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The New York Times Tries to Get Itself Out of the Duckgate Hole Using a Spade

By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | June 5, 2019

A number of people, including myself, wrote to the New York Times journalist, Julian Barnes, to point out that the piece he and his colleague, Adam Goldman, published on 16th April 2019 about the CIA Director, Gina Haspel, contained a part which unwittingly showed that she had misled President Trump into expelling 60 Russian diplomats in March 2018. Here were the paragraphs of interest:

“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 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.”

I pointed out to the authors in an (unanswered) email that this was an extraordinary claim, because no children became sick due to poisoning by a toxic chemical, and nor did any ducks die. And so unless they were prepared to correct or retract their piece, there could only be two possibilities:

  1. Ms Haspel unwittingly showed false images to no less a person than the President of the United States, supplied to her by the British Government who knew them to be false, which persuaded him to embrace the “strong option”.
  2. Ms Haspel knowingly showed false images to no less a person than the President of the United States, which persuaded him to embrace the “strong option”.

It seems that the two journalists have not ignored mine and the many other emails they received about this issue, and they have today corrected their story. The paragraphs of interest now read as follows:

“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 tried to demonstrate the dangers of using a nerve agent like Novichok in a populated area. Ms. Haspel showed pictures from other nerve agent attacks that showed their effects on people.

The British government had told Trump administration officials about early intelligence reports that said children were sickened and ducks were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.

The information was based on early reporting, and Trump administration officials had requested more details about the children and ducks, a person familiar with the intelligence said, though Ms. Haspel did not present that information to the president. After this article was published, local health officials in Britain said that no children were harmed.

Ms. Haspel was not the first to use emotional appeals to the president. She and Mr. Pompeo showed Mr. Trump images of children sickened by chemical weapons attacks in Syria, in an earlier presentation. But Ms. Haspel’s strategy in the March briefing was to pair emotional appeals with her hard-nosed realism and it proved effective. At the end of the briefing, Mr. Trump embraced the strong option. [my emphasis]”

Below is Mr Barnes’s explanation on Twitter for the error and the correction:

“I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to figure out where I went wrong. Initially, I reported that in March 2018, Gina Haspel, then the future CIA director, briefed President Trump about the Skirpal nerve agent attack, showing pictures of sickened children and dead ducks. That was wrong. There are—so far as we know—no pictures of dead ducks or sickened kids. Haspel did show pictures to Trump, but they were about the effects of nerve agents in general, they were not specific to the attack in the UK.

British officials did brief the Trump administration about early reports of dead ducks & sick children. Officials sought more info, believing such intel would be persuasive to Trump, who was skeptical of the proposed expulsion of 60 Russians in response to the attack. But Haspel did not brief the president on that intelligence.

Local UK health officials deny that any animals or children were sickened, as British officials pointed out soon after our story published. (In response to good reporting by @haynesdeborah, @guardian and others.) (link: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/18/no-children-ducks-harmed-novichok-attack-wiltshire-health-officials)

The intelligence about the ducks and children were based on an early intelligence report, according to people familiar with the matter. The intelligence was presented to the US in an effort to share all that was known, not to deceive the Trump administration. This correction was delayed because conducting the research to figure out what I got wrong, how I got it wrong and what was the correct information took time.

I regret the error and offer my apology. I strive to get information right the first time. That is what subscribers pay for. But when I get something wrong, I fix it.”

Here is my response on Twitter to Mr Barnes:

Dear Julian,

Thanks for taking the time to correct your report. However, it unfortunately raises just as many questions as the initial report.

Firstly, you say British officials briefed the Trump administration about early reports of dead ducks & sick children.

Really? Which early reports were these? There were none. The parents of the children who had tests to see if they had been contaminated were only contacted 2 weeks after the incident, and none of them was found to be ill. This is the first report on it, and it confirms the children were given the all clear. And there were never any dead ducks in Salisbury nor any reports of them.

Secondly, you say that “Officials sought more info, believing such intel would be persuasive to Trump, who was skeptical of the proposed expulsion of 60 Russians in response to the attack.” But the fact is that any further (truthful) info could not have persuaded Mr Trump, for the simple reason that no other people were harmed in Salisbury than the three people who were initially harmed. How, then, was he persuaded?

Thirdly, you presumably give the answer to the second point, when you say “Haspel did show pictures to Trump, but they were about the effects of nerve agents in general, they were not specific to the attack in the UK.” So in other words, Ms Haspel couldn’t show any pictures from Salisbury to persuade the sceptical Mr Trump, because there weren’t any to show. So she showed him pictures from other nerve agent attacks, which were presumably sufficiently bad to turn him from his scepticism, to expelling 60 diplomats. Even though nothing like that happened in Salisbury.

Thank you for clarifying that Ms Haspel did indeed wilfully mislead the President.”

Despite NYT’s correction, the question it poses is this: Which is worse:

  • The deputy director of the CIA showing a sceptical President some fake pictures of dead ducks and sick children to persuade him to take the strongest action?
  • Or the deputy director of the CIA, knowing full well that there weren’t any pictures of the effects of nerve agent on the population of Salisbury because only three people were ever affected, showing some pictures of actual nerve agent victims who were never anywhere near Salisbury to persuade him to take the strongest action?

The answer is they’re both as bad. In both scenarios, an utterly false picture of what happened in Salisbury was given to the sceptical President to twist his arm into taking action he didn’t want to take.

As they say, when in a hole, better stop digging.

June 5, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Hillary Clinton’s Russia collusion IOU: The answers she owes America

By John Solomon – The Hill – 06/03/19

During the combined two decades she served as a U.S. senator and secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had official business pending before America’s most powerful political woman.

The pattern of political IOUs paid to the Clinton Foundation was so pernicious that the State Department even tried to execute a special agreement with the charity to avoid the overt appearance of “pay-to-play” policy.

Still, the money continued to flow by the millions of dollars, from foreigners and Americans alike who were perceived to be indebted to the Clinton machine or in need of its help.

It’s time for the American public to call in their own IOU on political transparency.

The reason? Never before — until 2016 — had the apparatus of a U.S. presidential candidate managed to sic the weight of the FBI and U.S. intelligence community on a rival nominee during an election, and by using a foreign-fed, uncorroborated political opposition research document.

But Clinton’s campaign, in concert with the Democratic Party and through their shared law firm, funded Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier which, it turns out, falsely portrayed Republican Donald Trump as a treasonous asset colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin to hijack the U.S. election.

Steele went to the FBI to get an investigation started and then leaked the existence of the investigation, with the hope of sinking Trump’s presidential aspirations.

On its face, it is arguably the most devious political dirty trick in American history and one of the most overt intrusions of a foreigner into a U.S. election.

It appears the Clinton machine knew that what it was doing was controversial. That’s why it did backflips to disguise the operation from Congress and the public, and in its Federal Election Commission (FEC) spending reports.

Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) used the law firm of Perkins Coie to hire Glenn Simpson’s research firm, Fusion GPS, which then hired Steele — several layers that obfuscated transparency, kept the operation off the campaign’s public FEC reports and gave the Clintons plausible deniability.

But Steele’s first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI’s imagination. So the Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr — whose wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion — to push his Trump dirt to the top of the FBI.

Nellie Ohr likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele’s dossier to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump dirt at the FBI, too.

Then Steele and, separately, longtime Clinton protégé Cody Shearer went to the State Department to get the story out, increasing pressure on the FBI.

In short, the Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure — and bad intel — until an investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the time, James Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as then-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

To finish the mission, Simpson and Steele leaked the existence of the FBI investigation to the news media to ensure it would hurt Trump politically. Simpson even called the leaks a “hail Mary” that failed.

Trump won, however. And now, thanks to special counsel Robert Mueller, we know the Russia-collusion allegations relentlessly peddled by Team Clinton were bogus. But not before the FBI used the Clinton-funded, foreign-created research to get a total of four warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, transition and presidency from October 2016 through the following autumn.

The Clinton team’s dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out its political hit job on Trump.

After two years of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, it’s time for the house to call in its IOU.

Hillary Clinton owes us answers — lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while doing many high-profile media interviews.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said Friday night on Fox News that it’s time for Clinton to answer what she knew and when she knew it.

Here are 10 essential questions:

  1. In January 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a formal investigative request for documents and written answers from your campaign. Do you plan to comply?
  2. Please identify each person in your campaign who was involved with, or aware of, hiring Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele.
  3. Please identify each person in your campaign, including Perkins Coie lawyers, who were aware that Steele provided information to the FBI or State Department, and when they learned it.
  4. Describe any information you and your campaign staff received, or were briefed on, before Election Day that was derived from the work of Simpson, Steele, Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr or Perkins Coie and that tried to connect Trump, his campaign or his business empire with Russia.
  5. Please describe all contacts your campaign had before Election Day with or about the following individuals: Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, former foreign policy scholar Stefan Halper and Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud.
  6. Did you or any senior members of your campaign, including lawyers such as Michael Sussmann, have any contact with the CIA, its former Director John Brennan, current Director Gina Haspel, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe?
  7. Describe all contacts your campaign had with Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal concerning Trump, Russia and Ukraine.
  8. Describe all contacts you and your campaign had with DNC contractor Alexander Chalupa, the Ukraine government, the Ukraine Embassy in the United States or the U.S. Embassy in Kiev concerning Trump, Russia or former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
  9. Why did your campaign and the Democratic Party make a concerted effort to portray Trump as a Russian asset?
  10. Given that investigations by a House committee, a Senate committee and a special prosecutor all have concluded there isn’t evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, do you regret the actions by your campaign and by Steele, Simpson and Sussmann to inject these unfounded allegations into the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and the news media?

Hillary Clinton owes us answers to each of these questions. She should skip the lawyer-speak and answer them with the candor worthy of an elder American stateswoman.

June 5, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Refreshing the Dossier: New Report Portrays Venezuela as a Criminal Organization

Mision Verdad | June 3, 2019

The Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS, its acronym in English) on May 26 in Washington DC presented a report entitled The Last Defense of Maduro: The Survival of Venezuela through the Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise, written by Douglas Farah and Caitlyn Yates, who are part of IBI Consultants, LLC and are “visiting fellows” of the National Defense University (INSS).

The event consisted in the presentation of the document and in a subsequent discussion with a panel composed of Farah himself, José Cárdenas (former assistant secretary for Latin America and the Caribbean of USAID and director of think tank Vision Americas), among others, and moderated by Venezuelan Moisés Rendón (Associate Director for CSIS Americas), known for his active role in the siege of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, between April and May.

The CSIS, of unquestionable neo-conservative tendency can be remembered in recent times for hosting a discussion and round table (in Washington DC a few weeks ago) evaluating the possibility of an invasion of Venezuela.

There are clear indications to consider the entire performance (the preparation of the report and its institutional presentation) as a new information operation, a multipurpose intelligence action.

DETAILS AND SHADOWS OF THE REPORT
According to a review by IBI Consultants, Farah is a national security consultant and analyst who worked for nine months with the Intelligence Study Consortium, studying armed groups and intelligence reform, during the past two decades, a foreign correspondent and investigative journalist for the Washington Post and other publications, covering Latin America and West Africa.”

He is also one of the “specialists” consulted to highlight trends around the link between Hezbollah and Latin America or why Bolivia is supposedly a narco-state.

IBI Consultants is what is known as a private intelligence firm, which contracts directly or indirectly with governments and corporations linked to armed or political conflicts of medium and high intensity.

This purported investigation, although in its initial statement reaffirms that “it does not necessarily represent the position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or any other body of the US government,” it is logical to think that the Trump Administration has used this firm to justify the next step of the sanctions cycle of 2019: designate the government of Nicolás Maduro as a “transnational criminal organization” or the inclusion of the country in the list of states that sponsor terrorism. Two turns of the screw.

Farah and Yates affirm that “the alliance of the Bolivarian states (ALBA) together with the FARC has merged into what we define as the Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise.”

In this endeavor they unite several actors who are linked by the confrontation with the United States, specifically the guerrillas (inspired by the Cuban doctrine of asymmetric warfare) of the Farabundo Martí Front and the Sandinista Front, which later came to power in El Salvador and Nicaragua respectively, the former guerrilla of FARC (accused of drug trafficking since the 1980s by the US and Colombian authorities) and Venezuela under the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.

The report classifies as “criminal acts” actions that have not been proven and that in the first phase of the text does not lead to any specific fact. They take as a basis, for example, an accusation about PDVSA’s diversion of money by the District Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of Florida, in an attempt to project that this accusation corresponds to a plot related to terrorist acts and other crimes that place at risk the security of the Western Hemisphere. A propaganda maneuver consisting of half-truths, deceptive links and misinformation about the scope of the investigation of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Southern District of Florida.

Elsewhere it says that “the financial sum of these criminal acts is not known exactly, but a recent investigation conducted by a consortium of Latin American journalists found that Venezuela diverted US $ 28 billion from PDVSA, we have located at least US $ 10 billion in funds linked to Venezuela that moved between 2007 and 2018. ”

On the one hand, IBI Consultants affirms that it has made findings of funds, without any evidence, but on the other, it establishes a justification base for the United States government to extend the radius of confiscations and looting against Venezuelan assets.

Similarly, they try to convince that “in several oil subsidiaries of the region, through its branch PDV Caribe”, and the legitimate movements of funds made by PDVSA through that subsidiary, constitute an illegality. They condemn the agreements of PDVSA with the ALBA organization (specifically with the governments of Nicaragua and El Salvador) and show that the profits that come from this agreement represent “illicit funds”. Again, the report does not show evidence to support this claim.

Relying on press reports and interviews that can not be verified or contrasted through public sources, the report argues that from the company Alba Petróleo and Albanisa (Nicaragua) resources were diverted to tax havens, generating facade companies through frontmen in these countries

In this way, Douglas Farrah and Caitlyn Yates bet on the credibility of IBI Consultants to lie about Venezuela. They pay themselves and pocket the change.

