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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…

September 16, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

The NYT’s Yellow Journalism on Russia

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | September 15, 2017

Reading The New York Times these days is like getting a daily dose of the “Two Minutes Hate” as envisioned in George Orwell’s 1984, except applied to America’s new/old enemy Russia. Even routine international behavior, such as Russia using fictitious names for potential adversaries during a military drill, is transformed into something weird and evil.

In the snide and alarmist style that the Times now always applies to Russia, reporter Andrew Higgins wrote – referring to a fictitious war-game “enemy” – “The country does not exist, so it has neither an army nor any real citizens, though it has acquired a feisty following of would-be patriots online. Starting on Thursday, however, the fictional state, Veishnoriya, a distillation of the Kremlin’s darkest fears about the West, becomes the target of the combined military might of Russia and its ally Belarus.”

This snarky front-page story in Thursday’s print editions also played into the Times’ larger narrative about Russia as a disseminator of “fake news.” You see the Russkies are even inventing “fictional” enemies to bully. Hah-hah-hah! The article was entitled, “Russia’s War Games With Fake Enemies Cause Real Alarm.”

Of course, the U.S. and its allies also conduct war games against fictitious enemies, but you wouldn’t know that from reading the Times. For instance, U.S. war games in 2015 substituted five made-up states – Ariana, Atropia, Donovia, Gorgas and Limaria – for nations near the Caucasus mountains along the borders of Russia and Iran.

In earlier war games, the U.S. used both fictitious names and colors in place of actual countries. For instance, in 1981, the Reagan administration conducted “Ocean Venture” with that war-game scenario focused on a group of islands called “Amber and the Amberdines,” obvious stand-ins for Grenada and the Grenadines, with “Orange” used to represent Cuba.

In those cases, the maneuvers by the powerful U.S. military were clearly intended to intimidate far weaker countries. Yet, the U.S. mainstream media did not treat those war rehearsals for what they were, implicit aggression, but rather mocked protests from the obvious targets as paranoia since we all know the U.S. would never violate international law and invade some weak country! (As it turned out, Ocean Venture ’81 was a dress rehearsal for the actual U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983.)

Yet, as far as the Times and its many imitators in the major media are concerned, there’s one standard for “us” and another for Russia and other countries that “we” don’t like.

Yellow Journalism

But the Times’ behavior over the past several years suggests something even more sinister than biased reporting. The “newspaper of record” has slid into yellow journalism, the practice of two earlier New York newspapers – William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World – that in the 1890s manipulated facts about the crisis in Cuba to push the United States into war with Spain, a conflict that many historians say marked the beginning of America’s global empire.

Except in today’s instance, The New York Times is prepping the American people for what could become World War III. The daily message is that you must learn to hate Russia and its President Vladimir Putin so much that, first, you should support vast new spending on America’s Military-Industrial Complex and, second, you’ll be ginned up for nuclear war if it comes to that.

At this stage, the Times doesn’t even try for a cosmetic appearance of objective journalism. Look at how the Times has twisted the history of the Ukraine crisis, treating it simply as a case of “Russian aggression” or a “Russian invasion.” The Times routinely ignores what actually happened in Ukraine in late 2013 and early 2014 when the U.S. government aided and abetted a violent coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych after he had been demonized in the Western media.

Even as neo-Nazi and ultranationalist protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at police, Yanukovych signaled a willingness to compromise and ordered his police to avoid worsening violence. But compromise wasn’t good enough for U.S. neocons – such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland; Sen. John McCain; and National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman. They had invested too much in moving Ukraine away from Russia.

Nuland put the U.S. spending at $5 billion and was caught discussing with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who should be in the new government and how to “glue” or “midwife this thing”; McCain appeared on stage urging on far-right militants; and Gershman was overseeing scores of NED projects inside Ukraine, which he had deemed the “biggest prize” and an important step in achieving an even bigger regime change in Russia, or as he put it: “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. … Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

The Putsch

So, on Feb. 20, 2014, instead of seeking peace, a sniper firing from a building controlled by anti-Yanukovych forces killed both police and protesters, touching off a day of carnage. Immediately, the Western media blamed Yanukovych.

Shaken by the violence, Yanukovych again tried to pacify matters by reaching a compromise — guaranteed by France, Germany and Poland — to relinquish some of his powers and move up an election so he could be voted out of office peacefully. He also pulled back the police.

At that juncture, the neo-Nazis and ultra-nationalists spearheaded a violent putsch on Feb. 22, 2014, forcing Yanukovych and other officials to flee for their lives. Ignoring the agreement guaranteed by the three European nations, Nuland and the U.S. State Department quickly deemed the coup regime “legitimate.”

However, ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, which represented Yanukovych’s electoral base, resisted the coup and turned to Russia for protection. Contrary to the Times’ narrative, there was no “Russian invasion” of Crimea because Russian troops were already there as part of an agreement for its Sevastopol naval base. That’s why you’ve never seen photos of Russian troops crashing across Ukraine’s borders in tanks or splashing ashore in Crimea with an amphibious landing or descending by parachute. They were already inside Crimea.

The Crimean autonomous government also voted to undertake a referendum on whether to leave the failed Ukrainian state and to rejoin Russia, which had governed Crimea since the Eighteenth Century. In that referendum, Crimean citizens voted by some 96 percent to exit Ukraine and seek reunion with Russia, a democratic and voluntary process that the Times always calls “annexation.”

The Times and much of the U.S. mainstream media refuses even to acknowledge that there is another side to the Ukraine story. Anyone who mentions this reality is deemed a “Kremlin stooge” in much the same way that people who questioned the mainstream certainty about Iraq’s WMD in 2002-03 were called “Saddam apologists.”

