The Manson Murders, JFK, 9/11, and the Psychopathy of Power
A Review of CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill
“With Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who’d written a book on MKULTRA, I laid out a circumstantial case linking (CIA mind control guru Jolly) West to Manson. Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? ‘No,’ he said, ‘an MKULTRA experiment gone right.’” (CHAOS , p. 369)
By Kevin Barrett • Unz Review • July 29, 2019
I moved out of Southern California in the summer of 1969. I was ten years old, and my parents were fleeing decadence and depravity in favor of the more wholesome Midwest.
Before our move, a story had circulated about some local (Newport Beach) high schoolers who had “gone on an LSD trip” and gotten caught by police. As I understood it, the teenagers had “taken LSD” and started leaping from rooftop to rooftop, “tripping” all over the neighborhood and waking people up to the sound of thundering hoofbeats overhead. At the time I wondered whether LSD conferred a miraculous leaping or flying ability, since the houses in Lido Sands, though rather tightly clustered, were mostly spaced perhaps eight or ten feet apart, which seemed like a long way to jump.
I vaguely recall this “LSD-fueled teenage midnight horsemen of the apocalypse” story having something to do with my parents’ decision to move back to Wisconsin. Southern California circa 1969, a few years after the hippie movement had peaked and turned into a bad trip, didn’t seem like a good place to send your kids to high school. (Little did my parents know that the 60s would hit Wisconsin high schools ten years late, putting me and my siblings directly in the path of the psychedelic hurricane.)
Years later, as an “experienced” (in the Jimi Hendrix sense) subversive teenage wannabe intellectual, I would read about the Manson murders and notice how convenient they had been for the Establishment. From the moment Charlie Manson’s grinning, demonic face started leering from every front page and TV screen in America, the whole hippie-antiwar thing had seemed a whole lot scarier. I read the official version of the Manson myth, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, and thought: This is too crazy to be true. None of the Wisconsin hippies I know are even remotely like these characters. Maybe it’s something they add to the fluoride in the Southern California water.
By 1975 I had seen Mark Lane’s presentation of the Zapruder film and knew that America had experienced an unspeakably evil coup d’état in 1963. In 1979 I read John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control and discussed it with William S. Burroughs, who told me he had been aware of such activities for many years before they were publicly revealed by the Church and Rockefeller Commissions: “The thing about these secrets is they’re not all that secret.”
Well, maybe not, Bill. But if you had proclaimed in 1960 that the CIA’s most heavily funded program aimed at turning people into killer zombies, you would have gotten blank stares at best. Rumors whispered in bohemian demimondes, blown up into dystopian parody in books like Naked Lunch, are hardly threats to national security secrecy.
Looking back, it seems doubtful that America ever recovered from the bad trip of the 1960s. Indeed, one has to wonder whether potential recovery wasn’t intentionally forestalled. The Kennedy assassinations, along with the killings of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and so many others, were a national nightmare. So was the pointless carnage in Vietnam. The protest movement that rose up against the nightmare, seeking to awaken the nation and return it to sanity, collapsed into the drug-fueled promiscuity and bloody chaos whose avatar was none other than Charles Manson. Now, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Manson murders, we must wonder whether Manson was also an avatar another kind of CHAOS: the CIA’s ultra-secret, ultra-illegal domestic counterinsurgency program.
That notion isn’t entirely new. In 1993, while researching my first book, A Guide to Mysterious San Francisco, I heard rumors that Manson was a CIA mind control slave. But since this was just hearsay, unsupported by citable sources, I left it out of the book, and consigned it to the relatively short list of major conspiracy theories that might actually not be true.
That list keeps getting shorter. Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties makes a convincing, thoroughly documented case that the official Vincent Bugliosi rendition of the Manson murders is as blatantly bogus as Bugliosi’s “Oswald acted alone” version of the JFK assassination. Though O’Neill doesn’t quite come right out and say so, his evidence suggests that CIA mind control maniac Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West and/or his acolytes brainwashed a psychopathic prisoner named Charles Manson, gave him a CIA get-out-of-jail-free card, set him up next door to Jolly’s safe house in the Haight-Ashbury hippie district of San Francisco, and taught him how to control human minds using drugs and hypnosis. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS, it may be plausibly surmised, first weaponized the Manson family for use against the Black Panthers, then finally turned Manson into the ultimate TV commercial against the antiwar counterculture. When Manson and one of his CIA handlers, Reeve Whitson, rearranged the Tate murders crime scene before anyone else got there, they were literally setting the stage for the upcoming theatrical production.
Tom O’Neill’s twenty years’ research definitively demonstrates that a massive cover-up of the truth about the Manson murders is no longer a hypothesis, it is established fact. Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, as well as the courts and big media, have been effectively corrupted and muzzled. But the truth, or at least enough of it for us to get the picture, is tucked away in the documents they forgot to shred. Though the most important Manson-related documents have either “mysteriously disappeared” from various archives or are being stubbornly withheld for undisclosed reasons, O’Neill—an obsessively persistent journalistic gumshoe—managed to get his hands on enough of them, and to find and interview enough witnesses, to turn the conventional picture of the Manson family upside-down and inside-out.
The whole story, in its multilayered complexity of detail and documentation, is beautifully told in O’Neill’s book. Like many authors with mainstream publishers, O’Neill generally refrains from speculating about the big picture; instead, he lays out the hard facts and invites the reader to connect the dots. So let’s accept his invitation and consider the the CIA’s Operation Manson in historical perspective.
