The right wing Ecuadorean government of President Moreno continues to churn out its production line of fake documents regarding Julian Assange, and channel them straight to MI6 mouthpiece Luke Harding of the Guardian.
Amazingly, more Ecuadorean Government documents have just been discovered for the Guardian, this time spy agency reports detailing visits of Paul Manafort and unspecified “Russians” to the Embassy. By a wonderful coincidence of timing, this is the day after Mueller announced that Manafort’s plea deal was over.
The problem with this latest fabrication is that Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these “Russians” are in the visitor logs.
This is impossible. The visitor logs were not kept by Wikileaks, but by the very strict Ecuadorean security. Nobody was ever admitted without being entered in the logs. The procedure was very thorough. To go in, you had to submit your passport (no other type of document was accepted). A copy of your passport was taken and the passport details entered into the log. Your passport, along with your mobile phone and any other electronic equipment, was retained until you left, along with your bag and coat. I feature in the logs every time I visited.
There were no exceptions. For an exception to be made for Manafort and the “Russians” would have had to be a decision of the Government of Ecuador, not of Wikileaks, and that would be so exceptional the reason for it would surely have been noted in the now leaked supposed Ecuadorean “intelligence report” of the visits. What possible motive would the Ecuadorean government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is impossible that the intelligence agency – who were in charge of the security – would not know the identity of these alleged “Russians”.
Previously Harding and the Guardian have published documents faked by the Moreno government regarding a diplomatic appointment to Russia for Assange of which he had no knowledge. Now they follow this up with more documents aimed to provide fictitious evidence to bolster Mueller’s pathetically failed attempt to substantiate the story that Russia deprived Hillary of the Presidency.
My friend William Binney, probably the world’s greatest expert on electronic surveillance, former Technical Director of the NSA, has stated that it is impossible the DNC servers were hacked, the technical evidence shows it was a download to a directly connected memory stick. I knew the US security services were conducting a fake investigation the moment it became clear that the FBI did not even themselves look at the DNC servers, instead accepting a report from the Clinton linked DNC “security consultants” Crowdstrike.
I would love to believe that the fact Julian has never met Manafort is bound to be established. But I fear that state control of propaganda may be such that this massive “Big Lie” will come to enter public consciousness in the same way as the non-existent Russian hack of the DNC servers.
Assange never met Manafort. The DNC emails were downloaded by an insider. Assange never even considered fleeing to Russia. Those are the facts, and I am in a position to give you a personal assurance of them.
I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services.
I am not a fan of Donald Trump. But to see the partisans of the defeated candidate (and a particularly obnoxious defeated candidate) manipulate the security services and the media to create an entirely false public perception, in order to attempt to overturn the result of the US Presidential election, is the most astonishing thing I have witnessed in my lifetime.
Plainly the government of Ecuador is releasing lies about Assange to curry favour with the security establishment of the USA and UK, and to damage Assange’s support prior to expelling him from the Embassy. He will then be extradited from London to the USA on charges of espionage.
Assange is not a whistleblower or a spy – he is the greatest publisher of his age, and has done more to bring the crimes of governments to light than the mainstream media will ever be motivated to achieve. That supposedly great newspaper titles like the Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post are involved in the spreading of lies to damage Assange, and are seeking his imprisonment for publishing state secrets, is clear evidence that the idea of the “liberal media” no longer exists in the new plutocratic age. The press are not on the side of the people, they are an instrument of elite control.
Update: WikiLeaks has fired back at the Guardian, tweeting: “Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.”
This is going to be one of the most infamous news disasters since Stern published the “Hitler Diaries”.
The Guardian’s report was written by Luke Harding and Dan Collyns, and was based exclusively on unnamed sources.
***
Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, right around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, according to The Guardian,which as is now the norm in reports of this kind refers to unnamed “sources.”
Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.
It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers. –The Guardian
The 69-year-old Manafort has denied any involvement in the release of the emails, and has said that the claim is “100% false.”
While Manafort was jailed this year under a plea agreement with special counsel Robert Mueller, on Monday, Mueller said that Manafort had repeatedly lied to the FBI, breaching his deal. According to documents filed in court, Manafort committed “crimes and lies” covering a “variety of subject matters.”
According to The Guardian, Manafort’s first visit to the Ecuadorian embassy occurred one year after Assange was granted asylum inside, according to two sources. To add icing to the cake, “a separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senian Intelligence agency and seen by The Guardian lists “Paul Manaford [sic]” as one of Assange’s several well-known guests, along with… “Russians.”
According to two sources, Manafort returned to the embassy in 2015. He paid another visit in spring 2016, turning up alone, around the time Trump named him as his convention manager. The visit is tentatively dated to March.
Manafort’s 2016 visit to Assange lasted about 40 minutes, one source said, adding that the American was casually dressed when he exited the embassy, wearing sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt.
Visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports. Sources in Ecuador, however, say Manafort was not logged. –The Guardian
So we have Manafort allegedly visiting Assange, in sandy-coloured chinos, and that Russians also visited the WikiLeaks founder. And none of this was known until today.
The Guardian goes on to suggest that “The revelation could shed new light on the sequence of events in the run-up to summer 2016, when WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails hacked by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. Hillary Clinton has said the hack contributed to her defeat.”
Note that The Guardian has considered the “hack” settled, which agrees with Western intelligence assessments (the same Western intelligence that conducted espionage on Donald Trump’s campaign). Nowhere to be found is the possibility that the emails were copied locally – a theory recently bolstered by a fresh analysis that flies in the face of a report commissioned by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike – which was caught fabricating a report on Russia hacking Ukrainian munitions, and was forced to retract portions of their analysis after the government of Ukraine admonished them.
CrowdStrike has retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking https://t.co/8AZOvoQl0K
The Guardian goes on to link Manafort to “black operations” against the political rival of Ukraine’s former “Moscow-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych,” and that Manafort “flew frequently from the US to Ukraine’s capital, Kiev – usually via Frankfurt but sometimes through London.”
Manafort is currently in jail in Alexandria, Virginia. In August a jury convicted him of crimes arising from his decade-long activities in Ukraine. They include large-scale money laundering and failure to pay US tax. Manafort pleaded guilty to further charges in order to avoid a second trial in Washington.
As well as accusing him of lying on Monday, the special counsel moved to set a date for Manafort to be sentenced.
One person familiar with WikiLeaks said Assange was motivated to damage the Democrats campaign because he believed a future Trump administration would be less likely to seek his extradition on possible charges of espionage. This fate had hung over Assange since 2010, when he released confidential US state department cables. It contributed to his decision to take refuge in the embassy. –The Guardian
And in perhaps the most shocking part of The Guardian‘s reporting, they refer to the highly salacious and largely discredited “Steele Dossier,” saying that according to the document, Manafort was at the center of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, and that both sides had a mutual interest in defeating Clinton, wrote former MI6 spy Christopher Steele.
In a memo written soon after the DNC emails were published, Steele said: “The [hacking] operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.” –The Guardian
You know things are desperate when the Steele Dossier makes a guest appearance to once again bolster unsupported reporting.
One of the most disturbing trends in the era of Trump has been the flock of billionaires that have come rushing into the Democratic Party to pose as leaders of an opposition movement to the “fascist” predations of the real estate mogul. These billionaires, which include capitalists such as George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer are the architects of a “Big Tent” strategy first outlined by Black Agenda Report Editor Glen Ford. This strategy was devised by the Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign of 2016. The strategy has two components. The first component is the promotion of “diversity” to distract from the fact that the Democratic Party can no longer appeal to the interests of the poor or working-class, especially Black people who have been held in electoral captivity for a generation. Second, “Big Tent” Democrats actively seek an alliance of Wall Street, the military and intelligence apparatus, and Republicans to provide the financial and political strength behind the strategy.
The “Big Tent” strategy is called the “Resistance.” One of the chief billionaire-backers of the “Resistance” is Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar is the founder of the eBay corporation. His surplus profits have been used over the years to exert “soft power” influence over the U.S. state. Omidyar has given hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cash to Democratic Party candidates since 1999.
Omidyar was one of the principle donors to the NeverTrump Political Action Committee (PAC) that formed during the 2016 election. The NeverTrump PAC brought together neoliberal and neoconservative Democrats into an alliance against Trump. William Kristol, editor in chief at the Weekly Standard and longtime Republican, has been one of the most vocal supporters of the NeverTrump movement. Kristol is an expert in the think-tank business and understands the importance of “soft power.” He helped found the Project for the New American Century that peddled neocon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as an escalation of the U.S.’ military presence around the world, including on Russia’s doorstep. Kristol has become a favorite of the corporate media since Trump was elected in 2016. He is a regular on MSNBC and is viewed by corporate Democrats as the “sane” wing of the Republican Party.
