NewsGuard: A Neoconservative Contrivance Which Promotes an Establishment View
By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | January 28, 2019
There’s a new thought policeman in town. He calls himself NewsGuard and he promises to restore “Trust and Accountability” to what one reads online. His website elaborates that “NewsGuard uses journalism to fight false news, misinformation, and disinformation. Our trained analysts, who are experienced journalists, research online news brands to help readers and viewers know which ones are trying to do legitimate journalism—and which are not… Our Green-Red ratings signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”
One might well stop reading immediately after running into “our trained analysts” with all that implies, but that would deny the greater pleasure derived from considering news-sites that have “… a hidden agenda or knowingly [publish] falsehoods or propaganda.” Excuse me, but hidden agendas, lies and propaganda are what the mainstream media is all about, note particularly the recent feeding frenzy over the Covington school incident at the Lincoln Memorial. Catholic racist white boys vs. elderly Native American war hero was how the story was framed all over the mainstream media before it became clear that the entire chosen narrative was upside down. Only a couple of news outlets bothered to apologize when the truth became known.
NewsGuard claims to have a staff of 50 that evaluates 2,000 websites in something like real time. How exactly it does that is not clear, but The New York Times repeats company claims that “the sites it rates account for 96% of online news and information engagement in the U.S.” NewsGuard also told The Times that it intends to quadruple its vetting of sites and seeks to make its coverage “ubiquitous.”
Make no mistake, NewsGuard is a neoconservative contrivance which promotes an establishment view of what is true and what is false. Its co-founder Gordon Crovitz is an ex-editor of The Wall Street Journal, who has enthused over the project, saying that it is “a milestone in the fight to bring consumers the information they need to counter false information, misinformation and disinformation online.” Crovitz has also been associated with the leading neocon foundation The American Enterprise Institute while the NewsGuard advisory board includes Tom Ridge, who was head of the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, and Michael Hayden, who directed both the CIA and NSA. It is as government-establishment in orientation as it is possible to be.
In a sense seeking to establish “accuracy” in news reporting is nothing new as the social media, to include Facebook and Twitter, have had that objective for some time, but NewsGuard defines itself as having as its target the screening of the entire media in a politically impartial fashion, as “an information resource.” And the real danger is that it will soon be appearing on your computer or phone whether you want it there or not. It is already installed on local library computers in Hawaii and Ohio and is working with university and even high school libraries to include its software on all public computers. Worse still, NewsGuard is in partnership with Microsoft as part of the latter’s Defending Democracy Program. Microsoft currently has NewsGuard on its Edge browser and it intends to install the tool on its Microsoft 10 operating system as a built-in feature. Microsoft 10 is the standard operating system on nearly all computers sold in the United States.
When you go to a news site NewsGuard has a little shield that pops up in the corner of your screen that will tell you whether that site is a reliable source or not. A green tag displays for approved and red for not compliant. Similarly, if you do a search the responses that come up will feature a green or red shield as part of the results. The site for NBC news shows green, approved, with the heading “this website generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” It then uses what it calls a “nutrition label” to break down the nine specific areas that were assessed, each of which also receives and individual green check for NBC. Under “Credibility” appears “Does not repeatedly publish false content; Gathers and presents information responsibly; Regularly corrects or clarifies errors; Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly; and Avoids deceptive headlines.” Under “Accountability” appears “Website discloses ownership and financing; Clearly labels advertising; Reveals who’s in charge including any possible conflict of interest; and The site provides names of any content creators along with either contact or biographical information.”
The first thing one might observe about the system is that it is designed to favor large, well-funded establishment news sources that are staffed to go through the motions of fact checks and corrections. All of the major news networks are approved, including Fox, MSNBC and CNN, all of which editorialize heavily, almost constantly, in their news coverage. Voice of America, which is a U.S. government propaganda instrument by design, also is approved. NewsGuard also has approved all major newspapers to include The New York Times, which frequently gets the story wrong, and The Washington Post, where news stories are nearly indistinguishable from editorials through the use of evocative headlines and slanted narrative. All the U.S. media currently lead off, for example, with stories about Russia that include the assertion that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 election, a claim that has yet to be confirmed through actual evidence.
Russian media operating in the U.S. including RT America and Sputnik get red ratings with a warning “Proceed with caution: this website fails to basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” RT is apparently guilty of “repeatedly publishing false content,” “not gather[ing] and publish[ing] information responsibly,” “not handl[ing] the difference between news and opinion responsibly” and “not provid[ing] the names of creators.” Al-Jazeera, another news service that often criticizes the United States and its governmental policies also is rated red, suggesting that the true criterion for rejection by NewsGuard is one’s relationship to the official establishment and globalist/interventionist line being promoted by the United States.
A glaring example of NewsGuard’s political bias relates to BuzzFeed, which is an approved site. The Washington Post reported recently how a BuzzFeed story about Michael Cohen and President Trump claimed that the president had directed his lawyer to lie to Congress regarding a proposed office tower project in Moscow, which would have been both a crime and impeachable. A day later Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office intervened and described the story as untrue. The New York Times ran the first story on page one but the retraction that followed appeared on page 11.
And it was not the first major bit of fake news for BuzzFeed. The same two journalists had previously reported that Russia had financed the 2016 election.
CNN, another NewsGuard green authority, inevitably bemoaned possible consequences arising from the Cohen-Trump story by complaining that it would be used to justify “bad stereotypes about the news media,” had its own Russiagate misstep when it falsely claimed that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks’ DNC emails before their 2016 publication.
The BBC, yet another reliable source approved by NewsGuard, reported back in September that the U.S. government had evidence that the Syrian “regime” was continuing to develop chemical weapons. It added an assessment from the completely befuddled U.S. envoy for Syria James Jeffrey that “President Assad had ‘no future as a ruler’ in Syria… Right now [the Syrian government] is a cadaver sitting in rubble with just half the territory of Syria under regime control on a good day.”
The fact is that Jeffrey was completely wrong about developments in Syria, where the government had been extremely successful in re-asserting control over nearly all of the country, while the claims of chemical weapons use have been rebutted many times, including by actual witnesses and journalists on the ground during the alleged attack at Douma in April.
Reuters news agency, yet another NewsGuard green light, is also into the game. In November 2013 it published an article, part of a series, entitled “Khamenei controls massive financial empire based on property seizures,” which claimed that an Iranian government charitable foundation called Setad (also known as EIKO) actually exists to take control of property for the use of the government’s religious leadership.
