Israel’s Ploy Selling a Syrian Nuke Strike
By Gareth Porter | Consortium News | November 18, 2017
In September 2007, Israeli warplanes bombed a building in eastern Syria that the Israelis claimed held a covert nuclear reactor that had been built with North Korean assistance. Seven months later, the CIA released an extraordinary 11-minute video and mounted press and Congressional briefings that supported that claim.
Supposed Syrian nuclear site before and after Israeli airstrike
But nothing about that alleged reactor in the Syrian desert turns out to be what it appeared at the time. The evidence now available shows that there was no such nuclear reactor, and that the Israelis had misled George W. Bush’s administration into believing that it was in order to draw the United States into bombing missile storage sites in Syria. Other evidence now suggests, moreover, that the Syrian government had led the Israelis to believe wrongly that it was a key storage site for Hezbollah missiles and rockets.
The International Atomic Agency’s top specialist on North Korean reactors, Egyptian national Yousry Abushady, warned top IAEA officials in 2008 that the published CIA claims about the alleged reactor in the Syrian desert could not possibly have been true. In a series of interviews in Vienna and by phone and e-mail exchanges over several months Abushady detailed the technical evidence that led him to issue that warning and to be even more confident about that judgment later on. And a retired nuclear engineer and research scientist with many years of experience at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has confirmed a crucial element of that technical evidence.
Published revelations by senior Bush administration officials show, moreover, that principal U.S. figures in the story all had their own political motives for supporting the Israeli claim of a Syrian reactor being built with North Korean help.
Vice President Dick Cheney hoped to use the alleged reactor to get President George W. Bush to initiate U.S. airstrikes in Syria in the hope of shaking the Syrian-Iranian alliance. And both Cheney and then CIA Director Michael Hayden also hoped to use the story of a North Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria to kill a deal that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was negotiating with North Korea on its nuclear weapons program in 2007-08.
Mossad Chief’s Dramatic Evidence
In April 2007 the chief of Israel’s Mossad foreign intelligence agency, Meir Dagan, presented Cheney, Hayden and National Security Adviser Steven Hadley with evidence of what he said was a nuclear reactor being constructed in eastern Syria with the help of the North Koreans. Dagan showed them nearly a hundred hand-held photographs of the site revealing what he described as the preparation for the installation of a North Korean reactor and claimed that it was only a few months from being operational.
The Israelis made no secret of their desire to have a U.S. airstrike destroy the alleged nuclear facility. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called President Bush immediately after that briefing and said, “George, I’m asking you to bomb the compound,” according to the account in Bush’s memoirs.
Cheney, who was known to be a personal friend of Olmert, wanted to go further. At White House meetings in subsequent weeks, Cheney argued forcefully for a U.S. attack not only on the purported reactor building but on Hezbollah weapons storage depots in Syria. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who participated in those meetings, recalled in his own memoirs that Cheney, who was also looking for an opportunity to provoke a war with Iran, hoped to “rattle Assad sufficiently so as to end his close relationship with Iran” and “send a powerful warning to the Iranians to abandon their nuclear ambitions.”
CIA Director Hayden aligned the agency clearly with Cheney on the issue, not because of Syria or Iran but because of North Korea. In his book, Playing to the Edge, published last year, Hayden recalls that, at a White House meeting to brief President Bush the day after Dagan’s visit, he whispered in Cheney’s ear, “You were right, Mr. Vice-President.”
Hayden was referring to the fierce political struggle within the Bush administration over North Korea policy that had been underway ever since Condoleezza Rice had become Secretary of State in early 2005. Rice had argued that diplomacy was the only realistic way to get Pyongyang to retreat from its nuclear weapons program. But Cheney and his administration allies John Bolton and Robert Joseph (who succeeded Bolton as the key State Department policymaker on North Korea after Bolton became U.N. Ambassador in 2005) were determined to end the diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang.
Cheney was still maneuvering to find a way to prevent the successful completion of the negotiations, and he saw the story of a Syrian nuclear reactor built secretly in the desert with help from the North Koreans as bolstering his case. Cheney reveals in his own memoirs that in January 2008, he sought to sandbag Rice’s North Korea nuclear deal by getting her to agree that a failure by North Korea to “admit they’ve proliferating to the Syrians would be a deal killer.”
Three months later, the CIA released its unprecedented 11-minute video supporting the entire Israeli case for a North-Korean-style nuclear reactor that was nearly completed. Hayden recalls that his decision to release the video on the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor in April 2008 was “to avoid a North Korean nuclear deal being sold to a Congress and a public ignorant of this very pertinent and very recent episode.”
The video, complete with computer reconstructions of the building and photographs from the Israelis made a big splash in the news media. But one specialist on nuclear reactors who examined the video closely found abundant reason to conclude that the CIA’s case was not based on real evidence.
Technical Evidence against a Reactor
Egyptian national Yousry Abushady was a PhD in nuclear engineering and 23-year veteran of the IAEA who had been promoted to section head for Western Europe in the operations division of agency’s Safeguards Department, meaning that he was in charge of all inspections of nuclear facilities in the region. He had been a trusted adviser to Bruno Pellaud, IAEA Deputy Director General for Safeguards from 1993 to 1999, who told this writer in an interview that he had “relied on Abushady frequently.”
Abushady recalled in an interview that, after spending many hours reviewing the video released by the CIA in April 2008 frame by frame, he was certain that the CIA case for a nuclear reactor at al-Kibar in the desert in eastern Syria was not plausible for multiple technical reasons. The Israelis and the CIA had claimed the alleged reactor was modeled on the type of reactor the North Koreans had installed at Yongbyon called a gas-cooled graphite-moderated (GCGM) reactor.
But Abushady knew that kind of reactor better than anyone else at the IAEA. He had designed a GCGM reactor for his doctoral student in nuclear engineering, had begun evaluating the Yongbyon reactor in 1993, and from 1999 to 2003 had headed the Safeguards Department unit responsible for North Korea.
Abushady had traveled to North Korea 15 times and conducted extensive technical discussions with the North Korean nuclear engineers who had designed and operated the Yongbyon reactor. And the evidence he saw in the video convinced him that no such reactor could have been under construction at al-Kibar.
On April 26, 2008, Abushady sent a “preliminary technical assessment” of the video to IAEA Deputy Director General for Safeguards Olli Heinonen, with a copy to Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. Abushady observed in his memorandum that the person responsible for assembling the CIA video was obviously unfamiliar with either the North Korean reactor or with GCGM reactors in general.
The first thing that struck Abushady about the CIA’s claims was that the building was too short to hold a reactor like the one in Yongbyon, North Korea.
“It is obvious,” he wrote in his “technical assessment” memo to Heinonen, “that the Syrian building with no UG [underground] construction, can not hold a [reactor] similar [to] NK GCR [North Korean gas-cooled reactor].”
Abushady estimated the height of the North Korean reactor building in Yongbyon at a 50 meters (165 feet) and estimated that the building at al-Kibar at a little more than a third as tall.
Abushady also found the observable characteristics of the al-Kibar site inconsistent with the most basic technical requirements for a GCGM reactor. He pointed out that the Yongbyon reactor had no less than 20 supporting buildings on the site, whereas the satellite imagery shows that the Syrian site did not have a single significant supporting structure.
The most telling indication of all for Abushady that the building could not have been a GCGM reactor was the absence of a cooling tower to reduce the temperature of the carbon dioxide gas coolant in such a reactor.
“How can you work a gas-cooled reactor in a desert without a cooling tower?” Abushady asked in an interview.
IAEA Deputy Director Heinonen claimed in an IAEA report that the site had sufficient pumping power to get river water from a pump house on the nearby Euphrates River to the site. But Abushady recalls asking Heinonen, “How could this water be transferred for about 1,000 meters and continue to the heat exchangers for cooling with the same power?”
Robert Kelley, a former head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Remote Sensing Laboratory and former senior IAEA inspector in Iraq, noticed another fundamental problem with Heinonen’s claim: the site had no facility for treating the river water before it reached the alleged reactor building.
“That river water would have been carrying debris and silt into the reactor heat exchangers,” Kelley said in an interview, making it highly questionable that a reactor could have operated there.
Yet another critical piece that Abushady found missing from the site was a cooling pond facility for spent fuel. The CIA had theorized that the reactor building itself contained a “spent fuel pond,” based on nothing more than an ambiguous shape in an aerial photograph of the bombed building.
But the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon and all 28 other GCGM reactors that had been built in the world all have the spent fuel pond in a separate building, Abushady said. The reason, he explained, was that the magnox cladding surrounding the fuel rods would react to any contact with moisture to produce hydrogen that could explode.
But the definitive and irrefutable proof that no GCGM reactor had been present at al-Kibar came from the environmental samples taken by the IAEA at the site in June 2008. Such a reactor would have contained nuclear-grade graphite, Abushady explained, and if the Israelis had actually bombed a GCGM reactor, it would have spread particles of nuclear-grade graphite all over the site.
Behrad Nakhai, a nuclear engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for many years, confirmed Abshuady’s observation in an interview. “You would have had hundreds of tons of nuclear-grade graphite scattered around the site,” he said, “and it would have been impossible to clean it up.”
IAEA reports remained silent for more than two years about what the samples showed about nuclear-grade graphite, then claimed in a May 2011 report that the graphite particles were “too small to permit an analysis of the purity compared to that normally required for use in a reactor.” But given the tools available to laboratories, the IAEA claim that they couldn’t determine whether the particles were nuclear grade or not “doesn’t make sense,” Nakhai said.
Hayden acknowledged in his 2016 account that “key components” of a nuclear reactor site for nuclear weapons were “still missing.” The CIA had tried to find evidence of a reprocessing facility in Syria that could be used to obtain the plutonium for a nuclear bomb but had been unable to find any trace of one.
The CIA also had found no evidence of a fuel fabrication facility, without which a reactor could not have gotten the fuel rods to be reprocessed. Syria could not have gotten them from North Korea, because the fuel fabrication plant at Yongbyon had produced no fuel rods since 1994 and was known to have fallen into serious disrepair after the regime had agreed to scrap its own plutonium reactor program.
Manipulated and Misleading Photographs
Hayden’s account shows that he was ready to give the CIA’s stamp of approval to the Israeli photographs even before the agency’s analysts had even begun analyzing them. He admits that when he met Dagan face-to-face he didn’t ask how and when Mossad had obtained the photographs, citing “espionage protocol” among cooperating intelligence partners. Such a protocol would hardly apply, however, to a government sharing intelligence in order to get the United States to carry out an act of war on its behalf.
The CIA video relied heavily on the photographs that Mossad had given to Bush administration in making its case. Hayden writes that it was “pretty convincing stuff, if we could be confident that the pictures hadn’t been altered.”
But by his own account Hayden knew Mossad had engaged in at least one deception. He writes that when CIA experts reviewed the photographs from Mossad, they found that one of them had been photo-shopped to remove the writing on the side of a truck.
Hayden professes to have had no concern about that photo-shopped picture. But after this writer asked how CIA analysts interpreted Mossad’s photo shopping of the picture as one of the questions his staff requested in advance of a possible interview with Hayden, he declined the interview.
Abushady points out that the main issues with the photographs the CIA released publicly are whether they were actually taken at the al-Kibar site and whether they were consistent with a GCGM reactor. One of the photographs showed what the CIA video called “the steel liner for the reinforced-concrete reactor vessel before it was installed.” Abushady noticed immediately, however, that nothing in the picture links the steel liner to the al-Kibar site.
Both the video and CIA’s press briefing explained that the network of small pipes on the outside of the structure was for “cooling water to protect the concrete against the reactor’s intense heat and radiation.”
But Abushady, who specializes in such technology, pointed out that the structure in the picture bore no resemblance to a Gas-Cooled Reactor vessel. “This vessel cannot be for a Gas-Cooled Reactor,” Abushady explained, “based on its dimensions, it thickness and the pipes shown on the side of the vessel.”
The CIA video’s explanation that the network of pipes was necessary for “cooling water” made no sense, Abushady said, because gas-cooled reactors use only carbon dioxide gas — not water — as a coolant. Any contact between water and the Magnox-cladding used in that type of reactor, Abushady explained, could cause an explosion.
A second Mossad photograph showed what the CIA said were the “exit points” for the reactor’s control rods and fuel rods. The CIA juxtaposed that photograph with a photograph of the tops of the control rods and fuel rods of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon and claimed a “very close resemblance” between the two.
Abushady found major differences between the two pictures, however. The North Korean reactor had a total of 97 ports, but the picture allegedly taken at al-Kibar shows only 52 ports. Abushady was certain that the reactor shown in the photograph could not have been based on the Yongbyon reactor. He also noted that the picture had a pronounced sepia tone, suggesting that it was taken quite a few years earlier.
Abushady warned Heinonen and ElBaradei in his initial assessment that the photo presented as taken from inside the reactor building appeared to an old photo of a small gas-cooled reactor, most likely an early such reactor built in the U.K.
A Double Deception
Many observers have suggested that Syria’s failure to protest the strike in the desert loudly suggests that it was indeed a reactor. Information provided by a former Syrian air force major who defected to an anti-Assad military command in Aleppo and by the head of Syria’s atomic energy program helps unlock the mystery of what was really in the building at al-Kibar.
The Syrian major, “Abu Mohammed,” told The Guardian in February 2013 that he was serving in the air defense station at Deir Azzor, the city nearest to al-Kibar, when he got a phone call from a Brigadier General at the Strategic Air Command in Damascus just after midnight on Sept. 6, 2007. Enemy planes were approaching his area, the general said, but “you are to do nothing.”