That Omidyar would align with Kristol is a stark indication of the “Big Tent” strategy at work. In a post on Twitter after the midterm elections came to pass, Kristol celebrated the support that he has received from “the left” and its benefactors such as Pierre Omidyar. Kristol’s excitement about billionaire support from all sides of the political aisle represents a development in the Trump era that is far more dangerous than Trump himself. The “Big Tent” strategy is a marked political shift to the right. Not only this, but the shift is part and parcel of a covert war against the real “left” that is principally being waged by the fake “left” coalition of thieves and warmongers in the Democratic Party.
The critical question that must be asked is whether there are any benefits for ordinary poor and working-class people in supporting the NeverTrump coalition or billionaire backers such as Omidyar. And the answer is more complex than a simple “no.” It is far worse than that. Omidyar is not a “lesser-evil” billionaire. In the system of U.S. imperialism, those don’t exist.
By supporting Omidyar and his version of the “Resistance,” most of humanity stands to lose. Omidyar’s “soft power” network has only one mission and that is to stabilize an empire in crisis. One of the ways that Omidyar has attempted to stabilize the imperialist system is through investments in journalism. Omidyar is the principle owner of First Look Media, the parent corporation of The Intercept. While The Intercept has covered important issues in the past, it has been charged with privatizing Edward Snowden’s leaks and promoting regime change efforts in Syria through direct attacks on the democratically-elected government of Bashar Al-Assad. Furthermore, The Intercept possesses a troubling record of outing the identities of those leaking secret government information. In a word, Omidyar has used his influence over The Intercept to stifle dissent while promoting the outlet as a pioneer of “independent” media.
Omidyar is most concerned, however, with ensuring that the US empire maintains corporate and military control over the world’s nations and peoples. He has donated millions to the Clinton Global Initiative responsible for imposing ruthless austerity measures on nations such as Haiti. There is also documented evidence that Omidyar used his philanthropic network to support the “Maidan Revolution” in Ukraine in 2014 which propelled neo-Nazis into state power, much to the pleasure of the IMF. The billionaire eBay mogul has also been a critical supporter of the United States Agency for International Development or USAID. USAID is well-known for its support of “soft power” tactics to promote regime change in nations that do not bow down to U.S. military and corporate power such as Cuba.
Omidyar is not just dangerous at the individual level. Rather, the billionaire’s influence over the U.S. power structure is representative of conflict within the ruling class of the imperialist system headed by the United States. On the other side of Omidyar stands Trump, a ruthless billionaire who holds no allegiance to any sector of the imperialist system. Trump is not loyal to the banks or the military and intelligence apparatus. Trump is loyal to himself. His moves as President thus far such as the tax breaks for the rich, his willingness to broker peace in Korea, or his racist dog whistles and policies toward immigration from Central America, are all representative of the sharpening decline of imperialism.
Omidyar wants to save the imperialist system from decline. The section of the billionaire class from which Omidyar belongs is interested only in engendering endless war and austerity under conditions of social peace. The likes of Omidyar pose as the “Resistance” to Trump but really represent a threat of potentially greater proportions. Omidyar actively creates infrastructure for leftists and progressives to be bamboozled into supporting the machinations of imperialism. It is no secret that the section of the Republican Party that supports Trump also wields “soft power” through its own think-tanks such as the Federalist Society. However, in this period of crisis in the political apparatus of imperialism, party lines are becoming blurred. The “Big Tent” strategy reigns and billionaires such as Omidyar will do anything to ensure that the deadly alliance re-assumes full control of the system from Trump.
In conclusion, a dialectical relationship exists between Omidyar and Trump. It was Omidyar’s section of the ruling class that created the economic and political conditions for Trump. For over thirty years, billionaires such as Omidyar, Steyer, and Buffet have bled workers and poor people dry. Wages and wealth have plummeted for the majority while profits and land holdings have soared for the minority. The only thing that workers and poor people can count on is that the military, police, and surveillance apparatus will grow as people become more desperate and impoverished. Omidyar and the Democratic Party-aligned billionaires have coalesced with as many repressive forces in the ruling class as possible to wage a struggle against Trump. In doing so, they avoid the very real crisis of legitimacy that elected Donald Trump in the first place.
We should steer clear of supporting Omidyar and expose his putrid political record as proof that there is no such thing as a “progressive” billionaire. Real progressives and radicals stand for universal healthcare, peace, jobs, and against war, mass incarceration, and mass surveillance. These are the political issues of our time that the entire ruling class stands against. Trump knew this and politically appealed to anti-regime change and anti-free trade sentiment within the Republican and Democratic Party. Through their “resistance” toward Trump, Omidyar and his ilk have as their real goal the suppression of this sentiment so that it never becomes a truly progressive movement for social transformation in this country.
Ever since Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey, the Post has pressed hard to show that the murder was a state-sponsored assassination orchestrated by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
If only the Post had shown the same diligence, determination, and perseverance in the assassination of President Kennedy that it is displaying in the Khashoggi assassination. Instead, like many other U.S. mainstream newspapers, the Post has long taken the same position on the Kennedy assassination that President Trump is taking with respect to the Khashoggi assassination: obtuse denial.
This was especially true during the tenure of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s. You couldn’t find a better example of journalistic indifference than what happened during that period of time. The following are just two examples of this phenomenon.
First, though, the background:
In 1991 Oliver Stone came out with his movie JFK, which posited that the assassination of President Kennedy was actually a highly sophisticated regime-change operation at the hands of the U.S. national security establishment, i.e., the military and the CIA.
The mainstream press went after Stone with a vengeance. Although they didn’t dispute the fact that the U.S. national-security establishment carried out assassinations and regime-change operations against foreign leaders, they were indignant and outraged over the suggestion that such an operation would be carried out against a U.S. president.
At the end of Stone’s movie was a blub informing people that despite the passage of almost 30 years since the assassination, the national-security agencies were steadfastly continuing to keep their records relating to the Kennedy assassination secret from the American people, most of whom had never accepted the official lone-nut theory of the assassination.
That blurb produced such outrage among the public that Congress was pressured into enacting the JFK Records Act, which mandated that the national-security agencies disclose their long-secret records to the public.
But there was a major oddity about the law: While the ARRB was charged with enforcing the JFK Records Act, the law also prohibited it from investigating any aspect of the assassination. That is a very bizarre provision. If newly discovered evidence is discovered that incriminates the national-security establishment, why wouldn’t Congress want it investigated?
Did the Post write any editorials questioning that particular provision? Nope. Unlike the Khashoggi assassination, about which the Post has published multiple editorials and op-eds, the Post didn’t see fit to issue even a mild criticism of that no-investigation provision.
Did the ARRB come up with evidence that incriminated the national-security establishment? You bet it did. The following are just a few examples.
The two brain examinations
The military pathologists who conducted the autopsy on President Kennedy’s body claimed that there was only one examination of President Kennedy’s brain as part of the autopsy. The general counsel for the ARRB, an attorney named Jeremy Gunn, and an ARRB staff member named Douglas Horne discovered, however, that that was a lie. They discovered that were actually two brain examinations, the second which could not possibly have involved the president’s brain and instead was almost certainly a brain specimen that had been brought over from the Bethesda Medical School.
How did Gunn and Horne discover the military pathologists’ lie? They did it by examining the testimony and the timelines of the two brain exams.
The first brain examination was held within a couple of days after the assassination. It was attended by the two military pathologists who were falsely claiming that there was only one brain examination, Navy Commanders James Humes and J. Thornton Boswell.
That first brain exam was also attended by the official autopsy photographer, John Stringer, who taught medical photography at the Bethesda Medical School. Stringer told the ARRB that at that brain examination, which almost certainly involved President Kennedy’s brain, the pathologists “sectioned” the brain. That meant that they cut it like one would cut a loaf of bread. That is standard procedure in gunshot wounds to the head, especially to examine the trajectory of the bullet. Once a brain is sectioned, there is no way to put it back together. It remains cut into slices.
The second brain examination was held about a week later. How do we know that? Because the third military pathologist who conducted the autopsy, Army Lt. Col. Pierre Finck, told the ARRB that he attended that brain examination. Also attending that second brain exam were the two lying pathologists, Humes and Boswell.
Thus, Humes and Boswell participated in both brain exams, which they were falsely conflating into one brain exam.
Stringer told the ARRB that Finck was not at the brain examination. Finck told the ARRB that Stringer was not at the brain examination. That’s how Gunn and Horne figured out that Humes and Boswell were lying when they claimed that there had been only one brain examination.
Here’s something important about the second brain examination: The brain in that examination was fully intact. That means that it had to be a brain specimen of someone other than President Kennedy because, again, a brain that has been sectioned cannot be put back together.
Here’s something else to note about the second brain examination: The second brain weighed 150 grams more than an average person’s brain, which would have been impossible if it were President Kennedy’s brain. That’s because the gunshot that hit Kennedy in the head destroyed one-fourth to one-third of his brain. Thus, there is no way that Kennedy’s brain could have weighed more than an average person’s brain after having lost so much brain mass from the gunshot.