A subsequent news report that appeared in January in the alternative media revealed that the investigative journalists who wrote the story did so from Dubai, London and New York and never visited the properties they identified, in most cases completely misrepresenting what could be seen on the ground.
Robert Fontina at Counterpunch has also rejected the depiction of Setad as anything but a charitable foundation. The truth is that Setad engages in major social projects, including rural poverty alleviation, empowering women, home and school building, and provision of healthcare. Fontina observes that American sanctions against it and similar entities hit ordinary Iranians’ lives by producing food insecurity while also restricting the supplies of needed medications. Ahmad Noroozi of the Barakat Foundation claims that numerous Iranians have already been affected by U.S.-initiated sanctions directed against his country, restricting access to cancer treatments and other pharmaceuticals.
So who gets the endorsement from NewsGuard? Those who toe the line on U.S. policy and the establishment globalist/interventionist agenda. It would be interesting to know what NewsGuard’s staff of analysts is really looking for when it researches a site or media outlet. As the examples cited above demonstrate, NewsGuard has nothing to do with taking pains to report the news accurately, nor is there any evidence of real accountability. It is all about who pays the bills and who is in charge. They give the orders and one either falls in line or goes out the door. That is the reality of today’s mainstream media.
Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain.
IRmep Lawsuit: US nuclear “policy substitution” for Israel undermines NPT, AECA and bilks US taxpayers
By Ryan Dawson | ANTI neocon Report | January 26, 2019
On January 17, IRmep filed a 59-page brief (PDF HTML) in a lawsuit demanding release of a series of secret presidential letters promising not to force Israel to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) or publicly discuss Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
The brief contextualizes a formerly top-secret 1969 cross-agency study about what U.S. policy toward Israel’s nuclear weapons should be. Unanimous consensus between the Departments of Defense, State and intelligence community was that Israel should be compelled to sign the NPT in order to be allowed to purchase conventional U.S. military weapons. Government agencies correctly believed that if Israel was allowed to possess nuclear weapons there would never be peace in the Middle East. National security adviser Henry Kissinger also grudgingly revealed intelligence in the summary that Israelis had stolen U.S. government nuclear material to build their arsenal atomic weapons. (1969 NSC papers on the Israeli nuclear weapons program filed as Exhibit A PDF)
Going against the consensus advice, on September 26, 1969, President Nixon adopted the Israeli policy of “ambiguity” (never confirming or denying Israel’s nuclear weapons program) in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. US presidents through Donald Trump have continued the Israeli “ambiguity” policy in a series of letters written under intense lobbying by the Israeli government.
According to the IRmep legal filing, this policy has perpetuated a $222.8 billion dollar fraud against U.S. taxpayers through non-enforcement of Arms Export Control Act bans on U.S. foreign aid—absent specific waivers—to known foreign nuclear powers that have not signed the NPT. The IRmep filing also debunks a series of assertions and disinformation filed in an affidavit by the National Security Council
On January 18, 2019 the Department of Justice filed a motion to indefinitely stop the lawsuit from proceeding until the end of the government shutdown, citing lack of funds to mount a legal defense. (PDF)
Listen to a discussion about next steps for this critical IRmep litigation and our other lawsuits on the Scott Horton Show (MP3).
More Child Exploitation as the Globalist Climate Project Creates its very own Bana Persona
By Barbara McKenzie | December 15, 2018
People who followed with awful fascination the Bana account, designed to facilitate the destruction of Syria, will have a sense of deja vu at the arrival on the ‘climate’ scene of another shocking example of cynical child exploitation and manipulation: that of Swedish girl Greta Thunberg.
The Bana Alabed twitter account tweeted ostensibly from Aleppo in the months leading up to its liberation from terrorist forces. Her task was to claim war crimes on the part of “Assad” and Russia and demand action on Syria from world leaders, WIII if necessary, but at least a Libya-style “no-fly-zone”.
From the age of seven Bana Alabed has been shamelessly exploited by the world’s media, forced to dissemble, to take part in bogus interviews where she clearly had no idea of what she was saying, and to pose with a series of mature men from terrorists to Erdogan to UNICEF’s Justin Forsyth. Although she became a citizen of Turkey, there is no evidence that Bana has ever been to school in Turkey, or given the opportunity to learn the Turkish language,. Instead, she has been given the star treatment, appearing at conferences and flying all over the world (The Crucifixion of Bana Alabed). At the same time her role as a puppet exposes her to eternal ridicule.
We are now being treated to another gruesome spectacle of child abuse, the creation of the Greta Thunberg persona. At 15 Greta is older than Bana, but is self-described as suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, a fact which if anything appears to make the exploitation more acceptable in the eyes of the mainstream and ‘alternative’ media). Bana has been a media star from the age of seven – all the signs indicate that normal life is over for Greta Thunberg too. (For further information on Greta, she now has her own Wikipedia page, in eight languages.)
Greta Thunberg’s function is not to call for destruction, but on the contrary, to warn of impending doom for the planet if we do not do something about CO2 – presumably something which gives more power to the United Nations and helps pave the way for global government. She first hit the headlines with a call to school children to strike to save the climate.
Being both older and a citizen of Sweden, many of the flaws in the Bana accounts are not obvious with Greta. When her account opened Bana’s spoken English was non-existent, and so the contrast between the speech in her videos and the perfectly idiomatic English of her tweets was positively embarrassing. In the case of Greta, however, one could argue that a well-educated Swedish girl might just have the immaculate English of her speeches. Furthermore, the completely passionless delivery of her claims of ‘climate breakdown’ and fast-approaching ‘extinction’ can be put down to her Asperger’s Syndrome.
As with the Bana account, but even more so, Greta’s social media accounts are completely focused on the task in hand (creating ‘climate panic’ in defiance of the facts), and certainly nothing like what might be expected from a 15 year-old, Aspergers or no Aspergers. The Facebook account is series of self-promotional posts with no interraction with comments. The list of people that Greta follows on twitter parallels in an eerie fashion those favoured by Bana Aalbed: world leaders and major political figures such as Antonio Guterres and Bernie Sanders, climate and environment accounts like Soros-funded Greenpeace and WWF (i.e. all supporting the UN’s climate/world government project), like-minded celebrities such as Michael Moore and Ricky Gervais, and like-minded media such as the Guardian.
Bana was never more than media and political spin, promoted by the likes of the New York Times and the BBC, as well of course by the United Nations, but without any mass following. Although she bought up thousands of twitter followers, the majority of comments on her tweets came either from critics or from obvious trolls or bots with a handful of followers. At the very least the same thing will happen with Greta, however the plan is more ambitious. There are clearly genuine hopes of galvanising the world’s youth in her support.
