Syria Debacles Epitomize Perpetual Perfidy of U.S. Foreign Policy
By James Bovard | Future of Freedom Foundation | March 6, 2020
Turkey is ratcheting up its invasion of Syria and trying to drag NATO into Erdogan’s personal rehabilitation scheme. Threats and counter-threats are flying as thickly as the bombs and bullets. It remains to be seen whether U.S. policymakers will blunder deeper into this quagmire.
Last October, the Washington establishment was aghast when President Trump appeared to approve a Turkish invasion of northern Syria. The U.S. was seen as abandoning the Kurds, some of whom had allied with the U.S. in the fight against ISIS and other terrorist groups. But the indignation over the latest U.S. policy shift in the Middle East is farcical considering the long record of U.S. double-crosses. Rather than the triumph of American idealism, recent U.S. policy has been perpetual perfidy leavened with frequent doses of idiocy.
Almost none of the media coverage of the Turkish invasion and flight of Kurdish refugees mentioned that President George H. W. Bush had urged the Kurds and other Iraqis to “take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside” during the U.S. bombing campaign in 1991 in the first Gulf War. After it became clear that the U.S. military could not protect the Kurds from Saddam’s backlash, U.S. policymakers basically shrugged and moseyed along. As a CNN analysis noted in 2003, “Bush refrained from aiding Kurdish rebels in the north, although he finally sent troops and relief supplies to protect hundreds of thousands of fleeing Kurds who were in danger of freezing or starving to death. Bush has never regretted his decision not to intervene.” George H.W. Bush’s abandonment and betrayal of the Kurds did nothing to deter the media and political establishment from posthumously sainting him after he died in late 2018.
U.S. meddling in the Middle East multiplied after the 9/11 attacks. Even though most of the hijackers were Saudis who received plenty of assistance from the Saudi government, the George W. Bush administration seized the chance to demonize and assault Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. President Bush portrayed his invasion of Iraq as American idealism at his best. In his May 1, 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech abroad the USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush hailed “the character of our military through history” for showing “the decency and idealism that turned enemies into allies.” Speaking three weeks later at a Republican fundraiser, Bush bragged, “The world has seen the strength and the idealism of the United States military.” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius declared in late 2003 that “this may be the most idealistic war fought in modern times.” The torture scandal at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq has not been permitted to deter the recent semi-canonization of George W. Bush by the establishment media.
The Bush administration and their media allies produced one smokescreen after another to sanctify the war. Almost all the pre-invasion broadcast news stories on Iraq originated with the federal government. PBS’s Bill Moyers noted that “of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news, from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.” A 2008 report by the Center for Public Integrity found that “in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.” The report concluded that the “false statements – amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts” created “an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war.” Bush’s falsehoods on Iraq proved far more toxic than anything in Saddam’s arsenal. But the exposure of the official lies did not deter Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from equating criticizing the Iraq war with appeasing Adolph Hitler in 2006.
The chaos from the 2003 invasion of Iraq was still spiraling out of control when the Bush administration began seeking pretexts to attack Iran, which Bush had designated part of the “Axis of Evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address. Bush officials and subsequent administration chose to champion the Iranian terrorist group, Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK). That organization sprang up in the 1960s and proceeded to kill Americans in the 1970s and to kill large numbers of Iranians in the subsequent decades. A 2004 FBI report noted that MEK continued to be “actively involved in planning and executing acts of terrorism.” NBC News reported in early 2012 that MEK carried out killings of Iranian nuclear scientists and that it “financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.”
That was the same year that a stampede of Washington hustlers took huge payoffs to publicly champion de-listing the MEK as a terrorist organization. As Trita Parsi noted in the New York Review of Books, MEK “rented office space in Washington, held fundraisers with lawmakers, or offered US officials speaking fees to appear at their gatherings. But the MEK did this openly for years, despite being on the US government’s terrorist list.” Federal law prohibited taking money from or advocating on behalf of any designated terrorist group. But, as a 2011 Huffpost headline reported, “Former U.S. Officials Make Millions Advocating For Terrorist Organization.” Former FBI boss Louis Freeh, former CIA boss Porter Goss, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission Lee Hamilton, former attorney general Michael B. Mukasey, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge pocketing $30,000 or more for brief speeches to pro-MEK events. Glenn Greenwald rightly scoffed that the advocacy for MEK “reveals the impunity with which political elites commit the most egregious crimes, as well as the special privileges to which they explicitly believe they — and they alone — are entitled.” Greenwald pointed that average people were scourged by the same law the pooh-bahs brazenly trampled: “A Staten Island satellite TV salesman in 2009 was sentenced to five years in federal prison merely for including a Hezbollah TV channel as part of the satellite package he sold to customers.”
