Documents reveal CIA support for anti-Iranian propaganda film Argo
By Tom Secker | Press TV | June 22, 2021
The 2012 spy comedy-drama Argo was a massive critical and commercial success, and while the CIA’s support for the film was an open secret, until now the details on how and why the Agency helped to make Argo were hard to come by. In response to a FOIA request made in 2012, the CIA recently released over 200 pages of documents about their role in the making of Argo, providing a glimpse behind the curtain of why the CIA is working with Hollywood.
Argo tells the story of six US State Department employees who fled the US embassy in Tehran during the 1979 revolution, and were hiding out in the city. The CIA’s Tony Mendez came up with the idea of pretending they were a Hollywood film crew, so he could sneak them out of Iran. The CIA, with the help of assets in Tinseltown, set up a fake production company and bought the rights to a sci-fi script, titled Argo, before Mendez traveled to Tehran and exfiltrated the six government employees.
‘We Love the Agency’
Numerous emails between the CIA and the film-makers, including star and director Ben Affleck, reveal a disturbingly close relationship. Affleck declared, “We love the Agency and this heroic action” before promising “we really want the process of bringing it to the big screen to be as real as possible.” One CIA officer wrote back, “The story you’re telling in the movie is one we’re proud of (something that is probably clear since we feature the tale in the museum).”
The documents detail how, over the following months, the CIA provided extensive support on Argo. Affleck, fellow star Bryan Cranston, and the producers were given tours of the Langley headquarters, Affleck was provided with archive photographs so the crew could recreate 80s-style CIA offices, and Affleck even had a roundtable meeting with senior CIA officials to plan out the project.
This culminated in the Agency granting permission for Affleck to film at CIA headquarters — a benefit provided to a tiny handful of productions since 1973s Scorpio became the first movie to be granted that privilege.
In one sequence, Affleck — playing Mendez — is shown arriving at Langley and entering the headquarters, walking over the CIA seal in the lobby. As Affleck revealed on the DVD commentary, they had to digitally remove the security gates in the lobby because they didn’t exist at the time of the Argo operation. A lengthy dialog scene between Affleck and Cranston — playing Mendez’ supervisor — was shot in a Langley corridor.
Unlike the Pentagon and other government agencies with a large number of locations and impressive-looking hardware, the CIA’s only cinematic asset is its Langley campus. As one CIA public affairs officer put it in an email to Affleck, “I love opportunities to show off our Langley home and, of course, the men and women of America’s premier intelligence service.” But it took months before the Agency’s higher-ups approved Argo for filming at their HQ, and several reviews of the evolving script by public affairs officers.
Authenticity vs. reality: How Argo butchered history
This rarely-granted access added production value, and lent Argo a degree of authenticity that few spy films achieve. In an interview with the CIA’s in-house magazine, Affleck declared, “I hope we can make it feel real,” but his film grossly distorted major details of the operation and surrounding events. Critics lauded Argo for authentically recreating the period and capturing the zeitgeist of the time, but soon the cracks started to emerge.
The Canadian government, which played a key role in the operation by both housing the six in Tehran and providing false Canadian passports to help them “sell” their cover identities, objected to having been sidelined in the Argo script. Former Canadian ambassador to Iran Ken Taylor criticized the movie, saying, “In general, it makes it seem like the Canadians were just along for the ride. The Canadians were brave. Period.”
These remarks were echoed by former President Carter. “90% of the contributions to the ideas and the consummation of the plan was Canadian, and the movie gives almost all of the credit to the American CIA.”
Carter went on to point out that Affleck’s character, Tony Mendez, “was only in Tehran for a day and a half” and that Taylor was the real hero of the operation. This led to Affleck adding a card at the end of the movie acknowledging the role of the Canadians, but he made no other changes in response to this criticism. Tellingly, the newly-released CIA documents don’t mention Canada even once.
Indeed, the CIA’s internal history of the Argo operation, which was written by Mendez, records just how briefly he was on the ground in Iran, and grants Taylor far more credit than the movie does. It also notes that a second CIA officer also went to Tehran to help exfiltrate the “film crew,” referred to by the pseudonym “Julio.”
The film — which Mendez worked on as a script consultant and technical adviser — makes no mention of “Julio,” minimizes the role of the Canadian government, and turns Mendez and the CIA into the heroic saviors of the story. While this might have “felt real” to some audiences and critics, it was far from reality.
Remediating the CIA Coup of ’53 and the Hostage Crisis
Perhaps more importantly, the film also distorts history in its depiction of Iran, and the causes of the Iranian revolution. The film’s introduction admits that the CIA-MI6 coup in Iran in 1953, and the CIA’s subsequent training of the Savak in brutal interrogation methods, were among the provocations behind the 1979 uprising and the replacement of the American-backed Shah.
However, this is told through an animated sequence, the suffering of Iranians at the hands of the CIA is presented in a cartoonish way and so has little emotional impact. The brief animation overlooks the CIA’s deceitful, violent tactics during the coup, which included provoking riots and arranging for the “sham bombing” of the home of a prominent religious leader in Tehran, i.e. a false flag terrorist attack.
Similarly, Argo makes no mention of the Iranian hostage crisis, focusing solely on the six officials living at Ken Taylor’s house after fleeing the embassy and ignoring the larger number held hostage for months after the revolution. Operation Eagle Claw, which saw a Delta Force team attempt to fly into Tehran on helicopters to rescue the hostages, ended in a horrific failure when two of the helicopters crashed into one another, and several others had to be abandoned in the desert.
By misrepresenting or ignoring the wider story of what was happening in Iran, and why, Argo remediated a string of bad operations and horrific decisions by the CIA and US military, turning it into the Agency’s Saving Private Ryan. As an internal email from the CIA’s deputy director for public affairs put it, “This is a good news CIA story, with real life CIA good guys.” Note: they didn’t say it was a real life story, because it wasn’t.
Demonizing Iranians? No problem, says the CIA
Throughout its two hour run, Argo depicts Iranians as constantly hostile and a violent threat to the safety of Americans. Any notion that Iran’s citizens have legitimate grievances is pushed aside in favor of lengthy sequences of Iranians shouting aggressively, throwing Molotov cocktails and burning American flags. According to Argo, the threat to Americans is not just the Revolutionary Guard, or even the new Iranian government as a whole, but every single person in Iran.
By depicting Iranians as irrationally angry and violent, and framing the story around everyone in Iran posing a threat to our small band of Americans, the film emotionally reverses what really happened. In reality, America was and is the much larger power and poses a far greater threat to Iran than vice versa, but in the world of Argo, the conflict and danger originates from Iran, and from Iranians.
Three sequences stand out: one where the “film crew” go on a fake location scout in a Tehran marketplace and are hassled, threatened, and even attacked by miscellaneous Iranian citizens; the lengthy interrogation of the group by Revolutionary Guardsmen at the airport; and the ending of the film, which sees the Revolutionary Guard chasing the plane carrying Mendez and the “film crew” down the runway in a reckless attempt to stop them fleeing the country.
None of these events actually happened. There was no phony film scouting trip, and no time to do anything like that given how briefly the two CIA officers were actually on the ground. Likewise, the group’s passage through the airport went as “smooth as silk,” according to Mendez’s official account. He described how easy it was, saying, “I was armed with the Argo portfolio and would overwhelm anyone standing in the way with Hollywood talk. The Iranian official at the checkpoint could not have cared less.”
The CIA — which knew how far the script deviated from reality — had no problem with any of this. They reviewed multiple drafts of the screenplay before approving the filming at Langley, with one internal email detailing, “I’ve reviewed the script, which I think looks good. The Agency comes off looking very well, in my opinion, and the action of the movie is, for the most part, squarely rooted in the facts of the mission. There is some fiction thrown in toward the end for dramatic effect, but nothing too ridiculous.”
The CIA’s website says that through its relationships with Hollywood producers, it “strives to provide an accurate portrayal of the people of CIA, their skills, and their commitment to public service. To achieve this goal, [the CIA’s] Entertainment Industry Liaison works with creatives to make their scripts, stories, and other products as authentic as possible.”
By any objective measure, Argo should have failed these tests. It deviated from history, excluded the role of allies, and fabricated angry, violent Iranians who hate all Americans for no good reason. But instead of being rejected by “America’s premier intelligence agency,” Argo was granted an unusual degree of access, to boost its authenticity and help sells its twisted narrative of American-Iranian relations to the global public.
Tom Secker is a British-based investigative journalist, author and podcaster. You can follow his work via his Spy Culture site and his podcast ClandesTime.
America’s Soup-Brained President Says The US Never Interferes In Other Countries’ Elections
By Caitlin Johnstone | June 17, 2021
During an astonishingly sycophantic press conference after the Geneva summit with Vladimir Putin, President Biden posited an entirely hypothetical scenario about what the world would think of the United States if it were interfering in foreign elections and everybody knew it.
When AP’s Jonathan Lemire asked the president of the most powerful government in the world what “consequences” he’d threatened the Russian leader with should the Kremlin interfere in US elections going forward, Biden meandered his way through one of his signature not-quite-lucid word salads, and then said the following:
“Let’s get this straight: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power.”
The fact that the entire press corps did not erupt in side-splitting laughter at this ridiculous utterance is in itself proof that western news media is pure propaganda. The United States has directly interfered in scores of foreign elections since it began its ascent to global domination at the end of the second World War, to say nothing of all the coups, color revolutions, proxy conflicts and regime change military invasions it has also participated in during that time. The US openly interfered in Russia’s elections in the nineties, and literally just tried to stage a coup in Bolivia by interfering in its democratic process. The US is far and away the single most egregious offender in the world on this front, which is largely why it is perceived around the world as a greater threat to democracy than any other government.
This is not a secret, internationally or in the United States. Anyone who has done any learning about the US government’s actual behavior on the world stage knows this. Hell, a former CIA director openly joked about it on Fox News a few years ago.
Fox’s Laura Ingraham unsurprisingly introduced former CIA Director James Woolsey as “an old friend” in a 2018 interview about Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 alleged members of a Russian troll farm, in which Woolsey unsurprisingly talked about how dangerous Russian “disinformation” is and Ingraham unsurprisingly said that everyone should actually be afraid of China. What was a bit surprising, though, was what happened at the end of the interview.
“Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Ingraham asked in response to Woolsey’s Russia remarks.
“Oh, probably,” Woolsey said with a grin. “But it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists from taking over. For example, in Europe, in ’47, ’48, ’49, the Greeks and the Italians we CIA-”
“We don’t do that anymore though?” Ingraham interrupted. “We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?”
Woolsey smiled and said said “Well…”, followed by a joking incoherent mumble, adding, “Only for a very good cause.”
And then they both laughed.
The fact that not one person in the press pool questioned or criticized Biden’s outrageous remarks tells you everything you need to know about the western media and what its real function is. This is further illustrated by the rest of the behavior of these odious propagandists during the summit, which was illustrated quite well by the glowing praise of Democratic Party insider Andrea Chalupa on Twitter:
“The winners of #GenevaSummit2021 are the White House press corp,” Chalupa said. “Excellent questions confronting Putin and challenging Biden on holding a summit with a ruthless dictator. And they literally held their ground when shoved by Putin’s security and propagandists.”
That actually says it all. Western reporters are forbidden by their oligarchic owners from ever confronting power in any meaningful way; the closest they’re ever allowed to get to punching up is challenging the leaders of CIA-targeted governments, and demanding to know why their own officials aren’t being more hawkish and aggressive toward those leaders.
As RT’s Murad Gazdiev pointed out, “ABC, NBC, BBC, CNN, and many other Western outlets were invited for Putin’s press conference. No Russian media was invited to Biden’s press conference.” The whole thing was a navel-gazing, masturbatory cold war propaganda orgy where western “journalists” made up fantasies about their soup-brained leader staring down Putin, where they yelled nonsense about Alexei Navalny at the Russian president and then fangirled at Biden’s response.
Real journalists go to Belmarsh Prison for exposing US war crimes. Western propagandists ask Putin why he’s such a doodoo dumb dumb poopy head and then dream about Pulitzers all night.
