Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 17, 2023 3:33 pm

Attacks on RFK Jr. as a “Conspiracy Theorist” Show All the Hallmarks of CIA Disinformation
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - July 12, 2023 7

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Robert F. Kennedy announcing the start of his presidential campaign in Boston on April 19. [Source: foxnews.com]

Whether One Agrees or Disagrees With Aspects of His Outlook, the Media is Clearly Slanted Against Him
In January 1967, the CIA sent a memo (marked “SECRET,” “RESTRICTED,” and “DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED”) to its army of media “assets” secretly embedded in virtually every area of U.S. communications.

This army of covert operatives (exposed as “Operation Mockingbird” in a historic 1977 Rolling Stone article by Carl Bernstein) extended all the way up to world famous columnists, bureau chiefs, managing editors, newspaper publishers and CEOs of major radio and television broadcasting networks.

What did the CIA’s secret memo instruct its media assets to do?

Entitled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” the memo provided guidance for countering “conspiracy theorists” who challenged the Warren Report’s false conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy.

It recommended the strategy of smearing critics of the Warren Report by describing them as being financially motivated; or having “anti-American, far-left or communist sympathies,” or being hasty, inaccurate or ego-driven in their research.

Sound familiar? Although five decades old, the tactics recommended by the memo seem chillingly current, a virtual operating manual for how the present-day CIA tries to smear and discredit anyone who dares to question official government propaganda.

Although the specific term “conspiracy theorist” pre-dates the JFK assassination, it was enthusiastically embraced and deployed by the CIA as one of its most powerful psychological weapons, to be wielded against anyone who suspects the government of secret wrongdoing. It is an effective way to silence dissenting voices by marginalizing them and leaving them open to ridicule.

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[Source: reddit.com]

Ever since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his candidacy for the Presidency on April 19, mainstream media have attacked him with the very same tactics outlined in the CIA’s secret memo of 1967.

This is not surprising since Kennedy has re-invoked the ghosts of Earl Warren and Lyndon B. Johnson, who set up the Warren Committee, by publicly asserting that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone assassin of his uncle (JFK), and that his father had considered the work of the Warren Commission to be a “shoddy work of craftsmanship.”

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LBJ next to Earl Warren and the rest of the Warren Commission, whose work Robert F. Kennedy called “a shoddy work of craftsmanship.” [Source: jfkfacts.org]

According to Kennedy Jr.: “the evidence that the CIA murdered my uncle is overwhelming, I would say, beyond a reasonable doubt. As an attorney, I would be very comfortable arguing that case to a jury. I think that the evidence that the CIA murdered my father is circumstantial but very, very, very persuasive. Or very compelling. Let me put it that way—very compelling. And of course the CIA participation in the cover-up of both those murders is also beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s very well documented.”

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a pallbearer at his father’s funeral in June 1968. [Source: theatlantic.com]

Kennedy has criticized the CIA for other major crimes that it carried out during the Cold War, tweeting out, for example, an article from Truthout about MK-ULTRA (unethical drug testing) and its abuse of black and indigenous children. Kennedy stated in the tweet that: “CIA conspiracy theories are not just ‘right wing’ and they are not just theories.”

This is not what the CIA wants to hear; or has ever heard from a Democratic Party presidential contender in recent decades, and so not surprisingly is out to get Kennedy.

A characteristic hit piece in the June 26 New York Times by columnist Farhad Manjoo was titled “It’s Not Possible to ‘Win’ an Argument With Kennedy.” The subtitle read: “Conspiracy theorists don’t care about facts, just attention.”[1]

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Farhad Manjoo [Source: vox.com]

Manjoo started the article by asserting that, in the summer of 2006, he entered a debate with Kennedy about the 2004 election, which Kennedy claimed had been stolen from John Kerry.

Manjoo said that Kennedy’s position was based on reckless claims and did not hold up—though in fact Kennedy was presenting considerable evidence to corroborate his view.

As he outlined at the time, nearly half of the six million American voters living abroad never received their ballots, and a consulting firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.

Additionally in New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots and, in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched George W. Bush’s victory in the Electoral College, local officials purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines, and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency.[2]

Manjoo says that he was a reporter at Salon during the 2004 election cycle and investigated Kennedy’s theories about the election and concedes that Kennedy was right that the 2004 election was “rife with irregularities,” particularly in Ohio. Nevertheless, he writes that “pretty much every expert that I talked to said it was unlikely that any of the issues were big enough to have undone Bush’s win.”

So Kennedy is thus branded a conspiracy theorist even though Manjoo admits that he was right about the existence of irregularities, but disputes the extent to which those irregularities ultimately impacted the final results based on “experts” he consulted and also the findings of a report issued by the Democratic National Committee.

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[Source: rollingstone.com]

However, another expert, journalist Craig Unger, who wrote a biography of Republican Party kingmaker Karl Rove, suggests that Kennedy may have been correct and that Kerry was cheated out of an election victory when voting data in Ohio was inexplicably switched over to a technology service company, SmarTech, after the news networks had called Florida for George W. Bush.

The shift coincided with serious anomalies that saw an increase in votes favorable to Bush, who decisively won the state.[3]

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[Source: realclearpolitics.com]

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Karl Rove [Source: heightweightnetworth.com]

With regard to vaccines, Manjoo in his column admits that “some vaccines have serious side effects,” which is Kennedy’s position, but again smears him as a “conspiracy theorist” on this matter without either effectively articulating or challenging his views on the topic.

Manjoo’s column is par for the course these days in the mainstream media.

Every time that Kennedy’s name is mentioned in an article in The New York Times and most other mainstream media, it is with the qualifying statement that defines him as a “conspiracy theorist.”

Kennedy is also routinely disparaged for “cavorting with right-wing figures.”[4] This inverts the old smear of being a Marxist or of the far-left, primarily because the right wing is now identified with “conspiratorial views” and criticism of the CIA and “deep state,” as Kennedy has pointed out, and is also much stronger than the left.

That Kennedy’s political supporters include libertarians opposed to what they consider coercive medical practices and government surveillance, and that he is branding himself as a candidate capable of bringing together Americans on the right and left, should not generally be considered a bad thing; it makes sense for someone who wants to win people’s votes.

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Michelle Goldberg [Source: grist.org]

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg acknowledged that Kennedy was bringing together a “coalition of the distrustful” cutting across traditional “divisions of right and left” and that this is “giving him surprising strength in many polls.”[5]

On June 26, The Atlantic ran a characteristic hit piece on Kennedy titled “The First MAGA Democrat: Robert Kennedy Jr. is Feeding America’s Appetite for Conspiracies,” which scoffed at Kennedy’s sensible belief that “Ukraine is engaged in a ‘proxy’ war” and that Russia’s invasion, although “illegal,” would not have taken place if the United States “didn’t want it to.”[6]

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The First MAGA Democrat? What Does That Mean? [Source: theatlantic.com]

On June 22, Slate ran another typical smear piece right out of the CIA’s playbook by Molly Olmstead entitled “RFK Jr.’s Conspiracy Theories Go Way Beyond Vaccines.”

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Molly Olmstead [Source: whca/press/winner/molly-o]

The subtitle of the article was: “The 2024 candidate sure is a man of, um, ‘ideas.’”

Kennedy is indeed a man of ideas; but not in a negative way. By any objective measure, his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (New York: Skyhorse, 2021), is an impressive feat of scholarship that sold more than a million copies.

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[Source: upload.wikimedia.org]

The book provides a deeply researched account of the corruption of Anthony Fauci and Big Pharma along with insightful analysis about the CIA’s involvement in and cover-up of lethal and unethical Gain of Function research and germ warfare practices that date to the era of the Cold War.

In her article, Olmstead suggests that Kennedy’s claim about Gain of Function research is part of his conspiratorial view, when that research is known to have been carried out.[7]

She also maligns Kennedy for his warning about the growth of the surveillance state and suggesting that “the orchestrated, planned use of pandemics [aimed] to clamp down totalitarian control.”

We know for a fact, however, that the current Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, participated in a simulation on coronavirus and pandemics in New York City in October 2019, known as Event 201, whose primary purpose was to explore how government authorities could exploit the situation to clamp down using censorship, and to force mask wearing, mandatory vaccinations, and lockdowns on the population.

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Avril Haines [Source: nbcnews.com]

Olmstead repeats in her piece the false claim that Kennedy advances “anti-vaccine conspiracy theories” when Kennedy has never said he was against vaccines, but only against certain vaccines that he believes were unethically manufactured.

When another reporter used the term “anti-vax” to describe Kennedy, former Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Kennedy’s campaign manager, responded that the term was a “left-handed smear” and “a clipped assessment that has been used for political purposes by the adherents of the pharmaceutical industry,” when Kennedy stands for vaccine safety.

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Dennis Kucinich holding up a sign for Kennedy at his official presidential announcement in Boston on April 19. [Source: cnn.com]

While people might legitimately contest some of Kennedy’s views about vaccines and COVID-19 or other topics including the Israel Palestine conflict, the trend seen in the mainstream media is to simplify, caricature and/or misrepresent Kennedy’s perspective, while failing to engage with any of the evidence that Kennedy presents to back it up.[8]

Kennedy is well read in scientific literature and cites many scientific authorities on medical topics though is still mocked. A different standard is applied to most other politicians who are treated not only more respectfully but usually deferentially, particularly centrist Democrats or moderate Republicans in the mainstream liberal outlets that Kennedy is attacked in.

In her Slate piece, Olmstead claims that Kennedy has progressed from being an anti-vaxxer to advancing more conspiracies, such as one that “Wi-Fi radiation from cellphones causes cancer—or, more specifically, ‘Wi-Fi radiation’ from cellphones causes ‘cellphone tumors.”

In fact, there is a growing body of scientific research that verifies these latter concerns, including by highly reputable scientists like Dr. Joel Moskowitz, director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health, who has been on a decades-long quest to prove that radiation from cell phones is unsafe, which he says most people do not want to hear because they are addicted to their smart phones.[9]

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Dr. Joel Moskowitz [Source: publichealth.berkeley.edu]

So who is the real conspiracy theorist? Kennedy or Olmstead?

And if conspiracy theorist means a real intellectual who probes beneath the surface to try to expose government corruption and uncover the truth, then I too strive to be a conspiracy theorist—proudly so.

David Talbot, the author of an acclaimed book on former CIA director Allen Dulles (who was involved in the coverup of the JFK assassination as a member of the Warren Commission), The Devil’s Chessboard, said that Kennedy is someone who “who thinks like I do, outside the box, willing to take risks.”

