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.
Liz Cheney Lied About Her Role in Spreading the Discredited CIA “Russian Bounty” Story
By Glenn Greenwald | May 14, 2021
In an interview on Tuesday with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) denied that she spread the discredited CIA “Russian bounty” story. That CIA tale, claiming Russia was paying Taliban fighters to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan, was cooked up by the CIA and then published by The New York Times on June 27 of last year, right as former President Trump announced his plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The Times story, citing anonymous intelligence officials, was then continually invoked by pro-war Republicans and Democrats — led by Cheney — to justify their blocking of that troop withdrawal. The story was discredited when the U.S. intelligence community admitted last month that it had only “low to moderate confidence” that any of this even happened.
When Baier asked Cheney about her role in spreading this debunked CIA story, Cheney blatantly lied to him, claiming “if you go back and look at what I said — every single thing I said: I said if those stories are true, we need to know why the President and Vice President were not briefed on them.” After Baier pressed her on the fact that she vested this story with credibility, Cheney insisted a second time that she never endorsed the claim but merely spoke conditionally, always using the “if these reports are true” formulation. Watch Cheney deny her role in spreading that story.
Liz Cheney, as she so often does, blatantly lied. That she merely spoke of the Russian bounty story in the conditional — “every single thing I said: I said if those stories are true” — is completely and demonstrably false. Indeed, other than Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), there are few if any members of Congress who did more to spread this Russian bounty story as proven truth, all in order to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. In so doing, she borrowed from a pro-war playbook pioneered by her dad, to whom she owes her career: the former Vice President would leak CIA claims to The New York Times to justify war, then go on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, as he did on September 8, 2002, and cite those New York Times reports as though they were independent confirmation of his views coming from that paper rather than from him:
MR. RUSSERT: What, specifically, has [Saddam] obtained that you believe would enhance his nuclear development program? …..
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Now, in the case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or highly enriched uranium. And what we’ve seen recently that has raised our level of concern to the current state of unrest, if you will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he now is trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs.
MR. RUSSERT: Aluminum tubes.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Specifically aluminum tubes. There’s a story in The New York Times this morning this is — I don’t — and I want to attribute The Times. I don’t want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it’s now public that, in fact, [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge. And the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb.
So having CIA stories leak to the press that fuel the pro-war case, then having pro-war politicians cite those to justify their pro-war position, is a Cheney Family speciality.
On July 1, the House Armed Services Committee, of which Rep. Cheney is a member, debated amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that authorized $740.5 billion in military spending. One of Cheney’s top priorities was to align with the Committee’s pro-war Democrats, funded by weapons manufacturers, to block Trump’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020 and to withdraw roughly 1/3 of the 34,000 U.S. troops in Germany.
To justify her opposition, Cheney — contrary to what she repeatedly insisted to Baier — cited the CIA’s Russian bounty story without skepticism. In a joint statement with Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, that Cheney published on her website on June 27 — the same day that The New York Times published its first story about the CIA tale — Cheney pronounced herself “concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces.” There was nothing conditional about the statement: they were preparing to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and cited this story as proof that “Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan.”
After today’s briefing with senior White House officials, we remain concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces. It has been clear for some time that Russia does not wish us well in Afghanistan. We believe it is important to vigorously pursue any information related to Russia or any other country targeting our forces. Congress has no more important obligation than providing for the security of our nation and ensuring our forces have the resources they need.
An even more definitive use of this Russia bounty story came when Cheney held a press conference to explain her opposition to Trump’s plans to withdraw troops. In this statement, she proclaimed that she “remains concerned about Russian activities in Afghanistan.” She then explicitly threatened Russia over the CIA’s “bounty” story, warning them that “any targeting of U.S. forces by Russians, by anyone else, will face a very swift and deadly response.” She then gloated about the U.S. bombing of Russia-linked troops in Syria in 2018 using what she called “overwhelming and lethal force,” and warned that this would happen again if they target U.S. forces in Afghanistan:
Does this sound even remotely like what Cheney claimed to Baier? She denied having played a key role in spreading the Russia bounty story because, as she put it, “every single thing I said, I said: if those stories are true.” She also told him that she never referred to that CIA claim except by saying: “if these reports are true.” That is false.
The issue is not merely that Cheney lied: that would hardly be news. It is that the entire media narrative about Cheney’s removal from her House leadership role is a fraud. Her attacks on Trump and her party leadership were not confined to criticisms of the role played by the former president in contesting the validity of the 2020 election outcome or inciting the January 6 Capitol riot — because Liz Cheney is such a stalwart defender of the need for truth and adherence to the rule of law in politics.
Cheney played the key role in forming an alliance with pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee to repeatedly defeat the bipartisan anti-war minority [led by Ro Khanna (D-CA), Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)] to prevent any meaningful changes promised by Trump during the 2016 campaign to put an end to the U.S. posture of Endless War. As I reported about the House Armed Services Committee hearing last July, the CIA tale was repeatedly cited by Cheney and her allies to justify ongoing U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan.
Cheney is motivated by power, not ethics. In 2016, Trump ran — and won — by explicitly inveighing against the Bush/Cheney foreign policy of endless war, militarism and imperialism that Liz Cheney, above all else, still vehemently supports. What she is attempting to do is reclaim the Republican Party and deliver it back to the neocons and warmongers who dominated it under her father’s reign. She is waging an ideological battle, not an ethical one, for control of the Republican Party.
That will be a debate for Republican voters to resolve. In the meantime, Liz Cheney cannot be allowed to distance herself from the CIA’s fairy tale about Russians in Afghanistan. Along with pro-war Democrats, she used this conveniently leaked CIA story repeatedly to block troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. And just as her father taught her to do — by example if not expressly — she is now lying to distance herself from a pro-war CIA script that she, in fact, explicitly promoted.
Using ‘Russiagate’ & ‘bounties’ logic, anonymous officials claim GRU behind mysterious ‘sonic attacks’ on US spies
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | May 11, 2021
Mysterious “sonic attacks” a scientist had identified as the work of crickets are now being blamed on some kind of Russian secret sci-fi superweapon by anonymous US officials, using the same script as “bounties” and ‘Russiagate’.
The “suspected directed-energy incidents” that have allegedly afflicted US diplomats and spies around the world may have been the work of “Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU,” Politico claimed on Monday, citing “three current and former officials with direct knowledge of the discussions.”
Both the CIA and the State Department are looking into the alleged attacks, but “all 18 federal intelligence agencies” are now focusing on the GRU’s “potential involvement” according to one anonymous congressional official. That makes it highly likely the source is someone from the office of House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-California), best known as the promoter of the conspiracy theory that Russia “hacked our democracy” in 2016.
That part about “18 intelligence agencies” is almost verbatim the “17 intelligence agencies” line used in Russiagate. The Space Force has added another agency in the meantime, you see. Trouble is, only select teams from four – the FBI, CIA, NSA and ODNI – ended up actually involved in the Russiagate document.
They produced an assessment that the alleged meddling was “consistent with the methods and motivations” they attributed to Moscow. Compare that to Politico quoting one former national security official, who said it “looks, smells and feels like the GRU.”
“When you are looking at the landscape, there are very few people who are willing, capable and have the technology. It’s pretty simple forensics,” said the anonymous former official, somehow supposedly still in the loop.
Another former official said that Israel and China may also have the technology, but not a presence in all the locations of the alleged incidents, or desire to attack Americans. But Russia does? Again, no evidence, or even explanation what any of this is supposed to be based on.
Politico’s sources also admitted no specific weapon was identified, but that didn’t stop them from speculating about a device that could fit into a car or a large backpack, capable of targeting an individual from 500 to 1,000 yards away. Does any such weapon actually exist?
Now that the KGB is no more, US propagandists love pointing the finger at GRU – which hasn’t been known under that name for a decade, by the way. The agency has been accused of everything and anything – without evidence – from hacking the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta and running WikiLeaks in 2016, to paying “bounties” to the Taliban to kill US troops in Afghanistan.
The “Russian bounties” story – likewise based on anonymous sources – emerged just in time to derail President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2020, and give then-candidate Joe Biden ammunition to call Trump unpatriotic. After Biden was installed in the White House and announced that he would withdraw from Afghanistan, the “bounties” story was downgraded to “low confidence” and quietly dropped.
Politico’s bombshell speculation was picked up and parroted just as quickly and uncritically as the bounties story had been. In doing so, outlets around the world ignored the publication’s warning earlier in the day that the White House communications team handles all the quotes emanating from administration officials.
While Biden campaigned on “following the science” – a phrase the 78-year-old is fond of repeating in speeches – that commitment seems entirely absent from discussions of the alleged sonic incidents. Back in January 2019, a US Berkeley scientist said he had analyzed the recordings of the “attacks” published by AP and identified them as the chirping of the Indies short-tailed cricket.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator.
Leading Russiagate conspiracy theorist appointed to key national security role at Biden’s Department of Justice
RT | May 10, 2021
Susan Hennessey, a former Obama-Biden administration lawyer who turned to promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory during Donald Trump’s presidential term, has finally found her landing spot on President Joe Biden’s team.
Hennessey announced the move herself after seemingly scrubbing her Twitter account of Russiagate tweets, saying on Monday that she’s “honored to be joining the extraordinary team at the Department of Justice (DOJ).” In fact, she will be senior counsel in the DOJ’s National Security Division.