But what is particularly remarkable about the endless Russia-bashing is that – because it started under President Obama – it sucked in many American liberals and even some progressives. That process grew even worse when the contempt for Russia merged with the Left’s revulsion over Donald Trump’s election.

Many liberals came to view the dubious claims of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election as the golden ticket to remove Trump from the White House. So, amid that frenzy, all standards of proof were jettisoned to make Russia-gate the new Watergate.

The Times, The Washington Post and pretty much the entire U.S. news media joined the “resistance” to Trump’s presidency and embraced the neocon “regime change” goal for Putin’s Russia. Very few people care about the enormous risks that this “strategy” entails.

For one, even if the U.S. government were to succeed in destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia sufficiently to force out President Putin, the neocon dream of another malleable Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin is far less likely than the emergence of an extreme Russian nationalist who might be ready to push the nuclear button rather than accept further humiliation of Mother Russia.

The truth is that the world has much less to fear from the calculating Vladimir Putin than from the guy who might follow a deposed Vladimir Putin amid economic desperation and political chaos in Russia. But the possibility of nuclear Armageddon doesn’t seem to bother the neocon/liberal-interventionist New York Times. Nor apparently does the principle of fair and honest journalism.

The Times and rest of the mainstream media are just having too much fun hating Russia and Putin to worry about the possible extermination of life on planet Earth.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

September 15, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The (Criminal?) Subversion of the Academy in the Case Against Professor Anthony Hall


Power Against the Quest for Truth

Tony Hall c4d0c

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.

September 15, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook Promises To Censor All Material That Makes Zuckerberg Sad

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | September 13, 2017

Earlier this morning, Facebook Vice President of Media Partnerships shared a new blog post on the company’s website detailing precisely how they intend to censor content with which they happen to disagree.  Apparently all content providers who share “clickbait or sensationalism, or post misinformation and false news” will be deemed ineligible to monetize their efforts over Facebook.

To use any of our monetization features, you must comply with Facebook’s policies and terms, including our Community Standards, Payment Terms, and Page Terms. Our goal is support creators and publishers who are enriching our community. Those creators and publishers who are violating our policies regarding intellectual property, authenticity, and user safety, or are engaging in fraudulent business practices, may be ineligible to monetize using our features.

Creators and publishers must have an authentic, established presence on Facebook — they are who they represent themselves to be, and have had a profile or Page on Facebook for at least one month. Additionally, some of our features like Ad Breaks require a sufficient follower base, something that could extend to other features over time.

Those who share content that repeatedly violates our Content Guidelines for Monetization, share clickbait or sensationalism, or post misinformation and false news may be ineligible or may lose their eligibility to monetize.

Ironically, the biggest peddlers of “clickbait or sensationalism, or misinformation and false news” these days seems to be the largest, and ‘most respected’ mainstream media outlets… presumably there is a carve out for the likes of CNN, NYT and Wapo ?

Zuck

Of course, we first noted the efforts of Facebook to combat the spread of “fake news” over social media back in December 2016 when they first introduced a filter intended to flag ‘fake’ content so that users wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of critically analyzing information on their own.  As we noted at the time, it was a genius plan, except for one small issue:  who determines what is considered “fake news” and how exactly do they draw those conclusions?  From our prior post (see “Facebook Launches Campaign To Combat “Fake News”“):

The first problem, however, immediately emerges because as NBC notes, “legitimate news outlets won’t be able to be flagged”, which then begs the question who or what is considered “legitimate news outlets”, does it include the likes of NYTs and the WaPos, which during the runup to the election declared on a daily basis, that Trump has no chance of winning, which have since posted defamatory stories about so-called “Russian propaganda news sites”, admitting subsequently that their source data was incorrect, and which many consider to be the source of “fake news”.

Also, just who makes the determination what is considered “legitimate news outlets.”

Luckily, Zuckerberg cleared up all the confusion in a subsequent post in which he basically admitted that all ‘fact-checking’ would be outsourced to disaffected Hillary voters and the completely impartial, ‘myth-busting’ website Snopes.com.

Historically, we have relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not. Anyone on Facebook can report any link as false, and we use signals from those reports along with a number of others — like people sharing links to myth-busting sites such as Snopes — to understand which stories we can confidently classify as misinformation. Similar to clickbait, spam and scams, we penalize this content in News Feed so it’s much less likely to spread.

Keep in mind folks, this entire Facebook witch hunt has been prompted by $50,000 worth of ads that ‘MAY’ have been purchased by Russian-linked accounts to run ‘potentially politically related’ ads. 

September 15, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Government Scientists : No Data – But Tremendous Precision

By Tony Heller | The Deplorable Science Blog | September 13, 2017

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/figures/station-counts-1891-1920-temp.png

NOAA has no daily temperature data from Central or South America, or most of Canada from the year 1900, But they claim to know the temperature in those regions very precisely. Same story in the rest of the world.

Despite not having any data, all government agencies agree very precisely about the global temperature.

Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet: Scientific Consensus

The claimed global temperature record is completely fake. There is no science behind it. It is the product of criminals, not scientists. This is the biggest scam in history.

September 14, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

State Dept propaganda team in disarray – report

RT | September 14, 2017

Three members of the US government’s messaging arm, which was set up at the State Department to “counter narratives” from ISIS and Russia, quit last week, leaving the year-old operation in limbo.

The Global Engagement Center’s chief technology officer, along with two other members of its analytics team, resigned without providing reasons, Defense One reported Tuesday.

The outlet has obtained former tech chief Nash Borges’s farewell email, in which he makes general suggestions about better management.