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David Talbot [Source: sfpublicpress.org]

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Jann Wenner [Source: wikipedia.org]

Jan Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone Magazine, which has published some of Kennedy’s writings, characterized him as a “crusader much like his father: pursuing justice and fairness for people….The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Olmstead at the end of her piece has the gall to attack Kennedy for promoting “conspiracy theories about his own family,” including related to the murder of his uncle and father, both of which, he believes, the CIA was behind.

CovertAction Magazine investigations along with a small library of books have found that RFK Jr’s views are well founded.

The refrain about Kennedy and his father and uncle’s assassination was nevertheless echoed in a) a New York Times article by Rebecca Davis O’Brien on June 29, b) a New Yorker article by David Remnick entitled “The Alternative Facts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,”[10] c) a New York Magazine profile by Rebecca Traister that calls Kennedy’s ideas on the assassination “unproven to ludicrous to dangerously irresponsible,” and d) in yet another New York Times piece on July 6 by Anjali Huynh, which invokes the authority of the widely discredited Warren Commission.

Characterized by Richard Nixon in the Watergate tapes as the “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated,” the Warren Commission advanced the magic bullet theory postulating that a single bullet caused eight wounds in JFK and his car-mate, Texas Governor John Connally, which is impossible by the laws of physics.[11]

David W. Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., leading expert on the medical evidence in the case of JFK, plotted the official trajectory of the bullet that officials claim passed through JFK’s neck and entered Connally’s back and discovered that it is anatomically impossible because cervical vertebra intervene. Former Tulsa police detective Craig Roberts points out that the supposed “magic bullet” would have had to have made “two 90 degree turns, and had to pause 1.8 seconds in flight at the same time.”

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[Source: eyemagazine.com]

Olmstead in her Slate piece acknowledges that the CIA may have indeed had some involvement in JFK and RFK’s deaths, but criticized RFK Jr. for “turn[ing] his belief into a crusade, conducting months of research into the assassination and leading a campaign to have Sirhan [who was fingered as the lone assassin] released from prison,” which others in his family did not support.[12]

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Sirhan Sirhan, on the left, who, Robert Kennedy, Jr., believes based upon photographic evidence of the assassination scene, was falsely framed for his father’s murder in June 1968. [Source: radaronline.com]

These comments actually paint Kennedy in a flattering light as someone who will invest the time to carry out deep research to try to validate his suspicions. They reveal further that he is a compassionate man who is trying to right a wrong by freeing the man he has come to believe was wrongfully convicted of his father’s murder—which others in his family are not willing to do.

Call for Détente Like His Uncle
Kennedy beautifully invoked the legacy of his father and uncle in a foreign policy speech that he delivered at St. Anselm College in June that was ignored in the media. The speech was delivered on the 60th anniversary of a historic peace speech that President John F. Kennedy gave at American University advocating for détente with the Soviet Union.

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JFK giving famous peace speech at American University that some historians believe marked him for death. [Source: wikipedia.org]
See JFK’s speech here; and RFK Jr.’s speech here

RFK Jr. in his speech discussed how military provocations by the U.S. towards Russia had left the world at a dangerous risk of nuclear war similar to the era of the Cuban missile crisis.

The U.S. betrayed a pledge not to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) towards Russia’s borders, has pointed missiles stationed in Eastern Europe at Russia, and has openly called for regime change and the dismembering of Russia, while using Ukraine as a pawn in a dangerous and deadly proxy war.

War mongers inside the U.S. administration—who have predominated since his uncle and father’s death—are staging war games and seem to believe that nuclear war is winnable.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivering speech at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire that invoked the legacy of his uncle. [Source: foryougamepc.netlify.ap]

Before his assassination, JFK set an excellent model by banning nuclear weapon testing, meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and traveling around the country telling Americans to put themselves in the shoes of the Russians and try and see things from their point of view.

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JFK and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a summit in Vienna in 1961. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his speech called on Joe Biden to again meet with Vladimir Putin and work with him to de escalate the new Cold War, as his Uncle had done with Khrushchev. [Source: euromaidanpress.com]

Kennedy said that it is particularly important today to consider the legitimate security needs of the Russians and to change the mindset undergirding a period of endless wars.

The dominant foreign policy discourse constantly warns about foreign enemies and threats and adopts a comic book narrative in which America and allies like Israel are good, and their enemies like Russia and Iran are evil, leaving no room for complexity or compromise.

Peace can only come about when Americans examine their own attitudes and begin to try and better understand and empathize with peoples around the world and abandon the reflex towards violence as a response for any and all crises.

Now is the time to build a new peace movement that will reject the insanity of the present foreign policy course and compel the Biden administration to de escalate the conflict with Russia and China and reverse the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned about and his uncle and father were trying to fight before they got killed.

He Has It Worse Than Bernie—Though There is a Silver Lining
The biased media coverage of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign seems worse than for Bernie Sanders, who was repeatedly attacked during the 2016 and 2020 primaries for supporting supposed socialist dictatorships, like in Nicaragua during the 1980s.

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Bernie on the stump. [Source: theonion.com]

In 2016, the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found that the Washington Post ran a stunning 16 negative stories on Sanders in just 16 hours.

When Sanders was ahead in the polls in Iowa, The New York Times reported misleadingly that he had been “eclipsed by Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttgieg.” The Onion subsequently wrote a parody entitled: “MSNBC Poll Finds Support For Bernie Sanders Has Plummeted 2 Points Up”—which might as well have been said about any major outlet.

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Collage of critical articles of Bernie Sanders that appeared in The Washington Post in a 16-hour period. [Source: fair.org]

Though Sanders was more committed than Kennedy to taxing the wealthy and financial regulation and better on immigration, Kennedy is more radical than Sanders in challenging the military-industrial complex and CIA.[13] (Sanders has repeatedly advanced CIA disinformation about Russia, and voted for emergency aid measures to Ukraine).[14]

RFK Jr. has additionally spoken out more forcefully on censorship and challenged the dominant political and media narrative about the COVID-19 pandemic—which Sanders never questioned—while taking on the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex in a way that Bernie has never done.

Kennedy’s vilification in the media, ironically, may be one major source of his popularity across the country in an electorate that no longer has much faith in the mainstream media.

The denunciation of critics of government policy as conspiracy theorists over many years may be beginning to backfire as more and more people understand how the term has been used as a weapon against truth-seekers, of whom Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is surely one.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

1.Farhad Manjoo, “It’s Not Possible to ‘Win’ an Argument With Kennedy,” The New York Times, June 26, 2023, A22. ↑

2.Kennedy further noted that a heavily Republican precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of 98%, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland, which is overwhelmingly Democrat, recorded an equally impossible turnout of only 7%. In Warren County, GOP election officials invented a non-existent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count. For further evidence of GOP manipulation that corroborates Kennedy’s view, see Craig Unger, Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power (New York: Scribner, 2014). ↑

3.Unger told The Daily Banter: “One of the frustrating things of course if you want to make an absolutely conclusive case forensically what you find is that so much of the evidence has disappeared, so I should have that caveat up front. At the same time. the sequence of events was highly highly disturbing.” ↑

4.See, for example, Reid J. Epstein, “Why Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 Bid Is a Headache for Biden,” The New York Times, June 19, 2023. ↑

5.Michelle Goldberg, “The Coalition of the DIstrustful,” The New York Times, July 2, 2023, 5. Despite some sober judgments in her piece, Goldberg fits the norm in her demonization of Kennedy, referring to him as a “crank.” ↑

6.CAM has detailed U.S. provocations in numerous articles. ↑

7.See Andrew G. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the biggest Lie in History (New York: Skyhorse, 2022). ↑

8.The left media is often no better than the mainstream. Jeffrey St. Clair at Counterpunch regularly rips and belittles Kennedy, for example. Naomi Klein, author of books critical of corporate power and a left-wing celebrity, characterized Kennedy as a “huckster” and “spreader of all manner of dangerous, unsupported theories,” in her column in The Guardian. The Nation Magazine’s editor Katrina Vanden Heuval called Kennedy an “anti-vaccine crank” in an article entitled “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a Flawed Heretic,” though did acknowledge that Kennedy “offered common sense too rare in our political discourse” on U.S. foreign policy and the war in Ukraine. Rather than pointing to the media bias as it normally does, the media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) published an article by Ari Paul attacking Kennedy for being essentially a “MAGA Democrat.” He suggests that while Kennedy “claims that he is carrying on the liberal torch of his father and uncle …everything he says sounds to the right of Richard Nixon.” Really, however, the only thing RFK Jr. would agree with Nixon on was Nixon’s support for détente with the Soviets, opening to China, and embrace of some Keynesian ideas. Nixon escalated the Vietnam War whereas Kennedy has called for the revitalization of the U.S. peace movement and significant cuts in military spending to fund social programs. Nixon also waged war on drugs and on the political left through the FBI and Huston Plan, when Kennedy is a strong civil libertarian. He is further a staunch environmentalist who wants to block oil drilling on public lands and hazardous mining. Most of Kennedy’s policy positions are generally ones traditionally adopted by liberal democrats, including his support for labor unions, and his outlook is similar to his father and uncle whom he often invokes in speeches. ↑

9.Many cell phones actually come with warnings in the settings about the risks of cancer from prolonged use. ↑

10.In an exchange revealing the moral bankruptcy of elite liberal intellectual culture today; what Chris Hedges termed the “Death of the Liberal Class,” Remnick asked Kennedy during an interview with him what news sources he read. When Kennedy responded that he read alternative media, including commentary on Ukraine by Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Remnick responded by quoting favorably from Liz Cheney (R-WY) who said that Macgregor represented “the Putin wing of the GOP.” Joseph McCarthy couldn’t have said it better. ↑

11.Phil Nelson, LBJ Mastermind of the JFK Assassination (New York: Skyhorse, 2013), 459; JFK: Who, How, and Why: Solving the World’s Greatest Murder Mystery, ed. Jim Fetzer and Mike Palecek (Crestview, Florida: Moon Rock Books, 2017); Craig Roberts, A Sniper Looks at Dealy Plaza (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Consolidated Press International, 1997), 61. ↑

12.Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan recently that the military, the intelligence community and his uncle were “at war” with each other during JFK’s presidency and that the two entities were “trying to trick” the late president into deploying troops to various countries, including Cuba and Vietnam. Kennedy added that his uncle was so fed up with the CIA that he wanted to “shatter” the agency and “scatter it to the winds.” Kennedy additionally said he has to “be careful” that the CIA doesn’t take him out, and that if he were elected president, he would be assassinated by the CIA—as he has claimed the agency was involved in the assassination of his uncle. “I gotta be careful,” Kennedy said. “I’m aware of that, you know, I’m aware of that danger. I don’t live in fear of it at all.” ↑

13.Kennedy’s belief in the “free market” follows in the pattern of his father and uncle, whom Bruce Miroff in Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy (New York: Longman, 1976) defines as an “enlightened conservative” and “corporation liberal” whose economic policies served to hold wages down and underwrite new corporate investment while “stabilizing” and “rationalizing the corporate economy.” Regarding border policy, RFK Jr. said that he would restore an abandoned operation named Streamline under which the U.S. targeted illegal migrants for criminal prosecution and rapid deportation. ↑

14.See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Bernie Sanders Claims the Mantle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Has He Earned It?” CovertAction Magazine, April 12, 2022, https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/0 ... earned-it/. ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... formation/

This bears repeating:
Whether One Agrees or Disagrees With Aspects of His Outlook, the Media is Clearly Slanted Against Him
As was and is the case with Trump. Just cause the government took full advantage of the pandemic to tighten the screws does not necessitate the plague being bogus. The canonization of Fauci was nothing but a prop for the government. And I am so 'done' with the Kennedy haliography, JFK was a Cold-warrior from the git-go and his bro had some pretty reactionary aspects too.Given that I question the CIA being the primary suspect tho a faction or other governmental body is very possible. But it weren't Oswald alone. People I've known did serious research on 2004 and had lot of damning information so that ain't too 'fringy'. Having that treacherous little worm Kucinnich as his campaign manager instills no confidence, a sheepdog before the term was coined by Bruce Dixon.

Still, these is no doubt that Kennedy is being targeted, and it's working too, better than it worked on Trump. But why all the effort for a fringe candidate? Because Joe Biden's support is weak, weak, weak. A fart could knock him over. The rank and file want somebody else but Dem Central wants Biden cause they got nobody else who might win and is reliable. Kennedy might could win, it's not impossible, but he ain't reliable and that's the most important thing. The owners have put up with one unreliable president who couldn't deliver the imperialist program, they'll not have another.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 19, 2023 2:31 pm

From ICC to ‘Sportswashing’: West’s Self-Serving Narratives Must Be Combated
JULY 18, 2023

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Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) with President of the Republic of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa. Photo: Ramil Sitdikov, RIA Novosti, via Wikimedia Commons.

By Ramzy Baroud – Jul 17, 2023

Now that we are on the cusp of a new world order, we must confront this hypocrisy with the clearest language – and action – possible.

In March, the South Africa Communist Party (SACP) denounced what it described as the ‘imperialist bias’ of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The denunciation of the ICC as a “supranational institution at the service of imperialist states” came two days after the Hague-based court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another Russian official for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

The speed with which the case against Putin was lodged, discussed and followed by concrete action raised many questions about the integrity, balance and political agenda of the Western-inclined court.

While Palestinians immediately, and rightly, protested the hypocrisy of the ICC as it continues to treat alleged Israeli war criminals with kid gloves, Iraqis, Afghans, but mostly African activists and intellectuals found the ICC’s moral inconsistency reprehensible.

In the 21 years of its existence, “the ICC has not issued a single warrant of arrest for or prosecuted any United States or European president, prime minister or monarch as head of state,” protested Africa’s oldest communist party, echoing the cries of numerous organizations, politicians and activists who, for years, pointed out that Africa has received the lion’s share of ICC investigations and arrest warrants.

Indeed, since its existence in 2002, the ICC has been “fixated” on Africa. As of June 2021, “all 44 people indicted by the Court have been Africans,” wrote Qumar Ba in Foreign Affairs, and “ten out of its 14 active investigations involve Africa.”

This argument is not intended as a blanket defense of Africa. Many alleged war crimes have been committed on the African continent – in fact, in other regions in the Global South – many of which are associated with old and new civil wars, mass scale governments’ repression and violent crackdowns.

But why should Africa be the exception, when numerous and, at times, even more, alleged grisly war crimes and crimes against humanity were affiliated with Western governments? Western wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone have resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of people – some studies suggest even millions – most of whom are civilians. The consequences of these wars destabilized whole regions and led to other crimes, including that of genocide.

None of this has been legally pursued in any serious fashion. The mere attempt at investigating alleged war crimes in Afghanistan led to an executive order by the Trump Administration to impose sanctions on the then-ICC Chief Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, and other court officials. Though the US is not a member of the ICC, its Western allies at the Court are ensuring the Afghanistan war chapter is never to be opened again.

Africa, the Middle East, Asia – in fact, the entire Global South – have every right to be outraged.

Yet, this hypocrisy does not only apply to war, politics and economic exploitation. It reaches every aspect of global relations, including sports.

Newspapers and other media outlets in the US, Britain and throughout the Western world are bothered by the fact that top European players are signing contracts with wealthy Middle Eastern clubs. They claim that such lucrative deals are offered, not in the name of sports, but in the name of what is being referred to as “sportswashing”.

A writer in the British tabloid, The Mirror, went as far as comparing this ‘sportswashing’ in the Middle East to “Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics” and to “Russia’s 2018 World Cup”.

Considering the hypocritical attacks on Qatar before, during and after the hosting of a successful World Cup in November and December 2022, one wonders if Western writers have the slightest degree of self-awareness.

While one cannot earnestly argue against the use of sports to divert from poor political and human rights records, one must insist on reminding the angry, and I am sure, handsomely paid writers of Western corporate media, that sportswashing goes both ways. The London Summer Olympics of 2012 was arguably the greatest act of sportswashing in recent memory.

The British role in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars can hardly be overlooked, and the devastation resulting from these wars is fully acknowledged even by mainstream British society. But why is it okay for Britain, the US, Canada and all other Western governments, without exception, to create a separation between sports events, politics and war, while such separation is forbidden for non-western governments?

When pro-Palestinian groups called on the world football federation, FIFA, to bar racist Israeli teams, especially those based in illegal Jewish settlements in Occupied Palestine, from participating in FIFA-organized sports events, their calls fell on deaf ears. FIFA “must remain neutral with regard to political matters,” the FIFA Council stated in October 2017.

While the “sports and politics don’t mix” pretense is readily infused when calls for justice come from nations in the Global South, or racial minorities in Western countries – for example, African Americans – mixing the issues seems to pose no moral dilemma when the enemy in question is perceived to be anti-western nations.

Western double standards should, by now, be too obvious to ignore or excuse. As Western writers continue to wage wars against their non-western enemies, in the name of international law, human rights, democracy, sports, etc., we too must wage a counter-offensive in the name of equality for all.

Now that we are on the cusp of a new world order, we must confront this hypocrisy with the clearest language – and action – possible. It is, either we develop a fair and just global paradigm that applies to all of us, or refuse to abide by the selective Western paradigms that only apply to some.


(The Palestine Chronicle)

https://orinocotribune.com/from-icc-to- ... -combated/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 20, 2023 3:19 pm

Anderson Cooper Is A Disgusting CIA Goon

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In a recent CNN interview of US presidential candidate Cornel West, former CIA intern Anderson Cooper argued that the US invasion of Iraq was morally superior to the Russian attack on the city of Grozny.

Pushing back against West’s claim that NATO provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine and his call for ceasefire negotiations, Cooper argued that Putin was too evil and murderous to agree to stop slaughtering people.


“I mean, you saw what he did to Grozny in the nineties,” Cooper said. “I mean, he flattened that city. Civilians were trapped in that city. The world didn’t come to the rescue of Grozny. He did exactly what he wanted to do. I mean, unchecked, he will slaughter people.”

“Well, I mean, unchecked, he will slaughter folk, unchecked, what we did in Iraq was slaughtering people, unchecked,” West replied, when Cooper began frantically interrupting him.

“Nation states do that and they are wrong. And when they’re wrong, you have to point it out,” West continued while Cooper talked over him.

“Look, again, I respect you,” Cooper said. “You know I love you, but I do think it’s inappropriate to compare the Russian bombing of Grozny, and what we witnessed there with the war in Iraq. I mean, to say that innocents were killed. I mean, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, the horrible things happen-”

“Half a million Iraqis killed, my brother? Half a million,” interjected West.

“I certainly understand,” said Cooper. “I also saw a lot of Americans getting killed. And I saw, you know, the horrors of Saddam Hussein.I don’t think it’s accurate to compare the pummeling of a city by Russian artillery, with civilians inside, pummeling every single day with the intention of just destroying and flattening a city with actions the US took.”


Mainstream estimates for the number of civilians killed in the Battle of Grozny range from five thousand to eight thousand. Estimates for the number of people killed as a result of the Iraq invasion range into the millions. One was a single battle in one city, the other was a years-long nationwide war which plunged an entire region into violence and chaos. Cooper is correct that it’s inaccurate to compare the two, but he’s obviously incorrect that this is because the Iraq invasion was less depraved.

Think about the kind of mentality you’d need to have to feel like it’s legitimate to claim a US war for power and profit is morally superior to a Russian attack which killed far, far fewer people. Think of all the things you’d have to hold as true in order to make that make sense in your mind.

For one, you’d have to believe that the US only uses its military for noble reasons and with noble intentions. For another, you’d have to believe that your own government only kills civilians by accident while other governments only kill civilians because they are evil monsters who enjoy committing war crimes. It would probably also help that perspective make sense if you believed that Arab lives are worth a tiny fraction of what white lives are worth.

It’s literally this meme put into action:

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Cooper immediately followed West’s appearance with an interview with Democratic Party swamp monster James Carville, who promptly began smearing West as a “menace” and a “threat to the continued constitutional order in the United States.”

Carville then went on to assert that former Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who is West’s campaign manager, is “almost certainly an agent of the Russian government.”

To substantiate his claim that Cornel West’s campaign manager is a secret agent of the Russian government, Carville urged Cooper’s audience to “Google photo, General Flynn, Vladimir Putin, Jill Stein.”

Carville knows that telling CNN’s viewers to google those words will produce a photo of Stein, Flynn and Putin at a table together. What Carville does not tell CNN’s viewers is that Stein has provided a perfectly adequate explanation of what she was doing at that event.

The photo was taken at an RT conference back in 2015, when meeting with Russians was not considered an outrageous scandal. Stein says she attended the event because she saw it as an opportunity to push her usual agendas of peace and environmentalism. She says she didn’t interact with Putin or Flynn, that she wasn’t paid for her appearance, and that RT offered to pay for her travel but she declined the offer. Nothing in the comprehensive investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election has turned up a single shred of evidence that any of Stein’s claims are false, which means the claim that the photo in question is proof that she works for the Kremlin is completely baseless.

So Carville was actively deceiving CNN’s audience about Jill Stein, and about Cornel West’s presidential campaign by extension. The journalistically responsible thing to do would have been to interrogate Carville’s wild claims, but Cooper let them slide through completely unchecked. Calling a presidential candidate’s campaign manager a secret Russian agent is about as incendiary an accusation as you can possibly make, and Cooper just accepted it as an established fact and moved on.

As far as Anderson Cooper is concerned, criticizing the US for the destruction of Iraq requires not just interrogation but immediate hostile opposition, while falsely accusing West of working with a literal Russian agent doesn’t even merit a single follow-up question.

That’s how unscrupulous you have to be to get elevated to the highest echelon of American news media. Those are the depths you have to be willing to plunge to in defense of the world’s most powerful and destructive government. That’s how low you have to be willing to sink to make $12 million a year working in the mainstream press like Anderson Cooper does. These are the kinds of people who are teaching Americans what to believe about their nation and their world. And that’s precisely why everything’s so messed up.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/20 ... -cia-goon/

It’s Not The Really Blatant Propaganda That Gets You

One of my favorite follows on Twitter right now is a smallish account run by an anti-imperialist activist who goes by “Left I on the News”, because he has a real knack for going through articles in the mainstream press and highlighting the mundane little manipulations we’re fed each day to shape our worldview in alignment with the US empire.

One story he singled out recently was a New York Times article titled “Russia Fires Drones and Missiles at Southern Ukraine,” which opens with the line, “Russian forces launched drones and missiles at cities in southern Ukraine from the Black Sea early Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said, a day after Moscow blamed Kyiv for an attack on a bridge linking the occupied Crimean Peninsula to Russia.”

Can you spot anything funny in that sentence? It’s not super obvious at first glance.

“Look how the NYT phrases this subhead to make Russia sound extra evil,” Left I tweeted with a screenshot of the article. “Not ‘a day after Kyiv attacked the Kerch Bridge’, but a day after Russia blamed them for doing it (as if it’s just some wild accusation). Remember — the most effective propaganda is the subtlest.”


“The most effective propaganda is the subtlest” is a phrase you should try to remember, because it’s so very true.

It is indeed ridiculous to try to frame this as some wild accusation by Russia, as though Moscow should have remained open to the possibility that the bridge was struck by Bolivia or Nepal. CNN reports that Ukrainian officials have taken credit for the attack, and just days ago Ukraine’s deputy defense minister publicly acknowledged that Ukraine was behind last year’s attack on the very same bridge. No serious person doubts that Ukraine was behind the attack, including those who support Ukraine.

But that subtle manipulation didn’t really stand out when you first saw it, did it?

As we’ve discussed previously, these subtle little adjustments of perception are what constitutes the vast majority of the propaganda westerners ingest through the news media from day to day. This is because the really overt, ham-fisted propaganda isn’t what’s effective; what’s effective is those sneaky little lies that slide in unchecked underneath people’s critical thinking faculties.

Contrast the above example with the response we’ve been seeing to Yeonmi Park, whose outlandish, larger-than-life propagandistic lies about what it’s like to live in North Korea have turned her into an internet meme. She’s become so widely mocked that even The Washington Post, among the first to help amplify her as a trustworthy North Korean defector after her arrival in the US in 2014, is now openly questioning her credibility.

This is because propaganda only works if it doesn’t ring people’s cognitive alarm bells. You can’t slide propaganda down people’s throats if it triggers their critical thinking gag reflex. If you want to poison someone’s food, you can only pull off the deed if they don’t taste the poison or throw it up before it takes effect.

So most propaganda isn’t of the Yeonmi Park “communists are so poor that they have to eat mud and get out of the train and push it because there’s no electricity” variety. It’s subtle. It’s these tiny little adjustments where US allies are reported on more sympathetically than US enemies, claims made by unaligned governments are reported with much more scrutiny and skepticism than aligned governments, and the sins which take place within the US-centralized power structure are overlooked while those outside it are amplified and condemned.


We’ve been ingesting these tiny little manipulations all our lives like microplastics in our water supply, and they build up within our reality tunnels to significantly warp our perception of what’s going on in the world.

And the fact that it’s been so many tiny little lies over years and years means it’s a lot harder to extract all the perception management from our worldview once we’ve discovered that it’s happening. If it was just a few really big lies we could reorient ourselves toward truth fairly quickly just by recognizing them, but because it’s so very many tiny manipulations it takes years of sincere work to fully free yourself from all the distortions and false assumptions you grew up with.

But it’s worth doing, because positive change can only come from an awareness of what’s true, whether you’re talking about individuals or humanity as a whole. Our task as humans is to come to a truth-based relationship with reality to the furthest extent possible, and that means fearlessly diving headfirst into the long, hard slog of sorting out fact from fiction, one lie at a time, no matter how subtle.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/19 ... -gets-you/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Jul 23, 2023 2:24 pm

House Judiciary Committee Report Reveals How FBI Schemed with Ukrainian Intelligence Services to Censor Social Media Accounts of American Journalists and Even State Department Officials
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - July 22, 2023 3

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[Source: axisoflogic.com]
Among the corrupting aspects of the Ukraine War has been the further erosion of democratic standards in the U.S.


On July 10, the House Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government issued an interim staff report detailing how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) worked with the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) to try to censor social media accounts of Americans in violation of First Amendment rights to free speech.

The Americans who were targeted included journalists and, amazingly, the U.S. State Department, whose Russian-language account was flagged by the SBU for promoting pro-Russian disinformation.

In February, the House Committee on the Judiciary, chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH), issued subpoenas to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube.

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[Source: greatandhra.com]

The documents that they obtained revealed that the FBI requested on behalf of the SBU that the world’s largest social-media platforms censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online.

FBI Special Agent Aleksandr Kobzanets, the FBI’s Assistant Legal Attaché in Kyiv from 2020 to 2022, worked closely with the SBU, an organization heavily supported by the CIA, which monitored social media with the purpose of identifying suspected Russian “influence operations.”

The SBU passed information through Kobzanets to the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which was established in 2017 by Director Christopher Wray to “identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the U.S.”

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Christopher Wray [Source: federaltimes.com]

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Laura Dehmlow [Source: rantburg.com]

The head of the FITF, Laura Dehmlow, said in 2022 that “the U.S. government needs to early educate the populace” about “misinformation, disinformation and malevolent information” because “critical thinking seems to be a problem currently.”

This viewpoint was undercut by the admission of Ilia Vitiuk, head of the SBU’s Department of Cyber and Information Security, who told journalist Lee Fang in April 2023 that, “[w]hen people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’…I say ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding.”

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Ilia Vitiuk [Source: pravda.com]

Vitiuk’s comments make clear that the alleged “misinformation” which Dehmlow and her associates are trying to “educate” the American population about is really any statement or argument that contradicts Ukrainian government propaganda.

The House Judiciary report concluded that censorship was being meted out by the FBI based on the viewpoint of the persons targeted, and was not fact-based—meaning that people who were being censored may have actually been providing good information and not misinformation.

Keystone Cops
The incompetence of the FBI was displayed in its lack of proper vetting of social-media posts that were targeted for censorship.

The House Judiciary report points not only to attempts to censor the State Department’s own Russian-language account, but also to censor Russian-speaking Americans who actually criticized Vladimir Putin and Russian policy in Ukraine.

One flagged account, for example, expressed skepticism that Ukraine was dominated by Nazis when its president was Jewish.

Another was by a Russian-speaking Ukrainian who said that he had never been prevented by the Ukrainian government from speaking Russian in eastern Ukraine and concluded with the hashtags “#stopputin” and “#freeukraine.”

Yet another denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin for what he was doing in “Russians’ name.”

The House Judiciary report concluded by emphasizing that there was no legal justification for the FBI collaborating with a foreign intelligence service to impose censorship on Americans, whose right to free speech is protected under the U.S. Constitution.

Historically, the U.S. involvement in foreign wars and quest for overseas empire has been a major impediment to democracy, and the Ukraine War—which has become increasingly Americanized—is clearly no exception.

Lower Level of Trust Than J. Edgar Hoover
After the release of the report, FBI Director Christopher Wray came under attack from the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

Jim Jordan opened July 12 hearings by accusing the Bureau of allowing social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, and of retaliating against alleged FBI whistleblowers and mishandling threats against school boards.

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Jim Jordan [Source: cnn.com]

“Are you protecting the Bidens?” asked Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) after pressing Wray over allegations from a supposed IRS whistleblower related to the Hunter Biden investigation.

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Matt Gaetz [Source: mediate.com]

“Absolutely not,” Wray responded. “The FBI does not, has no interest in protecting anyone politically.”

Gaetz and Wray engaged in a heated exchange after the Florida Republican alleged that the Bureau has “the lowest level of trust in the FBI’s history.”

“People trusted the FBI more when J. Edgar Hoover was running the place than when you are, and the reason is because you don’t give straight answers,” Gaetz opined.

Hoover of course was well known for his mendacity and criminal activities related to COINTELPRO and political assassinations. At the time, many trusted him only because of the heroic image that Hoover cultivated for the FBI through effective public relations, which Wray has not been able to replicate.

An NBC poll shows that only 37% of the public supports the FBI, and only 17% of Republicans.

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J. Edgar Hoover [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]

Wray looked particularly foolish when he claimed that he was not sure whether there were undercover agents at the scene of the January 6 riots, when former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund has asserted that the protest crowd was filled with federal agents, and when a whistleblower has come forward saying that top FBI brass passed down orders to conceal at least 25 confidential human sources [ie. informants] participating in the protest at the Capitol.

In his exchange with Gaetz, Wray defended the Bureau by claiming that FBI applications were way up in Gaetz’ home state of Florida, to which Gaetz responded: “we’re deeply proud of them, and they deserve better than you.”

As CAM has reported, someone who also deserves better is Omali Yeshitela, the 80-year-old leader of the African People’s Socialist Party; he had his home raided by the FBI in a military-style attack and, with three associates, is facing years in prison after being accused of being a Russian agent.

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Scene outside Yeshitela’s home in East St. Louis last July. [Source: theburningspear.com]

Yeshitela’s case is yet another reminder of the oppressive tactics adopted by the FBI reminiscent of the Cold War.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/0 ... officials/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 26, 2023 2:45 pm

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The impending pro-war Democratic Party takeover of Pacifica Radio
By Ann Garrison (Posted Jul 26, 2023)

Originally published: The Grayzone on July 1, 2023 (more by The Grayzone)

I can’t imagine the New York Times, flawed as it is in many ways, would be part of some grand conspiracy to implicate Assad.

-Sonali Kolhatkar, A Syrian Speaks Out on Trump’s Latest Bombing, on Pacifica Radio’s KPFA-Northern California, KPFK-Los Angeles, and KPFT-Houston in April 2018


When Pacifica host Sonali Kolhatkar aired an interview with Syrian regime change activist Robin Yassin-Kassab, her guest was adamant about one point in particular: that President Trump had not bombed enough in response to unproven allegations of chemical attacks in Syria.

According to Yassin-Kassab, Trump had likely only struck a few “probably empty chemical weapons sites” and his refusal to be drawn more fully into the conflict meant that he was effectively guilty of collaboration with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad:

The actual policy in Syria, with regard to the West, is not regime change. It’s appeasement or perhaps collaboration. There’s no evidence that the United States or the West or the Europeans have actually tried to get rid of Assad.

Kolhatkar agreed, and together the two spent much of the hour-long interview chastising leftists who’d objected to the bombing.


“Sadly, on the left here in the United States, and I believe in the UK as well, we’re hearing a lot of people saying, ‘there’s no way Assad had any responsibility for this chemical attack because he had nothing to gain,” she complained, although she never made clear how the Syrian government would benefit by inviting U.S. airstrikes.

“But clearly he did have something to gain, and he gained it,” she insisted.

By not embracing a more aggressive policy in Syria, they agreed, Trump had shown his cards to Assad and demonstrated that the Syrian President could get away with using chemical weapons with little resistance from the West. She cited Reuters, a UK intelligence-linked news agency:

Reuters just put out a piece in the last couple of days… saying ‘Syria attack triggered Western action, but on the ground Assad gained.’

“Under pressure from beleaguered residents and facing Russian threats of further such attacks, the rebel group Jaish al-Islam finally agreed to surrender Douma and leave for the Turkish border,” she quoted, seemingly agreeing that the loss of territory by the Saudi-backed jihadist militia represented a disappointment for Syrians.


Another source frequently cited by Kolhatkar is Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, whom she introduced to her audience in a 2021 segment thusly:

In an age of disinformation and misinformation, where right wing authoritarians are on the rise, an unlikely institution battling such dangerous trends has emerged: in the form of an international collective of citizen journalists and computer sleuths. Bellingcat, founded by my guest Eliot Higgins, is the force behind bombshell revelations centered on the Syrian war, Russian political persecutions, and pro-Trump white supremacists in the U.S.

In the course of her sympathetic interview, Kolhatkar goes on to contrast Higgins’ establishment-friendly output with the work of jailed Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, whom she characterizes as a kind of rogue information warrior hellbent on releasing state secrets.

You also write in your book about Wikileaks, which enjoys a lot of support on the left in the United States, and often when we think about, y’know, sort of citizen-led accountability of intelligence agencies and governments, Wikileaks often comes up, but you say that Wikileaks was about leaking classified information, which is different from what your organization, what Bellingcat does. Can you expand on that a little bit more in terms of the difference between accessing information and making it public versus actual sleuthing, actual investigation, y’know, connecting dots through evidence-based research?

Throughout the interview, Kolhatkar defers to Higgins on virtually every matter he turns his attention to–despite the fact that Bellingcat is widely considered to be a tool of U.S./EU/NATO foreign policy and is funded by “private and public foundations” including U.S. and UK intelligence contractors that profit from Western interventionism. While the group’s website insists it doesn’t take money “directly from governments,” it’s received grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. government-funded CIA cutout known for promoting destabilization and regime change in states targeted by the West.

Why review Sonali Kolhatkar’s Pacifica programming now?
Although Pacifica Radio established its pro-peace bona fides largely by countering efforts to promote imperialist wars and regime change operations, when it came to Syria, different considerations seemed to be at play. Instead, Kolhatkar represents a new generation of Pacifica hosts who enthusiastically embrace establishment media narratives.

A faction within the Pacifica audience and its elected governance structure put forth Kolhatkar and another Pacifica host, Ian Masters, as prominent endorsers on their website, New Day Pacifica. If New Day wins the internal elections, listeners are likely to hear a lot more of them at the five major metropolitan stations (KPFA-Northern California, KPFK-Los Angeles, KPFT-Houston, WBAI-New York City, WPFW-Washington, D.C) in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Ian Masters left KPFK’s airwaves angrily in August 2021, urging his audience to stop supporting the station because he’d been told to stop ranting about Pacifica’s internal politics on the air. But his show, Background Briefing with Ian Masters, now airs on KPFA in the early mornings and afternoons four days a week, with Kolhatkar’s show Rising Up taking its place on Fridays. They have KPFA’s weekday 3:00 to 4:00 pm slot sewn up between them.

Of Masters’s last 25 shows, 15 have been focused on the alleged perfidy of Donald Trump–more often than not as the lead story. He frequently rails against the sins of Republicans and Vladimir Putin, insists that Russiagate was real, advocates for Joe Biden and his son Hunter, defends the U.S. role in the US/Russian proxy war in Ukraine, and calls for evermore advanced weapons for Ukraine.

According to a Pacifica manager who preferred to remain anonymous, New Day Pacifica “are aiming at having Pacifica be an adjunct of the Biden re-election campaign by as early in 2024 as possible.”

New Day Pacifica came to prominence in 2021 when it launched a failed referendum which would have radically altered the bylaws for governing Pacifica democratically. This year, the group is endorsing staff and listener candidates in the upcoming elections for the Local Station Boards. Those elected to the Local Station Boards will in turn elect representatives to the Pacifica National Board (PNB), which ultimately runs the show.

The PNB hires an Executive Director who hires General Managers who hire Program Directors at each station, but ultimately, these elections are about two things: financial strategy and programming.

But the decisions made in this fall’s elections will ultimately echo across the airwaves of five major U.S. cities.

A recent Roots Action Education Fund mailer quotes Kolhatkar saying,

We are in a battle for the heart and soul of Pacifica… At stake is whether Pacifica represents the highest standards of journalistic integrity, or a mix of snake oil quackery and fake radicalism.

Indeed.

Voting in Local Station Board elections at Pacifica’s five metropolitan stations is open to anyone who contributed at least $25 to one of the five in the past year.

Candidate literature will be mailed and e-mailed to eligible voters and distributed at community events.

Balloting will take place between August 15 and September 20, with results announced on October 1.

The antiwar, anti-imperialist campaigns resisting the Democratic Party takeover are represented on the website Rescue Pacifica.

In a recent statement, Rescue Pacifica evokes the station’s long legacy of peace advocacy, explaining that “since 1949, KPFA has stood up to Joe McCarthy and HUAC and opposed the wars in Korea and Vietnam as well as nuclear armament.”

“This remarkable radio network has survived many perils, but not all,” the message continues.

It’s never, ever been out of danger.

The corporations and their government agencies, the CIA etc., which subvert the media, overthrow democratically elected leaders and impose dictatorships around the world, are a standing threat to all independent media–including Pacifica.


The group noted that there’s a precedent for the liberal campaign to capture the stations. “During the 1990s operatives of the Bill Clinton White House took over KPFA/Pacifica,” they write, in reference to Mary Francis Berry, a Clinton appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission who served on the Pacifica National Board until she was ousted in early 2000. Her departure came amid accusations that she used her connections at the Justice Department to deploy police against ‘Free Pacifica’ protestors during a protracted internal dispute.

Urging the station’s contributors to have their voices heard in the upcoming elections, the statement added:

We need to restore and defend Pacifica’s antiwar voice and defend grassroots social justice programs.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/26/the-imp ... ica-radio/

I remember the DC affiliate back in the day...the bosses' fixers leave no stone unturned in their need for worms.

******

News not fit to print
July 26, 2023

What you should know but will either not find in this morning’s New York Times or Financial Times or read through a very distorted lens

As one might expect, yesterday evening’s news program on Rossiya 1 gave special attention to the arrival in St Petersburg of delegations from 49 out of the 54 African nations, out of which 21 delegations were led by heads of state or heads of government. They will all meet with President Putin and in parallel one may expect that many commercial, cultural and military agreements will be reached. The emphasis last night was on how this very high attendance rate was achieved in the face of extreme pressure applied by the United States and European allies, especially France, to ensure that no one would come to Putin’s party.

On the sidelines of the African Summit there will be a gathering of BRICS negotiating teams with high level officials from China and India specifically mentioned in the news.

Why are these meetings being held in Petersburg and not in Moscow? I imagine that both the timing and the venue of the Summit is connected with a very important Russian military event that takes place in the Northern Capital this Sunday starting at 11.00AM Moscow time: the annual Naval Parade of state of the art Russian warships down the Neva and in the greater harbor extending to the naval center at Kronstadt, where a new Naval Museum is opening in time for the Parade. Logically many of the African leaders will be honored guests at this Parade.

Meanwhile, this morning’s FT crows that “limited representation from continent is a blow to Vladimir Putin” and “Today we analyse the significant slump in interest from African leaders towards the Kremlin’s invitations.”

One other very interesting item in last night’s news program was a video clip of the arrival of a military delegation headed by RF Minister of Defense Shoigu’s at the Sunan international airport of North Korea. The timing was set to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the end of the Korean war. We are told that Shoigu was met at his plane by North Korea’s Defense Minister General Kan Sun Nam and that the delegation will be engaged in talks to further the development of military ties and cooperation between the countries.

See https://rg.ru/2023/07/25/minoborony-ros ... -kndr.html

In effect what this means is that the Russians are finally abandoning all pretence at sanctioning North Korea. The ‘axis of evil’ that George W. Bush had once declared, when none in fact then existed, is being fleshed out daily by the obtuse and self-destructive efforts of the Biden Administration.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2023/07/26/ ... -to-print/

Who knew that the FT couldn't do math?
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 27, 2023 2:16 pm

Censorship of the Black Left
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 26 Jul 2023

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As the empire crumbles, the neoliberal capitalist order run by a corrupt duopoly is working to silence dissent. The Black left, of course, is always the first target.

In recent days and weeks both Black Power Media and Revolutionary Blackout Network have received what are called “strikes” on Youtube which ban them from uploading new content for one week. Just as in the game of baseball, on YouTube three strikes put a channel out if received in a 90-day period. At Black Agenda Report we have long noted that the drive to censor is directed most heavily towards the Black left.

The regime of censorship began in earnest during the 2016 presidential campaign as Hillary Clinton sought to paint Donald Trump as a Russia agent, “Putin’s puppet,” as she said. From that time on she and her friends in the corporate media and surveillance state did everything they could to continue the falsehood. There are many things one can say about Trump but he is no Russian asset. But it was the Democratic National Committee law firm that paid for the Steele Dossier, a phony document meant to make the case against Trump.

We have seen an ever worsening atmosphere since the 2016 election and Trump’s unexpected triumph. The neoliberal capitalist order has worked to make sure that no outsider will have a voice, even though Trump proved to be like every other American president and followed the same imperialist directive. Fear of someone succeeding electorally from outside the duopoly created greater censorship immediately after the election.

The group Propornot, whose work appeared in the Washington Post, the paper of the surveillance state, whose owner, Jeff Bezos, provides cloud computing services for the CIA. Propornot created a list of those said to be under Russian influence, and included Black Agenda Report. The Russian influence trope continues and the same people still want to silence anyone who presents a narrative that might gain traction among the public.

Now that Dr. Cornel West has announced his candidacy for the Green Party presidential nomination, those outlets which give him a space to talk about politics domestically and internationally are under attack. It isn’t surprising that it is the Black outlets that are receiving this treatment from YouTube and from other platforms as well.

It is ironic that the left media needs the very platforms that are so closely aligned with the state and that the liberal class is playing the biggest role in this censorship regime. It was the Democratic Party, after all, that used the state apparatus and corporate media to begin what Trump accurately called a witch hunt against him.

The man whose politics have been described as fascistic, who has been labeled as the most racist president, is one whom they cannot defeat politically. That is because the Democratic Party isn’t really much different. And so they are at a loss as to how to secure victory without silencing anyone who might expose their fraudulence. So it is the liberal class which has led the fight to silence the left.

It isn’t surprising that Black left channels are feared. The state has been in a quandary for the last three years ever since the uprisings in the wake of the killing of George Floyd inspired millions of people to protest. They fear that that mobilization which sprang up then can happen again. Now they are facing an unpopular presidency. Joe Biden is the candidate foisted upon democratic voters and who won because of great antipathy towards Trump, the most polarizing president in modern history. Biden acted as he always has, as an errand boy for neoliberalism. He has offered people so little despite propaganda efforts to paint him as a progressive. They remain in a state of panic, hoping to prove themselves to be different than what they have shown themselves to be. This trickery can only be accomplished by silencing those who tell inconvenient truths.

For the past year the duopoly have shoveled billions of dollars in public money into a futile effort to weaken Russia. But that will not result in victory for Ukraine. There will at best be a stalemate which will continue suffering for the people the US claims to care about.

But while the US props up Ukraine’s economy, including its pension system, and keeps the Ukrainian government afloat, people in the US are kicked off of medicaid, are losing their SNAP benefits, and live with a presidential administration which will not defend any of the things the Democratic Party claimed to care about,and which keep millions of people in debt peonage from student loans. Cobbling together a last minute plan does little to help the people after the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s half hearted and pitiful attempt to win last year's midterm election.

This conundrum explains why the Cornel West candidacy is so dangerous as are the outlets which allow him to speak about the issues that matter to millions of people, issues they’re told can’t be addressed. And so the corporate media and the liberal class join in condemning his candidacy. The Nation magazine, allegedly left, asks West to run as a Democrat, a sure way to be the latest sheepdog, the latest person to sacrifice the needs of millions of people to prop up what can’t be propped up. And that is why it is important to silence outlets like Black Power Media and Revolutionary Blackout Network. It is Black people who still keep the Democratic party together and who must be convinced that they can’t stray from its orthodoxy.

The democrats are so zealous in their censorship that they end up giving their rivals positive press. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he of the famous political family, is running as a Democratic candidate for president. He is more of a gadfly than a serious candidate, and is probably not one who the democrats should worry about, but a party whose goal is to fool people into voting for them sought to silence Kennedy at a hearing on censorship.

Kennedy has exposed himself as a dilettante unsuited for a high profile political campaign and some of whose pronouncements are troubling to the democrats’ rank and file. He wouldn’t be a threat to a party that had an interest in working on behalf of the people. But so great is their need to lie that they gave him gravitas while silencing him.

They shut down anyone who tells the truth about the democrats. When Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s laptop was found with incriminating emails, the media colluded with the Biden campaign to kill a true story. The younger Biden was hired at a $50,000 per month salary to do nothing except be a Biden for a Ukrainian gas company. The laptop contents proved that everything Biden’s detractors said was true. As the Vice President he met with his son’s employer and at the very least peddled influence.

When the story broke, Twitter and Facebook followed Biden campaign dictates and banned this accurate information from their platforms. Which brings us back to Black Power Media and Revolutionary Blackout Network. They are easy targets and pose great danger to the oligarchy as they expose Cop City and allow a prominent outsider to be heard on the campaign trail.

The Washington Post tagline is, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” That is certainly true. Unfortunately, the corporate media are ruling class outlets make certain that the people are kept in the dark. It follows that the Black left will be censored in order to keep the leaky ship afloat.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/censorship-black-left
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 31, 2023 4:54 pm

The ‘Scandal Implosion’ Stratagem: Will It Work for Ukraine?

Alastair Crooke

July 31, 2023

Defeat has destroyed the myth of NATO’s omnipotence, Alastair Crooke writes.

Biden: “Putin has already lost the war … Putin has a real problem: How does he move from here? What does he do?” Secretary Blinken repeats ad infinitum the same mantra: ‘Russia has lost’. So does the head of MI6, and Bill Burns, the head of CIA, opines, (replete with snide asides) at the Aspen Security Conference, that not only has Putin ‘lost’, but further, that Putin is failing to keep a hold on a fragmenting Russian state, entering upon a likely death-spiral disintegration.

What is going on? Some suggest a psychic disorder or groupthink has seized the White House Team, resulting in the formation of a pseudo-reality, severed from the world, but unobtrusively shaped around wider ideological ends.

The parroting of dubious narrative however, morphs for the informed world into seeming western delusion – the world as the ‘Team’ imagines it to be, or more to the point, would like it to be.

This tight parroting though is clearly no ‘coincidence’. A clutch of high officials speaking to script and in concert are not deluded. They are mounting a new narrative. The ‘Russia has lost’ mantra defines the mega-narrative that has been decided. It is the prelude to an intense ‘blame game’: Project Ukraine ‘is failing because the Ukrainians are not implementing the doctrines received from NATO trainers – yet despite this, the war has shown that Putin has ‘lost’ too: Russia too, is weakened’.

This is another exemplar of the current western fixation on the idea that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battle space are incidentals. What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated across the spectrum, asserting firmly that the Ukraine ‘episode’ now is closed and should be ‘book-ended’ by the demand that we all ‘move on’.

The gist of it is that ‘We’ control narrative; us ‘winning’ and Russia losing, therefore, becomes inevitable. The flaw to this hubris is firstly that it puts the Administration ‘high priests’ at war with reality, and secondly, that the public long ago lost trust in mainstream media.

Jonathan Turley, a recognized legal scholar and Professor at Georgetown, who has written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory, draws attention to: “the last ditch effort of the members of Congress and the media to get the public to just ‘move on’ from the Biden corruption scandal”. The message, he writes, “is clear … Everybody needs to back off! … [However] as evidence and public interest increase, it is a bit late for spin or shiny objects”.

“This week, the scandal is likely to be even more serious for the Bidens and the country. The media is increasingly taking on the appearance of Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun yelling that there is “nothing to see here” in front of a virtual apocalyptic scene of fire and destruction.”

What is the link to Ukraine? Well, a year ago, Professor Turley wrote that the political and media establishment would likely use a ‘scandal implosion’ approach to the corruption allegations as the evidence mounted. There would be an attempt to ‘cap off’ the scandal with Turley suggesting that the Justice Department would secure a ‘light plea’ by Hunter Biden on a couple of tax counts, with little or no jail time.

Well, that’s exactly what has occurred one year later. Then came the predicted ‘scandal implosion’: Hunter pleaded guilty to having delayed due tax payments – to a chorus of House members and the media shrugging off all other corruption allegations, and firmly declaring the scandal ‘closed’, together with the demand to “move on”. Turley notes however, “the media’s desire to “move on” from the scandal is reaching an almost frantic level, as millions in foreign payments and dozens of corporate shell companies are revealed – and incriminating emails are released”.

It is not clear that the stratagem will work. It is already in trouble.

The key elements to the ‘implosion stratagem’ are revealed as outright, unflinching denial that there is any ‘problem’ at all, and an obstinate refusal to concede even a scintilla to the notion of there being any type of failure. No need to look in the mirror.

This too was the modus operandi in respect to the Nordstream débacle (the destruction of the gas pipeline to Germany): Admit to nothing, and get the CIA to rustle up a ‘scandal implosion’ scenario. In this case, a nonsense diversionary story of a yacht with a few nefarious sub-aqua divers descending to 80-90 metres, without special equipment or using specialised gases, to lay and detonate explosive devices. No real investigation; ‘Nothing to see here’.

But as events in Germany indicate, the story is not believed; the coalition in Berlin is in deep trouble.

And now, the stratagem is being applied to Ukraine: The ‘Chorus’ cries out, ‘Putin has lost’, in spite of Ukraine messing up its chance to weaken Russia decisively. The hope is plain – that ‘Team Biden’ can steal away, undamaged, from devastating defeat, with ‘a scandal implosion’ mechanism already being primed (for after NATO’s summer ‘deadline’ to achieve a ‘win’): ‘We gave them everything – yet, the Ukrainians turned ‘their back’ on our expert advice for how to ‘win’ – and consequently have achieved nothing.

“Ukraine’s counter-offensive is failing to make progress because its army is not fully implementing training it has received from NATO, according to a leaked German intelligence assessment … Ukrainian soldiers trained by the West are showing “great learning success”; but they are let down by commanders who have not been through the [NATO] boot camps, it adds … the Ukrainian military favours promoting soldiers with combat experience, over those who have received NATO-standard instruction”.

Well, well? Like Afghanistan?

The war in Afghanistan was a sort of crucible, too. In very real terms, Afghanistan was turned into a testbed for every single innovation in NATO technocratic project management – with each innovation heralded as precursor to a game-changing future. Funds poured in; buildings were thrown up; and an army of globalised technocrats arrived to oversee the process. Big data, AI and the real-time utilization of ever expanding sets of technical surveillance and reconnaissance were to topple old ‘stodgy’ military doctrines. It was to be a showcase for technical managerialism. It presumed that a properly technical and scientific way of war clearly would prevail.

But technocracy as the only means of constructing a functional NATO-style military birthed instead, in Afghanistan, something thoroughly rotten – “data-driven defeat”, as one U.S. Afghan veteran described it, that it collapsed in a matter of days. In Ukraine, its forces were caught between Scylla and Charybdis: neither the armoured fist thrust taught by NATO to break the Russian defences, nor the alternative light infantry attacks were successful. Ukraine is suffering rather, a NATO-driven defeat.

Why then, opt to take reality ‘head-on’, with the snide insistence that Putin ‘has lost’? We do not, of course, know ‘the Team’s’ internal rationale. However, to open negotiations with Moscow in the hope of obtaining a ceasefire or a frozen conflict (to bolster the ‘Narrative’) would likely disclose a ‘Moscow’ as insistent only on Kiev’s full capitulation. And that would sit awkwardly with the ‘Putin losing story’.

Perhaps the calculus is to hope that between now and winter, public interest in Ukraine would have been so diverted by other events that the public might have ‘moved on’, and with blame clearly hung around the necks of Ukrainian Commanders showing “considerable deficiencies in leadership” which lead to “wrong and dangerous decisions” – by ignoring NATO-standard instruction.

Professor Turley concludes,

“None of this is going to work, of course. The public has lost trust in the media. Indeed, the “Let’s Go, Brandon” movement is as much a mocking of the media – as is a targeting of Biden”. “Polls show that the public is not “moving on” [from the Hunter allegations] and now view this as a major scandal. A majority believes that Hunter has received special protection in the investigation. While the media can continue to suppress the evidence and allegations within their own echo-chambered platforms – truth like water has a way of finding a way out”.

In effect, ‘events’ are marching forward – with or without the media.

And here is the crux: To the degree that Turley estimates the Biden affair constitutes a putative ‘apocalyptic site of domestic U.S. destruction’, so the West faces a yet more strategic defeat segueing out from its Ukraine project – for that defeat encompasses not just that of the Ukrainian battle-ground – It has destroyed the myth of NATO omnipotence. It has upended the story of ‘magical’ western weaponry. It has burst the image of western competence.

The stakes were never higher. Yet did the ruling-class think this through when they so lightly embarked on this ill-fated Ukraine ‘project’? Did the possibility of ‘failure’ even enter to their consciousness?

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023 ... r-ukraine/

"Failure is not an option...."
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 03, 2023 2:13 pm

AUGUST 1, 2023
How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths
A review of Norman Solomon’s War Made Invisible
BRYCE GREENE
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(New Press, 2023)
Brown University’s Costs of War project released a study this year estimating that US-led wars since 9/11 have contributed directly and indirectly to 4.5 million deaths in the targeted countries. Those countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Syria—have also seen an estimated 40–60 million people displaced from their homes. This refugee crisis is as destructive as any war, and marks the largest number of refugees since the end of World War II. By all accounts, the US-led Global War on Terror has been a disaster for tens of millions of people.

When the study was released in May, there was only one report (Washington Post, 5/15/23) in all of America’s top newspapers that brought attention to the staggering figure. The Hill (5/16/23) and a few smaller outlets (NY1, 5/17/23; UPI, 5/16/23) published pieces on the topic, but the bulk of corporate media did not deem it worthy of any coverage at all.

No solemn reflections about the war machine, no policy pieces about how we might avoid such devastation in the future, and certainly no op-eds calling for the wars’ architects to stand trial for their crimes.

How does our media environment so easily dismiss carnage of this scale? Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its War Machine (New Press), offers a deep look at the media system that enables a monstrous war machine to extract such a heavy toll on the world with impunity.

Solomon’s book attempts to show how our institutions came to be so casual about burying the costs of US wars. He challenges the traditional myth of the American “free press” as a check on power, and instead shows how the media act as “a fourth branch of government.” This book serves as a survey of media malfeasance in recent history, but also as a meditation on the role of our media system in manufacturing consent for a brutal foreign policy for the entire world.

Useful victims

Solomon takes aim at the common, unchallenged assumptions that often shape how media portray conflicts. Persistent tropes, like the constant appeal for America to “lead the world,” and dangerously common euphemisms like “defense spending” contribute to a culture that worships a mythical version of America, while the empire’s true nature remains hidden.
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FAIR.org (3/18/22): In the Ukraine War, US corporate media discovered a “newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.”
One key aspect of that myth-building is the selective way US media cover civilian victims. Some are covered extensively, eliciting calls for revenge, while others are ignored entirely—depending on who the aggressor is. Solomon recalls a critical moment just a few weeks into the US invasion of Afghanistan—at a time when, as the Washington Post (10/31/01) reported, “more errant US bombs have landed in residential areas, causing damage to such places as a Red Cross warehouse and senior citizens’ center.” Images of these atrocities had sparked “criticism of the American war effort.”

At CNN, chair Walter Isaacson declared in a memo to staff that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” When the network did cover the toll on civilians, Isaacson told the Washington Post (10/31/01), “You want to make sure people understand…it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” John Moody, the vice president of Fox News at the time, called the directive “not at all a bad thing,” because “Americans need to remember what started this.” The coverage was designed to reinforce the US government line of a noble cause, to shield viewers from the toll on civilians, and justify them if they were shown.

The media’s expedient treatment of civilian suffering has continued to this day. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where civilian casualties supported rather than hindered the message the media wanted to send, the coverage was reversed (FAIR.org, 3/18/22). “By any consistent standard,” Solomon writes, “the horrors that the US military had brought to so many civilians since the autumn of 2001 were no less terrible for the victims than what Russia was doing in Ukraine.” Despite that, the media coverage of Ukraine was “vastly more immediate, graphic, extensive and outraged about Russia’s slaughter than America’s slaughter.”

During April 2022, the New York Times published 14 front-page stories on civilian casualties from Russia’s military offensive. During a comparable period after the US invasion of Iraq, there was only one front-page story about civilian victims of the US attack (FAIR.org, 6/9/22).

Media boundaries

Looming over any current discussion of news media is their abysmal reporting of the Global War on Terror. Solomon uses the case of Iraq to demonstrate the boundaries of our media system, both top-down and self-imposed.

Through social filtering, the journalists who end up covering wars for elite institutions often have internalized the assumptions that justify the empire. Journalist Reese Erlich (Target Iraq, Solomon and Erlich) recounted that he “didn’t meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the US and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraqi government by force.” This selection bias was clearly reflected in the West’s acquiescent coverage of the war.
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Ashleigh Banfield (4/24/03): “There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story.”
Other times, boundaries can be rigidly and publicly reinforced, as in the case of the young journalist Ashleigh Banfield. Banfield was a journalist who ascended the heights of cable news. A rising star, Banfield’s career at NBC hit a wall after she made a speech in April 2003 deeply critical of how the media obscured the harsh realities of the Iraq War. She told an audience at Kansas State University:

What didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed… There are horrors that were completely left out of this war.

Television coverage of the war, Banfield said, was “a glorious wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited.”

NBC announced that it was “deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks.” Her punishment was swift and harsh:

I was officeless for ten months. No phone, no computer…. Eventually after ten months of this, I was given an office that was a tape closet…. The message was crystal clear.

The message wasn’t just for Banfield. Journalists could not help but pay close attention to this destruction of one of their own. If they stray outside the unspoken bounds set by corporate media’s owners, they could share Banfield’s fate or worse.

Accepting forever wars
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Even war critics give the US military credit for being “more humane” (New York Times, 9/3/21).
As of 2021, the last soldiers exited Afghanistan, solidifying a new era of US warfare dubbed “over the horizon.” This is a reference to the constant high-tech, “lower intensity” slaughter emanating from the hundreds of military bases the US still has across the world.

US drone warfare has been a persistent source of horror for millions. But, as Solomon notes, “the systems of remote killing get major help from reporters, producers and editors who detour around the carnage at the other end of US weaponry.” One clear way they help is by endorsing and repeating the idea that America’s campaign of air assassinations is a new form of “humane war.”

Even some of the more thoughtful critics of this kind of war fall into linguistic traps that minimize its true toll. In a New York Times op-ed (9/3/21) that described the trend as “disturbing,” Yale historian Samuel Moyn wrote that “America’s bequest to the world…over the last 20 years” was an “endless and humane” form of “counterterrorist belligerency,” one in which “Human Rights Watch examined for violations of the law of war and…military lawyers helped pick targets.” Moyn is concerned that “more humane war became a companion to an increasingly interventionist foreign policy”—but seems to miss the irony of calling a strategy “humane” that kills innocents by the millions.

Moyn seems partially aware that the “humane” war is more rebranding than restraint, but insists that the “improved humanity of our wars” is both “ostensible and real.” References to “humane” war should ring just as hollow as Lyndon Johnson’s proclamation in 1966 about soldiers on the way to Vietnam: “No American army in all of our long history has been so compassionate.”

The risk of truth-telling
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Jacobin (8/21) notes that “the Espionage Act makes no distinction between spies who steal information for hostile foreign governments and government employees who share information of public interest with the press, journalists, or even members of the public.”
As a sharp contrast to the media who shield the empire from any reckoning, Solomon highlights the people who take a risk to bring the world the truth about this detached, mechanized warfare. He talks to Cian Westmoreland, who “spoke sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes.” Brandon Bryant lamented that the entire system was designed “so that no one has taken responsibility for what happens.” There was Heather Linebaugh, who recounted how she and her colleagues “always wonder if we killed the right people.”

One of these heroes was Daniel Hale, who remains in prison today for leaking information that showed that over a five-month period in 2012, 90% of the people killed in Afghanistan drone strikes were not the intended target. Solomon quotes Hale’s touching letter explaining that he leaked the information so that “I might someday humbly ask forgiveness.”

Other whistleblowers have suffered immensely for their acts of bravery. In 2010, army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, showing US forces using an Apache helicopter to gun down a dozen civilians in Iraq. The dead included two Reuters employees. For leaking the video and other documents, Manning spent seven years in prison, much of that in solitary confinement. In 2019, Manning spent another year in prison for refusing to testify against the publisher of her documents, Julian Assange—who is himself incarcerated in Britain, facing extradition to the United States to face charges related to exposing US war crimes.

These whistleblowers and truth-tellers only exist on the margins in public discourse. When the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan was bookended by yet another “unintentional” drone strike on ten civilians, the words of these whistleblowers had long left the public mind. Media shrugged when the Pentagon cleared itself of any wrongdoing, as they have done countless times before. In this so-called free press, Solomon writes, “outliers can’t compete with drumbeats.”

It really is no surprise that US media had so little to say when Brown University’s Cost of War Project released its estimates for the death toll of the US’s post-9/11 wars. They ensured America’s 4.5 million victims barely registered in the public consciousness, as they diverted audiences’ attention to another noble US cause in Ukraine. War Made Invisible lays bare the very heart of the system that allows the US war machine to grind onward, with minimal resistance from a confused and misled public.

https://fair.org/home/how-to-ignore-4-5-million-deaths/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 04, 2023 2:12 pm

Mainstream Journalists Are Cloistered Ivy League-Educated Trust Fund Kids
It’s not just the obscenely wealthy owners of the mass media who are protecting their class interests, it’s the reporters, editors and pundits as well.

Caitlin Johnstone
August 4, 2023

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Iraq war cheerleader David Brooks has an article in The New York Times titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?“, another one of those tired old think pieces we’ve been seeing for the last eight years that asks “golly gosh could we coastal elites have played some role in the rise of Trumpism?” like it’s the first time anyone has ever considered that obvious point (the answer is yes, duh, you soft-handed silver spoon-fed ivory tower bubble boy).

One worthwhile paragraph about the media stands out though:

“Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.”


Brooks is not the first to make this observation about the drastic shift in the socioeconomic makeup of news reporters that has taken place from previous generations to now.

“The class factor in journalism gets overlooked,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said on the Jimmy Dore Show in 2021. “Thirty or forty years ago, fifty years ago, journalists really were outsiders. That’s why they all had unions; they made shit money, they came from like working class families. They hated the elite. They hated bankers and politicians. It was kind of like a boss-employee relationship — they hated them and wanted to throw rocks at them and take them down pegs.”

“If I were to list the twenty richest people I’ve ever met in my entire life, I think like seven or eight of them are people I met because they work at The Intercept — people from like the richest fucking families on the planet,” Greenwald added.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, whose father worked for NBC, made similar observations on the Dark Horse podcast back in 2020.

“Reporters when I was growing up, they came from a different class of people than they do today,” Taibbi said. “A lot of them were kind of more working class — their parents were more likely to be plumbers or electricians than they were to be doctors or lawyers. Like this thing where the journalist is an Ivy League grad, that’s a relatively new thing that I think came about in the seventies and eighties with my generation. But reporters just instinctively hated rich people, they hated powerful people. Like if you put up a poster of a politician in a newsroom it was defaced instantaneously, like there were darts on it. Reporters saw it as their job to stick it to the man.”

“Mostly the job is different now,” Taibbi said. “The fantasy among reporters in the nineties about politicians started to be, I want to be the person that hangs out with the candidate after the speech and has a beer and is sort of close to power. And that’s kind of the model, that’s where we’re at right now. That’s kind of the problem is that basically people in the business want to be behind the rope line with people of influence. And it’s going to be a problem to get us back to that other adversarial posture of the past.”


This is a major reason behind the freakish sycophancy and empire loyalism we see in the mainstream press. It’s not just the obscenely wealthy owners of the mass media who are protecting their class interests — it’s the reporters, editors and pundits as well.

These are typically fairly wealthy people from fairly wealthy families, who become more and more wealthy the more their careers are elevated. As insiders of the mainstream press have attested, it’s widely understood by employees of the mainstream media that the way to elevate your career is to toe the establishment line and refrain from spotlighting issues that are inconvenient to the powerful.

This identification with the ruling class feeds into the dynamic described by Taibbi in which modern journalists have come to value close proximity to those in power. These are the people they want to be sharing drinks with and going to parties with and invited to the weddings of; the “us vs them” dynamic which used to exist between the press and politicians switched, and now the press see themselves and the politicians they fraternize with as “us” and the general public as “them”.

There are other factors at play with regard to elite education. The number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013; if your wealthy parents aren’t paying that off for you then you’ve got crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself, which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money, which you can only do by acting as a dependable propagandist for the imperial establishment.


Universities themselves tend to play a status quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth won’t flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation, and they are certainly not going to send their kids there.

“The whole intellectual culture has a filtering system, starting as a child in school,” Noam Chomsky once explained in an interview. “You’re expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don’t accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you’re weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering… which creates a strong tendency to impose conformism.”

The people who make it through this filtering system are the ones who are elevated to the most influential positions in our civilization. All the most widely amplified voices in our society are the celebrities, journalists, pundits and politicians who’ve proven themselves to be reliable stewards of the matrix of narrative control which keeps the public jacked in to the mainstream worldview.

Is it any wonder, then, that all the sources we’ve been taught to look to for information about our world continually feed us stories which give the impression that the status quo is working fine and this is the only way things can possibly be? Is it any wonder that the mass media support all US wars and cheerlead all imperial agendas?

This is how things were set up to be. Our media act like propagandists for a tyrannical regime because that’s exactly what they are.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/08 ... fund-kids/

When looking at contradictions you'll usually find class. Who needs conspiracies' when there's class? Indeed, what so-called 'conspiracy' does is misdirect one from class. Class explains why the Democratic Party ain't the lesser evil. Class explains why the environmental movement refuses to indict capitalism. Class is why liberals and libertarians can never be trusted. Class explains why, until very recently, the CIA(and it's predecessor, the OSS) recruited largely from upper class schools. Class explains the dominate narratives of our society: throughout history it has been the upper classes which produce literature, for few workers struggling to survive have time for that.

*******

NC Under Attack from Ukraine After Posting on Gonzalo Lira Being Tortured and Extorted While in Prison
Posted on August 4, 2023 by Yves Smith

While this attack from Ukraine did not overwhelm our defenses nor as far as we can tell, result in timeouts for readers, but it did make the site sluggish, particularly for admin tasks. Our tech guru Dave took additional protective measures.

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Dave analyzed the traffic spike and there is no question, based on more granular information about where it came from, that this was an attack. It started not long after we posted Gonzalo Lira Reports Torture in Ukraine Prison, Extortion, Inevitable Conviction with Sentence of 5 to 8 Years in Labor Camp which was on the first page of Google after the story broke.


I wonder if other sites that have reported on the incarceration and torture of Gonzolo Lira have also been under attack. Readers?

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08 ... rison.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 05, 2023 3:06 pm

Rejection of the policy of "neutrality"
August 5, 13:51

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Rejection of the policy of "neutrality"

One of the founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, came out and admitted that the editors of the Internet encyclopedia had long abandoned the "policy of neutrality" on which it was originally built.

On the System Update broadcast, Sanger said that he noticed the first interventions by US intelligence agencies in a "free and independent" encyclopedia back in 2008. Since then, this "moderation" by the US government has continued to grow. And since 2015, Wiki has been systematically used by Washington as a propaganda tool.

Sanger confirmed to everyone a long-obvious fact - Wikipedia is an American tool for forming public opinion.

https://vk.com/journal_joj?z=photo-2211 ... 4_00%2Frev - zinc

Nevertheless, alternatively gifted broadcasters about "neutral" Wikipedia are still found.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8545759.html

Google Translator

******

Disrupt The Culture Wars

Keep breaking the spell and drawing attention to what’s really going on, and you can stomp out the abuse at its source.

Caitlin Johnstone
August 5, 2023

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One of the great challenges faced by westerners who oppose the political status quo today is the way the narrative managers of both mainstream factions continuously divert all political energy away from issues which threaten the interests of the powerful like economic injustice, war, militarism, authoritarianism, corruption, capitalism and ecocide and toward issues which don’t threaten the powerful at all like abortion, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

This method of social control serves the powerful in some very obvious ways, and is being used very effectively. As long as it remains effective, it will continue to be used. The worse things get the more urgent the need to fight the class war will become, anf the more urgent the need to fight the class war becomes the more vitriolic and intense the artificial culture war will become in order to prevent political changes which inconvenience the powerful. This is 100 percent guaranteed. And what’s tricky is that all the vitriolic intensity will create the illusion that the culture war has gotten more important, when in reality the class war has.

It’s just a straightforward fact that the more miserable, impoverished and disempowered the public becomes, the more hateful and all-consuming the artificial culture war will be made to prevent revolution. That’s what’s been happening, and that’s what will continue to happen. You can hate hearing it, and you can hate me for saying it. But it is a fact, and I think we all pretty much know it’s a fact.

So what’s do be done about this? Obviously it’s not an option to just throw disempowered groups to the wolves and ignore the abuses they’re suffering under the directed hatred coming after them from the right. And obviously it’s not an option to run to the other side of the artificial partisan divide and play along with the mainstream faction which says we should focus only on culture war issues, as in Hillary Clinton famously arguing that breaking up the banks won’t end racism and sexism.

As with most problems, the first step toward finding a solution is to bring consciousness to what’s happening. Draw attention to the fact that marginalized groups are being used and abused by mainstream narrative managers to keep the public from turning their gaze on the abuses of their rulers. Draw attention to the way rightist narrative managers direct hatred toward marginalized groups to keep hatred away from our rulers, and to the way liberal narrative managers seize on that to direct their herd away from issues that can inconvenience the powerful and toward exclusive focus on the culture war.

Stop letting people get sucked up into the performance, and instead draw attention to what’s really going on here. Act like a loud jerk at a movie theater who keeps yelling “None of this is real! Those are actors on a movie set!”

Can you imagine how hard it would be to get lost in the narrative of a movie if somebody was constantly doing that to you? After a while you’d stop seeing Oppenheimer and you’d only be able to see Cillian Murphy.

Basically all you’re trying to do is take all the emotional heat that’s being diverted into partisan feuding over issues whose outcomes will never inconvenience power in the slightest, and stear that emotional heat toward the people who are directing all this. This is both easy to do and completely honest, because how fucked up is it that they’re doing this? How fucked up is it that the most influential voices in our society on both sides of the mainstream partisan divide are facilitating the abuse of marginalized groups in order to protect the powerful?

It’s about as loathsome a thing as you could possibly come up with. They’re pitting human against human at the expense of society’s most vulnerable members and watching them fight from on high like Greek gods. Can you think of anything more vile?

Draw attention to how disgusting what they’re doing is. Draw attention to how deeply evil this behavior is. Keep shouting in that movie theater and drawing attention to what’s really going on to highlight how profoundly depraved these monsters really are.

Draw people’s attention to this dynamic wherever you see it. When right wing “populists” babble about LGBTQ conspiracies and shriek about wokeness, mock them for the ridiculous sheep they are for playing into a dynamic that directly serves the elite power structures they claim to oppose. When liberals are ignoring economic injustice, war, militarism, authoritarianism, corruption, capitalism and ecocide to focus on culture war battles whose outcomes will never even slightly inconvenience the powerful, highlight the disgusting way they themselves are feeding into a dynamic that imperils the marginalized communities they claim to defend.

People on both sides of the divide will object to this message. The source of their objection is the exact programming I just described. The truth hides just beneath that objection. On some level you all know this is happening.

Keep breaking the spell and drawing attention to what’s really going on, and you can stomp out the abuse at its source.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/08 ... ture-wars/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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