Washington Post Pushes More Dubious Russia-bashing
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | September 25, 2017
Some people are calling the anti-Russian hysteria being whipped up across the U.S. mainstream news media a new “golden age of American journalism,” although it looks to me more like a new age of yellow journalism, prepping the people for more military spending, more “information warfare” and more actual war.
Yes, without doubt, President Trump is a boorish and dangerous demagogue, now highlighted by his reckless speech before the United Nations last week, his schoolyard Tweet taunts toward North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and his ugly denunciation of black athletes for protesting against police killings of often unarmed African-Americans.
And, yes, I know that some people feel that the evidence-lite and/or false allegations about “Russian meddling” are the golden ticket to Trump’s impeachment. But the unprofessional behavior of The New York Times, The Washington Post and pretty much the entire mainstream media regarding Russia-gate cannot be properly justified by the goal of removing Trump from office.
Ethically in journalism, the ends – however much you might wish them to succeed – cannot justify the means, if those means involve violating rules of evidence and principles of fairness. Journalism should be a place where all sides get a fair shake, not where some get a bum’s rush.
But the U.S. mainstream media has clearly joined the anti-Trump Resistance and hates Russian President Vladimir Putin, too. So, we are given such travesties of journalism as appeared as a banner headline across the front page of Monday’s Washington Post, another screed about how Russia supposedly used Facebook ads to flip last November’s election for Trump.
The article purports to give the inside story of how Facebook belatedly came to grips with how the “company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election,” but actually it is a story about how powerful politicians bullied Facebook into coming up with something – anything – to support the narrative of “Russian meddling,” including direct interventions by President Obama and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a key legislator regarding regulation of high-tech industries.
Finding the ‘Evidence’
In other words, Facebook was sent back again and again to find what Obama and Warner wanted the social media company to find. Eventually, Facebook turned up $100,000 in ads from 2015 into 2017 that supposedly were traced somehow to Russia. These ads apparently addressed political issues in America although Facebook has said most did not pertain directly to the presidential election and some ads were purchased after the election.
Left out of the Post’s latest opus is what a very small pebble these ads were – even assuming that Russians did toss the $100,000 or so in ad buys into the very large lake of billions of dollars in U.S. political spending for the 2016 election cycle. It also amounts to a miniscule fraction of Facebook’s $27 billion in annual revenue.
So the assertion that this alleged “meddling” – and we’ve yet to see any evidence connecting these ads to the Russian government – “played a key role in the U.S. election” is both silly and outrageous, especially given the risks involved in stoking animosities between nuclear-armed Russia and nuclear-armed America.
Even the Post’s alarmist article briefly acknowledges that it is still unclear who bought the ads, referring to the purchasers as “suspected Russian operatives.” In other words, we don’t even know that the $100,000 in ads over three years came from Russians seeking to influence the U.S. election. (By comparison, many Facebook advertisers – even some small businesses – spend $100,000 per day on their ads, not $100,000 over three years.)
But this diminutive effort by “suspected Russian operatives” doesn’t stop the Post from going on and on about “fake news” and “disinformation,” albeit again without offering evidence or specifics of any Russian “fake news” or “disinformation.”
It has simply become Official Washington’s new groupthink to say that everything linked to Russia or its international TV network RT is “fake news” or “disinformation” even though examples are lacking or often turn out to be false accusations themselves.
For instance, there is nothing in the Post’s article acknowledging that nothing from the various Democratic email disclosures, which have been blamed on Russia (again without real evidence), has been identified as untrue. So, how can truthful information, whether you like how it was obtained or not, be “fake news” or “disinformation”?
Falsehood as Fact
But Monday’s Post exposé simply asserts the claim as flat fact. Or as the article asserts: “what Russian operatives posted on Facebook was, for the most part, indistinguishable from legitimate political speech. The difference was the accounts that were set up to spread the misinformation and hate were illegitimate.”
In responsible journalism, such an accusation would be followed by a for-instance, giving an example of “the misinformation and hate” that the “Russian operatives” – note how they have been magically transformed from “suspected Russian operatives” to simply “Russian operatives” – were disseminating.
But there is no example of the Russian “misinformation and hate,” a classic violation of the reporting principle of “show, don’t tell.” In this story, it’s all tell and no show.
Indeed, what is shown in the article is often contradictory to the story’s conclusion. The article says, for instance, “A review by the company found that most of the groups behind the problematic pages had clear financial motives, which suggested that they weren’t working for a foreign government. But amid the mass of data the company was analyzing, the security team did not find clear evidence of Russian disinformation or ad purchases by Russian-linked accounts.”
So, Facebook initially – after extensive searching – did not find evidence of a Russian operation. Then, after continued pressure from high-level Democrats, Facebook continued to scour its system and again found nothing, or as the Post article acknowledged, Facebook “had searched extensively for evidence of foreign purchases of political advertising but had come up short.”
That prompted Warner to fly out to Silicon Valley to personally press Facebook executives to come up with the evidence to support the Democrats’ theory about Russia paying for carefully targeted anti-Clinton ads in key districts.
The Post’s article reported that “Finally, [Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex] Stamos appealed to Warner for help: If U.S. intelligence agencies had any information about the Russian operation or the troll farms it used to disseminate misinformation, they should share it with Facebook. The company is still waiting, people involved in the matter said.”
Under Pressure
Still, faced with extraordinary pressure from senior Democrats, Facebook finally delivered the desired results, or as the Post reported, “By early August, Facebook had identified more than 3,000 ads addressing social and political issues that ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017 and that appear to have come from accounts associated with the [St. Petersburg, Russia-based] Internet Research Agency.”
So, the ads covering three years, including post-election 2017, only “appear” to be “associated” with some private Russian operation that only allegedly has ties to the Kremlin. And the total sums of the ad buys are infinitesimal compared to what it actually takes to have any real impact on Facebook or in a U.S. presidential election.
If the context of this story were changed slightly – say, it was about the U.S. government trying to influence public opinion in another country (which actually does happen quite a bit) – the Post would be among the first news outlets to laugh off such allegations or dismiss the vague accusations as a conspiracy theory, but since these allegations fit with the prejudices of the Post’s editors, an entirely different set of journalistic standards is applied.
What the article also ignores is the extraordinary degree of coercion that such high-level political pressure can put on a company that recognizes its vulnerability to government regulation.
As Facebook has acknowledged in corporate filings, “Action by governments to restrict access to Facebook in their countries could substantially harm our business and financial results. It is possible that governments of one or more countries may seek to censor content available on Facebook in their country, restrict access to Facebook from their country entirely, or impose other restrictions that may affect the accessibility of Facebook in their country for an extended period of time or indefinitely. …
“In the event that access to Facebook is restricted, in whole or in part, in one or more countries or our competitors are able to successfully penetrate geographic markets that we cannot access, our ability to retain or increase our user base and user engagement may be adversely affected, we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated, and our financial results could be adversely affected.”
Avoiding Reality
In other words, another way to have framed this story is that powerful politicians who could severely harm Facebook’s business model were getting in the face of Facebook executives and essentially demanding that they come up with something to support the Democratic Party’s theory of “Russian meddling.”
The Democratic leaders wanted this finding as an explanation for Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat, rather than going through the painful process of examining why the party has steadily lost ground in white working-class areas across the country.
What is missed in these Russia-bashing articles is that the Democratic brand has been sinking for years, including massive losses in statehouses across the country as well as in Congress. The party’s decline was not a one-off event with Donald Trump suddenly snaking away with significant parts of the white working class because the Russians bought some Facebook ads.
However, instead of looking in the mirror, national Democrats demanded that Facebook executives ferret out whatever tiny or imaginary information there might be about some Russians buying Facebook ads – and then allow those coerced findings to be fed into the excuse industry for why Hillary Clinton lost.