The major was confused. He wondered why the Syrian command would want to let Israeli fighter planes approach Deir Azzor unhindered. The only logical reason for such an otherwise inexplicable order would be that, instead of wanting to keep the Israelis away from the building at al-Kibar, the Syrian government actually wanted the Israelis to attack it. In the aftermath of the strike, the Damascus issued only an opaque statement claiming that the Israeli jets had been driven away and remaining silent on the airstrike at al-Kibar.
Abushady told this writer he learned from meetings with Syrian officials during his final year at the IAEA that the Syrian government had indeed originally built the structure at al-Kibar for the storage of missiles as well as for a fixed firing position for them. And he said Ibrahim Othman, the head of Syria’s Atomic Energy Commission, had confirmed that point in a private meeting with him in Vienna in September 2015.
Othman also confirmed Abushady’s suspicion from viewing satellite photographs that the roof over the central room in the building had been made with two movable light plates that could be opened to allow the firing of a missile. And he told Abushady that he had been correct in believing that what had appeared in a satellite image immediately after the bombing to be two semi-circular shapes was what had remained of the original concrete launching silo for missiles.
In the wake of the Israel’s 2006 invasion of Southern Lebanon, the Israelis were searching intensively for Hezbollah missiles and rockets that could reach Israel and they believed many of those Hezbollah weapons were being stored in Syria. If they wished to draw the attention of the Israelis away from actual missile storage sites, the Syrians would have had good reason to want to convince the Israelis that this was one of their major storage sites.
Othman told Abushady that the building had been abandoned in 2002, after the construction had been completed. The Israelis had acquired ground-level pictures from 2001-02 showing the construction of outer walls that would hide the central hall of the building. The Israelis and the CIA both insisted in 2007-08 that this new construction indicated that it had to be a reactor building, but it is equally consistent with a building designed to hide missile storage and a missile-firing position.
Although Mossad went to great lengths to convince the Bush administration that the site was a nuclear reactor, what the Israelis really wanted was for the Bush administration to launch U.S. airstrikes against Hezbollah and Syrian missile storage sites. Senior officials of the Bush administration didn’t buy the Israeli bid to get the United States to do the bombing, but none of them ever raised questions about the Israeli ruse.
So both the Assad regime and the Israeli government appear to have succeeded in carrying out their own parts in a double deception in the Syrian desert.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian on U.S. national security policy and the recipient of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism.
Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017
Edward S. Herman, the economist, Wharton School professor emeritus, and prolific author, died this week at age 92. The following article by Edward Herman appeared in the July-August issue of Monthly Review .
It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of “fake news.” These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate power
An important form of mainstream media fake news is that which is presented while suppressing information that calls the preferred news into question. This was the case with “The Lie That Wasn’t Shot Down,” the title of a January 18, 1988, Times editorial referring to a propaganda claim of five years earlier that the editors had swallowed and never looked into any further. The lie—that the Soviets knew that Korean airliner 007, which they shot down on August 31, 1983, was a civilian plane—was eventually uncovered by congressman Lee Hamilton, not by the Times.
Mainstream media fake news is especially likely where a party line is quickly formed on a topic, with any deviations therefore immediately dismissed as naïve, unpatriotic, or simply wrong. In a dramatic illustration, for a book chapter entitled “Worthy and Unworthy Victims,” Noam Chomsky and I showed that coverage by Time, Newsweek, CBS News, and the New York Times of the 1984 murder of the priest Jerzy Popieluzko in Communist Poland, a dramatic and politically useful event for the politicized Western mainstream media, exceeded all their coverage of the murders of a hundred religious figures killed in Latin America by U.S. client states in the post-Second World War years taken together.1 It was cheap and safe to focus heavily on the “worthy” victim, whereas looking closely at the deaths of those hundred would have required an expensive and sometimes dangerous research effort that would have upset the State Department. But it was in effect a form of fake news to so selectively devote coverage (and indignation) to a politically useful victim, while ignoring large numbers whose murder the political establishment sought to downplay or completely suppress.
Fake news on Russia is a Times tradition that can be traced back at least as far as the 1917 revolution. In a classic study of the paper’s coverage of Russia from February 1917 to March 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz found that “From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all…. They can fairly be charged with boundless credulity, and an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions with a downright lack of common sense.”2 Lippmann and Merz found that strong editorial bias clearly fed into news reporting. The editors’ zealous opposition to the communists led the paper to report atrocities that never happened, and to predict the imminent collapse of the Bolshevik regime no fewer than ninety-one times in three years. Journalists uncritically accepted official statements and relied on reports from unidentified “high authority.” This was standard Times practice.
This fake news performance of 1917–20 was repeated often in the years that followed. The Soviet Union was an enemy target up to the Second World War, and through it all, Times coverage was consistently hostile. With the end of the war and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military rival, and soon a competing nuclear power, the Cold War was on. In the United States, anti-communism became a national religion, and the Soviet Union was portrayed in official discourse and the news media as a global menace in urgent need of containment. With this ideology in place and with U.S. plans for its own global expansion of power established, the Communist threat would help sustain the steady growth of the military-industrial complex and repeated interventions to counter purported Soviet aggressions.3
An Early Great Crime: Guatemala
One of the most flagrant cases in which the Soviet threat was exploited to justify U.S.-sponsored violence was the overthrow of the social democratic government of Guatemala in 1954 by a small proxy army invading from U.S. ally Somoza’s Nicaragua. This action was provoked by government reforms that upset U.S. officials, including a 1947 law permitting the formation of labor unions, and plans to buy back (at tax-rate valuations) and distribute to landless peasants some of the unused property owned by United Fruit Company and other large landowners. The United States, which had been perfectly content with the earlier fourteen-year-long dictatorship of Jose Ubico, could not tolerate this democratic challenge, and the elected government, led by Jacobo Arbenz, was soon charged with assorted villainies, based on an alleged Red capture of the Guatemalan government.4
In the pre-invasion propaganda campaign, the mainstream media fell into line behind false charges of extreme government repression, threats to its neighbors, and the Communist takeover. The Times repeatedly reported these alleged abuses and threats from 1950 onward (my favorite: Sidney Gruson’s “How Communists Won Control of Guatemala,” March 1, 1953). Arbenz and his predecessor, Juan Jose Arevalo, had carefully avoided establishing any embassies with Soviet bloc countries, fearing U.S. reprisals—to no avail. Following the removal of Arbenz and the installation of a right-wing dictatorship, court historian Ronald Schneider, after studying 50,000 documents seized from Communist sources in Guatemala, found that not only did Communists never control the country, but that the Soviet Union “made no significant or even material investment in the Arbenz regime,” and was at the time too preoccupied with internal problems to concern itself with Central America.5
The coup government quickly attacked and decimated the new social groups that had formed in the democratic era, mainly peasant, worker, and teacher organizations. Arbenz had won 65 percent of the votes in a free election, but the “liberator” Castillo Armas quickly won a “plebiscite” with 99.6 percent of the vote. Although this is a result familiar in totalitarian regimes, the mainstream media had by then lost interest in Guatemala, barely mentioning this electoral outcome. The Times had claimed in 1950 that U.S. Guatemala policy “is not trying to block social and economic progress but is interested in seeing that Guatemala becomes a liberal democracy.”6 But in the aftermath, the editors failed to note that the result of U.S. policy was precisely to “block social and economic progress,” through the installation of a regime of reactionary terror.
In 2011, more than half a century after 1954, the Times reported that Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom had apologized for that “Great Crime,” the violent overthrow of the Arbenz government, “an act of aggression to a government starting its democratic spring.”7 The article mentions that, according to president Colom, the Arbenz family is “seeking an apology from the United States for its role” in the Great Crime. The Times has never made any apology or even acknowledgement of its own role in the Great Crime.
Another Great Crime: Vietnam
Fake news abounded in the Times and other mainstream publications during the Vietnam War. The common perception that the paper’s editors opposed the war is misleading and essentially false. In Without Fear or Favor, former Times reporter Harrison Salisbury acknowledged that in 1962, when U.S. intervention escalated, the Times was “deeply and consistently” supportive of the war policy.8 He contends that the paper grew steadily more oppositional from 1965, culminating in the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. But Salisbury fails to recognize that from 1954 to the present, the Times never abandoned the Cold War framework and vocabulary, according to which the United States was resisting another nation’s “aggression” and protecting “South Vietnam.” The paper never applied the word aggression to this country, but used it freely in referring to North Vietnamese actions and those of the National Liberation Front in the southern half of Vietnam.
The various pauses in the U.S. bombing war in 1965 and after, in the alleged interest of “giving peace a chance,” were also the basis of fake news as the Johnson administration used these temporary halts to quiet antiwar protests, while making it clear to the Vietnamese that U.S. officials demanded full surrender. The Times and its colleagues swallowed this bait without a murmur of dissent.9
Furthermore, although from 1965 onward the Times was willing to publish more reports that put the war in a less favorable light, it never broke from its heavy dependence on official sources, or from its reluctance to confront the damage wrought on Vietnam and its civilian population by the U.S. war machine. In contrast with its eager pursuit of Cambodian refugees from the Khmer Rouge after April 1975, the paper rarely sought testimony from the millions of Vietnamese refugees fleeing U.S. bombing and chemical warfare. In its opinion columns as well, the new openness was limited to commentators who accepted the premises of the war and would confine their criticisms to its tactical problems and domestic costs. From beginning to end, those who criticized the war as an immoral campaign of sheer aggression were excluded from the debate.10
The 1981 Papal Assassination Attempt
The mainstream media gave a further boost to Cold War propaganda in reporting on the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in May 1981. At a time when the Reagan administration was seeking to demonize the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” the shooting of the pope by Turkish fascist Ali Agca was quickly tied to Moscow, helped by Agca’s confession—after seventeen months of imprisonment, interrogations, threats, inducements, and access to the media—that the Bulgarians and Soviet KGB were behind it all. No credible evidence supported this connection, the claims were implausible, and the corruption in the process was remarkable. (Agca also periodically claimed to be Jesus Christ.) The case against the Bulgarians (and implicitly the KGB) was lost even in Italy’s extremely biased and politicized judicial framework. But the Times bought it, and gave it prolonged, intense, and completely unquestioning attention, as did most of the U.S. media.
During the 1991 Senate hearings on the nomination of Robert Gates to head the CIA, former agency officer Melvin Goodman testified that the CIA knew from the start that Agca’s confessions were false, because they had “very good penetration” of the Bulgarian secret services. The Times omitted this statement in its reporting on Goodman’s testimony. During the same year, with Bulgaria now a member of the “free world,” conservative analyst Allen Weinstein obtained permission to examine Bulgarian secret service files on the assassination attempt. His mission was widely reported, including in the Times, but when he returned without having found anything implicating Bulgaria or the KGB, several papers, including the Times, found his investigations no longer newsworthy.
Missile Gap
From roughly 1975 to 1986, much of the reporting on the purported “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union was little more than fake news, with Times reporters passing along a steady stream of inflammatory official statements and baseless claims. An important case occurred in the mid-1970s, as right-wing hawks in the Ford administration were trying to escalate the Cold War and arms race. A 1975 CIA report had found that the Soviets were aiming only for nuclear parity. This was unsatisfactory, so CIA head George H. W. Bush appointed a new team of hardliners, who soon found that the Soviets were achieving nuclear superiority and preparing to fight a nuclear war. This so-called Team B report was taken at face value in a Times front page article of December 26, 1976, by David Binder, who failed to mention its political bias or purpose, and made no attempt to consult experts with differing views. The CIA finally admitted in 1983 that the Team B estimates were fabrications. But throughout this period, the Times supported the case for militarization by disseminating false information, much of it convincingly refuted by Tom Gervasi in his classic The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy, a book never reviewed in the Times.
Yugoslavia and “Humanitarian Intervention”
The 1990s wars of dismantlement in Yugoslavia succeeded in removing an independent government from power and replacing it with a broken Serbian remnant and poor and unstable failed states in Bosnia and Kosovo. It also provided unwarranted support for the concept of “humanitarian intervention,” which rested on a mass of misrepresentations and selective reporting. The demonized Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević was not an ultra-nationalist seeking a “Greater Serbia,” but rather a non-aligned leader on the Western hit list who tried to help Serb minorities in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo remain in Yugoslavia as the United States and the European Union supported a legally questionable exodus by several constituent Yugoslav Republics. He supported each of the proposed settlements of these conflicts, which were sabotaged by Bosnian and U.S. officials who wanted better terms or the outright military defeat of Serbia, ultimately achieving the latter. Milošević had nothing to do with the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serbs took revenge on Bosnian Muslim soldiers who had been ravaging nearby Bosnian Serb villages from their base in Srebrenica under NATO protection. The several thousand Serb civilian deaths were essentially unreported in the mainstream media, while the numbers of Srebrenica’s executed victims were correspondingly inflated.11
The Putin Era
The U.S. political establishment was shocked and delighted by the 1989–91 fall of the Soviet Union, and its members were similarly pleased with the policies of President Boris Yeltsin, a virtual U.S. client, under whose rule ordinary Russians suffered a calamitous fall in living standards, while a small set of oligarchs were able to loot the broken state. Yeltsin’s election victory in 1996, greatly assisted by U.S. consultants, advice, and money, was, for the editors of the Times, “A Victory for Russian Democracy.”12 They were not bothered by either the electoral corruption, the creation of a grand-larceny-based economic oligarchy, or, shortly thereafter, the new rules centralizing power in the office of president.13
Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, gradually abandoned the former’s subservience to Western interests, and was thereby perceived as a menace. His reelection in 2012, although surely less corrupt than Yeltsin’s in 1996, was castigated in the U.S. media. The lead Times article on May 5, 2012, featured “a slap in the face” from Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe observers, claims of no real competition, and “thousands of antigovernment protesters gathered in Moscow square to chant ‘Russia without Putin.’”14 There had been no “challenges to legitimacy” reported in the Times after Yeltsin’s tainted victory in 1996.
