Making Excuses for Russiagate
By Daniel Lazare | Consortium News | May 18, 2018
The best evidence that Russia-gate is sinking beneath the waves is the way those pushing the pseudo-scandal are now busily covering their tracks. The Guardian complains that “as the inquiry has expanded and dominated the news agenda over the last year, the real issues of people’s lives are in danger of being drowned out by obsessive cable television coverage of the Russia investigation” – as if the Guardian’s own coverage hasn’t been every bit as obsessive as anything CNN has come up with.
The Washington Post, second to none when it comes to painting Putin as a real-life Lord Voldemort, now says that Special counsel Robert Mueller “faces a particular challenge maintaining the confidence of the citizenry” as his investigation enters its second year – although it’s sticking to its guns that the problem is not the inquiry itself, but “the regular attacks he faces from President Trump, who has decried the probe as a ‘witch hunt.’”
And then there’s the New York Times, which this week devoted a 3,600-word front-page article to explain why the FBI had no choice but to launch an investigation into Trump’s alleged Russian links and how, if anything, the inquiry wasn’t aggressive enough. As the article puts it, “Interviews with a dozen current and former government officials and a review of documents show that the FBI was even more circumspect in that case than has been previously known.”
It’s Nobody’s Fault
The result is a late-breaking media chorus to the effect that it’s not the fault of the FBI that the investigation has dragged on with so little to show for it; it’s not the fault of Mueller either, and, most of all, it’s not the fault of the corporate press, even though it’s done little over the last two years than scream about Russia. It’s not anyone’s fault, evidently, but simply how the system works.
This is nonsense, and the gaping holes in the Times article show why.
The piece, written by Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, and Nicholas Fandos and entitled “Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation,” is pretty much like everything else the Times has written on the subject, i.e. biased, misleading, and incomplete. Its main argument is that the FBI had no option but to step in because four Trump campaign aides had “obvious or suspected Russian ties.”
‘At Putin’s Arm’
One was Michael Flynn, who would briefly serve as Donald Trump’s national security adviser and who, according to the Times, “was paid $45,000 by the Russian government’s media arm for a 2015 speech and dined at the arm of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.” Another was Paul Manafort, who briefly served as Trump’s campaign chairman and was a source of concern because he had “lobbied for pro-Russia interests in Ukraine and worked with an associate who has been identified as having connections to Russian intelligence.” A third was Carter Page, a Trump foreign-policy adviser who “was well known to the FBI” because “[h]e had previously been recruited by Russian spies and was suspected of meeting one in Moscow during the campaign.” The fourth was George Papadopoulos, a “young and inexperienced campaign aide whose wine-fueled conversation with the Australian ambassador set off the investigation. Before hacked Democratic emails appeared online, he had seemed to know that Russia had political dirt on Mrs. Clinton.”
Seems incriminating, eh? But in each case the connection was more tenuous than the Times lets on. Flynn, for example, didn’t dine “at the arm of the Russian president” at a now-famous December 2015 Moscow banquet honoring the Russian media outlet RT. He was merely at a table at which Putin happened to sit down for “maybe five minutes, maybe twenty, tops,” according to Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein who was just a few chairs away. No words were exchanged, Stein says, and “[n]obody introduced anybody to anybody. There was no translator. The Russians spoke Russian. The four people who spoke English spoke English.”
The Manafort associate with the supposed Russian intelligence links turns out to be a Russian-Ukrainian translator named Konstantin Kilimnik who studied English at a Soviet military school and who vehemently denies any such connection. It seems that the Ukrainian authorities did investigate the allegations at one point but declined to press charges. So the connection is unproven.
Page Was No Spy
The same goes for Carter Page, who was not “recruited” by Russian intelligence, but, rather, approached by what he thought were Russian trade representatives at a January 2013 energy symposium in New York. When the FBI informed him five or six months later that it believed the men were intelligence agents, Page appears to have cooperated fully based on a federal indictment filed with the Southern District of New York. Thus, Page was not a spy but a government informant as ex-federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has pointed out – in other words, a good guy, as the Times would undoubtedly see it, helping the catch a couple of baddies.
As for Papadopoulos, who the Times suggests somehow got advance word that WikiLeaks was about to dump a treasure trove of Hillary Clinton emails, the article fails to mention that at the time the conversation with the Australian ambassador took place, the Clinton communications in the news were the 30,000 State Department emails that she had improperly stored on her private computer. These were the emails that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about,” as Bernie Sanders put it. Instead of spilling the beans about a data breach yet to come, it’s more likely that Papadopoulos was referring to emails that were already in the news – a possibility the Times fails to discuss.
FBI ‘Perplexed’
One could go on. But not only does the Times article get the details wrong, it paints the big picture in misleading tones as well. It says that the FBI was “perplexed” by such Trump antics as calling on Russia to release still more Clinton emails after WikiLeaks went public with its disclosure. The word suggests a disinterested observer who can’t figure out what’s going on. But it ignores how poisonous the atmosphere had become by that point and how everyone’s mind was seemingly made up.
By July 2016, Clinton was striking out at Trump at every opportunity about his Russian ties – not because they were true, but because a candidate who had struggled to come up with a winning slogan had at last come across an issue that seemed to resonate with her fan base. Consequently, an intelligence report that Russia was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee “was a godsend,” wrote Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in Shattered, their best-selling account of the Clinton campaign, because it was “hard evidence upon which Hillary could start to really build the case that Trump was actually in league with Moscow.”
