Censorship, fake news, perception management

Questions, Comments, Concerns etc about The Bell
User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 19, 2020 12:29 pm

The New Anti-China Campaign Is Built On Lies
To avoid self-examination of the failures that let the U.S. exceed the covid-19 casualty numbers of every other nation the powers that be decided to blame someone else.

Trump's first attempt was to blame the World Health Organization for not providing all information. But 16 U.S. administration officials were embedded with the WHO in Geneva. They relayed real time updates of all information the WHO received.

As the Democrats and the media did not join Trump in blaming the WHO another scapegoat was needed. Everyone then agreed that it China would be the most convenient target.

The intensity of the current anti-China campaign reminds one of the run up to the war on Iraq. The people who now claim that 'China lied, people died' are the very same who ran the Iraq WMD campaign. But all the reports claiming Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were just fantasy. The reports of Chinese culpability are similar nonsense.

As this is an election year both parties try to associate the other side with the new villain:

“Donald Trump sent critical medical supplies to China as Americans continue to suffer. He needs to follow his supposed motto of America First,” American Bridge President Bradley Beychok said in a statement. “We’re making sure that voters across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin know full well not only how badly Trump botched this crisis, but also how badly he bent the knee to China in the midst of it as well.”
...
“We are more than happy to let the American public decide whom they trust, President Trump or Beijing Joe Biden, to get tough on China,” said Brian O. Walsh, president of America First, in response to the new ad campaign by American Bridge. American Bridge said the ad is the first of its new offensive campaign targeting Trump, his company, business associates and adult children over their ties to China and other foreign investments.
The group said it plans on rolling out microtargeted digital ads on that theme as part of “an all-out assault on Trump and his family over their corruption — in China and other countries — involving foreign bribes, political favors, shady real estate investments, and parties with dictators.”

This will be bad for other important political issues:

Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek - 19:27 UTC · Apr 17, 2020
The anti China hawkishness is going to drown out progressive momentum for universal healthcare and cancelling student debt. Like Russiagate, this new yellow peril will lead to greater military spending and more war. Sad so many who should know better can’t see that.

Some lawmakers want to allow random people to sue China over the 'damage it caused'. Other seek to default on the $1.2 trillion of debt the U.S. owns China.

To blame China the hawks are accusing it of three issues:

Lack of public hygiene
Insufficient information
Creating or spreading the virus by accident
The "wet market" in Wuhan did not have hygiene problems. A "wet market" is comparable to a farmers market (vid). It is "wet" in that it provides fresh products like fruits, vegetables, meat and fish. A "dry market" provides the complementary products like rice, flour, tea and sugar. China has yet to be overrun by super market chains. Some 40% of the Chinese people source their daily food at the wet markets.

The wet market in Wuhan was not the source of the epidemic. It did not and does not sell bats. The epidemic started in December at a time when bats hibernate. The first known case was not related to the market at all.

The U.S. claims that China did not inform it sufficiently. The timeline as published by China and confirmed by media reports does not support that claim.

On January 3 the head of the U.S. Center of Disease Control was personally informed by his Chinese counterpart that there was an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. On January 8 the "unknown cause" was identified as a novel coronavirus. A full genome sequence of the virus was published on January 12 and preliminary testing kits were developed and made available in Wuhan. By January 13 another test and test protocol had been developed in Germany and on January 17 the WHO adopted its refined version.

In the U.S. the CDC insisted on developing its own test and failed by contaminating its test components. It then failed for more than a month to correct the issue.

The German Federal Health Ministry was recently asked if it perceived a lack of information from China or saw reason to criticize China over its changing case numbers. It responded (in German, my translation):

"The federal government is not aware that China held back any data." ... "Considering the interim development the adoption of different definitions of cases during the epidemic in China is comprehensible."
Another claim is that China somehow created the virus or let it escape from a laboratory in Wuhan where it was researching bat viruses.

But scientists see strong evidence that the novel coronavirus is a natural development and they do not believe that it leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan:

Edward Holmes, a biologist at the University of Sydney and a fellow of the respected Royal Society in London, said the Wuhan laboratory blamed by some for the pandemic does have specimens of the bat virus RaTG13, the closest relative of Covid-19 source SARS-CoV-2, but the two are not genetically linked.
RaTG13 strains, he says, are from the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, not the central city of Wuhan, the pandemic’s initial epicenter.
...
Genome tracing has revealed that the bat virus RaTG13 has at least 20 years of genetic divergence, or evolutionary change, from SARS-CoV-2, and possibly as much as 50 years, ruling it out as the source of the pandemic.

The claims against China made by both U.S. parties do not have a factual basis.

It is no wonder than that Chinese people are asking "What Do You Really Want From Us?"

Posted by b on April 18, 2020 at 17:43 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/04/t ... .html#more
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 25, 2020 11:50 am

How anti-China stories are concocted: ‘deliberately spreading’ COVID-19?
25 APRIL, 2020 ~ LEAVE A COMMENT

Almost everyday there is a weirder and more twisted idea that gets aired. Those who are unfortunate enough to be located in one of the ‘zero-sum largard’ countries are rather used to the lies, gossip and propaganda that passes as ‘news’, as they are also used to politicians who garner about the same level of distrust as a used-car salesman or a real-estate agent. But when a historian starts peddling the same stuff, you have to wonder what has gone wrong with the West. The historian and public intellectual in question is a certain Niall Ferguson, who has suggested that China ‘deliberately spread’ COVID-19 around the world. Before saying any more, let me copy an article from the Global Times (here), written by Daniel Bell, who now works at Shandong University.

US President Donald Trump said at news briefing on April 18 that Beijing should face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for the coronavirus pandemic. Where do such allegations come from? Surprisingly, it’s not just from the fertile imaginations of obscure conspiracy theorists or Hollywood screenwriters.

Such claims are also published in mainstream media organizations. Niall Ferguson is a leading historian and public intellectual. I had great respect for his scholarship. So it came as a big surprise when he wrote a column for the London-based Sunday Times on April 5 to call on China for answers to questions about coronavirus.

The Chinese local government did make some mistakes at the start of the coronavirus crisis and Ferguson asks some legitimate questions. But he asks a question that stood out from the rest: “After it became clear that there was a full-blown epidemic spreading from Wuhan to the rest of Hubei province, why did you cut off travel from Hubei to the rest of China — on January 23 — but not from Hubei to the rest of the world?”

The force of his question rests on the factual assumption that China allowed flights from Wuhan to the rest of the world but not to the rest of China after January 23. But is it a fact?

To support the allegation, Ferguson added: “January is always a peak month for travel from China to Europe and America because of the lunar new year holiday. As far as I can tell from the available records, however, regular direct flights from Wuhan continued to run to London, Paris, Rome, New York and San Francisco throughout January and in some cases into February.”

I was surprised by the allegation that China allowed regular direct flights from Wuhan to cities in the US and Europe after it cut flights from Wuhan to the rest of China.

Why does it matter? If the Chinese government did allow regular flights from Wuhan to Western countries after January 23, it suggests the Chinese government deliberately allowed, if not encouraged, the spread of the virus to five cities in Western countries after it tried to control it in China.

Not surprisingly, Ferguson’s article generated huge interest around the world. In the US, it was tweeted by both prominent liberals and conservatives. Canada’s leading newspaper the Globe and Mail published a shortened version of the comment. Websites from the Arab world and Africa publicized Ferguson’s allegation about allowing regular flights out of Wuhan to the rest of the world after they had been cut off inside China.

Puzzled, I decided to ask Ferguson himself if the allegation is true (I’m motivated by personal curiosity and the concern for truth, and I’m not acting with or on behalf of anybody else). So I sent him a polite email, asking if he has any evidence to support the claim that regular flights continued from Wuhan to the rest of the world continued after January 23.

Ferguson replied: “I can assure you I wouldn’t write a sentence like that if I had not researched it rather thoroughly.” To support his claim, he sent me several pieces of evidence.

But the sources he sent did not support the allegation that there were regular commercial flights from Wuhan to the US and Europe after January 23 and “in some cases into February.” Ferguson sent me a link to this New York Times story, “430,000 People Have Traveled From China to US Since Coronavirus Surfaced” published on April 4 and updated on April 15.

Surprisingly, this article includes one sentence that suggests the opposite of what Ferguson claims: “Scott Liu, 56, a Wuhan native and a textile importer who lives in New York, caught the last commercial flight, on Jan. 22.”

Ferguson also sent a link of a Nikkei article, “China’s inaction for 3 days in January at root of pandemic” published on March 19. This article mentions that group travel continued out of China until January 27 but it does not say anything about planes leaving from Wuhan to cities outside of China after January 23.

Professor Ferguson sent me two Flightstats records of flights from Wuhan in January or February. The Flightstat records seem to show that 31 flights left from Wuhan to cities in the US and Europe on or after January 23. But those same records show that the “est. runway departure” and “actual runway departure” in Wuhan is blank for all the flights that left to other cities after one that left Wuhan for Paris at 11:26 am on January 23. And 26 out of 31 of the flights listed after January 23 are in red color.

So I did a search on a Chinese language application called Umetrip, provided by the website for the Civil Aviation Administration of China. I checked all the flights listed on the spreadsheet Professor Ferguson sent me. It turns out that none of the flights that supposedly left from Wuhan after 11:26 am on January 23 actually left from Wuhan. The flights listed as red on Ferguson’s spreadsheet were canceled. And some listed as black that left from Guangzhou and in normal times would do a stopover in Wuhan on the way to San Francisco had the stopover cancelled. The app shows the actual flight paths of those flights as direct from Guangzhou to the US city.

In short, the “available records” provided by Professor Ferguson do not show that “regular direct flights from Wuhan continued to run to London, Paris, Rome, New York and San Francisco throughout January and in some cases into February.” The records show that flights out of Wuhan to the rest of the world stopped around mid-day on January 23, the same day China stopped flights from Wuhan to the rest of China.

In subsequent communication, however, Professor Ferguson added a new point not mentioned in his original article. He claimed that flights from Wuhan landed at Moscow on January 26, 29, 31, February 2, and February 5.

In fact, there is no such evidence.

I checked those flights to Moscow again and it’s the same situation as the other flights listed in black after January 23: The five flights that were supposed to leave from Wuhan to Moscow actually left from Guangzhou. I also found out that distance flied by those five flights to Moscow was 7,010 kilometers respectively. But the flight from Wuhan to Moscow on January 19 covered 6,429 kilometers. So it’s quite clear those flights left from Guangzhou to Moscow, not from Wuhan.

Ferguson continues to support his allegation even after I pointed out that the evidence he provided does not support it. That’s worrisome. Conspiracy theorizing of this sort deflects attention from what actually went wrong. And it fuels the demonization of the Chinese political system at the same time we need collaboration between China and the rest of the world to deal with an urgent global pandemic.

Image

https://stalinsmoustache.org/2020/04/25 ... -covid-19/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue May 05, 2020 11:14 am

As Death Toll Increases Blame China Campaign Intensifies
The Trump administration will continue its efforts to blame China for the novel Coronavirus because the epidemic situation in U.S. will soon become worse:

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.
The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

Image

Image

There continues to be some infighting between the Trump administration and the intelligence services about blaming China. The administration wanted the U.S. intelligence services to claim that the virus was probably manmade or escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. The intelligence services disagree with the administration on both points.

The administration then penned a paper from open sources that contains those and other allegations and pushed it to friendly media.