The demonization of Putin escalated with the Ukraine crisis of 2014 and subsequent Kiev warfare in Eastern Ukraine, Russian support of the East Ukraine resistance, and the Crimean referendum and absorption of Crimea by Russia. This was all declared “aggression” by the United States and its allies and clients, and sanctions were imposed on Russia, and a major U.S.-NATO military buildup was initiated on Russia’s borders. Tensions mounted further with the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over southeastern Ukraine—promptly, but almost surely falsely, blamed on the “pro-Russian” rebels and Russia itself.15
Anti-Russian hostilities were further inflamed by the country’s escalated intervention in Syria from 2015 on, in support of Bashar al-Assad and against rebel forces that had come to be dominated by ISIS and al-Nusra, an offshoot of al-Qaeda. The United States and its NATO and Middle East allies had been committing aggression against Syria, in de facto alliance with al-Nusra and other extremist Islamic factions, for several years. Russian intervention turned the tide, frustrating the U.S. and Saudi goal of regime change against Assad, and weakening tacit U.S. allies.
The Times has covered these developments with unstinting apologetics—for the February 2014 coup in Kiev—which it has never labeled as such, for the U.S. role in the overthrow of the elected government of Victor Yanukovych, and with anger and horror at the Crimea referendum and Russian absorption, which it never allows might be a defensive response to the Kiev coup. Its calls for punishment for the casualty-free Russian “aggression” in Crimea is in marked contrast to its apologetics for the million-plus casualties caused by U.S. aggression “of choice” (not defensive) in Iraq from March 2003 on. The paper’s editors and columnists condemn Putin’s disregard for international law, while exempting their own country from criticism for its repeated violations of that same law.16
In the Times‘s reporting and opinion columns Russia is regularly assailed as expansionist and threatening its neighbors, but virtually no mention is made of NATO’s expansion up to the Russian borders and first-strike-threat placement of anti-missile weapons in Eastern Europe—the latter earlier claimed to be in response to a missile threat from Iran! Analyses by political scientist John Mearsheimer and Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen that noted this NATO advance were excluded from the opinion pages of the Times.17 In contrast, a member of the Russian band Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, was given op-ed space to denounce Putin and Russia, and the punk rock group was granted a meeting with the Times editorial board.18 Between January 1 and March 31, 2014, the paper ran twenty-three articles featuring Pussy Riot and its alleged significance as a symbol of Russian limits on free speech. Pussy Riot had disrupted a church service in Moscow and only stopped after police intervened, at the request of church authorities. A two-year prison sentence followed. Meanwhile, in February 2014, eighty-four-year-old nun Sister Megan Rice was sentenced to four years in prison for having entered a U.S. nuclear weapons site in July 2012 and carried out a symbolic protest. The Times gave this news a tiny mention in its National Briefing section, under the title “Tennessee Nun is Sentenced for Peace Protest.” No op-ed columns or meeting with the Times board for Rice. There are worthy and unworthy protesters, just as there are victims.
In Syria, with Russian help, Assad’s army and allied militias were able to dislodge the rebels from Aleppo, to the dismay of Washington and the mainstream media. It has been enlightening to see the alarm expressed over civilian casualties in Aleppo, with accompanying photographs of forsaken children and stories of civilian suffering and deprivation. The Times’ focus on those civilians and children and its indignation at Putin-Assad inhumanity stands in sharp contrast with their virtual silence on massive civilian casualties in Fallujah in 2004 and beyond, and more recently in rebel-held areas of Syria, and in the Iraqi city of Mosul, under U.S. and allied attack.19 The differential treatment of worthy and unworthy victims has been in full force in coverage of Syria.
A further phase of intensifying Russophobia may be dated from the October 2016 presidential debates, in which Hillary Clinton declared that Donald Trump would be a Putin “puppet” as president, a theme her campaign began to stress. This emphasis only increased after the election, with the help of the media and intelligence services, as the Clinton camp sought to explain their electoral loss, maintain party control, and possibly even have the election results overturned in the courts or electoral college by attributing Trump’s victory to Russian interference.
A major impetus for the Putin connection came with the January 2017 release of a report by the Office of Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Background of Assessing Russian Activities and Intention in Recent US Elections. More than half of this short document is devoted to the Russian-sponsored RT news network, which the report treats as an illegitimate propaganda source. The organization is allegedly part of Russia’s “influence campaign… [that] aspired to help President-elect Trump’s chances of victory when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to the President-elect.” No semblance of proof is offered that there was any planned “campaign,” rather than an ongoing expression of opinion and news judgments. The same standards used to identify a Russian “influence campaign” could be applied with equal force to U.S. media and Radio Free Europe’s treatment of any Russian election—and of course, the U.S. intervention in the 1996 Russian election was overt, direct, and went far beyond any covert “influence campaign.”
Regarding more direct Russian intervention in the U.S. election, the DNI authors concede the absence of “full supporting evidence,” but in fact provide no supporting evidence at all—only speculative assertions, assumptions, and guesses. “We assess that… Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2015,” they write, designed to defeat Mrs. Clinton, and “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” but provide no proof of any such order. The report also contains no evidence that Russia hacked the communications of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) or the emails of Clinton and former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, or that it gave hacked information to WikiLeaks. Julian Assange and former British diplomat Craig Murray have repeatedly claimed that these sources were leaked by local insiders, not hacked from outside. Veteran intelligence experts William Binney and Ray McGovern likewise contend that the WikiLeaks evidence was leaked, not hacked.20 It is also notable that of the three intelligence agencies who signed the DNI document, the National Security Agency—the agency most likely to have proof of Russian hacking and its transmission to WikiLeaks, as well as of any “orders” from Putin—only expressed “moderate confidence” in its findings.
But as with the Reds ruling Guatemala, the Soviets outpacing U.S. missile capabilities, or the KGB plotting to assassinate the pope, the Times has taken the Russian hacking story as established fact, despite the absence of hard evidence. Times reporter David Sanger refers to the report’s “damning and surprisingly detailed account of Russia’s efforts to undermine the American electoral system,” only to then acknowledge that the published report “contains no information about how the agencies had … come to their conclusions.”21 The report itself includes the astonishing statement that “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” Furthermore, if the report was based on “intercepts of conversations” as well as on hacked computer data, as Sanger and the DNI claim, why has the DNI failed to quote a single conversation showing Putin’s alleged orders and plans?
The Times has never cited or given op-ed space to William Binney, Ray McGovern, or Craig Murray, leading dissident authorities on hacking technology, methodology, and the specifics of the DNC hacks. But room was found for Louise Mensch’s op-ed “What to Ask about Russian Hacking.” Mensch is a notorious conspiracy theorist with no relevant technical background, described by writers Nathan Robinson and Alex Nichols as best-known for “spending most of her time on Twitter issuing frenzied denunciations of imagined armies of online ‘Putinbots,’” making her “one of the least credible people on the internet.”22 But she is published in the Times because, in contrast with the informed and credible Binney and Murray, she follows the party line, taking Russian hacking of the DNC as a premise.
The CIA’s brazen intervention in the electoral process in 2016 and 2017 broke new ground in the agency’s politicization. Former CIA head Michael Morell announced in an August 2016 op-ed in the Times: “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton,” and former CIA boss Michael Hayden published an op-ed in the Washington Post just days before the election, entitled “Former CIA Chief: Trump is Russia’s Useful Fool.” Morell had yet another op-ed in the Times on January 6, now openly assailing the new president. These attacks were unrelievedly insulting to Trump and laudatory to Clinton, even portraying Trump as a traitor; they also made clear that Clinton’s more pugnacious stance toward Syria and Russia was preferable by far to Trump’s leanings toward negotiation and cooperation with Russia.
This was also true of the scandal surrounding former Trump Defense Intelligence nominee Michael Flynn’s telephone call with the Russian ambassador, which may have included a discussion of the incoming administration’s policy actions. The political possibilities of this interaction were quickly grasped by outgoing Obama officials, security personnel, and the mainstream media, with the FBI interrogating Flynn and with widespread expressions of horror at Flynn’s action, which could have allegedly exposed him to Russian blackmail. But such pre-inauguration meetings with Russian diplomats have been a “common practice” according to Jack Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Reagan and Bush, and Matlock had personally arranged such a meeting for Jimmy Carter.23 Obama’s own ambassador to the country, Michael McFaul, admitted visiting Moscow for talks with officials in 2008, even before the election. Daniel Lazare has made a good case not only that the illegality and blackmail threat are implausible, but that the FBI’s interrogation of Flynn reeks of entrapment. “Yet anti-Trump liberals are trying to convince the public that it’s all ‘worse than Watergate.’”24
The political point of the DNI report thus seems to have been, at minimum, to tie the Trump administration’s hands in its dealings with Russia. Some analysts outside the mainstream have argued that we may have been witnessing an incipient spy or palace coup that fell short, but still had the desired effect of weakening the new administration.25 The Times has not offered a word of criticism of this politicization and intervention in the election process by intelligence agencies, and in fact the editors have been working with them and the Democratic Party as a loose-knit team in a distinctly un- and anti-democratic program designed to undermine or reverse the results of the 2016 election, on the pretext of alleged foreign electoral interference.
The Times and the mainstream media in general have also barely mentioned the awkward fact that the allegedly hacked disclosures of the DNC and Clinton and Podesta emails disclosed uncontested facts about real electoral manipulations on behalf of the Clinton campaign, facts that the public had a right to know and that might well have affected the election results. The focus on the evidence-free claims of a Russian hacking intrusion have helped divert attention from the real electoral abuses disclosed by the WikiLeaks material. Here again, official and mainstream media fake news helped bury real news.
Another arrow in the Russophobia quiver was a private intelligence “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent working for Orbis Business Intelligence, a private firm hired by the DNC to dig up dirt on Trump. Steele’s first report, delivered in June 2016, made numerous serious accusations against Trump, most notably that Trump had been caught in a sexual escapade in Moscow, that his political advance had been supported by the Kremlin for at least five years, under Putin’s direction, in order to sow discord within the U.S. political establishment and disrupt the Western alliance. This document was based on alleged conversations by Steele with distant (Russian) officials: that is, strictly on hearsay evidence, whose assertions, where verifiable, are sometimes erroneous.26 But it said just what the Democrats, the mainstream media, and the CIA wanted to hear, and intelligence officials accordingly declared the author “credible,” and the media lapped it up. The Times hedged somewhat on its own cooperation in this tawdry campaign by calling the report “unverified,” but nevertheless reported its claims.27
The Steele dossier also became a central part of the investigation and hearings on “Russia-gate” held by the House Intelligence Committee starting in March 2017, led by Democratic Representative Adam Schiff. While basing his opening statement on the hearsay-laden dossier, Schiff expressed no interest in establishing who funded the Steele effort, the identity and exact status of the Russian officials quoted, or how much they were paid. Apparently talking to Russians with a design of influencing an American presidential election is perfectly acceptable if the candidate supported by this intrusion is anti-Russian!
The Times has played a major role in this latest wave of Russophobia, reminiscent of its 1917–20 performance in which, as Lippmann and Merz noted in 1920, “boundless credulity, and an untiring readiness to be gulled” characterized the news-making process. While quoting the CIA’s admission that it had no hard evidence, relying instead on “circumstantial evidence” and “capabilities,” the Times was happy to describe these capabilities at great length and to imply that they proved something.28 Editorials and news articles have worked uniformly on the false supposition that Russian hacking was proved, and that the Russians had given these data to WikiLeaks, also unproven and strenuously denied by Assange and Murray.
The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy’s “Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,” February 20, 2017.29 But what is more extraordinary is the uniformity with which the paper’s regular columnists accept as a given the CIA’s assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and “non-partisan” investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this “fake news” threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery.
The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post‘s piece by Craig Timberg, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” which featured a report by a group of anonymous “experts” entity called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance toward U.S. foreign policy, the “experts” refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being “targeted by legions of skilled hackers.” As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, “You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won’t put your name to your claims? Take a hike.”30 But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.)
On December 23, 2016, President Obama signed the Portman-Murphy Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which will supposedly allow the United States to more effectively combat foreign (namely Russian and Chinese) propaganda and disinformation. It will encourage more government counter-propaganda efforts, and provide funding to non-government entities to help in this enterprise. It is clearly a follow-on to the claims of Russian hacking and propaganda, and shares the spirit of the listing of two hundred tools of Moscow featured in the Washington Post. (Perhaps PropOrNot will qualify for a subsidy and be able to enlarge its list.) Liberals have been quiet on this new threat to freedom of speech, undoubtedly influenced by their fears of Russian-based fake news and propaganda. But they may yet take notice, even if belatedly, when Trump or one of his successors puts it to work on their own notions of fake news and propaganda.