That again confirms that the second brain could not possibly have been President Kennedy’s brain. Yet, a photograph of that second brain is what is in the official autopsy record. The photograph of the second brain shows that the brain is damaged but without major loss of brain tissue. In other words, the military’s photograph of President Kennedys’ brain in the official autopsy record is bogus.
But here’s the kicker: Remember that provision in the JFK Records Act, the one that the Washington Post didn’t see fit to criticize when the law was enacted. It prohibited the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the Kennedy assassination. It was a provision of the law that the board of commissioners of the ARRB strictly enforced on the staff, making it very clear that any staff member who was caught violating that restriction would be immediately fired.
Thus, after discovering that there were, in fact, two separate brain examinations, the second of which could not possibly have involved the president’s brain, Gunn and Horne were absolutely prohibited from investigating the matter.
Did the Washington Post investigate the issue? After all, here was clear circumstantial evidence pointing in the direction of a fraudulent autopsy having been carried out on the body of the deceased president on the very day of the assassination. Isn’t that something that any self-respecting investigative newspaper or journalist would relish checking into? Like maybe just a telephone call to Humes and Boswell asking them to explain why Stringer and Finck were both claiming to be at the brain exam at completely different times and denying that the other was there.
And it’s not like the Post was unaware of what Gunn and Horne had discovered. Take a look at these two articles, both of which detail Gunn’s and Horne’s discovery of the two brain examinations:
Did the Post follow up on these two articles by assigning an investigative reporter to investigate the matter? Did it publish a slew of editorials and op-eds demanding that the military explain what was going on here, as it has with the Khashoggi assassination? Did it publish critiques of the provision in the JFK Records Act that prohibited the ARRB from investigating the matter and request Congress to amend the law to allow such an investigation?
No, no, and no.
The Saundra Spencer testimony
During its tenure in the 1990s, the ARRB summoned a woman named Saundra Spencer to testify. In November 1963, Spencer was a U.S. Navy Petty Officer who was working in the U.S. Navy’s photography lab in Washington, D.C. She had a top-secret security clearance and helped developed top-secret photographs. She worked closely with the White House. No one has ever questioned the integrity, veracity, or competence of Saundra Spencer. It would be virtually impossible to find a more credible witness.
Spencer told the ARRB an astounding story. On the weekend of the assassination, she was asked to develop, on a top-secret, classified basis the military’s autopsy photographs for President Kennedy. Given that she had been led to believe that the matter was classified, Spencer had kept her secret for some 30 years.
The ARRB’s general counsel, Jeremy Gunn, showed her the official autopsy photographs in the JFK autopsy record. Spencer carefully examined them. She then told Gunn in direct and unequivocal terms that those official autopsy photographs were not the ones she developed on the weekend of the assassination. The records she developed, she stated, showed a massive exit-sized wound in the lower back of Kennedy’s head. The military’s official autopsy photographs show no such wound and show the back of Kennedy’s head to be fully intact.
There is something important to note about Spencer’s testimony: It matched what the treating physicians at Parkland Hospital in Dallas said immediately after the president was declared dead. It also matched what bystanders stated who were situated to the rear of the presidential limousine and who had been splattered with brain tissue. It also matched what two of the Parkland nurses stated. It also matched what Secret Service agent Clint Hill stated. It also matched the bone fragment from the lower rear of the president’s skull that was found the day after the assassination. It also matched what two FBI agents said, one of whom told the ARRB that the official autopsy photographs appeared to be “doctored.” It also matched what many of the official autopsy participants had secretly told the House Select Committee in the 1970s.
That could only mean one thing: The military’s autopsy photograph of the back of President Kennedy’s head was bogus, as bogus as the military’s autopsy brain photograph.
But keep in mind something important: Notwithstanding Spencer’s sworn testimony, the ARRB was prohibited from investigating the matter because of the no-investigation provision that someone had slipped into the JFK Records Act.
Did Spencer’s testimony motivate the Washington Post to launch a journalistic investigation into the Kennedy autopsy? Did her testimony motive the Post to call for a modification of the JFK Records Act to enable ARRB to investigate the matter?
No and no.
You see, only national-security establishments of other countries carry out assassinations and regime-change operations against their own leaders. In the eyes of the U.S. mainstream press, our national-security establishment would never do such a thing. Therefore, there was and is no reason to investigate the manifest fraud in the Kennedy autopsy that was carried out by the U.S. military on the very evening of assassination as well as the origin and purpose of that fraudulent scheme.
US citizen of Pakistan descent David Headley, despite pleading guilty of plotting the Mumbai terror attack, was not extradited to India as part of a plea bargain with the US administration in 2010. Indian security agencies were not allowed access to Headley for a second time, despite repeated requests.
The US has announced a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction in any country of any individual who committed, conspired, aided or abetted the terror attacks in Mumbai, India on 26 November 2008. This is the second time that the US is announcing such reward, as the first such announcement did not yield any result.
“We call upon all countries, particularly Pakistan, to uphold their UN Security Council obligations to implement sanctions against the terrorists responsible for this atrocity, including Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and its affiliates,” Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, said.
But why was David Headley, the American spy who allegedly hatched the conspiracy for the attacks, converted into an “Approver” by the US? This question continues to haunt the Indian security agencies, as the US has never explained to India in the last 10 years why it entered into a plea bargain with Headley in 2010 that helped him escape the death penalty.
The plea bargain said that he would not be extradited to India, Denmark (where he hatched terror conspiracy), or Pakistan for any offenses for which he has been convicted under the plea, including conspiracy to bomb places of public use in India.
David Headley’s plea bargain, according to India’s intelligence officers who did not wish to be quoted, made the case weaker as “Indian intelligence only received such information, which was already out there in public domain.”
India’s National Investigative Agency only once interacted with David Headley in 2010 to record his statement and that, too, 10 days after the Indian official landed in the US. Since then, Indian agencies were not able to catch hold of Headley until 2016, when he deposed before a Mumbai court through video conferencing from a US jail, but despite making attempts, the US authorities never disclosed the whereabouts of Headley.
There has been a perception among certain section in the Indian administration that the US had every detail of Headley’s movement and that is why the US administration never allowed Indian agencies to question him independently.
Not getting access to Headley was one of the main reasons why the Indian agencies could not get answers to key questions including “who were the ‘state actors’ Headley was close to?”
It is believed that Headley visited Mumbai several times citing the reason as “for setting up of immigration office” but the key question that remains unanswered is — “how did the US citizen manage to sneak into India several times on false pretext?”
Having now watched the rest of the BBC Panorama programme, Salisbury Nerve Agent Attack – the Inside Story, I have to say that I’m really very thankful. Thankful that after being subjected to an hour of what can only be described as relentless propaganda, half-baked truths, and fully-baked untruths, I have lived to tell the tale and emerged to come up for air.
One of the worst aspects of this programme was the fact that the BBC is surely well aware that large numbers of people have been sceptical about the Government and Metropolitan Police narrative from the start. Yet you wouldn’t know from the show that there was ever any room for doubt, and the number of questions that the nation’s public service broadcaster asked which might have represented the views of the many people who have had nagging doubts was less than one.
I want to make one big observation about the programme, which I believe pretty much destroys The Met’s narrative, but before I do here are 10 other points.
First: At one point the presenter, Jane Corbin, stated the following:
“In Salisbury, it takes two weeks of painstaking investigation for scientists and police to work out exactly how the Skripals came into contact with the Novichok.”
Dept Asst Commissioner Dean Haydon is then seen saying:
“To find the source of the Novichok, actually was our first breakthrough. We identified that it was Novichok on the front door the front door handle of their home address.”
This two week period makes little sense. From the moment it was known that Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey had been poisoned, it should have been very straightforward to start zeroing in on the location of the poisoning. The reason for this is that logically it could only have been in a place that both he and the Skripals had been. And according to Mr Bailey’s story, which was completely different than what many officials previously told us about his movements, this can only have been at the house (not even the bench according to his testimony, as he now apparently wasn’t there when the Skripals were). And so the house should have been locked down, with swabs taken as early as 6th March, and the location of the poison identified. But instead, we got two weeks of “it could be here, it could be there” — all in various places which couldn’t possibly have been the location because Mr Bailey hadn’t actually been to them.
Second: Despite the fact that the programme portrayed “Novichok” as “deadly,” “lethal,” “10X more toxic than any nerve agent created before or since,” “unique in its ability to poison individuals at quite low concentrations,” “the tiniest dose can be fatal,” there is of course the fact that it singularly failed to kill a 65-year-old, overweight diabetic, his daughter, and Mr Bailey. In order to get around this, Mrs Corbin interviewed one of the men who worked on the original Foliant (not “Novichok”) project, Vil Mirzyanov, who said:
“Maybe the dose was not high enough. Salisbury was rainy and muggy. Novichok breaks down in damp conditions, reducing its toxicity. It’s the Achilles Heel of Novichok.”