Greta works in tandem with Extinction Rebellion (XR), which appears to be the climate cult’s Antifa, promoting civil disobedience in order to force action on the ‘climate emergency’ (see Frances Leader, From Occupy to Extinction Rebellion: Exposing the Common Purpose).
Within a few short months Greta’s stature was such that she was invited to address the UN’s Climate Change Conference at Katowice, making her plea for ‘climate justice’.
Extinction Rebellion and Greta are both heavily promoted by media specialising in climate catastrophism, from the Guardian’s George Monbiot
to ‘independent analysts’ Media Lens.
Greta was motivated, it seems, by a heatwave in Sweden, due of course to “climate change” -never mind the fact that Swedish high temperature records go back many decades, still unbroken by July 2018, which is hardly consistent with runaway global warming whatever may have happened later that summer.
Greta’s very first tweet back in June 2018 was to post an article (in English of course) which warned that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.
For the first time in 33 million years, it seems, we are almost at a point where there is no ice at either pole. ‘The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,[…] with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years’.
This is obviously claptrap, the Arctic was never anywhere melting away, and latest reports indicate that the poles are putting on ice. The earth has not returned to the temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period when Greenland was colonised – how can we be approaching temperatures not seen in 33 million years?
Being both older and a citizen of Sweden, many of the flaws in the Bana accounts are not obvious with Greta. When her account opened Bana’s spoken English was non-existent, and so the contrast between the speech in her videos and the perfectly idiomatic English of her tweets was positively embarrassing. In the case of Greta, however, one could argue that a well-educated Swedish girl might just have the immaculate English of her speeches. Furthermore, the completely passionless delivery can be put down to her Asperger’s Syndrome.
As with the Bana account, Greta’s social media accounts are completely focused on the task in hand (creating ‘climate panic’ in defiance of the facts), and certainly nothing like what might be expected from a 15 year-old, Aspergers or no Aspergers. The list of people that Greta follows on twitter parallels in an eerie fashion those favoured by Bana: world leaders and major political figures such as Antonio Guterres and Bernie Sanders, climate and environment accounts like Soros-funded Greenpeace and WWF (i.e. all supporting the UN’s climate/world government project), like-minded celebrities such as Michael Moore and Ricky Gervais, and like-minded media such as the Guardian.
As with the Bana account, there is growing concern at the unashamed exploitation of Greta Thunberg:
The spectacle of the globalist media using a young girl in order to panic the world into giving more power to the United Nations is both bizarre and horrifying.
Thousands of the world’s scientists (see here and here) have called climate alarmism a hoax. However, ludicrous as it may seem, we are expected to ignore the facts about geological history, Co2 and global climate, and to follow the lead of a 15 year old who parrots arrant nonsense embedded in unending cliché, on the say-so of the likes of George Monbiot and Media Lens, the very people who have themselves been parroting the same nonsense for years.
And as with Bana Alabed, the media serving the globalist agenda have absolutely no qualms about the callous exploitation and manipulation of a child in order to further the goal of world government.
See also:
Jamie Spry, Global Warming Is The Greatest And Most Successful Pseudoscientific Fraud In History
Windows on the World have produced a series of articles and videos on Extinction Rebellion, see Globalist Fake Revolution
A large number of people have pointed out the function of the climate scare is actually to scare the world’s populace into accepting an ever increasing role for the United Nations, and eventually global government by the Club of Rome elite that control the corrupt United Nations bureaucracy. See for example Agenda 21: The Plan for a Global Fascist Dictatorship. or Maurice Newman, The Corrupted UN Must Not Be Allowed to Lecture Us.
The Vultures of Caracas
By Craig Murray | January 26, 2019
We are frequently told that people in Venezuela have no food, clothing or toilet paper, and that popular discontent with the left wing government is driven by real hunger. There are elements of truth in this story, though the causes of economic dislocation are far more complex than the media would have us believe.
But I ask you to look at this photo of supporters of CIA poster-boy, the West’s puppet unelected “President” Juan Guaido, taken at a Guaido rally in Caracas two days ago and published yesterday in security services house journal The Guardian. Please take a really close look at the photo. Blow it up as big as you can. Scan individual people in the crowd, one by one.
These are not the poor and most certainly not the starving. As it chances I have a great deal of life experience working amongst seriously deprived, hungry and despairing people. I know the gaunt face of want and the desperate glance of need. Look at these Guaido supporters, one by one by one. This designer spectacled, well-coiffed, elegantly dressed, sleekly jowled group does not know hunger. This group does not know want. This is a proper right wing gathering, a gathering of the nicely off section of society. This is a group of those who have corruptly been siphoning Venezuela’s great wealth for decades and who want to make sure the gravy train flows properly in their direction again. It is, in short, a group of exactly the kind of people you would expect to support a CIA coup.
Those manicured hands raised in the air will never throw rocks, or get involved in violence unless against a peasant strapped to a chair for them. It is not this crowd which will suffer as public disorder is manipulated and directed by the CIA. These wealthy ones are immune, just as Davos serves as nothing but an annual reminder of how very poorly God aims avalanches.
There is real suffering in Venezuela. The CIA is working hard to stoke violence, and the genuine poor will soon start to die, both in those egged on to riot and in the security services. But do not get taken in by the complete nonsense that this is a popular, democratic revolution. It is not. It is yet another barefaced CIA regime change coup.
UPDATE Such wisdom as this blog finds is often crowd-source, and with thanks to a commenter below here is some useful information from Jill Stein.
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Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, Craig Murray’s blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the articles, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions to keep Craig going are gratefully received.
US bid to create crisis in Iran-IAEA ties ‘falling flat’: Report
Press TV – January 26, 2019
The US has failed to create a crisis in Iran’s cooperation with the UN atomic agency which has repeatedly confirmed the peaceful nature of the country’s nuclear program, Bloomberg reports.
Bloomberg said the US was pushing to open “a special investigation” into Iran’s past nuclear work, but “it’s not gaining traction among the international officials who can make it happen.”
The financial news provider said it had obtained documents and interviewed diplomats who attended a meeting between US officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna last week.
“American officials have been ratcheting up pressure at the International Atomic Energy Agency in recent weeks, threatening new sanctions and advocating for more aggressive inspections,” Bloomberg said.
“However, the efforts are falling flat,” it said, citing three diplomats who participated in the meeting.