Likewise, they center their accusations on the ALBA agreement and Nicaragua, countries that were declared by John Bolton as the “troika of evil”, specifically on Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua as targets of the unconventional international war being carried out by the Trump Administration, with the purpose of undermining the ALBA alternative within the framework of international relations in the Western Hemisphere.

The report places special emphasis on the figure of the Venezuelan businessman in the media and insurance branch, Raúl Gorrín. According to the text, “it is estimated that this scheme would have laundered between US $ 1.2 and 2.4 billion, using the US financial system, over four years”. Gorrín’s participation in this scheme would total approximately US $ 159 million”.

Farrah and Yates are not only (deliberately) inaccurate when it comes to handling data and accusations, but they also try to link Raúl Gorrín with the Venezuelan government. The report does not show this relationship that it insists on projecting, but only in the reference and the aprioristic sentence.

In addition, the authors use press reports and Bloomberg reports to construct a plot where, supposedly, the Venezuelan government would be in a relationship with the Kaloti Suriname Mint House company, in which not only does it not prove that this is true, but it also endorses criminal charges for the president of Suriname, Desi Bouterse, relying on biased reports from digital media.

On that same topic, “given that Venezuelan Central Bank gold reserves grew by 11 tons in 2018, despite the massive sale underway, everything suggests that a significant amount of merchandise was obtained illegally by the dissident groups of the FARC and the ELN”. Although there is no proof that this is the case, or that the aforementioned Colombian guerrilla groups are linked to the country’s gold activities, the report passes as unobjectionable truth what is a partial and biased opinion, impossible to verify or contrast, on the part of the “researchers“.

They accuse the Venezuelan government of laundering funds through “banco a banco” and with “fake infrastructure projects.” However, they emphasize, in the first part, that they do not have consistent information that supports their complaints.

Finally, the report attempts to link the deprivation of Venezuelan society in access to medicines, among other variables that affect the full development of their human rights, with the set of data and biased information they present throughout the purported investigation. In this sense, it tries to project the Venezuelan government as a “criminal state”, while it whitens and omits the blockade via sanctions as the most important factor in the violation of the human rights of the Venezuelan population.

In this sense, the positioning of the Venezuelan government as a “criminal state” or “joint criminal enterprise” is inconsistent. Venezuela is the victim of a high voltage operation against its economy, political system and national stability, so it seems illogical that a state victim of these hybrid war operations can be classified as a “criminal state”.

The report concludes that the result of this process of structuring the Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise “is a complex criminal operation that undermines the rule of law, democratic governance and US alliances throughout the Western Hemisphere.”

It is worth mentioning and highlighting in extenso the second paragraph of the three that make up the conclusion:

“The Bolivarian structure has proven to be adaptable and resilient, with multiple redundant capacities, operatively, when one of the facets of the criminal network is under pressure, the Bolivarian Joint Criminal Enterprise is able to move its operations to new areas or find new allies, in general, by nurturing different strengths and connections of the shared history and the common objectives of the Enterprise, the US government has recently made a more unified and holistic effort to confront these criminal actors, offering significant results. The efforts to channel the funds that flow from PDVSA and the Bolivarian banking structure to the legitimately recognized Guaidó government – and out of the hands of the Maduro regime – are innovative and necessary as the former head of the Southern Command, Admiral James Stavridis, said: ‘A network is needed to fight a network’ “.

The report ends highlighting the need to confront the “Bolivarian structure” in a joint manner combining “resources and authorities … to face the multiple nodes of the Enterprise”.

But these combined actions between Defense, Treasury and State, for example, have already become evident in the maneuvers against Venezuela. However, the authors insist: “Now that the ideological impulses of the Bolivarian Revolution have been widely contested, this is an opportunity for the United States to boldly confront the region and confront the scope and complexity that this criminal enterprise encompasses.”

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

  1. The multi-purpose: the structure of the report seeks to justify some categories that cover the criminal / judicial as the moral / informative. In the first case it offers an express characterization that would seek to move the next steps of the US power to fulfill the objective of “resolving the Venezuelan issue”, no longer as a problem within the framework of international legislation, forcing its discussion and resolution as something of an ordinary legal case (within the US system) closing the treatment of Venezuela as a domestic issue, returning to track the “unusual and extraordinary threat.” The Noriega method.
  2. In the plane here called “moral / informative” the distribution apparatus of the fake news against Venezuela is oxygenated, now moving the justification of the intervention and control over the story (which has suffered notable blows especially after 30A, preventing consolidation of the informational fence) to a moral issue. From the same logic, morality would also supplant the mediocre success of the attempt to sustain sanctions and the blockade as something legitimate and protected in a high cause. In that direction, it also works as a damage control.
  3. To exhibit the method more than the content: these kind of information aggressions are designed fundamentally so that it is difficult to take them to argumentation, of the ideas and their sustenance. Technically, it recalls the Gish Galop a lot, a specific tactic of debate that seeks to saturate the debate space with seemingly related particles of discourse that prevent a direct confrontation, and that, in the arena of discussion, seeks to win by attrition. Therefore, rather than focusing directly on the content, it is convenient to approach it from the use of the forms: how it is put together, what is the benefit in saying it (sources, data treatment, political orientation and / or interested in them), at what time it is said, who reacts and finally who wins with this operation. It can not be lost to sight, already under the reflexive logic of the intelligence services, that this set of elements produces the effect of plausible denial, the CIA’s motto: “We can not deny or confirm this information”.
  4. Deactivate the sources of enunciation: along with what was said about the meeting in early April promoted by the CSIS on a possible military invasion in Venezuela, we suggest evaluating the possibility of legal actions against these entities and their authors, which establish a line of defense elementary in the matter of false and delicate accusations made by private entities. This, within the American justice system itself, could have a precedent among its main variables.
  5. This type of accusation is not new, made, in addition, by the usual [actors]. If we take the case of Senator Marco Rubio, his marked insistence on the hashtag #MaduroCrimeFamily to refer to the president and the government in general, especially as of January 23 of the current year and the Guaidó cycle, is best seen in context from where it is coming to give form to the concept, and how now it aspires to fill the void that, by itself, represents the verbiage tweeted by Rubio.
  6. This maneuver reveals two elements to consider: 1) the degree of proactivity of a specific ideological sector with projections within the executive and operational power regarding the case of Venezuela (the Bolton-Pompeo-Pence-Rubio quartet) that needs to further accentuate the imperative of direct and expeditious intervention (pressing against the inertia and the vagaries of its president?), and 2) in addition to that process, the establishment of a new category at the same time “judicial” and “moral” (in the neoconservative key) to move, as we said, the penal institutions against a “mafia and corrupt” structure, and in its media projection to insert the concept as a “mobilizing” idea that provides another degree of encouragement to a regime change operation that has not reached its objectives in the short and medium term.