Wuhan lab 'most likely' coronavirus source, U.S. government analysis finds - Washington Times, Apr 28

A Wuhan laboratory is the “most likely” source of the COVID-19 outbreak now ravaging the globe, according to a U.S. government analysis that catalogs the evidence and concludes that other explanations for the origin of the coronavirus are less credible.
The document, compiled from open sources and not a finished product, says there is no smoking gun to blame the virus on either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, both located in the city where the first outbreaks were reported.

But “there is circumstantial evidence to suggest such may be the case,” the paper says.

“All other possible places of the virus’ origin have been proven to be highly unlikely,” the document concludes. A copy of the report, compiled this month, was obtained by The Washington Times.

A 'U.S. government analysis' based on open sources is not an intelligence product but a writeup on Google searches by some intern. But there was pressure to make it into an official intelligence judgment.

Trump Officials Are Said to Press Spies to Link Virus and Wuhan Labs- NY Times, Apr 30

Senior Trump administration officials have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak, according to current and former American officials.
...
Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS.
That this leaked at all was the first sign that the intelligence services were resisting the push from their higher ups. More push back followed with an official statement.

Intelligence Community Statement on Origins of COVID-19 - ODNI, Apr 30

“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to U.S. policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China. The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.
“As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to U.S. national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

That was not good enough for the "We lied, we stole, we cheated" Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (vid).

ABCNews 'This Week' Transcript 5-3-20

RADDATZ: And, Mr. Secretary, have you seen anything that gives you high confidence that it originated in that Wuhan lab?
POMPEO: Martha, there's enormous evidence that that's where this began. ... I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.

RADDATZ: Do you believe it was manmade or genetically modified?

POMPEO: Look, the best experts so far seem to think it was manmade. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.

RADDATZ: Your -- your Office of the DNI says the consensus, the scientific consensus was not manmade or genetically modified.

POMPEO: That's right. I -- I -- I agree with that. Yes. I've -- I've seen their analysis. I've seen the summary that you saw that was released publicly. I have no reason to doubt that that is accurate at this point.

Then the same dodgy paper that was shopped to the Washington Times a week earlier appeared in an Australian broadsheet.

Coronavirus NSW: Dossier lays out case against China bat virus program - Daily Telegraph, May 4

China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an “assault on international transparency’’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion.
The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence of it in laboratories and refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.

A "research document" prepared by "concerned Western governments" is not an intelligence product.

But Foxnews picked up from there and made the paper into one.

Leaked Western intel dossier reveals how China deceived the world about coronavirus - Foxnews, Apr 4

A research dossier compiled by the so-called "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance states that China intentionally hid or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak, leading to the loss of tens of thousands of lives around the world
The 15-page document from the intelligence agencies of the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, was obtained by Australia's Saturday Telegraph newspaper and states that China's secrecy amounted to an “assault on international transparency."

The Australian Telegraph never claimed that the dossier was a "Five Eyes" product. That is a Foxnews invention. The five eyes countries share intelligence but they do not produce common dossiers or analyses. Each service does that separately for its own government.

Only a few hours after the Telegraph had published the above the Australian intelligence services shot the nonsense down.

Australian intelligence knocks back US government's Wuhan lab virus claim, Sydney Morning Herald, May 4

Senior members of the Australian intelligence community told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age a research document shared in political circles under the Five Eyes intelligence arrangement was mostly based on news reports and contained no material from intelligence gathering.
A 15-page "dossier" has been widely quoted by local and international media about China's alleged cover-up of the virus. Australian intelligence officials have since identified a research report which was based entirely on open source material. The officials said it was likely the reports were the same.
...
Multiple senior intelligence sources who spoke to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in recent days have confirmed that Australia has still not been provided with any evidence that strongly suggests the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the outbreak. Intelligence agencies have not been able to rule out the Wuhan lab, but the more likely cause of the virus is still the city's Huanan Seafood Market where environmental samples of the virus were found.

The WHO also said that its had received no evidence from the U.S. about the 'speculative' Wuhan laboratory claim.

The Trump administration is likely to continue this game and the intelligence services will hopefully continue to resist the pressure they are under.

As the U.S. will soon have as many death per day from covid-19 as it had casualties on 9/11 the risk of a (military?) escalation against China based on false claims will soon become exceptionally high.

Posted by b on May 4, 2020 at 18:20 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/05/a ... .html#more

I do not think the Pentagon will be dragged into a war they don't think they can win handily just so Trump can get re-elected. Hell, they cannot even deal with Venezuela. On the macro scale the US military is to a large degree just as Mao said, a paper tiger. 'Cept of course for the WMDs...China's special problem.

I'm sure the spooks would like to trash China as part of the on-going campaign but given the intense international interest they are being forced to play it relatively straight. Not that they won't jump at an opportunity. When not even the greasy Aussies won't have your back then you are on very shakey ground.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue May 12, 2020 1:19 pm

Facebook on May 9 deleted posts with the Banner of Victory over the Reichstag
05/10/2020

Brave, new world

On May 9, Russian users of the Facebook social network noted that the internal censorship system removed publications to which the famous photograph “The Banner of Victory over the Reichstag” was attached.


Image
Victory Banner over the Reichstag

The social network reported to the victims : “Your publication violates our community standards regarding dangerous people and organizations. Your post is hidden from others. These standards are designed to prevent harm to anyone in the real world. ”

By the end of the day, TASS reported that Facebook was deleting photos due to incorrect algorithm performance. This, according to the publication, the official representative of the company.

“This content was deleted in error by our automated violation detection tools and is now restored. We apologize to the users for any inconvenience caused in this regard, ”the company’s response read .

A kind of congratulation of the social network on the 75th anniversary of the Victory, of course, can really be attributed to the incorrect operation of the algorithms - it’s good, users also reported that the mostly color version of the photo is being deleted, the original social network does not touch. However, the very fact of such behavior on such a significant date and its absolute inability to influence this suggests that the beautiful world of Aldous Huxley is actually much closer than we sometimes think, and no one knows if the image of a Soviet soldier as a representative will be banned in a decade "Dangerous people or organizations."

https://www.rotfront.su/facebook-na-9-m ... enem-pobe/

Google Translator

These swine have absolutely no honor. One should not be surprise and one should act accordingly. No quarter given.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu May 14, 2020 11:40 am

How The Trump Administration Inserts 'Blame China' Propaganda Into Main Stream Media
Throughout the last month there have been a number of reports with headlines like:

China Lab In Focus Of Coronavirus Outbreak
US officials sounded alarm about Wuhan lab years before coronavirus outbreak
US officials were reportedly concerned that safety breaches at a Wuhan lab studying coronaviruses in bats could cause a pandemic
All the above and many more hark back to a Washington Post opinion piece by Josh Rogin published on April 14 and headlined:

State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses.

Josh Rogin is a neo-conservative hack who carries water for the Trump administration. That administration has launched a 'blame China' campaign to distract from its failure to contain the epidemic outbreak in the United States. To that purpose they handed Rogin an old diplomatic cable and told him how to 'interpret' it. Rogin dutifully does as he is told.

He begins:

Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.
That sets the frame for describing the one cable that was given to Rogin. But when one extracts the facts from his reporting while eliminating the propaganda this picture arises:

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has a level 4 bio-security laboratory.
The institute is known for research on coronaviruses that occur in bats from south China.
Some of the research was done in collaboration with two U.S. universities and financed by the U.S. government.
The laboratory had asked to receive additional U.S. support for further studies.
The January 2018 the U.S. embassy in China sends two diplomats to visit the laboratory. Neither of them is an expert for laboratory safety or virology.
The diplomats are told that research on bat derived coronaviruses is important as such viruses, like SARS, can threaten humans.
They are told by the Chinese researchers that more work could be done if the laboratory had more trained technicians.
The diplomats travel back to their embassy. They write a cable using the researchers' arguments to recommend that additional U.S. support should be granted to the laboratory.
No additional funds are granted.
When described as above the story is one that occurs in publicly financed research institutions day in and out. Everyone research institution is always looking for new grants. It communicates with possible grant givers and empathizes the necessity of its research and the need for further support.

But Rogin constructs a rather wild picture from those facts:

What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.
“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists.

A real warning about safety issues at the lab would certainly be classified. What Rogin describes as "warning about safety" is a warning of a new SARS like pandemic. The "management weakness" is the desire to get the U.S. to finance more personnel at the laboratory. Rogin admits as much in his next paragraph:

The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.
Rogin then introduces an additional scare factor by lamenting about 'gain of function' research on viruses. Such research attempts to manipulated viruses to give them additional features. He is trying to associate the Wuhan lab with such type of research:

As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.
...
The research was designed to prevent the next SARS-like pandemic by anticipating how it might emerge. But even in 2015, other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks. In October 2014, the U.S. government had imposed a moratorium on funding of any research that makes a virus more deadly or contagious, known as “gain-of-function” experiments.
The link Rogin provides goes to a Nature piece on a debate about a certain 'gain of function' research. The research in question was experiments at University of North Carolina, not in Wuhan. The paper describing that research, A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence, was written by Professor Ralph S. Baric who had also designed the experiment. The paper lists a total of fifteen collaborators. One of the listed authors is indeed Zhengli-Li Shi who leads the laboratory in Wuhan.

But neither Zhengli-Li Shi, nor her laboratory, were actually involved in any of the experiments. At the and of the research paper the contributions of each co-author are listed. About Zhengli-Li Shi it says:

Z.-L.S. provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids.
The Wuhan laboratory only provided specific gene sequences from its pool of bat viruses, the laboratory's and Zhengi-Li Shi's specialty, that the researchers in North Caroline wanted to use in their experiment.

To construe that furnisher function as involvement in 'gain of function' experiments is a unjustified exaggeration. I have found no evidence that the Wuhan lab itself ever engaged in such research.

Rogin concludes his scare piece by handing the microphone to the demagogue in the White House that is his source:

Inside the Trump administration, many national security officials have long suspected either the WIV or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab was the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak. According to the New York Times, the intelligence community has provided no evidence to confirm this. But one senior administration official told me that the cables provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.
“The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial. Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points and there’s almost nothing on the other side,” the official said.

Manipulated interpretations of diplomatic cables and evidence-free claims about allegedly existing evidence were also used in warmongering campaigns about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and chemical attacks in Syria. The neo-conservatives are now using the same old tricks against China.

The media echo shows that they have some success with this.

Posted by b on May 13, 2020 at 17:21 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/05/h ... .html#more
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat May 16, 2020 4:11 pm

US falsifications and manipulations, from the Gulf of Tonkin to today

by Giuseppe Sini

Image

As in the USA procedural drama, the viewer's sympathy is skillfully oriented towards detectives and prosecutors committed to identifying the evidence of the crime, evidence that will then be exhibited in the courtroom with the guilty party behind him and despite his attempts to scrub the system, in the reality of international relations US imperialism and its lackeys in the media are now, more and more clumsily, trying to direct public opinion in their favor, boasting evidence against the target of duty constantly painted as committed to evading its responsibilities.

So Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a few days ago, spoke of the existence of a "significant amount of evidence" [1] according to which COVID-19 would emerge from the Wuhan laboratory; immediately public opinion was divided, like those present at a classroom debate, between those who consider the words of the former CIA director very little credible and those, mainly the variegated (but increasingly more right-handed and pro-Atlantic) sovereign galaxy, who immediately raised them as yet another nail on the coffin of the alleged Chinese bad faith.

