Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC
Matt Kwong, Accessory after the Fact [source: CBC]
Winter Patriot | September 15, 2016
Number 4 : Matt Kwong and the CBC, for “Why the ‘9/11 Truth’ movement endures 15 years later”
As we saw in the previous installment, when Jack Holmes tried to prove the Truthers wrong on all major points and failed dismally, a head-on, evidence-based attack on 9/11 Truth is sub-optimal strategy. In this episode, we turn to an accessory after the fact who set himself a much different task, but failed anyway.
Presumably because he’s too smart to attack the Truth Movement from the front, Matt Kwong of the CBC comes at it from the rear. Rather than taking on the evidence, which did no good at all for Jack Holmes, Matt Kwong turns to time-honored journalistic tactics: smear and innuendo, woven together with sleight-of-hand that would have made a magician drool if it had worked.
The result is not merely a pathetic fail but a nasty one — a transparently ugly smear against the people who want to know the truth about 9/11, and especially against Bob McIlvaine, who lost his son Bobby that day.
Bob McIlvaine has been trying to find out what happened to Bobby, and trying to get people to care about what happened to all of us, for the past 15 years. To those of us who have followed the story, Bob McIlvaine is something of a role model — because he didn’t believe the lies he was told, and he didn’t cower when he was told to sit down and shut up, and he’s been waging an uphill battle for a long time, and he hasn’t quit.
If Bobby McIlvaine had died under mysterious circumstances in a foreign country, and Bob had spent 15 years trying to find out what happened to him, Bob would be seen as a heroic figure. A paperback writer would churn out a vapid tribute to his dogged persistence and his enduring love for his son, and we would see the result in drugstores.
But because of where, and when, and how Bobby McIlvaine died, Bob’s efforts cannot be praised, only denigrated. This is how far we have fallen.
Under the bizarre sub-heading “Father of 9/11 victim reconciles unconventional beliefs with grief,” Matt Kwong writes:
Robert McIlvaine knows better than to talk, unsolicited, about the research he pores over at home in Oreland, Pa. […] it’s the circumstances around the attacks — specifically, McIlvaine’s beliefs about precisely how the world-altering event unfolded — that he’s cautious to discuss. […] “My wife doesn’t take me out; doesn’t go with me anymore because she’s afraid I’ll bring it up with friends,” he says. […] “No one wants to talk about it,” McIlvaine says. “It’s like you have leprosy.”
… and so on. But there’s a mystery. If no one wants to talk about it, why are people still talking about it?
There must be a reason. What could it be? … Well, maybe it’s the Internet!
Fifteen years later, the devastating attack on America that coincided with the nascent internet age continues to spawn discussions hosted in forums that speculate about the moon landing, the Hollow Earth hypothesis and the JFK assassination.
Here we go! This is called red herring and guilt by association, a truly journalistic combination of logical fallacies to provide just the right context for what comes next — the few relevant details we will ever get from Matt Kwong:
The official account says McIlvaine’s eldest son […] was […] on the 106th floor when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower.
McIlvaine suspects otherwise. Based on injuries his son sustained, including to his face and chest, he maintains Bobby was killed by an explosion, possibly before the plane crash. As Bobby was among the first 10 bodies found, he says, McIlvaine believes his son was in the tower’s lobby.
“If he was on the 106th floor, he wouldn’t have been found so quickly.”
I think Bob’s kidding himself. In my view, if Bobby was on the 106th floor, he probably wouldn’t have been found at all!
But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is the condition of Bobby’s body. “Injuries […] to his face and chest” hardly qualifies as an accurate description of the wounds.
Matt Kwong doesn’t give you enough details to help you understand this aspect of the story. But if you do some research to supplement his so-called journalism, you can learn quite a bit, fairly easily.
According to McIlvaine, the wounds described by the doctor indicated that his son had been hit by flying glass from some kind of massive blast. Bobby’s face was damaged beyond recognition, he had lacerations all over his chest from flying glass, and he had post-mortem burns. In fact, the blast was strong enough to literally blow Bobby out of his laced shoes (they were not on the body when it was brought to the morgue).
“My final summation is that he was walking into the building, and before he got into the building there was a huge explosion, and of course the force of it just threw him back into the open area,” McIlvaine says. “That’s why he was picked up so quickly, because the EMTs came down there so quickly. Someone had gotten him out of there and to the morgue before the towers came down.”
In other words, Bob has good reason to think Bobby was not killed by fire at the top of the tower, but by blast and flying glass at its base. And if Bob thinks these were the result of a massive explosion? Well, what else could it have been?
Matt Kwong could have told you this; anyone familiar with the stories of the 9/11 families could have done the same. Bob’s been speaking in public for a long time, and his story about Bobby — unlike the official narrative — hasn’t changed. He certainly wouldn’t have been reluctant to tell Matt Kwong why he thinks what he thinks.
But Matt Kwong can’t (or won’t) tell you all this. And the reason is simple: If you focus on two things — what Bob knows about his son’s death, and the official explanation behind the attacks — you can’t help seeing the basic contradiction: How could Bobby have been killed by an explosion if there were no explosions?
National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice responds to a question during testimony before the 9/11 Commission in the Hart Senate office building in Washington on April 8, 2004.
(Larry Downing/Reuters) [source: CBC]
What did Bob McIlvaine do about it? According to Matt Kwong, he waited to see what the government would say, thus:
McIlvaine attended the 9/11 Commission [but] he left angry and dissatisfied by testimony from then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
(Curiously (or not!), several paragraphs before mentioning Condoleezza Rice, the CBC inserted a photo of Miss Rice herself, looking cool and comfortable as she testified before the Commission. The photo, the caption, and the placement combine to create a subtle hint that Bob’s got his nose out of joint for nothing. I’ve included the photo and CBC’s caption verbatim, several paragraphs before mentioning it, to give you a subtle hint of what CBC is doing.)
But Matt Kwong doesn’t tell you about Miss Rice’s testimony. And he certainly wouldn’t want you to see a video of her being questioned. Matt Kwong won’t show you video evidence of the other family members who were outraged at the hearings, either.
But I digress. Here’s Matt Kwong again:
McIlvaine began to dig on his own for answers online, watching web documentaries such as Dylan Avery’s 9/11 truth staple, Loose Change, as well as reading more American history.
And this was the dangerous, slippery part. By daring to educate himself, Bob McIlvaine put himself in danger of becoming what’s called a “conspiracy theorist,” of the noxious variety known as “9/11 Truther.”
To help you “understand” what happened to Bob, Matt Kwong takes you on a journey to the land of conspiracy theory research. But he weaves the McIlvaine story through the travelogue, making things very confusing. (I didn’t say the confusion was deliberate.)
In this piece, I have shuffled the order somewhat, separating Bob McIlvaine’s story (which we’ve been reading) from the conspiracy theory research (to which we now turn).
Here’s Matt Kwong:
“People who are more personally distrustful tend to buy into conspiracy theories more,” says Mike Wood, a Canadian lecturer at the University of Winchester in England specializing in the psychology of conspiracy theories.
If anything, Americans seem more distrustful of their government than in a long time. […]
Wood says those suspicious of the government also tend to be more aware of “actual historical conspiracies, where the government did something shady.” […]
Research also shows conspiracy theories tend to reach peaks around “times of uncertainty,” according to Wood. In the case of something as extraordinary as a 9/11, an event resulting in thousands of lost lives, a massive reshaping of the iconic New York skyline and two wars, he says the conventional narrative may be tough to swallow.
It certainly is. And there’s nothing wrong with this analysis as far as it goes. But where does it go?
Matt Kwong again:
Some Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11. And so, alternative explanations filled the vacuum, says Dave Thomas, a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry […]
Dave Thomas may be Skeptical, but I fear he’s not quite skeptical enough!
It may be true that “Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11,” and it may be true that “alternative explanations filled the vacuum,” but there’s no causal connection here, because there’s a link missing.
As the attack was unfolding, and in the immediate aftermath, there was no vacuum. There was an avalanche. No matter where you turned, the news kept talking about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and Afghanistan, and the country was ready to go to war before the dust had settled. The vacuum came later, when more and more people began to see through the lies that comprise the official story. That’s when “alternative explanations filled the vacuum.”
As time went on, we learned more and more about the official story, and the more you know about it, the less credible it is, so the number of people who questioned it — or rejected it outright — grew. Some people started reading American history, just like Bob did. And what they learned was shocking … until all the pieces started to click into place. And suddenly, the nonsensical official story made perfect sense to them, once they saw it as an elaborate deception rather than a series of unprecedented failures.
