“I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.” – Pol Pot (Dictator of Cambodia, 1963-1981)
Similarly, on Monday, Sept 15, 2014, Department of Justice (DoJ) leader, Eric Holder, announced a new set of US programs designed to increase America’s internal ability to spy and report on its own citizens.
Not content to merely spy on US phones, internet services, bank accounts, safe deposit boxes, medical records, library records and facial recognition without a warrant, United States Attorney General (USAG) Holder has combined his Justice Dept. with the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Counter Terrorism Center to train selected Americans in every city and town to spy and report on any persons who are deemed to be potentially subversive.
During Mr. Holder’s term the wide brush of “Terrorism” has grown broader than at any time in US history.
Six years hence, we are, now, all terrorists.
1-The Charges
Unfortunately, some time must elapse before history will pronounce final judgment on Attorney General Eric Holder. The full breadth of his six-year tenure of aiding and abetting national American endemic criminal corruption, when the dust of short-term memory settles, will show clearly the obvious: Mr. Holder is guilty. Guilty of the highest crime of all: the degradation of what little remained of America’s already declining morality.
American justice died long ago.
On the heels of creating his new East German style, Stasi-esque domestic spy network, Mr. Holder has now, damage done, announced his resignation. The punch-line to this political joke was the satirical announcement the next day of his accepting a $77-million per annum payback/job as Chief Compliance Officer for uber- banking criminals, JP Morgan Chase. This may yet come true.
Who better to hire than an accomplice, like Holder, with a proven, long-term track record of subordinating criminal behavior?
Considering Holder’s rap-sheet; a wise choice indeed.
The main stream press dutifully sing his praises while ignoring the consummation of his multiple bastardizations of actual justice. Hidden from view, the history of Eric Holder, USAG, shows him to be the typical self-promoting puppet who had an epiphany along his career path, that selling his morals, and his office, to the highest bidder was the true American path to political success. Gospel indeed.
Certainly, the other puppet in the White House, and the one on the Supreme Court bench, were model examples of the successful gains of devout personal hypocrisy.
2-The Crimes
Holder started on a personal drive up the road to financial success as soon as he graduated from Columbia Law School in 1976, going straight to work for the Dept. of Justice. In 1988 President Reagan appointed him as a Superior Court judge for the District of Columbia, where he served for five years.
Holder soon had his chance to “buy-in” to better judicial appointments/connections thanks to his rubbing elbows with one of the most greasy and morally bankrupt US presidents in generations.
In a White House where everything was for sale, from overnight stays and ambassadorships to presidential pardons, then President William Jefferson, “Slick Willie,” Clinton appointed, in 1993, Eric Holder as US Attorney for Washington DC, the plum of the only ninety-three US district positions. Reportedly this office was also for sale. Next, in 1997, Clinton appointed him Deputy Attorney General where he served until 2001.
Here, Holder learned quickly the value of administrative corruption culminating in the pardon of Marc Rich, fugitive criminal billionaire oil broker who had flaunted US v. Iran sanctions and an oil embargo.
Deflecting criticism of his pardon, Clinton credited Holder for his council in convincing him to pardon Rich. Sucking up to power would remain Holder’s M.O. for years to come.
During the Bush administration, Eric Holder worked at a DC law firm whose main clients included Merck Pharmaceuticals and UBS bank.
He was an early backer of candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and a major, and apparently successful, fundraising bundler for the future President.
When President Obama took office, he appointed Holder US Attorney General.
For a price. The mortita? Campaign contributions.
In his book Extortion, author Peter Schweizer details how President Obama leveraged to Holder his position as AG and the positions of Associate Attorney General to the other people who would head his Justice Dept, Thomas Perrelli, Karol Mason, and Tony West.
Schweizer writes, ‘For the first time, at least half a dozen senior positions were occupied by individuals who had been campaign bundlers (fund raisers) for a presidential candidate.”
The six-year chronology of Holder, as chief steward of the flame of justice, shows him to be more criminal than cop. His crimes fall into several categories, but follow a common, pervasive theme: allowing the wealthy the privilege to go completely unpunished for alleged and admitted criminal behavior.
Similar to the “indulgences” sold in the past by Kings and Popes, Holder offered a modern “get-out-of-jail-free” card, seemingly upon request.
Like the Mark Rich pardon, HSBC was given a pass from their admitted involvement in the largest gun running and drug money laundering scheme in US history.
Similarly, not a single member of the fraudulent financial industry guilty of causing the 2007-08 global collapse has ever been prosecuted. For good reason: The national banking criminals bought off Holder’s Justice Dept. for pennies on the dollar; the mere cost of doing business in the USA.
Bank of America and Wells Fargo used the fraud of “Robo-signing” machines to have Marshalls across America evict hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, illegally stealing their property.
Holder’s response: Force a settlement on the nation’s home owners of a paltry $2,000 for each stolen home and then indemnify the same criminal banks from further legal action by the defrauded home owners.
Nice.
When former New Jersey US senator, Jon Corzine, ripped off his company’s, MF Global, account holders for $1.6 billion, salvation for his crime was only a phone call away.
Law firm for MF Global, Covington & Burlington, who Holder had worked for, evidently used its influence with its former sibling since Holder assigned as prosecutor, Tony West, who had worked for Morrison & Foerester, the firm that was handling MF Global’s assets at the same time. So, of course, Corzine and the $1.6 billion were never indicted.
That kind of loyalty can indeed get one a $77-million pay day.
In his Sept. 15 announcement of the further evisceration of US constitutional protections and its new spy network, Holder showcased the depth of the problem. “We must never lose sight of what violent extremists fear the most…” said Holder with a somber face.
“Our unwavering respect for equality, civil rights, and civil liberties; and our enduring commitment to justice, democracy, and the rule of law.”
Of course the head of US “justice” failed to point out his further personal exemptions to his statement.
Having prosecuted, interrogated, and intimidated more journalists than any other USAG, Holder gave special treatment to the Associated Press (AP), then Fox News and New York Times reporters James Rosen, and James Risen. When Rolling Stone Magazine released the dirt on America’s “Knight-of-the-Empire”, General David Petraeus, investigator Michael Hasting’s out-of- control car strangely exploded one hundred feet before hitting a tree at one-hundred-and-forty mile per hour.
There was no investigation of this tragic “traffic accident.”
Whistleblowers who dared use the facts, like CIA agent John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Thomas Drake were among the many truth-tellers in Holder’s gun-sights, despite his protestations of “unwavering respect for equality, civil rights, and civil liberties.”
Free speech and freedom of the press were once on that list. AP President and CEO, Gary Pruitt, described the DOJ’s actions more accurately as a, “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The extra-judicial killing of innocent Americans was a unique machination of Holder’s reign. While his boss had his weekly Tuesday, “Kill Meetings,” Holder avoided at all costs his own John Yoo moment of having to embarrass himself nationally by torturing the English language and rule of law sufficiently, under oath and before congress, to justify his president’s wanton killing of innocents with US drones.
When White House blood lust developed a taste for American blood, Holder was quite willing to go along with the blowing-to-bits of Anwar al-Awlaki and his equally innocent sixteen-year-old son, Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, who was born in Denver, Co.
But Holder’s willingness to kill his own citizens was not limited to foreign shores. Documents reveal that Holder knew of and supported an FBI report and plan to assassinate, using a high powered rifle, the leaders of the Houston, TX Occupy movement. Although the plan was not completed, this likely had to do with Holder razing to the ground every one of the scores of Occupy camps across America in one forty-eight hour, carefully orchestrated, national police mobilization on Feb 4th and 5th, 2012.
Holder killed the hope of Occupy instead.
Of course, as US Attorney General, Holder was above his own laws. Questions regarding the “Fast and Furious” drug dealing, gun running, money laundering, DoJ fiasco follow Holder to this day and remain unanswered.
When the main Mexican drug kingpin wanted, at least, for questioning, Manuel Celis-Acosta, was taken into custody twice by the Justice Dept, both times the DoJ released him without charges.
Holder’s silence, in refusing to testify or provide thousands of congressionally subpoenaed records of Obama Government gun running, earned him a 2012 Contempt of Congress from the US House of Representatives.
The joke continued, however, as the DoJ was, of course, the agency tasked with punishing their leader’s crimes.
3-Closing Statement
Indeed history will take this mere overview of the conflicts of interest that brought US jurisprudence to its knees before the power of money, and judge Eric Holder most harshly. But of these crimes cumulatively, the damage inflicted rises to a more monstrous crime, indeed a felony, of genocidal proportions.