Now, just as the reality of the US judicial system is very different from that of the serial , the same is true of international relations compared to an ideal global classroom where subjects subject to a law equal to all would compare, perhaps with international bodies in the role of impartial judges. The request made to Pompeo to produce the evidence of which it exists, if not because of the unequal distribution of power (economic, military and media) of the parties involved, at least based on the long history, is therefore completely cloying. even recently, of forgery and manipulation by the United States.

PROVOCATIONS, ACTUAL AGGRESSIONS ... AND FLYING FISH

The so-called "Gulf of Tonkin Accident" in the vast majority of reports from the US side is today treated with tones between the embarrassed and the ambiguous, playing on the fact that it was two episodes that occurred after two days, or better a real clash between US and North American boats, that of August 2, 1964, and one that never occurred, as admitted a few years ago by the then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara [2] , or that of August 4 of the same year. The whole affair, and in particular the events of August 4, 1964, provided the pretext for a further extension of the US imperialist aggression to Vietnam, sanctioned by the approval by Congress of a resolution that in its preamble, with the usual face tough yankee, proclaimed the will to "promote the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia".

As already mentioned, the episode of August 2 actually took place: three North Vietnamese lookouts attacked the destroyer Maddox, who operated in the context of the patrol missions DE SOTO; all in the context of the OPLAN 34-A, a program of secret actions that included sabotages and attacks on or related infrastructure in Hanoi, both in North Vietnamese and Laotian territory and waters; actions conducted both by South Vietnamese commandos and by American pilots. Therefore, even this North Vietnamese attack, or rather reaction, was anything but "deliberate and unjustified", to quote McNamara's mystifying statements, having taken place within the framework of repeated provocations and attacks by the US [3] .

The one of August 4, however, did not happen, although the manipulation of the confused reports about an alleged second attack was decisive in getting the aforementioned resolution approved, compacting a public opinion already widely aligned with the administration and weakening the small resistance to inside the Congress. On what happened on August 4, 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, it is sufficient to quote Lyndon Johnson's comment, demonstrating that the administration was perfectly aware that there had been no attack on the North Vietnamese side that day: "To hell with these damned stupid Marians were shooting flying fish. " [4]

WAR BALES INCUBATORS

Probably the fifteen-year-old Nayirah, appearing to testify in October 1990 in front of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus , bipartisan group of the House of Representatives, was not aware that her words would have incubated a classic of propaganda of US imperialist aggressions over the years subsequent, that of the alleged atrocities carried out by the forces of the enemy on duty against the hospitals, with or without the detail of the incubators. The girl - actually Nayirah Al-Sabah, daughter of the then Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasir Al-Sabah [5]- declared that he had witnessed the raid of Iraqi soldiers in the hospital, where he claimed to be voluntary, and that they had extracted the babies from the incubators leaving them to die on the floor [6] .

The dramatic "testimony" was filmed by a public relations agency and widely re-launched on TV [7] ; Amnesty International, always zealous in regurgitating imperialist propaganda, helped to validate it, only to whimper about the Bush administration's "opportunistic manipulation of the international movement of human rights" [8] . Few politicians and especially journalists expressed the slightest perplexity about a shaky story from the start; just to understand each other, the New York Times took about two years to document the forgery, "discovering" the real identity of the witness, an identity well known to some members of the congress as early as 1990 [9]. As evidence of how the bales of imperialist propaganda often have long legs, the story, in 2002, was revived by a docudrama of the HBO network without any mention of his fraudulent [10] .

Just as the Gulf of Tonkin incident was certainly not the cause of the US military escalation in Vietnam, the incubator hoax did not determine the Gulf War, however both events played a non-secondary role in selling the two conflicts to opinion public and albeit marginal politicians still skeptical. The fandonia of 1990 then, further confirming its effectiveness and longevity, made its reappearance during the imperialist aggression against Syria, as well as Venezuela, albeit with some variations on the theme [11] .

TESTS AND TEST TUBES

Of the dramatic weeks preceding the US aggression on Iraq, a grotesque image has remained in the memory of many: Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, who shakes a test tube containing no one knows what, during his harangue to the Security Council of the UN on February 5, 2003. Because it was a harangue, in the style of those seen in the TV series we mentioned at the beginning, with the accusation that it shows photos, in this case the usual satellite photos that the USA pull out as needed, and do not prove anything but so impressed the journalists, illustrated reconstructions, drawings laughable alleged factories of biological agents, etc .

We said a grotesque performance, which however obtained the desired effect: to cite just one example, the report of the Corriere della Sera the following day titled, "Colin Powell presents the evidence to the UN", and in the "analyzes" signed by Guido Olimpio, "the tests that convince", weakly balanced by a "the tests that do not convince" [12] ; faintly for the simple fact that there was no evidence, or rather, there was solid evidence that Iraq did not hold any weapon of mass destruction, chemical, biological or otherwise. Simply, the war had already been decided, whether the UN inspectors provided the pretext, or that, as in fact it did, they did not lend themselves to the machinations of Bush son and his comrade Blair [13] .

When the story is recalled by the media, they often resort to ambiguous formulations of the type, "weapons of mass destruction never found", omitting that there was nothing to find; an understandable fact given that the press and TV were not infrequently willing accomplices of that large-scale mystification. To limit ourselves to Italy, the Panorama magazine, at the time directed by Carlo Rossella, in league with SISMI contributed to inflating the fake uranium from Niger purchased from Iraq [14] , as documented by Repubblica in 2005, when the newspaper founded by Scalfari retained a semblance of dignity.

REPUBLIC OF THE BALES

Returning to Pompeo's "tests" today, and starting right from the Republic, it is a noteworthy fact that this once black beast of our local sovereigns has been conducting a symphobic campaign for weeks with tones and modalities that would make it blush shameful Beitbart News and Libero. The moment the CNN publishes an article which, albeit circumspectly, highlights all the inconsistency of the Secretary of State's statements on the origin of COVID-19, the Roman newspaper comes up with an article, constructed in a manner to say the least unscrupulous, in support of the thesis of the virus escaped from Wuhan's laboratory [15]. A few days earlier, on the same pages, Federico Rampini gave credit to the bids of US intelligence and, according to him, of "several allied countries from Australia to France", passing in silence the heavy doubts advanced by Australian intelligence (and widely reported by the country press) on what was trumpeted by US colleagues and by Pompeo [16] .

This pro-Trumpian fold of Repubblica is not surprising, taking into account Maurizio Molinari's recent rise to his direction, although the Atlantic loyalty of this sheet has always been out of the question. However, his taking over by a more paranoid Westernist exponent, convinced that "Putin's Russia and Xi's China want to transform Europe into a land of conquests", is indicative of the increasingly evident convergence between sovereigns and free them. Some, in the sewers of the internet, now do not hesitate to invoke the liberating invasion by Trump (as if the peninsula was not already a huge US military base), the others evoke their traditional bogeymen with ramshackle appeals: authoritarianism and statism, all summarized in the feared "Chinese model" [17] .

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN22F0SC .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HODxnUrFX6k .
Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, Mondadori, 2017, pp. 141-148.
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/l ... -fish.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/06/opin ... uwait.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmfVs3WaE9Y
https://web.archive.org/web/20080420060 ... /5/war.asp
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n03 ... ight-stuff ; https://newspapers.bc.edu/cgi-bin/bosto ... 10128.2.41
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/06/opin ... uwait.html ; https://web.archive.org/web/20110429012 ... n1228.html
https://www.prwatch.org/spin/2002/12/16 ... ah-pr-hoax
https://contropiano.org/interventi/2011 ... tico-04970 ; https://contropiano.org/news/internazio ... ica-083965
https://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Est ... well.shtml
Statement by Sir John Chilcot: 6 July 2016, p. 3, https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov ... he-report/
https://www.repubblica.it/2005/j/sezion ... /bodv.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/06/poli ... index.html utm_term = link & utm_medium = social & utm_content = 2020-05-06T17% 3A40% 3A00 & utm_source = twCNN ; "That virus most likely came out of Wuhan's lab"
Coronavirus, wiretapping and missing witnesses: thus was born the US investigation accusing China ; https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal ... 54pk3.html ; https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal ... 54qhp.html
https://www.repubblica.it/robinson/2020 ... 255505570/

https://ottobre.info/2020/05/13/falsifi ... o-ad-oggi/

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu May 21, 2020 1:24 pm

Image

US Military Planners Advise Expanded Online Psychological Warfare Against China
May 18, 2020 Alan MacLeod anti-china campaign, blame the other to distract, China, smear campaign, US decline, Xi Jinping
Just three years ago, Americans had a neutral view of China (and nine years ago it was strongly favorable). Today, the same polls show that 66 percent of Americans dislike the country.

By Alan Macleod – May 18, 2020

As the U.S. military turns its attention from the Middle East to conflict with Russia and China, American war planners are advising that the United States greatly expand its own online “psychological operations” against Beijing.

A new report from the Financial Times details how top brass in Washington are strategizing a new Cold War with China, describing it less as World War III and more as “kicking each other under the table.” Last week, General Richard Clarke, head of Special Operations Command, said that the “kill-capture missions” the military conducted in Afghanistan were inappropriate for this new conflict, and Special Operations must move towards cyber influence campaigns instead.

Military analyst David Maxwell, a former Special Ops soldier himself, advocated for a widespread culture war, which would include the Pentagon commissioning what he called “Taiwanese Tom Clancy” novels, intended to demonize China and demoralize its citizens, arguing that Washington should “weaponize” China’s one-child policy by bombarding Chinese people with stories of the wartime deaths of their only children, and therefore, their bloodline.

A not dissimilar tactic was used during the first Cold War against the Soviet Union, where the CIA sponsored a huge network of artists, writers and thinkers to promote liberal and social-democratic critiques of the U.S.S.R., unbeknownst to the public, and, sometimes, even the artists themselves.

Manufacturing consent
In the space of only a few months, the Trump administration has gone from praising China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic to blaming them for the outbreak, even suggesting they pay reparations for their alleged negligence. Just three years ago, Americans had a neutral view of China (and nine years ago it was strongly favorable). Today, the same polls show that 66 percent of Americans dislike China, with only 26 percent holding a positive opinion of the country. Over four-in-five people essentially support a full-scale economic war with Beijing, something the president threatened to enact last week.

The corporate press is certainly doing their part as well, constantly framing China as an authoritarian threat to the United States, rather than a neutral force or even a potential ally, leading to a surge in anti-Chinese racist attacks at home.



Retooling for an intercontinental war
Although analysts have long warned that the United States gets its “ass handed to it” in hot war simulations with China or even Russia, it is not clear whether this is a sober assessment or a self-serving attempt to increase military spending. In 2002, the U.S. conducted a war game trial invasion of Iraq, where it was catastrophically defeated by Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, commanding Iraqi forces, leading to the whole experiment being nixed halfway through. Yet the subsequent invasion was carried out without massive loss of American lives.

The recently published Pentagon budget request for 2021 makes clear that the United States is retooling for a potential intercontinental war with China and/or Russia. It asks for $705 billion to “shift focus from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a greater emphasis on the types of weapons that could be used to confront nuclear giants like Russia and China,” noting that it requires “more advanced high-end weapon systems, which provide increased standoff, enhanced lethality and autonomous targeting for employment against near-peer threats in a more contested environment.” The military has recently received the first batch of low-yield nuclear warheads that experts agree blurs the line between conventional and nuclear conflict, making an all out example of the latter far more likely.