It’s a rare pushback for the US at the IAEA … the episode illustrates the rising difficulty American officials face in convincing allies to follow the US on Iran,” it added.
During the private meeting held on January 20 and attended by 70 diplomats assigned to the IAEA, the participants heard what hawkish US national security adviser John Bolton called “substantial evidence” that Iran had lied to IAEA inspectors.
“There is a sense that the administration is frustrated that their campaign to renegotiate the deal isn’t working,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“What we see is the US maximum pressure campaign is heating up even further,” she added.
The diplomats said the fresh US allegation was based on an analysis by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Institute for Science and International Security, which used data supplied by Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has on several occasions drawn international ridicule for his allegations about Iran’s “secret” nuclear activities.
Last September, Netanyahu went to the UN to show pictures of an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons storage site, which turned out to be a carpet cleaning factory, with the IAEA ignoring the claim.
“There has been a concern that the US and some other countries want to precipitate an inspection crisis,” Geranmayeh said. “But there’s been resistance to this. The deal’s stakeholders feel they have a good grip on what’s happening in Iran.”
The US has been trying to coerce the Europeans into following its lead and withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which President Donald Trump renounced in May.
Since the US left, the deal’s remaining powers — China, France, Germany, Russia and the UK — have struggled to provide the sanctions relief promised when Iran agreed to nuclear caps.
The Europeans are currently trying to put a special purpose vehicle designed to protect companies from US sanctions into operation, but are facing Washington’s threats of retribution for any trade with Tehran.
Bloomberg cited the diplomats in Vienna as saying that “while they will continue engaging with the US, they want to avoid provoking a scenario that will escalate into a new crisis with Iran.”
One envoy said the US was forcing the IAEA to “rehash 20-year-old information” which had already been settled by the nuclear agency, warning that it could shut the doors to diplomacy and lead to “tragic consequences”.
BuzzFeed CEO Has History of Writing Fake News About Political, Business Rivals
Sputnik – 24.01.2019
In the years before founding BuzzFeed, CEO Jonah Peretti masqueraded as political opponents or business rivals, creating fake websites and spreading false statements and emails pretending to be them in order to defame them, one of his victims told Sputnik Wednesday.
Peretti, whose news outlet has recently gotten into hot water after publishing and sticking with a story refuted by the Office of the Special Counsel, also has a history of knowingly spreading false information about others.
John Lott, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a specialist on civilian use of firearms, told Sputnik Wednesday that Peretti impersonated him in 2003 in the interests of whipping up support for a hotly debated gun control law.
At the time, Peretti was the director of the R&D lab at Eyebeam, a New York-based not-for-profit art and technology center.
Peretti adopted the identity of Lott, who authored the book “More Guns, Less Crime,” purporting to have had a change of heart and sending out emails urging recipients that he’d had a change of heart and to oppose the “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” which lawmakers intended to use to protect gun makers from lawsuits. A website Peretti created, AskJohnLott.org, carried the same message, Lott explained in a Tuesday op-ed on Fox News.
“[Peretti] set up a website using my picture and appearing to be from me, and as I described in the op-ed, he sent out emails that appeared to be from me and he emailed back and forth with people trying to convince them he was me,” Lott told Sputnik.
Peretti began receiving hundreds of angry phone calls after the faux email sender began advising recipients how to get around gun control laws. He wrote that he contacted the fake email address after being alerted to it and its messages by James K. Glassman, a former Washington Post columnist, who later served as US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.
“I talked to [Peretti] on the phone a couple times when we finally figured out who had done it,” Lott said. “I mean, he had registered the domain name in my name and used my address in setting it up, so it took some effort. But when we finally discovered who it was — because I had emailed back to the askJohnLott.org email address and he wouldn’t respond to that — but when we finally figured out who it was, I had a few discussions with him.”
Lott said that only when he lawyered up did Peretti make any effort to indicate that the page wasn’t real, and then made a half-hearted attempt to call his identity fraud parody. “He only put down that it was a parody account after it was discovered, after I brought the lawsuit. But before I brought the lawsuit, he just wasn’t willing to do anything.”
However, Lott pressed forward with the suit, telling Sputnik, “you can’t take somebody’s identity and try to use it for your own advantage.” He included MBA student Jeff Goldblatt in the suit, another of Peretti’s victims who had suffered a similar kind of harassment and identity theft.
Lott wrote on Fox that Peretti set up a fake website and email to impersonate Goldblatt, too, after the latter set up a dating service called “Rejection Hotline” at around the time Peretti set up a similar service of his own. Lott said Peretti’s sister and co-founder of their service, called “Rejection Line,” went so far as to interview Goldblatt while posing as a real New York-based reporter and then using that information to create fake content that “contained multiple lies about me and portrayed me as an arrogant jerk who was bragging about how I stole the idea of the New York City Rejection Line,” he told Lott.
“I guess [Peretti] just thought he was competing against somebody and rather than doing the normal competition, he thought that somehow it was justifiable,” Lott told Sputnik. “I never really asked him why he would do these things, I just kind of assumed he knew that it was wrong and, you know, I tried to argue with him about it, but until I brought the suit I wasn’t able to get anywhere with him, and even then he tried to fight a little bit.”
“He basically pleaded poverty when I was suing him,” Lott said, noting that today Peretti is worth $200 million. “He had wealthy financial backers at the time and he kind of used the threat, or tried to use the threat, of having the wealthy financial backers go and cover his legal costs. It didn’t deter me from continuing the suit and forcing him to settle. I mean… it would have been costly to go to court, obviously, but I was glad we were able to settle,” which they did in 2005 for an undisclosed amount, including a formal apology to both Lott and Goldblatt.
That same year, Peretti co-founded the Huffington Post and the following year he co-founded BuzzFeed.
UK-funded psyop outfit Integrity Initiative locks Twitter account after wiping content from website
RT | January 23, 2019
After wiping its website clean pending a ‘probe’ into embarrassing leaks, the British state-funded Integrity Initiative (II) has hidden its Twitter account from the public, meaning only ‘approved’ followers can see its activity.
The Scotland-based organization, which received roughly £2 million in government funding over the last 18 months, had fashioned itself as a benign charity fighting “disinformation” online.
That was until a series of leaks, posted online by a group that claimed to be associated with the Anonymous hacker collective, revealed that it had been working with “clusters” of journalists, politicians and academics to engage in shady anti-Russia ‘influence’ campaigns across Europe, as well as a domestic smear campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who it tried to frame as a tool of the Kremlin.
