The CIA’s 70-Year History of Disinformation: How the CIA Funded the Opinion Magazines in Europe
By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | January 15, 2018
When an intelligence agency arranges to disseminate fake news it is called “disinformation” and it is a subset of what is referred to as covert action, basically secret operations run in a foreign country to influence opinion or to disrupt the functioning of a government or group that is considered to be hostile.
During the Cold War, disinformation operations were run by many of the leading players in both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and in the opposition Warsaw Pact. Sometimes the activity and the sponsorship were clearly visible, as when Radio Free Europe and Radio Moscow would exchange barbs about just how bad daily life was in the opposition alliance. Sometimes, however, it took the form of clandestinely placing stories in the media that were clearly untrue but designed to shift public perceptions of what was taking place in the world. The Vietnam War provided a perfect proxy playing field, with stories emanating from the U.S. government and its supporters presenting a narrative of a fight for democracy against totalitarianism while the Communist bloc promoted a contrary tale of colonial and capitalist oppression of a people striving to be free.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) inherited the mantle of covert action operations as a legacy from its OSS predecessor, which had had considerable success in conducting disinformation operations during World War 2. But there was from the start considerable opposition to continuing such programs as they were both expensive and subject to devastating blowback when they were identified and exposed. In Western Europe, powerful domestic communist parties were quick to publicize U.S. intelligence missteps, but nevertheless the ability to manipulate the news and information media to place stories critical of the Soviets and their allies led to major programs that funded magazines and books while also seeking to acquire a cadre of journalists that would produce pieces on demand proved too tempting to ignore.
There has been considerable ex post facto examination of the CIA’s use of covert funding mechanisms including the Congress of Cultural Freedom to fund writers and magazines in Europe, the best known of which were The Paris Review and Encounter out of London. As there was a low intensity war going on against communism, a conflict which many patriotic writers supported, funding magazines and finding contributors to write appropriate material was relatively easy and hardly challenged. Some senior editors knew or strongly suspected where their funding was coming from while some did not, but most didn’t ask any questions because then as now patrons of literary magazines were in short supply. Many of the writers were in the dark about the funding, but wrote what they did because of their own personal political convictions. The CIA, seeking value for money, would urge certain editorial lines but was not always very aggressive in doing so as it sought to allow the process to play out without too much interference.
Opinion magazines were one thing, but penetrating the newspaper world was quite a different story. It was easy to find a low or mid-level journalist and pay him to write certain pieces, but the pathway to actual publication was and is more complicated than that, going as it does through several editorial levels before appearing in print. A recent book cites the belief that CIA had “an agent at a newspaper in every world capital at least since 1977” who could be directed to post or kill stories. While it is true that U.S. Embassies and intelligence services had considerable ability to place stories in capitals in Latin America and parts of Asia, the record in Europe, where I worked, was somewhat mixed. I knew of only one senior editor of a major European newspaper who was considered to be an Agency resource, and even he could not place fake news as he was answerable both to his editorial board and the conglomerate that owned the paper. He also refused to take a salary from CIA, which meant that his cooperation was voluntary and he could not be directed.
CIA did indeed have a considerable number of journalist “assets” in Europe but they were generally stringers or mid-level and had only limited capability to actually shape the news. They frequently wrote for publications that had little or no impact. Indeed, one might reasonably ask whether the support of literary magazines in the fifties and sixties which morphed into more direct operations seeking journalist agents had any significant impact at all in geopolitical terms or on the Cold War itself.
More insidious was so-called Operation Mockingbird, which began in the early 1950s and which more-or-less openly obtained the cooperation of major American publications and news outlets to help fight communist “subversion.” The activity was exposed by Seymour Hersh in 1975 and was further described by the Church Commission in 1976, after which point CIA operations to influence opinion in the United States became illegal and the use of American journalists as agents was also generally prohibited. It was also learned that the Agency had been working outside its founding charter to infiltrate student groups and antiwar organizations under Operation Chaos, run by the CIA’s controversial if not completely crazy counterintelligence Czar James Jesus Angleton.
As the wheel of government frequently ends up turning full circle, we appear to be back in the age of disinformation, where the national security agencies of the U.S. government, including CIA, are now suspected of peddling stories that are intended to influence opinion in the United States and produce a political response. The Steele Dossier on Donald Trump is a perfect example, a report that surfaced through a deliberate series of actions by then CIA Director John Brennan, and which was filled with unverifiable innuendo intended to destroy the president-elect’s reputation before he took office. It is undeniably a positive development for all Americans who care about good governance that Congress is now intending to investigate the dossier to determine who ordered it, paid for it, and what it was intended to achieve.
January 15, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | CIA, John Brennan, United States | Leave a comment
US Urges EU to ‘Fix’ Iran Deal: Brussels Between a Rock and a Hard Place
By Peter KORZUN | Strategic Culture Foundation | 15.01.2018
President Trump said it was the final waiver extending Iran nuclear deal. He did it with strings attached. The president’s demands include: immediate inspections at sites by international inspectors and “denying Iran paths to nuclear weapons forever” (instead of 10 years as stipulated under current law). New sanctions were issued against 14 people and entities involved with Iran’s ballistic missile programs and a crackdown on government protesters. The president wants the deal to cover Iran’s ballistic missile programs.
Restrictive measures were extended three times last year. And Donald Trump never certified the agreement. Senator Bob Corker, the current chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, said “significant progress” had been made on bipartisan congressional legislation to address “flaws in the agreement without violating US commitments.”
According to President Trump, there are only two options: either the deal is fixed or the US pulls out. This time he wants to pass the buck, emphasizing that the decision to do it the last time is explained by his desire to secure the agreement of US European allies to fix what he calls “the terrible flaws” of the Joint Commission Plan of Action (JCPOA) or the Iran nuclear deal. Europeans have 120 days to define their position. From now on, Europe is facing a real hard choice: it’s either dancing to the US tune or being adamant in its support for the deal. The latter will bring it closer to Russia.
Germany said on Jan.12 that it remained committed to the deal and that it would consult with “European partners to find a common way forward”. The European Union remains committed to support the implementation of the JCPOA.
The US plan hardly has a chance of success. Even if Europe joins the US, which is not the case, at least for now, the introduction of any changes to the deal requires the consent of other participants: Russia, China and Iran. Tehran has taken a tough stance, flatly refusing any talks on changes.
Another element of US proposal is also a tall order. The president wants a separate follow-on deal on Iran with the EU “to enshrine triggers that the Iranian government could not exceed related to ballistic missiles.” The consent of other participants is not needed but a separate agreement will bury the JCPOA as the provisions of the two deals will contradict each other. Iran will have to pull out and it will not be its fault and responsibility.
A unilateral US withdrawal is the most feasible option. But it will provoke an international outcry. It’s better to face the consequences being a member of an international coalition. So, the US is aggressively pursuing its goals. The stakes are high and Europe will have to make its choice. If it does not back the deal, its image as a reliable partner will be damaged internationally. The EU has economic interests in Iran. It’ll lose a lot pulling out from the JCPOA. On the other hand, Europe is not at all happy at the prospect of deteriorating relations with the United States.
There is another important aspect not to be forgotten. It’s a win-win situation for Moscow. Russia does not want the Iran deal threatened. Its contribution into it was important enough. But if Brussels succumbs to pressure, it’ll be a political win for Russia to bolster its image as a reliable partner remaining faithful to its obligations. Even with the JCPOA in place, some restrictions on economic and military cooperation remain in force. If the US tears up the deal, there will be no formal obligation to comply with them. Tehran will be pushed to develop even closer ties with Moscow and Beijing.
If the EU stands tall and has it its way, the US European partners may not back the United States in the United Nations, undermining what is called “Western unity”. Brussels and Moscow will get closer. Iran will become a field for cooperation. The process of rapprochement will be spurred if the US imposes restrictive measures on European companies participating in joint projects with Russia, such as Nord Stream-2, for instance. That’s how US sticking with tough stance on Iran may backfire. Acting high and mighty on international stage does not always bring the desired results. Taking well-thought-out foreign policy moves as elements of grand strategy does pay off but the US prefers to act otherwise. By doing so, it risks shooting itself in the foot.
January 15, 2018 Posted by aletho | Economics, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | European Union, JCPOA, Russia, Sanctions against Iran, United States | Leave a comment
The Strange Fate Of Those Who Saw JFK Shot
TruePublica January 13, 2019
William Penn Jones Jr. was an American journalist, the editor of the Midlothian Mirror and author. He was also one of the earliest John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists. Jones attended the University of Texas at Austin and was a classmate of Henry Wade and John Connally. Wade later become the District Attorney in Dallas while Connolly would later become the 39th Governor of Texas. Both men were figures in the assassination of JFK.
In 1946, Jones purchased the Midlothian Mirror for $4,000; he eventually sold the newspaper in 1974. In 1963, Penn received the Elijah Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism.
Jones was also known for being an early critic of the Warren Commission‘s report on the assassination of JFK. In 1967, he self-published Forgive My Grief, a four-volume work on the assassination of President Kennedy. In the 1980s, Jones co-edited The Continuing Inquiry newsletter with Gary Mack of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza.
On January 25, 1998, Jones died of Alzheimer’s disease in an Alvarado, Texas nursing home at the age of 83.
In January 1983 Rebel Magazine published an article written by Jones, which is republished in full, with no editing below (except images). The JFK assissination was one of the biggest events to have ever hit America and Jones assumes that the reader of the time would have known quite a bit about it. This article makes for fascinating reading whether you believe the official state narrative or alternative theories. Last October, Statista concluded from surveys that 61 percent of Americans believe JFK was not killed by Oswald alone and that others were involved.
Over 100 murders, suicides, mysterious deaths – the strange fate of those who saw Kennedy shot.
By Penn Jones Jr.
Shortly after dark on Sunday night November 24, 1963, after Ruby had killed Lee Harvey Oswald, a meeting took place in Jack Ruby’s apartment in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas, Texas. Five persons were present. George Senator and Attorney Tom Howard were present and having a drink in the apartment when two newsmen arrived. The newsmen were Bill Hunter of the Long Beach California Press Telegram, and Jim Koethe of the Dallas Times Herald. Attorney C.A. Droby of Dallas arranged the meeting for the two newsmen. Jim Martin, a close friend of George Senator’s, was also present at the apartment meeting.
This writer asked Martin if he thought it was unusual for Senator to forget the meeting while testifying in Washington on April 22, 1964, since Bill Hunter, who was a newsman present at the meeting, was shot to death that very night. Martin grinned and said: “Oh, you’re looking for a conspiracy.”
