Fourth OPCW whistleblower: Staff ‘frightened into silence’, watchdog brought into ‘shameful disrepute’ over Douma probe
RT | March 13, 2020
A fourth whistleblower has come forward to defend two senior OPCW inspectors who revealed the watchdog tried to cover up evidence in the Douma chemical weapons probe, saying that other employees were “frightened into silence.”
In a statement to the Grayzone, the latest whistleblower said they were “horrified” but “unsurprised” by recent events within the organization, describing the “mistreatment” of “two highly regarded and accomplished professionals” as “abhorrent.”
The employee wrote that he is “one of many who were stunned and frightened into silence by the reality how the organization operates,” and that the “threat of personal harm” to those who speak out is “not an illusion.”
The fourth whistleblower emerged after the OPCW leadership attempted to smear and discredit veteran inspector Ian Henderson and an individual known as ‘Alex’ who challenged the organization’s narrative on the alleged Syrian government attack on Douma in 2018. A third whistleblower has also previously defended the integrity of the first two who spoke out and expressed concern for the safety and security of those who dissent from the official narrative.
The Grayzone said it had independently verified the identity of the fourth whistleblower and their position at the OPCW, but granted them anonymity “to protect them from potential retaliation.”
Last week, Henderson and ‘Alex’ both wrote to OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias, accusing the organization of trying to “smear” their reputations and questioning why two top inspectors with “impeccable records” would suddenly “go rogue.” The letters followed an effort by the chemical weapons watchdog to discredit them, rubbish their serious concerns, and frame them merely as two disgruntled former employees.
“I fully support their endeavors, in that it is for the greater good and not for personal gain or in the name of any political agenda,” the fourth whistleblower wrote, adding that the inspectors are “trying to protect the integrity of the organization which has been hijacked and brought into shameful disrepute.”
After a detailed study, Henderson, who led the probe on the ground in Douma, concluded that gas cylinders found at the scene had likely been manually placed, which suggests the attack may have been a false flag staged by anti-government militants. The incident, however, was swiftly used to justify US, UK and French airstrikes on Syria before OPCW investigators had even arrived at the scene.
Yet, the OPCW disregarded Henderson’s evidence without explanation and in its official report implied that the gas cylinders were dropped by Syrian military planes – allegedly after “unacceptable pressure” was applied by the US government.
Must… have… oil…
Climate Discussion Nexus | March 11, 2020
The implosion of investment in Canadian energy, most recently the cancellation of the Teck Frontier oilsands mine and Warren Buffett bailing on Quebec’s giant Énergie Saguenay LNG plant, brings home that if all this airy talk of transitioning away from fossil fuels actually lands, it will land on us very hard. (Mind you poor shy Canada finally got the world’s attention, if it’s any consolation.) As Anjli Raval warns in a major piece in The Financial Times, other countries are expanding their capacity as we crush ours because “The world runs on oil.” It accounts for 34% of world energy consumption, followed by its hydrocarbon cousins coal (27%) and natural gas (24%). But, as climate activists are often reminded in vain about their own lifestyles and protest accessories, “the fossil fuel has also quietly seeped into other aspects of our lives: from paint, washing detergents and nail polish to plastic packaging, medical equipment, mattress foams, clothing and coatings for television screens. Last year, global demand reached a record 100 million barrels a day”. And in Canada we’re part of the demand. Just increasingly not the supply.
Raval’s piece is not triumphal. Far from it. She says oil is bad. Bad bad bad. “Even as our thirst for oil seems insatiable, it is becoming politically and environmentally toxic. As the world wakes up to the catastrophic impact of climate change, from rising sea levels and drought to wildfires and crop failure, scientists have warned of a need to rapidly shift away from fossil fuels. Yet when it comes to oil demand, there is little sign of this happening. Our usage has jumped 62 per cent over the course of a few decades — up from 61.6 million b/d in 1986.” Almost as if we didn’t believe all that talk we keep… emitting.
Raval says “How the world can provide abundant energy supplies while dramatically reducing emissions has become one of the defining issues of our time. The challenge is huge. In order to keep global warming ‘well below’ a 2 C increase, the IEA says the world would need to stomach a fall in oil consumption to 67 million b/d by 2040. Environment analysts argue that we need to learn to survive on far lower levels — about 10 million b/d — and ultimately remove it from our energy system entirely.” Ah. Analysts. Cousins of experts.
If the challenge is huge, the response is not. She notes that “Governments are beginning to take some action, from incentivizing the purchase of low emissions vehicles to funding cleaner energy research.” But doing actual stuff that might matter is a lot harder because, wait for it, oil is vital. “While coal and gas are starting to be displaced by lower-cost renewables in electricity generation, oil has a stranglehold over the transport sector, and the petrochemicals industry is a fast-growing consumer of refined products. Aside from the commercial interests of oil-producer nations and corporations, there is a practical question: How will the world function without a material on which we depend so deeply?… Throughout history, energy has been at the heart of how civilizations have prospered.”
In keeping with the realism of half of the piece, she’s very clear that crude oil did wonders to advance prosperity, a sentiment with which we entirely agree. Then she goes unreal: “Yet humanity’s improved well-being has come at the expense of the planet’s. The earth has warmed by 1 C since pre-industrial times and is likely to heat up by another 2 C by the turn of the century — overshooting the targets of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.”
If so, what happens? Well, we all might sort of die. “A 2018 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report showed warming beyond 1.5 C risked irreversible changes — from the mass extinction of species to extreme weather and ecosystem changes that threaten global stability.” Scary yet vague. We’re not quite ready to open the sixth seal. But we still commend the piece because it is quite realistic about the situation if not the future.
“Even after the world began moving from coal to other fuels, coal did not disappear. With the emergence of each new source, we have simply added it to the mix rather than replace old ones.” And she quotes Greta Thunberg (who else?) on the urgency of getting not to “net” zero but “real zero”. (Sort of like Canada’s energy industry the way things are going.) But Raval warns, “Cars, trucks and other road vehicles make up more than 40 per cent of global oil usage. When you add in aircraft, ships and trains, transport accounts for about 60 per cent. So any attempt to reduce our oil habit hinges on this sector.” Buildings and industry are also big, so pretty much the stuff that we do that makes us warm, fed and happy or at least entertained. So maybe we can go for “offsets such as planting trees.” It’s gonna take quite a few.
Next Raval makes a daffy claim indeed. She quotes “Jason Bordoff, who heads the Centre on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University” that “Ultimately, the world has to make value judgments about what temperature target it wants to hit.” Value judgements?
To hear the great and good tell it, we already did. We know what temperature target we want to hit. And we’re also arrogant enough to think we don’t just know the ideal temperature (for some reason it’s what we had in 1950, not 1850 or 1150), we also know how to hit it. Except for the tricky bit where we risk turning First World countries into Third World countries and kill vast numbers in Third World countries gone Fourth World by shutting off their path out of poverty because otherwise bad things will happen.
No really. Raval says “The world’s addiction to oil is often compared with tobacco. But while smoking is something people can choose to do, using energy is not…. Yet the cost of climate change could be far greater — and the world is running out of time.”
The piece does at least make plain just how high the cost of giving up oil would be in theory unless and until we find something better. Meanwhile in Canada we’re toying with demonstrating it in practice.
Guardian uses misleading data to imply COVID worse than Spanish Flu
By Catte Black | OffGuardian | March 11, 2020
The curious downgrading of the 1918 Spanish Flu case fatality rate, which I looked into March 9, has taken an interesting new turn today, with the Guardian publishing this piece, by science journalist Laura Spinney
Closed borders and ‘black weddings’: what the 1918 flu teaches us about coronavirus
which uses this anomalous lower figure (2.5%) to imply that COVID19 may prove more dangerous than the Spanish Flu:
Last week the WHO provisionally quoted a CFR of 3.4% [for COVID19], which would be alarming if it were correct. The CFR of the 1918 flu is still being debated… but the number usually quoted is 2.5%…
Elsewhere, however she also describes the 1918 Spanish Flu as:
That global human catastrophe, which killed between 50 million and 100 million people…
This is curious for a couple of reasons:
- Because the Spanish Flu CFR ‘number usually quoted’ is NOT 2.5% It’s 10-20%. Or 50-100 million deaths from 500 million cases.
- Because Spinney herself has pointed out in her book, Pale Rider:the Spanish Flu of 1918 & How it Changed the World, that this lower CFR (2.5%) is irreconcilable with the commonly accepted numbers of dead:
Indeed, as I showed in my previous article, those two figures – a death-rate of 50-100 million and a CFR of 2.5% can’t co-exist. They are mutually exclusive. For 50 million to be 2.5% of all cases there would have to have been 2 billion cases. If 100 million is 2.5% of all cases then there would have to have been 4 billion cases. Even the lower figure is greater than the entire population of the world at that time. It’s an obvious error.
But how did it come about? And why is this anomalous 2.5% figure seeing a resurgence of use in very recent days?
A recent Twitter thread by Ferres Jabr, a science writer for the NYT magazine, does a lot to expose how the two twisted and irreconcilable stats – 50-100 million dead and a CFR of 2.5% originally came about. I urge you all to read this entire thing, it’s excellent (the thread is also available in PDF form here, just in case it gets memory holed):
To sum up its findings. The number of Spanish Flu cases worldwide has long been estimated at around 500 million, and this estimate has not changed. However the number of estimated deaths has changed quite dramatically in recent times, and this is the source of the error.
Back in the 1970s the total number of deaths was estimated at around 20 million, due to a failure to assimilate many cases from the non-Western world. The CFR of 2.5% it estimated was a little low but broadly inline with its other figure.
But in 2002 a new study corrected the lacuna in non-Western cases and produced the estimate of worldwide deaths we are familiar with now – 50-100 million. This meant the CFR was no longer 2.5% but now 10-20% of total estimated cases.
Then a later study, from 2006, used these updated fatality figures, but omitted to update the CFR, citing it as still 2.5%. Which meant it was offering the impossible and contradictory number recently adopted by Wikipedia.
Obviously this was a simple error, and it has been pointed out several times in the intervening years (see for example here). But, as the recently ‘corrected’ Wikipedia article shows, it’s proving a very fortuitous error right now for those wanting to instil very high amounts of public fear.
Pretty obviously this innocent error is being exploited as part of a very cynical bid by some entities, including the Wikipedia editors, to make the current coronavirus scare seem, well, scarier. The 1918 flu pandemic is embedded in the collective mind as an exemplar of a terrifying outbreak. If the stats can be manipulated to allow people to claim its CFR was actually lower than COVID19 – well that’s some valuable fear porn for use in articles and headlines, and by sock puppets BTL trying to create memes.
To that end, the current confusion is a bit of a Godsend.
Spinney’s article illustrates this very well. Spinney is well aware of the ‘2.5% anomaly’ as she herself has drawn attention to it, but no reference to it appears anywhere in this piece. And, while her article stops short of actually claiming COVID19 is going to be bigger than the Spanish Flu, the opening paras – which will be the most read of course – certainly leave that possibility more than open, where they directly compare the alleged CFR of the current coronavirus (3.4%) with the 2.5% figure for Spanish Flu – which she knows to be erroneous.
This is cynically providing a nice easy and totally misleading quote for anyone who wants to claim COVID19 is measurably more dangerous than the Spanish Flu, while stopping short of actually making the claim.
Spinney ought, at very least, to have added her own rider from her own book to this Guardian article, and made it perfectly clear that the ‘commonly accepted’ Spanish Flu CFR of 2.5% is not just wrong, but impossible.
The fact she chose not to, or was possibly deterred from doing so by her editor, is not just revealing of agenda, it’s actually shameful and irresponsible to a very high degree.
The UK government has asked people to report any sources of misleading information on COVID19. This Guardian article is clearly one such, but I highly doubt it is the kind of ‘misinformation’ they want to be apprised of.
How the UK press supports the British military and intelligence establishment
By Mark Curtis | Declassified UK | March 11, 2020
Britain’s national press is acting largely as a platform for the views of the UK military and intelligence establishment, new statistical research by Declassified UK shows.
The UK press, from The Times to The Guardian, is also routinely helping to demonise states identified by the British government as enemies, while tending to whitewash those seen as allies.
The research, which analyses the UK national print media, suggests that the public is being bombarded by views and selective information supporting the priorities of policy-makers. The media is found to be routinely misinforming the public and acting far from independently.
This is the second part of a two-part analysis of UK national press coverage of British foreign policy.
Elite platform
Numerous stories or points of information on Britain’s intelligence agencies, such as MI6 and GCHQ, are being fed to journalists by anonymous “security sources” – often military or intelligence officials who do not want to be named.
The term “security sources” has been mentioned in 1,020 press articles in the past three years alone, close to one a day. While not all of these relate to UK sources, it indicates the common use of this method by British journalists.
Declassified’s recent research found that officials in the UK military and intelligence establishment had been sources for at least 34 major national media stories that cast Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a danger to British security. The research also found 440 articles in the UK press from September 2015 until December 2019 specifically mentioning Corbyn as a “threat to national security”.
Anonymous sources easily push out messages supportive of government policy and often include misleading or unverifiable information with no come-back from journalists. The Ministry of Defence (MOD) says it has 89 “media relations and communications” officers.
Many journalists regularly present the views of the MOD or security services to the public with few or no filters or challenges, merely amplifying what their sources tell them. In “exclusive” interviews with MI6 or MI5, for example, journalists invariably allow the security services to promote their views without serious, or any, scepticism for their claims or relevant context.
That the UK intelligence services are regularly presented as politically neutral actors and the bearers of objective information is exemplified in headlines such as “MI6 lays bare the growing Russian threat” (in the Times) and “Russia and Assad regime ‘creating a new generation of terrorists who will be threat to us all’, MI6 warns” (in the Independent).
Press coverage of the RAF’s 100th “birthday” in 2018 produced no critical articles that could be found, with most being stories from the MOD presented as news. This is despite episodes in the RAF’s history such as the bombing of civilians in colonial campaigns in the Middle East in the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s and its prominent current role in supporting Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, which has helped create the world’s biggest humanitarian disaster.
Similarly, for GCHQ’s 100th anniversary in 2019, the press appeared to simply write up information provided by the organisation. Only the occasional article mentioned GCHQ’s role in operating programmes of mass surveillance while its covert online action programmes and secret spy bases in at least one repressive Middle East regime were ignored by every paper at the time, as far as could be found.
The national press are generally strong supporters of the security services and the military. A number of outlets, from the Times and Telegraph to the Mirror, are strongly opposed to government cuts in parts of the military budget, for example.
The British army’s main special forces unit, the SAS, which is currently involved in seven covert wars, is invariably seen positively in the national press. A search reveals 384 mentions of the term “SAS hero” in the UK national press in the past five years – mainly in the Sun, but also in the Times, Express, Mail, Telegraph and others.
Critical articles on the special forces are rare, and the journalists writing them can face a backlash from other reporters.
In some press articles, MOD media releases are largely copied and pasted. For example, recent MOD material on RAF Typhoons in Eastern Europe scrambling to intercept Russian aircraft has often been repeated word for word across the media.
A press release from the UK’s Royal Air Force, and how it was covered by two British newspapers, The Sun and The Independent.
Such “embedded journalism” poses a significant threat to the public interest. Richard Norton-Taylor, formerly the Guardian’s security correspondent for over 40 years, told Declassified : “Embedded journalists — those invited to join British military units in conflict zones — are at the mercy of their MOD handlers at the best of times. Journalists covering defence, security and intelligence are far too deferential and indulge far too much in self-censorship”.
Some papers are more extreme than others in their willingness to act as platforms for the military and intelligence establishment. The Express may well be the most supportive: its coverage of MOD stories and vilification of official enemies, notably Russia, is remarkable and consistent.
The Guardian, however, has also been shown to play a similar role. Declassified’s recent analysis, drawing on newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists, found that the paper has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the “security state”.
Censorship by omission
Articles critical of the Ministry of Defence or security services are occasionally published in the press. However, these tend to be either on relatively minor issues or are reported on briefly and then forgotten. Rarely do seriously critical stories receive sustained coverage or are widely picked up across the rest of the media.
Often, reporters will cover a topic and elide the most important information for no clear reason. For example, there is considerable coverage of possible MI5 failures to prevent the May 2017 Manchester terrorist bombing — failings which may be understandable given the large number of terrorist suspects being monitored at any one time.
However, the government admitted in parliament in March 2018 that it “likely” had contacts with two militant groups in the 2011 war in Libya for which the Manchester bomber and his father reportedly fought at the time, one of which groups the UK had covertly supported in the past. This significant admission in parliament has not been reported in any press article, as far as can be found.
People lay flowers in St Annes Square on the first anniversary of the Manchester Arena bombing in Manchester, Britain, 22 May 2018. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Nigel Roddis)
Last September, veteran investigative journalist Ian Cobain broke a story on the alternative news site Middle East Eye revealing that the senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British army’s psychological warfare unit, the so-called 77th Brigade.
This story was picked up by a few media outlets at the time (including the Financial Times, the Times and the Independent ) but our research finds that it then went unmentioned in the hundreds of press articles subsequently covering Twitter.
Similarly, in November 2018, a story broke on a secretive UK government-financed programme called the Integrity Initiative, which is ostensibly a “counter disinformation” programme to challenge Russian information operations but was also revealed to be tweeting messages attacking Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Our research finds that in the 14 months until December 2019, the Integrity Initiative was mentioned less than 20 times in the UK-wide national press, mainly in the Times (it was also mentioned 15 times in the Scottish paper, the Sunday Mail ).
By contrast, when stories break that are useful to the British establishment, they tend to receive sustained media coverage.
Establishment think tanks
The British press routinely chooses to rely on sources in think tanks that largely share the same pro-military and pro-intervention agenda as the state.
The two most widely-cited military-related think tanks in the UK are the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) which are usually quoted as independent voices or experts. In the last five years, RUSI has appeared in 534 press articles and IISS in 120.
However, both are funded by governments and corporations. RUSI, which is located next door to the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, has funders such as BAE Systems, the Qatar government, the Foreign Office and the US State Department. IISS’s chief financial backers include BAE Systems, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Airbus.
This funding is mentioned in only two press reports that could be found – the Guardian reported that IISS received money from the regime in Bahrain while the Times once noted, “RUSI, while funded in part by the MoD, is an independent think tank”.
One Telegraph article refers to a “research fellow at RUSI who specialises in combat airpower”, without mentioning that its funder BAE Systems is a major producer of warplanes.
Although many senior figures in these organisations previously worked in government, press readers are rarely informed of this. RUSI’s chair is former foreign secretary William Hague, its vice-chair is former MI6 director Sir John Scarlett and its senior vice-president is David Petraeus, former CIA director.
The IISS’s deputy secretary-general is a former senior official at the US State Department while its Middle East director is a former Lieutenant-General in the British army who served as defence senior adviser to the Middle East. One of IISS’ senior advisers is Nigel Inkster, a former senior MI6 officer.
Media and intelligence
Richard Keeble, professor of journalism at the University of Lincoln, has noted that the influence of the intelligence services on the media may be “enormous” and the British secret service may even control large parts of the press. “Most tabloid newspapers – or even newspapers in general – are playthings of MI5”, says Roy Greenslade, a former editor of the Daily Mirror who has also worked as media specialist for both the Telegraph and the Guardian.
David Leigh, former investigations editor of the Guardian, has written that reporters are routinely approached and manipulated by intelligence agents, who operate in three ways: they attempt to recruit journalists to spy on other people or go themselves under journalistic “cover”, they pose as journalists in order to write tendentious articles under false names, and they plant stories on willing journalists, who disguise their origin from their readers — known as black propaganda.
MI6 managed a psychological warfare operation in the run-up to the Iraq war of 2003 that was revealed by former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter. Known as Operation Mass Appeal, this operation “served as a focal point for passing MI6 intelligence on Iraq to the media, both in the UK and around the world. The goal was to help shape public opinion about Iraq and the threat posed by WMD [weapons of mass destruction]”.
Various fabricated reports were written up in the media in the run-up to the Iraq war, based on intelligence sources. These included cargo ships said to be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (covered in the Independent and Guardian ) and claims that Saddam Hussein killed his missile chief to thwart a UN team (Sunday Telegraph ).
More recent examples of apparently fabricated stories in the establishment media include Guardian articles on the subject of Julian Assange. The paper claimed in a front page splash written by Luke Harding and Dan Collyns in November 2018 that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly met Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy three times.
The Guardian also falsely reported on a “Russia escape plot” to enable Assange to leave the embassy for which the paper later gave a partial apology. Both stories appeared to be part of a months-long campaign by the Guardian against Assange.
The exterior view of Thames House, MI5 Headquarters, in Millbank, on the bank of the River Thames, London, Britain. (Photo: EPA-EFE/ Horacio Villalobos)
Demonising enemies
The media plays a consistent role in following the state’s demonisation of official enemies. The term “Russian threat” is mentioned in 401 articles in the past five years, across the national press. The Express may be the largest press amplifier of the government’s demonisation of Russia — the paper carries a steady stream of stories critical of Russia and Putin.
The British establishment has invoked Russia as an enemy in recent years due mainly to the poisonings in the town of Salisbury and policy in eastern Europe. Whatever malign policies Russia is promoting, which can be real, false or exaggerated, it is noteworthy that this has been elevated by the press to a general “threat” to the UK. As during the cold war, this is useful to the British military and security services arguing for larger budgets and for offensive military postures in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Russia’s alleged interference in British politics has received huge coverage compared to alleged Israeli influence. A simple comparison of search terms using “Russia/Israel and UK and interference” in press articles in the past five years yields seven times more mentions of Russia than Israel, despite considerable evidence of Israeli interference.
UK press reporting on Iran is also noticeably supportive of government policy. A search for “Iran and nuclear weapons programme” reveals 325 articles in the past five years. While this large coverage is driven by president Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, it is also driven by Iran being a designated enemy of the US and UK, which have deemed it unacceptable that Tehran should ever acquire nuclear weapons.
By contrast, “Israel’s nuclear weapons” (and variants of this search term) are mentioned in under 30 press articles in the past five years. Natanz, Iran’s main nuclear arms facility, has been mentioned in around four times more press articles than Dimona, the Israeli nuclear site, in the past five years.
The contrast in reporting on Iran and Israel is striking since Iran does not possess nuclear weapons, and it is not certain that it seeks to, whereas Western ally Israel already has such weapons, estimated at around 80 warheads.
An aerial view of Israel’s nuclear site at Dimona. (Google Maps)
Labelling goodies and baddies
The national press strongly follows the government in labelling states as enemies or allies.
States favoured by the UK are mainly described in the press using the neutral term “government” rather the more critical term “regime”. In the past three years, for example, the term “Saudi government” has been used in 790 articles while “Saudi regime” is mentioned in 388. However, with Iran the number of instances is reversed: “Iranian government” is used in 419 articles whereas “Iranian regime” is mentioned in 456.
The same holds for other allies. The “Egyptian regime” receives 24 mentions while “Egyptian government” has 222, in the past three years. The “Bahraini regime” is mentioned in 10 articles while “Bahraini government” is mentioned in 60.
The precise term “Iranian-backed Houthi rebels”, referring to the war in Yemen, is mentioned in 198 articles in the last five years. However, the equivalent term for the UK backing the Saudis in Yemen (using search terms such as “UK-backed Saudis” or “British-backed Saudis”) appears in just three articles.
The pattern is also that the crimes of official enemies are covered extensively in the national press but those of the UK and its allies much less so, if at all.
Articles mentioning “war crimes and Syria” number 1,527 in the past five years compared to 495 covering “war crimes and Yemen”. While the press often reports that the Syrian government has carried out war crimes, most articles simply suggest or allege war crimes by the Saudis in Yemen.
Indeed, the UK press has been much more interested in covering the Syrian war—chiefly prosecuted by the UK’s opponents—than the Yemen war, where Britain has played a sustained widespread role. As a basic indicator, the specific term “war in Syria” is mentioned in well over double the number of articles as “war in Yemen” in the past five years.
Furthermore, government enemies are regularly described in the press as supporters of terrorism, which rarely applies to allies.
In the past three years 185 articles mention the term “sponsor of terrorism”, most referring to Iran, followed by Sudan and North Korea with the occasional mention of Libya and Pakistan. None specifically label UK allies Turkey or Saudi “sponsors of terrorism”, despite evidence of this in Syria and elsewhere, and none describe Britain or the US as such.
Some 102 articles in the past five years specifically mention Russia’s “occupation of Crimea”. However, despite some critical articles on UK policy towards the Chagos Islands in the Indian ocean—which were depopulated by the UK in the 1970s and which the US now uses as a military base—only two articles specifically mention the UK’s “occupation of Chagos” (or variants of this term).
Similar labelling prevails on opposition forces in foreign countries. Protesters in Hong Kong are routinely called “pro-democracy” by the press – the term has been mentioned in hundreds of articles in the past two years. However, protesters in UK allies Bahrain and Egypt have been referred to as “pro-democracy” in only a handful of cases, the research finds.
The special relationship
While demonising enemies, UK allies are regularly presented favourably in the press. This is especially true of the US, the UK’s key special relationship on which much of its global power rests. US foreign policy is routinely presented as promoting the same noble objectives as the UK and the press follows the US government line on many foreign policy issues.
The term “leader of the free world” to refer to the US has been used in over 1,500 articles in the past five years, invariably taken seriously across the media, without challenge or ridicule.
The view that the US promotes democracy is widely repeated across the press. A 2018 editorial in the Financial Times, written by its chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman, notes that, “Leading figures in both [US political] parties — from John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan through to the Bushes and Clintons — agreed that it was in US interests to promote free-trade and democracy around the world”. In 2017 Daniel McCarthy wrote in the Telegraph of “two decades of idealism in US foreign policy, of attempts to spread liberalism and democracy”.
It is equally common for the UK press to quote US figures on their supposed noble aims, without challenge. For example, the Sunday Times recently cited without comment the US state department saying “Promoting freedom, democracy and transparency and the protection of human rights are central to US foreign policy”.
The press often strongly criticises President Donald Trump, but often for betraying otherwise benign US values and policies that it assumes previous presidents have promoted. For example, Tom Leonard in the Daily Mail writes of “Mr Trump’s belief that US foreign policy should be guided by cold self-interest rather than protecting democracy and human rights”.
The Guardian is especially supportive of US foreign policy. A sub-heading to a recent article notes: “The US once led Western states’ support of democracy around the world, but under this president [Trump] that feels like a long time ago”. One of its main foreign affairs columnists, Simon Tisdall, recently wrote that the US fundamental “mission” was an “exemplary global vision of democracy, prosperity and freedom”, albeit one which has been distorted by the war on terror.
The Guardian regularly heaped praise on president Obama. An editorial in January 2017 commented that Obama was a “successful US leader” and that “internationally” his vision “could hardly be faulted for lack of ambition”. It also noted Obama’s “liberalism and ethics” and that: “Mr Obama has governed impeccably for eight years without any ethical scandal”.
Although the article noted US wars and civilian casualties in Yemen and Libya, the paper brushed these off, stating “But to ascribe the world’s tragedies to a single leader’s choices can be simplistic. The global superpower cannot control local dynamics”.
Research covered the period to the end of 2019 using the media search tool, Factiva. It analysed the “mainstream” UK-wide print media (dailies and Sundays) over different time scales, usually two or five years, as specified in the article. Media search engines cannot be guaranteed to work perfectly so additional research was sometimes undertaken.
Mark Curtis is the co-founder and editor of Declassified UK, an historian and author of five books on UK foreign policy. He tweets at: @markcurtis30.
Greece’s Migrant Crisis Has Further Exposed Turkish Fake News
By Paul Antonopoulos | March 10, 2020
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attempt to intimidate the Syrian Army and force them to withdraw to the Sochi Agreement lines in Idlib utterly failed, resulting in the Turkish leader having to embarrassingly accept large swathes of liberated territory will remain under Syrian sovereignty despite his attempts to occupy it. This was especially embarrassing as Erdoğan’s end of February ultimatum came and went with no grand Turkish military offensive to push back the Syrian Army as he had promised. This embarrassment comes as Erdoğan’s approval has reached as low as 41.1% according to data published by the Ankara-based pollster MetroPoll last Friday. As Erdoğan’s foreign policy is largely driven by a desire for a neo-Ottoman ambitions and to serve as a distraction from Turkey’s currency nosedive, he was quick to create issues against the “Old Enemy,” Greece.
In a tantrum and frustrated that his power projections of aggression against both Libya and Syria failed, Erdoğan unleashed tens of thousands of illegal immigrants against Greece and utilized English-speaking Turkish media to discredit the Balkan country’s border protection units for human rights violations. Although many commentators claim that Erdoğan’s unleashing of illegal immigrants is an attack against the European Union (EU), we cannot ignore that the second and only other EU state that Turkey borders is Bulgaria, a country that Ankara assured would not send illegal migrants to, a promise that has not yet been broken. Erdoğan is not only punishing Greece for vetoing a NATO communique in support of Turkish operations in Idlib, he is pushing ahead with his imperial ambitions to not only steal Syrian territory, but Greece’s eastern island and northern mainland territories, as outlined on published government-funded maps of “Greater Turkey.”
Erdoğan wasted no time after the Idlib ceasefire deal was made with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday after the latter embarrassed the Turkish leader by meeting him in a room with a statue of Catherine the Great, the liberator of Crimea who defeated the Ottoman Empire in many wars. On the very same day as meeting, Erdoğan announced that Turkey will deploy 1000 special forces police to the Greek border to fight back against Greek security forces who have successfully ensured that thousands of illegal immigrants have not entered EU territory. It’s an odd choice that Turkey deployed special forces police considering it is not their borders that have breach attempts and rather it has been an aggressor as they continually shoot tear gas at Greek border security and attempt to pull down the border fence so migrants can illegally enter Greece. Although it may seem like an exaggeration to some, Athens is treating this latest migrant crisis as a Turkish asymmetric invasion, as they remember the words of former Turkish President Turgut Özal, who said “We do not need to make war with Greece. We just need to send them a few million immigrants and finish with them.”
To assist in distracting the Turkish population of his failures in Syria and the economy, Erdoğan has fully utilized Turkish media to assist in the propaganda campaign. Turkey is one of the lowest ranked countries for media freedoms in the world, is the second most susceptible country surveyed on the European continent to fake news, has the most journalists jailed in the whole world, and 90% of media is government controlled. It is fair to be sceptical of Turkey and its coverage of the latest migrant crisis, and here is why.
On Saturday, Bosnian Muslim reporter Semir Sejfovic of Turkish state-owned TRT World made such a comical performance that Twitter users are mocking him to be an Oscar nominee after his elaborate attempts to accuse Greek police of firing live ammunition into Turkey. It is one comical performance that has to be seen to be believed. The ridiculousness of the performance was so much so that several screen grabs show even the illegal immigrants surrounding Sejfovic laughing during the “intense firing” of live ammunition by the Greek police. Other users questioned why illegal immigrants much closer to the border fence and seen in the background of the video never took cover and continued standing as usual during the alleged shooting, something Sejfovic has refused to answer.
In another incident on Saturday, TRT World published photos claiming Greek soldiers stripped and robbed illegal immigrants of their clothes, mobiles and money. The problem? In other photos not published by TRT World, the same illegal immigrants are seen in front of a camera phone preparing to take the propaganda photos, while in another photo a mobile phone is clearly seen inside the pocket of a “robbed” illegal immigrant.
In another incident on Sunday, TRT World made a tweet on Sunday publishing photos of immigrants in hospital wounded “when Greek forces opened fire” over the weekend. However, a quick search found that the fourth photo is from at least November 2019.
These are just some of the many allegations made by English-speaking Turkish media that have been debunked. It demonstrates that Turkish media is not interested in objectively reporting the migrant crisis but is serving a critical role as Erdoğan’s propaganda wing to discredit Greece in front of international audiences. However, if we use social media responses, European responses and other media republications of Turkish media claims as indicators, it all points that TRT World has only served to reinforce Turkish media’s bad reputation rather than discredit Greek border security and catastrophically failed in their objective.
Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.
Trump campaign sues Washington Post for ‘millions of dollars’ over ‘false and defamatory’ statements on ‘Russia collusion’
RT | March 3, 2020
Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign has reportedly filed a libel suit against the Washington Post for “millions of dollars,” accusing the newspaper of publishing “false and defamatory” statements about alleged collusion with Russia.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the US District Court in Washington, DC on Tuesday, highlights two articles published by the Post in 2019 linking Trump’s team to alleged foreign interference in the 2016 election, Fox News reported.
The complaint, which was seen by the news outlet, alleges that the Post was “well aware” that the statements were false but published them anyway for the “intentional purpose” of hurting Trump’s campaign. The articles were part of the newspaper’s “systematic pattern of bias” against Trump, it said.
One of the articles, published on June 13, stated that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s extensive investigation into alleged collusion concluded that Trump’s campaign “tried to conspire with” a “sweeping and systematic” attack by Russia during the 2016 election.
Trump’s team noted that Mueller’s report in fact “concluded there was no conspiracy” between then-candidate Trump’s campaign and Russia – and that no US person intentionally coordinated with any alleged Russian effort to interfere with the 2016 election.
The second article, published on June 20, suggested Trump had “invited” both Russia and North Korea to “offer their assistance” to his campaign. This was also described as “false and defamatory” since there “has never been any statement” by anyone associated with Trump’s campaign inviting the two countries to interfere or assist.
The lawsuit also says there is “an extensive record” of statements from Trump’s campaign and the White House disavowing any notion of Russian assistance and “not a shred of evidence” that there were contacts between the campaign and North Korea.
Trump’s campaign said the lawsuit had been filed in order to “publicly establish the truth” and “properly inform” readers, as well as to seek “appropriate remedies for the harm caused.” The complaint says Trump’s campaign was damaged “in the millions of dollars” – the exact amount to be determined in court.
The suit against the Post comes on the heels of a similar lawsuit filed by Trump’s campaign against the New York Times last week in relation to a 2019 op-ed, which it said contained similarly false statements intended to influence the 2020 presidential election.
Syria’s War of Self-Defence Turning the tables on claims of war crimes
By David Macilwain | OffGuardian | February 28, 2020
Continuing in efforts to get the OPCW fraud exposed to the Western mainstream media’s sheltered and blinkered audience, I recently had an opportunity to have an opinion article published in the Sydney Morning Herald. This followed a formal complaint to ACMA, Australia’s media overseer, over the failure of state broadcasters to report on the OPCW story. The proviso for this article was that the OPCW “story” needed to be linked in some way to current events in Syria, given its controversial nature.
This, of course, I readily accepted, because the very “humanitarian crisis” in Idlib predicted two and more years earlier was now eventuating, or at least in the minds of anyone following the Western MSM news output.
Linking this with what happened in Douma in April 2018 was no problem, and in fact was more than that, because had the lies about the “humanitarian crisis in Eastern Ghouta” been properly exposed at the time, along with the fake chemical attack, the course of the war would have been entirely different.
Now two years later, as the true extent of the deception is exposed, along with those who organised it in Westminster and Washington, Tel Aviv and Ankara, I had hoped that credible newspapers like the non-Murdoch SMH would consider dipping a toe in the water. Then at least they would be already swimming with it if the water came up rather suddenly, and be ready with some explanation or excuse on how they had been wrong or didn’t know.
It didn’t even need to be “wrong about Assad” – in the first instance, and before the penny dropped on the ramifications of corruption at the OPCW. As James Harkin “admitted” – Jaish al Islam ruled Douma with an Iron Fist, so the White Helmets had to do what they said, and were desperate for foreign assistance. It was all just a big misunderstanding, and Trump’s fault for launching a missile attack on an impulse.
So I wrote an article proposal, looking at the way that the “humanitarian crisis” predicted in Aleppo in 2016 and in Ghouta in 2018 had not materialised, and had in fact been prevented by the Syrian government’s setting up of humanitarian corridors to allow people to escape – to the safety of areas protected by the Syrian Army and Russian police. It was I said, the failure of Western media to report on what had actually happened that allowed yet another humanitarian crisis to be played as a cause for intervention once again.
Naturally and unavoidably I criticised those media for relying on unbalanced and unsavoury sources, and for providing platforms for “propagandumentaries” like For Sama. The awarding and release of this film to coincide with the campaign to liberate Idlib deserves a whole article of its own, as more doctors with photogenic young children now appear in the last hospitals in Idlib.
Criticism of Waad al Khatib and her Oscar-winning partners in East Aleppo could have been a mistake, but the critical role of the White Helmets in staging the “Chlorine attack” in Douma made this part of the essential context for a discussion on the OPCW story – which was, of course, the real focus of the article.
In declining to publish my article following consultations with the opinion page editor, and despite my assurances on the credentials of Ian Henderson, I was offered the following explanation:
Thanks for the contribution but after talking to the opinion editor I think it doesn’t work for us as it is. There are enough questions over whether Henderson is telling the truth or not to make it hard to use him to absolve the Assad regime of war crimes during the war.
To say so lightly would offend not just the security establishment in the West but also the many Syrians who (even allowing for the exaggerations of western propaganda) have suffered at Assad’s hands.
Perhaps you mean that Syria is no worse than the rest, and as the government it has a right to use violence. But at the moment it seems to whitewash Assad.
In fact I’d already concluded my views “wouldn’t work” for the SMH, after just reading their correspondent’s “Explainer” on the Syrian war and events that led up to the current crisis in Idlib. It didn’t explain anything to me, except why it was that I would never get an article published in this mainstream paper!
Almost every sentence in my article contradicted the accepted Western narrative expressed by the Herald’s correspondent, as here:
Assad, largely thanks to Russian air power, has subdued the rebels in most parts of the country, partly by bombing several of his own largest cities into oblivion and deploying chemical weapons against his own citizens.”
And this is what most people believe, with emotive propaganda and photos turning belief into a conviction which evidence and reasoning is unable to dislodge. The SMH article above devoted as much space to a photo of a blond-haired child sitting in a bus as it did to the ‘explainer’, along with the title – “Sequel to a real-life horror show”.
Such propaganda has worked not just on the audience but on the editors of our media, as it has also done on most of the refugees living in Turkey. They fled because they were told the Syrian Army was coming after them, and they now believe they are in danger of retribution if they were to return. The idea that the Syrian Army and its partners are fighting and dying to kill the terrorists so that it will be safe for Syrians to come home is probably not one they can believe.
In deference to the editor of the Herald, I welcomed his willingness to consider my views and some of the evidence supplied in links. That he did is clear from his recognition that “using Henderson’s claims” should not be taken lightly as “it could absolve Assad of war crimes”. Which of course was my very point.
While OffGuardian remains something of a “Salon des Refuses” to republish opinion unacceptable to the mainstream, it is more useful to repaint this dispute over the OPCW’s toxic deception as a question of “whose war-crimes”. As far as we – on Syria’s side – are concerned, all the war-crimes committed in Syria are attributable to the aggressors who started and fuelled the war on Syria, including all those cases where civilians have been victims of Syrian or Russian airstrikes.
Both militaries have gone to great lengths to avoid hitting civilians where they can be identified, despite the incessant stream of claims to the contrary. An integral part of this effort has been to provide and protect humanitarian corridors for civilians to escape, and many or most of the trapped residents have bravely resisted the insurgents’ threats and propaganda to do so.
There is little verifiable evidence of civilian deaths from Syrian bombing however, as confirmed by the White Helmets’ evident need to fake such deaths for their rescue videos. At the centre of the Douma hoax chemical attack were the contorted bodies of 35 women and children, whose murder for a propaganda video is certainly a war-crime. At the same time the number of civilians killed by the terrorist groups in missile and bomb attacks aimed at residential neighbourhoods now numbers in the hundred-thousands.
The difficulty in persuading people – even reasonable and sympathetic people – of this evident truth on who is responsible for the worst war-crime of this century – the war of aggression on Syria – is illustrated by another group discussion in which I have been involved this week.
On one side are those who believe that President Bashar al Assad is basically a good person who has not, and would not intentionally kill “his own people”, and of course would never and never did use chemical weapons against them, (or even against terrorists for that matter). One of our group, still recovering from the pleasure of meeting Assad last year, dared to refer to him as “wonderful”.
Despite all the contributors to this discussion claiming opposition to all US foreign interventions and regime-change wars and NATO support for extremists and tyrants, some simply cannot stomach such admiration for a man “who has killed civilians”, and no amount of argument or evidence will counter their belief that he has.
It is as though the very first events in the so-called uprising – the false-flag shootings in Dera’a – made an indelible mark on those who believed them, and believed the false story of “Assad’s brutal crackdown on protestors”. And as long as they believe this, the responsibility for Syria’s dead can be shifted and shared, and one day their alleged culprits will be brought to “justice” – in Western courts.
Perhaps there is no answer to this dispute, where even those who are potentially most sympathetic to the Syrian cause cannot be persuaded of its most essential character – that the Syrian army and its allies have fought a war of self-defence since the start; a “just war” which even the most anti-war of activists should accept as legitimate. So rather than pursue this hopeless quest, we should turn on the offensive.
Instead of denying claims that Assad used chemical weapons in Douma, in Khan Shaikoun, and in Ghouta we must demand evidence and proof that he did so, because there is none. We could follow the style of Vassily Nebenzia, expressed so well at the start of this UN session (embedded above) on the OPCW fraud, as he mocks the “highly likely” standard of proof Syria’s enemies pretend is sufficient as a casus belli.
GOVERNMENT WANTS TO BAN EVERYTHING! – #NewWorldNextWeek
Corbett • 02/27/2020
Welcome to New World Next Week — the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Watch this video on BitChute / Minds.com / YouTube or Download the mp4
Story #1: Posting Anti-Vaccine Propaganda on Social Media Could Become Criminal Offence
Zero Hedge Suspended On Twitter
Outrage as YouTube Reportedly Blocks History Teachers Uploading Hitler Archive Clips
UK Police Deny Responsibility for Poster Urging Parents to Report Kids for Using Linux
Story #2: UNESCO Claims Climate Denial To Be Criminalized And Prosecuted
Jerome Ravetz on The Corbett Report
Story #3: Foreign Interference In Elections Is Unacceptable. Congress Must Make It Illegal.
You can help support our independent and non-commercial work by visiting http://CorbettReport.com/Support & http://MediaMonarchy.com/Join. Thank You.
Washington Post Admits OAS Bolivia Election Report It Defended During Coup Was ‘Deeply Flawed’
By Morgan Artyukhina | Sputnik | February 27, 2020
The Washington Post reported Thursday on a study concluding the Organization of American States’ claims of voter fraud in the October 2019 Bolivian election “appear deeply flawed.” However, the paper’s editorial board consistently pushed the narrative that Evo Morales was “undermin[ing] Bolivia’s democracy” during the crisis leading to his ouster.
‘Deeply Flawed’ Conclusions
“Bolivia dismissed its October elections as fraudulent. Our research found no reason to suspect fraud,” reads a Thursday headline in the Washington Post’s analysis section. Penned by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab researchers John Curiel and Jack R. Williams, the piece based on their study closely examines data from the October 20 Bolivian election and methods used by the Organization of American States (OAS) to determine the vote count had been fraudulent.
“There is not any statistical evidence of fraud that we can find – the trends in the preliminary count, the lack of any big jump in support for Morales after the halt, and the size of Morales’s margin all appear legitimate,” the duo concluded. “All in all, the OAS’s statistical analysis and conclusions would appear deeply flawed.”
MIT Graph showing Morales’ Movement for Socialism steadily gained ground as votes were tallied, explaining Evo Morales’ late victory
According to the researchers, the OAS’ conclusion relies on an undemonstrated assumption: that actual voting results are accurately reflected by unofficial counts and by reported voter preferences, and that deviation between these heavily points to voter fraud by the Bolivian government once official counting was resumed the day after election day. La Paz had previously promised to count four-fifths of preliminary votes on election night and count the rest the next day, but when Morales’ standing began to improve after the resumption of counting, the OAS cried foul.
“Our results were straightforward. There does not seem to be a statistically significant difference in the margin before and after the halt of the preliminary vote,” Curiel and Williams wrote. “Instead, it is highly likely that Morales surpassed the 10-percentage-point margin in the first round.”
MIT Graph showing correlation margin of voting precincts’ results before and after tallying was paused, demonstrating no new irregularities
The researchers ran 1,000 simulations to see if the difference between votes for Morales and his closest competitor, Carlos Masa, could be predicted. “In our simulations, we found that Morales could expect at least a 10.49 point lead over his closest competitor, above the necessary 10-percentage-point threshold necessary to win outright. Again, this suggests that any increase in Morales’s margin after the stop can be explained entirely by the votes already counted.”
MIT Graph showing Evo Morales’ margin of victory in 1,000 simulations of the October 20, 2019 Bolivian election
The study was reprinted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which noted in a disclosure that it “contracted with the authors to see if the numerical and statistical results of CEPR’s November 2019 study could be independently verified. Any analysis and interpretation of findings in this report express the sole views of the authors, researchers at MIT Election Data and Science Lab.”
“The OAS greatly misled the media and the public about what happened in Bolivia’s elections, and helped to foster a great deal of mistrust in the electoral process and the results,” economist and CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said in a Thursday statement about the MIT report. “The OAS needs to explain why it made these statements and why anyone should trust it when it comes to elections.”
Parallel Findings Prior to Coup Ignored
However, at the time of the crisis, Washington Post editors seemed uninterested in CEPR’s analysis, deferring instead to the OAS, whose faults CEPR had already seen through even before Morales was ousted.
The day after the OAS statement and two days after the election, Weisbrot called on the body to retract its “irresponsible” statement on the election.
“The OAS statement implies that there is something wrong with the vote count in Bolivia because later-reporting voting centers showed a different margin than earlier ones,” Weisbrot said. “But it provides absolutely no evidence – no statistics, numbers, or facts of any kind – to support this idea. And in fact, a preliminary analysis of the voting data at all of the more than 34,000 voting tables – which is all publicly available and can be downloaded by anyone – shows no evidence of irregularity.”
“This kind of change in voting results, due to later-reporting areas being politically or demographically different than earlier ones, is quite common in election returns – as anyone who has watched election returns come in on CNN in the United States knows,” Weisbrot continued. “That is why it is wrong to draw conclusions from a change in the voting pattern without any statistical analysis or even looking closely at the data.”
“As this narrative gets repeated in the media, it will take on a life of its own, and will be difficult to correct, even as more people look at the data, or produce statistical analysis,” he warned.
CEPR’s formal report was published on November 8, titled, “No Evidence That Bolivian Election Results Were Affected by Irregularities or Fraud, Statistical Analysis Shows.” Two days later, opposition forces, urged on by supportive western powers including the United States, forced Morales from office, and the opposition and began a violent and bloody purge against the Movement for Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS-IPSP), Morales’ indigenous-working class umbrella party.
Newspaper Beat Coup Drums During Crisis
As Weisbrot predicted, the media did perpetuate this narrative – and the Washington Post played a key role in building momentum for Morales’ ouster.
On October 14, six days before the election, the Post ran a story titled “How Evo Morales running again – and again – undermines Bolivia’s democracy,” which warned that “depending on how the election goes,” Morales’ next term “could place democracy itself at risk in the Andean country.”
“In a tight race, international scrutiny and a strong, unified response to any electoral irregularities could be what allows Bolivians to salvage their democracy from the brink,” the opinion piece warns.
.@washingtonpost now reports fraud allegations in Morales’ October 2019 reelection had no basis – but its editorial board wasted no effort demonizing @evoespueblo & claiming he was “undermining democracy” in #Bolivia in the crucial weeks between the election & coup. pic.twitter.com/sDuEO2LQbT
— Morgan Artyukhina (@LavenderNRed) February 27, 2020
However, four days after the election, on October 24, the Washington Post’s editorial board made its official voice known, declaring that “There’s still time for Bolivia’s president to right the path to democracy.” The article justifies its position using the OAS La Paz observer statement from October 21 and a similar one by the US State Department, which was adamantly pro-coup.
Then on November 10, the coup came, and Morales was forced to resign and flee the country. After pro-opposition police forces and far-right militias acted to block MAS senators from attending a key Senate session on November 12, the highest-ranking opposition senator, Jeanine Añez, declared herself the country’s interim president. Añez moved quickly to prepare de facto martial law, and the army and police massacred dozens of Morales supporters who rallied against the seizure of power.
© AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko A backer of former President Evo Morales scuffles with police in La Paz, Bolivia, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2019.
The opposition senator who has claimed Bolivia’s presidency, Jeanine Anez, faces the challenge of stabilizing the nation and organizing national elections within three months at a time of political disputes that pushed Morales to fly off to self-exile in Mexico after 14 years in power.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, built a bulwark of pro-coup support for its readers in the nation’s capital and around the world. On November 11, during the interregnum, the Post’s editorial board once again made its voice heard: “Bolivia is in danger of slipping into anarchy. It’s Evo Morales’s fault.”
“Mr. Morales, who had grown increasingly autocratic in nearly 14 years in office, insisted on running for a fourth term even after he lost a national referendum on whether he could seek it. The electoral tribunal, which he controls, then moved to falsify the results of the Oct. 20 vote so as to hand him a first-round victory,” the paper’s editors wrote, stating as fact what had previously been merely warned to be suspected. “The result was predictable: Angry Bolivians took to the streets all over the country. They had been demonstrating for weeks when, on Sunday, an audit released by the Organization of American States reported massive irregularities in the vote count and called for a fresh election.”
Two days later, the day after Añez seized power, the Post ran another story by the title “It’s not just a ‘coup’: Bolivia’s democracy is in meltdown.” Then on the 15th came the laconically titled piece, “The Bolivian ‘coup’ that wasn’t.” While the two stories quibble over what to call the opposition’s seizure of power, the underlying point is the same: Morales tried to steal the election and went against world opinion and domestic popular will by clinging to power.
With the publication of Curiel’s and Williams’ findings, the Post has helped to unring the bell it shook so hard during the election crisis. However, it doesn’t change the fact that the paper helped provide ideological cover for the ouster of yet another democratically elected leader in a Third World nation by uncritically accepting and repeating the US State Department’s positions and those of international bodies like the OAS that help forward its policies.
South Carolina Debate Attended by Elite ‘Sponsors’, Featured Syria War Propaganda
CBS News’ Margaret Brennan pushing Syria war propaganda with Pete Buttigieg
21st Century Wire | February 26, 2020
The Democratic Party held its 10th presidential debate Tuesday night in Charleston, South Carolina, as candidates continued their attacks on national frontrunner Bernie Sanders in front of a live audience of elite ‘sponsors’ who paid over a thousand dollars to attend the event.
A local Charleston TV news station confirmed earlier this month that a “guaranteed ticket” at the debate required a sponsorship to be paid at levels between $1750 to $3200, prompting the trending hashtag, #WineCaveDebate, during the live broadcast.
CBS News carried the debate and featured a foreign policy question to be asked by Twitter users.
Debate moderator Margaret Brennan then read the selected tweet and directed the question to Pete Buttigieg:
The city of Idlib in Syria is facing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The Syrian regime and Russia are targeting schools, bakeries, and hospitals. What would you do as President to push back Regime and Russian forces and stop the killing of innocent civilians?
It was apparent that CBS News did not verify the dubious claims made in the tweeted question, and thus was able to present a false narrative about the war in Syria to its viewing audience.
The Syrian Arab Army and its Russian military partners have actually been advancing on Idlib to liberate it from the jihadi terrorists that have taken control of it from peaceful Syrians.
Buttigieg responded to the question by saying “I stand with the people of Idlib…”
Later, Brennan direct the same question to Elizabeth Warren, but rephrased it as “What would you do to stop the mass murder?”
Collusion: Franklin Roosevelt, British Intelligence, and the Secret Campaign to Push the US Into War
President Roosvelt, Prime Minister Churchill and premier Stalin, at the historic “Big Three” conference in Yalta, February 1945
By Mark Weber – Institute for Historical Review – February 2020
We’ve heard a lot recently about alleged secret and illegal collaboration by prominent Americans with foreign governments. Collusion is widely regarded as so malign and disgraceful that any official who cooperates with a foreign power in an underhanded way is considered unfit to hold public office. In particular, politicians and media commentators have been charging that devious cooperation by Donald Trump with the government of Ukraine or Russia renders him unfit to be President.
However valid such accusations may be, secretive and unlawful collusion by an American leader with a foreign power that subverts the US political process is not new. The most far-reaching and flagrant case was by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940-41.
The stage for this had been set some months earlier. In September 1939, Germany and then Soviet Russia attacked Poland. Two days after the German assault, Britain and France declared war against Germany.
Following the defeat of Poland after barely five weeks of fighting, the German leader appealed to Britain and France for peace. Hitler’s plea was rejected. After British and French leaders made clear their determination to continue the war, Germany struck in the West in May 1940. Military and political leaders in Britain and France were confident that their forces would prevail. After all, those two countries had more soldiers, more artillery, more tanks and armored vehicles, and vastly more impressive and numerous naval vessels, than did the Germans. Nonetheless, in just six weeks German forces subdued France and forced the British to flee to their island nation.[1]
Hitler then launched yet another peace initiative. In a dramatic July 19, 1940, appeal for an end to the conflict, he stressed that his proposal did not in any way harm vital British interests or violate British honor. This offer was also rejected, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill vowed to continue the war.[2]
Privately, though, he and all other high-level British officials knew that their country’s resources were hopelessly inferior to those of Germany and her allies, and that Britain’s only hope for “victory” required somehow bringing the United States into the war. In a one-on-one conversation during this period Randolph Churchill pointedly asked his father just how Britain could possibly beat Germany. “With great intensity,” he later recalled, Winston Churchill replied: “I shall drag the United States in.”[3]
From mid-1940 onwards, bringing the US into war was a priority British government objective. The great problem, though, was that the great majority of Americans wanted to keep their country neutral, and avoid any direct involvement in the European conflict. Millions remembered with bitterness the deceit by which the US had entered the world war of 1914-1918, and the betrayal of the solemn, noble-sounding pledges made during those years by US President Wilson and the leaders of Britain and France.
Roosevelt secretly supported Churchill’s efforts. Even before the outbreak of war in September 1939, the President was already working, behind the scenes, to encourage Britain to make war against Germany, with the goal of “regime change” there.[4] America’s most influential newspapers, magazines and radio commentators shared Roosevelt’s hostile attitude toward Hitler’s Germany, and they supported his campaign for war by putting out stories designed to persuade the public that Germany was a grave danger. Even prior to the outbreak of war in Europe, for example, the country’s most influential illustrated weekly, Life magazine, published a major article headlined “America Gets Ready to Fight Germany, Italy, Japan.” Readers were told that Germany and Italy “covet … the rich resources of South America,” and warned that “fascist fleets and legions may swarm across the Atlantic.”[5]
In the months before December 1941, when the US formally entered the war in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt did everything he could to get America into the global conflict without actually declaring war. He proceeded with caution and cunning, because his measures were often contrary to US law, and without Congressional or Constitutional mandate. Roosevelt also acted with ever more brazen disregard for international law and America’s legal standing as a neutral country. As part of his campaign, he sought to convince the public that Hitler’s Germany threatened the US.
“The Nazi masters of Germany,” he announced in a December 1940 radio address, “have made clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world …” In August 1941, the President met with British premier Churchill to pledge US support for war against Germany. They issued a joint declaration, the “Atlantic Charter,” that laid out the ambitious and noble-sounding war aims of the two countries.[6]
Roosevelt and Churchill at their historic “Atlantic Charter” meeting off the coast of Newfoundland, August 1941
In a nationally-broadcast address two weeks later, Roosevelt told Americans that “… our fundamental rights – including the rights of labor – are threatened by Hitler’s violent attempt to rule the world,” and pledged that “we shall do everything in our power to crush Hitler and his Nazi forces.”[7] In another radio address on September 11 the President announced a “shoot-on-sight” order to US naval warships to attack German and Italian vessels on the high seas.
In spite of these and other hostile measures, German leaders fervently sought to avoid conflict with the US. Hitler ordered German submarines to avoid any clash with American forces, and to use their weapons only in self-defense and as a final resort. So belligerent were US actions against Germany and her allies, and so blatant was US disregard for the country’s officially neutral status, that Admiral Harold Stark, US Chief of Naval Operations, warned the Secretary of State that Hitler “has every excuse in the world to declare war on us now, if he were of a mind to.”[8]
As part of Churchill’s effort to bring the US into the war, in 1940 his government established an agency that came to be known as the British Security Coordination (BSC), which managed operations in North and South America of Britain’s key intelligence bureaus, including MI5, MI6, the Special Operations Executive, and the Political Warfare Executive.
BSC operations were headed by William Stephenson. Born in Canada, he had distinguished himself as a flier with British forces during the First World War, and afterwards became a highly successful businessman in England. From its central offices on two floors of the Rockefeller Center building on Fifth Avenue in New York City, the BSC at its height supervised the work of more than two thousand full- and part-time employees, agents and operatives. These included linguists, cipher and crytology experts, intelligence agents, propaganda specialists, people skilled in business and finance, and operatives in a range of other fields. Nearly a thousand were active in New York, while more than that number worked in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, as well as in Canada, Mexico City, Havana, and other centers in Latin America. “The scale and audacity” of British intelligence acclivities in the US between June 1940 and December 1941, concludes one historian, “were without parallel in the history of relations between allied democracies.”[9]
William Stephenson
At the end of World War II, Stephenson arranged for an official history of the British Security Coordination to be written, based on its voluminous files and records. Just twenty copies of this secret and very restricted work were produced, and then the entire archive of BSC documents and papers was gathered together and burned.[10]
In the years that followed, some information about BSC operations came to public attention in a few widely-read books. But it was not until 1999 – more than half a century after the end of World War II – that the full text was finally published. This important primary source, titled British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-1945, throws light on the carefully hidden record of collusion between the Roosevelt White House and a foreign government.
Not long after William Stephenson arrived in the US to begin work, Prime Minister Churchill informed President Roosevelt of Stephenson’s assignment. After a briefing on the BSC’s planned operations, Roosevelt said: “There should be the closest possible marriage between the FBI and British intelligence.” The president also communicated his views on this to the British ambassador in Washington.[11] Roosevelt arranged for Stephenson’s agency to work closely with William Donovan, a highly trusted colleague of the President who went on to establish and head the wartime Office of Strategic Services, which after the war became the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency.
William Donovan
As the official BSC history acknowledges, BSC operations “could not have come into being at all without American approval on the highest level.” The official history goes on: “The climax of that offensive was reached some six months before Pearl Harbor when BSC secured, through the establishment of the organization which eventually came to be known as the Office of Strategic Services, an assurance of full American participation and collaboration with the British in secret activities directed against the enemy throughout the world.”[12]
Moreover, “Inasmuch as the cause of American intervention was symbolized in the foresight and determination of the President himself, the ultimate purpose of all BSC’s Political Warfare was to assist Mr Roosevelt’s own campaign for preparedness. This was not merely an abstract conception, for WS [William Stephenson] kept in close touch with the White House and as time went on the president gave clear indication of his personal concern both to encourage and take advantage of BSC’s activities.”[13]
This cooperation with British intelligence by the President and other high-ranking US officials, as well as with the FBI, the US federal government’s main domestic security and police agency, was quite illegal. Such collusion by the nominally neutral US to further the war aims of a foreign government was contrary to both US law and universally accepted international norms. Accordingly, the White House kept this collaboration secret even from the State Department.
Incidentally, the official BSC history acknowledges the role of Donovan in a little known but important chapter of World War II history. On March 25, 1941, Yugoslavia joined the Axis alliance with Germany, Italy and other European countries. Two days later, a group of Serbian officers led by General Dusan Simovic, carried out a putsch in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, that violently overthrew the country’s legal government. Ten days later the new regime signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union.
How did this sudden “regime change” come about? Several months earlier, during a visit to Belgrade in January 1941, William Donovan was in the Yugoslav capital as an agent of President Roosevelt and of the British government. During a crucial meeting and conversation with General Simovic, he set the stage for the “regime change” overthrow of the country’s government. The official BSC history puts it this way: “In Yugoslavia, Donovan paved the way for the coup d’état which resulted at the eleventh hour in Yugoslav resistance to, instead of acquiescence in, German aggression. He interviewed General Simovic, who asked him whether Britain could hold out against the Nazis and whether the United States would enter the war … He answered both questions in the affirmative; and at his persuasion Simovic agreed to organize the revolution which a few months later overthrew the pro-German government of Prince Paul.”[14]
William Stephenson is honored for his wartime service with the US “Medal of Merit,” presented by William Donovan at a ceremony in 1946
A major task of the BSC – as the official history reports – was “to organize American public opinion in favour of aid to Britain.” As part of what the BSC called “political warfare designed to influence American public opinion,” BSC agents were “placing special material in the American press.” Stephenson’s operatives were very active in prodding, cajoling and steering the US media to foment fear and hatred of Germany, and to encourage public support for Roosevelt’s ever more overt campaign of military backing for Britain, and later for Soviet Russia.
“Of particular value,” the BSC history notes, was the cooperation of the publisher of the New York Post, the editor of the New York daily PM, the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, the publisher of the Baltimore Sun, and the president of the New York Times, as well as the country’s most influential columnists, including Walter Lippman, Drew Pearson, and Walter Winchell. Pearson’s column alone appeared in 616 newspapers with a combined readership of more than twenty million. In working “to bring the United Sates into the `shooting’ war by attacking isolationism and fostering interventionism,” the BSC “was able to initiate internal propaganda through its undercover contacts with selected newspapers, such as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Post, and the Baltimore Sun; with newspaper columnists and radio commentators; and with various political pressure organizations.”
The BSC worked closely with a specially created news service. Set up in July 1940, the “Overseas News Agency” was a supposedly legitimate and trustworthy enterprise. Actually, and as the BSC history notes, this was “a branch of the Jewish Telegraph[ic] Agency, owned in part by the rich New York Jew who controlled the liberal and vehemently anti-Nazi New York Post.”
As the official history goes on to explain: “After a series of secret negotiations, BSC agreed to give ONA [Overseas News Agency] a monthly subsidy in return for promise of cooperation in certain specific ways … It’s value … lay in its ability not only to channel propaganda outwards but to assure wide dissemination of material originated by BSC and intended for internal consumption. In April 1941, the ONA clients within the United States already numbered more than forty-five English language papers, which included such giants as the New York Times … It afforded a useful instrument for rapid dissemination abroad of subversive propaganda originated by BSC in the United States.”[15]
The Jewish-run ONA agency soon became an important distributor of “fake news” as part of the widening campaign to smear and discredit National Socialist Germany, and to promote public support for US involvement in war against Germany and her allies. As one historian put it: “From the start, attacking Nazi Germany was a higher priority for ONA than hewing to the truth.” ONA articles influenced many millions of Americans, appearing in such major daily papers as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Washington Post.[16]
Here are a few examples:
In August 1940 an ONA report cited anonymous “qualified Czech sources” to inform Americans that “Czechoslovak girls and young women have been transported from the [Czech] Protectorate to German garrison towns to become white slaves.” It went on to tell readers that “Nazi officials, dispatching these trainloads of prospective white slaves to the Reich, informed husbands and relatives that the women `will be entrusted with the important work of amusing German soldiers, in order to keep up the morale of the troops’.”[17]
In February 1941 American newspapers carried a sensational ONA report claiming that the US was threatened by “fascist bands” in the Caribbean country of Haiti, which had become a dangerous center of Nazi activity. Germans were supposedly preparing that county as a base for attacks on Florida, the Panama Canal, and Puerto Rico.[18] In June 1941 an ONA report appearing in newspapers across the US told of a daring British parachute raid within Germany that had succeeded in capturing 40 German pilots. This and similar stories were meant to encourage Americans to believe that the British had the skill and resolve to defeat Germany and her allies. But the raid never happened. This “fake news” story was conceived in London by the MI6 agency, and was written by a British agent.[19]
In August 1941, an ONA item in the New York Post told readers that “Hitler is not at the Russian front, but at Berchtesgaden suffering from a severe nervous breakdown.” The article went on to assert that the German leader’s personal physician had recently traveled to Switzerland to consult with the famed psychiatrist Carl Jung to discuss “the rapid deterioration of Hitler’s mental condition,” which was supposedly characterized by delusional rages.[20] That same month, The New York Times published a report of the Overseas News Agency telling readers that in the Middle East the recent death of a 130-year-old Bedouin soothsayer was widely regarded as “a sign of a coming defeat for Hitler.”[21]
Stephenson’s BSC also rigged public opinion polls to give the impression that Americans were more willing to join Britain and the Soviet Union in war against Germany than was actually the case. Polls that showed American unhappiness with British policies, such as Britain’s imperial rule in India, were suppressed. As a result, one historian cautions, many surveys of American public opinion during this period “should be seen for what they were: at worst they were flatly rigged, at best they were tweaked and massaged and cooked – advocacy polls without the advocate being visible.”[22]
An important British propaganda outlet during this period was radio station WRUL, an American short-wave broadcaster based in Long Island, New York. With 50,000 watts of power, its reach was unsurpassed by any other station either in the US or Europe. “By the middle of 1941,” the official BSC history reports, “station WRUL was virtually, though quite unconsciously, a subsidiary of BSC, sending out covert British propaganda all over the world … Daily broadcasts went out in no less than twenty-two different languages …”[23]
In its efforts to influence the American public, the British had formidable competition. News, photos and contextual information provided by German agencies was more timely and detailed, and consequently better appreciated and more effective, than what Britain provided. The German “news agencies, Transocean and DNB, were always first with the headlines,” the BSC history acknowledged.[24]
In two confidential telegrams sent to London in April 1941, Stephenson wrote frankly about the unsatisfactory situation: “Close examination of US press during past fortnight indicates almost complete failure [to] prevent Axis monopoly of war news coverage … most journals … carry predominance of Axis news … [and] photographs … few if any British photographs appear … Axis news reports reach here more quickly than ours … rapidly followed by copious flow of descriptive material, photographs and films … Transocean and DNB keep up flow and build up stories even in quiet periods … invariably beat our news to headlines … US newsmen here say Germans show far better sense of news and timing … infinitely better understanding US psychology.”[25]
As the BSC official history goes on to explain, “these warnings went unheeded, and accordingly WS [William Stephenson] decided to take action on his own initiative” by waging a “covert war against the mass of American groups which were organized throughout the country to spread isolationism and anti-British feeling.” This included coordination with vehemently anti-German organizations that were pushing for US involvement in war against Germany. BSC was especially keen to counter the formidable influence and effectiveness of the America First Committee. As the official history notes, “because America First was a particularly serious menace, BSC decided to take more direct action.” It took measures to “disrupt” America First rallies, and to “discredit” America First speakers. “Such activities by BSC agents and cooperating pro-British committees were frequent, and on many occasions America First was harassed and heckled and embarrassed.”
Gerald Nye
British intelligence agents also worked to elect candidates who favored US intervention in the European war, to defeat candidates who advocated neutrality, and to silence or destroy the reputations of Americans who were deemed to be a menace to British interests. An important target of BSC operations was US Senator Gerald Nye, an influential critic of the President’s campaign for war. Once, when he was getting ready to address a meeting in Boston, a BSC-backed group called “Fight for Freedom” “passed out 25,000 handbills attacking him as an appeaser and as a Nazi-lover.”[26]
Another political figure whom BSC operatives sought to discredit was US Representative Hamilton Fish, a vigorous critic of Roosevelt’s war policy. Fish was particularly effective because he was intelligent, well educated, and exceptionally knowledgeable about international relations, with extensive first-hand understanding of European affairs. British agents funded Fish’s election opponents, published pamphlets suggesting he was pro-Hitler, released a faked photo of Fish with the head of the pro-Nazi German American Bund, and planted stories saying that he was getting financial aid from German agents. Such underhanded activities were important in finally removing him from Congress in the November 1944 elections. The BSC history notes that while Fish “attributed his defeat to Reds and Communists. He might – with more accuracy – have blamed BSC.”[27]
Hamilton Fish
Fortune tellers were also used by British intelligence to sway public opinion. Such propaganda, the official BSC history notes, is effective only with people who are not very discerning or sophisticated. The BSC begins its description of these operations with condescending remarks about American gullibility:
“A country that is extremely heterogeneous in character offers a wide variety of choice propaganda methods. While it is probably true that all Americans are intensely suspicious of propaganda, it is certain that a great many of them are unusually susceptible to it even in its most patent form … The United States is still a fertile field for outré practices. It is unlikely that any propagandist would seriously attempt to influence politically the people of England, say, or France through the medium of astrological predictions. Yet in the United States this was done with effective if limited results.”[28]
In the summer of 1941 the BSC employed Louis de Wohl, who is described in the BSC history as a “bogus Hungarian astrologer.” He was directed to issue predictions to show that Hitler’s “fall was now certain.” At public meetings, in radio appearances, in interviews, and in widely distributed press items, he “declared that Hitler’s doom was sealed.” De Wohl, who was presented as an “astro-philosopher,” also sought to discredit Charles Lindbergh, the much admired American aviator who was also a prominent spokesman for the America First Committee and an effective critic of Roosevelt’s war policies. De Wohl claimed that Lindbergh’s first son, who had been kidnapped and killed in 1932, was actually still alive and living in Germany, where he was being trained as a future Nazi leader. “There is little doubt,” the BSC history concludes, that the work of de Wohl “had a considerable effect upon certain sections of the [American] people.”[29]
British agents also publicized the equally absurd predictions of an Egyptian astrologer who claimed that within four months Hitler would be killed, as well as similarly fantastic predictions of a Nigerian priest named Ulokoigbe. As Stephenson and his BSC colleagues intended, American newspapers eagerly picked up and spread such nonsense to millions of readers.[30]
The BSC also set up a center that fabricated letters and other documents, as well as an organization that excelled in spreading expedient rumors. British agents illegally interecpted and copied US mail. They carried out wiretapping to get embarrassing information on those it wished to discredit, and leaked the results of its illegal surveillance. One important target was the French embassy in Washington, DC, which was wiretapped and burgled by Stephenson’s agents.[31]
Ernest Cuneo
An important figure in all this was Ernest Cuneo, a publicist, lawyer, and intelligence operative who played a key role as liaison between Stephenson’s BSC, the White House, Donovan’s agency, the FBI, and the media. He later described the scope of British operations in a memo. The BSC, he wrote, “ran espionage agents, tampered with the mails, tapped telephones, smuggled propaganda into the country, disrupted public gatherings, covertly subsidized newspapers, radios, and organizations, perpetrated forgeries – even palming one off on the president of the United States (a map that out-lined Nazi plans to dominate Latin America) – violated the aliens registrations act, shanghaied sailors numerous times, and possibly murdered one or more persons in this country.”[32]
A high point of British-White House collusion, and of the BSC campaign to influence American public opinion, came on October 27, 1941. While Franklin Roosevelt was not the first or the last American president to deliberately mislead the public, rarely has a major political figure given a speech as loaded with brazen falsehood as he did in his address on that date. His remarks, delivered to a large gathering at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, were broadcast live over nationwide radio.[33]
In a nationally broadcast address of Oct. 27, 1941, President Roosevelt claimed to have documents proving German plans to take over South America and abolish all the world’s religions.
After giving a highly distorted review of recent US-German relations, Roosevelt made a startling announcement. He said: “Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean … I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government – by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it.” This map, the President explained, showed South America, as well as “our great life line, the Panama Canal,” divided into five vassal states under German domination. He said: “That map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.”
Roosevelt went on to announce another startling revelation. He told his listeners that he also had in his possession “another document made in Germany by Hitler’s government. It is a detailed plan to abolish all existing religions – Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike” which Germany will impose “on a dominated world, if Hitler wins.”
“The property of all churches will be seized by the Reich and its puppets,” he continued. “The cross and all other symbols of religion are to be forbidden. The clergy are to be forever silenced under penalty of the concentration camps … In the place of the churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an international Nazi church – a church which will be served by orators sent out by the Nazi government. In the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols – the swastika and the naked sword.”
“Let us well ponder,” he said, “these grim truths which I have told you of the present and future plans of Hitlerism.” All Americans, he went on, “are faced with the choice between the kind of world we want to live in and the kind of world which Hitler and his hordes would impose on us.” Accordingly, he said, “we are pledged to pull our own oar in the destruction of Hitlerism.”
The full story about these documents did not emerge until many years later. The map cited by the President did exist, but it was a forgery produced by British intelligence. Stephenson had passed it on to Donovan, who had it delivered to the President. The other “document” cited by Roosevelt, purporting to outline German plans to abolish the world’s religions, was even more fanciful than the “secret map.”
The “secret map” cited by President Roosevelt as proof of German plans to take over South America was produced by British intelligence and passed on to the White House by William Donovan.
It’s not clear if Roosevelt himself knew that the map was a fake, or whether he was taken in by the British fraud and actually believed it to be authentic. In this case we don’t know if the President was deliberately lying to the American people, or was merely a credulous dupe and tool of a foreign government.
The German government responded to the President’s speech with a statement that categorically rejected his accusations. The purported secret documents, it declared, “are forgeries of the crudest and most brazen kind.” Furthermore, the statement went on: “The allegations of a conquest of South America by Germany and an elimination of the religions of the churches in the world and their replacement by a National Socialist church are so nonsensical and absurd that it is superfluous for the Reich government to discuss them.”[34] German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels also responded to Roosevelt’s claims in a widely read commentary. The American president’s “absurd accusations,” he wrote, were a “grand swindle” designed to “whip up American public opinion.”[35]
That the President’s claims were absurd on their face should have been obvious to any discerning and reasonably well-informed person. Assertions that Germany was planning to take over South America were clearly fantastic given that, first, Germany had been unable or unwilling even to launch an invasion of Britain, and, second, that German forces at that moment were fully engaged in a titanic clash with Soviet Russia, a conflict that would ultimately end with the victory of the Red Army.
Roosevelt’s claim that Hitler was bent on quashing the world’s religions was not just a falsehood; it was nearly the opposite of the truth. At the same time he was telling Americans that Hitler’s Germany threatened religious life in their country and the rest of the world, President Roosevelt and his government were organizing military aid to the one country that was ruled by an openly atheist regime, the Soviet Union. While Roosevelt was speaking, military forces of Germany, Italy, Romania, Finland, Hungary and other European countries were battling to bring down the anti-religious Bolshevik state. Millions of Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, and others who had already been freed from Soviet rule were, with German support, opening churches and restoring the traditional religious life that had been so brutally suppressed by the Stalinist regime.
During the war years, Germany’s Protestant and Catholic churches not only received government financial support, they were packed with worshipers. In Catholic regions of the Reich, notably in Bavaria and Austria, crucifixes were displayed in many public buildings, including courtrooms and school classrooms. The government of one country that was closely allied with Hitler’s Germany during World War II, Slovakia, was actually headed by a Roman Catholic priest.
In 1941 few Americans could believe that their President would so deliberately and emphatically deceive them, especially about matters of the gravest national and global importance. Millions accepted Roosevelt’s alarmist claims as true. After all, whom should any decent, patriotic citizen believe?: Their President, or the government of a foreign country that much of the American media told them was a mendacious regime dedicated to brutally imposing oppressive rule over the United States and the entire planet?
The Roosevelt-British propaganda campaign of 1940-41 was based on a great falsehood: the claim that Hitler was trying to “take over the world.” Actually, it was not Germany that launched war against Britain and France, but rather the reverse. It was Churchill, later joined by the US President, who rejected all German initiatives to end the terrible war. Demanding “unconditional surrender,” they insisted on the complete capitulation of Germany, including “regime change” elimination of the country’s government.
The legacy of President Roosevelt’s secretive and unlawful collusion with a foreign government, including his sanctioning of crimes by British and US agents, are relevant for our time. That’s especially true because Roosevelt is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most admirable of America’s past leaders. He is, for example, one of the very few persons whose image appears on US coins. Roads, streets, schools and other learning centers across the country bear his name.
His legacy should concern those who today are understandably unhappy with the routinely partisan and often polemical presentation of news and information in the mainstream media. The way that “fake news” and slanted, sensationalized information were given to the public in 1940-41 by the mainstream media, in secret collaboration with the White House and a foreign government, tells us much about how news and opinion can be manipulated in our country, and by whom.
In 1990 The New York Times issued a kind of apology for having published, decades earlier, the reporting of its once highly regarded correspondent in Moscow. In 1932 Walter Duranty’s dispatches from the Soviet Union earned him America’s highest award for journalistic achievement, the Pultizer Prize. Only years later did it become clear that Duranty’s portrayal of life in the USSR amounted to a deliberate whitewashing of reality. In particular he concealed the famine, starvation, and deaths of millions, especially in Ukraine, due to the Stalinist regime’s brutal “collectivization” of the vast country’s rural and farming population. Although reporting by major American newspapers in 1940-41 about Roosevelt administration’s policies for war was similarly distorted and misleading, neither the The New York Times, The Washington Post, nor any other paper has been moved to issue a comparable apology.
President Roosvelt, Prime Minister Churchill and premier Stalin, at the historic “Big Three” conference in Yalta, February 1945
President Richard Nixon is today widely regarded as a disgraced figure who deserved impeachment for trying to cover up the “Watergate” break-in. President Trump, many say, should likewise be punished for breaking the law. If that’s true, how then should we regard Franklin Roosevelt? His deceit and crimes – which are routinely ignored, excused or justified – vastly overshadow the misdeeds of Nixon and Trump.
Those who admire Franklin Roosevelt seem to believe that presidential deception and misconduct are justified if the perpetrator’s motives or goals are good. One influential scholar who has expressed this view is American historian Thomas A. Bailey. He acknowledged Roosevelt’s record, but sought to justify it. “Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor,” he wrote. “He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good … The country was overwhelmingly noninterventionist to the very day of Pearl Harbor, and an overt attempt to lead the people into war would have resulted in certain failure and an almost certain ousting of Roosevelt in 1940, with a complete defeat of his ultimate aims.”[36]
Prof. Bailey went on with a further justification: “A president who cannot entrust the people with the truth betrays a certain lack of faith in the basic tenets of democracy. But because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. This is clearly what Roosevelt had to do, and who shall say that posterity will not thank him for it?”
In spite of all the rhetoric we hear about “our democracy” and “government of the people,” it seems that our leaders do not really believe that American-style democracy works as it’s supposed to. They don’t trust the people to “handle the truth.” The defenders of the Roosevelt legacy apparently believe that, at least sometimes, political leaders can and must break the law, violate the Constitution, and deliberately deceive the people for what a supposedly enlightened elite believes is in the nation’s “real” best interest, and for what it regards as a “higher” and worthy cause.
Roosevelt set a precedent for similarly deceitful and unlawful behavior by later presidents. Senator J. William Fulbright, a prominent critic of President Lyndon Johnson’s deception and disregard for law and the Constitution during the Vietnam war remarked that “FDR’s deviousness in a good cause made it much easier for LBJ to practice the same kind of deviousness in a bad cause.”[37]
“After a generation of presidential wars,” observed historian Joseph P. Lash, “it is possible to see that, in the hands of Roosevelt’s successors, the powers that he wielded as commander in chief to deploy the army, navy and air force as he deemed necessary in the national interest and to portray clashes in distant waters and skies as enemy-initiated led the nation into the Vietnam quagmire.”[38]
J. William Fulbright
Roosevelt’s methods seem to have become firmly entrenched in modern American political life. President George W. Bush, for one, followed in Roosevelt’s path when he and other high-level officials in his administration, with support from the mainstream media, deceived the American people to make possible the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. “I used to puzzle over the question of how American democracy could be adapted to the kind of role we have come to play in the world,” Senator Fulbright said in 1971. “I think I now know the answer: it cannot be done.”[39]
While many Americans today yearn for honest and ethical political leaders, transparent governance, and “real” democracy, such hopes are likely to remain elusive as long as the mainstream media, educators and politicians continue to portray Franklin Roosevelt as an exemplary President, and his administration as a paragon of leadership, while successfully suppressing or justifying his record of deceit and wrongdoing.
Endnotes
[1] Basil H. Liddell-Hart, The Second World War (New York: Putnam, 1971), pp. 17-22, 66; Clive Ponting, 1940: Myth and Reality (Chicago: 1993), pp. 79-80; Niall Ferguson, The War of the World (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 387-390; William Carr, Poland to Pearl Harbor (1986), pp. 93, 96.
[2] Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and `The Unnecessary War’ (New York: Crown, 2008), pp. 361-366; John Charmely, Churchill’s Grand Alliance (Harcourt Brace, 1996), pp. 82-83, 178; Clive Ponting, 1940: Myth and Reality (1993), p. 124; Friedrich Stieve, What the World Rejected: Hitler’s Peace Offers, 1933-1939.
[3] Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston Churchill,1939-41 (1984), p. 358. Quoted in: Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston (2004), p. 51; M. Hastings, Winston’s War, 1940-1945 (2010), p. 25.
[4] Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill (1976), pp. 23-31; M. Weber, “President Roosevelt’s Campaign to Incite War in Europe,” The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983.
[5] “America Gets Ready to Fight Germany, Italy, Japan,” Life, Oct. 31, 1938.
( http://mk.christogenea.org/content/it-was-planned-way-3-years-previously-page-1 )
[6] Roosevelt “fireside chat” radio address of Dec. 29, 1940. ; Regarding the “Atlantic Charter,” see: William H. Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade (1950 and 2008); Benjamin Colby, ‘Twas a Famous Victory (1975).
[7] Roosevelt Labor Day radio address, Sept. 1, 1941.
[8] Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill (1976), pp. 360, 415, 429; Stark memo to Secretary Hull, Oct. 8, 1941. Quoted in: J. P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill (1976), p. 426.
[9] Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1999), p. 16; Steven T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections Between Espionage and Journalism in Washington (Prometheus, 2018), pp. 101-104; Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days (New York: Random House, 2013), p. 117; William Boyd, “The Secret Persuaders,” The Guardian (Britain), Aug. 19, 2006.
[10] Nigel West (introduction) in: William Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (New York: 1999), pp. xi, xii.
[11] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), p. xxv.
[12] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), pp. xxxvi, xxxiii.
[13] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), p. 16.
[14] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), p. 14.
[15] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), pp. 58, 59.
[16] Steven T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies (2018), esp. pp. 135-140, 325-327; P. J. Grisar, “Sharks Defending Britain From Nazis? How ‘Fake News’ Helped Foil Hitler,” Forward, Oct. 22, 2018; Menachem Wecker, “The true story of a Jewish news agency that peddled fake news to undo Hitler.” Religion News Service, October 1, 2018
[17] Steven T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies (2018), p. 135.
[18] S. T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies (2018), pp. 138-139, 326 (n.).