The decision to lock its Twitter account comes just a day after the II announced (via that Twitter account) that it had deleted all content from its website pending an investigation into the “theft” of its data.
A statement posted on the site claimed that some of the leaks had been “falsified” but didn’t include any evidence to back that up, leading to speculation that the organization was simply trying to clean house and prepare a credible excuse in the wake of the disturbing leaks.
That perception has only intensified since it decided to hide its tweets from the public, with some wondering why the group would need to delete all of its content and hide its social media activity from the public if there was nothing questionable in its history.
Academic Tim Hayward tweeted that it was strange that a person now had to be an “accepted” follower in order to see how the II defends them from disinformation. Hayward said the move should force the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to “reconsider” its funding for the sketchy operation.
Others complained that the general public should be allowed to view the activity of a taxpayer-funded organization and suggested that it would only make its account private if it had something to hide.
The II has faced sharp criticism from alternative news outlets and independent journalists since the first batch of leaks were dumped in November, but little coverage from British and US mainstream media which has preferred to stay away from the story despite many questions about its funding and activities being left unanswered.
The Integrity Initiative and the British Roots of the Deep State: How the Round Table Infiltrated America
Kissinger’s takeover of the State Department ushered in a new era of British occupation of American foreign policy
By Matthew Ehret | Oriental Review | January 23, 2019
With the nearly weekly revelations that the British Foreign Office, MI6, and GCHQ have been behind the long standing agenda to undermine the Presidency of Donald Trump and undo the peaceful alliance between nationalist leaders in America, Russia, China and elsewhere, a new focus on the British hand in undermining the United States has become a serious thought for many citizens. In the first week of the new year, fuel was added to this fire when internal memos were leaked from the British-run Integrity Initiative featuring a startling account of the techniques deployed by the anti-Russian British operation to infiltrate American intelligence institutions, think tanks and media.
For those who may not know, The Integrity Initiative is an anti-Russian propaganda outfit funded to the tune of $140 million by the British Foreign office. The January 2019 leak, featuring documents dated to the early period of Trump’s election, demonstrate that this organization, already active across Europe promoting anti-Russian PR and smearing nationalist leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn, was intent on spreading deeply into the State Department and setting up “clusters” of anti-Trump operatives. The documents reveal high level meetings that Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly had with former Trump Advisor Sebastien Gorka, McCain Foundation director Kurt Volker, Pentagon PR guru John Rendon among many others.
The exposure of the British hand behind the scenes affords us a unique glimpse into the real historical forces undermining America’s true constitutional tradition throughout the 20th century, as Mueller/the Five Eyes/Integrity Initiative are not new phenomena but actually follow a modus operandi set down for already more than a century. One of the biggest obstacles to seeing this modus operandi run by the British Empire is located in the belief in a mythology which has become embedded in the global psyche for over half a century and which we should do our best to free ourselves of.
Debunking the Myth of the “American Empire”
While there has been a long-standing narrative promoted for over 70 years that the British Empire disappeared after World War II having been replaced by the “American Empire”, it is the furthest thing from the truth. America, as constitutionally represented by its greatest presidents (who can unfortunately be identified by their early deaths while serving in office), were never colonialist and were always in favor of reining in British Institutions at home while fighting British colonial thinking abroad.
Franklin Roosevelt’s thirteen year-long battle with the Deep State, which he referred to as the “economic royalists who should have left America in 1776″, was defined in clear terms by his patriotic Vice-President Henry Wallace who warned of the emergence of a new Anglo-American fascism in 1944 when he said:
“Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.”
The fact is that already in 1944, a policy of Anglo-Saxon imperialism had been promoted subversively by British-run think tanks known as the Round Table Movement and Fabian Society, and the seeds had already been laid for the anti-Russian cold war by those British-run American fascists. It is not a coincidence that this fascist Cold War policy was announced in a March 5, 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri by none other than Round Table-follower Winston Churchill.
The Empire Strikes
When the Round Table Movement was created with funds from the Rhodes Trust in 1902, a new plan was laid out to create a new technocratic elite to manage the re-emergence of the new British Empire and crush the emergence of American-inspired nationalism globally. This organization would be staffed by generations of Rhodes Scholars who would receive their indoctrination in Oxford before being sent back to advance a “post-nation state” agenda in their respective countries.
As this agenda largely followed the mandate set out by Cecil Rhodes in his Seventh Will who said “Why should we not form a secret society with but one object: the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, and for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire?”
With the help of an anglophile, racist president in America, leading figures organizing these think tanks first advanced a program to create a “League of Nations” as the solution to the “nationalist problem” which humanity was told “caused” World War One. Nationalist forces in America rejected the idea that the constitution should be rendered obsolete and the plan for global governance failed. However that did not stop the Round Table Movement from trying again. Leading Round Table controller Lord Lothian (British Ambassador to the USA) complained of the “American problem” in 1918.
”There is a fundamentally different concept in regard to this question between Great Britain and the United States as to the necessity of civilized control over politically backward peoples…. The inhabitants of Africa and parts of Asia have proved unable to govern themselves…. Yet America not only has no conception of this aspect of the problem but has been led to believe that the assumption of this kind of responsibility is iniquitous imperialism.
They take an attitude towards the problem of world government exactly analogous to the one they [earlier] took toward the problem of the world war. If they are slow in learning we shall be condemned to a period of strained relations between the various parts of the English-speaking world. [We must] get into the heads of Canadians and Americans that a share in the burden of world government is just as great and glorious a responsibility as participation in the war”.
A Chinese leader of the American-inspired republican revolution of 1911 named Sun Yat-sen warned of the likes of Lord Lothian and the League of Nations in 1924 when he said “The nations which are employing imperialism to conquer others and which are trying to maintain their own favored positions as sovereign lords of the whole world are advocating cosmopolitanism [aka: global governance/globalization -ed] and want the world to join them… Nationalism is that precious possession by which humanity maintains its existence. If nationalism decays, then when cosmopolitanism flourishes we will be unable to survive and will be eliminated”.
New Name. Same Beast
By 1919, the Round Table Movement changed its name to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (aka: Chatham House) with the “Round Table” name relegated to its geopolitical periodical. In Canada and Australia, branches were created in 1928 under the rubrics of “Canadian and Australian Institutes for International Affairs” (CIIA, AIIA). However in America, where knowledge of the British Empire’s subversive role was more widely known, the name “American Institute for International Affairs” was still too delicate. Instead the name “Council on Foreign Relations” was chosen and was chartered in 1921.