Former President Barack Obama established the GEC in March 2016, directing it to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations,” including Islamic State, Al-Qaeda “and other violent extremists abroad.”

By the year’s end, the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act had broadened the GEC’s mandate to include advancing “fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests” and countering what Congress called “Russian disinformation.”

It’s not immediately clear how many analysts remain at the center. Defense One cited a former senior official describing the three team members who quit as “the whole enchilada,” adding that “things are bad.”

The GEC is currently leaderless, the outlet reported, saying the State Department has not filled the director’s job, which requires Senate confirmation, or the post of acting director, which does not.

Last month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson agreed to greenlight $60 million for the GEC. Congress initially allocated $80 million for the operation, $60 million of which was to be used to counter Russia and only about $19 million aimed at ISIS, according to Defense One. It’s still unclear how the GEC plans to spend the funds that Tillerson approved.

The Secretary of State faced criticism from Republican and Democratic lawmakers for seemingly not being interested in all of the money Congress had allocated for the GEC.

“Congress has provided substantial resources to combat foreign propaganda, particularly from Russia. There is broad agreement that the US Government is behind the curve on this threat,” Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

“Countering foreign propaganda should be a top priority, and it is very concerning that progress on combatting this problem is being delayed because the State Department isn’t tapping into these resources.”

Last November, at the Defense One summit in Washington, DC, GEC’s former director Michael Lumpkin described how the center was using Facebook ads to push its messaging.

“Using Facebook ads, I can go within Facebook, I can go grab an audience, I can pick Country X, I need age group 13 to 34, I need people who have liked — whether it’s Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi or any other set — I can shoot and hit them directly with messaging,” Lumpkin said. He emphasized that with the right data, effective message targeting could be done for “pennies a click.”

Last week, Facebook issued a statement saying it had looked into whether Russia purchased ads on the platform to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election.

The social media giant claimed it “found approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June of 2015 to May of 2017” connected to “about 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages in violation of our policies. Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia.”

A number of news outlets, including Defense One, interpreted Facebook’s assessment that the accounts were “likely operated out of Russia,” as to assert that the Kremlin bought the ads.

Earlier this week, The Daily Beast claimed the Kremlin set up a Facebook event to organize a protest in rural Idaho last year, which was attended by four people.

Read more:

Kremlin used Facebook to subvert Twin Falls, Idaho – Daily Beast

September 13, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Kremlin used Facebook to subvert Twin Falls, Idaho – Daily Beast

RT | September 12, 2017

A long-canceled Facebook event in Idaho, attended by only four people, is highlighted by the Daily Beast as an example of the Russian government’s alleged campaign to influence the US 2016 presidential election.

The Kremlin set up Facebook events to organize protests in the US, including the one in August 2016 calling to ban Muslim refugees from the rural town of Twin Falls, Idaho, the outlet alleged in an article referencing Facebook’s hunt for suspected Russian operatives.

The publication said Facebook confirmed that it “shut down several promoted events as part of the takedown” of fake user profiles last week. The social media giant did not specify the events, however.

The Daily Beast writers concluded that the Facebook events “are the first indication that the Kremlin’s attempts to shape America’s political discourse moved beyond fake news and led unwitting Americans into specific real-life action.”

RT has reached out to Facebook for comment on whether the social media giant thought the “Citizens before refugees” event in Idaho was organized by the Kremlin. We also reached out to the Daily Beast, asking how their writers arrived at their conclusion. We have received no response as of yet.

Facebook shows that only four people marked themselves as having attended the Idaho protest in question.

The event was set up by a Facebook community called “Secured Borders,” which has since been shut down amid reports that it was operated from Russia. Facebook has yet to respond to RT’s question on what exactly was the basis for deleting the community’s page.

The events were “the next step” of Russia’s influence campaign, “when you can get people to physically do something,” the Daily Beast cited Clint Watts, founder of the “Alliance for Securing Democracy,” which operates Hamilton 68, the operation that claims to be “tracking Russia’s influence on Twitter.”

Last week, Watts’ group accused Russia of promoting hurricane preparedness websites such as ready.gov, hurricanes.gov and redcross.org.

On September 6, Facebook issued a statement saying it looked into questions on whether Russia purchased ads on the platform to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election.

The social-media giant claimed it “found approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June of 2015 to May of 2017″ connected to “about 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages in violation of our policies. Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia.”

The ads and accounts “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum,” rather than referencing the election or a particular candidate, Facebook said.

The company did not elaborate what its attribution was based on, but added that it also looked for ads “with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort. This was a broad search, including, for instance, ads bought from accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian — even though they didn’t necessarily violate any policy or law.”

The statement prompted some on social media to question whether political events set up by Russian-Americans, or just Russians in the US, could be viewed as part of a nefarious influence campaign and then be targeted.

Neither Facebook nor the Daily Beast immediately responded to RT’s inquiries on whether they thought activity by someone in Russia, or a Russian speaker, automatically implicated the Kremlin.

Following Facebook’s findings last week, Google said it failed to unearth any facts that would implicate Russia in exploiting its advertising tools to manipulate the US election.

“We’re always monitoring for abuse or violations of our policies and we’ve seen no evidence this type of ad campaign was run on our platforms,” Google said in a statement Thursday, as cited by Reuters.

September 12, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Latest Attack on Sputnik a ‘Symptom of a US Media Unused to Competition’

Sputnik – 11.09.2017

The FBI has questioned former Sputnik employee Andrew Feinberg as part of an ongoing Congressional investigation into whether the agency is a ‘Russian propaganda network’ worthy of a registry in the US Foreign Agents Act. Speaking to Sputnik, respected author and journalist James Petras explained what was really at the heart of this political circus.