Source URL: Mision Verdad

June 4, 2019 Posted by | Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Trudeau government squeezes Cuba

By Yves Engler | June 3, 2019

Ottawa faces a dilemma. How far are Trudeau’s Liberals prepared to go in squeezing Cuba? Can Canadian corporations with interests on the island restrain the most pro-US, anti-socialist, elements of the ruling class?

Recently, the Canadian Embassy in Havana closed its Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship section. Now most Cubans wanting to visit Canada or get work/study permits will have to travel to a Canadian embassy in another country to submit their documents. In some cases Cubans will have to travel to another country at least twice to submit information to enter Canada. The draconian measure has already undercut cultural exchange and family visits, as described in a Toronto Star op-ed titled “Canada closes a door on Cuban culture”.

It’s rare for an embassy to simply eliminate visa processing, but what’s prompted this measure is the stuff of science fiction. Canada’s embassy staff was cut in half in January after diplomats became ill following a mysterious ailment that felled US diplomats sent to Cuba after Donald Trump’s election. Four months after the first US diplomats (apparently) became ill US ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis met his Canadian, British and French counterparts to ask if any of their staff were sick. According to a recent New York Times Magazine story, “none knew of any similar experiences afflicting their officials in Cuba. But after the Canadian ambassador notified his staff, 27 officials and family members there asked to be tested. Twelve were found to be suffering from a variety of symptoms, similar to those experienced by the Americans.”

With theories ranging from “mass hysteria” to the sounds of “Indies short-tailed crickets” to an “outbreak of functional disorders”, the medical questions remain largely unresolved. The politics of the affair are far clearer. In response, the Trump Administration withdrew most of its embassy staff in Havana and expelled Cuban diplomats from Washington. They’ve rolled back measures the Obama Administration instituted to re-engage with Cuba and recently implemented an extreme measure even the George W. Bush administration shied away from.

Ottawa has followed along partly because it’s committed to overthrowing Venezuela’s government and an important talking point of the anti-Nicolás Maduro coalition is that Havana is propping him up. On May 3 Justin Trudeau called Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel to pressure him to join Ottawa’s effort to oust President Maduro. The release noted, “the Prime Minister, on behalf of the Lima Group [of countries hostile to Maduro], underscored the desire to see free and fair elections and the constitution upheld in Venezuela.” Four days later Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland added to the diplomatic pressure on Havana. She told reporters, “Cuba needs to not be part of the problem in Venezuela, but become part of the solution.” A week later Freeland visited Cuba to discuss Venezuela.

On Tuesday Freeland talked with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about Venezuela and Cuba. Afterwards the State Department tweeted, “Secretary Pompeo spoke with Canada’s Foreign Minister Freeland to discuss ongoing efforts to restore democracy in Venezuela. The Secretary and Foreign Minister agreed to continue working together to press the Cuban regime to provide for a democratic and prosperous future for the people of Cuba.”

Ottawa supports putting pressure on Cuba in the hopes of further isolating/demonizing the Maduro government. But, the Trudeau government is simultaneously uncomfortable with how the US campaign against Cuba threatens the interests of some Canadian-owned businesses.

The other subject atop the agenda when Freeland traveled to Havana was Washington’s decision to allow lawsuits for property confiscated after the 1959 Cuban revolution. The Trump Administration recently activated a section of the Helms-Burton Act that permits Cubans and US citizens to sue foreign companies doing business in Cuba over property nationalized decades ago. The move could trigger billions of dollars in legal claims in US courts against Canadian and European businesses operating on the island.

Obviously, Canadian firms that extract Cuban minerals and deliver over a million vacationers to the Caribbean country each year don’t want to be sued in US courts. They want Ottawa’s backing, but the Trudeau government’s response to Washington’s move has been relatively muted. This speaks to Trudeau/Freeland’s commitment to overthrowing Venezuela’s government.

But, it also reflects the broader history of Canada-Cuba ties. Despite the hullabaloo around Ottawa’s seemingly cordial relations with Havana, the reality is more complicated than often presented. Similar to Venezuela today, Ottawa has previously aligned with US fear-mongering about the “Cuban menace” in Latin America and elsewhere. Even Prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who famously declared “viva Castro” during a trip to that country in 1976, denounced (highly altruistic) Cuban efforts to defend newly independent Angola from apartheid South Africa’s invasion. In response, Trudeau stated, “Canada disapproves with horror [of] participation of Cuban troops in Africa” and later terminated the Canadian International Development Agency’s small aid program in Cuba as a result.

After the 1959 Cuban revolution Ottawa never broke off diplomatic relations, even though most other countries in the hemisphere did. Three Nights in Havana explains part of why Ottawa maintained diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba: “Recently declassified State Department documents have revealed that, far from encouraging Canada to support the embargo, the United States secretly urged Diefenbaker to maintain normal relations because it was thought that Canada would be well positioned to gather intelligence on the island.” Washington was okay with Canada’s continued relations with the island. It simply wanted assurances, which were promptly given, that Canada wouldn’t take over the trade the US lost. For their part, Canadian business interests in the country, which were sizable, were generally less hostile to the revolution since they were mostly compensated when their operations were nationalized. Still, the more ideological elements of corporate Canada have always preferred the Cuban model didn’t exist.

If a Canadian company is sued in the US for operating in Cuba, Ottawa will face greater pressure to push back on Washington. If simultaneously the Venezuelan government remains, Ottawa’s ability to sustain its position against Cuba and Venezuela is likely to become even more difficult.

June 3, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

Contracts Reveal For First Time How DEA Exercises Control Over Television, Film Productions

By Tom Secker | ShadowProof | May 28, 2019

Nearly 200 pages of Drug Enforcement Administration contracts with producers were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They show for the first time how the agency interacts with television and film productions.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is quite active in the entertainment industry. It exercises stringent control over how the agency is represented in documentaries, reality shows, and dramas.

With several projects, the DEA carefully reviews their own files to pick out select cases that made them look good, which then form the basis for either fictional or factual productions.

The contracts [PDF] cover 2011 to 2017. Over that time period, DEA supported dozens of projects, including “Cops and Coyotes” and multiple episodes of “Drugs Inc.” and “Gangsters: America’s Most Evil.” They support the fictional drugs drama “Pure,” too.

Other supported projects were “Lethal Cargo,” “The Notorious Mr. Bout,” and “Declassified: Untold Stories of American Spies.” They even worked with the U.S. government-funded Middle East Broadcasting Network for a program that featured the DEA museum.

Strangely absent from the contracts are “Narcos” and “Breaking Bad,” despite various reports that both shows employed DEA employees as consultants.

In response to a separate FOIA request asking about their input on “Breaking Bad,” the DEA claimed they couldn’t find any records whatsoever. The released documents also do not include “Finding Escobar’s Millions” and “Battle Zone: The Origins of Sicario,” even though the DEA was credited on both documentaries.

The contracts show the near-total control the DEA wields over productions they assist.