Thanks to Holder’s national example the bar of justice, and its advertised availability for purchase, are now so low as to be barbaric. The world sees this clearly everyday across the globe of the attempted US empire. Americans are predictably exceptional, i.e., oblivious, to this easy observation of global hegemonic inhumanity.
And, in the Homeland?
Recently, sixteen-year-old Ethan Couch decided he was entitled to get really drunk and drive his father’s company’s brand new Ford F-350 Super Cab into a family of four working on a stalled car on the side of the country Texas road.
Young master Couch was also a pill head, as toxicology showed 0.24% blood alcohol level and valium present.
All four died and many of his truck’s passengers sustained life-long critical injuries.
But, Couch also had a rich Texas daddy who hired a rich Texas lawyer who had convenient connections with a getting-richer-all-the-time Texas State District Judge, Jean Boyd.
The privileged parents, arguing that their vehicular murderer son was the sad product of their affluence, and therefore, poor parenting, hired an attorney that brought on a psychologist to say Couch was “a product of wealth” and was accustomed to getting “whatever he wanted.”
Because he was so affluent and accustomed to never having consequences, the attorney argued that he should get therapy as opposed to jail. Soul-less Judge Jean Boyd who was of course influenced to appreciate this highly selective argument gave multi-murderer, Ethan Couch, again, what he wanted. The judge punished the spoiled brat, and spawn of endemic American greed, with a suspended sentence and $450,000 stay in an ultra-posh “Hope by the Sea,” rehabilitation center in San Juan Capistrano, Ca.
So was born a new felony criminal defense strategy, only possible in an increasingly immoral country: the defense of “Afflu-enza.”
Six dead: Four-hundred-and-fifty grand.
Cool.
Robert H. Richards IV is a member of the DuPont family, great-grandson of chemical tycoon Irenee du Pont, and rich. He is also a sick and twisted example of rich entitlement. Mr. Richards was arrested for two counts of second-degree child rape in 2009, two felonies that carry a 10-year mandatory jail sentence. He raped his three year old daughter. He was convicted. But that meant nothing in Eric Holder’s model of a new America.
The 47-year-old pedophile then enlisted one of the most high-priced law firms in the state, which helped him reach a plea deal of one count of fourth-degree rape.
Fourth-degree rape doesn’t require a mandatory minimum sentence, so Richards accepted the deal and admit to sexually assaulting his infant daughter between 2005 and 2007.
Regardless of the courtroom confession of raping a three year old girl, Delaware Superior Court Judge, Jan Jurden, ruled that Richards “will not fare well” in prison due to his sad, unfortunate life of affluence; this being odd that a Judge would somehow miss the point of mandatory incarceration.
So the Judge, Jan Jurden, applied the legal precedents set by the chief justice of the land, Eric Holder, and decided that this rich criminal would learn the error of his ways more effectively in a different posh rehab center for other rich criminals instead of, like all other rapists, prison.
While taking a lie detector test in April of 2010, Richards admitted to also sexually abusing his son in December of 2005 when the boy was just 19-month-old and continuing the abuse for roughly two years.
But with recidivism of child sex offenders running only about ninety percent who return to jail, Judge Jan Jurden’s decision of a suspended sentence and rehabilitation will be tested soon.
Three years old!
4-Guilty
Yes. Guilty as charged. On all counts.
Morality in America is now directly proportional to money and, preferably, power.
America has lost its way in every facet of normal society, most importantly in the application of justice.
America’s nationalist politicians are corrupt, its sports heroes cheaters, and its drug addled celebrities adored for sage wisdom.
And the man who should be the bastion of fair, consistent, constitutional US justice, is a crook.
So, thanks to the corruption of the national US example of justice, US Attorney General Eric Holder, the bar of justice is now so low that three year old girls are fair game for rich rapists and US kings and princes can kill with impunity, albeit for a price.
Indeed. Pol Pot, the Cambodian tyrant and authoritarian hypocrite that brought his people the “Killing Fields,” where the bodies of the older generations were dumped in favor of the reeducation of the young, made no apologies. His barbarism was so extreme that the recently post-war Vietnamese had to invade and stop it.
But the kind of barbarism that will purge its society in Cambodia starts with a methodical decent from real justice, through child rapists to wanton killers, and finally to full societal atrocity.
Thanks to USAG Holder, America’s direction has become terminal.
Throughout this entire maddening decent, the condition of destructive and deteriorating justice is tolerated, always, as “normal.”
Guilty, Mr. Holder. Guilty of making the morally unconscionable and American inhumanity to man, normal.
When a society becomes endemically corrupt it is then a good idea for its corrupt government to keep a watchful eye reporting on absolutely everyone.
It’s not often I praise the BBC for producing real journalism. Further, it is with some disbelief that I find myself applauding Jane Corbin, who I will struggle till my dying day to forgive for her despicable piece of Israeli propaganda parading as reportage a few years back on the Israeli navy’s attack on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to Gaza.
Nonetheless, Corbin has now fronted a truly disturbing revisionist documentary on Rwanda, called Rwanda’s Untold Story. The programme’s argument is that the official story about a straightforward genocide by the Hutu majority of Rwanda’s Tutsis 20 years ago is highly selective and entirely misleading. One scholar suggests that the narrative we have been fed is the equivalent of reducing the Second World War to the Holocaust and claiming nothing else of significance happened.
What the documentary demonstrates forcefully is that Paul Kagame, the hero of the official story of Rwanda’s genocide, was almost certainly the biggest war criminal to have emerged from those horrifying events. Kagame led the Tutsis’ main militia, the RPF. He almost certainly ordered the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s plane, the trigger for a civil war that quickly escalated into a genocide; on the best estimates, his RPF was responsible for killing 80% of the 1 million who died inside Rwanda, making the Hutus, not the Tutsis, the chief victims; and his subsequent decision to extend the civil war into neighbouring Congo, where many Hutu civilians had fled to escape the RPF, led to the deaths of up to 5 million more.
Not surprising then that Kagame is championed by Britain’s own biggest war criminal, Tony Blair. But the rot has spread much further. Rwanda, now praised as a model democracy under Kagame, is in truth a police state, where the president kills or locks up all opponents, fixes the elections, and has made any questioning of the official story he created – that the Tutsis were the exclusive victims of the genocide – a crime.
The BBC has not had to dig up any new information to make this programme. It’s all been available for years. But no one apart from a few experts – academics, UN military personnel who were there, UN investigators, and Kagame’s former, and disillusioned, inner circle – have dared to speak out.
The real criminals, as ever, it seems, have been the western powers and the UN. They have happily paraded their remorse at failing to intervene at the time of the genocide (presumably because their self-confessed error helped to justify the subsequent wave of bogus “humanitarian interventions” in the Middle East). But what the documentary makes clear is that Blair, Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan and many others have helped to whitewash Kagame’s crimes against humanity and provide a veneer of legitimacy to his current oppressive rule. Anyone who has threatened to blow the lid, like Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the UN’s international tribunal on Rwanda, has been forced out.
But as I watched the programme, one thing struck me forcefully in particular, though it was not referred to by Corbin: what were the journalists who crawled all over the Rwanda story for years doing? How were Blair, Clinton and Annan allowed to forge the myth of a simple Hutu genocide of Tutsis without serious challenge from serious reporters working for serious newspapers that were supposed to be making sense of these events for us?
From my own experience covering Israel-Palestine, I can guess what happened. The reporters on the ground feared straying too far from the consensus in their newsrooms. Rather than telling their editors what the story was (the model of news production most people assume to be the case), the editors were creating the framework of the story for the reporters, based on the official narrative being promoted in political and diplomatic circles. Correspondents who cared about their careers dared not challenge the party line too strongly, even when they knew it to be a lie.
Rwanda also offers a telling example of how such group-think works, and how a non-expert far from real events but schooled in a kind of London or Washington consensus on foreign affairs ends up policing the limits of possible thought in a way that strips us, his readers, of the right to hear a counter-narrative.
The guilty party in this case was George Monbiot, often seen as one of the most radical and original thinkers publishing in the British mainstream liberal media. Two years ago he wrote an ugly attack, entitled “Naming the Genocide Deniers“, on two scholars, one of them the renowned Ed Herman. Monbiot eventually dragged in a host of other thinkers, including Noam Chomsky, accusing them of being “genocide belittlers” for not turning on the pair at his instigation.
The crime committed by this tiny group was that they had raised the possibility that the official story of the genocide in Rwanda – as well as of some of the massacres in the Balkans – might not be entirely historically accurate, and that the accounts might have been distorted for political advantage. Monbiot, uninterested in assessing their claims or addressing the facts, abused them for straying from the official narrative. Monbiot might like to reconsider his behaviour, for which I and others criticised him at the time, and issue a long-overdue apology.