On Monday, anonymous sources told Yahoo News that the FBI had questioned Feinberg, and is studying his Sputnik work correspondence, as well as that of Joseph John Fionda, another former employee of the agency’s Washington bureau. These efforts are part of a probe to determine whether Sputnik should be included on the list of foreign agents under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and sanctioned accordingly.

Earlier, a bill was submitted to Congress proposing an amendment to the requirements for the registration of foreign agents under FARA, including the provision of additional powers to the Department of Justice to identify and prosecute organizations which work illegally to try to influence the political process in the United States.

Asked to comment on the brewing scandal involving the FBI and Congress on one hand and Russian foreign news broadcasters on the other, Dr. James Petras, respected sociologist, author and activist, said that he believes the Sputnik inquiry is simply another chapter in the US political elite’s efforts to harm Russia-US relations.

“It’s part of the attempt to harm Russian-US relations – there’s no question about it,” Petras said. “There is a paranoia that runs through Washington these days that discovers plots and conspiracy, beginning sometime back [from] the time of the election of President Trump.”

As for the charges alleging that Sputnik may be a ‘foreign agent’, ‘illegally’ influencing the US political process, Petras stressed that there is simply “no basis” for this claim. “There is no basis for saying that Sputnik intervened in or is prejudicing elections. They’re publishing information. All countries in the world are always engaged in presenting news from whatever slant they want, and nobody considers that a point of intervention.”

In fact, the scholar recalled, the US itself “has radio stations and other means of communications which present US policy and US interests, and are slanted from a particular direction.”

Accordingly, Petras said he believed that this attack on Sputnik “is part of an effort to break relations with Russia. I think the intervention in the consulate is an unprecedented violation of international law.” Along with the new, recently approved sanctions, the Sputnik inquiry is really just “part of an effort building up toward a break in diplomatic relations… This is part of a turn in US foreign policy which stems from a war in Washington between the pro- and anti-Trump people.”

The academic noted that the Democratic Party, in particular, appeared “willing to sacrifice major diplomatic ties in order to isolate and oust President Trump. It has very little to do with Russian foreign policy, and everything to do with the civil war going on in Washington between Trump and anti-Trump forces,” he said.

Asked to comment on the Andrew Feinberg inquiry, and specifically the editorial approach said to influence Sputnik’s content, Petras suggested that the allegations were frankly “laughable” compared to those found in US mainstream media.

“I think the propaganda message from the Washington Post, in particular, reflects a point of view which essentially is pointing to a conspiracy theory of politics,” the scholar said. “It slants the news according to the desires of the most extreme elements of the deep state in the United States. You read the Washington Post and it’s almost as if you’re reading bulletins from the CIA, the Pentagon or the State Department. It has no independence, and I think it’s laughable to accuse Sputnik of what the US press does.”

Asked about the real goals behind the attempts, both in the media and US Congress, to brand Russia’s foreign language news outlets as propaganda, Petras said that this was “paranoia” rooted in the mainstream media’s loss of much of its audience to these alternative resources.

“I think the point of view that we hear in the [mainstream] media has alienated a great many listeners, and I think part of the ‘problem’ is that Sputnik and RT are picking up listeners in the United States and Europe, the observer noted.

“I think the competition is something the US media is not used to, and the fact that they have tried to monopolize the media with their particular political message has a lot to do with the smear on the [Russian outlets]. Even if the investigation reveals nothing, the propaganda is that they [were] subject to investigation. I think it’s a form of intimidation… I think it’s a war against the free media, not only out of Russia but elsewhere,” Petras warned.

Asked what it is that’s really driving the anti-Russia hysteria found in the much of the US media and its political system, Petras suggested it has to do with Washington’s desire for hegemony in countries with whom Russia has friendly relations.

“I think this is the key,” he said. “Under Putin, Russia is an independent country; it develops ties with allies. It has expanded its relations with China, Iran and other countries. I think the wish of the State Department and the mass media is to return to the period of Yeltsin, when Russia was converted into a helpless satellite of the United States. They cannot accept the fact that after 2000, Russia has returned to assuming an important role in the world economy, and has the independence to engage in relationships outside the orbit of the US.”

September 12, 2017 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Al-Shabaab is Not Mining Uranium in Somalia to Sell to Iran

By Cindy Vestergaard | The Fact of the Matter* | September 8, 2017

The Common Misconception

Militants are strip mining uranium deposits in Somalia to sell to Iran.

Fox News: “Al Qaeda affiliate mining uranium to send to Iran, Somali official warns US ambassador.”
VOA: “Somalia Seeks US Help, Says Militants Plot to Supply Uranium to Iran… the letter might be intended to draw additional military support from Washington more than anything else.”

The Fact of the Matter

A letter sent by Somalia’s Foreign Minister Yusuf Garaad to the U.S. Ambassador of Somalia, Stephen Schwartz, on August 11 overstates the risk of nuclear proliferation as an attempt to bring the United States into what is a decades-long protracted, factional conflict further complicated by high food insecurity, terrorism and no functioning central government.

Additional Background

There are no operating uranium mines in Somalia, nor any plans to construct one. The country’s known reserves are small and highly expensive to extract[1] with data largely based on geological mapping efforts done in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, mining activities in Somalia are described as small-scale and artisanal, mainly gemstones and salt production in Somaliland,[2] a self-declared independent (but not internationally recognized) region of Somalia.