Some producers are given permission to embed film crews within DEA Enforcement Groups but only under the provision that “DEA supervisors on the scene shall have the final say in approving any filming during real-time law enforcement operations.”

The production support offered by the DEA is completely free. It costs the producers nothing and ranges from granting permission to use the DEA name and logo to filming at DEA installations and interviewing their agents.

Some of the DEA’s restrictions apply to certain projects. The producers of “Canada: Drug Kingpin” were told they weren’t allowed to “accompany DEA employees to Canadian-U.S. border ‘hot spots’ known for the transit of illicit substances.”

The makers of “Lethal Cargo” were only permitted to interview one DEA employee, and the contract specifies several topics that he was not allowed to talk about. The forbidden topics included, “Information relating to the production and consumption status of a country and that country’s law enforcement approach to drug trafficking,” “the port of Valencia as an ingress point for cocaine,” and “the Nigerian mafia as couriers.”

In more recent years, with marijuana legalization a growing issue and reality, the DEA began including a clause saying that any interviews with “DEA personnel regarding marijuana operations or related issues” had to be approved in advance by the agency’s chief of congressional and public affairs.

On all supported projects, the producers must grant a “senior DEA official” control over the final edit, to ensure a project doesn’t compromise an “ongoing investigation or prosecution, investigative practices or techniques, or the identities of confidential sources or DEA special agent or task force officers.”

The official “may make that determination at any time during the editing and production process,” and the “producer agrees to abide by DEA requests to modify, delete or otherwise change” anything that is deemed objectionable.

While some of these restrictions are reasonable and protect the rights of those accused of crimes, the DEA-imposed limits also ensure they are depicted in a positive light.

Shadowproof spoke with author Doug Valentine, who has written extensively on the DEA’s culture and corruption. “Positive P.R. is more important [to the DEA] than accurate portrayal,” he said.

The contracts list several specific scenarios that cannot be shown under any circumstances. They include, “Recording of any shooting incident, regardless of who fires,” “filming of suspect interrogations,” “filming where an individual’s communications are being monitored in any fashion,” and “footage that exposes DEA’s confidential or sensitive investigative techniques.”

As a consequence of these restrictions, the productions all maintain the same basic message—that the DEA are heroes, who are fighting evil people who threaten American society.

“It’s propaganda B.S. pure and simple,” Valentine said. “I talk a lot about the myth of the hero. They want to portray themselves as heroes on a noble cause. They demand total control over the narrative.”

Asked whether these shows were inaccurate representations of the real relationships between DEA agents and drug dealers, Valentine replied, “Depends on the agent and the trafficker, but the trafficker can never arrest the agent. So agents have the power of the law. Where it gets sticky is with informants and special hires and undercover ops. CIA stuff.”

In addition to asserting control over the final edit of a production, the documents have clauses saying the DEA “reserves the right to perform background checks and, if necessary, deny access to those individuals who DEA believes may compromise DEA operations. DEA also reserves the right to limit the number of representatives who may have access to DEA.”

Like the FBI, the DEA is not just concerned with the content of the productions they support but also with the backgrounds of the people producing them.

“It’s another way of assuring control. DEA is obsessed with control and being the superior force,” Valentine added.

Further demonstrating the DEA’s obsession with control, the contracts require the producers to destroy any materials provided by the DEA (photos, documents, statistics, b-roll footage and so on) as soon as the production is released or broadcast.

The producers must provide the DEA with a DVD copy and a non-exclusive license to use the resulting film or TV show for the purposes of “recruiting, training, professional development, community relations, or demand reduction efforts.”

June 2, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Film Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

As a New Paradigm of East and West Cooperation Emerges, Martin Luther King’s Assassins Try Killing Him Again

By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 2, 2019

A new assassination is now being attempted 51 years after the life of Martin Luther King was cut short by a bullet on the balcony of the Loraine Motel on April 4, 1968. A story has gone viral across the international media in recent days which promises to shed light on the dark perversity of Martin Luther King Jr.

The scandal will be featured in Britain’s June edition of Standpoint magazine by internationally renowned Martin Luther King “authority” David Garrow and promises to destroy the myth of King as a moral leader of America by showcasing the ugliness of King’s true self as a an orgy-loving rapist who had over 40 affairs and laughed as a friend raped a parishioner. Garrow states that his expose “poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive historical review possible.”

The fact that so many news outlets are jumping on the bandwagon should cause one to wonder why is this happening at this moment in history? Could this strange hysteria over a mediocre slander piece have anything to do with the fact that the polarized cages of left and right are finally breaking down? Could it have anything to do with the fact that as America comes closer to a potential alliance with Russia and China, an era of cooperation and economic justice may awaken something within the collective psyche of Americans which many had thought was long dead?

The timing is especially strange since the supposed “ground breaking evidence” which the heroic Garrow is bringing to light was actually first made public in November 2017, and on closer inspection, it wouldn’t qualify by any lawyer’s standard as “evidence”.

The “Scandal” Being Exposed

In November 2017, a batch of 19,000 formerly classified government documents, and wiretap transcripts relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy were made public as per the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992. Although nothing very dramatic was found among that otherwise highly redacted bundle, a strange 20 page FBI report on Martin Luther King Jr did cause some to take notice. In this report published weeks before his murder, an anonymous FBI agent records his assessment that MLK was a paid and loyal member of the Communist Party who had his speeches approved by Communist controllers. Not only that, but the report paints King as a sexual deviant of the highest order.

In the last two pages, the report explains how King engaged in a “two day drunken sex orgy in Washington D.C., Many of those present engaged in sexual acts, natural as well as un-natural, for the entertainment of onlookers. When one of the females shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and other of the males present discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect”.

The conspicuous quality of this FBI report, is that it is so reminiscent of Christopher Steele’s 30 page “dodgy dossier” which justified FBI surveillance on President Trump in the lead up to the 2016 elections. Without ever taking a moment to prove any of its claims, the Steele dossier asserted dozens of instances of Trump’s sexual perversity and his adherence to the nefarious agenda of the Kremlin.

Similarly ignoring all actual evidence, the 1968 FBI report advances an image of King as a degenerate using only hearsay, conjecture, and third hand reports. For example, the FBI, not known for their honesty, are convinced that King fathered a child with a mistress in Los Angeles purely because they were informed by “a very responsible Los Angeles individual in a position to know”. The audio tapes, if they exist at all, have never actually been heard by anyone and we are told will supposedly be made public in 2027.

Garrow’s Sleight of Hand

Before going further, it is worth taking a moment to ask who is this David Garrow who has found the courage to reveal the “true Martin Luther King”?

Garrow is celebrated by the Mainstream Press as an international authority on Martin Luther King due largely to his Pulitzer Prize winning 1986 book “Bearing the Cross” which has somehow given him the authority to be the last word on the narrative of King’s life for the next 33 years. Since that book Garrow has worked as a professor of history at various universities has found himself writing for proven CIA-sponsored mainstream rags such as the Washington Post, NY Times, Financial Times, New Republic and has more recently been stationed in England as a senior research Fellow at Cambridge University from 2005-2011. Today Garrow has become the official biographer of Barack Obama, and also an authority on the fraud of Russia-Gate attracting hordes of Trump supporters to his analysis.