Perhaps it is the Achilles Heel of Novichok. But if it is, it is also the Achilles Heel of the whole premise of the Panorama programme, since it raises two vital questions: firstly, given that the English weather in general is often damp, and the weather conditions on that weekend in particular were very damp, how likely exactly do you think it is that professional assassins would place a substance that breaks down in damp conditions on an outside door handle? And secondly, if the substance had already broken down within an hour of its application, as The Met’s case relies on to explain how a deadly nerve agent didn’t kill, how exactly were the OPCW able to find traces of the toxic chemical which they described as high purity and with “almost complete absence of impurities,” nearly three weeks later after much rain, much snow, and much general dampness?
Third: I was struck by the fact that Mrs Corbin stood by the bed of Mr Skripal’s mother, and heard that clearly very distressed lady say that she just wanted to hear her son’s voice, and yet it did not appear to occur to Mrs Corbin to ask anyone in officialdom back home, “Why won’t you let the son talk to his mother?”
Fourth: Mrs Corbin claimed of Yulia Skripal that in her Reuters statement, she:
“appears in public, to deny continuing Russian claims that the Skripals have been abducted by the British.”
This is simply a falsehood. You can look at that video or the transcript and you will find no such statement from Yulia Skripal.
Fifth: The ex head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, who in the immortal words of Anne Widdecombe about Michael Howard, appears to have “something of the night” about him, stated the following:
“The GRU probably chose a time when she [Yulia] was coming here and would be in the house, because that would give them certainty that Sergei Skripal would be in the house as well. They weren’t targeting Yulia Skripal, but she was entirely dispensable.”
The first part of this statement may well win the prize for the most ridiculous statement of the whole programme. I’ll leave you to work out why. As for the second part, in the light of his comments, Sir John should explain the following: If it’s the case that the GRU carried out this reckless attempt on her father’s life, and viewed her as entirely dispensable, why is it that Yulia has, on numerous occasions, expressed a desire to go back to live in Russia? Has MI6 failed in its attempt to persuade her who was behind the poisoning and why this means she can never go back?
Sixth: A reconstruction of the alleged events on 4th March was shown, including the two suspects at Salisbury train station, followed by the Wilton Road, and then on the bridge at Fisherton Street. This was accompanied by a comment from Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dean Haydon, who said:
“I don’t think they were expecting to be captured on CCTV in the way they have.”
Here, he was seemingly vying with Sir John for the title of silliest comment on the programme, since:
a) Britain is well known for being the CCTV capital of the world, and the GRU are likely to be aware of this, and
b) It’s not like Petrov and Boshirov made attempts not to be seen, but got caught all the same, as Mr Haydon’s comment implies. No, the most obvious point about the men in the footage is that at no point do they make any attempt to keep their identities hid from the cameras.
Seventh: Mr Haydon also made the following comment during the “reconstruction”:
“Past the petrol station, what the CCTV shows is the two suspects on the way to Christie Miller Road. On the way to the Skripals home.”
This is simply misleading. The CCTV does not show them “on their way to Christie Miller Road”. When you see the two men walking next to the garage, Christie Miller Road is roughly perpendicular to them, about 400-500 yards away. It is true that they might have crossed the road and gone up Canadian Avenue, and then onto Christie Miller Road, but this CCTV doesn’t show this, and no other evidence was presented to show that this is what they actually did. And so without any further evidence that they crossed the road to go to Christie Miller Road, it is simply misleading to say that it “shows them on the way to Christie Miller Road.”
What the CCTV does do, however, is almost certainly rule out one of the possible routes they might have taken to get to Christie Miller Road, which is to go through a passageway just past the Shell garage, which leads to Montgomery Gardens and then onto Christie Miller Road. To take this passage, they would have had to cross the road, and the easiest way of doing this would be to cross to a small island just opposite the garage. But as you can see from the footage, they are walking straight on, and there is no sign whatsoever of them crossing to this island. Though not conclusive, it makes it extremely doubtful that they were intending to, or ever did, walk through this passage.
I also have to say that if I was walking that way up Wilton Road (as I have done), and wanted to go up Canadian Avenue, I would cross at that small island, since it is by far the easiest way to get there.
Eighth: One of the more glaring things about the programme was who was missing. Although Mr Bailey’s appearance was something of a surprise, hardly any of the key witnesses at the bench were interviewed, nor was Charlie Rowley, who seems to have disappeared after his claim about the bottle he found being cellophane wrapped kind of muddled things up a bit. And then of course Yulia Skripal, who has been mysteriously silent since July, when she informed her cousin that she finally understood what had happened. And the biggest one of all — Sergei Skripal himself. Strangely, Mrs Corbin expressed no surprise that he has not been seen of or heard of during this whole saga, and she made no reasonable attempt to explain why she had not been given access to him for an interview.
Ninth: Mrs Corbin asserted the following:
“Within a few weeks, the investigative website, Bellingcat, reveals their [Petrov and Boshirov] true identities.”
The odd thing about this, however, is that in their latest statement released on 22nd November, The Met does not mention the identities Bellingcat has claimed for them. They still refer to the two as Petrov and Boshirov, and although they state that these are aliases, they make no mention of the names Chepiga and Mishkin. I find it odd that these identities have yet to be confirmed or denied officially, but even odder that the BBC went with Bellingcat and not the official investigators.
Tenth: Deputy Assistant Commissioner Haydon stated the following:
“My ambition remains to bring these two individuals, and anybody else involved in this attack to justice through the British Criminal Justice System. I will not give up.”
Very difficult to stop oneself bursting out laughing at this point. There was Mr Haydon, taking part in a programme that, with its cast iron claims of guilt against the two suspects making it absolutely impossible for a fair trial to ever take place, saying that his aim is to see justice done. Hmm!!!
Now to the big revelation in the programme — the one that made it worth watching. This was it, from Mrs Corbin, describing the reconstruction of the moment that the two suspects went to the house:
“The Skripals are at home, oblivious to what is happening right outside.”
Aha! So they were at home were they? Since this programme was put together with the assistance of The Metropolitan Police, we can therefore assume that it is their official position that the Skripals were at home at 12:00pm and following, before they left some time around 13:30 to go to the City Centre.
There are many interesting things about this, not least of which is that it’s the first time that we have been officially told where the Skripals were before they went into town. In the early days of the inquiry, a few appeals were made for information as to what the pair were doing that morning, before their car was seen driving into town at just after 13:30. But that timeline was never completed, and quietly forgotten after the last update, which was on 17th March (last time I looked, even this incomplete timeline was no longer on their website).
So why did the Met, for the first time, come out with this piece of information, and what is its significance?
On the first question, my hunch is that the answer is connected with Mr Skripal’s best friend, Ross Cassidy. Here’s an extract from an article that appeared in the Mail, just after the police released their timeline of the two suspects back in September:
“Police say Novichok was sprayed on to the front door handle of the Skripal’s house the following afternoon between midday and about 1pm. Sergei and Yulia became ill around three hours later.
But Mr Cassidy questions the police timeline. It is his understanding that Sergei and Yulia were at home until 1pm. And he said Mr Skripal’s ‘heightened state of awareness’ would have frustrated any attack in broad daylight.”
I believe that Mr Cassidy put a bit of a spanner in the works of the Met’s claims with this interview. As I stated back here:
“For the claims of the Metropolitan Police to be true, that these two men were the assassins and that they placed “Novichok” on Mr Skripal’s door handle, two things must be shown to be true:
Firstly, the Skripals must have been out between the hours of 12:10 and 13:30.
Secondly, the Skripals must have returned at some point between these two times.
Why so?
Firstly, if the Skripal’s were at home before 12:10, the claims collapse since firstly the “assassins” would almost certainly not have targeted them whilst they were at home (Mr Skripal’s garage was used as an office, and so the car would be in the drive), but more crucially both Sergei and Yulia could not have both touched the outside door handle.
Secondly, if the Skripals were out at 12:10, but did not return between then and 13:30, again the claims would be proven false since there would be no possible way that they could have touched the door handle.”
Yet because Mr Cassidy somehow knew that they were in between 12:00 and 13:00, the BBC could hardly come out on a programme going out to millions and say that they were not there at the time. Why, Mr Cassidy and perhaps some neighbours might have popped up to say that actually they were in. How embarrassing would that be?
To get around this, the BBC employed what you might call a little craft. Prior to the reconstruction section, Mrs Corbin made the following statement, after talking about Yulia leaving Moscow:
“In Salisbury, her father has no idea how much danger he is in.”