Thanks in part to the torrent of insider endorsements, the Obama administration canceled the MEK’s terrorist designation in 2012. While Washington poohbahs continue portraying the group as idealistic freedom fighters devoted to democracy, a simple online search shows that the Farsi translation of the group’s name is “holy warriors of the people,” as Ted Carpenter noted in his new book, Gullible Superpower. Trump administration officials have gurgled about MEK’s possible role in ruling Iran after the current government is toppled. But MEK remains odious to the Iranian people regardless of the group’s PR successes inside the Beltway.
The prior pratfalls of U.S. Middle East policy did nothing to stymie the outrage over Trump asserted that he was withdrawing U.S. troops from eastern Syria. Congress showed more indignation about a troop pullback than it had shown the loss of all the American soldiers’ lives in pointless conflicts over the past 18 years. The House of Representatives condemned Trump by a 354 to 60 vote, and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, proclaimed, “At President Trump’s hands, American leadership has been laid low, and American foreign policy has become nothing more than a tool to advance his own interests.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said he felt “horror and shame” over Trump’s action. Boston Globe columnist Stephen Kinzer aptly described Congress’s protest as “a classic example of ‘buffet outrage,’ in which one picks and chooses which horrors to condemn.”
President Barack Obama had promised 16 times that there would be no “U.S. boots on the ground” in Syria; when Obama betrayed that promise, Congress did nothing. Trump’s plans to have fewer U.S. boots on the ground in Syria — or at least in part of it — somehow became the moral equivalent of giving Alaska back to Russia. Pundits attacked politicians who supported the troop pullback as “Russian assets” – i.e., traitors.
Syria offers another reminder that “material support of terrorism” is a federal crime unless you work for the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, or White House. After President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former Secretary of State John Kerry all publicly declared that Syrian president Assad must exit power, the U.S. armed terrorist groups to topple Assad. The Obama administration’s beloved, non-existent “moderate Syrian rebels” achieved nothing. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, a prime beneficiary of the U.S. occupation, has been considered a terrorist group by the U.S. government since 1997. Evan McMullin, a 2016 presidential candidate, admitted on Twitter: “My role in the CIA was to go out & convince Al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us.” Such absurdities spurred Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, to introduce The Stop Arming Terrorists Act in 2017 to prohibit any U.S. funding of terrorist groups. Gabbard’s bill was mostly ignored and never enacted though her outspoken criticism of U.S. policy did spur Hillary Clinton and others to vilify her.
Prominent politicians and much of the media blamed Trump for the attacks on civilians that followed the Turkish invasion, carried out mainly by groups allied with the Turkish government. U.S.-armed terrorist groups involved in the Turkish invasion have freed Islamic State prisoners. A Turkish think tank analyzed the violent groups committing atrocities in Syria after the start of the Turkish invasion; “Out of the 28 factions, 21 were previously supported by the United States, three of them via the Pentagon’s program to combat DAESH. Eighteen of these factions were supplied by the CIA.” A prominent Turkish journalist observed after his government invaded Syria: “The groups that were educated and equipped by the United States west of the Euphrates are now fighting against the groups east of the Euphrates that have been also educated and equipped by the United States.” This is nothing new: in 2016, Pentagon-backed Syrian rebels have openly battled CIA-backed rebels in Syria. A prominent Assad opponent who organized a conference of anti-Assad groups financed by the CIA was denied political asylum in 2017 because he provided “material support” to the Free Syrian Army, which meant he had “engaged in terrorist activity,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. A press backlash spurred a reversal on that decision but the media mostly ignored the other contradictions in U.S. policy in Syria.
Members of Congress were indignant that Syrian civilians suffered as the result of Trump’s troop pullback. But both Congress and most of the American media ignored the Syrian women, children, and men who died as a result of U.S. policies that intensified and prolonged that nation’s civil war. This is typical inside the Beltway scoring: the only fatalities worthy of recognizing are those that are politically useful.
Despite Trump’s sporadic declarations on Syria, the U.S. continues to have more than 50,000 troops deployed in the Middle East. The sooner those troops come home, the less likely that our nation will be dragged into another quagmire. The perennial follies and frauds of Middle East policy provide one of the strongest arguments for the United States to mind its own business.
The Long Roots of Our Russophobia
By Jeremy Kuzmarov | CounterPunch | March 6, 2020
For the last five years, the American media has been filled with scurrilous articles demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin has been accused of every crime imaginable, from shooting down airplanes, to assassinating opponents, to invading neighboring countries, to stealing money to manipulating the U.S. president and helping to rig the 2016 election.
Few of the accusations directed against Putin have ever been substantiated and the quality of journalism has been at the level of “yellow journalism.”
In a desperate attempt to sustain their political careers, centrist Democrats like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton accused their adversaries of being Russian agents – again without proof.