The success of the war party’s campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically clear in the Trump administration’s speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did not require evidence of Assad’s guilt beyond their government’s claims.31 The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served the rebels well.
But the mainstream media never ask cui bono? in cases like this. In 2013, a similar charge against Assad, which brought the United States to the brink of a full-scale bombing war in Syria, turned out to be a false flag operation, and some authorities believe the current case is equally problematic.32 Nevertheless, Trump moved quickly (and illegally), dealing a blow to any further rapprochement between the United States and Russia. The CIA, the Pentagon, leading Democrats, and the rest of the war party had won an important skirmish in the struggle over permanent war.
Notes
- Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon, 2008), chapter 2.
- Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, A Test of the News (New York: New Republic, 1920).
- On the Grand Area framework, see Noam Chomsky, “The New Framework of Order,” inOn Power and Ideology (Boston: South End, 1987).
- Edward S. Herman, “Returning Guatemala to the Fold,” in Gary Rawnsley, ed.,Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (London: Macmillan, 1999).
- Ronald Schneider,Communism in Guatemala, 1944–1954 (New York: Praeger, 1959), 41, 196–97, 294.
- Editorial Board, “The Guatemala Incident,”New York Times, April 8, 1950.
- Elisabeth Malkin, “An Apology for a Guatemalan Coup, 57 Years Later,”New York Times, October 11, 2011.
- Harrison Salisbury,Without Fear or Favor (New York: Times Books, 1980), 486.
- Richard Du Boff and Edward Herman,America’s Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception(Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs, 1966).
- See Chomsky and Herman, Manufacturing Consent, chapter 6.
- Editorial Board, “A Victory for Russian Democracy,”New York Times, July 4, 1996.
- Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia,”Monthly Review 59, no. 5 (October 2007); Herman and Peterson, “Poor Marlise: Her Old Allies Are Now Attacking the Tribunal and Even Portraying the Serbs as Victims,” ZNet, October 30, 2008, http://zcomm.org.
- Stephen F. Cohen,Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: Norton, 2000).
- Ellen Barry and Michael Schwartz, “After Election, Putin Faces Challenges to Legitimacy,”New York Times, March 5, 2012.
- Robert Parry, “Troubling Gaps in the New MH-17 Report,” Consortium News, September 28, 2016, http://consortiumnews.com.
- Paul Krugman says, “Mr. Putin is someone who doesn’t worry about little things like international law” (“The Siberian Candidate,”New York Times, July 22, 2016)—implying, falsely, that U.S. leaders do “worry about” such things.
- A version of Mearsheimer’s article appeared as “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,”Foreign Affairs, September 10, 2014. The paper likewise rejected Stephen Cohen’s 2012 article “The Demonization of Putin.”
- “Sochi Under Siege,”New York Times, February 21, 2014.
- Michael Kimmelman, “Aleppo’s Faces Beckon to Us, To Little Avail,”New York Times, December 15, 2016. Above this front-page article were four photographs of dead or injured children, the most prominent one in Syria. The accompanying editorial, “Aleppo’s Destroyers: Assad, Putin, Iran,” omits some key actors and killers. See also Rick Sterling, “How US Propaganda Plays in Syrian War,” Consortium News, September 23, 2016.
- William Binney and Ray McGovern, “The Dubious Case on Russian ‘Hacking,’” Consortium News, January 6, 2017.
- David Sanger, “Putin Ordered ‘Influence Campaign’ Aimed at U.S. Election, Report Says,”New York Times, January 6, 2017.
- Nathan J. Robinson and Alex Nichols, “What Constitutes Reasonable Mainstream Opinion,”Current Affairs, March 22, 2017.
- Jack Matlock, “Contacts with Russian Embassy,” Jack Matlock blog, March 4, 2017, http://jackmatlock.com.
- Daniel Lazare, “Democrats, Liberals, Catch McCarthyistic Fever,” Consortium News, February 17, 2017.
- Robert Parry, “A Spy Coup in America?” Consortium News, December 18, 2016; Andre Damon, “Democratic Party Floats Proposal for a Palace Coup,” Information Clearing House,” March 23, 2017, http://informationclearinghouse.info.
- Robert Parry, “The Sleazy Origins of Russia-gate,” Consortium News, March 29, 2017.
- Scott Shane et al., “How a Sensational, Unverified Dossier Became a Crisis for Donald Trump,”New York Times, January 11, 2017.
- Matt Fegenheimer and Scott Shane, “Bipartisan Voices Back U.S. Agencies On Russia Hacking,”New York Times, January 6, 2017; Michael Shear and David Sanger, “Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds,”New York Times,January 7, 2017; Andrew Kramer, “How Russia Recruited Elite Hackers for Its Cyberwar,”New York Times, December 30, 2016.
- Robert Parry, “NYT’s Fake News about Fake News,” Consortium News, February 22, 2017.
- Matt Taibbi, “The ‘Washington Post’ ‘Blacklist’ Story Is Shameful and Disgusting,”Rolling Stone, November 28, 2016.
- Adam Johnson, “Out of 47 Media Editorials on Trump’s Syria Strikes, Only One Opposed,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, April 11, 2017, http://fair.org.
- Scott Ritter, “Wag the Dog—How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump and The American Media,” Huffington Post, April 9, 2017; James Carden, “The Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria: Is There a Place for Skepticism?”Nation, April 11, 2017.
CIA Attempts to Cover al-Qaeda’s Crimes With ‘Iranian Connection’
Sputnik – 14.11.2017
Documents released by the CIA that allegedly reveal a connection between Tehran and al-Qaeda appear to be merely a part of an anti-Iranian information campaign waged by the United States.
Iranian analysts interviewed by Sputnik have dismissed claims about the alleged ties between Tehran and al-Qaeda brought forward by the CIA, arguing that it’s merely an attempt by the US to tarnish Iran’s reputation.
Seyyed Hadi Afghahi, Middle Eastern affairs expert and former official at the Iranian embassy in Lebanon, told Sputnik Iran that there are several important factors that need to be taken into account in this matter.
“First of all, it’s strange that the CIA decided to disclose this information just now, after so many years. Second, why won’t the CIA disclose information pertaining to the emergence of Osama bin Laden himself and about his ties with the United States? This disclosure – assuming that you could call it that, considering that there are no photos of this report penned by a senior al-Qaeda member that contain all these accusations against Iran – does feel rather selective in terms of which data is being revealed,” Afghahi said.
According to Afghahi, the disclosed report does contain one bit of truth – namely, Iran did at one time provide shelter to families of al-Qaeda members after a group of terrorists became trapped at the border between Iran and Afghanistan. He pointed out, however, that Tehran only granted safe haven to women and children, and that later these people were taken out of the country at the request of Saudi Arabia, so Iran did not harbor any al-Qaeda terrorists on its soil.
“Therefore, by raising this issue after so many years and with such a misleading angle, the US pursues just one goal – to tarnish the reputation of Iran and its allies (Hezbollah) by blaming them for the crimes that they (the US, Saudi Arabia and Israel) are guilty of. This is all part of the strategy that Donald Trump implements against us,” he argued.
Dr Ali Reza Rezahah, political observer to Iran’s Spiritual Leader at the Analytical Expert Center, also remarked that by portraying Iran as “terrorist,” the US may justify the seizure of Iranian assets on American territory.
“The US also has a mercantile interest in this matter: it does not intend to return the Iranian assets and property that were seized by the American capitalists even before the Islamic Revolution. In so doing, they use these false accusations as an excuse to avoid returning said assets,” Rezahah said.
He also stressed that the ideology of Iran and that of al-Qaeda are polar opposites, and that the terrorist group has “brought grief and murder” to his country.
“Allow me to remind you that it was a terrorist belonging to that very group who staged an attack at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, killing innocent pilgrims, women and children. And the mastermind of this atrocity, Yousef Ramzi, is currently kept in one of the US prisons. If we visit the FBI website we can see that one of the crimes he’s been accused of is the killing of innocents in Iran during an Ashura ceremony. Iran filed extradition requests for this criminal on several occasions,” he said.
There can never be any contacts between Iran and al-Qaeda, Rezahah maintained, as the terrorist group and Tehran are “on the opposite sides of the barricades.”
The trove of documents found at Osama bin Laden’s hideout that was disclosed on November 1 by the CIA contains a 19-page report apparently penned by a senior al-Qaeda member, which details instances of cooperation between the terrorist group and Iran.
According to the report, Iran allegedly granted shelter to some of bin Laden’s cohorts who were fleeing Afghanistan after the US-led military intervention there, supplied al-Qaeda terrorists with money and weapons and helped train them at Hezbollah camps. In return, the terrorist group launched attacks against US installations in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States that were designated by Tehran, according to the report.
Mocking Trump Doesn’t Prove Russia’s Guilt
By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | November 13, 2107
If the bloody debacle in Iraq should have taught Americans anything, it is that endorsements by lots of important people who think something is true don’t amount to evidence that it actually is true. If endorsements were the same as evidence, U.S. troops would have found tons of WMD in Iraq, rather than come up empty.
So, when it comes to whether or not Russia “hacked” Democratic emails last year and slipped them to WikiLeaks, just because a bunch of people with fancy titles think the Russians are guilty doesn’t compensate for the lack of evidence so far evinced to support this core charge.
But the reaction of Official Washington and the U.S. mainstream media to President Trump saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed sincere in denying Russian “meddling” was sputtering outrage: How could Trump doubt what so many important people think is true?
Yet, if the case were all that strong that Russia did “hack” the emails, you would have expected a straightforward explication of the evidence rather than a demonstration of a full-blown groupthink, but what we got this weekend was all groupthink and no evidence.
For instance, on Saturday, CNN responded to Trump’s comment that Putin seems to “mean it” when he denied meddling by running a list of important Americans who had endorsed the Russian-guilt verdict. Other U.S. news outlets and politicians followed the same pattern.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a big promoter of the Russia-gate allegations, scoffed at what Trump said: “You believe a foreign adversary over your own intelligence agencies?”
The Washington Post’s headline sitting atop Sunday’s lede article read: “Trump says Putin sincere in denial of Russian meddling: Critics call that ‘unconscionable.’”
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and another Russia-gate sparkplug, said he was left “completely speechless” by Trump’s willingness to take Putin’s word “over the conclusions of our own combined intelligence community.”
Which gets us back to the Jan. 6 “Intelligence Community Assessment” and its stunning lack of evidence in support of its Russian guilty verdict. The ICA even admitted as much, that it wasn’t asserting Russian guilt as fact but rather as opinion:
“Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”
Even The New York Times, which has led the media groupthink on Russian guilt, initially published the surprised reaction from correspondent Scott Shane who wrote: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”
In other words, the ICA was not a disposition of fact; it was guesswork, possibly understandable guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless. And guesswork should be open to debate.
Shutting Down Debate
But the debate was shut down earlier this year by the oft-repeated claim that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred in the assessment and how could anyone question what all 17 intelligence agencies concluded!
However, that canard was finally knocked down by President Obama’s own Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who acknowledged in sworn congressional testimony that the ICA was the product of “handpicked” analysts from only three agencies – the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.
In other words, not only did the full intelligence community not participate in the ICA but only analysts “handpicked” by Obama’s intelligence chiefs conducted the analysis – and as we intelligence veterans know well, if you handpick the analysts, you are handpicking the conclusions.
For instance, put a group of analysts known for their hardline views on Russia in a room for a few weeks, prevent analysts with dissenting viewpoints from weighing in, don’t require any actual evidence, and you are pretty sure to get the Russia-bashing result that you wanted.
So why do you think Clapper and Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan put up the no-entry sign that kept out analysts from the State Department and Defense Intelligence Agency, two entities that might have significant insights into Russian intentions? By all rights, they should have been included. But, clearly, no dissenting footnotes or wider-perspective views were desired.
If you remember back to the Iraq WMD intelligence estimate, analysts from the State Department’s intelligence bureau, known as INR, offered unwelcome dissenting views about the pace of Iraq’s supposed nuclear program, inserting a footnote saying they found it too difficult to predict the fruition of a program when there was no reliable evidence as to when – not to mention if – it had started.
DIA also was demonstrating an unusually independent streak, displaying a willingness to give due consideration to Russia’s perspective. Here’s the heterodox line DIA took in a major report published in December 2015:
“The Kremlin is convinced the United States is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further reinforced by the events in Ukraine. Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and the Arab Spring and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts.”
So, not only did the Jan. 6 report exclude input from INR and DIA and the other dozen or so intelligence agencies but it even avoided a fully diverse set of opinions from inside the CIA, FBI and NSA. The assessment – or guesswork – came only from those “hand-picked” analysts.
It’s also worth noting that not only does Putin deny that Russia was behind the publication of the Democratic emails but so too does WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange who has insisted repeatedly that the material did not come from the Russians. He and others around WikiLeaks have strongly suggested that the emails came as leaks from Democratic insiders.
Seeking Real Answers
In the face of Official Washington’s evidence-free groupthink, what some of us former U.S. intelligence analysts have been trying to do is provide both a fuller understanding of Russian behavior and whatever scientific analysis can be applied to the alleged “hacks.”
Forensic investigations and testing of relevant download speeds, reported by members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), have undermined the Russia-did-it groupthink. But this attempt to engage in actual evaluation of evidence has been either ignored or mocked by mainstream news outlets.