Political Demonization and the Creation and Maintenance of Public Myth
The Manson op was an exercise in demonization. Manson, an ordinary psychologically-disturbed small-time criminal with psychopathic tendencies, became, under the expert tutelage of Jolly West & Co., an avatar of the demonic second only to Hitler in the mass mediated popular imagination. Manson’s long hair and scraggly beard became an icon of pure evil, as Hitler’s mustache had before, and as Bin Laden’s beard would later. In literally demonizing Manson, Jolly and The Company (wasn’t that a ‘60s Bay Area band? No, you’re thinking of Big Brother) figuratively demonized the antiwar counterculture that was giving the Establishment fits.
By demonizing Manson, the CIA “skunked” the antiwar counterculture’s message of “peace, love, freedom” by associating it with an image of violence, hatred, and extreme authoritarianism. After all, the people behind such operations know that the best way to discredit a message is to put it in the mouth of an unpleasant spokesperson. That’s why criticism of the world’s worst crime syndicate, the international bankster cartel, has come to be associated with Hitler’s evil mustache. In like fashion, resistance to Zionism and other Western assaults on the Islamic world has come to be associated with Bin Laden’s big black beard. These associations didn’t just happen by accident. They were engineered.
Philip Zelikow, effectively the sole author of that work of fiction known as the 9/11 Commission Report (which he completed in chapter outline before the Commission even convened) is a history professor and self-styled expert in “the creation and maintenance of public myths.” Zelikow defines public myths as “beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community.” The public myths he is most interested in are those that most powerfully shape political perception and behavior; the first example he gives is the myth of the dastardly Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which transformed America from an isolationist republic to an interventionist empire.
Anyone who has studied the alternative literature on such events as Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassinations, and 9/11 knows that any overwhelmingly powerful mythic event that changes public perceptions and, in so doing, changes history, ought to be greeted with profound suspicion and subjected to the most painstaking scrutiny. As Philip Zelikow wrote in a 1998 Foreign Affairs article, a catastrophic terror attack on America, such as the destruction of the World Trade Center, would be a “transforming event,” a “watershed event in American history” that would, “like Pearl Harbor… divide our past and future into a before and after.” The “after” would feature “draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.” Zelikow’s 2001 false flag operation would achieve all that and more. It succeeded in demonizing opposition to Zionism and empire, and to tyranny in general, by associating resistance with the fearsome image of a scary looking guy sporting an easily-identifiable villain’s beard.
Indeed, bearded heavies like Bin Laden and Manson seem to come straight out of central casting. They remind us of neoconservative guru Leo Strauss’s advice to Machievellian operators: Make your operation like a B-grade Hollywood Western: slap a big white hat on the good guy and a big black hat on the bad guy. And if you don’t have a real enemy to play the villain’s role, invent one.
The official version of the Manson myth is told by its self-aggrandizing, profiteering hero, Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who put the bad guy behind bars. In somewhat similar fashion, the official version of the 9/11 myth, ventriloquized by Zelikow, seems told by a sort of Greek chorus representing the heroic victims, the American people. But in both cases, the ostensibly heroic narrator is the real villain. In the case of 9/11, Zelikow must be suspected of involvement in writing the script for the 9/11 false flag operation itself, and then plagiarizing that script for his Report. And in the case of Bugliosi, it’s clear that he consciously crafted a big lie for the jury that he later adapted for his bestseller, committing numerous crimes, including subornation of perjury, in the process.
As for the villains, both Manson and Bin Laden were manufactured by the CIA. As O’Neill’s evidence suggests, Manson was Jolly West’s golem, taught by Jolly how to manufacture more golems… preferably 14-year-old female ones. Bin Laden, for his part, was created by the CIA and its Saudi assets as a front man for the CIA-Saudi war to expel the Russians from Afghanistan. Originally assigned the hero role for an audience of Muslims, Osama was later transferred to a different movie in which he played the villain for an audience of Americans.
Though the official Manson narrative demonizes hippies, O’Neill’s revisionist account shows that the worst decadence and depravity was located not at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, but in Hollywood and the entertainment industry; Los Angeles, as Faulkner famously said, is “the plastic asshole of the universe.” The movie and music business, O’Neill shows, was (and presumably remains) infested by gangsters, intelligence agency criminals, and an astonishing variety of perverted human vermin. (There is considerable overlap between those three categories.) The worst part is that these people, the scum of the earth, literally run the show. Real power and authority is invested not in elected officials and the courts, but in supermob gangsters and their intel agency partners in crime. The cops, courts, and media are terrified of such people, and basically do whatever they’re told.
The Manson murders and the JFK assassination, two nightmarish crimes, bookended “the 1960s”: that brief period from 1964 to 1969 that witnessed the meteoric rise and fall of youthful idealism, whose chief expressions were the civil rights and antiwar movements. Like 9/11, the JFK assassination divided time into a more innocent “before” of wholesome family sitcoms and a less innocent “after” of protests, violence, and social breakdown fueled by pills, especially of the psychedelic and birth control varieties. Between JFK and Manson, youthful idealism looked like it might win the day. After Manson, America entered a “whole new world” of extreme disillusionment.
