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A Look Back at Clapper’s Jan. 2017 ‘Assessment’ on Russia-gate

By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | January 8, 2019

The banner headline atop page one of The New York Times two years ago today, on January 7, 2017, set the tone for two years of Dick Cheney-like chicanery: “Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says.”

Under a edia drumbeat of anti-Russian hysteria, credulous Americans were led to believe that Donald Trump owed his election victory to the president of Russia, and that Trump, according to the Times, “colluded” in Putin’s “interference … to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.”

Hard evidence supporting the media and political rhetoric has been as elusive as proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002-2003. This time, though, an alarming increase in the possibility of war with nuclear-armed Russia has ensued — whether by design, hubris, or rank stupidity. The possible consequences for the world are even more dire than 16 years of war and destruction in the Middle East.

If It Walks Like a Canard…

The CIA-friendly New York Times two years ago led the media quacking in a campaign that wobbled like a duck, canard in French.

A glance at the title of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which was not endorsed by the whole community) — “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” — would suffice to show that the widely respected and independently-minded State Department intelligence bureau should have been included. State intelligence had demurred on several points made in the Oct. 2002 Estimate on Iraq, and even insisted on including a footnote of dissent. James Clapper, then director of national intelligence who put together the ICA, knew that all too well. So he evidently thought it would be better not to involve troublesome dissenters, or even inform them what was afoot.

Similarly, the Defense Intelligence Agency should have been included, particularly since it has considerable expertise on the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence agency, which has been blamed for Russian hacking of the DNC emails. But DIA, too, has an independent streak and, in fact, is capable of reaching judgments Clapper would reject as anathema. Just one year before Clapper decided to do the rump “Intelligence Community Assessment,” DIA had formally blessed the following heterodox idea in its “December 2015 National Security Strategy”:

“The Kremlin is convinced the United States is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further reinforced by the events in Ukraine. Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts.”

Any further questions as to why the Defense Intelligence Agency was kept away from the ICA drafting table?

Handpicked Analysts

With help from the Times and other mainstream media, Clapper, mostly by his silence, was able to foster the charade that the ICA was actually a bonafide product of the entire intelligence community for as long as he could get away with it. After four months it came time to fess up that the ICA had not been prepared, as Secretary Clinton and the media kept claiming, by “all 17 intelligence agencies.”

In fact, Clapper went one better, proudly asserting — with striking naiveté — that the ICA writers were “handpicked analysts” from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He may have thought that this would enhance the ICA’s credibility. It is a no-brainer, however, that when you want handpicked answers, you better handpick the analysts. And so he did.

Why is no one interested in the identities of the handpicked analysts and the hand-pickers? After all, we have the names of the chief analysts/managers responsible for the fraudulent NIE of October 2002 that greased the skids for the war on Iraq. Listed in the NIE itself are the principal analyst Robert D. Walpole and his chief assistants Paul Pillar, Lawrence K. Gershwin and Maj. Gen. John R. Landry.

The Overlooked Disclaimer

Buried in an inside page of the Times‘ Jan. 7, 2017 report was a cautionary paragraph by reporter Scott Shane. It seems he had read the ICA all the way through, and had taken due note of the derriere-protecting caveats included in the strangely cobbled together report. Shane had to wade through nine pages of drivel about “Russia’s Propaganda Efforts” to reach Annex B with its curious disclaimer:

“Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents. … High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.”

Small wonder, then, that Shane noted: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. This a significant omission.”

Since then, Shane has evidently realized what side his bread is buttered on and has joined the ranks of Russia-gate aficionados. Decades ago, he did some good reporting on such issues, so it was sad to see him decide to blend in with the likes of David Sanger and promote the NYT official Russia-gate narrative. An embarrassing feature, “The Plot to Subvert an Election: Unraveling the Russia Story So Far,” that Shane wrote with NYT colleague Mark Mazzetti in September, is full of gaping holes, picked apart in two pieces by Consortium News.

Shades of WMD

Sanger is one of the intelligence community’s favorite go-to journalists. He was second only to the disgraced Judith Miller in promoting the canard of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. For example, in a July 29, 2002 article, “U.S. Exploring Baghdad Strike As Iraq Option,” co-written by Sanger and Thom Shanker, the existence of WMD in Iraq was stated as flat fact no fewer than seven times.

The Sanger/Shanker article appeared just a week after then-CIA Director George Tenet confided to his British counterpart that President George W. Bush had decided “to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” At that critical juncture, Clapper was in charge of the analysis of satellite imagery and hid the fact that the number of confirmed WMD sites in Iraq was zero.

Despite that fact and that his “assessment” has never been proven, Clapper continues to receive praise.

During a “briefing” I attended at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington several weeks ago, Clapper displayed master circular reasoning, saying in effect, that the assessment had to be correct because that’s what he and other intelligence directors told President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump.

I got a chance to question him at the event. His disingenuous answers brought a painful flashback to one of the most shameful episodes in the annals of U.S. intelligence analysis.

Ray McGovern: My name is Ray McGovern. Thanks for this book; it’s very interesting [Ray holds up his copy of Clapper’s memoir]. I’m part of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.  I’d like to refer to the Russia problem, but first there’s an analogy that I see here.  You were in charge of imagery analysis before Iraq.

James Clapper: Yes.

RM: You confess [in the book] to having been shocked that no weapons of mass destruction were found.  And then, to your credit, you admit, as you say here [quotes from the book], “the blame is due to intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help [the administration make war on Iraq] that we found what wasn’t really there.”

Now fast forward to two years ago.  Your superiors were hell bent on finding ways to blame Trump’s victory on the Russians.  Do you think that your efforts were guilty of the same sin here?  Do you think that you found a lot of things that weren’t really there?  Because that’s what our conclusion is, especially from the technical end.  There was no hacking of the DNC; it was leaked, and you know that because you talked to NSA.