Rhodes Scholar William Yandall Elliot surrounded by a few of his leading disciples: Sir Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski Samuel Huntington and Pierre Trudeau
Staffed with Rhodes Scholars and Fabians, the CFR (and its International Chatham House counterparts) dubbed themselves “independent think tanks” which interfaced with Rhodes Scholars and Fabians in academia, government and the private sector alike with the mission of advancing a foreign policy agenda that was in alignment with the British Empire’s dream of an Anglo-American “special relationship”. One such Rhodes Scholar was William Yandall Elliot, who played a major role mentoring Henry Kissinger and a generation of geo-politicians from Harvard, not the least of whom include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Samuel (Clash of Civilizations) Huntington.
The Round Table in Canada and the Coup Against FDR
In Canada, five leading Rhodes Scholars were busy creating the League of Social Reconstruction as a self-described “Fabian Society of Canada” in 1931 which was meant to be a fascist/technocratic answer to the chaos of “greedy nationalism” that supposedly caused the economic collapse of Black Friday in 1929. During the same time in America, a different path to fascism was taken by these networks during the early 1930s. This plan involved installing a General named Smedley Butler into power as a puppet dictator steered by the Anglo-American establishment. Luckily for America and the world, General Butler blew the whistle on the coup against Franklin Roosevelt at the last minute.
Kissinger’s British Takeover of America
Though it took a few assassinations throughout the post war years, Kissinger’s takeover of the State Department ushered in a new era of British occupation of American foreign policy, whereby the republic increasingly became the “Dumb Giant” acting as “American Brawn for the British brains” using Churchill’s words. While a nihilistic generation of youth were tuning in on LSD, and an old guard of patriots surrounding Wallace and Kennedy had fallen to the “red scare” witch hunt, geopolitical theory was fed like a sweet poison down the throat of a sleeping nation, replacing a policy of peace and “win-win cooperation” advanced by true nationalist patriots as FDR, Wallace and the Kennedys, with an imperial clone masquerading as a republic.
Sir Kissinger did nothing less than reveal his total allegiance to the British Empire on May 10, 1981 during a Chatham House conference in Britain when he described his relationship with the British Foreign office in the following terms: “The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never practiced between sovereign nations… In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department… It was symptomatic”.
During this period, Kissinger worked closely with CIA director George Bush Senior, who was later rewarded for his role in advancing the British-planned first war on Kuwait with a knighthood. This war set the stage for the second wave of Middle East wars beginning with the Anglo-Saudi orchestrated operation known as 9/11 and the ushering in of the new “post-nation state order” by Kissinger and Blair.
This was the era which was celebrated by both Kissinger and Bush in sundry places as “the New World Order”.
The Dystopic New World Order Threatened by a New Deal of the 21st Century
It is this dystopic geopolitical order which has been challenged by the Russia-China alliance which arose in earnest with Xi Jinping’s 2013 announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative as the Grand design for large scale infrastructure projects internationally and in September 2015 with Vladimir Putin’s intervention into Syria which defeated the Hobbesian regime change paradigm which poisoned the west. In 2016, the election of nationalist American President Donald Trump opened the door for the first time in over 50 years to a true national coalition of sovereign nations to eliminate the cancer of colonial thinking forever from the earth.
It is this same British-run deep state which owns Robert Mueller, who along with the Integrity Initiative, Five Eyes and other Deep State operatives are dedicated to overthrowing President Trump from office and undoing the great potential now facing the world as outlined by the Schiller Institute and American statesman Lyndon LaRouche: 1) an FDR-style re-organization of the bankrupt banking system and 2) the unleashing of a global New Silk Road as the New Deal of the 21st Century.
Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.
Did Khashoggi Really Die?
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 23.01.2019
I have not been convinced about the claims coming from Turkey and from the Washington Post and others regarding the allegations of a gruesome murder of intelligence asset, Jamal Khashoggi, in October, 2018. There are too many anomalies as it was portrayed by various statements from Turkey President Erdogan, and echoed by a chorus of the Western mainstream media. Recent research suggests that perhaps Khashoggi was never in that Saudi Consulate in Istanbul that day, and in fact may still be quite alive and in hiding. If so, it suggests a far larger story behind the affair. Let’s consider the following.
The best way to outline this is to go back to the events around the surprise arrest and detention of numerous Saudi high-ranking persons in late 2017, by Prince Mohammed bin Salman or MBS as he is known. On November 4, 2017 MBS announced via state TV that numerous leading Saudis including one of the wealthiest, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, had been arrested on charges of corruption, and were being detained in the Riyadh Ritz Carlton hotel. Prince Alwaleed is clearly the critical person.
The son-in-law of President Trump had reportedly made a non-publicized visit to Riyadh for private talks with MBS just days before the mass arrests. A report in the UK Mail newspaper in 2018 claimed that Jared Kushner, representing the President, had informed MBS of a rival Saudi Royals plot to eliminate the Crown Prince. Prince Alwaleed was reported to be at the center of the plotters.
After three months imprisonment, Alwaleed was released from detention on 27 January 2018, following a reported financial settlement. In March 2018 he dropped out from Forbes’ World’s Billionaires’ list. Before his arrest Alwaleed was the largest shareholder in Citibank, a major owner of Twitter, once partner of Bill Gates in Gates Foundation vaccine programs, and generous donor to select Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. According to media reports, Hillary campaign aide Huma Abedin’s brother, Hassan Abedin, Muslim Brotherhood member, worked with Bin Talal on a project called “Spreading Islam to the West.” Bin Talal and other Saudi sources donated as much as $25 million to the Clinton Foundation as she was preparing her Presidential bid. The Prince was also an open foe of Donald Trump.
Who was Khashoggi Really?
Jamal Khashoggi was no ordinary journalist. He actually worked for Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. In an interview in the Gulf Times in November last year Alwaleed stated, “Jamal wasn’t only my friend. He was working with me. Actually, his last job in Saudi Arabia was with me…” Jamal was, or is, nephew of CIA-linked asset, the recently deceased Adnan Khashoggi, a nefarious arms dealer involved in the CIA-Saudi BCCI bank and Iran-Contra. Nephew Jamal also worked for the then-Saudi Ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar, someone so close to the Bush family that George W. nicknamed him “Bandar Bush.” In short, Khashoggi was part of Saudi circles close to the Bush-Clinton group. When King Abdullah decided to skip over Alwaleed’s father, Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, dubbed “The Red Prince” for his reformist views, in his succession, a move that led to Salman, father of MBS, as successor, Alwaleed was on the outs in the Saudi power calculus of King Salman and Crown Prince MBS.