Not only did Clinton believe this, but her followers did as well, as did the corporate media and, evidently, the FBI. This is the takeaway from text messages that FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok exchanged with FBI staff attorney Lisa Page.
Andrew McCarthy, who has done a masterful job of reconstructing the sequence, notes that in late July 2016, Page mentioned an article she had come across on a liberal web site discussing Trump’s alleged Russia ties. Strzok texted back that he’s “partial to any women sending articles about nasty the Russians are.” Page replied that the Russians “are probably the worst. Very little I finding redeeming about this. Even in history. Couple of good writers and artists I guess.” Strzok heartily agreed: “f***ing conniving cheating savages. At statecraft, athletics, you name it. I’m glad I’m on Team USA.”
The F’ing Russian ‘Savages’
This is the institutional bias that the Times doesn’t dare mention. An agency whose top officials believe that “f***ing conniving cheating savages” are breaking down the door is one that is fairly guaranteed to construe evidence in the most negative, anti-Russian way possible while ignoring anything to the contrary. So what if Carter Page had cooperated with the FBI? What’s important is that he had had contact with Russian intelligence at all, which was enough to render him suspicious in the bureau’s eyes. Ditto Konstantin Kilimnik. So what if the Ukrainian authorities had declined to press charges? The fact that they had even looked was damning enough.
The FBI thus made the classic methodological error of allowing its investigation to be contaminated by its preconceived beliefs. Objectivity fell by the wayside. The Times says that Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 agent whose infamous, DNC and Clinton camp paid-for opposition research dossier turned “golden showers” into a household term, struck the FBI as “highly credible” because he had “helped agents unravel complicated cases” in the past. Perhaps. But the real reason is that he told agents what they wanted to hear, which is that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years” with the “[a]im, endorsed by PUTIN, … [of] encourage[ing] splits and divisions in [the] western alliance.” (which can be construed as a shrewd defensive move against a Western alliance massing troops on Russian borders.)
What else would one expect of people as “nasty” as these? In fact, the Steele dossier should have caused alarm bells to go off. How could Putin have possibly known five years before that Trump would be a viable presidential candidate? Why would high-level Kremlin officials share inside information with an ex-intelligence official thousands of miles away? Why would the dossier declare on one page that the Kremlin has offered Trump “various lucrative real estate development business deals” but then say on another that Trump’s efforts to drum up business had gone nowhere and that he therefore “had had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather than business success”? Given that the dossier was little more than “oppo research” commissioned and funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, why was it worthy of consideration at all?
The Rush to Believe
But all such questions disappeared amid the general rush to believe. The Times is right that the FBI slow-walked the investigation until Election Day. This is because agents assumed that Trump would lose and that therefore there was no need to rush. But when he didn’t, the mood turned to one of panic and fury.
Without offering a shred of evidence, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a formal assessment on Jan. 6, 2017, that “Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election … [in order] to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.”
The New Yorker reports that an ex-aide to John McCain hoped to persuade the senator to use the Steele dossier to force Trump to resign even before taking office. (The ex-aide denies that this was the case.)
When FBI Director James Comey personally confronted Trump with news of the dossier two weeks prior to inauguration, the Times says he “feared making this conversation a ‘J. Edgar Hoover-type situation,’ with the FBI presenting embarrassing information “to lord over a president-elect.”
But that is precisely what happened. When someone – most likely CIA Director John Brennan, now a commentator with NBC News – leaked word of the meeting and Buzzfeed published the dossier four days later, the corporate media went wild. Trump was gravely wounded, while Adam Schiff, Democratic point man on the House Intelligence Committee, would subsequently trumpet the Steele dossier as the unvarnished truth. According to the Times account, Trump was unpersuaded by Comey’s assurances that he was there to help. “Hours earlier,” the paper says, “… he debuted what would quickly become a favorite phrase: ‘This is a political witch hunt.’”
The Times clearly regards the idea as preposterous on its face. But while Trump is wrong about many things, on this one subject he happens to be right. The press, the intelligence community, and the Democrats have all gone off the deep end in search of a Russia connection that doesn’t exist. They misled their readers, they made fools of themselves, and they committed a crime against journalism. And now they’re trying to dodge the blame.
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics.
‘Independent’ Syrian Observatory for Human Rights receives nearly £200k from UK – Peter Hitchens
By Omar Baggili | RT | May 14, 2018
The British government has given the self-described ‘impartial’ Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) £194,769.60 for a project to help fund “communications equipment and cameras,” according to journalist Peter Hitchens.
The Sunday Mail’s Hitchens, a regular critic of British foreign policy, tweeted on Sunday: “Boris Johnson’s Foreign Office admits it gave £194,769.60 to the supposedly ‘independent’ Syrian Human Rights Observatory. How many other ‘independent’ bodies in the Syrian controversy aren’t as ‘independent’ as they look?”
The SOHR declares on its website that it’s “not associated or linked to any political body.” Hitchens in his Sunday Mail blog asks: “Is Boris Johnson’s Foreign Office not a political body?” Hitchens appears to question the legitimacy of the relationship, in relation to the Syrian conflict “in which the British government clearly takes sides.”
Fellow Mail journalist and author of ‘Not the Chilcot Report,’ Peter Oborne has added that the “Syrian Observatory has been treated as a gold standard for information on Syria. Quoted by BBC all the time. Always described as independent.”