JC: Well, I have talked with NSA a lot, and I also know what we briefed to then-President Elect Trump on the 6th of January.  And in my mind, uh, I spent a lot of time in the SIGINT [signals intelligence] business, the forensic evidence was overwhelming about what the Russians had done.  There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever.  The Intelligence Community Assessment that we rendered that day, that was asked, tasked to us by President Obama — and uh — in early December, made no call whatsoever on whether, to what extent the Russians influenced the outcome of the election. Uh, the administration, uh, the team then, the President-Elect’s team, wanted to say that — that we said that the Russian interference had no impact whatsoever on the election.  And I attempted, we all did, to try to correct that misapprehension as they were writing a press release before we left the room.

However, as a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn’t have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election.

RM: That’s what the New York Times says.  But let me say this: we have two former Technical Directors from NSA in our movement here, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity; we also have forensics, okay?

Now the President himself, your President, President Obama said two days before he left town: The conclusions of the intelligence community — this is ten days after you briefed him — with respect to how WikiLeaks got the DNC emails are “inconclusive” end quote.  Now why would he say that if you had said it was conclusive?

JC: I can’t explain what he said or why.  But I can tell you we’re, we’re pretty sure we know, or knew at the time, how WikiLeaks got those emails.  I’m not going to go into the technical details about why we believe that.

RM: We are too [pretty sure we know]; and it was a leak onto a thumb drive — gotten to Julian Assange — really simple.  If you knew it, and the NSA has that information, you have a duty, you have a duty to confess to that, as well as to [Iraq].

JC: Confess to what?

RM: Confess to the fact that you’ve been distorting the evidence.

JC: I don’t confess to that.

RM: The Intelligence Community Assessment was without evidence.

JC: I do not confess to that. I simply do not agree with your conclusions.

William J. Burns (Carnegie President): Hey, Ray, I appreciate your question.  I didn’t want this to look like Jim Acosta in the White House grabbing microphones away.  Thank you for the questioning though.  Yes ma’am [Burns recognizes the next questioner].

The above exchange can be seen starting at 28:45 in this video.

Not Worth His Salt

Having supervised intelligence analysis, including chairing National Intelligence Estimates, for three-quarters of my 27-year career at CIA, my antennae are fine-tuned for canards. And so, at Carnegie, when Clapper focused on the rump analysis masquerading as an “Intelligence Community Assessment,” the scent of the duck came back strongly.

Intelligence analysts worth their salt give very close scrutiny to sources, their possible agendas, and their records for truthfulness. Clapper flunks on his own record, including his performance before the Iraq war — not to mention his giving sworn testimony to Congress that he had to admit was “clearly erroneous,” when documents released by Edward Snowden proved him a perjurer. At Carnegie, the questioner who followed me brought that up and asked, “How on earth did you keep your job, Sir?”

The next questioner, a former manager of State Department intelligence, posed another salient question: Why, he asked, was State Department intelligence excluded from the “Intelligence Community Assessment”?

Among the dubious reasons Clapper gave was the claim, “We only had a month, and so it wasn’t treated as a full-up National Intelligence Estimate where all 16 members of the intelligence community would pass judgment on it.” Clapper then tried to spread the blame around (“That was a deliberate decision that we made and that I agreed with”), but as director of national intelligence the decision was his.

Given the questioner’s experience in the State Department’s intelligence, he was painfully aware of how quickly a “full-up NIE” can be prepared. He knew all too well that the October 2002 NIE, “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” was ginned up in less than a month, when Cheney and Bush wanted to get Congress to vote for war on Iraq. (As head of imagery analysis, Clapper signed off on that meretricious estimate, even though he knew no WMD sites had been confirmed in Iraq.)

It’s in the Russians’ DNA

The criteria Clapper used to handpick his own assistants are not hard to divine. An Air Force general in the mold of Curtis LeMay, Clapper knows all about “the Russians.” And he does not like them, not one bit. During an interview with NBC on May 28, 2017, Clapper referred to “the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique.” And just before I questioned him at Carnegie, he muttered, “It’s in their DNA.”

Even those who may accept Clapper’s bizarre views about Russian genetics still lack credible proof that (as the ICA concludes “with high confidence”) Russia’s main military intelligence unit, the G.R.U., created a “persona” called Guccifer 2.0 to release the emails of the Democratic National Committee. When those disclosures received what was seen as insufficient attention, the G.R.U. “relayed material it acquired from the D.N.C. and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks,” the assessment said.

At Carnegie, Clapper cited “forensics.” But forensics from where? To his embarrassment, then-FBI Director James Comey, for reasons best known to him, chose not to do forensics on the “Russian hack” of the DNC computers, preferring to rely on a computer outfit of tawdry reputation hired by the DNC. Moreover, there is zero indication that the drafters of the ICA had any reliable forensics to work with.

In contrast, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, working with independent forensic investigators, examined metadata from a July 5, 2016 DNC intrusion that was alleged to be a “hack.” However, the metadata showed a transfer speed far exceeding the capacity of the Internet at the time. Actually, all the speed turned out to be precisely what a thumb drive could accommodate, indicating that what was involved was a copy onto an external storage device and not a hack — by Russia or anyone else.

WikiLeaks had obtained the DNC emails earlier. On June 12, 2016 Julian Assange announced he had “emails relating to Hillary Clinton.” NSA appears to lack any evidence that those emails — the embarrassing ones showing that the DNC cards were stacked against Bernie Sanders — were hacked.

Since NSA’s dragnet coverage scoops up everything on the Internet, NSA or its partners can, and do trace all hacks. In the absence of evidence that the DNC was hacked, all available factual evidence indicates that earlier in the spring of 2016, an external storage device like a thumb drive was used in copying the DNC emails given to WikiLeaks.

Additional investigation has proved Guccifer 2.0 to be an out-and-out fabrication — and a faulty basis for indictments.

A Gaping Gap

Clapper and the directors of the CIA, FBI, and NSA briefed President Obama on the ICA on Jan. 5, 2007, the day before they briefed President-elect Trump. At Carnegie, I asked Clapper to explain why President Obama still had serious doubts.  On Jan. 18, 2017, at his final press conference, Obama saw fit to use lawyerly language to cover his own derriere, saying: “The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.”