The Saudi government as well as the Brookings Institution confirm that Khashoggi had been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was banned from Saudi Arabia in 2011 following the Obama-Hillary Clinton Arab Spring, when the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, and those around him realized that the royal house itself was a potential target for brotherhood regime change, as in Egypt and Tunisia.
The Obama Administration, as I detail in Manifest Destiny, working with the CIA, planned a drastic series of regime changes across the Islamic world to install Muslim Brotherhood regimes “friendly” with the CIA and the Obama administration. Key members of the Obama Administration, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s special assistant, Huma Abedin, had deep ties to the Saudi part of the Muslim Brotherhood where Abedin’s mother lives. Her mother, Saleha Abedin– an academic in Saudi Arabia where Huma grew up– according to a report on Al Jazeera and other Arab media, is a prominent member of the womens’ organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Huma’s brother is also reported linked to the organization. Notably, the late John McCain, whose ties to leading members of ISIS and Al Qaeda is public record, tried to discredit fellow Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann for pointing to Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood ties. This is the faction within Saudi Arabia that Khashoggi was tied to.
As President, Trump’s first foreign trip was to meet MBS and the Saudi King, a trip sharply criticized by Democrat Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. Once a Trump Presidency moved to rebuild the frayed relations that had developed between Obama and the Saudi monarchy under King Abdullah and later King Salman, father of Crown Prince MBS, the faction around pro-Obama Prince Bin Talal Alwaleed was out of favor, to put it mildly, especially after Hillary Clinton lost. In June 2017 Alwaleed’s former employee, Jamal Khashoggi, fled into self-imposed exile in the US where he had studied earlier, after the government banned his twitter account in Saudi.
Khashoggi alive?
Once MBS acted to arrest Alwaleed and numerous others, the future of the money flows between Alwaleed to not only Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and to other Democrats he had “supported” with Saudi millions, was in jeopardy. While it is difficult to confirm, a BBC Turkish journalist in Istanbul reportedly told an arab language paper after the alleged gruesome murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi that, in fact, Jamal Khashoggi was alive and well, somewhere in hiding.
It is a fact that former CIA head and now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with then-Defense Secretary James Mattis, gave a briefing to the US Senate in which they told the senators that there was no evidence to suggest MBS was behind this alleged crime. They added that they couldn’t even confirm a crime had happened! Only CIA head Gina Haspel, former CIA London station chief, disputed their claims. The Erdogan claims that the body was chopped up and then dissolved in acid for disposal without trace harkens back to the account of the Navy Seal disposal of the dead body allegedly of Osama bin Laden, which the Obama Administration claimed they dumped at sea “according to Muslim tradition.” Conveniently in both cases there was no body to forensically confirm.
Indeed the allegations to world media around the Khashoggi affair were tightly controlled by Turkey’s President Erdogan who repeatedly promised then failed to reveal, what he said were secret Turkish intelligence tapes of the alleged murder. Erdogan is reported very close to the Muslim Brotherhood if not a hidden member, one reason for his close support of Qatar after MBS and the Saudi king declared economic sanctions on Qatar for support of terrorism, in fact Qatari support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Here we are dealing with shifting political alliances with huge consequences potentially for US and world politics given the enormous size of the Saudi financial resources. It’s also bizarre that Khashoggi allegedly agreed to go to a Saudi Consulate in Turkey and to supposedly get divorce papers. Further, his reported fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, seems to be equally mysterious, with some asking whether she in fact is an agent of Turkish intelligence used to discredit Saudi Arabia.
The claims of Erdogan of the assassination of Jamal by a Saudi team were buttressed by a mysterious Khaled Saffuri, who told Yahoo News reporter, Michael Isikoff, that Khashoggi became a bitter foe of MBS for his articles in the media criticizing the arrests of Prince Bin Talal and others. Research reveals that Saffuri, media source on the Khashoggi alleged murder, also has had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood front organization, American Muslim Council, and to Qatar, host to the exiled Brotherhood for years. Qatari support for the Muslim Brotherhood was a factor in the break between MBS and Qatar two years ago.
Saffuri is also the protégé of al-Qaeda fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi, reportedly also an influential Muslim Brotherhood supporter who before 2004 met with both G.W. Bush and Hillary Clinton. Alamoudi is currently in US federal prison since 2004 for his role as bagman for a Libyan/Al-Qaeda assassination plot to assassinate then-Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. In brief, the prime sources on the Khashoggi murder are few and hardly without bias.
At this point it is difficult to go beyond speculation. Clear is that Jamal Khashoggi is missing from public view since early October. But until the Turkish government or someone else presents serious forensic evidence, habeas corpus, that indeed shows Alwaleed’s former employee, Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by a Saudi assassination team, let alone by one commanded by Crown Prince bin Salman, the situation warrants more serious examination. It is curious that the same liberal media such as Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post that attacks MBS for the alleged murder of their reporter, Khashoggi, fails to criticize previous Saudi executions or even subsequent ones.
Did Khashoggi really die at the Istanbul Consulate or was something else going on? To stage a fake execution of Khashoggi to discredit and even possibly topple MBS might possibly have appeared to Alwaleed and his CIA friends in Washington to be a clever way of restoring their power and financial influence. If so, it seems to have failed.
Geopolitics before sport: Russian athletes were punished for being Russian
By Neil Clark | RT | January 23, 2019
Russian athletes, falsely accused of doping, won an important legal victory at the weekend. But unfortunately, the mud has stuck which is what Russia’s geopolitical enemies always wanted.
As the old saying goes “a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.” Basically on the ‘evidence’ of one man, who lives in America, and the lobbying of certain NATO countries, Russian athletes were collectively held to be guilty of doping offences and deprived of their opportunity to compete at the very highest level.
A great injustice was done to the sportsmen and women involved, but now, finally, the record is being put straight.
On Saturday, the Swiss Supreme Court turned down the International Olympic Committee’s appeal against the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s ruling to acquit 28 members of Team Russia of doping allegations during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
Christof Wieschemann, the lawyer for Russian cross-country skier Alexander Legkov, who the IOC tried to deprive of Olympic medals, has stated that Russian athletes falsely accused could have avoided career-ruining bans if the IOC hadn’t concealed facts of their innocence.
His firm says that the IOC “seriously violated the procedural rights of the athletes and even withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense and the court.”
Wieschemann says he filed no fewer than five written requests to the IOC for evidence against his client, but he was never shown any.
