The Terrorists Among US10| The IO Echo Chamber Scott Shane Joel Harding

October 13, 2019

by George Eliason for The Saker Blog

At the beginning of October, I was contacted by the New York Times, @ScottShane for an interview about US President Donald Trump. The biggest pressing question he had revolved around how (not if) I’m guiding US foreign policy and advising President Donald Trump on Ukraine and the deep-state war in the US from Donbass. Try reading that over your first sip of coffee. Exactly.

Welcome to the new IO. They keep setting up an elegant chessboard just to play a middling game of checkers.

Information Operations (IO) in action are defined by “What would we do? Disrupt, deny, degrade, deceive, corrupt, usurp or destroy the information. The information, please don’t forget, is the ultimate objective of cyber. That will directly impact the decision-making process of the adversary’s leader who is the ultimate target.” – Joel Harding

While I’m including the entire interview, I will scatter parts of it throughout as it pertains to what Scott Shane was attempting as a smear piece against alternative media. As for my connection to smaller publications than the New York Times, for all intents and purposes, they seem to have a lot stricter publishing guidelines. They wouldn’t print an innuendo journalist effort like the following effort-

When I started reading his article “The CrowdStrike Plot: How a Fringe Theory Took Root in the White House”, I was expecting something heady or at least thought-provoking. What he delivered instead sadly was an unvetted, undocumented attempt to take a swipe at something he had no grasp of. I wasn’t what he expected and in one of my answers to him, I encouraged him to really vet the basis of his question, triple-check his sources, and then fact check it until he knew the information was absolutely clean. His insinuation was…weird. I got a chuckle and you might too.

Why is a NYT, Pulitzer winner contacting me? We both write in the two areas that have the biggest geopolitical impact since before the 2016 election. The good part about this is after reviewing both of our creds and articles, you will need to fully decide if you’re going to give a deep state narrative priority or fact-based journalism.

“Together we’ll see if we can send that to enough people to make a case against him, embarrass him and make it impossible for his to show his face without being labeled a bad journalist, a liar, guilty of perjury, and a dirty propagandist…Photographs can be photoshopped, so can videos. Eyewitness accounts are suspect. Reporters stories are only as reliable as the news sources and that means they are not reliable. Even if the most reliable person in the world says something, their word can always be branded speculation, biased or that they are a paid troll, be it Russian or otherwise (although I really don’t know of any others).”Joel Harding Aug 31, 2015

@scottshane trotted out after I wrote the articles showing the timeline for the deep state coup going on right now. This was done from the perspective of the planners and on a timeline fashion with milestones and comments of progress from the planners.

It was directly after I positively identified the changes made to legitimize the first whistleblower were part of a cookie-cutter methodology from the Next Generation Regime change authors I identified.

So, yes, I was amused.

Looking at it from a head to head perspective, facts should win over politics when the fabric of society and the future are at stake.

His NYT profile page reads; Scott Shane is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he has written about national security and other topics. He was part of teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2017 for coverage of Russia’s hacking and other projections of power abroad and in 2018 for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Donald Trump campaign and administration.

While I don’t know if any of the Pulitzer judges will do a face-palm over this, I do know the IO planners for Ukraine and US election interference are cheering his effort on.

Except, they already stated in no uncertain terms, there were no remotely successful attempts by Russians to influence the 2016 election.

“In response, another senior wrote: Perhaps we could stop telling the Kremlin their ops were so successful when there is little evidence their activities did anything to affect the outcome…and now for something completely different.  Good news. Russian propaganda is being ignored in the United States.”

And

“It is entirely possible the DNC hired online trolls, regardless their geographic origin, to undermine the US President-elect since their party is currently reeling from a crushing loss. – Joel Harding

 “Perhaps the DNC is hiring Russian trolls to wage guerilla warfare on Donald Trump’s nascent administration. I have no proof, so I put this in the form of a question.”- Joel Harding November 2016

Scott Shane’s Facebook’s Russia-Linked Ads Came in Many Disguises has a plausible reason even if he got the story wrong.

I’m not accusing the DNC of hiring Russian trolls to attack Trump, undermine his success, or throw the legal electorate process into disarray and confusion.  I’m not even accusing the DNC of hiring trolls, although that has already been proven.

But what’s that expression again? “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”- Joel Harding December 11, 2016

So now we have the man that marked the inauguration of Ukraine’s Internet Army which had 40,000 trolls on opening day insinuating they were working for the DNC and Team Clinton.