The JFK and Manson murders aren’t just linked in the American mythic imagination; they also intersect by way of a certain already-mentioned CIA mind-control psychopath, Dr. Jolly West. O’Neill’s Chaos presents evidence that Jolly West brainwashed and rendered mad two key figures in the respective dramas, Charles Manson and Jack Rubenstein a.k.a. Ruby. We have already seen how West made a madman of Manson. As for Ruby, it seems he was very likely programmed to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, just as Sirhan Sirhan was later programmed to fire in the general direction of Robert Kennedy. And though there is no hard-and-fast documentation proving West mind-controlled Ruby, O’Neill does document West’s suspiciously quick and intense post-assassination interest in Ruby, which culminated in West getting a private audience with the gun-smuggling cop-bribing Mickey Cohen organization hit man. Prior to West’s closed-door no-witnesses one-on-one with Ruby, the latter had been perfectly sane, though puzzled about being accused of a crime he had no memory of committing. From the moment West stepped out the door of Ruby’s cell, Ruby was stark, raving nuts.
America has real enemies, people like Jolly West and his bosses, psychopathic vermin who have infested the highest echelons of power. In the wake of their murder of JFK, they understandably feared exposure. The biggest threat was coming from honest, idealistic, politically-engaged citizens, most of whom leaned toward the political left in general, and the civil rights and antiwar movements in particular. To neutralize that threat, they flooded the civil rights and antiwar communities with LSD and amphetamines (as well as Cointelpro and CHAOS agents provocateurs). After several years of this, they administered the coup de grace by immortalizing the iconic evil hippie, Charles Manson, in a mass mind-control operation that sounded the death knell of the 1960s and set the stage for the age of dystopian neoliberal authoritarianism that followed.
The takeaway is that our real enemies conceal themselves by fabricating ersatz enemies and elevating them to mythic, iconic status. Their controlled mainstream media summon us daily to engage in the obligatory Orwellian two minutes of hate. When will we wake up and learn to hate not the cartoon figure on the screen, but the psychopath behind the curtain?
Israel Has “The Most Moral Army in the World”?
The creepy French “intellectual” Bernard-Henri Levy gets it wrong
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • July 30, 2019
Eight days ago eleven Palestinian buildings containing seventy family apartments located in the illegally Israeli occupied East Jerusalem village of Wadi al-Hummus were demolished in a military-led operation by more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers, policemen and municipal workers using bulldozers, backhoes and explosives. Residents who resisted were beaten by the soldiers, kicked down flights of stairs and even shot at close range with rubber bullets. The soldiers were recorded laughing and celebrating as they did their dirty work. Occupants who did not resist and who held their hands up in surrender were also not spared the rod, as were also foreign observers who were present to add their voices to those who were protesting the outrage. The injuries sustained by some of the victims have been photographed and are available online.
Twelve Palestinians and four British observers were injured badly enough to be hospitalized. The British reported that they were “stamped on, dragged by the hair, strangled with a scarf and pepper sprayed by Israeli border police.” One who was hospitalized described how Israeli soldiers dragged him by his feet, lifting him up, and kicking him in the stomach, while one soldier stamped on his head four times “at full force” before standing on his head and pulling his hair. Another suffered a fractured rib after “[the policeman] then stamped on my throat and others started punching my torso. It was a sadistic display of violence…”
Yet another foreign observer was dragged out of the house, “… her hands were crushed so badly that she suffered a fractured knuckle on her left hand, and her right hand suffered severe tissue damage ‘which will be permanently misshapen unless she gets cosmetic surgery.’”
Edmond Sichrovsky, an Austrian activist of Jewish origin, who was in one of the houses, described how Israeli forces broke the door down, first dragging out the Palestinians, “knocking the grandfather to the floor in front of his crying and screaming grandchildren.” Cell phones were forcibly removed to eliminate any picture taking or filming before soldiers began attacking him and four other activists. “I was repeatedly kicked and kneed, which left a bloody nose and multiple cuts, as well breaking my glasses from a knee in the face. Once outside, they slammed me against a car while shouting verbal insults at me and women activists, calling them whores.”
The buildings were destroyed due to claims that they were too close to Israel’s illegal separation wall, with the Benjamin Netanyahu government citing “security concerns.” The families living in the buildings that did not have either the time or ability to remove their furniture and other personal items will now have to comb through the rubble to see what they can recover, if the Israeli soldiers will even allow them that grace. They will also have to find new places to live as the Israelis have made no provision for housing them.
The homes were legally constructed on land that is nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA), a fine point that the Israeli authorities chose to consider irrelevant. When the Palestinians object to such arbitrary behavior, they are sent to Israeli military courts that always endorse the government decisions. And the Netanyahu regime of kleptocrats has made clear that it does not recognize international law about treatment of people who are under occupation.
The buildings were destroyed a few days after rampaging Israeli settlers on the West Bank continued their campaign to destroy the livelihoods of their Palestinian neighbors. Hundreds of olive trees were burned on the West Bank on July 10th, a deliberate attempt to drive the Arabs from their land by making it impossible to farm, strangling the local economy. Olive trees are particularly targeted as they are a cash crop and the trees take many years to mature and produce. The Israeli settlers have also been known to kill livestock, poison water, destroy crops, burn down buildings, and beat and even kill the Palestinian farmers and their families. And in Hebron the settlers have surrounded the old town, dumping excrement and other refuse on the Palestinians shops below that are still trying to do business. It should surprise no one that the Jewish settlers who engage in the violence are rarely caught, even less often tried, and almost never punished. The ghastly Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has declared that what was once Palestine is now a country called Israel and it is only for Jews. Killing a Palestinian by a Jewish Israeli is considered de facto to be a misdemeanor.