In between her roles with Obama-Biden and now Biden-Harris, Hennessey served as one of the more unhinged voices of the anti-Trump “#Resistance” and supported the Russiagate propaganda campaign through jobs as CNN analyst, Lawfare blog executive editor and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank.
Responding to the appointment, journalist Glenn Greenwald called Hennessey “one of the most deranged Russiagate conspiracists.”
One of her Lawfare articles defended the widely discredited Steele dossier, suggesting that the mere fact the anti-Trump “intelligence community” had briefed the president-elect on the sordid allegations gave the report credibility. Even the fact that then-intelligence director James Clapper – later a CNN contributor and anti-Trump media activist – refrained from calling the dossier false meant that it must be at least partly true, she argued.
Hennessey’s attacks on Trump were wide-ranging, from the more minor “clearly, Melania hates him,” jab, to arguing that FBI officials “were telling the truth” when they misled the court to secretly spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. She even wrote a book saying that Trump was waging “war on the world’s most powerful office.”
When then-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard suggested in 2019 that the US should pursue calm and better relations with Russia, Hennessey called the Democrat congresswoman “absurd.” She blasted Attorney General Bill Barr last year after the DOJ dropped charges against ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, saying there should be mass resignations from the DOJ, despite a review having determined that the case against the retired general was “unjustified.”
Journalist Michael Tracey said it was “blatant, transparent corruption” for Hennessey to seamlessly transition from NSA lawyer to Russiagate propagandist, then shift right back to the “National Security State” after Trump was ousted.
“Hunter Biden getting hired to run DEA would be less absurd than Biden’s decision to hire Hennessey to work on national security law, unless of course DOJ plans to falsify evidence and illegally spy on its political opponents,” Federalist co-founder Sean Davis said. “She’s perfect for that.”
USAID was ‘key tool’ for Washington undermining the Venezuelan government, official review reveals
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | May 9, 2021
Allegations that the US government’s leading aid provider is in fact a ‘trojan horse’ for regime change have circulated for years but were always strenuously denied. Now though, Washington appears to have confirmed it in writing.
On April 16, the oversight division of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) quietly published a review of the organization’s activities in Venezuela from January-April 2019. Its seismic findings were almost universally ignored by the mainstream media, although the Grayzone certainly took notice.
During that chaotic period, Juan Guaido declared himself the country’s acting and rightful leader, challenging the legitimacy of elected President Nicolas Maduro, leading to fiery upheaval engulfing the streets of Caracas. In a widely publicized incident on February 23, trucks carrying USAID “humanitarian commodities” from Colombia into Venezuela were stopped at border crossings and set ablaze.
Western news outlets and politicians were quick to blame the arson on government forces, framing the action as a dastardly attempt to prevent vital supplies reaching citizens desperately in need.
However, journalist Max Blumenthal was actually on the ground in Venezuela at the time, and compiled compelling evidence the fires were started by anti-Maduro activists. Two weeks later, the New York Times published video evidence proving this was in fact the case, without acknowledging Blumenthal had already busted the ploy wide open.
The event is specifically referenced in the USAID review, and while the language is highly euphemistic, reading between the lines it appears the aid was never intended to reach Caracas, and the incendiary episode was, in effect, a Washington-directed “false flag” event.
In interviews with investigators, senior USAID staff admitted the agency’s programs are “subject to foreign policy guidance from the National Security Council and State Department,” guidance which may “impact USAID’s ability to adhere to humanitarian principles and mitigate operational risks.”
In other words, no matter what positive ends its distribution of aid may achieve in some areas, the agency is ultimately answerable to the US military and intelligence agencies, while also engaging in activities that are anything but philanthropic at their behest as a result.
The review notes that it was in response to such “directives” – which included “taking actions that deviated from humanitarian principles and heightened security and fiduciary risks” – USAID dispatched those trucks to the Venezuelan border.
The State Department and National Security Council is reported to have specifically approached USAID for the purpose after the US government in January and February 2019 “identified USAID’s humanitarian assistance for Venezuelans as also serving as a key tool to elevate support” for Guaido’s illegitimate “interim government” and “increase pressure on the Maduro regime.”
Though it’s striking to see USAID’s shadowy nature spelled out in an official report intended for public consumption, the agency’s wide-ranging, insidious role in US efforts to reverse Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution has been clear since 2010. That year, WikiLeaks published a US embassy cable from 2006 that was transmitted from Caracas to US diplomatic missions the world over – including Vatican City.
It noted that in August 2004, the US ambassador outlined his team’s “five point strategy” in Venezuela, which included “penetrating [Hugo] Chavez’ political base,” “dividing Chavismo,” “protecting vital US business,” and “isolating Chavez internationally.” USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), which “provides fast, flexible, short-term assistance targeted at key political transition” – i.e. facilitates regime change – was said to be central to these efforts.
OTI’s activities in Venezuela included supporting over 300 NGOs across the country “with technical assistance, capacity building, connecting them with each other and international movements, and financial support upwards of $15 million.”
Many of the NGOs which included initiatives “dealing with the rights of the handicapped,” and countering “revolutionary ideology” via “civic education” were said to have been specifically launched off the back of OTI funding. Quite some trojan horse, although USAID’s destabilization efforts aren’t always conducted under the bogus banner of democracy and human rights.
For example, in 2014 it was revealed that OTI had established ZunZuneo, a ‘Cuban Twitter’, in order to stir unrest in Havana. It was constructed via a nexus of secret shell companies and financed by foreign banks.
Tens of thousands of Cubans registered accounts on the social network over the course of two years. The plan was to build a receptive audience, then push them toward unseating the government of Raul Castro. Users were entirely unaware it was created by USAID, and that their sensitive personal data was surreptitiously being gathered in service of a prospective future coup.
In response to the scandal, then-White House press secretary Jay Carney said, “USAID is a development agency not an intelligence agency.” Allegations to the contrary have swirled for decades, and quite understandably. From 1962-1974, a core division of the agency was the Office of Public Safety (OPS), which tutored thousands of police officers in 49 countries over the course of its existence, and provided them with weapons and pacification equipment worth millions.
Its director was Byron Engle, a veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The OPS provided cover for its operatives overseas, helped Langley plant staff in the local police forces of countries of interest to Washington, and also worked as a prospective agent talent spotter. In the late 1960s, it became the subject of negative congressional scrutiny due to allegations equipment it provided and personnel it had trained were linked to torture, murder and disappearances across Latin America.
A US Government Accountability Office report on the OPS, published two years after it shuttered, concluded the unit “encouraged or condoned police brutality, taught or encouraged use of terror and torture techniques, and promoted creation of police states” – charges which government officials, perhaps unsurprisingly, denied.
That report also exposed how extensive support was provided to police forces in countries notorious for their brutal treatment of political dissidents today, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Mercifully, no one seems to have been tortured or killed as a result of USAID’s cloak-and-dagger machinations in Venezuela, although the oversight review was far from glowing in its appraisal of the agency’s National Security Council and State Department-directed activities there.
For instance, USAID’s implementers in Colombia “did not assess the risks of fraud or develop risk mitigation strategies with anti-fraud control activities,” meaning untold funds and “humanitarian commodities” may have been pilfered by Guaido and his interim government.
After all, in June 2019, it was revealed the would-be leader’s entourage, including hundreds of defectors from the Venezuelan armed forces, had spent vast sums of aid money on expensive dinners, nightclubs and shopping trips in Bogota, as they awaited the downfall of Maduro. Said to have an appetite for “prostitutes, alcohol and violence,” the hotels they and their families stayed in went unpaid for three months despite Guaido’s promises to bankroll them, prompting their eviction.
Given the effort to remove the legitimate government of Venezuela remains abortive as of May 2021, it’s likely the ramshackle administration-in-exile has racked up an even bigger bill. Who will ultimately pick up that hefty tab is anyone’s guess.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
Silicon Valley Algorithm Manipulation Is The Only Thing Keeping Mainstream Media Alive
By Caitlin Johnstone | May 3, 2021
The emergence of the internet was met with hope and enthusiasm by people who understood that the plutocrat-controlled mainstream media were manipulating public opinion to manufacture consent for the status quo. The democratization of information-sharing was going to give rise to a public consciousness that is emancipated from the domination of plutocratic narrative control, thereby opening up the possibility of revolutionary change to our society’s corrupt systems.
But it never happened. Internet use has become commonplace around the world and humanity is able to network and share information like never before, yet we remain firmly under the thumb of the same power structures we’ve been ruled by for generations, both politically and psychologically. Even the dominant media institutions are somehow still the same.
So what went wrong? Nobody’s buying newspapers anymore, and the audiences for television and radio are dwindling. How is it possible that those same imperialist oligarchic institutions are still controlling the way most people think about their world?
The answer is algorithm manipulation.
Last month a very informative interview saw the CEO of YouTube, which is owned by Google, candidly discussing the way the platform uses algorithms to elevate mainstream news outlets and suppress independent content.
At the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Technology Governance Summit, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that while the platform still allows arts and entertainment videos an equal shot at going viral and getting lots of views and subscribers, on important areas like news media it artificially elevates “authoritative sources”.