Western news media exists to funnel propaganda into the minds of the public. It is controlled by plutocrats who work in alliance with opaque government agencies to weave narratives about why the US government needs to do the things it had already planned on doing anyway. This gets more obvious by the day.
Jessica Ashooh: The Taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant Tabbed to Do It
How and why did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and in the halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard site with an anti-establishment reputation?
Photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | June 11, 2021
Reddit is one of the world’s most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States’ eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times.
That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the company’s decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East foreign policy wonk at NATO’s think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the same time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was demanding more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google search for “Jessica Ashooh Reddit” filtered between late 2016 and early 2017 (after she was appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable appointment.
This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official — all of which raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the national security state.
A hawk’s talons on Syria
The Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and takes funding from the military alliance, as well as from the U.S. government, the U.S. military, Middle Eastern dictatorships, other Western governments, big tech companies, and weapons manufacturers. Its board of directors has been and continues to be a who’s who of high U.S. statespeople like Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as well as senior military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark, David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the late Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA directors are also on the board. As such, the council chooses to represent both political wings of the national security state.
Ashooh’s LinkedIn resume epitomizes the troubling relantionship between think tanks and big tech.
Between 2015 and 2017, Ashooh was Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force, working directly with and under Madeline Albright and Stephen Hadley. This is particularly noteworthy, given both these individuals’ roles in the region. As Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Albright oversaw the Iraq sanctions and the Oil for Food Program, denounced as “genocide” by the successive United Nations diplomats charged with carrying them out. In an infamous interview with 60 Minutes, Albright casually brushed off a question about her role in the killing of half a million children, stating “the price is worth it.” Meanwhile, Hadley was deputy or senior national security advisor to the government of George W. Bush throughout the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, surely the greatest crimes against humanity thus far in the 21st century.
Ashooh appears to be as hawkish as her bosses. Her particular area of expertise is the war in Syria, regarding which she has been among the most belligerent voices, constantly calling for more American intervention to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. In a 2015 interview with Al Jazeera, she praised the U.K. government’s decision to bomb the country, claiming that the British public was “coming around” to the idea of war. A shocked interviewer asked “how will the British airstrikes [on] Syria… make the British public any safer?” Ashooh replied that it was “generally a positive decision” because “it goes a long way in improving international consensus on the way forward on Syria,” although she lamented that there wouldn’t be “much improvement in the situation without ground troops.” There will be “no political solution without a military element,” she predicted, essentially making the pitch for war.
Ashooh has also constantly praised and supported Syria’s opposition forces. In 2016, she said that she was very happy that “fighters on the ground from a number of key factions” were uniting against the “Assad regime.” She condemned Russia for claiming these opposition forces were members of terrorist groups like Al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam or ISIS, insisting that these were “moderate” rebels.
Of course, the idea that there was still any measurable distance between “moderate” rebels and outright militant jihadists by 2016 was hard to maintain. Even The Washington Post by this time was admitting as much, noting that so-called moderates were now so “intermingled” with al-Nusra that it was difficult to tell them apart.
Nevertheless, the New Hampshire native took to the pages of The New York Times to demand that the U.S. arm the opposition. Of course, it was already doing so, the CIA spending $1 billion per year fielding rebel mercenary armies in the conflict — with one in every 15 dollars the agency spent going to this endeavor. All of this Ashooh surely knew, yet she maintained that the West must continue to “jack up the price” of Russia defending Assad. “As long as [Assad] remains in power and remains the figurehead of the Syrian government… this conflict won’t end,” she said, laying out her regime-change-or-bust position. Just weeks before unexpectedly taking over at Reddit, Ashooh seemed to still be in full foreign-policy-hawk mode, condemning Obama in the pages of The Washington Post for his apparent softness on Syria and demanding that Trump “restore U.S. credibility” by “order[ing] targeted, punitive strikes against the Assad regime.”
Ashooh attends British Polo Day at Abu Dhabi’s Ghantoot Racing and Polo Club. Photo | Ahlan
Dirty war, dirty warrior
Ashooh is actually even more involved in the Syrian conflict than one might realize from her hawkish opinions alone. Between 2011 and 2015, she worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, in her own words, “[p]rovid[ing] senior decision makers with policy analysis and strategic advice, with a particular focus on Syria.”
At that time the UAE was using its enormous financial clout to arm and fund a myriad of jihadist groups attempting to overthow the secular strongman Assad and establish some kind of Islamic state. Far from a conspiracy theory, this comes straight from the horse’s mouth, as then-Vice President Joe Biden revealed in a Q&A session in 2014. The future president frankly stated:
The Saudis, the Emiratis, what were they doing?… They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world. “
Under pressure, he later apologized for his loose lips.
MintPress News asked the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs to comment on precisely what Ashooh’s role was, but they failed to respond.
Ashooh is pictured during her time as a “consultant” in Iraqi Kurdistan. Photo | Academyalumni
Ashooh herself appears to have been a relatively major player in the Syrian Civil War. In her previously mentioned Washington Post article, she notes that her boss was a former Emirati Air Force General and that she was flown to Istanbul in 2013 to attend an emergency meeting with leaders of the Syrian opposition, as well as ambassadors from unnamed Arab and Western states, in order to plan a response to a reported chemical weapons attack and to help the U.S. “coordinate with the Syrian opposition.”
At the same time as she was advising the nation on Middle Eastern affairs, the UAE was widely accused of flying ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders into Yemen to help them intensify the Saudi-led onslaught on the impoverished nation and of smuggling U.S.-made weaponry — including small arms, TOW missiles and Oshkosh fighting vehicles — to the jihadist groups. While Ashooh’s writing is careful to maintain a distinction between the “moderate” rebels she supports and the fundamentalist radicals she does not, it certainly is noteworthy that the entities she worked for consistently seem to end up in league with the most regressive forces in the region. MintPress also reached out to Reddit for comment on why they appointed Ashooh, given her past history, and on the wider phenomenon of government penetration of social media. The company initially promised to issue a response to the inquiry but has not followed through with it.
Opposing some dictatorships, supporting others
Regime change is on the table for more than just one Middle Eastern nation. In a 2017 paper for the Center for the National Interest — a think tank established by former Republican President Richard Nixon and the “Godfather of Neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol — Ashooh explores the different options for forcing regime change in Iran, but concludes that overthrowing the “odious regime” is an impossible task right now, and criticizes the idea as a quixotic dream.
Nevertheless, she is far from an Iran dove. An Atlantic Council report she co-wrote insists that “Iranian interference in the Arab world must be deterred,” and that “America’s friends and partners must be reassured that the U.S. opposes Iranian hegemony and will work with them to prevent it.”
Ashooh’s commitment to fighting against Middle Eastern dictatorships might seem more principled if she did not appear so enamored of the least democratic one of them all. In 2016, she accompanied Albright and Hadley to Saudi Arabia and praised the monarchy’s dynamic leadership on the economy and its nurturing of a new generation. “It was really really exciting to see that level of energy and the level of government support for these young people who were interested in shaping their own futures… it was just wonderful,” she said. In an article about her experience for business news website Market Watch, she waxed lyrical about how forward-thinking the Saudi government is and how the country has become “a hub for the dynamic and positive change that is swelling up throughout the region.” Presumably, this excludes Yemen, a nation they were bombing relentlessly. In a 2020 interview, Ashooh revealed that her dream job would be U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. One of her earliest comments on her public Reddit page (made before she began working there) is deflecting the Kingdom from criticism of its dreadful treatment of women.
As part of the Atlantic Council, Ashooh was tasked with envisaging a new Middle East for the 21st century. Given her output, it seems that she advocates for a transition towards a more privatized, free-market economic setup, not completely unlike the shock therapy tried in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. “We have to “encourage states to make the reforms that move economies from state-based to ones that support entrepreneurship, because the age of state-based economies is over,” she said at a talk at New York University in 2015, adding:
You’ve got to move to support entrepreneurship in the region and let people take advantage of the natural industrial tendencies of people in the Middle East. My God, if you’ve ever been to a Turkish bazaar or a market in Cairo you know that these countries are perfectly capable of having functioning market economies. But the state has gotten in the way.
Ashooh’s LinkedIn profile also notes that in 2010, she worked as an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Planning “on a variety of strategic and economic development issues,” but does not go into any more detail about what those issues were. A further biography merely states that her consultancy agency “provid[ed] strategic and management consulting services to the Ministry of Planning of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq.” Unsurprisingly, the organization has links to the U.S. military; the agency’s lead partner being a former Army captain.
Think Tankie
Ashooh comes from a relatively prominent New Hampshire family of Lebanese descent, the most notable of which is probably her uncle Richard. Richard Ashooh was Donald Trump’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration and a former executive at weapons manufacturer BAE Systems. Unlike her uncle, Jessica appears to lean more Democratic, having donated money to a number of local politicians, as well as to anti-Trump Republican groups aimed at convincing them to vote blue, such as Right Side PAC and the now infamous Lincoln Project. However, she also appears to have great respect for many Republicans, having written her doctoral thesis at Oxford University on the Middle East policy of the George W. Bush administration. She also stated that the person she would have most liked to have met was 41st President George Bush Senior, describing him as possessing “incredible amounts of strategy, finesse and restraint.” Thus, her political views appear to be exactly in the center of the neoliberal “blob” in Washington.
Ashooh also worked for the right-wing think tank the CATO Institute and is a Term Member of the more Democratic-aligned Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR’s term member program is intended to, in its own words, “cultivate the next generation of foreign policy leaders.”
Surveillance Valley
How and why, then, did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and in the halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard site with an anti-establishment reputation? Virtually everyone else in senior roles at Reddit has relevant backgrounds in marketing or tech, having worked with comparable companies such as Yelp, Expedia and Snapchat.
Tom Secker — a journalist, podcaster and researcher who runs SpyCulture.com, an online archive about government involvement in the entertainment industry — was deeply skeptical. “That someone whose entire career has been in international relations and foreign affairs is now the senior policy wonk at Reddit is simply bizarre. Given her ties to the CFR, Atlantic Council and the like, it’s downright suspicious,” Secker told MintPress.
Underneath the surface, however, the Atlantic Council has been rapidly expanding its influence and control over big social media companies. In 2018, it announced that it would be partnering with Facebook to promote trustworthy sources and derank, demote and even delete low quality or fake news, thus effectively curating what the platform’s 2.85 billion worldwide users see in their news feeds. But the effect of recent algorithmic changes has been to throttle alternative media traffic in favor of establishment sources such as CNN, Fox News and The New York Times. Even such more mainstream liberal sites as Mother Jones have seen their numbers crater. Facebook later admitted that they were directly targeting Mother Jones because of its left-leaning content, raising the question that if such a middle-of-the-road liberal outlet was being penalized, wasn’t the collapse in traffic to more radical publications surely deliberate? Given the Atlantic Council’s funding and the identities of those on its board, their control over social media is tantamount to state censorship on a global level.
Earlier this year, Facebook also hired NATO press officer Ben Nimmo to be its intelligence chief, in another move that dismayed free-speech advocates. In the past, Nimmo has identified a Welsh pensioner and an internationally known Ukranian pianist as Russian bots, raising more questions about the suitability of the Atlantic Council to be an arbiter of truth online.
The Facebook-Atlantic Council link mirrors that of Microsoft with NewsGuard, a new piece of software purportedly trying to fight fake news by placing either green shields or red warning logos, corresponding to an outlet’s credibility, beside all links in its browser, Microsoft Edge — this credibility being decided entirely by NewsGuard itself. Newsguard pushed Microsoft to install the software on all its products as standard. Again, however, NewsGuard’s system rated establishment websites like Fox News and CNN as trustworthy but independent media as suspect. And again, a glance at its advisory board makes it clear that this is a state operation. Those in key positions included George W. Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security and former NSA and CIA Director General Michael Hayden; ex-White House Communications Director Don Baer; and former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Worse still, NewsGuard is also linked to a PR agency employed in whitewashing the Saudi government’s human-rights record and its role in the carnage in Yemen.