The group has come under criticism, being accused by some as a tool of Western propaganda due to its location and lack of staff. Its operation is managed by one man in Coventry in the UK, Rami Abdurrahman, who fled Syria in 2000. He relies on a handful of Syrians to assist him in collating information from “more than 230 activists on the ground”, a network of people from his youth, reports New York Times.
Abdurrahman’s neutrality on the Syrian conflict came under fire when he told Reuters in 2011 he would return to Syria only “when Bashar al-Assad goes,” and according to CNN, was part of a delegation of Syrian opposition officials that met with the then-Foreign Secretary William Hague, that same year.
It’s not the only Syrian-focused human rights group to come under the spotlight with accusations of questionable neutrality because of UK government links. The White Helmets, officially known as the ‘Syria Civil Defence’ has also come under fire. Since 2011, the UK has provided the organization with £38.4m of funding, a freedom of information request has revealed, as reported in The Guardian.
The group operates in areas under the control of the Syrian opposition forces, including Islamist rebels such as Jaysh al-Islam, who controlled the city of Douma until recently, and the location of the latest alleged chemical weapons attack.
According to reports, Theresa May is preparing to increase funding to the White Helmets in response to media claims that President Donald Trump is to withdraw US support for the organization. In March, Trump froze a $200m (£148m) package of US aid to Syria, including money for the White Helmets.
The US President has said he would like to see his country relieve itself of military and humanitarian duties in Syria, calling on other countries to help fill the financial void to fund stabilizing and rebuilding projects in the country after the fight against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), claims ABC news.
Addressing parliament on Wednesday, the UK PM said: “We do support them [the White Helmets], we will continue to support them and … the international development secretary will be looking at the level of support in the future.”
Two Syrian groups claim to be impartial, yet are happy to receive funding from the UK government who, as Hitchens says, are clearly taking sides on the Syrian conflict.
Hilarious fake Yulia Skripal twitter account (now deleted)
Niqnaq | May 6, 2018
Would you believe that a twitter account purporting to be Yulia Skripal appeared 2 days ago & her first follower was The Washington Post ? The lies continue unabated. I challenged her to show her face & give us the grand interview the whole world wants to see. I got no reply.
— Maria (@mariabirchwood) May 6, 2018
Alexander Yakovenko (diplomat) slams British journalists over the Skripal case as he asks “what’s happening in the UK?”:
A Bucketful of Novichok
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | May 5, 2018
In my last piece, I wrote that one of the downsides of the probable D-Notice slapped on the Skripal Case was that we may well be deprived of our daily dose of farcical nonsense, such as whether the poison was administered in the restaurant, the car, the cemetery, the flowers, the luggage, the bench, the porridge, the door handle or – and I’m surprised nobody has thought of it yet – perhaps the cat. There is no doubt an FSB manual waiting to be found which explains how cats can be safely used as conduits for “Novichok”, and it has almost certainly been put together by the dashingly handsome, astonishingly intelligent, but inexplicably bitmapped ruthless ex-KGB assassin, “Gordon”, who was apparently a suspect a couple of weeks ago, but is no longer deemed a person of interest.
But despite the D-Notice, on the morning of 5th May it seemed that the torrent of patent absurdities was actually not about to cease anytime soon. In an interview with the New York Times, the Director General of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Ahmet Uzumcu, said the following:
“For research activities or protection you would need, for instance, five to 10 grams or so, but even in Salisbury it looks like they may have used more than that, without knowing the exact quantity, I am told it may be 50, 100 grams or so, which goes beyond research activities for protection.”
My immediate reaction was to ask why only 50-100 grams (which the New York Times helpfully tells its readers is between about a quarter-cup to a half-cup of liquid)? Why not a whole bucketful of Novichok, splashed indiscriminately over the front door of Mr Skripal’s house?
It is testimony to the truly uninquisitive minds of the dutiful stenographers at the New York Times and the rest of the media which ran with the same story, that none of them appear to have wondered to themselves something along these lines:
“Huh? 100 grams of military-grade nerve agent? Of a type said to be 5-8 times more lethal than VX, which itself has a median lethal dose of 10 milligrams. And we’re now apparently talking about 100,000 milligrams! And yet not only are the Skripals alive (well at least they were when last Yulia got hold of a phone) but the population of Salisbury seems to be doing okay as well. In fact no-one died (apart from the cat and the guinea pigs). Does Mr Uzumcu know what he’s talking about?”
My next reaction was to wonder whether actually he knows exactly what he’s talking about. But I’ll come back to that in a moment.
Anyway, later in the day, the OPCW issued a Statement on Amount of Nerve Agent Used in Salisbury, which read as follows:
“In response to questions from the media, the OPCW Spokesperson stated that the OPCW would not be able to estimate or determine the amount of the nerve agent that was used in Salisbury on 4 March 2018. The quantity should probably be characterised in milligrams. However, the analysis of samples collected by the OPCW Technical Assistance Visit team concluded that the chemical substance found was of high purity, persistent and resistant to weather conditions.”
As an aside, I’d love to know which media asked the questions. My guess is that it wasn’t any of those organisations who had repeated the claims made in the New York Times.
But what of the statement itself? Taken at face value, along with Mr Uzumcu’s original statement, it is very odd for a number of reasons:
1. Firstly, it says that the OPCW would not be able to estimate or determine the amount of the substance used. But of course this is exactly what Mr Uzumcu did appear to say, when he mentioned the quantities 50 and 100 grams.