And meanwhile the carnage continues in Gaza, with the death toll of unarmed demonstrating Palestinians now at more than 200 plus several thousand wounded, many of them children and medical workers. Recently, orders to the Israeli army snipers direct them to shoot demonstrators in the ankles so they will be crippled for life. This is what it takes to be the “most moral army” in the world as defined by French fop pseudo intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, demonstrating only yet again that the tribe knows how to stick together. But the war crimes carried out by Israel also require unlimited support from the United States, both in money and political cover to allow it all to happen. Israel would not be killing Palestinians with such impunity if it were not for the green light from Donald Trump and his settler-loving mock Ambassador David Friedman backed up by a congress that seems to cherish Israelis more than Americans.
How is it that the horrific treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis as aided and abetted by the worldwide Jewish diaspora is not featured in headlines all over the world? Why isn’t my government with its highly suspect but nevertheless declared agenda of bringing democracy and freedom to all saying anything about the Palestinians? Or condemning Israeli behavior as it once did regarding South Africa?
Can one even imagine what The New York Times and Washington Post would be headlining if American soldiers and police were evicting and beating the residents of a housing project in a U.S. city? But somehow Israel always gets a pass, no matter what it does and politicians from both parties delight in describing how the “special relationship” with the Jewish state is cast in stone.
In the wake of the home demolitions, Washington yet again shielded Israel from a United Nations censure for its behavior by casting a Security Council veto. The Jewish state is consequently never held accountable for its bad behavior, and let us be completely honest, Israel is the ultimate rogue regime, dedicated to turning its neighbors into smoking ruins with U.S. assistance. It is evil manifest and it is not in America’s own interest to continue to be dragged down that road.
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 councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Weaponizing Space Is the New Bad Idea Coming From Washington D.C.
By Federico Pieraccini | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 29, 2019
When considering the possibility of great-power conflict in the near future, it is difficult to bypass space as one of the main areas of strategic focus for the major powers. The United States, Russia and China all have cutting-edge programs for the militarization of space, though with a big difference.
Donald Trump’s announcement of a “Space Force” is by no means a new idea. During the Reagan presidency, a similar idea was proposed in the form of the famous “Star Wars“ program, formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. It aimed to do away with the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) by positioning anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) interceptors in low-Earth orbit in order for them to be able to easily intercept ballistic missiles during their entry into orbit and before their re-entry phase. The costs and technology at the time proved prohibitive for the program, but military planners retained the dream of negating the concept of MAD in Washington’s favor, especially with the dawning of the unipolar era following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The decisions taken in the years since, such as the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002 during Bush’s presidency and from the INF Treaty during Trump’s, follows Reagan in trying to invalidate MAD, a balance of terror that has served to maintain a strategic stability.
This hope of doing away with MAD so that the unthinkable may become thinkable has guided the missile developments of Russia and China, which through the development of hypersonic missiles aim to nullify the US’s ABM systems and thereby make the thought of an unreciprocated nuclear first strike MAD again. With Russia’s recent successes in testing hypersoning technologies, and the fast-tracking of other new strategic weapons announced by Putin less than 12 months ago, strategic stability seems to have been restored through Russia’s strengthened deterrence posture.
The weaponization of space is a less known and talked about aspect of Washington’s mad attempts to make mutually assured destruction no longer mutual and therefore thinkable. During the peak of the unipolar moment, the idea of the Pentagon and the lobbyists of the military-industrial complex was to develop the so-called Prompt Global Strike system, which envisioned being able to deliver an air strike with conventional weapons anywhere in the world in the space of an hour. The dream (or delusion) of the US was to have the unique ability to determine the course of events around the globe within an hour. Such experimental craft as the Orbital Test Vehicle seem to confirm that serious efforts have been underway to realize this objective.
Neither China nor Russia has been sitting idly by waiting to be struck undefended. Russia’s development of its S-500 system has been quite timely. The S-500 system is often considered an upgrade to the better-known S-400 system, but these are in reality different systems with different aims and objectives. The main task of the S-500 is to engage long-distance targets in low-Earth orbit. We are therefore talking about the ability to take out military or any future ABM satellites as those originally conceived with Reagan’s “Star Wars” program.
Unlike Washington, Moscow and Beijing do not appear to be developing space-based weaponry; they are certainly not going to increase their military budgets to create a space force. On the contrary, both countries have been working for more than a decade on a proposed Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) treaty that seeks to ban the weaponization of space. The aims are summarized as follows:
“Under the draft treaty submitted to the [Conference on Disarmament] by Russia in 2008, State Parties would have to refrain from carrying out such weapons and threatening to use objects in outer space. State Parties would also agree to practice agreed confidence-building measures.
A PAROS treaty would complement and reaffirm the importance of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which aims to preserve space for peaceful uses by prohibiting the use of space weapons, and technology related to ‘missile defense’. The treaty would prevent any nation from gaining a military advantage in outer space.”
The intentions of the draft treaty clearly go against Washington’s plans. It is therefore not surprising that Washington has no intention of acceding to PAROS, and it is probably only a matter of time before Washington withdraws from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
Trump is looking at things from a practical point of view. He wants to give a major boost to the military-industrial complex, which is salivating at the prospect of being showered with tens or even hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars in a quest to weaponize space. But the policy makers in Washington and in think-tanks look at the weaponization of space from a different perspective. They look at it from the point of view of Washington as a superpower that must seek to prolong its unipolar moment through the use of force, even from space. While it is delusional nonsense, it has nevertheless been the prevailing outlook in Washington for at least the last 25 years.