That aside, Monbiot’s disgraceful accusations are a useful illustration of how powerful is the emotional, imaginative and possibly financial grip of the mainstream media on journalists, even those feted for their independence.
It is with that context in mind too that one should tip one’s hat to the BBC and, reluctantly, to Jane Corbin for doing their jobs for once. Rwanda’s Untold Story reminds us how rarely journalists actually engage in the myth-busting, truth-telling work they claim to be bedrock of their craft.
David Brooks is a prominent and powerful journalist. He is a columnist for the New York Times and a commentator for PBS New Hour and NPR.
Now we learn, through an article in Jewish Journal, that Brooks’ son is in the Israeli military. In other words, he has a profound conflict with impartiality, as the New York Timesethics code calls it, and Brooks, the Times, NPR, etc. have not revealed this to the public.
The Jewish Journal article reports:
One of the more interesting nuggets buried in a long, Hebrew-language interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks in the recent Ha’aretz magazine is the revelation, toward the very end, that Brooks’s oldest son serves in the Israel Defense Forces.
I find it interesting, and disturbing, that Ha’aretz hid this information from its English readers.
(By the way, I have written extensively about numerous journalists having close personal and family ties to the Israeli military – see below.)
Philip Weis has a strong article that tells about Brooks’ reporting, and notes:
“So when David Brooks was commenting favorably on Israel’s onslaught on Gaza this summer on National Public Radio, his son was serving in the Israeli army. Why didn’t NPR tell us?”
It is ironic, then, that Weiss also decides not to tell readers insider information he feels they shouldn’t know:
“This is now the third Times reporter/writer whose son has gone into the Israeli Defense Forces. Famously Ethan Bronner, of course… and a third person I will not identify (I know the individual personally, the beat didn’t involve the Middle East, the son left before long).”
Weiss’s reluctance to share his insider information with others is a bit reminiscent of Ha’aretz. Perhaps it’s ok, since this is a personal friend. But it shows again that some are inside a loop that the rest of us aren’t.
This is also reminiscent of Common Dreams, which exposed an Israel-partisan who posed as an anti-Semite on numerous websites, but refused to disclose his name, thus keeping its insider information away from the rest of us – even though many of our websites may also have been victimized by this infiltrator.
Again, some are in the loop. The rest of us aren’t.
*
Some of my articles on US journalists’ personal ties to the Israeli military
In order to overcome massive US and world public opposition to new wars in the Middle East, Obama relied on the horrific internet broadcasts of ISIS slaughtering two American hostages, the journalists James Foley and Steve Sotloff, by decapitation. These brutal murders were Obama’s main propaganda tool to set a new Middle East war agenda – his own casus belli bonanza!
This explains the US Administration’s threats of criminal prosecution against the families of Foley and Sotloff when they sought to ransom their captive sons from ISIS.
With the American mass media repeatedly showing the severed heads of these two helpless men, public indignation and disgust were aroused with calls for US military involvement to stop the terror. US and EU political leaders presented the decapitations of Western hostages by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) as a direct and mortal threat to the safety of civilians in the US and Europe. The imagery evoked was of black-clad faceless terrorists, armed to the teeth, invading Europe and the US and executing innocent families as they begged for rescue and mercy.
The problem with this propaganda ploy is not the villainy and brutal crimes celebrated by ISIS, but the fact that Obama’s closest ally in his seventh war in six years is Saudi Arabia, a repugnant kingdom which routinely decapitates its prisoners in public without any judicial process recognizable as fair by civilized standards – unless tortured ‘confessions’ are now a Western norm. During August 2014, when ISIS decapitated two American captives, Riyadh beheaded fourteen prisoners. Since the beginning of the year the Saudi monarchy has decapitated more than 46 prisoners and chopped off the arms and limbs of many more. During Obama and Kerry’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, horrendous decapitations were displayed in public. These atrocities did not dim the bright smile on Barak Obama’s face as he strolled with his genial royal Saudi executioners, in stark contrast to the US President’s stern and angry countenance as he presented the ISIS killing of two Americans as his pretext for bombing Syria.
The Western mass media are silent in the face of the Saudi Kingdom’s common practice of public decapitation. Not one among the major news corporations, the BBC, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS and NPR, have questioned the moral authority of a US President who engages in selective condemnation of ISIS while ignoring the official Saudi state beheadings and the amputations.
Decapitation and Dismemberment: By Dagger and Drones
The ISIS internet videos showing gaunt, orange-suited Western prisoners and their lopped-off heads have evoked widespread dismay and fear. We are repeatedly told: ‘ISIS is coming to get us!’ But ISIS is open and public about their criminal acts against helpless hostages. We cannot say the same about the decapitations and dismemberment of the hundreds of victims of US drone attacks. When a drone fires its missiles on a home, a school, wedding party or vehicle, the bodies of living people are dismembered, macerated, decapitated and burned beyond recognition – all by remote control. The carnage is not videoed or displayed for mass consumption by Obama’s high command. Indeed, civilian deaths, if even acknowledged, are brushed off as ‘collateral damage’ while the vaporized remnants of men, women and children have been described by US troops as ‘pink foam’.
If the brutal decapitation and dismemberment of innocent civilians is a capital crime that should be punished, as I believe it is, then both ISIS and the Obama regime with his allied leaders should face a people’s war crimes tribunal in the countries where the crimes occurred.
There are good reasons to view Washington’s close relation with the Saudi royal beheaders as part of a much broader alliance with terror-evoking brutality. For decades, the US drug agencies and banks have worked closely with criminal drug cartels in Mexico while glossing over their notorious practice of decapitating, dismembering and displaying their victims, be they local civilians, courageous journalists, captured police or migrants fleeing the terror of Central America. The notorious Zetas and the Knights Templar have penetrated the highest reaches of the Mexican federal and local governments, turning state officials and institutions into submissive and obedient clients. Over 100,000 Mexicans have lost their lives because of this ‘state within a state’, an ‘ISIS’ in Mexico – just ‘South of the Border’. And just like ISIS in the Middle East, the cartels get their weapons from the US imported right across the Texas and Arizona borders. Despite this gruesome terror on the US southern flank, the nation’s principle banks, including Bank of America, CitiBank, Wells Fargo and many others have laundered billions of dollars of drug profits for the cartels. For example, the discovery of 49 decapitated bodies in one mass in May 2014 did not prompt Washington to form a world-wide coalition to bomb Mexico, nor was it moved to arrest the Wall Street bankers laundering the ‘beheaders bloody booty’.
Conclusion
Obama’s hysterical and very selective presentation of ISIS crimes forms the pretext for launching another war against a predominantly Muslim country, Syria, while shielding his close ally, the royal Saudi decapitator from US public outrage. ISIS crimes have become another excuse to launch a campaign of ‘mass decapitation by drones and bombers’. The mass propaganda campaign over one crime against humanity becomes the basis for perpetrating even worse crimes against humanity. Many hundreds of innocent civilians in Syria and Iraq will be dismembered by ‘anti-terrorist’ bombs and drones unleashed by another of Obama’s ‘coalition’.
The localized savagery of ISIS will be multiplied, amplified and spread by the US-directed ‘coalition of the willing decapitators’. The terror of hooded beheaders on the ground will be answered and expanded by their faceless counterparts in the air, while delicately hiding the heads rolling through the public squares of Riyadh or the headless bodies displayed along the highways of Mexico … and especially ignoring the hidden victims of US-Saudi aggression in the towns and villages of Syria.
In 1996 – as major U.S. news outlets disparaged the Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine story and destroyed the career of investigative reporter Gary Webb for reviving it – the CIA marveled at the success of its public-relations team guiding the mainstream media’s hostility toward both the story and Webb, according to a newly released internal report.
Entitled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” the six-page report describes the CIA’s damage control after Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series was published in the San Jose Mercury-News in August 1996. Webb had resurrected disclosures from the 1980s about the CIA-backed Contras collaborating with cocaine traffickers as the Reagan administration worked to conceal the crimes.
Although the CIA’s inspector general later corroborated the truth about the Contra-cocaine connection and the Reagan administration’s cover-up, the mainstream media’s counterattack in defense of the CIA in late summer and fall of 1996 proved so effective that the subsequent CIA confession made little dent in the conventional wisdom regarding either the Contra-cocaine scandal or Gary Webb.
