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London Times runs fake Browder story by acolytes Ben Brandon & Alex Bailin

By Lucy Komisar | The Komisar Scoop | October 25, 2019

Ben Brandon and Alex Bailin are London lawyers who have co-authored a fake story based on fabrications by William Browder about Russia’s legal action against his tax evasion and the death of his accountant, Sergei Magnitsky. The writers of this London Times op ed managed to put eight lies into just five opening lines.

Co-author Brandon is the lawyer representing the U.S. in its request to extradite war-crimes whistleblower- publisher Julian Assange. This raises questions about the connection between the U.S. and the U.K. in the promotion of the Browder/Magnitsky hoax and the attack against Assange.

Here is their story. And my proof of their fabrications.

Their Story

Screen shot of the London Times op ed.

The Times, October 24 2019

By Ben Brandon and Alex Bailin

We must not lag behind the rest of the world when it comes to holding human rights abusers and corrupt regimes to account.

Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer, was hired in 2008 by Bill Browder, the chief executive of Hermitage Capital, to investigate a tax fraud on his fund. Having diligently uncovered a large scale embezzlement by influential Russian officials, Mr Magnitsky was arrested and mistreated in prison in an attempt to pressure him into withdrawing his testimony.

He refused to retract and was beaten to death.

My Response

Dear Messrs Brandon and Bailin, I assume that as lawyers you think it’s a good idea to check out what people claim, since even clients lie. Therefore, please consider the evidence below, not what convicted fraudster William Browder apparently told you.

[1] Lawyer: Magnitsky was an accountant. Browder acknowledges in his deposition in US federal court 2015 that Magnitsky didn’t have a law degree or go to law school. See him say it in a video clip. In his own interrogations, Magnitsky is identified as an auditor.

[2] Hired in 2008: Magnitsky worked for the accounting/law firm Firestone Duncan which Browder hired in 1997 to handle his company accounts and tax filings. The Russian court found that Magnitsky in the interests of Browder in 1997-2002 implemented an illegal tax evasion scheme using firms registered in Kalmykia and managed by Hermitage Capital. (See article) Browder claims he hired Magnitsky in 2007, so Brandon and Bailin get even that fabrication wrong.

[3] To investigate a tax fraud: See above. He was hired in 1997, ten years before the 2007 tax refund fraud. Magnitsky’s 2006 interrogation was about Browder’s company tax evasion. See his testimony and the cited article. And the fraud wasn’t on his fund, it was on the Russian Treasury. Fraudsters scammed the Russian Treasury by obtaining a $230mil tax refund based on fraudulent lawsuits.

[4] Uncovered embezzlement: The tax fraud, which is not properly described as an embezzlement as it was a fraud on the Russian Treasury, not on a company, was first reported by Rimma Starova in April 2008. The Russian newspaper Vedomosti and the New York Times reported it in July 2008. Magnitsky mentioned in testimony only in his October 2008 interrogation.

[5] Influential Russian officials: There are no Russian officials accused in any of the reports, by Starova, the newspapers or by Magnitsky. Read the documents.

[6] Mistreated: He suffered the same poor conditions as other inmates.

[7] pressure him into withdrawing his testimony: There is no evidence he was pressured to withdraw testimony. Or do you have any?

[8] Beaten to death: There is no evidence he was beaten to death. Or do you have any?

The only on-site independent report, by the Moscow Public Oversight Commission, indicates terrible prison conditions and failure to provide needed medical care. The Physicians for Human Rights (Cambridge Mass) report, cites the POC report and is addressed to Browder, who gave PHR 44 documents to back up his claims. It reached the same conclusion.

Browder’s initial statements about Magnitsky’s death, in 2009 and 2010, mention no beatings.

Check out his talk at Chatham House, in your home town. “I don’t know what they were thinking. I don’t know whether they killed him deliberately on the night of the 18th, or if he died of neglect.”

How Browder changed his stories about Magnitsky’s death. (Graphic by Michael Thau)

And the video of his address to the San Diego Law School the next year. “They put him into a straight-jacket, put him into an isolation room and waited outside the door for 1hr18 minutes until he died.”

He invented the beating death in 2011 when he decided to create and lobby for the Magnitsky Act in the U.S. Congress to stop Russian authorities from pursuing him for $100 million in evaded taxes and illicit stock buys.

Ironically, though he uses the U.S. to build a wall against Russian tax collectors, he gave up his American citizenship in 1998 to avoid paying taxes. He is listed by CBS News as a “tax expatriate.”

If you are serious lawyers and investigators, you will examine the evidence and respond. (And change your story.)

The rest of the op ed is to support unspecified steps to hold to account those who benefit from human rights abuses and corruption. No mention of the persecutors of Julian Assange or the beneficiaries of the U.K.’s worldwide system of tax havens. The real purpose appears to be to repeat the Browder hoax in the lede.

I sent copies of the article to Brandon and Bailin. No response.

I also sent a complaint to IPSO the British Independent Press Standards Organization.

It calls itself “the independent regulator of most of the UK’s newspapers and magazines.” It says: We hold newspapers and magazines to account for their actions, protect individual rights, uphold high standards of journalism and help to maintain freedom of expression for the press.

Clauses breached
1 Accuracy
This op ed article is based on egregiously fake facts. See this story and the links for the evidence. I have sent it to the authors. They should retract the story. https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2019/10/london-times-runs-fake-browder-story-by-acolytes-ben-brandon-alex-bailin/

Lucy Komisar is an investigative reporter who writes about financial corruption and won a Gerald Loeb award, the most important prize in financial journalism, for breaking the story about how Ponzi schemer Allen Stanford got the Florida Banking Dept to allow him to move money offshore with no regulation. Her stories about William Browder focus on tax evasion.  Find out more on The Komisar Scoop and on Twitter, @lucykomisar.

November 2, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

The Clinton-Silsby Trafficking Scandal And How The Media Covered It Up

By William Craddick – Disobedient Media – January 25, 2017

Contrary to reports in the media, the crowd sourced investigation labeled by some as “Pizzagate” did not begin with internet sleuths digging through the Wikileaks Podesta Files releases looking for pizza parlors and encoded language discussing human trafficking. It began with the shocking discovery that Hillary and Bill Clinton provided assistance to convicted child trafficker, Laura Silsby, resulting in a reduced sentence for child trafficking.

Silsby was arrested at the Haitian border attempting to smuggle 33 children out of Haiti without documentation. Her sentence and charges were reduced after an intervention by Bill Clinton. In the aftermath of Silsby’s arrest, her originally retained lawyer Jorge Puello was arrested in connection with an international smuggling ring accused of trafficking women and minors from Central America and Haiti. The revelation of this news in November was either ignored by the Western media or attacked by Clinton controlled publications.

I. Hillary Clinton Intervened Politically on Behalf of Laura Silsby

Laura Silsby is the former director of The New Life Children’s Refuge. Emails from her organization can be found in Wikileaks’ Hillary Clinton Email Archive discussing the NGO before her arrest. Silsby’s organization also appears in Clinton’s emails, soliciting donations for their “ministry.” The Refuge was founded by Silsby and Charisa Coulter, both attendees of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho. Silsby was reported to have a history of bad debts and unpaid wages.