Had the official story been credible, none of this would have happened. If the story had been even halfway believable, most of us would have been happy to believe it and get on with other things. But that didn’t happen.
I can explain what did happen in a parable. Think of this mystery as a “connect-the-dots” puzzle. From the day of the attack (or earlier in some cases), we started taking note of important dots, and wondering what they could mean. As the official story became clearer, we looked at how the dots were being arranged, and how they were being connected, and how many of the dots weren’t being connected at all, and we started to wonder. But when we realized how many of the dots had been erased, we stopped wondering, because we knew those dots didn’t erase themselves.
So it’s far more accurate to say the vacuum was caused by the holes in the official story.
The fact that “some Americans had never heard of al-Qaeda or even Afghanistan before 9/11” doesn’t make any difference at all.
But Matt Kwong can’t tell you that. Instead — if we want to follow his story — we have to think backwards.
Backward thinking regarding 9/11 shows up in many guises. For instance, as I showed in the previous installment, the 9/11 Commission was set up to run backward. They decided who committed the crime, and then they decided which evidence to consider, based on whether it could be used to support their predetermined conclusions. Then they put together a narrative that was supposed to tie all the evidence together. But there was a problem with some of the evidence, namely: the evidence they decided not to consider. And the problem is: We know about that evidence, and it undermines their story. So their solution is: the facts must be suppressed. And now the defenders of the official story claim not only that there were no explosions, but also that there was no evidence of explosions!
This claim is clearly false. The New York Times published an oral history of 9/11, compiled by the NYFD, in which more than 100 first responders described bombs in the towers, or gave other evidence that can only be explained by explosions. Numerous other eyewitnesses, who were interviewed on the day and later, described the explosions they experienced. There are videos in which we can see and hear explosions going off in the buildings. Mainstream media reports on the day of the attacks contained many mentions of explosions. And the whole world watched the towers exploding on television, over and over and over — for two weeks! But according to defenders of the official story, none of this happened — even though much of it, including the NYT oral history, is freely available online.
And the reason why they claim none of this happened is because the official story-tellers couldn’t figure out a way to explain how al Qaeda could have planted explosives in the towers. Their line of backward thinking ran: al Qaeda did it; al Qaeda could not have planted explosives in the towers; therefore there were no explosives in the towers.
Similarly, we have a whole new field of academic research now, in which Conspiracy Theories are studied as a sociological or psychological phenomenon. Bright, well-educated people, who really ought to be doing productive work, are now paid to track conspiracy theories, to watch how they grow and spread, and to explain, if they can, why people believe them.
But explaining this is more difficult than I’ve indicated, because they have to explain them in a politically acceptable way. That is to say: they cannot ever consider the possibility that some “conspiracy theories” may be more credible than the corresponding official stories.
This consideration is essential, in my analysis, because of the fact that so many official stories are impossible. In each of these cases, all conspiracy theories are more credible than the official story, even if they are only marginally plausible. But no academic researcher can say this; they have to pretend that the official stories are all true.
So all their research has to run backward. They can’t connect cause and effect in the logical way, so they do it in reverse. And this is how they get the idea that we believe conspiracy theories because we don’t trust the government.
To be sure, some researchers will grant that we don’t trust the government because we know more about the government than those who do trust it. But they can’t admit that what separates conspiracy theorists from the people around us is our greater knowledge of topics such as history and government!
Instead they claim that we believe conspiracy theories because we don’t trust the government, when in fact the opposite is true: We don’t believe the official stories because they are clearly false. And this is why we believe conspiracy theories, and this is also why we don’t trust the government.
But this is a path which accessories after the fact dare not tread.
Instead Matt Kwong continues this way:
Distrust in authority “plays into this rejection of the reigning or orthodox narrative of some subject,” says Syracuse University professor emeritus of political science Michael Barkun, author of A Culture of Conspiracy.
“We want stories and narratives that make sense of the world,” Barkun says. “The idea that such an event like the sudden destruction of landmark buildings like the World Trade Center could be caused by 19 nobodies belonging to an organization that almost no Americans had ever heard of, living in ragged encampments in Afghanistan, simply, I think, made no sense to some people.”
It made no sense to a lot of people!
Some of them went on with their lives and didn’t think about it anymore. What could they do about it? So why should they worry about it? What’s so mysterious about that?
The rest of us did worry about it. We didn’t just get on with our lives, because we could see that something fundamental had changed, in a truly awful way, based on a story which couldn’t possibly be true. It bothered us, and we thought we lived in a democracy, because we’ve been taught that we have some influence in the political process, so we got active. What’s so mysterious about that?
But NO! NO, NO, NO! We are definitely not going there! We’ll go sideways instead, with Matt Kwong:
Researchers who study conspiracy theorists point to the dismissal of an official “lone nobody” conclusion on 9/11 as sharing similarities to the continued obsession with the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1963.
It’s a diversion and a red herring, and the word “obsession” is a smear, but in sad fact, the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks display many similarities, some of which are relevant enough to discuss here.
For serious researchers, the main point of interesting similarity is not that “Oswald was a nobody” and “Nobody had ever heard of al Qaeda,” although these curious facts may have piqued some interest for some of them at one time. Personally, I’ve never given either of these ideas any thought at all, except when I’ve stumbled over them in propaganda pieces.
The main point for me, and for many other serious researchers, is this: neither Oswald nor al Qaeda could possibly have done what they are alleged to have done.
Does this matter? YES! As Webster Tarpley keeps reminding us, we always need to ask: Did they have the physical and technical capabilities to cause the observed effects? And the answers, in the cases of JFK and 9/11, are clearly “NO!”
Why? The sight on “Oswald’s rifle” was out of alignment. The FBI fired it for testing, and their expert marksmen couldn’t hit any targets with it. So they adjusted the sight and tested it again. But Oswald, who was not a marksman at all, was said to have caused 7 wounds with 3 shots, firing at a moving target, all in 6 seconds, with that rifle, before the sight was adjusted.
Oswald’s pistol was in even worse shape. It wouldn’t fire at all because the firing pin was bent. So the pistol was disassembled, the firing pin was straightened, and the pistol was reassembled so that it could be tested. But Oswald was said to have killed Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit, with that pistol, before it was repaired.
This information came into the public domain through the Warren Commission itself. So the facts themselves can hardly be disputed, and therefore the accessories after the fact would prefer us to ignore them. Otherwise the situation would be too clear.
We don’t have problems with the story because “Oswald was a nobody.” We would have been much more reluctant to accept the story if we’d been told that JFK was killed by somebody famous — like Frank Sinatra or Doris Day. On the contrary: aside from the obvious tampering with evidence, we have problems with the official story because Oswald lacked the physical and technical means to commit the crimes for which he was accused.
With 9/11, we have the same pattern, and the primary illustration is this: al Qaeda could not have put explosives in the towers, so the official story doesn’t try to explain how they did; instead it pretends there were no explosives in the towers at all.
How do we know al Qaeda couldn’t have put explosives in the towers? We have two main ways of knowing this. First, according to defenders of the official story, nobody could have put explosives in the towers. It would have taken too long, somebody would have noticed, and so on. Presumably this logic applies equally, or especially, to nasty-looking foreigners who have no reason to be in the towers at all. And second, if al Qaeda could have put explosives in the towers, then the official story-tellers would admit the presence of explosives and blame them on al Qaeda, which would be much easier than trying to suppress all the evidence of explosives, if only it could be done at all.
But that’s not the only impossibility in the story. The alleged hijackers had no idea how to fly a jumbo jet — according to their instructors, they could barely fly a Cessna — and yet they were said to have performed low-altitude maneuvers that the best pilots in the country couldn’t match, at speeds which would have been far beyond the capabilities of the aircraft.
The terrorists had no way of disabling America’s security systems, from airport surveillance videos right up to the US Air Force. But they are said to evaded every defense along the way.
And no magician has ever made a jumbo jet disappear into a field, leaving only a 20-foot wide hole and no wreckage. But that’s what the plane in Shanksville is supposed to have done.
The list of impossibilities goes on and on. But we don’t have to examine all of them to see the same pattern that we saw in the JFK case.
It doesn’t matter whether anybody had ever heard of al Qaeda. We don’t buy the official story because the alleged hijackers lacked the physical and technical means to cause the effects for which they were blamed.
In other words: we know both official stories are false because the events they describe not physically possible.
So why should we believe them? According to Matt Kwong, the answer lies in Popular Mechanics.
Despite an exhaustive 2005 special report by Popular Mechanics debunking 9/11 theories, polls still show a sizeable population of Americans dispute the official account.
As I mentioned in the previous post, no “report” in such a format could be anything but cursory and shallow.
The format: (1) Reduce all the implausible aspects of the official story to a short list of bullet points. (2) Then, for each point: Reduce all the relevant evidence and all its implications to a single sentence, a crazy one if possible; then “debunk” it with a “telling quote” from an “expert source.”
It’s a combination of logical fallacies, primarily Special Pleading, Straw Man, and Appeal to Authority. And it’s all predicated on the notion that “denied” means the same as “debunked.”
But in PM‘s case, the format was the strongest part of the “report.” The so-called “evidence” presented by PM wasn’t even weak — it was ludicrous.
Thus, contrary to Matt Kwong’s assertion, the “report” from Popular Mechanics was neither “special” nor “exhaustive,” and because they can’t give us anything more convincing, and because nobody else even wants to try, it may be time to consider the possibility that “a sizeable population of Americans dispute the official account” because it’s simply not true!
But Matt Kwong won’t go in that direction. He’s going this way instead:
For his part, McIlvaine doesn’t care about the Truther movement one way or the other, or about the many articles and investigations that have debunked 9/11 conspiracy theories.
He remains convinced about his own narrative.
“I feel good about what I’ve done. My wife’s happy about it, my [other] son’s happy about it. I still go to bed,” he says. “And I’ll say I did what I did for Bobby.”
Bob McIlvaine is tired of being lied to, he’s tired of being belittled and betrayed, and he doesn’t care what anybody thinks anymore — all of which is entirely understandable in my view, given what he’s experienced.
Matt Kwong paints him as a stubborn crackpot who started wondering why his son’s body was found so soon, fell into a hole called the Internet, and wound up believing the craziest nonsense — and he leaves it to the reader to fill in the gaps: the 9/11 truth movement endures because it’s made up of stubborn crackpots who started out asking simple questions and fell into the same hole.
That may be true in some instances, but for me personally it’s despicable slander. I know the official story is false because so many of its features are physically impossible. I don’t care how many accessories after the fact call me crazy. And I am not one in a million — I am one of many millions!
This is why the 9/11 Truth movement endures.
We’re smart enough to spot an obvious lie, even though we’ve heard it a thousand times. And we’re brave enough to say so.
If that makes us stubborn crackpots, so be it. Like it or not, that’s the reason we haven’t gone away. And we’re not going away anytime soon.
Sorry, Matt! You lose! You had all the pieces in your hand and you couldn’t — or wouldn’t — put them together.
Sorry, CBC. You lose, too! There will be a special place in Heaven for any mainstream news organization that’s brave enough to treat this issue with the integrity it deserves. But so far we have none.
In any case: Matt Kwong and CBC, you both stand clearly and willingly on the wrong side of a mass-murderous lie, and an obvious one at that. May God have mercy upon your souls.
On the other hand, Congratulations! You’ve made my list!
As I’ve been saying:
The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?
The Façade of “Humanitarian Intentions” in Libya
Review of Paolo Sensini’s book, Sowing Chaos: Libya in the Wake of Humanitarian Intervention
By Edward Curtin | Global Research | August 10, 2016
It is rare for a historian to write a history of a significant issue and bring it into the present time; even rarer when the work coincides with the reemergence of that issue on the world stage. Paolo Sensini has done just that with Sowing Chaos: Libya in the Wake of Humanitarian Intervention (Clarity Press, 2016). It is a revelatory historical analysis of the exploitation and invasion of Libya by colonial and imperialistic powers for more than a century.
It is also timely since the western powers, led by the United States, have once again invaded Libya (2011), overthrown its government, and are in the process (2016) of creating further chaos and destruction by bombing the country for the benefit of western elites under the pretext of humanitarian concern.
As with the history of many countries off the radar of western consciousness, Libyan history is a tragic tale of what happens when a country dares assert its right to independence – it is destroyed by violent attack, financial subterfuge, or both.
Although an Italian and Italy has a long history of exploiting Libya, a close neighbor, Sensini stands with the victims of colonial and imperial savagery. Not an armchair historian, he traveled to Libya during the 2011 war to see for himself what was true. Despite his moral stand against western aggression, his historical accuracy is unerring and his sourcing impeccable. For 234 pages of text, he provides 481 endnotes, including such fine sources as Peter Dale Scott, Patrick Cockburn, Michel Chossudovsky, Pepe Escobar, and Robert Parry, to name but a few better known names.
His account begins with Italy’s 1911 war against Libya that “Francesco Saverio Nitti charmingly described …. as the taking of a ‘sandbox’.” The war was accompanied by a popular song, “Tripoli, bel suol d’amore” (Tripoli, beauteous land of love). Even in those days war and love were synonymous in the eyes of aggressors.
This war went on until 1932 when the Sanusis’s resistance was finally crushed by Mussolini. First Italy conquered the Ottoman Turks, who controlled western Libya (Tripolitania); then the Sanusis, a Sunni Islamic mystical militant brotherhood, who controlled eastern Libya (Cyrenaica). This Italian war of imperial aggression lasted 19 years, and, as Sensini writes, “was hardly noticed in Italy.”
I cannot help but think of the U.S. wars against Afghanistan and Iraq that are in their 15th and 13th years respectively, and counting; they are not making a ripple on the placid indifference of the American people.
Sensini presents this history clearly and succinctly. Most of the book is devoted to the period following the 1968 overthrow of King Idris by the Free Unionist Officers, led by the 27 year old captain Mu’ammar Gaddafi. This bloodless coup d’état by military officers, who had all risen from the poorer classes, was called “Operation Jerusalem” to honor the Palestinian liberation movement. The new government, The Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), had “three key themes …. ‘freedom, socialism, and unity,’ to which we can add the struggle against western influences within the Arab world, and, in particular, the struggle against Israel (whose very existence was, according to Gaddafi, a confirmation of colonialization and subjugation).”
Sensini explains the Libyan government under Gaddafi, including his world theory that was encapsulated in his “Green Book” and the birth of what was called “Jamahiriyya” (State of the Masses). Gaddafi called Libya the “Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya.”
Under Gaddafi there was dialogue between Christians and Muslims, including the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Holy See, and visits from Eastern Orthodox and Anglican religious leaders. Fundamentalist Islamic groups criticized Gaddafi as a heretic for these moves. Gaddafi described Islamists as “reactionaries in the name of Islam.” His animus toward Israel remained, however, due to the Palestinian issue. He promoted women’s rights, and in 1996 Libya “was the first country to issue an international arrest warrant with Osama bin Laden’s name on it.”
He had a lot of enemies: Israel, Islamists, al Qaeda, the western imperial countries, etc. But he had friends as well, especially among the developing countries.
A large portion of the book concerns the U.S./NATO 2011 attack on Libya and its aftermath. This attack was justified and sanctioned by UN Resolutions 1970 (2/26/11) and 1973 (3/17/11). These resolutions were prepared by the work of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) that in 2000-2001 produced a justification for powerful nations to intervene in the internal affairs of any nation they chose. Termed the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), it justified the illegal and immoral “humanitarian” attack on Libya in 2011. The ICISS, based in NYC, was founded by, among others, the Carnegie Corporation, the Simons, Rockefeller, William and Flora Hewitt, and John D. and Catherine MacArthur foundations, elite moneyed institutions devoted to American interventions throughout the world.
When the US/NATO attacked Libya, they did so despite the illegality of the intervention (an Orwellian term) under the UN Resolutions that prohibit arming of ‘rebels’ who do not represent the legal government of a country. On March 30, 2011 the Washington Post, a staunch supporter of US aggression, reported an anonymous government source as saying that “President Obama has issued a secret finding that would authorize the CIA to carry out a clandestine effort to provide arms and other support to Libyan opposition groups.” None of the mainstream media, including the Washington Post, noted the hypocrisy of reporting illegal activities as if they were legal. The law had become irrelevant.
The Obama administration had become the opposite of the Kennedy administration. Whereas JFK, together with Dag Hammarskjold the assassinated U.N. Secretary General, had used the UN to defend the growing third world independence movements throughout the world, Obama has chosen to use the UN to justify his wars of aggression against them. Libya is a prime example.
Sensini shows in great detail which groups were armed, where they operated, and who they represented. The US/NATO forces armed and supported all sorts of Islamist terrorists, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), led by Abu al-Laith al Libby, a close Afghan associate of Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda’s third in command.
“These fanatical criminals (acclaimed as liberators by the mainstream media worldwide) were to form Libya’s emerging ruling class. These were people tasked to ensure a democratic future for Libya. However, the ‘rebel’ council of Benghazi did what it does best – ensuring chaos for the country as a whole, under a phantom government and a system of local fiefdoms (each with a warlord or tribal chief). This appears to be the desired outcome all along, and not just in Libya.”
Sensini is especially strong in his critical analysis of the behavior of the corporate mass media worldwide in propagandizing public opinion for war. Outright lies – “aligning its actions with Goebbels’ famous principle of perception management” and the Big Lie (thanks to Edward Bernays, the American father of Public Relations) – were told by Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and repeated by the western media, about Gaddafi allegedly slaughtering and raping thousands of Libyans. Sensini argues persuasively that Libya was a game-changer in this regard.
Here, the mass media played the part of a military vanguard. The cart, as it were, had been put before the horse. Rather than obediently repackaging and relaying the news that had been spoon fed to them by military commanders and Secretaries of State, the media were called upon actually to provide legitimation for armed actors. The media’s function was military. The material aggression on the ground and in the sky was paralleled and anticipated by virtual and symbolic aggression. Worldwide, we have witnessed the affirmation of a Soviet approach to information, enhanced to the nth degree. It effectively produces a ‘deafening silence’ – an information deficit. The trade unions, the parties of the left and the ‘love-thy-neighbor’ pacifists did not rise to this challenge and demonstrate against the rape of Libya.
The US/NATO attack on Libya, involving tens of thousands of bombing raids and cruise missile, killed thousands of innocent civilians. This was, as usual, explained away as unfortunate “collateral damage,” when it was admitted at all. The media did their part to downplay it. Sensini rightly claims that the U.S./NATO and the UN are basically uninterested in the question of the human toll. “The most widely cited press report on the effects of the NATO sorties and missile attacks on the civilian population is most surely that of The New York Times. In ‘Strikes on Libya by NATO, an Unspoken Civilian Toll’, conveniently published after NATO’s direct intervention had ceased. The article is truly a fine example of ‘embeddedness’:”
While the overwhelming preponderance of strikes seemed to hit their targets without killing noncombatants, many factors contributed to a run of fatal mistakes. These included a technically faulty bomb, poor or dated intelligence and the near absence of experience military personnel on the ground who could direct air strikes. The alliances apparent presumption that residences thought to harbor pro Gaddafi forces were not occupied by civilians repeatedly proved mistaken, the evidence suggests, posing a reminder to advocates of air power that no war is cost or error free.
The use of words like “seemed” and “apparent,” together with the oft used technical excuse and the ex post facto reminder are classic stratagems of the New York Times’ misuse of the English language for propaganda purposes.
Justifying the killing, President Obama “explained the entire campaign away with a lie. Gaddafi, he said, was planning a massacre of his own people.”
Hillary Clinton, who was then Secretary of State, was aware from the start, as an FOIA document reveals, that the rebel militias the U.S. was arming and backing were summarily executing anyone they captured: “The State Department and Obama were fully aware that the U.S.-backed ‘rebel’ forces had no such regard for the lives of the innocent.”
Clinton also knew that France’s involvement was because of the threat Gaddafi’s single African currency plan posed to French financial interests in Francophone Africa. Her joyous ejaculation about Gaddafi’s brutal death – “We came, we saw, he died” – sick in human terms, was no doubt also an expression of relief that the interests of western elites, her backers, had been served.
It is true that Gaddafi did represent a threat to western financial interests. As Sensini writes, “Gaddafi had successfully achieved Libya’s economic independence, and was on the point of concluding agreements with the African Union that might have contributed decisively to the economic independence of the entire continent of Africa.”
Thus, following the NATO attack, Obama confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank. Sensini references Ellen Brown, the astute founder of the Public Banking Institute in the U.S., who explains how a state owned Central Bank, as in Libya, contributes to the public’s well-being. Brown in turn refers to the comment of Erica Encina, posted on Market Oracle, which explains how Libya’s 100% state owned Central Bank allowed it to sustain its own economic destiny. Encina concludes, “Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy [and Clinton] but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.”
In five pages Sensini tells more truth about the infamous events in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three American colleagues than the MSM has done in five years. After the overthrow of Gaddafi, in 2012 Stevens was sharing the American “Consulate” quarters with the CIA. Benghazi was the center of Sanusi jihadi fundamentalism, those who the US/NATO had armed to attack Gaddafi’s government. These terrorists were allied with the US. “Stevens’s task in Benghazi,” writes Sensini, “now was to oversee shipments of Gaddafi’s arms to Turkish ports. The arms were then transferred to jihadi forces engaged in terrorist actions against the government of Syria under Bashar al-Assad.” Contrary to the Western media, Sensini says that Stevens and the others were killed, not by the jihadi extremists supported by the US, but by Gaddafi loyalists who had tried to kill Stevens previously. These loyalists disappeared from the Libyan and international press afterwards. “The reports now focused on al-Qaida, Islamists, terrorists and protesters. No one was to mention either Gaddafi … or his ghosts.”
The stage for a long-term Western intervention against terrorists, who were armed by the US/NATO, was now set. The insoluble disorder of a vicious circle game meant to perpetuate chaos was set in motion. Sensini’s disgust manifests itself when he says, “Given its record of lavish distribution of arms to all and sundry in Syria, the USA’s warning that, in Libya, arms might reach ‘armed groups outside the government’s control’ is beneath contempt.”
Sowing Chaos: Libya in the Wake of Humanitarian Intervention is a superb book. If you wish to understand the ongoing Libyan tragedy, and learn where responsibility lies, read it. If the tale it tells doesn’t disgust you, I’d be surprised.
In closing, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a stalwart and courageous truth teller, has written a fine forward where she puts Libya and Sensini’s analysis into a larger global perspective. As usual, she pulls no punches.
Copyright © Edward Curtin, Global Research, 2016
Pathetic Fail #5: Jack Holmes and Esquire
WinterPatriot | September 13, 2016
Jack Holmes, Accessory after the Fact [source: Daily Beast ]
Number 5 : Jack Holmes and Esquire, for “Disproving 9 of the Biggest 9/11 Conspiracy Theories”
We continue our review of pathetic propaganda disasters with a piece from Jack Holmes and Esquire. It begins with one of the niftiest bits of verbal gymnastics I have seen in a long time. Get a load of this:
An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation. But for some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners in a coordinated attack and use them as 400-ton missiles to destroy such massive buildings still doesn’t make sense.
There’s magic in them there words, and it’s powerful magic, too.
You don’t believe me? Read it again, without the magic:
An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation. For some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners in a coordinated attack and use them as 400-ton missiles to destroy such massive buildings doesn’t make sense.
Now read it again, the original text this time, with emphasis on the magical words:
An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation. But for some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners in a coordinated attack and use them as 400-ton missiles to destroy such massive buildings still doesn’t make sense.
I can’t disagree with Jack Holmes when he says, “An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation.” This is clearly true. Who could disagree?
And I can’t argue against the statement that “for some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners […] and use them […] to destroy […] massive buildings doesn’t make sense.” This is clearly true as well.
So we have two statements that nobody could deny, strung together and twisted with the words “but” and “still” to create the implication that the official explanation should make sense to everybody because it’s extraordinary, as was the attack. And that makes no sense on the face of it.
The attack was extraordinary in many ways. It was certainly extraordinary in scale and ferocity. It was also an extraordinarily brazen attack, and one that would be, under normal conditions, extraordinarily unlikely to succeed.
The official explanation is extraordinary in many ways as well. It arrived with extraordinarily promptness; we “knew” Osama bin Laden was behind the attack before it was even over, and we “knew” the twin towers had “collapsed” due to “damage from aircraft impact and the resulting fires” almost as quickly. It was also extraordinarily flexible; we got three very different stories about why the Air Force didn’t stop those “400-ton missiles” which were on course to “destroy massive buildings.” But above all, the official explanation is extraordinarily implausible, in more ways than Jack Holmes cares to admit.
But many readers won’t take the time to think this through, and there’s the magic. If you don’t think too much about the magical opening passage, it all looks true, but if you pay attention to the magic words, you can see that Jack Holmes is kicking off his attempt to “disprove” the “conspiracy theories” by sneakily implying that the official explanation should satisfy everyone because the attack and the explanation were both extraordinary — i.e. because the attack was extraordinarily unlikely and the explanation is extraordinarily implausible.
This is as twisted as anyone could hope for, because in the world of sane people, an extraordinary event requires an extraordinarily credible explanation.