Any development of the minerals sector is complicated by Somalia’s grim security environment. Twenty-six years of war, famine, foreign intervention, and terrorism have left Somalia’s 12 million inhabitants hungry, acutely malnourished, and displaced with most of the population (73%) living on less than US$2 per day. Mogadishu and other towns are now under government control, but the situation is far too divided and violent for democratic elections — the last were held in 1969. Somalia is Africa’s most failed state[3] and has been called “the worst place in the world.”[4]

The letter’s claim that Al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group allied to al-Qaeda, is “strip mining triuranium octoxide” from “captured critical surface exposed uranium deposits in the Galmudug region” would suppose first that Al-Shabaab has an interest in excavating the land for uranium and secondly has the large industrial equipment, dump trucks, solvents and know-how to break and crush ore then extract and separate out uranium, and process it into a concentrate form for transport. No extremist group is known to have the resources for a mining operation, even if taking over an-already operational mine, nor would such an operation go unnoticed by intelligence agencies.

Lastly, the letter’s claim that Iran is the destination is a gross distortion even if al-Shabaab had the ability to mine uranium. The United Nations Security Council would know if uranium concentrates were being transferred to Iran. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) reached by Iran and six other powers (the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, United Kingdom) plus the European Union in July 2015 monitors all transfers, trade and/or domestic production of uranium ore concentrates. Moreover, if Iran wanted to buy uranium it can do so openly through a ‘procurement channel’ established by the JCPOA and endorsed by United Nations Security Council resolution 2231 (2015) for States wanting to transfer nuclear or dual-use goods, technology or related services to Iran. All such activities are to be approved by the Security Council, including any acquisitions by Iran of an interest in a commercial activity in another State involving uranium mining or production of nuclear materials.

If the argument has an oddly familiar ring, it is because uranium — or rather the fear of it — was a key part of the justification by the George W. Bush Administration (and by U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair) for invading Iraq in 2003. The claim was discredited and eventually retracted by the White House four months after the United States had begun military operations in Baghdad.

[1] Uranium recoverable at a cost less than USD 260/kgU. See: OECD-IAEA Red Book, : http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2016/7301-uranium-2016.pdf

[2] https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/country/2011/myb3-2011-so.pdf

[3] Somalia is Africa’s “most failed state” The Economist, (https://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21706522-twenty-five-years-chaos-horn-africa-most-failed-state)

[4] “The Worst Place in the World: See What Life is Like in Somalia,” Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/somalia-is-the-most-failed-state-on-earth-2013-7?r=US&IR=T&IR=T


Cindy Vestergaard is a Senior Associate with the Nuclear Safeguards program at the Stimson Center.

*The Fact of the Matter is an ongoing series that highlights — and corrects — common misconceptions in conventional wisdom. Contributions to this series are from experts at the nonpartisan Stimson Center.

September 12, 2017 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

‘Where are the Russians?’ WaPo worried it can’t find Kremlin hackers in German election

RT | September 12, 2017

With two weeks left till the general election in Germany, the Washington Post is “worried” to see no evidence of a massive Russian meddling campaign. The article does not, however, consider the possibility that Russia had no intention of conducting one in the first place.

Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election in the US has become a universal truth for the American media. Many observers and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were expecting ‘Kremlin-controlled hackers and bots’ to act blatantly during this year’s elections in key European nations – France and Germany.

The two rounds of the French election in April and May witnessed a frenzy of Russia-blaming, with Emmanuel Macron’s campaign pointing fingers eastwards over a strategically-timed leak of emails and alleged peddling of fake news. The leak could not be traced to the Russian government by the National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSSI), and those labeled as sources of fake news, RT and Sputnik, both continue to wait for now-president Macron to name a single example.

While Macron’s office in France is struggling with his approval rating nose-dive, the eyes of all observers are on Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is slated to keep her mandate after the September 24 vote.  Despite expectations, there is no evidence of a campaign to derail the election which could be attributed to Moscow, the Washington Post noted last Sunday, asking in the headline “Where are the Russians?

In particular, the newspaper says, the trove of documents stolen in 2015 by hackers who targeted the German parliament never surfaced. The hack was blamed on a group designated APT28 and dubbed “Fancy Bear” by a US cybersecurity firm, which said that the group’s activities coincided with working hours in Moscow and that it must be working for the Russian government because the Kremlin would benefit from APT28 operations. Fancy Bear was named as the party behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee in the US and the Macron campaign hack, among others.

Nor does there seem to be a campaign in social media to spread “fake news” which could affect the outcome of the vote, the Washington Post reported, saying that “Kremlin-orchestrated bots” in Germany have been “conspicuously silent”.

“The apparent absence of a robust Russian campaign to sabotage the German vote has become a mystery among officials and experts who had warned of a likely onslaught,” the newspaper added.

“That’s what makes me worried,” said Maksymilian Czuperski, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab told the newspaper. “Why is it so quiet? It doesn’t feel right.”

The Washington Post suggests several theories to explain the situation, including Moscow waiting for a last-minute intervention, or having simply backed off because of boosted German cybersecurity and efforts to counter “Russian propaganda” on social media. Unlike the US under President Barack Obama, the Germans did not hesitate to accuse Russia of cyber-attacks, it said.

The one theory the newspaper does not even consider is that Russia is telling the truth when it says that it did not interfere with the US election or any other. After all, the US intelligence community says otherwise, and it is an institution with a long record of trustworthiness.

Read more:

Boogeyman picked: Germany concerned with Russian ‘meddling’ in upcoming election

No trace of Russian hacking in Macron election campaign attack – French cyber defense chief

September 12, 2017 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

September 11, 2001: Questions to Ask if You Still Believe the Official Narrative

By Tony Cartalucci | Land Destroyer | September 11, 2017

The attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) left nearly 3,000 dead in NYC, Washington D.C. and over Pennsylvania. The attacks transformed America into a deepening police state at home and a nation perpetually at war abroad.