Still, the suggestion in our July 24 VIPS memo that President Trump ask current CIA Director Mike Pompeo to take a fresh look at the issue recently had some consequence when Pompeo contacted VIPS member William Binney, a former NSA Technical Director, and invited him to explain his latest research on the impossibility of the Russians extracting the Democratic emails via an Internet hack based on known download speeds.
In typically candid terms, Binney explained to Pompeo why VIPS had concluded that the intelligence analysts behind the Jan. 6 report had been making stuff up about Russian “hacking.”
When news of the Binney-Pompeo meeting broke last week, the U.S. mainstream media again rejected the opportunity to rethink the Russia-did-it groupthink and instead treated Binney as some sort of “conspiracy theorist” with a “disputed” theory, while attacking Pompeo’s willingness to discuss Binney’s findings as “politicizing intelligence.”
Despite the smearing of Binney, President Trump appears to have taken some of this new evidence to heart, explaining his dispute with open-mouthed White House reporters on Air Force One who baited Trump with various forms of the same question: “Do you believe Putin?” amid the new jeering about Trump “getting played” by Putin.
Trump’s demeanor, however, suggested increased confidence that the Russian “hacking” allegations were the “witch hunt” that he has decried for months.
Trump also jabbed the press over its earlier false claims that “all 17 intelligence agencies” concurred on the Russian “hack.” And Trump introduced the idea of a different kind of “hack,” i.e., Obama’s political appointees at the heads of the agencies behind the Jan. 6 report.
Trump said, “You hear it’s 17 agencies. Well it’s three. And one is Brennan … give me a break. They’re political hacks. … I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper, you have [FBI Director James] Comey. Comey is proven to be a liar and he’s proven to be a leaker.”
Later, in deference to those still at work in intelligence, Trump said, “I’m with our [intelligence] agencies as currently constituted.”
While Trump surely has a dismal record of his own regarding truth-telling, he’s not wrong about the checkered record of the triumvirate of Clapper, Brennan and Comey.
Clapper played a key role in the bogus Iraq-WMD intelligence when he was head of the National Geo-spatial Agency and hid the fact that there was zero evidence in satellite imagery of any weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq invasion. When no WMDs were found, Clapper told the media that he thought they were shipped off to Syria.
In 2013, Clapper perjured himself before Congress by denying NSA’s unconstitutional blanket surveillance of Americans. After evidence emerged revealing the falsity of Clapper’s testimony, he wrote a letter to Congress admitting, “My response was clearly erroneous – for which I apologize.” Despite the deception, he was allowed to stay as Obama’s most senior intelligence officer for almost four more years.
Clapper also has demonstrated an ugly bias about Russians. On May 28, as a former DNI, Clapper explained Russian “interference” in the U.S. election to NBC’s Chuck Todd on May 28 with a tutorial on what everyone should know about “the historical practices of the Russians.” Clapper said, “the Russians, typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique.”
Brennan, who had previously defended torture as having been an effective way to gain intelligence, was CIA director when agency operatives broke into the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee when it was investigating CIA torture.
Former FBI Director Comey is infamous for letting the Democratic National Committee arrange its own investigation of the “hacking” that was then blamed on Russia, a development that led some members of Congress to call the supposed “hack” an “act of war.” Despite the risk of nuclear conflagration, the FBI didn’t bother to do its own forensics.
And, by his own admission, Comey arranged a leak to The New York Times that was specifically designed to get a Special Prosecutor appointed to investigate Russia-gate, a job that fell to his old friend Robert Mueller, who has had his own mixed record as the previous FBI director in mishandling the 9/11 investigation.
There are plenty of reasons to want Trump out of the White House, but there also should be respect for facts and due process. So far, the powers-that-be in Washington – in politics, the media and other dominant institutions, what some call the Deep State – have shown little regard for fairness in the Russia-gate “scandal.”
The goal seems to be to remove the President or at least emasculate him on a bum rap, giving him the bum’s rush, so to speak, while also further demonizing Russia and exacerbating an already dangerous New Cold War.
The truth should still count for something. No one’s character should be assassinated, as Bill Binney’s is being now, for running afoul of the conventional wisdom that Trump – like bête noire Putin – never tells the truth, and that to believe either is, well, “unconscionable,” as The Washington Post warns.
Ray McGovern was a CIA intelligence analyst for 27 years and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
‘Zero evidence’ for claims Russia hacked DNC – NSA whistleblower
The CIA director Mike Pompeo has come under fire for meeting a former intelligence official, William Binney, over the alleged hacking of the Democratic party back in 2016. The US intelligence community laid the blame for the hack, on Moscow. READ MORE: https://on.rt.com/8rsl
How The Deep State Controls Social Media and Digitally Assassinates Critics
By Robert David Steele | American Herald Tribune | November 7, 2017
This is a speculative account based on personal experience and broad reading. In no way is it a substitute for a proper legal discovery process – but it could be useful in guiding such a process.
The recent arbitrary deletion with no appeal by Twitter of two accounts – one belonging to my friend Alt-Right white male Roger Stone [1] and the other to an Alt-Left black female activist who goes by the name of “Charlie Peach” [2] and reminds me of my friend Cynthia McKinney, [3] should be the death rattle of #GoogleGestapo. If Roger Stone and “Charlie Peach” were to sue Twitter together, in combination with my own lawsuit against three apparatchiks and their many co-conspirators, [4] and the new potentially formidable case by Prager University against Google, YouTube, and DOES 1-25, [5] I believe these three cases and perhaps others might converge in a most constructive manner assuredly in the public interest. The above juxtaposition is important – the Deep State is seeking to censor and in some cases digitally assassinate both those on the right and those on the left who challenge official narratives. This is discrimination based on political affiliation or belief.
While I identify the Deep State as the ultimate antagonist, it is the Zionists who have refined the system that the Deep State now uses to control social media and digitally assassinate critics and those espousing conservative values or support for the US Constitution as well as opposition to the prevailing “Israel First” mantra at the federal, state, and local levels. [6] “Hate speech” and related filters are code for repressing those critical of the Zionist and Deep State narratives, known in the aggregate as “Alternative Media.” [7]
I have found it helpful to distinguish early on between a few very powerful extremist Zionists who serve a foreign agenda that calls for the complete subversion of the United States of America (USA) and other countries, and millions of loyal decent Jews world-wide, nine million of whom reside in the USA. My focus is on a limited number of extremists who are certain they are above all laws; they do not represent decent Jews – or the established religion of Judaism – as a whole. My focus is also only on social media control, not on other methods used by the Zionists to subvert entire countries. [8]
In combination with false flag [9] events that perpetuate a climate of fear and astronomic levels of spending on a militarized domestic total surveillance and control system in which police forces abandon community-based policing and go straight to treating the public as the enemy, with a complicit Mainstream Media (MSM), #GoogleGestapo has emerged as the social control mechanism of the 21st Century, not only blocking over 400 websites [10] (I suspect the number is much higher) but censoring millions and digitally assassinating tens of thousands of individuals, many of them in the USA. The intent of the Deep State has recently been made clear by one of its fronts, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR): dissidents and those who question authority should be treated as “domestic terrorists.” [11]
I do not address the related issue of #GoogleGestapo as a global surveillance [12] enterprise violating all rights to anonymity, identity, privacy, and security – my focus here and now is on discrimination. [13]
It bears noting in passing that Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure do not apply to third party cloud holdings – this is yet another sucking chest wound in the GooglePlex waiting for the law to catch up.
The Prager University team includes Alan Dershowitz, who is both a celebrated scholar and defense lawyer and an Israel Firster [14] – a mixed blessing when one is suing a Zionist system that is relied upon by the Deep State. Having this enormous but conflicted talent on the team reminds me of the Warren Commission, where Allen Dulles, the mastermind of the John F. Kennedy (JFK) assassination, was put on the Commission by Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), the man who signed JFK’s death warrant, to ensure that the falsehoods being put forward by the government were adhered to. [15] The Plaintiffs may wish to consider adding someone like Judge Andrew Napolitano to their team, and be most wary of Dershowitz negotiating a pro forma settlement behind the scenes that results in a limited victory that forestalls the much larger Title 7 challenge to the entire #GoogleGestapo system administered for the Deep State by the Zionists. I predict You Tube will quickly restore the videos in question and apologize, so as to stop this case, potentially the Title 7 [16] case of the century, from going to discovery, trial, and logical expansion.
Here is a simple example of a discovery question that the Prager U team could ask, given that they have over fifty videos that have been banned from YouTube:
Provide a list of all banned videos in the past five years, the specific reasons why each video was banned; and the identity of and contact information for each of the related individuals or organizations for each of the banned videos.
This matters because no one, anywhere, has been able to compile a list of all banned videos. The legal discovery process is the only means by which we can compel the revelation of this vital information while assuring that the resulting information is of evidentiary quality.
Properly done, a larger challenge would also document through a legal discovery process – and then hold accountable – organizations such as Kaspersky, Rolling Stone, Slate, Mother Jones, and others that have been lazy and allowed Zionist trolls to “game” their reporting systems and digitally assassinate individuals critical of Zionist Israel (or skeptical of the Deep State narrative) by submitting false reports of bullying, spamming, hating, and even – the latest – “X-Rated Content” such that entire web sites are blocked from being accessed. As Congress has recently determined, the social media endeavors – which should be but are not regulated as public utilities [17] – have been cutting corners on screening content, and been severely remiss in both technical and human quality control. [18] As most cases against the #GoogleGestapo monolith should show if legal discovery is pursued, there is both a failure to be serious in terms of properly screening content, and a double standard – those that agree with the Deep State – or serve the needs of the Deep State – are allowed to threaten assassination, spew hateful language, and crowd-stalk at will. Those that do not agree with the Deep State are at the capricious mercy of an unregulated system that excels at censorship and crowd-stalking with impunity. [19]
#GoogleGestapo Overview
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and In-Q-Tel, both early sponsors of Google and other social media innovations, clearly understood the value of these enterprises to create a desired “total surveillance” architecture. [20] It was the Zionists, however, who appear to have perfected a pervasive blend of people, organizations, and technologies to achieve persistent and pervasive censorship and crowd-stalking that is now in the service of the Deep State, both in the USA and around the world.
Below are the key elements of #GoogleGestapo based on my broad reading and direct personal experience. Pending proper legal discovery, I speculate that all levels are connected – this is a system.
• Deep State – banking families including Vatican, City of London, Wall Street [21]
• Zionist Government of Israel/Benjamin Netanyahu/Mossad [22]
• American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Anti-Defamation League (ADL) [23]
• Eric Schmidt, Arnon Milchan, George Soros, Media Matters and many more
• Complicit Internet services companies including Facebook, MeetUp, Twitter
• Paid sub-contractors that do live-streaming defamation on command
• Paid trolls — Israeli reservists, ADL, Media Matters and others
• Volunteer trolls too stupid to know they are being lied to — sayonim
• Dumb algorithms and lack of investment in ethics, human oversight, etc. by design
• “Shadow banning” (demonetization), subscription list neutralization, service cancellation [24]
• Lack of government regulation, not holding social media to anti-discrimination standards
Not included in my own experience with #GoogleGestapo, but highly pertinent to YouTube’s lack of professionalism in both algorithms and human quality control and respect for customers given the ease with which false reports can destroy entire channels, is the entire matter of grand-fathered changed terms of service, moronic keyword and meta data restrictions, and malicious copyright strikes (to include the destruction of negative reviews of a product) and copyright extortion. [25]
My Personal Experience
Live-Streamed Defamation
On 13 June I did a live-streamed interview with George Webb, whom I respect very much. He was being “handled” at the time by one Jason Goodman with Patricia Negron as his partner. In the course of that interview, [26] I raised the prospect of Goodman himself being handled – perhaps unwittingly – by the Mossad. I speculate now that legal discovery will reveal both monthly payments to Goodman on the order of $3,000 a month, and a pattern of email and cellular contacts suggestive that Goodman has been taking direction, first toward undermining George Webb (who was getting too close to the truth about the Awan brothers being patsies for a Mossad operation via Debbie Wasserman Schultz, spying on and blackmailing Members of Congress) and then #UNRIG, Earth Intelligence Network, and me. [27]
From that day forward, Goodman began a campaign of defamation, video slander, crowd-stalking libelous commentary, and tortuous interference that I have carefully documented. I will not litigate this case in public. Goodman and his many co-conspirators will have their day in court – but I note with interest that YouTube, a surrogate of Google, has not – despite my repeated complaints – deleted any of the many slanderous videos by Goodman, Negon, and “Queen Tut” now known to be Susan Lutzky. Based on my personal experience, I speculate that #GoogleGestapo – the full list of elements yet to be defined through legal discovery – is a co-conspirator with those who seek to manipulate public perception with aggressive character assassination and discrimination, the “Alt Right” and pro-Trumpers being top targets at this time. [28]
YouTube appears to be the most prominent element within which slander and libel occur daily – those with pro-Zionist opinions who parrot the government party line are protected – they slander and libel with impunity – while those who challenge Zionist atrocities and improprieties and the government party line find themselves de-monetized (“shadow-banned”) or digitally assassinated – in many cases an entire life’s work destroyed – with no recourse.