Laura had claimed she planned to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, but a State Department diplomatic cable revealed that authorities in the country said she never submitted an application for this purpose. They instead located to Haiti.

On January 29, 2010, Silsby was arrested with nine other American nationals attempting to steal 33 children from the country, most of whom were not even orphans and had families according to some reports. CNN reported on February 9, 2010 that this was not the first time Silsby had attempted to traffic children out of Haiti. Haitian police acting on a tip had intercepted Silsby in an earlier, separate attempt to remove 40 children out of the country. She was turned back at the Haitian border. For a brief period, Haitian authorities were considering adding a new kidnapping charge based on this evidence.

Hillary and Bill Clinton took an extraordinary interest in Silsby’s case from the moment she was arrested and almost immediately stepped in on her behalf. The Harvard Human Rights Journal stated that one of Bill Clinton’s first acts as special envoy for the United Nations in Haiti “was to put out the fire of a child abduction scandal involving American citizens.” On February 7th, 2010, The Sunday Times reported that Bill Clinton had intervened to strike a deal with the Haitian government, securing the release of all co-conspirators except for Silsby. Prosecutors ultimately sought a six-month sentence in Silsby’s case, reducing charges for conspiracy and child abduction to mere “arranging irregular travel.” A shockingly light penalty given the circumstances of her arrest, which would likely not have been possible but for the intervention of the Clintons in Silsby’s case.

On February 9th, 2010 Hillary Clinton consulted with Counselor Cheryl Mills and other attorneys in an email discussing the U.S. Government’s “options” regarding the arrested Americans. The heavily redacted memo attached to that email does not reveal what these “options” consisted of. However, the State Department’s American Citizens Services is only authorized to offer lists of local, English speaking attorneys to Americans arrested or detained abroad. To go beyond that authorization is a severe violation of protocol and is illegal. Additional emails reveal that the State Department was involved with making statements on the Silsby scandal and preparing to assist Silsby’s co-conspirators with their return to the United States, although this is consistent with State Department protocol in these situations.

II. Silsby’s Lawyer and His Wife Were Both Arrested For Involvement in Human Sex Trafficking of Minors and Women

On February 11th, the New York Times reported that Silsby’s original lawyer, Jorge Puello, was suspected of leading an international human trafficking ring involving women and minors. According the the Harvard Human Rights Journal Puello was ultimately arrested in an investigation being lead by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in connection with the ring. He was wanted in the United States, El Salvador and Costa Rica for his involvement with a network trafficking Central Americans and Haitians. 

At the time of his arrest, his wife was already imprisoned in El Salvador and “faced charges of presumed sexual exploitation of minors and women.” Puello was ultimately sentenced to three years in federal prison for “alien smuggling.” Another surprisingly light sentence given the original charges he was sought for. It is not known at this time whether or not Laura Silsby was associated with Puello’s criminal enterprise.

III. The Daily Beast Engaged in an Illicit Cover Up Operation of the Above Information

On November 3rd, 2016, this author made a post to Reddit containing preliminary research and information on the above story. The post was made to the pro-Trump subreddit r/the_donald due to the forum’s reputation as the only outlet on Reddit where news was not being censored during the U.S. Presidential Election. The same day, Wikileaks tweeted a link to the Reddit post labeling it as a “significant, if partisan, find.”

On November 4th, 2016 The Daily Beast wrote a non-factual and intentionally misleading article covering the Clinton-Silsby scandal. They accused Wikileaks of publicizing a “Reddit conspiracy theory” which was “riddled with incorrect information.” The author, Ben Collins neglected to do basic research on the totality of the links presented in the post as evidence. Mr. Collins attacked the policies of r/the_donald towards freedom of speech and accused the forum of being racist without citing extensive or definitive proof. At no point did The Daily Beast provide proof that the allegations were not true, and did not disprove any of the evidence submitted. A link to an extensive study of the case by the Harvard Human Rights Journal which clearly linked Bill Clinton to the scandal was totally ignored. They similarly failed to acknowledge or address emails published by Wikileaks between Hillary Clinton and her legal counsel which may potentially indicate that she violated State Department policy for the treatment of U.S. citizens arrested or detained abroad.

The Daily Beast is a holding of American media conglomerate InterActiveCorp. Chelsea Clinton, Vice President of the Clinton Foundation and daughter of Hillary and Bill Clinton, sits on InterActiveCorp’s Board of Directors. The proximity of the Clinton family to the organization responsible for oversight and direction of The Daily Beast raises questions about the publication’s journalistic independence and their commitment to factual and ethical reporting on current events and topics of public interest. Given their slanderous and incorrect reporting on the Clinton-Silsby scandal, it seems clear that they do not hold these values in high regard.

Since her release from detention in Haiti, Laura Silsby has returned to Idaho. In 2015, she married and took the last name Gayler. Silsby is currently employed by software company AlertSense as their Vice President of Marketing. AlertSense works with the Federal Government on FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS). One of IPAWS functions is to issue Amber Alerts during kidnapping events.

Update: It appears that since the time of publication, Laura Silsby-Gayler is no longer listed as a member of Alert Sense’s Leadership Team.

November 1, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , | 2 Comments

The “Deep State” Has Been Redefined as Career Bureaucrats Doing Their Patriotic Duty

By Edward J. Curtin | Behind the Curtain | October 31, 2019

It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news. There’s something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of “conspiracy theorists” is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor. But with a twisted twist.

The corporate mass-media has recently discovered a “deep state” that they claim to be not some evil group of assassins who work for the super-rich owners of the country and murder their own president (JFK) and other unpatriotic dissidents (Malcom X, MLK, RK, among others) and undermine democracy home and abroad, but are now said to be just fine upstanding American citizens who work within the government bureaucracies and are patriotic believers in democracy intent on doing the right thing and keeping their jobs.

This redefinition has been in the works for a few years, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that this tricky treat was being prepared for our consumption a few years ago by The Council on Foreign Relations.  In its September/October 2017 edition of its journal Foreign Affairs, Jon D. Michaels, in “Trump and the Deep State: The Government Strikes Back,” writes:

Furious at what they consider treachery by internal saboteurs, the president and his surrogates have responded by borrowing a bit of political science jargon, claiming to be victims of the “deep state,” a conspiracy of powerful, unelected bureaucrats secretly pursuing their own agenda. The concept of a deep state is valuable in its original context, the study of developing countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where shadowy elites in the military and government ministries have been known to countermand or simply defy democratic directives. Yet it has little relevance to the United States, where governmental power structures are almost entirely transparent, egalitarian, and rule-bound.

The White House is correct to perceive widespread resistance inside the government to many of its endeavors. But the same way the administration’s media problems come not from “fake news” but simply from news, so its bureaucratic problems come not from an insidious, undemocratic “deep state” but simply from the state—the large, complex hive of people and procedures that constitute the U.S. federal government.