The reason why China and Russia have proposed and continue to discuss the PAROS lies in their political and military philosophies that contrast with that of the US. As an imperial power bent on global domination, the US is always looking for ways to subjugate and dominate what it considers to be its underlings, while Russia and China act to hold back and counterbalance US aggression, in the process serving to enhance global stability.
The proposal for the non-militarization of space is the latest example of what unites and guides the Eurasian strategy of China and Russia without having any illusions about Washington’s intentions. The development of the SR-72 system seems to confirm that Washington wants to also bridge the gap with its Eurasian competitors in the field of hypersonic technology in addition to wishing to weaponize space.
Realistically, however, global powers in a multipolar context will seek to defend their territorial and economic sovereignty with every means at their disposal. Likewise, those seeking global hegemony will try to exploit any existing domain to gain an advantage over their rivals.
China and Russia seek to weaponize distance and speed to make any possible US attack on them impracticable, both in terms of the logistics required and the revivified cost-benefit calculus of MAD. The US, on the other hand, is trying to weaponize all conceivable domains of conflict by all means possible, hoping to be able to find a chink in its opponents’ armor.
Beijing and Moscow seem to have studied extensively how to respond. All the various defensive systems produced in recent years, from hypersonic anti-ship missiles to multi-layered defense systems like the S-400, S-500 and A-135/A-235, seem to meet the challenge.
Beijing fears US naval strength, and while seeking to achieve parity and surpass the US in the future, it aims above all to prevent the use of aircraft carriers as launching platforms through the employment of defensive area-denial weapons. In this sense, speed (Mach 10) and extending the range of Chinese anti-ship missiles (DF-21) are fundamental to the success of this strategy. Similarly, Moscow intends to seal Eurasia’s skies, and the S-500 seems to be the final flourish, able to protect up to 800 kilometers above sea level.
The weaponization of space is the latest issue that the US is exploiting for various political purposes. Be that as it may, this creates an adversarial environment that compels the US’s peer competitors to develop weapons capable of countering US belligerency. Instead of sitting down and defining the parameters of major-power interaction so as to reduce the likelihood of war, we are witnessing an intentional US policy of pursuing an arms race in every possible domain of warfare.
Talks only possible with ‘tangible results,’ but US does not ‘seek dialogue’ – Tehran
RT | July 29, 2019
There is no point in talking when no “practical results” can be achieved, and Washington is not interested in good-faith dialogue, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said amid rising tensions with the US.
“Dialogue and negotiation can be held when we have a certain agenda in place, and when we could get some tangible and practical results out of it,” Abbas Mousavi said on Monday, as cited by Reuters.
The Americans “are not seeking dialogue,” he added.
Problems have been piling up between the US and Iran over the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programs, as well as attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, which the US blames Tehran for. Iran denies any wrongdoing and urges Washington to stop meddling in regional affairs.
Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo proposed traveling to Iran to “speak directly to the Iranian people.”
Mousavi rebuffed Pompeo’s offer as a step in “psychological warfare” and a “defensive move” by the US in response to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s recent trip to New York. The official said Iran “sees no sincerity” in Pompeo’s suggestion and pointed out that Zarif travels to New York only to attend UN events, not for bilateral talks with the US.
Amid the standoff with Iran, US officials maintain that Washington is open and ready for dialogue, but not until the Islamic Republic fulfills a laundry list of demands. Tehran has also been saying that it is ready to negotiate, but only on an equal footing and without threats and ultimatums by the US.
Russia wades into oily waters of East Mediterranean
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | July 29, 2019
The cold war brewing in the East Mediterranean over the vast hydrocarbon reserves in the region is already ‘multipolar’. Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, Greece, the United States and Turkey figure as the main protagonists. Then, in mid-July, the European Union grew out of its observer status and joined as active participant. Furthermore, as July ends, Russia is tiptoeing toward the theatre — not quite an actor yet but willing to be one if a role becomes available.
Last weekend, in a seemingly innocuous remark, the Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak dropped the hint that Russian oil companies can roll out exploration in offshore Mediterranean energy fields in cooperation with Turkey. As he put it, “Russian companies have successfully implemented energy projects in the Mediterranean Sea. For example, Rosneft is working at Zohr [gas field in Egypt]. If these projects benefit all the parties from the commercial point of view, Russian companies can decide on cooperation with Turkey in the East Mediterranean.”
Novak saw it as a business proposition but is certainly savvy enough to know, being an influential Kremlin politician, that the geopolitics of oil and gas, be it in the Arctic or the Black Sea or the Persian Gulf and East Mediterranean, is integral to his country’s foreign policy. What made Novak’s remark particularly significant is not only that he singled out Turkey as Russia’s potential partner in East Mediterranean, but also that he made the remark in an exclusive interview with the Turkish official news agency Anadolu, which the Russian state news agency Tass promptly featured as a news report.
Russia’s locus standii is not in doubt, being an energy superpower and Turkey’s number one energy supplier. Surely, a partnership in the East Mediterranean can only further consolidate the entente between Russia and Turkey, which only recently acquired a new template of defence cooperation following Turkey’s bold decision to press ahead with the purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defence system despite the threat of US sanctions and notwithstanding Turkey’s NATO membership.