“What we’ve done is really fine-tune our algorithms to be able to make sure that we are still giving the new creators the ability to be found when it comes to music or humor or something funny,” Wojcicki said. “But when we’re dealing with sensitive areas, we really need to take a different approach.”
Wojcicki said in addition to banning content deemed harmful, YouTube has also created a category labeled “borderline content” which it algorithmically de-boosts so that it won’t show up as a recommended video to viewers who are interested in that topic:
“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources that we’re recommending are authoritative news, medical science, et cetera. And we also have created a category of more borderline content where sometimes we’ll see people looking at content that’s lower quality and borderline. And so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. So that’s a content that stays on the platform but is not something that we’re going to recommend. And so our algorithms have definitely evolved in terms of handling all these different content types.”
Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski has a good video out reacting to Wojcicki’s comments, saying he believes his (entirely harmless) channel has been grouped in the “borderline” category because his views and new subscribers suddenly took a dramatic and inexplicable plunge. Kulinski reports that overnight he went from getting tens of thousands of new subscriptions per month to maybe a thousand.
“People went to YouTube to escape the mainstream nonsense that they see on cable news and on TV, and now YouTube just wants to become cable news and TV,” Kulinski says. “People are coming here to escape that and you’re gonna force-feed them the stuff they’re escaping like CNN and MSNBC and Fox News.”
It is not terribly surprising to hear Susan Wojcicki admit to elevating the media of the oligarchic empire to the CEO of a neoconservative publication at the World Economic Forum. She comes from the same elite empire management background as all the empire managers who’ve been placed in charge of mainstream media outlets by their plutocratic owners, having gone to Harvard after being literally raised on the campus of Stanford University as a child. Her sister Anne is the founder of the genetic-testing company 23andMe and was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Google itself also uses algorithms to artificially boost empire media in its searches. In 2017 World Socialist Website (WSWS) began documenting the fact that it, along with other leftist and antiwar outlets, had suddenly experienced a dramatic drop in traffic from Google searches. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal confirmed WSWS claims, reporting that “Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results.” In 2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to censoring WSWS at a Senate hearing in response to one senator’s suggestion that Google only censors right wing content.
Google, for the record, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA. It pours massive amounts of money into federal lobbying and DC think tanks, has a cozy relationship with the NSA, and has been a military-intelligence contractor from the beginning.
Then you’ve got Facebook, where a third of Americans regularly get their news. Facebook is a bit less evasive about its status quo-enforcing censorship practices, openly enlisting the government-and-plutocrat-funded imperialist narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to help it determine what content to censor and what to boost. Facebook has stated that if its “fact checkers” like The Atlantic Council deem a page or domain guilty of spreading false information, it will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”
All the algorithm stacking by the dominant news distribution giants Google and Facebook also ensures that mainstream platforms and reporters will have far more followers than indie media on platforms like Twitter, since an article that has been artificially amplified will receive far more views and therefore far more clicks on their social media information. Mass media employees tend to clique up and amplify each other on Twitter, further exacerbating the divide. Meanwhile left and antiwar voices, including myself, have been complaining for years that Twitter artificially throttles their follower count.
If not for these deliberate acts of sabotage and manipulation by Silicon Valley megacorporations, the mainstream media which have deceived us into war after war and which manufacture consent for an oppressive status quo would have been replaced by independent media years ago. These tech giants are the life support system of corporate media propaganda.
Did Jeremy Scahill’s Analysis Fumble the Ball in Its Indictment of Joe Biden as an “Empire Politician”?
The Intercept series on Biden is marred by omissions and even State Department disinformation
By Jeremy Kuzmarov | CovertAction Magazine | April 30, 2021
Known for his exposés of Blackwater and the U.S. dirty wars in the Middle East, The Intercept reporter Jeremy Scahill’s latest blockbuster is a series on Joe Biden’s history as an “empire politician.”
The series is impressive and informative, however, it ignores certain unflattering historical facts and perpetuates a few popular misperceptions.
CovertAction Magazine commends The Intercept’s investigation into Biden’s influence on U.S. foreign policy over the last half-century, and hopes it will amend and improve it by examining some of the problems with what it reported—and the even greater problems with what it failed to report.
In his introduction, Scahill writes that after poring over congressional reports and speeches among other documents, he came to the conclusion that Biden is a man “dedicated to the U.S. as an empire, who believes that preserving U.S. national interests and ‘prestige’ on the global stage outweighs considerations of morality or even at times the deaths of innocent people.”
The series goes on to provide strong evidence to corroborate this assessment.
Scahill details, for example, Biden’s chairing of congressional hearings that helped build support for the 2003 War in Iraq, his staunch support for the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, and for the kind of military occupation that the U.S. had conducted in Germany and Japan after WW II there.
Biden further supported U.S. aggression in Grenada, Libya and Panama in the 1980s, which resulted in the deaths of many civilians, and in 1981 voted to provide expansive aid to Pakistan in order to arm Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
One year later, Biden tried to justify Israel’s killing of civilians in Lebanon, which even the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin couldn’t do.
In the 1990s, Biden backed President Bill Clinton as he bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and supported President George W. Bush’s sending suspected terrorist suspects to Guantanamo Bay.
Biden supported the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan under false pretexts in 1998. [Source: csmonitor.com ]
When he first ran for the Senate, Biden positioned himself as an opponent of the Vietnam War, albeit on tactical grounds, considering the war to have been “lousy policy” rather than a crime.
Before that Biden had obtained a draft deferment because he had asthma as a teenager. However, he never took part in antiwar protests and referred to antiwar protesters who had occupied the chancellor’s office at Syracuse University where he was a law student as “assholes.”
Senator-elect Joe Biden, D-Del., takes his oath of office in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 13, 1972. [Source: theintercept.com ]
During his early years in the Senate, Biden co-sponsored the 1973 War Powers Act, which mandated that presidents obtain congressional authorization before going to war.
Eighteen years later, Senator Biden denounced President George H.W. Bush’s “monarchist” disdain for congressional authority and opposed the Gulf War in Iraq.
Soon after Bush declared victory in the Gulf, Biden, however, determined that his opposition was a political mistake and began a transformation into a top hawk on Iraq and supporter of many subsequent wars.
While early in his career voting to rein in the CIA, he evolved also into a foe of whistleblowers and helped block the nomination of Theodore Sorensen as CIA Director when it was discovered that Sorensen had given an affidavit in the case of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg that sympathized with Ellsberg.
Ted Sorensen, center, arrives with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., right, at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Sorensen’s nomination for CIA director on Jan. 17, 1977. [Source: theintercept.com ]
Distortions and Omissions
As the above summary indicates, there is much to learn from The Intercept’s series and admire.
However, there are certain topics that are only superficially covered, or inexplicably left out altogether.
Scahill, for example, says nothing about how Biden was mentored when he first came into the Senate “as a young kid” by Averell Harriman, the “father of the Cold War.”
A son of one of the original robber barons who founded the legendary Wall Street firm Brown Brothers & Co., Harriman served as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union 1943-1946, Secretary of Commerce 1946-1948, Governor of New York 1955-1958 and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Harriman’s support for an aggressive anticommunist foreign policy was both ideological and personal; he lost a fortune when zinc mines that he had invested in were nationalized by communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
In the late 1970s, Biden accompanied Harriman and his wife Pamela on a trip to Yugoslavia to attend the funeral of Eduard Kardelj, Tito’s intellectual mentor [Tito was the socialist leader of Yugoslavia from 1953-1980].
W. Averell Harriman, Biden’s political mentor. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Two decades later, as a prominent member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden helped see to it that Harriman’s ambition was fulfilled.
He supported secessionist factions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia that caused the breakup of Yugoslavia and aggressively promoted the bombing of Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro, whose end result was the establishment of a giant U.S. military base, Camp Bondsteel.
Aerial photo of Camp Bondsteel. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Scahill’s discussion of the Bosnia war omits any consideration of the geopolitical imperative underlying U.S. policy and presents a misleading narrative about the war.
He writes that “as Yugoslavia’ disintegrated in the early 1990s, Serbia and Croatia began a bloody battle for control of large swaths [of it].” The Serbs, however, had attempted to keep the Yugoslav federation together when Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina seceded with U.S. encouragement.
The IMF and World Bank had contributed to Yugoslavia’s dissolution through its promotion of fiscal austerity and neoliberal economic programs, which Scahill omits.
After his pithy assessment of the war’s origins, Scahill writes that in Bosnia, “Serb forces committed widespread atrocities, particularly against Muslims.” While this statement is true, it reinforces the dominant view of the Muslims as victims of Serb aggression and war crimes.
The Muslims not only committed their own gruesome atrocities, but were led by an Islamic fundamentalist, Alija Izetbegović, who had been arrested in World War II after recruiting Muslims for a military unit organized by the SS Gestapo.
Then Senator Biden speaks with Alija Izetbegović in Sarajevo on April 9, 1993. [Source: aljazeera.com]
The Muslim fighting regiments were also bolstered by 4,000 Arab jihadist fighters from Afghanistan, Algeria, and other Islamic countries and included two future 9/11 hijackers—a fact Scahill ought to have mentioned.
Srebrenica Distortions
The quality of Scahill’s analysis descends further when he promotes misinformation about the July 1995 killings by Bosnian Serb forces of Muslims in Srebrenica.