Notice how in these comical passages about U.S. government transparency and egalitarianism, Michaels slyly and falsely attributes to Trump the very definition – “unelected bureaucrats” – that in the next paragraph he claims to be the real deep state, which is just the state power structures. Pseudo-innocence conquers all here as there is no mention of the Democratic party, Russiagate, etc., and all the machinations led by the intelligence services and Democratic forces to oust Trump from the day he was elected. State power structures just move so quickly, as anyone knows who has studied the speed which bureaucracies operate. Ask Max Weber.

Drip by drip over the past few years, this “state bureaucracy” meme has been introduced by the mainstream media propagandists as they have gradually revealed that the government deep-staters are just doing their patriotic duty in trying openly to oust an elected president.

Many writers have commented on the recent New York Times article, Trump’s War on the ‘Deep State’ Turns Against Him asserting that the Times has finally admitted to the existence of the deep state, which is true as far as it goes, which is not too far. But in this game of deceptive revelations – going shallower to go deeper – what is missing is a focus on the linguistic mind control involved in the changed definition.

In a recent article by Robert W. Merry, whose intentions I am not questioning – New York Times Confirms: It’s Trump Versus the Deep State – originally published at The American Conservative and widely reprinted, the lead-in to the article proper reads: “Even the Gray Lady admits the president is up against a powerful bureaucracy that wants him sunk.” So the “powerful bureaucracy” redefinition, this immovable force of government bureaucrats, is slipped into public consciousness as what the deep state supposedly is. Gone are CIA conspirators and evil doers. In their place we find career civil servants doing their patriotic duty.

Then there is The New York Times’ columnist James Stewart who, appearing on the Today Show recently, where he was promoting his new book, told Savannah Guthrie that:

Well, you meet these characters in my book, and the fact is, in a sense, he’s right. There is a deep state… there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law. They do not work for the President. They work for the American people. And, as Comey told me in my book, ‘thank goodness for that,’ because they are protecting the Constitution and the people when individuals – we don’t have a monarch, we don’t have a dictator – they restrain them from crossing the boundaries of law. What Trump calls the deep state in the United States is protecting the American people and protecting the Constitution. It’s a positive thing in this sense.

So again we are told that the deep-state bureaucracy is defending the Constitution and protecting the American people, as James Comey told Stewart, “in my book, ‘thank goodness for that,’” as he put it so eloquently. These guys talk in books, of course, not person to person, but that is the level not just of English grammar and general stupidity, but of the brazen bullshit these guys are capable of.

This new and shallow deep state definition has buried the old meaning of the deep state as evil conspirators carrying out coup d’états, assassinations, and massive media propaganda campaigns at home and abroad, and who, by implication and direct declaration, never existed in the good old U.S.A. but only in countries such as Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan where shadowy elites killed and deposed leaders and opponents in an endless series of coup d’états. No mention in Foreign Affairs, of course, of the American support for the ruthless leaders of these countries who have always been our dear allies when they obey our every order and serve as our servile proxies in murder and mayhem.

Even Edward Snowden, the courageous whistleblower in exile in Russia, in a recent interview with Joe Rogan, repeats this nonsense when he says the deep state is just “career government officials” who want to keep their jobs and who outlast presidents. From his own experience, he should know better. Much better.

Linguistic mind control is insidious like the slow drip of a water faucet. After a while you don’t hear it and just go about your business, even as your mind, like a rotting rubber washer, keeps disintegrating under propaganda’s endless reiterations.

To think that the deep state is government employees just doing their patriotic duty is plain idiocy and plainer propaganda.

Happy Halloween!

October 31, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 2 Comments

The History (And Future) of Social Engineering

Corbett • 06/22/2014

James Corbett joins Walter Hendricks of The Solvinur Event to discuss social engineering. In this wide-ranging conversation, James and Walter break down propaganda and PR, advertising and education, how the media is used to form our habits and opinions, and how to fight back against the social engineers.

SHOW NOTES:
Propaganda by Edward Bernays

Carroll Quigley on the Bank for International Settlements

Aldous Huxley: The Ultimate Revolution

How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute launched the 2012 and psychedelic revolutions

B.F. Skinner’s Shaping Experiment (“Skinner’s Box”)

Most Disturbing Presentation Ever

The Roboroach

José Delgado stops a bull in its tracks with electromagnetic mind control

“Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” by Étienne de La Boétie

Edward Bernays Explains the “Torches of Freedom” Campaign

Meet Adam Curtis, Establishment Contrarian

October 30, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

From Russiagate to Ukrainegate: An Impeachment Inquiry

By Renée Parsons | OffGuardian | October 30, 2019

As the Quantum field oversees the disintegration of institutions no longer in service to the public, the Democratic party continues to lose their marbles, perpetuating their own simulated bubble as if they alone are the nation’s most trusted purveyors of truth.

Since the Mueller Report failed to deliver on the dubious Russiagate accusations, the party of Thomas Jefferson continues to remain in search of another ethical pretense to justify continued partisan turmoil.  In an effort to discredit and/or distract attention from the Barr-Durham and IG investigations, the Dems have come up with an implausible piece of political theatre known as Ukrainegate which has morphed into an impeachment inquiry.

The Inspector General’s Report, which may soon be ready for release, will address the presentation of fabricated FBI evidence to the FISA Court for permission to initiate a surveillance campaign on Trump Administration personnel. In addition, the Department of Justice has confirmed that Special Investigator John Durham’s probe into the origin of the FBI’s counter intelligence investigation during the 2016 election has moved from an administrative review into the criminal prosecution realm. Durham will now be able to actively pursue candidates for possible prosecution.

The defensive assault from the Democrat hierarchy and its corporate media cohorts can be expected to reach a fevered pitch of manic proportions as both investigations threatened not only their political future in 2020 but perhaps their very existence.

NBC suggests that the Barr investigation is a ‘mysterious’ review “amid concerns about whether the probe has any legal or factual basis” while the NY Times continues to cast doubt that the investigation has a legitimate basis implying that AG Barr is attempting to “deliver a political victory for President Trump.”  The Times misleads its readers with:

Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it.”

… when in fact, it was the Russiagate collusion allegations that Trump referred to as a hoax, rather than the Mueller investigation per se.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va), minority leader of the Senate Intel Committee suggested that Attorney General William Barr “owes the Committee an explanation” since the committee is completing a “three-year bipartisan investigation” that has “found nothing to justify” Barr’s expanded effort.

The Senator’s gauntlet will be ever so fascinating as the public reads exactly how the Intel Committee spent three years and came up with “nothing” as compared to what Durham and the IG reports have to say.

On the House side, prime-time whiners Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) commented that news of the Durham investigation moving towards criminal liability “raised profound concerns that Barr has lost his independence and become a vehicle for political revenge” and that “the Rule of Law will suffer irreparable damage.”

Since Barr has issued no determination of blame other than to assure a full, fair and rigorous investigation, it is curious that the Dems are in premature meltdown as if they expect indictments even though the investigations are not yet complete.