Interestingly, Novak’s remark comes at a time when the multi-vectored regional rivalries in the East Mediterranean pit Turkey against Cyprus (which is backed by Greece and Israel and enjoys US support.) The fierce rivalries spawned by the discovery of massive offshore hydrocarbon reserves in the East Mediterranean by Israel and Cyprus are hopelessly intertwined today with Turkey’s traditionally adversarial relationships with Greece and Cyprus.
The unresolved Cyprus question lurks just below the surface, dating back to 1974 when the then military junta in Athens orchestrated a coup’ d’etat in Nicosia in a bid to unify the two countries and Turkey subsequently intervened in Cyrus militarily and occupied one-third of the island in the north inhabited by the ethnic Turkish Cypriots, which has since become a de facto Turkish protectorate.
In sum, Turkey has a very serious territorial dispute with Cyprus and will not brook the latter’s unilateral moves to appropriate the massive hydrocarbon reserves in East Mediterranean in waters Ankara regards either belonging to the Turkish Cypriots as well or as falling within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
Suffice to say, a Cyprus settlement is the core issue here, but the Greek Cypriot opinion is disinterested in re-unification of the island. (The EU granted Cyprus full membership shortly after the ethnic Greek population voted against reunification, rejecting the settlement plan of then UN secretary general Kofi Annan.)
What complicates matters further is that Turkey has poor relations with Israel, which has banded together with Greece and Cyprus in a sort of tripartite alliance against Turkey lately (with Washington’s blessings.) The US resents Turkey’s independent foreign policies and American oil majors (ExxonMobil) are involved in prospecting / exploiting East Mediterranean’s oil and gas in the seas claimed by Cyprus.
ExxonMobil announced in February that it has made the world’s third-biggest natural gas discovery in two years off the coast of Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean at the Glaucus-1 well. The region is already known for some of the world’s largest such discoveries. The discovery could represent a natural gas resource of approximately 5 trillion to 8 trillion cubic feet.
Besides, the US geo-strategic objective is to market the energy supplies from East Mediterranean in Europe, which would erode Russia’s dominance as energy supplier while also enabling Israel to tap a big source of income.
Turkey is pretty much isolated today in the East Mediterranean rivalries, as Ankara intensifies its own exploration for natural gas in the region. After Cyprus after began its exploration (ExxonMobil) with the US ships providing security, Ankara despatched two drill ships to the seas and Turkey’s Naval Forces Command is providing “full and continuous protection” to the drilling vessels, with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles, watercraft, assault boats and submarines.
Turkey held a big naval exercise in in the eastern Mediterranean, Aegean and Black Sea in May asserting its rights not only in Cyprus, but also in Greece. Turkey claims its continental shelf not only takes in portions of Cyprus’s EEZ, but extends westwards to Crete in Greece’s EEZ. This in effect means that Turkey seeks to share the coastal energy resources of both Cyprus and Greece.
A time-bomb is ticking. Washington has repeatedly warned Turkey. In mid-July the EU foreign ministers also came down hard on Ankara, calling its actions “illegal”, punishing it by reducing EU’s assistance to Turkey for 2020 by €145.8 million, inviting European Investment Bank to review its lending activities in Turkey (€358.8 million last year) and threatening to “continue to work on options for targeted measures” (read sanctions.)
Turkey has defiantly rejected the EU intervention, but will feel its isolation mitigated if Russia stretches a helping hand at this juncture. The point is, the storm clouds gathering in East Mediterranean could have serious geopolitical ramifications. In a developing scenario of the West versus Turkey, which is already there, Moscow will be making a profound statement if Russian oil companies join hands with Turkey.
Any such Turkish-Russian collaboration will be a game changer for regional politics — in Syria, Levant, the Black Sea, etc. It coincides with a moment when the Pentagon just caricatured Russia in a strategy report last month as a “revitalised malign actor”, which, in league with China, “frequently jointly oppose US-sponsored measures at the United Nations Security Council” and works for a multipolar world order in which the US is “weaker and less influential.”
Indeed, any Turkish-Russian cooperation in the East Mediterranean will dovetail with global politics. Read a Xinhua report from the weekend titled China, Russia vow to strengthen cooperation, promote world stability.
US-trained ‘saboteurs’ sent from Al-Tanf to destabilize situation in other parts of Syria – Moscow
RT | July 29, 2019
US-trained saboteurs are being sent from Al-Tanf to other parts of Syria to try to destabilize the situation, Col. Gen. Sergey Rudskoy, chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the Russian General Staff, said on Monday. A ‘major armed unit’ of Jaish Magawir al-Saura militants is being trained in the 55km zone surrounding the Al-Tanf base, he said.
Almost 2,700 militants are being trained in the US-controlled Al-Tanf zone for activities including the destruction of the oil and gas infrastructure and conducting terrorist attacks against Syrian government forces, RIA Novosti quoted Rudskoy as saying at the Defense Ministry.
He said that some of these militants are being transferred by US Air Force helicopters to the trans-Euphrates region.
In November last year, spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova said that Moscow has information about the US military training militants in the Al-Tanf region. The big US military base is adjacent to the borders of Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, and is close to the highway connecting Baghdad with Damascus.
Hoaxing Academic Journals Now Forbidden
Portland State University says submitting fake papers to journals explicitly to assess their rigour is an ethics violation.