And, what about the Post’s repeated accusations about Russia engaging in “disinformation” and “fake news” without offering a single example? Apparently, these assertions have become such articles of faith in the U.S. mainstream media that they don’t require any proof.
However, honest journalism demands examples and evidence, not just vague accusations. The reality is that the U.S. government has stumbled again and again when seeking to paint RT as a disinformation outlet or a vehicle for undermining American democracy.
For instance, the Jan. 6 report on alleged Russian “cyber operations,” released by Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, included a lengthy appendix, dated from 2012, which decried RT for such offenses as allowing a debate among third-party presidential candidates who had been excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates; covering the Occupy Wall Street protests; and citing the environmental dangers from “fracking.”
The idea that American democracy is threatened by allowing third-party candidates or other American dissidents to have a voice is at best an upside-down understanding of democracy and, more likely, an exercise in hypocritical propaganda.
False Accusations
Another misfired attempt to discredit RT came from Obama’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Richard Stengel, who issued a “Dipnote” in April 2014, which helped establish the narrative of RT as a source of Russian disinformation.
For instance, Stengel claimed that RT reported a “ludicrous assertion” that the United States had spent $5 billion to produce Ukraine’s “regime change” in February 2014.
But what Stengel, a former managing editor of Time magazine, apparently failed to understand was that RT was referring to a public speech by Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, in which she told them that “we have invested more than $5 billion” in what was needed for Ukraine to achieve its “European aspirations.” In other words, the RT report wasn’t “ludicrous” at all.
Nuland also was a leading proponent of “regime change” in Ukraine who personally cheered on the Maidan demonstrators, even passing out cookies. In an intercepted pre-coup phone call with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland discussed who should run the new government and pondered with Pyatt how to “glue” or “midwife this thing.”
So, Stengel was the one disseminating false information, not RT.
Similarly, senior U.S. politicians, including Hillary Clinton, and the U.S. mainstream media have falsely asserted that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies signed off on the Russia-did-it hacking claims.
For months, that canard was used to silence skepticism. After all, how could you question something that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed to be true?
But it turned out that – as DNI Clapper, himself a hardline Russia-basher, belatedly acknowledged – the Jan. 6 report on the alleged Russian hacking was the work of “hand-picked” analysts from only three agencies, the CIA, FBI and NSA, and the “assessment” itself admitted that it was not asserting the Russian conclusion as fact, only the analysts’ opinion.
The New York Times finally retracted its use of the fake claim about “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies” in late June 2017 although it wouldn’t let the lie lie, so instead the Times made misleading references to a “consensus” among U.S. intelligence agencies without using the number.
Recent studies by former U.S. intelligence experts have punched more holes in the certainty by raising doubts that the email downloads could have been accomplished over the Internet at the recorded speeds and more likely were achieved by an insider downloading onto a thumb drive.
Deciding What’s Real
So who is guilty of “fake news” and “disinformation”?
One positive from the current PBS series, “The Vietnam War,” is that despite its bend-over-backwards attempts to make excuses for the “good faith” decisions by U.S. politicians, no one can watch the series without encountering the chasm between the upbeat Official Story being peddled by the U.S. government and the ghastly on-the-ground reality.
Yet, given how little accountability was meted out then for journalists who served as conveyor belts for pro-war propaganda in Vietnam – or more recently over the fraudulent reporting that rationalized the U.S. aggressive war against Iraq – it is perhaps not surprising that similar false group thinks would coalesce around Russia now.
Careerist journalists understand that there is no danger in running with the pack – indeed, there is safety in numbers – but there are extraordinary risks to your career if you challenge the conventional wisdom even if you turn out to be right. As one establishment journalist once told me, “there’s no honor in being right too soon.”
So, for the Post reporters responsible for the latest journalistic violation of standards – Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg – there will be no penalty for the offense of telling about Russia’s alleged “disinformation” and “fake news” – rather than showing, i.e., providing actual examples. When it comes to Russia these days – as with the Vietcong in the 1960s or Iraq in 2002-03 – you can pretty much write whatever you want. All journalistic standards are gone.
Yet, what is perhaps most insidious about what we are seeing is that – in the name of defending democracy – the U.S. mainstream media is trampling a chief principle of the Enlightenment, the belief that the marketplace of ideas is the best way to determine the truth and to create an informed populace.
The new U.S. mainstream media paradigm is that only establishment-approved views can be expressed; everything else must be suppressed, purged and punished.
For instance, if you question the State Department’s narrative on alleged Syrian government sarin attacks – by noting contrary evidence that points to staged incidents by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate – you are called an “apologist” for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
If you question the one-sided State Department narrative regarding the Ukraine coup in 2014 – indeed even if you use the word “coup” – you are denounced as a “Kremlin stooge.”
No ‘Other’ Side
It is now not okay to even consider the other side of these stories, just as it was anathema to suggest that Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government may have been telling the truth in 2002-03 when it declared repeatedly that it had destroyed its WMDs. That made you a “Saddam apologist.”
The hostility toward Americans who dare question the current anti-Russian hysteria was highlighted by an article last Thanksgiving Day by one of the authors of the new Post article, Craig Timberg.
In another front-page Post story, Timberg allowed an anonymous group called PropOrNot to malign the professionalism and patriotism of 200 Web sites, including our own Consortiumnews, that were lumped together in a McCarthyistic smear that they were somehow guilty of disseminating “Russian propaganda.”
The unnamed accusers – granted anonymity by the Post – acknowledged that they had no evidence that the sites were part of some grand Russian conspiracy but made the judgment based on PropOrNot’s analysis of the Web sites’ content.
In other words, if you questioned the State Department’s narratives on Ukraine or Syria – regardless of how well-supported those critiques were – you got smeared as a “Russian propagandist” – and the Post, which didn’t even bother to contact the accused, considered that sort of analysis to be worthy of its front page.
The story fed into another frenzy about the need to use algorithms and artificial intelligence to hunt down and suppress or purge such dissenting views from the Internet, supposedly to protect the sanctity of American democracy and spare Americans from exposure to “fake news.”
So, well-meaning Americans who may hope that Russia-gate will somehow bring down Trump are getting recruited into a movement that intends to silence dissent and allow the U.S. establishment to dictate what information you will get to see and hear.
And that officially approved “information” will surely lead to new global tensions, more military spending. and additional warfare up to and possibly including nuclear war with Russia.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
The 11-Year Major Hurricane Drought: Much More Unusual than Two Cat 4 Strikes
By Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. | September 21, 2017
Weather.com published an article noting that the two Cat 4 hurricane strikes this year (Harvey and Irma) is a new record. Here’s a nice graphic they used showing both storms at landfall.
Left: Hurricane Harvey makes landfall near Rockport, Texas, on Aug. 25, 2017 | Right: Hurricane Irma makes its first landfall at Cudjoe Key, Florida, 9-10-17 (graphic: Weather.com).
But the statistics of rare events (like hurricanes) are not very well behaved. Let’s look at this new record, and compare it to the 11+year period of no major hurricane strikes that ended when Harvey struck Texas.
The Probability of Two Cat 4 Strikes in One Year
By my count, we have had 24 Cat 4 or Cat 5 landfalls in the U.S. between 1851 and 2016. This gives a probability (prior to Harvey and Irma) of one Cat4+ strike every 7 years. It also leads to an average return period of two Cat4+ strikes of about 50 years (maybe one of you statisticians out there can correct me if I’m wrong).
So, since the average return period is once every 50 years, we were overdue for two Cat4+ strikes in the same year over the entire 166 period of record. (Again, for rare events, the statistics aren’t very well behaved.)
The Probability of the 11-Year “Drought” in Major Landfalling Hurricane
In 2015, a NASA study was published which calculated how unlikely the (then) 9-year stretch with no major hurricane landfalls was. They came up with a 177 year return period for such an event.
I used that statistic to estimate what eventually happened, which was 11 years with no major hurricane strikes.
I get a return period of 560 years!