There is, however, one small inconvenient glitch that challenges the Democratic version of reality that does not fit their partisan spin. The news that former FBI General Counsel James Baker is actively cooperating with the Barr-Durham investigation ought to send ripples through the ranks. Baker has already stated that it was a ‘small group’ within the agency who led the counterintelligence inquiry into the Trump campaign; notably former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

Baker’s cooperation was not totally unexpected since he also cooperated with the Inspector General’s FISA abuse investigation which is awaiting public release.

As FBI General Counsel, Baker had a role in reviewing the FISA applications before they were submitted to the FISA court and currently remains under criminal investigation for making unauthorized leaks to the media.

As the agency’s chief legal officer, Baker had to be a first-hand participant and privy to every strategy discussion and decision (real or contemplated). It was his job to identify potential legal implications that might negatively affect the agency or boomerang back on the FBI. In other words, Baker is in a unique position to know who knew what and when did they knew it.

His ‘cooperation’ can be generally attributed to being more concerned with saving his own butt rather than the Constitution.

In any case, the information he is able to provide will be key for getting to the true origins of Russiagate and the FISA scandal. Baker’s collaboration may augur others facing possible prosecution to step up since ‘cooperation’ usually comes with the gift of a lesser charge.

With a special focus on senior Obama era intel officials Durham has reportedly already interviewed up to two dozen former and current FBI employees as well as officials in the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

From the number of interviews conducted to date it can be surmised that Durham has been accumulating all the necessary facts and evidence as he works his way up the chain of command, prior to concentrating on top officials who may be central to the investigation.

It has also been reported that Durham expects to interview current and former intelligence officials including CIA analysts, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper regarding Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.

In a recent CNN interview, when asked if he was concerned about any wrongdoing on the part of intel officials, Clapper nervously responded:

I don’t know. I don’t think there was any wrongdoing. It is disconcerting to know that we are being investigated for having done our duty and done what we were told to do by the President.”

One wonders if Clapper might be a candidate for ‘cooperating’ along with Baker.

As CIA Director, Brennan made no secret of his efforts to nail the Trump Administration. In the summer of 2016, he formed an inter-agency taskforce to investigate what was being reported as Russian collusion within the Trump campaign. He boasted to Rachel Maddow that he brought NSA and FBI officials together with the CIA to ‘connect the dots.”

With the addition of James Clapper’s DNI, three reports were released: October, 2016, December, 2016 and January, 2017 all disseminating the Russian-Trump collusion theory which the Mueller Report later found to be unproven.

Since 1947 when the CIA was first authorized by President Harry Truman who belatedly regretted his approval, the agency has been operating as if they report to no one and that they never owe the public or Congress any explanation of their behaviour or activity or how they spend the money.

Since those days it has been a weak-minded Congress, intimidated and/or compromised Members who have allowed intel to run their own show as if they are immune to the Constitution and the Rule of Law.  Since 1947, there has been no functioning Congress willing to provide true accountability or meaningful oversight on the intel community.

Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31

October 30, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , | 2 Comments

The Myth of the Apolitical Scientist

It’s absurd to say scientists are only now speaking up. Reuters publishes egregious climate propaganda.

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 28, 2019

Matthew Green is not a naive teenager. He’s a seasoned journalist who has worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and who has written a book about a Ugandan warlord. So how do we explain the Reuters story he filed earlier this month, headlined Scientists endorse mass civil disobedience to force climate action?

Its major theme is that there’s something new going on, that the climate situation is so dire scientists have begun behaving in an extraordinary manner. 400 scientists from 20 countries have broken “with the caution traditionally associated” with their profession, he says. Having previously “shunned overt political debate,” they’ve now discovered “a moral duty” to “defy convention.”

Green quotes Julia Steinberger, an ecological economist:

We can’t allow the role of scientists to be just to write papers and publish them in obscure journals and hope somehow that somebody out there will pay attention. We need to be rethinking the role of the scientist… We can’t allow science as usual.

Lordy, where have these people been? Living in a cave for the past 50 years? Activist scientists who insist that “incalculable human suffering” will result if the world doesn’t prioritize their opinions above all else, are nothing new. Not even close.

In his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, biology professor Paul Ehrlich declared that “the time of famines” had arrived. The only “hope for survival” was “drastic worldwide measures.” His book was a political treatise that advocated “brutal and heartless decisions” to solve a problem that never did materialize.

The 1972 bestseller, titled A Blueprint for Survival, similarly proclaimed that “a succession of famines, epidemics, social crises and wars” were inevitable if governments didn’t take specific, dramatic actions. Politicians and the public were urged to pay attention since “34 distinguished biologists, ecologists, doctors and economists” had attached their names to that blueprint.

Steinberger’s comments to the contrary, it has been a long time since we’ve had ‘science as usual.’ Here’s a quote from a book published in 1976:

In the past, specialists have often been reluctant to engage in political debate or to share their knowledge and fears with the general public… This generalization no longer holds true. In many branches of science there are radical movements. Increasingly, both in the rich and poor worlds, scientists are involved in active advocacy which they see as an intellectual and ethical duty.” [bold added]

In 1988, climatologist and activist James Hansen mainstreamed global warming as a planetary crisis. Since then, rather than expressing his political opinions lawfully, he has behaved in a manner that has resulted in his arrest on at least four occasions: June 2009, September 2010, August 2011, and February 2013. His actions have produced headlines such as Top NASA scientist arrested (again) in White House protest.

Canadian geneticist and household name David Suzuki has similarly declared it “crystal clear that the planet is losing a battle with the deadliest predator in the history of life on Earth” – humanity. That statement, and many others characteristic of a drama queen, appeared in his 1990 book, It’s a Matter of Survival. 29 years ago, the message from this scientist was unambiguous: adopt his advice or really bad things would happen.

In 2003, environmental biologist Stephen Schneider boycotted a scientific conference because the presentations made there would afterward be published by Cambridge University Press. Schneider said he’d only participate if that publisher withdrew Bjorn Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Far from being neutral and dispassionate, this major figure in climate science was demanding the equivalent of book burning.

In 2007, Mark Serreze, a “senior scientist at the U.S. government’s National Snow and Ice Data Center,” told the Associated Press: “The Arctic is screaming.” Within the same article, a second scientist, Jay Zwally, was equally over-the-top with his language. Global warming had already become so serious, he said, “the canary has died.”

Elsewhere, I’ve explained how 5 of the 10 lead authors of a crucial chapter in a 2007 climate report had documented links to the activist lobby group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Indeed, 79 individuals with ties to the WWF helped write that report.

In 2009, hundreds of Canadian scientists, as well as several scientific organizations, signed an open letter published in a national newspaper promoting particular responses to climate change. The letter was orchestrated by the WWF. And let’s not forget UK economist Nicholas Stern’s insistence that a 2009 climate meeting was absolutely our “last chance to save the planet.”

click for full article

In 2010, climate modeller Andrew Weaver (who went on to become the leader of the Green Party in the province of British Columbia), called Canada’s democratically elected Prime Minister a “dictator,” and compared Canada to Zimbabwe in a media interview that was anything but an example of dispassionate science.

In 2012, Canadian economist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) author Mark Jaccard was among 13 people arrested after blockading a coal train. Meanwhile, a powerful member of the Obama administration, scientist Jane Lubchenco, flew to Australia to deliver a speech that urged other scientists to become passionate, engaged activists.