A bipartisan affair
There has been no meaningful pushback from the Democrats. Indeed, Joe Biden’s team has suggested that the United States’ entire industrial policy should revolve around “competing with China” and that their “top priority” is dealing with the supposed threat Beijing poses. The former vice-president has also attacked Trump from the right on China, trying to present him as a tool of Beijing, bringing to mind how Clinton portrayed him in 2016 as a Kremlin asset. (Green Party presidential frontrunner Howie Hawkins has promised to cut the military budget by 75 percent and to unilaterally disarm).

Nevertheless, voices raising concern about a new arms race are few and far between. Veteran deproliferation activist Andrew Feinstein is one exception, saying:

“Our governments spend over 1.75 trillion dollars every year on wars, on weapons, on conflict…If we could deploy that sort of resource to address the coronavirus crisis that we’re currently living through, imagine what else we could be doing. Imagine how we could be fighting the climate crisis, how we could be addressing global poverty, inequality. Our priority should never be war; our priorities need to be public health, the environment, and human well being.”

However, if the government is going to launch a new psychological war against China, it is unlikely antiwar voices like Feinstein’s will feature much in the mainstream press.



Featured image: Pictures of U.S. national flag and Chinese President Xi Jinping with mask, made by protestors are displayed in central district of Hong Kong’s business district, Oct. 14, 2019. Kin Cheung | AP

Source URL: MintPress

https://orinocotribune.com/us-military- ... nst-china/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:19 pm

Image

FBI Launches Open Attack on “Foreign” Alternative Media Outlets Challenging US Foreign Policy

June 8, 2020 orinocotribune AHT, American Herald Tribune, Anthony Hall, censorship, Davir K. Porter, democracy, FBI, FireEye, FITF, free press, Freedom of press, intimidation, Philip Giraldi, US Imperialism
Under FBI orders, Facebook and Google removed American Herald Tribune, an alternative site that publishes US and European writers critical of US foreign policy. The bureau’s justification for the removal was dubious, and it sets a troubling precedent for other critical outlets.

By Gareth Porter

The FBI has publicly justified its suppression of dissenting online views about US foreign policy if a media outlet can be somehow linked to one of its adversaries. The Bureau’s justification followed a series of instances in which Silicon Valley social media platforms banned accounts following consultations with the FBI.



In a particularly notable case in 2018, the FBI encouraged Facebook, Instagram and Google to remove or restrict ads on the American Herald Tribune (AHT), an online journal that published critical opinion articles on US policy toward Iran and the Middle East. The bureau has never offered a clear rationale, however, despite its private discussions with Facebook on the ban.

The FBI’s first step toward intervening against dissenting views on social media took place in October 2017 with the creation of a Foreign Influence Task Force (FTIF) in the bureau’s Counterintelligence Division. Next, the FBI defined any effort by states designated by the Department of Defense as major adversaries (Russia, China, Iran and North Korea) to influence American public opinion as a threat to US national security.

In February 2020, the FBI defined that threat in much more specific terms and implied that it would act against any online media outlet that was found to fall within its ambit. At a conference on election security on February 24, David K. Porter, who identified himself as Assistant Section Chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force, defined what the FBI described as “malign foreign influence activity” as “actions by a foreign power to influence U.S. policy, distort political sentiment and public discourse.”

Porter described “information confrontation” as a force “designed to undermine public confidence in the credibility of free and independent news media.” Those who practice this dark craft, he said, seek to “push consumers to alternative news sources,” where “it’s much easier to introduce false narratives” and thus “sow doubt and confusion about the true narratives by exploiting the media landscape to introduce conflicting story lines.”

“Information confrontation”, however, is simply the literal Russian translation of the term “information warfare.” Its use by the FTIF appears to be aimed merely at justifying an FBI role in seeking to suppress what it calls “alternative news sources” under any set of circumstances it can justify.



While expressing his intention to target alternative media, Porter simultaneously denied that the FBI was concerned about censoring media. The FITF, he said “doesn’t go around chasing content. We don’t focus on what the actors say.” Instead, he insisted that “attribution is key,” suggesting that the FTIF was only interested in finding hidden foreign government actors at work.

Thus the question of “attribution” has become the FBI’s key lever for censoring alternative media that publishes critical content on U.S. foreign policy, or which attacks mainstream and corporate media narratives. If an outlet can be somehow linked to a foreign adversary, removing it from online platforms is fair game for the feds.

The strange disappearance of American Herald Tribune
In 2018, Facebook deleted the Facebook page of the American Herald Tribune (AHT), a website that publishes commentary from an array of notable authors who are harshly critical of U.S. foreign policy. Gmail, which is run by Google, quickly followed suit by removing ads linked to the outlet, while the Facebook-owned Instagram scrubbed AHT’s account altogether.



Tribune editor Anthony Hall reported at the time that the removals occurred at the end of August 2018, but there was no announcement of the move by Facebook. Nor was it reported by the corporate news media until January 2020, when CNN elicited a confirmation from a Facebook spokesman that it had indeed done so in 2018. Furthermore, the FBI was advising Facebook on both Iranian and Russian sites that were banned during that same period of a few days. As Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos noted on July 21, 2018, “We have proactively reported our technical findings to US law enforcement, because they have much more information than we do, and may in time be in a position to provide public attribution.”

On August 2, a few days following the removal of AHT and two weeks after hundreds of Russian and Iranian Pages had been removed by Facebook, FBI Director Christopher Wray told reporters at a White House briefing that FBI officials had “met with top social media and technology companies several times” during the year, “providing actionable intelligence to better enable them to address abuse of their platforms by foreign actors.” He remarked that FBI officials had “shared specific threat indicators and account information so they can better monitor their own platforms.”

Cybersecurity firm FireEye, which boasts that it has contracts to support “nearly every department in the United States government,” and which has been used by Department of Homeland Security as a primary source of “threat intelligence,” also influenced Facebook’s crackdown on the Tribune. CNN cited an unnamed official of FireEye stating that the company had “assessed” with “moderate confidence” that the AHT’s website was founded in Iran and was “part of a larger influence operation.”

The CNN author was evidently unaware that in U.S. intelligence parlance “moderate confidence” suggests a near-total absence of genuine conviction. As the 2011 official “consumer’s guide” to US intelligence explained, the term “moderate confidence” generally indicates that either there are still differences of view in the intelligence community on the issue or that the judgment ”is credible and plausible but not sufficiently corroborated to warrant higher level of confidence.”

CNN also quoted FireEye official Lee Foster’s claim that “indicators, both technical and behavioral” showed that American Herald Tribune was part of the larger influence operation. The CNN story linked to a study published by FireEye featuring a “map” showing how Iranian-related media were allegedly linked to one another, primarily by similarities in content. But CNN apparently hadn’t bothered to read the study, which did not once mention the American Herald Tribune.

Finally, the CNN piece cited a 2018 tweet by Daily Beast contributor Josh Russell which it said provided “further evidence supporting American Herald Tribune’s alleged links to Iran.” In fact, his tweet merely documented the AHT’s sharing of an internet hosting service with another pro-Iran site “at some point in time.” Investigators familiar with the problem know that two websites using the same hosting service, especially over a period of years, is not a reliable indicator of a coherent organizational connection.

CNN did find evidence of deception over the registration of the AHT. The outlet’s editor, Anthony Hall, continues to give the false impression that a large number of journalists and others (including this writer), are contributors, despite the fact that their articles have been republished from other sources without permission.

However, AHT has one characteristic that differentiates it from the others that have been kicked off Facebook: The American and European authors who have appeared in its pages are all real and are advancing their own authentic views. Some are sympathetic to the Islamic Republic, but others are simply angry about U.S. policies: Some are Libertarian anti-interventionists; others are supporters of the 9/11 Truth movement or other conspiracy theories.

One notable independent contributor to AHT is Philip Giraldi, an 18-year veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service and and an articulate critic of US wars in the Middle East and of Israeli influence on American policy and politics. From its inception in 2015, the AHT has been edited by Anthony Hall, Professor Emeritus at University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada.

In announcing yet another takedown of Iranian Pages in October 2018, Facebook’s Gleicher declared that “coordinated inauthentic behavior” occurs when “people or organizations create networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are what they’re doing.” That certainly doesn’t apply to those who provided the content for the American Herald Tribune.

Thus the takedown of the publication by Facebook, with FBI and FireEye encouragement represents a disturbing precedent for future actions against individuals who criticize US foreign policy and outlets that attack corporate media narratives.

Shelby Pierson, the CIA official appointed by then director of national intelligence in July 2019 to chair the inter-agency “Election Executive and Leadership Board,” appeared to hint at differences in the criteria employed by his agency and the FBI on foreign and alternative media.

In an interview with former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell in February, Pierson said, “[P]articularly on the [foreign] influence side of the house, when you’re talking about blended content with First Amendment-protected speech…against the backdrop of a political paradigm and you’re involving yourself in those activities, I think that makes it more complicated” (emphasis added).

Further emphasizing the uncertainty surrounding the FBI’s methods of online media suppression, she added that the position in question “doesn’t have the same unanimity that we have in the counterterrorism context.”

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

Source URL: The GrayZone

https://orinocotribune.com/fbi-launches ... gn-policy/

It is laudatory to treat sources like Mint Press & Grey Zone with suspicion. But on issues of 'speech' & the press they do some good work. Watch 'em like a hawk...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 13, 2020 4:27 pm

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
June 13, 2020 Ben Norton AlterNet, Bellingcat, BobfromBrockley, censorship, corporate censorship, MaoGo, MintPress, Naftali Bennett, Phillip Cross, ReyHahn, Rosguill, Snooganssnoogans, Telesur, The Grayzone, Venezuelanalysis, Wikipedia, Zfigueroa, ZiaLater
On Wikipedia, a small group of regime-change advocates and right-wing Venezuelan opposition supporters have blacklisted independent media outlets like The Grayzone on explicitly political grounds, violating the encyclopedia’s guidelines.

By Ben Norton – Jun 11, 2020 (The Grayzone)

Internet encyclopedia giant Wikipedia is censoring independent news websites by adding them to an official blacklist of taboo “deprecated” media outlets.



The Grayzone is among the news websites targeted by the censorship campaign. Others include leftist and anti-imperialist outlets like MintPress News and the Latin American news broadcaster Telesur, along with several prominent right-wing political sites, including the Daily Caller.

The campaign to blacklist The Grayzone was initiated by Wikipedia editors who identify as Venezuelans and openly support the country’s right-wing, US-backed opposition. These users obsessively monitor Venezuela-related articles, aggressively pushing a regime-change line and working to excise any piece of information or opinion that interferes with their agenda.

This online cabal of Venezuelan opposition supporters has been joined by an assortment of neoconservatives who spend countless hours per day, every day of the week, inundating Wikipedia articles with talking points defending Western intervention and demonizing NATO’s Official Enemies.

Together, this tiny handful of editors has successfully banned Wikipedia from citing The Grayzone, falsely claiming that the website publishes unreliable, false, or fabricated information. In fact, in its more than four years of existence, including its first two years hosted at the website AlterNet (whose use is not forbidden on Wikipedia), The Grayzone has never had to issue a major correction or retract a story.

Even more absurdly, the editors behind the campaign to blacklist The Grayzone made it clear in their public discussions that they were motivated to censor The Grayzone’s reporting based on the political perspective of its writers – not on the basis of any falsehoods or distortions that appeared on its website.

The Wikipedia editor who presided over the official “survey” to censor The Grayzone is a hyper-partisan supporter of the Venezuelan opposition. This figure also initiated and moderated the surveys to successfully blacklist TeleSUR and Venezuelanalysis, among the few news sources that challenge the hegemonic anti-Chavista perspective furthered by Western mainstream media.