So we end up with “inconclusive conclusions” on that admittedly crucial point. In other words, U.S. intelligence does not know how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks. In the absence of any evidence from NSA (or from its foreign partners) of an Internet hack of the DNC emails the claim that “the Russians gave the DNC emails to WikiLeaks” rests on thin gruel. After all, these agencies collect everything that goes over the Internet.

Clapper answered: “I cannot explain what he [Obama] said or why. But I can tell you we’re, we’re pretty sure we know, or knew at the time, how WikiLeaks got those emails.”

Really?

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year CIA career he supervised intelligence analysis as Chief of Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, as editor/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief, as a member of the Production Review Staff, and as chair of National Intelligence Estimates. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

January 8, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

What Happened To the Billions Germany Gave Israel?

By Hafsa Kara-Mustapha | American Herald Tribune | January 8, 2019

The Holiday season as December is now referred to, is a time for parties, family gatherings, gift sharing and all the lovely things associated with the end of year festivities.

As the party season bids farewell and the cold weather intensifies it is also a time to reflect on those less fortunate.

In this context, charities work particularly hard to raise funds for the category of people they chose to support. Across social media, which have become major advertising platforms, appeals for funds are now a regular fixture on users’ feeds.

A recent request for donations that was of particular interest was one for money to help elderly Holocaust survivors in their twilight years.

The touching images of frail-looking men and woman are undoubtedly moving and force all those who see them feel much empathy towards a group of vulnerable people who suffered major trauma. Yet as the details of requested donations emerged it became increasingly odd to see these adverts. Of all the vulnerable groups existing today Holocaust survivors are, thanks to reparations paid by Germany, aptly provided for.

Claims Conference

In 1951, just under six years after the end of the Second World War, an organisation was set up called the Claims Conference.

It was tasked with obtaining reparations from Germany in order to compensate Jews for the persecution they suffered at the hands of the Nazi regime. It has to be noted however that Roma, gay, disabled as well as Communist activists who were equally interned in concentration camps, were not offered financial reparations.

Never the less the Claims Conference, set up by a group of Jewish organisations, has been working tirelessly to seek ‘a small measure of justice for Jewish victims’ as stated on its website.

This ‘small measure,’ obtained from Germany, has totalled over $70bn over the past seventy years.

This eye-watering sum that amounts to the state budgets of several countries would have been used to assist Jewish victims following the collapse of Hitler’s rule.

Yet the regular appeals for further donations, from ordinary citizens, implies that Holocaust survivors are still in need of monetary assistance, despite ongoing negotiations with the governments of Germany and Austria to pay further damages to Jewish claimants.

So the question is if Germany –and Austria – have released over $70bn to compensate survivors yet survivors are still in need of assistance, where has the money gone?

In July 2018 the German government agreed to release a further $88m towards care cost for the elderly.

Yet by Christmas adverts appealing for support for the very few survivors left were circulating again.

According to Claims Conference auditing is undertaken by KPMG however the body is regulated by the organisations that form it.

In 2013, a Holocaust survivor called Dora Roth made headlines when she accused the Israeli government of siphoning money destined for victims such as herself.

In April 2016 Haim Katz, Israel’s welfare minister, released a report revealing that more than 20,000 survivors in Israel had never received financial assistance owed to them.

The money, however, was regularly delivered by Germany yet it appears it never reached those it was intended for.

While Germany is only too happy to deliver the funds it is silent on who should be their recipients. According to one former German politician, now working in the financial sector, German politicians cannot stand up to Israel. ‘They know Israel will shout anti-Semitism at the first opportunity and are too terrified with being labelled with that fateful word.’ Asked if German media and politicians are not concerned about where these vast sums of money are ending, he added that issues relevant to compensation and Israel are taboo in his country.

‘Despite the economic downturn, we continue to be milked like cash cows, knowing full well it’s beyond reason to continue to demand such sums, yet there are no brave politicians or journalists willing to ask the questions.’

The Israeli minister who exposed the problem also went on to say that the problem is far worse than it appears as his report only took into account the surviving victims as of 2016 explaining that many more died throughout the years without ever seeing the money Israel claimed on their behalf.

Israel for its part blames the delay in delivering the funds to issues relating to heavy bureaucracy but many find that argument laughable.

Simon, an ex Israeli now living in Paris laughs at this excuse: ‘it didn’t take them 70 years to fleece the Germans but they –Israeli authorities- need 70 years to distribute the money.’

Disillusioned with Israel and its founding ideology Zionism, Simon is scathing towards his former country: ‘To get a permit to destroy a Palestinian home, they took 7 minutes, adding that his rejection of the country was a result of the abuse he received from other Israelis because he was a Holocaust survivor.’

We were viewed with absolute contempt by our ‘fellow countrymen’ (he insists on the brackets). They would tell us we were weak and went to the camps like ‘sheep to the slaughter’.

They would even make sheep noises when I used to walk in the streets when neighbours found out I was a survivor.

Confirming how unimportant Holocaust survivors are in Israeli society, and how oblivious the public is to their plight, Roth’s outburst had little consequences. From a European or American perspective, the fact survivors who have obtained so many reparations –unlike any other group in history- should be left to die in poverty should be major news and yet the money continues to be delivered while the victims continue to die destitute.

Ironically it is their legacy that is used as a justification for the existence of the nation that continues to neglect and despise them.

Who will dare ask the question?

Despite all the evidence of legitimate questions being raised, no one is raising them.

Where is this money ending up? Who is tasked with distributing and why is it failing?

Why should so much of it go through the Israeli government when not all survivors are or have remained in Israel?

Some claim Israel uses it as part of its nationwide budget others still say it is going to fund the military.

It is ironic that money made available to victims of war should now be invested in furthering wars by a country itself often accused of Nazi-like policies and routinely committing war crimes.

The spectre of being labelled an anti-Semite is, of course, a genuine concern no politician or journalist can ignore.

The mere fact of holding to account Israel over the possibility some are extorting funds would be spun as the ‘age-old accusations Jews love money.’

Anti-semitic ‘tropes’ as these bizarre semantic twists are called are casually thrown about wherever Israel or a Zionist person or organisation face questions.

If questions arise about misinformation from an Israeli source then claims of ‘Jews run the media’ will soon surface and bring the subject to a close.