Unexpected: The top of the South Tower turns to dust as explosives pulverize the steel and concrete below the damaged zone. This was called a “collapse.” [source: Esquire ]
If a scientist sees something unexpected in an experiment, and a colleague offers a loopy explanation, the scientist doesn’t say, “Well that must be it, then. It’s a weird explanation, but it was a weird event, so you must be right!” On the contrary: The stranger the event, the more plausible, the more thorough, and the better supported the explanation must be, otherwise nobody will believe it. But we’re not supposed to think this way about 9/11, according to Jack Holmes.
The rest of his “appetizer” is not quite so magical, so I want to focus on the “main course,” so to speak. Jack Holmes has written a catchy and provocative headline, and it made me wonder: How will he “disprove 9 of the biggest 9/11 conspiracy theories”?
Jack Holmes says he will do it through the use of evidence:
Below are nine of the most prominent theories, as well as the evidence explaining why they simply don’t add up.
“Aha!” I thought. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Most defenders of the official story run away from evidence as fast as they can. They want to talk about other things. But this is better. Or at least, this promises to be better.”
And what’s the evidence? What evidence does Jack Holmes have? The answer is … a rehash of Popular Mechanics !
Jack Holmes not only copies the format used by Popular Mechanics in its infamous “Debunking 9/11” fiasco, he also quotes freely from it.
The format: (1) Reduce all the implausible aspects of the official story to a short list of bullet points. (2) Then, for each point: Reduce all the relevant evidence and all its implications to a single sentence, a crazy one if possible; then “debunk” it with a “telling quote” from an “expert source.”
It’s a combination of logical fallacies, primarily Special Pleading, Straw Man, and Appeal to Authority. And it’s all predicated on the notion that “denied” means the same as “debunked.” In other words, if Jack Holmes can find one “expert” who says X is false, then X is false and that’s the end of the discussion. The one statement settles the matter and closes the case forever, no matter how much or how little sense it makes, no matter how much or how little evidence supports it.
For example:
THE HOLES WERE SIMPLY TOO SMALL
The theory: The two holes in the Pentagon after the attack—75 and 12 feet wide—were too small to have been carved by a 125-foot-wide jet. Some theories have concluded the attack was actually carried out with a satellite-guided missile.
The debunk: “A crashing jet doesn’t punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building,” says Popular Mechanics, citing Mete Sozen, a structural engineering expert at Purdue University. One wing hit the ground, while the other was torn off by the force of impact. “What was left of the plane flowed into the structure in a state closer to liquid than a solid mass.” The 12-foot hole was punched through by the plane’s landing gear.
There are multiple obvious problems with this attempted refutation.
If “one wing hit the ground,” why are there no scars on the lawn? Why is there no broken-off wing? What happened to the fuel in the wing? If “one wing hit the ground,” even if that wing magically bounced through the hole and into the Pentagon, even if all the fuel that was in the wing burned in a great fireball that nobody saw or reported, we should still see a large patch of black where the grass used to be green. This is what’s always left behind when there’s been a fire. So what happened to it this time?
And if the other wing “was torn off by the force of impact,” where did it go? Mete Sozen isn’t saying, and we can probably take that as a hint that he doesn’t know.
As for the rest of the plane, are we supposed to believe it “almost” melted, rather than crumpling and breaking up, as all the other planes that have ever crashed have done?
And even if the force of the impact caused the plane to “almost” melt, how did all that “almost” molten metal get through the hole?
It’s all very mysterious; nothing like this has ever happened before or since; the explanation is literally incredible, and Mete Sozen has a long track record of telling obvious lies about 9/11.
He explained the “collapse” of the twin towers by talking about fire heating the steel until “the steel goes away.” He demonstrated the plane crashing into the Pentagon using a computer simulation which shows the plane’s engines disappearing on impact.
How was this computer simulation built? One can only imagine: “What happened to the engines?” “Nobody knows. We can’t find any sign of engine damage in the building.” “Well, can’t we make up something the Truthers might believe?” “Probably not.” “Well, then, just get rid of the engines! Make them go away!”
Maybe the words are not quite verbatim, but this is clearly the level of integrity that we’re dealing with here. Mete Sozen is one of the most infamous accessories after the fact, reviled by anyone who has studied the issue. Why should we believe him this time? Especially when his “explanation” makes no sense.
This is a representative sample of Jack Holmes’ work, both the style of presentation and the “depth” of research. It’s a lame enough fail to make my short list all on its own, but there are eight more lame fails with it.
Here’s another example, possibly even a better one:
INSIDER TRADING
The theory: In the days leading up to September 11, a large volume of American and United Airlines stock was traded—and in many cases shorted, or bet against—by people who had prior knowledge of the attacks.
The debunk: Bloomberg Trade Book data did show much higher than normal put option volume (people betting against the stock of American and United) in the weeks and days leading up to the attacks, Snopes reports, including a volume 100 times above average on the Thursday before. However, the 9/11 Commission found no evidence those trades were the result of prior knowledge. For example, “a single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent” of the put options on United’s parent company on September 6, according to the report, while “much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American [stock] on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9.”
As that’s a government report, the conspiracists will likely remain unconvinced.
Quoting the 9/11 Commission to prove the official story is like quoting the Bible to prove that Jesus was born of a virgin. It’s convincing for those who already believe it, but it doesn’t do anything for the skeptics except confirm their opinion. Surely any other source, any other evidence, would be more convincing. And Jack Holmes knows this. That’s why he says, “that’s a government report, [so] the conspiracists will likely remain unconvinced.” So why does he offer nothing else? Because he’s got nothing else to offer. That’s why!
Again there are multiple problems with the attempted refutation. It may well be true that “95 percent of the put options on United’s parent company” were purchased by “a single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda.” But is this a legitimate reason not to investigate the investor? Or is it a hint that al Qaeda may not have been behind the attacks at all? What conceivable ties does this U.S.-based institutional investor have, exactly? How could he have known? What was the object of the trade? Was he gambling millions of dollars on a hunch? We’ll never know because the 9/11 Commission wasn’t the slightest bit curious about anybody who wasn’t obviously and intimately connected with al Qaeda.
And it may be true that “much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American [stock] on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9.” But in what way does this imply that whoever sent the newsletter on September 9 had no idea what was going to happen on September 11? Here, the Commission doesn’t even offer the lame excuse of “no conceivable connection,” which suggests the question: Did the author of this newsletter have some conceivable connection with al Qaeda?
Maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe the suspicion of inside knowledge is ruled out by the fact that the newsletter was faxed, because terrorists don’t know how to use fax machines.
It’s all so very lame, especially when we know that serious investigators always “follow the money.” But in this case it appears they ran away from the money, even by their own account.
In sum, even if it’s true, this “explanation” is a pathetic fail because it does nothing to prove or even support the official story, nor does it state or even imply — let alone prove — that the investors who bought the suspicious put options had no prior knowledge of the attack.
What it does prove — whether it be true or false — is that the so-called “investigation” was set up to run backwards: First they decided who did it, then they decided which evidence to consider, based on whether or not it agreed with their predetermined conclusions. This is probably why defenders of the official story accuse “conspiracy theorists” of “cherry-picking evidence.” They always accuse us of the very things they themselves are doing.
But there’s good reason to believe that the core of this “debunk” is false, because we’ve had a number of reliable reports indicating that the bulk of the suspicious insider trading was carried out by a German bank closely affiliated with a certain “former” high-ranking CIA officer, which makes ties to al Qaeda slightly less than “inconceivable,” does it not?
al Qaeda, you may recall, was allied with the CIA before and after 9/11, but not during, at least according to defenders of the official story.
Again, this “debunk” is sufficiently pathetic to put Jack Holmes on my short list, even if he had not qualified already.
But let’s look at one more example. This one shows the same technique, but with a slightly different twist:
THE HIJACKERS ARE STILL ALIVE
The theory: Conspiracists seized on news reports in the immediate aftermath of the attacks—particularly one from the BBC—that reported various hijacker suspects identified by authorities were actually still alive and well. This indicates that the attacks had been carried out by actors with other means.
The debunk: The people who were found to still be alive in those reports were different people with similar or identical names to the hijackers, as other BBC reports showed. “The confusion over names and identities we reported back in 2001 may have arisen because these were common Arabic and Islamic names,” a subsequent report suggests, adding that both the 9/11 Commission and the FBI are confident they correctly identified the 19 hijackers.
The main problem here concerns the disappearing layers of detail.
The first BBC piece linked by Jack Holmes, which was published in September of 2001, reports on four of the hijackers who survived their martyrdom, beginning with Waleed Al Shehri. It explains that he saw his name and his photograph on the news, along with the name of the flight school he had attended, so he was sure he was the man the FBI had named as a suicide hijacker.
The second BBC piece refers to yet another BBC piece, published in October of 2006, which acknowledges some confusion but certainly does not refute — or even refer to — the 2001 story.
In other words, the 2006 piece does not state or even imply that Waleed Al Shehri was the one who was confused. It doesn’t even mention Waleed Al Shehri at all. So it’s difficult to see how the 2006 story could be used to support the claim made here by Jack Holmes, or by the BBC editors, for that matter.
Crucially, we’re still left with the mystery of how “different people with similar or identical names” could have posed for identical photographs and attended the same flight school.
But once again, it’s a case where the refutation doesn’t have to be thorough, plausible, or credible in any way. A “denial” is as good as a “debunking” as far as Jack Holmes is concerned. And why?
The BBC article that supposedly settles the question also says:
There is no direct evidence in the public domain linking Osama Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks. At best the evidence is circumstantial. […]
The evidence is not being judged in a court of law. It only needs to persuade governments around the world to back the US-led war on terrorism and to a lesser extent to carry public opinion.
As Dr. David Ray Griffin says, “The evidence wasn’t good enough to go to court, but it was good enough to go to war!”
And it looks as if the BBC itself was (and still is) trying “to persuade governments around the world to back the US-led war on terrorism and to a lesser extent to carry public opinion,” which is totally more important than petty insignificant details like getting a credible account of what happened, and who did it, and why — or seeing that the perpetrators are brought to justice. But as far as Jack Holmes can see, the FBI’s word is gold, even if it took them five years to not find any direct evidence implicating the mastermind who was fingered on the very morning of the attack.
And the BBC’s word is gold too, and so is the unnamed subsequent report. Nobody can say, “Wait a minute! What about the photograph? What about the flight school? You’re positing one of the craziest coincidences ever, without even a shred of evidence.” That would be too journalistic, apparently. Too confrontational. Insufficiently dedicated to persuading governments around the world, and to a lesser extent carrying public opinion.
Jack Holmes gives us six more bullet points, but there’s no point grinding through them all. This is America, right? Three strikes and you’re out!
Sorry, Jack! You lose! If this is the best you can do, maybe you ought to find something else to write about — at least until you learn to do your own research.
Sorry, Esquire! You lose, too! Maybe this drivel is good enough for guys who are mostly thinking about how much their next suit is gonna cost, but for real people who are really connected to the real world … no! sorry! That’s a big sad fail!
I said at the top that Jack Holmes’ magical implication “makes no sense on the face of it.” But then again, maybe it does make sense, if you consider that it’s coming from a bright young man who knows where his next meal is coming from, if not his next suit. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, Jackie Boy! Don’t rock the boat! We need more young men like yourself, clever and clueless and eager to peddle transparent lies in support of our indefensible fiction!
It’s an extraordinarily pathetic fail, if you ask me. It’s almost as if Jack Holmes were a closet Truther, putting out the weakest nonsense he could find, trying to lead his readers to the obvious logical leap — since this is the best evidence that can be marshaled in defense of the official story, the story must be 100% phony — without running the risk of saying so in plain English.
But in the final analysis, there’s no evidence to support this line of thinking, and therefore no good reason to believe it. I think we have to assume that Jack Holmes meant what he said and said what he meant. In other words, I don’t think he’s a cowardly Truther. I think he’s a pathetic Liar.
As I’ve been saying:
The facts must be suppressed, and the people who are trying to gather and disseminate those facts must be suppressed, and that is the one and only thing that matters to these people. And why? Why would you hide the crime unless you were trying to protect the criminals?
Series: Accessories After The Fact Go Splat!!
Previous: Pathetic Fail #6: Robert Bridge and RT
Next: Pathetic Fail #4: Matt Kwong and the CBC
Who killed Vladimir Petukhov?
Farida Islamova, widow of murdered mayor Vladimir Petukhov
OffGuardian | September 17, 2016
However much the likes of the Guardian try to portray Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky as a champion of freedom who suffered under the yoke of government oppression before escaping tyranny for the freedom of the West, the fact remains he was and is more Capone than Solzhenitsyn; a greedy robber-baron and willing tool of US hegemony, who exploited his country’s darkest hour, cheated his workforce and eventually served a well-deserved term in prison for fraud, tax-evasion and money-laundering, before scuttling out of his mother-land to live the life of a celebrated “pro-democracy” exile.
It’s less widely understood that there are even darker things being laid at his door than corruption, theft and opportunistic lying for profit. Murder for example. But yes, in 2015, Russian Interpol put Khodorkovsky on a wanted list in connection with the murder of a Siberian city mayor in 1998.
Vladimir Petukhov was the first mayor of oil-rich Nefteyugansk. Popular locally and considered to be a man of the people, he was shot dead on his way in to work, June 26, 1998. A subsequent criminal investigation described the killing as an assassination, and implicated two members of Khodorkovsky’s Yukos Oil Company in a plot to be rid of the Mayor.
A court eventually sentenced Alexei Pichugin to life in prison for multiple murders and attempted murders. His boss Khodorkovsky was not accused of, or prosecuted for, any involvement, though many have claimed he may have known more than he claimed. According to Pravda :
In May 1998 Petukhov accused Yukos of tax evasion, which resulted in the shortage of funds in the local budget to pay wages to employees of state-run enterprises. The mayor went on a hunger strike demanding chairmen of municipal and district tax offices be dismissed from their positions and a criminal case against Yukos be filed on counts of tax evasion.
Vladimir Petukhov was shot dead on June 26 on his way to work.
Local residents took to the streets soon after the assassination of their mayor. Many attempted to seize the local office of Yukos. The Office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation brought assassination charges against an employee of Yukos’s security service, Aleksei Pichugn, only in 2005.
Petukov’s wife, Farida Islamova was and is convinced Mikhail Borisovitch was involved in the plot to murder her husband, and for many years she has been trying to have him brought to justice. She has even written a book – Khodorkovsky, who killed my Husband?, given an English language translation in 2014. In it she says:
Vladimir Petukhov, Mayor of Nefteyugansk, was shot down on his way to work, not far from the municipal administration building. The killer fired several submachine gun bursts from the cover of nearby bushes. Later on, the investigators would find 18 empty cases at the crime scene. In the face of such fire-power, the unarmed security man, Vyacheslav Kokoshkin, was helpless, he himself took several bullets, has never recovered from his wounds… At that time he was only 30 years old, and still today lives with one of these bullets – a sort of a message from Khodorkovsky – in his body…..
Vladimir Petukhov died in the hospital several hours after the attempt. That was a planned contract assassination…
Unsurprisingly, Farida has had little success in getting the English-language media to take interest in her story. No mainstream outfit has covered her book. Her wait for justice drags on as the western media continues to fete Mikhail Borisovich, embezzler of state funds, tax-evader and suspected murderer, as a symbol of the values they hold most dear.
Then again – maybe that’s not as stupid as it first sounds.
Eva Bartlett Debates Syria with Misinformed US University Prof
By Richard Edmondson | Fig Trees and Vineyards | September 16, 2016
Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett attempts to clarify issues about the Syrian conflict in a debate with two Americans, one of whom, is Stephen Zunes, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco. From his perch in California, Zunes, who seems to have a peculiar facial tic, pompously suggests he knows more about the situation in Syria that does Bartlett, who has filed numerous reports from on the ground inside Syria.
Zunes apparently relies a lot on the mainstream media for his information. For one thing, he believes there are “moderate” rebels. He also asserts that protests held in 2011 at the outset of the conflict were “brutally suppressed by the Assad regime,” and he refers to the democratically elected president of Syria as a “war criminal.” If Zunes is typical of university professors in America, it’s no wonder the country is in such a sad state.
When Bartlett attempts to set the record straight–for instance on the early protests–Zunes basically dismisses everything she has to say.
The other guest on the show, Gareth Porter, is not one of my favorite writers either, but at least he has the grace and good form to concede at one point that Bartlett “knows much more about this than I do.” No such concession is made by the presumptuous and overbearing Mr. Zunes. … More
Netflix and The White Helmets, ‘Hand in Hand with Al Qaeda’
21st Century Wire | September 15, 2016
Has Netflix revealed itself to be another deep state conscript? The recent Syria White Helmet promotional movie has caused uproar among people awakened to the US, UK state and intelligence agency involvement in this pseudo ‘first responder’ faux NGO outfit that has infiltrated Syria on behalf of its funders and donors based in the US and NATO neocolonialist “regime change” command centres.