In fall 1998, when the CIA inspector general’s extraordinary findings were released, the major U.S. news media largely ignored them, leaving Webb a “disgraced” journalist who – unable to find a decent-paying job in his profession – committed suicide in 2004, a dark tale that will be revisited in a new movie, “Kill the Messenger,” starring Jeremy Renner and scheduled to reach theaters on Oct. 10.
The “Managing a Nightmare” report offers something of the CIA’s back story for how the spy agency’s PR team exploited relationships with mainstream journalists who then essentially did the CIA’s work for it, mounting a devastating counterattack against Webb that marginalized him and painted the Contra-cocaine trafficking story as some baseless conspiracy theory.
Crucial to that success, the report credits “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists and an effective response by the Director of Central Intelligence’s Public Affairs Staff [that] helped prevent this story from becoming an unmitigated disaster.
“This success has to be viewed in relative terms. In the world of public relations, as in war, avoiding a rout in the face of hostile multitudes can be considered a success. … By anyone’s definition, the emergence of this story posed a genuine public relations crisis for the Agency.” [As approved for release by the CIA last July 29, the report’s author was redacted as classified, however, Ryan Devereaux of The Interceptidentified the writer as former Directorate of Intelligence staffer Nicholas Dujmovic.]
According to the CIA report, the public affairs staff convinced some journalists, who followed up Webb’s exposé by calling the CIA, that “this series represented no real news, in that similar charges were made in the 1980s and were investigated by the Congress and were found to be without substance. Reporters were encouraged to read the ‘Dark Alliance’ series closely and with a critical eye to what allegations could actually be backed with evidence. Early in the life of this story, one major news affiliate, after speaking with a CIA media spokesman, decided not to run the story.”
Of course, the CIA’s assertion that the Contra-cocaine charges had been disproved in the 1980s was false. In fact, after Brian Barger and I wrote the first article about the Contra-cocaine scandal for the Associated Press in December 1985, a Senate investigation headed by Sen. John Kerry confirmed that many of the Contra forces were linked to cocaine traffickers and that the Reagan administration had even contracted with drug-connected airlines to fly supplies to the Contras who were fighting Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government.
However, in the late 1980s, the Reagan administration and the CIA had considerable success steering the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major news outlets away from the politically devastating reality that President Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras were tied up with cocaine traffickers. Kerry’s groundbreaking report – when issued in 1989 – was largely ignored or mocked by the mainstream media.
That earlier media response left the CIA’s PR office free to cite the established “group think” – rather than the truth — when beating back Webb’s resurfacing of the scandal in 1996.
A ‘Firestorm’ of Attacks
The initial attacks on Webb’s series came from the right-wing media, such as the Washington Times and the Weekly Standard, but the CIA’s report identified the key turning point as coming when the Washington Post pummeled Webb in two influential articles.
The CIA’s PR experts quickly exploited that opening. The CIA’s internal report said: “Public Affairs made sure that reporters and news directors calling for information – as well as former Agency officials, who were themselves representing the Agency in interviews with the media – received copies of these more balanced stories. Because of the Post’s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a ‘firestorm of reaction’ against the San Jose Mercury-News.”
The CIA’s report then noted the happy news that Webb’s editors at the Mercury-News began scurrying for cover, “conceding the paper might have done some things differently.” The retreat soon became a rout with some mainstream journalists essentially begging the CIA for forgiveness for ever doubting its innocence.
“One reporter of a major regional newspaper told [CIA] Public Affairs that, because it had reprinted the Mercury-News stories in their entirety, his paper now had ‘egg on its face,’ in light of what other newspapers were saying,” the CIA’s report noted, as its PR team kept track of the successful counterattack.
“By the end of September [1996], the number of observed stories in the print media that indicated skepticism of the Mercury-News series surpassed that of the negative coverage, which had already peaked,” the report said. “The observed number of skeptical treatments of the alleged CIA connection grew until it more than tripled the coverage that gave credibility to that connection. The growth in balanced reporting was largely due to the criticisms of the San Jose Mercury-News by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and especially The Los Angeles Times.”
The overall tone of the CIA’s internal assessment is one of almost amazement at how its PR team could, with a deft touch, help convince mainstream U.S. journalists to trash a fellow reporter on a story that put the CIA in a negative light.
“What CIA media spokesmen can do, as this case demonstrates, is to work with journalists who are already disposed toward writing a balanced story,” the report said. “What gives this limited influence a ‘multiplier effect’ is something that surprised me about the media: that the journalistic profession has the will and the ability to hold its own members to certain standards.”
The report then praises the neoconservative American Journalism Review for largely sealing Webb’s fate with a harsh critique entitled “The Web That Gary Spun,” with AJR’s editor adding that the Mercury-News “deserved all the heat leveled at it for ‘Dark Alliance.’”
The report also cites with some pleasure the judgment of the Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz who reacted to Webb’s observation that the war was a business to some Contra leaders with the snide comment: “Oliver Stone, check your voice mail.”
Neither Kurtz nor the CIA writer apparently was aware of the disclosure — among Iran-Contra documents — of a March 17, 1986 message about the Contra leadership from White House aide Oliver North’s emissary to the Contras, Robert Owen, who complained to North: “Few of the so-called leaders of the movement . . . really care about the boys in the field. … THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.” [Emphasis in original.]
Misguided Group Think
Yet, faced with this mainstream “group think” – as misguided as it was – Webb’s Mercury-News editors surrendered to the pressure, apologizing for the series, shutting down the newspaper’s continuing investigation into the Contra-cocaine scandal and forcing Webb to resign in disgrace.
But Webb’s painful experience provided an important gift to American history, at least for those who aren’t enamored of superficial “conventional wisdom.” CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz ultimately produced a fairly honest and comprehensive report that not only confirmed many of the longstanding allegations about Contra-cocaine trafficking but revealed that the CIA and the Reagan administration knew much more about the criminal activity than any of us outsiders did.
Hitz completed his investigation in mid-1998 and the second volume of his two-volume investigation was published on Oct. 8, 1998. In the report, Hitz identified more than 50 Contras and Contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s.
According to Volume Two, the CIA knew the criminal nature of its Contra clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The earliest Contra force, called the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ADREN) or the 15th of September Legion, had chosen “to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre,” according to a June 1981 draft of a CIA field report.
According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981. ADREN’s leaders included Enrique Bermúdez and other early Contras who would later direct the major Contra army, the CIA-organized FDN. Throughout the war, Bermúdez remained the top Contra military commander.
The CIA corroborated the allegations about ADREN’s cocaine trafficking, but insisted that Bermúdez had opposed the drug shipments to the United States that went ahead nonetheless. The truth about Bermúdez’s supposed objections to drug trafficking, however, was less clear.
According to Hitz’s Volume One, Bermúdez enlisted Norwin Meneses, a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine smuggler and a key figure in Webb’s series, to raise money and buy supplies for the Contras. Volume One had quoted a Meneses associate, another Nicaraguan trafficker named Danilo Blandón, who told Hitz’s investigators that he and Meneses flew to Honduras to meet with Bermúdez in 1982. At the time, Meneses’s criminal activities were well-known in the Nicaraguan exile community. But Bermúdez told these cocaine smugglers that “the ends justify the means” in raising money for the Contras.
After the Bermúdez meeting, Contra soldiers helped Meneses and Blandón get past Honduran police who briefly arrested them on drug-trafficking suspicions. After their release, Blandón and Meneses traveled on to Bolivia to complete a cocaine transaction.
There were other indications of Bermúdez’s drug-smuggling tolerance. In February 1988, another Nicaraguan exile linked to the drug trade accused Bermúdez of participation in narcotics trafficking, according to Hitz’s report. After the Contra war ended, Bermúdez returned to Managua, Nicaragua, where he was shot to death on Feb. 16, 1991. The murder has never been solved. [For more details on Hitz’s report and the Contra-cocaine scandal, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
Shrinking Fig Leaf
By the time that Hitz’s Volume Two was published in fall 1998, the CIA’s defense against Webb’s series had shrunk to a fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the Contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking. But Hitz made clear that the Contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of Contra crimes from the Justice Department, Congress and even the CIA’s own analytical division.
Besides tracing the evidence of Contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long Contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the Contra-drug problem but didn’t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.
According to Hitz, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. . . . [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the Contra program.” One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”
Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the Contras hid evidence of Contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA’s analysts.
Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that “only a handful of Contras might have been involved in drug trafficking.” That false assessment was passed on to Congress and to major news organizations — serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his “Dark Alliance” series in 1996.
Although Hitz’s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it went almost unnoticed by major U.S. news outlets. By fall 1998, the U.S. mainstream media was obsessed with President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. So, few readers of major U.S. newspapers saw much about the CIA’s inspector general admitting that America’s premier spy agency had collaborated with and protected cocaine traffickers.