Below is a table of specific slanderous videos posted to YouTube (in red), and specific libelous crowd-stalking endeavors against third party videos (in black) in which I am interviewed, correlated with the collapse of our non-profit educational crowd-funding campaign at IndieGoGo (in green). [29]
Troll Armies – from Israel to Media Matters to the Sayonim
In my speculative view based on my direct experience, the Zionists have perfected the use of human trolls and automated bots; one overtly active Mossad collaborator can inspire a crowd-stalking campaign that mobilizes over 400 distinctly identifiable trolls and bots (my best guess is one third human, two thirds artificial). While I have no direct knowledge, my understanding from secondary sources is that there is a clear division of labor between Israeli Army reservists based in Israel, the primary Zionist agents in the USA, not only the ADL but also its parent organization AIPAC, and specific sympathetic organizations such as Media Matters, whose “troll army” has been widely publicized.
Then there are the sayonim. These are volunteers who buy the Zionist “party line” and dedicate themselves to destroying anyone they see as an “enemy” of the Zionists. I have dealt personally with many such individuals who have emailed me, and it is with great sadness that I report my impression that these people, while well-intentioned, are out of touch with reality and often poorly educated.
Below is a partial listing of specific trolls for whom I have in hand copies of defamatory statements suitable for submission to a Court, for YouTube only. I have another list and copies of defamatory statements for Facebook. Every single one of these individuals is discoverable in true name via legal discovery, and can be held to account as a crowd-stalker and co-conspirator.
In my direct personal experience, these troll armies are very capable at persistent pervasive crowd-stalking. Every YouTube channel I have appeared on has been attacked (not just current, but past), to the point that most of my hosts have been forced to disable all comments, depriving the honest viewers of the interaction that I take pains to provide when not being crowd-stalked. Many hosts have not invited me to return, perhaps influenced by the demonetization (“shadow-banning”) of any interview with me rather than the substance of my work that led to my being recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize in January 2017. [30]
These crowd-stalkers have also, on occasion, succeeded in getting videos deleted by marshalling multiple reports of “bullying” which is patently absurd in my case, but effective when YouTube is lazy (or complicit). Here is one case of a perfectly reasonable interview deleted by YouTube – there are others.
Steele, Robert, with Kenneth Ameduri, “Another False Flag? What Evidence Shows Us About The Las Vegas Shooting,” Crush the Street (Audio, 30:57), October 17, 2017.
In my direct personal experience, these crowd-stalkers are skilled at destroying fund-raising campaigns, to include pursuing all 1,500 Facebook shares (in the case of the #UNRIG IndieGoGo-Generosity campaign) such that a campaign raising $29,237.44 the month prior to the crowd-stalking, can quickly be brought down to $8,054.14, then $4,733.41, then $1,200 or so in two subsequent earnings. The most recent was $542.51.
In my direct personal experience, these crowd-stalkers engage in campaigns of defamation intended to make their target destitute. Apart from alienating all possible donors, funding channels such as IndieGoGo and PayPal appear to receive hundreds of emails claiming that a particular individual, organization, or campaign is a scam or a fraud. To their great credit, both IndieGoGo and PayPal have proven to be steady level-headed organizations able to discern such obvious defamation endeavors in my specific case, but I am troubled by some instances where they have closed accounts on the basis of what appear to me to be both illegal and often capricious discriminatory actions.
In my direct personal experience, these crowd-stalkers do not read. They worship at the altar of video and social media blurbs. They are so myopic that they are incapable of visiting my personal website where my life’s work is free online, including two books with Forewords by US Senators, and my recent recommendation for the Nobel Peace Prize. [31]
Media “Hit Jobs” On Demand
I appeared on Alex Jones’ InfoWars on 29 June 2017, speaking for two hours on the subject of pedophilia. [32] Few people know that I am both a Commissioner for the International Tribunal for International Justice (INTJ) [33] and its project on elite pedophilia led by Chief Justice Sir John Walsh of Brannaugh, and I am also nurturing a book by West Point graduate Joachim Hagopian, Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy, and the Deep State. [34] My remarks clearly scared at least one major pedophile in the media world. On the very same day, Ben Collins at The Daily Beast published a story intended to discredit me, “NASA Denies That It’s Running a Child Slave Colony on Mars,” that was quickly repeated by Peter Holley of The Washington Post and then a number of other international outlets. [35] This stuff does not happen by accident. This was a hit job.
During a two-hour interview with Alex Jones, I spoke in depth about pedophilia and the fatal exploitation of children (on Earth), including their murder and the harvesting of their blood, body parts, and bone marrow. Only at the very end, in answer to a caller who in retrospect may have been setting me up, did I address children sent into space on “20 year and out missions” to leverage growth while in transit; and an existing colony on Mars, established fifteen years ago, with 10,000 people there now. [36]
The Daily Beast conflated these three completely separate factual concepts to discredit me. I believe that legal discovery will determine that Ben Collins was “fed” the conflated false story and lacked the integrity to refuse the lead. Who, exactly, put Ben Collins on to this story and authorized the follow on by The Washington Post is discoverable by due legal process. If I had to guess, I would look to Media Matters, which is led by an individual with some serious issues, and “ruthlessly targets conservatives.” [37]
This aspect of #GoogleGestapo represents the total complicity between the MSM and the new social media control network – the larger “system” is comprehensive and includes – in addition to the ability to marshal public communications including Hollywood movies – the ability to interfere with commercial contracts.
Meet-Up Pro Account Termination
In early July 2017, when Cynthia McKinney agreed to join me in leading #UNRIG, [38] a non-violent fact-based alternative to #RESIST, I committed to a $77,300 per year paid professional MeetUp network of 435 fully-integrated MeetUps (one for each Congressional District). At the same time I published the below concept graphic for billboards and bumper stickers.
Almost immediately (with notification to me on 14 July via email), the CEO of MeetUp, Scott Heiferman, appears to have personally ordered the cancellation of our 435 MeetUps, giving up $77,300 in revenue. This is the same CEO who is collaborating with the ADL to sponsor 1,087 #RESIST MeetUps for whom the fees have been waived – hence MeetUp appears to be providing an illegal, undeclared, in-kind donation to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) of over $195,000 dollars. The ADL is the co-sponsor of all 1,087 #RESIST MeetUps. I speculate – subject to legal discovery at the appropriate time and place – that the ADL directed Scott Heiferman to cancel our #UNRIG professional network. [39] This action was so outrageous it inspired the below cartoon by Robert Ocegueda.
I would not be at all surprised to learn that the ADL (or its higher master, AIPAC), provided $77,300 to Meet-Up as a covert substitute payment, and perhaps also paid the $195,000 in “waived” fees. All of this is discoverable by due process of law.
Denial of Service Attacks
When all else fails, do denial of service attacks. We have been shut down for as long as a week. Fortunately these brute force attacks – while demanding time and money to defeat – are moderately moronic. I have much more admiration for the manner in which the Zionists subvert otherwise well-intentioned institutions (including in my own experience, the various newspapers in the United Kingdom (UK) that very stupidly censor commentators reported by the Zionists to be spammers and haters, without bothering to actually read the content in question).
It has been amusing for me to trace some of these denial of service attacks to rogue elements of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as well as Delphi in Ashburn, Virginia. If and when a full legal discovery process can take place, specific chains of command can be identified.
X-Ratings Across Microsoft via Kaspersky
I don’t make this stuff up. A fan – we have millions of them – sent me the below graphic.
Kaspersky is not stupid – they are just lazy, as are all others who rely on automated processes to filter out individuals and sites on the basis of what are largely false reports from Zionist trolls.
What the above really means is that the Zionists have successfully fooled Kaspersky – and perhaps Norton and others – into X-rating a non-profit educational website that sets the gold standard for truth in public service. This means that citizens in libraries, universities, and government agencies as well as corporations who have legitimate needs for access to truthful information are being blocked by Zionists who have mastered the art of censoring information critical of Zionist Israel or the larger Deep State.
As someone who has managed a false flag operation for the CIA, and who is a top published author on the topics of deep state, false flag operations, pedophilia, and fake news (and rarely but sometimes about the holocaust and Zionist subversion), I speculate that my non-profit educational website is triggering just about every flagword on the Deep State / Zionist watchlist – a watchlist that is “Top Secret” and not subject to any form of Congressional or judicial oversight. The First Amendment consequences are staggering, completely apart from a global conspiracy to commit tortuous interference against hundreds of thousands in not millions of individuals and organizations.
My Personal Conclusions
All Paths Lead to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) appears to be the Zionist social media spy service and enforcer. [40] In the early years of social media, the ADL and the Zionist Information Operations (IO) units – generally reservists is Israel – appear to have perfected the art of digital assassination. Anyone critical of Israel and Zionist atrocities (such as the genociding of the Palestinians) or calling for the boycott of Israel in social media was immediately “reported” by no fewer than twelve Zionist trolls as being a spammer, a hater, or – as has been used to successfully cause the deletion of three interviews of me at YouTube [41] – a “bully.” They seem to have perfected the art of gaming the system – from Kaspersky to Rolling Stone to Slate to Mother Jones and all other sites, the “system” is on automatic pilot and anytime twelve or more “reports” come in, they are assumed to be authentic and the person being reported is automatically assassinated – banned, blocked, deleted or in the case of Kaspersky, “X-Rated.” I experienced this personally and found that none of the organizations where this process works to the Zionists’ complete satisfaction are competent at detecting and neutralizing digital assassination – nor do they care – they are part of the system, with malice aforethought.
#GoogleGestapo: A Work in Progress
Eric Schmidt was hired by Larry Page and Sergei Brin to build Google after they stole Yahoo’s search engine, [42] received funding from Dr. Rick Steinheiser in CIA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), [43] and picked up the best and the brightest from Alta Vista that was suffering under Hewlett Packard (HP) dysfunctionality. [44] It was probably Schmidt that master-minded the illegal, undeclared in-kind contributions from Google to the Hillary Clinton campaign, manipulating search results so that “Hillary + Crime” become just Hillary, and “Trump” became Trump plus Hitler. [45] Schmidt went on to create a virtual Censorship Board that included Facebook and Twitter and others, and began actively manipulating, across all social media, not just searches, but polls and trending. Most recently Twitter has admitted that in the weeks leading up to Election Day it repressed substantial numbers of tweets critical of Hillary Clinton or referring to alleged pedophile John Podesta’s emails. [46] Today I see the Censorship Board actively demonetizing, [47] censoring, and assassinating – digitally assassinating – anyone who they judge to be a source of “fake news” which is to say, any source that disputes the MSM and USG narratives that are so obviously false themselves.
I have learned recently that Eric Schmidt is so proud of his Censorship Board [48] and his ability to control, censor, and manipulate social media, that he has offered this system to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – Communist China. Imagine the irony. Made in the USA by Zionists, totally satisfactory to Communist China. [49]
I must also observe that Google appears to have become an alternative to the CIA, a full-fledged covert operations organization where Zionist Jared Cohen is totally enamored of regime change operations and the digital assassination of dissidents [50] in every dictatorship the USA loves (which is to say, all of them less North Korea and Cuba), [51] and the active manipulation of information to serve his Deep State masters including the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) – the same organization that has recommended that US citizen dissidents be treated as “domestic terrorists.” [52]
The Zionist Double-Standard
What is quite clear to me is that no one is holding the Zionists (or other elements of the Deep State) accountable. For all of the misplaced focus on Russian efforts to “hack” the election – a pack of lies that I and others have compellingly challenged [53] – no one has raised the obvious point that the pernicious influence of Israel is everywhere and the Zionist attacks on all of us are carried out with impunity.
A double-standard appears to exist. It is “okay” for Zionists to call for the assassination of Barack Obama, or Donald Trump, or Roger Stone on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, but it is not “okay” for Prager University, [54] to take the most important case of our time, to espouse conservative values consistent with the US Constitution and all that it represents; nor is it “okay” for me to question the official narrative despite my unique qualifications for doing so as a former spy who has managed a false flag and covert media influence operations, and is in passing the top Amazon reviewer for non-fiction who has also been recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Snap-Shot of the Zionist Attack Machine: Six Ways, Ninety Days
Using #UNRIG and myself as a case study, I speculate – subject to legal discovery – that I have seen #GoogleGestapo apply against #UNRIG, Earth Intelligence Network and me a total of six methods in ninety days (there may be more).
01 The ordering of a paid asset to begin a 90-day defamation campaign including many lies, mobilizing many others to do crowd-stalking and actively libel me, perhaps with some assurance of indemnity (coverage of the eventual award from a federal lawsuit).
02 The ordering of a Media Matters hit-job that reached over 25 million people
03 The ordering of Meet-Up to shut down a legitimate non-profit educational campaign, sacrificing $77,300 in revenue (perhaps paying the same amount covertly)
04 The mobilization of over 400 distinct trolls and bots to defame, slander, libel, and otherwise interfere with the legitimate election reform civics education campaign of my non-profit educational corporation, focused on censoring my public appearances and cutting off all donations.
05 The ordering of multiple denial of service attacks against my primary blog.
06 The mobilization of over 400 distinct trolls and bots to report http://phibetaiota.net as an X-rated website to be blocked across governments, corporations, libraries, and other institutions.
All of this is personal speculation pending a legal discovery process – I have written all of this down because I am worried that the emerging legal cases will be “gamed” through settlements that forego legal discovery documenting a much larger systemic conspiracy – a global racketeering network inimical to democracy, freedom, peace, and prosperity.
Conclusion
All of the social media enterprises appear to be vulnerable to a massive Title 7 discrimination lawsuit. I believe that Prager University is making a mistake in limiting its focus to YouTube, a Google surrogate, alone.