Funded to the tune of over $60 million by the US, UK and EU member states, these mercenaries in beige clothing have a base of operations in Turkey, but appear to operate exclusively in terrorist-held zones in Syria, and can also be seen running ‘mop-up’ operations for Al Nusra Front and other terrorist fighting groups.
The ‘White Helmets’ documentary premiered today at the Toronto International Film Festival, and on Netflix streaming website.
The following are a few examples of the comments being left on the Netflix trailer for their White Helmets “documentary”:
“Dear Netflix: STOP SUPPORTING TERRORISTS. The so called White Helmets are a transparent construct of NATO to take over Syria by stealth in the guise of “do gooders”. NO serious journalists who have been to Syria believe they are doing what this film suggests. Only journalists too lazy to think for themselves believe this. NO locals in Syria have seen these white Helmets in their white helmets – except when their very expensive cameras turn up to film them for propaganda.
And shame on any news outlet who has bought any of that footage and bought their story hook line and sinker without investigating their known connections to Al Nusra and Al Qaeda.Syrian men trying to really save children are hindered from doing so by inhumane sanctions and by the White Helmets blocking roads and villages. Local heroes have no supplies, they do not have a 90 million pound budget to get food, and first aid or digging equipment, yet nobody makes a film about these people… the real Syrian people.
Local people say these are mercenaries who wear ordinary clothes, are not Syrian, and are committing atrocities and keeping food and supplies from reaching cities and villages. Paid terrorists loaded with weapons and supplies and a 90 million pound budget from EU and NATO countries who have an obsession with illegally deposing an honestly elected president of a nation state. It is another way to take over a regime… without using bombs.. by stealth, this is a Trojan Horse and these men are not heroes at all but murderers and thieves. ASK THE PEOPLE OF SYRIA. GO TO SYRIA and see for yourself. Do not just use footage made by terrorists and spread it all over the world when it is the opposite of the truth.”
Image creation: Cory Morningstar of Wrong Kind of Green
“Soros production, pure propaganda.”
“In Aleppo, the most important thing to remember is that all life is precious”. So precious that the White Helmets are ready to take the dead bodies away after Al-Qaeda executes them, while the camera is still rolling!!”
“When the saint go marching in”, White Helmets are not saints, they are terrorists. When not in front of a camera, they take off their white helmets and strap on their guns.”
“The white helmets are a media blitz project created by the US & UK in which they received monies from the state department & billionaires who made their fortune in the oil and gas industry.”
21WIRE will be bringing you more detailed reports on the Soros funding of the Netflix operation and of course further information on the REAL Syria Civil Defence that journalist Vanessa Beeley has recently met with and interviewed in Syria – in Aleppo, Lattakia, Tartous and the Head Quarters in Damascus.
Here is an excellent alternative to the Netflix official trailer made by Steve Ezzeddine for Hands Off Syria, Sydney. Watch:
For a further reading on the White Helmets and their role in the Dirty War on Syria read 21st Century Wire’s comprehensive compilation of the most important investigations into NATO’s latest fifth column creation: Who are the Syria White Helmets
Billions in Taxpayer Money to Israel: How the NYT Hides Unsavory Facts from View
By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | September 15, 2016
Thanks to American taxpayers, Israel has been receiving $3.1 billion in direct military aid each year, and under a new agreement signed this week that amount is set to rise to $3.8 annually. This is a hefty package and major news, but The New York Times has been oddly reticent about it, running a story on page 6 of the print edition and without fanfare online.
This is not a new phenomenon at the Times. Over the past year, as the United States and Israel have negotiated a new 10-year memorandum of understanding concerning military aid, readers have seen few references to the topic, and even with the signing of a new agreement this week, the newspaper maintains its minimalist approach.
The article by Peter Baker and Julie Hirschfeld Davis gives few details of the deal, instead proving a great deal of space to the state of U.S.-Israeli relations. The story reports that the present aid package (signed in 2007 and due to expire next year) amounts to “about $3 billion a year” with additional funds of up to $500 million a year authorized by Congress for missile defense.
We also learn that Israel made some concessions in negotiations, that this week’s deal is “the largest of its kind” and that Israel receives more U.S. money than any other country. But much is missing.
In fact, Israel gets more than half of all U.S. military aid ($3.1 billion out of a total of $5.9 billion), and Israel together with Egypt receives 75 percent of American foreign military assistance. Since the large allotment for Egypt is aimed at maintaining a non-threatening neighbor on Israel’s border, this could also be counted as indirect aid to Israel.
In fact Israel has been receiving well over $3.1 billion. By a conservative estimate, the United States has been giving the country $3.7 billion in direct aid annually with funds for immigrants to Israel, grants for American hospitals and schools, “joint defense projects” with the Department of Defense, and an early disbursement of aid.
The last item on that list refers to a special arrangement: In contrast to other recipients, Israel receives all its funds from the United States in one lump sum within the first month of the fiscal year. The money is then transferred to a Federal Reserve Bank interest-bearing account, allowing Israel to accrue some $15 million annually in interest.
Then there are other perks, such as loan guarantees, “cash flow financing,” and the right to purchase arms directly from companies rather than going through a Department of Defense review.
In addition, donations sent by Jewish and Christian groups to support settlements are tax-exempt. So every dollar donated to support the colonization of Palestinian land means the loss of at least 20 cents that should go into the U.S. treasury. This is an indirect subsidy to Israel that has cost American taxpayers an incalculable amount, at least some tens of millions of dollars.
The Times, however, has shown no interest in revealing the full extent of aid or of pursuing the arguments against pouring so much money into Israel. This week’s story mentions criticism of the aid agreement not until about three quarters into the text, and then it is reduced to three bland paragraphs with quotes from the representative of an anti-occupation organization.
In fact, the opposition goes well beyond such groups. A member of Congress, Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), has asked the State Department to investigate Israeli military units for possible violations of the Leahy Act, which prohibits the dispersal of U.S. funds to groups that violate human rights with impunity.
In 2012, 15 leaders of major religious organizations wrote to Congress asking that military aid be made contingent on compliance with American law. Other groups have sponsored billboards in various areas of the country highlighting the incredible largesse the United States provides for Israel.
Moreover, a poll of Americans taken in 2014 revealed that 60 percent believed the United States gives too much aid to Israel, and of that group 34 percent said it received “much too much.” The percentage claiming that our aid package was excessive was even higher (65 percent) among Americans under 34.
Other commentators have noted that Israel is a wealthy country, with universal health care, and is less in need of help than American citizens who struggle to fund their schools, pay for prescription drugs and meet medical fees.
None of this debate appears in the Times, which seems determined to keep the subject well below the radar. Thus we find a lightweight story on the inside pages of the print edition, well behind a more prominent one about Syrian and Israeli skirmishes in the Golan Heights, and an uninformative one-minute video of the signing ceremony on the Middle East page.
Times readers are to remain ignorant of the full, unsavory story about U.S. aid to Israel. If the facts were fully reported, this might inspire unwelcome questions and pushback. Better to say as little as possible and allow Israel to keep collecting its yearly billions from American taxpayers.
Follow @TimesWarp on Twitter.
A History of Violence
What mainstream accounts of Venezuela’s “peaceful” opposition leave out
By Gabriel Hetland | Jacobin | September 11, 2016
The media narrative is clear: peaceful demonstrators upset about a collapsing economy and political repression are fighting an oppressive state in Venezuela. The actual history, however, is more murky.
For more than a decade the Venezuelan opposition has used a variety of violent tactics to try to topple the country’s democratically elected government. An April 2002 coup deposed Hugo Chávez for forty-seven hours and led to multiple civilian deaths.
Violent protests in April 2013 targeted government-run health clinics and other public institutions, resulting in at least seven civilian casualties; this occurred following the 2013 presidential election, which the opposition lost but refused to concede to the government. The early 2014 wave of protests resulted in forty-three deaths, half at the hands of the opposition.
During the 2014 protests, opposition activists deliberately targeted state security forces and even strung galvanized wire across intersections, leading to the brutal decapitation of a motorcyclist. Nor can we omit mention of the approximately two hundred peasant leaders killed by ranchers opposed to the 2001 land reform law pushed by Chávez.
This brutal history is almost totally absent from mainstream media depictions of the opposition. The same is true of leading opposition figures’ present-day celebrations of this violence. In mainstream accounts of last week’s protests in Caracas, the opposition is depicted as an essentially peaceful force, seeking to use constitutional means — a recall referendum — to legally put an end to an incompetent, repressive government.