I nodded yes and he grinned and said, “You will never find it.”
I asked soberly, “Never find it, or not there?”
He added soberly, “Not there.”
Bill Hunter, a native of Dallas and an award winning newsman in Long Beach, was on duty and reading a book in the police station called “Public Safety Building.” Two policemen going off duty came into the press room, and one policeman shot Hunter through the heart at a range officially ruled to be “no more than three feet.” The policeman said he dropped his gun, and it fired as he picked it up, but the angle of the bullet caused him to change his story. He finally said he was playing a game of quick draw with his fellow officer. The other officer testified he had his back turned when the shooting took place.
Hunter, who covered the assassination for his paper, the Long Beach Press Telegram, had written:
“Within minutes of Ruby’s execution of Oswald, before the eyes of millions watching television, at least two Dallas attorneys appeared to talk with him.”
Hunter was quoting Tom Howard who died of a heart attack in Dallas a few months after Hunter’s own death. Lawyer Tom Howard was observed acting strangely to his friends two days before his death. Howard was taken to the hospital by a “friend” according to the newspapers. No autopsy was performed.
Dallas Times Herald reporter Jim Koethe was killed by a karate chop to the throat just as he emerged from a shower in his apartment on September 21, 1964. His murderer was not indicted.
What went on in that significant meeting in Ruby’s and Senator’s apartment?
Few are left to tell. There is no one in authority to ask the question, since the Warren Commission has made its final report, and The House Select Committee has closed its investigation.
Dorothy Kilgallen was another reporter who died strangely and suddenly after her involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Miss Kilgallen is the only journalist who was granted a private interview with Jack Ruby after he killed Lee Harvey Oswald. Judge Joe B. Brown granted the interview during the course of the Ruby trial in Dallas–to the intense anger of the hundreds of other newspeople present.
We will not divulge exactly what Miss Kilgallen did to obtain the interview with Ruby. But Judge Brown bragged about the price paid. Only that was not the real price Miss Kilgallen paid. She gave her life for the interview. Miss Kilgallen stated that she was “going to break this case wide open.”
She died on November 8, 1965. Her autopsy report took eight days. She was 52 years old. Two days later Mrs. Earl T. Smith, a close friend of Miss Kilgallen’s died of undetermined causes.
Tom Howard, who died of a heart attack, was a good friend of District Attorney Henry Wade, although they often opposed each other in court. Howard was close to Ruby and other fringes of the Dallas underworld.
Like Ruby, Howard’s life revolved around the police station, and it was not surprising when he and Ruby (toting his gun) showed up at the station on the evening of the assassination of President Kennedy. Nor was it unusual when Howard arrived at the jail shortly after Ruby shot Oswald, asking to see his old friend.
Howard was shown into a meeting room to see a bewildered Ruby who had not asked for a lawyer. For the next two days–until Ruby’s brother, Earl, soured on him, and had Howard relieved–he was Jack Ruby’s chief attorney and public spokesman.
Howard took to the publicity with alacrity, called a press conference, wheeled and dealed. He told newsmen the case was a “once-in-a-lifetime chance,” and that “speaking as a private citizen,” he thought Ruby deserved a Congressional medal. He told the Houston Post that Ruby had been in the police station Friday night (November 22, 1963) with a gun. Howard dickered with a national magazine for an Oswald murder story. He got hold of a picture showing the President’s brains flying out of the car, and tried to sell it to Life magazine. Ruby’s sister, Eva Grant, even accused Howard of leaking information to the DA. It was never quite clear whether Howard was working for Ruby or against him.
On March 27, 1965, Howard was taken to a hospital by an unidentified person and died there. He was 48. The doctor, without benefit of an autopsy, said he had suffered a heart attack. Some reporters and friends of Howard’s were not so certain. Some said he was “bumped off.”
Earlene Roberts was the plump widow who managed the rooming house where Lee Harvey Oswald was living under the name O. H. Lee. She testified before the Warren Commission that she saw Oswald come home around one o’clock, go to his room for three or four minutes and walk out zipping his light weight jacket. A few minutes later, a mile away, officer J. D. Tippit was shot dead.
Mrs. Roberts testified that while Oswald was in his room, two uniformed cops pulled up in front of the rooming house and honked twice–“Just tit tit,” she said.
The police department issued a report saying all patrol cars in the area, except Tippit’s, were accounted for. The Warren Commission let it go at that.
After testifying in Dallas in April 1964, Mrs. Roberts was subjected to intensive police harassment. They visited her at all hours of the day and night. Earlene complained of being “worried to death” by the police. She died on January 9, 1966 in Parkland Hospital (the hospital where President Kennedy was taken). Police said she suffered a heart attack in her home. No autopsy was performed.
Warren Reynolds was minding his used car lot on East Jefferson Street in Oak Cliff in Dallas, when he heard shots two blocks away. He thought it was a marital quarrel. Then he saw a man having a great difficulty tucking “a pistol or an automatic” in his belt, and running at the same time. Reynolds gave chase for a short piece being careful to keep his distance, then lost the fleeing man. He didn’t know it then, but he had apparently witnessed the flight of the killer (or one of the killers) of patrolman Jefferson David Tippit. Feeling helpful, he gave his name to a passing policeman and offered his cooperation. Television cameras zeroed in on him, got his story, and made him well known. Warren Reynolds, the amiable used car man, was making history.
Reynolds was not questioned until two months after the event. The FBI finally talked to him in January 1964. The FBI interview report said, ” . . . he was hesitant to definitely identify Oswald as the individual.” Then it added, “He advised he is of the opinion Oswald is the person.”
Two days after Reynolds talked to the FBI, he was shot in the head. He was closing up his used car lot for the night at the time. Nothing was stolen. Later after consulting retired General Edwin Walker (the man Oswald allegedly shot at before he assassinated President Kennedy), he told the Warren Commission Counsel that Oswald was definitely the man he saw fleeing the Tippit murder scene.
A young hood was arrested for the murder attempt. Darrell Wayne Garner had called a relative bragging that he shot Reynolds. But Garner had an alibi, Nancy Jane Mooney, alias Betty McDonald, who said Garner was in bed with her at the time he was supposed to have shot Reynolds. Nancy Jane had worked at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. Garner was freed.
Nancy Jane was picked up a week later for fighting with a girlfriend. She was arrested for disturbing the peace. The girlfriend was not arrested. Within hours after her arrest, Nancy Jane was dead. Police reports said she hanged herself with her toreador pants.
Reynolds and his family were harassed and threatened. But upon giving the Warren Commission a firm identification of Oswald as being the Tippit murder fugitive, he said, “I don’t think they are going to bother me any more.”
Hank Killam was a house painter who lived at Mrs. A.C. Johnson’s rooming house at the same time Lee Harvey Oswald lived there. His wife, Wanda, once pushed cigarettes and drinks at Jack Ruby’s club.
Hank was a big man, over six feet and weighing over 200 pounds. After the assassination, federal agents visited him repeatedly causing him to lose one job after another.
Killam was absorbed by the assassination, even obsessed. Hours after the event, he came home, “white as a sheet.” Wanda said he stayed up all night watching the television accounts of the assassination. Later he bought all the papers and clipped the stories about Kennedy’s death.
Before Christmas, Killam left for Florida. Wanda confessed where he was. Federal agents hounded him in Tampa, Florida where he was working selling cars at his brother-in-law’s car lot. He lost his job.
Killam wrote Wanda that he would be sending for her soon. He received a phone call on St. Patrick’s day. He left the house immediately. He was found later on a sidewalk in front of a broken window. His jugular vein was cut. He bled to death en route to the hospital.
There is no mention of Killam by the Warren Commission. A number of FBI documents on Killam relating to the assassination were withheld, along with documents prepared by the CIA. What is clear is that SOMEBODY considered Hank Killam a very important guy.
William Whaley was known as the “Oswald Cabbie.” He was one of the few who had the opportunity to talk alone with the accused killer of President Kennedy. He testified that Oswald hailed him at the Dallas Greyhound bus station. Whaley said he drove Oswald to the intersection of Beckley and Neches–half a block from the rooming house–and collected a dollar. Later he identified Oswald as his fare in a questionable police line-up.
Whaley was killed in a head-on collision on a bridge over the Trinity River, December 18, 1965; his passenger was critically injured. The 83 year old driver of the other car was also killed. Whaley had been with the City Transportation Company since 1936 and had a perfect driving record. He was the first Dallas cabbie to be killed on duty since 1937. When I went to interview the manager of the cab company about Whaley’s death, he literally pushed me out of the office, “If you’re smart, you won’t be coming around here asking questions.”
Domingo Benavides, an auto mechanic, was witness to the murder of Officer Tippit. Benavides testified he got a “really good view of the slayer.”
Benavides said the killer resembled newspaper pictures of Oswald, but he described him differently, “I remember the back of his head seemed like his hairline went square instead of tapered off . . .”
Benavides reported he was repeatedly threatened by the police who advised him not to talk about what he saw.
In mid-February 1964, his brother Eddy, who resembled him, was fatally shot in the back of the head at a beer joint on Second Avenue in Dallas. The case was marked “unsolved.”
Benavides’s father-in-law J. W. Jackson was not impressed by the investigation. He began his own inquiry. Two weeks later, J.W. Jackson was shot at his home. As the gunman escaped, a police car came around the block. It made no attempt to follow the speeding car with the gunman.
The police advised that Jackson should “lay off this business.” “Don’t go around asking questions; that’s our job.” Jackson and Benavides are both convinced that Eddy’s murder was a case of mistaken identity and that Domingo Benavides, the Tippit witness was the intended victim.
Lee Bowers’s testimony is perhaps as explosive as any recorded by the Warren Commission. He was one of the 65 witnesses who saw the President’s assassination, and who thought shots were fired from the area of the Grassy Knoll. (The Knoll is west of the Texas School Book Depository Building.) But more than that, he was in a unique position to observe some pretty strange behavior in the Knoll area before and during the assassination.
Bowers, then a towerman for the Union Terminal Co., was stationed in his 14 foot tower directly behind the Grassy Knoll. He faced the scene of the assassination. He could see the railroad overpass to his right. Directly in front of him was a parking lot and a wooden stockade fence, and a row of trees running along the top of the Grassy Knoll. The Knoll sloped down to the spot on Elm Street where the President was killed. Police had “cut off” traffic into the parking lot, Bowers said, “so that anyone moving around could actually be observed.”