As my own experience suggests, there is a larger construct of control and I am quite certain that if Prager University and its superb legal team plan for a jury trial and discovery along the lines I have outlined above, they will find that this is a vaster conspiracy than they imagined (they are being attacked at multiple points, not just through the deletion of a few videos); that it has been deliberately constructed by Eric Schmidt and others serving Zion; and if they can legally discover and document this conspiracy in detail, then they are eligible for triple damages as well as a place of honor among those who defend the First Amendment specifically and the US Constitution generally.
The role of Alan Dershowitz within the Prager team is of some concern to me. Absent the lead lawyers understanding that he is an Israel Firster, it is possible they will allow him to gut their case down to a simple restoration of a few videos, rather than the systemic discovery of a conspiracy that must be exposed in detail, and eradicated, if we are to restore democracy and the rule of law in the USA while ending the scourge of predatory digital censorship and assassination world-wide.
There is a middle ground but I doubt that the social media mandarins are ready to consider the following accommodations to the public interest – if Alan Dershowitz can make this happen, he will have served us all very well and I will be the first to acknowledge his national service.
01 Restore all banned videos and posts going back in time except those that violate copyright or are defamatory – end false copyright strikes (e.g. against negative reviews) and end copyright extortion;
02 Establish a clear demonetization policy approved by advertisers and open to all for review;
03 Respect all providers of content without exception: create a 24/7 appeals process with real humans and maintain a publicly accessible list of every banned and demonetized video or post with a clear explanation of why it was banned or demonetized;
04 Respect all reports of defamation without exception: create a 24/7 delete and ban process with real humans and maintain a publicly accessible list of every instance of defamation that has been acted upon.
05 Require all subscribers to have one identity only; end trolls and end bots.
06 End the role of the ADL and others as preferred “fact-checkers” – reject Israel First and specifically protect all criticism of Israel and all calls for a boycott of Israel.
07 Agree that all Internet services providers are de facto public utilities and earnestly abide by Title 7.
All of this is my personal opinion, not a legal commentary. I believe we are beginning a 1,000 year cycle of peace and prosperity; #GoogleGestapo can reform itself, or it can be replaced. The collective is rising.
*(Image credit: Snapshout courtesy of The Alex Jones Channel/ YouTube)
Endnotes
[1] Sonam Sheth, “Roger Stone plans to sue Twitter for suspending his account,” BusinessInsider.com, 29 October 2017.
[2] Editors, “‘I’m looking to sue’: Black activist says Twitter banned her as ‘Russian bot’,” Newline.com, 26 October 2017.
[3] I founded #UNRIG and was pleased to have Dr. Cynthia McKinney agree to not only join the non-profit educational campaign, but assume total responsibility for the people side of the campaign – creating and nurturing civics “PowerCells” – while I pursue crypto solutions (Crypto-Value, Crypto-Voice, Crypto-Tools, and Crypto-Intelligence). Learn more at http://unrig.net.
[4] Jason Goodman, Patricia Negron, and “Queen Tut” now known to be Susan Lutzke, have been served. The original complaint, soon to be expanded and amended, can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/Steele-vs-Goodman. I will not litigate this case in social media or published articles – I trust the Court and Jury to render fair judgment on the basis of both my own evidence and evidence discovered through due process of the law.
[5] Prager University, “Prager University (PragerU) Takes Legal Action Against Google and YouTube for Discrimination,” Press Release, 24 October 2017. The Complaint for Damages, Injunctive Relief, and Declaratory Judgment demanding a Jury Trial was filed on 10/23 and served on 11/1. DOES 1-25 is probably an open-ended reference to 25 specific individuals to be identified as the case goes forward and discovery is undertaken. As of 5 November 21 of the banned videos are available for viewing via the following: Rachel del Guidice, “Watch the 21 PragerU Videos That YouTube Is Censoring,” The Daily Signal, 14 October 2016. The editors have been asked to update the post to include the 50+ banned videos as of today.
[6] Outrage is growing across the USA against the Zionists. From pedophilia to legislation that would make it felony to criticize Israel and call for a boycott of Israel, to the Las Vegas massacre and associated financial crimes, to the recent discovery that many state and local leaders are mandating that no one can receive disaster relief or even have a contract with their state or local government unless they swear to never boycott Israel, the Israel First versus America First confrontation has never been more obvious to so many.
[7] Arnold, Steve, “Revealing the Google Relevance Sins,” Beyond Search, 2 May 2017 and Arnold, Steve, “Google and Hate Speech: None of This I Know It When I See It,” Beyond Search, 7 June 2017. See also 21st Century Wire, “Google Is the Engine of Censorship,” GlobalResearch.ca, 11 August 2017; Andre Damon, “Google Turning into Censorship Engine,” GlobalReseach.ca, 5 August 2017 and Andre Damon, “Google’s chief search engineer legitimizes new censorship algorithm,” World Socialist Web Site, 31 July 2017; Susan Duclos, “Google-YouTube Goes Full Nazi Against Independent Media – Hiding ‘Controversial Content’ And ‘Redirecting’ Searches,” AllNewPipeline.com, 2 August 2017; Peter Hasson, “Anti-Corporate Voices On Both Right And Left Claim Google Censorship,” Daily Caller, 31 August 2017; David North, “An Open Letter to Google: Stop the Censorship of the Internet!” GlobalResearch.ca, 25 August 2017; Michael Nunez, “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,” Gizmodo, 9 May 2016; Valentina Palladino, “YouTube clarifies “hate speech” definition and which videos won’t be monetized,” ArsTechnica.com, 2 June 2017; Bethania Palma, “Facebook Introduces Measure to Block Advertisements From Sites That Share Fake News,” Snopes.com, 28 August 2017.
Robert Parry, “NYT Cheers the Rise of Censorship Algorithms,” ConsoritumNews.com, 2 May 2017 and my favorite, Whitney Webb, “YouTube Moves To Censor “Controversial” Content – Brings ADL On Board As Flagger,” MintPressNews.com, 7 August 2017.
[8] Related but far beyond the scope of this carefully focused work are Zionist controls over banking, entertainment, and media; Zionist use of “crypto-Jews” who over generations remain deeply devout but penetrate other religious hierarchies as well as institutions inherent hostile to Zionists; and inter-marriage to include very calculated targeting of brides from prominent non-Jewish families that comprise the non-Zionist “establishment.”
[9] As a spy I managed a false flag event for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – no one died. Since leaving CIA and particularly since 9/11 I have published and spoken extensively on false flag events in which some people do die, and the budget-building nature of these events in which most domestic terrorists appear to be entrapment operations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Cf. Trevor Aaronson, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism (Ig Publishing, 2013). An excellent summary review of this book that studies 175 court cases across the USA can be read at Orange Alert!
[10] Thomas Dishaw, “Bookmark This: Over 400 Links Google Doesn’t Want You To Visit,” Government Slaves, 29 August 2017; Eric Sommer, “Google Censors Block Access to CounterPunch and Other Progressive Sites,” CounterPunch, 9 August 2017. The best over-all review is Robert Epstein, “The New Censorship: How did Google become the internet’s censor and master manipulator, blocking access to millions of websites?” US News & World Report, 22 June 2016.
[11] David Byman, “Should We Treat Domestic Terrorists the Way We Treat ISIS? What Works—and What Doesn’t,” Foreign Affairs, 3 October 2017.
[12] Editors, “Facebook admits “oversight” after leak reveals internal research on vulnerable children,” CBS News, 1 May 2017; Editors, “Google Spying on Credit Card Spending to See if Ads Work Raises Privacy Concerns,” SputnikNews.com, 24 May 2017; Christopher Ketcham and Travis Kelly, “The Cloud Panopticon: Google, Cloud Computing and the Surveillance-Industrial-Complex,” CounterPunch, 12 May 2017; John Naughton, “Google, not GCHQ, is the truly chilling spy network,” The Guardian, 18 June 2017.
[13] Christopher Ketcham and Travis Kelly, “The Cloud Panopticon: Google, Cloud Computing and the Surveillance-Industrial-Complex,” CounterPunch, 12 May 2017. The following quotes are most helpful:
“’In legal terms, Google is in the Wild West,’ says Bankston. ‘The law hasn’t kept up.’
“But one of the big problems with the cloud, and the danger it presents, is that the Fourth Amendment’s protections against search and seizure do not apply. The caveats are buried deep in the text that users usually skip over, and click “I agree,” to install a new application. But the consequences are huge, says Bankston. ‘When private data is held by a third party like Google, the Supreme Court has ruled that you ‘assume the risk’ of disclosure of that data.’ When you store e-mail at Gmail – or, similarly, in the cloud at Yahoo or Hotmail – ‘you lose your constitutional protections immediately.’”
[14] Editors, “Alan Dershowitz,” Wikipedia, undated, accessed 3 November 2017.
[15] David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (Harper Perennial, 2016). My summary review, which is “shadow-banned” by Amazon – itself part of the #GoogleGestapo system that censors with impunity – can be seen at 6-Star Reference for President Donald Trump — John Brennan Using Allen Dulles Playbook.
[16] Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, covers discriminatory practices and redress. While the language refers only to employees it appears to be applicable in practice to customers and the general public. One Department of Labor online notice entitled “Discrimination Is Against the Law,” undated, accessed 3 November 2017, says this: “These types of discrimination are against the law[:] A program that is covered by one of the laws mentioned at the top of this poster is not allowed to discriminate on any of the following bases (types of discrimination): For customers, applicants, employees, and the general public: • race • color • national origin • religion• sex • age • disability • political affiliation or belief.” It is the latter – political affiliation or belief – that applies to Roger Stone, “Charlie Peach,” Prager University, and those of us who oppose the pernicious influence of Zionists within the USA. The matter of how “fake news” can be arbitrated and moderated, and who has the authority to censor anyone exercising their First Amendment rights including the right to put forward beliefs and opinions contrary to all evidence if evidence is considered, does not appear to be adequately addressed by existing law in as much as the US Constitution, as amended, has been thrown out by the Deep State and is not being respected – from power of the purse to the power to declare war, Congress appears to be in enemy hands. What we do know is that both the USG and MSM lie to the public (and to the Courts) on a regular basis, and it is most difficult for “Alternative Media” to get treated fairly by the social media counterparts – including fund-raising channels – to the MSM.
[17] Ryan Brim, “Steve Bannon Wants Facebook and Google Regulated Like Utilities,” The Intercept, 27 July 2017.
[18] Cf. Philip Ewing, “Tough Questions, Hours Of Hearings But No Silver Bullet On Russian Tech Interference,” NPR.org, 2 November 2017. Both Congress and the social media enterprises continue to be hypocritical in pursuing the Russians as the primary offenders. The only person that hacked the US elections was Hillary Clinton, who stole 13 primary elections from Bernie Sanders (who knew it and went along) and was then blocked from doing the same thing to Donald Trump in the general election. Cf. Editors, “Graphic: How Hillary Clinton Stole the Democratic Nomination from Bernie Sanders — and Did Not Legally Win the Popular Vote,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 16 November 2017, with link to Axel Geijsel and Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, “Are we witnessing a dishonest election? A between state comparison based on the used voting procedures of the 2016 Democratic Party Primary for the Presidency of the United States of America,” White Paper, 7 June 2016 and other sources. My own two best analytic products are Steele, Robert. The Soft Coup Collapses – Blackmail Revealed – What Next?: CIA was bluffing, produced no evidence – Russians did not “hack” the election. Is this the beginning of the end of the Deep State in the USA? (Trump Revolution Series Book 6), Amazon Kindle, 7 January 2017 and Steele, Robert. Donald Trump, The Accidental President, Under Siege! (Trump Revolution Series Book 5), Amazon Kindle, 11 November, 2016. It is the Zionists – the Debbie Wasserman Schultz Awan Brothers case and of course Jeffrey Epstein’s covert operations – and our own CIA and FBI as well as National Security Agency (NSA) – that are spying on and blackmailing politicians, judges, celebrities, and selected bankers. These hearings are “fake news” and we can only hope that the Prager University case is not settled in a fake way – restoring 50+ videos and a quit claim when in fact the entire system could be exposed and dismantled.
[19] A really excellent contrast is provided by Michelle Malkin, “YouTube Banned Me, But Not the Hate Imams,” CNSNews.com, 7 June 2017.
[20] Nafeez Ahmed, “How the CIA made Google: Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 1,” Medium.com, 22 January 2015; Deidre Fulton, “Revealed: CIA Funding Companies that Specialize in Social Media Spying,” CommonDreams.org, 15 April 2016.
[21] This work is not focusing on political enablers such as the “two-party tyranny” that legalizes high crimes by the Deep State, nor covert operations by elements of the USG. As unconstitutional as both of those may be, the primary focus here is on the private sector “system” known as #GoogleGestapo. On the two-party tyranny legalizing Deep State crime, see Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History (Spiegel & Grau, 2011) and Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (Spiegel & Grau, 2014). For an excellent article about covert government operations, using a British case, see Glenn Greenwald, “How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations,” The Intercept, 24 February 2014. I feel personally blessed to have always been supported by CIA in my post-government authorship, to include rapid approval of major books on intelligence reform by the Publications Review Board (PRB). I have the impression that most of the “dirty tricks” of this sort in the USA are based at Fort Meade and done by a mix of NSA contractors and US Army reservists. I do believe that CIA, the FBI, and NSA are actively spying on and blackmailing Members of Congress, but that is another story for another day.