In 2014, when the IPCC released a portion of its new report, it didn’t stick carefully to neutral language. Instead, it presented itself as the planet’s saviour (see the image at the top of this post).

In 2015, twenty US academics publicly urged President Obama to target dissenting scientists with organized crime-type investigations. Also that year, dozens of “members of the scientific community” issued an open letter urging museums to spurn donations from people alleged to be large “contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.”

I could go on. And on. And on. For at least half a century, numerous scientists have spoken publicly about issues of the day. They have scolded and threatened us. They have frightened our children, and consumed police resources.

Do scientists who work hard at being neutral and dispassionate still exist? Of course. But it is laughably wrong for journalist Green to suggest that, only now in 2019, have matters become so urgent that scientists are crossing a hitherto uncrossed line.

That premise is so patently incorrect, it makes this Reuters news story look like pure propaganda.

October 30, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 1 Comment

Democrats Cheer ‘Hillary Unplugged’ After Clinton Labels Gabbard A Russian Asset

SHADOWPROOF | October 22, 2019

Numerous Democrats and liberal pundits have come to Hillary Clinton’s defense as she faces a backlash from everyone from President Donald Trump to Senator Bernie Sanders for her suggestion that Representative Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset.

Lisa Lerer, a New York Times reporter, celebrated Clinton as a “master troll” who “picked a fight” with Gabbard. She’s “living her best life,” as she spreads rumors that a sitting congresswoman is likely an agent of a foreign power. “Welcome to Hillary Unplugged.”

She wrote an article for the Times before the October 15 debate, “What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?” It freely cast aspersions on Gabbard for not dropping out of the presidential race and followed a template prevalent in the United States media since Gabbard declared her candidacy.

Zac Petkanas, who was the rapid response director for the Clinton campaign, quipped that it took awhile for Gabbard to react to Clinton because she had to run her response by Vladimir Putin first. “Honestly, it probably sounded better in the original Russian.”

Phillippe Reines, a former Clinton spokesperson, later added, “In three tweets, [Gabbard] called Hillary worse than she has ever called Assad or Putin. If Russian-compromised Trump and third-party menace Jill Stein had a child, it would be Tulsi Gabbard.”

Clinton Democrats have long believed, absent any proof, that the Green Party presidential candidate was a Russian agent whose role in the 2016 election was to ensure Clinton lost to Trump. And Clinton said Russia may want Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate but that depends on whether Stein will give up her role in the party.

Adam Parkhomenko, founder of the Ready For Hillary super PAC, reacted, “Tulsi Gabbard (R-Moscow) is back on the clock,” and, “Tulski Gabbard is wide awake at almost midnight local time in Moscow. For those that want to support the American running against her and lift up our efforts to elect him, let’s add another 250 contributions to his campaign now.”

When Sanders came to Gabbard’s defense, he viscerally reacted, “Fuck Bernie. I’d forgotten how much I despise that asshole. Thanks for the reminder.”

Zerlina Maxwell, a former Clinton campaign official and director of SiriusXM’s progressive programming, said she “didn’t go far enough, and we have to decide whether or not we’ll listen to Hillary Clinton.” She added, “In 2016, anchors literally laughed at Hillary Clinton when she said it was Russia” targeting her campaign.

Back in March, it was Maxwell who lied about one of the first speeches Sanders delivered as part of his 2020 presidential campaign. She said he did not mention race or gender until 23 minutes into the speech.

Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin, hosts of “The View,” applauded Clinton and described Gabbard as a “useful idiot” and a “Trojan horse” candidate.

“She told us about Russia, she told us about the probable interference,” Hostin remarked. “She was secretary of state. She has deep world knowledge of world issues. I thought, where’s the lie?”

Similarly, Terry McAuliffe promoted the viewpoint that the public should trust Clinton. Maybe she knows something more that she is not sharing at this moment.

“This is something that she’s been reading a lot about. I don’t know whether Tulsi Gabbard is connected with the Russians,” McAuliffe said on CNN. “But the Russian state media has been very favorable toward her. She won’t come out and really go after [Bashar] Assad, who is a genocidal dictator.”

Media hucksters have tried to play dumb, pretending it was never confirmed that Clinton was referring to Gabbard.

Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart said on MSNBC that Clinton had not named names. However, Gabbard was like, “‘Me! Me! Me! Me!’” (In 2016, Capehart spread false accusations that Sanders shared “fake photos” of himself engaged in civil rights activism.)

As NBC News reporter Jonathan Allen put it, Clinton said there was a Russian asset, didn’t name anybody, and yet Gabbard reacted, “How dare you call me a Russian asset?”

But Clinton spokesperson Nick Merrill told reporters, “If the nesting doll fits,” and confirmed she was referring to Gabbard.

Kimberly Atkins, a senior news correspondent for WBUR, appeared on MSNBC’s “Up with Gura” on October 19 and said Gabbard “never denied being a Russian asset.” The panel erupted into nasty laughter.

Behar also said, “She hasn’t denied it. She hasn’t said anything in her tweets. ‘How dare you? It’s outrageous. Of course, I’m not.’ She didn’t say that. She’s just going after Hillary.”

The Daily Beast poured sprinkles on top of this McCarthyist sundae with an article headlined, “The Kremlin’s Strategy For the 2020 U.S. Election: Secure the Base, Split the Opposition.” Though it did not specifically highlight Clinton’s attack on Gabbard, it sought to lend credence to the thrust of what she claimed.

“Russia’s propagandists will seek agents-of-influence, individuals inside the American government and media able to influence national policy,” Daily Beast contributor Clint Watts wrote. “And the agents they seek this time around will largely be across the political left, seeking to amplify and connect their preferred Kremlin message with that of the right.”

It was Clinton and her supporters in and outside of the press, who went after Gabbard and sowed discord. Yet, based upon widespread delusions, many Democrats and liberal pundits would have the public believe this is exactly what Putin wants. He is pleased that Trump, Sanders, and various other Democratic presidential candidates are condemning the presidential nominee Trump defeated.

October 28, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | 2 Comments

The Democratic Party’s Umpteenth Nervous Breakdown

By Daniel Lazare | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 25, 2019

Another week, another Democratic Party nervous breakdown. Actually, last week saw two such breakdowns, one in response to White House spokesman Mick Mulvaney and the other with regard to remarks by an ever-paranoid Hillary Clinton.

Let’s begin with poor Mick, whose innocuous comments about the Ukraine triggered the first round of hysterics. His press conference last Thursday wasn’t going half-badly considering that he faced the impossible task of explaining why Donald Trump thought it was a good idea to host next June’s Group of Seven conference at a golf resort he owns in Miami.

But it was when he moved on to why his boss held up nearly $400 million in Ukrainian military aid that matters really got out of hand.

The reason, Mulvaney explained, was corruption: “President Trump is not a big fan of foreign aid. Never has been. Still isn’t. Doesn’t like spending money overseas, especially when it’s poorly spent. And that is exactly what drove this decision.”

Then came the money quote: “Did he also mention to me in pass[ing] the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that’s it. And that’s why we held up the money.”

Corporate media outlets went into a collective swoon. CNN said that Mulvaney’s remarks confirmed that Trump was trying to push the Ukraine “into investigating Democrats,” the Washington Post said they were proof that the White House was looking to validate “Trump’s favorite whackjob conspiracy theory,” while the New York Times said Washington was in “turmoil.”

But the real whackjob was the media itself. Admittedly, the Ukraine story is complicated because it concerns two separate investigations. One involves Rudy Giuliani, the president’s private attorney, who is looking into the high-paid job that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, landed at a Ukrainian natural-gas company known as Burisma Holdings while the vice president was allegedly battling Ukrainian corruption. The other involves Attorney General William Barr, whom Trump has assigned to look into the origins of Russiagate.

One investigation is private and unofficial, which is why the fact that Trump would ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help Giuliani out in his famous July 25 phone call is indeed troubling. But the other is perfectly legitimate. Considering that the Russiagate pseudo-scandal dominated headlines for two and a half years, Americans deserve to know how it arose and there’s nothing wrong with Trump leaning on Zelensky to help Barr get to the bottom of it.

Mulvaney left no doubt as to which investigation was which. “The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation,” he said. “And that is absolutely appropriate.” The prose may be a bit awkward but the meaning is clear. What concerned Trump were allegations of Russian interference in 2016, not the Burisma appointment two years earlier.

But reporters ignored the distinction in their rush to judgment. They did so because they’re incompetent or, more likely, because they’re intent on blurring the difference between the two. They’re terrified that the Barr investigation will undermine the report that their hero, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, issued last spring. Hence, they want to head him off at the pass by lumping his investigation in with Giuliani’s and tarring him as politically biased before his work is even complete.

It’s a desperate ploy that will end up undermining Mueller even more than he’s already undermined himself and will undermine Democratic as well.

The other nervous episode concerned Hillary Clinton’s astounding comments about Green Party leader Jill Stein and Democratic primary candidate Tulsi Gabbard in an interview with former Obama campaign manager (and Clinton sycophant) David Plouffe. “Yes, she’s a Russian asset,” Clinton said of Stein. “I mean totally.” Of Gabbard, she added: “I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians.”

The comments ignited a firestorm. When Gabbard shot back that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill tried to tough it out. “Divisive language filled with vitriol and conspiracy theories?” he said. “Can’t imagine a better proof point than this.”

But it’s not proof at all. Gabbard’s outrage was entirely justified while Clinton’s comments are examples of the free-form paranoia that has typified the anti-Russia campaign from the start. Evidence? Democrats like Clinton don’t need no stinking evidence (to paraphrase “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”). They figure that they can hurl the collusion charge at foreign-policy dissidents as much as they like and that the public will fall for it every time.

But it no longer works. People are wising up, and weekly bouts of outrage only wind up making Democrats look more foolish than they already are. This is why impeachment will fizzle and why the Democratic establishment is facing destruction at the hands of either Sanders or Trump. The phoniness of people like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Adam Schiff is as clear as the midday sun. It’s why they deserve to lose, and why they almost certainly will.

October 25, 2019 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Whitewashing Neoliberal Repression in Chile and Ecuador

By Lucas Koerner | FAIR | October 23, 2019

Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, people are rising up against right-wing, US-backed governments and their neoliberal austerity policies.

Currently in Chile, the government of billionaire Sebastian Piñera has deployed the army to crush nationwide demonstrations against inequality sparked by a subway fare hike.

In Ecuador, indigenous peoples, workers and students recently brought the country to a standstill during 11 days of protests against the gutting of fuel subsidies by President Lenín Moreno as part of an IMF austerity package.

One might expect these popular rebellions to receive unreservedly sympathetic coverage from international media that claim to be on the side of democracy and the common people. On the contrary, corporate journalists frequently describe these uprisings as dangerous alterations of “law and order,” laden with “violence,” “chaos” and “unrest.”

This portrait contrasts remarkably with coverage of anti-government protests in Venezuela, where generally the only violence highlighted is that allegedly perpetrated by the state. In the eyes of Western elite opinion, Venezuela’s middle-class opposition have long been leaders of a legitimate popular protest against an authoritarian, anti-American regime. Poor people rebelling against repressive US client states are considered an unacceptable deviation from this script.

‘Crackdown’ in Venezuela

Corporate journalists have never been able to contain their enthusiasm for the right-wing Venezuelan opposition’s repeated coup attempts, which are regularly cast as a “pro-democracy” movement (FAIR.org, 5/10/19).

In 2017, Venezuela’s opposition led four months of violent, insurrectionary protests demanding early presidential elections, resulting in over 125 dead,  including protesters, government supporters and bystanders. It was the opposition’s fifth major effort to oust the government by force since 2002.

Despite the demonstrations featuring attacks on journalists, lynchings and assassinations of government supporters, they were depicted as a “uprising” against “authoritarianism” (New York  Times, 6/22/17), a “rebellion” in the face of “the government’s crackdown” (Bloomberg, 5/18/17) and a David-like movement of “young firebrands” facing down a sinister regime (Guardian, 5/25/17). Reporters frequently attributed the mounting death toll to state security forces (France 24, 7/21/17; Newsweek, 6/20/17; Washington Post, 6/3/17), while generally ignoring opposition political violence reported to be responsible for over 30 deaths.

The pattern was repeated in January, when deadly clashes broke out across the country  in the days before and after opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself “interim president” with the US’s encouragement. Corporate outlets described the events as a “violent crackdown” (Independent, 1/24/19), with security forces “spreading terror…to target critics” (Reuters, 2/3/19) and “soldiers and paramilitary gunmen…hunting opposition activists” (Miami Herald, 1/27/19). International journalists based their accounts largely on pro-opposition sources, suppressing inconvenient details that complicated their Manichean narrative, such as the fact that some 38% of protests were violent and at least 28% featured armed confrontations with authorities.

Unlike in Chile and Ecuador, corporate outlets have consistently vilified Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—who won 6.2 million votes, or 31% of the electorate last year—as an “authoritarian” (FAIR.org, 4/11/19, 8/5/19) or a “dictator” (FAIR.org, 4/11/19), justifying the latest coup effort.

Chile ‘Riots’ 

In recent days, Chileans have taken to the streets in mass demonstrations against the Piñera administration, following a further increase in Santiago’s exorbitant subway fare.

Beginning as high school student–led protests, the movement has escalated into a full-scale rebellion against the savagely unequal neoliberal order, prompting the government to militarize the streets and impose a curfew for the first time since the Western-backed Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90).

Despite the largest protests since the return of democracy, the international corporate media have largely referred to them in pejorative terms such as “riots” (CNN, 10/19/19; CNBC, 10/21/19), “violent unrest” (New York Times, 10/19/19) and “chaos” (NPR, 10/19/19; Vice, 10/21/19), providing a moral casus belli for war against the people.

Revealingly, no major outlets have described the government’s brutal repression as a “crackdown,” nor called into question the legitimacy of Piñera, who was elected in 2017 with the backing of 26% of registered voters.

It’s true that international journalists are beginning to reference allegations of human rights violations reported by Chile’s National Human Rights Institute, including, as of October 23, 173 people shot and 18 dead, among them at least five presumably at the hands of authorities.

However, the victims of state violence in Chile have not received anywhere near the amount of attention international outlets have dedicated to protester deaths in Venezuela, where the dead have been movingly profiled (New York Times, 6/10/17; BBC, 5/14/17)—provided they were not lynched by the opposition.

In two emblematic cases, Manuel Rebolledo, 23, died on October 21 after being run over by a navy vehicle near Concepción, while Ecuadorian national Romario Veloz, 26, was shot dead the day before at a protest in La Serena. Neither men have been mentioned by name in Western press reports.

It would appear that the only worthy victims, in the eyes of US corporate journalists, are those that have propaganda value from the standpoint of Western foreign policy interests. Reporters spontaneously empathize with neoliberal technocrats like Piñera, even as they occasionally chide them for “excesses.”

“Mr. Piñera said that he is mindful of the broader grievances that fueled the unrest… But he seemed to have difficulty coming to grips with the real source of the population’s frustrations,” the New York Times (10/21/19) sympathetically observed, before going on to note that the president has declared “war” against his own people.

The paper of record suggested that Chileans might find the imposition of martial law “jarring,” given that “the military had killed and tortured thousands of people just decades ago in the name of restoring order.” But despite the article being headlined “What You Need to Know About the Unrest in Chile,” the Times did not find it relevant to mention anywhere that state security forces were currently maiming and killing demonstrators in the streets, and allegedly torturing detainees.

The dominant narrative fed to the public is that Piñera’s government has been “inept” in responding to the protests (Economist, 10/20/19; Reuters, 10/21/19; New York Times, 10/21/19), but never criminal or cruel.

No Western newspapers have published scathing op-eds calling Piñera a “dictator” and demanding their government take action to “restore democracy,” as they have done regularly in the case of Venezuela (FAIR.org, 4/11/19). Rather, they counsel the billionaire president to address “inequality,” barring any reference to what is increasingly coming to resemble state terror (New York Times, 10/22/19; Guardian, 10/23/19; Bloomberg, 10/23/19).

Corporate journalists continue  to whitewash Piñera, describing him as “center-right” (Guardian, 10/21/19; CNBC, 10/19/19; Reuters, 10/21/19) and concealing his personal ties to murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet and those of his top cabinet members.

Ecuador ‘Violence’ 

Corporate journalists have shown only marginally more sympathy to Ecuador’s recent indigenous-led uprising against IMF-imposed austerity measures, frequently described in headlines as “violent protests” (CNN, 10/8/19; Guardian, 10/8/19; USA Today, 10/9/19; Financial Times, 10/8/19).

President Moreno has yet to be labeled by the international media as “authoritarian,” despite ordering soldiers to repress demonstrators in the streets, imposing a curfew, suspending basic civil liberties and arresting rival politicians.

Since betraying his campaign promise to continue his predecessor Rafael Correa’s left-wing policies. and embracing the oligarchy he ran against, Moreno has become the darling of Western elite opinion (FAIR.org, 2/4/18).

Like in Chile, corporate outlets have whitewashed Moreno’s vicious crackdown, which left seven dead, around a thousand arrested and a similar figure wounded. However, corporate outlets have been even more nefarious in obfuscating the origins of the crisis in Ecuador.

As Joe Emersberger has recently exposed for FAIR (10/23/19), Western journalists’ favorite lie is that Moreno “inherited a debt crisis that ballooned as his predecessor and one-time mentor, former President Rafael Correa, took out loans for a major dam, highways, schools, clinics and other projects” (New York Times, 10/8/19). In fact, the country’s debt-to-GDP level remains low, though it has increased slightly under Moreno, due not to public works but to his pro-elite policies.

Corporate outlets have for the most part admitted that Moreno has presented no evidence to back his ludicrous claims of Correa and Maduro supporters orchestrating the protests; nonetheless, they have, with few exceptions (DW, 10/14/19; Reuters, 10/12/19), shamefully ignored Moreno’s draconian persecution of Correaist politicians (including elected representatives), which he justifies on the basis of the very same conspiracy theory. This coverage contrasts sharply with the red carpet treatment regularly provided to Venezuela’s US-friendly opposition politicians, regardless of how many coups they perpetrate (Reuters, 4/30/19; LA Times, 4/30/19; Guardian, 2/6/19).

Western Media Gendarmerie 

It is not coincidental that Western journalists stand aghast at the violence of the excluded and exploited in Chile and Ecuador, while rationalizing that spearheaded by Washington-backed opposition elites in Venezuela.

This bias has nothing to do with any actual amount of looting or arson. Rather, it is the eruption of the racialized poor into polite bourgeois society’s technocratic body politic that is viscerally violent to local neocolonial elites and their Western professional-class backers.

Ecuador’s protests are the latest in a long line of anti-neoliberal uprisings, which brought down three presidents between 1997 and 2005.

The rebellion exploding in Chile is the largest in over a generation, evidencing the terminal legitimacy crisis of the “low-intensity democracy” crafted by Pinochet to maintain the neoliberal model imposed at gunpoint. The Chilean uprising has genuinely terrified elites, leading  the right-wing president to wage war on his own people. At stake is not just the stability of a key Western ally, but more crucially, neoliberalism’s ideological narrative that has upheld Chile as a “success story.”

Corporate journalists will most likely continue to muffle themselves vis-a-vis repressive US client states, in the same way that they systematically conceal the impact of Washington’s sanctions on Venezuela (FAIR.org, 6/26/19), which are estimated to have already killed 40,000 Venezuelans since 2017.

If the first casualty of war is truth, its self-anointed purveyors in the international media have much blood on their hands indeed.

October 25, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

West’s hacking allegations aimed at ‘driving a wedge’ between Iran, Russia: Moscow

Press TV – October 25, 2019

Russia has dismissed a report by Western media this week that Russian hackers had used Iranian computer infrastructure to attack dozens of countries across the world.

Citing British and American spy agencies, Reuters reported Monday that a cyber-espionage group, known as Turla and allegedly linked to Russian intelligence agency, had hijacked the tools of an Iranian group to lead attacks in more than 35 countries over the last 18 months.

The attacks were allegedly carried out against government departments, military installations and industrial organizations, the British news agency said.

A spokesman for the Russian embassy in the UK reacted to the report on Thursday, describing it as “an unsavory interpretation of a concise report of the British National Cyber Security Center and the American National Security Agency.”

“The security services themselves are not putting forward any accusations against Russia and Russian citizens,” he added.

The spokesman said that the publications are aimed at driving “a wedge” between Moscow and Tehran, both of which have repeatedly denied Western hacking allegations in the past.

Russia and Iran enjoy strong bilateral ties and have been working in a strategic partnership format on their issues of mutual interest.

Russia has been critical of Washington’s exit from a 2015 multilateral deal with Iran and the re-imposition of harsh sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Tehran and Moscow have also been assisting Syria in its efforts to uproot the terrorist groups that have been wreaking havoc on the Arab state since 2011 with the backing of Washington and its allies.

October 25, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Pentagon Grants Earth Another 20 Year Reprieve

By Tony Heller | Real Climate Science | October 24, 2019

The Pentagon says the world could end in 20 years because of global warming.

U.S. Military Could Collapse Within 20 Years Due to Climate Change, Report Commissioned By Pentagon Says – VICE

This is good news, because in 2004 they said the world would end in 2020.

Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us | Environment | The Guardian

And the new date is 65 years after the CIA said global cooling was going to kill us.

Daily News – Google News Archive Search

October 24, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment

More on the Quincy Institute: Don’t Mention Israel

By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | October 21, 2019

I have written frequently about how the overwhelming deference to Israeli perceptions not only distorts U.S. foreign policy, it also corrupts discourse regarding genuine national interests at all levels. The mainstream media, where Zionist journalists and editors exist in grossly disproportionate numbers, has long been a source of fake news about the Middle East, successfully obscuring Israel’s abominable record of war crimes and ethnic cleansing. The media lies overlap and often become self-propagating, with one lie from the likes of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC being employed to confirm the veracity of another similar lie being floated by someone like Jake Tapper on CNN.

So, the media, which is part of the Establishment and has a vested interest in promoting the status quo, is part of the “intellectual” underpinning of the government policies that it prefers. And it is joined by a more powerful and secretive ally in the form of the numerous think tanks that have sprung up in Washington like diseased mushrooms over the past twenty years. It is the think tanks that send ideologically driven “experts” to testify in front of congressional committees regarding policy, that draft legislation for lazy legislators, and that host well-funded panel discussions in which they air their biased views on the state of the nation.

I have written several times about the new think tank kid on the block the Quincy Institute, which is currently planning on “launching” during the month of November. Quincy, which claims to represent “Responsible Statecraft,” is largely funded by George Soros and the Charles Koch, both of whom have considerable negative baggage, and one is scarcely ever wrong when positing that compromising one’s views in exchange for money and celebrity is what Washington is all about.

My most recent rant on Quincy involved an article by the organization’s president, Professor Andrew Bacevich, whose books I have previously admired. His piece was entitled “President Trump, Please End the American Era in the Middle East.” The article appeared as one of Bacevich’s regular weekly contributions to The American Conservative (TAC) website under the rubric “Realism and Restraint.” I cited it as a good example of how self-censorship by authors works.

The article particularly focused on the foreign policy pronouncements of Bret Stephens, the resident neocon who writes for The New York Times. Stephens, per Bacevich, has been urging constant war in the Middle East and worrying lest “we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the American era in the Middle East.”

Bacevich wrote the article without once mentioning Israel in spite of the fact that Stephens is an arch-propagandist for the Jewish state, a clearly deliberate omission that was noted not only by me but also by a number of comments from other readers. As the TAC site where the article appeared is heavily moderated, one suspects that additional, more vitriolic comments were not allowed to appear.

Bacevich is clearly on a roll. He followed up the piece on TAC with a stunningly ridiculous propaganda piece entitled “Foreign governments are messing with our elections the old-fashioned way” that appeared last week in the Boston Globe.

The article begins: “President Trump’s record as a unifier is spotty at best. Yet on at least one issue, he has helped forge a solid consensus: Americans are not going to tolerate further outside meddling in their politics. In discussing next year’s elections, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell recently put it this way: ‘Any foreign country that messes with us is going to have a serious problem in return.’ The integrity of our electoral system is sacrosanct. Consider yourself warned, Mr. Putin. The Mueller report showed conclusively that in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election Russian hackers had done plenty of messing. Republicans and Democrats alike (if not President Trump himself) are now intent on preventing any recurrence of such interference, whether by Russia or other mischief-making interlopers such as Iran or China. Patriotic citizens must hope that those efforts will succeed.”

Let’s pause right there. Any article that pretends to be a serious discussion of America’s relationship with foreign powers should avoid quoting Mitch McConnell, who is possibly one of the slimiest politicians currently on display in the Senate. All his judgments are conditioned not by the national interest but rather by political considerations that relate to advancing his own personal agenda as well as the agenda of establishment Republicans. If the “integrity” of the U.S. electoral system is truly threatened, nearly all of the damage comes from inside the system, where corruption is rampant at all levels.

And, one might also note that the Mueller report may have demonstrated that in 2016 there were certain intrusions and manipulations by entities that may or may not have been connected to the Russian government, but it never revealed any plan by the Kremlin to influence voters in any serious way or change the results. It has not even been conclusively demonstrated that the Russians hacked anyone as the FBI has never been able to examine the Democratic National Committee computers. In fact, it is widely recognized that the Russian click-bait efforts on social media were insignificant and had no influence on the outcome. Overturning election results is called “regime change” and it is something that the United States does regularly, not the Russians.

Bacevich continues, “Yet those same citizens would do well to consider the other ways in which foreign governments, many of them ostensible friends, have habitually interfered in our politics. To do so, those governments do not employ the latest innovations in information warfare, waged via social media. No, they mess with our politics the old-fashioned way, distributing vast sums of money to buy influence.”

The professor makes a good point, that money in politics can create access and buy influence, but he then goes on to cite Saudi Arabia as a prime example of that specific form of corruption. He claims that the Saudis spent in 2018 alone “$33 million in their attempts to influence US policy” and wonders “… why the pervasive use of Saudi money to influence U.S. policy is any more tolerable than Moscow’s campaign to tilt the outcome of a presidential election in favor of its preferred candidate.”

Bacevich concludes with “Interested in salvaging the remnants of integrity that survive in American democracy? Well, it won’t be enough to stop the hackers employed by Moscow or Beijing or Tehran (even assuming that it’s possible to do so). To prevent foreign governments from mucking around where they are not wanted will require a concerted effort to get outside money out of American politics altogether. The moneychangers need to be ousted from the temple.”

With this recent series of somewhat related articles Professor Bacevich, unfortunately, defines himself as just another run-of-the-mill American hack propagandist. The enemies list includes Russia, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia but it deliberately avoids mentioning that country the more than any other interferes in U.S. politics. That country is, of course, Israel.

The $33 million that the Saudis allegedly spend on lobbying the U.S. is little more than chump change for the Israel Lobby, which is awash with money donated by Jewish oligarchs like casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who came up with three times that much and more in 2016 to insure that America would have a solidly pro-Israel foreign policy. The Lobby plays with hundreds of millions of dollars annually, costs the U.S. taxpayer billions in various free rides for the Jewish state and has hundreds of full-time employees in groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

Andrew Bacevich is a smart man and he knows well that what I have written about above is correct. He knows first-hand that Israel’s interference in U.S. politics is highly organized, generously funded and ongoing at every level of government to obscure what Israel actually represents while also inter alia making it illegal to criticize the Jewish state in any way. Professor Bacevich fully well knows those things even as he pontificates about Americans not tolerating foreign influence in our politics, so why doesn’t he tell the truth for a change? Is it all about the Quincy Institute’s Benjamins?

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , | 4 Comments

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