“One of the really neat things about this election is seeing all my information operations and information warfare friends on social media, contributing and commenting, looking darned intelligent! Theirs is normally the voice of reason, maturity, and intelligence.” Joel Harding

Email between Ali Chalupa (Consultant for the DNC) and Luis Miranda, Communication Director for the DNC) dated 5/3/16

“In addition, already 21 November Dmitry Zolotukhin met with his US counterpart, team representative Bellingcat Aric Toler, who conducted a similar training for journalists in Kyiv on the invitation of Media Development Foundation. They also discussed the possibility of holding a conference in Kiev on thematic instruments OSINT-use techniques in the modern media.”

One of the Media Development Center’s sponsors is NATO. It is a project of the US Embassy in Kiev because of the association with the embassy’s diplomatic paper, the Kyiv Post.”

Dimitry Zolotukhin is the Deputy Minister of Information in Ukraine which does Intel and targets dissenters,  the Pravy Sektor/ Fancy Bear hackers answer directly to him. In the notice above which was prepared by his office, it is noted Bellingcat’s Aric Toler is working in an equal capacity to him in the USA.”- How Fancy Bear Destroyed Eliot Higgins Bellingcat Credibility\

The private Intel operatives hired by Alexandra Chalupa to do opposition research against Paul Manfort and Donald Trump were the Ukraine’s Intel Hacker groups. Because they worked for her, Bellingcat, and the Atlantic Council, they would need password access at the DNC.

Ukraine Cyber Alliance and CyberHunta work for the Ukrainian Information ministry. According to cyber expert Jeff Carr, Alperovich and the Ukrainians were the only 2 groups that had key components to hack. This relationship extended through the Atlantic Council.

Why did this relationship start?

The hackers were Alexandra Chalupa’s Oppo Researchers. They are the core of InformNapalm and work with the US Intel Community and Atlantic Council.Their manager was a Ukrainian contractor for the US State Dept.Crowdstrike worked for DNC and Team Hillary at the same time they did.Through the Atlantic Council the hackers worked with Andrea and Irena Chalupa on other projects.Because of Alexandra Chalupa and a Ukrainian State Department contractor Ukraine Intel hackers had access the entire time they worked for the DNC.

Would cyber Oppo researchers need access to the DNC server itself?

If they didn’t have permission to download or retrieve information- It’s a hack. It should be noted that Clinton kept 6 seats to State Department servers after she left for Oppo research that Ukrainian Intel had access to because of this situation.

At the same time, let’s look at Mueller’s Russians and see where they really fit in.

From 2014- Oct 2016 the Ukraine’s Intel and hacking group had a Russian component. Mueller indicted that group. It’s called Shaltay Boltay. Led by former FSB and GRU, they were a Russian criminal gang. Shaltay Boltay, AKA Anonymous International, worked for Ukrainian Intel throughout the election.

Shaltay Boltay wrote the story of the Internet Research Agency from Ukraine fabricating Russian interference. They worked for Clinton on the Ukrainian team doing Oppo Research. As part of CyberHunta, they would need password access to do their job.

The IRA (Internet Research Agency) was the tie Mueller unsuccessfully tried to use showing Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia. In fact, this is a part of the basis for @scottshane articles on the subject. And it is the only narrative proof for Mueller that was available.

Here’s the problem. The collusion work of the IRA was only known through a blog written by Ukrainian Intel hacking group CyberHunta, from Ukraine. They worked through the Information ministry created by Joel Harding. They were in Ukraine actively trying to hurt the Russian government. They were not in Russia.

Scott Shane ignores the fact that everyone involved are working with, working for, or is part of very few groups involved in this ongoing IO. The fact that every individual group or company I’ve written about, are tied together working on the same project set should raise concern by itself.

The Russian criminal gang were hired by Alexandra Chalupa. In October 2016 they went back to Russia and were convicted for treason

Further proof of relationship is in the Surkov government hack in Russia. From Ukraine, Shaltay Boltay was credited with the hack. After, it was the Ukrainian Intel group CyberHunta that released the emails to the Atlantic Council. Ukrainian Cyber Alliance bragged to RFE/RL they changed the geopolitics of the entire world by themselves in 2016.

Did you know HRC’s extended group was among those that wrote the rules governing cyberwar including attribution that made catching Russians for the DNC hack possible? It’s kind of like rewriting the whistleblower policy was supposed to work for the first Trump-Ukraine whistleblower, but with better results.