Wikipedia has imposed numerous “guidelines” against this kind of advocacy editing, which blatantly violates the platform’s founding principle mandating a “neutral point of view.”

But the website, and the Wikimedia Foundation that runs it, has taken no action against the gang of politically motivated editors that targeted The Grayzone. Instead, it has given them free rein to flagrantly sabotage the encyclopedia’s ostensible commitment to neutrality, and shield the public from critical reporting that conflicts with Washington’s agenda.

The cast of editors seeking to censor The Grayzone runs the gamut from Russiagate conspiracy theorists to anarcho-neocons to regime-change lobbyists to elite Venezuelan opposition members – basically anyone threatened by journalism that challenges the Washington consensus. Their ability to dominate Wikipedia is symptomatic of a much larger crisis that has fundamentally corrupted the website and torn its stated principles to shreds.



The internet encyclopedia has become a deeply undemocratic platform, dominated by Western state-backed actors and corporate public relations flacks, easily manipulated by powerful forces. And it is run by figures who often represent these same elite interests, or align with their regime-change politics.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Only around 3,000 editors are very active on English-language Wikipedia


Wikipedia is dominated by state-sponsored propaganda and corporate PR
Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites on Earth, with more traffic than the mega-corporation Amazon. It is far and away the top source of information for people all across the planet. (Wikipedia publishes in several different languages. This article focuses on the English-language version of Wikipedia, which is by far the largest.)

Yet while the website markets itself as an open-source encyclopedia that anyone in the world can edit, the reality is the platform is tightly controlled by a small group of administrators and editors – and heavily dominated by powerful institutions that have the resources to mobilize users to advance their interests.

An academic study found that, from 2001 to 2010, a staggering 80 percent of edits on Wikipedia were made by just 1 percent of users.

In fact, statistics provided by Wikipedia shows that just over 3,000 editors are “very active” on the website, meaning they contribute more than 100 edits per month.

In other words, a tiny handful of editors have disproportionate control of what people across the world read when they research something online.

And retention rates for new editors have plummeted over the years.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
A graph showing very low rates of editor retention rates on Wikipedia from 2004 to 2009
So Wikipedia is anything but the democratic and decentralized marketplace of ideas and information it advertises itself as.

Even more troubling is the fact that governments, intelligence agencies, and large corporations maintain significant influence over Wikipedia, editing the encyclopedia to push their agendas, while carefully monitoring articles and policing new edits.

The CIA, FBI, New York Police Department, Vatican, and fossil fuel colossus BP, to name just a few, have all been caught directly editing Wikipedia articles.

But the rot goes much deeper. Powerful interests, from states to companies, hire Wikipedia editors to sanitize entries about themselves. Past clients for these services have included social media giant Facebook itself, along with corporate media juggernauts like NBC and the Koch Brothers oligarchs.


Mark Ames

@MarkAmesExiled
Wikipedia is the most perfectly corrupt neoliberal encyclopedia imaginable. There are countless examples like this, but it’ll be many more years before the culture manages a u-turn. The idea that “we” are in charge of wikipedia is seared into our minds https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wikipedi ... e942967225


Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages
And it almost always works.

huffpost.com
443
10:51 AM - Mar 15, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
290 people are talking about this
Indeed, there is an entire cottage industry of willing propagandists, public relations flacks, and digital mercenaries who will eagerly manipulate the global population’s easy access to information if you pay them enough.

Similarly, far-right Israeli politician Naftali Bennett has organized training sessions to help new Wikipedia editors spread hasbara propaganda on Wikipedia. The Guardian newspaper noted that Israeli groups planned “a competition to find the ‘Best Zionist editor‘, with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel.”





Numerous other governments and state-backed institutions have been caught carefully crafting their image on Wikipedia as well.

These astroturfing efforts have been known for a long time. The New York Times published an article on “corporate editing of Wikipedia” back in 2007. And the problem has only gotten worse since.

Wikipedia is essentially a bulletin board for powerful interests. And the group that runs it, the Wikimedia Foundation, has expressed little interest in combating this corruption. In the 2007 Times report, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that, while they discouraged conflicts of interests, “We don’t make it an absolute rule”; it is just a “guideline.”

These Wikipedia guidelines do technically forbid conflict-of-interest editing, but virtually nothing is done to stop it. And Wikipedia has no substantial mechanisms to monitor and root it out.

In fact Wikipedia also simultaneously tells editors they can simply “ignore all rules,” assuring them there are “no firm rules.” This contradiction shows how the encyclopedia can have its cake and eat it too, claiming to be decentralized, democratic, and opposed to political bias and special interests, while at the same time being utterly overwhelmed by these problems.

Politically motivated editing by small groups
The fact that the vast majority of edits on Wikipedia are performed by a tiny fraction of users makes it easy for small groups with time and resources to push political bias on the website.

Wikipedia has one of the highest search engine presences on all of the internet, so whatever appears on the website is virtually impossible to hide. Wikipedia is typically the top result for a topic, often above even the homepage of a website, in a search engine like Google.

In this way, a few elite editors have a massively outsize influence on the global population, manipulating public opinion to push their political line. And few people even know they exist.

RELATED CONTENT: Trump Sanctions The Hague for Investigating US War Crimes – Venezuela Condemns the Move (Communique)


Ben Norton

@BenjaminNorton
Wikipedia is a scam. It's a propaganda vehicle for intelligence agencies, govts, corporations, and PR flacks

This extremely shady "user" Philip Cross edits all day every day, 7 am to 11 pm, posting nonstop pro-war propaganda — including almost every edit on @MaxBlumenthal's page

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter
2,787
6:34 PM - Feb 12, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,591 people are talking about this
There has been some coverage in alternative media, for instance, of the mysterious editor Philip Cross. This lone user spends hours per day, virtually every of the week, obsessively monitoring and editing articles to smear anti-war journalists and politicians.


leftworks
@leftworks1
Since @RaniaKhalek's @Wikipedia
page has been locked, Philip Cross is now turning his attention to @MaxBlumenthal. Now removing references to Mr Blumenthal's book "The Management of Savagery" on the grounds that it is "unreliable" and "much criticized".https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... ilip_Cross

View image on Twitter
173
5:05 PM - Jan 12, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
122 people are talking about this
But the problem is much larger than Philip Cross. A bigger group of pro-intervention editors who support Western regime-change operations spend huge amounts of time on Wikipedia censoring and distorting content to push their political agenda.

These editors not only manipulate and monopolize the globe’s easy access to information; they have even led campaigns to delete the Wikipedia articles of numerous left-wing journalists and media figures.

Popular YouTube host Kyle Kulinski had his page erased following a campaign by the coterie of regime change extremists. This author, Ben Norton, also had his Wikipedia article removed by this cabal.


Secular Talk

@KyleKulinski
Neoliberal trolls successfully got my Wikipedia page deleted. That's both hilarious and sad. If you're not part of the club they do everything they can to erase you, quite literally.

13K
6:37 PM - Feb 26, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,872 people are talking about this
Politicized editing technically violates the second of Wikipedia’s five pillars, which requires editors to uphold a “neutral point of view.”

“All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic,” the principle states.

Wikipedia has similarly adopted a guideline against advocacy: “the use of Wikipedia to promote personal beliefs or agendas at the expense of Wikipedia’s goals and core content policies, including verifiability and neutral point of view.”

Moreover, Wikipedia claims to take issue with what is calls “single-purpose accounts,” or users “whose editing is limited to one very narrow area or set of articles, or whose edits to many articles appear to be for a common purpose.”

But in reality, the guidelines are hollow ideals that are scarcely, if ever, enforced – particularly when leftist and anti-imperialist media figures are under attack. Indeed, Wikipedia is dominated by editors that show a clear bias, and that use edits to push their ideology and political interests.

The platform has no mechanisms to hold these editors accountable and prevent this from happening. These users are responsible for the majority of edits on entire topics, especially controversial political issues. And Wikipedia has no teeth to reinforce the guidelines.

In the very rare cases that an editor is banned, they can simply create a new account; if their IP address is blocked, they can use a new device to edit.

This system makes it easy for a few users to coordinate together to not only write and edit articles to suit their interests, but even to blacklist entire news sources that expose their misdeeds.

The campaign to censor The Grayzone and other independent media outlets is a case study of this problem, and a clear reflection of the rampant bias that contradicts one of the core pillars of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s blacklist of independent media outlets
Wikipedia maintains an official list of reliable sources. These are the news outlets that editors are allowed to cite in an article.

Prominent editors and admins, who have special privileges not afforded to average users, debate what sources are considered legitimate on the encyclopedia. There is no independent oversight of this process. And it is for the most part monopolized by a small group, which has repeatedly shown a blatant political bias.

In its list of reliable sources, Wikipedia maintains a hierarchy of classifications to measure how accurate a media outlet is. These designations have a color and a name.

Mainstream corporate media outlets are green, deemed “generally reliable.” The Associated Press (AP), Reuters, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, and The Intercept all get the green light of approval.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Examples of sources considered “generally reliable” by Wikipedia, highlighted in green
For some sources, there is not an editorial consensus on their reliability, so they fall into the yellow category. Examples of are more Gonzo-style outlets like VICE, tabloids such as Cosmopolitan and the Daily Mirror, some think tanks like the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a few left-leaning websites like Democracy Now and CounterPunch.

However most independent news websites are considered by Wikipedia to be “generally unreliable,” and are hit with the red light of rejection. AlterNet, The Canary, and Electronic Intifada, for example, are considered “partisan sources,” and Wikipedia editors can only credit them if they attribute their statements to the website in the text of the article.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Sources that Wikipedia considers “generally unreliable” (light red), and those that have no consensus (yellow)
Some right-wing websites, such as The Blaze, the Daily Wire, and Quillette have been hit by this designation as well, along with the libertarian website Zero Hedge.

But the censorship targeting The Grayzone represents an entirely different level of suppression: The Grayzone is part of a small handful of publications that have been totally blacklisted on Wikipedia. It is considered a “deprecated source,” and is listed in dark red. This is the worst possible designation on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Wikipedia is censoring The Grayzone by listing it as “deprecated,” in dark red
This censorship is the product of a politicized pressure campaign by centrist, pro-war editors, who have sought to silence The Grayzone solely because they detest its reporting and editorial line. They have proven wholly unable to provide any concrete examples of inaccuracy or fabrication.

The hyper-partisan editors who led the censorious campaign (named and detailed below in this article) justified the blacklisting by claiming, “There is consensus that The Grayzone publishes false or fabricated information. Some editors describe The Grayzone as Max Blumenthal’s blog, and question the website’s editorial oversight.”

Once again, The Grayzone has never been forced to issue a major correction or retract a false story. The smear is absurd, and there is no evidence provided to back it up.

Joining The Grayzone on the Wikipedia blacklist is MintPress News, an independent left-leaning anti-war news website also based in the United States.

This group of centrist Wikipedia editors also deprecated The Daily Caller, a right-wing website that the editors claimed publishes “false or fabricated information.”

The Daily Caller, which was founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, certainly has published questionable material and editorials that any progressive would find deeply objectionable. Yet Wikipedia strangely places it on the same level as deranged far-right websites like The Epoch Times, a propaganda network run by the Chinese cult Falun Gong; the aggregation blog Gateway Pundit; Breitbart; and the white supremacist website VDARE.

According to Wikipedia, The Grayzone, an investigative journalism website founded by an award-winning journalist, is as unreliable as these other extremist media outlets.