Just imagine if US athletes had been treated in such a scandalous way. But it’s Russians and of course we all know they’re a bunch of cheats, don’t we? That’s certainly what we are supposed to believe by those who want us to hate Russia as much as they do.
The campaign to get Russian athletes banned can be traced back directly to those countries who are most vocal in opposing Russia internationally. This is about politics and not genuine concern about sporting malpractice.
In July 2016, Reuters revealed how the heads of US and Canada’s anti-doping bodies had drafted a letter to WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, calling for ALL Russian athletes to be banned from the Rio Olympic Games. The letter was circulated by the Canadian representative to other WADA members.
As I wrote here, just imagine if the Russian anti-doping agency had sought to get all US or Canada athletes banned, whether or not they had been found guilty of cheating.
The WADA report into alleged Russian ‘state-sponsored’ doping, based solely on the testimony of former Moscow anti-doping laboratory director Grigory Rodchenkov, who defected to the US in 2015, was put together by a Canadian lawyer, Richard McLaren.
No one is saying that McLaren was himself biased, but surely in the interests of natural justice, would it not have been better if the report had been compiled by someone from a non-NATO country and not a country that was, quite clearly, pushing for a Russian ban?
Even Russian Paralympians have been victimized. In 2016, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) bowed to pressure to introduce a blanket ban on Russian Paralympians competing in Rio. Six of the 14 members of the IPC’s governing board came from NATO countries.
The IOC itself came under enormous pressure to introduce a similar blanket ban on Team Russia competing in the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. We know from leaks from the hacktivist group Fancy Bear, that the IOC was far from satisfied with the ‘proof’ of a state-sponsored program in parts of the McLaren report. We also know that Martial Saugy, the former director of the WADA’s accredited doping Laboratory of Lausanne accused the McLaren report of making “incorrect allegations.”
In November 2017, WADA chief Craig Reedie admitted that, while there were “hints” and “claims” of evidence of a systematic state-sponsored Russian doping scheme, 95 of the 96 cases of Russian athletes WADA was investigating had been suspended because “there was not sufficient evidence to pursue an anti-doping rule violation.”
In normal times, the IOC would have acknowledged that the case against Russia did not stack up. But these were not normal times.
Portraying Russia as a country that cheated, on a routine, state-sanctioned level at sport has been an important part of the propaganda campaign to delegitimize the country and place it in the international ‘sin-bin.’ This would be punishment for Russia for daring to thwart neocon plans for regime change in Syria and for being a competitor with the US in the lucrative European energy markets. Russia can’t be trusted. It needs to be sanctioned. Don’t you get the message?
It was entirely predictable that the IOC’s decision to ban Russian athletes from competing under the Russian flag in PyeongChang, was lauded on social media by the late US neocon Senator John McCain. He also used it an opportunity to call, once again, for FIFA to take the 2018 Football World Cup away from Russia.
An American playwright called Bryan Fogel, also did his bit. As I noted here, it was Fogel and Rodchenkov who took their story to the New York Times, triggering the McLaren report.
‘Icarus’, the documentary film Fogel made, which included interviews with Rodchenkov, not surprisingly given the neo-con induced Russophobic climate, won an Academy Award in 2018.
In an interview with the FT, Fogel said Russia had a “cultural problem” with drugs, which went back to communism.
Let’s not mention how communist Hungary were cheated out of the 1954 World Cup, or the allegations about widespread US doping made by Wade Exum, the US Olympic Committee’s former director of drug control, in 2003, shall we?
I took a look at Fogel’s Twitter feed and guess what? The first tweet is a retweet of Kremlin critic Bill Browder. Fogel also refers to WADA chief Sir Craig Reedie – who spoke to RT in 2017 – as a “criminal President.”
You can see where he’s coming from.
Saturday’s Swiss court decision comes too late for the innocent Russian athletes who lost their chance to compete under the flag of their own country at the greatest sporting events in the world.
But it should, I think, inspire a new report and then a new investigative documentary on the campaign to get Russia banned. It could be called ‘Robbed!’. Only this time, don’t expect it to win an Oscar.
Integrity Initiative wipes website pending probe into ‘theft’ of disturbing leaked data
RT | January 22, 2019
The British state-funded Integrity Initiative, exposed last year for conducting Europe-wide political influence campaigns in leaked files, has removed all of its website content “pending an investigation” into the data “theft.”
A group claiming association with the loose hacktivist collective Anonymous has been dumping private Integrity Initiative documents online in various batches since November. The leaks revealed that the Scotland-based, government-funded organization, which bills itself as a non-partisan disinformation-busting charity, was actually using “clusters” of journalists, politicians, and academics to carry out secret anti-Russia campaigns, interfere in domestic politics across Europe and smear anyone who questioned its narratives.
In a surprise move on Monday, the Integrity Initiative abruptly announced on Twitter that it had “temporarily removed” all content from its site “pending an investigation into the theft of data” from the Institute of Statecraft, the II’s London-based parent operation.
In a statement posted on its now mostly bare website, the II claimed the leaks were “part of a campaign to undermine the work” of the Initiative which it said involved “researching, publicising and countering the threat” Europe faces in the in the form of “disinformation” and “hybrid warfare” – ironically, exactly what the shady organization itself was accused of engaging in with its hefty government paycheck.
It remains an open question if, in an effort to save face, the group would accuse Russia of being behind the leaks and even of doctoring the documents. While the statement admitted that some of the leaks were “genuine,” it claimed others were “falsified” – but did not provide any evidence to back up that claim. It is, however, apparent that Russia has been the Initiative’s main target during the course of its questionable work.
The website will be “relaunched shortly” and “analysis” of the hack and its “significance” will be published soon, the statement said. It doesn’t look as though many will be awaiting that analysis with bated breath, however.
Perhaps discouraging for the Integrity Initiative, few seemed upset to see their content disappear. Most responses to the announcement tweet are of the trolling variety, accusing the organization of simply being caught in the act and trying to clean house.
After the II leaks, Scottish newspaper the Daily Record wrote that the revelations – including that the government-funded organization had also conducted a domestic smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn – was “one of the biggest political scandals of the year.”
The scandal received scant coverage by mainstream British media, however. Labour MP Chris Williamson told RT earlier this month that the lack of interest could have something to do with the fact that high profile journalists themselves were seemingly involved in the shady operation.
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From the Archives
Is America behind the massive surge in Kiev regime’s child trafficking?
By Drago Bosnic | August 10, 2023
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
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