The Atlantic Council worked on this. Dimitry Alperovitch from Crowdstrike is their resident expert. As far as attribution, as long as there was a Russian in the room with former FSB or GRU ties, it could loosely be attributed to the Russian government according to Rule 17, article 8 Tallinn Manual on cyberwar.

The FBI, the DNC, and Team Clinton knew Shaltay Boltay did the Yahoo hack in 2013 that stole Huma Abedin’s State Dept passwords. The only reason Hillary Clinton’s campaign would have to provide this particular group of hackers passwords to do their job as Oppo researchers would be to throw a shadow on the Russian government.- Fancy Bear Exposed-the People Behind the Hacking Group

But, unlike Scott Shane, I work hard to find the professionals doing the IO work or guiding it. Here we have a group of professional IO operators. Joel Harding is happy because of how well they are doing their job in America trying to sway the 2016 election.

These statements take away the value of Scott Shane’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize entirely, all by themselves. The statements are directly from the IO planner coordinating the media effort behind the anti-Russian effort Shane Scott is part of which took wings in the US as a deep state coup.

In June 2016, the Ukrainian US State Dept. contractor, Christina Dobrovolska went to Washington to meet with her boss at a conference. She brought a Ukrainian Delegation to meet the OUNb Ukrainian Diaspora leader Nestor Paslawsky in New York and got Joel Harding rehired for another year.

If we look at Scott Shane’s article titled How a Fringe Theory About Ukraine Took Root in the White House, we see like a 2x Pulitzer winner, he brought out the big gun to show his narrative is true.

From @scottshane -“Ukraine is the perfect scapegoat for him because it’s the enemy of Russia,” said Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington who regularly visits Ukraine and is writing a book called “How to Lose the Information War.”

She noted that a number of Ukraine-linked stories, some of them distorted or exaggerated, have been pulled together by Mr. Trump’s supporters into a single narrative.

“Now it seems like all of these conspiracy theories are merging into one,” Ms. Jankowicz said. She studies disinformation, she said, but Mr. Trump produced one claim she’d never come across.“I do this for a living, and I’d never heard anyone say the servers were in Ukraine,” she said.

In 2016-2017, Scott Shane’s star expert Nina Jankowicz worked in Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, providing strategic communications advice to the MFA’s Spokesperson according to her bio at Foreign Policy International.

This means she was also working with Ukraine’s Information Ministry which does cyber Intel. She was working with Christina Dobrovolska who was the State Dept. liaison to OUNb Diaspora heads like Nestor Paslawsky. The idea Nina was working with Ukrainian Intel people and Alexandra Chalupa is not so farfetched because her position put her in contact with Joel Harding who beyond all this IO madness, wrote Ukraine’s Information Policy.

Nina’s contact with the IO coup group extends to the German Marshall Fund where Aaron Weisburd and Clint Watts are also experts. Jankowicz had contact with Karen Kornbluh because of her State Dept position as well as being another resident expert at the German Marshall Fund.

Kornbluh is on the board of what was the Broadcasting Board of Governors which oversee RFE/RL and other projects. Joel Harding worked at the BBG during this timeframe influencing major media outlets.

According to Mr. Shane’s article –Mr. Eliason and other purveyors of Ukraine conspiracies often point to the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, as the locus of the schemes. The Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk has made donations to the council and serves on its international advisory board; Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder, who was born in Russia and came to the United States as a child, is an Atlantic Council senior fellow.

That connection seems slender, but it may be the origin of Mr. Trump’s association of a wealthy Ukrainian with CrowdStrike.

So as not to disappoint Shane, his expert is an Atlantic Council expert and writes at EUvsDisinfo as well. For those not in the know, they were sued by news publications that label publications Russian propaganda.

The Atlantic Council signed a contract to work for/with the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) and everything they do supports the Information Operation originally intended for Ukraine.

From Mr. Shane’s article- “Mr. Eliason and other purveyors of Ukraine conspiracies often point to the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, as the locus of the schemes. The Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk has made donations to the council and serves on its international advisory board; Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder, who was born in Russia and came to the United States as a child, is an Atlantic Council senior fellow.

That connection seems slender, but it may be the origin of Mr. Trump’s association of a wealthy Ukrainian with CrowdStrike.”

So, are the connections actually slender? Only for people stuck inside a narrative box.

I think this next point may sink Mr. Scott into a deep depression. He refers to alternative media in such a dismissive way that it needs addressing.