But this is yet another of the programme’s many deceptions. Numerous reports stated that in the weeks prior to the incident, Mr Skripal began to get very nervous and to even change his routine. Apparently, he very much knew that he was in danger, and we can see this very clearly by once again turning to the interview with Ross Cassidy:
“Sergei was very apprehensive. It was as though he knew something was up. Had he been tipped off or heard that things were moving against him back in Russia? One thing is for sure. He was unusually twitchy. He was spooked …
Something had spooked Sergei in the weeks prior to the attack. He was twitchy, I don’t know why, and he even changed his mobile phone.”
You might say the precise timings [about when the alleged door handle daubing took place] don’t matter. But they do matter because they don’t currently make sense.’”
He’s dead right, they don’t make sense. All the more so when you consider what he had to say about the possibility of a daylight assassination with the Skripals at home:
“However, I was surprised that they said the Novichok was placed on the Sunday lunchtime. I have always thought it was placed on the Saturday afternoon when we were collecting Yulia from Heathrow, or even Saturday night. These guys are professional assassins. It would have been far too brazen for them to have walked down a dead-end cul-de-sac in broad daylight on a Sunday lunchtime. Sergei’s house faces up the cul-de-sac. He had a converted garage that he used as his office — this gives a full view of the street. Almost always, Sergei used to open the door to us before we had chance to knock. Whenever we visited, he’d see us approaching [my emphasis].”
So even under normal circumstances, because of the position of the house, Mr Skripal would see people approaching. But factor in that Mr Skripal was “very apprehensive,” “unusually twitchy,” “spooked,” “knew something was up,” and “even changed his mobile phone,” and now ask yourself these three questions:
1. What are the chances that two people could have walked up to Mr Skripal’s house, in broad daylight, gone right up to the door, whilst the “twitchy” Mr Skripal and his daughter were inside, and sprayed a chemical on the handle, without being noticed?
2. What are the chances that two highly trained GRU assassins would walk up to a door in broad daylight, with people inside the house, and the car in the drive, and spray a chemical which breaks down in damp conditions, onto the door handle in damp conditions, in order to try to kill one of the occupants (apart from anything, the driver car door handle would have been far more targeted)?
3. And if either of these ridiculously implausible scenarios had hypothetically happened, what are the chances that both of them would have come out of the house and touched the door handle, in order to have got said chemical on their hands?
This, in my view, is the significance of the admission, for the very first time, that the Skripals were at home when the suspects were alleged to have done their deed. This was the real big takeaway from this programme. What it does is effectively relegates the door handle theory to the realm of “crackpot conspiracy theories not to be believed by rational people”. The chances of it happening were already low, given that the Skripals went for a drive, a duck feed, a meal and a drink after apparently becoming contaminated. I would say that, thanks to this BBC propaganda show, its plausibility as an explanation just plummeted even further, all the way to freezing point.
Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, one of the first people to be hospitalized in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia in Salisbury in March, has given his first-ever interview to the BBC Panorama programme.
In the interview, which aired on Thursday evening, Bailey says he was contaminated by the poison as he inspected the Skripals house, after they were found ill on a park bench in Salisbury city centre.
The British government and media were quick to blame the Russian state for the poisonings of Yulia and Sergei, declaring that the substance was the nerve agent a-234, or ‘novichok’ which had been smeared on the door handle of the Skripals’ house by two Russian military intelligence officers.
The two suspects’ identities were later put forward by the blogger website Bellingcat, which British state broadcaster the BBC widely promoted.However for some, there are still many questions remaining in the British version of the Skripal case. Columnist for the Independent and Guardian newspapers, Mary Dejevsky spoke to Sputnik about her reservations with the British media’s representation and analysis of the Skripal case.
Sputnik: Mary you tweeted recently that the BBC Panorama programme aired on Thursday night and showing an interview with Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey was ‘close to propaganda’; what made you say that?
Mary Dejevsky: Although the UK doesn’t have a state television service, this came pretty close.
My particular problem with this programme was that it posed none of the questions that have been hanging in the air ever since the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury happened back in March.
There are an awful lot of questions that are open; there is a lot of the official version put out by the government which has been challenged, and rightly challenged because there are huge questions. But the programme on the BBC posed none of these questions.
Sputnik: Why do you think it is that there has been no real analysis from British mainstream media of the Skripal case?
Mary Dejevsky: Even when there was the death of Alexander Litvinenko there were a few people that were actually questioning the official version and it wasn’t really until after the enquiry that a lot of the questions closed down.But with the Skripal case it seems to me that there has been an extraordinary consensus from the very beginning. One of the reasons I think is that the government seemed so certain about its case, and supposedly they presented evidence which mobilized this international diplomatic action where there was coordination of countries expelling Russian diplomats who were, it was claimed, working undercover – undeclared members of the Russian security services – working under diplomatic cover.
Now it’s not clear to me because I think there have been reports from Germany for instance that there was no additional evidence provided by Britain other than what they presented to parliament which was extremely flimsy.
Sputnik: What questions remain unanswered in the Skripal case?
Mary Dejevsky: There are dozens of questions. One of the most obvious is that the CCTV footage of the two alleged GRU agents going from London to Salisbury and back again twice is highly selective.
We have no CCTV footage that’s been made public of the Skripals in central Salisbury that day, even though it is apparently known that the CCTV cameras were working efficiently across Salisbury that day. We were told that the two Russian agents went to the Skripals’ house and put novichok on the door handle.The only CCTV footage that has been produced of the two has been, at the closest, half a kilometer away from the Skripals’ house. There is enormous questions, in my view, about the whole version of whether novichok or anything was put on the door handle of the Skripals’ house.
How come that they apparently went in and out of the house, it’s not clear at what times, but how come they were apparently found together collapsed on a bench several hours later as the victims of what was supposed to be a potentially fatal substance that could kill anyone that went near it, in minutes?
Sputnik: A letter was written to The Times on 14th March by Dr Stephen Davies, consultant in Emergency Medicine at Salisbury hospital, saying ‘May I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent in Salisbury, and there have only been three patients with significant poisoning’ – this really is a discrepancy in the story is it not?
Mary Dejevsky: Yes, this has always been in the background in this story, this letter that was published in The Times that denied that anyone was treated for nerve agent poisoning, and there have been various suggested explanations given since, including that when they were taken to hospital they had symptoms of fentanyl poisoning, not nerve agent poisoning, and that this explains the doctor’s letter.And there have been various attempts to square the circle, but to my mind none of them has been entirely convincing. We also have the question of the chemical weapons’ agency’s findings and whether the substance that the OPCW agency tested was actually the substance that the Skripals were poisoned with.
It doesn’t appear that there is a completely secure chain of evidence from as it were, start to finish, that nothing might have sort of inserted into the process. So there are all these questions and none of them were asked on the BBC programme.
I mentioned in a couple of comments yesterday that I don’t own a television. In fact, I haven’t had one since 2001. To begin with it’s hard, but if you stick with it you very soon come to see it as remarkably odd that you’ve spent a significant amount of your time sitting in front of a box, wondering if there’s anything on, and still watching it even if there isn’t, and letting other people drip their agenda and propaganda into your head night after night, through perhaps the most powerful medium ever created.
The downside is of course that there are sometimes things that are worth watching. I’m not that into football, but I quite fancied watching some World Cup games with my children this summer. But not having a TV or a licence I had to resort to watching the games broadcast on some dodgy website direct from Kazakhstan. So there is that.
But by and large the plusses far outweigh the minuses, one of which is the fact that I don’t have to hand over a penny of cash to an institution I have come to loathe — the BBC. But perhaps the biggest plus is that when I do get to watch a programme — especially a documentary on some political or social issue — I find that I’m better able to spot propaganda than I ever would have done had I been immersed in TV culture on a regular basis.
And so it was with the BBC’s Panorama programme. I’ve only managed to watch the first 20 minutes so far, and so I’m only able to comment on that (my thanks to David S for uploading it to YouTube). But what I’ve seen so far is one of the best — or worst depending on how you look at these things — examples of political propaganda I’ve seen in a long time.
There was of course lots of creepy music. There were of course no dissident voices. There were of course no difficult questions put to those in charge of an operation which has seen the narrative changing on a regular basis, and not making any more sense despite the changes.
Why, if the boot had been on the other foot, so to speak, and this sort of thing had been put out by Russian state television, I would find it hard to know whether to laugh or cry at it. But the one thing I would be certain of is that it was clear evidence that that country was slipping back into the dark days of Soviet propaganda, only using modern technology to make it all feel a lot more cool and spangly.
Let me say firstly that the worst thing by a country mile in the section I’ve watched so far came right at the very beginning, where the presenter, Jane Corbin, made the following statement:
“Now, moving images, never seen before of the Russian assassins just after the attack [my emphasis].”
I don’t know whether Mrs Corbin has any idea of what she just did, or whether she even cares, but in one foul swoop she completely undermined the concepts of due process, and innocent until proven guilty, and she also made it impossible for the two suspects to ever receive a fair trial, were it ever to come to that.
This is really bad. No, it’s worse than that: it’s really, really, stonkingly terribly bad. On the same day as the Panorama programme, The Metropolitan Police released CCTV footage of the men from 4th March, and the header at the top of their statement says, “Counter Terrorism Police continue appeal over Salisbury suspects [my emphasis].” In the statement itself they refer to the two men, Petrov and Boshirov, no less than five times using the word “suspects”. Yet the national broadcaster has just informed the populace that they are not suspects in an investigation, but assassins. Case closed by the Bellingcat Broadcasting Corporation?
It was basically this issue that got my goat about this case in the first place. The fact that the British Government came out and made pronouncements about what had happened, before an investigation had really properly started, literally tore up hundreds of years of English common law and indicated to me that we really are heading towards arbitrary, tyrannical Government. The fact that the BBC has now come out and pronounced authoritatively on a case that is still ongoing, where no facts whatsoever have been proven in open court, only serves to reinforce this view.
It seems that we need reminding of the following: it really doesn’t matter two hoots what our views are of what happened on 4th March in Salisbury, or whether we think that Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov were responsible, the principles of due process and the presumption of innocence, which were enshrined by people immensely wiser than our current foolish generation of leaders, still apply. They must apply, else we are done for. But the Government doesn’t seem to care about that. And the BBC doesn’t seem to care about it either. Do you?
As for the actual details of the programme, just two observations, and then maybe some more in another piece once I’ve had time to look at the rest of it.
Firstly, it seems to me that the programme contained an astonishingly glaring contrast between what we are supposed to believe about the substance apparently used, and what actually happened. Here are some quotes the programme put out about the substance itself:
“It’s very unique in its ability to poison individuals at quite low concentrations.” – Porton Down Professor Tim speaking about Novichok.
“The Russians called it Novichok. Thought to be 10X more toxic than any nerve agent created before or since.” – Jane Corbin.
“To kill a person, you need only 1mg. To be sure, 2mg.” – Vil Mirzyanov, who worked on the Foliant project.
“The person starts to go blind, that’s the first sign. The second is difficulty breathing, even to the point that they stop breathing. The third sign is constant vomiting. The fourth, uncontrollable convulsions.” – Vil Mirzyanov, on the effects of “Novichok”.
“The Russians weaponised Novichok for the battlefield. The tiniest dose can be fatal.”– Jane Corbin.
It’s like they had to keep reminding us of just how deadly the substance is. But if it is unique in its ability to poison individuals at quite low concentrations, if it is 10X more toxic than the next deadliest nerve agent, and if the tiniest dose can be fatal why — a reasonably person might ask — are the Skripals and Nick Bailey still alive? Why is the BBC reinforcing to us just how deadly a substance it is, then in the next breath telling us all about the 65-year-old diabetic who survived, even though he must have got much more than a tiny dose, since he apparently left trails of it all over the City (though interestingly, not at the duck feed, the car park meter, or the door handles at Zizzis and The Mill). And I’m afraid that the explanation of “excellent medical care will not do.” By their own admission, the hospital staff did not know how to treat it for a long while after the poisoning. And so either “Novichok” is not as deadly as they kept making out on the programme. Or “Novichok” was not used. Simple as that. But you can’t have it both ways. If you can square that particular circle, good luck. There’s a highly paid job out there for you somewhere.
The other huge anomaly was of course the movements of Nick Bailey. The account that he and a colleague went to 47 Christie Miller Road at about midnight raises some huge questions, not least because it flatly contradicts numerous previous reports. Very briefly, here are some questions that arise from what was said:
1. Many of the first reports said he was a first responder to the Skripals, but from his account on the BBC programme, I got the impression that he arrived at the bench after the Skripals had already been taken to hospital. Why then was he named as the hero cop who went to help the Skripals if he did not do this?
2. He states at one point that, “There was nothing lying near the bench”. This is a bit strange as Freya Church mentioned that both Mr Skripal and Yulia had bags with them next to the bench when she saw them. What had happened to these bags before Mr Bailey got there, and was the person who removed them also taken to Salisbury District Hospital (SDH) for tests?
3. He says that he and a colleague went to the house wearing “full protective suits.” How, then, could he have become contaminated at the house?
4. According to the report, Mr Bailey and his colleague went to 47 Christie Miller Road at around midnight on 4th March. Since their visit must have been known by his seniors, why did it take until 9th March before any news of his visit to the house was made public (by a man not even part of the investigation – former Met Commissioner, Lord Ian Blair)?
5. Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu claimed that Mr Bailey had worn a body camera when he went to the house. Why did the BBC not show this footage, but instead did their own reconstruction?
6. In his book, the BBC’s Mark Urban stated that Mr Bailey couldn’t get in the front door, and so went around the back. The programme directly contradicted this. Which one is correct?
7. Mr Bailey states that:
“Once I’d come back from the house, the Skripals house, my eyes were like … my pupils were like pinpricks, and I was quite sweaty and hot. At the time I put that down to being tired and stressed.”
But according to the programme, it was not until the Tuesday, well over 24 hours later, that he was apparently driven to SDH. How on earth could it have taken that time for him or his superiors to put two and two together, since the whole point in him doing the search and wearing the forensic suit was because it was known by that time that an unknown chemical had been used?
8. The claim that Mr Bailey was first at the house, and that this was at midnight flatly contradicts the testimony of a number of Mr Skripal’s neighbours. For instance, the Salisbury Journal reported the following on 5th March:
“Police arrived at Skripal’s home in Christie Miller Road, Salisbury, yesterday at 5pm, according to neighbours.”
“Neighbours say police have been at the ex-spy’s home since 5pm that day.”
If the lights are still on at either publication, perhaps the journalists who wrote those pieces might want to take it up with the BBC. And if the lights are still on in the country, perhaps we might want to reflect on whether it really is a very good idea to give up our precious legal safeguards, like due process, the presumption of innocence, and trial by jury, in favour of what we now appear to have, which is basically Trial by Propaganda.
Fifty-five years ago, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Although there has been a great deal written about this event over the years, I want to draw attention to one exceptionally important article, originally delivered as a talk on November 20, 1998. Vincent Salandria gave this talk in Dallas at the invitation of the Coalition on Political Assassinations. (See Sources.)
Salandria had been a high school teacher at the time of the assassination (he later became a lawyer) and was one of the first people in the US to write essays expressing dissent from the government narrative of lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, maverick leftist.
In his 1998 talk Salandria went through over a dozen of the famous obstacles to the government story—the grassy knoll witnesses, the “magic bullet,” the testimony of the doctors at Parkland Hospital, and so on—but he did not let himself get sidetracked into detailed debates on any of these. By 1998 he had already seen, and participated in, 35 years of such debates. He had long ago concluded that, “the national security state at the very highest level of its power killed President John F. Kennedy for his efforts at seeking to develop a modus vivendi with the Soviets and with socialist Cuba.”
In 1998 he felt it was time to warn researchers about the danger of wasting time in “false debates,” where the essential facts had clearly been established and the wrangling served only the purposes of the assassins. Rather than repeat the debates, Salandria decided in 1998 to outline his basic approach. I will call this the Salandria Approach. I draw attention to it because I believe it helps us find our feet when we tackle not only the JFK killing but many of the killings in the 21st century’s War on Terror.
Here are Salandria’s words:
I began to sift through the myriad facts regarding the assassination which our government and the US media offered us. What I did was to examine the data in a different fashion from the approach adopted by our news media. I chose to assess how an innocent civilian-controlled US government would have reacted to those data. I also envisioned how a guilty US national security state which may have gained control of and may have become semi-autonomous to the civilian US governmental structure would have reacted to the data of the assassination.”
He adds that,
only a guilty government seeking to serve the interests of the assassins would consistently resort to accepting one improbable conclusion after another while rejecting a long series of probable conclusions.”
Let us take two cases from Salandria’s list of over one dozen in order to see what he was getting at.
The Grassy Knoll
Dozens of witnesses thought there were shots from an extended grassy rise, containing several structures, situated west of the famous Texas School Book Depository Building. Salandria, refusing to get drawn into the familiar debate, says:
Let us assume arguendo [for the sake of argument] that all of the eyewitnesses who had concluded that shots were fired from the grassy knoll were dead wrong. But an innocent government could not and would not at that time have concluded that these good citizens were wrong and would not have immediately rushed to declare a far-fetched single assassin theory as fact.”
Note that Salandria’s emphasis is not on the details of the grassy knoll discussion but on the method the government followed in its investigation. And he is right, both about the immediate claim that Oswald acted alone— presented, as he explains, by a government representative on November 22 itself—and about the identical statement presented later by the Warren Commission.
In both cases the claim flew in the face of the eyewitness evidence. For example, despite the fact that there are references to dozens of witnesses to shots from the grassy knoll in the 26 volumes of evidence appended to the Warren Report, the Commission itself displayed little interest in them. And when the Commission dismissed every single one of the grassy knoll witnesses to protect its lone gunman theory it did so without bothering to make a sustained argument.
It chose instead to play a credibility game. It pronounced:
No credible evidence suggests that the shots were fired from the railroad bridge over the Triple Underpass, the nearby railroad yards or any place other than the Texas School Book Depository Building” Warren Report, p. 61
In other words, the Commission decided to gather together into one great agglomeration the credibility of its seven well dressed and high-ranking white men associated with government and use this to crush the credibility of the “good citizens” who were present in the Plaza and witnessed, with their senses, the unfolding of events.
It was a breathtaking move. But in what way could it be said to characterize an innocent government? How could any serious investigator pretend to solve an evidential problem by playing a credibility game? Standard practice in a homicide investigation would be to find all witnesses, to interview them, and to record their statements impartially, making sure to ask each one of them where they thought the shots came from and why they reached their conclusion. How would the opinions of congressmen, spies and the like possibly be relevant to the case when these gentlemen declined to offer adequate counter-evidence or to give a serious argument to support their peculiar conclusion?
Readers who have never had the opportunity to see and hear for themselves the good citizens in question may benefit from Mark Lane’s documentary:
Well, where, in such a case, does the Salandria Approach lead us? We have no choice but to conclude that the Warren Commission’s investigation was not what we would expect from “an innocent civilian-controlled US government.”
It was more characteristic of “a guilty government seeking to serve the interests of the assassins.” There was a predetermined perpetrator and an insistence on the guilt of this perpetrator, while evidence suggestive of a conspiracy was systematically ignored, distorted or suppressed.
Suppose we were to apply the Salandria Approach to events of the 21st century–to the eyewitnesses at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, for example? We have over 150 witnesses who reported that they saw, heard or felt explosions at the time of the beginning of destruction of the Twin Towers. (See Sources for assertions in this and the following paragraph.)
Their testimony constitutes very significant support for the theory that the Trade Center was blown up and did not undergo collapse from structural failure caused by airplane collision. We are not simply talking about loud sounds here. We are talking about sounds that experienced firefighters suspected were caused by bombs. We are talking about patterns of explosions seen pulverizing the buildings. We are talking, in some cases, about witnesses who say these explosions threw them through the air. Now, avoiding the debates about the details of this testimony, let us follow Salandria and ask: What did the government’s 9/11 Commission do with these eyewitness accounts, all of which were in its possession?
The answer is that it called for no comprehensive search for eyewitnesses (neither did the FBI, as far as I can discover), nor did it have such witnesses asked the appropriate questions. It devoted to these witnesses a single line in the roughly 585 pages of its Report. And that single line is both dismissive and extremely misleading.
What about the National Institute of Standards and Technology, assigned by government the task of looking in detail at the destruction of the Trade Center and sorting out the reasons for its destruction? In the thousands of pages of its reports on the Twin Towers we find not a single mention of the explosion witnesses. Despite NIST’s pride in its interviewing techniques, and despite its access to all the relevant information, it somehow missed over 150 witnesses. It made no attempt to find them, to sort out their testimony, or to discover how their words might illumine the mystery of the so-called “collapses.”
We should recall that the efforts of the 9/11 Commission and NIST were mere follow-through. A strenuous attempt to promote the structural failure hypothesis was begun on the very day of September 11, 2001, in the absence of serious evidence in its favour and in bold contradiction to what large numbers of witnesses were saying. (Sources)
When we adopt the Salandria Approach we must, to paraphrase Salandria, conclude that, “an innocent government could not and would not at that time have concluded that these good citizens were wrong and would not have immediately rushed to declare a far-fetched [structural failure] theory as fact.”
The Magic Bullet
In his essay Salandria explains the absurdity of the single bullet (“magic bullet”) theory, according to which one bullet passed entirely through the president’s body and then caused all of Governor Connally’s wounds, emerging after its adventure in near-pristine condition. This bullet evidently had no difficulty changing direction in mid-air, nor did it balk at losing mass in Connally’s body and then regaining this mass at the end of its journey. Salandria concludes:
“our Cold War government in the context of the assassination had declared a moratorium on the science of physics.”
Remember: the issue before us is not merely he single bullet theory itself but the behavior of government representatives in investigating this hypothesis. So it is in those moments when we read the Warren Commission transcripts and watch counsel Arlen Specter leading and pressuring witnesses into accepting the single bullet theory that we realize we are seeing the handiwork of a guilty state.
Now, what might we find if we were to apply the Salandria Approach to the destruction of the World Trade Center? To restrict ourselves, for the sake of this discussion, to World Trade 7, what would the approach of an innocent government to this building destruction look like? Would we not expect a thorough search for eyewitnesses?
Would not all of the recoverable steel be preserved carefully and made accessible to civilian experts? Would there not be a serious attempt to explain evidence of corrosion and vaporization of the steel? Would there not be the most rigorous examination of the Trade Center dust, searching for evidence that would allow ascertainment of temperatures reached during the building’s destruction and searching as well for residue of explosives and incendiaries?
Would there not be frank astonishment at the fact that the descent of this 47-storey building, not hit by a plane, began rapidly, symmetrically, and at free fall acceleration? Would not physicists openly debate this astounding event, troubled by the fact that the vertical columns of this well constructed steel-framed high-rise offered no resistance whatsoever when, for mysterious reasons, the collapse began?
Surely an innocent government sincerely probing for the truth would not choose, instead of taking the path outlined above, to construct a computer simulation that, even with manipulation, could not replicate the historical event clearly preserved on video? Surely investigators would not bring the simulation to an abrupt end before it was able to represent total collapse, and surely they would not refuse to release the complete data set used in their simulation, claiming it might compromise national security? (Sources)
When we ask these questions and contemplate the answers we see at once what game NIST has been playing in its account of World Trade 7. In the 21st century there is, perhaps, no more obvious demonstration that the US government, for the sake of its War on Terror, has “declared a moratorium on the science of physics.”
There is an entire organization, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which has taken as its task for over a decade the pointing out of such violations of the laws of physics in the US government’s account of the September 11, 2001 crime. The organization is to be praised for its creativity and persistence. Yet the false debate continues, and the intelligentsia continues to insist that the Emperor is well dressed, thank you very much.
Political Implications of Grassy Knolls and Magic Bullets
There is something I have always found arresting about the grassy knoll, and my concerns extend to the suppressed witnesses of September 11. In both cases we have ordinary folks—people like ourselves—who are, supposedly, citizens of a democracy. They are also, as far as we can tell, of sound mind and body, able to perceive with their senses and assess with their minds. Yet, all of a sudden, when their bodies and minds tell them something that conflicts with a government dictum, they are considered by government of no more political competence than cattle. I find it hard to think of a greater insult to these “good citizens” and to the notion of democracy, and I find it hard to think of a more brash assertion of the principle of authority.
This is why witnesses from the grassy knoll and the World Trade Center should be at the centre of the current debate about state deception and its relation to democracy.
As for magic bullets in Dealey Plaza and the mysterious collapse of World Trade 7, they are, I suggest, of comparable political importance to the abused witnesses. We face a collection of gentlemen in suits and ties (seven gentlemen in the Warren Commission and ten in the 9/11 Commission) telling us that their stories are more potent than the laws of the universe. How poor must be our self-confidence that we can put up with this guff? How defective must be our educational systems if they produce citizens who accept this?
Here we are, then, at the 55th anniversary of the murder of a president who was moving away from Cold War thinking and entering a different path. As we reflect on the direction in which his assassins have steered the United States of America, to the detriment of all of us, US citizens and otherwise, let us reflect on Salandria’s words:
By coming to understand the true answer to the historical question of who killed President Kennedy and why, we will have developed a delicate and precisely accurate prism through which we can examine how power works in this militarized country. By understanding the nature of this monumental crime, we will become equipped to organize the struggle through which we can make this country a civilian republic in more than name only.”
Graeme MacQueen is the former director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University. He is a member of the 9/11 Consensus Panel, former co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, and an organizer of the 2011 Toronto Hearings, the results of which have been published in book form as The 9/11 Toronto Report. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Sources
The Salandria essay that is the basis of my article, “The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes,” can be found here.
3. The list of 156 eyewitnesses to explosions in the Twin Towers can be found here. A discussion of the method used to arrive at the list as well as the treatment of these witnesses by the 9/11 Commission and NIST can be found in my article, “Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in the Twin Towers” in The 9/11 Toronto Report, ed. James Gourley, International Center for 9/11 Studies, 2012.
For a discussion of Kennedy’s turn away from the Cold War see James Douglass’s brilliant JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).
A recent report alleges that British MI6 operatives fear that releasing the ‘Russiagate’ wiretap warrant on Donald Trump surrogate Carter Page in full will jeopardize intel-gathering and set a dangerous precedent for the future.
