reporting is so brazen that it suggests a far deeper problem than any one story.
Indeed, the deeply misleading Trump/Russia coverage and the 1619 Project are not deviations
from the norm. They are the new standard at prestigious outlets that are committed to pursuing
their notion of the capital T truth – inconvenient facts be damned.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The Insider is an online publication specializing in investigative journalism, fact-checking
and political analytics.
The Insider has received numerous international awards, including the Council of Europe
Innovation Award (2018), The European Press Prize (2019), Free Media Award (2019) and many
others.
An important source of funding for The Insider is regular donations, so we encourage
everyone who wants to support our publication to subscribe to regular donations.
"The Insider" is a Russian online publication. Founded in November 2013 by a member of
the movement
"Solidarity", a journalist and political activist of liberal-democratic
orientation
Roman Dobrokhotov, who is the editor-in-chief of the publication.
Dobrokhotov. As I live and breathe -- a "kreakl"!!!!
In September 2018, in collaboration with "Bellingcat" Eliot Higgins, "The Insider"
conducted an investigation, allegedly publishing copies of official documents of the Russian
Federal migration service for passport application in the name of Alexander Petrov, one of
the suspects of the British authorities in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which
may indicate his connection with the Russian special services.
In February 2020, "The Insider", jointly with "Bellingcat"and "Der Spiegel", conducted
an investigation and stated that the murder of Zelimkhan khangoshvili in Berlin in August
2019 was organized by the special unit of the FSB "Vimpel". They said that the FSB special
assignment Centre was preparing a repeat killer, Vadim Krasikov, for this murder, and they
also gave some details of Krasikov's movements around Europe.
On November 10, 2017, "The Insider" received from"The World Forum for Democracy"an award for innovation in democracy with the following wording:
"'The Insider' is an investigative publication that seeks to provide its readers with
information about the current political, economic and social situation in Russia, while
promoting democratic values and highlighting issues related to human rights and civil
society. In addition, 'The Insider' carries out the project 'Antifake', the task of which is
to systematically expose false news in the Russian media, which helps its audience to
distinguish real information from false news and propaganda".
In 2019, "The Insider" and "Bellingcat" received the European Press Prize for
establishing the identity of the two men allegedly responsible for the poisoning of Sergei
and Yulia Skripal .
How drole! "The insider" likes to shout out "Fake!" yet seems to work closely with
"Bellingcat".
By the way, further to the Pevchikh saga, another twist to the tale has turned up
in the Russian media concerning those allegedly "Novichok" contaminated bottles that she
dutifully retrieved from Navalny's hotel room in Tomsk as soon she heard that his Moscow
bound flight was making an unplanned landing at Omsk.
She couldn't fly directly to Omsk from Tomsk, so she claims she drove from Tomsk to
Novosibirsk, whence she flew to Omsk, where she boarded the aircraft kindly provided by the
Germans and which took Navalny and her and the bottles to Berlin.
Small problem: the investigations that have been taking place concerning her claims
reveal that she had no bottles with her, either on her person or in her baggage, at the
Novosibirsk and at Omsk airports when she went through security there. And there is video
evidence of her baggage being opened and searched there. No bottles. But she handed over
these bottles, she says, to the German authorities, which bottles were then sent to the
Bundeswehr labs in Munich, allegedly.
And get this: Navalny and Pevchikh claim there was a bomb scare at Omsk airport that was
intended to prevent the aircraft on board which the US agent was howling and screaming.
though he wasn't in pain, he says,
This planting of a bomb at Omsk airport, according to the bullshitter, was done so that
he would not be hospitalized in Omsk and would therefore die on board the aircraft.
It now turns out, according to the cops, that there had been a call claiming that a
bomb had been planted at Omsk airport. And the call originated in Berlin. Nothing in the
Western media about this, of course, though plenty in the Russian media.
I'd provide links but I can't be arsed because I'm writing this in bed on my iPhone.
Well. Those certainly are interesting developments. Not that it would make any difference
in the mainstream media, where the narrative die is already cast – just more of
Russia's 'pathetic evasions' as it tries to twist out from under the weight of accumulated
evidence against it.
08 October 2020 16:21 Transport police: "Navalny's bottles" were not in the luggage, the airport was "mined"
from Germany
[the Russian term for placing a bomb somewhere. e.g. as a terrorist act, is "to mine" a
place -- ME]
The office of the Siberian Transport Prosecutor has questions for an employee of the
Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) Maria Pevchikh to answer as regards the case of the
hospitalization of Aleksei Navalny. However, she evaded giving evidence and flew from Omsk to
Germany. Despite a summons and communication with her lawyer, Pevchikh has not appeared at
the preliminary investigation.
Maria Pevchikh has not replied to the investigator's questions about how the items
allegedly taken from Navalny's room in a Tomsk hotel were removed. The transport police have
reconstructed the Pevchikh route and got together all their videos concerning this, Interfax
reports. And then the surprises begin, which do not fit in with the version that Maria
Pevchikh took from Tomsk to Berlin a bottle, on which traces of a neuroparalytic poisonous
substance from the Novichok group were later allegedly found .
Firstly, after Navalny's hospitalization, Maria Pevchikh travelled from Tomsk to
Novosibirsk by car together with Georgy Alburov [Alburov is the one who, allegedly, was
an FBK front man, posing as head of the investigatory section of Navalny's "fund", but
Pevchik, it seems, was really the investigation boss, very likely directing investigations
into corruption in "Putin's Mafia State" under the guidance of MI6, though nobody had ever
heard of her at FBK until questions started being asked about her role after she had flown to
Germany from Omsk with the Bullshitter -- ME] , and then flew to Omsk.
Secondly, at Novosibirsk Tolmachevo airport , during pre-flight checks, there were no
containers and bottles of more than 100 milliliters in Maria Pevchikh's suitcase and
rucksack. She did buy, however, a half-litre bottle of "Svyatoy Istochnik" ["Holy Spring"
NOT "Saint Spring"! -- ME] water in the sterile zone [namely after having passed
through baggage and security checks and before boarding her flight -- ME], with which she
flew to Omsk.
Earlier, Anton Timofeev had said that after Navalny had been hospitalized, the people
accompanying him seized three bottles of water from his room, which were given to Georgy
Alburov. Alburov then flew from Novosibirsk to Omsk together with the Pevchikh. But there
were no bottles in his luggage either. The moment of the acquisition of a bottle of "Holy
Spring" water by Pevchikh, as well as images from the X-ray scanner installation at the
airport, prove this.
In addition, Sergey Potapov, deputy head of the transport investigation department of
the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Siberian Federal District, announced that
on the day of Navalny's hospitalization, an anonymous message had been received about the
mining of Omsk airport. It was sent via a free e-mail service whose servers are located in
Germany. On this issue, Russia then addressed Germany in order to establish the identity of
the person who sent the message. The police believe that the message about the
pseudo-mining [i.e. a bomb scare -- ME] of the airport came in order to prevent the
aircraft with Navalny on board from urgently landing at Omsk. Aleksei Navalny himself thanked
the pilots who landed the aircraft at Omsk, although the airport had been "mined". And here
is another inconsistency: information about the "mining" of the Omsk airport was closed and
was not disclosed to anyone.
[Shooting his big gob off again, see! -- ME]
The police have also to check how Aleksei Navalny, who was in a coma at the Berlin
Charité clinic, got hold of this information about the "mining" of Omsk airport, at a
time when he had already lost consciousness whilst on board an aircraft on August 20 and was
subsequently unconscious until September 7.
180 visitors and 58 employees were evacuated from the [Omsk] airport building,
excluding flight safety services. In the e-mail that arrived at an e-mail address in the
district of the Omsk Leninsky District Court, there was information about the mining of the
buildings of the district court, the railway station, banks, the post office and the airport.
After that, a criminal case was initiated under Part 2 of Article 207 of the Criminal Code of
Russia ("Knowingly falsely reporting of an act of terrorism").
The German government has said that Aleksei Navalny was poisoned with a chemical
warfare agent from the Novichok group. Allegedly, in addition to the Bundeswehr laboratory,
traces of Novichok were found in his analyses by military chemists in Sweden and France.
Berlin sent the data of these tests to the OPCW, but ignored all Russian requests for
cooperation in investigating the incident with the blogger [i.e. Navalny -- M E] . And
on September 22, Aleksei Navalny was discharged from the hospital after his so-called
"poisoning" with a "military grade poison". Navalny has estimated that his treatment at the
Berlin hospital will cost 70 thousand euros. [Rattling his collection box already! -- ME]. He
is still in Berlin as a special guest of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Moscow,
meanwhile, has invited OPCW experts to familiarize themselves with the samples that were
taken from Aleksei Navalny before leaving for Germany. It is curious that the doctors of the
Berlin clinic also did not find traces of toxic substances in the analyses of their
patient.
[A point often omitted in the free Western press: it was the Bundeswehr that stated
that the Bullshitter had been poisoned by a Novichok type agent, as did the Swedish and
French military -- ME.]
The above article is biased, of course, because it refers to the gobshite Navalny as a
"blogger" and not as a "politician" or "leader of the opposition" etc.
But here's a source that can in no way be described as being biased against "Putin's
fiercest critic": "Radio Freedom" no less!
08 October 2020 Interior Ministry: there was no water bottle in the luggage of Navalny's colleague Maria
Pevchikh
The Department of Transport of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the
Siberian Federal District, which is conducting a pre-investigation check into the
circumstances of the hospitalization of the head of the Anti-Corruption Fund, Aleksei
Navalny, in the Omsk hospital on August 20, published on Thursday a report on the work that
has been done. According to the department, an e-mail with a message about the mining of Omsk
airport, from which Navalny was taken to the hospital, was sent from a free postal service,
whose server is located in Germany.
The department claims that it had addressed the law enforcement agencies of Germany
with a request to provide legal assistance and to determine the owner of the email address,
but had not received an answer. "We do not understand and do not accept the inaction of our
foreign colleagues", the Interior Ministry said in a report.
Earlier, Navalny's associates suggested that the false mining of the Omsk airport had
been carried out in order to delay the hospitalization of the oppositionist, who was on the
verge of life and death -- the aircraft with Navalny on board made an emergency landing in
Omsk after a sudden sharp deterioration in his condition. It is known that on August 20, in
connection with an anonymous report about the bomb, the police evacuated all visitors and
employees from the airport building. RBC, in turn, notes that on the morning of August 20,
false reports of mining were received not only in Omsk, but also in the cities of the the
Novosibirsk region, the Perm and Krasnoyarsk territories, as well as the Volga region: one of
the bombs, in particular, was allegedly planted on the territory of the Samara International
airport "Kurumoch".
In addition to information related to false mining, the report of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs claims that in the luggage of Navalny's colleagues Maria Pevchikh (in the
original version of the message she was named Marina) and Georgy Alburov, who, after reports
of the hospitalization of the head of the FBK, examined his hotel room in Tomsk and
confiscated from there several objects, and then flew to Omsk themselves, no liquids with a
volume of more than 100 milliliters hd been found.
As is now known, Pevchikh subsequently transported a bottle of water to Berlin, from
which Navalny had drunk in a Tomsk hotel, and on which traces of a chemical warfare agent had
allegedly been later found. In a report by the Ministry of Internal Affairs about Pevchikh,
it is said that "for the investigation, communication with this citizen is of great
interest", but she has not been responding to our summons.
Earlier, Navalny's companions, talking about the things they collected from Navalny's
room, said that they were taken to Omsk to be sent to Germany in different ways (according to
Maria Pevchikh, "they were strategically packaged in different places"), that is, by no means
necessary, that it was Pevchikh who carried the bottle from Tomsk to Omsk.
And now, the same story from "The Insider", which most definitely is biased against the
"Putin regime" and those dastardly Orcs, albeit written by an Orc, it seems:
Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation fake: Maria Pevchikh did not
take out of Russia a bottle from which Navalny had drunk
8 October 2020
[Right in your face it shouts FAKE! -- ME]
Russian media outlets are retelling a statement made by the Transport Directorate of
the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Siberian Federal District under the
heading "Investigation in connection with Navalny's hospitalization continues", which
says:
According to information published in the media, there has been carried out on the
territory of Germany a toxicological study of a bottle of water that had been handed over for
investigation by Maria Pevchikh and on which the presence of a nerve agent has been allegedly
found.
Also in the media there was information about the transportation of these items by car
and aeroplane from Tomsk to Germany. At the same time, the investigating authorities have
objectively established that Maria Pevchikh together with Georgy Alburov, after Navalny's
hospitalization, proceeded from the city of Tomsk to the city of Novosibirsk by road, and
then by air to the city of Omsk. During the pre-flight inspection of Maria Pevchikh at
Tolmachevo airport (Novosibirsk), there were no containers with a volume of more than 100 ml
in her suitcase and rucksack, and no bottle of water. After having passed through pre-flight
checks, whilst in the airport transit zone Maria Pevchikh then bought from a vending machine
a 500 ml bottle of "Holy Spring" water, with which she flew to the city of Omsk.
According to a video posted on the Internet, after Navalny had been hospitalized,
persons who had accompanied him seized from the hotel room where he had bben staying three
bottles of water. In accordance with the explanation of one of the indicated persons –
Anton Timofeev – he handed the seized items to Georgy Alburov, who flew with Maria
Pevchikh from Tolmachevo airport (Novosibirsk) to the city of Omsk. During the inspection of
Alburov's belongings at the airport, bottles with a volume of more than 100 ml were also not
found.
This is confirmed by photographs from the airport security cameras, which captured the
moment Maria Pevchikh bought a bottle of water, as well as from the X-ray scanner
installation at the airport, where Pevchikh and Alburov went through baggage
inspection.
It is worth noting the wording about "containers with a volume of more than 100 ml".
There are rules restricting the carriage of liquids on aeroplanes: they can only be
transported in hand luggage in containers of no more than 100 ml. Therefore, hand luggage is
inspected for the presence of prohibited containers, but not luggage in which liquids can be
carried freely. The bottles taken from Navalny's room in the Tomsk hotel were most likely
carried by Maria Pevchikh in her luggage, which could have been taken away during the
inspection of her hand luggage.
Baggage at an airport is screened using an X-ray scanner. Of course, people don't pay
attention to water bottles. There is a technical ability to save images from the scanner, but
there is no information about its use in practice: the luggage is scanned and examined in
real time, and when suspicious objects are found, they are immediately opened. It makes no
sense to store a huge amount of X-ray images of every piece of baggage passing through an
airport.
The CCTV footage of Maria Pevchikh buying a bottle of water from a vending machine
proves practically nothing.
Thirsty MI6 operative Pevchikh at Omsk airport -- ME
Firstly, it is not clear what kind of drink she is buying. It is unlikely that a Coca
Cola vending machine exclusively sells "Holy Spring". If the Ministry of Internal Affairs has
not provided footage allowing it to be established exactly what Pevchikh bought, then most
likely it does not have such information at all and the statement about the 500 ml bottle of
"Holy Spring" is not based on anything -- except for the fact that it is on such a bottle
that traces of "Novichok" were found. Even the statement that Pevchikh brought a bottle she
bought at the Novosibirsk airport to Omsk cannot be called reliable: it is likely that she,
after having drunk the water, left the bottle on the aeroplane.
Secondly, FBK employees took away not one, but three bottles from Tomsk, which the
Ministry of Internal Affairs also admits. If the Ministry of Internal Affairs had footage
proving that Pevchikh and Alburov had purchased three bottles, it would hardly conceal
them.
The certainty with which the Ministry of Internal Affairs makes statements that cannot
be substantiated raises doubts about its message as a whole.
Sort of like the certainty with which Navalny makes statements that cannot be
substantiated as regards Putin trying to murder him with "Novichok" or the statements made by
the German authorities about his having also been poisoned by "Novichok" without their
providing any substantiation?
Should these statements also raise doubts in an enquiring mind, I wonder.
I thought 2020 can't get any crazier – – but this tweet from CIA John Brennan
. is right up there
https://twitter.com/JohnBrennan/status/1314587438568833025?s=20
John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) Tweeted: Imagine prospects for world peace, prosperity, &
security if Joe Biden were President of the United States & Alexei Navalny the President
of Russia. We'll soon be halfway there.
"Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You, you may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one"
Hmmm So Navalny is indeed a CIA asset as those lying Russians claimed.
And this impartial government official, source of unbiased intelligence, is endorsing
Biden? If the above tweet is authentic, this country has reached maximum discord, betrayal
and treason.
Ministry of Internal Affairs: the "bottle from Navalny's room" was bought by Pevchikh
at the airport
The Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Transport in the Siberian
Federal District has stated that Aleksey Navalny's associate Maria Pevchikh had not taken
away bottles of water from his hotel room in Tomsk. These bottles, as reported earlier, the
German authorities had handed over for investigation, which had found traces of
poison.
The police said in a statement that Pevchikh had no bottles in her luggage during the
security check at Tolmachevo airport. After having gone through the security check, she
bought "a 0.5 litre bottle of water from a vending machine whilst in transit at the airport"
and with which bottle she flew to the city of Omsk".
And here is the very bottle (only its top is visible) that Maria Pevchikh was
secretly carrying.
The "deadly poison" was lying amongst cosmetics, laptops and underwear (it does not
seem that the bottle was considered to be "deadly dangerous").. According to the data that we
have available, there were no other bottles, neither with Pevchikh's nor Navalny's things.
This is an X-ray of the only suitcase in which a bottle can be seen.
Earlier, the German government had stated that, amongst other things, traces of
"Novichok" had been found on a bottle of water out of which Navalny had drunk.
15:17, 8 October 2020 During a search of Navalny's colleague, the alleged bottle with "Novichok" was not
found
During a search at Novosibirsk airport, Alexei Navalny's comrade-in-arms Maria Pevchikh
was not found to have a bottle, which, allegedly, had traces of poison from the Novichok
group. This has been stated by Sergei Potapov, deputy head of the Investigation Department of
the Transport Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Siberian
Federal District, TASS reports.
8 October 2020 15:45 The alleged bottle with "Novichok" was not found on Maria Pevchikh during a security
check
The bottle with which she flew to Omsk had been bought in the transit zone
Oh shit!
I suppose this story is now being reported in the USA, UK, French, German, Polish,
Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian press etc., etc.
By the way, if you "Google" the following: "Pevchikh -- bottles -- airport" or similar, at
the top of the list of links presented is one to "The Insider" article that screams out
FAKE.
Only by scrolling down the list do you find Russian media articles on the Ministry of the
Interior (Siberia) statement concerning Pevchikh and the bottles and the uncanny way the
Bullshitter knew about the "mining" of Omsk airport even though the email from Germany
warning that bombs had been planted there was closed information and when it was sent, the
"Oppositionsführer" was in a state of a medically induced coma.
"... AP is hardly the Ministry of Truth, dictating Newspeak under the penalty of torture. As it turns out, it doesn't have to be. A bit of updated style – and thought – guidance announced on Twitter from time to time will do. ..."
Used as the journalism Bible by most English-language media, the AP Stylebook has updated its guidance for employing the word 'riot,'
citing the need to avoid "stigmatizing" groups protesting "for racial justice."
While acknowledging the dictionary definition of riot as a "wild or violent disturbance of the peace," AP said the word
somehow "suggests uncontrolled chaos and pandemonium."
Worse yet, "Focusing on rioting and property destruction rather than underlying grievance has been used in the past to stigmatize
broad swaths of people protesting against lynching, police brutality or for racial justice " the Stylebook account tweeted on
Wednesday.
The claim that something has been used in the past in a racist way has already led to banishing many English terms to the Orwellian
"memory hole." It certainly appears the AP is trying to do the same with "riot" now.
Instead of promoting precision, the Stylebook is urging reporters to use euphemisms such as "protest" or "demonstration."
It advises "revolt" and "uprising" if the violence is directed "against powerful groups or governing systems,"
in an alarming shift in focus from what is being done towards who is doing it to whom .
There is even a helpful suggestion to use "unrest" because it's "a vaguer, milder and less emotional term for a condition
of angry discontent and protest verging on revolt."
Translated to plain English, this means a lot more mentions of "unrest" and almost no references to "riot," in media
coverage going forward, regardless of how much actual rioting is happening.
Mainstream media across the US have already gone out of their way to avoid labeling what has unfolded since the death of George
Floyd in May as "riots." Though protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota turned violent within 48 hours, before spreading to other
cities across the US – and even internationally – the media continued calling them "peaceful" and "protests for racial
justice."
Yet in just the first two weeks of the riots, 20 people have been killed and the property damage has
exceeded $2 billion , according
to insurance estimates – the highest in US history.
AP is no stranger to changing the language to better comport to 'proper' political sensitivities. At the height of the riots in
June, the Stylebook decided to capitalize"Black" and "Indigenous" in a "racial, ethnic or cultural sense."
A month later, the expected decision
to leave "white" in lowercase was justified by saying that "White people in general have much less shared history and culture,
and don't have the experience of being discriminated against because of skin color."
Moreover, "Capitalizing the term 'white,' as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs,"
wrote AP's vice-president for standards John Daniszewski.
The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, as its full name goes, has effectively dictated the tone of English-language
outlets around the world since it first appeared in 1953. It is also required reference material in journalism schools.
So when it embraces vagueness over precision and worrying about "suggestions" and "subtly conveying" things over
plain meaning, that rings especially Orwellian – in both the '1984' sense of censoring speech and thought and regarding the corruption
of language the author lamented in his famous 1946
essay 'Politics and the English language.'
AP is hardly the Ministry of Truth, dictating Newspeak under the penalty of torture. As it turns out, it doesn't have to be.
A bit of updated style – and thought – guidance announced on Twitter from time to time will do.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent
those of RT.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from
2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
By Jonny Tickle Angela Merkel's visit to Alexey Navalny was an attempt to politicize
the situation, according to Russia's Foreign Ministry. The German Chancellor dropped in to see
the Russian opposition figure when he was hospitalized in Berlin.
Speaking to Komsomolskaya Pravda Radio, the Ministry's spokesperson Maria Zakharova said
that the chancellor's visit had "nothing to do with the desire to find the truth" about
what happened to an opposition figure who was allegedly poisoned, and was simply a political
decision.
"Many people ask why," Zakharova said, when questioned about Merkel's motives. "I
think these questions should be addressed to the German side we regard it as an attempt to
politicize the issue."
The current communication between Moscow and Berlin is an "endless game of tag," with
Germany refusing to use official channels, Zakharova claimed.
On Monday, Navalny confirmed that the chancellor had met with him in Berlin's Charite
hospital. The opposition figure denied that the meeting was "secret," calling it a
"private conversation with (his) family." The visit was also confirmed by German
government spokesperson Steffen Seibert, who clarified that Berlin does not announce Merkel's
private meetings. According to German magazine Der Spiegel, which first broke the news of the
encounter, it "should be regarded as a clue for the Russian government that Berlin will not
give in and will find out the truth [behind the incident]."
On August 20, Navalny was hospitalized in the Siberian city of Omsk after he became ill on a
flight from Tomsk to Moscow. Two days later, after a request from his family and associates,
the activist was flown to Berlin for treatment at the city's Charite clinic. Over a week later,
German authorities announced that the anti-corruption activist was poisoned with a substance
from the Novichok group of nerve agents. The medical team in Omsk denies that any poison was
found in Navalny's body. On September 23, he was discharged from hospital and is expected to
make a full recovery.
If you like this story, share it with a friend! Embla Bill Johnson 7 hours ago What
is certain is that EUC Ursula Von der Legen was activated. At least they are two about it. So
therefore the geopolitical region is covering EU member countries, not only Germany. Tor
Gjesdal 5 hours ago When the Banksters, Rothschild s are your Masters you just have to obey
Merkel. Besides US$ HAS much dirt on You also by their Spying on us All... Cyber criminals
Supreme. Which simply put: No Real Democracy at all, Faked this also. ((( Not to mention their
lies, cheating and stealing in their Medias and schools. etc.. What complete Hypocrits and how
Truely Un-Godly! It is so sad to see these Leaders of the Nazto-sphere showing how sold out
their Souls and Minds are. (( Galaxy31 5 hours ago The West is so desperate to make crooked
Navalny look like an important fierce opposition. In reality he is far far from being important
or a fierce opposition. He is simply a traitor politely said, nothing else. ariadnatheo 3 hours
ago What do they and what does Angela herself mean by "a private visit"? She is the head of the
German state for Zweibelkuchen sake! Private as in ... intimate? I cannot see her as a cougar.
In fact I can't even imagine her in bed. No way! Please say it ain't so, Angela! armyexpat 1
hour ago I wonder what "they" have on Merkel or her gov. The German gov is spinning a fairy
tail as fact.
Yes, those are all good and sound arguments. The point I was trying to make, though, is
that American toxicologists and field experts are astounded that anyone might survive
exposure to VX; it is unaccountable not only that they could be alive, but that there is not
a trail of death following the assassins as well until it kills them, too. But nobody seems
surprised for Navalny to make a complete recovery and be sitting up in bed making demands and
strolling around the stairwells, after exposure to a much more toxic agent that should have
killed him, while nobody noticed anyone sneaking into his room dressed in a full hazmat suit
with breathing apparatus and apparently others could come and go from the scene of the
alleged exposure with no protection.
Perhaps the Skripals 'disappeared' because the British government was unsure how to
present them after a supposedly-deadly poisoning attempt which they plainly are said to have
survived. Perhaps also it is the judgment of similar authorities that the public will accept
the dichotomy without demur; hence, the agent can still be nefarious beyond belief because it
is so insidious and deadly, but Navalny can be alive and making noise after exposure to
it.
I'd like to look at the Navalny 'poisoning" from a slightly different angle, one which I
think bears scrutiny. I've said several times that nobody – to the best of my knowledge
– has ever survived poisoning by VX. But that's not quite accurate – the two
women who thrust what was always believed to be VX in some form into the face of Kim Jong Nam
(Kim Jong-Un's half-brother) at an airport in Kuala Lumpur killed him stone dead. But they
themselves apparently survived with no ill effects except that one of them allegedly may have
vomited.
The major difference in the way the stories are treated, then, is the incredulity with
which the apparent survival of the alleged poisoners is regarded by the western press.
Consider;
An amount of VX, we are told, that weighs as much as two pennies would kill 500 people. I
assume that's what he meant, as he is strikingly un-eloquent for a scientist and the 'penny'
is not a weight of measure. Is that a British penny, or an American one? Big difference in
weight.
''The other chemical agents like sarin, tabun, those kinds of things, they're way below
this. They're toxic, yes, but this is the king,'' said John Trestrail, a U.S. forensic
toxicologist who has examined more than 1,000 poisoning crimes.
He said an amount of VX weighing two pennies could kill 500 people through skin
exposure. It's also hard to acquire and would likely have come from a chemical weapons
laboratory, making it more likely that the attack was executed by a government."
Yes, you read that right – VX is the King of vicious toxicological agents. Except
for Novichok, which is ten times as deadly, and the would-be killers dusted Navalny's bottle
with enough of it that the bottle was liberally covered with the dust, and his clothes
apparently were as well, or so Team Navalny suspects. Say – that's a handy little
timeline right there, innit? When did Navalny put those clothes on? Presumably he had a
shower before going to bed; did he dress in fresh clothes before leaving for the airport, or
wear the same stuff from the day before? Either way, the poisoner must have accessed
Navalny's room between the time he got up and the time the plane took off – if he still
had Novichok on his clothes from the day before, he'd be dead, plus would have contaminated
God knows how many surfaces.
Anyway, remember – Novichok is ten times as deadly as the King of nerve agents, VX.
But it has killed – according to western yarns – only one of six people exposed
to it; Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Detective Nick Bailey, Navalny and Charles Rowley all
survived and have apparently achieved full recovery, Navalny in only a week after emerging
from an alleged coma.
Western incredulity? None. Nothing to see here, old chap.
Listen to the awful consequences of poisoning with VX, and remember the assassins only
pushed some quantity of VX into Kim Jong-Nam's face; a second's contact, them they ran away,
not wearing gloves or any protective gear at all.
"VX is an amber-colored, tasteless, odorless chemical weapon first produced in the
1950s. When inhaled or absorbed through the skin, it disrupts the nervous system and causes
constriction and increased secretions in the throat, leading to difficulty breathing. Fluids
pour from the body, including sweat, spontaneous urination and defecation, often followed by
convulsions, paralysis and death. Kim Jong Nam sought help at the airport clinic and died en
route to a hospital within two hours of being attacked, police said."
I don't think anyone has reported what Navalny was roaring and screaming, but perhaps it
was"Get back!!! I'm shitting myself!! Jesus, I can't stop pissing!!! Help me!!" although you
would think if his symptoms included spontaneous defecation and urination, someone would have
said – it could be important. Different agent, I know, but the symptoms of nerve-agent
poisoning are quite similar across the type. Navalny's symptoms were nothing like nerve-agent
poisoning, no matter how energetically the defector Mirzayanov and his fan club try to
backstop Navalny's story. The intense sweating and the obvious gross irritation of the mucous
membranes would have been unmistakable to the doctors in Omsk, considering Navalny had
already passed the onset of whatever symptoms he did have and was unconscious.
Kim Jong-Nam died within two hours of being attacked with a nerve agent ten times less
toxic than Novichok. Navalny was definitely poisoned with a substance ten times more toxic
than VX, according to the Germans and the French and whoever else swears to that ludicrous
story, but was to all appearances normal at least an hour after having been poisoned, since
he showed no symptoms until at least 40 minutes after the plane took off with no obvious GRU
agents on board, and hung around the airport before the flight was called at least long
enough to drink a cup of tea, plus however long it took for him to get from the hotel to the
airport.
"The two women -- one Vietnamese, one Indonesian -- recorded on surveillance cameras
thrusting a substance into Kim Jong Nam's face as he was about to check in for a flight home
to Macau, apparently did not suffer serious health problems. Malaysian police have said they
were not wearing gloves or protective gear and that they washed their hands afterward as they
were trained to do. However, authorities said Friday that one of them vomited
afterward.
Both have been arrested along with another man. Authorities are also seeking several
others, including an employee of North Korea's state-owned airline, Air Koryo.
''If they used their bare hands, there's just no possible way that they would have
exposed him to VX unless they took some sort of precaution,'' Goldberger said. ''The only
precaution I know of would be administration of the antidote before this went down.''
Perhaps that's it; perhaps immediately after swigging from his water-bottle – which
he left in the hotel room, obviously – Navalny rang room service for some Novichok
antidote. Just in case. Can't be too careful, when you are the main opposition leader.
"No areas were cordoned off and protective measures were not taken. When asked about it
a day after the attack, airport spokesman Shah Rahim said there was no risk to travelers and
the airport was regularly and properly cleaned. But officials announced Friday that the
facility would be decontaminated.
''It's as persistent as motor oil. It's going to stay there for a long time. A long
time, which means anyone coming in contact with this could be intoxicated from it,''
Trestrail said. ''If this truly is VX, they ought to be calling in a hazmat team and looking
at any place these women or the victim traveled after the exposure.''
A hazmat team, and looking at any place the assassin or anyone potentially exposed might
have traveled. For an agent ten times less toxic than Novichok.
"... Maybe Navalny had allegedly been assisted by his apparent drug of choice, cocaine? ..."
"... On the Navalny poisoning. Interesting to see that Vladimir Ashurkov is in the inner core of the Integrity Initiative. Suggesting another media-led provocation. ..."
"... Apparently, Pevchikh was given a bogus interview on the BBC and was presented as an uninteresting, nothing special sort of person, about whom rumours and innuendo were amassing for no reason whatsoever. ..."
"... The interviewer never pressed her on how long she had lived in the UK, what her business interests there were (claims have been made that she runs a book store), why she visits Russia so frequently, what indeed isher present citizenship, how she became involved with Navalny's "fund" -- she says she answered an ad., but where? In the UK? Hardly! And on and on . ..."
"... On Thursday (24 September), Christian Gramm, the president of Germany's Military Intelligence Service (MAD), was forced to resign. To many, the shake-up doesn't come as a surprise given the recent criticism over how the agency handled investigations into right-wing extremism in the German Special Forces (KSK). Gramm's term as MAD president will come to an end next month ..."
"... Verzilov is supposedly – according to one source I read – the force behind having Navalny evacuated to Germany. It will be funny now if he cannot return to Russia. ..."
"... That guy is a self-important prick with delusions of grandeur. If he is representative of the non-systemic opposition in Russia then, assuming that Putin is even aware of this guy, it would only provide a good laugh after a hard day at the office ..."
"... Verzilov is an attention junkie. He set himself up as the 'spokesman' of Pussy Riot because they were getting a lot of attention and he wanted to be part of it. He has no visible talent of his own – except perhaps a facility for languages, his English is pretty good ..."
"... His English is good because he went to school in Toronto until his somehow landing a place at MGU Philosophy Faculty, which is one of the greatest riddles of the Cosmos, in my opinion. ..."
"... I'd like to look at the Navalny 'poisoning" from a slightly different angle, one which I think bears scrutiny. I've said several times that nobody – to the best of my knowledge – has ever survived poisoning by VX. But that's not quite accurate – the two women who thrust what was always believed to be VX in some form into the face of Kim Jong Nam (Kim Jong-Un's half-brother) at an airport in Kuala Lumpur killed him stone dead. But they themselves apparently survived with no ill effects except that one of them allegedly may have vomited. ..."
"... The major difference in the way the stories are treated, then, is the incredulity with which the apparent survival of the alleged poisoners is regarded by the western press. Consider; ..."
"... It's hard to imagine the Germans poisoned his samples, although I suppose it is possible. But if Pevchik had poisoned him with something intended to incapacitate but not kill him, you'd think the doctors in Omsk would have detected it. ..."
"... It might be interesting to see what kind of deal would result from a process in which Russia has given up trying to be liked by the west, and consequently examines each negotiation on its merits alone. ..."
, "When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to
be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the
bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false." Uncle
Volodya
"Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent."
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
who haven't got it."
– George Bernard Shaw
I'm lazy. But vanity constrains me from admitting that, so I call it 'busy'. However I choose to label it, I haven't written
anything new in a long time. It's not writer's block, because I had a couple of topics in mind; if I had to blame it on
anything, I'd blame it on the comments section. We don't really have any rules here, or not many (there are a couple of people
who can't comment, but that's because they cannot be trusted to not instantly return to old habits as soon as they are
allowed), and things routinely drift off-topic to whatever is going on at the time. Current events; yes, that's the term I was
looking for. So when new things are happening, we tend to discuss them in the comments section, instead of my writing a new
post dedicated specifically to that issue. It's the primary cause, I'm afraid, of important comments you would like to be able
to locate because they contain hard-to-find sources or just the information you need to settle an argument, because they are
not linked by subject. Obviously I prefer the unregulated format, or I wouldn't use it, but it does have its disadvantages.
Anyway, the silver lining that comes with being late to discuss a particular current event is that you get to talk about the
filtered version, after the ferment has settled down and often new facts have presented. So it is with the teapot tempest of
Alexei Navalny, vaulted to international fame virtually overnight by becoming the latest victim poisoned by nefarious
Soviet-era deadly nerve agents that, in their known application, have a success rate of 16.67%. A funny statistic has emerged
from the absurd times we are living in – a viral infection, the 'novel coronavirus', more commonly called COVID-19, has the
world shivering with terror like frogs in a glass cage with a big snake, even though its Infection Fatality Rate (IFR)
compares with the annual influenza bouts we have lived with all our years. Yet an engineered nerve agent reputed to be ten
times as deadly as the most toxic poison the west could come up with – one which, I might add, has a known survivor list among
the exposed of zero point zero – has never killed the individual it was intended to kill, and managed to incidentally slay one
innocent bystander who was also
an
alcoholic and drug abuser
. As John Lennon remarked in "Nobody Told Me"; strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Mama.
https://c0.pubmine.com/sf/0.0.3/html/safeframe.html
REPORT THIS AD
I looked it up so as to have an electronic link, so readers could get the full effect. But I initially saw it in the
newspaper, the Canadian Globe & Mail (British Columbia edition), in which it was headlined a little differently –
"Why
nobody has power to make Kremlin come clean on poisoning"
. So far as I can make out on initial examination, the body of
the article is unchanged. Both pieces – well, the same piece with two different headlines – are by Mark MacKinnon, who is
The
Globe & Mail
's senior international correspondent, based in London, UK. He's
quite
highly-regarded by his employers
, is a seven-time winner of the National Newspaper Awards (for creativity, perhaps,
although they don't say), and the author of "
The New Cold War:
Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics
". Gee, that sounds like it might be about a particular country; let's
have a dekko at
the
writeup
.
"When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two
years later, liberal democracy was supposed to fill the void left by Soviet Communism. Poland and Czechoslovakia made the best
of reforms, but the citizens of the "Evil Empire" itself saw little of the promised freedom, and more of the same old despots
and corruption. Recently, a second wave of reforms -- Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, and Ukraine in 2004, as well as
Kyrgyzstan's regime change in 2005 -- have proven almost as monumental as those in Berlin and Moscow. The people of the Eastern
bloc, aided in no small part by Western money and advice, are again rising up and demanding an end to autocracy. And once
more, the Kremlin is battling the White House every step of the way. Mark MacKinnon spent these years working in Moscow, and
his view of the story and access to those involved remains unparalleled. With The New Cold War, he reveals the links between
these democratic revolutions -- and George Soros, the idealistic American billionaire behind them -- in a major investigation
into the forces that are quietly reshaping the post-Soviet world."
Because western-imposed liberal democracy has been such a star-speckled success in so many places – Libya. Iraq,
Venezuela anyway, the above author information is offered to sort of set the tone for the type of worldview you might expect.
And to introduce a premonition, before you even read his material, that Mark MacKinnon just might be exactly the sort of guy
who would smirk with revulsion at the mention of Putin's name, and have a big ol' man-crush on Alexei Navalny. I'm not
implying anything untoward, here; Mr. MacKinnon is a realist. An ideologue, yes, but a realist.
And as with others of his ideological type, I marvel that he apparently sees some sort of inspirational leader in Navalny. I'm
cautiously optimistic, of course, because until international busybodies have a vote in Russian elections – as they have in
other places, except it's called 'regime change' – there is about as much chance of Alexei Navalny being elected to a position
of influence by a broad Russian vote as there is of you dying from coronavirus. Which you have about a 99.6% chance of
surviving, if you should get it. Anyway, I'm optimistic, as I have suggested many times before, because for so long as western
liberal meddlers choose to put all their eggs in the Navalny basket, for that long leaders elected by Russian votes will rule
more or less unmolested. You could probably persuade Russians to dress up as Obama on Hallowe'en (well, first you would have
to persuade them to celebrate it, which
The Moscow Times
almost
reduced itself to tears trying to bring about) as you could to persuade them to vote for Navalny. And this latest escapade,
which – perversely – has put him in the western hall of political fame has probably actually cost him votes in Russia, which
is remarkable considering he already was about as popular as vomit air-freshener.
https://c0.pubmine.com/sf/0.0.3/html/safeframe.html
REPORT THIS AD
Mr. MacKinnon starts off his excoriation of the Kremlin, and his apparent poignant appeal for someone to rid us of this
troublesome autocratic dictator, with some lighthearted snark about how predictable it is that the Kremlin would deny
poisoning Alexei Navalny. Uh huh; of course they would. Real men would immediately own up – yeah, I poisoned that
motherfucker. Teach him to talk smack about me. What are you gonna do about it? You might be repulsed by the implicit evil
there, but at least you could respect Putin for telling the truth.
Let's look at it a little differently. Suppose I said "Mark MacKinnon is a wife-beater". For the record, I don't even know if
he is married. Or straight. But that's beside the point, which is that to the best of my knowledge, it is not true. Doesn't
matter. Predictably, he would deny it. Now suppose I repeated that allegation regularly for twenty years. Might I be able to
say, wearily, "the only predictable thing about MacKinnon's latest wife-beating incident is his denial of having had anything
to do with it"? I think I could. But denying it is exactly the predictable occurrence if he had not done it.
How about we take a quick recap of some of the things Russia has been accused of just in the last few years. A state-sponsored
doping program for its Olympic athletes, in which they were fed performance-enhancing cocktails that powered them all the way
to the podium. The special investigatory body put together to look into it, headed by Canadian Richard McLaren, claimed there
was so much proof that it was embarrassing. When we got down to where the rubber meets the road, said investigatory body could
not prove fuck-all, their star witness
fell
apart in testimony
, and 28 Russian athletes
had
their Olympic bans reversed
while 7 medals were reinstated. The Nation
recapped
it thus
;
"How the Times could provide such minimal coverage of these important
April 2018 reasoned CAS decisions on matters on which the Times had extensively reported is inexplicable. By allowing the
Russian athletes, for the very first time, to confront their accusers with cross-examination, the CAS was in a position to
make startling revelations about Rodchenkov and McLaren. Rodchenkov, for example, admitted that he never personally witnessed
any accused Russian athlete committing doping violations themselves, including taking the illegal drug cocktail, giving a
clean urine sample out of competition, tampering with a urine sample, or transmitting information to co-conspirators about the
coding on the drug sample after it had been given.
Furthermore, several of Rodchenkov's explanations of events were simply
not believable. For example, Rodchenkov had stated that the swapping of urine samples occurred after 1 am, but his own diary
entries confirmed his bedtime by midnight each night, with two or three exceptions. When confronted with this contradiction,
he made the incredible claim that he had lied to his diary."
Were the Russians guilty? Apparently not. What is the appropriate response when you are accused of something but did not do
it? Denial? Damn straight. But there's another key takeaway in there – the testimonial hearing in which the athletes and their
representatives dismantled Rodchenkov's self-important blathering was
the
very first time they had been able to confront their accuser
. Uncorroborated denials are easy to brush off, which would
seem to summarize Mr, MacKinnon's style.
One more. Russia was accused by the United States – whose allies quickly picked it up as one more example of the reprehensible
Russian conduct that just makes you shake your head in helpless wonder – of paying the Taliban in Afghanistan a bounty to kill
American soldiers.
https://c0.pubmine.com/sf/0.0.3/html/safeframe.html
REPORT THIS AD
For starters, it would not be difficult to imagine the US Army as being so loathed in Afghanistan – considering American
military operations have devastated the country for 19 years now – that jihadis in Afghanistan would be happy to kill them for
free; might even pay for the opportunity, if they had any money. Some might say well, if not for the democracy-promotion
efforts of America, the Taliban might still be in charge! Yeah, ha, ha; funny story about that. President Trump announced this
past Spring that it was
time
to turn over law and order in Afghanistan
to the Taliban.
He said US troops had been killing terrorists in Afghanistan "by the
thousands" and now it was "time for someone else to do that work and it will be the Taliban and it could be surrounding
countries".
Personally, I think it's a hell of a cheek of the Taliban to accept money from the Russians to kill Americans who just cut
them such an exceptional deal – you would think they would be so happy that they would dance into the streets with their arms
full of flowers and candy. Oh, wait – different democracy-promotion operation.
And I'd just like to point out to anyone who is forming the opinion that I am a sarcastic prick that the main piece of
'evidence' on which the Americans based the assessment that a mysterious Russian GRU (military intelligence) unit was paying
bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers was the discovery of 'a large amount of American cash from a raid on a
Taliban outpost'.
Jesus, God of our fathers – please tell me they had more than that. Quite apart from the patent rudeness of carrying out a
raid on the 'outposts' of your new Afghanistan caretakers, the US dollar is the most common and widely-circulated currency in
the world. Instead of leaping to the conclusion that it had to have come from the Russians – whose currency was still the
ruble the last time I looked – why was the King Arthur Flour Company not immediately a suspect? After all, sourdough baking
has
lunged
to a quivering peak
during 'COVID times' (as I heard one imbecile describe the peyote cartoon we are all living); King
Arthur offers a
very
popular sourdough starter
, and the Afghans are great bakers. Maybe they were saving up to buy a couple of truckloads, give
the people something to raise their morale! Get it? 'Raise' their morale? It's not funny if I have to explain it. But it makes
as much sense as assuming the Russians want to accelerate the killing of American forces just as they are arranging terms for
a pullout, which would surely make them stay longer.
Well, let's get back to Mr. MacKinnon's story, before we wander too far off the path. But I hope that addresses the issue of
the Kremlin denying western accusations. Deny is what you do when you really had nothing to do with whatever it was you are
being accused of, instead of 'manning up' and saying "Yeah; it was me". Gaddafi did that, in the hope of making peace with the
Americans, and look where it got him. And America is not put off by lack of evidence – obviously.
So we're back where Russia might be believed today, if the past 20 years had never happened. At that, I would suggest he's
casting too wide a net; the USA and Russia were getting along fairly well between the time the Harvard Boys were invited in to
remake Russia in 1991, and the presidential candidacy of American Idiot and Venture Capitalist Mitt Romney, during which
candidacy he identified Russia – for no apparent reason than that it sometimes caused headaches for the United States at the
UN – as the USA's Number One Geopolitical Enemy. That was in 2012, which was only 8 years ago, and in fact the great majority
of western accusations against Russia have taken place since 2014 and the US State Department's successful second run at
taking over Ukraine to Make It Safe For Democracy. It's pretty hard to restore your 'credibility' when the international press
whose language is foreign to your own continues to insist it has mountains of evidence that you are lying, but cannot reveal
any of it because of national security. On the occasions it does publish some of its substantiation, the alternate-narrative
element of the public is so scathing in its scorn – as happened when the British tried going public with their Skripals Case –
that
the
storytellers are sent back to the drawing-board
to make up something different. Otherwise they might have to explain why a
poison so virulent that Sergei Skripal's house had to have its roof removed because Novichok was daubed on the front doorknob,
but the same poison failed to kill not only the Skripals times two, Detective Nick Bailey, Charles Rowley and now Navalny. The
Skripals came into direct contact with it while the family's roof did not, unless they had a sixteen-foot diameter doorknob,
and Navalny actually
drank
it. So the story goes. I don't think
'absurd' is too strong a word.
Russia, we hear, denied that its soldiers were in Crimea before Russia 'annexed' the territory in 2014. Where? Russia was
permitted by international agreement to base sufficient forces at Sevastopol to easily take the region away from a Ukrainian
Army so useless that initial attempts to stop the unraveling were made by civilian militias. Oh, and my favourite; Russia
denied shooting down MH-17 "even after the anti-aircraft system involved in the attack was detected leaving Russia then
returning short one missile." Is that a fact? Well, no; it's not. That accusation was made by Bellingcat, the brain trust of
former underwear-company accountant Eliot Higgins, and there was
never
any 'detection'
of any such anti-air system "leaving Russia and returning short one missile". Bellingcat offered a
potential route such a system might have taken to and from a launch site, in an animation, which was itself never
substantiated by evidence – a route which took the system many vulnerable kilometers out of its way on the alleged return –
and the photograph that made the cover of Paris Match is
so
obviously a Photoshop mosaic
. And the inclusion of Ukraine, who was automatically a suspect considering the incident
occurred in Ukrainian airspace, in the investigation to establish Russian guilt, together with its unsupervised access to the
collected evidence, renders the whole issue farcical.
"And on it went. The official RIA Novosti newswire quoted chemical-weapon
experts who said that had Novichok been used, Mr. Navalny would already be dead. It's a line Russian state media have used
before, after Mr. Skripal and his daughter survived the 2018 attack, but one they dropped after 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess died
after coming into contact with an unused vial of Novichok in a Salisbury park three months later."
Is that what happened, Mr. seven-times-recipient-of-the-National-Newspapers-Award? Dawn Sturgess was given the perfume bottle
as a gift from her boyfriend, Charles Rowley, at his home in Amesbury, 8 miles from Salisbury. She allegedly 'immediately
sprayed some on her wrists and rubbed them together'
according
to Rowley
.
"Charlie Rowley claimed his partner, mother-of-three Dawn Sturgess, fell
ill within 15 minutes of spraying the bottle, which he said he had found, on to her wrists at his home in Amesbury,
Wiltshire."
Couldn't ask for much more of an eyewitness than Rowley – he's kind of at the center of the story, albeit he is a heroin
addict himself, according to a previously-cited reference. He claims that within 15 minutes she was stricken, claimed to have
a headache, and disappeared to the bathroom, where he found her fully clothed and lying in the bath, 'in a very ill state'.
That's
funny; according to Sky News, she was not so ill that she could not admit herself to hospital, which she is alleged to have
done at 11 AM on Saturday, after being poisoned with a nerve agent ten times as deadly as VX, exposure to which nobody has
survived.
"During their trip to Salisbury on Friday, the pair visited a number of
shops during the afternoon and evening with their friend Sam Hobson.
https://c0.pubmine.com/sf/0.0.3/html/safeframe.html
REPORT THIS AD
The following day, Ms Sturgess admitted herself to hospital at 11am. Mr
Hobson, 29, and Mr Rowley went on to visit a number of places in the town centre."
Mr. Rowley, the poor man who 'lost so much', was so affected by his beloved's condition that he and his friend Sam Hobson went
on – after she admitted herself to hospital – to see the sights of downtown Amesbury. We know they were in Amesbury because
one of the locations they visited, Boots the Chemist in Amesbury, was soon thereafter closed by police as part of the
investigation.
Perhaps they were looking around for the hospital. Because
there
isn't one in Amesbury
. The closest is in Salisbury, 8 miles away, and the next-closest is in Andover, even further. So the
poor woman, having passed out in a very ill state after spraying a deadly nerve agent directly on her skin, somehow roused
herself for the 8-mile drive to Salisbury and then proceeded with the admittance process, while the cretins in Emergency let
the two who had dropped her off head back to Amesbury for some window-shopping. The alternative is that they were not even
with her, and she drove herself. Say, do you know what one of the symptoms of nerve-agent poisoning is? Blurred vision due to
excessive watering of the eyes.
The 'only predictable part of the drama', to borrow from Mr. MacKinnon's introduction, is that Ms. Sturgess did not "die after
coming into contact with an unused vial of Novichok in a Salisbury park", or anything close to it. Sloppy, or loyal? Which is
it?
Anyway, back to Navalny; for some reason I seem to be incapable of staying on his dramatic story. So, 'predictably', there are
some pretty big holes in his story. For one, he was supposedly – initially – exposed to a near-unimaginably-toxic nerve agent
which he drank in tea at the airport, prior to departure. Then the same Novichok which laid out Dawn Sturgess within 15
minutes did not affect Lyosha until 40 minutes after the plane took off. Team Navalny and its backers have attempted to
explain that away by suggesting this was a specially-engineered 'slow-acting' Novichok.
What use would a slow-acting military-grade nerve agent be? Want to give the enemy a fair chance before killing him stone
dead? And while we're on the subject: note to the GRU, or the FSB or whoever – stop engineering Novichok to be slow-acting
just to attack Navalny, and impervious to rain (like no other nerve agent ever, the immediate countermeasure is to flush the
area with water and take atropine) to attack Sergei Skripal, and WORK ON MAKING IT KILL PEOPLE!!! Jesus Christ, do I have to
think of everything myself?
So, obviously, the tea narrative was not going to work. Enter The Water Bottle Of Death. Allegedly, the GRU or FSB, or maybe
Putin himself poisoned a water bottle and left it in Navalny's hotel room in Tomsk, where there were always people in and out
and they had no clue whether it would kill Navalny or someone else. Maybe that's why they engineered it to be slow-acting and
non-fatal. Then, after Navalny checked out and headed to the airport, where he hung around for at least long enough to drink a
cup of tea before his flight was called, and then after takeoff and 40 minutes into the flight, suddenly, Lyosha is poisoned!!
He begins to roar and scream with pain, and members of his entourage immediately go to get a lawyer to accompany them, and go
to Navalny's hotel, and – wonder of wonders – not only has it not been cleaned, it is still completely undisturbed!! Fucking
hotel service in Tomsk, unbelievable, I hope they don't pay them much.
So, what do we deduce from that? Not only did Navalny show no ill effects after being poisoned with a military-grade nerve
agent for approximately an hour – rolling back the moment of his poisoning to his drinking tea in the airport before his
flight was called – he survived it for significantly longer than that, because in the end the tea was just tea. He did not
take the Water Bottle Of Death with him, instead leaving it in his hotel room, so he must have drunk from it before he left
the room. How long was that? How far was his hotel from the airport? Well, let's see – he
stayed
at the Xander
(four stars, not too shabby), which is
24
km from the Bogashevo Airport
. I feel safe in suggesting Navalny survived direct contact with a military-grade nerve agent
for at least two hours before he even showed any symptoms, and perhaps for considerably longer than that. Which sounds quite a
bit like the Skripal saga, in which they were poisoned by their front doorknob – the approximately sixteen-foot-diameter one
which reaches to the roof, it's a two-level home – but still managed to drive to the town center, feed the duckies in the park
and then go on to a restaurant and finish dinner, before throwing a poison wobbler on a nearby bench outside. Where they
happened to be discovered by the senior medical officer in the British Army. Quite by chance, she was just passing by.
So contact with the American VX agent means near-instantaneous death, but contact with a substance ten times more toxic means
nothing at all for at least an hour and perhaps twice that, then an unpleasant bout of coma, then presto! 90% recovery of
mental faculties – admittedly, not a high threshold for Navalny – and maybe 50% recovery of physical capability, with a
cautiously-optimistic prognosis of a full recovery. Lawdy Jeebus; a miracle!
Back to MacKinnon's story for a moment. "His transfer to Berlin's specialist Charité hospital was delayed for 24 crucial hours
while Russian officials floated wildly different versions of what might have happened to him." Actually, they did no such
thing; the doctors in Omsk are acknowledged to have probably saved his life, there actually was something wrong with him. They
stabilized him for transport rather than immediately saying "Here you go, Krauts, it's your show", so his transfer was delayed
for a not-at-all-excessive 24 hours, and it was the Germans who 'floated wildly different versions of what might have happened
to him', initially claiming he had been poisoned with a cholinesterase inhibitor, and only changing the story to Novichok
after the Water Bottle Of Death was delivered to Berlin by Navalny's wife. And unless Lyosha had a water bottle secretly
hidden on his person, they did not establish nerve-agent poisoning from his samples, either, unless the German doctors are
incredibly incompetent. It would be pretty hard for a skilled medical technician to confuse a cholinesterase inhibitor with a
nerve agent, and the doctors in Berlin initially had no clue what was wrong with him. They became confident after the water
bottle was delivered.
Navalny's aide is shown delivering his tea to him at the airport. No gloves, no Personal Protective Equipment whatsoever. But
Lyosha was already crawling with Novicok – he must have been poisoned in his room. Was the hotel closed? The airport? Was the
plane impounded and destroyed? Why is Navalny's aide still alive, and not just waking up from a coma?
And now I am afraid I have some questions about Chain of Custody of important evidence in a criminal investigation. Because
according to the timeline of the 'Navalny poisoning', Team Navalny back on the ground in Tomsk did not announce the discovery
of a poisoned water bottle from his hotel room until September 17th – two days after the fact. Right up until then, Navalny's
'press agent' stuck with the story that he was poisoned with tea at the airport. What kind of four-star hotel does not clean
the room of a guest who has checked out for two days afterward? Alternatively, what kind of political team allows a narrative
to persist that their leader was poisoned with tea at the airport for two whole days before they clue the world in that they
have discovered important evidence to the contrary? So far as we know, nobody had analyzed the alleged traces on the bottle
while it was still in Russia – the Germans allegedly established it was Novichok. Or else Team Navalny already knew, but
didn't bother to tell anyone, just assuming everyone who handled it would take deadly-nerve-agent precautions. Who else might
have been inside that hotel room in two days?
According
to the NewsTimes
, an Instagram post by Navalny claimed members of his 'team' tossed his hotel room looking for evidence
only an hour after he collapsed, which is pretty impressive considering they had no real reason at that point to suspect a
crime had been committed; he probably had just reached the hospital in Omsk by that point, if even that, and there had been no
announcement as to his condition, But they waited until September 17th to announce they had discovered a bottle contaminated
with Novichok? nearly a month later? Excuse me – some state-sponsored nerve agent – the bottle had not been tested yet.
According to the certifiable inbreeders in the European Parliament, Novichok and its family of poisons can only be made in
state-owned military laboratories, and there is no way civilians could have gotten hold of it.
"MEPs have called for
sanctions against Russia, saying on September 17, "The poison used, belonging to the 'Novichok group', can only be developed
in state-owned military laboratories and cannot be acquired by private individuals, which strongly implies that Russian
authorities were behind the attack."
Huh. That's odd. Because Alistair Hay – a toxicologist at the University of Leeds, a leading expert in the toxic properties of
chemical warfare agents and a member of the British government's advisory group on chemical warfare –
assessed
that it could be made by "any competent chemist"
. I'm pretty sure they're not all in the military, and obviously they do
not need to be Russian. The principal developmental engineer of Novichok, Vil Marzayanov, published a book which contained the
formula, and which sells on Amazon for less than 30 bucks. But what does Hay know, right?
"The Kremlin's latest denials should and will fall flat with Western
governments. It was already clear that Mr. Putin's inner circle had ample reasons to wish Mr. Navalny harm. (The Kremlin's
feelings about the anti-corruption campaigner have long been obvious. Mr. Putin has repeatedly refused to use Mr. Navalny's
name, even when asked direct questions about him. On Thursday, Mr. Peskov continued that practice, referring only to "the
Berlin patient.")
Ha, ha!! Oh, my God. It is clear that the Kremlin has ample reasons to wish Mr. Navalny harm, because they don't talk about
him. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it. That's some award-winning journalism right there.
I think we're done here; what is supposed to be a straightforward tale of the unrepentant state poisoning of a political
opponent is in fact so confusing and contradictory that I cannot make any sense of it. I suspect even closer examination of it
is only going to reveal further inconsistencies.
"The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner
strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations
that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as
inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the
nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among
the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen
who – with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological
testing, and so forth – dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right."
Harry G. Frankfurt, from "
On Bullshit
".
How many of you would describe the western media as "
exquisitely
sophisticated craftsmen who dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right"
?
Count me out. They're not even good at it. Fortunately for them, critical thinking is at an all-time low.
In the
aftermath of 9/11, I never could have imagined that the US government would ever openly side with the perpetrators, much
less that the public at large would be OK with it. And yet that is precisely what happened in Libya and Syria. When
Trump showed signs of disengaging from Syria, some of the people protesting were themselves survivors of 9/11 or
families of the victims. If they can get away with that, what can't they do? It seems like the media can claim whatever
they want, no matter how ridiculous, and the public will believe them without question. Some of the things I've seen in
the media look to me like experiments being undertaken to probe the gullibility of the public.
This is
what weakens the sincerity of people like Tulsi Gabbard and retired Colonel, Senator Richard Black despite all the
good that they have said and done.
Exactly –
WHY would the US aid and abet in Iraq, Libya and Syria the group that 'allegedly' perpetrated the worst act of
diabolical terrorism against American citizens in its history it wouldn't – unless of course the official narrative
was just not true.
You only
have to listen to very clumsy performance by Ehud Barak in the BBC studios on the very day, or Jane Standley
declaring the collapse of WT7 23 minutes before it happened (an honest mistake according to official BBC response) or
the very fact that WT7 collapsed at all to know that the 'official narrative' is Bullshit.
**"Tyranny
requires that the truth be silenced, that real history be erased and rewritten, that speech be restricted, and that
individual thought be silenced."**
*Erasing
History and Erasing Truth: Censorship and Destroying Records Is the Cornerstone of Tyrants* by Gary D. Barnett
We have
always been at war with Eastasia. It is hard to believe that Orwell almost predated television (he died in 1950), and
'1984' certainly did.
American –
and, in fact, western in general – manipulation of public perception almost invariably relies on values and the
public's impression of what is 'the right thing to do'. Consequently, the choice is always a Manichean one; this guy
is trampling on democratic values. He's killing his own people. Peaceful protests are being forcibly dispersed with
machine-gun fire. An entire people cries out for freedom. Are we gonna let him get away with it? Who's with me???
Slightly more subtle is the implication of, "If you're not with us, you're against us". There is no possibility of
detachment. Thus it is with the coronavirus crisis now – you and everyone else have a responsibility to public
safety. If you don't do as the government says is necessary for public safety, then you are an enemy of public
safety, and deserve the scorn of your fellow man. Come on; who's with me??
You simply
have to make it clear that everyone must make a choice; there is no such thing as 'sitting this one out'. Then you
frame the choice in such a way that choosing for the majority is easy – do you want to make the world a better place?
If you say 'No', then obviously you want to make it a worse place.
Like taking
candy from a baby. In Trump's case, though, he's on the wrong side of the equation, and rather than he and his
administration steering the narrative, others both for him and against him are framing the choice and he is having to
react to it. Those who are against him want to destroy and cast him out, and those for him want to use him as a
global influence.
Thank you
Mark; I'm glad to have found your blog site.
I find the
format just fine- I learn a heck of a lot from the diversion onto 'off topic' topical events.
I wandered
into one of my favourite bookstores a couple of times over the last week (I am in Australia). Really, the only reason
for doing so is to check out the classics section (which remains authentic) or to follow up on a special order – there
is nothing on the shelves these days, especially the 'latest/best sellers', that is worth burning the paper it is
printed on. I get most of my books directly from the author's site or as free pdf downloads from such places as
archive-dot-org. I have never, and never would utilise Amazon.
You will see
books glorifying Greta, Jacinda, Hillary, Michael (sic), the Walrus, the latest ['Rage'] by Woodward or the latest
obligatory 'testimony' from a 100-year-old 'survivor'.
They then have
the array of trash talk vilifying, demonising and assassinating anyone with integrity who has something worthwhile to
say and who cares about humanity:
"The Doctor
Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield's War on Vaccines"
– "Award-winning investigative journalist Brian Deer reveals the shocking truth blah "
But the
centrepiece at the moment is
"The
Rodchenkov Affair: How I Brought Down Putin's/Russia's Secret Doping Empire" by Grigory Rodchenkov. [Oh dear!!]
Great lines:
"exquisitely
sophisticated craftsmen who dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly wrong
[sic]"
"When an
honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that
he considers his statements to be false."
This is what
so impresses me – that they can produce so much bullshit that some (?many/most) people actually find credible – but when
what is left of the world and humanity is based entirely on exquisitely crafted lies – then what?
PS. I see that
Russia and/or China meddled in the RBG's respiratory system overnight. One commenter wrote "Weekend at Bernie's" is
FINALLY over.
PPS. Russia
has also denied bombing schools and hospital in Syria. Boris Johnson would know – here he is admitting that the UK
openly funds terrorists – he forgot that people would actually realise who and what the 'White Helmets' are as he
proudly boasts of another £65 million going the way of these "fantastically brave people".
not to
mention the despicable practice of 'double tapping' by Russia and the [Assad] 'regime' – rotten bastards!
Ha, ha!
Thanks, Julius; I thought the post just went on and on as it was, and each avenue seemed to lead into another, so
that I despaired of ever finishing it. If I had brought Browder into it, I'd still be writing. But if you are a
devotee of Browder and his mendacious machinations, here's a post from my old blog on 'that individual'. Get it? I'm
showing how much he disturbs me by refusing to mention him by name.
Navalny is simulating – we go through this point by point
Navalny came to his senses and immediately started having photos
published on Instagram. Indeed, what else is there to to do in hospital? But it would have been better, of course, if he
had not do this, because the public has raised many questions.
Journalist Alexander Sosnovsky has analyzed Navalny's photos and
posts on social networks, coming to a rather simple and logical conclusion -- Alexey is simulating. This is hardly
surprising, given Navalny and his associate's love for exaggeration, lies and fraudulent schemes.
Sosnovsky
highlighted several points by which it is quite easy to realize that the blogger is lying about his "terrible" state.
There is no tracheostomy mark on Navalny's neck, which means that he did not have such a serious violation of the
respiratory system. And it means that there is no talk of any kind of poisoning with combat poison.
In the photo, he is walking down stairs -- after a few weeks in a
coma, muscles can hardly recover so quickly. The knee joints literally "freeze", and it is simply impossible to use
stairs so easily.
The same applies to sitting in the lotus position, and this is how
the blogger is sitting in the earlier photo. Again, this is absolutely impossible after such a severe poisoning, as all
Navalny's hamsters and his family talk about.
By the way, In the message, Navalny thanks the doctor, but he did not
write about his family under any of the photos. But when a person is on the verge of death, relatives are the first ones
he thinks of when he comes to his senses. And his daughter had flown from the USA, but not a word about Yulia, Dasha and
Zakhara, although usually Navalny now and then shows photos and videos of his family, posing as a loving family man.
Next, we pay attention to Navalny's trainers, and they are rather
heavy, not of cloth. Such footwear is not worn in an intensive care unit. It is used by patients undergoing normal
treatment and who can walk about on the street, but the blogger has not been outside, otherwise his photos would have
already appeared on the Web, because there are a lot of paparazzi around. By the way, the fact that he is in the
"Charité" has not been in any way confirmed.
In general, there are a lot of questions about Navalny. It remains
only to wait for answers from him, although he probably will not bother to devote time to this, because the blogger
usually does not comment on any of his type of fraud.
s
t
imulating?
Maybe Navalny had allegedly
been assisted by his apparent
drug of choice, cocaine? Or, he was actually out of a coma a few days earlier (to plan how to spin things) and had
access to a rowing machine
My
point is that we are given a
narrative
but there really
is absolutely nothing but his/team/Charite's word about any of this. It's annoying that we have to question
everything but even then we often accept much of what is said and look at the most obvious inconsistencies
rather than the much more subtle
sleights of hand
or
sideways misdirections. It is non-stop.
What
we can do is if we know the conclusion sic 'Navalny poisoned', then the narrative has to (mostly) fit in to
that box/framework. So work backwards and see if the public claims fit that narrative, short of deliberate
traps to to mop up the conspiracy crowd.
Yes,
I had to laugh when MacKinnon ridiculed the notion that Navalny might have been poisoned by samagon by invoking
the image of Navalny – as painted by his 'press agent' and his 'team' – as a "near teetolaler". What are they
going to say? That he is a lush who drowns kittens? Mark MacKinnon, Stenographer to the Stars, all gossip
repeated.
What is far
more likely is that he will consult with his handlers, and together they will come up with a reply stinging in its
scorn, revolving around the theme, "Can you believe they are saying this??", inviting all readers to have a hearty
laugh at the squalling of the conspiracy theorists. It's worked before – no reason to change the formula until it
stops working.
In that
photo, Navalny looks as if he is walking through a fire escape area. Would hospitals really allow patients to walk
unassisted and unprotected through the fire escape area? Once the door into the fire escape closes, if you're in
the fire escape, you cannot open it again. You'd have to walk all the way down to the exit and out into the open
air – fire escapes are designed to get you out of a burning building. Once out, Navalny would be exposed to all
kinds of aerosols including air pollutants, let alone the odd coronavirus spike-ball, that could sicken him in his
recently recovered state.
This
makes you wonder whether Navalny even set foot into any hospital in Berlin at all, and not just a medical clinic
or some place where discharged patients go to recuperate after a hospital stay. (I forget the term used for such
places where people receive care after being discharged from hospital.)
Which
I would say support my suposition that Berlin's Charite hospital has been rather conservative with it is press
release (patient confidentialty) that has afforded FC Nav
alny's PR team
sufficient time to create a nice visual story fit for western consumption, nyam nyam nyam copy copy copy,
snore.
Perhaps the
category and grade of Novichok used to poison Navalny are the same as for the Novichok used on Julia Skripal. Recall
that during her May 2018 interview with the Reuters reporter at USAF Fairford base in Gloucestershire or wherever,
Julis Skripal looked slim and radiant and her skin was in good condition. She was able to walk unassisted to the
interview as well. It seems clear to me that that Novichok stuff must actually be some Fountain of Youth elixir, that
it puts its victims into temporary Snow White repose and then, without warning, not only awakens them but restores
them to a better state of health and physical condition better than what they had before they were poisoned. Next
thing you know, Navalny will be training for the marathon in next year's Olympic Games.
Oh, man. New
reader here. The "peyote cartoon" line made me laugh so damn hard. Thanks you for that. Nothing beats this cult-like
world like a good long laugh at the cult's expense.
While the
western world(read fascist) was going ape over novichok-you know the Russian bio-weapon that is the most dangerous
chemical known to man except it fails to kill anyone-Putin had developed and infected the entire political and mass
media leaders of the west with a new bio-weapon that he created himself. It's called Notajoke and it makes those
infected become babbling idiots and anyone can see that it has worked. Trump got his dose from some Las Vegas hookers
who the FSB infected and they in turn pissed on him. Even worse, it eventually gives every infected person a Hitler
mustache that cannot be gotten rid of. These babbling idiots are aware something is wrong but they are not sure of whats
happening and they have developed a strategum. They are going to emulate certain successful comics from the past and
make their adversaries die laughing. Trump becomes Moe, Boris becomes Larry and Angela becomes Curly-wise guy eh? They
plan to resort to slapstick, where upon they slap you with sanctions and then stick it to you, bomb your country and
everyone is in stitches(in the hospital) "Yeah that' what we'll do eh Moe?". As part of the plan the G7 mental 7 dwarfs
are on board with Moe(Trump-coc) as their leader followed by Larry(Boris-sleezy) and Curly(Angela-frumpy) with those
idiots True-dough(dopey) Canada, Cunte(bashful) Italy, Macaroon(creepy) France and the Jap chap Ape Abe(jappy). What a
team folks- I may die of laughter before I'm finished this tirade. Their latest brilliant stroke is to put an end to
Nordstream 2 so that their citizens can pay double thereby aiding Moe and getting rid of their excess money. The Baltic
states are on board as well. They are afraid that Russia will steal their technology- ooops they don't have any, their
natural resources- ooops ditto, their dirt-ya that's it, their dirt. Poland is worried about the theft of their
telecommunications technology developed by Alexander Graham Kowalski better known as "The Telephone Pole". Ukraine got
on board and has now elevated itself to the poorest country in Europe. Moe thought Putin may be behind all this so he
offered a challenge. Putin responded with chess?, judo?, hockey?, Moe had in mind a pie throwing contest. "wise guy eh?"
Pompeo and
Abrahms not to be outdone have become Ollie and Stan as Ollie admonishes Stan-"this is another fine mess you've gotten
me into" over Venezuela and proceed to bump into one another. To add a little "stiff" competition in comes Joe "the
stiff" Biden to out stupid them all.
MacKinnon is
a
follower.
No relation to autistic hacker Gary MacKinnon.* This
MacKinnon is a member of the Ford Estate, not the Fourth Estate. It's the
appearance
of
journalism. Just because some thing is long (lots of words) doesn't make it fact. Never mistake quantity for
quality, but that is the strategic propaganda goal against Russia. Bombard the public with endless long, big, stronger,
higher, faster, deeper/whatever reports/investigations/studies etc. which when you actually look for the source is
either
anonymous/highly likely/judged to be
/whatever, but you
never get to read the actual source material. NEVER.
Vis the poison
in the hot tea. What got me was that no-one commented that using a poison in 70c+ tea would dramatically reduce its
effect (chemically break down very quickly) which is directly contrary to the claimed goal of killing Navalny). It would
also have to be specifically designed to be heat resistant which is a whole other level of chemical weapons development
more suitable for a sci-fi future of scorching global temperatures where the human race dwell below ground like
Morlocks.
Top stories in
the Russian press on Thursday, September 17
Vedomosti:
Rostec
to shell out $1.7 bln on creating new Sukhoi Superjet aircraft
By 2023, the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) plans to create the
Sukhoi SuperJet New, an import-substituted version of the short-haul Sukhoi SuperJet 100, the only civilian jet built by
the Russian aviation industry. The development of the new Sukhoi Superjet New aircraft, which UAC plans to create by
2023, will cost 120 bln-130 bln rubles ($1.6-1.7 bln), Vedomosti writes, citing sources close to the corporate
leadership of Rostec and UAC.
According to the newspaper, the United Engine Corporation (UEC) is
developing a domestic PD-8 engine, which the aircraft will use. ..UAC will allocate at least 50 bln rubles ($664 mln)
for the development of SSJ New.
####
Plenty of
stuff, but as usual, put up or shut up. Russia puts up.
Vis the
u-Ropean 'Magnitsky Act' no unanimity required. Russia would do well to say in advance that it would counter-act against
certain senior EU officials/member states for complicity in genocide in Libya, Yemen etc.
The problem
with u-Rope is that is that Brussels is a balm for the crimes of its member states. On the one hand the EU is the
collective consciousness of its member states but is not responsible for their individual actions. It is yet again 'cake
and eat it.' Brussels needs to be rudely disabused that it can continue to play this game without consequence (f/y
European Parliament second hand, seat warming pols who are only waiting until their party wins elections back home
again). Take away this option. I don't see Russia taking this new act lying down though and are deliberately playing
their cards close to their chest.
Now on
reflection, this act has taken a remarkably long time to come to this point. This in itself tells us that there are
clearly significant misgivings behind closed doors. The fact that it has now reached his stage also tells us that
Brussels/Paris/Berlin think they have come up with a
cunning plan
aka
'squared the circle', but it is also a significant sign of weakness. Maybe the timing is related to the almost completed
NordStream 2 but that is irrelevant. This is about
consequence.
u-Rope
is currently at its weakest (politically and economically) for a long time but for some reason it thinks now is the time
for a EU Magnitsky It's really poor thinking.
So, I declare
2020 as the year of Hail Marys. The last throw of the dice. Desparation of maybe a final win, however fleeting to go out
in a blaze of heavenly glory before the EU turns inward to deal with its US sponsored saboage attempts, sic the PiS run
lo-land of Po-land that runs out of substantial cash on 31 December 2020 and the wheels of the bus start coming off.
The only other
tidbit I've seen is about Byelorussia. In particular only Latvia has STFU about and avoided the ire of Lucky-shenko. The
Brits would say that Riga is 'Boxing Clever.' Still, is it setting itself up as an EU interlocutor. Yet again, this is a
story of omisson. Lucky shouldn't trust any of them. And speaking of f/kers who won't let go, Borissov in Bulgaria is
still refusing to resign (who cares, they're in the EU) and Djukanovic in pro-EU Montengro remains presient despite
losing parliament. But, if you are in Da Klub, however korrupt or faked (hello Romania too!), it's just not
news.
So it must be
true! "Novichok" was used to murder the "Leader of the opposition"! Soviet developer of "Novichok" makes an apology to
Navalny:
Отравление
Навального , 20 сен, 00:23 179 058
Разработчик "Новичка" извинился перед Навальным
Он назвал разработку боевого яда "преступным бизнесом" и пояснил, что посвятил всю свою последующую жизнь борьбе против
применения отравляющих веществ
Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov, a Tatar now living happily in the USA,
where he likes to dish the dirt on Russia as regards chemical weapons
Novichok developer has apologized to Navalny
He called the
development of combat poison "a criminal business" and explained that he had devoted his entire subsequent life to the
fight against the use of toxic substances
A chemist and one of the developers of the Novichok chemical warfare
agent Vil Mirzayanov has apologized to opposition leader Alexei Navalny on the Dozhd TV channel.
"I sincerely
apologize to Navalny for being involved in this criminal business -- the development of this substance, which he was
poisoned with", said the chemist who has lived in the United States since 1995.
He noted that
he had devoted himself all his subsequent life to the fight against the use of combat poisons.
In an
interview with Dozhd, Mirzayanov explained that in 1993 he met a man who had survived poisoning by "Novichok". He stated
that the symptoms he described were similar to those mentioned by Navalny on Instagram on September 19.
"All the
symptoms are similar. He overcame, survived. Apparently, Navalny will have to be patient. But, ultimately, he must be
healthy, "said the scientist. The restoration of full health to the Russian politician, Mirzayan said, could take up to
a year.
In his opinion, the situation as regards the impossibility of writing
words on a blackboard, which Navalny described, is associated with problems of signal transmission from the brain to
functional organs -- "Novichok" molecules prevent the breakdown of the protein responsible for the transmission of such
signals.
RBK calls
Navalny a "politician".
"Dozhd" gave
the interview.
Both are
libturd organs.
Mirzayanov was
not a developer of "Novichok". At one time he worked at the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology
in the department for counteracting foreign technical intelligence, where he rose to the rank of head of department.
That is, he was familiar with what they do in laboratories, but he himself did not "invent" Novichok.
He started
blowing the whistle as regards the Soviet Union allegedly working around compliancy with the proposed 1990 Chemical
Weapons Accord and In 1992 published an article about the USSR and Russian development of extremely potent
fourth-generation chemical weapons from the 1970s until the early 1990s. The publication appeared just on the eve of
Russia signing the 1990 Chemical Weapons Convention.
Mirzayanov was
arrested on treason charges but the trial collapsed. He was released, but kept under house arrest and observation. In
1995 he relocated to the United States where he presently resides, taking a position at Rutgers University in New
Jersey.
Mirzayanov is
a professional Tatar: On October 26, 2008, was elected to the Presidium of the Milli Mejlis of the Tartar People in
exile. On January 17, 2009, in an article on CNN, he published the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE OF TATARSTAN, adopted at
a Special Meeting of the Milli Mejlis of the Tatar People on December 20, 2008] At a conference on the separation of
Tatarstan from Russia, held in Ankara in the same year, Mirzayanov was elected "Prime Minister" of the "government in
exile". In March 2010, Mirzayanov signed the "Putin Must Go" campaign.
In March 2018,
after the alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal by "Novichok", Mirzayanov spoke about how Russia had maintained
tight control over its "Novichok" stockpile and that the agent is too complicated for a non-state actor to have
weaponized.
"It's torture.
It's absolutely incurable."
"I never
imagined even in my bad dreams that this chemical weapon, developed with my participation, would be used as terrorist
weapons."
Mirzayanov
said only the Russians could be behind the use of the weapon and said he was convinced Russia carried it out as a way of
intimidating opponents of President Vladimir Putin.
All part of
Washington's momentum campaign – keep it rolling, a new atrocity by Russia every day. Mirzayanov is an American now,
well established and apparently happy, and doubtless he will be well-rewarded for his storytelling. But I doubt the
'apology' to Navalny was his idea. Washington just wants to keep Navalny in the news, in the hope that the more
people learn who he is and what he is all about, the greater will be his influence in Russia.
Who is Mirzayanov and why did he apologize to Navalny?
The mass media, which in general few people trust, continue to
increase false publications about the poisoning of blogger Navalny. So, absurd information has appeared on the Web
about the fact that one of the creators of "Novichok", Vil Mirzayanov, who lives in the States, has apologized to
Alexei Navalny.
But the
fact is that Mirzayanov is not a developer of Novichok, he has nothing to do with this poisonous substance. He was
involved in some kind of indirect way with the creation of the poison, as were many others, but to call him a
developer is like calling a woodworker who made a stretcher for a canvas the artist who created the oil painting that
is on it.
So in
general, complete nonsense. One of the direct participants in the process of creating the toxin, Leonid Rink, stated
that Mirzayanov was only one of the workers on "Novichok", but did not participate in the direct creation of the
poison.
He also
commented on Navalny's symptoms, saying that they are in no way similar to those that should have been in the case of
Novchik poisoning. Rink stressed that his "colleague" also cannot know what the real symptoms are when this toxin
enters the human body. So Mirzayanov's statement is completely unfounded, and may apparently be explained as having
been made because he was ordered by someone to make it.
Finally, Rink said that if Navalny had been poisoned with this
particular poison, he would not have been saved.
Russia has
so many internal traitors (Navalny, Rodchenko and this Mirzayanov for example) that it makes too easy for Russia's
enemies to use them against Russia.
And is
it working? Is the west achieving the goals it set for itself by co-opting these traitors? Maybe in the short
term; the west was successful – using Rodchenkov – of keeping Russia largely out of a couple of Olympics series.
But the overall effect, it seems to me, is that the west is increasingly revealed as a partisan liar, and
consequently untrustworthy.
Why do
you say, "So many"? Does Russia have more 'internal traitors' than other countries? From the point of view that
they are willing to help other countries overthrow their own government, perhaps. But otherwise they are simply
people who disagree with the way their country is run, by the people who run it. The rest is support offered by
the west for them to air their views. Do you think Russia could make good use of Edward Snowden to bring down the
United States government by starting a movement in the USA of discontented people? I do; it wouldn't even be
difficult – it is a fragmented and angry country already, with several anti-government movements the government
can barely keep in check. Are there any signs Russia plans to use that approach? I mean, for real, not the
hysterical cries that Russia is behind Black Lives Matter and other obviously-American groups that are fed up with
their lives as they are.
It is
working because 95% of the people in Finland or the United States or Germany believe that Russian state
poisoned Navalny. The facts don't matter as much as what people believe in.
And
those who want more sanctions against Russia and isolate Russia also benefit, because they can point to Navalny
"poisoning" and say that Russia must be punished.
In
the US, virtually everyone has an opinion regardless of the level of familiarity with the topic. But, the
willingness to suffer for those opinions is ZERO, nada, ništa.
I
would appreciate a link to the information indicating 95% of the US population "believe[s] that Russian
state poisoned Navalny".
Like I said before, so much US propaganda is being dispensed that its value, like an overprinted currency,
is diminishing. When the US economic system collapses, as it surely will, all those opinions will be
forgotten as quickly as last year's "America's Got Talent" runner-up.
And so they apply more sanctions. Has that had any measurable negative effect on Russia? What will they do,
ban it from the Council of Europe again?
Look at it this way – the sanctions and the regime-change operations in neighbouring countries and the
serial-lying campaigns have all been part of a plan, a plan to drive Putin from power and put a western
bobblehead in his place. How many years have they been trying this, now – since 2014? Is it working? Is
Russia in worse shape now than it was then, or better? Is it more independent, or less? More assertive, or
less? Does it have a more diversified economy, or less?
If
I had put this plan together, and poured it on as hard as I could for six straight years now and had as
little to show for it as the west has, I'd be expecting to be called into the office any day now to get
fired.
Russia has so many internal traitors (Navalny, Rodchenko and
this Mirzayanov for example) that it makes too easy for Russia's enemies to use them against Russia.
The US
government/deep state leadership is traitorous to its own population. The steadily decreasing standard of living
over the past 3-4 decades combined with a rapidly growing wealth inequity tell us that,
Having
traitors fighting the national leadership is to be much preferred to a national leadership in the hands of
traitors. More simply, the US does not have many traitors because the traitors are running the show.
Got it?
When all
is said and done, the countries with the most fit population will generally prevail if left alone. The West knows
that hence the continuous pressure on Russia. Still got it?
The last photo of
Alexei Navalny before boarding the Moscow bound aeroplane plane in Tomsk / Twitter
Taken after
Navalny had allegedly drunk poisoned tea, they all at first howled in unison, but now they say he drank from a Novichok
contaminated bottle in his hotel room, which the Navalnyites later so fortuitously recovered from Navalny's long vacated
hotel room and sent to Berlin.
95% of people
in the West believe this story, namely that Navalny was poisoned by Novichok?
And not only
do 95% of Westerners believe that Navalny had ingested Novichok, but also, that it was a specially developed delayed
action Novichok that would only take effect some 40 minutes after that photo above had been taken.
Furthermore,
95% of Westerners believe that Navalny recovered from his poisoning by specially developed, delayed-action Novichok.
Now if the
story were subsequently changed and it were claimed that Navalny had been poisoned by, say, special, delayed action
strychnine,
AND
had
recovered from its effects, would 95% of Westerners believe that as well?
Well, maybe,
if it were alleged that such special, delayed action Strychnine could only have been developed by evil Russian
scientists, and one of those who partook in its development now showed remorse for his nefarious activities ands made a
public apology to Navalny for all the bother said strychnine had caused him.
Greetings from
Berlin! The happy couple enjoying
deutsche Gemütlichkeit
. It's a
miracle, I tell ya!
The above
Instagram text reads:
Julia and I had our
anniversary on August 26 -- 20 years of being wed, but I'm even glad that I missed it and I can write this today, when I
know a little more about love than I did a month ago.
You, of
course, have seen this a hundred times in films and read about it in books: one loving person lies in a coma, and the
other brings him back to life with her love and incessant care. Of course, we also acted in this way. According to the
canons of classic films about love and coma. I slept and slept and slept. Julia came, talked to me, sang songs to me,
turned on music. I won't lie – I don't remember anything.
But I'll tell
you what I remember exactly. Rather, it can hardly be called a "memory", rather, a bundle of my very first sensations
and emotions. However, it was so important to me that it has been forever imprinted in my mind. I'm lying there. I have
already been brought out of the coma, but I don't recognize anyone, I don't understand what is happening. I don't speak
and I don't know what to say. And the whole of the time that I was there was spent waiting for her arrival. Who she is
is unclear. I don't know what she looks like either. Even if I manage to see something with a defocused gaze, then I
simply cannot remember the picture. But She is different, I understand that, so I lie and wait for her all the time. She
comes and becomes the head of the ward. She adjusts my pillow very comfortably. She doesn't have a quiet, sympathetic
tone. She talks cheerfully and laughs. She tells me something. When she is around, idiotic hallucinations recede. It's
very good with her. Then she leaves, I feel sad, and I start waiting for her again.
I don't doubt for a
second that there is a scientific explanation for this. Well, like, I caught the timbre of my wife's voice, my brain
secreted dopamines, it became easier for me. Each visit literally became healing, and the expectation effect increased
the dopamine reward. But no matter how cool scientific and medical explanation sounds, now I know for sure just from my
own experience: love heals and brings you back to life. Julia, you saved me, and let it be written in the textbooks on
neuroscience😍
[Wipes tear
from eye .]
The body of
the Kommersant article text:
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny has published a blog post in which
he is outraged by the lack of a criminal investigation into his poisoning. He has also demanded the return of his
clothes, which may be important evidence. Mr. Navalny noted that two independent laboratories in France and Sweden, as
well as a German special laboratory in the Bundeswehr, had confirmed the presence of Novichok in his body. "However, in
Russian political and legal reality, none of this exists In Russia there is no criminal case, but there is a
"pre-investigation check on the fact of hospitalization ". It seems that I didn't fall into a coma on the aeroplane, but
slipped in a supermarket and broke my leg", wrote Mr. Navalny. He also demanded that the clothes he wore on August 20 be
returned to him -- the day he felt sick. According to the politician, he was "sent absolutely naked" to Germany.
"Considering that a Novichok was found on my body and a contact method of infection is very likely, my clothes are a
very important piece of evidence. 30 days allotted by law for pre-investigation
Listen,
arsehole: you threw a wobbler on the aircraft, howled and screamed and rolled around on the deck and then, allegedly,
went into a coma. On admission to hospital, you were put into a coma and remained in an induced comatose state until
your miraculous recovery in the Charité, Berlin
The reason why
no criminal case has been made in the country where you were allegedly dosed with Novichock, is that there is no
evidence of this being the case. Furthermore, there was no evidence of poisoning in the analyses of your body fluids and
tissue done in Omsk.
German doctors
say that they have such evidence, but they wont show it; likewise the Bundeswehr laboratories.
And there will
be no traces of Novichok on your clothing in the Omsk hospital either. If there had been, there would have been a lot of
dead people at that hospital last month.
September
21, 2020
The results of investigations of Navalny's clothing have become
known
Russian experts did not find traces of poison or hazardous
substances on the belongings of Alexei Navalny, in which he was on the day of hospitalization. The results of the
research have been made known to the TASS agency.
"In his
personal belongings, no dangerous, prohibited, poisonous, other substances or their traces were found", said a source
in law enforcement agencies.
Earlier,
the Ministry of Health of the Omsk region told Interfax that Navalny's clothes were seized from doctors by the
investigating authorities during an inspection.
On Monday, September 21, the blogger demanded that the things that
were removed from him in the Omsk hospital be returned to him. According to him, these clothes could become important
evidence, since there were traces of a poisonous substance on his body. "30 days of a 'pre-investigation check' were
used to hide this vital piece of evidence. I demand that my clothes be carefully packed in a plastic bag and returned
to me", the oppositionist said.
Yeah, deny,
deny, deny! That's all that Russians do. However, 95% of Finnish people think he was Novichocked and there were
traces of the most deadly nerve agent known to man on his clothes.
RUSSIA HAS NO
FUTURE: NAVALNY'S PARTY LIQUIDATED
09/21/2020
Today, September 21, the RF Supreme Court liquidated Navalny's party
"Russia of the Future".
In mid-May
2019, Alexey Navalny's assistants submitted documents to the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation for
registration of the "Russia of the Future" party. True, the ministry re-registered the "Party of Free Citizens" under a
new name, but refused to register Navalny's associates, owing to the fact that a party with this name had already been
registered.
Alexei Navalny
filed a lawsuit trying to challenge the registration refusal. Ultimately, both the Zamoskvoretsky Court and the Moscow
City Court were on the side of the Ministry of Justice.
Navalny's
aide, Ivan Zhdanov, said they currently do not plan to reapply for party registration.
"Our case has
been communicated to the ECHR and we are not planning new filings in the near future", Zhdanov said.
Since 2012, politician Navalny has been trying to register his party
under the names "People's Alliance", "Party of Progress" or "Russia of the Future". However, all attempts to do so have
been in vain.
In other
words, as I have said before: "Fuck off, arsehole!"
The
"politician" without a party and with statistically zilch public support in Russia.
No mass
protests or civil unrest anywhere in Russia since Navalny's alleged poisoning: nothing like the massive popular protests
held week in week out in support for Furgal in Khabarovsk. Sweet FA in support of the "leader of the Russian opposition"
whom Putin tried to murder with Novichok!
However, I
hear that 95% of people in the West believe there was indeed an assassination attempt made against the US agent using
the most deadly nerve agent (weapons grade, modified) known to man and undertaken on Putin's direct order.
Here's a
possible solution – call it "The Party of Crooks and Thieves". Subtle, innit? Then The Kremlin will think Navalny is
calling himself and his fellow party members crooks and thieves, when all along he is simply planning – cunningly, as
he and the US Department of State do everything – to give his signature phrase the publicity boost it deserves!
Fookin' ELEGANT!
Over a dozen members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's
Russiagate-investigating team "accidentally" wiped their phones before they could be inspected and "lost" the phone of
disgraced FBI lawyer Lisa Page with anti-Trump texts.
Musing
during an evening work break – the reason why mass rape of children by our vaunted leaders draw so little attention
from the MSM has nothing to do with "protecting" those in power either due to fear or reward. Rather, Bill and Hilary
do what comes natural to sociopaths. As such, their behavior is accepted, if not condoned, as normal for those in
power. Us deplorables just don't get it.
Journalist who has visited Charité has pointed out signs of Navalny's
absence there
14:55 22 September 2020, Berlin, Germany
Alexei Navalny is not at the Charité clinic in Berlin. This is the
conclusion reached by journalist Alexander Sosnovsky, who has visited the place.
A journalist from
Berlin has shown why Navalny cannot be at the "Charité" / Collage: FBA "Economics Today"
According to the journalist, the photo of Navalny with his wife on a
balcony makes one think about his whereabouts. Sosnovsky, who is familiar with the architecture of Berlin, drew
attention to the strange urban landscape in the corner of the picture. He pointed out that the Charité building does not
have balconies with a similar view, as it is located in the central part of Berlin with a completely different
architecture.
To confirm his
words in practical way, Sosnovsky personally went to the Charité and walked around the building with a camera. He drew
attention to the construction work near the clinic (this would probably have got into the blogger's photo), as well as
the complete absence of journalists and security. All this confirmed Sosnovsky's suspicions about Navalny's absence from
Charité.
In addition to
the cityscape, the journalist had questions about the can with cigarette butts on Navalny's balcony. Sosnovsky called
such an object impossible in an élite medical institution in Germany with patients of this level. If Navalny himself
smoked all the cigarettes in the frame, this raises even more questions about his "diagnosis" and the conclusions of
German doctors.
The journalist
notes that all the shots of Navalny taken after he had emerged from the coma are static and "inanimate." Sosnovsky, a
person with a medical education and a practicing doctor, calls this understandable, pointing to the possibility of
identifying the signs of specific diseases and influences based on movements, speech and other dynamic manifestations.
For example, after a tracheostomy (artificial windpipe), a person often has voice problems.
"Any video and
audio makes it possible with a high degree of probability to calculate where and how it was made. It is much more
difficult from a photo. And if they hide from us the opportunity to determine the location and diagnosis, this is very
significant", Sosnovsky said on the air of Soloviev Live.
Earlier, Navalny demanded that Russia return the clothes in which the
blogger was hospitalized in Omsk. However, Navalny's own associates previously wrote that all his belongings were
transferred to his wife, and some of the items that the blogger touched and used could have been taken out by Maria
Pevchikh, a suspect in his poisoning.
" This makes you wonder whether Navalny even set foot into any
hospital in Berlin at all, and not just a medical clinic or some place where discharged patients go to recuperate
after a hospital stay "
– even
before that photo of the Navalnys being lovey-dovey on a balcony appeared. Do hospital floor plans normally include
balconies attached to patient wards? I am sure hospitals are not designed like hotels or even like educational
institutions, to include balconies for individual patients or groups of patients, for possible security and liability
reasons among others. (You don't want patients sneaking out at night and possibly getting run over in traffic when
they are supposed to be under hospital supervision; and you also don't want to make entry easy for people looking for
drugs and entering hospitals through patient wards to get drugs.)
And since
when do hospitals allow patients or even their visitors to smoke on their premises? Not only are they a health hazard
(to smokers and non-smokers alike in sealed air-conditioned environments such as hospitals provide) but they are also
a fire hazard.
I can't
remember where I read it (Euractiv?), but apparently the current NordStream II plan is to complete it
and
then
apply restrictive measures such as capacity caps etc. This I can believe. A) it get's Brussels off the hook for
wildly violating its own Energy Charter (private investor protections), something which you may all recall Brussels has
been trying to use against Russia even though the latter did not ratify it but is technically supposed to be bound by
the rules or a period; b) it looks like it has taken action; c) it can reverse at any point not to mention all the
exemptions Brussels allowed for 'Field Pipes', TAP etc. and retro-actively trying to redefine its rule to be
ex-territoria – i.e. apply to out pipline that are not end-to-end EU pipelines but cross outside of the EU. And finally
to threaten and blackmail Gazprom in public to agree Privately mutually beneficial terms that do not contravene the
Energy Charter, i.e. if Gazprom
voluntarliy
goes along with the
new rules. Very Brussels 'squaring the circle'/presenting weakness/compromise as VICTORY!
We know from
the past that Brussels imposed a 50% capacity cap on Russian gas though NS I until demand picked up and the restriction
would have driven up prices for EU industry and private customers and thus magically lifted the cap, subject to 'market
conditions' of course!
In other news,
a PiS (Polish government) spokesman said that they didn't need coalition partners which turned out to mean that
'The
PiS-led coalition would lose its parliamentary majority without United Poland, which has 17 seats. The coalition crisis
came after simmering tensions spilled into open conflict when the junior members refused to support an animal rights
bill.
.' 'Hanging by a thread' anal-cyst looks more like projection to me.
Oh, what a
stupid fucking plan. They're not serious, or don't realize they are not, but ENI and Uniper and Wintershall are not
going to put up with that shit for a minute. They invested to make money, not lose it, and they are not remotely
interested in making room for American LNG. I sometimes wonder what passes for political nous in Europe these days –
it doesn't look like you have to have too many synapses firing.
Therefore it is very much a political figleaf. Something they can tell themselves and others knowing full well
that they won't do it. More importantly they think it buys them time for example if t-Rump is not re-elected even
though the Dems are onboard with the 'f/k NSII' plans.
I think
this actually shows that they looked down the barrel of the gun (i.e. spoke to their own Legal Service) and didn't
like what they saw, that Brussels would be unequivocaly on the hook for NSII not being completed. This is just
like earlier when the EU Legal Services told them that they couldn't apply the Third Energy Package retroactively
(as previously posted on this blog – or was it the old one?). The article below has a pdf upload of the actual EU
Legal Services opinion & the German.* Bundesnetzagentur.
Oh, look at
that – Mr. Less-than-5% has been 'discharged' from the hospital he probably was never in, so you journalists can stop
hanging about picking the western storyline apart; he ain't here no more.
Poisoned with the deadliest nerve agent
known to man, and in less than a week he's ready to hit the road (less than a week after coming out of a coma where
he had to have a ventilator breathe for him, I mean). Day one, he wakes up. Day two, he's recovered 90% of his brain
function and nearly all his mobility. And only a couple of days after that, he's demanding his clothes back from
Russia and making plans for his glorious return, perhaps riding an Abrams main battle tank. Wasn't Detective Bailey
in the hospital for weeks, with death hovering over his pillow the whole time? And HE had gloves on! Navalny is
Superman. Remarkable.
Fully
recovered, the Fritz miracle worker doctors say.
A golden
Guinea to the swab who first spies a balcony on yon white monster! Aaaaarrr!!!
As it
happens, I lived in Berlin for a while in 1988 -- in both the capitalist showcase of "West Berlin" and in "East
Berlin", the capital of the former German Democratic Republic or "sowjetische Besatzungszone" as "West German"
politicians liked to label the place without going into details about why exactly a large chunk of the so=called
"Thousand Year Reich" was indeed occupied by the Soviet Union, and I agree with other critics: no way was that
balcony shot of Bullshitter and his wife taken at the Charité, which is situated right slap bang in the middle of
Berlin.
Berlin's
Charité Hospital -- "Bettenhochhaus" -- was completed in 1982 and was cleaned and renovated in 2016-2017. It is
around 87m tall and is Germany's largest hospital. It dominates the skyline at the Mitte Campus, nestled right in
the middle of the city near the Parliament and Central Station.
Not because he
is in trouble with the law here. Although a trial awaits him in order to establish the truth as regards another criminal
case. Not because he can be poisoned (but who needs him), although no one poisoned him. He is either a pawn in someone's
dirty game that was used on the quiet, or the initiator of this whole bad story.
If he had
really been poisoned with a chemical warfare agent, then everyone who had contact with him would be in the hospital bed.
And the aeroplane in which they brought the bottle on which the traces of "Novichok" were allegedly found, would have
been burnt long ago. As in the case with the Skripals, the British demolished the house where they had found traces of
the poison. Somehow everything turns out awkwardly.
What is it all
for? By and large, Navalny does not play any role in Russian politics. An ordinary blogger who positions himself as an
opposition politician, fighter against corruption. True, it is worth recalling that this fighter against corruption has
himself been a defendant in a criminal case of embezzlement in Kirovles. And he received a five-year suspended sentence
for embezzlement and yet more embezzlement.
Scandals are
his bread and butter. The forgotten blogger decided to remind everyone about himself in this way, let's say for the sake
of hype. True, it all went too far. And if the truth is revealed, and someday it will definitely come out, then Navalny
will really have to worry about his health . . .
Most likely, the fugitive blogger will disappear like Skripal. It
will be better for everyone. So stay there in Germany or go to the states.
And the above
opinion, in my opinion, is what the vast majority of Russians think.
I live with
Russians -- real Russians: I don't sit in flash cafés or bars, chinwagging with the Russian bourgeois "élite", who are
ever willing to spill forth to me their tales of woe and suffering in the "regime" and their yearning for the
establishment of a "liberal" Western "democracy" here, as do the likes of Independent Moscow correspondent Carroll, and
Shaun "don't-give-me-no-dill" Walker, the BBC correspondent Rainsford, so full of negative spin on all things Russian,
and her slimy git of a BBC colleague Rosenberg.
And now the
ever truthful Frog rag "Le Monde" reports that in conversation with Macron, Putin suggested that the Bullshitter may
have poisoned himself. Signal
immediate heart-rending response from team Navalny -- read "Washington":
"I cooked 'Novichok' in the kitchen. I took a soft sip from a flask on
the plane "
Navalny has responded to Putin's suggestion that the oppositionist himself drank poison
Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has responded to the
words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, published in the French newspaper "Le Monde", that he poisoned himself with a
substance from the "Novichok" group. "Good version. I believe that it deserves the closest study. Cooked "Novichok" in
the kitchen. Took a soft sip from a flask on the plane. I fell into a coma. Prior to that, I agreed with my wife,
friends and colleagues that if the Ministry of Health insists that they take me to Germany for treatment, they would not
allow it to be done. To die in the Omsk hospital and end up in the Omsk morgue, where the cause of death would be
established: "had lived enough" – this is the ultimate goal of my cunning plan. But Putin outplayed me. You just can't
fool him. As a result, I, like a fool, lay in a coma for 18 days, but did not achieve my goal. The provocation failed! "
– ironically Navalny on his page on the social network Instagram.
23
September 2020, 08:39
Macron's statement on Navalny and the resonating publication of "Le
Monde"
The French
President said that what happened to the Russian oppositionist was an "assassination attempt." Le Monde wrote about
the conversation between Macron and Putin, and the Russian ambassador to Germany has said that Berlin does not want
to cooperate with Moscow over the Navalny situation.
Updated at
10:07
French President Emmanuel Macron called on Russia to shed light on
the situation with Navalny. Speaking at a session of the UN General Assembly, the French President called the
incident an "assassination attempt": "We will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons in Europe, Russia or Syria. We
need to clarify quickly and flawlessly as we will make sure that the red lines are respected. "
His video
message to the UN coincided with a high-profile publication of the French newspaper "Le Monde" about a telephone
conversation between Macron and Putin. Sources of the publication retell their conversation about the situation with
Navalny.
According to Le Monde, it was "a conversation not intended to be
heard". According to sources, Macron said that since it would be impossible for a private organization to use
"Novichok"
[Why? Peddling another "Novichok" myth yet again! -- ME]
,
an official Russian explanation is needed
[Why? Presumption of Russian guilt? -- ME]
.
In response, Putin allegedly called Alexei Navalny "a simple internet brawler who committed illegal actions in the
past and used the Anti-Corruption Fund to blackmail deputies and officials". According to the newspaper, the Russian
president noted that Navalny had previously simulated various diseases and could have swallowed the poison himself.
Why the politician did this, Putin did not explain, writes "Le Monde".
According
to the newspaper, Vladimir Putin also noted that "Novichok" is a much less complex substance than it is believed. The
lack of an official investigation was explained by the fact that the results of the French and German tests were not
transferred to Russia. In addition, the Russian president, according to "Le Monde's" sources, suggested investigating
other versions, leading, in particular, to Latvia, where the inventor of "Novichk" lives. As the newspaper noted, in
fact, several Soviet scientists took part in the creation of "Novichk" at once, and the fact that one of them lives
abroad says nothing, especially in the absence of any plausible motive. According to the newspaper, Macron rejected
the Latvian trace and the version of an attempt to poison himself.
How should
one feel about the publication of "Le Monde" and will it have any impact in Europe? Commentary by political scientist
Georgy Bovt:
– First of
all, Le Monde has just thrown shit at the Russian president, because, first of all, we do not know in what context
this was said. It could have been said in such a sarcastic tone, for example, and in the context of other spoken
phrases, it would have sounded different from what it sounds like now, when such a position seems rather too strange
to many. This happens quite often when retelling rather frank conversations of politicians, which are then presented
without understanding the tone and context. So, of course, this post will make a difference. And secondly, the fact
that the Elysée Palace itself considered it possible to leak this information to the press makes it problematic in
the future to communicate with Macron at the level at which it happened before.
– During his speech at the session, he also called on Russia to shed
light on, as he put it, the attempt to assassinate Navalny.
– It
doesn't matter much now, since it is obvious that the conversation with Putin, which took place in confidence, was
leaked to the press. Usually this is not done after all. And if it is done, then the relationship that was before is
cancelled out. This probably means that Macron also decided to cross out his relationship with Putin, which had
developed before.
– Couldn't Putin have thus, on the contrary, been try to improve
relations by recounting all Navalny's "ideas" and attempts to blackmail people close to the authorities during his
investigations?
– The Kremlin's attitude towards Navalny can hardly be called
exalted, and to say that the Kremlin loves Navalny would be a strong exaggeration. Therefore, the attitude to this
politician there is supercritical, dismissive. Nevertheless, to seriously talk about the fact that he poisoned
himself -- well, the general public will not understand this: this requires at least some additional clarification
about the basis on which such statements are made, if they are made seriously, and not in such a manner as a cynical
joke.
[You must
be kidding, Bovt! Navalny critics -- and most Russians are! -- think he's lower than a snake's belly, that he's a
TRAITOR, a FOREIGN AGENT!!!!! If the Pindosi tell him to give one for the Gipper, he'll fucking well do it! That's
his nature. He's in it for the moolah!!!! Nothing else! -- ME]
Late at
night, Navalny himself reacted to the publication. On social media, he wrote: "Good version. I cooked "Novichok" in
the kitchen. I took a soft sip from a flask on the aeroplane. To die in an Omsk hospital and end up in an Omsk
morgue, where the cause of death would be established "had lived enough" -- that was the ultimate goal of my cunning
plan. But Putin outplayed me. You just can't fool him. As a result, I, like a fool, lay in a coma for 18 days, but
did not achieve my goal. The provocation failed! "
Russian
Ambassador to Germany Sergei Nechaev said that Berlin does not want to cooperate with Moscow on the situation with
Navalny. According to him, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office sent requests for legal assistance to France,
Sweden and twice to Germany, but did not receive a single answer.
According
to the diplomat, without these samples from foreign laboratories, law enforcement agencies cannot start a criminal
investigation into the incident. He said that a preliminary investigation of the situation had already begun on the
part of Russia: many objects were examined, the staff of the hotel, hospital and airport were interviewed.
According
to the latest data, Navalny's condition improved and he was discharged from the hospital. This was told in the Berlin
clinic Charite. Doctors consider it possible that he will recover completely.
Which all
begs the question that he was poisoned with "Novichok", which he clearly wasn't!
Why?
Because he
is not dead!
It matters
not who administered the poison or whether the bullshitting bastard took it himself: the dose wasn't lethal.
The bastard
took some salts in the aircraft toilet, then put on a show for the passengers, none of whom suffered any ill effects
from their having been in close proximity with a person covered with the most deadly poison known to man.
Russian
doctors at Omsk know that the lying traitorous bastard wasn't poisoned.
So do
German doctors in Berlin, but they have political agenda to follow.
On the Navalny
poisoning. Interesting to see that Vladimir Ashurkov is in the inner core of the Integrity Initiative. Suggesting
another media-led provocation.
More fool
you BBC for believing the story of such a cnut!
Ashurkov is
Executive Director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. A former banker, Ashurkov was rolling the lolly in as the
Director of Group Portfolio Management and Control at Alfa Group Consortium from 2006 to 2012, when he was asked to
step down because of his political involvement with Alexei Navalny. So he has an axe trto grind.
As usual,
the rich and privileged Ashurkov is so typical of the millions of Russians who love and adore Bullshitter Navalny.
From the
Russian
Wiki
entry on Ashurkov, which is far more revealing than the sparse
English
Wiki
on the thieving twat:
In April 2014, Ashurkov left Russia. On July 30, 2014, he was put
on the federal wanted list in the case of fraud with the financing of Navalny's election campaign as mayor of Moscow.
In July
2014, he applied for political asylum in the UK in connection with persecution in the Russian Federation. In February
2015, he received asylum, at the same time his common-law wife Alexandrina Markvo was arrested in absentia by the
Basmanny Court, whose firm Bureau 17 of the RF IC was accused of stealing several million budget funds during
literary events.
In the UK,
he was engaged in investment projects in the field of venture and angel investments dedicated to e-commerce. At the
same time, he continued to work with Alexei Navalny. In December 2015, he launched the
Sanation
Law
project, which analyzes the adopted scandalous bills and the process of their further cancellation, "which
will become relevant when the political system is liberalized and the new government takes a course to dismantle the
authoritarian regime". According to his own statements, he changed his libertarian beliefs to more leftist ones.
He gave,
along with several others, testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons of the British
Parliament in connection with the preparation of the latter's report "Russian corruption and the UK inquiry", which
was presented in May 2018 year.
In November 2018, hackers of the Anonymous group published
documents of the British project Integrity Initiative; amongst others, Ashurkov's surname appeared in the lists of
participants. Ashurkov suggested that the hackers stole the Institute of Statecraft (one of the founders of the
Integrity Initiative) mailing address database, which actually contains his email address. According to him, he had
not heard of the Integrity Initiative.
Western politicians are still undecided over their response to
the
poisoning
, says the BBC's Jenny Hill in Berlin.
However, Mr
Navalny's discharge from hospital will intensify pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel who has demanded – so far
in vain – a full explanation from the Kremlin, she adds.
A nerve agent from the Novichok group was also used to poison Russian
ex-spy Sergei Skripal
and his daughter in Salisbury, England in 2018. They both survived, but a local woman, Dawn
Sturgess, died after coming into contact with the poison.
Britain
accused
Russia's military intelligence of carrying out that attack
. Twenty countries expelled more than 100 Russian
diplomats and spies. Moscow denied any involvement.
And no
evidence presented whatsoever for the above highlighted accusations.
But Russia, as
ever, is presented as denying a fully proven fact -- a "slam dunk" accusation, as I believe Pindosi are sometimes wont to
say.
What with all the noise of the dogs and camels, a swan song can be
easily missed. But not Maria Pevchikh's (lead image, right) broadcast by the BBC's Russian Service.
For the first
time, the British state propaganda organ has said too much too loudly in defence of one of its Russian assets, and
confirmed the combination of celebrity, political ambition, and money which has made the poisoning of Alexei Navalny a
faulty fabrication; and Navalny's attempt to make political capital out of it, a modest success for the British secret
services; an immodest failure for the German Foreign Ministry, Defence Ministry, German Army, and the Berlin medical
clinic which goes by the name of Charity
German sources close to the thinking of the Chancellery in Berlin
and of Chancellor Angela Merkel believe that whatever she has been told by her subordinates and experts, her intention
is to let the Navalny poisoning narrative fade away for lack of evidence of a crime the Germans are willing to publish
####
More at the
link.
I concur with
the conclusion. I think at some point Merkel realized she was being bumped in to action and rather than just saying 'No'
against a mass of pressure and liability for her, she moved sideways and insisted on the full processes to be followed.
That way she could not be accused of blocking, and secondly it affects the time frame for actions which is the whole
critical point of the whole affair. Outside a certain window, proposed actions lose much of their force, are obsolete or
ultimately become pointless.
As for les
grenouilles, le coq is all about puffing up its chest and looking much bigger than ite really is. Maybe they've given up
on their 'special relationship' with Russia. It's certainly backwards from when Putin allowed Sarkozy to dig the EU/NATO
and the west out of its self-made hole of backing Saakashiti's 2008 'war of liberation.' Exactly what 'other tools' does
Clément Beaune think the EU can bring to bear on Russia that would have any more effect than the current sanction etc.?*
Unless he is talking about sorcery
But we were so bad at dealing with power that we just delegated it,
if I may put it like that, to NATO, to the U.S., to national states, armies and so on," Beaune said.
"The EU was not about this. So the EU is learning that, hello, there
are some powers on the doorstep -- Russia, Turkey, just to mention two of them, the main ones -- and they are not so nice.
So we have to unite and we have to develop tools, and we don't have them at this stage," he said
Apparently,
Pevchikh was given a bogus interview on the BBC and was presented as an uninteresting, nothing special sort of
person, about whom rumours and innuendo were amassing for no reason whatsoever.
The
interviewer never pressed her on how long she had lived in the UK, what her business interests there were (claims
have been made that she runs a book store), why she visits Russia so frequently, what indeed isher present
citizenship, how she became involved with Navalny's "fund" -- she says she answered an ad., but where? In the UK?
Hardly! And on and on .
It was a
"nothing to see here, now move along!" interview undertaken by the free of state control BBC under the auspices of
the State Intelligence Service, for whom, I am sure, Pevchikh is a most willing helper, if not in its employ.
"In response
to the actions of the European Union, Russia has decided to expand the list of representatives of EU member states and
institutions that are prohibited from entering the Russian Federation".
She stressed that the number of people in the list is equal to a
similar list compiled by the European Union, adding that the bloc has taken multiple unfriendly steps towards Russian
citizens, using sanctions as an "absurd" excuse
With his
receding hairline and rapidly thinning mop Navalny has exceeded his shelf life for attracting naïve youngsters. He looks
like the Russian equivalent of Rigsby, the seedy rackrent landlord in Rising Damp.
Rigsby
was a great snidey, lecherous, creep of a landlord
Poor old
Leonard Rossiter was a good actor as well. I was rather saddened when he died unexpectedly.
One of
my old workmates could take Rigsby off to a "T". He used to chat up girls using Rigsby-style creepy flattery and
strangely enough, he used to hit it off with them when performing his chatting-up of them in this fashion.
Oh, I doubt
it – Pevchikh is the exact opposite of a media personality, apparently doing her best to remain in a blurry
background and not get noticed. And owing to the suspicion now surrounding her, she would never have Navalny's
freedom of movement in Russia, where he is watched only by the newbies who need the training and the guys who showed
up to work hung-over and are being punished.
Did Russia
really poison opposition politician Navalny? And NATO wants a color revolution in Belarus
708 views•23 Sep 2020
Moderate
Rebels
20.9K subscribers
Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton start off with an exclusive, bombshell intercepted recording we were leaked of Russian
President Vladimir Putin's phone calls.
Then we speak
with journalist Bryan MacDonald, who lives in Russia, about the very suspicious alleged poisoning of opposition
candidate Alexei Navalny, and what his real, xenophobic politics are.
We also
discuss the NATO/EU attempt to orchestrate a so-called color revolution in Belarus and install a pro-Western neoliberal
regime.
SECTIONS
0:00 Exclusive, bombshell intercepted recording
8:33 Poisoning of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny
45:00 Belarus color revolution attempt
1:21:30 Outro
Over at
OffGuardian, a frequent contributor argues compellingly that information which supports questions as to whether face
masks have any beneficial effect against an airborne viral infection is being systematically purged from the internet.
Furthermore,
the comments carry on the discussion of the extent to which not only well-known corporate-friendly browsers and search
engines like Google censor searches and limit access to critical information through down-ranking algorithms, but even
'independent' browsers like DuckDuckGo.
Often people
who narrate tech talks seem chosen for their preoccupied monotone delivery, so that reading the phone book seems a
viable alternative to listening, and this one is no exception – nonetheless, a very interesting demo of a fairly-new
website known as 'Censored Search'.
I think most
people realize the internet is slowly but surely being taken over by corporate and one-world interests that want to
shape your thinking by controlling what you read – apparently monitoring was not enough. But I would wager few grasp
just how blatant and invasive it is. The internet is lost, and it is past time for an alternative that gets back to its
maverick early days while maintaining its present versatility. The secret to the success of advertising – which after
all, is mostly propaganda – is to prevent your ability to turn it off and not be exposed to it.
Which is
the modern version that stands today, then? The one with balconies, or without?
According
to Wiki, the Charite has four campuses, all in Berlin – the main building in Mitte (which appears to be the one in
which the honoured guest was allegedly quartered and allowed to smoke and wander about the stairwells at will). the
Benjamin Franklin in Lichterfelde , the Virchow Klinikum in Wedding and the Berlin Buch, in Buch. Of those pictured,
only the main building appears to have balconies like a hotel. The Buch is not pictured, but was apparently acquired
in 2001 by the Helios clinics Group; the Charite now uses it only for research facilities.
It's hard
to know which side you're looking at, but one side appears flat right across while the sections that are balconied
protrude slightly at each side. It would obviously be much easier to build them on than to blast them off, so it
appears the version with the balconies is current.
On Thursday
(24 September), Christian Gramm, the president of Germany's Military Intelligence Service (MAD), was forced to resign.
To many, the shake-up doesn't come as a surprise given the recent criticism over how the agency handled investigations
into right-wing extremism in the German Special Forces (KSK). Gramm's term as MAD president will come to an end next
month
####
Curious timing
no? Surely completely unrelated to the recent likely faked Navalny 'poisoning.'
I'll be
damned. That IS an astonishing coincidence, and they apparently felt it was enough of a glaring coincidence that a
red-herring excuse was supplied. If your guess is accurate, it likely suggests there will be no flinching from
Germany on supplying Navalny's samples to Russia, and no apology; the issue will just be allowed to fade away, while
a few selective firings is supposed to send its own message. We'll see. Good catch!
Well
keep an eye on the follow up or far more likely the almost total absence of it.
When it
is embarassing to oneself, suddenly it becomes like classic 'straight facts' reporting. When it can cause trouble
for your enemies, speculation runs wild, pure
Rosenford
(Rosenberg/Rainsford),
They can peddle all kinds of ropey speculative s/t and opinon as proper journalism
because
it is Russia
where we all know that everything is possible.
RUSSIA AND COVID. As far as I can see it's pretty much under control
in Russia. CNN has a (surprisingly) intelligent discussion; counting is everything (vide: with or from?) and the
Russians are stricter on their counting. They also treat early with an effective drug. Meanwhile in the USA and UK,
supposedly the best prepared I recommend Stephen Walt's essay again: The Death of American Competence. And I reiterate:
2020 will go down as the year the West lost its mojo .
####
Navalny's apartment in Moscow has been seized following a lawsuit by
Prigozhin
Bailiffs have
seized the apartment of opposition politician Alexei Navalny in Moscow, FBK press secretary Kira Yarmysh said on
Twitter.
According to
her, Federal Bailiff Service officers announced a ban on registration actions at the end of August, a week after Navalny
had been poisoned on board a Tomsk-Moscow flight.
"This means
that the apartment cannot be sold, donated or mortgaged. At the same time, Alexey's accounts have been seized", Yarmysh
explained.
She also added
that the seizure was connected with a lawsuit filed by the St. Petersburg businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who bought out
the FBK debt of 88 million rubles from "Moskovskiy Shkolnik". 30 million rubles have already been collected from the
fund's accounts.
In October, the Moscow Arbitration Court took the side of "Moskovskiy
Shkolnik" in a dispute with FBK. The company demanded compensation for damages received as a result of the fund's
investigation of poor quality food in the capital's schools.
Data from an extract of the Unified State Register of Real Estate,
which is at the disposal of RIA Novosti, confirms that the bailiffs imposed encumbrances on Navalny's apartment, in
which he owns one third of the living space.
In addition,
as follows from the database of enforcement proceedings on the Federal Bailiff Service website, Navalny must pay almost
29 million rubles under a writ of execution on "other foreclosures of a property nature" in favour of individuals and
legal entities, as well as pay off an enforcement fee of more than two million rubles.
Commenting on
the situation with Navalny's apartment, Yevgeny Prigozhin, director of "Concord Management and Consulting", said that he
would be able to give shelter the blogger for a small fee.
"As for Navalny's apartment, if he does not find shelter with his comrades-in-arms, like Lenin, then I will make him an
inexpensive in the hallway", the Concord press service quotes him.
In 2019, a
court in Moscow found 17 statements in a video clip and a publication on catering in Moscow schools and kindergartens as
untrue and defamatory to the business reputation of "Moskovskiy Shkolnik" and ordered that there be recovered from FBK,
as well as Navalny and Lyubov Sobol, in total 88 million rubles. They were also ordered to remove the subject and
articles containing inaccurate information from their websites and social media accounts, as well as publish a
refutation in the form of the operative part of the court decision.
In July this year, Navalny announced the closure of the
Anti-Corruption Fund. In August, Prigozhine bought out the debt of Navalny, Lyubov Sobol and FBK to the Moscow Schoolboy
company. After that, the right to claim passed to the businessman.
What you gonna
do now, Yogi?
You should
know: both you and Sobol are lawyers -- aren't you?
It sounds
as if 'the Kremlin' is finally going to get serious about punishing that toad. He's so used to piling up suspended
sentences hat he perhaps expected another. But I suspect the purpose of the legal actions against him this time
around is to prevent his return to Russia. Moscow is likely quite comfortable with the idea of him becoming another
'president in exile' like Khodorkovsky.
And Navalny has access to the finest legal minds in the west – surely they
will take his case pro bono, and show up where 'the Kremlin' is acting illegally. If they cannot do that, well then
what must be our conclusion?
I suspect
the days of money-for-nothing for Lyosha may be over.
It
sounds like a lien or inhibition on dealing with the property – standard practice in seeking to recover monies
owed in the western legal systems so admired by the blogger. A bog-standard remedy in private law disputes – i.e.
NOT involving the state other than through its position to adjudicate between non-state parties in duly conducted
court proceedings.
The
purchase of the assignation of rights in the school services defamation case was pure genius.
Commenting
on the situation with Navalny's apartment, Yevgeny Prigozhin, director of "Concord Management and Consulting", said
that he would be able to give shelter to the blogger for a small fee.
"As for Navalny's apartment, if he does not find shelter with his comrades-in-arms, like Lenin, then I will fashion
him an inexpensive bed in the hallway", the Concord press service quotes him.
Dasha studied English language in-depth at Moscow Gymnasium No. 45,
one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the Russian capital,
However, after
graduating from high school, the girl did not want to stay in her native Moscow. Dasha has frankly admitted in her blog:
she is going to study at Stanford University, one of the top universities in America, located in sunny California.
According to Daria, she will study at Stanford free of charge, since
her parents' income is below one hundred thousand dollars. However, this has caused more surprise among Russians – the
fact is that only US citizens on a low income have the opportunity of studying at this university without paying fees,
and In any case, her parents must pay considerable expenses for her living and studying in America
I daresay
Moscow is starting a dossier on Darya, with relevant information such as this, against the day she will want to
return to Russia as a celebrated dissident like Daddy.
*Pussy Riot
Activist May Have Been Poisoned, German Doctors Say*
Sept. 18, 2018
BERLIN --
German doctors treating a Pussy Riot activist who lost his sight, speech and mobility after spending time in a court in
Moscow said on Tuesday that it was "highly plausible" that he had been poisoned, as their tests had found no evidence
that he was suffering from a long-term illness.
The activist,
Pyotr Verzilov, 30, was treated for several days in the toxicology wards of two hospitals in Moscow after falling ill.
On Saturday, he was flown to Berlin and admitted to the Charité hospital. His doctors in the German capital told
reporters at a news conference that he was in an intensive care unit but was not in life-threatening condition.
"We are
working on the assumption of a poisoning that has lasted about a week," Dr. Kai-Uwe Eckardt, director of the hospital's
medical center, said. "Test results indicate certain active ingredients, but the exact substance has not yet been
determined."
Verzilov is
supposedly – according to one source I read – the force behind having Navalny evacuated to Germany. It will be funny
now if he cannot return to Russia.
That
guy is a self-important prick with delusions of grandeur. If he is representative of the non-systemic
opposition in Russia then, assuming that Putin is even aware of this guy, it would only provide a good laugh
after a hard day at the office
Verzilov is an attention junkie. He set himself up as the 'spokesman' of Pussy Riot because they were
getting a lot of attention and he wanted to be part of it. He has no visible talent of his own – except
perhaps a facility for languages, his English is pretty good – and so he must attach himself to those who
either are talented, or who fancy they are and who are supported in that belief by the English-speaking
media.
His English is good because he went to school in Toronto until his somehow landing a place at MGU
Philosophy Faculty, which is one of the greatest riddles of the Cosmos, in my opinion.
I think he was at least 12 when he began to live in Canada. He lived there with his "philosopher" first
wife as well. What exactly their status in Canada is, I can never clearly find out.
She dropped out of the MGU Philosophy Faculty after he had humped her when she was 18. A couple of weeks
before she had the baby, he was shagging her in public -- or simulating the act -- in a Moscow zoological
museum. He and his ex-wife had other fornicating accomplices during the "event".
Time to pay up! More than three million rubles have been blocked on
Alburov's bank account
Today, 18:17
Georgy Alburov, who
had previously called himself the head of the FBK investigation department, suddenly revealed his real boss to the
world, when the activities of Maria Pevchikh were exposed
Photo:
http://www.instagram.com/alburov
It is time to
pay the bills. The hand of justice has also reached out to the liberalist Georgy Alburov from the so-called
Anti-Corruption Fund, recognized as a foreign agent. More than three million rubles have been blocked on his bank
account. The money will go towards losses incurred by government services during last year's rallies in Moscow.
Navalnyist Alburov was one of the main agitators of the disorder there.
Unlike
adequate people, Navalnyists do not recognize the obvious illegality of their actions, as well as the right of
representatives of the authorities to impose completely justified punishment against them. They start screaming on all
their Twitter, Facebook, Telegram etc. accounts about alleged blatant injustice and, as it happens, every time, they ask
for donations. Thus, they manage, of course, by manipulating the hamsters a little, to avoid financial responsibility by
dumping it on their lop-eared biomass.
This method is
used not only by Alburov, it is a common feature of FBK foreign agent members. First, they fuck everything up and then
cry onto ther subscribers' shoulders
Sabine
Hossenfelder is one intelligent and charismatic physicist. She takes on established science for its tendency to pursue
projects simply to create job openings for scientists as well as presenting lucid explanations of various scientific
phenomenon. Here, she rants about science being used to justify political decisions.
Navalny is 'a
ray of light emerging from the darkness'. Remarkable. Like Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show in "Cover of the Rolling
Stone", Navalny will want to buy five copies for his mother.
Well, well;
look at that. Shale oil and gas production in the USA continues to fall, and according to BP's 2020 Energy Outlook
Report, oil demand 'may never return to pre-pandemic levels'. Which would suggest we saw the peak in global consumption
last year.
And which, I
am bound to suggest, is not the desirable state of affairs if you fancy yourself the World's Biggest Energy Exporter.
International
Banker agrees, adding the gloomy forecast – depending on your point of view – that according to IATA, airline companies
will require 25% fewer planes in the sky over the next 5 years. That's hardly good news for Boeing, and might mean the
end of production for the 737 MAX. But it's quite a few gallons less of avgas, as well.
"Can US shale bounce back quickly from this crisis? It seems
unlikely. According to Ramanan Krishnamoorti, professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston's Cullen
College of Engineering, the industry is in serious trouble. "You're going to see a lot of bankruptcies, a lot of
furloughs, more than furloughs. You're going to see layoffs. You're going to see people leave this entire industry
because there aren't going to be jobs," he told Houston's ABC13 news outlet."
The US
fracking industry has been basically a Ponzi scheme since the first well was drilled. It seems to have become the
darling of the investment class who never quite seemed to realize that they were really not making much as a return
on investment.
Combine
that with what seems to be very short life spans for wells, and I think we probably have seen a decimation or
destruction of the industry. I'm not sure but I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see that the US will not have oil "
self-sufficiency" how much longer. (We will not mention the Russian and Canadian oil that is being imported.)
After
putting up with Doug Ford for the last while, I have rather given up on expecting modern-day Conservatives to
actually have a grasp on reality that Kenny is really a worry. It really sounds like he thinks did Alberta is going
to go back to the boom days of 1970s or at least of the 1990s. He is nuts.
I was just
reading about city of Shenzhan, the new 12 million inhabitant city just over the border from Hong Kong. As of this
year there's 16,000+ city buses and God knows how many taxis that have all gone electric. This is just a hint of
what's going to be happening around the world from the look of it. Heck, my small city has 3 electric buses on order.
The oil
market is not going to disappear anytime soon but even BP is reported as saying they don't expect oil demand to come
back to what it was before the pandemic
Our
lease ran out a couple of weeks ago on the RX-350, and we traded it in for a hybrid, the
UX-250H
.
Below 40 kph it's all-electric, like if you are cruising around a neighbourhood looking for a particular house
number. Above that the gas engine kicks in, but it is supported by the electric motor and gets more than 700 km on
a tank of gas. Teslas used to be a bit of an oddity around here as recently as 5 years ago, but now they're
everywhere. The Nissan Leaf is very popular as well, and the buyer base for electrics has expanded rapidly as soon
as drivers realized electric vehicles do not have to be nerdy, and at the high end (Tesla) they can leave
conventionally-powered cars in the dust. The Tesla is very fast and the acceleration is instant, with no throttle
lag.
Losing
the economic clout of the energy industry would be a blow – potentially a fatal one – to the USA. A few years ago,
not many, oil and gas companies would have made up nearly half of the top ten US companies for both revenue and
profit. Only one makes both listings now – Exxon-Mobil – but the industry remains tremendously influential in
politics and, more importantly, is into the government for so much money in loans and investments that its
collapse would imperil the government itself.
Some
would be quite happy to see America with its shoulders pinned to the mat, after enduring decades of its arrogance
and swaggering; I wouldn't be too sorry to see it myself. But it maintains -somehow – the world's biggest and
best-outfitted military by a long shot, and when it sees itself on an irreversible downward trend, it is going to
want to take its enemies with it.
It may
seem like a small matter but China seems to have electrified its entire scooter fleet. Scooters often pump out
more pollution than a car. Multiply that by tens of millions and you have a major pollution source. The battery
powered scooters are quiet and likely maintenance-free. Compare and contrast with India and its tens of millions
of two-cycle oil smoke/unburnt gasoline pollution generators a.k.a. scooters.
I
have not heard if it is 100% but it should be close. IIRC, I have read that Shanghai is full of them and there
seems to be pretty decent recharge facilities.
Given
the combination of global warming and the often atrocious air quality in major cities, the Communist Gov't
seems to be really pushing to get away from fossil fuels.
India
might be a good market for Chinese scooters and might spur some Indian companies to get going -- well after this
latest border war calms down.
And you
won't find the u-Ropean Parliament harping much or even loudly about the authoritarian regime in Azerbaidjan because
its produces good gas and it is run by
our kind of
dictator.
That's their 'Human Rights' bulls/t in a can for you. Myanmar has also got of remarkably lightly from the west too.
Leaving
Europe behind, I have always been amazed that President Duterte of the Philippines is`not not a pariah. Declaring
open season on one's citizens and
letting
encouraging the police to
shoot anyone they want strikes me as a bit dubious for a head of state.
Putin proposed, "exchanging guarantees of non-interference in each
other's internal affairs, including electoral processes, including using information and communication technologies and
high-tech methods."..
####
That is some
excellently timed next level trolling from Pootie-McPoot-Face.
I'd like to
look at the Navalny 'poisoning" from a slightly different angle, one which I think bears scrutiny. I've said several
times that nobody – to the best of my knowledge – has ever survived poisoning by VX. But that's not quite accurate – the
two women who thrust what was always believed to be VX in some form into the face of Kim Jong Nam (Kim Jong-Un's
half-brother) at an airport in Kuala Lumpur killed him stone dead. But they themselves apparently survived with no ill
effects except that one of them allegedly may have vomited.
The major
difference in the way the stories are treated, then, is the incredulity with which the apparent survival of the alleged
poisoners is regarded by the western press. Consider;
An amount of
VX, we are told, that weighs as much as two pennies would kill 500 people. I assume that's what he meant, as he is
strikingly un-eloquent for a scientist and the 'penny' is not a weight of measure. Is that a British penny, or an
American one? Big difference in weight.
''The other chemical agents like sarin, tabun, those kinds of things,
they're way below this. They're toxic, yes, but this is the king,'' said John Trestrail, a U.S. forensic toxicologist
who has examined more than 1,000 poisoning crimes.
He said an amount of VX weighing two pennies could kill 500 people
through skin exposure. It's also hard to acquire and would likely have come from a chemical weapons laboratory, making
it more likely that the attack was executed by a government."
Yes, you read
that right – VX is the King of vicious toxicological agents. Except for Novichok, which is ten times as deadly, and the
would-be killers dusted Navalny's bottle with enough of it that the bottle was liberally covered with the dust, and his
clothes apparently were as well, or so Team Navalny suspects. Say – that's a handy little timeline right there, innit?
When did Navalny put those clothes on? Presumably he had a shower before going to bed; did he dress in fresh clothes
before leaving for the airport, or wear the same stuff from the day before? Either way, the poisoner must have accessed
Navalny's room between the time he got up and the time the plane took off – if he still had Novichok on his clothes from
the day before, he'd be dead, plus would have contaminated God knows how many surfaces.
Anyway,
remember – Novichok is ten times as deadly as the King of nerve agents, VX. But it has killed – according to western
yarns – only one of six people exposed to it; Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Detective Nick Bailey, Navalny and
Charles Rowley all survived and have apparently achieved full recovery, Navalny in only a week after emerging from an
alleged coma.
Western
incredulity? None. Nothing to see here, old chap.
Listen to the
awful consequences of poisoning with VX, and remember the assassins only pushed some quantity of VX into Kim Jong-Nam's
face; a second's contact, them they ran away, not wearing gloves or any protective gear at all.
"VX is an amber-colored, tasteless, odorless chemical weapon first
produced in the 1950s. When inhaled or absorbed through the skin, it disrupts the nervous system and causes constriction
and increased secretions in the throat, leading to difficulty breathing. Fluids pour from the body, including sweat,
spontaneous urination and defecation, often followed by convulsions, paralysis and death. Kim Jong Nam sought help at
the airport clinic and died en route to a hospital within two hours of being attacked, police said."
I don't think
anyone has reported what Navalny was roaring and screaming, but perhaps it was"Get back!!! I'm shitting myself!! Jesus,
I can't stop pissing!!! Help me!!" although you would think if his symptoms included spontaneous defecation and
urination, someone would have said – it could be important. Different agent, I know, but the symptoms of nerve-agent
poisoning are quite similar across the type. Navalny's symptoms were nothing like nerve-agent poisoning, no matter how
energetically the defector Mirzayanov and his fan club try to backstop Navalny's story. The intense sweating and the
obvious gross irritation of the mucous membranes would have been unmistakable to the doctors in Omsk, considering
Navalny had already passed the onset of whatever symptoms he did have and was unconscious.
Kim Jong-Nam
died within two hours of being attacked with a nerve agent ten times less toxic than Novichok. Navalny was definitely
poisoned with a substance ten times more toxic than VX, according to the Germans and the French and whoever else swears
to that ludicrous story, but was to all appearances normal at least an hour after having been poisoned, since he showed
no symptoms until at least 40 minutes after the plane took off with no obvious GRU agents on board, and hung around the
airport before the flight was called at least long enough to drink a cup of tea, plus however long it took for him to
get from the hotel to the airport.
"The two women -- one Vietnamese, one Indonesian -- recorded on
surveillance cameras thrusting a substance into Kim Jong Nam's face as he was about to check in for a flight home to
Macau, apparently did not suffer serious health problems. Malaysian police have said they were not wearing gloves or
protective gear and that they washed their hands afterward as they were trained to do. However, authorities said Friday
that one of them vomited afterward.
Both have been
arrested along with another man. Authorities are also seeking several others, including an employee of North Korea's
state-owned airline, Air Koryo.
''If they used their bare hands, there's just no possible way that
they would have exposed him to VX unless they took some sort of precaution,'' Goldberger said. ''The only precaution I
know of would be administration of the antidote before this went down.''
Perhaps that's
it; perhaps immediately after swigging from his water-bottle – which he left in the hotel room, obviously – Navalny rang
room service for some Novichok antidote. Just in case. Can't be too careful, when you are the main opposition leader.
"No areas were cordoned off and protective measures were not taken.
When asked about it a day after the attack, airport spokesman Shah Rahim said there was no risk to travelers and the
airport was regularly and properly cleaned. But officials announced Friday that the facility would be decontaminated.
''It's as persistent as motor oil. It's going to stay there for a
long time. A long time, which means anyone coming in contact with this could be intoxicated from it,'' Trestrail said.
''If this truly is VX, they ought to be calling in a hazmat team and looking at any place these women or the victim
traveled after the exposure.''
A hazmat team,
and looking at any place the assassin or anyone potentially exposed might have traveled. For an agent ten times less
toxic than Novichok.
Reading
this
Wikipedia account
of how Kim Jong-nam was targeted and attacked by the two women, I think there are other
possibilities to consider:
(a) that the substance or substances sprayed into his face was / were dangerous only if (in the case of two or more
substances) combined in a particular way and then inhaled;
(b) Kim was known to be allergic to particular substances and the people who plotted his assassination knew what
those substances were and used them to induce an anaphylactic shock that killed him;
(c) Kim had other health issues (he was a very tubby fellow) that should have been considered factors in his death;
(d) one of the women who attacked Kim supposedly crept up behind him, took out a cloth with chemical on it and
reached around his head to smack the cloth onto his face – sounds a bit like those movie / TV show stunts where
someone creeps up from behind his victim and puts a chloroform-soaked cloth onto the victim's face – and
chloroform
can be toxic in high doses
;
(e) Kim's treatment at the Menara clinic at the airport included atropine and adrenaline and these could have
contributed to his death if the plotters had foreknowledge of what would be used to treat him were he to be poisoned
and planned his assassination accordingly.
Kim's
assassins need not have been North Koreans or connected to the North Korean government in any way. He also might not
have been expected to die but just be given a scare, but the shock he got along with his obesity and other underlying
health issues might have done him in.
Yes,
those are all good and sound arguments. The point I was trying to make, though, is that American toxicologists and
field experts are astounded that anyone might survive exposure to VX; it is unaccountable not only that they could
be alive, but that there is not a trail of death following the assassins as well until it kills them, too. But
nobody seems surprised for Navalny to make a complete recovery and be sitting up in bed making demands and
strolling around the stairwells, after exposure to a much more toxic agent that should have killed him, while
nobody noticed anyone sneaking into his room dressed in a full hazmat suit with breathing apparatus and apparently
others could come and go from the scene of the alleged exposure with no protection.
Perhaps
the Skripals 'disappeared' because the British government was unsure how to present them after a supposedly-deadly
poisoning attempt which they plainly are said to have survived. Perhaps also it is the judgment of similar
authorities that the public will accept the dichotomy without demur; hence, the agent can still be nefarious
beyond belief because it is so insidious and deadly, but Navalny can be alive and making noise after exposure to
it.
MOSCOW,
September 28 – RIA Novosti.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel secretly
visited Alexei Navalny while he was being treated at the Charité clinic in Berlin, "Spiegel" weekly reported, citing its
own informant.
Other details
are not provided.
On August 20,
the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation* was hospitalized in Omsk after he had fallen ill on an aeroplane. Doctors
diagnosed a metabolic disorder that had caused a sharp drop in blood sugar levels. It is not yet clear what caused this,
but no poisons were found in Navalny's blood and urine.
Later he was
transported to Germany. In early September, the German government announced that the Russian had been poisoned with a
substance from the "Novichok" group of biological warfare agents. Moscow sent a request for more detailed information on
the results of analyses from the Berlin laboratory, but there was no response.
At the same
time, it is known that the German intelligence service BND has had access to "Novichok" since the 1990s. In addition, it
has been studied by about 20 Western countries, including Great Britain, the USA, Sweden, the Czech Republic. Russia, in
accordance with a presidential decree of 1992, stopped developing in the field of chemical weapons, and in 2017
destroyed the entire available stock of such substances, which has been confirmed by the OPCW.
On September
7, Navalny was discharged from the hospital, his condition is satisfactory.
*The Anti-Corruption Foundation is included by the Russian Ministry
of Justice in the register of NGOs performing the functions of a foreign agent.
Note: the
bastion of freedom and democracy has still not, as per agreement, destroyed its chemical weapons stocks -- always delays
and so on, see
On Wednesday the Director-General of the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü of Turkey, congratulated Russia on completing the
destruction of its chemical weapons stockpile which originally totalled 39 967 agent tonnes (i.e. excluding munition
weight). This represents a major milestone towards realizing a world without chemical weapons as envisaged by the
negotiators of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)
The USA, the other major possessor of a chemical weapons stockpile
(which originally totalled approximately 30 000 agent tonnes), has completed the destruction of approximately 90 per
cent of its stockpile and is scheduled to finish its operations by 2023 .
Technologically backward Russia completes its task as agreed: the far more technologically advanced USA is still
dawdling along
It's hard
to imagine the Germans poisoned his samples, although I suppose it is possible. But if Pevchik had poisoned him with
something intended to incapacitate but not kill him, you'd think the doctors in Omsk would have detected it.
Navalny confirms meeting with Merkel at Berlin clinic
28 September 2020, 11:22
Blogger Alexei Navalny has confirmed that German Chancellor Angela
Merkel visited him at the Berlin Charité clinic, where he was being treated. Earlier, the secret visit of the politician
was reported by the journal "Der Spiegel", citing sources.
"There was a
meeting, but you shouldn't call it "secret " -- rather, a private meeting and conversation with the family. I am very
grateful to Chancellor Merkel for visiting me at the hospital", Navalny wrote on his Twitter microblog on September 28.
At the same
time, the interlocutors of "Der Spiegel" called the visit top secret, without giving details of the meeting. The
publication considered this fact a sign of Merkel's loyalty to Navalny.
Earlier, the
German Chancellor called Navalny a victim of an attack carried out with a substance from the "Novichok" group.
The Russian
Foreign Ministry considered such statements by Berlin to be yet another information campaign against Russia, noting that
the accusations were not supported by facts.
Alexei Navalny
felt unwell during the Tomsk-Moscow flight on 20 August. The plane urgently landed in Omsk, the blogger was taken to the
emergency hospital No. 1, and later transported to the Charite clinic in Berlin,
Gazeta.ru
recalls.
There, the Russian "found" signs of intoxication with a substance
from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. However, Omsk doctors during the examination of the patient did not reveal
intoxication with this substance. On September 23, Navalny was discharged from the hospital.
So Merkel too
is part and parcel of the Navalny bullshit performance dreamt up by the US Dept. of State.
I wonder if
she "secretly" visited Yuschenko and Timoshenko and Verzilov when they were patients at the Charité
I should
hardly imagine so -- they are of no importance whatsoever when compared with the "leader of the Russian opposition",
albeit the Russians themselves consider the Bullshitter with the derision he deserves, but don't tell anyone in the
"free world" that!
Germany
seems to be collecting Eastern Europe's politicians. Timoshenko miraculously woke from her coronavirus coma, but I
cannot find information that says she was also at Charite.
EU green light
for merger suggests Franco-German pressure for 'champion' companies is paying off.
blah blah blah blah
The clearance
could become a precedent for other political mergers -- such as the Franco-Italian tie-up between cruise ship-builders
Fincantieri and Chantiers de l'Atlantique -- and the Commission will have to "limit the contagion," the first senior
official said.
And the Dane has to ensure the Polish champion keeps its promises .
####
Interesting if
you follow how the Brussels/EU is still struggling to adapt to the real world (i.e. outside the EU) rather than its own
bubble and dreams of a western led globalization, particularly it's failure to balance consumer protection with building
modern, EU based companies/organizations that can hold their own against other globocorps. It's where principles hit
reality.
But, I was
sure that there was something in the past about a possible Russian share in the Gdansk Lotos Refinery (I was wrong) but
I did come across this in looking for further information:
One of the
arguments for the thesis that Russians could enter the Polish market as a shareholder of one of the two biggest
refineries, is supposedly the fact that they are already present in Germany. However, it is worth reminding that they
slipped into Germany thanks to Venezuela's fondness towards Russian politics. Venezuela's late president Hugo Chavez
agreed for PDVSA, a state-owned oil company, to sell its shares in five German refineries to Russia's Rosneft. Since
then, Igor Sechin's concern has been trying to acquire the missing link – the retail market and gas stations. Despite
interventions, negotiations and investments, Russians have not achieved this goal yet. They have been trying to purchase
gas stations in Germany for a few years. This is the next natural step for any oil company that took over shares in a
refinery on a new market. After the success on the wholesale market, it wants to earn on the retail market by selling
its own oil products. However, nobody wants to sell Russians, in this case Rosneft, any gas stations despite the fact
they have been present on the market in Germany for years.
In January
2019, Rosneft Deutschland GmbH, Rosneft's daughter company, launched a trade and marketing business in Germany. Today it
purchases products from three German refineries in which it has shares
Why would Russians want to enter the Polish market? Poland is one of
the biggest importers of Russian oil. In 2019 PKN Orlen imported 8.3 m tons of oil from Russia, which makes it one of
the biggest importers of this fuel. By entering the Polish market, Russians could achieve synergy by acquiring 30
percent of shares in the refinery. However,
####
Plenty more at
the link.
So, it looks
like this merger is to bolster the lo-land of Po-lands energy position and protect the key refinery being picked up by
one means or another by Russia.
French
president heads to Lithuania and Latvia, where discussion will focus on Russia and Belarus.
"The so-called new architecture of security that France wants to
develop with Russia is sensitive for us, because it's a bilateral conversation discussing a multilateral issue," said a
Lithuanian government official ahead of Macron's visit
So far
Macron's team has played it coy, avoiding confirming that he will meet with Tikhanovskaya but not ruling it out either.
She has expressed her desire to meet with him
Western officials have stressed that they are not in competition
with Moscow over Belarus and Macron believes Russia has a role to play.
####
The €µ
'Failing at Home so preening abroad' PR campaign continues apace after his successful trip to Lebanon where he saved the
country from disaster. Except he didn't!
Le Coq soit
bloqué! (trans. 'cock block' ! 😉 )
What the f/k
does he think he can offer? Are the Balts and Russia going to be overawed with his garlic charm before he sleeps with
their wives (and husbands) before they all form a circle and hold hands merrily? No.
Yes, the only
thing that makes sense is a a grand strategic treaty between the EU and Russia, but when some of its own members are
actively undermining such a thing and playing with the Americans at the same time, you have to wonder what all the point
of this is? Simply 'Don't you forget about me'? Russia is not going to patiently wait for the EU to climb out of its own
hypocritical a**hole after years of sanctions and 'Do as we say, not as we do.'
The CFE Treaty
is not fit for purpose and the permanent rotation of NATO forces on Russia's borders drives a tank through it, however
clever they think this loophole is. By the time the EU is ready to talk properly and get off its high horse, the only
things it will have attached to its shoulders will be its own stubby little fingers, or should that be 'cut off its nose
to spite its face'? Just ridiculous!
Ha, ha,
haaaa!! 'Garlic charm' – I don't know if that was deliberate or accidental, but it's brilliant.
The Baltic
position on Russia is well-known, and you would not have to be much of a political wunderkind to figure out that the
Balts hope for a chance to shit all over any plans France might have that smack too much of rapprochement to suit
them. But there is no real danger Micron would proceed with any such plans even if he made them; he is a political
lightweight aching to duplicate the derring-do of Sarkozy. No political softening between Russia and Europe is
possible with the current crop of European leaders, as all are committed Atlanticists to some degree and in thrall to
Washington. They might pretend Washington is bullying them, but it hurts so good, daddy.
Lavrov has
already announced that Russia has given up on trying to get the west to like it, and acknowledges it is not possible.
Just like admitting you are an alcoholic – metaphorically speaking, I wasn't pointing at you personally -is the day
your recovery begins, resolving to dedicate no more Russian effort to wooing the western delinquents is the day the
west loses a shiny toy it loved to play with. Few moments were so satisfying as those dedicated to typing "Moscow
denies it!" after some new fabricated atrocity was thrown in Russia's face. I recommend a macro be built into all
Russian diplomatic computers' word-processor programs which reads, "Believe what you like. It is of no interest to
us. Oh, and your zipper is open. Made you look!!". The last two sentences are optional, but I think they lend a
certain
joie de vivre
.
Why the
German Chancellor visited the blogger at the hospital is not quite clear. After all, if German doctors are right
about "Novichok", then the head of the German Cabinet of Ministers, Bundeskanzlerin Merkel, seriously risked her
life.
Armen
Gasparyan* has suggested that the matter is due to the status of the patient from Russia -- after all, he is in
Germany as an official guest of the Chancellor. And what kind of guest is this, with whom the hospitable hostess does
not even meet?
So they
decided to support this fantasy about his status in Germany by following due protocol, but with a supposedly secret
visit, which secret the whole world immediately learnt about.
* Armen
Gasparyan works for a Russian media outlet Sputnik and, at the same time, is a member of Russia Today board. In
parallel, he is a member of Russian State Duma Youth Council and a holder of a prize from the Ministry of
Communications of the Russian Federation for his contribution towards developing radio communication.
In December
2018, the "Russian opposition" (that's the non-systemic opposition, mind you -- the ones that no one votes for) -- has
included Gasparyan in the list of "Putin's propagandists".
It might be
interesting to see what kind of deal would result from a process in which Russia has given up trying to be liked by
the west, and consequently examines each negotiation on its merits alone.
I think it might result in quite a few
initial offers being rebuffed with "Uh huh. Go fuck yourself." And that would be kind of refreshing. It might usher
in an international process between the two countries in which no 'deal' was possible until each side was satisfied
it had gotten the better of the other. I need hardly point out these would be few and far between, and none would be
arms-control agreements.
22 September 2020 13:18 What is known about Maria Pevchikh: Navalny's mysterious companion – connected with
his foreign customers?
The trail of Maria Pevchikh begins in London and seems to lead to the shadow curators of the
Anti-Corruption Foundation
If you believe that journalists have so far been able to unearth Navalny's mysterious
companion on his "last tour" in Siberia, Maria Pevchikh lives in a prestigious area of London
overlooking the Thames. But her old grandmother Valentina Vasilievna – in a modest
two-room apartment on the far outskirts of Moscow – in Zelenograd. Only now her
granddaughter does not visit her at all, although in recent years she has flown to Moscow 64
times.
"Komsomolskaya Pravda" went to all the addresses of Maria Pevchikh in Russia –
Zelenograd, Moscow State University, school, neighbours, relatives and colleagues at
FBK
and discovered that Pevchikh was not only Navalny's employee, but the conspiratorial
head of his investigation department, and, possibly, its curator from Western
customers.
LIKE A DETECTIVE Maria Pevchikh. A couple of weeks ago, this name was not known to anyone except to a
narrow circle of people. But now it has thundered all over the world. Now Pevchikh claims to
be an old and trusted employee of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (Navalny's main brainchild)
with almost 10 years of experience, who has had a hand in almost all of his landmark
investigations. But her name never flashed in the credits for the FBK video exposures . And
the opposition blogger's associates have never spoken about her anywhere.
So after the mysterious "poisoning" of Navalny on August 20, no one let slip the fact
that on the trip he was accompanied by a mysterious companion – 33-year-old Maria
Pevchikh. Perhaps Maria would have remained unnoticed if the transport police of the Siberian
Federal District had not found her name among those who were on that trip with the
oppositionist. And it turned out – what a coincidence – she was the only one of
the 6 members of Navalny's entourage in Siberia who was not interviewed: " Marina [sic}
Pevchikh, who permanently resides in Great Britain, on August 20, avoided giving
explanations. On August 22 the said citizen flew to Germany, and therefore it was not
possible to get an explanation from her", the police reported on September 11. That is, 3
weeks after the incident! Until that moment, there was complete silence about the existence
of Pevchikh.
But as soon as this name was sounded, something strange began to happen. More like a
detective story.
LOOKING FOR POLICE, LOOKING FOR JOURNALISTS
The name of the Pevchikh immediately became surrounded with rumours and speculation. Who is
she? Where from? FBK employees were stubbornly silent. There were only two mentions of
Pevchikh in open sources. First, how about a 9th grade student from Zelenograd gymnasium No.
1528 who took part in the international (!) "Gifted children" competition. The second (from
2010) on the website of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Moscow State University:
"Congratulations to Maria Pevchikh! The 5th year student has been selected as the head of the
Russian delegation at the G8 Youth Forum in Canada based on the results of the All-Russian
competition". And a photo of a smiling red-haired girl. And journalists also found the name
of the Pevchikh in the list of students at the prestigious London School of Economics and
Political Science.
A couple more blurry images from the Internet, where it is generally difficult to see
someone (supposedly in 2013, from a Moscow hotel, where Navalny had a secret meeting with the
ex-Prime Minister of Belgium). Well, Western journalists also recognized Maria as the woman
caught in the lenses of cameras in Berlin next to Navalny's wife Julia. True, everywhere the
"Pevchikhs" are in dark glasses and wearing a mask. From coronavirus or prying eyes? That, in
fact, is all.
We congratulate Maria Pevchikh!
Such mystery only spurred interest – who is this lady?
"Investigations" began – who Pevchikh was, overshadowing even the "poisoning" of
Navalny. And bit by bit the image of a certain secret agent was formed – a sort of
James Bond in a skirt. With reference to a source close to FBK, a Sherlock Holmes managed to
dig up from the Internet that Maria lives in a prestigious area of London overlooking Tower
Bridge. Owns a chain of bookstores in Britain. And she participates in competitions under the
US Special Forces program – "Navy Seals"!
And she is also a friend of Navalny's rivals and associates in the fight against the
"Russian regime" who have settled in London – Khodorkovsky, Chichvarkin, Ashurkov. But
bad luck – none of these figures in social networks have found a friend by the name of
Pevchikh. And in the photos that appear in their social networks, none of Maria is to be
seen.
Maria's story with social networks is generally amazing – they simply do not
exist! In the 21st century that is simply unthinkable for a young woman. Have you at least
one young woman acquaintance who has no Facebook or Instagram page, or who is in at least in
Odnoklassniki or VKontakte? Quite!
Experts believe that such secrecy is one of the sure signs that a person is related to
the special services. They – both in Russia and abroad – do not welcome the
publicity of their employees on social networks.
However, Major General of the FSB in reserve Alexander Mikhailov admits that she might
be playing a two-sided gamey:
"Apparently, this person leads a double life and, on the one hand, creates turbulence
around her activities in the same social networks, but on the other hand, she does not want
to attract personal attention to herself. I think this woman may have accounts, but under
assumed names. Because it is impossible to imagine that she works in such a field and does
not use modern technologies at all."
HER FATHER IS A SCIENTIST AND WORKS WITH VIRUSES
But a page on the social network has turned out to belong to Pevchikh's father
Konstantin. No one has any doubts that he is Maria's father – both are registered in
the same apartment in Zelenograd. And Konstantinovna is Maria's patronymic. At the same time,
there is no Maria Pevchikh even in his photo or in subscribers! But there is information that
he is the general director of the Zelenograd NIOBIS LLC, which is engaged in research in the
field of virology. At the same time, he is developing the SkinPort system of painless (say,
invisible) drug delivery through the skin. Which is also a very suspicious circumstance, when
his daughter accompanies an oppositionist, who was either injected or not with some kind of
poison. So much so that he only knew he had been poisoned when he began to feel bad.
There is not much information about NIOBIS either. In the magazine "Zelenograd
Entrepreneur" of October 2011, there is an interview with the leaders of the company Grishin
and Morozov (Pevchikh even then did not communicate with journalists for some reason). In it,
they declare that the NIOBIS biological laboratory is a joint project of the Probe Microscopy
and Nanotechnology Research and Education Centre and the Zelenograd Nanotechnology Centre.
However, in these centres, no matter how many times we called, they did not tell us anything
about NIOBIS, switching from one employee to another. At the legal address in Moscow on
Viktorenko Street, we did not find any information.
Interestingly, the British tabloids could not find Pevchikh either. In search of at
least some information, British journalists began to call Russia, former and current FBK
employees.
"British journalists contacted me and found out at least some information about Maria
Pevchikh", Vitaly Serukanov, the former deputy head of Navalny's Moscow headquarters and
lawyer of his foundation, told KP. "This suggests that not only we in Russia do not
understand what kind of person she is, but, apparently, the British themselves are not clear
about what kind of activities she is involved with. Even they have nothing concrete to go
on.
Of course, rumours immediately spread that Maria Pevchikh was a spy. Some even stated
it openly:
"She is an undercover British intelligence agent with MI6", political scientist
Vladislav Rogimov believes. "My source, a former high-ranking official of the Stasi [GDR
Ministry of State Security] , immediately stated this. And Pevchikh supplied Navalny with
information about the targets of his investigations, such that an ordinary person cannot
get."
A couple more blurry shots from the Internet, where it is generally difficult to see
anyone
MSU AND COLLEGE
Strange, but none of the graduates of those years could remember the outstanding student who
glorified the faculty during her studies by becoming the leader of a youth
delegation.
"Well, I seem to remember Maria – such a bright girl. We crossed paths with her
in the hostel. She loved rock music and knew English well", Svetlana Cherezova, a graduate of
the social faculty in 2009, told KP. [American rock music, the chief weapon of US soft
power! Rock music is the bane of modern society! -- ME 😦 ]
"And how did you realise that she knows a foreign language?"
"In the summer, foreign students were settled in the hostel. And she communicated well
with them. But after that I somehow didn't see her "
Another graduate of the social faculty recalled the Pevchikh, but also only vaguely.
"Yes, she studied with us. Smart, open like that. But that's all I remember about
her."
And in the Zelenograd gymnasium №1528 Maria Pevchikh was not remembered at all. Even
by the old-timers who have been working at the school for over 30 years.
"No, we didn't have a student with that last name."
HEAD, ABOUT WHOM NO ONE KNEW ANYTHING Even after journalists had found out that Pevchikh has been an FBK employee since 2011,
Navalny's fund employees remained silent about her. No statements! None at all.
And only on September 15, when Navalny came to his senses, and journalists and
political analysts said in unison that Pevchikh herself could have organized his "poisoning",
the FBK employees, as if on command "from above", began to urgently divert suspicions from
her, turning everything into a joke and publishing pictures of themselves with her. Georgy
Alburov, who had previously called himself the head of the FBK investigation department,
suddenly revealed his real boss to the world yes, Pevchikh:
"I have been working with Maria in the Investigation Department for 8 years and for
about 7 of them we constantly joked about some kind of martial art that she went to a couple
of times. They teach how to fight off drunken men with the help of a hundred different
techniques of hitting in the groin (we laugh at this). Our office wiretap also failed to
remember the name, and now Maria is featured in the media as 'a martial arts master trained
under the US Army SEAL program'. It's funny. And it's not funny that now all her relatives
are hunted by the Prigozhin gangster 'media' (and the British ones are also "Prigozhin
gangsters", yes, George? – author) . Not for the poisoners of Alexei, but for
Maria's 85-year-old grandmother. We shall remember this and shall not forget. And I wish my
fighting friend (and boss) fortitude and courage."
Georgy Alburov, who had previously called himself the head of the FBK investigation
department, suddenly revealed his real boss to the world. Photo: http://www.instagram.com/alburov
On the same day, FBK lawyer Lyubov Sobol also published a photo of herself with Maria:
"I know Masha as an honest and decent person. To suggest that she may have been involved in
the poisoning of Navalny complete bullshit and a smokescreen to distract attention".
And not a word about why for so long all as one "fighters against corruption" were
silent about the existence of Pevchikh and the fact that she was on a trip with Navalny in
Siberia.
BUT WHAT ABOUT GRANDMA?
And Maria Pevchikh's grandmother really lives in Zelenograd. Not far from the local forest
park. Here, apparently, the "Prigozhin gangster media" had been hunting for her.
In general, it is strange that an employee of the investigation department, who herself
"hunts" for the targets of Navalny's revelations and for these targets' relatives as well,
was outraged that journalists began to visit all possible addresses associated with Maria.
What would have happened if the "Navalnyites" themselves had not hidden her existence hardly
anyone could have "crossed her grandma's threshold", because nobody had seen her there for a
long time: she dwelt elsewhere.
"Yes, I know Valentina Vasilievna. Our children studied together, in the same school.
My son and her Kostya", a neighbour told the KP correspondent on the street at the entrance.
"She lived here just like me since the construction of the house, since 1982. But I haven't
seen her for a long time, although I had met her all the time before. She seems to be still
working".
"At 85 years of age?"
"Why 85? She is 84".
"And what does she do? "
"Earlier, I believe, she was at Mikron [manufacturer of integrated circuits –
author] . Where now, I do not know".
"Her son often turns up here? "
"No, I haven't seen him for a long time.
And her granddaughter Maria?
"Oh, I did not know that she has a granddaughter! I have never seen her."
No other neighbours remembered Masha Pevchikh, even from the photo. Although she, as
the media has already dug up, in recent years flew to Moscow at least 64 times, but here,
with her grandmother, she has not appeared. At least, neighbours have never came across
her.
"I AM SO FUCKING AWESOME" .
And only ABOUT a month after the "poisoning" of Navalny, when suspicions about Maria Pevchikh
had reached their peak, she herself gave an interview for some reason to the BBC, and not to
the Russian media. "I am the head of the investigation department at FBK. I was recruited by
an ad (in 2011), as they say. If you've seen our investigations on Navalny's channel, then I
have this or that relationship." Maria explained her incognito state in one phrase: "It was
my personal choice and desire to avoid publicity". But at the same time: "Absolutely everyone
in the office knew me. A huge number of people from the journalistic environment knew me.
Therefore, the fact that I am somehow connected with FBK is a secret only for a very wide
audience."
Investigations about herself were ridiculed by Pevchikh (a professional technique when
it is impossible to refute, but it is necessary to object): "This is absolutely ridiculous. I
read about myself and thought: Damn, how fucking awesome I am".
About the her scientist father: "Some creepy, crazy story has been made up about my
father, with whom I have not communicated for 15 years – my parents are divorced. And
he is portrayed as almost a key figure in all that has happened".
But Maria gave a lot and of details about what happened in Tomsk, about how boldly she,
together with others, rushed into Navalny's room in order to collect "evidence" –
bottles of water. She confirmed that she flew to Germany on the same aircraft as did Navalny
and took those bottles out of the hotel to the West and on which German experts found traces
of "poison". True, she did not explain why she had not y taken sheets and towels, because
poison can be both solid and gaseous. The discerning Pevchikh's' suspicions fell only on
liquid.
Maria tossed a few of her pictures to the BBC and a portion, apparently to dilute the
avaricious photos that the media was chewed on.
Talking about everything and yet . . . again about nothing. Also a professional
reception?
SECRET BRITISH FBK CURATOR
"When they began asking me about Maria Pevchikh, I also could not immediately understand who
it was", Vitaly Serukanov, an FBK employee in 2013-2017, told KP. "But then I remembered that
I first noticed her (although I had probably seen her many times, but had not paid any
attention to her) in 2016. It was surprising to me that Navalny, who always kept his distance
from his employees, behaved in a special way with her. With respectful reverence. As if they
were of the same rank, as if they were of the the same position. This is generally strange
and did not fit into the paradigm of his behaviour. That is to say, Maria is a person who
appeared sometimes, but who had to be respected. My personal opinion is that she is a liaison
agent between Navalny and foreign customers. The person who brought the invoice and, at the
right time, audited the investigation department, supervised its work. Such as , you know, a
British auditor who is always lurking in the shadows.
"Pevchikh told the BBC that she actually ran Navalny's investigation
department.
"I have been saying for a long time that the FBK investigation department "headed by
the talented Alburov" was a screen that does not represent anything. Alburov is just a drone
driver who provides a naive Russian man in the street with a picture: "You see, we are not
foreign agents. Our investigation department is here". In fact, there is no talented Alburov.
And there are people like Maria Pevchikh who flock to Russia to promote the interests of
their Russian and Western masters. That's all, no matter how tough it sounds.
"That is, all this hidden lifestyle, lack of social networks and photos are part of
this opera?
"Absolutely!"
But you had some corporate parties, meetings at FBK. How did it happen that for
almost 10 years Pevchikh never got into the frame?
"She very professionally avoided attracting attention to herself. Never hit the lens.
And I'm sure the rest of the people made sure that this did not happen. At the same time, FBK
is a special society where everyone wants to become a media and popular person. There are
even internal competitions to see who is more popular on social media. The same was always
demanded by Navalny. His main postulate in politics was: "I am absolutely open. I have no
secrets. " But it turns out there are! Suddenly, a certain Pevchikh is presented to the
world, who has never even been registered in the fund and who lives on an unbelievable
income. All the stories about her business are just a way to legalize her financial situation
– like 'I'm such an ordinary simpleton from Britain'. Who's going to believe
that?
And they would hide Pevchikh further. But she was so very much lit up in this story
with the "poisoning" that they had no other choice. I was really amused how all these clowns,
such as Alburov and Sobol, on command, simultaneously began to upload their prepared photos
of Pevchikh. It's funny. Why did they hide her before? Refused to answer questions about her?
And then they burst through at once. Received instructions to bring Pevchikh out into the
light so as to ward off the threat from her? All this suggests that Pevchikh knows more than
we can ever imagine. The story is a real detective one. Even a spy one. It's very interesting
what will happen next.
She is almost too perfect; a daddy who is both a virologist and a developer of a means of
delivering a drug through the skin without a needle or any sensation likely to be noticed,
leader of the effort to collect 'evidence' in the hotel room – an effort surprising in
its thoroughness in that they thought to take a lawyer with them and yet still made it before
the hotel had begun to clean the room, and a young woman with no social media presence when
they normally cannot powder their noses without Facebooking it. Add to that the full-court
press by the Navalnyites to ridicule any possibility she might be involved; especially Sobol,
who as a lawyer herself would be able to more accurately appraise the weight of mounting
coincidences.
But you went too far when you spat on American rock music. I will grant that at least half
of it is crap, but America is the cradle of rock, more so than the UK. Your punishment is to
listen to Joan Jett and the Blackhearts do "I Hate Myself for Loving You" on a volume at
least 8 and preferably all the way over. This is a fine example of the genre, one I used to
play for the little 'un when she actually was a little 'un, to show her that women can do
anything.
"Then there are the Chinese. OK, they really are communists, but who is it that has
bought into the nonsense about them oppressing poor, innocent, religious head choppers? Who
cares even if those lies were true? Yep, that's millennial morons."
Actually it was the USG through funding of various think tanks and NGOs that started the
whole fiasco with the MSM pushing the narrative. You know people with power in established
organizations, who tend to be much older. I wouldn't blame the people at the bottom so much for
the decisions made at the top.
Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt
influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift
U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's
confidence in our democratic process."
What America is yet again conniving to do is to discredit any domestic political dissent
against the fraud of "American Democracy" by connecting this dissent to those nations that
are the latest targets of America's Two Minutes of Hate campaign.
This is a standard American tactic that the USA always resorts to when it fears its own
citizens are starting to question the fairy tale of American "Democracy and Freedom." Thus,
during the Cold War, the USA even to discredit some elements of the Civil Rights movement as
being assets of the Soviet Union.
The great Orwellian hypocrisy of America's pants-wetting complaints that other countries
are meddling in America's (fake) democracy is that the United States itself is guilty of
regime changing, balkanizing, and colonizing scores of foreign nations dating back over a
century to the USA's regime change and eventual colonization of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Bottom Line: America needs to drink a big up of Shut the F*ck Up with its pathetic Pity
Party whining about foreigners trying to influence its bogus democracy.
The US is ruthlessly waging an intense Hybrid War on Russian energy interests in Europe by
targeting the Eurasian Great Power's relevant projects in Germany, Belarus, and Bulgaria,
banking on the fact that even the partial success of this strategy would greatly advance the
scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's transatlantic
allies.
The Newest Front In The New Cold War
The New
Cold War is heating up in Europe after the US intensified its Hybrid
War on Russian interests there over the past two months. This proxy conflict is being
simultaneously waged in Germany, Belarus, and Bulgaria, all three of which are key transit
states for Russian energy exports to the continent, which enable it to maintain at least some
influence there even during the worst of times. The US, however, wants to greatly advance the
scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's transatlantic
allies which would allow America to reassert its unipolar hegemony there even if this campaign
is only partially successful. This article aims to explore the broad contours of the US'
contemporary Hybrid War strategy on Russian energy in Europe, pointing out how recent events in
those three previously mentioned transit states are all part of this larger
plan.
Germany
From north to south, the first and largest of these targets is Germany, which is nowadays
treating Russian anti-corruption blogger Navalny. The author accurately predicted
in late August that "intense pressure might be put upon the authorities by domestic politicians
and their American patrons to politicize the final leg of Nord Stream II's construction by
potentially delaying it as 'punishment to Putin'", which is exactly what's happening after
Berlin signaled that it might rethink its commitment to this energy project. America isn't all
to blame, however, since Germany ultimately takes responsibility for its provocative statements
to this effect. Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, published a
thought-provoking piece titled " Russian-German Relations: Back To The Future " about
how bilateral relations will drastically change in the aftermath of this incident. It's concise
and well worth the read for those who are interested in this topic.
Belarus
The next Hybrid War target is Belarus , which the
author has been tracking for half a decade already. After failing to convince Lukashenko to
break off ties with Russia after this summer's Wagner incident, a Color Revolution was then
hatched to overthrow him so that his replacements can turn the country into another Ukraine
insofar as it relates to holding Russian energy exports to Europe hostage. The end goal is to
increase the costs of Russian resources so that the US' own become more competitive by
comparison. Ultimately, it's planned that Russian pipelines will be phased out in the
worst-case scenario, though this would happen gradually since Europe can't immediately replace
such imports with American and other ones. "Losing" Belarus, whether on its own or together
with Nord Stream II, would deal a heavy blow to Russia's geopolitical interests. Countries like
Germany wouldn't have a need to maintain cordial relations with it, thus facilitating a
possible "decoupling".
That's where Bulgaria could become the proverbial "icing on the cake". Turkish Stream is
expected to transit through this Balkan country en route to Europe, but the latest
anti-government protests there threaten to topple the government, leading to worries that
its replacement might either politicize or suspend this project. Azerbaijan's TANAP and the
Eastern Mediterranean's GRISCY pipelines
might help Southeastern Europe compensate for the loss of Russian resources, though the latter
has yet to be constructed and is only in the planning stages right now. Nevertheless,
eliminating Turkish Stream from the energy equation (or at the very least hamstringing the
project prior to replacing/scrapping it) would deal a death blow to Russia's already very
limited Balkan influence. Russia would then be practically pushed out of the region, becoming
nothing more than a distant cultural-historical memory with close to no remaining political
influence to speak of.
Economic Warfare
The overarching goal connecting these three Hybrid War fronts isn't just to weaken Russia's
energy interests, but to replace its current role with American and other industry competitors.
The US-backed and Polish-led " Three Seas Initiative
" is vying to become a serious player in the strategic Central & Eastern European space,
and it can achieve a lot of its ambitions through the construction of new LNG and oil terminals
for facilitating America's plans. In addition, artificially increasing the costs of Russian
energy imports through political means related to these Hybrid Wars could also reduce Russia's
revenue from these sources, which presently account for 40%
of its budget . Considering that Russia's in the midst of a systemic economic transition
away from its disproportionate budgetary dependence on energy, this could hit Moscow where it
hurts at a sensitive time.
The Ball's In Berlin's Court
The linchpin of Russia's defensive strategy is Germany, without whose support all of
Moscow's energy plans stand zero chance of succeeding. If Germany submits to the US on one,
some, or all three of these Hybrid War fronts in contravention of its natural economic
interests, then it'll be much easier for America to provoke a comprehensive "decoupling"
between Russia and Europe. It's only energy geopolitics that allows for both sides to maintain
some sense of cooperation despite the US-encouraged sanctions regime against Russia after its
reunification with Crimea and thus provides an opportunity for improving their relations
sometime in the future. Sabotaging Russia's energy interests there would thus doom any
realistic prospects for a rapprochement between them, but the ball's in Berlin's court since it
has the chance to say no to the US and ensure that the German-Russian Strategic Partnership
upholds Europe's strategic autonomy across the present century.
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT
MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
Concluding Thoughts
For as much as cautiously optimistic as many in the Alt-Media Community might
be that the US' Hybrid War on Russian energy in Europe will fail, the facts paint a much more
sobering picture which suggests that at least one of these plots will succeed. Should that
happen, then the era of energy geopolitics laying the foundation for Russian-European relations
will soon draw to a close, thereby facilitating the US' hoped-for "decoupling" between them,
causing budgetary difficulties for Moscow at the moment when it can least afford to experience
such, and pushing the Eurasian Great Power's strategic attention even further towards Asia. The
last-mentioned consequence will put more pressure on Russia to perfect its "balancing"
act between China and India , which could potentially be a double-edged sword that makes it
more relevant in Asian geopolitical affairs but also means that one wrong move might seriously
complicate its
21st-century grand strategy .
If you look at the three countries mentioned Belarus will likely be absorbed by Russia
sooner rather than later. The push for this is underway looking at meetings taking place. For
Bulgaria the US is far away and has no power to stop the Turks. It is the Turks the
Bulgarians fear, with a lot of reasons, their surest way of keeping out of the Turks clutches
is to look to Russia for support. Unfortunately the USA has an appalling track record of
betraying countries, ask Libya.
The Germans have no choice but take the Russian gas, economically, socially and for
strategic reasons. The truly big fear for the US is a German/Russian bloc. German and Russian
technology with unrivaled resources. That is the future super power if they are pushed
together, something that is very likely if we see a major economic contraction in the next
few years.
Mustahattu , 4 hours ago
The US fear of an Eurasian alliance. The US fear Europe will create a Silicon Valley of
the future. The US fear the Euro will replace the dollar as a reserve currency. The US fear
Russia will become a superpower. The US fear China. There's a lot to fear yankee dear...cos
it's all gonna happen.
Hope Copy , 1 hour ago
RUSSIA is content with 45 and 25nm as it can be hardened.. 14 and especially 7nm is so
that the **** will wear out..
Ace006 , 2 hours ago
Instead of fretting about how this or that country or bloc will become a/an _________
superpower the US could focus on regaining its former pre-eminence.
It's a crazy thought, I know, but
moving a massive amount of industrial capacity to China and fueling the rise of a
communist country just might have been a bad idea and
thrashing about in the international arena like a rutting rhinoceros at huge expense
makes us look foolish and, in the case of Syria, petty and vindictive.
Repairing the damage from the former and stopping the hemorrhage of money and reputation
respectively would be a far better objective than playing Frankenstein in Libya, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Iran, Poland, N. Korea, and Venezuela, inter alia .
Mexico is a failed state right on our border that contributes mightily to our immigration,
cultural, and political problems. But, no, the puffed up, prancing morons who make US policy
can summon the imagination to figure out how to help our very own neighbors deal with their
hideous problems. No. Let's engage in regime change and "nation building" in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Belarus.
The words of the great Marcus Aurelius are on point: "Within ten days thou wilt seem a god
to those to whom thou art now a beast and an ape, if thou wilt return to thy principles and
the worship of reason."
Herodotus , 1 hour ago
Bulgaria must return to the protection of the Ottoman Empire.
yerfej , 4 hours ago
Easy solution, end NATO. Just have all US forces told to leave the EU and let them
determine their own destiny. Then do the same with US forces in the ME, Japan, Korea, etc.
EVERYONE would be better off, including US taxpayers which get nothing out of the useless
overseas deployment of resources which could be better spent at home.
yojimbo , 3 hours ago
5% budget deficit, 5% military spending. Leave the world, drop 4.5% of the spending and
either save money, or build infrastructure. It's so simple, I am disappointed Trump doesn't
at least state it. I get he is limited by the system, and can't be a Cincinnatus, even if he
wanted to, but he has his First Amendment.. though I grant him a personal fear of being
Kennedied!
Bac Si , 2 hours ago
Howdy Yerfej. It sounds like you are all for Isolationism.
But Isolationism means different things to different people. Pre WW2, Isolationism in the
US meant selling our products to hostile countries. In the case of Japan, oil to help them
kill Chinese people. In the case of Germany and Italy, food and vehicles to help them conquer
all of Europe.
Considering the ridiculous education that the US gives its children, it's no wonder that
most Americans don't know much about history (I say that in general terms, not to you
specifically). Henry Ford senior not only received the 'Grand Cross of the German Eagle' from
Adolf Hitler in 1938, he also received a 'Congressional Medal' from the US Congress shortly
after WW2 – and for the same reason. Selling trucks to help the war effort.
Even after Pearl Harbor, there were politically powerful Isolationists that did not want
the US to get involved in WW2. Why? Because a lot of money was at stake. It still is. These
same people will continue to argue for Isolationism even after we are attacked.
Two months AFTER Pearl Harbor, FDR made a speech that included this:
"Those Americans who believed that we could live under the illusion of isolationism wanted
the American eagle to imitate the tactics of the ostrich. Now, many of those same people,
afraid that we may be sticking our necks out, want our national bird to be turned into a
turtle. But we prefer to retain the eagle as it is – flying high and striking hard. I
know that I speak for the mass of the American people when I say that we reject the turtle
policy and will continue increasingly the policy of carrying the war to the enemy in distant
lands and distant waters – as far away as possible from our own home grounds." –
FDR
This radical change in our foreign policy has never been explained or even referred to in
US history books. Powerful economic forces will always love the idea of "Open Trade
Isolationism". But if Isolationism is ever suddenly defined by not doing business with any
hostile government – those powerful forces will go ballistic. They will strongly lobby
against 'Economic Warfare'. In other words, they will always want to make lots of money by
selling their products to hostile governments, no matter how many people die.
Want a great example?
Right after Loral Corporation CEO Bernard L. Schwartz donated a million dollars to the
DNC, President Clinton authorized the release of ballistic missile technology to China so
Loral could get their satellites into space fast and at low cost. Those same missiles, and
their nuclear warheads, are now pointed at the US.
The argument has always been that if we trade with hostile governments, they will grow to
like us. Does anyone out there believe that if the UK and France gave pre WW2 Germany an
extra $20 billion in trade, Germany wouldn't have started WW2? Anyone with a brain would tell
you that Germany would have put those resources into their military (like China has been
doing) and WW2 would have started earlier.
Yerfej, if we brought back the Cold War organization called the Coordinating Committee for
Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), I would be all for Isolationism. President Clinton got
rid of it in his first year, and Western weapons technology has been threatening us ever
since.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 5 hours ago
You have to love the dynamic duo of "lie, cheat and steal" Pompeo and his "mob boss"
Trump. There is absolutely no subtlety in their obvious shakedown tactics.
PrivetHedge , 4 hours ago
The mob had far more honor, and better morals.
PrivetHedge , 4 hours ago
Washington's transatlantic allies...
Hahahah, occupied vassals.
Washington has cost Germany a massive slice of GDP.
you_do , 4 hours ago
Yankee has plenty of problems at home.
Rest of the world can decide their own energy policy.
They do not suffer from the 'Russia' propaganda.
geno-econ , 5 hours ago
Let Russia, the lowest cost energy producer win energy competition in Europe as China, the
lowest cost manufacturing producer is winning in America. Only difference is retailers,
shippers, assembly part importers such as auto, electronics and appliance makers are making a
profit and consumer gets lower prices. We should let others decide for themselves and stop
meddling----only result will be a bloody nose
you_do , 4 hours ago
Yankee has plenty of problems at home.
Rest of the world can decide their own energy policy.
They do not suffer from the 'Russia' propaganda.
geno-econ , 5 hours ago
Let Russia, the lowest cost energy producer win energy competition in Europe as China, the
lowest cost manufacturing producer is winning in America. Only difference is retailers,
shippers, assembly part importers such as auto, electronics and appliance makers are making a
profit and consumer gets lower prices. We should let others decide for themselves and stop
meddling----only result will be a bloody nose
free-energy , 4 hours ago
Notice how everything the US does around the world is a WAR. War on Energy, War on Drugs,
War on Birth Control, War War War... America will fall after 2020 if nothing changes for the
better. Every year the world grows more and more tired of the US bs and moves further away
from it. Its so bad that they choose to deal with a communist country over us.
You reap what you've sowed.
Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago
The Anglo American parasite pirate gangsters keep barking on about Russia bad, China bad,
but I look around and I see nothing but these trouble makers waging war on anything they
cannot control. The US and UK are devil nations. They will deserve all the rot they have
coming their way.
Unknown User , 5 hours ago
Trump wants a trade balance with all major economies like Germany and China. If they don't
buy from us, he will have to raise tariffs. In case of Germany, they need nothing from us so
he wants them to buy US LNG. Merkel's position is that "there is a cheap Russian gas", while
Trump is telling her "no there isn't one".
Pumpinfe , 4 hours ago
So trump loves to deep throat Russia but give Germany a hard time to Nordstream 2? Wake up
fanboys, your hero is a ******. I got so much money invested in gazprom. LNG is junk and
gazprom (Russian owned) is gona crush LNG and trump and his idiot following can't do a damn
thing. You trump idiots will believe anything. Let me enlighten you...gazprom is the lowest
cost producer of natural gas in the world...go look at the difference between gazprom and LNG
and then you will realize that orange dump is an idiot along with his army of empty heads. Oh
and if you think China and Russia are not friendly, go look up the Power of Siberia pipeline.
That will give you a good sense of the relationship between Russia and China. America is
rotting from the inside and Russia and China are eating their popcorn watching it happen.
Dabooda , 3 hours ago
I don't see Trump deep-throating anyone but Netanyahu. Sans gratuitous insults, your
comment about Gazprom is spot on
Lokiban , 5 hours ago
I doubt Merkel will give in. She would commit political suicide if she did that. She knows
Navalny is a US effort to stop Nordstream 2.
What is the alternative? Buying gas from the US or US-controlled oilfields in Iraq and Syria?
Putin might have a say in that.
Lokiban , 5 hours ago
I doubt Merkel will give in. She would commit political suicide if she did that. She knows
Navalny is a US effort to stop Nordstream 2.
What is the alternative? Buying gas from the US or US-controlled oilfields in Iraq and Syria?
Putin might have a say in that.
thurstjo63 , 3 hours ago
The main fault in Mr Korybko's thinking is that he believes that European countries will
not just shoot themselves in the foot but in the head to appease the US. At a european and
local level, those who wanted Nord Stream 2 to be suspended or killed have failed. The costs
are way too high. For that we can thank, perversely, the agreements associated with
protecting investments from political decisions pushed by the US itself!!! Given that there
is no proof of Navalny being poisoned, Germany knows that there is no way that they could
hope to win their case for stopping Nord Stream 2 in a tribunal with persons capable of
rational thought. That is why they made the deal to buy some US liquified gas for a couple of
billion dollars. Because that is the cheapest way of extricating themselves from this
situation. Otherwise, they are looking at orders of magnitude more compensation to russian
and european firms for stopping the pipeline.
As for Belarus, barring Lukashenko doing something profoundly stupid like reacting
violently to protests, that ship has already sailed. Protests are smaller every week and
mainly on the weekend as now the "opposition" has been publishing people's profiles accusing
them of collaborating with the government without any proof, leading to innocent people and
their families to be threatened. There will be a transition from Lukashenko over the next
couple of years but you can be sure that the present "opposition" given their desire to break
away from Russia will not be part of the group that comes to power in the future since their
base of support diminishes every week.
Finally Bulgaria already shot themselves in the foot when they backed out of South Stream
and had major problems securing energy resources to meet its needs during the intervening
period. Radev as any politician wanting to stay in office knows, if he doesn't go through
with connecting Turk Stream to the rest of Europe that he might as well resign. So unless the
US has compromising information on him that can force him from office or the Radev's
administration doesn't control the US attempts to create the conditions for a colour
revolution in Bulgaria, it is definitely not going to happen.
I'm sorry but Mr. Korybko is wrong on all counts!
Savvy , 4 hours ago
When the US backed Georgia's violent incursion into S Ossetia it took Russia one day to
send them back.
Russians are slow to saddle but ride fast.
Joiningupthedots , 2 hours ago
That was with the remnants of the old Soviet Army too.
The new Russian Army is an entirely different beast in both organisation, training,
experience and equipment.
Decoupling Russia from EU, is re-enforcing the Eurasia bloc...where is the future of the
world.
Russia belongs to Europa...not the USA.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 4 hours ago
Geographically Europe and Asia are one continent. It was "European exceptionalism" (the
precursor to American Exceptionalism) that divided it as an ethno-cultural construct.
researchfix , 5 hours ago
Cancelling NS2 will chase the German industry into Russia. Cheap energy, moderate wages,
Eurasian market at the front steps.
The sheep and their ex working places and Mutti will stay in Germany.
Bobby Farrell Can Dance , 3 hours ago
Do Germans want to be slaves of these abject Brits and Americans? Pffffft....gas from
Russia is a NO BRAINER.
Only British and Americans rats do not like that idea. How un-selfish then, it is for
these jealous, insecure morons to dictate to Germany how she should trade. That's called
outright meddling. These imperialists are like entitled Karens, they think the world owes
them favours at the snap of a finger.
Sandmann , 4 hours ago
Nordstream 2 has an add-on leg to UK. Germany is largest gas importer on earth and cannot
run its industry without gas imports from Russia. LNG is simply too expensive unless US
taxpayers subsidise it.
If US wants to destabilise Europe it will reap the consequences. Southern Europe depends
on gas from North Africa - Portugal generates electricity from Maghreb Pipeline to Spain from
Algeria via Morocco. Erdogan hopes to put Turkey in position of supplying gas to Europe.
Germany will not abandon Nordstream 2 but might abandon USA first.
Max21c , 3 hours ago
The US is ruthlessly waging an intense Hybrid War on Russian energy interests in Europe
by targeting the Eurasian Great Power's relevant projects in Germany, Belarus, and
Bulgaria, banking on the fact that even the partial success of this strategy would greatly
advance the scenario of an externally provoked "decoupling" between Moscow and Washington's
transatlantic allies.
It's a petty game and when it fails then the Washingtonians credibility and legitimacy
just further erodes. The EU needs the energy supplies and the Russian Federation has the
supplies. It's all just short term & small gain silliness by a pack of freaks in
Washington DC and their freaks in the CIA, Thunk Tank freaks and freaks in the foreign policy
establishment. It's just more of the Carnival sideshow/freakshow put on by Washingtonians. As
usual if it's a Washingtonian (post Cold War) policy then there's little or no substance
behind it and you can be sure it hasn't be thought through thoroughly and it'll eventually
turn and boomerang back on the circus people in Washington, Ivy League circus people, and
JudeoWASP elite circus people, CIA circus clowns and circus clowns in the Thunk Tonks and
elites Fareign Poolicy ***-tablishment.
John Hansen , 3 hours ago
If all it takes is a Navaly hoax to cause this Europe isn't really worth dealing with.
propaganda_reaper , 3 hours ago
Once upon a time, a revolution occurred in a country through which passed a gas pipeline.
The bad guys were vanquished. And the very good foreign guys who helped the local good guys
defeat the tyrant said: "We got the same stuff, but liquid."
Any similarity with fictitious events or characters was purely coincidental.
Remember the Gas to Europe still flows through the Ukraine. Russia just needs to reduce
the gas Pressure and blame the Ukraine and Europe goes cold and Dark.
German People will beg for Nordstream 2 to be switched on.
lucitanian , 31 minutes ago
That's not the way Russia works. But it's the kind of blackmail that the US uses. And
that's why Russia is a more dependable partner for Europe for energy.
Hope Copy , 1 hour ago
This **** goes right back to the 'DeepState' pseudo-revolution that got the Nicky-the-weak
killed ,because he financed his railroads and wanted to be rich as hell as he perceived the
ENGLISH monarchy to be, with a parliamentary DUMA that he could over rule if need be. I have
looked 'DeepState' right in the eyes when I was young and dumb and was told that I would
never go to their masion.. Nicky had family enemies. and the Czech fighting force was never
going to save him.. Stalin was also double-crossed, but was well informed.. it was in his
sector if one reads and believes. Cunning fox Stalin was, always playing those under him to
do his bidding.. and that lesson has been well learned by a couple of the world's leaders in
this day-in-age...
Herodotus , 1 hour ago
German manufacturing costs must be driven higher to take the heat off of the UK as they
emerge from the EU and attempt to become competitive.
novictim , 1 hour ago
When "War" is actually not war but trade policy and financial incentives then you know you
are engaged in dangerous bloviations and hyperbole.
When the shooting starts, then you can talk of War.
SuperareDolo , 2 hours ago
Russia might not want to fight these attempts to isolate it from the western economy. The
collateral damage will be that much less, once Babylon the great finally falls.
LoveTruth , 2 hours ago
And US claims to be a "Fair Player," caring for freedom and democracy, while twisting arms
and supporting corrupted officials.
IronForge , 3 hours ago
PetroUSD, MIC, Colonial Control of Vassals. World Domination Play by the Hegemony.
Just like the Policies of NATO: Russians Out, Germans Down, Anglo-American-ZioMasons and
Vatican_Vassals In.
Policies were like this - Sponsored by Anglo-ZioMasons from Pre-WWI, continued through
WWII and the First Cold War, and onwards after the Collapse of the SUN and the ensuing NeoCon
Wolfowitz Doctrine and PNAC7/Bush-Cheney PetroUSD Plans.
The Hegemony Control MENA Energy Producers. The IRQ-KWT War were mishandled; and KSA
demanded for the USA to Smite IRQ. The Initial War and Occupation prompted Hussein to opt the
EUR for Petroleum, which Brought about the End of Hussein through the 9-11/PNAC7 Long
War.
LBY opted for the Au-Dinar for Petroleum; and were Fail-Stated. IRN and RUS remain the
only Major Energy Producers not Controlled by the Hegemony.
IRN were Sanctioned since removing the Shackles of Hegemonic Occupancy via Shah Par Levi;
and attempts for Energy Diversification via Nuclear means raised suspicions of Nuclear
Weapons Development - prompting for heavier Sanctions and 5thColumn Regime Change Operations
by the Hegemony. IRN circumvented Sanctions in part by selling their Petroleum via Major
Currencies and Barter. Though many Countries have reduced or maintained their purchase of IRN
Petroleum via Sanctions Protocols, CHN are involved in Purchasing IRN's Output.
RUS, another Target of Ruin, Plunder, and Occupational Exploitation by the Hegemony, were
Too Large a Country with Standing Armed Forces for Direct Military Invasion by the Hegemony.
After the Collapse of the SUN, The Harvard/Chicago led Economic Reforms ended in Plunder -
which prompted the Selection and Rise of Putin, who drove out the Plunderers. The Hegemony
continue their Geopolitical War of Influence Peddling around RUS while attempting Soft War
NATO Membership Recruitment and Regime Change Coups within RUS, Ex-SUN Nation-States, and
Trading Partners.
RUS have endured, became Militarily mightier, have become the Major Energy Producer for
North/Western Europe and CHN. In addition to the Production, RUS now have begun Trading
Petroleum+NatGas outside of the PetroUSD Exchange Mechanism, opting for Customer Currencies
or RUB.
RUS and IRN are expected to be Key Providers of the PetroCNY-Au Exchange Mechanism.
The Hegemony and MENA Vassals can't Compete in Combined Petroleum+NatGas Volume and Price;
and DEU - by Directly Importing from RUS - will most likely become more Independent from the
Hegemon.
CHN, RUS, and DEU - Major Energy, Industrial, Natural Resource, and Military Powers
Decoupling from the Influences of the Hegemony, with IND Slowly coming to their Own (IND are
simply Too Large to remain Vassals to the Hegemon; and Vassal GBR did so much to Oppress them
in the past).
Funny that the Anglo-American-ZioMasons and VAT have brought each of these 3 Powers to
Ruin and Occupation in the Past 2 Centuries.
The Ironies being Played Out are that:
1) GBR Lost their Prime Colonies - America/USA, IND, and now Trade City Colony HKG - by
their Oppressive and Exploitative Occupancy; and
2) USA, after Fighting Wars for Independence from such Occupations by GBR - Once Becoming
a Major Military Power, Followed in the Anglo-ZioMason Tradition of Geopolitical Conquest and
Control to the Scale of pursing not only in World Domination - but in Absolute Global
Rule.
Maghreb2 , 2 hours ago
Problem is demographic
shift . The previous modern system dominated by Zio-Masonry was GNP and GDP where
currencies were measured against global output and floated against gold and each other. Now
with high inflation and demographic decline knocking out the economy is easier leading to
fights between zones of influence. Petro Ruble, Euro or dollar. Dangerous commodities like
kilos of heroin, trafficked humans or weapons. Zio-Masonic system has fallen to gangsterism.
Hybrid Warfare is the kind of thing we saw in Afghanistan or 80s Columbia .
Militarized Russian mafia vs NATO backed militarized police forces.
Once the population reaches a certain age and consumption drops there isn't much to fight
over besides social control systems of the young minority. Color revolutions in Central
Europe are really only effecting the long term economy of the young . Hope would be Left wing Radicals
stood up to the system and aligned with right wing groups to eliminate masonic and Zionist
factions and take back the command and control systems before the continet is shut down
permanently.
Precision strikes and hunting down their
descendents . Easy to find because Hitler and Stalin had their ancestors massacred for
loyalty to Rothschild. They won't bite the hands that feed.The Vatican vassal systems was
built on knowing that a Zionist is Zionist and Masons is a Mason. They are cults simply
teaching them the correct way to behave can avert these political problems.
In terms of Belarus and Russia they should consider the fact the birth rate rate rose
after the Soviet collapse and exodus west means many of them shouldn't have even been born in
Rothschilds plan. In their " system
" economic planning starts at birth because color revolutions effect
long term bond issuances they control.
Stalin and Hitler both knew this and used money linked to raw marterials and goods to beat
the British gold standard system. If you knew what the Western Central banks were worth you
would kill people for using their money.
"Life is hard, it's harder if your stupid" - John Wayne
Freeman of the City , 18 seconds ago
'It's Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled'
- Mark Twain
palmereldritch , 49 seconds ago
And prior to Bezos/CIA ownership the paper was managed by heirs whose ownership stake was
originally acquired through a bankruptcy sale by a board member/trustee of The Federal
Reserve.
So maybe it was just a share transfer...
Freeman of the City , 1 minute ago
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free"
Once I'd seen this mention of The Russian Playbook (aka KGB, Kremlin or Putin's Playbook), I saw the expression all over the place.
Here's an early – perhaps the earliest – use of the term. In October 2016, the Center for Strategic and International studies ("
Ranked #1 ") informed us of the "
Kremlin Playbook " with this ominous beginning
There was a deeply held assumption that, when the countries of Central and Eastern Europe joined NATO and the European Union
in 2004, these countries would continue their positive democratic and economic transformation. Yet more than a decade later, the
region has experienced a steady decline in democratic standards and governance practices at the same time that Russia's economic
engagement with the region expanded significantly.
And asks
Are these developments coincidental, or has the Kremlin sought deliberately to erode the region's democratic institutions
through its influence to 'break the internal coherence of the enemy system'?
Well, to these people, to ask the question is to answer it: can't possibly be disappointment at the gap between 2004's expectations
and 2020's reality, can't be that they don't like the total Western values package that they have to accept, it must be those crafty
Russians deceiving them. This was the earliest reference to The Playbook that I found, but it certainly wasn't the last.
Of course, all these people are convinced Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Somehow. To some effect. Never
really specified but the latest outburst of insanity is this
video from the Lincoln Project . As Anatoly Karlin observes:
"I think it's really cool how
we Russians took over America just by shitposting online. How does it feel to be subhuman?" He has a point: the Lincoln Project,
and the others shrieking about Russian interference, take it for granted that American democracy is so flimsy and Americans so gullible
that a few Facebook ads can bring the whole facade down. A curious mental state indeed.
What can we know about The Playbook? For a start it must be written in Russian, a language that those crafty Russians insist on
speaking among themselves. Secondly such an important document would be protected the way that highly classified material is protected.
There would be a very restricted need to know; underlings participating in one of the many plays would not know how their part fitted
into The Playbook; few would ever see The Playbook itself. The Playbook would be brought to the desk of the few authorised to see
it by a courier, signed for, the courier would watch the reader and take away the copy afterwards. The very few copies in existence
would be securely locked away; each numbered and differing subtly from the others so that, should a leak occur, the authorities would
know which copy read by whom had been leaked. Printed on paper that could not be photographed or duplicated. As much protection as
human cunning could devise; right up there with
the nuclear
codes .
And so on. It's all quite ridiculous: we're supposed to believe that Moscow easily controls far-away countries but can't keep
its neighbours under control.
There is no Russian Playbook, that's just projection. But there is a "playbook" and it's written in English, it's freely available
and it's inexpensive enough that every pundit can have a personal copy: it's named "
From Dictatorship To Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation " and it's written by
Gene Sharp (1928-2018) . Whatever Sharp may have thought he
was doing, whatever good cause he thought he was assisting, his book has been used as a guide to create regime changes around the
world. Billed as "democracy" and "freedom", their results are not so benign. Witness Ukraine today. Or Libya. Or Kosovo whose long-time
leader has just been indicted for numerous crimes
. Curiously enough, these efforts always take place in countries that resist Washington's line but never in countries that don't.
Here we do see training, financing, propaganda, discord being sown, divisions exploited to effect regime change – all the things
in the imaginary "Russian Playbook". So, whatever he may have thought he was helping, Sharp's advice has been used to produce what
only the propagandists could call "
model interventions "; to the "liberated" themselves, the reality is
poverty ,
destruction ,
war and
refugees
.
Reading Sharp's book, however, makes one wonder if he was just fooling himself. Has there ever been a "dictatorship" overthrown
by "non-violent" resistance along the lines of what he is suggesting? He mentions Norwegians who resisted Hitler; but Norway was
liberated, along with the rest of Occupied Europe, by extremely violent warfare. While some Jews escaped, most didn't and it was
the conquest of Berlin that saved the rest: the nazi state was killed . The USSR went away, together with its satellite governments
in Europe but that was a top-down event. He likes Gandhi but Gandhi wouldn't have lasted a minute under Stalin.
Otpor was greatly aided by NATO's war on Serbia. And, they're only
"non-violent" because the Western media doesn't talk much about
the violence ; "non-violent" is not the first word that
comes to mind in this video of Kiev 2014 . "Colour revolutions"
are manufactured from existing grievances, to be sure, but with a great deal of outside assistance, direction and funding; upon inspection,
there's much design behind their "spontaneity". And, not infrequently, with mysterious sniping at a expedient moment – see
Katchanovski's research
on the "Heavenly Hundred" of the Maidan showing pretty convincingly that the shootings were " a false flag operation" involving
"an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland".
There is little in Sharp's book to suggest that non-violent resistance would have had much effect on a really brutal and determined
government. He also has the naïve habit of using "democrat" and "dictator" as if these words were as precisely defined as coconuts
and codfish. But any "dictatorship" – for example Stalin's is a very complex affair with many shades of opinion in it. So, in terms
of what he was apparently trying to do, one can see it only succeeding against rather mild "dictators" presiding over extremely unpopular
polities. With a great deal of outside effort and resources.
Patrick Armstrong was an analyst in the Canadian Department of National Defence specialising in the USSR/Russia from 1984
and a Counsellor in the Canadian Embassy in Moscow in 1993-1996. He retired in 2008 and has been writing on Russia and related subjects
on the Net ever since.
We all know that we are living in crazy, and dangerous, times, yet I can't help being awed
at what the imperial propaganda machine (aka the legacy ziomedia) is trying to make us all
swallow. The list of truly batshit crazy stuff we are being told to believe is now very long,
and today I just want to pick on a few of my "favorites" (so to speak).
First, of course, comes the " Novichok Reloaded " scandal around the alleged poisoning of
the so-called "dissident" Alexei Navalnyi. I already mentioned this absolutely ridiculous story
once
, so I won't repeat it all here. I just want to mention a few very basic facts:
in my
past article , if what the German authorities are claiming is true, then the Russians are
truly the dumbest imbeciles on the planet. Not content to use this now famous "Novichok" gas
against Skripal in the UK and after failing to kill Skripal, these stupid Russians decided to
try the very same gas, only "improved", and they failed again: Navalnyi is quite alive and
well, thank you! Then there is this: according to the imperial propaganda machine, Novichok
was so horribly dangerous, that the Brits had to use full biosuits to investigate the alleged
poisoning of Skripal. They also said that they would completely destroy the dangerous Skripal
home (though they never did that). The self same propaganda machine says that the Novichok
used on Navalnyi was a more powerful, improved version. Okay. Then try to answer this one:
why did the Russians NOT put on biosuits, why did not a single passenger suffer from any side
effects (inside a closed aircraft cabin!)? How is it that this super-dooper Novichok not only
failed to kill Navalnyi (who, allegedly, ingested it!) but also failed to even moderately
inconvenience anybody from the many people Navalnyi was surrounded by on that day?
I could continue to deconstruct all this nonsense, but that would take pages. I will mention
two thing though:
First, the Russians have requested any and all evidence available to the Germans and to the
Organization for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons – but they got
absolutely nothing in return. Yet the EU is demanding an investigation (which is already under
way in Russia anyway!) as if the Russians did not want the exact same!
After being exposed
to an improved Novichok and after weeks in coma in intensive care, here is Navalnyi trotting
down stairs feeling great
Second, Navalnyi apparently has an immunity to otherwise deadly Russian biological agents,
just take a look at him on this post-Novichok photo:
[By the way, the first time around the Brits also never gave the Russians any information,
nevermind any kind of evidence. Apparently, to hide some super-secret secrets. Yeah,
right!]
If you have ever wondered why Syrian jihadists, or so-called 'moderate opposition', got
support from the woke liberal West, a recent leak by Anonymous reveals it's because Western
governments funded this propaganda.
In the end, it is the sheer childishness of the propaganda which amazes me most, not that
our rulers lie about other countries – I have always known that. But somehow there was a
kernel of truth around which the web of lies was spun, for example about life in the old Soviet
Union.
I began to realise the scope of Western ability to literally invent the most baseless lies
only in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, and only because I knew more about Iraq than any
politician in Britain or America and ten times more than the average made-up telly-dolly
chuntering through their auto-cued war propaganda. The women presenters weren't any better.
This all came flooding back to me when I received an email from Anonymous earlier this week
and then read Ben Norton's excellent analysis of it all in The GrayZone.
If anyone ever wondered how the hordes of head-chopping throat-cutting heart-eating
gay-murdering women-hating 'Jihadists' of the Syrian War ever managed to get a fair press in a
'woke' liberal West that gets hot under the lace collar about JK Rowling novels, the answers
are all in
the Anonymous leak . The principle answer is that you, the taxpayer, paid for it.
That's right. The blizzard of 'White Helmets' (who made it right up to the Oscars to thank
everyone who'd helped them except those that had helped them the most), "chemical-weapons
attacks" and all the paraphernalia of a newly "moderate opposition" in Syria – was all
paid for by YOU. Millions of pounds of British taxpayers' money was revealed to have been spent
secretly on UK support for the throat-cutting coalition of chaos, which for a decade massacred
its way across Syria wearing a snow-white Western beard of respectability.
It would appear that while the US (or rather its milk-cows in the Gulf) was paying for the
lethal-weapons, perfidious Albion was doing what it does best – lying through its teeth
whilst making those being lied to, pay for the privilege. Now that – thanks to the leaks
– we know this, it should put us on guard for the next one. Yet somehow it doesn't, at
least not for the purveyors of the news.
The Lazarus-like resurrection (and photo-shoot) of Russia's opposition figure and Western
darling Alexey Navalny after yet another alleged Novichok (believed to be 5-8 times more toxic
than VX nerve agent) attack without so much as a tracheostomy to show for it is swallowed whole
in yet another anti-Russian public relations offensive.
Grown sane men call my television show to talk about 'concentration camps' in China in
which, we are told, "a million Uighur Muslims" are being held and forcibly sterilised. This is
despite the allegations being largely based on studies backed by the American government and
statements by Western media favourite, German researcher Adrian Zenz. Zenz, who is part of the
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a US-backed advocacy group,
believes that he is "led by God" on his "mission" against China. Meanwhile, according to China's
official statistics the Uighur population in Xinjiang province increased by over 25 percent
between 2010 and 2018, while the Han Chinese rose by only two percent.
The lying industry may be the only sector of the Western economies still in full production.
No need for furlough or bounce-back loans. The lie-machines never still. No smoke is usually
detected from their chimneys, but inside, their pants are well and truly on fire.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Thank you for the links, very interesting. I've seen several of the pics of Navalny, the
heads look edited in, a bit too big, not quite aligned. This all seems very amateruish, like
the Belorussian coup attempt. I'll bet they are connected more than we know.
I don't believe a bit of it. I haven't seem any evidence of life for Navalny except some not
very convincing pictures.
The video of Ms Pevchickh is interesting too, she is very animated, works hard to get her
point across.
If you allow she was part of a plot to get him "poisoned", lots of new questions pop up:
did Navalny know, was he in on it? Was this supposed to tie in with the Belarus unrest, a
distraction, something else? Who talked Merkel into going along and how? Is Heiko Maas really
that dumb he thought this was going to work?
"... On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. ..."
On rules based disorder and the capitulation of Merkel and her BND lapdogs to the 'hate
Russia' fulminations of the UKUSA morons. I see that the German Parliament has NOT TAKEN its
red pills these days and is reluctant to swallow the BS. It would be satisfying to see
the collective wisdom of the Parliament to exceed that of the BND. But then that is a low
bar.
So they say he has been discharged now, but not where he is. He said in the beginning he
wanted to go home. I'm guessing he won't do that yet. In the picture he looks spooked, as
one can easily understand. I think this whole thing with Navalny since he left the Russian
hospital is fake, theater, sort of like Boris Johnson's bout with COVID19, which I think
was also fake.
Thank you and I bet he IS spooked. It is possible that he was expatriated without his
consent and that he knew what the consequences would be if he ever tried to leave apart from
this fiasco. The scenes back at the hotel and the loose lipped egotistical rants from his
English minder, Pevchikh and also the BBC are just one enormous debacle.
Read John Helmer's multiple
posts on this entire story and it smells like a rats nest of intrigues to set him up
or (a more remote possibility) to extricate him.
One thing is certain, if he tries to return to Russia the British bulldog will kill
him. Time will tell.
... According to [Sosnovsky], the photo of Navalny with his wife on the balcony makes one
think about his whereabouts. Sosnovsky, who is well acquainted with the architecture of
Berlin, drew attention to the strange urban landscape in the corner of the picture. He
pointed out that the Charite building does not have balconies with such a view, as it is
located in the central part of Berlin with a completely different architecture.
To confirm his words in practice, Sosnovsky personally went to the Charite and walked
around the building with a camera. He drew attention to the construction work near the
clinic (it would probably have gotten into the blogger's photo), as well as the complete
absence of journalists and security. All of this confirmed Sosnovsky's suspicions about
Navalny's absence from the Charité.
In addition to the cityscape, the journalist had questions about the can with
cigarette butts on Navalny's balcony. Sosnovsky called such an object impossible in an
elite medical institution in Germany with patients of this level. If all the cigarettes in
the frame were smoked by Navalny himself, this raises even more questions about his
"diagnosis" and the conclusions of German doctors.
The journalist notes that all the shots with Navalny after he emerged from the coma are
static and "inanimate." Sosnovsky, a person with a medical education and a practicing
doctor, calls this understandable, pointing to the possibility of identifying the signs of
specific diseases and influences by movements, speech and other dynamic manifestations. For
example, after a tracheostomy (artificial windpipe), a person often has voice problems.
"Any video and audio makes it possible with a high degree of probability to calculate
where and how it was done. It is much more difficult from a photo. And if they hide from us
the opportunity to determine the location and diagnosis, this is very indicative,"
Sosnovsky said on the air of Soloviev Live.
Earlier, Navalny demanded that Russia return his clothes , in which the blogger was
hospitalized in Omsk. However, Navalny's associates had previously written that all of his
belongings were transferred to his wife, and some of the items that the blogger touched and
used could be taken out by Maria Pevchikh, a suspect in his poisoning."
I have seen the photo of Navalny walking down a staircase with no help and a second photo
of Navalny and his wife Julia out on a balcony at the hospital where he is (supposedly?)
staying with the can of cigarette butts placed near the bottom of the sliding door. I had my
doubts about Navalny being in hospital even before I saw the Sosnovsky article - would a
hospital allow a patient just out of a coma to walk around by himself, especially down the
stairs, or allow him to smoke cigarettes? Would a hospital even have balconies attached to
patients' wards?
"... The blogger Caitlin Johnstone accurately states that these most of these mainstream corporate journalists are really *narrative managers* in that their primary role is to peddle the official narrative of the US corporate/political establishment for any given topic. ..."
"... I would add that the managing editors of these "journalists"/narrative managers would be more honestly described as "handlers," to use the parlance of spooks. ..."
"... Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality". ..."
"... In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try ..."
snake , Sep 22 2020 0:59 utc | 22 can we not invent a method that can counter this tactic of using propaganda to control
the narrative?
1) Hack them. Release their planning documents, emails, phone calls, etc. showing how the scam was set up.
2) Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus reality"
- that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one coordinated
narrative, you can't set "reality".
3) In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power, due to
cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate may *say*
they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own internal belief
systems. So again, waste of time to try.
Well....as always, and especially if it involves anything even remotely relating to 'Russia', or Iran, or whatever adversarial
operational target of the day might be -- one can reliably count on our very own "Izvestia on the Hudson" to faithfully execute
their officially sanctioned nation security state propaganda mission by dutifully steno-graphing as much dis/mis-information as
their NSA/CIA/Pentagon handlers request (require) from them.
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper's movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic
was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called
"the narrative." We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with
editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.
Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the
mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting
National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: "My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?"
The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper's daily Page One meeting:
"We set the agenda for the country in that room.
The blogger Caitlin Johnstone accurately states that these most of these mainstream corporate journalists are really *narrative
managers* in that their primary role is to peddle the official narrative of the US corporate/political establishment for any given
topic.
I would add that the managing editors of these "journalists"/narrative managers would be more honestly described as "handlers,"
to use the parlance of spooks.
In fact, it would be apt to described venerable institution of journalism itself as an intelligence operation.
@snake | Sep 22 2020 0:59 utc | 22 can we not invent a method that can counter this tactic of using propaganda to control the
narrative?
1) Hack them. Release their planning documents, emails, phone calls, etc. showing how the scam was set up.
2) Waste of time. They control the media. The Internet may have lots of influence, but it still does not set "consensus
reality" - that remains with the MSM. The MSM issues one coordinated narrative. The Internet is all over the place. Without one
coordinated narrative, you can't set "reality".
3) In addition, those who issue the narrative and control the MSM have the power. People want to believe those in power,
due to cognitive dissonance - otherwise they'd have to accept that everyone ruling their lives is a corrupt liar. The electorate
may *say* they understand that their rulers are corrupt - but they can't act* on that realization without compromising their own
internal belief systems. So again, waste of time to try.
The rapid onset of a mysterious illness that almost killed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny last week and ultimately led to his
emergency airlifting to Germany for treatment while in a medically induced coma immediately prompted widespread speculation
from the Western media that the authorities had tried to poison him, but it's unrealistic to imagine such a scenario since
there are several compelling reasons why the government wouldn't ever want to harm him as well as some relevant arguments for
why the West wants their targeted audience across the world to think otherwise.
The Mysterious Illness
The
Western media has been captivated by the curious case of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny after the rapid onset of a mysterious
illness almost killed him while he was mid-flight from Siberia to Moscow to
face
charges of slander
after calling a World War II veteran a "traitor" earlier this summer for supporting amendments to the
constitution. Navalny was ultimately airlifted to Germany for treatment while in a medically induced coma at his
wife's
request
. Private individuals
footed
the bill
, and the authorities
didn't
object
to his departure. Prior to that, the Russian doctors shared their
preliminary
diagnosis
that his illness was caused by a "metabolic disorder" which might have been triggered by a "sharp drop in blood
sugar". They also
confirmed
that
"no poisons or traces of poison have been found in his system", which is why a law enforcement source told
TASS
that
"There are no grounds for opening a criminal case, no crime elements have been identified." An
industrial
chemical
was found on his hands and clothes during testing, but the Omsk Regional Office of the Interior Ministry is of
the belief that "it may have appeared after contact with plastic glass".
Assassination Speculations
Those are the facts as they objectively exist at the moment of this article's publication on 24 August, but the political
context of the case has fueled speculation about foul play. The
most
popular theory
is that he was poisoned after drinking a cup of tea that was
handed
to him by his aide
while waiting for his flight at the airport. Staff at the cafe in question that were interviewed by
police said that they
didn't
know anything
about the incident, and the business has since
closed
.
Despite the Russian doctors
concluding
that
there were "no toxicological substances that could have been described as a poison" in his system, the Western media has
speculated that he was poisoned as part of a Kremlin plot. This narrative builds upon the unproven stories of the past two
decades, especially the recent Skripal case from two years ago, alleging that President Putin personally orders his critics
across the world to be poisoned as punishment for bruising his ego. Despite being ridiculous to countenance for any objective
observer, it nevertheless advances the information warfare narrative that the Russian leader is a "dangerous dictator" who
must be stopped by all means possible.
Navalny's Real Role In Russian Society
This politically self-serving depiction of events relies on its targeted audience's ignorance of Russian domestic politics
since those who are aware of everyday realities there know better than to imagine such a scenario. Navalny isn't the
"opposition leader" that he's portrayed as abroad, but is more like an investigative blogger and protest organizer than
anything else. His ethno-nationalist views only appeal to the extreme right-wing fringe of society, though Westerners are
generally unaware of them since their media mostly only focuses on his occasional liberal rhetoric and regular criticism of
the authorities. While his racial beliefs are politically dangerous in terms of threatening to unravel the cosmopolitan
country's unity, they're not an electoral threat considering how unpopular they are, hence why the ruling United Russia party
isn't too concerned about him. Navalny wouldn't even be that well-known at home had he not repeatedly broken the law by
organizing unauthorized rallies, provocations which always receive disproportionate attention from his Western media allies.
Exaggerating his political importance is therefore nothing more than a Western infowar tactic.
The "Pressure Valve"
This presumably irks the government, but it in no way threatens it. If anything, the authorities have come to accept the role
that Navalny plays in society as a "pressure valve" for people's frustration with corruption and other related issues. They're
used to his antics by now, and he's regarded as the "devil that they know". His departure from the scene would actually be
counterproductive since it might open up the opportunity for an even more radical individual to replace him, one who's much
less "manageable" and might dangerously stir up ethno-nationalist tensions in society under the cover "anti-corruption"
rhetoric. Since he's so highly regarded in the West as a result of their long-running infowar, they know that they'd
immediately be suspected if anything happened to him. This in turn, as is presently on display as a result of his mysterious
medical crisis, could then be twisted into even more devious infowar narratives against their country such as the current one
speculating that the authorities tried to assassinate him. They'd never do anything of the sort, but all that matters is that
the West's targeted audience believes this false claim after being preconditioned for years to accept it.
Different Infowar Targets, Different Intended Outcomes
The
non-Russian audience is having their negative views about the country reinforced by the "
media
circus
" surrounding Navalny's mysterious illness, and their governments might potentially use the incident as a pretext
for tightening the sanctions regime against Russia, and especially against specific individuals who they might eventually
claim were linked to what's being wrongly portrayed as an "assassination attempt". As for the targeted Russian audience, the
West might hope that this incident could spark another wave of protests in Moscow along the lines of the ongoing ones in the
Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk and the Belarusian capital of Minsk. That wouldn't be for the purpose of overthrowing the
government which is completely unrealistic, but simply to cause some more trouble for it. The German doctors'
forthcoming
prognosis
will be crucial in determining the scenario trajectory since they'll either reaffirm the findings of their
Russian counterparts and predictably lead to this manufactured scandal blowing over or possibly challenge them under pressure
from Western intelligence agencies and thus exacerbate the situation.
The
ambulance that transported Alexei Navalny to Charite Mitte Hospital Complex in Berlin, Germany August 22, 2020
Scenario Forecasting
There are no credible reasons to doubt the Russian doctors' preliminary prognosis that Navalny's medical emergency was caused
by a sharp drop in his blood-sugar levels, but their German counterparts might publicly allege a different version of events.
Should that happen, then it's almost certain that Western governments will claim that he was poisoned at the behest of
President Putin, threaten to impose more sanctions against Russia (most likely targeted ones), and naturally grant Navalny
political asylum. Russia would predictably object to that series of events considering the fact that its doctors concluded
that there were no poisons found in his system, which would lead to yet another layer of tension in Russia-West relations. Not
only that, but since Navalny is currently being treated in Germany, intense pressure might be put upon the authorities by
domestic politicians and their American patrons to politicize the final leg of Nord Stream II's construction by potentially
delaying it as "punishment to Putin". That would be an unfortunate twist to the situation, but one that definitely can't be
ruled out after taking into account just how badly the US wants to sabotage that project.
Concluding Thoughts
As
it stands, it looks like Navalny really did experience a genuine medical emergency, one which was naturally occurring and not
the result of any foul play. Neither the Russian authorities nor foreign intelligence agencies attempted to assassinate him,
but the German doctors might be pressured by Western intelligence agencies to contradict their counterpart's findings in order
to provoke a fake crisis in Russia-West relations, one which could then potentially be leveraged to put interfere with the
final stage of Nord Stream II's construction. Regardless of how this incident ends, one thing's for certain, and it's that
Navalny's mysterious illness was politicized before there were any grounds to do so. The Western media has an interest in
making it seem like President Putin ordered his assassination because of his bruised ego, but this is ridiculous to
countenance since Navalny fulfills a useful role in Russian society by functioning as a "pressure valve" for people's
frustration with corruption and other related issues. The last thing that the Kremlin would ever do is harm him since all
Russian authorities already know that their government would immediately be suspected if something happened to him.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God
"... In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a
blow to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding. ..."
Stephen F Cohen, the renowned American scholar on Russia and leading authority on US-Russian
relations, has died of lung cancer at the
age of 81.
As one of the precious few western voices of sanity on the subject
of Russia while everyone else has been frantically flushing their brains down the toilet,
this is a real loss. I myself have cited Cohen's expert analysis many times in my own work, and
his perspective has played a formative role in my understanding of what's really going on with
the monolithic cross-partisan manufacturing of consent for increased western aggressions
against Moscow.
In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen's death is a blow
to humanity's desperate quest for clarity and understanding.
I don't know how long Cohen had cancer. I don't know how long he was aware that he might not
have much time left on this earth. What I do know is he spent much of his energy in his final
years urgently trying to warn the world about the rapidly escalating danger of nuclear war,
which in our strange new reality he saw as in many ways completely unprecedented.
The last of the many books Cohen authored was 2019's
War
with Russia? , detailing his ideas on how the complex multi-front nature of the post-2016
cold
war escalations against Moscow combines with Russiagate and other factors to make it in
some ways more dangerous even than the most dangerous point of the previous cold war.
"You know it's easy to joke about this, except that we're at maybe the most dangerous moment
in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever," Cohen told The Young Turks in 2017. "And the reason is that we're
in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the
possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented
military buildup on Russia's border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between
Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are
flying in the same territory. Anything could happen."
Cohen repeatedly points to the most likely cause of a future nuclear war: not one that is
planned but one which erupts in tense, complex situations where "anything could happen" in the
chaos and confusion as a result of misfire, miscommunication or technical malfunction, as
nearly
happened many times during the last cold war.
"I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the
Cuban missile crisis," Cohen told Democracy
Now in 2017. "And arguably, it's more dangerous, because it's more complex. Therefore, we
-- and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these -- and, in my judgment, factless
accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in
American-Russian relations, we have an American president who's being politically crippled by
the worst imaginable -- it's unprecedented. Let's stop and think. No American president has
ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we're talking about here, or that his
associates have committed treason."
"Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis," Cohen added. "Imagine
if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been
crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn't was to have launched a war against
the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war."
"A recurring theme of my recently published book War with Russia? is that the new Cold War
is more dangerous, more fraught with hot war, than the one we survived," Cohen wrote
last year . "Histories of the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War tell us that both sides came to
understand their mutual responsibility for the conflict, a recognition that created political
space for the constant peace-keeping negotiations, including nuclear arms control agreements,
often known as détente. But as I also chronicle in the book, today's American Cold
Warriors blame only Russia, specifically 'Putin's Russia,' leaving no room or incentive for
rethinking any US policy toward post-Soviet Russia since 1991."
"Finally, there continues to be no effective, organized American opposition to the new Cold
War," Cohen added. "This too is a major theme of my book and another reason why this Cold War
is more dangerous than was its predecessor. In the 1970s and 1980s, advocates of détente
were well-organized, well-funded, and well-represented, from grassroots politics and
universities to think tanks, mainstream media, Congress, the State Department, and even the
White House. Today there is no such opposition anywhere."
"A major factor is, of course, 'Russiagate'," Cohen continued. "As evidenced in the sources
I cite above, much of the extreme American Cold War advocacy we witness today is a mindless
response to President Trump's pledge to find ways to 'cooperate with Russia' and to the
still-unproven allegations generated by it. Certainly, the Democratic Party is not an
opposition party in regard to the new Cold War."
"Détente with Russia has always been a fiercely opposed, crisis-ridden policy
pursuit, but one manifestly in the interests of the United States and the world," Cohen
wrote in another
essay last year. "No American president can achieve it without substantial bipartisan
support at home, which Trump manifestly lacks. What kind of catastrophe will it take -- in
Ukraine, the Baltic region, Syria, or somewhere on Russia's electric grid -- to shock US
Democrats and others out of what has been called, not unreasonably, their Trump Derangement
Syndrome, particularly in the realm of American national security? Meanwhile, the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists has recently reset its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before
midnight."
And now Stephen Cohen is dead, and that clock is inching ever closer to midnight. The
Russiagate psyop that he predicted would pressure Trump to advance dangerous cold war
escalations with no opposition from the supposed opposition party
has indeed done exactly that with nary a peep of criticism from either partisan faction of
the political/media class. Cohen has for years been correctly
predicting this chilling scenario which now threatens the life of every organism on earth,
even while his own life was nearing its end.
And now the complex cold war escalations he kept urgently warning us about have become even
more complex with the
addition of nuclear-armed China to the multiple fronts the US-centralized empire has been
plate-spinning its brinkmanship upon, and it is clear from the ramping
up of anti-China propaganda since last year that we are being prepped for those aggressions
to continue to increase.
We should heed the dire warnings that Cohen spent his last breaths issuing. We should demand
a walk-back of these insane imperialist aggressions which benefit nobody and call for
détente with Russia and China. We should begin creating an opposition to this
world-threatening flirtation with armageddon before it is too late. Every life on this planet
may well depend on our doing so.
Stephen Cohen is dead, and we are marching toward the death of everything. God help us
all.
People are just now starting to realize that possible alternate path. But the Demoncrats
in the USA must first be put down, politically euthanized, along with their neocon
never-Trump Republican partners. And that cleaning up is on the way. Trump's second term will
be the advancement of the USA-Russia initiative that is so long overdue.
PerilouseTimes , 48 minutes ago
Putin won't let western billionaires rape Russia's enormous natural resources and on top
of that Putin is against child molesters, that is what this Russia bashing is all about.
awesomepic4u , 1 hour ago
Sad to hear this.
What a good man. It is a real shame that we dont have others to stand up to this crazy pr
that is going on right now. Making peace with the world at this point is important. We dont need or
want another war and i am sure that both Europe and Russia dont want it on their turf but it
seems we keep sticking our finger in their eye. If there is another war it will be the last
war. As Einstein said, after the 3rd World War we will be using sticks and stones to fight
it.
Clint Liquor , 44 minutes ago
Cohen truly was an island of reason in a sea of insanity. Ironic that those panicked over
climate change are unconcerned about the increasing threat of Nuclear War.
thunderchief , 41 minutes ago
One of the very few level headed people on Russia.
All thats left are anti Russia-phobic nut jobs.
Send in the clowns.
Stephen Cohen isn't around to call them what they are anymore.
Eastern Whale , 55 minutes ago
cooperate with Russia
Has the US ever cooperated with anyone?
fucking truth , 3 minutes ago
That is the crux. All or nothing.
Mustafa Kemal , 49 minutes ago
Ive read several of his books. They are essential, imo, if you want to understand modern
russian history.
Normal , 1 hour ago
The bankers created the new CCP cold war.
evoila , 19 minutes ago
Max Boot is an effing idiot. Tucker wiped him clean too. It was an insult to Stephen to
even put them on the same panel.
RIP Stephen.
Gary Sick is the equivalent to Stephen, except for Iran. He too is of an era of competence
which is and will be missed as their voices are drowned out by neocon warmongers
thebigunit , 17 minutes ago
I heard Stephen Cohen a number of time in John Bachelor's podcasts.
He seemed very lucid and made a lot of sense.
He made it very clear that he thought the Democrat's "Trump - Russia collusion schtick"
was a bunch of crap.
He didn't sound like a leftie, but I'm sure he never told me the stuff he discussed with
his wife who was editor of the left wing "The Nation" magazine.
Boogity , 9 minutes ago
Cohen was a traditional old school anti-war Liberal. They're essentially extinct now with
the exception of a few such as Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich who have both been
ostracized from the Democrat Party and the political system.
Vaccine against coronaviruses is a very tricky business as the virus tend to mutate with
time. Still it looks like Russian found some nw avenue to tackle this problem which might be more
efficient then alternatives.
Western reporters to not like to correct their own false reporting. They rather reinforce it
as much as possible. Only when overwhelmed by the facts will they silently admit that they were
wrong in the first place. Here is a prime example of how that's done.
In mid-August we exposed how 'western' media lied about the approval for phase-3 testing of
the Russian Sputnik vaccine against Covid-19. They said that Russia claimed the vaccine was
ready to go population wide. That never was the case.
Russia has not approved a vaccine against Covid-19 and it is not skipping large-scale
clinical trials. The Russia regulator gave a preliminary approval for a vaccine candidate to
start the large-scale clinical trial. [...]
Science Magazine is one of the few media who
got it right : ...
One of the false reports we pointed out was by the New York Times Moscow
correspondent Andrew E. Kramer:
Russia has become the first country in the world to approve a vaccine for the coronavirus,
President Vladimir V. Putin announced on Tuesday, though global health authorities say the
vaccine has yet to complete critical, late-stage clinical trials to determine its safety and
effectiveness.
...
By skipping large-scale clinical trials, the Russian dash for a vaccine has raised widespread
concern that it is circumventing vital steps -- and potentially endangering people -- in
order to score global propaganda points.
Russia had, as we and Science Magazine reported, never the intent to skip
large-scale clinical trials. Kramer made that up.
In new report today Kramer reinforces his previous false and disproven claims to lament
about an alleged slow distribution of the Sputnik vaccine in Russia:
More than a month after becoming the first country to approve a coronavirus vaccine, Russia
has yet to administer it to a large population outside a clinical trial, health officials and
outside experts say.
The approval, which came with much fanfare, occurred before Russia had tested the vaccine
in late-stage trials for possible side effects and for its disease-fighting ability. It was
seen as a political gesture by President Vladimir V. Putin to assert victory in the global
race for a vaccine.
It is not clear whether the slow start to the vaccination campaign is a result of limited
production capacity or second thoughts about inoculating the population with an unproven
product.
The Times author reinforces his own lie that Russia had declared its vaccine ready
for population wide application. It had never done that. The official registration of the
vaccine by the relevant authorities was only a necessary precondition to start the large scale
phase-3 testing of the vaccine. There never was a Russian intent to distribute the vaccine to a
large population without phase-3 testing.
In the bottom third of his long piece Kramer comes near to admitting that. There he
describes that the Sputnik phase-3 testing is now ongoing. That contradicts all of his previous
reporting on the issues though he himself never says that. But even now he is getting the
details wrong:
The trial in Russia began on Sept. 9, and Russian officials have said they expect early
results before the end of the year, though the Gamaleya Institute, the scientific body that
developed the vaccine, has scheduled the trial to continue until May.
That timeline is similar to the testing schedules announced by the three pharmaceutical
companies testing potential vaccines in the United States, AstraZeneca, Moderna and
Pfizer.
...
The Russian late-stage, or Phase 3, clinical trial is being carried out entirely in Moscow,
where 30,000 people will receive the vaccine and 10,000 will get a placebo.
Yevgenia Zubova, a spokeswoman for the Moscow city health department, said in an interview
that the vaccine was available only to trial participants.
Those last two paragraphs, which completely debunk Kramer's original reporting, should have
been at the very top of the piece. They are buried down in paragraph 23 and 24 of a 29
paragraphs story that starts out with an epic repeat of the previously made false claims.
Post-registration clinical trials involving more than 40,000 people in Russia will be
launched in a week starting from August, 24. A number of countries, such as UAE, Saudi
Arabia, Philippines and possibly India or Brazil will join the clinical trials of Sputnik V
locally. [...] Mass production of the vaccine is expected to start in September 2020.
That testing of Sputnik V will also happen outside of Moscow has been confirmed
by recent reports :
Russia's sovereign wealth fund will supply 100 million doses of its potential coronavirus
vaccine to Indian drug company Dr Reddy's Laboratories, the fund said on Wednesday, as Moscow
speeds up plans to distribute its shot abroad.
...
Dr Reddy's, one of India's top pharmaceutical companies, will carry out Phase III clinical
trials of Sputnik-V in India, RDIF said.
It is not Russia that is fudging the testing of its vaccine. It is the Trump administration
that is
planning to do so out of political reasons:
We have the protocols. Now we know how there will very likely be an Emergency Use Approval
(EUA) for a vaccine prior to November 3. The company and political motivations are fully
aligned.
In contrast to the U.S. the Russian testing of its Sputnik vaccine will be -as usual- of
high integrity and will strictly follow the protocols such trials are supposed to follow. In
paragraph 29, the very last one in today's NYT story, the author at last admits as
much :
[W]hen medicines are tested, Russia has an exceptionally good track record on managing
clinical trials , according to a database of U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspections of
clinical trials around the world. The F.D.A. found a lower percentage of trials with problems
in Russia than in any other European country or the United States.
If I get the chance to chose a vaccine for myself I will rather take the one which was
developed by a highly qualified state financed research institution and approved in Russia than
one developed by some profit oriented pharmaceutic conglomerate that is in cahoots with a
politicized regulator under the Trump administration.
Posted by b on September 20, 2020 at 12:12 UTC |
Permalink
If I get the chance to chose a vaccine for myself I will rather take the one which was
developed by a highly qualified state financed research institution and approved in Russia
than one developed by some profit oriented pharmaceutic conglomerate that is in cahoots
with a politicized regulator under the Trump administration.
To top it off, Gamaleya's vaccine simply has the better science behind it. It uses two
human adenoviruses, in opposition to the single chimpanzee adenovirus used by the AstraZeneca
one (the Chinese one also uses only one adenovirus, but I don't remember if it is human or
chimpanzee).
No other laboratory in the world is using Gamaleya's technology - which it already
dominates. Two American laboratories (Moderna and one more that I forgot the name) are
testing the untried and dangerous mRNA technology. It is very unlikely those two mRNA
vaccines will ever come out to the public; those two labs probably just cashed in their USD 2
billion checks they received from the USG.
This gives force to my original hypothesis: the Anglo-Saxon laboratories are exploiting
exotic technologies for their vaccines because they want something the can patent, thus
charging astronomical prices to the national governments and thus emerge from this pandemic
even richer.
--//--
Speaking of AstraZeneca (Oxford), it released its blueprints yesterday after "public
pressure":
The USG is, behind the scenes (I already posted the link here in the open thread),
extremely worried about this vaccine.
AstraZeneca will try to get what it can get, but the fact is it's game over for them. The
thing here is that the Gamaleya alternative is better and if the USA (where the vaccine
makers will really make money) wants to get political, it will simply opt for one of the many
American vaccines that will come out - ready or not, satisfactory or not - next year. As a
British vaccine, AstraZeneca-Oxford will, at best, have to do with the British market, which
is very tiny for a big pharmaceutical company.
It is better if they just cancel the trials and abandon production.
If I had money I'd fly to Russia for their vaccine. They made theirs for the people and in
Amerika we make it for profits and protect the makes from lawsuits.
To be frank, at this point, ironically, it's Big Pharma's own self-interest that might help
us to counter Trump's lunacy. There are enough anti-vaxxers around for them not to want a
screwed up vaccine and a big scandal that would only comfort the vaxxers and sow mistrust
among the population. They need people to assume vaccines are well done and mostly harmless
if they want to keep making profit with them. Trump is only interested in a victory in the
next few weeks, Pharma business is interested in making profits for the next decades.
That's quite a damning indictment of our Western system, but then 2020 is a milestone, the
threshold beyond which it won't be possible to consider the Western liberal capitalistic
system as the superior one, if not the best one possible - quite the opposite.
The Kramer reporting is highly unusual. Normally the important information should be in the
third paragraph from the end and now it's in the sixth and seventh last.
Anyway, while I agree that this vaccine should be treated as an entirely legitimate effort
I want to add:
- phase 1/2 testing did appear a too lightweight and the article on it in the Lancet has been
criticized by russian scientists (
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/09/08/leading-scientists-question-highly-improbable-russian-vaccine-results-published-in-lancet-a71384).
- one family of vaccines can be more controversial and experimental than another and the
judgement of the testers can take this in account when considering shortcuts.
- One should distinguish what the makers of the vaccine claim with the political
(exaggerated) statements from Putin about it .
- The statements on testing on the Sputnikvaccine have changed over time. In the beginning it
said 2000 people in Russia and it listed 4 more countries(UAE, KSA, Brazil,Mexico). That was
insufficient. Several of these countries have been omitted since, and others have been added.
One can say that the intent to do decent testing was always there but the confirmed planning
was not.
- rollout to large population was impossible anyway at an early stage because the production
capacity was limited.
Kramer is not wrong, he simply lies. In the Relotius media this is standard practice when
covering politically sensitive topics, combined with omissions.
Of course, many well-researched and truthful articles are published in the nyt, faz, nzz etc.
That is exactly what makes these media so refined and what they base their claim to be
quality media on. One lies and distort as little and as targeted as possible.
The Europena and Australian vassals of the USA would not be given a choice to choose the more
authetic option of the vaccine. But Israel would probably opt for the Russian version without
consequence. It's over for the West!
Nobody is saying the Gamaleya vaccine will be the second coming of the polio vaccine.
Whichever COVID-19 vaccine comes out will inevitably be imperfect (in relation to the already
tested and tried vaccines everybody takes nowadays).
Your worries are all legitimate. Indeed, Gamaleya publicly admitted phases 1 and 2 of its
trials has small samples of subjects.
However, you also have to take into account that the science is solid (two human
adenoviruses, a tested and tried technology) and that Gamaleya is the center of excellence in
adenovirus vaccine technology. That's why - and not because it is Russian - we can trust
Gamaleya's vaccine is, given the circumstances (pandemic), reliable. The fact Gamaleya
already dominated the adenovirus technology also explains why it was the first laboratory to
come out with a solution - it simply used a tested and tried method it already dominated,
while the other pharmaceuticals are basically having to relearn how to develop a vaccine
and/or are adventuring in uncharted territory because they want something they can
patent.
So yes, we can search and find defects in Gamaleya's trials - but the strongest argument
in its favor is not the trials, it's the solid science and technology behind it.
Vk and the wabbit - right on. And Thanks to you, B, for this clear and straightforwardly
informative piece (as usual).
Is it any surprise that the NYT uses the usual propaganda format of truth (when it accords
with the ruling elites perspective) and lies (when "reporting on" what is happening in those
"bad hat" countries)? And might I add that NPR and the BBC World Service do exactly the same
thing, boosting the US-UK-NATO worldview (which equals the western
corporate-captitalist-imperialist, oh so exceptional, ruling elites world position) while
denigrating Russia, China, Iran (and now Lukashenko - indeed the Beeb refuses to pronounce
his name properly, always reducing it to the feminine form, and believe me, as born and
raised Brit, that's deliberate) via lies, lies and more lies. And via those weasely words:
"likely," "Highly likely" and so on and on ....
All that this latest vaccine competition (western) will produce is more anti-vaxxers. And
this time round, sensibly so.
Tuyzefot (5): it is common for the NYT to lead with propaganda and bury the facts at the end
of the article.
I noticed it decades ago in articles covering Palestine. I learned to skip whatever was
printed on the front page and immediately jump to the final five paragraphs found deep within
the paper. I guess they print the facts at all there only as a bizarre way of covering their
asses in a feeble attempt at integrity.
The vaccine uses a unique two-vector human adenovirus technology which no-one else in
the world currently has for COVID-19.
[...]
On the surface the Sputnik V trial with 76 participants seems smaller in size compared
to 1,077 people that, for example, AstraZeneca had in its Phase 1-2 studies. However,
the design of the Sputnik V trial was much more efficient and based on better
assumptions.
[...]
The post-registration studies involving more than 40,000 people started in Russia on
August 26, before AstraZeneca has started its Phase 3 trial in the U.S. with 30,000
participants. Clinical trials in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Philippines,
India and Brazil will begin this month. The preliminary results of the Phase 3 trial will
be published in October-November 2020.
[...]
Q.: Why has the Sputnik V vaccine already become eligible for emergency use
registration?
Because of the very positive results of the Phase 1-2 trials and because the human
adenoviral vector-based delivery platform has been proven the safest vaccine delivery
platform over decades including through 75 international scientific publications and in
more than 250 clinical trials.
[...]
Some other companies are using human adenoviral vector-based platforms for their
COVID-19 vaccines. For example, Johnson & Johnson uses only Ad26 vector and China's
CanSino only Ad5 while Sputnik V uses both of these vectors. The work of Johnson &
Johnson and CanSino not only validates the Russian approach but also shows Sputnik V's
advantage as studies have demonstrated that two different vectors produce better
results than one.
[...]
The monkey adenovirus and mRNA vaccines have never been used and approved before and
their research is lagging the proven human adenoviral vector-based platform by at least 20
years. However, their developers have already secured supply contracts worth billions of
dollars from Western governments and may potentially apply for fast-track registration --
while receiving full indemnity at the same time.
At the end of the Q&A, Dmitriev counters his Western colleagues:
Question 1: Are there any long-term studies of mRNA and monkey adenovirus vector-based
technologies for carcinogenic effects and impact on fertility? (Hint: there are none)
Question 2: Could their absence be the reason why some of the leading pharmaceutical
firms making COVID-19 vaccines based on these technologies pushed the countries buying
their vaccines for full indemnification from lawsuits if something goes wrong?
Question 3: Why is Western media not reporting a lack of long term studies for mRNA and
monkey adenoviral vector-based vaccines?
The constant Russia bashing is a disconnect from the truth and the real world.
It is annoying to wade through.
Far more important, it is crippling for a nation if its leadership actually does
disconnect from reality and believe its own fantasy.
Disconnect from reality, belief in convenient fantasy, is exactly how the Democrats went
from losing with Hillary to running again with Hillary II, the same donors and advisers and
influence peddlers pushing the same right wing triangulation by the Democratic Party.
Maybe they can squeak out a win this time. It should not be close.
Far more important, there are things that need doing, things that would win like health
care for all, that they simply won't offer or run on. We are not going to get from them what
we need, we know that, and that is why they again have a squeaker election even against a
joke like Trump.
Perfect example of the free and unfettered press at work. What do you mean we're just a
propaganda rag? See, right down at the bottom, the bit you didn't bother to read down to,
right next to the denture ad, we told the truth. So there! Balanced and accurate reporting!
Trump's "national security" state has managed to kill 200000 by him the autocrat in chief to
come out and tell the truth as he admitted so to Woodward. This fucking American national
security phobia is costing American lives more than all past 70 years of national security
wars.
@JohnH 13 , it was hm, a joke. There is indeed rule of thumb that you have to look fore the
third to last paragraph. I upgraded it into something of a law, which is then violated in
this case.
@vk 10, I wouldn't call it my worries, just that I think B. posted a version which was too
simple and rosy. In the meantime I saw your post 14 which I roughly expected but hadn't read
about yet.
Andrew Kramer's reporting on the Sputnik V vaccine is deliberately written to discredit the
Russians and anything and everything they do, which includes the way they conduct scientific
and medical research (because it's govt-funded, not funded by global pharmaceutical
corporations) and the way they run their healthcare system (not privatised).
First, Kramer says the Kremlin approved the vaccine: this is to set up Moscow and Putin in
particular as rash, so that the supposed "roll-out" of the vaccine can be (secondly)
portrayed as inefficient.
Kramer knows he is lying which is why his piece is long (he knows most NYT readers are
time-poor and want the celebrity news and baseball results) and the most important
information is squeezed into the last two paragraphs of his article.
I tried linking to that Moscow Times article at your link and either I hit a dead end or
the newspaper removed the article, which does not surprise me since that newspaper is as
credible as The New York Times. It used to be given away f o r free in Moscow but I believe
it now exists only as an online paper.
@Jen, you have to remove the last two characters ').' because I omitted a space. The article
in the moscow times is ok and not too alarming. It is also not discrediting the lancet
article. Just raising concerns.
Counter disinformation network can't revive the dead chicken of neoliberal ideology.
Neoliberal elite lost legitimacy and as such has difficulties controlling the narrative.
That's why all this frantic efforts were launched to rectify the situation.
Anti-Russian angle of Atlantic council revealed here quite clearly
The paper's biggest single recommendation was that the United States and EU establish a
Counter-Disinformation Coalition, a public/private group bringing together, on a regular basis,
government and non-government stakeholders, including social media companies, traditional
media, Internet service providers (ISPs), and civil society groups. The Counter-Disinformation
Coalition would develop best practices for confronting disinformation from nondemocratic
countries, consistent with democratic norms. It also recommended that this coalition start with
a voluntary code of conduct outlining principles and agreed procedures for dealing with
disinformation, drawing from the recommendations as summarized above.
In drawing up these recommendations, we were aware that disinformation most often comes from
domestic, not foreign, sources. 8 While Russian and other disinformation players are
known to work in coordination with domestic purveyors of disinformation, both overtly and
covertly, the recommendations are limited to foreign disinformation, which falls within the
scope of "political warfare." Nevertheless, it may be that these policy recommendations,
particularly those focused on transparency and social resilience, may be applicable to
combatting other forms of disinformation.
So, it appears the War on Populism is building
toward an exciting climax. All the proper pieces are in place for a Class-A GloboCap color
revolution , and maybe even civil war. You got your unauthorized Putin-Nazi president, your
imaginary apocalyptic pandemic, your violent identitarian civil unrest, your heavily-armed
politically-polarized populace, your ominous rumblings from military quarters you couldn't
really ask for much more.
OK, the plot is pretty obvious by now (as it is in all big-budget action spectacles, which
is essentially what color revolutions are), but that won't spoil our viewing experience. The
fun isn't in guessing what is going to happen. Everybody knows what's going to happen. The fun
is in watching Bruce, or Sigourney, or "the moderate rebels," or the GloboCap "Resistance,"
take down the monster, or the terrorists, or Hitler, and save the world, or democracy, or
whatever.
The issue surely must be why media like The New York Times (Russia paying Taliban to target
US forces in Afghanistan) and Politico (Iran planning to assassinate US ambassador to South
Africa) continue to repeat the lie over and over even when they have been found out and
everyone around the world is dying of laughter at the continued stupidity. Are the NYT and
Politico stenographers so dense and wrapped up in their own tiny worlds that they are
tone-deaf?
Are the NYT and Politico stenographers so dense and wrapped up in their own tiny worlds
that they are tone-deaf?"
Denial is a BIG river. And we've been living in a make believe world for a long time here.
And finally, it's all they've got left. It's like Vietnam all over again, same bunch of
morons, same mistakes, same wall-to-wall lying. Even a lot of the same players.
The MSM, especially the prestigious outlets, such as the NYT and the WaPo, serve as the main
conduits for U.S. government propaganda. Their prestige makes them especially suited to
receive leaks, which they obediently publish regardless of their veracity. Other outlets
repeat the stories until almost every person who follows the news has been exposed to them.
Reporters working for these outlets know that their careers depend upon maintaining
relationships with sources who will provide them with leaks. Careers taking precedence over
journalistic integrity, they play ball rather than leave the field. It's a brilliant system
that controls the flow of information without formal controls.
What I find amazing is how the American people will believe almost any government statement
without evidence given on news broadcast. Other countries may display the same
characteristic, but not at the same level as Americans. Personally, I find most
unsubstantiated reports as nothing more than Gossip and hearsay until verified by three other
international independent sources; what used to be a basic journalistic standard.
Posted by: Jen | Sep 19 2020 10:59 utc | 3 why media like The New York Times...and
Politico...continue to repeat the lie over and over even when they have been found out and
everyone around the world is dying of laughter
That's their job. And it's the US electorate who are *not* "dying of laughter" - because
they have been brainwashed by that same MSM.
A few years back I read a poll in which something like 77% of the US electorate believe
that Iran has actual nuclear weapons - not just a weapon program, actual nuclear weapons
deployed. This is the results you get from MSM reporting - and that's why they do it. They
are hand in glove with the US government. They are owned by corporations that have defense
contracts - not to mention that wars sell papers and boost broadcast ratings. You remember
that
moron talking about "beautiful US weapons"? You think that is an accident?
Why wouldn't they? After all, deep down, they know they have to invade countries to
survive. Better to do that while sleeping with a clean consciousness.
Alice's "curiouser and curiouser" remark in Lewis Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland applies
to dubious twists in the Navalny novichok poisoning hoax.
No evidence or motive links Russia to what happened to him.
Was the August 20 Tomsk, Russia incident made-in-the-USA?
Was Germany pressured, bullied or bribed to go along -- at the expense of its own
self-interest?
Clearly Angela Merkel, other German officials, their Western counterparts, and establishment
media know the claim about Navalny's novichok poisoning is a colossal hoax.
They know that anyone exposed to the toxin, the world's deadliest, would be dead in
minutes.
The same goes for others in close proximity to the exposed individual.
Navalny is very much alive and recovering nearly a month after falling ill.
No one he came in contact with developed novichok poisoning symptoms.
Russian doctors treating him with state-of-the-art equipment and tests found no toxins of
any kind in his system.
They saved his life and stabilized his condition, enabling him to travel to Berlin for
further treatment.
If the Kremlin wanted him dead, he'd have been left untreated in Russia to die.
He's recovering because of heroic treatment by Russian doctors.
On Thursday, elements close to Navalny shifted the fake news novichok poisoning narrative
from tea he drank in the Tomsk, Russia airline terminal to the deadly nerve agent in his hotel
room water bottle.
Are other versions of what happened to him coming ahead?
Claiming novichok traces were found in a hotel water bottle he drank from doesn't pass the
smell test.
The deadly substance in an opened hotel room bottle would likely contaminate and kill anyone
near it.
If, in fact, Navalny was poisoned by novichok in his hotel room overnight, he'd have died in
minutes, clearly not what happened.
The novichok in a hotel room bottle scenario is implausible on its face.
Claiming members of his team entered his hotel room after learning of his illness, found it
uncleaned, and examined everything potentially useful for an investigation -- "recording,
describing, and packing" everything would have exposed them to novichok if it existed by
touching the alleged bottle with the toxin.
Whatever happened to Navalny wasn't from novichok poisoning in a bottle or from any other
source.
On Thursday, Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow's
representative to the OPCW Alexander Shulgin requested copies of files the organization
received from Germany on Navalny's condition, but got no response, adding:
"According to our data Germany and a whole number of (other Western) countries (are)
cultivating the OPCW" with regard to the Navalny incident.
Since he arrived in Berlin for treatment over three weeks ago, Merkel's government
stonewalled Russia by refusing to provide evidence it claims to have about novichok poisoning
because there is none.
On Thursday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said "(t)here is too much absurdity about this
whole situation to take anyone's word on trust, so we are not going to take anyone's word,"
adding:
"(T)he situation is as follows: the OPCW Technical Secretariat says 'we know nothing. Talk
to the Germans,' and the Germans say 'we know nothing. Talk to the OPCW."
Russian lower house State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin suggested foreign intelligence
responsibility for what happened to Navalny.
On Thursday, majority Russophobic European Parliament (EP) MPs adopted a resolution that
calls for an "immediate launch of an impartial international investigation (sic)" on the
Navalny incident by the EU, its allies, the UN, Council of Europe, and OPCW -- to frame Russia
for what happened to Navalny.
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
The resolution also calls for (unjustifiably and unlawfully) sanctioning Russia and
suspending Nord Stream 2 construction.
EP resolutions are non-binding. The EP, Council of the European Union, European Council, and
European Commission operate separately from individual member states.
Time and again earlier, they irresponsibly bashed Russia in cahoots with the US, adopting
non-binding resolutions.
According to Zakharova earlier, anti-Russia propaganda is based on "paranoia phobias,
fictitious messages (and) myths."
Interviewed by Radio Sputnik in Moscow, Sergey Lavrov said Western governments want Russia
"punished both for what is happening in Belarus and for the incident with Navalny," adding:
They refuse to fulfill mandated obligations under the European Convention on Legal Aid by
not responding to official requests by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office for documented
information on Navalny's condition.
"Germany says that it cannot tell us anything. They say, go to the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)."
"We went there several times. They say go to Berlin."
"They loudly declare that the fact of poisoning has been established. Except for Russia
nobody could have done it. Admit it."
"All this has already happened with the" fake news Skripals novichok poisoning
incident.
Russia is a valued ally of all world community countries.
Instead of fostering cooperative relations with Moscow, actions by Germany and other EU
countries risk rupturing them.
Were Khodorkovsky or Browder among people involved? To what extent Trump administration and
MI6 were involved? Looks more and more line a bad replay of Skripals poisoning
Notable quotes:
"... Germans and "the whole world", to quote Pompeo, know the truth: Russians simply deny the truth, and the more they deny, the more truthful the accusations appear. And the elephant in the room: Why isn't the poisoned by "Novichok" bullshitting bastard of a US agent dead? And the answer given by the Germans, that is ironic in the extreme: because Russian doctors saved his life in Omsk. ..."
"... There are undeniable advantages to accusations for which no substantiation is offered – as we saw with the Skripals, you can await public comment, identify where you went wrong from scornful rejections of the narrative, and then modify it so that it makes more sense. ..."
"... I hope Germany offers residency to the Navalnys, and that they accept. Russia can't really refuse to let him back in, he's a citizen. But as long as he is there he will cause trouble, and he'll be recharged with all the PR he has received from this latest caper. ..."
"... But it is suggested that Russia is bargaining for his return; the story also expands on Lavrov's recent statements, and introduces a villain in the woodpile I would not have personally suspected: Poland. ..."
"... I recall Lavrov querying the other day Pevchikh's presence in Germany, her refusal to be interviewed by investigators in Omsk and how come she managed to fly to Germany with Navalny? He also said that other supporters of Navalny had also turned up in Germany. ..."
"... I lay a pound to a pinch of shit that Pevchikh is a British agent. ..."
"... Looking good for almost a corpse. COVID-19, a flu virus, is a deadly killer, and Novichok, a deadly nerve agent, is not a killer. ..."
"... Dances with Bears: THE PEVCHIKH PLOT – NAVALNY BOTTLE, LONDON WITNESS FLEE THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, BERLIN TOO http://johnhelmer.net/the-pevchikh-plot-navalny-bottle-london-witness-flee-the-scene-of-the-crime-berlin-too/ ..."
"... I reckon Khordokovsky has a hand in this. He has the same moral compass as dead Berezovsky. None. And he has refused to stick to agreements (keep out of politics). If the British or someone else get fingered for this cunning plan , would they serve him up on a silver platter? Almost certainly so. ..."
"... We certainly did well to focus on Maria Pevchikh as soon as we discovered that in addition to being the one who evaded questioning by Russian authorities by flying out to Germany, she also had British residency. She certainly has become a "person of interest" and could well be the major individual in the plot to incapacitate Navalny and use him to pressure Germany over NSII and Russia over the Belarus unrest. ..."
"... It is still unknown whether Pevchikh is a British citizen. I think she is and probably must be, in fact, for if she is only a visa holder or an applicant for UK citizenship, she could be told by the Home Office to go take a hike if it is proven that she was instrumental in the poisoning plot. ..."
"... Ask Pevchikh! Only she is now probably undergoing debriefing in London at UK Secret Intelligence Services HQ, 85 Albert Embankment. ..."
"... There was considerable risk involved in the deception. I doubt that Navalny went into the deception willingly. There was a very real risk that he could have suffered some brain damage going into the first coma and that's sure to compromise his health in the long term in other ways. ..."
"... More likely it seems a lot of the deception was planned behind Navalny's back and people were waiting for an opportunity to carry it out. It may have been planned years ago for someone else and then switched to Navalny once he was in the Omsk hospital. Julia Navalnaya may have been pushed into demanding that Navalny be transferred to Berlin and while the Omsk hospital doctors were stabilising him for the transfer, the deception then started going into action in Germany. ..."
"... Lavrov smelt a rat several days ago -- last week, I'm sure -- when he stated that suspicions had been aroused by one of Navalny's gang refusing to answer investigators' questions in Omsk and then scarpering off to Germany. ..."
"... I'm quite sure the FSB already knew of Pevchikh's comings and goings between London and Moscow (over 60 flights there and back I read somewhere) and her activities with the Navalny organization. ..."
"... if Washington thinks it can actually halt Nord Stream II – with the understanding that the Russians would probably give up after such a stinging second rebuke – then the sky is the limit, and they will scornfully reject any other solution. The one who stands to get hurt the most is Europe. But I don't think they realize it. ..."
NYT сообщила о
планах
Навального
вернуться в
Россию
15 сентября 2020
NYT has announced Navalney's to return to Russia
15 September 2020
Founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Alexei Navalny, who is undergoing treatment
in Germany, has discussed his poisoning with the German prosecutor and announced that he
plans to return to Russia, The New York Times has reported, citing a source in the German
security forces.
According to the source, Navalny is fully aware of his condition, of what happened and
where he is. In a conversation with the prosecutor, he refused that his case be jointly
investigated by Germany and Russia. Navalny said he planned to return to Russia immediately
after his recovery and continue his mission, the newspaper notes.
I notice that the Navalny fake story has gone off the radar in the Western MSM.
Now there just remain the lies and innuendos fixed in the minds of the sheeple.
Only an investigation by the Germans.
No investigation by the Russians.
Germans and "the whole world", to quote Pompeo, know the truth: Russians simply deny
the truth, and the more they deny, the more truthful the accusations appear. And the elephant
in the room: Why isn't the poisoned by "Novichok" bullshitting bastard of a US agent dead?
And the answer given by the Germans, that is ironic in the extreme: because Russian doctors
saved his life in Omsk.
Other elephants lurking in the shadows:
Why hadn't everyone who had been in contact with the piece of shit, including fellow
passengers on the Tomsk-Moscow flight died?
Where were the hazmat-suit-wearing specialists that should have detoxified the aeroplane
on board of which the Bullshitter threw a wobbler?
So many elephants, all ignored.
Total fabrication.
When the liar returns here, how about arresting him for breach of his bail conditions?
Not technically but absolutely legally he was not allowed to leave the country.
How about arresting him for perverting the course of justice? You can get life for doing
that in the UK!
He refuses to allow the Russian state to investigate his case but he and his controllers
and supporters maintain that the Russian state attempted to murder him with the most deadly
nerve agent known to man -- but it didn't work.
And on the plus side he can sell expensive 'blessed' trinkets to his hamsters help
subsidize his interesting lifestyle. Think holy relics, think Medjigorje, Lourdes
etc.
Навальный,
"Новичок" и
"белая коробка"
13 сентября 2020
Navalny, "Novichok" and the "White Box"
13 September 2020
Why is not a single Berlin doctor ready to personally confirm the announced poisoning
of Navalny?
A Russian patient is recovering in the "White Box" of the Charité hospital.
During the three weeks of Navalny's stay within these walls, no one shouted at the doctors
that they were murderers, no one demanded from them hourly reports on the patient's state of
health. At the beginning of the week, the hospital's press service informs the press that the
personal guest of the Federal Chancellor has been withdrawn from an artificial coma and is
reacting to other people. A couple of days later, "Spiegel" magazine publishes encouraging
information: "More progress has been made. If his health continues to improve, Navalny will
begin to receive more visitors". According to "Bellingcat" and "Der Spiegel", Navalny can
already speak and can probably recall the events that happened before he lost consciousness
on an aeroplane flying from Tomsk to Moscow.
In general, the latest Charité press releases are in clear contradiction to the
horror that the German press had been gathering all week. The already poisoned underpants
have been forgotten, the newspaper "Die Zeit" returns the reader to a famous photograph:
morning in a café at the Tomsk airport, a passenger for the flight to Moscow flight
peers into a cup that he has raised in order to drink out of it. In it,, according to a "Die
" source, is not just a chemical warfare agent from the "Novichok" group: in there is a
"Novichok" on steroids.
"Before this assassination attempt, the world did not know about this poison, which is
said to be even more deadly and dangerous than all known substances from the Novichok group.
Scientists found corresponding traces on the Navalny's hands and on the neck of a bottle from
which he had drunk. This "modified Novichok" allegedly acts more slowly than previous
versions. The Germans assume that one of the FSB agents monitoring Navalny, or an undercover
agent, added drops of poison to his tea or applied a substance to the surface of a cup.
Navalny was supposed to die on board the aircraft", writes "Die Zeit".
Everything is just fine and dandy here: for example, about agents who had to perform
the necessary manipulations with a super-poison in a crowded place. A remarkable and suddenly
appeared bottle -- no bottle was seen in Omsk at all. The story goes on about the fact that,
apart from tea, Navalny did not drink anything. It turns out that those accompanying the
blogger took the bottle out of the plane, hid it, and then transported it to Germany and
handed it to Bundeswehr chemists Concealing evidence is pure criminality. But the most
interesting thing is the super-"Novichok".
After the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury (let us recount the usual version of
events that happened there), about 50 more people sought medical help. Houses were taken
apart, pets were destroyed. But here no one except Navalny was hurt: neither the people at
Tomsk airport, nor the fellow travellers with whom he, having the terrible poison in his
hands, took a selfie on a bus, nor the passengers on board the aircraft, and he also touched
things there. Symptoms of poisoning should have appeared amongst the passengers, but they did
not. This should raise questions from the authors of the serious newspaper "Die Zeit", but it
does not. A weapon of mass destruction by any reasoning, but the longer the German press
examines the Navalny case, the more mediaeval and grotesque it becomes. And it works -- you
can see it even from the reaction of quite moderate politicians.
Already a week and a half ago, Merkel announced the results of a toxicological
examination, allegedly carried out in a secret laboratory of the Bundeswehr (yes, Navalny was
poisoned), opponents of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline have intensified their onslaught
against the federal government in order to stop the construction, they say, this is the only
way to punish Russia. At the head of the column are the party leaders of the Greens and those
associates of Merkel who are friendly with Washington and have plans for higher party or
administrative posts after the Chancellor leaves.
These voices were at least heard. In an evening talk show on ZDF, German Foreign
Minister Heiko Maas made it clear that the shutdown of Nord Stream 2 could be one
response.
"We cannot say that since the sanctions do not work, then there is no need to introduce
any. Sometimes we have to put up with the risk of the consequences, thereby saying that we do
not want to live in a world without rules", Maas said.
Now Herr Maas, along with many members of the government and administration and the
Chancellor, lives in a world of very strange rules. Merkel's press secretary Seibert
reiterated that Germany will interact with Russia exclusively at the site of the Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), where all the documents allegedly have
already been sent.
The OPCW Technical Secretariat informed our permanent representative, Alexander
Shulgin, that Berlin had only sent a notification about Navalny's poisoning, a sheet of A4
paper, but there is still nothing that the experts could work on. But the Germans had to
formulate a response to the proposal of the Russian Prosecutor General's Office on exchange
of information: any information about the state of Navalny can be transferred to Russia only
with his permission.
This was the case in 2004. The Charité clinic then diagnosed the presidential
candidate of the Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin poisoning -- no one ever saw
documentary evidence. Yushchenko then for 4 years, while he was of interest he was to the
public, promised to show everything, but he never did.
This trick can be repeated again, the main thing is to find the answer to an urgent
task: to inflate the level of confrontation between Russia and Germany, and therefore the
entire West, in order to force the Russian authorities to be as cautious as possible in their
domestic and foreign policy, for example, in the Belarusian direction.
However, the fact that Nord Stream 2, for which the German federal government was ready
to support unto death, suddenly became an instrument of blackmail -- admit the poisoning,
otherwise we can close it down -- openly outraged German business and regional
elites.
"It seems that the verdict has already been given -- there are demands that
construction of the pipeline be stopped. I strongly oppose such measures", said Michael
Kretschmer, Prime Minister of Saxony.
"We have had absolutely trusting cooperation with Russia in the energy sector for 50
years. And even in the most difficult political times, which were probably even more
difficult during the Cold War, we managed to maintain this trust", emphasized Michael Harms,
executive director of Eastern Committee of the German economy.
Even a true transatlantist, the president of the Munich Security Conference Wolfgang
Ischinger, stood up for Nord Stream 2 (and Denmark had joined the renewed US incitement
against it the day before).
Political games will not pass themselves of as force majeure. Investors will go to the
German government for their money. Here you need to think ten times, because along with the
demands of multibillion-dollar compensation, there will definitely be asked unpleasant
questions about the reasons that made the German authorities abandon a project that was
profitable to all sides. So you can go to Navalny's analyses. In a normal court, bureaucratic
excuses will not work. And, by the way, in Germany there are politician-lawyers who can
professionally draw up a claim and conduct a case.
"I want to investigate this. One of the developers of Novichok is in the US. It is
known that many special services have this poison. Of course, the Russian have it as well,
but if Putin did it, then why give Navalny to Germany? So that we can establish all this
here? A crime must have some logic", says Bundestag deputy Gregor Gizi.
The logic that we now see is somehow not German. One gets the impression that the
compassion and humanism of the German politician, brought up on the lessons of the past, are
now being tried out by smart and cynical people who know how to competently fabricate,
substitute and cover their tracks. And not too far away, we already had Britain.
At the end of May 2003, the BBC released material that Prime Minister Blair and his
cabinet had made a decision to enter the war in Iraq based on falsified intelligence. The
person who passed on this information to reporters was David Kelly, a leading chemical
weapons specialist at the British Department of Defence. His speech at the parliamentary
hearings threatened the prime minister, the military and the secret services with big
problems, Hiwever, on July 18, 2003, Kelly was found dead in the woods near his home.
Suicide, the investigation stated, but in 2007, a group of parliamentarians conducted an
unofficial investigation -- there were no legal consequences, but now all British people know
that Kelly was murdered in cold blood.
In 2015, Blair was forced to admit that he lied to citizens about Iraq, and escaped
trial only because no one wanted to get involved with it. Nevertheless, Blair has gone down
in history with this lie. And history is important to remember in order to do it right.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov calls on the Germans to leave emotions and turn on
their brains.
"I hope that these absurd actions will be stopped and Germany, at least for the sake of
the reputation of German punctuality, will fulfill its obligations under the agreement with
the Russian Federation. Moreover, they are demanding an investigation from us, but it turns
out that all those who accompanied Navalny are slowly moving to Germany too. this is very
unpleasant and leads to serious thoughts. Therefore, it is in the interests of our German
colleagues to protect their reputation and provide all the necessary information that would
somehow shed light on their so far absolutely unfounded accusations", Lavrov said.
Another proposal has gone from Moscow to Berlin: to send a Russian investigation team
to Germany in order to jointly study the circumstances of the case, the victim of which is a
Russian citizen. So far, there is no reason to believe that Berlin will respond with
consent.
Some German politicians and almost all the SMS likes to moralize against Russia,
periodically recalling the Stalinist repressions and the GULAG. But now Germany itself
behaves like an investigator during interrogation in the dungeons of the NKVD. Confession is
the queen of proof.*
There are undeniable advantages to accusations for which no substantiation is offered
– as we saw with the Skripals, you can await public comment, identify where you went
wrong from scornful rejections of the narrative, and then modify it so that it makes more
sense.
In this case, people wonder why such a potent nerve agent did not fell Navalny instantly
like a poleaxed ox, before he ever left the terminal, instead of 40 minutes or so into the
flight. Ahhh but this, we later learn, was a specially-modified Novichok, engineered to be
slow-acting. Just what you want in a nerve agent. Hint – no, it isn't. Just like you
don't want it specially engineered to be 'persistent', like that chemical-warfare expert tit
for Bellingcat claimed was the reason the poison daubed on Skripal's doorknob did not wash
away in the rain and was still deadly weeks afterward. You want a nerve agent to quickly and
efficiently kill enemy troops caught in the open and unprotected, and then as quickly degrade
and disperse so your own forces can move in and occupy the objective. The last thing you want
is it hanging about for weeks, or being 'slow-acting' so those troops can come in and wax
your ass and then later fall down dead. One of the first casualties of these silly stories
must be that the agent is 'military grade'. The military would say, if you want to use that
useless shite, spread it yourself – we want nothing to do with it.
navalny Hi, this is Navalny. I miss you all 😍. I still can hardly do
anything, but yesterday I was able to breathe on my own all day. Generally myself. I did not
use any outside help, not even the simplest valve in my throat. I liked it very much. An
amazing, underestimated by many thing. Would totally recommend.
What, no tracheotomy scar?
Why aren't you dead, you wanker?
Thinking about thanking the Omsk doctors who "saved your life" after you had taken a dose
of salts in the aircraft shithouse?
I take it that the kiddie Navalnyites in the above Instagram are all Russian citizens and
part of the Bullshitter's entourage that turned up in Berlin, hot on the heels of their
comatose hero.
So how did they get the documentation that enabled them to leave the Mafia State and enter
Germany, the coronavirus shamdemic notwithstanding?
Yes, they are his children. Navalnaya clearly got permission for their son to travel to
Germany. His daughter has flown in from the USA.
However, the question still remains as regards those Navalnyites who rolled up in Germany
following their leader's private flight there: how did they get the appropriate documentation
to do so at such short notice, not to mention Pevchikh, who flew with the comatose Navalny to
Berlin -- and then vanished?.
Seibert was asked about this and said he knew nothing about her.
Ah, yes; that's a good point. I just assumed the hamsters were blathering from a distance,
as in Russia. I did not realize some of them had turned up in Germany, except for the
mysterious Masha.
I hope Germany offers residency to the Navalnys, and that they accept. Russia can't
really refuse to let him back in, he's a citizen. But as long as he is there he will cause
trouble, and he'll be recharged with all the PR he has received from this latest
caper.
But it is suggested that Russia is bargaining for his return; the story also expands
on Lavrov's recent statements, and introduces a villain in the woodpile I would not have
personally suspected: Poland.
I recall Lavrov querying the other day Pevchikh's presence in Germany, her refusal to
be interviewed by investigators in Omsk and how come she managed to fly to Germany with
Navalny? He also said that other supporters of Navalny had also turned up in
Germany.
I lay a pound to a pinch of shit that Pevchikh is a British agent.
British and other international toxicological experts say that without technical
reporting by the laboratory of the spectrometric composition of the chemical, and without
identifying the compound by the international naming protocol there is no evidence at
all;..
the US Army had recently manufactured its own Novichok types: "A230, A232 and A234 A232
has a CAS number of 2308498-31-7. A230 and A234 have no known CAS numbers."
####
I reckon Khordokovsky has a hand in this. He has the same moral compass as dead
Berezovsky. None. And he has refused to stick to agreements (keep out of politics). If the
British or someone else get fingered for this cunning plan , would they serve him up
on a silver platter? Almost certainly so.
We certainly did well to focus on Maria Pevchikh as soon as we discovered that in
addition to being the one who evaded questioning by Russian authorities by flying out to
Germany, she also had British residency. She certainly has become a "person of interest" and
could well be the major individual in the plot to incapacitate Navalny and use him to
pressure Germany over NSII and Russia over the Belarus unrest.
It is still unknown whether Pevchikh is a British citizen. I think she is and probably
must be, in fact, for if she is only a visa holder or an applicant for UK citizenship, she
could be told by the Home Office to go take a hike if it is proven that she was instrumental
in the poisoning plot.
When Berezovsky got cocky in the UK after a judge there had prevented his being forced to
leave Misty Albion because Berzovsky had persuaded him that were he to return to Mordor, he
would face an unfair trial and his life would be in danger -- the erstwhile "Godfather of the
Kremlin" had arrived in the with a 6-month visitor's visa -- he started bragging to the
"Guardian" that he was organizing with his chums still in the Evil Empire the overthrow of
the tyrant Putin.
The Home Secretary at the time was none other than "Jack" Straw -- another odious pile of
ordure -- who promptly summonsed Berezovsky to the Home Office for an official bollocking. He
was told that if, while resident in the UK, he continued to engage himself with the overthrow
of a foreign head of state, he was out.
Be that as it may, I am quite sure he was working with British state security, as was his
once favoured acolyte Litvinenko.
Litvinenko was poisoned. Berezovsky committed suicide -- they say.
Россия задала
ЕС девять
вопросов об
обвинениях в
ситуации с
Навальным
Постоянное
представительство
России при
Евросоюзе
указало на
ключевые
нестыковки в
версии об
отравлении
Алексея
Навального
15 сентября 2020
Russia has asked the EU nine questions about accusations in the situation with
Navalny
The Permanent Representative of Russia to the European Union has pointed out the key
inconsistencies in the version about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny
15 September 2020
In the eighth question, Russian diplomats drew attention to a bottle of water, on
which, according to Germany, traces of poison had been found: "Not a single surveillance
camera recorded how Navalny drank from a similar bottle at the Tomsk airport [before
departure]. from this bottle earlier or on board the plane, how did this bottle get to
Berlin? "
Ask Pevchikh! Only she is now probably undergoing debriefing in London at UK Secret
Intelligence Services HQ, 85 Albert Embankment.
Navalny, if indeed he was close to death, must now realize he was set up by one of his own
benefactors. What would be his next move? Going back to Russia would make the most sense as
the Russians may actually protect him from another show-assassination and he would have
freedom to prance around to his heart's content.
I don't believe he was ever 'close to death', rather that he was an active part of the
deception. He is a grifting idiot who puffs up like a toad upon being flattered. He could
never win power in Russia legitimately, as he is mostly a figure of contempt in Russia save
for the perennially-discontented children of the liberal elite and the few Americaphiles who
don't know enough to keep their heads down. I believe he played his role by taking something
that would nauseate him but not seriously hurt him, rolling about and screaming, and that the
introduction of the phony 'poison bottle' was with his full knowledge. I wish Russia would
just disown him and tell the Germans they can have him.
However, I could be wrong. We will know from the tone of his remarks when he feels he is
strong enough to once again assume his president-in-waiting role, and starts spouting off
about what happened to him. He is the most likely candidate to be selected to get the
water-bottle narrative back on track, so if he comes out with an explanation for how he drank
from the bottle somewhere there were no surveillance cameras, and noticed a sketchy-looking
guy in a leather jacket and a "Vote For Putin!" T-shirt standing nearby just before he drank,
it will be a pretty good indication that he is as full of shit as ever.
There was considerable risk involved in the deception. I doubt that Navalny went into
the deception willingly. There was a very real risk that he could have suffered some brain
damage going into the first coma and that's sure to compromise his health in the long term in
other ways.
More likely it seems a lot of the deception was planned behind Navalny's back and
people were waiting for an opportunity to carry it out. It may have been planned years ago
for someone else and then switched to Navalny once he was in the Omsk hospital. Julia
Navalnaya may have been pushed into demanding that Navalny be transferred to Berlin and while
the Omsk hospital doctors were stabilising him for the transfer, the deception then started
going into action in Germany.
Lavrov smelt a rat several days ago -- last week, I'm sure -- when he stated that
suspicions had been aroused by one of Navalny's gang refusing to answer investigators'
questions in Omsk and then scarpering off to Germany.
I'm quite sure the FSB already knew of Pevchikh's comings and goings between London
and Moscow (over 60 flights there and back I read somewhere) and her activities with the
Navalny organization.
Perhaps they allowed Navalny to leave for Germany -- with Pevchikh flying out with him, I
may add -- because they knew what was afoot and would later expose the Germans for liars, or
if not that, then for their falling to a sucker punch off the British secret service.
They certainly allowed Pevchikh to leave Russia: she didn't sneak on board Navalny's
private flight.
Just Pevchikh, note, not Navalnaya, who is not a British agent, I'm sure.
Certainly possible – as I say, we will know more from his blabber once he starts
giving interviews, which he lives to do. His tone will have changed considerably if he
believes his erstwhile chums in politics intended to martyr him. Otherwise I read his
expressed desire to return at once to Russia as simply remaining in character – the
selfless hero risking all for freedom and democracy.
I wonder how he will thank the doctors in Omsk for saving his life, as it is generally
acknowledged they did. He cannot go into transports of admiration for their professional
skills, because they claimed to have found no trace of poisoning in his samples. He faces the
choice, then, of simply passing over it without mention, or accusing the people who saved his
life of 'being part of the machine'. Doing either will certainly not increase his popularity
in Russia. And it makes no difference at all how popular he is in the west – something
the west seemingly cannot be taught.
Die Zeit сообщила о
предложении
США от ФРГ по
"Северному
потоку -- 2"
RT на русском, 16
сентября 2020
Die Zeit announced the proposal of the USA from Germany for the "Nord Stream –
2
RT in Russian, September 16, 2020
The German government has offered the United States a deal in exchange for Washington's
waiver of sanctions against Nord Stream 2.
This is reported by the newspaper Die Zeit, citing sources
It is noted that Berlin has expressed its readiness to invest up to € 1 billion in
the construction of two terminals in Germany for receiving liquefied natural gas from the
United States.
"In response, the United States will allow the unhindered completion and operation of
Nord Stream 2", TASS quotes the text of a letter from German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz,
which was sent on August 7 to the head of the US Treasury, Stephen Mnuchin.
In early August, US senators sent a letter to the operator of the German port of
Sassnitz calling for an end to work to support the construction of Nord Stream 2.
Very true about the term "loser" being a harsh insult for Americans. The "loser" tag
starts to be applied to kids in early grade school and only intensifies from that point. The
glorification of success (defined by the level of conspicuous consumption) further sharpens
the divide between losers and winners. Our "feel-good" stories are often about individuals
who were able to transform themselves from "losers" to "winners". American culture is
one-dimensional in that way.
Building an LNG terminal is one thing, buying US LNG is another thing. In addition, I
believe that Russia could provide LNG to Germany as well and likely at a substantially lower
price.
The US may settle for this gesture as it does hold the door open, however slightly, for
future developments to be leveraged by the US to force Germany to reduce or stop gas
purchases from Russia. Having the terminal in place could make a future change in suppliers
more feasible and faster but nevertheless representing an economic disaster for Germany. Lets
call it step 1 in Plan B.
On the other hand any diplomatic/economic success plays well in this presidential erection
year. So a) is it worth it?; b) can they reverse the decision the day after? I assume they
can have their cake and eat it as Brussels is mostly spineless. Borrell can squeal about
Russia, but that's because he can do f/k all about the USA's behavior, being spokeshole and
all
That's what people seem not to get – the decision would not ever be 'reversible'
once Nord Stream II is complete. That pipeline quad alone can carry all of Europe's gas
supply that it receives from Russia. None through Ukraine, not a whiff, if that is Moscow's
will, although the Russians have agreed to transit token amounts, which the Ukrainians say
are not enough to make the system's continued operation viable – without the large
volumes they are accustomed to handling, they will have to progressively begin shutting down,
bypassing and dismantling sections they can no longer afford to maintain.
So long as the pipeline's future remains in doubt, Uncle Sam can sell the philosophical
possibility of supplying Europe with large volumes of cheap LNG via tankers, made desirable
– although it will cost a little more, no getting around that – for political
reasons. Once Nord Stream II is complete, the reality of a reliable supply of cheap pipeline
gas would have to be countered with a concrete offer from the USA; this many cubic meters
times this many Euros. Any housewife can do a cost-benefit analysis at that level. Do you
want to pay more for American gas just because it comes from America? Well, let me think
about it – what are the benefits? Well, it comes from America! What, you mean, that's
it? There would be no possibility the Americans would use their status as a major energy
supplier as leverage to bring about economic or political changes in Europe that they
desired, would there? Well I can't guarantee that.
You know what? I'm okay with Russian gas, thanks just the same. Maybe I'll use the money I
save to buy a Ford – how's that?
Pathetic. After declaring forcefully that American extraterritorial sanctions are illegal
– which, technically, they are, only America has a right to threaten to limit European
trade in America if it wishes; although that, too is illegal under WTO rules – Germany
is now cowering and trying to 'make a deal'. With Trump, in case anyone missed that, whose
'Art of the Deal' consists of destroying the opponent until he is happy to have escaped with
his life, and will never publicly complain about a 'deal' which came out very much to his
disadvantage. Put another way, offering America a 'deal' only highlights that you believe you
are in a weak position, are looking for mercy, and are ripe for the plucking. Germany was
already planning to build the heaviest concentration of LNG terminals in Europe; a far better
strategy would have been to threaten to cancel them all if Uncle Sam did not back off. The
Americans are certainly smart enough to figure out – in about 2.5 seconds – that
more LNG terminals means diddly when Russia can also supply LNG far cheaper than the USA
because it has teensy transport costs by comparison, being much closer. Two more LNG
terminals buys America precisely zero advantage, but the willingness to 'deal' reveals
vulnerability. The only American response to rolling on your back to expose your belly is to
step on your head.
I swear, it is hard to recognize Germany as the country which once frightened the
world.
A Trump counter-offer might be a commitment from Germany to buy X amount of American LNG
at a locked-in price, said amount to be sufficient that extra Nord Stream capacity would not
be utilized. It depends on whether the Americans really think they can actually stop Nord
Stream II, because even that would ultimately be a loser strategy. Unless a term far into the
future were specified, the Americans know that once the pipeline is finished, their product
is no longer competitive and cannot ever be unless it is unprofitable to themselves. They
could satisfy themselves with gutting the Germans for a year or two (if they accepted), but
it would be short-term satisfaction at best. Might be enough to win Trump the election,
though.
But if Washington thinks it can actually halt Nord Stream II – with the
understanding that the Russians would probably give up after such a stinging second rebuke
– then the sky is the limit, and they will scornfully reject any other solution. The
one who stands to get hurt the most is Europe. But I don't think they realize
it.
The Borgias are history. Well, obviously, they ARE history. But now they have been
relegated to the Second Division/Championship (football joke) of Poisoners by Sergei Lavrov
and his chef de cuisine:
Oh look! The Navalnyites have shown a video, shot in Tomsk, of Navalny drinking from the
allegedly poisoned water bottle that earlier nobody had seen or made mention of before it
turned up in Berlin and was sent to the Bundeswehr lab.
Recall that his loud-mouth spokeswoman had from the very start insisted that Navalny had
been poisoned by laced-with-poison tea that he had drunk at Tomsk airport.
Change of story line -- as persistently happened in the Skripal fake.
Video Showing Water Bottle That 'Poisoned' Alexei Navalny Shared by His Team
17 September, 2020: 10:17
That Sputnik headline should read, I think, "shared with his team".
And if that is the case, why didn't his team also start howling and screaming and rolling
around on the deck some time later on board the Tomsk-Moscow flight?
Navalny's companions have reported that they took bottles from a hotel room in
Tomsk
Alexei Navalny's companions have said that a bottle of mineral water, on which German
experts had allegedly found traces of poison from the Novichok group, had been brought from a
hotel room in Tomsk.
On an Instagram, they have posted a video in which, according to them, an hour after
news of Navalny's deteriorating condition, they examine the room and seize all the items
which he had been able to touch.
On August 20, the aeroplane in which Navalny was flying urgently landed in Omsk, from
where the blogger was taken to hospital. On August 21, doctors announced that the main
diagnosis was metabolic disorders.
At the moment, Navalny is in Germany, where he has been taken out of an artificial
coma. German doctors announced that he had been poisoned with substances from the Novichok
group, but did not provide any relevant evidence.
So why didn't the Navalny hamsters, who dutifully sought out the poison bottle and most
certainly handled it, throw wobblers as did Navalny when performing what he thought were the
effects of nerve agent poisoning?
And whom did the hamsters hand the bottle to -- Navalnaya or Pevchikh? And who handled the
bottle after its arrival in Berlin and before the obliging Bundeswehr said it had been dosed
with the most lethal nerve agent (weapons grade) known to man?
Why isn't there a trail of stiffs from Tomsk to Berlin and beyond?
Who's going to believe this shite?
"Why, the whole world knows it's true!" will Imperial Plenipotentiary Pompeus Fattus Arsus
surely say.
One of the developers of Novichok, Leonid Rink, commented on reports that a bottle in
the Tomsk hotel where Alexei Navalny had stayed could [have been] Novichok
[contaminated] .
"This is a situation where no one would have been allowed to touch the bottle -- you
would have died if you had done so. If this had really been the case, then there would have
basically been a deceased person, and everyone who had carried this bottle without gloves and
protection would also have died", he told RIA Novosti.
Ah, but . . . Rink is forgetting that it was a special, delayed action Novichok made to
take effect on "Putin's Fiercest Critic" when he was on board the Tomsk-Moscow flight.
Rink's an old Soviet has-been and knows nothing about the latest developments in
diabolical weaponry that issues forth from secret Orc laboratories.
Maybe the cunning developers have produced a Novichok variant safe to those who have
sinned but fatal (or liable, at least, to provoke a severe tummy upset, occasionally) to the
purest of heart?
I like this idea of the special edition of Novichok with the delayed kick. Maybe we could
call it Brawndo and speculate that the poison only goes into action when it does because the
added electrolytes take time to work to release the poison.
Alexei Navalny's team immediately after his departure from Tomsk airport, went to the
hotel room in that city where he had spent the night, and packed all the items (including
water bottles) so as to deliver them for analysis (of course, not in Russia). A video about
this was posted on the oppositionist's Instagram.
Everything in this story is beautiful. Navalny's supporters were collecting "evidence"
on a case that had not yet happened -- but it was already supposed to have happened? Together
with them, there went a lawyer to the hotel -- he was also at the ready. But why were none of
the "trackers" hurt if on the "evidence", as is said, they found traces of the "Novichok"
military poison? And how did the "people of Navalny" end up in a room where cleaning up
should have been done after the guest's departure? There are other questions as well. Some of
them "KP" asked FSB reserve general Alexander Mikhailov .
And the person shown handling the bottle is wearing gloves – they made sure to show
that. But as others have pointed out, this was well before anyone knew 'an attempt had been
made on the Opposition Leader's life'. What, all Lyosha's shit was still in his hotel room,
towels on the floor, the next day, after he checked out? Pretty crappy service in those
Russian hotels. He didn't even leave Russia for several days, and the first suggestions he
had been poisoned came from his 'press agent', who claimed he had been poisoned with tea at
the airport.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sergei Yerofeyev, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, has spoken about
this.
According to Yerofeyev, Navalny has been nominated for the prize by "a number of
professors from recognized universities who deal with Russia". He did not give specific
names, but noted that there are "great people" amongst the scientists who have nominated
Navalny.
A professor of any university in the world can nominate a candidate for the Nobel Peace
Prize: there are no specific requirements for a candidate. In addition, members of national
governments and parliaments, heads of state and some other categories of persons can nominate
candidates.
The oppositionist will have to fight for the main prize of the planet with venerable
rivals.
This is, first of all, US President Donald Trump, who was nominated by Christian
Tubring-Jedde, a member of the Norwegian parliament from the far-right Libertarian Progress
Party. As the MP said in an interview with Fox News, Donald Trump should be awarded for his
role in concluding an agreement on the full normalization of relations between Israel and the
UAE.
And why not? O'Bummer was awarded the peace prize, wasn't he?
I wonder how the Kiev Post evaluates Navalny's position on the Crimea?
The status of the Crimea is a problem that a new democratic Russia will inherit from
its former government. The Russian position on this problem will be determined by the
recognition of the right of the citizens of the Crimea to determine their own destiny
-- Navalny
20!8
I say give it to him. Let him join the prestigious ranks of Obama, the OPCW, the EU.
I also propose starting a Nobel War Prize, to be awarded to whatever individual or
organization is responsible for the highest body count in a given year. Although that may be
redundant, considering that it would probably be given to the same people as the Peace
Prize.
Ha, ha!! And it all descends into farce, again. Navalny has arrived – he has gone
global, beyond his wildest dreams. The nothing from Wherever He Is From who could not even
break 5% in presidential election polling is now a major star, glittering in the western
firmament. As Saint Lily Tomlin once remarked, no matter how cynical you get, you can never
keep up.
All the west is going to be able to get out of this is the satisfaction of showing its ass
to the neo-Soviets, the way it does when it re-names the street the Russian Embassy is
– or was – located on after some prominent Russian dissident. Beavis and Butthead
level, at best.
That's it! This is a farewell article. A real goodbye to the topic. More precisely,
parting with Navalny as a topic. His political role has been played to the end. And even
lethal doses of Novichok have not caused a mass movement. Furgal's arrest caused an explosion
of civil consciousness in Khabarovsk. The poisoning of Navalny, sending him abroad, the
discovery of Novichok, official accusations from Germany did not cause any rally, no
procession, no movement. No excitement in civic consciousness has occurred and will never
happen.
"... As soon as Novichok was mentioned, I knew it was geopolitics and not internal Russian politics. ..."
"... NOVICHOK is a highly toxic and contagious substance. The reason why "it didn't kill the Skripals" is because it was never used on the Skripals just as it has not been used on Navalny. In both cases there would have been dozens of collateral victims. From the moment Navalny started to reel with pain during the domestic commercial flight to 4 days later when amid treatment in Berlin it is reasonable to estimate that 300 to 400 people had been in his proximity. Not one of them has shown or known to have contaged symptons. Let us list the narrative. ..."
"... I think my estimate of a total 300 to 400 people within the first 3 to 4 days having been within close proximity to Navalny is quite reasonable. If he was really was infected with an horrific chemical warfare agent, why would he even be allowed into Germany ? ..."
"... In political terms he is a cult leader of an SPB/Moscow elitist metropolitan cult that does not give a damn about most of Russia. ..."
"... Who benefits? For certain not the Joe Publics of UK, Russia and Germany but maybe the likes of Exxon, chevron, bp etc might. ..."
"... I suspected Navalny may be connected to our 'trusted friend' Browder. Now I know for sure. ..."
"... At some point, as background noise, there was some news read out on the radio. After the segment about the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, NordStream 2 and possible EU sanctions the taxi driver shook his head and said thoughtfully: "Yeah, mommy is stuck " ..."
"... "What mommy?" asked the taxi driver. "That same one, Angela Merkel. You know why Navalny was surrendered to Germany? Let me explain." And then, for a quarter of an hour, the taxi driver presented a coherent theory of what happened, worthy of study at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which answered all the questions that had been bothering me. ..."
"... Operatives at the German Ministry of International Affairs, who sympathized with Schröder's SPD, got in touch with Yulia Navalny (his wife) and offered to hospitalize him in a clinic in Germany. Yulia agreed, and appealed to Putin. ..."
"... The next day Berlin announced that analysis results showed poisoning with a cholinesterase inhibitor. This was its last warning shot. Then there was another phone call, to warn that the next time "Novichok" will be found. Moscow refused, and promised Minsk a billion dollars on that very day. ..."
"... There followed an attempt by Fritz Merz, Angela Merkel's deputy in the DCU, to lean on Merkel to shut down NordStream 2, but he swiftly got his ears boxed by the business lobby of German companies that invested in this pipeline and, whining and whimpering, crawled back into his hole. ..."
"... Then Lukashenko, being a tough nut to crack, presented an intentionally amateurish intercept of secret diplomatic communications between Poland and Germany in which they discussed their plans for poisoning Navalny. Now they are sitting in Warsaw and Berlin and have no idea how to respond to this movie -- to deny or to pretend that they didn't notice it. What a dilemma! ..."
"... If Merkel announces that it is the crime of the century in which a great Russian opposition figure has been fiendishly poisoned with "Novichok," then she would be obligated to sever all relations with the bloody regime and present evidence. But there won't be any evidence to present. And nobody will allow her to freeze the completion of the pipeline. Otherwise German companies, which invested in NordStream 2 will take the Reichstag even ahead of the irate German citizens. In either case, DCU/CSU will face a defeat. ..."
"... But what about Russia's friend Gehrhard Schröder? Being the chairman of the board of the NordStream 2 company and head of the SPD, he looks into the future with confidence and optimism. In any case, CDU/CSU will be deflated and SPD will reinforce its position in the Bundestag and either independently or in coalition with other parties will install its own leader as Bundeskanzler. NordStream 2, which has been in political limbo for a few years, will be completed and enter into service at full rated capacity very quickly. ..."
A 33-year-old young woman who recently flew in from London. On August 15 she celebrated her birthday and then went with Navalny
on the working trip. When the plane urgently landed in Omsk for Navalny's hospitalization, the woman also remained on the ground
in the 'Ibis Siberia Omsk' hotel, waiting for Alexei to recover. She left from Russia to Britain on August 22.
Maria Konstantinovna Pevchikh (Мария Константиновна Певчих) born in 1987, russian. In 2010 she graduated from the sociological
faculty of Moscow Lomonosov State University.
Lives in London. Fond of sports, trains under the program of "Navy Seals", an elite US military unit, owns bookstores in the
UK and Australia.
Have close ties with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yevgeny Chichvarkin. Joined Navalny's activity in 2009. At that time, she was
22-year-old and worked as an assistant to one of the British parliamentarians.
It is alleged that the family and relatives do not know this woman.
The investigation previously published a chronology of events here https://ria.ru/20200821/khronologiya-1576110899.html
They discovered that in Tomsk the blogger's company has booked seven rooms for four people, Navalny himself spent the night in
a different room that was recorded in his name.
"WTF are you talking about? The USA is perfectly willing to fight Russia to the last European NATO member.."
Peter. An Ex-CIA man, of whom I've long forgotten his name used to say the same thing about Saudi Arabia, that the Saudis were
willing to fight Iran down to the last American soldier.
Myth, the US state blames the pusillanimity of the public for its tactics of ultraviolence. The Russians would be drowning
in their own blood were it not for Russian military power and the Chinese alliance.
"Recall that Alexei Navalny has two suspended sentences and is involved in several criminal cases at once.
"In December last year, he was sentenced in the case of embezzlement of money from the Yves Rocher company to a three and a
half years suspended sentence. His brother Oleg was sentenced to a real three and a half years in prison.
In 2013, Navalny, who in 2009 worked as an adviser to the governor of the Kirov region, was found guilty of embezzling property
of the state-owned company Kirovles and sentenced to five years in a general regime colony. He was taken into custody in the courtroom
and placed in a pre-trial detention center, but the very next day the Kirov regional court changed the measure of restraint to
a recognizance not to leave. As a result, the sentence was changed to a suspended one.
In addition, the Investigative Committee is investigating the case of the theft of 100 million rubles from the SPS party against
Alexei Navalny since the end of December 2012.
Activists of Navalny's team – deputy of the Zyuzino metropolitan area Konstantin Yankauskas, as well as entrepreneurs Nikolai
Lyaskin and Vladimir Ashurkov – are suspected of fraud related to violation of the procedure for financing the campaign in the
election of the mayor of Moscow.
Navalny has repeatedly found himself in the role of a defendant in claims for the protection of honor and dignity – for throwing
slanderous publications into the Internet. So, recently, the Lublin Court of Moscow satisfied such a claim by the chairman of
the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, Innovative Development and Entrepreneurship Igor Rudensky."
I have the same feeling as you. Russophobia simply indicates the bastards are working together against us the steeple. Chinaphobia
maybe indicates the Chinese leadership and US leadership jointly want to cull the older generation with bio warfare.
Since none of UK , US. Russia nor China are democracies, their only task is to manage the narrative they tell the people. If
I was to go out and buy a product made in China, half the cost would be for transport or profit to the dealer. That is a shared
enterprise. One party for example manufactures a diesel generator, while the Western parties sit on their bums and take profit.
You are really missing the point. NOVICHOK which you should know was developed (though not originally invented) in a lab in
Soviet Uzbekistan, which following post Soviet independence, was dismantled by the CIA who took the samples back home to the USA.
So it is the Americans not the Russians who have the original well-spring.
NOVICHOK is a highly toxic and contagious substance. The reason why "it didn't kill the Skripals" is because it was never
used on the Skripals just as it has not been used on Navalny. In both cases there would have been dozens of collateral victims.
From the moment Navalny started to reel with pain during the domestic commercial flight to 4 days later when amid treatment in
Berlin it is reasonable to estimate that 300 to 400 people had been in his proximity. Not one of them has shown or known to have
contaged symptons. Let us list the narrative.
Original domestic commercial flight, passengers, crew & colleagues travelling with him
Ambulance to Russian hospital in Omsk ambulance crew
Doctors, nurses, officials, press and Navalny family at hospital in Omsk
German doctors arrived the next day, working along side Russian doctors whom they praised and credited with saving Navalny's
life.
Russian doctors agree to release Navalny for medivac transport against their own medical advice, respecting Navalny family
wishes.
Ambulance crew once again takes Navalny in the reverse direction back to the airport where the private jet was waiting.
Introducing the patient with the "military grade nerve agent" oozing out of his skin to a new flight crew.
Plane lands in Berlin and a German ambulance crew now handles the human chemical warfare torpedo. Note the German ambulance
crew members had short sleeves. If the German Gov believed there was a possibility of a Novichok type substance at play why
was the official greeting party not all dressed up like those Mi5 Salisbury central casting extras in Hazmat suits?
The convoy arrives at the hospital in Berlin handing Navalny over to the German team no doubt comprised of endless staff
members.
I think my estimate of a total 300 to 400 people within the first 3 to 4 days having been within close proximity to Navalny
is quite reasonable. If he was really was infected with an horrific chemical warfare agent, why would he even be allowed into
Germany ?
As for Navalny and the Russian administration and the Russian public, they both view him as useful but not likeable. The Putin
administration has made good use of reports by Navalny's anti-corruption group to expose both people in government and in business.
The Russian public watches the Youtube videos of Navalny's reports to the tune of millions of hits & clicks. However as a person
Alexei Navalny is not like and for good reason. This is reflected in his 2% poll rated that due to all the current focus has moved
up to 4% for Navalny as a potential "politician" (he is actually already a failed one) 4% is his high water mark.
The likes of The Guardian and The Independent have portrayed Navalny over the years as some kind of Russian Nelson Mandela
when in fact Navalny is a better educated more sophisticated Tommy Robinson. Only Navalny is even more racist than so-called "Tommy
Robinson" as I don't even recall him ever saying "All Muslims are cockroaches" as Navalny was once quoted to have said.
In political terms he is a cult leader of an SPB/Moscow elitist metropolitan cult that does not give a damn about most
of Russia. He and his political cohorts such as Ms Sobol offer not one single policy for the people of the Russian Heartland.
Who are far better cared for and better represented by Valdimir Putin, whom the Heartland people lovingly address as Vladimirovich,
President Putin's middle name. Navalny is even more Neo-Liberal and far less small "l" liberal in general values and mindset than
President Putin.
The description is very accurate, and the definition of "elite metropolitan cult" hit the bull's eye. Young people think that
being an oppositionist is being active, fashionable, trendy (also at protests you can post photos on Instagram!) Unfortunately,
if they are asked specific questions, they cannot answer. They are there for self-expression.
--
People follow ideas, Navalny's idea is not clear, where is the plan, where is the perspective? Looking at Navalny's activity,
I feel they are trying to sell me something.
E.g. his website promotes the Smart Voting system https://navalny.com/p/6418/
the title is "Do you want it like in Belarus? Here is a list of candidates, find yours"
the first paragraph point is "to support the rebellious people in word, action and money is very right, but you may do even
more right thing "
the second "it is impossible to use your vote wisely without our smart voting system", a call to action "register"
the third "a few brave Spartans (sic!) broke through Putin's evil cordons and you can support them here is how:
1. Check out the list of candidates. Transfer money to someone you like
Well, actually I sell something myself and I wright similar marketing texts. Compare:
"Are you in search of Boho, Ethnic or Tribal fashion? You're in the right place Our unique *** is the way to express your style!
Does your daughter think of cutting off her gorgeous long hair? Get a pair of our *** for her to show your love and care Here
is how: visit our shop *** Choose the one you like and let us work on the perfect *** crafted especially for you "
When people create an online store of political candidates, it is not credible. Our electoral system means collecting signatures,
real signatures of living people, not collecting money.
Thank you for your courage to speak the truth Mr. Murray. I am trying to do it sometimes too here in the Netherlands, but I
am an engineer, not a politician or journalist, so my means and persuasive talents are limited. However – to stay on the topic
of poison – it feels good to see that the anti-Russian propaganda has not poisoned all minds in West Europe yet.
It's only today that I've realised who is Prigozhin. He is the owner of Concord group, they were those russian with whom Trump
conspired to win elections!
Prigozhin sent 1 million roubles to Charite for Navalny.
He demands 88 millions, I wrote about it previously. It is a demand due to court's decision. I don't think it was издевательство,
it looks more like Prigozhin is afraid of being accused of poisoning 🙂
Russophobes these days, which is an enormous section of the population, will believe anything dastardly about that country
and its leadership. The narrative here, that doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny as Murray shows, is that the Russians
are bumbling villains that couldn't kill a wet paper bag.
Another narrative is that they didn't kill Navalny on purpose. It's just "a warning", etc.. A villain is a villain.
One BS story is as good as another. Of course, there should be a delay between one fiction and the next one. However, the old
saying still applies: throw enough sh*t and something is bound to stick.
At the interpersonal level, it's sometimes simpler to simply exaggerate the exaggeration: e.g., Putin is a villain and look
at what he did to dirty my underwear; there's a Putin under your bed; yeah, and what about the bad weather we've been having?
Putin, of course.
And it's not like any of this is new, e.g., US President Reagan: "Russia has been outlawed forever. Bombing begins in 5 minutes."
It so happened that yesterday I was coming home in a taxi. The taxi driver, who looked like Bill Murray, turned out to be very
talkative: during the trip, as often happens, we touched on all subjects, from the weather to blondes behind the wheel.
At some point, as background noise, there was some news read out on the radio. After the segment about the poisoning of
Alexei Navalny, NordStream 2 and possible EU sanctions the taxi driver shook his head and said thoughtfully: "Yeah, mommy is stuck
"
"What mommy?" I inquired.
"What mommy?" asked the taxi driver. "That same one, Angela Merkel. You know why Navalny was surrendered to Germany? Let
me explain." And then, for a quarter of an hour, the taxi driver presented a coherent theory of what happened, worthy of study
at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which answered all the questions that had been bothering me.
This is how it all came down.
At the beginning of August everybody was preparing for the elections in Belarus -- Belarus itself, as well as Russia and countries
in the EU. It was an exciting game in which everybody placed bets on their own candidate. But I must immediately warn you that
what we were observing was just the visible part of the iceberg, while the underwater currents were known only to a few.
Moscow and Minsk were demonstratively smashing dishes, shouting at each other and pulling each other by the hair, creating
the illusion of a complete break in relations. This was as intended!
Europe, content and relaxed, was rubbing its hands and already seeing how it will very soon kick out "Europe's last dictator"
and install a Belorussian Juan Guaido clone in Minsk, grabbing this delectable piece for itself.
The elections were held. Everybody froze. Not bothering to wait for the election results to come in, on orders from the Polish
provocateur [Telegraph channel] Nexta the Belorussian white-red-white [Nazi occupation flag] opposition marched into battle.
At first everything was going to plan. Excited white-red-white crowds flooded the streets and started threatening the police,
officials and journalists, starting skirmishes and strikes. Slovak and Spanish ambassadors in Belarus spoke out in support of
the protesters and "came over to the side of the people." This was also as intended. It looked like just a bit more of this and
["Europe's last dictator"] Lukashenko would fall.
But then Moscow entered into the game. It recognized the outcome of the elections [which Lukashenko won] and started to support
him organizationally, informationally and financially. Europe had to ramp up pressure. But how?
Nexta was crapping bricks and exhorting the white-red-white activists to get more active, but they just couldn't get any traction
in their attempts to seize power. They turned out to be too weak compared to their own people.
And then, luckily, Navalny was poisoned. In any case, that's what some people imagined.
Operatives at the German Ministry of International Affairs, who sympathized with Schröder's SPD, got in touch with Yulia
Navalny (his wife) and offered to hospitalize him in a clinic in Germany. Yulia agreed, and appealed to Putin.
Then the German minister of foreign affairs walked into Bundeskanzlerin's office and laid his joker on the table: "We
can take away Navalny for treatment. If Moscow tries to prevent this, we will cause a loud scandal. We'll get his body and then
decide how to play this." Merkel found this proposal attractive and, not thinking too long, agreed. Moscow did not object to Navalny's
transfer.
After Navalny was brought to Germany and delivered to the Charité clinic in a cortège consisting of 12 cars, mommy Angela called
Moscow and demanded: Russia must stop supporting Lukashenko, otherwise we will announce that Navalny had been poisoned with "Novichok."
Moscow refused and increased support of Lukashenko, declaring that it has created a reserve of special forces to be sent into
Belarus and take control -- just in case anyone makes a sudden move.
The next day Berlin announced that analysis results showed poisoning with a cholinesterase inhibitor. This was its last
warning shot. Then there was another phone call, to warn that the next time "Novichok" will be found. Moscow refused, and promised
Minsk a billion dollars on that very day.
At that point, Berlin's patience ran out. Navalny was immediately transferred to a military hospital, where it was immediately
"discovered" that he had been poisoned with "Novichok." It was not possible to find "Novichok" while he was at Charité because
journalists and officials could demand to see the test results, while at a military hospital such requests would be denied: the
information is secret. But not even "Novichok" could force Moscow to stop supporting Minsk. Russia's prime minister Mikhail Mishustin
was dispatched to Minsk with a briefcase bulging with papers to sign.
There followed an attempt by Fritz Merz, Angela Merkel's deputy in the DCU, to lean on Merkel to shut down NordStream 2,
but he swiftly got his ears boxed by the business lobby of German companies that invested in this pipeline and, whining and whimpering,
crawled back into his hole.
Then Lukashenko, being a tough nut to crack, presented an intentionally amateurish intercept of secret diplomatic communications
between Poland and Germany in which they discussed their plans for poisoning Navalny. Now they are sitting in Warsaw and Berlin
and have no idea how to respond to this movie -- to deny or to pretend that they didn't notice it. What a dilemma!
The interim result is thus as follows: Navalny is alive and well, sitting quietly in a German military hospital and inquiring
periodically when he will be allowed to go home. But he won't be allowed to go home any time soon.
Now, a year ahead of elections, parliamentary electoral campaign is starting in Germany. Merkel's DCU/CSU coalition doesn't
have a lot of popular support as it is. Some people are even now ready to take the Reichstag with their bare hands and put their
own flag on top of it. And then we have this toxic story with "Novichok"!
If Merkel announces that it is the crime of the century in which a great Russian opposition figure has been fiendishly
poisoned with "Novichok," then she would be obligated to sever all relations with the bloody regime and present evidence. But
there won't be any evidence to present. And nobody will allow her to freeze the completion of the pipeline. Otherwise German companies,
which invested in NordStream 2 will take the Reichstag even ahead of the irate German citizens. In either case, DCU/CSU will face
a defeat.
But if she slams the transmission into reverse, apologizes and returns Navalny to Russia, claiming that what happened was an
unfortunate series of errors, and punishes everybody who had put her in this situation to the full extent of German law, this
won't save the situation either. German voter's won't forgive Merkel over the loss of Germany's international authority, loss
of influence in Europe and total incompetence in handling foreign affairs, and will still punish her at the polls.
Therefore, her only choice is to bide her time, sitting with one buttock on each of two chairs -- blaming Russia for deploying
"Novichok" and simultaneously supporting the completion of NordStream 2. But we are about to see a flood of eyewitness reports,
photographs and documents from the various hospitals where the VIP patient has been treated, knocking out one of the two chairs.
And so the possibility that Merkel's retirement will occur before her term is up should not be dismissed. In that case, she will
have been unable to beat Helmut's Kohl's 16-year record as Bundeskanzler.
But what about Russia's friend Gehrhard Schröder? Being the chairman of the board of the NordStream 2 company and head
of the SPD, he looks into the future with confidence and optimism. In any case, CDU/CSU will be deflated and SPD will reinforce
its position in the Bundestag and either independently or in coalition with other parties will install its own leader as Bundeskanzler.
NordStream 2, which has been in political limbo for a few years, will be completed and enter into service at full rated capacity
very quickly.
When we rolled up to my house, the taxi driver asked: "Do you play chess?"
"Sometimes," I nodded.
In chess, there is a variation called "poisoned pawn." Your opponent, trying to gain material advantage, takes this pawn, ends
up trapped and inevitably loses.
As I was getting out of the taxi, somewhat perplexed, I asked the taxi driver where he got all this information. He smiled
a sad Bill Murray smile and answered: "From my brother. He lives in Germany and also works as a taxi driver." It was at this moment
that I realized that taxi drivers know everything.
New Documents Reveal Secret British Efforts To Arm, Assist And Propagandize 'Moderate
Rebels' In Syria
In November 2018 some anonymous people published a number of documents that had been
liberated from a clandestine British propaganda organization, the Integrity Initiative
.
The same group or person who revealed the Integrity Initiative papers has now
released several dozens of documents about another 'Strategic Communication' campaign run by
the British Foreign Office. The current release reveals a number of train and assist missions
for 'Syrian rebels' as well as propaganda operations run in Syria and globally on behalf of the
British government.
Most of the documents are detailed company responses to several solicitations from the
Foreign Office for global and local campaigns in support of the 'moderate rebels' who are
fighting against the Syrian government and people.
The documents lay out large scale campaigns which have on-the-ground elements in Syria,
training and arming efforts in neighboring countries, command and control elements in Jordan,
Turkey and Iraq, as well as global propaganda efforts. These operations were wide spread.
Most of the documents are from 2016 to 2019. They detail the organization of such operations
and also portrait persons involved in these projects. They often refer back to previous
campaigns that have been run from 2011/2012 onward. This is where the documents are probably
the most interesting. They reveal what an immense effort was and is waged to fill the
information space with pro-rebel/pro-Islamist propaganda.
The documents are not about the 'White Helmets' which were a separate British run Strategic
Communication campaign financed by various governments. While the operations described in the
new documents were coordinated with U.S. efforts they do not reference the CIA run campaigns in
Syria which included similar efforts at a cost of $1 billion per year.
The various projects and the detailed commercial offers to implement them from various
notorious companies are roughly described in the above two links. I will therefore refrain from
repeating that here. Some of the documents' content will surely be used in future Moon of
Alabama posts. But for now I will let you rummage through the stash.
Please let us know in the comments of the surprising bits that you might find.
Posted by b on September 18, 2020 at 15:51 UTC |
Permalink
Documents the "war crimes industry" of the UK, and others, as expressed in Libya and Syria.
Assad has indicated he will pursue reparations from the nations that have killed 400,000
citizens, destroyed or stolen his industrial infrastructure (whole factories broken down and
trucked into Turkey).
One reason why the US and UK and France want Assad dead is the tens of billions of dollars
they will have to pay the Syrian people for the genocidal war waged for a decade in order to
kill Assad and break Syria into pieces.
This confirms the UK has essentially kept the same military doctrine it adopted by necessity
in 1945, which is: attach itself to the USA, focus on intelligence, punch above your weight.
Ideologically, they rationalize that by attributing themselves the role of the cultured
province of the USA; "Greece to the USA's Rome".
The British were always fascinated with intelligence/paramilitary forces. In their vision,
it gives you (a nation) an air of sophistication, a civilizing aspect to the nation that
wages this kind of warfare.
After the Suez fiasco of 1956, the UK gave up direct interventions in the Middle East. It
now only intervenes there under the skirt of the USA. Of course, whenever they can, they do
that with their weapon of choice, which is intelligence. So, yeah, these documents don't
surprise me.
Maria Pevchikh was among the group of six people who accompanied opposition figure and
anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny on the trip to Siberia that ended with his poisoning .
Now, the Transit Police Department for Russia's Siberian Federal District is claiming that Maria
Pevchikh -- or as they've mistakenly called her, "Marina" Pevchikh -- is refusing to testify.
The department is carrying out a preliminary inquiry into Navalny's hospitalization in Omsk
(Russian police officials have yet to open an actual case over the attack on Navalny).
"Pevchikh, one of [the people] who were with Navalny, [who] resides permanently in Great
Britain, avoided making a statement on August 20. According to the investigation, on August 22,
the citizen in question flew to Germany, as a result it wasn't possible to get a statement from
her. Her whereabouts are currently being established," transit police officials said in a
statement.
The other five people who accompanied Navalny have been questioned. This includes Vladlen
Los, Georgy Alburnov, and Ilya Pakhomov -- employees of Navalny's non-profit, the
Anti-Corruption Foundation, -- as well as his press secretary Kira Yarmysh and cameraman Pavel
Zelensky. The transit police are also looking to establish the whereabouts of other passengers
who were on the same flight from Tomsk to Moscow as Navalny.
Pro-Kremlin media accuse
Pevchikh of 'involvement in Navalny's poisoning'
On September 7, the pro-Kremlin outlet Pravda.ru reported, citing an anonymous
source, that Pevchikh accompanied Navalny on his trip to Siberia "on the instructions of FBK
director Vladimir Ashurkov ," who allegedly came in conflict with Navalny shortly beforehand,
over his decision to
dissolve the FBK . Pravda.ru said Pevchikh was "likely Navalny's poisoner," claiming
that she stayed in the same hotel room as him, but wasn't with him on the plane from Tomsk to
Moscow; instead, she drove to Novosibirsk and then flew from there to Omsk. In addition,
Pravda.ru called Pevchikh "a woman with an opaque life story and very interesting facts
in her biography."
Kremlin-linked catering magnate Evgeny Prigozhin also made
allegations about Pevchikh's possible involvement in Navalny's poisoning via statements from
the press service of his company, Concord (however, the company also claims that Navalny's
press secretary Kira Yarmysh was involved in poisoning him). The pro-government websites
Tsarygrad TV and Putin News made similar claims .
In fact, police officials made no
attempt to contact Maria Pevchikh
According to Meduza's research, Maria Pevchikh studied sociology at Moscow State
University and political science at the London School of Economics, concurrently. She has
worked for the FBK since 2011, and now leads the foundation's research department. Pevchikh
lives in London, but she travels to Russia often. Her job includes gathering materials and
writing scripts for the FBK's investigations.
Prior to Navalny's poisoning, Pevchikh was with him in Tomsk, where his team was filming new
video investigations. According to Meduza's research, all of the group members stayed in
separate rooms at the Xander Hotel. The investigation, Meduza found out, went relatively
smoothly.
When Navalny left Tomsk, a few of the group members stayed behind, including Maria Pevchikh.
After the news broke that Navalny had been poisoned, they all went to Omsk. Meduza found out
that Maria Pevchikh was allowed to leave Russia without any difficulties. Russia's law
enforcement agencies have made no attempt to contact her over the past two weeks, even though
her Russian phone is always on. She was never called in for questioning or interrogation, and
hasn't received a summons. Pevchikh told Meduza that she will be prepared to give detailed
comments at a later date.
Transit police officials plan to seek help from Germany
The Transit Police Department for Russia's Siberian Federal District reports that in
addition to questioning Navalny's companions, the preliminary investigation has established the
route he travelled, as well as the places he visited and stayed in Tomsk and the Tomsk Region.
This includes the Xander Hotel, the restaurant Velvet, a rental apartment, where Navalny's
supporters held a working meeting, and the Vienna Cafe in the Tomsk Airport. According to
police officials, these are the places where Navalny ate and drank, "including wine and
alcoholic cocktails."
Given
medical reports that Navalny has been brought out of his coma, the investigative unit of
the transit police is preparing a request for legal assistance from Germany. The request
includes an application to involve Russia's state investigators in the German investigation of
Navalny's case -- seeking in particular "the opportunity to ask clarifying and additional
questions while retrieving statements."
Russian police say they are searching for a woman who was with Alexey Navalny in Tomsk
before his alleged poisoning, last month. They claim 'Marina Pevchikh,' who left Russia after
refusing to answer police questions.
Investigators said on Friday morning that the woman left for Germany on August 22, when
Navalny was taken to Berlin for treatment at the request of his associates.
However, later the same day, Pevchikh herself apparently spoke and insisted that Russian law
enforcement officials had not tried to contact her, even though her Russian phone is always on.
She added that she was never summoned for interrogations and questioning, nor she did not
receive any summons.
The woman also clarified that her name is Maria, not Marina. She was speaking to Meduza, a
Western state-funded Russian language news site, based in Latvia.
Russian investigators are now looking into the events surrounding Navalny's illness, which
quickly left him incapacitated. The police have researched what he did in Tomsk, including who
he met, where he stayed, and where he ate. The investigation led authorities to Pevchikh, who
they claim previously refused to answer police questions.
"To date, five out of the six citizens who accompanied Navalny during the trip have been
interviewed: Vladlen Los, Georgy Alburov, Ilya Pakhomov, Kira Yarmysh, and Pavel Zelensky,"
said the police department's statement. "Marina Pevchikh, who was with Navalny and
permanently resides in Britain, refused to give her side of the story on August 20. According
to the investigation, on August 22, she flew to Germany, and therefore it was not possible to
question her."
The police note that the investigation is ongoing, and they are also establishing the
whereabouts of passengers who flew on the plane with Navalny.
In response to the incident, officials from NATO and the European Union have demanded that
Russia conducts a "full and transparent" investigation. Despite no conclusion yet being
reached, some have called for Moscow to be sanctioned over the alleged poisoning, which the
Kremlin has called "absurd."
On Wednesday, Russia's Foreign Ministry lodged a formal protest with Germany's ambassador,
calling suggestions of state involvement "unfounded."
Speaking at a press conference in Moscow on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
noted that Navalny's associates are now "slowly beginning to move to Germany," which, in
the context of the country's accusations against the Kremlin, is "very unpleasant."
"It is still in the interests of our German colleagues to protect their reputation and
provide all the necessary information that would somehow shed light on the so-far unfounded
accusations," Lavrov said.
On August 20, Navalny was taken ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. Following an emergency
landing in Omsk, a Siberian city 2,000km east of the capital, he was taken to a local hospital.
The opposition figure was flown to Berlin's Charite clinic two days later, where he is
currently being treated. According to German doctors, Navalny was poisoned with a variant of
the nerve agent family 'Novichok'.
"... Furthermore, Navalny had been in the Charité clinic for a week before it was announced that he had been poisoned by so-called Novichok, and only then after his test samples had been sent from Berlin to the Bundeswehr laboratory in Munich, which declared that "Novichok" had. been found. ..."
"... All this is being done with the objective of driving a wedge between Russia and Germany. And it is succeeding, from the tone set by Lavrov. ..."
"... I do not doubt the French and Swedish found Novichok or whatever the stuff is in Navalny's blood sample; they were meant to find it. That's quite a different thing from finding Navalny was poisoned with it. They have probably tested the bottle, and a blood sample given to them. But if Navalny was actually poisoned with a deadly nerve agent, he should be dead instead of up and about and feeling peckish. ..."
"... I would not be surprised if the Spiez laboratory that tested samples of the Skripals' blood in 2018 had not been asked to test Navalny's blood samples 'cos as any fule knows , that place's computers are chock full of Russian hackers nosing around all their databases, and Russian spies are everywhere in the building, hiding in the ceilings and cupboards and beneath the floorboards they might even be hiding in the kitchen rubbish bins or the incinerator ..."
"... Navalny drank something shitty in the Tomsk-Moscow aircraft toilet, then he performed his dramatics outside the toilet for all to behold, and the "Novichok" contaminated bottle was given to Navalnaya by Pevchikh en route to Berlin. ..."
"... The fundamental thing about this false flag is that the Doctors in Omsk saved Navalnys life. They treated him and ensured that he lived, So the samples the Russian doctors took and their analysis to find a cure for Navlany are the most important factor in all this. They found no evidence of poisoning. German doctors who came to Omsk acknowledged this at the time and discussions were held. ..."
"... Pevchikh attracted attention by the fact that she had flown to Russia from Great Britain for Navalny's "tour", and as soon as the blogger was poisoned, she immediately left the country on the same flight that took Alexey to Germany. By the way, even the blogger's wife was not allowed on board that flight, yet Pevchikh was allowed to do so. She was with him all the way. ..."
French, Swedish labs confirm Navalny poisoned with Novichok
Specialist laboratories in France and Sweden have independently confirmed findings that
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a chemical agent from the Novichok group,
the German government has said.
Now how about testing the samples of Navalny's blood and tissue that were used in
Omsk?
Chain of possession of samples?
Something added to samples between Omsk and Berlin?
No samples from Russia have been tested in Europe, samples that were tested in Omsk by US
manufactured, state of the art spectroscopy apparatus.
Furthermore, Navalny had been in the Charité clinic for a week before it was
announced that he had been poisoned by so-called Novichok, and only then after his test
samples had been sent from Berlin to the Bundeswehr laboratory in Munich, which declared that
"Novichok" had. been found.
And during that long wait for the German findings, total silence from the Navalnyites,
who, when Navalny was in the Omsk hospital, were howling and screaming for an immediate
statement from doctors there about what had "poisoned" their heroic leader.
All this is being done with the objective of driving a wedge between Russia and
Germany. And it is succeeding, from the tone set by Lavrov.
I do not doubt the French and Swedish found Novichok or whatever the stuff is in
Navalny's blood sample; they were meant to find it. That's quite a different thing from
finding Navalny was poisoned with it. They have probably tested the bottle, and a blood
sample given to them. But if Navalny was actually poisoned with a deadly nerve agent, he
should be dead instead of up and about and feeling peckish.
I suppose we'll never know what these specialist labs in France and Sweden are, we'll just
have to take the German government's word that it sent samples of Navalny's blood to these
and possibly other labs to test.
I would not be surprised if the Spiez laboratory that tested samples of the Skripals'
blood in 2018 had not been asked to test Navalny's blood samples
'cos as any fule knows , that place's computers are chock full of Russian hackers nosing
around all their databases, and Russian spies are everywhere in the building, hiding in the
ceilings and cupboards and beneath the floorboards they might even be hiding in the kitchen
rubbish bins or the incinerator
Navalny drank something shitty in the Tomsk-Moscow aircraft toilet, then he performed
his dramatics outside the toilet for all to behold, and the "Novichok" contaminated bottle
was given to Navalnaya by Pevchikh en route to Berlin.
It will be interesting to learn full details of the chain of transmission of the
"deadly-ish" bottle from its last handling by an agent of the Russian state onwards. If the
bottle is to play the central role demanded by the "martyr"'s present narrative, then the
transfer of custody thereof has to be evident and indisputable. Moreover, the transmission of
the bottle to German hands needs to have a rational explanation including such minor issues
as why the Russian authorities didn't seize it as evidence or confiscate it at the security
checkpoints?
The fundamental thing about this false flag is that the Doctors in Omsk saved Navalnys
life. They treated him and ensured that he lived, So the samples the Russian doctors took and
their analysis to find a cure for Navlany are the most important factor in all this. They
found no evidence of poisoning. German doctors who came to Omsk acknowledged this at the time
and discussions were held.
Germany did not play any part in saving his life they just brought him out of the induced
coma. Whatever happened in that Clinic and after wards is all unclear and lacks transparency.
PS. France and Sweden can only say the samples they were given had "poison".
Very many people die every day of poisoning. On death certificates one often sees the term
"septicaemia" as cause of death. That's what it said on my father's death certificate.
Septicaemia is commonly called "blood poisoning".
My unfortunate father was not poisoned by anyone: his body poisoned him. He had
cancer.
And this what the the Germans etc. at first said: they found poison in body.
This has been taken as his having been poisoned by one someone using a poison and this
poison is "Novichok".
Macron has said today that somebody had attempted to murder Navalny.
Because he was a "threat" to the "Kremlin Party" and Putin in particular?
Macron and the BBC, CNN, Fox News etc. should take a look at the Russian election results
now being announced.
I think it's actually called "Chain of Custody", and refers to the traceability of every
time a piece of evidence was handled by a different person, how it was sealed against
tampering, and so forth.
"Custody" is a loaded, legal term which the supporters of the "martyr" should be wary of
using, Mark.
If the bottle was suspected by one or more of Navalny's companions when still in Russian
territory of having contained a toxic substance then it ought to have been transmitted to the
custody of the appropriate Russian authorities. Reasonable safeguards such as video recording
the handover could be taken. Thereafter a "chain of custody" of potential evidence can follow
to provide a Court – those pesky places that the shit-smearers would run a mile from
– to assess (test, prove if you prefer) the quality of the evidence and the reliability
of the chain of custody thereof.
The allegations of poisoning have been enabled by the deliberate withholding of "evidence"
from the Russian investigators. Those who did not cooperate with the Russian authorities have
been given so many free passes on the basis of their being plucky Scooby Doo style kids that
I half-expect VVP to mumble about "getting away with it except for those pesky kids". The
cartoonish level of the entire affair and the contempt this narrative displays towards media
consumers in "The West" is dangerous. When all are held to the same standards progress will
be made.
To revert to the "chain of custody" briefly: let's hold the feet of the plucky kids to the
fire of legal process and find out the truth about the "magic bottle" and its amazing journey
to the West. I read recently that in the aftermath of the fall of the Shah in 1979 many very
prosperous Iranians relocated to California. Among those were Zoroastrians who had time
enough and plenty to find digs for themselves and then to finalise the new home for the Holy
Fire which arrived by sea months later. Perhaps the Navalnyites have a similar story to
account for the miraculous appearance of The Bottle in Germany.
From the Orc Blogosphere, so it will be fake, unlike squeaky clean Western MSM and its
open sources:
Pevchikh attracted attention by the fact that she had flown to Russia from Great
Britain for Navalny's "tour", and as soon as the blogger was poisoned, she immediately left
the country on the same flight that took Alexey to Germany. By the way, even the blogger's
wife was not allowed on board that flight, yet Pevchikh was allowed to do so. She was with
him all the way.
According to statements made by German doctors, the poison was found on Navalny's
underwear and on the neck of a bottle. Maybe you are still just thinking about this bottle,
but only a few had access to Alexey's underwear, apart from people who were staying with him:
Pevchikh, for example.
She organized Navalny's meetings with politicians from other countries to discuss the
assistance that the West is ready to provide the blogger with, provided him with exclusive
information and could even play the role of Alexey's "curator" from the West.
As soon as Navalny began to lose popularity, the West could well have decided to take
extreme measures and make a "holy sacrifice" out of Alexey.
He was taken out of a coma. It seems as though he remembers something and can speak,
without suffering any consequences. But will he return to Russia? Or will we never see him
again? Good question.
But one thing is clear for sure, if he returns to the country -- it will already be a
completely different story and a completely different game.
Source:
Кажется,в "деле
Навального"
появился
подозреваемый |
Политические
заметки |
Яндекс Дзен
It seems that a suspect has appeared in the "Navalny case" | Political Notes | Yandex
Zen
In short, Lavrov has demanded that the Germans present evidence for their accusations.
There is none so far.
They have evidence they insist -- "undeniable results from the Bundeswehr -- but they
won't show the data that the Bundeswehr states has given "undeniable" confirmation that
Navalny was poisoned with something that the Western MSM and governments call "Novichok".
I mean, there is a difference between data and the interpretation thereof.
The Germans persistently refuse to present the data that they allege to have, but present
an interpretation of said data as given by the Bundeswehr laboratory.
The ancients interpreted the data of the heavens that they had in the belief that the
earth was the centre of all things and later, this interpretation was based on the belief in
what is written in "Holy Scripture", which they believed was the word of something they
called "god", which had created the All.
The Western interpretation of the data that they say they have concerning analyses of
Navalny's medical tests taken in Germany is based on the belief that the Russians are wont to
use something that the West calls "Novichok" in order to eliminate "dissidents" in the
Russian "regime" and journalists and "leaders of the opposition" there in "Putin's Mafia
State" who dare to criticize the Russian "tyrant".
'In the early stage, you're a young crusader and you write an exposé story about
the powers that be, and you bring it to your editor and the editor says: "No, kill it. We
can't touch that. Too hot."
'Stage two: You get an idea for the story, but you don't write it and you check with
the editor first and he says: "No, won't fly. No, I think the old man won't like it. Don't do
that, he has a lot of friends in there and that might get messy."
'Stage three: You get an idea for the story and you yourself dismiss it as
silly.
'Stage four: You no longer get the idea for that kind of an exposé
story.
'And I would add a stage five: You then appear on panels, with media critics like me,
and you get very angry and indignant when we say that there are biases in the media and
you're not as free and independent as you think.'
Perhaps when the BBC's John Simpson finally retires, or Channel 4's Jon Snow, or ITV's
Mark Austin, or any of the other big beasts in the media jungle, they'll be brave and honest
enough to make similar cogent observations about journalism .
####
A lot more at the link.
I just came across this even though it is from May 2013. Very succinct points especially
as I regularly mention the west's five stages of grief and guesstimate where it is currently
at. As The Canary piece notes: As Chomsky noted, he didn't think journalists like Marr
"self-censor". But that:
if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're
sitting
####
Though to be honest I know a few journalists and they do privately rail against the
reporting of their own employers, ergo self-censorship = self-preservation and future
channels of advancement. They generally believe that they cannot change anything in a
meaningful way. This explains why quite a few quit the business to do something completely
different but often keep a toe in with a blog or infrequent item on current
affairs/whatever.
Continuing the Pevchikh saga, I saw on Russian TV yesterday a presser in Berlin, during
which a journalist asked spokesman for Merkel's government Seibert about that woman of
mystery.
Seibert just repeated that he knew nothing about such a woman. He was pressed further,
told that she had left Russia on board the same aircraft as Navalny had, arrived with him in
Berlin, and vanished.
Seibert was asked how come a Russian national was allowed entry into Germany without
appropriate documentation, especially during this CORONA-19 crisis. Seibert repeatedly acted
stumm .
Huh. Where's that famous 'pressure from the streets' from Navalny's hamsters to find out?
Or is nobody interested in hearing any possibility but 'Putin dunnit'? Not a peep from the
Navalny entourage, none of whom appear to be curious about the mysterious Masha.
Apparently you are just supposed to take Germany's word that There Is Nothing To See Here.
Just like they suddenly gained an immovable certainty that Navalny was poisoned with a new
version of Novichok which acts totally differently from that which poisoned the Skripals, yet
still bears the state seal of the Russian Federation and could not have been employed without
the Head Of State's approval. After three days or so of testing and suggesting he was
poisoned with something, but it might have been a cholinesterase inhibitor of some kind.
By Bryan MacDonald We are now expected to believe that Kremlin assassins used a new,
even more powerful, Novichok poison on Alexey Navalny, and his aides brought a water bottle
laced with it to Germany, but nobody suffered any side effects.
At this point, Western reporters covering the story are either completely high on the
Kool-Aid or they are going to intense lengths to suppress their skepticism, because so much of
the narrative simply doesn't add up.
The opposition figure's condition when he was first hospitalized, in Siberia, was clearly
very grave. He was placed into an induced coma and attached to a ventilator. The situation was
so serious that his wife and associates demanded he be moved abroad, to Germany, for treatment.
A request Russian authorities acquiesced to the following evening, after a tense day when the
doctors treating him in Omsk stated that they felt he was too unwell to travel, and his
associates alleged they were stalling.
Since Navalny's arrival in Berlin, things have become politicized, and there has been talk
of sanctions and other diplomatic and economic penalties being directed at Russia. Germany
insists that its experts
found traces of the extremely lethal Novichok poison in the activist's system. Angela Merkel
herself has more-or-less accused the Russian government of being behind what she has described
as an "attempted murder."
Moscow claims that Russian doctors didn't find any substance of that nature in their tests.
But Berlin has shot back by saying laboratories in France and Sweden have backed up its
assertions.
When it comes to Russia, the mainstream Western media operates in a self-contained pit of
rumor, fear, braggadocio, bulls**t, and propaganda. Thus its correspondents have treated the
Navalny case in a predictable fashion: Any pronouncements from the opposition figure's
associates, and the German government – even when contradictory or scarcely believable
– are treated like gospel truth, but anything Russian officials say is immediately
disparaged.
Before Thursday, the most blatant example of this came on September 9, when, to quote Max
Seddon, a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, "Germany apparently concluded (that)
Navalny was poisoned with a substance 'that the world did not know until this attack, but which
is more malicious and deadly than all known offshoots of the Novichok family,' and that Russian
security must have done it."
Now, given that the previous incarnation of Novichok was said to be eight times more potent
than VX (a deadly nerve agent famously used in the assassination of North Korean leader Kim
Jong-un's half brother Kim Jong-nam), if the new variant is even deadlier, how could Navalny
not only be alive, but, at that point, already out of his coma.
Less than a week later, he was able to get out of bed, and pose for photographs. Yet,
Western media has just accepted the German statement at face value and has failed to ask how
can a pronouncement like this be credible?
Now, we have an even stranger illustration. On Thursday Navalny's team posted a video to his
official Instagram, which alleges that traces of Novichok were found on a water bottle in his
Tomsk hotel room, where he stayed the night before the ill-fated flight to Moscow.
They described how, after learning that his plane had been forced to make an emergency
landing, his aides went to the room, which had not yet been cleaned. The video shows Navalny's
supporters "recording, describing, and packing" everything they found there. According
to the text, they took what they found to scientists in Germany.
While Western media has faithfully amplified the allegations, the reality is it's all pretty
hard to swallow. For the narrative to be true, we have to suspend disbelief, and imagine that
the Kremlin's crack assassins tried to kill Navalny by dousing the most deadly nerve agent
known to man on bottles in his hotel room. Then, they didn't even bother trying to cover up
their dastardly act by at least telling the hotel to have housekeeping clean up the place and
remove the receptacles?
Instead, they just left the evidence there, not at all worried that the Novichok might kill
the hotel staff or the next guest in the room, leading to the exposure of the secret agents
involved, and a local scandal. Also, how did the poisoners know which room Navalny would stay
in? It's common knowledge that his team never books under his name, so they could just as
easily have killed one of his aides.
Also, how did they time the Novichok to conveniently work while the activist was on his
flight, given they could not have known what time he'd take a swig of the water? Plus, what if
he never drank it at all, and instead gave it to a thirsty comrade? Perhaps the Kremlin
assassins stuck a label on it? 'For Alexei Anatolievich only! Please drink at precisely
(whatever) o'clock'.
What's more, you then have to imagine Navalny's team came back, with no protective gear,
beyond rubber gloves, and touched bottles laced with this killer substance, but suffered no
side effects? Not only this, but they managed to subsequently fly them out of the country,
presumably on commercial flights, during a pandemic when direct routes from Russia to Berlin
are closed? Without any care for the dangers of taking a potentially lethal substance on a
plane full of innocent passengers?
The story pushes beyond the normal bounds of believability, and stretches all credibility.
It's also another example of how bad and distorted Western reporting out of Moscow has become.
Much of it being little more than PR boosterism for those opposition figures who are viewed as
favourable to Western interests in Russia.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
A 33-year-old young woman who recently flew in from London. On August 15 she celebrated
her birthday and then went with Navalny on the working trip. When the plane urgently landed
in Omsk for Navalny's hospitalization, the woman also remained on the ground in the 'Ibis
Siberia Omsk' hotel, waiting for Alexei to recover. She left from Russia to Britain on August
22.
Maria Konstantinovna Pevchikh (Мария
Константиновна
Певчих) born in 1987, Russian. In 2010 she graduated from
the sociological faculty of Moscow Lomonosov State University.
Lives in London. Fond of sports, trains under the program of "Navy Seals", an elite US
military unit, owns bookstores in the UK and Australia.
Have close ties with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yevgeny Chichvarkin. Joined Navalny's
activity in 2009. At that time, she was 22-year-old and worked as an assistant to one of the
British parliamentarians.
It is alleged that the family and relatives do not know this woman.
They discovered that in Tomsk the blogger's company has booked seven rooms for four
people, Navalny himself spent the night in a different room that was recorded in his
name.
April 12,
2018Translated by Ollie Richardson & Angelina Siard00:47:39 12/04/2018ria.ru
Vladimir Sivkovich headed the commission of inquiry of the Verkhovna Rada in the case of
"Viktor Yushchenko's poisoning" . Yushchenko's team actively inflated the story of
"poisoning" , the image of a victim helped him to become the President. However, the
Rada commission found out that there wasn't any poisoning, and at the same time Yushchenko
refused to cooperate with the investigation. Moreover, as Sivkovich told the correspondent of
RIA Novosti, people from the president's environment made their own conclusion for the Austrian
doctors and asked to "freeze" the investigation.
What conclusions did the commission come to?
"The main conclusion is that there isn't any proof of deliberate poisoning. There aren't
any suspects or accused in this case. All the story with poisoning is simply political
PR."
There was the narrative that Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxine
"All experts who we talked to affirm: dioxine will decompose in an organism only 7-10
years later. The consequences are incurable. And Yushchenko was able to miraculously
recover."
There wasn't any dioxine in his blood?
"We aren't aware of any. He refused to cooperate with us and didn't present blood samples
to the commission. He didn't cooperate not only with us, but also with the Prosecutor-General's
Office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. These departments were headed by people who he
appointed. And he even didn't trust them."
Yushchenko gave his blood to an Austrian clinic
"I contacted these doctors. Some blood was given to them. But what blood -- they don't
know. Dioxine could've been added to it later. And in general it is necessary to understand
that dioxine is a weapon of mass destruction. This is 'agent Orange', which the Americans used
in Vietnam. If Yushchenko was indeed poisoned with dioxine, then there would be many victims,
and not just Yushchenko. It simply doesn't logically correspond."
Where then did the narrative about dioxine come from?
"They looked at approximate symptoms. Like what the Vietnamese had. And straight off
invented it."
What happened to Yushchenko back then?
"We investigated the fact of supposed poisoning. No proof of poisoning was found. Nobody
poisoned Yushchenko! What actually happened Yushchenko underwent certain medical procedures in
order to look better. Experts who we spoke to affirm: after such a procedure it is necessary to
stick to a diet. For example, it is forbidden to take alcohol. I know for sure that Yushchenko
sometimes drank, there are photos. It is also important to understand that he had pancreatitis.
All of this was superimposed on each other."
Who knew that there wasn't any poisoning?
"Everyone in Yushchenko's HQ knew. All his management knew very well. When Yushchenko
stated that he had been poisoned, the SBU was immediately suspected. And when I headed the
parliamentary commission, I was allowed to listen to staff recordings. I don't know on what
basis they recorded HQ employees. Perhaps there was some criminal case. I listened to these
recordings for 3 days, and all of them knew very well that there was no poisoning. And the
current president – Petro Poroshenko – also knows about this. And Yushchenko was
then treated at the expense of Poroshenko.
This imaginary poisoning was the main secret of Yushchenko, his weak point. Those who
were aware of this could blackmail the President. It was caught on a 'hook'. In Ukraine every
President has a secret: for Kuchma it is 'Gongadze's case' and Melnichenko's films, for
Yanukovych it is criminal record, and Yushchenko had a false poisoning."
Who invented this narrative?
"David Zhvaniya, who was a part of the 'Our Ukraine' party, directly stated to our
commission: the leadership of this party falsified the poisoning. Dioxine was somehow
externally added to Yushchenko's blood sample. And this sample was sent to the Austrian clinic.
And it is precisely for this reason that he refused to give a blood test for our commission: if
he was really poisoned, then he would be the first to be interested in it. What reason did he
have to refuse, in this case?
The text for the Austrian doctors was thought up by the vice speaker Aleksandr Zinchenko.
He wrote it himself and sent it to the clinic, and the doctors simply voiced it."
Was the commission put under pressure?
"I will say it like this. People from Yushchenko's environment asked me to 'freeze' the
work. This was the agreement: they promised not to promote the poisoning topic any more if we
don't investigate this story. But in 2009 Yushchenko violated the agreement -- and the
commission resumed its work.
There unambiguously wasn't any poisoning. No proof of poisoning was provided, this is an
entirely political story. The loud accusation was hurled, while there was no proof. This is
very similar to the affair with Skripal's poisoning -- it's the same
mechanism."
I always assumed that Trump was the candidate of MIC in 2016 elections, while Hillary was the
candidate of "Intelligence community." But it looks like US military is infected with desperados
like Mattis and Trump was unable fully please them despite all his efforts.
But it looks like US military is infected with desperados like Mattis and Trump was unable
fully please them despite all his efforts. Military desperados are not interested in how many
American they deprived of decent standard of living due to outside military expenses. All they
want is to dominate the word and maintain the "Full Spectrum Dominance" whatever it costs.
It is Trump's tortured relationship with the military that stands out the most, especially
as told through the eyes of former Secretary of Defense Jim 'Mad Dog' Mattis, a retired marine
general. It is clear that Bob Woodward spent hours speaking with Mattis -- the insights,
emotions and internal voice captured in the book show a level of intimacy that could only be
reached through in-depth interviews, and Woodward has a well-earned reputation for getting
people to speak to him.
The book makes it clear that Mattis viewed Trump as a threat to the US' standing as the
defender of a rules-based order -- built on the back of decades-old alliances -- that had been
in place since the end of the Second World War.
It also makes it clear that Mattis and the military officers he oversaw placed defending
this order above implementing the will of the American people, as expressed through the free
and fair election that elevated Donald Trump to the position of commander-in-chief. In short,
Mattis and his coterie of generals knew best, and when the president dared issue an order or
instruction that conflicted with their vision of how the world should work, they would do their
best to undermine this order, all the while confirming to the president that it was being
followed.
This trend was on display in Woodward's telling of Trump's efforts to forge better relations
with North Korea. At every turn, Mattis and his military commanders sought to isolate the
president from the reality on the ground, briefing him only on what they thought he needed to
know, and keeping him in the dark about what was really going on.
In a telling passage, Woodward takes us into the mind of Jim Mattis as he contemplates the
horrors of a nuclear war with North Korea, and the responsibility he believed he shouldered
when it came to making the hard decision as to whether nuclear weapons should be used or not.
Constitutionally, the decision was the president's alone to make, something Mattis begrudgingly
acknowledges. But in Mattis' world, he, as secretary of defense, would be the one who
influenced that decision.
Mattis, along with the other general officers described by Woodward, is clearly gripped with
what can only be described as the 'Military Messiah Syndrome'.
What defines this 'syndrome' is perhaps best captured in the words of Emma Sky, the female
peace activist-turned adviser to General Ray Odierno, the one-time commander of US forces in
Iraq. In a frank give-and-take captured by Ms. Sky in her book 'The Unravelling', Odierno spoke
of the value he placed on the military's willingness to defend "freedom" anywhere in the world.
" There is, " he said, " no one who understands more the importance of liberty and
freedom in all its forms than those who travel the world to defend it ."
Ms. Sky responded in typically direct fashion: " One day, I will have you admit that the
[Iraq] war was a bad idea, that the administration was led by a radical neocon program, that
the US's standing in the world has gone down greatly, and that we are far less safe than we
were before 9/11. "
Odierno would have nothing of it. " It will never happen while I'm the commander of
soldiers in Iraq ."
" To lead soldiers in battle ," Ms. Sky noted, " a commander had to believe in the
cause. " Left unsaid was the obvious: even if the cause was morally and intellectually
unsound.
his, more than anything, is the most dangerous thing about the 'Military Messiah Syndrome'
as captured by Bob Woodward -- the fact that the military is trapped in an inherited reality
divorced from the present, driven by precepts which have nothing to with what is, but rather by
what the military commanders believe should be. The unyielding notion that the US military is a
force for good becomes little more than meaningless drivel when juxtaposed with the reality
that the mission being executed is inherently wrong.
The 'Military Messiah Syndrome' lends itself to dishonesty and, worse, to self-delusion. It
is one thing to lie; it is another altogether to believe the lie as truth.
No single
general had the courage to tell Trump allegations against Syria were a hoax
The cruise missile attack on Syria in early April 2017 stands out as a case in point. The
attack was ordered in response to allegations that Syria had dropped a bomb containing the
sarin nerve agent on a town -- Khan Shaykhun -- that was controlled by Al-Qaeda-affiliated
Islamic militants.
Trump was led to believe that the 59 cruise missiles launched against Shayrat Airbase --
where the Su-22 aircraft alleged to have dropped the bombs were based -- destroyed Syria's
capability to carry out a similar attack in the future. When shown post-strike imagery in which
the runways were clearly untouched, Trump was outraged, lashing out at Secretary of Defense
Mattis in a conference call. " I can't believe you didn't destroy the runway !",
Woodward reports the president shouting.
" Mr. President ," Mattis responds in the text, " they would rebuild the runway in
24 hours, and it would have little effect on their ability to deploy weapons. We destroyed the
capability to deploy weapons " for months, Mattis said.
" That was the mission the president had approved, " Woodward writes, clearly
channeling Mattis, " and they had succeeded ."
The problem with this passage is that it is a lie. There is no doubt that Bob Woodward has
the audio tape of Jim Mattis saying these things. But none of it is true. Mattis knew it when
he spoke to Woodward, and Woodward knew it when he wrote the book.
There was no confirmed use of chemical weapons by Syria at Khan Shaykhun. Indeed, the
forensic evidence available about the attack points to the incident being a false flag effort
-- a successful one, it turns out -- on the part of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamists to
provoke a US military strike against Syria. No targets related to either the production,
storage or handling of chemical weapons were hit by the US cruise missiles, if for no other
reason than no such targets could exist if Syria did not possess and/or use a chemical weapon
against Khan Shaykhun.
Moreover, the US failed to produce a narrative of causality which provided some underlying
logic to the targets that were struck at Khan Shaykhun -- "Here is where the chemical weapons
were stored, here is where the chemical weapons were filled, here is where the chemical weapons
were loaded onto the aircraft." Instead, 59 cruise missiles struck empty aircraft hangars,
destroying derelict aircraft, and killing at least four Syrian soldiers and up to nine
civilians.
The next morning, the same Su-22 aircraft that were alleged to have bombed Khan Shaykhun
were once again taking off from Shayrat Air Base -- less than 24 hours after the US cruise
missiles struck that facility. President Trump had every reason to be outraged by the
results.
But the President should have been outraged by the processes behind the attack, where
military commanders, fully afflicted by 'Military Messiah Syndrome', offered up solutions that
solved nothing for problems that did not exist. Not a single general (or admiral) had the
courage to tell the president that the allegations against Syria were a hoax, and that a
military response was not only not needed, but would be singularly counterproductive.
But that's not how generals and admirals -- or colonels and lieutenant colonels -- are
wired. That kind of introspective honesty cannot happen while they are in command.
Bob Woodward knows this truth, but he chose not to give it a voice in his book, because to
do so would disrupt the pre-scripted narrative that he had constructed, around which he bent
and twisted the words of those he interviewed -- including the president and Jim Mattis. As
such, 'Rage' is, in effect, a lie built on a lie. It is one thing for politicians and those in
power to manipulate the truth to their advantage. It's something altogether different for
journalists to report something as true that they know to be a lie.
On the back cover of 'Rage', the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Robert Caro is quoted from
a speech he gave about Bob Woodward. " Bob Woodward ," Caro notes, " a great
reporter. What is a great reporter? Someone who never stops trying to get as close to the truth
as possible ."
After reading 'Rage', one cannot help but conclude the opposite -- that Bob Woodward has
written a volume which pointedly ignores the truth. Instead, he gives voice to a lie of his own
construct, predicated on the flawed accounts of sources inflicted with 'Military Messiah
Syndrome', whose words embrace a fantasy world populated by military members fulfilling
missions far removed from the common good of their fellow citizens -- and often at conflict
with the stated intent and instruction of the civilian leadership they ostensibly serve. In
doing so, Woodward is as complicit as the generals and former generals he quotes in misleading
the American public about issues of fundamental importance.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Scott Ritter
is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ' SCORPION
KING : America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the
Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff
during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter
@RealScottRitter
Whichever construct you want to believe, the fact remains that US has continued to sow
instability around the world in the name of defending the liberty and freedom. Which brings
to the question how the world can continue to allow a superpower to dictate what's good or
bad for a sovereign country.
Johan le Roux Jewel Gyn 18 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 03:42 AM
The answer you seek is not in the US's proclaimed vision of 'democracy' ot 'rescuing
populations from the clutches of vile dictators.' They just say that to validate their
actions which in reality is using their military as a mercenary force to secure and steal the
resources of countries.
Joaquin Montano 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 04:57 PM
Bob Woodward was enshrined as a great, heroic like journalist by the Hollywood propaganda
machine, but reality is he is a US Security agent pretending to be a well informed/connected
journalist. And indeed, he is well informed/connected, since he was a Naval intelligence man,
part responsible of the demise of the Nixon administration when it fell out of grace with the
powerful elites, and the Washington Post being well connected with the CIA, the rest is
history. And as they say, once a CIA man, always a CIA man.
That is correct. Woodward is a Naval intelligence man. The elite in the US was not happy
about Nixon's foreign policy and his detante with the Soviet Union. Watergate was invented,
and Nixon had nothing to do with it. However, it brought him down, thank's to Woodward.
NoJustice Joaquin Montano 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:48 PM
But he also exposed Trump's lies about Covid-19.
lectrodectus 17 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:45 AM
Another first class article by ....Scott .. The book makes it clear that Mattis viewed Trump
as a threat to the Us' standing as the defender of a " rules -based order -built on the back
of decades -old alliances-that had been in place since the end of the second World War". It
also makes it clear that " Mattis and the Military officials he oversaw placed defending this
order above the implementing the will of the American People " These old Military Dinosaurs
simply can't let go of the past, unfortunately for the American people / the World I can't
see anything ever changing, it will be business as usual ie, war after War after War.
Jonny247364 lectrodectus 5 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:53 PM
Just because donny signs a dictact it does not equate to the will of the americian people.
The americian people did not ask donny to murder Assad.
neeon9 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:56 PM
"a threat to the US’ standing as the defender of a rules-based order –" Who made
that a thing? who voted for the US to be the policeman of the planet? and who said their
"rules" are right? I sure didn't, nor did anyone I know, even my american friends don't know
whose idea it was!
fezzie035fezzm 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:29 PM
It's interesting to note that every president since J.F.K. has got America into a military
conflict, or has turned a minor conflict into a major one. Trump is the exception. Trump
inherited conflicts (Afghanistan, Syria etc) but has not started a new one, and he has spent
his three years ending or winding down the conflicts he had inherited.
NoJustice fezzie035fezzm 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:34 PM
Trump increased military deployment to the Middle East. He increased military spending. He
had a foreign general assassinated. He had missiles fired into Syria. He vetoed a bill that
would limit his authority to wage war. Trump is not an exception.
T. Agee Kaye 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 05:59 PM
Good op ed. 'Rage is built on a lie' applies to many things.
E_Kaos T. Agee Kaye 7 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:46 PM
True, the beginning of a new narrative and the continuation of an old narrative.
PYCb988 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 07:25 PM
Something's amiss here. Mattis was openly telling the press that there was no evidence
against Assad. Just Google: Mattis Newsweek Assad.
erniedouglas 12 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:14 AM
What was Watergate? Even bet says there were tapes of a private relationship between Nixon
and BB Rebozo.
allan Kaplan 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:03 PM
Continuation of a highly organized and tightly controlled disinformation campaign to do one
singularly the most significant and historically one of the most illegal act of American
betrayal... overthrow American elections at any and all costs to install one of the most
deranged, demoralized sold out brain dead Biden and his equally brown nosing Harris only to
unseat a legally and democratically elected US president according to our Constitution! Will
their evil acts against America work? I doubt it! But at a price that America has never
before seen. Let's sit back and watch this Rose Bowl parade of America's dirtiest of the
dirty politics!
E_Kaos allan Kaplan 7 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:49 PM
"brown nosing harris", how apropos with the play on words.
Bill Spence allan Kaplan 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:29 PM
Both parties and their politicians are totally corrupt. Why would anyone support one side
over the other? Is that because you believe the promises and lies?
custos125 17 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:35 AM
Is there any evidence that both Mattis and Woodward knew that the allegations of a Syrian use
of chemical weapons by plane were not true, a false flag? On the assumption of this use, the
capacity to fly such attack and deploy such weapons was destroyed for some time. I recommend
reading of Rage, it is quite interesting, even if some people will not like it and try to
keep people away from the book.
E_Kaos custos125 7 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:58 PM
My observations were: 1 - where were the bomb fragments 2 - why use rusted gas cylinders 3 -
how do you attach a rusted gas cylinder to a plane 4 - were the rusted gas cylinders tossed
out of a plane 5 - how did the rusted gas cylinders land so close to each other My conclusion
- False Flag Incident
neeon9 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:58 PM
The is only one threat to peace in the world, and it's the US/Israeli M.I.C.. War mongering
children, who actually believe, against all reason, that they are the most worthy and
entitled race on earth! they are not. The US has been responsible for more misery in the
world than any other state, which isn't surprising given how many Nazi's were resettled there
by the Jews. They are also the only Ppl on the planet who think a nuclear war is winnable!
How strange is that!
NoJustice 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:22 PM
So everything is a lie because Woodward didn't mention that there was no evidence found that
linked the Syrian government to the chemical attack?
Strongbo50 6 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:58 PM
The left is firing up the Russian Interference narrative again, how Russia is trying to take
the election. The real truth is in plain sight, The main stream media is trying to deliver
Biden a win, along with google yahoo msn facebook and twitter. I say, come on Russia, if you
can help stem that tide of lies please Mr Putin help. That's a joke but the media is real.
And Woodward in his old age wants one more trophy on his mantle.
CuttySark 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 05:41 PM
Trump has become the great white whale. Seems like there are Ahab's everywhere willing to
shoot their hearts upon the beast to bring it down whatever the cost. I think it was this
kind of rage and attitude that got Adolf off to a good start.
NoJustice CuttySark 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 05:44 PM
He's an easy target because he keeps screwing up.
Gryphon_ 1 day ago 16 Sep, 2020 06:59 PM
The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. Never in my life have I seen a
newspaper that lies as much as the post. Bob Woodward works for the post.
Is this a preparation for immigration with important political side effect? After all Navalny
is former stock speculator, so he can concoct some scheme of "escape" from Russia in such a
dramatic way. And German intelligence service were only too glad to play their role, as they did
in Yushchenko case.
The idea of Novichok poisoning is pretty crude and highly quetionable -- being military agent
it supposedly it acts instantly killing the victim. Here Navalny manage to get into plain and
remain countious for at least 30 min. More probably is the same scheme as in Skripal case. Some
agent after which you lose conciouness, but that does not cause any serious side effects.
A video posted by Navalny's team on his Instagram page showed them searching Navalny's room
at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk on Aug. 20, an hour after they were informed about his
illness.
Apparently, this is how Germany got the materials, which a military lab allegedly tested to
confirm the presence of Novichok. Initially, Navalny's team claimed he had been poisoned after
drinking a cup of tea at the airport. But now it's a water bottle from his hotel room. The
story just keeps changing,
"It was decided to gather up everything that could even hypothetically be useful and hand
it to the doctors in Germany. The fact that the case would not be investigated in Russia was
quite obvious," the post said.
It showed his team bagging several empty bottles of "Holy Spring" mineral water, among
other items, while wearing protective gloves.
"Two weeks later, a German laboratory found traces of Novichok precisely on the bottle of
water from the Tomsk hotel room," the post said.
"And then more laboratories that took analyses from Alexei confirmed that that was what
poisoned Navalny. Now we understand: it was done before he left his hotel room to go to the
airport."
One of Navalny's team members bragged to Al Jazeera that the evidence was taken "right under
the KGB's nose".
Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister and an ally of Navalny, said his team had
outplayed the FSB security police with their quick thinking: "They took the evidence from
under their noses and shipped it out of the country."
Navalny's flight took off at 08:01am, so he must have left the room by 5am, to go to the
airport to catch the flight. The bedside clock in the video says 11:45 (presumably am)... and
the room had not been cleaned? Really??
Why did Navalny's team think he would be going to Germany... it was 2 more days until the
family made that request. Odd...
Were Navalny's team checked for nerve agent? They were in a room with "the world's most
deadly" nerve agent... but they all seem fine.
Has the room been used by anyone else since? Are they all OK?
This story is complete garbage.
SiFiUK , 7 hours ago
So sick of this BS, is anything real any more? Surely, in the near future, the public
won't believe anything the MSM says, whether it really is true or not.
EDIT: I still remember well how, during the BBC's Skripal coverage, one of the 'actors',
dramatically dressed in a hazmat suit and searching for 'clues', took his helmet off thinking
he'd gone off camera. Epic fail, yet the story still stuck enough to have confidence in
launching a sequel!
d0gpants , 6 hours ago
Just like that ***** said...something like 'we know were successful when everything the
public believes is a lie'
BigJim , 6 hours ago
William Casey, I do believe.
Meanwhile, the FSB poison Navalny, but don't bother removing the evidence, or worry about
his woman touching the bottle (the fiends!) and his "team" have no problems getting into his
room... after he#s already checked out.
BetaGap , 5 hours ago
Did they need the bottle or could they find the substance on the photo already?
Was the name putin written on each molecule?
HowdyDoody , 6 hours ago
A clear water bottle with a blue top was spotted peeking out of his wife's handbag as she
tavelled to Germany. The water bottle sold for use on the flights are blue with a pink
top.
And there is no verifiable chain of custody for this bottle. In other words it is not
evidence.
thurstjo63 , 5 hours ago
@EuroPox,
Thank you for pointing out exactly what I was thinking! Difficult to believe that the room
was not already cleaned especially since the hotel already knew that he checked out.
But consider the fact that Navalny's team is supposedly going into his hotel room to
recover novichuk, a deadly nerve agent!?!
Maybe Navalny thinks that this is going to revive his career!
EuroPox , 4 hours ago
I do not understand how Germany got suckered into this, especially as Nordstream is such a
hot topic... how could the Germans have been so stupid? Merkel really was caught with her
pants down (which is not an image I wish to dwell on...)
A_Huxley , 3 hours ago
Its that special agent. That does not work.
That people can be around.
But its super secret.
Then it gets found.
Then the media talks a lot on when, how and where and when again.
All very secret, but we can read along in real time.
Space-Time Continuum , 8 hours ago
You're being presented:
Skripal 2
Like all remakes, this one is worse.
BorisTheBlade , 8 hours ago
Naturally, as Marx used to say: history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a
farce. Modern day marxists usually skip the tragedy, go straight to farce and outright
nonsense. Moron is a new normal.
BuboTB48 , 7 hours ago
BOLLOCKS !!!
If a lethal dose of Potassium Cyanide is about the size of a pea, then imagine that a
lethal dose of Sarin is about the size of a full stop (period).
Now we have to change scales and assume that the lethal dose of Sarin is the size of a
baseball, then the lethal dose of VX is now smaller than the aforementioned full stop
(period).
Unfortunately we have to change scales again to consider Novichok. So the Potassium
Cyanide lethal dose becomes the size of a seriously over-inflated basketball, while the sarin
lethal dose is struggling to look like a poorly endowed baseball. The VX lethal dose is a lot
smaller than a marble. The Novichok lethal dose is still smaller than the full stop
(period).
Seriously lethal, and pretty quick acting it has the same symptoms as most nerve agents
which are designed to destroy the bodies ability to transmit nerve signals via acetyocholine
and cholinesterase. You get pinpoint pupils, convulsions, asphyxiation, etc and of course,
most importantly death. If you survive, typically by injecting Atropine, then the damage to
the nervous system may well still be permanent and you will never really recover.
Military NBCD training gives you 9 seconds to get your gas mask on and a further minute to
get into the full activated carbon NBCD suit, after this you then have to decontaminate all
over with a neutraliser like Fuller's Earth.
How the fcuk have three people now survived being poisoned by this monstrous chemical,
while all showing different symptoms and two of them disappeared of the face of the
earth.
As I said at the start, complete and utter bollocks
AlphaSnail , 7 hours ago
+ 1000 ups
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 5 hours ago
I could do a thousand ups with your avatar.
serotonindumptruck , 8 hours ago
Navalny is clearly a see-eye-ay spy.
Water bottles?
I thought it was tea consumed at the Moscow airport?
One doesn't survive Novichok nerve agent poisoning, which is reputed to be 10 times more
deadly than VX nerve gas.
Can the Western intelligence agencies manage to get their narrative straight?
This was a massive false flag operation designed to shut down the Nord Stream II
pipeline.
greenskeeper carl , 8 hours ago
They really do think we are stupid. I could make a long list of people who benefit from
his being 'poisoned' but Putin is not on there.
Vivekwhu , 8 hours ago
The NATO gangsters are banking on the Plebs being too hooked on football and the
Kardassians.
gatorengineer , 8 hours ago
Yes they really do think we are that stoopid, covid is proving to them how stoopid we
are.
SiFiUK , 7 hours ago
I truly believe that there were several members of the elite questioning whether this
covid hoax was a stretch too far, and if the public really were that dumb. After seeing the
success of 'Phase 1' (to quote Gates), it is clear that even the skeptics among them agree
that the public deserves everything they get.
How can any of us deny that anyone falling for this BS doesn't deserve to get poisoned by
the vaccine?
4Y_LURKER , 8 hours ago
I like how all these people are supposedly being poisoned by a deadly nerve agent but are
all living, this is better than worldcup soccer drama queens. Russia!
gatorengineer , 8 hours ago
6 billion died from covid so far, just as amazing...
4Y_LURKER , 2 hours ago
Plot twist: we all died during COVID it was the salmon
BlindMonkey , 8 hours ago
Deadly nerve agent is on the water bottles and they are just sitting around on a hospital
table and nobody around them dies?
How is this supposed to be remotely believable?
BigJim , 6 hours ago
Hotel room... but yeah, the story sucks
BlindMonkey , 2 hours ago
Pic looks like a hospital bed. YMMV
John Hansen , 8 hours ago
Pretty easy to slip stuff past the KGB considering they haven't existed for over 20
years.
bill_bly , 6 hours ago
They still do (under that name) in Belarus, but your point is valid.
AriusArmenian , 6 hours ago
Sure, Russia attempted to kill him with Novichok which didn't work then let's him go to
Germany so that they can blame Russia. This is over the top stupid.
And in the West most people believe it. It must be a kind of IQ Test to show just how
gullible most people are.
Yamaoka Tesshu , 6 hours ago
After the Skripal circus in the UK, I doubt anybody buys it.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 5 hours ago
Not so, anyone who only gets their news from the MSM will believe it.
josie0802 , 6 hours ago
Sounds like a ten year old attempting to write a detective novel.
abee , 7 hours ago
Navalny is an idiot
lucitanian , 6 hours ago
True, but the German government is showing itself to be more than an idiot.
BetaGap , 5 hours ago
Seems like in Germany you can present everything to the people there.
Putin poisened Navalny.
The sky is green.
Invaders are refugees.
etc. etc. etc.
44magnum , 5 hours ago
German zio occupational government
Volkodav , 6 hours ago
Addict
Yamaoka Tesshu , 6 hours ago
That would depend on how much they pay him.
hzp , 8 hours ago
How can you tell if Putin ordered the poisoning or not? he still alive!!!
Joe A , 7 hours ago
How fast does this poison work because he got the symptoms on the plane. Some sources says
if works after 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
It must have been a couple of hours since he left his hotel room before he developed the
symptoms on the plane. How many hours are there between him leaving the hotel room or
drinking the water and the development of symptoms? Did he check out? Did he keep the hotel
room? If the poison was in the water bottle in the hotel room and he drank it there then he
should have developed the symptoms there.
Yamaoka Tesshu , 4 hours ago
From what I've read the stuff shuts you down right away. Read, mind you. But they did want
to kill him. The note from Putin had vodka spilled on it, and the operatives saw "n" and "k"
and assumed it was like last time. VVP actually wrote "nunchuck", figuring they should keep
it simple this time.
ooobie , 8 hours ago
simply not credible, not a word of it. It was a set up with some other non-deadly
substance, making him sick but not killing him. Doubt he was aware, but somebody involved in
his group did this for the p.r. value as NATO drivels over the thought of adding Belarus to
the Hate Russia coalition, a NATO umbrella group.
humbug , 5 hours ago
So let's assume they poisoned him with the old "Novichok" calling card - which they also
would know would backfire on Nordstream 2 and give the USA (Russia's main geopolitical enemy)
an opportunity to sell its more expensive gas exports to the EU instead, long term, pushing
them out the market for good.
Bollocks!!
JackBurton , 5 hours ago
Exactly..zero benefit for Russia to do this. Just another wrench to throw in the
spokes..
CriticalUser , 4 hours ago
The benefit is a frightening warning to Putins' political opponents. Putin has seen what
is happening in Belarus.
Argon1 , 3 hours ago
By all accounts he wishes it would collapse already, its come around with a begging bowl
after decades of oligarch rule.
bluez , 7 hours ago
This is simply a dirt cheap way for the Germans to placate the USSA. Everybody with a
brain larger than a walnut knows that this absurd narrative is unenforceable. It won't change
anything, and the pipeline will be completed.
If the Russians were going to poison somebody one might suppose that they would try
something else. It would be plain stupid to just keep using 'Novichok®' over and
over.
44magnum , 5 hours ago
Especially if it doesn't kill anyone
lucitanian , 6 hours ago
The fact that German government officials at ministerial level are trying to hold up this
farce of a story that Navalny was poisoned by Novichok and that the Russian government is to
blame is simply incredible.
As someone else bellow pointed out. At 11:45 (according to the bedside clock) at the hotel
when Navalny must have left 4 or 5 hours earlier, how did they know that he would lnd up sick
in Germany since that was only clear 2 days later? Also the chain of evidence is soooo
unreliable. A total joke to even call it evidence.
The German government has been made to look totally stupid. Who's idea was it to go down
this rabbit hole?
jmNZ , 6 hours ago
Like the UK government, they're vassals of the US.
VZ58 , 7 hours ago
Man oh man...you'd think that MI6/CIA would get their act together and use some actually
deadly "Russian Novichok" from their lab in Porton Down the next time they want a do another
Skripal! Oh wait, I see...they don't want their assets like Navalny or the Skripals to
actually die...
Vivekwhu , 8 hours ago
Stage-managed or what? The US Evil Empire is really desperate to stop Nordstream II. Now I
know what to do the next time I go to the hotel in the UK. I could make a killing out of the
UK government and become a star in the Russia, China, Iran etc.
I could scream "Boris poisoned me with "Etonian mineral spring water, laced with VX".
And all because I criticised him for having too many babies.
To the NATO nutjobs who planned this farce: only those drunk and drugged (half of the
US/EU population) are stupid enough to believe these anti_Russian RACIST propaganda
farts.
Egao , 7 hours ago
This is evidence tampering :) now Russian state can rightfully deny any potential
liability as the bottles were extracted illegally by Navalny's subordinates without due
custody chain and could be replaced at any point of time. Not to mention that his stuff is
one of the most interested parties and had real motive to poison Navalny.
Jgault , 7 hours ago
Except that the russian state is the only known manufacturer of novochok in the
world...where did that come from?
bluez , 7 hours ago
I had a chemist girlfriend who made Novichok® every Saturday night. A tiny touch of
that with a heroic helping of fine hash gives incredible sexual results.
bluez , 7 hours ago
Holy smokes! Man you have no clue what you missed out on!
Volkodav , 7 hours ago
Wrong
simpson seers , 5 hours ago
are you really and truly that stupid?.....
AlphaSnail , 7 hours ago
you dont need proof when you can issue a press release.
Banjo , 6 hours ago
An anonymous sourced one even better.
DEDA CVETKO , 8 hours ago
In related news, a squadron of flying piglets defects from Belarus to Saudi Arabia.
tranium , 8 hours ago
That's it. NO Nord Stream 2 for you!
researchfix , 8 hours ago
That´s quite o.k.
Citizens will pay 3 times in energy cost, because industry will be excluded from raising
cost.
The cost of being dumb...
xrxs , 8 hours ago
Molecules of freedom ain't free.
QABubba , 6 hours ago
And the winner of the Academy Award for best Documentary is: "The White Helmets," err,
"Alexia Navalny and Co."
blitzen69 , 7 hours ago
navalny, the russian version of macron...just another rothschild punk assed b*tch
xxyyzzsmith , 5 hours ago
Being a Yale World Fellow and having a daughter at Stanford. No chance of his being a
stooge for other interests hoping for color revolution in Russia?
CriticalUser , 5 hours ago
You think Putin's daughter lives in Russia? Think again!
CatInTheHat , 2 hours ago
Why YES so glad you asked!
The US tiny hats are all freaking out as it looks as?if no maidan in Belarus is going to
take place.
A little bit of pressure on Russia to let Lukashenko go and maybe then they will get to
keep their pipeline.
Russia is no fool. They will continue to support Belarus and Lukashenko so that the US
cannot plunder it and put nukes on it's border with Russia.
Putin played his hand beautifully.
BaNNeD oN THe RuN , 5 hours ago
Riddle me this. If the KGB (really the FSB now, but why quibble) conducted the attempted
poison via a water bottle, would they also not clean up the crime scene after.
Are we to believe they are that incompetent on both counts?
No, whatever traces of Novi-whatever were found on the bottle was applied in Germany.
I trust whoever did it got extra hazard pay ;-)
ComeOnThink , 3 hours ago
Not to mention the same problem with the Skripal narrative - how can you get a nerve agent
into your system and not show symptoms until several hours later?
How does that work, exactly?
If you hit a fly with an insecticide does he happily fly around for hours afterwards and
then - hello! I'm not feeling well - drop dead?
Or does it start to show symptoms of distress almost instantly?
CatInTheHat , 2 hours ago
Did you know that when first responders were called about the Skripals the first thing
they said as they were getting Skripals to hospital was that they suspected FENTANYL
overdose.
ComeOnThink , 1 hour ago
Sure. But regardless of whether it is Fentanyl or Novichok, how is anyone expected to
believe that you can get the stuff into your system and NOT show effects for several hours
after exposure/ingesting/whatever.
It simply doesn't happen.
You get something nasty like that in your system then you get sick very, very quickly.
I have no doubt - none whatsoever - that whatever it was that made the Skripals sick was
administered to them in that park. And it acted so quickly that neither of them had any time
to react or cry for help.
Fentanyl? Novichok? Take your pick, but whatever it was that incapacitated them was
administered minutes before they were found slumped on that bench.
Same with Navalny: if he was poisoned (which is not a given) then it was done on that
plane, it was not done hours beforehand in his hotel room.
Did you know this: six members of his entourage hopped on that plane with him, and all six
of them stayed with him until he got to Germany. Five are still by his side, and one of them
has skipped town.
This one: Maria Pevchikh.
The first opportunity that presented itself she fled back to where she came from.
Which is not Moscow, but London.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
jmNZ , 6 hours ago
Navalny = Skripal 2
I wonder which patsy will be Skripal 3?
Yamaoka Tesshu , 6 hours ago
Does he have a cat? They can always recycle the Skripals' "crisis actor" cat. It has
experience "dying".
I don't get it, how are we supposed to be afraid of the Russians if they can't pull off a
simple poisoning? I was told now, they didn't even whack the kitty.
fnsnook , 7 hours ago
.....and a pristine russian passport and kgb identification was found on the bathroom
counter in the room.
Volkodav , 5 hours ago
KGB ID find would top this to ridiculous greatness.
gatorengineer , 8 hours ago
So MI-6 did it?
Indiana Militia , 8 hours ago
Our pathetic government has been murdering people non stop for decades, and they have the
nerve to act offended at something Putin does? You have got to be kidding me.
They have no problem with Saudi Arabia blowing up school buses full of children, or
chopping people up into pieces with a bone saw in foreign embassies. But God forbid the
Russians killing some pathetic CIA stooge trying to destroy their nation from within. Though
we all know it isn't true anyway.
They lock Kyle Rittenhouse up for daring to defend fellow Americans that they abandoned
from communist terrorists, while giving a pass to Israel who has been murdering people non
stop for 80 years. Oh how I truly hate them.
SMC , 5 hours ago
LOL... propaganda for idiots.
Sokhmate , 6 hours ago
Damn. I can spot the Novichonga particles in that picture. Damn Pesky Rooshians.
cashback , 6 hours ago
And the evidence point to CIA/MI6
CrazzeTimes4all , 7 hours ago
Aaah the classic False Flag.
It's pretty pathetic for the US to use an unsuccessful poisoning as leverage to sidetrack
Nordstream 2.
The empire's collapsing, so it's time to threaten the whole planet...either you deal
exclusively with us OR ELSE!!
PS Is killing someone really this difficult!?
JUICE E SMALL IT EMPIRE , 8 hours ago
It could go both ways. The only way I think that is because of the wine and chocolate.
However, I think if Russia wanted him dead. He would be dead. Putin is not in the business of
fighting with the USA.
ComeOnThink , 3 hours ago
Laughable.
Note this: "A video posted by Navalny's team on his Instagram page showed them searching
Navalny's room at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk on Aug. 20, an hour after they were informed
about his illness."
Navalny was in a Russian hospital on August 20. It wasn't agreed that he would be released
to the Germans until the day after.
Now note this: "It was decided to gather up everything that could even hypothetically be
useful and hand it to the doctors in Germany. The fact that the case would not be
investigated in Russia was quite obvious."
Dudes, he wasn't *in* Germany at the time that you were claiming to be rummaging around in
his hotel room collecting stuff for the Germans.
He was in a Russian hospital, and as far as you could have known at that time that's where
he was going to stay.
Honestly, this is amateur-hour stuff.
Moribundus , 3 hours ago
Immodestly, I still consider myself an expert in organic chemistry.
Of course, organophosphates were also a part of my studies, not only military grade
poisons, but also pesticides and toxicology.
When using nerve-paralytic combat poisons, such as Sarin, Soman, Tabun, VX, IVA, Novichok and
many others, it is not a problem to kill someone. The problem is the opposite rather than
poisoning someone so that he does not die.
Let's go to toxicity. Kim Jong-nam died after being hit with one drop of the American
neuroparalytic substance VX. The literature states that Novichok is 5-8 times more toxic than
American VX, the Germans even report that he is up to 10 times more toxic than VX. So what
tiny dose would Skripals and Navalny have to receive to survive?
After exposure to neuro-paralytic agents, death usually occurs within minutes of this point.
Death occurs rapidly, regardless of whether the substance has been ingested, inhaled, or
passed through the skin, which is no problem for these substances.
Even the evaporation of a single drop in an enclosed space or the inhalation of a single
grain (in the case of a solid, non-liquid version of Novichok) will cause death within a few
minutes. By blocking cholinesterase, these substances cause incredibly severe cramps, so
severe that the victim can break a own bone in the cramp; they also block the respiratory and
smooth muscles, in short, everything that is normally caused by nervous excitement.
After being poisoned by Novichok, the Skripals calmly walkec and sit on park bench and
Navalny calmly boarded the plane. Does anyone want to claim such crap to me, an organic
chemist? What is this dirty game of politicians?
The only person, the Russian chemist Andrei Zeleznakov, who was demonstrably hit by Novichok
(a small dose) and immediately received an antidote, still died within 5 years of a total
disruption of the nervous system. And Skripal's take took relax and grin into the lenses of
journalists.
How long do you want to feed common people with this myths about Novichok and the evil
Russians who are removing by them their opponents?
As a chemist, I say: if Navalny had been poisoned by Novichok, the only article you would
write about him, journalists, would be about his funeral.
And finally: how did the Germans identify that this was poisoning by Novichok? They claim
that they never made it. How they identified, when spectra were needed to identify it, at
least from infrared, mass and UV-VIS spectroscopy. However, reference spectra can only be
measured from a pure, real sample. So, as neither the Germans nor the British ever produced
Novichok, where did they have the reference spectra with which they made comparisons of the
samples of the Navalny and Skripals?
Without this (without comparing the spectra) it is not possible to reliably identify the
substance. So you can choose:
1) Neither the Germans nor the British found any Novichok in the bodies of the Navalny and
Skripals, they just launched a dirty media campaign against Russia, or
2) The Germans and the British know Novichok, they produce it by themselves, and therefore
they have spectra from it. Then they are dirty liars again, when they claim that they do not
have it, did not have, or never produced Novichok. So they are either lying in the first or
second point, but the result is still the same, they are liars. And stupid, sensational
greedy journalists help them spread these lies among the common people.
Berkleyboy , 3 hours ago
Thank you for this informative response
Itinerant , 1 hour ago
They are claiming to have found Novichok in Navalny's urine, skin, blood, and water
bottle.
Any such poison is quickly metabolized (otherwise it doesn't work), and you will never find
anything but trace metabolites (especially after days of delay), which can never establish
what the exact precursor poison was. That is why they need an environmental sample, such as
the water bottle. The story of finding traces in urine are technically impossible.
What I find confusing is that this story is coming out now when the shift to the water
bottle was reported quite a few days ago...
skippy dinner , 5 hours ago
Well, I guess they did a slightly better job of it than "Jucy" Smollett. But the idea was
much the same.
No. Hold the pictures next to each other. Significant differences...
vincenze , 4 hours ago
Try to make the image smaller and rotate it a little bit.
Also, his wife has a smaller head compared to his in other photos, unlike in the
photo.
Yamaoka Tesshu , 4 hours ago
Good catch. They're too lazy even for a quick photop.
CatInTheHat , 2 hours ago
My GOD her head does look photo shopped.
Notice also no equipment behind them looks as if it has been used. And his bed looks
fresh. As if never slept in.
UndercoverBrother , 6 hours ago
Putin is laughing his *** off
/any time you can use that remark is a good time
MAD_EYE_STARE , 7 hours ago
Jeez...he looks great....like he's been at a spa or something.
What a pissy weak nerve agent that was....
St. TwinkleToes , 7 hours ago
Fake poisoning just like the fake plandemic.
What's with all the fakery?
Is their a master plan for all this bs?
Its getting phucing old, and I'm not buying into this bs anymore.
File under: Propaganda, Disinformation, Fake News.
JPHR , 8 hours ago
Actually using the Skripal hoax as "proof" for this Skripa 2.0 Navanlny hoax can only be
facilitated by a completely moronic MSM press lacking any measure of common sense.
Sorry, run that by me again: Navalny swigged some nerve agent in his hotel room in Tromsk,
THEN travelled to the airport, THEN had a cup of tea, THEN boarded his flight, and only THEN
became sick?
How does that work again?
I can - maybe - understand a slow-acting poison that is in pill-form. Maybe.
But not a nerve agent that you ingest by drinking. The results are instant.
Honestly, you have to be a moron to buy this story.
BTW, who waves goodbye to their boss and then hangs around the hotel room for hours
afterwards?
Kaiama , 4 hours ago
So even before they knew he had been poisoned they already bagged the "evidence"
themselves and "smuggled it" past the KGB? Are we all born yesterday? This is an admission
that this was a planned provocation.
Woodenman , 4 hours ago
I think Russia should really kill a few people with Novichok and throw the U.S. and Europe
for a loop when Russia does what they are always accused of.
Berkleyboy , 3 hours ago
I could offer up a few names if it would help
VZ58 , 1 hour ago
Could start with an old Hungarian )ew...
WTFUD , 5 hours ago
Do not let this Guaidoesque like puppet back into Russia.
cowdogg , 6 hours ago
Did they look for evidence in Navalny's office in the US embassy in Moscow?
JeanTrejean , 6 hours ago
Questions ? ;
1) Doesn't they clean the rooms after the client check out the Hotel ?
2) Didn't the eventually killers, clean and supress all traces, as soon Navaltny left
?
3) Are they allowed to fly with bottles...?
4) Doesn't this extremely dangerous poison infected others person, at the hotel, at the
fly,...?
CriticalUser , 5 hours ago
1) Room cleaning doesn't happen immediately after departure of the client
2) Not necessarly
3) Bottles can be carried without problem in check-in luggage
4) Not if there is no physical contact. It's a nerve agent not a gas.
"... German Chancellor Angela Merkel personally announced at a press conference last week that a chemical weapons laboratory of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) had proved "beyond doubt" that Navalny was the victim of an attack using the Novichok nerve agent. She called on the Russian government to answer "very serious questions." ..."
"... At a special session of the Parliamentary Control Committee, which meets in secret, representatives of the German government and the secret services left no doubt, according to media reports, that the poisoning of Navalny had been carried out by Russian state authorities, with the approval of the Russian leadership. The poison was said to be a variant of the warfare agent -- one even more dangerous than that used in the Skripal case in Britain. It purportedly could enter the body simply through inhalation, and its production and use required skills possessed only by a state actor. ..."
"... Excerpt of an article by Peter Schwarz published by wsws.org ..."
The relationship between Germany and Russia has reached its lowest point since Berlin
supported the pro-Western coup in Ukraine six years ago and Russia subsequently annexed the
Crimean Peninsula.
The German government is openly accusing the Russian state of poisoning opposition
politician Alexei Navalny, who is currently in Berlin's Charité Clinic. He reportedly
awoke from a coma on Monday.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel personally announced at a press conference last week
that a chemical weapons laboratory of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) had proved "beyond doubt"
that Navalny was the victim of an attack using the Novichok nerve agent. She called on the
Russian government to answer "very serious questions."
At a special session of the Parliamentary Control Committee, which meets in secret,
representatives of the German government and the secret services left no doubt, according to
media reports, that the poisoning of Navalny had been carried out by Russian state authorities,
with the approval of the Russian leadership. The poison was said to be a variant of the warfare
agent -- one even more dangerous than that used in the Skripal case in Britain. It purportedly
could enter the body simply through inhalation, and its production and use required skills
possessed only by a state actor.
Germany and the European Union are threatening Russia with sanctions. The German government
has even questioned the completion of the almost finished Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline,
which it had categorically defended against pressure from the US and several Eastern European
states.
The German media has gone into propaganda mode, repeating the accusations against Russian
President Vladimir Putin with a thousand variations. Seventy-nine years after Hitler's invasion
of the Soviet Union, which claimed more than 25 million lives, German journalists and
politicians, in editorials, commentaries and on talk shows, speak with the arrogance of people
who are already planning the next military campaign against Moscow.
Anyone who expresses doubts or contradicts the official narrative is branded a "conspiracy
theorist." This is what happened to Left Party parliamentarian Sevim Dagdelen, among others, on
Sunday evening's "Anne Will" talk show. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) foreign policy
expert Norbert Röttgen, the head of the Munich Security Conference Wolfang Ischinger and
former Green Party Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin sought to outstrip one another in
their accusations against the Russian government. When Dagdelen gently pointed out that, so
far, no evidence whatsoever has been presented identifying the perpetrators, she was accused of
"playing games of confusion" and "encouraging unspeakable conspiracy theories."
The Russian government denies any responsibility in the Navalny case. It questions whether
Navalny was poisoned at all and has called on the German government to "show its cards" and
present evidence. Berlin, according to Moscow, is bluffing for dirty political
reasons.
Contradictory and implausible
Evidence of the involvement of the Russian state is as contradictory as it is
implausible.
For example, the German authorities have so far published no information or handed evidence
to Russian investigators identifying the chemical with which Navalny was poisoned. Novichok is
merely a generic term for several families of warfare agents.
No explanation has been given as to why no one else showed signs of poisoning from a nerve
agent that is fatal even in the tiniest amounts, if touched or inhaled. Navalny had had contact
with numerous people between the time he boarded the airplane on which he fainted, his entering
the clinic in Omsk where he was first treated, and his transfer to the Charité hospital
in Berlin.
This is only one of many unexplained anomalies in the German government's official story.
Career diplomat Frank Elbe, who headed the office of German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher for five years and negotiated the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as
head of the German delegation in Geneva from 1983 to 1986, wrote on Facebook on Friday: "I am
surprised that the Federal Ministry of Defence concludes that the nerve agent Novichok was used
against Navalny."
Novichok, he wrote, belongs "to the group of super-toxic lethal substances that cause
immediate death." It made no sense, he argued, to modify a nerve poison that was supposed to
kill instantly in such a way that it did not kill, but left traces behind allowing its
identification as a nerve agent.
There was something strange about this case, Elbe said. "Either the perpetrators -- whoever
they might be -- had a political interest in pointing to the use of nerve gas, or foreign
laboratories were jumping to conclusions that are in line with the current general negative
attitude towards Russia."
The assertion that only state actors can handle Novichok is also demonstrably false. The
poison was sold in the 1990s for small sums of money to Western secret services and economic
criminals, and the latter made use of it. For example, in 1995, the Russian banker Ivan
Kiwelidi and his secretary were poisoned with it. The chemist Leonid Rink confessed at the time
in court that he had sold quantities to criminals sufficient to kill hundreds of people. Since
the binary poisons are very stable, they can last for decades.
The Navalny case is not the reason, but the pretext for a new stage in the escalation of
German great power politics and militarism. The media hysteria over Navalny is reminiscent of
the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, when the German press glorified a coup d'état carried out
by armed fascist militias as a "democratic revolution."
Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then foreign minister and now German president,
personally travelled to Kiev to persuade the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, to
resign.
He also met with the fascist politician Oleh Tyahnybok, whose Swoboda Party glorifies Nazi
collaborators from World War II. Yanukovych's successor, Petro Poroshenko, one of the country's
richest oligarchs, was even more corrupt than his predecessor. He terrorised his opponents with
fascist militias, such as the infamous Azov regiment. But he brought Ukraine into NATO's sphere
of influence, which was the real purpose of the coup.
In the weeks before the Ukrainian coup, leading German politicians (including then-President
Joachim Gauck and Steinmeier) had announced a far-reaching reorientation of German foreign
policy. The country was too big "to comment on world politics from the sidelines," they
declared. Germany had to defend its global interests, including by military means.
NATO marched steadily eastward into Eastern Europe, breaking the agreements made at the time
of German reunification in 1990. For the first time since 1945, German soldiers today patrol
the border with Russia. With Ukraine's shift into the Western camp, Belarus is the only
remaining buffer country between Russia and NATO.
Berlin now sees the protests against the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko as an
opportunity to remove this hurdle as well. Unlike in Ukraine, where anti-Russian nationalists
exerted considerable influence, especially in the west of the country, such forces are weaker
in Belarus, where the majority speaks Russian. The working class is playing a greater role in
the resistance to the Lukashenko regime than it did in Ukraine. But Berlin is making targeted
efforts to steer the movement in a pro-Western direction. Forces that appeal for Western
support, such as the presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, are being
promoted.
The dispute over the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, whose discontinuation is
being demanded by more and more German politicians, must also be seen in this context. It was a
strategic project from the very beginning.
The natural gas pipeline, which will double the capacity of Nord Stream 1, which began
operations in 2011, will make Germany independent of the pipelines that run through Ukraine,
Poland and Belarus. These countries not only earn transit fees from the pipelines but have also
used then as a political lever.
With a total capacity of 110 billion cubic metres per year, Nord Stream 1 and 2 together
would carry almost all of Germany's annual gas imports. However, the gas is also to be
transported from the German Baltic Sea coast to other countries.
In addition to Russia's Gazprom, German, Austrian, French and Dutch energy companies are
participating in the financing of the project, which will cost almost €10 billion. The
chairman of the board of directors is former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social
Democratic Party), who is a friend of President Putin.
Nord Stream 2 is meeting with fierce opposition in Eastern Europe and the US. These
countries fear a strategic alliance between Berlin and Moscow. In December of last year, the US
Congress passed a law imposing severe sanctions on companies involved in the construction of
the pipeline -- an unprecedented move against nominal allies. The nearly completed construction
came to a standstill because the company operating the special ship for laying the pipes
withdrew. Berlin and Moscow protested vehemently against the US sanctions and agreed to
continue construction with Russian ships, which, however, will not be available until next year
at the earliest.
Excerpt of an article by Peter Schwarz published by wsws.org
That's according to Maximilian Krah, a member of the European Parliament from the
Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The "obscure" case involving the alleged poisoning
of Navalny has been used by the EU establishment to launch another round of Moscow-bashing, he
says.
The lawmaker explained that his fellow MEPs had not, in fact, seen a single piece of
evidence suggesting the Russian government might have had a hand in what happened to
Navalny.
We don't have the evidence... none of the members of parliament who today voted in
favor of sanctions has seen any evidence.
Krah said it was "unrealistic" to expect that Navalny's case would not be
politicized, arguing that it was "absolutely clear" it was being used to push an
anti-Moscow agenda.
On Thursday morning, the EU Parliament passed a resolution calling on member states to
"isolate Russia in international forums," to "halt the Nord Stream 2 project" and
to prioritize the approval of another round of sanctions against Moscow.
The MEP also expressed skepticism about the prospects of the broader public ever getting to
see any evidence linking the opposition figure's sudden illness to Russian foul play.
"Evidence will only get published and provided to Russia if there is public
pressure," he said, adding that he does not see any such pressure building anywhere in the
EU. Until that changes, Berlin is likely to continue demanding "answers" from Moscow
while holding off on requests by Russian for cooperation, Krah believes.
The German MEP also weighed in on the fate of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, suggesting that
the alleged poisoning could work to Washington's benefit, given that the White House has been
seeking to undermine the project, liking Russian gas to Germany, for months. Krah said it was
"clear from the beginning" that the US would try to use the situation to scupper the
project, which he says would make Germany "more independent from American
influence."
The EU resolution, which is not legally binding but acts as an advisory for the bloc's
leaders, was supported by 532 MEPs and opposed by 84, while 72 abstained. Fresh sanctions
against Russia have been mulled by both the EU and US since news about Navalny's alleged
poisoning was made public.
Moscow has repeatedly expressed its readiness to cooperate with Germany in the probe into
the incident, while stressing that the Russian medics who first treated Navalny when he fell
ill found no traces of any poison in his body. The Kremlin has also repeatedly approached
Berlin for data possessed by the German side, but has so far received none.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Dachaguy 8 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 02:02 PM
Of course, the investigation is incomplete, but that doesn't stop the EU from levying
"justice." We've seen this before in the Downing Street Memos, where the facts were, "being
fixed around the policy. " Millions of innocent people died as a result. When will people
learn?
Jeff_P 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 06:01 PM
There should be an international commission to look into this false flag. It should be
comprised of Russia and Germany, of course, but no other NATO or European countries and no US
vassal states other than Germany. Other members could be Cuba, China, Venezuela, and maybe
India. And, of course, the US playbook of assignment of guilt without the benefit of evidence
and the exacting of penalties without proving guilt won't fly. Russia might just tell Europe
to go FO and leave PACE and the other organizations that it supports but which insist on
abusing it.
perikleous 6 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:09 PM
If Russia was determined they would say you cannot delay NSII or we cut the Ukraine pipeline
as well, its all or none! Tick Tock Tick Tok, winter is coming soon! Hopefully the Covid 19
won't delay the fuel ships your relying on or the workers who procure the fuel, you know a
2nd wave... is "Highly Likely" and its taking over in the rural areas where the fuel comes
from! Present evidence to a poisoning directed by either the fuel company or the gov't and we
will continue, or just tell your "handlers" go ***, because I do not recall the US severing
weapons sales to Saudi Arabia after Admission to them Severing the head off of (J. Koshoggei)
because the US profits/jobs are bigger than one WaPo Journalists life! Hypocracy in action!
Shelbouy 6 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 03:46 PM
Germany has offered to help pay for the construction of two LNG terminals in Germany to the
tune of 1 billion plus to the US. to receive US LNG. The US in turn has said then they would
not interfere with the completion of Nord Stream 2 if this were to take place. I am
suggesting that Germany then would have 30% cheaper Russian gas than US LNG, blend these two
prices, hi cost US LNG and low cost Russian gas of Nord Stream 2, and sell to the EU
consumers at a price which would likely be higher than the current rate today, and who would
be the wiser, and who would consumers blame when the price of gas goes up instead of down.
This may, at least temporarily, appease the US while at the same time ensure the completion
of the cheaper Russian supply line, and prevent the diversion of Russian gas to other
customer nations like China, and Germany laughs all the way to the bank. This is only
speculation on my part because I do not know if it would work that way or not. If it did then
Germany would have their cake and eat it. The offer of Germany to the US is however, a fact.
The reasons behind this offer are speculative. After all, it's really all about money anyway.
perikleous Shelbouy 5 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 04:16 PM
The US would demand a contract/commitment for the fuel based on your yearly usage currently,
if you re neg, they still bill you for it! Then its handled in court while your bank accounts
are frozen and none of the US debt to you is paid until this is resolved. You may win the
hearing/court but the losses from not having access to that money will cost way more!
HimandI 4 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 05:47 PM
Just more proof that the EU rulers are bought and paid prostitutes.
Jayeshkumar 6 minutes ago 17 Sep, 2020 10:03 PM
May be EU is indirectly suggesting to use the 2nd Pipeline to be used Exclusively for
Transporting the Hydrogen, in the Future!
Congozebilu 2 hours ago 17 Sep, 2020 08:06 PM
From the first minute this Navalny story broke I knew it was aimed at Nordstream. Everyone
who understands geopolitics and also US desperation to sell "freedom gas" knows that
Nordstream was the intended target this Navalny clown show.
ivoivo 1 hour ago 17 Sep, 2020 09:00 PM
apparently there are evidence found in a trash can in his hotel room in omsk, they poisoned
him with novichock in a water they gave it to him and discard a paper cup in a trash can,
standard kremlins procedure, isn't it, what is happening to world intelligence, russians
can't kill some dude that is actually not even important and americans can't stop russian
hackers in meddling in us election
"... But CNN has and will continue to repeat the allegations as fact, so it's mission accomplished for the deep state. As another poster said on this board about manufacturing consent: "It is important to discuss the story, not its credibility, the more the discussion, the more the reaction and the more it reinforces the narrative." ..."
"... In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of systematic manipulation of "public opinion". This would become a hallmark of Western Civilization in the post-war. The public opinion theory states that the masses don't have an opinion for themselves or, if they have, it is sculpting/flexible. The dominant classes can, therefore, guide the masses like a shepherd, to its will. ..."
"... It is an insult to the noble profession, to call what the mainstream media in the west, especially in the USA do, journalism. In my opinion what they do is propaganda and stenography on behalf of those who are in power. I am not sure who coined the term but "presstitution" is not a bad attempt at describing their profession. ..."
"... While the western corporate media lie on a continuous basis - and that has the predictable effect - what is more insidious is not these acts of commissions ( meaning lies), but their acts of omission (meaning excluding or deemphasizing important contextual information) leading people to make the wrong conclusions. NPR in the US is an excellent example of such presstitution. ..."
"... Why are the US promoting conflict with China, with Russia? Why are they beating Europe, maybe with the intention to destroy it? Why is a new civil war in the US promoted? ..."
"... Normal (geopolitically interested) people would think: against China it is better to come together and unite, at least US & Europe, but eventually Russia included. For instance take the population of these three together: far less than China's. ..."
"... Journalism in the US is so superficial, it is a drop above the uppermost wavy comb. Not worth to pay attention to it. ..."
"... Other than few independent blog site such as this, every media outlet is in the service of its home government or foreign sponsors. Only born-suckers take the corporate media at face value. Modern journalism is nothing but an aggressive propaganda racket. ..."
"... Using lies (bearing false witness) to cause murder and theft are not exactly a new phenomenon. These 'groups of individuals', which are employing these fabricated deceptions, are doing nothing less than trying to commit murder and theft. ..."
"... Everything that was accomplished (albeit incompletely or moderately) through the New Deal and then the abortive Great Society absolutely spooked the oligarchy. Lifting much of the working class out of absolute wage slavery to the point where the next rung on Maslow's ladder was at least visible. And when it all culminated in the late 60's and early 70's with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Surface Mining act, and various labor protection measures, the wealthy owner class decided the proles had gained too much power to influence "their" captive government. ..."
"... What differs, however, is the presentation. Trump is criticized (not praised) for being allegedly soft on Russia and Biden criticized for being allegedly soft on China. This clever trick ensures that just about everybody is onboard the bash-China-and-Russia train. ..."
"... In a violently polarized society, with red-blue antagonism reaching ridiculous heights, people tend to act exclusively in contradiction to the cult figure they hate so much. ..."
"... I've been saying for years here to watch the documentary - Century of the Self. If you want to learn about and understand America, its all here. Government, Corporations, Consumerism, Militarism, Deep State, Psychology, Individual selfishness and mental illness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s ..."
Every few days U.S. 'intelligence' and 'officials' produce fake claims about this or that
'hostile' country. U.S. media continue to reproduce those claims even if they bare any logic
and do not make any sense.
On June 27 the New York Times and the Washington Post published fake news
about
alleged Russian payments to the Taliban for killing U.S. troops.
[T]hat the story was obviously bullshit did not prevent Democrats in Congress, including
'Russiagate' swindler Adam Schiff, to bluster about it and to call for immediate briefings
and new
sanctions on Russia .
Just a day after it was published the main accusation, that Trump was briefed on the
'intelligence' died. The Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Advisor and
the CIA publicly rejected the claim. Then the rest of the story started to crumble. On June
2, just one week after it was launched, the story was
declared dead .
...
The NYT buried the above quoted dead corpse of the original story page A-19.
Despite that the Democrats
continued to use the fake story for attacks on Donald Trump.
Yesterday the commander of the U.S. forces in the Middle East
drove a stake though the heart of the dead corpse of the original story:
Two months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian
government
bribed the Taliban to kill American service members , the commander of troops in the
region says a detailed review of all available intelligence has not been able to corroborate
the existence of such a program.
"It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," Gen. Frank
McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops
in Afghanistan.
But as one fake news zombie finally dies others get resurrected. Politico's
'intelligence' stenographer Natasha Bertrand produced
this nonsensical claim :
The Iranian government is weighing an assassination attempt against the American ambassador
to South Africa, U.S. intelligence reports say, according to a U.S. government official
familiar with the issue and another official who has seen the intelligence.
News of the plot comes as Iran continues to seek ways to retaliate for President Donald
Trump's decision to kill a powerful Iranian general earlier this year, the officials said. If
carried out, it could dramatically ratchet up already serious tensions between the U.S. and
Iran and create enormous pressure on Trump to strike back -- possibly in the middle of a
tense election season.
U.S. officials have been aware of a general threat against the ambassador, Lana Marks,
since the spring, the officials said. But the intelligence about the threat to the ambassador
has become more specific in recent weeks. The Iranian Embassy in Pretoria is involved in the
plot, the U.S. government official said.
Ambassador Lana Marks is known for selling overpriced handbags and for her donations to Trump's campaign.
To Iran she has zero political or symbolic value. There is no way Iran would ever think about
an attack on such a target. Accordingly the South African intelligence services
do not believe that there is such a threat:
South African Minister of State Security Ayanda Dlodlo said the matter was "receiving the
necessary attention" and that the State Security Agency (SSA) was "interacting with all
relevant partners both in the country and abroad, to ensure that no harm will be suffered by
the US Ambassador, including any other Diplomatic Officials inside the borders of our
country."
However, an informed intelligence source told Daily Maverick that although the
"matter has been taken seriously as we approach all such threats, specifically, there appears
to be, from our perspective, no discernible threat. Least of all from the source that it
purports to emanate from.
There was "no evidence or indicator", the source said, so the plot was "not likely to be
real". The "associations made are not sustainable on any level but all precautions will be
put in place".
The source suggested this was an instance of the "tail wagging the dog", of the Trump
administration wielding a "weapon of mass distraction" to divert attention from its failures
in the election campaign running up to President Donald Trump's re-election bid on November
3.
The spokesperson for the Iranian ministry of foreign affairs, Saeed Khatibzadeh, strongly
denied the allegation in the Politico report which he called "hackneyed and worn-out
anti-Iran propaganda".
In January the U.S. assassinated the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Soleimani
led the external campaigns of the Iranian Quds Forces. He was the one who orchestrated the
campaign that defeated the Islamic State. His mythic-symbolic position for Iran and the
resistance in the Middle East is beyond that of any U.S. figure.
There is simply no one in the U.S. military or political hierarchy who could be seen as his
equal. Iran has therefore announced that it will take other ways to revenge the assassination
of Soleimani.
As an immediate response to the assassination of Soleimani Iran
had launched a precise missile attack against two U.S. bases in Iraq. It has also announced
that it will make sure that the U.S. military will have to leave the Middle East. That program
is in full swing now as U.S. bases in Iraq are again coming under
daily missile attacks :
More than eight months after a barrage of rockets killed an American contractor and wounded
four American service members in Kirkuk, Iraq, militia groups continue to target U.S.
military bases in that country, and the frequency of those attacks has increased.
"We have had more indirect fire attacks around and against our bases the first half of
this year than we did the first half of last year," Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of the
U.S. Central Command, said. "Those attacks have been higher."
...
McKenzie's comments came just hours after he announced the United States would be cutting its
footprint in Iraq by almost half by the end of September, with about
2,200 troops leaving the country .
Just hours agon two Katyusha rockets were fired against the U.S.
embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone. Two British/U.S.convoys also came under attack . U.S. air
defense took the missiles down but its anti-missile fire is only further disgruntling the Iraqi
population.
These attacks are still limited and designed to not cause any significant casualties. But
they will continue to increase over time until the last U.S. soldier is withdrawn from
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other Middle East countries. That, and only that, is the
punishment Iran promised as revenge for Soleimani's death.
The alleged Iranian thread against the U.S. ambassador to South Africa is just another fake
news propaganda story. It is useful only for lame blustering:
According to press reports, Iran may be planning an assassination, or other attack,
against the United States in retaliation for the killing of terrorist leader Soleimani, which
was carried out for his planning a future attack, murdering U.S. Troops, and the death &
suffering...
...caused over so many years. Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will
be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!
The danger of such fake stories about Russia or Iran is that they might be used to justify a
response in the case of a false flag attack on the alleged targets.
Should something inconvenient happen to Ambassador Lana Marks the Trump administration could
use the fake story as an excuse to respond with a limited attack on Iran.
It is well known by now that U.S. President Donald Trump is lying about every time he opens
his mouth. Why do U.S. journalists presume that the agencies and anonymous officials who work
under him are more truthful in their utterings than the man himself is hard to understand. Why
do they swallow their bullshit?
Posted by b on September 15, 2020 at 11:50 UTC |
Permalink
US and European journalists are also lying constantly, that's why. Even when they make
embarrassing attempts at "being unbiased" or "factual". Do they understand it? Many might
not, but some do, perhaps fewer than anyone would think reasonable.
Btw a lot of these "journalists" in Europe in particular openly self-identify to "the
left" or even as socialists and communists or "greens". So much for ideology as some kind of
solution: entirely worthless and superficial.
But CNN has and will continue to repeat the allegations as fact, so it's mission
accomplished for the deep state. As another poster said on this board about manufacturing
consent:
"It is important to discuss the story, not its credibility, the more the discussion, the
more the reaction and the more it reinforces the narrative."
Just for laughs, I looked at the reviews of Gordon Chang's book, 'The Coming Economic
Collapse of China' to see if I could figure out the reasoning and one of the reviewers said
that China weakens because they lack a free press to hold their govt accountable. I had a
good laugh at that one.
In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of systematic manipulation of "public opinion".
This would become a hallmark of Western Civilization in the post-war. The public opinion theory states that the masses don't have an opinion for themselves or,
if they have, it is sculpting/flexible. The dominant classes can, therefore, guide the masses
like a shepherd, to its will.
Friedrich von Hayek - a colleague of Popper and father of British neoliberalism (the man
behind Thatcher) - then developed on the issue, by proposing the institutionalization of
public opinion. He proposed a system of three or four tiers of intellectuals which a
capitalist society should have. The first tier is the capitalist class itself, who would
govern the entire world anonymously, through secret meetings. These meetings would produce
secret reports, whose ideas would be spread to the second tier. The second tier is the
academia and the more prominent politicians and other political leaderships. The third tier
is the basic education teachers, who would indoctrinate the children. The fourth tier is the
MSM, whose job is to transform the ideas and opinions of the first tier into "common sense"
("public opinion").
Therefore, it's not a case where the Western journalists are being fooled. Their job was
never to inform the public. When they publish a lie about, say, Iran trying to kill an
American ambassador in South Africa, they are not telling a lie in their eyes: they are
telling an underlying truth through one thousand lies. The objective here is to convince
("teach") the American masses it is good for the USA if Iran was invaded and destroyed (which
is a truth). They are like the modern Christian God, who teach its subjects the Truth through
"mysterious ways".
It is an insult to the noble profession, to call what the mainstream media in the west,
especially in the USA do, journalism. In my opinion what they do is propaganda and
stenography on behalf of those who are in power. I am not sure who coined the term but
"presstitution" is not a bad attempt at describing their profession.
Unfortunately they have been amazingly successful in brainwashing people. One current
example, from numerous ones that could be cited, is the public's opinion on Julian Assange.
.
While the western corporate media lie on a continuous basis - and that has the predictable
effect - what is more insidious is not these acts of commissions ( meaning lies), but their
acts of omission (meaning excluding or deemphasizing important contextual information)
leading people to make the wrong conclusions. NPR in the US is an excellent example of such
presstitution.
What I am saying is nothing new to the bar flies here. But I am extremely distressed when
I see how poorly informed (propagandized, brainwashed) the vast majority of the people I know
are. Let's say a decade ago, ideological polarization was the main reason why it was so
difficult to have an open discussion on important issues the US. Today it has become even
more difficult because, thanks to the success of the presstitutes, people also have different
sets of "facts". And most alarmingly, after successfully creating a readership who believe in
alternative "facts", the mainstream presstitutes are moving on to creating a logic-free
narrative. Examples include Assad supposedly gassing his people when he was winning (even
though that was guaranteed to produce western intervention against him). A more recent
example is the Navalny affair. Sadly, very sadly, way too many people are affected.
Hi, thanks, and sorry, but: why does nobody look behind the curtain?
Why are the US promoting conflict with China, with Russia?
Why are they beating Europe, maybe with the intention to destroy it?
Why is a new civil war in the US promoted?
Are these random developments of history? Are laws of history behind that?
NO!! Surely not!
Normal (geopolitically interested) people would think: against China it is better to come
together and unite,
at least US & Europe, but eventually Russia included.
For instance take the population of these three together: far less than China's.
If something is going against the common sense, then there should be a reason behind.
This reason I recommend You, with due respect, to find - and to uncover the plan.
Journalism in the US is so superficial, it is a drop above the uppermost wavy comb.
Not worth to pay attention to it.
The actual demand is to understand and to show the forces playing deep underwater.
And to preview where these forces are determined to strike against.
A new report showing that US state-level voter databases were publicly available calls into
question the narrative that Russian intelligence "targeted" US state election-related
websites in 2016.
The problem with these sorts of accusations about "state-sponsored" hacking is they assume
that because a target has some connection to a state or some political activity that it means
the hackers are "nation-state". In reality, personal identification information (PII) is a
commodity on the black market, along with intellectual property - and *any* hacker will
target *any* such source of PII. So the mere fact that it is an election year, and that
voting organizations are loaded with PII, makes them an obvious target for any and every
hacker.
"Oregon's chief information security officer, Lisa Vasa, told the Washington Post in
September 2017 that her team blocks 'upwards of 14 million attempts to access our network
every day."'
This is the usual ridiculous claim from almost every organization. They treat every
Internet packet that hits their firewall as being an "attempt to access" the network (or
worse, a "breach" - which it is not.) Which is technically true, but would only be relevant
if they had *no* firewall - a setup which no organization runs these days. By definition,
99.99999% of those attempts are random mass scans of a block of IP addresses by either a
hacker or some malware on someone else's machine - or even a computer security researcher
attempting to find out how many sites are vulnerable.
"It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me," Gen. Frank
McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops
in Afghanistan.
Barflies should write Gen Frank McKenzie inside the back cover of their diaries, and count
the days until we hear of/from him again. I've a feeling he's crossed a line and knows
precisely what he's doing and why. Imo, the Swamp has just been put on notice.
Posted by: vk | Sep 15 2020 12:54 utc | 4
In the 1920s (or 30s), far-rightist Karl Popper coined the concept of "public opinion".
vk, I can't find anything regarding this coinage. Could you please provide a link.
Wiki is specially devoid of it and it goes back to 16 century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion
The term public opinion was derived from the French opinion publique which was first used in
1588 by Michel de Montaigne in the second edition of his Essays
Thank you, b. In this world of illusion that mainstream press provides it is forgivable that
we cannot even convince members of our own families that are dear to us of the underlying
truths behind what these masters of deception continue to print. Surely they only do so
because livelihoods are threatened, and the public perceptions are reaching a critical point
where belief in what they write, read by the diminishing numbers of faithful few, reaches a
pinnacle of perception and spills chaotically down into a watershed of realization.
I remember when we were told what happens on the top floor of the New York Times. It
opened my eyes. And perhaps here also, b is providing a chink through which we may glimpse
what is happening in military circles in fields of operation where facts collide with
fiction:
"We have had more indirect fire attacks around and against our bases the first half of
this year than we did the first half of last year," Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander
of the U.S. Central Command, said. "Those attacks have been higher."
...
McKenzie's comments came just hours after he announced the United States would be
cutting its footprint in Iraq by almost half by the end of September, with about 2,200
troops leaving the country.
On Hayek's "tiering", google "IHS model" ("pyramid of social change") and his book "The
Intellectuals and Socialism".
On Popper's conception of "public opinion", see "The Open Society and Its Enemies" (1945).
Yes, the term itself is not Popper's invention - he never claimed to have done so. But he
gave it a "twist", and we can say nowadays every Western journalist's conception of "public
opinion" is essentially Popper's.
because on matters related to Iran, China and Russia, they are not independent, there is
no real difference between the two camps in US, Biden' foreign policy which is endorsed and
supported by NYT and WP is not that different than Trump's, if not more radical. There is no
free press in US, as matter of fact, as long as this United Oligarchy of America exist there
will be no free press.
As well, this fake news propaganda barrage continues in the context of determined censorship
of alternative media and social media - a campaign which has been largely promoted by the
liberal intelligentsia in the US, in the name of reducing "fake news."
Having to live within an ever-widening swamp of utter BS is wearying and mind-numbing - also
to the point, one may assume.
Yes, I agree, IMO/observation, the US Government, the political parties and their supportive
media are rapidly ideologically polarizing their constituencies to two hard entrenched
ideological camps (which as you say has become hard shelled impenetrable). Except on one
common ideological point, which almost all the population has been and is being brain washed
as young as first grade, this common used term, which shield you from needing to investigate
or form any other opinion is: US has always been, is and will be a "force for good" by its
constitution, no matter what she has done or will do. This sentence when fully believed and
carved in one' mind from childhood is very difficult to erase and crack. These two
ideologically opposing camps about 70% of the population will not want to hear any fact or
not, other than what they are told and believed all their life.
"Unlike utopian engineering, piecemeal social engineering must be "small scale," Popper
said, meaning that social reform should focus on changing one institution at a time. Also,
whereas utopian engineering aims for lofty and abstract goals (for example, perfect justice,
true equality, a higher kind of happiness), piecemeal social engineering seeks to address
concrete social problems (for example, poverty, violence, unemployment, environmental
degradation, income inequality). It does so through the creation of new social institutions
or the redesign of existing ones. These new or reconfigured institutions are then tested
through implementation and altered accordingly and continually in light of their effects.
Institutions thus may undergo gradual improvement overtime and social ills gradually reduced.
Popper compared piecemeal social engineering to physical engineering. Just as physical
engineers refine machines through a series of small adjustments to existing models, social
engineers gradually improve social institutions through "piecemeal tinkering." In this way,
"[t]he piecemeal method permits repeated experiments and continuous readjustments" (Open
Society Vol 1., 163).
Only such social experiments, Popper said, can yield reliable feedback for social
planners. In contrast, as discussed above, social reform that is wide ranging, highly complex
and involves multiple institutions will produce social experiments in which it is too
difficult to untangle causes..."
So Top-Down with a vengeance, but softly, softly, hunting for 'good results', for what and
how these are defined is left out entirely, and who exactly runs the process...? (Btw China
sorta follows this approach with 'social experiments' gathering data that is analysed etc. to
improve governance.)
Don't forget that the only time the Amerikastani Empire's warmongering imperialist media
called Trump "presidential" was when he launched missiles at Syria on false pretences in
support of al Qaeda.
The statement by praetor McKenzie probably won't do much to remove the "Russian bounties"
tale from the received Beltway belief structure, where it lodged immediately upon
publication, any more than earlier refutations, or its inherent implausibility, did. I see
the bounties regularly referred to by Dems and Dem-adjacent media as established fact.
In the same light, it's worthwhile to read the Politico article on the alleged Iranian
designs on the purse princess and try to spot other fictions included as supposedly factual
background, some qualified as being American assertions, but others presented as undisputed
fact, such as:
Trump's version of the almost-happened retaliation after Iran downed a U.S. drone
that the attack that killed a U.S. "contractor" in Iraq that started last winter's
U.S./Iran tit-for-tat was "by an Iranian-allied militia"
Soleimani was responsible for the death of numerous U.S. troops
Soleimani plotted to hire a Mexican drug cartel to kill the Saudi ambassador in
Washington (remember that one? a blast from the past)
This new one about the plot to get the ambassador in Pretoria may be too trivial to get
sustained attention, but it will show up as background in some future Politico article or the
like, joining the rest in the Beltway's version of reality, which at this point is made
almost entirely of these falsehoods encrusting on each other, decade after decade, creating
the phony geopolitical mindscape these people live in.
Mere factual refutation – even from otherwise establishment-approved sources –
won't remove these barnacles. For instance, in February the NY Times itself published a
debunking of the initial account that it was an Iran-backed Shia militia, as opposed to
Salafist I.S.-affiliated forces, that killed that U.S. contractor last December. But the good
(if delayed) reporting is forgotten; the lie persists. The same fate awaits McKenzie's
dismissal of the Russian bounties nonsense.
The thoughtful reader would at this point stop and ponder. "Fake News About Iran, Russia,
China Is U.S. Journalism's Daily Bread". I agree with this statement. But not just U.S. Journalism. Minimally U.K. Journalism is
on-board, if not tutoring the Yanks in the art of Journalism. And then there is Europe
herself, she too has armies of Journalists and many Journals. They too mostly fake around in
general.
Now then, that leave Journalism in "Iran, Russia, China". It is fine trait to root for
underdogs but Journalism in these states is also subject to a highly controlled and managed
environment. It is disingenuous to ignore these facts.
Given this congregation of "fakers", worldwide, it is very reasonable to question the very
"fight" that these "fakers" keep telling us is on between the "adversaries".
Good to see so many being able to name the operation of the official narrative. It serves
also another purpose, witnessed by one of the most consequential actions of all, the wanton
abandonment of international law and accountability - the GWOT and the launching of same in
Afghanistan and Iraq. That other purpose is to create cover for those, elected in our name,
to avoid responsibility.
"Who knew?" asked the soulless Rumsfeld. And the refrain returned from the hollowed out
halls of the Greatest Democracy On Earth (tm) - "We were misled!", "Look it says so right
there in the official narrative, REMEMBER?" But the misleaders are never rounded up and never
face any consequences, cause truth be told all that voted for the AUMF belong in the pokey.
And the congressional class of '02-'03 would do the same thing all over again, 'cause the
narrative's got their back.
Despite the future grimness predicted by 1984 , the ability and effectiveness of Media
Structures to openly lie and thus herd the public to embrace the preferred Narrative hasn't
turned out quite the way Orwell thought it might. Former authoritarian blocs learned the hard
way that it's better to tell their citizens the truth and actively engage them in governance,
while the Anglo-Imperial powers have gone in the opposite direction, thus the question why?
IMO, the longstanding Narrative related to the mythical Dream has greatly eroded in the face
of Reality, while at the same time the Rentier Class and the Duopoly it controls needs
to try and obfuscate what it's doing. And thus we've seen the rise of BigLie Media to be used
for the purpose of Divide and Rule. There're numerous works detailing how and why; two of the
more important are Manufacturing of Consent and J is for Junk Economics . Part
of the overall process of dumbing-down populations is the deliberate destruction of the
educational process, particularly in the areas of philosophy and political-economy/history,
which are essentially connected as one when considering the History of Ideas or a sub-area
like the Philosophy of Science.
Such a dumbing-down of a nation's populous can be measured, the USSR and its Warsaw Bloc
being the most evident, but also The Inquisition and its affect on the advancement of science
within the regions it ruled, and the inward turning of China during the Ming Dynasty which
allowed for its subjugation by Western forces beginning in the 16th Century. Most recently,
this is evident in China's passing the Outlaw US Empire in terms of geoeconomics and thus
overall geopolitical power. An explanation for India's inability to match China's development
can be found in its refusal to do away with its semi-feudal caste system and not educate its
masses so they can become a similar collective dynamo as in China. At the beginning of his
brief tenure, JFK noted the Knowledge Gap that existed between a USSR that was nearing its
intellectual heights (although that wasn't known then) and the USA whose educational system
effectively excluded @60% of students from having the opportunity to advance. There would
never have been a Dot.Com economy without JFK's initiative to improve educational outcomes.
There seems to be a notion within the Outlaw US Empire's elite that an well educated populace
presents a danger to their rule and they can get by using AI and Robotics to further their
future plans. Here I'd refer such thinkers to the lessons provided by the failure of Asimov's
Galactic Empire in his Foundation series of books--particular their reliance on AI, robotics,
dumbing-down the populace to the point where no one recalls how atomics functioned. The sort
of balance sheet being constructed by the Fed cannot repair or replace crumbling
infrastructure or train the engineers needed to perform the work.
So, what continual BigLie Media lies tell us is the continued downward spiral of the
West's intellectual abilities will continue while an East that values the Truth and Discovery
moves on to eclipse it, mainly because the West has stopped trying, thinking it's found a
better way based on the continual amassing of Debt, which is seen as wealth on their balance
sheets. Ultimately, the West thinks the one person holding all the assets as the winner of
its Zero-sum Monopoly Game is a better outcome than having millions of people sharing the
winnings of a Win-Win system that promotes the wellbeing of all. I can tell you now which
philosophy will triumph, but you all ought to be capable of reasoning that outcome.
After a sound and an in-depth analysis, b sometimes confounds me with his credulity. Take
this sentence for example: "Why do U.S. journalist presume that the agencies and anonymous
officials who work under him are more truthful in their uttering than the man himself is hard
to understand. Why do swallow their bullshit?" Of course there is no daylight between the US,
and indeed the whole Western governments, and its Press. Other than few independent blog site
such as this, every media outlet is in the service of its home government or foreign
sponsors. Only born-suckers take the corporate media at face value. Modern journalism is
nothing but an aggressive propaganda racket.
You only have to look at who owns the media and who their close friends are,
to understand why the media says what it says or lies what it lies !
It's an industry promoting the elites self-interest, creating fictioous enemy countries to
feed the arms industry and create US domestic mass paranoia.
The Israeli lobby groups are at the wheel of the whole dam clown car.
Using lies (bearing false witness) to cause murder and theft are not exactly a new
phenomenon.
These 'groups of individuals', which are employing these fabricated deceptions, are doing
nothing less than trying to commit murder and theft.
No doubt the two propaganda streams will merge until we will be told that the CIA now
believes that Iran will attempt plausible deniability by funnelling the money through Putin,
who will offer it to the Taliban by way of a bounty on the Ambassador's head.
The CIA's wet dream: the Taliban does it, Putin arranged it, but it was all Iran's fault,
leading to:
A) infinite occupation of the poppy fie.... sorry, Afghanistan
B) even more sanctions on Russia
C) war with Iran
'"Public opinion", according to Bernays, is an amorphous group of judgments which are not
well elaborated even in the head of a single average individual. He extracts a quotation from
Wilfred Trotter, which states that this average man has many strong convictions whose origin
he can't explain (Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, p. 36). People's minds have
"logic-proof compartments" which must be approached by means beyond the rational. (pp.
61–68).'
Yes, I forgot to mention this very important book. If I'm not mistaken (and I may be),
Popper got the term from Bernays.
Popper, von Hayek... these guys are the fathers of neoliberalism. I'm not mentioning
backyard intellectuals here. They shaped the West as we know it today and, if you're a
Westerner and wants to understand the civilization you live in, you have to know what they
formulated.
Just to clear that off: I don't agree with Popper's (or Bernays, for that matter)
conception on "public opinion". The Marxist conception of ideology is much more complete and
precise scientifically.
Speaking of education (although of science/tach, rather than critical thinking)...
Add in the migration of top-level educated individuals. In the US, an underdeveloped
primary/secondary school system creates room at the university/grad level to absorb talent
from the rest of the world. For many years, this was a source of competitive advantage --
imported human capital is better than home grown, because if you import, you take it away
from someone else. Clever!
It was not that big a deal for the US if social mobility of native born lower and middle
classes was stifled somewhat. (and I would say it still would not be a big deal if the
resources of the country were not so grossly mismanaged/wasted/stolen).
But in the current century, or certainly the decade now ending, China alone can fill every
US grad school science/tech program and still have people to spare for itself. Other parts of
the world are right up there as well.
And then you have computers. Sometime between 2000 and 2010, computers became pretty much
cheap enough that you could give one to a every kid, even in families of limited means.
Provided the primary/secondary education system is there to support it, a country could
develop as much tech talent as they had population. The first generation of kids whose
childhood took place under this condition is now coming out of university - I would think
vastly greater in numbers than any amount the US (or Euro) higher educational system can
absorb. Should be a pretty serious shifting of gears in how human capital is distributed
worldwide.
But none of this is about critical thinking. Few systems of organizing society actually
promote that ... it tends to happen in spite of the organizing principles, rather than
because of them. Nor are the most educated (regardless of country of origin) any less
susceptible to the propaganda - if anything they are more so, due to the design of the
message, because it is more important that they receive it. You want a book recommendation
that talks about that, check out 'Disciplined Minds' by Jeff Schmidt (though perhaps with an
overly pessimistic outlook -- people can recognize the reality he describes and deal with
it... it is only the more naive/idealistic types who fall extra hard for the mythology and
then find themselves in a conflict they can't handle). There are lots of other avenues to
take too... about the psychology of self-discovery, discovery of self-vs-social-organism
etc....
Exactly that and yet we are constantly fed a diet from the bottom of the barrel. NYT?
WAPO? They are rags. Gutter press peddling drivel. Surely there are more erudite and critical
publications in this world than these USA drivel sheets. I am aware of good journalism in
Switzerland and elsewhere but currently separted from a device adequate to translate and
quote.
Thank you Conspiracy-theorist it I way past time we escaped the neverending story of BS +
HATE.
A propos fake news, John Helmer reports on the Navalny saga and was lately on the
Gorilla radio podcast with Chris Cook to discuss the newest events. It's a one-hour-talk
but very enjoyable listening to Helmer. You can also follow his reports on his blog
Dances With Bears .
Try this on for size. This is a conclusion I arrived at several decades ago, wrote about
several times, but not recently.
Everything that was accomplished (albeit incompletely or moderately) through the New Deal
and then the abortive Great Society absolutely spooked the oligarchy. Lifting much of the
working class out of absolute wage slavery to the point where the next rung on Maslow's
ladder was at least visible. And when it all culminated in the late 60's and early 70's with
the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, the Surface Mining act, and various labor protection
measures, the wealthy owner class decided the proles had gained too much power to influence
"their" captive government.
The princes and barons of industry and finance were very open about their complaints. The
advance of regulation on their ability to pollute and to exploit must stop or they would take
their bundles of riches and go elsewhere. It is what Saint Ronny was ALL about. And so all
that got fat and filthy rich during the real American Century took their wealth where
regulation and labor fairness and justice didn't exist to continue their exorbitant profit
taking.
And then they imported those cheap products here to wreak what was left of our industrial
base and to impress on all of us that they remain the boss, the real power. Drive down wages,
destroy pensions and safety nets and put US proles back into wage slavery. Remember the 80's
and 90's when Wal-Mart basically told established and storied US manufacturers "either you
produce the goods we want for what our Asian suppliers can make them for, or you're
finished." And that is exactly what happened. Wal-Mart was just the vanguard, it is now
ubiquitous. Another aspect of this assault was forcing us proles into the stock market
through our pensions and retirement funds so as to make us all sympathetic to de-regulation -
so as not to hurt OUR bottom line. Many labor unions became just a sick symbiosis with the
industries they "served."
Incomplete and observational, I am not erudite or lettered, but I think it is an accurate
narrative.
There is a curious schizophrenia where the U.S. press will treat presidential claims about
foreign affairs as a sacred truth but treat claims denying adultery, such as in the Lewinski
affair, as dismissible.
Living in the USA (Steve Miller classic) has always seemed to me about dealing with falsehood
and deception. US highschool seemed like he time for me when the formidable pressure to
conform became completely nonsensical, perhaps because it was so utterly cruel, but also
because it seemed untruthful. You basically were required to accept modes if behavior and
thought that seemed alien to human behavior, but were presented as the sine quo non of how to
be. How to succeed, how to live. It seems to me that if you were attempting to retain
truthfulness, this conformity was rife with logical fallacies of every sort which if you
tried to deal with them, or confront them, you were ostracized or at worst outcast.
In the many years since, it seems like everything else, once a person adopts untruthful
behavior, it is next to impossible to change course, so you deal with all kinds of people who
have doubled down on their personal deceptions. Marriages based on financial success come to
mind, and are like any deception, the cause of incredible dis ease and misey.
There is a philosophical concept I came upon called parrhesia that Foucault gives a
fantastic series of lectures on which can be found by searching the web, that investigates
the perils implicit in telling truth to falsehood, and the many disasters and tragedies that
have befallen human kind in the attempts to do so.
I've come to think that humans by nature are basically incapable of avoiding whatever it
is that is "truth." Because over and over life seems to present situations that are the
unswervingly the same to everyone. Youth and aging, for example, and the end result never
varies, like illness, death, and dying. And everyone has their own similar story navigating
the human predicaments and facing an inalterable "truth," which might be in this example,
death.
My wonder as I observe life as I age, is what is the damage done to those not only who try
their honest best to remain truthful, but what is the damage done to those who cannot escape
an adopted untruth and refuse to let go of it. I suppose in this moment of history, you need
only look at pandemic, wildfires, and conflicts to see how far human beings have digressed
from an Eden. But there must be a purpose to it all? Like, trying to cling to any kind of
integrity.
You think international fake news is just a Trump thing? Just off the top of my head we have
thins like Tonkin Bay, Kuwait babies being massacred by Iraqi troops, my personal favorite
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and a multiple of mean Assads killing their people with
poison. That is just a bipartisan few. We have one political party, who serves the deep
state. The deep state serves the interests of Wall Street and more importantly the Rothschild
world banking system. Give the spooks a lot of credit they let us have two "choices" while
controlling both. Think of it as a neo fascism kinda thing that ironically finances the anti
fascists. The press is just a means to an end. Assume everything is an agenda, and read the
independents for some actual thought. I may not agree with you all the time, but I do love
you MoA. Thank you for all your work.
'spooked oligarchy...reforms..culminated in ..70s'
Yep. When committed Dem's go off on Trump, it's deeply felt but kindof a ritual rant.
Bring Ralph Nader into the conversation, just mention him in passing, and the response
becomes live! Betrayal, danger of being shown up again!
Old and Grumpy @67 has a good point. Anyone suggesting that fake news is in any way related
to Trump being President are big parts of the problem for why fake news persists in the first
place. Suggesting that it is because of Trump, and thus implying that the fake news will go
away when Trump does, is either profoundly ignorant, or profoundly deceitful, though probably
both. Trump ranting about fake news exposed the problem and forced it into the public
discourse. Those rants did not create the problem.
"You basically were required to accept modes if behavior and thought that seemed alien to
human behavior ... ... forced to double down"
I had short but deeply influential conversation right out of college with a recruiter/HR
manager from Raytheon, of all places. He talked about exactly what you said. He spoke, in a
hypothetical third person, about a mid-career guy with a mortgage and family who finds
themselves questioning the defense industry. How that isn't the best place to be in,
mentally. I changed my career plans that day, forever thankful for the encounter.
However, regarding people being able to avoid unpleasant realities, he was of the opinion
that for most people, it is possible to do so. Even beneficial. (Except of course for the
recipients of his company's products. I didn't say that but I think he figured out that I was
thinking it). The issue, from the point of view of running an effective organization, is what
happens if the doubters and believers start to mix? Part of his assigned task was to simply
keep out people curious enough to ask too many questions. That's one of the "benefits" of
really polarizing politics too.
"My wonder as I observe life as I age, is what is the damage done to those not
only who try their honest best to remain truthful, but what is the damage done to those who
cannot escape an adopted untruth and refuse to let go of it."
That's what modern pharmaceuticals are for, and why one in six Americans (officially) are
prescribed them. If we include the numbers of Americans who self-medicate with alcohol and/or
grey/black market pharmaceuticals, then the proportion would be a bit (quite a bit) larger.
People who succeed at being truthful (mostly to themselves) are not confronted with cognitive
dissonance mind-quakes; however, such individuals are confronted with experiencing the retch
reflex when consuming mass media.
Is being truthful vs embracing the lies then half-dozen of one and six of the other? I
find satisfactory peace of mind from being truthful and simply avoiding the primary vector of
deception; the mass media. Noble individuals like our host and some of the posters here will
slog through that vile cesspool of lies and fish out the little nuggets of truth that leak
out. It is selfish of me to leave such dirty work to others, but at least I am not
hermetically isolated on a mountain somewhere.
An interesting thought. I have long had the feeling that a large part of the obviously
orchestrated drive to almost define both of the two US parties with really incredibly
unimportant issues like bathroom preferences were designed to split the voters as equally as
possible, so that to swing elections one had only to control the votes of a very small number
of tie breakers. I still think this is likely true, but I do think you make an important
point that a lot can be learned about what is truly important to the PTB by reflecting on the
topics that aren't being argued over.
Compare the "two" US political parties, and you will note that while they seem to be getting
ever more extreme and irreconcilable and quasi-religious in their differences, these
differences are always on the periphery. Both parties are being indoctrinated with certain
common beliefs they will take for granted because they are never talked about -- because
these points are not allowed to be in contention. So while even something like climate change
can be a big divider (no worries, there's money to be made on both sides of that issue, and
means of control); but you will never hear debate about
1. America is the greatest ever!
2.
America is always and unquestionably a force for good, and even it's proven bad things
(kidnapping, rendition, and torture programs) are done "for the greater good."
3. Unbridled
capitalism is the only way, and the privatization and unwinding of any vestiges of social
programs, like education, social security, and even utilities and infrastructure, is always a
good thing deserving of priority.
4. Individualism is the best, if not only, way. To be a
hero you must strike alone against the bad guys/the system/the government; someone who
rallies others, causes forces to be gathered and united, unionized, whatever are discouraged
or ignored.
5. "Leadership" in the affairs of others around the world is American right,
responsibility, and destiny. Having the largest, almost entirely offensively oriented
military on earth is essential; and having it, we must use it to get our money's worth.
6.
Omnipresent "intelligence" services equal safety and are absolutely required for life to be
normal. I'm sure there are other examples of "universally agreed" doctrines in the US, but
these are some that leap out.
These crazy MSM lies Anecdote. Last Sat (Geneva, Switz.) I spoke to 20 ppl whom I know
somewhat, all know I like to discuss news etc. I said, weird news this week, making no
mention of Navalny. 18/20 believed Putin poisoned Navalny and brought it up spontaneously!
There is something so appealing and narratively 'seductive' about spies and 'opponents'
(Skripal ) and mysterious poisons used by evil doers etc. that fiction just flows smoothly
into fact or whatever is 'real.'
I had to mention Assange myself to most, but there the reaction was very mixed, most
thought Assange was being persecuted, or it was 'not right', and took this story seriously in
one way or another - 4 ppl claimed not to know the latest news. Here, NGOs, Leftists and
Others have made demands for him to be offered asylum in Switz, so he has been front
page.
Besides that (I'm always interested in from-the-ground view-points, experiences, so post
some myself) what is going on is monopoly consolidation:
Mega MSM in cahoots with the MIC, Big Pharma, Big Agri, Finance, and so on. Corporations
joining up their positions bit by bit while also competing in some ways, bribing and owning
the Pols. who are front-men and women tasked with providing a lot of drama, manufactured
agitation, etc., which in turn is fodder for the MSM, etc.
Overall, the most important sector to watch is the GAFAM, 1, the reign of the middle men
is close at hand (control information, both the channels and the content, and commerce up to
a point.) All this leaves out energy considerations, another vital topic left aside.
Thanks for your reply! I've touched on the topic of human capital and its development
occasionally here, positing it's the #1 asset of all nations. Those nations who neglect to
develop their own human capital are bound to become deficient when it comes to basic
comparative advantages with other nations, particularly as political-economy shifts from
being materialistic to knowledge-based; thus Pepe Escobar agreeing wholeheartedly with my
comment about India. (He added this article to his FB timeline and I posted my comment
there.)
From 1999-2003, I was involved in developing distance learning platforms for the rapidly
advancing ability to learn outside of a school's four walls. The other educators I worked
with and myself had great hopes for the virtual classroom and what it might do to aide both
teachers and students. At the time we thought this development would provide a great
opportunity for the third member of the educational team--parents--to play a greater role in
the process since active parental involvement was proven to generate better student outcomes.
But for that to be properly implemented, equitable funding for all school districts became an
even greater issue than it was already. This issue highlighted the huge problems related to
financing education at a moment when BushCo Privatizers began to seriously threaten what was
already in place. And that problem has only worsened, the vast disparities being very evident
thanks to COVID-forced distance learning. The primary reason good teachers can't be retained
is the entire system's a massive Clusterfuck. And computers aren't substitutes for even poor
teachers. And parents are even more aloof from becoming involved in the process than ever
before.
The dumbing-down I mention is now entering its third generation. The educational structure
needs to be completely refitted nationally, but I wouldn't give that task to any of the
fuckwits employed by the past three administrations--Yes, I'm arguing education needs to be a
completely federal program instead of the 53 different school systems in states and
territories; and yes, I'm aware of the pitfalls and potential corruption that poses, which is
a microcosm of all the problems at the federal level of government. This problem is yet
another very basic reason why the Duopoly and its backers need to be ousted from government
and kept as far away as possible as the structure is torn down and rebuilt--The USA will
never be great again until that is done.
I suggest that the reason that the media focus on the ridiculous is to convince the public
that there is nothing important happening - except where the MSM wants the participation of
the public as in with anti-Russia, anti_China, anti-Socialism, etc. Good to get the public
participation directed at harmless targets.
They've got to fill the papers with something. The public must be kept warm, comfortable,
semi-comatose, watching cat videos...
Last thing anybody wants is the involvement of the public, they will only screw
everything-up or try anyway.
Thanks for your reply! Your explanation sadly is correct, but it was put into motion prior
to Reagan becoming POTUS. The tools used to undo the New Deal were put into place before FDR
became POTUS. And FDR's unwillingness to prosecute those who attempted to overthrow his
government provided that faction to infiltrate government and eventually attempt to undo the
good that was done prior to WW2. When looked at closely, American society was generally quite
Liberal in the positive aspects of that term and during the Depression was becoming ever more
Collectivist with the war advancing that even further. At the war's end, it was paramount for
the forces taking control of the nation to push the public to the right and away from its
collectivist proclivities. Where we find ourselves today thus is not an accident of history
but an engineered outcome. You may recall voices on the Right accusing Liberals and their
organizations of engaging in Social Engineering. Those accusations were projections since it
was actually forces on the Right that were maneuvering society to the Right while assiduously
applying the principle of Divide and Rule to create a condition where they would be immune
from political challenge, which is where we are now.
A few understand this ugly truth and how we arrived here. What's missing is scholarship
that links the changes that began in the 1870s with today's situation. Yes, there're good
examinations of various pieces of the overall puzzle. But it appears that only Hudson and
those in his small circle have figured it out; yet, they haven't produced a complete history
that encapsulates it all. And for us to have a realistic chance to undo what's been done, we
need to know how it all transpired.
Antonym @ 60
"There are big differences between Trump and Biden regarding their foreign policies:
Trump is hard on Xi-China and soft on Putin Russia, while Biden is the reverse."
I don't share your view. The current administration's foreign policy is very much aligned
with that of past administrations and the diplomatic circus surrounding the Skripal affair
alone is evidence that nobody is soft on Russia.
What differs, however, is the presentation. Trump is criticized (not praised) for being
allegedly soft on Russia and Biden criticized for being allegedly soft on China. This clever
trick ensures that just about everybody is onboard the bash-China-and-Russia train.
In a violently polarized society, with red-blue antagonism reaching ridiculous heights,
people tend to act exclusively in contradiction to the cult figure they hate so much.
If a Trump hater hears the criticism that the president is too soft on Russia, he will
readily grab the bash-Russia stick hoping to score a few hits on Trump. The same person's
reaction to a criticism on Biden will be either indifference or angry denial. In either case,
he will not be opposed to the bash-Russia nor the bash-China movement.
The dem hater's reaction is similar. Indifference to the soft-on-Russia claim (ie. no
opposition to the bash-Russia movement) and active support for the China-bashing.
The article and subsequent discussion brings to mind Dawkins discussion of Memes and
Memetics. Not those pesky internet memes. The propaganda war is fierce, and almost without
exception the people here are poking and prodding perhaps without being able to put the
finger on the "EZ button". This is war, baby, so one thinks the following link may be useful:
Wherein: " Ideally the virus of the mind being targeted will be overwritten with a higher
fidelity, fecundity, and longevity memeplex in order to assure long term sustainability. When
this is not practical, it is still possible to displace a dangerous memeplex, by creating a
more contagious benign meme utilizing certain packaging, replication, and propagation
tricks."
The lie is irrelevant, whether true or false, it must be believable, and it must
successfully replicate.
You are right, the early FDR days were, in hindsight, one of the most important in setting
the course of the US for the next century, and unfortunately Big Business won, taking us on a
long, ugly road to the right. I agree this would be a most fascinating history book if some
of those respected, genuinely knowledgeable people you often cite could collaborate on an
opus.
Yes, most people do not know that the wide ranging labor laws implemented at that time
were actually not meant to empower organized labor, but to limit it. Perhaps FDR thought it
was the best he could do for the working class, but I tend to think it was more a case of him
thinking that by outlawing general strikes, wildcat strikes, strikes in support of other
unions, and setting up an NLRB with a lot of political control by business, the powers who
had so recently let it be known they were ready to actively try to overthrow the government
might be mollified. I think he feared the US was at the cusp of a revolution, and perhaps it
was. Whether or not if would have been better had that been allowed to proceed is the big
question.
Anti-China activists funded by NED & Co make up all sorts of horrid stories online, which
are then picked up by MSM and political NGOs to spoon feed world audiences/viewers. Viola,
you have "fact-based" anti-China news!
This is literally what these overseas Uyghur activists do all day. Putting a random
caption on a video they ripped down from a medical worker's tiktok in China. And people
believe it. They'd even believe if the follow up rebuttal is that this is a forced labour
doctor.
Glad to see his name mentioned here. I've been saying for years here to watch the
documentary - Century of the Self. If you want to learn about and understand America, its all here. Government, Corporations,
Consumerism, Militarism, Deep State, Psychology, Individual selfishness and mental
illness.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Thanks for your reply! JK Galbraith in his American Capitalism: The Concept of
Countervailing Power lamented what you recap in your 2nd paragraph and that there was
thus no power capable of offsetting Big Business although one was sorely needed. As I wrote,
some very sharp minds have written about small segments of the overall movement toward
totalitarianism since the 1870s, Galbraith's 1952 book being one that's still worth
reading.
Karlof 1 @ 32 attacks vk @4-- Your attempt to credit Karl Popper with the concept of public
opinion is just as false as the stories b wrote about. Click here for a history of that
concept. by: karlof1 | Sep 15 2020 17:04 utc | 32
What I like about what vk@ 4 said is that he has given this list a beginning to not only
understand our plight as members of the governed classes, but also to analyze our experience
with this stuff and to develop a set of rules that can allow us to defend our minds against
being controlled by invisible hands of mind control.
can we on this list develop a defensive strategy and use it to teach the governed
masses?
Around the globe and throughout history it can be observed that the oligarchs invent a
collection of values and stuff them into structures they call nation states, culture,
institutions and journalist are all designed to, and rewarded for supporting the values,
while media is charged to keep the propaganda circulating.
The H&C propaganda model pulls together from across the political communications
literature the variety of factors which essentially constrain journalist and means that they
don't actually play the independent autonomous and watchdog role that we expect them to in a
democracy ae Herman Chromsky talk about the importance oe size concentration ownership oe
mainstream media the way in w/e ownership of most oe media outlets w/people go to for their
information is essentially associated w/very large conglomerates w/h overlapping interests
and overlapping interests with government and this produces a large structural constraint oe
way the media operates.
The Interface between Propaganda and War: Prof.
The Propaganda Model: The filters (Herman & Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, the political
economy of the mass media).
@5, Nathan Mulcahy, going by this Google Books Ngram Viewer
graph use of the word "presstitute" appeared around 1882. Its use really took off in
2009, peaking in 2016-2017, but definitely still up there. It didn't give an equivalent graph
for "presstitution".
I think that might be just for printed books, and not for online usage. Since at least
2014, if not earlier, Paul Craig Roberts has definitely contributed to popularizing the term,
imo. It's definitely fitting for our mainstream new media.
Speaking of fake news, Wikipedia asserts that it was coined by a "trend
forecaster" author Gerald Celente (but if you look at Wikipedia's source article, it's some
Indian news site article that clearly makes the attribution "according to
urban dictionary " which is not only a crowd-sourced site but also makes zero mention of
this Celente.
The day after the elections , Russians
got together to rally against election fraud. Even though the United Russia party, according to
preliminary results, is to lose some 77 seats compared to the previous Duma, most of the
protesters considered the election to be neither fair, nor free (see our previous reports on
the web crackdown
and massive
violation reports).
After the polls closed on Dec. 4, Solidarnost movement invited protesters to
Chistye Prudy metro station in Moscow, while the Communists, also unhappy with the election
results, organized their rally at Pushkinskaya square. Solidarnost movement represenatives,
most of whom have no political arena except street actions and the blogosphere, managed to
bring thousands of people together (while crowd estimates vary significantly, the most balanced
assessment seems to be from 8,000 to 10,000 people).
Chistye Prudy
People began gathering for the Solidarnost event at around 19:00 MSK. Georgiy Alburov
posted a picture of the
line to the site of the rally:
Line to the Chistye Prudy rally. Photo by Georgiy Alburov
Thousands out in cold/rain baying for free elections, Putin to be sent to prison. Never
seen anything on this scale. Definite change of mood
The overall coverage was chaotic as the mobile Internet stopped working in the area and
people couldn't upload videos and pictures. LiveJournal kept the chronology of the events
here [ru].
Only later in the evening people were able to upload videos [ru] from the rally and particularly
the speech [ru] by
Alexey Navalny, who was among the most popular politicians of the event. His speech probably
best describes the essence of the current events:
And then: "They can call us microbloggers or net hamsters. I am a net hamster! And I'll bite
[these bastards' heads off.] We'll all do it together! Because we do exist! [ ] We will not
forget, we will not forgive"
The reference to 'net hamsters' (a pejorative term for politically-engaged Internet
commenters) and their political will to change the country has destroyed the myth of the
slacktivist nature of political engagement online. Navalny has specifically emphasized
'forgetting/forgiving' to show that netizens do not necessarily have a short attention span
often ascribed to them.
On to Lubyanka
After several speeches made by the opposition politicians, the crowd moved on towards
Lubyanka Square, where the head office of the Federal Security Service is located. The
video [ru] uploaded by
user bigvane depicts Muscovites moving to Lubyanka and chanting "Free elections":
Most of the activists, however, were soon stopped on their way. Ilya Barabanov tweeted a
picture of the blocked road:
Blocked road. Photo by Ilya Barabanov
Twenty minutes after the aforementioned photo was made, Alexey Navalny was detained by the
police. Ilya Barabanov was detained three minutes after Navalny. (See this great photo report
made by ridus.ru correspondents here [ru].)
But even the detention didn't break the rebellious and quite positive spirit of the
protesters. Navalny, while sitting in a police bus together with other activists, shared an
instagram photo of the cheerful detained protesters:
'I'm sitting in a police bus with all the guys. They all say hi.' Photo by Alexey
Navalny
Another video , also shot
inside a police bus, showed protesters discussing the salaries of police officers, laughing a
lot.
The Hamster Revolution
The most interesting part of the post-election rebellion is not its peaceful manner (also an
important feature compared to violent nationalist riots), but its new demographics. Tvrain.ru
field reporter said that the crowd consisted mainly of the "intelligentsia, hipsters, and young
people." "It is a fashionable rally," said the reporter. Later, these observations were added:
the age of the protesters was between 16 and 33 and for many of those who were detained this
was the first street action experience. As Vera Kichanova tweeted :
Lyosha Nikitin writes that he is the only one of the 16 people in the police bus who had been
detained before. Others were taking part in a rally for the first time!
***
Meanwhile, levada.ru, the site of Levada Center polling and sociological
research organization, has been DDoSed [ru] and the contents
of epic-hero.ru were removed [ru] by the hosting provider.
In the days, weeks, and months immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Arab-Americans,
South Asian-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and Sikh-Americans were the targets of widespread
hate violence. Many of the perpetrators of these acts of hate violence claimed they were
acting patriotically by retaliating against those responsible for 9/11.
...
Just after September 11, numerous Arabs, Muslims, and individuals perceived to be Arab or
Muslim were assaulted, and some killed, by individuals who believed they were responsible
for or connected to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The first backlash
killing occurred four days after September 11.
Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot to death on September 15 as he was planting flowers outside
his Chevron gas station. The man who shot Sodhi, Frank Roque, had told an employee of an
Applebee's restaurant that he was "going to go out and shoot some towel heads." Roque
mistakenly thought Sodhi was Arab because Sodhi, an immigrant from India, had a beard and
wore a turban as part of his Sikh faith. After shooting Sodhi, Roque drove to a Mobil gas
station a few miles away and shot at a Lebanese-American clerk. He then drove to a home he
once owned and shot and almost hit an Afghani man who was coming out the front door. When
he was arrested two hours later, Roque shouted, "I stand for America all the way."
The next two killings were committed by a man named Mark Stroman. On September 15, 2001,
Stroman shot and killed Waquar Hassan, an immigrant from Pakistan, at Hassan's grocery
store in Dallas, Texas. On October 4, 2001, Stroman shot and killed Vasudev Patel, an
immigrant from India and a naturalized U.S. citizen, while Patel was working at his Shell
station convenience store. A store video camera recorded the killing, helping police to
identify Stroman as the killer. Stroman later told a Dallas television station that he shot
Hassan and Patel because, "We're at war. I did what I had to do. I did it to retaliate
against those who retaliated against us."
Beyond these killings, there were more than a thousand other anti-Muslim or anti-Arab
acts of hate which took the form of physical assaults, verbal harassment and intimidation,
arson, attacks on mosques, vandalism, and other property damage.
Instead of "calming prejudice" the GB Bush administration institutionalized hate
crimes:
First, in the weeks immediately following the September 11 attacks, the government began
secretly arresting and detaining Arab, Muslim, and South Asian men. Within the first two
months after the attacks, the government had detained at least 1,200 men.
...
Second, in November 2001, the Department of Justice began efforts to "interview"
approximately 5,000 men between the ages of 18 and 33 from Middle Eastern or Muslim nations
who had arrived in the United States within the previous two years on a temporary student,
tourist, or business visa and were lawful residents of the United States. Four months
later, the government announced it would seek to interview an additional 3,000 men from
countries with an Al Qaeda presence.
...
Third, in September 2002, the government implemented a "Special Registration" program also
known as NSEERS (National Security Entry-Exit Registration System), requiring immigrant men
from 26 mostly Muslim countries to register their name, address, telephone number, place of
birth, date of arrival in the United States, height, weight, hair and eye color, financial
information and the addresses, birth dates and phone numbers of parents and any foreign
friends with the government.
Besides all that a rather useless security theater was installed at U.S. airports which
has costs many billions in lost time and productivity ever since. The Patriot Act was
introduced which allowed for unlimited spying on private citizens. Wars were launched that
were claimed to be justified by 9/11. These were "mass outbreaks of anti-Muslim sentiment and
violence. Many were killed and maimed in them. People were tortured and vanished. All of this
happened largely to applause of a majority of the U.S. people which were glued to 24 and dreamed of being "terrorist
hunters".
Anyone with a functional memory knows that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was anything but
"pretty calm". It is ridiculous that Krugman is claiming that.
I find it a bit humorous b that you are critical of Krugman for his 911 dementia when for
years many of us finance types have railed about how morally corrupt the logic and thinking
of Paul Krugman is.
Paul Krugman is to economics what Bernie Sanders has become for the purported "left" side
of the "right wing" uni-party....a sheep dog for the easily led.
Paul Krugman is an acolyte for the God of Mammon/global private finance elite.
While spreading anger and hate toward Arab people, The Bush Administration rescued the
many members of the Kingdom's family from all around the US and escorted their flights out of
the US to safety in Saudi Arabia.
Distracting the public big time was Dick Cheney, VP, who insisted from the very next day
that the plot to hit the Twin Towers was Saddam's plot.
So, the historical record and US response was skewed from the getgo. AQ and Bin Laden
didn't concern the neocons. They wanted the US to go to Iraq again, and this time start a
wide war that would spread to Syria and Lebanon and Iran.
It was easy times to spread fear and hate, and Cheney and the war mongers of CENTCOM were
riding high. Americans were scared of all Arabs, all Sunnis, all Shiites, from anywhere. They
were all the same in the public's mind. Enemies.
It was perfect and has led to 19 years of endless wars. Add ISIS and al Nusra and the
Taliban and you have an endless soup of enemies.
krugman is a terrible shill for the neo-cons and liberal-interventionists of the 21st
century
at my age, I shouldn't really be surprised any more by what american "intellectuals" and
"nobel prize winners" say about anything..... but I am.
He's neo-liberal interventionist moron of the first rank, and saying what he did actually
normalizes the war mania and war-mongering which has become so staple in mainstream thought
and the "think tanks" and is now practically part of the american DNA and "culture".
shame on krugman
...
It appears the Deep State has attacked the USA's people twice in two decades--on 911 and with
the decision to let as many die as possible by deliberately not doing anything to mitigate
the impact of COVID-19 and allowing the real economy to atrophy so even more will die in the
long run.
Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 11 2020 19:40 utc | 34
Talking about tilting at windmills - I'll never forget Robert Fisk angrily pointing out
that the Yankees knew where to find Al CIA-duh because they extended the cave complex at Tora
Bora to help Al CIA-duh, equipped with 10,000 US Stinger Missiles, kick the Russians out of
Afghanistan in the 1980s!!!
(The Yankees had to wait for 10+ years to invade Afghanistan because it takes that long
for Stingers to pass their Use By date)
@michaelj72. "krugman is a terrible shill for the neo-cons and liberal-interventionists of
the 21st century"
Actually, Paul Krugman was a strong and outspoken opponent of the Iraq War since early
2003 and possibly earlier. He was amongst the few mainstream liberal commentators to take
that stand.
If MoA readers and commenters were to read the entire series of Krugman's tweets, six in
all, they will see mention of how the Bush govt began exploiting the events of 11 September
2001 almost immediately. Though the example Krugman actually uses would make most people
cringe at what it suggests about the bubble he lives in and how far removed it is from most
people's lives and experiences, and his reference to a "horrible war" does not mention either
Afghanistan or Iraq.
It has to be said that Twitter is not designed very well for the kind of informal
conversational commentary that people often use it for. But then you would think Krugman
would use something other than Twitter to discuss and compare 9/11 with the impact of
COVID-19.
The real issue I have with Krugman's Tweet is that he is revising history and bending over
backwards to apologise for Dubya in a way to criticise Donald Trump's performance as
President.
b " Anyone with a functional memory knows that the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was anything but
"pretty calm". It is ridiculous that Krugman is claiming that. "
Careful with that axe b, you are talking about Biden's chief economic adviser and likely
appointee as Chair of the Fed. How does this look?
Volker
Greenspan
Bernanke
Yellen
Powell
Krugman
Reading Krugman's columns in 2016, I had a strong to overwhelming sense that this was a
person revving up for a spot in Hillary's White House or cabinet. For some reason it isn't
hitting me as strongly this time around – he may not have as close connections in
Biden's circle – but it certainly would not be a surprise to see him take a turn
through the media/government revolving door if Trump loses (though, fwiw, I don't think it
will be a job at the Fed).
Yep. Pretty staggering how a few disgruntled ex-CIA contractors managed to, deliberately
or not, help the US Gov't launch the biggest world war operation right under the noses of the
brainwashed masses.
99% of Westerners still are clueless as to explaining the last 20 years in a broader
geopolitical context.
#28: "The antiwar protests in the US were small and insignificant."
No they were not. Millions of people demonstrated against the planned war, in the US,
in the UK, and around the world...
We mustn't forget how the vast majority of those who allegedly were anti-war suddenly went
totally pro-war silent upon Obama coming in.
But that pales compared to the vile spectacle of all the self-alleged
"anti-authoritarians", "anti-propagandists" "dissidents", who suddenly regard the government
media as the literal voice of God, where their alleged God speaks of Covid.
His book, End this Depression Now, is pretty weak. He has no theory of why the crash
occurred. He critiques the austerity agenda but doesn't understand that government spending
CAN create tax liabilities for capital down the road and eat into profits, thus blocking
expanded investments and growth. Moronic libertarians hate Krugman just because they are
right wing assholes who think, like fairies, that a free market without the state will work
fine and self correct. Marx debunked this fairy tale thoroughly in Capital Volume 1, showing
that, even if we start with the mythical free market of libertarian morons, capitalism will
still operate according to the general law by which concentration and centralization lead to
class polarization. In any case, in volume 3 of Capital, Marx develops his laws of crisis,
showing that the cycles of expansion and depression under capitalism follow the movements of
the rate of profit, which itself is determined by the ratio of the value of sunk capital in
production technologies to the rate of exploitation (profits/wages). If the former rises more
than the latter, the rate of profit sinks, along with investment, output and employment.
Financial crises then set in.
The empirical evidence in the data bears out Marx's theory, not Krugman's dumb notion of
aggregate demand, or the stupid libertarian focus on interest rates.
We could discuss here all day about the sociological subject of the American people's true
positioning in the aftermath of 9/11. It would be, sincerely, a waste of time.
The important thing to grasp over this episode - from the point of view of History - is
this: it was a strategic victory for al-Qaeda . The USA took the bait (all scripted?)
and went into a quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a few years, the surplus the USA had
accumulated with the sacking and absorption of the Soviet space during Bill Clinton
evaporated and became a huge deficit in the Empire's accounts. Not long after, the 2008
financial meltdown happened, burying Bushism in a spectacular way.
There's a debate about the size of the hole the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan cost the
American Empire. Some put it into the dozens of billions of USDs; others put it into the
trillions of USDs range. We will never know. What we know is that the hole was big enough to
both erase the American surplus and to not avoid the financial meltdown of 2008.
Either the expansion through the Middle East wasn't fast and provided riches enough to
keep up with the Empire's voracious appetite or the invasion itself already represented a
last, desperate attempt by the Empire to avoid its imminent collapse. We know, however, that
POTUS Bush had a list of countries he wanted to invade beyond Iraq (the "Axis of Evil") which
contained a secret country (Venezuela). He was conscious Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't be
enough. Whatever the case, he didn't have the time, and the financial meltdown happened in
his last year in the White House.
They knew who the perps of 9/11 were: their "own" Saudi irregulars in the CIA's US main
land training camps, who started practicing on the "wrong"- domestic American- targets. These
guys were officially entered without any background checks.
The Bush and Bin Laden families go way back in money making. That is why George had to ponder
so long in that Florida kindergarten after hearing about the attacks: he had a suspicion. The
Saudi only fly out after 9/11 confirms that.
Paul Krugman Is a pro. Completely owned by Deep State. His purpose is to deflect
discussion and prevent questioning the official version of 9/11 , and get people chasing
something completely irrelevant. Well done Paul, most have taken the bait.
At the time of writing, he is still in a coma in the intensive care unit, in the same
German clinic. What happened to him, no one can say for sure yet (or does not want
to).
Written before it was not unsurprisingly "revealed" by the Germans that Navalny was
poisoned with "Novichok".
I recall how in 2012, having spouted his usual bullshit to the mob at Bolotnaya, Navalny
left the stage but did not join the sheeple, some of whom wished to storm the police lines
containing them in order that they not cross a nearby bridge over the Moscow River and head
for the Kremlin, but went the opposite way, where a line of OMON personnel prevented persons
from venturing any further.
A gap then appeared in the OMON cordon, through which the Bullshitter nonchalantly
proceeded, whither no one knows.
I used to teach a bloke at KPMG who believed that Navalny was employed by the FSB. He was
a regular sort of bloke: mid-30s, married, young family, well educated, widely travelled, a
tax specialist.
Politically, he was right of centre, but not much: certainly not a Libtard and no rampant
nationalist either.
He had a younger brother, he told me, who was still at college and whom he considered to
be a dickhead because he was a Navalny hamster who attended the Bullshitter's unsanctioned
assemblies.
There have been a few Orcs who have expressed their opinion to me over the years that
Navalny is a latter-day "Father Gapon".
Western regime-change tuners would do well to take notice that Navalny is popular with
disaffected children of the elite and the intelligentsia for the same reason The Rolling
Stones and Deep Purple were beloved by the youth of my generation – because adults
despised them. I still believe Ritchie Blackmore is the greatest rock guitarist who ever
lived, but if he announced he was moving to Canada to run for Prime Minister, I would just
laugh. There is no crossover in those skills. Well, I couldn't actually give less of a fuck
who is the next Prime Minister of Canada, so perhaps it's not a good example, and Blackmore
would doubtless do as well as anyone else. But you see my point, I'm sure. Being a
Navalny-follower is cool because it is an act of rebellion. Lyosha was a real-estate lawyer,
and his understanding of massive organizations like the Ministry of Finance or the
labyrinthine workings of the tax code is strictly at the newspaper-commenter level. To be
fair, that's true of many Prime Ministers and Presidents as well, but they rely on Heads of
Departments and Ministers to know that stuff. Navalny seems to think those people would serve
him loyally and make his imaginings come to life if he could just win. It's surprising he has
not looked to America there, too, for his inspiration. Was that Obama's experience? I don't
think so. Nor is it Trump's.
I suppose Lyosha reasons that if he could just get elected, Harvard would send a team of
experts to help him remodel Russia, and doubtless it would. But that was tried once already,
and I think the reaction to a repeat attempt would be a little less welcoming this time
around.
Omsk doctor says there were no toxicants in Navalny's body
"Любой
токсикант,
проходя через
наши органы
детоксикации (а
это печень,
почки и лёгкие),
оставит след. В
данном случае в
течение всего
времени
пребывания ни
почки, ни
лёгкие, ни
печень не были
(поражены. -- RT)", --
уточнил
Александр
Сабаев в
разговоре с RT.
"Any toxicant passing through our detoxification organs (which are the liver,
kidneys and lungs) will leave a trace. In this case, during his entire stay, neither his
kidneys, nor his lungs, nor his liver were (affected. – RT) ", Alexander Sabaev
clarified in a conversation with RT.
And I am willing to bet that at the Omsk hospital they have records of their analyses on
hand to prove this. They used a USA manufactured machine to do these analyses, by the
way.
This is called "presenting evidence".
Over to you, "Free World" doctors at the Berlin Charité clinic -- better said
"Porton Down" and Bundeswehr laboratories!
I guess their hope was that Russia would just deny and then subside into sullen acceptance
when it could not be heard. It does not look like that is going to happen. If Germany has to
admit to fabricating its case, or even to confess it was mistaken, it will do 'great
propaganda damage' – to use Karl's phrase – to the west in general and Germany in
particular. Russia should not let up, and not accept non-answers like 'results classified for
reasons of national security'.
Hello again, folks. This is going to be interesting. Dilyana Gaytandzhieva has been
working away on researching that lab in Georgia. There has now been a data leak of hundreds
of documents from the lab. She had discovered something fishy going on there earlier in the
year, a biological warfare program run on Georgian soil by the US. Interesting, everyone
involved in fighting disinformation then turned on her and said it was Russian propaganda.
More recently, there have been claims in the media further obscuring the actual work there by
saying that the lab has been working on COVID research. Right. Anyway, Dilyana's twitter feed
is worth checking.
Now here's something for those who think that Putin was "a moron" for allowing Navalny to
go to Germany for treatment:
Knowing full well that Navalny had not been poisoned by anything, let alone "Novichok",
and having irrefutable evidence that this was the case, the powers-that-be here allowed the
Bullshitter to go to Germany, where the Evil Russians rightly assumed that the Germans, on
CIA advice, would attempt to use the Novichok gambit, a scam that they felt was an astounding
success in the UK.
Now it looks as though the wicked Orcs might now be able to kill 2 birds with one stone:
to reveal what lying bastards those who hold the levers of power in the USA snd its vassal
states are and to "debunk" (favourite term used by our erstwhile Venezualian troll) the
Skripal story.
I don't think that was a clever plan by the Russians – I actually think it was an
unpleasant surprise when Germany revealed that it, too, cannot be trusted because it is an
agent of Washington, or at least that there are powerful American influences in Berlin. I am
beginning to get a little respect back for Merkel, as she always has to be putting off some
special-interest group or other which is trying to back her into a corner; and, as we're all
aware, she is not a well woman.
Russia was right, I believe, to permit Navalny's transportation as it was at the wish of
the family, as you stated, and the western media is always ready to scream that Russians are
not free to make their own decisions. A note of caution should have been introduced, though,
by Germany's picking up the tab; Russia should have known then that something opportunistic
was afoot. But now Germany is in a very awkward position, and Russia is actually on pretty
solid ground – all it has to do is keep putting the screws to Germany and demanding an
explanation for why there was no 'nerve agent' in Navalny's samples before he left Russia,
but it magically showed up in Germany. Not to mention that the Germans tried to go with
poisoning using a cholinesterase-inhibitor until there was a rational explanation for that,
and only then switched to Novichok. The Germans are on the back foot now.
"Der Spiegel" has now said that traces of poison have been found on Navalny's clothing,
skin etc..
They just wont give up!
But are they still saying he was Novichocked? If they are, then why aren't his fellow
passengers on the Tomsk – Moscow flight not dropping dead like flies? For that matter,
why isnt Navalny dead? In fact, why didn't he die immediately after drinking his Novichocked
tea?
Ummm .how did Lyosha get such a heavy dose of poison that it was all over him, and he has
no clue where it came from? Or is that why he's been kept in a coma – so he doesn't
have to provide any answers?
"In all fairness, we should probably draw everyone's attention to the fact that the
Omsk hospital provided more information about the patient's health than, for example, the
Berlin hospital is doing right now. Our doctors behaved much more transparently with regard
to informing both journalists and all those interested than their German colleagues
do."
What a frightful image that conjures up: the snap of tight fitting surgical gloves as she
puts them on her hands before sticking her right index finger into a big jar of that goo!
No KY jelly in the the gas-station with missile, see: just good ol' Vaseline.
Such interesting Novichok. It only worked on Navalny 40 minutes after takeoff.
According to a young woman, the blogger [Navalny -- ME] suddenly felt
unwell about 40 minutes after take-off.
A passenger on the Tomsk-Moscow flight, in an interview with 5 -tv.ru , spoke about the
incident with Alexey Navalny on board the plane. The girl noted that she initially saw the
blogger at the airport in the cafeteria, where she was drinking coffee. According to her, the
man was sitting at a table and enjoying tea.
When boarding, the passenger noticed that Alexei Navalny was behind her and she asked
him for a photo to be taken of him and her together. The celebrity reacted positively to his
fellow traveller's request, after which the girl went to her seat.
"It seemed to me that he was feeling fine, absolutely. I had a photo taken of me and
him: you can't tell from it that he was somehow in bad way. We took photos; I went to my
place. I sat at the tail-end, where it all happened. We took off. Some flight time had
already passed, maybe 40 minutes, and he went to the toilet. I didn't see him come out, I
tried to sleep. I woke up because of a stewardess screaming that medical assistance was
needed", said the passenger.
The call of the cabin crew was answered by a woman who tried to bring Alexei Navalny to
life. While this was happening, his companions – a girl and a lad -- were shouting:
"Lyosha [Navalny -- ME] , don't close your eyes! Lyosha, breathe!"
The passenger said that at some point, Alexei Navalny began to shout in an inhuman
voice. This greatly frightened some of the passengers.
"In the end he began to shout 'beluga' [expensive brand of black caviar -- ME] ,
unlike a human being. It scared everyone very much. I burst into tears there then and I
started to panic. His cheeks were slapped. The pilot announced an emergency landing in Omsk",
the girl said.
After the landing, a medical team came on board. After having been examined, the
blogger was immediately put on a saline drip and was soon carried out of the aeroplane on a
stretcher. By that time, according to the incident witness, Alexei Navalny was already
unconscious.
The blogger's fellow passenger emphasized that when the aircraft was being refueled,
people in the cabin were vigorously discussing the incident. One of the passengers suggested
that Alexei Navalny had had an overdose of illegal drugs.
"When all this was happening, we were already at the refueling station and there was a
discussion going on between people. The woman who had tried to provide him with medical
assistance said: "Everything will be fine with him. He will now be cleaned up there and he
will be released". There were shouts from passengers: "Addict! Serves him right! ", "This is
an overdose!" said the blogger's fellow passenger.
The girl added that many began to intercede for Alexei Navalny and reject assumptions
about his taking drugs.
The blogger is currently in a serious condition, doctors say that he is stable. He was
put into a drug-induced coma ad connected to a ventilator. A final diagnosis has not been
established. A full investigation is underway.
Earlier, 5 -tv.ru reported that the police did not believe in the intentional poisoning
of Navalny.
Ate something that was a little off, Lyosha? And washed down with moonshine vodka?
Opinion: Will Vladimir Putin ride out the Navalny storm?
The consequences of what German Chancellor Angela Merkel all but called an
assassination attempt on Alexei Navalny could be serious and substantial for Vladimir Putin,
says DW's Konstantin Eggert.
Russian society should have been the first to react to Alexei Navalny's predicament.
But do not expect tens of thousands of people at the gates of the Kremlin, chanting "We won't
forget, we won't forgive," as they usually do during anti-Putin protests.
Do they really do that "at the gates of the Kremlin"?
Many are also afraid. What happened to the opposition leader was most probably designed
to warn the politically active: "This is what happens when you cross the authorities'
path."
The public will most probably remain as indifferent to the fate of Navalny as to the
struggle of the "brotherly" Belarusian people for civil rights. Russians are preoccupied with
the coronavirus pandemic, anxious about their jobs and the future of their families. Many are
also afraid. What happened to the opposition leader was most probably designed to warn the
politically active: "This is what happens when you cross the authorities' path."
That a fact, Eggert?
Navalny is not just a "blogger," as the Kremlin's propagandists like to call him. He is
a politician who has actively formulated an alternative political and economic agenda for
Russia. Even his temporary departure from the political scene is a blow to all critics of the
Kremlin. It is difficult to replace him.
An economic agenda you say? Are you serious?
The question is how cohesive and organised his supporters are. The inability to garner
broad popular support has plagued all Russian anti-authoritarian movements for centuries,
starting with the "Decembrist" uprising in 1825.
Broad and popular support? Now I know you are pulling my pisser!
No one really expects an objective and transparent investigation from Moscow into the
poisoning. The key question now is how seriously Germany and its EU and NATO allies
respond.
Talking about transparency, where's the fucking evidence that your pals say they have,
proving that "Novichok"was used to assassinate the charlatan who you like to label as a
politician and not a foreign agent?
Having taken responsibility for Navalny's fate, the German government has also taken on
a moral burden so serious that it is now almost impossible to shed it without incurring
lasting damage.
Responsibility for the Bullshitter's fate?
Moral burden?
Oh fuck off will ya!
No, on second thoughts don't! Let's analyse the heap of shite you wrote for DW in, say6
months' time, and see how it compares with the reality of Russian politics.
And I tell you what: Navalny will be alive and well before that time, he will not be
president of Russia, but he will still be a blogger hired by the US State Dept.
However, he but won't be blogging from his present home address: he'll be blogging from
Berlin or even further afield, perhaps from the USA.
Stop flogging yourself ME and let it go. I almost posted a piece by Lithuanian gobshite
and FM
Linas Linkevičius. I will not give those likes the oxygen of publicity unless there is
actually something new. It seems that Merkel is 'coming under pressure' because she refuses
to be bounced in to immediate action of do something and NATO of course have
commented. This is the same NATO that wants 'discussions with Turkey' but that Greece
completely rejects. Who's falling apart here again?
Well, just a small quibble – Von Eggert did not say Navalny had broad popular
support – he said the opposite, citing an INABILITY to garner broad political
support.
If Lyosha has a complete plan for Russia under his leadership, he's keeping it under wraps
except for loving peeks offered to western reporters; I have never seen a complete and
coherent election platform from Navalny. If anyone has, please post it here. That means a
serious plan in which objectives like – for example – 'reduce taxes' are costed
and the explanation provided for where the money will come from makes sense. Of course every
political candidate cites the need for reforms, and doubtless reforms are always needed,
nobody has a perfect plan. But it is one thing to say 'reduce taxes' and other
vote-compelling inducements, and quite another to do it and still have enough money for the
state to carry out needed improvements to public infrastructure.
But do not expect tens of thousands of people at the gates of the Kremlin, chanting "We
won't forget, we won't forgive," as they usually do during anti-Putin protests
."
My stress.
And they don't do that during anti-Putin protests -- ever..
For one thing, Navalny and his mostly juvenile mob are not allowed anywhere near the
Kremlin..
That's why the charlatan always surfaces at Pushkin Square metro station and, like a Pied
Piper, tries to lead his hamsters downhill along Tverskaya Street towards Manezh Square and
the Kremlin. When doing this, he usually gets lifted about 100 metres away from the metro
station by Putin's brutal, thuggish police.
An open and shut case! Clearly Novichok poisoning, a deadly poison made only in Russia,
and the Russians have already used it at least once. The most deadly nerve agent known to man
and part of the brutal armament that Putin's thugs use on their murderous missions.
Germany has denied allegation of falsification of the Navalny case
3 September 2020
MOSCOW, September 3 – RIA Novosti. The statement made by the President of
Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, about the falsification of data on the "poisoning" of Navalny
is not true, the press service of the German Cabinet told RIA Novosti.
Earlier, at a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Lukashenko said that
Minsk had intercepted a conversation between Warsaw and Berlin, which denied allegations of
the blogger's poisoning. He promised that he would give the Russian side a transcript of this
"interesting dialogue, which clearly indicates that this is falsification".
"Of course, Mr. Lukashenko's statement does not correspond to reality. Yesterday the
Federal Chancellor, the Foreign Minister and the Defence Minister expressed their views on
the new circumstances in the Navalny poisoning case There is nothing to add", the cabinet
told the agency.
In Moscow, they noted that they had not yet received this evidence.
"Lukashenko hast just announced this. He said that the material would be transferred to
the FSB. There is no other information yet", Peskov told RIA Novosti.
What a duplicitous creep Lukashenko is!
Always jumping to one side of the fence to the other and thinking he is so smart in doing
so.
Then again, perhaps he has such damning evidence, but even if he had, nobody would believe
it, because Germany, being a vassal state of the USA, is on the side of freedom and
democracy.
"Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit für das deutsche Vaterland" as one sings there to a
well known tune.
" Once Navalny was in Berlin it was only a matter of time before it was declared that he
was poisoned with Novichok. The Russophobes are delighted. This of course eliminates all
vestiges of doubt about what happened to the Skripals, and proves that Russia must be
isolated and sanctioned to death and we must spend untold billions on weapons and security
services. We must also increase domestic surveillance, crack down on dissenting online
opinion. It also proves that Donald Trump is a Russian puppet and Brexit is a Russian
plot.
I am going to prove beyond all doubt that I am a Russian troll by asking the question Cui
Bono?, brilliantly identified by the Integrity Initiative's Ben Nimmo as a sure sign of
Russian influence.
I should state that I have no difficulty at all with the notion that a powerful oligarch
or an organ of the Russian state may have tried to assassinate Navalny. He is a minor
irritant, rather more famous here than in Russia, but not being a major threat does not
protect you against political assassination in Russia.
What I do have difficulty with is the notion that if Putin, or other very powerful Russian
actors, wanted Navalny dead, and had attacked him while he was in Siberia, he would not be
alive in Germany today. If Putin wanted him dead, he would be dead.
Let us first take the weapon of attack. One thing we know about a "Novichok" for sure is
that it appears not to be very good at assassination. Poor Dawn Sturgess is the only person
ever to have allegedly died from "Novichok", accidentally according to the official
narrative. "Novichok" did not kill the Skripals, the actual target. If Putin wanted Navalny
dead, he would try something that works. Like a bullet to the head, or an actually deadly
poison.
"Novichok" is not a specific chemical. It is a class of chemical weapon designed to be
improvised in the field from common domestic or industrial precursors. It makes some sense to
use on foreign soil as you are not carrying around the actual nerve agent, and may be able to
buy the ingredients locally. But it makes no sense at all in your own country, where the FSB
or GRU can swan around with any deadly weapon they wish, to be making homemade nerve agents
in the sink. Why would you do that?
Further we are expected to believe that, the Russian state having poisoned Navalny, the
Russian state then allowed the airplane he was traveling in, on a domestic flight, to divert
to another airport, and make an emergency landing, so he could be rushed to hospital. If the
Russian secret services had poisoned Navalny at the airport before takeoff as alleged, why
would they not insist the plane stick to its original flight plan and let him die on the
plane? They would have foreseen what would happen to the plane he was on.
Next, we are supposed to believe that the Russian state, having poisoned Navalny, was not
able to contrive his death in the intensive care unit of a Russian state hospital. We are
supposed to believe that the evil Russian state was able to falsify all his toxicology tests
and prevent doctors telling the truth about his poisoning, but the evil Russian state lacked
the power to switch off the ventilator for a few minutes or slip something into his drip. In
a Russian state hospital.
Next we are supposed to believe that Putin, having poisoned Navalny with novichok, allowed
him to be flown to Germany to be saved, making it certain the novichok would be discovered.
And that Putin did this because he was worried Merkel was angry, not realising she might be
still more angry when she discovered Putin had poisoned him with novichok
There are a whole stream of utterly unbelievable points there, every single one of which
you have to believe to go along with the western narrative. Personally I do not buy a single
one of them, but then I am a notorious Russophile traitor.
The United States is very keen indeed to stop Germany completing the Nord Stream 2
pipeline, which will supply Russian gas to Germany on a massive scale, sufficient for about
40% of its electricity generation. Personally I am opposed to Nord Stream 2 myself, on both
environmental and strategic grounds. I would much rather Germany put its formidable
industrial might into renewables and self-sufficiency. But my reasons are very different from
those of the USA, which is concerned about the market for liquefied gas to Europe for US
produces and for the Gulf allies of the US. Key decisions on the completion of Nord Stream 2
are now in train in Germany.
The US and Saudi Arabia have every reason to instigate a split between Germany and Russia
at this time. Navalny is certainly a victim of international politics. That he is a victim of
Putin I tend to doubt.
I do hope that Murray was writing cynically when he penned the following words above about
Navalny:
He is a minor irritant, rather more famous here than in Russia
His popularity here is minimal and his political base statistically zilch, the incessant
swamping of the Russian blogosphere with his praise by his hamsters notwithstanding.
I saw one of such hamster's nonsense only the other week in which the retard wrote that
Navalny is the most well-known person in Russia and another post of yet another hamster who
presented a list of policies that the bullshitter would follow "when he becomes
president".
The whole crock of Navalny -- Novichok shite neatly summed up by a comment to Murray's
article linked above:
Goose
September 4, 2020 at 00:28 We're being asked to believe by people calling themselves serious journalists, that the
Kremlin's thought process was thus :
Let's poison this guy with Novichok. Nobody will know it was us and there'll be no
diplomatic fallout.
Completely illogical.
Logic has no part in this machination, dear chap: the people to whom these lies are
directed are fucking stupid: uneducated, brain-dead, browser surfing, soap opera and
"Celebrity Come Dancing" and "Reality TV" and porn watching morons.
Oh yes! And in the UK they're daily fed pap about "The Royals": every day without fail the
UK media presents page after page of "stories" concerning "Kate and Wills" and "Harry and
Megan".
And much of the rest of the UK media is full of shite about "football" and its prima
donnas -- that's "Associated Football" or "soccer" as they prefer to say in North America,
and not "Rugby Football" -- better said: not "Rugby League Football".
Nato has called for Russia to disclose its Novichok nerve agent programme to
international monitors, following the poisoning of activist Alexei Navalny.
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said members were united in condemning the
"horrific" attack.
He added there was "proof beyond doubt" that a Novichok nerve agent was used against Mr
Navalny.
Where is the proof????????
You just say so or some "guy" at Porton Down or some Bundeswehr
Scheißkerl laboratories?
Get fucked Stoltenberg!
And Peskov, a word of advice: Shut the fuck up and say nothing.
Don't believe that silence from you will be taken as proof of guilt!
You and the Russian state are guilty of everything as charged by the very nature of the
fact that you are Russian, "the other"!
Sound familiar?
It's what the Nazis said about every Jew: guilty of all accusations because of their
ethnicity -- not their religion, note: Christianized Jews were still "Jews". They were guilty
of all charges from the moment of each and every one's birth as a "Jew".
And the sickening thing is that "woke" arseholes the world over condemn racism, but racism
directed against Russians is fair game.
The US president has received heavy criticism for his reluctance to immediately join
NATO allies in pressing Russia over the Navalny incident, which CNN called "the latest
instance of Trump failing to speak out and call for answers from the Kremlin on issues
ranging from election interference to possible bounties on US troops in Afghanistan."
I presume that the concept of "burden of proof" is now a dead letter in the Free West.
I thought that whole Russia-offered-bounties-for-dead-US-troops thing had been 'debunked'
for good. Several western sources which are sometimes not snapping-turtle crazy said there
was nothing to it. So why are they still citing it?
Alexei Navalny is one of the most important leaders of what passes for political
opposition in President Putin's Russia. Some say he is, in effect, "the" leader of the
opposition in Russia. He has just been the subject of an assassination attempt, and lies in
an induced coma in a German hospital. It's worth repeating: the leader of the opposition to
Vladimir Putin has been poisoned, perhaps fatally, using novichok, a chemical weapon banned
by international treaty. There is little doubt that, in one form or another, formal or
informal agents of the Russian state would have been part of the plot, especially given the
evidence of novichok, and that the highest circles of the Russian establishment would either
have knowledge of the attack, or made it apparent to any shady blah, blah. blah ..
Now don't you folks go and forget, BoJo recently made Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of that
rag and who penned the above shite, a Baronet.
Lebedev has dual Russian/British citizen and has lived in the UK since he arrived there as
an 8-year-old with his KGB papa, who had landed a cushy number at the Soviet Embassy.
Papa Lebedev went back to Russia, where in the immediate post-Soviet years of Russia he
made a mint and became an "oligarch", namely an extremely successful thief who had pillaged
Russia. His son became a UK citizen in 2010.
Evgeny Lebedev is now a life peer and may now plonk his arse (and get paid for doing so!)
in one of the chambers of the British legislature, the one whose members are unelected: they
are there either through their aristocratic "birthright" or are appointees, such as is
Lebedev.
When BoJo appointed Lebedev as a life peer, the moronic Russophobes in the UK accused that
fool of a British PM of being under the Evil One's control.
Just shows you how they know shag all about Russia and Russians.
Recording of conversation between Berlin and Warsaw on Navalny case published
20:40 09/04/2020 (updated: 05:19 09/05/2020)
MOSCOW, September 4 – RIA Novosti.The state Belarusian media has
published a recording of the negotiations between Berlin and Warsaw on the situation with
Alexei Navalny, intercepted by Minsk .
RIA Novosti is publishing a transcript of this dialogue.
– Hello, good afternoon, Nick. How are we getting on?
– Everything seems to be going according to plan. The materials about Navalny are
ready. They'll be transferred to the Chancellor's office. We'll be waiting for her
statement.
– Has the poisoning been definitely confirmed?
– Look, Mike, it's not that important in this case. There is a war going on. And
during a war, all sorts of methods are good.
– I agree. It is necessary to discourage Putin from sticking his nose into the
affairs of Belarus. The most effective way is to drown him with the problems in Russia, and
there are many of them. Moreover, in the near future they will have elections, voting day in
the Russian regions.
– This is what we are doing. How are you doing in Belarus?
– To be honest, not that well, really. President Lukashenko has turned out to be
a tough nut to crack. They are professional and organized. It is clear that Russia supports
them. The officials and the military are loyal to the president. We are working on it. The
rest [of this conversation] we'll have when we meet and not on the 'phone.
I find it hard to believe this is real. Lukashenko is 'a tough nut to crack'? The
Belarusian government is 'professional and organized'? Well, you never know with the Poles.
But it seems so perfectly to confirm western perfidy that it must be made up. Who would be
stupid enough to say things like that on the phone?
And "Yats is our man!" Victory Noodles crowed to Pie-whacked.
Don't forget also that Jens Stoltenberg was dumb enough to think he could drive a taxi
around Oslo and pick up paying passengers without their recognising him and commenting on his
poor driving skills and knowledge of Oslo streets.
And on hearing off a Latvian (?) politician, who had been observing the "Revolution of
Dignity" and was involved in an investigation into the deaths of the "Heavenly Hundred", that
there were good grounds to believe that those martyrs for Ukrainian freedom had been martyred
by being shot in the back by their fellow countrymen who were of a fascist bent, Lady Ashton
said: "Gosh!""
Now that really was a dumb utterance to make on the phone, considering the
circumstances.
It is also worth underlining that the Russian pilot who decided to make an emergency
landing in Omsk, rather than proceed to Moscow, may have saved Navalny's life, as may the
doctors in Omsk who – despite their professed doubts about poison – administered
atropine, the closest treatment there is to a novichok antidote, early on. The claim, made by
some, that this was a brazen attack, with the Kremlin's fingerprints all over it, designed to
be found out and interpreted as a "two fingers up" to the west, does not stack up.
But the German findings that probably the most influential Russian opposition leader
was poisoned and that the substance used was the same as the one identified in the Skripal
case – a military-grade nerve agent, moreover, that is associated with Russia, even
though it was developed in the Soviet-era and can be found outside Russia – means that
the Kremlin has a case to answer. Yes, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the
Kremlin is all denials, but the onus is now squarely on Putin to make his case in the court
of international opinion.
" the doctors in Omsk who – despite their professed doubts about poison –
administered atropine, the closest treatment there is to a novichok antidote, early on."
That a fact, Doctor Dejevsky?
" everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the Kremlin is all denials, but the onus
is now squarely on Putin to make his case in the court of international opinion"
Burden of proof?
Russia has been accused! Russia is not obliged to prove its innocence, FFS!!!!
Where is the evidence to back up the accusation????
Of course the Omsk hospital doctors had to apply atropine because Navalny's groupies were
squealing that he had been poisoned. They would have squealed again and accused the hospital
of malpractice if the hospital had not used the drug.
Russian doctors have proposed to their German colleagues that they establish a joint
group on the case of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, the president of Russia's
National Medical Chamber, noted paediatrician Leonid Roshal, told reporters on
Saturday.
Will the Germans agree?
I shouldn't imagine so. They and the rest of the West have crossed the Rubicon:
By Dr. Karin Kneissl , who works as an energy analyst and book author. She served as the Austrian minister of foreign affairs
from 2017-2019. In June, she published her book on diplomacy 'Diplomatie Macht Geschichte' in Germany through Olms, and in early
September her book 'Die Mobilitätswende', or 'Mobility in Transition', was released in Vienna by Braumüller. The cacophony of
noise generated in the wake of the attack on the Russian opposition figure is drowning out the reality. As Angela Merkel has always
maintained, the German-Russian gas deal is purely a commercial project.
Nord Stream has always had the ingredients to drive sober-minded Germans emotional. I remember energy conferences in Germany back
in 2006 when already the idea of such a gas pipeline as a direct connection from Russia to Germany provoked deep political rows,
not just in Berlin but across the EU.
Conservatives disliked it for the simple reason that it was a "Schröder thing," the legacy of social democrat Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder, who lost the election of September 2005 to Angela Merkel. Schröder had negotiated the project with his good friend, President
Vladimir Putin, and then chaired the company in charge of implementing it.
Around that time, I was invited to an energy conference in Munich by the conservative think tank, the Hanns Seidel Foundation,
managed by the Bavarian party CSU, the traditional junior partner of the ruling CDU in the government. The bottom-line of the debate
on Nord Stream was negative, with the consensus being that the German-Russian pipeline would lead to the implosion of a European
common foreign policy and damage the EU's energy ambitions.
I attended many other such events across Germany, from parliament to universities, and listened carefully to all the arguments.
The feelings towards Nord Stream were much more benign at meetings held under the auspices of the SPD.
But over the years, the rift between different political parties evaporated, and a consensus emerged which supported enhanced
energy cooperation between Berlin and Moscow. Politicians of all shades defended the first pipeline, Nord Stream 1, after it went
operational in 2011, bringing Russian gas directly to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
They also enthusiastically supported the creation of the second, Nord Stream 2, better known by its acronym NS2. This $11bn (£8.4bn)
1,200km pipeline is almost finished and was due to go online next year.
But now, in the very final stage of construction, everything has been thrown in limbo thanks to the alleged poisoning of Russian
opposition figure Alexey Navalny.
NS2 has always been controversial. Critics, such as the US and Poland, have argued that it makes Germany too reliant on energy
from a politically unreliable partner. President Trump last year signed a law imposing sanctions on any firm that helps Russia's
state-owned gas company, Gazprom, finish it. The White House fears NS2 will tighten Russia's grip over Europe's energy supply and
reduce its own share of the lucrative European market for American liquefied natural gas.
These sanctions have caused delays to the project. A special ship owned by a Swiss company menaced with sanctions had to be replaced.
And prior to that, various legal provisions were brought up by the European Commission that had to be fulfilled by the companies
in retrospect.
Now the case of Navalny, currently being treated at a Berlin clinic after being awoken from a medically induced coma, has thrown
everything up in the air again. It has triggered a political cacophony that threatens relations between Germany, the EU, Russia,
and Washington. And at the center is the pipeline.
Various German sources, among them laboratories of the armed forces, have alleged that Navalny had been poisoned with the nerve
agent Novichok. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD)
stated in an interview published on Sunday by Bild: " I hope the Russians don't force us to change our stance on Nord Stream
2 – we have high expectations of the Russian government that it will solve this serious crime ." He claimed to have seen "
a lot of evidence " that the Russian state was behind the attack. " The deadly chemical weapon with which Navalny was poisoned
was in the past in the possession of Russian authorities ," he insisted.
He conceded that stopping the almost-completed pipeline would harm German and broader European business interests, pointing out
that the gas pipeline's construction involves "over 100 companies from 12 European countries, and about half of them come from Germany."
Maas also threatened the Kremlin with broader EU sanctions if it did not help clarify what happened "in the coming days." Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov responded by labeling the accusations "groundless" and Moscow has staunchly denied any involvement
in the affair.
The whole matter is complicated by domestic political considerations in Germany. CDU politician Norbert Röttgen, who heads up
foreign affairs within the ruling party and has demanded that the pipeline should be stopped, is among those conservatives vying
to lead the CDU in the run-up to Chancellor Angela Merkel's retirement next year. Meanwhile, Merkel is still trying to strike a balance
between the country's legal commitments, her well-known mantra that NS2 is a " purely commercial project, " and what is now
a major foreign policy crisis.
The chancellor had always focused on the business dimension. But most large energy projects also have a geopolitical dimension,
and that certainly holds true with Nord Stream.
When I was Austria's foreign minister, I saw first-hand the recurring and very harsh criticism of the project by US politicians
and officials. I remember the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, in a speech at the margins of the UN General Assembly in September
2018 that focused solely on NS2. I replied by pointing out to him that pipelines are not built to annoy others, but because there
is demand. One thing was certain – the US opposition to Nord Stream would not wane and now the Navalny case has given it new impetus.
What we are witnessing is a tremendous politicization of the pipeline with a wide range of people all shouting very loudly.
So here we are, in a very poisoned atmosphere where it might be difficult to revise positions without losing face. The social
democrat Maas, just like the conservative Röttgen and many others, have taken to the media for different reasons. In my observation,
it might have to do with their respective desires to take a strong position in order to also mark their upcoming emancipation from
the political giant Merkel (she is due to step down next year).
Due to her professional and empathetic handling of the pandemic, she is today much more popular than before the crisis. That makes
it difficult for a junior partner, represented by Foreign Minister Maas, and for all those who wish to challenge her inside the party.
What is needed is to get the topic out of the media and out of the to-and-fro of daily petty politics. Noisy statements might
serve some, but not the overall interests involved. And there are many at stake. It is not only about energy security in times of
transition, namely moving away from nuclear, but much wider matters.
As a legal scholar, I deem the loss of trust in contracts. Vertragstreue, as we call it in German – loyalty to the contract –
will be the biggest collateral damage if the pipeline is abandoned for political reasons. This fundamental principle of every civilization
was coined as pacta sunt servanda by the Romans – agreements must be kept. Our legal system is based on this. Who would still conclude
contracts of such volumes with German companies if politics can change the terms of trade overnight?
In June 2014, construction sites on the coasts of the Black sea, both in Russia and Bulgaria, were ready for starting the gas
pipeline South Stream. After pressure from the European Commission, the work never started. The political reason was the dispute
on Ukraine – in particular, the annexation of the Crimea. However, the legal argument was that the tenders for the contracts were
in contradiction with EU regulations on competition. Tens of thousands of work permits, which had been issued from Bulgaria to Serbia
etc., were withdrawn. The economic consequence was the rise of China's influence in the region. South Stream was redirected to Turkey.
So here we are in the midst of a diplomatic standoff. It is a genuine dilemma, but it could also turn into a watershed. Will contracts
be respected or will we move into a further cycle of uncertainty on all levels? Germany is built on contracts, norms (probably much
too many) and not on arbitrariness.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
silvermoon 5 hours ago
All these weeks have passed and Germany has still not shown shared actual evidence of their Navalny tests
with Russia though. That is the same as saying we found the gun with your finger prints on it but never showing it.
Count_Cash
silvermoon 3 hours ago
Correct, Germany has only since 10th September (if confirmed) shared any 'evidence'. That is sufficient intervening
time to concoct any test result and associated materials that they want - another Diesel scandal. Indeed people will ask why when
you had the patient on 22nd of august, it took you so long to send samples to the OPCW, despite almost immediately yelling Poison!
gainwmn silvermoon 5 hours ago
U stupid sheep: Germany did show it to the OPCW, i.e. the organization RF is the member of,
and therefore the latter gets the full access to all the data provided by Germany, as well as any other of 192 members. Kremlin lies
and demands in this regard is more than ridiculous, they completely destroy any shred of trust left to all RF governmental structures
and regime itself.
Teodor Nitu gainwmn 3 hours ago
Riiight!...Those Russians...not only their chemical
weapons are no longer working, but they are no longer capable to choose the proper time to use them, or so the story goes. Think
about it; they 'used' novichok to kill the Skripals and they are still alive and well (supposedly), now they (Russians) 'used' novichok
again to kill Navalny and he is alive and getting better.
Besides, they chose the absolutely wrong time to do it. With Skripals it
was just before the opening of the World Cup in Russia and now, just before the finishing of the North Stream 2 pipeline.
It sounds
that they are sabotaging their own interests, aren't they? Are they (Russians) that stup!d? Some 'smart' posters here seem to believe
it. But lets get real, one has to be able to see beyond the length of his nose, in order to understand what is really going on.
silvermoon Teodor Nitu 2 hours ago
Russia had all their chemical weapons legally destroyed. Along with hundreds of countries. The
US, UK and Israel never did. Navalny the innocent anti Putin. Can't win one way try another.
Pro_RussiaPole gainwmn 2 hours ago
So why is Russia still asking for it? Clearly, something is being withheld. As for
the OPCW, their credibility has been shot for years with all their fake Syrian chem weapon attack reports.
seawolf 6 hours ago
Even if there was not Navalny's story, they could invent another to stop the project.
Abraxas79 seawolf 4 hours ago
Exactly.
I hope Russia is the one that abandons it. Let Germany be the one that decides to cancel it and go along with it. Concentrate on
supplying China and other Asian nations and internal consumption. Forget about Europe. You don't have to turn off the current supply,
just charge more for it when the market allows. Looks like the next German leader according to this article is quite the Russophobe,
which means relations will only get worse.
Pro_RussiaPole Abraxas79 2 hours ago
If this navalny farce does end up cancelling the NS2 project, Russia should stop all gas transit to western Europe through
Poland and Ukraine by spring of next year. Tell those countries that will be cut off that Russia can either sell them LNG, or
that they will have to connect to other sources of gas. Because if certain countries are so against Russian gas, then why are
they not doing anything against Russian gas going through Poland and Ukraine, and why isn't Trump threatening sanctions on
these countries for doing so?
Blue8ball713 RTjackanory 3 hours ago
Its a far longer list
and it have the fingerprints of GB secret services all over it.
Reply Gabriel Delpino seawolf 46 seconds ago It is not in the interest
of Germany to stop de project. Reply
magicmirror 6 hours ago
Europe should have nothing to do with the USA ....... proved time and
time again they cannot be trusted. All they want is markets, resources and consumers. They lie, they cheat, they steal...... (quoting mr Pompeo, I think). A big opportunity to win Europe's independence.
SmellLaRata
5 hours ago
All due respect for Mr. Navalny but since when does an individual fate of one person dictates the fate for millions ?
And c' mon Germany. Your hypocrisy is so utterly laughable. You ignore the Assange and Snowden cases, the slaughter of Kashoggi,
the brutal beating of yellow vests, the brutal actions against the Catalans ... but Navalni. Not even a hint of a proof of government
involvemen. But it fits the agenda, does it? The agenda which is dictated by the deep state agitators who so much flourished under
Obama.
gainwmn SmellLaRata
4 hours ago
Even being not a fan (to say the least) of the US foreign and some of the domestic policy, I have to point out that tried
by U analogy is largely out of balance: first, the issue in Navalny (as well as in Scripals' and others cases acted on with poisons)
case is not so much the assassination attempt on a person's life, as the banned use of chemical weapons, the ban RF's signature has
been under since 1993. And that conclusion (Russia's guilt) has not been made by the UK or Germany or any other country alone, but
the OPCW - the organization not only RF is the member of, but also 191(!) other countries, out of which not a single country (except
RF) rejected that conclusion!; second, the US did not made attempt on either Snowden's or Assange's life, with any kind of weapon,
not already mentioning the weapons banned by the international agreements American government(s) signed. This is a large - I would
say - decisive difference! As far as Kashoggi's case or other cases sited by U, RF did not react with sanctions against the respective
perpetrators either, thus demonstrating the same disregard for the law and order as the US did... therefore making all lies about
innocent RF and evil US, foolish, at the least.
Pro_RussiaPole gainwmn 2 hours ago
The US and its lackeys are killing Assange. They are doing it slowly. And many voices going along with a lie does not make
the lie true. Because these poisoning allegations are lies. The accused were never allowed to see the evidence or challenge
it. And there is the whole issue of politicized reports coming out of the OPCW that contradicted evidence and reality.
Nathi Sibbs 4 hours ago
After completing the pipe and
it start running Russia must turn off all Ukraine pipes. No more gas for free from Russia, Ukraine must start importing LNG from thier reliable partner USA. I think imports from USA will be good for Ukrainian Nazi people
Abraxas79 Nathi Sibbs 4 hours
ago
How are they going to pay for it? Ukraine's only exports these days are its women to various brothels across Europe and North
America.
Hilarous 5 hours ago
The German leaders know very well that the case of Navalny will never be resolved and exists
for no other reason than to seize a pretext to demonize Russia and to end Nord Stream 2 in exchange for US freedom gas
magicmirror
Hilarous 4 hours ago
freedom gas and handsome presents .....
SandythePole 3 hours ago
This is an excellent account by Dr Karin Kneissl. It is a genuine dilemma for 'occupied'
Europe. Its occupying master does NOT want NS2 and will do anything to stop it. Russia suffers sanctions upon sanctions, but still
gallantly tries to maintain friendly and honourable business relations with its implacable neighbours. For how much longer is this
to continue? Surely there must be some limit to the endless provocations of occupied Europe and its Western master. Perhaps it is
time to shut off the oil and gas and leave Germany to sail under its own wind.
dunkie56 3 hours ago
Perhaps Russia should disengage
with Germany/EU totally and forge ahead in partnership with China and India and whoever wants to do business. let the EU tie it's
ship to the sinking US ship and drown along with it's protection racket partner! Then Russia should build a new iron curtain between
itself and all countries who want to align with the EU..in the long run Russia has tried to forge a partnership with the West but
it just has not born any fruit and even as pragmatic as Russia is they must be coming to the conclusion they are flogging a dead
horse!
Blue8ball713 dunkie56 2 hours ago With 146 million citizen Russia is too small to be a real partner to anyone like
China or India. Best fit is the EU, but the EU is controlled or better said occupied by the USA. Its part of their hegemonial system.
So Russia is left out in the rain..
micktaketo 5 hours ago
I am not sure if it is the right thing to do but I think Russia
should sue the German authorities if this deal is withdrawn and if it is have nothing to do with Germany again along with other corrupt
countries that cannot prove or at the least bring forth their evidence to be seen, to be transparent to all even Russia the first,
because Russia is the one being accused. These countries must think we the people are all completely stupid and Russia more so. This
corruption stinks to high heaven and is obvious to all sane people who love fairness. You cannot trust an entity that believes in
getting what they want by hook or by crook. Russia learn your lesson ! So you countries that love whats good for you and your people
do not cheat them for they voted for you to help them. Germany do not kick yourself, it will hurt your people. Saying, There is more
than one way to skin a cat, they say.
Mutlu Ozer 3 hours ago
There is a simple concept to investigate a crime to find the criminals: Just look at whose benefit the crime is? EU
politicians are certainly smart people to know this basic concept of criminal investigation. However, now they are playing a
new strategy about how to domesticate(!) not only Russia China as well... Germans are the main actors in the stage of the WW-I
and WW-II. I surely claim that Germans would be the main architect of the last war, WW-III.
For anyone old enough to have been alive and aware of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and
of so-called COVID-19 in 2020, memory may serve to remind one of an eerie parallel between the
two operations.
However, if memory has been expunged by the work of one's forgettery or deleted by the
corporate media's flushing it down the memory hole, or if knowledge is lacking, or maybe fear
or cognitive dissonance is blocking awareness , I would like to point out some similarities
that might perk one up to consider some parallels and connections between these two
operations.
The fundamental tie that binds them is that both events aroused the human fear of death.
Underlying all fears is the fear of death. A fear that has both biological and cultural
roots. On the biological level, we all react to death threats in a fight or flight manner.
Culturally, there are multiple ways that fear can be allayed or exacerbated, purposely or not.
Usually, culture serves to ease the fear of death, which can traumatize people, through its
symbols and myths. Religion has for a long time served that purpose, but when religion loses
its hold on people's imaginations, especially in regard to the belief in immortality, as Orwell
pointed out in the mid-1940s, a huge void is left. Without that consolation, fear is usually
tranquilized by trivial pursuits.
In the cases of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the current corona virus operation,
the fear of death has been used by the power elites in order to control populations and
institute long-planned agendas. There is a red thread that connects the two events.
Both events were clearly anticipated and planned.
In the case of September 11, 2001, as I have argued before
, linguistic mind-control was carefully crafted in advance to conjure fear at the deepest
levels with the use of such repeated terms as Pearl Harbor, Homeland, Ground Zero, the
Unthinkable, and 9/11. Each in its turns served to raise the fear level dramatically. Each drew
on past meetings, documents, events, speeches, and deep associations of dread. This language
was conjured from the chief sorcerer's playbook, not from that of an apprentice out of
control.
And as David Ray Griffin, the seminal 9/11 researcher (and others), has pointed out in a
dozen meticulously argued and documented
books , the events of that day had to be carefully planned in advance, and the post hoc
official explanations can only be described as scientific miracles, not scientific
explanations. These miracles include: massive steel-framed high-rise buildings for the first
time in history coming down without explosives or incendiaries in free fall speed; one of them
being WTC-7 that was not even hit by a plane; an alleged hijacker pilot, Hani Hanjour, who
could barely fly a Piper Cub, flying a massive Boeing 757 in a most difficult maneuver into the
Pentagon; airport security at four airports failing at the same moment on the same day; all
sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies failing; air traffic control failing, etc. The list goes on
and on. And all this controlled by Osama bin Laden. It's a fairy tale.
Then we had the crucially important anthrax attacks that are linked to 9/11. Graeme
MacQueen, in
The 2001 Anthrax Deception , brilliantly shows that these too were a domestic
conspiracy.
These planned events led to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the U.S.
withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, the invasion of Iraq , the ongoing war on terror, etc.
Let us not forget years of those fraudulent color-coded warnings of the terrorist levels and
the government admonition to use duct tape around your windows to protect against a massive
chemical and biological attack.
Jump to 2020 .
Let me start in reverse while color-coded designs are fresh in our minds. As the COVID-19
lockdowns were under way, a funny thing happened as people were wishing that life could return
to normal and they could be let out of their cages. Similar color-coded designs popped up
everywhere at the same time. They showed the step-by-step schedule of possible loosening of
government controls if things went according to plan. Red to yellow to green. Eye catching. Red
orange yellow blue green. As with the terrorist warnings following September 11, 2001. In
Massachusetts, a so-called blue state where I live, it's color chart ends in blue, not green,
with Phase 4 blue termed "the new normal: Development of vaccines and/or treatments enable the
resumption of 'the new normal.'" Interesting wording. A resumption that takes us back to the
future.
As with the duct tape admonitions after 9/11, now everyone is advised to wear a mask. It's
interesting to note that the 3 M Company, a major seller of duct tape, is also one of the
world's major sellers of face masks. The company was expected to be producing 50
million N95 respirator masks per month by June 2020 and 2 billion globally within the coming
year. Then there is 3 M's masking tape but this is a sticky topic.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, we were told repeatedly that the world was changed
forever. Now we are told that after COVID 19, life will never be the same. This is the "new
normal," while the post-9/11-pre-Covid-19 world must have been the old new normal. So
everything is different but normal also. So as the Massachusetts government website puts it, in
the days to come we may be enabled to enact "the resumption of 'the new normal.'" This new old
normal will no doubt be a form of techno-fascist transhumanism enacted for our own good.
As with 9/11, there is ample evidence that the corona virus outbreak was expected and
planned; that people have been the victims of a propaganda campaign to use an invisible virus
to scare us into submission and shut down the world's economy for the global elites. It is a
clear case, as Peter Koenig tells Michel Chossudovsky in this must-see interview
, that is not a conspiracy theory but a blatant factual plan spelled out in the 2010
Rockefeller Report , the October 18, 2019 Event 201 , and Agenda
21 , among other places.
Like amorphous terrorists and a war against "terrorism," which is a tactic and therefore not
something you can fight, a virus is invisible except when the media presents it as a pale,
orange-spiked bunch of floating weird balls that are everywhere and nowhere. Watch your back,
watch your face, mask up, wash your hands, keep your distance – you never know when those
orange spiked balls may get you.
As with 9/11, whenever anyone questions the official narrative of Covid-19, the official
statistics, the validity of the tests,
the effectiveness of masks , the powers behind the heralded vaccine to come, and the
horrible consequences of the lockdowns that are destroying economies, killing people, forcing
people to despair and to commit suicide, creating traumatized children, bankrupting small and
middle-sized businesses for the sake of enriching the richest, etc., the corporate media mock
the dissidents as conspiracy nuts, aiding the viral enemy.
This is so even when the dissenters are highly respected doctors, scientists, intellectuals,
et al., who are regularly disappeared from the internet. With September 11, there were
initially far fewer dissenters than now, and so the censorship of opposing viewpoints didn't
need the blatant censorship that is now growing daily.
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS
MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
This censorship happens all across the internet now, quickly and stealthily, the same
internet that is being forced on everyone as the new normal as presented in the Great
Global Reset , the digital lie, where, as Anthony Fauci put it, no one should ever shake
hands again.
A world of abstract images and beings in which, as Arthur Jensen tells Howard Beal in the
film, Network , "All necessities [will be] provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom
amused." A digital dystopia that is fast approaching as perhaps the end of that red thread that
runs from 9/11 to today.
Heidi Evens and Thomas Hackett write in the New York Daily News :
With the nation's illusion of safety and security in ruins, Americans begin the slow and
fitful process of healing from a trauma that feels deeply, cruelly personal leaving citizens
throughout the country with the frightening knowledge of their vulnerability.
"so basically, any legitimate grievance or concern of citizens is a Russian plot ."
Other commenters tweeted that they didn't need any help from Moscow to clearly see that Biden's
mind
is failing .
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went on CNN to accuse Russia of
interfering in US affairs including the Covid-19 pandemic, Portland and Kenosha protests, and
election meddling while giving no real evidence.
Clapper, who has previously said Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to
co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever," was more than happy to push more xenophobic Russia
conspiracy theories during a Monday CNN interview when prompted by anchor Alisyn
Camerota.
If Johnson doesn't play ball, Christopher Steele will prepare a dossier on him.
aspnaz , 2 hours ago
Only the UK would be dumb enough to keep on paying Steele. Jesus, he is like a muck
spreader: **** in, **** rain out.
Sandmann , 1 hour ago
Steele was disowned by UK in Jan 2017 in handwritten note to White House
Unknown User , 2 hours ago
Russians build rockets, jets, missiles, nukes, etc. but can't seem to produce a poison.
Unlike Brits who successfully poisoned lots of Russians, starting with Ivan the "Terrible"
(that's what Brits called Ivan the Fearsome) and his whole family including his son, which
Brits insist was killed by Ivan. And remember Rasputin? The one who was poisoned and then
shot by a British agent.
Yes. Useless Russians can't do it like the Brits.
PJBloggs , 2 hours ago
It is indeed suspicious that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia have disappeared into
the embrace of the British deep state and not been heard from since. Their family in Russia
got one phone call from a stressed Yulia who they believed couldn't speak freely.
If the Skripals are indeed safe and living willingly & freely in British protection, then
the UK should give them a live interview to express their gratitude and reassure their family
in Russia.
The silence from the Skripals is more suspicious than what ails Navalny.
aspnaz , 2 hours ago
David Kelly is dead: Skripals are dead.
foxenburg , 1 hour ago
Imagine if a US citizen (version of Yulia) were detained in Moscow and the US consular
people wanted to speak with her to check that she was OK....and they were told to buzz off
and she didn't want to speak to them. Diplomatic law, signed by all countries, states that
consular access MUST be allowed to citizens....even if they don't want it...because otherwise
a country has no way of establishing if its citizen has been kidnapped or murdered.
What if the Iranians managed to kidnap Pompeo (Oh, Happy Day!) and when the State Dept
went ballistic and said give him back, the Iranians just released a statement; "Mr Pompeo
says he does not want to speak to any US officials. He has thanked Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for
saving his life. He says please leave him alone. In deference to his security needs, you will
never hear from him again".
Ace006 , 34 minutes ago
Full marks. It's astonishing to have Boris on the Russians' case about yet another
poisoning (YAP) by them when, hopefully, he's holding two alleged victims incommunicado for
over two years. "Oh, THAT, old bean. Bit of a bother. We disappear people in the U.K. all the
time."
headfake , 4 hours ago
Why does the UK and US always try to demonise Russia? Where does this deep rooted hatred
come from? Were they not allies in WW2? I've never understood this. Is it jealousy or
something different? Did they not like the fact the Russians developed their own Nuclear
arsenal and therefore cannot be bossed around? Or was it cos they kicked out the bankers?
Herodotus , 3 hours ago
The UK always allys with others in opposition to the strongest military power in Europe.
That is their foreign policy. They don't want any single power to be able to dominate the
continent. Today, that happens to be Russia. In the past, it was Germany, or France, or
Spain.
Arch_Stanton , 2 hours ago
True, but someone should tell pedo island that the 19th century wants its foreign policy
back.
PJBloggs , 2 hours ago
Russia under Putin exerts its sovereignty from the globalist banking oligarchy based in
London, Wall Street, Israel & Western Eorope. Russia is in the way of the NWO this
planned demic is meant to usher in.
JPHR , 2 hours ago
British Empire lost "Great Game to Russia". That started the downfall of that British
Empire. US intelligence was groomed by British intelligence during WWII. US hegemony as
illustrated by Brzezinsky's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its Geostrategic
Imperatives (1997)" still based on the very same McKinder based ideas from the British Empire
defining control over Eurasia as a precondition for maintaining that empire. Adding insult to
injury Putin twarted US and UK banks in their operation to destroy Russia and acquire its
resources.
The malignancy of this ideology is well illustrated in Brzezinski proudly announcing in
the intrduction of aforementioned book how his ideas are shared by both Hitler and
Stalin:
"Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be
played, and that struggle involves geostrategy -- the strategic management of geopolitical
interests. It is noteworthy that as recently as 1940 two aspirants to global power, Adolf
Hitler and Joseph Stalin, agreed explicitly (in the secret negotiations of November of that
year) that America should be excluded from Eurasia. Each realized that the injection of
American power into Eurasia would preclude his ambitions regarding global domination. Each
shared the assumption that Eurasia is the center of the world and that he who controls
Eurasia controls the world. "
Sandmann , 1 hour ago
UK has a natural ally in Europe - it is not France - it is Russia.
Uk is run by interests like Bill Browder who buy influence and set the tenor. UK is a very
Oligarchic country, highly centralised run for the Benefit of The Few
PJBloggs , 2 hours ago
Navalny was an asset to Putin. With a popularity rating around 2% his party couldn't get
seats in the Duma.
Why would you poison him and give The West a propaganda victory at same time The West is
trying a colour revolution in your most valuable military ally?
Just like why would you poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia just before holding a
successful World Cup of football?
The Skripals are probably DEAD.......and that happened on the UK's watch under UK
control.
The Russian poison meme?
Even the the thickest halfwit that reads The Sun, The Mirror, The Star....the comic strips
et al understands that the monkeys in control are actually nothing more than better read
versions of themselves.
Johnstone and Co are certainly not more intelligent.......their nonsense utterances and
actions prove this.
Vladimirovich , 2 hours ago
Dear Readers,
Sadly the British people are every bit a dopey as others in the western world and will
always vote for the worst possible person to 'do the job'. Please be patient.
In the UK Boris Johnson is colloquially known as "The village idiot", and he does his best
to match up to that title.
That being so he will remain in office until his masters decide to make a change.
Wish the UK well......PLEASE !
Roger Casement , 2 hours ago
Gangsters always play dumb. So do all politicians.
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what
had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and
from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was
which.
Son of Captain Nemo , 2 hours ago
Reading between the lines of B0J0...
We the U.K. who's "sun never sets", requires a generous purchase of British Pound Sterling
and $USD by the Russian Central Bank effective immediately before his Nation's "sun
sets"!...
And if the Russian Federation should refuse... We shall make up more nasty hasbara stories
that aren't true like Skripal/Navalny to our public that doesn't care about either of
them!...
aspnaz , 2 hours ago
Yep, "Sun never sets", the government really need to hire some better astronomer,
astrologers, maybe witches, to sort this out. I often wonder about this, lying in bed in
Wickham in the dark at midnight.
Ace006 , 1 hour ago
Well, technically the British Empire extends to the English Channel these days so what's
true in Wickham may not necessarily be true in Norwich.
deplorableX , 3 hours ago
Bojo appears to be struggling with alcoholism which would explain his sticking to a saga
which was pretty much fabricated from the get go. Delirium tremens.
bh2 , 3 hours ago
After the absurd plot described by British authorities in the Skripal case, nobody
believes these concocted political dramas.
Until both Skripals can be interviewed in public and without an official UK "keeper"
hovering about, nobody is going to believe them, either.
Moribundus , 3 hours ago
Evaluation of the finding is misinformation, because without medicinal products from the
category, cholinesterase inhibitors, it is not possible to keep the patient in artificial
sleep or to connect to artificial lung ventilation, because cholinesterase inhibitor
preparations are not a poison but a drug such as diazepam used to treat anxiety or
clonazepam, which are used specifically to relax the patient's muscles during artificial lung
ventilation.
Thus, the Germans did not find out what caused the comatic condition of the patient, but
what the patient was treated in Russia,
respectively given to the patient on board the aircraft, during transport to Germany.
When induced coma, hospitals use relaxants in combo with anaesthetic. Typically those are
indeed Choline Sterase inhibitors... So, some of that stuff is in his system the moment they
intubated him in hospital.. at least under normal circumstances (learned al lot about covid
ICU treatment = induced coma).
Nobody - absolutely NOBODY! - can recycle a Silly Schoolboy Script - with a straight face!
-as well as the THICK BRITS... even as the rest of Planet Earth laughs its a$$ off!
Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the latest Western leader to wildly jump on the
bandwagon claiming that Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was poisoned, and by
implication insinuating the Kremlin had a sinister hand in it.
"The poisoning of Alexei Navalny shocked the world,"
asserted Johnson on Twitter, who went on to call for a "transparent investigation" to find
the perpetrators . The British premier didn't explicitly finger the Russian authorities, but
that was what he implied.
It's amazing how Boris Johnson, wracked by the political disaster of his sheer incompetent
mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic in Britain, somehow has the time and "authority" to
poke into Russian affairs.
Johnson's rush to judgement replicates other Western leaders who have
concluded without any evidence that Navalny was poisoned in a malicious way. U.S. Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo has said he backs the European Union's call for a comprehensive
investigation. Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel not only referred to Navalny's condition as
"poisoning" but also a "crime".
Boris Johnson's intervention is reminiscent of how he accused the Kremlin of poisoning
former MI6 spy Sergei Skripal in March 2018 within days of that incident. Johnson was then the
UK's foreign minister. What actually happened to Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English
city of Salisbury remains a mystery since the pair have not been seen or heard of since.
Presumably, they are in the custody of the British authorities, who have denied all
international norms by not allowing Russia consular access to at least one of its citizens.
As with the Skripal case, the reflexive response among Western governments and media is to
accuse Russian authorities of malign involvement in the case of Navalny. Demanding an
investigation by the Russian government indicates a high-handed presumption to interfere in
Russian internal affairs. It also indicates a Western prejudice to criminalize Moscow over any
incident.
As soon as Navalny was hospitalized after apparently being taken ill during a flight last
week from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, Western media headlines immediately inferred it
was the result of sinister play. "Putin critic" was ubiquitous in headlines, as were unfounded
claims of "poisoning" from drinking tea. (Russian trope alert.)
The Russian doctors who treated Navalny said there was no evidence of poisonous substance
found in his body. They said his seizure may have been caused by a fatal drop in blood sugar
levels. He is reportedly diabetic. So, from what we can tell, the Russian doctors appear to
have saved Navalny's life by their rapid response, but they were unable to make a precise
diagnosis. What then merits Western demands for an investigation by the Russian
authorities?
Two days after being treated in Russia, Navalny is airlifted on Saturday, August 22, by a
private jet to a hospital in Germany, where he continues to reside, reportedly in a coma, which
is not life-threatening. The doctors in the Charité hospital in Berlin release a vague
statement
claiming that it is "likely" he has been "poisoned" . They cite the presence of "cholinesterase
inhibitors" in his body as evidence of "poisoning".
The Russian medics were also aware of "cholinesterase inhibitors" being present and were
treating Navalny with atropine, a known antidote. But as the Russians point out, cholinesterase
inhibitors are widely found in a variety of clinical pharmaceuticals as well as more sinister
substances, such as nerve agents. By merely detecting the presence of cholinesterase inhibitors
and while not detecting any specific chemical that then does not permit a conclusion of
"poisoning", which the Russian doctors refrained from.
Therefore, what we have is a hasty assessment by the German doctors who make a dramatic
conclusion, which the Russian counterparts do not, even though both teams were working on the
same clinical sample information. Surely, that is unprofessional and unethical on the part of
the German medics.
It would appear that the doctors at the Berlin hospital share the same mental condition as
Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel and Mike Pompeo. That is, a condition of condemning Russia before
any evidence is in. Then let the media pile on the propaganda tropes and "history" of
"assassinations" by "Kremlin poisoning"
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
The curious question is: why did the Russia authorities permit the private transport of a
Russian citizen out of the country at a time when he was in a serious medical condition? Was
the Russian government unnerved by the media accusations of foul play against a dissident
figure who has been lionized by the West as some kind of political hero? Did they feel the need
to be excessively "open"?
Alexei Navalny, despite his high-profile among Western media, is a minor figure in Russian
politics. His so-called anti-corruption campaigns have negligible interest for most ordinary
Russian citizens, and minimal political impact for the Russian government. In short, Navalny is
a professional gadfly whose importance is blown out of all proportion to its reality by Western
media. There is nothing to gain for the Russian authorities in causing injury to this person,
assuming that such a malicious event might even be considered.
That may well explain why Russian officials assented to Navalny being airlifted to Berlin,
knowing full well that his medical condition was not caused by anything pertaining to
deliberate, sinister action. Still, that decision by the Russians seems an odd concession over
a matter of sovereignty. It's doubtful that the Americans, British, Germans or others would
have followed a similar course for one of their citizens being take abroad, especially one who
could be exploited for propaganda value.
Surely, Moscow did not underestimate the mentality of Russophobia which Western politicians
suffer from? The cardinal rule is never give hostages to fortune when dealing with buffoons
like Britain's Boris Johnson. It looks like Navalny is now one such hostage to anti-Russian
fortune.
2 play_arrow smacker , 58 minutes ago
"The curious question is: why did the Russia authorities permit the private transport of
a
Russian citizen out of the country at a time when he was in a serious medical
condition?"
Because the Russians knew from their own examination of Navalny that the Germans
wouldn't
find anything in him they didn't already know about? And this seems to be the case.
What's left is spin and Boris' blustering bullsh1t.
Vivekwhu , 2 hours ago
Boris statement: my name is Boris and I am addicted to Russian Collusion Delusion Virus
poisoning.
This idiot actually bongs for Britain and makes more baby Borises!
InTheLandOfTheBlind , 2 hours ago
Mi5/6 are still in control
JPHR , 2 hours ago
By know Steele's reputation is totally destroyed by exposing his supposedly relevant
"Russian" sources for the Russiagate dossier as a Brookings Institute employee's bar
talk.
Given Steele's involvement with the Litvinenko affair one really ought to revisit any so
called British proof especially because the UK refused to follow Chemical Weapons Convention
dispute settlement procedure just like it refused to follow that procedure with respect to
the Skripal hoax.
Again Britain is alleging Russian guilt with a previous hoax as proof.
That is the UK Standard Operating procedure.
interrupt , 3 hours ago
This is classic Russian modus operandi - poison your enemies then deny everything. Works
every time.
JPHR , 2 hours ago
Classic is alleging a chemical attack and don't wait for the nonexistent proof and start
either attacking like in Syria or expelling diplomats.
The OPCW has been weaponized. MSM has ignored the extensive multiple whistle blowers
reports about falsifying reports by the OPCW.
So if the OPCW gets involved with this Navalny incident too that will confirm that this is
another western intelligence hoax probably to be used against for example Nordstream 2.
Why-Am-I-Banned , 3 hours ago
Yes a country with a GDP of $1.4 Trillion is the enemy of the world... I'm so sick of this
Russian $hit, we need to be partners with them, we have more in common with Russians than you
can even imagine
Herodotus , 4 hours ago
Russia has always been ruled by a dictator or quasi-dictator.
Winston Churchill , 4 hours ago
A chronic diabetic slips into a coma on an airline flight ,surely poisoned ?
Yamaoka Tesshu , 3 hours ago
A chronic alcoholic has medical problems? Outlandish! The Russian State furnished the
poison alright. It has a monopoly on vodka.
"... Yes, Metformin is the preferred drug. I started on twice a day, then once I lost 45 pounds, the doctor dropped me to one a day. In fact, now I could stop taking it, but I continue to do so because it has alleged anti-aging properties. The only real negative is that it leeches vitamin B-12 from the body - but I take tons of B-12 anyway, so doesn't concern me. Metformin usually needs to be taken with food because otherwise it tends to give you "the runs". ..."
I've seen this site before - they post statements from various medical people on matters of
public medical interest, such as the pandemic. Useful for people who want some background on
the chemicals involved.
Posted by: Circe | Aug 25 2020 16:14 utc | 29
Yup. Just ran across that piece while searching for anything on Navalny having diabetes.
Found nothing so far beyond that. b's source appears to be the only one mentioning any diabetes
in Navalny's medical history. Apparently his personal doctor has denied this, saying that the
"diabetes" issue appears to have more a "description" of his medical condition rather than an
actual diagnosis.
Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 25 2020 17:26 utc | 40 And if he's diabetic or even pre-diabetic,
there's a suite of meds he'd need to take daily if not requiring insulin, and those meds must
be ingested with food--I know.
Yes, Metformin is the preferred drug. I started on twice a day, then once I lost 45 pounds,
the doctor dropped me to one a day. In fact, now I could stop taking it, but I continue to do
so because it has alleged anti-aging properties. The only real negative is that it leeches
vitamin B-12 from the body - but I take tons of B-12 anyway, so doesn't concern me. Metformin
usually needs to be taken with food because otherwise it tends to give you "the runs".
Russian news agency Interfax later quoted officials in Omsk as saying tests had identified
the presence of an industrial chemical in his body.
Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs told the agency that since the substance they claim
was present is commonly used to increase plasticity in products, "it is possible that it
could appear in surface washings through the contact of Alexei Navalny with similar objects,
for example, through a plastic cup".
Studies have previously shown that the chemical officials were referring to - 2-ethylhexyl diphenyl phosphate - does not have a strong toxic effect on humans.
So it appears from the articles so far that initially the police detected that specific
chemical, but medical experts ruled it out as a cause, merely a by-product of having drunk from
a plastic cup.
This article discusses the term "metabolic disease", clarifying that it doesn't necessarily
mean diabetes.
Bottom line: There is no evidence Navalny had diabetes, although he might well have had
either Type 2 or Type 1 diabetes but never diagnosed. However, if he was in a diabetic coma,
that should have been detected almost immediately, even by first responders in the ambulance.
Beyond that, it appears that whatever chemical was the cause of his condition, it's likely
undetectable now.
So another "nothing-burger" which will be seized on to drum up hysteria against Russia. And
I've spent *way* too much time on this irrelevant crap.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Aug 25 2020 18:52 utc |
63
The way Merkel and other politicians immediately jumped on the poisoning thesis is
reminiscent of May's reaction in the Skripal case. It is difficult not to become suspicious.
Looks like they like to reuse the same propaganda memes over and over. Russian bounties to the
Taliban become Iranian bounties to the Taliban, Novichok becomes cholinesterase inhibitor, rinse
and repeat.
Russia did it. Evil Putin ordered it. Horrible China sponsored it. Iran backed it.
Hezbollah played a hand as well.
Thank Glorious God for the Indispensable Nation of American Exceptionalism. Rescuing the
world from evil dictators and conspiring theorists plots. Evil doers who hate OUR way of
life stand no chance against the Glorious Christians and their Honorable Zionist
gatekeepers.
Thanks and Glory to American Gods that Juan Guaido is now the President of Venezuela.
Soon the Zionist will offer their Chosen Ones to replace Evil Dictators.
Thanks and praise to MOA for shining Gods Light and dancing on Western narratives giving
them validity against the Evil doers of Poison and injustice.
Trump and Pence are "Men of the Bible" seeking out injustice and filling the world with
Christian values of Bro Love and world Peace. May all you Christians take a knee and pray
for these Mens souls and the Soul of America for leading the way to righteousness. Oh yeah-
and pray for whatever the fuck his name is Nirvany Nalvinny poisoned guy.
If the Russians are really trying to assassinate, why do it in so theatrical a manner?
Just shoot him twice in the back of the head and call it suicide like the Americans do.
I don't understand why people commenting here still insist on playing CSI Miami. The
Russian doctors have already publicly stated their own lab results showed absolutely no signs
of Cholinesterase Inhibitors. As in evidence of zero CI - not zero evidence of CI:
"Upon his admission to the [Omsk] hospital, Alexey Navalny was tested on a wide range of
narcotics, synthetic substances, psychodiletics and medicinal substances, including
cholinesterase inhibitors -- all tests came back negative ," Sabayev said in a
press statement, as quoted by the Omsk Ministry of Health.
No cholinesterase inhibitors were used, according to the Russian lab results. It's not
that they didn't test Navalny for the substances - they did and they came out negative.
Sabayev even called the Germans' bluff:
"Additionally, Navalny lacked symptoms specific of the poisoning with cholinesterase
inhibitors substances . As we said earlier, we are ready to share Alexey Navalny's
samples with our German colleagues for examination ," the health official [Sabayev]
added.
MoA's own German source state the lab tests in Germany were carried out by "independent
laboratories". They most likely are in BND's control, in one way or the other. Many Western
European nations have constitutional clauses that allow their respective governments
(usually, at the discretion of the executive) to intervene directly on the private sector in
specific occasions, normally under "national security" reasons. The executive of the British
government, for example, has a legal device that allows it to outright censor (without the
need for legislative approval) any specific information from all the British media outlets.
I'm sure modern Germany also has many constitutional clauses that allow its government and
intelligence agencies to intervene anywhere, anytime in the German economy instantly and
covertly, under the umbrella of national security.
As I predicted, the Russians aren't that stupid. They stored some blood samples from
Navalny, and they know, for sure, that he wasn't poisoned with CIs. That's why Peskov was so
direct, so sudden and so confident when he declared the Kremlin was in no hurry - because they
saw no reason - to initiate an investigation on Navalny's sudden health problems. And he also
called the German bluff ("If the substance is established and if it is established that this
is poisoning, then, of course, this will be a cause for investigation", i.e. there won't be
an investigation because there's no poison).
From southfront:
The air travel between Russia and Germany is mostly suspended due to coronavirus limitations.
The flight to Germany was organized by the Berlin-based Cinema for Peace Foundation. The
flight was paid by businessman Boris Zimin. Boris Zimin is the son of Dmitry Zimin –
the founder of VimpelCom (Beeline telecommunications brand).
PJSC VimpelCom is the third-largest wireless and second-largest telecom operator in
Russia. It is wholly owned by VEON Ltd. through which it is linked to Mikhail Fridman,
Russian Western-linked business magnate. Fridman's Alfa Group Consortium is among the main
shareholders of VEON Ltd.
These persons and entities represent the Russian influence group linked to the global
finance. The very same group has links and support work of think tanks affiliated with the
Higher School of Economics, the center of the Alma Mater of the liberal economic block of the
Russian government. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobanin and Chairwoman of the Bank of Russia Elvira
Nabiullina also could be considered a part of the global finance in Russia.
In Russian media, this network of Western-linked persons, organizations, influence groups
and top officials is often described as the 'liberal tower' of the Kremlin. Thus, despite the
image of the opposition figure, Navalny receives support from the highest levels of the
Russian governance and business systems.
Whenever Navalny does end up dying the Russian government will be blamed anyway, so if
they wanted him dead then why not just blow him up with some missiles like the US did with
General Soleimani? Why not just arrest him, claim he resisted arrest, then shoot him like
happens with so many people in the US?
This talk about him being targeted by the Russian government using obscure toxins that
don't work is beyond silly.
Due to Navalny's dealings in Tomsk, this smells more of a bid to leave the country.
Orchestrations set in place by Germany suggests an asset that has run his course, but they
can't leave him in country to deal with any complications of him being taken by someone else.
This doesn't feel like state acting....or at least not the Russian state. Gruff is right,
this isn't targeting by the Russians. Navalny hasn't been relevant in Russian circles since
at least 2012-13 if he was even then.
This talk about him being targeted by the Russian government using obscure toxins that
don't work is beyond silly.
But that's the West's MO when it comes to trying to frame the USSR/Warsaw Pact
Member/Russia over the decades--an old Big Lie Narrative that will be used until the Outlaw
US Empire finally drowns.
From yesterday :
"'The Russians were there and they are there now 24/7 trying to interfere in our election,
but they're not the only ones', Pelosi said."
But then Pelosi added:
"We take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and
domestic. And sadly, the domestic enemies to our voting system and our honoring of the
Constitution are right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with their allies in the Congress of the
United States".
Amazing that Pelosi is suddenly aware of her duty.
"... Navalny fell ill on August 20 during a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was transferred to a hospital. Navalny fell into a coma. The doctors diagnosed a sharp drop in his blood sugar. Navalny has diabetes and his symptoms as described were consistent with a diabetic shock. We therefore (somewhat prematurely) concluded that Navalny was not poisoned . ..."
"... The wording of the Charité statement seems to imply that the laboratory results point to the potential effects of a cholinesterase inhibitors, not to a specific substance itself. This is consistent with a statement by the clinic in Omsk which insists that no cholinesterase inhibitors, i.e a 'poison', were found: ..."
"... We can be quite sure that a trained toxicologist would recognize a Cholinergic crisis . There is however a documented case from India in which an organophosphate poisoning was falsely interpreted as diabetic ketoacidosis (hat tip Bernd Neuner ): ..."
"... If Navalny was poisoned - which is not established - the next question must be how Navalny came into contact with a cholinesterase inhibitor. Was the contact caused by himself or by someone else? Was it intentionally or unintentionally? ..."
"... Navalny's spokeswomen has insisted that the only substance Navalny ingested that morning was a tea from an airport bar. A CCTV video from the airport shows that the tea was brought from the bar by a person that then sits down with Navalny. They presumably traveled together. How would the airport barkeeper, if he supposedly poisoned Navalny, knew for whom the tea was? ..."
"... next page " the poison theory constructors are creating a colorful james bond style movie script. It captures the imagination. If the exciting, easily visualised, movie script is solidly imprinted in the imagination, then dull, tedious, evidence based reality doesn't get a look-in. ..."
"... Besides, this doesn't explain the almost immediate poisoning accusation by Merkel and then, the next day (today), by top EU ideologue Josep Borrell. The German State (at least the BND) must be involved - the fact that the Charité is owned by the State itself only strengthens this hypothesis. ..."
"... Someone on the web (might even be here) mentioned that cholinesterase inhibitors can be used against Cocaine dependence. Is this true or not? I do not have any other information and I am not a Medecin/doctor or user. But these days I am naturally cynical about any "official" statements, whoever makes them. ..."
"... The way Merkel and other politicians immediately jumped on the poisoning thesis is reminiscent of May's reaction in the Skripal case. It is difficult not to become suspicious. ..."
"... Due to Navalny's dealings in Tomsk, this smells more of a bid to leave the country. Orchestrations set in place by Germany suggests an asset that has run his course, but they can't leave him in country to deal with any complications of him being taken by someone else. ..."
The case of the alleged 'poisoning' of the Russian rabble rouser Alexey Navalny is becoming
more curious.
Navalny fell ill on August 20 during a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow. The plane
made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was transferred to a hospital. Navalny fell into a
coma. The doctors diagnosed a sharp drop in his blood sugar. Navalny has diabetes and his
symptoms as described were consistent with a diabetic shock. We therefore (somewhat
prematurely) concluded that
Navalny was not poisoned .
After a day and a half in the Omsk hospital the patient stabilized. On request of his family
he was flown to Berlin and admitted to the Charité hospital. The Charité is a
very large (14,000 employees) state run university clinic that is leading in many medical
fields. Its laboratories
found effects consistent with the ingestion of, or contact with, a cholinesterase
inhibitor:
Following his admission, Mr. Navalny underwent extensive examination by a team of
Charité physicians. Clinical findings indicate poisoning with a substance from the
group of cholinesterase inhibitors. The specific substance involved remains unknown, and a
further series of comprehensive testing has been initiated. The effect of the poison –
namely, the inhibition of cholinesterase in the body – was confirmed by multiple tests
in independent laboratories.
As a result of this diagnosis, the patient is now being treated with the antidote
atropine.
Cholinesterase is needed in the human nerve system to break down acetylcholine which is a
signaling substance between synapses. Inhibitors of cholinesterase are used in the
therapy of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, anxiety disorder and other illnesses.
Cholinesterase inhibitors can be found in certain plant extracts or synthesized. There
are two types of cholinesterase inhibitors, carbamates and organophosphates. Both types are
also widely used as pesticides. During World War II organophosphates were developed as chemical
weapons (tabun, sarin, soman) but not widely used.
The wording of the Charité statement seems to imply that the laboratory results point
to the potential effects of a cholinesterase inhibitors, not to a specific substance itself.
This is consistent with a statement by the clinic in Omsk which insists that no
cholinesterase inhibitors, i.e a 'poison', were found:
"When Alexey Navalny was admitted to the in-patient clinic, he was examined for a wide range
of narcotics, synthetic substances, psychedelic drugs and medical substances, including
cholinesterase inhibitors. The result was negative," said Sabayev, chief of the acute
poisoning unit at the Omsk emergency care hospital where Navalny was treated before being
airlifted to Germany.
"Besides, he did not have a clinical picture, specific for poisoning with substances from
the group of cholinesterase inhibitors," Sabayev, who is also the top toxicologist in the
Omsk Region and the Siberian Federal District, added.
We can be quite sure that a trained toxicologist would recognize a Cholinergic crisis . There is however
a documented case from India in which an organophosphate poisoning was falsely interpreted as diabetic
ketoacidosis (hat tip Bernd Neuner ):
We present a 15-year-old girl who was initially treated for "diabetic ketoacidosis" with
further worsening of her general condition. This delayed recovery, coupled with focused
investigations, finally led us to a diagnosis and the appropriate management of an
intentional overdose with organophosphorous (OP) pesticide, presenting as diabetic
ketoacidosis.
The statement by German doctors on the diagnosis of FBK founder Alexei Navalny is nothing new
for Russian specialists, Dmitry Peskov, press secretary of the Russian President, told
reporters.
"We have not yet learned anything new from this statement. We specifically contacted our
doctors and asked how, from a professional point of view, we can relate to what was written.
The fact is that the fact of this lowered cholinesterase was established in the first hours
by our doctors in a hospital in Omsk. And the atropine, which the Germans are talking about
and which is now being given to the patient, began to be administered during the first hour
of the patient's stay in intensive care, " said Peskov.
The presidential spokesman stressed that the level of cholinesterase may decrease for a
variety of reasons, including from taking a number of medications. At the same time, German
doctors did not identify a toxic substance in Navalny's analyzes.
"Therefore, it is very important here to find out what caused the decrease in
cholinesterase levels. And neither our doctors, nor the Germans have yet been able to
establish the cause . At least, this follows from the statement of our German doctors'
colleagues. There is no substance, unfortunately, it cannot be established, analyzes do not
show it," Peskov explained.
He stressed that the analytical data of Russian and German doctors are the same, but the
conclusions are different.
"We do not understand why our German colleagues are in such a hurry, using the word
"poisoning". You know, this version was among the first that our doctors considered, but I
repeat once again: the substance has not yet been established. Maybe the Germans have some
data," said Peskov, noting that Russian doctors are ready to provide samples of the first
tests.
If Navalny was poisoned - which is not established - the next question must be how Navalny
came into contact with a cholinesterase inhibitor. Was the contact caused by himself or by
someone else? Was it intentionally or unintentionally?
Navalny's spokeswomen has insisted that the only substance Navalny ingested that morning was
a tea from an airport bar. A CCTV video from the airport shows that the tea was
brought from the bar by a person that then sits down with Navalny. They presumably traveled
together. How would the airport barkeeper, if he supposedly poisoned Navalny, knew for whom the
tea was?
As 'western' media continue with their "Putin poisoned Navalny" nonsense it is important to
again point out that
other people have more reason to harm Navalny than the Kremlin does:
During the last years Navalny has made some enemies by uncovering corruption cases. His
latest one was about the local governor of Tomsk. It was also the reason why he had flown
there. Should Navaly become the victim of a crime the suspects should be sought there.
Posted by b on August 25, 2020 at 11:57 UTC | Permalink
next page " the poison theory constructors are creating a colorful james bond style
movie script.
It captures the imagination. If the exciting, easily visualised, movie script is solidly
imprinted in the imagination, then dull, tedious, evidence based reality doesn't get a
look-in.
The India girl case is an interesting case if you're a doctor, but it is too over the top to
claim they are common. The important thing to consider here is that the Russian doctor who
treated him (and saved his life) discarded that possibility.
It is only the doctor that can diagnose his/her patient. Hunting for exotic cases around
the world is not diagnosis.
Besides, this doesn't explain the almost immediate poisoning accusation by Merkel and
then, the next day (today), by top EU ideologue Josep Borrell. The German State (at least the
BND) must be involved - the fact that the Charité is owned by the State itself only
strengthens this hypothesis.
The numbers consolidate last month's preview. It's bad, and Germany is officially in an
economic depression (2009-2020).
Uniting this data with my previous speculation on the "Prussian" and the "double-header"
hypotheses, I'm inclined to think the Belarus-Navalny operations are a gambit by the EU to
expand further to the East (Russia) and, ultimately, to dispute with China over the control
of Eurasia in the 21st/22nd Centuries.
I am a great fan of MOA, a refugee from ZH which is now an almost unreadable and tainted by
its anti-China drumbeat.
However, with all due respect I find that our host tends to come to conclusions a bit too
quickly... Navalny could well have been poisoned, but by whom? Guaido and her female clone
Tikhanovskaya better watch out - their handlers in the CIA may see them more useful as
martyrs than as "legitimate opposition".
As for other topics, I also find b to have way, way too quickly dismissed the Beirut blast
as anything other than AM.
As in, too quickly because the ramifications were too terrible to contemplate, as in the
ascendence of unspeakable evil on the part of the shitty little state. As to whether the
blast was nuclear or conventional, that is a minor point.
"If the substance is established and if it is established that this is poisoning, then, of
course, this will be a cause for investigation," he [Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov] said.
Someone on the web (might even be here) mentioned that cholinesterase inhibitors can be used
against Cocaine dependence. Is this true or not? I do not have any other information and I am
not a Medecin/doctor or user. But these days I am naturally cynical about any "official"
statements, whoever makes them.
This (anti-cocaine use) might equally be "disinformation", but with its' widespread use in
"elite" circles, it is not inconcievable. Navalny being in the toilets rather than having an
immediate reaction to the tea at the airport, could be an indication that something happened
in there.
The Russians caused the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico in a plot to meddle with the U.S.
elections by causing disruptions in Texas which may vote Democrat in November. Considering
this it is plausible to think Putin poisoned Nav' in an attempt to take over the world.
3/3 Though a doctor from another region of Russia, who did not treat Navalny, wrote that
in his practice, cholinesterase inhibitors Proserin &Ubretid are allegedly widely used to
prevent disorders developing in patients placed on mechanical ventilation.
Josep Borrell as the top ideologue of the EU is overestimating a gray functionary
belonging to the Felipe González group, a group that somehow preceded the false center
left of Blair in the UK or Clinton in the USA.
From that same group of politicians that first
campaigned against Spain joining NATO back in the '80s with the slogan "De entrada no",
something like to start with NO, well one of those socialists later became NATO's secretary
general and lead the organization during its sinister days of the Yugoslavia bombings,
handsomely rewarded monetarily later became Mister Pesc, a strange definition for the sort of
foreign minister of the EU, the place than Borrell has been rewarded with nowadays, which
means he has rendered the required services to the empire. Those guys true ideology is
personal advancement and nothing else, so it kind of sounds funny to think he is the top
ideologue of the EU, but then again, he could be, which is a true mesure of what the EU is
worth politically, a pitiful colony.
Note that this is an off-label use of cholinesterase inhibitors, so an American doctor
would not likely prescribe it. Someone who has a supply of cocaine sufficient enough to
become an addict, on the other hand, probably would not have difficulty obtaining a
cholinesterase inhibitor like Galantamine, though. Navalny's CIA/State Department handlers
who keep him on coke could probably get him anything he asked for, though if I were in his
shoes I wouldn't put anything from them up my nose.
Unlikely. Europe hardly survived WW2. Russia plus China are a lot of people to make
angry.
It's more likely some projects continuing because someone has forgotten to stop them or
because they still have got money left. You would have to carry Europe to fight and even then
they would not fight.
As is, Europe's south has been bought up by Chinese investment. They invest strategically
not for short term returns.
Noone will climb a tree before knowing the results of US elections.
There is however a documented case from India in which an organophosphate poisoning was
falsely interpreted as diabetic ketoacidosis
So what? Doctors make false diagnoses all the time. It is called medical error. A
significant proportion of deaths in hospitals worldwide are due to medical error. India? Now,
if somebody is going to suggest that medical error never happens in India I am going to say
either they are a liar or an idiot. Medical errors also happen in German hospitals, by the
way, including Charité - plenty of them! Including both with and without intent.
This whole Navalny "poisoning" fantasy stinks to high heaven. It differs very little in
essential essence from the Skripal fantasy so far, and I am quite sure it is headed on the
same path.
But have we missed a point here? Is this not just trying to round the anti-Russia circle
started by the Skripal poisoning? Will not everyone now assume that Navalny was poisoned with
Novichok and that this proves beyond doubt that this is the preferred way for getting rid of
Kremlin enemies? You don't really have to prove anything more, it is now all out there, like
Russia gate, the dog whistle has been blown.
Re: "This whole Navalny "poisoning" fantasy stinks to high heaven. It differs very little
in essential essence from the Skripal fantasy so far, and I am quite sure it is headed on the
same path."
I agree completely. The whole script is so old and tired one would have to have spent the
last few decades living under a rock not to see through it, throw enough shit and hope some
of it sticks. It is probably just another ploy to put pressure on the German government to
cancel Nordstream 2.
This is the source a few other articles on the net also quote from, but where did it come
from. I spent some time searching for other earlier references to Navalny having diabetes but
could not find any.
@vk #3
Why do you believe that the EU and/or Germany wish to expand eastward when their economy is
in deep recession and they already have 45 million Ukrainians for cheap labor?
I would note that even East Germany is lagging West Germany in terms of economic progress
since reunification, which itself was incredibly expensive.
Ukraine isn't a great example either of neither economic progress nor contributing
integration into the EU.
From southfront:
The air travel between Russia and Germany is mostly suspended due to coronavirus limitations.
The flight to Germany was organized by the Berlin-based Cinema for Peace Foundation. The
flight was paid by businessman Boris Zimin. Boris Zimin is the son of Dmitry Zimin –
the founder of VimpelCom (Beeline telecommunications brand).
PJSC VimpelCom is the third-largest wireless and second-largest telecom operator in
Russia. It is wholly owned by VEON Ltd. through which it is linked to Mikhail Fridman,
Russian Western-linked business magnate. Fridman's Alfa Group Consortium is among the main
shareholders of VEON Ltd.
These persons and entities represent the Russian influence group linked to the global
finance. The very same group has links and support work of think tanks affiliated with the
Higher School of Economics, the center of the Alma Mater of the liberal economic block of the
Russian government. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobanin and Chairwoman of the Bank of Russia Elvira
Nabiullina also could be considered a part of the global finance in Russia.
In Russian media, this network of Western-linked persons, organizations, influence groups
and top officials is often described as the 'liberal tower' of the Kremlin. Thus, despite the
image of the opposition figure, Navalny receives support from the highest levels of the
Russian governance and business systems.
1) the plan was never to make the DDR prosperous. On the contrary: too much people living
prosperously is damaging to capitalist expansion;
2) that's the pattern of recent EU expansion, with the latest great batch of new members
coming from ex-Yugoslavia and the Iron Curtain (why not, for example, insisting on the
accession of Norway and Switzerland, which are much richer and culturally alike
countries?);
3) besides the huge pool of cheap and relatively well-educated labor power (which can be
imported to Germany proper, thus rising unemployment rates, thus eroding the power of the
mighty German unions), there's the pot of gold of the old communist infrastructure (water,
electricity, communications, education, healthcare), which is already centralized and thus
would result in monopolistic rent for the German capitalists who will inevitably buy them in
a privatization process (as happened with Slovakia);
4) Belarus is the natural springboard to invade Russia, thus increasing Germany's leverage
within NATO.
Thanks for the reply. - Even if Navalny was suffering from a "manque" of his favourite
substance, the Germans and others would not mention it. He would not have had (much ?) trace
in his blood either.
Esteemed B, I am still waiting for a source reference for Navalnys diabetes. It is still
important to get the information confirmed. His environment says that he did not consume
anything except the tea. That would be a very risky behavior for a diabetic in itself.
Whether a diabetic shock can be ruled out due to the cholinesterase problem, which can
probably be considered certain after it has been confirmed by two hospitals, I cannot judge.
You seem to assume that.
The way Merkel and other politicians immediately jumped on the poisoning thesis is
reminiscent of May's reaction in the Skripal case. It is difficult not to become suspicious.
I dwell on the words Navalny spoke in Tomsk to his crew, about him becoming a martyr and it
not helping Putin, then his trauma on the following day. Yes, the observation about the tea
at the airport is of great importance. The time between its ingestion and boarding the plane
is similarly important IF he was administered a toxic agent via that tea. And if he's
diabetic or even pre-diabetic, there's a suite of meds he'd need to take daily if not
requiring insulin, and those meds must be ingested with food--I know.
I imagine all security camera footage of his time at Tomsk airport has been scrutinized,
the result being the Kremlin's ruling no investigation's warranted. That decision's good
enough for me.
navalny's words the day before about being a hero if Putin killed him is I think key.
Russia seems to produce a few Rasputin types - like the clown that nailed his balls to the
pavement.
Seen some photos of Navalny when he was younger and his eyes looked normal. Those wide open
staring eyes in selfies and so forth in recent years give more than a hint of madness.
I agree with Karlof1. If Navalny is diabetic, he seems a bit careless to me to just drink a
tea all morning. He should eat something according to his diet and probably take some meds as
well (if the disease isn't at a very early stage).
To compare Pavlensky to Rasputin is not proportional. The monk was the victim of the
British services and has been thoroughly discredited and demonized, by the same guys that
killed him. Check out the movie about Rasputin's life with no other than Gerard Depardieu.
Rasputin had the Tsarina's ear and he was against Russia going to war, the first world war,
and that was the main motive to eliminate him.
Pavlensky on the other hand is a freak useful to the empire propaganda on a condom basis, use
and throw away, just like the Pussy Riots, always referred to as the punk group, a group that
never issued a first album, save for a couple of clips on youtube after leaving Russia.
Freaks of that caliber are a dime a dozen everywhere, but since they are useful to discredit
Russia, well then they are endowed with media attention, and even Hillary receiving one of
the Riots member, Tolokonnikova, the one that being pregnant engaged in a public orgy,
another one of the group hits was introducing a frozen chicken into a members vagina.
Pavlensky was hailed as a hero for burning the FSB building entrance door, the feared
Lyubianka. He tried the same trick with the gates of the Bank of France, and he was sent to a
psychiatric ward, with no media noise at all. If that would have occurred back in Moscow we
would be still hearing and reading about psychiatric torture back to the good old days of the
Soviet Union.
Russia did it. Evil Putin ordered it. Horrible China sponsored it. Iran backed it. Hezbollah
played a hand as well.
Thank Glorious God for the Indispensable Nation of American Exceptionalism. Rescuing the
world from evil dictators and conspiring theorists plots. Evil doers who hate OUR way of life
stand no chance against the Glorious Christians and their Honorable Zionist gatekeepers.
Thanks and Glory to American Gods that Juan Guaido is now the President of Venezuela. Soon
the Zionist will offer their Chosen Ones to replace Evil Dictators.
Thanks and praise to MOA for shining Gods Light and dancing on Western narratives giving
them validity against the Evil doers of Poison and injustice.
Trump and Pence are "Men of the Bible" seeking out injustice and filling the world with
Christian values of Bro Love and world Peace. May all you Christians take a knee and pray for
these Mens souls and the Soul of America for leading the way to righteousness. Oh yeah- and
pray for whatever the fuck his name is Nirvany Nalvinny poisoned guy.
they like to reuse the same propaganda memes over and over. Russian bounties to the Taliban
become Iranian bounties to the Taliban, Novichok becomes cholinesterase inhibitor, rinse and
repeat.
As the collective west, including Germany, proceed to fabricate another "highly likely" Putin
play, may I ask what they have been doing while the collective west has buried Julian Assange
alive? Hypocricy is a much too weak word for it.
@ Posted by: Clueless Joe | Aug 25 2020 17:37 utc | 42
There's an extreme treatment for diabetics type 2, where you live in a near state of
starvation for months. In some mild cases, it is stated to cure diabetes.
Navalny could be going through this treatment, hence just a cup of tea (there are many
teas famous for cutting the appetite) in the morning.
If the Russians are really trying to assassinate, why do it in so theatrical a manner?
Just shoot him twice in the back of the head and call it suicide like the Americans do.
I've seen this site before - they post statements from various medical people on matters
of public medical interest, such as the pandemic. Useful for people who want some background
on the chemicals involved.
Posted by: Circe | Aug 25 2020 16:14 utc | 29
Yup. Just ran across that piece while searching for anything on Navalny having diabetes.
Found nothing so far beyond that. b's source appears to be the only one mentioning any
diabetes in Navalny's medical history. Apparently his personal doctor has denied this, saying
that the "diabetes" issue appears to have more a "description" of his medical condition
rather than an actual diagnosis.
Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 25 2020 17:26 utc | 40 And if he's diabetic or even pre-diabetic,
there's a suite of meds he'd need to take daily if not requiring insulin, and those meds must
be ingested with food--I know.
Yes, Metformin is the preferred drug. I started on twice a day, then once I lost 45
pounds, the doctor dropped me to one a day. In fact, now I could stop taking it, but I
continue to do so because it has alleged anti-aging properties. The only real negative is
that it leeches vitamin B-12 from the body - but I take tons of B-12 anyway, so doesn't
concern me. Metformin usually needs to be taken with food because otherwise it tends to give
you "the runs".
Russian news agency Interfax later quoted officials in Omsk as saying tests had identified
the presence of an industrial chemical in his body.
Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs told the agency that since the substance they
claim was present is commonly used to increase plasticity in products, "it is possible that
it could appear in surface washings through the contact of Alexei Navalny with similar
objects, for example, through a plastic cup".
Studies have previously shown that the chemical officials were referring to -
2-ethylhexyl diphenyl phosphate - does not have a strong toxic effect on humans.
So it appears from the articles so far that initially the police detected that specific
chemical, but medical experts ruled it out as a cause, merely a by-product of having drunk
from a plastic cup.
This article discusses the term "metabolic disease", clarifying that it doesn't
necessarily mean diabetes.
Bottom line: There is no evidence Navalny had diabetes, although he might well have had
either Type 2 or Type 1 diabetes but never diagnosed. However, if he was in a diabetic coma,
that should have been detected almost immediately, even by first responders in the ambulance.
Beyond that, it appears that whatever chemical was the cause of his condition, it's likely
undetectable now.
So another "nothing-burger" which will be seized on to drum up hysteria against Russia.
And I've spent *way* too much time on this irrelevant crap.
At your age, you should take an interest in dissecting and studying insects.
Re coma from undiagnosed diabetes. From what I can find, that would be due to high blood
sugar, whereas a diagnosed patient taking meds can be hit with low blood sugar if
carbohydrates and insulin are not matched.
We need a timeline showing when tea drunk; when airplane boarded; when Navalny went to loo on
plane. Video showing his demeanor as he boarded would be great. It's been said his stomach
was empty except for the tea, so anything in that tea presumably would have acted quickly,
prior to his boarding. Or there was nothing in the tea and Navalny injured himself -- or was
injured by someone during the walk in the jet-way from the terminal to the plane. Security
Video?
"Mr Navalny drank a cup of tea at a cafe inside Tomsk airport, which his supporters
suspect had been poisoned because it was all he ate or drank that morning."
"The saleswoman, who did not want to be identified, said one of Mr Navalny's entourage
bought the tea at the counter and took it to him at the table."
The long delay between administration of the poison and the onset of effects AND the apparent
nonlethatity are clear evidence of novichok. Case closed.
Precisely four hours between contact with novichok and onset of symptoms, regardless of
victim age, weight, health, and quantity of novichok contacted. It is a truly amazing
chemical weapon, though not very practical for battlefield use.
testing for circulating cholinesterase activity is very simple-- a chromogenic assay with
acetyl thiocholine and DTNB. So its the first thing you would do in a case like this. In the
case of a nerve agent there should be no circulating activity. The Russians must have known
this.
So the question is now -- is there anything stuck to the active site serine of the enzyme--
an adduct. This one for Porton Down -- they will find it probably by immunoprecipitation and
mass spectrometry and they ought to get the mass and some structural data on the toxin.
Clinically, he should have had a bradycardia and excess secretions and pupils constricted.
Doesn't sound like that. The question is can we trust the West to be truthful here. After
various OPCW fiascos I doubt it.
CJ
Whenever Navalny does end up dying the Russian government will be blamed anyway, so if
they wanted him dead then why not just blow him up with some missiles like the US did with
General Soleimani? Why not just arrest him, claim he resisted arrest, then shoot him like
happens with so many people in the US?
This talk about him being targeted by the Russian government using obscure toxins that
don't work is beyond silly.
Due to Navalny's dealings in Tomsk, this smells more of a bid to leave the country.
Orchestrations set in place by Germany suggests an asset that has run his course, but they
can't leave him in country to deal with any complications of him being taken by someone else.
This doesn't feel like state acting....or at least not the Russian state. Gruff is right,
this isn't targeting by the Russians. Navalny hasn't been relevant in Russian circles since
at least 2012-13 if he was even then.
I don't understand why people commenting here still insist on playing CSI Miami. The Russian
doctors have already publicly stated their own lab results showed absolutely no signs of
Cholinesterase Inhibitors. As in evidence of zero CI - not zero evidence of CI:
"Upon his admission to the [Omsk] hospital, Alexey Navalny was tested on a wide range of
narcotics, synthetic substances, psychodiletics and medicinal substances, including
cholinesterase inhibitors -- all tests came back negative ," Sabayev said in a
press statement, as quoted by the Omsk Ministry of Health.
No cholinesterase inhibitors were used, according to the Russian lab results. It's not
that they didn't test Navalny for the substances - they did and they came out negative.
Sabayev even called the Germans' bluff:
"Additionally, Navalny lacked symptoms specific of the poisoning with cholinesterase
inhibitors substances . As we said earlier, we are ready to share Alexey Navalny's
samples with our German colleagues for examination ," the health official [Sabayev]
added.
MoA's own German source state the lab tests in Germany were carried out by "independent
laboratories". They most likely are in BND's control, in one way or the other. Many Western
European nations have constitutional clauses that allow their respective governments
(usually, at the discretion of the executive) to intervene directly on the private sector in
specific occasions, normally under "national security" reasons. The executive of the British
government, for example, has a legal device that allows it to outright censor (without the
need for legislative approval) any specific information from all the British media outlets.
I'm sure modern Germany also has many constitutional clauses that allow its government and
intelligence agencies to intervene anywhere, anytime in the German economy instantly and
covertly, under the umbrella of national security.
As I predicted, the Russians aren't that stupid. They stored some blood samples from
Navalny, and they know, for sure, that he wasn't poisoned with CIs. That's why Peskov was so
direct, so sudden and so confident when he declared the Kremlin was in no hurry - because they
saw no reason - to initiate an investigation on Navalny's sudden health problems. And he also
called the German bluff ("If the substance is established and if it is established that this
is poisoning, then, of course, this will be a cause for investigation", i.e. there won't be
an investigation because there's no poison).
It is known that activation of acetylcholine receptors (specifically M3 muscarinic receptors)
in the pancreas promotes insulin release into the bloodstream, which consequently would tend
to decrease blood glucose.
It's therefore possible that hypoglycemia could be triggered by increased acetylcholine
levels (drug-induced or otherwise). This would be less likely to occur in diabetics, as such
individuals would be deficient in either the ability to produce (type 1 diabetes) or respond
(type 2 diabetes) to insulin.
Dmitri Petrovsky, a doctor of medical sciences, a surgeon and deputy of the
municipality of Yaroslavl, questioned the competence of German doctors who said that blogger
Alexei Navalny had been poisoned.
Doctors [treating] Navalny [at] the German clinic "Charité" reported on Monday,
August 24, about the presence in the body of the blogger substance, part of the group of
inhibitors cholinesterase. According to them, this indicates the poisoning of the head of the
Anti-Corruption Foundation (recognized as a foreign agent).
Dmitri Petrovsky, M.D., surgeon and deputy of the municipality of Yaroslavl, commented
on the statement of German medics.
"What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care is
normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. And if
the doctor finds them in the analysis of the person after a stay in the operating room and
concludes that he was poisoned, then the conclusion is: either it is a political order,
or an illiterate doctor," the expert said.
According to public figure Ernest Makarenko, the hospitalization of Navalny in
["Charité"] is nothing but a political matter. Omsk doctors coped perfectly with the
blogger's treatment, but to make Navalny a "victim", he had to be defiantly taken to the
West, the expert added.
Readers will need to use Google Translate.
In other words, if Navalny had not been found to have cholinesterase inhibitors in his
body after being treated in an ICU with intubation, then the doctors at the Omsk hospital who
initially treated him hadn't been doing their job properly.
Aha - found MPN's comment @ 12, clicked on the link to Elena Evdokimova's tweets and then
clicked on a link she provides and here is another article (from Zhurnalistskaya Pravda)
on Dmitri Petrovsky's comments about Navalny's treatment in Germany.
What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care
is normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. If they
weren't there, it would be strange, I'd be surprised.
Tonight, doctors of the German clinic "Charite" found in the blood of blogger Alexei
Navalny substance, which, in their opinion, could provoke his illness, and hastened to
announce the poisoning. However, in Russian practice, this substance is widely used to
prevent disorders that developing in patients on ventilator.
German doctors found in Navalny substance - cholinesterase inhibitor.
"The effect of the toxin, i.e. the inhibition of cholinesterase in the body, has been
proven several times in independent laboratories. According to the diagnosis, the patient is
treated with an antidote to atropine. The outcome of the disease remains unsafe and the
subsequent effects, especially in the nervous system, cannot be ruled out at this time," the
statement obtained by Izvestia reads.
Deputy of the municipality of Yaroslavl, M.D., surgeon Dmitry Petrovsky commented on
this "find" of German colleagues.
"Cholinesterase inhibitors are widely used medicines in medicine. Basically, they are
used in the postoperative management of patients, when transferring to independent
breathing. That's what Navalny had. He was first on ventilator and when trying to translate
it, could use the drug Proserin. It is a cholinesterase inhibitor that is officially
administered to all patients when transferred to independent breathing. It must be used. I
think it was used. But I also understand that, most likely, he had to shine as Proserin's
German colleagues. Perhaps used not Proserin in its pure form, but another drug, more rare
- Ubretide, which is also an absolutely official drug, which is used in intensive care, in
postoperative practice to prevent bladder atony, to prevent bowel atony and, accordingly,
widely used. But, I admit, it can be used little in Germany, and it was not in the
toxicology kit, so they could be surprised, and because of this all the cheese-bor.
What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care is
normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. If they
weren't there, it would be strange, I'd be surprised.
When a person breathes with the help of the ventilator, various disorders develop,
including respiratory, cardiovascular, with the intestines, with the bladder. Various drugs
are used to prevent these disorders, including cholinesterase inhibitors. And if the doctor
finds them in the analysis of the person after a stay in the operating room and concludes
that he was poisoned, then the conclusion is: either it is a political order, or an
illiterate doctor."
Perhaps next time Navalny is in Russia and has a seizure or a collapse requiring IC
treatment and intubation, hospital staff should just arrange to send him to the closest
international airport and phone Charité to collect him as he is.
Thanks for providing those! IMO, sometime after the Skripal kidnapping a memo was sent to
all Russian medical personnel about the handling of known dissidents -- to use kid gloves and a
fine tooth comb whilst saving all fluids taken for testing and using an impeccable evidence
chain, for that's what's related by the doctor. I'd like to think such attention to detail is
usual practice in Russia.
i recommend a new ''military grade chemical agent" Novichok in honour of Alexey Navalny...
maybe alexeychok is better... it has a nice malevolent russian ring to it!
Opinion: Germany unlikely to pressure Russia on reported poisoning
Doctors in Berlin have revealed that Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny may have
been poisoned. Even if this were proven beyond doubt, the German government has no way to
retaliate against Moscow, says Jens Thurau.
A change from the recently trumpeted MSM headlines that the Germans had found poison in
Navalny's system.
But then:
Siberian doctors said Navalny, who has become known as one of President Vladimir
Putin's fiercest critics, had suffered from a metabolic disorder. Soon thereafter, the
gravely ill man was flown to Berlin for medical treatment, even though Russian authorities
had argued he was too unwell to travel. Was his relocation deliberately delayed so that
traces of his suspected poisoning would be harder to detect in his body? If so, the plan did
not work. Shortly after Navalny's arrival in the German capital, Berlin doctors announced
there was a high likelihood he had been poisoned.
Jesus H Christ!!!
Hopefully, the medical professionals in Berlin will help Navalny make it through
this. [Because those Russian retards certainly couldn't have done this? -- ME] But it
is highly unlikely Germany will adopt a tougher stance on Russia or impose meaningful
sanctions -- just as it highly improbable Russia will help shine any light on the Navalny
case. This is a cynical assessment, granted. But these are the times we are living
in.
Highly improbable, you wanker?
Shine a light on the Navalny case?
You mean, find out who poisoned the so full of shit lying imposter?
If he was poisoned, that is.
Sequence of events in the "Navalny Case":
Navalny goes to the toilet.
Comes out.
Starts screaming and howling.
Loses consciousness.
Entourage starts shouting "Poisoned!"
Aeroplane emergency landing, Navalny rushed to hospital.
Coma induced by medics.
No poison in body found.
Navalny still under INDUCED coma flown to Berlin.
May possibly/ likely/ highly likely be that he was poisoned say German medics.
Still under INDUCED coma.
And some poor bastard in the Berlin "Charité" clinic sill continues to wipe that
bastard's arse and empty his piss bottle.
Still shaping the narrative – now when Germany does not take any concrete action, it
will not be because Navalny was not poisoned and the whole thing an engineered crisis, but
because Germany is hesitant to do anything. Like the previous situation discussed, in which
Europe orders Russia to do something it knows Russia is going to do anyway, so that it
appears Russia is responding to European orders. Shaping the narrative. And either way, in
this instance, it results in bad feeling between Germany and Russia, which was the objective.
It does highlight, though, that there remains a significant liberal presence in Germany which
is sympathetic to America and its 'values', and it would be foolish to discount this in
further planning. And the media outlets are mostly dominated by those liberals.
The timing is terrible though. It'll be September in less than a week and all the other
domestic problems automatically become amplified (kids back to school/masks etc.). That'll
knock Saint Navalny off the front pages and his team will have to compete for space while
running on fumes.
Even the National post, which is rabidly conservative and borderline Republican, has
backed away a little from the "He was POISONED!!" shocker, today featuring 'The Kremlin's'
story, although the tone was still catty and it made a point of mentioning this and that
speaker was a 'Putin ally'.
"Шарите"
заподозрили в
непрофессионализме
из-за выводов
по Навальному
Анастасия
Броцкая, 24
августа 2020
"Charité" suspected of unprofessionalism because of conclusions about
Navalny
Anastasia Brotskaya, 24 August 2020
Doctor of Medical Sciences, surgeon and deputy of the municipality of the city of
Yaroslavl Dmitry Petrovsky, in an interview with Journalistic Pravda, commented on the
statement of German doctors.
"The fact that they found cholinesterase inhibitors in Navalny after his being in
intensive care is normal. They should be in a person who has been in intensive care and on
mechanical ventilation. The conclusion was that he had been poisoned -- then the conclusion
is this: either it is a political order, or an illiterate doctor," the expert noted.
"Cholinesterase inhibitors are widely used medicines in medicine. Basically, they are
used in the postoperative management of patients, when transferring to independent
breathing. That's what Navalny had. He was first on ventilator and when trying to translate
it, could use the drug Proserin. It is a cholinesterase inhibitor that is officially
administered to all patients when transferred to independent breathing. It must be used. I
think it was used. But I also understand that, most likely, he had to shine as Proserin's
German colleagues. Perhaps used not Proserin in its pure form, but another drug, more rare
– Ubretide, which is also an absolutely official drug, which is used in intensive
care, in postoperative practice to prevent bladder atony, to prevent bowel atony and,
accordingly, widely used. But, I admit, it can be used little in Germany, and it was not in
the toxicology kit, so they could be surprised, and because of this all the cheese-bor.
What they found in Navalny cholinesterase inhibitors after being in intensive care is
normal. They should be in the man who was in intensive care and was on ventilator. If they
weren't there, it would be strange, I'd be surprised.
When a person breathes with the help of the ventilator, various disorders develop,
including respiratory, cardiovascular, with the intestines, with the bladder. Various drugs
are used to prevent these disorders, including cholinesterase inhibitors. And if the doctor
finds them in the analysis of the person after a stay in the operating room and concludes
that he was poisoned, then the conclusion is: either it is a political order, or an
illiterate doctor."
I had to look up "atony" and Google tells me it's a condition in which a muscle loses its
strength or goes slack.
I guess next time when Navalny is back in Russia (if he ever does go back) and suffers a
seizure or falls into a diabetic coma and needs intensive care and intubation, the attending
medical staff should instead send him to the closest international airport and call
Charité to collect him as he is. He can have the minimum care to keep him his heart
beating and his brain oxygenated but no more.
Bravo! Jen for Prime Minister of the Russian Federation – get that weak sister
Medvedev out of there! I am all in favour of aggressive and hard-nosed Russian responses to
western idiocy, and having made fools of German doctors, Russia might even now make an
advance notice that in the event of Navalny's return to Russia – and considering the
west plainly considers Russian medical care to be a potential death sentence for Navalny
– he will be refused medical care and maybe it might be a good idea to establish a
German air-ambulance 'hot line' now for the future. Stress that this policy is brought about
wholly because of the accusatory nature of the German media.
What's the betting that the cheat and swindler and foreign agent Navalny claims asylum in
Germany after he has been brought out of the state of induced coma that he is at present
in?
After all, his life is always under threat in Russia., isn't it?
Good. Russia's loss is the Germans' hard bargain, what? They're welcome to the useless
tit. He will gravitate to wherever he can earn a comfortable living on who he is and not what
he does, as he has always done, living it up while he has no regular source of income and is
always free to go on vacation. But he can't run for office in Russia while living in Germany.
So we will be spared his endless presidential campaigns.
As I've commented several times already, Navalny is well past his sell-by date and his
protégée Sobol now seems more and more to be moving into position as front
person for the "Fund for the Struggle against Corruption".
Navalny's other sidekick, Volkov, has already for a good while now had a home address in
Luxembourg; Lyosha might soon have a Berlin one.
In Berlin, having been at death's door, he will most certainly be feted by all the German
liberals and well rewarded with lucrative media contracts, as is Nemtsov's daughter, who
slags off on Deutsche Welle to her heart's content and with monotonous regularity all things
Russian.
Nemtsova's life would certainly not be under threat if she were to live in Russia, but she
has clearly seized the main chance, making money in Germany whilst ensuring that her dear
dead papa not be forgotten.
Better than standing in shifts on a bridge in Moscow.
As I have probably suggested before, Russia has to get used to the idea that the western
alliance is its implacable enemy, and its core – the United States – will accept
no other solution than Russia's demise in violence or its complete submission to American
disposal.
I approve of Russia continuing to refer to 'our western colleagues' or 'partners', because
it suggests mockery to me so long as nobody in Russia believes it. But the American and
American-dominated media has escalated the campaign against Russia to the point that it is
the root of everything which is wrong with the world.
When you would think any reasonable country would lie quiet for awhile, having aroused the
ire of its enemies to a fever pitch, Russia goes right on provoking and poking and daring the
west to do something.
Or so the story goes. It is disappointing to see official Germany so easily pushed off its
previous halfway-defiant platform, but not really surprising. It remains to be seen if it
will actually use the completion of Nord Stream II as leverage to get what will mollify the
Americans.
I frankly doubt it, and suspect Mutti Merkel and Heiko are just making indignant noises
while they scramble for a new position, but you never know.
As I have often said also, if Europe was left dependent on American LNG shipped in by
tankers, it would serve it right. Just as long as Russia is not coerced into shipping gas
through Ukraine forever and a day. That's the absolute no-go point.
As I have probably suggested before, Russia has to get used to the idea that the western
alliance is its implacable enemy, and its core – the United States – will
accept no other solution than Russia's demise in violence or its complete submission to
American disposal.
This is first of all about preservation and expansion of the US-centered global neoliberal
empire, not so much about Russia. They react identically to any threat to the "neoliberal
world order" and "full spectrum dominance" from any country. False poisonings, creating and
organizing internal opposition out of neoliberal fifth column (which is influential in any
xUSSR country and consists first of all os some stratas of professionals (IT professionals,
part of academic community getting foreign grants and trips, journalists fifth column, etc )
as well as of compradors working in foreign firms, NGO, or getting foreign grants (aka
"grantoeds") ) attempts to stage color revolutions, all the arsenal of subversion is
used.
I think this might turn into a play of German intelligence (with some support and even
encouragement of political leadership) , which was a formidable opponent for Soviets during
WWII. So the same story repeats now on a new level. The idea is probably to convert this into
Scripals II scandal to keep Russophobia hysteria going strong. .
BTW Merkel government was instrumental in pushing Yushchenko poisoning story, which is
some ways was a dressed rehearsal of Scripal's poisoning story (in neither case victims died
and in both cases circumstances of poisoning were really mysterious ). And The Mirror
reminded us about this link in 2018:
Moreover, Merkel was instrumental in organizing color revolution of 2014 in Ukraine (aka
Euromaidan). Klitschko and his party were her puppets. With direct and indirect financial and
organizational support. He was called "Merkel's Boxer Boy In Ukraine." It was against her
attempt to hijack this color revolution Nuland's famous remarks "F*ck the EU" were
directed.
After that Klitschko political star faded and he never got into the Provisional
Government. Yatsenyuk was put in charge.
She is a staunch neoliberal and thus a lapdog of the USA with, nevertheless, her own
dreams of economic "Drang nach Osten". Ambitions which actually fully materialized in Ukraine
and Bulgaria.
So I would expect more pushing of yet another "false flag poisoning" story by all NATO
countries MSM.
Российские
врачи отвергли
немецкую
версию
отравления
Навального в
первый же день
Russian doctors have rejected the German version of Navalny's poisoning on the first
day
24 August 2020
Head of the department of anaesthesiology and resuscitation number 1 of the N.I.
Pirogov Centre, Boris Teplykh, has said that he had not heard "anything new" from the
statement of German doctors. According to him, on the very first day, Russian doctors were
working on the version about the intoxication of opposition leader Alexei Navalny with
cholinesterase inhibitors. But the substance was not found.
"They are talking about clinical data, and not about the substance itself, which
neither we nor, apparently, they have found at the moment. On the very first day of the
patient's admission, we worked on this version, but did not find confirmation", Mr. Teplykh
told RIA Novosti.
According to him, the atropine assigned to Alexei Navalny was given to him from the
first minutes after his hospitalization in Omsk.
"Subsequently, the need for its re-introduction was discussed In addition, the presence
of such a chemical reaction in the body is possible both as a result of the use of other
medications, and in the natural course of the sickness", said Mr. Teplykh.
The chief toxicologist of the Omsk region and the Siberian Federal District, Alexander
Sabaev, also said that cholinesterase inhibitors were not detected during the examination of
Mr. Navalny in Omsk.
"Upon his admission to the hospital, Alexei Navalny underwent investigations on a wide
range of narcotic, synthetic substances, psychodeletics and medicinal substances, including
cholinesterase inhibitors: the result was negative", said Mr. Sabaev. "In addition, he did
not have a clinical picture specific to poisoning by substances of the group of
cholinesterase inhibitors".
Recall that after the hospitalization of Alexei Navalny in the Omsk hospital, a
consultation was held, in which there took part specialists from the N. I. Pirogov National
Medical and Chemical Centre and the N. N. Burdenko Centre for Neurosurgery.
Clinical studies in the Berlin clinic "Charité" showed intoxication of Alexei
Navalny's body with a substance from the group of cholinesterase inhibitors. The exact
substance has not yet been identified. It is also not clear how exactly it got into the body.
Mr. Navalny's condition is assessed as "serious", but there is no acute threat to his
life.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas have called on the
Russian authorities to investigate the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. They
have also demanded that those responsible be punished.
At least "Kommersant" says they Russian doctors "have rejected"the "Charité"
doctors' statement and not "denied" that the charlatan had been poisoned
The whole thing is a set-up done by Team-Navalny, that foreign agent hamming it up for all
it was worth with his screaming and howling on board the aircraft. I somehow don't think that
a man poisoned with a "nerve agent" some while before take off would suddenly start howling
in agony after having visited the aircraft toilet.
Germany is a United States satrap and acts as behoves an occupied by the USA state.
Yes, that's just what Putin would do – wait until Navalny was all but used-up as an
opposition figure, and then poison him with something that would not offer any threat to his
life. Just sort of a cryptic, "Next time, Lyosha " warning. Right? If he didn't die of old
age first.
What a ridiculous farce. But, once again Navalny is talked about and talked about from
sunup to sundown, cosseted as if he were a national treasure. He'll probably have to go on a
very long and expensive vacation after this, with his statuesque wife and his lovely children
(except perhaps for the one busy with her American studies) to recover.
"We cannot treat the accusations you mentioned seriously. These accusations have
absolutely nothing to do with truth and are more like empty noise", Peskov told
reporters.
"We do not understand why our German colleagues are in such a hurry to use the word
'poisoning' and so on. This version was among the first to be considered by our doctors, but,
I repeat, the exact substance has not been determined", Peskov said.
Euractiv avec AFP: EU calls for 'independent, transparent' probe into Navalny
case
Cholinesterase is an enzyme needed for the central nervous system to function properly.
Its inhibitors are used to make medicines and insecticides, but also nerve agents such as
sarin
####
Or an escape route if necessary?
A 'full investigation' is required for Russia to prove that it is not guilty of 'possibly'
having done 'something' and the final arbiters of such a truth will be western politicans and
institutions. Have cake, will eat. You would expect u-Rope to be more careful considering the
US is trying by hook or by crook to kill NSII and destroy EU relations with Russia, but there
are plenty of broad-spectrum russophobes in the EU who don't care. Consequences are for
others.
What will be really funny will be if they are successful. I can imagine the looks on their
faces upon being told Nord Stream II is canceled and the Ukrainian transit contract will not
be renewed. It's not as if Russia could not sell the gas elsewhere. But gas prices in Europe
would transcend the fantastic. And America would get the opportunity to prove it just wants
to be Europe's commercial good friend, and would NEVER use energy imports to meddle in
national affairs like elections.
Why not? That's what the formerly-handsome Viktor Yushchenko did, coming out of it looking
like a pine-cone, but a martyr forever to a Russian attempt to kill him. I tell you what
– the Russians are going to have to give up poison as a weapon of assassination,
because they suck at it – they can't kill anyone! Put a little investment into a
commercially-available long gun in a common caliber, and shoot enemies of the state from a
nearby rooftop. That won't work repeatedly, because after the first time the cops will
blanket every rooftop and high point for miles around, but you'll have a dead dissident to
show for it.
In case anyone is in doubt, that is sarcasm and not an actual assassination plan. But I
cannot refrain from pointing out it has been used with great success in the United States by
individuals who most people, to put it kindly, would not consider extra-smart. This whole
poison thing seems too complicated and relies too much on chance, and the results are plainly
unsatisfactory. Time to get back to fundamentals, what?
Of course, if it is all just a big scam, it will be kind of hard for Washington to
actually shoot Navalny and kill him and pin it on Russia. Although the British did a
reasonable job of it by simply picking two Russians visiting the UK and painting them as
professional FSB 'wet men'.
I disagree. He is a spokesman. His comments were short and to the point. Now that they
have been made there is no need to respond to anything else unless something actually new
turns up and certainly not including the next range of unsubstantiated rumors. In short,
Peskov said 'Put up or shut up.' Diplomatically.
Whatever, a former Kremlin top doc held no punches as regards this latest Navalny
performance:
. . . the former chief physician of the Kremlin Hospital of the Russian President's
Property Management Department, Alexander Myasnikov, did not remain silent. When he heard the
diagnosis from German doctors that Navalny had been poisoned, he said:
" I shall speak cynically: if they had wanted to kill him, they would have killed
him! "
Maybe, but he should know that an invitation to comment is an invitation to engage, and
that past history indicates every official Russian statement will be dismissed as lies. Same
for the Chinese, now, really. Their denials of having started the coronavirus 'pandemic' are
regarded humorously as pathetic dissembling, and actually tacit admissions of guilt. Only the
west always tells the truth – all others always lie. A landscape which would not be at
all unfamiliar to Winston Smith.
Navalny's spokeswoman's response to Peskov statement:
In response, Mr Navalny's spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, tweeted: "It was obvious that the
crime would not be properly investigated and the culprit found. However, we all know
perfectly well who he is."
I absolutely agree. Just let those looking for a comment get a busy signal. The Russian
state has no comment, or cannot be reached. The latter is preferable.
"... I approve of Russia continuing to refer to 'our western colleagues' or 'partners', because it suggests mockery to me so long as nobody in Russia believes it. ..."
That was the first that I'd heard of 'Russia hacking the SK Olympics' so I looked it up and
unfortunately I ran across this which may be the article that Hornsby may have read:
How digital detectives unraveled the mystery of Olympic Destroyer -- and why the next big
attack will be even harder to crack.
####
This is what passes for 'journalism.'
It is full of the usual false and long debunked claims, suppositions and 'detective work',
namely Guccifer 2.0 (CIA/whatever creation to cover up the DNC leaks which were not hacked but
given by USB stick by Seth Rich as 1st person source former ambassador Craig Murray has told
us), but the author knows better. Quite the feather in his cap for writing something that could
have come straight out of Langley.
He quotes from FireEye which we know has also been rather loose with the facts (Russian
interference in US election machines) and worst of all discovers 'metadata' that proves it was
'Da Kremlin', even though we all know about the NSA's hacking tools and obfuscation programs
like MARBLE via Snowden. And plenty more. Yes, Russians are still really clever but they cannot
help but use the same IP addresses as previous attacks and 'Hello Mama' in cyrillic like
teenage scriptkiddies. Greenberg's real pro.
It just goes to show that they never give up and there is always a journalist at an
established publication more than willing to run with it when the story is a bit exciting and
involves 'anonymous' security agencies and sources who tell them what they want to hear. Who
needs censorship when you live in your own weird reality?
As I have probably suggested before, Russia has to get used to the idea that the western
alliance is its implacable enemy, and its core – the United States – will accept
no other solution than Russia's demise in violence or its complete submission to American
disposal.
I approve of Russia continuing to refer to 'our western colleagues' or 'partners',
because it suggests mockery to me so long as nobody in Russia believes it.
But the American and American-dominated media has escalated the campaign against Russia to
the point that it is the root of everything which is wrong with the world. When you would
think any reasonable country would lie quiet for awhile, having aroused the ire of its
enemies to a fever pitch, Russia goes right on provoking and poking and daring the west to do
something. Or so the story goes. It is disappointing to see official Germany so easily pushed
off its previous halfway-defiant platform, but not really surprising. It remains to be seen
if it will actually use the completion of Nord Stream II as leverage to get what will mollify
the Americans. I frankly doubt it, and suspect Mutti Merkel and Heiko are just making
indignant noises while they scramble for a new position, but you never know. As I have often
said also, if Europe was left dependent on American LNG shipped in by tankers, it would serve
it right. Just as long as Russia is not coerced into shipping gas through Ukraine forever and
a day. That's the absolute no-go point.
"... It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. ..."
For forty years I carefully read the New York Times in hard copy each and every
morning, eager to discover what had transpired since the previous day. But just in the last few
months, my commitment has begun to flag, and my eyes often only lightly glance at half or more
of the articles and their columnar headlines.
I'd never thought much of Donald Trump, but can't seem to work up the enthusiasm to read yet
another article headlining the "lies" of our Great Satan or his coterie of lesser Satans. The
endless villainies of his Luciferian ally Vladimir Putin have grown dull to my mental tongue.
The diabolical wickedness of China, whom Trump had supposedly so recently courted, elicits
little interest. Closer to home, my eyes skip over another "social distancing" advice column
about Covid-19, or further explanations of how "peaceful protesters" had recently set a
government building on fire in Portland, Oregon, or destroyed Chicago's wealthiest downtown
shopping district.
The Business Section reports that the worst disease outbreak in a century, the worst
unemployment since the Great Depression, and the worst national rioting in two generations has
produced unprecedented gains in share prices on Wall Street, but the staff writers have
apparently forgotten the word "bubble." Many days the Arts Section seems to have become almost
monochromatically black. So my daily regular morning ritual now takes much less time than it
did in the past.
I can't exactly plot the trajectory of this sharp drop in my recent interest. But I
certainly noticed the change not longer after
a Twitter-mob forced the Times to summarily purge for insufficient "wokeness" its
highly-regarded Editorial Page Editor, widely considered a leading contender to run the paper,
perhaps suggesting that the journalists changed their coverage and writing style to avoid a
similar fate. I had always read my morning newspapers at a local coffee-shop, but the
Coronavirus outbreak ended that possibility, thereby disrupting my routine. And my years of
denouncing the dishonesty of "Our American Pravda" in my own articles
may have finally begun to register in my own mind.
There are occasional exceptions to this pattern. Earlier this month the Times
carefully tabulated our national mortality figures and determined that our "excess deaths"
from early March to the end of July had already exceeded 200,000 , indicating that the
American body-count from our Covid-19 epidemic was considerably larger than generally assumed,
and might even reach the half million mark by the end of the year. But examples of such solid
reporting seem few and far between these days.
The obvious decline of the Times is especially apparent to me each morning when I
compare it with the rival Wall Street Journal , which I read immediately afterward.
After Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal in 2007, most observers predicted a sad fate
at the hands of the proprietor whose early Fleet Street media empire had been built upon on the
frontal nudity of the Page Three Girls of his tabloid Sun . But Murdoch totally
confounded those skeptics, providing his new flagship broadsheet with huge financial backing
and a hands-off editorial policy, thereby elevating it from a business-focused publication to a
near-peer rival to the Gray Lady at a time when so many other papers were about to begin
shriveling from massive loss of advertising. Within a couple of years, even such inveterate
Murdoch-haters as The Nationacknowledged this
surprising reality .
Superb journalist resources unshackled by extreme "political correctness" allow an
outstanding product, and this has certainly been demonstrated by the Journal 's
regular front-page investigative reports. A few days ago, our continuing Covid-19 disaster
prompted yet another of these, which I think lacked only a few crucial elements to be worthy of
a Pulitzer Prize.
Numerous publications have documented America's severe mistakes in combating the disease,
but
this 4,500 word WSJ report focused upon the serious mishandling of the original
outbreak by Chinese authorities.
The article revealed that top public health officials at China's Center for Disease Control
only became aware of the situation on December 30th, when they learned that at least 25
suspected cases of a mysterious illness had already occurred in Wuhan during that month. But as
the writers noted, the outbreak had certainly begun somewhat earlier:
Even a fully empowered China CDC would likely have missed the very first cases of the
coronavirus, which probably began spreading around Wuhan in October or November, most likely
in people who never showed symptoms, or did but never saw a doctor, researchers say.
All of this new information seems quite consistent with what had previously been discovered
by America's leading media outlets. But the Journal writers seem to have missed one
additional fact that could have elevated this important story from a mundane investigation to a
sensational expose. Although they documented that the Chinese government only learned of the
Wuhan outbreak at the end of December, they seemed unaware that more than a month earlier
American intelligence officials had distributed a secret report to our military allies
describing the "cataclysmic" disease outbreak then underway in Wuhan.
A few months ago, I
had noted the clear implications of this bizarre discrepancy in timing:
For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early
missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has
presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.
As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather
detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese
documents. Provocatively entitled "China Didn't Warn Public of Likely
Pandemic for 6 Key Days" , the piece was widely distributed, running
in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the
Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan.
14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the
number of infections greatly multiplied.
Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough
4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful
timeline of those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of
emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese
officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January,
with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public
health measures later that same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious,
elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the
ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month,
an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far
back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence
Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in
the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our
government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the
story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report,
while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a
few days later,
Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared
such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to
independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several
government sources.
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of
the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese
government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of
precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the
earliest knowledge of future fires.
An entirely new disease that spreads in silent, asymptomatic fashion can easily escape
initial detection, and we should not be surprised that no one in China noticed the Wuhan
outbreak when it first began in October or November. But America's intelligence operatives were
entirely aware of what was happening from the very beginning, and began informing all our
allies. This seems about as close to a "smoking gun" as we can ever likely to encounter in the
annals of the murky world of intelligence operations.
Moreover, I
have also noted the very unusual international pattern the deadly disease immediately began
to follow:
As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China's own borders, another
development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had
occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But
by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more
surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with
a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least
a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were
quite
senior . Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred
Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only
political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran,
and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost
anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top
military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian
ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon
dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere
coincidence?
So if the journalists at the WSJ had merely taken note of what had previously been
reported by ABC News and confirmed by Israeli television, they would surely have
earned themselves a Pulitzer Prize. But earning and receiving are two separate matters, and
they might easily have instead been purged for treading upon such touchy national security
matters. After all, our own webzine was banned by both
Facebook and Google just days after we raised these same matters.
Such retaliation helps explain why our American mainstream media has long since concluded
that discretion is the better part of valor.
"... The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle . The last four reality-impaired years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don't know what's going on. ..."
"... The LSM should be confronted: "At long last have you left no sense of decency?" But who would hear the question -- much less any answer? ..."
"... Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there are no referees to call the fouls. ..."
"... Incidentally, Mueller's report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee's magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages -- and fortified. So there. ..."
"... is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of its study -- call it "Mueller (Enhanced)" -- and the propaganda fanfare -- come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning, as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message. ..."
"... The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks. ..."
"... The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness -- particularly with regard to Covid-19 -- he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith. The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling to all concerned is to say the obvious. ..."
"... None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known -- even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel about people like Paul Manafort "sharing polling data with Russians" who might be intelligence officers. That data was "mostly public" the Times itself reported , and the paper had to correct a story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned. ..."
"... On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele, labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium News explained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to push Russiagate. ..."
"... the description of #WikiLeaks ' publishing activities by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee 's Report appears a true #EdgarHoover 's disinformation campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive ..."
"... And that's not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word feature, "The Plot to Subvert an Election," trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans. ..."
"... That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people's news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed. ..."
"... "Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for 'hacking' Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks ." ..."
The New York Times is leading the full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed
effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump...
The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle . The last four reality-impaired
years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don't know what's going
on.
The LSM should be confronted: "At long last have you left no sense of decency?" But who would hear the question -- much less any
answer? The corporate media have a lock on what Americans are permitted or not permitted to hear. Checking the truth, once routine
in journalism, is a thing of the past.
Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards
as Special Counsel Robert Mueller's weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there
are no referees to call the fouls.
The recent release of a 1,000-page, sans bombshells and already out-of-date report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has provided
the occasion to "catapult the propaganda," as President George W. Bush once put it.
As the the Times 's Mark Mazzetti put it in his
article Wednesday:
"Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, Republican-majority senators hoped it would refocus attention
on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated."
Mazzetti is telling his readers, soto voce : regarding that interference four years ago, and the "continued-unabated" part, you
just have to trust us and our intelligence community sources who would never lie to you. And if, nevertheless, you persist in asking
for actual evidence, you are clearly in Putin's pocket.
Incidentally, Mueller's report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee's
magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages -- and fortified. So there.
Iron Pills
Recall how disappointed the LSM and the rest of the Establishment were with Mueller's anemic findings in spring 2019. His report
claimed that the Russian government "interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" via a social
media campaign run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and by "hacking" Democratic emails. But the evidence behind those charges
could not bear close scrutiny.
You would hardly know it from the LSM, but the accusation against the IRA was thrown out of court when the U.S. government admitted
it could not prove that the IRA was working for the Russian government. Mueller's ipse dixit did not suffice, as we
explained a year ago
in "Sic Transit Gloria Mueller."
The Best Defense
is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of its study -- call it "Mueller (Enhanced)" -- and the propaganda
fanfare -- come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning,
as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message.
Durham
One chief worry, of course, derives from the uncertainty as to whether John Durham, the US Attorney investigating those FBI and
other officials who launched the Trump-Russia investigation will let some heavy shoes drop before the election. Barr has said he
expects "developments in Durham's investigation hopefully before the end of the summer."
FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith already has decided to plead guilty to the felony of falsifying evidence used to support a warrant
from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveillance to spy on Trump associate Carter Page. It is abundantly clear that
Clinesmith was just a small cog in the deep-state machine in action against candidate and then President Trump. And those running
the machine are well known. The president has named names, and Barr has made no bones about his disdain for what he calls spying
on the president.
The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former
FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper,
for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be
the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without
taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks.
The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness -- particularly
with regard to Covid-19 -- he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith.
The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling
to all concerned is to say the obvious.
So, the stakes are high -- for the Democrats, as well -- and, not least, the LSM. In these circumstances it would seem imperative
not just to circle the wagons but to mount the best offense/defense possible, despite the fact that virtually all the ammunition
(as in the Senate report) is familiar and stale ("enhanced" or not).
Black eyes might well be in store for the very top former law enforcement and intelligence officials, the Democrats, and the LSM
-- and in the key pre-election period. So, the calculation: launch "Mueller Report (Enhanced)" and catapult the truth now with propaganda,
before it is too late.
No Evidence of Hacking
The "hacking of the DNC" charge suffered a fatal blow three months ago when it became known that Shawn Henry, president of the
DNC-hired cyber-security firm CrowdStrike,
admitted under oath that his firm had no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked -- by Russia or anyone else.
(YouTube)
Henry gave his testimony on Dec. 5, 2017,
but House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff was able to keep it hidden until May 7, 2020.
Here's a brief taste of how Henry's testimony went: Asked by Schiff for "the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data",
Henry replied, "We just don't have the evidence that says it actually left."
You did not know that? You may be forgiven -- up until now -- if your information diet is limited to the LSM and you believe The
New York Times still publishes "all the news that's fit to print." I am taking bets on how much longer the NYT will be able to keep
Henry's testimony hidden; Schiff's record of 29 months will be hard to beat.
Putting Lipstick on the Pig of Russian 'Tampering'
Worse still for the LSM and other Russiagate diehards, Mueller's findings last year enabled Trump to shout "No Collusion" with
Russia. What seems clear at this point is that a key objective of the current catapulting of the truth is to apply lipstick to Mueller's
findings.
After all, he was supposed to find treacherous plotting between the Trump campaign and the Russians and failed miserably. Most
LSM-suffused Americans remain blissfully unaware of this, and the likes of Pulitzer Prize winner Mazzetti have been commissioned
to keep it that way.
In Wednesday's
article , for example, Mazzetti puts it somewhat plaintively:
"Like the special counsel the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with
the Russian government -- a fact that the Republicans seized on to argue that there was 'no collusion'."
How could they!
Mazzetti is playing with words. "Collusion," however one defines it, is not a crime; conspiracy is.
'Breathtaking' Contacts: Mueller (Enhanced)
Mark Mazzetti (YouTube)
Mazzetti emphasizes that the Senate report "showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied
to the Kremlin," and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the intelligence committee's vice chairman,
said the committee report details "a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives
that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections."
None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known -- even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel
about people like Paul Manafort "sharing polling data with Russians" who might be intelligence officers. That data was "mostly public"
the Times itself
reported
, and the paper had to correct
a story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working
to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned.
Recent revelations regarding the false data given the FISA court by an FBI lawyer to "justify" eavesdropping on Trump associate
Carter Page show the Senate report to be not up to date and misguided in endorsing the FBI's decision to investigate Page. The committee
may wish to revisit that endorsement -- at least.
On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele,
labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium News
explained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to
push Russiagate.
Also missed by the intelligence committee was a document released by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that
revealed that Steele's "Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed
up as formal intelligence memos."
Smearing WikiLeaks
The Intelligence Committee report also repeats thoroughly
debunked
myths about WikiLeaks and, like Mueller, the committee made no effort to interview Julian Assange before launching its smears.
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who partnered with WikiLeaks in the publication of the Podesta emails, described the report's
treatment of WikiLeaks in this Twitter thread
:
2. the description of #WikiLeaks ' publishing activities
by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee
's Report appears a true #EdgarHoover 's disinformation
campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive
3. Clearly, to describe #WikiLeaks and its publishing activities the #SenateIntelligenceCommittee's Report completely rely
on #US intelligence community+ #MikePompeo's characterisation of #WikiLeaks. There is not even any pretense of an independent
approach
4. there are also unsubstantiated claims like:
– "[WikiLeaks'] disclosures have jeopardized the safety of individual Americans and foreign allies" (p.200)
– "WikiLeaks has passed information to U.S. adversaries" (p.201)
5. it's completely false that "#WikiLeaks does not seem to weigh whether its disclosures add any public interest value" (p.200)
and any longtime media partner like me could provide you dozens of examples on how wrong this characterisation [is].
Titillating
Mazzetti did add some spice to the version of his article that dominated the two top right columns of Wednesday's Times with the
blaring headline: "Senate Panel Ties Russian Officials to Trump's Aides: G.O.P.-Led Committee Echoes Mueller's Findings on Election
Tampering."
Those who make it to the end of Mazzetti's piece will learn that the Senate committee report "did not establish" that the Russian
government obtained any compromising material on Mr. Trump or that they tried to use such materials [that they didn't have] as leverage
against him." However, Mazzetti adds,
"According to the report, Mr. Trump met a former Miss Moscow at a party during one trip in 1996. After the party, a Trump associate
told others he had seen Mr. Trump with the woman on multiple occasions and that they 'might have had a brief romantic relationship.'
"The report also raised the possibility that, during that trip, Mr. Trump spent the night with two young women who joined him
the next morning at a business meeting with the mayor of Moscow."
This is journalism?
Another Pulitzer in Store?
The Times appends a note reminding us that Mazzetti was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald
Trump's advisers and their connections to Russia.
And that's not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word
feature, "The Plot to Subvert an Election," trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully
swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans.
That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the
fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed
in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people's news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to
mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed.
In exposing that chicanery, prize-winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter
commented :
"The descent of The New York Times into this unprecedented level of propagandizing for the narrative of Russia's threat to
U.S. democracy is dramatic evidence of a broader problem of abuses by corporate media Greater awareness of the dishonesty at the
heart of the Times' coverage of that issue is a key to leveraging media reform and political change."
Nothingburgers With Russian Dressing: the Backstory
The late Robert Parry.
"It's too much; it's just too much, too much", a sedated, semi-conscious Robert Parry kept telling me from his hospital bed in
late January 2018 a couple of days before he died. Bob was founder of Consortium News .
It was already clear what Bob meant; he had taken care to see to that. On Dec. 31, 2017 the reason for saying that came in what
he titled "An Apology
& Explanation" for "spotty production in recent days." A stroke on Christmas Eve had left Bob with impaired vision, but he was able
to summon enough strength to write an Apologia -- his vision for honest journalism and his dismay at what had happened to his profession
before he died on Jan. 27, 2018. The dichotomy was "just too much".
Parry rued the role that journalism was playing in the "unrelenting ugliness that has become Official Washington. Facts and logic
no longer mattered. It was a case of using whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent this loss of objective standards
reached deeply into the most prestigious halls of American media."
What bothered Bob most was the needless, dishonest tweaking of the Russian bear. "The U.S. media's approach to Russia," he wrote,
"is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read The New York Times ' or The Washington Post 's coverage
of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts? Western journalists now apparently see
it as their patriotic duty to hide facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia."
Parry, who was no conservative, continued:
"Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency
produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for 'hacking' Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks ."
Bob noted that the 'hand-picked' authors "evinced no evidence and even admitted that they weren't asserting any of this as fact."
It was just too much.
Robert Parry's Last Article
Peter Strzok during congressional hearing in July 2018. (Wikimedia Commons)
Bob posted his last substantive article on Dec. 13, 2017, the day after text exchanges between senior FBI officials Peter Strzok
and Lisa Page were made public. (Typically, readers of The New York Times the following day would altogether
miss the
importance of the text-exchanges.)
Bob Parry rarely felt any need for a "sanity check." Dec. 12, 2017 was an exception. He called me about the Strzok-Page texts;
we agreed they were explosive. FBI Agent Peter Strzok was on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff investigating alleged Russian
interference, until Mueller removed him.
Strzok reportedly was a "hand-picked" FBI agent taking part in the Jan 2017 evidence-impoverished, rump, misnomered "intelligence
community" assessment that blamed Russia for hacking and other election meddling. And he had helped lead the investigation into Hillary
Clinton's misuse of her computer servers. Page was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's right-hand lawyer.
His Dec. 13, 2017 piece
would be his fourth related article in less than two weeks; it turned out to be his last substantive article. All three of the earlier
ones are worth a re-read as examples of fearless, unbiased, perceptive journalism. Here
are the links .
Bob began his article
on the Strzok-Page bombshell:
"The disclosure of fiercely anti-Trump text messages between two romantically involved senior FBI officials who played key
roles in the early Russia-gate inquiry has turned the supposed Russian-election-meddling "scandal" into its own scandal, by providing
evidence that some government investigators saw it as their duty to block or destroy Donald Trump's presidency.?
"As much as the U.S. mainstream media has mocked the idea that an American 'deep state' exists and that it has maneuvered to
remove Trump from office, the text messages between senior FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and senior FBI lawyer
Lisa Page reveal how two high-ranking members of the government's intelligence/legal bureaucracy saw their role as protecting
the United States from an election that might elevate to the presidency someone as unfit as Trump."
Not a fragment of Bob's or other Consortium News analysis made any impact on what Bob used to call the Establishment media. As
a matter of fact, eight months later during a talk in Seattle that I titled "Russia-gate: Can You Handle the Truth?", only three
out of a very progressive audience of some 150 had ever heard of Strzok and Page.
Lest I am accused of being "in Putin's pocket," let me add the explanatory note that we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity included in our
most explosive Memorandum for President Trump, on "Russian hacking."
Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that
agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say
and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former
intelligence colleagues.
We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians
and pundits say is purely coincidental. The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly
politicized times.
somecallmetimmah , 1 hour ago
Only brain-washed losers read the new york times. Garbage propaganda for garbage people.
AtATrESICI , 43 minutes ago
"developments in Durham's investigation hopefully before the end of the summer." What summer? The summer of 2099.
Mouldy , 1 hour ago
So in a nutshell.. They just called half the USA too stupid to make an informed decision for themselves.
ominous , 1 hour ago
the disagreement is over which half is the stupid half
homeskillet , 25 minutes ago
The MIC's bogey man. What a crock of **** this whole country has become. Pravda puts out more truth than our MSM. I trust
Putin more than the Dem leaders at this point.
Demeter55 , 1 hour ago
The Globalist/New World Order/Deep State/Elitists (or whatever other arrogant subsection of the psychopaths among us you
wish to consider) have one great failing which will defeat them utterly in the end:
They do not know when to cut their losses.
As a result of that irrational stubbornness, born of a "Manifest Destiny" assumption of an eternal lock on the situation,
they will go too far.
Having more wealth than anyone is temporary.
Having more power than anyone is temporary.
Life is temporary.
And we outnumber them by several billion.
Even if they systematically try to destroy us, they will not have the ability unless we are complicit in our own destruction.
While there are many who have "taken the knee" to these tyrants in training, there are more who have no intention of doing
so.
Most nations are not so buffaloed as to fall for this propaganda, but the United States especially was created with the
notion that all men are created equal, and this is ingrained in the national character. We don't buy it.
And our numbers are growing daily, as people wake up and realize they have to take a side for themselves, their families,
their communities.
The global covid-panic was a masterful attack, but it will fail. Indeed, it has failed already. The building counter-attack
will take out those who chose to declare war on humanity. There really is no alternative for us, the humans. Live Free or Die,
as they say in New Hampshire.
And despite the full support of the MSM and the DNC, the Would-Be Masters of the Universe will not succeed.
sborovay07 , 1 hour ago
Sad Assange wasn't granted immunity to testify and was silenced just prior to the release of the Mueller report. Little
has been heard since except his health is horrific. Now, all the Deep State figures on both sides are just throwing as much
mud against Trump as possible to hide the truth. If Durnham does not indict the Deep State figures who participated in the
Obama led coup, all is for not. Only the foot soldiers marching in lock step will be charged.
wn , 1 hour ago
To sum it up.
Conclusion of the Democrats.
Americans need Russian brains to decide their leader in order to move forward.
nokilli , 25 minutes ago
Once the MO for "Russian hacking" is published to the international intelligence community, any (((party))) can pose as
a "Russian hacker."
This is the way computers work. Sybil is eponymous.
KuriousKat , 35 minutes ago
Mazzeti looks like the typical Gopher boy for the CIA Station Chiefs around the world..they retire or become contributors
to NewsWeek Wapo or NYT. ..not Any major network w/o one...Doing **** like this is mandatory..not elective.
I hope I live to see the day when the "New York Times" is deemed the same caliber of
"journalism" as the "National Inquirer". Of course, those with two brain cells to rub
together already know that this is the case. However, by "deemed", I mean by the
one-brain-celled masses.
homeskillet , 23 minutes ago
The National Enquirer actually has many more believable articles.
Pernicious Gold Phallusy , 20 minutes ago
The National Enquirer broke the story of Presidential candidate John Edwards cheating on
his wife, who was undergoing breast cancer treatment at the time. Other media organizations,
including the NYT, knew about it and refused to cover it.
Stu Pedassle , 1 hour ago
Glad to see Operation Mockingbird is still going strong after 60 years
American main stream media is not informing and reporting but is actually Goebbels-like
propaganda for the Democrats. Fox is only retaliating with opposing views. Imagine Walter
Cronkite being advocate for one party – that would be scandalous. However the present
insects on CNN, MSNBC, NYT or WP and other dishonest outlets have no guts to stand up against
their owners disloyalty to this country.
Insightful overview. Giraldi explores the most important topic in American life. And one
of the most neglected: MSM distortions, omissions, sanctimony, propaganda, deception and
gaslighting. Stomach-turning drek –all of it.
Americans are in a half-Zombie state because of what they see on TV, and cannot discuss on
social media.
Hollywood, elite media, and Big Tech are the gatekeepers [ of the neoliberal power].
The shysters at WPO and NYT think that once they have misdirected the voters for their
goal into voting for Joe Biden, it can pick up things where they left off and fix it without
any problems but what they don't realize is that the train has left the station and now it's
barreling down the dark abyss from where there is no return to safety.
It took balls for Carlson to have Anya Parampil on his show last night. He has had her on
before, so he knows what she is like she tells it like it is. He will get shit for that.
I don't think he agrees with everything she said but agrees with some of it.
@Tommy Thompson he military is responsible for or how Israel is treated, how corporations
are handed free billions upon billions, etc, and its largely business as usual. All the noise
about Trump the disruptor is just that, noise. He hasn't disrupted anything of note.
As long as the two political parties exist, voting is for people who want to believe a
lie. Deep down they know, absolutely know, that the system is rigged but they can't let
themselves fully believe that because that would mean there is no hope. They would realize
that they live in a sophisticated soft military dictatorship that has stolen $21 Trillion
dollars and is the actual gov't of the country. That realization is unpalatable and
hence rejected.
However the present insects on CNN, MSNBC, NYT or WP and other dishonest outlets have no
guts to stand up against their owners disloyalty to this country.
It's not a simple as that. All the media people know that it's a rotten system, but if
they step out of line – they lose their jobs – and make themselves unemployable
anywhere else.
IMO it's not a question of standing up – which is pointless – but using
organized subversion. After all, this is what Jewry have been doing for decades in targeting
Anglo run organizations and it works. It's your friend and collaborator who is really your
enemy.
Thanks Phil for pointing out these prime examples of Media being MIA. But the question
remains, is there anything, new to the media's role in reporting, misreporting or
non-reporting the serious news stories of the day.
The MSM (Main Stream Media) and even a good part of the Alternative Media has been AWOL as
a protector of the rights of the public really for decades. The problem lies with our self
created media system. We have Freedom of the Press only for those that can afford to
buy their own press, print or electronic. The MSM has been accurately shown to be controlled
by a few consolidated Zio- owned Media conglomerates. Thus their has never been any serious
reporting on Israel – Palestine conflict, as it is not allowed and most critical
thinkers have to seek real news tidbits from the biased but less censored Israeli press.
Israel has govt censors, but we have Owner self-censorship which now extends to many other of
domestic and international politics.
The American public is now reaping what it has sowed. It's near total apathy and misplaced
faith in a very outdated electoral system which has slowly winded down its usefulness to the
American public in raising real leaders and statesmen who are willing to defend our Bill of
Rights and national independence is the real culprit.
The dumbed down and distracted public mind set in America is leading the country down a
deep chasm where it looks increasingly impossible to climb out of. Surely this is all leading
to a slow societal self-destruction.
As pointed out by Phil, the MSM failure to call a spade a spade on most key issues
from the Bombing of Beirut to the Portland civil insurrection, are just recent examples of a
press whose job has become more psy-ops and naked propaganda than providing any informed and
objective news reporting and defense of the general public from the political malevolent
forces taking over our country and world.
I think you finally hit it on the head. For 4 years the only agenda has been "get Trump".
Or I should say the only day the MSM LOVED Trump in unison was the day he illegally bombed
Syria over the fake chemical weapons attack on April 5th, 2017. That day every editorial page
in the country said silly things like he's "Presidential" and " a real leader". As if they
take their marching orders from the same Soros News Agency, approved copy for the unwashed
masses. See the problem? That's the day I said "Whoa, we really got a problem". The problem
was the MSM finally thought they got some control over Trump, or should I say the CIA finally
thought it got some control over Trump. Because that's what it really is: Our true masters,
not some silly guy who thinks the "President" is actually a president, and not the " General
Asset Manager, US division" for the NWO.
" the American public has largely figured things out "
A poll about a week ago found that the average American thinks 9% of the population has
died from Covid. (= about 30 million people) A few weeks ago a poll found that (by a narrow
margin) Americans think Trump suffers from cognitive impairment to a greater degree than
Biden. These are not exactly arcane issues, and the degree of ignorance is astonishing.
Brainwashing has succeeded. This is why 'la asserts that the "demonstrators" are mothers and
veterans; and that Biden will cure Covid; she believes that, with the assistance of the
media, she can sell these.
An interesting point about 2020 NYC starting to resemble the 70s. I've talked to several
people who actually say they miss it compared to the "cleaner, safer" NYC since then. All I
remember is garbage, crime, and "malaise."
"... Are you arguing that sociopaths have an inalienable right to hold office, even though they will inevitably use that office to aggrandize themselves at the expense of everyone else, and could spark a general war just for their own enjoyment and to gather yet more power to themselves? ..."
"... How do people who don't share your beliefs get represented if you rig the system to exclude them? People unlike you are sociopaths? It isn't even tempting. Your cost benefit study benefits you. The world is destabilized if your guys don't get in? No surprise. ..."
"... The under-employment rate is also very informative. People working less hours or in lower positions than their investment in education should have returned to them. They are working, but not enough to be able to independently sustain themselves, which makes them insecure in variety of ways. ..."
"... It all depends on what the penalties are. Confiscation of hidden assets would chill that behavior, strike one. Loss of the privilege to conduct business with federal and state entities would also chill such behavior, strike two. Finally, for persistent violations of the cap, loss of citizenship and expulsion form the country, three strikes and you are literally out, would be the ultimate penalty. ..."
"... The United States is actually both a federation (hardly unique by the way) and a representative democracy. Whether you call them members of Parliament or members of Congress, their representatives are elected by the people. ..."
Huge numbers of people who disagree with me and don't share my particular beliefs are not sociopaths, nothing would stop them
from running or holding office, and I've no problem with that.
Are you arguing that sociopaths have an inalienable right to hold office, even though they will inevitably use that office
to aggrandize themselves at the expense of everyone else, and could spark a general war just for their own enjoyment and to gather
yet more power to themselves?
How do people who don't share your beliefs get represented if you rig the system to exclude them? People unlike you are sociopaths?
It isn't even tempting. Your cost benefit study benefits you. The world is destabilized if your guys don't get in? No surprise.
Love this line: "the gig economy combined with record debt and astronomically high rent prices cancel out any potential economic
stability for millions of people."
The under-employment rate is also very informative. People working less hours or in lower positions than their investment in
education should have returned to them. They are working, but not enough to be able to independently sustain themselves, which
makes them insecure in variety of ways.
Do you think the interpreters might turn out to be agents, or perhaps even assassins, from other governments? Or maybe everybody
will be knocked out with fentanyl gas at dinner. In the dining room.
1. It all depends on what the penalties are. Confiscation of hidden assets would chill that behavior, strike one. Loss of the
privilege to conduct business with federal and state entities would also chill such behavior, strike two. Finally, for persistent
violations of the cap, loss of citizenship and expulsion form the country, three strikes and you are literally out, would be the
ultimate penalty.
The alternative, continuing to allow unlimited wealth accumulation will ultimately destroy democracy and end in a dictatorship
nearly impossible to remove without massive casualties. Is that preferable to trying to control the behavior of wealth addicts?
Make no mistake: billionaires are addicts, their uncontrollable addiction to more is an extreme form of hoarding dysfunction,
one that, like all uncontrolled addictions, has had disastrous consequences for everyone but them.
3. Fewer Representatives means you are concentrating power rather than dispersing it. More means smaller districts, which in
turn means more accountability, not less. As it stands now, Congresscritters can safely ignore the wishes of the public, because
when someone "represents" nearly a million citizens, it means they actually represent only themselves. If taken in conjunction
with item #2, more citizens would be invested in the political process and far more likely to pay attention.
4. The Hare test is a standard written exam that is difficult to cheat. Getting caught at cheating or attempting to cheat would
mark one automatically as a sociopath. The latest studies of brain structures show that sociopaths have physically different brains,
and those physical differences are detectable. Brain activity as shown by fMRI also clearly marks a sociopath from a normal, since
while they can fake emotional responses very well, their brain activity shows their true lack of response to emotionally charged
images, words, etc. Using a three-layer test, written>fMRI>genetic should be robust enough to correctly identify most. The stakes
are too huge to risk a set of sociopaths and their lackeys control of the machinery of government. The genetic test is the most
likely to give problematic results, but if the written is failed, the fMRI would then be done to confirm or reject the written
results, while the genetics would be a supplementary confirmation. Widespread genetic testing of politicians and would-bes would
undoubtedly advance research and understanding dramatically.
When you do even a casual cost-benefit study, the answer is clear: test them. Ask yourself: is the thwarting of an individual's
potential career in politics really that great a cost compared to preventing unknowingly electing a sociopath who could destabilize
the entire world?
Another big difference of course is a little thing called the law.
Are you under the impression the British don't have rule of law? Their elected representatives make their laws, not
their ceremonial royal family. Their royal family's job is to abide by the same laws as every other UK citizen, stay out of politics
and promote British tourism and gossip magazines.
The United States is actually a federal republic, not a democracy.
The United States is actually both a federation (hardly unique by the way) and a representative democracy. Whether you call
them members of Parliament or members of Congress, their representatives are elected by the people.
If we move the cheap manufacturing to the US, and wages are lower due to a depression, people will take the jobs, and the
job numbers will improve. And China will be toast.
We will never beat China at manufacturing cheap and efficient products using human labor. Robotic labor maybe, but that might
not happen for a decade or more at least--if they or another country doesn't beat us to retooling our factories.
Labor and manufacturing will never return in the US--unless we have another world war we win, in which all global production is
again concentrated in the US because the rest of the worlds factories are bombed to rubble. Besides, they have the most central
location for manufacturing in the world and a cheap source of endless labor.
What they don't have is innovation, tech and freedom to try products out on a free market. We are squandering those advantages
in the US when we cut education and limit college education to the masses.
Are Americans the most immoral people on earth? I don't think so. Do we have the strictest code of laws on earth? I don't think
so either. Yet we have the highest incarceration rate on earth. Higher than authoritarian countries like China & Russia.
This alone should tell you something is wrong with our system. Never mind the stats about differing average sentences depending
on race & wealth.
Doubt implies a reason behind the wrong, where uncertainty implies an unknowing trait--a mystery behind the wrong.
The right, what with all its fake news scams, deep state BS and witch hunt propaganda, is uncertainty at best, a mystery of sorts--it
provides us with a conspiracy that can neither be proved or unproven--an enigma.
Doubt, about if Russia meddled in the US election in collusion with the president or at the least his advisors, surely implies
something is wrong, especially in the face of criminal charges, doubt is inherent and well intentioned, but not always true and
can be proven false in the face of doubt.
At one time the US was agrarian and one could subsist via bartering. Consider reliance on for-profit healthcare, transportation
systems, debt, credit cards, landlords, grocery stores, and the lack of any ability to subsist without statewide and nationwide
infrastructure. Right now, people in the US already die prematurely if they can't afford healthcare. Many are homeless. And this
is when things are better than ever? What will happen here is what happened in Europe during WWII. People will suffer, and they
will be forced to adopt socialist practices (like the EU does today). People in Europe really did starve to death, and people
in India, Africa, and other countries are starving and dying today. China doles out food rations because they practice communism.
That's why they have cheap, efficient labor that serves to manufacture products for US consumers. Communism and socialism help
American corporations big time.
Citizens United is a First Amendment decision. Which part of the First Amendment do you want moot? What gives any government the
right to decide which assemblies of citizens have no free speech rights?
You are aware, I imagine, that the US can adjust its money supply to adapt to circumstances? We can feed ourselves. We have our
own power sources. We can improvise, adapt, and overcome. Prices go up and down. No big deal. Scaring people for political gain
doesn't have the clout it onvce did.
Too many virtue signalers seem to think that only the innocent are ever convicted.
The system is not crooked, but if you can set up a better one that doesn't bankrupt every community, have at it.
You really, really, really like screaming racist, don't you? And slide in a Godwin. Wow. The concept that black pastors would
be negatively impacted by financial attacks on their churches never ever occurred to you, did it? You get off on pretending to
care about people that you have no direct, routine connection to. How virtuous of you. Wouldn't deliberately harming black churches
make you the racist storm trooper?
Violence will break out when credit cards stop working. Can't even imagine what will happen if people are starving. No problem
in a socialistic country like Finland, but a big problem here. My guess is that Trump knows the economy is hanging by a thread,
so needs to create an alternate reason (trade wars). Or he figures he might as well have a trade war if it's all going to pieces
anyway. Of course China manufactures just about everything for the US. If we move the cheap manufacturing to the US, and wages
are lower due to a depression, people will take the jobs, and the job numbers will improve. And China will be toast.
Don't forget as the Trump trade war heats up and China decides to sell off US bonds en-masse (they own 1.17 trillion in US debt).
That's gonna put a hurt on the already low US dollar and could send inflation soaring. China could also devalue its currency and
increase the trade deficit. Combine those with all the things you've pointed out and you've got financial troubles the likes of
which no large government has ever dealt with in human history.
Starving people--China can handle in droves; not so much the US. We're talking nasty violence if that kinda stuff happens here.
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for
profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable,
unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection,
safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
Occupy Wall Street began due to income inequality when the worst effects of the Great Recession were being felt by the population.
Wealth inequality has only increased since then.
Right now, the population is held at bay because the media and politicians claim that the economy is so incredibly hot it's overheating.
But we know that's a lie. For one, the gig economy combined with record debt and astronomically high rent prices cancel out any
potential economic stability for millions of people. This year, 401(k) plans have returned almost nothing (or are going negative).
This was also the case in 2016. Savings accounts have returned almost nothing for the last decade (they should be providing approximately
5% interest).
The worker participation rate today is 3.2% below what it was in 2008 (during the Great Recession). The US population, meanwhile,
has increased by approximately 24,321,000. That's a 7.68% increase. The labor force has increased by 5% during this time (unemployment
rate was relatively similar, 5.6% vs 4%). From June 2008 to June 2018, the labor force increased by approximately 8 million. However,
if the worker participation rate was the same now as it was then, there would be approximately 8 million more people in the labor
force. If you add 8 million people to the current number of people who are counted as unemployed by the BLS, the unemployment
rate is approximately 9%. This is about as high as the unemployment rate got during the depths of the Great Recession, right when
Occupy Wall Street was born.
Now, OK, sure, the economy has REPLACED lost jobs, but it has not ADDED jobs for the last decade. The unemployment rate is false.
It should be at least 8%. There's many millions of Americans who do not have steady, gainful employment - or any employment -
and they are not counted.
The billionaires and their bought politicians are responsible for fixing this. They can fix it and should fix it. Otherwise, the
economy and their profits are going to fall off a giant cliff any day now. The next recession has basically already begun, but
it can still be alleviated. If things continue as they are, unemployment could be 16% by 2020, with the U6 measure approaching
or exceeding 25%. If stocks drop enough, people may starve to death.
Who supported Citizen's United? All cons and republicans
Who supports campaign finance reform and legislation that would make Cititzen's United moot? Democrats and progressives
Really tired of the false equivalencies. Republicans are now the polar opposite of Democrats in policy and principles. Vote Blue
this November and get rid of the republicans; every single one of them. It can be done if people get out and vote.
1. Anything is possible but I don't think this is practical. The rich can just cheat on the definition of ownership, pass it around
between family members, offshore it, sink it into their businesses in token ways, etc. When you try to take wealth (power) away
from the most powerful people in the country they will start devoting SERIOUS resources to getting around it.
3. I'm not saying we need fewer people doing congress's job in total. But we should be electing fewer of them, and letting
those fewer people do more hiring/delegating. The way things are now, most of the public only knows much about the president.
Everyone else is mostly just a vote for a party. But if the country only voted for 50 Congressmen in total - or even fewer - then
we would all have a more careful eye on them. We would know them better and see them more individually. They would have less pressure
to toe the party line all the time.
4. As long as there's a written test then it will get cheated. Right now the testing is rarely given and the specific consequences
don't determine powerful people's careers. Make it a widespread & important thing and people will learn to cheat it.
The genetic + fMRI research is interesting but the whole thing opens up serious cans of worms. We're talking about DQ'ing somebody
from an important career based partially on the results of a genetic screening for a character trait. That's a dangerous business
for our whole society to get into. Although I do realize the payoff for this specific instance would be very big.
1. Why do you think that? Using teams of forensic accountants and outlawing secret accounts would go a long way towards increasing
enforceability. But you are viewing it as a legal problem rather than a cultural problem. If an effective propaganda campaign
aimed on one level at the public and another level at the billionaires, it could work. Many billionaires are already committed
to returning their fortunes to the economy (mostly after they are dead, true). Convince a few and the rest will follow. Give them
the lure of claiming the title of the richest who ever were and some would be eager for that place in history.
Anything can be done if the will is there.
2. Income taxes are just a portion of the federal revenues, ~47%. Corporate taxes, parkland fees, excise taxes, ~18% taken
together and Social Security make up the rest. Revenues would increase as taxpayers topped off step amounts to keep control. The
beauty of it is that Congress would see very clearly where the nation's priorities were. Any politician trying to raise fines
so that they had more money under their control would soon find themselves out of office. Unpopular programs would
have to be financed out of the 18%, and that would likely make them increase corporate taxes. But most importantly, it would cut
the power of politicians and decrease the effectiveness of lobbyists.
3. Actually, we have too few, not too many. The work of governance suffers because there is too much to be done and too few
to do it. Spreading the workload and assigning responsibility areas would increase efficiency. Most importantly though, it would
break up the oligarchic duopoly that keeps a stranglehold on the nation's politics, and bring more third party candidates into
office giving Congress a more diverse culture by adding viewpoints based on other things than business interests.
4. Actually, advances in fMRI equipment and procedures, along with genetics and written testing can prove beyond a reasonable
doubt whether or not someone is a sociopath, do some research and you'l see it is true. False positives in any testing regime
are always an issue, but tens of millions of workers submit to drug tests to qualify for their jobs, and their jobs don't usually
run the risk of plunging the world into war, economic or environmental disasters. False positives are common in the workplace
and cost many thousands their jobs.
And there's an easy way to prove you aren't really a sociopath: be honest, don't lie, and genuinely care about people...things
sociopaths cannot do over time.
Seriously, it is a societal safety issue that demands to be done, protecting the few against false positives means opening
the floodgates for the many sociopaths who seek power over others.
Not just eliminate--alter and add to it, but since it takes 2/3 majority of the house and senate to amend the constitution--it's
not an easy feat--that's why there has only been 17 amendments altogether and two of them are there to cancel each other out!
You see, the beauty behind the National
Popular Vote Bill is that it's done on a state by state basis and will only work when the required 270 electoral votes are
gained with the bill--this means all voters would have their votes tallied in a presidential election and it eliminates swing
states with a winner takes all approach. The electoral college and state control of elections are preserved and every one is happy.
I feel like you've not read up on any of this even though I provide a link. 12 of these bills have been enacted into state law
already, comprising of 172 electoral votes and 3,112 legislative sponsors. That's more than halfway there.
To continue to say that changing the way we vote by altering the EC is a fantasy is in itself a fantasy because obviously it is
gaining traction across the country.
Which 'side' do you imagine I'm on Mike ? FYI.. Im not a member of any tribe especially regarding the republican or democrat parties...
you may have noticed that as part of the progress towards a globalized economy, 'Money' now has open borders...but the restrictions
of movement for people are growing as nationalism rises and wealth and the power it yields, becomes ever more concentrated in
fewer hands...this is a dangerous precedent and history repeats if lessons of the past are not learned.
I can well recall when humanity and the ability of the individual to attain freedom and liberty based upon the merit of the individual
was once celebrated.
What really irks me and causes me to voice my opinion on this forum, ( thank you Guardian for your continued efforts at informing
us all and especially for promoting participation) is how easily people are duped .. when 'others' can easily see that they are
being lied to. My parents fought for freedom and liberty against vicious tyranny in Europe and paid a HUGE price..by the time
the scales had tipped the balance towards fascism, it was far too late for anything other than all out war... the fact that they
survived the required sacrifice to pitch in to protect democracy, and the freedom and liberty which comes with it, still seems
miraculous..
Billionaires on the left should put some of that money into paying for and distributing subscriptions to newspapers and magazines
which live up to the standards of professional journalism. These papers should be made available, free, at high schools, colleges,
libraries, and commercial centers of loitering and "neighborly" discussions. May I suggest the NYT, WP, The Guardian, and The
Economist.
"What the country sorely needs is a new constitution."
No thanks! The Founders were quite a bit more intelligent than the current national 'brain trust' -- on the both sides
of the Aisle -- that would be charged with writing a new Constitution.
"The Sedwill/Younger narrative of what happened on the day, the British prosecution case
against two GRU agents for the novichok attack, and the ongoing inquest into the cause of
Dawn Sturgess's death remain at risk of exposure; to reduce that risk and move on to a new
policy towards Russia and other enemies, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings have now forced
Sedwill and Younger into retirement, concealing the purge and their purpose": John
Helmer."Dances with Bears" website.
Thanks to Mark2 for the YouTube link on the 77th brigade. You may find Helmer's
investigations as fascinating as I do.
And as an adjunct to uncle tungsten's comments re. the round table and Rhodes scholarship
recipients. Susan Rice is a Rhodes scholar. This is portentous.
"The long read [...] does not account for who or what instigated the British spies into
launching their campaign against Trump. My hunch is that then CIA director John Brennan was
the central person behind it."
You're starting from the assumption that our British "cousins" are junior partners in the
American hegemon's globalist designs, but in fact American imperialism is a departure from
its founding principles, in which willing Anglophiles (Aaron Burr, J.P. Morgan, the Dulles
Bros., to name a few -- you get the picture) have always subverted efforts by US leaders to
break from British geopolitics as formulated by Halford Mackinder, etc., for whom the
survival of Atlanticist world power still depends on preventing US-Russia collaboration to
bring about a world anti-colonialist order. This oligarchy, whose species memory far
surpasses that of the clueless masses for whom they rewrite history, can still feel the burn
of Catherine the Great's support for the American Revolution when she refused George III
Russia's help suppressing rebellion in the American colonies, or when Alexander II deployed
two whole fleets of the Russian Navy to prevent the British from bailing out the failing
Confederacy. More recently, Franklin Roosevelt sent Churchill into apoplectic rage when he
categorically rejected that racist pig's demand to return her colonies back to Britain at the
end of the war.
Since at least the assassination of Lincoln (or earlier, when British soldiers came down
from Canada to burn down Washington in 1814) the British Empire and its surviving heirs have
always been at the core of efforts to denature America, replacing win-win Hamiltonian
economics with a phony "free-trade" ideology increasingly adopted as gospel by "western"
economic authorities, and sabotaging every effort by Americans to play a productive,
cooperative role with other nations in world affairs. Just like Hillary Clinton and her
crazed minions refuse to acknowledge the election of Donald Trump, the Brits never accepted
the loss of their former colonies, and have never missed an opportunity to subvert the
uniquely American System by which we became a world power -- no thanks to any kind of
"special relationship" with Britain, which quickly sank its hooks into our finances by
establishing Wall Street as an outpost of the City of London, and infiltrating all of our
political and economic as well as cultural and academic institutions (Harvard, e.g.) with
devotees of that financial empire. True American interests have always been betrayed by
Anglophile fifth-columnists aligned with the Brits -- more broadly defined as a true
oligarchy that goes back to Venice and its alliance with the Ottoman Empire to bring down
Constantinople, the gateway to a Eurasian powerhouse which then and now threatens to weaken
these globalists' hold over world affairs.
So "Rule Britannia" is still the battle cry of the Five Eyes "intelligence community" as
it spins out wild, implausible narratives to demonize every alternative to the necrotic
vulture capitalism behind globalist hegemony, which most mistakenly see as an American
enterprise but in reality is the essence of the "Deep State" that so-called patriots believe
they oppose. Such is these psy-warriors' control of collective awareness, through mainstream
media and well-placed mouthpieces, as well as, increasingly, "independent" social media and
education itself, that red-blooded Americans who instinctively deplore this usurpation of
their sovereignty blame Russia, or China, or whomever, and mindlessly parrot absurd
"intelligence community" slanders against any country standing up to the status quo
Perfidious Albion has been craftily building since... well, since the day after Yorktown. Any
initial skepticism at this historical perspective, protestations that such claims are
preposterous and the British Empire died long ago, will quickly fall away as the origin of
every fake news item used against the Trump administration is examined, whether paid for by
the Democratic Party, the FBI, etc. Consider this a mere primer in a much-needed re-framing
of strategic analyses at this time. As Leviathan lashes out in increasing pain at an
encroaching multi-polar paradigm of development and growth, its DNA will become increasingly
apparent.
My hunch is that the "long read," by omitting this piece of the puzzle, is a bit of
a cover-up... or, as they say, "limited hangout."
a bit of a cover-up... or, as they say, "limited hangout."
I concur with that.
I believe that the operation was approved by bigwigs in both the US and UK
establishment.
Gina Haspel's presence in London is not likely to be an accident. If the operation was
supposed to elect Hillary instead of Trump, I suspect she wouldn't be CIA Director today.
We should not underestimate the angst in 2013 and 2014 at Russia's interventions in Syria
and Ukraine. Russian assertiveness showed that their alliance with China was serious.
The poms have a way of getting away with this kind of stuff - have been doing it for their
entire history. Lots of conspiring, lots of coverupping. But when the Americans are
actively involved I guess things can get complicated.
Thank you for that post. re Skripals - it is also possible that the two 'Russian chaps'
picked up what they were after (left at a drop by Sergei) and returned to London as planned
and then on to Russia that night. When the MI6 imagined rendezvous between the Russian chaps
and Skripals failed to materialise and then things went pear shape at the pub, MI6 decided to
fix the Skripals. Perhaps they left the 'Russian chaps' alone as it was all too late or too
dangerous for MI6 to grab them as well. Perhaps Sergei gave them material that was promptly
uploaded and sent home as the two rode the train to London. They caught the 1300 train afaik
and the Skripals were 'hit' at 1700 more or less.
But something critical seems to have gone down at the pub and MI6 was not in that loop.
Mayhem ensued as the Skripals then walked away to their doom.
Pure speculation on my part as I seek logic in a black ops world.
Thank you for the advice on Susan Rice. Rhodes Scholar data base here for barflies to ponder . See Alumni and
Volunteers for a roadmap etc.
The first and the most important fact that there will no elections in November -- both candidates represent the same oligarchy,
just slightly different factions of it.
Look like NYT is controlled by Bolton faction of CIA. They really want to overturn the
results of 2020 elections and using Russia as a bogeyman is a perfect opportunity to achieve this
goal.
Neocons understand very well that it is MIC who better their bread, so amplifying rumors the simplify getting additional budget
money for intelligence agencies (which are a part of MIC) is always the most desirable goal.
Notable quotes:
"... But a new assessment says China would prefer to see the president defeated, though it is not clear Beijing is doing much to meddle in the 2020 campaign to help Joseph R. Biden Jr. ..."
"... The statement then claims: "Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's confidence in our democratic process." ..."
"... But how do the 'intelligence' agencies know that foreign states want to "sway preferences", "increase discord" or "undermine confidence" in elections? ..."
"... But ascribing motive and intent is a tricky business, because perceived impact is often mistaken for true intent. [...] Where is the evidence that Russia actually wants to bring down the liberal world order and watch the United States burn? ..."
"... Well there is none. And that is why the 'intelligence' agencies do not present any evidence. ..."
"... Is there a secret policy paper by the Russian government that says it should "increase discord" in the United States? Is there some Chinese think tank report which says that undermining U.S. people's confidence in their democratic process would be good for China? ..."
"... If the 'intelligence' people have copies of those papers why not publish them? ..."
"... Let me guess. The 'intelligence' agencies have nothing, zero, nada. They are just making wild-ass guesses about 'intentions' of perceived enemies to impress the people who sign off their budget. ..."
"... Nowadays that seems to be their main purpose. ..."
But when one reads the piece itself one finds no fact that would support the 'Russia
Continues Interfering' statement:
Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr., American intelligence
officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow continues to try to
interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.
At the same time, the officials said China preferred that Mr. Trump be defeated in
November and was weighing whether to take more aggressive action in the election.
But officials briefed on the intelligence said that Russia was the far graver, and more
immediate, threat. While China seeks to gain influence in American politics, its leaders have
not yet decided to wade directly into the presidential contest, however much they may dislike
Mr. Trump, the officials said.
The assessment, included in a
statement released by William R. Evanina, the director of the National
Counterintelligence and Security Center, suggested the intelligence community was treading
carefully, reflecting the political heat generated by previous findings.
The authors emphasize the scaremongering hearsay from "officials briefed on the
intelligence" - i.e. Democratic congress members - about Russia but have nothing to back it
up.
When one reads the
statement by Evanina one finds nothing in it about Russian attempts to interfere in the
U.S. elections. Here is the only 'evidence' that is noted:
For example, pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach is spreading claims about
corruption – including through publicizing leaked phone calls – to undermine
former Vice President Biden's candidacy and the Democratic Party. Some Kremlin-linked actors
are also seeking to boost President Trump's candidacy on social media and Russian television.
After a request from Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal attorney, a Ukrainian
parliamentarian published Ukrainian
evidence of Biden's very real interference in the Ukraine. Also: Some guest of a Russian TV
show had an opinion. How is either of those two items 'evidence' of Russian interference in
U.S. elections?
The statement then claims: "Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt
influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift
U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's
confidence in our democratic process."
But how do the 'intelligence' agencies know that foreign states want to "sway preferences",
"increase discord" or "undermine confidence" in elections?
The mainstream view in the U.S. media and government holds that the Kremlin is waging a
long-haul campaign to undermine and destabilize American democracy. Putin wants to see the
United States burn, and contentious elections offer a ready-made opportunity to fan the
flames.
But ascribing motive and intent is a tricky business, because perceived impact is often
mistaken for true intent. [...] Where is the evidence that Russia actually wants to bring
down the liberal world order and watch the United States burn?
Well there is none. And that is why the 'intelligence' agencies do not present any
evidence.
Even the NYT writers have to
admit that there is nothing there:
The release on Friday was short on specifics, ...
and
Intelligence agencies focus their work on the intentions of foreign governments, and steer
clear of assessing if those efforts have had an effect on American voters.
How do 'intelligence' agencies know Russian, Chinese or Iranian 'intentions'. Is there a
secret policy paper by the Russian government that says it should "increase discord" in the
United States? Is there some Chinese think tank report which says that undermining U.S.
people's confidence in their democratic process would be good for China?
If the 'intelligence' people have copies of those papers why not publish them?
Let me guess. The 'intelligence' agencies have nothing, zero, nada. They are just making
wild-ass guesses about 'intentions' of perceived enemies to impress the people who sign off
their budget.
Nowadays that seems to be their main purpose.
Posted by b on August 8, 2020 at 18:08 UTC |
Permalink
It would be interesting to see how many of inhabitants of CHAZ zone, who experinced the "summer of love" will vote for Trump in
Novemebr.
Notable quotes:
"... The land of soy milk and honey was disbanded on July 1 and was duly eulogised by the usual suspects as basically an extended block party. A month on, the NY Times finally got around to sending a reporter to speak to the people who lived and worked in the area before the protestors moved in and produced an admittedly excellent piece of reportage on the situation. ..."
"... The piece, as journalist Michael Tracey observed on Twitter, would have been dismissed as right-wing propaganda just a month ago and shows that this little experiment in anarcho-communism was a million miles away from paradise. ..."
"... The picture painted by the residents is one of gangs of armed thugs running protection rackets and widespread vandalism. The first person mentioned in the piece, a gay man of Middle Eastern extraction named Faizel Khan, reveals that to get to the coffee shop he runs he had to get permission from "gun wielding white men" who at one point barricaded him and all his customers in the store. ..."
"... In his pre-CHOP days, Mr Hearns was a security guard for many years, but after the police vacated the area (their precinct was taken over by protesters and then promptly set on fire) he became part of the "Black Lives Matter Community Patrol". This patrol had locals "pay for their protection." ..."
"... It doesn't sound like they were particularly good at ensuring community cohesion either, considering six people were shot under their jurisdiction and two of them died. ..."
"... Observers also noted that rather than being a multi-racial melting pot of equality, the CHOP turned into a "white occupation" as the numbers of Antifa activists began to outnumber the BLM protesters. They also established "black only segregated areas" within the CHOP, making it frightening similar to the Confederacy, which also, coincidentally, seceded from the union. ..."
"... The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. ..."
Following
an investigative report the paper of record has revealed that business owners who were stuck in the Capitol Hill Organised Protest
'aren't so sure about abolishing the police'. No sh*t Sherlock.
The New York Times has done something distinctly out of character and actually produced some decent journalism. Taking a break
from getting editors sacked for allowing Republican senators to write op-eds and forcing out the few remaining sane people on their
staff for not quaffing the identity politics Cool-Aid enthusiastically enough, they dispatched a reporter to
Seattle to pick through the remnants
of the CHOP , a month after it closed.
The Capital Hill Organised Protest, formally CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), was the area of the city that, for 23 glorious
days, declared independence from the United States. A bunch of Black Lives Matter and Antifa radicals hoofed out the police and decided
to try and run the area as some sort of Marxist utopia. What they actually established was a gang run hellhole that made the Wild
West look like Switzerland.
It wasn't described as such at the time of course. Seattle's mayor said the city was in for a "summer of love"
and most
of the left-wing press would have had you believe that it was pretty much a hippy commune full of free vegan food and urban collective
farms.
The land of soy milk and honey was disbanded on July 1 and was duly eulogised by the usual suspects as basically an extended block
party. A month on, the NY Times finally got around to sending a reporter to speak to the people who lived and worked in the area
before the protestors moved in and produced an admittedly excellent piece of reportage on the situation. It was headlined,
"Abolish
the Police? Those Who Survived the Chaos in Seattle Aren't So Sure." The piece, as journalist Michael Tracey observed on Twitter,
would have been dismissed as right-wing propaganda just a month ago and shows that this little experiment in anarcho-communism was
a million miles away from paradise.
To say they "aren't sure" has to be the understatement of the year. The picture painted by the residents is one of gangs
of armed thugs running protection rackets and widespread vandalism. The first person mentioned in the piece, a gay man of Middle
Eastern extraction named Faizel Khan, reveals that to get to the coffee shop he runs he had to get permission from "gun wielding
white men" who at one point barricaded him and all his customers in the store.
Mr Khan's experiences during these three and a bit weeks of lawlessness were so horrendous that he and a host of other small business
owners, described as "lonely voices in progressive areas," are suing Seattle after the local police force refused to respond
to their calls for the duration of the CHOP. And as the litany of horrors they were subjected to is laid bare in the NY Times article,
it is not hard to see why.
Another character we meet in this saga is Rick Hearns. In his pre-CHOP days, Mr Hearns was a security guard for many years, but
after the police vacated the area (their precinct was taken over by protesters and then promptly set on fire) he became part of the
"Black Lives Matter Community Patrol". This patrol had locals "pay for their protection." Now what other organisation does
that remind you of? If you can't think of it, may I suggest you watch virtually any Martin Scorsese movie and I think you'll get
the picture.
It doesn't sound like they were particularly good at ensuring community cohesion either, considering
six people were shot
under their jurisdiction and two of them died. Interestingly, since they were replacing the "institutionally racist"
police force, (run by a black woman incidentally but why let facts spoil it) one of the victims was a black teenager.
Observers also noted that rather than being a multi-racial melting pot of equality, the CHOP turned into a "white occupation"
as the numbers of Antifa activists began to outnumber the BLM protesters. They also established "black only segregated areas"
within the CHOP, making it frightening similar to the Confederacy, which also, coincidentally, seceded from the union. Oh, and
they had a Warlord, Raz from CHAZ, too, just as an icing on the cake.
Quite why these so-called activists felt the need to see how anarchy turns out in a world where Somaila exists is beyond me, and
frankly any sane person who is even vaguely aware of history. I'm sure if they'd managed to get hold of the port it wouldn't have
been long before they decided to give piracy on the high seas a try, but alas they didn't have the time.
This just makes the tone of the NY Times piece all the more baffling. While it does chart the horrors of the zone well, framing
the notion of "abolishing the police" as anything other than irredeemably stupid is frankly ridiculous. I suppose they do
deserve praise for finally telling the story, but in no way does it make up for the way they have fomented and given succour to the
absurd and dangerous ideas that gave rise to the CHOP for so long.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
Guy Birchall, British journalist covering current affairs, politics and free speech issues. Recently published in The Sun and
Spiked Online. Follow him on Twitter @guybirchall 7 Aug, 2020 22:11
Get short URL
CHAZ/CHOP protesters remove man for bothering them, June 13, 2020
WASHINGTON -- Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr.,
American intelligence officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow
continues to try to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.
At the same time, the officials said China preferred that Mr. Trump be defeated in November
and was weighing whether to take more aggressive action in the election.
But officials briefed on the intelligence said that Russia was the far graver, and more
immediate, threat. While China seeks to gain influence in American politics, its leaders have
not yet decided to wade directly into the presidential contest, however much they may dislike
Mr. Trump, the officials said.
The assessment, included in a
statement released by William R. Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence
and Security Center, suggested the intelligence community was treading carefully, reflecting
the political heat generated by previous findings.
The White House has
objected in the past to conclusions that Moscow is working to help Mr. Trump, and Democrats
on Capitol Hill have expressed growing concern that the intelligence agencies are not being
forthright enough about Russia's preference for him and that the agencies are introducing
China's anti-Trump stance to balance the scales.
The assessment appeared to draw a distinction between what it called the "range of measures"
being deployed by Moscow to influence the election and its conclusion that China prefers that
Mr. Trump be defeated.
It cited efforts coming out of pro-Russia forces in Ukraine to damage Mr. Biden and
Kremlin-linked figures who "are also seeking to boost President Trump's candidacy on social
media and Russian television."
China, it said, has so far signaled its position mostly through increased public criticism
of the administration's tough line on China on a variety of fronts.
An American official briefed on the intelligence said it was wrong to equate the two
countries. Russia, the official said, is a tornado, capable of inflicting damage on American
democracy now. China is more like climate change, the official said: The threat is real and
grave, but more long term.
Democratic lawmakers made the same point about the report, which also found that Iran was
seeking "to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, President Trump, and to divide the country"
ahead of the general election.
"Unfortunately, today's statement still treats three actors of differing intent and
capability as equal threats to our democratic elections," Speaker Nancy Pelosi and
Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a
joint statement.
Asked about the report during a news conference on Friday night at his golf club in New
Jersey, Mr. Trump said, "The last person Russia wants to see in office is Donald Trump because
nobody's been tougher on Russia than I have." He said that if Mr. Biden won the presidency,
"China would own our country."
Aides and allies of Mr. Biden assailed Mr. Trump, saying that he had repeatedly sided with
President Vladimir V. Putin on whether Russia had intervened to help him in 2016 and that he
had been impeached by the House for trying to pressure Ukraine into helping him undercut Mr.
Biden.
"Donald Trump has publicly and repeatedly invited, emboldened and even tried to coerce
foreign interference in American elections," said Tony Blinken, a senior adviser to the former
vice president.
It is not clear how much China is doing to interfere directly in the presidential election.
Intelligence officials have briefed Congress in recent days that much of Beijing's focus is on
state and local races. But Mr. Evanina's statement on Friday suggested China was on weighing an
increased effort.
"Although China will continue to weigh the risks and benefits of aggressive action, its
public rhetoric over the past few months has grown increasingly critical of the current
administration's Covid-19 response, closure of China's Houston Consulate and actions on other
issues," Mr. Evanina said.
Mr. Evanina pointed to growing tensions over territorial claims in the South China Sea, Hong
Kong autonomy, the TikTok app and other issues. China, officials have said, has also tried to
collect information on the presidential campaigns, as it has in previous contests.
The release on Friday was short on specifics, but that was largely because the intelligence
community is intent on trying to protect its sources of information, said Senator Angus King,
the Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
"The director has basically put the American people on notice that Russia in particular,
also China and Iran, are going to be trying to meddle in this election and undermine our
democratic system," said Mr. King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Intelligence officials said there was no way to avoid political criticism when releasing
information about the election. An official with the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence said that the goal was not to rank order threats and that Russia, China and Iran
all pose a danger to the election.
Fighting over the intelligence reports, the official said, only benefits adversaries trying
to sow divisions.
While both Beijing and Moscow have a preference, the Chinese and Russian influence campaigns
are very different, officials said.
Outside of a few scattered examples, it is hard to find much evidence of intensifying
Chinese influence efforts that could have a national effect.
Much of what China is doing currently amounts to using its economic might to influence local
politics, officials said. But that is hardly new. Beijing is also using a variety of means to
push back on various Trump administration policies, including tariffs and bans on Chinese tech
companies, but those efforts are not covert and it is unclear if they would have an effect on
presidential politics.
Russia, but not China, is trying to "actively influence" the outcome of the 2020 election,
said the American official briefed on the underlying intelligence.
"The fact that adversaries like China or Iran don't like an American president's policies is
normal fare," said Jeremy Bash, a former Obama administration official. "What's abnormal,
disturbing and dangerous is that an adversary like Russia is actively trying to get Trump
re-elected."
Russia tried to use influence campaigns during 2018 midterm voting to try to sway public
opinion, but it did not successfully tamper with voting infrastructure.
Mr. Evanina said it would be difficult for adversarial countries to try to manipulate voting
results on a large scale. But nevertheless, the countries could try to interfere in the voting
process or take steps aimed at "calling into question the validity of the election
results."
The new release comes on the heels of congressional briefings that have alarmed lawmakers,
particularly Democrats. Those briefings have described a stepped-up Chinese pressure campaign,
as well as efforts by Moscow to paint Mr. Biden as corrupt.
"Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt
influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift
U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's
confidence in our democratic process," Mr. Evanina said in a statement.
The statement called out Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia member of Ukraine's Parliament who has
been involved in releasing information about Mr. Biden. Intelligence officials said he had ties
to Russian intelligence.
Intelligence officials have briefed Congress in recent weeks on details of the Russian
efforts to tarnish Mr. Biden as corrupt, prompting
senior Democrats to request more information.
A Senate committee led by Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, has been leading an
investigation of Mr. Biden's son Hunter Biden and his work for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy
firm. Some intelligence officials have said that a witness the committee was seeking to call
was a witting or unwitting agent of Russian disinformation.
Democrats had pushed intelligence officials to release more information to the public,
arguing that only a broad declassification of the foreign interference attempts can inoculate
voters against attempts by Russia, China or other countries to try to influence voting.
In
meetings on Capitol Hill , Mr. Evanina and other intelligence officials have expanded their
warnings beyond Russia and have included China and Iran, as well. This year, the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence put Mr. Evanina in charge of election security briefings to
Congress and the campaigns.
Intelligence and other officials in recent days have been stepping up their releases
of information about foreign interference efforts, and the State
Department has sent texts to cellphones around the world advertising a $10 million reward
for information on would-be election hackers.
How effective China's campaign or Russia's efforts to smear Mr. Biden as corrupt have been
is not clear. Intelligence agencies focus their work on the intentions of foreign governments,
and steer clear of assessing if those efforts have had an effect on American voters.
The first reactions from Capitol Hill to the release of the assessment were positive. A
joint statement by the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee
praised it, and asked colleagues to refrain from politicizing Mr. Evanina's statement.
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the acting Republican chairman of the committee, and Senator
Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic vice chairman, said they hoped Mr. Evanina continued to
make more information available to the public. But they praised him for responding to calls for
more information.
"Evanina's statement highlights some of the serious and ongoing threats to our election from
China, Russia, and Iran," the two men's joint statement said. "Everyone -- from the voting
public, local officials, and members of Congress -- needs to be aware of these threats."
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.
Behind every narrative
unfriendly to US geopolitical aims is a Russian proxy typing madly away, according to the Global Engagement Center (GEC), the
State Department's "counter-propaganda" vehicle, which released a report to that effect on Wednesday titled
"Pillars
of Russia's Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem."
More than half of the
76-page paper consists of
"proxy site profiles"
– writeups of websites deemed to be
secretly (or not-so-secretly) operated by the Kremlin. While some are openly connected to the Russian government (New Eastern
Outlook, an official publication of the Russian Academy of Sciences), others – like Montreal-based Global Research – are not.
In the eyes of the GEC,
however, all
"serve no other purpose but to push pro-Kremlin content"
(which might
be news to the websites' operators). Most have previously appeared on lists of "Russian propaganda websites" such as the
sprawling blacklist published by PropOrNot – a
shady
outfit
linked to pro-war think tank, the Atlantic Council – in November 2016.
While the report is
supposedly dedicated to
"exposing Russia's tactics so that partner and allied
governments, civil society organizations, academia, the press, and the international public"
can arm themselves against
evil Kremlin propaganda, its focus on specific websites, their social media follower counts, and the amount of traffic they
get seems tailor-made for legitimizing government censorship. Any ideas which resemble the content of these particular
websites are to be squashed, sidelined, and suppressed, as are any other sites who publish writers associated with the "proxy
sites."
The
"ecosystem"
metaphor
is deployed to explain why some alleged Russian proxies occasionally come out with material opposing the Russian government
line – they're just
"muddying the waters of the information environment in order to
confuse those trying to discern the truth."
As for
"truth,"
the
report has an interesting interpretation of the concept. The claims that it deems to constitute
"disinformation"
include
the assertion that
"financial circles and governments are using the coronavirus to
achieve [their] own financial and political goals"
(are there
any
that
aren't?).
They also include claims
that
"EU bureaucrats and affiliated propaganda bodies are blaming Russia for the crisis
over the outbreak of coronavirus"
(who knew the
Financial
Times
was a Kremlin disinfo outlet too?)
Also included are claims
that
"George Soros' tentacles entangle politics and generate chaos around the world"
(if
the shoe
fits
).
The GEC report wouldn't be
a Russia scare-sheet if it didn't include a heavy dose of projection, and this one does not disappoint. The Kremlin's
"weaponization
of social media"
and
"cyber-enabled disinformation"
are deemed
"part
of its approach to using information as a weapon,"
while Moscow is accused of
"invest[ing]
massively in its propaganda channels, its intelligence services and its proxies to conduct malicious cyber activity to support
their disinformation efforts."
But the CIA and US
military intelligence have been engaging in pre-emptive cyber-warfare for two years with the full knowledge and consent of the
executive branch – a legitimization of
covert
activities
that previously ran on a don't-ask-don't-tell basis dating at least back to the development of the Stuxnet
virus that devastated Iran's nuclear sites over a decade ago.
US weaponization of social
media is so pervasive the US Army was recently
booted
off
streaming platform Twitch for relentlessly propagandizing teenage users. The Pentagon has been
spreading
pro-US
propaganda using hordes of "sock puppets" – fake social media accounts purporting to be real people – for upwards of a decade.
Indeed, the report hints at these very operations, praising the "thriving counter-disinformation community" that is "pushing
back" against those naughty Russians.
With social media
platforms jittery over the looming US election in November, the report appears designed to serve as a handy cheat-sheet as to
which opinions to censor to avoid a repeat of President Donald Trump's upset victory in 2016 – even though none of the listed
"proxies" could be considered pro-Trump by any stretch of the imagination. It also provides a portable reference for Americans
worried about committing thought-crime, though the complete lack of fanfare accompanying its publication – Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo mentioned it in passing during a press conference on Wednesday – would seem to suggest it is not meant for the hoi
polloi.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
The Guardian is running a more sophisticated version of the story. It claims the Russians
hacked the papers and gave them to Jeremy Corbyn so he could win the General Elections of
December 2019:
The stolen documents – a 451-page dossier of emails – ultimately ended up in
the hands of Jeremy Corbyn during last winter's election campaign after Russian actors
tried to disseminate the material online.
They had been posted on the social media platform Reddit and brought to the attention of
the then Labour leader's team. Corbyn said the documents revealed the NHS "was on the
table" in trade talks with the US.
Details of Russia's targeting of Fox's emails were first revealed on Monday by Reuters,
which said his account was accessed several times between 12 July and 21 October last year.
It was unclear if the documents were obtained when the staunch leave supporter was still
trade secretary; he was dropped by Boris Johnson on 24 July.
However, it still is keeping the earliest date as July 12th, thus reproducing the entire
Reuters' version.
My guess is that The Guardian adapted the story to its center-left (i.e. Blairite)
audience, in a way both Corbyn and the Conservative and Unionist Party could be melded
together as a single evil force. If that's the case, then it is circumstantial evidence for a
highly and centrally coordinated propaganda machine in the UK, possibly ran directly from the
MI5/6, which directly involves all the important British newspapers, TV channels and
more.
It's interesting to see how The Guardian sophisticated the clearly fake story. In the
excerpt I quoted above, it is clear the source of the leak could've only been secretary Fox
(or Fox served as the sacrificial lamb, it doesn't matter for the sake of the argument
here).
Then, it connected Fox's leak with Raab's public accusation of Russia (that story where he
accused Russia in the name of the British government, but didn't reveal the evidence).
To end with a high note, the Guardian then revived a story of hacked e-mails from 2012 and
2017.
You can then see how the British are capable of recycling old, failed propaganda
attacks/fake news to transform then into a new "truth". Very curious and sophisticated
methodology of building a long-term, sustained, false narrative. It almost mirrors the
Christian method of typology, where a previous event is brought up from oblivion to serve as
a prelude for the new event (i.e. the newest fake news).
"The attack bore the hallmarks of a state-backed operation."
There is no such thing.
Look at the Twitter hack last week. Everyone said "must be some sophisticated actor,
possibly state-sponsored". Turns out it was a 17-year-old in Florida. That has happened
repeatedly in the last ten years or more: hacks that looked "sophisticated" turned out to be
done by a single individual. People forget that some organized crime hacker groups earn
millions of dollars from their hacks and can afford to put quite an effort into the
development of sophisticated hacking tools that are the equal of anything a state
intelligence agency can produce.
People in infosec know the truth: it's not that hard to compromise any corporation or
individual. And "attribution by target" - that is, the notion that because a particular
person or organization is government or media, therefore it has to be a state-related hacker
- is completely false. *Any* hacker will hit *any* target that provides 1) a challenge,
and/or 2) personal identification information, and/or intellectual property that can be sold
on the Dark Web.
Only situations where specialized knowledge that is not commonly available to individuals
or civilian groups was used in the hack can clearly indicate a state actor. Stuxnet is the
classic example, requiring access to and the ability to test the malware with specific pieces
of hardware that aren't commonly available to persons outside of industrial or nuclear
engineering.
Stealing some papers from a government individual off his phone or home or office desktop
is almost trivial in comparison.
"his account was accessed several times between 12 July and 21 October"
So for three months they did nothing to fix his security? Good work, guys...you're fired.
This is typical - hackers sitting in a corporation's network for months or even years without
being detected. It's likely they didn't even notice the unauthorized access until they
decided to look back. Not to mention that a government worker isn't supposed to be using
"personal email" to host classified information. So the idiot involved should be fired.
Typical infosec clusterfuck. That's assuming it happened at all, of course, which is
doubtful.
Well, lost two post due to the VPN being on...sigh...
OK, to quote the old British comedy radio show, "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again"...
"...the attack bore the hallmarks of a state-backed operation."
There is no such thing. *Any* hacker will hack *any* target provided it provides 1) a
challenge, and/or 2) personal identification information, and/or 3) intellectual property,
the latter two being sold on the Dark Web. Trying to attribute the hacker based on his target
is a fool's game - not that there is any lack of fools in the infosec space who use such
attribution as marketing, such as CrowdStrike.
Then there's the fact that this guy's account was accessed several times over a
three-month period - meaning no one was monitoring his email security, least of all him. Not
to mention that he was passing classified papers over a personal email account - which should
get him fired. Email is *insecure*, period, unless encrypted between the parties involved.
And even then, you just compromise one party's desktop, laptop or phone, and bingo,
encryption bypassed. And compromising an individual's or organization's email system is not
particularly hard, as any penetration tester knows. One phishing email targeted to the right
person usually does it.
I have a comment that was moderated in the vaccine thread that speaks to this. Some yahoo
claimed that those engaged in the vaccine hype are on the up and up and have the same
motivation all of us unwashed have for an effective and affordable vaccine.
These are the people in charge and we're to believe they are on the up and up and have our
best interests at heart -- that they are magnanimous people with the utmost integrity? Yeah,
no, I don't think so.
The irony is, a vaccine gone wrong, because caveat emptor is now the rule of the day, will
be the REAL Novichok writ large on the world at large.
So the story about the "perfume bottle" was as fictitious as it sounded? I wonder about
the rumors that the Skripals were knocked out with fentanyl might be true.
It always seemed to me that Dawn S was just an afterthought. A woman, who was known to use
drugs, died (unclear how) – and wouldn't it just help our case if we linked it to
Skripals' troubles? The story of a sealed perfume bottle – which seemed to have no
effect on her partner – was always something out of an Alice-in- Wonderland
narrative.
And to think that there is a whole department, somewhere in the bowels of MI6 – that is
paid to come up with such nonsense.
Lies, upon lies, upon more lies. My first reaction on seeing Helmer's report last week was
'et tu, FT-us?' There simply is not a single western media outlet that can be trusted not to
lie.
And if anyone is still confused – just think about this: where are the Skripals? We've
not seen or heard of them in about two years. Julia is a Russian citizen – who seems to
have been kidnapped by another govt (UK). Imagine if Russians had done something like
that.
And as usual we will only have to wait for some appropriate amount of time to pass before
we get the next British rendition of the story. It'll be a good one because it's possible the
British could be dragged into the Hague for this, isn't it?
Delay and delay until people say "who are the Skripals?" Already people are saying "what's
the Steele dossier?" (Just googled Steele, comes at 16th place, page two)
"Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government's allegation that
Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military
intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention."
Er, OK, could we perhaps have a link to this official confirmation, or at least a summary of
what the Austrian government is supposed to have said? Otherwise it's just an assertion
without any evidence.
Helmer seems a bit confused. All the article says is that it's been established by the
bar-code that the ultimate source of the copy of the OPCW report used by the FT was the
Austrians , who as a state party would routinely have received a copy of the report. Since
the FT presumably wanted to protect their sources they obscured the origins. And since it's
highly unlikely the whoever leaked a copy of the report would have handed it directly to the
FT (why would they?) it's likely that it came through intermediaries. He doesn't claim to
have seen the report himself, and in the long and complicated story of his to which he links
simply quotes an anonymous "expert" who hasn't seen the report either. Bricks wthout
straw
It was obvious at the time, and still is, that there was something weird about the Skripal
affair, but this doesn't get us any further forward, I'm afraid.
I am confused as well. The oe24 website doesn't say anything about the contents of the
report, and does not say that Austria wrote the report, or that Austria did their own
research.
All it says is that Marsalek had the Austrian copy of the document.
John Helmer seems to spend a lot of words dancing around so that he can selectively quote
the the following two paragraphs:
The OPCW's findings confirm the United Kingdom's analysis of the identity of the toxic
chemical. It supports our finding that a military grade nerve agent of a type known as
Novichok was used in Salisbury. DSTL, our laboratories at Porton Down, established the
highest concentrations of the agent were found on the handle of Mr Skripal's front
door.
But of course, while the identification of the nerve agent used is an essential piece of
technical evidence in our investigation, neither DSTL's analysis, nor the OPCW's report,
identifies the country or laboratory of origin of the agent used in this attack.So let me
also set out the wider picture, which leads the United Kingdom to assess that there is no
plausible alternative explanation for what happened in Salisbury than Russian State
responsibility. We believe that only the Russian Federation had the technical means,
operational experience, and the motive to target the Skripals.
I.e. Everyone involved is confident Novichok was used, but they were unable to track it to
a specific Russian lab. Given all the other evidence, this is hardly exculpatory, nor is it
contradictory, unless there have previously been high-profile claims that the specific source
of the Novichok was identified. Checking Wikipedia and sources back in 2018 finds multiple
statements, including from the UK government, that they had not be able to track down the
exact source of the nerve agent.
That's how I read it as well. The Austrians reported that they found no traces of Novichok
or other nerve agent in the Skripals' blood samples. At that point, you'd think, they would
have run further tests to determine what agent was involved. The smartest poison would have
been one that left no trace. So that lets out the "technical means" of the Russian state
– it clearly was never needed.
But that's the weird thing. Helmer says:
"Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government's allegation that
Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military
intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention."
But his only link is the Oe24 website, and it does not say anything like that. It only
says that the Austrian government had a copy of the OPCW report, and this particular copy was
leaked to Marsalek.
The Oe24 website does not say anything about the content of that report, and it does not
say that the Austria government did any research of their own.
Perhaps Helmer has other sources, but I can't find them. In particular, I would have
expected a link to the official confirmation by the Austrian government, if there is such a
thing
I don't think "the Austrians" have played any role in this at all, in spite of Helmer's
confusing suggestions. As OPCW state parties they would have received a copy of the report.
That's it. The OE24 story is just that their own copy leaked in some way, which is
embarrassing for the Austrian government since these reports are confidential. But there's no
suggestion that the Austrians played any other role, or even that they could have if they
wanted to. (Why would they?).
To answer your question properly, you'd need an organic chemist who was a specialist in nerve
agents. Remember that "Novichok" is not a nerve agent: it just means something like "new
one", and is the generic name for at least five known nerve agents developed by the Soviet
Union before the end of the Cold War. Each presumably has common characteristics but also
differences, and you'd need an expert to tell you what traces they leave, how fast these
traces decay, and so on. It may simply have been that, whilst the symptoms of the Skripals
were consistent with the use of one or more of the agents, it couldn't be shown clearly
exactly what the agent was. Certainly the careful statements of the UK government at the time
would support that interpretation.
Don't forget by the way that the Russians, as OPCW state parties, would have a copy of the
report, and may have decided that it would suit their interests if it became public in some
roundabout manner.
I asked Helmer on his own website for the same. There is one step missing from the
argument – the content of the OPCW memo. Apparently Helmer in another piece quotes a
chemist who appears to have seen the document and says the FT could not have had material
which confirmed the British government story. But we are not in a position to judge for
ourselves.
The way the other piece reads, the memo may be on the Austrian newspapers website. But
when I clicked on the link I could not find it. Quite often, sensitive links like this are
moved to prevent a snowjob falling apart. So its possible Helmer might have linked to it and
the link was moved. But I cannot say.
However I have to disagree regarding whether this adds information. The FT presented their
story to make it appear the document had been leaked by the Russians. They didnt obscure the
source, they misrepresented it. Curiouser still is the involvement of the FT Russian
correspondent.
But I suspect this is just one installment in the story. I await Mr. Helmer's
clarification.
It was obvious at the time, and still is, that there was something weird about the
Skripal affair, but this doesn't get us any further forward, I'm afraid.
Agreed. The level of reporting here fails to even clear the bar of "anonymous people close
to the matter" sourcing that we would be excoriating mainstream media for: he doesn't offer
us the contents of the report, or claim to have seen it, or even provide testimony of someone
who does claim to have seen it. Helmer comes off, at best, as a crank, and at worst
intentionally obfuscatory. Is this typical of his work?
What's the bet that in a coupla years, that there will be a showcase trial of some
Russians like they are doing in the Netherlands at the moment over the MH17 shoot down. You
would think that being in the same country that they could do it through the International
Criminal Court at the Hague. Only problem here is that they cannot stop the accused giving
evidence in defence but they can through these show trials. To think that the OPCW had such a
great reputation just a few years ago but now they have been corrupted.
Meanwhile in Oz, I see advertised on TV a three-part series coming here called "The
Salisbury Poisoning." I can hardly wait-
I have seen these two strange looking persons here in Esher, south west London. I don't
know if they are he's or she's or them's but sure as fek they are evil russkies with their
backpacks full of nasty substances.
Save for somewhat lighter facial and bodily complexion they are same as the beach vendors
i encountered in Jamaica many years ago, who were not only offering ackee and fish but also a
whole array of chemical mind altering substances as well as privileged access to all and any
members of their supposed family, especially those of self declared female persuasion.
But but but Bellingcat, which is a totally independent organization interested only in
exposing the truth said that it was proven that Russia did it it with the super duper evil
novichoks!
And if the official story doesn't quite hang together and the Skripals don't need to be
"kept safe", then that begs the question of where are they?
Aren't there treaties to not develop nerve agents? So not just the question of who
supplied and administered the agent, but being caught at breaking the treaty?
Rules are for little people, not "state actors." "A fig for your treaty." Remember, of
course, the sell substantiated comment that the US (and its imperial minions and lackeys"
is/are not "agreement-capable."
Interesting, the rigorous and gimlet-eyed analysis being applied to Helmer's article. Too
bad people who are doing that did not also apply the same rigor and skepticism to the
"government" fish story
"We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public
believes is false." Evil CIA Director William Casey, Feb. 1981. https://amallulla.org/casey/
These agents were developed before the entry into force of the CWC, and it appears that
they were deliberately designed to circumvent its likely provisions. According to various
published sources, some of the agents were "binaries", ie they were agents which would be
created in the field from precursors which would not themselves be subject to the Treaty. It
has been suggested that they were developed hidden within a much larger agricultural
pesticide programme. The old Soviet regime always drew a distinction between signing a Treaty
(which was a political act) and implementing it, which was another matter. I doubt if much
has changed in Moscow since then.
just to add to what appears to be the majority of posts on this matter -- I find the
article from Helmer entirely unconvincing, and certainly doesn't supply any evidence, or
reasoning, that would justify the view that the Brits claim of Russian use of a Novichock
type agent on the Skripals "looks to have fallen apart"
Helmer's article was either very badly written, or very cleverly composed to give it the
"look and feel" of a well researched and well footnoted article despite an underlying
disconnect between evidence provided and verdict announced.
It's almost impossible to refute such an article, beyond returning it to the author for a
rewrite.
I wouldn't go to the wall defending the Brits version of events, but at this point it hangs
together WAY better than Mr. Helmer's article does
For those interested in better understanding the agents in question, here's a link to a
discussion at the time on a well known chemistry blog with chemistry commenters, In the
Pipeline:
Like other commenters I'm not exactly sure what is being asserted by whom here. But I
would say generally, given the context of who the Skripals were and the timing with Russian
signaling, not to mention the Russians having excellent chemistry capabilities, nobody I know
in the chemistry community doubted it was the Russians. I'd struggle to believe they were set
up. And if it were traced back conclusively to a Russian fingerprint, that would be a feature
not a bug, to keep the expats in line.
1) The Uk has fairly good chemistry capabilities too. And so conveniently located
2) The timing was terrible for Russia. But excellent for the UK. Cui bono?
3) This article suggests that the chemical in question was not what was reported in the
media. Its interesting that this material is not public domain. The Russians announced the
confidential Lab analysis result was BZ. They were ignored. Naturally
4) The Skripals fed ducks by hand after leaving home. They gave bread to local children to
feed the ducks. Neither the kids nor the ducks suffered any ill effects.
5) UK government timeline makes no sense
6) Dawn Sturgess' partner is adamant that the "perfume" he gave her was still in its
cellophane wrap. There is no explanation for how it was there given the charity bin he took
it from had been emptied several times.
7) A doctor at the local hospital wrote a letter to the Times disputing the notion of any
poisoning in the area.
This list of inconsistencies is not complete. There are many others. Which is not to say i
know what happened. Just that the story the UK told approximates impossible.
1. The UK is certainly capable. However these aren't synthetically difficult, the hard
part is not killing yourself in the process.
2. I think it fits with Putin's messaging, and maybe they expected to pull this off like a
heart attack or drug OD and the agent screwed up. Historically some of their foreign
assassinations were designed to be written off as accidents or suicides.
3. Chemistry reporting is generally terrible so yes. And there are tons of things, not
just chemical warfare but even mundane things like cosmetic formulations, that are not in the
public domain. As a chemist I wouldn't believe what Russia said unless I'd heard it confirmed
through the gravevine. In any case we certainly know it's a nerve agent, and therefore
deliberate.
4. Agree that the delivery method isn't clear, but I don't find it hard to believe they
came into contact with a sophisticated poison and that once that happened, we saw the result.
There are a lot of ways to deliver a poison e.g. remember the ricin umbrella incident. I
don't think the UK correctly figured it out.
5,6. I agree, and it's related to 4.
7. Honestly doctors are so generally underinformed that when chemists manage to poison
themselves at work, someone else from the lab has to go with them to help the hospital
understand how to treat. So I don't put any weight on this.
I think it's possible to agree that the UK story has issues, probably due to not having
proper investigation by actual experts, without that eliminating the possibility of the
Russian angle. The Russians have a long and storied history of poisoning dissidents in pretty
dramatic ways in foreign countries this matches their pattern. Remember the polonium
incident? That was messy and they didn't care. And if the UK was doing it 'in house' there
would be a lot more pressure not to have collateral damage on a setup like this. Given that
history, I think that invoking a setup takes a lot more evidence, when it's already credible
that the Russians did it again given who Skripal was.
"If you put that in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to
interfere with the election," he said. "And just the historical practices of the Russians,
who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever,
which is a typical Russian technique. So, we were concerned." https://observer.com/2017/05/james-clapper-russia-xenophobia/
I'll clarify my statements and say that they are specific to the Russian government. I
have personally had long working relationships with Russian scientists, and they are
excellent scientists and people who are deservedly part of the international scientific
community. Russian chemistry and physics are first rate.
If you don't like these links, a Google search will show you there are a lot more than
just a few people. The Russian government certainly has a track record with this, and I think
it's fair to state this criticism publicly.
"The Russians have a long and storied history of poisoning dissidents in pretty dramatic
ways in foreign countries"
links please and I'll need more than one about Litvinenko or the familiar Russo-phobic
screed from a deranged British anti-communist still living in the '50's.
No one has explained how the Scripals could have pure novichok on their hands for appox.
4hours feeling fine drinking in the Mill pub and then going for a meal in a Zizzi restaurant
and then both very suddenly, a man twice the weight and age of his
daughter, together become. very ill at exactly the same moment
Oh and hey those professional Russian assasins stroll out of Salisbury station undesguised
at about 11.30am knowing full well that CCT will catch them out and walk up to the Scripal
M16 funded house on a Sunday lunchtime with the Scripals in at the time!
How likely is it that the first person to come to the aid of the Skripals just happened to
be
Colonel Alison McCourt, chief nursing officer in the British Army. This fact was kept secret
for months afterwards, and only came to be known through happenstance.
McCourt joined the Army in 1988 and became Chief Nursing Officer for the Army on February 1,
2018, just a month before the Skriprals' poisoning. She received the OBE (Officer of the Most
Excellent Order of the British Empire) honour from the Queen in 2015. The biography, which
includes a posed photo of McCourt outside the prime minister's residence 10 Downing Street,
notes, "Alison has deployed to Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Sierra Leone." Subsequent assignments
include Officer Instructor at the Defence Medical Services Training Centre and a deployment
to Kosovo as the Senior Nursing Officer for 33 Field Hospital in 2001. During that
operational tour she was the in-theatre lead for the establishment of the joint UK/US
hospital facility at Camp Bondsteel."
I read the FT.
It's a neoliberal joke.
I enjoy making comments, giving an alternative explanation of events.
The funniest bit.
The curse of FT.
They always promote neoliberals and are convinced neoliberal leaders will bring success to a
country.
It always turns into a disaster.
Another amusing aspect is when they give the game away accidently.
The FT had graphs of growth over the years.
A quick glance revealed that growth was much higher in the Keynesian era, even in the
1970s.
The FT did a timeline of financial crises with each one marked by a vertical bar.
There were lots before the Keynesian era, and lots after the Keynesian era, but hardly any
during the Keynesian era.
Surprisingly the FT journalist missed the obvious.
If they had realised they wouldn't have put the timeline in.
Anybody coming new to the Skripal story could do worse than read this blog, which covers
all the absurdities and improbabilities and impossibilities of the official British
government story:
Well, we seem to have arrived at a consensus that Helmer has published a story with a
click-bait title and introduction making accusations which he doesn't even try to
substantiate. Either he's completely confused, or he's just publishing propaganda. Whichever,
I won't take him seriously as a journalist any more: a pity, because some of the things he's
written in the past have been quite informative.
Austria officially confirmed this week that the British Government's allegation that
Novichok, a Russian chemical warfare agent, was used in England by GRU, the Russian military
intelligence service, in March 2018, was a British invention.
Investigations in Vienna by four Austrian government ministries, the BVT intelligence
agency, and by Austrian prosecutors have revealed that secret OPCW reports on the blood testing
of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, copies of which were transferred to the Austrian government, did
not reveal a Russian-made nerve agent.
Two reports, published in Vienna this week by the OE media group and reporter Isabelle
Daniel, reveal that the Financial Times publication of the cover-page of one of the OPCW
reports exposed a barcode identifying the source of the leaked documents was the Austrian
government. The Austrian Foreign Ministry and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und
Terrorismusbekämpfung (BVT), the domestic intelligence agency equivalent to MI5 or FBI,
have corroborated the authenticity of the documents.
The Austrian disclosures also reveal that in London the Financial Times editor, Roula
Khalaf, four of the newspaper's reporters, and the management of the Japanese-owned company
have fabricated a false and misleading version of the OPCW evidence and have covered up British
government lying on the Skripal blood testing and the Novichok evidence.
On Wednesday afternoon this week, OE24, a news portal of the OE media group in Vienna, broke
the first story (lead image, right) that the barcode found on the OPCW document photograph
published in London had been traced to several Austrian state
ministries . The next day, OE political editor Isabelle Daniel reported the Austrian
Foreign, Defence and Economics Ministries had received copies of the barcoded OPCW dossier, and
that the Justice Ministry and prosecutors were investigating "potential moles".
Daniel also
quoted a Foreign Ministry source as saying its copy of the documents had been securely
stored in its disarmament department safe, and that there were "no tips" the leak had come from
there. Daniel also quoted a BVT spokesman as confirming the authenticity of the OPCW file had
been verified. "We have checked it recently. Officially it has not come to us."
Left: Isabelle Daniel of OE, Vienna. Right, Roula Khalaf Razzouk, editor of the
Financial Times since her recent appointment by the Nikkei group, the newspaper's owner. Her
full name and concealment of her Lebanese political and business interests can be followed
here . The names of
the four Financial Times reporters who have participated in the misrepresentation and cover-up
are Paul Murphy, investigations editor; Dan McCrum, a reporter; Helen Warrell, NATO
correspondent; and Max Seddon of the Moscow bureau.
The leak had been an "explosive secret betrayal" and a criminal investigation was under way,
OE24 reported. OE is a privately owned Austrian media group, based in Vienna. It
publishes a newspaper, the news portal OE.at, radio and television.
The Financial Times report first exposing the
OPCW documents appeared on July 9. Details of how the newspaper fabricated the interpretation
the OPCW had corroborated Russian involvement in the Novichok attack can be read
here . For the full Skripal story, read the
book .
At an OPCW Executive Council meeting on April 14, 2018, five weeks after the Skripal attack,
the British Government confirmed that a few days earlier "all States parties" had received
copies of the OPCW dossier. This included Austria, as the Viennese sources now acknowledge.
"The OPCW responded promptly to our request to send their experts to the United Kingdom,"
declared Peter Wilson, the British representative to the OPCW on April 14, 2018.
"They conducted a highly professional mission. The OPCW's designated laboratories have
also responded professionally and promptly. What the Director-General said was really
important on this, and the Technical Secretariat's presentation shows how professional that
work was. The report the Technical Secretariat presented to us on 11 April was thorough and
methodical. The Technical Secretariat responded quickly to our request to share that report
with all States Parties. All have had the chance to see the quality of that work."
Wilson went on to say:
"As you know, on 4 March Yulia and Sergei Skripal were poisoned in Salisbury, the United
Kingdom, with a chemical weapon, which United Kingdom experts established to be a Novichok.
OPCW has now clearly verified those findings."
The Austrian copy of the OPCW file now confirms this was a misrepresentation of the chemical
formula and other evidence the OPCW had gathered.
Wilson went on to conclude:
"the identification of the nerve agent used is an essential piece of technical evidence in
our investigation, neither DSTL's [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down]
analysis, nor the OPCW's report, identifies the country or laboratory of origin of the agent
used in this attack. So let me also set out the wider picture, which leads the United Kingdom
to assess that there is no plausible alternative explanation for what happened in Salisbury
than Russian State responsibility. We believe that only the Russian Federation had the
technical means, operational experience, and the motive to target the Skripals."
The first qualifying sentence was the British truth; the conclusion was the British lie. The
Austrian evidence now verifies there was no evidence of a Russian source in the blood and other
test samples; no evidence of Novichok; and no evidence to corroborate the British allegations
of a Russian chemical warfare attack.
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
In its report, the Financial Times displayed a partial photograph of the cover-page of one
of the OPCW documents in its possession (lead image, left). A classification stamp appears to
be showing through the title page, but no barcode is visible. The London newspaper appears to
have cropped the published picture so as to hide the barcode . That concealment -- proof of the
Austrian source – allowed the newspaper reporters to claim the source of the document was
unknown, probably Russian, as the headline implied: "Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek touted
Russian nerve gas documents."
A British military source was reported as claiming "the documents were 'unlikely' to have
come from OPCW member states in western Europe or the US." Khalaf and her reporters added: "The
OPCW, which is based in The Hague, said this week that it was investigating the matter, but
declined further comment. The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment."
With the barcode in their possession but hidden, they knew they were publishing a combination
of disinformation and lies.
The disclosure of the barcode to the Austrians appears to have followed after they had
requested it from Khalaf. She checked with her superiors in the newspaper management before
handing it over. They believed they were doing so in secret.
It is not known if Motohiro Matsumoto , the
Nikkei executive responsible for the London publishing company, was alerted and gave his
authorization; he refuses to answer questions. Matsumoto, one of the five directors of
Financial Times Ltd., is the general manager of Nikkei's global business division. He takes his
running orders from Nikkei's chairman and a long-time media executive, Tsuneo Kita. Matsumoto
replaced Hirotomo Nomura at the head of the Financial Times on March 25, 2020. When Nikkei
bought the newspaper from Pearson Plc in 2015, Nikkei became its sole proprietor.
The Austrian press has yet to report how the barcode was obtained from the newspaper.
Because the BVT and state prosecutors in Vienna are involved in their search for the "moles",
it is likely they contacted their counterparts at MI5 and the Home Office, and that the
newspaper agreed to hand over its copy of the OPCW file to the latter. The collaboration of the
journalists with the secret services to falsify evidence against Moscow in the Novichok story
remains a sensitive secret.
Khalaf has refused repeated requests for comment. Max Seddon, the newspaper's Moscow
reporter, was also asked for additional information about the photograph of the cover-page. He
will not answer.
"... The U.S. has spent a century or more trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences. ..."
"... The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal, nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. ..."
"... To the point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so? ..."
"... Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business. ..."
"... Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers, including former Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin, Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world. ..."
"... Under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the ' Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to have played a role in the murder of Che Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered. ..."
"... To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,' adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind. ..."
"... Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War. ..."
"... the U.S. had indicated its intention to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be taken in good faith. ..."
"... Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them. In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former Baltic states were brought under NATO's control . ..."
"... The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here . The economic and military annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2 . The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis on its payroll in 1948. ..."
"... That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges ..."
"... Its near instantaneous adoption by bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?' ..."
"... Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this move. ..."
The political success of Russiagate lies in the vanishing of American history in favor of a
façade of liberal virtue. Posed as a response to the election of Donald Trump, a
straight line can be drawn from efforts to undermine the decommissioning of the American war
economy in 1946 to the CIA's alliance with Ukrainian fascists in 2014. In 1945 the NSC
(National Security Council) issued a series of directives that gave logic and direction to the
CIA's actions during the Cold War. That these persist despite the 'fall of communism' suggests
that it was always just a placeholder in the pursuit of other objectives.
The first Cold War was an imperial business enterprise to keep the Generals, bureaucrats,
and war materiel suppliers in power and their bank accounts flush after WWII. Likewise, the
American side of the nuclear arms race left former
Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA to put their paranoid fantasies forward as
assessments of Russian military capabilities. Why, of all people, would former Nazi officers be
put in charge military intelligence if accurate assessments were the goal? The Nazis hated the
Soviets more than the Americans did.
The ideological binaries of Russiagate -- for or against Donald Trump, for or against
neoliberal, petrostate Russia, define the boundaries of acceptable discourse to the benefit of
deeply nefarious interests. The U.S. has spent a century or more
trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR
in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to
loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed
NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a
negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a
reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences.
The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria
Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal,
nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have
used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists
subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. Furthermore, Steinem's
aggressive ignorance of the actual history of the CIA illustrates the liberal propensity to
conflate bourgeois dress and attitude with an imagined
gentility . To the
point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not
employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so?
On the American left, Russiagate is treated as a case of bad reporting, of official outlets
for government propaganda serially reporting facts and events that were subsequently disproved.
However, some fair portion of the American bourgeois, the PMC that acts in supporting roles for
capital, believes every word of it. Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American
fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time
that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the
Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly
fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business.
Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers,
including former
Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human
beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin,
Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the
Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's
overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear
weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated
into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world.
By the time that (Senator) John F. Kennedy claimed a U.S. 'missile gap' with the Soviets in
1958, the CIA was providing estimates of Soviet ICBMs (Inter-continental Ballistic Missiles),
that were
wildly inflated -- most likely provided to it by the Gehlen Organization. Once satellite
and U2 reconnaissance estimates became available, the CIA lowered its own to 120 Soviet ICBMs
when the actual number
was four . On the one hand, the Soviets really did have a nuclear weapons program. On the
other, it was a tiny fraction of what was being claimed. Bad reporting, unerringly on the side
of larger military budgets, appears to be the constant.
Under the
Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially
disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the '
Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to
labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in
political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to
have played a role in the murder of Che
Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi
concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered.
The historical sequence in the U.S. was WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, to an economy that
was heavily dependent on war production. The threatened decommissioning of the war economy in
1946 was first met with an
honest assessment of Soviet intentions -- the Soviets were moving infrastructure back into
Soviet territory as quickly as was practicable, then to the military budget-friendly claim that
they were putting resources in place to invade Europe. The result of the shift was that the
American Generals kept their power and the war industry kept producing materiel and weapons. By
1948 these weapons had come to include atomic bombs.
To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward
the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly
traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and
are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,'
adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear
arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons
non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind.
What ties the Gehlen Organization to CIA estimates of Soviet nuclear weapons from 1948
– 1958 is 1) the Gehlen Organization was central to the CIA's intelligence operations
vis-à-vis the Soviets, 2) the CIA had limited alternatives to gather information on the
Soviets outside of the Gehlen Organization and 3) the senior leadership of the U.S. military
had
long demonstrated that it approved of exaggerating foreign threats when doing so enhanced
their power and added to their budgets. Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former
Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive
Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War.
Where this gets interesting is that American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was working for the Rand
Corporation in the late 1950s and early 1960s when estimates of Soviet ICBMs were being put
forward. JFK had run (in 1960) on a platform that included closing the Soviet – U.S. '
missile
gap .' The USAF (U.S. Air Force), charged with delivering nuclear missiles to their
targets, was estimating that the Soviets had 1,000 ICBMs. Mr. Ellsberg, who had limited
security clearance through his employment at Rand, was leaked the known number of Soviet ICBMs.
The Air Force was saying 1,000 Soviet ICBMs when the number confirmed by reconnaissance
satellites was four.
By 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA had shifted nominal control of the
Gehlen Organization to the BND, for whom Gehlen continued to work. Based on ongoing satellite
reconnaissance data, the CIA was busy lowering its estimates of Soviet nuclear capabilities.
Benjamin Schwarz, writing
for The Atlantic in 2013, provided an account, apparently informed by the CIA's lowered
estimates, where he placed the whole of the Soviet nuclear weapons program (in 1962) at roughly
one-ninth the size of the U.S. effort. However, given Ellsberg's known count of four Soviet
ICBMs at the time of the missile crisis, even Schwarz's ratio of 1:9 seems to overstate Soviet
capabilities.
Further per Schwarz's reporting, the Jupiter nuclear missiles that the U.S. had placed in
Italy prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis only made sense as first-strike weapons. This
interpretation is corroborated by Daniel Ellsberg , who argues
that the American plan was always to initiate the use of nuclear weapons (first strike). This
made JFK's posture of equally matched contestants in a geopolitical game of nuclear chicken
utterly unhinged. Should this be less than clear, because the U.S. had indicated its intention
to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing
Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be
taken in good faith.
The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 was met with a promised reduction in U.S. military
spending and an end to the Cold War, neither of which ultimately materialized. Following the
election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was
repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them.
In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging
the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then
unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former
Baltic
states were brought under NATO's control .
The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of
fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically
elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing
the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC)
in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here .
The economic and military
annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2
. The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan
to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace
the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated
former Nazis on its payroll in 1948.
That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security
Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks
volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges.
Its near instantaneous adoption by
bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That
liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by
unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of
historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers
employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?'
The Nazi War
Crimes Disclosure Act came about in part because Nazi hunters kept coming across Nazi war
criminals living in the U.S. who told them they had been brought here and given employment by
the CIA, CIC, or some other division of the Federal government. If the people in these agencies
thought that doing so was justified, why the secrecy? And if it wasn't justified, why was it
done? Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical
ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the
upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this
move.Cue the Sex
Pistols .
"... Case in point, reporting today on the newly disclosed Ghisline Maxwell documents only mentioned Prince Andrew and not a word about Bill Clinton ..."
"... believe James Murdoch was part of the "we are all gonna die in <11 years" Green New Deal school of thought. ..."
"James Murdoch, the younger son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has resigned from the board
of News Corporation citing "disagreements over editorial content".
In a filing to US regulators, he said he also disagreed with some "strategic decisions" made
by the company.
The exact nature of the disagreements was not detailed.
... ... ..,
I watch a lot of TeeVee news on all the major networks including the two Foxnews
channels.
It has become apparent to me over the last year or so that there is an internal ideology
contest at Fox between the hard core conservatives like Dobbs. Carlson, Mark Levin, Bartiromo,
Degan McDowell, etc. and a much more liberal set of people like Chris Wallace, Cavuto and the
newer reporters at the White House. I expect that the departure of James Murdoch will result in
more uniformly conservative reporting and commentary on Fox. I say that presuming that James
Murdoch was a major force in trying to push Foxnews toward the left.
I am surprised that Murdoch sent his son to Harvard. pl
Been noticing a lot of irresponsible reporting of late in the WSJ - not on the opinion
page, but in some pretty sloppy reporting with a lot of editorial bias in what is included
and what is intentionally left out.
Case in point, reporting today on the newly disclosed Ghisline Maxwell documents only
mentioned Prince Andrew and not a word about Bill Clinton . Doesn't WSJ know its readers
draw from multiple media sources that have provided original content? Everyday there are
several similar, bias by omission, articles.
One can only hope newly constituted management team will finally get rid of Peggy
Noonan.
John Helmer thinks Skripal was going to bring back to Russia info related to Porton Down
and military secrets.
But I suspect that Skripal was actually the true "primary sub-source" for Steele's "dirty
dossier" (I've voiced this suspicion several times now at moa). I think Skripal knew that
that material in the dossier was false and that it was MEANT to be false. Because it was
intended to throw shade on Russia without actually tarnishing Trump.
Why would Hillary and the Democrats want a dossier that wasn't true? Trick question! CIA
wanted to elect Trump as a nationalist President that would counter Russia and China. Hillary
was almost certainly in on it - along with other top US officials (each of whom feel it was
the patriotic thing to do).
IMO Skripal was probably trying to run back to Russia. Not necessary to bring British
secrets but because he didn't feel safe because he knew too much about the operation to elect
Trump.
That's my conspiracy theory -story and I'm stickin' to it! LOL. Until/unless
there's info that disproves it.
The US MSM is a giant propaganda machine used by the elites to control major narratives in
the heads of the public. They have learned the lesson well from the British and US Empires:
divide and conquer – keep the people in fear and hatred fighting with each other so the
elites can continue to acquire more power and money and wars while they drop crumbs to the
people.
The elites have bought off everything in the US – that is the gift of turbo charged
capitalist neoliberal economics which went on a privatization tear after the end of Cold War
v1.
They made millions on the outsourcing of jobs and industry to Asia but now that the
pickings are getting slim and China is going its own way they are running demonization
narratives on China to march the American people into another Cold War while they make more
millions (since they are still the insiders pushing the buttons).
And most Americans are just childlike and ignorant enough to march along blaming China for
their jobs going overseas. This will go on until US elites have turned America into a dried
out husk.
UK 'Russia report' fear-mongers about meddling yet finds no evidence
10,974 views•25 Jul 2020
The Grayzone
111K subscribers
Pushback with Aaron Maté
A long-awaited UK government report finds no evidence of Russian meddling in British
domestic politics, including the 2016 Brexit vote. But that hasn't stopped the
fear-mongering: the report claims the UK government didn't find evidence because it didn't
look for it, and backs increased powers for intelligence agencies and media censorship as a
result. Afshin Rattansi, a British journalist and host of RT's "Going Underground",
responds.
Guest: Afshin Rattansi, British journalist and host of RT's "Going Underground."
People's old ways of understanding what's going on in the world just aren't holding together
anymore.
Trust in the mass media is at an all-time low, and it's only getting lower.
People are more aware than ever that anything they see can be propaganda or
disinformation.
Deepfake technology will soon be so advanced and so accessible that nobody will even trust
video anymore.
The leader of the most powerful country on earth speaks in a way that has no real
relationship with facts or reality in any way, and people have just learned to roll with
it.
Ordinary people are hurting financially but Wall Street is booming, a glaring plot hole in
the story of the economy that's only getting more pronounced.
The entire media class will now spend years leading the public on a wild goose chase for
Russian collusion and then act like it's no big deal when the whole thing turned out to be
completely baseless.
... ... ...
New Cold War escalations between the U.S.-centralized empire and the unabsorbed governments
of China and Russia are going to cause the media airwaves around the planet to become saturated
in ever-intensifying propaganda narratives which favor one side or the other and have no
interest in honestly telling people the truth about what's going on.
The good , a 5 minute segment where a guest picked winner / loser countries post
covid19 world.
Winners: Germany, Taiwan, and Russia, Loser: United States.
It was amusing to watch Zakaria's face contort at the mention of Russia being named a winner,
'wha-whaaaaaaat?' The guest had to reassure Zakaria that Russia is a crap country and only
benefits because of Putin's Fortress Russia campaign and low debt making it capable of
weathering storms. Zakaria's face still frozen in a mask of horror.
The bad a rather long segment on Russia, China, and Iran's meddling campaign for
our next election. This was more painful to me then when I had appendicitis and had to wait
several hours before anyone could drive me to the emergency room.
1. Two experts, a China hater and a Russia hater from different 'Institutes'
2. The gratuitous adding of Iran to the list without explanation. Pro-Iranian views are
invisible.
3. Russian hatefest was over the top. It was a classic case of accusing Russia of what we
do. Russia (aka United States) nihilistically creates trouble and by amplifying discord in
other countries in order to deflect from their own domestic problems and foreign adventurism
in places like Syria and Ukraine.
Nihilistic spoilers? We the U.S. lost in Syria but are now trying to create a quagmire for
Russia and are pulling out all of the stops to make Syrians brutally suffer with a full scale
trade embargo and partition of their country.
The Washington Post has settled a $250 million defamation lawsuit filed by Covington
Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann for an undisclosed amount, after the teen claimed
the left-leaning news outlet 'led the hate campaign' against him following a racially charged
January, 2019 incident at the March for Life Rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
Sandmann was viciously attacked by left-leaning news outlets over a deceptively edited video
clip from the incident, in which the teenager, seen wearing a MAGA hat, appeared to be mocking
a Native American man beating a drum (a known political grifter who
lied about the incident , and
stole valor ).
The following day, a longer version of the video revealed that Sandmann did absolutely
nothing wrong - as the Native American, Nathan Phillips, aggressively approached Sandmann and
beat a drum in his face.
In a tweet on his 18th birthday, Sandmann wrote "On 2/19/19, I filed $250M defamation
lawsuit against Washington Post. Today, I turned 18 & WaPo settled my lawsuit."
https://lockerdome.com/lad/13084989113709670?pubid=ld-dfp-ad-13084989113709670-0&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com&rid=www.zerohedge.com&width=890
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
Sandmann is also suing ABC, CBS, The Guardian, The Hill and NBC Universal.
The kid needs to add NPR to his hit list. Their reporting of it made me permanently
stop listening to that channel (in a vain attempt to hear both sides of the narrative,
you know give the MSM a chance to be honest etc). Good on him for suing and winning
because that's the only way we'll be able to get rid of the drivel that calls itself news
these days.
ay_arrow
VideoEng_NC , 9 minutes ago
Every one of these news sources is screwed, it's going to be euphoric knowing each
judgment means their accounting dept has to cut a fat check. Nick, don't forget the
individuals on the list like Sen Warren & Ellen. Redistribute their wealth to your
account young man, tell em' it's for a cause they should be supporting.
y_arrow
Mzhen , 22 minutes ago
A Washington Post reporter was retweeting the viral video clip by 8:00 a.m. the next
morning. The first Washington Post story was being published online that day (Saturday)
at the same time a group of about 60 Indians was descending on the Bascilica of the
National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception with the intention of disrupting the mass
and reading their list of "demands," which included college educations being denied to
Nick and his classmates.
The Post really played up the anti-Catholic angle in ensuing stories. So if there was
email coordination between the Indian march organizers and the Post , they couldn't
afford to have it come out in discovery.
play_arrow
nsurf9 , 30 minutes ago
His lawyers should have required WaPo publish an apology and name those on its staff
that were responsible for their intentional libel - in bold, headline font - right on its
figging FRONT PAGE - FOR A SOLID MONTH !
When schools in Britain
eventually reopen in September, children filling into the classrooms won't just be learning their reading, writing and
arithmetic. On top of these fundamentals, their teachers will spoon-feed them blatant propaganda that would make Herr Goebbels
blush.
The propaganda source in
question is The Day, a news site founded by a team of established journalists and directed at teens. Designed for use in the
classroom, each of The Day's stories is presented alongside a range of thought-provoking questions and exercises to help young
people learn to
"think for themselves and engage with the world."
Though UK-focused, The Day
is used in classrooms around the world as a teaching aid.
A recent article
describes
Russian
President Vladimir Putin as
"the most dangerous man in the world"
and suggests
"nothing
can be done to bring this rogue state [Russia] to heel."
Moscow's entire foreign policy is
"shameless"
and
Putin is described as a man who delights in stoking unrest in the West. The widely-debunked accusations of Russian
interference into the 2016 US election are treated as fact, as are the rumors that Putin meddled in the UK's Brexit referendum
and in last year's general election.
The children are also
offered Bill Browder's opinion that Russia is a
"mafia state running a mafia operation."
Browder,
the site omits, is a magnate and fraudster who made billions of dollars in Russia during the privatization rush of the 1990s
and
reinvented
himself
as an anti-Putin activist once his revenue stream was cut off.
Below the article, kids
are asked to answer a number of questions, such as
"Should Russia be expelled from the
United Nations?"
and even to write a creative story about what it would be like to meet Putin during his KGB days. For
good measure, the New York Times' recent
evidence-free
and
widely criticized story claiming Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan is suggested as further
reading to help kids become an
"expert"
on all things Putin.
The Day does not bill itself as an anti-Russia think tank for kids. Quite the opposite. Ironically, its founder, Richard
Addis, wanted to set up the site to fight deceptive journalism, hoaxes,
"slanted
reporting"
and
"stories where the truth is contentious"
-- fake news in other
words.
He was supported in this
quest by the British government's Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills in Schools, which
partnered with The Day to compile a damning
report
in
2018, revealing that only two percent of British youngsters have the critical thinking skills to spot phony news.
"It is clear that our schools are absolutely vital in encouraging children to burrow
through the rubbish and rootle out the truth,"
Addis said at the time. Stories on the site with titles like 'Putin the
terrible' and 'Toxic Putin on mission to poison the West' are clearly what Addis considers balanced journalism.
Balance, however, is not a common trait among British Russia-watchers. Parliament's long-awaited 'Russia report'
relies
almost
wholesale on
"allegations"
to back up its claim that Moscow
"poses
a significant threat to the UK."
The report even relies on articles by BuzzFeed to substantiate its shaky claims.
As slanted as its coverage
is, The Day's message may fall on deaf ears. According to the same government report, only a quarter of older children
actually trust the news they read online. As such, The Day's propagandizing might all be in vain.
Craig
Murray lambasts a Russophobic media that celebrates a supposed cyber attack on UK vaccine research, ignores collapse
of key evidence of a "hack" and dabbles in dubious memorabilia.
The Guardian's
headquarters
in London.
(Bryantbob,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Andrew Marr, center, in 2014.
(
Financial
Times
, Flickr)
A whole slew of these were rehearsed by Andrew Marr on his flagship BBC1 morning show. The latest is the accusation
that Russia is responsible for a cyber attack on Covid-19 vaccination research. This is another totally evidence-free
accusation. But it misses the point anyway.
The alleged cyber attack, if it happened, was a hack not an attack -- the allegation is that there was an effort to
obtain the results of research, not to disrupt research. It is appalling that the U.K. is trying to keep its research
results secret rather than share them freely with the world scientific community.
As I have
reported
before
, the U.K. and the USA have been preventing the WHO from implementing a common research and common vaccine
solution for Covid-19, insisting instead on a profit driven approach to benefit the big pharmaceutical companies (and
disadvantage the global poor).
What makes the accusation that Russia tried to hack the research even more dubious is the fact that Russia had
just
bought
the very research specified. You don't steal things you already own.
Evidence of CIA Hacks
If anybody had indeed hacked the research, we all know it is impossible to trace with certainty the whereabouts of
hackers. My VPNs [virtual private networks] are habitually set to India, Australia or South Africa depending on where
I am trying to watch the cricket, dodging broadcasting restrictions.
More pertinently,
WikiLeaks'
Vault
7 release of CIA material showed the
specific
programs
for the CIA in how to leave clues to make a leak look like it came from Russia. This irrefutable
evidence that the CIA do computer hacks with apparent Russian "fingerprints" deliberately left, like little bits of
Cyrillic script, is an absolutely classic example of a fact that everybody working in the mainstream media knows to
be true, but which they all contrive never to mention.
Thus when last week's "Russian hacking" story was briefed by the security services -- that former Labour Party Leader
Jeremy Corbyn deployed secret documents on U.K./U.S. trade talks which had been posted on Reddit, after being stolen
by an evil Russian who left his name of Grigor in his Reddit handle -- there was no questioning in the media of this
narrative. Instead, we had another round of McCarthyite witch-hunt aimed at the rather tired looking Corbyn.
Personally, if the Russians had been responsible for revealing that the Tories are prepared to open up the NHS
"market" to big American companies, including ending or raising caps on pharmaceutical prices, I should be very
grateful to the Russians for telling us. Just as the world would owe the Russians a favor if it were indeed them who
leaked evidence of just how systematically the DNC rigged the 2016 primaries against Bernie Sanders.
But as it happens, it was not the Russians. The latter case was a leak by a disgusted insider, and I very much
suspect the NHS U.S. trade deal link was also from a disgusted insider.
When governments do appalling things, very often somebody manages to blow the whistle.
Crowdstrike's Quiet Admission
Crowdstrike's Shawn Henry presenting at the International Security Forum in Vancouver, 2009.
(Hubert K, Flickr)
If you can delay even the most startling truth for several years, it loses much of its political bite. If you can
announce it during a health crisis, it loses still more. The world therefore did not shudder to a halt when the CEO
of Crowdstrike admitted there had never been any evidence of a Russian hack of the DNC servers.
You will recall the near incredible fact that, even through the Mueller investigation, the FBI never inspected the
DNC servers themselves but simply relied on a technical report from Crowdstrike, the Hillary Clinton-related IT
security consultant for the DNC.
It is now known for sure that Crowdstrike had been peddling fake news for Hillary. In fact, Crowdstrike had no record
of any internet hack at all. There was no evidence of the email material being exported over the internet. What they
claimed did exist was evidence that the files had been organized preparatory to export.
Remember the entire "Russian hacking" story was based ONLY on Crowdstrike's say so. There is literally no other
evidence of Russian involvement in the DNC emails, which is unsurprising as I have been telling you for four years
from my own direct sources that Russia was not involved. Yet finally declassified congressional testimony revealed
that Shawn Henry stated on oath that "we did not have concrete evidence" and "There's circumstantial evidence , but
no evidence they were actually exfiltrated."
This testimony fits with what I was told by Bill Binney, a former technical director of the National Security Agency
(NSA), who told me that it was impossible that any large amount of data should be moved across the internet from the
USA, without the NSA both seeing it happen in real time and recording it. If there really had been a Russian hack,
the NSA would have been able to give the time of it to a millisecond.
That the NSA did not have that information was proof the transfer had never happened, according to Binney. What had
happened, Binney deduced, was that the files had been downloaded locally, probably to a thumb drive.
Bill Binney.
(Miquel
Taverna / CCCB via Flickr)
So arguably the biggest news story of the past four years -- the claim that Putin effectively interfered to have
Donald Trump elected U.S. president -- turns out indeed to be utterly baseless. Has the mainstream media, acting on
security service behest, done anything to row back from the false impression it created? No it has doubled down.
Anti-Russia Theme
The "Russian hacking" theme keeps being brought back related to whatever is the big story of the day.
Then we have those continual security service briefings. Two weeks ago we had unnamed security service sources
telling
The New York Times
that
Russia had offered the Taliban
a
bounty
for killing American soldiers. This information had allegedly come from interrogation of captured Taliban
in Afghanistan, which would almost certainly mean it was obtained under torture.
It is a wildly improbable tale. The Afghans have never needed that kind of incentivization to kill foreign invaders
on their soil. It is also a fascinating throwback of an accusation – the British did indeed offer Afghans money for,
quite literally, the heads of Afghan resistance leaders during the first Afghan War in 1841, as I detail in my
book "Sikunder Burnes."
Taliban in Herat, Afghanistan, 2001.
(Wikipedia)
You do not have to look back that far to realize the gross hypocrisy of the accusation. In the 1980s the West was
quite openly paying, arming and training the Taliban -- including Osama bin Laden – to kill Russian and other Soviet
conscripts in their thousands. That is just one example of the hypocrisy.
The U.S. and U.K. security services both cultivate and bribe senior political and other figures abroad in order to
influence policy all of the time. We work to manipulate the result of elections -- I have done it personally in my
former role as a U.K. diplomat. A great deal of the behavior over which Western governments and media are creating
this new McCarthyite anti-Russian witch hunt, is standard diplomatic practice.
My own view is that there are malign Russian forces attempting to act on government in the U.K. and the USA, but they
are not nearly as powerful as the malign British and American forces acting on their own governments.
The truth is that the world is under the increasing control of a global elite of billionaires, to whom nationality is
irrelevant and national governments are tools to be manipulated. Russia is not attempting to buy corrupt political
influence on behalf of the Russian people, who are decent folk every bit as exploited by the ultra-wealthy as you or
I. Russian billionaires are, just like billionaires everywhere, attempting to game global political, commercial and
social structures in their personal interest.
The other extreme point of hypocrisy lies in human rights. So many Western media commentators are suddenly interested
in China and the Uighurs or in restrictions on the LBGT community in Russia, yet turn a completely blind eye to the
abuse committed by Western "allies" such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
As somebody who was campaigning about the human rights of both the Uighurs and of gay people in Russia a good decade
before it became fashionable, I am disgusted by how the term "human rights" has become weaponized for deployment only
against those countries designated as enemy by the Western elite.
Finally, do not forget that there is a massive armaments industry and a massive security industry all dependent on
having an "enemy." Powerful people make money from this Russophobia. Expect much more of it. There is money in a Cold
War.
Craig
Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002
to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
On the core subject
here: By necessity, a pandemic requires a cooperative international response. Only one country has
refused to do so: The US. In their supreme arrogance, our ruling class lost track the fact that the US
needs the rest of the world, not the other way way around.
Zalamander
,
July 22, 2020 at 19:12
One by one the
so-called Russiagate "evidence" have collapsed. The fake Steele Dossier, "Russian spy" Joseph Mifsud who
is actually a self-admitted member of the Clinton Foundation, Roger Stone's non-existant Wikileaks
contacts, Russian Afgan bounties, etc. But the neoliberal mainstream media still presents these as
"facts" with no retractions. This is not journalism, its disinformation designed to distract the American
public from the failures of capitalism.
Peter Janney
July 22, 2020 at 06:55
Craig Murray succinctly (and very beautifully) gives us a REAL glimpse of what great journalism really
looks like.
-- --
Perhaps it is great writing, but is it journalism?
Some people in
National Union of Journalists (a trade union in UK) ponder that question for many months, unable to
decide if Craig should be allowed to join or not. If he is neither a flack nor a hack, who kind of
journalist is he? (More details at Craig Murray's web site).
Journalism is
printing what someone else does not want printed.
Everything else is public relations.
-- George Orwell
rosemerry
,
July 22, 2020 at 16:42
All of the Russophobia
and lies serve the rulers of the USA?UK and their poodles well. The whole year of Skripal mania started
by Theresa May and joined in by Trump, with the media such as the Guardian's scurrilous Luke Harding
providing fantasy "evidence" and the whole story conveniently disappearing, like the Skripals, when other
"news" arrived, has no benefit to seekers of even the minimum of truth.
DH Fabian
,
July 22, 2020 at 19:46
Certainly, and this
is key to understanding the current situation. What we're seeing now is the final stages of the
long-sinking West -- those once-mighty partners of empire, the UK/US. This descent appears to have
begun with the Reagan/Thatcher years, and is now in the final stages. We've seen a rather dramatic
growth of psychosis in the political-media-public discussion over the past 3-4 years, driven by an
irrational obsession with China/Russia. (Russia and China both quietly observe, prepared to respond if
attacked.) There really isn't anything we can do about it, beyond acknowledging it as what it is.
Very good, but needs
to be supplemented by reference to the interview with NIH Director Franaic Collins on last Sunday's Meet
the Press. When host Chuck Todd asked Collins about Russian hacking of US vaccine research Collins smiled
and answered by pointing out that the research wasn't intended to be secret and that it was all to be
published for "transparency." Todd looked disappointed, mumbled, "OK," and changed the subject. No media
have reported this exchange, which is retrievable on the internet.
JOHN CHUCKMAN
,
July 22, 2020 at 10:58
Brilliant, but that's
what one expects of Craig Murray.
Craig Murray
succinctly (and very beautifully) gives us a REAL glimpse of what great journalism really looks like. I
commend his courage for never bending in the face of all the bullshit we have had to tolerate from the
mainstream media. Thank you, thank you dear Craig . . .
geeyp
,
July 22, 2020 at 00:10
Regarding Craig's last
summing up paragraph, all one need do to confirm that is read the previous article of Michael T. Klare.
O MG you guys Putin hacked our coronavirus vaccine secrets!
Today mainstream media is reporting what is arguably the single dumbest Russiavape story of
all time, against some very stiff competition.
"Russian hackers are targeting health care organizations in the West in an attempt to steal
coronavirus vaccine research, the U.S. and Britain said," reportsThe New York
Times .
"Hackers backed by the Russian state are trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine and treatment
research from academic and pharmaceutical institutions around the world, Britain's National
Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said on Thursday,"
Reuters reports .
"Russian news agency RIA cited spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying the Kremlin rejected
London's allegations, which he said were not backed by proper evidence," adds Reuters.
First of all, how many more completely unsubstantiated government agency allegations about
Russian nefariousness are we the public going to accept from the corporate mass media? Since
2016 it's been wall-to-wall narrative about evil things Russia is doing to the empire-like
cluster of allies loosely centralized around the United States, and they all just happen to be
things for which nobody can actually provide hard verifiable evidence.
Ever since the shady
cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike
admitted that it never actually saw hard proof of Russia hacking the DNC servers, the
already shaky and always unsubstantiated narrative that Russian hackers interfered in the
U.S. presidential election in 2016 has been on thinner ice than ever. Yet because the mass
media converged on this narrative and
repeated it as fact over and over they've been able to get the mainstream headline-skimming
public to accept it as an established truth, priming them for an increasingly idiotic litany of
completely unsubstantiated Russia scandals, culminating most recently in the entirely
debunked claim that Russia paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill coalition forces in
Afghanistan.
Secondly, the news story doesn't even claim that these supposed Russian hackers even
succeeded in doing whatever they were supposed to have been doing in this supposed
cyberattack.
"Officials have not commented on whether the attacks were successful but also have not ruled
out that this is the case," Wired reports
.
Thirdly, this is a "vaccine" which does not even exist at this point in time, and the
research which was supposedly hacked may never lead to one. Meanwhile, Sechenov First Moscow
State Medical University
reports that it has "successfully completed tests on volunteers of the world's first
vaccine against coronavirus," in Russia.
Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, how obnoxious and idiotic is it that coronavirus
vaccine "secrets" are even a thing?? This is a global pandemic which is hurting all of us;
scientists should be free to collaborate with other scientists anywhere in the world to find a
solution to this problem. Nobody has any business keeping "secrets" from the world about this
virus or any possible vaccine or treatment. If they do, anyone in the world is well within
their rights to pry those secrets away from them.
This intensely stupid story comes out at the same time British media are blaring stories about Russian
interference in the 2019 election, which if you actually listen carefully to the claims
being advanced amounts to literally nothing more than the assertion that Russians talked about
already leaked documents pertaining to the U.K.'s healthcare system on the internet.
"Russian actors 'sought to interfere' in last winter's general election by amplifying an
illicitly acquired NHS dossier that was seized upon by Labour during the campaign, the foreign
secretary has said,"
reports The Guardian .
"Amplifying." That's literally all there is to this story. As we learned with the ridiculous U.S. Russiagate narrative , with such
allegations, Russia "amplifying" something can mean anything from RT reporting on a
major news story to a Twitter account from St. Petersburg sharing an article from The
Washington Post . Even the
foreign secretary's claim itself explicitly admits that "there is no evidence of a broad
spectrum Russian campaign against the General Election."
"The statement is so foggy and contradictory that it is almost impossible to understand it,"
responded Russia's foreign
ministry to the allegations. "If it's inappropriate to say something then don't say it. If you
say it, produce the facts."
Instead of producing facts you've got the Murdoch press pestering Jeremy Corbyn, the
Labour Party candidate, on his doorstep over this ridiculous non-story, and popular
right-wing outlets like Guido Fawkes running the blatantly false
headline "Government Confirms Corbyn Used Russian-Hacked Documents in 2019 Election." The
completely bogus allegation that the NHS documents came to Jeremy Corbyn by way of Russian
hackers is not made anywhere in the article itself, but for the headline-skimming majority this
makes no difference. And headline skimmers get as many votes as people who read and think
critically.
All this new Cold War Russia hysteria is turning people's brains into guacamole. We've got
to find a way to snap out of the propaganda trance so we can start creating a world that is
based on truth and a desire for peace.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of
Consortium News.
Putin Apologist , July 19, 2020 at 17:50
"How many more completely unsubstantiated government agency allegations about Russian
nefariousness are we the public going to accept from the corporate mass media?"
The Answer is none. Nobody (well, nobody with a brain) believes anything the "corporate
mass media" says about Russia, or China, Iran or Venezuela or anything else for that
matter.
James Keye , July 19, 2020 at 10:26
Guy , July 18, 2020 at 15:32
But,but, but we never heard the words "highly likely" ,they must be slipping.LOL
DH Fabian , July 18, 2020 at 13:41
The Democrat right wing are robotically persistent, and count on the ignorance of their
base. By late last year, we saw them begin setting the stage to blame-away an expected 2020
defeat on Russia. Once again, proving that today's Democrats are just too dangerous to vote
for. Donald Trump owes a great deal to his "friends across the aisle."
There's no way the trillion in T-bills will be seized/defaulted/whatever. The damage to US
credibility will be unrecoverable.
It is certainly crazy time. AG Barr threatened major US corporations Disney & Apple
with having to register as "foreign agents" due to their Chinese investments. Earlier in the
year, the FBI and Congress decided to destroy the career of one of America's top scientists
over failure to submit relatively inconsequential paperwork. These are the types of things
which should result in a determined pushback against an intrusive national security state,
but the balance of power in USA may have flipped.
Zucker probably was not independent player. Bewkes approval was needed. In any case both are
kind of Hollywood types and animosity to Trump is given. On behalf of NYC Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg , Bewkes was one of
the chairs of Media.NYC.2020, which reviewed the future of the global media industry, the
implications for NYC, and suggested actionable next steps for the NYC government. [12]
A CNN whistleblower leaked video showcasing CNN President Jeff Zucker's vendetta against
President Trump and obsession with pushing stories of impeachment.
"Jeff Zucker, basically the president of CNN has a personal vendetta against Trump," said
Nick Neville, a media coordinator at CNN. "It's not gonna be positive for Trump. He hates him.
He's going to be negative."
The whistleblower identified himself as Cary Poarch, a satellite uplink technician at CNN's
Washington, D.C. bureau.
"When I came to work at CNN, I mean it was my dream job," Poarch said. "And that dream,
actually turned into a nightmare."
Poarch recorded the 9:00 a.m. morning calls held by Zucker, in which he urged CNN employees
to focus on the impeachment narrative.
"Let's just stay very focused on impeachment," Zucker said. "We're moving towards
impeachment. I mean, don't like, you know we shouldn't pretend this is going one way. And so,
all these moves are moves towards impeachment."
Zucker also encouraged CNN employees to report on Fox News as if it were a conspiracy
outlet.
"I think what's going on in America now is really fundamentally the result of years of fake
news, conspiracy nonsense from Fox News," Zucker said. "The fake conspiracy nonsense that Fox
has spread for years is now deeply embedded in American society, and frankly that is beyond
destructive for America. And I do not think we should be scared to say so."
After the release of this video,
Poarch announced he saw no other option but to wear a hidden camera and expose the bias of
CNN. Chrissy Clark is a former staff writer at The Federalist. She has work featured in The
Daily Signal and received a degree in political science from Michigan State University. Follow
her on social media @chrissyclark_. Photo Project Veritas/Twitter
This is not simply projection on the part of UK MI5/MI6 duet, this is a real war on reality.
UK false flag operation with Skripla poisoning (which probably was designed to hide possible role
of Skripal in creating Steele dossier) now will forever be textbook example of evilness MI5/MI6
honchos.
If we think that GRU is the past was able to fight Abwehr to standstill, they really would now be worried
about the blowback from Skripal mess.
A highly-anticipated report by the U.K. Parliament into Russia n interference in the country was
released on Tuesday, claiming that Russian influence in the U.K. is the "new normal."
The Russia Report, published after months of delay, is the culmination of two years of fact
finding by the U.K. Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ICS), providing insights
on the
Salisbury Novichok poisonings , Russian financial influence and social media
disinformation. The report said the U.K. was a "top target" for Russian interference.
The publication of the report comes a week after security services in the U.S., U.K. and
Canada said that Russian hackers had been attempting to
hack into global coronavirus vaccine research . The Kremlin has denied the accusations.
However, the report will likely disappoint observers who expected the ICS to detail
how far Russia interfered in the bitterly contested Brexit Referendum of 2016 . Prime
Minister Boris Johnson's was accused of withholding the publication of the report until after
the election of December 2019, a claim they denied.
There is something rotten in the state .. of England.
This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was
involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier. He was getting
homesick (perhaps his mother getting older is part of this) for Russia and he thought that to
get back to Russia he needed something big to get back in Putin's good graces. He would have
needed something really big because Putin really has no use for traitors. Skripal put out some
feelers (perhaps through his daughter though that may be dicey). The two couriers were sent to
seal or move the deal forward. The Brits (and perhaps the CIA) found out about this and decided
to make an example of Sergei. Perhaps because they found out about this late, the deep
state/intelligence people had to move very quickly. The deep state story was was extremely
shaky (to put it mildly) as a result. Or they were just incompetent and full of hubris.
Then they were stuck with the story and bullshit coverup was layered on bullshit coverup. 7
Reply FlorianGeyer Reply to
Marcus April 20, 2019
@ Marcus.
To hope to get away with lies, one must have perfect memory and a superior intellect that
can create a lie with some semblance of reality in real life, as opposed to the digital
'reality' in a Video game. And a rather corny video game at that.
MI5/6 failed on all parts of Lie creation 2 Reply Mistaron April 21, 2019
If Trump was so furious about being conned by Haspel, how come he then went on to promote
her to becoming the head of the CIA? It's quite perplexing.
The text of the OPCW document is "enhanced" in FT reports. "Sexed up" was the term used
about the UN Weapons Inspectors' report on Iraq's WMD programme way back when.
A Dr. David Kelly was involved. I wonder what became of him?
That term "sexed up" really made me cringe when it suddenly came in vogue amongst UK
commenters and "journalists" .
I was already in exile when the the shit hit the fan in the UK as regards criminal Blair's
warmongering and was at a loss to understand what "sexed up" meant in the British newspaper
articles that I read at the time -- no Internet then, so once a week I used to buy a copy of
the "Sunday Times" (Woden forgive me!) in the foyer of of the five-star Hotel National,
Moscow. Used to cost me an arm and a leg an' all! Robbing bastards!
Tutisicecream
Jul 17, 2020 8:44 AM Yikes! The Ruskies are hacking again! Let's not forget that the British Superb plan for
Brexit was born out of Vova's cunning mind.
From the people who brought you polonium in a teacup, Basha's bouncing Barrel Bombs,
Salisbury Plain Pizza and the Covid- Horrid. Now want you to know Vova is back!
Last weekend they launched their counter move with Luke Harding interviewing himself
about his new book
The decline of the Guardian is legend and one of their supposed ace gumshoes, Luke
Harding, who has been the chief protagonist of the "Stupid Russia/ Cunning Russia" Guardian
editorial line gets this time to interview himself. Displacement in psychology, as I'm sure
Luke must have learnt from his handlers, is where we see in others that which we can't or
fail to recognise in ourselves.
Those CIFers long in the tooth will recall how he moderated his own BTL comments on
Russia until it all got too much for him. At which point they were cancelled. Now it seems
it's all gone to a new level as Harding apparently interviews himself about his new book! In
the Guardian's new post apocalyptic normal, where self censorship plus self promotion is the
norm for their self congratulatory hacks and hackets Harding never fails to amaze at this
genre.
As expected the reader is taken into the usual spy vs spy world of allusion and
narrative plus fake intrigue and facts, so much the hallmark of Harding's work. None of which
stands up to serious analysis as we recall:
where we have Arron Maté, a real journalist doing a superb job of exposing Harding
as the crude propagandist he truly is.
This interview is about Harding's last book "Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and
How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win the 2016 US election".
Now we have a new cash cow where clearly with Harding's latest shtick the Guardian can't
be arsed having him interviewed for another piece of self promotion by one of their hacks. So
they go for the off the shelf fake interview where they allow Harding to talk to himself.
Clearly as they point out Harding is working for home, with more than one foot in the
grave it must be time to furlough him.
Did Skripal played any role in this mess. In this case his poisoning looks more logical as an attempt to hide him from
Russians, who might well suspect him in playing a role in creating Steele dossier by some myths that were present in it.
Notable quotes:
"... Even Beria would laugh at this kind of "evidence". ..."
Much of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Donald Trump was built on the premise
that Christopher Steele and his dossier were to be believed. This even though, early on,
Steele's claims failed to bear scrutiny. Just how far off the claims were became clear when the
FBI interviewed Steele's "Primary Subsource" over three days beginning on Feb. 9, 2017.
Notes taken by FBI agents of those interviews were released by the Senate Judiciary
Committee Friday afternoon.
The Primary Subsource was in reality Steele's sole source, a long-time Russian-speaking
contractor for the former British spy's company, Orbis Business Intelligence. In turn, the
Primary Subsource had a group of friends in Russia. All of their names remain redacted. From
the FBI interviews it becomes clear that the Primary Subsource and his friends peddled
warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence
memos.
Paul Manafort: The Steele dossier's "Primary Subsource" admitted to the FBI "that he was
'clueless' about who Manafort was, and that this was a 'strange task' to have been given." AP
Photo/Seth Wenig, File
Steele's operation didn't rely on great expertise, to judge from the Primary Subsource's
account. He described to the FBI the instructions Steele had given him sometime in the spring
of 2016 regarding Paul Manafort: "Do you know [about] Manafort? Find out about Manafort's
dealings with Ukraine, his dealings with other countries, and any corrupt schemes." The Primary
Subsource admitted to the FBI "that he was 'clueless' about who Manafort was, and that this was
a 'strange task' to have been given."
The Primary Subsource said at first that maybe he had asked some of his friends in Russia
– he didn't have a network of sources, according to his lawyer, but instead just a
"social circle." And a boozy one at that: When the Primary Subsource would get together with
his old friend Source 4, the two would drink heavily. But his social circle was no help with
the Manafort question and so the Primary Subsource scrounged up a few old news clippings about
Manafort and fed them back to Steele.
Also in his "social circle" was Primary Subsource's friend "Source 2," a character who was
always on the make. "He often tries to monetize his relationship with [the Primary Subsource],
suggesting that the two of them should try and do projects together for money," the Primary
Subsource told the FBI (a caution that the Primary Subsource would repeat again and again.) It
was Source 2 who "told [the Primary Subsource] that there was compromising material on
Trump."
And then there was Source 3, a very special friend. Over a redacted number of years, the
Primary Subsource has "helped out [Source 3] financially." She stayed with him when visiting
the United States. The Primary Subsource told the FBI that in the midst of their conversations
about Trump, they would also talk about "a private subject." (The FBI agents, for all their
hardnosed reputation, were too delicate to intrude by asking what that "private subject"
was).
Michael Cohen: The bogus story of the Trump fixer's trip to Prague seems to have originated
with "Source 3," a woman friend of the Primary Subsource, who was "not sure if Source 3 was
brainstorming here." AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File
One day Steele told his lead contractor to get dirt on five individuals. By the time he got
around to it, the Primary Subsource had forgotten two of the names, but seemed to recall Carter
Page, Paul Manafort and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. The Primary Subsource said he asked his
special friend Source 3 if she knew any of them. At first she didn't. But within minutes she
seemed to recall having heard of Cohen, according to the FBI notes. Indeed, before long it came
back to her that she had heard Cohen and three henchmen had gone to Prague to meet with
Russians.
Source 3 kept spinning yarns about Michael Cohen in Prague. For example, she claimed Cohen
was delivering "deniable cash payments" to hackers. But come to think of it, the Primary
Subsource was "not sure if Source 3 was brainstorming here," the FBI notes say.
The Steele Dossier would end up having authoritative-sounding reports of hackers who had
been "recruited under duress by the FSB" -- the Russian security service -- and how they "had
been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct
'altering operations' against the the Democratic Party." What exactly, the FBI asked the
subject, were "altering operations?" The Primary Subsource wouldn't be much help there, as he
told the FBI "that his understanding of this topic (i.e. cyber) was 'zero.'" But what about his
girlfriend whom he had known since they were in eighth grade together? The Primary Subsource
admitted to the FBI that Source 3 "is not an IT specialist herself."
And then there was Source 6. Or at least the Primary Subsource thinks it was Source 6.
Ritz-Carlton Moscow: The Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI "he had not been able to
confirm the story" about Trump and prostitutes at the hotel. But he did check with someone who
supposedly asked a hotel manager, who said that with celebrities, "one never knows what they're
doing." Moscowjob.net/Wikimedia
While he was doing his research on Manafort, the Primary Subsource met a U.S. journalist "at
a Thai restaurant." The Primary Subsource didn't want to ask "revealing questions" but managed
to go so far as to ask, "Do you [redacted] know anyone who can talk about all of this
Trump/Manafort stuff, or Trump and Russia?" According to the FBI notes, the journalist told
Primary Subsource "that he was skeptical and nothing substantive had turned up." But the
journalist put the Primary Subsource in touch with a "colleague" who in turn gave him an email
of "this guy" journalist 2 had interviewed and "that he should talk to."
With the email address of "this guy" in hand, the Primary Subsource sent him a message "in
either June or July 2016." Some weeks later the Primary Subsource "received a telephone call
from an unidentified Russia guy." He "thought" but had no evidence that the mystery "Russian
guy" was " that guy." The mystery caller "never identified himself." The Primary Subsource
labeled the anonymous caller "Source 6." The Primary Subsource and Source 6 talked for a total
of "about 10 minutes." During that brief conversation they spoke about the Primary Subsource
traveling to meet the anonymous caller, but the hook-up never happened.
Nonetheless, the Primary Subsource labeled the unknown Russian voice "Source 6" and gave
Christopher Steele the rundown on their brief conversation – how they had "a general
discussion about Trump and the Kremlin" and "that it was an ongoing relationship." For use in
the dossier, Steele named the voice Source E.
When Steele was done putting this utterly unsourced claim into the style of the dossier,
here's how the mystery call from the unknown guy was presented: "Speaking in confidence to a
compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US
presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of
co-operation between them and the Russian leadership." Steele writes "Inter alia," – yes,
he really does deploy the Latin formulation for "among other things" – "Source E
acknowledged that the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail
messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee [DNC], to the WikiLeaks
platform."
All that and more is presented as the testimony of a "close associate" of Trump, when it was
just the disembodied voice of an unknown guy.
Perhaps even more perplexing is that the FBI interviewers, knowing that Source E was just an
anonymous caller, didn't compare that admission to the fantastical Steele bluster and declare
the dossier a fabrication on the spot.
But perhaps it might be argued that Christopher Steele was bringing crack investigative
skills of his own to bear. For something as rich in detail and powerful in effect as the
dossier, Steele must have been researching these questions himself as well, using his
hard-earned spy savvy to pry closely held secrets away from the Russians. Or at the very least
he must have relied on a team of intelligence operatives who could have gone far beyond the
obvious limitations the Primary Subsource and his group of drinking buddies.
But no. As we learned in December from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Steele "was not
the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting." Steele, the IG
reported "relied on a primary sub-source (Primary Sub-source) for information, and this Primary
Sub-source used a network of [further] sub-sources to gather the information that was relayed
to Steele." The inspector general's report noted that "neither Steele nor the Primary
Sub-source had direct access to the information being reported."
One might, by now, harbor some skepticism about the dossier. One might even be inclined to
doubt the story that Trump was "into water sports" as the Primary Subsource so delicately
described the tale of Trump and Moscow prostitutes. But, in this account, there was an effort,
however feeble, to nail down the "rumor and speculation" that Trump engaged in "unorthodox
sexual activity at the Ritz."
While the Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI "he had not been able to confirm the story,"
Source 2 (who will be remembered as the hustler always looking for a lucrative score)
supposedly asked a hotel manager about Trump and the manager said that with celebrities, "one
never knows what they're doing." One never knows – not exactly a robust proof of
something that smacks of urban myth. But the Primary Subsource makes the best of it, declaring
that at least "it wasn't a denial."
If there was any denial going on it was the FBI's, an agency in denial that its
extraordinary investigation was crumbling.
bh2, 23 minutes ago
Even Beria would laugh at this kind of "evidence".
So Russia started to suspect him and British staged this fun show with Novichok ?
Heavily drinking individuals are probably common in London Russian emigrant circles.
‘Duckgate’, as it is now being dubbed, was used to trick US President Trump into expelling 60 Russian Diplomats over false
photographic evidence presented to him by Haspel, as it was provided to her by UK authorities. The manipulation of Trump, courtesy
of CIA Director Haspel, the UK government (and accidentally documented on by the NYT), had blown first serious holes into the
entire narrative that Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by Russian agents with the deadly Novichok nerve agent.
"Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the
Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were
inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives "
Notable quotes:
"... The Primary Subsource was in reality Steele’s sole source, a long-time Russian-speaking contractor for the former British spy’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence. In turn, the Primary Subsource had a group of friends in Russia. All of their names remain redacted. From the FBI interviews it becomes clear that the Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos. ..."
The Primary Subsource was in reality Steele’s sole source, a long-time Russian-speaking contractor for the former British
spy’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence. In turn, the Primary Subsource had a group of friends in Russia. All of their names
remain redacted. From the FBI interviews it becomes clear that the Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors
and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos.
...Steele’s operation didn’t rely on great expertise, to judge from the Primary Subsource’s account. He described to
the FBI the instructions Steele had given him sometime in the spring of 2016 regarding Paul Manafort: “Do you know [about]
Manafort? Find out about Manafort’s dealings with Ukraine, his dealings with other countries, and any corrupt schemes.” The
Primary Subsource admitted to the FBI “that he was ‘clueless’ about who Manafort was, and that this was a ‘strange task’ to have
been given.”
The Primary Subsource said at first that maybe he had asked some of his friends in Russia – he didn’t have a network of sources,
according to his lawyer, but instead just a “social circle.” And a boozy one at that: When the Primary Subsource would get
together with his old friend Source 4, the two would drink heavily. But his social circle was no help with the Manafort question
and so the Primary Subsource scrounged up a few old news clippings about Manafort and fed them back to Steele.
bh2 , 23 minutes ago
Even Beria would laugh at this kind of "evidence".
Versengetorix, 1 hour ago remove
The Durham investigation has been covered over with asphalt.
ze_vodka , 1 hour ago
After all that has happened, if anyone actually still thinks the Trump = Putin story has
any shred of truth... well... there are no words left to write about that.
It was a lie.
Everyone involved is pretty much a seditious traitor.
Everyone who has at least 1 lonely marble floating in the Grey Matter Soup knows it's a
lie.
Kinda like a digital form of chlamydia combined with binary syphilis , it never seems to wanna go away no matter how many times
you treat it.
alex kalish , 1 hour ago
Oh Yahoo News - why does ZH reprint blatant crap ? Is their source Christopher Steele ? LMAO. A 17 year old pimple face kid
could hack the CIA and they are going on the offensive ? They may blow up Hoover damn or shut down the electric grid by mistake....
Encroaching Darkness , 1 hour ago
********, top to bottom.
(A) Yahoo news - seriously, Yahoo news?
(B) Brennan wanted to overthrow Flynn / Trump - his proteges are still roaming through the agency. Why would Trump trust Brennan's
underlings to hold a cookout at Langley, let alone unsupervised operations?
(C) Why MUST the CIA be responsible for Iran's explosions? Aren't the Israelis (with much higher motivation, closer location
and more contacts) capable of doing this all by themselves?
Article full of unsupported and unsupportable assumptions, from a pseudo-news organization, trying to blame Trump for Iranian
incompetence. Major fail!
DaBard51 , 1 hour ago
The source is... Yahoo News? Yahoo News is the new "Paper of Record"?
The same Yahoo News that "corroborated" the Steele dossier?
"... Any NYT reporting on Epstein is meant as a distraction -- to cover up the facts. The NYT is the elites' protector, it punches down instead of up. The NYT 'revelations' about guards are a) punching down to protect elites and b) a distraction to protect elites. The NYT is one of the Augean Stables. ..."
Now, people who are doubting the USG are automatically labelled "conspiracy theorists".
Except that, in this case, it is perfectly sensible to doubt about his death. He could've put
down really powerful people. He wasn't your daily mafia-boy struggling against his mafia boss
over US$ 1 billion in cocaine; no: he could put down half the American royalty.
Ah yes, that self-admitted CIA linked, totally-not deep state propaganda puppet outlet
lecturing the rest of us about the virtues of fact-checking and journalistic integrity...
Any NYT reporting on Epstein is meant as a distraction -- to cover up the facts.
The NYT is the elites' protector, it punches down instead of up.
The NYT 'revelations' about guards are a) punching down to protect elites and b) a
distraction to protect elites.
The NYT is one of the Augean Stables.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch I'm tempted to say this is really good news, but that
would be very unkind. By contrast, the Spectator is still growing:
Drilldown , Jul 16, 2020 9:40 PM Reply to
John Pretty
The Guardian will use this to become more American controlled. they have two offices there
and only one in the UK. I wish they are going under, at least you know Fox is lying to you,
the Guardian pretends to be your friend then lies to you. They are just an arm of the
Neo-liberal hell, like all the other media.
Straighthrough , Jul 16, 2020 10:01 PM Reply to
Drilldown
Guardians of the galaxy, Masters of gaslightling – as are all politico's! media
being no exception, and left right centre distractions aside.
Eyes Open , Jul 16, 2020 10:38 PM Reply to
Drilldown
Yes. I call the Guardian 'the guardian of neoliberalism'.
Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital and hsot of The Portal podcast, has
gone scorched earth on the New York Times following the Tuesday resignation of journalist
Bari Weiss.
Weinstein describes how The Times has morphed into an activist rag - refusing to cover
"news" unpaletable to their narrative, while ignoring key questions such as whether Jeffrey
Epstein's sex-trafficking ring was "intelligence related."
Jump into Weinstein's Twitter thread by clicking on the below tweet, or scroll down for your
convenience.
At that moment Bari Weiss became all that was left of the "Paper of Record." Why? Because the
existence of Black Racists with the power to hunt professors with Baseball Bats and even
redefine the word 'racism' to make their story impossible to cover ran totally
counter-narrative.
At some point after 2011, the NYT gradually stopped covering the News and became the News
instead. And Bari has been fighting internally from the opinion section to re-establish
Journalism inside tbe the NYT. A total reversal of the Chinese Wall that separates news from
opinion.
This is the paper in 2016 that couldnt be interested in the story that millions of Americans
were likely lying to pollsters about Donald Trump.
The paper refusing to ask the CIA/FBI if Epstein was Intelligence related.
The paper that can't report that it seeks race rioting:
I have had the honor of trying to support both @bariweiss at the New York Times and
@BretWeinstein in their battles simply to stand alone against the internal mob mentality. It is
THE story all over the country. Our courageous individuals are being hunted at work for
dissenting.
Before Bari resigned, I did a podcast with her. It was chilling. I'd make an innocuous
statement of simple fact and ask her about it. She'd reply " That is obviously true but I'm
sorry we can't say that here. It will get me strung up ." That's when I stopped telling her to
hang on.
So what just happened? Let me put it bluntly: What was left of the New York Times just
resigned from the New York Times. The Times canceled itself. As a separate Hong Kong exists in
name only, the New New York Times and affiliated "news" is now the chief threat to our
democracy.
This is the moment when the passengers who have been becoming increasingly alarmed, start to
entertain a new idea: what if the people now in the cockpit are not airline pilots? Well the
Twitter Activists at the @nytimes and elsewhere are not journalists.
What if those calling for empathy have a specific deadness of empathy?
Those calling for justice *are* the unjust?
Those calling "Privilege" are the privileged?
Those calling for equality seek to oppress us?
Those anti-racists are open racists?
The progressives seek regress?
The journalists are covering up the news?
Try the following exercise: put a minus sign in front of nearly every banner claim made by
"the progressives".
Q: Doesn't that make more sense?
NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST
ZEROHEDGE DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX
Receive a daily recap featuring a curated list of must-read stories.
Those aren't the pilots you imagine. And we are far closer to revolution than you think.
Bari and I agree on a lot but also disagree fiercely. And so I have learned that she is
tougher than tough. But these university and journalistic workplaces are now unworkable. They
are the antithesis off what they were built to stand for. It is astounding how long she held
out.
Read her letter. I have asked her to do a make-up podcast & she has agreed. Stay tuned
If you don't want to be surprised again by what's coming understand this: just as there has
been no functioning president, there's now no journalism. We're moving towards a 🌎 of
pure activism.
Prepare to lose your ability to call the police & for more autonomous zones where kids
die so that Govenors & Mayors can LARP as Kayfabe revolutionaries . Disagree with Ms Weiss
all you want as she isn't perfect. But Bari is a true patriot who tried to stand alone. Glad
she's out.
We are not finished by a long shot. What the Intellectual Dark Web tried to do MUST now be
given an institutional home.
Podcast with Bari on The Portal to come as soon as she is ready.
Stay tuned. And thanks for reading this. It is of the utmost importance.
Thank you all. 🙏
P.S. Please retweet the lead tweet from this thread if you understand where we are.
Appreciated.
Criticisms of "cancel culture" often is hypocrtical, as was the case with Weiss, and are connected with prioritizing speech that
shores up the status quo -- necon dominance in the US MSM.
An open letter published by Harper's magazine,
and signed by 150 prominent writers and public figures, has focused attention on the apparent dangers of what has been termed a new
"cancel culture".
The letter brings together an unlikely alliance of genuine leftists, such as Noam Chomsky and Matt Karp, centrists such as J K
Rowling and Ian Buruma, and neoconservatives such as David Frum and Bari Weiss, all speaking out in defence of free speech.
Although the letter doesn't explicitly use the term "cancel culture", it is clearly what is meant in the complaint about a "stifling"
cultural climate that is imposing "ideological conformity" and weakening "norms of open debate and toleration of differences".
It is easy to agree with the letter's generalized argument for tolerance and free and fair debate. But the reality is that many
of those who signed are utter hypocrites, who have shown precisely zero commitment to free speech, either in their words or in their
deeds.
Further, the intent of many them in signing the letter is the very reverse of their professed goal: they want to stifle free speech,
not protect it.
To understand what is really going on with this letter, we first need to scrutinize the motives , rather than the substance,
of the letter.
A new 'illiberalism'
"Cancel culture" started as the shaming, often on social media, of people who were seen to have said offensive things. But of
late, cancel culture has on occasion become more tangible, as the letter notes, with individuals fired or denied the chance to speak
at a public venue or to publish their work.
The letter denounces this supposedly new type of "illiberalism":
"We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls
for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.
"Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred
from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; The result has been to steadily
narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion
among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient
zeal in agreement."
Tricky identity politics
The array of signatories is actually more troubling than reassuring. If we lived in a more just world, some of those signing –
like Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former US State Department official – would
be facing a reckoning before a Hague war crimes tribunal for their roles in promoting "interventions" in Iraq and Libya respectively,
not being held up as champions of free speech.
That is one clue that these various individuals have signed the letter for very different reasons.
Chomsky signed because he has been a lifelong and consistent defender of the right to free speech, even for those with appalling
opinions such as Holocaust denial.
Frum, who coined the term "axis of evil" that rationalised the invasion of Iraq, and Weiss, a New York Times columnist, signed
because they have found their lives getting tougher. True, it is easy for them to dominate platforms in the corporate media while
advocating for criminal wars abroad, and they have paid no career price when their analyses and predictions have turned out to be
so much dangerous hokum. But they are now feeling the backlash on university campuses and social media.
Meanwhile, centrists like Buruma and Rowling have discovered that it is getting ever harder to navigate the tricky terrain of
identity politics without tripping up. The reputational damage can have serious consequences.
Buruma famously lost his job as editor of the New York Review of Books two years ago after after he published and defended an
article that
violated
the new spirit of the #MeToo movement. And Rowling made the
mistake of thinking her followers would be as
fascinated by her traditional views on transgender issues as they are by her Harry Potter books.
'Fake news, Russian trolls'
But the fact that all of these writers and intellectuals agree that there is a price to be paid in the new, more culturally sensitive
climate does not mean that they are all equally interested in protecting the right to be controversial or outspoken.
Chomsky, importantly, is defending free speech for all , because he correctly understands that the powerful are only too
keen to find justifications to silence those who challenge their power. Elites protect free speech only in so far as it serves their
interests in dominating the public space.
If those on the progressive left do not defend the speech rights of everyone, even their political opponents, then any restrictions
will soon be turned against them. The establishment will always tolerate the hate speech of a Trump or a Bolsonaro over the justice
speech of a Sanders or a Corbyn.
By contrast, most of the rest of those who signed – the rightwingers and the centrists – are interested in free speech for
themselves and those like them . They care about protecting free speech only in so far as it allows them to continue dominating
the public space with their views – something they were only too used to until a few years ago, before social media started to level
the playing field a little.
The center and the right have been fighting back ever since with claims that anyone who seriously challenges the neoliberal status
quo at home and the neoconservative one abroad is promoting "fake news" or is a "Russian troll". This updating of the charge of being
"un-American" embodies cancel culture at its very worst.
Social media accountability
In other words, apart from in the case of a few progressives, the letter is simply special pleading – for a return to the status
quo. And for that reason, as we shall see, Chomsky might have been better advised not to have added his name, however much he agrees
with the letter's vague, ostensibly pro-free speech sentiments.
What is striking about a significant proportion of those who signed is their self-identification as ardent supporters of Israel.
And as Israel's critics know only too well, advocates for Israel have been at the forefront of the cancel culture – from long before
the term was even coined.
For decades, pro-Israel activists have sought to silence anyone seen to be seriously critiquing this small, highly militarized
state, sponsored by the colonial powers, that was implanted in a region rich with a natural resource, oil, needed to lubricate the
global economy, and at a terrible cost to its native, Palestinian population.
Nothing should encourage us to believe that zealous defenders of Israel among those signing the letter have now seen the error
of their ways. Their newfound concern for free speech is simply evidence that they have begun to suffer from the very same cancel
culture they have always promoted in relation to Israel.
They have lost control of the "cancel culture" because of two recent developments: a rapid growth in identity politics among liberals
and leftists, and a new popular demand for "accountability" spawned by the rise of social media.
Cancelling Israel's critics
In fact, despite their professions of concern, the evidence suggests that some of those signing the letter have been intensifying
their own contribution to cancel culture in relation to Israel, rather than contesting it.
That is hardly surprising. The need to counter criticism of Israel has grown more pressing as Israel has more obviously become
a pariah state. Israel has refused to countenance peace talks with the Palestinians and it has intensified its efforts to realize
long-harbored plans to annex swaths of the West Bank in violation of international law.
Rather than allow "robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters" on Israel, Israel's supporters have preferred the
tactics of those identified in the letter as enemies of free speech: "swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions
of speech and thought".
Just ask Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour party who was reviled, along with his supporters, as an antisemite – one
of the worst smears imaginable – by several people on the Harper's list, including
Rowling and
Weiss . Such claims
were promoted even though his critics could produce no actual evidence of an antisemitism problem in the Labour party.
Similarly, think of the treatment of Palestinian solidarity activists who support a boycott of Israel (BDS), modeled on the one
that helped push South Africa's leaders into renouncing apartheid. BDS activists too have been smeared as antisemites – and Weiss
again has been a prime
offender .
The incidents highlighted in the Harper's letter in which individuals have supposedly been cancelled is trivial compared to the
cancelling of a major political party and of a movement that stands in solidarity with a people who have been oppressed for decades.
And yet how many of these free speech warriors have come forward to denounce the fact that leftists – including many Jewish anti-Zionists
– have been pilloried as antisemites to prevent them from engaging in debates about Israel's behavior and its abuses of Palestinian
rights?
How many of them have decried the imposition of a new definition of antisemitism, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance,
that has been rapidly gaining ground in western countries?
That definition is designed to silence a large section of the left by prioritizing the safety of Israel from being criticized
before the safety of Jews from being vilified and attacked – something that even the lawyer who authored the definition has come
to
regret .
Why has none of this "cancel culture" provoked an open letter to Harper's from these champions of free speech?
Double-edge sword
The truth is that many of those who signed the letter are defending not free speech but their right to continue dominating the
public square – and their right to do so without being held accountable.
Bari Weiss, before she landed a job at the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times, spent her student years trying to
get Muslim professors
fired from her university – cancelling them – because of their criticism of Israel. And she explicitly did so under the banner
of "academic freedom", claiming pro-Israel students felt intimidated in the classroom.
The New York Civil Liberties Union concluded that it was Weiss, not the professors, who was the real threat to academic freedom.
This was not some youthful indiscretion. In a book last year Weiss cited her efforts to rid Columbia university of these professors
as a formative experience on which she still draws.
Weiss and many of the others listed under the letter are angry that the rhetorical tools they used for so long to stifle the free
speech of others have now been turned against them. Those who lived for so long by the sword of identity politics – on Israel, for
example – are worried that their reputations may die by that very same sword – on issues of race, sex and gender.
Narcissistic concern
To understand how the cancel culture is central to the worldview of many of these writers and intellectuals, and how blind they
are to their own complicity in that culture, consider the case of Jonathan Freedland, a columnist with the supposedly liberal-left
British newspaper the Guardian. Although Freedland is not among those signing the letter, he is very much aligned with the centrists
among them and, of course, supported the letter in an article
published in the Guardian.
Freedland, we should note, led the "cancel culture" campaign against the Labour party referenced above. He was one of the key
figures in Britain's Jewish community who breathed life into the
antisemitism smears
against Corbyn and his supporters.
But note the brief clip below. In it, Freedland's voice can be heard cracking as he explains how he has been a victim of the cancel
culture himself: he confesses that he has suffered verbal and emotional abuse at the hands of Israel's most extreme apologists –
those who are even more unapologetically pro-Israel than he is.
He reports that he has been called a "kapo", the term for Jewish collaborators in the Nazi concentration camps, and a "sonderkommando",
the Jews who disposed of the bodies of fellow Jews killed in the gas chambers. He admits such abuse "burrows under your skin" and
"hurts tremendously".
And yet, despite the personal pain he has experienced of being unfairly accused, of being cancelled by a section of his own community,
Freedland has been at the forefront of the campaign to tar critics of Israel, including anti-Zionist Jews, as antisemites on the
flimsiest of evidence.
He is entirely oblivious to the ugly nature of the cancel culture – unless it applies to himself . His concern is purely
narcissistic. And so it is with the majority of those who signed the letter.
Conducting a monologue
The letter's main conceit is the pretence that "illiberalism" is a new phenomenon, that free speech is under threat, and that
the cancel culture only arrived at the moment it was given a name.
That is simply nonsense. Anyone over the age of 35 can easily remember a time when newspapers and websites did not have a talkback
section, when blogs were few in number and rarely read, and when there was no social media on which to challenge or hold to account
"the great and the good".
Writers and columnists like those who signed the letter were then able to conduct a monologue in which they revealed their opinions
to the rest of us as if they were Moses bringing down the tablets from the mountaintop.
In those days, no one noticed the cancel culture – or was allowed to remark on it. And that was because only those who held approved
opinions were ever given a media platform from which to present those opinions.
Before the digital revolution, if you dissented from the narrow consensus imposed by the billionaire owners of the corporate media,
all you could do was print your own primitive newsletter and send it by post to the handful of people who had heard of you.
That was the real cancel culture. And the proof is in the fact that many of those formerly obscure writers quickly found they
could amass tens of thousands of followers – with no help from the traditional corporate media – when they had access to blogs and
social media.
Silencing the left
Which brings us to the most troubling aspect of the open letter in Harper's. Under cover of calls for tolerance, given credibility
by Chomsky's name, a proportion of those signing actually want to restrict the free speech of one section of the population – the
part influenced by Chomsky.
They are not against the big cancel culture from which they have benefited for so long. They are against the small cancel culture
– the new more chaotic, and more democratic, media environment we currently enjoy – in which they are for the first time being held
to account for their views, on a range of issues including Israel.
Just as Weiss tried to get professors fired under the claim of academic freedom, many of these writers and public figures are
using the banner of free speech to discredit speech they don't like, speech that exposes the hollowness of their own positions.
Their criticisms of "cancel culture" are really about prioritizing "responsible" speech, defined as speech shared by centrists
and the right that shores up the status quo. They want a return to a time when the progressive left – those who seek to disrupt a
manufactured consensus, who challenge the presumed verities of neoliberal and neoconservative orthodoxy – had no real voice.
The new attacks on "cancel culture" echo the attacks on Bernie Sanders' supporters, who were framed as "Bernie Bros" – the evidence-free
allegation that he attracted a rabble of aggressive, women-hating men who tried to bully others into silence on social media.
Just as this claim was used to discredit Sanders' policies, so the center and the right now want to discredit the left more generally
by implying that, without curbs, they too will bully everyone else into silence and submission through their "cancel culture".
If this conclusion sounds unconvincing, consider that President Donald Trump could easily have added his name to the letter alongside
Chomsky's. Trump used his recent Independence Day
speech at Mount Rushmore to make similar points to the Harper's letter. He at least was explicit in equating "cancel culture"
with what he called "far-left fascism":
"One of [the left's] political weapons is 'Cancel Culture' – driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding
total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism This attack on our liberty, our magnificent
liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly."
Trump, in all his vulgarity, makes plain what the Harper's letter, in all its cultural finery, obscures. That attacks on the new
"cancel culture" are simply another front – alongside supposed concerns about "fake news" and "Russian trolls" – in the establishment's
efforts to limit speech by the left.
Attention redirected
This is not to deny that there is fake news on social media or that there are trolls, some of them even Russian. Rather, it is
to point out that our attention is being redirected, and our concerns manipulated by a political agenda.
Despite the way it has been presented in the corporate media, fake news on social media has been mostly a problem of the right.
And the worst examples of fake news – and the most influential – are found not on social media at all, but on the front pages of
the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
What genuinely fake news on Facebook has ever rivaled the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that were knowingly peddled
by a political elite and their stenographers in the corporate media. Those lies led directly to more than a million Iraqi deaths,
turned millions more into refugees, destroyed an entire country, and fuelled a new type of nihilistic Islamic extremism whose effects
we are still feeling.
Most of the worst lies from the current period – those that have obscured or justified US interference in Syria and Venezuela,
or rationalized war crimes against Iran, or approved the continuing imprisonment of Julian Assange for exposing war crimes – can
only be understood by turning our backs on the corporate media and looking to experts who can rarely find a platform outside of social
media.
I say this as someone who has concerns about the fashionable focus on identity politics rather than class politics. I say it also
as someone who rejects all forms of cancel culture – whether it is the old-style, "liberal" cancel culture that imposes on us a narrow
"consensus" politics (the Overton window), or the new "leftwing" cancel culture that too often prefers to focus on easy cultural
targets like Rowling than the structural corruption of western political systems.
But those who are impressed by the letter simply because Chomsky's name is attached should beware. Just as "fake news" has provided
the pretext for Google and social media platforms to change their algorithms to vanish left-wingers from searches and threads, just
as "antisemitism" has been redefined to demonize the left, so too the supposed threat of "cancel culture" will be exploited to silence
the left.
Protecting Bari Weiss and J K Rowling from a baying left-wing "mob" – a mob that that claims a right to challenge their views
on Israel or trans issues – will become the new rallying cry from the establishment for action against "irresponsible" or
"intimidating" speech.
Progressive leftists who join these calls out of irritation with the current focus on identity politics, or because they fear
being labelled an antisemite, or because they mistakenly assume that the issue really is about free speech, will quickly find that
they are the main targets.
In defending free speech, they will end up being the very ones who are silenced.
UPDATE:
You don't criticise Chomsky however tangentially and respectfully – at least not from a left perspective – without expecting a
whirlwind of opposition. But one issue that keeps being raised on my social media feeds in his defence is just plain wrong-headed,
so I want to quickly address it. Here's one my followers expressing the point succinctly:
"The sentiments in the letter stand or fall on their own merits, not on the characters or histories of some of the signatories,
nor their future plans."
The problem, as I'm sure Chomsky would explain in any other context, is that this letter fails not just because of the other people
who signed it but on its merit too . And that's because, as I explain above, it ignores the most oppressive and most established
forms of cancel culture, as Chomsky should have been the first to notice.
Highlighting the small cancel culture, while ignoring the much larger, establishment-backed cancel culture, distorts our understanding
of what is at stake and who wields power.
Chomsky unwittingly just helped a group of mostly establishment stooges skew our perceptions of free speech problems so that we
side with them against ourselves. There is no way that can be a good thing.
UPDATE 2:
There are still people holding out against the idea that it harmed the left to have Chomsky sign this letter. And rather than
address their points individually, let me try another way of explaining my argument:
Why has Chomsky not signed a letter backing the furore over "fake news", even though there is some fake news on social media?
Why has he not endorsed the "Bernie Bros" narrative, even though doubtless there are some bullying Sanders supporters on social media?
Why has he not supported the campaign claiming the Labour party has an antisemitism problem, even though there are some antisemites
in the Labour party (as there are everywhere)?
He hasn't joined any of those campaigns for a very obvious reason – because he understands how power works, and that on the left
you hit up, not down. You certainly don't cheerlead those who are up as they hit down.
Chomsky understands this principle only too well because here he is
setting it out in relation to Iran:
"Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies
I don't agree with, like bombing."
For exactly the same reason he has not joined those pillorying Iran – because his support would be used for nefarious ends – he
shouldn't have joined this campaign. He made a mistake. He's fallible.
Also, this isn't about the left eating itself. Really, Chomsky shouldn't be the issue. The issue should be that a bunch
of centrists and right-wingers used this letter to try to reinforce a narrative designed to harm the left, and lay the groundwork
for further curbs on its access to social media. But because Chomsky signed the letter, many more leftists are now buying into that
narrative – a narrative intended to harm them. That's why Chomsky's role cannot be ignored, nor his mistake glossed over.
UPDATE 3:
I had not anticipated how many ways people on the left might find to justify this letter.
Here's the latest reasoning. Apparently, the letter sets an important benchmark that can in future be used to protect free speech
by the left when we are threatened with being "cancelled" – as, for example, with the antisemitism smears that were used against
anti-Zionist Jews and other critics of Israel in the British Labour party.
I should hardly need to point out how naive this argument is. It completely ignores how power works in our societies: who gets
to decide what words mean and how principles are applied. This letter won't help the left because "cancel culture" is being framed
– by this letter, by Trump, by the media – as a "loony left" problem. It is a new iteration of the "politically correct gone mad"
discourse, and it will be used in exactly the same way.
It won't help Steven Salaita, sacked from a university job because he criticised Israel's killing of civilians in Gaza, or Chris
Williamson, the Labour MP expelled because he defended the party's record on being anti-racist.
The "cancel culture" furore isn't interested in the fact that they were "cancelled". Worse still, this moral panic turns the whole
idea of cancelling on its head: it is Salaita and Williamson who are accused – and found guilty – of doing the cancelling, of cancelling
Israel and Jews.
Israel's supporters will continue to win this battle by claiming that criticism of Israel "cancels" that country ("wipes it off
the map"), "cancels" Israel's Jewish population ("drives them into the sea"), and "cancels" Jews more generally ("denies a central
component of modern Jewish identity").
Greater awareness of "cancel culture" would not have saved Corbyn from the antisemitism smears because the kind of cancel culture
that smeared Corbyn is never going to be defined as "cancelling".
For anyone who wishes to see how this works in practice, watch Guardian columnist Owen Jones cave in – as he has done so often
– to the power dynamics of the "cancel culture" discourse in this interview with Sky News. I actually agree with almost everything
Jones says in this clip, apart from his joining yet again in the witch-hunt against Labour's anti-Zionists. He doesn't see that witch-hunt
as "cancel culture", and neither will anyone else with a large platform like his to protect:
Plenty of decent people have headed to five eyes thinking they would find a better life,
but we also take in the scum of the world that can be used against their own countries. These
generally rise to high places.
Imperial France seems of the same mindset and Chechen freedom fighters are now fighting for
their freedom in France. Yankistans freedom fighter Osama Bin Larden was just fighting for
freedom apparently. Like the AQ media wing 'White Helmets' that UK and Canada took in, not to
mention the nazi's that participated in the genocides in their own countries in WWII.
When peasants living conditions are constantly improving, there will be no revolt and no
civil war. Yankistan propaganda can't even come up with an opposition in China.
Angloshere propaganda mostly projects onto target countries what they themselves are
doing.
"... If Skripal is involved with all the Clinton stuff, then he would want an insurance policy for example on an USB drive that he could leave for someone to pick up, and leak if something foreshortened his life ..."
"The judge also concluded that Steele's notes of his first interaction with the FBI
about the dossier on July 5, 2016 made clear that his ultimate client for his research
project was Hillary Clinton's campaign as directed by her campaign law firm Perkins Coie. The
FBI did not disclose that information to the court."
Finally we are getting down to where the cheese binds. Hillary Clinton's campaign, with
Mrs. Clinton's knowledge, commissioned the Steele dossier to try to torpedo Trump's election
prospects. She never thought he could win, but the Dems wanted to make sure.
I'd bet a dollar to a doughnut Skripal was the source of the Russian 'intelligence', and
that he was bumped off afterward to make sure he stayed quiet.
The whole Russiagate scandal was just Democrat bullshit, and they kept up with it long
after they all knew they were lying. And Biden thinks he's going to get elected, after that
revelation? The Democrats deserve to be expelled from politics en masse. Leading with that
wretched prick Schiff.
It would seem likely that had the Klintonator won the 2016 Presidential election, Sergei
Skripal might have been left alone mouldering with his guinea pigs and cats in his Salsibury
home. Perhaps he had to take the fall for HRC's loss in the election, for whatever reason
(not shovelling enough shit into the dossier to bring down Trump perhaps); someone had to
take the blame and of course HRC will never admit responsibility for her own failure.
Well, you never know – Russians are kind of an endangered species in the UK. They
turn up dead whenever a public accusation of another Putin 'state hit' would be a useful
feature in the papers.
What I want to know is if the paths of the Skripals passed with those of the supposed
Russian assassins (which I assume to be possible decoys) or anyone else in space, but not
necessarily time. If Skripal is involved with all the Clinton stuff, then he would want
an insurance policy for example on an USB drive that he could leave for someone to pick up,
and leak if something foreshortened his life
It could well have been a simple dead-drop and when alerted by their phones being turned
off and batteries removed, the priority was to immobilize/incapacitate them. A bit tricky in
public, but not at all impossible by a near/passer by to their bench with an aerosol, say a
cyclist walking with his bike After all, they did also have the Chief nurse of the BA on hand
just in case it went wrong as things sometimes do. Which leads to the question, was it just
the Brits alone, together with the Americans, or watching the Americans and then cleaning up
their mess? 2 or more likely 3 seem most likely if we look at sheer brazeness.
That concludes my speculation for the day! Maybe I should be a journalist. I could be paid
for this!
Yes, you never know, but it's certainly hard to believe Occam was English. It seems pretty
clear the simplest explanation is "MI6 bumped him off and blamed it on Russia". When you are
trying to arrange a death which is bound to be suspicious, you want to do it in a way that
when it becomes public knowledge, the first people the public thinks of is not you. means,
motive and opportunity all strongly favour the English side. It seems to be be fairly common
knowledge that Skripal wanted to return to Russia; we have no way of knowing if he planned to
live there or just visit, more likely the latter. But Putin decides to send an assassination
team to England to rub him out. Instead of welcoming him home to Russia, where he could
prevent the British from investigating, and then killing him. Presumably in a much more
prosaic fashion – say, running him down with a car – rather than employing some
exotic poison or isotope which will scream 'Russia!!' How long would the British have been
investigating the Skripals' deaths (if they had died) had they been run down with a 7.5 ton
lorry which was subsequently found burned to a shell several counties away? Would the British
papers have been shrieking "Putin's Truck!!!" next morning? But no – Russian assassins
always have to 'send a message', which must inspire Britain to 'send a message' of its own by
punishing the entire country. Maybe it's just me, but flash-cooking Skripal in the High
Street with a flamethrower in broad daylight would send a message. And then say to the
police, "Keep your hands where I can see 'em, unless you want a couple of shashliks,
comrade", before speeding away in an Aurus Senat limousine. That would send a message,
too.
Remember, Sir John Sawers is the former chief of MI6 and is in no way linked to the
UK government. He is a private individual. This is not Hybrid Warfare.
Which is good, because it allows Ed to earnestly parrot his talking points and add plenty
of filler in that well known balanced, independent and journalistically shining star of an
outlet, the Daily Fail.
The lesson I think we can take from this is that UK gov has finally been caught in its own
bitch 'n' slap China trap and also a victim of t-Rump's bash China campaign. Time has run out
on this strategy. It was more than happy to sign on to loud anti-China slogans, as long as it
didn't cost UK plc serious cash or future investme nt. The problem is that China has had
enough of mostly ignoring those slings and arrows for years.
The new so-called 'Wolf-warrior' China response that the west is publicly bemoaning as
'threatening' comes after so much sinophobia. Thus, UK gov has got the message much more
forcefully in the last few days and the opposition like 'ex' directors of British
intelligence and others are all hands to the wheel because they do not hold official power
and have no other way of influencing the government. 2020 really is a momentous year.
I didn't really have time to read it because I have to leave for work, but the headline
alone is enough to showcase classic Lucas behavior – enthusiastically cheer the
government 'taking a stand', and leaving the accountants to sort out the damage and try to
salvage something from the rubble. You know, it is a miracle Britain has survived as long as
it has with the eejits who are let to run it.
I have to confess, I'm having a hard time getting past the headline. There's so much about it that screams of a policy flak who knows how to
present things as facts when they are anything but, and lead you into the piece already
believing that (a) Britain has been the victim of more than one attack by Russia, (b) that a
country supposedly friendless, without allies and with its economy reeling and staggering from
punishing sanctions still somehow has sufficient power to not only grip Europe, but to squeeze
it until it squeaks, and (c) Britain can do something about it.
REPORT THIS AD
Well, let's look; if Mr. Straw is totally unconcerned about potential embarrassment. there's
nothing holding us back, is there? As we have often done before, let's look at each of the
'attacks' Russia is supposed to have visited upon Britain. Ready? Litvinenko.
Litvinenko is
supposed to have ingested Polonium 210 – a uniquely Russian isotope, although the
United States buys enough Polonium from Russia nearly every month to have killed Litvinenko
about 8,000 times – which was slipped to him by two Russian agents in the Pine Bar in
London. Polonium traces were subsequently found all over London, including on documents
Litvinenko had touched, a Fax machine at fellow collaborator Boris Berzovsky's house, and in a
cab in which Litvinenko had ridden, which was so toxic thereafter that it had to be withdrawn
from service. The problem with that is that neither of Litvinenko's accused murderers was with
him in the cab, or touched the documents he handled but Litvinenko never touched Polonium with
his hands. He swallowed it, in tea, and once inside him it could not contaminate anything else
unless Litvinenko licked it, because Polonium – despite its toxicity – is a
low-alpha isotope which cannot penetrate skin. Litvinenko was, remarkably, covered from head to
toe in skin.
Litvinenko produced a passionately and eloquently-written deathbed accusation which tabbed
Vladimir Putin as his murderer, because he – Litvinenko – 'knew too much',
including Putin's secret pedophilia, evidence of which was the subject of KGB videotapes made
while Putin was a student, although the first personal video recorder (the Sony Betamax) was
not introduced until the year Putin graduated. Litvinenko himself could barely order a cup of
coffee in English, but that puzzle was solved when Alexander Goldfarb – a former nuclear
scientist in Russia and a close confidante of Boris Berezovsky – stepped up to say that
Litvinenko had 'dictated it to him'. Just as an interesting aside, Litvinenko had bragged to
his brother how he had lied to British authorities before in the case of a supposed murder
attempt against Boris Berezovsky by the Russian state, using a poisoned pen. This fake murder
plot was successfully used by Berzovsky to argue against deportation from Great Britain.
Anyway, we don't want to go on and on about Litvinenko – how believable is the British
tale of his assassination by the Russian state? Polonium traces all over London in places the
alleged assassins had never visited could not have been left by Litvinenko, because he never
touched Polonium with his hands, and it cannot penetrate skin. Polonium was not discovered in
his urine until after he was dead. We will never know if radiation poisoning made his hair fall
out, because his head was shaved by one of Berezovsky's dissident Chechen sidekicks. Berezovsky
himself also turned up dead in England, after losing a major legal case, having supposedly hung
himself with his tie inside a locked bathroom at his home. Coincidentally, Polonium as a murder
weapon led straight back to Russia (if we assume we did not know about the American purchases
of Polonium, which had the added cachet of bearing the telltale signature of having been made
in a Russian nuclear reactor), and would have been a breathtakingly stupid choice for a Russian
assassin. Still, they almost got away with it – British doctors were totally on the wrong
track, and the alleged assassins had already left the country, when an 'anonymous tipster'
(*cough* Goldfarb *cough*) suggested they check for Polonium 210.
The Skripals – yes, 'pon my word, old chap; what a nefarious example of Russian
ruthlessness. Probably ordered straight from the top, by Vladimir Putin himself – "Will
no one rid me of this troublesome has-been KGB agent who has been out of Russia since 2010:
would that I had snuffed him then, instead of trading him to the UK in a spy swap!" Yes, I
know, already stupid, but it gets so much more unbelievable . Once
again, a distinctively Russian murder weapon; Novichok, a nerve agent manufactured from
commercially-available fertilizers and organophosphates. The helpful BBC miniseries Mr. Straw
speaks of was an exercise in retconning – retroactive connectivity, an after-the-fact fix
which explains what was unexplainable in previous versions. For instance, the co-poisoning of
Detective Nick Bailey, so ill he was nigh unto death.
Originally the story was that he was contaminated because he was one of the first
responders, when the Skripals were jerking and drooling on a public bench near the restaurant
where they had just eaten, in Salisbury. But the first passer-by, who helpfully attended them, just happened
to be none other than the senior medical officer in the British Army, and she was in no way
affected although she wore no protection than perhaps rubber gloves. Nick Bailey also wore
gloves, because it was cold. The next version had him entering the Skripal home – where
he was contaminated – via the back door. But the assassins had unhelpfully smeared the
poison on the front doorknob. Shit! So, unable to bring the assassins and the Skripals and Nick
Bailey all together at the same doorknob within the same period of lethality, the story was
changed again. Bailey had actually nipped next door, borrowed the spare key – the
existence of which was completely unknown to anyone prior to the television broadcast –
from a neighbour, and entered by the front door, where he became contaminated. It was touch and
go there for awhile, but he went home 18 days later, none the worse for his brush with one of
the deadliest nerve agents known to man. A nerve agent which, incidentally, was not known to
the elimination of other possibilities to have killed anyone. Dawn Sturgess died later, in
Amesbury, after spraying pure Novichok on her wrists from a fake perfume bottle, we are told.
But Dawn Sturgess was a known drug addict, Novichok as an aerosol spray would have taken effect
within seconds but she was not stricken for hours, and the medium of infection was not
discovered until three days after her death, sitting conspicuously on Charles Rowley's kitchen
counter, although the house had already been searched. Perfectly intact and waiting to be
discovered, although Charles Rowley's brother reported that the bottle had broken in his
brother's hands as Sturgess handed it back to him, which was how he became contaminated.
Another insultingly full-of-bullshit story that would not survive press scrutiny for an hour if
it had been Russia reporting a poisoning by British agents in Russia.
Well, I spent a lot longer on that than I meant to; let's move on. Suffice it to say that
while there indeed is 'overwhelming evidence' in both cases as Mr. Straw avers, it argues
strongly that Britain made up both scenarios, and not very competently, while there is actually
zero evidence that Russia had anything to do with either except for the screaming 'made in
Russia' agents used, which Russian assassins would be beyond foolish to have chosen for that
very reason. Would it make sense for a British assassin in Moscow to bump off a former double
agent by caving in his skull with a King Dick claw
hammer , and then leave it at the scene? Do international test scores suggest an
otherworldly degree of reasoning ability on the part of Britons, while Russians are abysmally
stupid by comparison? Not that I have ever seen.
Straw claims an 'ever-present threat of Russia's efforts to destabilise the UK and European
Union.' Is there anything more destabilizing between the two than
Brexit ? Whose idea was that – Putin's?
Mr. Straw claims Russia's alleged belligerence results from insecurity, a feeling of
weakness and is a function of how many more times Russia's defense budget other countries and
alliances spend. How do you figure? The best fighter aircraft the USA can come up with, for
more than $80 Million
a copy , is the F-35. The F-35 was unable to
defeat previous-generation aircraft from its own armed forces. The Sukhoi S-35 costs less
than half as much, and while western sites which match the two grant all sorts of 'excitement points' to the
F-35 for its technology and Beyond-Visual-Range (BVR) performance, the SU-35 is more
maneuverable, has a higher rate of climb, more thrust, has double the speed, and while the
F-35's BVR performance is rated much better, its engagement range with its embarked missile is
only a bit better than half the SU-35's.
"However, despite high spending on its military, it is no match for the US, which spends
12 times as much, nor China, which spends four times its budget. Russia's population is
declining, and its GDP per head is just 50th in the world. It feels isolated, surrounded by
potentially hostile forces, and weak."
I was led to believe by some other online sites (the names of which I've now forgotten)
that Sergei Skripal's neighbour, from whom Detective Nick Bailey must have borrowed the
spare key 'coz who else could have held it, was none other than Pablo Miller. I'd have
thought the D-notice imposed on British media compelling them never to refer to him back in
March 2018 was still current. How would the BBC or those Guardian journos who wrote the
script for the recent TV series have avoided referring to him when the detective was trying
to locate a spare key? I admit I haven't seen the TV series yet and from what I've seen and
heard about it so far, it's not worth a look.
Thanks for the new post, Mark, and for making it as detailed and riveting as ever.
The D-Notice system (DSMA?) technically only requires voluntary compliance but
curiously all the British media consistently go along with it Ho! Ho! Ho!
..Any D-Notices or DA-notices are only advisory requests and are not legally
enforceable; hence, news editors can choose not to abide by them. However, they are
generally complied with by the media
Thanks, Jennifer; I didn't really have to do much – Moscow Exile was kind and
psychic enough to print out Straw's whole editorial, else I might have had to subscribe to
The Independent to even see it. *Shudder*. And Straw just opened his head and let the
bullshit flow – I only had to redirect the stream a little here and there.
I don't think Miller was the neighbour, I seem to remember a different name nope, that
was Ross Cassidy, who was cited by John Helmer as perhaps the only person Skripal trusted
enough to have left a key with him, but he didn't live next door. Pablo Miller does indeed
also live in Salisbury, but I have seen no mention of where,
Pablo Miller, Mark Urban and Hamish de Bretton-Gordon all served in the same tank
regiment in the British Army. I have seen one other source – can't remember where now
– that claimed Christopher Steele also served in the same regiment, but that's not
true – he was recruited straight out of Cambridge at graduation, by MI6, and worked
for them for 22 years. That's not to say there were not connections, though – Steele
was also Case Officer for Litvinenko, and was allegedly the first to assess that
Litvinenko's death was 'a Russian state hit'.
"Over a career that spanned more than 20 years, Steele performed a series of roles,
but always appeared to be drawn back to Russia; he was, sources say, head of MI6's Russia
desk. When the agency was plunged into panic over the poisoning of its agent Alexander
Litvinenko in 2006, the then chief, Sir John Scarlett, needed a trusted senior officer to
plot a way through the minefield ahead – so he turned to Steele. It was Steele,
sources say, who correctly and quickly realised that Litvinenko's death was a Russian state
"hit"."
You'll enjoy that piece by The Grauniad – it goes on and on about how first-rate
credible Steele was, and how the quality of his work is above reproach. His legendary
'dossier', obviously, has since fallen apart and been dismissed as fanciful
disinformation.
The spare key was found in the usual place: inside the cane rod of the little angling
garden gnome modelled on His Imperial Majesty Tsar Nicholas II, stood by that awkward
entrance to the back porch. No need for nosy neighbours. (I added this detail for inclusion
in Version 4 of The Skripals, due out in January 2021.)
Thanks, Jennifer; I didn't really have to do much – Moscow Exile was kind and
psychic enough to print out Straw's whole editorial, else I might have had to subscribe to
The Independent to even see it. *Shudder*. And Straw just opened his head and let the
bullshit flow – I only had to redirect the stream a little here and there.
I don't think Miller was the neighbour, I seem to remember a different name nope, that was
Ross Cassidy, who was cited by John Helmer as perhaps the only person Skripal trusted enough
to have left a key with him, but he didn't live next door. Pablo Miller does indeed also live
in Salisbury, but I have seen no mention of where,
Pablo Miller, Mark Urban and Hamish de Bretton-Gordon all served in the same tank regiment
in the British Army. I have seen one other source – can't remember where now –
that claimed Christopher Steele also served in the same regiment, but that's not true –
he was recruited straight out of Cambridge at graduation, by MI6, and worked for them for 22
years. That's not to say there were not connections, though – Steele was also Case
Officer for Litvinenko, and was allegedly the first to assess that Litvinenko's death was 'a
Russian state hit'.
"Over a career that spanned more than 20 years, Steele performed a series of roles, but
always appeared to be drawn back to Russia; he was, sources say, head of MI6's Russia desk.
When the agency was plunged into panic over the poisoning of its agent Alexander Litvinenko
in 2006, the then chief, Sir John Scarlett, needed a trusted senior officer to plot a way
through the minefield ahead – so he turned to Steele. It was Steele, sources say, who
correctly and quickly realised that Litvinenko's death was a Russian state "hit"."
You'll enjoy that piece by The Grauniad – it goes on and on about how first-rate
credible Steele was, and how the quality of his work is above reproach. His legendary
'dossier', obviously, has since fallen apart and been dismissed as fanciful
disinformation.
May good ideas about the level of suppression of "free thought" in US universities.
But this Red Guard persecution are really bizarre and contradict all moral norms.
Notable quotes:
"... One of the main problems with this sort of lofty rhetoric is that it misrepresents the severely deficient reality of American political discourse. We live in a period when the rise of neoliberal capitalism and untrammeled corporate power have cheapened "public" political discourse to serve the interests of plutocratic wealth and power, while assaulting notions of the common good and the public health. Idealistic rhetoric about exploring diverse views falls flat, and is a mischaracterization of reality to the deficiencies in U.S. political discourse under neoliberal corporate capitalism, when debates are perverted by political and economic elites who have contempt for the free exchange of ideas. ..."
"... Ours is a reactionary culture, which celebrates ideas that service political and economic power centers. In this society, views that are elevated to being worthy of discussion include milquetoast liberal values that are sympathetic (or at least not antagonistic) to corporate power, apolitical content that's aimed at mindless entertainment and political diversion, and reactionary authoritarian views that border on fascistic, but are vital to demonizing immigrants, people of color, and other minorities, and reinforce a white patriarchal corporate power structure. Radical lefties, or even progressive-leftists, need not apply to be included in this circumscribed discourse. Their views are routinely blacklisted from the mass media, and are increasingly marginalized in higher educational institutions. ..."
"... My understanding of how the mass media operates is based on extensive personal experiences, and those from countless left intellectuals I know. Many of us have struggled (and mostly failed) to break into "mainstream" discourse because of the limited space in corporate news devoted to marginalized perspectives. With this marginalization comes the near erasure of critical views, including those seeking to spotlight record (and rising) economic inequality, repressive institutions that reinforce racial, gender and transphobic systems of repression, the corporate ecocidal assault on the environment, the rise of unbridled corporate power and plutocracy, the rising authoritarianism in American politics, and the increasingly reactionary and fascistic rhetoric that has taken over the American right. ..."
"... Reflecting on my own experiences within this system, the very notion of academics serving as public intellectuals has been under systematic assault by the rise of a "professionalization" culture that depicts political engagement as "biased," "unprofessional," and "unacceptable." Whatever lingering commitment to higher education as a public good was rolled back decades ago with the rise of corporatized academic "professional" norms. Scholars are now primarily concerned with publishing in esoteric, jargon-laden journals that no one reads, and almost no one cites, while elevating a discussion of the methods of how one does research over a discussion of the political and social significance of our work. In this process, there's been a suppression of any commitment to producing active citizens who see themselves as having an ethical or moral responsibility to be regularly politically engaged. ..."
"... The reactionary "professionalization" that's celebrated in the ivory tower is relentlessly promoted at every step of the process through which academics develop and are socialized: in the graduate school experience, in the job hiring, tenure, and promotion processes, and in the process of peer review for academic publications. Those who don't get with the program are filtered out at some point in this process. Very few who are committed to challenging professionalized academic norms make it through PhD programs, and fewer still obtain tenure-track jobs and tenure. It is a rare to find academics who learn how to effectively hide their political values in grad school, and who then actively draw on those same values in their scholarship once they've secured an academic job. ..."
"... I see zero interest in elite academic publishing houses – the Oxfords, Princetons, and Cambridges of the world – in making space for openly leftist frameworks of analysis, let alone for the sort of applied Gramscian and Marxian empirical research that I do on media propaganda, hegemony, indoctrination, and mass false consciousness. Neither do any of the reputable journals in most social science disciplines express interest in this sort of research. ..."
"... There's little interest in prioritizing high-profile campus speaking events for such topics in the neoliberal corporate academy. Considering the utter contempt for such scholarship, it's difficult for me to focus my limited time and energy lamenting campus attacks on authoritarians like Milo Yiannopoulos, or whatever other reactionary pseudo-intellectual flavor of the week who has been disinvited from paid speaking engagements that I and other leftist scholars couldn't dream of receiving in the first place. ..."
"... I won't shed a tear for reactionaries who seek to appropriate dwindling university resources for their own personal publicity and self-aggrandizement, considering that their ideology actively supports gutting the very institutions that they so shamelessly take advantage of. ..."
"... U.S. media and educational institutions have never been committed to the free exploration of competing views, at least not for those who question corporate power. The sooner we stop pretending this landscape represents a free and open exchange of ideas, the better. ..."
Harper's Magazine's July 7 th " Letter on Justice and Open
Debate " is making its rounds in popular political discourse, and takes aim at the "PC"
"cancel culture" we are told is being fueled by the most recent round of Black Lives Matter
protests. This cancel culture, we are warned, is quickly and perniciously taking over American
discourse, and will severely limit the free exploration of competing viewpoints.
The Harper's letter signatories run across the ideological spectrum, including prominent
conservatives such as David Brooks and J.K. Rowling, liberals such as Mark Lilla and Sean
Willentz, and progressives such as Noam Chomsky and Todd Gitlin. I have no doubt that the
supporters of the letter are well meaning in their support for free speech. And I have no
interest in singling out any one person or group of signatories for condemnation. Rather, I
think it's warranted to focus on the ways in which "free speech" is being weaponized in this
case, and in contemporary American discourse, to empower reactionary voices, under the
façade of a free exploration of ideas.
The ideas established in the Harper's letter sound just fine in principle, and when examined
in a vacuum. The supporters embrace norms of "open debate" and "toleration of differences," and
opposition to "dogma[s]," "coercion," and "intolerant climate[s]" that stifle open exploration
of competing views. The letter's supporters celebrate "the free exchange of information and
ideas," which they deem "the lifeblood of a liberal society," contrary to a rising "vogue for
public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding
moral certainty." The letter elaborates :
"But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response
to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional
leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate
punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial
pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing
on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a
researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of
organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments
around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of
what can be said without the threat of reprisal."
Appealing to Americans' commitment to civic responsibility for open dialogue, the Harper's
letter warns, "restriction of debate" "invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone
less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument,
and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away."
One of the main problems with this sort of lofty rhetoric is that it misrepresents the
severely deficient reality of American political discourse. We live in a period when the rise
of neoliberal capitalism and untrammeled corporate power have cheapened "public" political
discourse to serve the interests of plutocratic wealth and power, while assaulting notions of
the common good and the public health. Idealistic rhetoric about exploring diverse views falls
flat, and is a mischaracterization of reality to the deficiencies in U.S. political discourse
under neoliberal corporate capitalism, when debates are perverted by political and economic
elites who have contempt for the free exchange of ideas.
Numerous passages in the Harper's letter create the impression that U.S. political discourse
is characterized by a vibrant and open exploration of diverse and competing views. The letter
includes
:
A lament that the emerging "cancel culture" threatens to "weaken our norms of open
debate and toleration."
The claim that the "free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal
society, is daily becoming more constricted."
The assertion that American discourse is characterized by institutions that "uphold the
value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters."
The call "to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire
professional consequences."
All of these claims are romanticizations of American life. They obscure the reality that
progressive left and radical dissident views are routinely blacklisted from "mainstream"
political, economic, and social discourse by the media and by mainstream academic
institutions.
The "let's engage in a diversity of competing views" position sounds great until one
realizes that we do not, and have never lived in, that sort of pluralistic democracy. We live
in a political culture that, on its face, is committed to free speech protections for all, in
which through the respectful exchange of ideas, we arrive at a better understanding of truth,
to the benefit of all. But we don't really live in that society. Ours is a reactionary culture,
which celebrates ideas that service political and economic power centers. In this society,
views that are elevated to being worthy of discussion include milquetoast liberal values that
are sympathetic (or at least not antagonistic) to corporate power, apolitical content that's
aimed at mindless entertainment and political diversion, and reactionary authoritarian views
that border on fascistic, but are vital to demonizing immigrants, people of color, and other
minorities, and reinforce a white patriarchal corporate power structure. Radical lefties, or
even progressive-leftists, need not apply to be included in this circumscribed discourse. Their
views are routinely blacklisted from the mass media, and are increasingly marginalized in
higher educational institutions.
I don't draw these conclusions lightly. My understanding of how the mass media operates is
based on extensive personal experiences, and those from countless left intellectuals I know.
Many of us have struggled (and mostly failed) to break into "mainstream" discourse because of
the limited space in corporate news devoted to marginalized perspectives. With this
marginalization comes the near erasure of critical views, including those seeking to spotlight
record (and rising) economic inequality, repressive institutions that reinforce racial, gender
and transphobic systems of repression, the corporate ecocidal assault on the environment, the
rise of unbridled corporate power and plutocracy, the rising authoritarianism in American
politics, and the increasingly reactionary and fascistic rhetoric that has taken over the
American right.
Despite complaints about a pervasive liberal bias in higher education, available evidence
reveals the opposite. As I've
documented through my own comprehensive analysis of hundreds of national opinion polling
questions on Americans' political and economic values, there's virtually no empirical evidence
to suggest that increased education in the U.S. is associated with increased likelihood of
holding liberal attitudes. The reason for this non-link between education and liberalism is
obvious to those leftists who have struggled to carve out a space in the increasingly
reactionary American university: there's very little commitment to progressive or leftist
values in the modern corporate collegiate "experience"-oriented schooling system.
Reflecting on my own experiences within this system, the very notion of academics serving as
public intellectuals has been under systematic assault by the rise of a "professionalization"
culture that depicts political engagement as "biased," "unprofessional," and "unacceptable."
Whatever lingering commitment to higher education as a public good was rolled back decades ago
with the rise of corporatized academic "professional" norms. Scholars are now primarily
concerned with publishing in esoteric, jargon-laden journals that no one reads, and almost no
one cites, while elevating a discussion of the methods of how one does research over a
discussion of the political and social significance of our work. In this process, there's been
a suppression of any commitment to producing active citizens who see themselves as having an
ethical or moral responsibility to be regularly politically engaged.
The reactionary "professionalization" that's celebrated in the ivory tower is relentlessly
promoted at every step of the process through which academics develop and are socialized: in
the graduate school experience, in the job hiring, tenure, and promotion processes, and in the
process of peer review for academic publications. Those who don't get with the program are
filtered out at some point in this process. Very few who are committed to challenging
professionalized academic norms make it through PhD programs, and fewer still obtain
tenure-track jobs and tenure. It is a rare to find academics who learn how to effectively hide
their political values in grad school, and who then actively draw on those same values in their
scholarship once they've secured an academic job.
In my more than two decades in higher ed, I can say there's no such thing as a fair hearing
for the progressive-radical left when it comes to academic publishing. Thinking of my own
research, I see zero interest in elite academic publishing houses – the Oxfords, Princetons, and Cambridges of the world – in making space for openly leftist frameworks
of analysis, let alone for the sort of applied Gramscian and Marxian empirical research that I
do on media propaganda, hegemony, indoctrination, and mass false consciousness. Neither do any
of the reputable journals in most social science disciplines express interest in this sort of
research.
Considering the research I do focuses on social movement protests, media propaganda/fake
news, and inequality studies, one might think these timely topics would draw a large number of
requests for university speaking engagements. These are, after all, defining political issues
of our time. But this isn't at all the case. The academy remains as reactionary as ever in
terms of sidelining and blacklisting leftist ideas and frameworks for understanding the world.
There's little interest in prioritizing high-profile campus speaking events for such topics in
the neoliberal corporate academy. Considering the utter contempt for such scholarship, it's
difficult for me to focus my limited time and energy lamenting campus attacks on authoritarians
like Milo Yiannopoulos, or whatever other reactionary pseudo-intellectual flavor of the week
who has been disinvited from paid speaking engagements that I and other leftist scholars
couldn't dream of receiving in the first place.
I won't shed a tear for reactionaries who seek to appropriate dwindling university resources
for their own personal publicity and self-aggrandizement, considering that their ideology
actively supports gutting the very institutions that they so shamelessly take advantage of. The
reality of the matter is that there's no First Amendment "free speech" right to be invited to
numerous campus engagements, to be paid a generous speaking fee, or to have campus security
resources devoted to protecting arch-reactionary authoritarian speakers in light of the large
student protests that are mobilized against these campus events.
We should recognize that the recent wave of laments against PC "cancel culture" from the
right reinforce a specific power dynamic in American society. It is one in which reactionaries
have initiated an assault on what little remains of independent and critical thinking within
the media and higher ed.
They have done so by draping their contempt for free and critical
inquiry in the rhetoric of "free speech." But U.S. media and educational institutions have
never been committed to the free exploration of competing views, at least not for those who
question corporate power. The sooner we stop pretending this landscape represents a free and
open exchange of ideas, the better.
Anthony DiMaggio is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He earned
his PhD from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and is the author of 9 books, including most
recently: Political Power in
America (SUNY Press, 2019) and
Rebellion in America (Routledge, 2020). He can be reached at:
[email protected]
"... Browder testimony to Senate Judiciary Committee ..."
"... claimed that Magnitsky was beaten to death by 8 riot guards ..."
"... Browder's Hermitage Fund in 2009 put out press release noting Starova's complaint to police. See last graph. Browder deleted it when his narrative changed, but the Wayback Machine preserved it. ..."
"... She says there has been a violation of Article 165 of the criminal code. ..."
"... Browder translates that into Starova accusing his companies of the theft of state funds. She talks about involvement of Viktor Markelov, who organized the fraud. In his testimony , Markelov said he got documents from a "Sergei Leonidovich." Magnitsky's full name was Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky. ..."
"... Magnitsky's body on a cot in the hospital ward. ..."
"... Script: The position of the corpse of Mr. S. L. Magnitsky. ..."
"... Script: The situation in the [hospital] ward, viewed towards the door. ..."
"... Magnitsky face shoulders on hospital-bed ..."
"... Script: Chest image of Mr. S. L. Magnitsky. ..."
"... Browder doctored report claims a section illegible, third line. ..."
"... Russian document shows nothing is illegible. ..."
"... Dr. Robert Bux ..."
"... They do exist, but Browder did not give them to PHR. ..."
"... Forensic photos of bruises on Magnitsky's hands and knee ..."
"... Forensic schematic drawings showing marks of injuries show no injuries. ..."
"... closed craniocerebral injury ..."
"... No signs of a violent death detected." ..."
"... Magnitsky death certificate – no signs of a violent death detected ..."
Browder
testimony
to
Senate Judiciary Committee
claimed that Magnitsky was beaten to death by 8 riot guards
.
The U.S. and UK are intensifying their collaborative Cold War against Russia. In Washington, calls for sanctions are based on
the fake "bountygate," and the UK has sanctioned selected Russians based on William Browder's Magnitsky hoax.
The "bountygate" charge that Russia paid militants to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan is unproved by U.S. intelligence
agencies and even discounted by the international wire-tapping National Security Agency (NSA). The UK
sanctions
against
25 Russians, judges and court officials, tax investigators, and prison doctors, are based on disproved claims by billionaire
investor William Browder that they were responsible for the death of his accountant Sergei Magnitsky.
Browder's Magnitsky story is a pillar of America's Russiagate, which has five. Before bountygate, there was the 2019 Mueller
Report which found no evidence that President Trump had colluded with the Russians, the Jan 2017 intelligence agencies'
charge
of
Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 election which concludes with the admission that they had no proof; and the 2016
accusation that Russians had stolen Democratic National Committee emails, made by the private security group CrowdStrike,
later walked back by CrowdStrike's president
Shawn
Henry
at a secret House hearing in Dec 2017, but not revealed till this May.
With the UK, we return to the first pillar of the U.S. Russiagate story, the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which targeted many on the
U.S. list. The Magnitsky Act is recognized as the beginning of the deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations. It is based on a
hoax invented by Browder and easily disproved by documentary evidence, if governments cared about that.
The European Court of Human Rights on Magnitsky's arrest
First, a few of the obvious fake charges. Three judges are accused of detaining Magnitsky, which the UK says "facilitated" his
mistreatment and denial of medical care. However, the European Court of Human Rights
ruled
in
August 2019, "The Russians had good reason to arrest Sergei Magnitsky for Hermitage tax evasion." The Court said: "The
accusations were based on documentary evidence relating to the payment of taxes by those companies and statements by several
disabled persons who had confessed to sham work for the two companies."
The decision to arrest him was made after "investigating authorities noted that during a tax inquiry which had preceded the
criminal investigation, Mr Magnitskiy had influenced witnesses, and that he had been preparing to flee abroad. In particular,
he had applied for an entry visa to the United Kingdom and had booked a flight to Kyiv." He was a flight risk.
Several of the UK targets were said to have "facilitated" mistreatment of Magnitsky because they had been involved in a fraud
he exposed. The reference is to a $230-million tax refund scam against the Russian Treasury.
Back to the ECHR: "The Court observe[d] that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal proceedings
against Mr Magnitskiy, started in 2004, long before he complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in fraudulent
acts." The taxes were the real story; the fraud narrative was a cover-up.
The fake fraud story
Magnitsky did not uncover a massive fraud. That was the tax refund fraud in which companies engaged in collusive lawsuits,
"lost" the suits, and "agreed" to pay damages equal to their entire year's profits. They then requested a full refund of taxes
paid on the now zero gains. The fake lawsuits and payouts were first revealed to police by Russian shell company director
Rimma Starova
April
9
and
July
10,
2008. (Russian originals
April
and
July
.)
With investigators on the trail, Browder's Hermitage Fund director Paul Wrench filed a complaint about the fraud, and Browder
gave the story to The
NYTimes
and
the Russian paper
Vedomosti
,
which published it July 24, 2008, long before Magnitsky mentioned it in October 2008. His
testimony
did
not accuse any officials.
Browder's
Hermitage Fund in 2009 put out press release noting Starova's complaint to police. See last graph. Browder deleted it when his
narrative changed, but the Wayback Machine preserved it.
She says there has been a
violation of
Article
165
of the criminal code.
Browder translates that into Starova accusing his
companies of the theft of state funds. She talks about involvement of Viktor Markelov, who organized the fraud. In his
testimony
,
Markelov said he got documents from a "Sergei Leonidovich." Magnitsky's full name was Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky.
The main story at the center of the Magnitsky Acts in the U.S. and UK are not that he was mistreated or failed to get good
medical care, which is what is mostly alleged here. That would put dozens of U.S. prison officials in the crosshairs,
including recently those running state prison systems in
Alabama
and
Mississippi
.
It is that he was murdered. In the only reference to beating, the head of the Matrosskaya detention center is accused of
"ordering the handcuffing and beating" of Magnitsky before he died.
The U.S. Act, on which the British version is modeled, says that in detention Magnitsky "was beaten by 8 guards with rubber
batons on the last day of his life." But the alleged assailants' names are not on the list. A key argument made by sponsors
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md) and Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass) was that the people targeted – tax investigators, court officials,
hospital workers -- played a role in this claimed murder of Magnitsky. (Cardin and McGovern haven't responded to my requests
to comment on contradictory evidence.)
UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab takes the same line, declaring, "You cannot set foot in this country, and we will seize your
blood-drenched ill-gotten gains if you try," as he announced the new sanctions. Blood-drenched? No evidence supplied for the
sanctioned Russians.
For Browder, the purpose of the Magnitsky Acts he promotes in the West is as a political tool to build a wall against Russia's
attempt to have him answer for documented financial frauds totaling at least $100 million, and with new evidence as much as
$400 million.
The death hoax: Forensic photos tell the truth
Here is the story of Magnitsky death hoax, with links to evidence, including how Browder forged and falsified documents.
Browder had the Russian forensic reports and photos that were made after Magnitsky's death but suppressed what did not support
his arguments. The photos in this forensic
report
show
that Magnitsky, allegedly beaten to death, didn't have a life-threatening mark on his body.
Magnitsky's
body on a cot in the hospital ward.
Script: The position of the corpse of Mr. S. L.
Magnitsky.
Script:
The situation in the [hospital] ward, viewed towards the door.
Magnitsky
face shoulders on hospital-bed
.
Script: Chest image of Mr. S. L. Magnitsky.
Browder doctored part of another forensic
report
provided
in translation to the Physicians for Human Rights, Cambridge, Mass., for its
analysis
of
Magnitsky's death. It notes as "illegible" words that show there were no beating marks on Magnitsky's body and that there was
no scalp damage. The deleted parts of the true translation are underlined.
"The cadaverous spots are abundant, bluish-violet, diffuse, located on the back surface of the neck, trunk, upper and lower
extremities,
with pressure on them
with a finger disappear and restore their original color after 8 minutes. Damage
not found on the scalp."
The doctored line reads, "The cadaverous spots are abundant, bluish-violet, diffuse, located on the back surface of the neck,
trunk, upper and lower extremities, (illegible) not found on the scalp."
Here in the report that Browder gave PHR:
Browder
doctored report claims a section illegible, third line.
The paragraph in the Russian
document
shows
nothing is illegible.
Russian
document shows nothing is illegible.
The Russian words omitted in the doctored English document are "при надавливании на них пальцем исчезают и восстанавливают
свою первоначальную окраску через 8 минут. Повреждений на волосистой части головы не обнаружено."
The full Russian text can be translated online: Трупные пятна обильные, синюшно-фиолетовые, разлитые, располагающиеся на
задней поверхности шеи, туловища, верхних и нижних конечностей, при надавливании на них пальцем исчезают и восстанавливают
свою первоначальную окраску через 8 минут. Повреждений на волосистой части головы не обнаружено. Кости лицевого скелета, хрящи
носа на ощупь целы. Глаза закрыты.
What the American pathologist who analyzed Browder's documents said
Dr.
Robert Bux
Dr. Robert C. Bux, then coroner/chief medical examiner for the El Paso County Coroner's Office in Colorado Springs, was the
forensic expert on the team that wrote the PHR
report
.
Bux told me, "I do not think that these spots are contusions. Contusions will not go away and can be demonstrated by incising
or cutting into the tissues under the skin. These are reportedly all on the posterior aspect of the neck, body and limbs and
may represent postmortem
lividity
when
the body was viewed by the prosecutor of the autopsy."
Dr. Bux said, "If this is lividity (red purple coloration of the skin) it is not yet fixed and will blanch to a pale skin
color and red purple coloration will disappear. If the body is then placed face up i.e. supine then after a few minutes then
it will appear again. This is simply due to blood settling in the small blood vessels and a function of gravity."
It's not what a layman reading Browder's forged "illegible" might think.
Dr. Bux added, "Having said all of this, I have never seen any
autopsy photographs demonstrating this, and while photographs should have been taken to document all skin abnormalities as
well as all surfaces of the body to document the presence or absence of trauma, I do not know if photographs were taken and
withheld or never taken
."
PHR said, "A full and independent review of the cause of death of S.L. Magnitsky is not possible given the documentation
presented and available to PHR." The document list is at its report pages
2-3
.
The PHR autopsy protocol claims that there are "photo tables on 2 sheets" and "schematic representation of injuries on 1
sheet. However, if they exist, they were not available for the present review."
They do exist, but Browder did not
give them to PHR.
Browder posted and widely distributed this composite of
photos
of
bruises on Magnitsky's hand and knee taken November 17
th
,
2009, the day after the accountant's death.
Forensic
photos of bruises on Magnitsky's hands and knee
He got them from Russian forensic
Report
2052.
Katie
Fisher
,
doing public relations for Hermitage,
posted
them,
but not the text, to Google Cloud.
The report cited "circular abrasions in the wrist area," a "bluish-violet bruise" and "multiple strip-like horizontally
located abrasions."
It said, "A bruise located on the inner surface of the right lower limb in the projection of the ankle joint appeared 3-6 days
before the time death."
It concluded, "[T]hese injuries in living persons do not entail a temporary disability or a significant permanent loss of
general disability and are not regarded as harm to health, they are not in a cause and effect relationship with death."
The forensic reports attribute bruises to Magnitsky wearing handcuffs and kicking and hitting against cell doors. Magnitsky's
lawyer Dmitri Kharitonov
told
filmmaker
Andrei Nekrasov, "I think he was simply banging on the door with all his force trying to make them let him out and none paid
attention."
No other injuries found
The same
report
includes
schematic drawings of Magnitsky's body on which to note other relevant marks or injuries.
The report said,
"There were no marks or injuries noted on his head
or torso No other injuries were found on the corpse
" Browder didn't send PHR these drawings or make them public.
Forensic
schematic drawings showing marks of injuries show no injuries.
Asked if there was evidence that Magnitsky was "beaten to death by
riot guards," Dr. Bux told me, "I have no evidence to suggest that this occurred."
For the record,
PHR
said
Magnitsky's
death was from untreated serious illness. Even without the body photos, its experts didn't claim a beating. Forensic analysts
never have.
Manipulating the death certificate
To promote his fabrication, Browder posted a deceptive PowerPoint of the death certificate that indicated a
"
closed
craniocerebral injury
?"
circled in red, with the other text too small to
read.
Magnitsky
death certificate – no signs of a violent death detected
"Closed" meant "past." Several forensic documents include an interview with Magnitsky's mother Natalya Magnitskaya. She
told
investigators,
"In 1993 – I can't say a more accurate date, S.L Magnitsky had a craniocerebral injury. He slipped on the street and as a
result hit his head, after which he had headaches for some time."
Investigators obtained full medical records including this on page 29 of
Report
555-10
in English, which Browder gave PHR: "
On February 4, 1993, at about
08:40 a.m.., in his house entrance he slipped and fell down hitting his head, lost consciousness for a short time, vomited,
attended for emergency help by an ambulance which took him to the City Clinic Hospital (GKB).
Was examined by the
neurosurgeon in the reception ward, craniogram without pathema. Diagnosis: brain concussion, recommended treatment to be taken
on an out-patient clinic basis."
Browder's assertion that the "closed craniocerebral injury" came from a beating was a lie.
Browder's changing stories on the death of Magnitsky
Browder did not initially claim Magnitsky had been murdered. He said Magnitsky, left alone uncared for in a room, had simply
died. After a few years, pushing the Magnitsky Act, he declared Magnitsky had been tied up and beaten by rubber baton-wielding
thugs until dead.
Graphic by Michael Thau.
Browder December 2009 tells
Chatham
House
, London, "I don't know what they were thinking. I don't know whether they killed him deliberately on the night of
the 16th, or if he died of neglect."
"They put him in a straight-jacket, put him in an isolation room and waited 1 hour and 18 minutes until he died." December
2010,
San
Diego Law School
.
Then, promoting the Magnitsky Act, "They put him in an isolation cell, tied him to a bed, then allowed eight guards guards
beat him with rubber batons for 118 min until he was dead." December 2011,
University
of Cambridge
Judge Business School.
" .they put him in an isolation cell, chained him to a bed, and eight riot guards came in and beat him with rubber batons.
That night he was found dead on the cell floor." July 2017, U.S.
Senate
Judiciary Committee
.
What the Moscow Public Oversight Commission says really happened
The
Public
Oversight Commission
, an independent Russian NGO, reports Magnitsky's final day differently. November 16, 2009:
7:00pm. The patient behaves inadequately. Talks to a "voice," looks disorientated, and shouts that someone wants to kill him.
His condition is diagnosed as psychosis. The emergency doctor was called. There are no body damages apart from traces of
handcuffs on the wrists.
7:30pm. He was left unattended without medical support.
8:48pm. Emergency team arrived. When emergency doctors entered the special cell, Sergei was sitting on the cot, with his eyes
unfocused.
9:15pm. The patient was surveyed again as his condition deteriorated. He lost consciousness. The reanimation procedure was
started (indirect heart massage and ventilation of lungs using the Ambu pillow). The patient was transferred to the special
room where he received an artificial ventilation of lungs and a hormones injection.
9:50pm. The patient died."
The commission reported no evidence of beating. The Russian forensic and medical experts' conclusion was that Magnitsky had
heart disease (arteriosclerosis), diabetes, hepatitis, and pancreatitis, some illnesses predating arrest. They wrote detailed
criticism of the doctors' treatment, saying that it wasn't timely or adequate and that "the shortcomings in the provision of
the medical assistance to S.L. Magnitsky" caused his death.
But it's not the riot squad beating Browder, with no evidence, sold to the U.S. Congress, the State Department, the UK
Parliament, the Foreign Office and the media. Or that U.S. or UK authorities or media ever attempted to prove. Because like
the Tonkin Gulf "incident" and Iraq's WMD, the weaponized Russiagate stories have a foreign/military policy goal. Truth is
quite irrelevant.
Skeletor @53 Re: Using compromised "Operation Mockingbird" corporate mass media as
sources even though that mass media is known to deliberately disinform.
These articles and news segments can be analysed at a deeper level, though. To build up to
their Big Lie of the story's narrative , the corporate mass media must use small
pieces of fact and truth, which they assemble in deceptive ways, to make their false
narrative palatable. It is the job of the analyst to look beyond the intended
narrative of a corporate mass media product to find the fact and truth fragments that
they are using to sell the false narrative .
What I get the biggest kick out of is that the creators of these corporate mass media
false narratives are often themselves the loudest voices protesting our host using
their own products to counter their narratives . They really hate it when their own
words are used to discredit their own narratives , and so they whine that if you are
not going to swallow their vile narrative , then you should not refer to their words.
Poor babies!
While it is true that inattentive readers who are prone to uncritically installing false
narratives in their own heads should avoid consuming those mass media products,
analysts who are skilled at filtering out and separating the narrative from the
supporting text of articles can easily dig out facts from that media ore without risk of
contamination of their minds with crap. Our host is one of those kinds of analysts.
Unfortunately, since you, Skeletor, cannot tell the difference between narrative and
information, you run a great risk of being remote controlled by the false narrative if
you consume unprocessed corporate mass media products. I recommend that you avoid them.
So they dusted of McFaul to provide the support for bounty provocation. I wonder whether
McFaul one one of Epstein guests, or what ?
So who was the clone of Ciaramella this time? People want to know the hero
Notable quotes:
"... Not to doubt McFaul's ulterior motives; one must assume him to be an "honest man" -- however misguided, in my opinion. He seems to be a disciple of the James Clapper-Curtis LeMay-Joe McCarthy School of Russian Analysis. ..."
"... Clapper, a graduate summa cum laude , certainly had the Russians pegged! Clapper was allowed to stay as Barack Obama's director of national intelligence for three and a half years after perjuring himself in formal Senate testimony (on NSA's illegal eavesdropping). On May 28, 2017 Clapper told NBC's Chuck Todd about "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique." ..."
"... As a finale, in full knowledge of Clapper's proclivities regarding Russia, Obama appointed him to prepare the evidence-impoverished, misnomered "Intelligence Community Assessment" claiming that Putin did all he could, including hacking the DNC, to help Trump get elected -- the most embarrassing such "intelligence assessment" I have seen in half a century . ..."
"... Does no one see the irony today in the Democrats' bashing Trump on Afghanistan, with the full support of the Establishment media? The inevitable defeat there is one of the few demonstrable disasters not attributable directly to Trump, but you would not know that from the media. Are the uncorroborated reports of Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops aimed at making it appear that Trump, unable to stand up to Putin, let the Russians drive the rest of U.S. troops out of Afghanistan? ..."
"... Does the current flap bespeak some kind of "Mutiny on the Bounties," so to speak, by a leaker aping Eric Chiaramella? Recall that the Democrats lionized the CIA official seconded to Trump's national security council as a "whistleblower" and proceeded to impeach Trump after Chiaramella leaked information on Trump's telephone call with the president of Ukraine. Far from being held to account, Chiaramella is probably expecting an influential job if his patron, Joe Biden, is elected president. Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House? ..."
"... It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the "intelligence" on WMD in Iraq was not "mistaken;" it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account. ..."
"... Here's an assignment due on Monday. Read McFaul's oped carefully. It appears under the title: "Trump would do anything for Putin. No wonder he's ignoring the Russian bounties: Russia's pattern of hostility matches Trump's pattern of accommodation." ..."
"... Full assignment for Monday: Read carefully through each paragraph of McFaul's text and select which of his claims you would put into one or more of the three categories adduced by Sen. Rockefeller 12 years ago about WMD on Iraq. With particular attention to the evidence behind McFaul's claims, determine which of the claims is (a) "uncorroborated"; which (b) "contradicted"; and which (c) "non-existent;" or (d) all of the above. For extra credit, find one that is supported by plausible evidence. ..."
"... Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both long-time members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), flagship of the globalist “liberal world order”. The CFR and its many interlocking affiliates, along with their media assets and frontmen in government, have dominated US policy since WW2. Most of the Fed chairmen and secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and CIA have been CFR members, including Jerome Powell and Mark Esper. ..."
"... The major finance, energy, defense and media corporations are CFR sponsors, and several of their execs are members. David Rubenstein, billionaire founder of the notorious Carlyle Group, is the current CFR chairman. Laurence Fink, billionaire chairman of BlackRock, is a CFR director. See lists at the CFR website. ..."
"... “It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the “intelligence” on WMD in Iraq was not “mistaken;” it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.” ..."
"... They are spoon fed those lies by our “intelligence” agencies. As CNN’s Jeff Zucker said, “We’re not investigators, we’re journalists”. Replace “journalists” with “toadies” or “shills” for our “intelligence” community and you’ve gotten to the truth of the matter. ..."
"... In the unhealthy society of Clintons, Obamas, Epstein, Mueller, Adelsons, Clapper, and Krystols, human dignity is a sin. ..."
"... Our institutions including journalism are not merely corrupt, they are degenerate. That is, the corruption is not occasional or the exception is is by design, desired and entirely normal. ..."
"... from Counterpunch.org : “Around 15,000 Soviet troops perished in the Afghan War between 1979 and 1989. The US funneled more than $20 billion to the Mujahideen and other anti-Soviet fighters over that same period. This works out to a “bounty” of $1.33 million for each Soviet soldier killed.” ..."
"... Yes, of course it is a well-known ‘fact’ that Putin has nothing better to do than destory American democracy, and I bet he has dreams about it too! But I am minded to think that if anybody has a penchant for destroying American democracy it is the powers that be in the US deep state, intelligence agencies, and zionist cliques controlling the President and Congress. ..."
"... Udo Ulfkotte was a German journalist. He wrote a sensational book about the practices he experienced of the CIA paying German journalists to publish certain stories. The book was a big best seller in Germany. Its English translation was suppressed for years, but I believe is now available. ..."
"... Gekaufte journalisten. Ulfkotte admitted he signed off on numerous articles that were prepared for him during his career. The last year’s of his life he changed his mores and advocated “better die in truth than live with lies”. ..."
Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House, as Obama's former ambassador to Russia
piles on the nonsense about Trump being in Putin's pocket?
C orporate media are binging on leaked Kool Aid not unlike the WMD concoction they offered
18 years ago to "justify" the U.S.-UK war of aggression on Iraq.
Now Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under President Obama, has been enlisted by The
Washington Post 's editorial page honcho, Fred Hiatt, to draw on his expertise (read,
incurable Russophobia) to help stick President Donald Trump back into "Putin's pocket." (This
has become increasingly urgent as the canard of "Russiagate" -- including the linchpin claim
that Russia hacked the DNC -- lies gasping for air.)
In an
oped on Thursday McFaul presented a long list of Vladimir Putin's alleged crimes, offering
a more ostensibly sophisticated version of amateur Russian specialist, Rep. Jason Crow's (D-CO)
claim that: "Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure
out how to destroy American democracy."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with McFaul meeting Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign
Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, on May 7, 2013. (State Department)
McFaul had -- well, let's call it an undistinguished career in Moscow. He arrived with a
huge chip on his shoulder and proceeded to alienate just about all his hosts, save for the
rabidly anti-Putin folks he openly and proudly cultivated. In a sense, McFaul became the
epitome of what Henry Wooton described as the role of ambassador -- "an honest man sent to lie
abroad for the good of his country." What should not be so readily accepted is an ambassador
who comes back home and just can't stop misleading.
Not to doubt McFaul's ulterior motives; one must assume him to be an "honest man" --
however misguided, in my opinion. He seems to be a disciple of the James Clapper-Curtis
LeMay-Joe McCarthy School of Russian Analysis.
Clapper, a graduate summa cum laude , certainly had the Russians pegged! Clapper
was allowed to stay as Barack Obama's director of national intelligence for three and a half
years after perjuring himself in formal Senate testimony (on NSA's illegal eavesdropping). On
May 28, 2017 Clapper told NBC's Chuck
Todd about "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically
driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian
technique."
As a finale, in full knowledge of Clapper's proclivities regarding Russia, Obama
appointed him to prepare the evidence-impoverished, misnomered "Intelligence Community
Assessment" claiming that Putin did all he could, including hacking the DNC, to help Trump get
elected -- the most embarrassing such "intelligence assessment" I have seen in half a century
.
Obama and the National Security State
I have asked myself if Obama also had earned some kind of degree from the
Clapper/LeMay/McCarthy School, or whether he simply lacked the courage to challenge the
pitiably self-serving "analysis" of the National Security State. Then I re-read "Obama Misses the Afghan
Exit-Ramp" of June 24, 2010 and was reminded of how deferential Obama was to the generals and
the intelligence gurus, and how unconscionable the generals were -- like their predecessors in
Vietnam -- in lying about always seeing light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
Thankfully, now ten years later, this is all
documented in Craig Whitlock's, "The Afghanistan Papers: At War With the Truth." Corporate
media, who played an essential role in that "war with the truth", have not given Whitlock's
damning story the attention it should command (surprise, surprise!). In any case, it strains
credulity to think that Obama was unaware he was being lied to on Afghanistan.
Some Questions
Clark Gable (l.) with Charles Laughton (r.) in Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935.
Does no one see the irony today in the Democrats' bashing Trump on Afghanistan, with the
full support of the Establishment media? The inevitable defeat there is one of the few
demonstrable disasters not attributable directly to Trump, but you would not know that from the
media. Are the uncorroborated reports of Russian bounties to kill U.S. troops aimed at making
it appear that Trump, unable to stand up to Putin, let the Russians drive the rest of U.S.
troops out of Afghanistan?
Does the current flap bespeak some kind of "Mutiny on the Bounties," so to speak, by a
leaker aping Eric Chiaramella? Recall that the Democrats lionized the CIA official seconded to
Trump's national security council as a "whistleblower" and proceeded to impeach Trump after
Chiaramella leaked information on Trump's telephone call with the president of Ukraine. Far
from being held to account, Chiaramella is probably expecting an influential job if his patron,
Joe Biden, is elected president. Has there been another mutiny in Trump's White House?
And what does one make of the
spectacle of Crow teaming up with Rep. Liz Cheney (R, WY) to restrict Trump's planned
pull-out of troops from Afghanistan, which The Los Angeles Timesreports
has now been blocked until after the election?
Hiatt & McFaul: Caveat Editor
And who published McFaul's oped? Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial page editor
for the past 20 years, who has a long record of listening to the whispers of anonymous
intelligence sources and submerging/drowning the subjunctive mood with flat fact. This was the
case with the (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S.-UK attack.
Readers of the Post were sure there were tons of WMD in Iraq. That Hiatt has invited
McFaul on stage should come as no surprise.
To be fair, Hiatt belatedly acknowledged that the Post should have been more
circumspect in its confident claims about the WMD. "If you look at the editorials we write
running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass
destruction," Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review . "If
that's not true, it would have been better not to say it." [CJR, March/April 2004]
At this word of wisdom, Consortium News founder, the late Robert Parry,
offered this comment: "Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn't
real, we're not supposed to confidently declare that it is." That Hiatt is still in that job
speaks volumes.
'Uncorroborated, Contradicted, or Even Non-Existent'
It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the "intelligence" on WMD in Iraq was
not "mistaken;" it was fraudulent from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never
held to account.
Announcing on June 5, 2008, the bipartisan conclusions from a five-year study by the Senate
Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller ( D-WV)
said the attack on Iraq was launched "under false pretenses." He described the intelligence
conjured up to "justify" war on Iraq as "uncorroborated, contradicted, or even
non-existent."
Homework
Yogi Berra in 1956. (Wikipedia)
Here's an assignment due on Monday. Read McFaul's
oped carefully. It appears under the title: "Trump would do anything for Putin. No wonder
he's ignoring the Russian bounties: Russia's pattern of hostility matches Trump's pattern of
accommodation."
And to give you a further taste, here is the first paragraph:
"Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have paid Taliban rebels in Afghanistan to
kill U.S. soldiers. Having resulted in at least one American death, and maybe more, these
Russian bounties reportedly produced the desired outcome. While deeply disturbing, this
effort by Putin is not surprising: It follows a clear pattern of ignoring international
norms, rules and laws -- and daring the United States to do anything about it."
Full assignment for Monday: Read carefully through each paragraph of McFaul's text and
select which of his claims you would put into one or more of the three categories adduced by
Sen. Rockefeller 12 years ago about WMD on Iraq. With particular attention to the evidence
behind McFaul's claims, determine which of the claims is (a) "uncorroborated"; which (b)
"contradicted"; and which (c) "non-existent;" or (d) all of the above. For extra credit, find
one that is supported by plausible evidence.
Yogi Berra might be surprised to hear us keep quoting him with "Deja vu, all over again."
Sorry, Yogi, that's what it is; you coined it.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and
briefed The President's Daily Brief for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He is
co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of
Consortium News.
Tarus77 , July 6, 2020 at 14:25
Gad, one wonders if it can ever get much lower in the press and the answer is yes, it can
and will go lower, i.e. the mcfaul/hiatt tag team. They are still plumbing for the lows.
The question becomes just how stupid these two are or how stupid do they believe the
readership is to read and believe this garbage.
Voice from Europe , July 6, 2020 at 11:58
By now the Russia did it ! is in effect a joke in Russia. Economically, politically, geo
strategically China and Asia and Africa have become more important and reliable partners of
Russia than the USA. And Europe is also dropping fast on the trustworthy partners
list…..
John , July 5, 2020 at 12:55
Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both long-time members of the Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR), flagship of the globalist “liberal world order”. The CFR and its
many interlocking affiliates, along with their media assets and frontmen in government, have
dominated US policy since WW2. Most of the Fed chairmen and secretaries of State, Treasury,
Defense and CIA have been CFR members, including Jerome Powell and Mark Esper.
The major finance, energy, defense and media corporations are CFR sponsors, and several of
their execs are members. David Rubenstein, billionaire founder of the notorious Carlyle
Group, is the current CFR chairman. Laurence Fink, billionaire chairman of BlackRock, is a
CFR director. See lists at the CFR website.
Anna , July 6, 2020 at 09:38
Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt are both very active promoters of hate crimes. Neither has
any decency hence decency is allergic to war profiteers and opportunistic liars.
The poor USA; to descend to such a deep moral hole that both Michael McFaul and Fred Hiatt
are still alive and prospering. Shamelessness and presstituting are paid well in the US.
Dems and Reps are already mad. You cannot destroy what does not exist; like Democracy in
these United States. Nor God or Putin could. This has always being a fallacy. This is not a
democracy; same thing with ”communist" China or the USSR .Those two were never
socialist. There has never being a real Socialist or Communist country.
Guy , July 4, 2020 at 12:26
“It is sad to have to remind folks 18 years later that the
“intelligence” on WMD in Iraq was not “mistaken;” it was fraudulent
from the get-go. The culprits were finally exposed but never held to account.”
That statement goes to the crux of the matter.Why should journalists care about what is true
or a lie in their reports ,they know they will never be held to account .They should be held
to account through the court system . A lie by any journalist should be actionable by any
court of law . The fear of jail time would sort out the scam journalists we presently have to
endure .
As it is they have perverted the profession of journalism and it is the law of the
jungle .No true democracy should put up with this. We are surrounded with lies that are
generated by the very establishment that should protect it’s citizens from same .
Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 15:36
They are spoon fed those lies by our “intelligence” agencies. As CNN’s
Jeff Zucker said, “We’re not investigators, we’re journalists”.
Replace “journalists” with “toadies” or “shills” for our
“intelligence” community and you’ve gotten to the truth of the matter.
Anna , July 6, 2020 at 09:50
The ‘journalists’ observe how things have been going on for Cheney the Traitor
and Bush the lesser — nothing happened to the mega criminals. The hate-bursting and
war-profiteering Cheney’s daughter has even squeezed into US Congress.
In a healthy society where human dignity is cherished, the Cheney family will be ostracized
and the family name became a synonym for the word ‘traitor.’ In the unhealthy society of Clintons, Obamas, Epstein, Mueller, Adelsons, Clapper, and Krystols, human dignity
is a sin.
Ricard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 11:42
Our institutions including journalism are not merely corrupt, they are degenerate. That
is, the corruption is not occasional or the exception is is by design, desired and entirely
normal.
Stan W. , July 4, 2020 at 12:10
I’m still confident that Durham’s investigation will expose and successfully
prosecute the maggots that infest our government.
Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 15:29
What is the basis for this confidence?
John Puma , July 4, 2020 at 12:03
Re: whether Obumma “had earned some kind of degree from the Clapper/LeMay/McCarthy
School” of Russia Analytics.
It would be a worthy addition to his degree collection featuring that earned from the
Neville Chamberlain Night School of Critical Political Negotiation.
Jeff Harrison , July 4, 2020 at 11:16
Hmmm. Lessee. The US attacks Afghanistan with about the same legitimacy that we had when
we attacked Iraq and the Taliban are in charge. We oust the Taliban from power and put our
own puppets in place. What idiot thinks that the Taliban are going to need a bounty to kill
Americans?
Jeff Harrison, I like your logic. Plus, I understand that far fewer Americans are being
killed in Afghanistan than were under Obama’s administration.
AnneR , July 4, 2020 at 10:27
Frankly, I am sick to death of the unwarranted, indeed bestial Russophobia that is
megaphoned minute by minute on NPR and the BBC World Service (only radio here since my
husband died). If it isn’t this latest trumped up (ho ho) charge, there are repeated
mentions, in passing, of course, of the Russiagate, hacking, Kremlin control of the Strumpet
to back up the latest bunch of lies.
Doesn’t matter at *all* that Russiagate was
debunked, that even Mueller couldn’t actually demonstrably pull the DNC/ruling elites
rabbit out of the hat, that the impeachment of the Strumpet went nowhere. And it clearly
– by its total absence on the above radio broadcasts – doesn’t matter one
iota that the Pentagonal hasn’t gone along, that gaping holes in the confabulation are
(and were) obvious to those who cared to think with half a mind awake and reflecting on past
US ruling elite lies, untruths, obfuscations. Nope. Just repeat, repeat, repeat. Orwell would
clap his hands (not because he agreed with the atrocious politics but the lesson is
learnt).
Added to the whipped up anti-Russia, decidedly anti-Putin crapola – is of course the
Russian peoples’ vote, decision making on their own country’s changes to the
Basic Law (a form of Constitution). When the radio broadcasts the usual sickening
anti-Russian/Putin propaganda regarding this vote immediately prior they would state that the
changes would install Putin for many more years: no mention that he would have to be elected,
i.e. voted by the populace into the presidency. (This was repeated ad infinitum without any
elaboration.) No other proposed changes were mentioned – certainly not that the Duma
would gain greater control over the governance of the country and over the president’s
cabinet. I.e. that the popularly elected (ain’t that what we call democracy??)
representatives in the Duma (parliament) would essentially have more power than the
president.
But most significantly, to my mind, no one has (well of course not – this is Russia)
raised the issue of the fact that it was the Russian people, the vox populi/hoi polloi, who
have had some say in how they are to be governed, how their government will work for them.
HOW much say have we had/do we have in how our government functions, works – let alone
for us, the hoi polloi? When did we the citizenry last have a voting say on ANY sentence in
the Constitution that governs us??? Ummm I do believe it was the creation of the wealthy
British descended slave holding, real estate ethnic-cleansing lot who wrote and ratified the
original document and the hardly dissimilar Congressional and state types who have over the
years written and voted on various amendments. And it is the members of the upper classes in
the Supreme Court who adjudicate on its application to various problems.
BUT We the hoi polloi have never, ever had a direct opportunity to individually vote for
or against any single part of the Constitution which is supposed to be the
“democratic” superstructure which governs us. Unlike the Russians a couple of
days ago.
Richard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 15:48
“HOW much say have we had/do we have in how our government functions,
works…” See, that’s your mistake right there. WE don’t have a
government. We need one, but we ain’t got one. THEY have a government which they let us
go through the motions of electing. ‘Member back when Bernie was talking about a
Political Revolution?
Here’s a little fact for you. The five most populous states have a total of
123,000,000 people. That’s 10 Senators. The five least populated states have a total of
3.5 million. That’s also 10 Senators. Democracy anyone?
vinnieoh , July 4, 2020 at 09:37
There have been three coup d’état within the US within the lifetimes of most
that read these pages. The first was explained to us by Eisenhower only as he was exiting his
time from the national stage; the MIC had co-opted our government. The second happened in
2000, with the putsch in Florida and then the adoption by the neocon cabal of Bush /Chaney of
the PNAC blueprint “Strategies for Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (Defenses
– hahahaha – shit!). The third happened late last year and early this year when
the bottom-up grass-roots movement of progressivism was crushed by the DNC and the
cold-warrior hack Biden was inserted as the champion of “the opposition
party.”
And, make no mistake that Kamala Harris WILL be his running mate. It was always going to
be Harris. It was to be Harris at the TOP of the ticket as the primaries began, but she
wasn’t even placing in the top tier in any of the contests. However, the poohbahs and
strategists of the DNC are nothing if not determined and consistent. If Biden should win, we
should all start practicing now saying “President Harris” because that is what
the future holds. For the DNC, she looks the part, she sounds the part, but more importantly
she is the very definition of the status quo, corporate ass-kisser, MIC tool.
The professional political class have fully colluded to fatally cripple this democratic
republic. “Democracy” is just a word they say like, “Where’s my
kickback?” (excuse me – my “motivation”.) This bounty scam and the
rehabilitation of GW Bush are nothing but a full blitzkrieg flanking of Trump on the right.
And Trump of course is so far out of his depth that he actually believes that Israel is his
friend. (A hint Donny: Israel is NO-ONE’S friend.)
What is most infuriating? hope-crushing? plain f$%&*#g scary? is that the majority of
Americans from all quarters do not want any of what the professional political class keeps
dumping on us. The very attempt at performing this upcoming election will finally and forever
lay completely bare the collapse of a functioning government. It’s going to be very
ugly, and it may very well be the end. Dog help us all.
Richard Coleman , July 6, 2020 at 15:51
Don’t you think that the assassination of JFK counts as a coup d’etat?
Zhu , July 7, 2020 at 02:10
Apres moi, le Deluge.
John Drake , July 7, 2020 at 11:25
Oh gosh how can you forget the Kennedy Assassination. Most people don’t realize he
was had ordered the removal of a thousand advisors from Vietnam starting the process of
completely cutting bait there, as he had in Laos and Cambodia. All of which made the generals
apoplectic. The great secret about Vietnam-which Ellsberg discovered much latter, and
mentioned in his book Secrets, another good read- was that every president had been warned it
was likely futile. Kennedy was the only one who took that intelligence seriously-like it was
actually intelligent intelligence.
Enter stage right Allen Dulles (fired CIA chief), the anti Castro Cubans, the Mafia and
most important the MIC; exit Jack Kennedy.
Douglas, JFK why he died and why it matters is the best work on the subject. And no Oswald
did not do it; it was a sniper team from different angles, but read the book it gets
complicated.
Roger , July 4, 2020 at 09:11
from Counterpunch.org : “Around 15,000 Soviet troops perished in the Afghan War
between 1979 and 1989. The US funneled more than $20 billion to the Mujahideen and other
anti-Soviet fighters over that same period. This works out to a “bounty” of $1.33
million for each Soviet soldier killed.”
Skip Scott , July 4, 2020 at 08:35
I am wondering how Cheney and Crow can block Trump from withdrawing the troops from
Afghanistan. Is Trump Commander in Chief, or not? How can two senators stop the Commander in
Chief from commanding troop movements? I realize they control the budget, but aren’t
they crossing into illegality by restricting Trump’s ability to
“command”?
Toad Sprocket , July 4, 2020 at 16:49
Yeah, I imagine it’s illegal. Didn’t Lindsay Graham threaten the same thing
when Trump was thinking of pulling troops/”advisers” from Syria? And other
congress warmongers joined in though I don’t think any legislation was passed. They
can’t be bothered to authorize the starts of wars but want to step in when someone
tries to end them.
Oh, and Schumer on South Korea troops, I think that one did pass. Almost certainly illegal
if it came down to it, but our government is of course lawless. And our courts full of judges
who are bought off or moronic or both.
dean 1000 , July 4, 2020 at 06:52
The soft coup attempt continues Ray. More lies and bullshit. It may continue until
election day. Will the media fess-up to its lies after the fact again?
Francis Lee , July 4, 2020 at 04:49
“Vladimir Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure
out how to destroy American democracy.”
Yes, of course it is a well-known ‘fact’ that Putin has nothing better to do
than destory American democracy, and I bet he has dreams about it too! But I am minded to
think that if anybody has a penchant for destroying American democracy it is the powers that
be in the US deep state, intelligence agencies, and zionist cliques controlling the President
and Congress.
”Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”
The American establishment seems to be suffering from a bad case of
‘projection’ as psychiatrists call it. That is to say accusing others of what
they are themselves actually doing.
The whole idiotic circus would be hilarious if it were not so serious.
Antonia Young , July 4, 2020 at 12:20
Putin’s (and by extension the Russian Federation’s) primary objective is
international stability. “Destroying America, dividing Americans is the last thing he
wants.) Putin learned many lessons during the break-up of the U.S.S.R. observing the carpet
baggers/oligarchs/vultures who descended on the weak nation, absconding with it’s
wealth and resources at mere fractions of their real value. The deep state’s worst fear
is the co-operation btwn Putin and President Trump to make the world more peaceful, stable,
co-operative and prosperous.
rosemerry , July 4, 2020 at 16:10
The whole conceited and arrogant “belief” that
The USA has any resemblance to a democracy and
Pres. Putin has nothing else to do but think how he could do a better job of showing the
destructive and irresponsible behavior of the USA than its own leaders” and media can
do with no help
has no basis in reality.
If anything, Putin is such a stickler for international law, negotiations, avoidance of
conflict that he is regarded by many as too Christian for this modern, individualistic,
LBGTQ, ”nobody matters but me” worldview of the USA!
Steve Naidamast , July 5, 2020 at 19:54
“If the enemy is self destructing, let them continue to do so…”
Napoleon
Zhu , July 7, 2020 at 02:17
“zionist cliques”: Christian Zionist fighting Fundies, eager for the End of
the World, the Second Coming of Jesus.
delia ruhe , July 4, 2020 at 01:09
Yup, we got a Bountygate. Since my early morning visit to the Foreign Policy site, the
place has exploded with breathless articles on the dastardly Putin and the cowardly Trump,
who has so far failed to hold Putin to account. Reminded me of a similar explosion there when
Russiagate finally got the attention the Dems thought it deserved.
(Anyone think that the intel community pays a fee to each of the FP columnists whenever
one of their a propaganda narratives needs a push to get it off the ground?)
Udo Ulfkotte was a German journalist. He wrote a sensational book about the practices he experienced of the CIA paying German
journalists to publish certain stories. The book was a big best seller in Germany. Its English translation was suppressed for years, but I believe is now available.
Susan Siens , July 5, 2020 at 16:30
Reply to John Chuckman: I’d love to read this book but it wasn’t available a
few years ago when I looked. I’ll look again!
Voice from Europe , July 6, 2020 at 11:52
Gekaufte journalisten.
Ulfkotte admitted he signed off on numerous articles that were prepared for him during his
career. The last year’s of his life he changed his mores and advocated “better
die in truth than live with lies”.
Richard A. , July 4, 2020 at 00:59
I remember the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour from decades ago. Real experts on Russia like
Dimitri Simes and Stephen Cohen were the ones to appear on that NewsHour. The NewsHour of
today rarely has experts on Russia, just experts on Russia bashing–like Michael McFaul.
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
Antonia Young , July 3, 2020 at 23:35
Thank you, Ray for your clarion voice in the midst of WMD-seventeen-point-oh. Will the
American people have the wisdom to notice how many times we’re being fooled? And
finally wake up and stop supporting these questionable news outlets? With appreciation for
your excellent analysis, as usual. ~Tonia Young (Formerly with the Topanga Peace
Alliance)
The majority of Americans have a lot more to worry about than the latest nonsense about
Russia. I think most people just tune it out.
The ones being fooled are the fools who have been lapping this crap up from the get go. The
supposed educated class who think themselves superior and well informed because they read and
listen to the propaganda of PBS, NPR, NYT etc.
They don’t seem to realize the ship is sinking while they’re playing these
ridiculous games.
Susan Siens , July 5, 2020 at 16:34
The supposedly educated class, yes! It can be stunning how people believe anything they
hear on PBS or NPR, and then they make fun of people who believe anything they hear on Fox
News. What’s the difference? Both are propaganda tools.
And, yes, watch us go down in flames while so-called progressives boo-hoo about Trump
thinking he’s above the law (like every other president before him). Our local
“peace and justice” group sent me an email asking me to sign a petition
supporting Robert Mueller. I was gobsmacked, and then I realized our local “peace and
justice” group had been taken over by Democratic Party “resisters.”
Jeezums, why is every word hijacked?
My take on Tucker and Maddow: both serve those who write their paychecks, but one of the
two bosses is a better businessman.
Tucker does not duplicate Hannity which lets them serve different (if overlapping)
segments of the audience. Showing Paralimpil and Gabbard to the viewers did not lead to any
major perturbation in American politics, but it lets his viewer feel that they are better
informed than the fools who watch Maddow. And it helps that to a degree they are.
I get that Tucker invites good a reasonable people on his show and gives voice space where
they would not otherwise get it. That is deliberate.
I bet you that the stats show that the demented monotone oozing out of MSNBC and CNN etc
has been a serious turn off for a sector of audience that is well informed and exercise
critical faculties. That is exactly what Tucker needs to pay for his program as I would be
fairly sure these people are Consumers of a desirable degree and advertisers like Tucker's
formula and Fox Bosses like Tuckers income generator.
I don't think it is more complex than that and his bosses will entertain most heresies as
long as the program generates advertiser demand for that time slot.
So Tucker is OK and he is reasonable and he will interview a broad spectrum. Good for him.
But he smooths the pillow and caresses the establishment arse.
"... Some countries like Italy (maybe Germany) are warming to Russia a little bit but Russia has a long way to go just to get back to their pre-2014 status with Europe. That is 'tightening their grip?'. I know, this is how propagandists speak. ..."
VK, re: Russia's grip on Europe is gradually tightening from the U.K.'s
INDEPENDENT
It's behind a paywall but I read just enough to be curious as to how someone could
possibly justify a clickbait title like that.
I suspect that the rest of the article is just
going to recap Russia's alleged sins in order to fan hatred but how can someone objectively
say that Russia is tightening its grip on Europe?
FUCKUS banned Russia from the Olympics on a bogus state sponsored steroid scam, no
reinstatement on horizon.
FUCKUS kicked Russia out of the now G7 and imposed a trade embargo that destroyed a large
commercial relationship w/Germany.
What is the 'overwhelming' evidence that the Russians poisoned the Skripal's, Novichok can be
made by just about anyone.
Some countries like Italy (maybe Germany) are warming to Russia a little bit but Russia
has a long way to go just to get back to their pre-2014 status with Europe. That is
'tightening their grip?'. I know, this is how propagandists speak.
I was surprised by the reference to Russia-gate as the prior example of propaganda
manipulation of the US public. What about 9-11? Three sky-scrappers in broad daylight, are
collapsed by planted demolitions, with explosions, melted structural steel, and perfect
complete vertical destruction. Which everyone watched over and over, yet everyone believes
that it was planes hijacked by Saudls that did this, on buildings designed to survive a plane
crash. And one building was not hit by a plane. Then, the US and NATO attacked Afghanistan,
and the US, UK, and their coalition attacked Iraq, because of obvious demolition in NY,
blamed on Saudis. Crazy. Double crazy. In plain sight. After the success of those 2 mental
manipulations, it is sure that any nonsense story with political implications will work. And
there unmentioned is climate heating, accelerating, to the demise of us all, even the
so-called elite and their money.
Notable also that this ludicrous story, whose promotion by the MI6 Guardian confirms the
obvious suspicions about it, also includes the wild claim that the Russian unit responsible
for the bounties was also behind the "Novichok" "attack" on the Skripals.
It is another loyalty oath operation designed to force intelligent people into professing to
believe incredible nonsense.
The bottom line of the bounty claim is that very few Americans have in fact been killed. If
there were an actual bounty the country is full of GIs ripe for plucking. And the money
compares well with poppy growing.
"... On Saturday, the Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed the NYT story as "fake information." ..."
"... This unsophisticated plant clearly illustrates the low intellectual abilities of the propagandists from US intelligence, who, instead of inventing something more plausible, resort to conjuring up such nonsense. ..."
"... "Then again, what else can one expect from intelligence services that have bungled the 20-year war in Afghanistan," the ministry said. ..."
"... Moscow has suggested that this misinformation was "planted" because the US may be against Russia "assisting" in peace talks between the Taliban and the internationally-recognised government in Kabul. ..."
The Russian Foreign Ministry has rejected a US media report
claiming Moscow offered to pay jihadi militants to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan. It said such 'fake news' merely betrays the
low skill levels of US spy agencies. Citing US intelligence officials – unnamed, of course – the New York Times reported that, last
year, Moscow had "covertly offered rewards" to Taliban-linked militants to attack American troops and their NATO allies
in Afghanistan.
On Saturday, the Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed the NYT story as "fake information."
This unsophisticated plant clearly illustrates the low intellectual abilities of the propagandists from US intelligence,
who, instead of inventing something more plausible, resort to conjuring up such nonsense.
"Then again, what else can one expect from intelligence services that have bungled the 20-year war in Afghanistan," the
ministry said.
Moscow has suggested that this misinformation was "planted" because the US may be against Russia "assisting"
in peace talks between the Taliban and the internationally-recognised government in Kabul.
US-led NATO troops have been fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2001. The campaign, launched in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, has cost Washington billions of dollars and resulted in the loss of thousands of American soldiers' lives. Despite maintaining
a military presence for almost two decades, the US has failed to defeat the Taliban, which is still in control of vast swaths of
the country.
Moreover, the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has compiled several reports detailing how
tens of millions of US taxpayers' funds have been spent on dubious regeneration projects.
This whole "story" stinks to high heaven. Judy Miller redux - regime-change info ops, coordinated across multiple media
organizations.
Notable quotes:
"... To be clear, this is journalistic malpractice. Mainstream media outlets which publish anonymous intelligence claims with no proof are just publishing CIA press releases disguised as news. They're just telling you to believe what sociopathic intelligence agencies want you to believe under the false guise of impartial and responsible reporting. This practice has become ubiquitous throughout mainstream news publications, but that doesn't make it any less immoral. ..."
"... "Same old story: alleged intelligence ops IMPOSSIBLE to verify, leaked to the press which reports them quoting ANONYMOUS officials," tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi. ..."
"... "So we are to simply believe the same intelligence orgs that paid bounties to bring innocent prisoners to Guantanamo, lied about torture in Afghanistan, and lied about premises for war from WMD in Iraq to the Gulf of Tonkin 'attack'? All this and no proof?" ..."
"... "It's totally outrageous for Russia to support the Taliban against Americans in Afghanistan. Of course, it's totally fine for the US to support jihadi rebels against Russians in Syria, jihadi rebels who openly said the Taliban is their hero," ..."
"... On the flip side, all the McResistance pundits have been speaking of this baseless allegation as a horrific event that is known to have happened, with Rachel Maddow going so far as to describe it as Putin offering bounties for the "scalps" of American soldiers in Afghanistan. This is an interesting choice of words, considering that offering bounties for scalps is, in fact, one of the many horrific things the US government did in furthering its colonialist ambitions , which, unlike the New York Times allegation, is known to have actually happened. ..."
By Caitlin Johnstone , an independent journalist based
in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on
Twitter @caitoz
Whenever one sees a news headline ending in
"US Intelligence Says", one should always mentally replace everything that comes before it with "Blah blah blah we're probably lying."
"Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill Troops, US Intelligence Says", blares the
latest viral headline from the New York Times . NYT's unnamed sources
allege that the GRU "secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan -- including
targeting American troops", and that the Trump administration has known this for months.
To be clear, this is journalistic malpractice. Mainstream media outlets which publish anonymous intelligence claims with no proof
are just publishing CIA press releases disguised as news. They're just telling you to believe what sociopathic intelligence agencies
want you to believe under the false guise of impartial and responsible reporting. This practice has become ubiquitous throughout
mainstream news publications, but that doesn't make it any less immoral.
In a post-Iraq-invasion world, the only correct response to unproven anonymous claims about a rival government by intelligence
agencies from the US or its allies is to assume that they are lying until you are provided with a mountain of independently verifiable
evidence to the contrary. The US has far too extensive a record of lying
about these things for any other response to ever be justified as rational, and its intelligence agencies consistently play a foundational
role in those lies.
Voices outside the mainstream-narrative control matrix have been calling these accusations what they are: baseless, lacking in
credibility, and not reflective of anything other than fair play, even if true.
"Same old story: alleged intelligence ops IMPOSSIBLE to verify, leaked to the press which reports them quoting ANONYMOUS officials,"
tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi.
"So we are to simply believe the same intelligence orgs that paid bounties to bring innocent prisoners to Guantanamo, lied
about torture in Afghanistan, and lied about premises for war from WMD in Iraq to the Gulf of Tonkin 'attack'? All this and no proof?"
tweeted author and analyst Jeffrey Kaye.
"It's totally outrageous for Russia to support the Taliban against Americans in Afghanistan. Of course, it's totally fine
for the US to support jihadi rebels against Russians in Syria, jihadi rebels who openly said the Taliban is their hero," tweeted author and analyst Max Abrams.
On the flip side, all the McResistance pundits have been
speaking of this baseless allegation as a horrific event that is known to have happened, with Rachel Maddow
going so far as to describe it as Putin offering
bounties for the "scalps" of American soldiers in Afghanistan. This is an interesting choice of words, considering that
offering bounties for scalps is, in fact, one of the many horrific things
the US government did in furthering its colonialist ambitions , which, unlike the New York Times allegation, is known to have
actually happened.
It is true, as many have been pointing out, that it would be fair play for Russia to fund violent opposition the the US in Afghanistan,
seeing as that's exactly what the US and its allies have been doing to Russia and its allies in Syria, and did to the Soviets in
Afghanistan via Operation Cyclone . It is also true
that the US military has no business in Afghanistan anyway, and any violence inflicted on US troops abroad is the fault of the military
expansionists who put them there. The US military has no place outside its own easily defended borders, and the assumption that it
is normal for a government to circle the planet with military bases is a faulty premise.
But before even getting into such arguments, the other side of the debate must meet its burden of proof that this has even happened.
That burden is far from met. It is literally the US intelligence community's job to lie to you. The New York Times has an extensive
history of pushing for new wars at every opportunity,
including the unforgivable
Iraq invasion , which killed a million people, based on lies. A mountain of proof is required before such claims should be seriously
considered, and we are very, very far from that.
I will repeat myself: it is the US intelligence community's job to lie to you. I will repeat myself again: it is the US intelligence
community's job to lie to you. Don't treat these CIA press releases with anything but contempt.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
Trump himself has rubbished the NYT's Russia/Taliban story on Twitter today:
"Nobody briefed or told me, @VP Pence, or Chief of Staff @MarkMeadows about the so-called
attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported through an "anonymous source"
by the Fake News @nytimes. Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on
us..... " https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1277202159109537793
NYT exclusive: breaking, bombshell report, bombshell report, Russia pays Taliban to kill
U.S. Troops
The puppets dance for their puppet masters yet again. I was struck that in all of the MSM
responses on CNN and FOX every single host accepted it as an absolute fact that this was
true. If an unnamed source said something to a reporter at the NYT then it must have happened
in that way and the facts are irrefutable. Wow our 'journalists' are pathetic.
1. The guy who leaked this could be twisting a half or even quarter truth to embarrass
Trump, derail our withdrawal from Germany or Afghanistan ... nahh impossible. Our CIA guys
never have an agenda.
2. This could be disinformation against Russia ... nahh we are the good guys, that's not
how we roll.
The guy on CNN could not believe the WH statement that they were not briefed, 'it strains
credibility'. Maybe one POW made an outlandish claim to get better treatment and lower level
staff did not think the claim itself had enough credibility. Nope, it was leaked by an
Intelligence guy, therefore it must be true.
journalism is dead. buried, dug up, cremated and then scattered over a trash dump in
the U.S.
Projection, yet another time. An old and very effective dirty propaganda trick. Fake news outlet are intelligence services
controlled outlets.
Notable quotes:
"... Reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post were called up by unnamed 'officials' and told to write that Russia pays some Afghans to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. There is zero evidence that the claim is true. The Taliban spokesman denies it. The numbers of U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan is minimal. The alleged sources of the claims are criminals the U.S. has taken as prisoners in Afghanistan. ..."
"... The journalistic standards at the New York Times and Washington Post must be below zero to publish such nonsense without requesting real evidence. The press release like stories below from anti-Trump/anti-Russian sources have nothing to do with ' great reporting ' but are pure stenography. ..."
"... If the Russians were truly inclined in a direction leading them to "pay bounties" for American scalps in Afghanistan, they would instead be doing what we once did: providing state-of-the-art Manpads to Afghan jihadis. Any sort of bar room or shit house rumor these days is attributed to "intelligence officials" or "intelligence sources", always unnamed of course. ..."
"... The paragraph about "reasons to believe" is vacuous in the extreme: ..."
"... "The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere." ..."
"... We know from the past that US forces were torturing TOTALLY RANDOM INDIVIDUALS, occasionally to death. Needless to say, "officials did not describe the mechanics" of the interrogation, neither did not describe any corroborative details. The most benign scenario is that "captured Afghan militants and criminals" are pure fiction rather than actual people subjected to "anal inspections", "peroneal strikes", left overnight hanging from the ceiling etc. to spit out random incoherent tidbits about the Russians, like "it is also not clear".... A long list of "not clear"'s. ..."
"... Together, it is very crude "manufacturing of consent", and unfortunately, this is a workable technique of manipulation. Crudity is the tool, not a defect in this case. I will explain later what I mean, this post is probably too long already. ..."
Evidence Free Press Release Claims 'Russia Did Bad, Trump Did
Not Respond' - NYT , WaPo Publish ItA. Pols , Jun 27 2020 14:34 utc |
1
There were allegations about emails that someone exfiltrated from the DNC and provided to
Wikileaks . Russia must have done it. The FBI and other intelligence services were
all over it. In the end no evidence was provided to support the claims.
There were allegations that Trump did not really win the elections. Russia must have done
it. The various U.S. intelligence service, together with their British friends, provided all
kinds of sinister leaks about the alleged case. In the end no evidence was provided to
support the claims.
A British double agent, Sergej Skirpal, was allegedly injured in a Russian attack on him.
The intelligence services told all kind of contradicting nonsense about the case. In the end
no evidence was provided to support the claims.
All three cases had two points in common. The were based on sources near to the U.S. and
British intelligence community. They were designed to increase hostility against Russia. The
last point was then used to sabotage Donald Trump's original plans for better relations with
Russia.
Now the intelligence services make another claim that fits right into the above
scheme.
Reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post were called up
by unnamed 'officials' and told to write that Russia pays some Afghans to kill U.S. soldiers
in Afghanistan. There is zero evidence that the claim is true. The Taliban spokesman denies
it. The numbers of U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan is minimal. The alleged sources of the
claims are criminals the U.S. has taken as prisoners in Afghanistan.
All that nonsense is again used to press against Trump's wish for better relations with
Russia. Imagine - Trump was told about these nonsensical claims and he did nothing about
it!
The same intelligence services and 'officials' previously paid bounties to bring innocent
prisoners to Guantanamo Bay, tortured them until they made false confessions and lied about
it. The same intelligence services and 'officials' lied about WMD in Iraq. The same
'intelligence officials' paid and pay Jihadis disguised as 'Syrian rebels' to kill Russian
and Syrian troops which defend their countries.
The journalistic standards at the New York Times and Washington Post
must be below zero to publish such nonsense without requesting real evidence. The press
release like stories below from anti-Trump/anti-Russian sources have nothing to do with '
great
reporting ' but are pure stenography.
Posted by b at
13:43 UTC |
Comments (3)If the Russians were truly inclined in a direction leading them to "pay
bounties" for American scalps in Afghanistan, they would instead be doing what we once did:
providing state-of-the-art Manpads to Afghan jihadis. Any sort of bar room or shit house
rumor these days is attributed to "intelligence officials" or "intelligence sources", always
unnamed of course.
Biden is the intelligence services' ideal candidate -- an easily manipulated empty suit.
There's a reason why charges of Biden wrongdoing are as easily dismissed as nonsensical
charges against Trump and Russia get fabricated. And that reason is that the media is as
happy to be manipulated as Biden.
The paragraph about "reasons to believe" is vacuous in the extreme:
"The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations
of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of
the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is
also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their
Taliban counterparts elsewhere."
We know from the past that US forces were torturing TOTALLY RANDOM INDIVIDUALS,
occasionally to death. Needless to say, "officials did not describe the mechanics" of the
interrogation, neither did not describe any corroborative details. The most benign scenario
is that "captured Afghan militants and criminals" are pure fiction rather than actual people
subjected to "anal inspections", "peroneal strikes", left overnight hanging from the ceiling
etc. to spit out random incoherent tidbits about the Russians, like "it is also not
clear".... A long list of "not clear"'s.
This is disturbing, although this is precisely the quality of "intelligence" that gets
released to the public. The second disturbing aspect is that the article was opened to
comments, and as usually in such cases, the comments are full of fury at Russians and Trump,
and with the numbers of "recommend"'s reaching thousands. On non-Russian topics, if comments
are allowed, one can see a much wider spectrum of opinion, sometimes with huge numbers of
"recommend"'s to people who criticize and doubt the official positions. Here I lost patience
looking for any skeptical comment.
Together, it is very crude "manufacturing of consent", and unfortunately, this is a
workable technique of manipulation. Crudity is the tool, not a defect in this case. I will
explain later what I mean, this post is probably too long already.
It turns out that the BBC really does believe that God is an Englishman. When the simple
impossibility of the official story on the Skripals finally overwhelmed the dramatists, they
resorted to Divine Intervention for an explanation – as propagandists have done for
millennia.
This particular piece of script from Episode 2 of The Salisbury Poisonings deserves an
induction in the Propaganda Hall of Fame:
Porton Down Man: I've got the reports from the Bailey house
Public Health Woman: Tell me, how many hits?
Porton Down Man: It was found in almost every room of the house. Kitchen, bathroom, living
room, bedrooms. It was even on the light switches. We found it in the family car too. But his
wife and children haven't been affected. I like to think of myself as a man of science, but
the only word for that is a miracle.
Well, it certainly would be a miracle that the family lived for a week in the house without
touching a light switch. But miracle is not really the "only word for that". Nonsense is a good
word. Bullshit is a ruder version. Lie is entirely appropriate in these circumstances.
Because that was not the only miracle on display. We were told specifically that the
Skripals had trailed novichok all over Zizzis and the Bishops Mill pub, leaving multiple deadly
deposits, dozens of them in total, which miraculously nobody had touched. We were told that
Detective Bailey was found to have left multiple deadly deposits of novichok on everything he
touched in a busy police station, but over several days before it was closed down nobody had
touched any of them, which must be an even bigger miracle than the Baileys' home.
Perhaps even more amazingly, as the Skripals spread novichok all over the restaurant and the
pub, nobody who served them had been harmed, nobody who took their payment. The man who went
through Sergei's wallet to learn his identity from his credit cards was not poisoned. The
people giving first aid were not poisoned. The ducks Sergei fed were not poisoned. The little
boy he fed the ducks with was not poisoned. So many miracles. If God were not an Englishman,
Salisbury would have been in real trouble, evidently.
The conclusion of episode two showed Charlie Rowley fishing out the perfume bottle from the
charity bin at least two months in the timeline before this really happened, thus neatly
sidestepping one of the most glaring impossibilities in the entire official story. I think we
can forgive the BBC that lie – there are only so many instances of divine intervention in
the story the public can be expected to buy in one episode.
It is fascinating to see that the construction of this edifice of lies was a joint venture
between the BBC and the security services' house journal, the Guardian. Not only is all round
pro-war propagandist "Colonel" Hamish De Bretton Gordon credited as Military Advisor, but
Guardian journalists Caroline Bannock and Steven Morris are credited as Script Consultants,
which I presume means they fed in the raw lies for the scriptwriters to shape into
miracles.
Now here is an interesting ethical point for readers of the Guardian. The Guardian published
in the last fortnight
two articles by
Morris and Bannock that purported to be reporting on the production of the drama and its
authenticity, without revealing to the readers that these full time Guardian journalists were
in fact a part of the BBC project. That is unethical and unprofessional in a number of quite
startling ways. But then it is the Guardian.
[Full disclosure. I shared a flat with Caroline at university. She was an honest person in
those days.]
Again, rather than pepper this article with links, I urge you to read
this comprehensive article , which contains plenty of links and remains entirely
unanswered.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
The original source of this
article is Craig Murray
"... Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness. ..."
"... The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily. ..."
"... Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who'd made politically "problematic" editorial or social media decisions. ..."
"... The New York Times, the Intercept , Vox, the Philadelphia Inquirier, Variety , and others saw challenges to management. ..."
"... I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it's going to be national news, but if a Black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of It's stuff just like that that I just want in the mix. ..."
"... The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of "balance," i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader's judgment as the routes to positive social change. ..."
Sometimes it seems life can't get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a
pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored
violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and
brutalizing protesters.
Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is
uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two
society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat's theorem.
Calls to "dominate" marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd's "great day" looking
down from heaven at Trump's crisis management and new unemployment numbers ("
only" 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems
determined to talk us into civil war.
But police violence, and Trump's daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are
only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described
liberals, we're watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of
tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It's become a cowardly mob
of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to
discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.
The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance,
free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew
debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the
guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand
up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.
Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of
controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with
internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers
demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who'd made politically "problematic" editorial
or social media decisions.
The New York Times, the Intercept , Vox, the Philadelphia
Inquirier, Variety , and others saw challenges to management.
Probably the most disturbing story involved Intercept writer Lee Fang, one of a
fast-shrinking number of young reporters actually skilled in investigative journalism. Fang's
work in the area of campaign finance especially has led to concrete impact, including a
record fine to a conservative Super PAC : few young reporters have done more to combat
corruption.
Yet Fang found himself denounced online as a racist, then hauled before H.R. His crime?
During protests, he tweeted this interview with an African-American
man named Maximum Fr, who described having two cousins murdered in the East Oakland
neighborhood where he grew up. Saying his aunt is still not over those killings, Max asked:
I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?...
Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it's going to be national news, but if a Black
man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of It's stuff just like that that I just want
in the mix.
Shortly after, a co-worker of Fang's, Akela Lacy, wrote, "Tired of being made to deal
continually with my co-worker @lhfang continuing to push black on black crime narratives after
being repeatedly asked not to. This isn't about me and him, it's about institutional racism and
using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired." She followed with, "Stop
being racist Lee."
Like many reporters, Fang has always viewed it as part of his job to ask questions in all
directions. He's written critically of political figures on the center-left, the left, and
"obviously on the right," and his reporting has inspired serious threats in the past. None of
those past experiences were as terrifying as this blitz by would-be colleagues, which he
described as "jarring," "deeply isolating," and "unique in my professional experience."
To save his career, Fang had to craft a public apology for
"insensitivity to the lived experience of others." According to one friend of his, it's been
communicated to Fang that his continued employment at The Intercept is contingent upon
avoiding comments that may upset colleagues. Lacy to her credit publicly thanked Fang for his
statement and expressed willingness to have a conversation; unfortunately, the throng of
Intercept co-workers who piled on her initial accusation did not join her in this.
I first met Lee Fang in 2014 and have never known him to be anything but kind, gracious, and
easygoing. He also appears earnestly committed to making the world a better place through his
work. It's stunning that so many colleagues are comfortable using a word as extreme and
villainous as racist to describe him.
Though he describes his upbringing as "solidly middle-class," Fang grew up in up in a
diverse community in Prince George's County, Maryland, and attended public schools where he was
frequently among the few non-African Americans in his class. As a teenager, he was witness to
the murder of a young man outside his home by police who were never prosecuted, and also
volunteered at a shelter for trafficked women, two of whom were murdered. If there's an edge to
Fang at all, it seems geared toward people in our business who grew up in affluent
circumstances and might intellectualize topics that have personal meaning for him.
In the tweets that got him in trouble with Lacy and other co-workers, he questioned the
logic of protesters attacking immigrant-owned businesses " with no connection to police brutality
at all ." He also offered his opinion on Martin Luther King's attitude toward
violent protest (Fang's take was that King did not support it; Lacy responded, "you know
they killed him too right"). These are issues around which there is still considerable
disagreement among self-described liberals, even among self-described leftists. Fang also
commented, presciently as it turns out, that many reporters were "terrified of openly
challenging the lefty conventional wisdom around riots."
Lacy says she never intended for Fang to be "fired, 'canceled,' or deplatformed," but
appeared irritated by questions on the subject, which she says suggest, "there is more concern
about naming racism than letting it persist."
Max himself was stunned to find out that his comments on all this had created a Twitter
firestorm. "I couldn't believe they were coming for the man's job over something I said," he
recounts. "It was not Lee's opinion. It was my opinion."
By phone, Max spoke of a responsibility he feels Black people have to speak out against all
forms of violence, "precisely because we experience it the most." He described being affected
by the Floyd story, but also by the story of retired African-American police captain David
Dorn, shot to death in recent
protests in St. Louis. He also mentioned Tony Timpa, a white man whose 2016 asphyxiation by
police was only uncovered last year. In body-camera footage, police are heard joking after
Timpa passed out and stopped moving, "
I don't want to go to school! Five more minutes, Mom !"
"If it happens to anyone, it has to be called out," Max says.
Max described discussions in which it was argued to him that bringing up these other
incidents now is not helpful to the causes being articulated at the protests. He understands
that point of view. He just disagrees.
"They say, there has to be the right time and a place to talk about that," he says. "But my
point is, when? I want to speak out now." He pauses. "We've taken the narrative, and instead of
being inclusive with it, we've become exclusive with it. Why?"
There were other incidents. The editors of Bon
Apetit and Refinery29 both resigned amid accusations
of toxic workplace culture. The editor of Variety, Claudia Eller, was
placed on leave after calling a South Asian freelance writer "bitter" in a Twitter exchange
about minority hiring at her company. The self-abasing apology ("I have tried to diversify our
newsroom over the past seven years, but I HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH") was insufficient. Meanwhile,
the Philadelphia Inquirer's editor, Stan Wischowski, was forced out after approving a
headline, "Buildings matter, too."
In the most discussed incident, Times editorial page editor James Bennet was ousted
for green-lighting an anti-protest editorial by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton
entitled, " Send in the
troops ."
I'm no fan of Cotton, but as was the case with Michael Moore's documentary and many other
controversial speech episodes, it's not clear that many of the people angriest about the piece
in question even read it. In classic Times fashion, the paper has already scrubbed a
mistake they made misreporting what their own editorial said, in an article about Bennet's
ouster. Here's how the piece by Marc Tracy
read originally (emphasis mine):
James Bennet, the editorial page editor of The New York Times, has resigned after a
controversy over an Op-Ed by a senator calling for military force against protesters in
American cities.
James Bennet resigned on Sunday from his job as the editorial page editor of The New York
Times, days after the newspaper's opinion section, which he oversaw, published a
much-criticized Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic
unrest in American cities.
Cotton did not call for "military force against protesters in American cities." He spoke of
a "show of force," to rectify a situation a significant portion of the country saw as spiraling
out of control. It's an important distinction. Cotton was presenting one side of the most
important question on the most important issue of a critically important day in American
history.
As Cotton points out in the piece, he was advancing a view arguably held by a majority of
the country. A Morning Consult poll showed
58% of Americans either strongly or somewhat supported the idea of "calling in the U.S.
military to supplement city police forces." That survey included 40% of self-described
"liberals" and 37% of African-Americans. To declare a point of view held by that many people
not only not worthy of discussion, but so toxic that publication of it without even necessarily
agreeing requires dismissal, is a dramatic reversal for a newspaper that long cast itself as
the national paper of record.
Incidentally, that
same poll cited by Cotton showed that 73% of Americans described protecting property as
"very important," while an additional 16% considered it "somewhat important." This means the
Philadelphia Inquirer editor was fired for running a headline – "Buildings
matter, too" – that the poll said expressed a view held by 89% of the population,
including 64% of African-Americans.
(Would I have run the Inquirer headline? No. In the context of the moment, the use
of the word "matter" especially sounds like the paper is equating "Black lives" and
"buildings," an odious and indefensible comparison. But why not just make this case in a
rebuttal editorial? Make it a teaching moment? How can any editor operate knowing that airing
opinions shared by a majority of readers might cost his or her job?)
The main thing accomplished by removing those types of editorials from newspapers -- apart
from scaring the hell out of editors -- is to shield readers from knowledge of what a major
segment of American society is thinking.
It also guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid
upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we
might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of
people professing to agree with one another. That's not agitation, that's misinformation.
The instinct to shield audiences from views or facts deemed politically uncomfortable has
been in evidence since Trump became a national phenomenon. We saw it when reporters told
audiences Hillary Clinton's small crowds were a "
wholly intentional " campaign decision. I listened to colleagues that summer of 2016 talk
about ignoring poll results, or anecdotes about Hillary's troubled campaign, on the grounds
that doing otherwise might "help Trump" (or, worse, be perceived that way).
Even if you embrace a wholly politically utilitarian vision of the news media – I
don't, but let's say – non-reporting of that "enthusiasm" story, or ignoring adverse poll
results, didn't help Hillary's campaign. I'd argue it more likely accomplished the opposite,
contributing to voter apathy by conveying the false impression that her victory was secure.
After the 2016 election, we began to see staff uprisings. In one case, publishers at the
Nation faced a revolt – from the Editor on down – after
articles by Aaron Mate
and Patrick Lawrence questioning the evidentiary basis for Russiagate claims was run.
Subsequent events, including the recent
declassification of congressional testimony , revealed that Mate especially was right to
point out that officials had no evidence for a Trump-Russia collusion case. It's precisely
because such unpopular views often turn out to be valid that we stress publishing and debating
them in the press.
In a related incident, the New Yorker ran an article about Glenn Greenwald's
Russiagate skepticism that quoted that same Nation editor, Joan Walsh, who had edited
Greenwald at Salon. She suggested to the New Yorker that Greenwald's
reservations were rooted in "disdain" for the Democratic Party, in part because of its
closeness to Wall Street, but also because of the " ascendance
of women and people of color ." The message was clear: even if you win a Pulitzer Prize,
you can be accused of racism for deviating from approved narratives, even on questions that
have nothing to do with race (the New Yorker piece also implied Greenwald's
intransigence on Russia was pathological and grounded in trauma from childhood).
In the case of Cotton, Times staffers protested on the grounds that " Running
this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger ." Bennet's editorial decision was not merely
ill-considered, but literally life-threatening (note pundits in the space of a few weeks have
told us that
protesting during lockdowns and notprotesting during
lockdowns are both literally lethal). The Times first attempted to rectify the
situation by apologizing, adding a long
Editor's note to Cotton's piece that read, as so many recent "apologies" have, like a note
written by a hostage.
Editors begged forgiveness for not being more involved, for not thinking to urge Cotton to
sound less like Cotton ("Editors should have offered suggestions"), and for allowing rhetoric
that was "needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful
debate." That last line is sadly funny, in the context of an episode in which reporters were
seeking to pre-empt a debate rather than have one at all; of course, no one got the joke, since
a primary characteristic of the current political climate is a total absence of a sense of
humor in any direction.
As many guessed, the "apology" was not enough, and Bennet was whacked a day later
in a terse announcement.
His replacement, Kathleen Kingsbury, issued a staff directive essentially telling employees
they now had a veto over
anything that made them uncomfortable : "Anyone who sees any piece of Opinion journalism,
headlines, social posts, photos -- you name it -- that gives you the slightest pause, please
call or text me immediately."
All these episodes sent a signal to everyone in a business already shedding jobs at an
extraordinary rate that failure to toe certain editorial lines can and will result in the loss
of your job. Perhaps additionally, you could face a public shaming campaign in which you will
be denounced as a racist and rendered unemployable.
These tensions led to amazing contradictions in coverage. For all the
extraordinary/inexplicable scenes of police viciousness in recent weeks -- and there was a ton
of it, ranging from police slashing tires in Minneapolis,
to Buffalo officers knocking over an elderly man,
to Philadelphia
police attacking protesters -- there were also
12 deaths in the first nine days of protests, only one at the hands of a police officer
(involving a man who may or may not have been aiming a gun at police).
Looting in some communities has been so bad that people have been left without banks to cash
checks, or pharmacies to fill prescriptions; business owners have been wiped out ("
My life is gone ," commented one Philly store owner); a car dealership in San Leandro,
California saw
74 cars stolen in a single night. It isn't the whole story, but it's demonstrably true that
violence, arson, and rioting are occurring.
Even people who try to keep up with protest goals find themselves denounced the moment they
fail to submit to some new tenet of ever-evolving doctrine, via a surprisingly consistent
stream of retorts: fuck you, shut up, send money, do better, check yourself, I'm tired
and racist .
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, who argued for police reform and attempted to show solidarity
with protesters in his city, was shouted down after he refused to
commit to defunding the police. Protesters shouted "Get the fuck out!" at him, then chanted "
Shame !" and threw refuse, Game of Thrones-style , as he skulked out of the gathering.
Frey's "shame" was refusing to endorse a position polls show 65% of
Americans oppose , including 62% of Democrats, with just 15% of all people, and only 33% of
African-Americans, in support.
Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than
politics. White protesters in Floyd's Houston hometown
kneeling and praying to black residents for "forgiveness for years and years of racism" are
one thing, but what are we to make of white police in Cary, North Carolina, kneeling and
washing the feet of Black pastors? What about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneeling
while dressed in "
African kente cloth scarves "?
There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these
are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too
paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the
willingness to ask tough questions, we've become afraid to ask obvious ones.
On CNN, Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender was asked a hypothetical question
about a future without police: "What if in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who
do I call?" When Bender, who is white, answered , "I know that comes from
a place of privilege," questions popped to mind. Does privilege mean one should let someone
break into one's home, or that one shouldn't ask that hypothetical question? (I was genuinely
confused). In any other situation, a media person pounces on a provocative response to dig out
its meaning, but an increasingly long list of words and topics are deemed too dangerous to
discuss.
The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told
the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are
abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey's
firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the
democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence "whistleblowers," all those interminable months of
Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown
violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc.
It's been learned in these episodes we may freely misreport reality, so long as the
political goal is righteous. It was okay to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier, because
Trump is scum. MSNBC could put Michael Avenatti on live TV to air a gang rape allegation
without vetting, because who cared about Brett Kavanaugh – except press airing of that
wild story ended up being a crucial factor in convincing key swing voter Maine Senator Susan
Collins the anti-Kavanaugh campaign was a political hit job (the allegation illustrated, "why
the presumption of innocence is so important,"
she said ). Reporters who were anxious to prevent Kavanaugh's appointment, in other words,
ended up helping it happen through overzealousness.
There were no press calls for self-audits after those episodes, just as there won't be a few
weeks from now if Covid-19 cases spike, or a few months from now if Donald Trump wins
re-election successfully painting the Democrats as supporters of violent protest who want to
abolish police. No: press activism is limited to denouncing and shaming colleagues for
insufficient fealty to the cheap knockoff of bullying campus Marxism that passes for leftist
thought these days.
The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of
"balance," i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The
ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not,
trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media
stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader's judgment as the routes to positive social
change.
For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed
to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or
disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to
flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for
instance).
Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave
truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president , but not one of them
will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to
tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we're afraid to do it?
This is such an IMPORTANT story.
But it's not just happening in newsrooms, it's happening everywhere: college campuses,
corporations and the workplace, social media platforms, politics, you name it. These
ideologues are the Red Guard of a new Cultural Revolution. Their goal is power and their
method is leveraging progressive guilt. I think they are far, far more dangerous than
Donald Trump or anything going on with the right. Thank you Matt for writing about this!
163
Dazed and Confused Jun 13
Bravo for writing this Matt.
You could, of course, have written it without first establishing your bona fides as a trump
detractor. The problem you address has nothing to do with trump and would exist regardless
of who was in the white house. This doesn't mean there are no problems with trump, or that
he hasn't made a bad situation worse. But that is where we are today. Before anyone can
criticize the obviously insane ideological absurdities within the liberal/left wing press
they must first take a swing at trump in case anyone thinks criticism of the press is the
same thing as supporting trump. How sad.
And those corporations and CIA financed entity asks readers for donations?
Notable quotes:
"... Amamou briefly served as secretary of state for sport and youth in Tunisia's transitional government, before later resigning. He noted that Maher traveled to the country several times since the Arab Spring protests broke out in 2011, and he found it strange that her affiliations kept changing. ..."
"... Katherine Maher is probably a CIA agent. She's been in Tunisia multiple times since 2011 under multiple affiliations ..."
"... Maher spoke about the libertarian philosophy behind Wikipedia, echoing the Ayn Randian ideology of founder Jimmy Wales. ..."
"... The Grayzone has clearly demonstrated how Wikipedia editors overwhelmingly side with Western governments in these editorial conflicts, echoing the perspectives of interventionists and censoring critical voices. ..."
"... The moderator of the discussion, Mattias Fyrenius, the CEO of the Nobel Prize's media arm, asked Maher: "There is some kind of information war going on – and maybe you can say that there is a war going on between the lies, and the propaganda, and the facts, and maybe truth – do you agree?" ..."
"... "Yes," Maher responded in agreement. She added her own question: "What are the institutions, what is the obligation of institutions to actually think about what the future looks like, if we actually want to pass through this period with our integrity intact?" ..."
"... Like Maher's former employer the National Democratic Institute, the OPT advances US imperial interests in the guise of promoting "internet freedom" and new technologies. It also provides large grants to opposition groups in foreign nations targeted by Washington for regime change. ..."
"... While she serves today as the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher remains a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, a Washington, DC think tank that grooms former military and intelligence professionals for careers in Democratic Party politics. ..."
"... As The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal reported, the most prominent fellow of the Truman Project is Pete Buttigieg, the US Naval intelligence veteran who emerged as a presidential frontrunner in the Democratic primary earlier this year. ..."
"... The extensive participation by the head of the Wikimedia Foundation in US government regime-change networks raises serious questions about the organization's commitment to neutrality. ..."
"... Perhaps the unchecked problem of political bias and coordinated smear campaigns by a small coterie of Wikipedia editors is not a bug, but a deliberately conceived feature of the website. ..."
Wikipedia has become a bulletin board for corporate and imperial interests under the watch
of its Randian founder, Jimmy Wales, and the veteran US regime-change operative who heads the
Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher.
Born from seemingly humble beginnings, the Wikimedia Foundation is today swimming in cash
and invested in many of the powerful interests that benefit from its lax editorial policy.
The foundation's largest donors include corporate
tech giants Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Craigslist. With more than $145 million
in assets in 2018, nearly $105 million in annual revenue, and a massive headquarters in San
Francisco, Wikimedia has carved out a space for itself next to these Big Tech oligarchs in the
Silicon Valley bubble.
It is also impossible to separate Wikipedia as a project from the
ideology of its creator. When he co-founded the platform in 2001, Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales was a
conservative
libertarian and devoted disciple of right-wing fanatic
Ayn Rand .
A former futures and options trader, Wales openly preached the gospel of " Objectivism ," Rand's
ultra-capitalist ideology that sees government and society itself as the root of all evil,
heralding individual capitalists as gods.
Wales described his philosophy behind Wikipedia in specifically Randian terms. In a video
clip from a 2008 interview, published by the Atlas Society, an organization dedicated to
evangelizing on behalf of Objectivism, Wales explained that he was influenced by Howard Roark,
the protagonist of Rand's novel The Fountainhead.
Wikipedia's structure was expressly meant to reflect the ideology of its libertarian tech
entrepreneur founder, and Wales openly said as much.
At the same time, however, Wikipedia editors have upheld the diehard Objectivist Jimmy
Wales, as the New York Times put it in 2008, as a "benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch,
digital evangelist and spiritual leader."
Wales has always balanced his libertarian inclinations with old-fashioned American
patriotism. He was summoned before the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government
Operations in 2007 to further explain how Wikipedia and its related technologies could be of
service to Uncle Sam.
Wales began his remarks stating, "I am grateful to be here today to testify about the
potential for the Wikipedia model of collaboration and information sharing which may be helpful
to government operations and homeland security."
"At a time when the United States has been increasingly criticized around the world, I
believe that Wikipedia is an incredible carrier of traditional American values of generosity,
hard work, and freedom of speech," Wales continued, implicitly referencing the George Bush
administration's military occupation of Iraq.
The Wikipedia founder added, "The US government has always been premised on responsiveness
to citizens, and I think we all believe good government comes from broad, open public dialogue.
I therefore also recommend that US agencies consider the use of wikis for public facing
projects to gather information from citizens and to seek new ways of effectively collaborating
with the public to generate solutions to the problem that citizens face."
Wikipedia Jimmy Wales Senate Homeland Security committee Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
testifying before the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Operations in
2007 In 2012, Wales married Kate Garvey, the former diary secretary of ex-British Prime
Minister Tony Blair. Their wedding, according to the conservative UK Telegraph, was "witnessed
by guests from the world of politics and celebrity."
Wales' status-quo-friendly politics have only grown more pronounced over the years. In 2018,
for instance, he publicly cheered on Israel's bombing of the besieged Gaza strip and portrayed
Britain's leftist former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Katherine Maher: US regime-change operative with deep corporate
links Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation claim to have little power over the encyclopedia
itself, but it is widely known that this is just PR. Wikimedia blew the lid off this myth in
2015 when it removed a community-elected member of its board of trustees, without
explanation.
At the time of this scandal, the Wikimedia Foundation's board of trustees included a former
corporate executive at Google, Arnnon Geshuri, who was heavily scrutinized for shady hiring
practices. Geshuri, who also worked at billionaire Elon Musk's company Tesla, was eventually
pressured to step down from the board.
But just a year later, Wikimedia appointed another corporate executive to its board of
trustees, Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti.
The figure that deserves the most scrutiny at the Wikimedia Foundation, however, is its
executive director Katherine Maher, who is closely linked to the US regime-change network.
Katherine Maher NDI Atlantic Council Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher (right) at a
"Disinformation Forum" sponsored by the US government regime-change entity NDI and the NATO-
and Gulf monarchy-backed Atlantic Council Maher boasts an eyebrow-raising résumé
that would impress the most ardent of cold warriors in Washington.
With a degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University, Maher studied
Arabic in Egypt and Syria, just a few years before the so-called Arab Spring uprising and
subsequent Western proxy war to overthrow the Syrian government.
Maher then interned at the bank Goldman Sachs, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations
and Eurasia Group, both elite foreign-policy institutions that are deeply embedded in the
Western regime-change machine.
At the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Maher says on her public LinkedIn profile that
she worked in the "US/Middle East Program," oversaw the "CFR Corporate Program," and
"Identified appropriate potential clients, conducted outreach."
At the Eurasia Group, Maher focused on Syria and Lebanon. According to her bio, she
"Developed stability forecasting and scenario modeling, and market and political stability
reports."
Katherine Maher LinkedIn Council on Foreign Relations Eurasia Group
Maher moved on to a job at London's HSBC bank – which would go on to pay a whopping
$1.9 billion fine after it was caught red-handed laundering money for drug traffickers and
Saudi financiers of international jihadism. Her work at HSBC brought her to the UK, Germany,
and Canada.
Next, Maher co-founded a little-known election monitoring project focused on Lebanon's 2008
elections called Sharek961. To create this platform, Maher and her associates partnered with an
influential technology non-profit organization, Meedan, which has received millions of dollars
of funding from Western foundations, large corporations like IBM, and the permanent monarchy of
Qatar.
Meedan also finances the regime-change lobbying website, Bellingcat, which is considering a
reliable source on Wikipedia, while journalism outlets like The Grayzone are formally
blacklisted.
Sharek961 was funded by the Technology for Transparency Network, a platform for
regime-change operations bankrolled by billionaire Pierre Omidyar's Omidyar Network and
billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundations.
Maher subsequently moved over to a position as an "innovation and communication officer" at
the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF. There, she oversaw projects funded by the US Agency
for International Development (USAID), an arm of the US State Department which finances
regime-change operations and covert activities around the globe under the auspices of
humanitarian goodwill.
Soon enough, Maher cut out the middleman and went to work as a program officer in
information and communications technology at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), which was
created and financed directly by the US government. The NDI is a central gear in the
regime-change machine; it bankrolls coup and destabilization efforts across the planet in the
guise of "democracy promotion."
At the NDI, Maher served as a program officer for "internet freedom projects," advancing
Washington's imperial soft power behind the front of boosting global internet access –
pursuing a strategy not unlike the one used to destabilize Cuba.
The Wikimedia Foundation CEO says on her LinkedIn profile that her work at the NDI included
"democracy and human rights support" as well as designing technology programs for "citizen
engagement, open government, independent media, and civil society for transitional, conflict,
and authoritarian countries, including internet freedom programming."
After a year at the NDI, she moved over to the World Bank, another notorious vehicle for
Washington's power projection.
Katherine Maher LinkedIn World Bank NDI
At the World Bank, Maher oversaw the creation of the Open Development Technology Alliance
(ODTA), an initiative that uses new technologies to impose more aggressive neoliberal economic
policies on developing countries.
Maher's LinkedIn page notes that her work entailed designing and implementing "open
government and open data in developing and transitioning nations," especially in the Middle
East and North Africa.
At the time of her employment at the World Bank, the Arab Spring protests were erupting.
In October 2012, in the early stages of the proxy war in Syria, Maher tweeted that she was
planning a trip to Gaziantep, a Turkish city near the Syrian border that became the main hub
for the Western-backed opposition. Gaziantep was at the time crawling with Syrian insurgents
and foreign intelligence operatives plotting to topple the government of President Bashar
al-Assad.
Katherine Maher ✔ @krmaher
Planning to go to Gaziantep in a few days. A timely NYT
report from the Turkish-Syrian border:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/13/world/middleeast/on-edge-in-turkey-as-syria-war-inches-closer.html?pagewanted=2&smid=tw-share
1 12:25 PM - Oct 13, 2012 Twitter Ads info and privacy
See Katherine Maher's other Tweets
Just two months later, in December, she tweeted that was was on a flight to Libya. Just over a
year before, a NATO regime-change war had destroyed the Libyan government, and foreign-backed
insurgents had killed leader Muammar Qadhafi, unleashing a wave of violence – and
open-air slave markets.
Today, Libya has no unified central government and is still plagued by a grueling civil war.
What Maher was doing in the war-torn country in 2012 is not clear.
Katherine Maher ✔ @krmaher
I'm on the plane to Libya. Holy wow, batman.
View image on Twitter 2 3:21 AM - Dec 9, 2012 Twitter Ads info and privacy
Maher's repeated trips to the Middle East and North Africa right around
the time of these uprisings and Western intervention campaigns raised eyebrows among local
activists.
In 2016, when Maher was named executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, a prominent
Tunisian activist named Slim Amamou spoke out, alleging that "Katherine Maher is probably a CIA
agent."
Amamou briefly served as secretary of state for sport and youth in Tunisia's transitional
government, before later resigning. He noted that Maher traveled to the country several times
since the Arab Spring protests broke out in 2011, and he found it strange that her affiliations
kept changing.
... ... ...
Slim Amamou ✔ @slim404 · Mar 13, 2016
Katherine Maher is probably a CIA agent.
She's been in Tunisia multiple times since 2011 under multiple affiliations
https://twitter.com/Wikimedia/status/708438130626408449
Wikimedia ✔ @Wikimedia
Chief communications officer Katherine Maher (@krmaher) named
interim executive director of Wikimedia Foundation.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/03/11/katherine-maher-interim-executive-director/
Slim Amamou ✔ @slim404
Wikmedia foundation is changing.. and not in a good way. It's
sad, because rare are organisations that have this reach in developing world
2 11:18 AM - Mar 13, 2016 Twitter Ads info and privacy See Slim Amamou's other Tweets
In
April 2017, in her new capacity as head of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher
participated in an event for the US State Department. The talk was a "Washington Foreign Press Center Briefing," entitled "Wikipedia in a
Post-fact World." It was published at the official State Department website.
Maher spoke about the libertarian philosophy behind Wikipedia, echoing the Ayn Randian
ideology of founder Jimmy Wales.
When journalists asked how Wikipedia deals "with highly charged topics," where "some
entities – sometimes countries, sometimes various other entities – are often
engaged in conflict with each other," Maher repeatedly provided a non-answer, recycling vague
platitudes about the Wikipedia community working together.
The Grayzone has clearly demonstrated how Wikipedia editors overwhelmingly side with Western
governments in these editorial conflicts, echoing the perspectives of interventionists and
censoring critical voices.
A few months later, in January 2018, Maher appeared on a panel with Michael Hayden, the
former director of both the CIA and NSA, and a notorious hater of journalists, as well with a
top Indian government official, K. VijayRaghavan.
The talk, entitled "Lies Propaganda and Truth," was held by the organization behind the
Nobel Prize.
The moderator of the discussion, Mattias Fyrenius, the CEO of the Nobel Prize's media arm,
asked Maher: "There is some kind of information war going on – and maybe you can say that
there is a war going on between the lies, and the propaganda, and the facts, and maybe truth
– do you agree?"
"Yes," Maher responded in agreement. She added her own question: "What are the institutions,
what is the obligation of institutions to actually think about what the future looks like, if
we actually want to pass through this period with our integrity intact?"
... ... ...
Wikimedia Foundation CEO Katherine Maher in a
panel discussion with CIA director Michael Hayden Hayden, the former US spy agency chief, then
blamed "the Russians" for waging that information war. He referred to Moscow as "the
adversary," and claimed the "Russian information bubble, information dominance machine, created
so much confusion." Maher laughed in approval, disputing nothing that Hayden said. In the same discussion, Maher
also threw WikiLeaks (which is blacklisted on Wikipedia) under the bus, affirming, "Not
WikiLeaks, I want to be clear, we're not the same organization." The former CIA director next
to her chuckled.
Wikipedia Katherine Maher Open Technology Fund US government Wikimedia Foundation executive
director Katherine Maher is a member of the advisory board of the US government's technology
regime-change arm the Open Technology Fund (OPT)
Today, Maher is a member of the advisory board
of the US government's technology regime-change arm the Open Technology Fund (OPT) – a
fact she proudly boasts on her LinkedIn profile. The OPT was created in 2012 as a project of Radio Free Asia, an information warfare vehicle
that the New York Times once described as a "worldwide propaganda network built by the
CIA." Since disaffiliating from this CIA cutout in 2019, the OPT is now bankrolled by the US
Agency for Global Media, the government's propaganda arm, formerly known as the Broadcasting
Board of Governors.
Like Maher's former employer the National Democratic Institute, the OPT advances US imperial
interests in the guise of promoting "internet freedom" and new technologies. It also provides
large grants to opposition groups in foreign nations targeted by Washington for regime
change.
Katherine Maher Truman National Security Project
While she serves today as the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine
Maher remains a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, a Washington, DC think tank
that grooms former military and intelligence professionals for careers in Democratic Party
politics.
The Truman Project website identifies Maher's expertise as "international development."
As The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal reported, the most prominent fellow of the Truman Project
is Pete Buttigieg, the US Naval intelligence veteran who emerged as a presidential frontrunner
in the Democratic primary earlier this year.
The extensive participation by the head of the Wikimedia Foundation in US government
regime-change networks raises serious questions about the organization's commitment to
neutrality.
Perhaps the unchecked problem of political bias and coordinated smear campaigns by a small
coterie of Wikipedia editors is not a bug, but a deliberately conceived feature of the
website.
Ben Norton Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor
of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor
Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
The media's Russiagate failures were just a trial-run for the last four months.
June 10, 2020
|
12:01 am
Arthur
Bloom The most effective kind of propaganda is by omission. Walter Duranty didn't cook up
accounts from smiling Ukrainian farmers, he simply said there was no evidence for a famine,
much like the media tells us today that there is no evidence antifa has a role in the current
protests. It is much harder to do this today than it was back then -- there are photographs and
video that show they have been -- which is the proximate cause for greater media concern about
conspiracy theories and disinformation.
For all the hyperventilating over the admittedly creepy 2008 article about "cognitive
infiltration," by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, it was a serious attempt to deal with the
problem of an informational center being lost in American public life, at a time when the
problem was not nearly as bad as it is today. It proposed a number of strategies to reduce the
credibility of conspiracy theorists, including seeding them with false information. Whether
such strategies have been employed, perhaps with QAnon, which has a remarkable ability to
absorb all other conspiracy theories that came before it, I leave to the reader's
speculation.
Books will one day be written about the many failures of the media during the Trump
presidency, but much of the Russiagate narrative-shaping was related to the broader problem of
decentralization and declining authority of establishment media. One of the more egregious
examples is the Washington Post's
report that relied upon a blacklist created by an anonymous group, PropOrNot, that found
more than 200 sites carried water for the Russians in some way, and not all on the right
either. In fact, if the Bush administration had commissioned a list of news sources that were
carrying water for Saddam Hussein in 2006, it would have looked almost the same as the
PropOrNot list, except here it was, recast as an effort to defend democratic integrity. On the
list was Naked Capitalism, Antiwar.com, and Truthdig.
This should have been a bigger scandal, very good evidence that the war on disinformation
was not that but a campaign against officially unapproved information. But virtually nobody
except Glenn Greenwald objected. There is some evidence that this style of blacklisting went
even further, into the architecture of search engines.
My reporting on Google search last year found that one of the "fringe domain" blacklists
included Robert Parry's Consortium News. In other words, if Google had been around in the
1980s, Parry's exposes on Iran-Contra would have been excluded from Google News results.
The criteria for inclusion on any of these lists are much more amorphous than a more
traditional one: taking money from a foreign power. As of this week, we now have
a figure for how much the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal
have taken from China Daily, a state-run newspaper, since 2016. It's $4.6 million, and $6
million, respectively. This is more than an order of magnitude greater than Russia is thought
to have spent on Facebook advertising prior to the 2016 election.
There are other specific Russiagate disgraces one would be remiss to overlook, like star
reporter Natasha Bertrand, who was hired at MSNBC after several appearances in which she
repeatedly defended the accuracy of the Steele Dossier, which itself was
likely tainted by Russian disinformation. The newspaper that published the Pentagon Papers
defended the outing of a source to the FBI. How David Ignatius, considered America's top
reporter on the intelligence community, can show his face in public after he was allegedly told
by James Clapper to "take the kill shot on Flynn," and then two days later doing just that, is
disturbing (Clapper's spokesman disputes this account, but Ignatius has not). The scoop, that
Flynn, the incoming national security advisor had spoken to the Russian ambassador, is in no
way suspicious, but for weeks was treated as if Flynn was making contact with his handler.
What Russiagate amounts to, as Matt Taibbi among others have written, is the use of federal
investigative resources to criminalize or persecute dissenters from the foreign policy line of
what we here at TAC call the Blob, in the same way that the PropOrNot list amounts to
an attempt to suppress unapproved sources of news.
Many of the same figures involved in prolonging the Russiagate hysteria were also big
cheerleaders for the Bush and Obama wars. Before Russiagate, there was the Pentagon military
analysts scandal, in which it was revealed that dozens of media commentators on military
affairs were doing so without disclosing their connections to the Pentagon or defense
contractors. It implicated Barry McCaffrey, Bill Clinton's drug war czar, who is now an MSNBC
contributor who helped to provide color for the narrative of General Flynn's decline,
suggesting
he was mentally ill after he had initially been supportive of him getting the job.
In a certain sense, Trump provides journalists who have disturbingly cozy relationships with
powerful people a way of looking like they are holding the powerful accountable, without
alienating any of their previous friends. Trump is in fact one of the weakest executives in
presidential history, partly because of the massive resistance to him in the federal workforce,
but also because his White House seems powerless to actually do anything about that. That
people actually think the dark cloud of fascism has descended upon the land when Trump can't
even figure out how to work those levers of power just shows how obsessed with symbolic matters
-- "representation," they call it -- our politics has become.
The subsequent failures of the American information landscape have only served to reinforce
this dynamic. Both the self-inflicted economic catastrophe of the coronavirus shutdowns, and
the recent civil unrest, will serve to concentrate wealth away from the hated red-state
bourgeoise and into the hands of the oligarchs in blue states, including Jeff Bezos, the owner
of the Washington Post . This bears repeating: COVID and the protests will lead to a
large transfer of wealth from a reliably Republican demographic -- small business owners -- to
one that is at best split, which is why you saw Jamie Dimon kneeling in front of a bank vault
this week.
Untangling the question of intent is difficult in the best of circumstances, and the same is
true here. The contrast between news networks ominously reporting on Florida beachgoers a month
ago now cheering on mass gatherings in large cities may not in fact be due to the fact that the
large consortiums that own the networks stand to benefit financially from the continued
shutdown of the country. They may sincerely believe, along with public health
officials , that balancing the risks of institutional racism and getting COVID-19 is worth
discussing in relation to protests, but balancing the same risks when it comes to going to
church or burying a family member is not. Or it may just be studied naivety, like the kind
exhibited a few weeks ago when the whole New York media scene rushed to the defense of the
New Yorker 's Jia Tolentino, who played the victim after people on social media
revealed that her family was involved in what certainly appears to be an exploitative
immigration scam.
The rise of the first-person essay and subjectivity in journalism may turn out to be a
perfectly congenial development for the powerful people in America; Tolentino is great at
writing about herself. For one thing, this is a lot cheaper than reporting; it probably isn't a
coincidence that this development has coincided with a huge decline in newsroom budgets. But at
the same time blaming this on economics feels like it misses the point, because there are many
people who are convinced this trend is good.
But the way it intersects with official corruption has me rather nervous. To give one
example, it seems clear that #MeToo degenerated after the Kavanaugh hearings and Biden's
nomination. And given the apparent loyalties of someone like David Ignatius, he isn't going to
be the one to unravel the intelligence connections involved in the great sexual violence story
of our generation, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. So we are left with the Netflix version,
slotted right into the typical narrative, in which the Epstein story looks fundamentally the
same as most other stories of sexual coercion, involving a powerful man and less powerful
woman, only with an exceptionally powerful man. And yet there are so many indications it was
not typical.
So it is today with George Floyd as well. It seems like there are perfectly reasonable
questions to be asked about the acquaintance between him and Derek Chauvin, and the fact that
the rather shady bar they both worked at conveniently burned down. But by now most of the media
is now highly invested in not seeing anything other than a statistic, another incident
in a long history of police brutality, and the search for facts has been replaced by
narratives. This is a shame, because it is perfectly possible to think that police have a
history of poor treatment toward black people and there might be corruption involved
in the George Floyd case, which is something Ben Crump, the lawyer for Floyd's family,
seems
to suggest in his interview on Face the Nation this weekend.
Two incidents in the last week, the freakout among young New York Times staffers
over their publication of an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that has now led to the resignation of
the editorial page editor, and the report by Cockburn that Andrew Sullivan has been barred from
writing about the protests by New York magazine, are a good indication that all of
this is going to get worse. As for the class of people who actually own these media properties,
they will probably find that building a padded room for woke staffers, in the form of whatever
HR and "safety"-related demands they're making, will suit their interests just fine. about
the author Arthur Bloom is managing editor of The American Conservative. He was previously
deputy editor of the Daily Caller and a columnist for the Catholic Herald. He holds masters
degrees in urban planning and American studies from the University of Kansas. His work has
appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Spectator (UK), The Guardian,
Quillette, The American Spectator , Modern Age, and Tiny Mix Tapes.
The contemporary geographical West bears almost nothing of classical Western culture.
Another good example is that classical Greco-Roman beauty standards opposes almost all kinds
of body modification and mutilations, like tattoos, piercings, scarification, circumcision,
etc. Many of these, especially the first two, became predominant in the last 3 decades.
Very true. Tattoos, piercings and scarification were deemed the sign of a criminal or a
barbarian in the Greco-Roman world. They valued the athletic body as it was and saw no need
to disfigure it. That is why they had such a hard time accepting circumcision.
One of my favorite journalists at the WSJ is Holman Jenkins. In a WSJ article ( May 23 )
he has an article called "Media Cowardice and the Collusion Hoax." In this article he asks
"What happens when the press becomes an interest group whose interest isn't the truth?"
Here's my question: What happens when half a country strongly supports a press or an
educational system whose interest isn't the truth? What happens is that the country becomes
too severely fragmented to function as a country and no longer exists as a country since the
inner structure, the commonality, cohesion and trust, the life force of a society, has died.
The outer structure that people see then is just the shell of a country that once existed.
Like a once beautiful tree that has died leaving only the outer shell standing till a storm
knocks it down and scatters the remains.
When can we expect such a terrible storm? Probably November when an attempt is made to
have a presidential election for a country that no longer exists as a country. Many are
already quite aware of this. The closer we get the more widespread this awareness will be.
This does not bode well for our future.
"Challenging the 1619 Project"
Tipping Point with Liz Wheeler, ( 2 min. )
So we had two major pandemic exercises last year projecting almost exactly what did happen
with the corona virus. First was Crimson Contagion Jan thru Aug 2019
Then Event 201 the international war gaming of a global pandemic almost exactly like what
happened which took place only months before the real pandemic on October 2019
So depressing that nobody in the UK has the guts to ask questions about the Skripal affair.
Parliamentarians and msm are silent but there is always Rob Slane A
HREF="https://www.theblogmire.com/">here for one of the more exacting research efforts by
himself and his commenters. Its worth a detailed examination as he never bought the Govt
fairytale from day one and has the most forensic analysis available given the erasing of all
public data and cctv in Salisbury on the day and days that followed. Rob Slane lives in
Salisbury and was swept up in the Skripal story from his quiet little social/christian blog.
He is a legend.
Or Craig Murray of course but he would prefer to be known as a Scotland man not an
englander.
John Helmer at Dancing with Bears has also written some fine pieces on the Skripal's. His
latest piece brings light to the Wiltshire Police report that states
"On July 4 – that is four days after Sturgess and Rowley had been admitted to
hospital – the Wiltshire police published the conclusion from their investigation,
their roundup of witnesses, and from the hospital evidence that the drugs Sturgess and Rowley
had taken were Class A criminal and contaminated. Detective Sergeant Eirin Martin was
explicit. "We believe the two patients have fallen ill after using from a contaminated batch
of drugs, possibly heroin or crack cocaine." The evidence was so strong, Martin acknowledged
that publishing details of the crime was an "unusual step we are also asking anyone who may
have information about this batch of drugs we just need to know how these people came to fall
ill and where the drugs may have been bought from and who they may have been sold to."
No wonder the bottle of Novichok wasn't discovered during the first search of Rowley's
flat. MI6 hadn't planted it there until some time later.
Thank you and I forgot John Helmer. He is a legend on this and other matters of our times.
The Sturgess/Rowley story was pure D grade vaudeville. If there is one event that confirms
the ignorance of the englander power elite and its running dog media, it was the
Sturgess/Rowley fubar. LMAO at that one PLUS the utter BS about the 'novichok contaminated'
hotel room that the two 'Russian Lads' stayed in.
Don't laugh derisively, as people do these days, but I've always admired the New York Times
. First draft of history. Talent everywhere. Best production values. Even with its ideological
spin, it can be scrupulous about facts. You can usually extract the truth with a decoder ring.
Its outsized influence over the rest of the press makes it essential. I've relied on it for
years. Even given everything, and I mean everything.
Until now. It's just too much. Too much unreality, manipulation, propaganda, and flat out
untruths that are immediately recognizable to anyone. I can't believe they think they can get
away with this with credibility intact. I'm not speaking of the many great reporters,
technicians, editors, production specialists, and the tens of thousands who make it all
possible. I'm speaking of a very small coterie of people who stand guard over the paper's
editorial mission of the moment and enforce it on the whole company, with no dissent
allowed.
Let's get right to the offending passage. It's not from the news or opinion section but the
official editorial section and hence the official voice of the paper. The paragraph from June
2, 2020, reads
as follows.
Healing the wounds ripped open in recent days and months will not be easy. The pandemic
has made Americans fearful of their neighbors, cut them off from their communities of faith,
shut their outlets for exercise and recreation and culture and learning. Worst of all, it has
separated Americans from their own livelihoods.
Can you imagine? The pandemic is the cause!
I would otherwise feel silly to have to point this out but for the utter absurdity of the
claim. The pandemic didn't do this. It caused a temporary and mostly media-fueled panic that
distracted officials from doing what they should have done, which is protect the vulnerable and
otherwise let society function and medical workers deal with disease.
Instead, the CDC and governors around the country, at the urging of bad computer-science
models uninformed by any experience in viruses, shut down schools, churches, events,
restaurants, gyms, theaters, sports, and further instructed people to stay in their homes,
enforced sometimes even by SWAT teams. Jewish funerals were broken up by the police.
It was brutal and egregious and it threw 40 million people out of work and bankrupted
countless businesses. Nothing this terrible was attempted even during the Black Death.
Maximum
economic damage; minimum health advantages . It's not even possible to find evidence that
the lockdowns saved lives at all .
But to hear the New York Times tell the story, it was not the lockdown but the pandemic that
did this. That's a level of ideological subterfuge that is almost impossible for a sane person
to conjure up, simply because it is so obviously unbelievable.
It's lockdown denialism.
Why? From February 2020 and following, the New York Times had a story and they are
continuing to stick to it. The story is that we are all going to die from this pandemic unless
government shuts down society. It was a drum this paper beat every day.
Consider what the top virus reporter Donald J. McNeil (B.A. Rhetoric, University of
California, Berkeley) wrote on
February 28, 2020, weeks before there was any talk of shutdowns in the U.S.:
There are two ways to fight epidemics: the medieval and the modern.
The modern way is to surrender to the power of the pathogens: Acknowledge that they are
unstoppable and to try to soften the blow with 20th-century inventions, including new
vaccines, antibiotics, hospital ventilators and thermal cameras searching for people with
fevers.
The medieval way, inherited from the era of the Black Death, is brutal: Close the borders,
quarantine the ships, pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities.
For the first time in more than a century, the world has chosen to confront a new and
terrifying virus with the iron fist instead of the latex glove.
And yes, he recommends the medieval way. The article continues on to praise China's response
and Cuba's to AIDS and says that this approach is natural to Trump and should be done in the
United States. ( AIER
called him out on this alarming column on March 4, 20202.)
McNeil then went on to greater fame with a series of shocking podcasts for the NYT that put
a voice and even more panic to the failed modeling of Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College
London.
This first
appeared the day before his op-ed calling for global lockdown. The transcript
includes this:
I spend a lot of time thinking about whether I'm being too alarmist or whether I'm being
not alarmist enough. And this is alarmist, but I think right now, it's justified. This one
reminds me of what I have read about the 1918 Spanish influenza.
Reminder: 675,000 Americans died in that pandemic. There were only 103 million people living
in the U.S. at the time.
He continues:
I'm trying to bring a sense that if things don't change, a lot of us might die. If you
have 300 relatively close friends and acquaintances, six of them would die in a 2.5 percent
mortality situation.
That's an astonishing claim that seems to forecast 8.25 million Americans will die. So far
as I know, that is the most extreme claim made by anyone, four times as high as the Imperial
College model.
What should we do to prevent this?
You can't leave. You can't see your families. All the flights are canceled. All the trains
are canceled. All the highways are closed. You're going to stay in there. And you're locked
in with a deadly disease. We can do it.
So because this coronavirus "reminds" him of one he read about, he can say on the air that
four million people could soon die, and therefore life itself should be cancelled. Because a
reporter is "reminded" of something.
This is the same newspaper that in 1957 urged people to stay calm during the Asian flu and
trust medical providers – running all of one editorial on the topic. What a change! This
was an amazing podcast -- amazingly irresponsible.
McNeil was not finished yet. He was
at it again on March 12, 2020, demanding that we not just close big events and schools but
shut down everything and everyone "for months." He went back on the podcast twice more, then
started riding the media circuit, including
NPR . It was also the same. China did it right. We need to lock down or people you know, if
you are one of the lucky survivors, will die.
To say that the New York Times was invested in the scenario of "lock down or we die" is an
understatement. It was as invested in this narrative as it was in the Russia-collaboration
story or the Ukrainian-phone call impeachment, tales to which they dedicated hundreds of
stories and many dozens of reporters. The virus was the third pitch to achieve their
objective.
Once in, there was no turning back, even after it became obvious that for the vast numbers
of people this was hardly a disease at all, and that most of the deaths came from one city and
mostly from nursing homes that were forced by law to take in COVID-19 patients.
That the newspaper, a once venerable institution, has something to answer for is apparent.
But instead of accepting moral culpability for having created a panic to fuel the overthrow of
the American way of life, they turn on a dime to celebrate people who are not socially
distancing in the streets to protest police brutality.
To me, the protests on the streets were a welcome relief from the vicious lockdowns. To the
New York Times , it seems like the lockdowns never happened. Down the Orwellian memory
hole.
In this paper's consistent editorializing, nothing is the fault of the lockdowns.
Everything instead is the fault of Trump, who "tends to see only political opportunity in
public fear and anger, as in his customary manner of contributing heat rather than light to the
confrontations between protesters and authority."
True about Trump but let us remember that the McNeil's first pro-lockdown article praised
Trump as perfectly suited to bring about the lockdown, and the paper urged him to do just that,
while only three months later washing their hands of the whole thing, as if had nothing to do
with current sufferings much less the rage on the streets.
And the rapid turnaround of this paper on street protests was stunning to behold. A month
ago, people protesting lockdowns were written about as vicious disease spreaders who were
denying good science. In the blink of an eye, the protesters against police brutality (the same
police who enforced the lockdown) were transmogrified into bold embracers of First Amendment
rights who posed no threat to public health.
Not even the scary warnings about the coming "second wave" were enough to stop the paper
from throwing out all its concern over "targeted layered containment" and "social distancing"
in order to celebrate protests in the streets that they like.
And they ask themselves why people are incredulous toward mainstream media today.
The lockdowns wrecked the fundamentals of life in America. The New York Times today wants to
pretend they either didn't happen, happened only in a limited way, or were just minor public
health measures that worked beautifully to mitigate disease. And instead of having an editorial
meltdown over these absurdities, preposterous forecasts, and extreme panic mongering that
contributed to vast carnage, we seen an internal
revolt over the publishing of a Tom Cotton editorial, a dispute over politics not
facts.
The record is there: this paper went all in back in February to demand the most
authoritarian possible response to a virus about which we already knew enough back then to
observe that this was nothing like the Spanish flu of 1918. They pretended otherwise, probably
for ideological reasons, most likely.
It was not the pandemic that blew up our lives, commercial networks, and health systems. It
was the response to the virus that did that. The Times needs to learn that it cannot construct
a fake version of reality just to avoid responsibility for what they've done. Are we really
supposed to believe what they write now and in the future? This time, I hope, people will be
smart and learn to consider the source.
1) Newsweek has already proven to be significantly compromised, even more than most
MSM, as described by Caitlin Johnstone (via Consortium News):
Newsweek has long been a reliable guard dog and attack dog for the US-centralized
empire, with examples of stories that its editors did permit to go to print including
an article by an actual, current military intelligence officerexplaining why U.S.
prosecution of Julian Assange is a good thing, fawning puff pieces on the White
Helmets, and despicable smear jobs on Tulsi Gabbard.
The outlet will occasionally print oppositional-looking articles like this one by
Ian Wilkie questioning the establishment Syria narrative, but not without immediately
turning around and publishing an attack on Wilkie's piece by Eliot Higgins, a former
Atlantic Council Senior Fellow who is the cofounder of the NED-funded imperial
narrative management firm Bellingcat. Newsweek also recently published an article
attacking Tucker Carlson for publicizing the OPCW scandal, basing its criticisms on a
bogus Bellingcat article ...
In any event, the publication of the Mueller report has cleared things up for me. I get it now. The investigation was never about
Trump colluding with Russia. It was always about Trump obstructing the investigation of the collusion with Russia that the investigation
was not about. Mueller was never looking for collusion. It was not his job to look for collusion.
His job was to look for obstruction of his investigation of alleged obstruction of his investigation of non-collusion, which he
found, and detailed at length in his report, and which qualifies as an impeachable offense.
... ... ...
In other words, his investigation was launched in order to investigate the obstruction of his investigation. And, on those terms,
it was a huge success. The fact that it didn't prove "collusion" means nothing -- that's just a straw man argument that Trump and
his Russian handlers make. The goal all along was to prove that Trump obstructed an investigation of his obstruction of that investigation,
not that he was "colluding" with Putin, or any of the other paranoid nonsense that the corporate media were forced to report on,
once an investigation into his obstruction of the investigation was launched.
2016 a Russia-Trump campaign collusion conspiracy was afoot and unfolding right before our eyes, we were told, as during his roll-out
foreign
policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., then candidate Trump said [ gasp! ]:
" Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries.
Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out."
NPR and others had breathlessly
reported at the time, "Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the U.S., was sitting in the front row" [ more gasps! ].
This 'suspicious'
"coincidence or something more?" event and of course the infamous
Steele 'Dodgy Dossier' were
followed by over two more years of the following connect-the-dots mere tiny sampling of unrestrained theorizing and avalanche of
accusations...
2019, Wired: Trump Must Be
A Russian Agent... (where we were told...ahem: " It would be rather embarrassing ... if Robert Mueller were to declare that
the president isn't an agent of Russian intelligence." )
It's especially worth noting that a
July 2018 New York Times
op-ed argued that President Trump -- dubbed a "treasonous traitor" for meeting with Putin in Helsinki -- should "be directing
all resources at his disposal to punish Russia."
Fast-forward to a July 2019 NY Times Editorial Board piece entitled
"What's America's Winning Hand if Russia
Plays the China Card?" How dizzying fast all of the above has been wiped from America's collective memory! Or at least the Times
is engaged in hastily pushing it all down the memory hole Orwell-style in order to cover its own dastardly tracks which contributed
in no small measure to non-stop national Russiagate hype and hysteria, with this astounding line:
That's right, The Times' pundits have already pivoted to the new bogeyman while stating they agree with Trump
on Russian relations :
"Given its economic, military and technological trajectory, together with its authoritarian model, China, not Russia , represents
by far the greater challenge to American objectives over the long term . That means President Trump is correct to try to establish
a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China ."
It's 2019, and we've now come full circle . This is The New York Times editorial board continuing their call for Trump to establish
"sounder" ties and "cooperation" with
Russia :
"Even during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union often made progress in one facet of their relationship while
they remained in conflict over other aspects. The United States and Russia could expand their cooperation in space . They could
also continue to work closely in the Arctic And they could revive cooperation on arms control."
Could we imagine if a mere six months ago Trump himself had uttered these same words? Now the mainstream media apparently agrees
that peace is better than war with Russia.
With 'Russiagate' now effectively dead, the NY Times' new criticism appears to be that Trump-Kremlin relations are not close enough
, as Trump's "approach has been ham-handed " - the 'paper of record' now tells us.
Or imagine if Trump had called for peaceful existence with Russia almost four years ago? Oh wait...
" Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries."
-- Then candidate Trump on
April 27, 2016
A way to capture this change was thinking in terms of the traditional task of journalists to
interview or consult a variety of sources to determine was is truth or true. The shift
gradually became one of now interviewing or consulting various sources and reporting those
opinions.
Old-school journalism was like being assigned the task of finding out what "1+1 =?" and the
task was to report the answer was "1."
Now the task would be to report that "Some say it is 1, some say it is 2, some say it is
3."
Neoliberal MSM just “got it wrong,” again … exactly like was the case
with those Iraqi WMDs ;-).
So many neocons and neolibs seem so disappointed to find out that the President is not a
Russian asset that it looks they’d secretly wish be ruled by Putin :-).
But in reality there well might be a credible "Trump copllition with the foreign power". Only
with a different foreign power. Looks like Trump traded American foreign policy for Zionist
money, not Russian money. That means that "the best-Congress-that-AIPAC-money-can-buy" will never
impeach him for that.
And BTW as long as Schiff remains the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee the witch
hunt is not over. So the leash remains strong.
Notable quotes:
"... it appears that hundreds of millions of Americans have, once again, been woefully bamboozled . Weird, how this just keeps on happening. At this point, Americans have to be the most frequently woefully bamboozled people in the entire history of woeful bamboozlement. ..."
"... That's right, as I'm sure you're aware by now, it turns out President Donald Trump, a pompous former reality TV star who can barely string three sentences together without totally losing his train of thought and barking like an elephant seal, is not, in fact, a secret agent conspiring with the Russian intelligence services to destroy the fabric of Western democracy. ..."
"... Paranoid collusion-obsessives will continue to obsess about redactions and cover-ups , but the long and short of the matter is, there will be no perp walks for any of the Trumps. No treason tribunals. No televised hangings. No detachment of Secret Service agents marching Hillary into the White House. ..."
So the Mueller report is finally in, and it appears that hundreds of millions of
Americans have, once again, been woefully bamboozled . Weird, how this just keeps on happening.
At this point, Americans have to be the most frequently woefully bamboozled people in the
entire history of woeful bamboozlement.
If you didn't know better, you'd think we were all a bunch of hopelessly credulous imbeciles
that you could con into believing almost anything, or that our brains had been bombarded with
so much propaganda from the time we were born that we couldn't really even think anymore.
That's right, as I'm sure you're aware by now, it turns out President Donald Trump, a
pompous former reality TV star who can barely string three sentences together without totally
losing his train of thought and barking like an elephant seal, is not, in fact, a secret agent
conspiring with the Russian intelligence services to destroy the fabric of Western
democracy.
After two long years of bug-eyed hysteria, Inspector Mueller came up with squat. Zip. Zero.
Nichts. Nada. Or, all right, he indicted a bunch of Russians that will never see the inside of
a courtroom, and a few of Trump's professional sleazebags for lying and assorted other
sleazebag activities (so I guess that was worth the $25 million of taxpayers' money that was
spent on this circus).
Notwithstanding those historic accomplishments, the entire Mueller investigation now appears
to have been another wild goose chase (like the "search" for those non-existent WMDs that we
invaded and destabilized the Middle East and murdered hundreds of thousands of people
pretending to conduct in 2003). Paranoid collusion-obsessives will continue to obsess about
redactions and
cover-ups , but the long and short of the matter is, there will be no perp walks for any of
the Trumps. No treason tribunals. No televised hangings. No detachment of Secret Service agents
marching Hillary into the White House.
The jig, as they say, is up.
But let's try to look on the bright side, shall we?
Funding
The Center for Public Integrity has received contributions from a number of left-leaning
foundation funders including the Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network Fund, Foundation to Promote
Open Society, Knight Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation.[3] The foundation has stated that
it no longer accepts corporate gifts, but it takes money from the private foundations of many
of the richest Americans including actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
Seems to be the parent of the UK government's Integrity Initiative boondoggle
The notion of "intractable conflict" is intresting.
Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump may have exploited the mistrust many conservatives have of mainstream journalism, but this wasn't invented by Trump. Professional journalists are among the least self-aware people around. I remember being at a big national journalism conference back in the 2000s, drinking at the bar with the handful of conservatives in the room, all of us telling stories about the total blindness and bigotry we've seen. I'll tell you, if you have been a minority in a professional space, as conservatives (especially religious conservatives) are in professional journalism, you learn first-hand that there is truth in the oft-heard claim that diversity is important in newsrooms, because it has to do with the kinds of stories we tell. You also learn, though, that most people in journalism see "diversity" as going only one way. ..."
"... Researchers have a name for the kind of divide America is currently experiencing. They call this an "intractable conflict," as social psychologist Peter T. Coleman describes in his book The Five Percent , and it's very similar to the kind of wicked feuds that emerge in about one out of every 20 conflicts worldwide. In this dynamic, people's encounters with the other tribe (political, religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise) become more and more charged. And the brain behaves differently in charged interactions. It's impossible to feel curious, for example, while also feeling threatened. ..."
"... In this hypervigilant state, we feel an involuntary need to defend our side and attack the other. That anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of investigative reporting or leaked documents will change our mind, no matter what. ..."
"... Intractable conflicts feed upon themselves. The more we try to stop the conflict, the worse it gets. These feuds "seem to have a power of their own that is inexplicable and total, driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the seeds of their ruin," Coleman writes. "We often think we understand these conflicts and can choose how to react to them, that we have options. We are usually mistaken, however. ..."
"... There are people who still trust the media? I'm not trolling here. If you still trust the media, why? ..."
If people believe that the media are not playing it straight, trying to be fair, I would
direct them to
this statement on "diversity, equity, and inclusion" by the Pulitzer Center ,
which administers the Pulitzer Prizes [ UPDATE:
I was wrong; the Pulitzer Center does not administer the Pulitzer Prizes -- Columbia University
does. I apologize for the error -- RD]. This is a big deal. It represents the abdication of
professional journalism standards, and the adoption of those of a left-wing propagandist.
Excerpt:
This is what it sounds like when progressive ideologues in journalism use jargon to talk
themselves into embracing left-wing propaganda strategies as a virtue. I remind you that the
Pulitzer Prize committee this year awarded the
Pulitzer Prize in Commentary to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her role in The 1619 Projec t, the
big New York Times attempt to rewrite the history of the American founding to make it
ideologically useful in advancing progressive identity politics.
I remember around 2004, having a conversation with a fellow conservative journalist, about
how frustrating it was to deal with young conservatives who contacted us wanting advice about
going into journalism as a career. Believe me, if you are a conservative working in the
mainstream media, you dearly want to encourage as many conservatives as you can to join the
profession, to help correct its many biases. The problem with those aspiring young people, my
conservative colleague and I agreed, is that so few of them actually wanted to learn the craft
of journalism. They wanted to become journalists as a form of political activism. This is
exactly the wrong reason to go into journalism, we thought. So many of the problems of American
journalism stem from crusading reporters being more interested in advancing progressive
narratives than in telling the complicated truth about life. But at least the liberals,
whatever their faults, usually respected the craft enough to learn how to do it well.
Now? I could not in good conscience advise young conservatives to go into journalism, at
least not of the mainstream kind. I don't believe the culture of newsrooms today is reformable.
I could be wrong! I haven't worked in a newsroom for eleven years. But I read and listen to the
media all the time, and the kind of biases I routinely saw have gotten worse. Now you have the
Pulitzer Center openly abandoning fairness in favor of "expand[ing] and democratiz[ing] our
narratives" -- Orwellian prog-speak that tells you exactly the kinds of stories they are
committing to tell, and the kinds that they will not tell. Some people are more diverse than
others, you know.
There is a kind of conservative who thinks that if they just keep pointing out to newsroom
leaders the deep inherent biases in their coverage, that the institutions will reform. Does
anybody believe that now? Donald Trump may have exploited the mistrust many conservatives
have of mainstream journalism, but this wasn't invented by Trump. Professional journalists are
among the least self-aware people around. I remember being at a big national journalism
conference back in the 2000s, drinking at the bar with the handful of conservatives in the
room, all of us telling stories about the total blindness and bigotry we've seen. I'll tell
you, if you have been a minority in a professional space, as conservatives (especially
religious conservatives) are in professional journalism, you learn first-hand that there is
truth in the oft-heard claim that diversity is important in newsrooms, because it has to do
with the kinds of stories we tell. You also learn, though, that most people in journalism see
"diversity" as going only one way.
Here's a 2019 piece I discovered recently by Amanda Ripley, about how journalism can tell
stories better. You might think it's a thumb-sucker of a piece, but it's actually good,
even for non-journalists. She writes about how the standard model of conflict-driven journalism
actually does not offer an accurate picture of society's divisions. Ripley ended up
interviewing people who are involved in professional conflict-resolution, and tries to apply
the lessons she learns to the journalism craft. Excerpts:
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I've been a journalist for over 20 years, writing books
and articles for Time, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal and all
kinds of places , and I did not know these lessons. After spending more than 50 hours
in training for various forms of dispute resolution, I realized that I've overestimated my
ability to quickly understand what drives people to do what they do. I have overvalued
reasoning in myself and others and undervalued pride, fear and the need to belong. I've been
operating like an economist, in other words -- an economist from the 1960s.
For decades, economists assumed that human beings were reasonable actors, operating in a
rational world. When people made mistakes in free markets, rational behavior would, it was
assumed, generally prevail. Then, in the 1970s, psychologists like Daniel Kahneman began to
challenge those assumptions. Their experiments showed that humans are subject to all manner
of biases and illusions.
More:
Researchers have a name for the kind of divide America is currently experiencing. They
call this an "intractable conflict," as social psychologist Peter T. Coleman describes in his
book The Five Percent , and it's very similar to the kind of wicked feuds that emerge
in about one out of every 20 conflicts worldwide. In this dynamic, people's encounters with
the other tribe (political, religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise) become more and more
charged. And the brain behaves differently in charged interactions. It's impossible to feel
curious, for example, while also feeling threatened.
In this hypervigilant state, we feel an involuntary need to defend our side and attack
the other. That anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of
investigative reporting or leaked documents will change our mind, no matter what.
Intractable conflicts feed upon themselves. The more we try to stop the conflict, the
worse it gets. These feuds "seem to have a power of their own that is inexplicable and total,
driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the
seeds of their ruin," Coleman writes. "We often think we understand these conflicts and can
choose how to react to them, that we have options. We are usually mistaken, however.
"
Once we get drawn in, the conflict takes control. Complexity collapses, and the
us-versus-them narrative sucks the oxygen from the room. "Over time, people grow increasingly
certain of the obvious rightness of their views and increasingly baffled by what seems like
unreasonable, malicious, extreme or crazy beliefs and actions of others," according to
training literature from Resetting the Table , an organization that
helps people talk across profound differences in the Middle East and the U.S.
Ripley concludes:
The lesson for journalists (or anyone) working amidst intractable conflict: complicate the
narrative. First, complexity leads to a fuller, more accurate story. Secondly, it boosts the
odds that your work will matter -- particularly if it is about a polarizing issue. When
people encounter complexity, they become more curious and less closed off to new information.
They listen, in other words.
There are many ways to complicate the narrative, as described in detail under the six
strategies below. But the main idea is to feature nuance, contradiction and ambiguity
wherever you can find it. This does not mean calling advocates for both sides and quoting
both; that is simplicity, and it usually backfires in the midst of conflict. "Just providing
the other side will only move people further away," Coleman says. Nor does it mean creating a
moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and their opponents. That is just simplicity in a cheap
suit. Complicating the narrative means finding and including the details that don't fit the
narrative -- on purpose.
The idea is to revive complexity in a time of false simplicity. "The problem with
stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete," novelist Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie says in her mesmerizing TED Talk "A Single Story." "[I]t's impossible to engage
properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and
that person."
But there is also a very practical reason Rogan can say whatever he thinks: He is an
individual and not an organization. Eric Weinstein ,
another podcaster and a friend of Rogan, told me, "It's the same reason that a contractor can
wear a MAGA hat on a job and an employee inside Facebook headquarters cannot: There is no HR
department at 'The Joe Rogan Experience'."
"When you have something that can't get canceled, you can be free," said Rogan.
The ability to be free of censorship is perhaps the thing Rogan prizes most -- and he's
very concerned about censorship, especially inside the tech companies that control the most
powerful forms of mass communication the world has ever seen.
I'm not a podcast listener, except when I'm driving (very little of that in the past three
months), but the few times I've listened to Rogan makes it easy to get why he's got such a
massive audience. He brings real curiosity to his interviews with guests. You never really know
what he's going to ask, but you know that for all his many quirks (e.g., he's a pothead), Rogan
is a real person who has genuine curiosity in the people to whom he speaks. Weiss writes:
His whole ethos -- curious; not particularly ideological; biased toward things that work;
baffled by the state of both parties -- is where so many Americans are right now. And that's
his power. He's a mirror, when so many publications are broken glass, capable of reflecting
only a shard.
Amen to that. Joe Rogan is one of the most popular and influential media figures in America,
but he could never be hired at an American newspaper. Seriously, the little Robespierres in the
cubicles would raise hell, and the lily-livered managers (like college presidents) would
capitulate. Alas for journalism. Rogan is interesting because he's interested in the world as
he finds it, not as a screen onto which to project his ideological convictions.
There was a time when American journalism felt like that. It's mostly why I became
interested in doing it for a living. If a young person was genuinely interested in journalism
for the right reasons, the ascent of Joe Rogan offers hope. We don't need every journalist to
be Joe Rogan. We need people who have been trained in the craft of investigative reporting, for
example, and professional standards. But we need investigative reporters, and features writers,
and national staffers, and everyone else in a standard newsroom, who can be more like Joe
Rogan, approaching the world with curiosity, not an agenda, a chip on their shoulder, and
fraudulent rationalizations for why the propagandistic approach they take to their work is
actually morally and professionally correct. These are educated liberals talking to educated
urban liberals about Things Educated Urban Liberals Believe. Who cares?
The Pulitzer Center is not the future of journalism. Thank God. The pothead podcaster's
success probably is. That's good news. Look:
In my 7 years & 400,000 miles spent in lower income neighborhoods, talking to
countless people, nobody ever mentioned the NYTimes, WP, or CNN, beyond a few unflattering
remarks. Everyone mentioned Radio, YouTube, & Instagram personalities. And Joe Rogan
https://t.co/RmwsjksfmK
I'm glad you included a Chris Arnade tweet. Arnade's book DIGNITY is great for exactly this
reason: he doesn't go in with an Agenda or a Story in mind -- he just wants to talk to
people, understand a bit about their lives, and record what they have to say and a little
bit of their story.
Until reading Arnade's book, I didn't realize how much virtually all mainstream media
reporting on downtrodden Americans is Agenda-driven. A professional reporter goes in
thinking: What's the Problem here, and what's the Solution? What's the Narrative? (e.g.
"opioids," "homelessness," "federal programs") and they craft their reporting around the
Narrative. But it seems like Arnade's not necessarily committed to a particular Agenda,
other than learning a little bit about people and making a little bit of a connection.
Rogan has an uncanny ability to get his guests talk about really complex subjects in a
clear way. Part of it is no time limit, he has the freedom to allow an answer to his
question to run for as long as needed.
This also belies the “no attention span” narrative about (especially) young
people. I get my clues about specific Rogan episodes from the MMA crowd, skewing young for
obvious reasons, and they have no problem listening to long stretches of complex
information about subjects that interest them. There was an episode when Rogan interviewed
Pavel Tsatsouline about intricacies of endurance training, for example. Riveting
conversation using words like “mitochondria” and such. Credit to Pavel of
course, but Rogan was the one steering the conversation.
Turns out maybe there’s a correlation between “reduced attention span”
and “crappy talking points-regurgitating journalism devoid of original thinking and
basic competency”.
You are sort of right, but Donald Trump has been a huge financial benefit to the mainstream
news business, which gives them a huge financial incentive as well as views/clicks
incentive to continue doing what they are doing. There is certainly a huge liberal bias in
the MSN, but that is not the reason they suck so bad at their job. They could pursue the
truth and nuance while still having a leftward bias (they also have a pro business and pro
war bias), but they don't. Instead they provide drama, outrage, and fear mongering with a
liberal bias. This has been going on for my entire life. In the 90s as a teenager I was
appalled by the vapidity and over dramatization I saw every day on the nightly news. It
hasn't gotten better. There is still good journalism going on, sometimes with a liberal
bias and sometimes with a conservative bias, but it is not generating the views and clicks
that news about the "End of Civilization!" does. Joe Rogan can do whatever he wants because
he already has a built in audience. Journalists that actually worry about their jobs and
their incomes have to make sure they have enough twitter followers and that they are
generating the clicks/views they need.
Donald Trump and the Mainstream Media have become two forms of the same memetic parasite,
the
Toxoplasma of Rage .
To wit:
Toxoplasma is a neat little parasite that is implicated in a couple of human diseases
including schizophrenia. Its life cycle goes like this: it starts in a cat. The cat poops
it out. The poop and the toxoplasma get in the water supply, where they are consumed by
some other animal, often a rat. The toxoplasma morphs into a rat-compatible form and
starts reproducing. Once it has strength in numbers, it hijacks the rat’s brain,
convincing the rat to hang out conspicuously in areas where cats can eat it. After a cat
eats the rat, the toxoplasma morphs back into its cat compatible form and reproduces some
more. Finally, it gets pooped back out by the cat, completing the cycle.
What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?
Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan
or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there
and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes
Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an
Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into
killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host
it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans
into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the
form of bombs.
From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From
the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and
butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a
replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.
I thought the point was to move away from simplistic models. You've followed the rejected
model perfectly, a simplistic (and doubtful) model which blames the out-group while
granting heroic satus to the in-group.
This history of jihad shows that any excuse will do. Including no excuse. The bombs we drop
in retaliation may help, they may not, but either way, that's a short-term effect.
Long-term, they don't need that excuse. Heck, they still list the loss of Andalusia as a
grievance against the West.
Because they are pretty damn good at what they do, every thing you know about China,
Korea, Japan, Mexico, Europe, Africa and the rest of the world, you learned from the media.
Fox, MSNBC & CNN are but a tiny fraction of the media, they and local news are also the
media outlets who spend most of their time dumbing things down for their US audience and
producing programming for the least amount of money possible. (BTW CNN International does a
far better job than CNN).
The NYT, WSJ, BBC, CBC, WP, NPR and various other news outlets do a pretty good job of
letting you know what the world outside your little corner of the world looks like. If you
want to travel to country you've never visited before you can go to your local library and
get country X for dummies and you'll know the basics (currency, language, historic
monuments, cities to visit, local food specialties,etc...)
If you know what the GDP per capita of Japan or China is, thank the media. If you know
approximately how many people have died from the corona virus, thank the media. If you know
how many Iraqis died during our last invasion of Iraq, thank the media.
Centrist libs in my experience trust the media, except when it criticizes centrist liberal
politicians. I am not joking.
The reason is that it reflects their worldview. The NYT, for instance, is pretty clearly
written for upper middle class moderate liberals. Rod will choke at the “
moderate”, but I am not talking about sexual or racial politics. You can be as woke
as you want on that and be opposed to single payer health care.
If you express skepticism about the media with centrist libs, they say you are like
Trump or that it is an example of horseshoe theory, where the far right and far left are
the same. You are showing that you are irrational.
Speaking from experience.
Generally agree, there's a lot of good stuff to chew on here.
- It's interesting to see a decline in trust "on both sides" with "our favorite media"
(declining trust among Democrats in the New York Times and MSNBC, declining trust among
Republicans in Fox News and WSJ). It would be interesting to hear from "both sides" why
they trust "their side media" less. (i.e., I'm not interested in hearing from Republicans
why trust in the NYT is declining, we already know what they think, I'm interested in
hearing from Democrats why they think trust in NYT is declining among Democrats, and if
their reason is the same as the reason that Republicans give, or something else - like do
Democrats say that the NYT is too liberal because of things like the 1619 Project, or not
liberal enough because they haven't done enough other things like the 1619 Project?)
- I think Joe Rogan does point to a future business model in an era of declining trust in
institutions - on many fronts, super-influencers are going to be competing with
institution-backed credentialed experts and professionals. As long and the influencers can
maintain their credibility and following, coupled with a feasible business model and low
barriers to entry (it will probably be easier to break into journalism as an amateur than,
say, becoming an amateur brain surgeon). But there are many possibilities besides
journalism.
- I think the "curiosity" makes a great journalist. As a long-term reader of this blog,
I've actually been wondering if you've ever considered interviewing a Woke activist or
LGBTQ activist out of a curiosity of what motivates such a person, what do they say they
believe and want, and to see if you can find anything that complicates your narrative of
"Woke/LGBT Totalitarianism"? I know you quote the words and deeds of such activists all the
time, but have you recently (or ever) had an hour-long interview with one of these people
with the intent of finding non-intuitive things that add complexity to the story (per
Ripley)? I would find that approach very interesting (out of my own curiosity, of course)
do Democrats say that the NYT is too liberal because of things like the 1619 Project, or
not liberal enough because they haven't done enough other things like the 1619
Project?)
The problem is not that the 1619 Project is too liberal, it's that the project is too
dishonest. Everyone has a limit for what level of partisan hackery they can put up with
even if they are teammates.
As far as the print media goes, money plays a big role in its decline. Thirty years
in-depth analyses and lengthy detailed features could be found in any big city newspaper.
Today, there's none of that-- because the newspapers can't afford it. I once could spend a
pleasant Sunday afternoon with the local Sunday edition, and then with the New York Times.
It takes me about twenty minutes max to go through the Sunday paper now-- maybe ten more if
I count the comics and the coupons. And I haven't bought a copy of the NYT in many years.
With Democrats and the NYT, you will find very different reasons.
People on the far left never trusted the NYT in the first place. The centrist libs
don’t like it because they think the NYT is or was too quick to write critical
stories about Clinton or other Democrats — I have seen that complaint.
"I'm interested in hearing from Democrats why they think trust in NYT is declining among
Democrats, and if their reason is the same as the reason that Republicans give, or
something else - like do Democrats say that the NYT is too liberal because of things like
the 1619 Project, or not liberal enough because they haven't done enough other things like
the1619 Project?)"
I'm a long-time subscriber to the Times, and one of the things I did immediately after
Trump's inauguration was subscribe to the Wall Street Journal for six months. I wanted to
have a fuller picture of what was going on than the one I'd get from reading the Times
alone. More recently, I've found myself skimming over the NYT op-eds, not bothering to
click the headlines (with one or two exceptions, Ross Douhat being one of them, Nicholas
Kristof being another). I despise Trump and think he's unfit for office, but is it really
possible that Trump has never implemented one good policy as president? Has his presidency
been a total and unmitigated disaster from Day One? My heart and the Times say yes, but the
facts and some of my conservative friends say no, not entirely. (Until COVID--but that's
another story.) So I read the Times, but I already know the slant nearly every story and
op-ed will take. (And I'm no longer surprised when the Times publishes an editorial about
the military and white supremacy over the Memorial Day weekend.)
I was troubled by the 1619 Project because it struck me as deeply flawed in its
premises, and I say this as someone who believes that America has yet to fully reckon with
its legacy of slavery and that without slave labor the U.S. would have never become the
economic force that it's historically been. I say this--brace yourselves--as someone who
would like to see reparations made (I just have no idea how it can be done). But when
Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded the Pulitzer, I felt my blood pressure go up a little.
Because that Pulitzer settled it and certified it--the 1619 Project is good history. It
will be taught in schools. And that makes me and my bleeding little heart feel kind of
crazy.
My point--and I do have one--is, no, I don't trust the Times as much as I used to
because I think it has an agenda beyond reporting the news with as little bias as possible.
I find some comfort in knowing that I'm not the only Democrat who feels that way.
I understand the Republican decline in trust in the media, but the Democratic decline (even
though modest) is striking. It makes me wonder what factors are driving it?
I mean, have you watched the news? Have they done anything this century to make you think
they are not just hysterical buffoons? I say this as someone with a strong leftwing bias.
A lot of us who identify with the Democratic Party are socialists who do so out of
convenience (so we can vote for Democratic Socialist candidates and promote our views
within the party.).
To a lot of us, the mainstream liberal media is a fundamentally hostile institution. A
lot of this is because it is dedicated towards preserving the establishment and established
norms we need to break down. Their relentless promotion of the foreign policy establishment
is a good example of this.
Another problem is the capitalist basis of these publications, meaning the news is often
aggressively selling either a product, or the ideology of capitalism itself through its
coverage, working to separate the working classes through identity politics, and burying
anything that might lead to looking too closely at class based issues in America.
Just as the liberal news media isn’t publishing their articles with you
conservatives in mind as their audience, is socialists are very much not their audience
either.
The press used to be liberal, as in, plain old liberals. But today, they are leftists, and
leftists and liberals used to be very different categories of politics. You could talk to
liberals ...liberals were just, "Hey, let's use government to make the world a better
place."
And the conservatives would say, "OK, but we really need to watch out that we don't make
things worse despite good intentions." Liberals could be arrogant, but not even in the same
class as leftists today. Liberals did still some real damage (Vietnam, housing projects,
affirmative action, 70s crime), but there was also some good (environmentalism, OSHA, labor
standards).
You can't talk to leftists. To a leftist, plain old liberalism was considered
reactionary. They didn't distinguish much between Pat Moynihan and Ayn Rand.
So the Pulitzer Center's statement of principles is pure critical theory, that is, wacko
leftism.
And it's a shame ... because leftists despite their great passion for justice literally
have no idea what they are doing, except damage in every possible way, and in no way
pursuing actual justice. There is no end game except destruction of this polity and its
replacement by something with far less freedom.
This is just painfully confused. Conservatives who talk about the different factions on the
left make about as much sense as the typical liberal talking about different factions on
the right.
If you followed the fights online between Sanders supporters ( leftists by any rational
definition) and supporters of other Democrats, you would see more of the extreme wokeness
on the mainstream Democratic side being used to demonize the Sanders movement for caring
about class. Rogan endorsed Sanders— which side would you expect the “
woke” element to have been on there? Sanders went to a conservative religious college
and spoke ( I forgot which one).
Mainstream liberals are often the ones most ferocious in their denunciation of any Trump
voter— leftists are more likely to think that some working class Trump voters could
be won over and might have legitimate grievances.
My media consumption habits have changed quite a bit. Never watch "news" anymore, except
the local weather occasionally. I check in with Rogan on occasion because he has
interesting guests, and often asks the kinds of questions I've been thinking about. But
mostly I'm watching longer form podcasts, or reading history. I'm on the final book of the
Teddy Roosevelt trilogy, and about to start Tom Holland's "Dominion." Anyway, Rod, I think
you should give the bald look a go. Maybe coincide the change with the promo of your new
book? Huh, whaddya think?
With the rise of Trump, the legacy media stopped even trying to pretend to be objective.
That is not to say that certain of Trump's obsessions are justified. Moreover, the
obvious bias merely gives Trump ammunition, even as it underscores the decline of the
legacy media into impotence.
MSM will double down on their hysterical lying propaganda because that's all these
Neo-Marxist useful idiots know how to do. Their half-dozen fat cat overlords that control
90% of the news flow in the US will be just fine, though, in their collusion with the DNC.
It's all of a piece, you know. A pox on them, I say.
The last three pieces that you have posted are truly a home run! You are really becoming
a sage. Thank you for all three of them.
When I read the piece on Trump's Tweets I remember that I was thinking the other day on
your interest on him originally, was for the goal of appointing conservative Judges on the
SCOTUS and ultimately how misguided and how ultimately undemocratic this approach is.
The undemocratic quibble comes from the numbers' game we end up being caught on.
Presently the US is categorized as a Constitutional Representative Republic, with a certain
sandbox where rules are set (very efficiently set up by FPTP and especially by the
electoral college where un-elected people vote on the US CEO) and decisions are made based
on how educated and informed citizens cast their votes. Any educated and informed and
intelligent person in this world knows in her/his bones that presently the US is an
Oligarchic run Empire, that has been excoriated and exposed many a times quite convincingly
here at TAC. Several of the present postings by other TAC staff indicate this.
As such, the fool's game of putting conservative judges on SCOTUS will not further your
interests. Same as Pulitzer Prize's mandate, the SCOTUS mandate is to maintain deep
divisions within the American Electorate such that matters than truly are important are
never, ever even considered, never mind addressed.
Thus, you are misguided to rely on SCOTUS for helping and use a legalistic approach on
people. We all know that the Law can be an ass and that one cannot legislate morals.
But there is no replacement for pieces like the last three pieces that you have posted,
very thoughtful but introspective in a sense, because you also put yourself under scrutiny
(Gorgias: know thyself), but there is also a genuine honesty and conviction on the actual
values you are defending. You continue on this righteous path, and at the end of your line
we'll be able to get a final and true measure of your success. The measure of success will
be in how many people at large you convinced to embrace your values (hope that pro-choice
will still be more popular). The more the merrier and full of praise the eulogies for you
should be. But that will still be only half the battle if your beloved country will remain
a Corrupt Demagogic Oligarchic Republic (
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/on... where you have One Dollar, One Vote.
Something is not right here. We are told that Joe Rogan has carved out a pretty big niche
for himself because there's no Human Resources department involved, because he is not
utterly controlled and managed by our society and its shibboleth enforcers. And yet we are
pointed towards this article about better journalism that recommends this:
Once we get drawn in, the conflict takes control. Complexity collapses, and the
us-versus-them narrative sucks the oxygen from the room. “Over time, people grow
increasingly certain of the obvious rightness of their views and increasingly baffled by
what seems like unreasonable, malicious, extreme or crazy beliefs and actions of
others,” according to training literature from Resetting the Table, an
organization that helps people talk across profound differences in the Middle East and the
U.S.
Look at that! "Training literature" (just LOL at the use of the word "literature" here,
a dead giveaway that one is dealing with soulless managerial technocrats when this word is
used for workplace and social hygiene manuals) produced by an "organization" that does
conflict resolution. The solution to journalism's problem is apparently more Human
Resources -- we don't have enough!
This is something like the mentality that says we'll have a real class revolution by
reading and hiring socialist Ivy League graduates whose big-city rent is subsidized by
Mommy and Daddy who are corporate lawyers or high-ups at Boeing. Or like the mentality that
if the Republicans just appoint one more Harvard or Yale Law grad with an impeccable ruling
class bio to the Supreme Court, the sacred-to-the-regime rights to abortion and gay
marriage will be overturned. The very structure of the "solution" involves empowering the
people who are the most dedicated to or even structurally created (in a social sense, so to
speak) by the problem.
The idea is to revive complexity in a time of false simplicity. “The problem
with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete,” novelist
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her mesmerizing TED Talk “A Single Story.”
“[I]t’s impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging
with all of the stories of that place and that person.”
This strikes me as banal mush, utterly predictable, something I've heard a million times
before. We are all Unique. We have so many Stories. It seems to me the issue is not "we're
not telling enough stories, we're not including enough details" but "are the
stories/details any good?" The idea that we need more detail, we need Complexity -- sounds
like an academic, and we all know academics are AWFUL storytellers! Simplicity Bad,
Complexity Good -- no, this isn't quite right, or at least not enough. It's the opposite of
being discerning, or discriminating. Just as the religion of the era is Non-Discrimination,
so do we see this idea that we "need to engage with all of the stories of that place and
that person," we supposedly need More Voices, we need this kind of leveling mush, this sort
of Primordial Ooze. It is a sort of paradox that Camille Paglia is very, very good on --
when you add more and more "complexity" you might just end up with a bland, dull, empty,
shapeless mass of nothing, like much academese. Whereas art is about Drawing the Line,
sculpture is about cutting away everything that isn't the subject. Perhaps Rogan is just
good at cutting through the b.s. to reveal something actually interesting about the people
he interviews?
I don't listen to podcasts, and it's just not the medium for me, but it sounds like
Rogan is somebody who won (at least for now?) the endless battle with the managers and the
Human Resources types, somebody who did it "his way." A very few people do, most of course
don't. I suppose this is probably a perpetual problem/conflict that never goes away,
although I think some periods must be better and some worse. Deindustrialization,
decadence, affluenza, scientism, globalization, nepotism, and feminism--no doubt others
things, too!-- have probably all helped to make the Current Era a particularly over-managed
and conformist period (with corresponding irritated reactions to that managerialism).
And will the end result be an even smaller set of bubbles within which people will stay
lest they hear/see something which goes against their bias? Will we descend to a Hobbsean
"war of all against all"? Because that is what happens when every faction has a complete
world of their own, complete with their own facts, shibboleths, and genealogies.
Perhaps the reason we don't find any alien civilizations broadcasting from Out There is
because their societies already discovered the Internet and Social Media and dissolved into
the thing we seem to be headed toward -- maggots disputing possession of a corpse.
Because distrust of the institutions which hold society together, and disdain for
continuity and stability will assuredly "inherit the wind".
These mantras of progressivism have no comfortable home in our institutions — yet,
settled in is the infection of the latter by the former — which thus acts like the
most aggressive form of an incurable cancer. An aerial view of this forest might better
encapsulate the horror of its individual trees alight, together.
The major legacy papers and networks simply no longer report, and people know it. They're
advocates for one side, plain and simple. They report the things that support their
previously held convictions. People see this and recognize it, and are simply not as dumb
as editors think. I used up open up a dozen newspapers and magazines a day, and I literally
have not looked at Washington Post, NYT, Atlantic, NPR, CNN, etc. in years now unless
someone sends me something. I work in and around politics, so I compare headlines with what
actually is going on, and have been a media skeptic for some time, but it's very telling to
me when my wife, who doesn't really follow any of this stuff tells me the other day, "I
simply don't believe anything I read in these headlines any more." And how could you?
Everything is about how they can make Trump look bad. They are truly obsessed. They write
headlines about things that are genuinely debatable, if now unknowable, as if they're fact.
And they all repeat the same bogus statistics and examples. I think a lot of these
publications are just irreparably broken, and maybe even dead and just don't know it yet.
As I pointed out in my 29 above about the front page noting the names and occupations of
1,000 of the 100,000 that have needlessly died due to Trump's Treasonous Do Nothing COVID-19
Policy, today
RT reports about a Memorial Day op/ed that disses the Military: "Why Does the U.S.
Military Celebrate White Supremacy?"
That made the Pentagon's Spin Master angry, puff out his chest to fume and moan.
There's not much to the RT report, but I can't recall any similar display done
before by the NY Times . IMO, something's happened within the Top Office and it seems
to be aimed at Trump.
Of course, I'd never have known about any such happening if it hadn't been for the
reporting by RT & Global Times .
"... Enter the Buk system, with the 9K37 SA-11 missile. It's got the range, it's got the altitude, the Russians have it in active service. Oooo problem. It's got the range, but only if it was fired from inside Ukraine. ..."
"... Anyway, back to the Buk system. And not a moment before time, either – I just re-read that sanctimonious stab above, again; " having armed the militants without due thought as to the consequences " What, exactly, is the ridiculous nature of the accusation being presented here? That the Russians gave an anti-aircraft system to the 'militants' without considering they might use it to shoot down an aircraft? How did they not see that coming? The Ukrainian Army shot down a civilian airliner in October of 2001 , and lied about it for as long as it could – interestingly, it took place during joint Ukrainian-Russian air defense exercises on the Crimean peninsula, and Russia tried hard to avoid assigning blame to Ukraine, while at least one Israeli television station claimed the Russians had shot down their own aircraft. This disaster and subsequent lying did not prevent the USA from giving the Javelin missile to Ukraine – did it not occur to them that they might use it to shoot tanks? No due thought to the consequences, obviously. ..."
"... The Buk air-defense system normally consists of at least 4 TELAR launchers , each with 4 missiles on the launch rails, a self-propelled acquisition radar designated by NATO nomenclature as Snow Drift (the radar on the nose of the TELAR unit itself is designated Fire Dome), and a self-propelled command post, for a minimum of 6 vehicles. Also usually part of the system is a mobile crane, to reload the launchers. If you were going to supply an air-defense system to militant rebels, why wouldn't you give them the whole system? In a pinch, you might be able to get away without the command post vehicle, although it is the station that collates all the input from the sensors and makes the decision to assign targets for acquisition, tracking and engagement. If you didn't give them the crane vehicle, and perhaps a logistics truck with some reloads, they would be limited to the missiles that came already mounted – once those were fired, they'd have to abandon the system, because they couldn't reload it. Seems a little wasteful, don't you think? ..."
"... I'm going a little further with my inexpert opinion, to say that the Buk system was selected as the 'murder weapon', because it provides a limited autonomous capability. To be clear, the Fire Dome radar on the nose of the TELAR does have a limited search capability, and once the radar is locked on to a target, the TELAR vehicle is completely autonomous. The purpose of the surveillance radar is to detect the target from far beyond the Fire Dome's range, assign it to a TELAR and thereby direct it to the elevation and bearing of the target so that the TELAR's radar knows exactly where to look, and continue to update its position until the TELAR to which it was assigned has locked on to the target. ..."
"... The Fire Dome radar mounted on the TELAR can search a 120-degree sector in 4 seconds, at an elevation of 6 to 7 degrees. Its search function is maximized for defense against ground attack aircraft, and a single launcher is not looking at 240 degrees of potential air threat axis during each sweep. It is not looking high enough to see an airliner at 30,000 ft+. More importantly for a system which was not designed to shoot down helpless airliners, it leaves two-thirds of a circle unobserved all the time it is searching for a target. And the Russians provided this to the 'militants' for air defense? They should be shot. ..."
"... There is no telling what kind of ordnance might be found in the wreckage itself, as the Ukrainian Army continued to shell the site for days after the crash; doubtless various artillery shells could be found at the crash site, as well, but it would be quite a leap of faith to suggest a Boeing 777 was shot down by artillery. What you would not find is pieces of the SAM that shot it down. ..."
"... Nor is that by any means all. The Dutch investigation which concluded with the preliminary report implied that nothing of any investigative value was found on the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) or the Flight Data Recorder (FDR). Nothing to indicate what might have happened to the aircraft – just that it was flying along, and suddenly it wasn't. How likely is that? No transcript was provided, and I guess that would be expected if there was no information at all. Funny how often that happens with Malaysian airliners; they really need to look at their quality control. Oh; except they don't build the aircraft. Boeing does. I could see there not being any information after the plane began to break up, because both the CVR and the FDR are in the tail , and that broke off before the fuselage hit. But the microphones are in the ceiling of the cockpit and in the microphone and earpiece of the pilots' headsets, which they wear at all times while in flight. The last audio claimed to have been recorded was a course alteration sent by Ukrainian ATC. ..."
"... According to the Malaysian government, there was an early plan by NATO for a military operation involving some 9000 troops to 'secure the crash site', which was forestalled by a covert Malaysian operation which recovered the 'black boxes' and blocked the plan. I have to say that given the many, many other unorthodox and bizarre happenings in the conduct of what was supposed to be a transparent and impartial international investigation, it's getting so nothing much is unbelievable. The Malaysian Prime Minister went on record as believing that the western powers had already concluded that Russia was responsible, and were mostly just going through the motions of investigating. ..."
"... The telephone recordings presented by the SBU as demonstrating Russian culpability were analyzed by OG IT Forensic Services, a Malaysian firm specializing in forensic analysis of audio, video and digital materials for court proceedings, which concluded the recordings were cut, edited and fabricated . Yet they are relied upon as important evidence of guilt by the Dutch and the JIT. ..."
>Uncle Volodya says, "We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else,
whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN."
"The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.
In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans
until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan."
– Adolf Hitler
We're going to do something just a bit different today; the event I want to talk about is current – in the future, actually –
but the reference which is the subject of the discussion is almost a year old. and the event it discusses is coming up to its sixth
anniversary. The past event was the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine, the future event is the trial in
absentia of persons accused by the west of having perpetrated that disaster, and the reference is this piece, by Mark Galeotti,
for the Moscow Times:
"Russia's Roadmap
Out of the MH17 Crisis" .
You all know Mr. Galeotti, I'm sure. Here's his bio, for Amazon:
"Professor Mark Galeotti is a senior researcher at UMV, the Institute of International Relations Prague, and coordinator of
its Centre for European Security. Formerly, he was Professor of Global Affairs at New York University and head of History at Keele
University. Educated at Cambridge University and the LSE, he is a specialist in modern Russian politics and security and transnational
organized crime. And he writes other things for fun, too "
Yes, yes, he certainly does, as you will see. But this bio is extremely modest, albeit he most likely wrote it himself. Mr. Galeotti
also authored an excellent blog, In Moscow's Shadows , which was once a go-to reference for crime and legal issues in Russia,
a subject in which he seems very well-informed. The blog is still active, although he seems mostly to use it now to advertise podcasts
and sell books. That's understandable – it's evident from the blur of titles appended to his name that he's a very busy man. Always
has been, really; either as a student or an educator. He also speaks with confidence on the details of military affairs and equipment
despite never having been in the military or studied engineering; his education has pretty much all been in history, law or political
science.
I know what you will say – many of the greatest reference works on pivotal battles, overall military campaigns and affairs were
written by those who had no personal military experience themselves. Mr. Galeotti studied under Dominic Lieven, whose
"Russia Against Napoleon"
was perhaps the greatest work of military history, rich with detail and insight, that I have ever read. It won him the Wolfson
prize for History for 2010, a well-deserved honour. Yet so far as I could make out, Mr. Lieven never served a day in uniform, and
if you handed him an AK-47 and said "Here; field-strip this", your likely response would be a blank look. He most certainly was not
a witness to the subject military campaign. No; his epic work on Napoleon's invasion of Russia was informed by research, reading
the accounts of others who were there at the time, poring over reams of old documents and matching references to get the best picture
we have been afforded to date of Napoleon's ignominious defeat through a combination of imperial overreach, a poor grasp of logistics
and, most of all, resistance by an adversary who refused to be drawn into playing to Napoleon's strength – the decisive, crushing
battle in which the enemy could not retreat, and in which Napoleon would commit all the reserves and crush his enemy to dust.
So it is perfectly possible for an inquisitive mind with no military experience to put together an excellent reference on military
happenings which already took place, even if the owner of that mind was not present for the actual event. Given human nature and
the capabilities afforded by modern military equipment, it is even possible to forecast future military events with a fair degree
of accuracy, going merely by political ambitions and enabling factors, without any personal military experience. After all, the decision-makers
who give the orders that send their military forces into battle are often not military men themselves.
Returning for a moment to Mr. Galeotti, it is quite believable that an author with no military background could compose such works
as "Armies of the Russian-Ukrainian War" , although there is no serious evidence that Russia is a part of such a conflict
in any real military strength. You could write such a book entirely from media references and documentation, which in this case would
come almost entirely from the side which claims it is under constant attack by the other – Ukraine. Likewise "Kulikovo 1380;
the Battle that Made Russia" . None of us were around in 1380, so we all have to go by historical references, and whoever collects
them all into a book first is likely to be regarded as an expert.
No, it's more when we get into how stuff works that I have an issue with it. Like " Spetsnaz: Russia's Special Forces
". Or " The Modern Russian Army ". I'm kind of skeptical about how someone could claim to know the actual internal workings
of either organization simply from reading about them in popular references, considering that more than half the material on Russia
written in English in western references is rubbish heavily influenced by politics and policy. We would not have to look very far
to find examples in which ridiculous overconfidence by one side that it had the other side's number resulted in a horrible surprise.
In fact, we would not have to look very far to find an example of this particular author confidently averring to know something inside-out,
only to find that version
of reality could not be sustained . And I would no more turn to a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute of International
Relations Prague for expert analysis of the "Combat Vehicles of Russia's Special Forces" than I would ask a house painter
to cut my hair. Unless I see some recollections of a college-age Galeotti tinkering with drivetrains and differentials until the
sun went down from a pure love of mechanics, I am going to go ahead and assume that he knows what the vast majority of us knows about
military vehicles – he could pick one out of a lineup which included a melon, a goat and an Armored Personnel Carrier, and if it
had a flat tire he could probably fix it given time and the essential equipment.
Just before we move on, the future event: the MH-17 'trial' has been
postponed
until June 8th , to give defense attorneys more time to prepare after the amazingly fortuitous capture of a 'key witness' in
Eastern Ukraine. I'm not going to elaborate here on what a kicking-the-can-down-the-road crock this is; we'll pick that up later.
The whole MH-17 'investigation' has been such a ridiculous exercise in funneling the pursuit to a single inescapable conclusion –
that Russia shot it down – irrespective of how many points have to be bent to fit the curve that no matter how it comes out, it will
stand as perhaps the greatest example of absurd western self-justification ever recorded.
There are a couple of ways of solving a mystery crime. One is to collect evidence, and follow where it takes you. Another is to
decide who you want to have been responsible, and then construct a sequence of events in which they might have done it. To do that,
especially in this case, we will have to throw out a few assumptions, such as all that stuff about means, motive and opportunity.
In the absence of a believable scenario, that is. Let's look at what we have, and what we need, and see how we get from there to
here.
First, we need for Ukraine not to have been responsible. That's going to be awkward, because it looks as if the aircraft was shot
down by a missile, but the missile had to have come from inside Ukraine, because the aircraft was too far from the nearest point
in Russia at the moment it was stricken for the missile to have come from there. But we need Russia to have been responsible, and
not Ukraine. Therefore we need a sequence of events in which a Russian missile launcher capable of shooting down an airliner at cruising
altitude was inside Ukraine, in a position from which it could have taken the shot.
You know what? We are going to have to look at means, motive and opportunity, just for a second. My purpose in doing
so is to illustrate just how improbable the western narrative is, starting from square one. The coup in Ukraine – and anyone who
believes it was a 'grass-roots revolution' might as well stop reading right here, because we are going to just get further apart
in our impressions of events – followed by the triumphant promise from the revolutionaries to repeal Yanukovych's language laws and
make Ukrainian the law of the land touched off the return of Crimea to its ancestral home in the Russian Federation. Crimea was about
65% ethnic Russian by population at the time, and only about 15% Ukrainian, and Crimea had made several attempts to break free of
Ukraine before that yet for some reason the west refused steadfastly to accept the results of a referendum which voted in favour
of Crimea becoming a part of the Russian Federation, as if it were more believable that a huge ethnic-Russian majority preferred
to learn Ukrainian and be governed by Kiev.
Be that as it may, Washington reacted very angrily; much more so than Europe, considering the distance between the United States
and Ukraine versus its proximity to Europe. Perhaps that is owed simply to Washington's assumption that every corner of the world
looks to it for leadership, and that it must have a position ready on any given situation, regardless how distant. So Washington
insisted there must be sanctions against Russia, for stealing Crimea from its rightful owner, Ukraine. We're not really going to
get into struggles for freedom and the right to self-determination right now, except to state that the USA considers nothing more
important in some cases, while in others it is completely irrelevant. Washington demanded sanctions but
much of Europe was reluctant .
"It is notoriously difficult to secure EU agreement on sanctions anywhere because they require unanimity from the 28 member
states. There were wide differences over the numbers of Russians and Crimeans to be punished, with countries such as Greece, Cyprus,
Bulgaria and Spain reluctant to penalise Moscow for fear of closing down channels of dialogue. The 21 named were on an original list
that ran to about 120 people Expanding the numbers on the sanctions list is almost certain to be discussed at the EU summit on Thursday
and Friday. Some EU states are torn about taking punitive measures against Russia for fear of undoing years of patient attempts to
establish closer ties with Moscow as well as increase trade. The EU has already suspended talks with Russia on an economic pact and
a visa agreement The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said any measure must leave "ways and possibilities open to
prevent a further escalation that could lead to the division of Europe" .
The original list of those to be sanctioned was 120 people. The haggling reduced that to 21. Only 7 of those were Russians. Putin
was not included. That was pretty plainly not the United Front That Speaks With One Voice that Washington had envisioned, and the
notion that Europe would buy into sanctions that might really do some damage to Russia, albeit there would be economic costs to Europe
as well, was a dim prospect.
Gosh – you know what we need? An atrocity which can be quickly tied to Russia, and which will so appall the EU member states that
resistance to far-reaching sanctions will collapse. That's called 'motive'. It's just not a motive for Russia. Having just gone far
out on a limb and taken back Crimea, to the obvious and vocal fury of the United States, it is a bit of a stretch that Russia was
looking for what else it could do that would stir up the world against it.
Means, now. That presents its own dilemma. Because Russia could have shot down an airliner from its own territory. Just not with
the weapon chosen. The S-400 could have done it; it has the range, easily. But if you were setting up a scenario in which something
happened that you wanted to blame on Russia, but they didn't really do it, you must have the weapon to do it yourself, or access
to it. By any reasonable construct, Ukraine must be a suspect as well – there was a hot war going on in Ukraine, Ukraine controlled
both the airspace and the aircraft that was lost, and the aircraft was lost over Ukrainian territory. But Ukraine doesn't have the
S-400. You could use a variety of western systems, but it would quickly be established that the plane was shot down with a weapon
that Russia does not have. In order for the narrative to be believable, Russia must have the weapon – but if it wasn't Russia, then
whoever did it must have the weapon, too.
Enter the Buk system, with the 9K37 SA-11 missile. It's got the range, it's got the altitude, the Russians have it in active service.
Oooo problem. It's got the range, but only if it was fired from inside Ukraine.
Which brings us back to Mr. Galeotti, an expert in Russian combat systems; enough of an expert to write books on them, anyway.
And he plainly believes it was an SA-11 missile fired from a single Buk TELAR (Transporter/Erector/Launcher and Radar) which brought
down the Boeing; he says that's what the evidence demonstrates, although by this time (2019) most of the world has backed away from
saying Putin showed up with no shirt on to close the firing switch personally (cue the instant British-press screaming headlines
before the dust had even settled, "PUTIN'S MISSILE!!!" "PUTIN KILLED MY SON!!!"). Now the story is that the disgraceful deed was
done by 'Ukrainian anti-government militants', using a weapon supplied by Russia.
"In this context, a full reversal of policy seems near-enough impossible. The evidence suggests that while the fateful missile
was fired by Ukrainian anti-government militants, it was supplied by the Russian 53rd Air Defense Brigade under orders from Moscow
and in a process managed by Russian military intelligence.
To admit this would not only be to acknowledge a share in the unlawful killing of 298 innocents, but also an unpicking of
the whole Kremlin narrative over the Donbass. It would mean admitting to having been an active participant in this bloody compound
of civil war and foreign intervention, to having armed the militants without due thought as to the consequences, and to having lied
to the world and the Russian people for half a decade."
We don't really have the scope in this piece to broaden the discussion to Russia's probable actual involvement. Suffice it to
say that despite non-stop allegations by Poroshenko throughout his presidency of entire battalions of active-service Russian Army
soldiers inside Ukraine, zero evidence has ever been provided of any such presence, although there have been
some clumsy attempts to fabricate
it . To argue that the Russian Army has been trying to overrun Ukraine for six years now, but has been unable to do so because
of the combat prowess of the Ukrainian Army is to imply a belief in leprechauns. This is only my own inexpert opinion, but it seems
likely to me the complete extent of Russia's involvement, militarily, is the minimum which prevents Eastern Ukraine from being overrun
by the Ukrainian military, and including the rebel areas' own far-from-inconsequential military forces. I'm always ready to entertain
competing theories, though; be sure to bring your evidence. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Constitution prohibits using the country's military
forces against its own citizens. The logic of 'Have cake, and eat it" cannot apply here – either the Ukrainian state is in direct
and obvious violation of its own constitution or the people of the breakaway regions are not Ukrainian citizens.
Anyway, back to the Buk system. And not a moment before time, either – I just re-read that
sanctimonious stab above, again; " having armed the militants without due thought as to the consequences " What, exactly,
is the ridiculous nature of the accusation being presented here? That the Russians gave an anti-aircraft system to the 'militants'
without considering they might use it to shoot down an aircraft? How did they not see that coming? The Ukrainian Army
shot down a civilian airliner in October of 2001
, and lied about it for as long as it could – interestingly, it took place during joint Ukrainian-Russian air defense exercises
on the Crimean peninsula, and Russia tried hard to avoid assigning blame to Ukraine, while at least one Israeli television station
claimed the Russians had shot down their own aircraft. This disaster and subsequent lying did not prevent the USA from giving the
Javelin missile to Ukraine – did it not occur to them that they might use it to shoot tanks? No due thought to the consequences,
obviously.
The Buk air-defense system normally consists of at least
4 TELAR launchers , each with 4 missiles on the launch rails, a self-propelled acquisition radar designated by NATO nomenclature
as Snow Drift (the radar on the nose of the TELAR unit itself is designated Fire Dome), and a self-propelled command post, for a
minimum of 6 vehicles. Also usually part of the system is a mobile crane, to reload the launchers. If you were going to supply an
air-defense system to militant rebels, why wouldn't you give them the whole system? In a pinch, you might be able to get away without
the command post vehicle, although it is the station that collates all the input from the sensors and makes the decision to assign
targets for acquisition, tracking and engagement. If you didn't give them the crane vehicle, and perhaps a logistics truck with some
reloads, they would be limited to the missiles that came already mounted – once those were fired, they'd have to abandon the system,
because they couldn't reload it. Seems a little wasteful, don't you think?
What about the acquisition radar? Because acquiring targets is all about scanning capability and situational awareness. We're
going to assume for a moment that you don't use an air defense system exclusively to hunt for airliners, but that you want to defend
yourself against ground-attack aircraft like the Sukhoi SU-25. Because, when you think about it, who is more likely to be trying
to kill you ? A Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, or an SU-25? The latter is not quite as fast as an airliner at its cruising
height of 30,000 ft+, but it is very agile and will be nearly down in the treetops if it is attacking you. You need to be able to
search all around, all the time.
That's where the acquisition radar comes in. A centimetric waveband search radar, the
Snow Drift (called the 9S18M1 by
its designer) has 360-degree coverage and from 0 to 40 degrees of height in a 6-second sweep in anti-aircraft mode, with a 160 km
detection range, obviously dependent on target altitude. An airliner, being a large target not attempting to evade detection, and
at a high altitude, would quite possibly be detected at the maximum range of which the system is capable. But then the operators
would certainly know it was an airliner. And the narrative says whoever shot it down probably did so by accident.
Maybe if it was his first day on the job. Let's talk for a minute about air-defense deconfliction. It would be nice if your Command
parked you somewhere that there was nothing around you but enemies. Well, not as nice as parking you across the street from a pulled-pork
barbecue joint with strippers and cold beer, but from a defense standpoint, it'd be nice to know that anything you detected, you
could shoot. Know something? It's never like that. Your own aircraft are flying around as if they didn't even know you are dangerous,
and as everyone now knows, civilian airliners continue their transport enterprises irrespective of war except in rare instances in
which high-flying aircraft have been shot down by long-range missiles. That rarely happens. Why? Because an aircraft flying a steady
course, at 30,000 ft+ and not descending, is no threat to you on the ground. From that altitude it can't even see you in the ground
clutter, and it'd be quite a bombardier that could hit a target the size of a two-car garage with a bomb dropped from 30,000 ft while
flying at 400 knots.
And unless you are an idiot, you know it is an airliner. When you are deployed into the field in an air-defense role, you know
where the commercial airlanes are that are going to be active. You know what a commercial-aviation profile looks like – aircraft
at 30,000 ft+ altitude, flying at ≥400 knots on a steady course, squawking Mode 3 and Charlie = airliner. Might as well take a moment
here to talk about
IFF ; Identification
Friend or Foe. This is a coded pulse signal transmitted by all commercial aircraft whenever they are in flight unless their equipment
is non-functional, and you are not allowed to take off with it in that state. Mode C provides the aircraft's altitude, taken automatically
from its barometric altimeter. All modern air search radars have IFF capability, and a dashed line just below the raw video of the
air track can be interrogated with a light-pen to provide the readout. You already know how high the plane is if you have a solid
radar track, but Mode C provides a confirmation.
Military aircraft have IFF transponders, too; in fact, most of the modes are reserved for military use. But military aircraft
often turn off their IFF equipment, because it provides a giveaway who and where they are. In Ukraine, which uses mostly Soviet military
aircraft, both sides are capable of reading each other's IFF, so all the more reason not to transmit. Foreign nations typically cannot
read each other's IFF except for the modes which are for both military and civilian use, other than those nations who are allies.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that the Snow Drift acquisition radar has IFF, and if it detected an airliner-like target at
160 km., the operator would have that much more time to interrogate it and determine it was an airliner. Just to reiterate, the western
narrative holds that the destruction of the airliner was a mistake.
I'm going a little further with my inexpert opinion, to say that the Buk system was selected as the 'murder weapon', because it
provides a limited autonomous capability. To be clear, the Fire Dome radar on the nose of the TELAR does have a limited search capability,
and once the radar is locked on to a target, the TELAR vehicle is completely autonomous. The purpose of the surveillance radar is
to detect the target from far beyond the Fire Dome's range, assign it to a TELAR and thereby direct it to the elevation and bearing
of the target so that the TELAR's radar knows exactly where to look, and continue to update its position until the TELAR to which
it was assigned has locked on to the target.
That autonomous capability is probably what made it attractive to those building the scenario; consider. A complete Buk system
of 6, maybe 7 vehicles could hardly get all the way inside Ukraine to the firing position without being noticed and perhaps recorded.
But perhaps a single TELAR could do it. The aircraft could be shot down by an SA-11 missile and blamed on Russia – Ukraine has access
to plenty of SA-11's. But it is a weapon in the Russian active-service inventory. Further, Galeotti's commitment to the allegation
that the single TELAR was provided by Russia's 53rd Air Defense Brigade tells us he supports the crackpot narrative offered by Bellingcat,
the loopy citizen-journalist website headed by failed financial clerk Eliot Higgins. Bellingcat claims the Buk TELAR was trucked
into Ukraine on the back of a flatbed, took the shot that slew MH-17, and was immediately withdrawn back to Russia.
Ummm .how was that an accident? The Russians gave the Ukrainian militants a single launcher with no crane or reload missiles,
so it was limited to a maximum of four shots. Its ability to defend itself from ground attack was almost nil, since the design purpose
of mounting a Fire Dome radar
on each TELAR is not to make the launcher units autonomous; it is to permit concurrent engagements by several launchers, all
coordinated by the acquisition radar and command post. Without a radar of its own on the launcher, the firing unit would have to
wait until each engagement was completed before it could switch to a new target, but with a fire-control guidance radar on each TELAR,
multiple targets can be assigned to multiple launchers, while the search radar limits itself to acquisition and target assignment.
The Fire Dome radar mounted on the TELAR can search a 120-degree sector in 4 seconds, at an elevation of 6 to 7 degrees. Its search
function is maximized for defense against ground attack aircraft, and a single launcher is not looking at 240 degrees of potential
air threat axis during each sweep. It is not looking high enough to see an airliner at 30,000 ft+. More importantly for a system
which was not designed to shoot down helpless airliners, it leaves two-thirds of a circle unobserved all the time it is searching
for a target. And the Russians provided this to the 'militants' for air defense? They should be shot.
A single TELAR with no reloads and no acquisition radar would have to be looking directly at the target when it was activated
in order to even see it; it takes 15 seconds for the launcher to swing into line and elevation even when that information is transmitted
to it from the acquisition radar. It takes 4 seconds for a scan to be completed when there is a whole two-thirds of a circle that
it is not even looking at, and you have to manually force it to search above 7 degrees because it is not designed to shoot down airliners.
All this time, the target is crossing the acquisition scope at 400 knots+. Fire Dome has integrated IFF, so if it did by some miracle
pick up an airliner in its search, the operator would know from transmitted IFF that he was looking at an airliner. A single TELAR
with no reload capability sent on an air-defense mission would have its ass ripped in half by ground-attack aircraft that it never
saw – if the autonomous capability is so good, why don't the Ukrainians use them as a single unit? Think of how much air-defense
coverage they could provide! Do you see the Ukrainian air-defense units employing the Buk that way? Never. Not once. Four TELARS,
acquisition radar vehicle, command vehicle, just the way the system was designed to operate.
Just because it has a limited capability to function in a given capacity should not suggest you would employ it that way. You
can use a hockey stick to turn off the bedroom light, and you won't even have to get out of bed. Would you do that? I hope not.
A one-third effective capacity in the air defense role together with the covert delivery and immediate withdrawal suggests that
the Russians provided the 'militants' with a single TELAR for the express purpose of shooting down a defenseless airliner. Except
nobody is saying that. It was a mistake. Well, except for Head of the Security Service of Ukraine Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, who claimed
"Terrorists and militants have planned a cynical terrorist attack on a civilian aircraft Aeroflot AFL-2074 Moscow-Larnaka that was
flying at that time above the territory of Ukraine." He further claimed that this was motivated by a desire to 'justify an invasion'.
I'm pretty sure if any western authority could prove anything even close to that, we would not have had to wait 6 years for a trial.
Which brings us to the covert delivery and extraction. As part of his personal investigation, Max van der Werff drove the route
Bellingcat claimed was the extraction route by which the single TELAR, on its flatbed, was returned to Russia. He verified that there
is a highway overpass on the route which is too low for a load that tall to pass underneath. When he pointed this out to Higgins,
he was told there is a bypass spur which goes around it, which would allow the flatbed to regain the road beyond without having gone
through the overpass. Max drew his attention to the concrete barriers which blocked that road at the top of the hill, and which locals
claimed had been in place long before the destruction of MH-17. And that was the end of that conversation. I cannot say enough about
the quality of Max's work and his diligent, patient dissection
of the evidence . His diagrams of the entry and egress routes as provided by Bellingcat illustrate how little sense they make.
It was imperative the guilty Russians get the fuck out of Dodge with the greatest possible dispatch so they drove 100 kilometers
out of their way? Don't even terrorist murderers have GPS now?
Similarly, the simpleminded flailing of the Ukrainian investigators suggests they do not even have much of a grasp of how Surface-To-Air
missiles work. In excited posts like this one , the
BBC discloses that an exhaust vent from the tail section of a 'Buk missile' (the missile is actually the SA-11, while Buk is the
entire system) was found in the wreckage of the crashed plane, while
this one
even shows terminally-stunned head prosecutor Fred Westerbeke standing next to what is allegedly part of the rocket body of an
SA-11, including legible inventory markings, also 'found at the crash scene'.
Do tell.
Let me review for you how an SA-11 missile shoots down an aircraft. Does it pierce it like a harpoon, blow up in a thunderous
explosion, and ride the doomed aircraft down to the crash site? It certainly does not. The missile blasts out of the launcher and
flies to the target via semiactive homing, which means it has an onboard seeker that updates the missile trajectory, while the radar
on the launcher also communicates with it and the missile and the target are brought together in intercept. When the proximity fuse
of the missile – this is the important part – senses that the missile's warhead is close to the target, the internal explosive detonates,
and a shower of prefragmented shrapnel pierces the area of the plane near where the missile detonated, usually the front, because
the missile is constantly adjusting to make sure it stays with the target until intercept.
MH-17 traveled on, mostly intact, for miles before it crashed into the ground; the crash site was some 13 miles from where the
plane was hit. The missile self-destructed miles away from the crash site, and the only parts of it which accompanied the plane to
its impact point were the shrapnel bits of the exploded warhead. The body of the missile, together with the exhaust vent, fell back
to the ground somewhere quite close to where the plane was hit, not where it fell. Once the missile's fuel is exhausted, either because
it ran out or because it was consumed in the explosion triggered by the proximity fuse, the missile parts do not fly around in formation,
seeking out the wreckage and coming gently to rest in it where they can later be found by investigators. I don't know how many times
I have to say this, because this is certainly not the first, but there would not be any missile parts in the wreckage of MH-17
because the missile would have blown up in front of the plane without ever touching it. The missile does not hit the plane.
The pieces of the warhead do. But reality has to take a back seat to making out an airtight case.
There is no telling what kind of ordnance might be found in the wreckage itself, as the Ukrainian Army
continued to shell the site
for days after the crash; doubtless various artillery shells could be found at the crash site, as well, but it would be quite
a leap of faith to suggest a Boeing 777 was shot down by artillery. What you would not find is pieces of the SAM that shot it down.
Several witnesses claimed to have seen an SU-25 near the plane before it exploded. They quite possibly did – the Ukrainian Air
Force was observed to be using civilian airliners as cover to allow them to get close to Eastern-Ukrainian villages which might be
protected by hand-held launchers known as MANPADS (for Man-Portable Air Defense System), reasoning the defenders would not shoot
if they were afraid they might hit a civil aircraft. Once they were close enough to the village or other target to make an attack
run, they would then return to the vicinity of the airliner for protection while withdrawing; the rebel side complained about this
illegal and immoral practice a month before the destruction of MH-17. But there is no evidence I am aware of linking the destruction
of MH-17 to an attack by aircraft.
It may no longer be possible to look at the shooting-down of the Malaysian Boeing objectively; the event has become a partisan
rush to judgment which was rendered immediately, after which an investigation began which plainly had as its goal proving the accusations
already made. Means and motive clearly favour the accusers rather than the accused, and opportunity is mostly irrelevant as a consideration.
Ukraine obviously had to be a suspect – the destruction of the aircraft occurred over Ukraine while Ukraine was in control of it
and the airspace in which it traveled. Yet Ukraine was allowed to lead the investigation, and to gather and safeguard evidence, while
the owner of the aircraft – Malaysia – was excluded until the investigation had been in progress for four months. Russia was not
allowed any part in it save to yield whatever evidence the investigators demanded, while all its theories were widely mocked. Demonstrations
set up by Almaz-Antey, the designers and builders of the SA-11, were unattended by any investigating nation – small wonder they do
not have Clue One how the missile works, and believe they are going to find big chunks of it in the wreckage, perhaps with Putin's
passport stuck to one of them. If any of these conditions prevailed in an investigation which favoured Russia, NATO would scream
as if it were being run over with spiked wheels – if the Boeing had been shot down over Russia, who thinks Russia would have been
heading the investigation, and custodian of the evidence?
Nor is that by any means all. The Dutch investigation which concluded with the preliminary report
implied that nothing of any investigative value was found on the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) or the Flight Data Recorder (FDR).
Nothing to indicate what might have happened to the aircraft – just that it was flying along, and suddenly it wasn't. How likely
is that? No transcript was provided, and I guess that would be expected if there was no information at all. Funny how often that
happens with Malaysian airliners; they really need to look at their quality control. Oh; except they don't build the aircraft. Boeing
does. I could see there not being any information after the plane began to break up, because
both the CVR and the FDR are in the
tail , and that broke off before the fuselage hit. But the microphones are in the ceiling of the cockpit and in the microphone
and earpiece of the pilots' headsets, which they wear at all times while in flight. The last audio claimed to have been recorded
was a course alteration sent by Ukrainian ATC.
According to the Malaysian government, there was an early plan by NATO for a military operation involving some 9000 troops to
'secure the crash site', which was
forestalled by a covert Malaysian operation which recovered the 'black boxes' and blocked the plan. I have to say that given
the many, many other unorthodox and bizarre happenings in the conduct of what was supposed to be a transparent and impartial international
investigation, it's getting so nothing much is unbelievable. The Malaysian Prime Minister went on record as believing that the western
powers had already concluded that Russia was responsible, and were mostly just going through the motions of investigating.
The telephone recordings presented by the SBU as demonstrating Russian culpability were analyzed by OG IT Forensic Services, a
Malaysian firm specializing in forensic analysis of audio, video and digital materials for court proceedings, which
concluded the recordings were cut, edited and fabricated . Yet they are relied upon as important evidence of guilt by the Dutch
and the JIT.
The conduct of the investigation has been all the way across town from transparent, and in fact seems to represent a clique of
cronies getting their heads together to attempt nailing down a consistent narrative, which is in the judgment of forensic professionals
based upon clumsy fabrications. The investigators plainly have no understanding of how the weapons systems involved perform, or they
would not claim confidently to have discovered pieces of the very missile that destroyed the plane in the wreckage of it. But rather
than take an objective look at how this flailing is perceived, they continue to rely on momentum and the appearance of getting things
done while being scrupulously impartial, all the while that more mountains of evidence are collected, which they cannot disclose
to the public, although it is all right to let the prime suspect keep it safe under wraps.
Make of that what you will.
" Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the
production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge
of the facts that are relevant to that topic. "
"... This was Bellingcrap's bread-and-butter function, to use satellite photos and make them say whatever Bellingcrap had been tasked to say they were, relying on the fact that mainstream media organisations rarely employ people expert in interpreting satellite imagery, before people outside the MSM environment started voicing suspicions about how the "evidence" for the official MH17 narrative was being worked and whipped into shape to fit that narrative. ..."
" The point is that we often tend to believe satellite photography shows what its
presenters say it shows because we do not have the skill to interpret it ourselves "
This was Bellingcrap's bread-and-butter function, to use satellite photos and make them
say whatever Bellingcrap had been tasked to say they were, relying on the fact that
mainstream media organisations rarely employ people expert in interpreting satellite imagery,
before people outside the MSM environment started voicing suspicions about how the "evidence"
for the official MH17 narrative was being worked and whipped into shape to fit that
narrative.
It's my understanding that there is a company in Colorado, called Digital something or
other, that supplies a huge amount of satellite imagery to the US government and other big
clients.
From comments: "
neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce
wholly artificial directives. Also, the work of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana
Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving into a totalitarian system of control through
cybernetic data aggregation."
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and
creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more
oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and
micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and
hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The
introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age
of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom
but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state,
insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of
freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so
much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and
assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The
bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning
efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
Notable quotes:
"... By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced. ..."
"... Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence. ..."
"... Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state, insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. ..."
"... Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself. ..."
"... The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a radicalized form of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become overt. ..."
"... The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with nationhood. ..."
Thousands of people march through London to protest against underfunding and privatisation
of the NHS. Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Images M y life was saved last year by the
Churchill Hospital in Oxford, through a skilful procedure
to remove a cancer from my body . Now I will need another operation, to remove my jaw from
the floor. I've just learned what was happening at the hospital while I was being treated. On
the surface, it ran smoothly. Underneath, unknown to me, was fury and tumult. Many of the staff
had objected to a decision by the National Health Service
to privatise the hospital's cancer scanning . They complained that the scanners the private
company was offering were less sensitive than the hospital's own machines. Privatisation, they
said, would put patients at risk. In response,
as the Guardian revealed last week , NHS England threatened to sue the hospital for libel
if its staff continued to criticise the decision.
The dominant system of political thought in this country, which produced both the creeping
privatisation of public health services and this astonishing attempt to stifle free speech,
promised to save us from dehumanising bureaucracy. By rolling back the state, neoliberalism
was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a
semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced.
Workers find themselves enmeshed in a
Kafkaesque bureaucracy , centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend
on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down,
hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into
public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is
brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and
silence.
Much of the theory behind these transformations arises from the work of Ludwig von Mises. In
his book Bureaucracy , published in 1944, he
argued that there could be no accommodation between capitalism and socialism. The creation of
the National Health Service in the UK, the New Deal in the US and other experiments in social
democracy would lead inexorably to the bureaucratic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and
Nazi Germany.
He recognised that some state bureaucracy was inevitable; there were certain functions that
could not be discharged without it. But unless the role of the state is minimised –
confined to defence, security, taxation, customs and not much else – workers would be
reduced to cogs "in a vast bureaucratic machine", deprived of initiative and free will.
By contrast, those who labour within an "unhampered capitalist system" are "free men", whose
liberty is guaranteed by "an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote". He
forgot to add that some people, in his capitalist utopia, have more votes than others. And
those votes become a source of power.
His ideas, alongside the writings of
Friedrich Hayek , Milton Friedman and other neoliberal thinkers, have been applied in this
country by Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, Theresa May and, to an alarming extent, Tony
Blair. All of those have attempted to privatise or marketise public services in the name of
freedom and efficiency, but they keep hitting the same snag: democracy. People want essential
services to remain public, and they are right to do so.
If you hand public services to private companies, either you create a private monopoly,
which can use its dominance to extract wealth and shape the system to serve its own needs
– or you introduce competition, creating an incoherent, fragmented service characterised
by the institutional failure you can see every day on our railways. We're not idiots, even if
we are treated as such. We know what the profit motive does to public services.
So successive governments decided that if they could not privatise our core services
outright, they would subject them to "market discipline". Von Mises repeatedly warned against
this approach. "No reform could transform a public office into a sort of private enterprise,"
he cautioned. The value of public administration "cannot be expressed in terms of money".
"Government efficiency and industrial efficiency are entirely different things."
"Intellectual work cannot be measured and valued by mechanical devices." "You cannot
'measure' a doctor according to the time he employs in examining one case." They ignored his
warnings.
Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state,
insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name
of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became
not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control.
Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and
assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The
bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning
efficacy. It has become an end in itself.
Its perversities afflict all public services. Schools teach to the test , depriving
children of a rounded and useful education. Hospitals manipulate waiting times, shuffling
patients from one list to another. Police forces ignore some crimes, reclassify others, and
persuade suspects to admit to extra offences to improve their statistics . Universities urge their
researchers to
write quick and superficial papers , instead of deep monographs, to maximise their scores
under the research excellence framework.
As a result, public services become highly inefficient for an obvious reason: the
destruction of staff morale. Skilled people, including surgeons whose training costs hundreds
of thousands of pounds, resign or retire early because of the stress and misery the system
causes. The leakage of talent is a far greater waste than any inefficiencies this quantomania
claims to address.
New extremes in the surveillance and control of workers are not, of course, confined to the
public sector. Amazon has patented
a wristband that can track workers' movements and detect the slightest deviation from
protocol. Technologies are used to monitor peoples' keystrokes, language, moods and tone of
voice. Some companies have begun to experiment with the
micro-chipping of their staff . As the philosopher Byung-Chul
Han points out , neoliberal work practices, epitomised by the gig economy, that
reclassifies workers as independent contractors, internalise exploitation. "Everyone is a
self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise."
The freedom we were promised turns out to be
freedom for capital , gained at the expense of human liberty. The system neoliberalism has
created is a bureaucracy that tends towards absolutism, produced in the public services by
managers mimicking corporate executives, imposing inappropriate and self-defeating efficiency
measures, and in the private sector by subjection to faceless technologies that can brook no
argument or complaint.
Attempts to resist are met by ever more extreme methods, such as the threatened lawsuit at
the Churchill Hospital. Such instruments of control crush autonomy and creativity. It is true
that the Soviet bureaucracy von Mises rightly denounced reduced its workers to subjugated
drones. But the system his disciples have created is heading the same way.
The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a
radicalized form of neoliberalism. If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have
been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to
legitimise itself.
Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist
ideologies and an order of market feudalism. In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian
orientations, previously effaced beneath discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become
overt.
The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a
medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. Individual entrepreneurs
collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become synonymous with
nationhood.
A corporate state emerges, free of the regulatory fetters of democracy. The final
restriction on the market - democracy itself - is removed. There then is no separate market
and state, just a totalitarian market state.
This is the best piece of writing on neoliberalism I have ever seen. Look, 'what is in
general good and probably most importantly what is in the future good'. Why are we
collectively not viewing everything that way? Surely those thoughts should drive us all?
Pinkie123: So good to read your understandings of neoliberalism. The political project is the
imposition of the all seeing all knowing 'market' on all aspects of human life. This version
of the market is an 'information processor'. Speaking of the different idea of the
laissez-faire version of market/non market areas and the function of the night watchman state
are you aware there are different neoliberalisms? The EU for example runs on the version
called 'ordoliberalism'. I understand that this still sees some areas of society as separate
from 'the market'?
ADamnSmith: Philip Mirowski has discussed this 'under the radar' aspect of neoliberalism. How
to impose 'the market' on human affairs - best not to be to explicit about what you are
doing. Only recently has some knowledge about the actual neoliberal project been appearing.
Most people think of neoliberalism as 'making the rich richer' - just a ramped up version of
capitalism. That's how the left has thought of it and they have been ineffective in stopping
its implementation.
Finally. A writer who can talk about neoliberalism as NOT being a retro version of classical
laissez faire liberalism. It is about imposing "The Market" as the sole arbiter of Truth on
us all.
Only the 'Market' knows what is true in life - no need for 'democracy' or 'education'.
Neoliberals believe - unlike classical liberals with their view of people as rational
individuals acting in their own self-interest - people are inherently 'unreliable', stupid.
Only entrepreneurs - those close to the market - can know 'the truth' about anything. To
succeed we all need to take our cues in life from what the market tells us. Neoliberalism is
not about a 'small state'. The state is repurposed to impose the 'all knowing' market on
everyone and everything. That is neoliberalism's political project. It is ultimately not
about 'economics'.
The left have been entirely wrong to believe that neoliberalism is a mobilisation of
anarchic, 'free' markets. It never was so. Only a few more acute thinkers on the left
(Jacques Ranciere, Foucault, Deleuze and, more recently, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Will
Davies and David Graeber) have understood neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of
control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce wholly artificial directives. Also, the work
of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving
into a totalitarian system of control through cybernetic data aggregation.
Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the
state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so
we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise
we'll hang back and let you do what you want'. Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state
is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices,
they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know
there would be socialism. This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of
government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is,
neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state
based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t
totalitarianism. Because concepts of social justice are expressed in language, neoliberals
are suspicious of linguistic concepts, regarding them as politically dangerous. Their
preference has always been for numbers. Hence, market bureaucracy aims for the quantification
of all values - translating the entirety of social reality into metrics, data, objectively
measurable price signals. Numbers are safe. The laws of numbers never change. Numbers do not
lead to revolutions. Hence, all the audit, performance review and tick-boxing that has been
enforced into public institutions serves to render them forever subservient to numerical
(market) logic. However, because social institutions are not measurable, attempts to make
them so become increasingly mystical and absurd. Administrators manage data that has no
relation to reality. Quantitatively unmeasurable things - like happiness or success - are
measured, with absurd results.
It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that
neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of
understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to
universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were
Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century
totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to
the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand
neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal.
However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to
economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any
other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic
irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes
that Hayek railed against.
Nationalised rail in the UK was under-funded and 'set up to fail' in its latter phase to make
privatisation seem like an attractive prospect. I have travelled by train under both
nationalisation and privatisation and the latter has been an unmitigated disaster in my
experience. Under privatisation, public services are run for the benefit of shareholders and
CEO's, rather than customers and citizens and under the opaque shroud of undemocratic
'commercial confidentiality'.
What has been very noticeable about the development of bureaucracy in the public and private
spheres over the last 40 years (since Thatcher govt of 79) has been the way systems are
designed now to place responsibility and culpability on the workers delivering the services -
Teachers, Nurses, social workers, etc. While those making the policies, passing the laws,
overseeing the regulations- viz. the people 'at the top', now no longer take the rap when
something goes wrong- they may be the Captain of their particular ship, but the
responsibility now rests with the man sweeping the decks. Instead they are covered by tying
up in knots those teachers etc. having to fill in endless check lists and reports, which have
as much use as clicking 'yes' one has understood those long legal terms provided by software
companies.... yet are legally binding. So how the hell do we get out of this mess? By us as
individuals uniting through unions or whatever and saying NO. No to your dumb educational
directives, No to your cruel welfare policies, No to your stupid NHS mismanagement.... there
would be a lot of No's but eventually we could say collectively 'Yes I did the right thing'.
'The left wing dialogue about neoliberalism used to be that it was the Wild West and that
anything goes. Now apparently it's a machine of mass control.'
It is the Wild West and anything goes for the corporate entities, and a machine of control
of the masses. Hence the wish of neoliberals to remove legislation that protects workers and
consumers.
@Godfree Roberts Just a headsup The Economist is a Rothschild publication, now
part-owned, The wife, Lynn Forester de Rothschild used to be Editor. Personally, I wouldn't
believe a single article in The Economist – its all propaganda to fit their
narrative, which is your point, I know.
Donald J. Trump: I think that the BuzzFeed piece was a disgrace to our country. It was a
disgrace to journalism and I think also the coverage by the mainstream media was disgraceful.
And I think it's going to take a long time for the mainstream media to recover its
credibility.
JS (Jeremy Scahill): Trump's absolutely bizarre legal marionette Rudy Giuliani was also
gleeful.
Rudy Giuliani: The Justice Department and the Special Counsel's Office said that the story
was inaccurate and the inaccuracy is that there's no evidence that the president told him to
lie.
JS: Now, I have no idea if BuzzFeed's report is accurate. It may be. Or some of it may be
wrong and some of it correct. But if it does turn out to be wrong in its major assertion, if
Trump did not in fact instruct Michael Cohen to lie, then this would be the latest in a string
of highly inflammatory stories relating to Trump and Russia and published by major news
organizations that turned out to be false.
The British Guardian newspaper has still not addressed why it is that no other news outlet
has reported that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort met three times with Wikileaks
founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. No one else has been able to
confirm any of that. Paul Manafort denies it. Julian Assange denies it. That is the most
surveilled embassy door on planet earth and no video has emerged to support the Guardian's
report. The story came. It was a very big deal. No one else confirmed it and now it's just
floating out there on the internet.
CNN and NBC also made a huge error when they reported on Don Jr. supposedly having advance
knowledge of Wikileaks publications during the campaign. Well, that turned out to be false too
and that the sources that gave that information to CNN and apparently NBC had actually gotten
dates wrong on emails sent to Don Jr. about Wikileaks. The emails were sent after the
publication of documents. Same is true of the salacious story -- this was a while ago, but I'm
sure you remember it -- that Trump had set up a secret Russian server to communicate with the
Kremlin. It was also untrue that Russian hackers had hacked into the U.S. electrical grid in
Vermont. Not true. Just not true.
I'm bringing all of this up not to say that there is no scandal with Trump or Trump/Russia
and move along, look the other way. I bring it up because all of these false stories help
Trump, they bolster his very dangerous narrative about the news media and about fake news. They
also potentially hurt the actual, provable assertions and allegations against Donald Trump
because Trump can now say, "Oh, well the waters are muddy and look at all these false stories
that have been published about me." He can use it to confuse the actual, provable
narrative.
And the fact that the public is drowning in sensationalized coverage of Trump and Russia and
Mueller, it's almost certainly going to set the public up for a very confusing, underwhelming
reality when the Special Counsel's report is made public. At least, that's what ABC News White
House correspondent Jonathan Karl seems to think.
Jonathan Karl: This is all building up to the Mueller report and raising expectations of a
bombshell report and they've been expectations that have been building of course, for over a
year on this. But people who are closest to what Mueller has been doing, interacting with the
Special Counsel caution me that this report is almost certain to be anti-climactic.
JS: Earlier this month, the veteran national security journalist William Arkin of NBC News
published an email that he sent to colleagues informing them that he was no longer working for
the network. In the letter, Arkin blasted NBC for its obsession over Trump, writing: "I find
myself completely out of sync with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor
interested in the Trump circus." Arkin went on to say that, at NBC, investigative journalism
"got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush. The
national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I
would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself --
busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play." Arkin continued: "I'd argue
that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn't missed a beat but indeed
has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to
criticism."
William Arkin: The national security community itself has gotten stronger and has gained
strength under Donald Trump and part of our responsibility as journalists is to cover the
government not just the president. And so, I feel like people should know more.
JS: I could not agree more with Bill Arkin's summation of how the national security
establishment, the CIA, the U.S. war machine has benefitted from the media's hyper-obsession
over Trump/Russia. At the same time, we have to cover stories that could potentially bring down
a president, or potentially conclude that the president has engaged in criminal conduct. It's
not a question of if this story deserves to be covered. It most certainly does and there has
been a lot of great journalism happening on Trump/Russia. But the real question is how unhinged
and unsubstantiated some of the most serious accusations are handled, including by major
established U.S. news organizations.
Journalist Michael Isikoff on Media Coverage of
Trump/Russia, The Mueller Investigation, Rudy Giuliani, and Donald Trump
JS: For more on all of this and the BuzzFeed story and the way Trump/Russia is covered, I am
joined by one of the most experienced investigative journalists in Washington, Michael Isikoff.
He is the chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo! News. Before that, he was an
investigative correspondent for NBC as well as a staff writer for Newsweek and the Washington
Post. Isikoff has written two best-sellers, "Uncovering Clinton" and along with David Corn
"Hubris," which was about the selling of the Iraq War. Isikoff has broken several major stories
on Donald Trump and he is the co-author with Corn of the book "Russian Roulette: The Inside
Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump."
Michael Isikoff, welcome to Intercepted.
MI: Good to be with you.
JS: I would be remiss in not kicking this off by asking you about this BuzzFeed story. What
is your assessment of what was reported in that piece and the veracity of the central
allegation which is that Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress
about these negotiations to build the Trump Tower in Moscow?
MI: Well, before we even get to the Mueller statement, just take the story on its face. It's
got this, you know, very bold, provocative lede that has enormous implications but there's
absolutely no backup in it at all -- directed him to lie which is what the lede said "The
president directed Cohen to lie" is a characterization of something. What is it a
characterization of? A conversation between Trump and Cohen? When? Where? How? How was it
documented if it was documented at all? And then when the story refers to texts and emails,
from whom? Where did they come from? I mean all the things you would want to know when you're
reading that story, or frankly, editing that story were not in it.
So, it's two anonymous federal law enforcement officials characterizing something but you
don't know what they're characterizing. So, the story raised lots of questions for me about you
know what to make of this because there were no facts in there. It was just somebody's
characterization of facts that we haven't seen. Then as the day went on, you know, you have
this disconnect between the two reporters on the story. One, Anthony Cormier tells CNN that no,
they hadn't seen any documents that underlie the gist of the story. And the other reporter
Jason Leopold tells MSNBC he has seen -- "We've seen the documents."
Brian Stelter: Anthony, you said on CNN on Friday that you had not seen the documents you
described in the story. Jason Leopold said on MSNBC we've seen documents. Can you explain that
to us?
Anthony Cormier: Yeah, I can't really get into the details there but we're really at this
point, because of the calls for a leak investigation and the sort of sensitivity around that
matter, we really can't go any further at all in order not to jeopardize our sources.
MI: So, you know it's sort of, they couldn't get their story straight.
JS: One of the reasons that I really wanted to talk to you is not just because of your
reporting on Trump/Russia but because of the totality of your reporting particularly in the
post 9/11 world that we live in and your ability to tell stories that very few journalists are
able to nail down. And I've always particularly admired your work on the Valerie Plame story
and the Iraq lack of WMDs. Have you in all of your muck-raking that you've been doing, heard
anything to back up what BuzzFeed reported about Trump directing Cohen to lie?
MI: Look, I think that the Trump Tower Moscow story is a hugely significant one because it
was an effort by the Trump organization to do business in Moscow during the presidential
campaign. So, when you add into the mix the fact -- unknown to the American public at the time
-- that Trump is simultaneously trying to do a deal in Moscow that presumably would have
required on some level the Kremlin's approval, it really was a significant conflict of interest
and an important one. And I think when Michael Cohen pled guilty at the end of November of last
year to the fact that he lied to the Senate about this, that the talks went on much further
than had been previously testified the fact that he was in direct communication with somebody
in Putin's office about securing land and financing for the deal, that is a major story and
something that should not be minimized or forgotten. In fact, it needs a full accounting. But
that said, the specifics in the BuzzFeed story about directing to lie, that's on its face an
impeachable offense. That's subordination of perjury. That's telling a witness to lie to the
Congress. So, yeah.
JS: Just to share with people the specific statement issued by the Special Counsel's Office,
it was as follows: "BuzzFeed's description of specific statements to the Special Counsel's
Office and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office regarding
Michael Cohen's congressional testimony are not accurate." How do you read that?
MI: There is, I suppose, some ambiguity there because to say something is not accurate, I
mean, I and I'm sure, you and virtually every reporter has gotten pushback on stories we've
written that your story is not accurate and of course, the first thing you want to know is well
what is not accurate? Is it something minor? Is it something peripheral or does it go to the
heart of the story? But that said, the way that statement is worded I take it as going to the
heart, to the core of the story. And it's worth just taking a step back and looking at what The
Washington Post reported about this which is they got the email that Jason Leopold sends to
Peter Carr. The email says "We are going to report that Trump directed Cohen to lie." And Carr
responds "We'll decline comment." So, it makes perfect sense to me that he would pass after
receiving that first email. But apparently he did something more. He did something else. He
then sends to Leopold a copy of what Cohen actually said about this when he pled guilty in
federal court. And what Cohen said was, I lied about this in order to be consistent with Donald
Trump's messaging during the presidential campaign and out of loyalty to him. He doesn't say
anything about being told to lie.
So, at a minimum the reporters if they had not gone back and looked at what Cohen said in
federal court in the first place, having been advised that they should look at it by Mueller's
office, should have included that in the story because there is an inconsistency between what
they were reporting and what Cohen himself said in federal court when he was pleading guilty.
And so, you know, in terms of the journalistic screw-ups here I would have to include that one
as sort of basic you know, responsible reporting is you've got to look at what the public
record says about this matter and the public record was not in sync with what the BuzzFeed guys
were reporting.
JS: When major news organizations get these big big stories wrong about Trump, how does it
impact the politics of this and the potential outcome?
MI: Just as we all learned a lesson on Friday to avoid the 'if true' construction, we should
probably also avoid the 'if not true' construction, OK. At this point, I want to hear from
Michael Cohen himself. He's supposed to testify February 7th before the House Oversight
Committee. All questions on the table going to the core of the Russia story should be asked of
him. He should be directed to answer. At this point, Congress has a responsibility to get to
the facts on its own regardless of whether Robert Mueller raises an objection or not. We really
do deserve a full accounting at this point. We've had more than two years of investigations
into this now.
It is in my view, outrageous that the House and the Senate investigating committees have
done virtually everything behind closed doors. We, the public has never seen the testimony of
key players including Michael Cohen, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, all of that took place
behind closed doors. We'll see what the Democrats in the House are now going to do whether they
will step up to the plate and perform their constitutional responsibility. I was disheartened
to see that Adam Schiff right off the bat after his first week on the job pledging a new era of
transparency at the Intelligence Committee said he wanted to have Cohen behind closed doors.
This is something that the public deserves answers. Congress needs to have the answers on its
own not outsourcing its constitutional responsibilities to an executive branch official which
is what they've done here for well over a year and a half now with Robert Mueller. So, and
look, a lot of the stories that you're citing are about Michael Cohen himself.
JS: Well, okay, what about Paul Manafort visiting Assange three times in the Ecuadorian
embassy?
MI: Sure, yeah, that's -- Look, I mean, there are legitimate questions. There've been
stories that nobody else has corroborate and that's not good for us. Yeah, now that said,
there's also been a lot of really terrific reporting by people --
JS: For sure, no question.
MI: -- Across the board. So, I don't want to, you know --
JS: No, no question about that.
MI: -- This is not a news media scandal. It is first and foremost --
JS: I agree.
MI: -- A scandal about Trump and Russia. But that said yeah, there's been a lot of stories
that have gotten people all whipped up and with very little backup.
JS: Well part part of why I'm asking you this, Michael, is because one of the concerns that
I've had from the beginning with this is that I think a lot of people are, unfortunately,
willing to believe you know any dung that's thrown on the wall of Trump because it just looks
so perfect sitting there. And when major news organizations get major stories wrong, I think it
hurts the investigation not just the official investigations but the kinds of investigations
you're doing because Trump can use it as part of his narrative. Have we been groomed to think
that there's going to be this cataclysmic finding by Mueller and that the facts are going to be
much shadier? I mean do you get what I'm saying? Like doesn't this undermine the impact of the
real investigation?
MI: As for Mueller's report? I don't know. I don't think anybody does. I do think that
there's been a little too much of this sort of fetish about Mueller as though you know, he's
God and he's going to come down with the you know with the Ten Commandments from Mt. Sinai that
will answer all our questions and direct us what to do from here. You know, Mueller's job is
actually very tailored and specific, is to find violations of federal statutes and prosecute
them if he can make them hold up in court. And that's you know, kind of much narrower brief
than I think you know, most of us would want at this point. And also the Mueller report -- I'm
not even sure -- we don't know what the Mueller report is. I mean, is it going to be a detailed
accounting of everything he's discovered or is it just going to be you know, a short terse memo
saying "I've prosecuted these people and I've declined to prosecute these other people?" And
you know, then after that there's the questions of grand jury secrecy and executive privilege,
all of which could restrict what we see in any report from Bob Mueller. So, as a general sense
yes, I think we've spent too much time waiting for the magic bullet from Robert Mueller to come
and all the more reason -- I go back to my point before -- is it's Congress job to resolve all
the many questions we have about this, not Robert Mueller's job.
JS: What do you make of the multiple performances by Rudy Giuliani this past weekend and the
statements that he made specifically about BuzzFeed and Michael Cohen? And you have this other
layer about the accidental revelation by Manafort's attorneys that he had shared polling data
with Konstantin Kilimnik who worked with Manafort as a political consultant in Ukraine. What do
you make of Rudy Giuliani's position representing the Trump administration right now?
MI: Oh God knows, I mean, you know, he's all over the map. He says something one day then he
clarifies it the next day. Clarifying his comments on Meet the Press on Sunday --
RG: Throughout 2016, weren't a lot of them but there were conversations. Can't be sure of
the exact dates. But the president can remember having conversations with him about it.
Chuck Todd: Throughout 2016 --
RG: The president also remembers -- yeah, probably up to, could be up to as far as October,
November. Our answers cover until the election. So, anytime during that period they could have
talked about it. But the president's recollection of it is --
MI: In his clarification, he says he's only speaking hypothetically and not based on any
conversations with his client. Well, if he's not basing it on conversations he's had with his
client or evidence he's accumulated as the president's lawyer, then on what basis is he talking
at all and why are people having him on TV? I mean, you know, he's only there because he's the
president's lawyer and if he's not speaking from a position of knowledge about the facts then
and only riffing on his own, I mean, you know, I don't know what to make of it. But you know,
some people see some kind of you know 'crazy like a fox' strategy here maybe but you know based
on the record so far you know it just seems to me he's the befuddled guy who can't keep his
facts straight.
JS: Michael, I wanted to ask you about William Arkin leaving NBC and his open letter that he
wrote about his departure from NBC where he was basically saying that because of the
overwhelming focus on Trump/Russia, we aren't paying attention or as close of attention as we
did under Bush or Obama to basically everything else happening in the world particularly on a
national security level with wars, with drone strikes, with what's happening with the process
with North Korea, in Afghanistan, Syria. Do you share some of Bill Arkin's analysis or concerns
about this?
MI: As you just articulated them, yes. Yeah, should we be paying more attention to what's
going on in the world in terms of U.S. foreign policy, U.S. military policy, what's going on,
what our military is doing in Africa and the Middle East and Afghanistan? Absolutely. You know,
we were talking before the podcast began about drone strikes something that we were all very
heavily focused on back during the Obama years because Obama had ramped them up and you know,
what kind of oversight there was of them, what kind of accountability there was for screw ups.
You know, how many innocent civilians were being killed by our drone strikes? You know, those
were all legitimate questions then. They are legitimate questions now and you know, we should
not forget about them while we're also simultaneously dealing with what I do think is a
legitimate scandal that we need to get to the bottom of and that's the story of Trump and
Russia.
JS: Do you believe that this story ends with Trump getting indicted in any jurisdiction?
MI: [Laughs.] Look, I mean, you know what Justice Department policy is and that is you can't
indict a sitting president. And by the way, I happened to, just happened to be looking last
night at the Special Counsel regulations it very explicitly says that the Special Counsel
should adhere to all Justice Department policies and so, no, I don't think that Donald Trump is
going to be indicted certainly by a federal grand jury while he is president. I suppose it is
conceivable that a state grand jury in New York or somewhere else could indict him. But there'd
be a legal battle you know, that would go to the Supreme Court about that. So, anyway, now what
happens after he leaves office? You know, assuming he leaves at the end of 2020, he doesn't get
re-elected, then you know all bets are off and he can be indicted then. But you know, right now
we still do not have a specific criminal charge. The closest we've got are the campaign finance
violations but we still have -- in New York, on the payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen
McDougal -- but we still have not seen the specific evidence on that.
JS: Right, and none of that is Russia.
MI: And none of that is Russia, correct.
JS: All right, Michael Isikoff, thank you very much for joining us.
MI: Good to be with you.
JS: Michael Isikoff is the chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo! News. He is the
author of "Uncovering Clinton," "Hubris" and most recently "Russian Roulette."
Those are far from failures, those were successful disinformation/propaganda operations conducted with a certain goal --
remove Trump -- which demonstrate the level of intelligence agencies control of the MSM. In other words those are
parts of a bigger intelligence operation -- the color revolution against Trump led most probably by Obama and Brennan.
Now we know that Obama played an important role in Russiagate media hysteria and, most porbably, in planning and executing the
operation to entrap Flynn.
Notable quotes:
"... They are listed in reverse order, as measured by the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news, the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger they caused ..."
"... Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories. That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors" went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the same agenda and script: ..."
"... Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked Ukrainian artillery apps; they then retracted it . ..."
"... The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all "17 intelligence agencies" agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally retracted that in June, 2017: "The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies -- the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community." ..."
"... Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered "sex for favors" were totally false (and scurrilous). ..."
BuzzFeed was once notorious for
traffic-generating "listicles," but has since become an impressive outlet for deep
investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the
news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story
that, like so many others of its kind,
blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the
extremely rare step to
label its key claims "inaccurate."
But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures
in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by
the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news,
the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger
they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets
(particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most
embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is
so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end
with (dis)honorable mention status.
Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave
threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media
outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would
expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories.
That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media
clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors"
went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the
same agenda and script:
10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)
On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that
C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false:
Holy shit. Russia state propaganda (RT) "hacked" into C-SPAN feed and took over for a good
40 seconds today? In middle of live broadcast. https://t.co/pwWYFoDGDU
9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat
During the Winter (WashPost)
On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S.
electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along
with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's
notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S.
electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was
false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:
Breaking: Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont
https://t.co/LED11lL7ej
8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the
Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive
Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)
On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post
published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian
infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being
"routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of
at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation
campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."
Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that
reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge
Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig,
and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul
Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note
in memory appended to the top of the article (but
not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the
media ecosystem):
Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election, say independent
researchers https://t.co/3ETVXWw16Q
Just want to note I hadn't heard of Propornot before the WP piece and never gave
permission to them to call Bellingcat "allies" https://t.co/jQKnWzjrBR
7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a Russian Hedge Fund Under
Senate Investigation (CNN)
On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the
Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story
and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network. 6. Russia Attacked
U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave
Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)
On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC
spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia
was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic
or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea
what to make of it.
But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered
any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective
psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds"
the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean
male cricket during mating season.
An @NBCNews
exclusive: After more than a year of mystery, Russia is the main suspect in the sonic attacks
that sickened 26 U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials in Cuba. @MitchellReports has the
latest. pic.twitter.com/NEI9PJ9CpD
4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy
and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)
On November 27, 2018, the Guardian
published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed
to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,
and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators
exploded.
Seven weeks later,
no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged;
the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into
hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian
official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:
Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in
London, and visited around the time he joined Trump's campaign, the Guardian has been told.
https://t.co/Fc2BVmXipk
The Guardian reports that Paul Manafort visited Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks,
the same month that Manafort joined Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016, a meeting
that could carry vast implications for the Russia investigation https://t.co/pYawnv4MHH
3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story
Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump
Tower Meeting (CNN)
On July 27, 2018, CNN
published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that
President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two
problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that
"contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis
was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous
other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however,
to this date has refused to do either: 2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and Witness Interviews Proving Trump
Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)
BREAKING: President Trump personally directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie
to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow in order to obscure his
involvement. https://t.co/BEoMKiDypn
The allegation that the President of the United States may have suborned perjury before
our committee in an effort to curtail the investigation and cover up his business dealings
with Russia is among the most serious to date. We will do what's necessary to find out if
it's true. https://t.co/GljBAFqOjh
Listen, if Mueller does have multiple sources confirming Trump directed Cohen to lie to
Congress, then we need to know this ASAP. Mueller shouldn't end his inquiry, but it's about
time for him to show Congress his cards before it's too late for us to act. https://t.co/ekG5VSBS8G
To those trying to parse the Mueller statement: it's a straight-up denial. Maybe Buzzfeed
can prove they are right, maybe Mueller can prove them wrong. But it's an emphatic denial
https://t.co/EI1J7XLCJe
. @Isikoff :
"There were red flags about the BuzzFeed story from the get-go." Notes it was inconsistent
with Cohen's guilty plea when he said he made false statements about Trump Tower to Congress
to be "consistent" with Trump, not at his direction. pic.twitter.com/tgDg6SNPpG
We at The Post also had riffs on the story our reporters hadn't confirmed. One noted Fox
downplayed it; another said it "if true, looks to be the most damning to date for Trump." The
industry needs to think deeply on how to cover others' reporting we can't confirm
independently. https://t.co/afzG5B8LAP
Washington Post says Mueller's denial of BuzzFeed News article is aimed at the full story:
"Mueller's denial, according to people familiar with the matter, aims to make clear that none
of those statements in the story are accurate." https://t.co/ene0yqe1mK
If you're one of the people tempted to believe the self-evidently laughable claim that
there's something "vague" or unclear about Mueller's statement, or that it just seeks to
quibble with a few semantic trivialities, read this @WashPost story about this https://t.co/0io99LyATS
pic.twitter.com/ca1TwPR3Og
You can spend hours parsing the Carr statement, but given how unusual it is for any DOJ
office to issue this sort of on the record denial, let alone this office, suspect it means
the story's core contention that they have evidence Trump told Cohen to lie is fundamentally
wrong.
New York Times throws a bit of cold water on BuzzFeed's explosive -- and now seriously
challenged -- report that Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress: https://t.co/9N7MiHs7et
pic.twitter.com/7FJFT9D8fW
I can't speak to Buzzfeed's sourcing, but, for what it's worth, I declined to run with
parts of the narrative they conveyed based on a source central to the story repeatedly
disputing the idea that Trump directly issued orders of that kind.
1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to the WikiLeaks Email Archive
(CNN/MSNBC)
The morning of December 9, 2017, launched
one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so
grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a
major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and
Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public.
Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to
have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have
been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked
emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC
videos
here ).
There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally
and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks
archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before.
Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and
MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian
message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole
world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all
got the date of the email wrong.
To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong
in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete
silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple,
independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating
– and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources
who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.
Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the
internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just
what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing
is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he
awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously
is:
Knowingly soliciting or receiving anything of value from a foreign national for campaign
purposes violates the Federal Election Campaign Act. If it's worth over $2,000 then penalties
include fines & IMPRISONMENT. @DonaldJTrumpJr may be in bigly
trouble. #FridayFeeling
https://t.co/dRz6Ph17Er
CNN is leading the way in bashing BuzzFeed but it's worth remembering CNN had a
humiliation at least as big & bad: when they yelled that Trump Jr. had advanced access to
the WL archive (!): all based on a wrong date. They removed all the segments from YouTube,
but this remains: pic.twitter.com/0jiA50aIku
ABC News' Brian Ross is fired for
reporting Trump told Flynn to make contact with Russians when he was still a candidate;
in fact, Trump did that after he won.
The New York Times claimed Manafort provided
polling data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a person "close to the Kremlin"; in fact, he
provided them to Ukrainians, not Russians.
Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked
Ukrainian artillery apps;
they then retracted it .
Bloomberg and the WSJ reported Mueller subpoenaed Deustche Bank for Trump's financial
records; the NYT said
that never happened .
Rachel Maddow devoted 20 minutes at the start of her show to very melodramatically
claiming a highly sophisticated party tried to trick her by sending her a fake Top Secret
document modeled after the one published by the Intercept, and said it could only have come
from the U.S. Government (or the Intercept) since the person obtained the document before it
was published by us and thus must have had special access to it; in fact,
Maddow and NBC completely misread the metadata on the document ; the fake sent to Maddow
was created after we published the document, and was sent to her by a random member of the
public who took the document from the Intercept's site and doctored it to see if she'd fall
for an obvious scam. Maddow's entire timeline, on which her whole melodramatic conspiracy
theory rested, was fictitious.
The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all "17 intelligence
agencies" agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally
retracted that in June, 2017: "The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies --
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not
approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community."
AP claimed on February 2, 2018, that the Free Beacon commissioned the Steele Dossier;
they thereafter acknowledged that was false and
noted, instead: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was
initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until
after Democratic groups had begun funding it."
Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered
"sex for favors" were
totally false (and scurrilous).
After a Russian regional jet crashed on February 11, 2018, shortly after it took off from
Moscow, killing all 71 people aboard, Harvard Law Professor and frequent MSNBC contributor
Laurence Tribe
strongly implied Putin purposely caused the plane to go down in order to murder Sergei
Millian, a person vaguely linked to George Papadopoulos and Jared Kushner; in fact, Millian
was not on the plane nor, to date, has anyone claimed they had any evidence that Putin
ordered his own country's civilian passenger jet brought down.
We remember that in 1898, William Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, in order to increase the sales
of their daily newspapers, published false information in order to deliberately provoke a war
between the United States and the Spanish colony of Cuba. This was the beginning of "yellow
journalism" (publishing anything to make money). Today it is called "fake news".
It is not known at this time whether tycoons deliberately spread panic about Covid-19,
making this vulgar epidemic seem like the "end of the world". However, one distortion after
another, governments have become involved. Of course, it is no longer a question of selling
advertising screens by frightening people, but of dominating populations by exploiting this
fear.
... ... ...
Modern propaganda should not be limited to the publication of false news as the United
Kingdom did to convince its people to enter the First World War, but should also be used in the
same way as Germany did to convince its people to fight in the Second World War. The recipe is
always the same: to exert psychological pressure to induce subjects to voluntarily practice
acts that they know are useless, but which will lead them to lie [ 5 ]. For
example, in 2001, it was common knowledge that those accused of hijacking planes on 9/11 were
not on the passenger boarding lists. Yet, in shock, most accepted without question the inane
accusations made by FBI Director Robert Muller against "19 hijackers". Or, as is well known,
President Hussein's Iraq had only old Soviet Scud launchers with a range of up to 700
kilometers, but many Americans caulked the windows and doors of their homes to protect
themselves from the deadly gases with which the evil dictator was going to attack America. This
time, in the case of the Covid-19, it is the voluntary confinement in the home that forces the
person who accepts it to convince himself of the veracity of the threat.
@Sgt.
Joe Friday "Actually, Maddow considers herself a Serious Journalist. She "speaks truth to
power," and she'd probably be the first to tell you that. Repeatedly.
Limbaugh on the other hand, if asked to pick a word to describe his profession would
likely say "entertainer.""
While in actuality, the roles are very nearly reversed. (Nearly only because I don't find
Maddow amusing)
"The New York Times has been accused for a second time of stealing major scoops from Russian
journalists. One of those stories won the Times a Pulitzer Prize this May.
The journalists who have accused the Times of taking their work without credit also
happen to be the same liberal media crusaders against Vladimir Putin [my emphasis] that
Western correspondents at the Times and other mainstream outlets have cast as persecuted
heroes
As Yasha Levine further down the page says, the NYT takes whatever it wants from whomever has
got it, without giving anything back or acknowledging any help or assistance, if it thinks it can
get away with it because it believes that, like the Empire it serves, it is Exceptional.
Chancellor Angela Merkel that stupid? "Chancellor Angela Merkel used strong words on Wednesday condemning an "outrageous"
cyberattack by Russia's foreign intelligence service on the German Parliament, her personal
email account included. Russia, she said, was pursuing "a strategy of hybrid warfare."
Notable quotes:
"... That alleged attack happened in 2015. The attribution to Russia is as shoddy as all attributions of cyberattacks are. ..."
"... Intelligence officials had long suspected Russian operatives were behind the attack, but they took five years to collect the evidence, which was presented in a report given to Ms. Merkel's office just last week. ..."
"... This is really funny because we recently learned that the company which investigated the alleged DNC intrusion, CrowdStrike, had found no evidence , as in zero, that a Russian hacker group had targeted the DNC or that DNC emails were exfiltrated over the Internet: ..."
"... CrowdStrike, the private cyber-security firm that first accused Russia of hacking Democratic Party emails and served as a critical source for U.S. intelligence officials in the years-long Trump-Russia probe, acknowledged to Congress more than two years ago that it had no concrete evidence that Russian hackers stole emails from the Democratic National Committee's server. ..."
"... The DNC emails were most likely stolen by its local network administrator, Seth Rich , who provided them to Wikileaks before he was killed in a suspicious 'robbery' during which nothing was taken. ..."
"... The whole attribution of case of the stolen DNC emails to Russia is based on exactly nothing but intelligence rumors and CrowdStrike claims for which it had no evidence. As there is no evidence at all that the DNC was attacked by a Russian cybergroup what does that mean for the attribution of the attack on the German Bundestag to the very same group? ..."
The New York Times continues its anti-Russia campaign with a report about an old
cyberattack on German parliament which also targeted the parliament office of Chancellor Angela
Merkel.
Chancellor Angela Merkel used strong words on Wednesday condemning an "outrageous"
cyberattack by Russia's foreign intelligence service on the German Parliament, her personal
email account included. Russia, she said, was pursuing "a strategy of hybrid warfare."
But asked how Berlin intended to deal with recent revelations implicating the Russians,
Ms. Merkel was less forthcoming.
"We always reserve the right to take measures," she said in Parliament, then immediately
added, "Nevertheless, I will continue to strive for a good relationship with Russia, because
I believe that there is every reason to always continue these diplomatic efforts."
That alleged attack happened in 2015. The attribution to Russia is as shoddy as all
attributions of cyberattacks are.
Intelligence officials had long suspected Russian operatives were behind the attack, but they
took five years to collect the evidence, which was presented in a report given to Ms.
Merkel's office just last week.
Officials say the report traced the attack to the same Russian hacker group that targeted
the Democratic Party during the U.S. presidential election campaign in 2016.
This is really funny because we recently learned that the company which investigated the
alleged DNC intrusion, CrowdStrike,
had found no evidence , as in zero, that a Russian hacker group had targeted the DNC or
that DNC emails were exfiltrated over the Internet:
CrowdStrike, the private cyber-security firm that first accused Russia of hacking Democratic
Party emails and served as a critical source for U.S. intelligence officials in the
years-long Trump-Russia probe, acknowledged to Congress more than two years ago that it had
no concrete evidence that Russian hackers stole emails from the Democratic National
Committee's server.
...
[CrowdStrike President Shawn] Henry personally led the remediation and forensics analysis of
the DNC server after being warned of a breach in late April 2016; his work was paid for by
the DNC, which refused to turn over its server to the FBI. Asked for the date when alleged
Russian hackers stole data from the DNC server, Henry testified that CrowdStrike did not in
fact know if such a theft occurred at all : "We did not have concrete evidence that the data
was exfiltrated [moved electronically] from the DNC, but we have indicators that it was
exfiltrated," Henry said.
The DNC emails were most likely stolen by its local network administrator, Seth Rich , who provided
them to Wikileaks before he was killed in a suspicious 'robbery' during which nothing was
taken.
The whole attribution of case of the stolen DNC emails to Russia is based on exactly nothing
but intelligence rumors and CrowdStrike claims for which it had no evidence. As there is no
evidence at all that the DNC was attacked by a Russian cybergroup what does that mean for the
attribution of the attack on the German Bundestag to the very same group?
While the NYT also mentions that NSA actually snooped on Merkel's private phonecalls
it tries to keep the spotlight on Russia:
As such, Germany's democracy has been a target of very different kinds of Russian
intelligence operations, officials say. In December 2016, 900,000 Germans lost access to
internet and telephone services following a cyberattack traced to Russia.
That mass attack on internet home routers, which by the way happened in November 2016 not in
December, was done with the Mirai
worm :
More than 900,000 customers of German ISP Deutsche Telekom (DT) were knocked offline this
week after their Internet routers got infected by a new variant of a computer worm known as
Mirai. The malware wriggled inside the routers via a newly discovered vulnerability in a
feature that allows ISPs to remotely upgrade the firmware on the devices. But the new Mirai
malware turns that feature off once it infests a device, complicating DT's cleanup and
restoration efforts.
...
This new variant of Mirai builds on malware
source code released at the end of September . That leak came a little more a week after
a botnet based on Mirai was used in a record-sized
attack that caused KrebsOnSecurity to go offline for several
days . Since then, dozens of new Mirai botnets have emerged , all
competing for a finite pool of vulnerable IoT systems that can be infected.
The attack has not been attributed to Russia but to a British man who offered attacks as a
service.
He was arrested in February 2017:
A 29-year-old man has been arrested at Luton airport by the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA)
in connection with a massive internet attack that disrupted telephone, television and
internet services in Germany last November. As regular readers of We Live Security will
recall, over 900,000 Deutsche Telekom broadband customers were knocked offline last November
as an alleged attempt was made to hijack their routers into a destructive botnet.
...
The NCA arrested the British man under a European Arrest Warrant issued by Germany's Federal
Criminal Police Office (BKA) who have described the attack as a threat to Germany's national
communication infrastructure.
According to German prosecutors, the British man allegedly offered to sell access to the
botnet on the computer underground. Agencies are planning to extradite the man to Germany,
where – if convicted – he could face up to ten years imprisonment.
During the trial, Daniel admitted that he never intended for the routers to cease
functioning. He only wanted to silently control them so he can use them as part of a DDoS
botnet to increase his botnet firepower. As discussed earlier he also confessed being paid by
competitors to takedown Lonestar.
In Aug 2017 Daniel was
extradited back to the UK to face extortion charges after attempting to blackmail Lloyds
and Barclays banks. According to press reports, he asked the Lloyds to pay about
£75,000 in bitcoins for the attack to be called off.
The Mirai attack is widely known to have been attributed to Kaye. The case has been
discussed
at length . IT security journalist Brian Krebs, who's site was also attacked by a Mirai bot
net, has written several
stories about it. It was never 'traced to Russia' or attributed it to anyone else but Daniel
Kaye.
Besides that Kennhold writes of "Russia's foreign intelligence service, known as the
G.R.U.". The real Russian foreign intelligence services is the SVR. The military intelligence
agency of Russia was once called GRU but has been renamed to GU.
The New York Times just made up the claim about Russia hacking in Germany from
absolutely nothing. The whole piece was published without even the most basic research and fact
checking.
It seems that for the Times anything can be blamed on Russia completely independent
of what the actually facts say.
Posted by b on May 14, 2020 at 14:38 UTC |
Permalink
Along the same lines, it always bothered me that among all the (mostly contrived)
arguments about who might have been responsible for the alleged "hacking" of DNC as well as
Clinton's emails, we never heard mentioned one single time the one third party that we
absolutely KNOW had intercepted and collected all of those emails--the NSA! Never a peep
about how US intelligence services could be tempted to mischief when in possession of
everyone's sensitive, personal information.
The "Fancy Bear" group (also knowns as advanced persistent threat 28) that is claimed to be
behind the hacks is likely little more than the collection of hacking tools shared on the
open and hidden parts of RuNet or Russian-speaking Internet. Many of these Russian-speaking
hackers are
actually Ukrainians .
Some of the Russian hackers also worked for the FSB, like the members of Shaltai
Boltai group that were later arrested for treason. George Eliason claims Shaltai Boltai
actually worked for Ukrainians. For a short version of the story read this:
Cyberanalyst George Eliason has written some intriguing blogs recently claiming that the
"Fancy Bear" which hacked the DNC server in mid-2016 was in fact a branch of Ukrainian
intelligence linked to the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike. I invite you to have a go at
one of his recent essays...
Patrick
Armstrong , May 14 2020 15:27 utc |
3 Wow! You've done it again. I was just writing my Sitrep and thinking what an amazing
coincidence it is that, just as the Russian pipelaying ship arrived to finish Nord Stream,
Merkel is told that them nasty Russkies are doing nasty things. I come here and you've
already solved it. Yet another scoop. Congratulations.
The NYT has removed that sentence about the attack on internet/phone access:
"Correction: May 14, 2020
An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed responsibility for a 2016
cyberattack in which 900,000 Germans lost access to internet and telephone services. The
attack was carried out by a British citizen, not Russia. The article also misstated when the
attack took place. It was in November, not December. The sentence has been removed from the
article. "
From this we can learn that anything can be blamed by MSM, completely independent of what the
facts are. It is not limited to allegations related to Russia or China, but any and all
claims by MSM that have no direct reference to provable fact.
great coverage b... thank you... facts don't matter.. what matters is taking down any
positive image of russia, or better - putting up a constantly negative one... of this the
intel and usa msm are consistent... the sad reality is a lot of people will believe this
bullshit too...
i was just reading paul robinsons blog last night -
#DEMOCRACY RIP AND THE NARCISSISM OF RUSSIAGATE .. even paul is starting to getting
pissed off on the insanity of the media towards russia which is rare from what i have read
from him!
@ 3 patrick armstrong.. keep up the good work!! thanks for your work..
There is already a correction made to the DT attack - someone reads MofA! Shame they don't
get more of their new interpretation form here.
Whole piece reads here like it started as a Merkel gets close to Russia piece, shown
around to colleagues and politicians for feedback, and a ton of fake "why Merkel actually
hates the Russians" nonsense was added in.
After all pretty much everyone has tapped Merkel's phone by now.
CNN's latest installment of its 'Facts and Fears' town hall on the coronavirus
pandemic will feature teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg as one of its experts. What
expertise Thunberg can offer on the virus is a mystery.
Under the subtitle The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, Thomas Rid helps remind us how we reached this
morass, one with antecedents reaching back to Czarist Russia and the Bolshevik revolution. To be sure, the US can use all the help
it can get as it navigates the current election cycle and the lies, rumours and
uncertainty that
shroud the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Rid was born in West Germany amid the cold war. The Berlin Wall fell when he was a teenager. He is now a professor at Johns Hopkins.
So what are “active measures”? Previously, Rid
testified they were “semi-covert or covert intelligence operations to shape an adversary’s political decisions”.
“Almost always,” he explained, “active measures conceal or falsify the source.”
The special counsel’s report framed them more narrowly as “operations conducted by Russian security services aimed at influencing
the course of international affairs”. Add in technology and hacking, and an image of modern asymmetric warfare emerges.
Rid travels back to the early years of communist
Russia, recounting the efforts of the government to discredit the remnants of the ancien régime and squash attempts to restore
the monarchy. The Cheka, the secret police, hatched a plot that involved forged correspondence, a fictitious organization, a fake
counter-revolutionary council and a government-approved travelogue.
Words and narratives morphed into readily transportable munitions. The émigré community was declawed and the multi-pronged combination
deemed “wildly successful”. The project also “served as an inspiration for future active measures”. A template had been set.
Fast forward to the cold war and the aftermath of the US supreme court’s landmark school desegregation case. The tension between
reality and the text and aspirations of the Declaration of Independence was in the open again. Lunch-counter sit-ins and demands
for the vote filled newspapers and TV screens. The fault lines were plainly visible – and the Soviet Union pounced.
In 1960, the KGB embarked on a “series of race-baiting disinformation operations” that included mailing Ku Klux Klan leaflets
to African and Asian delegations to the United Nations on the eve of a debate on colonialism. At the same time, Russian “operators
posed as an African American organization agitating against the KKK”.
More than a half-century later, Russia ran an updated version of the play. Twitter came to host
the fake accounts of both “John Davis”, ostensibly a gun-toting Texas Christian and family man, and @BlacktoLive”, along with
hundreds of others.
The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian troll factory, organized pro-Confederate flag rallies.
As detailed by Robert Mueller, the IRA also claimed that the civil war was not “about slavery” and instead was “all about money”,
a false trope that continues to gain resonance among Trump supporters and proponents of the “liberate the states” movement. According
to Brian
Westrate, treasurer of the Wisconsin Republican party, “the Confederacy was more about states’ rights than slavery.”
Depicting West Germany as Hitler’s heir was another aim. At the time, “some aging former Nazis still held positions of influence”,
Rid writes. In the late 1960s, “encouraging ‘anti-German tendencies in the West’ was very much a priority”.
In 1964, with Russian assistance, Czech intelligence mounted
Operation Neptun, sinking
Nazi wartime
documents to the bottom of the ominous sounding Black Lake, near the German border. The cache was then “discovered” – media pandemonium
ensued. Four years later the mastermind of the scheme, Ladislav Bittman, defected to the US.
Prior to 2016, Russia’s most notable active measure using the US as a foil was the lie that Aids was “made in the USA”. In retaliation
for US reports of Soviet use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan, the KGB unfurled Operation Denver, a multi-platformed campaign that
falsely claimed “Aids
was an American biological weapon developed at Fort Detrick, Maryland”. Central to the effort was the earlier publication of
an anonymous letter with a New York byline by an Indian newspaper. The forged missive claimed “Aids may invade India: mystery disease
caused by US lab experiments.”
To achieve their goals, the pro-NATO propagandists often exploit the so-called
'Russian threat' concept; however, this merely provides a cover for their aggressive
actions to silence and discredit opposing opinions and sources of information they deem to
be counter to their own interests.
The reason behind their activity is simple – they must justify their existence
in reports to their sponsors. They are constantly and fiercely working to engineer
'successful actions' regardless of their validity. In order to continue securing funding to
expose and defeat an imaginary enemy, they must create imaginary victories, irrespective of
reality.
Uh, the author obviously knows better so why promote this narrative? These operatives
are not going after "wrong", or "invalid" targets to justify their funding. They're
specifically hired to do what they're doing now.
MSM now run under control of intelligence agencies and use State Department of Foreign Office talking points, much like in the USSR, where this role was played by communist Party
Notable quotes:
"... Part of the problem is that newspapers have morphed into viewspapers. The distinction between reporting and comment has been blurred. Back in the 70s, leading publications only had one comment piece and an editorial. Their pages were packed with news items, with stories reported factually and without a 'bent'. ..."
"... Today, comment has taken over, but while there's no shortage of 'opinion', most of it is saying very much the same thing. I think we first saw this phenomenon in the lead up to the Iraq War. I was one of the very few mainstream commentators who ridiculed the claim that Iraq had WMDs. It was obvious to me that if the leaders of the UK and US genuinely believed Saddam possessed these terrible weapons, they wouldn't be planning to do the one thing which would provoke the Iraqi leader into using them, i.e. invade his country. Yet the Great WMDs Hoax, which a child of five could see through, was promoted by nearly all 'serious' journalists. The most vociferous media cheerleaders for the invasion faced no professional blowback, on the contrary, their careers have flourished. ..."
Trust in the written press in Britain is the lowest in 33 European countries. That's hardly surprising seeing how so many journalists
have become mere stenographers for, or lackeys of, the Establishment power elites. Just when you think the reputation of the UK media
couldn't sink any lower, it just did. An annual survey undertaken by EurobarometerEU, across 33 countries, puts the UK at the bottom,
with a net trust of -60. Yes that's right, minus 60 . It's a fall of 24 points since last year. Just 15 percent of Brits trust
their print media. But it's not the only survey showing a similar trend.
The attached graphic about trust in the written press, published last week, has not been widely reported in Britain. This is
a huge annual survey by @EurobarometerEU
across 33 countries. It's the ninth year out of the past ten that the UK has been last. We have a problem.
pic.twitter.com/8eYoQR7XZw
Newspapers came in rock bottom (with a rating of -50) in a YouGov poll on Sky where the question was asked, "How much do you
trust the following on Coronavirus?" And in case you think it's only the Sun we're talking about here, another poll showed that
distrust of so-called 'upmarket' papers was running at 52 percent.
How did we get here? I've got a collection of old newspapers and magazines dating back several decades. Part of the problem
is that newspapers have morphed into viewspapers. The distinction between reporting and comment has been blurred. Back in the 70s,
leading publications only had one comment piece and an editorial. Their pages were packed with news items, with stories reported
factually and without a 'bent'.
Today, comment has taken over, but while there's no shortage of 'opinion', most of it is saying very much the same thing.
I think we first saw this phenomenon in the lead up to the Iraq War. I was one of the very few mainstream commentators who ridiculed
the claim that Iraq had WMDs. It was obvious to me that if the leaders of the UK and US genuinely believed Saddam possessed these
terrible weapons, they wouldn't be planning to do the one thing which would provoke the Iraqi leader into using them, i.e. invade
his country. Yet the Great WMDs Hoax, which a child of five could see through, was promoted by nearly all 'serious' journalists.
The most vociferous media cheerleaders for the invasion faced no professional blowback, on the contrary, their careers have flourished.
As bad as the Iraq War propaganda was, things have got even worse since then. Obnoxious gatekeepers have ensured that the parameters
of what can and can't be said in print have narrowed still further.
In the mid-Noughties, I was writing regularly in the UK mainstream print media. So too was John Pilger. Our articles were popular
with readers, but not with the gatekeepers. When I
wrote a balanced, alternative
view on Belarus for the New Statesman in 2011, I came under fierce gatekeeper attack.
I forgot that on Belarus and many other issues, only one point of view was allowed. Silly me.
Only one thing can save UK print press
Today, the lack of diversity of opinion is one of the reasons why newspaper sales have crashed – (sales have
slumped by two-thirds in the past 20 years), and conversely why 'alternative' sites, and media outlets where a wide range of
opinions ARE heard have done so well. Who wants to pay money for a paper when the political views published in it range from pro-war
centrist-left, to pro-war centrist-right?
If there was a single newspaper or magazine column which examined forensically whether Labour really did have an anti-Semitism
'crisis' under Jeremy Corbyn, I must have missed it.
And apart from Mary Dejevsky in the i paper, where was the journalism examining the many inconsistencies in the official narrative
of the Skripal case? Why has 'Private Eye', which bills itself as 'anti-Establishment', not covered the ongoing Philip Cross Wikipedia
editing scandal ?
I'm sure the old 'Eye' of Richard Ingrams and Bron Waugh would have if Wikipedia had been around then.
And what about the Covid-19 coverage? Has any journalist asked the very simple question: if the virus is as bad as the government
says it is, and a domestic lockdown is necessary to stop its spread, why have flights continued to come into the country (including
from virus hotspots) unchecked?
Don't get me wrong, there are still some good columnists out there, but sadly you can count them on one hand.
The only thing that can save UK print media from total collapse is if there is a large-scale clear-out of the faux-left/neocon-dominated
commentariat and their replacement by writers who actually address the issues that readers are interested in. Newspapers used to
be published for their readers, now it seems most are published for people who write for other newspapers – and to enable 'Inside
the Tenters' to congratulate each other for their 'brilliant' articles on Twitter.
The smug, mutual back-slapping nonsense, seen at its worst at journalist 'award' ceremonies, has gone on for too long. We need
more old-style chain-smoking journos, not frightened of telling truth to power – and less smoke and mirrors.
Trust in British print media can be restored, but only if we go back to the future.
If you like this story, share it with a friend!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those
of RT.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.
He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66 is a journalist,
writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world
affairs @NeilClark66 6 May, 2020 17:39
Get short URL
"... I tend to doubt that Chinese leaders have any overwhelming commitment to the truth, and the reasons for their greater veracity are probably practical ones. American news and entertainment completely dominate the global media landscape and they face no significant domestic rival. So China recognizes that it is vastly outmatched in any propaganda conflict, and as the far weaker party must necessarily try to stick closer to the truth, lest its lies be immediately exposed. Meanwhile, America's overwhelming control over global information may inspire considerable hubris, with the government sometimes promoting the most outrageous and ridiculous falsehoods in the confident belief that a supportive American media will cover for any mistakes. ..."
"... These considerations should be kept in mind as we attempt to sift the accounts of our often unreliable and dishonest media in hopes of extracting the true circumstances of the current coronavirus epidemic. Unlike careful historical studies, we are working in real-time and our analysis is greatly hindered by the ongoing fog of war, so that any conclusions are necessarily very preliminary ones. But given the high stakes, such an attempt seems warranted. ..."
"... Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough 4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts. ..."
"... It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires. ..."
Even more serious charges are also being raised, with senior government officials informing
the media that they suspect that the Covid-19 virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory in
Wuhan and then carelessly released upon a vulnerable world. Such "conspiracy theories" were
once confined to the extreme political fringe of the Internet, but they are now found in the
respectable pages of my morning New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Whether plausible or not, such accusations carry the gravest international implications, and
there are growing demands that China financially compensate our country for its trillions of
dollars in economic losses. A new global Cold War along both political and economic lines may
soon be at hand.
I have no personal expertise in biowarfare technology, nor access to the secret American
intelligence reports that seem to have been taken seriously by our most elite national
newspapers. But I do think that a careful exploration of previous Sino-American clashes over
the last couple of decades may provide some useful insight into the relative credibility of
those two governments as well as that of our own media.
During the late 1990s, America seemed to reach the peak of its global power and prosperity,
basking in the aftermath of its historic victory in the long Cold War, while ordinary Americans
greatly benefited from the record-long economic expansion of that decade. A huge Tech Boom was
at its height, and Islamic terrorism seemed a vague and distant thing, almost entirely confined
to Hollywood movies. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the possibility of large scale war
seemed to have dissipated so political leaders boasted of the "peace dividend" that citizens
were starting to enjoy as our huge military forces, built up over nearly a half-century, were
downsized amid sweeping cuts in the bloated defense budget. America was finally returning to a
regular peacetime economy, with the benefits apparent to everyone.
At the time, I was overwhelmingly focused on domestic political issues, so I only paid
slight attention to our one small military operation of that period, the 1999 NATO air war
against Serbia, intended to safeguard the Kosovo Albanians from ethnic cleansing and massacre,
a Clinton Administration project that I fully endorsed.
Although our limited bombing campaign seemed quite successful and soon forced the Serbs to
the bargaining table, the short war did include one very embarrassing mishap. The use of old
maps had led to a targeting error that caused one of our smart bombs to accidentally strike the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three members of its delegation and wounding dozens more.
The Chinese were outraged by this incident, and their propaganda organs began claiming that the
attack had been deliberate, a reckless accusation that obviously made no logical sense.
In those days I watched the PBS Newshour every night, and was I shocked to see their
U.S. Ambassador raise those absurd charges with host Jim Lehrer, whose disbelief matched my
own. But when I considered that the Chinese government was still stubbornly denying the reality
of its massacre of the protesting students in Tiananmen Square a decade earlier, I concluded
that unreasonable behavior by PRC officials was only to be expected. Indeed, there was even
some speculation that China was cynically milking the unfortunate accident for domestic
reasons, hoping to stoke the sort of jingoist anti-Americanism among the Chinese people that
would finally help bind the social wounds of that 1989 outrage.
Such at least were my thoughts on that matter more than two decades ago. But in the years
that followed, my understanding of the world and of many pivotal events of modern history
underwent the sweeping transformations that I have described in my American Pravda series . And some
of my 1990s assumptions were among them.
Consider, for example, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which every June 4th still evokes an
annual wave of harsh condemnations in the news and opinion pages of our leading national
newspapers. I had never originally doubted those facts, but a year or two ago I happened to
come across a short article by journalist Jay Matthews entitled "The Myth of
Tiananmen" that completely upended that apparent reality.
According to Matthews the infamous massacre had likely never happened, but was merely a
media artifact produced by confused Western reporters and dishonest propaganda, a mistaken
belief that had quickly become embedded in our standard media storyline, endlessly repeated by
so many ignorant journalists that they all eventually believed it to be true. Instead, as near
as could be determined, the protesting students had all left Tiananmen Square peacefully, just
as the Chinese government had always maintained. Indeed, leading newspapers such as the New
York Times and the Washington Post had occasionally acknowledged these facts over
the years, but usually buried those scanty admissions so deep in their stories that few ever
noticed. Meanwhile, the bulk of the mainstream media had fallen for an apparent hoax.
Matthews himself had been the Beijing Bureau Chief of the Washington Post ,
personally covering the protests at the time, and his article appeared in the Columbia
Journalism Review , our most prestigious venue for media criticism. This authoritative
analysis containing such explosive conclusions was first published in 1998, and I find it
difficult to believe that many reporters or editors covering China have remained ignorant of
this information, yet the impact has been absolutely nil. For over twenty years virtually every
mainstream media account I have read has continued to promote the Tiananmen Square Massacre
Hoax, usually implicitly but sometimes explicitly.
Even more remarkable were the discoveries I made regarding our supposedly accidental bombing
of the Chinese Embassy in 1999. Not long after launching this website, I added former Asia
Times contributor Peter Lee as a columnist, incorporating his China Matters blogsite
archives that stretched back for a decade. He soon published a 7,000 word
article on the Belgrade Embassy bombing, representing a compilation of material already
contained in a
half-dozen previous pieces he'd written on that subject from 2007 onward. To my
considerable surprise, he provided a great deal of persuasive evidence that the American attack
on the Chinese embassy had indeed been deliberate, just as China had always claimed.
According to Lee, Beijing had allowed its embassy to be used as a site for secure radio
transmission facilities by the Serbian military, whose own communications network was a primary
target of NATO airstrikes. Meanwhile, Serbian air defenses had shot down an advanced American
F-117A fighter, whose top-secret stealth technology was a crucial U.S. military secret.
Portions of that enormously valuable wreckage were carefully gathered by the grateful Serbs,
who delivered it to the Chinese for temporary storage at their embassy prior to transport back
home. This vital technological acquisition later allowed China to deploy its own J20 stealth
fighter in early 2011, many years sooner than American military analysts had believed
possible.
Based upon this analysis, Lee argued that the Chinese embassy was attacked in order to
destroy the Serbian retransmission facilities located there, while punishing the Chinese for
allowing such use. There were also widespread rumors in China that another motive had been an
unsuccessful attempt to destroy the stealth debris stored within. Later Congressional testimony
revealed
that the among all the hundreds of NATO airstrikes, the attack on the Chinese embassy was the
only one directly ordered by the CIA, a highly-suspicious detail.
I was only slightly familiar with Lee's work, and under normal circumstances I would have
been very cautious in accepting his remarkable claims against the contrary position universally
held by all our own elite media outlets. But the sources he cited completely shifted that
balance.
Although the American media dominates the English-language world, many British publications
also possess a strong global reputation, and since they are often much less in thrall to our
own national security state, they have sometimes covered important stories that were ignored
here. And in this case, the Sunday Observer published a remarkable expose in October
1999, citing several NATO military and intelligence sources who fully confirmed the deliberate
nature of the American bombing of the Chinese embassy, with a US colonel even reportedly
boasting that their smartbomb had hit the exact room intended.
This important story was immediately summarized in the Guardian ,
a sister publication, and also covered by the rival Times of London and many of the
world's other most prestigious publications, but encountered an absolute wall of silence in our
own country. Such a bizarre divergence on a story of global strategic importance -- a
deliberate and deadly US attack against Chinese diplomatic territory -- drew the attention of
FAIR, a leading American media watchdog group, which published
an initial critique and
a subsequent follow-up . These two pieces totaled some 3,000 words, and effectively
summarized both the overwhelming evidence of the facts and also the heavy international
coverage, while reporting the weak excuses made by top American editors to explain their
continuing silence. Based upon these articles, I consider the matter settled.
Few Americans remember our 1999 attack upon the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and if not for
the annual waving of a bloody June 4th flag by our ignorant and disingenuous media, the
"Tiananmen Square Massacre" would also have long since faded from memory. Neither of these
events has much direct importance today, at least for our own citizens. But the broader media
implications of these examples do seem quite significant.
These incidents represented two of the most serious flashpoints between the Chinese and
American governments during the last thirty-odd years. In both cases the claims of the Chinese
government were entirely correct, although they were denied by our own top political leaders
and dismissed or ridiculed by virtually our entire mainstream media. Moreover, within a few
months or a year the true facts became known to many journalists, even being reported in fully
respectable venues. But that reality was still completely ignored and suppressed for decades,
so that today almost no American whose information comes from our regular media would even be
aware of it. Indeed, since many younger journalists draw their knowledge of the world from
these same elite media sources, I suspect that many of them have never learned what their
predecessors knew but dared not mention.
Most leading Chinese media outlets are owned or controlled by the Chinese government, and
they tend to broadly follow the government line. Leading American media outlets have a
corporate ownership structure and often boast of their fierce independence; but on many crucial
matters, I think the actual reality is not so very different from that in China.
I tend to doubt that Chinese leaders have any overwhelming commitment to the truth, and the
reasons for their greater veracity are probably practical ones. American news and entertainment
completely dominate the global media landscape and they face no significant domestic rival. So
China recognizes that it is vastly outmatched in any propaganda conflict, and as the far weaker
party must necessarily try to stick closer to the truth, lest its lies be immediately exposed.
Meanwhile, America's overwhelming control over global information may inspire considerable
hubris, with the government sometimes promoting the most outrageous and ridiculous falsehoods
in the confident belief that a supportive American media will cover for any mistakes.
These considerations should be kept in mind as we attempt to sift the accounts of our often
unreliable and dishonest media in hopes of extracting the true circumstances of the current
coronavirus epidemic. Unlike careful historical studies, we are working in real-time and our
analysis is greatly hindered by the ongoing fog of war, so that any conclusions are necessarily
very preliminary ones. But given the high stakes, such an attempt seems warranted.
When my morning newspapers first began mentioning the appearance of a mysterious new illness
in China during mid-January, I paid little attention, absorbed as I was in the aftermath of our
sudden assassination of Iran's top military leader and the dangerous possibility of a yet
another Middle Eastern war. But the reports persisted and grew, with deaths occurring and
evidence growing that the viral disease could be transmitted between humans. China's early
conventional efforts seemed unsuccessful in halting the spread of the disease.
Then on Jan. 23rd and after only 17 deaths, the Chinese government took the astonishing step
of locking down and quarantining the entire 11 million inhabitants of the city of Wuhan, a
story that drew worldwide attention. They soon extended this policy to the 60 million Chinese
of Hubei province, and not longer afterward shut down their entire national economy and
confined 700 million Chinese to their homes, a public health measure probably a thousand times
larger than anything previously undertaken in human history. So either the China's leadership
had suddenly gone insane, or they regarded this new virus as an absolutely deadly national
threat, one that needed to be controlled at any possible cost.
Given these dramatic Chinese actions and the international headlines that they generated,
the current accusations by Trump Administration officials that China had attempted to minimize
or conceal the serious nature of the disease outbreak is so ludicrous as to defy rationality.
In any event, the record shows that on December 31st, the Chinese had already alerted the World
Health Organization to the strange new illness, and Chinese scientists published the entire
genome of the virus on Jan. 12th, allowing diagnostic tests to be produced worldwide.
Unlike other nations, China had received no advance warning of the nature or existence of
the deadly new disease, and therefore faced unique obstacles. But their government implemented
public health control measures unprecedented in the history of the world and managed to almost
completely eradicate the disease with merely the loss of a few thousand lives. Meanwhile, many
other Western countries such as the US, Italy, Spain, France, and Britain dawdled for months
and ignored the potential threat, and have now suffered well over 100,000 dead as a
consequence, with the toll still rapidly mounting. For any of these nations or their media
organs to criticize China for its ineffectiveness or slow response represents an absolute
inversion of reality.
Some governments took full advantage of the early warning and scientific information
provided by China. Although nearby East Asian nations such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and
Singapore had been at greatest risk and were among the first infected, their competent and
energetic responses allowed them to almost completely suppress any major outbreak, and they
have suffered minimal fatalities. But America and several European countries avoiding adopting
these same early measures such as widespread testing, quarantine, and contact-tracing, and have
paid a terrible price for their insouciance.
A few weeks ago British Prime Minister Boris Johnson boldly declared that his own disease
strategy for Britain was based upon rapidly achieving "herd immunity" -- essentially
encouraging the bulk of his citizens to become infected -- then quickly backed away after his
desperate advisors recognized that the result might entail a million or more British
deaths.
By any reasonable measure, the response to this global health crisis by China and most East
Asian countries has been absolutely exemplary, while that of many Western countries has been
equally disastrous. Maintaining reasonable public health has been a basic function of
governments since the days of the city-states of Sumeria, and the sheer and total incompetence
of America and most of its European vassals has been breathtaking. If the Western media
attempts to pretend otherwise, it will permanently forfeit whatever remaining international
credibility it still possesses.
I do not think these particular facts are much disputed except among the most blinkered
partisans, and the Trump Administration probably recognizes the hopelessness of arguing
otherwise. This probably explains its recent shift towards a far more explosive and
controversial narrative, namely claiming that Covid-19 may have been the product of Chinese
research into deadly viruses at a Wuhan laboratory, which suggests that the blood of hundreds
of thousands or millions of victims around the world will be on Chinese hands. Dramatic
accusations backed by overwhelming international media power may deeply resonate across the
globe.
News reports appearing in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have been reasonably consistent. Senior Trump Administration
officials have pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading Chinese biolab, as the
possible source of the infection, with the deadly virus having been accidentally released,
subsequently spreading first throughout China and later worldwide. Trump himself has publicly
voiced similar suspicions, as did Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo in a
FoxNews
interview. Private lawsuits against China in the multi-trillion-dollar range have already
been filed by
rightwing activists and Republican senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham have raised similar
governmental demands.
I obviously have no personal access to the classified intelligence reports that have been
the basis of these charges by Trump, Pompeo, and other top administration officials. But in
reading these recent news accounts, I noticed something rather odd.
Back in January, few Americans were paying much attention to the early reports of an unusual
disease outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which was hardly a household name. Instead,
overwhelming political attention was focused on the battle over Trump's impeachment and the
aftermath of our dangerous military confrontation with Iran. But towards the end of that month,
I discovered that the fringes of the Internet were awash with claims that the disease was
caused by a Chinese bioweapon accidentally released from that same Wuhan laboratory, with
former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and ZeroHedge , a popular right-wing
conspiracy-website, playing leading roles in advancing the theory. Indeed, the stories became
so widespread in those ideological circles that Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading Republican Neocon,
began promoting them on Twitter and FoxNews, thereby provoking an
article in the NYT on those "fringe conspiracy theories."
I suspect that it may be more than purely coincidental that the biowarfare theories which
erupted in such concerted fashion on small political websites and Social Media accounts back in
January so closely match those now publicly advocated by top Trump Administration officials and
supposedly based upon our most secure intelligence sources. Perhaps a few intrepid
citizen-activists managed to replicate the findings of our multi-billion-dollar intelligence
apparatus, and did so in days while the latter required weeks or months. But a more likely
scenario is that the wave of January speculation was driven by private leaks and "guidance"
provided by exactly the same elements that today are very publicly leveling similar charges in
the elite media. Initially promoting controversial theories in less mainstream outlets has long
been a fairly standard intelligence practice.
Regardless of the origins of the idea, does it seem plausible that the coronavirus outbreak
might have originated as an accidental leak from that Chinese laboratory? I am not privy to the
security procedures of Chinese government facilities, but applying a little common sense may
shed some light on that question.
Although the coronavirus is only moderately lethal, apparently having a fatality rate of 1%
or less, it is extremely contagious, including during an extended pre-symptomatic period and
also among asymptomatic carriers. Thus, portions of the US and Europe are now suffering heavy
casualties, while the policies adopted to control the spread have devastated their national
economies. Although the virus is unlikely to kill more than a small sliver of our population,
we have seen to our dismay how a major outbreak can so easily wreck our entire economic
life.
During January, the journalists reporting on China's mushrooming health crisis regularly
emphasized that the mysterious new viral outbreak had occurred at the worst possible place and
time, appearing in the major transport hub of Wuhan just prior to the Lunar New Year holiday,
when hundreds of millions of Chinese would normally travel to their distant family homes for
the celebration, thereby potentially spreading the disease to all parts of the country and
producing a permanent, uncontrollable epidemic. The Chinese government avoided that grim fate
by the unprecedented decision to shut down its entire national economy and confine 700 million
Chinese to their own homes for many weeks. But the outcome seems to have been a very near
thing, and if Wuhan had remained open for just a few days longer, China might easily have
suffered long-term economic and social devastation.
The timing of an accidental laboratory release would obviously be entirely random. Yet the
outbreak seems to have begun during the precise period of time most likely to damage China, the
worst possible ten-day or perhaps thirty-day window. As I noted in
January, I saw no solid evidence that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, the
timing of the release seemed very unlikely to have been accidental.
If the virus was released intentionally, the context and motive for such a biowarfare attack
against China could not be more obvious. Although our disingenuous media continues to pretend
otherwise, the size of China's economy surpassed that of our own several years ago, and has
continued to grow much more rapidly. Chinese companies have also taken the lead in several
crucial technologies, with Huawei becoming the world's leading telecommunications equipment
manufacturer and dominating the important 5G market. China's sweeping Belt and Road Initiative
has threatened to reorient global trade around an interconnected Eurasian landmass, greatly
diminishing the leverage of America's own control over the seas. I have closely followed China
for over forty years, and the trend-lines have never been more apparent. Back in 2012, I
published an article bearing the provocative title "China's Rise, America's Fall?" and
since then I have seen no reason to reassess my verdict.
Which superpower is more threatened by its "extractive elites"?
RON UNZ • THE
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, APRIL 17, 2012 • 7,000 WORDS
For three generations following the end of World War II, America had stood as the world's
supreme economic and technological power, while the collapse of the Soviet Union thirty years
ago left us as the sole remaining superpower, facing no conceivable military rival. A growing
sense that we were rapidly losing that unchallenged position had certainly inspired the
anti-China rhetoric of many senior figures in the Trump Administration, who launched a major
trade war soon after coming into office. The increasing misery and growing impoverishment of
large sections of the American population naturally left these voters searching for a
convenient scapegoat, and the prosperous, rising Chinese made a perfect target.
Despite America's growing economic conflict with China over the last couple of years, I had
never considered the possibility that matters might take a military turn. The Chinese had long
ago deployed advanced intermediate range missiles that many believed could easily sink our
carriers in the region, and they had also generally improved their conventional military
deterrent. Moreover, China was on quite good terms with Russia, which itself had been the
target of intense American hostility for several years; and Russia's new suite of revolutionary
hypersonic missiles had drastically reduced any American strategic advantage. Thus, a
conventional war against China seemed an absolutely hopeless undertaking, while China's
outstanding businessmen and engineers were steadily gaining ground against America's decaying
and heavily-financialized economic system.
Under these difficult circumstances, an American biowarfare attack against China might have
seemed the only remaining card to play in hopes of maintaining American supremacy. Plausible
deniability would minimize the risk of any direct Chinese retaliation, and if successful, the
terrible blow inflicted to China's economy would set it back for many years, perhaps even
destabilizing its social and political system. Using alternative media to immediately promote
theories that the coronavirus outbreak was the result of a leak from a Chinese biowarfare lab
was a natural means of preempting any later Chinese accusations along similar lines, thereby
allowing America to win the international propaganda war before China had even begun to
play.
A decision by elements of our national security establishment to wage biological warfare in
hopes of maintaining American world power would certainly have been an extremely reckless act,
but extreme recklessness has become a regular aspect of American behavior since 2001,
especially under the Trump Administration. Just a year earlier we had kidnapped the
daughter of Huawei's founder and chairman, who also served as CFO and ranked as one of China's
most top executives, while at the beginning of January we suddenly assassinated Iran's top
military leader.
These were the thoughts that entered my mind during the last week of January once I
discovered the widely circulating theories suggesting that China's massive disease epidemic had
been the self-inflicted consequence of its own biowarfare research. I saw no solid evidence
that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, China was surely the innocent victim of
the attack, presumably carried out by elements of the American national security
establishment.
Soon afterward, someone brought to my attention a very long article by an American ex-pat
living in China who called himself "Metallicman" and held a wide range of eccentric and
implausible beliefs. I have long recognized that flawed individuals can often serve as the
vessels of important information otherwise unavailable, and this case constituted a perfect
example. His piece denounced the outbreak as a likely American biowarfare attack, and provided
a great wealth of factual material I had not previously considered. Since he authorized
republication elsewhere I did so, and
his 15,000 word analysis , although somewhat raw and unpolished, began attracting an
enormous amount of readership on our website, probably being one of the very first
English-language pieces to suggest that the mysterious new disease was an American bioweapon.
Many of his arguments appeared doubtful to me or have been obviated by later developments, but
several seemed quite telling.
He pointed out that during the previous two years, the Chinese economy had already suffered
serious blows from other mysterious new diseases, although these had targeted farm animals
rather than people. During 2018 a new Avian Flu virus had swept the country, eliminating large
portions of China's poultry industry, and during 2019 the Swine Flu viral epidemic had
devastated China's pig farms, destroying 40% of the nation's primary domestic source of meat,
with widespread claims that the latter disease was being spread by mysterious small drones. My
morning newspapers had hardly ignored these important business stories, noting
that the sudden collapse of much of China's domestic food production might prove a huge boon to
American farm exports at the height of our trade conflict, but I had never considered the
obvious implications. So for three years in a row, China had been severely impacted by strange
new viral diseases, though only the most recent had been deadly to humans. This evidence was
merely circumstantial, but the pattern seemed highly suspicious.
The writer also noted that shortly before the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, that city had
hosted 300 visiting American military officers, who came to participate in the 2019 Military World
Games , an absolutely remarkable coincidence of timing. As
I pointed out at the time, how would Americans react if 300 Chinese military officers had
paid an extended visit to Chicago, and soon afterward a mysterious and deadly epidemic had
suddenly broken out in that city? Once again, the evidence was merely circumstantial but
certainly raised dark suspicions.
Scientific investigation of the coronavirus had already pointed to its origins in a bat
virus, leading to widespread media speculation that bats sold as food in the Wuhan open markets
had been the original disease vector. Meanwhile, the orchestrated waves of anti-China
accusations had emphasized Chinese laboratory research on that same viral source. But we soon
published
a lengthy article by investigative journalist Whitney Webb providing copious evidence of
America's own enormous biowarfare research efforts, which had similarly focused for years on
bat viruses. Webb was then associated with MintPress News , but that publication had
strangely declined to publish her important piece, perhaps skittish about the grave suspicions
it directed towards the US government on so momentous an issue. So without the benefit of our
platform, her major contribution to the public debate might have attracted relatively little
readership.
Around the same time, I noted another
extremely strange coincidence that failed to attract any interest from our somnolent national
media. Although his name had meant nothing to me, in late January my morning newspapers carried
major stories on the
sudden arrest of Prof. Charles Lieber, one of Harvard University's top scientists and Chairman
of its Chemistry Department, sometimes characterized as a potential future Nobel Laureate.
The circumstances of that case seemed utterly bizarre to me. Like numerous other prominent
American academics, Lieber had had decades of close research ties with China, holding joint
appointments and receiving substantial funding for his work. But now he was accused of
financial reporting violations in the disclosure portions of his government grant applications
-- the most obscure sort of offense -- and on the basis of those accusations, he was seized by
the FBI in an early-morning raid on his suburban Lexington home and dragged off in shackles,
potentially facing years of federal imprisonment.
Such government action against an academic seemed almost without precedent. During the
height of the Cold War, numerous American scientists and technicians were rightfully accused of
having stolen our nuclear weapons secrets for delivery to Stalin, yet I had never heard of any
of them treated in so harsh a manner, let alone a scholar of Prof. Lieber's stature, who was
merely charged with technical disclosure violations. Indeed, this incident recalled accounts of
NKVD raids during the Soviet purges of the 1930s.
Although Lieber was described as a chemistry professor, a few seconds of Googling revealed
that some of his most important work had been in virology, including technology for the
detection of viruses. So a massive and deadly new viral epidemic had broken out in China and
almost simultaneously, a top American scholar with close Chinese ties and expertise in viruses
was suddenly arrested by the federal government, yet no one in the media expressed any
curiosity at a possible connection between these two events.
I think we can safely assume that Lieber's arrest by the FBI had been prompted by the
concurrent coronavirus epidemic, but anything more is mere speculation. Those now accusing
China of having created the coronavirus might surely suggest that our intelligence agencies
discovered that the Harvard professor had been personally involved with that deadly research.
But I think a far more likely possibility is that Lieber began to wonder whether the epidemic
in China might not be the result of an American biowarfare attack, and was perhaps a little too
free in voicing his suspicions, thereby drawing the wrath of our national security
establishment. Inflicting such extremely harsh treatment upon a top Harvard scientist would
greatly intimidate all of his lesser colleagues elsewhere, who would surely now think twice
before broaching certain controversial theories to any journalist.
By the end of January, our webzine had published a dozen articles and posts on the
coronavirus outbreak, then added many more by the middle of February. These pieces totaled tens
of thousands of words and attracted a half million words of comments, probably representing the
primary English-language source for a particular perspective on the deadly epidemic, with this
material eventually drawing many hundreds of thousands of pageviews. A few weeks later, the
Chinese government began gingerly raising the possibility that the coronavirus may have been
brought to Wuhan by the 300 American military officers visiting that city, and was
fiercely attacked by the Trump Administration for spreading anti-American propaganda. But I
strongly suspect that the Chinese had gotten that idea from our own publication.
As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China's own borders, another development
occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly
where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February
Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its
political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire
Iranian parliament soon infected and at least
a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were
quite
senior . Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred
Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political
elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they
died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else
in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran's top military commander
on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became
infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence.
Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
Biological warfare is a highly technical subject, and those possessing such expertise are
unlikely to candidly report their classified research activities in the pages of our major
newspapers, perhaps even less so after Prof. Lieber was dragged off to prison in chains. My own
knowledge is nil. But in mid-March I came across several extremely long and detailed comments
on the coronavirus outbreak that had been posted on a small website by an individual calling
himself "OldMicrobiologist" and who claimed to be a retired forty-year veteran of American
biodefense. The style and details of his material struck me as quite credible, and after a
little further investigation I concluded that there was a high likelihood his background was
exactly as he had described. I made arrangements to republish his comments in the form of
a 3,400 word
article , which soon attracted a great deal of traffic and 80,000 words of further
comments.
Although the writer emphasized the lack of any hard evidence, he said that his experience
led him to strongly suspect that the coronavirus outbreak was indeed an American biowarfare
attack against China, probably carried out by agents brought into that country under cover of
the Military Games held at Wuhan in late October, the sort of sabotage operation our
intelligence agencies had sometimes undertaken elsewhere. One important point he made was that
high lethality was often counter-productive in a bioweapon since debilitating or hospitalizing
large numbers of individuals may impose far greater economic costs on a country than a
biological agent which simply inflicts an equal number of deaths. In his words "a high
communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy," suggesting that the
apparent characteristics of the coronavirus were close to optimal in this regard. Those so
interested should read his analysis and judge for themselves his possible credibility and
persuasiveness.
One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of
the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and orchestrated
campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms to identify the
cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more
plausible hypothesis that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received
virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to take shape as I gradually located
and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often
anonymously authored. So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active
information war. The outbreak of the disease and the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major
propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack had occurred,
but I do think it tends to support such a theory.
When considering the hypothesis of an American biowarfare attack, certain natural objections
come to mind. The major drawback to biological warfare has always been the obvious fact that
the self-replicating agents employed will not respect national borders, thus raising the
serious risk that the disease might eventually return to the land of its origin and inflict
substantial casualties. For this reason, it seems very doubtful that any rational and
half-competent American leadership would have unleashed the coronavirus against China.
But as we see absolutely demonstrated in our daily news headlines, America's current
government is grotesquely and manifestly incompetent , more incompetent than one could
almost possibly imagine, with tens of thousands of Americans having now already paid with their
lives for such extreme incompetence. Rationality and competence are obviously nowhere to be
found among the Deep State Neocons that President Donald Trump has appointed to so many crucial
positions throughout our national security apparatus.
Moreover, the extremely lackadaisical notion that a massive coronavirus outbreak in China
would never spread back to America might have seemed plausible to individuals who carelessly
assumed that past historical analogies would continue to apply. As
I wrote a few weeks ago:
Reasonable people have suggested that if the coronavirus was a bioweapon deployed by
elements of the American national security apparatus against China (and Iran), it's difficult
to imagine why the they didn't assume it would naturally leak back in the US and start a huge
pandemic here, as is currently happening.
The most obvious answer is that they were stupid and incompetent, but here's another point
to consider
In late 2002 there was the outbreak of SARS in China, a related virus but that was far
more deadly and somewhat different in other characteristics. The virus killed hundreds of
Chinese and spread into a few other countries before it was controlled and stamped out. The
impact on the US and Europe was negligible, with just a small scattering of cases and only a
death or two.
So if American biowarfare analysts were considering a coronavirus attack against China,
isn't it quite possible they would have said to themselves that since SARS never
significantly leaked back into the US or Europe, we'd similarly remain insulated from the
coronavirus? Obviously, such an analysis was foolish and mistaken, but would it have seemed
so implausible at the time?
As some must have surely noticed, I have deliberately avoided investigating any of the
scientific details of the coronavirus. In principle, an objective and accurate analysis of the
characteristics and structure of the virus might help suggest whether it was entirely natural
or rather the product of a research laboratory, and in the latter case, perhaps whether the
likely source was China, America, or some third country.
But we are dealing with a cataclysmic world event and those questions obviously have
enormous political ramifications, so the entire subject is shrouded by a thick fog of complex
propaganda, with numerous conflicting claims being advanced by interested parties. I have no
background in microbiology let alone biological warfare, so I would be hopelessly adrift in
evaluating such conflicting scientific and technical claims. I suspect that this is equally
true of the overwhelming majority of other observers as well, although committed partisans are
loathe to admit that fact, and will eagerly seize upon any scientific argument that supports
their preferred position while rejecting those that contradict it.
Therefore, by necessity, my own focus is on evidence that can at least be understood by
every layman, if not necessarily always accepted. And I believe that the simple juxtaposition
of several recent disclosures in the mainstream media leads to a rather telling conclusion.
For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early
missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably
encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.
As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather
detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents.
Provocatively entitled "China Didn't Warn Public of Likely
Pandemic for 6 Key Days" , the piece was widely distributed, running
in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the
Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan.
14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the
number of infections greatly multiplied.
Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough
4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of
those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor
disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware
of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death
occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that
same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious,
sources within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones
asleep at the switch. Earlier this month,
an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back
as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency
had produced a report revealing than an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the
Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our
government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the
story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report,
while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a
few days later,
Israeli television revealed that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a
report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to
independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its
several government sources.
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the
deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government
itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I
think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of
future fires.
Back in February, before a single American had died from the disease,
I wrote my own overview of the possible course of events, and I would still stand by it
today:
Consider a particularly ironic outcome of this situation, not particularly likely but
certainly possible
Everyone knows that America's ruling elites are criminal, crazy, and also extremely
incompetent.
So perhaps the coronavirus outbreak was indeed a deliberate biowarfare attack against
China, hitting that nation just before Lunar New Year, the worst possible time to produce a
permanent nationwide pandemic. However, the PRC responded with remarkable speed and
efficiency, implementing by far the largest quarantine in human history, and the deadly
disease now seems to be in decline there.
Meanwhile, the disease naturally leaks back into the US, and despite all the advance
warning, our totally incompetent government mismanages the situation, producing a huge
national health disaster, and the collapse of our economy and decrepit political system.
As I said, not particularly likely, but certainly a very fitting end to the American
Empire
"... While this elite Pulitzer jury praised the New York Times for "at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin's regime," it is not exactly clear what that "risk" is supposed to entail – because the major US newspaper appears to have stolen at least part of its reporting from Russian journalists . ..."
"... On May 4, journalist Roman Badanin published a Facebook post accusing the Times of ripping off a story he had released months before without credit. Badanin is the founder and editor-in-chief of the liberal anti-Putin news website Proekt , known as The Project in English. ..."
"... This report is eerily similar to a report published by the New York Times eight months later, in November , titled " How Russia Meddles Abroad for Profit : Cash, Trolls and a Cult Leader." This story, which was filed in Madagascar, does not once link to or credit Proekt's original reporting . ..."
"... Another anti-Putin Russian news website, Meduza, published an article on May 7 drawing attention to these allegations, titled " 'Fuck the Pulitzer -- I just want a hyperlink' : Russian journalists say 'The New York Times' should have acknowledged their investigative work in the newspaper's award-winning reports about the Putin regime's 'predations.'" ..."
"... Meduza interviewed Badanin, who said the New York Times "report about Madagascar from November 2019 repeats all the main and even secondary conclusions from our reporting about Madagascar and Africa generally between March and April last year." ..."
"... Badanin was also given a Stanford John S. Knight international fellowship in journalism. Stanford University has established itself as an outpost for Russian pro-Western liberals, and its journalist fellowship program provides institutional support for dissidents in countries targeted by Washington for regime change. ..."
"... The Times even featured Badanin prominently in the header image of the story -- just two years before the same newspaper would go on to rip off his reporting. ..."
The New York Times has been accused for a second time of stealing major scoops from Russian
journalists . One of those stories won the Times a Pulitzer Prize this May.
The journalists who have accused the Times of taking their work without credit also happen
to be the same liberal media crusaders against Vladimir Putin that Western correspondents at
the Times and other mainstream outlets have cast as persecuted heroes. The Pulitzer Prize Board is comprised of a who's who
of media aristocrats and Ivy League bigwigs. Given the elite backgrounds of the judges, it is
hardly a surprise that they rewarded reporting reinforcing the narrative of the new US Cold War
against official enemies like Russia and China .
Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times correspondent who has since become a critic of US
foreign policy, noted that the three finalists in the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting
"were one story about how evil Russia is and two about how evil China is. These choices
encourage reporters to write stories that reinforce rather than question Washington's
foreign-policy narrative."
The finalists nominated in this category were Reuters and the New York Times for two
separate sets of stories.
The US newspaper of record ended up winning the 2020 award in international
reporting , for what the Pulitzer jury described as "a set of enthralling stories, reported
at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin's regime."
The 3 finalists in the #PulitzerPrize2020
"international reporting" category were one story about how evil #Russia is and two
about how evil #China is. These
choices encourage reporters to write stories that reinforce rather than question Washington's
foreign-policy narative.
The Times was nominated again as a finalist for what the jury called its "gripping accounts
that disclosed China's top-secret efforts to repress millions of Muslims through a system of
labor camps, brutality and surveillance."
The staff of Reuters was selected as the third finalist for its reporting in support of
anti-China
protesters in Hong
Kong . (The photography staff of Reuters ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize in breaking
news photography for the same coverage.)
Among the five members of the Pulitzer jury
who selected these finalists was Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the neoliberal
magazine The Atlantic and a former volunteer in the Israeli army who worked as a guard at a prison camp
where Palestinians who rose up in the First Intifada were interned.
Joining Goldberg on the jury was Susan Chira, a former New York Times editor.
While this elite Pulitzer jury praised the New York Times for "at great risk, exposing the
predations of Vladimir Putin's regime," it is not exactly clear what that "risk" is supposed to
entail – because the major US newspaper appears to have stolen at least part of its
reporting from Russian journalists .
On May 4, journalist Roman Badanin published a Facebook
post accusing the Times of ripping off a story he had released months before without
credit. Badanin is the founder and editor-in-chief of the liberal anti-Putin news website
Proekt , known as The Project in
English.
"I have no illusions about the real role of Russian journalism in the world, but I have to
note: the two The New York Times's investigations, for which this honored newspaper won the
Pulitzer prize yesterday, repeat the findings of The Project's articles published a few months
before," Badanin wrote on Facebook.
"I would also like to note that the winners did not put a single link to the English version
of our article, even when, for example, 8 months after The Project, they told about the
activities of Eugene Prigozhin's emissaries in Madagascar," he added.
Badanin linked to an article he published, both in Russian and English, back in March 2019
titled " Master and Chef : How
Evgeny Prigozhin led the Russian offensive in Africa." The story details how the businessman
Evgenу Prigozhin, who is sanctioned by the US government, has been promoting business
opportunities in Africa. The piece focuses specifically on Madagascar, where Russia also has a
military agreement.
This report is eerily similar to a report published by the New York Times eight months
later, in November , titled " How Russia
Meddles Abroad for Profit : Cash, Trolls and a Cult Leader." This story, which was filed in
Madagascar, does not once link to or credit Proekt's original reporting .
Another anti-Putin Russian news website, Meduza, published an article on May 7 drawing
attention to these allegations, titled " 'Fuck the
Pulitzer -- I just want a hyperlink' : Russian journalists say 'The New York Times' should
have acknowledged their investigative work in the newspaper's award-winning reports about the
Putin regime's 'predations.'"
Meduza interviewed Badanin, who said the New York Times "report about Madagascar from
November 2019 repeats all the main and even secondary conclusions from our reporting about
Madagascar and Africa generally between March and April last year."
While Badanin did not outright accuse the Times of plagiarism, he was frustrated that
"nowhere in the story did they acknowledge that we'd already reported on this topic," and said
it was either a "professional issue" or an "ethical problem."
A New York Times spokesperson denied that Proekt's reporting was used in any way. And the
Times reporter who authored this report from Madagascar, Michael Schwirtz , responded
dismissively to the accusations in a Twitter thread full of sarcastic quips.
Another
anti-Putin Russian activist accuses the New York Times of lifting his reporting
Michael Schwirtz authored another New York Times article in December that was cited by the
Pulitzer jury for the 2020 prize. This piece, "How a Poisoning
in Bulgaria Exposed Russian Assassins in Europe," is also suspiciously similar to reporting
published before by yet another anti-Putin website, called The Insider .
The Insider is edited by the Western-backed, diehard anti-Putin activist Roman Dobrokhotov.
In response to Schwirtz's Twitter thread, Dobrohotov angrily asked why The Insider's reports
were not credited as well. Schwirtz denied having used information from the previous
stories.
Schwirtz's Twitter thread tagged four Russian accounts: Proekt, The Insider, Dobrokhotov,
and Yasha Levine, the last of whom is an occasional contributor to The Grayzone and the author of " Surveillance Valley ."
Time to learn the hard truth: The New York Times -- like the Empire it represents --
doesn't give a fuck about you. It'll take whatever it wants, give nothing in return, and
suffer no consequences. And who'll believe you Russians anyway? https://t.co/V1YtZ7K6OB
"Time to learn the hard truth: The New York Times -- like the Empire it represents --
doesn't give a fuck about you. It'll take whatever it wants, give nothing in return, and
suffer no consequences. And who'll believe you Russians anyway?"
"The reverence with which liberal Russian journalists have treated the New York Times has
always been baffling to me," Levine continued. "But that's what you get when you're a colonial
subject like Russia. You fetishize the master. That reverence is starting to wear off, but it's
still there."
New York Times was also accused of stealing Russian journalists' reporting
back in 2017
This is not even the first time that the US newspaper of record has been accused of stealing
reporting from Russian journalists.
Back in 2017, the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for its
reports on "Vladimir Putin's efforts to project Russia's power abroad."
At the time, journalists from the anti-Putin website Meduza accused the Times of ripping off
their reporting. The website Global Voices highlighted the controversy, in an article titled
"Russian Journalists Say One of
NYT's Pulitzer-Winning Stories Was Stolen ."
Meduza reported Daniil Turovsky accused New York Times Moscow correspondent Andrew E. Kramer
of lifting his reporting. Kramer actually took the time to respond in a Facebook comment,
acknowledging that his report was based on the Russian journalist's.
"Daniil, I spoke with you while preparing this article and explained that I intended to
follow in the footsteps of your fine work, that I would credit Meduza, as I did, and thanked
you for your help," Kramer said.
This did not satisfy Meduza, which also reminded readers in its latest 2020 article that the
Times had ripped off its 2017 reporting.
The NYT times has been honored with a Pulitzer Prize for "exposing the predations of
Vladimir Putin's regime" in 2019, but several top investigative journalists in Russia say the
U.S. newspaper ignored their groundbreaking work in this area -- again. https://t.co/R4WZdqHDp4
The Grayzone has also experienced this kind of shameless journalistic theft. In March 2019,
the New York Times released a report acknowledging that the so-called "humanitarian aid" convoy
that the US government tried to ram across the Venezuelan border in a February coup attempt had
been set on
fire not by government forces, but rather Washington-backed right-wing opposition
hooligans.
At the time of this February 23 putsch attempt, the Times had initially joined US
politicians like Senator Marco Rubio and the majority of the corporate media in blaming
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. But The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, who was
reporting in Venezuela, published a report
showing that all of the available evidence pointed to the opposition being responsible.
When the Times finally admitted this fact weeks later, it made no mention whatsoever of
Blumenthal's reporting.
Glenn Greenwald was the only high-profile journalist to credit Blumenthal and The
Grayzone.
New York Times had ironically heroized these Russian journalists before
stealing their reporting
Further compounding this staggering hypocrisy is the fact that the New York Times has in
fact published numerous articles lionizing these anti-Putin Russian journalists, while
simultaneously ripping off their work.
Proekt founder and editor Roman Badanin is not some kind of crypto pro-Kremlin activist
– far from it. He has spent years working within mainstream outlets, and was previously
the editor-in-chief of the decidedly anti-Putin Russian edition of Forbes magazine.
Badanin does friendly interviews with US-based neoconservative think tanks like the
Free Russia Foundation , a
right-wing anti-Putin lobbying group that appointed regime-changer Michael Weiss as its
director for special investigations.
In an
interview conducted by Valeria Jegisman , a neoconservative
anti-Russian activist who worked as a spokesperson for the government of Estonia and now works
at the US government's propaganda arm Voice of America, group accused the Kremlin of spreading
false information, claiming "Russia will continue its disinformation tactics."
Badanin also called for "the West" to "support independent media projects with non-profit
funding," stating clearly: "I think that what the West can do is to continue to support
independent media in the most transparent and clear way, and to stop being afraid of the
million tricks that the Russian authorities come up with to force the West to abandon these
investments."
The Russian journalist's pro-Western perspective has been rewarded. Badanin was honored by
the European Press Prize , a
program backed by Western governments and the top corporate media outlets in Europe,
particularly The Guardian and Reuters.
Badanin was also given a Stanford John S. Knight international fellowship in journalism.
Stanford University has established itself as an outpost for Russian pro-Western liberals, and
its journalist fellowship program provides institutional support for dissidents in countries
targeted by Washington for regime change.
Badanin's extensive links to Western regime-change institutions should not come as a
surprise to the New York Times; it has in fact honored him in numerous articles.
In 2017, the Times published an entire article framed around Badanin. Reporter Jim Rutenberg
explained, "I wanted to better understand President Trump's America So I
went to Russia ."
In Moscow, Rutenberg met with Badanin at the headquarters of the anti-Putin station TV Rain,
which he described as a "warehouse complex here, populated by young people with beards,
tattoos, piercings and colored hair. (Brooklyn hipster imperialism knows no bounds.)"
While praising Badanin and TV Rain, the Times also noted that the channel published a poll
suggesting that the Soviet Union "should have abandoned Leningrad to the Nazis to save
lives."
The Times even featured Badanin prominently in the header image of the story -- just two
years before the same newspaper would go on to rip off his reporting.
The New York Times also reported on Roman Badanin in
2016 and
2011 . It is abundantly clear the newspaper knew who he was.
The Gray Lady's willingness to snatch Badanin's reporting shows how little respect
newspapers like the New York Times actually have for the anti-Putin journalists they claim to
lionize . For the jet-setting correspondents of Western corporate media outlets, liberal
Russian reporters are just tools to advance their own ambitions.
"... The foundational accusation of Russiagate was, and remains, charges that Russian President Putin ordered the hacking of DNC e-mails and their public dissemination through WikiLeaks in order to benefit Donald Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and that Trump and/or his associates colluded with the Kremlin in this "attack on American democracy." As no actual evidence for these allegations has been produced after nearly a year and a half of media and government investigations, we are left with Russiagate without Russia. ..."
"... This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even McCarthy's search for "Communist" connections. It would suggest, for example, that scores of American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise. ..."
"... Russiagate began sometime prior to June 2016, not after the presidential election in November, as is often said, as an anti-Trump political project. ..."
"... Leaving aside possible financial improprieties on the part of General Flynn, his persecution and subsequent prosecution is highly indicative. Flynn pled guilty to having lied to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, on behalf of the incoming Trump administration, discussions that unavoidably included some references, however vague, to sanctions imposed on Russia by President Obama in December 2016, just before leaving office. ..."
"... Those sanctions were highly unusual-last-minute, unprecedented in their seizure of Russian property in the United States, and including a reckless veiled threat of unspecified cyber attacks on Russia. ..."
"... Finally, and similarly, Cohen points out, there is the ongoing effort by the political-media establishment to drive Secretary of State Tillerson from office and replace him with a fully neocon, anti-Russian, anti-détente head of the State Department. ..."
Cohen offers the following general observations, which form the basis of the discussion:
The foundational accusation of Russiagate was, and remains, charges that Russian President Putin ordered the hacking of DNC
e-mails and their public dissemination through WikiLeaks in order to benefit Donald Trump and undermine Hillary Clinton in the 2016
presidential election, and that Trump and/or his associates colluded with the Kremlin in this "attack on American democracy." As
no actual evidence for these allegations has been produced after nearly a year and a half of media and government investigations,
we are left with Russiagate without Russia. (An apt formulation perhaps first coined in an e-mail exchange by Nation writer
James Carden.) Special counsel Mueller has produced four indictments: against Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's short-lived national-security
adviser, and George Papadopolous, a lowly and inconsequential Trump "adviser," for lying to the FBI; and against Paul Manafort and
his partner Rick Gates for financial improprieties. None of these charges has anything to do with improper collusion with Russia,
except for the wrongful insinuations against Flynn. Instead, the several investigations, desperate to find actual evidence of collusion,
have spread to "contacts with Russia"-political, financial, social, etc.-on the part of a growing number of people, often going back
many years before anyone imagined Trump as a presidential candidate. The resulting implication is that these "contacts" were criminal
or potentially so.
This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even McCarthy's search for "Communist" connections.
It would suggest, for example, that scores of American corporations doing business in Russia today are engaged in criminal enterprise.
More to the point, advisers to US policy-makers and even media commentators on Russia must have many and various contacts with Russia
if they are to understand anything about the dynamics of Kremlin policy-making. Cohen himself, to take an individual example, was
an adviser to two (unsuccessful) presidential campaigns, which considered his wide-ranging and longstanding "contacts" with Russia
to be an important credential, as did the one sitting president he advised. To suggest that such contacts are in any way criminal
is to slur hundreds of reputations and to leave US policy-makers with advisers laden with ideology and no actual expertise. It is
also to suggest that any quest for better relations with Russia, or détente, is somehow suspicious, illegitimate, or impossible,
as expressed recently by Andrew Weiss in The Wall Street Journal and by The Washington Post, in an editorial. This is one reason
Cohen, in a previous Batchelor broadcast and commentary, argued that Russiagate and its promoters have become the gravest threat
to American national security.
Russiagate began sometime prior to June 2016, not after the presidential election in November, as is often said, as an anti-Trump
political project. (Exactly why, how, and by whom remain unclear, and herein lies the real significance of the largely bogus
"Dossier" and the still murky role of top US intel officials in the creation of that document.) That said, Cohen continues, the mainstream
American media have been largely responsible for inflating, perpetuating, and sustaining the sham Russiagate as the real political
crisis it has become, arguably the greatest in modern American presidential and thus institutional political history. The media have
done this by increasingly betraying their own professed standards of verified news reporting and balanced coverage, even resorting
to tacit forms of censorship by systematically excluding dissenting reporting and opinions. (For inventories of recent examples,
see Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept and Joe Lauria at Consortium News. Anyone interested in exposures of such truly "fake news"
should visit these two sites regularly, the latter the product of the inestimable veteran journalist Robert Parry.) Still worse,
this mainstream malpractice has spread to some alternative-media publications once prized for their journalistic standards, where
expressed disdain for "evidence" and "proof" in favor of allegations without any actual facts can sometimes be found. Nor are these
practices merely the ordinary occasional mishaps of professional journalism. As Greenwald points out, all of the now retracted stories,
whether by print media or cable television, were zealous promotions of Russiagate and virulently anti-Trump. They, too, are examples
of Russiagate without Russia.
Leaving aside possible financial improprieties on the part of General Flynn, his persecution and subsequent prosecution is
highly indicative. Flynn pled guilty to having lied to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak,
on behalf of the incoming Trump administration, discussions that unavoidably included some references, however vague, to sanctions
imposed on Russia by President Obama in December 2016, just before leaving office.
Those sanctions were highly unusual-last-minute, unprecedented in their seizure of Russian property in the United States,
and including a reckless veiled threat of unspecified cyber attacks on Russia. They gave the impression that Obama wanted to
make even more difficult Trump's professed goal of improving relations with Moscow.
Still more, Obama's specified reason was not Russian behavior in Ukraine or Syria, as is commonly thought, but Russiagate-that
is, Putin's "attack on American democracy," which Obama's intel chiefs had evidently persuaded him was an entirely authentic allegation.
(Or which Obama, who regarded Trump's victory over his designated successor, Hillary Clinton, as a personal rebuff, was eager to
believe.) But Flynn's discussions with the Russian ambassador-as well as other Trump representatives' efforts to open "back-channel"
communications with Moscow–were anything but a crime. As Cohen pointed out in another previous commentary, there were so many precedents
of such overtures on behalf of presidents-elect, it was considered a normal, even necessary practice, if only to ask Moscow not to
make relations worse before the new president had a chance to review the relationship. When Henry Kissinger did this on behalf of
President-elect Nixon, his boss instructed him to keep the communication entirely confidential, not to inform any other members of
the incoming administration. Presumably Flynn was similarly secretive, thereby misinforming Vice President Pence and finding himself
trapped-or possibly entrapped-between loyalty to his president and an FBI agent. Flynn no doubt would have been especially guarded
with a representative of the FBI, knowing as he did the role of Obama's Intel bosses in Russiagate prior to the election and which
had escalated after Trump's surprise victory. In any event, to the extent that Flynn encouraged Moscow not to reply in kind immediately
to Obama's highly provocative sanctions, he performed a service to US national security, not a crime. And, assuming that Flynn was
acting on the instructions of his president-elect, so did Trump. Still more, if Flynn "colluded" in any way, it was with Israel,
not Russia, having been asked by that government to dissuade countries from voting for an impending anti-Israel UN resolution.
Finally, and similarly, Cohen points out, there is the ongoing effort by the political-media establishment to drive Secretary
of State Tillerson from office and replace him with a fully neocon, anti-Russian, anti-détente head of the State Department.
Tillerson was an admirable appointee by Trump-widely experienced in world affairs, a tested negotiator, a mature and practical-minded
man. Originally, his role as the CEO of Exxon Mobil who had negotiated and enacted an immensely profitable and strategically important
energy-extraction deal with the Kremlin earned him the slur of being "Putin's pal." This preposterous allegation has since given
way to charges that he is slowly restructuring, and trimming, the long bloated and mostly inept State Department, as indeed he should
do. Numerous former diplomats closely associated with Hillary Clinton have raced to influential op-ed pages to denounce Tillerson's
undermining of this purportedly glorious frontline institution of American national security. Many news reports, commentaries, and
editorials have been in the same vein. But who can recall, Cohen asks, a major diplomatic triumph by the State Department or a secretary
of state in recent years? The answer might be the Obama administration's multinational agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear-weapons
potential, but that was due no less to Russia's president and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which provided essential guarantees to
the sides involved. Forgotten, meanwhile, are the more than 50 career State Department officials who publicly protested-in the spirit
of DOD-Obama's rare attempt to cooperate with Moscow in Syria. Call it by what it was: the sabotaging of a president by his own State
Department. In this spirit, there are a flurry of leaked stories that Tillerson will soon resign or be ousted. Meanwhile, however,
he carries on. The ever-looming menace of Russiagate compels him to issue wildly exaggerated indictments of Russian behavior while,
at the same time, calling for a "productive new relationship" with Moscow, in which he clearly believes. (And which, if left unencumbered,
he might achieve.) Evidently, he has established a "productive" working relationship with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov,
the two of them having just announced North Korea's readiness to engage in negotiations with the United States and other governments
involved in the current crisis.
Tillerson's fate, Cohen concludes, will tell us much about the number-one foreign-policy question confronting America: cooperation
or escalating conflict with the other nuclear superpower, a détente-like diminishing of the new Cold War or the growing risks that
it will become hot war. Politics and policy should never be over-personalized; larger factors are always involved. But in these unprecedented
times, Tillerson may be the last man standing who represents the possibility of some kind of détente. Apart, that is, from President
Trump himself, loathe him or not. Or to put the issue differently: Will Russiagate continue to gravely endanger American national
security?
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University.
A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book, War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate, is available in
paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now in their seventh year,
are available at www.thenation.com.
It is interesting that Tucker Carlson started his program, last night, by railing against
news media that does not investigate issues, especially pertaining to Covid-19 he then
launched into a hypocritical tirade against China using unnamed government sources and unseen
government documents, as the source of Covid-19 malfeasance in reporting the disease, on
China's part. Carlson did this without one media investigation of the veracity of the US
government reports.
Carlson has turned into a hypocritical asshole.
This is because Tucker has always been a Sinophobe instead of a Russophobe.
Be that as it may, he is a hypocrite. Carlson pisses and moans about what lying, corrupt
bastards the intelligence agencies are when they attack the Trump administration, Roger
Stone, Gen. Flynn yet is ready to believe anything those same intelligence agencies say that
is derogatory toward China even though there is no evidence provided.
"... The effect of this information overload has been to disorientate the great majority of us who lack the time, the knowledge and the analytical skills to sift through it all and make sense of the world around us. It is hard to discriminate when there is so much information -- good and bad alike -- to digest. ..."
"... Nonetheless, we have got a sense from these online debates, reinforced by events in the non-virtual world, that our politicians do not always tell the truth, that money -- rather than the public interest -- sometimes wins out in decision-making processes, and that our elites may be little better equipped than us -- aside from their expensive educations -- to run our societies. ..."
"... One is to allow the information overload to continue, or even escalate. There is an argument to be made that the more possible truths we are presented with, the more powerless we feel and the more willing we are to defer to those most vocal in claiming authority. Confused and hopeless, we will look to father figures, to the strongmen of old, to those who have cultivated an aura of decisiveness and fearlessness, to those who look like down-to-earth mavericks and rebels. ..."
"... This approach will throw up more Donald Trumps, Boris Johnsons and Jair Bolsonaros. And these men, while charming us with their supposed lack of orthodoxy, will still, of course, be exceptionally accommodating to the most powerful corporate interests -- the military-industrial complex -- that really run the show. ..."
"... The other option, which has already been road-tested under the rubric of "fake news", will be to treat us, the public, like irresponsible children, who need a firm, guiding hand. The technocrats and professionals will try to re-establish their authority as though the last two decades never occurred, as though we never saw through their hypocrisy and lies. ..."
Debates like the 5G one have not emerged in a vacuum. They come at a moment of unprecedented
information dissemination that derives from a decade of rapid growth in social media. We are
the first societies to have access to data and information that was once the preserve of
monarchs, state officials and advisers, and in more recent times a few select journalists.
Now rogue academics, rogue journalists, rogue former officials -- anyone, in fact -- can go
online and discover a myriad of things that until recently no one outside a small establishment
circle was ever supposed to understand. If you know where to look, you can even find some of
this stuff on Wikipedia (see, for example, Operation Timber Sycamore ).
The effect of this information overload has been to disorientate the great majority of
us who lack the time, the knowledge and the analytical skills to sift through it all and make
sense of the world around us. It is hard to discriminate when there is so much information --
good and bad alike -- to digest.
Nonetheless, we have got a sense from these online debates, reinforced by events in the
non-virtual world, that our politicians do not always tell the truth, that money -- rather than
the public interest -- sometimes wins out in decision-making processes, and that our elites may
be little better equipped than us -- aside from their expensive educations -- to run our
societies.
Two decades of lies
There has been a handful of staging posts over the past two decades to our current era of
the Great Disillusionment. They include:
the
lack of transparency in the US government's
investigation into the events surrounding 9/11 (obscured by a parallel online controversy
about what took place that day); the
documented lies told about the reasons for launching a disastrous and illegal war of
aggression against Iraq in 2003 that unleashed regional chaos, waves of destabilising migration
into Europe and new, exceptionally brutal forms of political Islam; the astronomical bailouts
after the 2008 crash of bankers whose criminal activities nearly
bankrupted the global economy (but who were never held to account) and instituted more than
a decade of austerity measures that had to be paid for by the public; the refusal by western
governments and global institutions to take any
leadership on tackling climate change , as not only the science but the weather itself has
made the urgency of that emergency clear, because it would mean taking on their corporate
sponsors; and now the criminal failures of our governments to prepare
for, and respond properly to, the Covid-19 pandemic, despite many years of warnings.
Anyone who still takes what our governments say at face value well, I have several bridges
to sell you.
Experts failed us
But it is not just governments to blame. The failings of experts, administrators and the
professional class have been all too visible to the public as well. Those officials who have
enjoyed easy access to prominent platforms in the state-corporate media have obediently
repeated what state and corporate interests wanted us to hear, often only for that information
to be exposed later as incomplete, misleading or downright fabricated.
In the run-up to the 2003 attack on Iraq, too many political scientists, journalists and
weapons experts kept their heads down, keen to preserve their careers and status, rather than
speak up in support of those rare experts like Scott Ritter and
the late David Kelly who
dared to sound the alarm that we were not being told the whole truth.
In 2008, only a handful of economists was prepared to break with corporate orthodoxy and
question whether throwing money at bankers exposed as financial criminals was wise, or to
demand that these bankers be prosecuted. The economists did not argue the case that there must
be a price for the banks to pay, such as a public stake in the banks that were bailed out, in
return for forcing taxpayers to massively invest in these discredited businesses. And the
economists did not propose overhauling our financial systems to make sure there was no
repetition of the economic crash. Instead, they kept their heads down as well, in the hope that
their large salaries continued and that they would not lose their esteemed positions in
think-tanks and universities.
We know that climate scientists were quietly warning
back in the 1950s of the dangers of runaway global warming, and that in the 1980s scientists
working for the fossil-fuel companies predicted very precisely how and when the catastrophe
would unfold -- right about now. It is wonderful that today the vast majority of these
scientists are publicly agreed on the dangers, even if they are still trapped in a dangerous
caution by the conservatism of scientific procedure. But they forfeited public trust by leaving
it so very, very late to speak up.
And recently we have learnt, for example, that a series of Conservative governments in the
UK recklessly ran down the
supplies of hospital protective gear , even though they had more than a decade of warnings
of a coming pandemic. The question is why did no scientific advisers or health officials blow
the whistle earlier. Now it is too late to save the lives of many thousands, including dozens
of medical staff, who have fallen victim so far to the virus in the UK.
Worse still, in the Anglosphere of the US and the UK, we have ended up with political
systems that offer a choice between one party that supports a brutal, unrestrained version of
neoliberalism and another party that supports a marginally less brutal, slightly mitigated
version of neoliberalism. (And we have recently discovered in the UK that, after the grassroots
membership of one of those twinned parties managed to choose a leader in Jeremy Corbyn who
rejected this orthodoxy, his own party machine conspired
to throw the election rather than let him near power.) As we are warned at each election, in
case we decide that elections are in fact futile, we enjoy a choice -- between the lesser of
two evils.
Those who ignore or instinctively defend these glaring failings of the modern corporate
system are really in no position to sit smugly in judgment on those who wish to question the
safety of 5G, or vaccines, or the truth of 9/11, or the reality of a climate catastrophe, or
even of the presence of lizard overlords.
Because through their reflexive dismissal of doubt, of all critical thinking on anything
that has not been pre-approved by our governments and by the state-corporate media, they have
helped to disfigure the only yardsticks we have for measuring truth or falsehood. They have
forced on us a terrible choice: to blindly follow those who have repeatedly demonstrated they
are not worthy of being followed, or to trust nothing at all, to doubt everything. Neither
position is one a healthy, balanced individual would want to adopt. But that is where we are
today.
Big Brother regimes
It is therefore hardly surprising that those who have been so discredited by the current
explosion of information -- the politicians, the corporations and the professional class -- are
wondering how to fix things in the way most likely to maintain their power and authority.
They face two, possibly complementary options.
One is to allow the information overload to continue, or even escalate. There is an
argument to be made that the more possible truths we are presented with, the more powerless
we feel and the more willing we are to defer to those most vocal in claiming authority.
Confused and hopeless, we will look to father figures, to the strongmen of old, to those who
have cultivated an aura of decisiveness and fearlessness, to those who look like down-to-earth
mavericks and rebels.
This approach will throw up more Donald Trumps, Boris Johnsons and Jair Bolsonaros. And
these men, while charming us with their supposed lack of orthodoxy, will still, of course, be
exceptionally accommodating to the most powerful corporate interests -- the military-industrial complex -- that
really run the show.
The other option, which has already been road-tested under the rubric of "fake news",
will be to treat us, the public, like irresponsible children, who need a firm, guiding hand.
The technocrats and professionals will try to re-establish their authority as though the last
two decades never occurred, as though we never saw through their hypocrisy and lies.
They will cite "conspiracy theories" -- even the true ones -- as proof that it is time to
impose new curbs on internet freedoms, on the right to speak and to think. They will argue
that the social media experiment has run its course and proved itself a menace -- because we,
the public, are a menace. They are already flying trial balloons for this new Big Brother
world, under cover of tackling the health threats posed by the Covid-19 epidemic.
Surveillance a price worth paying to beat coronavirus, says Blair thinktank https://t.co/AAb1nnv4pG
We should not be surprised that the "thought-leaders" for shutting down the cacophony of the
internet are those whose failures have been most exposed by our new freedoms to explore the
dark recesses of the recent past. They have included Tony Blair, the British prime minister who
lied western publics into the disastrous and illegal war on Iraq in 2003, and Jack Goldsmith,
rewarded as a Harvard law professor for his role -- since whitewashed -- in helping the Bush
administration legalise torture and step up warrantless surveillance programmes.
Fmr. Bush admin lawyer/current Harvard Law prof Jack Goldsmith goes full-Thomas Friedman,
credits China's enlightened authoritarian approach to information as "largely right" and
laments the US' provincial fealty to the First Amendment as "largely wrong." https://t.co/1WyQtgE8bK
pic.twitter.com/1M03ybxh0I
The only alternative to a future in which we are ruled by Big Brother technocrats like Tony
Blair, or by chummy authoritarians who brook no dissent, or a mix of the two, will require a
complete overhaul of our societies' approach to information. We will need fewer curbs on free
speech, not more.
The real test of our societies -- and the only hope of surviving the coming emergencies,
economic and environmental -- will be finding a way to hold our leaders truly to account. Not
based on whether they are secretly lizards, but on what they are doing to save our planet from
our all-too-human, self-destructive instinct for acquisition and our craving for guarantees of
security in an uncertain world.
That, in turn, will require a transformation of our relationship to information and debate.
We will need a new model of independent, pluralistic, responsive, questioning media that is
accountable to the public, not to billionaires and corporations. Precisely the kind of media we
do not have now. We will need media we can trust to represent the full range of credible,
intelligent, informed debate, not the narrow Overton window through which we get a highly
partisan, distorted view of the world that serves the 1 per cent -- an elite so richly rewarded
by the current system that they are prepared to ignore the fact that they and we are hurtling
towards the abyss.
With that kind of media in place -- one that truly holds politicians to account and
celebrates scientists for their contributions to collective knowledge, not their usefulness to
corporate enrichment -- we would not need to worry about the safety of our communications
systems or medicines, we would not need to doubt the truth of events in the news or wonder
whether we have lizards for rulers, because in that kind of world no one would rule over us.
They would serve the public for the common good.
Sounds like a fantastical, improbable system of government? It has a name: democracy. Maybe
it is time for us finally to give it a go.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include
"Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East"
(Pluto
In the UK, looks like Tom Tugendhat, chair of the foreign affairs committee, is spreading the
China-did-it propaganda, after his comments on the BBC last week. He can file it alongside
his promotion of the White Helmets and the Skripal affair.
Oh, there are the customary snide asides to the effect that the Russian 'doctors' are
actually all military-intelligence spies, but this report seems to shift the blame for that
to La Stampa, and points out through the Italian staff that the equipment Russia supplied is
both useful and of excellent quality and effectiveness. Responses to questions by the Russian
medical staff who are interviewed are not portrayed as the most hilarious lies you ever
heard, as they usually are.
I'm not foolish enough to think it signals a change in policy, but it is refreshing
nonetheless.
The article was written by local Bergamo freelance writer, Anna Bonalume. She seems to be a
recent recruit as she has just one other article at The Fraudian.
Lo and behold, the article suggests that Bergamischi self-reliance, enterprise, hard-nosed
pragmatism, a strong work ethic and tendency to get going when the going gets tough might
have doomed the city, when the natives should have done was to call for an immediate lockdown
and then shutter all their businesses, batten down the hatches and wait for government
largesse (if any) to flow through the streets.
Nothing in the article about how air pollution levels
in the city – Bergamo is in that province (Lombardia) of northern Italy which is
notorious for registering some of the highest air pollution levels in Europe, second or equal
to parts of southern Poland where coal production is still dominant – together with the
unique physical geography of the province (most cities in Lombardia are located in or near a
river valley at the foot of the Alps: a perfect environment for annual thermal inversions in
which cold air containing air pollutants sits under warm air so everyone keeps breathing
polluted air) might have set a context in which COVID-19 or indeed any other major illness
transmitted through respiratory and/or tactile channels could proliferate with devastating
effects on the most vulnerable groups in society.
" Jonathan Reid, a Bristol University professor researching airborne transmission of
coronavirus, told The Guardian, "It is perhaps not surprising that while suspended in air,
the small droplets could combine with background urban particles and be carried around."
"
Looks like The Fraudian still has to get that information about air pollution particles
carrying droplets of coronavirus out to Bonalume.
Narrative control is the name of the game in the Skripal case.
A couple of articles about a phenomenon which was thought to exist only in
pre-Revolutionary France – the lettre de cachet – but seems to have been given a
new lease of life:
I would love to see the British government and Porton Down nailed to the barn door for this.
There's no telling if that will ever happen, but just on general principles their collective
evasiveness speaks volumes. When the truth is on your side and you know it, you shout it from
the rooftops. You don't obfuscate and hide behind national security, and pretend like amazing
technical and spycraft secrets might be compromised if you reveal your evidence.
If anyone can make it happen, it's Helmer. I've never seen such a talent for detail and
cause-and-effect. Remarkable.
I wonder if the NHS staff that took care of the Skripals and who have been keeping stumm
about that hapless duo's alleged poisoning by the Orcs with the most deadly nerve agent known
to man have performed a dance routine yet on Tik-Tok?
This is yet another demonstration that Western intelligence services became influential
political players. As Chich Republic is a NATO country its intellignce services are partially
controlled by outsiders. They also might have their own home grown neocon in the high ranks.
Czech newspaper Respekt alleges a Russian agent carrying the poison ricin arrived in
the country three weeks ago.
Mayor Zdenek Hrib refused to say why he was under protection but said he had told
police he was being followed .
####
Plenty more bs at the link.
When does the national intelligence services leak to anything but national media? When it
needs suckers! Vis the Christopher Steel Dossier of Steaming Bullshit to the Steaming Pile of
Bullshit masquerading as journalism known as Buttfeed.
We must remember that the Czech Republic is the United States' intelligence hub for
Central and Eastern Europe. Even then, a large portion of Czech citizens don't buy the
'Russia threat' propaganda, coz they voted for Babis as PM who has been under investigation
since elected because his is not anti-Russian.
These investigations have turned up nothing apart from a possible conflict of ethics
according to Brussels, which is ironic considering the latters refusal to publish minutes of
its Trilogues (closed door meetings between heads of the European Parliament, Commission
& Council) to agree EU policy before it is voted on in the Parliament – i.e.
pre-baked in secret, it's failure to have a de facto register of lobbyists etc. etc. What is
happening in Czechia is an ongoing soft coup which will not stop until Babis and others that
don't sign on are out of power. It's the wrong kind of democracy , innit?
"... I spotted Yahoo News carrying this NYT hit piece today and was tempted to respond. Then I saw the general run of comments that read like the target audience it was meant for, and figured I'd be wasting my time. It might have been worth squandering five minutes, though. ..."
"... It is a scary situation. A lot of people actually believe the New York Times. ..."
"... Did you see this one in today's NYTimes? The pot didn't just call the kettle black: With Selective Coronavirus Coverage, China Builds a Culture of Hate: The state propaganda machine highlights other countries' mistakes while suppressing China's, fueling anger toward foreigners and domestic critics alike. see: http://nytimes.com/2020/04/22/business/china-coronavirus-propaganda.html ..."
UPDATED: The paper of record is again laundering, without skepticism, U.S. intelligence
meant to ratchet up tensions with China, just as it did with Russia, writes Joe Lauria.
D uring the saga of Russiagate The New York Times was the main vehicle for unnamed
U.S. intelligence officials to filter uncorroborated allegations about Russia, presenting them
as proven fact.
Just as the Democratic Party attempted to shift the blame from its disastrous 2016 loss to
Donald Trump onto Russia, the Trump administration is now trying to shift the blame from
Trump's disastrous handling of the Coronavirus crisis onto China.
Robert Emmett , April 23, 2020 at 12:06
Yeah, wouldn't expect anything less than well-deserved acrimony for the Grey Hag on this
site. Some of us still remember how the so-called paper of record withheld the "smoking gun"
of King Geo the Younger's use of mass surveillance until after the 2004 election. Who do you
suppose is their target audience for this latest fake scoop? Could it be the newly woke crowd
who now raise the NYrag as their gold standard in all things considered Russia bashing? Talk
about fuddy-duddy.
Today's mass media is full of rope-a-dope tricks such as placing a tiny nugget of "truth"
within a massive hairball of innuendo, exaggeration, disinformation and lies to be extracted
at the exact right moment to gainsay those who would question the narrative du jour. Another
well-worn deception is to let the lowest common denominator source set the dodgy agenda and
then use that cue to follow the "news" as fits to serve their own agendas. Over the years,
that often involves skewing reactionary and "forgetting" how to connect dots.
You can see a prime example of this (also part of the current surge of anti-China
propaganda) at that other bastion of unnamed sources, the WaPo. Blumenthal lays out how it's
done at The Grayzone Project re: allegations that the Wuhan Biotech lab released the virus.
Funny though how there's a yawning gap in the story about the hows & whys &
wherefores of an actual shutdown of a similar Level 4 lab right in WaPo's own backyard at
Fort Detrick.
"Dodgy scoop" made me smile. Are those served on self-licking ice cream cones?
China and Russia had better be keeping their powder dry. No telling how far this lunacy is
going to go. With Pirro´s rant it looks like the crazies have been let out of the pen
and is just the thing to get the mentally challenged in an up roar and demanding military
action against China. I have no doubt that China can handle the American military in a
conventional confrontation but if it goes nuclear all bets are going to be off. The Better
Dead Than Reders seem to be riding high right now. Who knows they may just get their wish.
The Pirros et all do sound like the woman in a bar just itching to get a fight going, and
then screaming blue murder when her favorite gets the snot beat out of him. You just can
never get them to shut up before the fight gets going. but the Pirros of the world never can
quite get a grip around the fact that is proven over and over again, wars and fights are easy
to start, but hard to finish and no one knows how they aill turn out. And given the lack of
success of the American military in wars of choice since the Second World War I would be very
careful if I was her of what I was wishing for.
As I understand it, we (our intelligence people) were aware of the "potential" threat of
the virus before the Chinese leadership announced it to the world. China did announce it to
the world and people can argue they should have done it sooner. But the failure, if we decide
there is one, belongs to us in not acting on the intelligence. Why we didn't is a matter
worth investigating although what will be learned to prevent such future errors is
unclear.
Certainly, those who want to use this as a further wedge between us and China do not serve
anyone's interests other than the cui bono horde who benefits from such divisions.
As others have stated our most serious virus is the one that causes who to seek
confrontation with other governments whenever opportunity arises. It is a very destructive
virus.
DW Bartoo , April 23, 2020 at 10:38
It may be counted upon that ALL institutions in the U$ military empire will deliver the
worst possible outcomes.
The evidence for this assertion is voluminous and growing by the hour (quite as obscenely
as the "wealth" of Jeff Bezos grows at the rate of $11 thousand every second).
Frankly, one could hardly expect anything less from The NY Times.
Be it war-mongering, hysteria-building, or sycophantic "official" propagandizing [now
fully legal thanks to the sainted Obama, who also, it is alkedged, played a highly
significant role in destroying the (now obviously) pathetic campaign of Bernie Sander, that
Joe Biden, clearly suffering from dementia, and poster boy of the very neoliberal policies
which elevated Trump to power, will be the Dem "standard bearer seeking the same power while
promising to do nothing at all – about anything, which really IS the Standard Dem
policy, U$ politics being about nothing but controlling the spoils and keeping the
revolving-door/lobbying graving train rolling merrily along].
Yet the real Powers That Be, cannot only count upon all the vaunted institutions from a
pretend democracy and rigged political system, to a complacent, complicit, and criminally
compromised MSM to parrot absolute idiocy, they may also count on a thoroughly infantile
majority of the public to rally behind any war, of words, of weapons, even of nuclear
weapons, simply because the U$ is exceptional, beyond compare, and constitutionally unwilling
to learn anything from any other nation, society, or people.
It is not merely the MSM which inculcate these myths of superiority, it is the entire
educational system as well.
It is not, necessarily, a conspiracy, it is simply conveniently and comfortably profitable
to buy into the idiocy and pass it happily along.
Evidence?
Actual facts?
Not necessary.
And most inconvenient.
It might affect circulation.
U$ian Idiocy is quite as communicable as the "novel" coronavirus.
As my youngest daughter put it, "It's a long story."
Just to test my wits, she then asked me if I got the joke.
Yes, my dear, I got it.
At some point, it is possible that most of us will
Voice from Europe , April 23, 2020 at 08:37
The Chinese reports to the WHO are clear and transparent and date from the end of January.
Western MSM has no journalist worth that name !
Just like the new anti Hydrochloroquine study that was reported is full of potholes just
waiting for someone to be read.
People please check the published reprints of IHU mediterranee.
Hippocrates said: There are in fact two things, Science and Opinion. The former begets
Knowledge, the latter Ignorance.
Please people distinguish fact from opinion.
Mike from Jersey , April 22, 2020 at 18:39
The article states:
"Any reputable journalism school will teach its students that you hold off publishing
until you see the evidence underlying an assertion. "
But this was not a reputable newspaper.
So, what did you expect?
... ... ...
AnneR , April 23, 2020 at 14:04
Yastreb – Indeed worse, though less for the reality that propaganda, slanted
"reportage" is the common currency of the "news" organs of both the USA and Russia (not to
mention pretty much the rest of the world's MSM), than for the fact that while Russians, from
USSR days, knows to take everything in the media with some salt, to question the veracity of
unsupported, dubiously supported claims, here in the US of A unsubstantiated, or porously
backed, weakly supported "facts" usually expressed in Newspeak, slippery ways are very often
accepted by the target audience, hook, line and bloody sinker.
I mean – it's the NYT, or WaPo, or The Atlantic, CNN, MSDNC, PBS, NPR; they would
never try to mislead us. Would they? Gorblimey. One despairs, one really does.
And *not* as if the gullible readers, audiences (largely composed of the supporters of the
Dem face of the single-Janus party) have let Russiagate go, if what I hear on NPR (including
its BBC World Service broadcasts) is anything to go by.
China-gate – neither side of the single party can possibly let this opportunity to
prevent the rise of China, stop this ancient culture's challenging the "rightful,"
exceptional(ly barbaric) world hegemon, USA, from maintaining its proper position at the top
of the firmament however it is achieved.
Tobin Sterritt , April 22, 2020 at 17:03
I spotted Yahoo News carrying this NYT hit piece today and was tempted to respond. Then I
saw the general run of comments that read like the target audience it was meant for, and
figured I'd be wasting my time. It might have been worth squandering five minutes,
though.
Mike from Jersey , April 23, 2020 at 08:44
Tobin,
It is a scary situation. A lot of people actually believe the New York Times.
Did you see this one in today's NYTimes? The pot didn't just call the kettle black: With Selective Coronavirus Coverage, China Builds a Culture of Hate: The state propaganda
machine highlights other countries' mistakes while suppressing China's, fueling anger toward
foreigners and domestic critics alike. see:
http://nytimes.com/2020/04/22/business/china-coronavirus-propaganda.html
AnneR , April 23, 2020 at 14:08
O Society – well, bien sur. I mean we can blacken every people, culture, society,
government (except those we install – that we never do, unless they stray from their
[American] defined path) as much as we want, as often as we please and no one has the right
to call us out on that, complain. Heaven forfend – we'll bomb 'em, subject them to
siege warfare (via ever tightening economic sanctions no matter how many children we kill
doing this – "price is worth it" in'it?
Donald Duck , April 22, 2020 at 15:29
"Any reputable journalism school will teach its students that you hold off publishing
until you see the evidence underlying an assertion. This is especially true when quoting
anonymous sources. And it is doubly true when these sources are intelligence agents, who have
a long history of deception. It is part of their job description."
True enough, but we are not talking about 'reputable journalism' – such a
fuddy-duddy notion. We are talking about crude propaganda and a ruthless realpolitik.
Assertion, anonymous sources, smears, lies, calumny and dancing to the tune of whatever the
deep, state and national security play to us. We have entered a post-democratic age and we
would be well advised to bear this in mind. The ruling elites are blatantly bereft of any
type of moral scruples; Pompeo put it well, 'lie, cheat' an he might have added 'whack'
anyone who gets in the way of the grand project. 'Whack' being mafia terminology for murder
of ones opponents. Pompeo even looks like a mafia Godfather. Mafia ideology and methodology
have permeated the structure and institutions of American society.
bjd , April 22, 2020 at 17:00
Exactly.
And thus articles like these –premised on the idea that the NYT is reputable–
belong to the literary genre 'fiction'.
AnneR , April 23, 2020 at 14:17
Donnie – Pompeo claims (proudly? loudly?) to be a christian but somehow he missed
all of that stuff about helping your neighbor, turning the other cheek, taking care of the
stranger (Samaritan-wise). Or avoided it like the plague.
And given the really existing history of the USA – "mafia ideology and methodology"
deriving, backed by profound supremacist racism has permeated this country since the Brits
first landed and started grabbing the lands and killing the indigenous, then going to Africa
and buying the Africans in order to profit from their sale and their labor While overt
slavery has ended (the US Fed and State prisons continue to gain from such prisoner slave
labor) and theft of the remainder of Indigenous lands and resources is largely in the
shadows, the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors pretty much remain alive and ill-meaning.
JOHN CHUCKMAN , April 22, 2020 at 15:17
The New York Times: the house organ of America's establishment.
Sam F , April 22, 2020 at 14:35
The NYT story is also shaky because broadcasts to the US about a nationwide lockdown would
have been implausible, discredited by simple denial, and might well reduce virus panic. The
sources of such messages are easily counterfeited and therefore speculative, like the fake
"Russian" messages from Ukraine, and far more likely to originate from beneficiaries than the
MSM target du jour.
Bob Van Noy , April 23, 2020 at 12:10
Exactly Sam F and thank you Joe Lauria. We keep hearing the same scenario over and over
with different characters. I recently read "The Poisoner In Chief" by Stephen Kinzer and I
was stunned by the secret drug and mind control experiments of the 1950s and 1960s.
Certainly
it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that they continue. Also see the gray zone article
"How a Trump media dump mainstreamed Chinese lab corona virus conspiracy theory" by Max
Blumenthal and Ajit Singh.
Sam F , April 23, 2020 at 19:19
Good to see you back, Bob. The referenced article is indeed worthwhile.
jaycee , April 22, 2020 at 14:15
Provable links from lockdown protests to domestic right-wing astroturf organizations.
The fact-free claims of foreign interference seeking to exploit divisions or "sow chaos"
is itself a domestic program to exploit divisions and and direct projections onto "the
other". It is directed by the federal intelligence agencies in collaboration with the major
mainstream media outlets. The central "proof" of foreign perfidy is the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence's Report on alleged Russian measures to interfere with America
(released Nov 2018), which is one of the most vapid and factually barren "products" ever
produced. The New York Times has asserted the Report represents established fact. It's all,
ironically, very Soviet.
DavidH , April 22, 2020 at 20:19
I get your point, jaycee, I think. The stuff in the Times is all "very soviet"
(ironically) by the old Soviets' standards. That's if their old system had had, in
addition to domestic propaganda, an effective propaganda campaign abroad. Did they? I mean
all this projecting on Russia and China (meant to be digested by the homeland) is accompanied
by a considerable outlay for transmitted-outward propaganda. Did the old Soviet system really
have an outlay as big as ours is now? For sure they had spies, but so did we.
I'll have to listen again to Tuesday's Loud & Clear to know if Richard Wolff really
was as down on Putin as I seem to remember. Geopolitically Putin seems to me to have been
pretty much more fair than we have in the past, say, six or seven years. But, in terms of
oil, all energy hegemons it seems follow sort of the same patterns of behavior. They
want energy dominance for their group [they've got it], and in smaller theaters
individual members will attempt to attain it for themselves. But, yes, concomitant is that
they must agree some amongst each other just as crime syndicates must. This is a dimension of
hegemony it is sad to contemplate but real. One would like to think Russia is more fair, but
when it comes to oil Russia doesn't really seem to pay much lip service to any shade at all
of some global Green New Deal. And one would like to think China in general less
hypocritical, but then you have McKinsey and Prince and that whole mess [we see they had
things figured out better than us on SARS-CoV-2 but while as an American maybe I have no room
to talk Snowden probably had a point that civilization could have done even better
preparation than China's "pretty good" preparation]. So, in thinking about all this you have
to try I guess to name the overarching global paradigm and blame it. For sure the US
is in it up to its neck. Maybe even we invented it, or invented the things that morphed into
it. Everything Lauria wrote above makes sense, and once again we owe Consortium.
Glad to see this written (not just me that believes it) "The early view is that hardly
any government responded with the urgency required."
The amplification of messages – i.e. the re-transmission of memes and links –
is basically how Twitter is designed to work. The interpretation of normal processes as
something vaguely dangerous and sinister is itself a sort of psy-op. It seems to me a modern
version of old Bircher themes of impurification of fluids – and ultimately just as
wacky.
The notion that adversaries are intent on "sowing chaos" and division through the
transmission of memes seems to have developed from a realization that the Internet Research
Agency's ridiculous click-bait Facebook ads could not rationally be portrayed as a 'Vote
Trump" campaign, and so they were reinterpreted as a "Chaos" campaign based on a
pre-determined understanding that it was a deliberate program by an adversary state rather
than just simply an online marketing scheme.
All the evidence reveals and confirms that it was, in fact, simply an online marketing
scheme. The takeaway is that members of Congress and the mainstream media really do take us
all for easily manipulated idiots.
Tennegon , April 24, 2020 at 10:31
Regarding the so-called economic relief measures from Washington, there was this in a
local newspaper article about our local businesses struggles, and ultimate inability, to
access 'loans' to keep people employed, their enterprises viable:
"One reason the PPP ( Paycheck Protection Program) coffers emptied in 13 days is that
although the program was supposed to help small businesses, many larger companies received
the low-interest loans.
The Associated Press reported that at least 75 companies that have publicly traded stock
were given PPP loans, and some of those firms have market values exceeding $100 million.
Eight companies received the maximum $10 million loan, according to the AP, and 4,400
loans were for more than $5 million.
Aid wasn't limited to companies that strain the definition of "small business,"
either.
Harvard University received an $8.7 million loan."
DW Bartoo , April 23, 2020 at 21:09
Much appreciate that Consortium News has published this article, as have a number of other
sites.
This article has already sparked numerous conversations and may well serve to encourage
deeper and more conscientious thought which this nation desperately needs to embrace and
extend.
While the neoliberal and neoconservative "interests" fully intend to make use of this
pandemic to gain further choke-holds on the many, it is very possible that reason and
humanity might yet wrest compelling visions of possibility, of what a sane, humane, and
sustainable future could actually look and feel like, from this unfolding and continuing
crisis.
Many still assume that the pandemic and the political "response" to it are two
seperate things, that the clear failure of the U$ government to respond to the dire need of
the many, preferring to
"bailout" the wealthy and big corporations to the cost of the many now losing their jobs and
health insurance, is not connected to the intent of the few to position themselves such that
they may make the many even more desperate. The pandemic, is the excuse, the opportunity, for
the powerful and wealthy to fully establish a neofeudal "economy", as "normal".
It would be a true shame therefore, for the many, to waste this opportunity and settle for
either "more of the same", more viciously applied, or "nothing will change", more
hypocritically pursued, as the pretense of democracy now assumes it can foist on a public
instructed and coerced to "vote" for "lesser evilness", when lived experience (call it a
people's history) makes clear that systemic change is absolutely necessary, that principle
and human beings (not to mention life in general and the environment which permits and
sustains our very existence) matters very much more than "profit" and the pitiful "ambitions"
of the parasitic and pathological elite.
The pusillanimous political class, all a-pander to that money and power hungry elite, have
no useful solution or compassion on offer.
It is time to imagine and build a different human society in which the potential of all is
encouraged and, as well, to realize that there is enough to see that
every human being can receive, food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, worthwhile education and
meaningful endeavor, as basic rights of human existence.
What there is not enough of, is wealth and power sufficient to satisfy the pathologically
dis-eased amongst us.
They are the real plague, the real threat, the real danger to human existence, it is they
and their behavior that threaten extinction.
It is they who destroy through plunder, pillage, and war, the environment and the
wellbeing of the many.
It is they who embrace unreason, violence, propaganda, deceit, and the manipulation of
others.
It is they who make mock of the rule of law, of genuine democracy, and of human
decency.
It is they who threaten, terrorize, and tear down, "creative destruction", they term it,
as they pursue their pathological desire to control, to spy on, to frighten, and to diminish
the many, to set the many against each other, to herd and impoverish the many.
Who among us wishes that to be considered "normal"?
Who among us wishes to "return" to any such "normal"?
Only those who profit from such a vile and despicable "normal" want more of it.
JOHN CHUCKMAN , April 23, 2020 at 13:14
That Manhattan store sign is beautiful.
Had America more of that kind of spirit, our world would be a happier place, by far.
But it does not.
It has a trillion-dollar-a-year military-security state that kills and steals and
generates immense amounts of human misery.
"Evidence" means testimony, writings, material objects, or other things presented to the
senses that are offered to prove the existence or nonexistence of a fact. -- California
Evidence Code sec 140
Even the NYT acknowledged (before it erased the text in its story on Reade that noted
there were no other sexual misconduct charges pending against him other than that long
history of assaults and sniffing and hands-on, text removed by the Times at the instance of
the Biden campaign staff?
Here's the original text: " The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden,
beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable."
Waiting for the apologists to tell us why the edit to remove the last clause starting "beyond
" is just "Good journalism."
He and Trump are bad examples of the male part of the species. Nothing to choose that I
can see, other than who among the people that revise those bribes to them will be the first
in line at the MMT watering hole
i had a lengthy discussion about this with my brother and sil, it came down to her saying
I DON'T CARE ABOUT THAT re bidens history of being a ttl letch plus possible rapist and my
brother questioning what is obvious discomfort in multiple video evidence.
They said defeating trump was paramount to anything against biden. i simply give up at
this point.
Lots of partisan hackery and TDS going around in the last few years in once respectable
lefty publications. Mother Jones has gone completely to hell rather than raising any, as was
once their mission statement. I haven't read the Nation as much in recent years – I let
my subscription lapse a while ago as I found I just couldn't keep up with reading it.
Coincidentally I think that was about the time I started reading NC. The Nation has a history
of sheepdogging lefties to rally behind bad Dem candidates, which was another reason I didn't
feel bad letting my subscription go.
I do still have my subscription to Harper's but they were getting on my nerves quite a bit
to the point I considered cancelling them too. Rebecca Solnit wrote some truly cringe-worthy
editorials for them after Trump's election. They seem to have removed her from writing the
main editorial so maybe I wasn't the only one who felt she left a little to be desired. I'm
quite fond of the newer woman they have doing editorials, Lionel Shriver. She seems like
she'd fit in quite well here!
I left (pun intended) the Nation pub in the dust way back in the 1990's and buried it post
9/11. Used to be a real good alternative press pub 30-40 years ago. Somewhere along the line
it lost it's way and joined the wishy-washy "gatekeeper' society of "approved news."
RIP
The Nation was a sanity saviour back in late 70s and through 1980s; then something
happened. Not clear when or what, but I know I let my subscription lapse. Tried again later,
but it was never the same. It's mostly unbearable now, except for Stephen Cohen. Walsh has
been in the unbearable category for many years now.
Leonard Pitts just had an editorial in my local paper where he opined that even if Biden
had sexually assaulted Reade, it didn't really matter because we had to vote against
Trump.
I wrote this in reply:
So Leonard Pitts thinks that Biden's alleged sexual attack on Tara Reade isn't disqualifying,
even if true. Strange, he didn't think that way about Brett Kavanagh. I didn't want to attack
the columnist as a hypocrite without being sure, so I looked it up. Here is what he
wrote:
"It's a confluence of facts that speak painfully and pointedly to just how unseriously
America takes men's predations against women. You might disagree, noting that the Senate
Judiciary Committee has asked Ford to testify. But if history is any guide, that will prove
to be a mere formality – a sop to appearances – before the committee recommends
confirmation."
Looks very much like "Well, It's excusable when our guys do it."
Always had a crush on K v d Heuvel. (How's that for an opening to a post about misogyny
and sexual misconduct)?
But can't we disqualify Joe! as the craven proponent of the worst neo-lib policies that
got us exactly where we are today? Or, in polite company, ask politely whether he is even in
a mental state to hand over the keys to the to the family car, let alone the nuclear
football?
Let's take the Id out of IdPol, I don't care if the candidate has green skin and three
eyes if the policies they would enact come within smelling distance of benefiting the 99% (or
more precisely in Joe's case within hair smelling distance).
We can use his personal conduct as a component in our judgement but pleeease can we focus
on the stuff that would actually affect our lives. In his case, for the absolute worse.
(Note: I sincerely doubt whether Joe is currently allowed to drive a car, please oh please
Mr.God-Yahweh-Mohammed-Buddha-Obama can we not let him drive a nation).
Beside some of the most hardened diehard China basher which were posted here by many MoA
and including Willy2, is SCMP (South China Morning Post) probably rank top two or three MSM
ant-China and bashers.
This morning SCMP Headline "Donald Trump's latest attack on China over coronavirus
'highlights challenge in repairing relations'"
Two reporters Kristin Huang and Cissy Zhou wrote the piece (bios below) if two or more
reporters wrote a story mean controversial stories: Hong Kong riots, Trade Wars, Covid19,
Xinjiang, Police brutality, Tibet, Freedom of Speech, etc...
SCMP reporters previously embedded with - CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Wall Street Journals,
WaPo , are biases. "Politico announced a content-sharing partnership with the Hong
Kong-based newspaper South China Morning Post (SCMP) " a fucking NeoLiberal hack. SCMP is
free, owner Alibaba, Jack Ma - a CCP party cadre. I don't subscribe commie ideology ,
but fair and balance reporting. Unlike CGTN, XinHua, Global Times or People Daily mainly
China and China bias.
Examines reporters' language spoken, (I'm NOT an anthropologist or Linguistics and
NOT 100% correct but most probable) if mainlanders, HKie, ABC (American Born Chinese),
OBC (Overseas born Chinese). OBC normally spoke Mandarin and/or Cantonese. ABC Chinese never
speak Cantonese and/or Mandarin, dialect and Bahasa Malayu or Indonesian, Tagalog. I speak
four dialects beside Bahasa Malayu.
Last year China barred Phila Siu into Macau, this year again kicked out 3 Wall
Street Reporters, even thought the three reporters didn't wrote the piece "China the Sick man
of Asia" and requested withdrew the articles...
"Two of the three mainland China-based Wall Street Journal reporters whose press
credentials were revoked last week due to the outlet publishing an opinion piece titled
"China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia" left the country on Monday..... Josh Chin and
reporter Chao Deng.... Philip Wen , an Australian national. All three had five days to
leave the country after the February 19 announcement."
More... "Phila Siu...barred from Macau's.....journalist since 2009. He has reported on
human rights, security, politics , and society in Hong Kong, mainland China and
Southeast Asia. He holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Hong Kong Baptist University
and a human rights law master's degree from the University of Hong Kong.
Ultimately, these trash or Americunts must leave SCMP and HK, worked in US of A,
before 2047. More.... while CGTN Produced in Washington, DC., UK and Nairobi, Kenya,
correspondents and anchors mostly American (White, non ethnic Han or Chinese) based in US of
A. CGTN is smart and protect their arse.
Unless freaking US of A learn to respect China and treated China as equally like any
Nations on earth China will continue tit for tat
Kristin Huang is a senior China reporter, who focuses on diplomacy and defence. She joined
the Post in 2016 and previously reported for China Review News Agency. Kristin is interested
in security in northeast Asia and China's growing military might.
Areas of Expertise: International relations, diplomacy, defence
Languages Spoken: English, Mandarin, Cantonese
Cissy Zhou, Political Economy Reporter
Cissy joined the SCMP in 2019. Prior to that, she has been a producer at BBC News and
investigative reporter at CaiXin Media. She is interested in China's politics and
economy.
Areas of Expertise: Chinese politics, Chinese companies, Chinese economy
Languages Spoken: English, Mandarin
Disclaimer: Eng not my mother tongue, wish someone hijack and rewrite, correct Eng
mistakes etc. Finally SCMP is #2 anti-China media if ZeroHedge is #1. Thanks for
reading.
The Times long ago abandoned journalism the way it's supposed to be. All the news it claims
fit to print isn't fit to read.
Its daily editions feature state-approved managed news misinformation and disinformation --
notably against sovereign independent nations on the US target list for regime change.
Russia notably has been a prime target since its 1917 revolution, ending its czarist
dictatorship.
Except during WW II and Boris Yeltsin's 1990s rule, Times anti-Russia propaganda was and
remains relentless, notably throughout the Vladimir Putin era, the nation's most distinguished
ever political leader.
When Yeltsin died in April 2007, the Times shamefully called him "a Soviet-era reformer the
country's democratic father and later a towering figure of his time as the first freely elected
leader of Russia, presiding over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the
Communist Party (sic)."
He presided over Russia's lost decade. Under him, over half the population became
impoverished.
His adoption of US shock therapy produced economic genocide. GDP plunged 50%. Life
expectancy fell sharply.
Democratic freedoms died. An oligarch class accumulated enormous wealth.
Western interests profited at the expense of millions of exploited Russians.
Yeltsin let corruption and criminality flourish. One scandal followed others. Grand theft
became sport. So did money laundering.
Billions in stolen wealth were secreted in Western banks and offshore tax havens.
A critic reviled him, saying throughout much of his tenure, he "slept, drank, was ill,
relaxed, didn't show his face before the people and simply did nothing," adding:
"Despised by the majority of (Russians, he'll) go down in history as the first president of
Russia, having corrupted (the country) to the breaking point, not by his virtues and or by his
defects, but rather by his dullness, primitiveness, and unbridled power lust of a
hooligan."
He was a Western/establishment media favorite, notably by the Times, mindless of the human
misery and economic wreckage he caused.
Putin is a preeminent world leader, towering over his inferior Western counterparts,
especially in the US, why the Times reviles him.
On Monday, its propaganda machine falsely accused him of waging a long war on US science,
claiming he's promoting disinformation to "encourage the spread of deadly illnesses (sic)."
Not a shred of evidence was presented because none exists. The Times' disinformation report
was slammed in a preceding article.
On Wednesday, the self-styled newspaper of record was at it again -- reactivating the Big
Lie that won't die, saying with no corroborating evidence that "Russia may have sown
disinformation in a dossier used to investigate a former Trump campaign aide (sic),"
adding:
"Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide with numerous links to Russia was probably a
Russian agent (sic)."
Disinformation the Times cited came from former UK intelligence agent Christopher Steele's
dodgy dossier, financed by the DNC and Hillary campaign.
Its spurious accusations were exposed as fake news, notably phony accusations of Russian US
election interference that didn't happened.
Probes by Robert Mueller, House and Senate committees found no credible evidence of an
illegal or improper Trump campaign connection to Russia or election interference by the Kremlin
-- because there was none of either.
According to the Times, Steele's dodgy dossier "was potentially influenced by a 'Russian
disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations,' " citing FBI Big Lies as its
source.
Another article on Russia this week claimed "many people who don't work for the government
or in deep-pocketed state enterprises face economic devastation," adding:
Domestic violence increased because of social distancing and sheltering in place.
Not mentioned in the article is that mass unemployment and other COVID-19 fallout affect
Western and other countries adversely.
Putin was slammed for sending COVID-19 aid to the US, calling it "a propaganda coup for the
Kremlin -- tempered by an intensifying epidemic at home."
Outbreaks in Russia are a small fraction of US numbers, around 21,000 through Wednesday --
compared to nearly 650,000 in the US and over 28,000 deaths.
Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Britain have five-to-eightfold more outbreaks than
Russia.
NYC has over 110,000 cases. In the NY, NJ, CT tristate area, around 300,000 cases were
reported, almost as many COVID-19 deaths as outbreaks in Russia -- through Wednesday.
Putin is dealing with what's going on responsibly, stressing "we certainly must not relax,
as long as outbreaks occur.
A paid holiday is in effect through end of April for Russian workers, likely to be extended
if needed.
Essential workers continue on the job -- at home if able, otherwise operating as before.
National efforts continue to control outbreaks, aid ordinary Russians at a time of duress,
and work to restore more normal conditions.
While dealing with outbreaks at home, Russia supplied Italy, Serbia, and the US with aid to
combat the virus.
Yet Pompeo falsely accused Russia, China, and Iran with spreading disinformation about
COVID-19.
Gratitude and good will aren't US attributes, just the opposite.
Philosopher Larken Rose, in his ''manual'' on ''How to be a Successful Tyrant'', written 15
years ago: "Chapter 2 Exploiting fear. Almost all oppression via propaganda is based upon
scaring people, and then presenting a false choice, where the people can choose either to do
what you want them to do, or face some unknown, often purely fictional horror. This is not
the method of the common thug, which can be summarized as ''do this or I will hurt you''. A
successful modern tyrant never presents himself as the thing to be afraid of, as doing so
would obviously create resentment and hatred in the peasantry, and that leads to resistance.
Every ''thing to be feared'', with which you terrorize your peasants, must be presented as
some separate, outside evil, that only you can save them from.
You must present the simple choice between obedience to you, and the threat of some
unpleasant happening, which does not appear to be of your doing, and which you pretend to
lament the existence of. In short, you must deceive and scare the citizens into voluntarily
giving up their freedom. ''The people never give up their liberty but under some delusion.''
- Edmund Burke
A simple example would be making up a plague of some sort ;) , assuring people that
millions are doomed to die, and then claiming that giving you a lot of money and control is
the only hope of averting disaster. Or perhaps, instead of making up a disease, you can pick
a real disease, grossly exaggerate the risk it poses to the peasants ;) , whip them into a
frenzy, and then present yourself as their only hope for salvation. Which, of course, will
require you to be given much wealth and power. Even the common flu ;) , can be used to spread
alarm and panic in the peasantry.'' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4LtEciQUF8
"We have a few clips that we're just going to put up, we could just turn the lights down
lower, I think you'll find them interesting," Trump said. "And then we'll answer some
questions, I'll ask you some questions because you're so guilty, but forget it."
The president played the video on the screens at the White House press briefing
room.
White House
"The media minimized the risk from the start," the text of the video read, prior to
featuring a series of flashback clips to prominent media professionals downplaying the threat
posed by the virus.
The clip then featured a timeline of the president's actions to defend the country from the
virus, while partisan media and some Democrats criticized him at every step.
Other clips featured audio from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman talking about the
president's "effective" attempt to stop the spread of the virus with the travel ban on
China.
The clip also highlighted praise that the president received from Democrat governors.
Reporters appeared taken aback by the video, prompting questions about its source. White
House reporter Jonathan Karl questioned why the president would use White House staff to
complete a "campaign-style" video.
The president said that the clip was produced by White House staff in just a couple of hours
to show the media their reporting errors.
"We could have given you hundreds just like that," Trump said. "We have them. We didn't want
this to go on too long."
I've said some stupid things in my time, but up there with the best of them was a comment I
uttered to my wife on the morning of Tuesday 6 th March 2018. The previous night the
news had broken that an ex-spy by the name of Sergei Skripal had apparently been one of two
people hospitalised on the Sunday afternoon on a bench in The Maltings in Salisbury. At that
time the opioid, Fentanyl, was thought to be connected to it. Was this about to be a huge
international story? Or was it going to soon be forgotten about? I was decidedly of the latter
opinion. "Don't worry," I told her. "Probably just a drug overdose. It'll soon blow
over."
Two years later
Actually, two years on and most people have pretty much forgotten about it. Yes, they
remember that it happened; yes, they remember that it was a mighty odd occurrence with a number
of peculiarities about it; and for the people of Salisbury, I'm quite sure they will recall the
police, the cordons, the helicopters, the place swarming with international media, and of
course let's not forget the baby wipes. But by and large, it happened, it's done with, and the
case was solved a long while ago.
Except that it wasn't. Not by any stretch of the imagination. The fact is that two of
the many Russians who were in Salisbury on 3 rd and 4 th March, and who
were charged with the incident -- Petrov and Boshirov -- have never been charged with the
subsequent incident in Amesbury. This is very important. If the British authorities' case
against the two men in Salisbury is to be believed, there must be a clear link between them and
the second case in Amesbury. And yet it is impossible to reasonably connect the two cases based
on the British authorities' explanation of the Salisbury event. Unless, that is, you believe
that the two suspects were carrying a cellophane-wrapping machine with them with which to wrap
the bottle of lethal nerve agent they had apparently just used before dumping it in a bin. But
nobody could be daft enough to believe that, could they? Which leads to the question: if the
cases cannot be linked using the British authorities' explanation of the first incident --
which they can't (hence the reason the two men have not been charged for the second) -- then
how can we accept their explanation for the first? The answer is that we cannot, and for a
whole host of reasons, as I hope to show in a moment.
For those who have accepted The Met's and Government's account of the case, I am struck by a
couple of things. Firstly, their claims that those who haven't accepted it are conspiracy
theorists is really quite funny when you begin to count the number of absurd, implausible and
sometimes downright impossible things that one has to believe to accept that official account
(of which more below). But secondly, I am struck by their remarkable apathy and complacency,
given what they claim to believe. Let me put it this way: if I truly believed that agents of a
foreign power had come to my country and had entered my home city carrying, using and
discarding enough deadly nerve agent to kill thousands of people in my neighbourhood, I would
not only be livid at that foreign Government; I would be absolutely furious with the British
authorities for their pathetic, feeble response. Two dozen diplomats expelled in response to
the use of the (apparently) deadliest nerve agent known to man, which could have wiped out half
the population of Salisbury? It's the equivalent of sentencing an attempted murderer to a
£100 fine. Of course, while I accept that a declaration of war in response to such a
reckless act would have been a step too far, given that Russia is a nuclear-armed country with
a hugely powerful military, I would certainly want a response that was far closer to that than
the paltry expelling of a few diplomats. However, the fact that those who bark the loudest
about the alleged use of a nerve agent that could have killed 10,000 people are prepared to
accept the expulsion of a few diplomats as an adequate response, suggests that many of them are
not nearly as convinced as they make out that a lethal nerve agent was indeed used.
Either that or they're just a bit wet!
I am, however, livid at the British authorities for an entirely different reason. And
it is this: I really don't like being lied to. I really don't like handing over hard-earned
money in taxation, only to see it squandered away by people who devise the most elaborate
deceptions to divert attention away from what really happened. Nothing personal, you
understand. I don't like the fact that anyone has their hard-earned cash frittered away in this
way.
That's a big claim I just made. Elaborate deceptions are not accusations I bandy about
lightly. But as I hope to show below, I can see no other explanation for the many absurdities,
implausibilities and downright impossibilities in the case put forward by the Government and
Metropolitan Police (The Met) for what took place in Salisbury.
Let's begin with the case against the two Russians who have been charged over the Salisbury
incident. Whenever I have been involved in a discussion on this case with folks on Twitter,
invariably someone pops up to say that the case is closed, and the guilt of this pair has been
shown to be true. Incontrovertibly. Yet when examined carefully, the evidence of the apparent
guilt of this pair turns out to be incredibly threadbare. There are three basic parts to
it:
That they were in the vicinity of Mr Skripal's house on 4 th March, as seen on
footage taken outside a Shell garage on Salisbury's Wilton Road That "Novichok" was found in
the hotel room they stayed in the night before That they were/are agents of the GU (Russian
military police)
On that first point, the fact is that the Shell garage is approximately 500 yards from 47
Christie Miller Road. Whilst this may be "in the vicinity" in a very general sense, it is
nothing like "the vicinity" that would be needed to convince a juror that they actually went
there, much less that they daubed the door handle with a substance, and needless to say, one
cannot simply daub a door handle from 500 yards away.
Furthermore, in the footage shown of them, they were seen walking on the opposite side of
the road to the two routes (a path or a road) which they would have to have taken to reach the
house. If I had been going to Christie Miller Road along that route, I would either have
crossed the road before then, or I would have crossed at the small traffic island opposite the
garage, which can just be seen on the footage. Yet they did not appear to cross or to be about
to cross.
However, there is more. Although The Met showed these few seconds from this camera, what
they failed to inform the public is that there is a second camera just after the first, one
which does cover both routes to chez Skripal. And so if the men had taken either of
these routes that they would have needed to take to get to Christie Miller Road, this second
camera would have shown it. Why was it not shown then? That's probably more a question for The
Met than for me, but if I was a juror in the case, I should most definitely want to see the
footage from that second camera in order to confirm or deny whether they did indeed cross the
road to use those routes. In short: the footage from the first camera is certainly not proof
that they actually went to Mr Skripal's house; the refusal to use footage from the second
camera casts serious doubts that they did.
And of course given who Mr Skripal was, his house and front door would have been covered by
CCTV. In which case, if the men actually did go there, The Met could show it. But they never
have.
The second point is even flimsier. It was claimed that the tiniest trace of "Novichok" was
found in the hotel room they were staying in. However, a second swab apparently turned up
nothing. In other words, you need to trust The Met and Porton Down on this. Right? Er no.
Firstly, we are talking about the same people that allegedly found the "Novichok" at the
beginning of May 2018, yet failed to inform the hotel owner until September of that year of
their finding in his hotel (I'm not into suing, but he should have sued). Not only this, but
they also failed to trace those who had stayed at the hotel from 4th March to May. Not exactly
convincing, is it?
But in any case, the idea is self-evidently ludicrous. Why would there have been a tiny
trace of the stuff in the hotel room? If there was a leak, why wasn't the hotel closed, and the
trains the men travelled on decontaminated? Or are we supposed to believe that the guys took it
out to have a sniff the night before, and spilled just enough for one, but not two swabs? Yep,
that's what we're asked to believe. Fine, believe it, if it gives you pleasure. But to those
with more discerning minds, it does sound suspiciously like a detail made up by people who make
stuff up, doesn't it?
The third point -- that the two suspects were agents of the GU (Russian military
intelligence) -- is by far the most serious. I accept that they probably were, although I do so
with the caveat that one of the most strikingly odd things about this case is that this has
never been officially confirmed. Sure, an organisation that rhymes with Smellingrat has
stated this, and so too have numerous politicians, but it has not actually been stated on the
official charges against them. To this day, the Crown Prosecution Service's charges against
them still use their apparent pseudonyms -- Petrov and Boshirov -- and do not mention their
apparent true identities. I find that very odd.
Nonetheless, as I say I accept that they probably were agents of Russian Military
Intelligence. It is this which is enough for many to confirm their guilt as attempted
assassins. Well, if their actions comported with how military intelligence officers on
assassination missions act, I would be inclined to agree. But they don't. Not even remotely.
There is nothing about their actions, as shown by The Met, that in any way convince that they
were on a state-sanctioned assassination mission. They travelled together. They operated in
broad daylight. They made no attempt to evade detection by CCTV. They cavorted with a
prostitute the night before. They smoked dope and attracted attention in their hotel room the
night before. After allegedly finishing their top-secret mission, they strolled into town. They
took pictures. They went window shopping. Nerve agent assassins? I think not!
"Oh," comes the scoffing reply, "so you believe their story about being tourists come to
see the cathedral and Old Sarum? Idiot."
"No," comes my equally scoffing reply. "Why should I? But why would I limit myself to two
possibilities -- tourists or deadly assassins -- neither of which actually fit their actions?
Have we not imagination enough to think of more than two options? Goodness, what do they
teach them in these schools!?"
How about this: Yes, they were in Salisbury on a mission from the Russian state, but no it
was not an assassination attempt -- not unless Vladimir Putin has taken to employing muppets to
carry out highly sensitive and dangerous missions of the Russian state. But seriously, does he
strike you as someone who would tend to give the most highly sensitive missions to a couple of
pot-smoking, prostitute-cavorting, picture-snapping, CCTV-friendly, window-shopping dudes?
Hardly!
Yet they were almost certainly doing something there other than tourism, as they claimed,
and my guess is that it was connected to where they went on the Saturday 3 rd March,
which The Met laughably tried to tell us was a reconnaissance mission to check out Mr Skripal's
house. A reconnaissance mission? Ha ha! Reminder: this is Salisbury, not Afghanistan or Idlib.
You can walk about unhindered, unmolested, and you can even locate 47 Christie Miller Road
using Google Maps. So why would they have needed to do reconnaissance on a house that they
allegedly walked up to in broad daylight the following day?
But even more than this, if they went to check out the house on the Saturday, why did they
not daub the door handle then? The Skripals were out at the time. It would have been the ideal
time to do it, if that was what they were intending. But no, The Met wants you to believe that
they came to Salisbury, secretly made their way to Mr Skripal's house, saw it, noted that no
one was at home, decided not to "Novichok" the door handle there and then, but instead go back
to London (where they had apparently left their "Novichok" all day long in their hotel room),
and come back the following day to do it when -- according to The Met -- the Skripals were at
home and their car in the drive!
It really is such an utterly stupid and preposterous proposition, that I have no doubt this
is why The Met decided to give no timeline of where and when they went in Salisbury on the
Saturday; to present no footage; and to show no pictures, save for one at the train station.
For had they shown such footage, I am quite sure that far from it showing them going out of
the town towards Mr Skripal's house for reconnaissance, it would show them going into
town for reconnaissance, probably near The Mill pub and the Maltings, where the following
day they just happened to be in the vicinity of the Skripals at about 1:45 -- far closer than
the Shell garage footage shows them in the vicinity of the house.
None of the above evidence would pass muster in a courtroom. It is flimsy, it's pathetic and
it's full of holes.
But talking of holes, let's now set this all in the context of the entire story presented by
The Met and the Government. I mentioned above the number of absurd, implausible and sometimes
downright impossible things that one has to believe to accept their account. Below, I've
recounted 40 of the most glaring, although I'm sure regular readers here can think of many,
many more. In case of doubt, I have annexed a comment next to each point, depending on whether
it fits into the absurd, implausible or impossible category, although I understand that some
readers may well think it remiss of me not to have given some of them more than one of those
descriptions:
That two men put themselves and everyone on their flight in jeopardy, by
boarding a plane with at least one, possibly two, bottles of the World's Deadliest Nerve Agent
(WDNA) in their luggage. (ABSURD) That the two suspects dropped an unused package of the
WDNA in a bin somewhere, whilst taking the used bottle of nerve agent back to Moscow with them.
(ABSURD) Or alternatively, that they only had one package of WDNA with them, but brought
a cellophane wrapping machine to Salisbury to wrap the used box up in, before discarding it.
(ABSURD) That the two men sprayed WDNA in an open space, without wearing any protective
clothing. (ABSURD) That after they had done this, rather than legging it, they decided
to spend an hour in the city centre window-shopping and taking pictures. (ABSURD) That
Mr Skripal and his daughter both somehow managed to touch the door handle of his front door on
their way out (try it with someone next time you exit your house). (IMPLAUSIBLE) That
despite being contaminated with WDNA, they showed no effects for hours afterwards.
(IMPLAUSIBLE) That when they did show effects hours later, it was at precisely the same time,
despite their very different heights, weights and metabolisms. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That despite being
contaminated with WDNA, they went into town, fed ducks, went for a meal, then went to a pub for
a drink. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That despite having hands contaminated with WDNA, Mr Skripal
handed a piece of bread to a local boy who ate it without becoming contaminated. (IMPLAUSIBLE)
That despite having hands that were contaminated with WDNA, Mr Skripal somehow managed to
contaminate the table in Zizzis, but not the door or door handle on the way in. (IMPLAUSIBLE)
That despite having hands that were contaminated with WDNA, Mr Skripal somehow managed not to
contaminate the manager of Zizzis when he shook hands with him (confirmed to me by a local
source). (IMPLAUSIBLE) That after becoming extremely aggressive in Zizzis, which some assume
was the effects of poisoning with WDNA, Mr Skripal wolfed down a plate of seafood
risotto before sauntering over to the pub for a drink. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That no CCTV of Mr Skripal
or his daughter on 4 th March could be shown to the public to jog their memories,
because of something called "National Security". (ABSURD) That no CCTV could be shown of The
Maltings, on the grounds of National Security, even though according to the official story no
crime took place there. (ABSURD) That the Russian couple who were filmed on CCTV camera at
15:47 in Market Walk (confirmed by a reliable source in the comment section on this blog), were
not in any way connected with the case. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That the only CCTV the public were
allowed to see of this pair was an absurd, blurred, fuzzy image taken second hand on a mobile
phone, when they could have shown crystal clear footage from the CCTV camera at the other end
of Market Walk. (ABSURD) That the Skripals were somehow in Zizzis at the same time that they
were actually in the Mill pub (The Met's timeline shows them to have been in Zizzis from 14:20
and 15:35,
which is demonstrably untrue ). (IMPOSSIBLE) That the Metropolitan Police are unable to put
out correct timelines. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That WDNA deteriorated so much after an hour on a door
handle, that it was too weak to kill the Skripals. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That this same WDNA, which
allegedly deteriorated in an hour, was then found three weeks later after exposure to the
elements and after being touched by many human hands, to be in a state of "high purity,
persistent and weather resistant". (IMPOSSIBLE) That WDNA, which was allegedly sprayed on a
door handle, somehow managed to spread to the roof of the house, meaning that it had to be
replaced. (IMPOSSIBLE) Yet that same WDNA, 2mg of which is apparently enough to kill a person
(according to BBC Panorama), and which causes whole roofs to have to be replaced and cars to be
destroyed, can be cleansed by members of the public using baby wipes. (ABSURD) That the police
cars which attended the Maltings needed to be destroyed, yet the ones that attended Mr
Skripal's house, where the poison was apparently most concentrated, did not. (ABSURD) That
Detective Sergeant Nicholas Bailey managed to be a first responder at the bench when the two
Russians were on it, at the same time as not being at the bench when the two Russians were on
it. (IMPOSSIBLE) That Mr Bailey entered Mr Skripal's house via the back door, because he
couldn't open the front door; but also managed to enter the house via the front door because he
was able to open it. (IMPOSSIBLE) That he was wearing a forensic suit to enter the house of
someone who had apparently overdosed in a park on Fentanyl. (ABSURD) That he managed to get
contaminated by WDNA despite wearing a forensic suit. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That the numerous police
officers not wearing forensic suits, who went in and out of the house on 4 th and 5
th March, did not become contaminated by WDNA, even though it was allegedly found to
be most concentrated there three weeks later, and in a state of "high purity". (IMPOSSIBLE)
That the police somehow managed to miss all four of Mr Skripal's pets (two cats and two guinea
pigs), so leaving them to starve to death. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That an air ambulance was called for
what looked like a drug overdose on a park bench, when a land ambulance can get to the hospital
just as quickly, if not quicker given where the helicopter had to land. (ABSURD) That the chief
nurse of the British Army just happened to be shopping near the bench when the two Russians
were on it. (ABSURD) That there just happened to be two Porton Down trained doctors at
Salisbury District Hospital. (ABSURD) That despite The Met, the Government and the media
referring to the substance used as "Novichok", in their only official statement to a court of
law, Porton Down were unable to confirm this, instead referring to it as "a nerve agent or
related compound" and "a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent." (ABSURD) That
Porton Down were able to identify a substance within 36 hours that apparently no other country
on earth makes, has made, or can make. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That "Novichok" can only be made in
Russia, despite variants of it having been synthesised or stocked in numerous countries
including Czechia, Sweden, Germany, Iran, the US, and Britain (Boris Johnson having unwittingly
confirmed this when he blurted out that they had samples of it at Porton Down). (IMPOSSIBLE)
That after she and her father were allegedly poisoned by the Russian state, Yulia Skripal said
she wanted to return there. (ABSURD) That Mr Skripal and his daughter have never been seen
together since -- not even in a single photo. (IMPLAUSIBLE) That nothing has ever been heard
from Mr Skripal since (national security won't wash – his daughter was able to appear in
a video). (ABSURD) That Salisbury had its first case of Fentanyl poisoning on the same day, at
the same time, and in the same shopping centre apparently involving another couple.
(IMPLAUSIBLE)
Remember, this list of the absurd, the implausible, and the downright impossible is not a
bunch of lunacy that I or anyone else looking into the case has concocted. No, they are
things that the Government of Great Britain, and The Metropolitan Police have concocted. It's
their story, not mine, and I'm just pointing it out and saying, "Hey, come look at this. No
clothes and all that!" That being said, it is of course those who point out this absurd,
implausible and impossible folly who are called conspiracy theorists by the keepers of the
narrative and their devotees, which is rather like being called a scruffbag by Dominic
Cummings. But no matter, better to be called a conspiracy theorist for pointing out patent
absurdities and things which are impossible than to be a Believer in Patent Absurdities and
Impossible Things.
Speculation Corner
Having cleared that Stuff and Nonsense out of the way, what did happen on 4 th
March 2018 in Salisbury? I am bound to disappoint people looking for the answer, as I simply
don't know. I don't know because the keepers of the keys of the Stuff and Nonsense have not
only done their utmost to keep the truth away from the light (such as refusing to release even
a jot of CCTV footage of the Skripals that day), but the sheer number of absurdities and
conflicting stories they have put out make it impossible for those watching from afar to be
sure about which things happened on that day, and which things were subsequently added to
obscure the truth. All we can say, for sure, is what didn't happen (see above).
Nevertheless, there are a couple of big clues that allow us to speculate as to something of
the nature of the thing. These are The Mill Pub and Detective Sergeant Nicholas Bailey. They
are not clues in the sense of us being able to know what role they played. But they are clues
in the sense of the authorities never being able to come out with a straight answer about the
location and the man, thereby giving rise to speculation that the bizarre and conflicting tales
about them are extremely important.
Take Mr Bailey, for instance. Where exactly was he on that evening and where exactly did he
succumb to poisoning? As hinted at above, he has been placed in multiple places, depending on
who has been telling the story and when they've been telling it. He has been:
A first
responder to the incident at the bench Not a first responder to the incident at the bench Not
at the bench when the two Russians were there At the bench after the incident happened At the
house at midnight entering by the front door At the house at midnight but unable to enter the
front door Admitted to Salisbury District Hospital on the Monday morning Not admitted to
Salisbury District hospital on the Monday morning, but on the Tuesday Morning Admitted to
Salisbury District Hospital on the Monday morning, discharged but readmitted on the Tuesday
How can it have been so difficult to establish where he was? His movements would have been
easy to trace. Why were they not and why have so many different stories been mooted? As I wrote
back
here :
"I would submit that the most reasonable view to take -- until evidence confirms otherwise
-- is that Detective Sergeant Bailey was poisoned neither at the bench nor the house, but
somewhere else altogether."
Actually, I think that there is some evidence for this. Here is what a
Freedom of Information request revealed about how The Met were to deal with questions posed
by the media about Mr Bailey. Note that this was on 9 th March, two weeks before the
door handle claim was first made:
"IF ASKED: Why was a detective sergeant (Nick Bailey) a first responder?
ANSWER: He attended the initial scene in the town centre.
IF ASKED: It's been suggested DS Bailey was contaminated at Skripal's house. Did he go to
the house? Can you confirm he definitely went to the Maltings?
ANSWER: He was a first responder to the initial scene in the town centre. We are
not discussing further [my italics]."
So he was a first responder to the "initial scene" in the town centre. Okay, but according
to Mr Bailey himself, on the BBC Panorama Programme, he was not a first responder at the bench
when the Russian pair were there. He claimed to have wandered down there sometime after it had
all finished, which means that he was not a first responder at that scene. Which means what?
It means thatthere was another scene . That is implied in the phrase "initial
scene". Clearly, if there was an initial scene, there must have also been a subsequent scene.
And equally clearly, it cannot have been anything to do with the house or the door handle,
because on 9 th March, when this instruction was given, there was officially only
one scene -- that is, the bench. The door handle story had not yet emerged.
Put all that together and what is the inescapable conclusion? Mr Bailey was indeed injured,
but it was at an initial scene -- that is at a scene that occurred prior to whatever
happened at the bench .
Let's come back to that after looking at the other big clue, The Mill. In the aftermath of 4
th March, the back of the Mill was closed off and the chaps in HazMats were busy
doing their thing there. But hang on a minute. Why was this? That area was never any part of
the official story. There was never any suggestion whatsoever that Mr Skripal or his daughter
had been there, and so why would it have needed cleaning up? From what?
In addition, we know that the then Manager of the Mill, Greg Townsend was interviewed
intensively by investigators from The Met, no less than eight times in the week after 4
th March. According to Mr Townsend, he felt like he was being treated as "
a terror suspect ". Again, why? According to the official story, what did Mr Skripal and
his daughter do there? They went in. They had a drink. They left. Big deal. Why on earth would
the most intense questioning and focus be at that location then?
But thirdly, and most crucially, is the incorrect timeline put out by The Met about the
Skripals' visit to this pub. Here's what they said:
13:40 – Sergei and Yulia arrive at the Sainsbury's upper level car park in The
Maltings
The pair go to The Mill pub in Salisbury
Approximately 14.20 – The father and daughter eat at Zizzi restaurant on Castle
Street
15:35 – They leave the restaurant
This is simply wrong. They did not go to The Mill pub before Zizzis. They went to Zizzis
between about 2:00pm and 2:45pm, and then on to the Mill from around 3:00pm to 3:30pm. Every
single one of the original witness statements in the early days of the case confirms this, and
I have also had independent corroboration locally that this was the case (
see here for details ). So why did The Met put out a timeline saying that the Skripals were
in Zizzis between 3:00pm and 3:30pm, when in fact they were in The Mill? Unfortunately, the
only conclusion I can draw from this is that it was done deliberately, with the purpose of
drawing attention away from that location as being the place the Skripals visited before the
bench incident.
Put that together with the oddities around the location of the poisoning of Detective
Sergeant Nicholas Bailey, and it seems to me -- and I admit this is highly speculative -- that
there was an incident prior to the bench incident, that it most probably occurred at the back
of The Mill, and it was there -- not the bench or the house -- that Mr Bailey became
contaminated. Let me stress that this is speculation, and it may well be incorrect, yet it
seems to me to be the most plausible explanation for the extremely strange ambiguity
surrounding Mr Bailey's movements, the claim that he was injured as a first responder to "the
initial scene", and the bait and switch between Zizzis and The Mill given in The Met's
timeline.
I would add one further element that may hint at this, which is this extraordinary claim in
an article on 6 th March 2018 in
The Sun (also carried in The
Mail ):
"As emergency crews cleared the substance left near the bench, others were called to
decontaminate the hospital. First reports suggested traces of the opiate fentanyl -- a
synthetic toxin many times stronger than heroin -- had been detected at the scene. But that
was later linked to unconnected incident involving another couple coincidentally in the
shopping centre."
That really is extraordinary. Another incident, this time a Fentanyl poisoning, the first of
its kind in Salisbury, on the same day, around the same time, and in the same shopping centre
as a nerve agent incident. That's about as likely as the British Army's Chief Nurse happening
to be there at that exact same moment, isn't it? Did it really happen? I have no idea. But if
it did, was this something to do with the " initial scene" -- the one that saw Mr Bailey
and two of his colleagues taken to hospital ( here is a link to BBC article confirming that two
police officers were contaminated, as well as a third member of the emergency services, who was
clearly Mr Bailey)?
Questions, questions, questions. To which there must be answers, answers, answers.
Unfortunately, those controlling the narrative are not about to give them any time soon, and
they will no doubt continue to perpetuate the absurd, the implausible, and the impossible,
rather than coming clean with the truth.
This is the kind of country we are becoming. This is the kind of society that those behind
this riddle, wrapped in a cover up, inside a hoax, are leading us to. A national security
state, where the truth is buried underneath an avalanche of deception, and where those who try
to honestly get to the bottom of it are labelled enemies of the state, treated shamefully, so
that others are deterred from following suit. It rather minds me of this, from one of the early
church fathers, St. Anthony:
"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they
will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.'"
It's not the kind of society I hoped to see when I was growing up. It's not the kind of
society I hoped my children would grow up in. My guess is that it's not even the kind of
society that those who are playing these elaborate games wanted to grow up in. Yet it is what
it is, and I am persuaded that those who have brought us to this point have more trouble
sleeping than I do. I would urge them to consider this, before it is too late:
"For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will
not be known and come to light." – Jesus Christ (Luke 8:17)
POSTSCRIPT
I just wanted to say thanks once again for all the many wonderful commenters and their
thoughtful analysis of this case over the last couple of years. Your contributions are much
appreciated. Once again, it is my intention to write about other things, and my sincere hope is
that I don't find myself writing a 3rd anniversary piece.
I also wanted to draw your attention to a new book on the subject, Skripal in Prison
, by John Helmer. I regret that I would have liked to be in a position to be able to make one
or two comments on the book, but unfortunately I have not had the time to read it myself yet.
But given John's pieces on the subject on his blog, I have no doubt that it will be a most
interesting and enlightening read. You can get a copy of it here:
An interesting connection between Skripal false flag and Syria false flag.
Notable quotes:
"... Main Stream Media ..."
"... "The same people who assured you Saddam Hussein had WMDs now assure you Russian 'Novichok' nerve agents are being wielded by Vladimir Putin to attack people on British soil." [4] ..."
Hamish
de Bretton-Gordon is the pretentious name used by a fellow who seems to have been a
lieutenant colonel in the British Army and a chemical weapons expert. He has
access to the media and markets the Party Line . Whose? The Foreign Office's version of
truth, one that denies the very active role of the Israel Lobby in using American forces to make war
in the Middle East.
de Bretton Gordon's public position is that chemical weapons are nasty dangerous things
being used by Bashar al
Assad , the president of Syria
to attack innocent civilians. Before believing this story look at what Seymour Hersh has to
say; that the Syria Gas Attack Carried Out
By America .
... ... ...
Civilians were under fire, he went on. He failed to mention that Al-Nusra might be holding
them as human shields, as they did in Eastern Aleppo. The Syrian army liberated that area in
December twenty-sixteen.
For the first time in five years the city's Christians were able to celebrate Christmas
free from constant bombardment from the Al-Nusra terrorists in the east.
Celebrating Christmas in Aleppo December 2016.
The US and UK Governments and the mainstream media hated the liberation of Eastern Aleppo.
They will equally bewail the liberation of Eastern Ghouta, when it comes.
Indeed, during the BBC interview, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon came across as nothing more
than a UK government sock-puppet. He confirmed this when he commended what he said were 'the
peace talks in Geneva'. We shall come to that below.
Doctors Under Fire
Mr David Nott is a respected surgeon but blames 'Assad' for everything.
But what of this man, and what of 'Doctors Under Fire'? Well, the latter has apparently
just two members, De Bretton Gordon and one David Nott, a surgeon who has been in war-torn
areas. Mr Nott similarly finds no good word to say about the Syrian government.
Oddly, in a video on Vimeo from
2016 he says Doctors Under Fire will be a charity. The Charity Commission has no record
of it, nor of 'Medics under Fire' which is what the Doctors Under Fire website is called.
When you go to the website , at
this time of writing, you're invited to a rally on 7th May. On further investigation, that is
7th May 2016. Their website is two years out of date. Of course hospitals should not be
attacked in war zones, but
the Doctors Under Fire platform gives Messrs De B-G and Nott credibility to advance
another agenda.
Hospital bombing scam
Furthermore, this
astonishing video collated all the times the 'last hospital' in eastern Aleppo was put
out of action by 'Syrian regime airstrikes'. Can you guess how many it was? And how do the
mainstream media source their footage of sick children, hospitals, and dare we add, 'doctors
under fire'? They are entirely dependent on the terrorists. No western journalist can venture
into their areas. Why? For fear of being kidnapped and held for ransom by the very people
they champion.
De Bretton Gordon also claimed on the BBC a hospital in eastern Ghouta had been hit. That
was why they gave him a platform under his 'Doctors Under Fire' persona. But again, it was
second-hand terrorist propaganda.
Here, the impressive 'Off-Guardian' website exposes the Syrian totem head of the 'White
Helmets', which was a British Foreign Office creation, as we
investigated here . This relentless
tugging at western heart-strings is a scam and the msm [ Main Stream Media ] know it.
Hamish de
Bretton-Gordon
SecureBio spun off from Hamish De Bretton-Gordon's time in the British Army
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is a retired Colonel with an OBE. He commanded NATO's Rapid
Reaction Chemical Biological Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Battalion. He ran a company
called SecureBio with, we read on this
'military speakers' website , 'an impressive list of blue chip clients globally.'
However, Companies House says
SecureBio resolved to go into liquidation in June 2015.
The Colonel now apparently works for a company which makes breathing masks, Avon Protection . His LinkedIn
profile claims he is 'Managing Director CBRN' of Avon, despite not actually being a
director. He also claims still to be director of SecureBio. He does not mention that company
was dissolved in August 2017 with debts over £715,000.
Call for France to drop
bombs on Syria
De Bretton-Gordon has teamed up with Avon Protection which makes breathing masks.
De Bretton-Gordon no longer has any connection with military field-work. Nevertheless, he
has continued access to the world's media when subjects like Syria and alleged chemical
weapons come up.
Securebio's YouTube channel is
still online and has a number of videos of the colonel calling for 'safe havens' for
terrorists. He has appeared frequently on Sunni-Muslim Qatar's Al Jazeera TV channel.
Finally, why did the Colonel's promotion of the Geneva peace talks raise the alarm?
Because this is a UK-driven political view. In reality the Geneva talks stalled in February
twenty-seventeen. The Kurds took against the inconsequential opposition in exile pompously
called the High Negotiations Committee.
The Geneva talks finally collapsed in November when the Syrians would not agree to
President Assad stepping aside, a key, but stupid, UK and US demand.
The Guardian's highly-respected Patrick Wintour says the talks De Bretton Gordon extols
are 'perilously shorn of credibility'.
Meanwhile, the real peace talks, unmentioned by the Colonel, have been held in Astana,
capital of Kazakhstan. They are brokered by Russia, so the UK wants them to fail.
But the UN's Staffan de Mistura says the Astana talks are making small but 'clear
progress' to reducing violence in Syria.
They have now moved to Sochi on the Black Sea and we need to pray for
them.
They need to lay down their arms. But don't expect the Colonel to agree. The Bible says in
Psalm 120:7:
I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war.
Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon will keep ringing the UK Government bell. A knighthood
cannot be far away. But we must take what he and the rest of the BBC's pro-Foreign Office
pundits say with a very large pinch of salt.
De Bretton-Gordon is Managing Director CBRN at Avon
Protection , the recognised global market leader in respiratory protection system
technology specialising primarily in Military, Law Enforcement, Firefighting, and Industrial.
[2]
Novichok
nerve agent
On 4 March 2018, a Russian double agent Sergei Skripal was reported to have been
poisoned in Salisbury with a nerve agent which British authorities
identified as Novichok .
Theresa May told
Parliament that she held Russia responsible for Skripal's attempted
murder.
According to Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, Novichok was allegedly developed in the Soviet Union at a laboratory
complex in Shikhany, in central Russia. Vil
Mirzayanov , a Russian chemist involved in the development of Novichok, who later
defected to the United
States , said the Novichok was tested at Nukus, in Uzbekistan . [3]
Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray , who visited the site at Nukus,
said it had been dismantled with US help. He is among those advocating scepticism about the
UK placing blame on Russia for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. In a blog post, Murray
wrote:
"The same people who assured you Saddam Hussein had WMDs now assure you Russian 'Novichok' nerve
agents are being wielded by Vladimir Putin to attack people on British
soil." [4]
Deployments
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon's operational deployments included the 1st Gulf War , Cyprus , Bosnia , Kosovo , Iraq (multiple tours) and Afghanistan (2 tours) and has been in
Syria & Iraq frequently in the last 3 years.
This considerable experience in the field places Hamish de Bretton-Gordon as one of the
world's leading and most current experts in chemical and biological counter terrorism and
warfare.
Doctors
Under Fire
In December 2017, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon and fellow director David Nott of Doctors
Under Fire highlighted the case of seven children with curable cancer who were said to be
dying in Ghouta, Syria, for want of drugs and nourishment. They claimed
Union of Syrian Medical Care and Relief Organisations (UOSSM) hospitals in Ghouta were on
their knees with very few medicines left, and that kind words for the dying children were the
only palliative care available. [6]
UNQUOTE
This Christian has been abused; he does not approve of Homosexuality or abortion. In other words, he is
not a heretic.
The United States designated Jabhat al-Nusra as a foreign terrorist organization, followed
by the United Nations Security
Council and many other countries. [38] It was the
official Syrian branch of al-Qaeda until July 2016, when it ostensibly
split. [39][40]
In early 2015, the group became one of the major components of the powerful jihadist joint operations room
named the Army of
Conquest , which took over large territories in Northwestern Syria . It also operates in neighbouring Lebanon . [41] In November
2012, The
Washington Post described al-Nusra as the most successful arm of the rebel forces.
[[42]
In July 2016, al-Nusra formally separated from al-Qaeda and
re-branded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham ("Front for the Conquest of the Levant"). [39]
On 28 January 2017, following violent clashes with
Ahrar al-Sham and
other rebel groups, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham merged with four other groups to become Their al-Sham .
Christian
Voice ex Wiki
Christian Voice (CV) is a Christian advocacy group based in the
United Kingdom .
[1] Its stated
objective is "to uphold Christianity as the Faith of the United Kingdom, to be a voice for
Biblical values
in law and public policy, and to defend and support traditional family life." [2]
It is independent of religious, denominational, or political parties. [3]
CV is led by Stephen Green, with Lord Ashburn as its patron.
[3] Green
is the group's spokesperson, producing scores of press releases from 2005 to 2010. According
to Green, Christian Voice had in excess of 600 members in 2005. [4]
The group has been criticised for its positions. David Peel, leader of the United Reformed
Church called Christian Voice "a disgrace" [4] and
described their "claim to represent Christians" in the UK as "absurd". [[5]
Leadership Stephen Green
The leader, and sole staff member, of Christian Voice is Stephen Green [6]
, a former Chairman of the Conservative Family Campaign, who attends an Assemblies of
God Church. In the early 1990s, Green was a prominent campaigner against homosexuality through the
Conservative Family Campaign, and wrote a book called The Sexual Dead-End .
Medics Under Fire - org
Anti-Syrian government [ of 2016 ]
The repeated targeting of healthcare workers and hospitals by the Russian and Syrian
governments are war crimes. We call on you to give Syria's heroic healthcare workers and the
communities they serve a zone free from bombing to ensure their protection. The international
community has agreed the bombs need to stop. The resolutions are in place. They simply need
to be enforced.
Secure Bio
Limited ex Companies House
Registered office address
Bell Advisory, Tenth Floor 3 Hardman Street, Spinningfields, Manchester, M3 3H
Company status
Dissolved
Dissolved on
17 August 2017
Company type
Private limited Company
Incorporated on
29 June 2011
Last accounts made up to 31 December 2013
Nature of business (SIC)
82990 - Other business support service activities not elsewhere classified
Appointment of Hamish De Bretton-Gordon as a director
I stopped listening to npr after returning to the US after living overseas for more than a
decade. I was struck by how narrow their perspective was. Very constricted range of
"approved" thought and no room for dissenting opinions or independent thinkers there. It
almost seemed that its listeners were actually afraid to hear anything other than the
approved orthodoxy of the left. Almost as if they feared they might be won over to a
different way of thinking ;)
And now, enough of politics for me and I wish you a good night.
People don't hate media itself. People hate it, when corporate media becomes propagandists
for political parties. This is like saying - "why do people hate Germany, ever since Hitler
came to power". Maybe people don't hate Germany - mabye Hitler part is the problem.
It is one of the ironies of life that single-party polities often have more objective media
than frenetic democracies. Pravda was always less propagandistic than the New
York Times . In a totalitarian system, the ruling party benefits from taking hits as
they come; the effects diffuse faster that way. There's no need to omit facts that may
later become well known, or bury key information to a later page in the paper. Credibility
of the ruling party is paramount.
In democracies on the other hand, there's always a chance that kicking the can down the
road results in the consequences never having to be faced. So the whole nation becomes one
of bucket-kickers. Credibility of the ruling party is irrelevant, all to be forgotten in
the next (soon) cycle of elections.
One of the most significant aspects of the COV19 pandemic is that the Chinese government
lied to its citizenry about many facets of the disease, and that citizenry has discovered
the lie (for example, the true death tolls in Wuhan). The Communist Party has generally
never done that; what's to gain by taking the risk? And now they have and are paying for it
in credibility.
U.S. MSM is the most dishonest enterprise I read regularly. There's more truth in spam
e-mail from a marketing machine.
Of course, "Congress" includes the Republican Senate as well as the Democratic House;
there's every bit as much dislike out there for Moscow Mitch as there is for Nancy Pelosi.
And by the same token, "the media" is not just the New York Times , the
Washington Post , NPR, and the TV networks other than FOX. It's also FOX, the vast
apparatus of right-wing talk radio, the Wall Street Journal , goodness knows how
many local rags, Daily Caller, Breitbart, and the rest.
The thing about rating the press - some of the people have been trained to hate CNN, so
they rate the press low thinking that is what they are commenting on, while some of the
people have been trained to hate FOX News, so they rate the press low thinking that is what
they are commenting on. Meanwhile, ALL of the people have total faith in 'their' media.
Same way that Congress gets super low approval ratings, yet 94% of them get re-elected.
Congress may stink, but 'MY' congresscritter is the bestest...
First, "Media" is not the same thing as 'news media', just as 'news media' is not the same
thing as 'journalism'.
Second, the facts prove what a growing number of people think of the 'news media',
whores and sycophants for partisan politics. For example, Gannett, which has become the
biggest financial train wreck in recent memory. The reason is simple: fewer and fewer
people trust Gannett, so fewer and fewer people subscribe to and advertise in Gannett
publications, so the revenues continue to erode.
The late Patrick Caddell who worked for George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Joe Biden
and Jerry Brown called the media an enemy of the American people. Play Hide
Why does the left hate Jordan Peterson? An excerpt below from the excellent Atlantic
article by Caitlin Flanagan.
"It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and
art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is
afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent
with identity politics of any kind."
Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson?
The Canadian psychology professor's stardom is evidence that leftism is on the decline- and
is deeply vulnerable.
By Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com...
By a clever move of the US intelligence agencies they are left without a choice as to support Trump in 2020 election is as idiotic
as to support Biden.
U.S. intelligence community, through its preferred propaganda sheet the New York Times, is
now reporting that
Russia is taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis to spread disinformation through Europe and also in the U.S.
In particular, Putin has escalated a campaign-by-innuendo to reduce confidence in the outcome of the upcoming 2020 presidential
election.
In any event, the Russians are too late as the Democratic and Republican parties' behavior has already convinced many Americans
that voting in November will be a waste of time.
As RT UK launches, attacks on the channel in the British media have stepped up
The latest is a piece by Mr. Cyril Waugh-Monger, a very important newspaper columnist for the NeoCon Daily, a patron of the Senator
Joe McCarthy Appreciation Society and author of 'Why the Iraq War was a Brilliant Idea' and 'The Humanitarian Case for Bombing Syria.'
Dear socially inferior person reading this article. My name is Cyril Waugh-Monger (I'm called 'Mr Terribly Pompous Neo-Con' by
my friends) and I'm here to tell you why on no account should you watch RT and why you should be making complaints to Ofcom (a British
bureacracy which regulates TV) about this dreadful channel so that in the interests of 'free speech' and 'democracy' we can get it
off air.
1. RT doesn't peddle Russophobia
Outrageously, RT doesn't compare Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. It doesn't join in with the demonization of Russia and its leader.
How can we have a channel which is watched by people in Britain, which doesn't do that? We neocons say that demonization of Russia
and its leader is compulsory. How dare RT not do as we say!
RT is more vocally in support of Russia than western media
2. RT is sometimes rude to bankers
There's a man on RT called Max Keiser and he is often very rude to bankers. Why, he has even called for them to face the death
penalty. Such disrespect to our financial elites is shocking and should not be allowed in a free society.
3. Its coverage of the MH17 crash
Shockingly, RT commentators didn't rush to blame Vladimir Putin for the air disaster within seconds of the news breaking. Some
even said that we should wait for the forensic evidence before any statements apportioning guilt were made. Others said that we couldn't
rule out that the plane was downed by an another aircraft. This failure to come and say loud and clear "Putin personally shot down
the plane with a missile he made and fired with his own hands" within minutes of the crash is clear evidence of RT's bias and why
it must be taken off the air.
4. RT's 'pundits' include people who aren't neocons and 'liberal interventionists'
This is truly scandalous: RT gives airtime to people who don't support the West's policy of endless war and who opposed airstrikes
on Syria last year. Why, it's even broadcast interviews with the convener of the Stop the War coalition – and has a regular weekly
show fronted by George Galloway! This is unconscionable. Only people who support Western foreign policy should be allowed to express
their views on international affairs on television, not 'cranks' and 'fanatics' who oppose attacking a sovereign state in the Middle
East on deceitful grounds every couple of years. Why, if RT had been around in 2003, it would no doubt have given airtime to anti-war
'conspiracy theorists' who would have told viewers that Iraq had no WMDs – and claimed, fantastically – that Bush and Blair were
making it all up.
5. RT provides airtime to genuine socialists and genuine conservatives
This is really terrible: RT interviews people who oppose neo-liberalism and globalization, from both the left and the right. It's
given the microphone to socialists, communists, greens, and 'extremists' on the right, like Ron Paul. These people should not be
allowed to express their views on television; they are 'cranks' and should be totally marginalized. Only those who support the hegemonic
consensus should be allowed on TV. It's very important that in order to protect free speech and democracy, alternative opinions are
not heard.
6. RT pundits have 'extremist' links
I monitor the people who appear on RT very, very closely and I can tell you that there was once a case of an RT interviewee who
had a link on his website to another website which had a link to another website which had a link to another website – which denied
the Holocaust and said that little green men from Mars were ruling the US.
After considerable research, I also found that another RT pundit once attended a conference where a fellow invitee had once sat
at a restaurant table, a few days after another person who had actually praised Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Josef Stalin in a
magazine article published in North Korea in 1962.
7. RT is anti-semitic
Ok, I've got no evidence of this, but I'll bung it in anyway as it sounds good.
8. RT has broadcast documentaries on the wars in Yugoslavia which don't blame the Serbs for everything
This is totally unacceptable.
9. RT has had 'experts' on its programs who have made some very strong criticisms of Israel
This too is totally unacceptable. Anyone with a theory or definition that differs from Western minded politicians is demonized
for voicing their opinion.
10. RT pundits have often ridiculed leading American policymakers
For instance, when the US Secretary of State John Kerry said that "you just don't in the 21st century" invade another country
on "completely trumped up pretext," some people on RT had the audacity to say "What about Iraq?" This lack of respect towards a leading
American politician is appalling, and in a free society ought not to be allowed. The correct procedure whenever a leading US political
figure speaks is to tug one's forelock.
11. RT's coverage of the conflict in Syria
In 2011-13, we had so-called 'experts' on Syria telling us on RT that some of the freedom-fighting pro-democracy rebels were actually
fanatical terrorists who were guilty of committing atrocities. This was obviously a clear lie. Islamist terrorists like ISIS have
only been active in Syria since 2014 and of course, it's all the fault of President Assad and Russia.
12. RT interviews lots of people whose views I do not share
It ought not to be allowed! Aren't we supposed to live in a democracy?
13. The most important reason: RT is a threat
More and more people are watching it – which is why me and my little group of neocons and 'liberal interventionists' are so worried
and stepping up our attacks on the station and denigrating those people who appear on it.
The next big war is going to be much harder for us to 'sell' to the plebs, because we are no longer in control of the narrative
as we were in 2003, before the Iraq war. Oh, what happy days those were!
Don't watch RT because we really don't want you to 'question more.' We want you to question less. It's much easier for us that
way.
@niteranger
"For example, New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof on Sunday reported the disheartening analysis of Dr. Neil Ferguson of
Britain, one of the world's leading epidemiologists."
Nicholas Kristoff has the bad habit of falling for falling for frauds and making them famous. "Three cups of tea" for starters.
He's got a long track record of peddling fake stuff.
Moon of Alabama regurgitating the New York Times and National Public Radio. Sad!
You are an idiot.
It is true that the MSM serves up a lot of bullshit but people with a functioning brain
are usually able to differentiate between the garbage and the stories that have validity.
Only an utter fool with no reasoning abilities would categorically dismiss every
single article that appears in a mainstream publication. People like you that need a big
daddy authority figure to tell them what they are allowed to read and how to think are truly
messed up. Sad indeed...
Second of all yesterday I seem to remember finding a post at MoA which detailed wikipedia
changing the mortality rate of spanish flu.The post included wayback links which showed up
the deceit. I'm staying with a relative who is a recently retired journo defending his
professi8on & want to show him the piece as an example of exactly how perfidious what is
now called 'the communications industry' has become. I cannot find that post so if anyone
could point me to it I would appreciate that.
Off-Guardian has posted two articles on Freakipedia
and
The Fraudian changing or using misleading data concerning the case fatality rate for the
Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. Each article also has links to sources you can follow, if you
want to back up your argument. Good luck!
New article from John Helmer "MI6 & BBC REVEAL OPERATION MINCEPIE – SKRIPAL
BLOOD-TESTS AT SALISBURY HOSPITAL FAILED TO SHOW NERVE AGENT UNTIL PORTON DOWN ADDED IT FOR
THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT TO ANNOUNCE".
"The evidence of the Salisbury hospital personnel has been reviewed by a sharp-eyed
English analyst who prefers anonymity and an internet handle called Twiki. He has discovered
that the blood testing of the Skripals for at least 36 hours after their hospitalisation
– that is between their admission on Sunday afternoon March 4, and the following
Tuesday morning March 6 – did not (repeat not) reveal a marker for organo-phosphate
nerve agent poisoning; that is, the level of acetylcholinesterase (ACE) in the
bloodstream.*"
It seems to me that HMG fiction writers need to up their game. HMG novel on what happened
to the Skripal's is unbelievable. Has the quality of modern day Agatha Christie's
deteriorated that much? It seems that the events on March 4th in Salisbury were not
anticipated and a clusterfuck of the coverup has no clothes on it.
The importance of getting to the factual roots of what happened to put humanity on this
epidemiological trajectory should be especially clear after the debacle of September 11, 2001.
Without any sustained investigation of the 9/11 crimes, Americans were rushed into cycles of
seemingly perpetual warfare abroad, police state and surveillance state interventions at home.
This cycle of fast responses began within a month of 9/11 with a full-fledge military invasion
of Afghanistan, an invasion that continues yet.
When two US Senators, Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle, sought to slow the rush of the US
executive into emergency measures and war, they and the US Congress they served were hit hard
by a military grade bioweapon, anthrax. The violent tactic of the saboteurs proved effective in
easing aside close scrutiny that might have slowed down the fast approval by the end of October
of Congress's massive Patriot Act.
Since then a seemingly endless cycle of military invasions has been pushed forward in the
Middle East and Eurasia. The emergency measure powers claimed by the executive branch of the US
government extended to widespread illegal torture, domestic spying, media censorship and a
meteoric rise in extrajudicial murders especially by drones. This list is far from
complete.
All of these crimes against humanity were justified on the basis of an unproven official
explanation of 9/11. Subsequent scholarly investigations have demonstrated unequivocally for
the attentive that officialdom's explanations of what transpired on the fateful day in
September were wrong, severely wrong. The
initial interpretations are strongly at variance with the evidentiary record available on
the public record.
We must not allow ourselves to be hoodwinked in the same manner once again. The stakes are
too large, maybe even larger than was the case in 2001. The misinterpreted and misrepresented
events of 9/11 were exploited in conformity with the " Shock Doctrine ," a strategy for instituting
litanies of invasive state actions that the public would not otherwise have accepted.
The conscientious portion of humanity, many of whose members have done independent homework
of their own on the events of 9/11, will well understand the importance of identifying the
actual originating source of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic.
No less than in the wake of the 9/11 debacle , there are grave
dangers entailed in being too quick or too naïve or too trustful in immediately accepting
as gospel fact the Chinese government's initial explanations of the COVID-19 outbreak. Why not
take the time to investigate and test the current interpretations of the authorities that
proved themselves to be so wrong in their decision to reprimand Dr. Li?
Especially when the stakes are extremely high, the need is great for objective, third-party
adjudication to establish what really happened irrespective of official interpretations.
History provides abundant evidence to demonstrate that official interpretations of
transformative events often veer away from the truth in order to serve and protect the
interests of entrenched power.
All semblance of due process and the rule of law can quickly evaporate when powerful
institutions advance interpretations of catastrophic events used to justify their own
open-ended invocation of unlimited emergency measure powers. The well-documented examples of
the misrepresentation and exploitation of the 9/11 debacle demonstrate well the severity of the
current danger. The origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic have yet to be adequately
addressed and explained by a panel of genuinely independent investigators.
The Chinese Ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, acknowledged on Feb. 9 on CBS's
Face the Nation
that there is no certainty about the origins of COVID-19. When asked by CBS's Margaret Brennan
where the virus came from, the Chinese Ambassador responded, "We still don't know yet."
There has been considerable scholarly scrutiny of the anthrax attacks targeting the US Congress and
some media organizations in early October of 2001. The anthrax attacks constitute the most serious
assault ever on the operations of the US Congress, the primary interface between law and politics in
the United States.
These attacks have come to be understood as an integral part of the large body of
crimes committed in Manhattan and Washington DC on 9/11. The anthrax attacks killed five people
including two postal workers. Seventeen people were injured and Congress was shut down for a few days.
Anthrax-laden letter attacks were specifically directed at two Democratic Party Senators,
Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle. When they received the contaminated letters both lawmakers were engaged
in questioning provisions of the post-9/11 emergency measures legislation known as the Patriot Act.
Both Senators Leahy and Daschle were hesitant to rubber stamp the enactment that was seemingly
instantly drafted and put before Congress within three weeks of the 9/11 debacle.
The anthrax attacks took place just as the US Armed Forces began invading Afghanistan where the
culprits of the 9/11 crimes were supposed to be hiding out. The perpetrators of the anthrax attack,
who we were supposed to imagine at the time as al-Qaeda terrorists, succeeded in easing aside the
major locus of opposition to the Patriot Act's speedy passage in late October. Why, one might
legitimately ask, ask, would Islamic jihadists want the Patriot Act to be rushed through Congress. In
early October the US Armed Forces invaded Afghanistan at the same time that the US executive branch
was seeking with the Patriot a license to kill and torture and steal without any checks of
accountability.
Once the US Armed Forces went to war with Afghanistan on the basis of a fraudulent explanation of
9/11's genesis, there was basically no chance that a genuine and legitimate evidence-based
investigation of the September 11 crimes would ever take place. To this day the Global War on Terror
continues to unfold on a foundation of lies and illusions that have had devastating consequences for
the quality of life for average people throughout the United States and the world.
In his 2005 book,
Biowarfare and Terrorism
,
Prof.
Boyle's analysis
pointed to major problems in the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks
including the agency's destruction of relevant evidence. To Prof. Boyle, the highly refined
military-grade quality of the anthrax made it almost certain that the anthrax bioweapon was produced
within the US Armed Forces at the lab in Fort Detrick Maryland. Anthrax, or
Bacillus anthracis
,
is a rod-shaped bacteria found naturally in soil.
Looking back at the episode Dr. Boyle
observed
,
"The Pentagon and the C.I.A. are ready, willing, and able to launch biowarfare when it suits their
interests. They already attacked the American People and Congress and disabled our Republic with
super-weapons-grade anthrax in October 2001."
Prof. Boyle's interpretation was later verified and expanded upon in a book by Canadian Prof.
Graeme MacQueen. Prof. Boyle acknowledges the veracity of Prof. MacQueen's study of the anthrax
deception as part of a "domestic conspiracy." He sees
The
2001 Anthrax Deception
as the most advanced finding of academic research on the topic so far.
Prof. MacQueen is prominent among a very large group of academics and public officials who condemn
the official narrative of 9/11 for its dramatic inconsistencies with the available evidence. Those who
share this understanding include former Italian Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga, former German
Defence Minister Andreas von Bülow, former UK Minister of the Environment Michael Meacher, former
Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, former Director of the US Star Wars Missile
Defense Program Lt. Col. Bob Bowman, Princeton International Law Professor Richard Falk, and the
author of ten academic books on different aspects of the 9/11 debacle, Claremont Graduate University
Professor David Ray Griffin.
Prof. Francis Boyle shared the 9/11 skepticism of many when he
asked
,
Could the real culprits behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the
immediately-following terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same
people? Could it truly be coincidental that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist
anthrax attacks - Senators Daschle and Leahy - were holding up the speedy passage of the
pre-planned USA Patriot Act ... an act which provided the federal government with unprecedented
powers in relation to US citizens and institutions?
In his coverage of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic, Spiro Skouras highlighted the proceedings known
as Event 201. Event 201 brought together in New York on October 18, 2019 an assembly of delegates
hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins Center
for Health Security. The gathering anticipated the COVID-19 crisis by just a few weeks. I retrospect
it is almost as if Event 201 announced many of the controversies about to arise with the outbreak of
the real epidemic in Wuhan China. Event 201 performed functions similar to those of the drills that
frequently mimic the engineered scenarios animating false flag terror events but especially those of
9/11.
A major subject of the meeting highlighted the perceived need to control communications during an
epidemic. Levan Thiru of the Monetary Authority of Singapore went as far as to call for "a step up on
the part of governments to take action against Fake News." Thiru called for recriminatory litigation
aimed at criminalizing "bad actors." Cautioning against this kind of censorship, Skouras asked, Who is
going to decide what constitutes "Fake News"? If fact checkers are to be employed, "who will fact
check the fact checkers"?
Hasti Taghi, a media executive with NBC Universal in New York, was especially outspoken in
condemning the activities of "conspiracy theorists" that have organized themselves to question the
motives and methods of the complex of agencies involved in developing and disseminating vaccines.
She
frequently condemned
the role of "conspiracy theories" in energizing public distrust of the role
of pharmaceutical companies and media conglomerates in their interactions with government.
Tom Ingelsby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security injected an interesting twist into the
discussion. He asked,
"How much control of information should there be? By whom should control
of information be exercised? How can false information be effectively challenged?" Ingelsby then
added, "What happens if the false information is coming from companies and governments?"
https://www.youtube.com/embed/AoLw-Q8X174
This final question encapsulates a major problem for conscientious citizens trying to find
their way through the corruption and disinformation that often permeates our key institutions.
Those that try to counter the problem that governments and corporations sometimes peddle false
information can pretty much expect to face accusations that they are "conspiracy theorists." Too often
the calculations involved in deciding whom or what is credible (or not) depends primarily on simple
arithmetic favouring the preponderance of wealth and power.
Spiro Skouras gives careful consideration to the possibility that the United States
instigated the COVID-19 epidemic starting in Wuhan China.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/WE8m309gKVE
https://www.youtube.com/embed/p0DDXsPKGHw
He notes the precedent set in 1945 on the atomic attacks by the US government on the
civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Skouras points out that there is proof that since the
Second World War, the US government has conducted at least 239 experiments, secretly deploying toxic
chemical and biological agents against portions of its own population.
On the history of US involvement in biological warfare see
here
,
here
and
here
.
Skouras highlights the window presented for a covert US bioweapon attack at the World Military
Games in Wuhan China in the second half of October of 2019. He notes that 300 US soldiers participated
as athletes in the Wuhan Military Games together with a large contingent of American support
personnel. The timing and the circumstances of the event were more or less ideal to open up a new
pathogenic front in the US government's informal
"hybrid
war" against China
.
On Feb. 15 at the Munich Security Conference, US Defence Secretary, Mark T. Esper, developed a
highly critical characterization of Chinese wrongdoing in order to seemingly justify recriminatory
actions.
Esper
asserted
, "China's growth over the years has been remarkable, but in many ways it is fuelled by
theft, coercion, and exploitation of free market economies, private companies, and colleges and
universities Huawei and 5G are today's poster child for this nefarious activity.
The US antagonism to Huawei's leadership in the design and worldwide dissemination of 5 G
technology might well be a factor in the scandal generated by the Chinese connection to intertwined
research in microbiology at the level 4 labs in Winnipeg and Wuhan.
Back in 2000 the
notorious
report
entitled
Rebuilding America's Defenses
, a publication brought forward by the
neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), proposed that the US government should
refurbish and invoke its capacity to wage biological warfare. PNAC was the think tank that anticipated
the events of September 11, 2001 by outlining a strategic scheme that could only be realized by
mobilizing American public opinion with "a catalytic event like a New Pearl Harbor."
After 9/11, the PNAC Team of related neoconservative activists and Zionist organizations pretty
much took over the governance of the United States along with the build up and deployment of its
formidable war machine. PNAC called for the invocation of "advanced forms of biological warfare that
can 'target' specific genotypes." In this fashion "biological warfare might be transformed into a
politically useful tool."
The relationship of this pandemic to internal disagreements within China has been put on
full display in Steve Bannon's coverage of the crisis entitled
War Room: Pandemic
.
A
prominent member of US President Donald Trump's
inner
circle
, Steve Bannon is often accompanied on the daily show by Chinese billionaire dissident,
Miles Guo (aka Guo Wengui, Miles Haoyun, Miles Kwok).
Guo is an
outspoken Chinese refugee
. He is a
persistent critic of virtually every facet of the policies and actions of the Chinese Communist Party.
Guo regularly condemns those who dominate China's one-party system, a system run by an elite who,
he alleges, are corrupt, incompetent and inveterate liars. Guo regularly asserts that all of the
Chinese government's numbers on the pandemic, including death rates and infection rates, can probably
be multiplied by 10X or even 100X to get closer to accuracy.
[On the 10X guestimate of mortality and infection see
this
.]
Clearly Bannon and Guo would like to see the emergency conditions created by the pandemic as a
wedge of division, protest and regime change within China. One of the subjects they regularly raise,
as do others who accuse the Chinese government of systematic lying and deception, is that the
crematoriums in Wuhan and nearby Chongqing are burning corpses of dead people at a rate far higher
than official death figures. Some reports indicated that portable incinerators were being brought into
the most infected core of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic.
It is troubling, to say the least, that some reports indicate dead people are being
cremated far faster and at far higher rates than the Chinese government and the World Health
Organization are reporting. Some reckoning with the apparent disparity between reported and actual
deaths has led to widespread suspicions about what is actually going in the scenes of violent and
angry exchanges between people in the Wuhan area.
Many of these videos show brutal confrontations between Chinese civilians and Chinese security
police. The displays of desperation by some of those trying to escape apprehensions by uniformed
officials seem sometimes to suggest the
severity
of a life or death struggle
. It is made to seem that those seeking to escape the grip of
authorities are aware that their failure to do so might lead to a quick death and a quick exit by
incineration.
These
reflections
are, of course, speculative rather than definitive.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/yvouHwAEYCk
Questions concerning who we are supposed to believe or not in this crisis are becoming ever more
pressing and volatile. One of the emerging themes in the discourse developed at
War Room: Pandemic
is
the
propensity of some of the core agencies of mainstream media in the United States to accept
at face value the reports they receive from official media outlets answering to the Chinese Communist
Party.
To Banning and Guo this pattern makes media organizations like the
New York Times
,
The
Washington Post
, and
CNN
essentially propaganda extensions of the Chinese government.
The Chinese people themselves are clearly grappling in new ways with the problem of how to
understand the information and directives given them by the governing apparatus of the Chinese
Communist Party.
Clearly the Party initially failed the people by not intervening early and
decisively enough after the first cases of Coronavirus illness began to show up. The exit from Wuhan
of almost five million people in prior to the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations had huge
implications for spreading the contagion.
As noted in the introduction,
the death in Wuhan of Dr. Li Wenliang on 7 February has
become a flash point for popular criticism of the Chinese Communist Party led by General Secretary Xi
Jinping.
Dr. Li wrote to members of his medical school alumnus group suggesting that some
significant action should be taken in response to the appearance of SARS-like symptoms that suddenly
afflicted his patients.
For sending out this unauthorized communication, Dr. Li was summoned along with seven other
supposed offenders to the Public Security Bureau. There
he was warned by police to stop
"making false statements." He was ordered to cease and desist "spreading rumors," and "acting
illegally to disturb social order."
Dr. Li signed a form indicating he would refrain from continuing to do what he had been accused of
doing. The chastised professional returned to his medical practice. He took his own advice and began
treating patients exhibiting signs of the new illness. He himself soon
died
from COVID-19
when it was still known as 19-nCoV.
Is Twitter's permanent
deplatforming
of the Zero Hedge web site a North
American version of the police intervention in China with the goal of silencing Dr. Li? Is the
censorship of the Internet in the name of opposing
"conspiracy theorists"
repeating
the Chinese Communist Party's effort to silence Dr. Li?
Is Dr. Li to be appropriately understood as a Chinese version of a "conspiracy
theorist"?
How different was his treatment for allegedly "spreading rumours" and "acting
illegally to disturb social order" from the treatment of those in the Occident who have been
deplatformed, smeared and professionally defrocked for attempting to speak truth to power?
I have developed responses to these incursions based on hard-won experiences facing the propaganda
blows of an especially powerful political lobby able to seize control of the governing board of my
university.
These professional lobbyists seek to discredit academic analysis of their own
violations of law, ethics and civility by labelling critics of their zealotry as "conspiracy
theorists" or worse.
More recently I have been grappling against a variation on this process in trying to counter the
censorious attacks on the
American
Herald Tribune
.
These assaults on free expression and open debate began with the machinations
of military hawks whose hit job instructions were passed along to the disinformation specialists at
CNN
and
the
Washington Post
.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/1MXdLwZ6spE
No one can say for sure where the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic is taking the world. Wherever
we are headed, however, we are leaving behind an era that can never be recreated.
Whatever
happened to originate the contagion, this crisis is forcing us to take stock of the framework of
biological warfare as it has been developing in China, Russia, Israel and probably many other
countries.
Nowhere, however, is biological warfare being more expansively and expensively developed and
probably deployed than by the US Armed Forces.
The death and destruction that humanity is
presently experiencing should signal to us that it is time to get much more serious about inspecting
military facilities and enforcing the terms of the Biological Warfare Convention of 1972.
It
is, in fact, time to get much more serious about enforcing all aspects of international criminal law
in balanced ways that transcend the biases of Victors' Justice.
It is time to throw off the weight of the pseudo-laws introduced after 9/11 through
abhorrent tactics like the inside-job military anthrax attack on Congress.
Most certainly, it
is time to draw a clear distinction between research in the field of public health and research in the
development of lethal bioweapons. Better yet, we should work towards putting an end altogether to
militarization through the massive expansion of the "death sciences."
The vile activities of
fallen practitioners of the endangered life sciences are, for starters, undermining the integrity of
our besieged institutions of higher learning.
Without any proof, The New York Times and Washington Post run "Russia
helping Sanders" stories, and Sanders responds by bashing Russia, writes Joe Lauria.
W ith Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders spooking the Democratic establishment, The
Washington Post Friday reported damaging information from intelligence sources against
Sanders by saying that Russia is trying to help his campaign.
If the story is true and if intelligence agencies are truly committed to protecting U.S.
citizens, the Sanders campaign would have been quietly informed and shown evidence to back up
the claims.
Instead the story wound up on the front page of the Post , "according to people
familiar with the matter." Zero evidence was produced to back up the intelligence agencies'
assertion.
"It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken," the Post reported.
That would tell any traditional news editor that there was no story until it is known.
Instead major U.S. media are again playing the role of laundering totally unverified
"information" just because it comes from an intelligence source. Reporting such assertions
without proof amounts to an abdication of journalistic responsibility. It shows total trust in
U.S. intelligence despite decades of deception and skullduggery from these agencies.
Centrist Democratic Party leaders have expressed extreme unease with Sanders leading the
Democratic pack. Politicoreported
Friday that former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's entry into the race is explicitly to stop
Sanders from winning on the first ballot at the party convention.
A day after The New York Times
reported , also without evidence, that Russia is again trying to help Donald Trump win in
November, the Post reports Moscow is trying to help Sanders too, again without
substance. Both candidates whom the establishment loathes were smeared on successive days.
In a Tough Spot
The Times followed the Post report Friday by making it appear that Sanders
himself had chosen to make public the intelligence assessment about "Russian interference" in
his campaign.
But Sanders had known for a month about this assessment and only issued a statement after
the Post asked him for comment before publishing its uncorroborated story based on
anonymous sources.
Sanders was put in a difficult spot. If he said, "Show me the proof that Russia is trying to
help me," he ran the risk of being attacked for disbelieving (even disloyalty to) U.S.
intelligence, and, by default, defending the Kremlin.
So politician that he is, and one who is trying to win the White House, Sanders told the
Post :
"I don't care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president. My message to Putin is clear:
Stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do. In 2016,
Russia used Internet propaganda to sow division in our country, and my understanding is that
they are doing it again in 2020."
The Times quoted Sanders as calling Russian President Vladimir Putin an "autocratic
thug." The paper reported Sanders saying in a statement: "Let's be clear, the Russians want to
undermine American democracy by dividing us up and, unlike the current president, I stand
firmly against their efforts and any other foreign power that wants to interfere in our
election."
Responding to a cacophony of criticism that Sanders' supporters are especially vicious
online, as opposed to the millions of other vicious people online, Sanders attempted to use
Russia as a scapegoat, the way the Clinton campaign did in 2016. He said: "Some of the ugly
stuff on the Internet attributed to our campaign may well not be coming from real
supporters."
But no matter how strong Sander's denunciations of Russia, his opponents will now target him
as being a tool of the Kremlin.
Mission accomplished.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent
forThe Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe,Sunday Timesof London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at[email protected]and
followed on Twitter @unjoe .
Let`s face it,even though Bernie is a moderate Social Democrat,at best.He`s the only one
capable of beating "the Orange"version of Hitler.But he sounds as if the DNC,big wigs,decide
to deny him the nomination;he`d go along with it.Just like before;when he even campaigned for
the"Crooked One(Hillary).I guess we`ll see.
Kim Dixon , February 24, 2020 at 04:31
The most-important element missed in this piece is this: Sanders is helping the DNC and
the MIC gin up fear of, and hatred for, the only other nuclear superpower on earth.
If you were around during the McCarthy years, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the '73
Arab/Israeli war, and all the other almost-Armageddon crises of Cold War One, you know that
nothing could be stupider and more-dangerous than that. The missiles still sit in their
silos, waiting for the next early-warning misunderstanding or proxy-war miscalculation to
send them flying.
Sanders lived through it all. He's supposed to be the furthest-Left pol in Congress. So
how can he possibly advocate for anything but detente and disarmament?
SteveK9 , February 24, 2020 at 20:18
I would really like to support Bernie, but statements like this make me shake my head.
It's more a reflection of America today I guess. Politicians believe to a man (or woman) that
they must put the hate on Putin and Russia or they have no chance. It doesn't matter that the
Russia garbage is 100% false. And, I don't mean they 'interfered' only a little there was
nothing, nothing at all. Even Trump has to go along with this propaganda. I don't know how
anyone can believe this idiotic (and incredibly dangerous, as you point out) rubbish at this
point. But you can't call your friends blanking morons.
J Gray , February 25, 2020 at 02:55
I think he successfully dodged a bullet but set himself up to offer comprehensive election
reform if he pulls out a victory .
or it is an early sign that he, the DNC & MIC are coming to terms. It doesn't have
that ring to it to me, like when Trump called for regime-change war in Venezuela &
defunding schools to build a space army. That was a clear on-the-record sell-out & got
him off the Impeachment hook the next day. Similar to when the Clinton signed the Telecom Act
to get off his.
They are still coming after Sanders too hard w/their McCarthiast attacks to feel like he
is siding with them. I think he has to do this because they are bundling his movement,
Venezuela and Russia into the new Red Scare.
"#JoeLauria's piece in #ConsortiumNews is excellent. He calmly sets out #Sanders'
political dilemma. The latest line from US intelligence agency stenographer media like
#NYTimes is that #Russians are helping both #Trump and Sanders because they simply want to
sow discord and cynicism about US democracy , they do not care who wins. #CaitlinJohnstone
neatly satirises this by writing a spoof article claiming that US intelligence agencies have
discovered #Bloomberg is being helped by Russians because he has two Russian
grandfathers.
It has reached the point , as Lauria shows, where any criticism of such US MSM nonsense
leaves the speaker open to the allegation that he is soft on/ naive about/complicit in
Russian election meddling. Without being a Trump supporter, one can understand Trump's rage
and contempt for what is going on .
Justin Glyn. Consortium News. Joe Lauria. Tony Kevin"
Tony Kevin , February 23, 2020 at 21:32
Sanders and Trump will survive this Deep State manipulation and attempted blackmail . They
will see off the Clintonistas and Deep State moles, and will go on to fight a tough but fair
election. Americans are sick of Russophobia.
jack , February 24, 2020 at 15:25
agreed – the Russiagate psyop is past its shelf life – BUT Deep State will
carry on – it's a global entity and they're into literally everything – no idea
how any known, normal governing structure can deal with it
Enough with the "Russia" BS already! It is clear to me the wealthy corporate Dems and the
MSM are behind all of the smear tactics against Bernie and anyone else who serves the
people
Enough with the "Russia" BS already! It is clear to me the wealthy corporate Dems and the
MSM are behind all of the smear tactics against Bernie and anyone else who serves the
people
Dfnslblty , February 23, 2020 at 09:07
Front page drama plus zero evidence began long ago with 'anonymous sources said "!
Complete lack of accountability on the part of the sources and on the part of the
reporters.
Thus we receive a "reality teevee " potus , and we are pleased to be hypnotised and
titillated.
A true revolution would demand CN-quality reportage and reject msm pablum.
JohnDoe , February 23, 2020 at 03:43
It's enough to look at the news on mainstream media to understand who's, as usual,
meddling in the elections. In the latest period for the first time I saw a lot of
enthusiastic comments and articles about Bernie Sanders. It's clear they are pushing him. But
why those who isolated him in during the primaries against Clinton are now supporting him?
It's obvious, that they want to get rid of Elizabeth Warren, first push ahead the weaker
candidates, then they'll switch their support towards another candidate, probably
Bloomberg.
delia ruhe , February 23, 2020 at 00:14
Well, thank you Joe Lauria! I am in trouble in several comment threads for suggesting that
the intel community is at it again, trying to ruin two campaigns by identifying the
candidates with Putin and the Kremlin. Now I can quote you. Excellent piece, as usual.
Deniz , February 22, 2020 at 22:44
Imagine Sanders and Trump, putting their differences aside and declaring war on the deep
state during a debate. They have the same enemies.
The same people who planted Steele's dirty dosier are going to try to steal Sanders
election from him. It wont be Trump and the Republicans who rigs the election against
Sanders.
SteveK9 , February 24, 2020 at 20:21
Trump actually seemed to want to help Bernie a bit (well, he keeps calling him 'Crazy
Bernie as well). He put out some tweet calling this latest rubbish, Hoax #7. But Bernie would
rather say something stupid, like 'I'm not a friend of Putin he is' talk about 5-year
olds.
Deniz , February 25, 2020 at 00:49
Its disappointing. Sanders heart seems to be in the right place, but when it comes time to
face the sinister forces that run the country for their own benefit, he will be absolutely
crushed.
This will never end.
No president will ever change anything.
The deep state tentacles will eventually kill us all.
I am going to go and enjoy what's left.
Marko , February 22, 2020 at 20:24
" But Sanders had known for a month about this assessment and only issued a statement
after the Post asked him for comment before publishing its uncorroborated story based on
anonymous sources Sanders was put in a difficult spot. If he said, "Show me the proof that
Russia is trying to help me," he ran the risk of being attacked for disbelieving (even
disloyalty to) U.S. intelligence, and, by default, defending the Kremlin. "
I suspect that Sanders was given a classified briefing a month ago , which he couldn't
disclose to the public. If so , and given that he didn't make this clear immediately after
being accused of withholding this information , he has only himself to blame for the
resulting "bad look".
JWalters , February 22, 2020 at 19:06
The corporate media has revealed itself to be a monopoly behind the scenes, working in
unison to trash Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Even though Gabbard is only at a few
percent in the polls, her message is potentially devastating to the war profiteers who own
America's Vichy MSM.
"Congressman Oscar Callaway lost his Congressional election for opposing US entry into WW
1. Before he left office, he demanded investigation into JP Morgan & Co for purchasing
control over America's leading 25 newspapers in order to propagandize US public opinion in
favor of his corporate and banking interests, including profits from US participation in the
war."
war * profiteerstory. * blogspot. * com/p/war-profiteers-and-israels-bank.html
Thankfully, there is still a free American press, of which Consortium News is a stellar
example.
elmerfudzie , February 22, 2020 at 13:25
The CIA and DIA (it has about a dozen agencies under it and is much larger than any other
Intel agency) are supposed to monitor threats to our national security, that originate
abroad. Aside from a few closed door sessions with a select group of congresspersons, our
Intel agencies have practically no real democratic oversight and remain, for all intents and
purposes, a parallel government(s) well hidden from public view. In particular how they are
financed and what their actual annual budgets really are. How these agencies every managed to
seep into any electioneering process what so ever, is beyond me, since they are all
intentionally very surreptitious- by design. We ask questions and these Intel agencies are
quick to tout the usual phrase; that subject area is secret and needs to be addressed in
closed session, blah, blah, blah. Of course "secrecy" translates into, we do what we want
when we want and use information any way we want because our parallel governments represent
the best example(s) of a perpetual motion machine that does not require outside monitoring.
The origins of these "parallel entities" can be traced to the Rockefeller brothers and their
associated international corporations. There's the rub folks. Our citizens at large will
never overtake for the purposes of real monitoring, this empire and elephant in the room,
directly. However we do have one avenue left and it requires a rank and file demand from the
people to their state representatives demanding two long standing issues, they remain
unresolved and until a solution is found, will permit dark powers to side step every level of
democratic governments-anywhere.
The first is true campaign finance reform and the second is assigning, or rather, removing
the status of person-hood to corporate entities. The Rockefeller's used their corporate power
and wealth to influence legislative, judicial and executive bodies. They cannot help but do
as the puppet master commands! Be it some form of, corporatism, fascism, feudalism, monarchy,
oligarchy, even bankster-ism or any other "ism We as citizens at large must make every effort
to again, obtain true campaign finance reform and remove the lobbying presence inside the
beltway. Today, the corporate entity has risen to a level that completely overtakes and
smothers any authentic democratic representation, of and by the people. Originally (circa the
early1800's) American corporations were permitted to exist and papers were drawn based on the
specific duties they were about to perform, this for the benefit of the local community for
example, building a bridge. Once the job was completed, the incorporation was either
liquidated or remanded over to the relevant governing body for the purposes of reevaluating
the necessity of re-certifying the original incorporation papers. Old man Rockefeller changed
the governance and oversight privilege by forcing and promulgating legislation(s) such as
limited liability clauses, strategies to oppose competition, tax evasion schemes and
(eventually) assigning person-hood to corporate entities, thus creating a parallel government
within the government. It all began in Delaware and until we clear our heads and assign names
to the actual problems, as I've itemized here, our citizenry will never experience the
freedom to fashion our destiny. Please visit TUC radio's two part expose' by Richard
Grossman. It will help CONSORTIUMNEWS readers to understand just what a monumental task is
ahead for all of us. Work for a fair and equitable future in America, demand campaign finance
reform and kick the hustling lobbyists out of our government. Voters being choked to death
with senseless debates and useless candidates.
Jeff Harrison , February 22, 2020 at 12:36
The real threats to our democracy are our unaccountable surveillance state and the craven
politicians in Washington, DC. And, no, Ben, we can't keep our republic because we don't have
a sufficient mass of critical thinkers to run it. If we did, this kind of BS, having been
shot full of holes once, wouldn't get any air.
Alan Ross , February 22, 2020 at 10:37
Sanders may win the nomination and the election but he cannot get a break from some
purists on the left. His reaction may have been quite astute. When Sanders says that we
should station troops on the borders of Russia or arm the Ukrainians, then you can say he
really is anti-Russian. I have not heard all that he has said, but what I have heard sounds
so much like hot air put out by a left politician trying to deal with the ages-old
establishment and right wing smear that he is a pawn of the commies, a fellow traveler, a
pinko, and now an agent of a foreign power, a Russian asset and so on. There is real
criticism of Sanders, but his statements about Putin and Russia do not add up to much.
Skip Scott , February 22, 2020 at 09:51
Anyone who is still under the influence of the MSM hypnosis of RussiaGate, led by Rachel
Madcow, needs to think long and hard about this latest propaganda campaign. The real message
here is unless you support corporate sponsored warmonger from column A or B, you are a tool
of the "evil Rooskies". And the funny thing is, Sanders is "weak tea" when it comes to issues
of war and peace, and the feeding of the war machine at the government trough with no
limits.
The purpose of this BIG LIE of the "Intelligence" agencies is to make it impossible for
someone to be against the Forever War without being tarred as a "Foreign Agent", or at least
a "useful idiot", of the "EVIL ROOSKIES". To simply want peaceful coexistence on its own
merits is impossible.
Imagine if Sanders dared to mention that Putin enjoys substantial majority support inside
Russia, and seeks peaceful coexistence in a multi-polar world, instead of calling him an
"autocratic thug". Often for politicians, speaking the truth is a "bridge too far". I wonder
if Sanders (like Hillary) finds it necessary to hold "private" positions that differ from his
"public" positions? Or does he really believe his own BS?
I had not seen Mr Joe Lauria's article when I commented on Mr Ben Norton's story, but my
reply could fit here as well.
The idiot American public dismays me. To them, the "MSM news" and "celebrity gossip reports"
are equal and both to be wholeheartedly believed.
There is no point in trying to educate a resistant public in the differences between data and
gossip -- public doesn't care.
I weep for what we have lost -- a Constitution, a nation of free thinkers. My heart breaks
for the world's people, and what my country tries to do to them, with only a few resistant
other countries confronting and challenging America.
It is so difficult to know the truth of a situation and yet to know that almost no one
(statistically speaking) believes you.
Jim Hartz , February 23, 2020 at 12:04
A better distinction might be, concerning the intelligence of the American public, the one
Chomsky has used, rooted in Ancient Greek culture, that between KNOWLEDGE and OPINION.
Americans, of course, have OPINIONS about everything, but little KNOWLEDGE about much of
anything. And it seems their idea of FREEDOM is related to, bound up with, their having
OPINIONS about virtually EVERYTHING.
So much for our being a HIGHER life form.
We're in the process of destroying EVERYTHING, not just HIGHER LIFE FORMS [us], but all
flora and fauna, water and air on the planet–as I said, EVERYTHING. To paraphrase from
memory a citation by Perry Anderson from the work of heterodox Italian Marxist, Sebastiano
Timpanaro, "What we are witnessing is not the triumph of man over history, but the victory of
nature over man."
Tony , February 22, 2020 at 07:40
The Trump administration has pulled out of the INF missile treaty citing totally unproven
claims of Russian violations.
It also looks like allowing the START treaty on strategic nuclear missiles to lapse if we do
not stop it.
And so, in what sense would Putin want Trump to get re-elected?
Van Jones of CNN once described the original allegations of Russian meddling in US
elections as a 'great big nothing burger'.
Sounds right to me.
Sam F , February 22, 2020 at 07:24
When the secret agencies and mass media stop manipulating public opinion, despite their
oligarchy masters' ability to control election results anyway, we will know that they no
longer need deception to control the People. Simple force will do the job, with a few
marketing claims to assist in hiring goons to suppress any popular movement. Democracy is
completely lost, and the pretense of democracy will soon follow.
michael , February 22, 2020 at 07:03
Another foray into domestic politics by the CIA, with anonymous sources and no evidence
shown (as no evidence exists). Perhaps the CIA (which probably works for Putin, or Bloomberg,
or anyone who pays them best, but they are loyal to the US dollar only; and maybe heroin?) is
even now making up another Chris Steele/ Fusion GPS/ CrowdStrike dossier, getting that
Russian caterer to the Kremlin to pump out clickbait and sink both Trump and Sanders. Because
RUSSIANS!!! are "genetically driven" to interfere in American democracy. Next we'll have the
DNC (CIA) pushing Superpredator tropes such as "this enormous cohort of black and Latino
males" who "don't know how to behave in the workplace" and "don't have any prospects." With
this Clintonian (and Biden and Bloomberg) mindset, America will be increasing incarceration
once again. That $500,000 bribe the Clintons took from Putin in 2010 when Hillary was
Secretary of State probably plays a role.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon and Defense Secretary Mark Esper have surprisingly noted that China,
not Russia, is America's #1 concern: "America's concerns about Beijing's commercial and
military expansion should be your concerns as well." Since Bill Clinton's Chinagate fiasco in
1996, Communist China, for a measly $million or so in illegal campaign donations, gained
permanent trade status, took millions of American jobs, and suddenly were allowed access to
advanced, even military technologies. This was the impetus for China's rise to be the
strongest nation in the world. There are no doubt statues of the Clintons all over China, and
soon to Hunter Biden, if his Chinese backed hedge funds do well. There are some rumors that
Bloomberg has transacted business with China, although doubtful he tried to build a hotel in
Beijing or Moscow, or the CIA would be all over it (for a cut)!
Realist , February 24, 2020 at 00:22
Esper is a dangerously deranged man who seems, at least to me, to be telegraphing his
intent, and certainly his desire, to get into a kinetic war with both Russia and China
(Washington already has most of the hybrid war tactics already fully operational), unless
English usage has changed so drastically that insults, overt threats and unrestrained bombast
are now part of calm, rational cordial diplomacy. I would not be surprised if neocon
mouthpieces like Esper are not secretly honing their rhetorical style to emulate the
exaggerated volume and enunciation of der ursprüngliche Führer.
Ma Laoshi , February 22, 2020 at 06:04
"So politician that he is" -- isn't this already on the slippery slope towards double
standards, that is, would say Hillary get a similar pass for making McCarthyite statements
like this? Isn't a dispassionate reading of the situation that Bernie is an inveterate
liar , and moreover specializing in the particular brand of lies that could get us all
into nuclear war? Whether it's character or merely age, haven't we seen enough to conclude
that Mr. Sanders would be much weaker still vis-a-vis the Deep State than Donald Trump turned
out to be?
For those without a dog in this fight, shouldn't it cause great merriment if the various
RussiaGaters devour each other? Mr. Sanders has seen for years that the "muh Putin" hoax will
be turned against him whenever needed. If he nonetheless persists, doesn't that show his
resignation that his role in this election circus is a very temporary one, like in '16? How
was that definition of insanity again?
If you want to fix America, then the Empire and Zionism are your enemies; so is the Dem
party that is inextricably wedded to these forces. Play along with them and–well what
can you expect.
aNanyMouse , February 22, 2020 at 13:29
Yeah, and Bernie sucked up to the Dem brass on the impeachment crap, even tho Tulsi had
the stones to at least abstain. How sad.
GMCasey , February 21, 2020 at 22:33
Dear DNC:
KNOCK IT OFF! The only person I am voting for President is the only one who is capable -- and
that is Bernie Sanders.
And really, with NATO breaking the agreement where they agreed to NOT go up to Russia's
border : it is getting very sad and embarrassing to be an American because the elected ones
make agreements and yet break so many. What with Turkey and Israel and Saudi Arabia trying to
disrupt the area, I am sure that Russia is too busy to bother disrupting America . Lately
America seems to disrupt itself for many ridiculous reasons. I am sorry that the gossip rags,
which used to be important newspapers have failed in supporting their First Amendment right
of Free speech . I just finished reading "ALL the Presidents Men. " What has happened to you,
Washington Post, because as a newspaper, you really used to be somebody. Please review your
past and become what you once were, a real genuine news source.
Sam F , February 23, 2020 at 09:18
Wikipedia: "In October 2013, the paper's longtime controlling family, the Graham family,
sold the newspaper to Nash Holdings, a holding company established by Jeff Bezos, for $250
million in cash."
Jim Hartz , February 23, 2020 at 12:37
One of the craziest ongoing media phenomena, prevalent in the Impeachment Hearings, is the
repeated claim that RUSSIA IS AT WAR WITH UKRAINE.
What kind of "Higher Life Form" enthusiastically EATS IT'S OWN SHIT?
Sam F , February 21, 2020 at 22:10
Mass media denouncing politicians based upon "information" from secret agencies are
propaganda operations, and should be sued for proof of their claims. But of course the
judiciary are tools of oligarchy as much as the mass media. No one has constitutional rights
in the US under our utterly corrupt judiciary, only paid party privileges.
Eddie S , February 21, 2020 at 21:55
Hmmm.. so those oh-so-clever Russkies (I mean they MUST-BE if they were able to outwit ALL
the US politicos -- who are immersed in the US political culture 24/7 as well as having
grown-up in this country and having billions of $ to spend -- in 2016 with a mere $100k of
Facebook ads) messed-up this time! They're supporting OPPOSING candidates, effectively
canceling-out their efforts ? Kinda strange, unless that whole 'Russia meddling' thing was a
vastly exaggerated distraction by a losing hawkish candidate and her party, further inflated
by a sensationalistic media and a predictably antagonistic military & intelligence
community??
There is NO "intel"; plenty of un-intel, shameless mendacity from these info=dictators
zionazi NYT and Wapoop drivel; hopefully the insouciant public is starting to see what a sham
these rats are. Hearst outdistanced.
Daniel , February 22, 2020 at 10:45
"Kinda strange, unless that whole 'Russia meddling' thing was a vastly exaggerated
distraction by a losing hawkish candidate and her party, further inflated by a
sensationalistic media and a predictably antagonistic military & intelligence
community??"
Exactly. Shame on Hillary Clinton and all who view the electorate with such disdain as to
have pushed this propaganda on us for the last three years, and continue to do so, obviously.
If either Hillary Clinton or the "sensationalistic media and a predictably antagonistic
military & intelligence community" had any integrity at all, they would have beaten Trump
handily in 2016, just as they condescendingly told us they would. They did not, though, and
have been outraged to have been exposed as the frauds they are ever since.
When your political party is nothing more than a marketing scheme designed to fool the
population, that population will turn on you. Imagine that. And no amount of Russia-gating
will save you. Shame on all who would continue this charade.
John Drake , February 21, 2020 at 21:33
Gosh I wish those so called intel people could make up their mind about whom the big bad
Ruskies are trying to help. One week its Trump, the next it is Sanders. Frankly on the face,
it sounds like bad intel to me.
But fortunately I am a regular reader of this site and Ray McGovern; and know it's all, to
put it politely , disinformation; or less politely a pile of diarrhea invented by Hillarybots
after a really really bad election day three years ago.
The only thing that disturbs me is the way Bernie buys into this Russiagate thing himself.
Maybe you all could send him a trove of articles debunking the whole mess, especially Ray and
Bill's forensics.
Fred Dean , February 23, 2020 at 03:52
When Durham starts indicting people and the story of the Deep State coup against the
President becomes common knowledge, Bernie's statements on Russiagate will be a liability.
Trump's people are digging up whatever videos they can of Bernie talking smack about
Trump/Russia. It is a crack in Bernie's armor and we can expect Trump to exploit. Bernie has
been such a toadie to the DNC. He cowers to the Democratic establishment because he fears
they will pull his credentials to run as a Democrat.
OlyaPola , February 23, 2020 at 08:08
"Gosh I wish those so called intel people could make up their mind about whom the big bad
Ruskies are trying to help."
Output is a function of framing and consequently the intelligence community/opponents are
helping others including the Russians who encourage such help by doing nothing.
KiwiAntz , February 21, 2020 at 21:26
What a shambolic mess of a Nation that America is! Nothing more than a Billionaire's
Banana Republic? A International laughingstock ruled by a Oligarchy, masquerading as a
Democracy? And if all else fails to get rid of Bernie Saunders by vote rigging or
gerrymandering or other nefarious acts of sabotage with Superdelegates stealing the
nominations then resurrect the bogus Russiagate Conspiracy, a ridiculous failed & faked
experiment to gaslight, spook & confuse the population again? Wouldn't it be delicious if
Russiagate was actually TRUE, it would be payback for the USA, a Nation that meddles in the
affairs & politics of every other Country on Earth, overthrowing & regime changing
everyone who doesn't "bend the knee" to America, the most corrupt & evil Nation on Earth
since Nazi Germany! I've never seen a more propagandised or mindf**ked People on Earth than
the American people! It must be soul destroying to live in this Country & have to put up
with this nonsense, day in, day out?
Ian , February 22, 2020 at 02:47
Yes, it is. Living with the infuriating unreality and militaristic worldview that is so
cultivated here takes a personal emotional and intellectual toll. No place is perfect, but
when I travel to Europe I feel a weight lifted.
Broompilot , February 22, 2020 at 03:50
Kiwi you may have a point.
ML , February 22, 2020 at 09:19
Yep. But for those of us with our critical thinking skills intact, we won't let it be soul
destroying, Kiwi. Still, the daily crapload of bs we are fed in the "legacy" press is
aggravating beyond the beyonds. Cheers, fellow Earthling.
Daniel , February 22, 2020 at 11:09
I hear you, KiwiAntz. It IS soul destroying to withstand this onslaught of disinformation
each and every day. There is a rhythm to it that is undeniable, too. One can almost predict
when the next propaganda hit will come, as here – after their latest would-be savior,
Mike Bloomberg, imploded on live TV, and with Bernie looking more and more inevitable.
Our reality in the US today is that we have to fight against our own media to approach
anything resembling a reasonable discussion about what is important to vast majorities (mean
tweets and fake memes aren't it) or to champion candidates who display even the slightest
integrity. But, of course, it is not 'our' media. It is 'theirs.' And they will continue to
abuse us with it until we reject it completely.
robert e williamson jr , February 23, 2020 at 20:31
I see things pretty clearly for what they are and the billionaire democrats are heading
for a train wreck and I hate to admit I cannot look away.
Trump is just another self serving U.S. president leaving a stain in America's underwear
adding to the humongous pile of America's dirty laundry.
When the demographics finally dictate it change will come and likely not before. On that
note I wold like to reach out here. Justin King, who goes as Beau on the net runs a site
called the Fifth Column News and does a ton of informative and educational videos on many
various topics. .
If you go to youtube, search and watch each of the videos I'm about to list here you stand
to learn quite a lot about how Americans got screwed by the two party system without really
realizing it. Plenty of blame to go around , no doubt though. You will also learn of the
changing demographics in American politics. Many of the poor, minorities and youth of the
country are coming into politics for they stand to lose everything if they don't change the
status quo.
Feb 11 2020 runs 6:21 minutes and seconds- Search terms, Beau Lets talk about the parties
switching and the party of trump
Feb 15 2020 runs 4:11 Search terms, Beau Lets talk about dancing left and dancing
right
Feb 20 2020 runs 10:44 Search terms, Beau Lets talk about misunderstanding Bernie's
supporters
This last video is a long video by Justin's standards. Most of his videos are under 7
minutes.
Much thanks to CN this site and the Fifth Column New site give me strength and bolster my
courage by allowing me to know that there are those of us who know what gong on and know
things must change.
(newatlas.com)BeauHD on Monday June 17,
2019 @09:25PM from the easier-than-it-should-be dept. It is now possible to take a talking-head
style video, and add, delete or edit the speaker's
words as simply as you'd edit text in a word processor . A new deepfake algorithm can
process the audio and video into a new file in which the speaker says more or less whatever you
want them to. New Atlas reports: It's the work of a collaborative team from Stanford
University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Princeton University and Adobe Research, who
say that in a perfect world the technology would be used to cut down on expensive re-shoots
when an actor gets something wrong, or a script needs to be changed. In order to learn the face
movements of a speaker, the algorithm requires about 40 minutes of training video, and a
transcript of what's being said, so it's not something that can be thrown onto a short video
snippet and run if you want good results. That 40 minutes of video gives the algorithm the
chance to work out exactly what face shapes the subject is making for each phonetic syllable in
the original script.
From there, once you edit the script, the algorithm can then create a 3D model of the
face making the new shapes required. And from there, a machine learning technique called Neural
Rendering can paint the 3D model over with photo-realistic textures to make it look basically
indistinguishable from the real thing. Other software such as VoCo can be used if you wish to
generate the speaker's audio as well as video, and it takes the same approach, by breaking down
a heap of training audio into phonemes and then using that dataset to generate new words in a
familiar voice.
Adobe's Experimental AI Tool Can Tell If Something's Been Photoshopped (theinquirer.net) 65
Posted by BeauHD on Monday June 17,
2019 @07:20PM from the ctrl-z dept. Adobe and UC Berkeley researchers are
working on tool that
can tell if a photo has been manipulated in Adobe Photoshop . The goal is to cut down on
fake content and "to increase trust and authority in digital media." TheINQUIRER reports: A
bunch of images were created using Photoshop's "Face Aware
Liquify" tool , and mixed with a set of expertly human-doctored photographs. When humans
were shown the original image and the doctored version, they spotted the fakes 53 percent of
the time, but the artificial intelligence hit 99 percent. That's pretty good -- changing a coin
toss guess into near certainty, but the AI isn't quite done showboating. As well as being able
to point out what areas might have been changed, the AI can also predict what methods have been
used to change the image.
Better still, it'll have a stab at undoing the vandalism, and returning the image to its
former untampered glory. Not perfectly, but well enough to impress the researchers all the
same: it's like having an undo button on someone else's work, and who hasn't always wanted one
of those? "It might sound impossible because there are so many variations of facial geometry
possible," said Professor Alexei A. Efros of UC Berkeley. "But, in this case, because deep
learning can look at a combination of low-level image data, such as warping artifacts, as well
as higher level cues such as layout, it seems to work."
Forget Where's Wally, what we really want to know is where are the Skripals? It's exactly two years to
the day since the Russian spy and his daughter were novichoked in Salisbury, and we've still not seen
hide nor hair of them.
Former double agent Sergei has been completely off-grid, while Yulia Skripal was seen in a highly
staged video in 2018, filmed in an anonymous but pleasant leafy glade shortly after recovering from
her poisoning ordeal; but, apart from that, there has been no statements or updates about them at all.
The most recent piece of 'information', and I use that term loosely, to leak out about their whereabouts came this weekend
from Britain's Mail on Sunday, courtesy of a source which became ubiquitous throughout the Skripal
saga, the reliably unreliable
"security insiders."
It's always amazing how willing these
apparent insiders are to release top-level secrets to the home of the
"sidebar of shame."
The latest speculation from 'security insiders' is that the Skripals are hoping to head for a new
life down under in Australia after
"effectively living under house arrest since the attack."
This means either those insiders are the leakiest spies in the world, or the Skripals are going to be
nowhere near
Australia
anytime soon.
The house arrest must be at Julian Assange in Belmarsh levels of security, because even the
Skripals' family in Russia say they haven't heard from them in months.
So all quiet on the Skripal front and, frankly speaking, it's all quiet on the geopolitical front,
too, and in the media. The disputed events of March 4, 2018, over poisoned spies and their aftermath
formed the biggest story on the planet, and not just because the whole world finally started paying
attention to the majesty of Salisbury cathedral's glorious 123-metre spire.
This incident seemed like it might have genuine life-changing political consequences. Britain
entered the phrase
"highly likely"
into the lexicon of geopolitics, and [then-PM] Theresa
May's declaration that it was
"highly likely"
that the Kremlin was to blame was deemed strong
enough to see the West turn en masse against Moscow, and Russian diplomats and 'diplomats' were
expelled by the dozen, by London and its allies across the world. It seemed the bar for state-to-state
accusations had been lowered.
Russia to this day denies involvement in what happened in Salisbury.
So what has changed? If anything, all that has changed over the last two years is a desire to get
back to business, to rebuild ties and move on. Some of those expelled diplomats have reportedly moved
back
.
French leader Emmanuel Macron is pushing hard for relations between the West and Moscow to be
repaired, something Germany needs little encouragement for.
The Brexit dividend (for Russia)... In 2019, British imports of Russian
oil jumped by a whopping 57% compared to the previous year, as Boris Johnson's government
unleashed the potential of their country.
https://t.co/ZSIJGvpFif
Britain is still pretending to be in a huff, but British imports of Russian oil were up 57 percent
last year, so realpolitik reigns supreme in London, as ever.
Boris Johnson is now the prime minister and with a thumping majority doesn't need to use bogeyman
Russia as a tool to look strong quite as much as his predecessor did. Johnson and Putin even met in
January and there are reports the prime minister is considering an invitation to attend a second world
war commemoration
parade
in Moscow this May.
And as for the media, it's all gone quiet there, too. Skripal coverage is about as common in the
mainstream now as coverage of Julian Assange's imprisonment. He's a journalist whose supporters say is
'highly likely' a victim of a demonstrable state campaign against him because he attempted to uncover
the misdeed of power. However, a boring attack on free speech is nowhere near as exciting as a
poisoned spy, is it?!
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Simon Rite
is a writer based in London for RT, in charge of several projects including the political
satire group #ICYMI. Follow him on Twitter
@SiWrites
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
"... "Let me control the media and I will turn any nation into a herd of pigs" - Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, a very popular quote these days! ..."
That is NOT THE LESSON. The lesson is that MAIN S H I T Media and their FAKE NEWS cannot fool the Herd anymore.
ALL MSM did this last few years (after the brexit referendum) was to broadcast (98% of the time) only the side of those that
were against the brexit...
Clearly they weren't the majority!
The FUNNY part is that those du mb modern slaves gave those scoundrels a majority, so get ready for some AUSTERITY...
It's going to be fun.
"... Corbyn's weakness was always the elephant in the room but was fully revealed when he had to step up to plate and fight. No leader can survive without being able to fight his enemies and no country should be led by such a person. Saddly he squandered the enormous opportunity handed to him in the last election: in hindsight, that opportunity was handed to him by an electorate steeped in wishful thinking ..."
"... Of course it's criticism of the state of Israel. And of course that's not anti-Semitism. But the label "anti-Semitism" is the kiss of death to the executive class i.e. that middle layer who "inform" the masses. If you are one of them and you get called "anti-Semitic", it's the equivalent of your boss saying, "I want a word – and bring your coat!" ..."
"... Corbyn seems like a nice enough guy, an honest, yet unremarkable footsoldier MP, but the idea he was suited to leading the Labour Party into an epic struggle with a revitalised Tory Party under a strong leader like Boris Johnson, is a fantastic notion. Johnson had to be cut down to size, before the election. ..."
"... And, finally, Corbyn could have turned the media bias against him to his advantage, only he's not suited to the strategy that's required. That strategy is the one Donald Trump employed, taking on the media and identifying them as the enemy and explaining why they publish lies. Corbyn should have publically taken on both the Guardian and the BBC, rather than appeasing them, unsuccessfully, because appeasing them isn't possible. ..."
"... Why didn't Corbyn express anger and shock when he was accused of being a paedophile, sorry, an anti-Semite? Those MPs who went along with that sordid narrative, should have been kicked out of Labour immediately by Corbyn himself. ..."
"... "A big part of why Labor and Corbyn lost so badly is the complete abdication of "the Left" on Brexit. The left were supposed to be anti-globalists, in which case their task was to join battle offering an egalitarian, left-populist version of Brexit which would have benefited the people. Instead, faced with a real decision and a real opportunity they punted and ran home to globalist mama. This removed one of the main reasons to bother supporting them. ..."
"... The point about the EU not being directly responsible for Tory austerity is technically true but it is nonetheless a neo liberal monster crushing the shit out of the most vulnerable ..."
"... Especially when it comes to countries like Greece. I don't understand the constant veneration of the EU. By design, our membership did nothing to protect us from the carnage of this Tory crime wave. The EUs constitutional arrangements contains baked in obligations to maintain permanent austerity in the service of ever greater corporate profit. ..."
No one feels like recalling, for example, that more people voted against the Tories than for them (13.9mn for and 16.2mn against).
Or that 10.3 million people still voted Labour despite the entirety of the unprecedentedly vicious and Stalinist hate campaign
conducted against them – and Corbyn in particular – since the latter became leader in 2015.
Which fact, along with Labour's near-win in 2017 and the surprise Brexit victory in 2016, implies the mainstream media's ability
to direct and manipulate public opinion is a lot less wholesale and guaranteed than we oftentimes assume, and that this is unlikely
to be a single explanation for yesterday's result.
More importantly, no one – even those who are boggling at the implausibility – is questioning the validity of the result.
No one.
It's as if even suggesting election fraud can happen in a nice majority-white western country like the UK is improper and disrespectful.
Election fraud is – as every good racist knows – done by brown people or Orientals, or 'corrupt' eastern European nations, not by
fine upstanding empire builders like the British.
This seems to be so much of a given that the results of any vote are simply accepted as 100% valid – no matter how improbable
they may seem.
And apparently even in the face of clear evidence for at least some level of shady activity.
Remember this? It only happened on Wednesday but it's already some way down the Memory Hole.
There's been a lot of effort expended in
minimising the significance of this in social media and in the mainstream press – and indeed by resident trolls on OffG. There
have been claims it's 'routine' – as if that somehow makes it ok. Or that Kuenssberg was misinformed, or 'tired'.
And after all this, Labour heartlands – red since World War 2, through Thatcher and Foot and every anti-Labour hate campaign the
media could muster – all voted Conservative?
Does that seem likely?
I don't know, all I do know is I think that discussion needs to start. I think it's time to think the unthinkable, and at least
open the prospect of electoral fraud up for real discussion.
How secure is our electoral process? Can results be stage-managed, massaged or even rigged? What guarantees do we have that this
can't happen here? In an age of growing corruption and decay at the very top, do the checks and balances placed to safeguard our
democracy sill work well, or even at all?
This Friday the Thirteenth, with BoJo the Evil Clown back in Downing Street, looks like a good moment to get it going.
aspnaz ,
Corbyn's weakness was always the elephant in the room but was fully revealed when he had to step up to plate and fight. No
leader can survive without being able to fight his enemies and no country should be led by such a person. Saddly he squandered
the enormous opportunity handed to him in the last election: in hindsight, that opportunity was handed to him by an electorate
steeped in wishful thinking. Should he apologise to his supporters, probably not, they backed the wrong horse but the limp
was visible from day one.
That inequality and poverty will continue increasing under neoliberal economic policies, and the majority of us will continue
being ground into the dirt, or that Julian Assange will end up in the U.S for certain to face a Stalinesque show trial, or the
observation about George Galloway.
George Mc ,
I know it's bad for my health but oh I just can't stop myself. Had another Groan trip. Here's one from that good time gal Jess
Phillips:
I only supply the link to see if anyone can see any actual content in this. I suppose it must be a real cushy number to get
paid for pitching in a lot of foaming waffle that feels purposeful but remains totally non-commital. That and those nice cheques
rolling in from that Hyslop and Merton quiz fluff.
George Mc ,
You have to understand that it's all showbiz. Why did the Tories prefer Boris to Jeremy Hunt? Because Hunt looked and sounded
like the oily little tyke everyone wanted to kick. Whereas Boris was the cutesie country womble from a Two Ronnies sketch. When
Boris appeared on his test outing as host for Hignfy, all he had to do was to be incompetent i.e. all he had to do was turn up.
Oh how we all laughed.
As for Jess – well, she's the ballsy fake prole tomboy – like a WOKE verson of Thatcha. I doubt anyone is "buying this" (to
use one of the Americanisms we'll all be spouting as we become the 51st state) but it's all part of "the movie".
ricked by its sharp thorn anywhere near the heart. Don't know what the street name will be for it but it has two current codewords
i heard 'stellar' & 'jessa'.
George Mc ,
"Share On Twitter" target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=When+I+said+%26%238220%3Bcome+clean%26%238221%3B+I+meant+as+...+&url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-guardian.org%2F2019%2F12%2F13%2Fboris-johnsons-incredible-landslide%2F%23comment-106199">
When I said "come clean" I meant as in "reveal yourself". I really think you should calm down. Take some deep breaths. Have a
nice cup of tea.
By all means comment, but when you slander those who actually felt it important that their vote counted, that their opinion
mattered and then were told to fuck off by the very people asking them for their opinion, its expected you get blow back, which
is what has happened.
Now, may i enquire, do you have a belief in democracy and upholding democratic outcomes, do you believe that Russian interference
actually resulted in the Brexit vote itself, and do you believe that the working class is so fucking pig ignorant that it should
never be allowed to vote.
In summation, are you a Blairite by any chance as they way you communicate shows an utter contempt for those poor sods slagged
off by Remainiacs for so long to just fuck off.
As for economic decline, strange, but the UK is one of the top 10 wealthy nations globally, much of said wealth now from the
FIRE Economy, which means its extractive and put to no real purpose, whilst the break-up of the Union is up to the constituent
parts itself – as i support Irish reunification, i don't weep for Northern Ireland, whilst the Scots have every right o be free
of Westminster, its not as if they held an actual Referedum on it prior to the signing of the Act of Union is it.
And as for wales, well, here's a small country who's political establishment are incapable of recognising it elected to Leave
the EU, which sometimes has aspirations itself to Independence, an Independence it will never gain due to the fact nearly 800K
English live within our lands, but the fantasists persist none the less.
Now, as the EU, via the Treaty named after Lisbon is very much a neoliberal organisation, one that puts monetary union above
the welfare of its own citizens, please explain why I must support such an Institution that does not benefit the average Joe in
most member States?
Alan Tench ,
What you must remember is that a democratic decision isn't always a good one. In my view, the current one concerning Brexit, is
a bad one. The fact that a majority support it doesn't make it good or right. We just have to live with it. Consider the death
penalty. I'm sure the vast majority of voters in this country would vote in favour of it. Would that might it right?
Ruth ,
Don't blame them. In all likelihood they had their votes hijacked by MI5
Alan Tench ,
All this anti-Semitism stuff – anyone know what it's about? I assume it had zero influence on the electorate. Just how does it
manifest itself? Is most of it – maybe nearly all of it – concerned with criticism of the state of Israel? If so, it's not anti-Semitism
.
George Mc ,
Of course it's criticism of the state of Israel. And of course that's not anti-Semitism. But the label "anti-Semitism" is
the kiss of death to the executive class i.e. that middle layer who "inform" the masses. If you are one of them and you get called
"anti-Semitic", it's the equivalent of your boss saying, "I want a word – and bring your coat!"
MichaelK ,
I think the Labour Party's election strategy, and long before, was fatally flawed. I'm shocked by it. How bad it was. First they
should never have agreed to an election at this time. Wait, at least until Spring. The idea, surely, was to keep weakening Johnson's
brand and splitting the Tories apart. Johnson wanted an election for obvious reasons, that alone should have meant that one did
everything in one's power not to give him what he wanted. Labour did the exact opposite of what they should have done, march onto
a battleground chose by Johnson.
Of course one can argue that the liberals and the SNP had already hinted that they would support Johnson's demand, but Labour
could have 'bought them off' with a little effort. Give the SNP a pledge on a second referendum and give the Liberals a guarantee
of electoral reform, whatever.
The Liberals actually had an even more stupid and incompetent leadership than Labour and suffered a terrible defeat too. Why
is it that it's only the Tories who know how to play the election game, usually?
Corbyn seems like a nice enough guy, an honest, yet unremarkable footsoldier MP, but the idea he was suited to leading
the Labour Party into an epic struggle with a revitalised Tory Party under a strong leader like Boris Johnson, is a fantastic
notion. Johnson had to be cut down to size, before the election.
Allowing the Tories to become the People's Party, the Brexit Party in all but name; was a catastrohic mistake by Labour; unforegivabel
really.
And, finally, Corbyn could have turned the media bias against him to his advantage, only he's not suited to the strategy
that's required. That strategy is the one Donald Trump employed, taking on the media and identifying them as the enemy and explaining
why they publish lies. Corbyn should have publically taken on both the Guardian and the BBC, rather than appeasing them, unsuccessfully,
because appeasing them isn't possible.
Why didn't Corbyn express anger and shock when he was accused of being a paedophile, sorry, an anti-Semite? Those MPs who
went along with that sordid narrative, should have been kicked out of Labour immediately by Corbyn himself. He needed to
be far more aggressive and proactive, taking the fight to his enemies and using his position to crush them at once. Call me a
kiddy fiddler and I'll rip your fucking throat out! Only Corbyn was passive, defencesive, apathetic and totally hopeless when
smeared so terribly. People don't respect a coward, they do respect someone who fights back and sounds righteously angry at being
smeared so falsely. Corbyn looked and sounded like someone who had something to hide and appologise about, which only encouraged
the Israeli lobby to attack him even more! Un-fuckin' believable.
What's tragic is that the right understood Corbyn's weaknesses and character far better than his supporters, and how to destroy
him.
Ruth ,
I agree with you about the election timing
Derek ,
And, finally, Corbyn could have turned the media bias against him to his advantage, only he's not suited to the strategy that's
required.
Yes you are absolutely right, he should have stolen a journalists phone or hid in a fridge, maybe stare at the ground when
shown a picture of a child sleeping on a hospital floor. Now that's turning turning events to your advantage right?
He made many mistakes and you are right, but caving into "remain" the perceived overturning of the referendum by the Labour
party is what dunnit, the final nail in his coffin. I am sorry to see him go.
tonyopmoc ,
Judging by the spelling of "Labour", I guess an American wrote this on The Moon of Alabama's blog. It is however very accurate
and I know that MOA is a German man, running his blog from Germany. His analyses, are some of the best in the world.
Tony
"A big part of why Labor and Corbyn lost so badly is the complete abdication of "the Left" on Brexit. The left were supposed
to be anti-globalists, in which case their task was to join battle offering an egalitarian, left-populist version of Brexit which
would have benefited the people. Instead, faced with a real decision and a real opportunity they punted and ran home to globalist
mama. This removed one of the main reasons to bother supporting them.
Posted by: Russ | Dec 13 2019 7:09 utc | 33″
MichaelK ,
I thought the left were supposed to be internationalists too? I dunno. I think they should never have supported the referendum
scam in the first place. If the Tories wanted it, that alone should have made them oppose it. Look at what's happened, the referendum
and Brexit have massively benefitted the Tories and crushed everyone else. Isn't that an objective fact, or am I missing something;
seriously?
What does 'anti-globalist' really mean? The tragedy was allowing the Tories to blame Europe for the devastating consequences
of their own 'austerity' policies which hit the North so hard. These policies originated in London, not Bruxelles!
The truth is harsh. Corbyn was a terrible leader with awfully confused policies that he couldn't articulate properly and a
team around him that were just as bad.
Pam Ryan ,
The point about the EU not being directly responsible for Tory austerity is technically true but it is nonetheless a neo liberal
monster crushing the shit out of the most vulnerable.
Especially when it comes to countries like Greece. I don't understand the constant veneration of the EU. By design, our
membership did nothing to protect us from the carnage of this Tory crime wave. The EUs constitutional arrangements contains baked
in obligations to maintain permanent austerity in the service of ever greater corporate profit.
Thom ,
'Incredible' is the word. We're expected to believe that for all his personal and intellectual flaws, Johnson achieved a landslide
on the scale of Blair and Thatcher; that he drew in Leave supporters from traditional Labour voters while holding on to Remain
Tories; that all three major UK opposition parties flopped, including the one party pushing for outright Remain; and that turnout
fell even though millions registered just before the election. Sorry, but it doesn't add up.
nottheonly1 ,
"Share On Twitter" target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=What+just+happened+was+an+inverted+U.S.+selectio...+&url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-guardian.org%2F2019%2F12%2F13%2Fboris-johnsons-incredible-landslide%2F%23comment-106262">
What just happened was an inverted U.S. selection. In the U.S., a confused rich man got elected, because the alternative was a
psychopathic war criminal. In the U.K. a confused upper class twat got elected, because the alternative was too good to be true.
Something like that?
tonyopmoc ,
Something strange going on in Sedgefield. What the hell is Boris Johnson doing there today? Tony Blair Labour, Boris Johnson
Tory. What's the difference? Same neocons. Same sh1t?
tonyopmoc ,
Dungroanin, Jeremy Corbyn is 70 now. He's done his bit. Now its time for him to take it easy.
Incidentally "Viscount Palmerston was over 70 when he finally became Prime Minister: the most advanced age at which anyone
has ever become Prime Minister for the first time."
George Mc ,
The Groan is keen to highlight the sheer thanklessness of the BBC's undying fight to objectively bring The Truth to the masses:
And for all the tireless work they do, they are open to accusations of "conspiracy theory" and worse:
"The conspiracy theories that abound are frustrating. And let's be clear – some of the abuse which is directed at our journalists
who are doing their best for audiences day in, day out is sickening. It shouldn't happen. And I think it's something social
media platforms really need to do more about."
Sickening social media abuse? Echoes of all those frightfully uncivil – and never verified – messages that wrecked poor little
Ruth Smeeth's delicate health.
Thom ,
The only way the BBC and Guardian will understand if people don't pay the licence fee and don't click on their articles (and obviously
don't contribute!). Hit them in the pockets.
George Mc ,
It didn't take long for the Groaniad to "dissect" the Labour defeat. Here we get THE FIVE REASONS Labour lost the election:
Interesting. Note the space given to Blairite toadies Ruth Smeeth and Caroline Flint. Note the disingenuousness of this:
"In London, antisemitism and what people perceived as the absence of an apology appeared to be a key issue."
It's always suspicious when we get that expression "what people perceived". What "people"? And note that the dubiousness relates
to the absence of an apology for anti-Semitism – not the anti-Semitism itself which is, of course, taken for granted.
Also note the conclusion:
"With a new Conservative government led by Boris Johnson poised for office, the Guardian's independent, measured, authoritative
reporting has never been so vital."
Yes – The Groaniad is yer man, yer champion, yer hero!
"... Yet the mass media, freakishly, has had absolutely nothing to say about this extremely newsworthy story. ..."
"... The mass media's stone-dead silence on the OPCW scandal is becoming its own scandal, of equal or perhaps even greater significance than the OPCW scandal itself. It opens up a whole litany of questions which have tremendous importance for every citizen of the western world; questions like, how are people supposed to participate in democracy if all the outlets they normally turn to to make informed voting decisions adamantly refuse to tell them about the existence of massive news stories like the OPCW scandal? How are people meant to address such conspiracies of silence when there is no mechanism in place to hold the entire mass media to account for its complicity in it? And by what mechanism are all these outlets unifying in that conspiracy of silence? ..."
"... This is the FOURTH leak showing how the OPCW fabricated a report on a supposed Syrian 'chemical' attack," tweeted journalist Ben Norton. "And mainstream Western corporate media outlets are still silent, showing how authoritarian these 'democracies' are and how tightly they control info." "Media silence on this story is its own scandal," "Media silence on this story is its own scandal," "Media silence on this story is its own scandal," tweeted journalist Aaron Maté. ..."
This is getting really, really, really weird. WikiLeaks has WikiLeaks has
published yet another set of leaked
internal documents from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adding even more material to
the mountain of evidence that we've been lied to about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria last year which resulted
in airstrikes upon that nation from the US, UK and France.
This is mostly fear mongering as an affective bioengineered virus will create a pandemic, but
the truth is that Anthrax false flag attack after 9/11 was not an accident...
Trump administration beahaves like a completely lawless gang (stealing Syrian oil is one
example. Killing Soleimani is another ) , as for its behaviour on international arena, but I do
not believe they go that far. Even for for such "ruptured" gangster as Pompeo
Notable quotes:
"... Consider that a deadly virus created by the U.S. and used against another country was found out and verified, and in retaliation, that country or others decided to strike back with other toxic agents against America. Where would this end, and over time, how many billions could be affected in such a scenario? ..."
"... "In vast laboratories in the Ministry of Peace, and in experimental stations, teams of experts are indefatigably at work searching for new and deadlier gases; or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents; or for breeds of disease germs immunised against all possible antibodies." ..."
"... Additional notes: here , here , here , here , here and here . ..."
Interestingly, in the past, U.S. universities and NGOs went to China
specifically to do illegal biological experimentation, and this was so egregious to Chinese
officials, that forcible removal of these people was the result. Harvard University, one of the
major players in this scandal, stole the DNA samples of hundreds of thousands of Chinese
citizens, left China with those samples, and continued illegal bio-research in the U.S. It is
thought that the U.S. military, which puts a completely different spin on the conversation, had
commissioned the research in China at the time. This is more than suspicious.
The U.S. has, according to this
article at Global Research ,
had a massive biological warfare program since at least the early 1940s, but has used toxic
agents against this country and others since the 1860s . This is no secret, regardless of the
propaganda spread by the government and its partners in criminal bio-weapon research and
production.
As of 1999, the U.S. government had deployed its Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW)
arsenal against the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia,
Cuba, Haitian boat people, and our neighbor Canada according to this article at
Counter Punch . Of course, U.S.
citizens have been used as guinea pigs many times as well, and exposed to toxic germ agents and
deadly chemicals by government.
Keep in mind that this is a short list, as the U.S. is well known for also using proxies to
spread its toxic chemicals and germ agents, such as happened in Iraq and Syria. Since 1999
there have been continued incidences of several different viruses, most of which are presumed
to be
manmade , including the current Coronavirus that is affecting China today.
There is also much evidence of the research and development of race-specific bio-warfare
agents. This is very troubling. One would think, given the idiotic race arguments by
post-modern Marxists, that this would consume the mainstream news, and any participants in
these atrocious race-specific poisons would be outed at every level. That is not happening, but
I believe it is due to obvious reasons, including government cover-up, hypocrisy at all levels,
and leftist agenda driven objectives that would not gain ground with the exposure of this
government-funded anti-race science.
I will say that it is not just the U.S. that is developing and producing bio-warfare agents
and viruses, but many developed countries around the globe do so as well. But the United
States, as is the case in every area of war and killing, is by far the world leader in its
inhuman desire to be able to kill entire populations through biological and chemical warfare
means. Because these agents are extremely dangerous and uncontrollable, and can spread wildly,
the risk to not only isolated populations, but also the entire world is evident. Consider
that a deadly virus created by the U.S. and used against another country was found out and
verified, and in retaliation, that country or others decided to strike back with other toxic
agents against America. Where would this end, and over time, how many billions could be
affected in such a scenario?
All indications point to the fact that the most toxic, poisonous, and deadly viruses ever
known are being created in labs around the world. In the U.S. think of Fort Detrick, Maryland,
Pine Bluff Arsenal, Arkansas, Horn Island, Mississippi, Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, Vigo
Ordinance Plant, Indiana, and many others. Think of the fascist partnerships between this
government and the pharmaceutical industry. Think of the U.S. military installations positioned
all around the globe. Nothing good can come from this, as it is not about finding cures for
disease, or about discovering vaccines, but is done for one reason only, and that is for the
purpose of bio-warfare for mass killing.
The drive to find biological weapons that will sicken and kill millions at a time is not
only a travesty, but is beyond evil. This power is held by the few, but the potential victims
of this madness include everyone on earth. How can such insanity at this level be allowed to
continue? If any issue could ever unite the masses, governments participating in biological and
germ warfare, race-specific killing, and creating viruses with the potential to affect disease
and death worldwide, should cause many to stand together against it. The first step is to
expose that governments, the most likely culprit being the U.S. government, are planting these
viruses purposely to cause great harm. Once that is proven, the unbelievable risk to all will
be known, and then people everywhere should put their divisiveness aside, stand together, and
stop this assault on mankind.
"In vast laboratories in the Ministry of Peace, and in experimental stations, teams of
experts are indefatigably at work searching for new and deadlier gases; or for soluble
poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole
continents; or for breeds of disease germs immunised against all possible antibodies." ~
George Orwell – 1984
What is it about your site that you invite such mediocre comments? I have thought about
this a great deal.
Here Lochearn, do provide us with an erudite commentary on the role of the state and the
populace in regard to the extract below:
French security agencies then more than adequately identified the "Charlie Hebdo shooting"
perpetrators as potential threats and tracked them for years beforehand. More recently,
British authorities were more than well aware of the danger Sudesh Amman posed to society.
The problem is instead what appears to be a deliberate effort to keep these terrorists
roaming freely among society. Free to join Western-backed mercenary forces abroad to fight
in the West's various proxy wars, and free to commit heinous acts of terror at home, both
serving the singular agenda of expanding Western hegemony abroad while preserving the
primacy of select special interests at home through divide and conquer politics and the use
of fear as a political weapon.
Do assist us all to raise the debate and discuss the human challenges that we can
influence with our analysis.
I haven't followed the terror attacks in Britain closely enough to evaluate them, but I
did closely look at the one in Paris & quite a number of them here in the US. Every one
that I researched was indubitably phoney.
It used to be quite easy to piggy-back one's own research on that of others. One would
simply search "Nashville shooting hoax" or wherever it was, and all of the citizen videos
& commentaries would come up at once. These usually included images of the location
before the incident, often showing alterations that had been made to facilitate the
"incident."
Alas, these citizen analytics proved so effective in persuading others that TPTB began
abruptly to block them. (sigh)
"... "...real fear or anguish..." in fact only exist in people's heads. Identity politics poisoned neolibs like to externalize these sensations as being tangible features of the physical (non-metaphysical and non-imaginary) world. They are not. ..."
"... The corporate mass media exists solely to manufacture megatrends in society. Whether that is to manufacture mass cravings for a particular color and artificial flavor of carbonated corn syrup water or to manufacture the "real fear or anguish" that we are threatened by scary "others" to get the herd to crowd around symbols of security, the overall purpose is the same: Serve the interests of the big business elites. ..."
"...real fear or anguish..." in fact only exist in people's heads. Identity politics
poisoned neolibs like to externalize these sensations as being tangible features of the
physical (non-metaphysical and non-imaginary) world. They are not.
More topically, the corporate mass media excels at manufacturing "real fear or
anguish" . The farce taking place in HK is a perfect example of this, but we can see
similar examples elsewhere like Venezuela where well-fed upper middle class Venezuelans are
convinced beyond reason that Venezuelans (others that they don't know) are starving, or like
in Ukraine where western Ukrainians were certain in their anguish that eastern Ukrainians
were being killed by Russians. Many Americans are still experiencing very "real
fear or anguish" that Russians are wrecking their sham "Democracy™" . As
real as this may seem to the delusional and hysterical, it is still delusion and
hysteria.
The corporate mass media exists solely to manufacture megatrends in society. Whether
that is to manufacture mass cravings for a particular color and artificial flavor of
carbonated corn syrup water or to manufacture the "real fear or anguish" that we are
threatened by scary "others" to get the herd to crowd around symbols of security, the overall
purpose is the same: Serve the interests of the big business elites.
"... But you have to admit, it's a well-played scam: the CIA stirs up internal chaos in a country, and the US military then completes the destabilization program by bombing it into submission or terminal chaos. ..."
Is "national security" really the goal of the US military, or is "multinational corporation security" the real reason the US has
thousands of military bases around the world?
The US taxpayer foots the security bill for the same corporations that buy all of
our national elections.
But you have to admit, it's a well-played scam: the CIA stirs up internal chaos in a country, and the
US military then completes the destabilization program by bombing it into submission or terminal chaos.
"... Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon. ..."
"... This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception." ..."
"... During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted. ..."
"... When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. ..."
"... Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war." ..."
"... The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. ..."
"... Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. ..."
The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It
was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of
mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience:
us.
To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR
flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where
politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.
Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad
student's website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House
of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who
looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely
through the tempest. Why?
Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no
interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real
effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.
Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be
discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls
and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next.
When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the
mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was
an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don't
explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back.
Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey
Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion
palatable, not to justify it.
The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair
of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and
often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps
were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell
and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State
Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should
be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit
the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world.
Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on
the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two
advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff
shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses:
Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
At the State Department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board
of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of U.S. foreign policy." She
extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely
focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.
"Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers.
"All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves,
but for the outside world." Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of
perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.
Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a
conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange
nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It's a one-way
street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and
international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.
The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The
American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of "freedom" to
oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise
missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation
to its bizarre essence: "This war is about peace."
Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles
battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of
shock and awe were all after play.
Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of
public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Before becoming Rumsfeld's
mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and
Knowlton's D.C. office.
Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a
select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing
plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and
was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR
executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich
Galen.
The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie
Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was
conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working
feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR
firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press
coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed
all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money's worth. Boggs'
felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of
al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into
intelligence failures and 9/11.
According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to
the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to
buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just
nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the
military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They
suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion of
so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which,
of course, wasn't an "axis" at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other,
and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.
Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms
working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi
dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many
of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush
inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against
Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat .
At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the D.C. firm, the Rendon Group. Rendon is
one of Washington's heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand
in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for Michael Dukakis and Jimmy
Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he
offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm, Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from
the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to
produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.
As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped
his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.
Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public
relations for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning
and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon
refuse to disclose the details of the group's work there.
But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's
signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi
associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled
by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags
to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. "Where do you think they
got those American flags?" clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."
The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has
now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported
that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi
and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.
So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization
of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said
Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or
corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception
manager."
What exactly, is perception management? The Pentagon defines it this way: "actions to convey
and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their
emotions, motives and objective reasoning." In other words, lying about the intentions of the
U.S. government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan
(developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for
perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many
missions was to plant false stories in the press.
Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official
government memo bragging about how the media are manipulated for political objectives. So the
New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic
Influence; the Pentagon shut down the operation, and the press gloated with satisfaction on its
victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that while he was killing the office, the
same devious work would continue. "You can have the corpse," said Rumsfeld. "You can have the
name. But I'm going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have."
At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was
lost. It failed to convince even America's most fervent allies and dependent client states that
Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the U.N. and even NATO, a wholly
owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing
consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even
so, the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the U.S.A. overwhelmingly opposed the
war.
Domestically, it was a different story. A population traumatized by terror threats and
shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was
a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on
America with weapons of mass destruction.
Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of
threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans,
but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the
American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was
behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.
Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried
for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn't have any
functional chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn't even possess any SCUD missiles,
despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into
Kuwait.
This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps.
Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few
weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent
shape public perception."
During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized
opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the
Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no
one really wanted.
What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of
mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a
large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions,
Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the
troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter
for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as "our protectors."
The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do "anything and
everything they can ask of us."
When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the
war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a
fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain
death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. Of course,
nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any
made-for-TV-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a
week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to
look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.
The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the
Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video
clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present
the Pentagon's montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster
bombs, dead children and U.S. soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.
"A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion," predicted Lt. Jane Larogue,
director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter
occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about
installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the
flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then
the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign TV news crews banished from
Baghdad.
Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the
Post's pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3-to-1 margin.
Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass
destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington
Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of
war."
The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly
attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam.
Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself
was sent as President Ronald Reagan's personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold
message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a "strategic setback for the United States."
This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie
McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense
snapped, "Where'd you get that? Iraqi television?"
The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura
Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times' Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the
ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
How times have changed! In 1987, Mylroie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She wrote an
article for the New Republic titled "Back Iraq: Time for a U.S. Tilt in the Mideast," arguing
that the U.S. should publicly embrace Saddam's secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic
fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than
Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation's most bellicose Islamophobe. "The American weapons that Iraq
could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and
counterartillery radar," wrote Mylroie and Pipes. "The United States might also consider
upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."
In the rollout for the war, Mylroie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq.
She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter
manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs
Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative
career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the
Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the
nation's most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot,
Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador's assignment was to
embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows, and op-ed
pages.
Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the theme and made sure they all stayed
on message. "There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a
slightly different way," said Benador. "If not, people get scared." Scared of intentions of
their own government.
It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case
for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like
the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They
didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.
Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk
show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a
running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired
generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives
blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue's show attracted
more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike
on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the
memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in
presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's
motives."
The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home
for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every
opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot
and hoisted the battle flag.
It's war that sells.
There's a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no
returns.
Kevin Smith: "Higgins is currently frantically trying to prop up the Douma narrative against a mountain of evidence disproving
his conclusions. For those who’ve followed his story, it’s clear that Higgins is an intelligence asset, set up to take the fall
when the currently collapsing narratives take hold in the mainstream.
"You didn't think that one through, did you, @eliothiggins sweetie? You're not in the
ladies' lingerie trade now. This discussion is about truth, which endures, is not held together
by elastic, and is not for sale." ~Peter Hitchens responding to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat over the OPCW scandal on
Twitter – 2 January 2020.
"... I believe more people nowadays recognise that the devastating wars in Iraq and Libya and events in Syria were pushed by our governments and media. They can even accept, when you explain, that we've been assisting terrorists to unseat governments for years. But they seem hesitant of taking the next step and we need to encourage them on this path. ..."
"... This path leads to recognising the sheer evil in our midst and getting out of this mindset that criminal behavior and lying in governments and in our media is normal or should in any way be tolerated. Perhaps some people appreciate this already but don't want to address it out of concern to what they might find. Maybe some people dread the thought of a global conflict so ignore it. But we need to hammer home the consequences of simply doing nothing. ..."
"... I've been trying to think of an analogy to try to get this point across. I sometimes say to people, we wouldn't have released a serial killer like Harold Shipman from prison and appointed him Foreign Secretary. Therefore, why do we tolerate a long line of Foreign Secretaries complicit in laying waste to the world? Sadly, with this analogy most people usually look back at me blankly so I have been searching for one more complete and rooted in history which people can relate better to events today. ..."
"You didn't think that one through, did you, @eliothiggins sweetie? You're not in the
ladies' lingerie trade now. This discussion is about truth, which endures, is not held
together by elastic, and is not for sale."
Peter Hitchens responding to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat over the OPCW scandal on
Twitter – 2 January 2020.
Like many, I've been following the Douma scandal for some time and particularly since the
OPCW whistleblowers and leaked emails blew the lid off the official narrative that Assad used
chemical weapons there.
For the past few weeks he's been debating the topic with Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat, Scott Lucas and various Middle East based journalists
who created and then pushed the false narrative.
In fact, it's not really a debate. Peter Hitchens is quite literally slaughtering these
narrative managers – his logic and clear thinking – and wit exposing the numerous
gaps in their story and their desperate deflections.
Hitchens position is not exactly the same as many of us here hold – that Douma was a
clear false flag. What he is saying is the evidence points to there being no chemical attack by
the Syrian government, the pretext used for the attack on Syria. He doesn't wish to speculate
on matters which aren't conclusively proven, for example precisely on what did actually
happen.
I respect that position in many ways and his refusal to comment on the dead civilians in the
Douma images makes sense from a journalist in the mainstream. I think by having a position
which is clear and unassailable enables him to easily brush off his online detractors and not
allow them to deflect to other issues.
While I don't agree with everything he says, Hitchens has a calm and rational argument for
all the issues he covers. This puts clear ground between him and his online opponents who often
resort to childish abuse.
My 80-year old mum admires him too. She describes him as 'frightfully posh'. Perhaps someone
who might have belonged in a previous age – but I'm glad we have him in this one.
Anyway, I think we can be sure that Hitchens will continue his important work within the
remit he's chosen and others will investigate the unanswered questions which arise from the
Douma incident.
Ultimately the question about the dead civilians in the images is simply too dreadful to
ignore.
This is because if a chemical attack did not take place and Assad was not responsible it
seems highly likely that the civilians including children were murdered to facilitate a
fabrication.
And were our own intelligence agencies involved in a staged event, considering the refusal
to even establish the basic facts in the days following?
And then, of course, the resulting air strikes nearly caused us to go to war with Russia,
with all that would entail.
While these investigations continue, I think it's timely to see where these events fit into
the way the general public think and perceive wrongdoing and to try to radically to change
this.
I believe more people nowadays recognise that the devastating wars in Iraq and Libya and
events in Syria were pushed by our governments and media. They can even accept, when you
explain, that we've been assisting terrorists to unseat governments for years. But they seem
hesitant of taking the next step and we need to encourage them on this path.
This path leads to recognising the sheer evil in our midst and getting out of this mindset
that criminal behavior and lying in governments and in our media is normal or should in any way
be tolerated. Perhaps some people appreciate this already but don't want to address it out of
concern to what they might find. Maybe some people dread the thought of a global conflict so
ignore it. But we need to hammer home the consequences of simply doing nothing.
I've been trying to think of an analogy to try to get this point across. I sometimes say to
people, we wouldn't have released a serial killer like Harold Shipman from prison and appointed
him Foreign Secretary. Therefore, why do we tolerate a long line of Foreign Secretaries
complicit in laying waste to the world? Sadly, with this analogy most people usually look back
at me blankly so I have been searching for one more complete and rooted in history which people
can relate better to events today.
So, here follows an analogy of a character who lived in the 17th century. His traits, his
crimes, the political climate and peoples misguided perceptions in response can be compared to
recent events and one particular individual causing havoc in the world today.
Of course I refer to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat.
Eliot ( 'suck my balls' ) Higgins and
Titus Oates1. Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat
Higgins probably doesn't need much of an introduction here. It seems he has no specific
qualifications relevant to his role and a bit of a drop-out in terms of education.
Before the Arab spring I knew no more about weapons than the average Xbox owner. I had no
knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo."
But this didn't prevent him blogging about world events and then setting himself up and his
site as investigator for several incidents most notably the shooting down of the MH17 passenger
plane over Ukraine and allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria. It's now known that
Bellingcat is funded by pro-war groups including the Atlantic Council
Higgins has been accused by chemical weapons experts, academics and independent journalists
on the ground of fabricating evidence to reach a predetermined outcome decided on by his
funders.
His rise to prominence was fast and apparently some media editors now refer their
journalists to Bellingcat fabrications rather than allowing them to do any journalism
themselves.
For those who've followed his story, it's clear that Higgins is an intelligence asset, set
up to take the fall when the currently collapsing narratives take hold in the
mainstream.
2. Titus Oates and the Popish Plot
Oates was a foul-mouthed
charlatan , serial liar and master of deception who lived in the 17th century. His earlier
life included being expelled from school and he was labelled a 'dunce' by people who knew him.
He became a clergyman and later joined the Navy. His career was plagued by various sex scandals
and charges of perjury.
In the 1670s during the time of Charles II, religious tensions threatened to spill over into
civil war but the pragmatic King, by and large, kept a lid on it.
However, along with Dr Israel Tonge an anti-Catholic rector, Oates started writing
conspiracy theories and inventing plots and later began writing a manuscript alleging of a plan
to assassinate King Charles II and replace him with his openly Catholic brother.
When the fabrication started to gather momentum, the King had an audience with Oates and was
unconvinced and was said to have found discrepancies in his story.
However, the tense political and religious climate at that time was ideal for conspiracy
theories and scaremongering. The King's ministers took Oates at his word and over a dozen
Catholics were executed for treason. This story created panic and paranoia lasting several
years taking the nation to the brink of civil war.
Over time Oates lies were exposed and when the Catholic King James II came to the throne, he
tried Oates with perjury and he was whipped and placed in the pillory.
After James II fled England during the so-called 'Glorious Revolution' King William and
Queen Mary pardoned Oates and gave him a pension.
For me, this whole episode has many obvious parallels with Higgins, the long-running Russia
and the anti-Semitism witch-hunts in the media and the false narratives over Iraq, Libya and
Syria. Like those in power today, Oates had a knack for getting away with it. And I guess we
can all relate this to Julian Assange – the victims or whistleblowers being punished and
the perpetrators getting off.
I had wondered why James II, often ruthless and unforgiving had not executed Oates. But
apparently the crime of perjury even then didn't carry the death sentence. The judge who
convicted Oates was said to have tried his best to finish him off through the whipping, though
he survived.
But perhaps even the King and judiciary in failing in this or not using other means at their
disposal, couldn't comprehend the enormity of his crimes. Oates was after all a rather absurd
character, open to ridicule.
Perhaps this is a bit similar to people today when discovering that Eliot Higgins is also a
foul-mouthed fraud – but they can't reconcile this comical ex-lingerie employee as a
menace to humanity.
3. Modern day
In the past few weeks I've read various older articles on Iraq and Syria. US troops
shooting people for fun from a helicopter . The perpetrators are still free – the
whistle-blowers who exposed that, and other events in prison or exile.
Last year we learned about a shocking massacre of Syrian children,
unreported in the mainstream media . Mainstream journalists through their one-sided
distortions of the conflict and silence, perpetuating the myth that the terrorists who carried
out this mass murder are freedom fighters.
And as I've mentioned, we've seen firmer evidence of what many of us knew along – that
Douma was a staged fabrication as a pretext for air-strikes and dangerously escalating the
Syrian war. The likes of Eliot Higgins and others in the media, colluding in the cover-up of
mass murder which likely facilitated this event. And for those honest journalists and experts
who bring the truth of these staged events to us,
smears will no doubt continue .
Higgins and others in the media who lie, misinform or remain silent are no better than those
shooting civilians from helicopters or starting these wars in the first place. In fact, they
have killed more and keep killing.
This modern-day Titus Oates, and others share a big responsibility for death and destruction
in the Middle East and a dangerous new Cold War.
As I say, I think people are waking up to the distorted narratives and misdirections which
have inflicted war on others. Now they need to take the next step and grasp the sheer enormity
of the crimes and the risks of global conflict if we don't act.
So, how do we achieve this and get in a position of holding the criminals and war
propagandists to account?
By confronting them directly and mercilessly. As Jeremy Corbyn should have done over the
anti-Semitism hoax. Perhaps we should adopt some of the tactics they use against the
truth-tellers and whistle-blowers. I don't mean by lies or smears. Maybe even ridiculing these
people and their nonsense might have the effect of trivialising the crimes they have
committed.
No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the
true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks.
We need to recognise more the seriousness of the crimes. This commentary from the usually
measured Piers Robinson about the staged event in Douma reflects the true gravity of the
situation in
terms of the OPCW complicity .
4. The hijacking of OPCW
The cover-up of evidence that the Douma incident was staged is not merely misconduct. As
the staging of the Douma incident entailed mass murder of civilians, those in OPCW who have
suppressed the evidence of staging are, unwittingly or otherwise, colluding with mass
murder."
We need to now apply this strong language to all crimes committed, be it from the soldiers
on the ground, the governments starting these wars or supplying terrorists or the media which
promote mass murder through their lies, distortions and silence when presented with the true
facts.
We need to go on the offensive and call out the criminals and spell out in no uncertain
terms what we are dealing with. With the evidence and fact-based analogies or arguments we
publish we should be using more commentary such as 'mass murderer', 'traitor' or 'terrorist
propagandist'.
This is particularly important in light of events in recent days. The assassination of
General Qasem Soleimani has been normalised in both mainstream and on social media. The people
legitimising state-sponsored murder in offices thousands of miles away from Iran, woefully
ignorant of the potential of this causing a chain of events which could visit our door
soon.
Above all, we should specifically name and shame the individuals promoting war. This needs
to be relentless. The official war narratives which have crumbled so far are ample evidence of
wrongdoing on a vast scale. So, we can be confident in doing this with the truth firmly on our
side.
OffGuardian does not accept advertising or sponsored content. We have no large financial
backers. We are not funded by any government or NGO. Donations from our readers is our only
means of income. Even the smallest amount of support is hugely appreciated.
Connect with
Subscribe newest oldest most voted
wardropper ,
No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people for the
true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks.
Yes indeed.
I was, however, reminded today of the huge mountain we yet have to climb before it can be
normal again NOT to be corrupt and wicked. The scenario was a session of acrimony in a US
Senate chamber, and according to the NYTimes, "Tensions grew so raw after midnight that Chief
Justice Roberts cut in just before 1 a.m. to admonish the managers and the president's
lawyers to "remember where they are" and return to "civil discourse." "
"Remembering where you are", when dealing with Titus Oates and other vulgar frauds is perhaps
not entirely appropriate ?
wardropper ,
Apologies, I forgot to set the first sentence in quotes
Thom ,
Hitchens may be on the level on this particular issue but it is part of a wider deception
where Hitchens poses as a friend to critical thinkers and then tells them they are helpless
and/or can do nothing about it. If he really had journalistic integrity he wouldn't be taking
a salary from the Mail on Sunday, a newspaper that relentlessly lied for the Tories at the
last election, with the help of the itelligence agencies.
Koba ,
As good as Hitchens has done here he's still at heart a Trotskyist he lives a good split and
a toothless display just like the Trotskyists he used to side with. His brother went from
Trotskyist to soft neocon and peter went from Trotskyist to an ardent Christian Conservative
in a veeeeeery short space of time. Plus there dad was deeeeep in with the establishment and
his mum Jewish. So .
Bellingcrap is just another scam like Dupes (Snopes) and Politi"facts". All of them are
funded by the Atlantic Council and the CIA front National Endowment for "Democracy". Their
cover as an "independent objective fact checking service" is about as transparent as Saran
Wrap.
tonyopmoc ,
I really liked this when I read it this morning, before the grandkids came round, but I
thought some of the comments a bit severe..
I mean this photo is of some 40 year old kid, who lives in Leicester, and his
Mum/wife/sister or whatever works in the local Post Office .
I personally had never heard of Brown Noses, and I have never personnally succeeded in
getting anything I wrote, posted above our below the line, since The Manchester Guardian
moved from Manchester to London, and whilst I do love reading some of the posters' comments
well look face it.
Even though Rhys probabaly doesn't like what this kid writes – Elliot is it? he is
hardly going to come round with a chainsaw, to cut his head off is he? He probably never even
thought of it.
He did say he is small fry, and he probably is still a virgin (been brainwashed – so
he actually belives the model doll is better. What has he got to compare it to?)
So I can't blame any of them.
There are alternatives as well as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and all those Dating
Websites, when almost everything you write gets deleted.
Just go down the local pub when there is a good band on. Even I can pull there, but I am
better looking than both Rhys and Elliot
I Like Girls.
I am a man. It's Normal
Just keep fit dancing and smiling, and you will be O.K.
Tony
paul ,
The prime importance of these endless hoaxes, smears, lies, fabrications and official
approved conspiracy theories, lies not so much in the events themselves as what it says about
the nature of the people who rule over us and their courtiers and handmaidens in the MSM.
It would take a whole forest of trees merely to catalogue all their lies over the years,
whether it's the Iraq Incubator Babies, the black Viagra fuelled rape gangs in Libya, the
Syrian Gas Hoaxes, 9/11, Iraq's WMD, Iran's non existent nuclear weapons, Skripal,
Russiagate, Ukrainegate, or the communist spy/ terrorist/ anti semitic smear campaign against
Corbyn. And that is only the tip of a very large iceberg. You could go back further to
Gladio, Operation Northwoods, Tonkin Gulf, the "Holocaust", Zinoviev Letter, Bayonetted
Belgian Babies, Raped Belgian Nuns, Human Bodies Made Into Soap. The list is endless.
We have been lied to consistently for years, decades, and generations. And these lies have
been peddled endlessly in the MSM, no matter how ludicrous and transparently false they are.
In the absence of direct personal knowledge or very convincing evidence to the contrary, you
just have to assume that everything we have ever been told, are being told, and will be told,
and most of the accepted historical record, are simply false. Nothing, nothing at all, can
ever be taken at face value.
And those who rule over us and who are responsible for these lies are psychopathic
subhuman filth devoid of any moral values or any redeeming features whatsoever. They are a
thousand times worse than the worst mass murderers or child killers who have ever been
through our courts. The Moors Murderers, the Ted Bundys, the Jeffrey Dahmers, were seriously
damaged individuals who killed a handful of victims. And they did their own dirty work. The
Blairs, the Campbells, the Straws, the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, the Allbrights,
the Macrons, the Camerons, the Netanyahus, the Trumps, have the blood of millions on their
hands. They and their wire pullers are responsible for the death, starvation and misery of
tens and hundreds of millions.
So when Blair, or Johnson, or Trump or whoever is interviewed on television, you have to
remember that individual is a thousand times worse than the Moors Murderers, and we would
actually be that much better off if Brady or Hindley were ruling over us. They deserve no
respect or deference or legitimacy. They plot the murders of millions and the starvation of
tens of millions – and laugh and giggle as they do so. They should be simply recognised
for what they awe – psychopathic subhuman filth.
I do agree with you Paul and of course all you say is true. One of the main problems is that
these people have the power to build artificial constructs sufficient for the masses to
believe and perpetuated through their bought and paid for MSM whose journalists are mere foot
soldiers and wish only to get their pay checks. They have no reason to question the lies and
distortions pedaled to them by TPTB – they merely repeat the false narrative:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not
understanding it!" – Upton Sinclair
And we, the great 99%, have little power to change things except within our local network.
We can shout all we like on social media but it changes nothing until the great crisis
reoccurs and perhaps the masses will rise and demand a just and equitable system. Until that
day perhaps this little video will provide an understanding:
The business of the MSM throughout the ages has been to traumatise or at least just generally
worry the public with headlines focused on fear, envy, anger, revenge, and hate. Include all
five in your story and you're well on the way to a Pulitzer Prize, bestowed on the profession
by one of the great muckrakers of all time. It's not incidental that there have been a
disturbing number of winners that have turned out to be dissembling frauds. Add to this the
fact that 'journalism' training apparently does not teach entrants to distinguish the
difference between opinion and news, and the die is cast: propaganda as news.
Dungroanin ,
Here is what BellEndScat supporting Rusbridger is moaning about.
"For some years now – largely unreported – two chancery court judges have been
dealing with literally hundreds of cases of phone hacking against MGN Ltd and News Group, the
owners, respectively, of the Daily Mirror and the Sun (as well as the defunct News of the
World).
The two publishers are, between them, forking out eye-watering sums to avoid any cases going
to trial in open court. Because the newspaper industry lobbied so forcefully to scrap the
second part of the Leveson inquiry, which had been due to shine a light on such matters, we
can only surmise what is going on.
But there are clues. Mirror Group (now Reach) had by July 2018 set aside more than
£70m to settle phone-hacking claims without risking any of them getting to court. The
BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in
damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach
£1bn."
"Because the newspaper industry lobbied so forcefully to scrap the second part of the
Leveson inquiry, which had been due to shine a light on such matters, we can only surmise
what is going on."
-- --
Completely ignoring that the Integrity Iniative infested Guardian ITSELF objected to the
recommendation of Levesons thoroughly public Inquiry and opposition to a independent press
regulator!
It would have been a building block and certainly stopped most of the continued press
misbehaviour over the last 5 years.
Neither Fish nor Fowl Mr Rusbridger. More sinner that saint, more like.
Hugh O'Neill ,
Going to the heart of what Bellingcat, MI6 and CIA is Pompeo's: "We lie, we cheat, we steal."
These evil filth are devoid of any moral code and have no respect whatsoever for the laws of
God or Man. At which point, consider Moses' (how apt) Ten Commandments. There among them is:
"Thou shalt not bear false witness". Think what you will of these Ten, but as a moral code,
they were quite useful.
Richard Le Sarc ,
Would that all these scum could share the fate of their progenitor, Streicher-without the '
necktie party'. Life at hard labour would do the lot of them much good.
Brianeg ,
I looked at the Veterans Today link and it all sounds very plausible'
However in today's world nothing makes sense especially when the questions arise.
Is it possible to change the signal of an aircrafts transponder remotely. Can the target
acquisition radar on the missile be spoofed remotely. Just why did the flight control officer
sanction the take off of this plane in the middle of a war unless they were party to the
whole thing.. Just what were the six Israeli F-35 jets doing flying close to the Iranian
border?
Okay there is a lot of smoke but just where is the fire.
Just as interesting is that none of the twelve Iranian missiles was intercepted and there
are rumours that the Iranians were able to take out of action American air defences.
I am sure that like with Douma when the majority of NATO missiles were intercepted by
missiles that were decades old, you wonder what might happen when most of the middle east is
covered by the S-300 and later versions.
This is a story that has got a long way to run and we might never hear the ending.
Dungroanin ,
Facts are inconvenient.
Many planes took off.
This one was delayed by the pilot 'to remove overloading'.
Reports of Cruise missiles heading in.
The thing about 'chips' is they could easily be identified by putting them in a black box
and watching what they do using a chip which only does that!
The whole bs about it's THEM not US crap falls away. Just need some open source simple
'custodian' chip manufacturer to make that available. If it can be made a 'gate keeper' than
we are all safe.
Mucho ,
"It sounds a bit MAGA. "
After this, I will never, ever read any of your comments ever again. Get lost!
Mucho ,
You talk so much crap. Please, keep it to yourself
Dungroanin ,
I ain't saying that is your opinion am I?
The bit I watched was him being gung-ho about getting back 'control of microprocessors'
!!!
There is a big difference between designing chips and 'manufacturing' facilities'.
Have you never wondered why most actual building of small electrical component equipment
takes place in Asia?
I don't care wherher you read my comments- i am free to post what I want on whatevet
article and whoevers comment. And stick to facts.
Mucho ,
"The bit I watched ".
Honestly, I am so tired of people who comment on things they know nothing about. Everything
you say is wrong, because you are speaking from a position of total ignorance, because you
haven't watched the films.
Watch 1 to 3. Watch 22 and 23 ALL THE WAY THROUGH, not skimming. Then comment. Every
inaccurate comment you make is covered in detail. Honestly it's no wonder we're so fucked.
From 2005 after one google search, time spent on this, 10 seconds:
"While Yona was developed in partnership with one of Intel's California centers, the 65nm
microprocessor product is the first to be developed in its entirety, both the architecture
and strategy, by Intel engineers at its Israel plants in Haifa and Yakum. " https://www.israel21c.org/intels-new-chip-design-developed-in-israel/
You know zilch, you understand nothing, you make assumptions, you don't watch or read the
material, and then in your total ignorance, you spew your feeble thoughts on this forum.
Moron
Mucho ,
You define the phrase "ignorant Brit"
Dungroanin ,
Mucho since you FAILED instantly in your promise to ignore me – i will respond to your
toy throwing out of the parambulator.
First just telling people to WATCH something without explaining what the salient point to
be learnt – is not the way to influence or educate.
I prefer reading an argument- I definitely do not spend hours watching TV or listening to
propaganda by msm / indy or 'shock jocks' – that last was the personality I saw and
didn't feel the need to hear anymore as I don't when Nigel Farage and his ilk do on the radio
here.
If you want to inform or prove something to me or anyone else kindly post a link to a
written piece.
Second, chips are designed eveywhere there is such competence. Chip manufacturing mainly
improved theough research in top universities.
The UK was a lead chip designer too.
None of that means the Israelis haven't monopolosed tech and own many patents. The fact is
the Israelis ARE part of the 5+1 eyed world Empire – they are the plus one. Snowdens
whistleblowing makes absolutely clear that the +1 gets a higher clearance than the +4.
That's as nice as I am prepared to be, so finally, that last paragraph is what is known as
PROJECTION. Look it up and learn that it comes from your fav bogeymen brainfuckers.
That is some serious self-hate you have going on – work on it.
Take it easy ok?
Mucho ,
Number 23 is totally relevant too, going deep into chips, backdooring and kill switch usage
Koba ,
So the mocking of maga is what set you off? Fuck maga and it's idiot supporters great nations
don't slaughter civilians for capital
chris morris is very funny has a fine body of twisted comedick works
for all his charm his role is too destroy society degrade
he is khazar after all
sacha baron co hen the names speaks for itself an empty cruel tool
never trust a coen cohen khan or cowen or co they cookoo
eliot mcfuck higgins is not oirish
he is not certainly related to snooker loopy or is it darts i cannot remember hero alex
higgins.
eliot"s dad is rita katz from site intel group amaq news
his mom barbera lerner spector
or is it vice versa
versa vice
whatever
shirley you
get my the friends of the oirish israel drift
so to speaks
or sum such
Mucho ,
Brilliant, insightful, logical hypothesis of the recent plane downing over Iran by Jeremy
Rothe Kushel. Ignore the video, this is about the written article.
For further info about Israeli tech domination, what it is, where it comes from and the
implications of this, go to Brendon O Connell's YT channel. Number 22 in his list is very
important.
Mucho ,
Jeremy Rothe-Kushel is a very important member of the truth community, in no small part due
to the fact that he is an Ashkenazi Jew. My personal belief is that in the end, the Jewish
community will play a pivotal role in weeding out the evil that rules over us. I wish we
didn't have these labels, that we could have true freedom to play our chosen role in our God
created realm, but at this stage in the game, we're stuck with our divide and rule labels and
systems of control.
Jeremy's style is to the point, he has great depth of knowledge, an encyclopedic knowledge of
his field and is a highly astute commentator. He presents a lot of complex information in
fairly easy to digest chunks with his co-host, Greg McCarron, on their show "The Antedote" on
YT, as well as doing a lot of guerilla style activism in US politics. Highly recommended.
norman wisdom ,
i met elliot many years ago
the chap on the 8 year old lap top above
we called him fat face down the synagogue ohh how we laughed
he laughed as well everytime someone said it
such fun
are rabbi one day organised a trip and lecture tour of chatham house the belly of the
beast.
we learnt all about how tough regime change was and how difficult it is to do on a bbc size
budget.
what we learnt was that having are people everywhere really helped
scripted up to speed influencer roles in media in public on track on page working cog
like.
a kind of khazar collective non semites only for security reasons of course.
we could work from a very low pound dollar and shekels base and still be very effective.
never under estimate the benjamins or elliots it is folks like this that are the real hero
of the oded yinon
yes sir
already my life
fat face eliot boy done good
and like all khazar he hates the sephardim jewisher and the unclean arab which is shirley
a bonus is it not
George Mc ,
First off, if folks haven't a clue who Harold Shipman is, you're not going to get far with
Titus Oats. At the most they might think it's a character from Gormenghast.
Second, I initially misread the article and thought that the figure from the 17th century
actually WAS Higgins of Bellingcat. And if that seems an absurd assumption to make, even
temporarily, it doesn't seem much more absurd than some of the stuff he says e.g.
I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo.
The point has been raised that there are psyops perpetrated with a malicious sense of
humour as if to say, "These suckers will swallow anything". Higgins with his "education" from
Arnold and Rambo may be an example of one of those jokes.
Third, and to end on an optimistic note, I like the 17th century sentencing and recommend
we bring it back:
and he was whipped and placed in the pillory.
Dungroanin ,
Admin – a suggestion on keeping recent articles available from the top of the page.
Problem: As you add new aricles at top left the ones on the very right drop away! Almost
as if being binned into a memory hole.
Solution: allow a scroll at the right hand edge so that these older links are easily
available to readers. Only a minor coding change without any change to your front page.
Tallis Marsh ,
I concur! I'm sure many of us will appreciate a scroll on the right hand edge so we can
access the older articles. Thanks in advance, OffG!
Oliver ,
HM Armed Forces operations in Syria follow the doctrine of Major General Sir Frank Kitson who
learnt his stuff in Kenya in the 1950s. Murder, torture, rape the staples of the British
military's modern terrorist ability. NATO doctrine too.
This is an important article: one of the few that dares to express that Douma et al are not
mere false flags they a darkly psychotic form of 'snuff propaganda porn' (including the
recycling and rearanging of 'props' that were until recently animate human souls with a
lifetime of possibility abnegated for ideology). The Working Group on Syria is part of a
small counter-narrative subset – along with Sister Agnes Mariam, Vanessa Beeley, RT (on
occasion), UK Column, The Indicter, Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli – who are willing to
state plainly that this is child murder. Now I wholeheartedly commend Kevin that we should
name and shame the culprits and their supporters.
"No, I think it is time for plainer, no-holds-barred language describing these people
for the true evil they are – until the truth and label sticks."
I had a similar epiphany in early 2016. The barbaric of murder of starved and thirsty
children at Rashidin – Syrian innocence lured by much needed sweets and drinks only to
be blown apart in front of their mothers. Anyone who supports the White Helmets terrorist
construct and their NATO-proxy child-murderers needs to be exposed. But what if that trail of
exposure leads back to the leader of the Labour party: who had just personally endorsed the
charity funding of the White Helmets? And continued to support the Jo Cox Foundation of
Syrian humanitarian bombers and R2P interventionists? Which itself is a front for the dark
money web of 'philanthrocapitalism' that is the shadow support network for regime change
crimes against humanity. This is when righteous indignation meets the dark wall of silence
around the social construction of reality. Especially if you put Jeremy Corbyn in the
frame.
What this means is the ability to frame dark actors for the true evil they are has to be a
two-way flow. Meaning is created across networks, not just by naming but by naming and
agreeing across narrative communities. Again, this is not abstruse: it is social reality.
Social reality is not reality: it is a consensual constructivism. Significant numbers of
others have to be in a position of consensual agreement in order to challenge the dominant
narrative(s). So I echo the sentiment that many can see that the dominant narrative –
especially concerning Syria – is deeply flawed. But they are as yet unwilling to admit
that the depth of the flaw is in fact a tear in social reality that cannot be easily
healed.
This is the aspect of social reality called 'universe maintenance'. Doxa is the reality
constructing belief set – the episteme of interacting beliefs. The narrative has two
main aspects: ortho-doxa and hetero-doxa – the orthodox maintaining and heterodox
subverting discourses. In order to truly subvert the hegemonic orthodoxy – there has to
be a social moment of criticality when the heterodox is no longer deniable. To reach that
point: the intrajecting true has to be believable to the hegemonic orthodoxy. Now we have a
third mode: para-doxa when the true 'state of affairs' is not believable – it is easily
rejected as paradoxical to the reigning consensus covenant of the true. This is universe
maintaining: whereby the the totality of the dominant discourse actually subsumes or repels
any paradox as a half-truth or ameliorated, disarmed less-than-true ('conspiracy theory').
This is known as 'recuperation'. Anything that meets the dominant discourse has to be
explained in the terms of the dominant discourse accommodative and recommending itself to the
dominant discourse. Which then becomes a part of the dominant universe of discourse.
A moment of the true is like a barb to a bubble. It has to be contained and wrapped in
narrative that describes and explains it into a consumable form. The full realisation of the
propagandic child murder in Syria – tacitly supported by the Labour Party and Jeremy
Corbyn in particular – would destroy the symbolic universe of social reality. Of which
it is my personal experience no one really wants to do. The correlations, direct and indirect
links, and universally maintained orthodoxy of narrative discourse point to an accomodation.
An explanation or multivariate set of explanations that problem shift and ascribe blame to
imaginary actors. To deflect or defend the personal self. Because the personal self is
independently situated outside the social sphere. Or is it?
Seeing the real event as it happens requires the perspicacity of social inclusion. We all
create social reality together: with our without layers of dualising exclusion that protects
us from the way the world really is. Who would vote to legitimise the supporters of NATO and
the child-murderers of Syria? 31 million legitimising independent social actors just did. Do
you suppose they did so in full knowledge that it is child-murder they were supporting? Or
did they create universe maintaining accommodations to the truth? That is how powerful the
screening discourses and legitimising orthodoxic narrative mythology is. It is not that it
cannot be subverted: its just that calling out the true evil has to be heard in unison by
large or social small assemblages willing to totally change everything – including
themselves. In order to transition to a different social reality one that accommodates the
truth. One which will look nothing like the social reality we choose to maintain as is.
Francis Lee ,
My first attempt didn't get through. Herewith second.
It seems to me that the internal affairs of the Russian Federation, although they may have
some impact on external geopolitical issues, are a matter for them. At the present time the
relevant question regarding the RF is as follows: Question 1. Is Russia a revionist state
intent on an expansionist foreign policy? Answer NO. But it is not going to tolerate NATO
expansion into its own strategic zones, namely, Ukraine, Georgia and the North Caucusas.
Question 2. Is the Anglo-Zionist empire in open of pursuit of a world empire intent on
destroying any sovereign state – including first and foremost Russia – which
stands in its way? Answer YES. This really is so blatant that anyone who is ethnically
challenged should seek psychiatric help. In Polls conducted around the world the US is always
cited as the most dangerous enemy of world peace, including in the US itself. Thus a small
influential (unfortunately deranged) cabal based in the west has insinuated its way into the
institutions of power and poses a real and present danger to world peace.
This being the case it is imperative to push all and any 'normal' western governments and
shape public opinion and discourse (except the nut-jobs like Poland and the Baltics) into
diplomacy. Wind down NATO just as the Warsaw Pact was wound down. that will do for starters.
Of course the PTB in all the western institutions – the media (whores) the deep state,
the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House the Arms merchants, the
security services GCHQ, the CIA, Mossad and the rest will oppose this with all the power at
their command. This is the present primary site of struggle, mainly propagandistic, cultural
and economic, but with overtones of kinetic warfare.
Similar diplomatic initiatives must be directed at China. Yes, I know all about China's
social credit policy, I don't particularly like the idea of 24 hour system of surveillance,
and I wouldn't want to live there, but is already a virtual fait accompli in the west. Again
it bears repeating that sovereign states should be left to their own devices. After all
'States have neither permanent friends of allies, only permanent interests. (Lord Palmerston,
19 century British Statesman). No more 'humanitarian interventions' thank you very much. How
about Mind our own Business non-interventions.
I make no apologies for being a foreign policy realist – if that hasn't become
apparent by this stage!
BigB ,
Francis:
The Russian Federation is involved is strategic partnership with China in consolidating
the Eurasian 'supercontinent' into the world island. One which is slowly being drawn together
into a massive market covering 70% of the world's population, 75% of energy resources, and
70% of GDP. I'd call that expansionist, wouldn't you?
Market mechanisms and methodology are exponentially expansionist, extractivist, and
extrapolative. Market propaganda is free and equal exchange coupled with mutual development
through comparative advantage. Everyone benefits, right?
No: markets operate as vast surplus value extractors that only operate unequally to
deliver maximum competitive advantage to the suprasovereign core. Surplus value valorises
surplus capital which cannot be contained in a single domestic market: so it seeks to exploit
underdeveloped foreign markets setting up dependencies and peripheries in the satellite
states. Which keeps them maldeveloped. In short: Russia and China's wealth is not just their
own.
Russia and China are globalisation now. Globalist exponential expansionism, extractivism,
and extrapolation is the repression of humanism and destruction of the biosphere. It can't
stop growing in the cancer stage of hyper-capitalism. We are currently consuming every
resource at a material throughput increase of 3% per annum year on year. That's a 23 year
exponential doubling of material resources. And a 46 year doubling of the doubling. How long
before globalisation uses everything? How far into the race to the bottom will the market
collapse?
It would be really nice to return to a Westphalian System of non-expansionist,
non-extractivist sovereign nation states. It is just not even plausible under market
mechanisms of extraction. There can be no material decoupling and development remains
contingent on an impossible infinity: because development remains parallel and assymetrically
maintained. And all major resources are depleting exponentially too. Including the nominative
renewable and sustainable ones.
Degrowth; self-sufficiency; localised 'anti-fragility', steady-state; asymmetric
development of the marginalised and the peripheralised; regenerative agroecological
agriculture; human development not abstract market development; are just some of the
pre-requisites of a return to sovereign states. Russia 'sovereigntist' globalisation is the
expansionist opposite to that. The RF is part of the biggest market in the world that hoovers
up as much surplus value as it can before sending a large tranche of it to London. As much as
$25bn a year in capital flight into the offshore nexus of secrecy jurisdictions. It's a
globalist expansionist market mechanism that hoovers all vitality out of the life-ground.
That: I call expansionist and imperialist of which Russia and China are now the major
part.
Francis Lee ,
"The Russian Federation is involved is strategic partnership with China in consolidating the
Eurasian 'supercontinent' into the world island. One which is slowly being drawn together
into a massive market covering 70% of the world's population, 75% of energy resources, and
70% of GDP. I'd call that expansionist, wouldn't you?"
No, I wouldn't actually. Building roads, rail connections and other trade routes doesn't
strike me as imperial expansion. No-one is being forced to join the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO) or into reconfiguring their internal political and economic structures, as
the US does in Latin America or as the British did in India and Southern Africa. (East India
Company and the British British South Africa Chartered Company). The SCO is a voluntary
arrangement. Uzbekistan for example has decided not to join the central Asian Eurasian
Economic Union – well that's its prerogative. No-one is going to send any gun-boats to
force them. (I am aware that Uzbekistan is a landlocked country, but I was talking
figuratively.)
The EEU's genesis has along with the SCO and BRI has been forced upon the China/Russia
axis as part of an emerging counter-hegemonic alliance against the US's imperial
aggrandisement with its kowtowing vassals in tow. Russia has no claims on any of its
neighbours since it is already endowed with ample land and mineral deposits. China is a key
part of this essentially geopolitical bloc quite simply because the US imperial hegemon is
determined to stop China's development by all means necessary including the dragooning of
contiguous military bases in US proxy states around China's maritime borders.
A distinction should be made between rampant imperialism of the Anglo-zi0nist empire, and
the response of an increasingly bloc of states who find both their sovereignty and even their
existence threatened by the imperial juggernaut. What exactly did you expect them to do given
the hostility and destructive intent of the Empire? Defence against imperialism is not
imperialism. The defence of autonomy and sovereignty of international society and the
creation of an anti-hegemonic have the potential to finally create a transformative new world
order (and goodness knows we need one) announced at the end of the Cold War in 1991. This
ambition finds support not only in Russia and China but in other countries ready to align
with them, but also in many western countries. I obviously need to put the question again.
Who is and who is not the greatest threat to world peace? Surely to pose the question is to
answer it.
Dungroanin ,
Agree Francis.
There is a move to suggest that the Old Empire retains a 'maritime' world and the SCO
confines itself to the Eurasian land mass.
Dream on.
The Empire is DEAD. Long live the new Empire!
BigB ,
Who is the greatest threat to world peace and to the world itself? We are. The global carbon
consumption/pollution bourgeoisie. It is the global expansionist mindset that is increasing
its demands for growth – as the only solution to social problems, maldevelopment, and
maldistribution caused by excessive growth. Supply has to be met by exponentially expanding
markets. Whether this is voluntaristic or coerced makes very little difference to the market
cancer subsuming the globe. Benign or aggressive forms of cancer are still cancer. And the
net effect is the same.
Russia and China – the 'East' – uphold exactly the same corporate model of
global governance that the 'West' does. Which has been made clear in every joint communique
– especially BRICS communiques. I have made the case – following Professor
Patrick Bond – that BRICS in particular (a literal Goldman Sachs globalist marketing
ploy) – are sub-imperial, not anti-imperial. All their major institutions are dollar
denominated for loans; BRI finance is in dollars; BRICS re-capitalised the IMF; Contingency
Reserve Arrangements come with an IMF neoliberalising structural adjustment policy; etc. It
is the same model East and West. One is merely the pseudo-benign extension of the other. The
alternative to neoliberal globalisation is neoliberal globalisation. This became radiantly
clear at SPIEF 2019: TINA there is no alternative.
The perceived alternative is the reproduction of neoliberalism – which has long been
think-tanked and obvious – and its transformation from 'globalisation 3.0' to
'globalisation 4.0' trade in goods and services, with the emphasis on a transition to
high-speed interconnectivity and decoupled service economies. Something like the
Trans-Eurasian Information Super Highway (TASIM)? With a sovereigntist and social inclusivity
compact. So the neoliberal leopard can change its spots?
No. Whilst your argument is sound and well constructed: it is reliant on the early 20th
century Leninist definition of 'imperialism' as a purely militarist phenomena. Imperialism
mutated since then – from military to financial (which are not necessarily exclusive
sets) – and is set to metastasise again into 'green imperialism' of man over man (and
it is an andrarchic principle) and man (culture) over nature. Here your argument falls down
to an ecological and bio-materialist critique. Cancer is extractivist and expansionist
wherever it grows.
Russia is the fourth largest primary energy consumer on the planet. Disregarding hydro
– which is not truly ecological – it has a 1% renewable penetration. It is a
hydrocarbon behemoth set to grow the only way it knows how – consuming more
hydrocarbons. They cannot go 'green': no one can. And a with a global ecological footprint of
3.3 planets per capita, per annum, this is not sustainable. Now or ever.
So a distinction needs to be made between the old rampant neoliberal globalisation model
(3.0) – the Anglo-Zionist imperialist model – and the emergent neoliberal
globalisation model (4.0) of Russia/China's rampant ecological imperialism? And a further
distinction needs to be made about what humanity has to do to survive this distinction
between aggressive and quasi-benign cancer forms. Because we will be just as dead, just as
quick if we cannot even identify the underlying cancer we are all suffering from.
Koba ,
Big B sit down ultra! China and Russia rent empires and have no desire to be! If you're a
left winger you're another poor example of one and more than likely a Trotskyist
Richard Le Sarc ,
Love the nickname, Josef.
Louis Proyect ,
This is because if a chemical attack did not take place and Assad was not responsible it
seems highly likely that the civilians including children were murdered to facilitate a
fabrication.
And were our own intelligence agencies involved in a staged event, considering the refusal
to even establish the basic facts in the days following?
-- -
This is the sort of conclusion you must come to if you are into Islamophobic conspiracy
theories. The notion that this kind of slaughter took place to "facilitate" a false flag is
analogous to the 9/11 conspiracism that was on display here a while back and that manifested
itself through the inclusion of NYU 9/11 Truther Mark Crispin Miller on Tim Hayward's
Assadist propaganda team.
Sad, really.
Harry Stotle ,
Go on Louis, remind us about the 'terrorist passport' miraculously found at the foot of the
collapsed tower with a page coveniently left open displaying a 'Tora Bora' stamp – I
kove that bit.
I mean who, apart from half the worlds scientific community is not totally convinced by
such compelling evidence, especially when allied to the re-writing of the laws of physics in
order to rationlise the ludicrous 2 planes 3 towers conspiracy theory?
Next you'll be telling us it was necessary for the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for
reasons few American'srecall beyond the neocon fantasy contructed on 11th Septemember,
2001.
Dave Hansell ,
It's clear to a blind man on a galloping horse from this comment of yours Mr Proyect that
concepts such as objective evidence, logical and rational deduction, the scientific method
etc are beyond your ken.
Faced with the facts of a collapsing narrative of obvious bullshit and lies you have
bought into, which you are incapable of facing up to, it is unsurprising that you are reduced
to such puerile school playground level deflections.
So come on, try getting out of the gutter and upping your game. Because this fare is
nothing short of sad and pathetic.
We know from the evidence of those who actually know their arse from their elbow on these
matters that the claims of an attack using chemical weapons on this site are
unsustainable.
Which leaves the issue of the bodies at the site. Given they did not lose their lives as a
result of the unscientific bullshit explanation you desperately and clearly want to be the
case the question is how did those civilians lose their lives? How did their corpses find
their way to that location?
Did Assad and his "regime" murder them and move the bodies to that site (over which they
had no control) in order to create a false flag event to get themselves falsely accused of an
NBC attack Louis? Because that's the only reasonable and rational deduction one can imply
from your argument and approach.
It is certainly more reasoned, rational and in keeping with the scientific method (you
might want to try it sometime) to surmise that the bodies on site, having not been the result
of the claimed and unsustainable narrative you have naively committed to, either died on site
from some other cause or were brought to the site for the purpose of creating your fantasy
narrative.
In the latter case it is further a matter of rational and reasoned deduction that such an
occurrence could only be carried it in circumstances in which whoever carried it out had
actual, effective and physical control of a geographical location and area situated within a
wider conflict zone.
Again, it remains a piece of factual reality that this location was not under the control
of the Assad 'regime.' Not least because otherwise there would be no logical or rational
military reason for the de facto Syrian Government and it's armed forces to waste resources
attacking it.
Unless of course he buys I to the conspiracy theory and hat they somehow organised a false
flag implicating themselves?
I'm sure everyone else here in the reality based community is waiting with bated breath
for you to 'explain' how they did this Louis.
I know I am. I could do with a good laugh.
George Mc ,
This is the sort of conclusion you must come to if you are into Islamophobic conspiracy
theories.
Umm – the assumption that Muslims DIDN'T do it is "Islamophobic"? Even on your own
terms you're not making much sense these days, Louis.
Hi I'm Louis an unrepentant Marxist and I willfully refuse to use block-quotes.
Richard Le Sarc ,
More proyectile vomitus in defence of child-murdering salafist vermin. How low can this
creature descend?
Louis Proyect ,
Richard, such abusive language only indicates your inability to discuss the matter at hand.
In general, a detached sarcasm works much better in polemics. You need to read Lenin to see
how it is done. I should add that I am referring to V.I. Lenin, not John Lenin who wrote
"Crippled Inside".
Richard Le Sarc ,
You defended the salafist butchers with lies, proyectile-do you not even comprehend your own
sewage? Or did someone else write it and you just appended your paw-print?
Dave Hansell ,
Apologies here. There is an open goal and the ball needs to be put in the back of the net:
Seems that Louis here is well ahead of the curve in terms of Fukuyama's well known
observation about the end of history.
For Louise history, in terms of the progress and development of human knowledge, stopped
around a century ago with whatever Lenin wrote.
But that's what happens to those who only read one book.
Sad really.
Dungroanin ,
You come across more as Yaxley – Lenin mr Tommy Proyect – but he is a MI5 stooge
unlike you cough cough.
Koba ,
Lenin hates Trotsky! Trotsky was a power mad maniac who wanted a permanent war state to
somehow spread his specific brand of "ahem" socialism, which won't win you friends! "Hi yeah
sorry we killed your family in a war we started to save you but yippee Trotsky is now in
charge so stop complaining"! You're just a bunch of liars the trots
Maggie ,
learn to use the internet which has the information you need to learn the truth:
Maggie don't take jimmy bore as some truth teller he's a bland progressive with revolutionary
slogans like proyect! He also has a habit of equating Stalin with Hitler in that god awful
nasal accent of his
Richard Le Sarc ,
Thems White Helmets is always so neat and tidy. Their mammies must have insisted that they
always look their best.
paul ,
The British taxpayer funded head choppers and throat slitters in Syria routinely committed
massacres and filmed their victims. The resulting footage was passed off by tame media hacks
as "evidence" of regime atrocities.
Koba ,
Death to the Trotskyists
Fuck proyect your name calling says it all!
Islamophobes indeed?! What an idiot
Harry Stotle ,
The alternative media, and a smattering of truth tellers are locked in an asymmetrical
information-war with the establishment – with an all too obvious 'David & Goliath'
sort of dynamic underlying it.
The question asked at the heart of this article is how to break the vice like grip
information managers hold over various geopolitical narratives, referencing events in Douma
in particular.
Alnost reflexively 9/11 comes to mind – a fairly unambiguous example of mass murder
for which the official account does not withstand even the most cursory form of scrutiny.
Professionals even went so far as to purger themselves while the investigating committee
admitted they were 'set up to fail' (to quote its chairman).
Yet the public, instead of shredding Bush, limb from limb (for the lies that were told)
rolled onto their back while the neoncons tickled their collective belly as you might do with
a particulalrly adorable puppy,
So if we can't even get to the bottom of events in the middle of New York what realistic
chance of doing so in a hostile war zone like Douma?
On balance racism, together with other forms of collective loathing is the most likely
reason why this unsatisfactory state of affairs is unlikely to change.
A collective 'them and us' mindset makes it far easier for information managers to
manipulate a visceral hatred and fear of 'the other'.
Today it is Qasem Soleimani westerners are taugyt to despise, yesterday it was Bashar
al-Assad, before that Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Nicolás
Maduro . the list just goes on and on.
Information managers simply wind the public up so that collective anger can be directed
toward governments or individuals they are trying to bring down – recent history tells
us that the public are largely oblivious to this process, so thus never learn from their
mistakes.
Perhaps one thing western leaders, and the US in particular can always rely on, is the
ease with which the public can be persuaded to believe that certain bogeymen pose a grave
threat to 'our way of life' while failing to notice that it is in fact our own leaders who
are carrying out the worst atrocities.
harry law ,
Harry Stotle, .."Perhaps one thing western leaders, and the US in particular can always rely
on, is the ease with which the public can be persuaded to believe that certain bogeymen pose
a grave threat to 'our way of life'. That's true Hermann Goring had it about right with this
quote
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk
his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one
piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for
that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who
determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is
a democracy or fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no
voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you
have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
One of two things is wrong with America: Either the entire system is broken or is on the
verge of breaking, and we need someone to bring about radical, structural change, or -- we
don't need that at all! Which is it? Who can say? Certainly not me, and that is why I am
telling you now which candidate to vote for.
I hear tell that Emperor Trump is also grooming his potential successor/s
It's a neck and neck race between Kim Kardashian, who Trump is giving personal 'hands on'
assistance, and Montgomery Burns, who is one of Trump's role models.
'He might be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's OUR son-of-a-bitch'. Surely a 'Yeltsin' must replace
or join 'Quisling' in the popular lexicon as a title for a traitor, in future.
"... One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis Khan, but there isn't much that you can do about them.' ..."
"... 'If Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those who recognized that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country.' ..."
Wikipedia – the most popular source of information for most people – boldly
announces:
"Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy
that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without
directly refuting or disproving their argument. It is particularly associated with Soviet and
Russian propaganda Prominent usage: Soviet Union propaganda."
Perusal of recent mainstream articles adds one more dimension to the story. Not only
everything negative is habitually associated with Soviets and Russians, unless of course, it is
Iranians or North Koreans, when the equation has frequently been reversed.
If something negative occurs: Cherchez La Russie.
Mass media bias against President Trump has been observed on numerous occasions, but what is
particularly fascinating about this negativity is a persistent desire to paint Trump with the
Russian brush.
So it is hardly surprising that Trump has been turned into a practitioner of Russian
"Whataboutism," allowing Washington Post to
declare triumphantly: "Whataboutism: The Cold War tactic, thawed by Putin, is brandished by
Donald Trump."
The article elaborates:
What about the stock market? What about those 33,000 deleted emails? What about Benghazi?
.. What about what about what about. We've gotten very good at what-abouting. The president
has led the way. His campaign may or may not have conspired with Moscow, but President
Trump has routinely employed a durable old Soviet propaganda tactic."
The WaPo article by Dan Zak goes even further and explains the reasons behind Trump's
embrace of Russian Whataboutism. It is moral relativism, you see. It is a ploy of tyrannical
regimes, which intend to divert attention from their crimes:
That's exactly the kind of argument that Russian propagandists have used for years to
justify some of Putin's most brutal policies,"
wrote Michael McFaul , former ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration. ..
"Moral relativism -- 'whataboutism' -- has always been a favorite weapon of illiberal
regimes," Russian chessmaster and activist Garry Kasparov told the Columbia
Journalism Review in March."For a U.S. president to employ it against his own country
is tragic.
Viewed from the historical perspective, all this is blatantly false.
It is the democratic systems that need propaganda, spinning, and other soft-power weapons.
It is the democracies that rely on one party blaming another party for its own transgressions.
It is the liberal economic structures that need to promote one brand of toothpaste by
denigrating another brand.
"Whataboutism" is an integral fabric of Western society, as both its business and political
models depend on comparing, contrasting, diverting attention and so on.
Soviets, who had difficulty obtaining even one kind of toilet paper, did not need the
commercials that claim that the other brand leaks more. Soviet leadership that relied primarily
on the power of the gun didn't need to spend time and effort and hone its skills in the art of
maligning another party.
In other words, Soviets, and consequently Russians, are plain amateurs when it comes to
"whataboutism." When their government felt the need to resort to it, they would do it rather
sloppily and amateurishly, so that the people would just laugh it off, as the endless political
jokes testify.
Soviets were forced to resort to it during the time of Cold War, however, when there was a
real competition for the hearts and minds of several European countries such as France and
Italy, where post-war sympathies for Communists were running strong.
Needless to say, the Soviets were beaten soundly. The arguments that American freedoms were
worse than Soviets because of American racism did not really work for Europeans, who preferred
their Louis Armstrong to Leonid Utesov and their Jackson Pollock to Alexander Gerasimov. In the
battle between Georgy Alexandrov's Marion Dixon of Circus (1936) and Ernst Lubitsch's
Ninotchka (1939), Ninotchka won.
That's why I find it extremely ironic and peculiar that these methods of "whataboutism,"
these lines of reasoning that have pervaded the Western news coverage to the core, have been
magically turned into a signature method of Soviet Propaganda.
Equally ironic is the fact that any attempt to question Western hypocrisy, spinning, and
relentless brainwashing is deflected by a silly counter-attack: this criticism is nothing but
"whataboutism," the favorite activity of Russians and other moral relativists and denizens of
illiberal regimes.
Additional irony, of course, lies in the fact that Russians are the most self-critical
people that I know. That's the one thing they truly excel at – criticizing themselves,
their state, their people, their customs and their political system. It is another irony that
the information the West habitually exploits in its own shameless "whataboutism" was provided
to it free of charge by Russian dissidents from Herzen all the way to Solzhenitsyn and Masha
Gessen.
There is rarely an article in the mass media which, while addressing some ills of modern
society, doesn't refer to the evils of Gulag, Stalin, lack of democracy and other "ills" of
Soviet life. How many articles in the mass media do we read where references to the
extermination of the native population, of workers burning in their factories, of thugs
dispersing protests or demonstrations, of brutal exploitation, mass incarceration, deportation
of the Japanese, witch hunts, or cruel cynical wars – occur without simultaneous
references to Stalin's Russia?
You complain about the lack of political choices during elections? What, you want Commies to
run you life? You complain about economic inequality? What, you want drab socialism instead? In
other words, instead of a traditionally defined "whataboutism," Western propaganda utilizes a
slightly more subtle version revealing something bad about itself, but then rapidly switching
to demonizing and criticizing its rivals.
The classic example of this approach was described by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in
their 1988 study Manufacturing Consent .
In the chapter entitled "Worthy and Unworthy Victims," the authors draw the comparison
between the coverage of Polish priest, murdered by in Poland in 1984 and the media coverage of
Catholic Priests assassinated in Latin America. Jerzy Popieluszko had 78 articles devoted to
him, with ten articles on the front page. In the meantime, seventy-two religious victims in
Latin America during the period of 1964-78 were subject of only eight articles devoted to all
of them combined, with only one article making the front page (Chomsky & Herman,
Manufacturing Consent , Pantheon Books, 2002, p. 40).
Presumably, Soviets become a subject of jokes when, instead of addressing the question of
Stalin's victims, they embark on discussing the lynching of black Americans. What is worth
pondering is why the United States hasn't become the subject of similar jokes when they write
hundreds of articles on one death within the Soviet zone of influence while practically
ignoring persistent right-wing violence in their own sphere.
"Whataboutism" is not just a rhetorical device invented to deflect criticism; the accusation
in "whataboutism" leveled at anyone who defends himself from arbitrary or illogical charges is
the accusation that reveals a particular set of power relations.
These accusations of "whataboutism" imply a certain inequality, when the accuser bullies the
accused into admitting his guilt.
The accuser puts the accused on the defensive, clearly implying his moral superiority. This
moral superiority, of course, is rather fictional, especially if we keep in mind that the
Hebrew word "satan" means an accuser. Accusing and blaming others has a satanic ring to that,
something that anyone engaged in accusations should remember.
– You belched yesterday during dinner. You violated the laws of good table
manners.
– But everybody belches!
– It is irrelevant, please answer the charge and don't try to avoid it by resorting
to 'whataboutism." Did you belch or not?
"Putin's a killer," Bill O'Reilly said to Trump in a February interview. "There
are a lot of killers," Trump
whatabouted . "We've got a lot of killers. What do you think -- our country's so
innocent?"
Here, the media dismisses as "whataboutism" Trump's perfectly logical and correct answer
– the one that Trump highlighted himself last week when he ordered the killing of the
Iranian general Soleimaini.
Trump's answer, however, was interpreted as somehow outrageous. How dare he compare? As if
only a Russian stooge engaged in "whataboutism" can suggest that Western murders and violence
are not different from Russian ones.
Dan Zak, who invents a verb "to whatabout" in reference to Trump's exchange with O'Reilly,
reveals another highly significant dimension of the term. Due to the abuse of the concept
during the Cold War era, and due to the relentless propaganda of the likes of
Edward
Lucas or the former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, the charge of "whataboutism"
began to be leveled at anyone who says anything critical about the United States.
You talk about US racism – you are carrying water for Soviet "whataboutists;" you talk
about militarism, police brutality, wars and regime changes, or complain about the destruction
of nature – you are a Russian stooge.
And God forbid you criticize failed policies of the Democrats, the Clintons in particular.
You are worse than a stooge. You are a Soviet troll spitting "whataboutism," while interfering
in the US electoral process.
Trump might have more faults than any of the recent American political leader. Yet, it is
the charge of Russian connection and its merging with the charge of "Whataboutism" that began
to highlight some sort of sick synergy: if Trump uses this trope of Russian propaganda, he has
to be working with Putin. That's the tenor of all recent applications of the term in the mass
media.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the Trump administration's murky
ties to Vladimir Putin and his associates, whataboutism is viewed by many as a Russian
import,"
opines Claire Fallon in her essay on the subject, while the title says it all:
"Whataboutism, A Russian Propaganda Technique, Popular With Trump, His Supporters."
The list of publications with very similar titles can obviously go on and on.
And herein lies the most pernicious legacy of the term.
It subconsciously invokes the spirit of Joe McCarthy. And as such it is still very effective
in stifling discourse, in dismissing criticism, while character-assassinating dissenting
voices.
Never mind that the press, as in the good old days of Father Popieluszko, is still filled to
the brim with endless stories of Russian discrimination of the gay community, of Chinese abuse
of the Uighurs, or the absence of new and old freedoms in the countries that Pentagon
classifies as adversary.
To complain about the lack of balance and the biased focus would be engaging in "Soviet
Style of Whataboutism," wouldn't it be?
Vladimir Golstein, former associate professor at
Yale University, is currently Chair of the Department of Slavic Studies at Brown
University.
Charlotte Russe ,
US propaganda has been quite effective. After all, isn't it merely the merchandising and
selling of ideas. So why wouldn't a hyper-capitalist country be extremely effective at using
words and images to control behavior. That's how multibillion dollar corporations stimulate
consumerism. They convince the public to buy goods and services they don't really need. So
why not use those same marketing skills to impart ideological beliefs.
Essentially, isn't that how the notion of "exceptionalism" became rooted in the American
psyche, establishing a rationale to pursue a slew of military misadventures. And think of the
ingenious propagandist who invented the idea of "spreading democracy" via bombs, drones, and
bullets. For decades this secured public consent for innumerable military escapades.
However, the arrival of Trump changed everything. He unwittingly forced the US propaganda
machine to stumble and fumble with contradictory messages disassembling the control
mainstream media news once happily secured over the entire population.
In desperation to avoid building political consciousness the US state-run media neglected
to attack Trump exclusively over reactionary policies, but misguidedly warmongered against
Russia for more than three years. Liberal media accused right-wing Trump of being a Russian
asset a tactic used more than half a century ago by McCarthyite Russophobes to discredit the
Left. Perhaps, the silliness of this propaganda could only produce "lackluster" results
consequently never gaining substantial traction among the working-class.
The security state ultimately loses its ability to control the population with sloppy
propaganda–they just tune it out. Americans are becoming similar to their Russian
counterparts who just assume that all mainstream media news is contrived and not to be
believed.
George Mc ,
I thought the reference to the Wiki article was a piss take until I went direct to the
source. I see no logical connection between Russia or indeed any country and the rhetorical
device of "whataboutism". But it seems the mighty omniscient Wiki says otherwise. Yes –
and there's Trump getting a prominent place in the Wiki entry. Is every entry in Wiki geared
to the current demands of propaganda? What next I wonder? How about:
"Anti-Semitism": an ideology of hate originating with Corbyn's Labour party.
"Socialists": Misogynists who hate Laura Kuenssberg.
"US/Iran conflict": A distraction to divert everyone's attention away from Harry and
Meghan.
Willem ,
I first read about whataboutism at Chomsky's website. I thought Chomsky made a very good
definition at the time, so I looked up what he actually said and thought of quoting him here.
Well his definition is typical for Chomsky where he says some truthful things, which he
immediately buries under a pack of lies
Chomsky on whataboutism:
'CHOMSKY: One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the
anticipated consequences of your own actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis
Khan, but there isn't much that you can do about them.'
That is correct. But unfortunately for the professor, he is not devoid of a little
whataboutism himself, where he continues to say that
'If Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they
could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those who recognized that the first
duty is to concentrate on your own country.'
Then Chomsky buries this whataboutism with another lie saying that:
'And it is interesting that no one ever asks for an explanation, because in the case of
official enemies, truisms are indeed truisms.'
Which isn't a truism at all, but apparantly all official enemies of the US are, by
definition enemies of Chomsky.Then Chomsky continues by saying that
'It is when truisms are applied to ourselves that they become contentious, or even
outrageous. But they remain truisms.'
Not necessarily so, but it's close enough to pass for truth when discussing whataboutism.
After which Chomsky adds another lie, i.e., that
'In fact, the truisms hold far more for us than they did for Soviet dissidents, for the
simple reason that we are in free societies, do not face repression, and can have a
substantial influence on government policy.'
I mean, that is just so much bullshit that I do not even know where to start. For instance
Solzjenitsyn, SU greatest dissident, wrote his books in the SU, the Russians didn't like it,
and they let Solzjenitsyn go to Switzerland where he become famous and a millionaire, a Nobel
price winner, everything that money could buy. He returned to Russia in 1990 and was lauded
by amongst others Putin himself and died peacefully in 2008.
'Free society', bollocks: most of us have the freedom to watch the show that others play
on their behalf and toil, 'no repression': tell that to Assange, 'substantial influence on
government policy': quite difficult when most of the government's decisions are faceless.
This type of lying by Chomsky just goes on and on and I am amazed that I hadn't seen
through it the first time I read Chomsky.
Worst is his hypocrisy where professor Chomsky, the worlds best known 'dissident', whose
books are sold at airports, who received grants from the MIC to work on linguistics, and who
became a millionaire by airing his convoluted views that are not what they are supposed to be
(ie dissident), dares to write in the same interview that
'Elementary honesty is often uncomfortable, in personal life as well, and there are people
who make great efforts to evade it. For intellectuals, throughout history, it has often come
close to being their vocation. Intellectuals are commonly integrated into dominant
institutions. Their privilege and prestige derives from adapting to the interests of power
concentrations, often taking a critical look but in very limited ways.'
I mean that is just Chomsky writing about himself, but pretending a whataboutism about all
those other bad intellectuals.
Chomsky's an example of the establishment "pet intellectual" who quietly rages against his
master. Youthful dissidence, he found after a few police beatings, is a fool's game, noisy,
bloody and futile. Better to growl from a safe distance, repeat the obvious with clear logic
and wallow in unearned respect.
lundiel ,
According to a 2019 Gallop poll 40% of American women under 30 would like to leave the
US.
When you move to a racist, nationalist country, you have to spend every opportunity thanking
them for taking you and congratulating them for allowing you to work yourself to death so you
can pay the mortgage on your shed home.
Many of them are economic refugees who come here after B-52s have turned their country into a
parking lot or the elite of other countries who were caught selling out their nations and
enriching themselves or those that actually believed the PR that the USG actually gives a
flying phuk about "freedom and democracy" propagated by the child molesting perverts in Pedo
Wood.
There are also a number who have specifically come here to get even and who can blame
them?
Dungroanin ,
What about the 'Russian influence' report not published by Bozo The PM?
& while I'm here
What about the Durham investigation into Russiagate which also seems to have disappeared
from imminent publication over a month ago?
Hmm – wasn't it Kruschevs staffers who admired the US propaganda / Perception
Management advertising/PR industry by saying in Russia nobody believed the Russian propaganda
because Russians knew that's what it was; but all westerners swallowed it and rushed out to
buy ever 'better' washing powders, poisonous foods and products without realising they were
being lied to.
What about US violations of international law?
What about US wars of aggression?
What about US regime change operations?
What about US lying propaganda?
What about US murderous sanctions?
What about US funding, arming and training of jihadist terrorists?
What about US funding, arming and training of fascist terrorists?
What about US threats and intimidation of the International Criminal Court?
What about US exceptionalism, which mirrors nothing so much as the Nazi ideas of ubermensch
and untermensch?
richard le sarc ,
In Trump and Pompeo you see the evolution of a new type-the Ubumensch.
"... The Las Vegas billionaire gave Republicans $82m for the 2016 elections and his views, notably staunch support for Netanyahu's Israel, are now the official US line ..."
"... Adelson's considerable support for Republicans is in no small part motivated by what he regards as their more reliable support for the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu , which appear intent on preventing the creation of an independent Palestinian state. ..."
"... Adelson gave $82m toward Trump's and other Republican campaigns during the 2016 election cycle – more than three times the next largest individual donor, according to Open Secrets . ..."
"... That commitment bought him an attentive hearing from the new administration as he pushed for the appointment of Bolton as national security adviser knowing that he would be an important ally in getting the White House to kill the Iran nuclear deal. The New York Times reported that Adelson is a member of a " shadow National Security Council " advising Bolton. ..."
"... The day after Trump announced that the US was pulling out of the Iran agreement, Adelson was reported to have held a private meeting at the White House with the president, Bolton and Vice-President Mike Pence. ..."
"... Adelson was so enthusiastic about the move that he offered to pay for some of the costs and provided a jet to fly Guatemala's official delegation to Israel for the ceremony. (The Central American country has also announced plans to follow Trump and move its own embassy .) ..."
"... "Adelson is a linchpin in bringing together the radical extremists on the Israeli right and this group of hardliners on Israel and neoconservatives," said Levy, who is now president of the US-based Middle East Project. ..."
"... He paid for a new headquarters for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in Washington (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), spent $100m to fund "birthright" trips for young Jewish Americans to Israel, and funds a group opposing criticism of the Jewish state at US universities. ..."
"... In 2015 he secretly bought the Las Vegas newspaper, the Review-Journal , which had led the way in critical coverage of the billionaire's business dealings. Several reporters subsequently left the paper complaining of editorial interference and curbs on reporting of the gambling industry. ..."
"... Right now, Adelson is concentrated on ensuring the Republicans remain in control of Congress, and is pouring $30m into funding the GOP's midterm elections campaign. ..."
"... Adelson is no less active in Israel where he owns the country's largest newspaper, a publication so closely linked with Netanyahu's administration it has been dubbed the "Bibipaper" after the prime minister's nickname. ..."
"... In 2014, he told a conference during a discussion about the implications for democracy of perpetual occupation or annexation of parts of the West Bank without giving Palestinians the right to vote in Israeli elections: "Israel isn't going to be a democratic state. So what?" ..."
The Las Vegas
billionaire gave Republicans $82m for the 2016 elections and his views, notably staunch support
for Netanyahu's Israel, are now the official US line
Sheldon Adelson
has spent millions on backing Israel and attacking supporters of Palestinian rights in the US.
Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP In 2015, the billionaire casino owner and Republican party funder
Sheldon
Adelson spent days in a Las Vegas courtroom watching his reputation torn apart and
wondering if his gambling empire was facing ruin.
An official from Nevada's gaming control board sat at the back of the court listening to
mounting evidence that
Adelson bribed Chinese officials and worked with organised crime at his casinos in Macau
– allegations that could have seen the magnate's Las Vegas casinos stripped of their
licenses.
The case, a civil suit by a former manager of the Macau gaming operations who said he was
fired for curbing corrupt practices, was another blow in a bad run for Adelson.
He had thrown $150m into a futile effort to unseat the "socialist" and "anti-Israel" Barack
Obama in the 2012 election. His credibility as a political player was not enhanced by his
backing of Newt Gingrich for president.
But three years on from the court case, Adelson's influence has never been greater.
"Adelson's established himself as an influential figure in American politics with the amount
of money that he has contributed," said Logan Bayroff of the liberal pro-Israel group, J
Street. "There's no doubt that he has very strong, very far-right dangerous positions and that
– at very least – those positions are really being heard and thought about at the
highest levels of government."
As the 2015 court hearing unfolded, the billionaire swallowed his considerable pride and
paid millions of dollars to settle the lawsuit, heading off the danger of the graft allegations
being tested at a full trial.
The casinos stayed in business and continued to contribute to a vast wealth that made
Adelson the 14th
richest person in America last year with a net worth of $35bn, according to Forbes.
Adelson has put some of that money toward pushing an array of political interests ranging
from protecting his business from online gambling to opposition to marijuana legalisation.
But nothing aligns more closely with his world view than the intertwining of the Republican
party and Israel .
Adelson's considerable support for Republicans is in no small part motivated by what he
regards as their more reliable support for the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu , which appear
intent on preventing the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Adelson gave $82m toward Trump's and other Republican campaigns during the 2016 election
cycle – more than three times the next largest individual donor, according
to Open Secrets .
That commitment bought him an attentive hearing from the new administration as he pushed for
the appointment of Bolton as national security adviser knowing that he would be an important
ally in getting the White House to kill the Iran nuclear deal. The New York Times reported that
Adelson is a member of a " shadow
National Security Council " advising Bolton.
The day after Trump announced that the US was pulling out of the Iran agreement, Adelson was
reported to have held a
private meeting at the White House with the president, Bolton and Vice-President Mike
Pence.
Facebook
Twitter Pinterest Sheldon Adelson attends the opening ceremony of the new US embassy in
Jerusalem in May. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP
The casino magnate also pushed hard to see the US embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem
– an action previous presidents had shied away from because of the diplomatic
ramifications.
Adelson was so enthusiastic about the move that he offered to pay for some of the costs and
provided a jet to fly Guatemala's official delegation to Israel for the ceremony. (The Central
American country has also announced plans to
follow Trump and move its own embassy .)
Daniel Levy, a former member of Israeli negotiating teams with the Palestinians and policy
adviser to the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, said that Adelson's money had helped
resurface neoconservative policies which had been discredited after the US invasion of
Iraq.
"Adelson is a linchpin in bringing together the radical extremists on the Israeli right and
this group of hardliners on Israel and neoconservatives," said Levy, who is now president of
the US-based Middle East Project.
The billionaire is also deeply committed to protecting Israel within the US.
An example
of an anti-BDS poster funded by Sheldon Adelson. Photograph: Courtesy of Robert Gardner
He paid for a new headquarters for the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in Washington
(the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), spent $100m to fund "birthright" trips for
young Jewish Americans to Israel, and funds a group opposing criticism of the Jewish state at
US universities.
The Israeli newspaper
Haaretz recently revealed that Adelson funded an investigation by an Israeli firm with ties
to the country's police and military into the American activist Linda Sarsour, a co-chair of
the Women's March movement who campaigns for Palestinian rights and supports a boycott of the
Jewish state.
Adelson also funds Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and his World Values Network which published a
full-page personal attack in the New York Times on the actor Natalie Portman for refusing an
award from Israel because of its government's policies.
For his part, the casino magnate does not take criticism well.
In 2015
he secretly bought the Las Vegas newspaper, the Review-Journal , which had led the way in
critical coverage of the billionaire's business dealings. Several reporters subsequently left
the paper complaining of editorial interference and curbs on reporting of the gambling
industry.
Right now, Adelson is concentrated on ensuring the Republicans remain in control of
Congress, and is pouring $30m into funding the GOP's midterm elections campaign.
Adelson is no less active in Israel where he owns the country's largest newspaper, a
publication so closely linked with Netanyahu's administration it has been dubbed the
"Bibipaper" after the prime minister's nickname.
Personal relations with Netanyahu have soured but Adelson remains committed to the prime
minister's broader "Greater Israel" political agenda and to strengthening ties between the
Republicans' evangelical base and Israel.
It's not always a welcome involvement by a man who is not an Israeli citizen – not
least because Adelson's vision for the Jewish state does not represent how many of its people
see their country.
In 2014, he told a conference during a discussion about the implications for democracy of
perpetual occupation or annexation of parts of the West Bank without giving Palestinians the
right to vote in Israeli elections: "Israel isn't going to be a democratic state. So what?"
"... "There ain't room in this internet for the both of us," growled one CNN anchor on the air Monday evening. "There simply aren't enough people out there for us to fool with our fake news stories and The Babylon Bee to fool with their satire. There isn't enough clickbait and outrage traffic to go around. " ..."
CNN has slammed the world's best satire site, The Babylon Bee, after CNN executives
realized that "fake news" articles on the website were getting at least as much social media
traction as their own.
"There ain't room in this internet for the both of us," growled one CNN anchor on the air
Monday evening. "There simply aren't enough people out there for us to fool with our fake
news stories and The Babylon Bee to fool with their satire. There isn't enough clickbait and
outrage traffic to go around. "
"They're obviously amateurs over there at The Bee," said Brian Stelter.
"A lot of times, their reporting comes true. If you're gonna do fake news, do it right --
100% fake, guaranteed, 24/7. They really should learn from the pros over here at CNN."
Is there a chorus of politicians singing in there about how lazy they are, and how they
never bothered to verify Browder' story? The story is indeed remarkable, but not in the way
that first appears.
Stephen Fry / @stephenfry
You may or may not know the remarkable story of @Billbrowder and the #MagnitskyAct - find
out the startling truth by listening to
#MagnitskytheMusical by the wondrous @JohnnyFlynnHQ & @roberthudson - @BBCRadio3 7.30 Sun
12th Jan
Book and lyrics by Robert Hudson
Music and lyrics by Johnny Flynn
12 January 2020
О 1 hour, 34 minutes
Johnny Flynn and Robert Hudson bring us a musical based on the
incredible story of an American venture capitalist, a Russian tax
advisor, a crazy heist, the Trump Tower meeting and the very rule of
law.
Blending music and satire, the story explores the truths and fictions
surrounding the origins and aftershocks of the Magnitsky Act; global
legislation which allows governments to sanction those who they see
as offenders of human rights.
It tells the story of a tax adviser's struggle to uncover a huge tax
fraud, his imprisonment by the very authorities he is investigating,
and the American financier's crusade for justice.
Johnny Flynn, Paul Chahidi and members of the cast perform songs in
a epic story that explores democracy, corruption, and how we
undervalue the law at our peril.
Bill Paul Chahidi Sergei Johnny Flynn Jamie Fenella
Woolgar Natalia Ellie Kendrick Kuznetsov Gus Brown Guard Clive Hayward Silchenko Ian
Conningham Jared Will Kirk Fisherman Neil McCaul Judge Jessica Turner
Additional singing by Sinead Maclnnes, Laura Christy, Scarlett
Courtney and Lucy Reynolds.
The cellist is Joe Zeitlin. Sound is by Peter Ringrose.
Directed by Sasha Yevtushenko.
Manipulation of the language is one of the most powerful Propaganda tool. See the original Orwell essay at George Orwell Politics
and the English Language. among other things he stated "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
Notable quotes:
"... we were set a writing task as a follow-up, reporting on the same story using the same facts, from completely opposing points of view, using euphemism and mind-numbing cliches. Teach children to do this themselves and they can see how language can be skewed and facts distorted and misrepresented without technically lying. ..."
"... It might be taught in Media Studies, I suppose - but gosh, don't the right really hate that particular subject! Critical thinking is anathema to them. ..."
I remember at school we read Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language in an English class and then we were set
a writing task as a follow-up, reporting on the same story using the same facts, from completely opposing points of view, using
euphemism and mind-numbing cliches. Teach children to do this themselves and they can see how language can be skewed and facts
distorted and misrepresented without technically lying.
How many children in schools are taught such critical thinking these days, I wonder? It might be taught in Media Studies,
I suppose - but gosh, don't the right really hate that particular subject! Critical thinking is anathema to them.
Look at this way, the Democratic Party had two terms in office, under Obama,in order to deliver
a 'New Deal'.
It turned out,they were selling Snake Oil, life got no easier for ordinary Americans,
particularly those of colour.
So, the poor decided to give the Republicans a try, cutting out the middle men of the
democratic party.
Now,in order to get back into power, the neoliberal Left are breaking Trump's legs and the cycle
will start all over again, with so much time and money that could have been used to help those
who need it, going to the politicians and lawyers who run the charade.
The rich will get richer and the ears of the suckers who vote will bleed from listening to
all the bullshit.
Well, calling out the democrats for these. Things is not really a problem rather the
depressing truth. With clown shows like Nader and Schiff on display its not hard for voters
to conclude that the Democratic Party has become haters, undemocratic, not believers in rules
of evidence or due process, all foundations of American justice.
In other words
anti-American. Turning their so called investigation into the Schiff show has confirmed what
most Americans have come to understand, democrats are not fit to lead the country, and will
not after this next November.
When justice is muddied by the vengeance of politics there is little surety of integrity for
the common citizen believe in. When fighting each other in the name of the people becomes an
obsessive intent to hurt but not to serve, there is little foundation left for the common man
to be believe in.
Whilst perfection was never sought nor expected of those who were chosen by
the people to represent their hopes and wishes, the boundaries of common sense and
commonwealth must never be breached. The war which rages on in Washington is one which
represents little, if anything, of or for the people. In truth, regardless of Trump's fate,
the theatre of narrow political dreams go on, in the name of the people.
Since Trump stepped into office the Democrats were looking for something that would make him
impeachable. The deep state delivered them Russiagate, the claim that Trump 'colluded' with
the Russian government, by taking seriously an obvious fake dossier the Clinton campaign had
ordered and paid for. FBI agents who hated Trump even faked FISA court certification
submissions to be able to spy on the Trump campaign. They found nothing that supported the
'collusion' claims.
The FISA court is not amused about that:
"The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be
unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld
information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in
other FBI applications is reliable," Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in an order published
Tuesday.
The Dems would have been.better off just coming up with some better more appealing
policies but here's the rub, they haven't and that's because they can't, their agenda is one
of stay tje same, no change, keep the status quo, forever wars and printing money and just
hope it all gos away. Instead of hope we've got horseshit.
This article is spot on.
Impeachment probably persuaded only a tiny number of vacillating voters, sidelined Trump's
worst crimes, and rallied his base. Meanwhile, as the author states, the public is no closer to knowing what the Dems stand
for -- another downside in their election chances.
There has never been a president in my lifetime at least that has been so put under the
spotlight as Trump. Literally under investigation since the day he took office and yet the
best they have is a highly disputed telephone conversation. Meanwhile Biden is there on video
in all his glory boasting about using US aid to force behaviour that suited him.
Trump will be aquitted and the Democrats will suffer for their desperation.
you seem to be suffering from the delusion that actual policies and beliefs are being fought
over by two opposing sides,its a pathetic sideshow between two almost identical parties with
identical policies and the same paymasters,the outcome of this farce is utterly meaningless
to the ordinary citizen.
"... Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal' mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore. ..."
"... Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning, the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a series of impossible demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with Qatar not long ago ..."
"... Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. ..."
"... Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia. ..."
"... Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way. ..."
"... False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army. On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media ..."
As a history student years ago I remember our teacher explaining how past events are linked to what happens in the future. He
told us human behaviour always dictates that events will repeat in a similar way as before. I remember we studied 20th century history
and discussed World War I and the links to World War II. At this time, we were in the middle of the Cold War and in unchartered waters
and I couldn't really link past events to what was likely to happen next. Back then I guess like many I considered US presidents
more as statesman. They talked tough on the Soviet Union but they talked peace too. So, the threat to humanity was very different
then to now. Dangerous but perhaps a stable kind of dangerous. After the break up of the Soviet Union we then went through a phase
of disorderly change in the world. In the early 1990s the war in the Former Yugoslavia erupted and spread from republic to republic.
Up until the mid-to-late nineties I didn't necessarily sense that NATO and the West were the new threat to humanity. While there
was a clear bias to events in Yugoslavia there was still some even-handedness or fairness. Or so I thought. This all changed in 1999
with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges
and so on. But my wake-up call was the daily NATO briefings on the war. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being
destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage
of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative.
When the peace agreement was reached, out of 300 Serbian tanks which had entered Kosovo at the start of the conflict, over 285
were counted going back into Serbia proper which was
confirmation he had been
lying .
From this conflict onwards I started to see clear parallels with events of the past and some striking similarities with the lead
up to previous world wars. This all hit home when observing events in Syria and more recently Venezuala. But looking around seeing
people absorbed in their phones you wouldn't think the world is on the brink of war. For most of us with little time to watch world
events there are distractions which have obscured the picture historians and geopolitical experts see more clearly.
Recent and current
western leaders haven't been short people in military uniform shouting. That would be far too obvious. It's still military conflict
and mass murder but in smart suits with liberal sound-bites and high-fives. Then the uncool, uncouth conservative Trump came along
and muddied the waters.
Briefly it seemed there might be hope that these wars would stop. But there can be little doubt he's been
put under pressure to comply with the regime change culture embedded in the Deep State. Today, through their incendiary language
we see US leaders morphing into the open style dictators of the past. The only thing missing are the military uniforms and hats.
Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal'
mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up
to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore.
Let's look at some of these:
1) Military build up, alliances and proxy wars – for all the chaos and mass murder pursued by the Obama Administration he did
achieve limited successes in signing agreements with Iran and Cuba. But rather than reverse the endless wars as promised Trump cancels
the agreements leaving the grand sum of zilch foreign policy achievements. NATO has been around for 70 years, but in the last 20
or so has become obsessed with military build up. Nowadays it has hundreds of bases around the world but keeps destablising non-aligned
states, partly to isolate Russia and China. And Syria sums up the dangers of the regime change model used today. With over a dozen
states involved in the proxy war there is a still high risk of conflict breaking out between US and Russia. The motives for military
build up are many. First there are powerful people in the arms industry and media who benefit financially from perpetual war. The
US while powerful in military terms are a declining power which will continue, new powers emerging. The only return on their money
they can see is through military build up. Also there are many in government, intelligence services and media who can see that if
the current order continues to crumble they are likely to be prosecuted for various crimes. All this explains the threatening language
and the doubling-down on those who challenge them. In 1914, Europe had two backward thinking military alliance blocks and Sarajevo
showed how one event could trigger an unstoppable escalation dragging in many states. And empires such as Austro-Hungary were crumbling
from within as they are now. So a similar mentality prevails today where the powerful in these empires under threat favour conflict
to peace. For these individuals it's a last throw of the dice and a gamble with all our lives.
2) Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning,
the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and
unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US
has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a
series of impossible
demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic
as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day
US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with
Qatar not long ago.
3) Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is
in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. In addition we face a situation
of highly unpredictable, ideological regional leaders in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Most worrying of all, the language, threats
and actions of Trump, Pompeo and Bolton suggests there are psychopathic tendencies in play. Behind this is a Deep State and Democrat
Party pushing even harder for conflict. The level of paranoia is discouraging any notion of peace. 30 years ago Russia and US would
sit down at a summit and reach a consensus. Today a US leader or diplomat seen talking to a Russian official is accused of collusion.
When there are limited channels to talk in a crisis, you know we are in trouble. In Germany in the 1930s, ideology, propaganda and
creating enemies were key in getting the population on side for war. The leaders within the Nazi clique, Hitler, Goring and Himmler
look disturbingly similar to the Trump, Pompeo, Bolton line up.
4) Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public
would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been
a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia.
The terms and words; regime change, mass murder and terrorist have all been substituted by the media with 'humanitarian intervention',
'limited airstrikes' and 'moderate rebels' to fool a distracted public that the victims of the aggression are the bad guys. Western
funded 'fact checking' sites such as Bellingcat have appeared pushing the misdirections to a surreal new level. Obama was portayed
in the media as a cool guy and a little 'soft' on foreign policy. This despite the carnage in Libya, Syria and his drones. Sentiments
of equal rights and diversity fill the home affairs sections in the liberal press, while callous indifference and ethno-centrism
towards the Middle East and Russia dominate foreign affairs pages. In the press generally, BREXIT, non-existent anti-Semitism and
nonsense about the 'ISIS bride' continues unabated. This media circus seeks to distract from important matters, using these topics
to create pointless divisions, causing hostility towards Muslims and Jews in the process. The majority of a distracted public have
still not twigged largely because the propaganda is more subtle nowadays and presented under a false humanitarian cloak. A small
but vocal group of experts and journalists challenging these narratives are regularly smeared as
Putin
or Assad "apologists" . UK journalists are regularly caught out lying and some long standing hoaxes such as Russiagate exposed.
Following this and Iraq WMDs more people are starting to see a pattern here. Yet each time the media in the belief they've bamboozled
enough move on to the next big lie. This a sign of a controlled media which has reached the point of being unaccountable and untouchable,
deeply embedded within the establishment apparatus. In the lead up to World War II the Nazis ran an effective media propaganda campaign
which indoctrinated the population. The media in Germany also reached the point their blindingly obvious lies were rarely questioned.
The classic tactic was to blame others for the problems in Germany and the world and project their crimes on to their victims. There
are some differences as things have evolved. The Nazis created the media and state apparatus to pursue war. Nowadays this is the
opposite way around. Instead the state apparatus is already in place so whoever is leader whether they describe themself as liberal
or conservative, is merely a figurehead required to continue the same pro-war policies. Put a fresh-looking president in a shiny
suit and intoduce him to the Queen and you wouldn't think he's the biggest mass murderer since Hitler. Although there are some differences
in the propaganda techniques, all the signs are that today's media are on a similar war-footing as Germany's was just prior to the
outbreak of World War II.
5) Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli
aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for
time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily
unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way.
6) False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by
Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of
the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army.
On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being
played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media. The next flashpoint in Syria is Idlib, where it's highly
likely a new chemical fabrication will be attempted this Spring. In the 1930s the Nazis were believed to use false flags with increasing
frequency to discredit and close down internal opposition. Summary – We now live in a society where exposing warmongering is a more
serious crime than committing it. Prisons hold many people who have bravely exposed war crimes – yet most criminals continue to walk
free and hold positions of power. And when the media is pushing for Julian Assange to be extradicted you know this is beyond simple
envy of a man who has almost single-handedly done the job they've collectively failed to do. They are equally complicit in warmongering
hence why they see Assange and others as a threat. For those not fooled by the smart suits, liberal platitudes and media distraction
techniques, the parallels with Germany in the 1930s in particular are now fairly obvious. The blundering military alliances of 1914
and the pure evil of 1939 – with the ignorance, indifference and narcissism described above make for a destructive mix. Unless something
changes soon our days on this planet are likely be numbered. Depressing but one encouraging thing is that the indisputable truth
is now in plain sight for anyone with internet access to see and false narratives have collapsed before. It's still conceivable that
something may create a whole chain of events which sweep these dangerous parasites from power. So anything can happen. In the meantime
we should keep positive and continue to spread the message.
Kevin Smith is a British citizen living and working in London. He researches and writes down his thoughts on the foreign wars
promoted by Western governments and media. In the highly controlled and dumbed down UK media environment, he's keen on exploring
ways of discouraging ideology and tribalism in favour of free thinking.
2- 'Israel and its US relationship'. The 'hands off' policy of the Western powers, guarantees that Syria cannot even be a trigger
to any 'global conflict', supposing that a 'global conflict' was on the cards, especially when Russia is just a crumbling shadow
of the USSR and China a giant with feet of clay, heavily dependent on Western oligarchic goodwill, to maintain its economy and
its technological progress.
In 1914, the Serbian crisis was just trigger of WWI and not a true cause. It is not even clear if it was Germany that dragged
Austria-Hungary into the war or Russia. Although there was a possibility (only a possibility), that a swift and 'illegal' attack
by Austria-Hungary (without an ultimatum), would have localised and contained the conflict.
There is no similarity whatsoever between the 1914 'diktats' and modern US policy, as the US is the sole Superpower and its
acts are not opposed by a balancing and corresponding alliance. Save in the Chinese colony of North Korea, where the US is restrained
by a tacit alliance of the North Eastern Asiatic powers: China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, that oppose any military action
and so promote and protect North Korean bullying. Qatar, on the other hand, is one of the most radical supporters of the Syrian
opposition and terrorist groups around the muslim world, even more than Saudi Arabia and there are powerful reasons for the confrontation
of the Gulf rivals.
You should go back in Time and STUDY what really happened .. that means going back to the Creation of the socalled British Empire
..the Bank of England , the British East Indian Company , the Opium Wars and the Opium Trafficing , the Boer Wars for Gold and
Diamonds , the US Civil War and its aftermath , the manipulations of Gold and Silver by socalled british Financial Interests ,
The US Spanish Wars , the Japanese Russian War , the failed Coup against Czar Russia 1905 , the Young Turk Coup against the Ottoman
Empire 1908, the Armenian Genocide , the Creation of the Federal Reserve 1913 , the Multitude of Assinations and other Terror
Attacks in the period from 1900 and upwards , WHO were the perpetraders ? , , WW 1 and its originators , the Bolshevik Coup 1917
, the Treaty of Versailles and the Actors in that Treaty ,the Plunder of Germany , the dissolution of Austria Hungary , the Bolshevik
Coup attempts all over Europe , and then the run up to WW 2 , the Actions of Poland agianst Germans and Czechs .. Hitler , Musolini
and finally WW 2 .the post war period , the Nuernberg Trials , the Holocaust Mythology , the Creation of Israel , Gladio , the
Fall of the Sovjet Empire and the Warshav Pact , the Wars in the Middle East , the endless Terror Actions , the murder of Kennedy
and a mass of False Flag Terrorist Attacks since then , the destruction of the Balkans and the Middle east THERE IS PLENTY of
EXCELLENT LITERATURE and ANALYSIS on all subjects .
It was your Obama that 'persecuted' Mr Assange !!!
Syria demonstrates that there has NOT been a Western strategy for regime change (specially after the 'defeats' in Iraq and
Afghanistan), let alone a proxy war, but, on the contrary, an effort to keep the tyranny of Assad in power, in a weaker state,
to avoid any strong, 'revolutionary' rival near Israel. Russia has been given a free hand in Syria, otherwise, if the West had
properly armed the resistance groups, it would have been a catastrophe for the Russian forces, like it was in Afghanistan during
the Soviet intervention.
Trump's policy of 'equal' (proportional) contributions for all members of NATO and other allies, gives the lie to the US military
return 'argument' and should be understood as part of his war on unfair competition by other powers.
The 'military' and diplomatic alliances of 1914 were FORWARD thinking, so much so that they 'repeated' themselves during WWII,
with slight changes. But it is very doubtful that the Empires, like the Austro-Hungarian o the Russian ones, would have 'crumbled'
without the outbreak of WWI. They were never under threat, as their military power during the war showed. Only a World War of
cataclysmic character could destroy them. A war, triggered, but not created, by the 'conflict seeking mentality' of the powerful
in the small countries of the Balkans.
Generally attributed to Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1918 that 'when war comes the first casualty is truth' is as much a truism
now as it was then.
I'm more inclined to support hauptmanngurski's proposition that the members of the armed forces, from both sides, who return
from conflicts with life-changing injuries or even in flag-draped caskets defended only the freedom of multinational enterprises
and conglomerates to make and continue to make vast profits for the privileged few at the population's expense.
As Kevin Smith makes abundantly clear we are all subject to the downright lies and truth-stretching from our government aided
and abetted by a compliant main stream media as exemplified in the Skripal poisoning affair, which goes far beyond the counting
of Serbian tanks supposedly destroyed during the Balkans conflict. The Skripals' are now God knows where either as willing participants
or as detainees and our government shows no signs of clarifying the matter, so who would believe what it put out anyway in view
of its track record of misinformation ? The nation doesn't know what to believe.
Sadly, I believe this has always been the way of things and I cannot even speculate on how long it will be before this nation
will realise it is being deliberately mis-led.
I suspected that Deep State has at least two opposing factions. The Realistists want him to
break up the empire, turn back into a republic; the Delusionals want to extend the empire,
continue to exploit and destroy the world. If so, the contradictions, reversals, incoherence
make sense. IMO as I said.
Gary Weglarz ,
I predict that all Western MSM will begin to accurately and vocally cover Mr. Binney's
findings about this odious and treasonous U.S. government psyop at just about the exact time
that -- "hell freezes over" -- as they say.
Jen ,
They don't need to, they have Tony Blair's fellow Brit psycho Boris Johnson to go on
autopilot and blame the Russians the moment something happens and just before London Met
start their investigations.
"...Obama did sign H.R. 4310 into law, also passing the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of
2012. But the bill did not make it legal for independent, private-sector media outlets to
present outright false information to the public. Instead, it allowed government-sponsored
news like Voice of American to be broadcast in the United States. It removed restrictions
on U.S.-generated news from being presented to American audiences.'''"
Oki doki so what about those < cough > "independent, private-sector media outlets"
that are blatant 'governement funded fronts' that only 'claim' to be our independent,
private-sector media...
What just happened was an inverted U.S. selection. In the U.S., a confused rich man got
elected, because the alternative was a psychopathic war criminal. In the U.K. a confused
upper class twat got elected, because the alternative was too good to be true.
As Tony Kevin reported (watch-v=dJiS3nFzsWg) at one small fundraiser
Bill Clinton made an interesting remark. He said that the USA should always have enemies. That's absolutely true, this this
is a way to unite such a society as we have in the USA. probably the only way. And Russia simply fits the
bill. Very convenient bogeyman.
Notable quotes:
"... The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium. ..."
One aspect of this report in the NYT is very troubling but not a great surprise to those who
pay attention to Asian affairs.
The reports that US military leaders had no idea of what to
do in Afghanistan and constantly lied to the public should rouse citizens in America to take
a different view of military leaders. That view must be to trust nothing coming from the
Pentagon or from spokespersons for the military. Included must be any and all secretaries of defence, and all branches of the military.
It is totally unacceptable that 1-2 trillion dollars and several thousand lives were spent
by America for some nebulous cause. This does not include many thousands of civilians.
During the Vietnam disaster, it became obvious that American military was lying to the
public and taking many causalities in an unwinnable war. Nothing was learned about Asia or
Asian culture because America entered Afghanistan without a real plan and no understanding of
the country or it's history.
The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up
all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and
America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in
Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which
has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium.
The Washington DC foreign policy establishment are too busy appearing before the impeachment
inquiry and telling them how the orange man hurt their feelings.
File under: Tell us something that we didn't know already!
The reality is of course: that the media knows and understands that we are being lied to
all the time about these interventions, be it in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Honduras, Venezuela and
soon Iran, but they go along with it all because they are in the regime change echo
chamber club!
As George Carlin said: "It's a big club...but you ain't in it!"
"Share On Twitter" target="_blank"
href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=So+your+argument+consists+essentially+of+name-...+&url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-guardian.org%2F2019%2F12%2F12%2Fwill-pelosi-have-the-votes-to-impeach%2F%23comment-105752">
So your argument consists essentially of name-calling to exercise your own demons. You make
Trump look good, like the other stark raving lunatics opining on this , many in the
Democratic Party. You have zero chance of unseating Trump by impeachment and by the looks of
things that might not be such a bad thing, he said, making the sign of the cross and mouthing
pagan incantations, begging forgiveness from the ether.
You recall Bill Maher's comment before a previous election. "The Republicans have shifted
to the right and the Dems have shifted right into the insane asylum."
The USA "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine requires weakening and, if possible, partitioning Russia.
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin tells the audience that Skripals poisoning was a false flag operation. 7:00
He also point several weak points in Western politicians narrative about MH17
Notable quotes:
"... Cold War patterns of thinking about Russia show no sign of weakening in America ..."
"... Putin made it clear when he said the next war would not be fought inside Russia. The troglodytes in the West are unable to grasp not only what that means, but why he said it. ..."
"... The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans). ..."
"... I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!) ..."
"... There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause". ..."
"... Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic. ..."
"... "Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly. But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined." ..."
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin, in conversation with former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, says the West is unnecessarily
determined to undermine Russia.
A t an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign
to destabilize Russia, without cause.
When Kevin said he returned to Russia after more than 40 years in 2016 he realized he "had to take sides" in the U.S.-Russia standoff
when all Nato countries boycotted the Moscow celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
"I had to take a moral position that it is not right for the West to be ganging up on Russia," Kevin says in his conversation
with the former Australian foreign minister.
The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating
a disinformation" campaign today against Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders
and Russiagate.
Watch the hour-long in depth discussion which was filmed and produced by Consortium News' CN Live! Executive Producer Cathy
Vogan.
Putin & the Russian citizenry play chess on this 3-dimensional world.! The Americas and their inane elites attempt checkers
on their flat Earth . Pity, some such as Noam Chomsky are admirable world citizens..! Pity again.! WE will miss men of this honest
calibre and down- to-earth intelligence. Bob Carr is of this cohort.
Eugenie Basile , December 10, 2019 at 03:36
The 'Russia did it' mantra is a gift for the powers in the Kremlin. It rallies most Russians behind their leaders because they
are proud of their country and don't accept the West's moral hypocrite grandstanding.
Just recently the WADA proclaimed sporting ban against Russia is a perfect example. It excludes all Russian athletes because
they happen to represent their country while U.S. athletes who have been caught cheating in the past are allowed to participate
.
It is very encouraging to know there are good people like Mr. Tony Kevin and Mr. Bob Carr alive and sharing their powerful
wisdom at this dangerous historical point on planet Earth. Mr. Kevin and Mr. Carr's immensely important and courageously honest
discussion should become – immediately, and for many years to come – required study in university classrooms and government halls
around this world.
Peace.
ElderD , December 9, 2019 at 15:03
Tony's (especially!) and Bob's sane and sensible view of this dangerous and destructive state of affairs deserve the widest
possible distribution and attention.
George McGlynn , December 9, 2019 at 13:27
A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and little has changed. Cold War patterns of thinking
about Russia show no sign of weakening in America. The further we distance ourselves from the end of the Cold War, the closer
we come to its revival. Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States. It is now
so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured.
It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first. Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then,
it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of
nuclear deterrence doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation is.
Lois Gagnon , December 9, 2019 at 17:30
I agree. Putin made it clear when he said the next war would not be fought inside Russia. The troglodytes in the West are
unable to grasp not only what that means, but why he said it.
AnneR , December 9, 2019 at 07:48
The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed
oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events
including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans).
Then there were allegations – of those "highly likely" (therefore one knows to be untrue and unadulterated propaganda to increase
Russophobia) sort – about Russian hackers (always giving the impression that the "Kremlin" is behind itl) being the Labour Party's
source of the Tory party's US-UK trade deal which would/will deliberately and finally destroy the NHS and replace it with (of
course) US "health" insurance company profiteering.
(Always the Tory intention from the NHS's initiation in May of 1948; only its popularity among many Tory party supporters among
the working and lower middle classes prevented them from a full-frontal killing off the NHS; the Snatcher's government began the
undermining, via installing a top-heavy bureaucratization, siphoning off a sizable proportion of the funds that would otherwise
have gone to medical care, demanding that hospitals not "lose" money – a concept completely beyond the remit of the NHS as originally
conceived and constructed and like exactions.)
Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov (Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how
either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the
neo-Nazis of western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the Donbass). The Donbass fighters
are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile
the support for the neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the Ukrainian military,
thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency).
Someone even suggested that President Putin needed to be diplomatic. Really? From what I've read the man is the most diplomatic
and intelligent politician (not just political leader) along with Xi Jinping and the Iranian government that exist on the world
stage. None of them are hubristic, solipsistic, eager beaver killers of peoples in other countries. Unlike their western "world"
political counterparts.
Jeff Harrison , December 8, 2019 at 18:30
Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they agreed they were defeated. The US merely
assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said
any such thing.
St. Ronnie's whole thing back in the 80's was to outspend Russia militarily and it worked well. We're trying to
do it again but Russia isn't playing the same game this time and now it is the US that has a mountain of debt and Russia that
doesn't.
SIPIRI tags US military spending at $650B and Russian military spending at $62B. But we know that the $650B number is
bogus because it doesn't include our in-violation-of-the-NNPT nuclear program which is in the energy department or our veteran's
expenses which are in HHS. I don't know what's missing from Russia's $62B but I'll bet they can sustain that a whole lot better
than we can sustain our $650B and rising bill.
Antonio Costa , December 9, 2019 at 13:17
Good point regarding Russia's downsizing the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev to Putin there was NEVER a surrender, intended in
any way. The intent has been multilateral partnerships. For Russia the US/West won nothing at all except the opportunity to live
and work in peace. (By the way this policy has a long Russian history.)
They gave up the Warsaw Pact and America with our worthless "word" expanded NATO.
The US foreign policy has lost even the semblance of sanity. Our naked aggression is clear as never before, a mad man throwing
a global fit armed with megaton nuclear projectiles on trigger first strike alert. What could go wrong?
nondimenticare , December 8, 2019 at 15:56
If, magically, Consortium News/CN Live! were a mass-distribution network/magazine (hence universally consulted), allowing the
light in for the mass of the viewing and listening public, it could change the world – both an exalting and despairing thought.
Lily , December 8, 2019 at 09:52
It is a great joy to listen to this conversation!
I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus.
Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more.
(The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!)
I wish people would have the courage to break away from the group pressure originated by a nation which has been started by
killing more than 90% of the indigenous people in their country and since then has turned the worl into a very insecure place.
Chapeau, Tony Kevin! Thanks to Bob Carr and Consortiums News.
Lily , December 9, 2019 at 01:18
It seems that some facts are beginning to be realized in the military department.
"At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive
campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause."
The American establishment's problem with Russia is simply that Russia is the only country on earth capable of obliterating
the United States. Not even China has yet reached that capacity.
"Carthago delenda est"
Skip Scott , December 9, 2019 at 06:13
There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian
citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause".
Bruno DP , December 8, 2019 at 02:34
The West is ganging up on Russia? Replace "West" by "United States of America", and I will agree.
Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election
interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a
very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic.
Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all
of "the Western" intelligence combined.
I'm German, living in the US, and I agree with your comment. I especially love the last two sentences:
"Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly. But it has regularly done the right thing in international
conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined."
Since you bring up the issue of educating schoolgirls, it's worth remembering that when the
U.S. connived to drag the Soviet Union into its own Afghanistan conflict, one of the tactics we
used to inflame the mujahedeen was to remind them that, under Afghanistan's communist
government, girls were being educated as a matter of policy.
The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a
laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014,
he founded Bellingcat, an open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen
staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special
knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing
video games , which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
...
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by
journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society
Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for
Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.
"... "She went in out of a sense of duty," a friend said. "Once she was in the White House, she tried to impose some sense of order and process on the chaos over Russia policy. When there was a State Department translator in meetings Trump meetings with Putin, that didn't happen by accident." ..."
"... She handed responsibilities to her successor, Tim Morrison, on 15 July, and actually left the White House on 19 July, six days before Trump's infamous call with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which the US president asked for "a favour" in carrying out certain targeted investigations. ..."
"... It is unclear whether Trump's efforts to use Ukrainian reliance on the US to his political advantage affected the timing of Hill's departure ..."
"... The American chapter in her life opened quite by chance. After winning a scholarship to St Andrews University, she was in Moscow during the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev summit and got an internship making coffee for the NBC Today Show. There, she met an American professor who suggested she apply for postgraduate studies at Harvard. ..."
"... some pointing to the fact that she knows Christopher Steele , the author of the famous 2016 dossier alleging Trump's collusion with the Kremlin, from a previous stint in government, in the National Intelligence Council. ..."
Fiona Hill, a coalminer's daughter from County Durham who became the top Russia expert in
the White House, is the latest official to find herself at the eye of the
impeachment storm engulfing Donald Trump .
British-born Hill arrived on Capitol Hill on Monday morning to give testimony behind closed
doors to congressional committees investigating Trump's conduct in his relations with his
Ukrainian counterpart.
The committees are looking for evidence on whether Trump abused his office to try to
persuade the government in Kyiv to provide compromising material on a political opponent,
former vice-president Joe Biden.
Hill is likely to be interviewed on a much broader range of subjects, however. She was
senior director for Europe and Russia in the National Security
Council (NSC) for more than two years, giving her a front seat at the struggle over US policy
towards Moscow and Trump's peculiar personal attachment to Vladimir Putin.
Hill was brought into the White House by Trump's second national security adviser, HR
McMaster, plucking her out of the Washington thinktank world, because of her expertise on Putin
and Russia. She had co-written a book on the Russian autocrat, titled Mr Putin:
Operative in the Kremlin , that stressed the extent that his KGB career had shaped his
worldview.
"She went in out of a sense of duty," a friend said. "Once she was in the White House,
she tried to impose some sense of order and process on the chaos over Russia policy. When there
was a State Department translator in meetings Trump meetings with Putin, that didn't happen by
accident."
Hill planned to work at the NSC for a year but was asked to stay on by McMaster's successor,
John Bolton, despite calls to get rid of her from Trump acolytes, aware Hill was not a
political loyalist.
She handed responsibilities to her successor, Tim Morrison, on 15 July, and actually
left the White House on 19 July, six days before Trump's infamous call with Volodymyr
Zelenskiy, in which the US president asked for "a favour" in carrying out certain targeted
investigations.
It is unclear whether Trump's efforts to use Ukrainian reliance on the US to his
political advantage affected the timing of Hill's departure , but she is expected to
testify about the emergence of a parallel Ukraine policy run by Rudy Giuliani, the former
New York mayor who is commonly described as Trump's personal lawyer.
Giuliani clearly thought his channel, focusing on digging dirt on the Bidens, had priority,
and has sought to portray Hill as being out of the loop.
"Maybe she was engaged in secondary foreign policy if she didn't know I was asked to take a
call from President Zelenskiy's very close friend," he
told NBC News .
Texts released by Congress between two diplomats working with Giuliani, the ambassador to
the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and Kurt Volker, formerly special envoy for Ukraine,
suggest that they expected more flexibility from Morrison, Hill's replacement.
Hill was born in Bishop Auckland, Durham, the daughter of a miner and a nurse, and became a
dual national after marrying an American she met at Harvard. She still speaks with flat
northern English vowels.
The American chapter in her life opened quite by chance. After winning a scholarship to
St Andrews University, she was in Moscow during the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev summit and got an
internship making coffee for the NBC Today Show. There, she met an American professor who
suggested she apply for postgraduate studies at Harvard.
Since it became clear Hill would be an important witness in the House impeachment hearings,
she has been subjected to furious attack on hard-right talkshows and conspiracy theories on
social media, some pointing to the fact that she knows
Christopher Steele , the author of the
famous 2016 dossier alleging Trump's collusion with the Kremlin, from a previous stint in
government, in the National Intelligence Council.
Such attacks have become a routine form of intimidation aimed at stopping officials like
Hill saying what they know about the inner workings of the Trump White House.
Hill's manner is understated, precise and discreet. Since entering the White House, she has
hardly talked to the press and not made appearances in the thinktank world. Her deposition to
Congress puts her into an unaccustomed limelight.
"She was not looking forward to it but she knew she was going to testify. She will
answer the questions and says what she knows, but she is not going to give some sweeping
denunciation of the -> Trump administration ," her
friend said.
"She has respect for the people she worked for, even if she didn't necessarily agree with
them. They have all been in the same foxhole together."
"... We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras. ..."
"... So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? ' ..."
"... I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism and war reporting. ..."
"... Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip, the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations, briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported. ..."
"... He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact me later, in my occupation. ..."
"... Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given, but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline. ..."
"... But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times, and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything will be fine. ..."
"... From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany & Austria. ..."
"... Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate interests. ..."
"... Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs, politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order." ..."
"... "The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"." ..."
"... So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free. ..."
"... Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep. ..."
"... Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the get go. ..."
"... This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order). ..."
"... Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the greater fools want. ..."
"... Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management. ..."
"... Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they could get their greedy hands on at the time. ..."
"... Once pond scum always pond scum. ..."
"... It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm – always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society. ..."
"... Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can to get what they want. ..."
"... All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm ..."
In 2014, the German journalist and writer Udo Ulfkotte published a book that created a big stir, describing how the journalistic
profession is thoroughly corrupt and infiltrated by intelligence services.
Although eagerly anticipated by many, the English translation of the book, Bought Journalists , does not seem to be forthcoming
anytime soon.
So I have made English subtitles and transcribed this still very relevant 2015-lecture for those that are curious about Ulfkotte's
work. It covers many of the subjects described in the book.
Udo Ulfkotte died of a heart attack in January 2017, in all likelihood part of the severe medical complications he got from his
exposure to German-made chemical weapons supplied to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
Transcription
[Only the first 49 minutes are translated; the second half of the lecture deals mostly with more local issues]
Introducer Oliver: I am very proud to have such a brave man amongst us: Udo Ulfkotte
Udo Ulfkotte: Thanks Thanks for the invitation Thanks to Oliver. I heard to my great surprise from Oliver that he didn't
know someone from the intelligence services (VVS) would be present. I wish him a warm welcome. I don't mean that as a joke, I heard
this in advance, and got to know that Oliver didn't know. If he wants – if it is a man – he can wave. If not? no? [laughter from
the audience]
I'm fine with that. You can write down everything, or record it; no problem.
To the lecture. We are talking about media. we are talking about truth. I don't want to sell you books or such things. Each one
of us asks himself: Why do things develop like they do, even though the majority, or a lot of people shake their heads.
The majority of people in Germany don't want nuclear weapons on our territory. But we have nuclear weapons here. The majority
don't want foreign interventions by German soldiers. But we do.
What media narrates and the politicians say, and what the majority of the population believes – seems often obviously to be two
different things.
I can tell you this myself, from many years experience. I will start with very personal judgments, to tell you what my experiences
with 'The Lying Media' were – I mean exactly that with the word 'lying'.
I was born in a fairly poor family. I am a single child. I grew up on the eastern edge of the Ruhr-area. I studied Law, Political
Science and Islamic Studies. Already in my student years, I had contact with the German Foreign Intelligence, BND. We will get back
to that later.
From 1986 to 2003, I worked for a major German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), amongst other things as a war
reporter. I spent a lot of time in Eastern and African countries.
Now to the subject of lying media. When I was sent to the Iran-Iraq war for the first time, the first time was from 1980 to July
1986, I was sent to this war to report for FAZ. The Iraqis were then 'the good guys'.
I was bit afraid. I didn't have any experience as a war reporter. Then I arrived in Baghdad. I was fairly quickly sent along in
a bus by the Iraqi army, the bus was full of loud, experienced war reporters, from such prestigious media as the BBC, several foreign
TV-stations and newspapers, and me, poor newbie, who was sent to the front for the first time without any kind of preparation. The
first thing I saw was that they all carried along cans of petrol. And I at once got bad consciousness, because I thought: "oops,
if the bus gets stuck far from a petrol station, then everyone chips in with a bit of diesel'. I decided to in the future also carry
a can before I went anywhere, because it obviously was part of it.
We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing.
First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents
of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks
in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras.
It was my first experience with media, truth in reporting.
While I was wondering what the hell I was going to report for my newspaper, they all lined up and started: Behind them were flames
and plumes of smoke, and all the time the Iraqis were running in front of camera with their machine guns, casually, but with war
in their gaze. And the reporters were ducking all the time while talking.
So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking
all the time? '
'Quite simply because there are machine guns on the audio track, and it looks very good at home.'
That was several decades ago. It was in the beginning of my contact with war. I was thinking, the whole way back:'Young man, you
didn't see a war. You were in a place with a campfire. What are you going to tell?'
I returned to Baghdad. There weren't any mobile phones then. We waited in Hotel Rashid and other hotels where foreigners stayed,
sometimes for hours for an international telephone line. I first contacted my mother, not my newspaper. I was in despair, didn't
know what to do, and wanted to get advice from an elder person.
Then my mother shouted over the phone: 'My boy, you are alive!' I thought: 'How so? Is everything OK?'
'My boy, we thought ' 'What's the matter, mother?' 'We saw on TV what happened around you' TV had already sent lurid stories, and I tried to calm my mother down, it didn't happen like that. She thought I had lost my mind
from all the things that had happened in the war – she saw it with her own eyes!
I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism
and war reporting.
That is, I was very shocked by the first contact, it was entirely different from what I had experienced. But it wasn't an exceptional
case.
In the beginning, I mentioned that I am from a fairly poor family. I had to work hard for everything. I was a single child, my
father died when I was young. It didn't matter further on. But, I had a job, I had a degree, a goal in life.
I now had the choice: Should I declare that the whole thing was nonsense, these reports? I was nothing, a newbie straight out
of uni, in my first job. Or if I wanted to make money, to continue, look further. I chose the second option. I continued, and that
for many years.
Over these years, I gained lots of experience. When one comes from university to a big German newspaper – everything I say doesn't
only apply to FAZ, you can take other German or European media. I had contact with other European journalists, from reputable media
outlets. I later worked in other media. I can tell you: What I am about to tell you, I really discovered everywhere.
What did I experience? If you, as a reporter, work either in state media financed by forced license fees, or in the big private
media companies, then you can't write what you want yourself, what you feel like. There are certain guidelines.
Roughly speaking: everyone knows that you won't, for example in the Springer-newspapers – Bild, die Welt – get published articles
extremely critical of Israel. They stand no chance there, because one has to sign a statement that one is pro-Israel, that one won't
question the existence of the state of Israel or Israeli points of view, etc.
There are some sort of guidelines in all the big media companies. But that isn't all: I learned very fast that if one doesn't
– I don't mean this negatively – want to be stuck in the lower rungs of editors, if one wants to rise; for me this rise was that
I was allowed to travel with the Chancellor, ministers, the president and politicians, in planes owned by the state; then one has
to keep to certain subjects. I learned that fast.
That is, if one gets to follow a politician – and this hasn't changed to this day – I soon realized that when I followed the president
or Chancellor Helmut Kohl etc, one of course isn't invited because your name is Udo Ulfkotte, but because you belong to the newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip,
the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or
the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations,
briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the
same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported.
All the time you no one tells you to write it this or that way but you know quite exactly that if you DON'T write it this or that
way,then you won't get invited next time. Your media outlet will be invited, but they say 'we don't want him along'. Then you are
out.
Naturally you want to be invited. Of course it is wonderful to travel abroad and you can behave like a pig, no one cares. You
can buy what you want, because you know that when you return, you won't be checked. You can bring what you want. I had colleagues
who went along on a trip to the US.
They brought with them – it was an air force plane – a Harley Davidson, in parts. They sold it when they were back in Germany,
and of course earned on it. Anyway, just like the carpet-affair with that development minister, this is of course not a single instance.
No one talks about it.
You get invited if you have a certain way of seeing things. Which way to see things? Where and how is this view of the world formed?
I very often get asked: 'Where are these people behind the curtain who pulls the wires, so that everything gets told in a fairly
similar way?'
In the big media in Germany – just look yourself – who sit in the large transatlantic think-tanks and foundations,the foundation
The Atlantic Bridge, all these organizations, and how is one influenced there? I can tell from my own experience.
We mustn't talk only theoretically. I was invited by the think-tank The German Marshall Fund of the United States as a fellow.
I was to visit the United States for six weeks. It was fully paid. During these six weeks I could this think-tank has very close
connections to the CIA to this day, they acquired contacts in the CIA for me and they got me access to American politicians, to everyone
I wanted. Above all, they showered me with gifts.
Already before the journey with German Marshall Fund, I experienced plenty of bought journalism. This hasn't to do with a particular
media outlet. You see, I was invited and didn't particularly reflect over it, by billionaires, for example sultan Quabboos of Oman
on the Arabian peninsula.
When sultan Qabboos invited, and a poor boy like me could travel to a country with few inhabitants but immense wealth, where the
head of state had the largest yachts in the world, his own symphony orchestra which plays for him when he wants – by the way he bought
a pub close to Garmisch-Patenkirchen, because he is a Muslim believer, and someone might see him if he drank in his own country,
so he rather travels there. The place he bought every day fly in fresh lamb from Ireland and Scotland with his private jet. He is
also the head of an environmental foundation.
But this is a digression. If such a person, who is so incredibly rich, invites someone like me, then I arrive first class. I had
never traveled first class before. We arrive, and a driver is waiting for me. He carries your suitcase or backpack. You have a suite
in the hotel. And from the very start, you are showered with gifts. You get a platinum or gold coin. A hand-weaved carpet or whatever.
I interviewed the sultan, several times. He asked me what I wanted. I answered among other things a diving course. I wanted to
learn how to dive. He flew in a PADI-approved instructor from Greece. I was there for two weeks and got my first diving certificate.
On later occasions, the sultan flew me in several times, and the diving instructor. I got a certificate as rescue diver, all paid
for by the sultan. You see, when one is attended to in such a way, then you know that you are bought. For a certain type of journalism.
In the sultan's country, there is no freedom of the press.
There are no human rights. It is illegal to import many writings, because the sultan does not wish so. There are reports about
human rights violations, but my eyes are blind. I reported, like all German media when they report about the Sultanate of Oman, to
this day, only positive things. The great sultan, who is wonderful. The fantastic country of the fairy tale prince, overshadowing
everything else – because I was bought.
Apart from Oman, many others have bought me. They also bought colleagues. I got many invitations through the travel section in
my big newspaper. 5-star. The reportage never mentioned that I was bought, by country A or B or C. Yemenia, the Yemeni state airline,
invited me to such a trip.
I didn't report about the dirt and dilapidation in the country, because I was influenced by this treatment, I only reported positively,
because I wanted to come back. The Yemenis asked me when I had returned to Frankfurt what I wished In jest, I said "your large prawns,
from the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean, they were spectacular.", from the seaport of Mocha (Mocha-coffee is named after it). Two
days later, Yemenia flew in a buffet for the editorial office, with prawns and more.
Of course we were bought. We were bought in several ways. In your situation: when you buy a car or something else, you trust consumer
tests. Look closer. How well is the car tested? I know of no colleagues, no journalists, who do testing of cars, that aren't bribed
– maybe they do exist.
They get unlimited access to a car from the big car manufacturers, with free petrol and everything else. I had a work car in my
newspaper, if not, I might have exploited this. I had a BMW or Mercedes in the newspaper. But there are, outside the paper, many
colleagues who only have this kind of vehicle all year round. They are invited to South Africa, Malaysia, USA, to the grandest travels,
when a new car is presented.
Why? So that they will write positively about the car. But it doesn't say in these reports "Advertisement from bought journalists".
But that is the reality. You should also know – since we are on the subjects of tests – who owns which test magazines? Who owns
the magazine Eco-test? It is owned by the Social Democrats. More than a hundred magazines belong to the Social Democrats. It isn't
about only one party, but many editorial rooms have political allegiance. Behind them are party political interests.
I mentioned the sultan of Oman and the diving course, and I have mentioned German Marshall Fund. Back to the US and the German
Marshall Fund. There one told me, they knew exactly, 'hello, you were on a diving course in Oman ' The CIA knew very precisely. And
the CIA also gave me something: The diving gear. I received the diving gear in the United States, and I received in the US, during
my 6-week stay there, an invitation from the state of Oklahoma, from the governor. I went there. It was a small ceremony, and I received
an honorary citizenship.
I am now honorary citizen of an American state. And in this certificate, it is written that I will only cover the US positively.
I accepted this honorary citizenship and was quite proud of it. I proudly told about it to a colleague who worked in the US. He said
'ha, I already have 31 of these honorary citizenships!'
I don't tell about this to be witty, today I am ashamed, really.
I was greedy. I accepted many advantages that a regular citizen at my age in my occupation doesn't have, and shouldn't have. But
I perceived it – and that is no excuse – as entirely normal, because my colleagues around me all did the same. But this isn't normal.
When journalists are invited to think-tanks in the US, like German Marshall Fund, Atlantic Bridge, it is to 'bring them in line',
for in a friendly way to make them complicit, naturally to buy them, to grease them with money.
This has quite a few aspects that one normally doesn't talk about. When I for the first time was in Southern Africa, in the 80s,
Apartheid still existed in South Africa, segregated areas for blacks and whites. We didn't have any problems with this in my newspaper,
we received fully paid journeys from the Apartheid regime to do propaganda work.
I was invited by the South-African gold industry, coal industry, tourist board. In the first invitation, this trip was to Namibia
– I arrived tired to the hotel room in Windhoek and a dark woman lay in my bed. I at once left the room, went down to the reception
and said 'excuse me, but the room is already occupied' [laughter from the audience]
Without any fuss I got another room.
Next day at the breakfast table, this was a journalist trip, my colleagues asked me 'how was yours?' Only then I understood what
had happened. Until then, I had believed it was a silly coincidence.
With this I want to describe which methods are used, maybe to film journalists in such situations, buy, make dependent. Quite
simply to win them over to your side with the most brutal methods, so that they are 'brought in line'.
This doesn't happen to every journalist. It would be a conspiracy theory if I said that behind every journalist, someone pulls
the wires.
No. Not everyone has influence over the masses. When you – I don't mean this negatively – write about folk costume societies or
if you work with agriculture or politics, why should anyone from the upper political spheres have an interest in controlling the
reporting? As far as I know, this doesn't happen at all.
But if you work in one of the big media, and want up in this world, if you want to travel with politicians, heads of state, with
CEOs, who also travel on these planes, then it happens. Then you are regularly bought, you are regularly observed.
I said earlier that I already during my study days had contact with the intelligence services.
I will quickly explain this to you, because it is very important for this lecture.
I studied law, Political Science and Islamology, among other places in Freiburg. At the very beginning of my study, just before
end of the term, a professor approached me. Professors were then still authority figures.
He came with a brochure, and asked me: 'Mr. Ulfkotte, what are your plans for this vacation?'
I couldn't very well say that I first planned to work a bit at a building site, for then to grab my backpack and see the ocean
for the first time in my life, to Italy, 'la dolce vita', flirting with girls, lie on the beach and be a young person.
I wondered how I would break it to him. He then came with a brochure [Ulfkotte imitating professor]: 'I have something for
you a seminar, Introduction to Conflict Studies, two weeks in Bonn I am sure you would want to participate!'
I wondered how I would tell this elderly gentleman that I wanted to flirt with girls on the beach. Then he said 'you will get
20 Marks per day as support, paid train journey, money for books 150 Marks You will naturally get board and lodging.' He didn't stop
telling me what I would receive.
It buzzed around in my head that I had to achieve everything myself, work hard. I thought 'You have always wanted to participate
in a seminar on Introduction to Conflict Studies!'
So I went to Bonn from Freiburg, and I saw other students who had this urge to participate in this seminar. There were also girls
one could flirt with, about twenty people. The whole thing was very strange, because we sat in a room like this one, there were desks
and a lectern, and there sat some older men and a woman, they always wrote something down. They asked us about things; What we thought
of East Germany, we had to do role play.
The whole thing was a bit strange, but it was well paid. We didn't reflect any further. It was very strange that in this house,
in Ubierstraße 88 in Bonn, we weren't allowed to go to the second floor. There was a chain over the stairs, it was taboo.
We were allowed to go to the basement, there were constantly replenished supplies of new books that we were allowed to get for
free. Ebay didn't exist then, but we could still sell them used. Anyway, it was curious, but at the end of the fortnight, we were
allowed to go up these stairs, where we got an invitation to a continuation course in Conflict Studies.
After four such seminars, that is, after two years, someone asked me 'you have probably wondered what we are doing here'.
He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction
to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at
potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact
me later, in my occupation.
They gave me a lot of money. My mother has always taught me to be polite. So I said 'please do', and they came to me. I was then
working in the newspaper FAZ from 1986, straight after my studies.
Then the intelligence services came fairly soon to me. Why am I telling you this? The newspaper knew very soon. It is also written in my reference, therefore I can say it loud and clear. I had very close contact with the intelligence service BND.
Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given,
but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline.
I highlight certain things to explain them. But if I had said here: 'There are media that are influenced by BND', you could rightly
say that 'these are conspiracy theories, can you document it?'
I CAN document it. I can say, this and that article, with my byline in the paper, is written by the intelligence services, because
what is written there, I couldn't have known. I couldn't have known what existed in some cave or other in Libya, what secret thing
were there, what was being built there. This was all things that BND wanted published. It wasn't like this only in FAZ.
It was like this also in other media. I told about it. If we had rule of law, there would now be an investigation commission.
Because the political parties would stand up, regardless of if they are on the left, in the center or right, and say: What this Ulfkotte
fella says and claims he can document, this should be investigated. Did this occur in other places? Or is it still ongoing?'
I can tell you: Yes it still exists. I know colleagues who still have this close contact. One can probably show this fairly well
until a few years ago. But I would find it wonderful if this investigation commission existed.
But it will obviously not happen, because no one has an interest in doing so. Because then the public would realize how closely
integrated politics, media, and the secret services are in this country.
That is, one often sees in reporting, whether it is from the local paper, regional papers, TV-channels, national tabloids and
so-called serious papers.
Put them side by side, and you will discover that more than 90% looks almost identical. A lot of subjects and news, that are not
being reported at all, or they are – I claim reported very one-sided. One can only explain this if one knows the structures in the
background, how media is surrounded, bought and 'brought onboard' by politics and the intelligence services; Where politics and intelligence
services form a single unity. There is an intelligence coordinator by the Chancellor.
I can tell you, that under the former coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer, under Kohl, I walked in and out of the Chancellery and received
stacks of secret and confidential documents, which I shouldn't have received.
They were so many that we in the newspaper had own archive cabinets for them. Not only did I receive these documents,but Schmidbauer
should have been in jail if we had rule of law. Or there should have been a parliamentary commission or an investigation, because
he wasn't allowed
For example if I couldn't bring along the documents if the case was too hot, there was another trick. They locked me in a room.
In this room were the documents, which I could look through. I could record it all on tape, photograph them or write them down. When
I was done, I could call on the intercom, so they could lock me out. There were thousands of these tricks. Anonymous documents that
I and my colleagues needed could be placed in my mail box.
These are of course illegal things. BUT, you ONLY get them if you 'toe the line' with politics.
If I had written that Chancellor Helmut Kohl is stupid, a big idiot, or about what Schmidbauer did, I would of course not have
received more. That is, if you today, in newspapers, read about 'soon to be revealed exposures, we will publish a big story based
on material based on intelligence', then none of these media have dug a tunnel under the security services and somehow got hold of
something secret. It is rather that they work so well with intelligence services, with the military counterespionage, the foreign
intelligence, police intelligence etc, that if they have got hold of internal documents, it is because they cooperate so well that
they received them as a reward for well performed service.
You see, in this way one is in the end bought. One is bought to such a degree that at one point one can't exit this system anymore.
If I describe how you are supplied with prostitutes, bribed with cars, money; I tried to write down everything I received in gifts,
everything I was bribed with. I stopped doing so several years ago, more than a decade ago.
It doesn't make it any better, but today I regret everything. But I know that it goes this way with many journalists.
It would make me very happy if journalists stood up and said they won't participate in this any longer, and that they think this
is wrong.
But I see no possibility, because media corporations in any case are doing badly. Where should a journalist find work the next
day? It isn't so that tens of thousands of employers are waiting for you. It is the other way round. Tens of thousands of journalists
are looking for work or commissions.
That is, from pure desperation one is happy to be bribed. If a newsroom stands behind or not an article that in reality is advertising,
doesn't matter, one goes along. I know some, even respected journalists, who want to leave this system.
But imagine if you are working in one of the state channels, that you stand up and tell what you have received. How will that
be received by your colleagues? That you have political ulterior motives etc.
September 30 [2015], a few days ago, Chancellor Merkel invited all the directors in the state channels to her in the Chancellery.
I will claim that she talked with them about how one should report the Chancellors politics. Who of you [in the audience] heard about
this incident? 3-4-5? So a small minority. But this is reality. Merkel started already 6 years ago, at the beginning of the financial
crisis, to invite chief editors ..she invited chief editors in the large media corporations, with the express wish that media should
embellish reality, in a political way. This could have been only claims, one could believe me or not.
But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times,
and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw
their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything
will be fine.
In such a way it should be reported. Ladies and gentlemen, what I just said can be documented. These are facts, not a conspiracy
theory.
I formulated it a bit satirically, but I ask myself when I see how things are in this country: Is this the democracy described
in the Constitution? Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press?
Where one has to be afraid if one doesn't agree with the ruling political correctness, if one doesn't want to get in trouble.
Is this the republic our parents and grandparents fought for, that they built?
I claim that we more and more – as citizens – are cowards 'toeing the line', who don't open our mouths.
It is so nice to have plurality and diversity of opinions.
But it is at once clamped down on, today fairly openly.
Of my experiences with journalism, I can in general say that I have quit all media I have to pay for, for the reasons mentioned.
Then the question arises, 'but which pay-media can I trust?'
Naturally there are ones I support. They are definitely political, I'll add. But they are all fairly small. And they won't be
big anytime soon. But I have quit all big media that I used to subscribe to, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine, etc. I would like
to not having to pay the TV-license fee, without being arrested because I won't pay fines. But maybe someone here in the audience
can tell me how to do so without all these problems?
Either way, I don't want to financially support this kind of journalism. I can only give you the advice to get information from
alternative, independent media and all the forums that exist.
I'm not advertising for any of them. Some of you probably know that I write for the publishing house Kopp. But there are so many
portals. Every person is different in political viewpoint, culturally etc. The only thing uniting us, whether we are black or white,
religious or non-religious, right or left, or whatever; we all want to know the truth. We want to know what really happens out there,
and exactly in the burning political questions: asylum seekers, refugees, the financial crisis, bad infrastructure, one doesn't know
how it will continue. Precisely with this background, is it even more important that people get to know the truth.
And it is to my great surprise that I conclude that we in media, as well as in politics, have a guiding line.
To throw more and more dust in the citizens' eyes to calm them down. What is the sense in this? One can have totally different
opinions on the subject of refugees with good reasoning.
But facts are important for you as citizens to decide the future. That is, how many people will arrive? How will it affect my
personal affluence? Or will it affect my affluence at all? Will the pensions shrink? etc. Then you can talk with people about this,
quite openly. But to say that we should open all borders, and that this won't have any negative consequences, is very strange. What
I now say isn't a plug for my books. I know that some of them are on the table in front.
I'm not saying this so that you will buy books. I am saying this for another reason that soon will be clear. I started to write
books on certain subjects 18 years ago. They have sold millions. It is no longer about you buying my books. It is important that
you hear the titles, then you will see a certain line throughout the last ten years. One can have different opinions about this line,
but I have always tried to describe, based on my subjective experiences, formed over many years in the Middle East and Africa.
That there will be migration flows, from people from culture areas that are like; if one could compare a cultural area with an
engine, that one fills petrol in a diesel engine then everyone knows what will happen, the engine is great, diesel is great, but
if there too much petrol, then the engine starts to splutter and stop.
I have tried to make you aware of this, with drastic and less drastic words. What we can expect, and ever faster. The book titles
are SOS Occident; Warning Civil War; No Black,Red, Yellow [the colors in the German flag], Holy War in Europe; Mecca Germany.
I just want to say, when politicians and media today claim no one could have predicted it, everything is a complete surprise;
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not at all surprising. The migration flows, for years warnings have been coming from international
organizations, politicians, experts, exactly about what happened and it is predictable, if we had a map over North Africa and the
Middle East..
If the West continues to destabilize countries like Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, country by country, Iraq when we toppled Saddam
Hussein, Afghanistan. We as Europeans and Germans have spent tens of billions on a war where we allegedly defend peace and liberty,
at the mountain range Hindu Kush [in Afghanistan]. And here, in front of our own door, we soon have Hindu Kush.
We have no stabilization in Afghanistan. Dozens of German soldiers have lost their lives for nothing. We have a more unstable
situation than ever.
You can have your own opinions. I am only saying that these refugee flows didn't fall from the sky. It is predicable, that if
I bomb and destabilize a country, that people – it is always so in history – it hasn't anything to do with the Middle East or North
Africa. I have seen enough wars in Africa. Naturally they created refugee flows.
But all of us didn't want to see this. We haven't prepared. And now one is reacting in full panic, and what is most disconcerting
with this, is when media and politicians, allegedly from deepest inner conviction, say: 'this was all a complete surprise!'
Are they drunk? What are they smoking? What sort of pills are they eating? That they behave this way?
End transcription
The transcription has been edited for clarity, and may differ from the spoken word. The subtitles and transcription are for the
first 49 minutes of the lecture only. Subtitled and transcribed by Terje Maloy. This article is Creative Commons 4.0 for non-commercial
purposes.
Terje Maloy (
Website ) is a Norwegian citizen, with roots north of the Arctic Circle. Nowadays, he spends a lot of time in Australia, working
in the family business. He has particular interests in liberty, global justice, imperialism, history, media analysis and what Western
governments really are up to. He runs a blog , mostly in Norwegian,
but occasionally in English. He likes to write about general geopolitical matters, and Northern Europe in particular, presenting
perspectives that otherwise barely are mentioned in the dominant media (i.e. most things that actually matter).
Tim Jenkins
From 1:18 minutes, Ulfkotte reveals without question, that the EU Political 'elite's' combined intelligence services work with
& propagate . . .
Terror, Terrorists & Terrorism / a conscious organised Politics of FEAR ! / Freedom of Movement, of fully armed IS Agents
Provocateurs & with a Secret Services get out of jail free card, 'Hände Weg Nicht anfassen', it's 'Hammertime', "U Can't
Touch this", we're armed state operatives travelling to Germany & Austria, " don't mess with my operation !" & all journalists'
hands tied, too.
The suggestions & offers below to translate fully, what Ulfkotte declares publicly, make much sense. It is important to understand
that even an 'Orban' must bow occasionally, to deep state Security State Dictators and the pressures they can exert in so many
ways. Logic . . . or else one's life is made into hell, alive or an 'accidental' death: – and may I add, it is a curiously depressing
feeling when you have so many court cases on the go, that when a Gemeinde/Municipality Clerk is smiling, celebrating and telling
you, (representing yourself in court, with only independent translator & recorder), "You Won the Case, a superior judge has over-ruled
" and the only reply possible is,
"Which case number ?"
life gets tedious & time consuming, demanding extreme patience. Given his illness, surely Ulfkotte and his wife, deserve/d
extra credit & 'hot chocolate'. Makes a change to see & read some real journalism: congrats.@OffG
Excellent Professional Journalism on "Pseudo-Journalist State Actors & Terrorists". If you see a terrorist, guys, at
best just reason with him or her :- better than calling
INTERPOL or Secret Services @theguardian, because you wouldn't want a member of the public, grassing you up to your boss, would
you now ? ! Just tell the terrorist who he really works for . . . Those he resents ! Rather like Ulfkotte had to conclude,
with final resignation. My condolences to his good wife.
Wilmers31
Very good of you to not forget Ulfkotte. If I did not have sickness in the house, I would translate it. Maybe I can do one chapter
and someone else can do another one? What's the publisher saying?
You wouldn't say that if you could speak German, my friend ! ?
From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on
a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany
& Austria.
But, don't let that revelation bother you, living under a Deep State 'Politic of Fear' in the West and long unedited speeches
gets kinda' boring now, I know a bit like believing in some kinda' dumbfuk new pearl harbour, war on terror &&& all phoney propaganda
fairy story telling, just like on the 11/9/2001, when the real target was WTC 7, to hide elitist immoral endeavours, corruption
& the missing $$$TRILLIONS$$$ of tax payers money, 'mislaid' by the D.o.D. announced directly the day before by Rumsfeld, forgotten
? Before ramping the Surveillance States abilities in placing & employing "Parallel Platforms" on steroids, so that our secret
services can now employ terror & deploy terrorists at will .., against us, see ?
Plus ca change....
I remember on a similar note a 60 Minutes piece just prior to Clinton's humanitarian bombing of Serbian civilian infrastructure
(and long ago deleted, I'm sure) on a German free-lancer staging Kosovo atrocities in a Munich suburb, and having the German MSM
eating it up and asking for more. (WWII guilt assuagement at work, no doubt).
mark
Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate
interests.
That is their job.
That is what they do.
They have long since forfeited all credibility and integrity.
They have lied to us endlessly for decades and generations, from the Bayonetted Belgian Babies and Human Bodies Turned Into Soap
of WW1 to the Iraq Incubator Babies and Syrian Gas Attacks of more recent times.
You can no longer take anything at face value.
The default position has to be that every single word they print and every single word that comes out of their lying mouths is
untrue.
If they say it's snowing at the North Pole, you can't accept that without first going there and checking it out for yourself.
You can't accept anything that has not been independently verified.
This applies across the board.
All of the accepted historical narrative, including things like the holocaust.
And current Global Warming "science."
We know we have been lied to again and again and again.
So what else have we been lied to without us realising it?
mark
Come to think of it, I need to apologise to sex workers.
I have known quite a few of them who have quite high ethical and moral standards, certainly compared to the MSM.
And they certainly do less damage.
Vert few working girls have blood on their hands like the MSM.
Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.
Seamus Padraig
Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.
I heartily agree. Even if one disapproves morally of prostitution, how can it possibly be worse to sell your body than to sell
your soul?
Oliver
Quite. Checking things out for yourself is the way to go. Forget 'Peer Reviews', just as bent as the journalism Ulfkotte described.
DIY.
Mortgage
So natural, all it seems
Part II:
Bought Science
Part III:
Bought Health Services
mapquest directions
The video you shared with great info. I really like the information you share.
boxnovel
Gary Weglarz
I knew we were in dangerous new territory regarding government censorship when after waiting several years for Ulfkotte's best
selling book to finally be available in English – it suddenly, magically, disappeared completely – a vanishing act – and I couldn't
get so much as a response from, much less an explanation from, the would be publisher. Udo's book came at a time when it could
have made a difference countering the fact-free complete and total "fabrication of reality" by the U.S. and Western powers as
they have waged a brutal and ongoing neocolonial war on the world's poor under the guise of "fighting terrorism."
Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and
completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human
rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs,
politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used
to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice
is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities
that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order."
Ramdan
After watching the first 20 min I couldn't help but remembering this tale:
"The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who
lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have
to live on lentils.'
To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"."
which is also the reason why such a large part of humanity lives in voluntary servitude to power structures, living the dream,
the illusion of being free..
Ramdan
"English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalists" Suppressed?" at Global Research 2017!!
Just rechecked Amazon. Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News
by Udo Ulfkotte PH.D. The tag line reads.
Hard cover – currently unavailable; paperback cover – currently unavailable; Kindle edition – ?
Book burning anyone?
nottheonly1
No translation exists for this interview with Udo Ulfkotte on KenFM, the web site of Ken Jebsen. Ken Jebsen has been in the cross
hairs of the CIA and German agencies for his reporting of the truth. He was smeared and defamed by the same people that Dr. Ulfkotte
had written extensively about in his book 'Gekaufte Journalisten' ('Bought Journalists').
The reason why I add this link to the interview lies in the fact that Udo Ulfkotte speaks about an important part of Middle
Eastern and German history – a history that has been scrubbed from the U.S. and German populations. In the Iraq war against Iran
– that the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R. – German
chemical weapons were used under the supervision of the U.S. regime. The extend of the chemical weapons campaign was enormous
and to the present day, Iranians are born with birth defects stemming from the used of German weapons of mass destruction.
Dr. Ulfkotte rightfully bemoans, that every year German heads of state are kneeling for the Jewish victims of National socialism
– but not for the victims of German WMD's that were used against Iran. He stresses that the act of visual asking for forgiveness
in the case of the Jewish victims becomes hypocrisy, when 40 years after the Nazis reigned, German WMD's were used against Iran.
The German regime was in on the WMD attack on Iran. It was not something that happened because they had lost a couple of thousand
containers with WMDs. They delivered the WMD's to Iraq under U.S. supervision.
Ponder that. And there has never been an apology towards Iran, or compensations. Nada. Nothing. Instead, the vile rhetoric
and demagogery of every U.S. regime since has continued to paint Iran in the worst possible ways, most notably via incessant psychological
projection – accusing Iran of the war crimes and crimes against humanity the U.S. and its Western vassal regimes are guilty of.
Here is the interview that was recorded shortly before Udo Ulfkotte's death:
If enough people support the effort, I am willing to contact KenFM for the authorization to translate the interview and use
it for subtitles to the video. However, I can't do that on my own.
nottheonly1
Correction: the interview was recorded two years before his passing.
Antonym
the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R.
So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free.
nottheonly1
It would help if you would use your brain just once. 'Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired
outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You
are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep.
But then, with all the assaults by the unintelligence agencies, it does not come as a surprise when facts are twisted.
Antonym
Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the
get go. The timing of operation Barbarossa was brilliant though: it shocked Stalin into a temporary limbo as he had
his own aggressive plans.
Casandra2
This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting
attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order).
This approach has been assiduously applied, across the board, over many years, to the point were they now own and run everything
required to subjugate the 'human race' to the horrors of their psychopathic inclinations. They are presently holding the global
economy on hold until their AI population (social credit) control system/grid is in place before bringing the house down.
Needless to say, when this happens a disunited and frightened Global Population will be at their mercy.
If you wish to gain a full insight of what the Controlling Elite is about, and capable of, I recommend David Icke's latest
publication 'Trigger'. I know he's been tagged a 'nutter' over the past thirty years, but I reckon this book represents the 'gold
standard' in terms of generating awareness as a basis for launching a united global population counter-attack (given a great strategy)
against forces that can only be defined as pure 'EVIL'.
MASTER OF UNIVE
Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools
for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the
greater fools want. Engaging in compromise allows both parties to have complicit & explicit understanding that corruption
and falsehood are the tools of the trade. To all-of-a-sudden develop a conscience after decades of playing the part of a willing
participant is understandable in light of the guilt complex one must develop after screwing everyone in the world out of the critical
assessment we all need to obtain in order to make decisions regarding our futures.
Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least
the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have
instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management.
Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all
writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as
writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers
don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence
Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they
could get their greedy hands on at the time.
Developing a conscience late in life is too late.
May all that sell their souls to the Intel agencies understand that pond scum never had a conscience to begin with.
Once pond scum always pond scum.
MOU
nottheonly1
What is not addressed in this talk is the addictive nature of this sort of public relation writing. Journalism is something different
altogether. I know that, because I consider myself to be a journalist at heart – one that stopped doing it when the chalice was
offered to me. The problem is that one is not part of the cabal one day to another.
It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm
– always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other
name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society.
And I would also write a critique about a great restaurant – never paying a dime for a fantastic dinner. The point though is
that I would not write a good critique for a nasty place for money. I have never written anything but the truth – for which I
received sometimes as much as a bag full of the best rolls in the country.
Twisting the truth for any form of bribes is disgusting and attests of the lowest of any character.
MASTER OF UNIVE
Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is
involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can
to get what they want.
All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable
than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm.
If the devil offers inducements be sure to up the ante to outsmart the drunken sot.
I'm still quite annoyed about being called a "paid pro-Putin shill" on one of the Guardian's
comment sections. "Paid"! If only!
mark
I've been trying to get my KGB back pay for years. I wrote to the accounts dept. saying I'd
take roubles or bitcoin, but nothing has come through.
mark
We are all Russian assets now. I myself have been a Russian asset for years. I have had to do
Putin's bidding ever since he threatened to publish old KGB photographs of me having sex with
a rhinoceros.
Since then, I've been a Kremlin puppet, just like Trump. Gabbard and Jill
Stein.
Seamus Padraig
I am a Russian asset and I approve of this message!
This implicates State Department in the attempt to run a false flag operation. If we add that the State Department is the
key organization behind for color revolution against Trump that picture becomes even more disturbing. This is really a neocon
vipers nest.
Notable quotes:
"... This was because the public had already been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal of standing US Syria policy, as I noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun. ..."
"... "I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017," Cox told me on Twitter earlier today. ..."
"... And, like clockwork, on April 7 2018 dozens of civilians in Douma were killed in an incident which was quickly reported as a Syrian government chemical attack by all the usual establishment narrative managers on Syria , with everyone from the White Helmets to Charles Lister to Eliot Higgins to Julian Röpcke loudly flagging it on social media to draw the attention of mainstream news outlets who were slower to pick up the story. ..."
"... Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed, the US State Department declared it to have been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests. ..."
"... On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France launched an airstrike on the Syrian government as punishment for using chemical weapons, citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation could take place. ..."
"... The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018 published an interim report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits like Charles Lister who claimed that sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population." ..."
"... In May of this year, a leaked internal document from the OPCW investigation was published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government. ..."
"... The OPCW indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by clicking here . Establishment narrative managers had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work. ..."
"... "Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion ." ..."
"... "The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. " ..."
"... "The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact, acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported." ..."
"... "One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics were noted in the leaked study ." ..."
"... "Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to, or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma investigation." ..."
The Courage Foundation , an international
protection and advocacy group for whistleblowers, has
published the findings of a panel it
convened last week on the extremely suspicious behavior of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in its
investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria last year. After hearing an extensive presentation from a member of the
OPCW's Douma investigation team, the panel's members (including a world-renowned former OPCW Director General)
report that they are "unanimous in expressing
our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus
on 7 April 2018."
I'll get to the panel and its findings in a moment, but first I should provide some historical background so that readers who
aren't intimately familiar with this ongoing scandal can fully appreciate the significance of this new development.
In late March of last year, President Trump
publicly
stated that the US military would soon be withdrawing troops from Syria, causing some with an ear to the ground like
independent US congressional candidate Steve
Cox to predict that there would shortly be a false flag chemical weapons attack in that nation. This was because the public had
already
been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal
of standing US Syria policy, as I
noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun.
"I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017,"
Cox told me on Twitter earlier
today.
"Khan Shaykhun also occurred within days of the Trump Admin saying we're leaving Syria."
There was immediate skepticism, partly because
acclaimed journalists like Sy Hersh have
been highlighting plot holes in the official story about chemical weapons in Syria since 2013, partly because Assad would stand nothing
to gain and everything to lose by using a banned yet
highly ineffective
weapon in a battle he'd already essentially
won in that region, and partly because the people controlling things on the ground in Douma were the
Al Qaeda-linked
extremist group Jaysh-al Islam and the incredibly shady
narrative management operation known as the White Helmets. Those groups, unlike the Assad government, most certainly would stand
everything to gain by staging a chemical attack in the desperate hope that it would draw NATO powers into attacking the Syrian government
and perhaps saving their necks.
Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed,
the US State Department declared it to have
been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that
Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests.
On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France
launched an airstrike on the Syrian government
as punishment for using chemical weapons,
citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The
public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation
could take place.
The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018
published an interim
report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental
samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits
like Charles Lister who claimed that
sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW
issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly
implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter
account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted
at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed
chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population."
In May of this year, a leaked
internal document from the OPCW investigation was
published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report
published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment
said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability
both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the
forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government.
The OPCW
indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's
Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by
clicking here . Establishment narrative
managers
had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented
from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications
that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work.
Throughout this time, critical thinkers like myself have been aggressively smeared as deranged conspiracy theorists, war crimes
deniers and genocide deniers for expressing skepticism of the establishment-authorized narrative on Douma. Which takes us to today.
The Courage Foundation panel who met with the OPCW whistleblower consists of former OPCW Director General
José Bustani (whose highly successful peacemongering
once saw the lives of his
children threatened by John Bolton during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in an attempt to remove him from his position), WikiLeaks
editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson , Professor of
International Law Richard Falk , former British Army
Major General John Holmes , Dr Helmut
Lohrer of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, German professor
Dr Guenter Meyer of the Centre for Research on the Arab
World, and former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East Elizabeth Murray of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity.
So these are not scrubs. These are not "conspiracy theorists" or "Russian propagandists". These are highly qualified and reputable
professionals expressing deep concerns in the opaque and manipulative way the OPCW appears to have conducted its investigation into
the Douma incident. Some highlights from their joint
statement and analytical points are
quoted below, with my own emphasis added in bold:
"Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports,
we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma,
near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical
analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained
conclusion ."
"The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts
and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of
investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. "
~ Bustani
"A critical analysis of the
final report of the Douma
investigation left the panel in little doubt that conclusions drawn from each of the key evidentiary pillars of the investigation
(chemical analysis, toxicology, ballistics and witness testimonies,) are flawed and bear little relation to the facts. "
From the section on Chemical Analysis:
"The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking
gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in
the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact,
acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such
chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground
would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported."
"Although the report stresses the 'levels' of the chlorinated organic chemicals as a basis for its conclusions (para 2.6),
it never mentions what those levels were -- high, low, trace, sub-trace? Without providing data on the levels of these so-called
'smoking-gun' chemicals either for background or test samples, it is impossible to know if they were not simply due to background
presence . In this regard, the panel is disturbed to learn that quantitative results for the levels of 'smoking gun' chemicals
in specific samples were available to the investigators but this decisive information was withheld from the report ."
"The final report also acknowledges that the tell-tale chemicals supposedly indicating chlorine use, can also be generated
by contact of samples with sodium hypochlorite, the principal ingredient of household bleaching agent (para 8.15). This game-changing
hypothesis is, however, dismissed (and as it transpires, incorrectly) by stating no bleaching was observed at the site of investigation.
(' At both locations, there were no visible signs of a bleach agent or discoloration due to contact with a bleach agent' ). The
panel has been informed that no such observation was recorded during the on-site inspection and in any case dismissing the hypothesis
simply by claiming the non -observation of discoloration in an already dusty and scorched environment seems tenuous and unscientific
."
From the section on Toxicology:
"The toxicological studies also reveal inconsistencies, incoherence and possible scientific irregularities. Consultations with
toxicologists are reported to have taken place in September and October 2018 (para 8.87 and Annex 3), but no mention is made of
what those same experts opined or concluded. Whilst the final toxicological assessment of the authors states ' it is not possible
to precisely link the cause of the signs and symptoms to a specific chemical ' (para 9.6) the report nonetheless concludes there
were reasonable grounds to believe chlorine gas was the chemical (used as a weapon)."
"More worrying is the fact that the panel viewed documented evidence that showed other toxicologists had been consulted in
June 2018 prior to the release of the interim report. Expert opinions on that occasion were that the signs and symptoms observed
in videos and from witness accounts were not consistent with exposure to molecular chlorine or any reactive-chlorine-containing
chemical. Why no mention of this critical assessment, which contradicts that implied in the final report, was made is unclear
and of concern. "
From the section on Ballistic Studies:
"One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical
crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because
of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics
were noted in the leaked study ."
From the section titled "Exclusion of inspectors and attempts to obfuscate":
"Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the
inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to,
or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational
efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma
investigation."
Essentially neoliberal MSM were hijacked. Which was easy to do. The current anti-Russian campaign is conducted under
the direct guidance of MI6 and similar agencies
Notable quotes:
"... committee minutes note the secretary saying: "The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code." The minutes add: "This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it." ..."
"... These "considerable efforts" included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would "jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel". It was marked "private and confidential: not for publication, broadcast or use on social media". ..."
"... "The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] and the Telegraph published only a short". It continued by noting that only The Independent "followed up the substantive allegations". It added, "The BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story." ..."
"... The British security services had carried out more than a "symbolic act". It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies. ..."
"... The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair noted that after GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper's laptops "engagement with The Guardian had continued to strengthen". ..."
"... But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this, noting that "the process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice Committee] member". ..."
"... The Guardian's deputy editor went directly from the corporation's basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing. ..."
"... In November 2016, The Guardian published an unprecedented "exclusive" with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service. The article noted that this was the "first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service's 107-year history". It was co-written by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice Committee. This was not mentioned in the article. ..."
"... The MI5 chief was given copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an "increasingly aggressive" Russia. Johnson and his co-author noted, "Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the Snowden files." ..."
"... Just two weeks before the interview with MI6's chief was published, The Guardian itself reported on the high court stating that it would "hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service's decision not to charge MI6's former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004". ..."
"... The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these "exclusives" as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden's. They were possibly acting to prevent any revelations of this kind happening again. ..."
"... The Guardian's coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically. While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts. In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour concluded that the party "is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated every single United Kingdom race equality law." ..."
"... A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: "It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The Times rather than The Guardian." ..."
"... The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question: where does the next Snowden go? DM ..."
The Guardian, Britain's leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been
successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the 'security state', according to newly released
documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.
The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents
leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.
Snowden's bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and
its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of
mass surveillance
operated by both agencies.
According to minutes of meetings of the UK's Defence and Security Media Advisory
Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.
" This event was very concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the [committee] before publishing the
first tranche of information," state
minutes of a 7 November
2013 meeting at the MOD.
The DSMA Committee, more commonly known as the D-Notice Committee, is run by the MOD, where it meets every six months. A small
number of journalists are also invited to sit on the committee. Its
stated purpose is to "prevent inadvertent public disclosure
of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations". It can issue "notices" to the media to encourage them
not to publish certain information.
The committee is currently chaired by the MOD's director-general of security policy Dominic Wilson, who was
previously director of security and intelligence
in the British Cabinet Office. Its secretary is Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE, who
describes himself as an "accomplished, senior
ex-military commander with extensive experience of operational level leadership".
The D-Notice system describes itself as voluntary ,
placing no obligations on the media to comply with any notice issued. This means there should have been no need for the Guardian
to consult the MOD before publishing the Snowden documents.
Yet committee minutes note the secretary saying: "The Guardian was obliged to seek advice under the terms of the DA notice code." The minutes
add: "This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it."
' Considerable efforts'
These "considerable efforts" included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day after The Guardian published
the first documents – to all major UK media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would "jeopardise
both national security and possibly UK personnel". It was
marked "private and confidential: not
for publication, broadcast or use on social media".
Clearly the committee did not want its issuing of the notice to be publicised, and it was nearly successful. Only the right-wing
blog Guido Fawkes made it public.
At the time, according to the committee
minutes , the "intelligence
agencies in particular had continued to ask for more advisories [i.e. D-Notices] to be sent out". Such D-Notices were clearly seen
by the intelligence services not so much as a tool to advise the media but rather a way to threaten it not to publish further Snowden
revelations.
One night, amidst the first Snowden stories being published, the D-Notice Committee's then-secretary Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance
personally called Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian. Vallance "made clear his concern that The Guardian had failed to
consult him in advance before telling the world",
according to a Guardian journalist who interviewed Rusbridger.
Later in the year, Prime Minister David Cameron again used the D-Notice system as a threat to the media.
" I don't want to have to use injunctions or D-Notices or the other tougher measures," he
said
in a statement to MPs. "I think it's much better to appeal to newspapers' sense of social responsibility. But if they don't
demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for government to stand back and not to act."
The threats worked. The Press Gazette reported
at the time that "The FT [Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden revelations] and the Telegraph
published only a short". It continued by noting that only The Independent "followed up the substantive allegations". It added, "The
BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story."
The Guardian, however, remained uncowed.
According to the committee
minutes , the fact
The Guardian would not stop publishing "undoubtedly raised questions in some minds about the system's future usefulness". If the
D-Notice system could not prevent The Guardian publishing GCHQ's most sensitive secrets, what was it good for?
It was time to rein in The Guardian and make sure this never happened again.
GCHQ and laptops
The security services ratcheted up their "considerable efforts" to deal with the exposures. On 20 July 2013, GCHQ officials
entered The Guardian's offices at King's Cross in London, six weeks after the first Snowden-related article had been published. At the request of the government and security services, Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson, along with two others, spent
three hours destroying the laptops containing the Snowden documents.
The Guardian staffers, according to one of the newspaper's reporters,
brought "angle-grinders, dremels – drills with revolving bits – and masks". The reporter added, "The spy agency provided
one piece of hi-tech equipment, a 'degausser', which destroys magnetic fields and erases data."
Johnson
claims
that the destruction of the computers was "purely a symbolic act", adding that "the government and GCHQ knew, because we
had told them, that the material had been taken to the US to be shared with the New York Times. The reporting would go on. The episode
hadn't changed anything."
Yet the episode did change something. As the D-Notice Committee
minutes for November
2013 outlined: "Towards the end of July [as the computers were being destroyed], The Guardian had begun to seek and accept D-Notice
advice not to publish certain highly sensitive details and since then the dialogue [with the committee] had been reasonable and improving."
The British security services had carried out more than a "symbolic act". It was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The
Guardian was then the only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the US and British security bodies to receive
and cover their exposures, a situation which posed a challenge to security agencies.
The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The committee chair
noted that after
GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the newspaper's laptops "engagement with The Guardian had continued to strengthen".
Moreover, he added
, there were now "regular dialogues between the secretary and deputy secretaries and Guardian journalists". Rusbridger later
testified to the Home Affairs Committee that Air Vice-Marshal Vallance of the D-Notice committee and himself "collaborated"
in the aftermath of the Snowden affair and that Vallance had even "been at The Guardian offices to talk to all our reporters".
But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice
Committee itself. The committee minutes are explicit on this,
noting that "the
process had culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice
Committee] member".
At some point in 2013 or early 2014, Johnson – the same deputy editor who had smashed up his newspaper's computers under the watchful
gaze of British intelligence agents – was approached to take up a seat on the committee. Johnson attended his first meeting in
May 2014 and was
to remain on it until
October 2018
.
The Guardian's deputy editor went directly from the corporation's basement with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee
alongside the security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing.
A new editor
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger withstood intense pressure not to publish some of the Snowden revelations but agreed to Johnson
taking a seat on the D-Notice Committee as a tactical sop to the security services. Throughout his tenure, The Guardian continued
to publish some stories critical of the security services.
But in March 2015, the situation changed when the Guardian
appointed a new editor, Katharine Viner, who had less experience than Rusbridger of dealing with the security services. Viner
had started out on fashion and entertainment magazine Cosmopolitan and had no history in national security reporting. According
to insiders, she showed much less leadership during the Snowden affair than Janine Gibson in the US (Gibson was another
candidate
to be Rusbridger's successor).
Viner was then editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, which was
launched just two weeks before the first Snowden
revelations were published. Australia and New Zealand comprise two-fifths of the so-called
"Five Eyes" surveillance alliance exposed by Snowden.
This was an opportunity for the security services. It appears that their seduction began the following year.
In November 2016, The Guardian
published an unprecedented "exclusive" with Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service. The article
noted that this was the "first newspaper interview given by an incumbent MI5 chief in the service's 107-year history". It was co-written
by deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice
Committee. This was not mentioned in the article.
The MI5 chief was given
copious space to make claims about the national security threat posed by an "increasingly aggressive" Russia. Johnson
and his co-author noted, "Parker said he was talking to The Guardian rather than any other newspaper despite the publication of the
Snowden files."
Parker told the two reporters, "We recognise that in a changing world we have to change too. We have a responsibility to talk
about our work and explain it."
Four months after the MI5 interview, in March 2017, the Guardian
published another unprecedented "exclusive", this time with Alex Younger, the sitting chief of MI6, Britain's external
intelligence agency. This exclusive was awarded by the Secret Intelligence Service to The Guardian's investigations editor, Nick
Hopkins, who had been appointed 14 months previously.
The interview was the first Younger had given to a national newspaper and was again softball.
Titled "MI6 returns to 'tapping up' in an effort to recruit black and Asian officers", it focused almost entirely on the
intelligence service's stated desire to recruit from ethnic minority communities.
" Simply, we have to attract the best of modern Britain," Younger told Hopkins. "Every community from every part of Britain should
feel they have what it takes, no matter what their background or status."
Just two weeks before the interview with MI6's chief was published, The Guardian itself
reported on the high court stating that it would "hear an application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service's
decision not to charge MI6's former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant
wife who were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004".
None of this featured in The Guardian article, which did, however, cover discussions of whether the James Bond actor Daniel Craig
would qualify for the intelligence service. "He would not get into MI6," Younger told Hopkins.
More recently, in August 2019, The Guardian was
awarded yet another exclusive, this time with Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, Britain's most senior
counter-terrorism officer. This was Basu's " first major interview since taking up his post" the previous year and resulted in a
three-part series of articles, one of which was
entitled "Met police examine Vladimir Putin's role in Salisbury attack".
The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these "exclusives" as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralising
the only independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as Snowden's. They were possibly acting to prevent
any revelations of this kind happening again.
What, if any, private conversations have taken place between Viner and the security services during her tenure as editor are not
known. But in 2018, when Paul Johnson eventually left the D-Notice Committee, its chair, the MOD's Dominic Wilson,
praised Johnson who, he said, had been "instrumental in re-establishing links with The Guardian".
Decline in critical reporting
Amidst these spoon-fed intelligence exclusives, Viner also oversaw the breakup of The Guardian's celebrated investigative team,
whose muck-racking journalists were told to apply for other jobs outside of investigations.
One well-placed source
told the Press Gazette at the time that journalists on the investigations team "have not felt backed by senior
editors over the last year", and that "some also feel the company has become more risk-averse in the same period".
In the period since Snowden, The Guardian has lost many of its top investigative reporters who had covered national security issues,
notably Shiv Malik, Nick Davies, David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Ewen MacAskill and Ian Cobain. The few journalists who were
replaced were succeeded by less experienced reporters with apparently less commitment to exposing the security state. The current
defence and security editor, Dan Sabbagh,
started
at The Guardian as head of media and technology and has no history of covering national security.
" It seems they've got rid of everyone who seemed to cover the security services and military in an adversarial way," one current
Guardian journalist told us.
Indeed, during the last two years of Rusbridger's editorship, The Guardian published about 110 articles per year tagged as MI6
on its website. Since Viner took over, the average per year has halved and is decreasing year by year.
" Effective scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies -- epitomised by the Snowden scoops but also many other stories
-- appears to have been abandoned," a former Guardian journalist told us. The former reporter added that, in recent years, it "sometimes
seems The Guardian is worried about upsetting the spooks."
A second former Guardian journalist added: "The Guardian no longer seems to have such a challenging relationship with the intelligence
services, and is perhaps seeking to mend fences since Snowden. This is concerning, because spooks are always manipulative and not
always to be trusted."
While some articles critical of the security services still do appear in the paper, its "scoops" increasingly focus on issues
more acceptable to them. Since the Snowden affair, The Guardian does not appear to have published any articles based on an intelligence
or security services source that was not officially sanctioned to speak.
The Guardian has, by contrast,
published a steady stream of exclusives on the major official enemy of the security services, Russia, exposing Putin,
his friends and the work of its intelligence services and military.
In the Panama Papers leak in April 2016, which revealed how companies and individuals around the world were using an offshore
law firm to avoid paying tax, The Guardian's front-page launch scoop was authored by Luke Harding, who has received many security
service
tips focused on the "Russia threat", and was
titled "Revealed:
the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin".
Three sentences into the piece, however, Harding notes that "the president's name does not appear in any of the records" although
he insists that "the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured
without his patronage".
There was a much
bigger story
in the Panama Papers which The Guardian chose to downplay by leaving it to the following day. This concerned the father of
the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, who "ran an offshore fund that avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small
army of Bahamas residents – including a part-time bishop – to sign its paperwork".
We understand there was some argument between journalists about not leading with the Cameron story as the launch splash. Putin's
friends were eventually deemed more important than the Prime Minister of the country where the paper published.
Getting Julian Assange
The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator
during the early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.
One 2017 story came from investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who writes for The Guardian's sister paper The Observer,
titled "When Nigel Farage met Julian Assange". This concerned the visit of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage to the Ecuadorian embassy
in March 2017,
organised by the radio station LBC, for whom Farage worked as a presenter. Farage's producer at LBC accompanied Farage
at the meeting, but this was not mentioned by Cadwalladr.
Rather, she posited that this meeting was "potentially a channel of communication" between WikiLeaks, Farage and Donald Trump,
who were all said to be closely linked to Russia, adding that these actors were in a "political alignment" and that " WikiLeaks is,
in many ways, the swirling vortex at the centre of everything".
Yet Cadwalladr's one official on-the-record source for this speculation was a "highly placed contact with links to US intelligence",
who told her, "When the heat is turned up and all electronic communication, you have to assume, is being intensely monitored, then
those are the times when intelligence communication falls back on human couriers. Where you have individuals passing information
in ways and places that cannot be monitored."
It seems likely this was innuendo being fed to The Observer by an intelligence-linked individual to promote disinformation to
undermine Assange.
In 2018, however, The Guardian's attempted vilification of Assange was significantly stepped up. A new string of articles began
on 18 May 2018 with
one alleging Assange's "long-standing relationship with RT", the Russian state broadcaster. The series, which has been
closely
documented elsewhere, lasted for several months, consistently alleging with little or the most minimal circumstantial
evidence that Assange had ties to Russia or the Kremlin.
One story, co-authored again by Luke Harding,
claimed that "Russian diplomats held secret talks in London with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they
could help him flee the UK, The Guardian has learned". The former consul in the Ecuadorian embassy in London at this time, Fidel
Narvaez, vigorously denies the existence of any such "escape plot" involving Russia and is involved in a complaint process with The
Guardian for insinuating he coordinated such a plot.
This apparent mini-campaign ran until November 2018, culminating in a front-page
splash , based on anonymous sources, claiming that Assange had three secret meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy with Trump's
former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
This "scoop" failed all tests of journalistic credibility since it would have been impossible for anyone to have entered the highly
secured Ecuadorian embassy three times with no proof. WikiLeaks and others have strongly argued that the story was
manufactured
and it is telling that The Guardian has since failed to refer to it in its subsequent articles on the Assange case. The Guardian,
however, has still not retracted or apologised for the story which remains on its website.
The "exclusive" appeared just two weeks after Paul Johnson had been congratulated for "re-establishing links" between The Guardian
and the security services.
The string of Guardian articles, along with the vilification and smear stories about Assange elsewhere in the British media, helped
create the conditions for
a deal between Ecuador, the UK and the US to expel Assange from the embassy in April. Assange now sits in Belmarsh maximum-security
prison where he faces extradition to the US, and life in prison there, on charges under the Espionage Act.
Acting for the establishment
Another major focus of The Guardian's energies under Viner's editorship has been to attack the leader of the UK Labour Party,
Jeremy Corbyn.
The context is that Corbyn appears to have recently been a target of the security services. In 2015, soon after he was elected
Labour leader, the Sunday Times
reported a
serving general warning that "there would be a direct challenge from the army and mass resignations if Corbyn became prime minister".
The source told the newspaper: "The Army just wouldn't stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise
the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul, to prevent that."
On 20 May 2017, a little over two weeks before the 2017 General Election, the Daily Telegraph was
fed the story that "MI5 opened a file on Jeremy Corbyn amid concerns over his links to the IRA". It formed part of a Telegraph
investigation claiming to reveal "Mr Corbyn's full links to the IRA" and was sourced to an individual "close to" the MI5 investigation,
who said "a file had been opened on him by the early nineties".
The Metropolitan Police Special Branch was also said to be monitoring Corbyn in the same period.
Then, on the very eve of the General Election, the Telegraph gave space to an
article from Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of MI6, under a headline: "Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to this nation.
At MI6, which I once led, he wouldn't clear the security vetting."
Further, in September 2018, two anonymous senior government sources
told The Times that Corbyn had been "summoned" for a "'facts of life' talk on terror" by MI5 chief Andrew Parker.
Just two weeks after news of this private meeting was leaked by the government, the Daily Mail
reported another leak, this time revealing that "Jeremy Corbyn's most influential House of Commons adviser has been barred
from entering Ukraine on the grounds that he is a national security threat because of his alleged links to Vladimir Putin's 'global
propaganda network'."
The article concerned Andrew Murray, who had been working in Corbyn's office for a year but had still not received a security
pass to enter the UK parliament. The Mail reported, based on what it called "a senior parliamentary source", that Murray's application
had encountered "vetting problems".
Murray later heavily suggested that the security services had leaked the story to the Mail. "Call me sceptical if you must, but
I do not see journalistic enterprise behind the Mail's sudden capacity to tease obscure information out of the [Ukrainian security
service]," he wrote
in the New Statesman. He added, "Someone else is doing the hard work – possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt
if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows?"
Murray told us he was approached by the New Statesman after the story about him being banned from Ukraine was leaked. "However,"
he added, "I wouldn't dream of suggesting anything like that to The Guardian, since I do not know any journalists still working there
who I could trust."
The Guardian itself has run a remarkable number of news and comment articles criticising Corbyn since he was elected in 2015 and
the paper's clearly hostile stance has been widely
noted .
Given its appeal to traditional Labour supporters, the paper has probably done more to undermine Corbyn than any other. In particular,
its massive coverage of alleged widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has helped to disparage Corbyn more than other smears
carried in the media.
The Guardian's coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem
in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used politically. While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when
Corbyn became Labour leader, 0.06% of the Labour membership has been
investigated for anti-Semitic comments or posts. In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour
concluded
that the party "is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism. Further, it is the party that initiated
every single United Kingdom race equality law."
Analysis of two YouGov surveys, conducted in 2015 and 2017,
shows that anti-Semitic views held by Labour voters declined substantially in the first two years of Corbyn's tenure and
that such views were significantly more common among Conservative voters.
Despite this, since January 2016, The Guardian has published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-Semitism, an average of
around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. In the same period, The Guardian published
just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party's much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example,
found that nearly half of the Tory Party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister.
At the same time, some stories which paint Corbyn's critics in a negative light have been suppressed by The Guardian. According
to someone with knowledge of the matter, The Guardian declined to publish the results of a months-long critical investigation by
one of its reporters into a prominent anti-Corbyn Labour MP, citing only vague legal issues.
In July 2016, one of this article's authors emailed a Guardian editor asking if he could pitch an investigation about the first
attempt by the right-wing of the Labour Party to remove Corbyn, informing The Guardian of very good inside sources on those behind
the attempt and their real plans. The approach was rejected as being of no interest before a pitch was even sent.
A reliable publication?
On 20 May 2019, The Times newspaper
reported on a Freedom of Information request made by the Rendition Project, a group of academic experts working on torture
and rendition issues, which showed that the MOD had been "developing a secret policy on torture that allows ministers to sign off
intelligence-sharing that could lead to the abuse of detainees".
This might traditionally have been a Guardian story, not something for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times. According to one civil
society source, however, many groups working in this field no longer trust The Guardian.
A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: "It is significant that exclusive stories recently about British collusion in
torture and policy towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been passed to other papers including The
Times rather than The Guardian."
The Times published its scoop under a strong
headline , "Torture: Britain breaks law in Ministry of Defence secret policy". However, before the article was published,
the MOD fed The Guardian the same documents The Times were about to splash with, believing it could soften the impact of the revelations
by telling its side of the story.
The Guardian
posted its own article just before The Times, with a headline that would have pleased the government: "MoD says revised
torture guidance does not lower standards".
Its lead paragraph was a simple summary of the MOD's position: "The Ministry of Defence has insisted that newly emerged departmental
guidance on the sharing of intelligence derived from torture with allies, remains in line with practices agreed in the aftermath
of a series of scandals following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." However, an inspection of the documents showed this was clearly
disinformation.
The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state
to a platform trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once relatively independent media platform has
been largely neutralised by UK security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question: where does the next Snowden
go? DM
The Guardian did not respond to a request for comment.
Daily Maverick will formally launch Declassified – a new UK-focused investigation and analysis organisation run by the
authors of this article – in November 2019.
Matt Kennard is an investigative journalist and co-founder of Declassified . He was previously director of the
Centre for Investigative Journalism in London, and before that a reporter for the Financial Times in the US and UK. He is the author
of two books, Irregular Army and The Racket .
Mark Curtis is a leading UK foreign policy analyst, journalist and the author of six books including Web of
Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World and Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam .
The main achievement of neoliberal and imperial (warmongering) propaganda in the USA is that it achieved the complete,
undisputed dominance in MSM
Pot Calling the Kettle Black: "The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation machine is being unleashed via new platforms and continues to grow in Russia and
internationally. Russia seeks to destroy the very idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts as it attempts to influence opinions
about the United States and its allies. It is not an understatement to say that this new form of combat on the information battlefield
may be the fight of the 21st century."
Notable quotes:
"... Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to "court the compatible left." ..."
"... The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites. ..."
"... Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media (The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world. ..."
Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to "court the compatible left."
Right-wing and left-wing collaborators were needed to create a powerful propaganda apparatus that would be capable of hypnotizing
audiences into believing the myth of American exceptionalism and its divine right to rule the world.
The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites.
Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts
And Letters, and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers,
with particular emphasis on the complicity between the CIA and the famous literary journal, The Paris Review.
By the mid-1970s, as a result of the Church Committee hearings, it seemed as if the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. had been caught in flagrante
delicto and disgraced, confessed their sins, and resolved to go and sin no more.
Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media
(The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world.
It seemed as if all would be hunky-dory now with the bad boys purged from the American “free” press. Seemed to the most naïve,
that is, by which I mean the vast numbers of people who wanted to re-stick their heads in the sand and believe, as Ronald Reagan’s
team of truthtellers would announce, that it was “Morning in America” again with the free press reigning and the neo-conservatives,
many of whom had been “converted” from their leftist views, running things in Washington.
USAGM provides consistently accurate and compelling journalism that reflects the values of our society: freedom, openness,
democracy, and hope. Our guiding principles—enshrined in law—are to provide a reliable, authoritative, and independent source
of news that adheres to the strictest standards of journalism…
Russian Disinformation. And make no mistake, we are living through a global explosion of disinformation, state propaganda,
and lies generated by multiple authoritarian regimes around the world. The weaponization of information we are seeing today is
real. The Russian government and other authoritarian regimes engage in far-reaching malign influence campaigns across national
boundaries and language barriers.
The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation machine is being unleashed via new platforms and continues to grow in Russia and
internationally. Russia seeks to destroy the very idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts as it attempts to influence opinions
about the United States and its allies. It is not an understatement to say that this new form of combat on the information battlefield
may be the fight of the 21st century.
Then research the history of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, Radio and Television Marti, etc. You will
be reassured that Lansing’s July testimony was his job interview to head National Propaganda Radio.
Edward Curtin writes, and his writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He writes as a public
intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. He believes a non-committal sociology is an
impossibility and therefore sees all his work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding. His website is
edwardcurtin.com
Spot-on . Whenever I read this nonsense in the NYT or elsewhere I always ask myself the
same question ' Is this deliberate or are they really ignorant ? ' . I suspect the latter,
but I could be wrong.
The story goes like this: sometime during the height of the Cold War a group of American
journalists were hosting a visit to the U.S. of some of their Soviet counterparts.
After allowing their visitors some time to soak up the media zeitgeist stateside, most of
the Americans expected their guests to express unbridled envy at the professional liberties
they enjoyed in the Land of the Free Press.
One of the Russian scribes was indeed compelled to express his unabashed 'admiration' to his
hosts in particular, for the "far superior quality" of American "propaganda". Now it's
fair to say his hosts were taken aback by what was at best a backhanded compliment.
After some collegial 'piss-taking' about the stereotypes associated with Western "press
freedom" versus those of the controlled media in the Soviet system, one of the Americans called
on their Russian colleague to explain what he meant. In fractured English, he replied with the
following:
It's very simple. In Soviet Union, we don't believe our propaganda. In America, you
actually believe yours!"
"... Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name. ..."
"... In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets, also funded by the FO. ..."
"... "The Guardian is struggling for money" Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets. ..."
OffGuardian already covered the Global Media Freedom Conference, our article
Hypocrisy Taints UK's
Media Freedom Conference , was meant to be all there was to say. A quick note on the obvious hypocrisy of this event. But, in
the writing, I started to see more than that. This event is actually creepy. Let's just look back at one of the four "main themes"
of this conference:
Building trust in media and countering disinformation
"Countering disinformation"? Well, that's just another word for censorship. This is proven by their refusal to allow Sputnik or RT
accreditation. They claim RT "spreads disinformation" and they "countered" that by barring them from attending. "Building trust"?
In the post-Blair world of PR newspeak, "building trust" is just another way of saying "making people believe us" (the word usage
is actually interesting, building trust not earning trust). The whole conference is shot through with this language
that just feels off. Here is CNN's
Christiane Amanpour :
Our job is to be truthful, not neutral we need to take a stand for the truth, and never to create a false moral or factual equivalence."
Being "truthful not neutral" is one of Amanpour's
personal sayings
, she obviously thinks it's clever. Of course, what it is is NewSpeak for "bias". Refusing to cover evidence of The White
Helmets staging rescues, Israel arming ISIS or other inconvenient facts will be defended using this phrase – they will literally
claim to only publish "the truth", to get around impartiality and then set about making up whatever "truth" is convenient. Oh, and
if you don't know what "creating a false moral quivalence is", here I'll demonstrate: MSM: Putin is bad for shutting down critical
media. OffG: But you're supporting RT being banned and Wikileaks being shut down. BBC: No. That's not the same. OffG: It seems the
same. BBC: It's not. You're creating a false moral equivalence . Understand now? You "create a false moral equivalence" by
pointing out mainstream media's double standards. Other ways you could mistakenly create a "false moral equivalence": Bringing up
Gaza when the media talk about racism. Mentioning Saudi Arabia when the media preach about gay rights. Referencing the US coup in
Venezuela when the media work themselves into a froth over Russia's "interference in our democracy" Talking about the invasion of
Iraq. Ever. OR Pointing out that the BBC is state funded, just like RT. These are all no-longer flagrant examples of the media's
double standards, and if you say they are , you're "creating a false moral equivalence" and the media won't have to allow
you (or anyone who agrees with you) air time or column inches to disagree. Because they don't have a duty to be neutral or show both
sides, they only have a duty to tell "the truth" as soon as the government has told them what that is. Prepare to see both those
phrases – or variations there of – littering editorials in the Guardian and the Huffington Post in the coming months. Along
with people bemoaning how "fake news outlets abuse the notion of impartiality" by "being even handed between liars the truth tellers".
(I've been doing this site so long now, I have a Guardian-English dictionary in my head).
Equally dodgy-sounding buzz-phrases litter topics on the agenda. "Eastern Europe and Central Asia: building an integrated support
system for journalists facing hostile environments" , this means pumping money into NGOs to fund media that will criticize our
"enemies" in areas of strategic importance. It means flooding money into the anti-government press in Hungary, or Iran or (of course),
Russia. That is ALL it means. I said in my earlier article I don't know what "media sustainability" even means, but I feel I can
take a guess. It means "save the government mouthpieces". The Guardian is struggling for money, all print media are, TV news
is getting lower viewing figures all the time. "Building media sustainability" is code for "pumping public money into traditional
media that props up the government" or maybe "getting people to like our propaganda". But the worst offender on the list is, without
a doubt "Navigating Disinformation"
"Navigating Disinformation" was a 1 hour panel from the second day of the conference. You can watch it embedded above if you really
feel the need. I already did, so you don't have to. The panel was chaired by Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Foreign Minister. The
members included the Latvian Foreign Minister, a representative of the US NGO Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Ukrainian
Deputy Minister of Information
Have you guessed what "disinformation" they're going to be talking about? I'll give you a clue: It begins with R. Freeland, chairing
the panel, kicks it off by claiming that "disinformation isn't for any particular aim" . This is a very common thing for establishment
voices to repeat these days, which makes it all the more galling she seems to be pretending its is her original thought. The reason
they have to claim that "disinformation" doesn't have a "specific aim" is very simple: They don't know what they're going to call
"disinformation" yet. They can't afford to take a firm position, they need to keep their options open. They need to give themselves
the ability to describe any single piece of information or political opinion as "disinformation." Left or right. Foreign or domestic.
"Disinformation" is a weaponised term that is only as potent as it is vague. So, we're one minute in, and all "navigating disinformation"
has done is hand the State an excuse to ignore, or even criminalise, practically anything it wants to. Good start. Interestingly,
no one has actually said the word "Russia" at this point. They have talked about "malign actors" and "threats to democracy", but
not specifically Russia. It is SO ingrained in these people that "propaganda"= " Russian propaganda" that they don't need
to say it.
The idea that NATO as an entity, or the individual members thereof, could also use "disinformation" has not just been dismissed
it was literally never even contemplated. Next Freeland turns to Edgars Rinkēvičs, her Latvian colleague, and jokes about always
meeting at NATO functions. The Latvians know "more than most" about disinformation, she says. Rinkēvičs says disinformation is nothing
new, but that the methods of spreading it are changing then immediately calls for regulation of social media. Nobody disagrees. Then
he talks about the "illegal annexation of Crimea", and claims the West should outlaw "paid propaganda" like RT and Sputnik. Nobody
disagrees. Then he says that Latvia "protected" their elections from "interference" by "close cooperation between government agencies
and social media companies". Everyone nods along. If you don't find this terrifying, you're not paying attention. They don't say
it, they probably don't even realise they mean it, but when they talk about "close cooperation with social media networks", they
mean government censorship of social media. When they say "protecting" their elections they're talking about rigging them. It only
gets worse. The next step in the Latvian master plan is to bolster "traditional media".
The problems with traditional media, he says, are that journalists aren't paid enough, and don't keep up to date with all the
"new tricks". His solution is to "promote financing" for traditional media, and to open more schools like the "Baltic Centre of Media
Excellence", which is apparently a totally real thing .
It's a training centre which teaches young journalists about "media literacy" and "critical thinking". You can read their depressingly
predictable list of "donors" here . I truly wish I was joking. Next
up is Courtney Radsch from CPJ – a US-backed NGO, who notionally "protect journalists", but more accurately spread pro-US propaganda.
(Their token effort to "defend"
RT and Sputnik when they were barred from the conference was contemptible).
She talks for a long time without saying much at all. Her revolutionary idea is that disinformation could be countered if everyone
told the truth. Inspiring. Beata Balogova, Journalist and Editor from Slovakia, gets the ship back on course – immediately suggesting
politicians should not endorse "propaganda" platforms. She shares an anecdote about "a prominent Slovakian politician" who gave exclusive
interviews to a site that is "dubiously financed, we assume from Russia". They assume from Russia. Everyone nods.
It's like they don't even hear themselves.
Then she moves on to Hungary. Apparently, Orban has "created a propaganda machine" and produced "antisemitic George Soros posters".
No evidence is produced to back-up either of these claims. She thinks advertisers should be pressured into not giving money to "fake
news sites". She calls for "international pressure", but never explains exactly what that means. The stand-out maniac on this panel
is Emine Dzhaparova, the Ukrainian First Deputy Minister of Information Policy. (She works for the Ministry of Information – nicknamed
the Ministry of Truth, which was formed in 2014 to "counter lies about Ukraine". Even
The Guardian thought that sounded dodgy.)
She talks very fast and, without any sense of irony, spills out a story that shoots straight through "disinformation" and becomes
"incoherent rambling". She claims that Russian citizens are so brainwashed you'll never be able to talk to them, and that Russian
"cognitive influence" is "toxic like radiation." Is this paranoid, quasi-xenophobic nonsense countered? No. Her fellow panelists
nod and chuckle. On top of that, she just lies. She lies over and over and over again. She claims Russia is locking up Crimean Tartars
"just for being muslims", nobody questions her. She says the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, but doesn't mention that her
side is responsible for over 80% of civilian deaths.
She says only 30% of Crimeans voted in the referendum, and that they were "forced". A fact not supported by
any polls done by either side in the last
four years, and any referenda held
on the peninsula any time in the last last 30 year. It's simply a lie. Nobody asks her about the journalists
killed in Ukraine since their
glorious Maidan Revolution . Nobody questions the fact that she works for something called the "Ministry of Information". Nobody
does anything but nod and smile as the "countering disinformation" panel becomes just a platform for spreading total lies.
When everyone on the panel has had their ten minutes on the soapbox, Freeland asks for recommendations for countering this "threat"
– here's the list:
Work to distinguish "free speech" from "propaganda", when you find propaganda there must be a "strong reaction".
Pressure advertisers to abandon platforms who spread misinformation.
Regulate social media.
Educate journalists at special schools.
Start up a "Ministry of Information" and have state run media that isn't controlled, like in Ukraine.
This is the Global Conference on Media Freedom and all these six people want to talk about is how to control what can be said,
and who can say it. They single only four countries out for criticism: Hungary, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Russia .and Russia takes
up easily 90% of that. They mention only two media outlets by name: RT and Sputnik. This wasn't a panel on disinformation, it was
a public attack forum – a month's worth of 2 minutes of hate. These aren't just shills on this stage, they are solid gold idiots,
brainwashed to the point of total delusion.
They are the dangerous glassy eyes of a Deep State that never questions itself, never examines itself, and will do anything it
wants, to anyone it wants whilst happily patting itself on the back for its superior morality. They don't know, they don't care.
They're true believers. Terrifyingly dead inside. Talking about state censorship and re-education camps under a big sign that says
"Freedom". And that's just one talk. Just one panel in a 2 day itinerary filled to the brim with similarly soul-dead servants of
authority. Truly, perfectly Orwellian.
Read and be appalled at what America is up to .keep for further reference. We are in danger.
Tim Jenkins
It would serve Ms. Amanpour well, to relax, rewind & review her own interview with Sergei Lavrov:-
Then she might see why Larry King could stomach the appalling corporate dictatorship, even to the core of False & Fake recording
of 'our' "History of the National Security State" , No More
Amanpour was forced to laugh uncontrollably, when confronted with Lavrov's humorous interpretations of various legal aspects
of decency & his Judgement of others' politicians and 'Pussy Riots' >>> if you haven't seen it, it is to be recommended, the whole
interview, if nothing else but to study the body language and micro-facial expressions, coz' a belly up laugh is not something
anybody can easily control or even feign that first spark of cognition in her mind, as she digests Lavrov's response :- hilarious
Einstein
A GE won't solve matters since we have a Government of Occupation behind a parliament of puppets.
Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which
is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name.
In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business
of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign
countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets,
also funded by the FO.
Pryce's ventriloquist's dummy in parliament, the pompous Alan Duncan, announced another £10 million of public money for this
odious brainwashing programme.
Tim Jenkins
That panel should be nailed & plastered over, permanently:-
and as wall paper, 'Abstracts of New Law' should be pasted onto a collage of historic extracts from the Guardian, in
offices that issue journalistic licenses, comprised of 'Untouchables' :-
A professional habitat, to damp any further 'Freeland' amplification & resonance,
of negative energy from professional incompetence.
Francis Lee
Apropos of the redoubtable Ms Freeland, Canada's Foreign Secretary.
The records now being opened by the Polish government in Warsaw reveal that Freeland's maternal grandfather Michael (Mikhailo)
Chomiak was a Nazi collaborator from the beginning to the end of the war. He was given a powerful post, money, home and car by
the German Army in Cracow, then the capital of the German administration of the Galician region. His principal job was editor
in chief and publisher of a newspaper the Nazis created. His printing plant and other assets had been stolen from a Jewish newspaper
publisher, who was then sent to die in the Belzec concentration camp. During the German Army's winning phase of the war, Chomiak
celebrated in print the Wehrmacht's "success" at killing thousands of US Army troops. As the German Army was forced into retreat
by the Soviet counter-offensive, Chomiak was taken by the Germans to Vienna, where he continued to publish his Nazi propaganda,
at the same time informing for the Germans on other Ukrainians. They included fellow Galician Stepan Bandera, whose racism against
Russians Freeland has celebrated in print, and whom the current regime in Kiev has turned into a national hero.
Those Ukrainian 'Refugees' admitted to Canada in 1945 were almost certainly members of the 14th Waffen SS Division Galizia 1.
These Ukie collaboraters – not to be confused with the other Ukie Nazi outfit – Stepan Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army -were
held responsible for the massacre of many Poles in the Lviv area the most infamous being carried out in the Polish village of
Huta Pienacka. In the massacre, the village was destroyed and between 500] and 1,000 of the inhabitants were killed. According
to Polish accounts, civilians were locked in barns that were set on fire while those attempting to flee were killed. That's about
par for the course.
Canada's response was as follows:
The Canadian Deschênes Commission was set up to investigate alleged war crimes committed by the collaborators
Memorial to SS-Galizien division in Chervone, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine
The Canadian "Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes" of October 1986, by the Honourable Justice Jules Deschênesconcluded that in
relation to membership in the Galicia Division:
''The Galicia Division (14. Waffen grenadier division der SS [gal.1]) should not be indicted as a group. The members of Galicia
Division were individually screened for security purposes before admission to Canada. Charges of war crimes of Galicia Division
have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this
Commission. Further, in the absence of evidence of participation or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia
Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.''
However, the Commission's conclusion failed to acknowledge or heed the International Military Tribunal's verdict at the Nuremberg
Trials, in which the entire Waffen-SSorganisation was declared a "criminal organization" guilty of war crimes. Also, the Deschênes
Commission in its conclusion only referenced the division as 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr.1), thus in legal
terms, only acknowledging the formation's activity after its name change in August 1944, while the massacre of Poles in Huta Pieniacka,
Pidkamin and Palikrowy occurred when the division was called SS Freiwilligen Division "Galizien". Nevertheless, a subsequent review
by Canada's Minister of Justice again confirmed that members of the Division were not implicated in war crimes.
Yes, the west looks after its Nazis and even makes them and their descendants political figureheads.
mark
Most of these people are so smugly and complacently convinced of their own moral superiority that they just can't see the hypocrisy
and doublethink involved in the event.
Meanwhile Owen Jones has taken to Twitter to rubbish allegations that a reign of terror exists at Guardian Towers – the socialist
firebrand is quoted as saying 'journalists are free to say whatever they like, so long as it doesn't stray too far from Guardian-groupthink'.
Good analysis Kit, of the cognitive dissonant ping pong being played out by Nazi sympathisers such as Hunt and Freeland.
The echo chamber of deceit is amplified again by the selective use of information and the ignoring of relevant facts, such
as the miss reporting yesterday by Reuters of the Italian Neo-Nazi haul of weapons by the police, having not Russian but Ukrainian
links.
Not a word in the WMSM about this devious miss-reporting as the creation of fake news in action. But what would you expect?
Living as I do in Russia I can assure anyone reading this that the media freedom here is on a par with the West and somewhat
better as there is no paranoia about a fictitious enemy – Russians understand that the West is going through an existential crisis
(Brexit in the UK, Trump and the Clinton war of sameness in the US and Macron and Merkel in the EU). A crisis of Liberalism as
the failed life-support of capitalism. But hey, why worry about the politics when there is bigger fish to fry. Such as who will
pay me to dance?
The answer is clear from what Kit has writ. The government will pay the piper. How sweet.
I'd like to thank Kit for sitting through such a turgid masquerade and as I'm rather long in the tooth I do remember the old
BBC schools of journalism in Yelsin's Russia. What I remember is that old devious Auntie Beeb was busy training would be hopefuls
in the art of discretion regarding how the news is formed, or formulated.
In other words your audience. And it ain't the public
The British government's "Online Harms" White Paper has a whole section devoted to "disinformation" (ie, any facts, opinions,
analyses, evaluations, critiques that are critical of the elite's actual disinformation). If these proposals become law, the government
will have effective control over the Internet and we will be allowed access to their disinformation, shop and watch cute cat videos.
Question This
The liberal news media & hypocrisy, who would have ever thought you'd see those words in the same sentence.
But what do you expect from professional liars, politicians & 'their' free press?
Can this shit show get any worse? Yes, The other day I wrote to my MP regards the SNP legislating against the truth, effectively
making it compulsory to lie! Mr Blackford as much as called me a transphobic & seemed to go to great length publishing his neo-liberal
ideological views in some scottish rag, on how right is wrong & fact is turned into fiction & asked only those that agreed with
him contact him.
Tim Jenkins
"The science or logical consistency of true premise, cannot take place or bear fruit, when all communication and information is
'marketised and weaponised' to a mindset of possession and control."
B.Steere
Mikalina
I saw, somewhere (but can't find it now) a law or a prospective law which goes under the guise of harassment of MPs to include
action against constituents who 'pester' them.
I only emailed him once! That's hardly harassment. Anyway I sent it with proton-mail via vpn & used a false postcode using only
my first name so unlikely my civil & sincere correspondence will see me locked up for insisting my inalienable rights of freedom
of speech & beliefs are protected. But there again the state we live in, i may well be incarcerated for life, for such an outrageous
expectation.
Where to?
"The Guardian is struggling for money"
Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets.
Harry Stotle
Its the brazen nature of the conference that is especially galling, but what do you expect when crooks and liars no longer feel
they even have to pretend?
Nothing will change so long as politicians (or their shady backers) are never held to account for public assets diverted toward
a rapacious off-shore economic system, or the fact millions of lives have been shattered by the 'war on terror' and its evil twin,
'humanatarian regime change' (while disingenuous Labour MPs wail about the 'horrors' of antisemitism rather than the fact their
former leader is a key architect of the killings).
Kit remains a go-to voice when deconstructing claims made by political figures who clearly regard the MSM as a propaganda vehicle
for promoting western imperialism – the self-satisfied smugness of cunts like Jeremy Cunt stand in stark contrast to a real journalist
being tortured by the British authorities just a few short miles away.
It's a sligtly depressing thought but somebody has the unenviable task of monitoring just how far our politicians have drifted
from the everyday concerns of the 'just about managing' and as I say Mr Knightly does a fine job in informing readers what the
real of agenda of these media love-ins are actually about – it goes without saying a very lengthy barge pole is required when
the Saudis are invited but not Russia.
Where to?
This Media Freedom Conference is surely a creepy theatre of the absurd.
It is a test of what they can get away with.
Mikalina
Yep. Any soviet TV watcher would recognise this immediately. Message? THIS is the reality – and you are powerless.
mark
When are they going to give us the Ministry of Truth we so desperately need?
"... We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.' ..."
"... Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of the public. ..."
"... All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria, blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included bankers, financiers, industrialists, and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the ill-fated beer-hall putsch. (See here , and here .) ..."
"... The purpose of this propaganda barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering business interests.' ..."
Here was, of course, another surreal spectacle, this time courtesy of one of the Deep State's most dangerous, reviled, and divisive
figures, a notable protagonist in the Russia-Gate conspiracy, and America's most senior diplomat no less.
Not only is it difficult to accept that the former CIA Director actually believes what he is saying, well might we ask, "Who can
believe Mike Pompeo?"
And here's also someone whose manifest cynicism, hypocrisy, and chutzpah would embarrass the much-derided
scribes and Pharisees of Biblical days.
We have Pompeo on record recently in a rare moment of
honesty admitting – whilst laughing his ample ass off, as if recalling some "Boy's Own Adventure" from his misspent youth with a
bunch of his mates down at the local pub – that under his watch as CIA Director:
We lied, cheated, we stole we had entire training courses.'
It may have been one of the few times in his wretched existence that Pompeo didn't speak with a forked tongue.
At all events, his candour aside, we can assume safely that this reactionary, monomaniacal, Christian Zionist 'end-timer' passed
all the Company's "training courses" with flying colours.
According to Matthew Rosenberg
of the New York Times, all this did not stop Pompeo however from name-checking Wikileaks when it served his own interests. Back
in 2016 at the height of the election campaign, he had ' no compunction about pointing people toward emails stolen* by Russian hackers
from the Democratic National Committee and then posted by WikiLeaks."
[NOTE: Rosenberg's omission of the word "allegedly" -- as in "emails allegedly stolen" -- is a dead giveaway of bias on his part
(a journalistic Freudian slip perhaps?), with his employer
being one of those MSM marques leading the charge with the "Russian Collusion" 'story'. For a more insightful view of the source
of these emails and the skullduggery and thuggery that attended Russia-Gate, readers are encouraged to
check this out.]
And this is of course The Company we're talking about, whose past and present relationship with the media might be summed up in
two words:
Operation Mockingbird (OpMock). Anyone vaguely familiar with the well-documented Grand Deception that was OpMock, arguably the
CIA's most enduring, insidious, and successful
psy-ops gambit, will know what
we're talking about. (See
here ,
here ,
here , and
here .) At its most basic, this operation was all about propaganda and censorship, usually operating in tandem to ensure all
the bases are covered.
After opining that the MSM is 'totally infiltrated' by the CIA and various other agencies, for his part former NSA whistleblower
William Binney recently added , ' When it
comes to national security, the media only talk about what the administration wants you to hear, and basically suppress any other
statements about what's going on that the administration does not want get public. The media is basically the lapdogs for the government.'
We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.'
In order to provide a broader and deeper perspective, we should now consider the views of a few others on the subjects at hand,
along with some history. In a 2013 piece musing on the modern significance of the practice, my compatriot John Pilger
ecalled a time when he met
Leni Riefenstahl
back in 70s and asked her about her films that 'glorified the Nazis'.
Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger
noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's
spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the
"submissive void" of the public.
All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria,
blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also
impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included
bankers, financiers, industrialists,
and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the
ill-fated
beer-hall
putsch. (See
here , and here .)
" Triumph " apparently still resonates today. To the surprise of few one imagines, such was the impact of the film -- as casually
revealed in the excellent 2018 Alexis Bloom documentary Divide and
Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes -- it elicited no small amount of admiration from arguably the single most influential propagandist
of recent times.
[Readers might wish to check out Russell Crowe's recent portrayal of Ailes in Stan's mini-series
The Loudest Voice , in my view one the best performances of the man's career.]
In a recent piece unambiguously titled "Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems", my other compatriot Caitlin Johnstone also
had a few things to
say about the subject, echoing Orwell when she observed it was all about "controlling the narrative".
Though I'd suggest the greater "root" problem is our easy propensity to ignore this reality, pretend it doesn't or won't affect
us, or reject it as conspiratorial nonsense, in this, of course, she's correct. As she cogently observes,
I write about this stuff for a living, and even I don't have the time or energy to write about every single narrative control
tool that the US-centralised empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them emerging too damn
fast, because they're just that damn crucial for maintaining existing power structures.'
Fittingly, in a discussion encompassing amongst other things history, language, power, and dissent, he opined, ' Determining how
individuals communicate is' an objective which represents for the power elites 'the best chance' [they] have to control what people
think. This translates as: The more control 'we' have over what the proles think, the more 'we' can reduce the inherent risk for
elites in democracy.
' Clumsy men', Saul went on to say, 'try to do this through power and fear. Heavy-handed men running heavy-handed systems attempt
the same thing through police-enforced censorship. The more sophisticated the elites, the more they concentrate on creating intellectual
systems which control expression through the communications structures. These systems require only the discreet use of censorship
and uniformed men.'
In other words, along with assuming it is their right to take it in the first place, ' those who take power will always try to
change the established language ', presumably to better facilitate their hold on it and/or legitimise their claim to it.
For Oliver Boyd-Barrett, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open
exchange of ideas.' Yet for the author of the recently published
RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media , 'No such infrastructure exists.'
The mainstream media he says, is 'owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates'
that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates:
The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies
that are free of the shackles of US plutocratic self-regard is also well documented.'
Of course the word "inability" suggests the MSM view themselves as having some responsibility for maintaining such an egalitarian
news and information environment. They don't of course, and in truth, probably never really have! A better word would be "unwilling",
or even "refusal". The corporate media all but epitomise the " plutocratic self-regard" that is characteristic of "oligopoly capitalism".
Indeed, the MSM collectively functions as advertising, public relations/lobbying entities for Big Corp, in addition to acting
as its Praetorian bodyguard , protecting their secrets,
crimes, and lies from exposure. Like all other companies they are beholden to their shareholders (profits before truth and people),
most of whom it can safely be assumed are no strangers to "self-regard", and could care less about " histories, perspectives and
vocabularies" that run counter to their own interests.
It was Aussie social scientist Alex Carey who
pioneered the study of nationalism ,
corporatism , and moreso for our purposes herein, the
management (read: manipulation) of public opinion, though all three have important links (a story for another time). For Carey, the
following conclusion was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that
we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' This former farmer
from Western Australia became one of the world's acknowledged experts on propaganda and the manipulation of the truth.
Prior to embarking on his academic career, Carey was a successful sheep
grazier . By all accounts, he was a first-class judge of the
animal from which he made his early living, leaving one to ponder if this expertise gave him a unique insight into his main area
of research!
In any event, Carey in time sold the farm and travelled to the U.K. to study psychology, apparently a long-time ambition. From
the late fifties until his death in 1988, he was a senior lecturer in psychology and industrial relations at the Sydney-based University
of New South Wales, with his research being lauded by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, both of whom have had a thing
or three to say over the years about The Big Shill. In fact such was his admiration, Pilger
described him as "a second Orwell", which in anyone's lingo
is a big call.
In fact, for anyone with an interest in how public opinion is moulded and our perceptions are managed and manipulated, in whose
interests they are done so and to what end, it is as essential reading as any of the work of other more famous names. This tome came
complete with a foreword by Chomsky, so enamoured was the latter of Carey's work.
For Carey, the three "most significant developments" in the political economy of the twentieth century were:
the growth of democracy the growth of corporate power; and the growth of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against
democracy.
For Carey, it is an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is 'distinctive'
of totalitarian regimes. Yet as he stresses: the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda
is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is
vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not).' In this context, 'conventional
wisdom" becomes conventional ignorance; as for "common sense", maybe not so much.
The purpose of this propaganda
barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as
possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic
right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering
business interests.'
An extreme example of this view playing itself right under our noses and over decades was the cruel fiction of the "
trickle down effect " (TDE) -- aka the 'rising tide that would lift all yachts' -- of
Reaganomics . One of several mantras that defined Reagan's
overarching political shtick, the TDE was by any measure, decidedly more a torrent than a trickle, and said "torrent" was going up
not down. This reality as we now know was not in Reagan's glossy economic brochure to be sure, and it may have been because the Gipper
confused his prepositions and verbs.
Yet as the GFC of 2008 amply demonstrated, it culminated in a free-for all, dog eat dog, anything goes, everyman for himself form
of cannibal (or anarcho) capitalism -- an updated, much
improved version of the no-holds-barred mercenary mercantilism much reminiscent of the
Gilded Age and the
Robber Barons who 'infested' it, only one
that doesn't just eat its young, it eats itself!
Making the World Safe for Plutocracy
In the increasingly dysfunctional, one-sided political economy we inhabit then, whether it's widgets or wars or anything in between,
few people realise the degree to which our opinions, perceptions, emotions, and views are shaped and manipulated by propaganda (and
its similarly 'evil twin' censorship ,) its most adept practitioners, and those elite, institutional, political, and corporate entities
that seek out their expertise.
It is now just over a hundred years since the practice of propaganda took a giant leap forward, then in the service of persuading
palpably reluctant Americans that the war raging in Europe at the time was their war as well.
This was at a time when Americans had just voted their then-president
Woodrow Wilson back into office for a second term, a victory
largely achieved on the back of the promise he'd
"keep us out of the War." Americans were
very much in what was one of their most
isolationist
phases , and so Wilson's promise resonated with them.
But over time they were convinced of the need to become involved by a distinctly different appeal to their political sensibilities.
This "appeal" also dampened the isolationist mood, one which it has to be said was not embraced by most of the political, banking,
and business elites of the time, most of whom stood to lose big-time if the Germans won, and/or who were already profiting or benefitting
from the business of war.
For a president who "kept us out of the war", this wasn't going to be an easy 'pitch'. In order to sell the war the president
established the Committee on Public Information
(aka the Creel Committee) for the purposes of publicising the rationale for the war and from there, garnering support for it
from the general public.
Either way, Bernays 'combined their perspectives and synthesised them into an applied science', which he then 'branded' "public
relations".
For its part the Creel committee struggled with its brief from the off; but Bernays worked with them to persuade Americans their
involvement in the war was justified -- indeed necessary -- and to that end he devised the brilliantly inane slogan,
"making the world safe for democracy"
.
Thus was born arguably the first
great propaganda catch-phrases of the modern era, and certainly one of the most portentous. The following sums up Bernays's unabashed
mindset:
The conscious, intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power
of our country.'
The rest is history (sort of), with Americans becoming more willing to not just support the war effort but encouraged to view
the Germans and their allies as evil brutes threatening democracy and freedom and the 'American way of life', however that might've
been viewed then. From a geopolitical and historical perspective, it was an asinine premise of course, but nonetheless an extraordinary
example of how a few well chosen words tapped into the collective psyche of a country that was decidedly opposed to any U.S involvement
in the war and turned that mindset completely on its head.
' [S]aving the world for democracy' (or some 'cover version' thereof) has since become America's positioning statement, 'patriotic'
rallying cry, and the "Get-out-of-Jail Free" card for its war and its white collar criminal clique.
At all events it was by any measure, a stroke of genius on Bernays's part; by appealing to people's basic fears and desires, he
could engineer consent on a mass scale. It goes without saying it changed the course of history in more ways than one. That the U.S.
is to this day still using a not dissimilar meme to justify its
"foreign entanglements" is testament to both its utility and durability.
The reality as we now know was markedly different of course. They have almost always been about power, empire, control, hegemony,
resources, wealth, opportunity, profit, dispossession, keeping existing capitalist structures intact and well-defended, and crushing
dissent and opposition.
The Bewildered Herd
It is instructive to note that the template for 'manufacturing consent' for war had already been forged by the British. And the
Europeans did not 'sleepwalk'
like some " bewildered herd ' into this conflagration.
For twenty years prior to the outbreak of the war in 1914, the then stewards of the British Empire had been diligently preparing
the ground for what they viewed as a preordained clash with their rivals for empire the Germans.
To begin with, contrary to the opinion of the general populace over one hundred years later, it was not the much touted German
aggression and militarism, nor their undoubted imperial ambitions, which precipitated its outbreak. The stewards of the British Empire
were not about to let the Teutonic upstarts chow down on their imperial lunch as it were, and set about unilaterally and preemptively
crushing Germany and with it any ambitions it had for creating its own imperial domain in competition with the Empire upon which
Ol' Sol never set.
The "Great War" is worth noting here for other reasons. As documented so by Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty in their two books
covering the period from 1890-1920, we learn much about propaganda, which attest to its extraordinary power, in particular its
power to distort
reality en masse in enduring and subversive ways.
In reality, the only thing "great" about World War One was the degree to which the masses fighting for Britain were conned via
propaganda and censorship into believing this war was necessary, and the way the official narrative of the war was sustained for
posterity via the very same means. "Great" maybe, but not in a good way!
The horrendous carnage and destruction that resulted from it was of course unprecedented, the global effects of which linger on
now well over one hundred years later.
Such was the
enduring power
of the propaganda that today most folks would have great difficulty in accepting the following; this is a short summary of historical
realities revealed by Macgregor and Docherty that are at complete odds with the official narrative, the political discourse, and
the school textbooks:
It was Great Britain (supported by France and Russia) and not Germany who was the principal aggressor in the events and actions that
let to the outbreak of war; The British had for twenty years prior to 1914 viewed Germany as its most dangerous economic and imperial
rival, and fully anticipated that a war was inevitable; In the U.K. and the U.S., various factions worked feverishly to ensure the
war went on for as long as possible, and scuttled peacemaking efforts from the off; key truths about this most consequential of geopolitical
conflicts have been concealed for well over one hundred years, with no sign the official record will change; very powerful forces
(incl. a future US president) amongst U.S. political, media, and economic elites conspired to eventually convince an otherwise unwilling
populace in America that U.S. entry onto the war was necessary; those same forces and many similar groups in the U.K. and Europe
engaged in everything from war profiteering, destruction/forging of war records, false-flag ops, treason, conspiracy to wage aggressive
war, and direct efforts to prolong the war by any means necessary, many of which will rock folks to their very core.
But peace was not on the agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so embarrassing and costly, some key players in the
British government were willing to talk about peace. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be thrown under
the bus. The unelected European leaders had one common bond: They would fight Germany until she was crushed.
Prolonging the Agony details how this secret cabal organised to this end the change of government without a single vote being
cast. David Lloyd George was promoted to prime minister
in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister
in France. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite leader, Lord
Alfred Milner into power at the very inner-core of the
decision-makers in British politics.
Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The men entrusted with the task would keep going till
the end and their place-men were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and America.
Propaganda Always Wins
But just as the pioneering adherents of propaganda back in the day might never have dreamt how sophisticated and all-encompassing
the practice would become, nor would the citizenry at large have anticipated the extent to which the industry has facilitated an
entrenched, rapacious plutocracy at the expense of our economic opportunity, our financial and material security, our physical, social
and cultural environment, our values and attitudes, and increasingly, our basic democratic rights and freedoms.
We now live in the Age of the Big Shill -- cocooned in a submissive void no less -- an era where nothing can be taken on face
value yet where time and attention constraints (to name just a few) force us to do so; [where] few people in public life can be taken
at their word; where unchallenged perceptions become accepted reality; where 'open-book' history is now incontrovertible not-negotiable,
upon pain of imprisonment fact; where education is about uniformity, function, form and conformity, all in the service of imposed
neo-liberal ideologies embracing then prioritising individual -- albeit dubious -- freedoms.
More broadly, it's the "Roger Ailes" of this world -- acting on behalf of the power elites who after all are their paymasters
-- who create the intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures, whilst ensuring these systems
require only 'the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.'
They are the shapers and moulders of the discourse that passes for the accepted lingua franca of the increasingly globalised,
interconnected, corporatised political economy of the planet. Throughout this process they 'will always try to change the established
language.'
And we can no longer rely on our elected representatives to honestly represent us and our interests. Whether this decision making
is taking place inside or outside the legislative process, these processes are well and truly in the grip of the banks and financial
institutions and transnational organisations. In whose interests are they going to be more concerned with?
We saw this all just after the
Global Financial Crisis
(GFC) when the very people who brought the system to the brink, made billions off the dodge for their banks and millions for
themselves, bankrupted hundreds of thousands of American families, were called upon by the U.S. government to fix up the mess, and
to all intents given a blank cheque to so do.
That the U.S. is at even greater risk now of economic
implosion is something few serious pundits would dispute, and a testament to the effectiveness of the snow-job perpetrated upon Americans
regarding the causes, the impact, and the implications of the 2008 meltdown going forward.
In most cases, one accepts almost by definition such disconnects (read: hidden agendas) are the rule rather than the exception,
hence the multi-billion foundation -- and global reach and impact -- of the propaganda business. This in itself is a key indicator
as to why organisations place so much importance on this aspect of managing their affairs.
At the very least, once corporations saw how the psychology of persuasion could be leveraged to manipulate consumers and politicians
saw the same with the citizenry and even its own workers, the growth of the industry was assured.
As Riefenstahl noted during her chinwag with Pilger after he asked if those embracing the "submissive void" included the liberal,
educated bourgeoisie? " Everyone ," she said.
By way of underscoring her point, she added enigmatically: 'Propaganda always wins if you allow it'.
Greg Maybury is a freelance writer based in Perth, Australia. His main areas of interest are American history and politics
in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military, and geopolitical affairs. For 5 years he has regularly
contributed to a diverse range of news and opinion sites, including OpEd News, The Greanville Post, Consortium News, Dandelion Salad,
Global Research, Dissident Voice, OffGuardian, Contra Corner, International Policy Digest, the Hampton Institute, and others.
nottheonly1
This brilliant essay is proof of the reflective nature of the Universe. The worse the propaganda and oppression becomes, the greater
the likelihood such an essay will be written.
Such is the sophistication and ubiquity of the narrative control techniques used today -- afforded increasingly by 'computational
propaganda' via automated scripts, hacking, botnets, troll farms, and algorithms and the like, along with the barely veiled
censorship and information gatekeeping practised by Google and Facebook and other tech behemoths -- it's become one of the
most troubling aspects of the technological/social media revolution.
Very rarely can one experience such a degree of vindication. My moniker 'nottheonly1' has received more meaning with this precise
depiction of the long history of the manipulation of the masses. Recent events have destroyed but all of my confidence that there
might be a peaceful way out of this massive dilemma. Due to this sophistication in controlling the narrative, it has now become
apparent that we have arrived at a moment in time where total lawlessness reigns. 'Lawlessness' in this case means the loss of
common law and the use of code law to create ever new restrictions for free speech and liberty at large.
Over the last weeks, comments written on other discussion boards have unleashed a degree of character defamation and ridicule
for the most obvious crimes perpetrated on the masses through propaganda. In this unholy union of constant propaganda via main
stream 'media' with the character defamation by so called 'trolls' – which are actually virtual assassins of those who write the
truth – the ability of the population, or parts thereof to connect with, or search for like minded people is utterly destroyed.
This assault on the online community has devastating consequences. Those who have come into the cross hairs of the unintelligence
agencies will but turn away from the internet. Leaving behind an ocean of online propaganda and fake information. Few are now
the web sites on which it is possible to voice one's personal take on the status quo.
There is one word that describes these kind of activities precisely: traitor. Those who engage in the character defamation
of commenters, or authors per se, are traitors to humanity. They betray the collective consciousness with their poisonous attacks
of those who work for a sea change of the status quo. The owner class has all game pieces positioned. The fact that Julian Assange
is not only a free man, but still without a Nobel price for peace, while war criminals are recipients, shows just how much the
march into absolute totalitarianism has progressed. Bernays hated the masses and offered his 'services' to manipulate them often
for free.
Even though there are more solutions than problems, the time has come where meaningful participation in the search for such
solution has been made unbearable. It is therefore that a certain fatalism has developed – from resignation to the acceptance
of the status quo as being inevitable. Ancient wisdom has created a proverb that states 'This too, will pass'. While that is a
given, there are still enough Human Beings around that are determined to make a difference. To this group I count the author of
this marvelous, albeit depressing essay. Thank you more that words can express. And thank you, OffGuardian for being one of the
last remaining places where discourse is possible.
Really great post! Thanks. I'm part of the way through reading Alex Carey's book: "Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate
Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty," referenced in this article. I've learned more about the obviously verifiable history of
U.S. corporate propaganda in the first four chapters than I learned gaining a "minor" in history in 1974 (not surprisingly I can
now clearly see). I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in just how pervasive, entrenched and long-standing are the
propaganda systems shaping public perception, thought and behavior in America and the West.
Norcal
Wow Greg Maybury great essay, congratulations. This quote is brilliant, I've never see it before, "For Carey, the following conclusion
was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from
propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' "
Too, Rodger Ailes was the man credited with educating Nixon up as how to "use" the TV media, and Ailes never looked back as
he manipulated media at will. Thank you!
nondimenticare
That is also one of the basic theses of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech.
vexarb
I read in 'Guns, Germs and Steel' about Homo Sapiens and his domesticated animals. Apparently we got on best in places where we
could find animals that are very like us: sheep, cattle, horses and other herd animals which instinctively follow their Leader.
I think our cousins the chimpanzee are much the same; both species must have inherited this common trait from some pre-chimpanzee
ancestor who had found great survival value in passing on the sheeple trait to their progeny. As have the sheep themselves.
By the way, has anybody observed sheeple behaviour in ants and bees? For instance, quietly following a Leader ant to their
doom, or noisily ganging up to mob a worker bee that the Queen does not like?
I'd say the elites are both for and against. Competing factions.
It's clear that many are interested in overturning democracy, whilst others want to exploit it.
The average grunt on the street is in the fire, regardless of the pan chosen by the elites.
Grandpa Putin Loses Another Bet
TrueStory Gazette, Aug. 2019
Several anonymous, unverified, and possibly non-existent sources announced today that they
know, might know, or could possibly have heard from unknown others, who they suspect might
know or could have reasonably speculated that Vladimir Putin lost a bet he made with his
2-year old grandson, Vladimir, Jr.
We caught up with the young Putin as he emerged from his daycare school in central Moscow.
"Yes, he said, it is true. Grandpa lost the bet we made last week. We wagered about how long
Western media could cling to even a microcosm of credibility. Grandpa said it would last
until the end of this year, but I bet him that it would be gone much sooner than that."
Two-year old Putin, who is an avid reader of Moon of Alabama, said that when he woke up
this morning he read the latest article. He said, "I just rubbed Grandpa's face into that
article. He shrieked. He was so embarrassed. He had to admit that western media's credibility
is already totally kaput, not even a shred of credibility left, zero."
"Now Grandpa is the laughing stock of my daycare center. One of my classmates, who is
four, said 'how could your Grandpa be so dumb. Even a two-year old could see that western
media's credibility is in the dumpster. Your Grandpa is such a loser!'"
The young Putin, who stands only up to our reporter's waist, said that he is studying
English but still struggles with difficult words like "history." But he is not shy. When
asked what was the prevailing political view at his childcare center, he looked our reporter
in the eye, raised both fists, and loudly proclaimed, "All of us kids agree that U.S. Empire
is a hysterectomy!"
We asked Vladimir, Jr. about the stakes of his bet, what did he win? He said, "Grandpa
said I could have a place called Camp Pendleton in California to make a playground for kids
but I will have to wait a little while until he acquires it. I'm going to make it a
playground for Russian and American kids and we also will invite all of the kids from Central
America and Mexico."
Asked if he knew that Camp Pendleton was a U.S. military base, he replied, "I don't know
what it is now, but it's going to be a great playground for kids." And he added, "Look Pal,
my Grandpa loses lots of times. He loses his keys and his wallet and every bet he ever made
with me. But one thing about Grandpa, he ALWAYS KEEPS HIS PROMISES!"
It attests inventiveness and vicious amorality of neoliberals, who now promote the idea that criticizing neoliberalism and removing
Democratic party in the USA and Labor Party in the UK from clutches of Clintonism//Brairism is inherently Anti-Semitic ;-)
Israel lobby wants to extent the anti-Semitism smear to any critique of Israel. which is of course standard dirty trick in witch
hunts like neo-McCarthyism.
Notable quotes:
"... This, of course, is compounded by the over-amplifying of anti-Semitism by the media and the alacrity with which it has been taken up by Corbyn opponents, including hypocrites who floated "rootless cosmopolitan" criticisms of Ed Miliband when it suited just a few years ago. ..."
"... The resolution of the anti-Semitism crisis then is not a matter of compromise -- for each side the issue will only go away with the complete crushing and driving out of the party of the other. ..."
"... A good analysis. But, it emphasizes the point I made in the previous post, which is that, the right are currently engaged in an all out push to remove Corbyn and crush the left with the same old bureaucratic means. Whatever else Williamson may or may not be guilty of, his point that the leadership have facilitated this situation by their continual appeasement of the right is absolutely valid. Its that he is being attacked for, not anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Coming on the day when the FT have a column seriously positing that criticizing capitalism is inherently anti-Semitic, it seems to me that dancing on the head of a pin ..."
"... As many of the comments on your blog on Williamson attest, the salient feature of this - well, call it witch-hunt for the sake of argument - is the double standards where we have to be whiter than white, whilst no account whatsoever is taken of the most egregious racism elsewhere. ..."
"... The other nonsense that has grown up is that it is only those that suffer any form of discrimination who can define what that discrimination is, i.e. only Jews can define anti-Semitism, only black people can define racism against them, only women can define discrimination against women. ..."
"... That then assumes that the members of each of these groups are themselves homogeneous, and agreed in such definitions. In reality, it means that dominant elements, i.e. those connected to the ruling class and ruling ideas get to make those determinations. ..."
"... If we look at anti-Semitism, for example, it is quite clear that there is no agreement amongst Jews on what constitutes anti-Semitism. The JVL, certainly have a different definition than the JLM. ..."
"... Secker wrote a piece in the Morning Star last year comparing claims of anti-Semitism within Labour to the story of the emperor's new clothes. ..."
"... Given that the actual data, even allowing for all of the spurious and mischievous accusations of anti-Semitism in the party, made by right-wing enemies of the the party, and particularly of Corbyn and his supporters, amounts to only 0.1% of the membership, and given that of these, 40% were straight away found to be accusations against people who were not even LP members, with a further 20%, being found to have absolutely no evidence to back them, its quite possible that individual members of the LP, have never seen any instance of it. ..."
"... Take out all those mischievous and malicious allegations made in order to whip up the hysteria, so as to to damage the party, by its enemies, and you arrive at a figure of only 400 potential cases, out of a membership of 600,000, which is 1 member in 1500. ..."
"... In fact, based upon the actual facts, as opposed to the fiction and factional hysteria that is being whipped up by right-wing opponents of Corbyn and the party, and by supporters of Zionism for their own narrow political reasons, the chances are about 14: that you will never see any even potential instance of anti-Semitism, even on the narrow definition that the party has now imposed upon itself, which comes pretty close if not entirely to identifying anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, or even just criticism of the current Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu. ..."
"... In the US, Jewish groups that have long been ardent defenders of Israel have more recently come out to criticize the regime of Netanyahu, and the actions of the Israeli state. The main defenders of Zionism, besides the actual Zionists themselves, appear to be people like the AWL, who for whatever reason hitched their wagon to Zionist ideology some time ago, ..."
"... Just because the only case of stabbing I have witnessed was more than 50 years ago, does not, and should not lead me to think that knife crime was worse 50 years ago than it is today. The actual data would seem to suggest that cases of anti-Semitism were greater in the LP in previous times than they are currently, contrary to what the media and those with factional motives would have us believe. ..."
"... The apparent level of anti-semitism in Labour is a modern phenomenon turbo-charged and amplified by social media. People have their views reinforced within their bunkers where anti-Israeli memes become anti-Zionist and then become anti-Semitic. It is much easier to send an anonymous email than a letter. ..."
"... I wouldn't trust Lansman on this issue, any more than on many others. Lansman abolished democracy, to the extent it existed to begin with, by turning it into his personal fiefdom, reminiscent of the activities of Hyndman and the SDF. His position on anti-Semitism, and fighting the witch-hunt, and of appeasing the Blair-right's as they attacked Corbyn, has been appalling throughout. ..."
"... Having abolished any democracy in Momentum, which he now runs as its CEO, he also appears to want Corbyn to do the same thing with the Labour Party, abolishing its internal democratic procedures, and putting himself personally in charge of those disciplinary measures ..."
"... Its notable that, yesterday, when the Welsh Labour Grass Roots organisation came out to call for Williamson's suspension to be reversed, Kinnock and other Blair-rights immediately called for an investigation into them, ..."
"... This truly is reaching into the realms of McCarthyism, where you are found guilty not just of witchcraft, but of consorting with witches, or even having an opinion as to whether an individual charged with witchcraft is guilty, or even the extent to which the number of witches amongst might be exaggerated. ..."
"... It's not a factually accurate description of global political realities, because Israel does not control the US, if that is what the image is intended to imply. But, the message, is thereby anti-Israeli state, not anti-Semitic. It could only be considered anti-Semitic, if in fact you are a Zionist and claim that Israel and Jews are are interchangeable terms, which they are not. ..."
"... If we replace Zionism with Toryism, and Jew with British, the situation becomes fairly clear. If the we show the British state as being controlled by Tories, who implement their ideology of Toryism, in what way would criticism of the British state, under the control of such Tories, or criticism of Tories be the equivalent of British people as a whole? ..."
"... The hope of a Two-State Solution disappeared long ago, and was never credible. It simply allows Zionists to proclaim they are in favour of it, whilst doing everything to make it practically impossible, such as extending West Bank Settlements. The solution must flow from a struggle for democratic rights for Israeli Arabs, and for a right for all Arabs in occupied territories to be extended the same rights as any other Israeli, including the right to vote, and send representatives to the Knesset. As I argued thirty years ago, the longer-term solution is a Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine, guaranteeing democratic rights to all, as part of building a wider Federal Republic of MENA. ..."
"... Jim Denham: imperialist lackey and sycophant turned Witch hunter in chief ..."
"... Let us be very clear about what this witch hunt is about, it is about purging from public life any credible and effective opposition to Israel in particular and more generally opposition to the imperialist barbarians of the imperialist core. It is about driving from universities, social media and intellectual life any form of opposition to the interests of the imperialists. ..."
"... A UN report has concluded that Israel deliberately targeted and killed hundreds of protesting civilians, including children and disabled people and it shot 20,000+ people (yes 20,000+!). The UN says this likely a war crime. Why are the noble defenders of the Palestinian cause in the dock and not notorious Palestinian haters like Jim Denham? ..."
"... These attacks on Corbyn and his supporters, repeated in all of the most aggressive imperialist countries, are simply a proxy attack on the Palestinian people themselves. ..."
"... Jim Denham's comment here illustrates the problem entirely. The picture he has linked to shows an alien symbiote having attached itself to the face of the statue of liberty. The statue of liberty here represents the US. The symbiote has on its back the Israeli Flag, and likewise, thereby represents the state of Israel. The picture therefore, represents the well-worn, and clearly factually wrong meme that Israel controls the US. ..."
"... But, as a Zionist organisation, the AWL and its members cannot distinguish between the state of Israel and Jews, so they cannot distinguish between criticism of the state of Israel, and criticism if Jews. For them, as for the Zionist ideology of the state of Israel, which is most clearly manifest in the ideology of its current political leadership, in the form of the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu, with the recent introduction of blatantly racist laws that discriminate even more openly against not Jewish Israeli citizens, and with his willingness to try to keep his corrupt regime in office by going into coalition with an avowedly Neo-Nazi party that until recent times was considered beyond the pale, even by most Zionists, the term Zionism is synonymous with the term Jew. So, any criticism of Zionism, or of Israel is for them immediately equated with anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Once again Jim Denham reefuses to engage in rational debate, and again resorts instead to his assumption that Israel = Jews, as well as his crude attempts at a typical Stalinist amalgam, to conflate the views of his opponents with some hate figure. ..."
"... Again Jim Denham makes the conflation of Israel and Jews explicit when he says, "This image also plays on the tired and disgraceful antisemitic 'conspiracy theory' trope of undue Israeli (Jewish) influence on world affairs." ..."
"... The way that the right are using anti-Zionism as the equivalent for anti-Semitism, and the appeasement of that attack has led them to widen the scope of that attack. As Labour List reports , right-wing Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh, is now claiming that to be anti-capitalist is also to be "anti-Semitic". The idea was put forward also by former Blair-right spin doctor, John McTernan, who wrote an article in the FT to that same effect ..."
"... As the right-wing extend their witch-hunt against socialists in the LP to claim that Marxists are necessarily misogynist, as well as anti-Semitic – and the same logic presented by McDonagh, McTernon, and Phillips would presumably mean that the Left must also be xenophobic, homophobic, anti- Green, and many other charges they want to throw into the mix – it will be interesting to see whether and to what extent the AWL, join them in that assault, in the same way they have done in their promotion of Zionism. ..."
The problem, however, is because this is overlaid by factional struggle ...
This, of course, is compounded by the over-amplifying of anti-Semitism by the media and the alacrity with which it has been taken
up by Corbyn opponents, including hypocrites who floated "rootless cosmopolitan" criticisms of Ed Miliband when it suited just a
few years ago.
Here's the thing. Just because your opponents take up an issue, some times cynically and in bad faith. and use it to inflict as
much damage as they can does not mean the problem is fictitious.
Precisely because they can point to Facebook groups full of useful fools, and Twitter accounts with Corbyn-supporting hashtags
acting as if the Israel lobby and "Zionists" are the only active force in British politics, this is the stuff that makes the attacks
effective and trashes the standing of the party in the eyes of many Jews and the community's allies and friends.
The institutional anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is, therefore, somewhat different to the kind you find in other institutions.
It is sustained by the battle for the party, a grim battlefront in a zero sum game of entrenched position vs entrenched position.
As such, whatever the leadership do, whatever new processes the General Secretary introduces for one side it will never be enough
because, as far as many of them concerned, the leadership are politically illegitimate; and for the other it's a sop and capitulation.
The resolution of the anti-Semitism crisis then is not a matter of compromise -- for each side the issue will only go away
with the complete crushing and driving out of the party of the other. A situation that can only poison the well further, and
guarantee anti-Semitism won't honestly and comprehensively be confronted.
A good analysis. But, it emphasizes the point I made in the previous post, which is that, the right are currently engaged
in an all out push to remove Corbyn and crush the left with the same old bureaucratic means. Whatever else Williamson may or may
not be guilty of, his point that the leadership have facilitated this situation by their continual appeasement of the right is
absolutely valid. Its that he is being attacked for, not anti-Semitism.
It is first necessary to close ranks, and defeat the assault of the Right. As Marr said to Blair this morning, had Prescott
announced he was forming a separate group, and was establishing his own witch-hunting bureaucratic apparatus in the party, Blair
would have sacked him immediately - actually not so easy as the Deputy is elected. But the thrust is valid. Unless Corbyn deals
with Watson, the Right will roll over the Left, despite the huge disparity in numbers.
Again it comes down to whether Corbyn is up for that task, or whether we need a leadership of the left with a bit more backbone
to see it through.
I'm afraid this IS due to the "intersectionality" cult, whereby certain groups are always privileged and wrong, and some are always
oppressed and right. Jews are, according to this "analysis", the uber-privileged and uber-white.
We've heard several times that according to "intersectionality" that it's impossible to be racist against white people because
racism requires both prejudice and power, and white people are by definition powerful. Therefore, anti-Semitism is dismissed because
it can't be a thing because Jews are all-powerful and even more oppressive than other whites.
Those who don't subscribe to all of these beliefs are nevertheless tinged with them, which is why people who aren't staunch
antisemites will nevertheless fail to take anti-Semitism seriously.
Coming on the day when the FT have a column seriously positing that criticizing capitalism is inherently anti-Semitic, it
seems to me that dancing on the head of a pin about whether the 'careless' anti-Semitism you've described means the party
is institutionally anti-Semitic is rather missing the point. (OK, the column is by John McTernan, but the FT gave him column inches
to argue that case, and I guess they didn't mean it as the satire it most certainly is.)
As many of the comments on your
blog on Williamson attest, the salient feature of this - well, call it witch-hunt for the sake of argument - is the double standards
where we have to be whiter than white, whilst no account whatsoever is taken of the most egregious racism elsewhere. We live
in society: we can never, ever be that whiter than white - especially when it comes to Israel/Palestine, which is so full of contradictions
and traps for the unwary (e.g. the position of the Israeli state claiming to speak for all Jewry around the world, in the way
that the Board of Deputies position themselves as speaking for all British Jews - neither close to being true, but small wonder
that opponents of what they do and stand for take that universality at face value.)
The fight we need to take up is to compare and contrast just how pro-active the current party is against anti-Semitism in its
constitution and machinery with the glaring absence of such elsewhere, and to present a positive picture of what we are doing,
rather than mumbling apologetically into our beards. We need to take the fight to the rigged system at the same time as being
unstinting in rooting out the troubling stuff.
The other nonsense that has grown up is that it is only those that suffer any form of discrimination who can define what that
discrimination is, i.e. only Jews can define anti-Semitism, only black people can define racism against them, only women can define
discrimination against women.
That then assumes that the members of each of these groups are themselves homogeneous, and agreed in such definitions.
In reality, it means that dominant elements, i.e. those connected to the ruling class and ruling ideas get to make those determinations.
If we look at anti-Semitism, for example, it is quite clear that there is no agreement amongst Jews on what constitutes
anti-Semitism. The JVL, certainly have a different definition than the JLM.
But, just rationally, the concept that only those discriminated against get to define the discrimination is bonkers. Suppose
you come from Somalia or some other country that practices FGM, you could argue that it is part of your cultural heritage, and
that anyone seeking to prevent you from undertaking this barbaric practice was thereby racist, on your self-definition of what
that discrimination against you amounts to. Or Saudis might argue that it is racist to argue against their practice of lopping
off women's heads, or stoning them to death for adultery, including having been raped, etc.
The JVL come pretty close to arguing that there is *no* anti-Semitism in the Labour party (Jenny Manson, for instance, says she's
never witnessed any)and Glyn Secker wrote a piece in the Morning Star last year comparing claims of anti-Semitism within Labour
to the story of the emperor's new clothes.
Given that the actual data, even allowing for all of the spurious and mischievous accusations of anti-Semitism in the party,
made by right-wing enemies of the the party, and particularly of Corbyn and his supporters, amounts to only 0.1% of the membership,
and given that of these, 40% were straight away found to be accusations against people who were not even LP members, with a further
20%, being found to have absolutely no evidence to back them, its quite possible that individual members of the LP, have never
seen any instance of it.
Take out all those mischievous and malicious allegations made in order to whip up the hysteria, so as to to damage the
party, by its enemies, and you arrive at a figure of only 400 potential cases, out of a membership of 600,000, which is 1 member
in 1500. If the average branch size if 100 active members, it means on average there is one potential case of anti-Semitism
in every 15 branches. So, if you are a member in any of the other 14 branches, you would never see that one potential case of
anti-Semitism.
In fact, based upon the actual facts, as opposed to the fiction and factional hysteria that is being whipped up by right-wing
opponents of Corbyn and the party, and by supporters of Zionism for their own narrow political reasons, the chances are about
14: that you will never see any even potential instance of anti-Semitism, even on the narrow definition that the party has now
imposed upon itself, which comes pretty close if not entirely to identifying anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, or even just criticism
of the current Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu.
In the US, Jewish groups that have long been ardent defenders of Israel have more recently come out to criticize the regime
of Netanyahu, and the actions of the Israeli state. The main defenders of Zionism, besides the actual Zionists themselves, appear
to be people like the AWL, who for whatever reason hitched their wagon to Zionist ideology some time ago, probably in their
usual knee-jerk reaction of putting a plus sign wherever the SWP put a minus. Having done so, and as a result of the bureaucratic
centrist nature of the sect, they find themselves now having to follow through on the position they adopted on the basis of the
"practical politics" - opportunism - as it dictated itself to them at the time.
If, and probably more likely when, they change position, it will come as with all their previous changes of position with the
assertion that "nothing has changed", as when after claiming a few years ago that the LP was a stinking corpse - as they ridiculously
stood their own candidates in elections with the inevitable result - and the next minute proclaimed themselves as its most ardent
militants, as they sought to use their sharp elbows to gain positions on Momentum's leading bodies!
Incidentally, on the question of "observance", the only time I have seen someone get stabbed, is more than 50 years ago, when
I was at school. I've seen plenty of other violent stuff in the intervening period, for example, people getting glassed, people
having wrought iron tables smashed over their heads. My sister, who is several years older than me, and was out bopping during
the days of the Teddy Boys, saw more people getting slashed, in the 1950's, because the flick knife was the Ted's favoured weapon.
But, that doesn't mean that I disbelieve the media when it talks about the current spate of knife crimes. Its just that, however,
terrible such crimes are for those that suffer or witness them, and no matter how much the media that has to sensationalise every
story, for its own commercial purposes, talks about an epidemic or a knife crime crisis, the number of knife crimes per head of
population is extremely small.
The chances that 999 out of 1,000 of us will never be the victim of, or witness knife crime does not mean it doesn't exist.
But, those that then claim that the 999 out of 1,000 of us who say we have not seen it, must be somehow being dishonest, are not
dealing with the facts, and are simply fuelling a moral panic.
When some phenomena is statistically insignificant, which 1 in 1,500 cases, is, and when as with many such phenomena there
is no normal distribution of the occurrence of such cases - for example, knife crime will tend to be concentrated in particular
areas - trying to present any kind of rational analysis based upon personal observation is a mug's game.
Just because the only case of stabbing I have witnessed was more than 50 years ago, does not, and should not lead me to
think that knife crime was worse 50 years ago than it is today. The actual data would seem to suggest that cases of anti-Semitism
were greater in the LP in previous times than they are currently, contrary to what the media and those with factional motives
would have us believe. It is certainly thec ase that anti-Semitism is a bigger problem in the Tory party, and other right-wing
organisations than it is in the LP, again not that you would know that from the reporting of it, or from the attitude of certain
factional sects, such as the AWL.
Labour has 'much larger' group of antisemitic members which Corbyn has failed to deal with, Momentum founder warns
By Rob Merrick Deputy Political Editor The Independent, Monday 25 February 2019 16:10 |
Labour has "a much larger" group of antisemitic members than it recognises which Jeremy Corbyn has failed to "deal with", Momentum
founder Jon Lansman has warned.
The Labour leader's long-standing ally said "conspiracy theorists" had infiltrated the party – a consequence of its huge surge
in membership in recent years.
Mr Lansman stopped short of backing the call from Tom Watson, Labour's deputy leader, for Mr Corbyn to take personal charge
of the antisemitism complaints dogging Labour.
But he said: "I do think we have a major problem and it always seems to me that we underestimate the scale of it. I think it
is a widespread problem.
"I think it is now obvious that we have a much larger number of people with hardcore antisemitic opinions which, unfortunately,
is polluting the atmosphere in a lot of constituency parties and in particular online. We have to deal with these people."
The apparent level of anti-semitism in Labour is a modern phenomenon turbo-charged and amplified by social media. People
have their views reinforced within their bunkers where anti-Israeli memes become anti-Zionist and then become anti-Semitic. It
is much easier to send an anonymous email than a letter.
History is very much the tale of new technology transforming the potential of human behaviour and beliefs, and one of the oldest
beliefs ("the blood libel") is anti-Semitism.
This is how Labour has changed - ie, the rise of Corbyn has coincided with the ubiquity of this technology. In fact, arguably
the rise of Corbyn was aided by it.
Corbyn's nuanced position on Israel/Palestine gives permission to social media extremists.
The rest is history.
Incidentally, this is why you are less likely to confront anti-Semitism in real-life while the internet may be awash with it
- there are the real and virtual identities which only occasionally bleed into each other.
Which is true and which is not? We might wonder if technology has evolved ahead of human adaptation - the "real world" filters
that govern apparently "real" behaviour missing.
I'm sure even certain posters here are less bananas in "real life" than their online comments might suggest!
I wouldn't trust Lansman on this issue, any more than on many others. Lansman abolished democracy, to the extent it existed
to begin with, by turning it into his personal fiefdom, reminiscent of the activities of Hyndman and the SDF. His position on
anti-Semitism, and fighting the witch-hunt, and of appeasing the Blair-right's as they attacked Corbyn, has been appalling throughout.
Having abolished any democracy in Momentum, which he now runs as its CEO, he also appears to want Corbyn to do the same thing
with the Labour Party, abolishing its internal democratic procedures, and putting himself personally in charge of those disciplinary
measures. That truly would be the actions of a Bonapartist. That Tom Watson is prepared to do that, as he sets himself up in a
situation of dual power, to confront Corbyn is no surprise that anyone who even remotely considers themselves a part of the Left
should support should a move is a disgrace. Perhaps no surprise that the AWL supporters of Zionism, and the witch-hunt, appear
to be doing so, then.
Its notable that, yesterday, when the Welsh Labour Grass Roots organisation came out to call for Williamson's suspension to
be reversed, Kinnock and other Blair-rights immediately called for an investigation into them, and for its Secretary who sits
on Labour's NEC to also be suspended, for interfering in an ongoing investigation! So, why did those same Blair-rights not call
for the suspension of Watson, who immediately demanded Williamson's suspension, and withdrawal of the whip, before any investigation,
or indeed of Hodge and others who on a daily basis go to the media to sally forth about cases that are under investigation, or
waiting for investigation.
This truly is reaching into the realms of McCarthyism, where you are found guilty not just of witchcraft, but of consorting
with witches, or even having an opinion as to whether an individual charged with witchcraft is guilty, or even the extent to which
the number of witches amongst might be exaggerated.
Jim Denham's comment is a case in point. How much more "anti-Semitism" exists? What is the factual basis of the statement,
as opposed to click bait headline. Even if the actual extent is 100% more than the data so far presented, that would mean that
potentially 1 in 750 LP members might be guilty of some form of anti-Semitism. Its hardly an epidemic, or institutional anti-Semitism,
and far less than exists in the Tory Party, which is also infected by Islamaphobia, misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia.
In fact, its probably much less than you would find in the BBC, Sky or other establishment institutions. Anti-Semitism exists,
and is a problem, but that does not mean it is not being used by Labour's enemies or the proponents of Zionism for their own political
ends. The real conspiracy theorists are those that try to present anti-Semitism as a conspiracy based upon infiltration of the
LP, the same people who presented the support for Corbyn from 300,000 new members as really just being a case of far left entryism,
by Trots.
This is a meme, taken from Incog Man, a far-right site. It was posted with positive endorsement by a Labour member, Kayla Bibby,
a delegate to conference in fact:
Bibby subsequently received only a formal warning, with Thomas Gardiner of Labour's Governance and Legal Unit (what used to
be the Compliance Unit), saying it was only anti-Israel, and not anti-Semitic.
Not only could a Labour member post something obviously anti-Semitic, it was not deemed to be so by the Compliance Unit. I
bet we all know people who would agree.
It's not a factually accurate description of global political realities, because Israel does not control the US, if that is
what the image is intended to imply. But, the message, is thereby anti-Israeli state, not anti-Semitic. It could only be considered
anti-Semitic, if in fact you are a Zionist and claim that Israel and Jews are are interchangeable terms, which they are not.
In fact, there are probably not an inconsiderable number of Jews, who think that the state of Israel does exercise undue influence
over US policy, and certainly it seems to be the case that, in the US, more liberal Jewish groups, seem to think that one reason
that the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu, in Israel, was so supportive of Trump, and we see the same support for Trump amongst
Zionists in Britain, is at least in part due to the fact that Obama had been distancing the US from its historical uncritical
support for Israel.
If we replace Zionism with Toryism, and Jew with British, the situation becomes fairly clear. If the we show the British
state as being controlled by Tories, who implement their ideology of Toryism, in what way would criticism of the British state,
under the control of such Tories, or criticism of Tories be the equivalent of British people as a whole?
Clearly it wouldn't, because there are a majority of British people who oppose Toryism, and thereby oppose the actions of the
British state under the control of the Tories. A nationalist, or racist might want to equate the nation state with the whole of
its people, but the people who are doing that here, by interpreting criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism, are the
Zionists themselves, and their apologists, because they seek thereby to delegitimize any criticism of the state of Israel and
Zionism by equating it with anti-Semitism.
That in effect makes the Zionists themselves, and their apologists anti-Semites, because in adopting this equation of Jewishness
with being Zionist, and with Israel, they make all Jews thereby responsible for the actions of Zionism and of the state of Israel!
The problem for the AWL, and its members like Jim Denham, on this issue comes down to this. Until thirty years ago, the organisation,
under its previous names, was an ardent defender of the ideas and traditions of Jim Cannon. Cannon's "The Struggle for a Proletarian
Party" was required reading for all of its members. Then, in an about face, the organisation overnight collapsed into what Trotsky
called "the petit-bourgeois Third Camp", and so became ardent defenders of the enemies of Cannon, the petit-bourgeois Third Camp
of Burnham- Shachtman. That kind of wild zig-zag is typical of bureaucratic-centrist organisations, which is what the AWL is.
As part of this collapse into the petit-bourgeois Third Camp, and the moralistic politics it is based upon, the AWL also adopted
the ideas of Third Campists like Al Glotzer, in relation to Israel and Zionism, as opposed to the position of Mandel, which represented
a continuation of the ideas of Cannon and Trotsky. I set this out in a short blog post 12 years ago
Glotzer and the Jews as Special
, after the AWL had repeatedly censored it appearing on their website in response to an article setting out Glotzer's position.
Having committed themselves to the reactionary Zionist ideology that essentially underpins Glotzer's stance - the same thing
idea of having lost faith in the working-class, and so having to rely on the bourgeois state, or "progressive imperialism" to
accomplish the tasks of the working-class, is behind the AWL's support for NATo's war against Serbia, Iraq, Libya etc., but is
also behind the politics of other Third Campists such as the SWP, that instead look to other larger forces, such as reactionary
"anti-imperialist" states to carry forward its moral agenda - the AWL are left now trying to defend their position of support
for the creation of a racist, expansionist state in Israel, as the inevitable consequences of that venture unfold.
For a Marxist, it is not at all difficult to say that the establishment of the state of Israel is one that we should not have
supported at the time, because it would lead to the kind of consequences we see today, and yet, to say, 75 years on from the creation
of that state, it is an established fact, and trying to unwind history, by calling for the destruction of that state would have
even more calamitous consequences for the global working-class. It is quite easy for a Marx to say that the current nature of
the Israeli state, as a racist Zionist state, based, like almost no other state in the world on a confessional basis, i.e. of
being a Jewish state, a state for Jews in preference to every other ethnic/religious group flows from the ideology, and nature
of its creation. But, then to argue that the answer to that is not a destruction of the state of Israel, which could only be done
on the bones of millions of Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, but is to wage a working-class based struggle against that
racist foundation upon which the state has been founded, and that struggle is one that must unite Jews and Arabs alike. In fact,
the position of palestinians today is a mirror image of that of the Jews 75 years ago.
The hope of a Two-State Solution disappeared long ago, and was never credible. It simply allows Zionists to proclaim they are
in favour of it, whilst doing everything to make it practically impossible, such as extending West Bank Settlements. The solution
must flow from a struggle for democratic rights for Israeli Arabs, and for a right for all Arabs in occupied territories to be
extended the same rights as any other Israeli, including the right to vote, and send representatives to the Knesset. As I argued
thirty years ago, the longer-term solution is a Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine, guaranteeing democratic rights to all,
as part of building a wider Federal Republic of MENA.
Jim Denham: imperialist lackey and sycophant turned Witch hunter in chief
Let us be very clear about what this witch hunt is about, it is about purging from public life any credible and effective
opposition to Israel in particular and more generally opposition to the imperialist barbarians of the imperialist core. It is
about driving from universities, social media and intellectual life any form of opposition to the interests of the imperialists.
This is nothing but authoritarianism in action, censorship of political opponents and the closing down of any credible definition
of free speech.
In other words this is something any leftist worth half an atom would be fighting against with all their energies.
But what do we find, pathetic pro war pro imperialists leftists and post modern liberals joining the witch hunt.
Meanwhile in the real world:
A UN report has concluded that Israel deliberately targeted and killed hundreds of protesting civilians, including children
and disabled people and it shot 20,000+ people (yes 20,000+!). The UN says this likely a war crime. Why are the noble defenders
of the Palestinian cause in the dock and not notorious Palestinian haters like Jim Denham?
How can anyone on the left get away with supporting and providing ideological cover for Israel How can any leftist allow a
socialist movement to be sabotaged by the Israel state and its army of appalling immoral apologists?
These attacks on Corbyn and his supporters, repeated in all of the most aggressive imperialist countries, are simply a
proxy attack on the Palestinian people themselves.
Jim Denham's comment here illustrates the problem entirely. The picture he has linked to shows an alien symbiote having attached
itself to the face of the statue of liberty. The statue of liberty here represents the US. The symbiote has on its back the Israeli
Flag, and likewise, thereby represents the state of Israel. The picture therefore, represents the well-worn, and clearly factually
wrong meme that Israel controls the US.
But, as a Zionist organisation, the AWL and its members cannot distinguish between the state of Israel and Jews, so they
cannot distinguish between criticism of the state of Israel, and criticism if Jews. For them, as for the Zionist ideology of the
state of Israel, which is most clearly manifest in the ideology of its current political leadership, in the form of the Bonapartist
regime of Netanyahu, with the recent introduction of blatantly racist laws that discriminate even more openly against not Jewish
Israeli citizens, and with his willingness to try to keep his corrupt regime in office by going into coalition with an avowedly
Neo-Nazi party that until recent times was considered beyond the pale, even by most Zionists, the term Zionism is synonymous with
the term Jew. So, any criticism of Zionism, or of Israel is for them immediately equated with anti-Semitism.
It is what leads such Zionists to then also insist on their right to determine who is a Jew or not. The AWL do that with all
those Jews, such as the JVL, who refuse to accept the AWL's definition of anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism. Its like the old saw that
the definition of a Scot is someone who wears a kilt, and when asked about Jock McTavish, from Arbroath, who does not wear a kilt,
the reply comes back, then he cannot really be a Scot!
The Zionists insists on defining anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, and thereby closing down debate. Jim Denham does that most
clearly here, in his refusal to debate the actual substantive points. It is typical of the attitude of the AWL, in general which
long since gave up trying to defend its bourgeois liberal, opportunist politics by rational debate, and instead turned to bureaucratic
censorship, and ill-tempered invective.
Once again Jim Denham reefuses to engage in rational debate, and again resorts instead to his assumption that Israel = Jews,
as well as his crude attempts at a typical Stalinist amalgam, to conflate the views of his opponents with some hate figure.
Again Jim Denham makes the conflation of Israel and Jews explicit when he says, "This image also plays on the tired and
disgraceful antisemitic 'conspiracy theory' trope of undue Israeli (Jewish) influence on world affairs."
The conflation of equating Israel with the term Jew flows directly from the Zionist ideology that underpins the Israeli State,
but which also adopted by the AWL, and its members like Jim Denham. It thereby effectively denies statehood to non-Jewish Israeli
citizens, making them non-persons, erasing them from history, in the same way that Jim Denham has sought to do in diminishing
if not entirely denying the genocides against other ethnic groups such as Native North Americans, Australian and New Zealand aboriginals
etc., as a result of his Zionist privileging of the specific genocide against Jews in the Holocaust.
It is the same kind of racism, of course, that is applied by the BNP and other white nationalists, who seek to portray Britain
as being a nation for white Britons, and thereby deny other Britons the right to consider themselves really British. Every socialist,
can understand the racist nature of that ideology when it is applied to Britain, and elsewhere, but the AWL, and its members,
like Jim Denham, deny it when it is applied to Israel, which they want to treat as being different to every other state on the
planet, in defence of their Zionist ideology that privileges Israeli Jews over others, and by extension equates the term Jew with
the term Israel.
Its most extreme version comes with the fascists that Netanyahu has now gone into alliance with, whose ideology states that
God only put gentiels on the Earth to be slaves and serve the needs of Jews, as the chosen people! It means that they see the
place of non-Jewish Israelis in those terms, as being allowed to remain in Israel only on that subservient basis. This is the
ideology that the AWL is now logically tied to, in having adopted Zionism as the answer to the problems of Jewish workers rather
than socialism.
And, of course, the extension of that principle for other Zionists is illustrated in their support for fascists like Orban
in Hungary, who wants to adopt a similar nationalist ideology of keeping Hungary, and other "white" European nations exclusively
for "whites", in the same way that Zionists want to keep Israel exclusively for Jews.
It is a sorry state when socialists have degenerated to such an extent that not only do they fail to distinguish between nationalist
ideology and socialist ideology by adopting nationalist solutions to workers problems such as "nationalisation", by the capitalist
state, but where, in adopting such reactionary nationalist ideology, the logic of their position drives them to supporting the
idea that nation states should be exclusively for particular ethnic groups, such as Israel for the Jews, Hungary for white Christians
and so on.
The way that the right are using anti-Zionism as the equivalent for anti-Semitism, and the appeasement of that attack has
led them to widen the scope of that attack. As
Labour
List reports , right-wing Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh, is now claiming that to be anti-capitalist is also to be "anti-Semitic".
The idea was put forward also by former Blair-right spin doctor, John McTernan,
who wrote an article in the FT to that
same effect
Channelling Jim Denham, McTernan writes,
"As the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out, anti-Semitic tropes share three elements: money or finance is always in the
mix; an acknowledged cleverness that is also seen as conniving; and, power -- particularly a power to manipulate more powerful
entities.
All of these feature in the criticism of Israel and the so-called Israel lobby. They can be easily moulded into a critique
of capitalism, too."
The line of argument was illustrated to me some weeks ago, in a comment I received in relation to an article I wrote about
Marx's analysis of fictitious capital,
as part of my critique of Paul Mason's Postcapitalism . The commenter, argued that Marx's analysis of fictitious capital appeared
to be simply Marx blaming bankers and money lenders, for which read Jews, for the world's ills, and was thereby simply an expression
of the well-known fact that Marx was a self-hating Jew, much as the AWL, describe all those other Jews that do not share their
commitment to |Zionism. The commenter as evidence of this provided a link to a literary critique of Marx's
On The Jewish Question
, which is cited as proving that Marx was an anti-semite.
In fact, I pointed out that in nothing that Marx had written about fictitious capital, or what I had written describing Marx's
analysis of fictitious capital are bankers discussed, let alone Jewish bankers. The anonymous commenter, has, in fact, since deleted
their comments, meaning that my responses to them were also deleted.
But, this is the way this right-wing witch-hunt proceeds, by throwing a net to catch whatever they can trawl in, and at the very
least sowing the seeds of doubt as they require those being attacked to respond to their wild accusations. It means that any statement
can be framed to mean that there is some subtext beneath the actual words and pictures that is somehow anti-Semitic, if only you
know the relevant coda to unlock the true meaning, and anyone who doubts the meaning being placed upon it, is thereby a defender
of the anti-Semitic message. As with the attacks on Momentum, and the initial surge of membership supporting Corbyn, it is always
phrased in dark conspiratorial language, about unseen forces being behind what is seen on the surface. So, we were supposed to
believe that a few hundred Trots in Britain somehow morphed into 300,000 new LP members! But, Momentum now having shown that it
is a tame part of the establishment, is even able to recruit McTernan himself as a member.
The appeasement as with all witch-hunts only provokes the witch-hunters to widen the scope of their activities. The AWL, which
was at the forefront of helping the witch-hunters with their shameful support for the witch-hunting of Jackie Walker, was repaid
by having their own members expelled too, and having right-wing Labour MP's appear on TV, to characterise the AWL themselves as
"anti-Semites", despite their well-known Zionist politics. Yet, oddly, the AWL seem to consider that a price worth paying, as
their advocacy of Zionism seems to trump any other consideration for them in their politics.
It didn't take long for my comment of yesterday to be proved correct. Today we learn that Jess Phillips has claimed that Marxism
is necessarily misogynist, because it places class oppression above all else, and so now claims that as well as the Left in the
party being anti-Semitic, it is also misogynist. The attack of the Right, as I said yesterday will spread ever wider on this irrational
basis, using all of the usual conspiratorial language that such witch-hunts have always adopted. Rather like a Dan Brown novel,
it will imply that there are dark (Marxist) forces at work, of which Corbyn is the head of the coven (or even worse that some
unseen Dark Overlord is really standing behind Corbyn, who is only its representative on Earth (i.e. in the LP).
It will suggest that these dark forces do not speak openly, but only in codes and symbols that have to be unlocked by the forces
of Light, who like Jim Denham, can look into the minds of men and women, and see what is really going inside.
I actually found that despite the anonymous Zionist commenter to my article on Medium having deleted their comments, my replies
to them, were in fact still floating around
here
,
here , and
here .
As the right-wing extend their witch-hunt against socialists in the LP to claim that Marxists are necessarily misogynist,
as well as anti-Semitic – and the same logic presented by McDonagh, McTernon, and Phillips would presumably mean that the Left
must also be xenophobic, homophobic, anti- Green, and many other charges they want to throw into the mix – it will be interesting
to see whether and to what extent the AWL, join them in that assault, in the same way they have done in their promotion of Zionism.
The Democrats are considered "Moderate republicans" and have been for a number of years. So
the moderate moderate democrats are effectively republicans. Just like the so-called
centre-left here, are establishment right-wing.
"And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than
for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." -Matthew 19:24
That either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren might be considered left-wing is a mark of
how skewed American politics is. Where the hell's the center!? And who decided, anyway?
When asked where the phrase "from each according to his abilities, to each according to
his needs" came from by a 2002 survey conducted by Columbia Law School, over 66% of Americans
said the US Constitution.
CNN retained control of what issues were addressed and when rather than the candidates, so
the "clash" between the "moderate" and "progressive" wings of the party was largely
orchestrated by the network. Given the number of candidates involved and the structure of
what passes for debate during these spectacles they're largely a waste of time.
The inevitable question in any US election is can the candidates really change anything? for
all of the squealing about Trump he hasn't managed to do anything except give the rich a tax
cut.
The out of control military spending, the growing void between those born rich and those
born poor, the further consolidation of Corporate power...all seems to go unchecked
regardless of the rhetoric of any President
Watch an interview with Corruptus Maximus from the 1980s or early 90s. He was always a dick
and a narcissist, but he was articulate and able to speak in full sentences and follow a
conversation. He can't do any of that now. Little Donnie Dumbass is the poster boy for
cognitive decline.
Some people think the notion that Trump is a Kremlin spy is rather fanciful.
But if you look more closely, all the evidence is there.
He once got drunk on a bottle of vodka
before he became a teetotaller.
He often wears a red tie.
He was once seen attending a film performance of "War And Peace."
And (a dead giveaway) he has been seen talking to Putin and actually shaking his hand.
And if all that isn't conclusive evidence that he's a Kremlin spy, then I don't know what is.
"... "After watching seven hours of a spectacle that felt much more cruel than enlightening, I cannot avoid pondering a question which honestly gives me no joy to ponder: just how much damage has MSNBC in particular done to the left?" The Hill's Rising star began, before excoriating her former employer's "fevered speculations" about an "Infowars conspiracy theory" and the way it hosted people like Jonathan "maybe Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s" Chait and "conspiracy gadfly Louise Mensch" in search of ratings bumps. ..."
"... "This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats' chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up," Ball argued. "Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, I don't know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers' movement, whether we're going to war with Iran? I'm just spitballing here. ..."
"... Ball argued that the fact that MSNBC is doing so much damage to the Democratic Party in the name of ratings proves that MSNBC isn't "on Team D in the same way that Fox News is on Team R", saying they're really just in it for the money. But this is where Ball gets it wrong. It is of course true that ratings are a factor, and that conspiracy theories can be used to sell advertising space, but MSNBC would have had a much easier time marketing conspiracy theories about Trump's loyalties to Israel and Saudi Arabia , both of which would have had vastly more factual evidence to back them up. The only difference is that the US-centralized empire doesn't have agendas that it wants to advance against those two countries. ..."
"... Ball is correct that MSNBC doesn't serve the Democratic party, but she's incorrect that it serves only money. MSNBC, which is now arguably a more aggressive war propaganda network than Fox News, serves first and foremost the US national security state. And so do all the other western mainstream news networks. ..."
"... From the Pentagon's point of view, US hegemony good, Russia-China alliance very, very bad. ..."
"... I t was determined with the help of influential neoconservative think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view became the establishment orthodoxy , any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An "attack" on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity is now treated as a direct attack on the empire. ..."
"... This is why we've seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as "enemies" as though they pose some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack. ..."
"... This "if you're not obeying us you're attacking us" mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a Russian "attack" on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government. It's got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans. It's about continuing to rule the world. ..."
"After watching seven hours of a spectacle that felt much more cruel than enlightening, I cannot avoid pondering a question which
honestly gives me no joy to ponder: just how much damage has MSNBC in particular done to the left?" The Hill's Rising star began,
before excoriating her former employer's "fevered speculations" about an "Infowars conspiracy theory" and the way it hosted people
like Jonathan "maybe Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s" Chait and "conspiracy gadfly Louise Mensch" in search of ratings
bumps.
"This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats' chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could
ever have dreamed up," Ball argued. "Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories
that, I don't know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers' movement, whether we're
going to war with Iran? I'm just spitballing here.
I actually heard some pundit on Chris Hayes last night opine that independent women in middle America were going to be swayed
by what Mueller said yesterday. Are you kidding me? This is almost as bonkers and lacking in factual basis as that time Mimi Rocah
said that Bernie Sanders is not pro-women because that was what her feelings told her. Rocah, by the way, a political prosecutor
with no political background, is only opining at MSNBC because of her role in leading viewers to believe that any day now SDNY is
going to bring down Trump and his entire family."
Ball argued that the fact that MSNBC is doing so much damage to the
Democratic Party in the name of ratings proves that MSNBC isn't "on Team D in the same way that Fox News is on Team R", saying they're
really just in it for the money. But this is where Ball gets it wrong. It is of course true that ratings are a factor, and that conspiracy
theories can be used to sell advertising space, but MSNBC would have had a much easier time marketing conspiracy theories about Trump's
loyalties to
Israel and
Saudi Arabia , both of which would have had
vastly more factual evidence to back them up. The only difference is that the US-centralized empire doesn't have agendas that
it wants to advance against those two countries.
Ball is correct that MSNBC doesn't serve the Democratic party, but she's incorrect that it serves only money. MSNBC, which is
now arguably a more aggressive war propaganda network than Fox News, serves first and foremost the US national security state.
And so do all the other western mainstream news networks.
Consider the way the Syrian province of Idlib is being reported on right now, to pick one of many possible examples.
Al-Qaeda-controlled
Idlib is the final stronghold of the extremist militant groups that
the US and
its allies flooded Syria with in a
premeditated campaign to effect regime change, and Syria and its allies are fighting to recapture the region. They are using
methods that are identical to those commonly used by the US and its allies, yet the bombing campaigns of the US-centralized empire
receive virtually no critical coverage while western mainstream outlets like
CNN and
the BBC
are churning out brazenly propagandistic pieces about the evils of the Assad coalition's airstrikes.
"Civilians are dying in Idlib, just as they died in their thousands in recent US UK air strikes in eg Raqqa and Mosul," political
analyst Charles Shoebridge
observed on Twitter today. "The difference is that when it's (often unverified) claims that Russia or Syria are doing the killing,
US UK media make it front page news."
There are many gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative that outlets like MSNBC have been bashing everyone over the head
with, but the most obvious and easily provable of them is the indisputable fact that Donald Trump
has escalated tensions against Russia more than any US president in decades. You never hear anyone talk about this self-evident
fact in all the endless yammering about Russia, though, because it doesn't advance the agendas of either of America's two mainstream
parties, and it doesn't advance the interests of US imperialism. Democrats don't like acknowledging the fact that Trump has been
consistently and aggressively working directly against the interests of Moscow , and Trump supporters don't like acknowledging
that their president is just as much of a neocon-coddling globalist as those they claim to oppose, so the war machine has gone conveniently
unchallenged in manufacturing new cold war escalations against a nation they've had marked for destruction since the fall of the
Soviet Union.
In a very interesting new Grayzone
interview packed full of ideas that you'll never hear voiced on western mass media, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov
spoke openly about the various ways that Russia, China, and other nations who've resisted absorption into the blob of the US power
alliance have been working toward the creation of a multipolar world. Ryabkov said other nations have been watching the way the dominance
of the US dollar has been used to economically terrorize noncompliant nations into subservience by way of sanctions and other manipulations,
with Washington expecting that the dollar and the US financial system will remain "the cardiovascular system of the whole organism."
"That will not be the case," Ryabkov said. "People will bypass, in literal terms. And people will find ways how to defend themselves,
how to protect themselves, how to guarantee themselves against any emergencies if someone comes up at the White House or whatever,
at the Treasury, at the State, and says 'Hey guys, now we should stop what is going on in Country X, and let's squeeze them out.'
And this country sits on the dollar. So they will be done the moment those ideas will be pronounced. So China, Russia and others,
we create alternatives that we will most probably continue using not just national currencies, but baskets of currencies, currencies
of third countries, other modern barter schemes."
"We will use ways that will diminish the role of dollar and US banking system with all these risks of assets and transactions
being arrested, being stopped," Ryabkov concluded.
That, right there, is the real reason you're being sold Russia hysteria today.
And it isn't just on the matter of financial systems in which the unabsorbed powers are uniting against the imperial blob. Russia
and China
just carried out their first joint air patrol on Tuesday, drawing a hostile response from imperial vassals Japan and South Korea.
"Russian and Chinese bombers on 'first' joint patrol in the Asia-Pacific region. The China-Russia alliance has become a reality
and will last for long time,"
reads a post by one Russian Twitter commentator in response to the news.
The emergence of this alliance, which the Chinese government
has warned Washington is 'not vulnerable to interference', has been something the west has feared for a long time. A
Pentagon white paper published this past May titled "Russian Strategic Intentions" mentions the word "China" 108 times. Some
noteworthy excerpts:
The world system, and American influence in it, would be completely upended if Moscow and Beijing aligned more closely.
The allies' goal should be deterrence. At the same time, the US should bilaterally engage Russia to peel them away from China's
orbit.
He also encourages the development of the US's 'capability to effectively foster distrust and unease between the Russia Federation
and China.'
Along with Beijing, Moscow seeks a multipolar world in which US hegemony comes to an end. As Alexander Lukin recently pointed
out, the 'common ideal of a multipolar world [has] played a significant role in the rapprochement between Russia and China.'
Russia and China were explicitly mentioned in the 2018 National Defense Strategy as the great powers with which the US is
in competition. Both Russia and China have come a long way since the 1990s, and the 'friendship' that emerged in the immediate
post-Tiananmen period and continued to grow over the years now today appears to be one of the strongest bilateral alliances on
the planet.
Together, Russia's tentacles on its former Soviet neighbors and Moscow's strategic alliance with Beijing in pursuit of a multipolar
world (in which the US is no longer the global hegemon) form the two main pillars upon which Putin's grand strategy rests. All
other aspects of its foreign policy behavior can be traced back to this dual-pronged grand strategy.
I think you get the picture. From the Pentagon's point of view, US hegemony good, Russia-China alliance very, very bad.
Analysts like the white paper's authors, and even
The New York Times editorial board
, have urged the drivers of US foreign policy to attempt to lure Moscow away from Beijing, the latter rightly perceived as the greater
long-term threat to US dominance due to China's surging economic power. But diplomacy has clearly been ruled out toward this end,
with only a steadily escalating campaign to shove Russia off the world stage now deemed acceptable.
It
was determined with the help of
influential
neoconservative
think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view
became the establishment orthodoxy , any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An "attack"
on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity
is now treated as a direct attack on the empire.
This is why we've seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as "enemies" as though they pose
some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations
were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack.
This "if you're not obeying us you're attacking us" mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would
ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a
Russian "attack" on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government.
It's got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans. It's about continuing to rule the
world.
Over the last two years, a different, in some ways unrecognizable Larry Summers has been appearing in newspaper editorial pages.
More circumspect in tone, this humbler Summers has been arguing that economic opportunities in the developing world are slowing,
and that the already rich economies are finding it hard to get out of the crisis. Barring some kind of breakthrough, Summers says,
an era of slow growth is here to stay.
In Summers's recent writings, this sombre conclusion has often been paired with a surprising political goal: advocating for a
"responsible nationalism". Now he argues that politicians must recognise that "the basic responsibility of government is to maximise
the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good".
One curious thing about the pro-globalisation consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, and its collapse in recent years, is how closely
the cycle resembles a previous era. Pursuing free trade has always produced displacement and inequality – and political chaos, populism
and retrenchment to go with it. Every time the social consequences of free trade are overlooked, political backlash follows. But
free trade is only one of many forms that economic integration can take. History seems to suggest, however, that it might be the
most destabilising one.
... ... ...
The international systems that chastened figures such as Keynes helped produce in the next few years – especially the Bretton
Woods agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) – set the terms under which the new wave of globalisation
would take place.
The key to the system's viability, in Rodrik's view, was its flexibility – something absent from contemporary globalisation,
with its one-size-fits-all model of capitalism. Bretton Woods stabilised exchange rates by pegging the dollar loosely to gold, and
other currencies to the dollar. Gatt consisted of rules governing free trade – negotiated by participating countries in a series
of multinational "rounds" – that left many areas of the world economy, such as agriculture, untouched or unaddressed. "Gatt's purpose
was never to maximise free trade," Rodrik writes. "It was to achieve the maximum amount of trade compatible with different nations
doing their own thing. In that respect, the institution proved spectacularly successful."
Partly because Gatt was not always dogmatic about free trade, it allowed most countries to figure out their own economic objectives,
within a somewhat international ambit. When nations contravened the agreement's terms on specific areas of national interest, they
found that it "contained loopholes wide enough for an elephant to pass", in Rodrik's words. If a nation wanted to protect its steel
industry, for example, it could claim "injury" under the rules of Gatt and raise tariffs to discourage steel imports: "an abomination
from the standpoint of free trade". These were useful for countries that were recovering from the war and needed to build up their
own industries via tariffs – duties imposed on particular imports. Meanwhile, from 1948 to 1990, world trade grew at an annual average
of nearly 7% – faster than the post-communist years, which we think of as the high point of globalisation. "If there was a golden
era of globalisation," Rodrik has written, "this was it."
Gatt, however, failed to cover many of the countries in the developing world. These countries eventually created their own system,
the United Nations conference on trade and development (UNCTAD). Under this rubric, many countries – especially in Latin America,
the Middle East, Africa and Asia – adopted a policy of protecting homegrown industries by replacing imports with domestically produced
goods. It worked poorly in some places – India and Argentina, for example, where the trade barriers were too high, resulting in
factories that cost more to set up than the value of the goods they produced – but remarkably well in others, such as east Asia,
much of Latin America and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where homegrown industries did spring up. Though many later economists and
commentators would dismiss the achievements of this model, it theoretically fit Larry Summers's recent rubric on globalisation:
"the basic responsibility of government is to maximise the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global
good."
The critical turning point – away from this system of trade balanced against national protections – came in the 1980s. Flagging
growth and high inflation in the west, along with growing competition from Japan, opened the way for a political transformation.
The elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were seminal, putting free-market radicals in charge of two of the world's
five biggest economies and ushering in an era of "hyperglobalisation". In the new political climate, economies with large public
sectors and strong governments within the global capitalist system were no longer seen as aids to the system's functioning, but
impediments to it.
Not only did these ideologies take hold in the US and the UK; they seized international institutions as well. Gatt renamed itself
as the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the new rules the body negotiated began to cut more deeply into national policies. Its
international trade rules sometimes undermined national legislation. The WTO's appellate court intervened relentlessly in member
nations' tax, environmental and regulatory policies, including those of the United States: the US's fuel emissions standards were
judged to discriminate against imported gasoline, and its
ban on imported shrimp caught without turtle-excluding
devices was overturned. If national health and safety regulations were stricter than WTO rules necessitated, they could only
remain in place if they were shown to have "scientific justification".
The purest version of hyperglobalisation was tried out in Latin America in the 1980s. Known as the "Washington consensus", this
model usually involved loans from the IMF that were contingent on those countries lowering trade barriers and privatising many of
their nationally held industries. Well into the 1990s, economists were proclaiming the indisputable benefits of openness. In an
influential 1995 paper, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner wrote: "We find no cases to support the frequent worry that a country might
open and yet fail to grow."
But the Washington consensus was bad for business: most countries did worse than before. Growth faltered, and citizens across
Latin America revolted against attempted privatisations of water and gas. In Argentina, which followed the Washington consensus
to the letter, a grave crisis resulted in
2002 , precipitating an economic collapse and massive street protests that forced out the government that had pursued privatising
reforms. Argentina's revolt presaged a left-populist upsurge across the continent: from 1999 to 2007, leftwing leaders and parties
took power in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, all of them campaigning against the Washington consensus on globalisation.
These revolts were a preview of the backlash of today.
Rodrik – perhaps the contemporary economist whose views have been most amply vindicated by recent events – was himself a beneficiary
of protectionism in Turkey. His father's ballpoint pen company was sheltered under tariffs, and achieved enough success to allow
Rodrik to attend Harvard in the 1970s as an undergraduate. This personal understanding of the mixed nature of economic success may
be one of the reasons why his work runs against the broad consensus of mainstream economics writing on globalisation.
"I never felt that my ideas were out of the mainstream," Rodrik told me recently. Instead, it was that the mainstream had lost
touch with the diversity of opinions and methods that already existed within economics. "The economics profession is strange in
that the more you move away from the seminar room to the public domain, the more the nuances get lost, especially on issues of trade."
He lamented the fact that while, in the classroom, the models of trade discuss losers and winners, and, as a result, the necessity
of policies of redistribution, in practice, an "arrogance and hubris" had led many economists to ignore these implications. "Rather
than speaking truth to power, so to speak, many economists became cheerleaders for globalisation."
In his 2011 book The Globalization Paradox
, Rodrik concluded that "we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination, and economic globalisation." The
results of the 2016 elections and referendums provide ample testimony of the justness of the thesis, with millions voting to push
back, for better or for worse, against the campaigns and institutions that promised more globalisation. "I'm not at all surprised
by the backlash," Rodrik told me. "Really, nobody should have been surprised."
But what, in any case, would "more globalisation" look like? For the same economists and writers who have started to rethink
their commitments to greater integration, it doesn't mean quite what it did in the early 2000s. It's not only the discourse that's
changed: globalisation itself has changed, developing into a more chaotic and unequal system than many economists predicted. The
benefits of globalisation have been largely concentrated in a handful of Asian countries. And even in those countries, the good
times may be running out.
Statistics from Global Inequality
, a 2016 book by the development economist Branko Milanović, indicate that in relative terms the greatest benefits of globalisation
have accrued to a rising "emerging middle class", based preponderantly in China. But the cons are there, too: in absolute terms,
the largest gains have gone to what is commonly called "the 1%" – half of whom are based in the US. Economist Richard Baldwin has
shown in his recent book, The Great Convergence, that nearly all of the gains from globalisation have been concentrated in six countries.
Barring some political catastrophe, in which rightwing populism continued to gain, and in which globalisation would be the least
of our problems – Wolf admitted that he was "not at all sure" that this could be ruled out – globalisation was always going to slow;
in fact, it already has. One reason, says Wolf, was that "a very, very large proportion of the gains from globalisation – by no
means all – have been exploited. We have a more open world economy to trade than we've ever had before." Citing The Great Convergence,
Wolf noted that supply chains have already expanded, and that future developments, such as automation and the use of robots, looked
to undermine the promise of a growing industrial workforce. Today, the political priorities were less about trade and more about
the challenge of retraining workers , as technology renders old jobs obsolete and transforms the world of work.
Rodrik, too, believes that globalisation, whether reduced or increased, is unlikely to produce the kind of economic effects it
once did. For him, this slowdown has something to do with what he calls "premature deindustrialisation". In the past, the simplest
model of globalisation suggested that rich countries would gradually become "service economies", while emerging economies picked
up the industrial burden. Yet recent statistics show the world as a whole is deindustrialising. Countries that one would have expected
to have more industrial potential are going through the stages of automation more quickly than previously developed countries did,
and thereby failing to develop the broad industrial workforce seen as a key to shared prosperity.
For both Rodrik and Wolf, the political reaction to globalisation bore possibilities of deep uncertainty. "I really have found
it very difficult to decide whether what we're living through is a blip, or a fundamental and profound transformation of the world
– at least as significant as the one that brought about the first world war and the Russian revolution," Wolf told me. He cited
his agreement with economists such as Summers that shifting away from the earlier emphasis on globalisation had now become a political
priority; that to pursue still greater liberalisation was like showing "a red rag to a bull" in terms of what it might do to the
already compromised political stability of the western world.
Rodrik pointed to a belated emphasis, both among political figures and economists, on the necessity of compensating those displaced
by globalisation with retraining and more robust welfare states. But pro-free-traders had a history of cutting compensation: Bill
Clinton passed Nafta, but failed to expand safety nets. "The issue is that the people are rightly not trusting the centrists who
are now promising compensation," Rodrik said. "One reason that Hillary Clinton didn't get any traction with those people is that
she didn't have any credibility."
Rodrik felt that economics commentary failed to register the gravity of the situation: that there were increasingly few avenues
for global growth, and that much of the damage done by globalisation – economic and political – is irreversible. "There is a sense
that we're at a turning point," he said. "There's a lot more thinking about what can be done. There's a renewed emphasis on compensation
– which, you know, I think has come rather late."
"... Both neoliberal-driven governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor: They care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate and financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the benefits of the social contract and common good. ..."
"... Michael Yates (economist) points out throughout his book 'The Great Inequality', capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable. ..."
"... At bottom, neoliberals believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology which all boils down to the cheap labor they depend on to make their fortunes. ..."
"... The ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives just don't like working people. They don't like "bottom up" prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. "Corporate lords" have a harder time kicking them around. ..."
Both neoliberal-driven governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor:
They care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate and
financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the
benefits of the social contract and common good.
Michael Yates (economist) points out throughout his book 'The Great Inequality', capitalism
is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to
accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling
elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either
exploit or consider disposable.
At bottom, neoliberals believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have
taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology
which all boils down to the cheap labor they depend on to make their fortunes.
The ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives just don't like working people. They
don't like "bottom up" prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. "Corporate lords"
have a harder time kicking them around.
Once you understand this about the cheap-labor
conservatives, the real motivation for their policies makes perfect sense. Remember,
cheap-labour conservatives believe in social hierarchy and privilege, so the only prosperity
they want is limited to them. They want to see absolutely nothing that benefits those who
work for an hourly wage.
You also need to remember that voting the coalition out, which you need to do, will not
necessarily give you a neoliberal free zone; Labor needs to shed some the dogma as well.
"... Somehow, I think Kevin's being too generous saying NY Times is moderate when it comes to political views. IMO, reactionary is more appropriate given its editorial stances and what it's championed over its history. ..."
Interesting observation of
NY Times attitude after first D-Party debate noted by Kevin Gosztola:
"'Moderates' seems to be the New York Times media company's euphemism for itself. Liberals
at the Democratic presidential debate made the Times company 'anxious.'"
Somehow, I think Kevin's being too generous saying NY Times is moderate when it
comes to political views. IMO, reactionary is more appropriate given its editorial stances
and what it's championed over its history.
Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time
Such 'Error' HappensJOHN CHUCKMAN , Jun 26, 2019 2:10:12
PM |
23
Yesterday the news agencies Associated Press and Reuters mistranslated a
speech by Iran's President Hassan Rouhani. They made it sound as if Rouhani insulted U.S.
President Donald Trump as 'mentally retarded'. Rouhani never said that.
Iran's conservative new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Wednesday that Israel must be
"wiped off the map" and that attacks by Palestinians would destroy it, the ISNA press
agency reported.
...
Referring to comments by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution,
Ahmadinejad said, "As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."
Ever since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news
agencies at the time, it was that Israel "should be wiped off the map." Iran's nuclear
program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to
the infamous map remark.
Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political
affairs, recently: "Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish
to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or
should live with a nuclear Iran."
"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom
exists in Persian," remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of
Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was
misquoted. "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying
Jerusalem, would collapse." Since Iran has not "attacked another country aggressively for
over a century," he said in an e-mail exchange, "I smell the whiff of war propaganda."
Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently
laid out the case this way: "The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by
Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that 'this regime occupying
Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,' just as the Shah's regime in Iran had
vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation
of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The 'page of time' phrase suggests he did not
expect it to happen soon."
Despite the above
and other explanations the false "wipe Israel off the map" translation never died. Years
later it still reappeared in Guardian pieces which required it to issuemultiple
corrections and clarifications.
Now, as the Trump administration is pushing for war on Iran, a similar mistranslation
miraculously happened. It were again 'western' news agencies who lightened the fire:
A lot of Western media is reporting that Iranian President Rouhani called Trump
"mentally retarded." This is inaccurate.
Regarding Trump, he just said "no wise person would take such an action [the new sanctions
imposed]."
Absolutely incorrect. There is a word for "retarded" in Persian & Rouhani didn't use
it. Prior to him saying "mental disability" he even prefaced his comment by saying "mental
weakness." Those who speak Persian can listen & judge for themselves. Here is a video
clip of Rouhani's comment: link
Iran leadership doesn't understand the words "nice" or "compassion," they never have.
Sadly, the thing they do understand is Strength and Power, and the USA is by far the most
powerful Military Force in the world, with 1.5 Trillion Dollars invested over the last two
years alone..
....The wonderful Iranian people are suffering, and for no reason at all. Their
leadership spends all of its money on Terror, and little on anything else. The U.S. has not
forgotten Iran's use of IED's & EFP's (bombs), which killed 2000 Americans, and wounded
many more...
.... Iran's very ignorant and insulting statement , put out today, only shows that they
do not understand reality. Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great
and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration. No more John
Kerry & Obama!
Reuters , which also peddled the mistranslation, gleefully
connected the dots :
This follows in the footsteps of a rich history of mistranslating and obfuscating which is
rarely, if ever, corrected by our Guardians of Truth. I will not hold my breath for AP to
pull its tweet out issue any sort of correction. The war machine is revving up, truth be
damned.
To add a few obfuscations to the list of mistranslations: the Palestinian intifada. Sounds
scary, no? Violence against the benevolent Israelis. Because what does intifada actually
mean? Uprising, which by its nature suggests oppression, something which just 'can't' be
happening in Palestine, hence the need for intifada.
Or take jihad, 'a pillor' of Islam. Again, very scary, as jihad 'means' suicide bombs and
killing infidels. What the Guardians of Truth never mention is that jihad in Islam is a very,
very broad term that includes such things as helping the poor or less fortunate, educating
oneself, quiet reflection, and prayer. Jihad as meaning 'holy war' was a sense meaning
derived much later than the founding of the religion, as a reaction to very real threats to
believers of the time, the Crusades and Mongol invasions. That this specific sense meaning
was essentially confined to history afterward, only to be revived by Wahhabists and takfiris,
and one not believed in by the vast majority of Muslims, is never explained. 'Cause all them
crazy Muslims believe in jihad!
In all cases where the boogeyman of the day needs concocting, rest assured the
'mainstream' press, with AP in the lead, will be there to build a gleaming edifice mistruths,
omissions, and lies.
In approximately 17 months, the american public can make strides to fix this mess.
I guess that is a long time for the iranians, but still maybe best option.
Just in case there is any doubt in American minds here is the Israeli Ambassador to the UN.
He thinks the sanctions are working well. Iran is panicking.
They mistranslate Trump all the time, or they spin what he says. It is amazing to watch.
For instance, at the Helsinki meeting, where he met with Putin and they discussed multiple
topics, but the press ignored any topic but demanding that Trump denounce Putin and "admit"
that Putin helped him steal the election, and that he was therefore not the legitimate
president.
Obviously, Trump was not going to say that, so he said that he was the legitimate
president, and the mockingbird media spun that into "the president is a traitor to America
because he said that 17 national intelligence agencies are lying".
.....The ministers lie, the professors lie, the television lies,
the priests lie .
These lies mean that the country wants to die.
Lie after lie starts out into the prairie grass,
like enormous caravans of Conestoga wagons .
And a long desire for death flows out, guiding the
enormous caravans from beneath,
stringing together the vague and foolish words.
It is a desire to eat death,
to gobble it down,
to rush on it like a cobra with mouth open
It's a desire to take death inside,
to feel it burning inside, pushing out velvety hairs,
like a clothes brush in the intestines --
This is the thrill that leads the President on to lie....
Robert Bly, The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, originally published by City Lights books
1970
Maybe the translation is inacurate but the message had the expected reaction from Trump:
Tweet furor.
It is good that Trump realizes that he does not have the monopole of insulting leaders.
The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war. How could it give a lesson to
Iran who won a 8 years war against Iraq despite the support that the USA, the Gulf countries
and Western countries gave to Iraq.
Loud noise and indecisive actions: The disaster of the USA foreign policy
I remember watching CNN translate Khamenei's "Nuclear Power" to "Nuclear Weapons" right on
live TV in 2013. This is not new.
/div> Virgile "The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war".
The US won a war against Grenada [population 95,000] I would go so far as to say they whupped
ass. True there were only 64 Cuban soldiers there [security guards] All members of the US armed
forces were involved and 5,000 medals were given out. Ra Ra USA.
Posted by: Harry Law , Jun 26, 2019 5:29:37 PM |
50
Virgile "The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war". The US won a war
against Grenada [population 95,000] I would go so far as to say they whupped ass. True there
were only 64 Cuban soldiers there [security guards] All members of the US armed forces were
involved and 5,000 medals were given out. Ra Ra USA.
Posted by: Harry Law | Jun 26, 2019 5:29:37 PM |
50
b-
I am a Persian speaker and is true that president Rouhani never said Trump is retarded, we
now have way passed the point that insults can matte. Nevertheless it was better if President
Rouhani would have called Trump and the rest of the ruling US regime like what the whole
world has now come to understand, a true and unique collection of retards on a shining hill.
Reminds me of when Nikita Khruschev attempted to explain in 1956 his view that that
capitalism would destroy itself from within by quoting Marx: "What the bourgeoisie therefore
produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers." This was notoriously
mistranslated into English as "We will bury you", as if the Soviets were out to kill all
westerners themselves. Of course this mistranslated was quoted time and time again in western
media, fueling Cold War paranoia for years to come.
blue @ 19 The news media are wedded to the state which is wedded to the banking system which
are all subsidiaries of global capitalism. They don't need to correct themselves. They may
have the occasional family feud, but they're all on the same team. They will admit to
"mistakes" being made, but only long after it makes no difference.
We have a FREE PRESS in America-Pravda on the Potomac, Izvestia on the Hudson.
Have a look sometime at the Venn Diagrams that portray the overlapping/interlocking
memberships of the regulatory/financial/corporate leadership class.
But more than that, whatever the idea of a free press once meant, with the rise of digital
corporate networking "platforms", not subject to any accountability, the barriers to entry of
any competing narratives to the mainstream discourse are nearly insurmountable. Except maybe
through subversion?
What is missing is a true public 'Marketplace of Ideas'
The deliberate mis-translations of non-english speaking "adversaries" of the US is common in
the msm. Putin is frequently and deliberately mis-translated to make him appear dictatorial
and aggressive.
I listened to Rohani's speech. He said that if JCPOA is bad, it is bad for all parties; and
if it is good, it is good for all parties. They cannot expect for JCPOA to be bad for them
and good for us. They withdrew from the JCPOA and expect us to stay with the agreement. This
is what he meant when he said: White house has been affected by mental inability and mental
disability.
ADKC
Iran is at war. US and gang are trying to destroy Iran as a nation. The biggest asset in
times of war is deception. Used by both the attacker and the attacked.
Khamenei
has Tweeted a series of tweets, and his scribe has posted what he tweeted along with
other words
at his website in English so there's no mistranslation. Here's one of the series of 6:
"The graceful Iranian nation has been accused & insulted by world's most vicious
regime, the U.S., which is a source of wars, conflicts & plunder. Iranian nation won't
give up over such insults. Iranians have been wronged by oppressive sanctions but not
weakened & remain powerful."
They were made 14+ hours ago, yet I'm the first to post notice of them here?!
The USA government excels at propaganda. It always has. Doesn't matter if it babies and
incubators, mistranslated leaders of targeted countries, or supposed mass graves. BTW... what
ever happened to all those mass graves in Iraq? HRW was going to dig them all up and document
them. Hundreds of thousands. Most Americans I talk to still believe in this. Was it true?
Saddam himself had claimed it wasn't true. That it was Kurdish propaganda to gain sympathy.
He claimed the Anfal campaign was only to push the Kurds off the border so he could control
arms smuggling and that casualties were minimal. Looking into the search. They are graves
with a few hundred here and there but where are the rest of the bodies? If you google Iraq
mass graves there are more articles about ISIS mass graves than the Anfal campaign. There
were people killed in the South during the Shia uprising after the first gulf war than there
was for the Anfal campaign. Was that a lie too? Nearly every American believes it still.
PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that
'400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses
have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence,
quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet
on Iraq's mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US
government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've
already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'
Anyone who can undestand Farsi ( Persian language) can litsen Rouhani's speech. He did not
name "Trump", he said " White House".
I have been watching CNN news channel who said that Rouhani made a personal attack on Trump!
That was not true.
There was no personal attack on Rouhani's speech.
Importantly, the context of the speech and conclusion is diffent from western media reports
and western translations.
I would like give few links of some Iranian news agencies, reporting Rouhani's speech for
International use, as reference here:
1) FrasNews Agency
Rouhani said:
"These days, we see the White House in confusion and we are witnessing undue and
ridiculous words and adoption of a scandalous policy,"
..."The US sanctions are crime against humanity. The US recent measures indicate their
ultimate failure. The new US measures are the result of their frustration and confusion over
Iran. The White House has mental disability,"
Le président iranien, affirmant que les États-Unis, malgré de
nombreuses tentatives de pression exercées par divers leviers sur l'Iran, ont
échoué dans leurs objectifs, a poursuivi : "Une étrange frustration et
une grande confusion règnent au sein du Corps dirigeant de la Maison Blanche. Ils se
sentent déçus car ils n'ont obtenu aucun résultat, ils s'attendaient
à voir l'Iran brisé dans l'espace de quelques mois, mais ils ont fini par
constater que les Iraniens agissent de plus en plus fermement, de manière plus
créative que jamais ".
The president also decried the new US sanctions against Iran, saying the White House has
been thrown into confusion as its officials are making "inappropriate and ridiculous"
comments and adopting the policy of disgrace.
Wow that's amazing! Probably the best known Khrushchev 'quote', presented as evidence of
his boorish nature, is an intentional mistranslation. And the Marx quote is not exactly
obscure, it's from Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto for eff sake! At least it makes a
change from the 'lets just make things up' cottage industry of Lenin & Stalin
'quotes'.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its
shoes."
Mark Twain (or some other student of wisdom)
... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotations.html
Apr 26, 2017 - Mark Twain is one of many who gets credit for famous quotations he never wrote
or said. ... credited with saying "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth
is still putting on its shoes" ... Proverbial wisdom, in which a quotation is elevated to the
status of a proverb because its source is unknown;.
Circe , Jun 27, 2019 10:19:52 AM |
136Noirette , Jun 27, 2019 10:50:17 AM |
137
Mistranslations are a classical cheap n easy way to sway opinion.
Interesting that the examples b quotes, and most of those promoted currently by the
US-uk-eu, afaik, understand, are intended to project into the voice of Iranians, Russians,
Syrians, utterances, declarations, to be labelled insults, slander, threats, impropriety,
even rage, coming from these parties, as
there is nothing much else to display!
(Spanish is too comprehensible > does not apply to Mexico, Cuba, S. America.)
Often cultural matters play a role, but are ignored. Ahmadinejad was endlessly vilified
and mocked by the W-MSM for saying what was translated as there are no homosexuals in
Iran (no idea what the original formulation was) - which 'obviously' can't be 'true.'
Besides homosexuality being unacceptable in conservative rule-books, Iran is, or was (to
2010) above (or with) Thailand the no. 1. practitioner / destination for sex change
operations. Iran had super educated docs, great hospitals, etc.
Ahmadinejad was relying on a kind of fundamentalist principle where the 'soul' or the
'essential quality' of a person is what is tantamount, what counts above all. The physical
manifestation, here the human body, can be transformed to be in harmony with the deep-felt or
'innately' ascribed orientation or 'spirit.' So, no homosexuals in Iran, or only a few who
are in 'transition.' (Not denying real suffering of gays in Iran, other story.)
The W, in first place the US, is doing precisely the same with its 'gender change'
promotion, as applied to children and young teens. Here too, 'feelings' and 'identity'
override 'nature' : the physical can be overturned, overcome, fixed.
Such cultural issues play a role in mis-translations, deliberate or not. It may appear
that I wandered far off topic, I just picked a topical comprehensible ex. Sharia law is more
complex..
"... Risen detailed how his editors had been "quite willing to cooperate with the government." In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, "How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?" ..."
"... Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had "secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency." ..."
"... Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune. ..."
"... However, he added, "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc." ..."
"... These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government -- or at least for the US national security state. ..."
The New York Times casually acknowledged that it sends major scoops to the US government
before publication, to make sure "national security officials" have "no concerns."
By Ben Norton
June 25, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - The New York
Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for
approval from "national security officials" before publication.
This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The
American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing
reporting that top officials don't want made public.
On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber
attacks on Russia's power grid . According to the article, "the Trump administration is
using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively," as part of a larger "digital
Cold War between Washington and Moscow."
In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the
Times on Twitter, calling the article "a virtual act of Treason."
The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending
the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being
printed.
"Accusing the press of treason is dangerous," the Times communications team said. "We
described the article to the government before publication."
"As our story notes, President Trump's own national security officials said there were no
concerns," the Times added.
NY Times editors 'quite willing to cooperate with
the government'
The symbiotic relationship between the US corporate media and the government has been known
for some time. American intelligence agencies play the press like a musical instrument, using
it it to selectively leak information at opportune moments to push US soft power and advance
Washington's interests.
But rarely is this symbiotic relationship so casually and publicly acknowledged.
In 2018, former New York Times reporter James Risen published a 15,000-word article in
The Intercept providing further insight into how this unspoken alliance operates.
Risen
detailed how his editors had been "quite willing to cooperate with the government." In fact, a
top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was,
"How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?"
There is an "informal arrangement" between the state and the press, Risen explained, where
US government officials "regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop
the publication of sensitive national security stories."
"At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations," the former New York Times
reported said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to
the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and
asked him to kill the story.
"He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,"
Risen said. "I agreed."
Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. "If I had
reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a
public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,"
he wrote. "That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden
more seriously."
This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories.
"And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times," he
said.
"After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began asking the press to kill stories more
frequently," Risen continued. "They did it so often that I became convinced the administration
was invoking national security to quash stories that were merely politically embarrassing." In
the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently "clashed" with Times editors because he raised
questions about the US government's lies. But his stories "stories raising questions about the
intelligence, particularly the administration's claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda,
were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether."
The Times' executive editor Howell Raines "was believed by many at the paper to prefer
stories that supported the case for war," Risen said.
In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a
botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House,
where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.
Risen said Rice told him "to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make
another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone."
"The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national
security stories," Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated
the "war on the press."
CIA media infiltration and manufacturing consent
In their renowned study of US media, "
Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media," Edward S. Herman and
Chomsky articulated a "propaganda model," showing how "the media serve, and propagandize on
behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them," through "the
selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists'
internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the
institution's policy."
But in some cases, the relationship between US intelligence agencies and the corporate media
is not just one of mere ideological policing, indirect pressure, or friendship, but rather one
of employment.
In the 1950s, the CIA launched a covert operation called Project Mockingbird, in which it
surveilled, influenced, and manipulated American journalists and media coverage, explicitly in
order to direct public opinion against the Soviet Union, China, and the growing international
communist movement.
Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter who helped uncover
the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled "
The CIA and
the Media : How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central
Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up."
Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in
the previous 25 years had "secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence
Agency."
Bernstein wrote:
"Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit.
There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of
clandestine services -- from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with
spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared
their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who
considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less
exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their
work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy
business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees
masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were
engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading
news organizations."
Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including
ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday
Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune.
However, he added, "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA
officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc."
These layers of state
manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they
claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto
spokespeople for the government -- or at least for the US national security state.
Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer
of the Moderate Rebels podcast,
which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com , and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton .
This article was originally published by " Grayzone
"
@Fissile
I've seen that before. Although hardly an anarcho-capitalist, my uncle in Australia; a music
teacher in a private school would alway rail against unions and so-called union-power at
every opportunity. The moment his job came under threat, he'd signed up for membership
forthwith.
"... Friedrich von Hayek, one of the creed's most revered economic gurus, spent his productive years railing against government old age pension and medical insurance schemes. When he became old and infirm, he signed on for both social security and medicare. ..."
Friedrich von Hayek, one of the creed's most revered economic gurus, spent his productive
years railing against government old age pension and medical insurance schemes. When he
became old and infirm, he signed on for both social security and medicare.
Love it. When push comes to shove all those ideologies and beliefs crumble into the dust of
practical needs. Another individual who cloaked the self-interest of the rich and
powerful into some kind of spurious ideology.
George wrote a rather good article about Von
Hayek a few years ago I seem to remember.
Indeed! I attended a public lecture by Thomas Frank (former young conservative-now left
wing) at the LSE, and he was even describing Tea Party Placards, reading: (paraphrase)
'government get your hands off my Medicare'!
"... Republicanism and true Christianity are mutually exclusive. There is nothing for them to quote. Sharing your wealth? Giving to the poor? Egalitarianism? Loving your neighbour? The Good Samaritan? ..."
"... Best to pretend that Christianity is about extreme right wing economic policy (and fascist social mores), even though it is the opposite. ..."
"... And Tea Partiers like Ayn Rand? The most anti-Christian and anti-American lunatic you can find? The corporate agenda and Wall Street interests trump everything else. No news there. ..."
"... A lot of these people describe themselves as Christian, makes you wonder which part of Jesus' message they loved more, the part that said the poor should rot without help, or the part where he said violence was justified and the chasing of wealth is to be lauded. ..."
It never stops to amaze me how the American Republican Right claims to be Christian. Have you
noticed that they NEVER quote the words of Jesus Christ? I don't blame them,
Republicanism and true Christianity are mutually exclusive. There is nothing for them to
quote. Sharing your wealth? Giving to the poor? Egalitarianism? Loving your neighbour? The
Good Samaritan?
Dirty words all. Best to pretend that Christianity is about extreme right wing
economic policy (and fascist social mores), even though it is the opposite.
If Jesus came to the US today, he would not like Republicans and they would not like him.
Santorum, Palin, Limbaugh etc. would strap him to the electric chair and pull the lever if
they could, no doubt.
And Tea Partiers like Ayn Rand? The most anti-Christian and anti-American lunatic you
can find? The corporate agenda and Wall Street interests trump everything else. No news
there.
The most bizarre aspect of the rights infatuation with Ayn Rand is that she was an
ardent Atheist who's beliefs are diametrically opposite to those of Jesus & the
Bible.
A lot of these people describe themselves as Christian, makes you wonder which part of
Jesus' message they loved more, the part that said the poor should rot without help, or the
part where he said violence was justified and the chasing of wealth is to be lauded.
"the only way you're gonna be able to sleep at night (and go to heaven in the afterlife) is
to believe that the system has some moral justification based on the laws of nature"
I think this is one of the drivers in the shift from Catholicism to Protestanism,
especially in Northern Europe.
For Medieval Catholics everyone was where God had put them, so the rich were rich and the
poor poor as part of Gods plan, and anyone trying to change it was going against God.
Which is handy if you are a Baron or Bishop living the high life surrounded my thousands of
starving peasants (having armed retainers also helped).
Come the industrial revolution and the rise of the business and trade classes that's not so
appealing, so now God rewards the virtuous and hard working, who naturally rise to the
top.
George Monbiot is right: Rand was probably a female sociopath...
Notable quotes:
"... Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax. ..."
"... Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year. ..."
"... the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress. ..."
"... It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments. ..."
"... the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan , former head of the US Federal Reserve. ..."
"... As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system". ..."
"... Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history. ..."
Her
psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into
their doormats Comments
1,227 Illustration by Daniel Pudles I t has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the
postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and
compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated
power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the
belief system constructed by Ayn Rand , who died 30 years ago today, has never
been more popular or influential.
Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her
novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she
explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure
self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She
described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to
assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role
for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or
transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.
Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government
intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers. The
millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with
the result that the nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and selfishness,
by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt .
The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and their own sloth and
fecklessness. Those who try to help them are gassed. In a notorious passage, she argues that
all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for
instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a
civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife "who believed that she had the
right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing".
Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and
greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss
shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was
to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans,
according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of
copies every year.
Ignoring Rand's evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her
to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and
"Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague
anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by the
broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the
Republicans in Congress.
Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people who have never read
it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new
demands to remove the 50p tax band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering,
jeering bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking compassion and empathy,
attacking efforts to make the word a kinder place.
It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is
crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they
are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.
It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from
a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this
movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and
expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires' doormats. I wonder
how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of
her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed furiously against
both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her
belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.
But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy: as Adam Curtis's BBC
documentary showed last year, the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan , former head of
the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he
co-edited with her called Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal
. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no
need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as
"the 'greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking is the unexcelled
protector of the consumer". As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients
guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains,
is a "superlatively moral system".
Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for
the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and
the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already
documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history.
Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous admission that it was Rand
who persuaded him that "capitalism is not only efficient and practical but also moral", he
mentioned her in his memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion – and
this, it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful evidence that even today
Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having renounced his partial admission of failure to
Congress.
Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the Atlantic continues to demand
the rollback of the state, even as the wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go
down, the ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.
I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that
towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security.
In case nobody mentioned this book before, which is relevant to the theme:
These submerged policies, Mettler shows, obscure the role of government and
exaggerate that of the market. As a result, citizens are unaware not only of the benefits
they receive, but of the massive advantages given to powerful interests, such as insurance
companies and the financial industry. Neither do they realize that the policies of the
submerged state shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans, exacerbating
inequality.
"... If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to legitimise itself. ..."
"... Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist ideologies and an order of market feudalism. ..."
"... The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue. ..."
"... Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise we'll hang back and let you do what you want'. ..."
"... Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices, they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know there would be socialism. ..."
"... This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is, neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t totalitarianism. ..."
"... It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal. ..."
"... However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes that Hayek railed against. ..."
The other point to be made is that the return of fundamentalist nationalism is arguably a
radicalized form of neoliberalism. If 'free markets' of enterprising individuals have
been tested to destruction, then capitalism is unable to articulate an ideology with which to
legitimise itself.
Therefore, neoliberal hegemony can only be perpetuated with authoritarian, nationalist
ideologies and an order of market feudalism.
In other words, neoliberalism's authoritarian orientations, previously effaced beneath
discourses of egalitarian free-enterprise, become overt.
The market is no longer an enabler of private enterprise, but something more like a
medieval religion, conferring ultimate authority on a demagogue.
Individual entrepreneurs collectivise into a 'people' serving a market which has become
synonymous with nationhood. A corporate state emerges, free of the regulatory fetters of
democracy.
The final restriction on the market - democracy itself - is removed. There then is no
separate market and state, just a totalitarian market state.
Yes, the EU is an ordoliberal institution - the state imposing rules on the market from
without. Thus, it is not the chief danger. The takeover of 5G, and therefore our entire
economy and industry, by Huawei - now that would be a loss of state sovereignty. But because
Huawei is nominally a corporation, people do not think about is a form of governmental
bureaucracy, but if powerful enough that is exactly what it is.
Pinkie123: So good to read your understandings of neoliberalism. The political project is the
imposition of the all seeing all knowing 'market' on all aspects of human life. This version
of the market is an 'information processor'. Speaking of the different idea of the
laissez-faire version of market/non market areas and the function of the night watchman state
are you aware there are different neoliberalisms? The EU for example runs on the version
called 'ordoliberalism'. I understand that this still sees some areas of society as separate
from 'the market'?
ADamnSmith: Philip Mirowski has discussed this 'under the radar' aspect of neoliberalism. How
to impose 'the market' on human affairs - best not to be to explicit about what you are
doing. Only recently has some knowledge about the actual neoliberal project been appearing.
Most people think of neoliberalism as 'making the rich richer' - just a ramped up version of
capitalism. That's how the left has thought of it and they have been ineffective in stopping
its implementation.
Neoliberalism allows with impunity pesticide businesses to apply high risk toxic pesticides
everywhere seriously affecting the health of children, everyone as well as poisoning the
biosphere and all its biodiversity. This freedom has gone far too far and is totally
unacceptable and these chemicals should be banished immediately.
The left have been entirely wrong to believe that neoliberalism is a mobilisation of
anarchic, 'free' markets. It never was so. Only a few more acute thinkers on the left
(Jacques Ranciere, Foucault, Deleuze and, more recently, Mark Fisher, Wendy Brown, Will
Davies and David Graeber) have understood neoliberalism to be a techno-economic order of
control, requiring a state apparatus to enforce wholly artificial directives.
Also, the work
of recent critics of data markets such as Shoshana Zuboff has shown capitalism to be evolving
into a totalitarian system of control through cybernetic data aggregation.
Only in theory is neoliberalism a form of laissez-faire. Neoliberalism is not a case of the
state saying, as it were: 'OK everyone, we'll impose some very broad legal parameters, so
we'll make sure the police will turn up if someone breaks into your house; but otherwise
we'll hang back and let you do what you want'.
Hayek is perfectly clear that a strong state
is required to force people to act according to market logic. If left to their own devices,
they might collectivise, think up dangerous utopian ideologies, and the next thing you know
there would be socialism.
This the paradox of neoliberalism as an intellectual critique of
government: a socialist state can only be prohibited with an equally strong state. That is,
neoliberals are not opposed to a state as such, but to a specifically centrally-planned state
based on principles of social justice - a state which, to Hayek's mind, could only end in t
totalitarianism.
Because concepts of social justice are expressed in language, neoliberals
are suspicious of linguistic concepts, regarding them as politically dangerous. Their
preference has always been for numbers. Hence, market bureaucracy aims for the quantification
of all values - translating the entirety of social reality into metrics, data, objectively
measurable price signals. Numbers are safe. The laws of numbers never change. Numbers do not
lead to revolutions. Hence, all the audit, performance review and tick-boxing that has been
enforced into public institutions serves to render them forever subservient to numerical
(market) logic. However, because social institutions are not measurable, attempts to make
them so become increasingly mystical and absurd. Administrators manage data that has no
relation to reality. Quantitatively unmeasurable things - like happiness or success - are
measured, with absurd results.
It should be understood (and I speak above all as a critic of neoliberalism) that
neoliberal ideology is not merely a system of class power, but an entire metaphysic, a way of
understanding the world that has an emotional hold over people. For any ideology to
universalize itself, it must be based on some very powerful ideas. Hayek and Von Mises were
Jewish fugitives of Nazism, living through the worst horrors of twentieth-century
totalitarianism. There are passages of Hayek's that describe a world operating according to
the rules of a benign abstract system that make it sound rather lovely. To understand
neoliberalism, we must see that it has an appeal.
However, there is no perfect order of price signals. People do not simply act according to
economic self-interest. Therefore, neoliberalism is a utopian political project like any
other, requiring the brute power of the state to enforce ideological tenets. With tragic
irony, the neoliberal order eventually becomes not dissimilar to the totalitarian regimes
that Hayek railed against.
"... "The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy's 'Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,' February 20, 2017. But what is more extraordinary is the uniformity with which the paper's regular columnists accept as a given the CIA's assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and 'non-partisan' investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this 'fake news' threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery. ..."
"... "The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post's piece by Craig Timberg, 'Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say,' which featured a report by a group of anonymous "experts" entity called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were 'routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.' While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance toward U.S. foreign policy, the 'experts' refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being 'targeted by legions of skilled hackers.' As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, 'You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to your claims? Take a hike.' ..."
"... But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.) ..."
"... "The success of the war party's campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically clear in the Trump administration's speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did not require evidence of Assad's guilt beyond their government's claims. The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served the rebels well. ..."
"It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and
spread of 'fake news.' These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based
reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating
false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate
power.
"An important form of mainstream media fake news is that which is presented while suppressing information that calls the preferred
news into question. [ ]
"The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement
with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa
Eddy's 'Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,' February 20, 2017. But what is more extraordinary is the
uniformity with which the paper's regular columnists accept as a given the CIA's assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission
to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and 'non-partisan'
investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times
and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this 'fake news' threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form
of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery.
"The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post's piece by Craig Timberg, 'Russian propaganda
effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say,' which featured a report by a group of anonymous "experts" entity
called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were 'routine peddlers of Russian
propaganda.' While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance
toward U.S. foreign policy, the 'experts' refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being 'targeted by legions
of skilled hackers.' As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, 'You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to
your claims? Take a hike.'
But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon
or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.)
"On December 23, 2016, President Obama signed the Portman-Murphy Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which will supposedly
allow the United States to more effectively combat foreign (namely Russian and Chinese) propaganda and disinformation. It will
encourage more government counter-propaganda efforts, and provide funding to non-government entities to help in this enterprise.
It is clearly a follow-on to the claims of Russian hacking and propaganda, and shares the spirit of the listing of two hundred
tools of Moscow featured in the Washington Post. (Perhaps PropOrNot will qualify for a subsidy and be able to enlarge its list.)
Liberals have been quiet on this new threat to freedom of speech, undoubtedly influenced by their fears of Russian-based fake
news and propaganda. But they may yet take notice, even if belatedly, when Trump or one of his successors puts it to work on their
own notions of fake news and propaganda.
"The success of the war party's campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically
clear in the Trump administration's speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and
other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did
not require evidence of Assad's guilt beyond their government's claims. The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served
the rebels well.
"But the mainstream media never ask cui bono? in cases like this. In 2013, a similar charge against Assad, which brought the
United States to the brink of a full-scale bombing war in Syria, turned out to be a false flag operation, and some authorities
believe the current case is equally problematic. Nevertheless, Trump moved quickly (and illegally), dealing a blow to any further
rapprochement between the United States and Russia. The CIA, the Pentagon, leading Democrats, and the rest of the war party had
won an important skirmish in the struggle over permanent war."
Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017
During a press conference in Japan U.S. President Donald Trump today
said ( video ):
And I'm not looking to hurt Iran at all. I'm looking to have Iran say, "No nuclear weapons." We have enough problems in this world
right now with nuclear weapons. No nuclear weapons for Iran.
And I think we'll make a deal.
Iran said: "No nuclear weapons." It said that several times. It continues to say that.
Iran does not have the intent to make nuclear weapons. It has no nuclear weapons program.
But Trump may be confused because the U.S. 'paper of the record', the New York Times, recently again began to falsely assert
that Iran has such a program.
A May 4 editorial in the Times claimed that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps was running such a nuclear weapons program.
After a loud public outrage the Times corrected the editorial. Iran's UN office wrote a letter to the Times which was
published on May 6:
In an early version of "Trump Dials Up the Pressure on Iran" (editorial, nytimes.com, May 4), now corrected, you referred to a
nuclear weapons program in describing the reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
...
The editorial is correct in criticizing the punishing aspects of the Trump administration policy toward Iran -- one that has brought
only suffering to the Iranian people and one that will not result in any change in Iran's policies. But it was wrong to refer
to a weapons program -- a dangerous assertion that could lead to a great misunderstanding among the public .
Unfortunately that did not help. The NYT continues with the "dangerous assertion".
At a meeting of President Trump's top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented
an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces
or accelerate work on nuclear weapons , administration officials said.
One can not accelerate one's car, if one does not have one. The phrase "accelerate work on nuclear weapons" implies that Iran
has a nuclear weapons program. It may that the White House falsely claimed that but the authors use the phrase and never debunk it.
A May 14 NYT piece by Helene Cooper and Edward Wong
repeats the false claim
without pointing out that it is wrong:
The Trump administration is looking at plans to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American
forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons , The New York Times reported.
Also on May 14 the NYT 's editorial cartoon was published under the caption
Will Iran Revive Its Nuclear Program?
The caption of the orientalist cartoon falsely asserted that Iran had enriched Uranium to weapons grade. And no, Iran does not have
a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapons program in its freezer.
On May 16, after another public outcry, a correction was added to the cartoon:
An earlier version of a caption with this cartoon erroneously attributed a distinction to Iran's nuclear program. Iran has not
produced highly enriched uranium.
After this onslaught of false New York Times claims about Iran NYT critic Belen Fernandez asked:
Has the New York Times declared
war on Iran? She lists other claims made by the Times about Iran that are far from the truth.
Three days later, on May 25, Palko Karasz
reported in the
New York Times on Iran's reaction to Trump's
tiny
troop buildup in the Persian Gulf region. Again the obviously false "accelerate" phrase was used:
Under White House plans revised after pressure from hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, the president's national security adviser,
if Iran were to accelerate work on nuclear weapons , defense officials envision sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle
East.
Iran does not have a nuclear program. It can not "accelerate" one. The U.S. claims that Iran once had such a program but also
says that it was ended in 2003. The
standardformulation that
Reuters uses in its Iran reporting is thereby appropriate:
The United States and the U.N. nuclear watchdog believe Iran had a nuclear weapons program that it abandoned. Tehran denies ever
having had one.
Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transfer or whatsoever of nuclear
weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to
manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance
in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.
With that Iran said "No nuclear weapons". Iran also accepted the nuclear safeguards demand in Article III of the treaty in form
of routine inspections by the treaty's nuclear watchdog organization IAEA.
Article IV of the NPT gives all non-nuclear-weapon state parties like Iran the "inalienable right" to "develop research, production
and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination." After signing the NPT Iran launched several civil nuclear
projects. These started under the Shah in 1970s and continued after the 1979 revolution in Iran.
Ever since the Iranian revolution the U.S. expressed explicit hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It instigated the President
Saddam Hussein of Iraq to launch a war against the Islamic Republic and actively supported him throughout. It attempted and continues
to attempt to hobble Iran's development, nuclear and non-nuclear, by all possible means.
Under U.S. President George W. Bush the U.S. government claimed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. The Islamic Republic
Iran rejected that claim and in 2004 signed the
Additional Protocol to the NPT which allows the IAEA
to do more rigorous, short-notice inspections at declared and undeclared nuclear facilities to look for secret nuclear activities.
With that the Islamic Republic of Iran said: "No nuclear weapons".
In a 2006 New York Times op-ed Javid Zarif, then the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations,
wrote :
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, has issued a decree against the development, production, stockpiling
and use of nuclear weapons.
With that Iran's highest political and religious leader said: "No nuclear weapons".
Not only did Iran sign the NPT and its Additional Protocol but its political leadership outright rejects the development and ownership
of nuclear weapons.
Zarif also pointed out that the IAEA found that Iran had missed to declare some nuclear activities but also confirmed that it
never had the nuclear weapons program the Bush administration claimed it had:
In November 2003, for example, the agency confirmed that "to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear
material and activities were related to a nuclear weapons program."
During the "previously undeclared nuclear material and activities" which the IAEA investigated, some Iranian scientists worked
on a 'plan for a plan' towards nuclear weapons. They seem to have discussed what steps Iran would have to take, what materials, and
what kind of organization it would need to launch a nuclear weapons program. The work was not officially sanctioned and no actual
nuclear weapons program was ever launched. It is believed that the Iranian scientists worked on a 'plan for a plan' because they
were concerned that Iran's then arch enemy Saddam Hussein, who had bombarded Iranian cities with chemical weapons, was working towards
nuclear weapons. In 2003, after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that concern proved to be unfounded and the 'plan for a plan' project was
shut down.
In December 2007 all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies
confirmed the shut down:
A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the
program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.
...
[T]he new [National Intelligence Estimate] declares with "high confidence" that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform
that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt "was directed
primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure."
The National Intelligence Estimate ended efforts by the Bush administration to threaten Iran with war. But the U.S. government,
under Bush and then under President Obama, continued its effort to deny Iran its "inalienable right" to civil nuclear programs.
Obama waged a campaign of ever increasing sanctions on Iran. But the country did not give in. It countered by accelerating its
civil nuclear programs. It enriched more Uranium to civil use levels and developed more efficiant enrichment centrifuges. It was
the Obama administration that finally gave up on its escalatory course. It conceded that Iran has the "inalienable right" to run
its civil nuclear programs including Uranium enrichment. It was this concession, not the sanctions, that brought Iran to the table
for talks about its nuclear programs.
The result of those talks was the The Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which was endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, adopted on July 20, 2015.
The JCPOA gives the IAEA additional tools to inspect
facilities in Iran. It restricts Iran's civil nuclear program to certain limits which will terminate in October 2025. The JCPOA also
reaffirms that Iran has full rights under the NPT. The IAEA since regularly inspects facilities in Iran and consistently reaffirms
in its reports that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.
The Trump administrations hostility to Iran has nothing to do with anything nuclear. The U.S. wants hegemony over the Persian Gulf
region. Iran rejects such imperial desires. The U.S. wants to control the flow of hydrocarbon resources to its competitors, primarily
China. Iran does not allow such controls over its exports. The U.S. wants that all hydrocarbon sales are made in U.S. dollars. Iran
demands payments in other currencies. Israel, which has significant influence within the Trump administration, uses claims of a non
existing Iranian nuclear weapons program to manipulate the U.S. public and to divert from its racist apartheid policies in Palestine.
Trump's talk - "I'm looking to have Iran say, "No nuclear weapons."" - is simply bullshit. Iran said so several times and continues
to say so. But Trump obviously believes that he can get away with making such idiotic claims.
The New York Times proves him right. It is again slipping into the role that it played during the propaganda run-up to
the war on Iraq in 2002/2003. False claims made by members of the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were
reported by the Times as true, even while diligent reporters at other outlets
debunked those claims again and again.
The Times later apologized and fired Judith Miller, one of its reporters who wrote several of the pieces that supported the
false claims.
But it was never a problem of one reporter who channeled false claims by anonymous administration officials into her reports.
It was the editorial decision by the Times , taken long before the war on Iraq began, to use its power to support such a war. That
editorial decision made it possible that those false claims appeared in the paper.
This month alone one NYT editorial, one editorial cartoon and at least five reporters in three pieces published in the New
York Times made false claims about an Iranian nuclear weapons program that, as all the relevant official institutions confirm, does
not exist. This does not happen by chance.
It it is now obvious that the Times again decided to support false claims by an administration that is pushing the U.S. towards
another war in the Middle East.
"... what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers. ..."
"... the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people. ..."
Couple of factors not mentioned. one is Israel and the other is more sinister still and tied
to the conclusions to be drawn from the Mueller report.
it may be true that Skripal helped Steele with some elements of the dossier compiled by
Steele, via SKripals handler Pablo Miller. It may be true that Skripal went "stir crazy" and an
attempt was made to silence him and his daughter - permanently, because they simply cold not be
trusted. a similar motivation could be drawn up against Russia - with the two Russians visiting
Salisbury used as diversionary "stool pigeons". It may be true that the "poisoning" was self
inflicted and was in fact a murder/suicide attempt as a result of depression along the ines
"what's the point of it all".
what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the
poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of
the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community
"needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister
influences of foreign powers.
what ought to be apparent is
- the same tactics used by the special prosecutor to investigate the "Russia collusion"
smoke screen erected by the howler monkeys in the US intel agencies (aided and abetter by
howler monkeys in UK intel agencies) to stymie the US executive branch (Trump) are likely to be
used by the the UK government and some more as well - in true Le Carre fashion, but with much
dumber and less principled actors than Smiley's people.
these tactics prevented (and continue to prevent) investigation and prosecution of heinous
corruption within the obama administration of the previous 8 years - these howler monkey
intelligence agency tactics include(d) entrapment, honeypots, racketeering, blackmail, de facto
kidnapping (in the case of Skripals), bribery, wire fraud, unauthorized wire-tapping, breach of
authorized intel agency activities (like the FBI operating overseas and the CIA operating
domestically in the US, false and unverified claims in FISA warrants, NSA providing unauthorized
information to the CIA and FBI etc)
- given the howler monkey activities of the alphabet soup, it is not beyond the imagination
to draw parallels with the CIA's reporting and analysis of situations on the ground wherever
they operate to provide intel ahead of military activity. the DOD has already proved complicit
by hiring Halper (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to assist with the entrapment of Trump
operative Papadopoulos. Mifsud is likely a CIA, not a Russian, asset.
- given that we have ample evidence of the howler monkeys in the alphabet soup seeking to
facilitate a coup against a sitting US president, it is certainly plausible that - as with the
US goverment sponsoring the mujaheedin, isis and al qaeda in afghanistan to fight the russians
in late 80's early 90's, Iraq yellow cake and WMD - that the howler monkeys paid the white
helmets to ovethrow assad and foment civil war in Syria - thus causing the migration of some 5
million syrians into europe, iraq, turkey, jordan, turkey and lebanon.
so , the case is that howler monkey activity in intel agencies of the UK and US (add
(F)rance to get FUKUS) are guilty of the manufacture of human conflict by fabricating evidence,
breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing
shitty analysis (howler monkeys are only good at swinging in trees and flinging ****) and
generally operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity.
this can only be brought into sharp relief if howler monkey activities were instead shown to
be powers for good rather than the geo-political risks that persist in Iran, North Korea,
Venezuela, Yemen, Libya and so on and so forth.
Never mind how much past conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on relied on
evidence and analysis thrown at us by the howler monkeys in the tree tops, how much of what we
we are doing now is a fabrication causing needless suffering by civilian (not politicians or
military engaged in conflict) populations?
the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE,
Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life
in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down",
reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of
people.
there are equivalents of strzok, page, ohr right throughout the US and UK government
"machines" operating overseas. think about that. crimes exposed by Barr et al in the US -
against a sitting president - are replicated wherever howler monkeys operate overseas as well.
The US is closer to war with Iran
than it has been since the Bush years, or perhaps ever. And Bolton is largely to blame
But Bolton is on a fast track, seemingly aware that Trump's time in office may be limited.' Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters Donald
Trump's national security adviser John Bolton wants the United States to go to war with
Iran .
And everything that the Trump administration has done over its Iran policy, particularly since Bolton became Trump's top foreign
policy adviser in April of 2018, must be viewed through this lens, including the alarming US military posturing in the Middle East
of the past two weeks.
Just after one month on the job, Bolton
gave Trump
the final push he needed to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement, which at the time was (and still is, for now) successfully
boxing in Iran's nuclear program and blocking all pathways for Iran to build a bomb. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)
– as the Iran deal is formally known – was the biggest obstacle to Bolton's drive for a regime change war, because it eliminated
a helpful pretext that served so useful to sell the war in Iraq 17 years ago.
Since walking away from the deal, the Trump administration has claimed that with a "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, it
can achieve a "better deal" that magically turns Iran into a Jeffersonian democracy bowing to every and any American wish. But this
has always been a fantastically bad-faith argument meant to obscure the actual goal (regime change) and provide cover for the incremental
steps – the crushing sanctions, bellicose rhetoric, and antagonizing military maneuvers – that have now put the United States closer
to war with Iran than it has been since at least the latter half of the Bush administration, or perhaps ever.
In his White House statement 10 days ago announcing (an already pre-planned) carrier and bomber deployment to the Middle East,
Bolton cited "a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings" from Iran to justify the bolstered US military presence.
But multiple sources who have seen the same intelligence have since
said
that Bolton and the Trump administration blew it "out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually
was". Even a British general operating in the region pushed back this week,
saying he has seen no evidence of an increased Iranian threat.
What's even more worrying is that Bolton knows what he's doing. He's "a
seasoned bureaucratic infighter
who has the skills to press forcefully for his views" – and he has a long history of using those skills to undermine American
diplomacy and work toward killing arms control agreements.
As a senior official in the George W Bush administration,
he played key role
in the collapse of the Agreed Framework, the Clinton-era deal that froze North Korea's plutonium nuclear program (the North Koreans
tested their first bomb four years later).
He said
he "felt like a kid on Christmas day" after he orchestrated the US withdrawal from the international criminal court in 2002.
And now as a senior official in the Trump administration, he
pushed
for the US to withdrawal from a crucial nuclear arms treaty with Russia.
While it's unclear how much of a role he played in scuttling Trump's negotiations with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi last year, he publicly
called for the so-called
"Libya model" with the North Koreans (in other words, regime change by force). Just months before joining the administration, he
tried to make the
legal case for a preventive war against Pyongyang. And if you think he cares about the aftermath of war with North Korea, he
doesn't. Bolton was reportedly
"unmoved" by a presentation during his time in the Bush administration of the catastrophic consequences of such a war. "I don't
do war. I do policy," he said then.
So far, Bolton has been successful in moving the United States toward his desired outcome with Iran – if getting the Pentagon
to draw up plans to send
120,000 US troops to the region to confront Iran is any indication. There are hopeful signs that we can avoid war, as US officials
and our European allies, seemingly alarmed by what Bolton is up to, are
sounding the alarm about
the Trump administration skewing intelligence on Iran.
But Bolton is on a fast track, seemingly aware that Trump's time in office may be limited. The question, ultimately, is whether
the president can stick to his instincts of avoiding more military conflict, or acquiesce to a man hellbent on boxing him into a
corner with no way out other than war with Iran.
Ben Armbruster is the communications director for Win Without War and previously served as National Security Editor at ThinkProgress
...what motive would they possibly have, these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that
own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and
think tanks, and research institutes, to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative that allows them
to systematically stigmatize, marginalize, criminalize, deplatform, demonetize, and otherwise eliminate any type of speech they
deem to be "Russian disinformation," or "extremist content," or a "conspiracy theory," or simply too "dangerous," "divisive,"
or "confusing" to circulate among the general public?
No see? That makes no sense. That's just an example of the type of fascist disinformation these Putin-Nazi disinformationists
are trying to spread to confuse us to the point where we can't even concentrate long enough to think anymore, or parse the meaningless
jargon-laden nonsense they're trying to deceive us with, and just devolve into these Pavlovian imbeciles conditioned to respond
to specific trigger words, like "extremist," "terrorist," "fascist," "populist," "anti-Semitic," "Russians," "hackers," and whatever
other emotional stimuli we are being trained to instantly recognize and robotically react to like circus animals.
Or I don't know, maybe it isn't. I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say. Probably they've already got to me. I'd better get
back down into my anti-disinformation bunker, pull up The Guardian , or The Washington Post , or Der Spiegel
on my child-proof computer, and immerse myself in some objective journalism, before the Putin-Nazi spywhale makes its way up the
Landwehrkanal, takes control of what's left of my mind, and forces me into going out and trying to vote for Hitler or something.
I recommend you do the same, and I'll see you when this nightmare over.
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published
by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel,
ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy,
Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or
consentfactory.org .
Neocons and neolibs control the USA foreign policy. That's given. NYT just reflects foreign policy establishment talking points.
Links between Daniel Jones and Steele are really interesting and new information
Notable quotes:
"... "The goal here is bigger than any one election," said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities. ..."
"... According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received "significant funding" from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a street address with The Democracy Integrity Project. ..."
"... That's because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing "Russia Narrative" drama in Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. ..."
"... The NYT is very much invested in the post Cold War status quo. ..."
"... That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968. In fact, I believe this is the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump: the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years. ..."
"... told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay is about. ..."
"... Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked. ..."
"... So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days. ..."
"... Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding power. ..."
"... A few months ago, I made a comment to someone that it's like we're supposed to hate them (Russia) for their freedoms. ..."
gjohnsit on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:32pm The NY Times just posted one of the most atrocious pieces of
journalistic malpractice I have ever read.
Less than two weeks before pivotal elections for the European Parliament, a constellation of websites and social media accounts
linked to Russia or far-right groups is spreading disinformation, encouraging discord and amplifying distrust in the centrist
parties that have governed for decades.
European Union investigators, academics and advocacy groups say the new disinformation efforts share many of the same digital
fingerprints or tactics used in previous Russian attacks, including the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
That's a powerful statement. There's just one problem: the article doesn't present a single bit of proof. Just anecdotes. In fact,
it doesn't even quote anyone to back up these claims, but for one single exception.
"The goal here is bigger than any one election," said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose
nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement
authorities.
"It is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself. They're working
to destroy everything that was built post-World War II."
Russia is why people are losing faith in our government institutions. Not because they are owned by oligarchs. If you listen closely
you can hear President Bush.
So who is Daniel Jones and Advance Democracy? That's an
interesting story .
According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received "significant
funding" from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a
street address with The Democracy Integrity Project.
That's because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously
reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing "Russia Narrative" drama
in Washington, D.C.
Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the
committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. That's because TDIP, which receives
significant funding from George Soros, funneled some of that money toward Steele's research for Fusion GPS that led to the infamous
dossier on President Donald Trump.
However, as Ross reports today: "Mystery surrounds both of Jones's operations. The identities of both groups' donors have largely
been kept secret, as Jones has avoided revealing his backers.
Nothing to see here. Just two sketchy political organizations sharing the same street address. Perfectly normal.
"The election has yet to come, and we are already suspected of doing something wrong?" the Russian prime minister, Dmitri A.
Medvedev, said in March. "Suspecting someone of an event that has not yet happened is a bunch of paranoid nonsense."
It's not nonsense. It's scapegoating. There's a difference.
CBS News (2/4/19) briefly interviewed Honolulu Civil Beats reporter Nick Grube regarding Gabbard's campaign announcement. The
anchors had clearly never encountered the term anti-interventionism before, struggling to even pronounce the word, then laughing
and saying it "doesn't roll off the tongue."
They're [the Kremlin] working to destroy everything that was built post-World War II.
That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968. In fact, I believe this is
the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump:
the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years.
It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on. To
do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.
I heard someone recently say "We have to elect a Dem or else our post-War advantages will disappear."
Got to wonder where he's been for the past 40 years. That horse left the barn a long time ago.
told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember
a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the
election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay
is about.
Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked.
People say that Mueller has put to rest the fact that Russia indeed interfered with the election, but all he showed was the
FBIs "belief' that they did and that some Russians will ties to Vlad hacked the DNC computers. He didn't interview anyone involved
with that as laid out in my recent essay.
I've even seen people who were once against our invasions being okay with them and repeating the party line. Unfuckingbelievable!
The Year 2000 was not that long ago, and we were bombarded for two decades beforehand with talk of all the dreadful things
that might happen, could happen, and some people firmly believed would happen - and then didn't happen. (As it turned out,
the most obvious sign of "Y2K" was the "19100" bug that plagued Web pages for months afterward. It was cosmetic and harmless,
but annoying.)
I expected it to take about ten years for sanity to return - but it looks like being more like fifty. And there will probably
be some cultists who construct their own "reality" around what didn't happen, like the 1840s Millerites (who spun off the still-extant
Seventh Day Adventists).
The NYT and WaPoo have new articles out about how bad the dastardly Russians are still interfering with the whole dang country
now. And WaPoo had some university do a study on how Russia tried to get people to vote for Bernie and blah, blah,...
I read an article last year saying that Bernie needs to knock off being with the Russia Gaters because he is going to be accused
of being in Vlad's pockets anyway. But he's still saying that Trump is under Russia's thumb and that Russia is doing all kinds
of bad stuff.
Then there's all the websites like DK, emptyhead, democratic underground and others saying that Mueller confirmed Russia did
bad things and maybe if the democrats work harder on their investigations they will find stuff that Mueller missed. I think 10
years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take its going to be too long.
I think 10 years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take it's going to be too long.
Consider how long it took for Cold War I to finally start to ebb. It took at least a decade, and that was with the memory of
a horrendous world war fresh on most minds. Now, we're so insulated from the reality of war, not even allowed reports from the
battlefields, much less accurate information and numbers, that we have lost touch with the horror. Evil men such as Bolton spend
every minute of every day trying to embroil us in deadly excursions and foreign entanglements. Our "intelligence" agencies are
no more than modern versions of the NAZI era Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive
ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end
result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.
So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before
Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result
was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.
Fortunately for us ordinary Americans, the Russians really do love their children too.....
@snoopydawg
Are they going to say they're both (Bernie and Trump) working with Russia? That would be amusing. I wonder if it would cause any
of them to vote third party or not vote at all.
...who was a software development consultant at the time, the reason nothing much happened was that's lot of people worked
their butts off for several years. COBOL programmers were dragged out of retirement and all kinds of goofy OS and library hacks
were implemented to reduce the amount of work and risk.
It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on.
To do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.
I spent several years grappling with my fall down the rabbit hole. I started freeing myself from the matrix during #Occupy
and towards the end of Obama's first term I was starting to really get it... at least get it enough to know I wasn't voting for
him a second time. Then Bernie arrived on the scene and it was music to my ears. That pretty much completed the process for me
but it STILL took time and I STILL have places where I "don't believe they are that evil" (twin towers anyone) yet I suspect that
in the fullness of time I may yet find that they are in fact that evil.
I have a lot of sympathy for those still caught in the matrix. It's a really good trap. That doesn't change the fact that I
see them as my enemy and the enemy of all mankind but I at least understand.
@SnappleBC Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's
done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have
fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding
power.
Just this century this country has killed a million Iraqis and who knows how many people in the other countries we've invaded?
40,000 Venezuelans died last year because of our sanctions and no matter how many people in Yemen die every day because of the
Saudis we will continue supporting them.
Then there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki as aliasalias stated. Oh hell yes they are that evil.
killed and displaced around the Globe by the Empire in just this century alone, so many still can't believe this same government
could murder 3000 on 9/11.
Cognitive dissidence doesn't even start to explain it.
...is the intense access that these privatized propagandists have to the New York Times . And certainly the Times
should explain why it freely publishes radical divisive stories that cannot be verified from compromised sources that have previously
been exposed as disreputable. This is what Russia is accused of doing, sewing confusion and fear in the US, based on misinformation.
Now the New York Times is doing it for them. The fact that a US media outlet is deliberately sabotaging the domestic tranquility
with alarming lies is exactly what congress should be investigating. But any congressperson that did so would see their careers
destroyed. Congress surrendered to the media monopolies a long time ago.
What we can do is confirm for Americans that they must never trust anything they read in the New York Times and the
Washington Post . Remind them of the tragic facts in recent history. The lies that endangers people's lives and disables
their intelligence are written between the lines.
The NYT and WaPoo and other media are continuing to come up with new stories every day telling us something new that Russia
is doing. This is not going away any time soon. Unfortunately.
@Lookout@Lookout with
us all getting under our desks or along the walls if we are in the hallway and I don't think any one of us didn't treat this as
something critical for us to learn in order to survive.
As a kid that loved riding a bicycle one Public Service announcement I paid careful attention to was the instruction to do if
I saw that bright flash which was to throw the bike down and curl up along the curb, I even thought about that problem on unpaved
streets.
I remember bomb shelters were advertised a lot and I remember some tv dramas were about people fleeing to their bomb shelter
and the dilemma of being only fit to hold a small group but had neighbors, friends and strangers pleading to be let in.
The 'Twilight Zone' series even had one episode where a very wealthy man with a shelter picked certain important people in
his life, his school teacher, Priest and others were offered shelter only if they will apologize for things he'd caught criticism
for his behavior in his past. Trivial stuff, but he had a screen for them to watch the destruction live.
Long story short, they'd rather die than spend the rest of their lives with him. Especially with all their friends and family
gone, so he is alone, goes crazy, runs outside and is found by a policemen to be crying and babbling at a city fountain, in a
city that had not been bombed, but for him it had happened and all he could see was destruction around him.
All that aside considering we'd already dropped 'the' bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki those behind all the public warnings and
information that was needed in order for people to know how to survive couldn't really believe that nonsense.
Unless they could believe all those dead Japanese would've likely survived if they had ducked under their desks or curled up
along a curb, and if that were true they were as loony as the 'Twilight Zone' character.
Yeah if only all those schoolchildren had jumped under their desk before the building and everything around it was obliterated.
...if you see a light brighter than the sun. (1 min)
in the top of the ninth the screen goes black, the live stream has stopped because the electrical grid the Tropicana had shut
down and the stadium was without power for the lights, scoreboard, broadcast, etc. were down.
It took about forty-five minutes for power to be restored but right when it happened I thought it was the stream I was watching
so I clicked on other streaming sites and it was on a couple of them I read why all broadcasts were off.
But in the chat box I really couldn't tell if a few were joking or not when they blamed it on the Russians. One in particular
didn't look like they were joking as that person repeated the claim a few times. No kidding, and one lamented that (paraphrasing)
'now the Russians are messing with our National sport'.
Any time something happens now people will willingly accept that Russia did something that caused it. See the tweet I posted
above. Secret service agents and police are doing nothing as the Guaido goons keeps people from delivering food and stuff to the
embassy sitters. One goon tried taking the bag out of a guy's hands and they just watched. One person tried to throw a cucumber
and the cops pounced on him, pushed him to the ground and bloodied him up. But Russia is the one who put the embassy sitters into
the embassy and is supporting them. SMDH!
Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities."It
is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself.
An organization that reports undesirable speech to law enforcement is worried about the undermining of democracy. Got it.
This "shadowy Russian" might well be Sergey Skripal. This suggests that Steele dossier was CIA operation with British MI6 as transfer mechanism and
Steele as a cover. And implicates Brennan. So this is next level of leaks after "Stormy Daniel"...
Another NYT leak out of a set of well coordinated leans from anonymous intelligence officials ;-) Poor Melania...
Notable quotes:
"... But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times. ..."
"... If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries. ..."
"... More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what. ..."
"... Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down. ..."
"... the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy ..."
"... How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind ..."
"... You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS? ..."
"... "U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds. ..."
"... Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it... ..."
"... Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us. ..."
"... 'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot. ..."
"... i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump. ..."
"... Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth." ..."
"... And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works ..."
"... So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw? ..."
When they said "Russian collusion", few expected it to be between the CIA and a "shadowy
Russian operative." And yet, according to a blockbuster NYT report, that's precisely what
happened.
* * *
The CIA paid $100,000 last year to a Russian operative who claimed to have derogatory
information about President Trump, including a video tape of the Republican engaged with
prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. If the video showed Trump, it would support claims made in
the infamous Steele dossier, the salacious opposition research report financed by the Clinton
campaign and DNC.
But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other
information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to
a fascinating report from The New York Times.
American spies made contact with the Russia early in 2017 after he offered to sell the Trump
material along with cyber hacking tools that were stolen from the NSA that year, according to
The Times. U.S. intelligence officials told The Times they were so desperate to retrieve those
tools that they negotiated with the operative for months despite several red flags, including
indications that he was working in concert with Russian intelligence.
Another red flag was the Russian's financial request. He initially sought $10 million for
the information but dropped the asking price to $1 million.
After months of negotiations, American spies handed over $100,000 in cash in a brief case to
the Russian during a meeting in Berlin in September.
The operative also offered documents and emails that purported to implicate other Trump
associates, including former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But The Times viewed the
documents and reported that they were mostly information that is already in the public
domain.
The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers, showed the video
purported to be Trump to a Berlin-based American businessman who served as his intermediary to
the CIA. But according to the Times, the footage and the location of the viewing raised
questions about its authenticity.
The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was
Trump, and there was no audio. The Russian also showed the video to his American partner at the
Russian embassy in Berlin, a sign that the operative had ties to Russian intelligence.
The Russian stonewalled the production of the cyber tools, and U.S. officials eventually cut
ties, according to The Times. After the payout in Berlin, the man provided information about
Trump and his associates of questionable veracity.
The Americans gave him an ultimatum earlier in 2018 to either play ball, leave Western
Europe, or face criminal charges. He left, according to The Times, which interviewed U.S.
officials, the American intermediary and the Russian for its article.
The Times' U.S. sources -- who appear to paint the American side in a positive light -- said
that they were reluctant to purchase information because they did not want to be seen buying
dirt on the president.
The officials also expressed concern that the Russian operative was planting disinformation
on behalf of the Russian government. U.S. officials were worried that the Russian government
has sought to sow discord between U.S. intelligence agencies and Trump. The revelation that the
CIA purchased dirt on him would likely do the trick.
The Times report also has other new details.
Four other Russians with ties to the spy world have surfaced over the past year offering to
sell dirt on Trump that closely mirrors allegations made in the dossier, according to the
article. But officials have reason to believe that some of sellers have ties to Russian
intelligence agencies.
The Times also provides new details on Cody Shearer, a notorious operative close to the
Clintons. Shearer was recently revealed to have shopped
around a so-called "second dossier" prior to the campaign which mirrored the sex allegations of
the Steele report.
According to The Times, he has criss-crossed Europe over the past six months in an attempt
to find video footage of Trump from the Moscow hotel room. Shearer claimed to have information
from the FSB, Russia's spy service, that a video existed of Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow
hotel room.
He shared a memo making the allegations with his friend and fellow Clinton fixer, Sidney
Blumenthal. Blumenthal in turn passed the memo to his friend, Jonathan Winer, a Department of
State official. Winer then gave the information to Steele who provided it to the FBI in October
2016.
Steele also provided information to Winer, who wrote up a two-page memo that was circulated
within the State Department.
Trump has denied allegations that he used prostitutes in Moscow. He has called the dossier a
"hoax" and "crap."
* * *
On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted that "according to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony
secrets on "Trump" to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be
paid over time. I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is
all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!
Of course, if Trump really wants to "drain the swamp", any such decision would have
originate with him. Tags PoliticsCommercial Banks
Release the pee pee video now! No one pee peed in the $100,000 video in question. The
15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump,
and there was no audio. And how can anyone be more fascinated by the prospect of pee pee than
by the fact that US intelligence agencies were buying bad information from extremely shady
foreigners in an attempt to overthrow the President of the United States?
Trump is starting to assume that the people are dumber than Obowel did. Earth to Don, you
sir have the drain pump, you sir have surrounded yourself with Swamp creatures.... You sir
are.............
According to this, the Russians stole the hacking tools needed to cut through the Swamp
levee, which were developed by the NSA, and now the CIA cannot buy them back. Now, since the
USA wanted its Swamp, the Russians are more than happy to let the USA drown in its swamp.
Anyone have a link for the Qanon posts. I haven't seen them in a couple of weeks since he
left 8chan where he was posting. I don't want the Youtube BS, I just want the link... anyone
got one. Its strangely not googleable... LOLZ.
If you think that the CIA is a U.S. intelligence agency working on the best interests of
the United States, you better wake up and smell the treason. They only work for the best
interests of themselves.
Here is a question. Why does the CIA not come out and clear the air re: Trump?
I mean they were even paying people to come up with dirt. He is now your president and the
country is a fucking mess. Should the CIA not come out and say we tried but we got nothing?
They do have the ability to fix all this Trump shit and yet crickets.
And the best interests of clients. The CIA started out is the muscle for the Dulles
Brothers clients who were being booted out of various countries they were super-exploiting.
The Agency hasn't looked back since.
Nobody got whizzed on. That lurid fantasy came soley out of the head of Hillary Clinton,
given to Blumenthal, passed around and made to look like it came from Russia.
It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald
firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a
building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT
being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping
backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in
front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist
passports floating gently down from the sky.
RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had
CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban
hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief
of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn
Monroe.
The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a
thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b)
in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the
Cold War...
Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope
needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle
attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit
stationary targets reliably.
Drain the swamp! Townsquare justice for Odumbo and Hitlery! George Soros to bathe in the
Amazon River with 1 million Piranha Fish until it completely disappears. Drain the evil
Dumorat swamp. Drain the banana republic CIA and FBI. Our tax dollars and constitution did
not pay for this shit.
With today's technology, the CIA is most likely working on a fake video for you right now.
They might release it on Vimeo or Netflix to cover the costs and give themselves plausible
deniability. To add a finishing touch they will make a fake video of Julian Assange claiming
he is releasing it. You'll be in hog heaven. Which is where folks like you go just before
being slaughtered by your owners and turned into spam.
Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to
Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...
And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even
pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in
my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!
No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and
evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7
during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.
So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is
so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull
off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency?
You can't have it both ways.
We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all
day, where would we be without them?
Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to
Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...
And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even
pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in
my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!
No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and
evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7
during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.
So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is
so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull
off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency?
You can't have it both ways.
We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all
day, where would we be without them?
More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help
themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia
is still being stoked no matter what.
Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does
that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine,
McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to
Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the
rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down.
Good point in the last sentence. If someone is going to "drain the swamp" it is going to
have to be the president of the United States. I think I'm correct that he can fire anyone
that works in the executive department for cause. He can also order investigations or hire
people who will launch real investigations.
Mr. President, if you want to "drain the swamp," drain it.
If there was a video it would of been leaked during the election, they have nothing that
sticks on the guy.
All the evidence thus far states
Obama Hillary the FBI, DNC, CIA all spied on Trump and colluded with foreign governments
(U.K. , Ukraine , Russia) to try and dig up dirt to use against Trump (and they more or less
failed).
They turned over every rock they could, look at that stupid hot-mic video in the bus, how
many hours of video did they have to go through to dig up that crumb? they went back
searching through 30+ years of content and thats all they could come up with.... some locker
room talk lol
People have to just face it.
Your government was and still is corrupt and its a weaponized system of control, Your
government colluded with the enemy in a desperate attempt to stop Trump from becoming
president. Your government started a sham "Russia investigation" to cover up its own crimes.
Your government applied a different standard of justice to the clintons than it would have to
you or anyone else.
To date ZERO evidence has been brought forward that Trump or anyone in his campaign did
anything wrong, and the only people that have done anything wrong so far were picked by "the
swamp" to fill positions..... all the others fell into petty perjury Traps on meaningless
topics and insignificant factoids.
Isn't it lovely to find out that your money and mine is being used by government agents to
give us the government they want?
It's sort of like a thug robbing you and using part of your money to pay another thug to
rough you up from time time to time if you ask any questions with the thugs believing it's
for our own good.
Thanks, Hillary, for looking out for us. You and your best buds are the best. Such
bighearted givers! Meanwhile, give our regards to your partner in slime Obama, although it
must pain you to have been bested by 'Beavis' who thinks so much of himself to balance out
how little he impresses anyone who knows him.
"U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can
call off the hounds.
Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of
power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this
himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it...
As taxpayers can we sue the CIA for misusing our funds? Pretty sure that buying sex videos
for commercial release isn't part of the CIA's lawful mandate even at bargain prices.
Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US
intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on
their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own
treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big
bad russkies tricked us.
my sauces tell me that pink pussyhat wearing hollywood types have been called in because
they have a doppelganger for trump and access to 30,000 sexually abused victims that can act
as Russian prostitutes for just ten bucks each. snapchat has a trump emoji that can be transplanted onto any porn video star - male or
female - thus confirming that trump is a serial (serious?) user of ladies of the night
my sauces also tell me that the CIA offers a reward of 100,000 bucks (or 10 BTC) for every
photo-shopped (snap-shopped or porn-shopped) material.
of course, the CIA already owns many many porn movie studios and films, but it would
prefer third "party" movies - not from epstein's island where its operatives choose to rela
with a pizza.
the CIA "pink" budget for such movies is limited to just 5,000 clips or 5 billion of
taxpayers funds, whichever is the higher.
'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the
Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it
hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly
elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope.
Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a
long shot.
i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds.
this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to
trump.
Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I
copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a
cloth."
And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but
my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works.
So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and
more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers
for procurers of hosebags for him to screw?
I mean if they're so concerned about Trump and a couple of hookers... Better put some ice on that, CIA.
You all are so ridiculous and fooled with your "drain the swamp" bs. It's a great idea but
Trump doing it is a joke, I mean just look at who he has hired, what's wrong with you all are
you blind?!!
He can't even fill 1/3 of the government positions he's supposed to and the ones he has
have no business holding the positions given to them and are so incompetent, downright
criminal or just personally horrendous humans that they can't stay in office more than a few
months. All their blatant and moronically concocted lies are backing them into corners every
day that they just try and lie out of again. America is over if we really have gotten to the
point that a group like Trump's has support, it's just astonishing.
"... The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program. ..."
"... One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely. ..."
"... I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. ..."
"... Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant. ..."
"... That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, ..."
"... Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ..."
"... Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking " ..."
"... I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported. ..."
"... Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive: ..."
"... I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government? ..."
"... Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution. ..."
"... Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front. ..."
"... So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal. ..."
Do not focus on July 2016 as the so-called start of the counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump. That is a lie. We
know, thanks to the work of Judicial Watch, that the FBI had signed up Christopher Steele as a Confidential Human Source (aka CHS)
by February of 2016. It is incumbent on Attorney General Barr to examine the contact reports filed by Steele's FBI handler (those
reports are known as FD-1023s). He also, as I have noted in a previous post, needs to look at the FD-1023s for Felix Sater and Henry
Greenberg. But these will only tell a small part of the story. There is a massive intelligence side to this story.
The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer
of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive
steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives,
the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie
Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified
the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This
information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting."
This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.
One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was
CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka
the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely.
This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel
and the people they were communicating with overseas. You don't have to have access to intelligence information to understand this.
For example, you simply have to ask the question, "how did George Papadopoulos get on the radar." I am confident that a survey
of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially,
his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone
unless their name is in an intelligence report. We also know that Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump
and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann), initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Don't take my word for it, that's what Robert Mueller reported:
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately
September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert),
a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately
2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later
contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and
brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee
of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).
Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency
put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the
direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from
a registered FBI informant.
By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign
Manager John Podesta's email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:
" That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, " Budowski replies, later adding: "
Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ."
The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway. This was more the opposition research.
This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition
research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets--
Hakluyt: there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about
with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against
Donald Trump.
Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co. , founded by three former British intelligence
operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations
pay huge sums. . . .
Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's
Henry
Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6
[British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking "
I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI
for launching the investigation into
George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that
led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's
associates conspired," The Times reported.
Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially,
he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network
reported in a January 2016 exclusive:
But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client
cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.
His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation
of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.
Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain--there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET
intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation
mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story. This cannot be allowed to happen again.
Having watched interviews of Papadopoulos on TeeVee I would say that this creature would be easy to manipulate. His ego is so
enormous that a minimal effort would be required.
I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what
I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that
he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect
that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government?
The guts of the matter was well expressed by Judge T.S. Ellis when he made the distinction between different results which
can be expected from exerting pressures on witnesses: they may 'sing' - which is, commonly, in the interests of justice - but,
there again, they may 'compose', which is not.
Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law
enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses
to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should
be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution.
Yes, indeed, many a composition have been elicited by prosecutors in criminal cases. The issue is there is no penalty for prosecutorial
misconduct while the advancement points ratchet up with each conviction. The incentives are aligned perfectly for the "institution"
to run rough shod on ordinary Americans. Only those wealthy enough to fight the unlimited funds of the government have a chance.
But of course in matters relating to national security there is the added twist of state secrets that protects government malfeasance.
I don't know how the national security state we continue to build ever gets rolled back. A small victory would be for Trump
to declassify all documents and communications relating to the multifaceted spying on his campaign and as Larry so eloquently
writes to frame him as a Manchurian Candidate. At least the public will learn about what their grandchildren are paying for. But
it seems that Trump prefers tweeting to taking any kind of action. Not that it would matter much as half the country will still
believe that Trump deserves it until the tables are turned on their team. While most Americans will say to use Ben Hunt's phrasing
Yay! Constitution. Yay! Liberty. they sure don't care as the state oligarchy tighten their chokehold.
Yes, he seems young and ambitious enough to be easy (and willing) prey. Having been involved in some local political campaigns
though, I've observed that more and more than before, young people like him are hyper-concerned with networking. Papadopoulos'
ego aside, of course he and many people who sign on hope to make self-serving connections. Not only that, it's also been my observation
that casual sexual hook-ups go with the territory, and not only among young, single guys like him. I have to say I've been shocked
a few times by how risky and cavalier some liaisons have been that've come to my attention, considering "public figures" are involved.
No doubt that's why a "honeypot" was dispatched to try to help entrap Papadopoulos.
Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes
spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before
the country move forward on any front.
So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele
via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal.
Papadopolos was very young hence the nativity getting sucked in. The ego helped for sure. Probably exciting to be part of something
important probably for the first time since he started working for Trump campaign
One thing that's always concerned me about Larry's informative and insightful essays on these matters is how can we be assured
that the IC documentation mentioned has been filled out honestly and accurately -- or that the forms even still exist and haven't
been conveniently "lost" or surreptitiously destroyed?
Mon 29 Apr 2019 01.55 EDT Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian
navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force.
1 week ago
The whale was the secret intermediary between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. The messages were transmitted during weekly 'Whales-R-Us'
peer support sessions. It's ironic it turns up now, after Mr. Mueller's report has already been issued.
1 week ago (Edited)
I'm pretty sure "Nessie" is a mobile underwater propoganda base used by the Russians since the time of the Bolshevic revolution.
Originally, it was merely a base to hide the Reds operating on the outskirts of the Capitalist capitol of London. Scotland was
the perfect hiding place.
Now however, it's outfitted with the most sophisticated internet hacking equipment, AI technology so advanced it can
alter your political ideology just by selling you a mailorder slavic blow-up doll.
Taking a long view it was very astute and cleverly conceived plan to to present
counter-revolution as revolution; progress as regress; the new order 1980- (i.e.,
neoliberalism) was cool, and the old order 1945-1975 (welfare-capitalism) was fuddy-duddy.
Thus:
Capital controls = fuddy duddy
Capital Account liberalisation = cool
Worker’s Rights = fuddy duddy
Flexible Labour markets = cool
World Peace – fuddy duddy
War = Cool
National Sovereignty = fuddy duddy
Globalization = Cool
Social Mobility = fuddy duddy
Inequality = cool
Respect for elections/referenda = fuddy-duddy
Flexible referenda/elections = cool
Social solidarity = fuddy-duddy
Rampant nihilistic invidualism = cool
Respect for human rights and the UN International Law = fuddy-duddy
Blatant Imperialism = cool
And so the agenda goes on. Counter-revolution qua revolution
... Consider what it says about the state of America's political system that in the
left party, the presumptive frontrunner for the presidential nomination did not think
twice about kicking off his campaign with a fundraiser hosted
by the founder of a union-busting law firm, days before appearing at a major union-hosted
rally. And why should he? He gets the money, and then he gets the union support.
...I am not mad at Joe Biden. He is a type. His type is "The Old Way of Doing Things." Now
that he is in the race, his type is represented. He rounds out the field. Now, Democratic
voters truly have the entire buffet of choices, from "True Leftist Insurgent" to "Bland,
Winning Young Résumé-Polisher" to "Indistinguishable Ambitious Congresspersons"
to "The Same Old Kind of White Guy As Always".
This just in! The Independent reports a beluga whale seen in Norway was put there for
military purposes ( not porpoises) by the Russian Navy. They know because it had a tag on it
saying Equipment of St Petersburg, in English?
"One of the more important revelations in former Justice Department Special Counsel Robert
Mueller's report on the 2016 election is the close working relationship Bannon established
with Prince. Sensing fertile political ground for their far-right beliefs, Bannon and Prince
have established, under the aegis of their professed Catholicism, a movement that threatens
both the current pope and the European Union."
Try googling "could Emmanuel Macron be the antichrist?"
SBS broadcast a 4 part doco called The Fourth Estate in June last year. It's about the NYT unhealthy obsession with Trump.
Episode 1 begins with his swearing in and cuts to stunned(?) NYT staffers watching the speech in which he says "For too long,
our politicians have prospered while (blah blah blah) and this stops, right here, and right now."
From then on it consists of an endless stream of huddles as various groups of staffers ponder the best way to spin various 'angles'
and approaches, or solo senior staffers pontificating on all manner of hypotheticals. There are lots of opinionated people working
at the NYT and none of them is 'stupid'.
I recorded Episode 1 and my conclusion from watching it is that NOTHING the NYT publishes is accidental. I began recording Episode
2 but aborted the mission after 30 minutes or so because the repetitive self-worship and drivel was eerily similar to Episode
1.
Wikipedia has an entry devoted to the series and it's freely available on the www. I recommend watching the first few minutes
of Episode 1 just to get a feeling for the tone.
The cartoon in question was published in an International Edition as a gloat or a public (private) joke, imo. I remain unconvinced
that the Editorial Staff at the Jew York Times was blissfully unaware that the cartoon 'might' create an opportunity for the "Anti-Semitism!!?"
crowd to stir up, and capitalise upon, the ensuing indignation and outrage.
"... The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks. ..."
"... Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done. ..."
"... President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. ..."
"... The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence, ..."
"... According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. ..."
"... This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. ..."
"... Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control. ..."
"... In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department. ..."
"... The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA. ..."
"... As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. ..."
"... Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia. ..."
"... The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected. ..."
"... This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest. ..."
"... Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know: ..."
"... War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff. ..."
"... The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages. ..."
"... That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers. ..."
The British Role in 'Russiagate' Is About to Be Fully Exposed April 8, 2019
20190408-russiagate-exposed-brits.pdf
The "fake news" media has now dropped its pretense of having ever had any intention of allowing the truth -- as documented in
U.S. Attorney General Barr's summary of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's report, exonerating President Donald Trump of having
"conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" -- to thoroughly refute the Russiagate "Big Lie." Soon, however, it is certain
that the deliberate, British Intelligence-originated, military-grade disinformation campaign carried out against the United States,
including to this day, will be exposed.
The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix
the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth,
along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all
that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental
stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks.
"It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat," says the Chinese proverb. Yet, although the Mueller
report was called a "nothing burger," it was not: it still presented the potentially lethal lie that twelve Russian gremlins, code-named
Guccifer 2.0, hacked the DNC. Sundry media meatheads thus continue to blog and broadcast about "what else is really there."
The false Russian hack story, still being repeated, marches on, undeterred, like the emperor without any clothes. One lame-brained
variation, promoted in order to cover up the British role, states that Hillary Clinton, rather than Trump, colluded with the Russians.
It is being repeated by Republicans and Democrats alike, some of them malicious, some of them confused, and all of them completely
wrong. The media, such as the failed New York Times and various electronic media, must be forced to either admit the truth,
or be even more thoroughly discredited than they already have been. They must stop their constant repetition of this Joseph Goebbels-like
Big Lie. There must be a vigorous dissemination of the truth by all those journalists, politicians, activists and citizens that love
truth more than their own assumptions, including about President Trump, or other dearly-held systems of false belief.
Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard
Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several
years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper
policy motivation: why it was done.
A New Cultural Paradigm
The world is actually on the verge of ending the military conflicts among the major world powers, such as Russia, China, the United
States, and India. These four powers, and not the City of London, are the key fulcrum around which a new era in humanity's future
will be decided. A new monetary and credit system brought into being through these four powers would foster the greatest physical
economic growth in the history of humanity. In addition, discussions involving Italy working with China on the industrialization
of the African continent (discussions which could soon also involve the United States) show that sections of Europe want to join
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and leave the dying trans-Atlantic financial empire behind.
The recent announcement of a United States commitment to return to the Moon by 2024 can, in particular, become the basis for a
proposal to other nations -- for example, China, Russia, and India, all of whom are space powers of demonstrated capability -- to
resolve their differences on Earth in a higher, joint mission. As Russia's Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin said in a recent interview:
"I am a fierce proponent of international cooperation, including with Americans, because their country is big and technologically
advanced, and they can make good partners Especially since personal and professional relations between Roscosmos and NASA at the
working level are great."
There is also the possibility of ending the danger of thermonuclear war. President Trump, speaking on April 4 of the prospects
for world peace, stated:
"Between Russia, China, and us, we're all making hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is
ridiculous. I think it's much better if we all got together and didn't make these weapons those three countries I think can come
together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace."
This is a statement of real importance. Such an outlook is a rejection of the "perpetual crisis/perpetual war" outlook of the
Bush-Obama Administration, a four-term "war presidency" which was abruptly, unexpectedly ended in 2016. The British were not amused.
It is to stop this new cultural paradigm, pivoted on the Pacific and the potential Four Powers alliance, that British imperial
forces have deployed. The 2016 election of President Trump, and his personal friendship with President Xi Jinping and desire to work
with President Putin, are an intolerable strategic threat to the eighteenth-century geopolitics of the British empire. They have
repeatedly used Russiagate to disrupt the process of deliberation among Presidents Xi, Trump, and Putin, thus increasing the danger
of war. Russiagate, in the interest of international security, must be ended by exposing it for the utter fraud that it is.
The Truth Set Free
President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office,
Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of
America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American
people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again
to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and
Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth,
and the truth would set them free.
The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican
forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street,
or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection
against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase
the American Declaration of Independence,
"The history of the present Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the
undermining of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
DOCUMENTATION
While Robert Mueller found that there was "no collusion" between Donald Trump or the Trump Campaign and Russia, he also filed
two indictments regarding alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first alleges that 12 members of Russian Military
Intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta and delivered the purloined files to WikiLeaks for strategic publication before the
July 2016 Democratic National Convention and in October 2016, one month before the election. The second indictment charges the Internet
Research Agency, a Russian internet merchandising and marketing firm, with running social media campaigns in the U.S. in 2016 designed
to impact the election. When the fuller version of the Mueller report becomes public, it is certain to recharge the claims of Russian
interference based on the so-called background "evidence" supporting these indictments.
The good news, however, is that investigations in the United States and Britain, have unearthed significant contrary evidence
exposing British Intelligence, NATO, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine, as the actual foreign actors in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election. We provide a short summary of the main aspects of that evidence to spark further investigations of the British intelligence
networks, entities, and methods at issue, internationally. More detailed accounts concerning specific aspects of what we recite here
can be found on our website.
The Russian Hack That Wasn't
The Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an association of former U.S. intelligence officials, have demonstrated that
the Russian hack of the DNC alleged by Robert Mueller, was more likely an internal leak,
rather than a hack conducted
over the internet. William Binney, who conducted the main investigations for the VIPS, spent 30 years at the National Security Agency,
becoming Technical Director. He designed the sorts of NSA programs that would detect a Russian hack if one occurred. Binney conducted
an actual forensic examination of the DNC files released by WikiLeaks, and the related files circulated by the persona Guccifer 2.0,
who Robert Mueller claims is a GRU creation. Binney has demonstrated that the calculated transfer speeds and metadata characteristics
of these files are consistent with downloading to a thumb drive or storage device rather than an internet-based hack. This supports
the account by WikiLeaks of how it obtained the files. According to WikiLeaks and former Ambassador Craig Murray, they were obtained
from a person who was not a Russian state actor of any kind, in Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks offered to tell the Justice Department
all about this, and actual negotiations to this effect were proceeding in early 2017, when Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director James
Comey acted to sabotage and end the negotiations.
Further, as opposed to the hyperbole in the media and in Robert Mueller's indictment, analysis of the Internet Research Agency's
alleged "weaponization" of Facebook in 2016 involved
a paltry total of $46,000 in Facebook
ads and $4,700 spent on Google platforms . In an election in which the major campaigns spend tens of thousands of dollars every
day on these platforms, whatever the IRA thought it was doing in its amateurish and juvenile memes and tropes was like throwing a
stone in the ocean. Most of these activities occurred after the election and never mentioned either candidate. The interpretation
that these ads were designed to draw clicks and website traffic, rather than influence the election, must be considered.
The "evidence" for Mueller's GRU hacking indictment was provided, in part, by CrowdStrike, the DNC vendor that originated the
claims that the Russians had hacked that entity. CrowdStrike is closely associated with the Atlantic Council's Digital Research Lab
(DRL), an operation jointly funded by NATO's Strategic Communications Center and the U.S. State Department, to counter Russian "hybrid
warfare." CrowdStrike has been caught more than once falsely attributing hacks to the Russians and the Atlantic Council's DRL is
a font of anti-Russian intelligence operations.
The British Target Trump
According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump
and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence
leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. The former head
of the Russia Desk for MI6 and protégé of Sir Richard Dearlove, Christopher Steele, fresh from working for British Intelligence,
the FBI, and U.S. State Department in the 2014 Ukraine coup, assembled in 2016 a phony dossier called Operation Charlemagne, claiming
widespread Russian interference in European elections, including in the Brexit vote. By the spring of 2016, Steele was contributing
to a British/U.S. intelligence task force on the Trump Campaign which had been convened at CIA headquarters under John Brennan's
direction.
This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British
soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. The personnel employed in these operations all had multiple
connections to the British firm Hakluyt, to Steele's firm Orbis, and to the British military's Integrity Initiative. Sometime in
the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then head of GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief John Brennan personally. Hannigan abruptly
resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage
control.
Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were already on the radar and under investigation by the same British, Dearlove-centered intelligence
network and by Christopher Steele specifically. Flynn had been defamed by Dearlove and Stefan Halper, as a possible Russian agent
way back in 2014 because he spoke to Russian researcher Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner sponsored by Dearlove's Cambridge Security Forum.
Or, at least that was the pretext for the targeting of Flynn, who otherwise defied British intelligence by exposing Western support
for terrorist operations in Syria and sought a collaborative relationship with Russia to counter ISIS. Manafort was under FBI investigation
throughout 2014 and 2015, largely in retaliation for his role in steering the Party of the Regions to political power in Ukraine.
In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian
state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine.
Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department.
In or around June 2016, Christopher Steele began writing his dirty and bogus dossier about Trump and Russia. This is the dossier
which claimed that Trump was compromised by Putin and that Putin was coordinating with Trump in the 2016 election. The main "legend"
of this full-spectrum information warfare operation run from Britain, was that Donald Trump was receiving "dirt" on Hillary Clinton
from Russia. The operations targeting Page and Papadopoulos consisted of multiple attempts to plant fabricated evidence on them which
would reflect what Steele himself was fabricating in the dirty dossier. At the very same time, the infamous June 2016 meeting at
Trump Tower was being set up. That meeting involved the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, it was alleged in a series of
bizarre emails written by British publicist Ron Goldstone to set up the meeting, could deliver "dirt" on Hillary Clinton direct from
the Russian government. Veselnitskaya didn't deliver any such dirt. But the entire operation was being monitored by State Department
intelligence agent Kyle Parker, an expert on Russia. Parker's emails reveal deep ties to the highest levels of British intelligence
and much chatter between them about Trump and Russia.
A now-changed version of the website for Christopher Steele's firm, Orbis, trumpeted an expertise in information warfare operations,
and the networks in which Steele runs are deeply integrated into the British military's Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative
is a rapid response propaganda operation using major journalists in the United States and Europe to carry out targeted defamation
campaigns. Its central charge, according to documents posted by the hacking group Anonymous, is selling the United States and Western
Europe on the immediate need for regime change in Russia, even if that involves war.
Much has been made by Republicans and other lunkheads in the U.S. Congress of Steele's contacts with Russians for his dossier.
They claim that such contacts resulted in a Russian disinformation operation being run through the duped Christopher Steele. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
MI6's Dirty Dossier on Donald Trump: Full-Spectrum Information Warfare
On its face, Steele's dossier would immediately be recognized as a complete fabrication by any competent intelligence analyst.
He cites some 32 sources inside the Russian government for his fabricated claims about Trump. What they allegedly told him is specific
enough in time and content to identify them. To believe that the dossier is true or that actual Russians contributed to it, you must
also believe that that the British government was willing to roll up this entire network, exposing them, since the intention was
for the dossier's wild claims to be published as widely as possible. By all accounts, Britain and the United States together do not
have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy
tradecraft. Steele's fabrication also uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19% of the energy
company Rosneft, (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for lifting sanctions) to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes
and misdemeanors.
Other claims in the dossier were published, publicly, in various Ukrainian publications. The famous claim that Trump directed
prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama seems to be plagiarized from similarly fake 2009 British propaganda
stories about Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome, "defiling" Putin's bed. According to
various sources in the United States, this outrageous claim was made by Sergei Millian. George Papadopoulos has stated that he believes
Millian is an FBI informant, recounting in his book how a friend of Millian's blurted this out when Millian, Papadopoulos and the
friend were having coffee.
The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate
Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former
senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is
no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA.
Despite its obvious fake pedigree, Steele's dossier was laundered into the Justice Department repeatedly, by the CIA and State
Department and the Obama White House. It was used to obtain FISA surveillance warrants turning key members of the Trump Campaign
into walking microphones. It was circulated endlessly by the Clinton Campaign to a network of reporters in the U.S. known to serve
as scribes for the intelligence community. John Brennan used it to conduct a special emergency briefing of the leading members of
the U.S. Congress charged with intelligence responsibilities in August of 2016 and to brief Harry Reid, who was Senate Majority Leader
at the time. All of this activity meant that the salacious accusation that Trump was a Putin pawn and the FBI was investigating the
matter, leaked out and was used by the Clinton Campaign to defame Trump for its electoral advantage. When Trump won, Steele's nonsense
received the stamp of the U.S. intelligence community and official currency in the campaign to take out the President.
As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against
Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the
National Endowment for Democracy. The individuals involved might be named Veterans of the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, since all of
them also worked on this operation. It is no accident that Victoria Nuland, the case agent for the Ukraine coup, played a major role
in bolstering Steele's credentials for the purpose of selling his dirty dossier to the media and to the Justice Department. This
went so far as Steele giving a full scale briefing on his fabricated dossier at the State Department in October 2016.
Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there
to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda,
against Russia.
The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications
Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department.
Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly,
in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected.
This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the
attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That
is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with
ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest.
"in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe"
Perhaps add mainstream media to the list of such sincere believers, they will fire their own real journalists.
David Walters , April 24, 2019 at 13:14
"This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some
sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated
assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies."
Absolutely correct.
Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the student body of Texas A&M University,
my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent
that dark "art".
Right, David Walters, and see Pompous Pompeo now. The only truths he's told was to a student body of Texas A&M University –
his own alma mater – the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steal.
Even though he's left his post as CIA Director and assumed his current post of Secretary of State. Pompous Pompeo continues his
CIA traits of lying, cheating, and stealing. It's in a way similar to a phrase, "A leopard never changes its spots". This is why
the DPRK govt issued a Persona Non Grata on Pompous Pompeo – that he isn't a bona fide diplomat, but a CIA official.
CWG , April 22, 2019 at 17:15
Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.
There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably, Putin would have favored Clinton, since
she could be bought. Trump can't.
What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT a FISA warrant. They only obtained
that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.
Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That was apparent ever after Devin Nunes
did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying on him.
Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason) they needed to cover that up as quickly
as possible.
So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying till this very day. The same lie through
which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign was being pushed openly.
The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential Election'.
They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump through lying to the FISA Court, which
again, is treason. According to the Constitution, lying to the FISA court= Treason.
In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the Attorney General. At all costs, they
needed to try and hide what really happened.
So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire Trump campaign!'.
'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.
Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire story. It was only later on that Sarah
Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.
The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be able to achieve three main objectives.
1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential Election.
2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order to 'take them down'.
Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a crime that had ANYTHING to with with
the elections. NONE.
They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people are willing to believe the lie'.
So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many people as possible. 'Russian Collusion,
Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia. Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..
Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?
Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign.
There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the Presidential Election.
That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama regime!!
So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?
He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with Russia.
The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.
His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude with the Russians'.
Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.
They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about. Yet it was not.
The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.
It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.
The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
"Russia'.
So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?
A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY Russians.
And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was only a distraction)
B: Russians hacked the DNC.
That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.
Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.
It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire regime in order to let Clinton win the
Presidency.
That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!
In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad things.
That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence' that Russia somehow did bad things.
Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question 'why did Obama spy on the Trump
Campaign'.
Let's go a bit deeper still.
Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push? The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?
After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.
If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP
the real crime', what would happen?
They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately
proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.
They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing anything wrong, it would show us all
THEY were the criminals.
They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.
That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon still don't seem to see all
that.
They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is simply not true. It's a Mueller created
LIE.
That LIE = the Insurance Policy.
What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about preventing Trump from being elected.
Although true, that is only A.
They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and would find out they were illegally spying
on him!
The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected President.
What's the punishment for Treason?
About Assange and Seth Rich.
Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which seems to be succesfull, the Deep
State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that lie.
Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.
If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be exposed.
No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for his life.
Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48
While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is
that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the
overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not
have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.
Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.
boxerwars , April 22, 2019 at 17:13
RE: "A Russian Agent Smear"
:::
Was Pat Tillman Murdered?
JUL 30, 2007
I don't know, but it seems increasingly conceivable. Just absorb these facts:
O'Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman
was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" again and again when he was killed,
O'Neal said
In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman's head were so close together that it appeared the
Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
The motive? I don't know. It's still likeliest it was an accident. But there's some mysterious testimony in the SI report about
nameless snipers. A reader suggests the following interpretation:
News this weekend said that there were "snipers" present and the witnesses didn't remember their names. I believe that's code
in the Army–these guys were Delta. In the Tillman incident, these snipers weren't part of the unit and they were never mentioned
publicly before. That's a key indicator that they weren't supposed to be acknowledged.
If you've ever read Blackhawk Down, Mark Bowden explains how he grew frustrated because interviewed Rangers kept referring
to "soldiers from another unit" while claiming they didn't know the unit ID or the soldiers' names. It took him months to crack
the unit ID and find people from Delta who were present at the fight.
Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, the Delta operators who earned Medals of Honor in Mogadishu, have always been identified as
snipers, too.
If my theory is correct, the Delta guys could have fired the shots – a three-round burst to the forehead from 50 yards is impossible
for normal soldiers and Rangers, but is probably an easy shot for those guys. But because Delta doesn't officially exist and Tillman
was a hero, nobody in the Army would want to have to explain exactly how the event went down. Easier just to claim hostile fire
until the family forced them to do otherwise.
This makes some sense to me, although we shouldn't dismiss the chance he was murdered. Tillman was a star and might have aroused
jealousy or resentment. He also opposed the Iraq war and was a proud atheist. In Bush's increasingly sectarian military, that
might have stirred hostility. I don't know. But I know enough to want a deeper investigation. My atheist readers will no doubt
admire the way Tillman left this world, according to the man who was with him:
As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman's side started praying. "I thought I was praying to myself,
but I guess he heard me," Sgt. Bryan O'Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. "He said something like,
'Hey, O'Neal, why are you praying? God can't help us now."'
(Maybe the Congress can )
////// The USA is aghast with "smears" and "internal investigations" and promised but never produced "White Papers" 'as the
world turns' and circles continents Dominated by American Military Power / Predominantly Barbarous / Uncivilized Use of Force
/ and Arrogantly Effective in it's use of Dominating Military Power.
\\\\ The Poorer Peoples of the World accept their lots-in-life with some acceptance of reality vis-a-vis the "lot-in-life"
they've been alleged/assigned.
/// But How Do We Accept The Fact that our Self-Sacrificiing Hero,Pat Tillman, was slaughtered in Afghanistan,
(WITH POSITIVE PROOF) – by his own Fellow American soldiers – ???
!!!! What i'm say'n is, if Tillman represents the Life Surrendering "American Hero"
WHY DID HIS FELLOW "AMERICAN SOLDIERS" ASSASSINATE & MURDER HIM ???????
AND WHY IS THIS STORY BURIED ALONG WITH MANY OTHER SMEAR Stories
that provide prophylactic protection for all the Trump pianist prophylaxis cover
Up for the Right Wing theft of American Democracy under FDR
In favor of Ayn Rand's prevalent OBJECTIVISM under Trump.
"Capitalism and Altruism
are incompatible
capitalism and altruism
cannot coexist in man,
or in the same society".
President Trump represents
Stark & Total Capitalism
Just as "Conservative Party"
Core is in The Confederacy
AKA; The RIGHT WING
The Right Wing of US Gov't
Is All About PRESERVING
Confederate States' Laws
Written by Thomas Jefferson
Prior to The Constitution, which
became the Received/Judicial
Constitutional Law of the Land in
The Republic of the "United States"
It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to deteriorate the more his actions
and statements are attacked and countered? You know what happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them
down? They get weapons and start killing people.
There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the least being he's clearly mentally unfit.
Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation".
Nancy Pelosi stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda "for now". She's now
making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are: noise.
The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one issue to run on next year: getting
rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters,
the same ones they were positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip service to progressive
policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions once the donations start coming, but the common underlying
theme was and continues to be "Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."
In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because
Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton
campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they
disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November.
Eddie S , April 24, 2019 at 21:14
Exactly right, EKB -- - you can't ballroom dance without a partner! Also reminds me of the couples you occasionally run into
where one partner repeatedly runs-down the other, and you get the feeling that the critical partner doesn't have much going on
in his/her life so they deflect that by focusing on the other partner
Johnny Ryan S , April 22, 2019 at 13:38
Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did
you know:
1)Obama Appoints CrowdStrike Officer To Admin Post Two Months Before June 2016 Report On Russia Hacking DNC
2) CrowdStrike Co-Founder Is Fellow On Russia Hawk Group, Has Connections To George Soros, Ukrainian Billionaire
3) DNC stayed that the FBI never asked to investigate the servers – that is a lie.
4) CrowdStrike received $100 million in investments led by Google Capital (since re-branded as CapitalG) in 2015. CapitalG is
owned by Alphabet, and Eric Schmidt, Alphabet's chairman, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. More than just
supporting Clinton, leaked emails from Wikileaks in November 2016 showed that in 2014 he wanted to have an active role in the
campaign.
-daily caller and dan bongino have been bringing these points up since 2016.
Deniz , April 22, 2019 at 12:36
The Right is currently salivating over the tough law enforcement rhetoric coming out of Barr and Trump.
It reminds me of when Obama was running for office in 2008 when everyone, including myself, was in awe of him. What kept slipping
into his soaring anti-intervention speeches, was a commitment to the good war in Afghanistan, which seemed totally out of place
with the rest of his rhetoric. The fine print was far more reflective of his administration actions as the rest of it his communications
turned out to be just telling people what they wanted to hear.
War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff.
The argument about not inserting Rich and the download is a good one as a defense strategy but doesn't help with finding the
truth about the emails. We can only hope that pursuing the truth and producing it will have a cumulative effect and the illusory
truth effect will include this truth.
Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:00
>>> ". . . doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails."
The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that
they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages.
Why should we much care how they were acquired and provided to the publisher?
Lily , April 22, 2019 at 17:55
That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about
the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony
Blair are lyers and mass murderers.
All three of them are free, earning millions with their publicity whereas two brave persons who were telling the truth have
been tortured and are still in jail. Reality has become like the most horrible nightmare. Everything simply seems to have turned
upside down. No writer would invent such a primitive plot. And yet it is the unbelievable reality.
Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21
I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out
JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John
Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be
a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create.
"... The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene: ..."
"... Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose: ..."
"... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
"... Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option. ..."
"... If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked. ..."
"... The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him: ..."
"... The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. ..."
"... The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men. ..."
"... The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead. ..."
"... It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing. ..."
"... Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter. ..."
"... Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss. ..."
"... Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War. ..."
"... after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative.. ..."
"... once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible. ..."
"... Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians. ..."
"... The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both. ..."
"... Haspel will not be fired. ..."
"... It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). .. ..."
"... The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. ..."
An ass kissing portrait of Gina Haspel,
torture
queen and director of the CIA, reveals that she lied to Trump to push for more
aggression against Russia.
In March 2018 the British government asserted, without providing any evidence, that the
alleged 'Novichok' poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal was the fault of Russia. It urged
its allies to expel Russian officials from their countries.
The U.S. alone expelled
60 Russian officials. Trump
was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year
ago the Washington Post described the scene:
President Trump seemed distracted in March as his aides briefed him at his Mar-a-Lago
resort on the administration's plan to expel 60 Russian diplomats and suspected spies.
The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of
Russians as its European allies -- part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the
poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.
"We'll match their numbers," Trump instructed, according to a senior administration
official. "We're not taking the lead. We're matching."
The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials
said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian
officials -- far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.
The president, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely
equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the
media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.
The expulsion marked a turn in the Trump administration's relation with Russia:
The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration's increasingly
hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive
measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close
relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The past month, in particular, has marked a major turning point in the
administration's stance, according to senior administration officials. There have been
mass expulsions of Russian diplomats, sanctions on oligarchs that have bled billions of
dollars from Russia's already weak economy and, for the first time, a presidential tweet
that criticized Putin by name for backing Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Today the New York Timesportraits Gina
Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position.
They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her
shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its
own purpose:
Last March, top national security officials gathered inside the White House to discuss
with Mr. Trump how to respond to the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal,
the former Russian intelligence agent.
London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian
operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical. ... During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump.
She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told
the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not
the only victims of Russia's attack.
Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children
hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals.
She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently
killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.
Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but
pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the
pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he
embraced the strong option.
The Skripal case was widely covered and we
followed it diligently (scroll down). There were no reports of any children affected by
'Novichok' nor were their any reports of dead ducks. In the official storyline the
Skripals, before visiting a restaurant,
fed bread to ducks at a pond in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury.
They also
gave duck-bread to three children to do the same. The children were examined and their
blood was tested.
No
poison was found and none of them fell ill . No duck died. (The duck feeding episode
also disproves
the claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching a door handle.)
If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British
government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced
policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked.
The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were
fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to
manipulate him:
The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people
who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.
Co-workers and friends of Ms. Haspel push back on any notion that she is manipulating
the president. She is instead trying to get him to listen and to protect the agency,
according to former intelligence officials who know her.
The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own
policies. Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game:
Ms. Haspel won the trust of Mr. Pompeo, however, and has stayed loyal to him. As a
result, Mr. Trump sees Ms. Haspel as an extension of Mr. Pompeo, a view that has helped
protect her, current and former intelligence officials said.
Posted by b on April 16, 2019 at 08:37 AM |
Permalink
I don't see how it's possible to manipulate someone (and especially the US president) into
doing something they don't want to do with lies like the ones described here. On the
contrary presidents, CEOs etc. favor the staffers who tell them the kind of lies they want
to hear in order to reinforce what they wanted to do in the first place.
I've never seen any reason to alter my first position on Trump, that like any other
president he does what he wants to do.
The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create
trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life
with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma
all agency owned men.
The joke 7in the final scene Robert Redford tells See Eye A man Cliff Robertson that he
gave all the evidence to the NY Times. What a joke. The NY Times and the Wash Post are the
mouthpieces for the SEE Eye A. The AP news sources most of their stories from those two
papers and other lackey See Eye A newspapers.
One final criticism in moon's story. The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the
President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead.
After this, she got the top job, so what is the real lesson here? Sociopathic liars get
promoted....or you can tell the truth, try to be honorable and fade into obscurity.. In a nest of psychos, you have to really be depraved to become the top psycho...
Nuke it for orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Backing up Russ's point, when will you realise the "buck stops" on Trump's desk for any
and all departments he oversees, which are run by his appointees? Trump is dedicated to
creating a neoconservative foreign policy melded to a neoliberal economic policy favouring
his corporate fascist sponsors. Recently, you've been all over the Assange indictment,
Trump's relationship with Nuttyahoo and the related rollback of JCPOA. Is this what you
want to see continued into a second term?
There is much evidence to show Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy"
where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing
candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the
point where no one can tell the difference.
They haven't got there quite yet but once the judiciary is controlled by GOP ideologues
it's game over. And McConnell is dedicating his life to make that the reality ASAP.
Meanwhile back at the ranch we are dedicated to knocking down any and all potential
opposition to this GOP hostile takeover for some reason I've yet to fathom.
Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire
Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game[Pompeo]
Hopefully yes to all four propositions. Why am I sceptical though (except conceivably
the first)?
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. He's the first POTUS in decades I
believe to not even pretend to like dogs by having an official White House dog and every
policy his Administration can take against animals, they have taken. I'm not even sure I
buy the spin that he cared about dead kids either. And NYT readers know this about him, so
I don't understand what the point of peddling this fiction is other than to paint Torture
Queen in some kind of good light (and we KNOW that she certainly doesn't care about dead
anything).
another example of trump's stupidity and pathological inability to think for himself. he
gets his views from fox and his policy from bolton. his equally vapid daughter and kushner
whine to him about sooper sad syria pictures they saw in a sponsored link while googling
for new tmz gossip.
even worse that this is the twat in charge of one of russiagate's main instigating "deep
state" agencies. he spent the entirety of his presidency railing against their various lies
then takes this wankery at face value. it's just like the "chinese soldiers in venezuela";
if those pictures were legit they'd have been splattered over every front page and
permanently attached to screeching cnn and msnbc segments demanding trump "finally get
tough" on "putin's russia".
my only surprise is that she didn't tell him about british babies ripped from incubators
and dipped in anthrax powder.
the nyt shilling for a soCIopAth? not that surprising.
The consultant in emergency medicine at Salisbury hospital wrote to The Times, shortly
after the Skripal incident. His choice of words was odd, and some have said they indicate
no novichok poisoning occurred. Leaving that to one side, his letter certainly puts paid to
the idea that more than three people (the Skripals and the policeman, DCI Bailey) were
poisoned.
https://www.onaquietday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DocSaysNoNerveAgentInSalisbury.jpg
" the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, "
There was no attack on the Skripals. or on anyone else.
The Russophobia in whose context it falls, is of a higher order, in which a fabricated
narrative of a Skripal-like attack had an important function.
The Skripals were perfectly happy to lend their name to the fabrication, and are living
happily, probably in New Zealand.
The Daily Beast article that b linked to describes how many serious, well-informed people
felt that Haspel was unsuitable to lead the CIA. Even more strange and troubling was that Haspel was supported by Trump's nemesis,
John Brennan.
Despite all that, MAGA Trump still nominated her. Any notion that Trump is at odds with, or "manipulated" by, Haspel, Bolton, or Pompeo is
just propaganda. We've seen such reporting before (esp. wrt Bolton) and Trump has taken no
action.
I see that Trump derangement is alive and well here at MoA. Commenters talk as if Trump is
the first president stupid enough to be manipulated by the security agencies and shadow
government sometimes referred to as a "deep state". People don't have to be historians or
look back to Rome, just read the books about how the great general who "won WWII" was used
by the oligarchy which had full control of US foreign policy throughout Eisenhower's term in
office.
Works produced after WWII, C. Wright Mills, The Power elite was written in 1956,The
Brothers and The Divil's Chessboard each about the Dulles Brothers and how they operated US
foreign policy for the interests of the oligarchy, and the work Peter Phillips, GIANTS: The
Global Power Elite and the work of David Rothkopf which thoroughly describes the feudal
system under which the Western cultures are ruled.
The US government is a pantomime it is a show it has no power.
How many here can honestly say they understand that the US dollar itself and the ENTIRE
GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM is privately owned. Why do you think the "banks were bailed out"?
because the banks were in power not the government. The US is 22 trillion in debt - the
oligarchy is the creditor - take over the US gov. and you have a powerless pile of
debt.
Around 6,000 people control 85% of global assets until that changes nothing will change.
The oligarchy won virtually all the mines and control the price of all basic commodities
necessary for modern life, the internet, oil of course and more.
What is failing and what has failed over and over for 500 years is Western Civilization and
its three "great religions" which preach obedience, oppression, domination by a one god
suffocating mythology.
But the oligarchy doesn't own just the basic commodities, it owns the religions and it owns
the drugs and all illegal trade as well.
Western "civilization" is really nothing more than one vast feudal kingdom, with royal
courts in DC, Tel Aviv and Ryiadh. Wheather there is a god or not, religion is made of
flesh and blood not miracles. No Rabbi or Priest or Imam claims visitations by god to
instruct them on doctrine - they are flesh and blood and they want power so they behave
like sycophants to the money they need to expand their power...all for the good souls under
their care.
Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired
to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more
likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter.
What can we expect from a tv personality who became a US president? A man who ran with an
advertisement worthy of a business man like him, "Make America Great Again." How does he go
about doing it? Giving more money to the military industrial-Congressional complex, even
though we are really flat broke. Using aggressive tactics used by Wall Street in hostile
company takeovers to really intimidate other nations. And hire and place those he really
agrees with in important positions who really reflect his true feelings. I'm sure when he
spoke with Haspel before offering her the job, he brought up the topic of torture and
agreed with her on its use on terrorists.
I think there's a reasonable case to be made that they conspired not to stop Trump but
to further speculation of Trump's "collusion" with Russia (what would later be known as
Russiagate). The "collusion" and "Russia meddled" accusations are what fueled the new
McCarthyism.
I'll just add to Jerry's comment at #3 that the final line in the movie "Day of the Condor"
is something like "But will they print it?" which really spoke to the message of the film
in its entirety. The condor being an endangered bird for whom the hero is named, and the
beginning outrage being the brutal murder of book lovers researching useable plot details
for the 'company'makes this message current and applicable to what we see in the Skripal
case. And instead of librarians, we now have online commenters, a doughty breed, and we
have Assange.
Instead of 'Will they print it?' I am wondering 'Will they make another movie about
it?'
Remind me, where is Yulia Skripal these days? Well and truly 'disappeared' it seems. The
mask is off. the snarling face of the beast is there for all to see.
What a total waste of an article discussing a story published in NYT or WaPo.
b, the World has divided itself into those who consume alternative media such as this
and stupidos who consume MSM. There is nothing in-between that you are attempting to
discuss and dissect here. NYT = cognitive value zero.
Fake News not worth one millisecond of our time, not even to decode what the regime
wants us to know, we know all that already. Personally, I am only interested in the new
methods of domestic repression, what is next after the warning of Assange arrest, future
rendition and torture. The Deep Stare appears to be coming out into open, will it soon get
rid of the whole faux democracy construct and just use iron fist to rule? It already impose
its will as the rule of law. All of the Western block is heading in this direction.
Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn,
completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its
contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold
for their putative boss.
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. Mataman | Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM
This assumes that Trump would primarily care about the ducks (and children) when he
approved a massive expulsion, rather that his image and "ah, in that case it would look bad
if we do not do something really decisive".
In any case, I was thinking why NYT would disclose something like that. The point is
that readers of Craig Murray (not so few, but mostly Scottish nationalists who are also
leftist and have scant possibilities and/or inclination to vote in USA) and MoonOfAlabama
would quickly catch a dead fish here, but 99.9% of the public is blissfully unaware of any
incongruences in the "established" Skripal narrative.
BTW, it is possible that the journalist who scribbled fresh yarn obtained from CIA did it
earnestly. Journalists do not necessarily follow stories that they cover -- scribbling from
given notes does not require overtaxing the precious attention span that can be devoted to
more vital cognitive challenges. I am lazy to find the link, but while checking for news on
Venezuela, I stumbled on a piece from Express, a British tabloid, where Guaido was named a
"figurehead of the oposition" supported by "450 Western countries". My interpretation was
that more literate journalists were moved for to more compelling stories as Venezuela went
to the back burner.
Yes, indeed, the Skripal Affair is one of the obviously contrived stunts we've seen.
Just outrageous in its execution. On a par with the US having a man who didn't even run for president of Venezuela swear
himself in and then pressure everyone to accept him as president.
Interesting, I had no idea Gina Haspel - aka, The Queen of Blood - played a role. I
thought it was all original dirty work by Britain's Theresa May. Boy, I hope people are through with the false notion that if women just get into
leadership, the world will become a better gentler place.
Macron was (afaik?) the only EU 'leader' who was quoted in the MSM as bruiting re. the
Skripal affair a message like:
.. no culpability in the part of Russia has been evidenced .. for now...
I suppose he was enjoined to shut his gob right quick (have been reading about brexit so
brit eng) as nothing more in that line was heard.
Hooo, the EU expelled a lot of Russ. diplomats, obeying the USuk, which certainly
created some major upsets on the ground.
Some were expelled, went into other jobs, other places, but then others arrived, etc.
The MSM has not made any counts - lists - of names numbers - etc. of R diplos on the job -
anywhere. As some left and then others arrived.
Once more, this was mostly a symbolic move, if extremely nasty, insulting, and
disruptive.
Theresa May's speech re. Novichok, Independent 14 March 2018:
.. on Monday I set out that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a
Novichok: a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia. Based on this capability,
combined with their record of conducting state sponsored assassinations – including
against former intelligence officers whom they regard as legitimate targets – the UK
Government concluded it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and
despicable act. ..
imo, the media has, once again, simply taken its lead from trump himself, & started
making things up completely. & you're absolutely correct in pointing out that, much
like trump's true believers, the msm's targeted audience never even notices...
Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY
Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of
which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power
sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter
hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War.
after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the
msm will not be talking about integrity initiative..
what i didn't know is what @18 lysias pointed out.."Haspel was CIA station chief in
London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In
her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it.
That Brennan supported her argues for the latter." ditto jr's speculation @20 too...
so gaspel shows trump some cheap propaganda that she got from who??
my main problem with b's post - i tend to see it like kiza @23) is maintaining the idea
trump isn't in on all of this.. the thought trump is being duped by his underlings.. if he
was and it mattered, he would get rid of them.. the fact he doesn't says to me, he is in on
it - get russia, being the 24/7 game plan of the west here still..
Please stop listening to idiot libertarians and their "US is flat broke" meme.
The reality is that: so long as Americans transact in dollars, the United States government
can tax anytime it feels like by issuing new dollars via the Fed.
Equally, so long as 60% of the world's trade is conducted in dollars, this is tens to
hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxation surface area.
The MMT people - I don't agree 100% with everything they say, but they do understand the
actual operation of fiat currency.
The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to
hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency
devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy.
I doubt Haspel knew the ducks were fake - she was probably just given stuff to pass up
the chain.
It is a lot like John Kerry who was shown convincing satellite data of the BUK launch that
hit MH17 - but no one could be bothered to pass on even the launch site coordinates to the
JIT. I'm sure this stuff goes on all the time, and of course, once Teresa May has spoken in
Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative
version of the truth is possible.
Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to
get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might
have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger
one to blame the Russians.
The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both
originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about
both.
"The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion
to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that
currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy."
The useful idiocy is most surprising among US farmers. In the 19th century they broadly
understood that fiat money was good for chronic low-wealth debtors like themselves, while
hard money was bad and a gold standard lethal. This was the basis of the Populist movement.
Nothing has changed financially, but today's farmers, and the low-wealth debtor class in
general, seem more likely to be goldbuggers than to have any knowledge of economics or of
their own political history.
karlof1 36
Once a faction becomes submerged in the Mammon theocracy and becomes nothing but
mercenary nihilists, thinking is no longer necessary or desirable, except to come up with
attractive, pseudo-plausible lies.
This certainly characterizes "the right" (including liberals), but they have no monopoly
on it. By now "the left" is nearly as thoughtless and instrumental on behalf of Mammon,
except to the extent that a few people are starting to really grapple with what it means to
have an intrinsically ecocidal and therefore suicidal civilization. That's really the only
thought frontier left, all else has been engulfed in Mammon, productionism, scientism and
technocracy.
I remind that Mussolini wasted his legislature.. 1 balmy after noon @ a roadside spot.
it made his government stronger.?
It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no
one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes
anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). ..
The actors in
government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the
rest of the world. Everyone in the government is covering for the behaviors of someone else
in government, the MSM has raised the price of a pencil to just under a million, stock
markets are bags of hot thin air, and everyone in side and outside of the centers of power
at all levels of government have lied thru their teeth so much that their teeth are melting
from the continuous flow of hot deceitful air.
Corrupt is now the only qualification for
political office, trigger happy screwball the only qualification for the police and the
military and . making progress is like trying to conduct a panty raid at a female nudist
camp.
John Anthony La Pietra , Apr 16, 2019 3:47:03 PM |
link
Yeah, I remember Trump's healthcare "policy". It was a great, really, really great. The best
healthcare ever. Repeal and replace. Obamacare is failing, it has failed, it's a huge
failure, but Trump will do better. We were going to have the best healthcare in the world...
I guess he's just to distracted by building that wall he's not building. Or, golf.
Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An
example, with which I have much sympathy:
‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn
and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize
to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate
hoaxers. Sorry!’
Money quote: "The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from
the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White
House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. There are clear parallels between the end stages
of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from
reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against
the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not
lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate."
Notable quotes:
"... Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’ ..."
"... Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .) ..."
"... Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them. ..."
"... ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’ ..."
"... The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same. ..."
"... A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation. ..."
"... In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’) ..."
"... The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief. ..."
"... There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller." ..."
"... I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language. ..."
"... The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. ..."
"... There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate. ..."
"Dan, Thanks for the reference, which I will follow up. Unfortunately, although Bongino has produced a lot of extremely valuable
material, a lot of it is buried in the 'postcasts', searching through which is harder than with printed materials. It would greatly
help if there were transcripts, but of course those cost money.
I am still trying to fit the exploding mass of information which has been coming out into a coherent timeline. Part of the
problem is that there is so much appearing in so many different places. In addition to trying to think through the implications
of the information in this post and the subsequent exchanges of comments, I have been trying to make sense of evidence coming
out about the British end of the conspiracy.
An important development here has been rather well covered by Chuck Ross, in a recent ‘Daily Caller’ piece headlined ‘Cambridge
Academic Reflects On Interactions With 'Spygate’ Figure’ and one on ‘Fox’ by Catherine Herridge and Cyd Upson, entitled ‘Russian
academic linked to Flynn denies being spy, says her past contact was “used” to smear him.’ However, the evidence involved has ramifications
which they cannot be expected to understand, as yet at least.
At issue is the attempt to use the – apparently casual – encounter between Lieutenant-General Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova at a
dinner in Cambridge (U.K.) in February 2016 to smear him by, among other things, portraying her as some kind of ‘Mata Hari’ figure.
Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016
– a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with
Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’
This suggests that this was not simply a case Halper acting on his own. It also I think brings us back to the central importance
of Flynn’s visit to Moscow in December 2015.
Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come.
It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk
.)
Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This
points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians
might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic,
with Dearlove certainly among them.
Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:
‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to
cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes
#Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’
Meanwhile, another interesting recent ‘tweet’ comes from Eliot Higgins, of ‘Bellingcat’ fame. He is known to some skeptics as
‘the couch potato’ – perhaps he should be rechristened ‘king cockroach.’ It reads:
‘Looking forward to gettin g things rolling with the Open Information Partnership, with @bellingcat, @MDI_UK, @DFRLab, and @This_Is_Zinc
https://www.openinformation...’
There is an interesting ‘backstory’ to this. The announcement of an FCO-supported ‘Open Information Partnership of European Non-Governmental
Organisations, charities, academics, think-tanks and journalists’, supposedly to counter ‘disinformation’ from Russia, came in a
written answer from the Minister of State, Sir Alan Duncan, on 3 April.
In turn this followed the latest in a series of releases of material either leaked or hacked from the organisations calling themselves
‘Institute for Statecraft’ and ‘Integrity Initiative’ by the group calling themselves ‘Anonymous’ on 25 March.
The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium
whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium
member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same.
A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian
organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible
explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation.
An interesting paragraph reads as follows:
‘An expanded research component could generate better understanding of the drivers (psychological, sociopolitical, cultural
and environmental) of those who are susceptible to disinformation. This will allow us to map vulnerable audiences, and build scenario
planning models to test the efficiency of different activities to build resilience of those populations over time.’
They have not yet got to the point of recommending psychiatic treatment for ‘dissidents’, but these are still early days. The
‘Sovietisation’ of Western life proceeds apace.
In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different
countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright
to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they
need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’)
Study of the proposal hacked/leaked by ‘Anonymous’ bring out both the ‘boondoggle’ element – there is a lot of state funding available
for people happy to play these games – and also the strong transatlantic links.
A particularly significant presence, here, is the ‘DFRLab’. This is the ‘Digital Forensic Research Lab’ at the ‘Atlantic Council’,
where Eliot Higgins is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’ The same organisation has a ‘Cyber Statecraft Initiative’ where Dmitri Alperovitch
is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’
It cannot be repeated often enough that it is difficult to see any conceivable excuse for the FBI to fail to secure access to
the DNC servers. One would normally moreover expect that, on an issue of this sensitivity, they would have the ‘digital forensics’
done by their own people.
There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been
a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that
organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic ‘Atlantic Council’ is even more preposterous.
The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored
by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief.
There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from
‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly
goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller."
OT but related, just watched a former naval Intelligence officer, now working for the Hoover Institute interviewed on FOX about
the Rooshins in Venezuela. Said, the 100 Russians are there to protect Maduro because he cannot trust his own army. Maduro's days
are numbered because he is toxically unpopular.
Got me thinking, our Intelligence services are good at psy-ops and keeping our gullible MSM in line but God help us if we ever
actually needed real Intelligence about a country. I remember about a month ago how all of these 'Think Tank Guys' were predicting
how the only people loyal to Maduro were a few of his crony Generals, that the rank and file military hated him and there were
going to be mass defections.
It didn't happen and we are all just supposed to forget that.
[not a socialist, don't have any love for Maduro, I just know that I will never learn anything of about Venezuela from these think
tank dudes, we are just getting groomed]
Venezuela isn't about "socialism," or even Maduro--it's about the oil. They have the largest proven reserves in the world, though
much of it is non-conventional and would need a ton of investment to exploit. But it's their oil, not ours, and we have no right
to meddle in their internal affairs.
Venezuela is neither about socialism nor oil in my opinion. It is everything to do with the neocons. And Trump buying into their
hegemonic dreams. Notice the resurrection of Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame as the man spearheading this in a triumvirate
with Bolton & Pompeo. IMO, a perfect foil for Putin & Xi to embroil the US in another regime change quagmire that further weakens
the US.
"There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has
been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating
for that organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic 'Atlantic Council' is even more preposterous."
True; and true. It is also true that the Clinton e-mail investigation was faux, a limp caricature of what an investigation
would look like when it is designed to uncover the truth. Allowing a subject's law firm to review the subject's e-mails from when
she was in government for relevancy is beyond preposterous. An investigation conducted in the normal way by apolitical Agents
in a field office would not walk away from a trove of evidence empty handed.
The inter-relatedness and overlapping of DoJ, CIA, and FBI personnel assigned to the Clinton e-mail case, the Russophobic nightmare
of a 'case' targeting Carter Page, and by extension, the Trump presidential campaign, and yes, the Mueller political op, all reek
of political bias and ineptitude followed by more political bias; and then culmination in a scorched earth investigation more
characteristic of something the STASI might have undertaken than American justice.
Early morning raids, gag orders, solitary confinements, show indictments that will never see adjudication in a court room - truly
unbelievable.
In your opinion was this surveillance, criminal & counter-intelligence investigation as well as information operations against
Trump centrally orchestrated or was it more reactive & decentralized?
There are so many facets. Fusion GPS & Nellie Ohr with her previous CIA connection. Her husband Bruce at the DOJ stovepiping
the dossier to the FBI. Brennan and his EC. Clapper and his intelligence assessment. Halper, Mifsud, Steele along with Hannigan
and the MI6 + GCHQ connection. Downer and the Aussies. FISA warrants on Page & Papadopolous. The whole Strzok & Page texting.
Comey, Lynch & the Hillary exoneration. McCabe. Then all the Russians. And the media leaks to generate hysteria.
I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its
about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal
had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary,
increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language.
And yet the chatterati
continued to chatter and invent ludicrously unreal worlds and analyses of the actual world they lived in until... bang... it was
no more.
I'd skip the first few chapters which are full of impenetrable marxist jargon.
The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go.
This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House.
It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler.
There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion
is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their
facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising
inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire
crashes we may not be so fortunate.
Russian research team which claimed to have detected signs of intelligent life in Washington has now discovered the life there
not to be quite so intelligent after all.
A Russian spokesman, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our Moscow science correspondent -- who also wishes to remain anonymous
-- that the Washington atmosphere has been poisoned by huge clouds of putrid hot air belching from the corporate media. He explained
that such a hostile environment makes it almost impossible for intelligent life to survive, let alone evolve a sustainable culture.
The Russian team believes there may still be small pockets of intelligent life elsewhere on the North American continent but without
the necessary conditions they need to thrive they are destined to disappear without trace.
Speaking off the record, the Russian spokesman, who asked us not to disclose his identity, added that hopes of finding intelligent
life in London, Paris, Berlin and other Western European locations, where it might be expected to flourish, are fading fast. Though
it is believed intelligent life once existed in Occiental Europe, an atmosphere suitable for the maintenance of such life has all
but evaporated.
Money quote: "Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots
that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets
should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion.
But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union. "
Notable quotes:
"... Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally. ..."
"... There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge. ..."
In 2016, Andrei Lvovich Nekrasov, a well-known Russian film-maker, playwright, theater director, and actor, released a docudrama
entitled, The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes . Although the film won many artistic accolades, including a special commendation
from the Prix Europa Award for a Television Documentary, public screenings were abruptly canceled in both Europe and the United States.
Political pressure from various constituents and the threat of lawsuits from William Browder, the American-British billionaire and
human-rights activist, ensured the limitation of the film to a single website. To the knowledge of this author, there has been only
one public screening of The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes in the United States. In June 2016, Seymour Hersch, a renowned investigative
journalist, presided over a showing of the film at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that generated much controversy. The American press
has not been kind to either the film or the director, Andrei Nekrasov. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker,
and The Daily Beast all seem to agree that the film is an overt work of Russian propaganda that aims to introduce confusion
about the circumstances leading to the death of tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, in the minds of the viewers. The Putin administration,
which has been the prime target of both the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Accountability Act and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Human
Rights Accountability Act, has good reason to promote a film that questions the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's untimely death
in Moscow's Butyrka Prison in 2009.
Despite a flood of persuasive articles and editorials by well-known journalists suggesting that this inconvenient film deserves
no more than a quick burial, I was drawn to reconsider both the film and the political controversy that it continues to create for
two main reasons. First, as the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own recent presidential campaigns show, we can never entirely
prohibit the intrusion of propaganda or politically slanted content into the public sphere. Instead, as a historian and faculty member
who serves at a public university, I believe that it is my job to teach our students how to diagnose an issue, and how to consider
the many sides that a story necessarily involves. As an intellectual process this has immense value both in and of itself. Source
criticism is a time tested and reliable means through which we can make sense of an event or a phenomenon. Our students need to learn
both the mechanics and the intellectual value of analyzing a source and should be able to evaluate the nature of political content
whether it is embedded in a Facebook post, a scholarly article, or a documentary.
The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes can serve as an important vehicle to introduce the contested nature of historical
truth, and as a prism, it allows us to view the multiple modes through which various versions of the truth are disseminated in the
twenty-first century. Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a
real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating
analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative.
The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's
death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary.
Second, I am concerned by the fact that both critics and supporters have turned the debate about the film into a referendum on
William Browder, his business dealings as well as his global human rights activism, and the Putin administration. In this interview
with Andrei Nekrasov, I turn the spotlight back on the film-maker, his motivations for making the film, and on his political experiences
since the release of the film. It is important to remember that in the past Nekrasov has made several politically charged films including
Disbelief (2004), and Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007) -- films that are extremely critical of the
Putin administration. Nekrasov, a student of philosophy and literature, is in the unique position of having experienced censorship
in the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia, and in the democratic countries of Western Europe and the United States.
1) Why did you want to make a film about the Magnitsky Act? What drew you to this project?
Andrei Nekrasov : I felt that the story of Magnitsky, in its accepted version, was very powerful and important. I thought that
Sergei Magnitsky was a hero, and I wanted to tell the story of the modern hero, my compatriot. His case seemed very special because
Magnitsky, a tax lawyer (in reality, an accountant) had come from the world of capitalism, to symbolize all that is good and moral
in modern Russia. I believed that Magnitsky did not surrender under torture and sacrificed his life fighting corruption.
2) Who has funded the making of this film and what motivated them to invest in this production?
AN : The film was produced by Piraya Film, a Norwegian company. There is a long list of funders, and none are from Russia. (Please
visit www.magnitskyact.com for further information). And they are all
very "mainstream." I believe in the United States and Russia it is easier to construe the specific reasons that motivate funders,
who are mostly private, to support a project. In Europe, where more public money is available for the arts, the state is more or
less obliged to fund the cultural process. So I submit an idea to a producer, and if they like it, they introduce it into a complex
system of funding that is supposed to be politically neutral. Only quality matters, in theory. In practice "quality" has political
aspects, and its interpretation is open to prejudices.
But it would be a simplification to say the film was funded because I had set out to tell Browder's version of the Magnitsky case.
Those funders who were (through their commissioning editors) monitoring the editing process, ZDF/ARTE, for example, became aware
of the inconsistencies in Browder's version and supported my investigation into the truth. What they did not realize was who, and
what, we were all dealing with. They did not realize that Browder was supported by the entire political system of North America and
Western Europe. They realized that only when they were told by politicians to stop the film. And they obeyed, contrary to what I
thought was their principles.
3) How has the role of censorship, both in Russia and the West, affected your artistic career?
AN : Censorship has had a very strong and damaging impact on my career. But while censorship in Russia had never been something
surprising to me, the way that the film T he Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes was treated by western politicians was totally
unanticipated and shocking. Yet, intellectually, the experience was very illuminating. The pro-Western intelligentsia of Russia,
a class to which I have belonged, idolizes the West and believes that the freedom of expression is an essential and even intrinsic
part of Western culture. The notion that the interests of economically powerful groups can set a geopolitical agenda and that easily
overrides democratic freedom of expression is considered to be a remnant of Soviet era thinking. So I had to have a direct and personal
experience of Western censorship to realize that that notion is rooted in reality.
The issue of censorship in Russia is, on the other hand, often misunderstood in the West. There is no direct political censorship
of the kind that existed in the Soviet Union, and that possibly exists in countries like China today. Many popular Russian news outlets
are critical of the government, and of Putin personally as evidenced by the content in media outlets such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya
Gazeta, Dozhd TV, New Times, Vedomosti, Colta. ru, and others. The internet is full of mockery of Putin, his ministers and of
his party's representatives. There is neither a system nor the kind of wellresourced deep state structures that control the flow
of information. Many Russian media outlets, for example, repeat Browder's story of Magnitsky killed by the corrupt police with the
state covering it up. All that is perfectly "allowed" while Putin angrily condemns Browder as a criminal and Browder calls himself
Putin's number one enemy. In reality, it is not allowed but simply happens because of the lack of consistent political censorship.
However, you will hardly ever hear a proper analysis and criticism in the Russian media of the big corporations, and of the oligarchs
that make up the state. It is also true that such acute crises as military operations, such as Russian-Georgian war of 2008 produce
intolerance to the voices of the opposition. My film Russian Lessons (2008) about the suffering of the Georgians during that
short war and its aftermath wasbanned in Russia. But nationalism is not only a government policy. It's the prevailing mood. The supposedly
democratic leader of the opposition, that the West seems to praise and support, Alexei Navalny, was on the record insulting Georgians
in jingo-nationalistic posts during the war. The film industry is, of course, easier to steer in the "right direction" as films,
unlike articles and essays, are very expensive to produce. But Russia is a complex society, deeply troubled, but also misunderstood
by the West. If my films, such as Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File , and Russian Lessons (2010) were attacked
by pro-government media, then some of my articles were censored by the independent, "opposition" outlets, such as Ekho Moskvy
.
4) Did you actually begin filming the movie with an outcome of supporting Browder's story in mind, as you represent in the
film, or did you plan from the start of the filming process to end the film as it now stands?
AN : I started filming the story. I totally believed in the story that Browder had told me, and all the mainstream media repeated
after him.
5) You know that there are many more "disappeared" journalists and others listed in the formal US Congress Magnitsky Act
who have suffered from the effects of corrupt power in Russia. Why did you not address the fates of some of those others as well
in your film?
AN : I may be misunderstanding this question, but I do not see how addressing the fates of "disappeared" journalists and others'
would be relevant to the topic of my film in its final version. I obviously condemn the "disappearance" of journalists and others.
In Russia journalists disappear usually by being "simply" shot (not in "sophisticated" Saudi ways), and as far as I remember only
one is referred to in The Magnitsky Act , Paul Khlebnikov. He was the editor of Forbes, Russia , and was shot in 2004
when Bill Browder was a great fan of Vladimir Putin and continued to be for some time. I have not seen any evidence or even claim,
that Putin may have been behind that murder. I was a friend of Anna Politkovskaya, perhaps the most famous of all Russian journalists
who was assassinated in the recent past. She is featured in my film, Poisoned by Polonium .
The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a
fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally
sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international
organizations.
6) Does William Browder's role in the formulation of the Magnitsky Act invalidate its value and that of the Global
Magnitsky Act, in seeking to provide protection for those suffering from the effects of deadly and corrupt power such as the recently
deceased Saudi Arabian journalist, Jamal Khashoggi?
AN : Let me, for the argument's sake, pose myself what would seem like a version of your question: "Would Browder's role in creating
a weapon that could protect someone like Khashoggi from deadly and corrupt power invalidate that weapon?" My answer would be, no,
it would not invalidate that weapon. However, we are dealing with a fallacy here, in my humble opinion. The Magnitsky Act, in
my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of
Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was
he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never
mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people
named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen
and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights
of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent
investigator or judge.
Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West
is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be
built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But
the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union.
Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Chatterjee, along with Steven Marks,
Mary Neuberger, and Steve Sabol, edited The Wider Arc of Revolution in three volumes (Slavica Publishers).
Doubling down is just stupid. And that war pig Rachel Maddow lost 500k viewers. That's why she cries. she
sries about lst money.
She does not cry about deceived and brainwashed public, which was subjected to unprecedented Neo-McCarthyism complagn for more
then a year.
Notable quotes:
"... The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments ..."
"... Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something." ..."
"... "Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted radio host Mark Simone. ..."
"... "This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson. ..."
"... "#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history," quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods. ..."
"... "So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr. ..."
"... Later on Saturday, Maddow mocked the suggestion that she was watery-eyed and might have held back tears. ..."
Crying for indictments? Maddow 'holds backs tears' as she discusses end of Mueller probe (VIDEO)
The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump
and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which
wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments.
According to the Daily Caller, Maddow came
close to crying as she commented
on the Russiagate-deflating development. Many on Twitter insisted that she actually shed tears. A clip of the broadcast shows a watery-eyed
Maddow seemingly grappling with the reality that Donald Trump and his family will not be frog-marched out of the White House.
Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not
to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something."
The internet laughed and laughed.
"Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted
radio host Mark Simone.
Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up.
"This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the
bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson.
This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill
comes due. @maddowhttps://t.co/4bkBUEwx8y
"#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history,"
quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods.
"What's going on with Maddow? Has she been hospitalized? Sedated?" inquired journalist Michael Tracey.
Others expressed exasperation at Maddow's refusal to face the music, accusing the MSNBC host of ignoring real, pressing issues
as she leads her Russiagate crusade.
"So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years,
@maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually
do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr.
So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on
#Russiagate ?
For 2 years, @maddow has lead
@MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded
w/ Russia
What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually
do journalism?
"... The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections. ..."
"... At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this. ..."
"... I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy. ..."
"... It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further. ..."
"... They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. ..."
"... Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal. ..."
"... The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue; ..."
"... Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law. ..."
"... It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.) ..."
There were no major disagreements between Mueller and his managers at the U.S. Department of
Justice (DOJ).
The Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 election were exposed and charged -- but no
American was charged with any effort to conspire with Moscow and hijack the election.
the "Steele dossier" that was the main FISA evidence was paid for with funds
from Hillary Clinton
's campaign and the Democratic Party;
Christopher Steele, the dossier's author, had told a senior DOJ official he was desperate to
defeat Trump;
most of the dossier was not verified before it was used as evidence of alleged Trump-Russia
collusion; and
agents collected statements from key defendants such as Papadopoulos and Carter Page during
interactions with an FBI informant that strongly suggested their innocence.
Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and
every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.
An upcoming DOJ inspector general's report should trigger the beginning of that
accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying
all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials. " The Hill
------------
Pilgrims, the seditious conspiracy to depose the elected president of the United States for
conspiracy to commit treason with the Government of the Russian Federation has been
defeated.
The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously
used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make
an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to
overturn the results of elections.
At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary
Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever,
clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the
even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British
intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose
staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this.
The leftist press is already discounting the results of Mueller's investigation while
gloating over how long the Democratic held House of Representatives can continue to search
through Trump's life trying to find criminality.
AG Barr should stand Mueller up next to him at a press conference to make clear the results
of his report and to answer questions about it. After that the prosecutions should begin.
pl
I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee –
Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled
against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this
conspiracy.
It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a
strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' –
notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which
case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further.
The argument that declassification of relevant documentation would harm the intelligence
relationship between the U.S. and U.K. has clearly been made with great emphasis from this
side.
In fact, it is pure bollocks. A serious investigation on your side, which could lead to
the kind of clean-out which should have happened when the scale of the corruption of
intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq became clear, might pave the way for us
to reconstruct reasonably functional intelligence services.
Doing this on both sides of the Atlantic might pave the way for a reconstruction of an
intelligence relationship which was actually beneficial to both countries, as in recent years
it patently has not been.
Whether there is a realistic prospect of people on your side opening the cans of worms on
ours, as well as your own, of course remains a moot point.
I'm glad the Steele affair has been examined at the American end -
"They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with
Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US
political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and
spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York.
"
What about the UK end? We're fussing over some little local difficulties in the UK at the
moment and at our end the questions still remain - Who in the UK authorised it and how high did it go?
The problem with criminal prosecution is one must cite a Brit or US law which was violated.
The only ones in US law that I am aware of stipulate that the plotting must be by means of
violence, "by force". All this appears to me to be only the propagation of rumors.
I think it might be more the investigation of the propagation of rumours. Think back to that election campaign, and to the period before the inauguration.
Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an
odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers
nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it
turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal.
With respect it is not propagating rumours to ask how that happened. As for my own
interest in the affair, it is not propagating rumours to ask how a senior UK ex-Intelligence
Officer comes to be mixed up in it all. I suppose I started to look on it as rather more than a prank or a few cogs slipping when
that senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer got whisked away to a safe house. We're a penny
pinching lot over here and we don't run to that sort of thing for nothing.
An investigation could certainly be predicated on the reasonable suspicion that Steele, et
al, conspired to defraud the United States, in this case a purposeful and knowing smear of a
candidate for office; also, another potential violation could be lying to the FBI, T 18 USC
1001.
The problem, as I see it, is sorting out the malignant from the merely incompetent. As I've
argued many times, the dossier should have been dismissed from the outset as a pile of
garbage, empty of actionable content, because the ultimate sources could not be vetted: the
information could not be said to be either credible or reliable. The information was acted on
by screening it behind the reliabilty and credibility, so called, of Steele. So it would be
necessary to show that Steele knew that the information, point by point, was false. This
could be difficult. Steele's first line of defense would be that he threw everything that he
heard from anyone at all into the mix in the expectation that the "professionals" would
figure it out.
Yes, they were all partisan, Steele, his sources, his bosses, the so called
professionals, and their partisanship would be easy to prove; and yes, almost assuredly their
partisanship contributed, perhaps even explained, their defective judgement as to how to
handle the scurrilous information, especially on the part of the so called professionals, but
proving they actually knew the materials to be false would be difficult.
They couldn't know
that it was false because they had no ability to run down the sources. The professionals
would defend themselves by saying they had no ability to vet the sources but the information
represented such a serious security threat that they had no alternative but to try to vet the
information by launching the investigation against the targets. This puts the cart before the
horse, represents an astonishing lack of judgement, especially considering the "exalted"
positions in the Intel Community the people exercising the bad judgement occupied, but there
it is - "we thought we were doing the right thing."
Perhaps this defense could be overcome by
demonstrating that people at such high and important heights of government could not possible
be so stupid... maybe.
And of course we have the orchestrated leaks to various media, the orchestrated unmaskings,
all of which kept the media frenzy fired up. All in all, it was the greatest political dirty
trick ever attempted in American Politics, and did devastating damage to both domestic
tranquility and national security. Trump survived, but the damage done is incalculable.
So It pains me greatly to think that the reckoning will likely have to be political rather
than criminal because the malice that can be demonstrated is so admixed and even overshadowed
by incompetence and judgement flaws; and even a political reckoning given the state of the
country is so uncertain.
I hope that I am wrong and that some kind of prosecution can be fashioned because of the
sheer enormity of violence that was done to our electoral system, surpassing by far the
chickenshit case Mueller brought against the Russian troll farm; but I fear that I am right.
It hurts to think that so much damage can be caused by scheming little political weasels and
that they all may well walk away scot free; and even be lionized by their political confreres
as having tried to do the right thing. This is the state of American politics today!!!
I see that some of the midgets on horseback are saying that they will bring Mueller before
congress to explain himself. Their knight in shining armor has failed to return with the holy
grail. A couple even suggested that perhaps Mueller has been influenced by the Russians or
somehow intimated by Trump.
The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue;
and that
+ all the crazy Marxism (social and economic), bad immigration policy and Green New Deal is
going to doom the Democrats in 2020. They look like they are jumping off a final sake fueled
banzai charge. Maybe they think the best defense is a good offense re; the prosecutions that
should happen. What is the chance that Mueller will pass *all* he has learned to help get the
criminal cases under way?
On 13 July 2018, when announcing the indictment of 12 Russian military officers by the
Mueller group for "conspiring to interfere" in the 2016 presidential election, Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein admitted that no "interference" actually happened. In this
video of his announcement, starting at 5 minutes, 52 seconds into it and ending at the 6
minute, 5 second mark, he says--
"There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime.
There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election
result."
Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results
of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly
pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law.
However, I am concerned that the new attorney general, William Barr, will not do so based
on his past associations and work. I hope I am wrong about that, but I am not optimistic.
It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly
unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a
weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection"
operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such
obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.)
I'm wrestling with the idea that 'twas ever thus and now with the internet its workings
are revealed to a "lay" audience with no connection to the dark arts of the spy business. But
I am curious, with the good Colonel's indulgence, if the new tools of the trade have made
things which should be secret not possible to be kept secret?
Amen to the prosecutions. If there is seen to be no accountability for this fraud then we are
seriously damaging what's left of democracy. Who, in their right mind, is going to publicly
support and assist a political candidate who is not "Swamp approved" if they face the threat
of thereby triggering their own, and their family's destruction by the judicial system?
I suggest that even a pardon is not enough for those entrapped in this mess. There needs
to be restitution.
To put that another way, in my opinion, "birther" allegations could be passed off as
political tactics. Nobody got hurt. It is just good luck that Russiagate hasn't resulted in
suicide or worse - so far.
I certainly agree that consequences must be brought to bear: lying politicians without a
shred of evidence, nor did they offer any for their lies; press for their utter and complete
malfeasance and corruption without a shred of evidence, the doj/fbi corrupted and coup
plotting officials,and finally the shame to all who shrieked about "evil" putin, russia the
aggressor, etc. It has set our discourse back decades, forced any critics of this insanity
into the shadows, and completely killed any attempt at normal diplomacy between nations.
I noted one astute writer as equating this russiagate insanity to the lies surrounding wmd
and the destruction of iraq. Close. The damage from this criminality is incalculable!
Will the shrillest of all in the press lose their jobs? Nah, not a chance. Prob get raise
or promotion.Will the brennans, clintons, clappers, et al do the perp walk. Nah, not a
chance. High paid lawyers will tie the courts up for years if not decades.
And america has the institutional memory of a gnat. And of course, the question is as to
high up did this criminality go? I personally do not believe it is a question-it is obvious
to me. The major question for me is how high up the prosecution, if any, will go.
Problem is...who's going to do the prosecuting?
The DOJ - protector of the swamp - has become thoroughly corrupted as an arm of the
Democrat-media party.
Should (can) Trump appoint a special prosecutor as far as possible from the DOJ?
The president might use this and any Republican-led prosecutions as leverage to work out
deals that will allow him to achieve his agenda. I think he'll need to given how the
Democrats intend to use their house majority to launch investigations and hearings to find
something, anything to howl about and impede his agenda.
Still need to see the full report. I hope it is releasable. Otherwise the conspiracy theories
or leaks will never let up. The article cited is a partisan opinion piece, not a news report.
It accepts the fallback stance that yes, crimes were committed but collusion by Trump was not
among them. This actually seems possible if only in light of the chaotic condition of the
campaign.
That said, I would not be surprised to find collusion discounted. Not that the Russians
didn't interfere. That would be entirely in character. But I don't know any reason for
supposing that they would have a better understanding of American political dynamics than the
Americans who make good livings being the best in that arena. The Russians seem to have been
doing the same things as numerous other players. They shouldn't have been in that game, but
there is no strong reason for according them Superman status. Their strongest feature seems
to have been sheer quantity. Outrage over their actions often seems to flow from a poor grasp
of the real nature of normal political process.
"The Russians seem to have been doing the same things..."
Multiple members of the FBI and DOJ seem to have been interfering in the 2016 Presidential
election. How many other federal and state elections did they interfere with?
Can you cite a single piece of hard evidence, not simply allegation, that proves the Russians
interfered in the 2016 election? If so, please cite it, since I know of none. Thank you.
"... No one says Trump is a saint. But the deep state wanted to cover its tracks. Dems and deep state hated that their preferred candidate didn't win. They ended up achieving their goal of delegitimizing 2016 and distracting the country for 2 years. ..."
"... They tried to delegitimize the 2016 Election but failed to do so. ..."
The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away: not one single American was charged,
indicted or convicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election - not even a low-level volunteer. The number is zero.
Compare what cable hosts (let's leave them unnamed) & Democratic operatives spent two years claiming this would lead to - the
imprisonment of Don, Jr., Jared, even Trump on conspiracy-with-Russia charges - to what it actually produced. A huge media reckoning
is owed.
Don't even try to pretend the point of the Mueller investigation from the start wasn't to obtain prosecutions of Americans guilty
of conspiring with Russia to influence the outcome of the election or that Putin controlled Trump through blackmail. Nobody will
believe your denials.
Are we now ready to rid ourselves of the thrilling espionage fantasy that Trump is controlled by Putin and the Kremlin using blackmail?
There's no way Robert Mueller would have gone 18 months without telling anyone about this if it were true, right? How could that
be justified?
Perhaps now we can focus on the actually consequential actions the Trump administration is taking and finally move past the deranged
conspiracy theories that have drowned US discourse for 2+ years. A side benefit will be not ratcheting up tension between 2 nuclear-armed
powers.
Giving up these exciting conspiracy theories about international blackmail & convening panels to decipher all the genius hidden
maneuvers of Mueller will be bad for cable ratings, book sales & the Patreon accounts of online charlatans. But it'll be very healthy
in all other ways.
The desperate attempts to salvage something from this debacle by the Mueller dead-enders are just sad. Yes, the public hasn't
read the Mueller report. But we *know* he ended his investigation without indicting a single American for conspiring with Russia
to influence the election
Trump, Jr. testified for hours and hours before Congress, including about the Trump Tower meeting. If he lied there, or to Mueller,
why didn't Mueller indict him for perjury, lying to Congress or obstruction? Same questions for Kushner. Stop embarrassing yourselves.
If Mueller found evidence that Putin controls Trump & forces him to act against US interests & in favor of Russia - not just with
a pee-pee tape but with financial blackmail - what could possibly justify keeping that a secret through the end of the investigation?
It's ludicrous.
US discourse has been drowned for 2+ years with conspiratorial, unhinged, but highly inflammatory and unhinged idiocy - playing
games with two nuclear-armed powers because of anger over the 2016 election. It's time to stop. Mueller ended his work. We see the
public indictments.
So many in the media devoted endless airtime & print & pixels misleading people to believe Mueller was coming to arrest & prosecute
Trump, Jr, Kushner & so many others for conspiring with Russia over the election & obstruction. None of that happened. You can't
pretend it away.
They was never the point. No one says Trump is a saint. But the deep state wanted to cover its tracks. Dems and deep state hated
that their preferred candidate didn't win. They ended up achieving their goal of delegitimizing 2016 and distracting the country
for 2 years.
"... A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles are based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews are in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda is attributed exclusively to the opposite side... ..."
"In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the
systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts:"
Many thanks, and much respect to you Sir for bringing this important piece to my attention.
I apologize for another somewhat off topic posting, but I have not seen it posted here earlier, and I think that this should be
seen by as many eyes as possible.
It is one of the most important aspects of our media system -- and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international
news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means that Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording.
In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages
around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles
are based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews
are in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda is attributed exclusively to the opposite side...
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?
Notable quotes:
"... Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? ..."
"... "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." ..."
"... Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
"... The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. ..."
"... As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career". ..."
"... Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance. ..."
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from
an article at the excellent Medialens
And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...
I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services: While it might be difficult to identify precisely
the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources)
on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.
As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:
"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."
Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished
journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.
And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct
Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret
state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed
forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.
As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of
the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood
at the end of their career".
Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent
is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.
A brief history
Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a
cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest
Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.
Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf
of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.
The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the
Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided
by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists
and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.
According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism
served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour
of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.
And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret
service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.
In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives'
Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.
And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.
David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media
and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody
in every office in Fleet Street"
Leaker King
And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing
companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications".
Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear
he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction".
Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet
Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot". King was also closely
involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.
Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according
to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.
David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security
scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament.
Maxwell and Mossad
According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the
1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.
In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6
were equally as strong.
Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that
he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks
were fascinating.
For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse
during the Cold War."
The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster
Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked
to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted
to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms
of first-hand knowledge."
And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph
and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to
handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.
Lawson strongly denied the allegations.
Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan
McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security
services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland
Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not
being used." (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)
Growing power of secret state
Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.
But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official
Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into
the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.
Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.
According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by
the Rockingham cell within the MoD.
A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant
attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.
Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.
Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein
has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of
the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early
in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies
about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group,
the Iraqi National Congress.
Sexed up – and missed out
During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the
ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government
(in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.
The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that
drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition?
But those facts will be forever secret.
Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was
ignored by the inquiry.
Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of
WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US
President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress
and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.
Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the
propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published
stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker
than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures,
especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."
Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence
services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.
~
Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John
Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International
Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.
"... General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children. ..."
"... Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War". ..."
"... The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war. ..."
"... the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces. ..."
"... The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening ..."
"... In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing. ..."
"... The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. ..."
"... Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet. ..."
"... But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day. ..."
The American Public has gotten exactly what it deserved. They have been dumbed-down in our poor-by-intention school systems. The
moronic nonsense that passes for news in this country gets more sensational with each passing day. Over on Fox, they are making
the claim that ISIS fighters are bringing Ebola over the Mexican Border, which prompted a reply by the Mexican Embassy that won't
be reported on Fox.
We continue to hear and it was even reported in this very fine article by Ms. Benjamin that the American
People now support this new war. Really? I'm sorry, but I haven't seen that support anywhere but on the news and I just don't
believe it any more.
There is also the little problem of infiltration into key media slots by paid CIA Assets (Scarborough and brainless Mika are
two of these double dippers). Others are intermarried. Right-wing Neocon War Criminal Dan Senor is married to "respected" newsperson
Campbell Brown who is now involved in privatizing our school system. Victoria Nuland, the slimey State Department Official who
was overheard appointing the members of the future Ukrainian Government prior to the Maidan Coup is married to another Neo-Con--Larry
Kagan. Even sweet little Andrea Mitchell is actually Mrs. Alan Greenspan.
General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC.
MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market.
Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being
CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli
Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women
and Children.
Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is
connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option
discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to
a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior
put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War".
Yesterday there was a coordinated action by all of the networks, which was clearly designed to support the idea that the generals
want Obama to act and he just won't. The not-so-subtle message was that the generals were right and that the President's "inaction"
was somehow out of line-since, after all, the generals have recommended more war. It was as if these people don't remember that
the President, sleazy War Criminal that he is, is still the Commander in Chief.
The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our
various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that
they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war.
Finally, this Sunday every NFL Game will begin with some Patriotic "Honor America" Display, which will include a missing man
flyover, flags and fireworks, plenty of uniforms, wounded Vets and soon-to-be-wounded Vets. A giant American Flag will, once again,
cover the fields and hundreds of stupid young kids will rush down to their "Military Career Center" right after the game. These
are the ones that I pity most.
Let's be frank: powerful interests want war and subsequent puppet regimes in the half dozen nations that the neo-cons have been
eyeing (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). These interests surely include industries like banking, arms and oil-all of
whom make a killing on any war, and would stand to do well with friendly governments who could finance more arms purchases and
will never nationalize the oil.
So, the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come
back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact
that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark
forces.
IanB52, 10 October 2014 6:57pm
The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening. When I'm down at the gym they always have CNN on (I can
only imagine what FOX is like) which is a pretty much dyed in the wool yellow jingoist station at this point. With all the segments
they dedicate to ISIS, a new war, the "imminent" terrorist threat, they seem to favor talking heads who support a full ground
war and I have never, not once, heard anyone even speak about the mere possibility of peace. Not ever.
In media universe there
is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing.
I'd imagine that these media companies have a lot stock in and a cozy relationship with the defense contractors.
Damiano Iocovozzi, 10 October 2014 7:04pm
The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. The media doesn't report on anything but
relies on repeating manufactured crises, creating manufactured consent & discussing manufactured solutions. Follow the oil, the
pipelines & the money. Both R's & D's are left & right cheeks of the same buttock. Thanks to Citizens United & even Hobby Lobby,
a compliant Supreme Court, also owned by United States of Corporations, it's a done deal.
Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer
have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department
to your favorite media outlet.
Let me give you one clear example. A year ago Barack Obama came very close to bombing Syria to
kingdom come, the justification used was "Assad gassed his own people", referring to a sarin gas attack near Damascus. Well, it
turns out that Assad did not initiate that attack, discovered by research from many sources including the prestigious MIT, it
was a false flag attack planned by Turkey and carried out by some of Obama's own "moderate rebels".
But all that research from
MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written
still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and
distorts and misrepresents the news every day.
Yes, in a slightly modified form this is a very true statement: "Disinformation destroys
reality. The USA is master of this -- they have built a parallel reality."
But the real issues here is the neoliberalism is in decline, and to compensate for loss of power of neoliberal propaganda
Western MSM now use neo-McCarthyism. That is a very sad but pretty understandable story.
Just as disturbing is an analysis of Russia's worldwide fake news
campaign , which spreads contradictory reports and Kremlin-friendly propaganda.
"The Russians understand Western media far better than the Western media understands
itself," one interviewee says. "And they play to the Western media's short attention span."
Another says: "Disinformation destroys reality. The Russians are masters of this -- they
have built a parallel reality."
"... This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must continue to trust them. ..."
"... More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass media. ..."
"... CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed 's when they wrongly reported that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks' DNC email archives prior to their 2016 publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by multiple people ..."
"... The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage. ..."
"... The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it doesn't mean it's not true. The only reason people don't rise up and use the power of their numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media's endless cultural engineering project . ..."
"... They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better. ..."
Following what the Washington Post
has described as "the highest-profile misstep yet for a news organization during a period
of heightened and intense scrutiny of the press," mass media representatives are now flailing
desperately for an argument as to why people should continue to place their trust in mainstream
news outlets.
On Thursday Buzzfeed News delivered
the latest "bombshell" Russiagate report to fizzle within 24 hours of its publication, a
pattern that is now so consistent that I've personally made a practice of declining to comment
on such stories until a day or two after their release. "BOOM!" tweets were issued by
#Resistance pundits on Twitter, "If true this means X, Y and Z" bloviations were made on mass
media punditry panels, and for about 20 hours Russiagaters everywhere were riding the high of
their lives, giddy with the news that President Trump had committed an impeachable felony by
ordering Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a proposed Trump office tower in Moscow, a
proposal which died within weeks
and the Kremlin never touched .
There was reason enough already for any reasonable person to refrain from frenzied
celebration, including the fact that the story's two authors, Jason Leopold and Anthony
Cormier, were giving the press two very different accounts of
the information they'd based it on, with Cormier telling CNN that he had not personally seen
the evidence underlying his report and Leopold telling MSNBC that he had. Both Leopold and
Cormier, for the record, have already previously suffered a
Russiagate faceplant with the clickbait viral story that Russia had financed the 2016
election, burying the fact that it was a Russian election .
Then the entire story came crashing down when Mueller's office took the extremely rare step
of issuing an
unequivocal statement that the Buzzfeed story was wrong , writing simply, "BuzzFeed's
description of specific statements to the special counsel's office, and characterization of
documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen's congressional
testimony are not accurate."
According to journalist and economic analyst Doug Henwood, the print New York Times covered
the Buzzfeed report on its front page when the story broke, but the report on Mueller's
correction the next day was shoved back to page 11 .
This appalling journalistic malpractice makes it very funny that NYT's Wajahat Ali had the gall
to tweet , "Unlike the Trump
administration, journalists are fact checking and willing to correct the record if the Buzzfeed
story is found inaccurate. Not really the actions of a deep state and enemy of the people,
right?"
This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not
reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must
continue to trust them.
"Those trying to tar all media today aren't interested in improving journalism but
protecting themselves," tweeted NBC's Chuck Todd.
"There's a lot more accountability in media these days than in our politics. We know we
live in a glass house, we hope the folks we cover are as self aware."
More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your
advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid
exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass
media.
"Mueller didn't do the media any favors tonight, and he did do the president one,"
griped
the odious Chris Cuomo on CNN. "Because as you saw with Rudy Giuliani and as I'm sure
you'll see with the president himself, this allows them to say 'You can't believe it! You can't
believe what you read, you can't believe what you hear! You can only believe us. Even the
Special Counsel says that the media doesn't get it right.'"
"The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the
news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they're
willing to lie to do it, and I don't think that's true" said Jeffrey Toobin on a CNN panel , adding "I
just think this is a bad day for us."
"It does reinforce bad stereotypes about the news media," said Brian Stelter on the same CNN
panel.
"I am desperate as a media reporter to always say to the audience, judge folks
individually and judge brands individually. Don't fall for what these politicians out there
want you to do. They want you to think we're all crooked. We're not. But Buzzfeed now, now
the onus is on Buzzfeed. "
CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably
even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed 's when they wrongly reported that
Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks' DNC email archives prior to their 2016
publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by
multiple people.
The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be
distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant
promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even
more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a
preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage.
The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it
doesn't mean it's not true. The only reason people don't rise up and use the power of their
numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are
being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media's endless
cultural engineering project .
They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties
never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the
wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse
narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better.
"... Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate." ..."
"... "When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media." ..."
"... "And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything." ..."
"... "That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that." ..."
"... Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.. ..."
Cohen has largely been banished from mainstream media.
"I had been arguing for years -- very much against the American political media grain --
that a new US/Russian Cold War was unfolding -- driven primarily by politics in Washington, not
Moscow," Cohen writes in War with Russia. "For this perspective, I had been largely
excluded from influential print, broadcast and cable outlets where I had been previously
welcomed."
On the stage at Busboys and Poets with Cohen was Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of
The Nation magazine, and Robert Borosage, co-founder of the Campaign for America's
Future.
Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship
imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union.
"Until some period of time before Trump, on the question of what America's policy toward
Putin's Kremlin should be, there was a reasonable facsimile of a debate on those venues that
had these discussions," Cohen said. "Are we allowed to mention the former Charlie Rose for
example? On the long interview form, Charlie would have on a person who would argue for a very
hard policy toward Putin. And then somebody like myself who thought it wasn't a good idea."
"Occasionally that got on CNN too. MSNBC not so much. And you could get an op-ed piece
published, with effort, in the New York Times or Washington Post ."
"Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times six or
seven years ago. But then it stopped. And to me, that's the fundamental difference between this
Cold War and the preceding Cold War."
"I will tell you off the record – no, I'm not going to do it," Cohen said. "Two
exceedingly imminent Americans, who most op-ed pages would die to get a piece by, just to say
they were on the page, submitted such articles to the New York Times , and they were
rejected the same day. They didn't even debate it. They didn't even come back and say –
could you tone it down? They just didn't want it."
"Now is that censorship? In Italy, where each political party has its own newspaper, you
would say – okay fair enough. I will go to a newspaper that wants me. But here, we are
used to these newspapers."
"Remember how it works. I was in TV for 18 years being paid by CBS. So, I know how these
things work. TV doesn't generate its own news anymore. Their actual reporting has been
de-budgeted. They do video versions of what is in the newspapers."
"Look at the cable talk shows. You see it in the New York Times and Washington
Post in the morning, you turn on the TV at night and there is the video version. That's
just the way the news business works now."
"The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate
these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in
these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have
been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the
parameters of the debate."
"If you are not, then you struggle to create your own alternative media. It's new in my
lifetime. I know these imminent Americans I mentioned were shocked when they were just told no.
It's a lockdown. And it is a form of censorship."
"When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident
voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes
they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media."
"Dissidents created what is known as samizdat – that's typescript that you circulate
by hand. Gorbachev, before he came to power, did read some samizdat. But it's no match for
newspapers published with five, six, seven million copies a day. Or the three television
networks which were the only television networks Soviet citizens had access to."
"And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some
other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like
keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though
they haven't been convicted of anything."
"That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said
– I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are
doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that."
Cohen appears periodically on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News. And that rankled one person
in the audience at Busboys and Poets, who said he worried that Cohen's perspective on Russia
can be "appropriated by the right."
"Trump can take that and run on a nationalistic platform – to hell with NATO, to
hell with fighting these endless wars, to do what he did in 2016 and get the votes of people
who are very concerned about the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia," the
man said.
Cohen says that on a personal level, he likes Tucker Carlson "and I don't find him to be a
racist or a nationalist."
"Nationalism is on the rise around the world everywhere," Cohen said. "There are
different kinds of nationalism. We always called it patriotism in this country, but we have
always been a nationalistic country."
"Fox has about three to four million viewers at that hour," Cohen said. "If I am not
permitted to give my take on American/Russian relations on any other mass media, and by the
way, possibly talk directly to Trump, who seems to like his show, and say – Trump is
making a mistake, he should do this or do that instead -- I don't get many opportunities
– and I can't see why I shouldn't do it."
"I get three and a half to four minutes," Cohen said. "I don't see it as consistent with my
mission, if that's the right word, to say no. These articles I write for The Nation ,
which ended up in my book, are posted on some of the most God awful websites in the world. I
had to look them up to find out how bad they really are. But what can I do about it?"
The key question is how strong is Maduro support within Venezuela? When oil is in stake,
imperial powers usually take gloves off pretty quickly.
All this rhetoric of Eric Zuesse does not answer the key question: does Maduro movement
propose sustainable alternative to neoliberalism in Venezuela and has unwavering support of armed
forces and population in view of this externally driven aggression? Because if the model is
unsustainable (iether for internal or external reasons -- presence of neoliberal 3000 pound
guerilla on the continent) it will eventually be crushed. What is the plan and what Maduro is
trying to built? Left government in several other countries of LA were recently deposed by openly
neoliberal puppets: Argentina and Brazil are two recent examples.
"Progressive regimes" all run into problems in economics (which are given due to neocolonial
nature of the current World order) which in turn creates social problems and the precondition for
neoliberal coup d'état sponsored from Washington. So there is a Neoliberal Catch 22 for all countries who want to
excape dependence on the USA: neoliberals new order guarantee that economic condition of peripheral countries do not improve; that
creates social discontent that allows to propose population a neoliberal carrot -- elect a neoliberal leader and your standard of
living "soon" will be like in the USA. neoliberal coup d'état can now succeed. Further impoverishing follows but it is
too late -- the train has left the station.
While convention to to more extreme
version of neoliberalism does not solve the problems in economics (Argentina here is nice example
of "What happens next after neoliberals came back to power") and impoverishment of population is
given. But at the same time the civil war is prevented and the support of the USA guarantee a
certain period of political stability.
In other words this struggle is about alternatives to neoliberalism and anti-neoliberal
governments have a huge handicap in a form of the USA presence on the continent. It looks like
Canada is just another neoliberal puppet of the USA in this game/
Notable quotes:
"... Venezuelan soldiers have blocked the crossing ahead of a delivery arranged by opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who has declared himself interim president ..."
Today, we have been joined by our Lima Group partners, from Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Saint Lucia.
We have also been joined in our conversations with our partners from other countries, for
this Lima Group ministerial meeting. These include Ecuador, the European Union, France,
Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States."
She, along with U.S. President Donald Trump, had, all along, been the actual leaders of this
international diplomatic effort, to violate
the Venezuelan Constitution blatantly , so as to perpetrate the coup in Venezuela. Her active effort to replace Venezuela's Government began with her formation of the Lima
Group, nearly two years ago.
Canada's Ottawa Citizen headlined on 19 August 2017,
"Choosing Danger" , and their reporter Peter Hum interviewed Canada's Ambassador to
Venezuela, Ben Rowswell, who was then retiring from the post. Rowswell said that Venezuelans
who wanted an overthrow of their Government would continue to have the full support of Canada's
Government : "'I think that some of them were sort of anxious that it (the
embassy's support for human rights and democracy in Venezuela) might not
continue after I left,' Rowswell said. 'I don't think they have anything to worry
about because Minister (of Foreign Affairs Chrystia) Freeland has Venezuela way at the top
of her priority list.'"
Maybe it wasn't yet at the top of Trump's list, but it was at the top of hers. And she and
Trump together chose whom to
replace Venezuela's President, Nicholas Maduro, by: Juan Guaido . Guaido had secretly
courted other Latin American leaders for this, just as Freeland had already done, by means of
her secretly forming the Lima Group.
On 25 January 2019, the AP bannered "AP
Exclusive: Anti-Maduro coalition grew from secret talks" and reported that the man who now
claims to be Venezuela's legitimate President (though he had never even run for that post),
Juan Guaido, had secretly visited foreign countries in order to win their blessings for what he
was planning:
In mid-December, Guaido quietly traveled to Washington, Colombia and Brazil to
brief officials on the opposition's strategy of mass demonstrations to coincide with Maduro's
expected swearing-in for a second term on Jan. 10 in the face of widespread international
condemnation, according to exiled former Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma, an ally.
Playing a key role behind the scenes was Lima Group member Canada, whose Foreign Minister
Chrystia Freeland spoke to Guaido [9 January 2019] the night before Maduro's swearing-in
ceremony [on 10 January 2019] to offer her government's support should he confront the
socialist leader [Maduro], the Canadian official said. Also active was Colombia, which
shares a border with Venezuela and has received more than two million migrants fleeing economic
chaos, along with Peru and Brazil's new far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
To leave Venezuela, he sneaked across the lawless border with Colombia, so as not to raise
suspicions among immigration officials who sometimes harass opposition figures at the airport
and bar them from traveling abroad, said a different anti-government leader, speaking on
condition of anonymity to discuss security arrangements.
During the last days in office of Canada's Ambassador to Venezuela Rowswell, U.S. President
Donald Trump went public with his overt threat to invade Venezuela. On 11 August 2017,
McClatchy's Miami Herald bannered "Trump
was making friends in Latin America -- before he raised Venezuela 'military option'" , and
Patricia Mazzei reported that "President Donald Trump's unexpected
suggestion Friday that he might rely on military force to deal with Venezuela's pressing
political crisis was an astonishing statement that strained not only credulity but also the
White House's hard-won new friendships in Latin America."
Even a spokesperson from the Atlantic Council (which is the main PR agency for NATO) was
quoted as saying that "U.S. diplomats, after weeks of carefully building the groundwork for
a collective international response, suddenly find their efforts completely undercut by a
ridiculously over the top and anachronistic assertion. It makes us look imperialistic and
old-time. This is not how the U.S. has behaved in decades!" However, Peru's Foreign
Minister, Ricardo Luna, was just as eager for a coup in Venezuela as were Trump and
Freeland.
On 26 October 2017,
Peru's Gestion TV reported that Luna was the co-chair of the meeting of the Lima Group in
Toronto, which Freeland chaired, and that (as translated into English here) "Luna added that
the objective of the meeting of the Group of Lima 'is to create a propitious situation' so that
the regime of Nicolás Maduro 'feels obligated to negotiate' not only an exit to the
crisis, 'but also an exit to his own regime'."
This gang was going to make Maduro an offer that he couldn't refuse. So, the Lima Group,
which was founded by Luna and by Freeland, was taking the initiative as much and as boldly as
Trump was, regardless of what NATO might think about it. The topic of that news-report, and its
headline, was "Peru proposes Grupo de Lima to involve the UN to face the Venezuelan
crisis." Four days later, Freeland and Luna met privately at the U.N., in New York, with
the Secretary General, Antonio Guterres.
Inner City
Press reported that"The title of the meeting is 'the situation in Venezuela and efforts
by regional organizations to resolve the crisis per Chapter VIII of the UN Charter' [see it
here ] and the briefer will be not USG [Under Secretary General] Jeffrey Feltman but his
Assistant, ASG [Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs] Miroslav Jenca."
Jeffrey Feltman was the person who, in the secretly recorded 27 January 2014
phone-conversation in which U.S. President Barack Obama's agent, Victoria Nuland -- planning
and overseeing the February 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine's democratically elected President
-- instructed the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, that, after Ukraine's President is ousted,
Arseniy "Yats" Yatsenyuk was to be appointed as Ukraine's 'interim' leader as the new Prime
Minister, to replace the President. She also
said :
"I talked to Jeff Feltman this morning; he had a new name for the UN guy Robert Serry.
He's now gotten both Serry and Ban ki-Moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or
Tuesday. That would be great, I think, to help glue this thing, and to have the UN help glue
it, and, you know, fuck the EU."
So, the still Under Secretary General of the U.N, Mr. Feltman, is still America's fixer
there, who "glues" whatever the U.S. President orders the U.N. to do, and his Assistant was
filling in for him that day. Therefore, if Trump and Freeland turn out to be as successful as
Obama was, then the U.N. will "glue" the outcome. Chrystia Freeland happens also to be a friend
of Victoria Nuland, and a passionate supporter of her coup in Ukraine.
... ... ...
Of course, the man whom the U.S. and Canadian regimes and the Lima Group are trying to
install as Venezuela's President, Juan Guaido, had been well-groomed for that job, but not by
political and electoral experience, of which he has almost none, but by his foreign sponsors.
On 29 January 2019 the Gray Zone Project bannered
"The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela's Coup
Leader" , and their two star investigative journalists, Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal,
opened: "Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington's
elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at
the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization."
This report also noted that "The 'real work' began two years later, in 2007, when
Guaidó graduated from Andrés Bello Catholic University of Caracas. He moved to
Washington, DC to enroll in the Governance and Political Management Program at George
Washington University, under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia,
one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists. Berrizbeitia is a former executive
director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) [and the IMF is a central part the operation
that's described in John Perkins's now-classic Confessions of an Economic Hit Man] who spent
more than a decade working in the Venezuelan energy sector, under the old oligarchic regime
that was ousted by Chávez."
Moreover, "Stratfor and CANVAS – key advisors of Guaidó and his
anti-government cadre – devised a shockingly cynical plan to drive a dagger through the
heart of the Bolivarian revolution. The scheme hinged on a 70% collapse of the country's
electrical system by as early as April 2010." Etc. This is how 'democracy' now functions.
It's not democracy -- it is fascism. The euphemisms for it are "neoliberalism" and
"neoconservatism."
Regardless of whether or not the Trump-Freeland-Luna program for Venezuela succeeds,
democracy and human rights won't be advanced by it; but, if it succeeds, the fortunes of
US-and-allied billionaires will be . It's part of their global
privatization program .
Sidebar: If you want to understand what was the historical
context where Inner City Press reported that
"The title of the meeting is 'the situation in Venezuela and efforts by regional
organizations to resolve the crisis per Chapter VIII of the UN Charter'" ; then Luk Van Langenhove has
summarized that context , by saying:
Few invocations of Chapter VIII's provisions were made during the cold war period. But
when the bipolar world system collapsed and spawned new global security threats, the
explosion of local and regional armed conflicts provoked a renewed interest in regional
organizations and their role in the maintenance of regional peace and security. The United
Nations was forced to acknowledge its inability to solely bear the responsibility for
providing peace and security worldwide."
So, "during the cold war period," this provision of the UN Charter remained virtually
inactive. Then, suddenly, after 1991, when the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw
Pact military alliance to counter America's NATO military alliance, all ended (with
no concessions being made on the American side ), America could no longer use 'communism'
as a 'justification' to invade or perpetrate coups against foreign governments that were
friendly toward or else allied with Russia.
So, now, this provision of the U.N.'s Charter became activated by the U.S. and its
allies, in order to be able to say that The West's coups and invasions aren't actually to
build-out the U.S. empire, but are instead for (in the terms of this part of the U.N.'s
Charter) "the maintenance of international peace and security" -- so as to 'authorize' coups
and international invasions by the U.S. and its vassal nations, such as are the members of
NATO.
This is what U.S. President G.H.W. Bush had in mind to rely upon, when he told the leaders
of the U.S. regime's vassal states, secretly at Camp David, on the night of 24 February 1990,
that the 'Cold War' would now continue secretly on the U.S.-allied side, against Russia and
against any nation's leaders (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and
Viktor Yanukovych) that aren't hostile toward Russia, by Bush's saying then to them, that no
compromise must ever be allowed "with Moscow," because
"To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn't."
In other words, whereas the U.N. had been set up by FDR to evolve ultimately into the global
democratic federation of nation-states -- a democratic world-government -- so as to become the
sole possessor of control over all strategic weaponry, and thus to become the democratic
republic of the entire world authorized to settle international disputes peacefully, the
subterranean Nazis and other fascists whom U.S. President Truman and the Bilderberg group
represented, were determined that the U.S. and its vassal nations would ultimately become the
dictatorship over all nations, the entire world. That's what Ukraine, and now Venezuela, and
many other U.S. coups and invasions, are -- and have been -- really about. It's about the
'peace' of the graveyard, NOT any democracy, anywhere at all.
That's their dream. They want to monopolize the corruption everywhere, not to end it,
anywhere. And that's why they distort and blatantly lie about
Venezuela's democratic constitution now , just as they did about Ukraine's
democratic constitution in February 2014. It's, essentially, a lawless international gang
of billionaire thugs. It is the international
Deep State . It consists of the under 2,000 people who are international billionaires in
the U.S. and secondarily in the U.S.-allied countries, and of those billionaires' millions of
hirees.
585 of those under-2,000 are Americans .
But the wealthiest person on the planet isn't even listed on any of the standard lists of
billionaires, and
he is the King of Saudi Arabia . That person is the U.S. aristocracy's #1 international
ally, because ever since the 1970s when gold no longer backed the U.S. dollar but instead oil
did, that person's decisions have enabled the U.S. dollar to continue as being the world's
reserve currency, no matter how big the U.S. economy's trade deficits are, and no matter how
high the U.S. Government's fiscal deficits are.
Below those billionaires (and trillionaire), and below their millions of hirees, are the
billions of serfs; and, below those, at the very bottom, are the approximately 40 million slaves , and the many
millions imprisoned -- virtually all of whom have extremely low (if any) net worth at all,
since slavery and imprisonment are, in the real world, only for the very poor, not at all for
the international gangsters, except for a very few exceptions (such as, perhaps, "El
Chapo").
The billionaires command, and the governments obey; that's 'democracy', and it's 'the rule
of law', today. Everything to the contrary is propaganda, such as that what Trump-Freeland-Luna
want for Venezuela is to decrease corruption and to increase democracy and human rights.
At least the more blatant fascist John Bolton was honest when
he said on January 28th : "It will make a big difference to the United States
economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities
in Venezuela." But he would have been lots more honest if he had acknowledged, instead,
that "It will make a big difference to the United States billionaires economically if we
could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in
Venezuela."
This is all that the fascists ever really cared about. Mussolini called it "corporationism."
Now, decades in the wake of the Allies' supposed 'victory against fascism' -- against the Axis
powers -- in WW II, we all (at least the realists) are acknowledging that we clearly are
staring in the face the raw fact that fascism has finally won, or at least very nearly totally
won, in the world.
Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, died; but their ideological followers today rule the world,
and FDR would be turning in his grave.
Unfortunately the Orange one is being wagged again by those who are most seriously plotting his demise and
over reach in Venezuela may be just as much part of the plan as it was in pushing him into launching an attack
on Syria. It is true that the global elites are at a loss what to do, as the fracturing of the global
oligarchies is proving Marx right . capitalist are just a band of warring brothers [brigands, robbers, pirates
– all!]. As there is no serious ideological threat to their hegemony at the moment they fight amongst
themselves with imperial designs.
The threat to the imperium is the chaos which ensues when the elite power struggles fracture their hegemony
and an uncontrollable uprising ensues. Who shapes that revolution will be central to this. Where it will come
from is not evident yet but let's hope it's a grass roots one!
Yes, they will never stop. Just think of this brand-new propaganda lie of Maduro allegedly preventing aid
shipment to come into Venezuela. See BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47143492 : "Venezuelan soldiers have blocked the crossing
ahead of a delivery arranged by opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who has declared himself
interim president".
Notice the word "ahead" in this sentence. This word
appears because there was never a "delivery" (truck) with aid shipment at the bridge!
The Venezuelan government ("Maduro") blocked the bridge only because of war-threatening Columbia and USA.
If you want to send aid shipment to Venezuela you can send as much as you want anytime. Of course you have to
respect the regulations of the custom (like in every other country!). But that's all!
Whets foul with this story?
Well, this aid "delivery" cannot have been collected in Colombia – and thus being taken away from the
people of Colombia, who are much poorer than the people of Venezuela. So it would have to come from other
country (USA, Europe, China, Japan). And then you would not land this aid shipment in Columbia (a harbour, an
airport), drive it, in hot-humid air, through half of Colombia to the border crossing bridge of Cúcuta. Then
cross the bridge and then drive it through half of Venezuela!
Instead aid shipments for Venezuela would be landed directly in Venezuela – in an Venezuelan harbour or
airport.
There was one leading US politician whose name escapes me for the moment. When Chavez was
president, he complained bitterly that Venezuela's oil wealth was being squandered on things
like healthcare, education, literacy and welfare. It could have been given instead to hard
pressed Wall Street fund managers in bigger bonuses. He wasn't being ironic.
"... The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they come across a particularly adorable baby. ..."
"... I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's books and media appearances. ..."
"... George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one). ..."
"... That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems these people don't have a conscience. ..."
"... Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking, oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's. ..."
"... The Deep State Guardian. Why don't they just change their name to 'The Daily Thatcherite' and have done with it. ..."
"... They should just show it's full title: The Guardian Of The Establishment ..."
"... well, yeah. but for us mad people it goes deeper even than that: https://geopolitics.co/2018/12/02/in-memoriam-george-h-scherff-jr-aka-george-hw-bush-sr/ ..."
British and most western media are either in the direct or indirect pay of their governments. What journalist can expose this
for us? Any of you willing to make the biggest scoop of the 21st century? Tom Bradbury at ITN must be on the spook payroll, for
starters? MI6 had foreign correspondents for years, but domestic mouthpieces must now be on the take too? All paid to demonise
Russia and Putin.
The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and
roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they
come across a particularly adorable baby.
Simon 'white helmets' Tisdall is especially egregious – one can imagine him throwing darts at a picture of Putin while
producing his latest homily to the murderous actions of gangsters like Bush and his crime family.
Its hard not to despair now this has become the official face of Britains so-called liberal media.
I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's
books and media appearances. As with Michael White, with whom I had a very illuminating argument via email a few years back.
He *is* an asset, not a journalist (and a massive dick, to boot)
I thought the attitude of the Bush family to their fellow Americans was best illustrated by Barbara's response to the plight of
the homeless victims of Katrina who had been transported to the Houston domed stadium. They spent their nights there sleeping
on hard benches and when good ole Babs heard of it, she opined that they probably had never had it so good so why were they complaining.
Could Mother Theresa have had greater generosity of spirit?
Not just one article, the awful Guardian is full of contents eulogising [yet another] mongrel of a president.
But look at conservative media. The crazy Infowars.com described this Bush as an Anti-American Globalist and Traitor!! .. and
zerohedge.com is celebrating: "The Evil Has Died" and "In 2016 he voted for Hillary Clinton, because the Deep State Swamp sticks
together". https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-02/exploring-dark-side-bush-41
Just tell me, who is the rabid neo-con right-wing rag that is glorifying wars and mass murderers?
The late Robert Parry, sad to say. Maybe that now both the 'MacBeths' are stains on the tarmac – Parry's notes of the bloodstained
legacy of that dynasty can finally be displayed? That Barbara was one cold blooded mother! Would have happily pulled a trigger
on JFK, MLK herself (some think).
Just about the whole century from the setup of the Fed, the two world wars, the depression,
Hitler, Korea, Cuba all of it, had a a Bush hand in it. He was the self crowned Caesar having publicly executed the whole of Camelot
and left us with a poison toad, reminds us how low the Bush's took the USA.
George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual
beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one).
That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems
these people don't have a conscience. If you surround yourself with people of similar mindset and in a climate where war
is considered obligatory for US Presidents, you go into self denial. Wars are probably like an addiction for these people and
once you get to that stage you no longer have a conscience.
During John McCain's funeral where all living ex-presidents were in attendance, someone remarked on Twitter, 'Quick, lock the
church doors and hold the war crimes trial in the church!'. This was a far more realistic observation than the sickening McCain
apologist BBC coverage we were subjected to.
At the weekend I went to the place where Oliver Cromwell lived. There was an American tourist who told us she was shocked about
Oliver Cromwell being dug up from his grave and his head stuck on a pike. She said it was gruesome. I was tempted to say that
at least that was 350 years ago, and similar things are happening today in Iraq, Syria and Libya – all places where the US has
instigated the chaos and supports the perpretators. I resisted the temptation.
I note that Cromwell thought he was chosen by God to do what he did. But again that was in different times and there were some
redeeming factors in what he did, Probably on par with Obama – who wreaked havoc on the Middle East but reached agreements on
Iran and Cuba. Plus Obama looked cool while killing and droning.
But what goes around comes around. I sense the pure evil involved in the current regime change wars, government, media etc
will pay a heavy price – whether in this life or the next.
The state controlled BBC has just done another puff piece on McCain saying what a splendid chap and great statesman and all round
good egg he was.
The MSM likes to slag off Vlad The Bad by droning on about how he was in the KGB. But Bush wasn't just IN the CIA, he was the
BOSS of the CIA, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Central American peasant farmers and Indians were being killed by CIA
trained and orchestrated death squads.
Mark: jayzus Mark, don't you just want to projectile vomit when you see all this absolute bullshit, just straight out revising
of history, just the lies, on and on . I was involved in a Central American solidarity group in the 1980s – early 90s here in
Aussie, found out then all about U.S style 'democracatic values' and 'human rights concerns' and death squads and various fascists
fully supported by the United States, and places like Guatemala and Nicaragua. Its all an illusion for 'polite society' and the
gullible to believe in. Sigh
I can't remember the exact figures but I think it was over 200,000 murdered in Guatemala out of a population of 4 million. It
was the same story in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia. And of course the CIA satrap Noriega was hauled off in chains
when that country was invaded. But Uncle Sam is finally paying a price for his antics south of the border. Those societies were
wrecked and brutalised beyond repair. There is now an unbelievably high murder rate of women in Guatemala. Millions of those people
have sought some kind of refuge in the belly of the beast, causing an immigration crisis, with an illegal immigrant population
that may be as high as 30 million. Hence all the uproar over Trump's wall. The immigration crisis was a factor in Trump's election,
just as the tidal wave of migrants from the destroyed countries of the Middle East was a factor in Brexit. Cameron, Sarko and
Clinton thought it was a spiffing idea and quite a wizard wheeze to bomb Libya back to the Stone Age. So we now have a Mad Max
failed state complete with warlords and slave markets just across the Med. What goes around, comes around. You can't expect to
export violence and mayhem abroad and remain immune to it at home.
Mark: after Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup in Guatemala in 1982, US Ambassador Frederick Chapin declared that thanks
to the coup of Rios Montt "the Guatemalan Govt has come out of the darkness into the light". That sums it up in one sentence,
and you're probably aware of the mass killing and disappearances under his genocidal tyranny. Reagan kindly submitted that Rios
Montt was 'getting a bum rap on human rights, the same Reagan who declared the Contra's were 'The moral equal of our founding
fathers'. In El Salvador, the same mass slaughter, the same mass upheaval, and even murdering Archbishop Romero. You only need
to look at what happened in Central & South America to understand what the United States really represents.
That's entirely right. People understandably despise and revile people like Brady and Hindley, Sutcliffe, Dahmer, Bundy and the
like. But they killed a handful of people and were often very damaged individuals to begin with. And at least they did their own
dirty work. Subhuman scum sucking filth like Bush, Bush 2, Obama, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Blair, Straw and Campbell
are a thousand times worse. They kill millions without getting their hands dirty, and preen and posture as great statesmen and
public servants, expecting deference and state funerals and puff piece obituaries from nauseating, loathsome, lickspittle media
hacks like Tisdall.
Nailed it Kit. The attempt at revionism and rewriting history by these craven creatures, these sycophantic slimebag shills for
Imperialism and War and the Anglo Zionist Empire. They don't speak truth to power, they protect and grovel to the powerful. The
eulogising and fawning of Bush was stomach churning, as it was for the arch Imperialist McCain when he croaked. Thank God for
alternative news sites, and yeah Caitlin Johnston @ medium nailed it as well, as Fair Dinkum mentioned. Where's John Pilger when
you need him?
What no one seems to realize is that the VP often takes charge of the US National Security Council when POTUS is not able to attend
meetings, which are held weekly. Under Eisenhower it was Richard Nixon who often took charge of the meetings -- Tim Weiner's book
"Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" gives some details on this. Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking,
oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was
a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's.
I don't know but as a fairly apolitical individual, I never much bothered with the Kennedy Assasination. All that changed when
during the fiftieth anniversary, BBC Radio Four ran a program which included an interview with the Dallas police officer who was
handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. The consensus of that program was that the case was open shut and
Oswald did it. Around that time, several newspapers in the UK featured articles claiming that Oswald acted alone.
Whether or not anyone actively involved still lives, their descendants still do and the probable organising body too. There
still appears to be determination in some quarters to spread disinformation about the case. Given that as long ago as the late
seventies the House of Representatives Assassination Committee concluded that JFK's death was probably the consequence of a conspiracy,
determination amongst the mainstream media to lay Kennedy's death at the hands of Oswald alone suggests that there is still determination
that the truth never becomes public.
I'm sickened by the Guardian's and BBC's obedience to the US neocon project to seek, or create, and destroy "enemies" and whilst
ignoring all the disgusting atrocities that arise as a consequence.
The Guardian is not even worth the paper it's printed on. It's become The Guardian Of The Establishment rather than of the
Truth which it used to proclaim.
It is in danger of losing its budgie-cage-liner status. If budgies can talk they may refuse to evacuate on it. What kind of person
maintains ties to such a a poor excuse for cage toiletry. The moral crunch time for their journalists (actually their opinionists)
came and went a long time ago.
What a great piece. My parents knew them in New York and they came over once and left behind an embossed packet of White House
cigs. I asked my father (before he died) what he thought of them and all he ever said was he thought that Barbara was the intellect
in the family.
Bloody annoying, thanks Pater.
"The induction of DU weapons in 1991 in Iraq broke a 46-year taboo. This Trojan Horse of nuclear war continues to be used more
and more. DU remains radioactive longer than the age of the earth (estimated at 4.5 billion years). The long-term effects from
over a decade of DU exposures are devastating. The increased quantities of radioactive material used in Afghanistan are 3 to 5
times greater than Iraq, 1991. In Iraq, 2003, they are already estimated to be 6 to 10 times 1991, and will travel through a larger
area and affect many more people, babies and unborn. Countries within a 1000-mile radius of Baghdad and Kabul are being affected
by radiation poisoning
"DU remains radioactive longer than [ ] 4.5 billion years." It's worse than that. It loses half of its radioactivity in that time.
The good news is that that slow release means "D"U doesn't zap you much. The bad news is it's chemically toxic, like a heavy metal
(which it is).
Also no mention of the body of circumstantial evidence linking Bush to JFK's murder, though Bush repeatedly insisted that he couldn't
recall his whereabouts that day (I can precisely recall where I was, and I was 9 years old in 1963), in spite of the fact that
solid documentary evidence exists that puts him in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963.
The very first Google Search I did was this, (George H.W. Bush+November 22, 1963) and it yielded a page like the following link,
which began my research into the JFK Assassination.
Why, it is apparently the following, which is surely a red hot smoking gun. That is,
one that condemns the FBI, not Trump; and shows that the NYT , which once courageously
published the Pentagon Papers and had earned the above sobriquet for its journalistic
stateliness, sense of responsibility and possession of high virtue, has degenerated into a War
Party shill – not to say the journalistic equivalent of a comfort woman:
Mr. Trump had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when he called on
Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent,
Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising
President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party
softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit
Russia.
Well, for crying out loud!
Any journalist worth his salt would know that Trump's July 2016 shout-out to the Russians
was a campaign joke. At best, it was merely an attempt to cleverly state in one more way the
running GOP theme about Hillary's missing 30,000 emails. How many times before that had Sean
Hannity delivered his riff about Hillary's alleged hammer-smashing of 13 devices and
acid-washing with BleachBit of the missing emails?
Haigin88 ->
Tom J. Davis Clinton's Iraq
war vote. She was always dealing with the inverse Nixon In China rule. Just as only Nixon could speak with China, she probably perceived
that only males could be doves. That's an explanation not an excuse. Again, a total lack of integrity from Clinton.
Also, much of Clinton's later foulness was attempted to be offset by her early opinions and actions - her speeches at college;
her working for children. Gabbard is around the other way: her record got better, offsetting much of her earlier nonsense. Clinton
and Gabbard are apples and oranges, I think ,
Clinton's Iraq war vote. She was always dealing with the inverse Nixon In China rule. Just as only Nixon could speak with China,
she probably perceived that only males could be doves. That's an explanation not an excuse. Again, a total lack of integrity from
Clinton.
Also, much of Clinton's later foulness was attempted to be offset by her early opinions and actions - her speeches at college;
her working for children. Gabbard is around the other way: her record got better, offsetting much of her earlier nonsense. Clinton
and Gabbard are apples and oranges, I think
And, one last bit from the BBC report on March 8, 2018:
"...Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she
found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost
control of her bodily functions.
The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the
recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.
She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical
agent on Ms Skripal's face or body.
The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, but added
that she "feels fine"
Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever...
"... But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the "incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that Abigail was a very worthy winner. ..."
"... Colonel McCourt was appointed Chief Nursing Officer on February 1 2018, just one month before the Skripal incident happened. Colonel McCourt lives in Larkhill, a garrison town some 11 miles from Salisbury. She is known to visit elsewhere. ..."
"... That is such a great article b. I have had a great wry chuckle at the folly of human hubris. Fancy setting up your own daughter for an award. Certainly looks less and less like novichok and more like novifraud with every passing day. ..."
"... Not only is the military mother Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola , she is also the last line of defence for the Army medics and other healthcare workers fighting the deadly disease ..."
"... what a stroke of luck Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola was there, arguably the most qualified person in all of Britain to attend to the Skripals. ..."
"... The story of the heroic Abigail McCourt in helping to save the Skripals must be too good for the likes of The Fraudian and other so-called "progressive" MSM outlets to resist. Strange that such a narrative was not brought up until now, coming close to the anniversary of the poisoning and the deadline for Britain's exit from the EU. ..."
"... Curious that Abigail McCourt received basic first aid training at school (in which she would have been taught CPR) yet when Spire FM hosts spoke to her, she says that her training was not needed. In almost the same sentence, she says Julia Skripal was not breathing. ..."
"... Off-Guardian on Twitter wonders if Alison McCourt had been involved in Exercise Toxic Dagger (chemical weapons training exercise) staged by The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Royal Marines in February 2018: ..."
"... The main area for shoppers to park in Salisbury is just north of the Maltings (site of the alleged attack) so it's not surprising that someone shopping in Salisbury would pass the bench the Skripals were found on. What is surprising it that none of the family seems to have suffered any effects from the Novichok. ..."
"... The Skirpal case, the Maidan coup and the related MH17 downing, the various gas attacks in Syria, the most recent bombing incident also in Syria, the Mueller investigation in its entirety - the sheer incompetence shown by the US and British deep states is simply staggering, and in sharp contrast to the investigative ability of this and other sites. ..."
"... It all adds up to stasi state bullshit. They are so arrogant and cocksure of the controlled media that they can even draw attention to the provocation by seeking an award for a family member despite the prominence of the mother and her role in the power structure. Knowledge, of course, will remain limited to those who are canny enough not to believe the received propaganda wisdom of the five eyes spy state. ..."
"... So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army? ..."
"... Even though this could have gone a long, long way to explaining the biggest discrepancy in the government narrative (i.e. Novicock is way, way deadly only, err, umm, they didn't die). How odd. How very, very odd. You'd almost think that the government considered that acknowledging that fact would open up more questions than it would answer. Hard to see why..... ..."
"... Recall that it was recently established and published that the Steele Dossier was compiled to act as an Insurance Policy in the event Trump won the election. See here . I posted this news as a comment and b picked up on it too, but that aspect of the Dossier is omitted from his essay above. We can see that the Dossier--like Blair's Dodgy Dossier to sell the illegal war on Iraq--has had a massive impact on Trump's presidency, which, whether you like Trump or not, is a matter of grave concern for the institutions of governance of the USA, and IMO is very close to treason. ..."
"... Sure, the nurse revelation is curious to say the least, but I'm far more interested in the entire disinformation network built by the British along with previous and current versions operated by CIA here in USA. Think back to what Bill Casey said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false," then Rove's boast: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." ..."
"... Add those to all the 100% evidence free accusations made against Russia, China, Venezuela, Syria, other nations and private individuals--the "universal sports doping" by Russian athletes was a massive smear proven to be 100% false--and you can understand why I call it BigLie Media. Clearly, the Skripal story's utter fantasy. But the Brits will kill their own to insure the story isn't compromised--Dr. David Kelly, Dawn Sturgess, and quite likely Sergei Skripal, and likely others from incidents in the further past. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative was also heavily involved in promoting an anti-Russian agenda such as the Skripal affair. ..."
"... reminds me of the kuwaiti ambassador's daughter in the runup to the first gulf war. ..."
"... 'So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army?' And how embarrassing for our 'fearless' journalists and tabloid truth seekers! Let the crowd cry out 'shame'! ..."
On March 4 2018 the British/Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia
were found incapacitated on a bench in Salisbury. The British government asserts that they were affected by a chemical poison
of the so called Novichok group. The case led to a diplomatic conflict as Britain accused Russia of an attempt to kill the
Skripals. No evidence was provided by the British government to support those accusations. The Skripals have since been
vanished.
Today an intriguing new detail of the case came to light. Spire FM , a local
radio station in Salisbury,
reports of a young woman, Abigail McCourt, who was given a 'Lifesaver Award' for her
involvement in the Skripal case:
The 16 year old, from Larkhill, was the first to spot two people collapsed on a bench in
the Maltings on March 4th and didn't hesitate to help. Abigail quickly alerted her mum, a
qualified nurse, who was nearby and together they gave first aid to the victims until
paramedics arrived.
It soon became clear this was no ordinary medical incident, but the poisoning of a
former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, with Novichok.
...
Immediately following the incident and with the world's media focused on Salisbury, the
pair didn't want any want press attention and kept their involvement quiet.
But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the
"incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award
at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that
Abigail was a very worthy winner.
Earlier reports mentioned that a 'military nurse' had attended to the Skripals. Following
the above report Elena Evdokimova checked the name of the young women's mothers and found a
curiosity:
We were right, it was Alison McCourt who was that"unknown military nurse" who,
absolutely randomly, happened to be near the bench where #Skripals collapsed . Spire FM
alleges that it was her daughter Abigail alerted her, but no one mentioned her before
...
Colonel A L McCourt OBE ARRC QHN - Assistant Head Health Strategy / Chief Nursing Officer
(Army) - Senior Health Advisor (Army) Department.
Colonel McCourt was appointed Chief Nursing Officer on February 1 2018, just one month
before the Skripal incident happened. Colonel McCourt lives in Larkhill, a garrison town some
11 miles from Salisbury. She is known to visit elsewhere.
As I read this I had two thoughts. The first one is that the Brits have lost the competence
they once had with this stuff. "Operation Mincemeat" was, according to all accounts, a marvel
in planning, execution, and getting the desired reactions from the German High Command. The
"Double-Cross System" turned the extremely risky invasion at Normandy into a success. The
recent stuff is a comedy by comparison.
excellent reporting.. still we have little written collaborative evidence.. just as in 9/11
just top dogs saying improbable things.
What seems to me important now is to develop as you have done a set of hypotheses. and to
hack at them until we hit the ones which all evidence cannot dispute. Using your summary I
rewrite in hypothesis form,
hypothesis 1: Steele's dirty dossier is not related to the Skripal case.
hypothesis 2: Steele's dossier is not the result of an integrity initiative.
hypothesis 3: Downing street personnel were not involved in integrity initiative
hypothesis 4: media reported only supportable facts.
hypothesis 5: Neither the USA or any of its agencies were involved
hypothesis 6: Neither Israel or any of its agencies were involved
hypothesis 7: Neither Saudi Arabia or any of its Arab partners were involved
hypothesis 6: Neither Republicans or Democrats in America were involved.
hypothesis 8: the FBI had no part in this.
hypothesis 9: Developing sufficient misinformation to justify attacking Nord 2
pipeline was not one of the objectives of the integrity initiative.
hypothesis 10: No private interest supported organizing a false flag op against
Russia
Too good. That is such a great article b. I have had a great wry chuckle at the folly of
human hubris. Fancy setting up your own daughter for an award. Certainly looks less and less like novichok and more like novifraud with every passing
day.
Not only is the military mother Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent
battlefield against ebola , she is also the last line of defence for the Army medics
and other healthcare workers fighting the deadly disease.
what a stroke of luck Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against
ebola was there, arguably the most qualified person in all of Britain to attend to the
Skripals.
Coincidence? Probably like most here, I think not. But isn't this something of an own goal?
If indeed things are as we suspect, why would you put the daughter up for an award? Wouldn't
you want the can of worms this presents to remain unopened? Can they be this incompetent?
Well, looking at the Brexit process, I guess we know the answer to that last by now
rhetorical question.
The story of the heroic Abigail McCourt in helping to save the Skripals must be too good for
the likes of The Fraudian and other so-called "progressive" MSM outlets to resist. Strange
that such a narrative was not brought up until now, coming close to the anniversary of the
poisoning and the deadline for Britain's exit from the EU.
b, you are too suspicious. Nothing to see here.
Clearly way beyond a serious matter, this dastardly attack on Skripals by the Soviets, er,
the Russians, er, Putin.
In Canada our eloquent foreign Minister, in a barrage of outraged talking the talk that
was accompanied by making four Russian diplomats walk the walk home, said in words that will
surely take their high place in the history of inspired speeches, along with Churchill's
'Never have so many done so much for so few', and MLK's 'I have a nightmare':
And her words re the March 4 nerve agent attack on a close ally and partner of Canada "a
despicable, heinous and reckless act" that potentially endangered the lives of hundreds"
Strange - no military hospital in Salisbury but then there aren't military hospitals in
Britain anymore. Instead the military use civilian hospitals with a Ministry of Defence
Hospital Unit attached but none near Salisbury. The Ministry of Defence Hospital Units do not
treat operational casualties who are treated at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine at
Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in Birmingham. You'd think the Chief Nursing Officer for the
British Army, Colonel McCourt would work out off the most important site for defence medicine
in the UK (QEH in Birmingham) but instead she's based at Larkhill which from memory is where
the Royal Artillery is located.
Not so strange - The area inhabited by the British Army north of Salisbury (more specifically
north of the A303 road was classified as deprived because of the lack of shopping facilities,
so most residents of this area do their shopping in Salisbury which has the best shopping in
the area. There are now a Tesco superstore and a branch of Lidl in Tidworth so perhaps it's
not so deprived anymore.
The main area for shoppers to park in Salisbury is just north of the Maltings (site of the alleged attack) so it's not surprising that someone shopping in
Salisbury would pass the bench the Skripals were found on. What is surprising it that none of
the family seems to have suffered any effects from the Novichok.
The Skirpal case, the Maidan coup and the related MH17 downing, the various gas attacks in
Syria, the most recent bombing incident also in Syria, the Mueller investigation in its
entirety - the sheer incompetence shown by the US and British deep states is simply
staggering, and in sharp contrast to the investigative ability of this and other sites.
The US is fracturing, the EU is fracturing, and therein lies the greatest danger. With the
overplayed sanctions only making the sanctioned effect work arounds to the point that the
primacy of the US dollar is threatened, with the contain China train having left the station
and recently pulling into a station purpose built on the dark side of the moon, their only
options look to be to either go nuclear or go away.
2019 looks to be a most interesting year!
exiled off mainstreet , Jan 19, 2019 6:05:32 PM |
link
It all adds up to stasi state bullshit. They are so arrogant and cocksure of the controlled
media that they can even draw attention to the provocation by seeking an award for a family
member despite the prominence of the mother and her role in the power structure. Knowledge,
of course, will remain limited to those who are canny enough not to believe the received
propaganda wisdom of the five eyes spy state.
So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to
be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief
Nurse Of the British Army?
Even though this could have gone a long, long way to explaining the biggest discrepancy in
the government narrative (i.e. Novicock is way, way deadly only, err, umm, they didn't
die). How odd.
How very, very odd. You'd almost think that the government considered that acknowledging that fact would open
up more questions than it would answer. Hard to see why.....
I am beginning to wonder if Sir Humphrey Appleby and some of his colleagues are conducting a
deliberate hoax, piling impossibility upon impossibility and contradiction upon
contradiction, just to see how long it takes the unbelievably gullible British public to get
the joke and start throwing cabbages and rotten fruit. Not so funny for the poor woman who died - but then, as Sir Humphrey has often been heard
to remark, one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Recall that it was recently established and published that the Steele Dossier was compiled to
act as an Insurance Policy in the event Trump won the election.
See here . I posted this news as a comment and b picked up on it too, but that aspect of
the Dossier is omitted from his essay above. We can see that the Dossier--like Blair's Dodgy
Dossier to sell the illegal war on Iraq--has had a massive impact on Trump's presidency,
which, whether you like Trump or not, is a matter of grave concern for the institutions of
governance of the USA, and IMO is very close to treason.
Sure, the nurse revelation is curious to say the least, but I'm far more interested in the
entire disinformation network built by the British along with previous and current versions
operated by CIA here in USA. Think back to what Bill Casey said, "We'll know our
disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,"
then Rove's boast: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's
actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Add those to all the 100% evidence free accusations made against Russia, China, Venezuela,
Syria, other nations and private individuals--the "universal sports doping" by Russian
athletes was a massive smear proven to be 100% false--and you can understand why I call it
BigLie Media. Clearly, the Skripal story's utter fantasy. But the Brits will kill their own
to insure the story isn't compromised--Dr. David Kelly, Dawn Sturgess, and quite likely
Sergei Skripal, and likely others from incidents in the further past.
So, while it seems comical, this is all deadly serious.
The Integrity Initiative was also heavily involved in promoting an anti-Russian agenda such
as the Skripal affair.
Either Chris Donnelly of the Institute for Statecraft (IoS), (formally of the British
Army's Soviet Studies Research Centre at Sandhurst), or UK General Sir Richard Barrons
reportedly stated that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response,
then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it
out of the political space."
great coverage b.. thank you... it's either a coincidence theory, or a conspiracy theory...
no other choices, until the uk gets down to doing an open investigation on integrity
initiative...the investigators investigating the investigators.. ain't going to happen...
similar deal in the usa now.. basically this will be when hell freezes over - a very long
time if ever.. meanwhile the skripals are persona non grata... it would be very interesting
to find out where they are kept... it looks like their is no chance for any type of normal
life for them here on out... even if the novihoax didn't kill them, the uk has done the
equivalent.. it is hard not to tie operation toxic dagger into all of this... the
coincidences are just too great..
@ petri.. thanks for the that.. how did you manage to figure that one out? does that mean
that allison mccourt is the daughter of pablo miller, or was allison from another
relationship/marriage? of course m16 and some folks know the answer to this amazing
coincidences and probably are unable to openly say..
@ Glen Brown and bevin with their correction to my comment.....thanks
I was not in my best of mind and along with misspelling his name I projected my desire for
more movement by the UK opposition in light of having the government paying folks to work
against them.....my bad idealism........
If it is true that Alison McCourt is married to Pablo Miller as Petri Kohn asserts in
comment #1 then it looks like the daughter is being groomed for big things in the UK
government.....16 years old and already an award for criminal complicity.
Petri Krohn@1 - ? Only thing I could find is a reference to her husband Hugh - a
prison officer - and her two kids, Abagail (now 16) and Cameron (now 14). That was from a
DailyMail
article (I know...) from Dec. 20, 2014. She was spending time away from them during
Christmas when she was sent to Sierra Leone for the Ebola outbreak. The article also mentions
time away from Hugh and Abagail in 2003 when she was deployed to Iraq. Couldn't find anything
about Pablo Miller being married or having kids, but many mentions of his home in Salisbury.
Nice conjecture, except that those who devised the Dossier specifically said it was to be
used as insurance in case Trump won. Please see article I linked to in my comment.
The daughter is what's know as a "cutout". You can't have the "nurse of all nurses" be the
first on the scene. But, they didn't even bother with the daughter having to call mama at
home. She was luckily "nearby", presumably lurking behind a tree.
She might have been the commanding officer of 22 Field Hospital but now she's moved
on.
From the QARANC website:
Following promotion to Lieutenant Colonel in 2011, Alison attended the Advanced Command and
Staff Course. Her initial SO1 appointment was as Chief of Staff, Headquarters 2nd Medical
Brigade in York in Aug 2012. Alison assumed Command of 22 Field Hospital in July 2013 and
deployed the Unit to Sierra Leone on Op GRITROCK in Oct 14. She was awarded an OBE for her
leadership of 22 Field during Op GRITROCK.
On promotion to Colonel in Dec 2015 she assumed an appointment in the newly established
Senior Health Advisors department and has been the lead for Assurance and now Health
Strategy in that area.
Alison assumed the appointment of Chief Nursing Officer for the Army on 1 Feb 18.
@1 petri... unless they hooked up after 2014, your theory doesn't look very likely...
further to @36 paveways comment from the daily mail dec 20 2014 article - Even though
Lieut Col McCourt is a veteran of campaigns in Iraq and the Balkans, she admits this tour of
duty has taken a toll, and that she has depended on the support of her husband Hugh, a prison
officer, to help her through it. While this is her first Christmas apart from her children,
she is accustomed to leaving them and her husband behind. In 2003, she left Abigail, then
aged just eight months, in Hugh's arms while she went to Iraq to treat British soldiers
wounded in the Gulf War. She returned there in 2008 for a second tour of duty.
Lieut Col McCourt said: 'I have a very supportive husband. On both occasions I went to
Iraq he took sabbaticals from his job to ensure that our family life was maintained. Yes, it
was hard to say goodbye so soon after having my first child but you immerse yourself in your
work, and on an operational tour everyone is missing someone. This Christmas he'll be with
the children and my mum will join them at the family home in Aldershot. Of course I miss them
all but our focus has to be saving lives here.'
Suppose you were Russian and believed that the west would not attack because of the checks
and controls that exist in western democracy. Suppose a deadly incident occurred and Russia
was blamed and an attack became more likely. Suppose that (as a Russian) you knew Russia
wasn't involved and that the evidence was very sketchy and didn't make sense. Suppose this
was was all in the public domain but instead of the incident being questioned it was just
accepted and Russia was sanctioned and other western and allied countries (despite knowing it
was nonsense) joined in.
You might as a Russian come to believe that evidence didn't matter, that the west could
manipulate their populations at will and the idea that there was some "restraint" on western
attacks would be shown to be fanciful. You might, as a Russian, become very concerned that
you might be attacked and there was a lack of restraint on the west.
The west are blaming Russia for something they didn't do but, also, showing that they know
that Russia didn't do it and, more, letting Russia know they framed them, and showing Russia
that the evidence doesn't matter. Perhaps, not UK incompetence, maybe, it's all psyops.
Mr Moon, you have excelled yourself! A brilliant article, worthy of a standing ovation!
'So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed
to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief
Nurse Of the British Army?' And how embarrassing for our 'fearless' journalists and tabloid truth seekers! Let the
crowd cry out 'shame'!
John Helmer raises an important question, why does the roof of Sergei's house need to be
removed? Tongue firmly planted in cheek. The air leakage through the front door of Sergei's
house must be through the roof! How else does the fumes from novichok get from the front door
handle to the roof? Sure hope they do a proper energy efficient rebuild. Can't go wasting
that soon to be arriving at Perfidious Albion's shores horror of horrors, Russian gas. North
Sea gas wont last much longer.
"... By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US. ..."
The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing
foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US.
A bombshell
domestic spy scandal has been unfolding in Britain, after hacked internal communications exposed a covert UK state military-intelligence
psychological warfare operation targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied NATO countries under the cover of fighting
"Russian disinformation."
The leaked documents revealed a secret network of spies, prominent journalists and think-tanks colluding under the umbrella of
a group called "Integrity Initiative" to shape domestic opinion -- and to smear political opponents of the right-wing Tory government,
including the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
Until now, this Integrity Initiative domestic spy scandal has been ignored in the American media, perhaps because it has mostly
involved British names. But it is clear that the influence operation has already been activated in the US. Hacked documents reveal
that the Integrity Initiative is cultivating powerful allies inside the State Department, top DC think tanks, the FBI and the DHS,
where it has gained access to
Katharine Gorka and her
husband, the
fascist-linked cable news pundit
Sebastian Gorka .
The Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its network across the US, meddling in American politics and recruiting
"a new generation of Russia watchers" behind the false guise of a non-partisan charity. Moreover, the group has hired one of the
most notorious American "perception management" specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of pundits and cultivate relationships
with the media.
Back in the UK, Member of Parliament Chris Williamson has clamored for an investigation into the Integrity Initiative's abuse
of public money.
In a
recent editorial , Williamson drew a direct parallel between the group's collaboration with journalists and surreptitious payments
the CIA made to reporters during the Cold War.
"These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in
the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool," Williamson wrote.
"They manipulated the news agenda by recruiting leading journalists to write stories with the express purpose of influencing public
opinion in a particular way," the Labour parliamentarian continued. "Now it seems the British Establishment have dusted off the CIA's
old playbook and is intent on giving it another outing on this side of the Atlantic."
Unmasking a British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine
The existence of the Integrity Initiative was virtually unknown until this November, when the email servers of a previously obscure
British think tank called the Institute for Statecraft were hacked, prompting allegations of Russian intrusion. When the group's
internal documents appeared at a website hosted by Anonymous Europe, the public learned of a covert propaganda network seed-funded
to the tune of over $2 million dollars by the Tory-controlled UK Foreign Office, and run largely by military-intelligence officers.
Through a series of cash inducements, off the record briefings and all-day conferences, the Integrity Initiative has sought to
organize journalists across the West into an international echo chamber hyping up the supposed threat of Russian disinformation --
and to defame politicians and journalists critical of this new Cold War campaign.
A bid for
funding submitted by the Integrity Initiative in 2017 to the British Ministry of Defense promised to deliver a "tougher stance
on Russia" by arranging for "more information published in the media on the threat of Russian active measures."
The Integrity Initiative has also worked through its fronts in the media to smear political figures perceived as a threat to its
militaristic agenda. Its targets have included a Spanish Department of Homeland Security appointee, Pedro Banos, whose nomination
was scuttled thanks a media blitz it secretly orchestrated; Jeremy Corbyn, whom the outfit and its
media cutouts
painted as a useful idiot of Russia; and a Scottish member of parliament, Neil Findlay, whom one of its closest media allies
accused of adopting "Kremlin messaging" for daring to protest the official visit of the far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy
Parubiy -- the founder of two neo-Nazi parties and author of a white nationalist memoir,
"View From The Right."
These smear campaigns and many more surreptitiously orchestrated by the Integrity Initiative offer a disturbing preview of the
reactionary politics it plans to inject into an already toxic American political environment.
Lessons from "The Man Who Sold the War"
A newly released Integrity Initiative document reveals that the outfit plans an aggressive expansion across the US.
The Integrity Initiative claims to have already established a "simple office" in Washington DC, though it does not say where.
It also boasts of partnerships with top DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, CNA, and
close relationships with US officials.
A major hub of Integrity Initiative influence is the State Department's Global Engagement Center, a
de facto US government propaganda operation that was established by President Barack Obama to battle online ISIS recruitment,
but which was rapidly repurposed to counter Russian disinformation following the election of Trump.
He is John Rendon, best known as "The Man Who Sold
The War" -- several wars, in fact, but most notoriously the Iraq invasion. Rendon was the self-described "information warrior"
who planted fake news in the major US-UK media about non-existent WMD threats. With deep ties to the CIA and other military-intelligence
agencies, his PR firm was paid $100 million to organize and sell Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. In 2002, the New York Times
exposed a Pentagon program using Rendon to plant "disinformation" -- including "false stories" and "the blackest of black PR"
-- in media outlets around the world, in order to shape public opinion and sell the Iraq invasion.
John Rendon (left) with Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass, US Africa Command Chief of Staff (photo by US Africom Public Affairs)
Journalist James Bamford outlined a catalogue
of disinformation feats Rendon performed for the Pentagon, such as identifying "the biases of specific journalists and potentially
obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships." Bamford also
found proposals and programs Rendon was involved in that aimed to "'coerce' foreign journalists and plant false information overseas
[and] find ways to 'punish' those who convey the 'wrong message.'"
These tactics seem particularly relevant to his work with the Integrity Initiative, especially considering the internal documents
that reveal further Rendon-style plans to produce reports and studies to be
"fed anonymously into local media." (Among
the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily.)
Keeping Up with the Gorkas
Internal documents also refer to interactions between Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly and top Trump officials like
Katharine Gorka , a vehemently anti-Muslim Department of Homeland Security official, as well as her husband, Sebastian, who earned
right-wing fame during his brief tenure in Trump's White House.
The latter Gorka is an
open supporter of the Hungarian Vitezi Rend, a proto-fascist order that collaborated with Nazi Germany during its occupation
of Hungary. Following Trump's election victory in 2016, Gorka appeared for televised interviews in a black Vitezi Rend uniform.
Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb, with his wife, Katharine, on Election Night
Gorka was among the first figures listed on an itinerary for Donnelly to Washington this September 18 to 22. The itinerary indicates
that the two had breakfast before Donnelly delivered a presentation on "Mapping Russian Influence Activities" at the federally funded
military research center, CNA .
According to the itinerary, Donnelly was granted access to Pentagon officials like
Mara Karlin
, an up-and-coming neoconservative cadre
, and John McCain Institute executive director
Kurt Volker
, another neoconservative operative who also serves as the US Special Representative for Ukraine. Numerous meetings with staffers
inside the State Department's Office of Global Engagement were also detailed.
A Foreign Agent in the State Department?
Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal.
Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation,
misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team
member:
Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with "counter-propaganda," the State Department's
Global Engagement Center
has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My old job at the State Department was
as chief propagandist," confessed former
Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their
own population and I don't necessarily think it's that awful."
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's international network, the Global Engagement
Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian
disinformation smugly explaining how he would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem
smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation. His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message
and destroy the messenger.
Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract.
While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own
Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation
Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.
As a cut-out of the British Foreign Office and Defense Ministry, the Integrity Initiative's work with current and former US officials
and members of the media raises certain legal questions. For one, there is no indication that the group has registered under the
Justice Department's Foreign Agent Registration Act, as most foreign agents of influence are required to do.
Grants from the Neocons' Favorite Foundation
An Integrity Initiative memo states that the right-wing Smith Richardson Foundation has also committed to ponying up funding for
its US network as soon as the group receives 501 c-3 non-profit status. The foundation has already provided it with about $56,000
for covert propaganda activities across Europe.
The Smith Richardson Foundation has old ties to the US intelligence community and controversial cold war influence operations.
According to reporter
Russ Bellant , the foundation was secretly bankrolling radical right-wing "indoctrination campaigns for the American public on
cold war and foreign policy issues" -- programs that got the attention of Senator William Fulbright, who warned then-President Kennedy
of their dangers. At one of these indoctrination seminars, a Smith Richardson Foundation director "told attendees that 'it is within
the capacity of the people in this room to literally turn the State of Georgia into a civil war college,' in order to overcome their
opponents."
Smith Richardson has funded a who's who of the neoconservative movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War. "To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level
in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement,"
wrote journalist
Kelley Vlahos.
Besides Smith Richardson, the Integrity Initiative has stated its intention to apply for grants from the State Department "to
expand the Integrity Initiative activities both within and outside of the USA." This is yet another indicator that the US government
is paying for propaganda targeting its own citizens.
The "Main Event" in Seattle
An Integrity Initiative internal
document argues that because
"DC is well served by existing US institutions, such as those with which the Institute [for Statecraft] already collaborates," the
organization should "concentrate on extending the work of the Integrity Initiative into major cities and key State capitals [sic]
across the USA."
This December 10, the Integrity Initiative organized what it called its "main event" in the US. It was a conference on disinformation
held in Seattle, Washington
under the auspices
of a data firm called Adventium Labs. Together with the Technical Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, the Integrity
Initiative listed Adventium Labs as one of its "first partners outside DC."
Adventium is Minneapolis-based research and development firm that has reaped contracts from the US military, including a
recent $5.4 million cyber-security grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Inside a modest-sized hotel conference room, the Adventium/Integrity event
began with a speech by the Integrity Initiative's Simon Bracey-Lane. Two
years prior, Bracey-Lane appeared on the American political scene as a field worker for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential primary
run, earning media write-ups as the
"Brit for Bernie." Now, the young operator was back in the US as the advance man for a military-intelligence cut-out that specialized
in smearing left-wing political figures like Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader widely regarded as the British version of Sanders.
Bracey-Lane opened his address by explaining that Integrity Initiative director Chris Donnelly had been unable to appear at the
event, possibly because he was bogged down in the scandal back home. He proceeded to read remarks prepared by Donnelly that offered
a window into the frighteningly militaristic mindset the Integrity Initiative aims to impose on the public through their media and
political allies.
According to Donnelly's comments, the West was no longer in a "peace time, rules based environment." From the halls of government
to corporate boardrooms to even the UK's National Health System, "the conclusion is that we have to look for people who suit a wartime
environment rather than peacetime."
During Q&A, Bracey-Lane remarked that "we have to change the definition of war to encompass everything that war now encompasses,"
referring vaguely to various forms of "hybrid warfare."
"There is a great deal to be done in communicating that to young people," he continued. "When we mean being at war we don't mean
sending our boys off to fight. It's right here in our homes."
The emphasis on restructuring society along martial lines mirrored the disturbing thinking also on display in
notes of a private meeting
between Donnelly and Gen. Richard Barrons in 2016. During that chat, the two officers decided that the British military should
be removed from democratic supervision and be able to operate as "an independent body outside politics."
While Bracey-Lane's presentation perfectly captured the military mindset of the Integrity Initiative, the speakers that followed
him offered a diverse array of perspectives on the concept of disinformation, some more nuanced than others. But one talk stood out
from the rest -- not because of its quality, but because of its complete lack thereof.
Reanimating the "Red-Brown" Grifter
Alexander Reid Ross (left) and Emmi Bevensee at the Integrity Initiative's "main event" in Seattle
The presentation was delivered by Alexander Reid Ross, a half-baked political researcher who peddles computer-generated spiderweb
relationship charts to prove the existence of a vast hidden network of "red-brown" alliances and "syncretic media" conspiracies controlled
by puppeteers in Moscow.
Ross is a lecturer on geography at Portland State University with no scholarly or journalistic credentials on Russia. His students
have given him dismal marks at Rate My
Professors, complaining about his "terrible monotone lectures" and his penchant for "insert[ing] his own ideologies into our class."
But with a book, "Against the Fascist Creep," distributed by the well-known anarchist publishing house, AK Press, the middling academic
has tried to make his name as a maverick analyst.
Before the Integrity Initiative was exposed as a military-intelligence front operation, Ross was among a small coterie of pundits
and self-styled disinformation experts that followed the
group's Twitter account. The Integrity Initiative even retweeted his smear of War Nerd podcast co-host John Dolan.
In a series of articles for the Southern Poverty Law Center last year, Ross attempted to bring his warmed-over Cold War theories
to the broader public. He wound up trashing everyone from the co-author of this piece, Max Blumenthal, to Nation magazine publisher
Katrina Vanden Heuvel to Harvard University professor of international relations Stephen Walt as hidden shadow-fascists secretly
controlled by the Kremlin.
The articles ultimately
generated an embarrassing scandal and a series of public
retractions by the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen. And then, like some Dr. Frankenstein for
discredited and buried journalism careers, the British Ministry of Defense-backed Integrity Initiative moved in to reanimate Ross
as a sought-after public intellectual.
Before the Integrity Initiative-organized crowd, Ross offered a rambling recitation of his theory of a syncretic fascist alliance
puppeteered by Russians: "The alt right takes from both this 'red-brown,' it's called, or like left-right syncretic highly international
national of nationalisms, and from the United States' own paleoconservative movement, and it's sort of percolated down through college
organizing, um, and anti-interventionism meets anti-imperialism. Right?"
In a strange twist, Ross appeared on stage at the Integrity Initiative's Seattle event alongside
Emmi Bevensee , a contributor to the left-libertarian
Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank, whose tagline, "a left market anarchist think-tank" expresses its core aim of uniting
far-left anarchists with free-market right-libertarians.
Bevensee , a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona
and self-described "Borderlands anarcho into tech and crypto," concluded her presentation by asserting a linkage between the alternative
news site, Zero Hedge, and the "physical militarized presence in the borderlands" of anti-immigrant vigilantes. Like Bevensee, Ross
has written for C4SS in the past.
The irony of contributors to an anarchist group called the "Center for a Stateless Society" auditioning before The State – the
most jackbooted element of it, in fact – for more opportunities to attack anti-war politicians and journalists, can hardly be overstated.
But closer examination of the history of C4SS veers from irony into something much darker and more unsettling.
Pedophile Co-Founder, White Nationalist Associates
C4SS was co-founded in 2006 by a confessed
child rapist and libertarian activist, Brad Spangler, who set the group up to promote "Market anarchism" to
"replace Marxism on the
left."
When Spangler's child rape confessions emerged in 2015, the Center for Stateless Society founder was
finally drummed out by his colleagues.
There's more: Spangler's understudy and
deputy in the C4SS, Kevin
Carson -- currently listed as the group's "Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory"
-- turned out to be a longtime friend and defender
of white nationalist Keith Preston. Preston's name is prominently plastered on the back of Kevin Carson's book, hailing the C4SS
man as "the Proudhon of our
time" -- a loaded compliment, given Proudhon's unhinged
anti-Semitism . Carson
only disowned Preston in 2009,
shortly before Preston helped white nationalist leader Richard Spencer launch his alt-right webzine, Alternative Right.
The C4SS group currently participates in the annual Koch-backed International
Students For Liberty conference in Washington DC,
LibertyCon, a who's
who of libertarian think-tank hacks and Republican Party semi-celebrities like Steve Forbes, FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and Alan Dershowitz.
In 2013, C4SS's Kevin Carson tweeted out his dream fantasy that four Jewish leftists -- Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Corey Robin,
and Mark Potok -- would die in a plane crash while struggling over a single parachute. Potok was an executive editor at the Southern
Poverty Law Center, which last year retracted every one of the crank articles that Alexander Reid Ross published with them and
formally apologized for having run them.
For some reason, the super-sleuth Ross conveniently failed to investigate the libertarian group, C4SS, that he has chosen to partner
with and publish in. That ability to shamelessly smear and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links to the far-right
-- while cozying up to groups as sleazy as C4SS and authoritarian as the Integrity Initiative -- is the sort of adaptive trait that
MI6 spies and the Rendon Group would find useful in a covert domestic influence operation.
Ross did not respond to our request for comment on his involvement with the Integrity Initiative and C4SS.
Disinformation for Democracy
As it spans out across the US, the Integrity Initiative has
stated
its desire to "build a younger generation of Russia watchers." Toward this goal, it is supplementing its coterie of elite journalists,
think tank hacks, spooks and State Department info-warriors with certifiable cranks like Ross.
Less than 24 hours after Ross's appearance at the Integrity Initiative event in Seattle, he
sent a menacing email to the co-author
of this article, Ames, announcing his intention to recycle an old and discredited smear against him and publish it in the Daily Beast
-- a publication that appears to enjoy a
special relationship
with Integrity Initiative personnel.
Despite the threat of investigation in the UK, the Integrity Initiative's "network of networks" appears to be escalating its covert,
government-funded influence operation, trashing the political left and assailing anyone that gets in its way -- all in the name of
fighting foreign disinformation.
"We have to win this one," Integrity Initiative founder Col. Chris Donnelly
said , "because if we don't, democracy will be undermined."
making up lies to get paid. james angleton was paranoid (not that it seemed to make him more effective in counterintelligence)–these
people are just con artists, paid to be con artists.
i'm just waiting for "we have to undermine democracy in order to save it".
Agreed. Not only are they paid to make things up, but they have an ingenious scheme for paying themselves from narcotics and
arms dealing.
The most amazing feat of confidence artistry (apart from maybe the TARP bailout (c.f.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
) is their remarkable ability to convince the population they are needed and working on our behalf instead of being in jail
where they belong.
I submitted a long comment on this about an hour ago, which seems to have been eaten by the system. I won't repost it now,
but I'll do so later if it doesn't surface.
This is something that has repeatedly happened to me too recently – it often takes 2 or more hours for most of my recent posting
to surface on the site. It rarely disappears altogether, so I would assume your post will eventually arrive.
Same here on the delays. Keep a copy.
But anyway, very glad you posted this piece. Whatever we make of Patreon, it's one way to support Mark Ames' work.
Sir Alan Duncan, responding on behalf of the Government to Emily Thornberry's urgent question (Dec 12) on recent allegations
that the Foreign Office funded a company which carried out a smear campaign against the official Opposition.
What a frightful fellow that Alan Duncan is eh? Talks like a Mafia lawyer and he's supposed to be a national leader. He reminds
that other MP, the POS who interrogated David Kelly on TV, they both use the same style. Is it a qualification for legislator?
Just a minor note to start off. That image of "Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb". I think that Vitezi Rend actually refers
to the medal he wears on the left. The jacket itself more resembles the patrol jacket that British officers wore in the 19th century.
Moving on! Notice how the same players keep on coming up again and again in all these stories of skulduggery? John Rendon, the
Atlantic Council, Ajit Pai and Alan Dershowitz – the same scum-bags with a few new wannabe players. As an example.
The penchant that Brad Spangler, C4SS co-founder, has for under-age girls is disgusting of course but you have to put it into
the context of the people that you are talking about. If Spengler was more rich or more powerful, you might see his name on a
manifest for the "Lolita Express" but his activities would not be splashed about in an article like this one. That sort of activity
is given a level of protection if you are in the right group. And it is a good thing that that British General Richard Barrons
is retired as his comments are deserving of being cashiered.
Funny how a group that claims to be about protecting democracy wants to push it aside and install propaganda on a "1984" level
in the pursuit of their aims. I cannot decide if their target of Russia is a means or an end. If it is a means, that means using
the boogy-man of Russia to radically restructure western society to their tastes. If it is an end, well, it is true that Russia
has about $75 trillion in resources, mostly in Siberia and the east, so if it was broken up eventually, that would be a bonanza
of wealth appropriation.
I was thinking about the activities of this group and how they go about their activities, especially the smearing of anybody that
talks truth to power. I wonder if anybody here made the connection with this story and the PropOrNot website that came out of
nowhere about two years ago and that had the stamp of approval of the Washington Post. I would not be surprised if it turns out
to be that PropOrNot was a trial balloon in the United States for the Integrity Initiative to establish what it was capable of.
Just a thought.
He looks like an extra from Star Wars – one of those nazi guys working the bridge of the Death Star. The "look and feel" of
a lot of pre-war fascism strikes us as silly in retrospect, though it really wasn't at the time.
That tailored black jacket Sebastian wears looks like something Winston Churchill would have changed out of before that last
cavalry charge at Omdurman. It seems intentionally designed to mimic 19th century great power imperial army officer garb. Nostalgia
for the good times, apparently. Goes with his fascist priorities.
Let us not get carried away with the exuberance of discovering skulduggery among fascist elements of the media and politics.
This does not mean that the conspiracy means Russia is thereby a Goodie Twoshoes. It also does not mean that Russia is any less
a pain in the ass than it has heretorfore be characterized.
It does mean that there is less reason (any?) than ever to put much faith in FoxNews (already a mere propaganda machine) or
other orgs. I am uncomfortable hearing CNA is caught up in this as they are a pseudo government thinktank with some Pentagon influence.
If true, the story should be used to clear out some journalists and analyst riffraff. However, this story is surely not going
to restore, much less create, any integrity among the Beltway Punditry.
The article and related matters may also shed more light on the abrupt resignation of
Robert Hannigan from the leadership of GCHQ in January 2017 a few days after Trump's inauguration. Given previous revelations
about GCHQ and NSA spying on each other's citizens, what else is next in the UK and in the US and elsewhere?
After reading about that Carson character and others I am ready for a shower to try to wash off the disgust.
Yves Smith: Thanks for this. I am wondering about two stories that have been flapping around here for a few days: That odd
New Knowledge company that produced the report about Russian influence on the elections as well as the story about the case before
the Supreme Court of the US in which a company is invoking claims of sovereign immunity.
I have a feeling that New Knowledge definitely fits into the framework outlined by Ames above. A contractor that appears out
of nowhere with a "distinguished" board of concerned semi-liberals (at the trough)?
But what do I know? Some guy named Volodya showed up at my house and bought my vote in 2016 for two bottles of pickled mushrooms
Perfideus Albion is not just a neat saying, but a truth that the Irish, French and
Germans (etc.) have known forever, the people don't deserve it, but the
jumped up Tories do in spades.
Thank you for highlighting this article! It names names and connects some dots, including some connections reaching into the
U.S. It also describes propaganda mechanisms that have been around forever but have become pervasive today. A few protruding tips
of a massive iceberg, in my view. I'm sure *this* "bombshell" story will get the massive coverage it deserves in the MSM -- not!
That was interesting. Well argued all the way through I thought, but they could take a closer look at the unwinding of Yugoslavia;
what Serbia and Syria have in common is having been targeted by outside state powers for dissolution, responses did vary.
Thank you diptherio for posting the C4SS response. Such responses are helpful in evaluating issues like this, and we should
always be open to the other side when they take the time to reply. However, I can't agree that the response was "well argued."
The author does make some valid points, but mainly she resorts to ad hominem attacks on Ames (based on some juvenile antics at
eXile that are often used to smear him), or on both authors because they may have agreed with "Assadists" like Ambassador Peter
Ford or "9/11 Truthers" like Piers Robinson, whose claims about Syria or the White Helmets are, of course, Kremlin propaganda.
Which brings up why Blumenthal would have changed his position on Syria; it was not because of his gradual understanding of what
was really happening there. Rather, while he had once grasp the truth of the "revolution," he made the mistake of going to a Kremlin
gala and the Rooskies (and RT) got to him. Now he is just another propagandist. Nowhere that I can see does the author discuss
the major claims made in Ames and Blumenthal's article, or the evidence cited (except to say that if it was in RT or Sputnik,
we can ignore it anyway as propaganda). Nor does she address the actual defamation made by Alexander Ross-Reid through the SPLC
that pissed off Blumenthal in the first place. There are other problems (don't get me started on the "red-brown" smear), but that's
enough.
Having said all that, I do think that in their criticism of C4SS, Ames and Blumenthal perhaps did some unnecessary punching
down. They could have made clearer the distinction between organizations like the Integrity Initiative, that are pretty clearly
intelligence operatives or cut-outs, versus groups like C4SS that function more like "useful idiots" because of their ideological
position (e.g. equating U.S. and Russian imperialism in this case in their "anarchist" appeal). The latter are in no way as evil
as the former, in my mind.
You are clearly much more engaged with the related debates than I. I read the piece as a response to the punching down you
mention in your last paragraph and felt like I got a respectable read on someone still developing their arguments. I'm not informed
enough to argue with much of it, but having read Diana Johnstone's "Fools Crusade", the Syria/Serbia bit stuck in my craw.
I had thought about commenting on the ad hominems directed at Ames, but didn't want to get into the whole identity argument
embedded in much of the language of the post. While I disagree with many of her positions and attitudes on the state actions she
criticizes without, in my opinion, adequate grounding, I judged it a mostly good faith effort trying to find solid footing in
a world increasingly thick with distorted narratives.
It's hard to argue now, from anywhere with out power, without being someone's "useful idiot": trust has decayed to the point
where language impedes communication in the political sphere.
It's funny you should mention Johnstone's book. I normally would not use the derogatory term "useful idiot" for the very reason
you imply; most such people are acting in good faith. I admit that her comments on Syria irritated me. But the reason I sometimes
overreact to that sort of narrative is because of my own experiences as a useful idiot, starting with Yugoslavia. I fell for the
liberal "humanitarian" argument hook, line, and sinker in the 1990s, even though I considered myself a knowledgeable progressive
at the time. It wouldn't be the last time I was duped, but I'd like to think I'm a little wiser today.
I appreciate your comment. We definitely need to distinguish empire propagandists from the beliefs of people honestly trying
to find their way.
I thought the later part of Ames' piece was unnecessary. It's kind of the same sort of guilt-by-attending-same-conference thing
that I find annoying about the Russophobes.
Keep focused on government malfeasance, not basement brown-shirts.
Oh well, there would be a lot to argue here. In one side it is nice to see that the "Initiative" is being exposed although
it doesn't appear yet to trigger any significant response from supposedly democratic institutions like, let's say the english
parliament (at ransom by brexit).
Just to demonstrate how this article is well focused and pointed I wanted to comment on this bit:
(Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left
Spanish daily .)
YES! iIt is so true that the former "center-left" –if you wish– daily that years ago was a must read but has been degraded
to levels that I wouldn't have imagined, in a case that makes the Guardian as the "guardian of reporting-as-it should-be". One
has to bear in mind that the current most important shareholder of Grupo Prisa (owner of El Pais) is an english hedge fund Amber
Capital whose CEO,
Joseph
Oughorlian is chairman at Grupo Prisa and probably responsible for the Russia!Russia!Russia! campaign observed in this medium
that surprised me so much. You don't find nothing similar in Spain even in rigth and rigth of the rigth news outlets.
I believe this UK-based shareholder is clearly associated with the peculiar Russia!Russia!Russia! stance of the supposedly
centre-left daily.
For those of us from way back way back, these kooks relate to offshoots of the Watergate scandal, the original one, where people
working on those burglaries of psychiatrist's offices and Democratic headquarters got their start organizing small gangs of crooks
to infiltrate what was then a porous but trustable system of government – on they went to propose surveillance and collection
of data that was at first publicly laughed about but on they went. On they went. Technology with all its pluses has these minuses
we at first were able to counter (Church hearings) but the rats have scurried into all the back alleys and secretive pathways
that need a thorough cleanup. It can be done, but it needs to be done periodically. Hopefully this is finally the year when that
will happen.
Thank you, Yves. I believe these folk don't end up in a good place, but meanwhile they are wreaking havoc. The place to start,
after the brooms and mops, is to get money OUT of politics and restore a verifiable voting system that happens methodically and
is trustworthy. The citizenry will be behind this. We the people don't care how long it takes to vote or to find out who won.
We don't! Haste makes waste in more ways than we know.
Let's do this. And please, judges, do your duty or go to jail yourselves.
It's obvious that neither Ames or Blumenthal read the actual documents they're quoting from. Which is a shame considering the
relevant one involving the CIA's Operation Mockingbird comparison was only seven pages long. The CIA were merely imitating British
intelligence during the war and it is clearly stated as such when one of the replies involving General Sir Richard Barrons states
that they've done this before during the 1930s. The US didn't possess a foreign intelligence agency at the time and I'd fervently
argue that we still don't to this day.
but I've already commented about British Security Coordination in the aftermath of PropOrNot though and I'm reluctant to beat
a dead horse.
Ah, the smell (or should we say stench) of domestic propaganda in the morning, ironically by some of the same individuals who
brought us Iraq WMDs. While First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and other civil rights must be protected, it seems to
me that a careful balance can be drawn under new legislation that insulates us from such government-sponsored propaganda. We should
be able to rely on our government's representations. Instead, as with a former president who openly acknowledged, "My job is to
catapult the propaganda," the reverse, together with a related loss of trust, unfortunately seems to be increasingly the case.
Stop lying! What part of "of the People, by the People, for the People," is difficult to understand?
Hacking syndicate Anonymous has just released its fourth tranche of documents hacked from
the internal servers of the Institute for Statecraft and its subsidiary, the Integrity
Initiative. Several explosive files raise serious questions about the shadowy British state and
NATO-funded 'think tank' and its connections with the Skripal affair.
The files were
released just after 2:30pm GMT on January 4 -- I've barely scratched the surface of the
content, but what I've seen so far contains a panoply of bombshell revelations -- to say the
least, the organization(s) now have serious questions to answer about what role they played in
the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in March, and its aftermath both nationally and
internationally.
Sinister Timeline
One file
apparently dating to "early 2015" -- "Russian Federation Sanctions" -- written by the
Institute's Victor Madeira outlines "potential levers" to achieve Russian "behaviour change",
"peace with Ukraine", "return [of] Crimea", "regime change" or "other?". The suggested "levers"
span almost every conceivable area, including "civil society", "sports", "finance" and
"technology".
In the section marked "intelligence", Madeira suggests simultaneously expelling "every RF
[Russian Federation] intelligence officer and air/defense/naval attache from as many countries
as possible". In parentheses, it references 'Operation Foot' , the expulsion of over
1000 Soviet officials from the UK in September 1971, the largest expulsion of intelligence
officials by any government in history.
The section on sports also suggests "advocating the view [Russia] is unworthy of hosting
[sporting] events" -- and the section marked "information" recommends the sanctioning of
'Russian' media "in West for not complying with regulators' standards".
2015 File
Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions
In April that year, Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly was
promoted to Honorary Colonel of SGMI (Specialist Group Military Intelligence), and
in
October he met with General Sir Richard Barrons. Notes from the meeting don't make clear
who said what, but one despaired that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a
response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and
take it out of the political space."
"We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. We did this in the
1930s. My conclusion is it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something
dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside
government. We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the
national capabilities [and/or] capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of
resources to do it? We need this debate now. There is not a moment to be lost," they said.
Operation IRIS Begins
On 4 March 2018, former Russian military officer and double agent for MI6 Sergei Skripal and
his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England.
Within days, the Institute had submitted a proposal to the Foreign & Commonwealth
Office, "to study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news
spread and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.
The bid was accepted, and the Initiative's 'Operation Iris' was launched. Under its
auspices, the Institute employed 'global investigative solutions' firm Harod Associates to
analyze social media activity related to Skripal the world over.
It also conducted media monitoring of its own, with Institute 'research fellow' Simon
Bracey-Lane
producing regular 'roundups' of media coverage overseas, based on insights submitted by
individuals connected to the Initiative living in several countries. One submission, from an
unnamed source in Moldova, says they "cannot firmly say" whether the country's media had its
"own point of view" on the issue, or whether news organizations had taken "an obvious
pro-Russian or pro-Western position", strongly suggesting these were key questions for the
Initiative.
Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal
Incident
Moreover though, there are clear indications the Institute sought to shape the news
narrative on the attack -- and indeed the UK government's response.
One file dated March 11 appears to be a briefing document on the affair to date, with key
messages bolded throughout.
It opens by setting out "The Narrative" of the incident -- namely "Russia has carried out
yet another brutal attack, this time with a deadly nerve agent, on someone living in
Britain".
"Use of the nerve agent posed a threat to innocent British subjects, affecting 21 people and
seriously affecting a police officer. This is not the first time such an attack has been
carried out in the UK 14 deaths are believed to be attributable to the Kremlin Russia has
poisoned its enemies abroad on other occasions, most notably then-candidate for the Presidency
of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been
poisoned twice; and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also poisoned and later shot dead.
Since Putin has been running Russia, the Kremlin has a history of poisoning its opponents in a
gruesome way," the "narrative" reads.
The file goes on to declare the British response has been "far too weak it's essential the
government makes a much stronger response this time" -- and then lists "possible, realistic,
first actions", including banning RT and Sputnik from operating in the UK, boycotting the 2018
World Cup, withdrawing the UK ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador to
the UK, and refusing/revoking visas to leading Russians within Vladimir Putin's "circle", and
their families.
Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative
It's not clear who the document was distributed to -- but it may have been given to
journalists within the Initiative's UK 'cluster', if not others. This may explain why the
Institute's "narrative", and its various recommended "responses" utterly dominated mainstream
media reporting of the affair for months afterwards, despite the glaring lack of evidence of
Russian state involvement in the attack.
It's extremely curious so many of the briefing document's recommendations almost exactly --
if not exactly -- echo several of the suggested "levers" outlined in the 2015 document. It's
also somewhat troubling the "Global Operation Foot" spoken of in that file duly came to pass on
March 28 2018, with over 20 countries expelling over 100 Russian diplomats.
Likewise, it's striking Victor Madeira, the Institute staffer who made the recommendations
in 2015, made many media appearances discussing the poisoning following the incident
routinely documented by the Institute. Security consultant Dan Kaszeta also wrote a number
of articles for the Integrity Initiative website about chemical weapons following the attack --
including a July 14 article, How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the
Skripal attack? --receiving 40
pence per word .
Invoice submitted to
Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections
The Institute's bizarrely intimate connections with the incident don't end there. Another document
apparently dating to July 2018 contains the contact details of Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6
recruiter, handler and -- unbelievably -- neighbor in Salisbury. Anonymous claims the document
is an invitee list for a meeting the Institute convened between a number of individuals and
Syria's highly controversial White Helmets group, but this is yet to be verified.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the latest document dump raises yet further questions
about how and why it was BBC Diplomatic and Defense Editor Mark Urban -- who was in the same
tank regiment as Miller after leaving University -- came to meet with Skripal in the year
before his poisoning. When I attended the
launch of his book on the affair in October -- The Skripal Files -- he was evasive
on whether he played a role in connecting him with Skripal, and denied Miller was Skripal's
recruiter.
The latest trove also raises yet further questions about the activities of the Institute for
Statecraft and Integrity Initiative. In light of these revelations, reading the record of
Donnelly's meeting with General Barrons takes on an acutely chilling quality. It may be that
purely serendipitously the pair got their "catastrophe", their "something dreadful", which
"[woke] people up" and made the government "realise the problem" posed by Russia -- or it could
be they one way or another played a facilitative role of some kind.
After months of refusing to answer the vast number of questions I and thousands of others
have submitted to the paired organizations, it's high time for them to break cover, and be
honest with the public.
Images removed. Please brose the original to view them.
Notable quotes:
"... "Russian disinformation." ..."
"... "network of networks" ..."
"... It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence. ..."
"... "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" ..."
"... "global investigative solutions" ..."
"... What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow.... ..."
"... "pro-Russia troll accounts" ..."
"... "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case." ..."
"... Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" ..."
"... These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK." ..."
"... "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" ..."
"... "threat Russia poses." ..."
"... This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning ..."
"... One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot. ..."
"... "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history." ..."
"... "Makes you think " ..."
"... The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute. ..."
"... It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair. ..."
"... £2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019 ..."
"... It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance. ..."
The Integrity Initiative, a UK-funded group exposed in leaked files as psyop network, played a key role in monitoring and molding
media narratives after the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal, newly-dumped documents reveal. Created by the NATO-affiliated,
UK-funded Institute for Statecraft in 2015, the Integrity Initiative was
unmasked in November after hackers
released documents detailing a web of politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics involved in purportedly
fighting "Russian disinformation."
The secretive, government-bankrolled "network of networks" has found itself under scrutiny for
smearing UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
as a Kremlin stooge – ostensibly as part of its noble crusade against anti-Russian disinformation. Now, new
leaks show that the organization played a central role in shaping media narratives after Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia
were mysteriously poisoned in Salisbury last March.
It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented
following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence.
Operation Iris
Days after the Skripals were poisoned, the Institute solicited its services to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, offering to
"study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being
perceived" in a number of countries.
After receiving the government's blessing, the Integrity Initiative (II)
launched
'Operation Iris,' enlisting "global investigative solutions" firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity
related to Skripal.
What role did # IntegrityInitiative
play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers
from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow....
However, Harod's confidential
report
did more than just parse social media reactions to the Skripal affair: It compiled a list of alleged "pro-Russia troll accounts"
accused of "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case."
Among those who found themselves listed as nefarious thought-criminals were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a gentleman
from Kent who goes by Ian56 on Twitter.
Neocon Fascist, al-Qaeda Supporting Treasonous Scumbag @ Benimmo
is having a laugh with £2m of Taxpayers money. Nimmo should be IN JAIL for Fraud & Treason
"The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and Petrovas GRU agents"
- has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French yellow jackets. I kid you not.
Another
document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative"
of the Skripal incident, which blames Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally, as well as containing a number of recommended
actions.
These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to
Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the
UK."
Other suggestions included propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim
brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" and getting members of parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses."
It's not clear who the document was drawn up for, but it may have been provided to II-affiliated journalists in the UK and other
countries.
This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning
– which the UK and its allies unanimously blamed on Moscow.
Ahead of its time?
One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a
document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including
mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot.
Coincidentally, more than 100 Russian diplomats were expelled from 20 Western countries in an apparently show of solidarity with
the UK following the Skripal attack. At the time, UK Prime Minister Theresa May welcomed what she said was "the largest collective
expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history."
Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents, written long before the Salisbury events, also call for the arrest of RT and
Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding: "Makes you think "
The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made
all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the
alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler
and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute.
It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended
# IntegrityInitiative meetings. There
is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair.
It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity
Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were
drawn up years in advance.
"... If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another. ..."
"... The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.' ..."
"... There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech. ..."
"... I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. ..."
"... Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome. ..."
After contemplating the likely intelligence and propaganda efforts of HMG over the last 15 years or so I am puzzled as to motivation.
Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little to do with the welfare
of Britain. Why? I suppose that the same question can be asked for the US and I have.
In re "Our man in Havana" I think there
are many issues raised in the work that apply directly to the trade of espionage.
The question why? is a very interesting but also very dispiriting one, but also one which it is quite hard to get one's head
round. I hope to have something more coherent to say about it.
Among many reasons, however, there has been a kind of intellectual disintegration.
If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.'
It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating
one ham-fisted cover-up after another.
The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador
Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in
Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.'
Subsequently, of course, he set about colluding in the process. And, sixteen years later, Dearlove is still at it, with 'Russiagate'
-- and the product being actually accepted much more uncritically by the MSM than it was then.
And that is one of the problems -- nobody any longer pays any penalty for failure, or indeed feels any sense of shame about
it..
There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying
Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with
Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech.
As the Colonel eloquently asks:
"I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem
to have little todo with the welfare of Britain. Why?"
I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating
their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened
in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world
(with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.
Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May,
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though
there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome.
(I don't include the Maurice Cowling-ites in this fandango because they strike me as more Little Englanders. Though Peterhouse
is of course, shamefully, the HQ of the Henry Jackson Society).
Is this shadow of Integrity Initiative in the USA ? This false flag open the possibility that other similar events like
DNC (with very questionable investigation by Crowdstrike, which was a perfect venue to implement a false flag; cybersecurity area is
the perfect environment for planting false flags), MH17 (might be an incident but later it definitely was played as a false flag), Skripals
(Was Skripals poisoning a false flag decided to hide the fact that Sergey Skripal was involved in writing Steele dossier?) and Litvinenko
(probably connected with lack of safety measures in the process of smuggling of Plutonium by Litvinenko himself, but later played a
a false flag). All of those now should be re-assessed from the their potential of being yet another flag flag operation
against Russia. While Browder was a MI6 operation from the very beginning (and that explains
why he abdicated the US citizenship more convincingly that the desire to avoid taxes) .
Notable quotes:
"... Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior. ..."
"... Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign). ..."
"... By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling." ..."
"... The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true). ..."
For over two years now, the concepts of "Russian collusion" and "Russian election meddling" have been shoved down our throats
by the mainstream media (MSM) under the guise of legitimate concern that the Kremlin may have installed a puppet president in Donald
Trump.
Having no evidence of collusion aside from a largely unverified opposition-research dossier fabricated by a former British spy,
the focus shifted from "collusion" to "meddling" and "influence." In other words, maybe Trump didn't actually collude with Putin,
but the Kremlin used Russian tricks to influence the election in Trump's favor. To some, this looked like nothing more than an establishment
scheme to cast a permanent spectre of doubt over the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump.
Election meddling "Russian bots" and "troll farms" became the central focus - as claims were levied of social media operations
conducted by Kremlin-linked organizations which sought to influence and divide certain segments of America.
And while scant evidence of a Russian influence operation exists outside of a handful of indictments connected to a St. Petersburg
"Troll farm" (which a liberal journalist
cast serious doubt ov er), the MSM - with all of their proselytizing over the "threat to democracy" that election meddling poses,
has largely decided to ignore actual evidence of "Russian bots" created by Democrat IT experts, used against a GOP candidate in the
Alabama special election, and amplified through the Russian bot-detecting "Hamilton 68" dashboard developed by the same IT experts.
Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation
against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed
to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior.
As Russian state-owned RT puts
it - and who could blame them for being a bit pissed over the whole thing, "it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy
by "Russian bots." Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible
for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection. "
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout
by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.
Described by the
New York Times
as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies.
Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agenc y. His partner,
Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company
in 2018 alone.
...
On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as
fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names,
and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded
voters to support a write-in candidate instead.
In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea
that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."
It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones, which based its story
on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious creation, Hamilton 68. -
RT
Moore ended up losing the Alabama special election by a slim margin of just
In other words: In November 2017 – when Moore and his Democratic opponent were in a bitter fight to win over voters – Morgan
openly promoted the theory that Russian bots were supporting Moore's campaign . A year later – after being caught red-handed orchestrating
a self-described "false flag" operation – Morgan now says that his team never thought that the bots were Russian and have no idea
what their purpose was . Did he think no one would notice? -
RT
Disinformation warrior @ jonathonmorgan attempts to control
damage by lying. He now claims the "false flag operation" never took place and the botnet he promoted as Russian-linked (based
on phony Hamilton68 Russian troll tracker he developed) wasn't Russian https://www.
newknowledge.com/blog/about-ala bama
Even more strange is that Scott Shane - the journalist who wrote the New York Times piece exposing the Alabama "Russian bot" scheme,
knew about it for months after speaking at an event where the organizers bragged about the false flag on Moore .
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey
Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to
suppress Republican votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hrt Moore. He dubbed it "Project
Birmingham." - RT
Shane told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, though hid behind a nondisclosure agreement at the request of American
Engagement Technologies (AET). He instead chose to spin the New Knowledge "false flag" operation on Moore as "limited Russian tactics"
which were part of an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 - and which had no effect on the election.
New Knowledge suggested that the false flag operation was simply a "research project," which Morgan suggested was designed "to
better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation."
While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard
to give his "false flag" more credibility – misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was fake.
New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which
announced last week that five
accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
- RT
They knew exactly what they were doing
While Morgan and New Knowledge sought to frame the "Project Birmingham" as a simple research project, a leaked copy of the operation's
after-action report reveals that they knew exactly what they were doing .
"We targeted 650,000 like AL voters, with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification
and targeted advertising," reads the report published by entrepreneur and executive coach Jeff Giesea.
The rhetorical question remains, why did the MSM drop this election meddling story like a hot rock after the initial headlines
faded away?
criminal election meddling, but then who the **** is going to click on some morons tactic and switch votes?
anyone basing any funding, whether it is number of facebook hits or attempted mind games by egotistical cuck soyboys needs a serious
psychological examination. fake news is fake BECAUSE IT ISNT REAL AND DOES NOT MATTER TO ANYONE but those living in the excited misery
of their tiny bubble world safe spaces. SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CON AND IS NOT IMPORTANT OR RELEVANT TO ANYONE.
far more serious is destroying ballots, writing in ballots without consent, bussing voters around to vote multiple times in different
districts, registering dead voters and imperosnating the corpses, withholding votes until deadlines pass - making them invalid.
Herdee , 10 minutes ago
NATO on behalf of the Washington politicians uses the same bullsh*t propaganda for continual war.
Mugabe , 20 minutes ago
Yup "PROJECTION"...
Yippie21 , 21 minutes ago
None of this even touches on the 501c3 or whatever that was set up , concerned Alabama voters or somesuch, and was funneled
a **** load of money to be found to be in violation of the law AFTER the election and then it all just disappeared. Nothing to
see here folks, Democrat won, let's move on. There was a LOT of " tests " for the smart-set in that election and it all worked.
We saw a bunch of it used in 2018, especially in Texas with Beto and down-ballot races. Democrats cleaned up like crazy in Texas,
especially in Houston.
2020 is going to be a hot mess. And the press is in on it, and even if illegal or unseemly things are done, as long as Democrats
win, all good... let's move on. Crazy.
LetThemEatRand , 21 minutes ago
The fact that MSM is not covering this story -- which is so big it truly raises major questions about the entire Russiagate
conspiracy including why Mueller was appointed in the first place -- is proof that they have no interest in journalism or the
truth and that they are 100% agenda driven liars. Not that we needed more proof, but there it is anyway.
Oldguy05 , 19 minutes ago
Dimz corruption is a nogo. Now if it were conservatives.......
CosineCosineCosine , 23 minutes ago
I'm not a huge fan, but Jimmy Dore has a cathartic and entertaining 30 minutes on this farce. Well worth the watch:
Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election
(not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign).
By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we
are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were,
actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling."
The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all
on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people
who have a vested interest in convincing us its true).
dead hobo , 30 minutes ago
I've been watching Scandal on Netflix. Still only in season 2. Amazing how nothing changes.They nailed it and memorialized
it. The MSM are useful idiots who are happy to make money publicizing what will sell the best.
chunga , 30 minutes ago
The media is biased and sucks, yup.
The reason the reds lost the house is because they went along with this nonsense and did nothing about it, like frightened
baby chipmunks.
JRobby , 33 minutes ago
Only when "the opposition" does it is it illegal. Total totalitarian state wannabe stuff.
divingengineer , 22 minutes ago
Amazing how people can contort reality to justify their own righteous cause, but decry their opposition for the EXACT same
thing. See trump visit to troops signing hats as most recent proof. If DJT takes a piss and sprinkles the seat, it's a crime.
DarkPurpleHaze , 33 minutes ago
They're afraid to expose themselves...unlike Kevin Spacey. Trump or Whitaker will expose this with one signature. It's
coming.
divingengineer , 20 minutes ago
Spacey has totally lost it. See his latest video, it will be a powerful piece of evidence for an insanity plea.
CosineCosineCosine , 10 minutes ago
Disagree strongly. I think it was excellent - perhaps you misunderstood the point? 6 minutes Diana Davidson look at it clarifies
'Trickle down effect' - the favourite buzzword of neoliberal supporters. I'd like to see
trickle down effect tried at the local pub on the taps by the local mp. Imagine what would
happen. Definitely doesn't pass the pub test.
Add to this that Trump changed his election slogan from "make America [ "working class"]
great again" to "make Amerca [financial oligarchy] great again"
The only problem is that 'America' does not exist. America is a part description of a
continent and I think we are talking about the USA (only one country on North American
soil) Why do the yanks always have to exaggerate their own importance like the Olympics
bloke who claimed he was robbed at gunpoint lol! Do the USAians actually have an
inferiority complex?
"... Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! ..."
"... the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites? ..."
"... Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth. ..."
"... He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI). ..."
"... This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine. ..."
"... That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" ..."
"... In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea: ..."
"... Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia? ..."
"... Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda ..."
"... Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures ..."
"... Russian information warfare - airbrushing reality ..."
"... Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria ..."
"... Russian penetration in Germany ..."
"... Russian conspiracy theory and foreign policy ..."
"... The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it. ..."
"... Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart. ..."
"... McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters. ..."
"... Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force. ..."
"... It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit ..."
"... This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state. ..."
"... it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy. ..."
"... It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism. ..."
"... Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art. ..."
"... Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller? ..."
"... Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians. ..."
"... Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM ..."
"... The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions. ..."
"... right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with ..."
"... Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy. ..."
"... 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy ..."
Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation
program !!! How many billions is that guna save us all ! not to mention lives saved.
Wrong JR. It seems quite the obvious that the big boy in the west, the US, would seem to be
the one spearheading the whole globalist agenda.
But this is a retarded proposition.
The US is nothing more than a Golem. It has been reduced to somnambulism and hijacked,
utilized for the ends of these Non-National elites. Sure, like many posters here, it feels good
to blame the US for everything. But the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its
hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but
ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global
elites?
Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power
brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of
Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they
are fighting the commies.
Muntadhar al-Zaidi was arrested and tortured for it...
"They broke my teeth, my nose, my leg, they electrocuted me, lashed me, they would beat me,
they even broke a table or a chair over my back. I don't know, they had my eyes covered,"
al-Zaidi recalled. "This was one thing I never experienced before. Torture by the
authorities, by the rule of law."
I wish it had been a hand grenade.
The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading
anti-Russian propaganda and with influencing the public, military and governments of a number
of countries. What follows is an incomplete analysis of the third batch of the Initiative's
papers which was
dumped yesterday.
Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot
Integrity Initiative . The
Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".
Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government
Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.
Among the documents
lifted by some anonymous person from the servers of the Institute we find several papers
about Donnelly as well as some memos written by him. They show a russophobe mind with a lack of
realistic strategic thought.
There is also
a file (pdf) with a copy of his passport:
From his
curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army
Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA
Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office
(FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth.
He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries
General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises
the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's
Stabilisation Unit which
is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the
Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI).
During his time as military intelligence analyst in the 1980s Donnelly wrote several books
and papers about the Soviet Union and its military.
Our problem is that, for the last 70 years or so, we in the UK and Europe have been living in
a safe, secure rules-based system which has allowed us to enjoy a holiday from history.
... ... ...
Unfortunately, this state of affairs is now being challenged. A new paradigm of conflict
is replacing the 19th & 20th Century paradigm.
... ... ...
In this new paradigm, the clear distinction which most people have been able to draw
between war and peace, their expectation of stability and a degree of predictability in life,
are being replaced by a volatile unpredictability, a permanent state of instability in which
war and peace become ever more difficult to disentangle . The "classic" understanding of
conflict being between two distinct players or groups of players is giving way to a world of
Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big
corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each
other in a "war of all against all". The Western rules-based system, which most westerners
take for granted and have come to believe is "normal", is under attack from countries and
organisations which wish to replace our system with theirs. This is not a crisis which faces
us; it is a strategic challenge, and from several directions simultaneously.
In reality the "Western rules-based system", fully implemented after the demise of the
Soviet Union, is a concept under which 'the west' arbitrarily makes up rules and threatens to
kill anyone who does not follow them. Witness the wars against Serbia, the war on Iraq, the
destruction of Libya, the western led coup in Ukraine and the war by Jihadi proxies against the
people of Syria and Iraq. None of these actions were legal under international law. Demanding a
return to strict adherence to the rule of international law, as Russia,
China and others now do, it is not an attempt to replace "our system with theirs". It is a
return to the normal state of global diplomacy. It is certainly not a "Darwinian
competition".
In October 2016 Donnelly had a Private
Discussion with Gen Sir Richard Barrons (pdf), marked as personal and confidential. Barrons
is a former commander of the British Joint Forces Command. The nonsensical top line is: "The UK
defence model is failing. UK is at real risk."
Some interesting nuggets again reveal a paranoid mindset. The talk also includes some
realistic truthiness about the British military posture Barrons and others created:
There has been a progressive, systemic demobilisation of NATO militarily capability and a run
down of all its members' defences
...
We are seeing new / reinvented ways of warfare – hybrid , plus the reassertion of hard
power in warfare
...
Aircraft Carriers can be useful for lots of things, but not for war v China or Russia, so we
should equip them accordingly. ...
The West no longer has a military edge on Russia. ...
Our Nuclear programme drains resources from conventional forces and hollows them out. ...
The UK Brigade in Germany is no good as a deterrent against Russia. ...
Our battalion in Estonia are hostages, not a deterrent. ...
The general laments the lack of influence the military has on the British government and its
people. He argues for more government financed think tank research that can be fed back into
the government:
So, if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a
way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political
space. We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. NB We did this in
the 1930s
My conclusion is that it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something
dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside
government .
...
We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national
capabilities / capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to
do it? We need this debate NOW. There is not a moment to be lost.
This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper
into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken
from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine.
That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative
bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the
public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance
indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for
the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia"
.
Asking for government finance to influence the government to take a "tougher stand towards
Russia" seems a bit circular. But this is consistent with the operation of other Anglo-American
think tanks and policy initiatives in which one part of the government, usually the hawkish
one, secretly uses NGO's and think-tanks to lobby other parts of the government to support
their specific hobbyhorse and budget.
Here is how it is done. The 'experts' of the 'charity' Institute for Statecraft and
Integrity Initiative
testified
in the British parliament. While they were effectively paid by the government they lobbied
parliament under the cover of their NGO. This circularity also allows to use international
intermediates. Members of the Spanish cluster
(pdf) of the Initiative
testified in the British Parliament about the Catalan referendum and related allegations
against Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. (It is likely that this testimony led to the change
in the position of the Ecuadorian government towards Assange.)
Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are
incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. Chris Donnelly, despite a life long
experience in military intelligence, has obviously zero competence as a military strategist or
planner.
In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested
Military
measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea:
If I were in charge I would get the following implemented asp
Set up a cordon sanitaire across the Crimean Isthmus and on the coast N. of Crimea with
troops and mines
Mine Sevastopol harbour/bay. Can be done easily using a car ferry if they have no
minelayers. Doesn't need a lot of mines to be effective. They could easily buy some
mines.
Get their air force into the air and activate all their air defences. If they can't fly
the Migs on the airfield in Crimea those should be destroyed as a gesture that they are
serious. Going "live" electronically will worry the Russians as the Ukrainians have the
same electronic kit. If the Russians jam it they jam their own kit as well.
Ukraine used to have some seriously important weapons, such as a big microwave
anti-satellite weapon. If they still have this, they should use it.
The government needs a Strategic communication campaign-so far everything is coming
from Moscow. They need to articulate a long-term vision that will inspire the people,
however hard that is to do. Without it, what have people to fight for?
They should ask the west now to start supplying Oil and gas. There is plenty available
due to the mild winter.
I am trying to get this message across
Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the
frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures"
would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally
stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's
pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia?
Such half-assed thinking is typical for the Institute and its creation of propaganda. One of
its employees/contractors is Hugh Benedict Nimmo who the Initiative paid to produce
anti-Russian propaganda that was then disseminated through various western publications.
According to the (still very incomplete) Initiative files Ben Nimmo
received a monthly consultancy fee of £2.500 between December 2015 and March 2016. In
August 2016 he sent an invoice
(pdf) of £5,000 for his "August work on Integrity Initiative". A
Production Timetable (pdf) for March to June 2016 lists the following Nimmo outputs and
activities:
17 March Atlantic Council: Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda , Ben
Nimmo
21 March Newsweek: Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures , Ben
Nimmo
22 March, UK House of Commons: Russian information warfare - airbrushing
reality , Jonathan Eyal and Ben Nimmo
Mid May: Atlantic Council: Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria .
Ben Nimmo et al (Major study)
Early May timeframe: Russian penetration in Germany , Harold Elletson, Ben
Nimmo et al - 10,000 words
June timeframe: Atlantic Council, major report on Russian conspiracy theory and
foreign policy , Ben Nimmo (potential launch events in London and / or
Washington)
End-June: Mapping Russia's whole influence machine , Ben Nimmo - 10,000
words
One wonders how often Ben Nimmo double billed his various sponsors for these copy-paste
fantasy pamphlets.
In late 2017 Ben Nimmo and Guardian 'journalist' Carole Cadwalladr disseminated
allegations that Russia used Facebook ads to influence the Brexit decision. Cadwalladr even
received a price for her work. Unfortunately the price was not revoked when Facebook revealed
that "Russia linked" accounts had spend a total of 97 cents on Brexit ads. It is unexplained
how that was enough to achieve their alleged aim.
Cadwalladr is listed
as a speaker (pdf) at a "skill sharing" conference the Institute organized for November 1-2
under the headline: "Tackling Tools of Malign Influence - Supporting 21st Century
Journalism".
This year Ben Nimmo became notorious for claiming that
several real persons with individual opinions were "Russian trolls". As we
noted :
Nimmo, and several other dimwits quoted in the piece, came to the conclusion that Ian56 is
a Kremlin paid troll, not a real person. Next to Ian56 Nimmo 'identified' other 'Russian
troll' accounts:
One particularly influential retweeter (judging by the number of accounts which then
retweeted it) was @ValLisitsa, which posts in English and Russian. Last year, this account
joined the troll-factory #StopMorganLie campaign.
Had Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson, had some decent education he would have
know that @ValLisitsa, aka Valentina Lisitsa , is a famous
American- Ukrainian pianist. Yes, she sometimes tweets in Russian language to her many fans
in Russia and the Ukraine. Is that now a crime? The videos of her world wide
performances on Youtube have more than 170 million views. It is absurd to claim that she is a
'Russian troll' and to insinuate that she is taking Kremlin money to push 'Russian troll'
opinions.
The
Institute for Statecraft Expert Team (pdf) list several people with military intelligence
backgrounds as well as many 'journalists'. One of them is:
Mark Galeotti
Specialist in Russian strategic thinking; the application of Russian disinformation and
hybrid warfare; the use of organised crime as a weapon of hybrid warfare. Educational and
mentoring skills, including in a US and E European environment, and the corporate world.
Russian linguist
Galeotti is the infamous inventor of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' and of the propaganda about
Russia's alleged 'hybrid' warfare. In February 2013 the Russian General Valery Gerasimov, then
Russia's chief of the General Staff, published a paper that analysed the way the 'west' is
waging a new type of war by mixing propaganda, proxy armies and military force into one unified
operation.
Galeotti claimed that Gerasimov's analysis of 'western' operations was a new Russian
doctrine of 'hybrid war'. He invented the term 'Gerasimov doctrine' which then took off in the
propaganda realm. In February 2016 the U.S. Army Military Review
published a longer analysis of Gerasimov's paper that debunked the nonsense (pdf). It
concluded:
Gerasimov's article is not proposing a new Russian way of warfare or a hybrid war, as has
been stated in the West.
But anti-Russian propagandist
repeated Galeotti's nonsense over and over. Only in March 2018, five years after Galeotti
invented the 'Germasimov doctrine' and two years after he was thoroughly debunked, he finally
recanted
:
Everywhere, you'll find scholars, pundits, and policymakers talking about the threat the
"Gerasimov doctrine" -- named after Russia's chief of the general staff -- poses to the West.
It's a new way of war, "an expanded theory of modern warfare," or even "a vision of total
warfare."
There's one small problem. It doesn't exist. And the longer we pretend it does, the longer
we misunderstand the -- real, but different -- challenge Russia poses.
I feel I can say that because, to my immense chagrin, I created this term, which has since
acquired a destructive life of its own, lumbering clumsily into the world to spread fear and
loathing in its wake.
The Institute for Statecraft's "Specialist in Russian strategic thinking", an expert of
disinformation and hybrid warfare, created a non-existing Russian doctrine out of hot air and
used it to press for anti-Russian measures. Like Ben Nimmo he is an aptly example of the
quality of the Institute's experts and work.
One of the newly released documents headlined CND Gen list 2
(pdf) (CND= Chris Nigel Donnelly) includes the names and email addresses of a number of
military, government and think tank people. The anonymous releaser of the documents claims that
the list is "of employees who attended a closed-door meeting with the white helmets". (No
document has been published yet that confirms this.) One name on the list is of special
interest:
Pablo Miller was the handler and friend of Sergej Skripal, the British double agent who was
"novichoked" in Salisbury. When Miller's name was mentioned in the press the British government
issued a D-Notice to suppress its further publishing,
Pablo Miller, a British MI6 agent, had
recruited Sergej Skripal. The former MI6 agent in Moscow, Christopher Steele, was also
involved in the case. Skripal was caught by the Russian security services and went to jail.
Pablo Miller, the MI6 recruiter, was also the handler of Sergej Skripal after he was released
by Russia in a spy swap. He reportedly also lives in Salisbury. Both Christopher Steele and
Pablo Miller work for Orbis Business Intelligence which created the "Dirty Dossier" about
Donald Trump.
At the very beginning of the Skripal affair, before there was any talk of 'Novichok', we
asked
if Skripal was involved in creating the
now debunked "Dirty Dossier" and if that was a reason for certain British insiders to move
him out of the way:
Here are some question:
Did Skripal help Steele to make up the "dossier" about Trump?
Were Skripal's old connections used to contact other people in Russia to ask about
Trump dirt?
Did Skripal threaten to talk about this?
If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me,
then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots
of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and
running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very
dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia
looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.
The
most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth
reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the
Initiative commissioned
such research (pdf) and paid for it.
After two years the Muller investigation found zero
evidence for the 'collusion' between Russia and the Trump campaign that the fake Steele
dossier suggested. The whole collusion claim is a creation by 'former' British intelligence
operatives who likely acted on request of U.S. intelligence leaders Clapper and Brennan. How
deep was the Russia specialist Chris Donnelly and his Institute for Statecraft involved in this
endeavor?
Checking through all the released Initiative papers and lists one gets the impression of a
secret military intelligence operation, disguised as a public NGO. Financed by millions of
government money the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative work under a charity
label to create and disseminate disinformation to the global public and back into the
government and military itself.
The paranoia about Russia, which does way less harm than the 'western' "rules based system"
constantly creates, is illogical and not based on factual analysis. It creates Russia as an
"enemy" when it is none. It hypes a "threat" out of hot air. The only people who profit from
this are the propagandists and the companies and people who back them.
The Initiatives motto "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation" is a truly Orwellian
construct. By disseminating propaganda and using it to influence the public, parliament, the
military and governments, the Institute actively undermines the democratic process that depends
on the free availability of truthful information.
It should be shut down immediately.
---
Note: There have already been attempts to delete the released files from the Internet. A
complete archive of all Integrity Initiative files published so far is here . Should
the public links cease to work, you can contact the author of this blog for access to private
backups.
Aside from the fact that the government itself funds this organization, the creepiest thing
about it is that the "non-governmental individuals" that help fund it are the same people
that run the think tanks: a bunch of Rhodesians.
"Such half-assed thinking...Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of
Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in
Crimea. Those "gestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear
power which were legally stationed in Crimea."
It sure seems like this half-assed thinking isn't just the domain of a fringe element, but
is increasingly mainstream among the elites. Doesn't bode well.
Thank you B. It is truly amazing to watch the UK elites unravel as they have become truly
unhinged by their own connivances. It is a bad joke at the commoner's expense that they
propagandize and demonize in the name of the 'Western rules based system' even as they are
busy shooting themselves in both feet by committing Brexit. Although there are legitimate
grievances with the EU, it is clear that Brexit is a Tory power play that is all politics and
zero governance. Alas, Perfidious Albion has succumbed to Mad Cow disease.
What remains mysterious (not really) is why --if these initiatives are truly meant to save
and strengthen democracy-- they aren't proudly proclaimed and advertised, in the open,
transparent, for everyone one to see and judge, like an adult democracy that they claim to
stand for might want to debate and form an opinion on.
The fact that it isn't, is testimony to the nefarious anti-democratic, authoritarian and
totalitarian streak that runs in between every two lines that they put on paper.
McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal
practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been
MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being
sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow
vest protesters.
Every time one scratches the surface of such smears, it seems there is a connection to
US/British MIC, Ukraine, or Israel - essentially, those who benefit (financially or
otherwise) from greater tensions with Russia.
At what point does neocon doubling-down on failed foreign policy become more than just
picking our pockets and warping our minds? At what point do they start killing our kids in
another unnecessary war?
Cold War has been over for nearly 30 years. It's time enough for Western countries to send
into real retirement every single cold-warrior, their time is over, their mindset is quaint
and useless, if not downright dangerous and counter-productive.
Thank you 'b'
I'll just say -- - there is safety in numbers ! Already valuable information, important to
the public good and democracy has been spread wide enough to be certain, this gene won't go
back in the bottle ! D notice or no ! And by doing that, has made the fearless journalists
and investigators lives all the safer ! Safety in numbers, spread this wide everyone?
Thanks for the continued exposition of this story b.....may it go viral
I want to comment on some of the wording you quote Donnelly as writing
" .....is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players
– nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and
so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all".
"
This is Donnelly's characterization of a world in which finance is a public utility
instead of the private jackboot that it currently is. This is the delusion these people have
been led to believe.
So instead of his "war of all against all" that some might call human cooperation on the
basis of merit we have a mythical God of Mammon religion that continues to instantiate the
private finance led world of the West with it parasitic elite and fawning acolytes.
Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the
UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would
have responded with force.
Thankfully it wasn't done but the fact this was even discussed by senior figures confirms
that there was at least a sizable minority pushing for it. 30 years after the fall of the
Soviet Union, the Western elite have truly abandoned all sense of reality and embraced a
consequence free view of the use of force. After Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya they haven't
learned a thing! I'm becoming more and more certain that a peaceful transition to the
multipolar world is impossible and that it will only happen after the US or one of its'
vassal states blunder into a proxy war and get utterly and comprehensively defeated, forcing
a radical world realignment, but with nuts like John Bolton and the neocons in the Whitehouse
it could easily lead to a nuclear war
This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the
British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and
Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state.
exiled off mainstreet , Dec 15, 2018 2:22:39 PM |
link
As an aside this happens to be "Bill of Rights Day", the anniversary of the passage of the
Bill of Rights as amendments to the yankee constitution. This reveals again how far from the
rule of law the yankee imperium, now the key element of the British Empire they supposedly
seceded from, has strayed, since it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was
engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy.
It has also ensured that the victorious candidate has been neutered and faithfully follows
the world control line put forward by the five eyes spy-masters making up the empire in its
present iteration. This also shows what a farce the regime, based on the rule of law, now
presents.
It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's
kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it
is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic
and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes
fascism.
The "Western-based rules system" described in this article reminds me of a game called
"Calvin Ball" which appeared in the former comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes." In the strip
Calvin a wildly imaginative adolescent boy who plays a free-form of football with his
imaginary pet toy tiger (Hobbes). Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to
suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art.
b, I downloaded the zip file, and had also downloaded all the PDF's from pdf-archive
yesterday. There are more files in the zip, but the following were on pdf-archive and are NOT
in the zip:
integrity-france.pdf (this is a dud, looks like html, prob. response from a failed
attempt to put a file up on pdf-archive)
Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly
linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller?
Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either
generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. "
Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11,
with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians.
Emmanuel Goldstein , Dec 15, 2018 4:21:51 PM |
link
The transcript of his conversation with the general shows very starkly that we would last
about two minutes in a nuclear exchange, but about half a day in a conventional one. No
reserves, no equipment stockpiles, a navy consisting of two fat targets, neither of which has
any aircraft and some destroyers which have propulsion problems, a smallish air force and
very small numbers of troops. The tripwire force in Estonia is wholly sacrificial. In fact he
lays bare the whole fallacy of biting the bear. With the armed forces in the state he
describes, and with the recruitment and retention problems, wouldn't it be better, as one
defense minister said, 'to go away and shut up'...
Thanks b and especially the link to Valentina Lisitsa who I had tinkling in the background as
I read your grand expose. These people are seditious morons, parasites infesting the state
apparatus. Shut these fools down. Nice touch publishing the passport image. I can just
imagine the frenzied aftermath of Kit's visit to the basement. Big thanks to anonymous and
Craig Murray too. Their IT personel are probably visiting Devil's Island or Diego Garcia as
we read.
Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to
spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate
government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM
The British and US connections to loot and evade Russian riches and funds are exposed, as
well as the origin of sanctions, supposed "alt-media" "truth-seakers" like Meduza...or
supposed "pro-Russian" US intelligence operatives married to Russian women....
Amongst the many issues he usually passes over trying to make himself the fool, while at
the same time trying to convince us of the oustanding intellectual capacities, honesty and
classy stance of him and his "comittee"...
For that travel, to end bluntly and in such public view siding with the nazis of the "Azov
Regiment" and other criminals of war, there was no need of so many saddlebags, so as
pretending that the people who supported Trump as if there was no tomorrow, were enlightened
people who only wanted to rescue "America" for the "Americans", as if there would not be a
sign of blatant exceptionalism in appropriating of the term "Americans" for themselves in
such a huge continent....
In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of
chicken with Russia.
The FP pre-Soviet collapse consisted of one MO: GET THE COMMIES!
Since then, Neocons and Neolibs which are frontmen for this Non-National Globalized Elite,
have hijacked our country's military and have steered it to a Global agenda where dominance
in the ME means either superiority for these EURO elites or Vassal-hood.
The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse
which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism
(Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats
where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque
(less defensible) reasons and missions.
The average American could care less about the ME and the US would be 1000x better-off
reverting to an isolationist stance.
But this will not happen so long as Nationalism in the US and UK is repeatedly put-down.
It seems as though there is going to be another Brexit vote. Does anyone doubt that
miraculously the people by then will have second-guessed their will to Brexit and so will
vote against it given another crack at a vote?
Import IT workers and staff science faculties from abroad w dual citizens while kkr
buys wafer labs that outsource to mainland for manufacturing
Cry boo hoo hoo to wake up with indigenous capacity decades behind world players like
Russia, China, India, etc who operate on fractional budgets...
But this drama also exposes ashura/emigods intra necine warfare: right after 2016 US
elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation.
Seems that veil has been dispensed with , but it invites other questions, insofar as UK
is Her Majesty's Service, so are we to read this with Prince Harry or Philip's culture, or a
"consent by silence") in mind? Defending crown or EU "Saturnus Sattelitus"?
Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking,
setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right
about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry.
That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise
of free markets and democracy.
Good to see Trump finally give it a face... 'you need freedom and security now pay up
bitches'
In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of
chicken with Russia.... Globalist Agenda
I think the opposite is true.
The US-led Empire and their globalist sycophants seek to weaken Europe so that it can not
act independently in its own best interests. They will do what ever they can to ensure that
the vassals never join with Russia/China and the SCO.
Russian scare-mongering and immigration have been effective in furthering this agenda.
Also note: what USA has termed "new Europe" - eastern European states like Poland and Ukraine
- are solidly pro-American.
"... Having said that, still worrying that the CIA devotes time to finding out what Maureen Dowd might write! ..."
"... It is true that Mazzetti's emails with the CIA do not shock or surprise in the slightest. But that's the point. With some noble journalistic exceptions (at the NYT and elsewhere), these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as "watchdogs" over them." ..."
"... A few years ago the New York Times reported that there had been a successful coup in Venezuela - toppling Chavez. The story turned out to be inaccurate. The NY Times finally revealed their source - US State Dept... who were using NYT to give critical mass and support to their dream end to a thorn in their side. ..."
"... The New York Times-all the news the CIA decided is fit to print. ..."
Great column. The NYT does do some good things, such as give us Paul Krugman three times a
week, some important reporting and articulate editorial opposition to the republican
nightmare, but they are much, much too close to the government, as evidenced by their asking
for permission to print news the White House disapproves of.
They are also devoted to denying their readers an accurate picture of American foreign
policy. I frequently comment on threads there and my contributions nearly always get posted,
except when I use the word empire. I have never succeeded in getting that word onto their
website , nor have I seen it make it into anyone else's comment. It is like the famous
episode of Fawlty Towers. "Don't mention the empire.'' Stories and commentaries sometimes
describe specific aspects of US policy in negative terms, but connecting the dots is
obviously forbidden.
Bill Keller is like a character from The Wire. The perfect example of the kind of
authority-revering careerist that butt-kisses his way to the top in institutions.
most of the story seems to come down to the usual kind of thing we see from Judicial
Watch - manufactured outrage over almost nothing
I think part of the outrage here is the extent to which it's almost hard to muster the
energy because it's become so much the norm for the NYTimes to be in bed with whoever is in
power in Washington at any given time. It's the sort of thing that should be "they did
what!!!!?" but instead it's "yeah, well, Judith Miller, Wen Ho Lee, etcetc ... >long
drawn-out sigh<." So, perhaps there is some manufacturing of outrage, but not unreasonably
so if you take a step back and look at what's going on.
Having said that, still worrying that the CIA devotes time to finding out what Maureen
Dowd might write!
"This cynicism – oh, don't be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely
what enables such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.
It is true that Mazzetti's emails with the CIA do not shock or surprise in the slightest.
But that's the point. With some noble journalistic exceptions (at the NYT and elsewhere),
these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger –
between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as
"watchdogs" over them."
Once a corrupt practice is sufficiently perceived as commonplace, then it is transformed
in people's minds from something objectionable into something acceptable. Indeed, many
people believe it demonstrates their worldly sophistication to express indifference toward
bad behavior by powerful actors on the ground that it is so prevalent. This cynicism
– oh, don't be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely what enables
such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.
This is extremely important, and manifestly true. One runs into such people all the
time.
I haven't read any comments yet, but it would not surprise me to find some of them already
here.
Even worse, I've done it myself on occasion, most recently just the other day on a Cif
thread. Though I will say this; this kind of bullshit is not so much "transformed in people's
minds from something objectionable into something acceptable ", as grudgingly
transformed into something unstoppable , but still toxic and objectionable.
That's mighty thin gruel as an alibi, but the reality for a lot of ordinary working people
is they get fucking tired of it, and yes, they do get discouraged, then cynical and hardened
to it all.
That, of course, is part of the plan.
I'm unaware of a "source" being a person who requests documents from the reporter for doing
damage control on behalf of the boss. (Not that I'd worry about Dowd either.) How exactly is
this secret national intel? I'm glad this came out. We are being manipulated by the govt.
through its minions in the media. The entire incident, from the glorious movie to this
revelation is a fraud.
I found this interesting example of media manipulation at nakedcapitalsim.org:
"Pro-marijuana group endorses Obama The Hill. This purported group, which claims 10,000
members, appears to be just one guy with a PO Box and a press list. But don't count on your
average reporter digging deeper than the news release.":
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/links-82812.html#717LX1oL7dfPsb7I.99
The breadth and depth of propagandizing of citizens is astounding. I wonder what it's like
to have so little integrity. What kind of person so readily sells out their fellow citizen
with lies? It's scary because people read these things and they have no idea they are lies.
People are making decisions based on manufactured "facts". It's very difficult to find actual
information and I can tell you from personal experience, Obama supporters cling desperately
to "authorities" like the NYTimes to maintain their belief in the goodness of dear
leader.
This weird big-brother relationship goes both ways.
A few years ago the New York Times reported that there had been a successful coup in
Venezuela - toppling Chavez. The story turned out to be inaccurate.
The NY Times finally revealed their source - US State Dept... who were using NYT to give
critical mass and support to their dream end to a thorn in their side.
Nice investigative journalism. A couple of years ago the NYTmade a big deal of publicly
firing a low level writer for making up articles from his NY apt when he was supposed to be
in the field. He was hardly the worst of the bunch.
Great article and thankfully I do not trust big newspapers in the USA especially the New York
Times since it has being caught lying about Weapons of Mass Destructions in Iraq to justify
the Iraq War. Judith Millar was the liar then.
Read CounterPunch and smaller publications for the truth.
The NYT is all about selling ads on a Sunday. It really is a corrupt rag.
"this didn't come from me and please delete after you read." -- Mazzetti
This could serve as the epitaph for our times. This (Shock and Awe, drones, the Apache
Massacre, Guantanamo, killing children, etc.) didn't come from US (even though it did)
because ...our crimes can be deleted through that magical "we're too big and bad to fail"
button.
See, nothing to worry about.
(Except future historians who will not be blindfolded and gagged and who will
therefore have some choice things to say about the journalists who were fully complicit
in the crimes of this lawless era.)
They are not only presstitutes, they are degenerative presstitutes...
Notable quotes:
"... I love how the NYT mentions how no public evidence has emerged, to skirt around the fact that if there were internal evidence (from some gov agency or private citizen) it would've leaked by now. There is no such thing as evidence which hasn't been leaked in an alleged scandal of this size. ..."
"... Further, the corporate news media gave Trump something like $2 billion dollars worth of advertising in free airtime. That's a much larger impact -- around 20 times Clinton's campaign costs IIRC -- than any alleged hacked e-mails (though the e-mails were leaked not hacked, and that played a role. As well as the FBI's investigation into Clinton's illegal email server which was public fact at the time) or social media interference. ..."
"... Banks, defense contractors and oil companies decide who the President is and what their Cabinet will look like (see Obama's leaked CitiBank memo "recommending" executives to his 2009 Cabinet). Russians and the American people do not. ..."
"... John Pilger's essay: Hold the Front Page, the Reporters are Missing appropriately describes this BigLie media item b dissected, while also observing, "Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years," prior to providing Why this is so. ..."
"... but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. ..."
"... The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo. [My emphasis] ..."
"... on journalism and it being usurped by social media behemoths google, facebook, twitter and etc - i found this cbc radio) interview last night worth recommending.. ..."
"... That New York Times piece was amazing. Belief anything the US Gov't/anti-Russian lobby and other nut cases tell you, unquestioningly. Investigative journalism at its best! ..."
"... Accept the most stupid evidence with blinking an eye. Even if one believes the collusion argument, try to be a bit critical. And always believe that a GRU hacker will put Felix Dzerzinnsky's name in their program. For heaven's sake he was Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, not the GRU which was military intelligence. ..."
"After the security briefing and everyone cleared out, McCabe shut the door to
Priebus's office. This is very weird, thought Priebus, who was standing by his
desk.
"You know this story in The New York Times?" Priebus knew it all too well.
McCabe was referring to a recent Times story of February 14 that stated, "Phone records
and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's 2016
presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with
senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the elections, according to four
current and former American officials."
The story was one of the first bombs to go off about alleged Trump-Russian
connections after Flynn's resignation.
"It's total bullshit," McCabe said. "It's not true, and we want you to know
that. It's grossly overstated."
Oh my God, thought Priebus.
"Andrew," he said to the FBI deputy, "I'm getting killed."
The story about Russia and election meddling seemed to be running 24/7 on
cable news, driving Trump bananas and therefore driving Priebus bananas.
"This is crazy," Trump had told Priebus. "We've got to stop it. We need to
end the story."
McCabe had just walked in with a big gift, a Valentine's Day present. I'm
going to be the hero of this entire West Wing, Priebus thought.
"Can you help me?" Priebus asked. "Could this knockdown of the story be
made public?"
"Call me in a couple of hours," McCabe said. "I will ask around and I'll let
you know. I'll see what I can do."
Priebus practically ran to report to Trump the good news that the FBI would
soon be shooting down the Times story
Two hours passed and no call from McCabe. Priebus called him."I'm sorry, I can't," McCabe
said.
"There's nothing I can do about it. I tried, but if we start issuing comments on individual
stories, we'll be doing statements
every three days." The FBI could not become a clearinghouse for the accuracy of news stories.
If the FBI tried to debunk certain stories, a failure to comment could be seen as a
confirmation.
"Andrew, you're the one that came to my office to tell me this is a BS story,
and now you're telling me there's nothing you can do?"
McCabe said that was his position.
"This is insanity," Priebus said. "What am I supposed to do? Just suffer, bleed out?"
"Give me a couple more hours."
Nothing happened. No call from the FBI. Priebus tried to explain to Trump,
who was waiting for a recanting. It was another reason for Trump to distrust and
hate the FBI, a pernicious tease that left them dangling.
About a week later on February 24 CNN reported an exclusive: "FBI Refused
White House Request to Knock Down Recent Trump-Russia Story." Priebus
was cast as trying to manipulate the FBI for political purposes.
The White House tried and failed to correct the story and show that McCabe
had initiated the matter.
Four months later on June 8, Comey testified under oath publicly that the
original New York Times story on the Trump campaign aides' contacts with
senior Russian intelligence officials "in the main was not true."
The Mueller Hoax is unraveling.
Posted by: Sid2 | Sep 20, 2018 3:03:44 PM | 3
The Mueller Hoax is unraveling, and concommittently the NYT is digging in; ergo ,
the NYT is also unravelling! The NYT will permanently damage its reputation with its own
readers.
I love how the NYT mentions how no public evidence has emerged, to skirt around the
fact that if there were internal evidence (from some gov agency or private citizen) it
would've leaked by now. There is no such thing as evidence which hasn't been leaked in
an alleged scandal of this size.
Further, the corporate news media gave Trump something like $2 billion dollars worth of
advertising in free airtime. That's a much larger impact -- around 20 times Clinton's
campaign costs IIRC -- than any alleged hacked e-mails (though the e-mails were leaked
not hacked, and that played a role. As well as the FBI's investigation into Clinton's illegal
email server which was public fact at the time) or social media interference.
Banks, defense contractors and oil companies decide who the President is and what their
Cabinet will look like (see Obama's leaked CitiBank memo "recommending" executives to his
2009 Cabinet). Russians and the American people do not.
John Pilger's essay: Hold
the Front Page, the Reporters are Missing appropriately describes this BigLie media
item b dissected, while also observing, "Although journalism was always a loose extension of
establishment power, something has changed in recent years," prior to providing Why this is
so.
Want to highlight this additional bit from Pilger:
"Journalism students should study this [New book from Media Lens Propaganda Blitz ]
to understand that the source of "fake news" is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news,
or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal
journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects
it, and colludes with it.
The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has
failed to rehabilitate, is its echo. [My emphasis]
IMO, the bolded text well describes BigLie Media. I wonder what George Seldes would say
differently from Pilger if he were alive. Unfortunately, Pilger failed to include MoA as a
source in his short list of sites having journalistic integrity.
on journalism and it being usurped by social media behemoths google, facebook, twitter and
etc - i found
this cbc radio) interview last night worth recommending..
That New York Times piece was amazing. Belief anything the US Gov't/anti-Russian lobby and
other nut cases tell you, unquestioningly. Investigative journalism at its best!
Accept the most stupid evidence with blinking an eye. Even if one believes the collusion
argument, try to be a bit critical. And always believe that a GRU hacker will put Felix
Dzerzinnsky's name in their program. For heaven's sake he was Cheka, the forerunner of the
KGB, not the GRU which was military intelligence.
@outragedofacton - You have to be careful when you take on the banksters.
Abe Lincoln, John Kennedy and Hitler all tried or (in Kennedy's case planned) on the
issuance of money via the state circumventing the banks.
I hadn't realised the John WIlkes Booth and Lee Harey Oswald were bankers.
But I do always enjoy the scenes in Saving Private Ryan when thousands of
heavily-armed Goldman Sachs employees land on Omaha beach.
While he is not a central banker, I heard that
Lloyd Blankfein used to fly in Las Vegas on weekends and gamble in casino, as week was not enough for him
Notable quotes:
"... As central banks such as the FED and the ECB operate with insatiable greed and cannot be audited or regulated by any government body anywhere in the world, due to their charters having been set up that way, then bankers are free to meet secretly and plot depressions so as to gain full control over sovereign nations and manipulate markets so that their "chums and agents" in business can buy up assets and land in depressed economies -- while possible wars could also make corporations and banks more money as well! ..."
If private, stockholder-held central banks such as the FED and the FED-backed ECB were not
orchestrating this depression, and anybody who believed they were was a "wacko-nutcase
conspiracy theorist", then why do they keep repeating the same mistakes of forcing un-payable
bailout loans, collapsing banks, wiping out people's savings and then imposing austerity on
those nations year after year -- when it is clearly a failed policy?
Possible Answers :
1. Bank presidents are all ex-hippies who got hooked on LSD in the 70's and have not yet
recovered fully as their brains are still fried!
2. Central bankers have been recruited from insane asylums in both Europe and America in
government-sponsored programs to see whether blithering idiots are capable of running large,
international financial institutions.
3. All catastrophic events in the banking/business world, such as the derivative and
housing crash of 2008, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and The Great Depression of 1929-40
were totally random events that just occurred out of nowhere and central banks were caught
off guard -- leaving them no option but to play with their willies for years on end until a
major war suddenly happened to pull the whole world out of "bad times"!
4. As central banks such as the FED and the ECB operate with insatiable greed and
cannot be audited or regulated by any government body anywhere in the world, due to their
charters having been set up that way, then bankers are free to meet secretly and plot
depressions so as to gain full control over sovereign nations and manipulate markets so that
their "chums and agents" in business can buy up assets and land in depressed economies --
while possible wars could also make corporations and banks more money as well!
Please choose one of the possible answers from above and write a short 500 word essay on
whether it may or may not true -- using well-defined logical arguments. I expect your answers
in by Friday of this week as I would like to get pissed out of my mind at the pub on Saturday
night!
"... As for the self-licking ice cream cone that "mainstream media" have become, and how they overlook little peccadilloes like feeding at the government PR trough and helping Cheney and Bush attack Iraq, well – now, now – let's not be nasty. Here's how Jill Abramson, The New York Times Washington Bureau Chief from 2000 to 2003, while the Times acted as drum major for the war, lets Bob Woodward off the hook for his own abysmal investigative performance. ..."
"... Are we to believe that the Abramsons, Woodwards, et al. of the media elite simply missed the WMD deception? ..."
Dishonest (not "mistaken") intelligence greased the skids for the
widespread killing and maiming in the Middle East that began with the Cheney/Bush "Shock and
Awe" attack on Iraq. The media reveled in the unconscionable (but lucrative) buzzword
"shock-and-awe" for the initial attack. In retrospect, the real shock lies in the awesome
complicity of virtually all "mainstream media" in the leading false predicate for this war of
aggression – weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Only one major media group, Knight Ridder, avoided the presstitution, so to speak. It
faced into the headwinds blowing from the "acceptable" narrative, did the investigative
spadework, and found patriotic insiders who told them the truth. Karen Kwiatkowski, who had a
front-row seat at the Pentagon, was one key source for the intrepid Knight Ridder
journalists. Karen tells us that her actual role is accurately portrayed by the professional
actress in the Rob Reiner's film Shock and Awe .
Other members of the Sam Adams Associates were involved as well, but we will leave it to
them to share on Saturday evening how they helped Knight Ridder accurately depict the prewar
administration/intelligence/media fraud.
Intelligence Fraud
More recently, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper added a coda to
pre-Iraq-War intelligence performance. Clapper was put in charge of imagery analysis before
the Iraq war and was able to conceal the fact that there were were no weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq. In his memoir, Clapper writes that Vice President Cheney "was pushing"
for imagery analysis "to find (emphasis in original) the WMD sites."
For the record, none were found because there were none, although Clapper –
"eager to help" – gave it the old college try. Clapper proceeds, in a matter-of-fact
way, to blame not only pressure from the Cheney/Bush administration, but also "the
intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn't
really there."
Regarding those Clapper-produced "artist renderings" of "mobile production facilities for
biological agents"? Those trucks "were in fact used to pasteurize and transport milk,"
Clapper admits nonchalantly. When challenged on all
this while promoting his memoir at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, Clapper gave not the
slightest hint that it occurred to him his performance was somewhat lacking.
Media: Consequential Malfeasance
As for the self-licking ice cream cone that "mainstream media" have become, and how
they overlook little peccadilloes like feeding at the government PR trough and helping Cheney
and Bush attack Iraq, well – now, now – let's not be nasty. Here's how Jill
Abramson, The New York Times Washington Bureau Chief from 2000 to 2003, while the
Times acted as drum major for the war, lets Bob Woodward off the hook for his own abysmal
investigative performance.
Reviewing Woodward's recent book on the Trump White House, Abramson praises his "dogged
investigative reporting," noting that he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, and adds: "His work has
been factually unassailable." Then she (or perhaps an editor) adds in parenthesis: "(His
judgment is certainly not perfect, and he has been self-critical about his belief, based on
reporting before the Iraq War, that there were weapons of mass destruction.)"
Are we to believe that the Abramsons, Woodwards, et al. of the media elite simply
missed the WMD deception? (Hundreds of insiders knew of it, and some were willing to
share the truth with Knight Ridder and some other reporters.) Or did the media moguls simply
hunker down and let themselves be co-opted into helping Cheney/Bush start a major war? The
latter seems much more likely: and transparent attempts to cover up for one another, still,
is particularly sad – and consequential. Having suffered no consequences (for example,
in 2003 Abramson was promoted to Managing Editor of the NYT ), the "mainstream media"
appear just as likely to do a redux on Iran.
This is why there will be a premium on honest insider patriots, like Karen Kwiatkowski, to
rise to the occasion and try to prevent the next war. Bring along your insider friends on
Saturday; they need to know about Karen and about Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in
Intelligence.
Please do come and join us in congratulating Karen Kwiatkowski and the other SAAII members
who also helped Knight Ridder get the story right. (Those others shall remain unnamed until
Saturday.) And let insiders know this: they are not likely to hear about all this
otherwise.
Date : Saturday, December 8, 2018
Time : 6:30 PM Showing of film, "Shock and Awe" – 8:00 PM Presentation 17th
annual Sam Adams Award – Ceremony will include remarks by Larry Wilkerson, 7th SAAII
awardee (in 2009)
Place : The Festival Center, 1640 Columbia Road, NW, Washington, DC 20009
FREE : But RSVP, if you can, to give us an idea of how many to expect; email:
[email protected]
ALL WELCOME : Lots of space in main conference room
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as
Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily
Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). William
Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world
military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems
still used by NSA. Reprinted with permission from Consortium News .
So he screamed in the cafeteria and spilled his morning coffee. We all wondered what
happened to him and so we looked at his friend, and he told us that he must have read the
NYT, as that was his common reaction, a cry of pain and anguish and screams of "all lies, all
lies, all lies" whenever he reads the newspaper or watches the TV, esp. NYT.
Your article and the previous news about Manfort visiting Assange and the funny timing of
the same reminded me of this story.
The Western MSM is a lying scamming neoliberal propaganda machine.
Skripal events probably helped to advance this line of investigation. So in a way UK intelligence services put their own
stooge on the line of fire.
Notable quotes:
"... Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering ..."
"... The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively. ..."
"... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did. ..."
"... The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials. ..."
"... The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up. ..."
"... Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition. ..."
"... Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets. ..."
"... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
Kremlin
critic Bill Browder may have given the order for his employee Sergei Magnitsky to be poisoned
with a rare toxin in a Russian prison cell, along with other suspects in a tax-evasion probe
against him, prosecutors have said. British financier Browder was once a well-connected
investor in post-Soviet Russia, but he became a fugitive from the law in the country after
being accused of financial crimes. In the West, however, he is best known as the employer of
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who died in police custody while being investigated in
connection to the Browder case. Magnitsky's death became an international scandal, with Browder
accusing Russian officials of killing him.
Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with
Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new
criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his
extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money
laundering.
The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom
died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay
Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November
2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial
detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008
and September 2008, respectively.
Korobeinikov died after falling off a high-rise building, while the others had health
complications. The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a
rare water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being
poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths, while Korobeinikov had traces of it in his liver,
according to a post mortem. An investigation into four possible murders has been
opened.
Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within
months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely
that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony
against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told
journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia
didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but
several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did.
The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of
Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the
latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his
cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false
statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle
taxpayers' money involving Russian officials.
The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after
obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for
Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up.
Last year, Browder was sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison for tax evasion.
The trial was held in absentia and Moscow failed to have him extradited to serve the term. The
prosecutors said that they will renew attempts to get custody of Browder as part of the new
criminal case, using a UN convention on fighting transnational crime to have him arrested.
Browder is a US-born British financier, whose change of citizenship had the benefit of
allowing him to avoid paying tax on foreign earnings. However, he claimed the switch was
prompted by his family being persecuted in the US during the McCarthyism witch hunt, while the
UK seemed like the land of law and order.
He made a fortune in Russia during the country's chaotic transition to a market economy,
having invested before there was a stock exchange in Moscow. His Hermitage Capital Management
fund was a leading foreign investment entity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning
millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail
Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal
wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too
numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
The transformation of his public image from a financial shark into a human rights crusader
started when Browder himself entered the spotlight of Russian law enforcement. In 2007, the
foundation he ran was targeted by a probe into possible large-scale embezzlement of Russian
taxpayers' money. Magnitsky, who worked for Browder and had knowledge of his firms' finances,
was arrested and held in pre-trial detention until his death in November 2009. The British
businessman insisted that the entire case was fabricated and that Magnitsky had been
assassinated for exposing a criminal scheme involving several Russian tax officials.
The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of
Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for
his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by
Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin
as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic
competition.
Browder's new-found status as a rights advocate and self-proclaimed worst enemy of Putin
helps him deflect Russia's attempts to prosecute him. On several occasions, Russia filed
international arrest warrants against him with Interpol, which even led to his brief detention
in Spain last May.
Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part
of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian
government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was
apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its
architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to
US lawmakers and media outlets.
"... Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region ..."
"... The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies." ..."
The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" published a
trove of documents on November 5 which it claims exposes a UK-based psyop to create a " large-scale information secret service
" in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from
Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election.
The primary objective of the " Integrity Initiative " - established
in 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft - is "to provide a coordinated
Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare."
And while the notion of Russian disinformation has become the West's favorite new bogeyman to excuse things such as Hillary Clinton's
historic loss to Donald Trump, we note that "Anonymous" was called out by WikiLeaks in October 2016 as an FBI cutout, while the report
on the Integrity Initiative that Anonymous exposed comes from Russian state-owned network
RT - so it's anyone's guess whose 400lb
hackers are at work here.
Operating on a budget
of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists,
military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference
in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.
The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin,
with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to "change attitudes in Russia itself" as well as influencing
Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked
documents states. -
RT
The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway,
Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its
sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region .
The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts
embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government
agencies."
The initiative has received £168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and £250,000 from the
US State Department , the
documents allege.
Some of its purported members include British MPs and high-profile " independent" journalists with a penchant for anti-Russian
sentiment in their collective online oeuvre, as showcased by a brief glance at their Twitter feeds. -
RT
Noted examples of "inedependent" anti-Russia journalists:
Spanish "Op"
In one example of the group's activities, a "Moncloa Campaign" was successfully conducted by the group's Spanish cluster to block
the appointment of Colonel Pedro Banos as the director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took just seven-and-a-half
hours to accomplish, brags the group in the
documents .
"The [Spanish] government is preparing to appoint Colonel Banos, known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin positions in the Syrian
and Ukrainian conflicts, as Director of the Department of Homeland Security, a key body located at the Moncloa," begins Nacho Torreblanca
in a seven-part tweetstorm describing what happened.
Others joined in. Among them – according to the leaks – academic Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, who wrote that "Mr. Banos is to
geopolitics as a homeopath is to medicine." Appointing such a figure would be "a shame." -
RT
The operation was reported in Spanish media, while Banos was labeled "pro-Putin" by UK MP Bob Seely.
In short, expect anything counter to predominant "open-border" narratives to be the Kremlin's fault - and not a natural populist
reflex to the destruction of borders, language and culture.
"... It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" ..."
"... "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016." ..."
"... "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..." ..."
"... this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war ..."
"... Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK. ..."
"... The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth ..."
"... British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me ..."
"... It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations ..."
"... A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants? ..."
"... I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins. ..."
"... The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval. ..."
"... Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda ..."
"... This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap. ..."
"... Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification ..."
"... It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling ..."
"... As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love? ..."
"... They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites. ..."
"... The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation. ..."
"... Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power. ..."
"... Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government. ..."
British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear CampaignsSteveg , Nov 24,
2018 11:43:44 AM |
link
In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream.
We have already seen
many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who
does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign
against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but
seems to be part of a different project.
The ' Integrity
Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military
personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via
social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.
On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of
Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster
determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media
smear
campaign (pdf) against him.
The Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its
documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and
posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .
The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in
cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of
politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed
by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North
America.
It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and
promises that:
Cluster members will be sent to educational sessions abroad to improve the technical
competence of the cluster to deal with disinformation and strengthen bonds in the cluster
community. [...] (Events with DFR Digital Sherlocks, Bellingcat, EuVsDisinfo, Buzzfeed,
Irex, Detector Media, Stopfake, LT MOD Stratcom – add more names and propose cluster
participants as you desire).
The Initiatives Orwellian slogan is 'Defending Democracy Against Disinformation'. It
covers European countries, the UK, the U.S. and Canada and seems to want to expand to the
Middle East.
On its About page
it claims: "We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and
agencies who share our aims." The now published budget plans show that more than 95% of the
Initiative's funding is coming directly from the British government, NATO and the U.S. State
Department. All the 'contact persons' for creating 'clusters' in foreign countries are
British embassy officers. It amounts to a foreign influence campaign by the British
government that hides behind a 'civil society' NGO.
The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who
receives (pdf) £8,100 per month for creating the smear campaign network.
To counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe by: expanding the
knowledge base; harnessing existing expertise, and; establishing a network of networks of
experts, opinion formers and policy makers, to educate national audiences in the threat and
to help build national capacities to counter it .
The Initiative has a black and white view that is based on a "we are the good ones"
illusion. When "we" 'educate the public' it is legitimate work. When others do similar, it
its disinformation. That is of course not the reality. The Initiative's existence itself,
created to secretly manipulate the public, is proof that such a view is wrong.
If its work were as legit as it wants to be seen, why would the Foreign Office run it from
behind the curtain as an NGO? The Initiative is not the only such operation. It's
applications seek funding from a larger "Russian Language Strategic Communication Programme"
run by the Foreign Office.
The 2017/18 budget application sought FCO funding of £480,635. It received
£102,000 in co-funding from NATO and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense. The 2018/19
budget application shows a
planned spending (pdf) of £1,961,000.00. The co-sponsors this year are again NATO
and the Lithuanian MoD, but
also include (pdf) the U.S. State Department with £250,000 and Facebook with
£100,000. The budget lays out a strong cooperation with the local military of each
country. It notes that NATO is also generous in financing the local clusters.
One of the liberated papers of the Initiative is a talking points memo labeled
Top 3 Deliverable for FCO (pdf):
Developing and proving the cluster concept and methodology, setting up clusters in a
range of countries with different circumstances
Making people (in Government, think tanks, military, journalists) see the big
picture, making people acknowledge that we are under concerted, deliberate hybrid attack
by Russia
Increasing the speed of response, mobilising the network to activism in pursuit of
the "golden minute"
Under top 1, setting up clusters, a subitem reads:
- Connects media with academia with policy makers with practitioners in a country to impact
on policy and society: ( Jelena Milic silencing pro-kremlin voices on Serbian TV )
Defending Democracy by silencing certain voices on public TV seems to be a
self-contradicting concept.
Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:
We engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal
contacts, specifically to ensure that they do not come to see our work as a problem, and to
try to influence them gently, as befits an independent NGO operation like ours, viz;
- Germany, via the Zentrum Liberale Moderne to the Chancellor's Office and MOD
- Netherlands, via the HCSS to the MOD
- Poland and Romania, at desk level into their MFAs via their NATO Reps
- Spain, via special advisers, into the MOD and PM's office (NB this may change very soon
with the new Government)
- Norway, via personal contacts into the MOD
- HQ NATO, via the Policy Planning Unit into the Sec Gen's office.
We have latent contacts into other governments which we will activate as needs be as the
clusters develop.
A look at the 'clusters' set up in U.S. and UK shows some prominent names.
Members of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to
censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also
includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council
shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person
of interest is Andrew Wood who
handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over
alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah
Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus
of the BBC.
A ' Cluster
Roundup ' (pdf) from July 2018 details its activities in at least 35 countries. Another
file reveals (pdf) the local
partnering institutions and individuals involved in the programs.
The Initiatives Guide
to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of
flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the
Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation". But at least two of these events,
Khan Sheikun via the UK run White Helmets and the Skripal affair, are evidently products of
British intelligence disinformation operations.
The probably most interesting papers of the whole stash is the 'Project Plan' laid out at
pages 7-40 of the
2018 budget application v2 (pdf). Under 'Sustainability' it notes:
The programme is proposed to run until at least March 2019, to ensure that the clusters
established in each country have sufficient time to take root, find funding, and
demonstrate their effectiveness. FCO funding for Phase 2 will enable the activities to be
expanded in scale, reach and scope. As clusters have established themselves, they have
begun to access local sources of funding. But this is a slow process and harder in some
countries than others. HQ NATO PDD [Public Diplomacy Division] has proved a reliable source
of funding for national clusters. The ATA [Atlantic Treaty Association] promises to be the
same, giving access to other pots of money within NATO and member nations. Funding from
institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal
disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been
resolved and funding should now flow.
The programme has begun to create a critical mass of individuals from a cross society
(think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is
proving to be mutually reinforcing . Creating the network of networks has given each
national group local coherence, credibility and reach, as well as good international
access. Together, these conditions, plus the growing awareness within governments of the
need for this work, should guarantee the continuity of the work under various auspices and
in various forms.
The
third part of the budget application (pdf) list the various activities, their output and
outcome. The budget plan includes a section that describes 'Risks' to the initiative. These
include hacking of the Initiatives IT as well as:
Adverse publicity generated by Russia or by supporters of Russia in target countries, or by
political and interest groups affected by the work of the programme, aimed at discrediting
the programme or its participants, or to create political embarrassment.
We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.
Posted by b on November 24, 2018 at 11:24 AM |
Permalink
"The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to
prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election
meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil
throughout 2016."
"Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that
Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In
Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling
custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele
dossier..."
For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.
this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and
propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex
corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the
voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war.. i guess the idea is to get the
ordinary people to think in terms of hating another country based on lies and that this would
be a good thing... it is very sad what uk / usa leadership in the past century has come down
to here.... i can only hope that info releases like this will hasten it's demise...
Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of
illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a
financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same
laws as the rest of the UK.
The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to
me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth
@6 ingrian... things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of Russia after the fall of
the Soviet Union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit Russia
fully, as they'd intended...
Let the Doxx wars begin! Sure, Anonymous is not Russian but it will surely now be targeted
and smeared as such which would show that it has hit a nerve. British hypocrisy publicly
called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me.
I think we've all noticed the euro-asslantic press (and friends) on behalf of, willingly
and in cooperation with the British intelligence et al 'calling out' numerous Russians as
G(R)U/spies/whatever for a while now yet providing less than a shred of credible
evidence.
It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The
interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint
does not bode well for such relations.
Meanwhile in Brussels they are having their cake and eating it, i.e. bemoaning Europe's
'weak response' to Russian propaganda:
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of
the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you
have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?
Yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be
black at all; it's just the pot making up things. "These Russian criminals are using
propaganda to show (truths) like the fact the DNC and Clinton campaigns colluded to prevent
Sanders from being nominated, so we need to establish a clandestine propaganda network to
establish that the Russians are running propaganda!"
"In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream."
I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit
and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been
launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins.
The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's
explicit approval.
Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed
by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to
have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are
not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own
party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda
BUT...the author assures us that the "deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding
should now flow" Huh?? In other words, the fix is in. Mueller will pardon Trump on collusion charges but the
propaganda campaign against Russia will continue...with the full support of both parties. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it...
This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been
about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had
plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap.
A lot of
sour grapes with this so-called 'integrity initiative', IMO. BP was behind a lot of this, I
would also think. When Assad pulled the plug on the pipeline through the Levant in 2009, the
Brits hacked up a fur ball. It's gone downhill for them ever since. Couldn't happen to a
nicer lot. If you can't invade or beat them with proxies, you can at least call them names.
If Trump was taking dirty money or engaged in criminal activity with Russians then he
was doing it with Felix Sater, who was under the control of the FBI... And who was in
charge of the FBI during all of the time that Sater was a signed up FBI snitch? You got it
-- Robert Mueller (2001 thru 2013) ...
It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6
meddling, including:
Steele dossier: To create suspicion in government, media, and later the public
Leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks (but calling it a "hack"):
To help with election of Trump and link Wikileaks (as agent) to Russian election
meddling
Cambridge Analytica: To provide necessary reasoning for Trump's (certain) win of the electoral college.
Note: We later found that dozens of firms had undue access to Facebook data. Why did the
campaign turn to a British firm instead of an American firm? Well, it had to be a British
firm if MI6 was running the (supposed) Facebook targeting for CIA.
As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The
election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was
the best candidate for the job.
The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love?
"things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet
union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as
they'd intended..."
They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent
Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course
the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass
psychological pathology among the elites.
The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist
"order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US
and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation.
Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it
all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is
Strength." The three pillars of political power.
Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his
pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always
been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so
called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK
government...and in this context, new empowerished sovereign governemts into the EU should
consider the possibility expelling these traitors as spies of the UK....
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:
Germany: Harold Elletson ,Klaus NaumannWolf-Ruediger Bengs, Ex Amb Killian, Gebhardt v Moltke, Roland
Freudenstein, Hubertus Hoffmann, Bertil Wenger, Beate Wedekind, Klaus Wittmann, Florian
Schmidt, Norris v Schirach
Sweden, Norway, Finland: Martin Kragh , Jardar Ostbo, Chris Prebensen, Kate Hansen Bundt, Tor Bukkvoll, Henning-Andre
Sogaard, Kristen Ven Bruusgard, Henrik O Breitenbauch, Niels Poulsen, Jeppe Plenge, Claus
Mathiesen, Katri Pynnoniemi, Ian Robertson, Pauli Jarvenpaa, Andras Racz
Netherlands: Dr Sijbren de Jong, Ida Eklund-Lindwall, Yevhen Fedchenko, Rianne Siebenga, Jerry Sullivan,
Hunter B Treseder, Chris Quick
Spain: Nico de Pedro, Ricardo Blanco Tarno, Eduardo Serra Rexach, Dionisio Urteaga Todo, Dimitri
Barua, Fernando Valenzuela Marzo, Marta Garcia, Abraham Sanz, Fernando Maura, Jose Ignacio
Sanchez Amor, Jesus Ramon-Laca Clausen, Frances Ghiles, Carmen Claudin, Nika Prislan, Luis
Simon, Charles Powell, Mira Milosevich, Daniel Iriarte, Anna Bosch, Mira Milosevich-Juaristi,
Tito, Frances Ghiles, Borja Lasheras, Jordi Bacaria, Alvaro Imbernon-Sainz, Nacho Samor
US, Canada:
Mary Ellen Connell, Anders Aslund, Elizabeth Braw, Paul Goble, David Ziegler
Evelyn Farkas, Glen Howard, Stephen Blank, Ian Brzezinski, Thomas Mahnken, John Nevado,
Robert Nurick, Jeff McCausland
Todd Leventhal
UK: Chris Donnelly
Amalyah Hart William Browder John Ardis
Roderick Collins, Patrick Mileham Deborah Haynes
Dan Lafayeedney Chris Hernon Mungo Melvin
Rob Dover Julian Moore Agnes Josa David Aaronovitch Stephen Dalziel Raheem Shapi Ben
Nimmo
Robert Hall Alexander Hoare Steve Jermy Dominic Kennedy
Victor Madeira Ed Lucas Dr David Ryall
Graham Geale Steve Tatham Natalie Nougayrede Alan Riley [email protected]Anne Applebaum Neil Logan Brown James Wilson
Primavera Quantrill
Bruce Jones David Clark Charles Dick
Ahmed Dassu Sir Adam Thompson Lorna Fitzsimons Neil Buckley Richard Titley Euan Grant
Alastair Aitken Yusuf Desai Bobo Lo Duncan Allen Chris Bell
Peter Mason John Lough Catherine Crozier
Robin Ashcroft Johanna Moehring Vadim Kleiner David Fields Alistair Wood Ben Robinson Drew
Foxall Alex Finnen
Orsyia Lutsevych Charlie Hatton Vladimir Ashurkov
Giles Harris Ben Bradshaw
Chris Scheurweghs James Nixey
Charlie Hornick Baiba Braze J Lindley-French
Craig Oliphant Paul Kitching Nick Childs Celia Szusterman
James Sherr Alan Parfitt Alzbeta Chmelarova Keir Giles
Andy Pryce Zach Harkenrider
Kadri Liik Arron Rahaman David Nicholas Igor Sutyagin Rob Sandford Maya Parmar Andrew Wood
Richard Slack Ellie Scarnell
Nick Smith Asta Skaigiryte Ian Bond Joanna Szostek Gintaras Stonys Nina Jancowicz
Nick Washer Ian Williams Joe Green Carl Miller Adrian Bradshaw
Clement Daudy Jeremy Blackham Gabriel Daudy Andrew Lucy Stafford Diane Allen Alexandros
Papaioannou
Paddy Nicoll
In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream.
We have already seen
many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who does
not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign against
Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but seems to be
part of a different project.
The ' Integrity
Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military personal,
academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via social media to
take action when the British center perceives a need.
"... When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also. ..."
"... Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. ..."
"... This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts. ..."
One of the documents lists a series of propaganda weapons to be used against Russia. One is
use of the church as a weapon. That has already been started in Ukraine with Poroshenko
buying off regligious leader to split Ukraine Orthodoxy from Russian Orthodoxy. It also
explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a 'Dirty Trick' against Russia.
The British political system is on the verge of collapse. BREXIT has finally demonstrated
that the Government/ Opposition parties are clearly aligned against the interests of the
people. The EU is nothing more than an arm of the Globalist agenda of world domination.
The US has shown its true colours - sanctioning every country that stands for independent
sovereignty is not a good foreign policy, and is destined to turn the tide of public opinion
firmly against global hegemony, endless wars, and wealth inequity.
The old Empire is in its death throes. A new paradigm awaits which will exclude all those
who have exploited the many, in order to sit at the top of the pyramid. They cannot escape
Karma.
The Western world needs to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its
aftermath. Today, Russia is led by Putin and he obviously has objectives as any national
leader has.
Western "leaders" need to decide whether Putin:
Is trying to create Soviet Union 2.0, to have a 2nd attempt at ruling the world thru
communism and to do this by holding the world to ransom over oil/gas supplies. OR
Is wanting Russia to become a member of the family of nations and of a multi-polar world to improve the lives of
Russian people, but is being blocked at every twist and turn by manufactured events like Russia-gate and the Skripal affair
and now this latest revelation of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns being coordinated and run out of London.
Both of the above cannot be true because there are too many contradictions. Which is it??
Yes because imagine that that we lived in 1940 without any means to inform ourselves and
that media was still in control over the information that reaches us. We would already be in
a fullblown war with Russia because of it but now with the Internet and information going
around freely only a whimpy 10% of we the people stand behind their desperately wanted war.
Imagine that, an informed sheople.
Can't have that, they cannot do their usual stuff anymore.... good riddance.
"250,000 from the US State
Department , the documents allege."....... Interesting.
"During the third
Democratic debate on Saturday night, Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like
project" to break encrypted terrorist communications. The project would "bring the government and the tech communities together" to find a way
to give law enforcement access to encrypted messages, she said. It's something that some
politicians and intelligence officials have wanted for awhile,"........
***wasn't the Manhatten project a secret venture?????? Hummmmm"
Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI's . "Encryption keys" is
a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate
ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered
in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport
layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG
NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.
The convoluted structure managed by the "Federal Common Policy" group has ceded to
companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in
turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool
the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose
Law Firm."- patriots4truth
When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with
plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also.
FBI/Anonymous can use this story to support a narrative that social media bots posting
memes is a problem for everybody, and it's not a partisan issue. The idea is that fake news
and unrestricted social media are inherently dangerous, and both the West and Russia are
exploiting that, so governments need to agree to restrict the ability to use those platforms
for political speech, especially without using True Names.
Oilygawkies in the UK and USSA seem to be letting their spooks have a good-humored (rating
here on the absurd transparency of these ops) contest to see who can come up with the most
surreal propaganda psy-ops.
But they probably also serve as LHO distractions from something genuinely sleazy.
Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. Anything that is
remotely like Nationalism is the true enemy of these Globalist/Internationalists, which is
what the Top-Ape Bolshevik promoted: see Vladimir Lenin and his quotes on how he believed
fully in "internationalism" for a world without borders. Ironic how they Love the butchers of
the Soviet Union but hate Russia. It is ALL ABOUT IDEOLOGY to these people and "the means
justify the ends".
Basically, if one acquires factual information from an internet source, which leads to
overturning the propaganda to which we're all subjected, then it MUST have come from Putin.
This is the direction they're headed. Anyone speaking out against the official story is
obviously a Russian spy.
Better to call it the Anti-Integrity Initiative. UK cretins up to their usual dirty tricks - let them choke on their poison. The judgement of history will eventually catch up with them.
A good 'ole economic collapse will give western countries a chance to purge their crazy
leaders before they involve us all in a thermonuclear war. Short everything with your entire
accounts.
This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have
such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the
WEST? This is nuts.
Isn't it just as likely someone in the WEST planted this cache, intending Anonymous to
find it?
Any propaganda coming from the UK or US is strictly zionist. EVERYTHING they put out is to
the benefit of Israel and the "lobby". Russia isn't perfect, but if they're an enemy of the
latter, then they should NOT be considered a foe to all thinking and conscientious
people.
Yesterday, the BBC had a thing on Thai workers in Israel, and how they keep dying of
accidents, their general level of slavery etc. Very odd to have a negative Israel story, so I
wonder who upset whom, and what the ongoing status will be.
Thai labourers in Israel tell of harrowing conditions
A year-long BBC investigation has discovered widespread abuse of Thai nationals living
and working in Israel - under a scheme organized by the two governments.
Many are subjected to unsafe working practices and squalid, unsanitary living
conditions. Some are overworked, others underpaid and there are dozens of unexplained
deaths.
England and the U.S. don't like their very poor and rotten social conditions put out for
the public to see. Both countries have severely deteriorating problems on their streets
because of bankrupt governments printing money for foreign wars.
More of the same fraudulent duality while alleged so called but not money etc continues to
flow (everything is criminal) and the cesspool of a hierarchy pretends it's business as
usual.
This isn't about maintaining balance in a lie this is about disclosing the truth and
agendas (Agenda 21 now Agenda 2030 = The New Age Religion is Never Going To Be Saturnism).
The layers of the hierarchy are a lie so unless the alleged so called leaders of those layers
are publicly providing testimony and confession then everything that is being spoon fed to
the pablum puking public through all sources is a lie.
Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity
Initiative consists of "clusters" of (((local politicians, journalists, military personnel,
scientists and academics))).
The (((team))) is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian
interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes,
the documents claim.
UK politicians in Skripal story behaved by cheap clowns. Their story with door knob was pathetic. They tried to invent
the legend with poisoning on the fly and that shows. There is definitely something else brewing here and Shamir proposed his
version with Skripal double dealings or something along those line is quite plausible.
We will never know, but I think British discredited themselves for the whole world in this story. Trump was not better will
using this tory to impose additional sanctions on Russia. This is just another proof that he is another neocon who during election
campaign like Obama played the role of isolationalist and then appointed Haley to UN and hired Pompeo as his Secretary of
state and Bolton as his security advisor -- a typical "bat and switch" operation in US politics.
Notable quotes:
"... Vrublevsky thinks that British intelligence convinced the GRU (probably we should say that GRU is not called GRU anymore but GU, the Chief Directorate of the General Staff, but it hardly matters) that Mr Skripal wanted to return home to Russia. Probably they were told that Mr Skripal intended to bring some valuable dowry with him, including Porton Down data and the secrets of the Golden Rain dossier. It is possible that Skripal had been played, too; perhaps he indeed wanted to go back to Russia, the country he missed badly. ..."
"... As we had learned from videos and stills published by the Brits, the two men had been carefully followed from the beginning to the end. Meanwhile, British intelligence staged a 'poisoning' of Skripal and his daughter, and the two agents quickly returned home. ..."
"... There is not a single man close to Russian intelligence who thinks that Skripal had actually been poisoned by the Russians. First, there was absolutely no reason to do it, and second, if the Russians would poison him, he would stay poisoned, like the Ukrainian Quisling Stepan Bandera was. ..."
"... However, by playing this card, the British secret service convinced the Foreign Office to expel all diplomats who had contacts and connection to the exposed GRU agents. The massive expulsion of 150 diplomats caused serious damage to the Russian secret services. ..."
"... Such a massive operation against Russian agents and their contacts could signal forthcoming war. In normal circumstances, states do not reveal their full knowledge of enemy agents. ..."
"... I do not know what is the truth. At this point I no longer care because we will never know but it will be the British version that will be the most popular. I like most people like good stories. Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors. ..."
Vrublevsky thinks that British intelligence convinced the GRU (probably we should say that
GRU is not called GRU anymore but GU, the Chief Directorate of the General Staff, but it hardly
matters) that Mr Skripal wanted to return home to Russia. Probably they were told that Mr
Skripal intended to bring some valuable dowry with him, including Porton Down data and the
secrets of the Golden Rain dossier. It is possible that Skripal had been played, too; perhaps
he indeed wanted to go back to Russia, the country he missed badly.
Two GRU agents, supposedly experts on extraction (they allegedly sneaked the Ukrainian
president Yanukovych from Ukraine after the coup and saved him from lynching mob) were sent to
Salisbury to test the ground and make preparations for Skripal's return. As we had learned from
videos and stills published by the Brits, the two men had been carefully followed from the
beginning to the end. Meanwhile, British intelligence staged a 'poisoning' of Skripal and his
daughter, and the two agents quickly returned home.
There is not a single man close to Russian intelligence who thinks that Skripal had actually
been poisoned by the Russians. First, there was absolutely no reason to do it, and second, if
the Russians would poison him, he would stay poisoned, like the Ukrainian Quisling Stepan
Bandera was.
However, by playing this card, the British secret service convinced the Foreign Office to
expel all diplomats who had contacts and connection to the exposed GRU agents. The massive
expulsion of 150 diplomats caused serious damage to the Russian secret services.
Still, the Russians had no clue how the West had learned identities of so many diplomats
connected to GRU. They suspected that there was a mole, and a turncoat who delivered the stuff
to the enemy.
That is why Vladimir Putin decided to dare them. As he knew that the two men identified by
the British service had no connection to the alleged poisoning, he asked them to appear on the
RT in an interview with Ms Simonyan. By acting as village hicks, they were supposed to provoke
the enemy to disclose its source. The result was unexpected: instead of revealing the name of a
turncoat, the Belling Cat, a site used by the Western Secret Services for intentional leaks,
explained how the men were traced by using the stolen databases. Putin's plan misfired.
The Russian secret service is not dead. Intelligence services do suffer from enemy action
from time to time: the Cambridge Five infiltrated the upper reaches of the MI-5 and delivered
state secrets to Moscow for a long time, but the Intelligence Service survived. Le Carre's
novels were based on such a defeat of the intelligence. However they have a way to recover.
Identity of their top agents remain secret, and they are concealed from the enemy's eyes.
But in order to function properly, the Russians will have to clean their stables, remove
their databases from the market place and keep its citizenry reasonably safe. Lax, and
not-up-to-date agents do not apparently understand the degree the internet is being watched.
Considering it should have been done twenty years ago, and meanwhile a new generation of
Russians has came of age, perfectly prepared to sell whatever they can for cash, it is a
formidable task.
There is an additional reason to worry. Such a massive operation against Russian agents and
their contacts could signal forthcoming war. In normal circumstances, states do not reveal
their full knowledge of enemy agents. It made president Putin worry; and he said this week: we'll
go to heaven as martyrs, the attackers will die as sinners. In face of multiple and recent
threats, this end of the world is quite possible.
Great story. If told many people would believe it. But now it is kind of late. So why it
wasn't told within few days or weeks of Skripal affair? Why it is the British media that has
initiative and Russian media is reactive and defensive? The story that Skripal wanted to
return and that two agents were lured in there should have been told right away and that it
turned out be MI5 provocation should have been insinuated. And the two agents should have
been interviewed on Russian media. Instead we get defensive inept and indolent Russian
reactions.
I do not know what is the truth. At this point I no longer care because we will never
know but it will be the British version that will be the most popular. I like most people
like good stories. Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director
and actors.
@utu " Instead we get
defensive inept and indolent Russian reactions."
The reaction 'if we want to kill somebody that somebody does not survive' I cannot see as
inept and indolent.
Excellent piece by Israel Shamir which I think gives the correct explanation of the Skripal
poisoning. This was a classic fishing, 'click bait' operation which produced a very valuable
haul for Western Intelligence. The only question is whether Skripal cooperated with it
– which I think he did – not knowing that both he and his daughter were meant to
die. Hence Putin's rage against Skripal a few weeks ago ( calling him a scumbag traitor etc,
etc) after the Russian operatives were identified because retired agents are supposed to stay
retired.
Russia made a very serious mistake with the RT interview with the 2 operatives. Better not
to say anything if you can't give the whole story. The GU weren't happy to show their
incompetence, but compounded the original mistake with obvious lying. That was a propaganda
gift to the Western media and has helped convince original disbelievers of Russian
perfidy.
Russia needs to step up its game especially in the media dept.
@Anatoly Karlin " British
or American human capital, but there are certainly consummate professionals relative to what
passes for today's Russian intelligence services. "
On what this 'certainly' is based, I see no argument whatsoever.
Already a long time ago, I must admit, the CIA director had to admit to senator Moynihan that
he had lied about the CIA not laying mines in Havana harbour.
A professional in espionage does not get caught.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 'Secrecy', New Haven 1998
Anyone acquinted with Sept 11 understands that the USA's secret army, the CIA, was
involved.
Another blunder.
As far as I know British secret services never get caught.
How clever the Russians are, suppose quite clever, I for one do not think that the stupid
stories about for example Skripal have any truth in them.
Until now the asserted Russian meddling in USA elections have not been proved.
Do not know of anything credible that Russian intelligence people are said to have done.
But of course Russian intelligence does exist.
"A related problem is that since there is now a free market economy, with many more
attractive career options for talented people, the high quality people go to work in other
spheres, leaving the intelligence agencies with the dregs;" .
A direct result of erasing ideology so as to erase personality cult towards highly
respected people in former USSR .When you have no ideology ( or worst, share ideology with
your opponent, i.e free market .) all what you have, from values to secrets, from scientific
human capital to secret service officials, are out there in the global market for possible
selling to the best postor .this is the principle of capitalism .. after all, it is said,
almost everybody has a price .The challenge is finding out where that little bunch who have
not are ..Obviously, in this scenario, the one who has the printing machine has a "little"
advantage How to overcome this would be part of "what is to be done" ..
If the Russians wanted to kill them they would be dead. Period. It is all FN hoax.
The latest English came up with was that poison was smeared on the door handle and that both
touched the door handle. Give me a break. Such a idiocy. Just imagine the exit procedure
where both are touching the door knob.
And than both Russians went to garbage dump carrying the little bottle and thru it there.
What an exemplary citizen neat behavior by Russians,
All English story is such a stupid idiocy that it turns my stomach.
However, the presence of Russian spies in Salisbury can be explained by its nearness to
Porton Down, the secret British chemical lab and factory for manufacturing chemical weapons
applied by the White Helmets in Syria in their false-flag operation in Douma and other
places. It is possible that a resident of Salisbury (Mr Skripal?) had delivered samples
from Porton Down to the Russian intelligence agents. This makes much more sense than the
dubious story of Russians trying to poison an old ex-spy who did his stretch in a Russian
jail.
If Mr. Skripal has been poisoned by the stuff of which he himself took samples in Porton
Down, this would run completely parallel to the earlier poisoning of Mr. Alexander
Valterovich Litvinenko, who also became ill because of carrying poison (polonium) around.
If [Yulia Skripal] had not had the courage to make this call while slipping the
observance of British intelligence, she would probably be dead by now.
Both Skripals are most likely DEAD, murdered by British "intelligence"
services.
The formulaic and curiously uninterested treatment of the matter in the British media
seems inconsistent with the Skripals still being alive.
The article above suggests that the Skripals were unwitting or witting participants in a
sting to expose Russian intelligence agents. More importantly, Sergey Skripal appears to have
had a role in the creation of the DNC's "dossier" to undermine the Trump presidencey.
Whatever the background, Sergey Skripal became privy to important secrets that the Brits
and their seditious allies in the U.S. Deep State do not want exposed.
In the Skripal case the British have not explained why, after claiming to have found the
closest approach to a smoking gun in the form of traces of novichok in that hotel room, the
hotel was not then immediately quarantined.
And assuredly, with Putin's name on the line, the Russians have to do a better job if they
are to refute the standing accusations – the RT interview was something of a PR
disaster.
The Belloncat data, although superficially convincing, could so easily have been faked by
anybody with reasonable knowledge of Russian internet infrastructure and some proficiency in
Photoshop.
But I did not know about these massive intelligence security breaches in Russia. Wow,
that's huge. Even though it's not clear to me how this indicates Putin's plan misfired. If
anything he got exactly what he wanted: confirmation that the "West" had access to the entire
passport database. Knowing what your enemy has in intelligence is a huge win, now they can
work on correcting it (hard as it may be, it would be impossible without knowing).
But the fact is Russia has not really disputed the results so I am fairly confident that
not only was Belling Cat right, but Israel is right, and now we have the situation where
Russia knows that Western intelligence has full access to Russia's passport database.
@Tyrion 2 Had some
experiences with Chinese and Mossad spies, not to mention Russian Jewish hard-drug dealers.
Here are a few examples.
There was an AMES postdoc at UCSD, a Chinese applied-math brain who had a 10-plus female
handler. She'd stop by occasionally to check up on him. He always get extremely anxious when
she was around. Couldn't figure out if it was fear, sexual excitement, or a combination of
both.
There was an old Chinese man and his foxy young female protege, who enjoyed filming U.S.
military maneuvers along the San Diego coast. I observed their operation for days.
There was a swing-shift cleaning crew in a Southern California high-tech mfg facility that
was all Chinese, in an area that typically employed Latin American crews. Its head honcho was
a beautiful Chinese lady. They made it their job to sort through trash bins and save papers.
The feds busted them.
As far as the Mossad, I spent two years on a rental property in SD county, which was
occupied by them as well. Mostly Israeli kids using the property and a local Israeli-owned
vegetarian restaurant as their "scorpion den." Got fairly familiar with some of their
espionage work and methods.
I don't go looking for this stuff. I'm just able to recognize it. As an empath I can read
people, quite well. It's a natural gift.
Can't stomach Israel's insensitive nature. That's why you'll typically find me pointing
out their self-serving bullshit.
This is a pretty good article but also falls on its face at the end
Mr Shamir's 'inside' information confirms my own take on Petrov and Boshirov which I
published a few days after that RT interview with Ms Simonyan
I wrote this on Col Lang's blog on Sept 14
'Yeah those two 'tourists' do look the part don't they I would say they are probably GRU
or something similar but nobody 'poisoned' the Skripals that's total kabuki theater another
Potemkin village production from the reality masters
Something is afoot here though perhaps these two were lured to Salisbury as part of a
frame up plot, perhaps by Skripal himself or perhaps the Brits caught wind of their plans
to visit [on some standard spying mission, certainly not assassination] and put in motion
the elaborate hoax
Everybody there protested loudly including Andrey Martyanov [Smoothie] I also added
this
' I disagree with everyone here it seems these guys aren't tourists but they also didn't
try to kill anyone that's stupid
It's some sort of spy game
Here's one scenario double agent Skripal makes convincing noises about flipping back
someone at GRU [or some similar outfit] sends these two to Salisbury to check it out a very
stupid move which is why Putin is now miffed enough to display these guys publicly and
their field career surely over also a slap in the face to the silly Limeys for playing
dirty pool even in the cloak and dagger game there are unwritten rules '
This is now exactly the story that Mr Shamir is presenting here but he is a day late and a
dollar short
I also don't agree with his take that this is all somehow a big loss for Russian intel the
Brits are the ones who have painted themselves in a corner their Skripal story is a wet paper
bag waiting to fall apart the fact that they lured the Russians to Salisbury, under whatever
pretext, be it Skripal or Porton Down/white helmets etc was their only small tactical victory
because they could then later expose those two after months of Russian denials in order to
show the Russians were in fact somehow involved
But that exposure came months later all that time the Russians would have known that
Boshirov and Petrov had been captured on candid camera and would have had time to work on
their countermove
Mr Shamir writes this like the game is over that is ridiculous the Brits have no way out
of the Skripal hoax there was never any poisoning the original diagnosis of the Skripals in
the Salisbury hospital was opioid overdose that came out in the first BBC interview with the
hospital staff months after the 'poisoning'
It was not until 48 hours after the Skripals were admitted to hospital and the convenient
intervention of Porton Down that the medical diagnosis was 'changed' to nerve agent
poisoning
BUT this is an unsustainable story that WILL FALL APART the simple reason is medical and
chemical fact both nerve agents and agricultural pesticides are based on the exact
same chemical compound organophosphates
'There are nearly 3 million poisonings per year resulting in two hundred thousand
deaths.'
That is the simple reason why emergency doctors EVERYWHERE are trained to recognize and
treat this kind of poisoning especially in rural, agricultural areas like
Salisbury
That is why it took months for media to gain access to the medical staff at that hospital
the British spooks needed to do a lot of 'persuading' with medical professionals that would
have wanted no part in such trickery and fakery
But this is a ticking time bomb that is bound to blow up in the faces of the very stupid
Brits
So yes they pulled off a minor coup in luring those two to Salisbury but the game is very
very far from over
As for Skripal he is in on it for sure as I speculated in my original comment on the
matter..the Russian intel services are perfectly aware of this, yet Mr Shamir's supposedly
well connected source has zero knowledge of this which tells me this source is actually a
useless clown who 'knows' exactly what an internet commenter [myself] already knew two months
ago
PS the fact that the Brits supposedly have all kinds of database info on the Russian intel
apparatus and personnel files etc doesn't mean anything the author is a making a big deal out
of this, but his story lacks meat on its bones most 'intel' is open source material
anyway
As for sensitive stuff that may have been 'sold' by 'corrupt' bureaucrats one must ask if
such 'info' is actually real or a clever plant providing fake info is the oldest spy trick in
the book and this article simply takes for granted that such a trick would not have been
employed why not ?
@FB How would a fake
database leak include the real data on the two GRU agents that just happened to be sent to
UK? Maybe it was to make the data leak seem real?
In spycraft it is always impossible to know how deep the deception goes. That's why the
very article to which you are responding started with:
It is hard to evaluate the exact measure of things in the murky world of spies and
counter-spies, but it appears that the Western spies have had extraordinary success in the
subterranean battle.
I think that a clear strategy by the western "intelligence" services is starting to emerge
vis-a-vis the Russians. By accusing any Russian that they can get their hands on, of being a
spy, they want to scare the ordinary Russians from visiting the west, so afterwards any
Russian actually caught traveling to the west can be safely assumed to be a spy – since
by the calculations of the clever western intelligence – only someone who is actually a
spy while at the same time being Russian, would dare to travel to the west. How smart is
that?
Joking aside, it really is becoming unsafe for Russian nationals to travel to the west.
Even though the west reserves the generosity of calling somebody equal only for those that
are from the 3rd world – Russians clearly don't deserve such generosity.
Despite this, exceptions can be made and some unfortunate Russian soul could be accused of
being equal with those highly evolved westerners and against their will can be offered
protection from Mother Russia.
Pretty much like it happened to Yulia Skripal. She was only visiting her gastarbeiter
father in GB, who apparently expressed desire to return to Russia, against pretty much
everybody's wishes, and all of a sudden Yulia Skripal found herself bestowed with the western
generosity of being declared equal, and was disappeared from public eye in order to protect
her from those with whom she is clearly not equal – the Russians.
Thank God at least MI-6 proved equal to the task and discovered her equalness in a nick of
time and saved her. The moral of the story: Only democracy has the power to recognize who is
equal and who is not. Then, on the other hand, capitalism can keep acquiring new monikers
such as "democracy" – all they want, Russia still has better quality of equality,
despite ditching socialism.
@CalDre Yes I 'stubbornly'
refuse to take at face value this silly statement
it appears that the Western spies have had extraordinary success in the subterranean
battle.'
Because it's not backed up by anything other than hot air as for that supposed 'data'
about Petrov and Boshirov
that was put out by Bellingcat
Ie mickey mouse stuff as with everything these clowns do, it is meant only to bamboozle
the most utterly stupid bipeds
A very nice clue is the fact that a Russian website called 'The Insider' is Bellingcat's
acknowledged partner here
If you read the article in English they claim to have 'dug' up a lot of info from various
sources such the central Russian resident database and passenger check in data for their
flight to the UK
Big deal that Shamir is building a mountain out of a molehill is more than clear
In fact this entire Shamir tale appears to have one subtle purpose to publicize and
glorify the Bellingcat outfit
which irredeemably lost any credibility a few weeks back when illiterate poofter Eliott
Higgins refused a debate challenge by the distinguished MIT physicist and former presidential
advisor Ted Postol actually calling Postol an 'idiot' a move that astounded even those
willing to entertain Higgins on a semi-credible level
@Anatoly Karlin Be that as
it may, the "Western side" had (publicly known) Aldrich, Hanssen and Benghazi fiasco.
Boils down to, from the comment below:
When you have no ideology ( or worst, share ideology with your opponent, i.e free market
.) all what you have, from values to secrets, from scientific human capital to secret
service officials, are out there in the global market for possible selling to the best
postor .this is the principle of capitalism .. after all, it is said, almost everybody has
a price..
and
Obviously, in this scenario, the one who has the printing machine has a "little"
advantage.
And, on top of it, in West, since the fall of The Wall, we've been having "Cooking the
Intelligence to Fit the Political Agenda".
This commenter begs to differ with M. Karlin's assessment (8) of the relative competence of
Russian sovok and CIA. "consummate professionals relative to what passes for today's Russian
intelligence services"? Mais non.
CIA always gets caught. All they do is step on their crank, again and again. They depend
not on professionalism but on what Russ Baker describes as a strange mix of ruthlessness and
ineptitude. Both stem from impunity in municipal law.
For example: CIA torture and coercive interference got comprehensively exposed, worldwide,
in the '70s. What happened? Don Gregg gave the Church and Pike committees an ultimatum: Back
off or it's martial law. CIA got busted again in the '80s for the criminal enterprises under
the Iran/Contra rubric. By then CIA had installed Tom Polgar, Former Saigon Station Chief, as
chief investigator for the cognizant Senate Select committee, and Polgar assured Gregg that
his hearings would not be a repeat of the abortive Pike and Church flaps.
So CIA are clowns. They can afford to be clowns because they know they can get away with
it. Getting away with it is their only skill, and the only skill they need.
The persistent category error at this site is failing to realize that CIA is the state.
They rule the USA.
Very convincing. This Israeli expert blows up the UK's narrative in a few well-chosen
one-liners.
"If the GRU acted, both the killers and the other participants in the operation would come
to the UK on the passports of other countries that have visa-free relations with it. Here, two
alleged GRU officers go to the embassy, leave their fingerprints there, get a
visa, stop at the hotel, pass under all the cells. This you will not find even in ladies'
detective novels."
An Israeli expert on international terrorism, writer Alexander Brass, shared his view on the
case of the Skripals poisoning in Salisbury. Brass draws parallels between the work of the
special services of Israel and Russia – he believes that if to compare the British
version with the practice of the special agents, then the absurdity becomes obvious.
"Alexander, so what, in your opinion, happened in Salisbury?"
-There was a rough provocation by the British special services. In my opinion, this is
obvious.
"There's a lot of stupidity on stupidity." The story with Petrov and Boshirov does not hold
up any professional peer review. According to the Brits, the Skripals were poisoned by GRU
agents (this is what the department is called, although this is now the Main Directorate of the
RF General Staff).
I want to explain how the special services work. If you need someone to eliminate, then this
is a very serious operation, which is being prepared for a long time. A very significant
material and human resource is allocated. We are talking about dozens of employees. On the
territory of this state, an "advanced command post" is being created.
In the operation, a technical support group, a logistic group, a cover group, an external
surveillance group and a group of performers are involved.
The performers themselves appear at the very last moment. They do not go anywhere, lighting
up on cameras, do not use public transport, but move on rented cars, which they do not rent
themselves. And the more they will not stop in hotels, but will live on safe houses provided by
the logistics group.
Such groups do not come under the passport of their country, do not go to the embassy for
obtaining a visa, leaving fingerprints. This is complete nonsense. Professionals do not work
that way.
If the GRU acted, both the killers and the other participants in the operation would come to
the UK on the passports of other countries that have visa-free relations with it. Here, two
alleged GRU officers go to the embassy, leave their fingerprints there, get a
visa, stop at the hotel, pass under all the cells. This you will not find even in ladies'
detective novels.
"... And what about the possibility of MI5's involvement in, dare we use the term, false flag operations? ..."
"... As someone who abhors the premise of conspiracy theory on principle, the fact that more and more are turning to its warm embrace as an intellectual reflex against what is politely described as the 'official narrative' of events, well this is no surprise when we learn of the egregious machinations of Western intelligence agencies such as Britain's MI5. ..."
"... If any such investigation is to be taken seriously, however, it must include in its remit the power to investigate all possible links between Britain's intelligence community and organisations such as, let's see, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group ? ..."
"... The deafening UK mainstream media and political class silence over the trail connecting 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi and MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency, leaves a lingering stench of intrigue that will not out. The work of investigative journalist Mark Curtis on this sordid relationship is unsurpassed. ..."
"... "The evidence suggests that the barbaric Manchester bombing, which killed 22 innocent people on May 22nd, is a case of blowback on British citizens arising at least partly from the overt and covert actions of British governments." ..."
"... "The evidence points to the LIFG being seen by the UK as a proxy militia to promote its foreign policy objectives. Whitehall also saw Qatar as a proxy to provide boots on the ground in Libya in 2011, even as it empowered hardline Islamist groups." ..."
"... "Both David Cameron, then Prime Minister, and Theresa May – who was Home Secretary in 2011 when Libyan radicals were encouraged to fight Qadafi [Muammar Gaddafi] – clearly have serious questions to answer. We believe an independent public enquiry is urgently needed." ..."
"... In words that echo down to us from ancient Rome, the poet Juvenal taunts our complacency with a question most simple and pertinent: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard the guards themselves? ..."
An intelligence service given free rein to commit 'serious crimes' in its own country is an
intelligence service that is the enemy of its people. The quite astounding
revelation that Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, has enjoyed this very freedom
for decades has only just been made public at a special tribunal in London, set up to investigate the country's
intelligence services at the behest of a coalition of human rights groups, alleging a pattern
of illegality up to and including collusion in murder.
The hitherto MI5 covert policy sanctioning its agents to commit and/or solicit serious
crimes, as and when adjudged provident, is known as the Third Direction. This codename has been
crafted, it would appear, by someone with a penchant for all things James Bond within an agency
whose average operative is more likely to be 5'6" and balding with a paunch and bad teeth than
any kind of lantern-jawed 007.
The Pat Finucane Centre ,
one of the aforementioned human rights groups involved in bringing about this tribunal
investigation (Investigatory Powers Tribunal, to give it its Sunday name) into the nefarious
activities of Britain's domestic intelligence agency, issued a damning
statement in response to the further revelation that former Prime Minister David Cameron
introduced oversight guidelines with regard to the MI5 covert third direction policy back in
2012.
Cameron's decision to do so, the group claims, was far from nobly taken:
"It can be no coincidence that Prime Minister David Cameron issued new guidelines,
however flawed, on oversight of MI5 just two weeks before publication of the De Silva report
into the murder of Pat Finucane. The PM was clearly alive to the alarming evidence which was
about to emerge of the involvement of the Security Service in the murder. To date no-one within
a state agency has been held accountable. The latest revelations make the case for an
independent inquiry all the more compelling."
Pat Finucane, a Belfast Catholic, plied his trade as a human rights lawyer at a time when
the right to be fully human was denied the minority Catholic community of the small and
enduring outpost of British colonialism in the north east corner of Ireland, otherwise known as
Northern Ireland. He was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1989, back when the
decades-long conflict euphemistically referred to as the Troubles still raged, claiming victims both
innocent and not on all sides.
Unlike the vast majority of those killed and murdered in the course of this brutal conflict,
Finucane's murder sparked a long and hard fought struggle for justice by surviving family
members, friends and campaigners. They allege – rather convincingly, it should be said
– that it was carried out with the active collusion of MI5.
Stepping back and casting a wider view over this terrain, the criminal activities of
Britain's intelligence services constitute more than enough material for a book of considerable
heft. How fortunate then that just such a book has already been
written.
In his 'Dead Men Talking: Collusion, Cover Up and Murder in Northern Ireland's Dirty War',
author Nicholas Davies "provides information on a number of the killings [during the
Troubles], which were authorized at the highest level of MI5 and the British
government."
But over and above the crimes of MI5 in Ireland, what else have those doughty defenders of
the realm been up to over the years? After all, what is the use of having a license to engage
in serious criminal activity, including murder and, presumably, torture, if you're not prepared
to use (abuse) it? It begs the question of how many high profile deaths attributed to suicide,
natural causes, and accident down through the years have been the fruits of MI5 at work?
And what about the possibility of MI5's involvement in, dare we use the term, false flag
operations?
As someone who abhors the premise of conspiracy theory on principle, the fact that more and
more are turning to its warm embrace as an intellectual reflex against what is politely
described as the 'official narrative' of events, well this is no surprise when we learn of the
egregious machinations of Western intelligence agencies such as Britain's MI5.
What we are bound to state, doing so without fear of contradiction, is this particular
revelation opens up a veritable Pandora's Box of grim possibilities when it comes to the
potential crimes committed by Britain's domestic intelligence agency, ensuring that a full and
vigorous investigation and public inquiry is now both necessary and urgent.
If any such investigation is to be taken seriously, however, it must include in its remit
the power to investigate all possible links between Britain's intelligence community and
organisations such as, let's see, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group ?
The deafening UK mainstream media and political class silence over the trail connecting 2017
Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi and MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency,
leaves a lingering stench of intrigue that will not out. The work
of investigative journalist Mark Curtis on this sordid relationship is unsurpassed.
As Curtis writes,
"The evidence suggests that the barbaric Manchester bombing, which killed 22 innocent
people on May 22nd, is a case of blowback on British citizens arising at least partly from
the overt and covert actions of British governments."
In the same report he arrives at a conclusion both damning and chilling:
"The evidence points to the LIFG being seen by the UK as a proxy militia to promote its
foreign policy objectives. Whitehall also saw Qatar as a proxy to provide boots on the ground
in Libya in 2011, even as it empowered hardline Islamist groups."
Finally: "Both David Cameron, then Prime Minister, and Theresa May – who was Home
Secretary in 2011 when Libyan radicals were encouraged to fight Qadafi [Muammar Gaddafi]
– clearly have serious questions to answer. We believe an independent public enquiry is
urgently needed."
In words that echo down to us from ancient Rome, the poet Juvenal taunts our complacency
with a question most simple and pertinent: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will
guard the guards themselves?
Edward R Murrow
puts it rather more bluntly: "A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
Sooner or later, people in Britain are going to have to wake up to who the real enemy
is.
John Wight has written for a variety of newspapers and websites, including the
Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and
Foreign Policy Journal.
"... There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out in my book The Myth of Homeland Security ..."
"... "The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance. ..."
"... One thing that did ..."
"... US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point. ..."
"... My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection." ..."
"... All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault 7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. ..."
"... the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET -- Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ] ..."
"... It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being prepared for cyberwar. ..."
"... it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools. ..."
"... My observation is that the NSA and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese? ..."
"... The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are much smaller operations? ..."
"... That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other processors have similar backdoors. ..."
"... There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at all. ..."
"... So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order to justify its actions and defend its budget. ..."
"... What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes. ..."
"... Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of same. ..."
Bob Moore asks me to comment on an article about propaganda and security/intelligence. [
article ] This is going to be a mixture of opinion and references to facts; I'll try to be
clear which is which.
Yesterday several NATO countries ran a concerted propaganda campaign against Russia. The
context for it was a NATO summit in which the U.S. presses for an intensified cyberwar
against NATO's preferred enemy.
On the same day another coordinated campaign targeted China. It is aimed against China's
development of computer chip manufacturing further up the value chain. Related to this is
U.S. pressure on Taiwan, a leading chip manufacturer, to cut its ties with its big
motherland.
It is true that the US periodically makes a big push regarding "messaging" about hacking.
Whether or not it constitutes a "propaganda campaign" depends on how we choose to interpret
things and the labels we attach to them -- "propaganda campaign" has a lot of negative
connotations and one person's "outreach effort" is an other's "propaganda." An
ultra-nationalist or an authoritarian submissive who takes the government's word for anything
would call it "outreach."
There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that
China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking
to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out
in my book The Myth of Homeland Security (2004) [
wc ] claims such as that the Chinese had "40,000 highly trained hackers" are flat-out
absurd and ignore the reality of hacking; that's four army corps. Hackers don't engage in
"human wave" attacks.
"The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was
presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm
perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the
industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance.
One thing that did happen in 2010 around the same time as the nonexistent
cyberwar was China and Russia proposed trilateral talks with the US to attempt to define
appropriate limits on state-sponsored hacking. The US flatly rejected the proposal, but there
was virtually no coverage of that in the US media at the time. The UN also called for a
cyberwar treaty framework, and the effort was killed by the US. [ wired ] What's
fascinating and incomprehensible to me is that, whenever the US feels that its ability to claim
pre-emptive cyberwar is challenged, it responds with a wave of claims about Chinese (or Russian
or North Korean) cyberwar aggression.
John Negroponte, former director of US intelligence, said intelligence agencies in the
major powers would be the first to "express reservations" about such an accord.
US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to
war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in
advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the
superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to
try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point.
My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other
nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and
Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder
reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of
its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a
war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has
not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US
distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US
power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis
is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection."
The anti-Russian campaign is about alleged Russian spying, hacking and influence
operations. Britain and the Netherland took the lead. Britain accused Russia's military
intelligence service (GRU) of spying attempts against the Organisation for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague and Switzerland, of spying attempts against the British
Foreign Office, of influence campaigns related to European and the U.S. elections, and of
hacking the international doping agency WADA. British media willingly
helped to exaggerate the claims: [ ]
The Netherland [sic] for its part released
a flurry
of information about the alleged spying attempts against the OPCW in The Hague. It claims
that four GRU agents traveled to The Hague on official Russian diplomatic passports to sniff
out the WiFi network of the OPCW. (WiFi networks are notoriously easy to hack. If the OPCW is
indeed using such it should not be trusted with any security relevant issues.) The Russian
officials were allegedly very secretive, even cleaning out their own hotel trash, while they,
at the same, time carried laptops with private data and even taxi receipts showing their
travel from a GRU headquarter in Moscow to the airport. Like in the Skripal/Novichok saga the
Russian spies are, at the same time, portrayed as supervillains and hapless amateurs. Real
spies are neither.
There's a lot there, and I think the interpretation is a bit over-wrought, but it's mostly
accurate. The US and the UK (and other NATO allies, as necessary) clearly coordinate when it
comes to talking points. Claims of Chinese cyberwar in the US press will be followed by claims
in the UK and Australian press, as well. My suspicion is that this is not the US Government and
UK Government coordinating a story -- it's the intelligence agencies doing it. My
opinion is that the intelligence services are fairly close to a "deep state" -- the
CIA and NSA are completely out of control and the CIA has gone far toward building its own
military, while the NSA has implemented completely unrestricted surveillance worldwide.
All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault
7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking
the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. While the attribution
that "Fancy Bear is the GRU" has been made and is probably fairly solid, the attribution of NSA
malware and CIA malware is rock solid; the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET --
Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on
Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully
said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA
wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ]
It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US
has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being
prepared for cyberwar. I tend to be extremely skeptical of US claims because: bomber gap,
missile gap, gulf of Tonkin, Iraq WMD, Afghanistan, Libya and every other aggressive attack by
the US which was blamed on its target. The reason I assume the US is the most aggressive actor
in cyberspace is because the US has done a terrible job of protecting its tool-sets and
operational security: it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the
NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools.
Meanwhile, where are the leaks of Russian and Chinese tools? They have been few and far
between, if there have been any at all. Does this mean that the Russians and Chinese have
amazingly superior tradecraft, if not tools? I don't know. My observation is that the NSA
and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing
to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA
and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese?
The article does not have great depth to its understanding of the situation, I'm afraid. So
it comes off as a bit heavy on the recent news while ignoring the long-term trends. For
example:
The allegations of Chinese supply chain attacks are of course just as hypocritical as the
allegations against Russia. The very first know case of computer related supply chain
manipulation goes
back to 1982 :
A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped
software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas
pipeline, it emerged yesterday.
I wrote a piece about the "Farewell Dossier" in 2004. [ mjr
] Re-reading it, it comes off as skeptical but waffly. I think that it's self-promotion by the
CIA and exaggerates considerably ("look how clever we are!") at a time when the CIA was
suffering an attention and credibility deficit after its shitshow performance under George
Tenet. But the first known cases of computer related supply chain manipulation go back to the
70s and 80s -- the NSA even compromised Crypto AG's Hagelin M-209 system (a mechanical
ciphering machine) in order to read global communications encrypted with that product. You can
imagine Crypto AG's surprise when the Iranian secret police arrested one of their sales reps
for selling backdoor'd crypto -- the NSA had never told them about the backdoor, naturally. The
CIA was also on record for producing Xerox machines destined for the USSR, which had recorders
built into them So, while the article is portraying the historical sweep of NSA dirty tricks,
they're only looking at the recent ones. Remember: the NSA also weakened the elliptic curve
crypto library in RSA's Bsafe implementation, paying RSADSI $13 million to accept their tweaked
code.
Why haven't we been hearing about the Chinese and Russians doing that sort of thing? There
are four options:
The Russians and Chinese are doing it, they're just so darned good nobody has
caught them until just recently.
The Russians and Chinese simply resort to using existing tools developed by the
hacking/cybercrime community and rely on great operational security rather than fancy
tools.
The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts
the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence
agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is
around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are
much smaller operations?
Something else.
That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's
not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel
management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other
processors have similar backdoors.
Was the Intel IME a "backdoor" or just "a bad idea"? Well, that's tricky. Let me put my
tinfoil hat on: making a backdoor look like a sloppily developed product feature would be the
competent way to write a backdoor. Making it as sneaky as the backdoor in the Via is
unnecessary -- incompetence is eminently believable.
&
(kaspersky)
I believe all of these stories (including the Supermicro) are the tip of a great big, ugly
iceberg. The intelligence community has long known that software-only solutions are too
mutable, and are easy to decompile and figure out. They have wanted to be in the BIOS of
systems -- on the motherboard -- for a long time. If you go back to 2014, we have disclosures
about the NSA malware that hides in hard drive BIOS: [
vice ] [
vice ] That appears to have been in progress around 2000/2001.
Of note, the group recovered two modules belonging to EquationDrug and GrayFish that were
used to reprogram hard drives to give the attackers persistent control over a target machine.
These modules can target practically every hard drive manufacturer and brand on the market,
including Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba, Corsair, Hitachi and more. Such attacks
have traditionally been difficult to pull off, given the risk in modifying hard drive
software, which may explain why Kaspersky could only identify a handful of very specific
targets against which the attack was used, where the risk was worth the reward.
But
Equation Group's malware platforms have other tricks, too. GrayFish, for example, also has
the ability to install itself into computer's boot record -- software that loads even
before the operating system itself -- and stores all of its data inside a portion of
the operating system called the registry, where configuration data is normally stored.
EquationDrug was designed for use on older Windows operating systems, and "some of the
plugins were designed originally for use on Windows 95/98/ME" -- versions of Windows so old
that they offer a good indication of the Equation Group's age.
This is not a very good example of how to establish a "malware gap" since it just makes the
NSA look like they are incapable of keeping a secret. If you want an idea how bad it is,
Kaspersky labs' analysis of the NSA's toolchain is a good example of how to do attribution
correctly. Unfortunately for the US agenda, that solid attribution points toward Fort Meade in
Maryland. [kaspersky]
Let me be clear: I think we are fucked every which way from the start. With backdoors in the
BIOS, backdoors on the CPU, and wireless cellular-spectrum backdoors, there are probably
backdoors in the GPUs and the physical network controllers, as well. Maybe the backdoors in the
GPU come from the GRU and maybe the backdoors in the hard drives come from NSA, but who cares?
The upshot is that all of our systems are so heinously compromised that they can only be
considered marginally reliable. It is, literally, not your computer: it's theirs. They'll let
you use it so long as your information is interesting to them.
Do I believe the Chinese are capable of doing such a thing? Of course. Is the GRU? Probably.
Mossad? Sure. NSA? Well-documented attribution points toward NSA. Your computer is a free-fire
zone. It has been since the mid 1990s, when the NSA was told "no" on the Clipper chip and
decided to come up with its own Plan B, C, D, and E. Then, the CIA came up with theirs. Etc.
There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at
all.
From my 2012 RSA conference lecture "Cyberwar, you're doing it wrong."
The problem is that playing in this space is the purview of governments. Nobody in the
cybercrime or hacking world need tools like these. The intelligence operatives have huge
budgets, compared to a typical company's security budget, and it's unreasonable to expect any
business to invest such a level of effort on defending itself. So what should companies do?
They should do exactly what they are doing: expect the government to deal with it; that's what
governments are for. The problem with that strategy is that their government isn't on their
side, either! It's Hobbes' playground.
In case you think I am engaging in hyperbole, I assure you I am not. If you want another
example of the lengths (and willingness to bypass the law) "they" are willing to go, consider
'stingrays' that are in operation in every major US city and outside of every interesting hotel
and high tech park. Those devices are not passive -- they actively inject themselves into the
call set-up between your phone and your carrier -- your data goes through the stingray, or it
doesn't go at all. If there are multiple stingrays, then your latency goes through the roof.
"They" don't care. Are the stingrays NSA, FBI, CIA, Mossad, GRU, or PLA? Probably a bit of all
of the above depending on where and when.
Whenever the US gets caught with its pants down around its ankles, it blames the Chinese or
the Russians because they have done a good job of building the idea that the most serious
hackers on the planet at the Chinese. I don't believe that we're seeing complex propaganda
campaigns that are tied to specific incidents -- I think we see ongoing organic
propaganda campaigns that all serve the same end: protect the agencies, protect their budgets,
justify their existence, and downplay their incompetence.
So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been
consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order
to justify its actions and defend its budget.
The government also engages in propaganda, and is influenced by the intelligence
community's propaganda as well. And the propaganda campaigns work because everyone
involved assumes, "well, given what the NSA has been able to do, I should assume the Chinese
can do likewise." That's a perfectly reasonable assumption and I think it's probably true that
the Chinese have capabilities. The situation is what Chuck Spinney calls "A self-licking ice
cream cone" -- it's a justifying structure that makes participation in endless aggression seem
like a sensible thing to do. And, when there's inevitably a disaster, it's going to be like a
cyber-9/11 and will serve as a justification for even more unrestrained aggression.
Want to see what it looks like? A thousand thanks to Commentariat member [redacted] for this
link. If you don't like video, there's an article here. [ toms ]
Is this an NSA backdoor, or normal incompetence? Is Intel Management Engine an NSA-inspired
backdoor, or did some system engineers at Intel think that was a good idea? There are other
scary indications of embedded compromise: the CIA's Vault7 archive included code that appeared
to be intended to embed in the firmware of "smart" flatscreen TVs. That would make every LG
flat panel in every hotel room, a listening device just waiting to be turned on.
We know the Chinese didn't do that particular bug but why wouldn't they do
something similar, in something else? China is the world's oldest mature culture -- they
literally wrote the book on strategy -- Americans acting as though it's a great
surprise to learn that the Chinese are not stupid, it's just the parochialism of a 250 year-old
culture looking at a 3,000 year-old culture and saying "wow, you guys haven't been asleep at
the switch after all!"
What little I've been able to find out the new
Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive
retribution against (perceived) foes.
Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of
same.
Pierce R. Butler@#1: What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that
it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes.
Yes. Since 2001, as far as most of us can tell, federal cybersecurity spend has been 80%
offense, 20% defense. And a lot of the offensive spend has been aimed at We, The
People.
Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think
that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese
hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick
style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead
old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running
troll farms on social media). I mean, I've seen interviews with retired US intelligence
people since the 90s complain that since the late 1980s, the intelligence agencies have
been crippled by management in love with hi-tech "SIGINT" solutions to problems that never
deliver and neglecting old-fashioned "HUMINT" intelligence-gathering.
The thing is, Kevin Mitnick got away with a lot of what he did because people didn't
take security seriously then, and still don't. On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember
reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of the researchers who helped in the analysis of
the Morris worm
that took down a significant chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a
year or so afterwards and some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it
still hadn't patched the holes that had let the worm infect them in the first
place.
Cat Mara@#3: Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think
that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese
hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick
style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead
old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running
troll farms on social media).
I think that's right, to a high degree. What if Edward Snowden was an agent provocateur
instead of a well-meaning naive kid? A tremendous amount of damage could be done, as well
as stealing the US' expensive toys. The Russians have been very good at doing exactly that
sort of operation, since WWII. The Chinese are, if anything, more subtle than the
Russians.
The Chinese attitude, as expressed to me by someone who might be a credible source is,
"why are you picking a fight with us? We don't care, you're too far away for us to threaten
you, we both have loads of our own fish to fry. To them, the US is young, hyperactive, and
stupid.
The FBI is not competent, at all, against old-school humint intelligence-gathering.
Compared to the US' cyber-toys, the old ways are probably more efficient and cost
effective. China's intelligence community is also much more team-oriented than the CIA/NSA;
they're actually a disciplined operation under the strategic control of policy-makers.
That, by the way, is why Russians and Chinese stare in amazement when Americans ask things
like "Do you think Putin knew about this?" What a stupid question! It's an autocracy; they
don't have intelligence operatives just going an deciding "it's a nice day to go to England
with some Novichok." The entire American attitude toward espionage lacks maturity.
On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of
the researchers who helped in the analysis of the Morris worm that took down a significant
chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a year or so afterwards and
some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it still hadn't patched the
holes that had let the worm infect them in the first place.
That as an exciting time. We were downstream from University of Maryland, which got hit
pretty badly. Pete Cottrel and Chris Torek from UMD were also in on Bostic's dissection. We
were doing uucp over TCP for our email (that changed pretty soon after the worm) and our
uucp queue blew up. I cured the worm with a reboot into single-user mode and a quick 'rm
-f' in the uucp queue.
Thanks. I appreciate your measured analysis and the making explicit of the bottom line:
" agencies, protect their budgets, justify their existence, and downplay their
incompetence."
"... Steele also had extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie, who - along with Steele - was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump called for the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly reveal more about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of Justice for lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS. ..."
"... Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016 . Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to meet with). ..."
"... Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of Democrats' emails. ..."
"... Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a government-sanctioned surveillance operation. - Daily Caller ..."
"... In total, Halper received over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for "research," over $400,000 of which was granted before and during the 2016 election season. ..."
"... In short, it's understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the "witch hunt" of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a set-up from the start . ..."
"... Steele's ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true. ..."
"... Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele's unauthorized contacts with the press. ..."
"... That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious. ..."
"... I find it interesting that the Theresa May Govt in UK has the temerity to interfere with US politics (until they got caught out!), yet can't find the spine to stand up to the EU. ..."