Should claims of embezzlement surround an Israeli or Zionist body then its accusations of ‘Jews love money.’

Even high-profile cases of child abuse involving notable Zionist figures are inevitably spun as ‘Jews are using the blood of goyim children.’

For every Israeli/Zionist crime, there is its accompanying ‘anti-Semitism’ protection policy.

This time, however, victims of Israeli dishonesty are Jewish.

Who will speak up for them?

No one is the simple answer. According to varying reports, most if not all Holocaust victims will have died by 2025.

Israel is therefore just buying time. Meanwhile, now that Germany can no longer be ‘legally’ fleeced, Arab money is the next target for Israel’s appetite for easy ‘guilt money,’ as Simon puts it.

Israel- who expelled Palestinians from their ancestral homeland in 1948 yet refuses to compensate them- is going after Arab states in the hope of obtaining some $250bn in reparations. Though the overwhelming majority of Arab Jews left their Arab nations voluntarily and were never subjected to any treatment remotely equivalent to concentration camps, Israel, knowing it can manipulate international institutions, is launching its latest money-making scheme.

The only question that remains is who will be made to pay up next?

Gamblers are betting on Italy. After all the Roman Empire has a lot to answer for.

January 8, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , | Leave a comment

Media Reports on Skripals Life in UK After Incident Are False – Russian Embassy

Sputnik – January 8, 2019

LONDON – The recent report by the UK The Daily Telegraph newspaper on former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia’s life in the United Kingdom after the Salisbury murder attempt is yet another unsubstantiated falsification, the press officer of the Russian Embassy in the United Kingdom said on Tuesday.

“We are dealing with yet another media leak, unofficial and unverifiable. It provides no new facts on the Salisbury incident, let alone evidence. The circumstances of the incident remain as confusing as ever”, the press officer said, as quoted on the embassy’s official website.

The press officer specified that while the government source told The Daily Telegraph that the authorities knew “everything worth knowing,” in fact the investigation had not revealed any official information on where the Skripals went and what they did on the day of the attack, and the identification of the suspects, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, was based on “no evidence apart from them being filmed several hundred metres away from Mr Skripal’s house.”

“As regards the reports on the Skripals living in the South of England, on their changed appearance, on Yulia having been offered a job requiring Russian language skills, on her contacts with friends, etc., careful reading reveals that these are mere suggestions by people who claim to know the manner of work of British secret services in similar situations. This is speculation not deserving a serious comment,” the press officer went on to say.

He added that the UK government continued denying consular access to the Skripals, concealing their whereabouts, and refusing to coordinate with Russia on the investigation.

“This means that the Russian nationals, Sergei and Yulia Skripal, remain forcibly held by the UK, while true circumstances of the 4 March incident have still not been established. No amount of leaks and ‘expert’ comments can remedy this situation”, the press officer concluded.

The Daily Telegraph reported, citing unnamed sources from the UK government, that the Skripals were supposedly living in the south of the United Kingdom and undergoing medical treatment supervised by a narrow circle of experts. According to the newspaper, the UK authorities had established all the details of the Skripal case.

The Skripals were found slumped on a bench in a park in the UK town of Salisbury on 4 March, 2018, after being exposed to a suspected nerve agent that London called a Novichok type. Later, however, they recovered and left the hospital.The UK authorities accused Russia of being behind the murder attempt, but Moscow has repeatedly rejected the claim as baseless. London has left unanswered scores of Moscow’s diplomatic notes calling for cooperation in the investigation into the matter, claiming that it was Moscow who refused to cooperate.

READ MORE:

Shock Files: What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair?

January 8, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Prof on Skripal Case: Released Docs Pointing at Direction We Need to Investigate

Sputnik – January 8, 2019

On Friday evening the latest tranche of documents from the Integrity Initiative was released, exposing more information about the UK’s operation to combat so-called Russian disinformation. Sputnik has spoken to Professor David Miller, from the University of Bristol and asked him what he made of the latest information.

Sputnik: Why is it there has been no real coverage of the Integrity Initiative in the mainstream media?

Professor David Miller: Well, there’s a good question. Many of the people who would write about these things in the mainstream media appear in the documents themselves. Whether they are formally involved, to use the phrase of Deborah Haynes of Sky, formally of The Times, who says what she has ‘no formal or informal relationship with the Institute for Statecraft’ — well, you know, they are involved in some way or another, they have had contacts with, she has had contacts with, Carol Cadwalladr has had contacts with; people from the BBC have had contacts with the Integrity Initiative, and so they are conflicted. Whether they have had a formal involvement, or their involvement is as the documents suggest, is by the by, they are conflicted and they have failed to distance themselves from this programme of activities.

Sputnik: With regard to the Skripal case are there now serious questions for the government to answer when it comes to that?

Professor David Miller: Well, we’ve seen many more documents on the Skripal case in here and indeed some more on Syria, the alleged chemical attack on Douma. And of course the content of these documents is rather fanciful; there’s a large report about social media and media coverage of the Skripal case which fancifully refers to a whole load of people on twitter as being Kremlin trolls which they’re not. So I mean it’s very interesting to see all that and there are questions which arise about the extent to which the British government has been engaged in managing and manipulating media coverage of the Skripal affair.

The questions go deeper, there is a suggestion that there was a meeting called by the Integrity Initiative which involved Pablo Miller, the MI6 operative who was Sergei Skripal’s handler. And that raises very big questions indeed not least because the meeting is alleged to have been a meeting with the White Helmets — an organisation which has been intensely debated in relation to the Syrian conflict and which has been implicated to some extent at least in the fabrication of chemical weapons attack stories in Syria. So it raises all sorts of questions which the government has not begun to explore or explain and which most media has not begun to explore or explain.

Sputnik: There was a reference there, in the documents which suggested that if an incident is not to occur to provoke a tougher reaction against Russia then we need to be taking a tougher stance; and that in the context of the Skripal poisoning is quite sinister sounding isn’t it?