Scahill writes that “the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)… determined that more than 8,000 people were killed during the massacre and ruled that the Bosnian Serb operations constituted genocide.”
But the 2001 ICTY judgment of Serb commander Radislav Krstic gave a low estimate of seven thousand men that were captured by the Serbian forces at Srebrenica and concluded that only a “few mortal remains” were found near the purported killing site.[1]
The Sarajevo-based International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP), an adjunct of the ICTY, which matched the DNA from bone samples with family members of persons reported as missing, in 2007 identified a total of 6,930 Srebrenica victims.[2]
However, some on this list had gone missing prior to July 1995 and the study could not determine the cause of death.[3] Autopsy reports referred to bodies where only shell or mortar fragments were found, militating strongly against the thesis that they were executed.[4]
Satellite image of alleged mass graves were presented by U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright at the UN several weeks after the alleged Srebrenica massacre. The problem is that proof of the mass graves has never been firmly established and Albright never made the photos available for public examination. [Source: nsarchive2.gwu.edu]
Another thing Scahil omits is that Muslim regiments under Naser Orić, commander of the Bosnian Army’s 29th Division, killed over 3,000 Serb soldiers and civilians from the Srebrenica area, including the town Mayor, before the Serb massacre took place.[5]
Naser Orić a U.S.-supported warlord who bragged about massacres of Serbs committed near Srebrenica. [Source: serbiamonitor.com ]
Scahill makes a point of contrasting Biden’s agitation for war in the Balkans with his opposition to the use of force in Haiti to restore populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power after he had been ousted in a right-wing coup, insinuating that Biden was less concerned about Haitians because they were black.
This is fine, but Scahill could have written more about the politicization of human rights and geostrategic imperatives driving U.S. military intervention in the 1990s.
Biden and DuPont
A principle flaw of “Empire Politician” is that it does not discuss political-economy and the corporate interests that drove Biden’s support for the U.S. empire.
Readers are not made aware of the structural forces that need to be overcome for the forever wars to end. Scahill leaves the impression that Biden’s shifting and mostly odious record is the result of his own misjudgments, rather an oligarchic political system, and that a better man in his position might have done better.
We know that Biden enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the MBNA credit card company and big banks in Delaware along with the DuPont Corporation, the infamous war profiteer and polluter which for decades ruled Delaware like a personal fiefdom.
Biden’s first Senate campaign in 1972 was staffed by DuPont employees, had its office on a road named after DuPont and celebrated its victory in the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel DuPont.
Subsequently, Biden employed a DuPont lawyer as a top adviser and DuPont engineer as Senate chief of Staff and later head of his presidential transition team.
From 1974-1996, Biden lived in the DuPont mansion in Wilmington.
Aerial view of the DuPont mansion in Wilmington which Biden lived in from 1974 until 1996. [Source: housebeautiful.com ]
During the 2020 election cycle, DuPont provided the Biden campaign with $95,729.
Biden further received donations from DuPont lobbyists and executives working for companies owned by the Du Pont family.[6]
In the early 1980s, Biden launched an investigation into Summit Aviation Corp., a Middletown, Delaware company owned by Richard “Kip” DuPont that ferried bombs and guns to the Nicaraguan Contras, a right-wing paramilitary group fighting the left-wing Sandinistas, but never released the findings.[7]
Biden’s job clearly was to help to cover up for criminal activities by a prominent DuPont family member in return for DuPont supporting Biden’s political career.
DuPont later benefited from Biden’s policies in the Middle East, a fast-growing market for DuPont which supplies products to the oil and gas industry, and in Ukraine where the company opened a seed plant to support “increased demand for Pioneer brand corn hybrids.”
Imperial Vice President
Like with Biden’s ties to large corporations, Scahill is weak in analyzing Biden’s record as Vice President.
While acknowledging Biden’s role in supporting drone strikes and covert military interventions in the Middle East, he fails to discuss his advancement of U.S. corporate interests in Central America and record as the Obama administration’s key point man on Iraq.
In that latter capacity, Biden forged close relations with Nouri al-Maliki, the “Shia Saddam,” who helped trigger the growth of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) by oppressing Iraq’s Sunni population.
Biden laughs with Nouri al-Maliki, the “Shia Saddam,” at a press conference in Baghdad in 2009. [Source: sandiegouniontribune.com]
Biden later helped install Haidar al-Abadi as Iraq’s president in an attempt to fulfill the long-standing U.S. ambition of privatizing Iraq’s oil industry, and oversaw the Third Iraq War, which was among the least transparent in modern U.S. history.
Journalists Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal determined that one in five of the 27,500 coalition air strikes over Iraq resulted in at least one civilian death, more than 31 times that acknowledged by the U.S. government.[8]
Scene from Mosul after its sacking by U.S.-coalition forces in 2016. [Source: time.com ]
Ukraine
The biggest elephant in the room is Ukraine.
Biden’s actions there during his Vice-Presidency were arguably the most unethical of his career and showed the maturation of a corrupt political figure.
Biden played a key role in supporting a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that brought to power a regime infiltrated by Neo-Nazis, and was a close confidante of post-coup president Petro Poroshenko, who presided over one of the most corrupt regimes in the world.
Biden enjoys a laugh with Petro Poroshenko, the most corrupt leader in Europe. [Source: covertactionmagazine.com ]
Biden further promoted expanded arms sales to the Ukrainian military while it carried out large-scale human rights atrocities in a dirty war in the East provoked by the coup.
Later Biden bragged about blackmailing Ukraine’s president to secure the firing of an honest Attorney General in order to protect a corrupt energy company, Burisma, which appointed his son Hunter to its board of directors—even though Hunter had no experience in the energy field.
New York Post feature story Biden and his son Hunter’s misdeeds in Ukraine, which Scahill ignores. [Source: nypost.com ]
Evidence has emerged that would indicate that Burisma was a CIA front, controlled by a warlord, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who used it to finance private militias that were relied upon to wage the war in the East.
None of this is mentioned in “Empire’s Politician.”
Besides Ukraine, Scahill fails to address Biden’s support for color revolutions in Eastern Europe that resulted in the overthrow of pro-Russian leaders, and his support for oppressive rulers like Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia (2004-2007; 2008-2013), who provoked a deadly war with Russia that Biden supported.
Saakashvili pins a medal on Biden in July 2009. [Source: facebook.com]
Pierre Omidyar and The Intercept’s Black Hole on Ukraine
Given the shortcomings in Scahill’s study, the question needs to be asked: is Scahill limited in his skills as a researcher and historian—merely a B or B+ level performer, or is he compromised by his work for The Intercept?
The Intercept was launched in 2014 with $50 million in seed money from Pierre Omidyar, the founder of e-bay and owner of PayPal, whom Forbes ranked as the 24th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $21.8 billion.
Pierre Omidyar [Source: usatoday.com ]
Journalists Max Blumenthal and Alec Rubinstein found that Omidyar has partnered closely with many of the U.S.-funded outfits that fulfill the role the CIA used to play during the Cold War in backing opposition media and civil society in countries targeted for regime change.
One of these countries is Ukraine. In 2011, Omidyar’s foundation, the Omidyar Network, gave $335,000 to “New Citizen,” an NGO that was mobilizing political support against Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown in the 2014 Maidan coup.
The head of New Citizen, Oleh Rybachuk, was a favorite of the State Department, DC neocons, the EU, and NATO—and the right-hand man to Viktor Yushchenko, who had led Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution against Yanukovych, which Biden supported.
Scene from Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. [Source: pinterest.com]
Before the Maidan Square protests, Rybachuk boasted that he was planning another “Orange revolution.”
Oleh Rybachuk [Source: kyivpost.com ]
In December 2013, The Financial Times reported that Rybachuk’s “New Citizen” NGO campaign “played a big role in getting the [Maidan Square] protest up and running.”
New Citizen, along with the rest of Rybachuk’s network of NGOs and campaigns—“Center UA,” which Omidyar’s network provided over $100,000 to in 2012, “Chesno,” and “Stop Censorship”—targeted pro-Yanukovych politicians in an anti-corruption campaign that built its strength in Ukraine’s regions, before massing in Kyiv.
Omidyar’s Network further funded a virulently anti-Russian Ukrainian internet TV station, Hromadske TV, which promoted anti-Yanukovych propaganda during the Maidan protests, and Rappler, another internet TV station that allied with U.S. interests.
Omidyar’s background and support for the Maidan coup could very well explain why The Intercept’s exposé of Joe Biden leaves out Ukraine, and why Scahill watered down his analysis by omitting any discussion of political-economy.
Repression, Censorship, and Ideological Homogeneity on the Left
The Intercept’s black hole with regards to the Ukraine was apparent in the saga of Glenn Greenwald, who resigned after senior editors refused to publish an article of his about Biden and Ukraine before the November 2020 election.
Greenwald was The Intercept’s other star reporter who had published the Snowden leaks and reported on the machinations in Brazil that led to the impeachment of leftist leader Dilma Rousseff and jailing of Lula.
In his resignation letter, Greenwald wrote that “the same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded [The Intercept], culminating in censorship of my own articles.”
In a very subtle way, did Scahill succumb to the censorship and enforcement of ideological homogeneity by limiting the scope of his investigation into Biden?