And even the progressive hero Bernie Sanders – himself a victim of red-baiting – has engaged in Russia bashing and unsubstantiated accusations for which he offers no proof.
Guy Mettan’s book, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017) provides needed historical context for our current political moment, showing how anti-Russian hysteria has long proliferated as a means of justifying Western imperialism.
Mettan is a Swiss journalist and member of parliament who learned about the corruption of the 
media business when his reporting on the world anticommunist league rankled his newspapers’ shareholders, and when he realized that he was serving as a paid stenographer for the Bosnian Islamist leader Alija Izetbegovic in the early 1990s.
Mettan defines Russophobia as the promotion of negative stereotypes about Russia that associate the country with despotism, treachery, expansion, oppression and other negative character traits. In his view, it is “not linked to specific historical events” but “exists first in the head of the one who looks, not in the victim’s alleged behavior or characteristics.”
Like anti-semitism, Mettan writes, “Russophobia is a way of turning specific pseudo-facts into essential one-dimensional values, barbarity, despotism, and expansionism in the Russian case in order to justify stigmatization and ostracism.”
The origins of Russophobic discourse date back to a schism in the Church during the Middle Ages when Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the Roman empire and modified the Christian liturgy to introduce reforms execrated by the Eastern Orthodox Churches of the Byzantine empire.
Mettan writes that “the Europe of Charlemagne and of the year 1000 was in need of a foil in the East to rebuild herself, just as the Europe of the 2000s needs Russia to consolidate her union.”
Before the schism, European rulers had no negative opinions of Russia. When Capetian King Henri I found himself a widower, he turned towards the prestigious Kiev kingdom two thousand miles away and married Vladimir’s granddaughter, Princess Ann.
A main goal of the new liturgy adopted by Charlemagne was to undermine any Byzantine influence in Italy and Western Europe.
Over the next century, the schism evolved from a religious into a political one.
The Pope and the top Roman administration made documents disappear and truncated others in order to blame the Easterners.
Byzantium and Russia were in turn rebuked for their “caesaropapism,” or “Oriental style despotism,” which could be contrasted which the supposedly enlightened, democratic governing system in the West.
Russia was particularly hated because it had defied efforts of Western European countries to submit to their authority and impose Catholicism.
In the 1760s, French diplomats working with a variety of Ukrainian, Hungarian and Polish political figures produced a forged testament of Peter 1 [“The Great”] purporting to reveal Russia’s ‘grand design’ to conquer most of Europe.
This document was still taken seriously by governments during the Napoleanic wars; and as late as the Cold War, President Harry Truman found it helpful in explaining Stalin.
In Britain, the Whigs, who represented the liberal bourgeois opposition to the Tory government and its program of free-trade imperialism, were the most virulent Russophobes, much like today’s Democrats in the United States.
The British media also enflamed public opinion by taking hysterical positions against Russia – often on the eve of major military expeditions.
The London Times during the 1820s Greek Independence war editorialized that no “sane person” could “look with satisfaction at the immense and rapid overgrowth of Russian power.” The same thing was being written in The New York Times in the 2010s.
A great example of the Orientalist stereotype was Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, whose main character was modeled after Russian ruler, Ivan the Terrible. As if no English ruler in history was cruel either.
The Nazis took Russo-phobic discourse to new heights during the 1930s and 1940s, combining it with a virulent anti-bolshevism and anti-semitism.
A survey of German high school texts in the 1960s found little change in the image of Russia. The Russians were still depicted as “primitive, simple, very violent, cruel, mean, inhuman, cupid and very stubborn.”
The same stereotypes were displayed in many Hollywood films during the Cold War, where KGB figures were particularly maligned.
No wonder that when a former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin, took power, people went insane.
Russophobia in the United States has been advanced most insidiously by the nation’s foreign policy elite who have envisioned themselves as grand chess-masters seeking to checkmate their Russian adversary in order to control the Eurasian heartland.
This view is little different than European colonial strategists who had learned of the importance of molding public opinion through disinformation campaigns that depicted the Russian bear as a menace to Western civilization.
Guy Mettan has written a thought-provoking book that provides badly needed historical context for the anti-Russian delirium gripping our society.
Breaking the taboo on Russophobia is of vital importance in laying the groundwork for a more peaceful world order and genuinely progressive movement in the United States. Unfortunately, recent developments don’t inspire much confidence that history will be transcended.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).<
Foreign Propaganda Interference Done Right: Brits in 1940s U.S.
By Steve Sailer – VDARE – 02/22/2020
From the Washington Post:
Bernie Sanders briefed by U.S. officials that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign
By Shane Harris, Ellen Nakashima, Michael Scherer and Sean Sullivan
Feb. 21, 2020 at 1:16 p.m. PSTU.S. officials have told Sen. Bernie Sanders that Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest, according to people familiar with the matter.