On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz’s Volume Two was posted on the CIA’s Web site, the New York Times published a brief article that continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the Contra-drug problem may have been worse than earlier understood. Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times, which had assigned a huge team of 17 reporters to tear down Webb’s work, never published a story on the release of Hitz’s Volume Two.
In 2000, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee grudgingly acknowledged that the stories about Reagan’s CIA protecting Contra drug traffickers were true. The committee released a report citing classified testimony from CIA Inspector General Britt Snider (Hitz’s successor) admitting that the spy agency had turned a blind eye to evidence of Contra-drug smuggling and generally treated drug smuggling through Central America as a low priority.
“In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working,” Snider said, adding that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in “a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.”
The House committee still downplayed the significance of the Contra-cocaine scandal, but the panel acknowledged, deep inside its report, that in some cases, “CIA employees did nothing to verify or disprove drug trafficking information, even when they had the opportunity to do so. In some of these, receipt of a drug allegation appeared to provoke no specific response, and business went on as usual.”
Like the release of Hitz’s report in 1998, the admissions by Snider and the House committee drew virtually no media attention in 2000 — except for a few articles on the Internet, including one at Consortiumnews.com.
Killing the Messenger
Because of this abuse of power by the Big Three newspapers — choosing to conceal their own journalistic negligence on the Contra-cocaine scandal and to protect the Reagan administration’s image — Webb’s reputation was never rehabilitated.
After his original “Dark Alliance” series was published in 1996, Webb had been inundated with attractive book offers from major publishing houses, but once the vilification began, the interest evaporated. Webb’s agent contacted an independent publishing house, Seven Stories Press, which had a reputation for publishing books that had been censored, and it took on the project.
After Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion was published in 1998, I joined Webb in a few speaking appearances on the West Coast, including one packed book talk at the Midnight Special bookstore in Santa Monica, California. For a time, Webb was treated as a celebrity on the American Left, but that gradually faded.
In our interactions during these joint appearances, I found Webb to be a regular guy who seemed to be holding up fairly well under the terrible pressure. He had landed an investigative job with a California state legislative committee. He also felt some measure of vindication when CIA Inspector General Hitz’s reports came out.
However, Webb never could overcome the pain caused by his betrayal at the hands of his journalistic colleagues, his peers. In the years that followed, Webb was unable to find decent-paying work in his profession — the conventional wisdom remained that he had somehow been exposed as a journalistic fraud. His state job ended; his marriage fell apart; he struggled to pay bills; and he was faced with a forced move out of a just-sold house near Sacramento, California, and in with his mother.
On Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Webb typed out suicide notes to his ex-wife and his three children; laid out a certificate for his cremation; and taped a note on the door telling movers — who were coming the next morning — to instead call 911. Webb then took out his father’s pistol and shot himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more.
Even with Webb’s death, the big newspapers that had played key roles in his destruction couldn’t bring themselves to show Webb any mercy. After Webb’s body was found, I received a call from a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who knew that I was one of Webb’s few journalistic colleagues who had defended him and his work.
I told the reporter that American history owed a great debt to Gary Webb because he had forced out important facts about Reagan-era crimes. But I added that the Los Angeles Times would be hard-pressed to write an honest obituary because the newspaper had not published a single word on the contents of Hitz’s final report, which had largely vindicated Webb.
To my disappointment but not my surprise, I was correct. The Los Angeles Times ran a mean-spirited obituary that made no mention of either my defense of Webb or the CIA’s admissions in 1998. The obituary – more fitting for a deceased mob boss than a fellow journalist – was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post.
In effect, Webb’s suicide enabled senior editors at the Big Three newspapers to breathe a little easier — one of the few people who understood the ugly story of the Reagan administration’s cover-up of the Contra-cocaine scandal and the U.S. media’s complicity was now silenced.
No Accountability
To this day, none of the journalists or media critics who participated in the destruction of Gary Webb has paid a price for their actions. None has faced the sort of humiliation that Webb had to endure. None had to experience that special pain of standing up for what is best in the profession of journalism — taking on a difficult story that seeks to hold powerful people accountable for serious crimes — and then being vilified by your own colleagues, the people that you expected to understand and appreciate what you had done.
In May 2013, one of the Los Angeles Times reporters who had joined in the orchestrated destruction of Webb’s career acknowledged that the newspaper’s assault was a “tawdry exercise” amounting to “overkill,” which later contributed to Webb’s suicide. This limited apology by former Los Angeles Times reporter Jesse Katz was made during a radio interview and came as filming was about to start on “Kill the Messenger,” based on a book by the same name by Nick Schou.
On KPCC-FM 89.3′s AirTalk With Larry Mantle, Katz was pressed by callers to address his role in the destruction of Webb. Katz offered what could be viewed as a limited apology.
“As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope,” Katz said. “And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.”
Katz added, “We really didn’t do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of a tawdry exercise. … And it ruined that reporter’s career.”
Now, with the imminent release of a major Hollywood movie about Webb’s ordeal, the next question is whether the major newspapers will finally admit their longstanding complicity in the Contra-cocaine cover-up or whether they will simply join the CIA’s press office in another counterattack.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Possibly the most insightful statement ever made by a journalist was from Gary Webb, who killed himself in 2004, years after the CIA and media rivals destroyed his career and credibility.
I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.
Now Hollywood is making a film, called Kill the Messenger, about the San Jose Mercury News reporter. Webb briefly created a national scandal in 1996 by exposing how the CIA-backed Contras in Latin America had funded their guerrilla war through trafficking crack cocaine to African American communities in the US, with the knowledge of the CIA and other US agencies. The scandal quickly subsided because the CIA and other journalists – from the New York Times, the Washington Post and especially from the LA Times, who had been scooped on their own patch by Webb – waged a campaign of vilification. The toll eventually led Webb to take his own life.
It should be welcome news that his original revelations will be heard by a new generation, and that the US media’s hand-in-glove relationship to the US intelligence agencies will get national exposure.
A story like Webb’s ought to remind us that the CIA, the NSA and other US agencies are not there ultimately to “do good”, not even to serve us, the people, but to help prop up a world order that benefits a small, greedy global elite and to spread fear and misinformation among the rest of us to keep us divided and obedient. And the media’s role is to serve that same global elite, rarely to hold it to account. That was the mistake made by Webb and briefly by his news editors, who quickly abandoned Webb after more senior colleagues on bigger papers taught them what journalism is really about.
But I fear Hollywood’s interest should be read in different terms. It signifies a realisation by movie execs that Webb’s revelations are now old enough to constitute “history”, no more threatening to the contemporary reputations of the CIA or the US media than filming Mutiny on the Bounty was to the modern British navy.
Hollywood knows that where there’s a good story, there’s money to be made from us – audiences only too happy to be outraged at injustice but also only too wiling to believe such “ancient” injustices offer no lessons for the present. For that reason, it is doubtful Kill the Messenger’s viewers will emerge from the film more critical news consumers. They will still trust their daily paper and the TV news, and still assume that when all the president’s men tell them of events on distant shores – from Venezuela to Iran, Syria and Ukraine – they are being told the unvarnished truth.
It began with a call from his distraught daughter, writes Harvard professor Ricardo Hausmann. On national television, Nicholas Maduro, Venezuela’s president, had threatened the good professor with a legal investigation. And the professor’s daughter was worried. So too were the Harvard Crimson, whose editorial staff challenged President Maduro’s alleged “bullying,” and the Boston Globe,which promptly published a Hausmann missive. Lest one fears for the professor’s wellbeing, he assures us that he is free and unafraid, adding that he has “the protection of the U.S… the protection of Harvard.” Now we can all feel good, the USA’s robust free press, together with its august academic institutions, and the state itself, appear to be standing for academic freedom and empowering a lowly professor to speak truth to presidential power. Closer scrutiny suggests that quite the opposite may be true.
So how did the professor come to do the Joropo with the president?The latter was most outraged by an opinion piece Professor Hausmann co-wrote for Project Syndicate, “Should Venezuela Default?” President Nicholas Maduro recognized that Hausmann is an influential actor on the international banking scene and that his default prescription would only cause more fear, uncertainty and doubt.
And risk perception has a price. Hausmann’s article opens with exactly that measure. “Markets fear” that Venezuela may default on its debt and the price of this fear is that the interest rates on Venezuelan bonds are significantly higher than those on Mexico or Nigeria. This, in turn, has a negative impact on the lives of regular folk. Although Hausmann fails to note effective government countermeasures to protect the poor, the thrust of his remarks are true – higher interest rates hurt ordinary people… while the creditors’ returns are all the more secure.
In a man-bites-dog like inversion of roles, Hausmann, a JPMorgan Chase consultant and former chief economist at the Inter-American Development Bank, concludes that to “default on 30 million Venezuelans, rather than on Wall Street, is a… signal of moral bankruptcy.” The article had its all too predictable outcome. Interest rates shot up even more, settling back somewhat only after vigorous assurances from President Maduro.
All of this should immediately dispel any image of Hausmann as a cloistered academic analyzing reams of computer printouts in some basement office or lost in the stacks of Widener Library. In fact, Hausmann is a power player on the global scene and his dance with Venezuela’s revolutionary leadership began long ago.
Not immediately apparent from his Harvard CV is the gravity of his 1980s involvement in the Venezuelan government. Specifically, in the late 1980s, Hausmann was part of President Carlos Andres Perez’s economics cabinet. They implemented an IMF-style austerity program setting off the 1989 Caracazo—a popular rebellion put down by a massacre claiming over a thousand lives. Surely, given the resolve it demonstrates, this is an impressive fact meriting its own CV entry!
This success was followed by his promotion to Minister of Planning in the early 1990s and then, after Carlos Andres Perez was forced out of office for embezzlement, Hausmann’s career advanced with him becoming the Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank. Today, in addition to his Harvard gig, Hausmann is an advisor to many banks, governments and inter-governmental bodies.
Besides the massacre, none of this is particularly objectionable. Indeed these are the hallmarks of a successful career within the international mandarinate that governs the global economy. Of course, this belies the image of the innocuous and vulnerable professor that opens Hausmann’s Globe piece. There he also suggested the improbability of an American president attacking a professor; were it to happen, he speculates that an impeachment could follow. But there is precedent involving a powerful president attacking a real professor.
Ronald Reagan and the Professor
Consider the case of Ronald Reagan and E. Bradford Burns. A UCLA historian of Latin America, Burns debunked Ronald Reagan’s claims about Sandinista Nicaragua in a short 1985 article. At a dangerous moment in the Cold War, this was a truly brave act, one that could damage careers and worse. In fact, a well-known, award-winning actor, Edward Asner, had his CBS series, the Lou Grant Show, cancelled in 1982 after criticizing Reagan’s Central America policies. Solidarity activists in Burn’s Los Angeles lived in a charged atmosphere facing the real threat of thuggish repression from any number of sources. By 1988, activists reported death threats and alleged cases of kidnapping and rape. At the same time, the establishment in Southern California thrived on federal investment in Reagan’s war economy. Burns’ dissent, which undermined the rationale for Central American intervention and therewith part of the justification for the lucrative arms build-up that made Reagan so popular with regional elites, was therefore a real example of a humble professor speaking truth to power.
Ronald Reagan’s response was a televised attack that labeled Burns a purveyor of disinformation, and in vintage Reagan, the President promised to “pray for [Burn’s] students.” It also fueled the re-emerging academic McCarthyism and Oedipal resentments of folks like David Horowitz, who would later publish his infamous, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. But people fought back; with good humor, Burns recalled a student’s response, “As a citizen, I ask God to help President Reagan; Professor Burns’ students are doing fine.”
As we weigh the differences between Burns and Hausmann, it is worth noting the way in which each exercised power. Two years after Reagan’s attack, Burns won a distinguished teaching award. Notwithstanding his well-received research, Burns’ passion was for teaching. A former student recalls Burns’ view that, “We must learn to teach better… We must constantly transfer our conviction of the significance and relevance of history to the young. Tedium has no place in our lecture halls… We must convey that excitement.” And this was part of a broader perspective on social change, “Go ahead and do your research, publish your books,” he advised fellow academics, “A few of your colleagues will read and enjoy it, but if you want to change the world… teach undergraduates.” For the cynical, this idealism may be the long game of a presently enfeebled left, but it is certainly true to the picture that one imagines on hearing the word, “professor.”
More than a suave professor or deceptive editorialist, Hausmann is a man of action. No teaching awards adorn his CV. Perhaps he received some, but these are not deemed important enough to add. Since the early 2000s, he has been associated with the Venezuelan opposition’s hard right. Working for María Corina Machado’s Súmate to routinely predict the defeat of the Chavistasvia statistical analyses anticipating election outcomes only to have their claims falsified by real world voters, Hausmann is a partisan actor. Having failed at running the Venezuelan economy in the late 80s and into the 90s, he now attacks from the secure parapets of Harvard. As noted, his essay impacted the markets in entirely predictable ways.
Harvard as an Imperial Enterprise
It would behoove those interested in the development of the global economy to more closely, indeed, to forensically, examine the connections between Harvard, its faculty, and the economic policies of many governments. Beyond the scope of this article and the capacity of this author, such scrutiny should go beyond mere intellectual influence to uncover the interests involving the institution, its investments, its faculty, the advice they offer, and the actual flow of material benefits.
One gets a glimpse of what these may be in VERITA$: Everybody Loves Harvard, a documentary that explores the connections between Harvard and Russian economic policies. The late director Shin Eun-jung examined the relationship between the Harvard Institute for International Development and Russia’s conversion to a market economy. This was the Harvard Institute’s largest project. Earlier, it was involved in the financial liberalization of Indonesia and helped extend the Washington Consensus to Zambia, Kenya and Pakistan.
Receiving in excess of $40 million in grants for its Russia work, the Harvard Institute’s policies were adopted by end running the democratic process and helped enrich the privatizer of the Russian economy, Anatoly Chubais. Today a wealthy entrepreneur, Chubais is also an advisor to JPMorgan Chase. Together with Chubais, the Institute established the Russian Privatization Center which received more than $147 million in foreign funding that would have to be repaid at some point by the Russian people. With no constitutionally-defined role, the Center soon became fully embroiled in Russia’s corrupt transition to a market economy… and in benefiting the Harvard Management Company in the order of millions of dollars until the Asian banking crisis of the late 90s. So extreme was the corruption that even the US Justice Department investigated the mess. It later caught up with Harvard and the Institute, alleging false claims and conflicts of interest. It sued for $1.2 billion and settled in 2005 for $31 million, the largest suit in Harvard’s history according to Shin.
None of the foregoing suggests any kind of similar behavior on the part of Chubais’ fellow JPMorgan Chase advisor, Hausmann. But it does dispel the myth of Harvard as a purely academic institution. Instead, Harvard is clearly an economic actor on a global scale. Its faculty, especially those with Hausmann’s CV, have to be assessed in this light.
For those of us who respect Venezuelan sovereignty and admire that country’s attempt to transform its economy into one that works for working people, we have to acknowledge that this is a difficult time. Venezuela’s Revolución Bolivariana faces difficult choices between deepening the economic transformation with its attendant dislocations and accommodating parts of the splintering opposition. In this context, Hausmann’s intervention and feigned concern for “30 million Venezuelans” is a deft move likely aimed at aggravating an acute hard-currency shortage and provoking a political crisis.
If there are any doubts as to Hausmann’s concerns for the poor, we must ask where those rested when he was in power and implementing a harsh austerity program. Hausmann’s own values are hinted at when he castigates Nicholas Maduro by calling the president a “tropical thug.” One can and should denounce thuggish behavior, but his adding the adjective “tropical” casts things in a different light. Those of us from the Global South or familiar with ruling class racism readily recognize what is intended by the word.
Rather than suggesting any debate over academic freedom and the rights of Professor Hausmann, the media would be best advised to look at his intervention and President Maduro’s rebuke in the light of an extended class war playing out on a global stage. A critical media analysis will reveal that the partisan Hausmann knows how to navigate between the super-charged rhetoric of a country in the throes of an intense class struggle and the placid world of his university on the banks of Cambridge’s Charles River. Venezuelan rhetoric reflects the class struggle and also a different political rhetoric. Alma Llanera, Venezuela’s “second” anthem, celebrates claveles de pasión – “carnations of passion” – while Hausmann’s numbers games on the Charles River speaks to a coiffed banker’s calm exercise of power protected by the United States, protected by Harvard.
Suren Moodliar lives in Boston and finds much to admire at Harvard University. He may be contacted at suren <a.t> fairjobs >d o t< org. Although they are not responsible for any errors, Suren is grateful to Dave Burt, Umang Kumar, Mirna Lascano, Ben Manski, Jorge Marín, Christine O’Connell, Jason Pramas and Sandra Ruiz-Harris for their pre-publication comments.