The official narrative claims that 19 hijackers representing Al Qaeda took over 4 commercial aircraft to carry out attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.

The event served as impetus for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan which continues to present day. It also led directly to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Attempts to cite the attack to precipitate a war with Iran and other members of the so-called “Axis of Evil” (Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba) have also been made.

And if this is the version of reality one subscribes to, several questions remain worth asking.

1. Can the similarities between 9/11 and plans drawn up by the US Department of Defense (DoD) and Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in 1962 under the code name “Operation Northwoods” be easily dismissed? 

The US DoD and JCS wrote a detailed plan almost identical to the 9/11 attacks as early as 1962 called “Operation Northwoods” where the US proposed hijacking commercial airliners, committing terrorist attacks, and blaming Cuba to justify a US military intervention.

Far from a fringe conspiracy theory, mainstream media outlets including ABC News would cover the document in articles like, “U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba,” which would report:

In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

A full PDF copy of the document is available via George Washington University’s archives and states specifically regarding the hijacking of commercial aircraft:

An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

The document also cites the USS Maine in describing the sort of event the DoD-JCS sought to stage, a US warship whose destruction was used to maliciously provoke the Spanish-American War. It should be noted, that unlike the DoD-JCS document’s suggestion that airliner-related casualties be staged, the USS Maine explosion killed 260 sailors. It is likely that DoD and JCS would not risk engineering a provocation that leads to major war but allow low-level operators left alive with the knowledge of what they had participated in.

Considering that the US sought to deceive the public in order to provoke an unjustifiable war that would undoubtedly kill thousands or tens of thousands of innocent people, and that other proposals did include killing innocent people, it is worth considering that US policymakers would also be just as willing to extinguish innocent lives when staging the hijacking of aircraft to provoke such a war.

2. Why did US policymakers draw up extensive plans to reassert US global hegemony – including regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen – without any conceivable pretext until 9/11 conveniently unfolded? 

In 2000, US policymakers from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) sought a sweeping plan to reassert America as a global hegemon. In a 90-page document titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defense: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century” (PDF), a strategy for maintaining what it called “American military preeminence” would be laid out in detail.

It involved global moves the United States – in 2000 – could never justify, including placing US troops in Southeast Asia, building a global missile defense network prohibited by treaties signed during the Cold War, and the containment of developing nations that would eventually end up rolling back US global hegemony in the near future, including Iran, Iraq, China, North Korea, Libya, and Syria.

The report noted the difficulties of proposing and executing the transformations necessary to achieve the objectives laid out in the document. It would be explicitly stated that:

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.

In fact, the entire body of the document is an uncanny description of the post-9/11 “international order,” an order unimaginable had the events of 9/11 not transpired.

It should also be remembered that wars predicated on 9/11 like the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, were admittedly planned before 9/11 took place.

The Guardian in its 2004 article, “Bush team ‘agreed plan to attack the Taliban the day before September 11’,” would report:

The day before the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration agreed on a plan to oust the Taliban regime in Afghanistan by force if it refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, according to a report by a bipartisan commission of inquiry. The report pointed out that agreement on the plan, which involved a steady escalation of pressure over three years, had been repeatedly put off by the Clinton and Bush administrations, despite the repeated failure of attempts to use diplomatic and economic pressure.

While it seems inconceivable that the American or global public would tolerate the multi-trillion dollar 16 year war that the invasion of Afghanistan has become without the attacks on 9/11, such a war was admittedly in the making – in fact – years before 9/11 unfolded.

Similarly, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was strongly linked to the aftermath of 9/11, but was likewise decided upon long before 9/11 unfolded.

CNN in its article, “O’Neill: Bush planned Iraq invasion before 9/11,” would report:

The Bush administration began planning to use U.S. troops to invade Iraq within days after the former Texas governor entered the White House three years ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told CBS News’ 60 Minutes.

This echos similar statements made by US Army General Wesley Clark who repeatedly warned that the US sought global-spanning war post-Cold War to assert its hegemony over the planet, and fully sought to use 9/11 as a pretext to do it.

General Clark would list seven nations slated for regime change post 9/11, including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen – all nations now either at war or facing war with the United States and its proxies – or in the case of Libya – entirely divided and destroyed in the wake of US military operations.

3. If primarily Saudi hijackers with Saudi money and Saudi organization perpetrated the attacks of 9/11, why has the United States waged war or threatened war with every nation in the Middle East except Saudi Arabia and its allies? 

Not only has the United States made no moves against Saudi Arabia for its apparent role in the 9/11 attacks – spanning the administrations of US President George Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump – the United States has sold Saudi Arabia billions in arms, provided military support and protection to Saudi Arabia’s military and government, partnered with Saudi Arabia in its ongoing conflict with Yemen – all while US government documents and leaked e-mails between US politicians reveal Saudi Arabia is still a state sponsor of Al Qaeda – the organization officially blamed for the 9/11 attacks.

Indeed, a 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report would explicitly admit:

If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).

The DIA memo then explains exactly who this “Salafist principality’s” supporters are:

The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition; while Russia, China, and Iran support the regime.

This “Salafist principality” is now known as the “Islamic State,” an affiliate of Al Qaeda still operating with significant state sponsorship everywhere from Syria, Iraq, and Libya, to the Philippines and beyond.

Coincidentally, Saudi-armed and funded terrorists in the Philippines has served as a pretext for US military assets to begin expanding their presence in Southeast Asia, just as the aforementioned 2000 PNAC document had sought.