Twitter, too, has some extremely troubling links with state power. In 2019 Gordon MacMillan, a senior Twitter executive responsible for the Middle East region, was outed as an active duty officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online operations and psychological warfare. Far from causing a scandal, only one major U.S. outlet even mentioned the story, and the journalist in question resigned from the profession weeks later, claiming the existence of a network of top-down state censors who quash stories that threaten the power and prestige of the national security state. To this day, MacMillan remains in his post at Twitter, strongly suggesting the social media company knew of his role before he was hired.
Over the past few years, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook have announced the deletion of hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to sources in Russia, Iran, China and other enemy states, often on the recommendation of Western governments or state-sponsored intelligence organizations. However, they never seem willing or able to find any manipulation of their platforms by Western governments. Thus, the upshot of this has been to slowly dissuade critics of Western foreign policy from using their services.
“The mainstream media-politik establishment has managed to get a hold over Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — shadow-banning and downrating posts considered ‘Russian propaganda’ or whatever other excuse they use to marginalize perspectives and content outside of the mainstream,” Secker told MintPress. “Audiences for this sort of content are increasingly pissed off and alienated by the major social media sites.”
Increasingly, unwelcome political voices are either brushed off by centrist pundits as repeating Russian talking points or smeared as being amplified by Kremlin-based bot farms. The popularity of movements on the left like Black Lives Matter or the Bernie Sanders’ campaign were written off as partially linked to Russia, while others suggested that the January 6 insurrection in Washington was essentially a Russian operation.
The irony is that many of the wildest accusations against Putin that have fed this climate of suspicion began life in Atlantic Council documents. For example, the organization has published a series of studies that suggest that virtually every European political party challenging the neoliberal status quo in some way — from Labour and UKIP in the U.K. to Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece and PODEMOS and Vox in Spain — are secretly controlled by Russia, functioning as the “Kremlin’s Trojan Horses,” in its words.
The Atlantic Council is also deeply intertwined with a U.K. government-funded organization called the Integrity Initiative, something that purports to be a group defending democracy from disinformation. However, in practice, it appears to be doing the opposite: planting disinformation about politicians’ supposed links to Russia in order to undermine them. The Integrity Initiative is a government-backed cluster of journalists who operate in unison to conduct propaganda blitzes on unsuspecting publics. In 2018, it launched a successful operation to prevent Colonel Pedro Baños being appointed Spain’s head of national security. Considering Baños too soft on Russia for the Atlantic Council and other hawks’ liking, the initiative sprung into action, creating a storm of protest that led to another individual being chosen.
Reddit actually played a key role in a 2019 propaganda blitz against anti-war Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. A few days before the U.K.’s general election, Corbyn promoted documents leaked on the platform that showed that Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson was negotiating with American companies, putting much of the country’s National Health Service up for sale. With just days to go before polls opened, it could have proved a game changer. Reddit quickly came to Johnson’s rescue, however, asserting that the documents were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The story in the pliant British press switched from “Boris Johnson is selling off the NHS” to “Corbyn promotes Russian disinfo,” thus greasing the skids for an easy victory for the hardline anti-Russia Conservative Party, an outcome the hawks at the Atlantic Council were no doubt relieved by, given Corbyn’s open skepticism about war, empire and nuclear weapons. The veracity of the documents was not challenged.
For a while…
Founded in 2005, Reddit has grown to become one of the world’s largest and most influential websites. However, it began life as an anarchistic messageboard whose culture was profoundly libertarian and anti-establishment. For years, the company’s administrators took a near free speech absolutist position. Aaron Swartz, Reddit’s co-founder, was an open source hacktivist and even attempted to download and publish the entirety of academic publisher Jstor’s library. When authorities got wind of what he was doing, they threatened him with 40 years in prison, an action that caused him to take his own life in 2013.
Reddit’s own position on free information and free speech was often so extreme it caused huge controversy. The site became the internet’s largest source of child pornography. It was only after CNN began reporting on it to a nationwide audience that things began to change. Other, grossly offensive communities like /r/BeatingWomen and /r/CoonTown were also protected.
Nevertheless, the culture established by anarchistic tech bros remained for some years, with the site resembling darker corners of the internet like 4Chan and 8Chan as much as more family-friendly mainstream social media like Facebook.
Ashooh’s arrival in 2017 coincided with a new era in the site’s history. Gone were the days of protecting communities that would bring in bad publicity. Her team quickly brought in a new content policy and began to delete communities that violated it. Last year, she oversaw the banning of over 2,000 communities in a single day, including /r/The_Donald, the main Donald Trump subreddit, and /r/ChapoTrapHouse, the most active left-wing community. These decisions have helped the money flow in; since 2017 revenue has more than tripled.
However, what has been lost across the internet is the liberatory potential of these technologies. In the 1990s and 2000s, many predicted that the internet would usher in a new era of egalitarianism and genuine democracy, helping even to reduce barriers and tensions between nations. For a while, the new medium allowed political actors to challenge the status quo and gain huge followings quickly. Alternative media was easily outperforming legacy media, and challenging the status quo when it came to news. Seeing that, the reaction since 2016 has been swift, as the elite have moved to retighten their grip over the means of communication. Ashooh’s jump from national security state official to Reddit Director of Policy is just one more point of reference on that chart.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles.
White House admits CIA involvement in “War on Corruption” which jailed Lula and elected Bolsonaro
Brasil Wire – June 3, 2021
In a White House ‘Background Press Call by Senior Administration Officials on the Fight Against Corruption’, a Biden administration official admitted that the CIA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence apparatus were involved in assisting the “War on Corruption” which jailed former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and elected Jair Bolsonaro.
Read the full transcript here.
The admission will come as an embarrassment to a media who has for the most part omitted, minimised or denied U.S. involvement in anti-corruption actions across Latin America, despite it being a matter of public record for years.
In July 2017, Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco gave a speech at NATO think tank the Atlantic Council in which he bragged of FBI personnel informally involved in Brazilian anti-corruption operation Lava Jato and its prosecution of former president Lula. FBI personnel involved later boasted that it had “toppled presidents“. Lava Jato prosecutor Deltan Dellagnol described Lula’s 2018 arrest which kept him out of the election he was on course to win, as “a gift from the CIA“. The judge who prosecuted Lula, Sergio Moro, became Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister, and both made an unprecedented visit to CIA headquarters in Langley within months of taking office. Lava Jato’s origins can be traced back to 2008/09, where Moro and a blueprint for an operation of its type appear in State Department cables.
The role of anti-corruption as U.S. foreign policy tool in Latin America has expanded gradually since the 1990s, and has continued through successive Democrat and Republican administrations. Lava Jato was central to the ouster of president Dilma Rousseff, and pivotal to the election of Jair Bolsonaro, which were both undeniably advantageous to the United States government and business/banking sector, which is represented in Latin America by lobby and think tank Council of the Americas.
The June 3 press call was to mark a new national security study memorandum or NSSM on “Establishing the fight against corruption as a core U.S. national security interest“, which is being renewed under the Biden administration, and held by unnamed “senior administration officials”.
The following exchange left little to the imagination.
Journalist: “As you know, anti-corruption activists periodically urge the U.S. government to use its various assets and capabilities, including the intelligence community, to expose specific cases of corruption overseas, to name and shame corrupt officials — and the arguments they make are familiar — but also include not only, you know, a deterrent to corruption, but also a possible contribution to the promotion of democracy. Does the memorandum — does the program include any component that connects with that?”
Senior Administration Official: “What I can say on that front is that the memorandum includes components of the intelligence community. So, the work on that front, in part, remains to be seen, but they are included — the Director of National Intelligence and Central Intelligence Agency.”
“And so we’re just going to be looking at all of the tools in our disposal to make sure that we identify corruption where it’s happening and take appropriate policy responses.”
“And I’ll take the opportunity to mention that we’re also going to be using this effort to think about what more we can do to bolster other actors that are out in the world exposing corruption and bringing it to light.”
“So, of course, the U.S. government has its own internal methods, but, largely, the way that corruption is exposed is through the work of investigative journalists and investigative NGOs.”
“The U.S. government — to my point earlier, in terms of the support we’re already providing — in some instances provides support to these actors. And we’ll be looking at what more we can do on that front as well.”
The journalist asked for clarification: “What does the word “support” mean in that context?”
Senior Administration Official: “Well, sometimes it boils down to foreign assistance. There are lines of assistance that have jumpstarted investigatory journalism organizations. What comes to my mind most immediately is OCCRP, as well as foreign assistance that goes to NGOs, ultimately, that do investigative work on anti-corruption, as well.”
Evidence of the very nature that the official describes above has been dismissed by supporters of partisan anti-corruption campaigns for years.
The official was asked by a journalist specifically about Vice President Kamala Harris’s upcoming trip to Latin America, and: “if there were any corruption measures associated with that, or any, sort of, additional push related to that?”
The unnamed official responded: “I’m not going to characterize the views of the prior administration, but I would say, to your point: The essence of the memorandum we’re going to release today is that the U.S. government is placing the anti-corruption plight at the center of its foreign policy, so we very much want to prioritize this work across the board.”
The latest admission of CIA involvement in the U.S. led “fight against corruption”, of which Operation Lava Jato (Carwash) was the high-profile centrepiece, has grave implications for Brazilian democracy, and that of wider Latin America.
Brasil Wire has been covering this subject in depth since 2015: All articles on Lawfare in Brazil and U.S. involvement in it, 2015-2021.
The Notorious London Spy School Churning Out Many of the World’s Top Journalists
The Maughan Library Gate at Kings College London, UK. David JC | Alamy
By Alan MacLeod | MintPress News | June 4, 2021
LONDON — In a previous investigation, MintPress News explored how one university department, the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, functions as a school for spooks. Its teaching posts are filled with current or former NATO officials, army officers and intelligence operatives to churn out the next generation of spies and intelligence officers. However, we can now reveal an even more troubling product the department produces: journalists. An inordinate number of the world’s most influential reporters, producers and presenters, representing many of the most well-known and respected outlets — including The New York Times, CNN and the BBC — learned their craft in the classrooms of this London department, raising serious questions about the links between the fourth estate and the national security state.
National security school
Increasingly, it appears, intelligence agencies the world over are beginning to appreciate agents with a strong academic background. A 2009 study published by the CIA described how beneficial it is to “use universities as a means of intelligence training,” writing that, “exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system.”
The paper, written by two King’s College staffers, boasted that the department’s faculty has “extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience.” This was no exaggeration. Current Department of War Studies educators include the former Secretary General of NATO, former U.K. Minister of Defense, and military officers from the U.K, U.S. and other NATO countries. “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience,” said then-U.S. Secretary of Defense (and former CIA Director) Leon Panetta in a speech at the department in 2013.
King’s College London also admits to having a number of ongoing contracts with the British state, including with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), but refuses to divulge the details of those agreements.
American connections
Although a British university, King’s College markets itself heavily to American students. There are currently 1,265 Americans enrolled, making up about 4% of the student body. Many graduates of the Department of War Studies go on to attain powerful positions in major American media outlets. Andrew Carey, CNN’s Bureau Chief in Jerusalem, for example, completed a master’s there in 2012. Carey’s coverage of the latest Israeli attack on Gaza has presented the apartheid state as “responding” to Hamas rocket attacks, rather than being the instigator of violence. A leaked internal memo Carey sent to his staff last month at the height of the bombardment instructed them to always include the fact that the Gazan Ministry of Health is overseen by Hamas, lest readers begin to believe the well-documented Palestinian casualty figures brought on by days of bombing. “We need to be transparent about the fact that the Ministry of Health in Gaza is run by Hamas. Consequently, when we cite latest casualty numbers and attribute to the health ministry in Gaza, we need to include the fact that it is Hamas run,” read his instructions.
King’s College alumnus turned CNN Jerusalem bureau chief Andrew Carey instructed reporters on how to cover Israel’s latest assault on Gaza
Once publicized, his comments elicited considerable pushback. “This is a page straight out of Israel’s playbook. It serves to justify the attack on civilians and medical facilities,” commented Al-Jazeera Senior Presenter and Producer Dena Takruri.