After writing a puff piece about U.S. bombardiers in World War II entitled Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team, famed author John Steinbeck wrote: “We were all part of the war effort… correspondents were not liars but it is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.”[9]
Scahill is a viable critic of the military, but it is in the things not mentioned—Ukraine, Burisma, Averell Harriman, Naser Orić, Mosul, the Shia Saddam, Camp Bondsteel, Petro Poroshenko, Alija Izetbegović, and Dupont—that the untruth lies.
- “Radislav Krstić becomes the first person to be convicted of genocide at the ICTY and is sentenced to 46 years imprisonment.” UN, ICTY Press Release, August 4, 2001, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/krstic/tjug/en/010802_Krstic_summary_en.pdf ↑
- https://www.icmp.int/press-releases/over-7000-srebrenica-victims-recovered/; David Rohde, “Denying Genocide in the Face of Science,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2015. ↑
- Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The ‘Srebrenica Massacre’ Turns Twenty Years Old,” Dissident Voice, August 5, 2015, https://dissidentvoice.org/2015/08/the-srebrenica-massacre-turns-20-years-old/ Military service records showed that 140 of the total had been killed in combat months or years before the fall of Srebrenica. Stefan Karganovic, Deconstruction of a Virtual Genocide (Srebrenica Project, 2011), 186. Some on the Red Cross’ missing list also turned up on voter rolls later on and could have been captured or killed in other battles. ↑
- See The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics, ed. Edward S. Herman (Evergreen Park, Illinois: Alphabet Soup, 2011); Karganovic, Deconstruction of a Virtual Genocide. ↑
- “The Fall of Srebrenica, July 1995, Bosnia’s Darkest Hour: Srebrenica: Background and Battle,” Clinton Presidential Library, Yugoslavia Genocide, Srebrenica, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/53013. Orić even bragged about killing 114 Serbs in one single incident. Scahill’s discussion of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is flawed because it omits its involvement in heroin trafficking and ties to Islamic extremism and fact that President Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, referred to them as a “terrorist organization” mere months before the bombing commenced. Scahill misinterprets the reasons why KLA leader Hashim Thaçi was indicted for war crimes; he was accused of criminal involvement in over 100 murders during the war. ↑
- For a critical history of DuPont, see Gerard Colby, Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1984). ↑
- Colby, Du Pont Dynasty, 14, 786, 787. According to an international arms dealer who knew a Summit executive, Summit planes were used by high-ranking members of the Thai military in northern Thailand to protect illegal drug operations along the Cambodian border and for counterinsurgency operations in the Vietnam War and to protect the illegal Southeast Asian heroin connection by which the CIA funded mercenaries. Some of its warplanes–including ones outfitted for spraying crop defoliants–were sold illegally to dictatorships in Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala and Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaragua in operations supported by Theodore Roosevelt III. DuPont may have further set up military training camps at his Maryland farm where there were reports of automatic weapons being fired. ↑
- See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press Inc., 2019), 178-181. ↑
- John Steinbeck, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 137. ↑
Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: jkuzmarov2@gmail.com.
Ten years on, Syria is almost destroyed. Who’s to blame?
Syria in ruins after ten years of conflict (File photo)
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 20, 2021
In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, the ruling pigs led by Napoleon constantly rewrote history in order to justify and reinforce their own continuing power. The rewriting by the western powers of the history of the ongoing conflict in Syria leaps out of Orwell.
The joint statement issued by the foreign ministers of the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy last week to mark the tenth anniversary of the Syrian conflict begins with an outright falsehood by holding President Bashar al-Assad and “his backers” responsible for the horrific events in that country. It asserts that the five western powers “will not abandon” the Syrian people — till death do us part.
The historical reality is that Syria has been a theatre of the CIA’s activities ever since the inception of that agency in 1947. There is a whole history of CIA-sponsored “regime change” projects in Syria ranging from coup attempts and assassination plots to paramilitary strikes and funding and military training of anti-government forces.
It all began with the bloodless military coup in 1949 against then Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli which was engineered by the CIA. As per the memoirs of Miles Copeland Jr, the CIA station chief in Damascus at that time — who later actually went on to write a fine book of high literary quality on the subject — the coup aimed at safeguarding Syria from the communist party and other radicals!
However, the CIA-installed colonel in power, Adib Shaishakli, was a bad choice. As Copeland put it, he was a “likeable rogue” alright who had not “to my certain knowledge, ever bowed down to a graven image. He had, however, committed sacrilege, blasphemy, murder, adultery and theft” to earn American support. He lasted for four years before overthrown by the Ba’ath Party and military officers. By 1955, CIA estimated that Syria was ripe for another military coup. By April 1956, a joint CIA-SIS (British Secret Intelligence Service) plot was implemented to mobilise right-wing Syrian military officers. But then, the Suez fiasco interrupted the project.
The CIA revived the project and plotted a second coup in 1957 under the codename Operation Wappen — again, to save Syria from communism — and even spent $3 million to bribe Syrian military officers. Tim Weiner, in his masterly 2008 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, writes:
“The president (Dwight Eisenhower) said he wanted to promote the idea of an Islamic jihad against godless communism. “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” he said at a 1957 White House meeting… (Secretary of state) Foster Dulles proposed a “secret task force,” under whose auspices the CIA would deliver American guns, money, and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, and President Nuri Said of Iraq.”
“These four mongrels were supposed to be our defence against communism and the extremes of Arab nationalism in the Middle East… If arms could not buy loyalty in the Middle East, the almighty dollar was still the CIA’s secret weapon. Cash for political warfare and power plays was always welcome. It could help an American imperium in Arab and Asian lands.”
But, as it happened, some of those “right-wing” officers instead turned in the bribe money and revealed the CIA plot to the Syrian intelligence. Whereupon, 3 CIA officers were kicked out of the American embassy in Damascus, forcing Washington to withdraw its ambassador in Damascus. With egg on its face, Washington promptly branded Syria as a “Soviet satellite”, deployed a fleet to the Mediterranean and incited Turkey to amass troops on the Syrian border. Dulles even contemplated a military strike under the so-called “Eisenhower Doctrine” as retaliation against Syria’s “provocations”. By the way, Britain’s MI6 was also working with the CIA in the failed coup attempt; the details came to light accidentally in 2003 among the papers of British Defence Minister Duncan Sandys many years after his death.
Now, coming down to current history, suffice to say that according to the WikiLeaks, since 2006, the US had been funding London-based Syrian dissidents, and the CIA unit responsible for covert operations was deployed to Syria to mobilise rebel groups and ascertain potential supply routes. The US is known to have trained at least 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion annually since 2012. President Barack Obama reportedly admitted to a group of senators the operation to insert these CIA-trained rebel fighters into Syria.
The well-known American investigative journalist and political writer Seymour Hersh has written, based on inputs from intelligence officers, that the CIA was already transferring arms from its Benghazi station (Libya) to Syria around that time. Make no mistake, Obama was the first world leader to openly call for the removal of Assad. That was in August 2011. Then CIA chief David Petraeus paid two unannounced visits to Turkey (in March and September 2012) to persuade Erdogan to step in as the flag carrier of the US’ regime change project in Syria (under the rubric of “anti-terror fight”.)
In fact, the US’ key allies in the Persian Gulf — Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE — took the cue from Obama to loosen their purse strings to recruit, finance and equip thousands of jihadi fighters to be deployed to Syria. Equally, from the early stages of the conflict in Syria, major western intelligence agencies provided political, military and logistic support to the Syrian opposition and its associated rebel groups in Syria.
Curiously, the Russian intervention in Syria in September 2015 was in response to an emergent imminent defeat of the Syrian government forces at the hands of the jihadi fighters backed by the US’ regional allies. Saudi Arabia withdrew from the arena only in 2017 after the tide of the war turned, thanks to the Russian intervention.
The joint statement issued last week by the US and its NATO allies belongs to the world of fiction. In reality, there is Syrian blood in the hands of these NATO countries (including Turkey) and the US’ Gulf allies. Look at the colossal destruction that the US has caused: in the World Bank’s estimation, a cumulative total of $226 billion in gross domestic product was lost to Syria due to the war from 2011 to 2016 alone.
The Syrian conflict has been among the most tragic and destructive conflicts of our time. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died, half a nation has been displaced, and millions have been forced into desperate poverty and hunger. In the UNHRC estimation, after ten years of conflict, half of the Syrian population has been forced to flee home, 70% are living in poverty, 6.7 million Syrians have been internally displaced, over 13 million people need humanitarian assistance and protection, 12.4 million people suffer from lack of food (or 60% of the entire population), 5.9 million people are experiencing a housing emergency and nearly nine in 10 Syrians are living below the poverty threshold.
And, come to think of it, Syria used to have one of the highest levels of social formation in the entire Muslim Middle East. It used to be a middle income country until the US decided to destabilise Syria. Ever since the late 1940s, the US’ successive regime change projects were driven by geopolitical considerations. The agenda is unmistakeable: the US has systematically destroyed the heart, soul and mind of “Arabism” — Iraq, Syria and Egypt — with a view to perpetuate the western [Zionist] domination of the Middle East.
Former President Donald Trump intended to withdraw the US troops from Syria and end the war. He tried twice, but Pentagon commanders sabotaged his plans. What Joe Biden proposes to do is anybody’s guess. Biden doesn’t seem to be in any rush to withdraw the US troops.