The costs of the mainstream U.S. media’s wildly anti-Moscow bias in the Ukraine crisis are adding up, as the Obama administration has decided to react to alleged “Russian aggression” by investing as much as $1 trillion in modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
On Monday, a typically slanted New York Timesarticle justified these modernization plans by describing “Russia on the warpath” and adding: “Congress has expressed less interest in atomic reductions than looking tough in Washington’s escalating confrontation with Moscow.”
But the Ukraine crisis has been a textbook case of the U.S. mainstream media misreporting the facts of a foreign confrontation and then misinterpreting the meaning of the events, a classic case of “garbage in, garbage out.” The core of the false mainstream narrative is that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the crisis as an excuse to reclaim territory for the Russian Empire.
While that interpretation of events has been the cornerstone of Official Washington’s “group think,” the reality always was that Putin favored maintaining the status quo in Ukraine. He had no plans to “invade” Ukraine and was satisfied with the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Indeed, when the crisis heated up last February, Putin was distracted by the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Rather than Putin’s “warmongering” – as the Times said in the lead-in to another Monday article – the evidence is clear that it was the United States and the European Union that initiated this confrontation in a bid to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence and into the West’s orbit.
This was a scheme long in the making, but the immediate framework for the crisis took shape a year ago when influential U.S. neocons set their sights on Ukraine and Putin after Putin helped defuse a crisis in Syria by persuading President Barack Obama to set aside plans to bomb Syrian government targets over a disputed Sarin gas attack and instead accept Syria’s willingness to surrender its entire chemical weapons arsenal.
But the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies had their hearts set on another “shock and awe” campaign with the goal of precipitating another “regime change” against a Middle East government disfavored by Israel. Putin also worked with Obama to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, averting another neocon dream to “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”
The Despised Putin
So, Putin suddenly rose to the top of the neocons’ “enemies list” and some prominent neocons quickly detected his vulnerability in Ukraine, a historical route for western invasions of Russia and the scene of extraordinarily bloody fighting during World War II.
National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, one of the top neocon paymasters spreading around $100 million a year in U.S. taxpayers’ money, declared in late September 2013 that Ukraine represented “the biggest prize” but beyond that was an opportunity to put Putin “on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
The context for Gershman’s excitement was a European Union offer of an association agreement to Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych, but it came with some nasty strings attached, an austerity plan demanded by the International Monetary Fund that would have made the hard lives of the average Ukrainian even harder.
That prompted Yanukovych to seek a better deal from Putin who offered $15 billion in aid without the IMF’s harsh terms. Yet, once Yanukovych rebuffed the EU plan, his government was targeted by a destabilization campaign that involved scores of political and media projects funded by Gershman’s NED and other U.S. agencies.
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover who had been an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, reminded a group of Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations.” Nuland, wife of prominent neocon Robert Kagan, also showed up at the Maidan square in Kiev passing out cookies to protesters.
The Maidan protests, reflecting western Ukraine’s desire for closer ties to Europe, also were cheered on by neocon Sen. John McCain, who appeared on a podium with leaders of the far-right Svoboda party under a banner honoring Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. A year earlier, the European Parliament had identified Svoboda as professing “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views [that] go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles.”
Yet, militants from Svoboda and the even more extreme Right Sektor were emerging as the muscle of the Maidan protests, seizing government buildings and hurling firebombs at police. A well-known Ukrainian neo-Nazi leader, Andriy Parubiy, became the commandant of the Maidan’s “self-defense” forces.
Behind the scenes, Assistant Secretary Nuland was deciding who would take over the Ukrainian government once Yanukovych was ousted. In an intercepted phone call with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland crossed off some potential leaders and announced that “Yats” – or Arseniy Yatsenyuk – was her guy.
The Coup
On Feb. 20, as the neo-Nazi militias stepped up their attacks on police, a mysterious sniper opened fire on both protesters and police killing scores and bringing the political crisis to a boil. The U.S. news media blamed Yanukovych for the killings though he denied giving such an order and some evidence pointed toward a provocation from the far-right extremists.
As Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said in another intercepted phone call with EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Asthon, “there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition.”
But the sniper shootings led Yanukovych to agree on Feb. 21 to a deal guaranteed by three European countries – France, Germany and Poland – that he would surrender much of his power and move up elections so he could be voted out of office. He also assented to U.S. demands that he pull back his police.
That last move, however, prompted the neo-Nazi militias to overrun the presidential buildings on Feb. 22 and force Yanukovych’s officials to flee for their lives. Then, rather than seeking to enforce the Feb. 21 agreement, the U.S. State Department promptly declared the coup regime “legitimate” and blamed everything on Yanukovych and Putin.
Nuland’s choice, Yatsenyuk, was made prime minister and the neo-Nazis were rewarded for their crucial role by receiving several ministries, including national security headed by Parubiy. The parliament also voted to ban Russian as an official language (though that was later rescinded), and the IMF austerity demands were pushed through by Yatsenyuk. Not surprisingly, ethnic Russians in the south and east, the base of Yanukovych’s support, began resisting what they regarded as the illegitimate coup regime.
To blame this crisis on Putin simply ignores the facts and defies logic. To presume that Putin instigated the ouster of Yanukovych in some convoluted scheme to seize territory requires you to believe that Putin got the EU to make its reckless association offer, organized the mass protests at the Maidan, convinced neo-Nazis from western Ukraine to throw firebombs at police, and manipulated Gershman, Nuland and McCain to coordinate with the coup-makers – all while appearing to support Yanukovych’s idea for new elections within Ukraine’s constitutional structure.
Though such a crazy conspiracy theory would make people in tinfoil hats blush, this certainly is at the heart of what every “smart” person in Official Washington believes. If you dared to suggest that Putin was actually distracted by the Sochi Olympics last February, was caught off guard by the events in Ukraine, and reacted to a Western-inspired crisis on his border (including his acceptance of Crimea’s request to be readmitted to Russia), you would be immediately dismissed as “a stooge of Moscow.”
Such is how mindless “group think” works in Washington. All the people who matter jump on the bandwagon and smirk at anyone who questions how wise it is to be rolling downhill in some disastrous direction.
But the pols and pundits who appear on U.S. television spouting the conventional wisdom are always the winners in this scenario. They get to look tough, standing up to villains like Yanukovych and Putin and siding with the saintly Maidan protesters. The neo-Nazi brown shirts are whited out of the picture and any Ukrainian who objected to the U.S.-backed coup regime finds a black hat firmly glued on his or her head.
For the neocons, there are both financial and ideological benefits. By shattering the fragile alliance that had evolved between Putin and Obama over Syria and Iran, the neocons seized greater control over U.S. policies in the Middle East and revived the prospects for violent “regime change.”
On a more mundane level – by stirring up a new Cold War – the neocons generate more U.S. government money for military contractors who bestow a portion on Washington think tanks that provide cushy jobs for neocons when they are out of government.
The Losers
The worst losers are the people of Ukraine, most tragically the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, thousands of whom have died from a combination of heavy artillery fire by the Ukrainian army on residential areas followed by street fighting led by brutal neo-Nazi militias who were incorporated into Kiev’s battle plans. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]
The devastation of eastern Ukraine, which has driven an estimated one million Ukrainians out of their homes, has left parts of this industrial region in ruins. Of course, in the U.S. media version, it’s all Putin’s fault for deceiving these ethnic Russians with “propaganda” about neo-Nazis and then inducing these deluded individuals to resist the “legitimate” authorities in Kiev.
Notably, America’s righteous “responsibility to protect” crowd, which demanded that Obama begin airstrikes in Syria a year ago, swallowed its moral whistles when it came to the U.S.-backed Kiev regime butchering ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine (or for that matter, when Israeli forces slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza).
However, beyond the death and destruction in eastern Ukraine, the meddling by Nuland, Gershman and others has pushed all of Ukraine toward financial catastrophe. As “The Business Insider” reported on Sept. 21, “Ukraine Is on the Brink of Total Economic Collapse.”
Author Walter Kurtz wrote:
“Those who have spent any time in Ukraine during the winter know how harsh the weather can get. And at these [current] valuations, hryvnia [Ukraine’s currency] isn’t going to buy much heating fuel from abroad. …
“Inflation rate is running above 14% and will spike sharply from here in the next few months if the currency weakness persists. Real wages are collapsing. … Finally, Ukraine’s fiscal situation is unraveling.”
In other words, the already suffering Ukrainians from the west, east and center of the country can expect to suffer a great deal more. They have been made expendable pawns in a geopolitical chess game played by neocon masters and serving interests far from Lvov, Donetsk and Kiev.