President Trump and lawmakers on Capitol Hill also have been informed about the Russian assistance to the Vermont senator, those people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken.
So … that clears that up!
Let me guess, though: I bet some Russian … trolls … are posting … memes!
For example, here’s a high quality 2016 Russian interference effort:
On the other hand, if you want an example of Foreign Interference done right, consider the 1941 Hollywood movie That Hamilton Woman starring Vivien Leigh as Emma Hamilton and Laurence Olivier as Admiral Horatio Nelson, victor over Napoleon’s navy at Trafalgar. From Wikipedia:
The film was a critical and financial success, and while on the surface the plot is both a war story and a romance set in Napoleonic times, it was also intended to function as a deliberately pro-British film that would portray Britain positively within the context of World War II which was being fought at that time. At the time the film was released France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Denmark had all surrendered to the Nazis and the Soviet Union was still officially allied to them, correspondingly the British were fighting against the Nazis alone and felt the need to produce films that would both boost their own morale, and also portray them sympathetically to the foreign world, and in particular, to the United States. …
Shot in the United States during September and October 1940,[10] That Hamilton Woman defines Britain’s struggle against Napoleon in terms of resistance to a dictator who seeks to dominate the world.[11] The film was intended to parallel the current situation in Europe and was intended as propaganda at a time before the attack on Pearl Harbor when the United States was still formally neutral. … Stars Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were newlyweds at the time of filming and were considered a “dream couple.” …
While That Hamilton Woman was marketed as historical romance, its subtext falls into the “war propaganda” category.[16] In July 1941, the isolationist group America First Committee (AFC) targeted That Hamilton Woman and three other major Hollywood feature films (The Great Dictator, Chaplin/United Artists, 1940; Foreign Correspondent, Wanger/United Artists, 1940; The Mortal Storm, MGM, 1940) as productions that “seemed to be preparing Americans for war.” …
Critical sources usually point out that That Hamilton Woman was Winston Churchill’s favorite film.[19][Note 1] In her research on the subject, film historian Professor Stacey Olster reveals that at the time the film was made, Alexander Korda’s New York offices were “supplying cover to MI-5 agents gathering intelligence on both German activities in the United States and isolationist sentiments among makers of American foreign policy.”[20] According to Anthony Holden, Olivier’s biographer, That Hamilton Woman “became Exhibit A in a case brought against Korda by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Committee had accused him of operating an espionage and propaganda center for Britain in the United States—a charge Korda only escaped by virtue of the fact that his scheduled appearance before the committee on December 12, 1941 was preempted by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor five days earlier”.
From HistoryNet:
In one scene, whose significance was lost on no one who saw the film, Nelson declares, “You cannot make peace with dictators. You have to destroy them.” Korda always claimed that Churchill had written that line. More pro-British films poured out of Hollywood that year, among them A Yank in the R.A.F., starring Tyrone Power as an American flier who fights in the Battle of Britain, and a raft of melodramatic spy movies depicting sinister Nazi agents at work to undermine America.
The level of talent of British propagandists operating in America in the 1940s — e.g., besides movie stars like Olivier, Leigh, and Cary Grant, there were also Isaiah Berlin, C.S. Forester, Roald Dahl, Alfred Duff Cooper, Ian Fleming, and ad man David Ogilvy — was substantially higher than whatever Russia, Saudi Arabia, or China can muster today. For example, from Wikipedia:
In late March 1942, while in London, [fighter pilot Roald Dahl] met the Under-Secretary of State for Air, Major Harold Balfour, at his club. Impressed by Dahl’s war record and conversational abilities, Balfour appointed the young man as assistant air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.
… As part of his duties as assistant air attaché, Dahl was to help neutralise the isolationist views still held by many Americans by giving pro-British speeches and discussing his war service; the United States had entered the war only the previous December, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.[58]
At this time [Roald] Dahl met the noted British novelist C. S. Forester [Horatio Hornblower, The African Queen], who was also working to aid the British war effort. Forester worked for the British Ministry of Information and was writing propaganda for the Allied cause, mainly for American consumption. The Saturday Evening Post had asked Forester to write a story based on Dahl’s flying experiences; Forester asked Dahl to write down some RAF anecdotes so that he could shape them into a story. After Forester read what Dahl had given him, he decided to publish the story exactly as Dahl had written it.
.. Later he worked with such other well-known British officers as Ian Fleming (who later published the popular James Bond series) and David Ogilvy [future author of Confessions of an Advertising Man], promoting Britain’s interests and message in the US and combating the “America First” movement.
Wikipedia: A Disinformation Operation?