Now, which seems more unusual and potentially due to climate change: something that should happen only once every 50 years, or every 560 years?
Maybe global warming causes fewer landfalling major hurricanes.
Russia never placed ads on Facebook to interfere in US election – Kremlin
RT | September 22, 2017
Moscow has nothing to do with political advertisements on Facebook that were allegedly aimed at influencing the 2016 US presidential election, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.
“We don’t know who placed the advertisements on Facebook or how, and have never done it. The Russian side has never been part of it,” Peskov told journalists on Friday.
Earlier, Facebook reported that a Russian agency had purchased some ads on the social network during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Facebook co-founder and Chairman Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday that the company is “actively working with the US government on its ongoing investigations into Russian interference.”
The company also said that it “will help government authorities complete the vitally important work of assessing what happened in the 2016 election.”
“We are looking into foreign actors, including additional Russian groups and other former Soviet states, as well as organizations like the campaigns, to further our understanding of how they used our tools,” Zuckerberg said.
Russian Senator Konstantin Kosachev says Zuckerberg is apparently trying to improve his relations with the US authorities.
“It is known that some time ago Facebook was suspected of too much affection for [Hillary] Clinton and antipathy to Trump, who is quite vindictive as we all know. So let’s see what ‘evidence’ will be provided,” the head of the upper house’s Committee for International Relations told RT.
He also stressed that it would be interesting to see any investigation of Washington’s meddling in other countries’ affairs by Facebook.
“Zuckerberg, apparently, has not carried out any months-long investigations concerning the actions of the US to intervene in the affairs of other sovereign countries,” Kosachev said.
“I am sure that if such an inquiry were held, then countless [amounts of] evidence would be found.”
Earlier in September, Facebook said it had discovered some 3,000 ads purchased between June 2015 and May 2017, connected to 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages, which might have been related Russia’s alleged meddling.
However, the company did not directly accuse Russia and admitted that the “vast majority of ads run by these accounts” had nothing to do with the election, voting, or a particular candidate.
The US has been struggling credibly to accuse Moscow of meddling in the 2016 presidential election – a claim that Russia has strongly denied. No evidence of Russia’s alleged hacking of the US elections has been presented.
“The Russians interfered in our election…it is the high-confidence judgment of the entire intelligence community…,” former FBI director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in June. However, neither he nor special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign produced any evidence to support the assertion.
“The ex-FBI director said that he believes that there was Russian meddling in the electoral process [in the US], but at the same time provided no proof of that,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in June.
Another giant Internet company, Google, said earlier in September that it had failed to unearth any facts that would implicate Moscow in exploiting advertising to manipulate the election.
‘Driving Ms. Deep State’: Morgan Freeman Psy-Op Shows Desperation of US Establishment
By Andrew Korybko | Sputnik | September 20, 2017
Morgan Freeman’s latest publicly stunt permanently stained his legacy after the famous actor decided to join the fake news industry by passing off a blockbuster script as a true story.
Morgan Freeman declared in his latest two-minute video that “We have been attacked. We are at war”, but he’s wrong in saying that Americans have been victimized by Russia, but should have rather told the truth that they’re under attack by their own government. To channel Freeman, “Imagine this movie script”, albeit modified to reflect real-life events instead of conspiratorial ones:
[Imagine…] A globalist power cabal made up of the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (the “deep state”), in conjunction with the Democratic Party, “Cultural Marxist” professors, the Mainstream Media, and Hollywood have attacked American democracy using non-stop infowar operations against their own fellow citizens to spread propaganda and false information aimed at convincing people that the Republican candidate and future President of the United States is really a Russian puppet…
A few years ago this might have sounded just as ridiculous as the narrative that Freeman read off in front of the cameras, but the difference is that this actually happened whereas his story still remains the realm of fiction. The conspiracy theory that Russia somehow swayed the 2016 election has no basis in reality, and it’s very condescending to the millions of average Americans in the Midwest who swayed the election for Trump to even infer that these patriotic citizens were under the influence of a foreign intelligence operation at the time.
Midwesterners didn’t tip the election for Trump because President Putin, the FSB, RT, or Sputnik told them to — which they didn’t — but because they had enough of the old order of business in the US and were desperately craving a change, any change, to improve the all-around deteriorating conditions that have come to define their lives. Trump promised law and order, jobs and strong borders, and a no-nonsense approach to American domestic politics, the complete opposite of Hillary’s platform and exactly what Midwesterners wanted to hear.
Even without the DNC leaks, many of those folks would never have countenanced voting for Hillary due to her husband’s toxic legacy and that of his party. Moreover, these voters didn’t need proof of Hillary and the Democrats’ corruption because they had suspected it all along, though the amplification of their crimes by the global media vindicated them for what The Establishment had falsely claimed for years was just another tinfoil hat “conspiracy theory”.
Now about actual conspiracy facts, many people could never have thought that their own government would turn against them and attack America’s sacred political system, its electoral democracy, through the incessant demonization of Donald Trump and the plethora of fake news that they disseminated about him. When Trump claimed that his campaign was under surveillance by the Obama Administration, he was dismissed as a crackpot, but it’s since emerged just the other day that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice did in fact authorize the spying of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
On top of that, the never-ending assertions that Trump is in cahoots with the Russian government or somehow under the nefarious influence of shadowy Kremlin agents are regularly debunked by listening to the President and his Administration constantly talk about “Russian aggression” and watching them use this pretext to make hostile moves against Moscow. These actions strongly refute the claims of a secret Trump-Russian connection and most Americans understand that, but the “deep state” and their cohorts in the “Cultural Marxist” corners of academia, the Mainstream Media, Hollywood, and the masked mob of “Antifa” rioters believe that the population is just too stupid to see this and could therefore be easily misled into believing their fake news narrative that Putin’s proxy is in control of the White House.
The whole point behind this massive infowar operation against the minds of the American public is to delegitimize Trump’s election in a last-ditch bid to give the Democrats a chance to win back Congress during next year’s midterm elections. It’s also designed to influence the President’s domestic and foreign policy decision making, and it actually has succeeded to a degree in that respect if one holds the view that Trump truly believed what he said on the campaign trail but was later pressured by the “deep state” to take a decidedly neo-conservative stance towards International Affairs after he entered into office. Regardless, what’s important to focus on in this context are the American people themselves, who largely dismiss the conspiratorial, never-proven, and constantly debunked accusations that Morgan Freeman shamelessly told the American public with a straight face.
There’s a popular saying that one shouldn’t “shoot the messenger”, but that doesn’t mean that the said messenger is above criticism. Morgan Freeman is a beloved household name who is universally praised for his excellent acting skills and the unforgettable memories that he’s imbued his audiences with, but politics isn’t his element, and no matter how much the “Committee to Investigate Russia’ pleads that it’s “non-partisan”, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper’s open involvement in the project proves that it’s linked to the same anti-Trump “deep state” that’s been undermining American democracy for over the past two years. Morgan Freeman should have known better than to lend his acting talent to pretending that a movie script is a real-life story, and that’s why so many people are disappointed in him on a deep, personal level.
The irony of it all is that Morgan Freeman could have actually done a lot of good if he had the courage to say the truth. Instead of imploring Trump to sit down in front of the American people, elaborate on Hillary’s “Russia Did It!” conspiracy theory, and then “legitimize” it through a full-blown nationwide anti-Russian witch hunt stretching from the Office of the Presidency all the way down to the paupers in the inner city, he himself could have sat down in front of the American people just as he did in his two-minute psy-op video and calmly explain the actual real-life “deep state” conspiracy against Trump and the American people. He didn’t do that, so there’s no use in speculating about “coulda, shoulda, woulda”, but for the sake of cracking a smile and thinking about what might have been, it sure would have been powerful if he channeled his blockbuster script but adapted it to actual events by saying:
“My fellow Americans, during this past election, we came under attack by our own government. I’ve called on the patriotic members of Congress and our intelligence community to use every resource available to conduct a thorough investigation to determine exactly how this happened. Our citizens are demanding accountability. For 241 years our democracy has been imperfect but nevertheless something to aspire to, and we owe it to the brave people who have fought and died to protect this great nation and save democracy. And we owe it to our future generations to continue the fight.”