British spies have “genuine concerns” that the publication of the unredacted version of the FBI’s request to surveil Page will expose valuable sources, the Telegraphreported on Wednesday, citing interviews with a “dozen” UK and US officials.
The FBI suspected that Donald Trump’s foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, was being recruited by Moscow amid the 2016 US presidential campaign. The agency filed a request to wiretap him under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The request was approved by the court, and later renewed three times, even after Page quit Trump’s team.
Upon assuming the presidency, Trump pressured the Department of Justice to make the FISA request public. The released document was heavily redacted, with entire pages blacked out. It revealed that the FBI’s reasoning to spy on Gates was partially based on the notorious ‘Steele Dossier’, an unverified anti-Trump memo compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and sponsored by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Convinced that the FBI “misled” the court, President Trump ordered in September to declassify 21 redacted pages of the wiretap request, then allowed the DOJ to delay the procedure.
In opposition to Trump, people within spy agencies in both Washington and London agree that the complete document should never be released, the Telegraph reported.
“It boils down to the exposure of people”, an unnamed US intelligence official told the paper. “We don’t want to reveal sources and methods.”
His colleague was quoted by the outlet as saying that Britain worries about setting a “precedent” which will discourage people from sharing information in the future.
The paper doesn’t specify whether MI6 had taken concrete steps to prevent the Carter Page FISA application from being released. Trump and his allies suggested that the fact that the document referred to the Steele Dossier indicated that the Trump campaign was surveilled with political motives in minds. Page himself, who denied ties with Moscow, told RT last month that “various political actors” in Washington had “put in a lot of false information” about him.
Some people close to Trump suspect that once the document is released in full, it will not only portray the US secret services in a bad light, but will hurt London as well. Speaking to the Telegraph, an unnamed former top adviser to Trump stated: “You know the Brits are up to their neck.”
“I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don’t want to be implicated in,” he was quoted as saying.
It turns out that Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy tasked with creating an opposition research dossier on then-candidate Donald Trump using “Kremlin sources,” actually had terrible intelligence on Russian matters, reports The Hill’s John Solomon.
In a business matter unrelated to the dossier, Steele boasted in a Feb. 8, 2016 email to a potential private-sector client that Russian President Vladimir Putin might be losing his grip on power.
“I also don’t believe any Russian client or associate will admit to a Western business contact that PUTIN has been weakened or is on the way out, as the intel suggests, out of fear of being branded an oppositionist,” Steele cautioned the recipient. “We shall see but I hope you find them informative/useful anyway.” –The Hill
Steele was very hush-hush to the prospective client of his firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, writing “All are sensitive source, of course, and need handling accordingly with anyone Russian or Ukrainian.”
Not only was Steele’s information dead wrong, it flew in the face of CIA intelligence indicating that Putin was in fact gaining power.
… more than two-and-a-half years later, Steele’s intelligence seems debunked in retrospect.
Putin is firmly entrenched in power and, in the summer and fall of 2016, he pulled off one of his most daring feats against the Western world with his meddling in the U.S. presidential election.
Yet, even more alarming at the time was the fact that Steele’s reporting in February 2016 flew in the face of the CIA’s own assessment of Moscow, ironically given that exact same month to Congress in the agency’s annual global threats assessment. –The Hill
On Feb. 9, 2016 – just one day after Steele sent the email, the CIA declared that Putin was pursuing a “more assertive foreign policy approach,” as well as a Western disinformation campaign since his popularity at home was soaring.
“President Vladimir Putin has sustained his popular approval at or near record highs for nearly two years after illegally annexing Crimea,” the CIA reported, suggesting that protests in 2016 over the weakening Russian economy could be tamped down using “repressive tactics.”
In other words, Steele’s Russian intel was crap.
When it came to the wildly salacious and unproven “Trump-Russia dossier,” meanwhile, the icing on this particular cow-pie has to be that Steele’s “Kremlin” sources – described in Vanity Fair as “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure” and “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin – was instead a former intelligence figure in Washington D.C.
In notes between Steele’s former employer, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, and the former #4 official at the Justice Department, Bruce Ohr, Ohr writes “Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the US,” quoting Simpson.
In other words, Steele’s intelligence was hearsay collected a continent away from Moscow. –The Hill
What makes this particularly troubling is that the FBI relied on Steele’s Trump-Russia dossier, which they struggled to verify, in order to justify surveiling the Trump campaign.
Steele’s correspondence with the business associate is the latest piece of evidence suggesting the former British spy may not have been as well-versed or -sourced in Russian intelligence as he was portrayed when the FBI used his now-infamous anti-Trump dossier to support a request for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Both the DOJ’s inspector general and multiple committees in Congress are investigating whether the FBI properly handled the Trump-Russia collusion case or whether it fell prey to political pressure and shoddy investigative work, as congressional Republicans and President Trump himself claim.
The FBI has an obligation to submit only verified information to support a FISA warrant. –The Hill
No wonder Steele is afraid to come to the United States and testify in front of lawmakers!
It is rare that Thanksgiving falls on a significant date, as it does this year, November 22, the date President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. When we gather to give thanks, we should remember the extraordinarily courageous John F. Kennedy and the absent presence of a man whose death, dark and bloody as it was, is a sign of hope in these dark times.
For if John Kennedy had not had the spiritual conscience to secretly carry-on a back channel letter correspondence with the courageous Nikita Khrushchev, facilitated by Pope John XXIII, we very well might not be here, having been incinerated in a nuclear holocaust.
As then, so today, do we desperately need such a meeting of minds as the U.S. continually pushes Russia into a defensive posture that makes a nuclear confrontation so much more likely.
A true war hero twice over, John Kennedy risked his life to save his men in World War II, and then, after a radical turn toward peace-making in the last year of his life, he died in his own country at the hands of his domestic enemies as a soldier in a non-violent struggle for peace and reconciliation for all people across the world.
Hope? Not because he was assassinated, but why he was assassinated.
We know who killed him: the national security state, led by the CIA, killed him, not Lee Harvey Oswald. It was a coup d’état purposely conducted in plain sight to send a message that every president since has heeded: Your job is to make war and threaten nuclear annihilation for the Deep State elites. Follow orders or else. And they have followed.
If you find my assertion about the CIA audacious and absurd, first read James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, a book widely regarded as the best book on the assassination and its meaning. Read it very closely and slowly. Check all his sources, read his endnotes, and analyze his logic. Approach his meticulous research as if you agreed with Gandhi’s saying that truth is God and God is truth. Try to refute Douglass. You will be stymied.
Then read David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government for further clarification. You will come away from these two books profoundly shaken to your core. Be a truth-seeker, if you are not one already.
Or if you prefer, call me a “conspiracy theorist,” as the CIA wants, since it was the Agency that produced CIA Dispatch # 1035-960. “Most Americans,” writes Professor Lance deHaven-Smith of Florida State University, “will be shocked to learn that the conspiracy theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda campaign initiated in 1967.”
This program was aimed at critics of the Warren Commission. The CIA requested that its own people and corporate media accomplices, including all its many journalist assets, besmirch the good names of anyone who dared to point out the absurdities in the government claim that Lee Harvey Oswald, a man working for the CIA as a fall guy, could have killed Kennedy.
So be careful how you use the term, if you don’t want to be working with the assassins to silence their critics.
But my intention here is not to debate the obvious. In a season of thanksgiving and hope, I want to remind you to remember and honor JFK. Because he knew the horror of war and grasped the systemic evil of its proponents within his own government, John Kennedy grew out of the war machine – in James Douglass’s words in JFK and the Unspeakable, when he was assassinated, JFK “was turning, Teshuvah, ‘turning,’ the rabbinic word for repentance,” against war and toward peace as his actions in the last year of his life make crystal clear. As a result, the unspeakable deep-state forces murdered him. He knew they would, but as a man of great courage, he knew he must follow the words of Abraham Lincoln dear to his heart: “I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”
Hope comes from facing the truth, not from fleeing from it. The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, called our denial of the truth about JFK and his turn toward peace that led to his murder by forces within his own government, the “unspeakable”: “the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.”
We are living in that abyss today. But we can still speak; we can refuse to be silenced. And in speaking up we will find hope.
Jim Douglass asks: “How can we take hope from a peacemaking president’s assassination by his own national security state?”
He answers: “The story of why John Kennedy died encircles the earth. Because JFK chose peace on earth at the height of the Cold War, he was executed. But he turned toward peace, in spite of the consequences to himself, humanity is still alive and struggling. That is hopeful, especially if we understand what he went through and what he has given us as his vision.”
His life’s story is the story of the courage to change radically and turn toward truth and peace-making no matter what the cost.
We should all raise our glasses in a Thanksgiving toast to John Kennedy. In his story is ours; the hope he bequeathed to us through his courageous death is one of hope for life. Our gratitude to JFK must follow with our commitment to oppose the killers in our own government who want to silence us all, now and forevermore.
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
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