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | July 29, 2019
Peter Boghossian teaches critical thinking at Portland State University. Last October, he and two research colleagues revealed that seven satirical/hoax papers they’d authored had nevertheless been successfully published in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Concerned about “ideologically-motivated scholarship,” the trio set out to demonstrate that some academic fields utter gibberish can get published so long as it employs large amounts of identity politics jargon.
One paper is described by Boghossian as “a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf…rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory.” Another discusses dog parks, rape culture, and the patriarchy using “incredibly implausible statistics.”
This project intended to ring alarm bells, to call attention to what the researchers insist is a widespread problem:
Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview.
Rather than celebrating the Boghossian team as satirists par excellence, since last October Portland State University has subjected Boghossian to three separate investigations. One determined that no animals were harmed. Another found “no implications of plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification.” A third, however, determined that he violated “human subjects’ rights.”
In the weirdo world of contemporary higher education, people who run journals, and individuals who perform peer-review are now considered human subjects. Secretly submitting fake papers in order to assess the rigour of those journals is now considered human experimentation.
Such experimentation isn’t allowed unless one first secures the approval of an internal Institutional Review Board, an often lengthy and cumbersome process that will almost certainly undermine the secrecy upon which such research depends.
A few years ago, I wrote a report titled Peer Review: Why skepticism is essential. It cites a wide body of research, extending back decades, that highlights the often arbitrary, biased nature of the peer review process.
For example, a famous 1982 study attached fictitious author names to 12 papers that had already been published during the previous 18-32 months. The duplication was noticed in three cases, but peer reviewers working for the same journals gave thumbs down to eight out of nine remaining papers the second time around.
A 1990 study found female reviewers significantly less likely to recommend publication of male-authored papers compared to female-authored papers. Other research determined that a manuscript’s fate depends a great deal on whether its conclusions confirm or challenge a reviewer’s own theoretical perspective.
All of these findings provide important insight into how ‘official’ knowledge gets created. But now that journal editors and reviewers are considered human subjects whose rights shall not be violated, it’s doubtful whether such important work could still be conducted.
Study finds 50-year history of anti-Palestinian bias in mainstream news reporting

CONTEXT matters, and CONTEXT is often missing in news reports about Israel-Palestine
By Kathryn Shihadah – If Americans Knew – January 19, 2019
A recent media study based on analysis of 50 years of data found that major U.S. newspapers have provided consistently skewed, pro-Israel reporting on Israel-Palestine.
The study, conducted by 416Labs, a Toronto-based consulting and research firm, is the largest of its kind.
Using computer analysis, researchers evaluated the headlines of five influential U.S. newspapers: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal from 1967 to 2017.
The study period begins in June 1967, the date when Israel began its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip – now officially termed the Occupied Palestinian Territories – following its Six Day War against Jordan, Egypt and Syria.
Methodology involved the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a type of computer analysis that sifts through large amounts of natural language data and investigates the vocabulary. NLP tabulated the most commonly used words and word pairs, as well as the positive or negative sentiment associated with the headlines.
Using NLP to analyze 100,000 headlines, the study revealed that the coverage favored Israel in the “sheer quantity of stories covered,” by presenting Palestinian-centric stories from a more negative point of view, as well as by grossly under-representing the Palestinian narrative, and by omitting or downplaying “key topics that help to identify the conflict in all its significance.”
Four times more headlines mentioned Israel than Palestine
The Fifty Years of Occupation study reveals a clear media bias first in the quantity of headlines: over the half-century period in question, headlines mentioned Israel 4 times more frequently than Palestine.
The study revealed other discrepancies in coverage of Israel and Palestine/Palestinians as well.
Sentiment
For all 5 newspapers studied, Israel-centric headlines were on average more positive than the Palestinian-centric headlines.
Sentiment analysis measures “the degree to which ideological loyalty colors analysis.”
In order to measure sentiment, the study employed a “dictionary” of words classified as either positive or negative; each headline was scored based on its use of these words.
The report explains that journalistic standards require news stories to be “neutral, objective, and derived from facts,” but the reports on Israel-Palestine “exhibit some form of institutionalized ideological posturing and reflect a slant.” [See graphs below post]
Under-representation of the Palestinian voice
The study also found Palestinians marginalized as sources of news and information.
A simple case in point: The fact-checking organization Pundit Fact examined CNN guests during a segment of the 2014 Israeli incursion into Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. Pundit Fact reported that during this time, 20 Israeli officials were interviewed, compared to only 4 Palestinians, although Palestinians were overwhelmingly victims of the incursion with 2,251 deaths vs. 73 Israeli deaths.
The study’s data reveal what it calls “the privileging of Israeli voices and, invariably, Israeli narratives”: the phrases “Israel Says” and “Says Israel” occurred at a higher frequency than any other bigram (2-word phrase) throughout the 50 years of headlines – in fact, at a rate 250% higher than “Palestinian Says” and similar phrases. This indicates that not only are Israeli perspectives covered more often, but Palestinians rarely have an opportunity to defend or explain their actions.
The report explains the significance of such asymmetry:
This imbalance matters, as official Israeli government policy is effectively made an intrinsic part of the discussion of the conflict, while the views of Palestinians living under occupation are subordinated to the margins.
Sins of omission and de-emphasis
The analysis turned up yet another significant problem with the newspapers’ coverage: failure to report, or to report adequately, on important aspects of the Palestine-Israel conflict.