But then again, Hollywood by its very nature is fake and deceptive, so it might be too much to ever hope for an American movie icon to stand up and say those brave words that were imagined above, though that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have resonated with tens of millions of dyed-in-the-wool patriotic Americans who are sick and tired of the “deep state’s” manipulative mind games.
Morgan Freeman Declares War on Russia at Rob Reiner’s Behest
Sputnik – September 20, 2017
Social media is awash with outrage after Hollywood megastar Morgan Freeman appeared in a propaganda video issued by a newly-established anti-Russian non-profit group, in which he declares Washington is at war with Moscow.
Morgan Freeman is an almost universally beloved figure in the West, and his famed golden voice almost universally beloved across the West, so it’s understandable why the newly-established Committee to Investigate Russia might choose him to front its propaganda campaign.
However, initial reactions to the clip on social media suggest the move might’ve been a titanic misfire, as even supporters of the #TheRussiansDidIt hypothesis are criticizing the group, and slamming the video’s incendiary tone.
In the two-minute-long video, the Shawshank Redemption star issues a dire warning, “We have been attacked. We are at war.”
“My fellow Americans, during this past election, we came under attack by the Russian government. I’ve called on Congress and our intelligence community to use every resource available to conduct a thorough investigation to determine exactly how this happened. We need our president to speak directly to us and tell us the truth,” Freeman says.
No Experience Required
The Committee to Investigate Russia aims to help US citizens “understand and recognize the scope and scale of Russia’s continuing attacks on our democracy” — a lofty ambition, but given the weight of the group’s advisory board, one it will surely have little trouble achieving.
The five-strong board is led by Rob Reiner, director of “This Is Spinal Tap” and “When Harry Met Sally”; James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, who committed perjury in 2013 when he told a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence the NSA did not “wittingly” collect data on US citizens; Max Boot, a neoconservative blogger; Norman Ornstein, an obscure political scientist with no discernible history of research into Russia; Charles Sykes, a right-wing radio talk show host.
To promote the launch, board members appeared on numerous mainstream US news channels — Reiner, a consistent Trump critic who has called for “all out war” against the president, told CNN he was moved to found the group as he felt Americans didn’t understand the “gravity of what the Russians were able to do.”
“They’re trying to undermine our democracy. And for some reason we are not understanding the gravity of this. And I think a big part of that is because the president of the United States is not saying, in the Oval Office, “my fellow Americans, we’ve been attacked.” So I started reaching out to people who are patriots,” the director said.
Clapper likewise has a record of making controversial statements about Trump and Russia alike. He has previously suggested the president is secretly working for the Kremlin, and claimed Russians are “genetically” predisposed to manipulate and infiltrate.
Boot, an avowed Republican, has also been consistently condemnatory of Trump, and caused consternation in some conservative circles by announcing “real” Republicans should vote for Hillary Clinton in the Presidential election.
In the meantime, despite suggestions of Russian interference echoing since before the November 2016 presidential election, no evidence of Kremlin-backed covert interventions have been publicly offered, despite the House and Senate Intelligence committees launching investigations into the matter.
The Bana Alabed Psy-Op Proves The West Is Saturated In War Propaganda
By Caitlin Johnstone | The Last American Vagabond | September 18, 2017
If I could have everyone in the English-speaking world watch only one video on Youtube, it would without a doubt be a comedy bit performed by a funny-looking professional goofball on RT. I say in all seriousness that it could change the trajectory of our species on this planet.
The above segment is presented for an audience who showed up for a comedy show, but it also contains video evidence that should forever change the way they think about the media, their government, their nation, and everything they’ve been taught growing up about what their society is and how it works. So far this is probably the closest thing to mainstream coverage that the depravity of the Bana Alabed psy-op has received.
In the segment, Redacted Tonight’s John F. O’Donnell shows video footage of a seven year-old Syrian girl being “interviewed” by CNN’s conscience-free Alisyn Camerota, who as a side note recently had the gall to complain that she was suffering from “Russia fatigue” as a result of all the bogus Russia conspiracy theories with which her network has been relentlessly brutalizing the American psyche. O’Donnell then shows a clip illustrating that Bana does not in fact understand even the most rudimentary English, let alone the capacity for the geopolitical analysis demonstrated in the Camerota interview. It was scripted, and Bana was phonetically sounding out words that she did not understand in order to manufacture public support for more US interventionism in Syria.
The interview was scripted, and what for me is most shocking is that Alisyn Camerota necessarily had the other half of the script. Bana wouldn’t have been able to improvise answers to unscripted questions, so Camerota was necessarily knowingly acting out a staged, scripted scene and deceiving her audience about its nature. She lied to the American people for the most despicable reason imaginable, and exploited a little child to do it.
Here it is in full:
O’Donnell then goes on to describe how this despicable psy-op has been promoted across multiple platforms throughout the mainstream media, from CNN’s Jake Tapper to Time Magazine to a Simon & Schuster book deal. The plutocrats who control these powerful media corporations plainly want eyes on this girl, just not the kind of eyes that look with any degree of healthy skepticism.
The reason for all of this, of course, is that US hegemony is fully dependent on its massive military power. Since the heavily-armed American people would grow upset if they were told that the oligarchs who rule their country are spending an unfathomable amount of the nation’s money and resources trying to depose Bashar al-Assad because Syria occupies a crucial strategic location in US world dominance (risking a direct confrontation with the nuclear-armed Russia in the process), they make it about saving children instead. In 1990 a teenager gave false testimony about hospitalized babies being removed from incubators and left to die to manufacture support for US military involvement in the oil-rich Kuwait, and we’re seeing something very similar with Syria today. As Bana so often says, “Save the children of Syria.”
BANA ALABED: A Lost Childhood and a Future Jeopardized by Ongoing Child Exploitation https://t.co/VMEuvkls4N via @21WIRE @KhaledIskef
— vanessa beeley (@VanessaBeeley) July 19, 2017
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I’m very excited to see what appears to be an increased effort to push awareness of the Bana Alabed psy-op into mainstream consciousness. It’s not enough to have this undeniable act of deceitful war propaganda being discussed by a few Syrian activists and the occasional segment on RT; mainstream America needs to be told about this. If we all make a whole lot of noise pointing to the indisputable facts outlined in the Redacted Tonight segment at the beginning of this article, eventually mainstream outlets will be forced to comment on it. Alisyn Camerota will be forced to answer questions about her participation in the staged interview. They’ll be forced to overextend themselves and make even more mistakes. The true face of the mass media propaganda machine will swing into the full focus of everyday Americans. This can change the world.
Please help make this happen. Share the links I’ve placed in this article, make your own videos, podcasts, articles and tweets. The propaganda machine made a very foolish mistake using something so easily debunked in its war efforts, and we need to capitalize on that mistake while they’re vulnerable. Shove this thing as hard as you can into mainstream consciousness in every way you can think of. The machine is weaker than it seems. We can bring it down.
Google hiring 1,000 journalists in effort to control American news flow
It’s about controlling information offline and online
By Alex Christoforou | The Duran | September 19, 2017
Google is learning from its mistakes.
Not being able to place Hillary Clinton in office, the search monopoly has decided that online influence over what Americans think, say, and do is not enough to guarantee the right woman enters the White House.
Google is now embarking on a 5 year plan, where they will seed 1,000 aspiring, liberal left journalists into America’s local media markets.
Poynter reports that the Google News Lab will be working with Report For America (RFA) to hire 1,000 journalists all around the country.