"... THE UNITED KINGDOM along with ISRAEL & SAUDI ARABIA have always been the ones behind US Politics making, pulling the strings behind the curtains since the Petrodollar Inception, The Greater Israel project & the NWO initiative - only this time around Trump was not the UK's pick... ..."
"... England dominates the offshore money laundering havens where the super rich hide their money and evade taxes. They need to be brought down. No more African dictators looting their nation's resources and hiding the money first in offshore banks and then in JP Morgan and Brit banks. ..."
"... It is a test. If Trump doesn't go ahead with declassification, we know for sure he is no better than the globalists and neocons whose goal has always been to destroy and depopulate America. ..."
"... 'focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious' ..."
"... Not at all. It's obvious - the problem ISN'T Steele. They're living in fear, as are many in DC and elsewhere, that Trump is going to pry the lid open and reveal at least some of their activities. If killing him would fix the problem, they would. It's too late, considering what Trump is threatening to do. I wonder if he'll back down, at least some? ..."
"... U.K. does not want the jurisdiction. U.S. spies lure you overseas then...compromise you. ..."
"... Duh. This Started In London! Britain is the "foreign country" involved in our elections. Wake up everyone. It's LONDONGATE ..."
"... May gonna owe Vlad an apology when Skripal is revealed to be Steele's source. Steele himself hadn't been to Russian in 15 years. Will he get life in prison for attempted murder? ..."
"... "t's hard to tell who's telling the truth and who isn't in this whole Russia narrative. Fact is, NOBODY is telling the truth. That is what I've determined after doing my own research.": https://youtu.be/2AA5BIfGj3g ..."
"... Trump made promises before being elected, then lied and sold America out, just like every other corrupted assklown politician. he is no different than clinton bush obama, just as arrogant, just as corrupt, and just as much a traitor. ..."
UK Begged Trump Not To Declassify Russia Docs; Cited "Grave Concerns" Over Steele
Involvement
by Tyler Durden
Sun, 09/23/2018 - 11:15 4.6K SHARES
The British government "expressed grave concerns" to the US government over the
declassification and release of material related to the Trump-Russia investigation, according
to the New
York Times . President Trump ordered a wide swath of materials "immediately" declassified
"without redaction" on Monday, only to
change his mind later in the week by allowing the DOJ Inspector General to review the
materials first.
The Times reports that the UK's concern was over material which "includes direct references
to conversations between American law enforcement officials and Christopher Steele," the former
MI6 agent who compiled the infamous "Steele Dossier." The UK's objection, according to former
US and British officials, was over revealing Steele's identity in an official document,
"regardless of whether he had been named in press reports."
We would note, however, that Steele's name was contained within the Nunes Memo
- the House Intelligence Committee's majority opinion in the Trump-Russia case.
Steele also had
extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie, who - along with Steele
- was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump called for
the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly reveal more
about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of Justice for
lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS.
Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump
campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016 . Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos
was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor
that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would
drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to
meet with).
Also recall that CIA/FBI "informant" (spy) Stefan Halper met with both Carter Page
and Papadopoulos in
London.
Halper, a veteran of four Republican administrations, reached out to Trump aide George
Papadopoulos in September 2016 with an offer to fly to London to write an academic paper on
energy exploration in the Mediterranean Sea.
Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a
meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of
Democrats' emails.
Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a
government-sanctioned surveillance operation. - Daily Caller
In total, Halper received over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for "research," over
$400,000 of which was granted before and during the 2016 election season.
In short, it's understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the
"witch hunt" of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted
on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they
meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a
set-up from the start .
Steele's ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims
asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true.
Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump
dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the
relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele's unauthorized contacts
with the press.
He shared results of his investigation into Trump's links to Russia with the FBI beginning
in early July 2016.
The FBI relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to fill out applications for four
FISA warrants against Page. Page has denied the dossier's claims, which include that he was
the Trump campaign's back channel to the Kremlin. - Daily Caller
That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse
focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK
soil, is curious.
StychoKiller , 54 minutes ago
I find it interesting that the Theresa May Govt in UK has the temerity to interfere with
US politics (until they got caught out!), yet can't find the spine to stand up to the EU. If
I were Trump, not only would the shoe be dropping re: UK Govt involvement in US politics, but
said shoe would be making an imprint across her face! (stoopid twat!)
texantim , 1 hour ago
I say release the docs and put sanctions on UK.
BitchesBetterRecognize , 1 hour ago
So the Motherland ******* up with the ex-colony yet again, huh?
THE UNITED KINGDOM along with ISRAEL & SAUDI ARABIA have always been the ones behind
US Politics making, pulling the strings behind the curtains since the Petrodollar Inception,
The Greater Israel project & the NWO initiative - only this time around Trump was not the
UK's pick...
Oh, but those "civilized" Allies backstabbing each other for more power grip on the
USA....
Baron von Bud , 2 hours ago
England dominates the offshore money laundering havens where the super rich hide their
money and evade taxes. They need to be brought down. No more African dictators looting their
nation's resources and hiding the money first in offshore banks and then in JP Morgan and
Brit banks.
Many hedge funds are deep into this game. I'd wager on Carlyle Group and the Bush
clan. Billions of people can't get ahead because the super rich are ******* crooks running
the banks and governments. They don't pay taxes but force a small dry cleaner to pay 45% in
fed/state taxes. These criminals include Hillary Clinton and many members of congress.
Feinstein, Pelosi, Maxine and many more of both parties need to be investigated. How do they
get so rich on a congressman's salary. Deep into tax evasion and payoffs? Release the
documents and let MI6 hang.
Malvern Joe , 3 hours ago
It is a test. If Trump doesn't go ahead with declassification, we know for sure he is no
better than the globalists and neocons whose goal has always been to destroy and depopulate
America. It would represent the biggest sellout of this country since the creation of the Fed
in 1913, He will go down as the biggest fraud ever and his base will deport his *** to the
sums of India where he can defecate in public.
Bricker , 3 hours ago
You dont get to supply a rogue agent, that was probably told to do it in the first place,
and then tell Trump not to do it out of harm, harm is all you BRIT DEEP STATES deserve
Moving and Grooving , 3 hours ago
'focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on
UK soil, is curious'
Not at all. It's obvious - the problem ISN'T Steele. They're living in fear, as are many
in DC and elsewhere, that Trump is going to pry the lid open and reveal at least some of
their activities. If killing him would fix the problem, they would. It's too late,
considering what Trump is threatening to do. I wonder if he'll back down, at least some?
The sheer corruption of the Global Government is on display here, revealing itself, if you
watch for it. Whether planned or not, the last 6 months or so have been astonishing to watch.
The entire media has been shown to be liars, academia is shown to be an expensive provider of
unprepared students, the corporate world is furiously rent-seeking and finding new ways to
destroy humanity, and government is too busy selling Americans out to write a budget. In all
countries around the world, adjusting for national status. Lawsuits in the west, machetes in
the third world.
Ban KKiller , 4 hours ago
U.K. does not want the jurisdiction. U.S. spies lure you overseas then...compromise you.
John C Durham , 4 hours ago
Duh. This Started In London! Britain is the "foreign country" involved in our elections.
Wake up everyone. It's LONDONGATE .
Anunnaki , 4 hours ago
May gonna owe Vlad an apology when Skripal is revealed to be Steele's source. Steele himself hadn't been to Russian in 15 years. Will he get life in prison for attempted murder?
PeaceForWorld , 4 hours ago
"t's hard to tell who's telling the truth and who isn't in this whole Russia narrative.
Fact is, NOBODY is telling the truth. That is what I've determined after doing my own
research.": https://youtu.be/2AA5BIfGj3g
I really like this woman "Shut the **** up!". She is a former Bernie supporter just like
me. She has turned against Democrats just like me. She doesn't trust any of the Establishment
parties.
Buddha71 , 4 hours ago
Trump made promises before being elected, then lied and sold America out, just like every other
corrupted assklown politician. he is no different than clinton bush obama, just as arrogant,
just as corrupt, and just as much a traitor. he has broken the promises upon which he was
elected, just like all the other fkn liars before him. no different. just a pos. he has not
made america great again, just more of the same, unemployment is a lie, it is closer to
17%.
"... If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be. ..."
"... The US Senate has just passed Trump's mammoth military spending increase by a landslide 92–8 vote . The eight senators who voted "nay"? Seven Republicans, and Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget since the height of the Iraq war . Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential damage that can be done by a president they've been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they've been actively increasing his power as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen. ..."
"... They're on the same team, wearing different uniforms. ..."
"... US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give the illusion of competition. ..."
"... In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it's pretending to care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video game remote won't impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push. ..."
"... The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride toward war, ecocide and oppression. ..."
"... Reprinted with author's permission from Medium.com . ..."
"... Support Ms. Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal ..."
A new article from the Wall Street
Journal reports that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
lied to congress about the measures Saudi Arabia is taking to minimize the civilian
casualties in its catastrophic war on Yemen, and that he did so in order to secure two billion
dollars for war profiteers.
This is about as depraved as anything you could possibly imagine. US-made bombs have
been conclusively tied to civilian deaths in a war which has caused the single worst
humanitarian crisis on earth, a crisis which sees
scores of Yemeni children dying every single day and has
placed five million children at risk of death by starvation in a nation where families are
now eating
leaves to survive . CIA veteran Bruce Riedel
once said that "if the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King
Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow, because the Royal Saudi Airforce cannot
operate without American and British support." Nobody other than war plutocrats benefits from
the US assisting Saudi Arabia in its monstrous crimes against humanity, and yet Pompeo chose to
override his own expert advisors on the matter for fear of hurting the income of those very war
plutocrats.
If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this
administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for
days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for
days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be.
It would be so very, very easy for Democratic party leaders and Democrat-aligned media to
hurt this administration at the highest level and cause irreparable political damage based on
this story. All they'd have to do is give it the same blanket coverage they've given the
stories about Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort which
end up leading nowhere remotely near impeachment or proof of collusion with the Russian
government. The footage of the starving children is right there, ready to be aired to pluck at
the heart strings of rank-and-file Americans day after day until Republicans have lost all hope
of victory in the midterms and in 2020; all they'd have to do is use it. But they don't. And
they won't.
The US Senate has just passed Trump's mammoth military spending increase by
a landslide 92–8 vote . The eight senators who voted "nay"? Seven Republicans, and
Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget
since the
height of the Iraq war . Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential
damage that can be done by a president they've been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal
parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they've been actively increasing his power as
Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen.
The reason for this is very simple: President Trump's ostensible political opposition does
not oppose President Trump. They're on the same team, wearing different uniforms. This is the
reason they attack him on Russian collusion accusations which the brighter bulbs among them
know full well will never be proven and have no basis in reality. They don't stand up to Trump
because, as Julian Assange once said , they are
Trump.
In John Steinbeck's The Pearl, there are jewelry buyers set up around a fishing community
which are all owned by the same plutocrat, but they all pretend to be in competition with one
another. When the story's protagonist discovers an enormous and valuable pearl and goes to sell
it, they all gather round and individually bid far less than it is worth in order to trick him
into giving it away for almost nothing. US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream
parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give
the illusion of competition.
In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give
their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote
for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of
a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that
government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it's pretending to
care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video
game remote won't impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push.
The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start
waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them
the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace
whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride
toward war, ecocide and oppression.
If enough of us keep throwing sand in the gears of the lie
factory, we can wake
the masses up from the oligarchic lullaby they're being sung. And then maybe we'll be big
enough to have a shot at grabbing one of the real video game controllers.
Reprinted with author's permission from
Medium.com .
"... The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability of international and independent news in Western countries ..."
"... Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya; what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.) ..."
"... I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities as defined in the BBC charter. ..."
"... The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours" of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident. ..."
"... Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal. ..."
"... I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players. ..."
"... With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well as all his notes). ..."
"... Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc. ..."
"... Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled. ..."
"... Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia, the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said: ..."
"... No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear. ..."
"... I know about Ireland, and I agree, it was NOT a nerve agent. That said, I don't believe anyone was 'attacked', including the Skripals. ..."
"... All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about this. ..."
"... I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British universities for a long time. ..."
"... When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy. ..."
BBC is skanky state propaganda. The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability
of international and independent news in Western countries. The main thing that BBC used to have which propped up the illusion
of it being a respectable news source is that there was no competition or alternative to compare its narratives against. Since
that time is over, so is BBC's masquerading as an impartial or accurate news source.
Agree, Dave. That's what's informing the push to rubbish dissenting sites as fake news and eventually have them removed.
Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya;
what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.)
Well I was convinced of fake BBC news during 9/11 and not for the reasons of building 7 coming down too early but the fact
that the female journalist was facing a camera standing in front of a glass window and there was no reflection of her or the camera
person from the glass. Not even a faint shadow.
That's when I knew the BBC were employing vampires and have been ever since.
Green Screen technology I discovered later. All the On the spot reporters are at it apparently. Or repeating Reuters or PA.
I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to
be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities
as defined in the BBC charter. People should not only boycott the BBC but refuse to pay the license fee on the grounds that
it's a compulsory political subscription.
Dear Mark,
In a BBC article on 4 July 2018, you wrote: "I have not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do
now that the book is nearing completion."
Could you please explain that comment? I do not see why your acknowledgement of your meetings with Sergei Skripal should be
delayed until your book is nearing completion.
If you felt that it was right to reveal those meetings in July, then why was it not right to do so in March, soon after the
poisoning occurred? What difference would it have made if you had done so four months earlier?
I cannot think of any negative consequences of an earlier acknowledgement of the meetings. In fact, disclosures of any possible
conflict of interest are generally considered to be desirable in journalism, regardless of whether the conflict of interest is
real.
The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours"
of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident.
Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because
that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal.
And that can't happen because either Skripal would be asked about what happened on the day of the poisoning, or can't be guaranteed
to stick to the script, or is no longer alive. And that leads to a suspicion that whatever Skripal is supposed to have said in
his interviews with Urban has really just been made up by the British security services.
I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact
with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown
of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players.
Tongue in cheek, it'd be worth asking Urban if his decision to cover the Skripal poisoning in his new book was made before
or after the Skripals were actually poisoned.
The consensus seems to be that it was an anti-Russia book, but that doesn't conflict with what you say (there is overlap, your
view is just more specific). But, I just find it hard to believe that Urban and the conspirators would waste their time "counting
their chickens ". Not least because such a book would form a handy list of traitors (together with confessions) if Trump were
to prevail and it fell into the right hands. This is "101 – How to Organise a Revolution" (secrecy / don't put anything in writing);
surely British security services know that?
With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he
believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban
really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well
as all his notes).
Regardless, it looks like the master of the universe are losing their ability to create reality.
Last month, Mark Urban was promoting the reports that the Russian assassins had been identified from CCTV footage:
"There are now subjects of interest in the police Salisbury investigation. ( ) analytic and cyber techniques are now being
exploited against the Salisbury suspects by people with a wealth of experience in complex investigations." https://twitter.com/MarkUrban01/status/1020366761848385536
The BBC relies on it's interpretation of the Act because it is held for the purposes of 'journalism, art or literature.' but
this relies on a usually unrelated precedent and the opinions of a number of Judges which contradict this view. I'm in the process
of challenging this with ICO but don't expect anything will change until another supreme court ruling:
I can see the value in asking writers, journalists and artists to pose exactly the same questions as Eccles' original letter
but I'm not convinced about Craig's email.
A quick google shows me that a man named Mark Urban has written a book on the Skripals. Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping
the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?
It wouldn't surprise me if Urban cares far more about his writing career than his job at the BBC. I'm sure most journalists
would rather be authors. He's written a number of books on war and military intelligence. If his sources have nothing to do with
the BBC then why should he answer to an on line mob?
" Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?"
No, entirely unlikely. a chance to plug his forthcoming book and his Skripal contacts to a massive worldwide televion audience
was eschewed.
The book is now about the Skripal attack. Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened
yet. The book will just be a rehash of the "noble defector – Putin revenge" line and none of the questions I asked about the genesis
of his involvement will be answered in it.
"Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened yet." Or it was prescience ie that
it was part of the planning for the incident?
@BBC, Summer 2017, in an executive office:
"Hey Mark, why don't you go down to have a chat with this guy in Salisbury. I have a hunch that a story might be going to happen
involving him, you know, as an ex-Soviet spy. Spend time with him, get to know him, be able to write in depth about him. Say it's
for a book ."
Urban is never one-sided in his BBC reports on the Middle East. I would rather have him as Foreign Secretary than a bumbling
idiot like Hubris Johnson or a Tory racketeer Hunt, because however clunky the formula of BBC balance Urban is at least pretending
to be governed by normal rules. After Thatcher went anyone with half a brain left the Conservative party, leaving dolts like Johnson
and nasties like May and Cameron to pick up the pieces after Blair and Brown.
There's money to be made from Russian billionaires and tory shit will follow the money like flies on d**t**d.
Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to
find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc.
Tory shit Hubris Johnson finds this political research floating around the Foreign Office and decides to twist it into Russia
murders Skripal by Novichok. Unfortunately Johnson is already known to be a liar and gravy-trainer Tory and nobody believes him
at all. Mrs May , realising that Johnson, Fox, Rees-Mogg and Hunt are completely bonkers, does Chequers her own way.
Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon
wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled.
From memory the books description said that Mark had interviewed Skripal 'extensively' during 2017 and also mentioned the 'new'
spying war now happening between Britain and Russia.
Salisbury poisoning: Skripals 'were under Russian surveillance'
Mark Urban Diplomatic and defence editor, Newsnight
4 July 2018
'My meetings with Sergei Skripal
I met Sergei on a few occasions last summer and found him to be a private character who did not, even under the circumstances
then prevailing, wish to draw attention to himself.
He agreed to see me as a writer of history books rather than as a news journalist, since I was researching one on the post-Cold
War espionage battle between Russia and the West.
Information gained in these interviews was fed into my Newsnight coverage during the early days after the poisoning. I have
not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do now that the book is nearing completion.
As a man, Sergei is proud of his achievements, both before and after joining his country's intelligence service.
He has a deadpan wit and is remarkably stoical given the reverses he's suffered in his life; from his imprisonment following
conviction in 2006 on charges of spying for Britain, to the loss of his wife Liudmila to cancer in 2012, and the untimely death
of his son Alexander (or Sasha) last summer.'
Laughable given that the whole world and virtually all heads of State were under US surveillance by the NSA – at least until
Edward Snowden made all his revelations.
I have pasted and copied your Email regarding the above with a few slight alterations, it will be interesting to see the response
I receive if any being just a concerned citizen of the U.
Is this not a matter for the Police? (Even if you're not too sure if they'd do anything about it) These would be files that
are to do with an attempted murder case. And definitely not Journalism if the story is fabricated.
It feels as if you are moving in the right direction in linking Sergei to Steele. I'm intrigued by the very early media references
to Sergei wanting to return home to see his elderly mother for perhaps the last time. He had apparently written to Putin making
his request but again according to newspapers hadn't received a reply.
I would suggest Julia was bringing the answer via her own secret services contacts, her boyfriend and his mother, apparently
Senior in the Russian Intelligence Agency. Perhaps a sentimental man Sergei was aware his mother couldn't travel so the plea to
Putin was his best bet.
Such a request must have disturbed MI6 if Sergei had anything at all to do with the Steele dossier because inevitably if he
returned to Russia he'd be debriefed by his old colleagues. But how can you rely on a mercenary double agent? If he decided he
might want to stay in Russia with his family that might well have been attractive, away from the lonely existence in a Salisbury
cul de sac with only spies for company. But the Steele dossier has great potential to turn sour on the British.
It's author was a Senior spy and Head of the Russian Desk for some years. It is – perhaps you'd agree? – inconceivable that
he didn't require permission to prepare it, especially as much of it was based on his experience as a spy in Russia. Yet it's
equally inconceivable that the Agency bosses didn't know the identity of the commissioners or the use to which it would be put
in the US election – to boost Clinton's bid. If she'd won everything would have been fine but as it is any discussion of foreign
interference in that election would have to include MI6 leading the list (they probably didn't tell any politician?) To have Sergei
supporting and highlighting that embarrassment would be problematic for US-UK relations. Of course Sergei may have had other nuggets
to expose as well as Steele.
Soon after Julia's arrival the pair fell ill. They both survived but are now locked away, presumably for life and never able
to explain their side of the story.
It was a bodged job with a poor cover story from the start and could only be carried because of D Notices and media complicity.
Is his mother still alive? Would he still like to see her before she dies? Would Russia allow it? Would MI6 allow it? I think
that's 3 yeses and a resounding No.
Following the deaths of 55 Palestinians on the Gaza 'border' and the wounding of thousands, in this video, Urban asks the questions
but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against Hamas.
Gaza deaths: Who's to blame? – BBC Newsnight
Published on 15 May 2018
Subscribe 256K
Fresh protests against Israel are expected in the Palestinian territories, a day after Israeli troops killed 58 people in the
Gaza Strip.
David Keyes is the spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mark Urban asked him whether it was appropriate
for the US to open their embassy on the 70th anniversary of Israel's creation, a day that is hugely controversial for the Palestinian
people.
Mr Keyes' pronounced American accent was heard. The Occupation was not mentioned. A Palestinian voice was not heard.
This is another of his videos. On the same subject and on the opening of the Israeli Embassy in Jerusalem. This time, Jonathan
Conricus spoke for the IDF.
"Urban asks the questions but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against
Hamas."
Yes indeed : Urban asked the questions and allowed the interviewee to answer. Perhaps you would have preferred him to interrupt
the interviewee continually 'a la Today programme, or to have shouted at him similarly to the way I understand some people shout
at customers inside or outside supermarkets?
This may or may not be relevant regarding Russia, chemical weapons and BBC/MSM bovine effluent:
"US Poised to Hit Syria Harder: The Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement on Aug. 25 stating that the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham
militants had brought eight containers of chlorine to Idlib in order to stage a false-flag attack with the help of UK intelligence
agencies. A group of Tahrir al-Sham fighters trained to handle chemical warfare agents by the UK private military company Olive
arrived in the suburbs of the city of Jisr ash-Shugur, Idlib, 20 km. from the Turkish border."
Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia,
the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said:
"Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's
inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included
Germany, Estonia and Poland."
Perhaps not the Dossier, as such, but some material on collusion?
No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually
taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear.
Catch my last post Doodlebug, sadly MI6 diabolical elements can be traced back to Ireland in the 70's early 80's assassinations
theRealTerror (theRealElvis) understands.
Often it's been open. There was the BBC monitoring station at Caversham Park. The BBC's Foreign Broadcast Information Service
split the world into two parts with the CIA.
All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about
this.
Theresa May says a no deal Brexit "wouldn't be the end of the world".
This is not a negotiating strategy. This is not a pantomime where one giant on the stage can wink to his supporters (using
the British media) without his opponent (EU27) noticing.
The subconscious doesn't work well with negation. Whatever you do, please DON'T imagine an elephant at this time.
I would love to know what the preparations are at Trinity College, Cambridge, for food shortages. They own the port of
Felixstowe, which handles more than 40% of Britain's containerised trade. They also own a 50% stake in a portfolio of Tesco
stores. Soon food distribution will be what everyone is talking about. I am never going to stop making the point that the god
of the Tory party is Thomas Malthus.
" As a Prime Minister who believes both in free markets and in nations and businesses acting in line with well-established
rules and principles of conduct, I want to demonstrate to young Africans that their brightest future lies in a free and thriving
private sector. "
I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass
starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts
of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British
universities for a long time.
They are keen on Prince Philip, the guy who said he wanted to come back as a virus so he could kill a large part of the population.
Never trust anyone who has received a Templeton scholarship or prize or who has anything to do with these people or with the message
that free markets and the private sector are the key to "development"
When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy.
May's rhetoric is laughable .basically all her speeches read : 'the sky is green, the snow is black etc etc' -- totally detached
from reality and a spent political force, as their recent membership numbers showed, with more revenues from legacies left in
wills than from actual living members.
I agree with the Skripal relatives that Sergei is dead. He hasn't been seen or heard of and would have called his mother. Mind
boggling deception at all levels and I struggle to believe any of it.
Sergei Skripal could be in US custody, either in the US itself or in a US facility somewhere.
If he is dead, then the rehospitalisation of Charlie Rowley may be to assist with the narrative. "Once you've had a drop of
Novvy Chockk, you may recover but you can fall down ill at any time, and here's an Expert with a serious voice to confirm it."
I follow this blog closely, particularly in relation to the Skripal case, but this is my first comment. I just watched Sky
News piece on 'super recognisers' and couldn't help but wonder why, in an age of powerful facial recognition technology, the police
and security services seem to have drawn such a blank. The surveillance state in the UK is known to be one of the most advanced
in the world but when it comes to this highly important geopolitical crisis our technological infrastructure seems to be redundant
to the point where 'human eyes' are deemed to be more accurate than the most powerful supercomputers available. Psychologically,
all humans have an inherent facial recognition ability from a very young age, but the idea that some police officers have this
ability developed to such an extent that they supercede computer recognition is, i feel, laughable. To me this announcement through
the ever subservient Sky News reeks of desperation on the part of the ;official story'. Are we about to be shown suspects who,
although facial recognition technology fails to identify them, a 'super recogniser' can testify that it actually is person A or
person B and we are all supposed to accept that? Seems either a damning indictment of the judicial process, or a damning indictment
of the £££££'s of taxpayers money that is spent on places like GCHQ etc whose technology is now apparently no better than a highly
perceptive human brain. Give me a break !
People do die Trowbridge. I know you haven't, but you have the motivation of outliving your persecutors. With Muckin about
with Isis gone and covert operations isn't social work Kissinger looking as though he's on daily blood transfusions, you have
rejected Trump for some reason. But Trump has undone much of John McCain's worst mischief in one year. If McCain was an example
of a politician, we don't need politicians.
Give me an example, other than the Coopers. of a healthy couple one day that is found dying the next day like the Skripals.
And while i tried on another site to be generous about McCain. he got Navy Secretary John Lehman, Jr. to scare the Soviets
for prevailing in the Vietnam War so much about what NATO was up to in the fallout from shooting Swedish PM Olof Palme that Moscow
gave up the competition for fear that it would blow up the world, helping bring on the crappy one we have.
McCain was a continuing Cold Warrior who we don't need since we still have Trump who is just trying to do it another way.
The op-ed is nauseating because it tells us the truth why they do it: Because conservatives got
their tax cuts, deregulation and all the other conservative politics that gamble with people's
lives. It's disgusting.
Notable quotes:
"... Pirate ships were in reality the most egalitarian institutions that existed in the 17th century. Their articles laid out that both the captain and quartermaster (who divided the spoils) served at the pleasure of their crew, and that the entire crew had rights to a fair portion of the proceeds. ..."
"... On a real pirate ship, Captain Trump would have lost his job long ago and been abandoned on some tiny island with a single shot in his pistol. ..."
I am outraged at describing Trump's administration as a "pirate ship"!
Pirate ships were in
reality the most egalitarian institutions that existed in the 17th century. Their articles
laid out that both the captain and quartermaster (who divided the spoils) served at the
pleasure of their crew, and that the entire crew had rights to a fair portion of the
proceeds.
On a real pirate ship, Captain Trump would have lost his job long ago and been abandoned
on some tiny island with a single shot in his pistol.
Rather like Janet Jackson's nipples,
It's been a while since we've seen the Skripals.
Not so long ago they were all over the news
As official drones droned their official views.
They said that in Salisbury wherever you look
Lurked sinister types splashing novichuk.
Door handle specialists had been imported,
Or so the BBC unquestioningly reported.
A laundry list of despicable acts
Only vaguely coincident with the salient facts.
Boris Johnson wasn't sitting on the fence,
He don't need no stinkin' evidence.
'It was them Russkies wot dunnit, no doubt about that',
Said the country's pre-eminent diplomat.
KGB thugs sent to put the boot in,
By Mr. Evil, Vladimir Stalin Putin.
Novichuk's lethality was re-emphasised again,
More deadly than others by a factor of ten.
Yet somehow miraculously the Skripals survived,
In Salisbury General they inconveniently revived.
And that was all we heard for a while
Bar a weird statement in machine-prose style.
Then a curious video right out of the blue
That looked like an advert for flyaway shampoo.
A chilled out Yulia said she was contented,
And consular access had not been prevented,
But no, she didn't want to meet up with her kin
(Not that the government would let them in).
The whole production was charmingly informal,
As though poisoning and exile were perfectly normal.
This remarkable young woman's taken it all in her stride,
Seemingly happy to go along with the ride.
Her boyfriend, her job, her dog and her flat
All peremptorily dumped at the drop of a hat.
The un-fake corporate media performed as tasked
Ensuring awkward questions remained unasked.
And all this ludicrous b-movie rigmarole
Was discreetly d-noticed down the memory hole.
The legal and diplomatic situation's now clear:
'Move along sir, nothing to see here.'
This is an interesting analysis shedding some light on how the US intelligence services have gone rogue...
Notable quotes:
"... Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence. ..."
"... the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough. ..."
"... That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment. ..."
"... He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail? ..."
"... The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up." ..."
"... The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on. ..."
"... "What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task." ..."
"... "The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact." ..."
"... But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts. ..."
"... Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria. ..."
"... Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
In today's United States, the term "espionage" doesn't get too much
use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage,
but with regard to Americans' own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they
prefer the term "intelligence." This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you
look at things.
First of all, US "intelligence" is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has
been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and
China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and
conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you
are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.
In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days
torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged
in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and
that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate
negotiating future spy swaps.
In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a
good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies,
sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as "Al Qaeda." There was no such thing before US
intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.
Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr.
Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own
spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They
poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no
evidence.
There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working
in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly
super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their "secret" lab in Porton Down doesn't
work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).
There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it
needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the
prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An
alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be
following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value.
A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the courts is
acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the source is the person on trial and
the method -- treason -- can be divulged without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper,
professional spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double agents.
In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the professional thing to do is to try to
recruit him as a double agent or, failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for
injecting disinformation.
Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert
Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail
server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's
been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that
they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet.
Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from
Russia.
Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict Russian citizens in
Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court because of the following clause in the
Russian Constitution: "61.1 A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of
Russia or extradited to another state."
Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to interpret this sentence, or he can
just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule
against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough.
That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked
into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system
has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done
bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged
hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping
a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment.
He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC
officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie
Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian
hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So,
where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail?
Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on criminal
investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by Mueller. He even offered to
have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in return he wanted to question US officials who
may have aided and abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to
begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way, donated copious
amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton election campaign.
In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from questioning US
officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to have the twelve Russian spies interviewed,
at least one US official made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US
instead. Again, which part of 61.1 don't they understand?
The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the
traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance --
which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best
ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such
quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US
"intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit
up."
The "intelligence" the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything but; in fact, the
stupider it is the better, because its purpose is allow unintelligent people to make
unintelligent decisions. In fact, they consider facts harmful -- be they about Syrian chemical
weapons, or conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden -- because facts require accuracy and rigor
while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual
objective is easily discernible.
The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its
allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom
aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and
overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they
are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and
so on.
One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag
operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à la fake East Gouta
chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is
perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were
harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly
forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure
confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a
conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled. A
light-hearted answer would have been:
"What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They
were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to
claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped
lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available,
is an impossible task."
A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:
"The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig
the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to
prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately
be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as
conspiracy theory, not as fact."
And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:
"The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US Constitution, according to
which I am their Commander in Chief. They report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to
me, not I to them. If they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their
dismissal."
But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake
answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake
intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and
ultimately futile conflicts.
Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of
religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the
Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American
efforts in Iraq and Syria.
The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be $4,575,610,429,593.
Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax returns (whether they actually pay any tax is
too subtle a question), it works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the
US, that's your bill so far for the various US intelligence "oopsies."
The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion, and that seems like
a lot until you realize how supremely efficient they are: their "mistakes" have cost the
country close to 70 times their budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of
them has cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is totally out of
the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings per employee, at around $1.8 million
per. Valero Energy stands out at $7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence
community has been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US
intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver imaginable.
There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.
First, we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly incompetent and that
the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it is hard to imagine a situation where
grossly incompetent people nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average, toward
an assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder to imagine that such
incompetents would be allowed to blunder along decade after decade without being called out for
their mistakes.
Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has
been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic
and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile
conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How
that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable
definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at
it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better
than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be
perpetual liars."
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @
nytimes , @ NBCNews , @ ABC , @ CBS , @ CNN
) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! ~ Donald Trump
On Thursday, Mr. Trump expressed his distaste for journalists in more populist terms, saying,
"much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles in particular, speaks
not for the people, but for the special interests."
"The public doesn't believe you people anymore," Mr. Trump added. "Now, maybe I had something
to do with that. I don't know. But they don't believe you."
President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and ongoing fabrications of
the mass media. Never before has a President so forcefully identified the lies of the leading
print and TV outlets. The NY Times , Washington Post , the Financial
Times, NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the
larger public. They have lost legitimacy and trust. Where progressives have failed, a war
monger billionaire has accomplished, speaking a truth to serve many injustices.
"Door handle" theory is dead on arrival. the main theory now is that UK government gave Skripals different agent BX
(similar to LSD and which caused hallucinations) and they voluntarily took it in order to start preplanned Skripal false flag
provocation. That's why military nurse accidentally appeared near Skripals soon after poisoning.
Notable quotes:
"... Following the attack on the Skripals, European and US allies took Britain's side on the attack, ordering the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War, reports Reuters . In response, Russia retaliated by expelling Western diplomats, while the Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement in the attacks - while accusing the UK intelligence agencies of staging the attack in order to inflame anti-Russia tensions. ..."
"... Prior to the investigation's focus on the door handle, for a period of almost three weeks there were at least nine other theories proposed by the authorities as to where the Skripals came into contact with the poison. These included the restaurant, the pub, the bench, the cemetery, the car, the flowers, the luggage, the porridge and even a drone. During that time, police officers and investigators were entering and leaving the house, by the door, since it was not known to be the place where the poison was located. ..."
"... Once the door handle theory was established, those who had been in and out of the property during the previous three weeks would naturally have been concerned about the possibility that they had been contaminated. ..."
"... Every officer who entered the house after 4th March, and before the door handle became an object of interest, should have been given a medical examination to check for signs of poisoning. ..."
"... Initial reports about Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey stated that he was poisoned at the bench, after coming to the aid of Mr Skripal and Yulia. However, on 9th March, Lord Ian Blair stated that D.S. Bailey had actually become poisoned after visiting Mr Skripal's house. Since he was thought to have been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, and since it was thought that this had occurred at Mr Skripal's house, the immediate next step should have been to seal off the house and set up a mobile decontamination unit outside. However, numerous photographs show officers in normal uniforms standing close to the door long after Lord Blair's claim ..."
"... Can the authorities explain how these decisions did not put the health and even the lives of those officers in jeopardy? ..."
"... Before the door handle theory was settled on, the majority of competing theories put out by the authorities tended to assume that Mr Skripal was poisoned long before he went to Zizzis. For example, the flowers, the cemetery, the luggage, the porridge and the car explanations all assume this to be the case. What this means is that according to the assumptions of police at that time, when Mr Skripal fed the ducks near the Avon Playground with a few local boys, at around 1:45pm, he was already contaminated. Yet although this event was caught on CCTV camera, it was more than two weeks before the police contacted the parents of these boys. ..."
"... Can the authorities comment on why they did not air the CCTV footage on national television, in an effort to appeal to the boys or their parents to come forward, and whether the delay in tracking them down might have put them in danger? ..."
"... If the door handle was the place of poisoning, it is extremely likely that the bread handed by Mr Skripal to the boys would have been contaminated. Certainly, areas that he visited after this incident were deemed to be so much at risk that they were either closed down (for example, The Mill and Zizzis, which are both still closed), or destroyed (for instance, the restaurant table, the bench and – almost certainly – the red bag near the bench have all been destroyed). ..."
"... It has been said that one of the reasons the Government is/was so sure that the ultimate culprit behind the poisoning was the Russian state, is the apparent existence of an "FSB handbook" which, amongst other things, allegedly features descriptions of how to apply nerve agent to a door handle. Given that the Prime Minister first made a formal accusation of culpability on 12th March in her speech to the House of Commons, the Government must therefore have been in possession of this manual prior to that day. However, claims about the door handle being the location of the poison did not appear until late March (the first media reports of it were on 28th March). What this means is there was a delay of several weeks between the Government making its accusation, based partly on the apparent existence of the "door handle manual", and the door handle of Mr Skripal's house being a subject of interest to investigators. ..."
"... "We are learning more about Sergei and Yulia's movements but we need to be clearer around their exact movements on the morning of the incident. We believe that at around 9.15am on Sunday, 4 March, Sergei's car may have been in the areas of London Road, Churchill Way North and Wilton Road. Then at around 1.30pm it was seen being driven down Devizes Road, towards the town centre. We need to establish Sergei and Yulia's movements during the morning, before they headed to the town centre. Did you see this car, or what you believe was this car, on the day of the incident? We are particularly keen to hear from you if you saw the car before 1.30pm. If you have information, please call the police on 101." ..."
"... Now that Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been awake and able to communicate for around four months, these details are presumably now all known to investigators. In the normal course of such a high profile investigation, details such as these would be relayed to the public in the hope of jogging memories to prompt more information. And in fact, many such details have been released to the public in this case. Yet, confirmation of Mr Skripal's and Yulia's movements that day remain conspicuous by their absence. ..."
"... These questions have nothing to do with any conspiracy theory. On the contrary, they are all based on the assumption that the two central claims made by the authorities regarding the mode and the method used in this incident are correct. They are, however, very serious and perfectly legitimate questions about the way the authorities have dealt with this incident, on their own terms and on the basis of their own claims . ..."
"... "Reports that the United Kingdom is planning to ask Russia to extradite suspects in a Salisbury poisoning incident are nothing more than a "speculation," a spokesperson for the UK Foreign Office told Sputnik on Monday. ..."
The British government has prepared an extradition request to Moscow for two
Russians they claim carried out the Salisbury nerve agent attack, according to The Guardian ,
citing Whitehall and security sources.
Former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on
a public bench in Salisbury in early March - which UK authorities believe was due to a nerve
agent called Novichok.
Months later on June 30, nearby residents Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old
mother of three, were subsequently treated for exposure to the nerve agent. Rowley recovered
while Sturgess died.
Authorities are operating on the assumption that the Skripals were poisoned using a
novichok-laced perfume bottle or a door handle smeared with the nerve agent, while Rowley may
have picked up said bottle and given to Sturgess, who applied it to her wrists.
Sturgess received a much higher dose than the other three after apparently smearing the
substance on her wrists, having sprayed it from the bottle. Rowley's recovery was helped,
according to a source, by one of the first responders being familiar with the nerve agent,
having been involved in helping the Skripals.
The Porton Down military defence laboratory near Salisbury has examined the novichok found
on the Skripals' doorknob and the perfume bottle, but police have not yet said whether they
are from the same batch. -
The Guardian
UK authorities believe they have pieced together the movements of the two Russians, from
their entry into the UK to their departure after the alleged assassination attempt.
Following the attack on the Skripals, European and US allies took Britain's side on the
attack, ordering the largest expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War,
reports
Reuters . In response, Russia retaliated by expelling Western diplomats, while the Kremlin
has repeatedly denied involvement in the attacks - while accusing the UK intelligence agencies
of staging the attack in order to inflame anti-Russia tensions.
Oddly, Sergei Skripal was linked by
The Telegraph to a consultant with former UK spy Christopher Steele's Orbis Business
Intelligence, who he reportedly had repeated contacts with.
The motive for trying to assassinate the 66-year-old skripal is unknown. Skripal moved to
the UK in a Kremlin-approved "spy swap" in 2010, causing many to question why they would
suddenly try to take him out a decade later.
In July, journalist Rob Slane compiled
10 questions for the UK authorities on the ever-confusing Skripal case:
***
The two most basic claims made by the Government and investigators regarding the method and
the mode in the Salisbury poisoning are these:
That military grade nerve agent was used to poison Mr Skripal
That it was applied to the door handle of his house
These claims raise a number of very obvious questions. For example, how did the assassin(s)
apply such a powerful chemical without wearing protective clothing? How did the people who are
said to have come into contact with the substance not die immediately, or at the very least
suffer irreparable damage to their Central Nervous Systems? How did this military grade nerve
agent manage not only to have a delayed onset, but also managed to affect a large 66-year-old
man and his slim 33-year-old daughter, both of whom would have vastly different metabolic
rates, at exactly the same time?
These are perfectly reasonable questions that deserve reasonable answers. I am aware,
however, that no matter how obvious and rational such questions might be, doing so places one
– at least in the eyes of the authorities – in the camp of the conspiracy theorist.
This is disingenuous. One of the marks of a true conspiracy theorist is that he is someone who
refuses to accept an explanation for an event, even after being presented with facts which fit
and explain it coherently . But when the "facts" presented in a case do not fit the event they
are supposed to explain, and are neither rational nor coherent -- as in the Salisbury case --
then calling the person who raises legitimate questions a "conspiracy theorist" is a bit rich,
is it not?
Nevertheless, for the purposes of this piece, what I'd like to do is work on the assumption
that the "Military Grade Nerve Agent on the Door Handle" claim is correct. And working from
this assumption, I want to ask some questions about how the authorities have handled the case.
The point is this: These questions are not really intended to challenge the official claims;
rather the intention is to ask whether the authorities have handled the case correctly on their
own terms .
1. Prior to the investigation's focus on the door handle, for a period of almost three weeks
there were at least nine other theories proposed by the authorities as to where the Skripals
came into contact with the poison. These included the restaurant, the pub, the bench, the
cemetery, the car, the flowers, the luggage, the porridge and even a drone. During that time,
police officers and investigators were entering and leaving the house, by the door, since it
was not known to be the place where the poison was located.
Can the authorities explain how these officers and investigators were not poisoned?
2. Once the door handle theory was established, those who had been in and out of the
property during the previous three weeks would naturally have been concerned about the
possibility that they had been contaminated.
Can the authorities tell us what steps were taken to reassure these officers?
3. Every officer who entered the house after 4th March, and before the door handle became an
object of interest, should have been given a medical examination to check for signs of
poisoning.
Can the authorities confirm that this took place for every officer?
4. Initial reports about Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey stated that he was poisoned at the
bench, after coming to the aid of Mr Skripal and Yulia. However, on 9th March, Lord Ian Blair
stated that D.S. Bailey had actually become poisoned after visiting Mr Skripal's house. Since
he was thought to have been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, and since it was
thought that this had occurred at Mr Skripal's house, the immediate next step should have been
to seal off the house and set up a mobile decontamination unit outside. However, numerous
photographs show officers in normal uniforms standing close to the door long after Lord Blair's
claim.
Can the authorities confirm why the house was not sealed off and a decontamination unit set
up immediately after it became known that D.S. Bailey had been there, and why officers with no
protective clothing on were allowed to continue standing guard outside the house for the next
few weeks?
5. Can the authorities explain how these decisions did not put the health and even the lives
of those officers in jeopardy?
6. Before the door handle theory was settled on, the majority of competing theories put out
by the authorities tended to assume that Mr Skripal was poisoned long before he went to Zizzis.
For example, the flowers, the cemetery, the luggage, the porridge and the car explanations all
assume this to be the case. What this means is that according to the assumptions of police at
that time, when Mr Skripal fed the ducks near the Avon Playground with a few local boys, at
around 1:45pm, he was already contaminated. Yet although this event was caught on CCTV camera,
it was more than two weeks before the police contacted the parents of these boys.
Can the authorities explain why it took more than two weeks to track down the boys, who
– as the CCTV apparently shows – were given bread by Mr Skripal?
7. Can the authorities comment on why they did not air the CCTV footage on national
television, in an effort to appeal to the boys or their parents to come forward, and whether
the delay in tracking them down might have put them in danger?
8. If the door handle was the place of poisoning, it is extremely likely that the bread
handed by Mr Skripal to the boys would have been contaminated. Certainly, areas that he visited
after this incident were deemed to be so much at risk that they were either closed down (for
example, The Mill and Zizzis, which are both still closed), or destroyed (for instance, the
restaurant table, the bench and – almost certainly – the red bag near the bench
have all been destroyed).
Can the authorities comment on how the boys, who were handed bread by Mr Skripal, managed to
avoid contamination?
9. It has been said that one of the reasons the Government is/was so sure that the ultimate
culprit behind the poisoning was the Russian state, is the apparent existence of an "FSB
handbook" which, amongst other things, allegedly features descriptions of how to apply nerve
agent to a door handle. Given that the Prime Minister first made a formal accusation of
culpability on 12th March in her speech to the House of Commons, the Government must therefore
have been in possession of this manual prior to that day. However, claims about the door handle
being the location of the poison did not appear until late March (the first media reports of it
were on 28th March). What this means is there was a delay of several weeks between the
Government making its accusation, based partly on the apparent existence of the "door handle
manual", and the door handle of Mr Skripal's house being a subject of interest to
investigators.
Can the authorities therefore tell us whether the Government's failure to pass on details of
the "door handle manual" put the lives of the officers going in and out of Mr Skripal's house
from 5th March to 27th March in jeopardy?
10. On 17th March, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said:
"We are learning more about Sergei and Yulia's movements but we need to be clearer around
their exact movements on the morning of the incident. We believe that at around 9.15am on
Sunday, 4 March, Sergei's car may have been in the areas of London Road, Churchill Way North
and Wilton Road. Then at around 1.30pm it was seen being driven down Devizes Road, towards
the town centre. We need to establish Sergei and Yulia's movements during the morning, before
they headed to the town centre. Did you see this car, or what you believe was this car, on
the day of the incident? We are particularly keen to hear from you if you saw the car before
1.30pm. If you have information, please call the police on 101."
Now that Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been awake and able to communicate for around four
months, these details are presumably now all known to investigators. In the normal course of
such a high profile investigation, details such as these would be relayed to the public in the
hope of jogging memories to prompt more information. And in fact, many such details have been
released to the public in this case. Yet, confirmation of Mr Skripal's and Yulia's movements
that day remain conspicuous by their absence.
Can the authorities confirm that the movements of the Skripals that day are now understood,
and that they will be made known shortly, in order that more information from the public might
then be forthcoming?
These questions have nothing to do with any conspiracy theory. On the contrary, they are all
based on the assumption that the two central claims made by the authorities regarding the mode
and the method used in this incident are correct. They are, however, very serious and perfectly
legitimate questions about the way the authorities have dealt with this incident, on their own
terms and on the basis of their own claims .
"Reports that the United Kingdom is planning to ask Russia to extradite suspects in a
Salisbury poisoning incident are nothing more than a "speculation," a spokesperson for the UK
Foreign Office told Sputnik on Monday.
"This is just more speculation. The police investigation is ongoing and anything on the
record will need to come from the Police," the spokesperson said."
Here are ten bombshell revelations and fascinating new details to lately come out of both Sy
Hersh's new book, Reporter , as well as
interviews he's given since publication...
1) On a leaked Bush-era intelligence memo outlining the neocon plan to remake the Middle
East
(Note: though previously alluded to only anecdotally by General Wesley Clark in his memoir and in a 2007
speech , the below passage from Seymour Hersh is to our knowledge the first time this
highly classified memo has been quoted . Hersh's account appears to corroborate now retired
Gen. Clark's assertion that days after 9/11 a classified memo outlining plans to foster regime
change in "7 countries in
5 years" was being circulated among intelligence officials.)
From Reporter: A Memoir
pg. 306 -- A few months after the invasion of Iraq, during an interview overseas with a general
who was director of a foreign intelligence service, I was provided with a copy of a Republican
neocon plan for American dominance in the Middle East. The general was an American ally, but
one who was very rattled by the Bush/Cheney aggression. I was told that the document leaked to
me initially had been obtained by someone in the local CIA station. There was reason to be
rattled: The document declared that the war to reshape the Middle East had to begin "with the
assault on Iraq. The fundamental reason for this... is that the war will start making the U.S.
the hegemon of the Middle East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones,
as it were, the seriousness of American intent and determination." Victory in Iraq would lead
to an ultimatum to Damascus, the "defanging" of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat's Palestine
Liberation Organization, and other anti-Israeli groups. America's enemies must understand that
"they are fighting for their life: Pax Americana is on its way, which implies their
annihilation." I and the foreign general agreed that America's neocons were a menace to
civilization.
From Reporter: A Memoir
pages 306-307 -- Donald Rumsfeld was also infected with neocon fantasy. Turkey had refused to
permit America's Fourth Division to join the attack of Iraq from its territory, and the
division, with its twenty-five thousand men and women, did not arrive in force inside Iraq
until mid-April, when the initial fighting was essentially over. I learned then that Rumsfeld
had asked the American military command in Stuttgart, Germany, which had responsibility for
monitoring Europe, including Syria and Lebanon, to begin drawing up an operational plan for an
invasion of Syria. A young general assigned to the task refused to do so, thereby winning
applause from my friends on the inside and risking his career. The plan was seen by those I
knew as especially bizarre because Bashar Assad, the ruler of secular Syria, had responded to
9/11 by sharing with the CIA hundreds of his country's most sensitive intelligence files on the
Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg, where much of the planning for 9/11 was carried out... Rumsfeld
eventually came to his senses and back down, I was told...
3) On the Neocon deep state which seized power after 9/11
From Reporter: A Memoir
pages 305-306 -- I began to comprehend that eight or nine neoconservatives who were political
outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially overthrown the government of the United States
-- with ease . It was stunning to realize how fragile our Constitution was. The intellectual
leaders of that group -- Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle -- had not hidden their
ideology and their belief in the power of the executive but depicted themselves in public with
a great calmness and a self-assurance that masked their radicalism . I had spent many hours
after 9/11 in conversations with Perle that, luckily for me, helped me understand what was
coming. (Perle and I had been chatting about policy since the early 1980s, but he broke off
relations in 1993 over an article I did for The New Yorker linking him, a fervent supporter of
Israel, to a series of meetings with Saudi businessmen in an attempt to land a
multibillion-dollar contract from Saudi Arabia . Perle responded by publicly threatening to sue
me and characterizing me as a newspaper terrorist. He did not sue.
Meanwhile, Cheney had emerged as a leader of the neocon pack. From 9/11 on he did all he
could to undermine congressional oversight. I learned a great deal from the inside about his
primacy in the White House , but once again I was limited in what I would write for fear of
betraying my sources...
I came to understand that Cheney's goal was to run his most important military and
intelligence operations with as little congressional knowledge, and interference, as possible.
I was fascinating and important to learn what I did about Cheney's constant accumulation of
power and authority as vice president , but it was impossible to even begin to verify the
information without running the risk that Cheney would learn of my questioning and have a good
idea from whom I was getting the information.
4) On Russian meddling in the US election
From the recent
Independent interview based on his autobiography -- Hersh has vociferously strong opinions
on the subject and smells a rat. He states that there is "a great deal of animosity towards
Russia. All of that stuff about Russia hacking the election appears to be preposterous." He has
been researching the subject but is not ready to go public yet.
Hersh quips that the last time he heard the US defense establishment have high confidence,
it was regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He points out that the NSA only has moderate confidence in Russian
hacking. It is a point that has been made before; there has been no national intelligence
estimate in which all 17 US intelligence agencies would have to sign off. "When the intel
community wants to say something they say it High confidence effectively means that they don't
know."
5) On the Novichok poisoning
From the recent
Independent interview -- Hersh is also on the record as stating that the official version
of the
Skripal poisoning does not stand up to scrutiny. He tells me: "The story of novichok
poisoning has not held up very well. He [Skripal] was most likely talking to British
intelligence services about Russian organised crime." The unfortunate turn of events with the
contamination of other victims is suggestive, according to Hersh, of organised crime elements
rather than state-sponsored actions –though this files in the face of the UK government's
position.
Hersh modestly points out that these are just his opinions. Opinions or not, he is scathing
on Obama –
"a trimmer articulate [but] far from a radical a middleman". During his Goldsmiths talk, he
remarks that liberal critics underestimate Trump at their peril.
He ends the Goldsmiths talk with an anecdote about having lunch with his sources in the
wake of 9/11 . He vents his anger at the agencies for not sharing information. One of his
CIA sources fires back: "Sy you still don't get it after all these years – the FBI
catches bank robbers, the CIA robs banks." It is a delicious, if cryptic aphorism.
* * *
6) On the Bush-era 'Redirection' policy of arming Sunni radicals to counter Shia Iran, which
in a 2007 New Yorker article
Hersh accurately predicted
would set off war in Syria
From the
Independent interview : [Hersh] tells me it is "amazing how many times that story has been
reprinted" . I ask about his argument that US policy was designed to neutralize the Shia sphere
extending from Iran to Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon and hence redraw the Sykes-Picot
boundaries for the 21st century.
He goes on to say that Bush and Cheney "had it in for Iran", although he denies the idea
that Iran was heavily involved in Iraq: "They were providing intel, collecting intel The US did
many cross-border hunts to kill ops [with] much more aggression than Iran"...
He believes that the Trump administration has no memory of this approach. I'm sure though
that the military-industrial complex has a longer memory...
I press him on the RAND and Stratfor reports including one authored by Cheney and Paul
Wolfowitz in which they envisage deliberate ethno-sectarian partitioning of Iraq . Hersh
ruefully states that: "The day after 9/11 we should have gone to Russia. We did the one thing
that George Kennan warned us never to do – to expand NATO too far."
* * *
7) On the official 9/11 narrative
From the
Independent interview : We end up ruminating about 9/11, perhaps because it is another
narrative ripe for deconstruction by sceptics. Polling shows that a significant proportion of
the American public believes there is more to the truth. These doubts have been reinforced by
the declassification of the suppressed 28 pages of the 9/11 commission report last year
undermining the version that a group of terrorists acting independently managed to pull off the
attacks. The implication is that they may well have been state-sponsored with the Saudis
potentially involved.
Hersh tells me: "I don't necessarily buy the story that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11.
We really don't have an ending to the story. I've known people in the [intelligence] community.
We don't know anything empirical about who did what" . He continues: "The guy was living in a
cave. He really didn't know much English. He was pretty bright and he had a lot of hatred for
the US. We respond by attacking the Taliban. Eighteen years later How's it going guys?"
8) On the media and the morality of the powerful
From a recent
The Intercept interview and book review -- If
Hersh were a superhero, this would be his origin story. Two hundred and seventy-four pages
after the Chicago anecdote, he describes his coverage of a massive
slaughter of Iraqi troops and civilians by the U.S. in 1991 after a ceasefire had ended the
Persian Gulf War. America's indifference to this massacre was, Hersh writes, "a reminder of the
Vietnam War's MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it's a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime." It
was also, he adds, a reminder of something else: "I had learned a domestic version of that rule
decades earlier" in Chicago. "Reporter" demonstrates that Hersh has derived three simple lessons from that rule:
The powerful prey mercilessly upon the powerless, up to and including mass murder.
The powerful lie constantly about their predations.
The natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with it.
"... By creating an extremely anti-communist state, the elite will never have to worry about losing control over society because their wealth and power remains safe and sound. ..."
It is an evolution of conspiracy theory, not requiring any kind of convoluted logic or
story telling that used to be required for conspiracy theory to stick. Fake News allows for
simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without
examination.
Here's an ad about COCs (PDF) from
1942. They're used for tanning leather, in soaps and perfumes, as insect repellents, for
dying cloth, as antiseptics, and for many, many other commercial and industrial
purposes.
Damn those Syrian butchers for dropping perfume on civilians!
Fake News is the 21st century version of Conspiracy Theory.
It is an evolution of conspiracy theory, not requiring any kind of convoluted logic or
story telling that used to be required for conspiracy theory to stick. Fake News allows
for simple, truthful, and logical information to be dismissed out of hand, without
examination.
@The Voice In the
Wilderness In the dim reaches of pre-history, when Walter Cronkite was reporting, a
real journalist wouldn't report that someone launched a chemical weapons attack unless the
journalist had at least two credible, independent sources providing solid evidence that the
story was true. Newspaper editors and television producers knew their reputations were on the
line and that their competitors would make sure the egg on their face stuck if they reported
something blatantly wrong.
Nowadays, there are no competitors, because journalists and news outlets are mostly
hanging out together in one big cheery cartel, every member of which will defend every other
member to protect the reputation of the whole. The goal is not to outdo competitors and gain
more eyeballs or a greater distribution or greater authority over public opinion. The goal is
to defend the status quo by any means necessary, while somehow maintaining the credibility of
the press.
But no, they shouldn't have published a story that Assad had launched a chemical weapons
attack unless they had a significant amount of solid evidence that it was true.
I have a hard time understanding how people can even begin to credit this crap, given how
close it is to what they told us about Saddam Hussein. But it's actually even worse, because
at least Hussein did, at one time, use chemical weapons on the Kurds. I mean, at least he did
it once, even if he didn't have weapons of mass destruction ready to aim at Israel, or the
Saudis, or the U.S.
#7
It was big news. But failure to report it as false with just as much (or more) attention
and timing was journalistic malpractice. They should have been outraged to have been
conned into spreading false propaganda. IF they were legitimate journalists.
@Cant Stop the
Macedonian Signal
I don't know that anyone waits for confirmation anymore. And the two sources could
be the CIA and VOA or one of their tame journalists.
Credibility is in the eye of the beholder. After they all jumped on Saddam's WMD one can
hardly compare them with Cronkite.
I do remember web blogs asking to please wait for the UN inspectors report. When that
report did come out, anyone with integrity, even if not a professional journalist, would have
highlighted that report and retracted the original and not figuratively bury it on page
56.
But we are substantially together on this. They reported is as fact not as an
unsubstantiated claim.
Chomsky's Five News Filters: A little dated but a good starting point.
The first filter is Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation of the Mass Media. Mainstream
media is essentially owned by corporations and the government, because those are the very
agents who fund them. Any favourable studies, studies or information that the government or
corporations want the public to know (or don't want them to know) either ends up being aired
or buried as a result.
The second filter is Advertising License to do Business. Mass media isn't interested in
attracting viewers to educate them, but rather to sell them on something. They're more
interested in engaging an audience with higher buying power than actually making a difference
through education and information. Chomsky provides an excellent example, explaining: "CBS proudly tells its shareholders that while it "continuously seeks to maximize audience
delivery," it has developed a new "sales tool" with which it approaches advertisers: "Client
Audience Profile, or CAP, will help advertisers optimize the effectiveness of their network
television schedules by evaluating audience segments in proportion to usage levels of
advertisers' products and services." In short, the mass media are interested in attracting
audiences with buying power, not audiences per se."
The third filter is Sourcing Mass-Media News. Whatever is aired on mass media needs to be
100% credible, meaning it's viewers need to completely trust what's being aired, without the
need of them using their critical thinking skills. Since the majority of the public trusts
the government and mass corporations, AKA the propaganda machines, most of the "news worthy"
content comes from them. Plus, whatever's aired needs to be approved by corporations or the
government and/or mass media must avoid airing anything that would offend their contributors
and funders.
The fourth filter is Flak and the Enforcers. "Flak" refers to negative responses to a
media statement or program aired on the network. Perhaps the most influential producers of
flak are corporations and the government. Corporations have created large scale organizations
whose sole purpose is to produce flak. The government is also a large producer of flak, as it
constantly corrects or threatens the media based on their interests.
The final filter is Anticommunism as a Control Mechanism. Everything at home seems to be a
lesser evil if there's something on the news that seems much worse (fake terrorist attacks,
false enemies, and/or "radical" states). Anything that sounds too left can also be dismissed
if it sounds too much like "communism." By creating an extremely anti-communist state, the
elite will never have to worry about losing control over society because their wealth and
power remains safe and sound.
@fakenews
namely big, opinion-policing non-profits and their lobbyists and followers, ranging from
religious denominations, to AIPAC and the NRA, to the ADL and SPLC.
In this article, we have attempted to identify the most censored stories of modern times in
Britain. We have asked the opinions of one of the most famous and celebrated journalists and
documentary film-makers of our time, a high-profile former Mi5 intelligence officer, an
investigative journalist with one of the most well-known climate-change organisations, a
veteran journalist of the Iraq war, an ex-army officer, along with the head of one of the
worlds largest charities working against injustice.
One comment from our eclectic group of experts said; "the UK has the most legally protected
and least accountable intelligence agencies in the western world so even in just that field
competition is fierce, let alone all the other cover-ups."
So true have we found this statement to be that we've had to split this article into two
categories – military and non-military, with a view that we may well categorise
surveillance and privacy on its own another time.
Without further ado – here are the most non-military censored stories in Britain since
the 1980s, in no particular order. Do bear in mind that for those with inquisitive minds, some
of these stories you will have read something about somewhere – but to the majority of
citizens, these stories will read like conspiracy theories.
Consequences of American corporate influence over British welfare reforms
The demolition of the welfare state was first suggested in 1982 by the Conservative Prime
Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Using neoliberal politics, every UK government since 1982 has
covertly worked towards that goal. It is also the political thinking used as justification for
the welfare reforms of the New Labour government, which introduced the use of the Work
Capability Assessment (WCA) for all out-of-work disability benefit claimants. Neoliberal
politics also justified additional austerity measures introduced by the Coalition government
since 2010, and the Conservative government(s) since 2015, which were destined to cause
preventable harm when disregarding the human consequences. Much of this is known and in the
public domain.
However, what is less known is a story the government have tried
very hard to gag . The American healthcare insurance system of disability denial was
adopted, as was the involvement of a US healthcare company to distance the government from the
preventable harm created by its use. The private sector was introduced on a wide scale in many
areas of welfare and social policy as New Labour adopted American social and labour market
policies – and the gravity of its effects cannot be understated.
The result? In one 11 month study 10,600 deaths were attributed to the government disability
denial system of screening, with 2,200 people dying before the ESA assessment was even
completed. Between May 2010 and February 2014, an astonishing total of
40,680 people died within 12 months of going through a government Work Capability
Assessment. The government department responsible has since refused to publish updated
mortality totals.
This political and social scandal has been censored, with the author of
THIS truly damning report in trouble with the government for publishing it.
Climate Change, what a British oil giant knew all along
For decades, tobacco companies buried evidence that smoking was deadly, the same goes for
the fossil fuel industry. As early as 1981, big oil company Shell was aware of the causes and
catastrophic dangers of climate change. In the 1980s it was acknowledging with its own research
that anthropogenic global warming was a fact. Then, as the scientific consensus became more and
more clear, it started introducing doubt and giving weight to a "significant minority" of
"alternative viewpoints" as the full implications for the company's business model became
clear.
By the mid-90s, the company started talking about "distinguished scientists" that cast
aspersions of the seriousness of climate change.
THIS REPORT provides proof of Shell's documentation including emails of what they knew and
what they were hiding from the public domain. One document in 1988 confirms that: "By the time
the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to
reduce the effects or even stabilise the situation."
It was not until 2007 that scientific research eventually took a grip of the problem and
proved what was known all along. However, as Shell did say – it's probably too late to
take effective countermeasures now anyway. There is still persistent quoting of climate science
deniers by the fossil fuel industries.
Government Surveillance
In 2016, the UK was identified as the most
extreme surveillance state in the Western world. However, legislation really only came
about to legalise its use because of the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013. Prior to that, the
British government had created a secret 360-degree mass surveillance architecture that no-one,
including most members of parliament, knew anything about. And much of it has since been deemed
illegal by the highest courts in both Britain and the European Union.
From operation Optic Nerve which took millions of sexually explicit images of an unknowing
public through their devices to a hacking operation called Gemalto – where GCHQ stole the
keys to a global encryption system with 700 million subscribers. The unaccountable spymasters
of the UK have undertaken breathtaking operations of illegality with absolute impunity.
Some other programmes included; Three Smurfs
– an operation to turn on any mobile device so it could listen to or activate the camera
covertly on mobile phones. XKeyScore was basically a Google search engine for spies to find any
data about anyone. Upstream and Tempora hacked into the worlds main cable highway, intercepting
everything and anything globally with a leaked presentation slide from GCHQ on this programme
expressly stating they were intent on "Mastering the Internet". Royal Concierge identified diplomatic
hotel reservations so GCHQ could organise a surveillance operation against dignitaries either
domestic or foreign, in advance.
In truth, Britain is classed as an endemic surveillance state and right now, we only know
what has been uncovered by whistleblowers. This is why people like Julian Assange, Edward
Snowden and others are nothing less than political prisoners of Western governments. They don't
want you to know what they know about you. They also don't want you to know about them, which
is why the architecture is there in the first place. It is not for catching terrorists because
if it was the courts would not deem these surveillance systems as illegal.
Evidence-Based Medical Studies
Over the last few years, medical professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for
many people, proves difficult to swallow. One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current
editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected
peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.
"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps
half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid
exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for
pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards
darkness."
Across the pond, Dr
Marcia Angell , a physician and longtime Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal
(NEMJ), which is also considered another one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical
journals in the world, makes her view of the subject quite plain:
"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published
or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no
pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an
editor of the New England Journal of Medicine".
Many newspapers in Britain take the opportunity to indulge in some shameless click baiting
and report completely false stories simply to gain visitor numbers onto their website –
as in this example by the Mail Online HERE
or
HERE.
The Skripal poisoning and Pablo Millar
D-notice's (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice) are used by the British state to
censor the publication of potentially damaging news stories. They are issued to the mainstream
media to withhold publication of damaging information. One such case was the widespread use of
D-notices regarding the British ex-spy deeply involved in the Skripal/Novichok poisoning case
in Salisbury.
Mainstream journalists, the press and broadcast media were issued with D-notices in respect
of a former British intelligence officer called Pablo Miller. Miller was an associate of
Christopher Steele, first in espionage operations in Russia and more recently in the activities
of Steele's private intelligence firm,
Orbis Business Intelligence .
Steele was responsible for compiling the Trump–Russia dossier, comprising 17 memos
written in 2016 alleging misconduct and conspiracy between Donald Trump's presidential campaign
and the Putin administration. The dossier paid for by the Democratic Party, claimed that Trump
was compromised by evidence of his sexual proclivities (golden shower anyone?) in Russia's
possession. Steele was the subject of an earlier D-notice, which unsuccessfully attempted to
keep his identity as the author of the dossier a secret.
Millar is reported to be Skripal's handler in Salisbury and if Miller and by extension,
Skripal himself were involved in Orbis' work on the highly-suspect Steele-Trump dossier, which
is thought to be the case (for all sorts of reasons – including these D-notices)
alongside representatives of British and possibly US intelligence, then the motivations for the
attempted assassination on the ex-Russian double agent was very wide at best. As it turned out,
blame could not be pinned on Russia's intelligence service, the FSB, no matter how hard the
government tried. This particular part of the Skripal poisoning story remains buried by the
mainstream media.
The City of London – A global crime scene
For over a hundred years the Labour party tried in vain to abolish the City of London and
its accompanying financial corruption. In 1917, Labour's new rising star Herbert Morrison, the
grandfather of Peter Mandelson made a stand and failed, calling it the "devilry of modern
finance." And although attempt after attempt was made throughout the following decades, it was
Margaret Thatcher who succeeded by abolishing its opponent, the Greater London Council in
1986.
Tony Blair went about it another way and offered to reform the City of London in what turned
out to be a gift from God. He effectively gave the vote to corporations which swayed the
balance of democratic power away from residents and workers. It was received by its opponents
as the greatest retrograde step since the peace treaty of 1215, Magna Carta. The City won its
rights through debt financing in 1067, when William the Conqueror acceded to it and ever since
governments have allowed the continuation of its ancient rights above all others.
The consequence? It now stands as money
launderer of the world , the capital of global crime scene with Britain referred to by the
global criminal fraternity to be the most corrupt country in the world.
A 'watchman' sits at the high table of parliament and is its official
lobbyist sitting in the seat of power right next to the Speaker of the House who is
"charged with ensuring that its established rights are safeguarded." The job is to seek out
political dissent that might arise against the City.
The City of London has its own private funding and will 'buy-off' any attempt to erode its
powers – any scrutiny of its financial affairs are put beyond external inspection or
audit. It has it's own police force – and laws. Its dark and shadowy client list
includes; terrorists, drug barons, arms dealers, despots, dictators, shady politicians,
corporations, millionaires and billionaires – most with something to hide. The shocking
Panama Papers, Paradise Papers and Lux Leaks barely scratching the surface
even with their almost unbelievable revelations of criminality.
Keith Bristow Director-General of the UK's National Crime Agency
said in June 2015 that the sheer scale of crime and its subsequent money laundering
operations was "a serious strategic threat to Britain." And whilst much of this activity is
indeed published – the scale of it is not. It is now believed by many investigative
journalists that the City of London is managing "trillions in ill-gotten gains" – not
billions as we have all been told.
State propaganda – manipulating minds, controlling the internet
Reading this you would think this was the stuff of a conspiracy theory – sadly, it's
not. The government, through its spying agent GCHQ developed its own set of software tools to
infiltrate the internet to shape what people see, hear and read, with the ability to rig online
polls and psychologically manipulate people on social media. This was what Glenn Greenwald of
The Intercept confirmed through the Snowden files in 2014. It was not about surveillance
but about manipulating public opinion in ever more Orwellian ways.
These 'tools' now constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda delivery
systems and internet deception programmes known to mankind. What the Snowden files show are
that the government can change the outcome of online polls (codenamed Underpass), send mass
delivery of emails or SMS messages (Warpath) at will, disrupt video-based websites (Silverlord)
and have tools to permanently disable PC accounts. They can amplify a given message to push a
chosen narrative (GESTATOR), increase traffic to any given website" (GATEWAY) and have the
ability to inflate page views on websites (SLIPSTREAM). They can crash any website (PREDATORS
FACE), reduce page views and distort public responses, spoof any email account and telephone
calls they like. Visitors to WikiLeaks are tracked and monitored as if an inquiring mind is now
against the law.
Don't forget, the government has asked no-one for permission to do any of this and none of
this has been debated in parliament where representative democracy is supposed to be taking
place. There is no protective legislation for the general public and no-one is talking about or
debating these illegal programmes that taxpayers have been given no choice to fund –
costing billions. This is government sponsored fake news and public manipulation programmes on
a monumental scale.
Chris Huhne, a former cabinet minister and member of the national security council until
2012 said – "when it comes to the secret world of GCHQ, the depth of my 'privileged
information' has been dwarfed by the information provided by Edward Snowden to The
Guardian."
The Guardian's offices were then visited by MI5 and the Snowden files were ordered to be
destroyed under threats that if they didn't, it would be closed down – a sign of
British heavy-handedness reminiscent of the East-German Stasi.
Censorship – Spycatcher
'Spycatcher' was a truly candid autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer published in
1987. Written by Peter Wright, a former MI5 officer, it was published first in Australia after
being banned by the British government in 1985. Its allegations proved too much for the
authorities to allow it to be in the public domain.
In an interesting twist of irony, the UK government attempted to halt the book's Australian
publication. Malcolm Turnbull, current Prime Minister of Australia, was a lawyer at the time
and represented the publisher that defeated the British government's suppression orders against
Spycatcher in Australia in September 1987, and again on appeal in June 1988. This is the same
man that refuses to assist Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, from his hellhole existence
in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
The book details plans of the MI6 plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser during the
Suez Crisis; of joint MI5-CIA plotting against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and of
MI5's eavesdropping on high-level Commonwealth conferences. Wright also highlights the methods
and ethics of the spying business.
Newspapers printed in England, attempting proper reportage of Spycatcher's principal
allegations were served gag orders. If they continued, they were tried for contempt of court.
However, the book proved so popular many copies were smuggled into England. In 1987, the Law
Lords again barred reportage of Wright's allegations or sale of books.
The ruling was then overturned, but Wright was barred from receiving royalties from the sale
of the book in the United Kingdom. In November 1991, the European Court of Human Rights ruled
that the British government had breached the European Convention of Human Rights in gagging its
own newspapers. The book has sold more than two million copies. In 1995, Wright died a
millionaire from proceeds of his book.
Censorship – The Internet
To the inquisitive and knowledgeable, censorship of the internet by the British government
is not news. In addition, there have been many reports, especially from independent outlets
complaining about search engines and social media platforms censoring oppositional and
dissenting voices.
Already described earlier in this article is the involvement of the authorities in
strategies to manipulate public opinion and disseminate false narratives in their aims for
control of the internet itself.
A few months ago, the government changed the law to block online content deemed as either
pornographic or of an extremist nature to protect those under 16 years of age. It was
anticipated that approximately 50 websites would be banned altogether. What subsequently
happened was that thousands of websites
disappeared from the internet with no court orders, injunctions, notices or justification.
Even finding out which websites are on that list is a secret.
Over time, like many pieces of legislation that has been abused by the state, websites and
online content that the government of the day does not like will have the perfect tool to
simply press the 'delete' button, pretty much as they have already started doing.
Soon after the Second World War, some of America's richest people began setting up
a
network of thinktanks to promote their interests. These purport to offer dispassionate
opinions on public affairs. But they are more like corporate lobbyists, working on behalf of
those who founded and fund them. These are the organisations now running much of the
Trump administration . These same groups are now running much of Britain. Liam Fox and what
was the Atlantic Bridge and the
Adam Smith Institute are good examples.
They have control of the Conservative party and are largely responsible for years of work
that steered Britain through the EU referendum that ended with Brexit. Tens of £millions
have been spent, mostly undisclosed on making this dream to exploit Britain and its people a
reality. In fact, almost everything in this article is about such organisations. Those hugely
powerful individuals that own search engines and social media platforms along with the banking
industry, the pharmaceutical and medical business, the fossil fuel and arms industries –
they have reached a pinnacle of unprecedented corporate power.
Some of those fully censored stories pushed below the radar by these corporations include;
how over 100,000
EU citizens die every year because of lobbying against workplace carcinogens, how
corporate profits and taxes are hidden, the Tory-Trump plan to
kill food safety with Brexit – to name but a few. And don't forget the corporate
media who are complicit. There are a handful of offshore billionaires that have the ability to
decide what millions should read or see.
The Adam Smith Institute referred to earlier is a good example. It is a mouthpiece for
right-wing extreme neoliberal capitalists. With a turnover of over £130 million and an
operating profit of nearly £17 million, it has received millions of pounds in UK
government funding. That is taxpayers money being used against taxpayers because the ASI does
not believe in the likes of the NHS or civil society in general.
Talking of Dark Money – Brexit and the climate deniers
We recently reported about a
transatlantic network of lobbyists pushing against action on climate change and (latterly)
for Brexit? This group are all based out of one building around the corner from the Palace of
Westminster.
What is much less known is that more recently, these
groups have
lobbied for a Hard Brexit , hoping the UK's withdrawal from the EU will lead to a weakening
of those environmental regulations that hinder future profits. These same groups are also
behind the Tory-DUP pact , currently keeping Theresa May in her job while allowing
hard-line Northern Irish social conservatives to dictate significant parts of the UK's
political agenda, themselves climate change deniers. These are just some of Britain's most
censored stories. There are so many of them that we have had to categorise them, which says
something about how democracy, free speech, civil liberty and human rights are performing in
Britain right now. truepublica.org.uk
When the media is controlled by people responsible for false flag operation chances to use investigation to
discredit this false flag operation, no matter how many evidence they have is close to zero
In other word false flag operation is perfect weapon for the "sole superpower" and due to this status entail very little
risks.
Notable quotes:
"... Today's false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret. ..."
"... False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well. The past year's two major alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time. ..."
"... Because the rebels succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful. ..."
"... The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the evidence has taken place. The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring instead to respond to hysterical press reports by "doing something." If the U.N. investigation of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will apologize for having committed a war crime. ..."
"... The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury England on March 4 th . Russia had no credible motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so. ..."
"... Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage. Few now believe that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the CIA. ..."
"... The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if "an incident" looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag. ..."
False Flag is a concept that goes back centuries. It was considered to be a legitimate ploy
by the Greeks and Romans, where a military force would pretend to be friendly to get close to
an enemy before dropping the pretense and raising its banners to reveal its own affiliation
just before launching an attack. In the sea battles of the eighteenth century among Spain,
France and Britain hoisting an enemy flag instead of one's own to confuse the opponent was
considered to be a legitimate ruse de guerre , but it was only "honorable" if one
reverted to one's own flag before engaging in combat.
Today's false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and
non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if
the true attribution of an action remains secret. There is nothing honorable about them as
their intention is to blame an innocent party for something that it did not do. There has been
a lot of such activity lately and it was interesting to learn by way of a leak that the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) has developed a capability to mimic the internet fingerprints of
other foreign intelligence services. That means that when the media is trumpeting news reports
that the Russians or Chinese hacked into U.S. government websites or the sites of major
corporations, it could actually have been the CIA carrying out the intrusion and making it look
like it originated in Moscow or Beijing. Given that capability, there has been considerable
speculation in the alternative media that it was actually the CIA that interfered in the 2016
national elections in the United States.
False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well. The past year's two major
alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald
Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations
carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time.
The most recent reported attack on April 7th might not have occurred at all
according to doctors and other witnesses who were actually in Douma. Because the rebels
succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the
attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful.
The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to
avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the
evidence has taken place. The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring
instead to respond to hysterical press reports by "doing something." If the U.N. investigation
of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will
apologize for having committed a war crime.
The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and
his daughter Yulia in Salisbury England on March 4th. Russia had no credible
motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so. The allegations
made by British Prime Minister Theresa May about the claimed nerve agent being "very likely"
Russian in origin have been debunked, in part through examination by the U.K.'s own chemical
weapons lab. May, under attack even within her own party, needed a good story and a powerful
enemy to solidify her own hold on power so false flagging something to Russia probably appeared
to be just the ticket as Moscow would hardly be able to deny the "facts" being invented in
London. Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included
the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage. Few now believe
that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion
suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the
CIA.
The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if "an incident" looks like
it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag. A bit
of caution in assigning blame is appropriate given that the alternative would be a precipitate
and likely disproportionate response that could easily escalate into a shooting war.
The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream mediaIn short: because they are rapidly losing the propaganda monopoly by system failure
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find a source to inform me about the exact origin
(who and when) of the term 'fake news'. Generally, the term became mainstream during the last
years, and especially after some shocking events for the Western neoliberal establishment, like
Trump's presidency and Brexit.
Very briefly, it appears that the term was suspiciously invented by the neoliberal apparatus
to discredit people who supported such events, through social media and other Internet
platforms completely independent from the mainstream media control. Of course, one can easily
discredit this perception as 'conspiracy theory' or even 'fake news', as well.
While it's true that there has been a lot of hyperbole, misinformation and hard propaganda
circulated inside the cyberspace, it seems that the 'fake news' term was expanded somehow to
include even opinions and positions outside the dominant neoliberal orthodoxy expressed by the
political center in the West.
What's perhaps most interesting in the whole story, is that the term 'fake news' eventually
backfired against the establishment, as it was immediately adopted by the political 'extremes'
outside the neoliberal center, to include the misinformation and the smearing campaigns by the
mainstream media against those who didn't comply with the neoliberal narratives. Mainstream
media propaganda is what brought us numerous wars and plenty of disaster in previous decades,
after all.
numerous wars and plenty of disaster in previous decades, after all.
Now, a
relatively new technology with its origins in the beginning of the previous decade,
seems that it spreads a sort of panic among the mainstream media, often described as
'information apocalypse'.
What is new is the democratisation of
advanced IT, the fact that anyone with a computer can now engage in the weaponisation of
information. 2016 was the year we woke up to the power of fake news, with internet
conspiracy theories and lies used to bolster the case for both Brexit and Donald Trump. We
may, however, look back on it as a kind of phoney war, when photoshopping and video
manipulation were still easily detectable. That window is closing fast. A program developed
at Stanford University allows users to convincingly put words into politicians' mouths.
Celebrities can be inserted into porn videos. Quite soon it will be all but impossible for
ordinary people to tell what's real and what's not. What will the effects of this be? When a public figure claims the racist or sexist audio of
them is simply fake, will we believe them? How will political campaigns work when millions
of voters have the power to engage in dirty tricks? What about health messages on the
dangers of diesel or the safety of vaccines? Will vested interests or conspiracy theorists
attempt to manipulate them? Unable to trust what they see or hear, will people retreat into
lives of non-engagement, ceding the public sphere to the already powerful or the
unscrupulous? The potential for an "information apocalypse" is beginning to be taken seriously. The
problem is we have no idea what a world in which all words and images are suspect will look
like, so it's hard to come up with solutions. Perhaps not very much will change –
perhaps we will develop a sixth sense for bullshit and propaganda, in the same way that it
has become easy to distinguish sales calls from genuine inquiries, and scam emails with
fake bank logos from the real thing. But there's no guarantee we'll be able to defend
ourselves from the onslaught, and society could start to change in unpredictable ways as a
result.
The perspective described here is indeed frightening. Yet, what's really impressive in this
article and in other similar articles by the big media on the Internet, is that there is a type
of information elitism, implying that there is a media priesthood, which has the copyright of
Truth. You can tell that by the fact that the article completely ignores the possibility that
this technology could be used by the mainstream media too, to manipulate the public.
Inside this increasingly artificial reality, is there really anyone today who holds the keys of
the 'ultimate' truth? I don't think so.
So, this bizarre panic around the mainstream media about this new, and indeed frightening
technology, is not coming from their concern that you will be heavily misinformed. It's coming
from the fact that they want the monopoly to misinform you. Because they know that after
decades of lies and propaganda being upgraded to a literally scientific level, their
credibility today has reached a record low.
Celebrities can be inserted into porn videos by anyone. I don't like it. I don't think is
right.
Personalities should be protected and perhaps we need a new legislation code to achieve
that.
But what about the mainstream media pundits who will use this frightening technology to grab
the consent of the masses for another devastating war with millions of dead?
I knew this government contained idiots, ne'er do wells, compulsive liars, misfits, childish
imbeciles, ego maniacs, sociopaths, psychopaths, bigots, rorters, drunks, fascists,
intransigents, ideologs, religious nutters, dullards, dunces, dickheads, shonks, spivs,
lairs, carpetbaggers, rent seekers, lobbyists, conmen, urgers, scammers, ratbags and people
unable to get work in any other field of endeavour....but Neoliberals?
"... A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation. ..."
"... Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma. ..."
"... The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation. ..."
"... Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them. ..."
"... No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered. ..."
"... Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation. ..."
"... The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote." ..."
"... Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?" ..."
"... Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth. ..."
"... 1984, anyone? ..."
"... The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. ..."
"... Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right. ..."
"... Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. ..."
"... One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; ..."
"... while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned. ..."
"... Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation. ..."
"... Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™. ..."
"... Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar. ..."
"... And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus. ..."
"... Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school. ..."
"... In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting. ..."
The Grauniad is slipping deeper into the disinformation business:
Revealed: UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance is the headline of a page one piece
which reveals exactly nothing. There is no secret lifted and no one was discomforted by a
questioning journalist.
Like other such pieces it uses disinformation to accuse Russia of spreading such.
The main 'revelation' is stenographed from a British government official. Some quotes from
the usual anti-Russian propagandists were added. Dubious or false 'western' government claims
are held up as truth. That Russia does not endorse them is proof for Russian mischievousness
and its 'disinformation'.
The opener:
The UK will use a series of international summits this year to call for a comprehensive
strategy to combat Russian disinformation and urge a rethink over traditional diplomatic
dialogue with Moscow, following the Kremlin's aggressive campaign of denials over the use of
chemical weapons in the UK and Syria.
...
"The foreign secretary regards Russia's response to Douma and Salisbury as a turning point
and thinks there is international support to do more," a Whitehall official said. "The areas
the UK are most likely to pursue are countering Russian disinformation and finding a
mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons."
There is a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons. It is the
Chemical Weapon Convention and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
It was the British government which at first
rejected the use of these instruments during the Skripal incident:
Early involvement of the OPCW, as demanded by Russia, was resisted by the British
government. Only on March 14, ten days after the incident happened and two days after Prime
Minister Theresa may had made accusations against Russia, did the British government invite
the OPCW. Only on March 19, 15 days after the incident happen did the OPCW technical team
arrive and took blood samples.
Now back to the Guardian disinformation:
In making its case to foreign ministries, the UK is arguing that Russian denials over
Salisbury and Douma reveal a state uninterested in cooperating to reach a common
understanding of the truth , but instead using both episodes to try systematically to divide
western electorates and sow doubt.
A 'common understanding of the truth' is an interesting term. What is the truth? Whatever
the British government claims? It accused Russia of the Skripal incident a mere eight days
after it happened. Now, two month later, it admits that it
does not know who poisoned the Skripals:
Police and intelligence agencies have failed so far to identify the individual or
individuals who carried out the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the UK's national security
adviser has disclosed.
Do the Brits know where the alleged Novichok poison came from? Unless they produced it
themselves they likely have no idea. The Czech Republic just admitted that it
made small doses of a Novichok nerve agent for testing purposes. Others did too.
Back to the Guardian :
British politicians are not alone in claiming Russia's record of mendacity is not a personal
trait of Putin's, but a government-wide strategy that makes traditional diplomacy
ineffective.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, famously came off one lengthy phone call with Putin
– she had more than 40 in a year – to say he lived in a different world.
No, Merkel never said that. An Obama administration flunky planted that
in the New York Times :
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking
with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call
said. "In another world," she said.
When that claim was made in March 2014 we were immediately suspicious
of it:
This does not sound like typically Merkel but rather strange for her. I doubt that she said
that the way the "people briefed on the call" told it to the Times stenographer. It is rather
an attempt to discredit Merkel and to make it more difficult for her to find a solution with
Russia outside of U.S. control.
A day later the German government
denied (ger) that Merkel ever said such (my translation):
The chancellery is unhappy about the report in the New York Times. Merkel by no means meant
to express that Putin behaved irrational. In fact she told Obama that Putin has a different
perspective about the Crimea [than Obama has].
A McClatchy journalist investigated
further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was
disinformation.
That disinformation, spread by the Obama administration but immediately exposed as false, is
now held up as proof by Patrick Wintour, the Diplomatic editor of the Guardian , that
Russia uses disinformation and that Putin is a naughty man.
The British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson
wants journalists to enter the UK reserve forces to help with the creation of
propaganda:
He said army recruitment should be about "looking to different people who maybe think, as a
journalist: 'What are my skills in terms of how are they relevant to the armed forces?'
Patrick Wintour seems to be a qualified candidate.
Or maybe he should join the NATO for Information Warfare the Atlantic Council wants to
create to further disinform about those damned Russkies:
What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation -- call it
Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military
counterpart.
Like the Guardian piece above writer of the NATO propaganda lobby Atlantic Council
makes claims of Russian disinformation that do not hold up to the slightest test:
By pinning the Novichok nerve agent on Sweden or the Czech Republic, or blaming the UK for
the nerve gas attack in Syria, the Kremlin sows confusion among our populations and makes us
lose trust in our institutions.
Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that
several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in
Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma.
The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny.
Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation.
The bigger aim behind all these activities, demanding a myriad of new organizations to
propagandize against Russia, is to introduce a strict control over information within 'western'
societies.
Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed
with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy'
disinformation.
That scheme will be used against anyone who deviates from the ordered norm. You dislike that
pipeline in your backyard? You must be falling for
Russian trolls or maybe you yourself are an agent of a foreign power. Social Security? The
Russians like that. It is a disinformation thing. You better forget about it.
Excellent article, in an ongoing run of great journalism.
I am curious - have you read this? https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/
It purports to be a book by an American military man intimately familiar with the covert ops
portion of the US government. The internal Kafka-esque dynamics described certainly feel
true.
One of the reasons newspapers are getting worse is the economics. They aren't really viable
anymore. Their future is as some form of government sanctioned oligopoly. Two national papers
-- a "left" and a "right" -- and then a handful of regional papers. All spouting the same
neoliberal, neoconservative chicanery.
Genuine journalist Matt Taibbi warned of this sort of branding of disparate views as enemy a
month ago. He was also correct. Evil and insidious. The enemy of a free society.
Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning
of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as
they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA
will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them,
anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them.
I agree that it's difficult to see how the drive to renew the Cold War is going to be
stopped. I presume that, with the exception of certain NeoCon circles, there isn't a desire
for Hot War. Certainly not in the British sources you quote. Britain wouldn't want Hot War
with Russia. It's all a question of going to the limit for internal consumption. Do a 1984,
in order to keep the population in-line.
thanks b... i can't understand how any intelligent thinking person would read the guardian,
let alone something like the huff post, and etc. etc... why? the propaganda money that pays
for the white helmets, certainly goes to these outlets as well..
the uk have gone completely nuts! i guess it comes with reading the guardian, although, in
fairness, all british media seems very skewed - sky news, bbc, and etc. etc.
it does appear as though Patrick Wintour is on Gavin Williamson's propaganda
bandwagon/payroll already... in reading the comments and articles at craig murrays site, i
have become more familiar with just how crazy things are in the uk.. his latest article
freedom no
more sums it up well... throw the uk msm in the trash can... it is for all intensive
purposes, done..
Meanwhile, OPCW chief Uzumcu seems to have been pranked again, this time by his own staff
(this is how I interpret it):
He claimed that the amount of Novichok found was about 100 g and therefore more than
research laboratories would produce, i.e. this was weaponized Novichok.
Q: What is our reaction to the Guardian article on a "comprehensive strategy" to "deepen
the alliance against Russia" to be pursued by the UK Government at international forums?
A: Judging by the publication, the main current challenge for Whitehall is to preserve
the anti-Russian coalition that the Conservatives tried to build after the Salisbury
incident. This task is challenging indeed. The "fusion doctrine" promoted by the national
security apparatus has led to the Western bloc taking hasty decisions that, as life has
shown, were not based on any facts.
No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the
US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political
justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of
Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was
built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of
Russian responsibility) have been shattered.
Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian
logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to
see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting
countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation.
Hmmm... My reply to c1ue went sideways it seems. Yes, The late Mr. Prouty's book's the real
deal and the website hosting his very rare book is a rare gem itself. Click the JFK at page
top left to be transported to that sites archive of writings about his murder. The very important essay by
Prouty's there too.
The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is
his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote."
This one detail tells us so much about how propaganda works, and about how it can be
defeated. Successful propaganda both depends upon and seeks to accelerate the erasure of
historical memory. This is because its truths are always changing to suit the immediate needs
of the state. None of its truths can be understood historically. b makes the connection
between the documented but forgotten past "truth" of Merkel's quote and its present
reincarnation in the Guardian, and this is really all he *needs* to do. What b points out is
something quite simple; yet the ability to do this very simple thing is becoming increasingly
rare and its exercise increasingly difficult to achieve. It is for me the virtue that makes
b's analysis uniquely indispensable.
Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime,
"whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to
understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted
contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does
this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?"
Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no
essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth.
The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and
other sites is just so stupid its painful. This implies that the Skripals both closed the
door together and then went off on their day spreading the stuff everywhere, yet no one else
was contaminated (apart from the fantasy policeman).
Presumably the Skripals touch the
cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected
as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance
of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the
chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW
can't even get the amounts of the chemical right.
The problem is,,, most know it's all BS but find it 'easier' to believe or at most ignore, as
then there is no responsibility to 'do something'. Biggest problem with the world today is
lazy insouciant citizens. (Yes,,, I'm a PCR reader) :))
Did you catch the Lavrov interview I linked to on previous Yemen thread? As you might
imagine, the verbiage used is quite similar. One very important point Lavrov made was the
anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction
of humanity; and that while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the
rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of
forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter
envisioned.
"I cannot sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it is right to ban
a meeting with very distinguished speakers, because it is questioning the government and
establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead."
Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed
with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy'
disinformation. _______________________________________
Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and
including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™.
This isn't a new insight, but it's worth repeating. It struck me anew while I was
listening to a couple of UK "journalists" hectoring OPCW Representative Shulgin, and
directing scurrilous and provocative innuendo disguised as "questions" to Mr. Shulgin and the
Syrian witnesses testifying during his presentation.
It flashed upon me that there is no longer a reasonable expectation that the Perpetual Big
Liars must eventually abandon, much less confess, their heinous mendacity. Just as B points
out, there are no countervailing facts, evidence, rebuttals, theories, or explanations
that can't be countered with further iterations of Big Lies, however offensively incredible
and absurd.
Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or
technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech
Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought
off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar.
And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy
arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have
been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly
independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™
apparatus.
Even as the Big Liars reach a point of diminishing returns, they respond with more of the
same. I wish I were more confident that this reprehensible practice will eventually fail due
to the excess of malignant hubris; I'm not holding my breath.
Is Putin capitulating? Pro US Alexei Kudrin could join new government to negotiate "end of
sanctions" with the West.
Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin will be brought back to "mend fences with the West"
in order to revive Russia's economy. Kudrin has repeatedly said that unless Russia makes her
political system more democratic and ends its confrontation with Europe and the United
States, she will not be able to achieve economic growth. Russia's fifth-columnists were
exalted: "If Kudrin joined the administration or government, it would indicate that they have
agreed on a certain agenda of change, including in foreign policy, because without change in
foreign policy, reforms are simply impossible in Russia," said Yevgeny Gontmakher . . . who
works with a civil society organization set up by Mr. Kudrin. "It would be a powerful
message, because Kudrin is the only one in the top echelons with whom they will talk in the
west and towards whom there is a certain trust."
Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington
Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill
Clinton in charge of a girls' school.
It would mark Putin's de facto collapse as a leader. We
shall know very soon. Either way, if anyone wondered what the approach to Russia would be
from Bolton and Pompeo, we now know: they will play very hard ball with Putin, regardless of
what he does (or doesn't do), and with carefree readiness to risk an eventual snap.
Certainly looks like @ 18 is a fine example of what b is presenting.
A good way to extract one's self from the propaganda is to refuse using whatever meme the
disinformation uses, e.g. that Sergei Skripal was a double agent -- that is not a known, only
a convenient suggestion.
Military intelligence is far better described as military
information needed for some project or mission. Not surreptitious cloak and dagger spying.
This is not to say Sergei Scripal was a British spy for which he was convicted, stripped of
rank and career and exiled through a spy swap. To continue using Sergei Scripal was a double
agent only repeats and verifies the disinformation meme and all the framing that goes with
it. Find some alternative to what MSM produces that does not embed truthiness to their
efforts.
I realize it's from one of the biggest propaganda organs in the world... take this New
York Times report of the OPCW's retraction with a 100 grams -- 100mg? -- of salt:
Kudrin is a neoliberal and as such is an
enemy of humanity and will never again be allowed to hold a position of power within Russia's
government. Let him emigrate to the West like his fellow parasites and teach junk economics
at some likeminded university.
"... Testimony by Sir Mark Sedwill, British Prime Minister Theresa May's National Security Adviser, to the House of Commons Defence Committee on 1st May 2018 has now revealed that all the claims about a breakthrough in the Skripal case – not to mention the claims about "Gordon" aka "Mihails Savickis" – were (as I suspected) nonsense. ..."
"... In other words the investigation is going nowhere and has drawn a complete blank. ..."
"... All this comes hot on the heels of suggestions – which are very likely true – that the wall of silence which has recently descended on the British media's reporting of the Skripal case is the product of a British government D-Notice , ie. of a formal request by the British government to the media to limit their coverage of the Skripal story on grounds of national security. ..."
"... It has also been suggested that despite formal denials the most likely reason for the D-Notice is the desire of the British authorities to conceal a possible connection between Sergey Skripal, his former MI6 controller Pablo Miller, and Christopher Steele, the compiler of the Trump Dossier. ..."
Amidst speculation that British government has imposed reporting restrictions, British authorities admit they have no suspect
in Skripal case
A week ago the British media were full of reports from the usual anonymous sources of a breakthrough in the Skripal case.
Allegedly the British authorities by comparing CCTV pictures from Salisbury and details of travellers to and from Britain had
been to identify the persons who were supposedly responsible for the attack on Sergey and Yulia Skripal. These stories came with
further stories of a Russian James Bond style assassin – "Gordon" aka "Mihails Savickis" – who together with his team had supposedly
carried out the attack. The stories about "Gordon" aka "Mihails Savickis" came with a bizarre identikit picture supposedly of him,
which was too ridiculous to take seriously.
In an
article
I wrote for The Duran on 24th April 2018 I expressed skepticism about these claims
.it looks to me as if despite all the claims to the contrary the police investigation of the Skripal case has made little actual
progress. The British seem to have little more knowledge of who carried out the attack on Sergey and Yulia Skripal and why than
they did when the investigation began. Could it possibly be because they are looking in the wrong place?
Testimony by Sir Mark Sedwill, British Prime Minister Theresa May's National Security Adviser, to the House of Commons Defence
Committee on 1st May 2018 has now revealed that all the claims about a breakthrough in the Skripal case – not to mention the claims
about "Gordon" aka "Mihails Savickis" – were (as I suspected) nonsense.
Here is how Sir Mark Sedwill's testimony is reported by
The Guardian
Police and intelligence agencies have failed so far to
identify the individual or individuals who carried out the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the UK's national security adviser
has disclosed.
The comments by Sir Mark Sedwill punctured hopes that the police and other security agencies had pinpointed suspects but were
withholding the name or names from the public.
Asked by an MP at a Commons defence committee hearing if he knew the individuals responsible, he replied curtly: "Not yet."
Sedwill, who coordinates the work of the MI6, MI5, the surveillance agency
GCHQ and others, did not elaborate but among problems that have
hampered the agencies is a lack of CCTV coverage in Salisbury compared with London. Known Russian spies based in Britain have
also been investigated and ruled out.
In other words the investigation is going nowhere and has drawn a complete blank.
All this comes hot on the heels of suggestions – which are very likely true – that the wall of silence which has recently
descended on the British media's reporting of the Skripal case is the
product of a British government D-Notice , ie. of a formal
request by the British government to the media to limit their coverage of the Skripal story on grounds of national security.
It has also been suggested that despite formal denials the most likely reason for the D-Notice is the desire of the British
authorities to conceal a possible connection between Sergey Skripal, his former MI6 controller Pablo Miller, and Christopher Steele,
the compiler of the Trump Dossier.
There are even suggestions that Sergey Skripal may have had a hand in producing the Trump Dossier, and that this was the reason
for the attack on him.
Whilst all this may be true, I have to say that Sergey Skripal – identified as a British spy by the Russians in 2004 and isolated
from Russia in the leafy British town of Salisbury since 2010 – seems an unlikely source for the Trump Dossier, largely fictitious
though that strange concoction is.
See BBC
interview . One really good sarcasm from Lavrov. Sergey Lavrov comperating UK beahviour with
the famous Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland episode in order to describe the new western
'weird logic' of 'Sentence First, Verdict After' has to be watched repeatedly by all...what a
masterful HardTalk show...exposing the new bench mark in western international discourse.
Sergey Lavrov: No, I said "highly likely" as a new invention of the British diplomacy to
describe why they punish people – because these people are highly likely guilty, like in
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - when he described a trial. And when they discovered that
the jury could be engaged, then the King said "Let's ask the jury" and the Queen shouted "No
jury! Sentence first – verdict afterwards." That's the logic of "highly likely".
Question: Have you got one shred, shred of evidence to suggest British intelligence tried to
kill Sergei Skripal?
Sergey Lavrov: There is an old Roman criteria "who is to benefit". The UK is grossly
benefiting from the provocations both in Syria and in the United Kingdom itself.
Sergey Lavrov: That's a problem. First, the A-234 agent in highly pure form in high concentration is already raising
suspicions.
Question: It came from Russia. In the former Soviet Union, you invented that.
Sergey Lavrov: Stephen, you are not factual. You may be hard talking, but you are not listening. This chemical substance
indeed was invented in the Soviet Union, then one the inventors fled to the United States and made the formula public. And if you
want to check before raising the issue, please do so, the United States patented this formula; and it was formally taken by United
States special services or the army, I don't remember. But A-234 is a very light, I mean, it seriously damages a person, kills him
of her, but it evaporates very fast; and the sample taken two weeks after the event cannot, according to our scientists, contain
very high concentration.
Notable quotes:
"... 'No, no!' said the Queen. 'Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.' ..."
I just posted a link to a Vesti clip at the end of the previous thread, because it seems so
relevant to b's message about the western crackdown on free speech in this information war.
This open thread is coming so close on the heels of that wonderful article, that I want to
double-post here as well as there.
Margarita Simonyan of RT says how she's trying to talk, not to power but to common people,
because there are those among the common people who do speak up and who really do shape public
opinion - not governments. She cited Roger Waters as an example, who was speaking at a concert
and telling the truth about the White Helmets.
She said, someone has to read in order to speak. And someone has to write so someone can
read:
"... It is perfectly possible that the British government manufactured the whole Salisbury thing. We are capable of just as much despicable behavior and murder as the next. ..."
"... Tucker Carlson of Fox News has it nailed down.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M28aYkLRlm0 ..."
"... This "civil war" has been nothing but a war for Syrian resources waged by western proxies. ..."
"... So now, In desperation borne out of their impending defeat, the imperialists have staged a chemical attack in a last throw of the dice to gain popular support for an escalation in military intervention. Like military interventions of the past, it is being justified in the name of humanitarian intervention. ..."
Why is the prime minister of the United Kinkdom on the phone discussing whether or not to bomb a Sovereign country with the highly
unstable, Donald Trump?
Can she not make up her own mind? Either she thinks it's the right thing to do or it isn't. Hopefully,
the person on the other end of the phone was not Trump but someone with at least half a brain.
Proof, let's have some proof. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. Russia is saying it's all a put up job, show us your
facts. We are saying, don't be silly, we're British and besides, you may have done this sort of thing before.
It is perfectly possible that the British government manufactured the whole Salisbury thing. We are capable of just as
much despicable behavior and murder as the next.
Part of the Great British act's of bravery and heroism in the second world war is the part played by women agents who were
parachuted into France and helped organize local resistance groups. Odette Hallowes, Noor Inayat Khan and Violette Szabo are just
a few of the many names but they are the best known. What is not generally know is that many agents when undergoing their training
in the UK, were given information about the 'D' day landings, the approx time and place. They were then dropped into France into
the hands of the waiting German army who captured and tortured and often executed them.
The double agent, who Winston Churchill met and fully approved of the plan was Henri Dericourt, an officer in the German army
and our man on the ground in France. Dericourt organized the time and place for the drop off of the incoming agents, then told
the Germans. The information about the 'D' day invasion time and place was false. The British fed the agents (only a small number)
into German hands knowing they would be captured and the false information tortured out of them.
Source :- 'A Quiet Courage' Liane Jones.
It's a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.
From The Guardian articles today that I have read on Syria, it makes absolutely clear that if you in any way question the narrative
forwarded here, that you are a stupid conspiracy theorist in line with Richard Spencer and other far-right, American nutcases.
A more traditional form of argument to incline people to their way of thinking would be facts. But social pressure to conform
and not be a conspiratorial idiot in line with the far-right obviously work better for most of their readers. My only surprise
it that position hasn't been linked with Brexit.
Did anyone see the massive canister that was shown on TV repeatedly that was supposed to have been air-dropped and smashed through
the window of a house, landed on a bed and failed to go off.
The bed was in remarkable condition with just a few ruffled bedclothes considering it had been hit with a metal object weighing
god knows what and dropped from a great height.
"More than 40 years after the US sprayed millions of litres of chemical agents to defoliate"
The Defoliant Agent Orange was used to kill jungles, resulting in light getting through to the dark jungle floors & a massive
amount of low bush regrowing, making the finding of Vietcong fighters even harder!
It was sprayed even on American troops, it is a horrible stuff. Still compared to Chlorine poison gas, let alone nerve gases,
it is much less terrible. Though the long term effects are pretty horrible.
Who needs facts when you've got opinions? Non more hypocritical than the British. Its what you get when you lie and distort though
a willing press, you get found out and then nobody believes anything you say.anymore. The white helmets are a western funded and
founded organisation, they are NOT independent they are NOT volunteers, The UK the US and the Dutch fund them to the tune of over
$40 million. They are a propaganda dispensing outlet. The press shouldn't report anything they release because it is utterly unable
to substantiate ANY of it, there hasn't been a western journalist in these areas for over 4 years so why do the press expect us
to believe anything they print? Combine this with the worst and most incompetent Govt this country has seen for decades and all
you have is a massive distraction from massive domestic troubles which the same govt has no answers too.
""I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," [Winston Churchill] declared in one secret memorandum."
The current condemnation by the international community and international law is good and needs enforcement. But no virtue
signalling where there is none.
But we're still awaiting evidence that a chemical attack has been carried out in Douma, aren't we? And if an attack was carried
out, by whom. But before these essential points are verified, you feel that a targeted military response is justified. Are you
equally keen for some targeted military response for the use of chemical weapons, namely white phosphorus, in Palestine by the
Israaeli military? Unlike Douma, the use of these chemical weapons in the occupied territories by the IDF's personnel is well
documented. But we haven't attacked them yet. Funny that.
Instead of "chemicals" why not just firebomb them - you know like we did to entire cities full of women and children in WW2?
Hamburg 27 July 1943 - 46,000 civilians killed in a firestorm
Kassel 22 October 1943 - 9,000 civilians killed 24,000 houses destroyed in a firestorm
Darmstadt 11 September 1944 - 8,000 civilians killed in a firestorm
Dresden 13/14th February - 25,000 civilians killed in a firestorm
Obviously we were fighting Nazism and hadn't actually been invaded - and he is fighting Wahhabism and has had major cities
overrun...
Maybe if Assad burnt people to death rather than gassing them we would make a statue of him outside Westminster like the one
of Bomber Harris?
Remember the tearful Kuwaiti nurse with her heartrending story of Iraqi troops tipping premature babies out of their incubators
after the invasion in 1990? The story was published in pretty much every major Western newspaper, massively increased public support
for military intervention............................and turned out to be total bullshit.
Is it too much too ask that we try a bit of collective critical thinking and wait for hard evidence before blundering into
a military conflict with Assad; and potentially Putin?
Well, this is the sort of stuff that the Israelis would be gagging for. They want Assad neutralised and they are assisting ISIS
terrorists on the Golan Heights. They tend to their wounded and send them back across the border to fight Assad. What better than
to drag the Americans, Brits and French into the ring to finish him off. Job done eh?
Are you sure you are not promoting an Israeli agenda here Jonathan?
Incidentantally what did we in the west do when the Iraqis were gassing the Iranians with nerve agents in the marshes of southern
Iraq during the Iran Iraq War? Did we intervene then? No, we didn't we allowed it to happen.
Come on frip, you have to admit there was absolutely no motive for Assad's forces to carry out this attack. Why do you think the
Guardian and other main stream media outlets are not even considering the possibility the Jihadi rebels staged it to trigger western
intervention? I know, I know.. it's all evil Assad killing his own people for no other reason than he likes butchering people...
blah blah. The regime change agenda against Syria has been derailed, no amount of false flag attacks can change the facts on the
ground.
More than 40 years after the US sprayed millions of litres of chemical agents to defoliate vast swathes of Vietnam and in the
full knowledge it would be have a catastrophic effect on the health of the inhabitants of those area, Vietnam has by far the highest
incidence of liver cancer on the planet.
Then more recently we have the deadly depleted uranium from US shells that innocent Iraqis are inhaling as shrill voices denounce
Assad.
The Syrian people are heroically resisting and defeating western imperialism. This "civil war" has been nothing but a war
for Syrian resources waged by western proxies.
So now, In desperation borne out of their impending defeat, the imperialists have staged a chemical attack in a last throw
of the dice to gain popular support for an escalation in military intervention. Like military interventions of the past, it is
being justified in the name of humanitarian intervention.
But if we have a brief browse of history we can see that US & UK governments have brought only death, misery and destruction
on the populations it was supposedly helping. Hands off Syria.
"Trump is a congenital liar who is devoid of empathy, a narcissist with a nihilist's view of
the world. These are not mere character defects; they have a bearing on the decisions the de
facto leader of any action in Syria would take. Among the reasons I opposed the 2003 invasion
of Iraq was my fundamental distrust of George W Bush and his circle, especially on the matter
of motive. "
That is why Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Alistair Campbell fought so hard to oppose invasion of
Iraq. In the end they had to resort an academic paper to do it. I feel terrible for them.
"... For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office – the Information Research Department (IRD) – carried out propaganda campaigns using the international media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western destabilization and "regime change." IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets, tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly "The Daily Telegraph," "The Times," "Financial Times," Reuters, "The Guardian," and "The Economist," ran media smear campaigns against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow travelers). ..."
"... After the Cold War, this same propaganda operation took aim at Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Somalia's Mohamad Farrah Aidid, and Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Today, it is Assad's, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's, and Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont's turn to be in the Anglo-American state propaganda gunsights. Even Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, long a darling of the Western media and such propaganda moguls as George Soros, is now being targeted for Western visa bans and sanctions over the situation with Muslim Rohingya insurgents in Rakhine State. ..."
"... Through IRD-MI-6-Central Intelligence Agency joint propaganda operations, many British journalists received payments, knowingly or unknowingly, from the CIA via a front in London called Forum World Features (FWF), owned by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the "New York Herald Tribune" and a former US ambassador to London. ..."
When it comes to creating bogus news stories and advancing false narratives, the British
intelligence services have few peers. In fact, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) has led
the way for its American "cousins" and Britain's Commonwealth partners – from Canada and
Australia to India and Malaysia – in the dark art of spreading falsehoods as truths.
Recently, the world has witnessed such MI-6 subterfuge in news stories alleging that Russia
carried out a novichok nerve agent attack against a Russian émigré and his
daughter in Salisbury, England. This propaganda barrage was quickly followed by yet another
– the latest in a series of similar fabrications – alleging the Syrian government
attacked civilians in Douma, outside of Damascus, with chemical weapons.
It should come as no surprise that American news networks rely on British correspondents
stationed in northern Syria and Beirut as their primary sources. MI-6 has historically relied
on non-official cover (NOC) agents masquerading primarily as journalists, but also humanitarian
aid workers, Church of England clerics, international bankers, and hotel managers, to carry out
propaganda tasks. These NOCs are situated in positions where they can promulgate British
government disinformation to unsuspecting actual journalists and diplomats.
For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office – the Information
Research Department (IRD) – carried out propaganda campaigns using the international
media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iraq's Saddam
Hussein, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western
destabilization and "regime change." IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets,
tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly "The Daily Telegraph," "The Times,"
"Financial Times," Reuters, "The Guardian," and "The Economist," ran media smear campaigns
against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow
travelers).
These leaders included Indonesia's President Sukarno, North Korean leader (and grandfather
of Pyongyang's present leader) Kim Il-Sung, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cyprus's Archbishop
Makarios, Cuba's Fidel Castro, Chile's Salvador Allende, British Guiana's Cheddi Jagan,
Grenada's Maurice Bishop, Jamaica's Michael Manley, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, Guinea's Sekou
Toure, Burkina Faso's Thomas Sankara, Australia's Gough Whitlam, New Zealand's David Lange,
Cambodia's Norodom Sihanouk, Malta's Dom Mintoff, Vanuatu's Father Walter Lini, and Ghana's
Kwame Nkrumah.
After the Cold War, this same propaganda operation took aim at Serbian President Slobodan
Milosevic, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Somalia's Mohamad Farrah
Aidid, and Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Today, it is Assad's, Hungarian Prime Minister
Viktor Orban's, and Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont's turn to be in the
Anglo-American state propaganda gunsights. Even Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, long a darling
of the Western media and such propaganda moguls as George Soros, is now being targeted for
Western visa bans and sanctions over the situation with Muslim Rohingya insurgents in Rakhine
State.
Through IRD-MI-6-Central Intelligence Agency joint propaganda operations, many British
journalists received payments, knowingly or unknowingly, from the CIA via a front in London
called Forum World Features (FWF), owned by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the "New York Herald
Tribune" and a former US ambassador to London.
It is not a stretch to believe that similar and
even more formal relationships exist today between US and British intelligence and so-called
British "journalists" reporting from such war zones as Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan,
and the Gaza Strip, as well as from much-ballyhooed nerve agent attack locations as Salisbury,
England.
No sooner had recent news reports started to emerge from Douma about a Syrian chlorine gas
and sarin agent attack that killed between 40 to 70 civilians, British reporters in the Middle
East and London began echoing verbatim statements from the Syrian "White Helmets" and the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
In actuality, the White Helmets – claimed by Western media to be civilian defense
first-responders but are Islamist activists connected to jihadist radical groups funded by
Saudi Arabia – are believed to have staged the chemical attack in Douma by entering the
municipality's hospital and dowsing patients with buckets of water, video cameras at the ready.
The White Helmets distributed their videos to the global news media, with the BBC and Rupert
Murdoch's Sky News providing a British imprimatur to the propaganda campaign asserting that
Assad carried out another "barrel bomb" chemical attack against "his own people." And, as
always, the MI-6 financed Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad news front claimed
to be operated by a Syrian expatriate and British national named Rami Abdel Rahman from his
clothing shop in Coventry, England, began providing second-sourcing for the White Helmet's
chemical attack claims.
With President Trump bringing more and more neo-conservatives, discredited from their
massive anti-Iraq propaganda operations during the Bush-Cheney era, into his own
administration, the world is witnessing the prolongation of the "Trump Doctrine."
The Trump Doctrine can best be explained as follows: A nation will be subject to a US
military attack depending on whether Trump is facing a severe political or sex scandal at
home.
Such was the case in April 2017, when Trump ordered a cruise missile attack on the joint
Syrian-Russian airbase at Shayrat, Syria. Trump was still reeling from the resignation of his
National Security Adviser, Lt. General Michael Flynn, in February over the mixing of his
private consulting business with his official White House duties. Trump needed a diversion and
the false accusation that Assad used sarin gas on the village of Khan Sheikoun on April 4,
2017, provided the necessary pabulum for the war-hungry media.
The most recent cruise missile attack was to divert the public's attention away from Trump's
personal attorney being raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a sex scandal involving
Trump and a porn actress, and a "tell-all" book by Trump's fired FBI director, James Comey.
Although these two scandals provided opportunities for the neo-cons to test Trump with false
flag operations in Syria, they were not the first time such actions had been carried out. In
2013, the Syrian government was blamed for a similar chemical attack on civilians in Ghouta.
That year, Syrian rebels, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, admitted to the
Associated Press reporter on the ground in Syria that they had been given banned chemical
weapons by Saudi Arabia, but that the weapons canisters exploded after improper handling by the
rebels. Immediately, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Syrian rebel organizations
operating out of Turkey claimed that Assad had used chemical-laden barrel bombs on "his own
people." However, Turkish, American, and Lebanese sources confirmed that it was the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) that had badly bungled a false flag sarin nerve agent
attack on Ghouta.
Few Western media outlets were concerned about a March 19, 2013, sarin nerve agent by the
Bashair al-Nasr Brigade rebel group linked to the US- and British-backed Free Syrian Army. The
rebels used a "Bashair-3" unguided projectile, containing the deadly sarin agent, on civilians
in Khan al-Assal, outside Aleppo. At least 27 civilians were killed, and scores of others
injured in the attack. The Syrian Kurds also reported the use of chemical weapons on them
during the same time frame by Syrian rebel groups backed by the United States, Turkey, and
Saudi Arabia. The usual propaganda operations – Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,
Doctors Without Borders, the BBC, CNN, and Sky News – were all silent about these
attacks.
In 2013, April 2017, and April 2018, the Western media echo chamber blared out all the same
talking points: "Assad killing his own people," "Syrian weapons of mass destruction," and the
"mass murder of women and children." Western news networks featured videos of dead women and
children, while paid propagandists, known as "contributors" to corporate news networks –
all having links to the military-intelligence complex – demanded action be taken against
Assad.
Trump, now being advised by the notorious neocon war hawk John Bolton, the new National
Security Adviser, began referring to Assad as an "animal" and a "monster." Bolton, along with
Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby, helped craft similar
language against Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was
not coincidental that Trump – at the urging of Bolton and other neocons – gave a
full pardon to Libby on the very same day he ordered the cruise missile attack on Damascus and
other targets in Syria. Libby was convicted in 2005 of perjury and illegally disclosing
national security information.
The world is being asked to take, at face value, the word of patented liars like Trump,
Bolton, and other neocons who are now busy joining the Trump administration at breakneck speed.
The corporate media unabashedly acts as though it never lied about the reasons given by the
United States and Britain for going to war in Iraq and Libya. Why should anyone believe them
now?
Wayne
MADSEN Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society
of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club
"... "The primary conclusion of this study, based on a pharmacological analysis of the video and photographic evidence, is that the Ghouta Massacre near Damascus on Aug 21.2013 was not a sarin rocket attack carried out by Assad or his supporters. It was a false-flag stunt carried out by the insurgents using carbon monoxide or cyanide to murder children and use their corpses as bait to lure the Americans into attacking Assad." ..."
"Murder in the Sun Morgue" by Dr. Denis O'Brien (neuropharmacology expert):
"The primary conclusion of this study, based on a pharmacological analysis of the
video and photographic evidence, is that the Ghouta Massacre near Damascus on Aug 21.2013 was
not a sarin rocket attack carried out by Assad or his supporters. It was a false-flag stunt
carried out by the insurgents using carbon monoxide or cyanide to murder children and use
their corpses as bait to lure the Americans into attacking Assad."
"Comrade Putin, we have successfully stockpiled novichoks in secret for ten years, and kept
them hidden from the OPCW inspectors. We have also trained our agents in secret novichok
assassination techniques. The programme has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but now we
are ready. Naturally, the first time we use it we will expose our secret and suffer massive
international blowback. So who should be our first target? The head of a foreign intelligence
agency? A leading jihadist rebel in Syria? A key nuclear scientist? Even a Head of State?"
"No, Tovarich. There is this old retired guy I know living in Salisbury. We released him
from jail years ago "
"With respect Comrade Putin, are you sure he is the most important target to reveal a
programme we have put so much resource into for ten years?"
"Yes. I sit here every day and I cannot concentrate on the affairs of Russia or the World as
all the time am thinking of Sergei Skripal. I should never have let him out of jail to spend
his life buying lottery tickets and eating in Zizzis. But you must make absolutely certain to
kill him."
"Don't worry Comrade Putin, we have been training in secret novichok assassination
techniques for ten years. We even have an detailed manual explaining our methods. We will
spread the novichok on his outside door handle (fiendish laugh)."
"Are you sure comrade? Is there not a danger it will wash off or get diluted?"
"No Comrade Putin, it never rains in England."
That is, genuinely, in every detail the official British government version of what happened
in Salisbury, including the ten year programme and the secret assassination manual.
Despite this story being one of the most improbably wild conspiracy theories in human
history, it is those who express any doubt at all as to its veracity who are smeared as
"conspiracy theorists" or even "traitors".
All copyright on this article is waived. Feel free to use, translate and republish as you
wish.
Prime Minister May is seen at around the 0:40 (depending upon clip version) mark beating the
cat against a wall.
Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g
is the "Burn the Witch" scene. With Putin as the witch it is a fair representation of the type
of justice and deep thought applied to the Skripal case.
The absurd speed at which the British Government reacted to the incident probably means that the event was coordinated with
the USA. the fact that The British Government's ignoring of legal frameworks and protocols points to existence of a plan how to fuel
this incident to the British equivalent of Russiagate, facts be damned.
That returns us to the classic question Cue bono? When British government supported by the USA demanded that the Western nations
join in blaming Russia, with no evidence whatsoever only half the EU nations went along, and, while Trump allowed his Administration
to expel Russian diplomats, he himself laid no blame on the Russians, and announced that Moscow could replace their diplomats.
The UK's chemical weapons experts issues a statement which shown that Prime Minister May clearly jumped the gun. The question
is Why? She probably understood the flimsiness of the evidence better then nobody. So why "end justifies the means" act
on her part?
That suggest that we are witnessing just initial steps of multi-step gambit and there can be more victims is this story.
Please remember that Dr. David Kelly was "suicided" after testifying against Blair's "sexed up dossier" that lead to the Iraq War.
Notable quotes:
"... Not only has the British Government acted with lightning speed, it has also ridden roughshod over a number of international legal agreements and protocols. ..."
"... according to the British Government's own timeline , it wasn't until March 14th – the day that Mrs May formally announced the culpability of the Russian State to Parliament – that she actually wrote to the OPCW to involve them in the case. This is, I understand, contrary to the obligations Britain has as a member of the OPCW, and signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). ..."
"... In addition, the British Government has refused to provide evidence to the Russian Government. Again, my understanding is that this is contrary to the protocols set out in the CWC ..."
"... Why, if it was so sure of its claims, did the British Government feel the need to ignore international agreements to which it is a signatory, and instead act in this opaque and frankly suspicious manner? ..."
"... As mentioned above, the Chief Executive of Porton Down, Gary Aitkenhead has confirmed that the laboratory was unable to identify the origin of the substance used to poison the Skripals. ..."
"... In other words, according to the door theory, the two of them were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent, which then took over three hours to have any effect. Odd, wouldn't you say? ..."
"... Therefore, if they were poisoned at the front door, this would mean that not only did the two of them feel little or no effects for the three hours or so that followed, but it would also mean that a large 66-year-old man and an averagely built 33-year-old woman, of different height, weight and metabolism, somehow succumbed to the effects of poisoning at exactly the same time, some three hours or so later. Again, is that not very odd? ..."
"... Perhaps it is possible to survive a miniscule dose of such a nerve agent. The problem with this is that according to many earlier claims, there were significant traces of the substance in various parts of the City of Salisbury, which indicates that it cannot have been a very miniscule amount that they came into contact with at the door. Which means that we are being asked to believe that they were poisoned by "more than a miniscule amount" of this deadly poison, but both somehow survived, despite neither receiving an antidote (a fact now confirmed by Gary Aitkenhead). Does that not seem improbable? ..."
"... Another possibility – that the British Government or intelligence services were behind the incident – has been given great credibility by the British Government itself, in its absurdly quick reaction to the incident and its blatant ignoring of legal protocols. ..."
"... If British intelligence had planned a hit job on Mr Skripal using a military-grade nerve agent "of a type developed by Russia", in order to then pin the blame on the Russian Government, I doubt very much that Mr Skripal and his daughter would still be alive, or that the explanation for where the poison was administered would be changing on a daily basis, or that the British Government's evidence to other countries would have been as risible as it was (unless of course our intelligence agencies are as incompetent as such a scenario would require them to be, that is). ..."
I have now asked a total of 50 questions around the Skripal case, which you can find
here
and
here . Having gone back through these questions, as far as I can see only three have been answered by the release of public information
or events that have transpired. These are:
Are they (Sergei and Yulia Skripal) still alive?
If so, what is their current condition and what symptoms are they displaying?
Can the government confirm that its scientists at Porton Down have established that the substance that poisoned the Skripals
and D.S. Bailey was actually produced or manufactured in Russia?
On the first two points we are now told that Yulia Skripal's condition has significantly improved to the point where she is said
to be recovering well and talking. However, although this provides something of an answer to these questions, it also raises a number
of others. Is she finally being allowed consular access? Is she being allowed to speak to her fiancé, her grandmother, or her cousin
by telephone? Most importantly, how does her recovery comport with the claim that she was poisoned with a "military-grade nerve agent"
with a toxicity around 5-8 times that of VX nerve agent?
It is important that reasonable questions continue to be raised, as they not only help clarify the actual issues, but the answers
-- or lack thereof -- are also a good barometer as to how the official narrative stacks up. As a keen observer of the case -- especially
since it took place just a few hundred yards from my home in Salisbury -- I have to say that the official narrative of the British
Government has not stood up to even the most cursory scrutiny from the outset. In fact, there are three crucial issues that serve
to raise suspicions about it, and to my mind these issues are the most important aspects of the case so far:
The absurd speed at which the British Government reacted to the incident
The British Government's ignoring of legal frameworks and protocols
The large number of discrepancies between events and the official narrative
Let's just look at these in turn.
1. The absurd speed at which the British Government reacted to the incident
I remain astonished at the manner and the speed with which the British Government reacted to this incident. There was the speed
with which the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, first pointed the finger of culpability, less than 48 hours after the incident,
and before any investigation or analysis of the substance had taken place. There was the speed with which Porton Down was apparently
able to analyse and identify the substance, even though it is set to take the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW) at least three weeks to carry out a similar identification. There was the speed with which the British Government officially
accused the Russian Government of being behind the incident, and the 36-hour ultimatum given to it to prove its innocence without
being given any of the evidence that apparently showed its culpability. There was the speed with which the British Government, armed
with evidence that looked like it was put together by a
rather dull 14-year-old on work experience , managed
to convince a number of other countries to expel diplomats, including 60 from the United States.
Why, if it was so sure of its claims, did the British Government feel the need to act so hastily and recklessly, rather than await
the results of the investigation?
2. The British Government's ignoring of legal frameworks and protocols
Not only has the British Government acted with lightning speed, it has also ridden roughshod over a number of international
legal agreements and protocols.
Firstly, there is the involvement of the OPCW. What ought to have happened is the British Government should have invited the OPCW
in as part of the investigation immediately upon suspicion of the use of a nerve agent. However,
according to the British Government's own timeline
, it wasn't until March 14th – the day that Mrs May formally announced the culpability of the Russian State to Parliament – that
she actually wrote to the OPCW to involve them in the case. This is, I understand, contrary to the obligations Britain has as a member
of the OPCW, and signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).
In addition, the British Government has refused to provide evidence to the Russian Government. Again, my understanding is
that this is contrary to the protocols set out in the CWC.
The British Government has also refused to grant the Russian Embassy in London consular access to two Russian nationals, Sergei
and Yulia Skripal, which it is legally obliged to do under Articles 36 and 37 of the 1963 Vienna Convention and Article 35 (1) of
the 1965 Consular Convention.
Why, if it was so sure of its claims, did the British Government feel the need to ignore international agreements to which
it is a signatory, and instead act in this opaque and frankly suspicious manner?
3. The number of oddities and discrepancies in the official narrative
The speed of apportioning blame and the ignoring of international legal agreements might not have looked nearly as suspicious
had the narrative presented by the British Government and the facts on the ground been in harmony with one another. But they have
not been. Instead, many of the actual events that have transpired over the weeks since the incident was first reported simply do
not fit the overarching explanation given. Below are five of the most important:
1. As mentioned above, the Chief Executive of Porton Down, Gary Aitkenhead has confirmed that the laboratory was unable to
identify the origin of the substance used to poison the Skripals. This is in direct contradiction to the claims made by the
Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who said the following on the
Andrew Marr Show on 18th March :
Obviously to the best of our knowledge this is a Russian-made nerve agent that falls within the category Novichok made only by
Russia, and just to get back to the point about the international reaction which is so fascinating
If it's made only by Russia, as Mr Johnson claimed, then it must have originated in Russia. Right? Yet Mr Aitkenhead says they were
unable to identify where it was made.
Then in an interview with
Deutsche Welle two days after his above comments, Mr Johnson was categorical about the source of the nerve agent as being Russian.
Here's the exchange:
Interviewer: You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly?
Does Britain possess samples of it?
Johnson: "Let me be clear with you When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory "
Interviewer: "So they have the samples
Johnson: "They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, 'Are you sure?' And he said there's
no doubt."
Who "the guy" is, perhaps we'll never know. The cleaner perhaps? I suppose a politician of Mr Johnson's calibre will happily try
to weasel his way out of the implications of what he said. But to us lesser mortals, it does rather look like he was deliberately
misleading, doesn't it
2. Much of the investigation initially concentrated on where the Skripals were poisoned. Amongst the suggestions made were the
bench on which they collapsed, the Zizzi restaurant where they had eaten, Ms Skripal's luggage or Mr Skripal's car. Then, some 24
days after the incident, it was announced that a high concentration of the "military-grade nerve agent" had been found on the front
door, and that this was the likely place of poisoning. Yet it is known that after leaving the house, Mr Skripal and his daughter
drove into the City Centre, went to the Mill pub, and then to the restaurant where they ate a meal together. In other words,
according to the door theory, the two of them were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent, which then took over three hours to
have any effect. Odd, wouldn't you say?
3. Furthermore, it has been stated that the two of them became ill at the same time on the bench in the Maltings. Therefore,
if they were poisoned at the front door, this would mean that not only did the two of them feel little or no effects for the three
hours or so that followed, but it would also mean that a large 66-year-old man and an averagely built 33-year-old woman, of different
height, weight and metabolism, somehow succumbed to the effects of poisoning at exactly the same time, some three hours or so later.
Again, is that not very odd?
4. The claim that they were poisoned by a military grade nerve agent, of a type said to be 5-8 times the toxicity of VX nerve
agent, is itself surely open to question. Both Mr Skripal and his daughter not only survived, but Yulia Skripal is now said to be
sitting up and talking just weeks later. Perhaps it is possible to survive a miniscule dose of such a nerve agent. The problem
with this is that according to many earlier claims, there were significant traces of the substance in various parts of the City of
Salisbury, which indicates that it cannot have been a very miniscule amount that they came into contact with at the door. Which means
that we are being asked to believe that they were poisoned by "more than a miniscule amount" of this deadly poison, but both somehow
survived, despite neither receiving an antidote (a fact now confirmed by Gary Aitkenhead). Does that not seem improbable?
5. The official explanation – that this was planned and authorised at the highest level within the Russian Government – would
lead one to believe that the action was carried out by top level agents of the FSB. Yet the mode of attack – nerve agent apparently
smeared or sprayed on the door – has to be one of the least effective methods that could be used to assassinate anyone. For a start,
it rains a lot in Salisbury, and it did indeed rain on the day of the poisoning. If the substance was left at the front door (assuming
it was the outside), the attacker(s) could have had no guarantee that it would not be washed off before Mr Skripal touched it. Nor
could they have had any guarantee that he, as opposed to his daughter or perhaps a delivery person etc, would come into contact with
it. And of course there is the fact that Mr Skripal is still alive. Does any of this seem consistent with the narrative of a professional,
Kremlin-authorised hit-job.
Conclusion
Where does this leave us? The official narrative would have us believe that the Russian Government authorised the killing of a
has-been (former?) MI6 spy, who it had freed in 2010 and who presumably posed no threat to it, just a week before the Russian election
and weeks before the World Cup, using a nerve agent with an exclusively Russian signature, in a way (on the door) that could not
guarantee the intended target would touch it. This would be difficult enough to swallow by itself, but the British Government's rush
to judgement, disregard for law, and the many discrepancies in the actual events themselves make this scenario absurdly implausible.
Another possibility – that the British Government or intelligence services were behind the incident – has been given great
credibility by the British Government itself, in its absurdly quick reaction to the incident and its blatant ignoring of legal protocols.
These actions were bound to fuel suspicions about the possibility of its own involvement, and I have to say that such suspicions
are absolutely legitimate precisely because of the way it has behaved. However, it must be said that the oddities and discrepancies
in the case don't lend themselves very well to the idea of a carefully planned false flag. If British intelligence had planned
a hit job on Mr Skripal using a military-grade nerve agent "of a type developed by Russia", in order to then pin the blame on the
Russian Government, I doubt very much that Mr Skripal and his daughter would still be alive, or that the explanation for where the
poison was administered would be changing on a daily basis, or that the British Government's evidence to other countries would have
been as risible as it was (unless of course our
intelligence agencies are as incompetent as such a scenario would require them to be, that is).
My hunch -- and it is just that -- is that Mr Skripal himself was perhaps still working for British intelligence, and may have
been in possession of a nerve agent. Somehow, this involvement went wrong, and he ended up accidently poisoning himself and his daughter
on the bench in The Maltings. The Government then scrambled to concoct a story in order to cover up the real story of a Russian working
for MI6 and handling nerve agents, and so quickly decided to point the finger at that most convenient scapegoat, the Russian Government.
The reason that I'm attracted to this possibility is that it explains all three aspects I have described above, and which I think
are the most important aspects of the case. The rush to judgement -- which looked like panic-mode to me -- could have been an attempt
to divert attention away from the investigation looking at the possibility of Mr Skripal having military grade nerve agent in his
possession. The ignoring of international legal protocols, at least for a time, could have been done to ensure that the case was
not probed by any outside body, which may well have exposed discrepancies. And it could also explain many of the oddities mentioned
above, such as traces of nerve agent apparently being found in various places in Salisbury, since these could have come about because
Mr Skripal was in possession of some sort of nerve agent when he left his house that day.
As I say, this is just a hunch and purely speculative. I am probably wrong. But unless the British Government is able to produce
far better evidence than it has so far produced, to back up the claims it has made, I shall consider it a more credible possibility
than the one they have sold to the British public.
Paul Saunders, associate publisher of the National Interest , interviewed
retired Russian general Evgeny Buzhinsky. Buzhinsky retired from the Russian Armed Forces in
2009 as a lieutenant general.
Paul Saunders: You said recently that the confrontation between the United Kingdom and
Russia over the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury could lead to "the
last war in the history of mankind." What did you mean by that?
Evgeny Buzhinsky: I'm sorry, but the BBC correspondent understood me incorrectly. It is not
between Russia and the UK: it is between Russia and the so-called collective West, led by the
United States by the way. This incident was a crime. In investigating this sort of crime, any
investigator must ask some questions: who stands to benefit? What's the motive? For President
Putin, believe me, he is the last man on Earth to try to do such a terrible thing on the eve of
the Russian presidential elections and the eve of the soccer championship in Moscow. This is a
blatant provocation, but what is the aim of this provocation? I don't know if you've heard the
"breaking news" that the British military laboratory said that there are no clues that indicate
that this poison is of Russian production, which is not surprising to me. So no proof, no
evidence, yet the British government said that "we collected information" -- what information?
-- "and on the basis of that information we are sure this crime was committed by Russians."
The question always asked these days if this is a new Cold War or a second Cold War. I
always state that its worse! In the time of the Cold War, everything was clear: an ideological
confrontation, but there were definite truths, definite red lines, no threats, no sanctions. No
cases such as recently, with U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham has called to press Russia, to isolate
Russia, to economically corner Russia. In my view, it is a very dangerous game to try to corner
and isolate Russia.
Paul Saunders: In your statement though, you seem to suggest that you see a possibility of a
real military conflict between Russia and the West. How do you think something like that could
come about?
Evgeny Buzhinsky: The first place where such a conflict could come about is in Syria.
Recently, some days ago, when the Russians spoke to Dunford [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford] after the Americans threatened to strike the center of Damascus, and
Russia made a public statement that if the United States strikes the center of Damascus, where
Russian servicemen are located, where the headquarters where Russian police and advisors are,
then Russia will strike back against the cruise missiles and the carriers of the cruise
missiles. In my view, this is very dangerous since U.S. cruise missiles are launched from
warships.
Paul Saunders: So you view that statement by Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian
General Staff, as a very serious threat?
Evgeny Buzhinsky: Yes, it's serious. And I don't think he was joking or just making a
statement to surprise some Americans. No, I am absolutely sure he was serious.
While we're on Syria, there is the subject of chemical weapons. I do appreciate that our
gathered intelligence indicates and can warn the world that terrorists, not the Syrian
government, are the ones deploying chemical weapons in certain locations in provocative
attacks. This results in TV crews being in the right place at the right times, preventing such
provocations. But I think that with such confrontational circumstances that the United States
could decide to strike Damascus.
Paul Saunders: And in that situation, the Russian military would follow through on General
Gerasimov's statement? Many people in the United States would say to themselves that Russia has
a really powerful military force, but President Putin is ultimately a very pragmatic person who
knows that Russia's economy is less than 5 percent of the combined U.S. and European economies
and he would never risk a war like that.
Evgeny Buzhinsky: In the case of war, the economy doesn't matter. 5 percent, 2 percent, 3
percent, it doesn't matter. Because if it ends in war, it will be a very very short war. Do you
think that Russia will go to war with United States for months or years? Of course not.
Paul Saunders: Are you suggesting it would become a nuclear war or it would end very quickly
because of the nature of modern warfare and the conventional weapons at the disposal of the
United States and Russia?
Evgeny Buzhinsky: It is very difficult to predict, but I am sure that any military
confrontation will end up with the use of nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia.
I don't believe that a nuclear confrontation can be controlled; this is an illusion on the part
of the United States.
Paul Saunders: Do you see any dangers elsewhere apart from Syria?
Evgeny Buzhinsky: Possibly Ukraine, if the United States interferes. Ukraine started this,
Russia answered. But I don't think that's very likely.
Paul Saunders: Turning back to the dispute surrounding Mr. Skripal, the United Kingdom
called for solidarity among its allies. Most of the NATO countries also expelled Russian
diplomats. The United States certainly expelled a very considerable number and also closed the
consulate in Seattle. What impact do you think that had inside Russia? What message did the
Russian government and the Russian people take from that strong, coordinated response? Evgeny
Buzhinsky: First of all, I repeat: what happened with Mr. Skripal was a planned provocation. I
don't know if the UK was alone in planning this, but it is a clear-cut provocation attempting
to demonize and isolate Russia. To find a pretext for expelling Russian diplomats. This is why
I am unsure where this confrontational path can lead. What would be next? For example, now the
United States is thinking about their response; they will expel another round of Russian
diplomats. Russia would expel another fifty. Then the United States would expel another fifty.
After that, then what? A freezing of diplomatic relations?
Paul Saunders: Turning back, you mentioned the idea that this all started with a British
provocation, and it certainly seems to be a widespread view in Russia that this was some kind
of provocation, what do you think would be the motive of the British government to do something
like that?
Evgeny Buzhinsky: Well, no offense meant, but I believe that move by Theresa May was
coordinated with Washington. A lot of Russian experts and observers think so. What was the
motive? I don't know, maybe it was an attempt to divert attention from the internal problems
that Theresa May is facing. For example, what was the first item on the agenda during the last
EU summit? Brexit terms, including conditions that aren't favorable for Britain. And after this
provocation? Russia, with discussions about European solidarity against it instead of talking
about Brexit. Maybe that was the real motive.
Paul Saunders: As you can imagine, very few people in the United States or Britain find it
plausible that the British government would do something like that. Do you think there is any
evidence that would suggest something like that may have happened, beyond your view that there
was not really a motive for Russia to do something like that and there is a motive for the
UK?
Evgeny Buzhinsky: I must tell you frankly: I know some people from our intelligence
services, and they're very concerned. Because Mr. Skripal was exchanged via the illegal program
spy swap, there is a worry that this could endanger or ruin the entire mechanism of exchange.
What is the use of this mechanism if people will be killed afterwards? On the Russian side,
there is no motive whatsoever. On the British side, we can only guess.
On March 30 the Washington Post , the blog site of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, published
a report about the expulsion of some 'western' diplomats from Russia. The move was an expected
and proportional retaliation for the expulsion of Russian diplomats from some 'western'
countries.
The piece was originally published under the headline:
One by one Russia tells European ambassadors of latest diplomatic expulsions
This is visible in the web-address (URL) of the piece which was formed from the original
headline when it was first published.
The editors apparently disliked the original headline. It was factually correct but did not
create enough reason to hate Russia. The original headline was therefore replaced with a
factually false one:
For the record: "They", i.e. the ambassadors, learned of no such thing. Russia has not
expelled any ambassador. The report below the false headline does not claim that Russia did
such.
The blatant falsehood of the headline was immediately
pointed out in the comments to the piece. The @WashingtonPost Twitter account was notified of the 'mistake'.
Three days later the Post has not taken any corrective action. The fake news
headline is still up on its website. Most visitors of the Washington Post site will
not read the piece. They skim the headlines of the site and get a daily dosage of Russia-hate
from it.
The slogan of the Post , prominently displayed under its name, is " Democracy
Dies in Darkness ". When it peddles such sable propaganda it becomes obvious that the
paper hates democracy and an informed public. To curry favor with thuggish tyrants, as Post
owner Bezos does, is obviously more profitable than factual reporting.
speaking of "smart toasters" this 'daily show' clip from 15 years ago is a gut-busting
hoot.
i rarely if ever post links in comment sections, but this ties in quite nicely with this
article!!
Journalists are always "soldiers of the party". You just need to understand what party.
Notable quotes:
"... 'Fair and balanced' was a mid-20th century marketing tool and really, a confabulation of the times. ..."
"... The great Joseph Pulitzer largely founded his namesake prize for the same motives as Alfred Nobel, when the latter tried to make up for the incalculable injuries and deaths caused by the explosives he invented by endowing a Peace Prize. Pulitzer was attempting to atone for the "yellow journalism" sins of his own papers -- and even more, those of his arch rival, William Randolph "Citizen Kane" Hearst -- when he launched the prize that bears his name. ..."
"... To put it bluntly, as Frances McDormand's professor-mother in Almost Famous might have said, "Objective Journalism" was as much a marketing tool as anything else. It took off not because news neutrality was always enshrined in American journalistic ethics, but because of how rare it actually was. ..."
"... the Ochs-Sulzbergers of New York, the Meyer-Grahams of Washington, and the Chandlers of Los Angeles -- made a conscious decision to brand their newspapers as being truly fair and balanced to differentiate them from the competition. ..."
"... And even then, "objectivity" only went as far as the eyes and ears of the beholder. ..."
"... National Review ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Whether it's MSNBC on the left or Fox News on the right, the editorial decisions of how to spin a piece, where and how often to broadcast it, what kind of panelists you invite to "debate" a story, which anchors should be promoted and which ones will forever remain mere worker bees -- all these decisions are anything but "objective" or "unbiased." ..."
'Fair and balanced' was a mid-20th century marketing tool and really, a confabulation of the times.
"The Yellow Press", by L. M. Glackens, portrays newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst as a jester distributing sensational stories
in 1910. (Library of Congress/Public Domain) What the Greatest, Silent, and Boomer generations always regarded as the ideal of "objective
journalism" was actually the exception, not the rule. That was true from the time of Gutenberg until that of Franklin Roosevelt.
The great Joseph Pulitzer largely founded his namesake prize for the same motives as Alfred Nobel, when the latter tried to
make up for the incalculable injuries and deaths caused by the explosives he invented by endowing a Peace Prize. Pulitzer was attempting
to atone for the "yellow journalism" sins of his own papers -- and even more, those of his arch rival, William Randolph "Citizen
Kane" Hearst -- when he launched the prize that bears his name.
And if Pulitzer repented of his past, Hearst never did -- he went full speed ahead well into the 1920s and beyond, normalizing
Nazi science,
openly endorsing eugenics and white superiority, and promoting "Birth of a Nation"-like racism against African Americans, Latinos,
and Native Americans. His dehumanizing attacks against so-called
sneaking and treacherous "Japs" and "Chinks" -- well before Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, and communist China -- were even uglier.
To put it bluntly, as Frances McDormand's professor-mother in Almost Famous might have said, "Objective Journalism"
was as much a marketing tool as anything else. It took off not because news neutrality was always enshrined in American journalistic
ethics, but because of how rare it actually was. High-minded notions of "fairness" and "objective journalism" came to
the print media largely because the visionary first families of the papers that finally succeeded the Hearsts and Pulitzers in clout
and cache -- the Ochs-Sulzbergers of New York, the Meyer-Grahams of Washington, and the Chandlers of Los Angeles -- made a conscious
decision to brand their newspapers as being truly fair and balanced to differentiate them from the competition.
Meanwhile, the broadcast media (which didn't exist until the rise of radio and "talking pictures" in the late 1920s, followed
by TV after World War II) labored under the New Deal's famed Fairness Doctrine.
And even then, "objectivity" only went as far as the eyes and ears of the beholder. The fairness flag was fraying when
Spiro Agnew and Pat Buchanan took "liberal media elites" to task a generation ago during the Vietnam and civil rights era, while
Tom Wolfe made good, unclean fun out of the "radical chic" conceits of Manhattan and Hollywood limousine liberals.
What today's controversies illustrate is that a so-called "Fairness Doctrine" and "objective" newspaper reporting could only have
existed in a conformist Mad Men world where societal norms of what was (and wasn't) acceptable in the postwar Great Society
operated by consensus. That is to say, an America where moderate, respectable, white male centrist Republicans like Thomas Dewey,
Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and Gerald Ford "debated" moderate, respectable, white male centrist Democrats like Harry
Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, and Jimmy Carter.
Now contrast that with today. On November 25, the New York Times made a now-notorious attempt to
understand the Nazi next door,
running a profile of young suburban white supremacist, Tony Hovater. Transgender social media superstar Charlotte Clymer spoke for
her fellow liberals when she savagely satirized the Times with a
tweet-storm that included things like:
Bob is a vegan. He believes we should protect the environment. He likes "Big Bang Theory". He pays taxes. He served in the
military.
He's a serial killer who has tortured and murdered 14 people. He dissolved their bodies in acid at a remote site. He made
them beg for their lives as he tortured them.
He attends PTA meetings. He DVR's episodes of his wife's fave shows when she's late at work.
The moral of the fable being (as Miss Clymer put it): "Bob is a mass-murdering f***head. STOP GIVING BOB NUANCE!"
When the Times followed their neo-Nazi profile by turning an entire op-ed column over to Donald Trump supporters in mid-January,
the Resistance went to red alert. And after Ross Douthat penned a column in defense of (Jewish) anti-immigration hardliner Stephen
Miller on Holocaust Memorial Day in January,
they went full DEFCON.
"F*** you @nytimes for publishing this article on #HolocaustMemorialDay from me & from those in my family whose voices were silenced
during the Holocaust. Shame on you!" said Nadine Vander Velde on Twitter. London left-wing journalist Sarah Kendzior agreed that
"The NYT is now a white supremacist paper. The multiple Nazi puff pieces, constant pro-Trump PR, and praise for Miller on today of
all days is not exceptional – it's [now] the guiding ideology of the paper."
And the current furor over The Atlantic
's hiring of National Review firebrand Kevin D. Williamson only underscores that it isn't just campus leftists or Tea Partiers
who are hitting the censor button.
But revealingly, it wasn't just the usual left-wing snowflakes who have needed a trigger warning of late. Just six weeks into
the new year, the Washington Post and CNN ran a series of tabloidy, Inside Edition -style stories glamorizing Kim Yo-jong,
the sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The Washington Post even went so far as to call Ms. Yo-jong North Korea's
answer to Ivanka Trump (just ignore the fact she is the DPRK's assistant head of the Ministry of Propaganda and Agitation). That
led Bethany Mandel of the New York Post to wonder
what
was up with all the "perverse fawning over brutal Kim Jong-un's sister at the Olympics?"
Additionally, some of the most provocative critiques of "journalistic objectivity" have come from liberal polemicists like Matt
Taibbi and Sam Adler-Bell, who argue that before we go on blathering about untrammeled First Amendment freedom and "objectivity,"
the first question that must be asked is who has the balance of power and whose hands are on deck in the editing room. (And they're
not wrong to ask that question -- it was the same one that Pat Buchanan asked 50 years ago and Ann Coulter asked 20 years ago from
the opposite side of the newsroom.)
Whether it's MSNBC on the left or Fox News on the right, the editorial decisions of how to spin a piece, where and how often
to broadcast it, what kind of panelists you invite to "debate" a story, which anchors should be promoted and which ones will forever
remain mere worker bees -- all these decisions are anything but "objective" or "unbiased."
Let's face it: the supposedly more civilized, serious ecosystem of the pre-social media past would come across to identity-conscious
Millennials today as nothing more than stale white bread dominated by stale white men. Even among the campus leftists who protest
and violently riot to shut down and silence "hate speech," most of them would probably rather live in a world where Steve Bannon
and Richard Spencer anchored the nightly news on one channel -- so long as there was a hijab-wearing Muslim or a transgendered man
on another, equally highly-rated one.
What would be totally unacceptable to today's young consumer is any kind of return to the mid-century world where "the
news" was whatever Ben Bradlee, Johnny Apple, Robert Novak, and The Chancellor/Brinkley Nightly News said it was -- in essence,
the world where Punch Sulzberger, Otis Chandler, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw white-mansplained "facts" through their
own elite establishment filters, de facto ignoring everyone else.
Meanwhile, the beat goes on. From the left, conservative Sinclair Media
is accused of "forcing" its local anchors to read "pro-Trump propaganda." The Nation stalwart Eric Alterman
says that "When one side is
fascist, there's no need to show Both Sides." As for the right -- just ask your Fox-watching or Limbaugh-listening friends and families
what they think of the "mainstream media," the "Communist News Network," or the "opinion cartel."
The great Joan Didion once said "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Maybe "objective journalism" was always just a little
social white lie we in the media told ourselves to make ourselves feel better -- fairer, kinder, gentler, more "professional." But
if there's one lesson that Barack Obama, the Tea Party, Bernie Sanders, Antifa, Donald Trump, and the Great Recession have taught
us over the past decade, it isn't just that the mythical "center" will no longer hold. It's that there may no longer be a center
for any of us to hold on to.
Telly Davidson is the author of a new book on the politics and pop culture of the '90s,Culture War : How the 90's Made Us Who We Are Today (Like it Or Not). He has written on culture for ATTN, FrumForum, All About Jazz, FilmStew, and Guitar Player ,andworked
on the Emmy-nominated PBS series "Pioneers of Television."
"... You have obviously been at the crime scene, have witnessed the comatose bodies of the Skripals and after analyzing the Novitchok samples you meticulously collected, have reached the inescapable conclusion ..."
"... Nice sarcasm. Well deserved for those "Novichok hot heads", who claim that it is plausible that a military grade nerve gas was used. Actually initial reports were about a synthetic opioid, not any nerve gas ( https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ex-russian-agent-sergei-skripal-critical-condition-was-poisoned-by-fentanyl-1665286 ) ..."
"... I am amazed that people do not understand the level of absurdity of using nerve gas in such a case. It's really like ignorance has no boundaries. I understand that some people did not manage to graduate from a university or take a decent organic chemistry course, but still, this is simply amazing and very disturbing to read such posts. Especially here. ..."
You have obviously been at the crime scene, have witnessed the comatose bodies of the
Skripals and after analyzing the Novitchok samples you meticulously collected, have reached
the inescapable conclusion
I am amazed that people do not understand the level of absurdity of using nerve gas in
such a case. It's really like ignorance has no boundaries. I understand that some people did
not manage to graduate from a university or take a decent organic chemistry course, but
still, this is simply amazing and very disturbing to read such posts. Especially here.
If it was a nerve gas my question to "Novichok hot heads" here is who the assassin
was?
You need either to place a can or some punctured packet under the bench (probably
impossible) or spray the liquid on the victim from a short distance. The latter is a very
dangerous exercise if you are not wearing a respirator and protection gear.
Remember the place was under surveillance -- bad for any assassination. Also in lethal
concentrations, the gas kills the victims in several minutes. But Skripals survived
unattended for an hour or more and there was only one other seriously affected person -- a
policeman, while doctor who treated Skriplal's daughter on the bench was unaffected.
I do not see any reasonable way to administer the gas in this environment without
affecting many other people including any passerby, or the doctor who treated Skripal's
daughter
... I know about people who challenged the system and paid or are still paying the price.
Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, just to name a few of the most recognizable
names.
I know dozens of people who have left the US because of disagreements with its foreign
policy. They walk the walk and talk the talk.
Sure they are the minority because most people are conforming cowards or unthinking fools
who can be pulled on a boiled noodle. I have far more esteem for the members of that minority
though than for somebody who figures than spewing forth a couple of thousands words once a
week represents some form of serious resistance.
The French philosopher Alain Soral is quite right when he says that modern "journalists
are either unemployed or prostitutes"
An interesting observation. I will refrain from drawing any conclusions.
"... The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation. Which means that from now on the investigation is highly politicized and tainted in a sense that it will be conducted by people who proved the existence of Iraq WMD in the past: ..."
"... This is one step further from the "self-indictment as a formal proof" used in Show Trials. Now it looks like "suspicion is the formal proof." ..."
"... Both cyberspace and poisoning with exotic chemical agents proved to be a perfect media for false flag operations designed to poison relations between nations and fuel war-style demonization. ..."
The UK will promptly expel 23 Russian diplomats without waiting for the end of the investigation. Which means that from now
on the investigation is highly politicized and tainted in a sense that it will be conducted by people who proved the existence
of Iraq WMD in the past:
Moscow refused to meet Mrs May's midnight deadline to co-operate in the case, prompting Mrs May to announce
a series of measures intended to send a "clear message" to Russia.
These include:
Expelling 23 diplomats
Increasing checks on private flights, customs and freight
Freezing Russian state assets where there is evidence they may be used to threaten the life or property of UK nationals
or residents
Ministers and the Royal Family boycotting the Fifa World Cup in Russia later this year
Suspending all planned high-level bilateral contacts between the UK and Russia
Plans to consider new laws to increase defences against "hostile state activity"
Mrs May told MPs that Russia had provided "no explanation" as to how the nerve agent came to be used in the UK, describing
Moscow's response as one of "sarcasm, contempt and defiance".
The use of a Russian-made nerve agent on UK soil amounted to the "unlawful use of force", she said.
So it looks more and more like a well planned multi-step propaganda operation, not an impromptu action on the part of GB. Kind
of replica of Russian election influence witch hunt in the USA with the replacement of cyberspace and elections with chemical
agents and poisoning.
So inconsistencies that were pointed in this thread (such as the mere fact that three people exposed are still alive) do not
matter anymore.
The verdict now is in.
This is one step further from the "self-indictment as a formal proof" used in Show Trials. Now it looks like "suspicion
is the formal proof."
Both cyberspace and poisoning with exotic chemical agents proved to be a perfect media for false flag operations designed
to poison relations between nations and fuel war-style demonization.
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time.
It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'
In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background,
which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate
about him not being president.'
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion
GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.
This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or
some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both
in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.
And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it
was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the
area.
Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which
clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander
Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on
your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.
The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.
In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry
– the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.
Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier,
which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein
in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.
Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling
attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio
4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets,
backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.
The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available
– evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes
of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played
a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.
Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind
of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction
of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.
What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest
a sale had been completed.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very
happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent
spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.
All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich
and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder.
For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.
(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews
both with Mogilevich and Levinson at
In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to
prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.
Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential
threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions
north of the Litani.
These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that
somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later
to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.
What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the
part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian
side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.
Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking
'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.
Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic
downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William
Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.
So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that
material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem
that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.
All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen
for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella
was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's
personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was
sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who
then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence
which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate
Russia in supplying materials.
There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether
Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears
that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian
intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)
It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which
claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional,
Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's
offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.
It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here,
a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.
Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called
Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.
In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe
World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the
Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.
Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's
death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain,
but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as
Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)
That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase
nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:
'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve
year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents
state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear
limited life components and you can read for weeks).'
What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility,
in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of
ones which lasted longer.
For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.
What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily
smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide
to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring
to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.
In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited
for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'
According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would
you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?
As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned
with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to
ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.
In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been
describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties,
and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another
day.
A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according
to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious
of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.
Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full
dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation
suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.
thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..
it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy
and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..
Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone
I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.
Re: Levinson
# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier
by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved
he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.
# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson
went to Jablonski with it.
# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum
czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson?
The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing
came of it.
I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.
As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg
is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.
I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive
solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that
the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields.
Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have
been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. "
David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making.
Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf
of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration
cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but
not fundamentally.
I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their
policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.
It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing
themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace
to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of
defiance which they will not tolerate.
And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear.
That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to
defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.
So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a
counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.
Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.
In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry
favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness
would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two
birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage
and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.
Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming
media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century
endorsed her.
Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in.
Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything
possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is
clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling
the Borg pundits.
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.
Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called
consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda
in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp.
This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous
American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously
and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier
on atlantic side.
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''
The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.
'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG)
dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded
as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that
with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a
former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski
favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241,
251 - 256]
'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'
State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used
against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the
Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task
force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition
of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization
of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis"
and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time."
Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since
he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know
how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion,
did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental
people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan
back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that
in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting,
even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports
and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the
terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start
to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such
an escalation.
I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain
more pointers.
It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.
An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander
Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian
attempts to get hold of him. An extract:
'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and
afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the
largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'
Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which
Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.
Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:
'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge
on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing
charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly
smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to
win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'
So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has
changed.
For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always
judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial
Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:
'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [£1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent
political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign
passports for its "very, very special clients".
'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that
it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars
stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".
Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us
think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter,
Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:
'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He
said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he
must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko
by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would
have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'
When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about
the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was
immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.
She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator,
David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting
the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.
Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as
a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.
What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary
claim about Shvets:
'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government
quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically
motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable
posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq,
Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.
'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the
National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll
at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general
who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding
Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.
'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated
the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky
and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's
Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky
contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia
Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb
in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'
Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many
things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What
later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling
her as to the side for which he was working.
It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the
Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like
others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.
An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation
specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria'
was actually credible.
This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of
the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have
been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking,
and for similar action against Syria.
Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with
Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.
There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been
another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.
A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing.
This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or
indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High')
might be a start.
Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story
had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that
is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')
The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one
feel as though one wanted to throw up.
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.}
No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the
fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian
Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy
of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were
spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George
Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.
Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it
is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat
it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.
Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered
a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving
forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before
any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914.
Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information
on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention
of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the
matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption
the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the
memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and
dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.
The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem
for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At
that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones
in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems
ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They
are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet
and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google
also allows searches with more than one term. This link -
- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories"
on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.
If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what
you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.
"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in
the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.
The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations"
(hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping
boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many
of the contributors know it from inside.
In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle
between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product
of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible,
but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never
going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the
Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for
the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative
Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.
So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly
not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact
with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government
pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.
The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the
Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.
Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will
be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative
appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat
of the BEF.
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break
- David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname
comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament
names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
The hard, blinding truth:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it,
and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting
their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out
all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and
even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.
And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments
being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.
Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article
he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions
by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."
Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case
being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information
to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.
"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily
redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department
last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "
I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress
will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's
court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI
is lying.
What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos
on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that
are based on classified documents.
We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status.
You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am
thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak
their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are
anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a
political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.
Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are,
in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you.
You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant
to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from
Northeestern
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist.
I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians
- they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.
David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of
material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though
not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That
you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities
are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the
States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because
of that.
The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as
"salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other
professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling
around unsupervised?
The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't
seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm
boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever
they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon
might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about
what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced
with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but
for the general public, that bit more untenable.
So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he
was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have
to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far
as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group
then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.
I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up
on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out
so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least
as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type,
they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to
pay him until he left UK service. pl
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.
Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of
the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet
I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK
side.
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about
the "golden showers"? "
I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations
and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public
wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.
So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media
is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.
Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I
doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.
But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK
get mixed up in it?
When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on
SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised
and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.
A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played
a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact
that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario
Scaramella.
When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European
Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.
His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques,
and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium
forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.
So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case
as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract
from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their
prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'
The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive
summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.
The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and
Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December
2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:
'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War
to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic-
Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'
Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet
Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:
'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references
to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations
made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them
[presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had
been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti
warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say
that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company
of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange
Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'
The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':
'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's
sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations
made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news
and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI.
Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there
were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the
assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella
notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for
the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini.
Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'
In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward
Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation
had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography
– which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella
which had been described in the wiretap request.
As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who
could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the
three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.
In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from
Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.
Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes
to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.
'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to
the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies
implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed
by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with
him.'
From a fax dated 7 November 2005:
'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged
sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document
file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get
him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re:
Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even
then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'
From a fax dated 5 December 2005:
'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with
regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who
gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA
disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to
London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella
on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling
file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'
In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was
unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be
in a chaotic state.
However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp
unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed
to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves
for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus
justifications.
Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on
the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June
and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.
(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)
And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided
to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence
in the Inquiry.
Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come
from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.
Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin
years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the
supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.
The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged
about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame
Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')
The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis
itself or its instrumentation.
The paragraph that you have quoted:
"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his
team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to
brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."
And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics
- which did not and could not exist in this situation.
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was
managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there
is to know?
I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too
complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri
Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele
Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.
Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality?
Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.
By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the
date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage
in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.
Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to
obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.
Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those?
The German link is different. How about the Iranian?
another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime
and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s
I think the key to collapse of Soviet society and its satellites was the victory of
neoliberal ideology over communism. It was pure luck for neoliberalism was that its triumphal
march over the globe coincide with deep crisis of both communist ideology and the Soviet elite
(nomenklatura) in the USSR. Hapless, mediocre Gorbachov, a third rate politician who became the
leader of the USSR is a telling example here. Propaganda, especially "big troika" (BBC,
Deutsche Welle and
Voice of America), also played a very important role in this. Especially in Baltic countries and
Ukraine.
Domestic fake new industry always has huge advantage over foreign one in the USA and other
Western countries, because of general cultural dominance of the West.
The loss of effectiveness of neoliberal propaganda now is the same as the reason for loss of
effectiveness of communist propaganda since 60th. In the first case it was the crisis of
communist ideology, in the second is the crisis of neoliberal ideology. Everybody now understands
that the neoliberal promises were fake, and "bait and switch" manuver that enriched the tiny
percentage of population (top 1% and even more 0.01%).
When the society experience the crisis of ideology it became inoculated toward official
propaganda -- it simply loses its bite.
Notable quotes:
"... As the The Economist notes, a 2015 survey of the top 94 cable channels in America by the research firm Nielsen found that RT did not even make it into the rankings, capturing only 0.04 percent of viewers, according to the Broadcast Audience Research Board. ..."
"... RT has claimed dominance on YouTube, an assertion that apparently caught the attention of the U.S. intelligence community, which noted that RT videos get 1 million views a day, far surpassing other outlets. ..."
"... Or as media-effects theorists explain the communication process, the intentions of the producer (Soviet Union) and the conventions of the content (communist propaganda) were interwoven in a strategy aimed at influencing the receiver (the American audience). But the majority of Americans, with the exception of a few hard-core ideologues, interpreted the content of the message as pitiful Soviet propaganda, assuming they even paid attention to it. ..."
"... There is no doubt that Moscow, which regarded President Harry Truman as its leading American political nemesis, was hoping that Progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace would win the 1948 election -- and had tailored its propaganda effort in accordance with that goal. That pro-Wallace campaign took place at a time when the American Communist Party still maintained some influence in the United States, where many Americans still sympathized with the former World War II ally and a large number of Soviet spies were operating in the country. But then Wallace's Progressives ended up winning 2.5 percent of the vote, less than Strom Thurmond's Southern segregationist ticket. ..."
"... Yet we are supposed to believe that by employing RT, Sputnik, Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of hackers, the Russians could help their American candidate "steal" the 2016 presidential election. Is there any evidence that those white blue-collar workers and rural voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan -- the people who provided Trump with his margin of victory -- were even exposed to the reports distributed by RT and Sputnik, or by the memes constructed by Russian trolls or their posts on Facebook? ("Hey, did you watch RT last night?") ..."
"... Yet the assertion that a "silver bullet shot from a media gun" in the form of Russian propaganda was able "to penetrate a hapless audience" in the United States has been gaining more adherents in Washington and elsewhere. This conspiracy seems to correlate the intent of the Russian government and the content of their messages with the voting behavior of Americans. ..."
"... In a strange irony, those who are promoting this fallacious assertion may -- unlike their Russian scapegoat -- actually succeed in penetrating a hapless American audience. ..."
The Russians can dish it out, but don't expect Americans to swallow everything.
During the Cold War, it became an article of faith among Western policymakers and
journalists: One of the most effective ways to discredit the leaders of Communist countries
would be to provide their citizens with information from the West. It was a view that was
shared by Soviet Bloc regimes who were worried that listening to the Voice of America (VOA) or
watching Western television shows would induce their people to take political action against
the rulers.
So it was not surprising that government officials in East Germany, anxious that many TV
stations from West Germany could be viewed by their citizens, employed numerous means!such as
jamming the airwaves and even damaging TV antennas that were pointing west!in order to prevent
the so-called "subversive" western broadcasts from reaching audiences over the wall.
After the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, communication researchers studying public attitudes
in former East German areas assumed that they would discover that those who had access to West
German television!and were therefore exposed to the West's political freedom and economic
prosperity!were more politically energized and willing to challenge the communist regime than
those who couldn't watch Western television.
But as Evgeny Morozov recalled in his Net Delusion: The
Dark Side of Internet Freedom , a study conducted between 1966 and 1990 about incipient
protests in the so-called "Valley of the Clueless"!an area in East Germany where the government
successfully blocked Western television signals!raised questions about this conventional
wisdom.
As it turns out, having access to West German television actually made life in East Germany
more endurable. Far from radicalizing its citizens, it seemed to have made them more
politically compliant. As one East German dissident quoted by Morozov lamented, "The whole
people could leave the country and move to the West as a man at 8pm, via television."
Meanwhile, East German citizens who did not have access to Western German television were
actually more critical of their regime, and more politically restless.
The study concluded that "in an ironic twist for Marxism, capitalist television seems to
have performed the same narcotizing function in communist East Germany that Karl Marx had
attributed to religious beliefs in capitalist society when he condemned religion as the 'opium
of the people.'"
Morozov refers to the results of these and other studies to raise an interesting idea:
Western politicians and pundits have predicted that the rise of the Internet, which provides
free access to information to residents of the global village, would galvanize citizens in
Russia and other countries to challenge their authoritarian regimes. In reality, Morozov
contends that exposure to the Internet may have distracted Russian users from their political
problems. The young men who should be leading the revolution are instead staying at home and
watching online pornography. Trotsky, as we know, didn't tweet.
Yet the assumption that the content of the message is a "silver bullet shot from a media gun
to penetrate a hapless audience," as communication theorists James Arthur Anderson and Timothy
P. Meyer put it, remains popular among politicians and pundits today, despite ample evidence to
the contrary.
Hence the common assertion that a presidential candidate who has raised a lots of money and
can spend it on buying a lots of television commercials, has a clear advantage over rivals who
cannot afford to dominate the media environment. But the loser in the 2016 presidential race
spent about $141.7 million on ads, compared with $58.8 million for winner's campaign, according
to NBC News . Candidate Trump also spent a fraction of what his Republican rivals had
during the Republican primaries that he won.
Communication researchers like Anderson and Meyers are not suggesting that media messages
don't have any effect on target audiences, but that it is quite difficult to sell ice to
Eskimos. To put it in simple terms, media audiences are not hapless and passive. Although you
can flood them with messages that are in line with your views and interests, audiences actively
participate in the communication process. They will construct their own meaning from the
content they consume, and in some cases they might actually disregard your message.
Imagine a multi-billionaire who decides to produce thousands of commercials celebrating the
legacy of ISIS, runs them on primetime American television, and floods social media with
messages praising the murderous terrorist group. If that happened, would Americans be rallying
behind the flag of ISIS? One can imagine that the response from audiences would range from
anger to dismissal to laughter.
In 2013 Al Jazeera Media Network
purchased Current
TV , which was once partially owned by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and launched
an American news channel. Critics expressed concerns that the network, which is owned by the
government of Qatar and has been critical of U.S. policies in the Middle East, would try to
manipulate American audiences with their anti-Washington message.
Three years later, after hiring many star journalists and producing mostly straight news
shows, Al Jazeera America CEO Al Anstey announced that the network would cease
operations. Anstey cited the "economic landscape" which was another way of saying that its
ratings were distressingly low. The relatively small number of viewers who watched Al
Jazeera America 's programs considered them not anti-American but just, well, boring.
You don't have to be a marketing genius to figure out that in the age of the 24/7 media
environment, foreign networks face prohibitive competition from American cable news networks
like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, social media, not to mention Netflix and yes, those online porno
sites. Thus the chances that a foreign news organization would be able to attract large
American audiences, and have any serious impact on their political views, remain very low.
That, indeed, has been the experience of not only the defunct Al Jazeera America ,
but also of other foreign news outlets that have tried to imitate the Qatar-based network by
launching operations targeting American audiences. These networks have included CGTN (China
Global Television Network), the English-language news channel run by Chinese state broadcaster
China Central
Television ; PressTV, a 24-hour English language news and documentary network affiliated
with Islamic Republic of Iran
Broadcasting ; or RT (formerly Russia Today), a Russian international television network funded by the
Russian
government that operates cable and satellitetelevision channels directed to
audiences outside of Russia.
After all, unless you are getting to paid to watch CTGN, PressTV, or RT -- or you are a news
junkie with a lot of time on your hands -- why in the world would you be spending even one hour of
the day watching these foreign networks?
Yet if you have been following the coverage and public debate over the alleged Russian
interference in the 2016 presidential election, you get the impression that RT and another
Russian media outlet, Sputnik (a news agency and radio broadcast service established by the
Russian
government-controlled news agency Rossiya Segodnya ), were central players
in a conspiracy between the Trump presidential campaign and the Kremlin to deny the presidency
to Hillary Clinton.
In fact, more than half of the much-cited January report on the Russian electoral
interference released by U.S. intelligence agencies was devoted to warning of RT's growing
influence in the United States and across the world, referring to the "rapid expansion" of the
network's operations and budget to about $300 million a year, and citing the supposedly
impressive audience numbers listed on the RT website.
According to America's spooks, the coordinated activities of RT and the online-media
properties and social-media accounts that made up "Russia's state-run propaganda machine" have
been employed by the Russian government to "undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic
order."
And in a long cover story in TheNew York Times Magazine this month, with the
headline, "
RT, Sputnik and Russia's New Theory of War, " Jim Rutenberg suggested that the Kremlin has
"built one of the most powerful information weapons of the 21st century" and that it "may be
impossible to stop."
But as the British Economist magazine reported early this year, while RT claims to
reach 550 million people worldwide, with America and Britain supposedly being its most
successful markets, its "audience" of 550 million refers to "the number of people who can
access its channel, not those who actually watch it."
As the The Economist notes, a 2015 survey of the top 94 cable channels in America by
the research firm Nielsen found that RT did not even make it into the rankings, capturing only
0.04 percent of viewers, according to the Broadcast Audience Research Board.
The Times' s Rutenberg argues that the RT's ratings "are almost beside the point." RT
might not have amassed an audience that remotely rivals CNN's in conventional terms, "but in
the new, 'democratized' media landscape, it doesn't need to" since "the network has come to
form the hub of a new kind of state media operation: one that travels through the same diffuse
online channels, chasing the same viral hits and memes, as the rest of the
Twitter-and-Facebook-age media."
Traveling "through the same diffuse online channels" and "chasing the same viral hits and
memes" sounds quite impressive. Indeed, RT has claimed dominance on YouTube, an assertion that
apparently caught the attention of the U.S. intelligence community, which noted that RT videos
get 1 million views a day, far surpassing other outlets.
But as The Economist points out, when it comes to Twitter and Facebook, RT's reach is
narrower than that of other news networks. Its claim of YouTube success is mostly down to the
network's practice of buying the rights to sensational footage -- for instance, Japan's 2011
tsunami -- and repackaging it with the company logo. It's not clear, however, how the
dissemination of a footage of a natural disaster or of a dog playing the piano helps efforts to
"undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order."
It is obvious that the Russian leaders have been investing a lot of resources in RT,
Sputnik, and other media outlets, and that they employ them as propaganda tools aimed at
promoting their government's viewpoints and interests around the world. From that perspective,
these Russian media executives are heirs to the communist officials who had been in charge of
the propaganda empire of the Soviet Union and its satellites during much of the 20th
Century.
The worldwide communist propaganda machine did prove to be quite effective during the Great
Depression and World War II, when it succeeded in tapping into the economic and social
anxieties and anti-Nazi sentiments in the West and helped strengthen the power of the communist
parties in Europe and, to some extent, in the United States.
But in the same way that Western German television programs failed to politically energize
East Germans during the Cold War, much of the Soviet propaganda distributed by the Soviet Union
at that time had very little impact on the American public and its political attitudes, as
symbolized by the shrinking membership of the American Communist Party.
Or as media-effects theorists explain the communication process, the intentions of the
producer (Soviet Union) and the conventions of the content (communist propaganda) were
interwoven in a strategy aimed at influencing the receiver (the American audience). But the
majority of Americans, with the exception of a few hard-core ideologues, interpreted the
content of the message as pitiful Soviet propaganda, assuming they even paid attention to
it.
Soviet propaganda may have scored limited success during the Cold War when it came to
members of the large communist parties in France, Italy, and Japan, as well as exploited
anti-American sentiments in some third-world countries. In these cases, the intentions of the
producer and the convention of the message seemed to be in line with the interpretations of the
receivers.
There is no doubt that Moscow, which regarded President Harry Truman as its leading American
political nemesis, was hoping that Progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace would win
the 1948 election -- and had tailored its propaganda effort in accordance with that goal. That
pro-Wallace campaign took place at a time when the American Communist Party still maintained
some influence in the United States, where many Americans still sympathized with the former
World War II ally and a large number of Soviet spies were operating in the country. But then
Wallace's Progressives ended up winning 2.5 percent of the vote, less than Strom Thurmond's
Southern segregationist ticket.
Yet we are supposed to believe that by employing RT, Sputnik, Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch
of hackers, the Russians could help their American candidate "steal" the 2016 presidential
election. Is there any evidence that those white blue-collar workers and rural voters in
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan -- the people who provided Trump with his margin of victory -- were
even exposed to the reports distributed by RT and Sputnik, or by the memes constructed by
Russian trolls or their posts on Facebook? ("Hey, did you watch RT last night?")
Yet the assertion that a "silver bullet shot from a media gun" in the form of Russian
propaganda was able "to penetrate a hapless audience" in the United States has been gaining
more adherents in Washington and elsewhere. This conspiracy seems to correlate the intent of
the Russian government and the content of their messages with the voting behavior of
Americans.
In a strange irony, those who are promoting this fallacious assertion may -- unlike their
Russian scapegoat -- actually succeed in penetrating a hapless American audience.
Leon Hadar is a writer and author of the books Quagmire: America in the Middle East and
Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East. His articles have appeared in the New York Times,
The Washington Post, Washington Times, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy,
and the National Interest.
For an example of the success of propaganda, look at Breitbart. The messages online during
the 2016 election were pervasive and insidious. I think this post underestimates the threat
by focusing on traditional media instead of social interaction.
RT covered Assange during the election better than other outlets.
It's easy to see everything from a personal perspective and forget that we are very
diverse. We don't live in an ABC, CBS, and NBC world anymore, with information controlled.
Changes in thought and belief happen online now, in many, many different venues.
A government that has confidence in its own support doesn't need to fight foreign
information. In the '30s and '40s the US government encouraged shortwave listening, and
manufacturers made money by adding SW bands to their radios. We were going through a
depression and then a war, but our government was CONFIDENT enough to encourage us to
understand the world.
Since 1950 the government has been narrowing the focus of external input because it knows
that it no longer has the natural consent of the governed. TV and the Web are intentional
forms of jamming, filling our eyes and ears with internally produced nonsense to crowd out
the external info.
The ones you have to worry about are those much closer to home – "inside the tent".
Friends in the UK, Canada, and Europe are appalled at the distorting effect Israeli
propaganda has on American news sources, and how unaware of it typical Americans seem to
be.
Indeed, it is odd and more than a little worrying that all the concern about "foreign
meddling" has so far failed to engage with Israel, which is hands down the best funded, most
sophisticated and successful foreign meddler.
The FBI annually reports that Israel spies on us at the same level as Russia and China.
But we have yet to fully register that Israeli spying includes systematic efforts to
influence American elections and policies, efforts that dwarf those of Putin's Russia both in
scale and impact.
I think that the corporate masters of propaganda media and politics in these United States,
have, in the words of Edward G. Robinson's Rico in Little Caesar, "gotten to where you can
dish it out, but you can't take it anymore."
It's counterfactual to conflate Soviet propaganda with the perspective of Russians today,
unless Communism never really was the real point. In fact, it's our own leaders in media and
politics who now increasingly issue dogmatic and insulting derogatory language, sounding more
and more like late Soviet propagandists themselves.
So what? What's wrong with people being exposed to a broad array of points of view, trying
to better understand the world and constantly challenging, refining, and reshaping their
worldview in the process?
You're coming perilously close to suggesting that Americans who are critical of their
government are dupes of hostile foreign powers ! an unfair, unhelpful, and undemocratic
assertion.
The problem with Russian trolls is that people don't know they are Russian trolls. They think
they are their fellow Americans and neighbors on Facebook. The influence of foreign
propaganda on Americans is not due to transparent media like Al Jazeera. It's due to
propaganda disguised as your neighbor's opinion.
this conversation cant be taken serious without a serious discussion on Israel, who by the
way provides the perfect case and point of how effective foreign propaganda can be. They work
through our media, school systems and even our churches. Just look at what happened to McGraw
Hill for daring to show before and after maps of the Palestine over the years.
"... The word ["neoliberalism"] has become a rhetorical weapon, but it properly names the reigning ideology of our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human. ..."
"... Last summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over "neoliberalism": they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not known for its incaution, published a paper questioning the benefits of neoliberalism ..."
"... The paper gently called out a "neoliberal agenda" for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity or privatisation. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since 1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality. ..."
"... In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it was a way of assigning responsibility for the debacle, not to a political party per se, but to an establishment that had conceded its authority to the market. For the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, this concession was depicted as a grotesque betrayal of principle. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, it was said, had abandoned the left's traditional commitments, especially to workers, in favour of a global financial elite and the self-serving policies that enriched them; and in doing so, had enabled a sickening rise in inequality. ..."
"... Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market ..."
"... Of course the goal was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes and deregulate. But "neoliberalism" indicates something more than a standard rightwing wish list. It was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals. ..."
"... In short, "neoliberalism" is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity. ..."
"... No sooner had neoliberalism been certified as real, and no sooner had it made clear the universal hypocrisy of the market, than the populists and authoritarians came to power ..."
"... Against the forces of global integration, national identity is being reasserted, and in the crudest possible terms. What could the militant parochialism of Brexit Britain and Trumpist America have to do with neoliberal rationality? ..."
"... It isn't only that the free market produces a tiny cadre of winners and an enormous army of losers – and the losers, looking for revenge, have turned to Brexit and Trump. There was, from the beginning, an inevitable relationship between the utopian ideal of the free market and the dystopian present in which we find ourselves; ..."
"... That Hayek is considered the grandfather of neoliberalism – a style of thought that reduces everything to economics – is a little ironic given that he was such a mediocre economist. ..."
"... This last is what makes neoliberalism "neo". It is a crucial modification of the older belief in a free market and a minimal state, known as "classical liberalism". In classical liberalism, merchants simply asked the state to "leave us alone" – to laissez-nous faire. Neoliberalism recognised that the state must be active in the organisation of a market economy. The conditions allowing for a free market must be won politically, and the state must be re-engineered to support the free market on an ongoing basis. ..."
"... Hayek had only his idea to console him; an idea so grand it would one day dissolve the ground beneath the feet of Keynes and every other intellectual. Left to its own devices, the price system functions as a kind of mind. And not just any mind, but an omniscient one: the market computes what individuals cannot grasp. Reaching out to him as an intellectual comrade-in-arms, the American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote to Hayek, saying: "No human mind has ever understood the whole scheme of a society At best a mind can understand its own version of the scheme, something much thinner, which bears to reality some such relation as a silhouette to a man." ..."
"... The only social end is the maintenance of the market itself. In its omniscience, the market constitutes the only legitimate form of knowledge, next to which all other modes of reflection are partial, in both senses of the word: they comprehend only a fragment of a whole and they plead on behalf of a special interest. Individually, our values are personal ones, or mere opinions; collectively, the market converts them into prices, or objective facts. ..."
"... According to the logic of Hayek's Big Idea, these expressions of human subjectivity are meaningless without ratification by the market ..."
"... ociety reconceived as a giant market leads to a public life lost to bickering over mere opinions; until the public turns, finally, in frustration to a strongman as a last resort for solving its otherwise intractable problems. ..."
"... What began as a new form of intellectual authority, rooted in a devoutly apolitical worldview, nudged easily into an ultra-reactionary politics ..."
The word ["neoliberalism"] has become a rhetorical weapon, but it properly names the reigning ideology of
our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human.
Last summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over
"neoliberalism": they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not
known for its incaution, published
a paper questioning
the benefits of neoliberalism. In so doing, they helped put to rest the idea that the word is
nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power. The paper gently called
out a "neoliberal agenda" for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open
national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity
or privatisation. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since
1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality.
Neoliberalism is an old term, dating back to the 1930s, but it has been revived as a way of describing
our current politics – or more precisely,
the range of thought allowed by our politics . In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis,
it was a way of assigning responsibility for the debacle, not to a political party per se, but to
an establishment that had conceded its authority to the market. For the Democrats in the US and Labour
in the UK, this concession was depicted as a grotesque betrayal of principle. Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair, it was said, had abandoned the left's traditional commitments, especially to workers, in favour
of a global financial elite and the self-serving policies that enriched them; and in doing so, had
enabled a sickening rise in inequality.
Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world – podcast
Over the past few years, as debates have turned uglier, the word has become a rhetorical weapon,
a way for anyone left of centre to incriminate those even an inch to their right. (No wonder centrists
say it's a meaningless insult: they're the ones most meaningfully insulted by it.) But "neoliberalism"
is more than a gratifyingly righteous jibe. It is also, in its way, a pair of eyeglasses.
Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most
admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market
(and
not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss
calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties). Of course the goal
was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes
and deregulate. But "neoliberalism" indicates something more than a standard rightwing wish list.
It was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals.
Still peering through the lens, you see how, no less than the welfare state, the free market
is a human invention. You see how pervasively we are now urged to think of ourselves as proprietors
of our own talents and initiative, how glibly we are told to compete and adapt. You see the extent
to which a language formerly confined to chalkboard simplifications describing commodity markets
(competition, perfect information, rational behaviour) has been applied to all of society, until
it has invaded the grit of our personal lives, and how the attitude of the salesman has become enmeshed
in all modes of self-expression.
In short, "neoliberalism" is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises
with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that,
quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate
organising principle for human activity.
No sooner had neoliberalism been certified as real, and no sooner had it made clear the universal
hypocrisy of the market, than the populists and authoritarians came to power. In the US, Hillary
Clinton, the neoliberal arch-villain, lost – and to a man who knew just enough
to pretend he hated free trade . So are the eyeglasses now useless? Can they do anything to help
us understand what is broken about British and American politics? Against the forces of global
integration, national identity is being reasserted, and in the crudest possible terms. What could
the militant parochialism of Brexit Britain and Trumpist America have to do with neoliberal rationality?
What possible connection is there between the president – a freewheeling boob – and the bloodless
paragon of efficiency known as the free market?
It isn't only that the free market produces a tiny cadre of winners and an enormous army of
losers – and the losers, looking for revenge, have turned to Brexit and Trump. There was, from the
beginning, an inevitable relationship between the utopian ideal of the free market and the dystopian
present in which we find ourselves; between the market as unique discloser of value and guardian
of liberty, and our current descent into post-truth and illiberalism.
Moving the stale debate about neoliberalism forward begins, I think, with taking seriously the
measure of its cumulative effect on all of us, regardless of affiliation. And this requires returning
to its origins, which have nothing to do with Bill or Hillary Clinton. There once was a group of
people who did call themselves neoliberals, and did so proudly, and their ambition was a total revolution
in thought. The most prominent among them, Friedrich Hayek, did not think he was staking out a position
on the political spectrum, or making excuses for the fatuous rich, or tinkering along the edges of
microeconomics.
He thought he was solving the problem of modernity: the problem of objective knowledge. For Hayek,
the market didn't just facilitate trade in goods and services; it revealed truth. How did his ambition
collapse into its opposite – the mind-bending possibility that, thanks to our thoughtless veneration
of the free market, truth might be driven from public life altogether?
When the idea occurred to Friedrich Hayek in 1936, he knew, with the conviction of a "sudden illumination",
that he had struck upon something new. "How can the combination of fragments of knowledge existing
in different minds," he wrote, "bring about results which, if they were to be brought about deliberately,
would require a knowledge on the part of the directing mind which no single person can possess?"
This was not a technical point about interest rates or deflationary slumps. This was not a reactionary
polemic against collectivism or the welfare state. This was a way of birthing a new world. To his
mounting excitement, Hayek understood that the market could be thought of as a kind of mind.
Adam Smith's "invisible hand" had already given us the modern conception of the market: as an
autonomous sphere of human activity and therefore, potentially, a valid object of scientific knowledge.
But Smith was, until the end of his life, an 18th-century moralist. He thought the market could be
justified only in light of individual virtue, and he was anxious that a society governed by nothing
but transactional self-interest was no society at all. Neoliberalism is Adam Smith without the anxiety.
That Hayek is considered the grandfather of neoliberalism – a style of thought that reduces
everything to economics – is a little ironic given that he was such a mediocre economist. He
was just a young, obscure Viennese technocrat when he was recruited to the London School of
Economics to compete
with, or possibly even dim, the rising star of John Maynard Keynes at Cambridge.
The plan backfired, and Hayek lost out to Keynes in a rout. Keynes's General Theory of Employment,
Interest and Money, published in 1936, was greeted as a masterpiece. It dominated the public discussion,
especially among young English economists in training, for whom the brilliant, dashing, socially
connected Keynes was a beau idéal . By the end of the second world war, many prominent free-marketers
had come around to Keynes's way of thinking, conceding that government might play a role in managing
a modern economy. The initial excitement over Hayek had dissipated. His peculiar notion that doing
nothing could cure an economic depression had been discredited in theory and practice. He later admitted
that he wished his work criticising Keynes would simply be forgotten.
... Hayek built into neoliberalism the assumption that the market provides all necessary protection
against the one real political danger: totalitarianism. To prevent this, the state need only keep
the market free.
This last is what makes neoliberalism "neo". It is a crucial modification of the older belief
in a free market and a minimal state, known as "classical liberalism". In classical liberalism, merchants
simply asked the state to "leave us alone" – to laissez-nous faire. Neoliberalism recognised that
the state must be active in the organisation of a market economy. The conditions allowing for a free
market must be won politically, and the state must be re-engineered to support the free market on
an ongoing basis.
That isn't all: every aspect of democratic politics, from the choices of voters to the decisions
of politicians, must be submitted to a purely economic analysis. The lawmaker is obliged to leave
well enough alone – to not distort the natural actions of the marketplace – and so, ideally, the
state provides a fixed, neutral, universal legal framework within which market forces operate spontaneously.
The conscious direction of government is never preferable to the "automatic mechanism of adjustment"
– ie the price system, which is not only efficient but maximises liberty, or the opportunity for
men and women to make free choices about their own lives.
As Keynes jetted between London and Washington, creating the postwar order, Hayek sat pouting
in Cambridge. He had been sent there during the wartime evacuations; and he complained that he was
surrounded by "foreigners" and "no lack of orientals of all kinds" and "Europeans of practically
all nationalities, but very few of real intelligence".
Stuck in England, without influence or respect, Hayek had only his idea to console him; an
idea so grand it would one day dissolve the ground beneath the feet of Keynes and every other intellectual.
Left to its own devices, the price system functions as a kind of mind. And not just any mind, but
an omniscient one: the market computes what individuals cannot grasp. Reaching out to him as an intellectual
comrade-in-arms, the American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote to Hayek, saying: "No human mind has
ever understood the whole scheme of a society At best a mind can understand its own version of
the scheme, something much thinner, which bears to reality some such relation as a silhouette to
a man."
It is a grand epistemological claim – that the market is a way of knowing, one that radically
exceeds the capacity of any individual mind. Such a market is less a human contrivance, to be manipulated
like any other, than a force to be studied and placated. Economics ceases to be a technique – as
Keynes believed it to be – for achieving desirable social ends, such as growth or stable money.
The only social end is the maintenance of the market itself. In its omniscience, the market constitutes
the only legitimate form of knowledge, next to which all other modes of reflection are partial, in
both senses of the word: they comprehend only a fragment of a whole and they plead on behalf of a
special interest. Individually, our values are personal ones, or mere opinions; collectively, the
market converts them into prices, or objective facts.
... ... ...
The more Hayek's idea expands, the more reactionary it gets, the more it hides behind its pretence
of scientific neutrality – and the more it allows economics to link up with the major intellectual
trend of the west since the 17th century. The rise of modern science generated a problem: if the
world is universally obedient to natural laws, what does it mean to be human? Is a human being simply
an object in the world, like any other? There appears to be no way to assimilate the subjective,
interior human experience into nature as science conceives it – as something objective whose rules
we discover by observation.
... ... ...
More than anyone, even Hayek himself, it was the great postwar Chicago economist Milton Friedman
who helped convert governments and politicians to the power of Hayek's Big Idea. But first he broke
with two centuries of precedent and declared that economics is "in principle independent of any particular
ethical position or normative judgments" and is "an 'objective' science, in precisely the same sense
as any of the physical sciences". Values of the old, mental, normative kind were defective, they
were "differences about which men can ultimately only fight". There is the market, in other words,
and there is relativism.
Markets may be human facsimiles of natural systems, and like the universe itself, they may be
authorless and valueless. But the application of Hayek's Big Idea to every aspect of our lives negates
what is most distinctive about us. That is, it assigns what is most human about human beings – our
minds and our volition – to algorithms and markets, leaving us to mimic, zombie-like, the shrunken
idealisations of economic models. Supersizing Hayek's idea and radically upgrading the price system
into a kind of social omniscience means radically downgrading the importance of our individual capacity
to reason – our ability to provide and evaluate justifications for our actions and beliefs.
As a result, the public sphere – the space where we offer up reasons, and contest the reasons
of others – ceases to be a space for deliberation, and becomes a market in clicks, likes and retweets.
The internet is personal preference magnified by algorithm; a pseudo-public space that echoes the
voice already inside our head. Rather than a space of debate in which we make our way, as a society,
toward consensus, now there is a mutual-affirmation apparatus banally referred to as a "marketplace
of ideas". What looks like something public and lucid is only an extension of our own pre-existing
opinions, prejudices and beliefs, while the authority of institutions and experts has been displaced
by the aggregative logic of big data. When we access the world through a search engine, its results
are ranked, as the founder of Google puts it, "recursively" – by an infinity of individual users
functioning as a market, continuously and in real time.
... ... ...
According to the logic of Hayek's Big Idea, these expressions of human subjectivity are meaningless
without ratification by the market – as Friedman said, they are nothing but relativism, each
as good as any other. When the only objective truth is determined by the market, all other values
have the status of mere opinions; everything else is relativist hot air. But Friedman's "relativism"
is a charge that can be thrown at any claim based on human reason. It is a nonsense insult, as all
humanistic pursuits are "relative" in a way the sciences are not. They are relative to the (private)
condition of having a mind, and the (public) need to reason and understand even when we can't expect
scientific proof. When our debates are no longer resolved by deliberation over reasons, then the
whimsies of power will determine the outcome.
This is where the triumph of neoliberalism meets the political nightmare we are living through
now. "You had one job," the old joke goes, and Hayek's grand project, as originally conceived in
30s and 40s, was explicitly designed to prevent a backslide into political chaos and fascism. But
the Big Idea was always this abomination waiting to happen. It was, from the beginning, pregnant
with the thing it was said to protect against. Society reconceived as a giant market leads to
a public life lost to bickering over mere opinions; until the public turns, finally, in frustration
to a strongman as a last resort for solving its otherwise intractable problems.
... ... ...
What began as a new form of intellectual authority, rooted in a devoutly apolitical worldview,
nudged easily into an ultra-reactionary politics. What can't be quantified must not be real,
says the economist, and how do you measure the benefits of the core faiths of the enlightenment –
namely, critical reasoning, personal autonomy and democratic self-government? When we abandoned,
for its embarrassing residue of subjectivity, reason as a form of truth, and made science the sole
arbiter of both the real and the true, we created a void that pseudo-science was happy to fill.
"... The New York Times is prepping the American people for what could become World War III. The daily message is that you must learn to hate Russia and its President Vladimir Putin so much that, first, you should support vast new spending on America's Military-Industrial Complex and, second, you'll be ginned up for nuclear war if it comes to that. ..."
"... At this stage, the Times doesn't even try for a cosmetic appearance of objective journalism. Look at how the Times has twisted the history of the Ukraine crisis, treating it simply as a case of "Russian aggression" or a "Russian invasion." The Times routinely ignores what actually happened in Ukraine in late 2013 and early 2014 when the U.S. government aided and abetted a violent coup that overthrew Ukraine's elected President Viktor Yanukovych after he had been demonized in the Western media. ..."
"... The Times and much of the U.S. mainstream media refuses even to acknowledge that there is another side to the Ukraine story. Anyone who mentions this reality is deemed a "Kremlin stooge" in much the same way that people who questioned the mainstream certainty about Iraq's WMD in 2002-03 were called "Saddam apologists." ..."
"... Many liberals came to view the dubious claims of Russian "meddling" in the 2016 election as the golden ticket to remove Trump from the White House. So, amid that frenzy, all standards of proof were jettisoned to make Russia-gate the new Watergate. ..."
"... For one, even if the U.S. government were to succeed in destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia sufficiently to force out President Putin, the neocon dream of another malleable Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin is far less likely than the emergence of an extreme Russian nationalist who might be ready to push the nuclear button rather than accept further humiliation of Mother Russia. ..."
"... The truth is that the world has much less to fear from the calculating Vladimir Putin than from the guy who might follow a deposed Vladimir Putin amid economic desperation and political chaos in Russia. But the possibility of nuclear Armageddon doesn't seem to bother the neocon/liberal-interventionist New York Times. Nor apparently does the principle of fair and honest journalism. ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
"... The Trans-Atlantic Empire of banking cartels rest upon enmity with the only other Great Powers in the World: Russia and China, while keeping USA thoroughly within their orbit, relying on our Great Power as the engine that powers this Western Bankers' Empire (the steering room lies in City-of-London, who has LONG maneuvered, via their Wall Street assets, to bring us into Empire). Should peaceful, cooperative and productive relations break out between USA, Russia, and China, this would undermine everything the Western Empire has worked to build. ..."
"... THIS is why the phony Russiagate issue is flogged to get rid of Trump (who seeks cooperation with Russia and China), AND keeping Russia as "The Enemy", keeping the MIC, Intel community, various police-state ops, in high demand for "National Security" reasons (also positioned to foil any democratic uprisings, should they see past the progs daily curtain and see their plight). ..."
"... The funny thing about living through the 'fake news' era, is that now everyone thinks that their news source is the correct news source. Many believe that outside of the individual everyone else reads or listens too 'fake news'. It's like all of a sudden no one has credibility, yet everyone may have it, depending on what news source you subscribe to. I mean there's almost no way of knowing what the truth is, because everyone is claiming that they are getting their news from reputable news outlets, but some or many aren't, and who are the reputable news sources, if you don't mind my asking you this just for the record? ..."
"... To learn how to deal with this 'fake news', I would suggest you start studying the JFK assassination, or any other ill defined tragic event, and then you might learn how to decipher the 'fake news' matrix of confusion to learn what you so desire to learn. I chose this route, because when was the last time the Establishment brokered the truth in regard to a happening such as the JFK assassination? Upon learning of what a few well written books has to say, you will then need to rely on your own brain to at least give you enough satisfaction to allow you to believe that you pretty well got it right, and there go you. In other words, the truth is out there, hiding in plain sight, and if you are persistent enough you just might find it. Good luck. ..."
The NYT's Yellow Journalism on Russia September 15, 2017
Exclusive: The New York Times' descent into yellow journalism over Russia recalls the
sensationalism of Hearst and Pulitzer leading to the Spanish-American War, but the risks to
humanity are much greater now, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Reading The New York Times these days is like getting a daily dose of the "Two Minutes Hate"
as envisioned in George Orwell's 1984, except applied to America's new/old enemy
Russia. Even routine international behavior, such as Russia using fictitious names for
potential adversaries during a military drill, is transformed into something weird and
evil.
In the snide and alarmist style that the Times now always applies to Russia, reporter Andrew
Higgins wrote
– referring to a fictitious war-game "enemy" – "The country does not exist, so it
has neither an army nor any real citizens, though it has acquired a feisty following of
would-be patriots online. Starting on Thursday, however, the fictional state, Veishnoriya, a
distillation of the Kremlin's darkest fears about the West, becomes the target of the combined
military might of Russia and its ally Belarus."
This snarky front-page story in Thursday's print editions also played into the Times' larger
narrative about Russia as a disseminator of "fake news." You see the Russkies are even
inventing "fictional" enemies to bully. Hah-hah-hah -- The article was entitled, "Russia's War
Games With Fake Enemies Cause Real Alarm."
Of course, the U.S. and its allies also conduct war games against fictitious enemies, but
you wouldn't know that from reading the Times. For instance,
U.S. war games in 2015 substituted five made-up states – Ariana, Atropia, Donovia,
Gorgas and Limaria – for nations near the Caucasus mountains along the borders of Russia
and Iran.
In earlier war games, the U.S. used both fictitious names and colors in place of actual
countries. For instance, in 1981, the Reagan administration conducted "Ocean Venture" with that
war-game scenario focused on a group of islands called "Amber and the Amberdines," obvious
stand-ins for Grenada and the Grenadines, with "Orange" used to represent Cuba.
In those cases, the maneuvers by the powerful U.S. military were clearly intended to
intimidate far weaker countries. Yet, the U.S. mainstream media did not treat those war
rehearsals for what they were, implicit aggression, but rather mocked protests from the obvious
targets as paranoia since we all know the U.S. would never violate international law and invade
some weak country -- (As it turned out, Ocean Venture '81 was a dress rehearsal for the actual
U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983.)
Yet, as far as the Times and its many imitators in the major media are concerned, there's
one standard for "us" and another for Russia and other countries that "we" don't like.
Yellow Journalism
But the Times' behavior over the past several years suggests something even more sinister
than biased reporting. The "newspaper of record" has slid into yellow journalism, the practice
of two earlier New York newspapers – William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and
Joseph Pulitzer's New York World – that in the 1890s manipulated facts about the crisis
in Cuba to push the United States into war with Spain, a conflict that many historians say
marked the beginning of America's global empire.
Except in today's instance, The New York Times is prepping the American people for what
could become World War III. The daily message is that you must learn to hate Russia and its
President Vladimir Putin so much that, first, you should support vast new spending on America's
Military-Industrial Complex and, second, you'll be ginned up for nuclear war if it comes to
that.
At this stage, the Times doesn't even try for a cosmetic appearance of objective journalism.
Look at how the Times has twisted the history of the Ukraine crisis, treating it simply as a
case of "Russian aggression" or a "Russian invasion." The Times routinely ignores what actually
happened in Ukraine in late 2013 and early 2014 when the U.S. government aided and abetted a
violent coup that overthrew Ukraine's elected President Viktor Yanukovych after he had been
demonized in the Western media.
Even as neo-Nazi and ultranationalist protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at police,
Yanukovych signaled a willingness to compromise and ordered his police to avoid worsening
violence. But compromise wasn't good enough for U.S. neocons – such as Assistant
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland; Sen. John McCain; and National Endowment for Democracy
President Carl Gershman. They had invested too much in moving Ukraine away from Russia.
Nuland put the U.S. spending at $5 billion and was caught discussing with
U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who should be in the new government and how to "glue" or
"midwife this thing"; McCain appeared on stage urging on far-right militants; and Gershman
was
overseeing scores of NED projects inside Ukraine, which he had deemed the "biggest prize"
and an important step in achieving an even bigger regime change in Russia, or as he put it:
"Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian
imperialism that Putin represents. Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the
near abroad but within Russia itself."
The Putsch
So, on Feb. 20, 2014, instead of
seeking peace , a sniper firing from a building controlled by anti-Yanukovych forces killed
both police and protesters, touching off a day of carnage. Immediately, the Western media
blamed Yanukovych. Sen. John McCain appearing with Ukrainian rightists of the Svoboda party at a pre-coup rally
in Kiev.
Shaken by the violence, Yanukovych again tried to pacify matters by reaching a compromise
--
guaranteed by France, Germany and Poland -- to relinquish some of his powers and move up an
election so he could be voted out of office peacefully. He also pulled back the police.
At that juncture, the neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists spearheaded a violent putsch on Feb.
22, 2014, forcing Yanukovych and other officials to flee for their lives. Ignoring the
agreement guaranteed by the three European nations, Nuland and the U.S. State Department
quickly deemed the coup regime "legitimate."
However, ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, which represented Yanukovych's
electoral base, resisted the coup and turned to Russia for protection. Contrary to the Times'
narrative, there was no "Russian invasion" of Crimea because Russian troops were already there
as part of an agreement for its Sevastopol naval base. That's why you've never seen photos of
Russian troops crashing across Ukraine's borders in tanks or splashing ashore in Crimea with an
amphibious landing or descending by parachute. They were already inside Crimea.
The Crimean autonomous government also voted to undertake a referendum on whether to leave
the failed Ukrainian state and to rejoin Russia, which had governed Crimea since the Eighteenth
Century. In that referendum, Crimean citizens voted by some 96 percent to exit Ukraine and seek
reunion with Russia, a democratic and voluntary process that the Times always calls
"annexation."
The Times and much of the U.S. mainstream media refuses even to acknowledge that there
is another side to the Ukraine story. Anyone who mentions this reality is deemed a "Kremlin
stooge" in much the same way that people who questioned the mainstream certainty about Iraq's
WMD in 2002-03 were called "Saddam apologists."
But what is particularly remarkable about the endless Russia-bashing is that – because
it started under President Obama – it sucked in many American liberals and even some
progressives. That process grew even worse when the contempt for Russia merged with the Left's
revulsion over Donald Trump's election.
Many liberals came to view the dubious claims of Russian "meddling" in the 2016 election
as the golden ticket to remove Trump from the White House. So, amid that frenzy, all standards
of proof were jettisoned to make Russia-gate the new Watergate.
The Times, The Washington Post and pretty much the entire U.S. news media joined the
"resistance" to Trump's presidency and embraced the neocon "regime change" goal for Putin's
Russia. Very few people care about the enormous risks that this "strategy" entails.
For one, even if the U.S. government were to succeed in destabilizing nuclear-armed
Russia sufficiently to force out President Putin, the neocon dream of another malleable Boris
Yeltsin in the Kremlin is far less likely than the emergence of an extreme Russian nationalist
who might be ready to push the nuclear button rather than accept further humiliation of Mother
Russia.
The truth is that the world has much less to fear from the calculating Vladimir Putin
than from the guy who might follow a deposed Vladimir Putin amid economic desperation and
political chaos in Russia. But the possibility of nuclear Armageddon doesn't seem to bother the
neocon/liberal-interventionist New York Times. Nor apparently does the principle of fair and
honest journalism.
The Times and rest of the mainstream media are just having too much fun hating Russia and
Putin to worry about the possible extermination of life on planet Earth.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen
Narrative, either in print here or
as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
jo6pac , September 15, 2017 at 4:51 pm
Amerikas way of bring the big D to your nation. Death
Bingo -- In a surely related story, the mainstream press is equally relentless in AVOIDING
telling Americans the facts about Israel, and especially about its control over the American
press. "Israel lobby is never a story (for media that is in bed with the lobby)" http://mondoweiss.net/2017/09/israel-lobby-never/
Virtually everything average Americans have been told about Israel has been, amazingly, an
absolute lie. Israel was NOT victimized by powerful Arab armies. Israel
overpowered and victimized a defenseless, civilian Arab population. Military analysts knew
the Arab armies were in poor shape and would be unable to resist the zionist army. Muslim
"citizens" of Israel do NOT have all the same rights as Jews. Israelis are
NOT under threat from the indigineous Palestinians, but Palestinians are under
constant threats of theft and death from the Israelis. Israel does NOT share
America's most fundamental values, which rest on the principle of equal human rights for
all.
How has this gigantic package of outright lies has been foisted upon the American public
for so long? And how long can it continue? It turns out they did not foresee the internet,
and the facts are leaking out everywhere. So it appears they're desperately coercing facebook
and google to rig their rankings, trying to hide the facts. But one day soon there will be a
'snap' in the collective mind, and everybody will know that everybody knows.
JWalters
I can tell you are angry. I too was angry when I figured it out.
Long before I figured it out, I was a soldier. Our unit was prepared for an exercise and we
were all sleeping at the regiment compound, the buses would arrive at zero-dark thirty. I was
reading a book about the ME(this was shortly after 9-11). A friend, came up and asked what I
was reading. I told him I was reading about the Balfour paper and how that had a significant
effect on the ME. He began explaining to me how the zionist movement had used the idea that
no one lived on that land, to force the people from that land, out of that land.
I quickly responded that Israel had defended that land against 5 Arab armies and managed to
hold on to that land. I informed him he was mistaken.
He agreed to disagree, and walked away.
This happened way back in 2002 if only I could pick his mind now. How did he know about this,
way back before the internet was in any shape to wake people up?
There is hope still that guys who are young as i was, will say "Fuck You I defend this line
and no further."
Without their compliance, there can be no wars.
CommonTater your story parallels mine -- I was in the military, went to Vietnam to 'defend
our nation against communism', felt horror at the Zionist stories of how Palestinians
rocketed them, was told by senior officer about what Zionism is really about and I, like you,
disbelieved him. That was in 1974 -- -- Now, with all the troubles in the world I won't read the
MSP but look towards the alternative news sources. They make more sense. But as I try to
educate others on what I have learned I am as disappointed as my senior officer must have
been back them. Articles such as this one reproduced by ICH are gems: I save and print them
in a compendium detailing ongoing war crimes.
Thanks Mr. Parry,
You are a voice in the hurricane of hatred and lies propagated by the richest people on the
planet.
Eventually some moron who believes this new York Times garbage will actually unleash the bomb
and we will all be smoke.
That has always been the result of such successful propaganda. And it is very successful. It
has almost occluded any truth for the vast majority of westerners .
Michael Fish
Agreed. I wish this clear and comprehensive article could be stapled on every American
voter's door (wanted to say forehead but violence is bad). Many would toss it in the trash.
Many would not agree even with full comprehension because of their own horrid beliefs. But
maybe a few would read it and have an epiphany. It's very hard work to find an avenue to
change the minds of millions of people who've been inculcated by nationalist propaganda since
birth. Since 4 years old seeing the wonderful National Anthem and jets fly over the stadium
of their favorite sports team. Since required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in
school.
I refused to stand for or recite the Pledge when I was seven or eight years old. I was
sent to detention. My awesome mom though intervened and afterwards I could remain seated
while most or all other kids stood up to do the ritual. I refuse to stand up and place
hand-on-heart and remove cap during any sporting contests when the Anthem is played. I've
been threatened with physical violence by many strangers around me.
Thanks Mr. Parry, your voice is appreciated, your articles and logic are top-notch. Very
valuable stuff, available for the curious, the skeptical. Well, until Google monopolizes
search algorithms and calls this a Russian fake news site, perhaps or Congress the same
My hat is off to you sir, I have not been to any sporting events since I woke up, but I
imagine it would be very difficult to remain seated and hatted during the opening affirmation
of nationalism. My waking up coincides with a drastic drop in sports viewing. I used to be an
NFL fan, rooted for the Niners (started watching NFL in the late eighties), the last full
season I followed was the 2013-14 season.
It was the Ukraine coup that woke me up. It started when watching videos on youtube of guys
stomping on riot cops, using a fire hose on them like a reverse water cannon. Then I realized
these guys were the peaceful protesters being talked about on t.v. It was like a thread
hanging in front of me, I began pulling and pulling until the veil in front of my eyes came
apart. It was during this time I discovered consortiumnews.com.
Mr Common Tater–just appreciating reading that someone else "woke up". That is the
way it has felt to me. For me it was Oct 2002 and Bush's speech that was clearly heading us
to war in Iraq. The "election" (appointment) of Bush in 2000 though was the first alarm clock
that I started to hear. Most recent wake up is connected to Mr Parry's relentless (I hope)
and necessary debunking of the myth of Russian nastiness and corresponding myth of US
rectitude. Been watching The Untold History of the United States and have been dealing with
the real bedrock truth that my government invented and invents enemies as a tactic in a
game–ie. it's a bunch of boys thinking foreign relationship building is first and
foremost a game. It has been hard to wash away all this greasy insidious smut from my
life.
It sucks to wake up, in a way. Once one gets past the denial, Tom Clancy novel type movies
lose some of it's fun, although still entertaining. One secretly knows the audience in the
cinema is just eating it all up and loving it. The American hero yells "yippie kayay mother
f -- -r" as he defeats the post-Soviet Russian villain in Russia blowing up buildings, and
destroying s–t as he saves the world for democracy. The Russian authorities amount to
some guy in Soviet peaked hat, and long coat, begging for a bribe.
Oliver Stone's series is really good, it turns history on his head and shakes all the pennies
out his pockets. Another good reporter is John Pilger, he has a long list of docs he has done
over several decades.
I have been watching that same series, about 3 episodes in. The most mind blowing part to
think about is how the establishment consipired to block the nomination of the progressive
Henry Wallace as a repeat VP for Roosevelt, leading instead to Harry Truman's nomination as
VP, and then you know the rest of the story.
Funny how history repeated itself with the nomination of Clinton instead of Sanders. Btw,
after Sanders mistakenly jumped on the Russia bashing bandwagon he was one of the few who
voted against the recent sanctions being imposed against Russia, Iran, and North Korea. So
yeah, I'd feel alot better with a Sanders president at this point.
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:21 pm
Apart from the obvious Exceptionalist and Zionazi imperative to destroy Russia and China
in order that God's Kingdom of 'Full Spectrum Dominance' be established across His world by
his various 'Chosen People', the USA always needs an enemy. Now, more than ever, as the
country crumbles into disrepair and unprecedented inequality, poverty and elite arrogance,
the proles must be led to blame their plight on some Evil foreign daemon.
Only this time its
no Saddam or Gaddaffi or Assad that can be easily bombed back to that Stone Age that all the
non-Chosen must inhabit. This time the bullying thugs will get a, thermo-nuclear, bloody nose
if they do not back off. Regretably, their egos refuse to withdraw, even in the interest of
self-survival.
Paranam Kid , September 16, 2017 at 6:13 am
" It has almost occluded any truth for the vast majority of westerners."
You are so right about that, I notice it every day on other forums on which I discuss current
affairs with others: the US views are the accepted ones, and I get a lot of stick for stating
different views. It is actually frightening to see how few people can think for
themselves.
mike k , September 15, 2017 at 5:47 pm
The American people are being systematically lied to, and they don't have a clue that it
is happening. There is no awake and intelligent public to prevent what is unfolding. The
worst kind of criminals are in charge of our government, media, and military. The sleeping
masses are making their way down the dark mountain to the hellish outcome that awaits
them.
"These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur
of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it
seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and
kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future I should do foolishly. The beauty
of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain."
Robinson Jeffers
HopeLB , September 15, 2017 at 10:36 pm
Great, Dark and Accurate poem -- Thank You -- Think I'll send it to Rachel Maddow, Wapo and
the NYTimes.Might do them some good. Wouldn't that be lovely.
Patrick Lucius , September 16, 2017 at 12:42 am
Which poem is that? Not Shine, perishing Republic, is it?
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas -- GAS -- Quick, boys -- -- An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
******************************
And this, from Bob Dylan's "Jokerman" .
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?
******************************
I love life and am by nature a cockeyed optimist, but I find myself intermittently gloomy,
my optimism overwhelmed by cynicism, when I see the abundance of moronic belligerence so
passionately snarled out in the comments sections across the internet. Clearly, humans are
cursed with an addiction to violence For my part, I am old and will die soon and have no
children, plus I live in a quiet backwater far away from the nuclear blast zone. Humanity
seems on course for a major "culling". Insane and sad.
I'd like to see more investigative reporting on the NYT's and other major media outlets'
links to the CIA and other Deep State info-war bureaus. What the Times is doing now is
reminiscent of the Michael Gordon-Judith Miller propaganda in the run up to the invasion of
Iraq. Operation Mockingbird, uncovered during the mid-70s Church Hearings, is an ongoing
effort, it would seem. Revealing hard links to CIA information ops would be a great service
to humanity.
SteveK9 , September 15, 2017 at 7:22 pm
After 'Michael Gordon-Judith Miller' I stopped reading the Times.
Beard681 , September 18, 2017 at 11:52 am
I am amazed at how many conspiracy types there are who want to see some sort of oligarch,
capitalist, zionist or deep state cabal behind it all. (That is a REALLY optimistic view of
the human propensity for violent conflict.) It is just a bunch of corporate shills pushing
for war (hopefully cold) because war sells newspapers.
Robert Parry has gotten this exactly right -- I'm a regular NYTimes subscriber /-have been
for years -- and I have NEVER read anything about Russia that has not been written by
professional Russia-haters like Higgins. Frankly, I don't get it. What accounts for this
weird and dangerous bias?
mike k , September 15, 2017 at 6:03 pm
Have you looked into who owns the NYT?
Paranam Kid , September 16, 2017 at 6:32 am
Why do you keep reading the NYT? Not only the Russia stories are heavily biased, but all
their stories are. Most op-ed's about Israel/Palestine are written by zealous
pro-Israel/pro-Zionists, against very few pro-Palestine people.
Brad Owen , September 16, 2017 at 8:07 am
The Trans-Atlantic Empire of banking cartels rest upon enmity with the only other Great
Powers in the World: Russia and China, while keeping USA thoroughly within their orbit,
relying on our Great Power as the engine that powers this Western Bankers' Empire (the
steering room lies in City-of-London, who has LONG maneuvered, via their Wall Street assets,
to bring us into Empire). Should peaceful, cooperative and productive relations break out
between USA, Russia, and China, this would undermine everything the Western Empire has worked
to build.
THIS is why the phony Russiagate issue is flogged to get rid of Trump (who seeks
cooperation with Russia and China), AND keeping Russia as "The Enemy", keeping the MIC, Intel
community, various police-state ops, in high demand for "National Security" reasons (also
positioned to foil any democratic uprisings, should they see past the progs daily curtain and
see their plight).
Brad Owen , September 16, 2017 at 8:08 am
Progs=propaganda stupid iPad.
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:30 pm
Here in Aust-failure I read the papers for many years until they became TOO repulsive,
particularly the Murdoch hate and fear-mongering rags. I also, and still do, masochistically
listen to the Government ABC and SBS. In all those years I really cannot recall any articles
or programs that reported on Russia or China in a positive manner, save when Yeltsin, a true
hero to all our fakestream media, was in charge. That sort of uniformity of opinion, over
generations, is almost admirable. And the necessity to ALWAYS follow the Imperial US ('Our
great and powerful friend') line leads to some deficiencies in the quality of the personnel
employed, as I one again reflected upon the other day when one hackette referred to (The
Evil, of course)Kim Jong-un as 'President Un', several times.
Jeff Davis , September 18, 2017 at 12:31 pm
"What accounts for this weird and dangerous bias?"
Several points:
The Russian -- formerly Commie -- -- boogieman is a profit center for the military, their
industrial suppliers, and the political class. That's the major factor. But also, the Zionist
project requires a bulked up US military "tasked" with "full spectrum" military dominance
--
the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the American jackboot on the world's throat forever -- to insure the
eternal protection of Israel. Largely unseen in this Israeli/Zionist factor is the
thousand-year-old blood feud between the Jews and Russians. They are ancient enemies since
the founding of Czarist Russia. No amount of time or modernity can diminish the passion of
that animus. (I suspect that the Zionist aim to "destroy" Russia will eventually backfire and
lead instead to the destruction of Israel, but really, we shouldn't talk about that.)
mike k , September 15, 2017 at 6:26 pm
The richest man in the world has the controlling interest in the NYT. Draw your own
conclusions.
Mexico, ground zero for the world fascist movement in the 20s and 30s (going by name
Synarchy Internationale still does) throuout Ibero-America, centered in PAN. The
Spanish-speaking World had to contend with Franco, and Salazar being in power so long in the
respective "Mother Countries" of the Iberian Peninsula. This was the main trail for the
ratlines to travel.
I saw a dead coyote on the side of the road the other day. I know you know what that means
to me, Mike. Omens are a lost art in these modern times, and I have no expertise in these
matters, but it struck my attention hard. It was on the right side of the road: trouble for
Trump coming from The Right? They are more potent than the ineffective Left, so this might be
the way Trump is pulled down.
Sfomarco , September 16, 2017 at 3:37 pm
Carlos Slim (f/k/a Salim)
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:31 pm
Yes, but who bankrolls Slim?
Stiv , September 15, 2017 at 6:51 pm
I wouldn't even need to read this to know what's going to be said. After the last article
from Parry, which was very good and interesting .plowing new ground for him he's back to
rehashing the same old shit. Not that it's necessarily wrong, only been said about a hundred
times. Yawn
D.H. Fabian , September 16, 2017 at 2:46 am
After months of so many people pointing out how and why the "Russia stole the election"
claim is false, it came roaring back (in liberal media) in recent days. It demands a
response.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 7:26 am
No one is required to read anything on CN.
Virginia , September 16, 2017 at 1:58 pm
RP brought lots of new things into play in his article and showed how they mesh together
and support one another "against Trump." I almost skipped it because so familiar with the
topic, but RP brought new light to the subject, in my humble opinion.
I do not need to read or watch established "news" media to know what's going to be said.
After the last b.s. story from the usual talking heads which was low brow and insulting to
the intelligence of the audience, they are back at it again same ol'shit by the same talking
heads. It is most definitely wrong, and it needs to be countered as much as possible not
yawning.
Gregory Herr , September 16, 2017 at 8:18 pm
That's what struck me just how absurdly insulting will the Times get?
And I think the point that trying to destabilize the Russian Federation may very well
bring about a more militant hardline Russia is important to stress.
anon , September 17, 2017 at 9:02 am
"Stiv" is a troll who makes this junk comment every time. Better to ignore him.
Colin , September 18, 2017 at 11:54 am
Were you planning to contribute anything useful to the discussion?
SteveK9 , September 15, 2017 at 7:19 pm
I always wonder what motivation the accusers believe you have when they call you a 'Putin
stooge'. Why would you be one? Are you getting paid? Of course not, so this is just a
judgment on your part. They could call you a fool, but accuse you of 'carrying water for the
Kremlin' as I heard that execrable creature, Adam Schiff say to Tucker Carlson? That just
makes no sense. Of course, none of it is rational.
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:38 pm
They're insane. A crumbling Empire which was supposed to rule the world forever, 'Under
God' through Full Spectrum Dominance, but which, in fact, is disintegrating under its own
moral, intellectual and spiritual rottenness, is bound to produce hate-crazed zealots looking
for foreign scape-goats. Add the rage of the Clintonbots whose propaganda had told then for
months that the She-Devil would crush the carnival-huckster, and her vicious post-defeat
campaign to drive for war with Russia (what a truly Evil creature she is)and you get this
hysteria. Interestingly, 'hysteria' is the word used to describe Bibi Nutty-yahoo, the USA's
de facto 'capo di tutti capi', in Sochi recently when Putin refused to follow orders.
David Grace , September 15, 2017 at 7:30 pm
I have another theory I'd like to get reviewed. These are corporate wars, and not aimed at the stability of nations. It is claimed that in 1991, at the fall of the Soviet Union, the oligarchs were created by
the massive purchasing of the assets of the collapsing nation. The CIA was said to have put
together a 'bond issue' worth some $480 Billion, and it was used to buy farms, factories,
mineral rights and other formerly common holdings of the USSR. This 'bond issue' was never
repaid to the US taxpayers, and the deeds are in the hands of various oligarchs. Not all of
the oligarchs are tied to the CIA, as there were other wells of purchasers of the country,
but the ties to Trump are actually ties to dirty CIA or other organized crime entities.
The NY Times may be trying to capture certain assets for certain clients, and their
editorial policy reflects this.
David Grace . what have we here, a thinking man? I like your premise, and I haven't even
watched the link you supplied. That being said, I'll sign off and investigate that link.
D.H. Fabian , September 16, 2017 at 2:39 am
Conspiracy theories upon conspiracy theories, ensuring that the public will never be able
to root out the facts. People still argue about the Kennedy assassination 54 years later.
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:39 pm
There is no rational 'argument' about what really happened to JFK.
Zhu Bajie , September 17, 2017 at 7:12 pm
Most conspiracy theories are fantasy fiction. If you have real evidence, based on
verifiable facts, then it's not a theory any more. But most of the conspiracy theories
popular in the USA just serve popular vanity. We never have to accept our mistakes, our
crimes against humanity, etc. It's always THEIR fault.
We Americans over all are like small children, always making excuses.
mark , September 16, 2017 at 5:23 pm
Some of the material on the Black Eagle Trust are suspect. It gives figures for stolen
Japanese war loot, for example, that are simply ludicrous. Figures of so many thousand tons
of gold, for example, when the references should probably be to OUNCES of gold.
One sniper in Ukraine overthrew the democratic government. Previously one sniper in Dallas
overthrew another democratic government. Are there any other examples?
Is our infatuation with democracy just a propaganda thing – to fool citizens into
supposing they have value beyond their labour?
AshenLight , September 15, 2017 at 10:13 pm
> Is our infatuation with democracy just a propaganda thing – to fool citizens
into supposing they have value beyond their labour?
It's about control -- those who know they are slaves will resist and fight, but those who
mistakenly believe they are free will not (and if you give them even just a little comfort,
they'll tenaciously defend their own enslavement). It turns out this "inverted
totalitarianism" thing works a lot better than the old-fashioned kind.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 7:19 am
Indeed. Gurdjieff told the tale of a farmer whose sheep were always wandering off due to
his being unable to afford fences to keep them in. Then he had an idea, and called them all
together. He told some of them they were eagles, and others lions etc. They were now so proud
of their new identities that it never occurred to them anymore to escape from their master's
small domain.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 7:23 am
MLK is another example, as is Robert Kennedy.
Anna , September 16, 2017 at 12:53 pm
The American patriots are coming out: "CIA Agent Whistleblower Risks All To Expose The
Shadow Government" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHbrOg092G
That would be the end of the Lobby, mega oilmen and the FedReserve criminals
mark , September 16, 2017 at 5:30 pm
Yes, snipers on rooftops in Deraa, southern Syria, in 2011. These mysterious figures fired
into crowds, deliberately targeting women and young children to inflame the crowd. At the
same time the same snipers killed 7 police officers. Unarmed police had been sent in to deal
with unrest without bloodshed. These police officers were armed only with batons.
This is a standard page from the CIA playbook. The mysterious snipers in Maidan Square in
2014 are believed to have been Yugoslavian mercenaries hired by the CIA
We all have some kind of a bias but fortunately most of us here know the difference
between bias and propaganda. Bias based on facts and our own values is often constructive but
the N.Y. Times(like most msm) has descended into disseminating insidious propaganda.
Unfortunately the search for truth requires a bit more research and time than most people are
willing to invest. Thankfully, Robert Parry continues his quest but the dragons are not easy
to slay. My own quest for truth once led to a philosophical essay. The cartoon at the
bottom(SH Chambers) sums it up. https://crivellistreetchronicle.blogspot.com/2016/07/truth-elusive-concept.html
Mike, thanks so much, I'll look forward to reading it(so far, I don't see it
Moderation?)
Virginia , September 16, 2017 at 2:20 pm
If we have a bias towards honesty, that helps. It keeps one's mind more open and provides
a willingness to entertain various points of view. It's not naivete, however, but thoughtful
consideration coupled with awareness and that protects one from being easily manipulated. But
then, oppositely, there's a human tendency to want to be popular which inclines one towards
groupthink. But why that so entrenches itself, making people impervious to truth, is a
conundrum -- Maybe if the "why" can be answered, the "how" will become apparent -- how to reach
individuals with the truth as so oft told, though hard on the ears, at CN.
Jacob Leyva , September 15, 2017 at 10:12 pm
So what do you think of the Russia-Facebook dealings? When will we get an article on
that?
The Russian /Iranian vs the Ashkenazi has been going on for many, many years ..The USA is
to a large extent controlled by the Ashkenazi / Zionist agenda which literally owns most of
the MSM outlets .Agendas must be announced through propaganda to sway the sleeping public
toward conformity .The only baffling question that remains is why do Americans allow Zionist
to control such a large part of their great republic ?
Art , September 16, 2017 at 1:43 am
Robert, you come from intelligence. Why don't you look at Russia-gate from all possible
angles?
I suggest the following. Putin is an American spy. Russia-gate is created to make him a
winner, a hero.
And the specious confrontation is a good cover for Putin.
This is in a nutshell.
I can obviously say mu-uch more.
D.H. Fabian , September 16, 2017 at 2:33 am
Throughout 2017, we've seen a surge of efforts by both parties -- via the media that serve
them -- to build support for a final nuclear war. The focus jumps from rattling war sabers at
China (via Korea, at the moment) to rattling them at Russia, two nuclear-armed world powers.
This has been working to bring Russia and China together, resolving their years of conflict
in view of a potential world threat -- the US. Whatever their delusions, and regardless of
their ideology, our political leaders are setting the stage for the deaths of millions of us,
and the utter destruction of the US.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 6:59 am
Our political leaders have betrayed us.
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:42 pm
Thermo-nuclear war would cause human extinction, not just billions of casualties.
Jim Glover , September 16, 2017 at 3:15 am
It is the same now with North Korea and China. So what would happen if those nations were
destabilized by Sanctions or worse Russia, China Iran and more would support Kim. How to make
peace?
Dennis Rodman has the guts to suggest call and talk with Kim or "Try it you might like it
better than total mutual destruction". Think Love and Peace it can't hurt like all the war,
hate and fear the media keeps pushing for advertising profits. War and Fear is the biggest
racket on the planet. What can I do? Fighting a losing battle but it is fun tryin' to
win.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 6:57 am
We may be losing now, but who knows? It ain't over till it's over. Hang in there.
Great article- again . I used to live in the US, I used to live in Alaska, I used to live
in Crimea, Ukraine but now I live in Crimea, Russia and Smolensk, Ru. I watched this all go
down but it took awhile to see the entire picture. I seldom get any more emails from the
states – even my brother doesn't get it. They think I'm now a " commie" , I guess. I
see it as the last big gasp of hot, dangerous air from an Empire -- Exposed. Unfortunately,
its not over yet and maybe we/you will have more bad times ahead. Crimea this summer is doing
well with much work going on – from the badly needed new infrastructure to the new
bridge, the people are much better off than in Ukraine. They made the right choice in
returning to Mother Russia even though it was a no-brainer for them. The world is lucky to
have free writers like, Parry, Roberts, Vltchek, Pepe', the Saker and the intelligent
commenters are as important as the writers in spreading the Pravda. Spacibo Mr. Parry
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 6:54 am
Thanks for sharing with us GMC. And good luck to you.
ranney , September 16, 2017 at 4:22 am
YES -- -- -- -- -- Yes to all that you wrote Robert -- Thank you again for writing clearly and saying
what obviously needs to be said, but no one else will. We've been down this road before -i.e.
the media pulling us into wars of Empire – first the Spanish- American one, then a
bunch of others working up to Viet Nam, and then Iraq. Each one gets worse and now we're
reaching for a nuclear one. Keep writing; your voice gives some of us hope that just maybe
others will join in and stop the media from their constant "messages of hate" and the urging
of the public to a suicidal conflagration.
Joe Tedesky , September 16, 2017 at 8:55 am
The funny thing about living through the 'fake news' era, is that now everyone thinks that
their news source is the correct news source. Many believe that outside of the individual
everyone else reads or listens too 'fake news'. It's like all of a sudden no one has
credibility, yet everyone may have it, depending on what news source you subscribe to. I mean
there's almost no way of knowing what the truth is, because everyone is claiming that they
are getting their news from reputable news outlets, but some or many aren't, and who are the
reputable news sources, if you don't mind my asking you this just for the record?
Come to think of it, the 'fake news' theme is brilliant considering that now we have no
bench mark for what the truth is, and by not having that bench mark for the truth we all go
our separate ways believing what we believe, because certainly my news source is the only
truthful one, and your news source is beyond questionable of how the news should be
reported.
People read headlines, but hardly do they ever read the article. Many hear news sound
bites, but never do they do the research required, in order to verify the stories accuracy.
Hear say works even more to rain in the clouds of mass deception. Then there are those who
sort of buy whatever it is the established news outlets are selling based on their belief
that it doesn't much matter anyway, because 'the establishment' lies to us all the time as a
rule, so what's the big deal to keep up on the news, because it's all obviously one big lie
isn't it? So not only do we have irresponsible news journalist, we also have a very large
number of a monopolized unqualified news gatherers who must accept what the various news
agencies report, regardless of what the truth may be. It's better the Establishment keep it
this way, because then the Establishment has better control over the 'mob grabbing the
pitchforks and sickles' and crying out justice for somebody's head. It's kind of like job
security for the Establishment, but in their case it's more like a 'keeping your elitist
head' security, if you know what I mean.
To learn how to deal with this 'fake news', I would suggest you start studying the JFK
assassination, or any other ill defined tragic event, and then you might learn how to
decipher the 'fake news' matrix of confusion to learn what you so desire to learn. I chose
this route, because when was the last time the Establishment brokered the truth in regard to
a happening such as the JFK assassination? Upon learning of what a few well written books has
to say, you will then need to rely on your own brain to at least give you enough satisfaction
to allow you to believe that you pretty well got it right, and there go you. In other words,
the truth is out there, hiding in plain sight, and if you are persistent enough you just
might find it. Good luck.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 11:29 am
The truth has never been that easy to find Joe. Actually all the beyond obvious propaganda
on the MSM might wake some people up to do the searching necessary to get closer to what is
really happening in their world. Maybe the liars have finally overplayed their hand? Or are
we the people really that dumb? (I am scared to hear the answer to that one -- )
Joe Tedesky , September 16, 2017 at 12:04 pm
I could be a wise guy, and say to you 'or so you say' in reply to your kind comment, but
then that would make me a troll.
All I'm saying mike is that in this era of 'fake news' we are all running about on
different levels, and never shall the two of us meet. That is unless you and I get our news
from the same source, but what are the odds of all of us getting the same news? It's
impossible, and I'm not quite that sure that that would be what we want either. Still without
an objective, and honest large media to set the correct narrative we end up in this place,
where you might find yourself doing a spread sheet study to come to some conclusion of what
is true, and what isn't.
Case in point, read about Russia-Gate here on consortiumnews, and then go listen to Rachel
Maddow report on the same thing. Two different sets of stories. Just try and reconcile what
you read on sites like this one concerning Ukraine, then go watch MSNBC or CNN. Never a
match. So you mike read consortiumnews, and your in laws read the NYT and watch CNN, and
there you go, a controversy arises between you and the in laws and with that life goes on,
but where is the correct news to be found to settle the score?
Once upon a time the established news agencies such as CNN, and the NYT, were the hallmark
of the news, and sites such as this one were the ones on the edge, now I'm convinced this
conviction has reversed itself.
Thanks mike for the reply. Joe
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 9:07 am
Wouldn't it be hilarious mike, if the dumbed down people attacked the Bastille under false
pretense? Especially if the lie had been concocted by the blinded by their own hubris sitting
powers to be. Talk about poetic justice, and well placed irony. Priceless --
Virginia , September 16, 2017 at 2:38 pm
Joe, Apparently people take the easy way out. And that's just it -- "the way out."
Extinction -- Maybe they haven't learned there's something worth learning about and living for.
I'm gonna concentrate on that. Open eyes that they might see
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 8:08 am
You are right Virginia, it is probably 'a way out', and God bless them for it. My late
Mother was like that, but I'll tell you why. When my Mother was growing up in a family of
eleven children, her father would rent out their street level basement to the voting polls. A
block away my uncle who was quite older than my Mother owned a corner saloon. Now on Election
Day my Mother said how the men in suits would pull up in their big expensive cars, and they
would descend upon my uncles corner bar. Soon after one by one drunks would come out of the
tavern wearing Republican buttons then they would go into grandpap's basement voting booth,
and vote. Not long after my Mom said, the same drunks would come pouring out of my uncles
tavern and this time they were wearing Democratic buttons, and they would go vote once or as
many times as it would take to thank the big guys in the suits for the free drinks. My Mom
said this went on all day. She said a lot dead people voted whether they knew it or not, and
that's the truth. She would follow up by saying, 'yeah a lot of politicians won on the drunk
vote'.
So Virginia some can't take the decept and lying, and with that they give up. I myself
don't feel this way, but then there are the times I can't help but think of how my dear sweet
Mother probably did have it right for the sake of living your life in the most upright and
honest way. Sadly, there is no virtue in politics, or so it seems.
Oh yeah, that uncle who owned the corner saloon, he did go into politics holding nominee
appointed positions, until he got wise and got a honest job, as he would jokingly say.
For the record my Mother did vote, but she was the lady standing in line who looked
reluctant and pissed off to be there, but never the less my Mum was a voter. Oh, the
candidate my Mother loved the most was JFK. John F Kennedy's was the only presidential
picture my Mother ever hung in our humble home.
My message here, was only meant to give some cover, and an explanation for those who shy
away from politics, and not an excuse to stay uninvolved. For even my non political Mum did
at least in the end break down, and do the right thing. We should all at least try, and keep
up on the events of our time, and vote with the best intentions we can muster up.
Okay, I'm sorry for the length of my reply, but you are always worth taking time for me to
give a reasonable answer to. I also hope I'm entertaining with these stories I seem to tell
from time to time. Take care Virginia. Joe
Tannenhouser , September 17, 2017 at 7:28 pm
Humans are approximately 90% water, give or take depending on evaporation (Age). Water
always takes the path of least resistance. Oh I wish and hope for the day when most realize
they are much more than 'just' water:)
Mulga Mumblebrain , September 16, 2017 at 5:47 pm
The fakestream media lies incessantly, and has for generations. Chomsky and Herman's
'Manufacturing Consent' outlines the propaganda role of the 'mass media', and is twenty-five
years old, in which period things have gotten MUCH worse (just look at the fate of the UK
'Guardian' for an example). Yet the fakestream presstitutes STILL have the unmitigated gall
to call others 'fake' and demand that we believe their unbelievable narratives. That's real
chutzpah.
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 8:26 am
You know Mulga you are correct, many generations have listened to many, many, lies upon
their way to the voting booths. It goes without saying, how the aristocrats when they find it
necessary, as they often do find it necessary, they lie to their flock for a whole host of
reasons. Why we could pick anytime in history, and find out where lies have paved the way to
a leaders greater conquest, or a leaders said greater conquest if not met with defeat, but
never the less the public was used to propel some leaders wishes onward and upward whether
for the good or the bad.
But here we are Mulga, you and the rest of us here, straddling on the fence over what
might be right to what possibly could be wrong. Without a responsible press you and us Mulga
need to learn from each other. Like when comment posters leave links, that's always been
something good for me to follow through on.
We live in a unique time, but a time not that unique, as much as it is our time. Our
great, great, grandparents were straddling the same fence, and I'm guessing they too relied
on each other to navigate there way through the twisting maze of politics, and basically what
they all wanted, was a little peace on earth. So Mulga I also guess that you and we the
people are just carrying on a tradition that us common folk have been assigned too
continue.
Like reading your comments Mulga, good to see you here. Joe
Zhu Bajie , September 17, 2017 at 7:44 pm
Fake news has always been common. Critical thinking has never been popular because Occam's
Razor might slice your favorite story to shreds. Personally, I give full credence to few
things in life, but suspect many more, to some degree. I trust my own experiences more than
what I read in the media and try to reject conventional wisdom as much as possible.
Herman , September 16, 2017 at 9:39 am
Observing Putin's behavior, you have to be impressed with his continue willingness to
extend the olive branch and to seek a reasonable settlement of differences. His language
always leaves open the possibility of détente with the understanding that Russia is
not going to lay down to be run over. On the contrary, the language of Obama and Trump, and
their representatives is consistently take it or leave and engaging in school yard insults of
Russia, Putin, Lavrov and others. We have consistently played the bully in the school yard
encouraging others to join in the bullying. We talk about the corrosive discourse at home,
but observe the discourse in foreign affairs. Trump and his associates are guilty, but slick
talking Obama and his subordinates was often worse. .As has so often been said, we have only
two arrows in our foreign affairs quiver, war and sanctions. We lack the imagination and will
to actually engage in civil discussions with those on our enemies' list.
Parry is of course correct in his opinion of the New York Times but it doesn't stop there,
only that the New York Times undeservedly is the "newspaper of record." His citing of Orwell
is on the mark. Just turn your TV on for the news and see for yourself.
Dave P. , September 16, 2017 at 8:27 pm
Very well said, Herman. Very true.
Patricia Victour , September 16, 2017 at 9:54 am
I don't subscribe to the NYT for this reason, and it is galling to me that our local rag,
"The Santa Fe New Mexican," while featuring excellent local coverage for the most part, gets
all it's "national" news from the likes of the NYT, WaPo, and AP. These stories, much of it
"fake news" in my opinion, are offered as gospel by the "New Mexican", with no journalistic
effort to print opposing views. People I know seem so proud of themselves that they subscribe
to "The Times," and I don't even dare try to point out to them that they are being duped and
propagandized into believing the most outrageous (and dangerous) crap.
To add another dimension, these sources are so jealous of their position as the ultimate
word on what Americans are to believe, and also so worried about their waning influence, that
now RT and Sputnik, both Russia-sponsored news outlets, may be forced to register as "foreign
agents" in the U.S. I am not familiar with Sputnik, but I have been watching RT on TV for
several years and find it to be an excellent source of national and foreign news. Stories I
see first on RT are usually confirmed soon after by other reliable sources, such as this
excellent site – Consortiumnews. At no point did I feel I was being coerced by Russia
during the 2016 election – I needed no confirmation that both Trump and Clinton were
probably the worst candidates ever to run for President.
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 9:31 am
You know what I find interesting is how a reporter such as Robert Parry will pinpoint his
details to a critique of say the NYT, but when or if a NYTer is to write a likewise article
of the Alternative Internet Press the NYTer will just simply critique their internet rival as
a 'conspiracy theorist' or as now as in 2017 they refer to them as 'fake news artist'. I mean
no rebuttal back referencing certain details such as what Parry mentioned, but just
rhetorical words written over tabloid written headlines finalized under the heading of 'fake
news'. This must be being taught in journalism school these days, because it's popular in the
MSM.
Just like you have never heard or read from the MSM a detailed answered rebuttal to the
pointed questions of say the '911 Truthers' or a 'JFK Assassination Researcher' a valid bona
fide answer. No, but you do hear the masters and mistresses of the corporate media world call
writers such as Parry, Roberts, and St Clair, 'fake newscasters', 'Putin Puppets', and or a
whole host of other nasty names, as they feel fit to write, but never a honest too goodness
rebuttal. Then they talk about Trump not sounding or acting presidential hmm the nerve of
these wordsmiths.
BTW, I don't care much for Trump, and I even care less for our MSM. Just wanted to get
that straight.
Nice comment Patricia. Joe
hatedbyu , September 16, 2017 at 10:57 am
let's not forget about the nytimes grossly negligent reporting on syria and libya. judith
miller? russian doping scandal. lying about the holdomor . man i could do this all day ..
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 10:12 am
You mean the on air hours of punditry explaining away their professions mistakes, or the
honest rebuttal? It's at those particular times and occurrences of ignored self reflection
our honorable (not) MSM falls back on Orwell's 1984. Like it never happened. The dog didn't
eat no home work, because there never was a dog, nor was there any homework .stupid us. Life
goes on uninterrupted and non commercial time can be filled with an update on Bill Cosby's
past alleged sexual predator attacks, and this is our professional news casting doing its
best to entertain us, not inform us god forbid, but entertain us the ignorant masses of their
workless society.
One day hatedbyu the ignorant masses may just show the corporate infotainment duchess and
dudes that they 'the people' ain't so ignorant, and things must change. Well at least that's
the dream, but it's still a work in progress, and then there's the historical seesaw.
I think it's the power of empire to expand, just like a balloon, until it reaches it's
bursting point. But just what that bursting point is, is without a doubt the most disputable
of arguments to be made. I am coming to the belief we are, as always, continually getting to
that point, and we may of course be very close to igniting that spark in the not so far off
future. I would prefer the spark to be completely financial, and dealt with accordingly, but
I'm a dreamer purest and a conspiracy theorist, so that means when the crap starts going
down, I'll be the old man on the hill lighting up a big fat doobie cue soundtrack 'Fool On
the Hill'.
Sorry just had to get carried away, but it's Sunday morning hatedbyu and I'm home alone
and nobody's trying to break in .. Good comment hatedbyu. Joe
A Compilation Not seen in Corporate Media: See Link Below:
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
US Wars and Hostile Actions: A List
By David Swanson
Stephen J. Thank you for introducing me to David Swanson. Great link.
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 11:29 am
Im with you on that Bob, Stephen J providing the Swanson link should be a must read, to
keep things fair and balanced. I also do wonder if Swanson's message isn't getting out there,
and we all don't already know it? I'm a glass half full kind of guy, but what do we really
know about each other, other than what the corporate media instills on us? I wish cable news
would air a program made up of Swanson, Pilger, and Parry, for that at least could put some
well needed balance finality back, if it ever was there in the first place, back into the
public narrative .but there go I.
Good to see you Bob. Joe
Hank , September 16, 2017 at 11:32 am
The deep state sticks with what works: controlling the media keeps the masses ignorant and
malleable. "Remember the Maine"
Germans are bayoneting Belgium babies and "remember the Lusitania" , some evidence shows
higher ups knew the Japanese fleet was 400 miles from Hawaii, recall "Tonkin Gulf" episode,
Iran Contra , invasion of Granada, Panama, and of course 911 and war on terror, patriot act,
weapons of mass destruction, and Russia hacking the election. The masses "believe" these to
be true and react and respond accordingly.
"
"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that
matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, IT IS THE LEADERS of the country who
determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is
a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice
or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy.
All you have to do is TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING ATTACKED, and denounce the peacemakers for
lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY."
–Goering at the Nuremberg Trials
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 12:53 pm
Thanks Hank. Same ole same ole, eh? When will we ever learn?
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 11:32 am
"Trump might well go down in history of the President who screwed-up a historical
opportunity to really change our entire planet for the better and who, instead, by his abject
lack of courage and honor, his total lack of political and diplomatic education and by his
groveling subservience to the "swamp" he had promised to drain ended up being as pathetically
clueless as Obama was." (The Saker)
My sentiments exactly.
Voytenko , September 16, 2017 at 11:49 am
What a glaring lie this article is, its' author being either "useful idiot" played by
Kremlin, or maybe not so much of an idiot. What are you talking about here in comments, those
who applaud this article, this bunch of lies? You live in Ukraine, you know anything about
that so-called "putch"? How dare you to insult the whole nation – Ukrainian nation?
Shame on you, people. You don't know (author of the article including) anything about Russia,
Ukraine and that bloody Putin, but you have problems with the US and its' politics. US are
your business, Ukraine definitely not. Find some other examples of NYT and USA malfeasance,
some you know something about. Stop insulting other nations.
anon , September 17, 2017 at 9:53 am
You are not from Ukraine, and you care not for Ukraine, or you would seek unity not
dominance of East over West Ukraine. Tell us about your life in Ukraine, and show us the
evidence of "that bloody Putin."
Abe , September 16, 2017 at 1:31 pm
Yellow journalism now employs "open source and social media investigation" scams foisted
by Eliot Higgins and the Bellingcat disinformation site.
Bellingcat is allied with the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two principal
mainstream media organs for "regime change" propaganda, via the First Draft Coalition
"partner network".
In a triumph of Orwellian Newspeak, this Google-sponsored "post-Truth" Propaganda 3.0
coalition declares that member organizations will "work together to tackle common issues,
including ways to streamline the verification process".
The New York Times routinely hacks up Bellingcat "reports" and pretends they're
"verification"
Malachy Browne, "Senior Story Producer" at the New York Times, cited Bellingcat to
embellish the media "story" about the Khan Shaykhun chemical incident in Idlib Syria.
Before joining the Times, Browne was an editor at "social news and marketing agency"
Storyful and at Reported. ly, the "social reporting" arm of Pierre Omidyar's First Look
Media.
Browne generously "supplemented" his "reporting" on the Khan Shaykun incident with "videos
gathered by the journalist Eliot Higgins and the social media news agency Storyful".
Browne encouraged Times readers to participate in the Bellingcat-style "verification"
charade: "Find a computer, get on Google Earth and match what you see in the video to the
streets and buildings"
Browne of Storyful and Higgins of Bellingcat are founding members of the Google-funded
"First Draft" coalition.
Browne demonstrates how the NYT and other "First Draft" coalition media outlets use video
to "strengthen" their "storytelling".
In 2016, the NYT video department hired Browne and Andrew Glazer. a senior producer on the
team that launched VICE News, to help "enhance" the "reporting" at the Times.
Browne represents the Times' effort to package its dubious "reporting" using the Storyful
marketing strategy of "building trust, loyalty, and revenue with insight and emotionally
driven content" wedded with Bellingcat style "digital forensics" scams.
In other words, we should expect the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, UK Guardian,
and all the other "First Draft" coalition media "partners" to barrage us more Bellingcat /
Atlantic Council-style Facebook and YouTube video mashups, crazy fun with Google Earth, and
Twitter campaigns.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 1:47 pm
Thanks Abe. Sounds like these guys all read 1984, and decided it was just the thing for
2017 Amerika.
Obviously Browne is proud of the "investigation" even though merely shared a "story" fed
to him by Higgins' Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council .
Abe , September 16, 2017 at 1:58 pm
Higgins and Bellingcat receives direct funding from the Open Society Foundations (OSF)
founded by business magnate George Soros, and from Google's Digital News Initiatives
(DNI).
Google's 2017 DNI Fund Annual Report describes Higgins as "a world–leading expert in
news verification".
In their zeal to propagate the story of Higgins as a courageous former "unemployed man"
now busy independently "Codifying social conflict data", Google neglects to mention Higgins'
role as a "research fellow" for the NATO-funded Atlantic Council "regime change" think
tank.
Despite their claims of "independent journalism", Eliot Higgins and the team of
disinformation operatives at Bellingcat depend on the Atlantic Council to promote their
"online investigations".
The Atlantic Council donors list includes:
– US government and military entities: US State Department, US Air Force, US Army,
US Marines.
– The NATO military alliance
– Large corporations and major military contractors: Chevron, Google, Lockheed
Martin, Raytheon, BP, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Northrup Grumman, SAIC, ConocoPhillips,
and Dow Chemical
– Foreign governments: United Arab Emirates (UAE; which gives the think tank at
least $1 million), Kingdom of Bahrain, City of London, Ministry of Defense of Finland,
Embassy of Latvia, Estonian Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Defense of Georgia
– Other think tanks and think tankers: Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS), Nicolas Veron of Bruegel (formerly at PIIE), Anne-Marie Slaughter (head of
New America Foundation), Michele Flournoy (head of Center for a New American Security),
Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institution.
Higgins is a Research Associate of the Department of War Studies at King's College, and
was principal co-author of the Atlantic Council "reports" on Ukraine and Syria.
Damon Wilson, Executive Vice President of Programs and Strategy at the Atlantic Council, a
co-author with Higgins of the report, effusively praised Higgins' effort to bolster
anti-Russian propaganda:
Wilson stated, "We make this case using only open source, all unclassified material. And
none of it provided by government sources. And it's thanks to works, the work that's been
pioneered by human rights defenders and our partner Eliot Higgins, uh, we've been able to use
social media forensics and geolocation to back this up." (see Atlantic Council video
presentation minutes 35:10-36:30)
However, the Atlantic Council claim that "none" of Higgins' material was provided by
government sources is an obvious lie.
Higgins' primary "pieces of evidence" are a video depicting a Buk missile launcher and a
set of geolocation coordinates that were supplied by the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine)
and the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior via the Facebook page of senior-level Ukrainian
government official Arsen Avakov, the Minister of Internal Affairs.
Higgins and the Atlantic Council are working in support of the Pentagon and Western
intelligence's "hybrid war" against Russia.
The laudatory bio of Higgins on the Kings College website specifically acknowledges his
service to the Atlantic Council:
"an award winning investigative journalist and publishes the work of an international
alliance of fellow investigators using freely available online information. He has helped
inaugurate open-source and social media investigations by trawling through vast amounts of
data uploaded constantly on to the web and social media sites. His inquiries have revealed
extraordinary findings, including linking the Buk used to down flight MH17 to Russia,
uncovering details about the August 21st 2013 Sarin attacks in Damascus, and evidencing the
involvement of the Russian military in the Ukrainian conflict. Recently he has worked with
the Atlantic Council on the report "Hiding in Plain Sight", which used open source
information to detail Russia's military involvement in the crisis in Ukraine."
While it honors Higgins' enthusiastic "trawling", King's College curiously neglects to
mention that Higgins' "findings" on the Syian sarin attacks were thoroughly debunked.
King's College also curiously neglects to mention the fact that Higgins, now listed as a
Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's "Future Europe Initiative", was principal co-author
of the April 2016 Atlantic Council "report" on Syria.
The report's other key author was John E. Herbst, United States Ambassador to Ukraine from
September 2003 to May 2006 (the period that became known as the Orange Revolution) and
Director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.
Other report authors include Frederic C. Hof, who served as Special Adviser on Syrian
political transition to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012. Hof was previously the
Special Coordinator for Regional Affairs in the US Department of State's Office of the
Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, where he advised Special Envoy George Mitchel. Hof had
been a Resident Senior Fellow in the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle
East since November 2012, and assumed the position as Director in May 2016.
There is no daylight between the "online investigations" of Higgins and Bellingcat and the
"regime change" efforts of the NATO-backed Atlantic Council.
Thanks to the Atlantic Council, Soros, and Google, it's a pretty well-funded gig for fake
"citizen investigative journalist" Higgins.
Dave P. , September 17, 2017 at 12:26 am
Abe – Thanks for all the invaluable information you have been providing.
jaycee , September 16, 2017 at 1:52 pm
The meme of an aggressive assertive Russia, based on what happened in Crimea, is a
deliberate lie expressed with the utmost contempt towards principled diplomacy. The average
consumer of mainstream news is also being shamelessly and contemptuously manipulated.
First, the people of Crimea did not want to be part of Ukraine after the USSR dissolved,
and had previously expressed their opinion through referenda. The events of 2014 were part of
an obvious pattern of previously expressed opinion.
Second, around the time of the so-called Orange Revolution, NATO analysts forecast what
would probably happen should Ukraine embrace European "security architecture" (i.e. NATO),
and concluded that Russia would take steps to protect their naval facilities in Crimea. Yet,
in 2014, NATO officials would disingenuously express their utmost shock and surprise at the
event.
Third, Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power in Ukraine in 2005 through the NED-financed
Orange Revolution, consistently described his intention to join Ukraine with European
institutions, including its "security architecture" (NATO), although acknowledging that the
Ukrainian citizenry would have to be manipulated into accepting such a controversial and
adversarial position. He would downplay presumed Russian reaction to potential removal from
Crimea despite the obviousness and predictability of a serious crisis (see Sept 23, 2008
"Conversation with Viktor Yushchenko" Council On Foreign Relations). Yushchenko polled at
5.45% when he lost the Presidency in 2010, running on a platform of European integration.
Fourth, Russian officials at the highest level told their American counterparts in 2009
that any attempt to integrate Ukraine into NATO, and a corresponding threat to the Crimean
naval facilities, would result in moves similar to what would later happen in 2014. Yet the
United States, after instigating and legitimizing the Ukraine coup, would react to the
Crimean referendum as an aggressive act which represented an unexpected security crisis
requiring a reluctant but firm response of militarizing the entire region, and portraying the
Russian state to the public as a dangerous and aggressive rogue power.
The deliberate omission of relevant contextual background by politicians, military
officials, and the mainstream media demonstrates that none of these institutions can be
trusted, and it is they who represent the greatest threat to international security. Putin
has been relentlessly demonized, but it can be argued that his swift and essentially
bloodless moves in Crimea in 2014 avoided what could have been a major international crisis
on the level of the Berlin blockade in 1961. It appears, in hindsight, that such a crisis is
exactly what the NATO alliance desired all along.
Sam F , September 17, 2017 at 9:58 am
Well said.
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 12:02 pm
Nicely put jaycee. What you wrote took me back to a time of some eight months before
Maiden Square, when my niece decided to live in Kiev. A bit of a ways away from Pittsburgh,
so I started researching Ukraine. I also discovered RT & Moonofalabama, and sites like
that.
What you wrote jaycee, in my humble opinion should be said in our MSM news. If for no
other reason but to give an alternative fair and balance to say the likes of Rachel Maddow,
or Joy Ann Reed. The way the MSM picks and chooses, and skims across important events in
Ukraine, like Odessa, are criminal if ever the Press is to be judged for crimes of war. To
the crys of a destroyed empire's vanquished population would then your small essay be heard
jaycee, and yet that's the world we live in, but at least you said it.
Thanks jaycee (that's the first time I wrote your name and the j didn't go capital what
does that mean? Who cares.)
Joe
rosemerry , September 16, 2017 at 2:04 pm
Of course the NYT liars would not bother to watch Oliver Stone's interviews with Pres.
Putin, but during them he explained at length about his cooperation during the years after
Ukraine elected a pro-Western president, managing to carry out mutual agreements and
policies, but after the new pro- Russian president was elected, the USA did not accept him
and overthrew him, which preceded the antics of Nuland et al in 2014 and the rest which
followed.
MaDarby , September 16, 2017 at 2:05 pm
It appears to me that the elites decided long ago that the best solution to overpopulation
is just to let climate change take care of three or four billion people while the Saud family
and the Cargill family live on in their sheltered paradises with every convenience AI can
provide.
It is clear these mega-rich families DO NOT CARE about society, about mass human extension
or even about nature itself. They are the pinnacle of human evolution. Psycho-pathological
loss of empathy might have been a bad evolutionary experiment.
This is derangement on a human specie scale, no leader no one in power has been willing to
do anything but exploit every opportunity to make money and increase global domination, the
great powers knew this day was coming when they made their decisions to hide it 50 years ago.
The consequences are acceptable to the decision makers.
A mass extension of organic life is taking place before our eyes, nothing can stop it,
THEY DO NOT CARE.
They sure as hell don't care if millions don't believe the Russia crap they just move
ahead as the Imperial power, might makes right. In the end it is a religious project, the
biblical slaughter of the innocents to appease a vengeful god and rid the world of evil.
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 12:19 pm
What you bring up MaDarby takes me towards the direction of wondering what all those other
Departments, other than State & Defense, of the Presidential Cabinet are up too? If our
news were done and somehow properly organized, in such away as to educate us peons, then
whatever the time allowed would be to broadcast and print out what each Federal Agency is up
to. Now I know a citizen can seek out this information, but why can't there be a suitable
mass media representation to reach us clunkheads like me, not you?
What should be exposed is the corporate ownership of the very agencies that were put in
place to protect the 'Commons' has been corrupted to the point of no return. This dilemma
will take a huge public referendum short of a mob revolution to change this atmosphere of
complacency. The public will get blamed, but the real blame should be put on the massive
leadership programs which were bolted down on to their citizens masses knowledge of said
events, and there in lies the total crime of deception.
MaDarby your concern for nature is where a smart person should put their number one
priority concern, no arguing there, but just a lifting word of approval of how you put it.
Joe
Donald Patterson , September 16, 2017 at 2:45 pm
Consortium has been a clear voice on the lunacy of the Russia-Gate scandal. But to paint
Yanukovych former President of the Ukraine as an injured party considering his history in
government with what appears to be large scale corruption is part of the story as well. A
treason trial started in May. More info needed on what looks like a complicated story. This
would be a good piece of investigative journalism as well.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 9:03 pm
Can you imagine what a huge can of worms would be revealed if there was a thorough
investigation on every congressperson and public official in Washington DC? It would make
Yanukovych look like a saint. And in addition, let's investigate the 10,000 richest people in
the US, including all their offshore fortunes gained by illegal means. Wouldn't it make sense
to do that? Isn't there enough evidence of probable criminal activity to open these
investigations? Where is our ethical sense when it comes to our own dirty laundry? I guess
it's easier to speculate about other's crimes than look into our own, eh?
Joe Tedesky , September 17, 2017 at 12:40 pm
The focus I get isn't so much focused on Yanukovych, even Putin wasn't all that crazy
about his style of leadership, but my focus on a viable democratically created government
doesn't necessarily start with an armed public coup. Yes, leading up to the violence,
peaceful protesters took to the streets, but as we both know this is always the case until
the baton twirling thugs come to finally ramp up the protest to a marathon of violent clashes
and whatever else gets heads busted, until we have a full fledged revolution on our hands
pass out the cookies. I mean by by-passing the voting polls, even to somehow ad hoc a
temporary government in some manner of government overthrow were done peacefully, well then
maybe I could get on board with this new Ukrainian government, but even the NYT finds it
impossible to cover up everything.
And what about the people of Donbass? Shouldn't they have a say in this new government
realignment? Ukraine has, and has always had a East meets West kind of problem. That area has
been ruled over for centuries by each other, and one another, to a point of who's who and
what's what is hard to figure out. Donbass, should in my regard be separate from the Now Kiev
government. (Be kind with your critique of me for I am just an average American telling you
what I see from here)
It's like everything else, where we should let the people of the region sit down with each
other and work it out, we instead blame it on Putin, or whoever else Putin appears to be, and
there you have it MIC spending up the ying-yang, for the lack of a better portrayal, but
still a portrayal of what ills our modern geopolitical society.
mike k , September 16, 2017 at 2:49 pm
"The best thing which could happen to this country and its people would be the collapse of
this Empire. The support, even tacit and passive, of this Empire by people like yourself only
delays this outcome and allows this abomination to to bring even more misery and pain upon
millions of innocent people, including millions of your fellow Americans. This Empire now
also threatens my country, Russia, with war and possibly nuclear war and that, in turn, means
that this Empire threatens the survival of the human species. Whether the US Empire is the
most evil one in history is debatable, but the fact that it is by far the most dangerous one
is not. Is that not a good enough reason for you to say "enough is enough"? What would it
take for you to switch sides and join the rest of mankind in what is a struggle for the
survival of our species? Or will it take a nuclear winter to open your eyes to the true
nature of the Empire you apparently are still supporting against all evidence?" (the
Saker)
Please go to the entire article on today's Saker Blog.
Voytenko , September 16, 2017 at 3:48 pm
Sick edition consortiumnews, sick readers. Elites, Deep State, Evil Empire USA Dove Putin
with olive branch Guys, why don't you watch, say for a week, Russian TV, if you have somebody
around who can translate from Russian. If you want to hear real nazi racist alt-whatever
crap, Russian TV is the place. But you'll enjoy it, most probably. Thankfully, you guys, are
obviously, minority, with all your pseudo intellectual delusions, discussions and ideas.
"Useful idiots" – that's what Lenin said about the likes of you.
Abe , September 16, 2017 at 7:00 pm
There is no reason to assume that the trollish rants of "Voytenko" are from some outraged
flag-waving "patriot" in Kiev. There are plenty of other "useful idiots" ready, willing and
able to make mischief.
For example, about a million Jews emigrated to Israel ("made Aliyah") from the post-Soviet
states during the 1990s. Some 266,300 were Ukrainian Jews. A large number of Ukrainian Jews
also emigrated to the United States during this period. For example, out of an estimated 400
thousand Russian-speaking Jews in Metro New York, the largest number (thirty-six percent)
hail from Ukraine. Needless to say, many among them are not so well disposed toward the
nations of Russia or Ukraine, and quite capable of all manner of mischief.
A particularly "useful idiot" making mischief the days is Sergey Brin of Google. Brin's
parents were graduates of Moscow State University who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979
when their son was five years old.
Google, the company that runs the most visited website in the world, the company that owns
YouTube, is very snugly in bed with the US military-industrial-surveillance complex.
In fact, Google was seed funded by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA). The company now enjoys lavish "partnerships" with military
contractors like SAIC, Northrop Grumman and Blackbird.
Google's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and
make it universally accessible and useful".
In a 2004 letter prior to their initial public offering, Google founders Larry Page and
Sergey Brin explained their "Don't be evil" culture required objectivity and an absence of
bias: "We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and
research, not only to the information people pay for you to see."
The corporate giant appears to have replaced the original motto altogether. A carefully
reworded version appears in the Google Code of Conduct: "You can make money without doing
evil".
This new gospel allows Google and its "partners" to make money promoting propaganda and
engaging in surveillance, and somehow manage to not "be evil". That's "post-truth" logic for
you.
Indeed, a very cozy cross-promotion is happening between Google and Bellingcat.
In November 2014, Google Ideas and Google For Media, partnered the George Soros-funded
Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to host an "Investigathon" in New
York City. Google Ideas promoted Higgins' "War and Pieces: Social Media Investigations" song
and dance via their YouTube page.
Higgins constantly insists that Bellingcat "findings" are "reaffirmed" by accessing
imagery in Google Earth.
Google Earth, originally called EarthViewer 3D, was created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded company acquired by Google in 2004. Google Earth uses
satellite images provided by the company Digital Globe, a supplier of the US Department of
Defense (DoD) with deep connections to both the military and intelligence communities.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is both a combat support agency under
the United States Department of Defense, and an intelligence agency of the United States
Intelligence Community. Robert T. Cardillo, director of the NGA, lavishly praised Digital
Globe as "a true mission partner in every sense of the word". Examination of the Board of
Directors of Digital Globe reveals intimate connections to DoD and CIA
Google has quite the history of malicious behavior. In what became known as the "Wi-Spy"
scandal, it was revealed that Google had been collecting hundreds of gigabytes of payload
data, including personal and sensitive information. First names, email addresses, physical
addresses, and a conversation between two married individuals planning an extra-marital
affair were all cited by the FCC. In a 2012 settlement, the Federal Trade Commission
announced that Google will pay $22.5 million for overriding privacy settings in Apple's
Safari browser. Though it was the largest civil penalty the Federal Trade Commission had ever
imposed for violating one of its orders, the penalty as little more than symbolic for a
company that had $2.8 billion in earnings the previous quarter.
Google is a joint venture partner with the CIA In 2009, Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel
invested "under $10 million each" into Recorded Future shortly after the company was founded.
The company developed technology that strips information from web pages, blogs, and Twitter
accounts.
In addition to funding Bellingcat and joint ventures with the CIA, Brin's Google is
heavily invested in Crowdstrike, an American cybersecurity technology firm based in Irvine,
California.
Crowdstrike is the main "source" of the "Russians hacked the DNC" story.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, is a Senior
Fellow at the Atlantic Council "regime change" think tank.
Alperovitz said that Crowdstrike has "high confidence" it was "Russian hackers".
"But we don't have hard evidence," Alperovitch admitted in a June 16, 2016 Washington Post
interview.
Allegations of Russian perfidy are routinely issued by private companies with lucrative US
Department of Defense (DoD) contracts. The companies claiming to protect the nation against
"threats" have the ability to manufacture "threats".
The US and UK possess elite cyber capabilities for both cyberspace espionage and offensive
operations.
Both the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) are intelligence agencies with a long history of supporting military
operations. US military cyber operations are the responsibility of US Cyber Command, whose
commander is also the head of the NSA.
US offensive cyber operations have emphasized political coercion and opinion shaping,
shifting public perception in NATO countries as well as globally in ways favorable to the US,
and to create a sense of unease and distrust among perceived adversaries such as Russia and
China.
The Snowden revelations made it clear that US offensive cyber capabilities can and have
been directed both domestically and internationally. The notion that US and NATO cyber
operations are purely defensive is a myth.
Recent US domestic cyber operations have been used for coercive effect, creating
uncertainty and concern within the American government and population.
The perception that a foreign attacker may have infiltrated US networks, is monitoring
communications, and perhaps considering even more damaging actions, can have a disorienting
effect.
In the world of US "hybrid warfare" against Russia, offensive cyber operations work in
tandem with NATO propaganda efforts, perhaps best exemplified by the "online investigation"
antics of the Atlantic Council's Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcat disinformation site.
I live in Russia and see those shows that you speak of. The Nazi rants are from the
Ukraine folks invited on the show – you want to see Ukraine shows like the ones in RU.
– well, you won't see any Russians invited to talk -- -- NONE --
Gregory Herr , September 17, 2017 at 10:33 am
Your posts are so blatantly contrived it's almost funny. Do you write for sitcoms as
well?
mrtmbrnmn , September 16, 2017 at 4:48 pm
Is this a great country, or wot???
Stupid starts at the very top and there is no bottom to it .
The Washington Post has its own ironically self-describing slogan. Perhaps that of the NYT
these days should be, in the same vein, "The Sleep of Reason begets monsters". And who will
soon then be able to whistle in the darkness full of these things?
mike k , September 17, 2017 at 8:03 am
When looking for monsters, the WaPo should start by looking at themselves.
The chaos in Ukraine was engineered by Victoria Nuland at Hillary's request. Good that she
is not president. The Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same people, same DNA, same
religion Orthodoxy., Slavic, languages very close to each other, Cyrillic alphabet and a long
common history .
Russian_angel , September 17, 2017 at 9:43 pm
Thank you for the truth about Russia, it hurts the Russians to read about themselves in
the American newspapers a lie.
Florin , September 18, 2017 at 2:15 am
Gershman, Nuland, Pyland, Feltman . essentially ths four biggest US (quasi) diplomats,
like Volodymyr Groysman, Petro Poroshenko and perhaps 'our guy' Yats – are Jewish.
Add to this the role of Israeli 'ex' military, some hundreds, which means Mossad, and of
Jewish oligarchs in Ukraine – and consider that Jews are less than 1% of the
population.
The point is if we were free to speak plainly, the Ukraine coup looks to be one in which
American and Ukrainian Jews acted in concert to benefit Jewish power. There is more to be said on this, but this glimpse will suffice because, of course, one is
not free to speak plainly even where plain speaking is, on the face of it, encouraged.
Jamie , September 18, 2017 at 12:03 pm
Where was fake Antifa when Obama armed Nazi's in the Ukraine?
By ignoring the fascism of one political party, Antifa is actually pro-fascist. This fits
in well with their Hitler-like disdain for freedom of press, speech and assembly. And their
absolute love of violence, we also saw in the 1930s among Nazi groups
2019
2020
+43
66,319
Attorney General William Barr speaks at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention Feb. 26, 2020, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)
Short URL | Email Article | Comment | Contact | Print | A A
FILE PHOTOS. © Reuters / Kevin Lamarque ; Reuters / Christian Hartmann 88 Follow RT on
CNN head Jeff Zucker appears to have offered Donald Trump a "weekly show" on the network in 2016, also giving tips for a presidential debate, arguing Trump could not win the race without his outlet's support, leaked audio reveals.
George Galloway
FILE PHOTO: Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny © REUTERS / Shamil Zhumatov 135 Follow RT on
FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich announces charges against 'six Russsian intelligence officers' at the Department of Justice, October 19, 2020. © Andrew Harnik/Pool via REUTERS 14 Follow RT on
CORTES September 17, 2020 at 12:41 am© Sputnik / Valery Melnikov 90 Follow RT on
'Full & transparent' investigation: NATO & EU leaders demand Russia investigates 'attack' on opposition figure Navalny
FILE PHOTO: Alexei Navalny's campaign shows Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny attending a meeting of an action group to support his nomination as a candidate for Russian presidency in Moscow, Russia, 24 December 2017 © Getty Images / Evgeny Feldman for Alexei Navalny's Campaign /Anadolu Agency 39 Follow RT on
navalny
Verified
1,773 posts
·
1.9m followers
![]({"default":{"load":"defer","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17JxQi.img?h=100&w=100&m=6&q=60&u=t&o=t&l=f"}})
Trump falsely claims coronavirus is "disappearing" and Russia
![]({"default":{"load":"defer","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17IMkn.img?h=100&w=100&m=6&q=60&u=t&o=t&l=f"}})
Coronavirus updates: School district says 100 students, staff positive for COVID-19
![a group of people standing next to a person in a suit and tie: Joseph R. Biden Jr. last week in Wilmington, Del. A new intelligence assessment said Russia continues to interfere in the election on President Trump's behalf, while China prefers Mr. Biden.]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"45","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HDgI.img?h=450&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f"},"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HDgI.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HDgI.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f"}})
© Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times Joseph R. Biden Jr. last week in Wilmington, Del. A
new intelligence assessment said Russia continues to interfere in the election on President
Trump's behalf, while China prefers Mr. Biden.
![a group of people posing for a picture: Trump supporters in Ohio on Thursday, during the president's visit to a factory in Clyde.]({"default":{"load":"default","w":"80","h":"45","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HOTh.img?h=450&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=710&y=584"},"size3column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HOTh.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=710&y=584"},"size2column":{"load":"default","w":"62","h":"35","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB17HOTh.img?h=351&w=624&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=710&y=584"}})
© Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times Trump supporters in Ohio on Thursday, during the
president's visit to a factory in Clyde.
much about it that screams of a policy flak who knows how to
present things as facts when they are anything but, and lead you into the piece already
believing that (a) Britain has been the victim of more than one attack by Russia, (b) that a
country supposedly friendless, without allies and with its economy reeling and staggering from
punishing sanctions still somehow has sufficient power to not only grip Europe, but to squeeze
it until it squeaks, and (c) Britain can do something about it.
passer-by, who helpfully attended them, just happened
to be none other than the senior medical officer in the British Army, and she was in no way
affected although she wore no protection than perhaps rubber gloves. Nick Bailey also wore
gloves, because it was cold. The next version had him entering the Skripal home – where
he was contaminated – via the back door. But the assassins had unhelpfully smeared the
poison on the front doorknob. Shit! So, unable to bring the assassins and the Skripals and Nick
Bailey all together at the same doorknob within the same period of lethality, the story was
changed again. Bailey had actually nipped next door, borrowed the spare key – the
existence of which was completely unknown to anyone prior to the television broadcast –
from a neighbour, and entered by the front door, where he became contaminated. It was touch and
go there for awhile, but he went home 18 days later, none the worse for his brush with one of
the deadliest nerve agents known to man. A nerve agent which, incidentally, was not known to
the elimination of other possibilities to have killed anyone. Dawn Sturgess died later, in
Amesbury, after spraying pure Novichok on her wrists from a fake perfume bottle, we are told.
But Dawn Sturgess was a known drug addict, Novichok as an aerosol spray would have taken effect
within seconds but she was not stricken for hours, and the medium of infection was not
discovered until three days after her death, sitting conspicuously on Charles Rowley's kitchen
counter, although the house had already been searched. Perfectly intact and waiting to be
discovered, although Charles Rowley's brother reported that the bottle had broken in his
brother's hands as Sturgess handed it back to him, which was how he became contaminated.
Another insultingly full-of-bullshit story that would not survive press scrutiny for an hour if
it had been Russia reporting a poisoning by British agents in Russia.
matsb
Jul
9, 2020 at 3:39 pm
2015 File
Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions
Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal
Incident
Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative
Invoice submitted to
Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections
Unfortunately the Orange one is being wagged again by those who are most seriously plotting his demise and over reach in Venezuela may be just as much part of the plan as it was in pushing him into launching an attack on Syria. It is true that the global elites are at a loss what to do, as the fracturing of the global oligarchies is proving Marx right . capitalist are just a band of warring brothers [brigands, robbers, pirates – all!]. As there is no serious ideological threat to their hegemony at the moment they fight amongst themselves with imperial designs.
The threat to the imperium is the chaos which ensues when the elite power struggles fracture their hegemony and an uncontrollable uprising ensues. Who shapes that revolution will be central to this. Where it will come from is not evident yet but let's hope it's a grass roots one!