Bowers made two significant observations which he revealed to the Warren Commission. First, he saw three unfamiliar cars slowly cruising around the parking area in the 35 minutes before the assassination; the first two left after a few minutes. The driver of the second car appeared to be talking into a “mic or telephone”; “he was holding something up to his mouth with one hand and he was driving with the other.” A third car with out-of-state license plates and mud up to the windows, probed all around the parking area. Bowers last remembered seeing it about eight minutes before the shooting, pausing “just above the assassination site.”
Bowers also observed two unfamiliar men standing on the top of the Knoll at the edge of the parking lot, within 10 or 15 feet of each other. “One man, middle aged or slightly older, fairly heavy set, in a white shirt, fairly dark trousers. Another man, younger, about mid-twenties, in either a plaid shirt or plaid coat or jacket.” Both were facing toward Elm and Houston in anticipation of the motorcade. The two were the only strangers he remembered seeing. His description shows a remarkable similarity to Julia Ann Mercer’s description of two unidentified men climbing the Knoll.
When the shots rang out, Bowers’s attention was drawn to the area where he had seen the two men; he could still make out the one in the white shirt: “The darker dressed man was too hard to distinguish from the trees.”
Bowers observed “some commotion” at that spot . . .,” “. . . something out of the ordinary, a sort of milling around . . . which attracted my eye for some reason which I could not identify.” At that moment, a motorcycle policeman left the Presidential motorcade and roared up the Grassy Knoll, straight to where the two mysterious gentlemen were standing. Later, Bowers testified that the “commotion” that caught his eye may have been a “flash of light or smoke.”
On the morning of August 9, 1966, Lee Bowers, vice president of a construction firm, was driving south of Dallas on business. He was two miles south of Midlothian, Texas when his brand new company car veered from the road and hit a bridge abutment. A farmer who saw it, said the car was going about 50 miles an hour, a slow speed for that road.
Bowers died in a Dallas hospital. He was 41. There was no autopsy and he was cremated. A doctor from Midlothian who rode to Dallas in the ambulance with Bowers, noticed something peculiar about the victim. “He was in some strange sort of shock.” The doctor said, “A different kind of shock than an accident victim experiences. I can’t explain it. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
When I questioned his widow, she insisted there was nothing suspicious, but then became flustered and said, “They told him not to talk.”
Harold Russell was with Warren Reynolds when the Tippit shooting took place. Both men saw the Tippit killer escape. Russel was interviewed in January 1964, and signed a statement that the fleeing man was Oswald.
A few months after the assassination, Russell went back to his home near David, Oklahoma. In July of 1965, Russell went to a party with a female friend. He seemingly went out of his mind at the party and started telling everyone he was going to be killed. He begged friends to hide him. Someone called the police. When the policemen arrived, one of them hit Russell on the head with his pistol. Russell was then taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead a few hours later: cause of death was listed as “heart failure.”
Among others who died strangely were James Worrell, who died in a motorcycle accident on November 9, 1966. He saw a strange man run from the back door of the Texas School Book Depository shortly after the assassination.
Gary Underhill was shot. This death was ruled suicide on May 8, 1964. Underhill was a former CIA agent and claimed he knew who was responsible for killing President Kennedy.
Delilah Walle was a worker at Ruby’s club. She was married only 24 days when her new husband shot her. She had been working on a book of what she supposedly knew about the assassination.
William “Bill” Waters died May 20, 1967. Police said he died of a drug overdose (demerol). No autopsy was performed. His mother said Oswald and Killam came to her home before the assassination and her son tried to talk Oswald and Killam out of being involved. Waters called FBI agents after the assassination. The FBI told him he knew too much and to keep his mouth shut. He was arrested and kept in Memphis in a county jail for eight months on a misdemeanor charge.
Albert Guy Bogard, an automobile salesman who worked for Downtown Lincoln Mercury, showed a new Mercury to a man using the name “Lee Oswald.”
Shortly after Bogard gave his testimony to a Commission attorney in Dallas, he was badly beaten and had to be hospitalized. Upon his release, he was fearful for his safety. Bogard was from Hallsville, La. He was found dead in his car at the Hallsville Cemetery on St. Valentine’s day in 1966. A rubber hose was attached to the exhaust and the other end extending into the car. The ruling was suicide. He was just 41 years old.
Jack Ruby died of cancer. He was taken into the hospital with Pneumonia. Twenty eight days later, he was dead from cancer.
David Ferrie of New Orleans, before he could be brought to trial for his involvement in the Kennedy assassination, died of brain hemorrhage. Just what caused his brain hemorrhage has not been established. Ferrie was to testify in the famous Jim Garrison trial, but death prevented him.
Dr. Mary Stults Sherman, age 51, was found stabbed and burned in her apartment in New Orleans. Dr. Sherman had been working on a cancer experiment with Ferrie.
Another Ferrie associate, Eladio Cerefine de Valle, 43, died on the same day as Ferrie. His skull was split open; he was then shot. DeValle had used Ferrie as a pilot. DeValle had been identifying some men in a photo taken in New Orleans for Jim Garrison. One of the men in the photo was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Paul Dyer, of the New Orleans Police force died of cancer. He was the first police officer to interview Ferrie. Martin got sick on the job and died a month later of cancer. He had just interviewed David Ferrie.
News reporters were not exempt either. Two lady reporters died strangely. Lisa Howard supposedly committed suicide. She knew a great deal about the “understanding” which was in the making after the Bay of Pigs, between President Kennedy and the Cubans.
Marguerite Higgins bluntly accused the American authorities of the November 2nd, 1963 killing of Premier Diem and his brother Nhu. A few months after her accusation, she died in a landmine explosion in Vietnam.
On Saturday November 23, 1963, Jack Zangetty, the manager of a $150,000 modular motel complex near Lake Lugert, Oklahoma, remarked to some friends that “Three other men–not Oswald–killed the President.” He also stated that “A man named Ruby will kill Oswald tomorrow and in a few days a member of the Frank Sinatra family will be kidnapped just to take some of the attention away from the assassination.”
Two weeks later, Jack Zangetty was found floating in Lake Lugert with bullet holes in his chest. It appeared to witnesses he had been in the water one to two weeks.
Lou Staples, a radio announcer who was doing a good many of his radio shows on the Kennedy assassination, lost his life sometime on Friday night May 13, 1977. This was near Yukon, Oklahoma. He had been having radio shows on the assassination since 1973 and the response to his programs was overwhelming.
Lou’s death was termed suicide, but the bullet ending his life entered behind his right temple and Lou was left handed. He joined Gary Underhill, William Pitzer and Joe Cooper whose “suicides” were all done with the “wrong hand” shots to the head.
Lou had been stating that he wanted to purchase some property to build a home. He was lured out to a wheat field and his life ended there. I have been to the spot where Lou died.
Karyn Kupcinet, daughter of Irv Kupcinet, was trying to make a long distance call from Los Angeles. According to reports, the operator heard Miss Kupcinet scream into the phone that President Kennedy was going to be killed.
Two days after the assassination, she was found murdered in her apartment. The case is unsolved. She was 23.
Rose Cherami, 40, was an employee of Jack Ruby’s club. She was riding with two men on a return trip from Florida carrying a load of narcotics. She was thrown from the car when an argument began between her and one of the men. She was hospitalized for injuries and drug withdrawal. She told authorities that President Kennedy was going to be killed in Dallas. After her release from the hospital, she was a victim of a hit and run accident on September 4, 1965 near Big Sandy, Texas.
Robert L. Perrin was a gun runner for Jack Ruby. His wife, Nancy testified before the Warren Commission that Robert took a dose of arsenic in August 1962.
Guy Bannister was a private detective who was closely involved in the Jim Garrison trial. Guy and his partner, Hugh Ward, died within a 10 day period as the Warren Commission was closing its hearings. Guy supposedly died of a heart attack, but witnesses said he had a bullet hole in his body.
George deMohrenschildt was another man who was to give testimony but never made it. DeMohrenschildt, in his final days, became suspicious of everyone around him, even his wife, and was nearing a nervous breakdown some thought. He died of gun shot wounds. The verdict was suicide. But deMohrenschildt was a member of the White Russian society and very wealthy. He visited Lee Harvey Oswald and Marina Oswald when they lived on Neely Street. Marina visited the deMohrenschildts when she and Lee Harvey Oswald were having some of their disagreements.
Cliff Carter, LBJ’s aide who rode in the Vice President’s follow up car in the motorcade in Dealey Plaza where President Kennedy was gunned down, was LBJ’s top aide during his first administration. Carter died of mysterious circumstances. Carter died of pneumonia when no penicillin could be located in Washington, D.C. in September 1971. This was supposedly the cause of death.
Buddy Walthers, Deputy Sheriff, was at the kill sight of President Kennedy He picked up a bullet in a hunk of brain matter blown from the President’s head. Walthers never produced the bullet for evidence.
Walthers was also at the Texas Theater when Oswald was arrested. In a January 10th, 1969 shooting, Walthers was shot through the heart. In a shootout Walthers and his companion Deputy Alvin Maddox, were fired upon by Cherry, an escaped prisoner. Walthers and Maddox were trying to capture Cherry when Walthers was shot through the heart. Walthers’s widow received $10,000.00 for her husband dying in the line of duty.
Clay Shaw, age 60, died five years after he was charged by Jim Garrison for his involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Some reports have it that he had been ill for months after surgery for removing a blood clot. Other newspaper reports of his death stated he had cancer. It was revealed that Shaw was a paid contact for the CIA. A neighbor reported that an ambulance was seen pulling up to the Shaw home. Then a body was carried in and an empty stretcher brought out. A few hours later, Shaw was reportedly found dead in his home. Then he was given a quick embalming before a Coroner could be notified. It was then impossible to determine the cause of death.
On May 15, 1975, Roger Dean Craig died of a massive gun shot wound to the chest. Supposedly, it was his second try at suicide and a success. Craig was a witness to the slaughter of President Kennedy. Only Craig’s story was different from the one the police told.
Craig testified in the Jim Garrison trial. Before this, Craig had lost his job with the Dallas Police Dept. In 1961, he had been “Man of the Year.” Because he would not change his story of the assassination, he was harassed and threatened, stabbed, shot at, and his wife left him.
Craig wrote two manuscripts of what he witnessed. “When They Kill A President” and “The Patient Is Dying.”
Craig’s father was out mowing the lawn when Craig supposedly shot himself. Considering the hardships, Craig very well could have committed suicide. But no one will ever know.
John M. Crawford, 46, died in a mysterious plane crash near Huntsville, Texas on April 15, 1969. It appeared from witnesses that Crawford had left in a rush.