[19] Larry Getlen, “The Fake News That Pushed US Into WWII,” New York Post, Oct. 3, 2019, pp. 20-21.
[20] S. T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies (2018), p. 142.
[21] Steven T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies (2018), pp. 139, 326 (n.); Menachem Wecker, “The true story of a Jewish news agency that peddled fake news to undo Hitler.” RNS, Oct. 1, 2018
[22] Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception (1999), pp. 70-86; S. T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies (2018), pp. 113-116, 154-155; W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), pp. 81-84.
[23] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), pp. 59, 60, 61.
[24] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), p. 68.
[25] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), p. 69.
[26] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), p. 74.
[27] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), pp. 74, 80; T. E. Mahl, Desperate Deception (1999), pp. 107-135; Steven T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies (2018), pp. 119-127; Christopher Woolf, “How Britain Tried to Influence the US Election in 1940,” PRI, Jan. 17, 2017.
[28] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), pp. 102.
[29] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), pp. 102-103, 104; S. T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies (2018), p. 139.
[30] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), p. 103.
[31] W. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination (1999), pp. 104, 105, 107, 109; Steven T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies (2018), pp. 102, 140, 145-148.
[32] Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 (1999), pp. 16, 193; Michael Williams, “FDR’s Confidential Crusader,” Warfare History Network. Jan. 17, 2019.
[33] John F. Bratzel, Leslie B. Rout, Jr., “FDR and The ‘Secret Map’,” The Wilson Quarterly (Washington, DC), New Year’s 1985, pp. 167-173; Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), pp. 602, 603, 801 (notes); Mark Weber, “Roosevelt’s `Secret Map’ Speech,” The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1985.
[34] “The Reich Government’s Reply To Roosevelt’s Navy Day Speech,” The New York Times, Nov. 2, 1941; Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945. Series D, Vol. XIII, (Washington, DC: 1954), pp. 724-725 (Doc. No. 439 of Nov. 1, 1941).
[35] Joseph Goebbels, “Kreuzverhör mit Mr. Roosevelt,” Das Reich, Nov. 30, 1941. Nachdruck (reprint) in Das eherne Herz (1943), pp. 99-104. English translation: “Mr. Roosevelt Cross-Examined.”
( http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb2.htm )
[36] Thomas A. Bailey, The Man in the Street: The Impact of American Public Opinion on Foreign Policy. (New York: 1948), pp. 11-13. Quoted in: W. H. Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade (Indianapolis: Amagi/ Liberty Fund, 2008), p. 125.
[37] Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939-1941 (New York: 1976), pp. 9, 10, 420, 421; Address by Fulbright, April 3, 1971. Published in: Congressional Record – Senate, April 14, 1971, p. 10356.
( https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1971-pt8/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1971-pt8-4-1.pdf )
[38] J. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill (1976), p. 421.
[39] Address by Fulbright, April 3, 1971. Congressional Record – Senate, April 14, 1971, p. 10356.
Bibliography / For Further Reading
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008
Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. Institute for Historical Review, 1993
William Boyd, “The Secret Persuaders,” The Guardian (Britain), August 19, 2006.
( https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/aug/19/military.secondworldwar )
John F. Bratzel and Leslie B. Rout, Jr., “FDR and The ‘Secret Map’,” The Wilson Quarterly (Washington, DC), New Year’s 1985 (Vol. 9, No. 1), pp. 167-173.
Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan. New York: Times Books, 1982
Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and `The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. New York: Crown, 2008.
William H. Chamberlin, America’s Second Crusade. Chicago: 1950; Indianapolis: 2008
John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship, 1940-1957. Harvest/ Harcourt Brace, 1995.
Benjamin Colby, ‘Twas a Famous Victory. Arlington House, 1975
David Cole, “Tyler Kent and the Roosevelt Whistle-Blow Job,” Taki’s Mag, Nov. 19, 2019.
( https://www.takimag.com/article/tyler-kent-and-the-roosevelt-whistle-blow-job/ )
Jennet Conant, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington. Simon & Schuster, 2008.
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Hunter DeRensis, “The Campaign to Lie America Into World War II,” The American Conservative, December 7, 2019
( https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-campaign-to-lie-america-into-world-war-ii/ )
Larry Getlen, “The Fake News That Pushed US Into WWII,” New York Post, Oct. 3, 2019.
( https://nypost.com/2019/10/02/the-fake-news-that-pushed-us-into-world-war-ii/ )
P. J. Grisar, “Sharks Defending Britain From Nazis? How ‘Fake News’ Helped Foil Hitler,” Forward, Oct. 22, 2018.
( https://forward.com/culture/412422/sharks-defending-britain-from-nazis-how-fake-news-helped-foil-hitler/ )
Henry Hemming, Agents of Influence: A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II. PublicAffairs, 2019.
Robert Higgs, “Truncating the Antecedents: How Americans Have Been Misled About World War II.” March 18, 2008.
( http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs77.html )
Herbert C. Hoover, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and its Aftermath (George H. Nash, ed.). Stanford University, 2011.
David Ignatius, “Britain’s War in America: How Churchill’s Agents Secretly Manipulated the U.S. Before Pearl Harbor, The Washington Post, Sept. 17, 1989, pp. C-1, C-2.
Tyler Kent, “The Roosevelt Legacy and The Kent Case.” The Journal for Historical Review. Summer 1983 (Vol. 4, No. 2), pages 173-203. With Introduction by Mark Weber.
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v04/v04p173_Kent.html )
Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman. Princeton University Press, 1991
Charles C. Kolb. Review of: W. S. Stephenson, ed., British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas 1940-1945. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. December 1999.
( http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3623 )
Thomas E. Mahl, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44. Brassey’s, 1999.
Jerome O’Connor, “FDR’s Undeclared War,” Naval History (U.S. Naval Institute), Feb. 1, 2004.
( http://historyarticles.com/undeclared-war/ )
Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage. Random House, 2001.
“The Reich Government’s Reply To Roosevelt’s Navy Day Speech,” The New York Times, Nov. 2, 1941. ( http://ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1941/411101a.html )
Bruce M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into World War II. New York: Harper & Row, 1972
Friedrich Stieve. What the World Rejected: Hitler’s Peace Offers, 1933- 1939.
( http://ihr.org/other/what-the-world-rejected.html )
Steven T. Usdin, Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections Between Espionage and Journalism in Washington. Prometheus, 2018
Steve Usdin, “When a Foreign Government Interfered in a U.S. Election – In 1940, by Britain,” Politico, Jan. 16, 2017.
( https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/when-a-foreign-government-interfered-in-a-us-electionto-reelect-fdr-214634 )
Mark Weber, “The ‘Good War’ Myth of World War Two.” May 2008.
( http://www.ihr.org/news/weber_ww2_may08.html )
Mark Weber, “Roosevelt’s `Secret Map’ Speech,” The Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1985 (Vol. 6, No. 1), pp. 125-127.
( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v06/v06p125_Weber.html )
Menachem Wecker, “The true story of a Jewish news agency that peddled fake news to undo Hitler.” Religion News Service, October 1, 2018
( https://religionnews.com/2018/10/01/the-true-story-of-a-jewish-news-agency-that-peddled-fake-news-to-undo-hitler/ )
Michael Williams, “FDR’s Confidential Crusader,” Warfare History Network. Jan. 17, 2019.
( https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2019/01/22/fdrs-confidential-crusader-2/ )
Christopher Woolf, “How Britain Tried to Influence the US Election in 1940,” Public Radio International, January 17, 2017
( https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-01-17/how-britain-tried-influence-us-election-1940 )
Democrats resurrect ‘Russiagate’ to go after both Trump and Bernie Sanders, hide their own election trickery
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | February 22, 2020
Establishment Democrats have now used the claims of ‘Russian meddling’ to go after their own progressive wing as well as President Donald Trump. The bogus accusation seems to be nothing more than cover for their own wrongdoing.
Moscow is now supposedly helping Bernie Sanders in the 2020 US presidential election – that is, if you believe the anonymously sourced Washington Post “bombshell.” This follows a New York Times claim on Thursday that the Kremlin is “again” betting on Trump, written by known partisan hacks and likewise based on anonymous sources.
In the minds of the ‘Russiagate’ cult, the Kremlin is backing Sanders either to get Trump re-elected, or to get a “socialist” president. Never mind that Russia is not socialist, try arguing that there has been precisely zero evidence – now, or back in 2016 – that Russia has backed any US candidate, and watch people’s heads explode. Much like the vaunted US “intelligence community,” they want to believe. That’s the only way they can explain the mind-breaking shock of Hillary Clinton losing to Trump.
Through endless repetition and paranoid denunciations, “Russian meddling” has been elevated to an article of faith, and anyone who dares question it in the slightest is a heretic fit only for the pyre.
So there was little surprise when the canard was trotted out on Thursday, in what was clearly an effort to delegitimize Trump’s pick of Richard Grenell as Director of National Intelligence with a rumored mandate to “clean house” – of, I don’t know, maybe the people involved in spying on Trump’s campaign on false pretenses and manufacturing the predicate for ‘Russiagate’, perhaps?
What’s more shocking, however, is that this accusation has now been leveled against Sanders – and after him spending the past four years proving time and again how he was a loyal DNC foot soldier. Not only did he bend the knee to Clinton after it was documented that she and the DNC colluded to rob him in the primaries, he also jumped on the ‘Russiagate’ bandwagon, and even tried using it just this week to deflect from the Clintonite smear about “Bernie bros” being mean to people online.
Even so, Bernie has now been smeared as a “Russian asset.” Looking at the state of Democrat primaries, the answer is obvious: because he’s winning, despite the DNC’s attempts to promote Pete Buttigieg or literally anyone else in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries. With Joe Biden crashing and burning, the party even embraced billionaire media mogul Mike Bloomberg, only to see him wither on the debate stage last Friday and Sanders climb in the polls.
So the paper owned by Jeff Bezos, who reportedly asked Bloomberg to run and stands to pay billions in taxes if Sanders gets elected, breaks the glass and pushes the big red Russiagate button. Perfectly normal, you see.
In what surely must be a coincidence, the DNC had changed its debate rules to accommodate Bloomberg, even as it bent itself into pretzels to exclude Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. In an even more remarkable coincidence, Gabbard was accused last fall of being a “Russian favorite” by none other than Hillary Clinton, the very source of the original ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy.
There’s no way these things are related, though, and anyone who thinks so simply must be a Russian agent! Expect armed FBI agents to show up at your door, accompanied by CNN cameras, and a federal judge to declare you a danger to Our Democracy any moment now.
That is not to say that US elections haven’t been targeted for meddling, influence, and even hacking. Trouble is, every documented incident tends to point to, well… Democrats.
Lost in the shrieking about “Russia helping Bernie” on Friday was the announcement that the FBI has arrested and charged a hacker linked to California Democrat Katie Hill, who allegedly conducted cyber-attacks against her (Democrat) primary rivals back in 2018. Oops.
Then there is New Knowledge, the “cybersecurity” company that the Senate Intelligence Committee chose to inform its understanding of “Russian active measures.” They were uniquely qualified, you see, because they actually ran a disinformation campaign during the 2017 special election for the Senate in Alabama, using fake Russian bots to frame and defame the Republican candidate.
When you factor in that the loudest shrieking about ‘Russian meddling’ comes from the people who were actually involved in election shenanigans – such as illegally spying on Trump’s campaign using a dodgy dossier compiled by a British spy – what emerges is a damning picture of psychological projection.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
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A dark page from the CIA’s history: What was Project Artichoke, launched 74 years ago?
By Erkin Oncan | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 22, 2025
One of the most useful instruments hidden behind the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of “freedom and democracy” was the Central Intelligence Agency, founded on September 18, 1947, as the successor of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
Since its creation, the CIA has carried out countless inhumane operations: assassinations, coups, drug trafficking, support for terrorism, conspiracies. The list of its crimes is endless. But among the darkest and most inhumane chapters of its record lie the notorious “mind control” experiments. … continue
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