2. Secondly, the statement says that the quantity should probably be characterised in milligrams. Not bucketfuls then? But of course the problem with this is that it does appear to leave Mr Uzumcu looking rather stupid, as if he:
a) Doesn’t know his grams from his milligrams and
b) Doesn’t realise that a cupful of military grade nerve agent 5-8 times more toxic than VX would kill people – like, lots and lots and lots of people
3. And thirdly, the milligrams for grams exchange completely undercuts the whole point Mr Uzumcu was making. He was saying that it appeared from the amount used that it could not have been produced in any old laboratory, as he had admitted a week before when he had said it could be produced “in any country where there would be some chemical expertise.” Rather, the point he was making was that quantities like 50-100 grams could only point to military production of the agent, rather than simply for research purposes.
This is all very bizarre. That’s hardly surprising, though, since there is almost nothing about this case that has not been extremely odd. From what I can tell, there are only really two possible explanations for this latest bout of strangeness.
One possible explanation is that Mr Uzumcu is simply incompetent, and so lacking in knowledge that he doesn’t know his grams from his milligrams, nor that half a cup of deadly nerve agent would wipe out hundreds, if not thousands, of people (not to mention being impossible to put on a door handle in the first place, at least not without the kind of protection that might just draw attention). However, this seems to me fairly unlikely. I assume that you don’t become Director General of the OPCW and remain in the position for eight years if you really are that inept.
But is there another more revealing explanation?
If you go back and read Mr Uzumcu’s statement, it is very noticeable that he does not actually state that he personally believes the quantity of the poison used in Salisbury was 50 or 100 grams. What he actually said is:
“For research activities or protection you would need, for instance, five to 10 grams or so, but even in Salisbury it looks like they may have used more than that, without knowing the exact quantity, I am told it may be 50, 100 grams or so, which goes beyond research activities for protection” [my emphasis].
It looks like they may have used more than that? From what does it look like that? From the months long, multi-million pound clean up job being undertaken, by any chance?
And of the quantity, he says he was told this. But the question is, who told him?
I can’t be sure, but my hunch is that he does know his grams from his milligrams; that he is well aware that 50-100 grams of the stuff would be enough to have killed the Skripals outright, along with hundreds or possibly thousands of others in the surrounding area; and also that he understands full well that the current multi-million pound clean up operation in Salisbury, which is precisely intended to give the impression that there was so much of the stuff that it might make up half a cupful, or perhaps even a whole bucketful, is something of a farce.
And so even though his original statement at first seems absurd, I’m fairly convinced that it was not a display of incompetence on his part. Rather, together with the subsequent clarification, it was very likely a signal that he believes his source for the claim to be either incompetent or – shall we say – economical with the actualité. And it may be that his real aim was – as diplomatically as possible – to let certain folks in Britain know that he’s not as convinced by some of their claims as they might like him to be.
From the Skripals to Douma, the Globalist Pravda Network Reveals its True Face
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | May 2, 2018
People living in the Soviet Union had a wonderful phrase to describe the two biggest circulation state-controlled newspapers, Pravda (meaning “truth”) and Izvestia (meaning “news”). There’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia, was the oft-repeated expression. It is unfortunate that the mainstream media in the Western nations these days don’t have similar sorts of names, since it deprives us of an endless source of amusement in coming up with similarly apposite phrases about them.
It is, however, increasingly clear that on the great issues of the day, you are about as likely to find the truth in them as you would have done in Pravda, although I expect their sports and gardening sections are still relatively reliable. As for the important political and geopolitical issues of the day, I tend to imagine that on the walls next to the desks in the offices of many of these papers and broadcasters are the following instructions:
Rules for Reporting on Global Affairs
- Repeat Government line unquestioningly.
- If Government line is questioned, accuse those doing the questioning of being Bots, Kremlin-trolls and useful idiots.
- If the persistent questioning won’t go away and the Government line is seen to be contradictory and full of holes, bury the issue completely and start posing deep questions, such as “What will Meghan wear?” or “Is there a gender pay gap in midwifery?” or “How much sugar is really bad for you?”
The Skripal and Douma episodes have demonstrated this perhaps more than any others. First the Government line has been dutifully parroted by the media in a relentless propaganda campaign — no questions asked. Then there have been attempts to silence or ridicule those who didn’t bow to the parrots and who were asking legitimate questions — including the appalling treatment meted out to distinguished military men. And finally, both issues now appear to have been “disappeared” down the Memory Hole, apparently to be forgotten forever and ever.
This last point is so obvious in the Skripal case that it has caused some to speculate that the British Government has slapped a D-Notice on the case (this is a formal notice to the media to limit their coverage of the story on grounds of “national security”). I can hardly help thinking of that without giving a horse laugh. A D-Notice to stop the media reporting on the case on the grounds of national security? What’s funny about it is that all the media has done since day one of the case is to endlessly repeat the Government line on absolutely everything, even when that line became so utterly ludicrous that believing it required one to hold a number of contradictory and irreconcilable thoughts in one’s head at the same time.
In other words, if there is indeed a D-Notice on the issue, which seems very likely given the fact that there is now almost zero coverage of the case in the British media, it can have nothing to do with national security, per se, since from the get-go it was clear that the media had no interest in investigating any of the claims made by Government. The Government line was perfectly safe from being questioned by those who are apparently not able to report on it now, and so one can only conclude that it is because the Government line is so obviously full of holes that reporting on it needed to be stopped, lest increasing numbers of rational people recognised it to be somewhat barking.
It’s a shame really. I began to look forward to seeing what each day’s new dose of cock and bull would bring forth. They were poisoned at the restaurant. No the car. No the cemetery. The flowers. No, it was in the luggage. No, the bench. No, it was porridge. No, no, no! It was on the door handle, and it was liquid, which although tending to be runny, remained there for three weeks, even in all that rain and snow, in highly pure form, and you know the amazing thing is that people without protection stood just feet away from it, and they are fine. Whoda thunk it? But it is military-grade nerve agent “of a type developed by Russia” nonetheless. Seriously guv.
Oh and they’re in a coma. Sergei and Yulia, that is. Like to die they are. A judge will probably have to take the decision to switch off their life support. Oh hang on, Yulia’s on the phone. Yes of course she is. She’s fine. Sorry we forgot to mention that before when we were talking about the life support machine. And Sergei’s okay too. Yes we can confirm that. Sorry we didn’t mention that before either. But he’s unable to talk. So you won’t hear from him. Or her. He’s in the hospital, though. Probably. Don’t know where she is. Not to be disturbed though.
Oh and there’s the policeman at the bench. Sorry, we meant the house. The house and the bench. Which one? How on earth should we know? Both probably. At the same time. But he can’t talk either.
What is particularly funny is that according to Mark Sedwell, the UK’s National Security Advisor, certain classified information – such as the apparent door handle delivery method – was released in order to “counter Russian disinformation”. Ah so it was Russian disinformation that took us from the restaurant to the car to the cemetery to the flowers to the luggage to the bench via the porridge and finally (finally???) to the door handle (I say “finally???” only because nobody has yet suggested the cat as the conduit for the poison)? So it was Russian disinformation that tried to sell us the idea of a slow-working, lethal yet non-lethal, military-grade nerve agent that enables its victims to go to restaurants, make them hallucinate and then be as right as rain a few weeks later? So it was Russian disinformation that told us that after studying hours of CCTV footage, British intelligence had a suspect in the case – the dashingly handsome, astonishingly intelligent, and diabolically ruthless former KGB agent, codenamed “Gordon” or was it “Cecil” or “Squiffy” or something, with a penchant for martial arts and (who can doubt) fast cars and loose women – only for Mark Sedwell to tell MPs a week later that there is no suspect, there never has been a suspect, and the investigation has been hampered by lack of CCTV footage?
Russian disinformation? Alas no. It was the UK media wot did it. They managed to put about more disinformation, stuff and nonsense, and cock and bull in a month or so than 10,000 “trolls” working 16 hour shifts in a basement in St. Petersburg could have done in a decade. And so you can see why the Government might want to slap a D-Notice on it, can’t you? Except that it should obviously be a C-Notice, the C standing for Comedy.
As for Douma, the media excelled itself there as well. There we have three Governments, apparently dropping bombs on chemical weapons depots in response to an unproven chemical weapons attack, and not one journalist in the mainstream media thought to say, “Hang on a minute! You dropped bombs on what you thought was a chemical weapons depot? Isn’t that … em … a tad on the dangerous side? Toxic fumes and people in the surrounding area becoming contaminated and all that?”
And when nobody became contaminated, not one mainstream media journalist thought to ask, “Hang on a minute! Isn’t the fact that there was no release of toxic substances into the atmosphere when you bombed it sort of like evidence that … em … how can we put it … there weren’t any toxic substances there?”
And when one of the little boys and the doctors in the “chemical attack” video that the Western Governments used as a pretext to bomb a sovereign country and spook us into wondering whether WWIII was about to start — when they turned up alive and well in The Hague to testify that there was no chemical attack, did even one mainstream media journalist think to themselves, “Maybe it would be good to hear what they have to say, since they were there?” Alas no. Some moved onto number 2 in the Rules for Reporting on Global Affairs, denouncing with barely concealed fury the testimony of the very people who had appeared in the original video that had once seemed so persuasive to them, whilst others moved onto number 3, and started talking about what Kim Kardashian has been up to lately.
It is clear that there is a deep sickness at the heart of the media. The whole point of its existence is to investigate incidents, to go where the facts lead it, and to serve ordinary people by attempting to report and reveal what is true. And above all that, it is to act as a check on the overweening state, so that it does not feel that it has carte blanche to do whatsoever it wishes.
But the handling of these two major cases has shown perhaps more than ever before that it has no intention of doing these things. It will not investigate, it has no intention of revealing inconvenient facts, and it cares little for the truth. And above all, instead of acting as a break on the state and on Government recklessness, its chief concern now appears to be doing the bidding of a very powerful group of Globalists, defending and advancing their diabolical agenda, regardless of what is and what isn’t true.
What should we call such a media that seems to have little or no regard for the truth, and which collectively serves the interests of the Global elite? Mainstream? Globalist Pravda Network seems to me to be a more accurate description.
“Russian Talking Points” Look An Awful Lot Like Well-Documented Facts
By Caitlyn Johnstone | Rogue Journalist | May 2, 2018
Things aren’t looking great for the Democratic establishment, which recently admitted that it stacks its primaries against progressive candidates and is currently engaged in a desperate, hail Mary lawsuit against WikiLeaks for its factual publications about the party. So of course you know what that means.
That’s right! It’s time for Democratic pundits to begin down-punching Jill Stein.
Jill Stein is on @NewDay right now repeating Russian talking points on its interference in the 2016 election and on US foreign policy.
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) May 1, 2018
WATCH: Jill Stein refuses to condemn Russian election interference in babbling CNN interview https://t.co/klX5ivLLrG
— Raw Story (@RawStory) May 1, 2018
“Jill Stein is on @NewDay right now repeating Russian talking points on its interference in the 2016 election and on US foreign policy,” tweeted CNN Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto today, without shame or self-reflection.
Sciutto was referring to comments Stein made on a CNN interview today about America’s undeniable, entirely factual and well-documented history of meddling in other countries’ elections, including a citation of an ex-CIA Director’s recent admission that the US has interfered in foreign electoral processes and continues to do so to this day.
Because that’s what constitutes a “Russian talking point” these days: raw, easily verifiable facts.
Stein’s interviewer, Chris “It’s illegal to read WikiLeaks” Cuomo, echoed a similar sentiment in response to her points, in essence arguing that only Russians should be stating these blatantly obvious and extremely relevant facts.
“You know, that would be the case for Russia to make, not from the American perspective,” Cuomo said. “Of course, there’s hypocrisy involved, lots of different big state actors do lots of things that they may not want people to know about. But let Russia say that the United States did it to us, and here’s how they did it, so this is fair play. From the American perspective and you running for president, more than once of this country, shouldn’t your position have been, this was bad what they did, they’re trying to do it right now and we have to stop it?”
Right. Because you have so many Russians on your show making that case, do you Chris?
This is absolute lunacy. The implication here is that it isn’t ever okay for Americans to talk about Russia in any other context than how awful and evil its government is; that nobody can speak about how America’s behavior factors into the equation in a very real and significant way. Not because it’s not factual, not because it’s not relevant, but because it’s a “Russian talking point”, and only Russians should be saying it.
And this sentiment being promulgated by these establishment pundits is being swallowed hook, line and sinker by the rank-and-file citizenry who consume such media. Every single day, without exception, I am accused multiple times of being a propagandist for the Kremlin. Not because there’s any evidence for that, not because I’m writing anything that is untruthful, but because I’m writing “Russian talking points”, i.e. arguments that have ostensibly been made at some point by Russians.
And it is, to be perfectly honest, infuriating. These people are actively making the case for willful ignorance and stupidity. They’re actively arguing that facts which don’t support the narratives being promulgated by the CIA and the State Department should be completely excluded from all discussion within the western hemisphere, and that only Russians should be making them. They do this while simultaneously arguing that Russian media is dangerous and should be avoided by Americans. Only Russians should argue against CIA/CNN narratives, and we should never, ever listen to those arguments.
They’re arguing for the deliberate omission of relevant facts from dialogue. They are arguing that we should all be morons, on purpose.
Of course it’s relevant to the discussion that the US interferes with foreign democratic processes far more than any other government on the planet! Are you nuts? Yes, obviously if yours is the primary country responsible creating a climate wherein governments meddle in the elections of other nations, that undeniable fact must necessarily be a part of any sensible analysis of what’s happening and what should be done about it. Anyone who tries to argue that that fact shouldn’t be a part of the conversation is making an argument in favor of stupidity.
That’s not a “whataboutism”, as empire loyalists like Eric Boehlert habitually claim. It’s crucial factual information.
pressed on Russia election interference, Jill Stein on CNN opts for Russian wahtaboutism–America does it too, and even worse!!
she’s a self-parody
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) May 1, 2018
The environment that these pundits are creating is itself hostile to democracy. If all “talking points” are excluded from the conversation other than those which lead to continually escalating sanctions, proxy wars, nuclear posturing and brinkmanship, then there’s no way for activism or democracy to tap the brake on the west’s ongoing trajectory toward direct military confrontation with a nuclear superpower.
In her interview, Stein outlined this quite clearly:
“You know, I think that kind of position which says that we’re in a totally different category from the rest of the world is not working. This century of American domination, you know, sort of didn’t play out the way we thought it would, we’re embroiled now — we have the military in practically every country around the world. In the recent taxes that people pay, the average American paid almost $3,500 that went into the Department of Offense, I would call it, not the Department of Defense, $3,500, whereas we put $40 into the EPA.
“You know, 57 percent of our discretionary dollars now are going into the military. It’s part of a mindset that says, we’re always right and they’re always wrong and we’re going to be dominating militarily and economically. We’re in a multi-polar world right now and, you know, we need to behave as an exemplary member of the community and that is by upholding ourselves and leading the way on international law, human rights and diplomacy. That approach is really paying off on the Korean peninsula right now. I think we should be using it more broadly.”
Cuomo, who as the son of a New York Governor and brother of the current New York Governor is as much Democratic Party royalty as a Clinton, had some very interesting facial expressions in response to Stein’s arguments. Whenever an interviewee makes strong points which go against the establishment grain he always looks like he’s taking a really uncomfortable shit:
There have been far too many cartoonishly absurd responses to Stein’s interview for me to address in a single article without putting my laptop through the wall in a fit of rage, but this tweet from MSNBC and Atlantic contributor Natasha Bertrand is really something else.
“Jill Stein just told @CNN that her presence at RT gala in Moscow Dec 2015 wasn’t controversial at the time because Obama ‘was still on track for a reboot’ with Putin,” said Bertrand, adding that “Russia had already annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine, intervened in Syria for Assad, and hacked the DNC.”
This is actual, real-life “Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia” Orwellian revisionist doublethink. There was no public information about any Russian DNC hack in 2015, and the average American hardly ever thought about Russia at that time. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry personally met with Vladimir Putin in July of 2016 to discuss collaboration against terrorist forces in Syria. Only in the most warped, revisionist, funhouse mirror Orwellian reality tunnel can it be claimed that Stein visiting Moscow in December of 2015 would have been considered shady or controversial at the time.