At the same time, Wikipedia has given the interventionist pro-NATO blog Bellingcat a green light as a credible source on par with the AP.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Wikipedia considers regime-change website Bellingcat, which is funded by the US government’s NED, a reliable source
As The Grayzone has previously reported, Bellingcat is funded by the US government’s regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout created by Ronald Reagan, and is host to a crew of regime-change advocates who work with Western government-backed organizations like the Atlantic Council.

Bellingcat’s founder and editor, video game-obsessed college dropout Eliot Higgins, has no professional journalistic experience or specialized knowledge. When the New York Times lightly criticized his lack of expertise, Higgins insisted he was qualified because “of the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.”

But this centrist gang of Wikipedia editors has designated Bellingcat a reliable source on par with the most prestigious of newspapers, while simultaneously blacklisting and censoring the investigative journalism of The Grayzone, a news website founded and edited by Max Blumenthal, who – unlike Higgins – is an award-winning journalist who has published investigative scoops in many mainstream publications and authored four acclaimed books over the course of the past two decades.

Wikipedia editors have also determined that the now-defunct neoconservative, staunchly pro-war website The Weekly Standard is a “generally reliable” source, on the same level as the AFP.

The Weekly Standard, which was run by Bill Kristol, the godfather of American neoconservatism, printed numerous lies and demonstrably false stories in the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, trying to make the case for the war on behalf of the George W. Bush administration.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Wikipedia considers neoconservative website The Weekly Standard to be a reliable source
Thus Wikipedia considers neoconservative websites that printed conspiratorial lies about non-existent “WMDs” to be reliable sources, while blacklisting The Grayzone apparently because it publishes factual reporting that undermines these regime-change deceptions.

Wikipedia’s standards also show a clear double standard for state-backed media networks. Those that are run by Western governments such as the BBC, or which are friendly to Western government interests like Qatar’s Al Jazeera, receive the green stamp of approval as “generally reliable,” considered on par with Reuters.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Wikipedia gives Qatar state-backed Al Jazeera its green stamp of “generally reliable” approval
But news outlets backed by governments targeted by the US for regime change, such as TeleSUR, RT, HispanTV, and Press TV, are all considered deprecated sources by Wikipedia, and bear the dark red color signifying unreliability.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Wikipedia blacklists TeleSUR as a “deprecated” source
Wikipedia has also demonized the transparency publishing organization WikiLeaks, officially classifying it “generally unreliable,” branding it with the feared red color, and banning use of its documents as sources on articles.

Wikipedia claims that “there are concerns regarding whether the documents are genuine or tampered.” In fact, WikiLeaks has a 100 percent track record for publishing accurate documents. This is not disputed by any reliable source.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Wikipedia does not consider WikiLeaks to be reliable source, despite its track record of 100 percent accuracy
Campaign to blacklist The Grayzone initiated by right-wing Venezuelan opposition supporter
All edits made on Wikipedia are publicly listed. Every article includes an accessible “revision history” page, which shows all materials that were added or removed, at what time, and by what users — although the vast majority of editors are anonymous.

This makes it easy to track down who exactly is pushing a political line on the platform, and how they are abusing the encyclopedia to advance their partisan agenda, blatantly violating Wikipedia’s guidelines mandating a neutral point of view and rejecting advocacy and single-purpose accounts.

An investigation of the editors behind the campaign to blacklist The Grayzone clearly shows that the majority are politically motivated users who exploit Wikipedia to push their sectarian agenda.

In fact, the Wikipedia editor who initiated the official survey to censor The Grayzone is a right-wing Venezuelan opposition supporter who makes no effort to conceal their desire to target outlets with which they politically disagree.

In August 2019, an editor who used the username MaoGo, which was later changed to ReyHahn, initiated a discussion among Wikipedia editors “On the reliability of The Grayzone.”

On their profile, MaoGo/ReyHahn states openly that they are Venezuelan, and the user’s edits make it clear that the editor is strongly supportive of the country’s right-wing opposition and deeply opposed to the leftist Chavista movement and government of President Nicolás Maduro.

A glance at ReyHahn’s edits showed the user obsessively editing Venezuela-related pages on Wikipedia nearly every single day, for hours per day.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Dozens of Venezuela-related edits by Wikipedia user ReyHahn in just two days
Whether or not this user is being compensated for this editing – which given the hours of work required per day amounts to a job, not just a hobby – is not disclosed, because Wikipedia has no mechanism for enforcing action against conflicts of interest. But it is clear that ReyHahn’s campaign against The Grayzone was at the very least motivated by their political support for the Venezuelan opposition.

Even more troubling, when MaoGo/ReyHahn initiated the complaint, the user did not cite a single example of supposedly unreliable information by The Grayzone. Instead the user cited the participation of Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Anya Parampil in the Sao Paulo Forum, an annual gathering of Latin American leftists, as well as individual comments Norton made outside of his reporting at The Grayzone.

Joining the Venezuelan opposition supporter in the campaign to blacklist The Grayzone was another user, Rosguill. Past edits of this user’s profile make it clear that they identified as a socialist with an obsessive anti-communist axe to grind. In 2018, Rosguill publicly listed their involvement in WikiProject Socialism and Wikipedia’s Jewish Labour Bund Task Force, the latter referring to an anti-communist group of the early 20th century that opposed the Bolshevik Revolution.

This is yet another example of how editors with a clear political bias are censoring a media outlet because they believe its reporting upsets their sectarian ideology. It is a clear form of behavior that violates Wikipedia’s fundamental principle mandating a neutral point of view.

Rosguill stated outright that The Grayzone is “less than reliable.” Why? As supposed evidence, the politically motivated editor cited The Grayzone’s factual reporting stating that the US government funded the Serbian activist group Otpor. In fact, the New York Times admitted in 2000 that the US Agency for International Development (USAID), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and International Republican Institute all poured millions of dollars into support for Otpor – an undeniable fact that is ironically also noted on Wikipedia’s own article on Otpor.

However, this bad-faith discussion got the ball rolling for an official editors’ debate to censor The Grayzone on Wikipedia.

Regime-change advocates dominate debate to successfully blacklist The Grayzone
In December 2019, another staunch supporter of the right-wing Venezuelan opposition initiated and moderated an official “survey” that led to the blacklisting of The Grayzone.

This Venezuelan opposition advocate had also previously led the successful campaigns to blacklist the news outlets TeleSUR and Venezuelanalysis on Wikipedia.

The user’s post kicked off a fiery debate, with dozens of comments from a Who’s Who of Venezuelan opposition supporters and pro-Western government interventionists. They displayed a transparent political bias and attacked The Grayzone not for its reporting, which is factual, but rather because of the personal views of its journalists.

This survey was closely overseen by the Wikipedia editor ZiaLater, who in the past revealed on their user page that they are Venezuelan. This editor also previously listed the name Zfigueroa, before later deleting it.

ZiaLater is one of the most active editors policing Venezuela-related content on Wikipedia. A look at the user’s contributions shows that ZiaLater clearly, strongly supports Venezuela’s opposition. They edit very frequently, sometimes for hours per day. The vast majority of ZiaLater’s edits are on articles concerning Venezuela, and the editor almost always pushes the line of the country’s right-wing opposition.

On just one day, May 22, 2020, for instance, ZiaLater made more than 30 edits, over a period of many hours. Almost all of the edits were on Venezuela-related topics, including US-backed coup leader Juan Guaidó and the opposition’s botched invasion of the country, Operation Gideon.

RELATED CONTENT: One of George Floyd’s Killers Out on Bail (Thomas Lane)

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Wikipedia edits made by Venezuelan opposition supporter ZiaLater in just one day, on May 22, 2020
ZiaLater’s right-wing bias against the left-wing Chavista movement is so clear that the editor even has a disclaimer on their user page: “Please do not accuse me of being biased! It will just make me provide more sources. I only edit information that I find from sources.”

In fact, not only did this Venezuelan opposition supporter initiate the debate to blacklist The Grayzone, ZiaLater also wrote to other sympathetic Wikipedia editors to encourage them to help with the proceedings.

The result was a firestorm of ad hominem attacks and bad-faith smears from advocates of Western intervention.

The majority of the debate consisted of criticism of editor Max Blumenthal, his personal views and statements, and his past work, not the factual journalism published at The Grayzone.

ZiaLater contributed the most to the discussion. And instead of providing evidence of supposedly “false of fabricated information,” which The Grayzone was ostensibly blacklisted for, ZiaLater stated openly, “The main issue that Grayzone has with its editorial policy is its political ties.”

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)

This Venezuelan opposition supporter argued The Grayzone should be blacklisted on Wikipedia because editor Max Blumenthal has appeared on Russian media outlets like RT and criticized the Western regime-change war on Syria, as well groups like the White Helmets, which have been funded with tens of millions of dollars from the US and several European governments.

ZiaLater also cited the Ukrainian website StopFake, an anti-Russian advocacy group that is financed by the UK government’s Foreign Office and Czech Foreign Ministry.

Relying on StopFake, the editor claimed that “Russia often utilizes Grayzone editors and its founder Max Blumenthal to disseminating Russian propaganda,” falsely and baselessly suggesting a connection between The Grayzone that does not and has never existed.

An editor who opposed the deprecation campaign noted that The Grayzone’s factual reporting has been cited by mainstream media outlets that are considered reliable by Wikipedia. The user pointed to Glenn Greenwald’s article at The Intercept crediting Max Blumenthal’s report debunking false accusations that the Venezuelan government had set the Trump administration’s so-called humanitarian aid convoy on fire during a coup attempt in February 2019. The New York Times, which had originally spread these false claims, later acknowledged that its past reporting had been wrong, and it was the right-wing Venezuelan opposition that was in fact responsible for the fire, confirming what The Grayzone had initially reported. But ZiaLater downplayed the importance of this point and quickly changed the subject.

With such a blatantly biased moderator, it was clear that the survey was initiated in bad faith from the beginning.

Another editor cited op-eds criticizing The Grayzone by unhinged pro-war activists and regime-change lobbyists, some of whom have personally threatened The Grayzone’s reporters. User DreamLinker cited a political opinion piece at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) website, written by an anti-China activist; another op-ed at the pro-regime change blog Pulse Media; and an opionated screed by anti-Nicaragua activist Dan La Botz at the Cold War-era Trotskyite magazine New Politics.

This Wikipedia editor, DreamLinker, also insisted The Grayzone should be blacklisted because of an op-ed by notorious pro-war activist Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, published at Al Jazeera Opinion. Idrees Ahmad, an academic with negligible journalistic experience who has openly lobbied for and defended Western military interventions, has personally sent The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal threatening phone calls to intimidate him against publishing factual investigative articles about the White Helmets.

These Wikipedia editors did not provide any supposed examples of false information spread by The Grayzone; instead they relied on op-eds by regime-change activists who were politically motivated to blacklist and censor the website for its muckraking reporting.

Who’s Who of pro-interventionist editors join blacklist campaign
The vast majority of the users who chimed in in the official Wikipedia survey and argued in support of blacklisting The Grayzone have shown clear political bias in their editing.

Joining the campaign was Jamez42, another explicit advocate for Venezuela’s right-wing opposition. Jamez42 states clearly on their profile that they are Venezuelan, and, once again, the user edits Wikipedia for hours per day, every day, always pushing the line of US-backed, anti-Chavista politicians.

SandyGeorgia, a user that also constantly edits Venezuela-related articles, always pushing the line of the opposition, jumped in, echoing the smears of the other politically motivated editors.

Similarly, the vociferously pro-Israel Wikipedia editor BobfromBrockley enthusiastically backed the drive to blacklist The Grayzone. BobfromBrockley has been identified as Ben Gidley, a British academic who openly supports NATO and pushes an liberal Zionist ideology, smearing leftist anti-imperialists, including many supporters of former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, as anti-Semites.

Gidley produced a report in 2015 for the UK “Parliamentary Inquiry Into Antisemitism,” in which he portrayed activists protesting Israel’s 2014 massacre in Gaza as Jew haters.

Under the alias BobfromBrockley, Gidley maintains a blog in which he advances an anarcho-neoconservative ideology, obsessively attacking left-wing anti-war journalists and scholars as “Stalinists” while aggressively supporting Western regime-change efforts in China, Russia, Syria, Libya, and beyond. BobfromBrockley even defends US-backed Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó, while echoing right-wing propaganda demonizing elected President Nicolás Maduro.

BobfromBrockley is especially active on Wikipedia. He has made many thousands of edits, and obsessively monitors the website, making multiple changes on an almost daily basis. The vast majority of his edits relate to articles on left-wing outlets, and he spends significant time smearing anti-war journalists like Rania Khalek.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Edits by Wikipedia user BobFromBrockley, who pushes an aggressive sectarian political agenda
In the Wikipedia pile-on, BobfromBrockley claimed there were “several factual errors” on The Grayzone, but he did not cite a single example. Instead, Ben Gidley insisted the website should be blacklisted because “its agenda seems to converge 100% with the agenda of Russian state media,” and because “Most of its contributors are also regulars with Russian state media.”

In fact Gidley himself shared demonstrably false information in his bad-faith attack on The Grayzone. Reporter Anya Parampil was not an RT America presenter when he made this claim in December 2019. She had left the network nearly a year before. The Grayzone is an entirely independent website that does not work with any state media outlet and does not receive funding from any government institutions.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Wikipedia user BobFromBrockley / Ben Gidley smears The Grayzone by trying to link it to Russia
Yet Gidley’s neo-McCarthyite smears are further confirmation that the Wikipedia censorship campaign had little to do with false accusations of inaccuracy in The Grayzone’s reporting, but rather because of the political orientation of the website, which exposes the crimes and lies of Western interventionists.

While these Wikipedia editors claimed to be concerned about “false or fabricated information” – the stated reason for blacklisting The Grayzone – they were actually censoring the website because it told too many inconvenient truths.

Another prominent editor Snooganssnoogans, whose notorious political bias has been the subject of numerous mainstream media reports, also helped to blacklist The Grayzone based on the usual calumnies. Snooganssnoogans is infamous for editing Wikipedia for several hours per day, virtually every single day, always pushing a centrist, neoliberal perspective.

On Snooganssnoogans’ own user page, they make their political bias clear, smearing the popular Jimmy Dore Show as a “far-left conspiracy theory show.”

Another Wikipedia editor operating under the name “Neutrality” contributed to the campaign to blacklist The Grayzone. Neutrality is an administrator on the English Wikipedia, giving them special powers.

And a glance at Neutrality’s edits shows the user is an avid centrist that closely monitors articles related to US politics. They have strongly promoted the Russiagate conspiracy, posting extensive edits to suggest that the Kremlin meddled in the 2016 US election to get President Donald Trump elected, while closely monitoring edits on the articles of RT and skeptical politicians like Tulsi Gabbard. “Neutrality” also has shown a disproportionate fixation on demonizing the Venezuelan and Russian governments, writing large parts of Wikipedia’s article on “democratic backsliding” to demonize Presidents Maduro and Vladimir Putin specifically.

On the admin’s Wikipedia profile, “Neutrality” has two quotes. One is from Thomas Jefferson, but the other is ironically from Wikipedia itself: “If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.”

This contradictory guideline, “ignore all rules,” is indeed an official policy included on the website — further exposing the structural issues with the online encyclopedia, which claims to oppose advocacy editing and conflicts of interest, but reassures editors that they can just ignore those guidelines anyway.

The same politically motivated editors blacklisted TeleSUR and Venezuela Analysis
These are some of the main names in a clique of politically motivated Wikipedia editors who conspire together to censor alternative media outlets that challenge Western interventionism.

But The Grayzone is not the only independent news website that has been censored by this gang of regime-change enthusiasts.

In fact ZiaLater, the Venezuelan opposition-advocating editor who launched the successful censorship efforts against The Grayzone, did the same just a few months earlier against media outlets that operate under a leftist, pro-Chavista editorial line.

On February 1, 2019, ZiaLater initiated the Wikipedia survey to officially blacklist TeleSUR, the pan-Latin American left-wing news network.

Like The Grayzone, TeleSUR was censored following a debate that was full of blatantly right-wing, biased rhetoric focused not on TeleSUR’s factual reporting, but rather on the government of Venezuela, which editors referred to as a “regime” and “dictatorship.”

In fact the survey’s own moderator, ZiaLater, reluctantly admitted their political bias in the comments. “I would also want to apologize if this RfC entry does not seem neutral,” the Venezuelan opposition supporter wrote, using an acronym for the Wikipedia “Requests for comment” process.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Wikipedia editor ZiaLater, a strong supporter of Venezuela’s right-wing opposition, moderating the campaign to blacklist TeleSUR
ZiaLater tried to chalk up their flagrant political bias to mere ignorance of Wikipedia’s guidelines. But it follows in a long pattern of clear prejudice, which always points in the same direction: support for Venezuela’s right-wing opposition.

But by launching the official Wikipedia survey, moderating it, and kicking it off with comments about how TeleSUR is supposedly so untrustworthy, ZiaLater carefully constructed a scheme to blacklist the news network.

The survey was dominated by many of the same politically biased editors that blacklisted The Grayzone, including other staunch supporters of the Venezuelan opposition such as Jamez42 and SandyGeorgia.

Some of these anti-Chavista advocates, such as Jamez42 and ReyHahn, even openly discuss their Venezuela edits on Wikipedia talk pages.

The Russiagate-promoting administrator “Neutrality,” who helped blacklist The Grayzone, also participated in the campaign to censor TeleSUR, as did Rosguill, the sectarian left-wing editor from before.

Then just over a week later, on February 11, ZiaLater launched another survey to blacklist Venezuelanalysis, an independent website run mostly by non-Venezuelans who provide a pro-Chavista perspective on news and political issues.

Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing (Telesur and Venezuelanalysis Included)
Wikipedia editor ZiaLater, a right-wing Venezuelan opposition advocate, oversaw the official surveys to blacklist Venezuelanalysis, as well as The Grayzone and TeleSUR
Predictably, the discussion was more of the same, overwhelmed by right-wing Venezuelan opposition advocates who use Wikipedia to push their political line.

Many of the same pro-interventionist editors who blacklisted The Grayzone and TeleSUR joined in the campaign against Venezuelanalysis, including Jamez42, SandyGeorgia, and BobFromBrockley.

Venezuelanalysis was ultimately deemed “generally unreliable for factual reporting.”

The striking similarities of all three of these targeted campaigns illustrate how this blacklisting strategy works. A minuscule but tight-knit group of politically motivated Wikipedia editors censor news outlets that report facts that contradict their ideology, deploying any falsehood they can slip past the website’s guidelines.

These schemes tear to shreds Wikipedia’s stated principles upholding a neutral point of view and opposing advocacy and single-purpose accounts.

Wikipedia is corrupted on a fundamental level. It has been purged of any sense of internal democracy, and a fanatical gang of obsessive, politically motivated editors control its content, effectively monopolizing the entire world’s easy access to information.

Revealingly, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation that runs it have expressed little interest in trying to solve this fundamental problem. With their silent commission, they have given approval to a global censorship machine that aims to scrub the internet of any reporting or viewpoints that run counter to the prevailing official perspective in Washington.

https://orinocotribune.com/wikipedia-fo ... -included/

It should be noted that the mentioned news outlets have been known to be suspect from a left perspective(I particularly mistrust Grayzone) and that Ben Norton himself was a raging-'left' advocate of regime change in Syria until the tide turned, the White Helmets were utterly outted and he switched teams in a futile attempt to preserve his rep.(We remember...) Nonetheless, anything even vaguely political on Wiki, and that's a lot, should be viewed with a jaundiced eye.

PS: Norton, along with Blumenthal, Ames, Khalek all got reservations at the re-education camp.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 15, 2020 1:31 pm

NYT and Latin American Coups: In Hybrid War “Nuance” Is A Rhetorical Weapon

From Chile to Venezuela to Brazil to Bolivia, the "Paper of record" has a long history of using blurred language to provide cover for US-backed coups in Latin America

On June 10, 2020, the New York Times ran a front page article headlined “Coup Threats Rattle Brazil as Virus Deaths Surge”.

To seasoned Brazil watchers this was not in itself shocking. The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. President Jair Bolsonaro and his far-right supporters have threatened such an “auto-coup”; the dissolving of congress and the supreme court, since before he was even elected in October 2018.

What did exacerbate existing concerns was how quickly the New York Times altered its headline.

Within a matter of hours, out was the word “Coup”, replaced with “Military Action”.

Observers asked why the headline was changed, and who gave the instruction. Given historical precedents, their alarm was justified.

After all it was the New York Times, in 1993, whom an osbscure ex-military congressman told that if he was ever elected he would initiate an “auto-coup” inspired by Peru’s Alberto Fujimori, on his first day in office. 25 years later that man was President.

Such a move now would mark the consolidation of gradual military takeover of governance in Brazil since the 2016 coup to oust President Dilma Rousseff.

Just two days previously, on June 8, the NYT had admitted that its depiction of of Bolivia’s October 2019 election as fraudulent had been wrong, based on false information provided by the Organisation of American States. Think Tank CEPR had provided extensive evidence attesting to the validity of the election, which was ignored or dismissed, with doubt cast upon the honesty of the organisation itself.

At the time of Bolivia’s coup, a NYT interpreter column headlined “Bolivia Crisis Shows the Blurry Line Between Coup and Uprising” argued that “The Cold War binary of “bad” coups and “good” popular revolts no longer applies”, and insisting that “experts on Bolivia and on coups joined forces on Monday to challenge the black-and-white characterizations, urging pundits to see the shades of grey.”

In this era of hybrid war, there is a tendency to define a “coup” purely in terms of aesthetics – for it to mean “old school” military takeovers; tanks on the streets, politicians arrested, civilians massacred and so on. Given that Bolivia ticked most of these boxes, and added a few news ones of its own, such as the use of paramilitary militias to physically attack and humiliate elected officials, the coup’s western media whitewash required a new level of intellectual gymnastics, especially when compared to Brazil’s slow motion institutional creep.

Conversely, the OAS had congratulated Brazil on its 2018 election, in which the leading candidate Lula da Silva, had been jailed to keep him from running, against the explicit requests of the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Beyond this, the election was also stained by illegal disinformation campaigns, voter disenfranchisement and other irregularities. Yet the OAS made no complaint whatsoever.



August 22 2020 DataFolha poll had former President Lula 20% ahead of nearest rival Jair Bolsonaro, and on brink of a first round victory
As a result, Brazil’s 2018 election was and still is repeatedly referred to in Western media as “free and fair” when it was nothing of the sort, and it’s possible annulment by the Supreme Electoral Court is the principal motivation behind the “auto-coup” threat.

Dilma Rousseff had forewarned that the 2018 election would be the second phase of the coup which brought down her government, two years prior. She was right. She also predicted that, as had happened 50 years prior, a new more repressive authoritarian phase of the coup was still to come.

Following the NYT piece, the Brazilian Embassy in the U.S. issued a statement reaffirming its commitment to democratic ideals. The statement was shared un-ironically by Luis Almagro, head of the OAS.

“Brazil’s institutions are working” was the mantra of pro-coup pundits in the buildup to Rousseff’s ouster, and the rhetorical emphasis on constitutionality has been a feature of practically every coup in the region. Venezuela in 2002, Honduras in 2009, Paraguay in 2012, Brazil in 2016, Venezuela and Bolivia in 2019 shared similar scripts, and just as the NYT was admitting its mistakes on Bolivia, documents were released which indicated a new U.S.-backed coup plot against Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Late on Friday 12th May 2020, the Brazilian Presidential Palace issued a statement, signed by President Bolsonaro, Vice President General Hamilton Mourão and Defence Minister Fernando Azevedo e Silva, which was seen as formalisation of the military takeover threat. Just a few weeks prior six former Defence ministers issued a plea for the Armed Forces to protect Brazil’s democracy and resist calls for intervention.

“No evidence”

Media denial of Latin American coups is an obvious flag for foreign involvement. There’s a long tradition of this, not least in the New York Times.

Insertion of doubt is often even more effective than outright denial.

In 1973, it was deemed paternalistic to suggest that CIA was involved in the overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende. The day after his death, a New York Times editorial entitled “Tragedy in Chile” attempted to apportion blame for the coup on its principal victim.

“No Chilean party or faction can escape some responsibility for the disaster, but a heavy share must be assigned to the unfortunate Dr. Allende himself. Even when the dangers of polarization had become unmistakably evi dent, he persisted in pushing a program of pervasive socialism for which he had no popular mandate. His governing coalition—especially his own Socialist party—pursued this goal by dubious means, including attempts to bypass both Congress and the courts. Dr. Allende might have survived had he been able or willing to consolidate his considerable gains for socialism and to offer genuine cooperation in the Congress to the opposition Christian Democrats, Chile’s largest party.”

Crucially it then tried to suggest that even the well known U.S. plots against Allende, about which he had spoken at the 1972 United Nations General Assembly, were unrelated to current events in Chile.

“While there is no evidence that the Nixon Administration seriously considered the maneuvers against Dr. Allende suggested in 1970 by the C.I.A. or the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, it is essential that Washington meticulously keep hands off the present, crisis, which only Chileans can resolve. There must be no grounds whatsoever for even a suspicion of outside intervention.”

One year later this deceit was exposed, by journalist Seymour Hersh, in the New York Times.

The modern iteration of the paternalism trope is the claim that to suggest, or even demonstrate U.S. involvement, “denies agency” to the local opposition.

There also persists a disingenuous either/or strawman which attempts to force definition of regime change operations as being solely internal or foreign in origin, when, in Latin America and elsewhere, they almost always involve domestic powers in collusion with foreign support, in recent times usually the United States Government and/or its private actors.

There is, then, something quite perverse about treating US foreign correspondents as sole arbiters of whether their country is interfering in the one where they are based.

Edge of Democracy

Many NYT readers would only discover the reality of what happened in Brazil from 2013-18 through Petra Costa’s oscar-nominated documentary ‘The Edge of Democracy’, albeit with Bolsonaro already in power.

That it took that long was a result of a media failure equivalent to editorial cover the NYT and others gave to the Iraq invasion, or the destruction of Libya.

Brazil watchers are accustomed to “nuance” from the New York Times. It was dripping from their coverage of the 2016 mediatic/institutional coup against Dilma Rousseff. With self-proclaimed “Brazil experts” on hand to provide “nuanced” takes which merely obfuscated the situation for the average reader.

In an April 2016 piece on the New York Times opinion pages headlined “A House-Cleaning or a Coup? Is Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment a crackdown on corruption or a takeover by influential conservatives?”, several ostensibly different viewpoints were presented in short columns.

Final of the three was Economist Laura Carvalho, who was able to state unequivocally, and correctly, that Rousseff’s ouster was a coup, but only after Carlos Pio, a partner in Augurium Risk Consultants had claimed the opposite, even insisting that Rousseff’s clearly illegitimate impeachment was positive for democracy.

But first up was Bloomberg writer Alex Cuadros, under the almost comic heading: “The Dispute in Brazil Is Far From Black and White”. Whilst criticising its corrupt protagonists, Cuadros accused Dilma Rousseff of “conveniently oversimplifiying” her ouster in calling it a coup, adding that “The Workers’ Party has itself to blame for using bribery to maintain power.”

Four years later it is very clear that of those writers, only Carvalho gave an accurate reading of Brazil’s situation. Yet it was reduced to a matter of opinion. It is unclear how the average NYT reader would have interpreted the combination of these three viewpoints.

Similar was done over former President Lula’s arrest, and irregularities in the prosecution were systematically ignored.

“Anti-Corruption” cheerleader and friend of Judge Sérgio Moro, Council of the Americas’ Brian Winter, complained and demanded alterations to a op-ed by Lula in the New York Times which warned of the right-wing coup underway in Brazil, and even published what he called a “more honest” version of it. On the Latin America desk of the NYT was Juliana Barbassa, a former colleague of Winter at COA’s in house magazine, Americas Quarterly. Winter congratulated the NYT on publishing “corrections”. Two months later Jair Bolsonaro was President-elect of Brazil.

The Vaza Jato leaks published by the Intercept would later confirm that Lula’s prosecution was indeed a political persecution as the former President had insisted, and his removal from the 2018 election was a coup in its own right, with Sergio Moro effectively bringing far-right Bolsonaro to power in exchange for the Justice Minister position. It also confirmed that United States agents were operating illegally, and in secret, within the prosecution.



Jair Bolsonaro and his sons Eduardo, Flavio and Carlos at Council of the Americas Headquarters, New York, 2017
Commentary which is ostensibly from the left, yet originating from corporate philanthropy, right-wing think tanks and Libertarian organisations helped cast doubt upon not only on the 2016 coup, but also on Bolsonaro’s far-right credentials. There was denial, for example, that he could really be called a “fascist”. This echoed the rhetoric of his own supporters, and aided his international marketing as simply a “business friendly law and order candidate” or “arch conservative”.

Council of the Americas manipulates mainstream media narratives on Latin America through both its own magazine, and appearances in mainstream media platforms where it holds influence, such as thew New York Times.

Brian Mier writes: “Between February 24, 2017 and February 24, 2018, AS/COA staff either appeared in or were quoted in Anglo media stories 102 times (excluding stories on art, which I am leaving out of this analysis). This includes 39 stories about Venezuela, 13 stories about NAFTA and 7 stories about Brazil. The stories on Venezuela, the country with the World’s largest petroleum reserves, can best be classified as regime change propaganda. There is no attempt to provide balanced coverage in any of the articles to which AS/COA staff contribute to by speaking to anyone from the Venezuelan working class…”

Another occasional Americas Quarterly contributor, Vincent Bevins, recently made a jump to the New York Times. Bevins, a former Los Angeles Times and Washington Post correspondent, is the author of new book Jakarta Method, about US-backed anti-Communist genocides during the Cold War. He was recently challenged by lawyer Cristiano Zanin for a remark, which appeared to suggest that the concept of lawfare (“The strategic use of the law for the purpose of discrediting, damaging or annihilating an enemy”), was a PT (Workers Party) argument, and equated Bolsonaro’s legal situation with that of his client, Lula da Silva. He denied any apparent inference was intentional.

Throughout the coup, the very idea of politically motivated and targeted prosecutions was dismissed by right-wing forces and corporate media as a “PT narrative”. Insistence that the PT were not actually being persecuted was a cornerstone of media cover for that coup. Those accusations of political bias and persecution, accusations which were echoed by other political parties, scholars and neutral commentators, have long since been vindicated. Thus reappearance of similar looking rhetoric from influential journalists is bound to cause alarm.

Both in public and in secret, the U.S. Department of Justice was collaborating illegally on Operation Lava Jato, the anti-corruption purge which underpinned both Brazil’s coup of 2016 and the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro, with U.S. agents instructing their Brazilian counterparts to keep the collaboration hidden from Brazil’s Federal Government.

This has yet to be acknowledged by the New York Times, or by its journalists.

In a June 2016 editorial headlined “Brazil’s Gold Medal for Corruption“, the NYT editorial board quoted Lava Jato’s leader, U.S. trained Moro: “Systemic corruption schemes are damaging because they impact confidence in the rule of law and in democracy,” Sérgio Moro, the federal judge who has overseen the Petrobras investigation, wrote in an essay in Americas Quarterly last month, adding, “Crimes that are uncovered and proven must, respecting due process, be punished.””

The headline was particularly ironic. It would be unknown to NYT readers that Moro, who would later bring Bolsonaro to power through the jailing of electoral frontrunner Lula, had been regularly awarded the highest military awards for his services to the country, following every stage of the coup.

The NYT also chose this moment to attack Bolivia’s President over alleged corruption: “Brazil is not the only nation in the region bedeviled by corruption. A scandal in Bolivia has tarred the image of President Evo Morales.”

When Moro and Operation Lava Jato’s political motivation was exposed via Telegram conversations leaked to the Intercept in June 2019, the NYT’s headline read simply:

“Leaked Messages Raise Fairness Questions in Brazil Corruption Inquiry”. – NYT 10/6/2019

The issue for the NYT was not the growing evidence of a coup and U.S. interference in Brazilian democratic and judicial process, but “fairness”.

The cases of both Bolivia and Brazil are perfect examples of what journalist and historian John McEvoy describes as paralysis of the present, where evidence of U.S. involvement in foreign regime change is ignored by western media, for years, or even decades, until it is too late and the damage is done. This is often a matter of life and death, as international solidarity, an invaluable weapon for the defence of democracy and human rights, is eroded by the doubt such “nuance” generates.

A Democratic Revolution

In 1964 the New York Times initially called Brazil’s own Military takeover a “coup“.

Within weeks the word “coup” had been replaced by “revolution”, as depicted by its Brazilian protagonists.

“President Castelo Branco inherited a desperate economic and financial situation. He has emphasized that he earnestly desires to correct the great social injustices that obtain in Brazil today. He deserves to be given every chance to do so. Revolutions are not made in a day or a month.” a May 11 1964 editorial insisted.

It would be over a decade before the U.S. role in it would be acknowledged by the paper, yet it would be minimised. Former US ambassador to Brazil at the time of the coup, Lincoln Gordon, was forced to admit the dispatch of a carrier group to Brazil ready to intervene if leftist forces resisted. Yet, he was also allowed to deny that the C.I.A. was involved in the coup itself.

Documents released in the 1970s revealed that not only was the U.S. involved extensively, direct military intervention by the superpower had been discussed for several years. Extensive penetration, infiltration and CIA training, for example of military, trade union personnel, police, was combined with the resources of U.S. corporations channelled through a cutout organisation called Business Group for Latin America, which is now called Council of the Americas (AS/COA). Brazil in 1964 was arguably the Latin American blueprint for a new kind of state/corporate hybrid war.

Yet “nuanced” commentary will ignore or obscure this history, and will continue to minimise U.S. involvement in Latin America; insisting that the coups it backed simply would’ve happened anyway.

From its archive of fossilised propaganda, The New York Times will provide the citations.

https://www.brasilwire.com/nyt-and-lati ... al-weapon/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

Post Reply