Additionally, in a 2014 e-mail between US Counselor to the President John Podesta and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, it would be admitted that two of America’s closest regional allies – Saudi Arabia and Qatar – were providing financial and logistical support to the Islamic State.

The e-mail, leaked to the public through Wikileaks, stated:

… we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to [the Islamic State] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.

While the e-mail portrays the US in a fight against the very “Salafist” (Islamic) “principality” (State) it sought to create and use as a strategic asset in 2012, the fact that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are both acknowledged as state sponsors of the terrorist organization – and are both still enjoying immense military, economic, and political support from the United States and its European allies – indicates just how disingenuous America’s “war on terror” really is.

If the US truly believed Al Qaeda carried out the deadly attacks of 9/11, why does it count among its closest allies two of Al Qaeda’s largest and most prolific state sponsors?

Together – by honestly answering these three questions – we are left considering the very real possibility that 9/11 was not a terrorist attack carried out by foreign terrorists, but rather an attack engineered by special interests within the United States itself.

If we reject that conclusion, we must ask ourselves why the US DoD and JCS would take the time to draft plans for false flag attacks if they did not believe they were viable options US policymakers might seriously consider. At the very least we must ask why those at the DoD and JCS could be caught signing and dating a conspiracy to commit unspeakable terrorism to justify an unjust war and not only avoid criminal charges, but remain employed within the US government.

We must also ask ourselves why US policymakers would draft long-term plans for reasserting American global hegemony without any conceivable pretext to justify such plans. Even in the wake of 9/11, the US government found it difficult to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American public and its allies. Without 9/11, such salesmanship would have been impossible. In Syria – with 9/11 disappearing into the distant past – US regime change efforts have all but stalled.

Finally, we must find adequate explanations as to why those sponsoring the supposed perpetrators of 9/11 have remained recipients of unwavering American support, weapon sales, and both political and military protection. We must attempt to answer why militants fighting in Syria under the banner of Al Qaeda have been able to openly operate out of NATO-member Turkey’s territory for the past 6 years, side-by-side US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel who are admittedly fueling the conflict with weapons, money, and training “accidentally” ending up in Al Qaeda’s hands.

It is clear – that at the very least – the official narrative in no shape, form, or way adds up. If the official narrative doesn’t add up, what does?

September 11, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Islamophobia, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Has the NYT Gone Collectively Mad?

By Robert Parry | Consortium News | September 11, 2017

For those of us who have taught journalism or worked as editors, a sign that an article is the product of sloppy or dishonest journalism is that a key point will be declared as flat fact when it is unproven or a point in serious dispute – and it then becomes the foundation for other claims, building a story like a high-rise constructed on sand.

This use of speculation as fact is something to guard against particularly in the work of inexperienced or opinionated reporters. But what happens when this sort of unprofessional work tops page one of The New York Times one day as a major “investigative” article and reemerges the next in even more strident form as a major Times editorial? Are we dealing then with an inept journalist who got carried away with his thesis or are we facing institutional corruption or even a collective madness driven by ideological fervor?

What is stunning about the lede story in last Friday’s print edition of The New York Times is that it offers no real evidence to support its provocative claim that – as the headline states – “To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans” or its subhead: “Flooding Twitter and Facebook, Impostors Helped Fuel Anger in Polarized U.S.”

In the old days, this wildly speculative article, which spills over three pages, would have earned an F in a J-school class or gotten a rookie reporter a stern rebuke from a senior editor. But now such unprofessionalism is highlighted by The New York Times, which boasts that it is the standard-setter of American journalism, the nation’s “newspaper of record.”

In this case, it allows reporter Scott Shane to introduce his thesis by citing some Internet accounts that apparently used fake identities, but he ties none of them to the Russian government. Acting like he has minimal familiarity with the Internet – yes, a lot of people do use fake identities – Shane builds his case on the assumption that accounts that cited references to purloined Democratic emails must be somehow from an agent or a bot connected to the Kremlin.

For instance, Shane cites the fake identity of “Melvin Redick,” who suggested on June 8, 2016, that people visit DCLeaks which, a few days earlier, had posted some emails from prominent Americans, which Shane states as fact – not allegation – were “stolen … by Russian hackers.”

Shane then adds, also as flat fact, that “The site’s phony promoters were in the vanguard of a cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts, a legion of Russian-controlled impostors whose operations are still being unraveled.”

The Times’ Version

In other words, Shane tells us, “The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter, the American companies that essentially invented the tools of social media and, in this case, did not stop them from being turned into engines of deception and propaganda.”

Besides the obvious point that very few Americans watch RT and/or Sputnik and that Shane offers no details about the alleged falsity of those “fire hose of stories,” let’s examine how his accusations are backed up:

“An investigation by The New York Times, and new research from the cybersecurity firm FireEye, reveals some of the mechanisms by which suspected Russian operators used Twitter and Facebook to spread anti-Clinton messages and promote the hacked material they had leaked. On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign. On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages.”

Note the weasel words: “suspected”; “believe”; ‘linked”; “fingerprints.” When you see such equivocation, it means that these folks – both the Times and FireEye – don’t have hard evidence; they are speculating.

And it’s worth noting that the supposed “army of fake Americans” may amount to hundreds out of Facebook’s two billion or so monthly users and the $100,000 in ads compare to the company’s annual ad revenue of around $27 billion. (I’d do the math but my calculator doesn’t compute such tiny percentages.)

So, this “army” is really not an “army” and we don’t even know that it is “Russian.” But some readers might say that surely we know that the Kremlin did mastermind the hacking of Democratic emails!

That claim is supported by the Jan. 6 “intelligence community assessment” that was the work of what President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. But, as any intelligence expert will tell you, if you hand-pick the analysts, you are hand-picking the conclusions.