Professor David Miller: It is quite sinister sounding, if you look at the documents and the discussions of alleged propaganda lines on Skripal, which are no more than people doubting British government’s accounts — which is the first thing one should be doing in these circumstances — there is no acknowledgement in there of any more than the British government’s account — which is obviously correct and everyone else is wrong!

Some of the hints of this document are hints which raise questions about the British government’s role in the Skripal affair and those questions will not go away. It really very badly undermines the official British position that this was something done by the Russians — what was the official version? ‘Of a type produced by Russia’. That kind of propaganda is an indication that there is something not right in the Skripal story and these documents are pointing us in a certain direction when we need much more investigation of what happened in the Skripal case than we previously did.

January 8, 2019 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

‘Apparent bias’: Alex Salmond wins court battle over sexual harassment probe

RT | January 8, 2019

The Scottish government mishandled the probe of ex-SNP chief Alex Salmond over sexual misconduct allegations, a court has ruled. The officials admitted that the investigation was “procedurally flawed” and apologized.

The decision to launch a probe against former First Minister of Scotland and two-time SNP leader Alex Salmond was “procedurally unfair” and marred with “apparent bias,” Judge Lord Pentland said on Tuesday. The court also ordered the government to pay Salmond’s legal fees.

The investigation against Scotland’s political heavyweight was initiated last year, following allegations of sexual misconduct brought up by two of his former staffers. The alleged incidents supposedly occurred back in 2013 at the first minister’s official residence in Edinburgh.

Alex Salmond denied any wrongdoing, calling the claims “patently ridiculous.” He did, however, choose to temporarily leave the SNP pending the investigation.

The politician also criticized the investigation as “unjust” and complained that he wasn’t allowed to see any evidence and defend himself properly.

During Tuesday’s hearing, government officials admitted that they violated their own guidelines in handling the case. To investigate the accusation made against Salmond, they appointed a person who had prior contacts with the alleged victims. That “failure” rendered the probe “flawed,” Roddy Dunlop, lawyer representing the government, told the court.

Permanent secretary to the Scottish government, Leslie Evans, apologized “to all involved” for the violations that took place during the probe. She argued that there was no proof that the investigating officer was acting biased but admitted that it didn’t matter due to the breach of guidelines.

Evans noted that the government may launch a new investigation into the complaints against Salmond once a separate police probe on the same issue is over.

The former SNP chief welcomed the verdict. The government “unquestionably lacked candor” as the officials repeatedly failed to disclose crucial documents to the court, he said in a statement. The politician added that the evidence seen by the judge revealed an “obvious breach of the principles of fairness and natural justice.”

Alex Salmond served as Scotland’s first minister from 2007 to 2014. He was elected to lead the SNP from 1990 to 2000, and then again from 2004 to 2014. He currently hosts the Alex Salmond Show on RT.

January 8, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Spy Suspect’s Brother Confirms Whelan Has Four Citizenships

Sputnik – 05.01.2019

David Whelan confirmed to Sputnik that his brother Paul, detained in Russia on spy charges, has four citizenships. David also refused to disclose what little information they have about the friend of Paul’s that was getting married in Moscow.

Paul Whelan was detained during a “spy operation” in Moscow in late December on suspicion of espionage, according to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Whelan had allegedly gone to Moscow to attend a friend’s wedding.

“I’m aware that he has 4 citizenships,” David Whelan said on Friday. “And I do not have any plans to visit Russia, nor does my family,” he added.

The Irish and UK embassies in Russia have confirmed that Paul Whelan is a citizen of their respective countries. Global Affairs Canada told the local CBC broadcaster earlier this week it was aware that a Canadian national had been arrested in Russia.

US Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman visited Whelan and offered him assistance earlier this week, Andrea Kalan, the spokeswoman of the US embassy in Moscow told the RIA Novosti news agency.

Paul Whelan is currently employed as the director of global security with Michigan-based automotive components supplier BorgWarner. Whelan is also a former US marine. His service record, released by media, showed he had been convicted in 2008 on theft charges.

January 5, 2019 Posted by | Deception | | Leave a comment

‘Operation Iris’ & more: New documents tie Integrity Initiative to spin of Skripal affair

RT | January 4, 2019

Hackers who leaked documents from the Integrity Initiative, a shadowy outfit funded by the UK government, claim they show its connections to the March 2018 alleged poisoning attack in Salisbury and proposed actions against Russia.

The Integrity Initiative (II) was set up in 2015 by the equally shadowy “Institute for Statecraft,” according to the documents published online in November by hackers calling themselves a part of the Anonymous collective. While Anonymous has denied the group was behind the leak, the Institute confirmed the authenticity of the first batch of documents.

The hackers posted a fresh batch of documents purportedly from the Initiative and the Institute on Friday, hinting that both outfits had connections with Western media coverage of the March 2018 alleged poisoning of former Russian spy Sergey Skripal, and the actions against Russia taken subsequently by the UK government and its allies.

One of the documents is the confidential report by Harod Associates, a company hired by the Initiative to conduct “mainstream & social media analysis” of the Skripal scandal coverage. The entire undertaking was dubbed “Operation Iris.”

Among those who found themselves named “Russian trolls” and Kremlin agents in the report were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa and a gentleman from Kent who goes by Ian56 on Twitter.

Another document, dated March 11, 2018, contains a “Narrative” of the Skripal incident, blaming Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally and containing a number of recommended actions, such as boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany and block Russian access to SWIFT international banking system, but also to “ban RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK.”

Other suggestions include propaganda directed at British Muslims “to publicise what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion” (sic) and getting members of Parliament to publicize the “threat Russia poses.”

The document dump also contains the April 14, 2018 email from Andy Pryce, whom the hackers describe as “chief propaganda man” at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, containing the official government narrative of the Skripal affair and the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria. Pryce ends the email by recommending “good sources of further information” on alleged Russian propaganda, including the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, Bellingcat and Stopfake.

Documents obtained and published by the hackers also show connections between Skripal’s recruiter and neighbor Pablo Miller, the Institute for Statecraft, and the so-called rescue group White Helmets, created in militant-held areas of Syria by a former British official in 2013.

There are also several invoices from Dan Kaszeta of the Institute for Statecraft, for articles he wrote as supposedly a chemical weapons expert advancing the Institute’s narrative on both the Skripals and Syria.