An article on the protests in the Wall Street Journal quotes an opposition supporter saying, “[D]on’t tell me that we didn’t try to demand change peacefully through the constitution.” The article briefly mentions the 2002 coup, but fails to note that leading members of today’s opposition played key roles in that episode. Nor does it make any mention of more recent instances of opposition violence.
A New York Times article on the protests details the deteriorating conditions in Venezuela leading people to protest against the government, and provides ample coverage of claims that the government has repressed dissident politicians and foreign journalists. No mention is made of opposition violence.
A BBC article on the September 1 protests states that “A small group of protesters clashed with riot police as the peaceful rally ended.” The article mentions the 2014 protests and states that, “Forty-three people on both sides of the political divide were killed during those protests.” Like other mainstream articles, however, this piece focuses disproportionately on opposition allegations of instances of government repression.
A piece in Bloomberg on the September 1 protests briefly discusses the 2014 protests, but misleadingly gives readers the impression that “over 40 people were killed” because of a government “crackdown on anti-government protests,” eliding the opposition’s responsibility for many of those deaths.
The takeaway from these and other mainstream media stories about the protests is clear: the opposition is peaceful, and there is no reason to believe the government’s delusional and self-serving claims that it faces a real threat of a violent coup.
Indeed, opposition leaders have repeatedly denied seeking a coup. But statements from these figures, not to mention recent history, indicate that the government may have more reason to worry than mainstream sources allow for.
In May, Henrique Capriles, the opposition presidential candidate in the 2012 and 2013 elections, exhorted the Venezuelan military to “decide whether you are with the constitution or with Maduro.”
Other opposition leaders, such as Jesús Torrealba, have also made public statements that steer clear of explicitly calling on the military to overthrow the government, but still suggest that the military should actively support the opposition against President Maduro. One wonders how government officials in other countries would react if leading opposition figures made similar statements there?
A good test of whether the opposition is as “peaceful” as media accounts suggest is to examine how opposition leaders speak about past episodes of violence. It’s telling that key opposition figures not only fail to express remorse or contrition when events such as the 2002 coup are discussed, but openly celebrate such acts.
During a speech given on August 27, just days before the September 1 protests, Venezuelan National Assembly head and leading opposition figure Henry Ramos Allup repeatedly refers to the coup in an approving matter. In the speech Ramos Allup makes it clear that his only regret is that it did not succeed in ousting Chávez.
No doubt, there is plenty to criticize about the Venezuelan government these days. The government deserves ample blame for mismanaging its currency and failing to confront corruption. State violence that does occur should be condemned and there’s a need for an independent left to grow in the country. But the narratives we’re being sold by the media are giving the opposition a free pass.
Gabriel Hetland teaches at University at Albany and has written about Venezuelan politics for the Nation, NACLA, Qualitative Sociology, and Latin American Perspectives.
The Guardian’s coverage of Clinton’s health
By Kit | OffGuardian | September 12, 2016
OffGuardian has been quiet on the issue of Clinton’s health, about which there has been a whole lot of speculation in the alt-news in recent weeks, and a whole lot of denial in the MSM. Discussing someone’s health can be tricky, you have to tread a fine line between journalism and voyeurism. You have to have a baseline of respect for privacy that, one would hope, would be applied to oneself by others.
However, this isn’t about a private citizen, this is about the physical and mental fitness of the (notionally) most powerful person on the planet… and the absurdity of the current narrative cries out for a response. Stories about Clinton’s health in the Guardian or on CNN simply say “there is no evidence Clinton is sick!” and complain about Trump’s campaign stoking “conspiracy theories” (I was not aware that “Gosh, that old lady doesn’t look well!” was a conspiracy theory… but that’s the media for you).
The problem with the argument that “there’s no evidence Clinton is ill” is, pretty simply, that there’s quite a lot of evidence Clinton is ill.
- First, there are her coughing fits. Over the past couple of years Hillary has had repeated fits of coughing. See here, here and here.
- Secondly, there are her bizarre facial movements/spasms, what some people describe as “seizures”. The famous one here, and the odd one at the DNC.
- Third, there is her memory loss and cognitive problems, see this video, where she appears to freeze up. When she does eventually speak she simply repeats the phrase that was whispered into her ear by a man who appears to be secret service (there has been a lot of speculation as to his identity and/or role).
- Fourth, blood clots. She has had two major blood clots, one in her brain, and is consequently on blood thinners to prevent a third.
- Fifth, apparent weakness and unsteadiness. There are many photographs of Clinton seeming to need assistance standing, balancing, or climbing stairs. In many of her public appearances she is propped up on a stool rather than standing up.
The web is rich with speculation and theorising trying to tie these threads of evidence to a solid hypothesis, plenty of doctors have given their opinions, and some of their ideas seem to have merit. But that is not the point of this article. The point of this article is more to ask a simple question: How far will the media go to persuade people they cannot trust their own eyes? How self-evident must something be before it can no longer be dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”?
No mainstream media source has discussed the possibility that Clinton might be sick, no newspaper or network has offered a refutation of the evidence, or an explanation of her bizarre behaviour. They simply do not discuss it. That is not how a healthy media should work.
For weeks The Guardian has put out opinion pieces such as this, and this, which construct straw-man arguments to dismiss the idea that Clinton might be anything other than perfectly fine.
In her latest in a long line of Clinton-touting nonsense, Jill Abramson repeats that Hillary is “fundamentally honest” (whatever the hell that means), before summing up yesterdays collapse as:
…the candidate appeared to stumble after leaving the 9/11 memorial in New York.”
Which is akin to summarising the plot of Jaws as “Some fishermen appear, from some angles, to get rather too close to a shark”.
At the same time Barack Obama’s biographer, Richard Wolffe, describes the “stumble” in even more benign terms. A “hot wobble” he calls it, before launching into a rather long polemic about how Trump is worse than Hillary in practically every regard (including physically). It was just unfortunate, he says, that Hillary’s perfectly normal “hot wobble” happened to be caught on camera. She is actually totally healthy and fine.
All of which is rather undermined by the presence of an editor’s note which reads:
Editor’s note: shortly after publication of this article, the Clinton campaign revealed she was suffering from pneumonia.”
Friday’s beautifully Orwellian “Facebook Fact-check” (which, for the record, checked no facts) repeated the claim:
Unlike her rival Donald Trump, Clinton has released fairly detailed medical records. There is no evidence to suggest the 68-year-old should be worried about her health.
But Clinton has NOT released “detailed” medical records, rather her doctor – Dr Lisa Bardack – wrote an open letter to the New York Times… over a year ago. Incidentally, this is the same doctor who was shadowing the perfectly healthy candidate all yesterday morning…just in case she got heatstroke allergies pneumonia.
Perhaps the most beautifully timed editorial on the subject was David Ferguson’s, it headlined:
I cough at all the wrong times. Thank God I’m not Hillary Clinton”
Before adding in the sub-head:
Those of us with allergies know only too well what that tickle at the back of the throat feels like. Luckily, no one assumes we’re secretly dying.”
And then finishing on this note:
Sometimes, oh ye right-wing vultures, a cough is just a cough and the female candidate whose health you’ve never cared one iota about before now is probably just fine, suffering from – as her personal physician disclosed in detail – a round of seasonal allergies.
Three hours after this was published, Clinton collapsed in a parking lot. Ten minutes after that, the comments section under Mr Ferguson’s article was closed. It was a farce, and could not have been better timed if it had been deliberate.
Of course, the media’s refusal to deal with the subject of Clinton’s health goes beyond ATL denial, there is also the (now standard) BTL censorship.
In the interest of promoting educated discussion on this subject, I endeavoured to point out the relationship between pneumonia and some neurological diseases, like Parkinson’s, in the CiF comment section:
… Only to find that the Guardian is currently censoring any comment that uses the word “Parkinson’s”, I suggest you try it for yourself.
Interestingly, “Dr Drew” (real name Dr. David Andrew Pinsky), a famous TV doctor in the US, was subject to rather more high-profile censorship when he was fired just a week after airing his totally non-partisan thoughts on Clinton’s health, and the ability of her doctors.
I hope they realise that simply concealing a fact doesn’t change reality. I don’t know whether or not Hillary is ill, but IF Hillary is, in fact, very sick…no amount of censorship or denial is going to keep her alive.
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The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | January 17, 2023
I try not to write about anyone who has died because if it was my family member I would not want to read any speculations about their death. However, in this case I feel that justice has not been given a chance and therefore it needs highlighting. ... continue
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