Agreeing with Putin

But some still might protest that the Jan. 6 report surely presented convincing evidence of this serious charge about Russian President Vladimir Putin personally intervening in the U.S. election to help put Donald Trump in the White House. Well, as it turns out, not so much, and if you don’t believe me, we can call to the witness stand none other than New York Times reporter Scott Shane.

Shane wrote at the time: “What is missing from the [the Jan. 6] public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

So, even Scott Shane, the author of last Friday’s opus, recognized the lack of “hard evidence” to prove that the Russian government was behind the release of the Democratic emails, a claim that both Putin and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published a trove of the emails, have denied. While it is surely possible that Putin and Assange are lying or don’t know the facts, you might think that their denials would be relevant to this lengthy investigative article, which also could have benefited from some mention of Shane’s own skepticism of last January, but, hey, you don’t want inconvenient details to mess up a cool narrative.

Yet, if you struggle all the way to the end of last Friday’s article, you do find out how flimsy the Times’ case actually is. How, for instance, do we know that “Melvin Redick” is a Russian impostor posing as an American? The proof, according to Shane, is that “His posts were never personal, just news articles reflecting a pro-Russian worldview.”

As it turns out, the Times now operates with what must be called a neo-McCarthyistic approach for identifying people as Kremlin stooges, i.e., anyone who doubts the truthfulness of the State Department’s narratives on Syria, Ukraine and other international topics.

Unreliable Source

In the article’s last section, Shane acknowledges as much in citing one of his experts, “Andrew Weisburd, an Illinois online researcher who has written frequently about Russian influence on social media.” Shane quotes Weisburd as admitting how hard it is to differentiate Americans who just might oppose Hillary Clinton because they didn’t think she’d make a good president from supposed Russian operatives: “Trying to disaggregate the two was difficult, to put it mildly.”

According to Shane, “Mr. Weisburd said he had labeled some Twitter accounts ‘Kremlin trolls’ based simply on their pro-Russia tweets and with no proof of Russian government ties. The Times contacted several such users, who insisted that they had come by their anti-American, pro-Russian views honestly, without payment or instructions from Moscow.”

One of Weisburd’s “Kremlin trolls” turned out to be 66-year-old Marilyn Justice who lives in Nova Scotia and who somehow reached the conclusion that “Hillary’s a warmonger.” During the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, she reached another conclusion: that U.S. commentators were exhibiting a snide anti-Russia bias perhaps because they indeed were exhibiting a snide anti-Russia bias.

Shane tracked down another “Kremlin troll,” 48-year-old Marcel Sardo, a web producer in Zurich, Switzerland, who dares to dispute the West’s groupthink that Russia was responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, and the State Department’s claims that the Syrian government used sarin gas in a Damascus suburb on Aug. 21, 2013.

Presumably, if you don’t toe the line on those dubious U.S. government narratives, you are part of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. (In both cases, there actually are serious reasons to doubt the Western groupthinks which again lack real evidence.)

But Shane accuses Sardo and his fellow-travelers of spreading “what American officials consider to be Russian disinformation on election hacking, Syria, Ukraine and more.” In other words, if you examine the evidence on MH-17 or the Syrian sarin case and conclude that the U.S. government’s claims are dubious if not downright false, you are somehow disloyal and making Russian officials “gleeful at their success,” as Shane puts it.

But what kind of a traitor are you if you quote Shane’s initial judgment after reading the Jan. 6 report on alleged Russian election meddling? What are you if you agree with his factual observation that the report lacked anything approaching “hard evidence”? That’s a point that also dovetails with what Vladimir Putin has been saying – that “IP addresses can be simply made up. … This is no proof”?

So is Scott Shane a “Kremlin troll,” too? Should the Times immediately fire him as a disloyal foreign agent? What if Putin says that 2 plus 2 equals 4 and your child is taught the same thing in elementary school, what does that say about public school teachers?

Out of such gibberish come the evils of McCarthyism and the death of the Enlightenment. Instead of encouraging a questioning citizenry, the new American paradigm is to silence debate and ridicule anyone who steps out of line.

You might have thought people would have learned something from the disastrous groupthink about Iraqi WMD, a canard that the Times and most of the U.S. mainstream media eagerly promoted.

But if you’re feeling generous and thinking that the Times’ editors must have been chastened by their Iraq-WMD fiasco but perhaps had a bad day last week and somehow allowed an egregious piece of journalism to lead their front page, your kind-heartedness would be shattered on Saturday when the Times’ editorial board penned a laudatory reprise of Scott Shane’s big scoop.

Stripping away even the few caveats that the article had included, the Times’ editors informed us that “a startling investigation by Scott Shane of The New York Times, and new research by the cybersecurity firm FireEye, now reveal, the Kremlin’s stealth intrusion into the election was far broader and more complex, involving a cyberarmy of bloggers posing as Americans and spreading propaganda and disinformation to an American electorate on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. …

“Now that the scheming is clear, Facebook and Twitter say they are reviewing the 2016 race and studying how to defend against such meddling in the future. … Facing the Russian challenge will involve complicated issues dealing with secret foreign efforts to undermine American free speech.”

But what is the real threat to “American free speech”? Is it the possibility that Russia – in a very mild imitation of what the U.S. government does all over the world – used some Web sites clandestinely to get out its side of various stories, an accusation against Russia that still lacks any real evidence?

Or is the bigger threat that the nearly year-long Russia-gate hysteria will be used to clamp down on Americans who dare question fact-lite or fact-free Official Narratives handed down by the State Department and The New York Times ?

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

September 11, 2017 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment