Deep Politics Forum - Propaganda

NY Times And The Nashville Bomber

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:29:22 +0000

I met an interesting person through my Hendrix research named Gary Serkin of Nashville...Gary was an electric guitarist who was connected to the Hendrix world through his playing with Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell...I had never met a jewish person with a thick southern drawl...I spoke to Gary during the epidemic and he told me he was staying inside and was down to a can of string beans as his daily nutrition...About 3 weeks later I was shocked to hear Gary had died...I Facebooked his daughter and told her to check if he died from malnutrition...

During that phone call 3 weeks before his death Gary told me he was in regular contact with a guy named Tony who was big on government conspiracies...Gary told me Tony had worked at a telecom corporation and was skilled at computer technology...When the Nashville bombing occurred that conversation came back to me and I realized the bomber was the same guy...I thought to myself that if anyone was going to become a regular phone contact with me that he would need to disclose that he was friends with suicide bombers...As with Kennedy research, Hendrix conspiracy people can vary as to how far they will go and what they believe...You have to watch yourself in this outside territory...

Google: "NY Times Nashville Bomber Anthony Warner Conspiracy Theorist" to see how the New York Times tries to paint Kennedy Assassination researchers as nutty suicide bombers...The worst part of all this is Warner said 9-11 was the main thing that sent him down that path...The article shows the Times insulting our intelligence and courting pure evil...

The BASTARD Father of Modern Propaganda

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 09:45:16 +0000

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[url=https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/12/10/edward-bernays-propaganda-and-the-u-s-backed-1954-guatemalan-coup/#]
The young Bernays [Source: thefamouspeople.com; collage by Steve Brown]
Edward Bernays may be known as the Father of Public Relations, but you would not be mistaken if you thought of him as the Father of Lies. He was a bullshit artist par excellence who pioneered countless methods of deceiving the public.
For Bernays—author of mind-control manuals like Propaganda and The Engineering of Consent—there was no truth, no concept of an objective right or wrong. There were only wants, needs and desires. From advertising cigarettes to overthrowing governments—anything was possible. In his autobiography, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of a Public Relations Counsel, Bernays borrowed a quote from a friend to describe this post-truth reality: “The cure for propaganda is more propaganda.” [1]
Edward Bernays [Source: thoughtco.com]
Big Tobacco
Bernays understood the truth is malleable based on an individual’s needs. People are not purely rational actors. They make choices contrary to their self-interest, ignore facts they find inconvenient, and avoid information that may damage their ego. The nephew of famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Bernays drew on Freud’s work into the unconscious mind to construct elaborate public relations campaigns that preyed on these tendencies. His preferred tactic? The astroturf campaign—which gave off the illusion of having grass-roots support.
Today, Bernays is best remembered for a series of ads and media events dubbed “Torches of Freedom,” an early venture into social marketing that turned smoking into a form of gendered rebellion, but his first position in Big Tobacco was far more prescient of a future spent manipulating the public.
[Source: intelligentcollector.com] [Source: scoonan.wordpress.com]
Working for Liggett & Myers, Bernays established a fake pressure group called the Tobacco Society for Voice Culture and blitzed letters to the editor to influential newspapers under an assumed identity. [2] The letters attacked claims made in ads for cigarette brand Lucky Strike that stated the cigarette helped singers overcome, as Lucky owners American Tobacco put it, “voice irritation.” Bernays’s campaign resonated to such a degree that The New Yorker ran a profile in which it interviewed the group’s “sole member” Henry Bern, a Bern-ays patsy. [3]
Bernays sought to exploit the gap between what the media report and what the public hears and, though his ideas were not always immediately successful, they would blossom strange fruit for decades to come.
In one of his more ambitious proposals, he called for American Tobacco (now his employers thanks to the success of the Liggett & Myers campaign) to create a front group that could anonymously promote its interests. This fake news group, the Tobacco Information Service Bureau (TISB), would send made-up press releases and articles to newspapers and magazines to create the illusion of a legitimate news bureau. [4]
One of the examples of an intended Bernays pitch highlights the absurdity of the TISB: “DOCTORS SAY CIGARETTES REDUCE NUMBER OF MOUTH BACTERIA.” [5] Although American Tobacco never implemented the suggestion, this would not be the end of Bernays’s infatuation with fake news.
The United Fruit Company
By 1950, the United Fruit Company had a problem. Guatemala, the source of its largest cash crop, was in the midst of a protracted revolution.
For most of the 20th century Guatemalans had lived under the authoritarian rule of American agribusiness. The United States government propped up successive Guatemalan dictators in exchange for the right of American companies to establish plantations in the country. Working conditions on these plantations were harsh—but worse still was the Guatemalan government’s clear favoritism toward American business owners.
[Source: warhistoryonline.com]
In 1936, for example, then-President Jorge Ubico negotiated a deal with United Fruit exempting it from most export taxes. Resentment built among Guatemalans until 1944, when student protests at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala spiraled into a general strike.

July 1944 general strike in Guatemala. [Source: facebook.com]
Jorge Ubico [Source: wikipedia.org]

It was clear to United Fruit’s leadership, in particular company president Sam Zemurray, that the country was moving left. Guatemalan military leaders confirmed these fears in October 1944 when they overthrew the Ubico government, in what came to be known as the October Revolution. In the aftermath, Guatemala elected “spiritual socialist” Juan José Arévalo as its new leader. United Fruit needed something—or someone—to save its business.
Sam Zemurray, the “banana man.” [Source: medium.com]
It should come as no surprise that Sam Zemurray sought out the services of Edward Bernays. In the wake of Arévalo’s ascendance, Guatemala continued to experience political turmoil.
Between 1945 and 1951, there were anywhere from 25 to 30 coup attempts against the Arévalo government. [6]
Juan José Arévalo [Source: historica.fandom.com]
Bernays was not troubled by this violence. In fact, he found a use for it. His strategy in Guatemala would be simple: He would encourage further unrest. His goal, as described in Biography of an Idea, was to help the public “learn more about the countries in which [United Fruit] functioned and what social, economic, or other purposes it fulfilled.” [7]
[Source: amazon.com]
But this would be no innocent public relations campaign. Bernays, the Father of Lies, went back to his time in the tobacco industry to pull from his bag of tricks.
The Middle American Information Bureau
Established in 1943, the Middle America Information Bureau (MAIB) served, by Bernays’s estimate, 25,000 Americans working in the media. [8] The organization spun events in Central America through the filter of United Fruit’s economic and political goals, providing American journalists and opinion leaders with United Fruit-approved context.
In the run-up to the 1945 Guatemalan revolution, for example, the MAIB published a pamphlet titled “Every American has a personal stake in our relations with Middle America.” It collated pull quotes from military leaders, business executives, and government officials explaining the “interdependence of Middle America and the United States.” [9]
[Source: archive.org]
The MAIB was part of a much larger infrastructure Bernays and Zemurray had set up to dupe the public. The phrase “Middle America,” an attempt by the two at rebranding Central America, came from the Middle American Research Institute (MARI), a Zemurray-funded research group at Tulane University. [10]
Zemurray had established MARI with the intention of focusing on the cultural history of Mexico but, over time, its focus shifted to include countries colonized by United Fruit. Bernays found this of particular importance in his goal of deposing the Guatemalan government.
He could use the patina of respectability provided by MARI to lend his new front an air of legitimacy. “Within a year authoritative atlases used the name Middle America to describe the territory in which the company was active,” he wrote in Biography of an Idea. “We were succeeding in equating the company with the area in which it functioned.” [11]
This infrastructure would expand over the course of the 1940s and 1950s. What was once a simple front operating as a news bureau grew into a propaganda machine that oversaw company newsletters in multiple Central American countries. [12]
At least one of the United Fruit-affiliated newsletters, Latin American Report, was later found to have CIA connections through its editor William Gaudet, whom the agency supported by paying for more than 20 subscriptions a year. [13]
[Source: educationforum.ipbhost.com]
It is unclear what Bernays’s level of knowledge was regarding Gaudet and his association with the CIA. An FBI memorandum dated June 28, 1968, noted that United Fruit officials viewed Gaudet as suspect due to various threats he had leveled at the company in the past. [14]
By that point, however, Gaudet and United Fruit had a collaborative relationship dating back more than a decade, based on articles and advertisements found in Latin American Report. [15] Does this mean the CIA was backing Bernays and his plan to topple the Guatemalan government?
Bernays Tricks a Nation
Bernays was an innovator in that he did not need to rely on others. By the time he felt he had exhausted all possibilities at diplomacy with the Guatemalan government, in 1950, he already knew how he intended to agitate his coup.
Arévalo’s successor, Jacobo Árbenz, was promising agrarian reforms that would return land from American businesses to the Guatemalan people.
Jacobo Árbenz [Source: wikipedia.org]
Bernays surmised he could use this land-back promise to convince Americans that Árbenz was a threat not only to United Fruit but to the United States as well.
If Bernays could brand Árbenz a communist, he could inflate the threat posed in Guatemala. This would not be difficult, as he already believed Árbenz sympathetic to the communist cause. Writing in Biography of an Idea, he argued the Guatemalan leader “considered the anti-Communist movement subversive and openly accepted the Reds as allies.” [16]
A coup, however, required the full support of both the government and United Fruit, and United Fruit’s problem was that, to Bernays’s mind, its campaign against Guatemala was not aggressive enough. Sam Zemurray, United Fruit’s president, was well aware of the company’s image among American liberals as an aggressor in Central America and he had gone to great pains to rehab it.
United Fruit plantation in Guatemala. [Source: allthatsinteresting.com]
An open coup could hurt business. So, in January 1950, when liberal magazine The Nation published “Democracy in Latin America: Chaos on Our Doorstep” attacking United Fruit’s exploitation of countries like Guatemala, it came as a shock to Zemurray. Zemurray was an avid reader of the magazine and took its positions as a bellwether on public opinion. The article threatened the reformed image that Zemurray had spent years cultivating. He endeavored to pen a response. Bernays, ever the opportunist, jumped into action.
Bernays knew that for a coup to take place he would have to appeal not only to United Fruit but also its well-intentioned liberal critics. Thus, on March 18th, a week before Zemurray’s letter was set to appear in The Nation, the magazine published “Communism in the Caribbean?” an article by a pseudonymous American writer identified as Ellis Ogle. The article was an about-face and made the case for a military intervention from a liberal perspective, with Ogle attacking Guatemala’s “free election” and lamenting that “foreigners have no votes in Guatemala.” [17]
Bernays could not have been happier. “I proposed sending the Nation article to 100,000 liberals,” he wrote in Biography of an Idea. “I believed the Caribbean ferment was bound to become increasingly important. Liberals must play a decisive role. Zemurray agreed.” [18]
What role did Bernays play in the writing of The Nation article? He had, in the past, written letters to publications using pseudonyms, as in the case of the Tobacco Society for Voice Culture. On the other hand, someone identifying as either a real or pseudonymous Ellis Ogle had appeared once before in the pages of The Nation—but that Ellis Ogle was no journalist and certainly not one stationed in Central America.
That Ellis Ogle appeared in a 1920 letter-to-the-editor chastising the Boston Evening Transcript for its labor coverage. [19]
One final wrinkle: The CIA first authorized William Gaudet to begin receiving payments for “special reports” in 1950. [20] The same FBI case file that contained the earlier 1968 United Fruit memorandum also observed that he “may do some free-lance writing under a pen name.” [21]
Regardless of who wrote the article, it achieved its intended effect. Zemurray appeared happy with its influence and started providing direct financial support to The Nation the following year. [22]
Bernays, having removed his final obstacle to a coup, began organizing trips to Guatemala for reporters. Beginning with New York Times writers Will Lissner and Crede Calhoun, Bernays instigated a press panic with carefully curated tours highlighting the dangers of the Árbenz government. [23]
Crede Calhoun [Source: findagrave.com]
These Bernays-sponsored trips coincided with violent protests, helping to shape perception of Árbenz as a power-hungry dictator. Ludwell Denny, foreign editor for Scripps Howard Newspapers, summed up this sentiment best in a February 1952 syndicated story comparing an alleged alliance between “Guatemalan National Socialists” and Moscow to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. [24]
Ludwell Denny [Source: ebay.com]
Once again, as with his prior stunts, Bernays’s media blitz worked. The incoming Eisenhower administration—which included Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a partner at the law firm which had helped United Fruit negotiate the 1936 tax-dodging contract with Jorge Ubico—was open to the idea of a coup. [25]
Thus, in August 1953, President Eisenhower authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to undertake a covert operation to topple Árbenz.
John Foster Dulles, left, with Dwight Eisenhower. [Source: politico.com]
Operation PBSuccess
Code-named Operation PBSuccess, the CIA operation lasted almost a year and consisted of psychological warfare designed to break the will of the Guatemalan people. Although Bernays was not directly involved, the CIA took a cue from the PR guru and flooded Guatemalans with propaganda to counter the Árbenz government’s own messages, the most notorious example being a fake radio station named the Voice of Liberation.
The station, directed by agent and ex-actor David Atlee Philllips, broadcast messages ranging from fake bulletins on troop movements to disinformation intended to stir hysteria and sow confusion among Guatemala’s citizens. One such broadcast: “It is not true that the waters of Lake Atitlan have been poisoned.” [26]
David Atlee Phillips [Source: alchetron.com]
[Source: narratively.com]
If Bernays could not take part in the coup in person, he was there in spirit because, on June 27, 1954, he achieved what no PR professional had before him. In the late hours of the evening a pre-recorded broadcast went out to the Guatemalan people. “Workers, peasants, patriots,” intoned the voice of Jacobo Árbenz. “Guatemala is going through a hard trial. A cruel war against Guatemala has been unleashed. The United Fruit Company and U.S. monopolies, together with U.S. ruling circles, are responsible for…” [27]
Jacobo Árbenz had resigned as president. Árbenz ended the broadcast by declaring, “Long live Guatemala!” but this sentiment would be short lived. After a series of political maneuvers, exiled military leader Carlos Castillo Armas returned to Guatemala and took power with the full support of the United States government. Guatemala backslid into authoritarian rule and the Castillo Armas government established concentration camps for political prisoners, where they executed suspected communists. [28]
Castillo Armas and his supporters at the presidential palace. [Source: allthatsinteresting.com]
Bernays, for his part, was ambivalent about his involvement in the coup. In his war on the truth, he had somehow lost sight of his role in fomenting unrest and convinced himself that he was the real victim. “I, too, became a casualty of this revolution,” he wrote, reflecting on his time lobbying against Guatemala. “[United Fruit’s public relations director] sent me a note telling me I was so well off economically that I didn’t need the United Fruit Company as a client.” [29]
The Father of Lies
Whether selling cigarettes or deposing world leaders, Edward Bernays molded reality like clay. In his hands, words spun like so many hollow jars. However, the one constant, the one truth among his many distortions, is that Bernays had no use for the truth.
In this sense, Bernays is responsible for our current information crisis. His public relations campaigns formed the foundation of modern disinformation and influence operations. You are not really lying if the lies you tell are to counter other lies. The cure for propaganda is more propaganda.
We can see the influence of Bernays today all around us, in politics and beyond. Dark money networks birthing artificial advocacy organizations, shadowy donors funding fake pressure groups. Bernays’s specter illuminates the television, where think tanks assemble pundits on the factory line. But most of all, we see him on social media platforms, spaces reliant on a kind of emotional manipulation Bernays perfected a century before Facebook and Cambridge Analytica existed.
[Source: inc.com]
Astroturfing is now the primary tool of political deception online. Militaries and police departments operate under fake identities; politicians maintain burner accounts; and government agencies direct troll armies.
If the 20th century was the century of the self, then the 21st is the century of the second self—of the third, the fourth, and the fifth. We are no longer bound by the constraints of the truth; as with Bernays, we are free to create and assume identities as we desire. Will we use this freedom to topple governments? Who has already?
Edward Bernays: The father of public relations, the father of lies.

[1] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of a Public Relations Counsel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965), 384.
[2] Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998), 35-36.
[3] Josef Israels and James Thurber, “The Talk of the Town”, The New Yorker, December 23, 1927, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1927/...-an-oliver.
[4] Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 81-82.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982), 57; Jim Handy, “The Guatemalan Revolution and Civil Rights: Presidential Elections and the Judicial Process under Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 10, no. 19 (1985): 7.
[7] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 749.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Middle America Information Bureau, Every American has a personal stake in our relations with Middle America (New York: Middle America Information Bureau, 1945), 4, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=n...&skin=2021.
[10] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 749.
[11] Ibid., 749-750.
[12] Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), 82.
[13] Ibid. See also U.S. Congress, House Select Committee on Assassinations, 1975, “Memo of Conversation Between George Gaudet and Bernard Festerwald,” Unclassified Memorandum, Washington, D.C.: United States House of Representatives, https://www.archives.gov/files/research/...-10390.pdf.
[14] SAC New Orleans, “Reurlet of 6/14/68” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, New Oleans, LA: June 28, 1968), 2, https://www.archives.gov/files/research/...298962.pdf.
[15] William George Gaudet, “The Bounding Main…”, Latin American Report, 1, no. 8 (1956): 3; United Fruit Company, “Seven to One,” Latin American Report, 3, no. 4 (1959): 1; United Fruit Company, “United Fruit Is Growing With Jamaica and Helping Jamaica to Grow,” Latin American Report, 5, vol. 3 (1963): 8.
[16] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 762.
[17] Ellis Ogle, “Communism in the Caribbean?” The Nation, March 18, 1950, 246-247.
[18] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 759.
[19] Ellis Ogle, letter to the editor, The Nation, July 10, 1920, 44.
[20] Raymond Reardon, “Subject: William George Gaudet” (Security Analysis Group, Washington, DC: January 16, 1976), https://documents.theblackvault.com/docu...-10236.pdf. [NOTE: Shouldn’t it state that it is a “CIA Routing and Record Sheet” somewhere?]
[21] SAC New Orleans, “Reurlet of 6/14/68,” 3.
[22] Dan Koeppel, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed The World (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2008), 119.
[23] Will Lissner, “Soviet Agents Plotting to Ruin Unity, Defenses of Americas,” The New York Times, June 22, 1950, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesma...true&ip=0; C.H. Calhoun, “Guatemalan Reds Trade on Old Ills”, The New York Times, June 5, 1951, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesma...=true&ip=0.
[24] Ludwell Denny, “Enemy Below the Border,” Knoxville News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN), February 11, 1952, https://www.newspapers.com/image/595431436/.
[25] Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala, 71.
[26] Evan Thomas, “You Can Own the World,” The Washington Post, October 22, 1995, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/l...1d63a539d/.
[27] Jacobo Árbenz, “Arbenz Speech Delivered at 0310-0320” (speech, Guatemala, June 27, 1954), CIA Historical Review Program, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000920952.pdf.
[28] Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala, 198-199.
[29] Edward Bernays, Biography of an Idea, 775.

Twitter Middle East Executive is soldier for UK's 77 Brigade psywar unit

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 05:55:55 +0000

This blows a large hole in Twitter's credibility -such as it now, following repeated questionable suspensions of leading users critical of the official media and government narratives.

Britain's 77 Army Brigade was set up just 4 years ago in 2015 to conduct psychological warfare operations. It's emphasis is conducting psywar ops against ordinary mugs like us on social media sites.

Just off to the soup-kitchen for a game of tennis --- because I want to have a "healthy corporate social" 'responsibility' to remain "open, neutral and rigorously independent platform" guy.

See ya later!

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Twitter Suspends Accounts For Propaganda, Has Literal Propagandist As High-Level Executive
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Middle East Eyes Ian Cobain has published an exclusive titled "Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army psyops' soldier", exposing the fact that Twitter's senior editorial executive for Europe, the Middle East and Africa also works for an actual, literal propaganda unit in the British military called the 77th Brigade. Which is mighty interesting, considering the fact that Twitter constantly suspends accounts from non-empire-aligned nations based on the allegation that they are engaging in propaganda.
"The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army's psychological warfare unit," Cobain writes. "Gordon MacMillan, who joined the social media company's UK office six years ago, has for several years also served with the 77th Brigade, a unit formed in 2015 in order to develop non-lethal' ways of waging war. The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to wage what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, describes as information warfare'."

[URL="https://twitter.com/IanCobain"]Ian Cobain
@IanCobain
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[URL="https://twitter.com/IanCobain/status/1178590025128251392"]
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EXCLUSIVE: Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army 'psyops' soldier https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-executive-also-part-time-officer-uk-army-psychological-warfare-unit â€¦
[URL="https://t.co/wU7TO9vgia"]

EXCLUSIVE: Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army 'psyops' soldier
Head of editorial for MENA is part-time officer in the 77th Brigade, an 'information warfare' unit which has worked on 'behavioural change' projects in the region
middleeasteye.net

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[URL="https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1178590025128251392"]

308[/URL]
9:38 AM - Sep 30, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy

[URL="https://twitter.com/IanCobain/status/1178590025128251392"]

323 people are talking about this

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MacMillan's presence in a government psyops unit was not a secret; until Middle East Eye began raising questions on the matter, it was right there on his LinkedIn profile. This is not something that anyone considering him for promotion was likely to have been unaware of. According to his (now-edited) LinkedIn page, MacMillan has been in his current position as Head of Editorial EMEA since July 2016. According to Middle East Eye, MacMillan was already a captain in the 77th Brigade by the end of 2016. His current rank there is being hidden behind a wall of government secrecy.
When questioned by Middle East Eye about MacMillan's work in the British Army's online propaganda program, Twitter hilariously responded, "Twitter is an open, neutral and rigorously independent platform. We actively encourage all our employees to pursue external interests in line with our commitment to healthy corporate social responsibility, and we will continue to do so."
That's very nice of Twitter, isn't it? They encourage their employees to pursue wholesome external interests, whether that be tennis, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or moonlighting at a military program explicitly devoted to online psychological warfare. You know, just everyday socially responsible pastime stuff.
The fact that Twitter not only employs known propagandists but actively promotes them to executive positions is a very large and inconvenient plot hole in their "open, neutral and rigorously independent platform" story. Especially since, as I documented recently, the mass purges of foreign Twitter accounts we've been seeing more and more of lately always exclusively target governments and groups which are not in alignment with the interests of the US-centralized power alliance of which the UK is a part. We've seen mass suspensions of accounts from Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and the Catalan independence movement on allegations of "coordinated influence operations" and "covert, manipulative behaviors", yet Twitter currently employs a high-level executive for whom coordinated influence operations and covert, manipulative behaviors on behalf of the British government are a known vocation.
"On September 20 Twitter deleted a large number of accounts, including in MacMillan's area of responsibility. How many of those were designated by the British state?" asks Moon of Alabama of this new report.
How many indeed?

[URL="https://twitter.com/caitoz"]Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz
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[URL="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1172130858611830784"]
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Have You Noticed How Social Media Purges Always Align With The US Empire?

"There is no legitimate reason to go on pretending that these plutocratic Silicon Valley institutions are meaningfully separate from the US government."https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/have-you-noticed-how-social-media-purges-always-align-with-the-us-empire-63293f1a22e2 â€¦
[URL="https://t.co/Jdsj1JMWPB"]

Have You Noticed How Social Media Purges Always Align With The US Empire?
Twitter has suspended multiple large Cuban media accounts for reasons the social media platform has yet to explain as of this writing, aâ€¦
medium.com

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[URL="https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1172130858611830784"]

672[/URL]
1:52 PM - Sep 12, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy

[URL="https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1172130858611830784"]

459 people are talking about this

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This is just one more item on the ever-growing mountain of evidence that these giant, immensely influential social media platforms we've all been herded into are nothing other than state propaganda for the digital age. True, they operate in a way which disregards the official lines that are drawn between government power and corporate power and the lines that are drawn between nations, but then, so do our rulers. We are living in a globe-spanning corporate oligarchic empire, and these government-aligned Silicon Valley giants are a major part of that empire's propaganda engine.
The real power of that empire and that oligarchy lies in their invisibile and unacknowledged nature. Officially we all live in separate, sovereign nations run by democratically elected officials; unofficially we live in a massive transnational empire ruled by a loose alliance of plutocrats and opaque government agencies where military propagandists are employed by social media monopolies to manipulate public narratives. The official mask exists only on the level of narrative, while the unofficial reality is what's actually happening. Yet whenever you try to publicly discuss the threat that is being posed by oligarchic narrative control online, you get told by establishment loyalists and libertarians that Twitter is just a simple private business running things in a way that is entirely separate from government censorship and state propaganda.
All we clear-eyed rebels can do is keep documenting the evidence of what's going on and pointing to it as loudly as we can. So once again for the people in the back: Twitter employs literal government propagandists as high-level executives while purging accounts from unabsorbed governments for circulating unauthorized narratives. This is a fact. Remember it.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/10/01/...VH1Kue5Ek#

The New York Times

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 07:13:12 +0000

I think the New York Times can and should be saved.
For the Billy Joel song alone.
#SaveNYT

A dissection of the new contrived cold war

Fri, 13 Sep 2019 10:14:46 +0000

Although slightly Austrlain-centric -- the writer is a former Ozzie diplomat who served in Moscow in the late 1960's early 1970's who made the below presentation to the Independent Scholars Association, Canberra - it is non-the-less, for me anyway, a tour de force of the propaganda narrative and dirty tricks campaign deployed against Russia by the Anglo-Yank sphere over the last decade.

This narrative is fraying and collapsing. But don't expect the Anglo-Yanks to change it or admit it. They won't. Instead they'll simply continue to Goebbels-ise it... continue lying, spinning and fabricating ad nauseam.

Because that's all they know how to do and they have no other strategy available to them to try to save their ever waning hegemony. But I think that the myopia they have inculcated in their own citizens is slowly shredding before their eyes as the world irresistibly changes. Their days are numbered imo.

[quote]

The Devolution of US-Russia Relations

September 13, 2019 0 Comments

A retired Australian diplomat who served in Moscow dissects the emergence of the new Cold War and its dire consequences.

By Tony Kevin

[B]In 2014, we saw violent U.S.-supported regime change and civil war in Ukraine. In February, after months of increasing tension from the anti-Russian protest movement's sitdown strike in Kiev's Maidan Square, there was a murderous clash between protesters and Ukrainian police, sparked off by hidden shooters (we now know that were expert Georgian snipers) , aiming at police. The elected government collapsed and President Yanukevich fled to Russia, pursued by murder squads. [/B]The new Poroshenko government pledged harsh anti-Russian language laws. Rebels in two Russophone regions in Eastern Ukraine took local control, and appealed for Russian military help. In March, a referendum took place in Russian-speaking Crimea on leaving Ukraine, under Russian military protection. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, a request promptly granted by the Russian Parliament and President. Crimea's border with Ukraine was secured against saboteurs. Crimea is prospering under its pro-Russian government, with the economy kick-started by Russian transport infrastructure investment. In April, Poroshenko ordered full military attack on the separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. A brutal civil war ensued, with aerial and artillery bombardment bringing massive civilian death and destruction to the separatist region. There was major refugee outflow into Russia and other parts of Ukraine. The shootdown of MH17 took place in July 2014.

Poroshenko: Ordered military attack.

By August 2015, according to UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates, 13,000 people had been killed and 30,000 wounded. 1.4 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced, and 925,000 had fled to neighbouring countries, mostly Russia and to a lesser extent Poland. There is now a military stalemate, under the stalled Minsk peace process. But random fatal clashes continue, with the Ukrainian Army mostly blamed by UN observers. The UN reported last month that the ongoing war has affected 5.2 million people, leaving 3.5 million of them in need of relief, including 500,000 children. Most Russians blame the West for fomenting Ukrainian enmity towards Russia. This war brings back for older Russians horrible memories of the Nazi invasion in 1941. The Russia-Ukraine border is only 550 kilometres from Moscow. [B]Flashpoint Syria[/B][B]Russian forces joined the civil war in Syria in September 2015, at the request of the Syrian Government, faltering under the attacks of Islamist extremist rebel forces reinforced by foreign fighters and advanced weapons. With Russian air and ground support, the tide of war turned. Palmyra and Aleppo were recaptured in 2016. An alleged Syrian Government chemical attack at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017 resulted in a token U.S. missile attack on a Syrian Government airbase: an early decision by President Trump. [/B][B][B]NATO, Strategic Balance, Sanctions [/B][/B]

[B][B]An F-15C Eagle from the 493rd Fighter Squadron takes off from Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, March 6, 2014. The 48th Fighter Wing sent an additional six aircraft and more than 50 personnel to support NATO's air policing mission in Lithuania, at the request of U.S. allies in the Baltics. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Emerson Nunez/Released)
[/B][/B]

[B][B]Tensions have risen in the Baltic as NATO moves ground forces and battlefield missiles up to the Baltic states' borders with Russia. Both sides' naval and air forces play dangerous brinksmanship games in the Baltic. U.S. short-range, non-nuclear-armed anti-ballistic missiles were stationed in Poland and Romania, allegedly against threat of Iranian attack. They are easily convertible to nuclear-armed missiles aimed at nearby Russia. [/B][/B][B][B]Nuclear arms control talks have stalled. The INF intermediate nuclear forces treaty expired in 2019, after both sides accused the other of cheating. In March 2018, Putin announced that Russia has developed new types of intercontinental nuclear missiles using technologies that render U.S. defence systems useless. The West has pretended to ignore this announcement, but we can be sure Western defence ministries have noted it. Nuclear second-strike deterrence has returned, though most people in the West have forgotten what this means. Russians know exactly what it means. [/B][/B][B][B]Western economic sanctions against Russia continue to tighten after the 2014 events in Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to block the nearly completed Nordstream Baltic Sea underwater gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Sanctions are accelerating the division of the world into two trade and payments systems: the old NATO-led world, and the rest of the world led by China, with full Russian support and increasing interest from India, Japan, ROK and ASEAN. [/B][/B][B][B][B]Return to Moscow [/B][/B][/B][B][B]In 2013, my children gave me an Ipad. I began to spend several hours a day reading well beyond traditional mainstream Western sources: British and American dissident sites, writers like Craig Murray in UK and in the U.S. Stephen Cohen, and some Russian sites rt.com, Sputnik, TASS, and the official Foreign Ministry site mid.ru. in English. [/B][/B][B][B]In late 2015 I decided to visit Russia independently to write Return to Moscow, a literary travel memoir. I planned to compare my impressions of the Soviet Union, where I had lived and worked as an Australian diplomat in 1969-71, with Russia today. I knew there had been huge changes. I wanted to experience 'Putin's Russia' for myself, to see how it felt to be there as an anonymous visitor in the quiet winter season. I wanted to break out of the familiar one-dimensional hostile political view of Russia that Western mainstream media offer: to take my readers with me on a cultural pilgrimage through the tragedy and grandeur and inspiration of Russian history. As with my earlier book on Spain Walking the Camino', this was not intended to be a political book, and yet somehow it became one. [/B][/B][B][B]I was still uncommitted on contemporary Russian politics before going to Russia in January 2016. Using the metaphor of a seesaw, I was still sitting somewhere around the middle. [/B][/B][B][B]My book was written in late 2015 early 2016, expertly edited by UWA Publishing. It was launched in March 2017. By this time my political opinions had moved decisively to the Russian end of the seesaw, on the basis of what I had seen in Russia, and what I had read and thought during the year.[/B][/B][B][B]I have been back again twice, in winter 2018 and 2019. My 2018 visit included Crimea, and I happened to see a Navalny-led Sunday demonstration in Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed all three independent visits: in my opinion, they give my judgements on Russia some depth and authenticity. [/B][/B][B][B][B]Russophobia Becomes Entrenched [/B][/B][/B][B][B]Russia was a big talking point in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the initially unlikely Republican candidate Donald Trump's chances improved, anti-Putin and anti-Russian positions hardened in the outgoing Obama administration and in the Democratic Party establishment which backed candidate Hillary Clinton. [/B][/B][B][B]Russia and Putin became caught up in the Democratic Party's increasingly obsessive rage and hatred against the victorious Trump. Russophobia became entrenched in Washington and London U.S. and UK political and strategic elites, especially in intelligence circles: think of Pompeo, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. All sense of international protocol and diplomatic propriety towards Russia and its President was abandoned, as this appalling Economist cover from October 2016 shows.[/B][/B][B][B]My experience of undeclared political censorship in Australia since four months after publication of Return to Moscow' supports the thesis that:[/B][/B][B][B]We are now in the thick of a ruthless but mostly covert Anglo-American alliance information war against Russia. In this war, individuals who speak up publicly in the cause of detente with Russia will be discouraged from public discourse. [/B][/B][B][B][B]In the Thick of Information War [/B][/B][/B][B][B]When I spoke to you two years ago, I had no idea how far-reaching and ruthless this information war is becoming. I knew that a false negative image of Russia was taking hold in the West, even as Russia was becoming a more admirable and self-confident civil society, moving forward towards greater democracy and higher living standards, while maintaining essential national security. I did not then know why, or how. [/B][/B][B][B]I had just had time to add a few final paragraphs in my book about the possible consequences for Russia-West relations of Trump's surprise election victory in November 2016. I was right to be cautious, because since Trump's inauguration we have seen the step-by-step elimination of any serious pro-detente voices in Washington, and the reassertion of control over this haphazard president by the bipartisan imperial U.S. deep state, as personified from April 2018 by Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Adviser Bolton. Bolton has now been thrown from the sleigh as decoy for the wolves: under the smooth-talking Pompeo, the imperial policies remain. [/B][/B][B][B][B]Truth, Trust and False Narratives [/B][/B][/B][B][B]Let me now turn to some theory about political reality and perception, and how national communities are persuaded to accept false narratives. Let me acknowledge my debt to the fearless and brilliant Australian independent online journalist, Caitlin Johnstone. [/B][/B][B][B]Behavioural scientists have worked in the field of what used to be called propaganda since WW1. England has always excelled in this field. Modern wars are won or lost not just on the battlefield, but in people's minds. Propaganda, or as we now call it information warfare, is as much about influencing people's beliefs within your own national communityas it is about trying to demoralise and subvert the enemy population.[/B][/B][B][B]The IT revolution of the past few years has exponentially magnified the effectiveness of information warfare. Already in the 1940s, George Orwell understood how easily governments are able to control and shape public perceptions of reality and to suppress dissent. His brilliant books 1984 and Animal Farm are still instruction manuals in principles of information warfare. Their plots tell of the creation by the state of false narratives, with which to control their gullible populations. [/B][/B][B][B]The disillusioned Orwell wrote from his experience of real politics. As a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War, he saw how both Spanish sides used false news and propaganda narratives to demonise the enemy. He also saw how the Nazi and Stalinist systems in Germany and Russia used propaganda to support show trials and purges, the concentration camps and the Gulag, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, German master race and Stalinist class enemy ideologies; and hows dissident thought was suppressed in these controlled societies. Orwell tried to warn his readers: all this could happen here too, in our familiar old England. But because the good guys won the war against fascism, his warnings were ignored. [/B][/B][B][B]We are now in Britain, U.S. and Australia actually living in an information warfare world that has disturbing echoes of the world that Orwell wrote about. The essence of information control is the effective state management of two elements, trust and fear, to generate and uphold a particular view of truth. Truth, trust and fear: these are the three key elements, now as 100 years ago in WWI Britain. [/B][/B][B][B]People who work or have worked close to government in departments, politics, the armed forces, or top universities mostly accept whatever they understand at the time to be the government view' of truth.[B]Whether for reasons of organisational loyalty, career prudence or intellectual inertia, it is usually this way around governments. It is why moral issues like the Vietnam War and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq were so distressing for people of conscience working in or close to government and military jobs in Canberra. They were expected to engage in doublethink' as Orwell had described it:[/B][/B][/B][B][B]Even in Winston's nightmare world, there were still choices to retreat into the non-political world of the proles, or to think forbidden thoughts and read forbidden books. These choices involved large risks and punishments. It was easier and safer for most people to acquiesce in the fake news they were fed by state-controlled media. [/B][/B][B][B][B]Trust, Truth and False Narratives' [/B][/B][/B][B][B]Fairfax journalist Andrew Clark, in the Australian Financial Review, in an essay optimistically titled "Not fake news: Why truth and trust are still in good shape in Australia", (AFR Dec. 22, 2018), cited Professor William Davies thus: [/B][/B]

[B][B]"Most of the time, the edifice that we refer to as "truth" is really an investment of trust in our structures of politics and public life' â€¦ When trust sinks below a certain point, many people come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham."[/B][/B]

[B][B]Here is my main point: Effective information warfare requires the creation of enough public trust to make the public believe that state-supported lies are true.[/B][/B][B][B]The key tools are [B]repetition of messages, and [B]diversification of trusted voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining.[/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Caitlin Johnstone a few days ago put it this way:[/B][/B][/B][/B]

[B][B][B][B]"Power is being able to control what happens. Absolute poweris being able to control what people thinkabout what happens. If you can control what happens, you can have power until the public gets sick of your BS and tosses you out on your ass. If you can control what people thinkabout what happens, you can have power forever. As long as you can control how people are interpreting circumstances and events, there's no limit to the evils you can get away with."[/B][/B][/B][/B]

[B][B][B][B]The Internet has made propaganda campaigns that used to take weeks or months a matter of hours or even minutes to accomplish. It is about getting in quickly, using large enough clusters of trusted and diverse sources, in order to cement lies in place, to make the lies seem true, to magnify them through social messaging: in other words, to create credible false narratives that will quickly get into the public's bloodstream. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Over the past two years, I have seen this work many times: on issues like framing Russia for the MH17 tragedy; with false allegations of Assad mounting poison gas attacks in Syria; with false allegations of Russian agents using lethal Novichok to try to kill the Skripals in Salisbury; and with the multiple lies of Russiagate. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]It is the mind-numbing effect of constant repetition of disinformation by many eminent people and agencies, in hitherto trusted channels like the BBC or ABC or liberal Anglophone print media that gives the system its power to persuade the credulous. For if so many diverse and reputable people repeatedly report such negative news and express such negative judgements about Russia or China or Iran or Syria, surely they must be right? [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]We have become used to reading in our quality newspapers and hearing on the BBC and ABC and SBS gross assaults on truth, calmly presented as accepted facts. There is no real public debate on important facts in contention any more. There are no venues for dissent outside contrarian social media sites. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Sometimes, false narratives inter-connect. Often a disinformation narrative in one area is used to influence perceptions in other areas. For example, the false Skripals poisoning story was launched by British intelligence in March 2018, just in time to frame Syrian President Assad as the guilty party in a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma the following month. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B][B]The Skripals Gambit [/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]The Skripals gambit was also a failed British attempt to blight the Russia hosted Football World Cup in June 2018. In the event, hundreds of thousands of Western sports fans returned home with the warmest memories of Russian good sportsmanship and hospitality. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]How do I know the British Skripals narrative is false? For a start, it is illogical, incoherent, and constantly changes. Allegedly, two visiting Russian FSB agents in March 2018 sprayed or smeared Novichok, a deadly toxin instantly lethal in the most microscopic quantities, on the Skripals' house front doorknob. There is no video footage of the Skripals at their front door on the day. We are told they were found slumped on a park bench, and that is maybe where they had been sprayed with nerve gas? Shortly afterwards, Britain's Head of Army Nursing who happened to be passing by found them, and supervised their hospitalisation and emergency treatment. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Allegedly, much of Salisbury was contaminated by Novichok, and one unfortunate woman mysteriously died weeks later, yet the Skripals somehow did not die, as we are told. But where are they now? We saw a healthy Yulia in a carefully scripted video interview released in May 2018, after an alleged one in a million' recovery. We were assured her father had recovered too, but nobody has seen him at all. The Skripals have simply disappeared from sight since 16 months ago. Are they now alive or dead? Are they in voluntary or involuntary British custody? [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]A month after the poisoning, the UK Government sent biological samples from the Skripals to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , for testing. The OPCW sent the samples to a trusted OPCW laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B][B]Lavrov Spiez BZ claims, April 2018 [/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dramatically announced in Moscow that the Spiez lab had found in the samples a temporary-effect nerve agent BZ, used by U.S. and UK but not by Russia, that would have disabled the Skripals for a few days without killing them. He also revealed the Spiez lab had found that the Skripal samples had been twice tampered with while still in UK custody: first soon after the poisoning, and again shortly before passing them to the OPCW. He said the Spiez lab had found a high concentration of Novichok, which he called A- 234, in its original form. This was extremely suspicious as A-234 has high volatility and could not have retained its purity over a two weeks period. The dosage the Spiez lab found in the samples would have surely killed the Skripals. The OPCW under British pressure rejected Lavrov's claim, and suppressed the Spiez lab report. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Let's look finally at the alleged assassins. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B][B]Boshirov and Petrov'[/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]These two FSB operatives who visited Salisbury under the false identities of Boshirov' and Petrov' did not look or behave like credible assassins. It is more likely that they were sent to negotiate with Sergey Skripal about his rumoured interest in returning to Russia. They needed to apply for UK visas a month in advance of travel: ample time for the British agencies to identify them as FSB operatives, and to construct a false attempted assassination narrative around their visit. This false narrative repeatedly trips over its own lies and contradictions. British social media are full of alternative theories and rebuttals. Russians find the whole British Government Skripal narrative laughable. They have invented comedy skits and video games based on it. Yet it had major impact on Russia-West relations. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B][B]The Douma False Narrative [/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]I turn now to the claimed Assad chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018.[B]This falsely alleged attack triggered a major NATO air attack on Syrian targets, ordered by Trump. We came close to WWIII in these dangerous days. Thanks to the restraint of the then Secretary of Defence James Mattis and his Russian counterparts, the risk was contained. [/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]The allegation that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used outlawed chemical weapons against his own people was based solely on the evidence of faked video images of child victims, made by the discredited White Helmets, a UK-sponsored rebel-linked humanitarian' propaganda organisation with much blood on its hands. Founded in 2013 by a British private security specialist of intelligence background, James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets specialised in making fake videos of alleged Assad regime war crimes against Syrian civilians. It is by now a thoroughly discredited organisation that was prepared to kill its prisoners and then film their bodies as alleged victims of government chemical attacks. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B][B]White Helmets [/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]As the town of Douma was about to fall to advancing Syrian Government forces, the White Helmets filled a room with stacked corpses of murdered prisoners, and photographed them as alleged victims of aerial gas attack. They also made a video alleging child victims of this attack being hosed down by White Helmets. A video of a child named Hassan Diab went viral all over the Western world. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Hassan Diab later testified publicly in The Hague that he had been dragged terrified from his family by force, smeared with some sort of grease, and hosed down with water as part of a fake video. He went from hero to zero overnight, as Western governments and media rejected his testimony as Russian and Syrian propaganda. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]In a late development, there is proof that the OPCW suppressed its own engineers' report from Douma that the alleged poison gas cylinders could not have possibly been dropped from the air through the roof of the house where one was found, resting on a bed under a convenient hole in the roof. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]I could go on discussing the detail of such false narratives all day. No matter how often they are exposed by critics, our politicians and mainstream media go on referencing them as if they are true. Once people have come to believe false narratives, it is hard to refute them. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]So it is with the false narrative that Russian internet interference enabled Trump to win the 2016 U.S. presidential elections: a thesis for which no evidence was found by [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller, yet continues to be cited by many U.S. liberal Democratic media as if it were true. So, even, with MH17. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B][B]Managing Mass Opinion[/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]This mounting climate of Western Russophobia is not accidental: it is strategically directed, and it is nourished with regular maintenance doses of fresh lies. Each round of lies provides a credible platform for the next round somewhere else. The common thread is a claimed malign Russian origin for whatever goes wrong. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]So where is all this disinformation originating? Information technology firms in Washington and London that are closely networked into government elites, often through attending the same establishment schools or colleges like Eton and Yale, have closely studied and tested the science of influencing crowd opinions through mainstream media and online. They know, in a way that Orwell or Goebbels could hardly have dreamt, how to put out and repeat desired media messages. They know what sizes of internet attraction nodes' need to be established online, in order to create diverse critical masses of credible Russophobic messaging, which then attracts enough credulous and loyal followers to become self-propagating. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Firms like the SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) and the now defunct Cambridge Analytica pioneered such work in the UK. There are many similar firms in Washington, all in the business of monitoring, generating and managing mass opinion. It is big business, and it works closely with the national security state. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Starting in November 2018, an enterprising group of unknown hackers in the UK , who go by the name Anonymous', opened a remarkable window into this secret world. Over a few weeks, they hacked and dumped online a huge volume of original documents issued by and detailing the activities of the Institute for Statecraft (IfS) and the Integrity initiative (II). Here is the first page of one of their dumps, exposing propaganda against Jeremy Corbyn. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]We know from this material that the IfS and II are two secret British disinformation networks operating at arms' length from but funded by the UK security services and broader UK government establishment. They bring together high-ranking military and intelligence personnel, often nominally retired, journalists and academics, to produce and disseminate propaganda that serves the agendas of the UK and its allies. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Stung by these massive leaks, Chris Donnelly, a key figure in IfS and II and a former British Army intelligence officer, made a now famous seven-minute YouTube video in December 2018, artfully filmed in a London kitchen, defending their work. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]He argued quite unconvincingly in my opinion that IfS and II are simply defending Western societies against disinformation and malign influence, primarily from Russia. He boasted how they have set up in numerous targeted European countries, claimed to be under attack from Russian disinformation, what he called 'clusters of influence', to educate' public opinion and decision-makers in pro-NATO and anti-Russian directions. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Donnelly spoke frankly on how the West is already at war with Russia, a new kind of warfare', in which he said everything becomes a weapon'. He said that disinformation is the issue which unites all the other weapons in this conflict and gives them a third dimension'.[/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]He said the West has to fight back, if it is to defend itself and to prevail. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]We can confirm from the Anonymous leaked files the names of many people in Europe being recruited into these clusters of influence. They tend to be significant people in journalism, publishing, universities and foreign policy think-tanks: opinion-shapers. The leaked documents suggest how ideologically suitable candidates are identified: approached for initial screening interviews; and, if invited to join a cluster of influence, sworn to secrecy. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Remarkably, neither the Anonymous disclosures nor the Donnelly response have ever been reported in Australian media. Even in Britain where evidence that the Integrity Initiative was mounting a campaign against [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn provoked brief media interest. The story quickly disappeared from mainstream media and the BBC. A British under-foreign secretary admitted in Parliamentary Estimates that the UK Foreign Office subsidises the Institute of Statecraft to the tune of nearly 3 million pounds per year. It also gives various other kinds of non-monetary assistance, e.g. providing personnel and office support in Britain's overseas embassies. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]This is not about traditional spying or seeking agents of influence close to governments. It is about generating mass disinformation, in order to create mass climates of belief. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]In my opinion, such British and American disinformation efforts, using undeclared clusters of influence, through Five Eyes intelligence-sharing, and possibly with the help of British and American diplomatic missions, may have been in operation in Australia for many years.[/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Such networks may have been used against me since around mid-2017, to limit the commercial outreach of my book and the impact of its dangerous ideas on the need for East-West detente; and efficiently to suppress my voice in Australian public discourse about Russia and the West. Do I have evidence for this? Yes. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]It is not coincidence that the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2017 somehow lost all my sign-and-sell books from my sold-out scheduled speaking event; that a major debate with [Australian writer and foreign policy analyst] Bobo Lo at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne was cancelled by his Australian sponsor, the Lowy institute, two weeks before the advertised date; that my last invitation to any writers festival was 15 months ago, in May 2018; that Return to Moscow was not shortlisted for any Australian book prize, though I entered it in all of them ; that since my book's early promotion ended around August 2017, I have not been invited to join any ABC discussion panels, or to give any talks on Russia in any universities or institutes, apart from the admirable Australian Institute of International Affairs and the ISAA. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]My articles and shorter opinion commentaries on Russia and the West have not been published in mainstream media or in reputable online journals like Eureka Street, The Conversation, Inside Story orAustralian Book Review. Despite being an ANU Emeritus Fellow, I have not been invited to give a public talk or join any panel in ANU (Australian National University) or any Canberra think tank. In early 2018, I was invited to give a private briefing to a group of senior students travelling on an immersion course to Russia. I was not invited back in 2019, after high-level private advice within ANU that I was regarded as too pro-Putin. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]In all these ways none overt or acknowledged my voice as an open-minded writer and speaker on Russia-West relations seems to have been quietly but effectively suppressed in Australia. I would like to be proved wrong on this, but the evidence is there. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]This may be about "velvet-glove deterrence" of my Russia-sympathetic voice and pen, in order to discourage others, especially those working in or close to government. Nobody is going to put me in jail, unless I am stupid enough to violate Australia's now strict foreign influence laws. This deterrence is about generating fear of consequences for people still in their careers, paying their mortgages, putting kids through school. Nobody wants to miss their next promotion. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]There are other indications that Australian national security elite opinion has been indoctrinated prudently to fear and avoid any kind of public discussion of positive engagement with Russia (or indeed, with China). [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]There are only two kinds of news about Russia now permitted in our mainstream media, including the ABC and SBS: negative news and comment, or silence. Unless a story can be given an anti-Russian sting, it will not be carried at all. Important stories are simply spiked, like last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivistok, chaired by President Putin and attended by Prime Ministers Abe, Mahathir and Modi, among 8500 participants from 65 countries. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]The ABC idea of a balanced panel to discuss any Russian political topic was exemplified in an ABC Sunday Extra Roundtable panel chaired by Eleanor Hall on July, 22 2018, soon after the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki. The panel a former ONA Russia analyst, a professor of Soviet and Russian History at Melbourne University, and a Russian Ã©migrÃ© dissident journalist introduced as the Washington correspondent for Echo of Moscow radio' spent most of their time sneering at Putin and Trump. There were no other views. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]A powerful anti-Russian news narrative is now firmly in place in Australia, on every topic in contention: Ukraine, MH17, Crimea, Syria, the Skripals, Navalny and public protest in Russia. There is ill-informed criticism of Russia, or silence, on the crucial issues of arms control and Russia-China strategic and economic relations as they affect Australia's national security or economy. There is no analysis of the negative impact on Australia of economic sanctions against Russia. There is almost no discussion of how improved relations with China and Russia might contribute to Australia's national security and economic welfare, as American influence in the world and our region declines, and as American reliability as an ally comes more into question. Silence on inconvenient truths is an important part of the disinformation tool kit. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]I see two overall conflicting narratives the prevailing Anglo-American false narrative; and valiant efforts by small groups of dissenters, drawing on sources outside the Anglo-American official narrative, to present another narrative much closer to truth. And this is how most Russians now see it too. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018 was damaged by the Skripal and Syria fabrications. Trump left that summit friendless, frightened and humiliated. He soon surrendered to the power of the U.S. imperial state as then represented by [Mike] Pompeo and [John] Bolton, who had both been appointed as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in April 2018 and who really got into their stride after the Helsinki Summit. Pompeo now smoothly dominates Trump's foreign policy. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B][B]Self-Inflicted Wounds [/B][/B][/B][/B][/B]

[B][B][B][B]U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (Gage Skidmore)
[/B][/B][/B][/B]

[B][B][B][B]Finally, let me review the American political casualties over the past two years self-inflicted wounds arising from this secret information war against Russia. Let me list them without prejudging guilt or innocence. Slide 20 Self-inflicted wounds: casualties of anti-Russian information warfare. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Trump's first National Security Adviser, the highly decorated Michael Flynn lost his job after only three weeks, and soon went to jail. His successor H R McMaster lasted 13 months until replaced by John Bolton. Trump's first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson lasted just 14 months until his replacement by Trump's appointed CIA chief (in January 2017) Mike Pompeo. Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon lasted only seven months. Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is now in jail. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Defence Secretary James Mattis lasted nearly two years as Secretary of Defence, and was an invaluable source of strategic stability. He resigned in December 2018. The highly capable Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman lasted just two years: he is resigning next month. John Kelly lasted 18 months as White House Chief of Staff. Less senior figures like George Papadopoulos and Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen both served jail time. The pattern I see here is that people who may have been trying responsibly as senior U.S. officials to advance Trump's initial wish to explore possibilities for detente with Russia policies that he had advocated as a candidate were progressively purged, one after another. The anti-Russian U.S. bipartisan imperial state is now firmly back in control. Trump is safely contained as far as Russia is concerned.[/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Russians do not believe that any serious detente or arms control negotiations can get under way while cold warriors like Pompeo continue effectively to control Trump. There have been other casualties over the past two years of tightening American Russophobia. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning come to mind. The naive Maria Butina is a pathetic victim of American judicial rigidity and deep state vindictiveness. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]False anti-Russian Government narratives emanating from London and Washington may be laughed at in Moscow , but they are unquestioningly accepted in Canberra. We are the most gullible of audiences. There is no critical review. Important contrary factual information and analysis from and about Russia just does not reach Australian news reporting and commentary, nor I fear Australian intelligence assessment. We are prisoners of the false narratives fed to us by our senior Five Eyes partners U.S. and UK. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]To conclude: Some people may find what I am saying today difficult to accept. I understand this. I now work off open-source information about Russia with which many people here are unfamiliar, because they prefer not to read the diverse online information sources that I choose to read. The seesaw has tilted for me: I have clearly moved a long way from mainstream Western perceptions on Russia-West relations. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Under Trump and Pompeo, as the Syria and Iran crises show, the present risk of global nuclear war by accident or incompetent Western decision-making is as high as it ever was in the Cold War. The West needs to learn again how to dialogue usefully and in mutually respectful ways with Russia and China. This expert knowledge is dying with our older and wiser former public servants and ex-military chiefs. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]These remarks were delivered by Tony Kevin at the Independent Scholars Association of Australia in Canberra, Australia on Wednesday. [/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B]Watch Tony Kevin interviewed Friday night on [B]CN Live![/B][/B][/B][/B][/B][B][B][B][B][B]Tony Kevin is a retired Australian diplomat who was posted to Moscow from 1969 to 1971, and was later Australia's ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. His latest book is Return to Moscow, published by UWA Publishing.[/B][/B][/B][/B][/B]

[unquote]

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/09/13/th...relations/

State Department Troll Farm Receives Huge Cash Infusion

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 14:54:41 +0000

The U.S. State Department will increase its online trolling capabilities and up its support for meddling in other countries. The Hill reports:

The State Department is launching a $40 million initiative to crack down on foreign propaganda and disinformation amid widespread concerns about future Russian efforts to interfere in elections.The department announced Monday that it signed a deal with the Pentagon to transfer $40 million from the Defense Department's coffers to bolster the Global Engagement Center, an office set up at State during the Obama years to expose and counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.

The professed reason for the new funding is the alleged but unproven "Russian meddling" in the U.S. election campaign. U.S. Special Counsel Mueller indicted 13 Russians for what is claimed to be interference but which is likely mere commercial activity.

The announcement by the State Department explains that this new money will not only be used for measures against foreign trolling but to actively meddle in countries abroad:

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Steve Goldstein said the transfer of funds announced today reiterates the United States' commitment to the fight."This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation and that we can leverage deeper partnerships with our allies, Silicon Valley, and other partners in this fight," said Under Secretary Goldstein. "It is not merely a defensive posture that we should take, we also need to be on the offensive."

The mentioning of Silicon Valley is of interest. The big Silicon Valley companies Google, Facebook and Twitter were heavily involved in the U.S. election campaign. The companies embedded people within the campaigns to advise them how to reach a maximum trolling effect:

While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad pushes around upcoming speeches.

In May 2016 the Hillary Clinton campaign even set up her own troll farm:

Hillary Clinton's well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet's worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton's campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online.

Clinton is quite experienced in such issues. In 2009, during protests in Iran, then Secretary of State Clinton pushed Twitter to defer maintenance of its system to "help" the protesters. In 2010 USAid, under the State Department set up a Twitter-like service to meddle in Cuba.

The foreign policy advisor of Hillery Clinton's campaign, Laura Rosenberger, initiated and runs the Hamilton68 project which falsely explains any mentioning of issues disliked by its neo-conservative backers as the result of nefarious "Russian meddling".

The State Department can build on that and other experience.

Since at least 2011 the U.S. military is manipulating social media via sock puppets and trolls:

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
...
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".

It was then wisely predicted that other countries would follow up:

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities known to users of social media as "sock puppets" could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

Israel is long known for such information operations in which its paid trolls not only comment on issues on social media but actively manipulate Wikipedia entries. Such astroturfing has since become a common tool in commercial marketing campaigns.

With the new money the State Department will expand its Global Engagement Center (GEC) which is running "public diplomacy", aka propaganda, abroad:

The Fund will be a key part of the GEC's partnerships with local civil society organizations, NGOs, media providers, and content creators to counter propaganda and disinformation. The Fund will also drive the use of innovative messaging and data science techniques.Separately, the GEC will initiate a series of pilot projects developed with the Department of Defense that are designed to counter propaganda and disinformation. Those projects will be supported by Department of Defense funding.

This money will be in addition to the large funds the CIA traditionally spends on manipulating foreign media:

"We've been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947," said Mr. Johnson, now at the University of Georgia. "We've used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners you name it. We've planted false information in foreign newspapers. We've used what the British call King George's cavalry': suitcases of cash."
...
C.I.A. officials told Mr. Johnson in the late 1980s that "insertions" of information into foreign news media, mostly accurate but sometimes false, were running at 70 to 80 a day.

Part of the new State Department money will be used to provide grants. If online trolling or sock puppetry is your thing, you may want to apply now.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/sta...usion.html

Thoughts on the Missile Warning in Hawaii

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 19:01:01 +0000

[video]https://www.bitchute.com/video/YSosYdY12yk/[/video]

How Google Censors The Internet & What You Think Is There

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 09:30:16 +0000

While this article was written by and much about one socialist website, the general principles apply to all websites that are in anyway alternative, progressive, critical of or anti-capitalist, whistleblowers, presenting information and opinion opposed to the official propaganda lines, etc.

Quote:Google's new search protocol is restricting access to 13 leading socialist, progressive and anti-war web sites

2 August 2017

New data compiled by the World Socialist Web Site, with the assistance of other Internet-based news outlets and search technology experts, proves that a massive loss of readership observed by socialist, anti-war and progressive web sites over the past three months has been caused by a cumulative 45 percent decrease in traffic from Google searches.
The drop followed the implementation of changes in Google's search evaluation protocols. In a statement issued on April 25, Ben Gomes, the company's vice president for engineering, stated that Google's update of its search engine would block access to "offensive" sites, while working to surface more "authoritative content."
The World Socialist Web Site has obtained statistical data from SEMrush estimating the decline of traffic generated by Google searches for 13 sites with substantial readerships. The results are as follows:

* wsws.org fell by 67 percent
* alternet.org fell by 63 percent
* globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
* consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
* socialistworker.org fell by 47 percent
* mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
* commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
* internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
* democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
* wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
* truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
* counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
* theintercept.com fell by 19 percent

Of the 13 web sites on the list, the World Socialist Web Site has been the most heavily affected. Its traffic from Google searches has fallen by two thirds.
The new statistics demonstrate that the WSWS is a central target of Google's censorship campaign. In the twelve months preceding the implementation of the new Google protocols, the WSWS had experienced a substantial increase in readership. A significant component of this increase was the product of Google search results. The rapid rise in search traffic reflected the well-documented growth in popular interest in socialist politics during 2016. The rate of growth accelerated following the November election, which led to large protests against the election of Trump.
Search traffic to the WSWS peaked in April 2017, precisely at the point when Google began the implementation of its censorship protocols.
Another site affected by Google's action has provided information that confirms the findings of the WSWS.
"In late May, changes to Google's algorithm negatively impacted the volume of traffic to the Common Dreams website from organic Google searches," said Aaron Kaufman, director of development at progressive news outlet Common Dreams. "Since May, traffic from Google Search as a percentage of total traffic to the Common Dreams website has decreased nearly 50 percent."
The extent and impact of Google's actions prove that a combination of techniques is being employed to block access to targeted sites. These involve the direct flagging and blackballing of the WSWS and the other 12 sites listed above by Google evaluators. These sites are assigned a highly negative rating that assures that their articles will be either demoted or entirely bypassed. In addition, new programming technology teaches the computers to think like the evaluators, that is, to emulate their preferences and prejudices.
Finally, the precision of this operation strongly suggests that there is an additional range of exclusion techniques involving the selection of terms, words, phrases and topics that are associated with socialist and left-wing websites.
This would explain why the World SocialistWeb Site, which focuses on issues such as war, geopolitics, social inequality and working class struggles has experienced such a dramatic fall in Google-generated searches on these very topics. We have seen that the very terms and phrases that would under normal circumstances be most likely to generate the highest level of hitssuch as "socialism," "Marxism" and "Trotskyism"produce the lowest results.
This is an ongoing process in which one can expect that Google evaluators are continuously adding suspect terms to make their algorithm ever more precise, with the eventual goal of eliminating traffic to the WSWS and other targeted sites.
The information that has been gathered and published by the WSWS during the past week exposes that Google is at the center of a corporate-state conspiracy to drastically curtail democratic rights. The attack on free speech and uncensored access to information is aimed at crippling popular opposition to social inequality, war and authoritarianism.
The central and sinister role of Google in this process demonstrates that freedom of speech and thought is incompatible with corporate control of the Internet.
As we continue our exposure of Google's assault on democratic rights, we demand that it immediately and unequivocally halt and revoke its censorship program.
It is critical that a coordinated campaign be organized within the United States and internationally against Google's censorship of the Internet. We intend to do everything in our power to develop and contribute to a counter-offensive against its efforts to suppress freedom of speech and thought.
The fight against corporate-state censorship of the Internet is central to the defense of democratic rights, and there must be a broad-based collaboration among socialist, left and progressive websites to alert the public and the widest sections of the working class.

Google an increasing PROBLEM!

Sun, 08 Oct 2017 04:56:22 +0000

I personally have noticed that what I consider good/valuable political research/articles/sites are hidden deeper and deeper on the Google search engine - and the 'official versions' are more and more at the top of the list [always were].

Here is another progressive site's take on Google...but it is NOT hard to find MANY other examples:

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We are being censored and we need your help!
Earlier this year, Google changed its algorithm to suppress fake news' and ever since then, our readership at Popular Resistance has dropped dramatically. Your help is needed to break through this censorship. If you see an article on Popular Resistance that you like, please take a minute to use the sharing buttons at the top to post it on Facebook, Twitter or whichever social media platform you use. With your help, we the people will be the media and build the movement for social and economic transformation. Thank you. - Popular Resistance

Popular Resistance and other people's media outlets are not the only ones being targeted by Google. This summer, a group of ten people who study wealth inequality, led by Barry Lynn for the past 15 years at the New America Foundation, was fired after criticizing Google's growing domination. Fortunately, they regrouped as an independent organization and they continue to research and expose the causes of wealth inequality in the United States.
As one of the world's richest nations, the US stands out for having the greatest wealth divide and high levels of poverty. Over the past 40 years, wages have stagnated and, as Lynn points out, "the richest one percent took more than half of all income growth since 1979." Currently, the top 0.1 percent have wealth equal to the bottom 90 percent. It isn't a matter of whether the US has enough money to support basic necessities like health, education and housing, but who has the wealth in the US and where our tax dollars are being spent.

The Rich Stealing from the Poor
The White House and leaders in Congress released their new tax proposal this week, and its no surprise that it is a huge gift to the wealthy and the President himself. Americans for Tax Fairness estimates that if the tax proposal were to become reality, it would mean a $6.7 to $8.3 trillion tax cut for the wealthy and leave us with a larger budget deficit. President Trump alone would gain over a billion dollars, which Bob Lord at Inequality.org describes as "Trump will be effectively cutting himself a check from the U.S. Treasury for several billion dollars." But what else would we expect from a "Government by Goldman," as Gary Rivlin and Michael Hudson describe it?
The budget deficit means greater austerity for the rest of us. Congress will use the deficit to cut important social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and to cut spending on education, housing and other necessities. We can be certain that the war machine will not be cut. In fact Republicans and Democrats in the Senate recently voted 89-8 in favor of an $80 billion increase in military spending. The US spends more on its military than the next top ten nations combined.
This is what we mean when we say that the US is an Empire Economy. Imagine the great social uplift that could be created by dismantling the Empire and investing in a transition to a clean energy economy, high quality public education from preschool to higher education, comprehensive health care for everyone and affordable housing.
Beyond taxes, the wealthy steal from the poor through control over markets and workers. In "To Address Inequality, Let's Take on Monopolies," Barry Lynn explains that monopolies allow the rich to control prices and exploit workers. Trade agreements have allowed large corporations to seek out places where wages are low and regulations are lax. And the assault on labor unions has also weakened basic protections for workers in the US. The Supreme Court just agreed to hear another case that would attack public sector unions. Paddy Quick argues that we must fight for changes that redirect wealth to reduce our growing inequality.

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Sinclare - the ALL Right Wing & TERRORISM & Love Trump Network You've Never Heard Of - YET!

Fri, 25 Aug 2017 18:06:28 +0000

[FONT=&]This is Sinclair, 'the most dangerous US company you've never heard of'
[/FONT][FONT=&]
Lucia Graves
[URL="https://twitter.com/lucia_graves"]
@lucia_graves
[/URL]
[FONT=&]Thursday 17 August 2017 12.00 BSTLast modified on Thursday 17 August 2017 20.10 BST[/FONT]

[FONT=&]M[/FONT]ost Americans don't know it exists. Primetime US news refers to it as an "under-the-radar company". Unlike Fox News and Rupert Murdoch, virtually no one outside of business circles could name its CEO. And yet, Sinclair Media Group is the owner of the largest number of TV stations in America.
"Sinclair's probably the most dangerous company most people have never heard of," said Michael Copps, the George W Bush-appointed former chairman of Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the top US broadcast regulator.
John Oliver host of HBO's weekly satirical show Last Week Tonight used a similar line when he introduced an 18-minute segment on Sinclair last month by referring to it as "maybe the most influential media company you never heard of".

But that is beginning to change. Sinclair's size, rightwing politics and close connections to Donald Trump's White House are starting to attract attention. Democrats are wading in to the fray and demanding answers over Sinclair's close ties to the Trump administration, which, they say, could mean the group is getting preferential treatment.

The New York Times refers to the group as a "conservative giant" that, since the Bush presidency, has used its 173 television stations "to advance a mostly right-leaning agenda". The Washington Post describes it as a "company with a long history of favoring conservative causes and candidates on its stations' newscasts".
More recently, Sinclair has added a website, Circa, to its portfolio. But not any old website. Circa has been described as "the new Breitbart" and a favorite among White House aides who wish to platform news to a friendly source (a process otherwise known as "leaking"). As the US news site the Root put it: "What if Breitbart and Fox News had a couple of babies? What if they grew up to be a cool, slicker version of their parents and started becoming more powerful? Meet Sinclair and Circa Donald Trump's new besties."
The growing anxiety in America over the rise of Sinclair stems from the belief the company's close connections to Trump have allowed it to skirt market regulations. Already the biggest broadcaster in the country, Sinclair is poised to make its biggest move yet. If the FCC approves Sinclair's $3.9bn purchase of an additional 42 stations, it would reach into the homes of almost three-quarters of Americans.
Another cause for concern, and increased scrutiny, is what's seen as the company's pronounced political agenda. Sinclair forces its local stations to run pro-Trump "news" segments. In April, they hired Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump campaign spokesman and member of the White House press office, as its chief political analyst. His "must-run" 10-minute political commentary segments unsurprisingly hewed closely to the Trump administration's message. The news and analysis website Slate, referring to Epshteyn's contributions, said: "As far as propaganda goes, this is pure, industrial-strength stuff."

Some local stations have reportedly chafed at the idea of pro-Trump "must run" packages. Sinclair's management says the packages are necessary to provide viewers with diverse viewpoints as a counterweight to progressive leanings they're convinced are held by the media, including the staff of their own local stations. "Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the media is left of center," David Smith, then Sinclair's CEO, told Rolling Stone in 2005.
But Sinclair's politics isn't restricted to Epshteyn's contributions. It has a long history of airing material which has often been controversial, and for which it has been sanctioned in the past all the while purporting to simply report the "news".
While it doesn't have the cultural cachet of major conservative networks like Fox News, Sinclair's influence is more subtle. Unlike Fox News, which brands itself clearly and proudly, most viewers of Sinclair's local stations have no idea who owns them since they are not branded as part of the Sinclair network.
But it is their intended purchase of a collection of new stations owned by Tribune Media the former owners of the illustrious Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times that has thrust them into the national spotlight unlike ever before.
"It used to be a few years ago there were some mergers that were unthinkable," Copps, now with the DC-based watchdog group Common Cause, told the Guardian. "We're in a period now when everything's so wild that nothing is unthinkable."
For the Trump administration, Sinclair has obvious appeal

The figure that looms large behind Sinclair is David Smith, whose father founded the company in the Nixon era. Smith recently ended his 28-year reign as CEO, and along with his brothers maintains what an industry publication called "iron-clad control" of the billion-dollar media empire as well as the company's majority financial interest.
The Smith family, based in and around Baltimore, likes to keep a low profile they give few interviews and David Smith has no Wikipedia page. "We would tend to maintain as much anonymity as we can," he told the Baltimore Sun in 1995, one of the rare times he's spoken to the press.
Their political agenda is somewhat less mysterious. Campaign finance records show the Smith brothers have historically donated overwhelmingly to Republicans. And a Washington Post analysis of the company's 2016 presidential election coverage found Sinclair stations were unusually favorable towards Trump and negative towards Hillary Clinton.
During last year's presidential campaign, Sinclair conducted zero interviews with Clinton. But it touted 15 "exclusive" ones with Trump, which aired mostly in critical swing states in the final months of the election and without any commentary, despite the copious fact-checking Trump interviews tend to require. Sinclair has insisted it had no special arrangement with the Trump campaign and that Clinton simply did not make herself available to them. Clinton campaign officials say they spurned Sinclair for a reason, though her vice-presidential nominee, Tim Kaine, gave a handful interviews to Sinclair stations.
According to Politico, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner told a room full of Manhattan business executives that the campaign had struck a deal with Sinclair to secure better coverage in the states where they needed spots most.

The FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, testifies in the House of Representatives. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/ReutersThe manner in which Sinclair looks set to expand specifically, with Trump paving the way is causing widespread anxiety throughout media and political circles. The focus of the concern is Ajit Pai, the man Trump appointed as head of the country's top broadcasting regulator, the FCC.
Since he began work in January, Pai has been busy relaxing the protections for local broadcasting that had previously limited Sinclair's expansion.
Trump's new-look FCC has moved swiftly to clear the hurdles for Sinclair's proposed takeover of Tribune. A day before Trump was inaugurated, Smith invited Pai to a meeting at the Washington-area headquarters of the company's ABC affiliate. Within 10 days of taking over the FCC, a New York Times investigation found, Pai had already relaxed a restriction on TV stations' sharing of resources, including ad revenue precisely the topic Smith had met with Pai about.
Since January, the Times report found, "Pai has undertaken a deregulatory blitz enacting or proposing a wishlist of fundamental policy changes advocated by Mr Smith and his company."
Tom Wheeler, Pai's predecessor at the FCC, who is now at the Brookings Institution, said: "What's surprising is how fast the Trump FCC moved and how they moved without any real opportunity for public comment and without any following of procedural due process ... So you look at that kind of behavior and scratch your head."
To better understand such behavior and where it's leading, it helps to consider where Sinclair began.
David Smith's father, Julian Sinclair Smith, described by the company's official history as "patriarch to the Smith brothers", founded the company in 1971, and kept a hand in the business until his death, following a battle with Parkinson's, in 1993. But the company's greatest evolutionary changes began around 1990, when the brothers bought up the remainder of their parents' stock, kicking off an extended buying spree that would last decades.
As Sinclair grew, so did the scrutiny. And increasingly, the Smith brothers found themselves not just the broadcasters, but the subject of the news.
In 1996, David Smith was arrested on suspicion of soliciting a prostitute who performed what the police called "unnatural and perverted sex on him" in a Mercedes owned by Sinclair. More disturbing to critics than the misdemeanor sex offense, though, was the unusual way he got out of doing the court-ordered community service that resulted from his plea bargain in the case: by having his broadcasting company do what amounted to publicity hits for local drug counseling programs, packaged as news.
LuAnne Canipe, a former reporter for Sinclair, said the incident was also indicative of a broader culture of office sexism. "Let's just say the arrest of the CEO was part of a sexual atmosphere that trickled down to different levels in the company," said Canipe, who left Sinclair in 1998. "There was an improper work environment. I think that because of what he did, there was a feeling that everything was fair game."

The growth of Sinclair may have passed below the radar, but not past another media mogul Rupert Murdoch, chairman and acting CEO of Fox News.
Although Sinclair has insisted it has no interest in competing with national cable news platforms like Murdoch's, industry observers say the mogul is already planning a strategy to combat the rise of a potential rival. After a failed attempt to outbid Sinclair for Tribune, Murdoch is threatening a switch of Fox's broadcast affiliates from Sinclair-owned stations to those of a smaller independent broadcaster.

Donald Trump with media mogul Rupert Murdoch in July 2016. Photograph: Carlo Allegri / Reuters/ReutersBut it isn't just Sinclair's business interests that are a cause of creeping concern its political affiliations could be, too.
Take the case the former congressman Bob Ehrlich, a Maryland Republican who later become governor. After pressing the FCC to fast-track Sinclair's request to acquire more stations, Ehrlich enjoyed company perks like the frequent use of a Sinclair executive's luxury helicopter, as the Baltimore Sun reported in 2002. By the time full details of the report emerged, Ehrlich had already won his gubernatorial election.
In 2004, Sinclair leadership reportedly ordered its local affiliate stations to air a documentary critical of the Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, based on allegations which later proved unfounded that Kerry had exaggerated his record as a swift-boat officer in the Vietnam war.
A Washington DC bureau chief publicly resisted and was fired for the offense. The incident sent ripples through its stations, but Sinclair said media reports about the controversy exaggerated the issue.

[FONT=&]John Oliver: Sinclair Broadcasting brings 'troubling' rightwing bias to local news

[/FONT][/FONT][FONT=&]

Around the same time, as George W Bush faced criticism over the faltering war in Iraq, Sinclair ordered seven of its stations not to run an episode of Nightline in which host Ted Koppel read the names of every American soldier killed in the war, saying it "undermine[d] the efforts of the United States in Iraq". The decision sparked a major backlash, including from the Republican senator John McCain, a Vietnam war veteran, who wrote a letter to David Smith calling the decision "unpatriotic" and "a gross disservice to the public, and to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces".
Other times, Sinclair's influence has been more ambiguous. When the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs was assaulted by the then US congressional candidate Greg Gianforte on the eve of his election in Montana, the local NBC affiliate, recently purchased by Sinclair, refused to air Jacobs's audio recording of the incident, despite entreaties from NBC executives in New York. The local news director said she was not influenced by Sinclair, noting the pu

[/FONT]

[FONT=&]rchase was not yet complete. Gianforte won the election, and, the day after the Montana Republican was charged with assault, Sinclair's vice-president and director Fred Smith donated $1,000 to him.[/FONT]
[FONT=&]Meanwhile, with its 2015 purchase of Circa, a mobile aggregated news app, Sinclair has control for the first time of a national text-based news outlet. Backed by a staff of 70, Sinclair transformed the app into conservative-leaning platform offering thinly sourced scoops often written without any author byline other than "Circa staff" that frequently seem to advance the Trump administration's agenda du jour. Trump and his aides have returned the favor by linking to Circa's content, and it's become a favorite source of Sean Hannity, Fox News's most obsequious Trump booster. (Sinclair denies Circa has any political orientation, noting that it does not carry op-eds.)[/FONT]
[FONT=&]The rise of Sinclair has also recently stirred the Democrats in Washington, who have become increasingly vocal on the issue.[/FONT]
[FONT=&]This summer, Senator Maria Cantwell led a group of colleagues in urging commerce and judiciary leaders to carefully examine the pending deal with Tribune, citing concern "about the level of media concentration this merger creates, and its impact on the public interest", according to the lawmakers' June letter.[/FONT]
[FONT=&]And this week, House Democrats in top FCC oversight positions wrote directly to the FCC's Pai expressing their dismay at what they perceive to be a "pattern" of preferential treatment toward Sinclair.[/FONT]
[FONT=&]In addition to changes paving the way for Sinclair's merger, Pai's FCC has proposed eliminating one of its most fundamental rules, which requires local news stations to actually have a local studio where they broadcast the news.[/FONT]
[FONT=&]Now, the agency seems poised to do away with local broadcast protections, which would allow Sinclair and other broadcasters to save money by cutting local staff and to impose more editorial input from corporate headquarters.[/FONT]
[FONT=&]And that means many more Americans will be hearing from the most dangerous company most people have never heard of whether they know it or not.[/FONT]

Some of the most dangerous NRA [or any other] propaganda I've seen in a long time!

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 07:01:29 +0000

Reagan Era Psyops Bureaucracy Concealed Inside NSC to Flood World With Lies

Sun, 26 Mar 2017 07:41:24 +0000

Quote:
How US Flooded the World with Psyops
March 25, 2017

Special Report: The mainstream U.S. media obsesses over Russian "propaganda" yet the U.S. government created a "psyops" bureaucracy three decades ago to flood the world with dubious information, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that over the past three decades have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home.

Walter Raymond Jr., a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist who oversaw President Reagan's "perception management" and psyops projects at the National Security Council. Raymond is partially obscured by President Reagan and is sitting next to National Security Adviser John Poindexter.. (Photo credit: Reagan presidential library)

The documents reveal the formation of a psyops bureaucracy under the direction of Walter Raymond Jr., a senior CIA covert operations specialist who was assigned to President Reagan's National Security Council staff to enhance the importance of propaganda and psyops in undermining U.S. adversaries around the world and ensuring sufficient public support for foreign policies inside the United States.
Raymond, who has been compared to a character from a John LeCarrÃ© novel slipping easily into the woodwork, spent his years inside Reagan's White House as a shadowy puppet master who tried his best to avoid public attention or it seems even having his picture taken. From the tens of thousands of photographs from meetings at Reagan's White House, I found only a couple showing Raymond and he is seated in groups, partially concealed by other officials.
But Raymond appears to have grasped his true importance. In his NSC files, I found a doodle of an organizational chart that had Raymond at the top holding what looks like the crossed handles used by puppeteers to control the puppets below them. Although it's impossible to know exactly what the doodler had in mind, the drawing fits the reality of Raymond as the behind-the-curtains operative who was controlling the various inter-agency task forces that were responsible for implementing various propaganda and psyops strategies.
Until the 1980s, psyops were normally regarded as a military technique for undermining the will of an enemy force by spreading lies, confusion and terror. A classic case was Gen. Edward Lansdale considered the father of modern psyops draining the blood from a dead Filipino rebel in such a way so the dead rebel's superstitious comrades would think that a vampire-like creature was on the prowl. In Vietnam, Lansdale's psyops team supplied fake and dire astrological predictions for the fate of North Vietnamese and Vietcong leaders.
Essentially, the psyops idea was to play on the cultural weaknesses of a target population so they could be more easily manipulated and controlled. But the challenges facing the Reagan administration in the 1980s led to its determination that peacetime psyops were also needed and that the target populations had to include the American public.
The Reagan administration was obsessed with the problems left behind by the 1970s' disclosures of government lying about the Vietnam War and revelations about CIA abuses both in overthrowing democratically elected governments and spying on American dissidents. This so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" produced profound skepticism from regular American citizens as well as journalists and politicians when President Reagan tried to sell his plans for intervention in the civil wars then underway in Central America, Africa and elsewhere.
While Reagan saw Central America as a "Soviet beachhead," many Americans saw brutal Central American oligarchs and their bloody security forces slaughtering priests, nuns, labor activists, students, peasants and indigenous populations. Reagan and his advisers realized that they had to turn those perceptions around if they hoped to get sustained funding for the militaries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as well as for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, the CIA-organized paramilitary force marauding around leftist-ruled Nicaragua.
So, it became a high priority to reshape public perceptions to gain support for Reagan's Central American military operations both inside those targeted countries and among Americans.
A Psyops Totality'
As Col. Alfred R. Paddock Jr. wrote in an influential November 1983 paper, entitled "Military Psychological Operations and US Strategy," "the planned use of communications to influence attitudes or behavior should, if properly used, precede, accompany, and follow all applications of force. Put another way, psychological operations is the one weapons system which has an important role to play in peacetime, throughout the spectrum of conflict, and during the aftermath of conflict."

President Ronald Reagan leading a meeting on terrorism on Jan. 26, 1981, with National Security Advisor Richard Allen, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and White House counselor Edwin Meese. (photo credit: Reagan library)

Paddock continued, "Military psychological operations are an important part of the PSYOP Totality,' both in peace and war. â€¦ We need a program of psychological operations as an integral part of our national security policies and programs. â€¦ The continuity of a standing interagency board or committee to provide the necessary coordinating mechanism for development of a coherent, worldwide psychological operations strategy is badly needed."
Some of Raymond's recently available handwritten notes show a focus on El Salvador with the implementation of "Nation wide multi-media psyops" spread through rallies and electronic media. "Radio + TV also carried Psyops messages," Raymond wrote. (Emphasis in original.) Though Raymond's crimped handwriting is often hard to decipher, the notes make clear that psyops programs also were directed at Honduras, Guatemala and Peru.
One declassified "top secret" document in Raymond's file dated Feb. 4, 1985, from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger urged the fuller implementation of President Reagan's National Security Decision Directive 130, which was signed on March 6, 1984, and which authorized peacetime psyops by expanding psyops beyond its traditional boundaries of active military operations into peacetime situations in which the U.S. government could claim some threat to national interests.
"This approval can provide the impetus to the rebuilding of a necessary strategic capability, focus attention on psychological operations as a national not solely military instrument, and ensure that psychological operations are fully coordinated with public diplomacy and other international information activities," Weinberger's document said.
This broader commitment to psyops led to the creation of a Psychological Operations Committee (POC) that was to be chaired by a representative of Reagan's National Security Council with a vice chairman from the Pentagon and with representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency.
"This group will be responsible for planning, coordinating and implementing psychological operations activities in support of United States policies and interests relative to national security," according to a "secret" addendum to a memo, dated March 25, 1986, from Col. Paddock, the psyops advocate who had become the U.S. Army's Director for Psychological Operations.
"The committee will provide the focal point for interagency coordination of detailed contingency planning for the management of national information assets during war, and for the transition from peace to war," the addendum added. "The POC shall seek to ensure that in wartime or during crises (which may be defined as periods of acute tension involving a threat to the lives of American citizens or the imminence of war between the U.S. and other nations), U.S. international information elements are ready to initiate special procedures to ensure policy consistency, timely response and rapid feedback from the intended audience."
Taking Shape
The Psychological Operations Committee took formal shape with a "secret" memo from Reagan's National Security Advisor John Poindexter on July 31, 1986. Its first meeting was called on Sept. 2, 1986, with an agenda that focused on Central America and "How can other POC agencies support and complement DOD programs in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama." The POC was also tasked with "Developing National PSYOPS Guidelines" for "formulating and implementing a national PSYOPS program." (Underlining in original)

Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush with CIA Director William Casey at the White House on Feb. 11, 1981. (Photo credit: Reagan Library)

Raymond was named a co-chair of the POC along with CIA officer Vincent Cannistraro, who was then Deputy Director for Intelligence Programs on the NSC staff, according to a "secret" memo from Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Craig Alderman Jr. The memo also noted that future POC meetings would be briefed on psyops projects for the Philippines and Nicaragua, with the latter project codenamed "Niagara Falls." The memo also references a "Project Touchstone," but it is unclear where that psyops program was targeted.
Another "secret" memo dated Oct. 1, 1986, co-authored by Raymond, reported on the POC's first meeting on Sept. 10, 1986, and noted that "The POC will, at each meeting, focus on an area of operations (e.g., Central America, Afghanistan, Philippines)."
The POC's second meeting on Oct. 24, 1986, concentrated on the Philippines, according to a Nov. 4, 1986 memo also co-authored by Raymond. "The next step will be a tightly drafted outline for a PSYOPS Plan which we will send to that Embassy for its comment," the memo said. The plan "largely focused on a range of civic actions supportive of the overall effort to overcome the insurgency," an addendum noted. "There is considerable concern about the sensitivities of any type of a PSYOPS program given the political situation in the Philippines today."
Earlier in 1986, the Philippines had undergone the so-called "People Power Revolution," which drove longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos into exile, and the Reagan administration, which belatedly pulled its support from Marcos, was trying to stabilize the political situation to prevent more populist elements from gaining the upper hand.
But the Reagan administration's primary attention continued to go back to Central America, including "Project Niagara Falls," the psyops program aimed at Nicaragua. A "secret" Pentagon memo from Deputy Under Secretary Alderman on Nov. 20, 1986, outlined the work of the 4th Psychological Operations Group on this psyops plan "to help bring about democratization of Nicaragua," by which the Reagan administration meant a "regime change." The precise details of "Project Niagara Falls" were not disclosed in the declassified documents but the choice of codename suggested a cascade of psyops.
Other documents from Raymond's NSC file shed light on who other key operatives in the psyops and propaganda programs were. For instance, in undated notes on efforts to influence the Socialist International, including securing support for U.S. foreign policies from Socialist and Social Democratic parties in Europe, Raymond cited the efforts of "Ledeen, Gershman," a reference to neoconservative operative Michael Ledeen and Carl Gershman, another neocon who has served as president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), from 1983 to the present. (Underlining in original.)
Although NED is technically independent of the U.S. government, it receives the bulk of its funding (now about $100 million a year) from Congress. Documents from the Reagan archives also make clear that NED was organized as a way to replace some of the CIA's political and propaganda covert operations, which had fallen into disrepute in the 1970s. Earlier released documents from Raymond's file show CIA Director William Casey pushing for NED's creation and Raymond, Casey's handpicked man on the NSC, giving frequent advice and direction to Gershman. [See Consortiumnews.com's "CIA's Hidden Hand in Democracy' Groups."]
Another figure in Raymond's constellation of propaganda assets was media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who was viewed as both a key political ally of President Reagan and a valuable source of funding for private groups that were coordinating with White House propaganda operations. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Rupert Murdoch: Propaganda Recruit."]
In a Nov. 1, 1985 letter to Raymond, Charles R. Tanguy of the "Committees for a Community of Democracies USA" asked Raymond to intervene in efforts to secure Murdoch's funding for the group. "We would be grateful â€¦ if you could find the time to telephone Mr. Murdoch and encourage him to give us a positive response," the letter said.
Another document, entitled "Project Truth Enhancement," described how $24 million would be spent on upgrading the telecommunications infrastructure to arm "Project Truth, with the technical capability to provide the most efficient and productive media support for major USG policy initiatives like Political Democracy." Project Truth was the overarching name of the Reagan administration's propaganda operation. For the outside world, the program was billed as "public diplomacy," but administration insiders privately called it "perception management." [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Victory of Perception Management."]
The Early Years
The original priority of "Project Truth" was to clean up the images of the Guatemalan and Salvadoran security forces and the Nicaraguan Contras, who were led by ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza's ex-National Guard officers. To ensure steady military funding for these notorious forces, Reagan's team knew it had to defuse the negative publicity and somehow rally the American people's support.

President Ronald Reagan meeting with Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, who was later charged with genocide against indigenous populations in Guatemala's highlands.

At first, the effort focused on weeding out American reporters who uncovered facts that undercut the desired public images. As part of that effort, the administration denounced New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing the Salvadoran regime's massacre of about 800 men, women and children in the village of El Mozote in northeast El Salvador in December 1981. Accuracy in Media and conservative news organizations, such as The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, joined in pummeling Bonner, who was soon ousted from his job. But such efforts were largely ad hoc and disorganized.
CIA Director Casey, from his years crisscrossing the interlocking worlds of business and intelligence, had important contacts for creating a more systematic propaganda network. He recognized the value of using established groups known for advocating "human rights," such as Freedom House.
One document from the Reagan library showed senior Freedom House official Leo Cherne running a draft manuscript on political conditions in El Salvador past Casey and promising that Freedom House would make requested editorial "corrections and changes" and even send over the editor for consultation with whomever Casey assigned to review the paper.
In a "Dear Bill" letter dated June 24, 1981, Cherne, who was chairman of the Freedom House's executive committee, wrote: "I am enclosing a copy of the draft manuscript by Bruce McColm, Freedom House's resident specialist on Central America and the Caribbean. This manuscript on El Salvador was the one I had urged be prepared and in the haste to do so as rapidly as possible, it is quite rough. You had mentioned that the facts could be checked for meticulous accuracy within the government and this would be very helpful. â€¦
"If there are any questions about the McColm manuscript, I suggest that whomever is working on it contact Richard Salzmann at the Research Institute [an organization where Cherne was executive director]. He is Editor-in-Chief at the Institute and the Chairman of the Freedom House's Salvador Committee. He will make sure that the corrections and changes get to Rita Freedman who will also be working with him. If there is any benefit to be gained from Salzmann's coming down at any point to talk to that person, he is available to do so."
By 1982, Casey also was lining up some powerful right-wing ideologues to help fund the "perception management" project both with money and their own media outlets. Richard Mellon Scaife was the scion of the Mellon banking, oil and aluminum fortune who financed a variety of right-wing family foundations such as Sarah Scaife and Carthage that were financial benefactors to right-wing journalists and think tanks. Scaife also published the Tribune Review in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A more comprehensive "public diplomacy" operation began to take shape in 1982 when Raymond, a 30-year veteran of CIA clandestine services, was transferred to the NSC. Raymond became the sparkplug for this high-powered propaganda network, according to an unpublished draft chapter of the congressional Iran-Contra investigation that was suppressed as part of the deal to get three moderate Republican senators to sign on to the final report and give the inquiry a patina of bipartisanship.
Though the draft chapter didn't use Raymond's name in its opening pages, apparently because some of the information came from classified depositions, Raymond's name was used later in the chapter and the earlier citations matched Raymond's known role. According to the draft report, the CIA officer who was recruited for the NSC job had served as Director of the Covert Action Staff at the CIA from 1978 to 1982 and was a "specialist in propaganda and disinformation."
"The CIA official [Raymond] discussed the transfer with [CIA Director] Casey and NSC Advisor William Clark that he be assigned to the NSC as [Donald] Gregg's successor [as coordinator of intelligence operations in June 1982] and received approval for his involvement in setting up the public diplomacy program along with his intelligence responsibilities," the chapter said. Gregg was another senior CIA official who was assigned to the NSC before becoming Vice President George H.W. Bush's national security adviser.
"In the early part of 1983, documents obtained by the Select [Iran-Contra] Committees indicate that the Director of the Intelligence Staff of the NSC [Raymond] successfully recommended the establishment of an inter-governmental network to promote and manage a public diplomacy plan designed to create support for Reagan Administration policies at home and abroad."
War of Ideas
During his Iran-Contra deposition, Raymond explained the need for this propaganda structure, saying: "We were not configured effectively to deal with the war of ideas."

President Reagan meets with publisher Rupert Murdoch, U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Wick, lawyers Roy Cohn and Thomas Bolan in the Oval Office on Jan. 18, 1983. (Photo credit: Reagan presidential library)

One reason for this shortcoming was that federal law forbade taxpayers' money from being spent on domestic propaganda or grassroots lobbying to pressure congressional representatives. Of course, every president and his team had vast resources to make their case in public, but by tradition and law, they were restricted to speeches, testimony and one-on-one persuasion of lawmakers. But President Reagan saw the American public's "Vietnam Syndrome" as an obstacle to his more aggressive policies.
Along with Raymond's government-based organization, there were outside groups eager to cooperate and cash in. Back at Freedom House, Cherne and his associates were angling for financial support.
In an Aug. 9, 1982 letter to Raymond, Freedom House executive director Leonard R. Sussman wrote that "Leo Cherne has asked me to send these copies of Freedom Appeals. He has probably told you we have had to cut back this project to meet financial realities. â€¦ We would, of course, want to expand the project once again when, as and if the funds become available. Offshoots of that project appear in newspapers, magazines, books and on broadcast services here and abroad. It's a significant, unique channel of communication" precisely the focus of Raymond's work.
On Nov. 4, 1982, Raymond, after his transfer from the CIA to the NSC staff but while still a CIA officer, wrote to NSC Advisor Clark about the "Democracy Initiative and Information Programs," stating that "Bill Casey asked me to pass on the following thought concerning your meeting with [right-wing billionaire] Dick Scaife, Dave Abshire [then a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board], and Co. Casey had lunch with them today and discussed the need to get moving in the general area of supporting our friends around the world.
"By this definition he is including both building democracy' â€¦ and helping invigorate international media programs. The DCI [Casey] is also concerned about strengthening public information organizations in the United States such as Freedom House. â€¦ A critical piece of the puzzle is a serious effort to raise private funds to generate momentum. Casey's talk with Scaife and Co. suggests they would be very willing to cooperate. â€¦ Suggest that you note White House interest in private support for the Democracy initiative."
The importance of the CIA and White House secretly arranging private funds was that these supposedly independent voices would then reinforce and validate the administration's foreign policy arguments with a public that would assume the endorsements were based on the merits of the White House positions, not influenced by money changing hands. Like snake-oil salesmen who plant a few cohorts in the crowd to whip up excitement for the cure-all elixir, Reagan administration propagandists salted some well-paid "private" individuals around Washington to echo White House propaganda "themes."
The role of the CIA in these initiatives was concealed but never far from the surface. A Dec. 2, 1982 note addressed to "Bud," a reference to senior NSC official Robert "Bud" McFarlane, described a request from Raymond for a brief meeting. "When he [Raymond] returned from Langley [CIA headquarters], he had a proposed draft letter â€¦ re $100 M democ[racy] proj[ect]," the note said.
While Casey pulled the strings on this project, the CIA director instructed White House officials to hide the CIA's hand. "Obviously we here [at CIA] should not get out front in the development of such an organization, nor should we appear to be a sponsor or advocate," Casey said in one undated letter to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese III as Casey urged creation of a "National Endowment."
But the formation of the National Endowment for Democracy, with its hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. government money, was still months down the road. In the meantime, the Reagan administration would have to line up private donors to advance the propaganda cause.
"We will develop a scenario for obtaining private funding," NSC Advisor Clark wrote to Reagan in a Jan. 13, 1983 memo, adding that U.S. Information Agency Director "Charlie Wick has offered to take the lead. We may have to call on you to meet with a group of potential donors."
Despite Casey's and Raymond's success in bringing onboard wealthy conservatives to provide private funding for the propaganda operations, Raymond worried about whether a scandal could erupt over the CIA's involvement. Raymond formally resigned from the CIA in April 1983, so, he said, "there would be no question whatsoever of any contamination of this." But Raymond continued to act toward the U.S. public much like a CIA officer would in directing a propaganda operation in a hostile foreign country.
Raymond fretted, too, about the legality of Casey's ongoing role. Raymond confided in one memo that it was important "to get [Casey] out of the loop," but Casey never backed off and Raymond continued to send progress reports to his old boss well into 1986.
It was "the kind of thing which [Casey] had a broad catholic interest in," Raymond shrugged during his Iran-Contra deposition. He then offered the excuse that Casey undertook this apparently illegal interference in domestic politics "not so much in his CIA hat, but in his adviser to the president hat."
Peacetime Propaganda
Meanwhile, Reagan began laying out the formal authority for this unprecedented peacetime propaganda bureaucracy. On Jan. 14, 1983, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 77, entitled "Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security." In NSDD-77, Reagan deemed it "necessary to strengthen the organization, planning and coordination of the various aspects of public diplomacy of the United States Government."

President Reagan meeting with Charles Wick on March 7, 1986, in the Oval Office. Also present: Stephen Rhinesmith, Don Regan, John Poindexter, George Bush, Jack Matlock and Walter Raymond (seated next to Regan on the left side of the photo). (Photo credit: Reagan library)

Reagan ordered the creation of a special planning group within the National Security Council to direct these "public diplomacy" campaigns. The planning group would be headed by Walter Raymond and one of its principal outposts would be a new Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America, housed at the State Department but under the control of the NSC. (One of the directors of the Latin American public diplomacy office was neoconservative Robert Kagan, who would later co-found the Project for the New American Century in 1998 and become a chief promoter of President George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq.)
On May 20, 1983, Raymond recounted in a memo that $400,000 had been raised from private donors brought to the White House Situation Room by U.S. Information Agency Director Charles Wick. According to that memo, the money was divided among several organizations, including Freedom House and Accuracy in Media, a right-wing media attack organization.
When I wrote about that memo in my 1992 book, Fooling America, Freedom House denied receiving any White House money or collaborating with any CIA/NSC propaganda campaign. In a letter, Freedom House's Sussman called Raymond "a second-hand source" and insisted that "this organization did not need any special funding to take positions â€¦ on any foreign-policy issues."
But it made little sense that Raymond would have lied to a superior in an internal memo. And clearly, Freedom House remained central to the Reagan administration's schemes for aiding groups supportive of its Central American policies, particularly the CIA-organized Contra war against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Plus, White House documents released later revealed that Freedom House kept its hand out for funding.
On Sept. 15, 1984, Bruce McColm writing from Freedom House's Center for Caribbean and Central American Studies sent Raymond "a short proposal for the Center's Nicaragua project 1984-85. The project combines elements of the oral history proposal with the publication of The Nicaraguan Papers," a book that would disparage Sandinista ideology and practices.
"Maintaining the oral history part of the project adds to the overall costs; but preliminary discussions with film makers have given me the idea that an Improper Conduct-type of documentary could be made based on these materials," McColm wrote, referring to a 1984 film that offered a scathing critique of Fidel Castro's Cuba. "Such a film would have to be the work of a respected Latin American filmmaker or a European. American-made films on Central America are simply too abrasive ideologically and artistically poor."
McColm's three-page letter reads much like a book or movie pitch, trying to interest Raymond in financing the project: "The Nicaraguan Papers will also be readily accessible to the general reader, the journalist, opinion-maker, the academic and the like. The book would be distributed fairly broadly to these sectors and I am sure will be extremely useful. They already constitute a form of Freedom House samizdat, since I've been distributing them to journalists for the past two years as I've received them from disaffected Nicaraguans."
McColm proposed a face-to-face meeting with Raymond in Washington and attached a six-page grant proposal seeking $134,100. According to the grant proposal, the project would include "free distribution to members of Congress and key public officials; distribution of galleys in advance of publication for maximum publicity and timely reviews in newspapers and current affairs magazines; press conferences at Freedom House in New York and at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.; op-ed circulation to more than 100 newspapers â€¦; distribution of a Spanish-language edition through Hispanic organizations in the United States and in Latin America; arrangement of European distribution through Freedom House contacts."
The documents that I found at the Reagan library did not indicate what subsequently happened to this specific proposal. McColm did not respond to an email request for comment about the Nicaraguan Papers plan or the earlier letter from Cherne (who died in 1999) to Casey about editing McComb's manuscript. Freedom House did emerge as a leading critic of Nicaragua's Sandinista government and also became a major recipient of money from the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded in 1983 under the umbrella of the Casey-Raymond project.
The more recently released documents declassified between 2013 and 2017 show how these earlier Casey-Raymond efforts merged with the creation of a formal psyop bureaucracy in 1986 also under the control of Raymond's NSC operation. The combination of the propaganda and psyop programs underscored the powerful capability that the U.S. government developed more than three decades ago for planting slanted, distorted or fake news. (Casey died in 1987; Raymond died in 2003.)
Over those several decades, even as the White House changed hands from Republicans to Democrats to Republicans to Democrats, the momentum created by William Casey and Walter Raymond continued to push these "perception management/psyops" strategies forward. In more recent years, the wording has changed, giving way to more pleasing euphemisms, like "smart power" and "strategic communications." But the idea is still the same: how you can use propaganda to sell U.S. government policies abroad and at home.

Source

When Disinformation is Truth

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 08:55:34 +0000

Parry says what many of us have known since last Summer when the Russian meme was reborn inside Hilary's DNC camp.

I also think Parry is right when he concludes that if the very worst happens, those driving the death bus will deny all responsibility. Cowards are like that.

"Sometimes, I envision the argument that I would hear as the mushroom clouds begin rising over U.S. and Russian cities. If not incinerated in the first moments of the cataclysm, the "smart" people of the mainstream U.S. media (and their liberal and neocon allies) would be insisting that it wasn't their fault; it was someone else's fault; blame-shifting to the end."

Quote:When Disinformation' Is Truth

March 13, 2017

Exclusive: Democrats and liberals have climbed into bed with the neocons to push the "Russia-did-it" conspiracy theory as a way to "get Trump," but this New McCarthyism has grave dangers, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The anti-Russian McCarthyism that has spread out from the United States to encompass the European Union, Canada and Australia has at its core an implicit recognition that neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy have failed.

A scene from "Dr. Strangelove," in which the bomber pilot (played by actor Slim Pickens) rides a nuclear bomb to its target in the Soviet Union.
When I recently asked a European journalist why this anti-Russian hysteria had taken root among mainstream European political parties, he answered with a question: "Do you think they can run on their success in handling the recession and the refugees?"

In other words, European voters are angry about the painful economic conditions that followed the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the destabilizing surge of immigrants fleeing from Western "regime change" wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.

So, like the Democratic Party that doesn't want to engage in a soul-searching self-examination about Donald Trump's victory, the European "establishment" parties need a handy excuse to divert criticism and that excuse is Russia, a blame-shifting that has allowed nearly every recent criticism of an establishment government official to be sloughed off as "Russian disinformation."

It doesn't even matter anymore that the criticism may be based on solid fact. Even truthful information is now deemed "Russian disinformation" or Russian-inspired "fake news."

We saw that in the Canadian mainstream media's denunciations of Consortiumnews.com for running an article that pointed out that Canada's Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland had misrepresented her family history to white-out her maternal grandfather's role editing a Nazi newspaper in Poland that demonized Jews and justified the Holocaust.

Virtually every mainstream outlet in Canada rallied to Freeland's side when she dismissed our article as Russian disinformation. Only later did a few newspapers grudgingly acknowledge that our story was true and that Freeland knew it was true. Still, the attacks on us continued. We were labeled "Russian disinformationists," with no evidence needed to support the slander and no defense allowed.

Though arguably a small example, the Freeland story reflects what is happening across the Western mainstream news media. Almost every independent-minded news article that questions the establishment narratives on international affairs is dismissed as "Russian propaganda." The few politicians, academics and journalists who don't march in the establishment's parade are "Moscow stooges" or "Putin apologists."

The Russian Resistance

This anti-Russian hysteria began some years ago when Russian President Vladimir Putin made clear that Russia would no longer bow to dictates from Washington and Brussels. Russia bristled at the encroachment of NATO on its borders, rejected the neoconservative agenda of "regime change" wars in Muslim countries, and resisted the U.S.-backed putsch ousting Ukraine's elected president in 2014.

Hillary Clinton speaking at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
But the anti-Russian frenzy gained unstoppable momentum with the U.S. election in 2016. The Democrats, liberals and neoconservatives were horrified at the shocking upset of their presidential choice, Hillary Clinton, by the boorish and buffoonish Donald Trump.

After this bitter defeat, the losers looked for scapegoats rather than order up a serious autopsy on how they lost to the "unelectable" Trump, i.e, by choosing a corporate candidate who was associated with neoliberal economics and neoconservative war policies. Blaming Russia became the easy excuse that could unify the various pro-Clinton camps.

So, the Obama administration in an unprecedented step sought to poison the well for its successor by having the U.S. intelligence community put out evidence-lacking allegations about Russian "meddling" in the U.S. election to elect Trump.

The promoters of this Russia-did-it narrative merged with the "#Resistance" movement to do whatever was necessary to push Trump out of office. It didn't seem to matter that there was very little evidence that the Russians actually did meddle in the election.

The chief claim was that the Russians gave WikiLeaks the Democratic emails revealing the Democratic National Committee's sabotage of Sen. Bernie Sanders's campaign and the emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta exposing the contents of Clinton's hidden speeches to Wall Street and some pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.

WikiLeaks denied getting the material from the Russians, but more to the point there was no evidence of collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign, as even Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman have acknowledged. (The WikiLeaks disclosures also were not a major factor in Clinton's defeat, which she primarily blamed on FBI Director James Comey briefly reopening the investigation of her using a private email server while Secretary of State.)

Still, the absence of evidence has not deterred Democrats, liberals and neocons from spinning a vast Russian conspiracy theory that ties together Trump's past business dealings in Russia with the notion that somehow Putin foresaw that Trump would become U.S. president, an eventuality that nearly every American pundit considered an impossibility as recently as last year.

But skeptics of the Trump/Russia conspiracy if they dare note that Putin would have needed the world's best Ouija board to foresee Trump's victory must then prove that they are not "Russian propaganda/disinformation agents" for having these doubts.

New McCarthyism and Maddow

Given the emergence of this New Cold War, I suppose it made sense that we would soon have a New McCarthyism, although it may have come as a surprise that this witch-hunting is being led by the liberals and the mainstream media, albeit with important assistance from the neoconservatives who have long engaged in smearing the patriotism of anyone who doubted their geopolitical genius.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
Remember back in 1984 when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick, an early neocon, denounced traitorous Americans who would "blame America first."

But it appears now that many liberals and even progressives are so blinded by their hatred of Trump that they haven't thought through the wisdom of their new alliance with the neocons or the fairness of smearing fellow Americans as "Putin apologists."

Meanwhile, mainstream news organizations have abandoned even the pretense of professional objectivity in their propagandistic approach toward anything related to Russia or Trump. For instance, I would defy anyone reading The New York Times' coverage of Russia to assess it as fair and balanced when it is clearly snarky and sneering.

It also turns out that this New McCarthyism has become profitable for its leading practitioners. The New York Times reported on Monday that the ratings for MSNBC's Rachel Maddow are soaring with her frequent anti-Russian rants.

"Now, rattled liberals are surging back [to network television], seeking catharsis, solidarity and relief," the Times wrote, citing a Kentucky woman explaining why she has become a devotee of Maddow: "She's always talking about the Russians!"

Frankly, for the past dozen years, I've wondered about Maddow. I first heard her on the radio in August 2005 when she was a summer fill-in at Air America reporting on President George W. Bush's Katrina fiasco, which she partly blamed on the deployment of Louisiana National Guard units to Iraq, so they couldn't help evacuate flooded New Orleans.

It was clear that Maddow was talented and her excoriation of the Iraq War was on point, although by summer 2005 it didn't require a huge amount of journalistic courage to slam Bush over the Iraq War. As I watched her career rise through a regular Air America gig to her show on MSNBC and then to stardom as an anchor on the network's election coverage, I always wondered whether she would put her lucrative corporate acceptance at risk and go against the grain at a tough journalistic moment.

Now, Maddow's behavior in becoming a modern-day mainstream-media Joe McCarthy has put my doubts to rest. She is riding high in the ratings by keeping her whip hand coming down hard on the bash-Russia steed. She is putting her career or her politics ahead of journalism.

Like so many other Democrat/liberal/neocon activists, Maddow not only ignores the evidentiary gaps in the Russia-did-it conspiracy theory but she seems oblivious to the dangers of her opportunism. By stirring up this McCarthyistic frenzy, she and her "never-Trump" allies make a rational policy toward nuclear-armed Russia nearly impossible. Thus, she is contributing to the real risk of a hot war with Russia that could lead to the annihilation of life on the planet.

Thin-Skinned Trump

One of the bitter ironies here is that Trump's critics correctly noted that his thin-skinned temperament made him unfit to possess the nuclear button, but they are now egging him into a mano-a-mano confrontation with Putin. If Trump doesn't get the better of Putin in every situation, Trump will face renewed pummeling for "selling out" to the Russians.

President Donald Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)
Already, neocon Sen. Lindsey Graham has declared, "2017 is going to be a year of kicking Russia in the ass in Congress." If Trump doesn't go along, he will face battering from the likes of Maddow, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and pretty much every mainstream news outlet. So, Trump may have no political choice but to get tough. But what happens when Putin pushes back?

In the past when I've made this point about the recklessness of Russia-bashing, I've been told that I'm being alarmist, that "kicking Russia in the ass" and baiting Trump to join in the kicking won't lead to a nuclear war, that the Russians aren't that stupid.

While on the upside of this anti-Russia strategy, the anti-Trump activists insist it is the most promising route to get rid of Trump, which they view as justifying almost any action. It's not for them to prove that Trump did conspire with Putin to rig the U.S. presidential election; it's enough to raise the suspicion and use it to push for Trump's impeachment.

As someone who has covered national security scandals since the 1980s, I am familiar with the kind of evidence that should be required for making serious allegations. For instance, when Brian Barger and I wrote the first story about Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking in 1985 for The Associated Press, we had about two dozen sources, plus documents. Most of the sources were insiders i.e., inside the Contra movement and inside the Reagan administration who described how the operation was run. We had this evidence before we made any public accusation.

In the case of the Russia-Trump conspiracy theory, the U.S. intelligence community has presented almost no evidence of Russian "hacking" and admits that it has no evidence of Trump's collusion with the Russians. As far as we know, there is no insider who has described how this alleged conspiracy occurred.

That is not to say that some evidence might not eventually surface that confirms the Russia-Trump suspicions, but that is true of all conspiracy theories. Who knows, maybe Joe McCarthy was right about all those Communists inside the U.S. government secretly working for the Kremlin? Maybe he did have a real list of names. But that is what "witch hunts" are all about investigations designed to prove a point whether true or not.

In this current case, however, the downside is not "just" the destruction of people's careers and a few imprisonments. The downside of playing chicken with nuclear-armed Russia is the end of life as we know it. At such a moment, journalists and politicians should demand the highest standards of proof, not no proof at all.

Sometimes, I envision the argument that I would hear as the mushroom clouds begin rising over U.S. and Russian cities. If not incinerated in the first moments of the cataclysm, the "smart" people of the mainstream U.S. media (and their liberal and neocon allies) would be insisting that it wasn't their fault; it was someone else's fault; blame-shifting to the end.

So, as the Democrats and liberals join with the neocons in launching this New McCarthyism over Russia and with people like Rachel Maddow leading the charge what is arguably the most depressing fact is that there appears to be no Edward R. Murrow, a mainstream journalist with a conscience, anywhere on the horizon.

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Sheila Weller Attacks Assange

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 06:36:41 +0000

In the 'Political Assassinations' thread on Jimi Hendrix I pointed out how 60's Rolling Stone Magazine rock journalist Sheila Weller wrote an article in CIA and Ben Bradlee-associated Vanity Fair Magazine outlining Jimi Hendrix's alleged homosexual tendencies. That article came shortly after the explosive revelation that Jimi had been murdered by his MI-6 manager Michael Jeffery. Instead of doing an article on Jimi's murder Weller wrote a weird piece listing Jimi's specific feminine qualities. This kind of article is classic CIA psychological warfare defamation against one of their COINTELPRO targets. Intel never forgets.

I confronted Shelia on this on her Facebook page and she ignored it but only after saying she looked in to the murder claim and it was bullshit.

With this in mind I think Deep Politics people might be interested in this posting on Sheila's Facebook page:

" Julian Assange is a traitor, a coward, an opportunist, a paid agent of Russia, and a cynical thug. We are not living in a real -- responsible, sobersided, ethical, risk-weighing,patriotic --- democracy -- and this turn of events is courtesy of ONE of the two parties, shockingly ends-justify-means and corrupt.. We are close to living in Medieval England where kings beheaded people for sport, revenge, and petty disloyalty and in North Korea, where the terrified, uninformed masses support the scary despot because they have been brainwashed.

I am not a purist in that regard. Maybe it is an unpopular opinion for a social liberal, but I want a strong, competent US intelligences agency. I have long kidded but meant it that if it meant preventing another 9.11, the govt could read my completely irrelevant emails. I think -- I iknow from talking to CIA officers, one major one -- that their jobs have been made much harder by all the cyber.

makes Snowden far more heroic than he deserves to be presented) he is spurred to activism by the knowedge that the CIA can monitor citizens through their TVs. I guess I have moral failings for not precisely believing this or not being bothered by it. I worry more that my banjk account, such as it is!, can be hacked. And that when I was identity-thefted 4 years ago for 2 straight years the IRS was completely helpless in doing anythng about it and I was in a state of anxiety with no recourse all that time.

Yes, this honestly all scares me more than the CIA being able to turn on my TV. ** What scared me was -- way back in 1994! -- the National Enquirer had me follwoed when I was reporting my OJ book. And they paid off a telephone opertor in the hotel I was staying at near the Browns; house in Laguna and had her listen in on my conversations with my secret source and later the case's star witness and with my book editor.

Silicon Valley is doing this, not the CIA. Am I right, Susan Hasler? Or am I wrong? (And sorry for dragging you in. Bow out if you want. But you are one of my two major CIA FB Friends.) "

It's Time to Put the BBC Under the Spotlight and Bring it to Account

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 16:56:12 +0000

An excellent summary by British journalist and blogger, Jonathan Cook.

Panorama, the BBC's flagship investigative current affairs programme is accused of inserting staged footage of victims suffering from a chemical weapons attack falsely blamed on the Syrian government (in fact chemical weapons were used by Turkish Jihadists hoping to widen the conflict and usher in NATO forces openly) into one programme that was designed to publicly pressure the British government to intervene militarily in the Syrian conflict.

The BBC has done everything in its power to avoid discussing or responding continuing concerns of those who believe it knowingly used staged footage.

Quote:Is the BBC still lying over Syria footage?

8 March 2017

Robert Stuart, a tenacious blogger, has been picking away at a scab the BBC would rather leave firmly in place.

His forensic research concerns an edition of the BBC's flagship investigative current affairs show Panorama called Saving Syria's Children. It was broadcast more than three years ago, as many in the media were trying to push the British government into intervening in Syria with bombing raids against the Syrian government in a move that would effectively have bolstered ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria.

The Panorama programme was one important piece of evidence advanced for such intervention. The footage it included was broadcast in several different formats, and purported to show the victims of a chemical weapons attack by the Syrian military on a school. The BBC reporter for Panorama was Ian Panell.

From the outset, there were concerns about the authenticity of the footage, as I noted in a piece on my own blog in October 2013.
But Stuart's sustained research and questioning of the BBC, and the state broadcaster's increasing evasions, have given rise to ever greater concerns about the footage. It looks suspiciously like one scene in particular, of people with horrific chemical burns, was staged.

Rather than confront these concerns and dispell them, the BBC and Pannell have tried a mixture of going to ground, stonewalling and misdirection. That has included trying to remove the footage from both the BBC and social media sites where it had been available.

Even by the BBC's current dismal standards, its behaviour has been, on the best view, outrageously arrogant. Remember that the BBC is a publicly funded broadcaster. And yet the corporation appears to think it is not even minimally accountable to the British taxpayers who fund it.

In a fascinating new development, a leading freelance TV and radio producer Victor Lewis Smith and one with a rare conscience and backbone has intervened after viewing the footage.

He raised troubling questions with the BBC about the Panorama programme and threatened to tear up his contract for a forthcoming radio comedy pilot unless the corporation provided satisfactory answers.

For the first time, the state broadcaster was flushed out of its hiding hole. First, it tried more misdirection, telling him that Ofcom had reviewed the programme and sided with the BBC. But the Ofcom decision was about an RT investigation into the footage note that Ofcom has hardly been impartial in its treatment of RT and not a ruling on the accuracy of the BBC footage's, which Ofcom admitted it was not in a position to assess.
When Lewis Smith didn't roll over, as the BBC clearly expected, the corporation offered up Panorama's editor, Rachel Jupp. She would talk to Lewis Smith to placate him. But she had second thoughts and cried off. Lewis Smith then upped the stakes by asking for Panorama's rushes and again threatened to terminate his contract.

Finally Jupp issued a feeble statement that did nothing to address the concerns Stuart and others have raised.

The BBC has made clear it isn't willing to be transparent, open or accountable. British taxpayers wondering whether their money was used by the BBC to support a deception one designed to bolster the case for a decisive political intervention in an extremely volatile conflict still have no answers.

Lewis Smith has torn up his contract and announced his intention to make a crowd-funded feature documentary investigating the Panorama programme. Let's hope he does so. This could prove to be a vital case study to help the British public and others judge whether the BBC is really there to serve them or to serve the British political elite.

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No argument. They're there to serve British political elite interests.

The earlier article by Cook:

Quote:Why was a BBC interview in Syria doctored?

7 October 2013

The following two BBC video reports on the victims of the same incident in the Syrian civil war raise very troubling questions about the corporation's journalistic ethics. The two reports use seemingly identical footage of an interview with a British doctor but the words are different. Her mouth is covered by some kind of medical mask.

The first can be watched at:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-24288698

At about 2 mins, the doctor says the victims have burns that "must be some sort of chemical weapon, I'm not really sure"

The second can be watched at:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-23892594

At about 2.20 mins the doctor says the victims' injuries "must be some sort of, I'm not really sure, maybe napalm, something similar to that"
It should be possible to discuss this without therefore being accused of questioning or doubting the suffering of the victims of the Syrian civil war, or even of the injuries ascribed to the people shown in the videos. This is an issue, and a vitally important one at that, that concerns the extent to which we can trust media reports coming out of Syria and, more generally, the battlefields of the interminable "war on terror".

Why would a British doctor working on the front lines of the Syrian civil war, as severely injured Syrians are pouring through the door of her makeshift hospital, either agree or want to record two different versions of an interview on the tragic events unfolding? Even more to the point, why would the BBC record these two versions of an on-the-spot interview and then broadcast them both, separately, showing identical footage but with the doctor making two different accusations depending on which version you watch?

I'm racking my brains trying to think what possible answer the BBC could give, and for the life of me I can't think of a good one.

Did the doctor change her mind seconds after saying the burns were napalm-like and ask for a second take so she could accuse the Syrian government of using chemical weapons? And, if so, how could the BBC reporter, in good conscience, have allowed himself to be used in that kind of overt way?

Or, even more disconcertingly, did the BBC reporter ask her to redo the interview. Did she, for example, make the chemical weapons claim in their pre-filmed talk and the reporter asked her to make the claim again on camera? But then, how could she have known the victims were exposed to chemical weapons before they'd arrived and she'd seen them? And why would the reporter want her to give a different assessment to the one she made after she'd actually seen the victims?

And was this interview really as spontaneous as the BBC portray it as being?

It is difficult not to feel that we, as viewers, are being played here, either by the doctor or the reporter, or both. And if the BBC has either perpetrated this manipulation or conspired in it on this occasion (and got caught out by making the mistake of broadcasting both versions), how many other times has something similar happened in the BBC's coverage of Syria, or elsewhere for that matter?

I have a feeling we will never find out.

Kudos to the followers of Media Lens who discovered the discrepancy. For their discussion see
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/...78198.html

(h/t Craig Murray)

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