The most intriguing, however, is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971’s Operation Foot. One of the actions by the UK, US and several other NATO countries in the wake of claims that Russia used a nerve agent against Skripal was a mass expulsion of Russian diplomats.

Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents written long before the Salisbury events call for arrests of RT and Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding, “Makes you think…”

Previously published documents have revealed the Initiative and the Institute as being involved in widespread propaganda operations targeting not only foreign countries and media outlets – as one might expect from someone doing the bidding of the Foreign Office – but also domestic political figures, such as Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

January 4, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

How the US Spent Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World: A Review

By Danny Haiphong | Black Agenda Report | January 2, 2019

The U.S. military state overthrows democratically-elected governments that it deems to be a threat to corporate interests.

Dan Kovalik is a labor and human rights lawyer, but most of all he is an anti-imperialist and an author of three books. Kovalik’s first two books tackled the specific US war drives against Russia and Iran. His third installment, The Plot to Control the World: How the US Spent Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World, addresses the broad scope of US election meddling abroad. The book provides much needed political and ideological life support to an anti-war movement in the U.S that has been rendered nearly invisible to the naked eye.

The Plot to Control the World is as detailed in its critique of U.S. imperialism as it is concise. In just over 160 pages, Kovalik manages to analyze the various ways that the U.S. political and military apparatus interferes in the affairs of nations abroad to achieve global hegemony. He wastes no time in exposing the devastating lie that is American exceptionalism, beginning appropriately with the U.S. imperialist occupations of Haiti and the Philippines at the end of the 19thcentury and beginning of the 20th. The U.S. would murder millions of Filipinos and send both nations into a spiral of violence, instability, and poverty that continues to this day. As Kovalik explains regarding Haiti, “While the specific, claimed justifications for [U.S.] intervention changed over time- e.g., opposing the end of slavery, enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, fighting Communism, fighting drugs, restoring law and order — the fact is that the interventions never stopped and the results for the Haitian people have been invariably disastrous.”

US expansionism has relied upon the ideology of American exceptionalism to silence criticism and weaken anti-war forces in the United States. American exceptionalism claims that the U.S. is a force for good in the world and completely justified in its wars of conquest draped in the cover of spreading “democracy and freedom” around the world. Kovalik challenges American exceptionalism by showing readers just how much damage that US expansionism and militarism has caused for nations and peoples in every region of the planet.Russia, Honduras, Guatemala, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Vietnam and many other nations have seen their societies devastated by U.S. “election meddling.” In Honduras, for example, a U.S.-backed coup of left-wing President Manuel Zelaya in 2009 made the nation one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist, indigenous person, or trade-union/environmental activist. Thousands of Hondurans have been displaced, disappeared, or assassinated since the coup.

Another important aspect of The Plot to Control the World is its exposure of U.S hypocrisy surrounding the subject of “election meddling.” Since the end of the 2016 Presidential elections, the U.S. military, political, and media branches of the imperialist state have accused Russia of virtually implanting Donald Trump into the Oval office. The U.S. public has been fed a steady dose of anti-Russia talking points in an apparent effort on the part of the elites to beat the drums of war with the nuclear-armed state. No evidence has been presented to prove the conspiracy, as a recent National Public Radio (NPR) analysis states plainly. However, there is plenty of evidence that the United States is the most depraved and dangerous “meddler” in the affairs of other nations that history has ever known.

Just ask the much-vaunted Russians. Kovalik devotes an entire chapter to the 1996 Presidential election in Russia that re-elected the wildly unpopular Boris Yeltsin. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 began an era of “shock therapy” in the newly erected Russian Federation, a euphemism for the wholesale theft and transfer of socialized wealth into the hands of oligarchs and multinational corporations. Millions would perish in Russia from an early death due to the sudden loss of healthcare, housing, jobs, and other basic services. In 1996, President Bill Clinton ensured that Yeltsin maintained his near total grip on state power in Russia by providing the Russian President with a team of U.S. political consultants and over a billion dollars’ worth of IMF monies directly to the campaign. U.S. political and monetary support allowed Yeltsin to rig the election in his favor despite his dwindling popularity. Kovalik shows that if anyone should worry about election meddling, it should be the people of Russia and not the US elites that control Washington.

The Plot to Control the World takes readers into the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the CIA’s coup of revolutionary Patrice Lumumba continues to haunt the resource rich nation in the form of endless US-backed genocide. It travels to Guatemala, where the CIA overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz led to a U.S.-backed slaughter of a quarter million Guatemalans under the auspices of several military dictatorships. Kovalik shows us that the election of the fascistic Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil was no aberration, as the U.S. was primarily responsible for the rise in fascism in Brazilthrough its direct role in placing the nation under the control of a military dictatorship in 1964. The military dictatorship predated the CIA’s ouster of Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973, which handed the once socialist state to Augusto Pinochet’s murderous and repressive leadership.

The entire skeleton of the U.S. military state is on full display in The Plot to Control the World. The U.S. military state utilizes an array of tools to overthrow democratically-elected governments that it deems to be a threat to corporate interests. These tools include the U.S. intelligence agencies, so-called Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) such as the National Endowment for Democracy, and the various branches of the military itself, to name a few. Regardless of the tools employed, the mission is always the same: to destabilize independent nations that refuses to bow down to the dictates of U.S. imperialism.Thus, while Nicaragua, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Vietnam may possess unique histories, their economic and political development has been shaped by the destructive interference of the United States.

Dan Kovalik is not likely to be reviewed in the New York Times or other corporate outlets. That’s because Kovalik unapologetically speaks out against U.S. empire and all that upholds it. In doing so, Kovalik’s The Plot to Control the World walks in the footsteps of anti-imperialists such as Michael Parenti and William Blum. Blum, a former State Department employee, spent his post-State Department life providing humanity with knowledge about how US imperialism operates on the global stage. The New York Times wasted no time in slandering Blum in their obituary . This showed the great lengths that the ruling elites will go to discredit, defame, and condemn critics of the military industrial complex and how important it is for those who oppose war let go of any expectation that the corporate media will cover Kovalik’s work or anyone else who speaks out against war.