The New York Times, the United States’ most influential newspaper, has also employed Department of War Studies alumni. Christiaan Triebert (M.A., 2016), for example, is a journalist on their visual investigations team. He even won a Pulitzer Prize for “Revelations about Russia and Vladimir Putin’s aggressive actions in countries including Syria and Europe.” Hiring students from the school for spooks to bash Russia appears to be a common Times tactic, as it also employed Lincoln Pigman between 2016 and 2018 at its Moscow bureau.
Josh Smith, senior correspondent for influential news agency Reuters and formerly its correspondent in Afghanistan, also graduated from the department in question, as did The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Ford.
Arguably the most influential media figure from the university, however, is Ruaridh Arrow. Arrow was a producer at many of the U.K.’s largest news channels, including Channel 4, Sky News and the BBC, where he was world duty editor and senior producer on Newsnight, the network’s flagship political show. In 2019, Arrow left the BBC to become an executive producer at NBC News.
The British invasion
Unsurprisingly for a university based in London, the primary journalistic destination for Department of War Studies graduates is the United Kingdom. Indeed, the BBC, the country’s powerful state broadcaster, is full of War Studies alumni. Arif Ansari, head of news at the BBC Asian Network, completed a masters analyzing the Syrian Civil War in 2017 and was soon selected for a leadership development scheme, placing him in charge of a team of 25 journalists who curate news primarily geared toward the substantial Middle Eastern and South Asian communities in Great Britain.
Many BBC employees begin studying at King’s years after their careers have already taken off, and balance their professional lives with pursuing new qualifications. Ahmed Zaki, Senior Broadcast Journalist at BBC Global News, began his master’s six years after he started at the BBC. Meanwhile, Ian MacWilliam — who spent ten years at BBC World Service, the country’s official news broadcast worldwide, specializing in sensitive regions like Russia, Afghanistan and Central Asia — decided to study at King’s more than 30 years after completing his first degree.
Another influential War Studies alumnus at the World Service is Aliaume Leroy, producer for its Africa Eye program. Well-known BBC News presenter Sophie Long also graduated from the department, working for Reuters and ITN before joining the state broadcaster.
“It’s an open secret that King’s College London Department of War Studies operates as the finishing school for Anglo-American securocrats. So it’s maybe not a surprise that graduates of its various military and intelligence courses also enter into a world of corporate journalism that exists to launder the messaging of these same ‘security’ agencies,” Matt Kennard — an investigative journalist for Declassified U.K. who has previously exposed the university’s connections to the British state — told MintPress. “It is, however, a real and present danger to democracy. The university imprimatur gives the department’s research the patina of independence while it works, in reality, as the unofficial research arm of the U.K. Ministry of Defence,” he added.
Israeli writer and King’s College alumnus Neri Zilber has bylines in many of the media’s most important outlets
The Department of War Studies also trains many international journalists and commentators, including Nicholas Stuart of the Canberra Times (Australia); Pakistani writer Ayesha Siddiqa, whose work can be found in The New York Times, Al-Jazeera, The Hindu and many other outlets; and Israeli writer Neri Zilber, a contributor to The Daily Beast, The Guardian, Foreign Policy and Politico.
What’s it all about?
Why are so many influential figures in our media being hothoused in a department well known for its connections to state power, for its faculty being active or former military or government officials, and for producing spies and operatives for various three-letter agencies? The point of this is not to allege that these journalists are all secretly card-carrying spooks: they are not. Rather, it is to highlight the alarmingly close links between the national security state and the fourth estate we rely on to be a check on their power and to hold them accountable.
Journalists trained in this sort of environment are far more likely to see the world in the same manner as their professors do. And perhaps they would be less likely to challenge state power when the officials they are scrutinizing were their classmates or teachers.
These sorts of questions abound when such a phenomenon exists: Why are so many journalists choosing to study at this particular department, and why do so many go on to be so influential? Are they being vetted by security agencies, with or without their knowledge? How independent are they? Will they just repeat British and American state talking points, as the Department of War Studies’ publications do?
On the question of vetting, the BBC admitted that, at least until the 1990s, it conspired with domestic spying agency MI5 to make sure that people with left-wing and/or anti-war leanings, or views critical of British foreign policy and empire were secretly blocked from being hired. When pressed on whether this policy is still ongoing, the broadcaster refused to comment, citing “security issues” — a response that is unlikely to reassure skeptics.
“While it strikes me as very interesting that a single academic institution could play such a major role in the recruitment of pro-establishment activist intellectuals and delivery of the same to the media, it is not so surprising,” Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State’s School of Media and Communication and an expert in collusion between government and media, told MintPress, adding:
Elite institutions in the past and doubtless still today have been major playgrounds for intelligence services. The history of the modern nation-state generally, not just the USA, seems to suggest that national unity — and therefore elite safety — is regarded by elites as achievable only through careful management and often suppression or diversion of dissent. Far more resources are typically committed to this than many citizens, drilled in the propaganda of democracy, realize or care to concede.
The Bellingcat Boys
While the journalists cataloged above are not spooks, some other Department of War Studies figures working in journalism could possibly be described as such, particularly those around the influential and increasingly notorious investigative website Bellingcat.
Cameron Colquhoun, for instance, spent almost a decade at GCHQ, Britain’s version of the NSA, where he was a senior analyst running cyber and counter-terrorism operations. He holds qualifications from both King’s College London and the State Department. This background is not disclosed in his Bellingcat profile, which merely describes him as the managing director of a private intelligence company that “conduct[s] ethical investigations” for clients around the world.
Bellingcat’s senior investigator Nick Waters spent four years as an officer in the British Army, including a tour in Afghanistan, where he furthered the British state’s objectives in the region. After that, he joined the Department of War Studies and Bellingcat.
For the longest time, Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgings dismissed charges that his organization was funded by the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — a CIA cutout organization — as a ridiculous “conspiracy.” Yet by 2017, he was admitting that it was true. A year later, Higgins joined the Department of War Studies as a visiting research associate. Between 2016 and 2019 he was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the brains behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Higgins appears to have used the university department as a recruiting ground, commissioning other War Studies graduates, such as Jacob Beeders and the aforementioned Christiaan Triebert and Aliaume Leroy, to write for his site.
Bellingcat is held in very high regard by the CIA. “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love [Bellingcat],” said Marc Polymeropoulos, the agency’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia. Other officers explained that Bellingcat could be used to outsource and legitimize anti-Russia talking points. “The greatest value of Bellingcat is that we can then go to the Russians and say ‘there you go’ [when they ask for evidence],” added former CIA Chief of Station Daniel Hoffman.
Bellingcaught
A recent MintPress investigation explored how Bellingcat acts to launder national security state talking points into the mainstream under the guise of being neutral investigative journalists themselves.
Newly leaked documents show how Bellingcat, Reuters and the BBC were covertly cooperating with the U.K.’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to undermine the Kremlin and promote regime change in Moscow. This included training journalists and promoting explicitly anti-Russian media across Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, the FCO noted, Bellingcat had been “somewhat discredited,” as it constantly spread disinformation and was willing to produce reports for anyone with money.
Nevertheless, a new European Parliament proposal published last month recommends hiring Bellingcat to assist in producing reports that would lay the groundwork for sanctioning Russia, for throwing it out of international bodies, and to “assist Russia’s transformation into a democracy.” In other words, to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.
An academic journalistic nexus
The Department of War Studies is also part of this pro-NATO, anti-Russia group. Quite apart from being staffed by soldiers, spooks and government officials, it puts out influential reports advising Western governments on foreign and defense policy. For instance, a study entitled “The future strategic direction of NATO” advises that member states must increase their military budgets and allow American nuclear weapons to be stored in their countries, thereby “shar[ing] the burden.” It also recommended that NATO must redouble its commitment to opposing Russia while warning that it needed urgently to form a “coherent policy” on the Chinese threat.
Other War Studies reports claim that Russia is carrying out “information-psychological warfare” through its state channels RT and Sputnik, and counsel that the West must use its technical means to prevent its citizens from consuming this foreign propaganda.
King’s College London academics have also proven crucial in keeping dissident publisher Julian Assange imprisoned. A psychiatrist who has worked with the War Studies department testified in court that the Australian was suffering only “moderate” depression and that his suicide risk was “manageable,” concluding that extraditing him to the United States “would not be unjust.” As Matt Kennard’s investigation found, the U.K. Ministry of Defence had provided £2.2 million ($3.1 million) in funding to the institute where he worked (although the psychiatrist in question claimed his work was not directly funded by the MoD).
King’s College London markets the War Studies department to both graduates and undergraduates as a stepping stone towards a career in journalism. In its “career prospects” section for its master’s course in war studies, it tells interested students that “graduates go on to work for NGOs, the FCO, the MoD, the Home Office, NATO, the UN or pursue careers in journalism, finance, academia, the diplomatic services, the armed forces and more.”
Likewise, undergraduates are told that:
You will gain an in-depth and sophisticated understanding of war and international relations, both as subjects worthy of study and as intellectual preparation for the widest possible range of career choices, including in government, journalism, research, and humanitarian and international organisations.
Courses such as “New Wars, New Media, New Journalism” fuse together journalism and intelligence and are overseen by War Studies academics.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the department has taught many influential politicians, including foreign heads of state and members of the British parliament. But at least there is considerable overlap between the fields of defense policy and politics. The fact that the very department that trains high state officials and agents of secretive three letter agencies is also the place that produces many of the journalists we rely on to stand up to those officials and keep them in check is seriously problematic.
An unhealthy respect for authority
Unfortunately, rather than challenging power, many modern media outlets amplify its message uncritically. State officials and intelligence officers are among the least trustworthy sources, journalistically speaking. Yet many of the biggest stories in recent years have been based on nothing except the hearsay of officials who would not even put their names to their claims.
The level of credulity modern journalists have for the powerful was summed up by former CNN White House Correspondent Michelle Kosinski, who last month stated that:
As an American journalist, you never expect:
- Your own govt to lie to you, repeatedly
- Your own govt to hide information the public has a right to know
- Your own govt to spy on your communications
Unfortunately, credulity stretches into outright collaboration with intelligence in some cases. Leaked emails show that the Los Angeles Times’ national security reporter Ken Dilanian sent his articles directly to the CIA to be edited before they were published. Far from hurting his career, however, Dilanian is now a correspondent covering national security issues for NBC News.
Boyd-Barrett said that governments are dependent on “the assistance of a penetrated, colluding and docile mainstream media which of late — and in the context of massive confusion over Internet disinformation campaigns, real and alleged — appear ever more problematic guardians of the public right to know.”
In recent years, the national security state has increased its influence over social media giants as well. In 2018, Facebook and the Atlantic Council entered a partnership whereby the Silicon Valley giant partially outsourced curation of its 2.8 billion users’ news feeds to the Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, supposedly to help stop the spread of fake news online. The result, however, has been the promotion of “trustworthy” corporate media outlets like Fox News and CNN and the penalization of independent and alternative sources, which have seen their traffic decrease precipitously. Earlier this year, Facebook also hired former NATO press officer and current Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council Ben Nimmo to be its chief of intelligence. Reddit’s Director of Policy is also a former Atlantic Council official.
Meanwhile, in 2019, a senior Twitter executive for the Middle East region was unmasked as an active duty officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, its unit dedicated to psychological operations and online warfare. The most notable thing about this event was the almost complete lack of attention it received from the mainstream press. Coming at a time when foreign interference online was perhaps the number one story dominating the news cycle, only one major outlet, Newsweek, even mentioned it. Furthermore, the reporter who covered the story left his job just weeks later, citing stifling top-down censorship and a culture of deference to national security interests.
The purpose of this article is not to accuse any of those mentioned of being intelligence agency plants (although at least one person did actually work as an intel officer). The point is rather to highlight that we now have a media landscape where many of the West’s most influential journalists are being trained by exactly the same people in the same department as the next generation of national security operatives.
It is hardly a good look for a healthy, open democracy that so many spies, government officials, and journalists trusted to hold them accountable on our behalf are all being shot out of the very same cannon. Learning side by side has helped to create a situation where the fourth estate has become overwhelmingly deferential to the so-called deep state, where anonymous official’s words are taken as gospel. The Department of War Studies is just one part of this wider phenomenon.T
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles.
The Finders: CIA Ties to Child Sex Cult Obscured as Coverage Goes from Sensationalism to Silence
By Elizabeth Vos | MintPress News | June 3, 2021
WASHINGTON — In February 1987, an anonymous phone tip was called into the Tallahassee police department reporting that six children were dirty, hungry, and acting like animals in the custody of two well-dressed men in a Tallahassee, Florida park. That phone call would kick off the Finders scandal: a series of events and multiple investigations even more bizarre than the initial report.
The trail would ultimately lead to allegations of a cult involved in ritual abuse, an international child-trafficking ring, evidence of child abuse confirmed and later denied, and ties with the CIA, which was alleged to have interfered in the case. No one was ever prosecuted in the wake of the initial 1987 investigation or a 1993 inquiry into the allegations of CIA involvement: official denials were maintained, and authorities stated that no evidence of criminal activity was ever found. However, documents that have emerged over time beg significant questions as to the validity of the official narrative.
In contrast with other historical human trafficking rings covered in the independent press, including those I have previously discussed, the Finders scandal presents as something of a phantom. This is in consequence of the lack of adult victims who have come forward, an absence of hard evidence viewable to the public, and an absence of extensive trials or convictions. Further impeding the willingness of most journalists to cover such a story were claims of ritualistic abuse that were hyped by corporate media at the time of the incident, as well as allegations of a CIA-led coverup that were less widely recognized by the legacy press.
The story is further complicated by the fact that it takes place in three basic stages: the initial 1987 investigation spread across multiple states and law enforcement agencies; a subsequent 1993 inquiry into allegations of a CIA coverup and interference in the 1987 investigation; and the emergence of Customs Service documents detailing new aspects of initial searches of Finders properties which was followed by the publication of hundreds of documents from both investigations to the FBI vault in 2019.
By initially sensationalizing the issue via the framing of the Finders as a satanic cult, the media profited from immediate shock value while permitting this very sensationalism to become the premise for dismissing other aspects of the story and Finders ties to the CIA to remain unexplored.
The 1987 Investigation
On February 4, 1987, two men dressed in suits and ties in the company of six bug-bitten, dirty, hungry children were arrested in Tallahassee, Florida, on charges of child abuse after a concerned citizen called local police. Initially, Tallahassee police were concerned that the children might have been kidnapped and were being trafficked across state lines. The U.S. Customs Service, the Washington Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), and the FBI became involved in the attempt to identify the two men based on suspicions of interstate criminal activity including the possibility of child pornography.
The story exploded on a national scale after investigators linked the pair, identified as Douglas Ammerman and Michael Houlihan (also referred to as Michael Holwell), with a Washington D.C.-based group known as the Finders, which authorities publicly referred to as a “cult.” Initially, Tallahassee police reported that at least two of the children showed signs of sexual abuse.
Houlihan and Ammerman first told police that they were transporting the children to a school for brilliant children in Mexico. However, this explanation as to the purpose of the children’s trip would change significantly, with Finders members later stating that the group were on an adventure in Florida. The Finders group was found to have multiple properties in Washington, D.C. and a farm in rural Madison County, Virginia. It also became clear that the Finders were highly skilled with early computer technology, which would become a major aspect of the case as it unfolded.
Doug Ammerman and Michael Holwell sit in Leon County Court during a bond hearing related to charges of child abuse. Credit | Tallahassee Democrat
News reports across the country headlined allegations of ritual abuse for approximately six days after the initial arrests, before a tidal shift by both the media and authorities began on February 10. The New York Times reported on that day:
Local police officials announced here today that six children found last week in Florida had apparently not been kidnapped and that there was no evidence to show that the secretive group that has been raising them is a cult involved in child abuse. The statement from the Metropolitan Police Department conflicted with accounts from the police in Tallahassee, Fla., where the children were found, unwashed and hungry, last week. Officials there said this morning that at least two of the children had signs of sexual abuse.
As described by the Times and the Chicago Tribune, the children were placed in police protective custody after threats were received at the shelters where they had originally been housed. Eventually, the mothers of the children were reported to have been Finders members and the children were said to be transported by Houlihan and Ammerman with the full consent of their parents. Hence, suspicions of kidnapping and trafficking rapidly lost credibility, though issues of abuse remained. The original strong allegations of sexual abuse of at least two of the six children were eventually contradicted by Florida authorities.
In March 1987, Houlihan and Ammerman were released with charges dropped for lack of evidence, and all of the children were eventually returned to their mothers. The official and media consensus was that the entire issue was a miscommunication blown out of proportion, and that the Finders were simply a 1960’s-esque “alternative lifestyle community” with unusual education methods.
The 1993 inquiry into an Intelligence Community coverup
U.S. Customs Special Agent Ramon J. Martinez claimed in a memorandum that during his participation in the searches of two of the Finder’s properties in Washington he witnessed evidence of the Finders’ intent to traffic children and other potentially criminal acts. Martinez wrote that he was unable to review the evidence collected at the locations after multiple attempts to do so, and that he was eventually told by a third party at the MPD precinct that the Finders group had come under the protection of the CIA, which had interfered with the investigation by deeming the issue an “internal matter,” and had the case files labeled “Secret,” with no further action to be taken or evidence available for review. Clearly, Martinez’s account detailing what he witnessed presents a strong counter-narrative to the official story.
A man named Skip Clements allegedly communicated the U.S. Customs documents and other records to then-Florida Rep. Tom Lewis (R) and North Carolina Rep. Charlie Rose (D). Stemming in part from their protests, as well as the prospect of CBS’s 48 Hours producing a segment on the Finders story (which never aired), the Department of Justice announced it would investigate allegations of CIA interference in the 1987 investigation in late 1993. The previously mentioned congressmen claimed publicly that the Finders may have benefited from protection of the U.S. government agencies, with U.S.News & World Report writing in December 1993, (as the DOJ investigation was getting underway), that Lewis had asked:
Could our own government have something to do with this Finders organization and [have] turned their backs on these children? That’s what the evidence points to…. I can tell you that we’ve got a lot of people scrambling, and that wouldn’t be happening if there was nothing here.”
The DOJ’s investigation resulted in a verdict of no evidence of CIA interference and no evidence of criminal activity on the part of the Finders, and it represented the official and legal end of the story.
The 2019 publication of FBI Vault documents
Eventually, Customs documents including Ramon Martinez’s memo made their way onto the internet. The exact method by which this occurred remains murky, with the best copy of the documents being hosted by the website of now-deceased Ted Gunderson, who served as an FBI special agent in charge and head of the Los Angeles FBI.
I contacted Martinez in 2017 and confirmed that he authored the document and that it is genuine, but to date, he has otherwise refused to go on record to comment on the matter with me. Martinez has had limited communication with some other independent journalists, including Derrick Broze of the Conscious Resistance, who produced a documentary on the Finders case in 2019. I also described aspects of the Martinez memo and the Finders case as part of a report on alleged intelligence-tied child abuse scandals penned in August 2019 in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein’s death and renewed public interest in the overall subject matter.
Just months after Epstein’s death, in October 2019, the FBI began releasing hundreds of Finders investigation documents to their Vault. The publication sparked a storm of attention, but virtually no corporate press coverage aside from a piece by Vice, which framed any interest in the subject as a conspiracy theory.
Mainstream media outlets have been quick to dismiss CIA ties to The Finder’s as little more than conspiracy
On their face, the contents of the FBI Vault documents appear to contradict the allegations made by former Special Agent Martinez: they include statements from multiple officers involved in the investigation from various agencies to the effect that they experienced no overt interference in their work from the CIA. Yet, when one looks closely, the documents also corroborate significant aspects of Martinez’s allegations and substantiate questions regarding the Finders’ links with intelligence.
There is the admission that Isabelle Pettie, the wife of Finders leader Marion Pettie, worked for the CIA during the Cold-War era (Pettie also admitted that his son worked for the CIA-linked, Iran Contra-era Air America), and that it was her visas to North Korea, North Vietnam, Russia and elsewhere that had been approved by the State Department. Key documents from the MPD investigation are labeled secret, just as Martinez had claimed, which is bizarre on its face if we are to believe that the Finders were simply an odd “alternative living” commune.
These and other corroborating details add credibility to Martinez’s claims regarding having witnessed other documents that indicated international child trafficking, as well as his assertion that he was told that the case had been deemed a “CIA internal matter.”
The FBI’s Vault publication includes records from the preliminary Tallahassee police department investigation, the MPD investigation, heavily redacted records from the U.S. Customs Service, documents from the Washington Metro Field Office (WMFO) of the FBI, and other agencies, as well as the correspondence and documentation of the 1993 inquiry, mostly from the WMFO to FBI Headquarters. The documents are scattered throughout the three published sections in no coherent order, and are interspersed with news reports from the time ranging from the initial arrests and the child custody issue to the 1993 inquiry into CIA connections with and protection of the group.
Bizarrely, a map relating to the McMartin Preschool scandal is also included in the publication for no known reason, since at this time the cases are completely unrelated aside from both having contained allegations of satanic abuse. Regardless of the intent behind the document’s inclusion, it serves to further associate the Finders with the so-called “moral panic” scandals of the era, which I would argue distracts from the issue of intelligence ties to the case.
A map of the McMartin Preschool inexplicably included in the FBI’s Vault release
A fresh look
Before moving further into analysis of the available evidence, it’s important to recognize a number of problems we face in understanding the information published in the FBI’s Vault. First, a multitude of large, often critically placed redactions plague the documents, the most important of which are not labeled with privacy exemptions but are instead labeled “S,” presumably meaning that the information is classified as secret.
Another problem involves the fact that information requested by some agencies — especially during the 1993 preliminary inquiry into a CIA coverup — was not provided to the relevant investigating agencies. Then there is the phenomenon of information disappearing outright, including vanishing evidence and instances of records never having been kept, resulting in conflicting accounts of the existence of critical pieces of evidence.
This series will challenge both the sensationalism and the silence of establishment media surrounding the Finders narrative by examining the allegations made by the U.S. Customs documents in view of the FBI’s more recent Vault publications, which shed fresh light on the connections between the Finders and the U.S. intelligence apparatus.
Elizabeth Vos is an independent journalist and MintPress News Contributor. Her work has appeared in many media outlets including Consortium News, where she co-hosts the CNLive! webcast.
The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun — Even Without the New Laws Biden Wants
By Glenn Greenwald | June 2, 2021
The Department of Homeland Security on Friday issued a new warning bulletin, alerting Americans that domestic extremists may well use violence on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. This was at least the fourth such bulletin issued this year by Homeland Security (DHS) warning of the same danger and, thus far, none of the fears it is trying to instill into the American population has materialized.
The first was a January 14 warning, from numerous federal agencies including DHS, about violence in Washington, DC and all fifty state capitols that was likely to explode in protest of Inauguration Day (a threat which did not materialize). Then came a January 27 bulletin warning of “a heightened threat environment across the United States that is likely to persist over the coming weeks” from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” (that warning also was not realized). Then there was a May 14 bulletin warning of right-wing violence “to attack higher-capacity targets,” exacerbated by the lifting of COVID lockdowns (which also never happened). And now we are treated to this new DHS warning about domestic extremists preparing violent attacks over Tulsa (it remains to be seen if a DHS fear is finally realized).
Just like the first War on Terror, these threats are issued with virtually no specificity. They are just generalized warnings designed to put people in fear about their fellow citizens and to justify aggressive deployment of military and law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country. A CNN article which wildly hyped the latest danger bulletin about domestic extremists at Tulsa had to be edited with what the cable network, in an “update,” called “the additional information from the Department of Homeland Security that there is no specific or credible threats at this time.” And the supposed dangers from domestic extremists on Inauguration Day was such a flop that even The Washington Post — one of the outlets most vocal about lurking national security dangers in general and this one in particular — had to explicitly acknowledge the failure:
Thousands [of National Guard troops] had been deployed to capitals across the country late last week, ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized.
Once again on Wednesday, security officials’ worst fears weren’t borne out: In some states, it was close to business as usual. In others, demonstrations were small and peaceful, with only occasional tense moments.
Americans have seen this scam before. Throughout the first War on Terror, DHS, which was created in 2002, was frequently used to keep fear levels high and thus foster support for draconian government powers of spying, detention, and war. Even prior to the Department’s creation, its first Secretary, Tom Ridge, when he was still the White House’s Homeland Security Chief in early 2002, created an elaborate color-coded warning system to supply a constant alert to Americans about the evolving threat levels they faced from Islamic extremists.
DHS Bulletin on domestic extremists, Jan. 27, 2021; DHS Bulletin on domestic extremists, May 14, 2021.
In 2004, Ridge admitted that he had been repeatedly pressured by Bush officials to elevate the warnings and threat levels for political gain and to keep the population in fear. He claims that he, in particular, was coerced against his will to raise the threat level just prior to the 2004 presidential election and resigned for that reason shortly thereafter. DHS’s color scheme became “the brunt of endless jokes and derision,” concluded a 2007 scholarly study in the journal International Security, noting that it “became perceived as being politically motivated” largely due to the complete lack of specific information about what Americans were supposed to fear or avoid. Moreover, “its designers assumed that the population would trust in the national leadership and believe in the utility of the system’s information.” It failed because of how often the alleged threats failed to materialize, and because the warnings were rarely accompanied by any specificity that could permit action to be taken or avoided.
Though Obama scrapped the unpopular color-coded system in 2011, he — in a classic Obama gesture — merely replaced it with an equally vague and fear-generating bureaucratic alternative that was also subject to political manipulation. National security writers at Lawfare ultimately acknowledged that “like the [Bush/Ridge] system, there were no clear triggers for alerts [under Obama’s new scheme,] so the system remained objective and opaque.” As a result, they said, “the lack of specificity over time has resulted in similar levels of confusion as surrounded the [Bush/Ridge] color alerts.”
Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.
I saw first-hand how this dynamic functions when doing the Snowden-enabled reporting on mass domestic NSA surveillance under the Obama administration. By the time we broke the stories of mass domestic surveillance on Americans — twelve years after the 9/11 attack — fear levels over Al Qaeda in the U.S. had diminished greatly, especially after the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden. As a result, anger over Obama’s sprawling domestic surveillance programs was pervasive and bipartisan. A bill jointly sponsored by then-Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) — which would have greatly reined in NSA domestic spying powers — was on its way to easy, bipartisan victory as a result of that anger over NSA spying. But suddenly, the Obama White House convinced Nancy Pelosi to whip enough Democratic votes to ensure its defeat and save NSA domestic spying from reform. But the momentum which that bill had — it would have been the first since 9/11 to rollback rather than expand government powers — along with anti-surveillance-and-pro-privacy polling data, proved how significantly the playing field had shifted as a result of those revelations and, especially, the reduction in fear levels experienced by Americans.
But shortly thereafter, a new group — ISIS — emerged to replace Al Qaeda. It had a two-year stint with middling success in scaring Americans, but it was sufficient to turn back the tide of pro-privacy sentiment (at one point in 2014, the U.S. intelligence community claimed out of nowhere that a Syria-based group that virtually nobody in the U.S. had ever heard of previously or since — “the Khorasan Group” — was “a more direct and imminent threat to the United States,” but that new villain disappeared as quickly as it materialized). After ISIS’s star turn in the role of existential threat, the Democrats, during the 2016 campaign, elevated Russia, Putin and the Kremlin to that role, abandoning without explanation Obama’s eight-year argument that Russia was merely a regional power of no threat to the U.S. This revolving carousel of scary villains ensured that the pressure to reduce the powers and secrecy of the U.S. security state eroded in the name of staying safe.
Before Joe Bidenwas even inaugurated, he and his allies knew they needed a new villain. Putin never generated much fear in anyone beyond MSNBC panels, the CNN Green Room, and the newsrooms and op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. While negative views of Russia increased in the U.S. during Russiagate mania, few outside of hard-core Democratic partisans viewed that country as a genuine threat or primary enemy. Few Americans woke up shaking in fear about what the Kremlin might do to them.
The search for a new enemy around which the Biden administration could coalesce and in whose name they could keep fear levels high was quickly settled. Cast in that role would be right-wing domestic extremists. In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
Pending Domestic War on Terror legislation favored by the White House — sponsored by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — would simply amend the old War on Terror laws, which permitted a wide range of powers to fight foreign terrorist organizations, so as to now allow the U.S. government to also use those powers against groups designated as domestic terror organizations. Just as was true of the first War on Terror, this second one would thus vest the government with new, wide-ranging powers of surveillance, detention, prosecution and imprisonment, though this time for use against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
Even while that legislation is pending, the U.S. government is already waging an aggressive new domestic war on terror that has largely flown under the radar. Grave warnings from DHS are now just as common, vague and unreliable — but also fear-inducing — as they were in the days of Tom Ridge. Domestic surveillance is also on the rise. Last month, CNN reported that “the Biden administration is considering using outside firms to track extremist chatter by Americans online, an effort that would expand the government’s ability to gather intelligence but could draw criticism over surveillance of US citizens.”
CNN, May 3, 2021
The security mindset has subsumed the Democratic Party in particular. Just last week, the same Party that spent the summer of 2020 denouncing the police approved $1.9 billion in additional spending for Capitol security and police. The very faction of that party which chanted “Defund the Police” — the Squad — had the power to stop that expenditure, but half of them instead voted “present,” ensuring its passage.
Meanwhile, one of the most repressive features of the first War on Terror — due-process-free no-fly lists against American citizens — is now back in full force. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) have both been demanding that the FBI ban January 6 protesters and other “domestic extremists” from air travel without being convicted of any crime or even given a hearing to determine whether this prohibition is justified. Rep. Thompson even demanded that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) be put on the no-fly list, then took to Twitter to boast of how proud he was of this demand.
Beyond the DHS bulletins, that agency and other intelligence operatives continue to issue reports, for both public and classified consumption, warning that the greatest national security threat the U.S now faces is domestic extremism. As we reported here last month, that “domestic extremist” designation includes not just anti-Biden and anti-government protesters on the right but also leftist groups including animal rights activists — essentially anyone who objects to prevailing ruling class dogma and wants to use their constitutional rights to advance those views. To compile these reports, the CIA appears clearly to be breaking the law in using its vast intelligence weapons for domestic monitoring and control.
Online censorship, of course, is also rapidly increasing in the name of stopping the threat of domestic extremism. The extraordinary destruction of Parler in January by three Silicon Valley monopolies — Apple, Google and Amazon — occurred after leading Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — publicly demanded the platform’s removal from the internet. And Democratic-led Congressional committees continue to summon Silicon Valley executives to demand they impose greater degrees of political censorship against their political adversaries or else face legislative and regulatory reprisals.
These are all the same weapons as the ones invoked for the first War on Terror. Yet what is perhaps most notable about comparing this new domestic War on Terror to the first one is not the common weapons invoked to fight it but rather how identical are the rhetorical strategies used to demand submission to it.
No nuance or questioning is permitted when it comes to discussions of how much danger America really faces from domestic extremists. The parallels with the first War on Terror are manifest.
I know of nobody who dismissed the significance of the 9/11 attacks. A one-day attack that wipes out 3,000 human beings and crashes four passenger jets into three large buildings is a gravely serious event. But there were plenty of people — including myself — who spent years arguing that the threat reflected by that attack was being aggressively and deliberately exaggerated by U.S. officials and both political parties in order to justify extraordinary power grabs for themselves.
In response, a standard tactic was deployed against those who, after 9/11, urged that the threat be placed in rational context rather than melodramatically and cynically inflated. Anyone urging sober restraint was instantly accused of being sympathetic toward if not outright supportive of anti-American terrorism. The Bush administration demanded a binary framework most vividly expressed by the then-president’s decree in his late September, 2001, address to the Congress: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” And thus was any middle ground — I condemn the 9/11 attack but oppose dangerous overreaction or authoritarian power grabs in the name of combatting it — abolished.
That Bush “with-us-or-with-the-terrorists” directive provoked a fair amount of outrage at the time but is now the prevailing mentality within U.S. liberalism and the broader Democratic Party. I do not know a single prominent commentator or political figure who, after seeing what transpired, expressed support for the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Quite the contrary: all of them, at least to my knowledge, condemned the conduct of at least some of the protesters on that day. From the start, that group certainly included me (on January 7, I wrote: “It is not hard to understand why [the Capitol riot] has generated intense political passion and pervasive rage: the introduction of physical force into political protest is always lamentable, usually dangerous, and, except in the rarest of circumstances that are plainly inapplicable here, unjustifiable”). That is still my view, even as I denounce the Biden administration’s expansive domestic powers and attempts to exaggerate the threats and dangers that protest illustrated.
But that position is disallowed, or at least not recognized. Just as was true of the first War on Terror, any attempt to place the actual lingering threat in context (by rejecting the claim that the danger is so grave that it requires vast new powers), or to suggest it is being manipulatively exaggerated (by calling it The Insurrection), or to document actual lies being told in service of the prevailing narrative (such as the ongoing lie that a pro-Trump crowd murdered Officer Brian Sicknick) provokes furious accusations that one must be sympathetic to if not supportive of the January 6 rioters and any groups associated with them. Attempts to suggest that those charged in connection with the January 6 riot are being excessively prosecuted and punished provoke even greater rage — despite the fact that not a single one of them has been charged with treason, sedition, insurrection or domestic terrorism, and despite the fact that concerns about overzelaous prosecutors and the carceral state are supposed to be staples of liberals politics (though ones which, like anti-police sentiment and opposition to killing unarmed protesters, instantly disappear when convenient, such as when it comes time to exploit Officer Sicknick or cheer the fatal point-blank shooting of the unarmed Ashli Babbitt).
Objections to new powers vested in the U.S. security state in the name of fighting domestic terrorism are met with still greater scorn. If you oppose new anti-terrorism legislation for use on U.S. soil or are deeply concerned about the invocation of civil-liberties-destroying weapons such as no-fly lists, online censorship, and heightened domestic surveillance, then it is assumed that you must support domestic extremists — just as those who opposed the war in Iraq or the Patriot Act or NSA spying or torture were accused of supporting Al Qaeda.
It is a shoddy, anti-intellectual and deceitful tactic, to be sure, but it is now commonplace. And that is particularly concerning as the Democrats’ devotion to a new War on Terror continues to grow. On Monday, President Biden, citing “the intelligence community,” asserted that white supremacist terrorism is “the most lethal threat to the Homeland today.”
Opposing this new domestic War on Terror and all those new powers and secrecy authorities that go with it does not require support for or even indifference toward what happened at the Capitol on January 6. It merely requires a basic knowledge of recent U.S. history and how these powers are invariably used by the secretive U.S. security state when government-generated fears lead to their widespread enactment. The dangers of the first War on Terror were grave enough. Transferring it to “the Homeland,” as President Biden calls it, is bound to be far more dangerous still.
Biden Is on the Same Page As Trump in Maintaining an Anti-Cuba Stance
By Ramona Wadi | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 30, 2021
U.S. President Joe Biden has given every indication so far that U.S. policies on Cuba will not veer away from those of the Trump Administration. In March this year, U.S. officials told Reuters that Cuba is not a top foreign policy item for Biden. The statement was left open to interpretation until now, when the current U.S. administration decided to retain Cuba on the unilateral and defaming U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism list. The conditions for removal are very much based on how much U.S. influence the listed country will allow – in other words, becoming a U.S. accomplice in foreign policy is a must.