The study found several critical topics that the 5 newspapers failed to cover adequately, resulting in reader misperceptions.
Peace process?
One misperception revolves around the alleged existence of an ongoing “peace process.”
The study points out the consistent use of bigrams such as “peace talks,” in spite of the fact that since 1993, peace talks have been essentially nonexistent. And,
A hallmark of the conflict has been the perception that there is an ongoing peace process which, from time to time, breaks down, thereby delaying resolution of the conflict…the dispute is effectively portrayed as being one between two equal warring sides, not one where one group is an occupier and the other the occupied.
Occupation
The researchers emphasize the fact that as the occupation of the West Bank (and de facto occupation of Gaza) drags on past 50 years, the brutality of the Israeli occupation is becoming normalized and its illegality forgotten.
They draw this conclusion from their analysis of the unigram “occupation,” which has appeared in headlines less and less frequently, dropping by 85% in Israel-centric headlines, and by 65% in Palestinian-centric headlines over the 50-year period.
Gaza
The blockade of Gaza, and the economic hardships of Gazans under the blockade, were mentioned in Palestine-centric headlines just 30 and 63 times respectively, in the 11 years since the blockade began.
In Covering Gaza: is the mainstream media discourse changing on Palestine-Israel?, Tamara Kharroub of the Arab Center in Washington DC censures mainstream media coverage of the Great Return March – a nonviolent demonstration by Palestinian Gazans for justice and the end of the blockade – for failing to report the names of Gazan civilians killed by Israeli snipers, “in stark contrast to the usual reporting on Israeli victims, in which their pictures, lives, and grieving families are repeatedly shown and discussed.”
… and more
As another example, Palestinian refugees – still waiting to be repatriated according to UN Resolution 242 of 1949 – have been forgotten as a group: the words “Palestine Refugee(s)” in headlines has declined by 93% over the last 50 years, reflecting a decline in concern from media.
The study reveals similar underreporting on topics including the illegality of Israeli settlements and Palestinians’ designation of East Jerusalem as the future capital of the future Palestinian state.
According to Siham Rashid, formerly of the Palestinian Counseling Center, these accumulated flaws characterize the Israel-Palestine issue as
a conflict revolving around security and terrorism, with Israel being the victim…So, for many people, the conflict is understood as a conflict of land and borders between two peoples who have equal claims, not as a conflict between an oppressed and oppressor and colonized and colonizer.
International consensus
As cited by the researchers, Marda Dunsky’s 2008 book, Pens and Swords: How the American Mainstream Media Report the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, analyzed US media over a 4-year period. One of her most significant findings was the lack of coverage of the international consensus on important issues, for example the almost-universal conclusions that Israeli settlements are illegal, and that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their homes.
Greg Shupak’s The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media offers an example from Operation Protective Edge, the Israeli aggression of 2014 into Gaza. He points out that the blockade of Gaza, a key antecedent to the violence, was mentioned only once in the many New York Times editorials on the conflict published just before and during the war.
Shupak’s work shows how NYT “frequently omits important details that would better contextualize the conflict.”
In More Bad News From Israel, Glasgow University researchers Greg Philo and Mike Berry examined British mainstream media coverage of Israel-Palestine. In a study of BBC coverage, the lack of adequate context resulted in
the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation…BBC output does not consistently give a full and fair account of the conflict. In some ways the picture is incomplete and, in that sense, misleading.
Alison Weir of If Americans Knew has published extensive studies of American media coverage of Israel-Palestine which reveal “daily reporting [that is] profoundly skewed” and a “pervasive pattern of distortion” in which “[t]he favored population was the Israeli one.”
If Americans Knew has conducted six major studies and one shorter study on coverage of Israel-Palestine news and found that media had reported on Israeli deaths at far greater rates than they reported on Palestinian deaths. The studies also revealed the palpable pro-Israel bias, under-representation of the Palestinian voice and the omission or downplaying of critical topics.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a lobbying group that advocates pro-Israel policies to the Congress and Executive Branch of the United States.
Causation?
The Canadian researchers found a “systemic problem in coverage,” but did not study the causation. Nevertheless, they excluded the possibility of “deliberate planned bias,” attributing the biased coverage to “the U.S. media’s affinity to broadly align and support their government’s foreign policy objectives.”
Some other researchers, however, report a wider range of factors, many connected to the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. For example, Alison Weir discovered deep links between US media and Israel (e.g. here, here, here, and here). Mearsheimer and Walt reported on the power of pro-Israel pressure in their book The Israel Lobby; Paul Findley in his book They Dare to Speak Out, and others report a wider range of factors, many connected to the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. In many cases, pressure from pro-Israel groups in the Israel lobby, contributed significantly to the consistent slant in mainstream media.
Conclusion
As the authors point out:
Whether online, television, or print, the mainstream media serves to provide most Americans with their daily news. How the media frames the news and presents it to viewers can profoundly shape their perception of current events.
Yet numerous analysts, across time and region, have established that this media consistently skews the news when it comes to Israel-Palestine. This results in nations and their governments upholding Israeli priorities rather than those of their own people, and perpetuating injustice toward Palestinians.
RELATED READING:
Why we urgently need alternative news sources
Mainstream media repeatedly shows its Israel bias
Keeping an eye on the curators of the news
Correcting a few distortions about Gaza
Associated Press Double Standard in Israel-Palestine Reporting
Media selectively report on Jerusalem unrest; the clock keeps ticking…