Swiss Propaganda Research | March 2020
Wikipedia is generally thought of as an open, transparent, and mostly reliable online encyclopedia. Yet upon closer inspection, this turns out not to be the case.
In fact, the English Wikipedia with its 9 billion page views per month is governed by just 500 active administrators, whose real identity in many cases remains unknown.
Moreover, studies have shown that 80% of all Wikipedia content is written by just 1% of all Wikipedia editors, which again amounts to just a few hundred mostly unknown people.
Obviously, such a non-transparent and hierarchical structure is susceptible to corruption and manipulation, the notorious “paid editors” hired by corporations being just one example.
Indeed, already in 2007, researchers found that CIA and FBI employees were editing Wikipedia articles on controversial topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo military prison.
Also in 2007, researchers found that one of the most active and influential English Wikipedia administrators, called “Slim Virgin”, was in fact a former British intelligence informer.
More recently, another highly prolific Wikipedia editor going by the false name of “Philip Cross” turned out to be linked to UK intelligence as well as several mainstream media journalists.
In Germany, one of the most aggressive Wikipedia editors was exposed, after a two-year legal battle, as a political operative formerly serving in the Israeli army as a foreign volunteer.
Even in Switzerland, unidentified government employees were caught whitewashing Wikipedia entries about the Swiss secret service just prior to a public referendum about the agency.
Many of these Wikipedia personae are editing articles almost all day and every day, indicating that they are either highly dedicated individuals, or in fact, operated by a group of people.
In addition, articles edited by these personae cannot easily be revised, since the above-mentioned administrators can always revert changes or simply block disagreeing users altogether.
The primary goal of these covert campaigns appears to be pushing Western and Israeli government positions while destroying the reputation of independent journalists and politicians.
Articles most affected by this kind of manipulation include political, geopolitical and certain historical topics as well as biographies of non-conformist academics, journalists, and politicians.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, a friend of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and a “Young Leader” of the Davos forum, has repeatedly defended these operations.
Speaking of Davos, Wikimedia has itself amassed a fortune of more than $160 million, donated in large part not by lazy students, but by major US corporations and influential foundations.
Moreover, US social media and video platforms are increasingly referring to Wikipedia to frame or combat “controversial” topics. The revelations discussed above may perhaps help explain why.
To add at least some degree of transparency, German researchers have developed a free web browser tool called WikiWho that lets readers color code just who edited what in Wikipedia.
In many cases, the result looks as discomforting as one might expect.
Additional References:
- CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits (Reuters, 2007)
- Wikipedia and the Intelligence Services (OhMyNews, 2007)
- Spies in Wikipedia (Computerra Magazine, 2007, archived)
- What we know about SlimVirgin (Wikipedia Review, 2007, archived)
- Wikipedia and the Spooks – The Remake? (Intel Today, 2018)
- The Mystery Wikipedia Editor Targeting Anti-War Sites (ML, 2018)
- Wikipedia: Rotten to the Core (Helen Buyniski, 2018)
- Time to ditch Wikipedia? (Five Filters Analysis, 2018)
- Wikipedia Editing Scandal Continues (Neil Clark, 2019)
Salisbury poisoning unleashed Russian bogeyman … but where are the Skripals 2 years on?
By Simon Rite | RT | March 4, 2020
Forget Where’s Wally, what we really want to know is where are the Skripals? It’s exactly two years to the day since the Russian spy and his daughter were novichoked in Salisbury, and we’ve still not seen hide nor hair of them.
Former double agent Sergei has been completely off-grid, while Yulia Skripal was seen in a highly staged video in 2018, filmed in an anonymous but pleasant leafy glade shortly after recovering from her poisoning ordeal; but, apart from that, there have been no statements or updates about them at all.
The most recent piece of ‘information’, and I use that term loosely, to leak out about their whereabouts came this weekend from Britain’s Mail on Sunday, courtesy of a source which became ubiquitous throughout the Skripal saga, the reliably unreliable “security insiders.” It’s always amazing how willing these apparent insiders are to release top-level secrets to the home of the “sidebar of shame.”
The latest speculation from ‘security insiders’ is that the Skripals are hoping to head for a new life down under in Australia after “effectively living under house arrest since the attack.” This means either those insiders are the leakiest spies in the world, or the Skripals are going to be nowhere near Australia anytime soon.
The house arrest must be at Julian Assange in Belmarsh levels of security, because even the Skripals’ family in Russia say they haven’t heard from them in months.
So all quiet on the Skripal front and, frankly speaking, it’s all quiet on the geopolitical front, too, and in the media. The disputed events of March 4, 2018, over poisoned spies and their aftermath formed the biggest story on the planet, and not just because the whole world finally started paying attention to the majesty of Salisbury cathedral’s glorious 123-metre spire.