[22] The Mossad was among the first of the national intelligence agencies to understand that software was the next frontier for spying. From the mid-1980’s they excelled at both penetrating national, state, and local governments and law enforcement agencies with compromised software, and also overtly bidding for contracts to provide software and hardware services that enabled them to easily compromise the content of every client they served – the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA) are in my view totally compromised by the Zionists. A classic book on this subject is Martin Dillon and Gordon Thomas, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul (Carroll & Graf, 2002). My summary review, “shadow-banned” by Amazon, can be seen here: Riveting, Shocking, Eye-Opening, and Credible.
[23] Both of these are easily classified as unregistered agents of a foreign power but they have successfully avoided being held to account for failing to register, easily one of the reasons Israel supported the assassination of John F. Kennedy (the other was Kennedy’s insistence that CIA stop providing Israel with clandestine delivery of nuclear weapons components). Yitzhak Rabin was in Dallas for the assassination and appears to have been Israel’s official representation to the assassination cabal led by Allen Dulles and protected by Lyndon Baines Johnson. See among multiple other sources Michael Collins Piper, “Israel’s Central Role in JFK Assassination,” Rense.com, 1 August 2010; and Phil Giraldi, “Should AIPAC Register as a Foreign Agent?” The American Conservative, 29 July 2017.
[24] In my direct experience, YouTube is “neutralizing” the subscription lists of leading Alternative Truth channels such as those of Jordan Sather and Sarah Westall, the latter a business professor. I know people who have had their MailChimp and other accounts arbitrarily suspended. This along with “shadow banning” through de-monetization are the primary “light” censorship protocols. There is some evidence Google and YouTube are rethinking their blatant censorship – videos of Cynthia McKinney that were once demonetized have suddenly been remonetized, and many of the interviews with me are being allowed to earn ad revenue. Some of the demonetization is very legitimate – advertisers have a right to appear only in relation to content they favor – but a legal discovery process will probably find that YouTube has been weaponized against both the left and the right.
[25] The single best summary I have found to date, including many case studies with links, is Maximillian Laumeister, “Google is Deleting Your Favorite YouTube Channels, And They Won’t Say Why,” MaxLaumeister.com, 12 May 2016.
[26] Jason Goodman, Patricia Negron, and George Webb with Robert Steele, “Robert David Steele,” Crowd Source the Truth (YouTube, 51:30), 13 June 2017.
[27] Mongoose, “AWANGATE – Joint CIA-Mossad Operations to Spy on US Congress? Debbie Wasserman Schultz Indictable? Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 28 August 2017. As a former spy familiar with how our system works, I speculate that the CIA and perhaps the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been complicit in both Mossad spying on Congress directly, and the use of Jeffrey Epstein to entrap politicians, judges, and others through the “Lolita Island” and “no-name hotel” pedophilia complex. Learn more at Epstein @ Phi Beta Iota.
[28] Adi Robertson, “Two months ago, the internet tried to banish Nazis. No one knows if it worked,” The Verge, 9 October 2017 has provided a superb overview of recent discrimination against the Alt-Right while failing to observe that Charlottesville was a contrived false flag event intended to make the Alt Right vulnerable. The article also provides a useful review of “Alt Tech” endeavors to create a post-Google Internet, with BitChute being notable as an alternative to YouTube. Several evaluations of Charlottesville are provided by Owl, “Charlottesville False Flag — Professional Hit, Paid Protesters? UPDATE 9 Jim Fetzer Outlines False Flag Anomalies,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 14 August 2017.
[29] #UNRIG: Summer of Peace, Generosity, from June 2017. Donations from those who wish to resist Zionist exploitation of US social media are especially invited.
[30] Jan Kalvik, “Intelligence & the Nobel Peace Prize,” Defence and Intelligence Norway, 6 February 2017; and Nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize: Robert David Steele, undated, accessed 4 November 2017.
[31] http://robertdavidsteele.com.
[32] Steele, Robert, with Alex Jones, “Alex Jones (FULL SHOW Commercial Free) Thursday 6/29/17: Today’s News, Robert David Steele #UNRIG,” InfoWars (YouTube, 3:01:12), June 29, 2017. Steele starts at 48:00. The ITNJ of which I am a Commissioner was so dismayed by the media hit job (next note) that they immediately published an extract from the two-hour interview to showcase the statements about pedophilia that appear to have frightened the pedophiles in positions of media power, Steele, Robert, with Alex Jones, “#UNRIG – Robert David Steele on the Alex Jones Show 6/29/17 – excerpts,” Committee to Support the International Tribunal, July 1, 2017.
[33] https://www.itnj.org/.
[34] Joachim Hagopian, Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy, and the Deep State (Joachim Hagopian, on-going 2017). My Foreword and the first nine chapters are both free online and available as Kindle Shorts for 99 cents each. Access both via “Joachim Hagopian: Pedophilia & Empire – Satan, Sodomy, & the Deep State UPDATE 10 Kindles Up,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 2 July 2017. A memorable short url is http://tinyurl.com/pedoempire.
[35] The two links below contain both a link to the original articles and my open letter to each author. “Ben Collins: NASA Denies It Kidnaps Children for 20-Year+ Missions to Mars UPDATE 1,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 1 July 2017; and “Robert Steele with Peter Holley: NASA, Kidnapped Children, Mars — Open Letter,” Phi Beta Iota Public Intelligence Blog, 3 July 2017.
[36] I was briefed on this personally by a retired PhD from NASA in July 2017, in the presence of other international figures, and I absolutely believe what I was told.
[37] Rachel Alexander, “Astroturf ‘Outrage Machine’ of Paid Trolls Floods Social Media to Counteract Negative News About Hillary Clinton,” The Stream, 9 October 2017. . In an earlier article the same author outlines Media Matters partners, “American Bridge 21st Century will provide research. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, is an ethics watchdog group similar to Judicial Watch. Shareblue is a social media firm.” Rachael Alexander, “LEAKED: Media Matters’ Secret Plan to Destroy Conservatives,” The Stream, 22 August 2017. See also Jerome R. Corsi, “Leaked Docs: David Brock Conspires with Facebook, Google to Shut Down Conservative Media,” NotionalValueBlogspot.com, 9 February 2017. For a direct source, see Media Matters, “Donor Pitch,” Freebeacon.com, January 2017. Articles that focus on foreign troll armies, such as Leo Benedictus, “Invasion of the troll armies: from Russian Trump supporters to Turkish state stooges,” The Guardian, 6 November 2016, are very deliberately avoiding the “third rail” in banking, entertainment, government, and media: the Zionist “machine.”
[38] http://unrig.net and also http://tinyurl.com/IndieGoGo-UNRIG.
[39] MeetUp @ Phi Beta Iota.
[40] The ADL is the front end for the B’Nai Brith, the oldest Jewish service organization in the world, established in 1843. According to Wikipedia, 95% of its membership is in the USA, leading me to speculate the various agents of Israel (a foreign power) see the USA as the single most important nation-state to be subverted, controlled, and exploited (e.g. by instigating wars that serve Israel on the basis of false flag operations and other lies).
[41] Steele, Robert, with Kenneth Ameduri, “Another False Flag? What Evidence Shows Us About The Las Vegas Shooting,” Crush the Street (Audio, 30:57), October 17, 2017; Steele, Robert, with Sarah Westfall, “Robert David Steele: Las Vegas Massacre False Flag Case Study,” Business Game Changers (You Tube, 54:48), October 7, 2017. New: BitChute to overcome #GoogleGestapo deletion by YouTube; Steele, Robert. “MGM Execs Made $190M On Insider Trading -Las Vegas Update,” Victurus Libertas, October 6, 2017. Note: new spreadsheet shows $297M in insider trading. YouTube (a Google surrogate) has restored the second reference two times now – there is clearly a business discussion going on within YouTube – the more they discriminate, the more people are moving to DTube, BitChute, Steemit and other alternatives. There is growing demand for a post-Google Internet that cannot be censored or manipulated.
[42] Saul Hansell, “TECHNOLOGY; Google and Yahoo Settle Dispute Over Search Patent,” New York Times, 10 August 2004.
[43] Supra Note 13, Ketcham and Kelly. This was announced at my Open Source Solutions Conference in 2006 by Stephen E. Arnold himself author of The Google Trilogy.
[44] As I recollect the situation from various conversations with others Alta Vista was a demo project for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which was acquired by Compaq and then Compaq was acquired by HP. Neglected by HP and saddled with DEC “ovens” many but not all of the best and the brightest from Alta Vista quit and went to work for Google – these hires were the primary reason Google search worked as it did. Had HP understood the potential of Alta Vista, they would own it still today and Google would not exist – Alta Vista would be Google Plus.
[45] Jack Hadfield, “Report: Google Search Bias Protecting Hillary Clinton Confirmed in Experiment,” Breitbart.com, 13 September 2016, and Robert Epstein, “Research Proves Google Manipulates Millions to Favor Clinton,” Sputniknews.com, 12 September 2016. By its very nature #GoogleGestapo is designed to produce refutations of such accusations, see for example Don Evon, “Collusion Confusion: A viral video accused the search engine of manipulating results in favor of Hillary Clinton,” Snopes.com, 10 June 2016, declaring this to be FALSE. Whom are we to believe? It is the absence of integrity across the system that needs to be addressed, the persistence and pervasiveness of #GoogleGestapo – and the Zionist’s exploitation of the system – are merely symptoms of the disease. A prolonged legal discovery process, perhaps led by a convergence of multiple lawsuits, could move beyond speculation and informed but unproven accusations, and actually document the inter-locking personalities, tools, and techniques used to achieve both deliberate and casual discrimination against individuals and organizations across the spectrum. New law is needed, starting with the determination that social media services are public utilities subject to the most rigorous enforcement of existing laws against discrimination.
[46] Jerome Corsi, “Twitter Admits to Blocking Anti-Hillary Tweets During 2016 Campaign,” InfoWars.com, 2 November 2017; and Tyler Durden, “Twitter Admits It Buried “Podesta Email”, DNC Tweets Ahead Of The Presidential Election,” ZeroHedge.com, 2 November 2017. And then there are those allegedly out-of-control employees: Lucas Tolan, “Disgruntled Twitter Employee Temporarily Deletes President Trump’s Personal Account,” Breitbart, 2 November 2017.
[47] The most famous and blatant case of demonetization was that of Alex Jones and InfoWars. AdSense, a Google surrogate, declared InfoWars a purveyor of “fake news” and deprived his organization of $3.5 million dollars in advertising earnings in relation to his coverage of the PizzaGate story based on John Podesta emails suggestive of a major pedophilia network involving both political and media personalities, one of whom is known to have been James Alefantis’ gay lover. The speed with which Alex Jones backed down on a perfectly legitimate story is suggestive of the coercive power of #GoogleGestapo. See Roberto Villalpando, “Infowars’ Alex Jones apologizes for spreading fake ‘Pizzagate’ story,” Austin American-Statesman, 26 March 2017. I reject the notion that PizzaGate was fake news – the panic that it inspired among the elite – many of them pedophiles – is sufficient to suggest that this was close to the mark. PizzaGate played a major role in opening the public mind to the reality that pedophilia is “the last veil” that once removed, will destroy the 1%. PizzaGate was also the first major test of the Internet as a battleground between citizen investigators and #GoogleGestapo. Cf. Jasun Horsley, “David Brock, Invasion 4Chan, the Alt-Right, & Pizzagate,” Auticulture, 4 December 2016.
“David Brock and Correct the Record played a central role in a massive and long-term covert campaign of perception management that spans both Republican and Democratic parties. It involves the “infiltration” of 4chan and the illegitimate use of more mainstream social networking sites (reddit, twitter) in order to redirect and undermine public political debate, polarize opinion, and help “populate and co-opt” an alt-“Alt-right” movement to be associated with racism, misogyny, fascism, anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, and ‘fake news.’ Many of the agendas, and even players, involved in this can now be seen to congregate in or around the viral memeplex known as Pizzagate.’”
[48] Poynter’s International “fact-checking network” includes Snopes, Factcheck.org, ABC News, and Politifact, but behind the scenes the primary “aggressive” fact-checker is the ADL. Its funders are the enemies of democracy, including the Gates Foundation, Google, the Omidyar Network, and the Open Source Foundation (OSF).
[49] #GoogleGestapo @ Phi Beta Iota.
[50] Julian Assange, “Google Is Not What It Seems,” Wikileaks.org, 2014. The below is a quote from Assange:
“Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and “corporate responsibility” work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s ‘director of regime change.’”
[51] (Ambassador) Mark Palmer, Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). My summary review can be read at Single Most Important Work of the Century for American Moral Diplomacy.
[52] Supra Note 11, David Byman.
[53] Supra Note 18, Soft Coup. The CIA report, on page A-13, actually states in black and white that its findings are not based on evidence. See also many posts with linked sources under Russians @ Phi Beta Iota.
[54] Prager University, “Prager University (PragerU) Takes Legal Action Against Google and YouTube for Discrimination,” Press Release, 24 October 2017.
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From the Archives
The US-Iran Scenario That Most Scares Israel
By Ali Haydar | Al-Akhbar | October 9, 2013
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a series of threats toward Iran and its interlocutors in the West, including the US, as serious negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program seem more plausible.
As a possible rapprochement looms between the US and Iran, Netanyahu has attempted to impose impossible Israeli conditions on the negotiators, such as the full dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, not to mention threatening military force.
Whatever the deal that could materialize between Iran and the West, Israel is going to find itself before an open-ended path. One can foresee three possible scenarios… continue
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