This week, a note signed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was published, which stated, “I hereby determine and certify to the Congress that the following countries are not cooperating fully with United States anti-terrorism efforts.” Cuba was listed, along with Iran, Syria, Venezuela and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs unequivocally rejected Blinken’s stance: “This is a totally unfounded and political accusation that tries to justify aggression against Cuba, including the inhumane economic, commercial and financial blockades which our people have suffered.”
Cuba has been a victim of U.S. terrorism and invasions since the triumph of the Cuban revolution. Recently on social media, the Central Intelligence Agency drew attention to a commemorative coin which was created to mark an anticipated victory at the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, which ended in failure 72 hours later. The CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba spouted the same rhetoric that is being used by the current administration to justify its oppression of Cuba. Only the U.S. can determine what freedom means for Cuba, in imperialist rhetoric, and the Biden administration is not letting go of the narrative that has suited the U.S. so well.
In case the U.S. needs a reminder, Cuba raised its responsibilities against all forms of terrorism in the new national constitution adopted in 2019. Article 16 (1) of Chapter II of the constitution states that Cuba “rejects and condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, in particular state terrorism.”
At an international level, Cuba signed the Code of Conduct Towards Achieving a World Free of Terrorism in 2018. It has also declared itself committed to implementing the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy.
The issue is not Cuba’s commitment to fighting terrorism, but the U.S. inability to accept an independent, socialist sovereign state that has resisted against interference, despite all odds against it. When in 1998, Cuba’s State Security had notified the U.S. of terror activities against the island being planned by dissidents in Miami, the FBI made no move against the planned terror and proceeded to arrest the Cuban Five instead. Likewise, the U.S. never targeted the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) – a powerful lobby group involved in many attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro. Neither did the U.S. take action against well-known terrorists Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, both trained by the CIA.
It is more pertinent to ask why a powerful country that has sponsored so much global terror remains unchallenged in its designations of countries allegedly funding terrorism. The Biden Administration is prioritising Cuba in its foreign policy, but going about it in a backhanded manner. By maintaining Trump’s designation, Biden is taking an active part in attempting to diplomatically isolate Cuba, apart from upholding the ramifications of the illegal U.S. blockade on the island.
Rather than assume that the diplomatic rhetoric about “reviewing” Trump’s designation indicates a possible change in U.S. relations with Cuba, it might be better to hold the Biden Administration accountable to its actions. After all, Biden was voted in as an alternative to Trump. How well is that working in terms of U.S. foreign policy?
The Bogus January 6 Commission Poses a Real Threat to Freedom
By James Bovard – Mises Wire – 05/25/2021
“Truth will out” is the most popular fairy tale in Washington. Members of Congress are clashing over whether politicians will appoint an “independent” commission to reveal the facts behind the January 6 Capitol ruckus. Proponents are portraying the issue as a simple choice between “truth or Trump.”
Recent history provides no reason to expect a politically controlled process to expose facts that undermine powerful politicians. Congress has long been worse than useless as a fact-finding agency. “Oversight” is a euphemism for stupefying congressional procedures designed to avoid discovering information that might embarrass their allies. A senior House Republican admitted in 2004: “Our party controls the levers of government. We’re not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to cause heartburn.” Most members of Congress are more likely to grovel before federal agencies than to challenge their power. “How are you so great and how can we help you?” is the usual response when the FBI director testifies, as Guardian columnist Trevor Timm noted in 2016.
There is no reason to presume that a commission investigating January 6 would not be hogtied official stonewalling. Former Senate Intelligence Committee staff director Andy Johnson observed in 2014: “The fog of secrecy made a mockery of oversight” of the CIA torture scandal. The Obama administration did not object even when the CIA illegally spied on a congressional committee to thwart the torture investigation. Both Bush and Obama administration officials repeatedly lied during congressional testimony on war on terror policies but faced no consequences. But everything would be different in this investigation, right?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her team want a congressionally appointed commission in lieu of disclosing what actually happened on January 6. Cameras posted in and around the Capitol recorded fourteen hundred hours of film on January 6, but very little of the evidence has been publicly disclosed. Fourteen news organizations have requested that the Justice Department publicly release key videos on the federal court’s electronic dockets but no such luck. Capitol Police chief lawyer Thomas DiBiase warned that “providing unfettered access to hours of extremely sensitive information to defendants who already have shown a desire to interfere with the democratic process will … [cause that information to be] passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again.” But it is also “interfering with the democratic process” to withhold evidence of actions which have been endlessly demonized by the president, top congressional leaders, and their media allies.
Disclosing the video could settle the question of whether most protestors behaved like violent attackers or gaping tourists. Julie Kelly, writing for American Greatness, recently posted a forty-five-second video clip of protestors after they entered the Capitol that day. Capitol Police officer Keith Robishaw tells a group of protestors: “We’re not against … you need to show us … no attacking, no assault, remain calm.” The citizens shown in that clip don’t appear to have been hell-bent on overthrowing the government that day.
The media is touting the fact that Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the cochairs of the 9/11 Commission, have endorsed a commission to investigate January 6. But invoking Kean and Hamilton is like relying on the Three Stooges as references for a job application at a pie factory.
Kean and Hamilton issued a joint statement boasting about the 9/11 Commission: “We put country above party to examine, without bias, the events before, during, and after the attacks…. The January 6th attack on the US Capitol was one of the darkest days in our history. Americans deserve an objective and accurate account of what happened. As we did in the wake of September 11, it is time to set aside partisan politics and come together as Americans in common pursuit of truth and justice.”
The 9/11 Commission “pursued truth and justice” by permitting the White House to edit the final version of their report before it was publicly released. Despite its canonization inside the Beltway, that report would not be admissible in a court of law, because it relied on torture for many of its key assertions. The New York Times’s Philip Shenon, the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, noted that “more than a quarter of the report’s footnotes—441 of some 1,700—referred to detainees who were subjected to the CIA’s ‘enhanced’ interrogation program.” Shenon reported that commission members “forwarded questions to the CIA, whose interrogators posed them on the panel’s behalf. The commission’s report gave no hint that harsh interrogation methods [including waterboarding] were used in gathering information.” The commission’s report was released months after shocking photos from Abu Ghraib and key Justice Department and Pentagon memos leaked out, exposing the Bush administration’s torture regime. Yet, as Shenon noted, “The commission demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions.” The 9/11 Commission became profoundly complicit in the torture at the same time it pretended to objectively judge the Bush record.
The commission report was released in July 2004 at the same time that Bush was exploiting the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War for his reelection campaign. The commission ignored evidence compiled by a joint House-Senate investigation revealing that Saudi government agents bankrolled multiple Saudi hijackers in the US prior to the attacks (fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudis). But the Bush administration suppressed those twenty-eight pages of that congressional report and they were not released until 2016. Bush embraced Saudi leaders while insisting that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was somehow to blame for 9/11. If the 9/11 Commission had quoted the 2002 FBI memo stating that there was “incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these [9/11 hijacker] terrorists within the Saudi Government,” Bush might have been seriously damaged, but 9/11 commissioners chose to serve the White House rather than truth. Kean and Hamilton remain venerated by the media, because their kowtowing buttressed public trust in the political system.
Would an investigation of January 6 be more honest than the investigation of September 11? President Biden and Democratic congressional leaders are vested in the “terrorist attack/Pearl Harbor” narrative that they established within hours of the fracas. Democrats still refer to the protestors murdering a Capitol Police officer long after the belated revelation that he died of natural causes. The New York Times noted that that advocates of a January 6 commission insist it is “an ethical and practical necessity to fully understand the most violent attack on Congress in two centuries.” Tell that to the Puerto Rican nationalists who shot up Congress in 1954 or to Congressman Steve Scalise and two other Capitol employees who were shot by a Democratic Party zealot in 2017. If such “facts” are the baseline for accuracy, then citizens can start scoffing long before a commission issues a final report.
The biggest illusion behind the push for a January 6 commission is that there is a political constituency in Washington for truth. But that hasn’t been the case for decades. As French essayist Paul Valery warned long ago, “At every step, politics and freedom of mind exclude each other.”
In the same way that it took almost fifteen years for some key facts about the 9/11 attacks to be revealed, it may be months or years until key damning revelations about the Capitol clash are extracted from federal agencies or private individuals and groups. Creating a pseudoindependent commission is more likely to codify a deceptive but politically profitable storyline than to expose facts that undercut powerful Washingtonians or government agencies.
A façade of political “truth” can be more dangerous than no disclosure at all. Biden and congressional Democrats are seeking to turbocharge their push for a new domestic terrorism law to permit widespread federal crackdowns on their opponents. Any rigged commission would likely pour gasoline on a fire that could singe far more American rights and liberties.
Beijing, the Five Eyes or Something Else? Who’s to Blame for the COVID Pandemic?
By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 19, 2021
The oligarchy running the Trans Atlantic System certainly loves the centralized control found in the Chinese system, and they adore the behaviorist social credit stuff, but that is where the admiration ends, Matt Ehret writes.
Ever since the earliest days of the Coronavirus pandemic, evidence began to emerge that the virus was not a naturally occurring evolutionary phenomenon as asserted by the WHO, Nature, and editors at the Lancet, but had other origins.
Among the earliest of those who found themselves supporting this theory were the Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lijian Zhou who made international waves by sharing two articles by Larry Romanov on the possibility of “gene targeting” of the virus which was having a disproportionately bad effect on Iranians, Italians and various Asian genotypes. Zhou was soon joined by bioweapons experts like Francis Boyle, prominent virologists Luc Montagnier and Judy Mikovits, followed by a growing array of scholars, scientists and academics from around the world who all assessed that the virus’ apparent gene sequencing implied human handiwork. While all agreed that COVID appeared to have originated from a lab, it was still unclear whether that lab was Chinese or controlled by the USA.
Another obvious question arose with this lab theory: Was it an accidental leak or was it consciously deployed?
Since pandemic war game operations had become a normalized part of western geopolitical life from the early days of Dark Winter in 2000 to the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2011 Lock Step to the World Economic Forum’s Event 201 (and dozens more in between), the likelihood of conscious deployment was a very serious possibility.
Who had the motive, means and modus operandi to carry out such a global operation?
The Wuhan Theory Begins
By February 2020, the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis began to make headlines fed by evidence that Dr. Anthony Fauci had exported certain gain of function coronavirus experiments from U.S. bioweapons laboratories to Wuhan’s Institute of Virology – one of two BSL-4 labs in China equipped to conduct this sort of research in China.
When Sir Richard Dearlove (former head of MI6) became a loud proponent of the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis in June 2020, something seemed amiss. Dearlove certainly knew a thing or two about bioweapons. He knew very well of the Pentagon’s vast array of internationally extended bioweapons labs peppered across the world, and he certainly understood the art of misdirection being a byzantine shadow creature who operated at the highest echelons of British intelligence. Dearlove was after all in charge of the “yellowcake” dodgy dossier that launched an Iraq war, he knew of the fallacious reports of nerve gases used by the governments of Libya and Syria sponsored by MI6, had even overseen major components of Russiagate that drove a color revolutionary process in the USA. Dearlove also knew a thing or two about the Porton Down labs that manufactured Novichok used in the Skripal Affair.
While Dearlove’s cheerleading of the Wuhan lab theory raised alarm bells, as time passed, no smoking gun evidence surfaced that one could fully “take to court”. In this respect, Dearlove’s operation had the upper hand since receipts from Fauci’s NIH to the Wuhan Lab did make headlines. How convenient.
Before going into the next phase of the story, it is important to recall that the absence of empirical evidence is not by itself a proof of one party’s innocence, just as the existence of a piece of empirical evidence is not a proof of another party’s guilt. This was a sad discovery made far too late by Shakespeare’s Othello after Iago’s planted “evidence” of a handkerchief resulted in the foolish warrior to murder his loving wife.
Wuhan Lab Origins Go Viral Again
In recent weeks, the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis has once again become all the rage.
Rand Paul’s May 10 showdown with Fauci over this the latter’s funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology added fuel to the fire. Sky News’ May 7 reporting of public Chinese policy papers discussing covid-based bioweapons have gone viral. On March 26, former Center of Disease Control head Robert Redfield asserted support for the Wuhan lab leak theory. While the scanned receipts of the funds transfer from the NIH to Wuhan via Eco Health Alliance ($600 thousand went to Wuhan) for coronavirus research, had been available since last February, one must wonder why it is now over a year later that this fact is being spread across the perception landscape on all levels.
Both mainstream and alternative media across the western world representing both the left and right have jumped on board the bandwagon blaming China for leaking the virus whether by accident or intent (though obviously, intent is the conclusion which anyone is being expected to draw. But again, I must ask: In a world of misdirection, psychological warfare and perception management, do the clues that we are being given force us to conclude that the Chinese government is behind the global shutdown?
Chinese Leaders Blame the CIA
Zeng Guang, a chief epidemiologist at China’s Center of Disease Control recently joined the conspiracy club on February 9, 2021 in an interview with Chinese media. While denying that the Chinese Wuhan lab is the source of the virus as so many in the west have claimed, Guang asserted that SarsCov2’s origins in a laboratory should not be discounted. Pointing to the 200 globally extended U.S. bioweapons labs littering the earth (and citing the USA’s proven track record of deploying bioweapons as part of its asymmetrical war arsenal since WWII), Guang asked:
“Why are there so many laboratories in the United States when biology labs are all over the world? What is the purpose? On many things, the United States requires others to be open and transparent, only to find that it is the United States itself that is often the most opaque. Whether or not the United States has any special fame on the issue of the new crown virus this time, it should have the courage to be open and transparent. The United States should take responsibility for proving itself to the world, rather than being caught up in hegemonic thinking, hiding itself from the virus and dumping others.”
Guang was himself joined by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying who had also pointed to the Pentagon’s globally extended array of bioweapons laboratories saying:
“I’d like to stress that if the United States truly respects facts, it should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, give more transparency to issues like its 200-plus overseas bio-labs, invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States, and respond to the concerns from the international community with real actions.”
Those who tend to avoid looking at the history and scope of Pentagon controlled bioweapon warfare tend to ignore the content of such remarks cited by those Chinese officials above for a multitude of reasons. For one: it is easy to believe that Fauci and Gates are corrupt, and this theory not only implicates both men but also ties them to a Chinese government which most westerners have come to fear and hate as a bastion of global debt-trappery, genocide, technocracy and imperialism.
After conducting a short review of some of the fundamental facts of recent world history alongside certain geopolitical realities of our present world order referenced by the head of the Chinese CDC, I believe that China’s Wuhan Lab is being set up. Here’s why…
Fact #1) Depopulation Then and Now
While many people may wish to avoid looking at this fact, depopulation is a driving factor behind international unipolar policy today as it had been during the days of WW2 when Rockefeller Foundation, Macy Foundation, City of London and Wall Street interests gave their backing to both the rise of fascism as an economic miracle solution for the economic woes of the great depression and eugenics (the science of population control) as the governing religion of a new scientific priesthood.
Today, this agenda masquerades behind a new transhumanist movement, shaped by a words like “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, “decarbonized economies”, and “Great Resets”. The primary targets of this agenda remain: 1) the Institution of the sovereign nation state itself as it was the target a century ago when the Bank of England arranged the formation of the 1919 League of Nations, and 2) the “overpopulated zones” of the world with a focus on China, India, South America and Africa.
For anyone who would find themselves instinctively inclined to brush aside such claims as “conspiracy theorizing”, I would encourage a brief review of Sir Henry Kissinger’s infamous NSSM-200 report: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests published in 1974. This declassified report went far to transform U.S. foreign policy from a pro-development philosophy to a new paradigm of population control. Kissinger warned that “if future numbers are to be kept within reasonable bounds, it is urgent that measures to reduce fertility be started and made effective in the 1970s and 1980s…. (Financial) assistance will be given to other countries, considering such factors as population growth… Food and agricultural assistance is vital for any population sensitive development strategy… Allocation of scarce resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control… There is an alternative view that mandatory programs may be needed….”
In Kissinger’s twisted logic, U.S. Foreign Policy doctrine had too often foolishly sought to end hunger by providing the means of industrial and scientific development to poor nations.
A true Malthusian through and through, Kissinger believed that aiding the poor to stand on their own feet would result in global disequilibrium as the new middle classes would consume more, and use the strategic resources found under their own soil, which would set the world system into greater disequilibrium and accelerated entropy.
This was deemed unacceptable to the mind of Kissinger and any misanthropic follower of Malthus who shared his views of humanity and government.
Kissinger’s Master-Slave Global Society
At the time of Kissinger’s ascent to power as Secretary of State under Nixon, a new grand strategy was unleashed designed to create a new “master-slave” dependency between the developed and undeveloped sectors of the world… with a special emphasis on the 13 nations targeted by NSSM 200 plus China.
China itself was only permitted to acquire western tech needed to start climbing out of abject poverty on the condition that they obeyed the Rockefeller-World Bank demands that one child policy programs were imposed to curb population growth.
Kissinger began organizing for this new set of relations in society around “Have”, post-industrial consumers and a massive “Have-Not” class of poor laborers with access to industry, but remaining stagnant, cheap and without the means of purchasing the goods they produced. The other darker skinned parts of the world would be even more worse off, having neither the means of production, nor consumption while remaining in constant states of famine, war and backwardness. These dark age zones would be largely made up of Sub Saharan Africa and would find their resource-rich lands exploited by the corporate middle men and financiers trying to run the world order above the “obsolete order” of nation states.
Kissinger’s model of a world order was absolutely static with no room for population growth or technological progress which would have any connection to increasing the powers of production. Mao and the Gang of Four which ran the cultural revolution appeared to be highly compatible with Kissinger’s agenda. But when Mao died and the Gang of Four were rightfully imprisoned, a new long-term strategy known as the Four Modernizations shaped by Zhou Enlai and carried out by Deng Xiaoping was launched. This program was far more foresighted than Kissinger realized.
Fact #2) China is currently a leading force of pro-population growth.
While the west has been accelerating into a decaying path on every measurable level, China is quickly moving in an opposing trajectory via extending long term investments and advanced tech development into its own society as well as to its neighbors through such comprehensive projects as the Belt and Road Initiative.
While its own population has not healed from the disastrous 1979 one child policy and is far from achieving the 2.1 children per couple needed for replacement fertility, it did lift the one child limit to two in 2015 and leading Bank of China economists have called for a total elimination of all limits immediately. Meanwhile, the top-down national orientation of China towards increasing the free energy needed to support and grow the economy is unlike anything we have seen in the closed-system western world for many decades.
A vital fact often forgotten is that together China and India were instrumental in sabotaging the December 2009 COP-14 program in Copenhagen which had promised to establish legally binding emission target cuts to guide the de-carbonization (and de-industrialization) of much of society.
The London Guardian had reported that “Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.”
Apparently China and India, along with African governments like Sudan (which had not yet been carved up on the careful watch of Rhodes’ Susan Rice) did not wish to sacrifice their industry and national sovereignty on the altar of climate change models and technocrats that had only weeks earlier been publicly exposed as frauds by East Anglia University researchers during the embarrassing Climategate scandal.
While China and India should be celebrated for having sabotaged this effort 11 years ago, very few people have been able to hold this drama in their memory, and fewer still realize how this fight over sovereignty was in any way connected to China’s 2013 creation of the Belt and Road Initiative as the vital force behind the Multipolar Alliance.
Fact #3) Soros at Davos 2020: The two greatest threats to Open Society: 1) Donald Trump’s USA and 2) Xi Jinping’s China.
During his January 2020 Davos speech, Soros took aim at both Trump and Xi Jinping as the two greatest threats to his Open Society who had to be stopped at all costs. In September 2019 (just as Event 201 was happening) Soros wrote in the Wall Street Journal :
“As founder of the Open Society Foundations, my interest in defeating Xi Jinping’s China goes beyond U.S. national interests. As I explained in a speech in Davos earlier this year, I believe that the social-credit system Beijing is building, if allowed to expand, could sound the death knell of open societies not only in China but also around the globe.”
Before becoming mired into the “China virus” narrative, Donald Trump had worked exceptionally hard to emphasize good relations with China and even managed one of the most important trade deals that had successfully moved into phase one the week Soros spoke at Davos. This first phase involved China creating a market to purchase U.S. finished goods as part of the program to rebuild America’s lost manufacturing sector that had been hollowed out over 5 decades of “post industrialism”. Where Kissinger called NAFTA “the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War” Trump went far to renegotiate the anti-nation state treaty giving nation states a role to play in shaping economic policy for the first time in over 25 years.
While talking tough on China until 2020, Trump also resisted the war hawks pushing a total military encirclement of China begun under Obama’s Asia Pivot which is threatening nuclear war (same thing is happening on Russia’s perimeter). He took the fuel out of the THAAD missile encirclement of China which has justified its expansion based on the “North Korean threat” for over a decade – always denying the truth that the real target were both Russia and China. Trump’s push to build friendly relations with Kim Jong Un had much greater ramifications at changing U.S. Pacific military policy than many realized, although that fact was certainly not missed by the Chinese intelligentsia.
While the Soros/CIA-driven color revolutionary operations have so far failed to divide up China in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang, they have been successful in the USA.
Fact #4) The Pentagon’s Global Bioweapons Complex Is a Fact
While China is the proud owner of a total of TWO bioweapons labs (both within its borders), a vast array of dozens of Pentagon-run bioweapons labs litter the international landscape. Exactly how many is hard to estimate as Alexei Mukhin (Director General of Russia’s Center for Political Information) stated in a May 2020 interview:
“According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, in the post-Soviet space, 65 American secret bio-laboratories operate: 15 – in Ukraine, 12 – in Armenia, 15 – in Georgia, 4 – in Kazakhstan. In the United States, such activity is prohibited. Accordingly, the Pentagon, in its own laws, is engaged in illegal activities (in spirit, not in letter). The goal is the creation of biological weapons directed against the peoples who inhabited the territory of the USSR. Fortunately, biological material is “at hand.”
In 2018, investigative journalist Dilya Gaytandzhieva documented the Pentagon’s multibillion dollar budget that sustains bioweapons labs in 25 nations (and 11 within the USA itself) which grew exponentially since the December 2001 bioweaponized anthrax attack killed five Americans and justified a hyperbolic increase of bioweapon warfare to rise from $5 billion when Cheney’s Bioshield Act was passed in 2004 to over $50 billion today.
Additionally, an October 2000 policy document co-authored by William Kristol, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Donald Rumsfeld titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses (RAD) explicitly stated that in the new American Century, “combat will likely take place in new dimensions: In space, cyber-space and perhaps the world of microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”.
Fact #5) International Pandemic War Game Scenarios Laid the groundwork for the international response to Covid. Not China
The driving force behind such bioweapon war game exercises such as the June 2000 Operation Dark Winter, the May 2010 Rockefeller Foundation report Operation Lock step, and the World Economic Forum/Gates Foundation/CIA Event 201 pandemic exercises indicate to me that China is not the causal nexus.
All in all, I think these facts have persuaded me that China is being set up and is in fact a primary target for destruction.
How China would find itself the beneficiary of such an irresponsible unleashing of a novel virus that hammered its own economy, accelerated the blow out of the world financial bubble economy and led to a shut down of international stability is absurd to the extreme… especially considering the fact that everything China has done for the past decades has indicated a consistent desire to create stability, long term development and win-win cooperation with the international community. Nothing similar has been seen among members of the Five Eyes or their Trans Atlantic network of over bloated imperialists.
The oligarchy running the Trans Atlantic System certainly loves the centralized control found in the Chinese system, and they adore the behaviorist social credit stuff, but that is where the admiration ends. The Kissinger, Gates, Carney or Schwab- types hate and fear everything China has actually done for development, population growth, national banking, long term credit generation, building full spectrum industrial economies and defending sovereignty along with Russia whom they are tightly bonded with in the Eurasian Multipolar alliance.
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Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | February 27, 2013
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
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