The most disturbing aspect is that the US is methodically facilitating a Balkanisation of Syria by helping the Kurdish groups aligned with it to carve out a semiautonomous enclave in the country’s northeast. In fact, the the Arab population in northeastern Syria resents being under the Kurds’ governance, and this may eventually turn into a new source of recruits for Islamic State. Meanwhile, Turkey seized the US-Kurdish axis as alibi to occupy vast territories in northern Syria.
The sad part of the joint statement by the US and its European allies is not only that it is rewriting history and spreading falsehood but conveys a sense of despair that there is no hope for light at the end of the tunnel in the Syrian conflict in a conceivable future.
The US policy in Syria is opaque. It has oscillated between aiming to prevent a resurgence of IS, confronting Iran, pushing back against Russia, providing humanitarian aid, and even protecting Israel, while the crux of the matter is that successive US administrations have failed to articulate a clear strategy and rationale for the US military presence in Syria.
CNN’s New “Reporter,” Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist
CNN’s new national security reporter Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and NBC News, with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Sept. 19, 2019
By Glenn Greenwald | April 27, 2021
The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world.
The classic case is Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote one of the most deceitful and destructive articles of his generation: a lengthy New Yorker article in May, 2002 — right as the propagandistic groundwork for the invasion of Iraq was being laid — that claimed Saddam Hussein had formed an alliance with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. In February, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, NPR host Robert Siegel devoted a long segment to this claim. When he asked Goldberg about “a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Goldberg replied: “He is one of several men who might personify a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
Needless to say, nothing could generate hatred for someone among the American population — just nine months away from the 9/11 attack — more than associating them with bin Laden. Five months after Goldberg’s New Yorker article, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of military force to impose regime change on Iraq; ten months later, the U.S. invaded Iraq; and by September, 2003, close to 70% of Americans believed the lie that Saddam had personally participated in the 9/11 attack.
Goldberg’s fabrication-driven article generated ample celebratory media attention and even prestigious journalism awards. It also led to great financial reward and career advancement. In 2007, The Atlantic‘s publisher David Bradley lured Goldberg away from The New Yorker by lavishing him with a huge signing bonus and even sent exotic horses to entertain Goldberg’s children. Goldberg is now the editor-in-chief of that magazine and thus one of the most influential figures in media. In other words, the person who wrote what is arguably the most disastrous article of that decade was one most rewarded by the industry — all because he served the aims of the U.S. security state and its war aims. That is how U.S. corporate journalism functions.
Another illustrative mascot for this lucrative career path is NBC’s national security correspondent Ken Dilanian. In 2014, his own former paper, The Los Angeles Times, acknowledged his “collaborative” relationship with the CIA. During his stint there, he mimicked false claims from John Brennan’s CIA that no innocent people were killed from a 2012 Obama drone strike, only for human rights groups and leaked documents to prove many were.
A FOIA request produced documents published by The Intercept in 2015 that showed Dilanian submitting his “reporting” to the CIA for approval in violation of The LA Times’ own ethical guidelines and then repeating what he was told to say. But again, serving the CIA even with false “reporting” and unethical behavior is a career benefit in corporate media, not an impediment, and Dilanian rapidly fell upward after these embarrassing revelations. He first went to Associated Press and then to NBC News, where he broadcast numerous false Russiagate scams including purporting to “independently confirm” CNN’s ultimately retracted bombshell that Donald Trump, Jr. obtained advance access to the 2016 WikiLeaks archive.
On Monday, CNN made clear that this dynamic still drives the corporate media world. The network proudly announced that it had hired Natasha Bertrand away from Politico. In doing so, they added to their stable of former CIA operatives, NSA spies, Pentagon Generals and FBI agents a reporter who has done as much as anyone, if not more so, to advance the scripts of those agencies.
Bertrand’s career began taking off when, while at Business Insider, she abandoned her obsession with Russia’s role in Syria in 2016 in order to monomaniacally fixate on every last conspiracy theory and gossip item that drove the Russiagate fraud during the 2016 campaign and then into the Trump presidency. Each month, Bertrand produced dozens of Russiagate articles for the site that were so unhinged that they made Rachel Maddow look sober, cautious and reliable.
In 2018, it was Jeffrey Goldberg himself — knowing a star CIA propagandist when he sees one — who gave Bertrand her first big break by hiring her away from Business Insider to cover Russiagate for The Atlantic. Shortly after, she joined the Queen of Russiagate conspiracies herself by becoming a national security analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. From there, it was onto Politico and now CNN : the ideal, rapid career climb that is the dream of every liberal security state servant calling themselves a journalist. Her final conspiratorial article for The Atlantic before moving to Politico is the perfect illustration of who and what she is:
CNN’s new national security star was no ordinary Russiagate fanatic. There was no conspiracy theory too unhinged or evidence-free for her to promote. As The Washington Post‘s media reporter Erik Wemple documented once the Steele Dossier was debunked, there was arguably nobody in media other than Rachel Maddow who promoted and ratified that hoax as aggressively, uncritically and persistently as Bertrand. She defended it even after the Mueller Report corroborated virtually none of its key claims.
In a February, 2020 article headlined “How Politico’s Natasha Bertrand bootstrapped dossier credulity into MSNBC gig,” Wemple described how she was rewarded over and over for “journalism” that would be regarded in any healthy profession with nothing but scorn:
Where there’s a report on Russian meddling, there’s an MSNBC segment waiting to be taped. Last Thursday night, MSNBC host Joy Reid — subbing for “All In” host Chris Hayes — turned to Politico national security reporter Natasha Bertrand with a question about whether Trump “wants” Russian meddling or whether he can’t accept that “foreign help is there.“ Bertrand responded: “We don’t have the reporting that suggests that the president has told aides, for example, that he really wants Russia to interfere because he thinks that it’s going to help him, right?”
No, we don’t have that reporting — though there’s no prohibition against fantasizing about it on national television. Such is the theme of Bertrand’s commentary during previous coverage of Russian interference, specifically the dossier of memos drawn up by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. With winks and nods from MSNBC hosts, Bertrand heaped credibility on the dossier — which was published in full by BuzzFeed News in January 2017 — in repeated television appearances.
Wemple systematically reviewed the mountain of speculation, unproven conspiracies and outright falsehoods Bertrand shoveled to the public as she was repeatedly promoted. But it was the document that gave us deranged delusions about pee-pee tape blackmail and Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague that was her crown jewel: “The Bertrand highlight reel features a great deal of thumb-on-scale speculation regarding the dossier,” Wemple wrote.
And when information started being declassified that proved much of Bertrand’s claims about collusion to be a fraud, she complained that there was too much transparency, implying that the Trump administration was harming national security by allowing the public to know too much — namely, allowing the public to see that her reporting was a fraud. A journalist who complains about too much transparency is like a cardiologist who complains that a patient has stopped smoking cigarettes, or like a journalist who voluntarily rats out her own source to the FBI or who agitates for censorship of political speech: a walking negation of the professional values they are supposed to uphold. But that is Natasha Bertrand, and, to the extent that there are some people who still believe that working at CNN is desirable, she was just rewarded for it again yesterday — just as journalists who rat out their own sources to the FBI and advocate for internet censorship are now celebrated in today’s rotted media climate.
Bertrand’s trail of journalistic scandals and recklessness extend well beyond her Russiagate conspiracies. Last October, she published an article in Politico strongly implying that Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was speaking without authorization or any evidence when he said Iran was attempting to undermine President Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. But last month, the Biden administration declassified an intelligence report which said they had “high confidence” that Iran had done exactly what Ratcliffe alleged: namely, run an influence campaign to hurt Trump’s candidacy. A former national security official, Cliff Sims, said upon hearing of CNN’s hiring that he explicitly warned Bertrand’s editors that the story was false but they chose to publish it anyway.
It was also Bertrand who most effectively laundered the extremely significant CIA lie in October, 2020 that the documents obtained by The New York Post about the Biden family’s business dealings in China and Ukraine were “Russian disinformation.” Even though the John-Brennan-led former intelligence officials admitted from the start that they had no evidence for this claim, Bertrand not only amplified it but vouched for its credibility by writing that the Post‘s reporting “has drawn comparisons to 2016, when Russian hackers dumped troves of emails from Democrats onto the internet — producing few damaging revelations but fueling accusations of corruption by Trump” (that those 2016 DNC and Podesta documents produced “few damaging revelations” would come as a big surprise to the five DNC operatives, led by Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who were forced to resign when their pro-Hillary cheating was revealed).
It was this Politico article by Bertrand that was then used by Facebook and Twitter to justify their joint censorship of the Post‘s reporting in the weeks before the 2020 election, and numerous media outlets — including The Intercept — gullibly told their readers to ignore the revelations on the ground that these authentic documents were “Russian disinformation.” Yet once it did its job of helping defeat Trump, that claim was debunked when even the intelligence community acknowledged it had no evidence of Russian involvement in the appearance of these materials, and Hunter Biden himself admitted he was the subject of a federal investigation for the transactions revealed by those documents.