Crawford was a homosexual and a close friend of Jack Ruby’s. Ruby supposedly carried Crawford’s phone number in his pocket at all times. Crawford was also a friend of Buell Wesley Frazier’s, the neighbor who took Lee Harvey Oswald to work on that fatal morning of November 22, 1963.
Hale Boggs was the only member of the Warren Commission who disagreed with the conclusions. Hale Boggs did not follow Earl Warren and his disciples. He totally disagreed. Hale Boggs was in a plane crash lost over frozen Alaska.
Nicholas J. Chetta, M.D. age 50, Orleans Parish coroner since 1950, died at Mercy Hospital on May 25, 1968. Newspaper reports were sketchy. It was said he suffered a heart attack.
Dr. Chetta was the coroner who served at the death of David Ferrie.
Dr. Chetta was the key witness regarding Perry Russo against Clay Shaw. Shaw’s attorney went into federal court only after Dr. Chetta was dead.
Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered, then his assassin not captured until over a year later. Dr. King was the only hope this country had for bringing about equality.
The death of Robert Kennedy, only shortly after Dr. King’s death on June 5th, 1968, was a brazen act which gave notice to this entire nation. It became imperative, when Senator Kennedy became a threat as a Presidential candidate, that he had to be killed.
There is evidence that two persons, a man, and a woman were with the accused killer, but authorities have found no trace of them. Coroner, Dr. Thomas Noguchi told the Grand Jury the powder burns indicated the murder gun was fired not more than two to three inches from Kennedy’s right ear. Witnesses testified that Sirhan was never closer than four or five feet to the Senator.
I have not, by any means, listed “all” of the strange deaths. I have a complete list in my books. I have listed the most significant ones that occurred after the assassination. The strange deaths after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in my estimate, numbered over 100, but I am certain I know of only a fraction.
Many strange deaths occurred after the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. No one knows the exact number.
January 14, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | Assassination of John F. Kennedy, United States | Leave a comment
CIA and the Assassination of Leaders Overseas
By Vladimir Platov – New Eastern Outlook – 14.01.2018
The history of the US Central Intelligence Agency is replete with numerous examples of political assassinations, not only in the US, but also of leaders of countries Washington disagrees with. So today, the CIA has actively begun developing various methods for the deliberate elimination of the US’s newest political opponent, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, involving not only special forces in this task, but also the special services of countries that cooperate closely with the CIA.
Evidence of this, in particular, can be found in the $310,000 of the country’s defense budget for 2018, officially laid out by the South Korean government; the cost of eliminating North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. These funds will be spent on training and equipping a special “decapitation unit” dedicated to the North Korean leadership, the creation of which became known on December 1. The squad will include about one thousand commandos, whose task in the event of a war will be to find and kill Kim Jong-un and other top leaders of the neighboring state. As a source in the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Korea told the newspaper Korea Herald, the squad’s special equipment will include drones, suicide bombers, reconnaissance drones and even heavy grenade launchers. The structure and training plans of the squad are classified, but according to the information of the South Korean media, the soldiers of the new squad will train according to methodology used by the US special purpose team SEAL Team Six, which assassinated Osama bin Laden.
At the same time, it should be remembered that an attempt to create a special squad in South Korea in 1968 with similar goals ended in tragedy. At the time, 31 South Korean criminals were promised a pardon if the squad they formed killed Kim Il-sung. The group underwent intensive training, during which three people were killed, and in the end they were sent on rubber boats to the DPRK, but halfway were recalled. The prisoners were not released, the exhausting training continued, and the date of the new operation was set. In 1971, members of the squad rebelled, killed their instructors, tried to get to Seoul and, when they were blocked by the army, blew themselves up with grenades. The four survivors were later executed. In 2003 the South Korean film “Silmido” was made about this tragic episode.
Such radical plans to get rid of political opponents are hardly surprising, especially when these plans are developed and supervised by the CIA, which is adept in these matters. And it’s no wonder that even the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, spoke in October at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies forum in Washington, saying that if the CIA liquidates the leader of the DPRK, Kim Jong-un, he would not acknowledge involvement of American agents in the assassination.
Everyone knows that in order to maintain their dominance, the US stops at nothing, including the murders of undesirables. During the 50s and 60s, they killed the largest number of foreign leaders and public figures who were fighting not for communism, but for their countries’ national independence. Then came a certain lull, connected both with the policy of “detente” and with scandalous exposures of the CIA’s activities by the Senate Commission of F. Church in 1975. The committee’s conclusions about the illegal activities of American intelligence services (in particular, evidence of murders and numerous attempts on the lives of foreign statesmen) led to the adoption by US President J. Ford of an order banning “officially sanctioned” murders of foreign leaders. However, in 1981 this presidential decree was overturned by Reagan, and the list of victims began to grow rapidly once again.
After numerous media discussions, longstanding interest is not letting up in the secret of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s fast-developing infection and subsequent death with a new form of biological weapon: a cancer virus and the American special services’ involvement in this.
However, another highly strange and inexplicable fact (other than the special operation of the US special services), is that, besides Hugo Chavez, a number of other Latin American leaders, clearly disliked by Washington, “unexpectedly” fell ill with cancer all at the same time. Among them were Argentine President Nestor Kirchner (succeeded by Christine Kirchner), Brazilian President I. Lula da Silva (after whom Dilma Roussef came to power), and Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo (who was overthrown during the CIA’s coup d’état in 2012; shortly thereafter he was diagnosed with cancer). It is also curious that after the conservative and pro-American president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, began peace talks with the partisans of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), he also “unexpectedly” contracted cancer.
Venezuelan writer Luis Brito Garcia counted more than 900 attempts on the life of Cuban leader Fidel Castro organized by the CIA. And in the last years of his life, Castro also suffered a mysterious oncological bowel disease, which struck him after the 2006 “People’s Summit” in the Argentine city of Cordoba.
We also recall the very strange death of former Palestinian President (PLO) Yasser Arafat, who suffered … leukemia in 2004.
It is also not unreasonable to cite WikiLeaks’ revelations that in 2008 the CIA asked its embassy in Paraguay to collect biometric data, including DNA, of all four presidential candidates. With knowledge of a person’s DNA code, it is easy to develop an oncogene for each individual. And if we assume that such data were obtained on the eve of the elections in Brazil, then Dilma Roussef’s cancer, contracted in 2009, fits perfectly into this theory.
So, in addition to forceful options for eliminating political opponents (as, in particular, happened with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein or Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi), it is unlikely that the CIA would be above infecting them with cancer viruses. Moreover, similar experiments have been conducted for a long time in the secret laboratories of the CIA, where they became a “military trophy of the American special services” based on the brutal concentration camp human experimentation of Josef Mengele, and before that “on the experience” of the American, Cornelius “Doctor Death” Rhoads. This pathologist from the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research started work in Puerto Rico and became a “pioneer” in virtually all areas of the creation of new technologies for killing people, from chemical and biological methods to radiation. With funding from the Rockefeller Institute, he conducted experiments in Puerto Rico in the early 30s infecting people with cancer cells, which work was conducted inside a secret “Building No. 439″.
Is cancer the effect of a new weapon of the American intelligence agencies, fitting in well with the “modus vivendi” of the agonizing North American empire? We note only that the disease affected only those politicians whose political direction was contrary to the dominant position of the United States.
The US is on the edge of economic collapse and remains afloat only because it can launch a printing press to re-credit its economy, constantly growing its military budget and secret CIA operations. Therefore, it is entirely logical to assume that “the craftsmen of Langley” found new quick and inexpensive methods of effectively eliminating opponents. The most important advantage of these methods is that they leave no traces, are disguised as cancer or a heart attack and eliminate the possibility of exposure and direct liability.
January 14, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, South Korea, United States | Leave a comment
No charges for Israel soldier who killed Palestinian child returning from swimming
MEMO | January 12, 2018
An Israeli army officer who opened fire on a car of Palestinian civilians, killing a 15-year-old boy, will not be prosecuted, it was reported today.
Mahmoud Badran was killed, and four friends wounded, after returning from a swimming pool on the night of 21 June 2016.
At the time, the Israeli military claimed the forces responsible believed the car of youngsters were responsible for throwing stones at Route 443 in the occupied West Bank.
An investigation by the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (MPCID) has now concluded that the “mistake” was a reasonable one to make in the circumstances, despite the fact that the officer opened fire in violation of the regulations.
According to Haaretz, the officer in question is a platoon commander in the Kfir Brigade, which is based in the occupied West Bank. He, and two colleagues, were driving towards Jerusalem in plain clothes when they noticed stones and an oil patch on the road, and a bus parked up on the side.
After driving to where they believed the stones had been thrown from, the officer and soldiers got out and opened fire on a car driving on a road under Route 443. Open-fire regulations in the West Bank state that when a vehicle does not endanger the soldiers, shots must be fired in the air.
According to Israeli rights group B’Tselem, “massive fire” was directed at the vehicle of Palestinian youngsters, despite the fact that there was zero indication its occupants were responsible for the stone-throwing (and even if there had been, lethal force was unjustified).
The MPCID investigation similarly concluded that the officer had not seen the stone throwers, and targeted the car purely due to its proximity to the site. Despite such findings, no indictment will be filed against the officer, not even for causing death by negligence.
According to Haaretz, the officer faces dismissal for his conduct during the incident. The army spokesperson told the paper that the findings were still being examined by the Military Advocate General’s office ahead of a final decision.
At the time, B’Tselem predicted that the investigation would produce no results, slamming “the military law enforcement system” as “a whitewashing mechanism”.
January 13, 2018 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism | Leave a comment
Neocon Think Tanks Not Russian Media Are the Enemy Within
By John Wight | Sputnik | January 12, 2018
The latest salvo in the ongoing attempt to de-legitimize and demonize Russia-based media has arrived with a directive from the US Justice Department that Sputnik News in the US must register as a foreign agent.
In this regard Sputnik now joins RT America (previously directed to register as a foreign agent) in being stigmatized as peddling propaganda instead of news and news analysis, its journalists and contributors smeared by association, in the context of a wider neo-McCarthyite offensive unleashed with the aim of pushing back against opposition to neoconservative nostrums and influence on Western foreign policy, along with its neoliberal economic counterpart.
What needs to be stressed is that this offensive is being waged not so much against Russian media as against Western dissident voices who dare appear on Russian media. It is an attack on the free speech of US citizens – and also on UK and European citizens given that the same offensive is underway in those parts of the world – on their right to ply their trade as journalists, writers, broadcasters and political analysts.