This incident seemed like it might have genuine life-changing political consequences. Britain entered the phrase “highly likely” into the lexicon of geopolitics, and [then-PM] Theresa May’s declaration that it was “highly likely” that the Kremlin was to blame was deemed strong enough to see the West turn en masse against Moscow, and Russian diplomats and ‘diplomats’ were expelled by the dozen, by London and its allies across the world. It seemed the bar for state-to-state accusations had been lowered.
Russia to this day denies involvement in what happened in Salisbury.
So what has changed? If anything, all that has changed over the last two years is a desire to get back to business, to rebuild ties and move on. Some of those expelled diplomats have reportedly moved back.
French leader Emmanuel Macron is pushing hard for relations between the West and Moscow to be repaired, something Germany needs little encouragement for.
Britain is still pretending to be in a huff, but British imports of Russian oil were up 57 percent last year, so realpolitik reigns supreme in London, as ever.
Boris Johnson is now the prime minister and with a thumping majority doesn’t need to use bogeyman Russia as a tool to look strong quite as much as his predecessor did. Johnson and Putin even met in January and there are reports the prime minister is considering an invitation to attend a second world war commemoration parade in Moscow this May.
And as for the media, it’s all gone quiet there, too. Skripal coverage is about as common in the mainstream now as coverage of Julian Assange’s imprisonment. He’s a journalist whose supporters say is ‘highly likely’ a victim of a demonstrable state campaign against him because he attempted to uncover the misdeeds of power. However, a boring attack on free speech is nowhere near as exciting as a poisoned spy, is it?!
Simon Rite is a writer based in London for RT, in charge of several projects including the political satire group #ICYMI. Follow him on Twitter @SiWrites
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.
Hate vs. Peace and Harmony
By Gilad Atzmon | March 2, 2020
We learned today that Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Dannon told AIPAC that Bernie Sanders is an ‘ignorant fool, a liar or both. “We don’t want Sanders at AIPAC. We don’t want him in Israel… Whoever calls the prime minister of Israel a ‘racist’ is either a liar, an ignorant fool, or both,” Ambassador Dannon announced.
The evidence of Israel’s racism and the Netanyahu government’s racialist policies is, unfortunately, conclusive. One can look at the Netanyahu government’s approach to Black migrants. Or examine the racist Israeli national bill. This leads one to wonder what motivated Ambassador Dannon to act so ‘undiplomatically,’ by attacking the Democratic Party frontrunner for expressing a reasoned criticism of Israel and its PM?
But even before we can get to that question, we have to consider what the same Israeli media outlets have informed us. In a leaked recording, Netanyahu senior adviser Natan Eshel, revealed that “hate is what unites” the Israeli right-wing and it “works well on non-Ashkenazi voters.”
Eshel, a former Netanyahu chief of staff who resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct, continues to work with the Israeli PM, and last year led the two coalition negotiations.
In the recording, Eshel explains that Likud minister (and former IDF Spokeswoman) Miri Regev is “excellent” at “stirring up” Likud supporters. Eshel refers to Regev as “an animal,” but notes her tactics work very well in “drumming up the crowd.”
It is reasonable to think that Ambassador Dannon’s description of Sen. Sanders served a similar purpose: to drum up the AIPAC crowd. And, of course, the British Jewish media together with Jewish pressure groups and the Israeli Lobby have, since 2017, also used this technique to ignite their crowd’s hatred of the Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn. Some people, so it seems, are united by hate.
Netanyahu’s senior adviser’s leaked recording shines a light on the ever- growing Jewish fear of antisemitism. Those who are so easily ‘united by hate’ tend to believe that others are also similarly hateful. The Jewish fear of antisemitism can be seen as projection. Those who are ‘united by hate,’ may well attribute their own hatefulness to their neighbours whether they are Palestinians, Labour voters, or even the Democratic frontrunner.
What we see is a lethal snowball of loathing and fear: the more hateful one happens to be, the more one is tormented by imagining that the Other is afflicted by the same hatefulness.
Jesus Christ diagnosed this very dangerous trait amongst his brethren. His solution was shocking, if simple. Instead of stockpiling weapons, he preached that his followers turn the other cheek: take a step forward, love your neighbour, break away from the vicious circle, seek peace and harmony.
The fate of Jesus is known to us all. The fate of those who try to preach peace to Israelis and Zionists isn’t exactly a secret either.
The Media’s Deafening Silence on Mike Bloomberg’s Ties to Epstein and Other Criminals
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | February 28, 2020
After his late jump into the Democratic primary and, as critics argue, purchasing his way into the primary debates, former Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg has received mixed coverage from corporate media, with many negative critiques of the current presidential contender’s history, conduct and connections.
Yet, despite efforts by other campaigns and more progressive-leaning media outlets to dampen Bloomberg’s chances at the nomination, one clear weakness of Bloomberg’s has thus far evaded meaningful media coverage: his ties to key players in the Epstein scandal, including Leslie Wexner, Ghislaine Maxwell and even Jeffrey Epstein himself.
Silence among outlets that largely oppose Bloomberg’s candidacy regarding his connections to Epstein and those in his close social orbit is odd, especially when reporting on an individual’s connections to the intelligence-linked pedophile are a sure-fire way to generate considerable negative attention and fodder for rival campaigns. This is particularly striking given that the numerous accusations that Bloomberg has long stoked a toxic culture of sexual harassment at his company, resulting in no small number of non-disclosure agreements over the years, have received some media attention. Yet, the fact that many of Bloomberg’s close friends have been accused of far, far worse has received hardly any coverage by comparison.
For instance, when it was announced last week that the controlling stake in the Leslie Wexner-owned lingerie company Victoria’s Secret would be sold to a private equity firm called Sycamore Partners, only one media outlet — The Intercept — revealed that Bloomberg has at least $136 million of his money in that firm. The Intercept noted in passing that Wexner — the source of most of Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed fortune, his close collaborator for decades and alleged rapist of many of his victims — had been pressured to step down following the scandal, which also hit Wexner-owned companies hard and had forced the Ohio-based billionaire to seek a buyer for his lingerie brand and its tarnished reputation. Yet, the outlet did not make the direct connection that Sycamore Partners-backer Bloomberg is a friend of Wexner’s and has attended Wexner’s personal social parties for years prior to the most recent scandal.
Here’s alleged-rapist Mike Bloomberg attending a fancy horse party at Les Wexner’s place (Wexner furthest right) in 2010, about a year before Wexner formally transferred ownership of his Manhattan townhouse to Jeffrey Epstein. Cheers to good friends 😊 pic.twitter.com/gS8wpUVF00
— ePal, Your Close Friend™-Enterprise Edition (@wash_cloth) February 17, 2020
Yet, even well before this recent opportunity to point out Bloomberg’s ties to Leslie Wexner, there have been plenty of opportunities for the media to question Bloomberg about his now-infamous picture with Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Mossad-connected Robert Maxwell and Epstein’s alleged madam and co-conspirator.
From left to right, Tamara Mellon, Mike Bloomberg and Ghislaine Maxwell
That picture, taken in 2013 at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, has not been mentioned by mainstream media following the launch of Bloomberg’s candidacy late last November. Similarly, mainstream media have failed to question Bloomberg regarding why his name and five different telephone numbers for him appear in Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous list of contacts often referred to as his “little black book.”
Bloomberg and the Manhattan Swamp
The extent of the Maxwell-Bloomberg relationship is unknown, though Bloomberg’s deep ties to his former employer Salomon Brothers is a possible link, given that that firm served as one of the Maxwell family’s main investment bankers in the years prior to and following Robert Maxwell’s mysterious death in 1991. Similarly, Epstein had close ties to prominent figures on Wall Street, some dating back to his time at Bear Stearns, who are also close to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg and Epstein also shared close friendships with some of the same New York media executives like Mort Zuckerman. Media outlets have described Zuckerman, a former business partner of Epstein’s, as Bloomberg’s “long-time enabler.” In another example, Epstein’s former publicist Howard Rubenstein is a long-time supporter of Bloomberg and was reported to be the driving force behind Bloomberg’s controversial push to run around mayoral term limits and pursue a third term as Mayor of New York.
Another mutual Epstein-Bloomberg associate is disgraced media mogul Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein was part of an investment group with Epstein that sought to purchase New York magazine in 2003. Another member of that investment group was frequent MSNBC commentator Donny Deutsch, who has recently fervently backed Bloomberg’s candidacy.
Weinstein was recently convicted of rape and has dozens of accusers, whose decision to come forward about Weinstein’s sex crimes in recent years helped spark the “Me Too” movement. Weinstein also has ties to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was a close friend and business associate of Epstein’s, and it was Barak who personally introduced Weinstein to former Mossad spies that Weinstein hired to intimidate his accusers. In addition to being Prime Minister, Barak is also the former head of Israeli military intelligence, the foreign intelligence agency that sponsored Epstein’s sexual blackmail operation involving underage girls in the United States.
Bloomberg’s candidacy has yet to be strongly challenged over his ties to Weinstein, which are considerable. For instance, Weinstein was a major backer of Bloomberg’s mayoral campaigns and even recorded robocalls on Bloomberg’s behalf to boost his election chances. Bloomberg, in turn, appointed Weinstein to a charity board and Weinstein later praised Bloomberg for aiding his film company. While Bloomberg’s ties to Wexner, Epstein and Maxwell have gotten the silent treatment, some outlets (mostly right-leaning) have covered the Bloomberg-Weinstein ties, but there has been little pressure on Bloomberg from mainstream media to address those ties directly.
Another close Bloomberg associate who recently has been accused by numerous women of sexual harassment is hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt. Steinhardt is a long-time fixture in Bloomberg’s social circle and has long appeared at Bloomberg’s dinner parties. Steinhardt is also connected to Leslie Wexner through his membership in the so-called “Mega Group” — an exclusive group of organized-crime-linked “mega” donors to pro-Israel causes that Wexner co-founded in 1991. Steinhardt also boasts close ties to the now deceased founder of Glencore, the Mossad-linked Marc Rich, and Steinhardt — along with top Israeli politicians and spies — aggressively lobbied former President Bill Clinton to controversially pardon Rich before leaving office.
“Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are”
The oft-quoted saying “Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are,” seems to hold true for Bloomberg. For instance, his eponymous media conglomerate has received no small number of lawsuits over the years alleging rampant sexual harassment and even the rape of female workers, much of its allegedly egged on by Bloomberg’s long history of comments that have been derided as sexist. Many of those lawsuits ended in female accusers being asked to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). More recently, The Nation reported that Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign is making use of NDAs in such a way “that could prevent staffers from reporting workplace abuse.”
In addition, a 1999 profile of Bloomberg in Wired magazine quoted Bloomberg as saying “My daughter is tall and busty and blonde. We went to China together. And what’s a 16-year-old going to do on a business trip? So, I got her dates in every city in China.”
Bloomberg, not unlike Epstein and Wexner, also has a history of cozy ties to the CIA. For instance, during his tenure as Mayor of New York, Bloomberg actively promoted a controversial post-9/11 program that saw the CIA work directly with the NYPD to spy on the city’s Muslim communities. Even though the CIA is technically prohibited from spying on Americans not linked to criminal activity, one of the CIA officers working as part of the Bloomberg-backed program said he had “no limitations” on what he could do. Bloomberg has long defended this program and its merging of the CIA with local police.
In the case of Epstein and Wexner, as MintPress News reported in its viral series on the Epstein scandal last year, Epstein once claimed to have worked for the CIA during the 1980s and Epstein and Wexner were the key players behind the relocation of CIA front company Southern Air Transport to Ohio, where Wexner’s business interests have long been based.
Rudy Giuliani, left, New York Gov. George Pataki, center, and Mike Bloomberg during a “Salute to Israel Parade, May 5, 2002, in New York. Shawn Baldwin | AP
In addition, Bloomberg was also a key player in a controversial initiative regarding Israel’s intelligence-linked technology sector. For instance, Bloomberg created a $2 billion project that involved opening a Manhattan campus called “Cornell Tech” that brought together Cornell University and Israel’s Technion, which has close ties to Israel’s national security state and military-industrial complex. Bloomberg personally gave over $100 million to facilitate completion of that project. That campus is now a partner in the recent creation of two Israeli-run “cybersecurity” centers in New York City that are tied to Israeli intelligence and were recently reported on by MintPress.
Jeffrey Epstein was also involved with Israeli military intelligence-linked technology companies and, as previously mentioned, Israeli military intelligence was also the sponsor of Epstein’s sexual blackmail operation that targeted mostly U.S. politicians and public figures for the benefit of the state of Israel, whose military currently receives $3.8 billion per year from U.S. taxpayers.
While these aspects of Bloomberg’s past have received considerable media attention as of late, these same outlets have failed to note that Bloomberg’s inner circle boasts many individuals accused of harassment, rape or worse. With his clear ties to the “Epstein network,” the fact that mainstream media has declined to even question Bloomberg about his social appearances with Ghislaine Maxwell or Leslie Wexner and having five different telephone numbers of his in Epstein’s list of high-profile contacts is a damning indictment of the current landscape of both American media and American politics.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism
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.
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The 9/11 “Double-Cross” Conspiracy Theory
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • SEPTEMBER 6, 2022
Is it true that “9/11 was an inside job”? Yes, insofar as Israel is “inside” the U.S. But for the 9/11 truthers who have identified Israel as the main perpetrators, “9/11 was an inside job” is at best a half-truth, and at worst an integral part of the Zionist operation, like a secondary flag sewn as a lining under the false flag of Islamism. Victor Thorn (1963-2017) wrote in his book 9/11 made in Israel: The Plot Against America (2011): “In essence, the ‘9-11 truth movement’ was created prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as a means of suppressing news relating to Israeli complicity. . . . The slogan ‘9-11 was an inside job’ was quite possibly the greatest example of Israeli propaganda ever devised.” In milder terms, it is “controlled opposition”.
A genuine truth movement would have pointed to Israel as the prime suspect from the start. From day one, it was obvious who would benefit. … continue
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