Politico, Oct. 19, 2020
But even when her fantasies and conspiracies are debunked, Bertrand — like a good intelligence soldier — never cedes any ground in her propaganda campaigns. She was, needless to say, one of the journalists who most vocally promoted the CIA’s story — published as Trump was announcing his plans to withdraw from Afghanistan — that Russia had paid bounties to the Taliban for the death of U.S. soldiers. Yet even when the U.S. intelligence community under Joe Biden admitted last week that it has only “low to moderate” confidence that this even happened — with the NSA and other surveillance agencies saying it could find no evidence to corroborate the CIA’s story — she continued to insist that nothing had changed with the story, denying last week on a Mediaite podcast that anything had happened to cast doubt on the original story: “I think it’s much more nuanced than it being a walk-back. I don’t think that’s right actually.”
Even a cursory review of Bertrand’s prolific output reveals an endless array of gossip, conspiracy and speculative assertions masquerading as journalism. The commentator Luke Thomas detailed many of these transgressions on Monday and correctly observed that “arguably no single reporter has contributed more to the deranged and paranoid national security fantasies of the center-left than Natasha Bertrand. She’s an embarrassment to her profession and will, therefore, fit right in at CNN.”
As Thomas noted, beyond all of Bertrand’s well-documented and consequential propaganda, “she sees conspiracies and perfidiousness around every corner,” pointing to this demented yet highly viral tweet that deciphered comments from former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) as inadvertently revealing some secret scheme to expand Trump’s pardon powers. That scheme, like most of her speculative predictions, never materialized.
Then there is her garden-variety ethical scandal. In January, freelancer Dean Sterling Jones accused Bertrand of stealing his work without credit or payment. In a post he published, Jones documented how he emailed Bertrand a draft with reporting he had been working on, and in response she agreed to report it jointly with him on a co-byline. Yet two weeks later, the article appeared in The Atlantic with Bertrand as the only named reporter. Only after Jones complained did they insert a sentence into the story begrudgingly citing him as a source. “By my count,” Jones wrote, “Bertrand’s article contains at least six unequivocal examples of direct copying and revisions of my work.” When he published his post detailing his accusations, Bertrand arrogantly refused even to provide comment to the freelancer whose work she pilfered.
Natasha Bertrand has spent the last five years working as a spokesperson for the alliance composed of the CIA and the Democratic Party, spreading every unvetted and unproven conspiracy theory about Russiagate that they fed her. The more loyally she performed that propagandistic function, the more rapidly she was promoted and rewarded. Now she arrives at her latest destination: CNN, not only Russiagate Central along with MSNBC but also the home to countless ex-operatives of the security state agencies on whose behalf Bertrand speaks.
Once again we see the two key truths of modern corporate journalism in the U.S. First, we have the Jeffrey Goldberg Principle: you can never go wrong, but only right, by disseminating lies and propaganda from the CIA. Second, the organs that spread the most disinformation and crave disinformation agents as their employees are the very same ones who demand censorship of the internet in the name of stopping disinformation.
I’ve long said that if you want to understand how to thrive in this part of the media world, you should study the career advancement of Jeffrey Goldberg, propelled by one reckless act after the next. But now the sequel to the Goldberg Rise is the thriving career of this new CNN reporter whose value as a CIA propagandist Goldberg, notably, was the first to spot and reward.
Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One
By Glenn Greenwald | April 16, 2021
That Russia placed “bounties” on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was one of the most-discussed and consequential news stories of 2020. It was also, as it turns out, one of the most baseless — as the intelligence agencies who spread it through their media spokespeople now admit, largely because the tale has fulfilled and outlived its purpose.
The saga began on June 26, 2020, when The New York Times announced that unnamed “American intelligence officials” have concluded that “a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.” The paper called it “a significant and provocative escalation” by Russia. Though no evidence was ever presented to support the CIA’s claims — neither in that original story nor in any reporting since — most U.S. media outlets blindly believed it and spent weeks if not longer treating it as proven, highly significant truth. Leading politicians from both parties similarly used this emotional storyline to advance multiple agendas.
The story appeared — coincidentally or otherwise — just weeks after President Trump announced his plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020. Pro-war members of Congress from both parties and liberal hawks in corporate media spent weeks weaponizing this story to accuse Trump of appeasing Putin by leaving Afghanistan and being too scared to punish the Kremlin. Cable outlets and the op-ed pages of The New York Times and Washington Post endlessly discussed the grave implications of this Russian treachery and debated which severe retaliation was needed. “This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Then-candidate Joe Biden said Trump’s refusal to punish Russia and his casting doubt on the truth of the story was more proof that Trump’s “entire presidency has been a gift to Putin,” while Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) demanded that, in response, the U.S. put Russians and Afghans “in body bags.”
What was missing from this media orgy of indignation and militaristic demands for retaliation was an iota of questioning of whether the story was, in fact, true. All they had was an anonymous leak from “intelligence officials” — which The New York Times on Thursday admitted came from the CIA — but that was all they needed. That is because the vast majority of the corporate sector of the press lives under one overarching rule:
When the CIA or related security state agencies tell American journalists to believe something, we obey unquestioningly, and as a result, whatever assertions are spread by these agencies, no matter how bereft of evidence or shielded by accountability-free anonymity, they instantly transform, in our government-worshipping worldview, into a proven fact — gospel — never to be questioned but only affirmed and then repeated and spread as far and wide as possible.
That has been the dynamic driving the relationship between the corporate press and the CIA for decades, throughout the Cold War and then into the post-9/11 War on Terror and invasion of Iraq. But it has become so much more extreme in the Trump era. As the CIA became one of the leading anti-Trump #Resistance factions — a key player in domestic politics to subvert the presidency of the 45th President regarded by media figures as a Hitler-type menace — the bond between the corporate press and the intelligence community deepened more than ever. It is not an exaggeration to call it a merger: so much so that a parade of former security state officials from the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS and others was hired by these news outlets to deliver the news. The partnership was no longer clandestine but official, out in the open, and proud.
John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price, Rick Francona…
Also Michael Morell, John McLaughlin, John Sipher, Thomas Bossert, Clint Watts, James Baker, Mike Baker, Daniel Hoffman, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, David Preiss, Evelyn Farkas, Tony Blinken, Mike Rogers, “Alex Finley,” Malcolm Nance…
The first goal this story served was to weaponize it in the battle waged by pro-war House Democrats and their neocon GOP allies to stop Trump’s withdrawal plan from Afghanistan. How, they began demanding upon publication of the CIA/NYT story, can we possibly leave Afghanistan when the Russians are trying to kill our troops? Would that not be a reckless abdication to the Kremlin of this country that we own, and would withdrawal not be a reward to Putin after we learned he was engaged in such dastardly plotting to kill our sons and daughters?
In late June, this alliance of pro-war House Democrats — funded overwhelmingly by military contractors — and the Liz-Cheney-led neocon wing announced amendments to the military budget authorization process that would defund Trump’s efforts to withdraw troops from either Afghanistan or Germany (where they had been stationed for decades to defend Western Europe against a country, the Soviet Union, that ceased to exist decades ago). They instantly weaponized the NYT/CIA story as their primary argument.
The record-breaking $740 billion military budget was scheduled to be approved by the House Armed Services Committee in early July. In a joint statement with Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) on June 29 — the day the NYT story appeared — Liz Cheney proclaimed that “we remain concerned about Russian activity in Afghanistan, including reports that they have targeted U.S. forces.” One of the Democrats’ most pro-war House members, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), announced on July 1 (three days after the NYT story) his own amendment to block any troop withdrawal from Germany, citing “increasing Russian aggression.”
On July 1 and 2, the House Armed Services Committee held its hearings and votes — I watched all fourteen hours and reported on it in a series of articles and a 90-minute video report — and it not only approved this massive military budget but also both amendments to bar troop withdrawal. Over and over, the union of pro-war Democrats and Cheney-led neocon Republicans steamrolled the anti-war faction of left-wing and right-wing war opponents (led by Congressmembers Ro Khanna (D-CA), Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL)), and repeatedly used the Russia bounty story to justify continuation of the longest war in America’s history. This little speech from Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) was illustrative of how this CIA story was used all day:
The U.S. media was somehow more militaristic and blindly trusting about this CIA story than even this pro-war union of lawmakers. That the CIA’s leaked claim to The New York Times should even be questioned at all — given that it was leaked anonymously and was accompanied by exactly zero evidence — is not something that even crossed their journalistic minds.
These people who call themselves “journalists” do not view pronouncements from the U.S. security state as something that prompts skepticism let alone requires evidence before believing. The officials who run those agencies are their friends, partners and colleagues — those they most revere — and their every utterance is treated as Gospel. If — after watching them behave this way the last five years without pause — you think that is an exaggeration, watch this short video compilation produced by The Daily Caller to see for yourself how they instantly converted this CIA “Russia bounty” leak into proven fact that nobody, least of all them, should question:
As usual, the media figure most loudly and dramatically enshrining the CIA leak about Russia as Proven Truth was the undisputed Queen of demented conspiracy theories, jingoistic rhetoric, and CIA propaganda: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
Over and over, she devoted melodramatic segments to denouncing the unparalleled evil of Russian treachery in Afghanistan (because the U.S. would never pay bounties to kill Russian soldiers in Afghanistan), at no point pausing her histrionics for even a second or two to wonder whether evidence ought to be presented before telling the millions of #Resistance liberals who watch her show that she is vouching for the truth of this story.
Predictably, now that this CIA tale has served its purpose (namely, preventing Trump from leaving Afghanistan), and now that its enduring effects are impeding the Biden administration (which wants to leave Afghanistan and so needs to get rid of this story), the U.S. Government is now admitting that — surprise! — they had no convincing evidence for this story all along.