The reasoning behind this censorious campaign is not, as claimed, because those dissident voices are engaged in peddling falsehoods, lies and propaganda; instead it is because they deign to expose the actual causes of the seemingly unending wars and economic, social, political and refugee crises that are the norm in our time.
The most penetrating truths are often the most simply expressed, a truism given credence by the life and words of US labor leader and anti-war activist, Eugene Debs at the turn of the last century. “War does not come by chance,” the great man said in the context of his unstinting opposition to the First World War. “War is not the result of accident. There is a definite cause for war, especially a modern war.”
In our time the “definite cause for war” is Washington’s determination to maintain the ability of Western global corporations to rampage across the globe unimpeded, Wall Street to suck up the world’s surplus capital, and the continuing supremacy of the US dollar, backed up by a gargantuan military which stands as a monument not to democracy but imperialism.
Those committed to attacking the Western dissidents who appear on and work for Russian media do so on the basis of defending and maintaining this status quo, providing political and ideological support for regime change without end, no matter the scale of the carnage, human suffering and destabilization that ensues in its vapor trails.
By ‘those’ I refer specifically to the murky network of neocon think tanks such as the Henry Jackson Society, the Atlantic Council, and the Council on Foreign Relations, along with the veritable rogues gallery of funders and sponsors supporting them and their works. The aforesaid think tanks are, along with too many others to mention, institutions in which a coterie of expensively-educated, democracy-denying, regime change cranks work day and night producing papers ‘exposing’ Russian media and strategizing against supposed Russian influence and interference in the internal affairs of Western democracies. This they do while ascribing lurid and sensationalist motives to the actions of countries, such as Russia, whose refusal to bow to Washington marks them as the enemy without at the same time as its media, and by implication those who work for and contribute to its media, as the enemy within.
The pressing problem a world interested in the rule of law and stability has to contend with, however, is not alleged Russian interference in the internal affairs of Western democracies; the problem has and continues to be Western interference – or attempted interference – in the internal affairs of Russia, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Libya, and Iraq, etc. This is the true source of the ills the world is grappling with.
When you have a mainstream media outlet in the West such as Foreign Policy magazine carrying an article under the less than cryptic title, ‘It’s Time To Bomb North Korea’, you start to gain an insight into the virulent strain of moral sickness which has those who pen such articles, not forgetting the media that publishes such articles, in its grip. And when you have former NATO staffers such as Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council publishing articles exploring the work of Sputnik contributors, such as myself, with the intention of extrapolating some dark conspiratorial motive for the pattern of said articles, you know you must be doing something right.
As an aside, I would like to extend Mr Nimmo a friendly invitation to come on my Sputnik radio show, Hard Facts, to discuss these matters further. It could be the radio equivalent of Ali-Frazier. I’ll be Ali, gliding round the ring popping him with a righteous jab, exposing his lack of movement, mobility and defense, while he can be Frazier, coming at me in straight lines, bobbing and weaving, trying to land that famous left hook but hitting fresh air.
The claim that Russian media is propaganda is in itself propaganda. The claim that Russia is interfering in ‘our’ democracy is in itself interference in ‘our’ democracy, what with those making this charge arrogating to themselves the right and power to adjudicate over election outcomes and ascribe legitimacy or illegitimacy to them as they deem fit. For such people there are invisible red lines beyond which people tread at their peril.
Dare, for example, to declaim against NATO as a Western military alliance engaged in the projection of imperial power rather than the defender of peace and democracy it claims to be, you are deemed beyond the pale. Describe the 2003 US-led war on Iraq as a crime entirely compatible with Western cultural values, rather than a mistake wholly out of keeping with those values, and you are deemed beyond the pale. Refuse to accept that head-chopping extremists in Syria are ‘moderate rebels’, and refuse to refer to the Syrian government as the Syrian regime, and you soon find yourself regarded as persona non grata.
However, paraphrasing English liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, better an anti-imperialist pilloried and demonized than a fanatical neocon in clover.
January 13, 2018 Posted by aletho | Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | United States | Leave a comment
Trump’s craving for more nukes a ‘rip off’ that only benefits military industrial complex
RT | January 13, 2018
The Trump administration’s blueprint for building more nuclear warheads to contain “strategic competitors” is a “rip-off” that only benefits manufacturers, not the American people, foreign policy analyst Robert Naiman told RT.
The plan to expand the US low-yield nuclear arsenal, outlined in the draft of the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review leaked to the media, is an “outrageous and foolish” idea that will add nothing to US national security, argues Robert Naiman, policy director at Just Foreign Policy and president of the Truth Out organization.
“The United States has already more than enough nuclear weapons, and the idea of building more is foolish, dangerous and unnecessary and robbery of other priorities,” Naiman told RT. By channeling money into more nukes, Trump betrays his voters, who expected him to focus on infrastructure projects at home, he added.
“He talked about America First, rebuild America, people thought that meant we’re going to fix the roads and the bridges. Nah, we are going to build more nuclear weapons,” Naiman said.
While the nuclear plan is expected to be unveiled by Trump next month, the rather hawkish draft is still in the works and requires congressional approval, Naiman noted. He hopes lawmakers contest it.
Naiman also hopes other countries will not be “so stupid as to take the bait” and allow themselves to be dragged into an expensive new arms race. The funds that would be funneled into the pockets of arms manufacturers are US taxpayer dollars, stolen “under pretext of defending the US,” he stressed.
“Every billion dollars that are spent on nuclear weapons is a theft from education and healthcare and medical advances and roads – things that people need. Things that people need. We can’t eat nuclear weapons, we can’t educate ourselves with nuclear weapons. It’s a rip off.”
Attempts by the Trump administration to justify the nuclear build-up by claiming Russia and China pose a threat to the US do not hold water as “nobody really thinks that any sane person is going to do nuclear weapons in a strategic competition.”
While Russia and China are indeed “strategic competitors” to the US, the “idea that this means we need to produce more nuclear weapons doesn’t follow at all,” Naiman argued. In terms of nuclear deterrence, according to Naiman, it is not the quantity of nuclear weapons that matters, but the mere fact that the country possesses them.
The analyst believes it will be weapons manufacturers who will be the primary beneficiaries of the shift in nuclear policy, which is “not in the interest of the world” and “not in the interest of the majority of people in the United States.”
“The huge driver of this is the Pentagon industrial complex. Pentagon contractors are going to make money off producing nuclear weapons,” Naiman said, stressing that “parochial interests” of certain military industry players might be behind the overhaul. “We are not going to be more safe if we spend money on weapons that we don’t need.”
January 13, 2018 Posted by aletho | Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | United States | Leave a comment
Democrat Senators publish a deeply disturbing and profoundly racist report about Russia
By Alexander Mercouris | The Duran | January 12, 2018
In the aftermath of Russiagate a group of Democratic Party Senators have published one of the most bizarre and disturbing reports ever to issue from the US Senate.
The best way to summarise it is to say that it takes every single charge which has ever been made against Vladimir Putin and Russia and repeats them whilst ignoring any evidence which contradicts them.
The whole dreary catalogue is there: the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings, the Khodorkovsky prosecutions, the Politkovskaya and Litvinenko murders, the Magnitsky affair, Putin’s billions, Chechnya, the 2008 South Ossetia war, Crimea, the Ukrainian conflict, the state sponsorship of organised crime, the use of gas exports as a political weapon, the malign influence of RT and Sputnik, the sponsorship of extreme right groups in Europe, the Russian role in the Brexit vote, and even the Russian Olympic doping scandal.
To anyone accustomed to reading articles about Vladimir Putin and Russia in such places as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Economist and the Guardian, it is all very familiar. Indeed at times the report reads like an extended version of one of those articles.
In every case Vladimir Putin is the villain of the piece, demonically plotting to destroy democracy both in Russia and the West for reasons which incidentally are never made wholly clear.
As examples of where the report ignores contradictory evidence in order to make its case I will cite just five examples amongst the many others which could be made:
(1) The report claims that no-one has ever “credibly” claimed responsibility for the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings.
To this day, no credible source has ever claimed credit for the bombings and no credible evidence has been presented by the Russian authorities linking Chechen terrorists, or anyone else, to the Moscow bombings. As the public polling results show, there is still considerable doubt
The report says this in order to support its claim that Vladimir Putin and the Russian security services were actually responsible for the bombings.
However this is simply not true. The Chechen and Jihadi warlord Shamil Basayev and his Saudi associate Al-Khattab made quite clear who was responsible for the bombings in comments made shortly after they took place, linking the bombings quite clearly to the ongoing conflict in the Russian Caucasian republic of Dagestan, which they had just invaded with a volunteer army of Jihadi fighters.
Here is how Wikipedia reports their comments
Commenting on the attacks, Shamil Basayev said: “The latest blast in Moscow is not our work, but the work of the Dagestanis. Russia has been openly terrorizing Dagestan, it encircled three villages in the centre of Dagestan, did not allow women and children to leave.”[35] Al-Khattab, who was reportedly close with Basayev, said the attacks were a response to what the Russians had done in Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi, two Dagestani villages where followers of the Wahhabi sect were living until the Russian army bombed them out.[39] A group called the Liberation army of Dagestan claimed responsibility for the apartment bombings.[39][40][41][42]
The “Liberation Army of Dagestan” is now widely acknowledged to be one and the same as the Islamic Army of Dagestan formed by Basayev and Al-Khattab in 1999 to attack Dagestan.
There is no doubt that Jihadi terrorists were responsible for the Moscow apartment bombings. As the report rather grudgingly acknowledges many of those involved in the bombings were subsequently rounded up and put on trial for the bombings by the Russian authorities.
The outcome of the trials has never to my knowledge been challenged by the European Court of Human Rights which has the jurisdiction to do so and which would no doubt have done so if there had been anything about the trials which was obviously wrong.
All the major participants in the bombings have been identified and are known and it is or should be a fringe conspiracy theory to allege that Putin and the Russian authorities were responsible for them.
It is nonetheless that fringe conspiracy theory which the Democratic Senators have adopted for their report.
(2) The report repeats the common Western charge that the Russian billionaire oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested and persecuted because of his political activities
Putin and his allies have neutered political competition by creating rubber-stamp opposition parties and harassing legitimate opposition. For example, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the founder of the Russian oil company Yukos, was imprisoned for more than a decade on a spate of charges deemed to be politically motivated.
His prosecution could be broadly interpreted as a signal to other powerful oligarchs that supporting independent or anti-Putin parties carries great risk to one’s personal wealth and well-being.
This ignores the fact the European Court of Human Rights – the court with the authority to pronounce on this issue – has repeatedly said in a lengthy succession of Judgments that Khodorkovsky was convicted and imprisoned not because of his political activities but because he carried out a gigantic tax fraud – just as the Russian authorities have said – and that the case against him was not therefore brought for political reasons as the report says.
(3) The report repeats the charge that President Putin did away with direct election of governors in 2004 as part of a cynical power-grab
In 2004, Putin ‘‘radically restructured’’ the Russian political system by eliminating the election of regional governors by popular vote in favor of centrally directed appointments, characterizing this significant power grab as an effort to forge ‘‘national cohesion’’ in the wake of the terrorist attack at a school in Beslan in North Ossetia.
This ignores the fact that in 2012 direct election of governors was brought back again, something which the report never mentions.
It is fair to say that this reversal of the supposed “radical restructuring” of the Russian political system which took place in 2004 has not led to the dramatic changes in political conditions in Russia that some expected.
However that points to the underlying truth about the supposedly “radical restructuring” which supposedly took place in 2004: it wasn’t radical at all.
Though it is true that in 2004 Putin assumed the power to appoint governors to Russian regions, these appointments had to be approved by the parliament of the region to which the governor was appointed.
In practise regional parliaments showed no interest in challenging Putin’s nominees, just as regional electorates have shown little interest in the gubernational elections which were reintroduced in 2012, which almost always result in Putin’s nominees being elected.
This points to the political reality in Russia today. As is the case in most countries – including by the way the US – there is scant interest in politics at a regional level, whilst the reason Russia is politically stable is not because of the country’s institutional structure – which is its internal affair – but because the government is popular and enjoys legitimacy.
(4) The report gives an extraordinarily elliptical and mendacious account of the causes of the 2008 South Ossetia war
Leading up to August 2008, tensions had been growing in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, regions that had been contested since Georgia’s independence in 1991. South Ossetian separatists shelled Georgian villages in early August, which led to the deployment of the Georgian military to the area.417 The Russian military responded by pushing the Georgian troops out of South Ossetia with a heavy assault of tanks.418 It soon became clear that the Russian attack was not limited to just conventional military means, but was much more comprehensive in scope
This completely ignores the fact that the EU’s Independent Fact Finding Mission Report headed by the Swiss lawyer Heidi Tagliavini, though making severe criticisms of Russia’s conduct during the war, nonetheless concluded that it was Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili not Russia who started the war.
As it happens Vladimir Putin was away in Beijing attending the 2008 Summer Olympics at the time when the war started. That is hardly consistent with him planning or indeed expecting the war to start when it did.
(5) The report in a lengthy appendix discussing the Russian Olympic doping scandal treats the Russian government’s involvement in the doping of Russian athletes as proved. However the International Olympic Committee’s own investigation of this claim says quite clearly that it has not been proved. See my detailed discussion here.
These are just five examples taken at random where the report simply ignores contrary evidence in order to make its case.
Anyone willing to plough through the 200 plus pages of the report is welcome to do so if they wish to find others.
The report is also characterised by some quite remarkable leaps of logic.
For example the fact that President Putin and Russia are extremely popular in Bulgaria is President Putin’s and Russia’s fault. President Putin and Russia are also somehow to blame for the fact that there is massive corruption in Ukraine.
Presumably President Putin and Russia should be working to make themselves unpopular in Bulgaria, and presumably they also control Ukraine’s anti-corruption endeavours and are responsible for their failure despite the intense hostility to Russia of the current Ukrainian government.
The report in fact harps on the subject of “Russian corruption” to a frankly unhinged degree.
Not only are Putin and Russia corrupt but they ‘export’ corruption everywhere so that corruption wherever it happens whether in Ukraine or elsewhere is caused by them.
By way of example the political conflict in Catalonia is not the result of internal tensions within Catalonia. It is the result of a plan by corrupt Russian businessmen and organised crime chiefs to gain control of Catalonia in order to secure the wealth they have hidden there, and to gain control of Catalonia’s economy by driving out the Spanish and European firms which were formerly based there.
The association of Russia with corruption highlights another fact about the report.
It begins with the common ritual statement that its quarrel is with President Putin and his “regime” and not with the Russian people
…..it is important to draw a distinction between Mr. Putin’s corrupt regime and the people of Russia. Many Russian citizens strive for a transparent, accountable government that operates under the democratic rule of law, and we hold hope for better relations in the future with a Russian government that reflects these demands.
In practice, as the obsession with Russian corruption all too clearly shows, the report finds it impossible to sustain this claim. Hostility not just to Putin and his “regime” but to Russia itself is in fact present in every paragraph.
Thus the report contains a lengthy and tendentious discussion of Soviet disinformation activities during the Cold War though their relevance to what President Putin and his government are doing today is not obvious.
However the Soviets who carried out these disinformation activities were (mainly) Russians, which is obviously the reason the report discusses them at such length.
In other words Russians always and invariably engage in disinformation: they did so during the Cold War at the time of the USSR, and – because they are Russians – they are doing so again now.
Even the Russian government’s efforts to support Russian culture both at home and abroad is somehow sinister, as if the promotion of Russian culture is in itself sinister
Under Putin, the Kremlin has engaged and boosted cultural forces and religious institutions inside Russia to provide an additional bulwark against the democratic values and actors it paints as anathema to the country’s interests….
The Kremlin funds, directly or indirectly, a number of government-organized non-governmental organizations (GONGOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and think tanks throughout Russia and Europe. These groups carry out a number of functions, from disseminating pro-Kremlin views to seeking to influence elections abroad.
Following a series of ‘‘color revolutions’’ in former Soviet Union republics like Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, in 2006 the Russian government established the World Coordination Council of Russian Compatriots, which is responsible for coordinating the activities of Russian organizations abroad and their communications with the Kremlin.
Some GONGOs that receive and disburse funds from the Kremlin, such as the Russkiy Mir Foundation and Rossotrudnichestvo, established in 2007 and 2008, are headquartered in Russia but have branches throughout the EU, and are led by senior Russian political figures like the foreign minister or the chair of the foreign affairs committee of the upper house of the parliament.
Kremlin-linked oligarchs also sit on the boards of many of the GONGOs.
Based on conservative estimates from publicly available data, the Kremlin spends about $130 million a year through foundations like Rossotrudnichestvo and the Gorchakov fund, and, in 2015, channeled another $103 million in presidential grants to NGOs; after including support from state enterprises and private companies, however, actual funding levels may be much higher.
Most of the Russian government’s funding is focused on post-Soviet ‘’swing states’’ like Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia, but Kremlin-supported groups also operate in the Baltic states and the Balkans, especially Serbia and Bulgaria.
The Russkiy Mir Foundation which is referred to here is a cultural foundation and is Russia’s equivalent of the British Council and Germany’s Goethe Institute.
Rossotrudnichestvo is a Russian government agency concerned with administering civilian foreign aid programmes, principally within the territories of the former USSR.
The Gorchakov Fund is a publicly funded body intended to support Russian diplomacy (Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and former Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov are both trustees).
There is no justification for conflating the work of Rossotrudnichestvo and of the Gorchakov Fund with the quite different work of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, and it misrepresents the nature of the Russkiy Mir Foundation to do so.
Consistent with its hostility to the Russian government’s efforts to support Russian culture is the report’s intense and frankly sinister hostility to the Orthodox Church, to which the report devotes a whole chapter. Thus we read
One prominent example is the strong ties that Putin and his inner circle have forged with the Russian Orthodox Church and its affiliates.
The Russian Orthodox Church enjoys special recognition under Russian law, while in contrast, laws such as the 2006 NGO laws and the 2016 ‘‘Yarovaya’’ package of counterterrorism laws have enabled pressure against non-Russian Orthodox religious entities through cumbersome registration processes and administrative constraints, restrictions on proselytizing, and expanded surveillance.
Additionally, the U.S. State Department has reported that the Russian state has provided security and official vehicles to the Russian Orthodox patriarch (but not to other religious leaders) and noted reports that the Russian Orthodox Church has been a ‘‘primary beneficiary’’ of presidential grants ostensibly designed to reduce NGO dependence on foreign funding.103 In return for the state’s favor, the Russian Orthodox Church has promoted Putin and the state’s policies at multiple turns.
A former editor of the official journal of the Moscow Patriarchate (the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church and its affiliated churches outside the country) told The New York Times in 2016 that ‘‘The [Russian Orthodox] church has become an instrument of the Russian state. It is used to extend and legitimize the interests of the Kremlin.’’
This is noteworthy given Putin’s roots in the KGB—the tip of the Soviet spear in restricting religious activity during the Communist era—and it reflects a careful cultivation of his identity as a man of faith and a defender of the Orthodox faithful.
The image of Putin as defender of traditional religious and cultural values has also been leveraged by the Kremlin ‘‘as both an ideology and a source of influence abroad.’’
In projecting itself as ‘‘the natural ally of those who pine for a more secure, illiberal world free from the tradition-crushing rush of globalization, multiculturalism and women’s and gay rights,’’ the Russian government has been able to mobilize some Orthodox actors in places like Moldova and Montenegro to vigorously oppose integration with the West…..
Just as the Kremlin has strengthened its relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church and used it to bolster its standing at home, the Russian Orthodox Church also serves as its proxy abroad, and the two institutions [Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Russian Orthodox Church – AM] have several overlapping foreign policy objectives……
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also used Kirill to promote a relativistic view of human rights at the United Nations, arranging for him to give a speech in 2008 (before he was Patriarch) at the UN Human Rights Council, where he bemoaned that ‘‘there is a strong influence of feministic views and homosexual attitudes in the formulation of rules, recommendations and programs in human rights advocacy.’’
According to a report by Chatham House, in Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia, Orthodox parent committees, modelled on similar Russian Orthodox committees, have launched attacks on LGBT and feminist groups.
These committees ‘‘claim that gender equality is a Western construct intended to spread homosexuality in Eastern Europe, blaming the United States and the EU for the decay of ‘moral health’ in the respective societies.’’
The Russian Orthodox Church also enjoys strong financial backing from Kremlin-linked oligarchs Konstantin Malofeev and Vladimir Yakunin, who are both under U.S. sanctions.
In Bulgaria and Romania, the Kremlin even allegedly coopted Orthodox priests to lead anti-fracking protests.
In Moldova, senior priests have worked to halt the country’s integration with Europe (leading anti-homosexual protests and even claiming that new biometric passports for the EU were ‘’satanic’’ because they had a 13-digit number), and priests in Montenegro led efforts to block the country from joining NATO.
These comments paint Orthodox priests and believers everywhere and not just in Russia as proxies of the Kremlin, denying them any independent agency – at least when they speak out against Western cultural practices and US policies – and representing them as enemies of democracy.
To which all I can say is that Western attitudes to the Orthodox Church have witnessed an extraordinary reversal within my lifetime.
During the Soviet period the Orthodox Church was the heroic victim of Soviet persecution. Today it is the despicable handmaiden of Russian power. The one constant is Western hostility to the Russian government. That never changes.
The greater part of the report is however taken up with the now standard accusations about Russia’s supposed disinformation strategy and the way Russian media agencies like RT and Sputnik are supposedly destabilising the West and are interfering in Western political processes.
There are the usual calls to counter and censor these agencies and to police social media and the internet in order to discredit or eliminate these pro-Russian voices, “pro-Russian” in this context being anyone anywhere who voices any criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States or who makes any criticisms of its domestic conditions, even if that person is an American.
This harping on Russia’s disinformation strategy is every bit as obsessive as everything else in the report.
Its starting point is the belief that Russians – including of course the Russian media – have no right to hold or express views on any question which disagree with those of the US government.
That in turn leads inexorably to the assumption that when Russians do express such views they must be acting in bad faith.
The totalitarian nature of this reasoning is obvious, but the Democratic Senators who have authored the report seem oblivious to it.
Reading the report it is in fact quite clear that its authors believe that ‘disinformation’ is what Russians do, so that the Russians are ultimately responsible for all ‘disinformation’ wherever it takes place. Thus if a false story appears anywhere on the internet it must be the Russians who are to blame for it.
Moreover since no right thinking person could ever agree with the Russians on any issue – and certainly not on any issue which involves criticism of or disagreement with the US government – it follows that anyone who does so must be either a Russian agent or a “useful idiot”.
This is not just totalitarian thinking; it is also profoundly paranoid thinking. At one level it demonstrates an astonishing loss of nerve. During the Cold War it was the Soviets who placed restrictions on the flow of information. Now the reverse is happening. It is however the paranoia which stands out.
This is all the more ironic in that the report actually contains a chapter entitled “the Kremlin’s paranoid pathology”.
This chapter despite its title in fact contains only one passage which discusses Russian beliefs in order to show that they are paranoid
Putin’s regime and most of the Russian people view the history of the late 20th century and early 21st century in a starkly different light than most of the West does. The historical narrative popular in Russia paints this period as one of repeated attempts by the West to undermine and humiliate Russia.
In reality, the perceived aggression of the United States and the West against Russia allows Putin to ignore his domestic failures and present himself as the leader of a wartime nation: a ‘‘Fortress Russia.’’
This narrative repeatedly flogs core themes like enemy encirclement, conspiracy, and struggle, and portrays the United States, NATO, and Europe as conspiring to encircle Russia and make it subservient to the West. As part of this supposed conspiracy, the EU goes after former Soviet lands like Ukraine, and Western spies use civil society groups to meddle in and interfere with Russian affairs.
(bold italics added)
This is the only passage in the report which admits that the Russian people and President Putin and the Russian government on a specific issue believe one and the same thing.
The problem with this passage is however that the Russian beliefs it discusses cannot be described as paranoid for the simple reason that Russians are right to believe them.
Recently declassified documents have now confirmed what in truth has been known all along: that the West promised Russia on multiple occasions that NATO would not be extended eastwards, and that the West subsequently broke this promise.
Western interference in Ukraine is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of fact.
So is Western interference in Russian domestic politics, with Time magazine for example openly bragging about the US’s role in engineering Boris Yeltsin’s fraudulent election victory in 1996.
By contrast believing that stories which appear in the Russian media and the relatively small number of often contradictory social media messages which are claimed to originate in Russia can have any significant impact on Western political processes is paranoid, as is constantly harping on about supposed Russian misdeeds even when evidence has appeared which proves they are not true (see above).
What then is the significance of this strange report?
At its most basic, the report must be seen as a shot in the bitter partisan conflict which is currently raging in the US between President Trump and his Democratic Party opponents.
That the primary target of the report is actually President Trump – who continues to say that he wants better relations with Russia – is confirmed by these words in the report
Following attacks like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, U.S. presidents have rallied the country and the world to address the challenges facing the nation. Yet the current President of the United States has barely acknowledged the threat posed by Mr. Putin’s repeated attacks on democratic governments and institutions, let alone exercised the kind of leadership history has shown is necessary to effectively counter this kind of aggression.
Never before in American history has so clear a threat to national security been so clearly ignored by a U.S. president.
The threat posed by Mr. Putin’s meddling existed before the current U.S. Administration, and may well extend beyond it. Yet, as this report will demonstrate, the Russian government’s malign influence operations can be deterred.
Several countries in Europe took notice of the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election and realized the danger posed to their democracies. They have taken steps to build resilience against Mr. Putin’s aggression and interference, and the range of effective measures implemented by European countries provide valuable lessons for the United States.
To that end, this report recommends a series of actions that the United States should take across government, civil society, and the private sector—and in cooperation with our allies—to push back against the Kremlin’s aggression and establish a set of long-term norms that can neutralize such efforts to undermine democracy.
Yet it must be noted that without leadership from the President, any attempt to marshal such a response will be inherently weakened at the outset
(bold italics added)
The trouble is that the paranoid language of the report shows that the Democratic Party Senators who have authored it believe what they say.
They are not conjuring up an invented threat from Russia in order to attack Donald Trump. Rather their reason for attacking Donald Trump is first and foremost because he does not share their paranoid view of Russia.
To suppose otherwise would be both complacent and wrong.
That makes the prospect of any rapprochement taking place between the US and Russia in any foreseeable future extremely improbable, to put it mildly.
Even if this is only a minority report, the fact that it has not been ridiculed and criticised across the US for the paranoid and preposterous document that it is shows the extent to which paranoia about Russia within the US elite has become universal and internalised.
Paranoia of this intensity is not susceptible to reason or argument, and it is all but impossible to see how a rapprochement between the US and Russia is possible when there are so many powerful people in the US who hold these views.
The report also shows the intense pressure Donald Trump is under to be even tougher with Russia than the US already is.
As well as demanding the banning or restriction of “pro-Russian” voices in the media and on the internet, the authors of the report press for intensified confrontation with Russia on every possible front.
They want more military spending to confront Russia, more military deployments close to Russia’s borders, more interference in Russian domestic processes, more efforts to block Russian oil and gas exports to Europe, they want Nord Stream 2 cancelled, and they demand an almost certainly illegal prohibition on US citizens buying Russian sovereign debt.
Even if some of these demands are unworkable or are resisted, the pressure is so intense that some of them at least are likely to be implemented, whilst the prospect of any relaxation of the restrictions which are already in place quite simply is not there.
In the longer term it is difficult to avoid being deeply disturbed by all this.
Back on 12th October 2016 I wrote an article for The Duran discussing how racism against Russians has become the one form of racism which continues to be acceptable in the West, and how this racism and the ugly stereotyping of Russians to which it gives rise is dangerous because it lowers the threshold where violence against Russians becomes acceptable.
This report – with its hostile attitude towards the spread of Russian culture and to the Russian Orthodox Church, and its depiction of corruption, aggression, disinformation and organised crime activity as peculiarly Russian activities – is a case in point.
It is inconceivable that such a report could be written about the cultural, religious and information policies of any other other country – Israel or China are obvious example – without this provoking a furious outcry. By contrast in the case of Russia such a report not only can be published; it is widely treated as authoritative and goes unchallenged.
What the report shows is how far these anti-Russian attitudes which can be accurately called racist – and which President Putin has recently compared to anti-semitism – have become internalised even at the highest levels of the US government and of the US political elite, so that it is not only possible but even respectable to repeat them there.
That is a very worrying fact, and it is impossible to see how it can end any way but badly.
January 12, 2018 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | Democratic Party, United States | Leave a comment
Western Journalists Threaten Venezuela
Whitewashing a vile opposition leadership for decades makes military invasion a possibility
By Joe Emersberger | teleSUR | January 9, 2018
“Venezuela opposition looks to military to oust Maduro. Dream on” says the headline to an article by John Otis in the Guardian. “Having failed to dislodge President Nicolás Maduro, the opposition is openly talking of a coup but mutual benefit links the military with the ruling party” reads the subheading.
Otis cites opposition leaders Julio Borges, Maria Corina Machado and former Economist “journalist” Phil Gunson who is now with the International Crisis Group.
Borges and Machado, and the most prominent opposition leaders today (Henrique Capriles and Leopoldo Lopez) supported five different attempts to oust Venezuela’s democratically elected government by force. Otis doesn’t write a word about any of those attempts in his article. He thereby prevents readers from understanding why the opposition has suffered so many electoral defeats in Venezuela’s “chavista” era of the last 20 years. It has nothing to do with “undemocratic maneuvers” by the Venezuelan government as Otis suggests. In Otis’ own country, an opposition leadership like Venezuela’s – violent and foreign-funded – would have been immediately imprisoned and never seen or heard from again.
The most successful attempt to oust Venezuela’s government by force was a military coup in 2002 that briefly succeeded. It ousted Hugo Chavez for 2 days. It was backed by the Bush administration and prominent US media. It was also supported, tacitly, by the Labour government of Tony Blair, a key contributor to war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and a man whom the Guardian still makes periodic efforts to rehabilitate.
The most embarrassingly supportive of the 2002 coup was the New York Times editorial board that gushed over Pedro Carmona, the businessman turned dictator who fired Supreme Court justices, dismissed elected officials, and annulled the constitution voters had ratified in a referendum. Phil Gunson, like so many other corporate journalists based in Venezuela at the time, parroted the opposition’s propaganda during the coup. About 60 Chavez government supporters who rose up against Carmon’s dictatorship were killed, not that the international media cared then or now. Those deaths are routinely ignored when the coup is mentioned at all.
Months after that coup was defeated by a huge popular uprising among the poor, the opposition turned to massive sabotage of the oil industry that inflicted, at the time, the deepest economic downturn Venezuela had experienced in decades (until the current depression that began late in 2014).
In April of 2013, after the presidential election that Maduro won, Henrique Capriles led violent protests that sought to overturn the results by force. Those protests led to the deaths of several government supporters.
Early in 2014, shortly after suffering a big defeat in municipal elections, violent protests with the explicit aim of overthrowing the government were led by Machado and Lopez. They led to about 40 deaths; about half were government supporters, police or bystanders.
In 2016, violent protests led to 120 deaths. To the extent the facts are known, it appears the breakdown of the deaths is about the same as in 2014, with government supporters, police and bystanders accounting for roughly half the deaths.
Borges and other opposition leaders have constantly winked at another coup attempt like the one they briefly pulled off in 2002 by making direct veiled appeals to the military. While violent protests raged in 2014, Borges made such an appeal on Venezuela’s largest TV network (at about the 6:20 point of this video ). Borges turned to the cameras and said “…. A message to the armed forces: we know you are against the repression that is happening in Venezuela and that you want a constitution that will be respected….”
The hubris of Borges and other leaders has been greatly exacerbated by the overwhelming support they have received from the US government, the international corporate media and prominent NGOs. Borges recently likened Venezuelan migrants to infectious disease. He has openly boasted in Venezuelan media, where he very regularly appears, of having success blocking the government’s access to loans. In other words, Borges has bragged about making an economic crisis worse, a tactic opposed by most Venezuelans according to an opposition aligned pollster – and essentially confirmed by recent election results.
Otis’ article dismisses the Maduro government’s anti-corruption campaign, which has ensnared long time officials, as politically motivated. One can never discount political motivations in any government’s “anti-corruption” initiatives, but when perhaps the most brutal and backward government on earth, Saudi Arabia’s, launched a comically bogus “crackdown on corruption”, the Guardian published “news articles” that may as well have been written by the dictatorship. That these “news articles” brought no public protest from within the Guardian’s ranks, or resignations, speaks to how well-heeled and thoroughly “bought” liberal journalism is in the UK. Of course, hyping “reform” within Saudi Arabia has been done by the western media for several decades.
The positive or negative press a government gets in the western media has nothing to do with its record on democracy or human rights. It has everything to with whether or not western elites view it as sufficiently cooperative. Prominent Venezuelan opposition voices are now openly advocating foreign military invasion. If it happens, reporters like Otis and outlets the Guardian should be held primarily responsible. Two decades of relentless demonization of a democratically elected government have been essential to making that crime a possibility.
January 12, 2018 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | The Guardian, Venezuela | Leave a comment
US military seeks to control your Facebook
US Army seeks new intel tool able to understand social media posts in languages including Russian, Arabic and French, and which can post answers on its own
By Seraphim Hanisch Seraphim Hanisch | The Duran | January 11, 2018
For years the conspiracy theorists have claimed that Facebook is a CIA front operation, and that it serves as a way to track everyone in the USA. In the most recent years, especially from the time of the 2016 Presidential elections to now, Facebook, Twitter, Google and other platforms which allow social media have been charged with being biased and “against” the posting and activities of people who dissent with the way the government and powers-that-be want you to think.
Today we find some rather clear evidence that the US Army wants to truly have access to private citizen accounts in social media, and they want to have the tools to observe AND post things in the same idiom and style, apparently, as though it were you making the posts. We appear to be somewhere beyond the tinfoil hat stage now.
So, who is hacking whom now?
Here we show excerpts from the request made by INSCOM (The United States Army Intelligence and Security Command). First, we look at the purpose of INSCOM:
INSCOM has an Administrative Control (ADCON) relationship with 1st Information Operations Command. INSCOM G7 executes materiel and materiel-centric responsibilities as a Capability Developer and as the Army proponent for design and development of select operational level and expeditionary intelligence, cyber, and electronic warfare systems. 1st Information Operations Command (Land) provides IO and Cyberspace Operations support to the Army and other Military Forces through deployable support teams, reachback planning and analysis, specialized training, and a World Class Cyber OPFOR in order to support freedom of action in the Information Environment and to deny the same to our adversaries.
Then we look at what they are asking for. The bold typeface is my own addition for emphasis.
Additional Info: This RFI requests a vendor service and not hardware/firmware/software, and therefore should not require an Authority to Operate (ATO) or a Certificate of Networthiness (CoN). 1st IO Command has identified areas for which we are requesting White Papers from Industry on mature COTS solutions with a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of at least 7, relevant to the following Focus Areas and requirements:
0001: Content Translation of PAI
A. Capability to translate foreign language content (message text, voice, images, etc.) from the social media environment into English. Required languages are Arabic, French, Pashtu, Farsi, Urdu, Russian, and Korean.
B. Identify specific audiences through reading and understanding of colloquial phrasing, spelling variations, social media brevity codes, and emojis.
1. Automated capability for machine learning of foreign language content with accuracy comparable to Google and Microsoft Bing Translate. Must be able to incrementally improve over time.
2. Recognize language dialect to ensure effectual communication.
0002: Automated Sentiment Analysis (SA)
A. Capability to derive sentiment from all social media content.
1. At minimum, distinguish negative, neutral, and positive sentiment based on collective, contextual understanding of the specific audience.
a) Capability to determine anger, pleasure, sadness, and excitement.
2. Capability to recognize local colloquial and/or slang terms and phrases, spelling variations, social media brevity codes, capitalization, and emojis will be included.
3. Automated machine learning of SA must be able to incrementally improve over time.
a) Software should allow for heuristic updates to improve overall capability; e.g., manually suggest updates based on personal knowledge and experience.
B. Capability to suggest whether specific audiences could be influenced based on derived sentiment.
0003: Content Generation Based off of PAI
A. Capability to translate English into Arabic, French, Pashtu, Farsi, Urdu, Russian, and Korean.
B. Automated capability to generate/create at least three, and up to 10, unique statements derived from one (1) original social media statement, while retaining the meaning and tone of the original.
1. Customize language in a dialect consistent with a specific audience including spelling variations, cultural variations, colloquial phrasing, and social media brevity codes and emojis.
0004: Assessment
1. Capability to continually inform MOE with/through sentiment analysis, content generation, and new target audience content.
2. Capability for end user to extract empirical data and visualize metrics of service, including number of content samples translated, number of content samples generated, number of content samples downloaded, number of conversations influenced by generated content, etc.
0005: Data Protection and Management
Data protection will meet all standing DoD regulatory and security protocols.
This is a formidable request for a quite powerful eavesdropping AND propaganda disseminating application. It is also not the first time the military has sought or deployed such an application. The Guardian reported that the US Military had software in use six years ago that was able to create propaganda videos that used fake online personas. Now it appears that the military wants to piggyback – or hijack – REAL people’s accounts to do a similar purpose.
Is this helpful? Is this the proper way to conduct this kind of warfare? The military establishment appears to think so. However, this author has concerns about the privacy rights of American citizens, including the right to disagree, vehemently with the policies and directions taken by the government. We are a representative republic, and that means the government is supposed to work FOR us, not “take care of us.”
This last, of course, is a problem we Americans have gotten ourselves into by ceding personal responsibility to think for ourselves, and to gradually come to think of Uncle Sam as, really, some kind of uncle that takes care of us. But that was never the intention of the founders of this land, and truly, we have only ourselves and our laziness to blame for the military thinking that they can exercise this kind of power against any one of us.
January 12, 2018 Posted by aletho | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Facebook, INSCOM, United States | Leave a comment
Ecuador and Assange
By Craig Murray | January 12, 2018
It is for the government of Ecuador, not the UK, to determine who is an Ecuadorian citizen. It is for the government of Ecuador, not the UK, to determine who is an Ecuadorian diplomat.
It is not in the least unusual for Julian Assange to become an Ecuadorian citizen. Having been granted political asylum, and having lived for over five years under Ecuadorian jurisdiction, naturalisation is a perfectly normal step. There are a great many refugees in this country who are now naturalised UK citizens. Julian appears suitably proud of his new citizenship, and rightly so.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office appears to be putting out a story that it has refused to accredit Assange as an Ecuadorian diplomat. As the Guardian reports:
“Earlier this week the UK’s Foreign Office revealed that Ecuador had asked for Assange, who was born in Australia, to be accredited as a diplomat. The request was dismissed.”
I have no knowledge that the Ecuadorian government ever notified Assange as a member of diplomatic staff of its mission. But it has every right to appoint Assange, now an Ecuadorian citizen, as an Ecuadorian diplomat if it so chooses. Ecuador cannot tell the UK who may or may not be a British diplomat, and the converse applies.
The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations – to which the UK and Ecuador are both party – is the governing international law and determines the obligations to respect diplomatic immunity. It is crystal clear (Article 4,1) that the need to obtain agreement in advance of the receiving state only applies to the Head of Mission – ie the Ecuadorian Ambassador. For other staff of the mission the sending state (in this case, Ecuador) “may freely appoint” the other members of the mission, (Article 7), subject to provisos in Articles 5,8,9 and 11. Plainly the only one of these which applies in the Assange case is Article 9. Julian Assange is persona non grata – unwelcome -to the UK government. That is a legitimate reply to notification, but comes following the appointment; it does not pre-empt the appointment.
Here is the key point. A member of staff below head of mission can already have entered the country before appointment, and their diplomatic immunity starts from the moment their appointment is notified, and NOT from the moment it is accepted. Article 39 (i) could not be plainer:
1.Every person entitled to privileges and immunities shall enjoy them from the moment he enters
the territory of the receiving State on proceeding to take up his post or, if already in its territory, from
the moment when his appointment is notified to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs or such other ministry
as may be agreed.
So to summarise.
There is no requirement for prior approval before arrival of staff below Ambassador, and it is just a notification regime (Article 10). If the FCO is telling the truth and Ecuador notified the UK of its appointment of Julian Assange as a member of diplomatic staff, the UK can only have refused by declaring Assange persona non grata. That does not remove his diplomatic immunity which started the moment he was notified. It continues until he has been given the chance to leave the country in “a reasonable time”. (Article 9.2, and 39.2).
The immunity of envoys has been universally regarded as essential to inter-state relations for thousands of years. The reasons why that immunity must start at notification are obvious if you think it through. The FCO bragging about refusing the alleged Ecuadorian request has been carried in virtually the entire neo-liberal media. Not one article, anywhere, has reflected anything approaching the applicable legal arguments. I am again left wondering whether mainstream media journalists are simply entirely incompetent, or deeply corrupt.
I suppose both.
January 12, 2018 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Ecuador, UK | Leave a comment
#Winning: Facebook “Fake News” Flag Makes People MORE Likely to Click
corbettreport | January 9, 2018
Fakebook has had to ditch its fake news flag after finding that people don’t just blindly listen to them when they declare something to be fake! Imagine that! Happy new year everyone!
SHOW NOTES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=25625
January 11, 2018 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | Facebook | Leave a comment
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Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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