Jill Stein just told @CNN that her presence at RT gala in Moscow Dec 2015 wasn’t controversial at the time because Obama “was still on track for a reboot” with Putin.
(Russia had already annexed Crimea, invaded eastern Ukraine, intervened in Syria for Assad, and hacked the DNC.)— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) May 1, 2018
The fact that Bertrand’s tweet was liked and shared thousands of times on Twitter is extremely creepy and disturbing. Establishment media didn’t start indoctrinating American liberals with Russia hysteria until the tail end of 2016, but it’s been so effective that MSNBC mainliners are now gaslighting themselves into a revision of their own history.
This is why people like myself fight the CIA/CNN Russia narrative so aggressively. Not because we’re propagandists, not because we’re “useful idiots”, not because of “Russian talking points”, but because the US-centralized power establishment’s nonstop campaign to manufacture support for its agendas of global hegemony are making us all stupid and crazy.
Stop playing along with this bullshit. Stop letting them make us stupid and crazy. Stop letting them manipulate us into consenting to escalations with a nuclear superpower. Stop. Turn back. Wrong way.
The Skripal Case and Bombing Syria: Six Things We Learned About Modern Britain
By Neil Clark | Sputnik | May 3, 2018
To have been in ‘democratic’ Britain for the past eight weeks has been quite an educational experience.
We’ve seen how the NeoCon Establishment works, how dissent is policed, and how ‘gas-lighting’ techniques are used to try and make us think we’re going crazy for questioning the ‘official narrative’ — a narrative which we know just by employing simple logic, doesn’t make sense.
Here’s a list of the most important things we’ve learnt- that’s if you weren’t aware of them already.
1. The presumption of innocence doesn’t apply to NeoCon targets.
Innocent until proven guilty? Not if you’re in the line of fire of the Endless War Lobby, comrade. Russia was accused of trying to poison the Skripals before a proper criminal investigation had even begun. The Syrian government was blamed for a chemical weapons attack, before we had independently verification that a chemical weapons attack had even taken place. The ‘Official Narrative’ on both cases has unravelled spectacularly. No ‘smoking gun’ evidence of either Russian involvement in the Skripal case or of the Douma CW attack has been produced. On the contrary, witnesses testified last week at The Hague that the Douma attack didn’t happen.
But we’re expected not to notice — as the news cycle — conveniently for the accusers- moves on to other stories.
2. Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper plays an utterly pernicious role in British public life.
It was the Times which demanded action from Theresa May against Russia. It was the Times which has demanded (repeatedly, and again after the Skripal incident) that Ofcom acted against Russian media in the UK, such as RT. It was the Times, which accuses Russian media of peddling ‘fake news’, which reported Sergei Skripal as dead on its 12th March front page.
It was The Times which, on 14th March, falsely reported that ‘almost 40’ people had needed treatment in Salisbury, prompting Dr Stephen Davies, Consultant in Emergency Medicine to write to the paper stating ‘May I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning.’
It was The Times, which on the day the US/UK and France launched illegal attacks on Syria in response to the unverified chemical weapons attack at Douma, carried a front page attack on British academics who dare to challenge the War Party line on Syria. It was The Times which smeared other critics of western foreign policy as ‘Russian trolls’, including a peace campaigner from Finland who had been battling cancer.
John Wight has called the Times, the in-house organ of the neocon Henry Jackson Society. Its days as Britain’s respected newspaper of record have certainly long gone.
3. Britain is only what is called a ‘Democracy’.
Just think back to that Parliamentary debate on 14th March. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was attacked from his own side, for his cautious approach towards the government’s unproven claims about the Skripal case. To add insult to injury a number of Labour MPs then signed Early Day Motion 1071 – which stated ‘This House unequivocally accepts the Russian state’s culpability for the poisoning of Yulia and Sergei Skripal’. Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary Nia Griffith showed her support for Theresa May by saying ‘We very much accept what the Prime Minister said.’ Corbyn, coming under enormous Establishment pressure did buckle, saying the Russian authorities ‘needed to be held to account’, even though later he still quite rightly insisted that ‘absolute evidence’ was needed.
In bombing Syria on 14th April, Theresa May not only refused to recall Parliament, she also ignored public opinion which showed only 20% in favour of air strikes. In a genuine democracy that would have ruled out action. But May treated public opinion with utter contempt. That wonderful passage from ‘The Comments of Moung Ka’ by the Edwardian comic writer Saki springs readily to mind.
‘The people of Britain are what is called a Democracy’ said Moung Ka. ‘A Democracy?’ questioned Moung Thwa. What is that?’
‘A Democracy’ broke in Moung Shooglay eagerly, ‘is a community that governs itself according to its own wishes and interests by electing accredited representatives who enact its laws and supervise and control their administration. It’s aim and object is government of the community in the interests of the community’.
‘Then’, said Moung Thwa, turning to his neighbour, ‘If the people of Britain are a Democracy -‘
‘I never said they were a Democracy’, interrupted Moung Ka placidly.
‘Surely we both heard you!’, exclaimed Moung Thwa.
‘Not correctly, said Moung Ka; ‘I said they are what is called a Democracy’.
4. The ‘free press’ doesn’t act as you’d expect a ‘free press’ to act.
The striking thing about the Skripal case and Syria bombings from a journalist’s point of view has been the uniformity of the media coverage.
Right-wing papers like the Telegraph and liberal ones like The Guardian have taken exactly the same stance ie anti-Russian and anti-Syrian government. Whether its because of DSMA-Notices (see 6, below), or not, there’s been no proper questioning of the UK government’s claims about Salisbury — and not much on Syria either. Investigative journalism? What’s that?
The mainstream media is actually less diverse in its opinions now (on the things that really matter) than at the time of the Iraq war where publications like the New Statesman (now a ‘centrist’ Blairite organ), spoke out strongly against intervention. If you want a different perspective on Skripals and Syria you have had to tune in to Russian media, such as Sputnik and RT, and that of course is threatened by the NeoCon Thought Police, who want everyone to be singing from the same pro-war hymn sheet.
5. The role of the security services in the promotion of ‘official narratives’ is very important.
Every time a wheel has come off the Skripal narrative, we’ve been fed information to bolster it from ‘official sources’. After the head of Porton Down said that the laboratory there was unable to confirm that the nerve agent allegedly used to poison the Skripals came from Russia, the line was pushed that ‘intelligence-led assessments’ pointed to Russian guilt. Could we see these ‘assessments’? Of course not! We just have to believe that they’re there. Then as the ‘nerve agent placed on the door handle’ theory began to gain a head of steam we were told that ‘British Intelligence’ had ‘evidence’ that Russia had been testing the nerve agent on door handles prior to 3rd March. Could we see this ‘evidence’? No, of course not.
Alex Thomson of C4 News reported on 12th March that a ‘D-Notice’ had issued by the UK authorities to stop the media from fully identifying Sergei Skripal’s MI6 handler who lived nearby.
Were other DSMA-Notices issued too regarding the reporting of Salisbury? If it was so clear that Russia did it, why would they bother?
6. The British public aren’t mugs (or sheep).
Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven’t bought it. Literally or metaphorically. Inside the Tent gatekeepers have relentlessly attacked those brave individuals who have questioned the official narratives, but its these individuals- smeared as ‘crackpots’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ who the public are turning to for their analysis. Compare the number of retweets the former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray gets when he publishes on the Skripal case, with those who try and denigrate him. My own Twitter following has increased by several thousands since early March. Citizen Halo got a big boost in followers after she was smeared by The Times. After the lies told about Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya people no longer tamely accept what the NeoCon Establishment tells us. We’re at an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ moment in British politics where more and more people have found the courage to say out loud ‘The Emperor has no clothes!’. The elite have been lying to us and they know that we know they’ve been lying. The question is: what are we going to do about it?
Support his AntiStalker Legal Fund (vs. a Times journalist)
Featured Video
Seyed M. Marandi: Toward Total War in the Middle East
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
The Geopolitics behind the War in Yemen (I)
By Mahdi Darius NAZEMROAYA | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.03.2015
The United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia became very uneasy when the Yemenese or Yemenite movement of the Houthi or Ansarallah (meaning the supporters of God in Arabic) gained control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa/Sana, in September 2014. The US-supported Yemenite President Abd-Rabbuh Manṣour Al-Hadi was humiliatingly forced to share power with the Houthis and the coalition of northern Yemenese tribes that had helped them enter Sana. Al-Hadi declared that negotiations for a Yemeni national unity government would take place and his allies the US and Saudi Arabia tried to use a new national dialogue and mediated talks to co-opt and pacify the Houthis.
The truth has been turned on its head about the war in Yemen. The war and ousting of President Abd-Rabbuh Manṣour Al-Hadi in Yemen are not the results of «Houthi coup» in Yemen. It is the opposite. Al-Hadi was ousted, because with Saudi and US support he tried to backtrack on the power sharing agreements he had made and return Yemen to authoritarian rule. The ousting of President Al-Hadi by the Houthis and their political allies was an unexpected reaction to the takeover Al-Hadi was planning with Washington and the House of Saudi. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Pakistan-Iran talks secure LNG shipment to Islamabad through Hormuz
- Black Sea grain crisis puts global wheat supplies under pressure
- IRGC air defenses destroy another US MQ-1 drone over Strait of Hormuz
- Imran Khan’s entire immediate family detained in Pakistan ahead of mass protest demanding his release
- EU nation detains former presidential frontrunner
- Leaked: Britain’s Sham Conviction Of Hashim Thaci
- Seyed M. Marandi: U.S. Strike Imminent – Toward Total War in the Middle East
- Russia Voted Under Fire. Washington Is Loading the Tankers.
- 12 Things Your Oncologist Was Trained Not to Tell You
- Anthrax Attacks Paved Way for COVID-Era ‘Junk Drugs and Vaccines’
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli Attacks in Gaza Kill at Least Seven Palestinians Over Three Days, including Woman and Child
- Trump’s militarization of Washington DC as he pursues Israel’s war against Iran
- Why Israel Fears This Searing New Documentary
- Huckabee aide solicited cash gifts from Israelis
- This isn’t sci-fi, AI is already killing people
- ‘The Most Brutal Thing’: Investigation Reveals Execution of Elderly Woman in Rafah
- Inside Israel’s ‘soft’ ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza through the eyes of its victims
- New online database tracks pro-Israel political donations in the United States
- Israeli president pardons soldier convicted for killing wounded Palestinian
- Singer Ed Sheeran says his ‘heart broken’ by Gaza devastation, addresses Macklemore controversy
- No Tricks Zone
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
- Fear Of Debate: Alarmist German Climate Scientist Calls On Mainstream Media To Discredit Skeptic Voices
Aletho News 