The Daily Beast on Thursday was the first to notice that “the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had ‘low to moderate’ confidence in the story after all.” The outlet added: “that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.” The Guardian also reported that “US intelligence agencies have only ‘low to moderate confidence’ in reports last year that Russian spies were offering Taliban militants in Afghanistan bounties for killing US soldiers.” NBC News went even further, citing Biden’s campaign attacks on Trump for failing to punish Putin for these bounties, and noting: “Such a definitive statement was questionable even then…. They still have not found any evidence, a senior defense official said Thursday.”
What made this admission particularly bizarre — aside from rendering weeks of decrees from media figures and politicians humiliatingly reckless and baseless — is that the Biden administration continued to assert this claim as truth as recently as Thursday. When announcing new sanctions aimed at Moscow and diplomatic expulsions of Russian diplomats — primarily in response to allegations of Russian hacking — the White House said “it was responding to reports that Russia encouraged Taliban fighters to injure or kill coalition forces in Afghanistan.” The official White House announcement of the retaliation said explicitly that “the Administration is responding to the reports that Russia encouraged Taliban attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel in Afghanistan based on the best assessments from the Intelligence Community (IC)” — a claim for which the IC itself admits it has only “low to moderate confidence” is even true.
When asked about this glaring contradiction yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave an answer that barely rose to the level of cogency, yet she clearly admitted the lack of evidentiary basis for this long-standing CIA/media tale:
That there is no evidence for this media-laundered CIA story is not something we learned only yesterday. It has been obvious for many months. In September, NBC News — as Maddow was in the midst of her performative sadness and indignation over the story on its cable network — noted:
Two months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian government bribed the Taliban to kill American service members, the commander of troops in the region says a detailed review of all available intelligence has not been able to corroborate the existence of such a program.
“It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. continues to hunt for new information on the matter, he said.
“We continue to look for that evidence,” the general said. “I just haven’t seen it yet.
That was what made the refusal to question this story all along so maddening. Not only was no evidence presented to support the CIA’s assertions — something that, by itself, should have prevented every real journalist from endorsing its truth — but commanders in Afghanistan were saying months ago they could not find convincing evidence for it. That is what The Daily Beast meant in Thursday’s report when it said “there were reasons to doubt the story from the start” — not just the lack of evidence but also that “the initial stories emphasize[d] its basis on detainee reporting” and “the bounties represented a qualitative shift in recent Russian engagements with Afghan insurgents.” NBC News on Thursday also said that “such a definitive statement was questionable even then.”
But these doubts were virtually non-existent in most media reports. Indeed, one of the New York Times reporters who broke the story publicly attacked me as a conspiracy theorist back in September when I cited that NBC News story about the lack of evidence while pointing out what a crucial role this uncorroborated story played in stopping troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and claiming Trump was beholden to Putin. And while The Daily Beast on Thursday said there were reasons to doubt the story from the start, that same outlet was one of the most vocal and aggressive in pushing the story as true:
Even worse, other media outlets — led by The Washington Post — purported to have “independently confirmed” the NYT/CIA tale of Russian bounties. Twice in the last year, I have written about this bizarre practice where media outlets purport to “independently confirm” one another’s false stories by doing nothing more than going to the same anonymous sources who whisper to them the same things while providing no evidence. Yet they use this phrase “independent confirmation” to purposely imply that they obtained separate evidence corroborating the truth of the original story:
We have confirmed the @nytimes scoop: A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan. From @nakashimae @missy_ryan me and @shaneharris
For months, pro-war members of both parties and leading members of the NYT/CNN/MSNBC media axis pushed a story — an inflammatory, dangerous one — based on nothing more than the say-so of anonymous CIA operatives. How can anyone do this who knows even the bare minimum about what this agency does and what its function is: to spread disinformation not just to foreign countries but the domestic population as well? It is both mystifying and toxic. But for people who call themselves “journalists” to repeat, over and over, evidence-free CIA claims, telling those who trust them to believe it, is nothing short of repulsive.
If you think that, upon learning yesterday’s news, there was any self-reflection on the part of the media figures who spread this, or that they felt chastened about it in any way, you would be very, very wrong. In fact, not only did few if any admit error, but they did exactly the same thing on Thursday about a brand new evidence-free assertion from the U.S. Government concerning Russia: they mindlessly assumed it true and then stated it to millions of people as fact. They are not embarrassed to get caught spreading false CIA propaganda. They see their role, correctly, as doing exactly that.
On Thursday, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, run by Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, issued a short Press Release about its targeting of Russian-Ukrainian political consultant, Konstantin Kilimnik, with new sanctions. One sentence of this press release asserted a claim that the Mueller investigation, after searching for eighteen months, never found: namely, that “Kilimnik provided the Russia intelligence services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” that he received from then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Is it true that Kilimnik passed this polling data to the Kremlin? Maybe. But there is no way for a rational person — let alone someone calling themselves a “journalist” — to conclude that it is true. Why? Because, like the CIA tale about Russian bounties — a claim they learned yesterday had no evidence — this is nothing more than a U.S. Government assertion that lacks any evidence.
Do you think journalists learned the lesson that they just had rubbed in their faces hours before about the foolishness of assuming official statements to be true with no evidence? Of course that is a rhetorical question: too many to count instantly proclaimed that this story was true without spending an ounce of mental energy to question if it was or apply any skepticism. Here’s Maddow’s MSNBC comrade showing how this is done:
Do you see what Hayes just did there? It is vital not to lose sight of how irresponsible and destructive this behavior is just because it is now so common. He saw a Press Release from a U.S. Government agency, read an assertion that it contained in one sentence, had no evidence that this assertion was true, but nonetheless “reported” it as if it were proven fact to millions of people in a predictably viral tweet.
Hayes was far from alone. I cannot count how many employees of corporate media outlets did the same: read the Treasury Department’s Press Release and, without pausing for a second, proclaimed it to be true. Indeed, the two MSNBC hosts who follow Hayes’s nightly news program explicitly described this evidence-free Press Release as “confirmation”— confirmation!
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell celebrating an evidence-free Treasury Department Press Release as “confirmation,” Apr. 15, 2021
Let’s set aside the absurdity of treating this as some shocking revelation even if it were true. Just like the oozing historical ignorance of pretending that there would be something astonishing about Russians paying for the killing of U.S. troops in Afghanistan when the CIA just last week explicitly boasted of having done the same to Russian soldiers in Afghanistan, what is this Treasury Press Release supposed to prove that is so breathtaking and scandalous: that the Kremlin could not possibly have obtained polling data about the U.S. electorate had Manafort not provided it to them? That they never would have known that Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were swing states without an elaborate plot of collusion to learn this from the Trump campaign?
But the far more important point is the U.S. media’s willingness — their subservient eagerness — to obediently treat U.S. government pronouncements as Truth. Just like with the Russia bounty story, where there were ample reasons to doubt it from the start, the same is true of this Treasury Press Release. To begin with, if this were such a smoking gun “confirming” collusion, why did the Mueller investigation after eighteen months of highly aggressive subpoena-driven investigative activity not discover it?
Let’s express this as clearly as it can be expressed. Any journalist who treats unverified stories from the CIA or other government agencies as true, without needing any evidence or applying any skepticism, is worthless. Actually, they are worse than worthless: they are toxic influences who deserve pure contempt. Every journalist knows that governments lie constantly and that it is a betrayal of their profession to serve as mindless mouthpieces for these security agencies: that is why they will vehemently deny they do this if you confront them with this accusation. They know it is a shameful thing to do.
But just look at what they are doing: exactly this. These are not journalists. They are obsequious spokespeople for the CIA and other official authorities. Even when they learn that they deceived millions of people by uncritically repeating a story that the CIA told them was true, they will — on the very same day that they learn they did this — do exactly the same thing, this time with a one-paragraph Treasury Department Press Release. These are agents of disinformation: state media. And when they speak, you should listen to them with the knowledge of what they really are, and treat them accordingly.
Denying the Demonic
By Edward Curtin | April 16, 2021
… I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real. Is that a right-wing question? Of course not. It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.
I do think we are today in the grip of radical evil, demonic forces. The refusal to see and accept this is not new. As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.
I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers. When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense. A religious sense, if you prefer. But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.
It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow. But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.
So let me begin with a few reminders.
The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003. Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc. But who will say it was pure evil?
Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?
Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?
Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?
Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?
Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?
Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?
Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?
Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?
This list could extend down the page endlessly. Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.
If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering. They are overwhelming in their implications.
But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things. I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons. First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility. It elicits feelings of guilt. Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast they the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so. Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.
So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored. Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.
There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed devastating lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devasted vast numbers, etc. Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise. It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.
It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of conspirators have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites. They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die. Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.
Is this not radical evil? Demonic?
Let me end with an analogy. There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency. One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975. He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA. Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc. The stuff they did for Hitler. As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento. He confessed:
He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice. ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.’ He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said. ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’ Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’
Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost. We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world. Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.
Resist.
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Aaron Siri’s Book: Vaccines, Amen
By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026
For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.
Aaron Siri makes it clear in Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines that the story we’ve been told about vaccine science rests far more on belief than proof.
“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.
I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.
Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”
And he does. … continue
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