But other victims from these latest machinations by the U.S. political/media elite will include the American taxpayers who will be expected to foot the bill for the new Cold War launched in reaction to Putin’s imaginary scheme to instigate the Ukraine crisis so he could reclaim territory of the Russian Empire.
As nutty as that conspiracy theory is, it is now one of the key reasons why the American people have to spend $1 trillion to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal, rather than scaling back the thousands of U.S. atomic weapons to around 900, as had been planned.
Or as one supposed expert, Gary Samore at Harvard, explained to the New York Times : “The most fundamental game changer is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That has made any measure to reduce the stockpile unilaterally politically impossible.”
Thus, you can see how hyperbolic journalism and self-interested punditry can end up costing the American taxpayers vast sums of money and contributing to a more dangerous world.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Since mid-August 2014 major news organizations have conveyed videos allegedly found online by the SITE Intelligence Group.
Unsurprisingly the same media have failed to closely interrogate what the private company actually is and whether the material it promotes should be accepted as genuine.
The Search for International Terrorist Entities Intelligence Group (SITE) was co-founded by Rita Katz in 2001.
In 2003 Katz authored a book, Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America, which she published using the pseudonym, “Anonymous.”
In the book Katz explains how she took on the trappings of a Muslim woman to infiltrate the meetings of radical Muslim terrorists. The plot is unlikely, especially when one considers that such secret fundamentalist gatherings are almost always segregated along gender lines and no woman, however elaborate her costume, would be granted entry without her identity being firmly established.
SITE Intelligence Group consists of Katz and two “senior advisers,” one of whom is Bruce Hoffman, the Corporate Chair in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and former director of the RAND’s Washington DC office.
The SITE Intelligence Group “constantly monitors the Internet and traditional media for material and propaganda released by jihadist groups and their supporters,” the company’s website announces.
“Once obtained, SITE immediately translates the material and provides the intelligence along with a contextual analysis explaining the source of the material and its importance to our subscribers.”[1]
In 2003 and 2004, SITE received financial support from the US government. Also in the early 2000s SITE was on contract providing consulting services to the FBI.[2]
It would appear that SITE has abandoned its non-profit status and now relies on corporate and individual subscriptions for revenue. In 2005 the private mercenary contractor Blackwater hailed SITE as “an invaluable resource.”[3]
The majority of “jihadist groups” operate one or more media outlets that produce and publish “the group’s multimedia, and in some cases, communiqués and magazines,” SITE explains on its website.
“These media units involve production teams and correspondents who report directly from the battlefield, and craft propaganda to indoctrinate and recruit new fighters into the group’s ranks.” SITE provides no direct links to the jihadist groups’ websites or multimedia productions from its own platform.[4]
Katz describes SITE as geared toward international Islamic jihad. “[W]e at SITE for over a decade monitor, search, and study the jihadists online,” she explains.
We have been studying and monitoring the jihadists online, which also as they get more sophisticated, we follow their techniques and study them. And based on that, we could predict where they will be uploading their video.
After all, we have to remember that much of this propaganda is being posted online. Their releases are released online [sic]. So they have to be able to use certain locations to upload their releases before they are published.[5]
Though routinely overlooked in the flurry of front-page coverage corporate media have allotted the three beheading videos–the most recent of which featured Scottish aid worker David Cawthorne Haines–it is common knowledge that SITE uncannily secures terrorist statements and videos well before the US’s wide array of lavishly-funded intelligence services.
For example, as the Washington Post reported in 2007,
[a] small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7 … It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release. Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By mid-afternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.[6]
The video later proved to be fraudulent.
With the above in mind, one may ask, If parties within a US presidential administration or the State Department sought to bypass the potential scrutiny of a wide-ranging intelligence community concerning such matters, while simultaneously providing itself with the means to effectively propagandize the American public toward a broader end, what better way than to contract the services of an entity such as SITE?
If there is some merit in the above appraisal, the arrangement is now being pushed to an extreme by the Obama administration to pave the road toward a long-sought goal: war with Syria’s Bashar Al Assad regime. Indeed, services such as SITE’s are a potent and valuable means for moving public opinion, as they have done in recent weeks concerning military action against the Islamic State. Along these lines, a decade ago both John Kerry and George W. Bush credited the latter’s re-election to a surreptitious appearance by Osama bin Laden via video tape several days before the vote.[7]
Playing a role similar to SITE, IntelCenter acts as an intermediary between Al-Qaeda’s supposed media arm, As-Sahab, and major media. In other words, “they acquire the tapes and pass them on to the press, and have occasionally even predicted when tapes would be released beforehand,” Paul Joseph Watson reports.
“IntelCenter is run by Ben Venzke, who used to be the director of intelligence at a company called IDEFENSE, which is a Verisign company. IDEFENSE is a web security company that monitors intelligence from the Middle East conflicts and focuses on cyber threats among other things. It is also heavily populated with long serving ex-military intelligence officials.[8]
As noted, news outlets seldom see fit to closely analyze SITE or Katz concerning their research and function as conduits for terrorist propaganda. A LexisNexis search for SITE Intelligence in the article content of US newspapers and major world publications over the past two years produces 317 items—an admittedly low figure given the prominence of SITE’s recent disclosures. Yet a similar search for “Steven Sotloff” alone yields over 1,000 newspaper stories and 600 broadcast transcripts, suggesting the sensationalistic usage and effect of SITE’s data and how neither SITE nor Katz are called upon to explain their specific methods and findings.
Indeed, a similar search for “SITE Intelligence” and “Rita Katz” yields only 26 entries over a two year period. Of these, 14 appear in the Washington Post, a publication with well-established links to US intelligence. Four New York Times articles feature the combined entities.
In a CNN on the heels of the Sotloff beheading, Katz explains how again SITE curiously surpassed the combined capacities of the entire US intelligence community in securing the Sotloff footage.
“The video shows the beheading of Steven Sotloff,” Katz cautiously begins after being queried on the document’s authenticity.
The location from where the video was obtained from is the location where ISIS usually uploads their original videos to [sic]. The video shows a clear message from ISIS that follows the same message that it had before. And in fact within a short time after our release, ISIS’ account on social media indicated that within a short time they would be releasing the video, only we actually had that video beforehand and were able to beat them with the release. (emphasis added)
This unusual statement alongside SITE’s remarkable abilities, should put news outlets on guard concerning the reliability of SITE statements.
Undoubtedly this is a great deal to ask from a news media that all too frequently participate in orienting public opinion toward war, a feat it has once again accomplished with the aid of SITE.
The interests and alliances of the transnational entities owning such media make them poised to profit from the very geopolitical designs drawn up by SITE’s corporate and government clients–the most important of which may be those seeking to broaden Middle Eastern conflict. No doubt, the wide-scale acceptance of such propaganda is also the result of the vastly diminished critical capacities of the broader public, now several decades in the making.
Notes
[1] “Services,” SITE Intelligence Group, , accessed September 15, 2014,
[3] “SITE Institute,” Sourcewatch.org, Center for Media and Democracy, n.d.
[4] “Media Groups,” SITE Intelligence Group, n.d., accessed September 15, 2014.
[5] Karl Penhaul, Pamela Brown, Alisyn Camerota, Don Lemon, Paul Cruickshank, “Joan Rivers on Life Support; Chilling Words From ISIS Terrorist; How to Fight Radical Recruitment” (transcript), CNN, September 2, 2014.
Bureau of Investigative Journalism | September 15, 2014
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is asking a European court to rule on whether UK legislation properly protects journalists’ sources and communications from government scrutiny and mass surveillance.
The Bureau’s application was filed with the European Court of Human Rightson Friday. If the court rules in favour of the application it will force the UK government to review regulation around the mass collection of communications data.
The action follows concerns about the implications to journalists of some of the revelations that have come out of material leaked by Edward Snowden.
These have made it clear that by using mass surveillance techniques, government agencies can not only collect, store and scrutinise the content of electronic communications but also analyse masses of metadata – the details about where digital communications such as emails originate and the subject area of those communications.
Gavin Millar QC, who is working on the case with the Bureau, believes UK authorities are routinely carrying out such data collection and analysis and says this enables a sophisticated picture to be developed of a journalist’s or organisation’s network of contacts, sources and lines of enquiry as well as materials, subjects and persons of interest to them.
On 25 May, famous US actor Mark Ruffalo tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
“I have reflected and wanted to apologise for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’,” Ruffalo wrote, adding: “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify anti-Semitism, here and abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
But were Ruffalo’s earlier assessments, indeed, “not accurate, inflammatory and disrespectful”? And does equating Israel’s war on besieged, impoverished Gaza with genocide fit into the classification of “hyperbole”? … continue
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