Many local newsrooms have been cut to the bone so often that there’s hardly any bone left. But starting early next year, some may get the chance to rebuild, at least by one.
On Monday, a new project was announced at the Google News Lab Summit that aims to place 1,000 journalists in local newsrooms in the next five years. Report For America takes ideas from several existing organizations, including the Peace Corps, Americorps, Teach for America and public media.
Unlike foreign or domestic service programs or public media, however, RFA gets no government funding. But they are calling RFA a national service project. That might make some journalists uncomfortable – the idea of service and patriotism. But at its most fundamental, local journalism is about protecting democracy, said co-founder Charles Sennott, founder and CEO of the GroundTruth Project.
“I think journalism needs that kind of passion for public service to bring it back and to really address some of the ailments of the heart of journalism,” he said.
Here’s how RFA will work: On one end, emerging journalists will apply to be part of RFA. On the other, newsrooms will apply for a journalist. RFA will pay 50 percent of that journalist’s salary, with the newsroom paying 25 percent and local donors paying the other 25 percent. That reporter will work in the local newsroom for a year, with the opportunity to renew.
Zerohedge reports…
Of course, while the press release above tries to tout the shared financial responsibility of these 1,000 journalists, presumably as a testament to their ‘independence’, it took about 35 seconds to figure out that the primary funder of the journalists’ salaries, RFA, is funded by none other than Google News Lab.
Meanwhile, as a further testament to RFA’s ‘independence, we noticed that their Advisory Board is flooded with reputable, ‘impartial’ news organizations like the New York Times, NPR, CBS, ABC, etc….
We are sure that these 1,000 journalists will never be called upon by Google to report on the news in a way that benefits the giant search company.
Vladimir Putin and Russia versus Zionist Fairytales
By Phil Butler – New Eastern Outlook – 16.09.2017
Did you read the latest news that Vladimir Putin is rich and evil? Oh, you don’t read anymore, more power to you. Fake news has it that the Russian president has a new “secret” holiday mansion worth untold millions. Furthermore, some of the stories tell of Putin being the world’s richest and most evil man. For those of you who do not believe in fairytales, here’s a candid look at what Russians are really up against.
My initial reaction to reading “Drone footage shows Putin’s secret island mansion” at 9 News Australia was, “So what if the leader of Russia is rich?” I would have skimmed the article and moved on but for a familiar name popping up. I’ll get to the ousted industrialist shark Bill Browder in a minute, but first it’s important for readers to understand that Putin actually has little need of money in the traditional sense. Every financial magazine, every expert, and hordes of guessing investigators have tried for years to count Vladimir Putin’s gold, and to no avail. Some say he is worth more than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos combined, but nobody can trace down this immense wealth. Amid all the speculation as to “why” the Panama Papers could not convict Putin, the pointedly obvious shines through. Nobody can trace Putin’s fortune because there isn’t one. But this is fodder for another story, let me move on to the latest Alexei Navalny fairytale and to this Browder character cited in the Australian piece.
I needn’t outline the role and the character of Alexei Navalny again here. The blogger who would be kind of Russian was last seen fueling up his drones for another flyby of Sergey Shoygu’s super secret space station home. Having attempted to label Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev a criminal for the places he’s vacationed at, Navalny seems unable to stop himself proving the insignificant. I think the best reason for Russians to ignore Putin’s biggest detractor is the simple fact he knows nothing of Russian people. Hey Navalny, heads up, Russians don’t care if Putin is rich, they only care if he does his job. Sorry, this western poster boy of change in Russia, he just sets me off. What an idiot. But let’s move on to another famous profiteer who Putin banished from Russia, the founder of Hermitage Capital Management, Bill Browder.
It’s amazing how western mainstream media and the politicians always turn to Putin haters to be experts or to get “proof” on the Russian leader. Haven’t you noticed yet how Russian mafia types like Yukos Oil oligarch Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and before him the now deceased Boris Berezovsky always pop up as “experts” on Putin? Isn’t it a bit strange that news media in the west never seem to cite people with a positive or moderate stance on Russia’s president? I am sure this coincidence is not because of the scarcity of pro-Putin experts. Whatever the reasoning, the Australian article fueled by Navalny’s drone footage dredges up another ousted financial crook who hates Putin’s guts. Most readers will identify Bill Broder with Hermitage Capital, but few will recall that the investment firm was also funded by one Beny Steimetz, the Israeli oligarch and financier just arrested (August 14) by Israeli and Swiss anti-corruption officials for wide scale fraud and money laundering. The Russian privatization shark who was once Israel’s richest man is a subject for another report. I only bring him up here to point at two facets of this war on Putin. First, the Jewish connection in all this is something that just needs to come out. Secondly, the ring of profiteers bent on Putin’s demise all have gigantic skeletons in their wardrobes. A story citing one Putin hater, when investigated, always leads to ten more. This is no coincidence.
Back to Browder, his Hermitage was at one time the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. That was before Vladimir Putin put a stop to the rape of Russia’s legacy and the theft of her assets. This is undeniable fact, and even the lowliest of Russian peasants know it by now. Browder, a Chicago Jew, set out to profit from Russian privatization after Yeltsin, but was thwarted like other sharks when Putin’s hammer fell on other mafiosos. RICO suits, libel cases, tax evasion charges, and ties to some of the seediest characters in world finance highlight the man who pushed the now famous Magnitsky Act into US foreign policy play. It’s no coincidence that Browder has emerged as a central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The privateer who made billions off Russian privatization turned into a human rights activist, and now he’s bent on seeing Donald Trump impeached!
The reader might be surprise to discover the source of the statement “Russia is more dangerous than ISIS” was actually Bill Browder, rather than rabid Arizona Senator John McCain. Or was McCain first? Both Russia haters told reporters of the grave danger to the US at the same time actually, back in May of 2017. Perhaps the narrative of US war hawk politicians and ousted financial henchmen has become just that convergent, but I somehow doubt the coincidence. Both Browder and McCain contend that Russian President Vladimir Putin used the country’s primary security agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), to meddle in the U.S. presidential election, but neither has shown any proof of their claims. I mention this “coincidental” melding of message for obvious reasons. Or maybe McCain and Browder are now pals as this Browder Tweet on McCain returning to the Senate to do battle against Russia after his hospital stint suggests. What’s most amazing to me is the way FOX and other networks readily use Browder and other suspected criminals without searching out counter arguments for their stories. Maybe Rupert Murdoch can answer that one. And so on, and so on, and so on…
Every time I start researching for one of these stories I end up in a deep and dark rabbit hole of collusion and confusion. In each and every case I end up with Vladimir Putin stoically defending a position against wild assertions with no proof whatsoever. The big picture of the “game” by now is like watching a schoolyard name calling and finger pointing contest. The iconic bullies and thugs are on one end of the yard, while their target stands virtually alone looking as innocent as a lamb for a variety of reasons. It’s become ridiculous, but there’s always more.
A story by Kevin Alfred Strom at the National Vanguard, which was originally published back in 2004, adds light to a facet of the Russia privatization profiteering, and ties into some recent stories of my own here on NEO. “The Silent Coup: Putin vs. the Oligarchs” deals with these ousted oligarchs and the western investors intent on carving up Russia after the wall came down. But more importantly, the piece cites Putin on the case of Jewish mafiosos always seeming to play a role. The story of influence by Israel, AIPAC, and a cadre of Jewish billionaires converge when Strom cites Vladimir Putin in his story. Notable Jewish figures like Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Friedman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Alexander Smolensky are highlighted in the story alongside Putin’s lesser publicized views on Zionists in Russia at the time of privatization. The piece also points out the Russian people’s utter hatred for most of these Jewish oligarchs, a hatred that has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism by the way. Since Putin seized the Rothschild/Khodorkovsky share of Yukos Oil, Russia has been divesting herself of the only Zionist plot that matters, the ending of Jewish mafia/oligarch control of the country. Not many readers will realize that Russia’s Central Bank (CBR) is a member of Rothschild BIS.
An article by Alexander Azadgan at KATEHON expands on the Jewish money component, and reiterates the possibility of Putin nationalizing the CBR. Given new sanctions by the US and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev describing them as “full scale economic war” waged on Russia, it’s important to observe Putin’s moves east and especially the new BRICS dealings. For Russians, it matters little if Vladimir Putin has 100 yachts and fifty mansions, as long as Russia is not raped and destroyed by the unscrupulous of the world. Putin’s job is clear, defend Russia – period. His compensation is of little consequence to his people. All we hear, read, and see about Putin’s Russia is from a London, Brussels, or Washington standpoint – never a Moscow one. The influence of Zionist bankers is well known to Russians, and almost unheard of by Americans. The enemy Russia really consists of Zionists and technocrats who do know the name of the game, and the public they use to do their bidding. In the same way the Jewish religion and Jewish people are used for the Zionist bankers’ purposes, the waiting public is leveraged through blind ignorance and propaganda against Russia. For those who believe alternative fairytales I can only say…
The (Criminal?) Subversion of the Academy in the Case Against Professor Anthony Hall
Power Against the Quest for Truth
Professor Anthony Hall. Image credit: The Lethbridge Herald
By Robin Mathews | American Herald Tribune | September 15, 2017
In “the civilized and democratic Western World” a huge battle is in process to control information, belief, understanding, ‘credible knowledge’, and the (real or contrived) ‘facts’ people hold to be true. The process involves a major activity of indoctrination – constant and on-going – towards the acceptance of an increasingly ‘top down’, undemocratic form of rule. The indoctrination does not just involve language as we (think we) know it but it involves a purposeful shaping and reshaping of language influenced by both action and inaction in the ‘public’ world.
The shaping of ‘the (apparently) real’ through language is darkly affected by action in society … and the failure of action. If Criminal Conspiracy – for instance – happens openly and observably and the State will not call it Criminal Conspiracy the real begins to become inauthentic and the language surrounding it begins to weaken. Criminal Conspiracy, just for instance, begins to possess a kind of non-existence although it really happens and really exists in law ….
In Canada (2015-2016), for instance, thirty-one criminal charges (put in place by the Canadian “Crown”) were levied against a controversial Senator in Canada’s “Upper Chamber” as part, many believe, of a huge campaign to indoctrinate Canadians about the (false) integrity of the people in power. The criminal charges were all (every last one!) thrown out by a judge of the Ontario Court of Justice with plain expression of his alarm at those conspiring to force actions upon the innocent Senator.
The judge gave every indication (without saying it outright) that Senator Duffy had been criminally conspired against. No criminal investigation, however, has been conducted against those conspiring and no criminal charges have been laid. None are expected. The Liberal government that has followed the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper (which undertook the unseemly set of actions against Senator Duffy) seems very clearly to be demonstrating that it doesn’t disapprove of criminal actions taken to indoctrinate the Canadian public.
The process of working at highest levels of government, of corporations, and the so-called Mainstream Press and Media to indoctrinate and condition the population to prescribed, false beliefs in a total or ‘totalitarian’ manner (‘as if exerted by a single force permitting no dissenting view’) is pervasive in almost all of ‘the civilized and democratic Western World’. The process is clearly intended to impose false views of reality upon whole, unsuspecting populations.
One of the significant, recent (in history) very successful (on-going) falsifications is described by Lance deHaven Smith in his book (2012) Conspiracy Theory in America. There deHaven Smith points out that the criticism of the Warren Commission inquiry into the assassination (1963) of John F. Kennedy was becoming so effective [the Commission and its ‘findings’ are now considered by many to be without any credibility] that the CIA set to work with surprising effectiveness to slander as “conspiracy theory” criticism of any spurious and/or fraudulent government or intelligence or police activity … and to designate that criticism as the product of cranks, imposters, and/or other wholly irresponsible rumour-mongers.
The CIA was so successful that the phrase “conspiracy theorist” has been lodged in the minds of a large population as a term indicating someone making fraudulent claims instead of someone pointing to possible unacceptable action taken by those in power. (Anthony Hall is accused – among other things – of being a conspiracy theorist.)
Since the Warren Commission (1963-1964) conspiracies against the “democratic” populations of the West have increased and grown in size. The falsification of evidence, supported by George W. Bush, U.S. president, and Tony Blair, British prime minister, in order to permit the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – just for instance – are now common knowledge (and both continue their lives untroubled by legal actions). Those wars, without naming related others, are resulting (still) in enormous destruction, death, and devastation of community.
Other egregious falsifications of actions and events by governments are not common knowledge – in fact are disputed by every device of modern misinformation. The Afghanistan and Iraq invasions (2001 and 2003) are both connected to the enormous (2001) alleged False Flag operation to destroy three Trade Tower buildings in New York – which operation had very quickly attached to it an official version which, today, lies in tatters but is still forcefully maintained by all the Western governments. [As I write, 79 year old, former CIA agent Malcolm Howard – given only weeks to live – has reported that he was involved in the “controlled demolition” of the building called World Trade Centre #7.]
The growing library of works rejecting the official version is becoming immense. Professor Anthony Hall – as a scholar seeking the truth about official allegations against non-white (so-called) terrorists in the matter – is named as a Conspiracy Theorist partly because he has engaged in denial of the official 9/11 accounts and has considered the allegation that Israeli interests may have been deeply involved in 9/11.
To entertain that possibility is not necessarily to be opposed to the State of Israel – and it is clearly not evidence of anti-Semitism. But those claiming or asking if the Israeli State had a part in 9/11 are immediately under threat of being charged with anti-Semitism. Part of the basis for naming Professor Hall an anti-Semite lies in his on-going concern, as a broadcaster, with The False Flag Weekly News and with the on-going researches being undertaken on the causes of what is called 9/11.
The nature of scholarly endeavour is very frequently to reconsider accepted explanations of events … to re-configure “history”, and/or to offer new analyses of forces at work. Anthony Hall does those things in his two large scholarly volumes dedicated to the history of the displacement and erasure of indigenous peoples … and the developing Imperial Globalization accompanying their (on-going) oppression since 1492.
A criminal conspiracy was almost certainly entered into in order to attempt the destruction of Senator Mike Duffy. A much wider conspiracy is, I believe, in play to destroy Professor Anthony Hall of the University of Lethbridge. In the briefest terms there seem to be four more-or-less invisible global forces at work (and in conflict) which very likely have shaped the personnel and the nature of (what I call) the conspiracy against Professor Hall.
One is the view of Germany from 1930 to 1945. Another is the shifting view of the State of Israel at the present. Another – which has already been referred to – is the problem of False Flag events, the dishonesty involved in them, and the official explanations of them. The fourth is the role of universities in the examination of truth and the conflicts engendered when questionable or fraudulent ideas are held and championed by powerful forces in or connected to the university which – almost of necessity – come into contact with ‘truth seekers’ in universities … working in the traditional environment of “academic freedom”: freedom to inquire, to seek clear answers, and to speak freely without fear of censure or repression about findings.
A generally held view of Germany from the 1930s to 1945 has been one that believes the emergence of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took Germany on a path of increasing brutality and social violence, and that the path seemed to be approved by the larger population. The “SS State” is thought to have enslaved, starved, tortured, murdered and otherwise destroyed “enemy” people: Jews, Slavs, political dissidents, gypsies, gays, etc. Moreover, it is said to have conducted what is now called The Holocaust: the active process of exterminating all Jews – ‘the final solution’.
Over the years since 1945 voices have been raised to challenge that view or aspects of it. On a video made recently by the Committee for the Open Debate of the Holocaust Professor Hall is asked if he approves of the work of the Committee. He replies there that he approves of open debate on all subjects and accepted truths. He has said, also, that he has been reading more recent materials on Germany from 1930 to 1945 that are making him re-think some of his ideas.
In short, the ‘truth’ about Germany from 1930 to 1945 is being reviewed and reassessed. Many Germans – often children and grandchildren of the adult members of the German community in those years – are seeking a re-examination and a reassessment of the “accepted” view, to provide, perhaps, a view of a much less brutal and single-minded State and population. Where the truth lies is in contest.
The accepted view of Israel in the West is of an unfairly punished people who have gained a homeland and are building a new society on sovereign territory. It is a people viewed not only as having been brutally oppressed and punished for their identity by Nazi power, but rejected and demeaned by many so-called democratic populations. That view has never been globally consented to partly because of the dispute about Israel’s legitimacy (“on Palestinian land”) held in parts of the Middle East.
As the State of Israel appears to become more warlike, oppressive of Palestinians, and greedy for the possession of territory, (the last condemned by the United Nations), the feeling for brutally mistreated Jewish people of the past does not diminish. But alarm at what is thought by some to be oppressive policies and actions of the Israeli State has created a body of people sharply critical of that State’s policies and actions – especially in relation to Palestine and the Palestinians.
That sentiment comes into sharp conflict with the efforts of at least a part of the Israeli State to equate itself with Jewish identity – and so with the attempt to equate criticism of the actions of the Israeli State with anti-Semitism.
Needless to say, in that context, any mitigation of the view of a ruthless, inhumane, and anti-Semitic Germany from 1930 to 1945 probably offends some in the State of Israel and its closest supporting organizations outside Israel. They seem to see the necessity of a consenting global community about the persecution of the Jews in order to have the global community accept Israeli State policies, however offensive. If the Nazi regime was not as viciously brutal to Jews as some sources wish it to be seen to have been, (and as it may have been) then sympathy for the State of Israel might diminish.
In the playing out of the astonishing (and growing) scholarship concerning what might be called the (alleged) false information disseminated by governments to explain extraordinary, violent, and/or visibly brutal events in the community, claims are made that ‘government’ and/or related forces create many of the violent events to condition the population to be fearful and so to accept increasingly fascist rule, and/or to believe the government-created violence is the act of the enemy (whichever ‘foreigners’, religion, or State the government wishes the people of the country to learn to hate). The work undertaken by serious and reputable investigators to reveal and to prove that governments (or their proxies) create random terrorist acts – or what are called “False Flag Events” – has grown to sizable and convincing proportions. Indeed, the growing “False Flag Investigative Industry” suggests a growing field of government criminal acts disguised as the random, insane, or purposefully effected acts of “enemies” (or those that governments wish to convince their populations are enemies).
Professor Hall has engaged actively in “False Flag” inquiry and is a co-host of the weekly program (on the net) called The False Flag Weekly News in which recent (and suspected) manifestations of False Flag activity are tabled and discussed. Among the False Flag theories in play, one concerns the truth of the collapsed Trade Towers of 9/11 and who (if the official story is incorrect) was responsible for the attack. One theory (not by any means the only one) is that a major participant in the event may have represented the interests of the State of Israel or may have been, in fact, an arm of the State of Israel.
Professor Anthony Hall has encouraged open questioning of the standard view of Germany between 1930 and 1945 (without saying he believes the standard view is wrong). He has engaged in open discussion of the False Flag phenomenon and its relation to government and government policy. He has been willing to consider the possibility of Israeli involvement in 9/11 – the destruction of the Trade Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. He has exercised academic freedom and democratic ‘freedom of speech’ in those matters as well as others that have fallen within the scope of his research.
On August 26, 2016 a vicious anti-Semitic cartoon was posted on Professor Hall’s Facebook page when he was not in Canada. He was unaware of the posting, and of its removal – all happening in a period of several hours. And he was unaware of actions being taken over the next days against him as a guilty party wishing to defame and asperse Jews … by means of what (the posted cartoon, used as evidence) can easily be called Hate Literature.
He was unaware of all that went on … because he didn’t post the obnoxious cartoon and didn’t even know of its posting … and because the President of the University of Lethbridge, Mike Mahon, who was informed as soon as the next day and who entered into discussion with accusers of Professor Hall (and with others) over succeeding days did nothing whatever to make contact with Professor Hall, his colleague, and to test Hall’s reactions to news of the posting.
In the minds of many people the behaviour of president Mahon may well suggest he wanted to believe the accusers of Professor Hall and did not want to have to entertain the possibility that his senior colleague and twenty-six year member of the scholarly community of University of Lethbridge did not post … and had nothing to do with the posting … of the slanderous and hateful cartoon.
Some observations may be made about the conduct of President Mahon. One I derive from my own wide experience on every major campus in Canada (see “Canadianization Movement”,Wikipedia) where I consulted, variously, with student, faculty, and administrative personnel. The first observation is to note the failure of the President of the University of Lethbridge to respect collegial relations and to consult early with Professor Hall, simply as a colleague – and to gain absolutely necessary information about the incident. Secondly, one must observe President Mahon’s rejection of the demands of natural justice which would require him as President to consult and to inform (at the earliest possible moment) anyone at U. of Lethbridge whose reputation and livelihood were in peril by growing accusations (untested). Failing grossly on those two matters suggests, to me, that President Mahon might well appear to fair-minded people to have been astonishingly incompetent as a professional and as a human being in his treatment of the very serious allegations brought against Professor Hall.
An even more serious allegation may lie in another observation: President Mahon (growing evidence reveals) apparently consulted with some of the false accusers of Professor Hall, sat with committees of so-called investigators, and formulated punitive measures to take against Professor Hall without having asked to meet and speak with Professor Hall. That behaviour on the President’s part may well point to his participation in a Conspiracy to do irreparable harm to Professor Hall. A Conspiracy very strongly appears to have been undertaken against Senator Mike Duffy … as I have said … but a worse one may well have been undertaken against Professor Anthony Hall.
Though Professor Hall knew nothing about the vile cartoon posted on his Facebook Page, B’nai Brith Canada personnel and sympathizers knew about it very quickly. In very short order they – or a collaborator – informed the president of the University of Lethbridge, the Premier of the province of Alberta, the Solicitor General, and the Minister of Education of the province. Replies were returned to the person giving false information with what I call astonishing speed. In my experience of writing to top government figures I can provide witness that the average Canadian is not responded to with that alacrity. Who, then, could write to the Premier of Alberta and members of cabinet (conveying false information to them) and receive such speedy and sympathetic response? The name of that person is being (for some inexplicable reason) kept from inquirers by the Alberta government. What is the Alberta government hiding … what does the government of Alberta fear??
In a truly astonishing letter written to President Mike Mahon and sent to others like Premier Rachel Notley on September 1, 2016, Bert Raphael, Q.C., LSM, President of the Canadian Jewish Rights Association quotes the whole of the unsavoury text posted on Professor Hall’s Facebook Page. And he finishes his letter (a Queen’s Counsel assuming guilt with the rashness of a school boy) with the following paragraph:
“I trust you agree that such a statement has no place in Canada and most certainly from the lips of a university professor. I would respectfully suggest that such an odious pronouncement would warrant Professor Hall’s dismissal from your University. I would be interested in your response which I undertake to share with the members of my organization whose names appear on the reverse side of this stationery.”
President Mahon waited weeks without seeking a meeting with Professor Hall, then sought one (October 3) almost immediately – and when Professor Hall, otherwise committed, couldn’t comply, President Mahon announced the next day (October 4) (in a letter to Hall) that he was immediately “suspended, without pay from all duties and privileges as a member of the academic staff at the University of Lethbridge, including any and all duties and privileges associated with teaching, research, and community service.” Professor Hall was, in addition, told he could not “attend” at any University of Lethbridge campus.
Having thus, summarily effected in fact (and surely in the public mind) a punishment for wholly unproved (and, in fact, a false allegation against Professor Hall), President Mahon finished his letter by saying that the suspension was “being implemented as a precautionary, not disciplinary, measure… “
Receiving what was libellous, wholly incorrect information (and accepting it as truth without engaging in a word of consultation with his accused colleague) President Mahon wrote to the university community the following about the order that Professor Hall remain off campus, cease his on-going teaching there, and no longer receive his professional salary.
“This action is not focused on Dr. Hall’s published scholarship, driven by complaints of students, or the demands of external advocacy groups. It is focused on his You Tube based videos and comments in social media that have been characterized as being anti-Semitic, supportive of holocaust denial and engagement in conspiracy theories.” [Notice President Mahon uses the term ”conspiracy theories” in the way the CIA shaped the phrase in order to slander and make ineffective substantial criticism and research about government(s) (and others’) misuse of power.]
The questions that arise out of President Mahon’s strange statement are obvious: if president Mahon did not answer the demands of an external advocacy group, how did he come to know of the posting on Professor Hall’s Facebook Page? The President nowhere says he discovered it for himself in the brief few hours the posting was available. Moreover, he had to learn that the posting had been there by the (so far) anonymous writer and then by other writers plainly sympathetic to B’nai Brith … such as Bert Raphael QC whose astonishing accusation I have quoted above.
In addition, President Mahon is reported to have spoken personally on September 1, 2016 to the president of B’nai Brith Canada (but he did not speak to Professor Hall). The university, moreover, has refused to release for examination most of the records of its activities and communications involved in the actions against Professor Hall.
That, alone, is simply astounding – that a university (the bastion of free and open inquiry) would conspire to keep secret its actions and communications relating to what is almost certainly the most serious (and dubious) disciplinary matter in its history.
In addition, President Mahon writes not that he, the President, holds Anthony Hall’s (falsely alleged) comments to be “anti-Semitic” but that they “have been characterized as being anti-Semitic….” If that is the case, someone must have characterized them for President Mahon as the negative things he mentions; some “external advocacy” group or groups must have conveyed that impression to him. The President of the University of Lethbridge appears to be tripping embarrassingly over his own feet in an attempt to disguise the truth about his alleged knowledge and its sources. He has the knowledge of falsely alleged evil done by Professor Hall, “characterized as being anti-Semitic” but he doesn’t characterize it as that himself … and he appears to claim no one else does either!
Ken Rubin, contracted by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, reports further behaviour of the University of Lethbridge which points to a (criminal?) conspiracy to harm Professor Hall. I quote Ken Rubin:
“Incredibly, the records show President Mahon invited the 4 external groups (B’nai Brith et. al.) to consult with Robert Thompson, the university’s external lawyer investigating the Hall case where they could have their legal counsels present. Yet it appears Hall was never consulted or approached or at least there’s no record to that effect.” [Professor Hall reports he knew nothing of the meeting(s).]
The evidence convinces me that there is at least the likelihood that an intricate group of conspirators worked together to insult, to misrepresent, and to harm in character, reputation, and professional standing Professor Anthony Hall. President Mike Mahon of the University of Lethbridge, I believe, must be considered a possible central agent in such a concerted action. I may, of course, be wrong. The case being taken by Professor Hall against the University of Lethbridge should provide answers to most of the questions that the falsely attributed posting on Professor Hall’s Facebook have engendered.
At some time – quite early in this barbaric saga – the University of Lethbridge began and (apparently) completed a secret investigation of Professor Hall – an action repugnant in every way to the most basic principles of fairness held in university communities. In addition, it filed against him (without permitting him any participation) a complaint to the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The complaint was dismissed, but President Mahon’s team persisted, appealed the dismissal, apparently reformulated their materials, and had a complaint against Professor Hall accepted.
From the small part of it I have been able to examine, I judge I am reading a presentation that would be a delight to the CIA. Every statement of, for instance, “Islamic terrorism” or of a similar idea is accepted without murmur. Criticism of such easy acceptance is apparently a violation of someone’s Human Rights. That has to be a very peculiar state of mind in Canada. Especially since in July of 2016, Madam Justice Catherine Bruce of the B.C. Supreme court wrote a 217 page judgement making crystal clear that a so-called Islamic Terror Event staged at the British Columbia Legislature grounds (on July 1, 2013) was wholly undertaken by more than 200 RCMP employees, entrapping two socially challenged converts to Islam, spending millions of dollars of unknowing taxpayers money, and working with and through Ottawa Headquarters in relation to the action in British Columbia.
Other Islamic terror event shams have almost certainly occurred (probably frequently) in other places. Not to question those events may, indeed, contribute to the violation of the Human Rights of innocent people.
Anthony Hall – a wide-ranging, openly inquiring, continually scrutinizing Canadian – appears to have dared to ask questions and to be sympathetic to analyses that – while unproved – are in no way alien to discussion in democratic society … analyses that some forces in Canada wish to censor, to deny, and to erase from the attention of Canadians.
The seriousness of the attack on Professor Hall cannot be downplayed. Its perpetrators undertook to go around all established University of Lethbridge procedures built and agreed to by the faculty and administration there to manage such issues. The perpetrators undertook to ram into place a clause in a highly aberrant Alberta Education Law that permits university presidents to remove at will anyone they choose to remove. That strikes me as a plainly fascist initiative which President Mahon should have rejected openly and vigorously but which he seized upon to use against Professor Hall.
The size and the intensity of the conspiracy to destroy and defame Professor Anthony Hall can be glimpsed when one realizes it appears to want (A) to close down discussion of German history between 1930 and 1945. It appears to want (B) to close down discussion of False Flag (government and/or Deep State presentations of violent) events created apparently with the intention of placing blame for them upon whatever source those in power wish to defame and make ‘enemy’. It appears to want (C) to close down some perfectly legitimate considerations of the role of the State of Israel in Middle Eastern and global affairs. It wants (D) to keep secret almost all of its activities to inculpate Professor Hall. And, finally, (E), the conspirators appear to want to wipe out the idea of Academic Freedom – which is essentially what Canadians think of when they speak of “freedom of speech”. Canadians mean the right to inquire, to observe, to debate, to formulate and discuss ideas in public about public matters without fear of intimidation or punishment.
The (criminal?) conspirators (if that is what they are) acting against Professor Hall want, I believe, to decide what ideas Canadians in all walks of life are free to hold and to express. To name – as I think we must name – one university President as an actor among such alleged conspirators must be a wake-up call to all Canadians – and especially to those in the community of scholars – to make sure no one in the Academy can destroy its most fundamental and noble tradition: the open and unimpeded search for truth.
Robin Mathews is a retired professor who taught English literature at Carleton University in Ottawa Ontario and at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver BC. He is well known for his campaign to Canadianize the faculty and curricula of Canadian universities.
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Iran War: United States Military Versus Israel Firsters
By James Petras | November 27, 2007
Why must Jewish organizations be and be seen as the loudest drum-beaters of all? Why can we not bring ourselves to say that military intervention is not on the table at all? Why not stash it under the table, out of sight and mount instead a diplomatic assault? – Leonard Fein, Forward
Introduction
As the White House and Congress escalate their economic sanctions and military threats against Iran, top military commanders and Pentagon officials have launched a counter-offensive, opposing a new Middle East War. While some commentators and journalists, like Chris Hedges (Truthdig, November 13, 2007), privy to this high stakes inter-elite conflict, attribute this to a White House cabal led by Vice President Cheney, a more stringent and accurate assessment puts the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the center of the Iran war debate.
There is a great deal riding in this conflict – the future of the American empire as well as the balance of power in the Middle East. Equally important is the future of the US military and our already heavily constrained democratic freedoms. The outcome of the continuous and deepening confrontation between top US military officials and the Israel Firsters over US foreign policy in the Middle East has raised fundamental questions over self-determination, colonization, civilian primacy and military political intervention, empire or republic. These and related issues are far from being of academic interest only; they concern the future of the United States. … continue
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