With that said, one of the reasons that the left in the U.S. is so weak is because it has been numerically and politically isolated by the lies of the Empire. White supremacy is the biggest lie of all and is completely embedded in the ideology of American exceptionalism. Despite the ruthlessness of the austerity and incarceration regimes, many Americans continue to be convinced that the U.S. is the most exceptional nation in the world and do not balk when its military wages wars abroad at the expense of U.S. tax dollars and civilian lives. U.S. imperialism has made sure that Americans feel that they are special colonizers who see the victims of the U.S. military state as savages worthy of slaughter. The Plot to Control the World is based on a different premise: internationalism. The book links the struggle against US imperialism to the needs of the oppressed and working class living in the heart of empire, making it an essential read for those who are sick and tired of the prevailing narrative of American exceptionalism and want to be armed with knowledge that is essential toward changing it.

Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He and Roberto Sirvent are co-authors of the forthcoming book entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News- From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Skyhorse Publishing). He can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com

January 3, 2019 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression

By David Martin | DC Dave’s Column | December 28, 1999

Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government. When the government lacks an effective, fact-based defense, other techniques must be employed. The success of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press and a mere token opposition party.

  1. Dummy up. If it’s not reported, if it’s not news, it didn’t happen.
  2. Wax indignant. This is also known as the “How dare you?” gambit.
  3. Characterize the charges as “rumors” or, better yet, “wild rumors.” If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through “rumors.” (If they tend to believe the “rumors” it must be because they are simply “paranoid” or “hysterical.”)
  4. Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspects of the weakest charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up wild rumors (or plant false stories) and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the charges, real and fanciful alike.
  5. Call the skeptics names like “conspiracy theorist,” “nutcase,” “ranter,” “kook,” “crackpot,” and, of course, “rumor monger.” Be sure, too, to use heavily loaded verbs and adjectives when characterizing their charges and defending the “more reasonable” government and its defenders. You must then carefully avoid fair and open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned. For insurance, set up your own “skeptics” to shoot down.
  6. Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting strongly that they are not really interested in the truth but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money (compared to over-compensated adherents to the government line who, presumably, are not).
  7. Invoke authority. Here the controlled press and the sham opposition can be very useful.
  8. Dismiss the charges as “old news.”
  9. Come half-clean. This is also known as “confession and avoidance” or “taking the limited hangout route.” This way, you create the impression of candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively harmless, less-than-criminal “mistakes.” This stratagem often requires the embrace of a fall-back position quite different from the one originally taken. With effective damage control, the fall-back position need only be peddled by stooge skeptics to carefully limited markets.
  10. Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable.
  11. Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance. With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant. E.g. We have a completely free press. If evidence exists that the Vince Foster “suicide” note was forged, they would have reported it. They haven’t reported it so there is no such evidence. Another variation on this theme involves the likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a press who would report the leak.
  12. Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely. E.g. If Foster was murdered, who did it and why?
  13. Change the subject. This technique includes creating and/or publicizing distractions.
  14. Lightly report incriminating facts, and then make nothing of them. This is sometimes referred to as “bump and run” reporting.
  15. Baldly and brazenly lie. A favorite way of doing this is to attribute the “facts” furnished the public to a plausible-sounding, but anonymous, source.
  16. Expanding further on numbers 4 and 5, have your own stooges “expose” scandals and champion popular causes. Their job is to pre-empt real opponents and to play 99-yard football. A variation is to pay rich people for the job who will pretend to spend their own money.
  17. Flood the Internet with agents. This is the answer to the question, “What could possibly motivate a person to spend hour upon hour on Internet news groups defending the government and/or the press and harassing genuine critics?” Don’t the authorities have defenders enough in all the newspapers, magazines, radio, and television? One would think refusing to print critical letters and screening out serious callers or dumping them from radio talk shows would be control enough, but, obviously, it is not.

January 2, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

UK Government Refuses to Confirm if Israeli Ambassador’s Killers are Free

Sputnik – December 31, 2018

Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Shlomo Argov, was shot and mortally wounded in 1982, giving Menachem Begin’s government the excuse needed to invade Lebanon and drive the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) out of Beirut.

The UK National Archives has refused a request by a Sputnik reporter — made under the Freedom of Information Act — to reveal what happened to the terrorists who attacked Mr. Argov.

Mr. Argov, 52, was leaving a diplomatic function at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane, central London, when a gunmen approached him and fired two shots.

He was hit in the head, went into a coma for three months and later lost his sight.

Mr. Argov was transferred to Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem. His death in 2003 was blamed on the injuries he received that fateful night in London.

The gunman — Hussein Ahmad Ghassan Said — was shot and injured by a police officer who was acting as Mr. Argov’s bodyguard and he was arrested, along with two other men who fled the scene in a car, which was chased through the streets of London.

Said and the two other men, who had links to the Palestinian extremist Abu Nidal Organisation, were convicted of attempted murder and jailed for life in March 1983.

The file on Hussein Ahmad Ghassan Said, Marwan Al-Banna and Nauoff Nagib Meflehel al-Rosan at the National Archives is marked as “closed until 2077”.

The file covers the events of January 1982-December 1984.

Although the terrorists were from Abu Nidal Organisation and not Yasser Arafat’s PLO, the Israeli government retaliated by launching Operation Peace for Galilee, a full-scale invasion of Lebanon.

The Israelis occupied parts of Beirut and in September 1982 their Falangist allies massacred hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps while Israeli troops led by future prime minister Ariel Sharon turned a blind eye.

Israeli forces only left in 1985.

But what of the three men whose actions triggered these horrific events?

Said was a Jordanian national while al-Banna was Abu Nidal’s cousin and al-Rosan was a colonel in Saddam Hussain’s Iraqi intelligence agency.

The Abu Nidal Organization the PLO were enemies and ironically al-Banna and al-Rosan were also under orders to kill the PLO’s London representative, Nabil Ramlawi, but were arrested before they could get to him.

Said, al-Banna and al-Rosan were jailed for life at the Central Criminal Court in London and given minimum terms of between 30 and 35 years.

Two of them were reportedly later transferred to high security hospitals in the UK after becoming mentally ill.

In 1999 the respected Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published an article claiming MI5 had knew about the plot.

Lord Alton, a former Liberal MP, tried to raise the issue in the House of Lords but was rebuffed when Lord Williams of Mostyn, a Home Office minister, refused to comment “on the operations of the security and intelligence agencies.”

The Independent newspaper also claimed a convicted murderer, and Liverpool police informer, Ronald Waldron, said he had given a “hot” warning of the plot to kill Argov.

“I gave them everything, the group’s whole list of targets. I told them that they were planning to kill Argov. They knew that Argov was on the list, but they still left him with one bodyguard, completely exposed to the assassins’ bullets. That was really a crime,” Waldron told The Independent.

Abu Nidal died mysteriously in Baghdad in 2002.

In the intervening years Said, al-Banna and al-Rosan have vanished.

Are they still in jail? Are they in psychiatric hospitals? Have they been deported to Jordan or Iraq?

Or were they released and given political asylum in Britain?

A Sputnik reporter submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act in September.

But earlier this month this request was refused by the National Archives, after “consultation with the Ministry of Justice”.

They said they were unable to open the file because it was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act under various grounds.

“When these exemptions apply, we are required to consider whether it is in the public interest to release this information and we regret to say, after very careful consideration, we do not think there is a public interest in doing so. These exemptions apply because we considered that the factors in favour of release are outweighed by the factors against releasing this information into the public domain at this time,” said the National Archives in a statement to Sputnik.

So what were the exemptions?

Sections 23 and 24 both cover “national security”.

“It is in the public interest that our security bodies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that may assist those determined to undermine the security of the United Kingdom and its citizens,” said the National Archives statement.

So perhaps the Israeli press were right and MI5 were privy to the plot and failed to stop it, or even allowed it to happen?

Another exemption was “law enforcement”.

“The Metropolitan Police Service has a duty to protect life and property, which would not include the release of information that would prejudice law enforcement,” said the National Archives statement.

But Mr. Argov is dead and his three attackers were jailed after a trial at the Old Bailey so what information could possibly be released that would “prejudice law enforcement”?

Unless one or all of the three attackers had been a police informant and was perhaps released early in a secret deal?

Another exemption was “physical and mental health”.

The Ministry of Justice’s “duty to openness and transparency under the FOI Act must not be fulfilled in such a way as to undermine public confidence that the right to privacy of victim’s families will be upheld, and must be balanced against its parallel duties to protect them from further harm, shock and distress.”

Sputnik has tried to contact Mr. Argov’s son, Gideon, a venture capitalist who lives in Boston, but without success.

The final exemption is “third party personal data”.

“The exemption applies because the document contains the personal information of one or more identifiable individuals reasonably assumed still to be living. These individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy, which would not include the release of this information into the public domain during their lifetime,” says the National Archives statement.

But numerous files have been released by the National Archives containing personal information about individuals who are still alive.

December 31, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Burdensome’ transparency? US agency wants to ignore FOIA requests, in Americans’ best interests

RT | December 30, 2018

The US Department of the Interior seeks to reserve the right to ignore any FOIA requests from the public that it deems too “burdensome” to fulfil. The move amounts to censorship and is a crackdown on transparency, critics argue.

Claiming that it is overwhelmed by the volume of requests from journalist and the general public, the Department of the Interior proposed revising the regulations on processing records under the Freedom of Information Act.

“The bureau will not honor a request that requires an unreasonably burdensome search or requires the bureau to locate, review, redact, or arrange for inspection of a vast quantity of material,” the proposed new rule reads, adding that the modification is necessary to “best serve our customers.”

While the public has until January 28 to comment on the proposed amendment, the revision immediately raised red flags from government transparency activists and environmentalist groups in particular. Critics accused the department, which deals with the conservation and management of US national parks and natural resources, of trying to hide its cozy relationship with the energy industry.

“It reflects basically the fact that they are trying to run a secret government,” award-winning US journalist Dave Lindorff told RT. “What it is going to do is force people to have to go to court to get action on freedom of information requests which is totally antithetical to open government and what the FOIA was designed to do.”

The agency has seen a 30 percent increase in requests between 2016 and 2018, handling some 8,350 petitions last year, and partially blamed the FOIA’s “varying sets of operating procedures and insufficient levels of accountability” for its inefficiency in processing public requests.

“To best serve customers you hire staff,” Lindorff he added. “These are not classified things that people are looking for. They are open government things that should be freely available and quickly available.”

December 30, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | | Leave a comment

Iran arrests corrupt evangelists in Alborz Province

Press TV – December 30, 2018

Iranian authorities have arrested four members of a Zionist group engaging in corrupt evangelism and promotion of a falsified version of Christianity in the province of Alborz.

“These people were in systematic contact with elements based outside the country, and spread corrupt Christian beliefs and ideas,” Tasnim news agency reported on Saturday.

The agency said the Christian faithful in Alborz had officially protested against the propagation of the falsified Christian cultism throughout the province.

The arrests came following the detention of five members of the group in the province on Wednesday.

According to Tasnim, they engaged in misleading the people of faith, including Muslims, by setting up cults and home churches.

Zionists and evangelical extremists have historically found good friends in each other as they have targeted practicing Jews and Christians.

Describing the bad influence of Zionism on Judaism, a US-based rabbi told Press TV in late October that Zionists had “hijacked the identity” of Jews in favor of their goals.

Rabbi Dovid Weiss said they were pushing ahead with their policy of grabbing Palestinian properties “in the name of the Jewish people and the Jewish religion.”

According to the Islamic constitution of Iran, churches, synagogues and temples of divine religions are officially recognized and are free to operate and serve their congregations.

Iran has the biggest Jewish population of any country in the Middle East outside Israel and one of the biggest Christian communities in the region.

They have lived side by side with other Iranians for millennia and freely practiced their religions.

Iran’s Armenians and Assyro-Chaldeans, who practice Christianity, as well as its Jews and Zoroastrians are each represented by their lawmakers in the parliament.

December 30, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , | Leave a comment

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