Garrow has also made himself an enemy of the King family by leading slander campaigns against Coretta Scott King and her children who have managed the King Family Estate by labelling them as corrupt conspiracy theorists due to the family’s crazy belief that the government had anything to do with King’s assassination.

The Forgotten 1999 Civil Court Case

Garrow was first deployed to attack the family in the wake of the Memphis Civil Court trial in December 1999 wherein a four week long hearing of 70 witnesses ended with a Jury unanimously concluding not only that James Earl Ray (who had died in prison the year earlier) was innocent of the murder of Dr. King, but that the FBI and highest echelons of government conspired in the assassination.

During a press conference Coretta Scott King said: “There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr. And the civil court’s unanimous verdict has validated our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel that justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict is not only a great victory for my family, but also a great victory for America. It is a great victory for truth itself. It is important to know that this was a SWIFT verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury deliberation.”

Coretta’s son Dexter (who is now the president of the King Center) spoke after his mother saying: “We can say that because of the evidence and information obtained in Memphis we believe that this case is over. This is a period in the chapter. We constantly hear reports, which trouble me, that this verdict creates more questions than answers. That is totally false. Anyone who sat in on almost four weeks of testimony, with over seventy witnesses, credible witnesses I might add, from several judges to other very credible witnesses, would know that the truth is here.”

David Garrow stepped into the mud early on to slander the family and the court case as a whole saying of the family “The King youngsters are part of a larger population of American people who need to believe that the assassination of a King or a Kennedy must be the work of mightier forces… Individuals need to see something of a harmony amongst impact and cause. That if something has a large evil effect, it ought to be the result of a huge evil cause”.

By denying the existence of causality, or conspiracy in regards to historical processes, this “world renowned historian and MLK expert” essentially admitted that he is either extremely dumb or a part of the conspiracy himself.

Exhibiting the height of hypocrisy, Garrow said of King’s children in 2009 “I fear we are at the point where the behaviour of the children is doing lasting, indelible damage to King’s reputation”.

Philip Madison Jones, a Hollywood producer and best friend of Dexter King has stated that Garrow’s anti-King family malice is due to the fact that King’s late wife Coretta Scott King refused to put Garrow in charge of a project involving King’s papers. Apparently, Garrow wished to do to King what Edgar Poe’s “official” biographer Rufus Griswold did in 1850 (1).

Obama as a Superior Role Model

It was while working in Cambridge in 2008 that Garrow became obsessed with Barack Obama and with the idea of writing an untouchable biography that would render all other biographies obsolete for all time. This work was so magnificent and all-encompassing that it would require 9 years to write and would finally put an end to all speculation about Obama’s birth and shady life before politics. The effect of this work was a 1500 page fluff piece called “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama”.

Describing his motive for writing his book Garrow said: “my very purposeful intent with this book has been to produce a book of record that folks will still be using and relying upon 25, 35 years from now. All throughout 2008, I was disappointed by the quality and depth of journalism about his earlier life. I thought the mainstream media was being insufficiently curious about him and on the other hand, we simultaneously had all of these whacky oppositional actions out there regarding where was he born was he really a Muslim? And so I came to this really with a professional belief that someone with my background and experience should really tackle this.”

When asked in an interview how he managed to have so many long meetings with Obama in the White House (who apparently took the time out of his busy schedule to read the entire opus), Garrow stated that it was arranged by his personal friend Bob Bauer who just so happened to be Obama’s personal attorney. Amongst other crimes, Bauer had been known for providing the “legal justification” for Obama’s unconstitutional bombing of Libya in 2011. Both Bauer and Garrow are currently playing two sides of the anti-Trump operation with Bauer acting as a loud voice for impeachment and advocate of the Russia-Gate narrative and Garrow playing an anti-Russia-Gate liberal socialist who now appears on Fox News regularly as he is a rare case of a liberal intellectual attacking Russia-Gate. While promoting neo-liberal order embodied by Barack Obama on the one hand, Garrow has somehow managed to walk the fine line of convincing both left and right ideologues that he is trustworthy whose lofty intellect transcends partisanship.

Where do we go from Here?

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the FBI became recognized as just one branch of the Deep State/5 Eyes international intelligence apparatus which had made every effort to undermine America and bring the republic back under firm control of the British Empire as outlined by Cecil Rhodes in his 1877 will.

Just as the FBI often controlled the most reactionary and violent elements of anti-establishment movements during COINTELPRO, recent reports have proven that the vast majority of those “prevented” terrorist attempts which have occurred in America since 1993 have actually first been instigated by the FBI demonstrating conclusively that the bureau never reformed.

We stand at a moment which is shaped by a great hope for a new set of relationships based on the potential alliance between western cultures increasingly purged of the Deep State and Eastern nations led by Russia, China and the Belt and Road Initiative, let us remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr in his August 1967 speech titled “Where do we go from Here?”

“I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society…

Now, don’t think you have me in a bind today. I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. …Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated…

And I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future….

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In his closing remarks to the 1999 jury trial that found King to be a victim of a vast conspiracy, Martin’s son Dexter King left a challenge to all who would come into contact with this news:

“The question now is, “What will you do with that?” We as a family have done our part. We have carried this mantle for as long as we can carry it. We know what happened. It is on public record. The transcripts will be available; we will make them available on the Web at some point. Any serious researcher who wants to know what happened can find out.”

___________________

(1) The idea that Poe was a deviant, alcoholic and opium addict was entirely generated by the pen of Poe’s enemy Rufus Griswold who managed to purchase the entire body of Poe’s personal writings from the poet’s financially strained aunt and then proceeded to “lose everything” while publishing a biography that became the authoritative book on Poe for the next 170 years.

June 2, 2019 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Verdict: Robert Mueller’s Entire Operation Was a Political Hit-Job


21st Century Wire | June 1, 2019

On May 17, 2017, Robert S. Mueller III was appointed by then acting Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to serve as special counsel to investigate Russian collusion during the 2016 campaign. Two years, over 2,000 subpoenas, and thirty million dollars later, no such collusion was found. Following the release of the underwhelming Mueller Report a number of fundamental questions still remain. How could such an investigation have been triggered when there was no evidence of collusion to begin with? Why did Robert Mueller promptly hire partisan Democrats to run his investigation?

This past week Mueller staged what could only be described as a bizarre press event, but it was one where he openly revealed his derision for basic basic due process and rules of prosecutorial conduct, the rule of law, and not least of all, his clear partisan desire to damage and disqualify a duly-elected US President.

California Congressman Devin Nunes said Mueller’s stage show was meant to “light the fuse for impeachment.”

“Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report,” he said. “It contains our findings and analysis and the reasons for the decisions we made. We chose those words carefully, and the work speaks for itself. The report is my testimony.”

While most pundits and opponents on both sides of the political divide obsessed over whether or not he would be testifying before Congress, a depressingly few commentators picked up of the real underlying breakdown which was on full display.

Co-founder of The Federalist, Sean Davis, writes:

If there were any doubts about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s political intentions, his unprecedented press conference on Wednesday should put them all to rest. As he made abundantly clear during his doddering reading of a prepared statement that repeatedly contradicted itself, Mueller had no interest in the equal application of the rule of law. He gave the game, and his nakedly political intentions, away repeatedly throughout his statement.

“It is important that the office’s written work speak for itself,” Mueller said, referring to his office’s 448-page report. Mueller’s report was released to the public by Attorney General William Barr nearly six weeks ago. The entire report, minus limited redactions required by law, has been publicly available, pored through, and dissected. Its contents have been discussed ad nauseum in print and on television. The report has been speaking for itself since April 18, when it was released.

If it’s important for the work to speak for itself, then why did Mueller schedule a press conference in which he would speak for it weeks after it was released? The statement, given the venue in which it was provided, is self-refuting.

Let’s start with the Mueller team’s unique take on the nature of a prosecutor’s job. The standard American view of justice, affirmed and enforced by the U.S. Constitution, is that all are presumed innocent absent conviction by a jury of a specific charge of criminal wrongdoing. That is, the natural legal state of an individual in this country is innocence. It is not a state or a nature bestowed by cops or attorneys. Innocence is not granted by unelected bureaucrats or federal prosecutors.

At one point in his remarks, Mueller seemed to agree. Referring to indictments against various Russian individuals and institutions for allegedly hacking American servers during the 2016 election, Mueller said that the indictments “contain allegations and we are not commenting on the guilt or innocence of any specific defendant.”

“Every defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.”

Had he stopped there, he would have been correct. But then he crafted a brand new standard.

“The order appointing the special counsel authorized us to investigate actions that could obstruct the investigation. We conducted that investigation and kept the office of the acting attorney general apprised of our work,” Mueller said. “After that investigation, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

According to Mueller and his team, charged Russians are presumed innocent. An American president, however, is presumed guilty unless and until Mueller’s team determines he is innocent. Such a standard is an obscene abomination against the rule of law, one that would never be committed by independent attorneys who place a fidelity to their oaths and impartial enforcement of the law ahead of their political motivations.

Read the rest of Sean Davis’s editorial at The Federalist

According to the author Davis, multiple federal agents and prosecutors reached out to his publication following Mueller’s unusual press conference and voiced their disapproval to the former FBI director’s reckless application of due process and justice.

He first notes: “The prosecutor in a criminal case shall … refrain from making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused,” states Rule 3.8(f) of the American Bar Association’s rules of professional conduct.

Other federal officials and prosecutors weighed in:

“I’d have been crucified under this rule for a ‘not innocent’ comment about an uncharged party,” a former federal prosecutor told The Federalist. “I literally cannot fathom holding a press conference to say that an uncharged person was not innocent.”

“I wish these former FBI directors would learn their lessons: keep your mouths shut unless you’re referring a case for prosecution,” Jeff Danik, a retired FBI supervisor, said during a phone interview with The Federalist on Wednesday.

Aside from all this, you even have Mueller presiding over manipulative edits by his team to make otherwise innocuous conversations appear menacing:

The dumpster fire continues.

June 1, 2019 Posted by | Deception | | Leave a comment

‘Where is the evidence?’ Malaysian PM says attempts to pin MH17 downing on Russia lack proof

RT | May 30, 2019

Malaysia has accepted the Dutch report that a ‘Russian-made’ missile shot down its civilian airliner MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, but has yet to see evidence it was fired by Russia, said Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

“They are accusing Russia but where is the evidence?” Mahathir told reporters at the Japanese Foreign Correspondents Club (FCCJ) in Tokyo on Thursday.

“You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians,” the prime minister went on, according to the Malaysian state news agency Bernama. “It could be by the rebels in Ukraine; it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile.”

Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014 – amid heavy fighting between residents of two eastern regions who rejected the February coup in Kiev and troops dispatched by the Western-backed government to suppress them.

All 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board the Boeing-777 were killed. Kiev immediately blamed Russia for the incident, and most Western media uncritically agreed.

Mahathir was skeptical that anyone involved with the Russian military could have launched the missile that struck the plane, however, arguing that it would have been clear to professionals that the target was a civilian airliner.

“I don’t think a very highly disciplined party is responsible for launching the missile,” he said.

The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT), whose report last year blamed Moscow for shooting down MH17, barred Russia from participating in the investigation, but involved the government of Ukraine. Although Malaysia is also a member of JIT, Mahathir revealed that his country’s officials have been blocked from examining the plane’s flight recorders.

“For some reason, Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened,” he said. “We don’t know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it.”

“The idea was not to find out how this happened but seems to be concentrated on trying to pin it on the Russians.”

“This is not a neutral kind of examination,” Mahathir added.

Rejecting the JIT accusations, Russia made public the evidence the Dutch-led researchers refused to look into, including the serial number of the missile that allegedly struck MH17, showing that it was manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1986 and was in the arsenal of the Ukrainian army at the time of the tragedy.

May 31, 2019 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | | Leave a comment

A Robust Message from Palestine’s Foreign Minister and an Attempt at Israeli Propaganda from BBC Israeli Hasbara Asset Raffi Berg

Palestinian Foreign Minister, Riad Al-Maliki, talking in Catham House, London, May 2019
By Stuart Littlewood | American Herald Tribune | May 29, 2019

Chatham House, the international affairs think-tank in London, recently invited Dr Riad Malki, Palestine’s minister of foreign affairs, to talk about the future of Palestine ahead of the “Deal of the century” dreamed up by the Trump administration. Malki is involved in shaping the Palestinian response to that initiative when it is finally revealed.

During questions Raffi Berg (pictured at right), editor of the BBC News website’s Middle East section, said that while the official Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) position is for two states as the solution to the conflict, he mischievously suggested that the recent Israel election results showed that Israelis consider the Palestinians’ position to be “insincere”. He asked: “Can you make clear whether you fully accept the presence of Israel as a country in the Middle East within/outside [indistinct] the 1967 ceasefire line?”

This sounded a little off-key from the BBC, which is supposed to maintain an air of utter impartiality. However, Malki dealt with the unfriendly prod quite firmly:

We have made it very clear that we are going to accept, and we have taken the decision to accept, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, to accept the historic compromise that the state of Palestine will be established on the 22 per cent of historic Palestine. It is not only the Palestinian position, it is the position of almost every country around the world.

He reminded the audience that there is international consensus about the two-state solution and that the Palestinian state should be established on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem the capital of Palestine and of Israel. He continued:

We have also agreed in principle that we are ready during negotiations to talk about territorial exchange but always to keep the 1967 border as the border of the state of Palestine. So, we are not going to accept anything less than that.

If anyone talks about the State of Palestine on less than the 1967 border, or the State of Israel beyond that line, this is not acceptable because it defies not only the negotiating position but international law and the international consensus.

I recently wrote about Hanan Ashrawi, a long-time member of the PLO executive and an all-round formidable lady, saying we should see and hear more of her in a front line spokes role. The same goes for Raid Malki who is well informed and articulate and came across well at Chatham House. That they remain invisible to the Western world is the fault of the PLO and Palestinian Authority who are simply not media savvy and stubbornly intend to remain that way. Their embassies (or missions) around the globe are the same.

Malki was a one-time leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and has a PhD in civil engineering from the American University. His impressive CV includes Head of the Civil Engineering Department at Birzeit University, the European Peace Prize in 2000 in Copenhagen and the Italian Peace Prize (Lombardi) in 2005. He is a visiting professor at several European universities.

In his Chatham House speech Malki pulls no punches: “I know that some may be uncomfortable to hear the words ‘colonialism’ and ‘apartheid’ associated with Israel. But they are what we experience on a daily basis and what is visible to the naked eye.”

As for America, “the US administration has shown nothing but disregard for Palestinian rights and Palestinian lives, for international law and the internationally recognised terms of reference, and for common sense and decency”.

The Palestinian people, he insists, “want freedom not conditional liberty. They want sovereignty and not limited autonomy. They want peace and coexistence not domination and subjugation. He continued:

There are two ways to end the conflict: a peace accord or capitulation, meaning a surrender act. We continue to stand ready to negotiate the peace accords based on the internationally recognised terms of reference and the pre-1967 borders, under international monitoring holding accountable the parties and within a determined and binding timeframe. We will never be ready to sign a surrender act.

It is worth watching the video. Sparks are set to fly when Trump and Kushner eventually unveil their big deal.

I’m not a reader of the BBC News website. Long ago I came to distrust the BBC’s reporting of Middle East affairs, so I tend to ignore it. Berg’s line of questioning prompted me to look deeper and I found this piece from 2013 by Amena Saleem in Electronic Intifada titled “BBC editor urged colleagues to downplay Israel’s siege of Gaza”, in which she reports that Berg, during Israel’s eight-day assault on Gaza in November 2012 which killed nearly 200 Palestinians, emailed BBC staff to write more favourably about Israel. He urged them, allegedly, not to blame Israel for the prolonged onslaught but to promote the Israeli government line that the “offensive” was “aimed at ending rocket fire from Gaza”, despite the fact that it was Israel which broke the ceasefire.

In another email, he told them: “Please remember, Israel doesn’t maintain a blockade around Gaza. Egypt controls the southern border.” However, the United Nations regards Israel as the occupying power in Gaza and had called on Israel to end its siege, which is a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1860.

It is interesting to read that Berg’s boss until last year was James Harding, an ex-Murdoch editor and self-proclaimed Israel supporter – a strange choice for a supposedly non-partisan head of BBC News. Almost as strange as the appointment around the same time of ex-Labour minister and former Chairman of Labour Friends of Israel James Purnell as director of strategy at this beacon of impartiality. Purnell is still there.

May 31, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Deadly Japan Heatwave “Due To Global Warming”

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | May 30, 2019

Japan’s heatwave in July 2018 could not have happened without climate change.

That is the unequivocal conclusion of a report released last week, as the country battles yet another record-breaking heatwave.

The July 2018 heatwave, which killed 1,032 people, saw temperatures reach 41.1C, the highest temperature ever recorded in the country. Torrential rains also triggered landslides and the worst flooding in decades.

Penned by the Meteorological Society of Japan, the study is the first to establish that some aspects of the international heatwave could not have occurred in the absence of global warming. Scientists reached this conclusion by employing a technique known as event attribution (EA).

The relatively new method, lead author Yukkiko Imada told Climate Home News, sought to pin down the causality of climate change in the heatwave by simulating 18 climate scenarios with and without the current 1C global warming above pre-industrial levels.

They found a one in five chance of the heatwave occurring in the current climate, but almost no chance of in a climate unchanged by human activity.

https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/05/29/deadly-japan-heatwave-essentially-impossible-without-global-warming/

This claim is utterly absurd and dishonest.

As Imada’s study makes abundantly clear, the cause of the heatwave was the coming of two powerful high pressure systems, known as a double-high.

Moreover, two seasonal high-pressure systems, namely the North Pacific subtropical high (NPSH) in the lower troposphere and Tibetan high in the upper troposphere often cause warm climate in Japan (Imada et al. 2014). This two-tiered high-pressure system (double-High) was also visible in July 2018.

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sola/advpub/0/advpub_15A-002/_pdf/-char/ja

The paper goes on to say:

However, experts do not have any  answers on whether the double-High in 2018 was extreme compared to other such  historical events. It is even more difficult to determine the extent to which  human-induced global warming contributed to this event….

Thus, the double-High condition appears to be natural variability  and not affected by the human-induced climate change at this stage.

 In other words, the heatwave would have occurred, regardless of global warming.

As is usually the case with these sort of attribution studies, what this one actually says is that this event was slightly hotter than would have been the case prior to 20thC warming.

It is funny that we never seem to hear about studies that explain how cold winters would have been even colder without AGW!

It is reckoned that 1032 died in the Japan heatwave, but it is certain that many more would have died in pre-industrial versions of that weather event, before the days of air conditioning.

May 31, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Leaked OPCW report finds Douma chemical attack likely staged

TomoNews | May 29, 2019

A leaked document is casting doubt on the official narrative of the 2018 Douma gas attacks which were later used to justify American, British and French airstrikes on Syria.

May 30, 2019 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

US Claim of Illegal Russian Nuke Testing Lacks Proof – Arms Control Association

Sputnik – 29.05.2019

The claims by the United States that Russia illegally conducts nuclear testing lack evidence, the Arms Control Association said in a press release.

“But no public evidence has ever been provided to support the claim of illegal Russian testing and Gen. Ashley didn’t provide any Wednesday”, the Arms Control Association said. “Gen. Ashley also claimed that Russia has ‘not affirmed the language of zero-yield.’ But Russia has repeatedly affirmed publicly that they believe the treaty prohibits all nuclear test explosions”.

The association noted, for example, that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov emphasized in a 2017 op-ed that the treaty bans “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion, anywhere on Earth, whatever the yield”.

The best way for Washington to enforce adherence to the zero-yield standard would be for President Donald Trump and the US Senate to support ratifying the treaty to help bring it into force, the association added.

Such a move would pave the way for “intrusive, short-notice, on-site inspections to detect and deter any possible cheating”, the release said.

The United States should propose confidence-building visits to test sites as allowed for by the treaty if it indeed has any “credible evidence” of Russia violating the treaty, it added.

Russia’s Permanent Representative to International Organisations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov has commented on the matter saying that Washington is trying to distract attention from its own destructive policy on the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) by blaming Russia for violating the moratorium on nuclear tests.

The release comes after US Defenсe Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley said that the United States believes Russia may not be adhering to the nuclear testing moratorium outlined in the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

May 30, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

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