Scott Shane-“George Eliason, an American journalist who lives in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists fought Ukrainian forces, has written extensively about what he considers to be a “coup attempt” against President Trump involving American and Ukrainian intelligence agencies and CrowdStrike. He said he did not know if his writings for obscure websites might have influenced the president.”

Although the interview is carried in full below, this will give an idea of the contextual value of Scott Shane’s work.

From Scotts article-“CrowdStrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove,” he wrote in an email. “Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the U.S. to take a hardline stance against Russia? Are they using CrowdStrike to carry this out?”

My actual response to the question– Crowdstrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove. This is a sad fact proven by others including Jeff Carr. If the key components to the hack are in the hand of only 2 parties, it is simply making a determination of liability to the event.

What’s more important is determining Crowdstrike’s liability in the Intel Community coup attempt that’s being reported in mainstream media by journalists like Tucker Carlson, Sheryll Atkinson, and even former Congressman Ron Paul.

Now, you might understand why I got a chuckle from his article. If he based his 2017 Pulitzer on information from Crowdstrike, Dimitry Alperovich backed his attribution of a Russian Hack at the DNC on a lie he invented. If a Pulitzer Prize winner is afraid to publish what is actually said by an interviewee, he’s scared to death of the facts.

Let me show you what I mean. Part of the evidence Dimitry Alperovich used in his justification for the DNC hack Russian attribution was destroyed by VOA in an embarrassing way. This was his backing proof of Russian involvement. Shane’s work is backed by this fiasco whether he realizes it or not. You have to take the time to vet sources.

According to Alperovitch “The malware used to track Ukrainian artillery units was a variant of the kind used to hack into the U.S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the presidential election this year  said CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch.”

When VOA asked Crowdstrike about the sources they responded “We cited the public, third-party reference source that was quoted,” VOA was told. “But the source referenced in the CrowdStrike report on its website is not the site of the actual IISS, but an article on The Saker, a site that presents a largely pro-Russian version of events in Syria and Ukraine.”

How careful is Crowdstrike and Alperovitch with information? After all, they were dealing with Ukrainian Intelligence directly. Alperovitch even has a twitter social relationship with Ukraine’s hackers.

The chain of information went like this:  IISS Report(think tank) –>Colonel Cassad (Russian blogger)–> the Saker(analytical blog/ translator)—>Alperovitch/ Crowdstrike(information purposely misquoted to create Russian hacker) —>FBI—>CIA—>ODNI (DNI report)—-> You scratching your head wondering who makes this intel crap up. This is one of the DNI report’s secret sources and one that the whole report rests on.- Indict Clinton For the Russian DNC Hack January 16, 2017

To keep things simple, Shane’s 2017 Pulitzer is partly based on Alperovitch misquoting one of the analytic platforms Scott Shane disdains and I write for.

@scottshane do you feel the Pulitzer people are doing a face-palm about right now?

Now, alone this is damning, but it is taken from what is now a 10 part of the series over 30,000 words deep in dense proof provided from the same people who gave Robert Mueller his Russian narrative. They drew @scottshane into to take the feet out from my work. Instead, he makes the case for my work with his own choice of experts and takes away the narrative fictions that won his Pulitzer instead. Maybe you can return them quietly.

If it was just the NYT article, I’d probably still take the time to answer it. But it’s not. This is a coordinated 3-prong effort. That puts it square in the Information Operation coup against the US Presidency.

NBC ran the same type of article in the same timeframe. “Trump seized on a conspiracy theory called the ‘insurance policy.’ Now, it’s at the center of an impeachment investigation.

Just months after Trump’s inauguration, conspiracy theorists pushed a fanciful and unsubstantiated narrative in which the DNC framed Russia for election interference.”

And third, one of the private Intel companies working for Ukraine was able to push the following into the Senate Intel Committee. What they are doing is trying to turn the pressure this article series and the work of many other journalists back onto the journalists and news platforms. This will stop investigations on the IO coup as well as push the Senate toward impeaching the President of the United States based on their fabrications.

As noted in Part 8, Bellingcat and Eliot Higgins have been part of the Intel coup against the Presidency since it began. The timeline and milestones in the article is where they discussed their progress.

When I told Eliot Higgins about my findings and the proof was there, here was his response.

The choice is whether the fabric of United States democracy will be irreparably torn or not. If they win, the world loses.

If you couple both efforts with @scottshane‘s, it’s looks damning. All three have the same goal. All three efforts are within the same timeframe. It looks like a coordinated effort to destroy the fact-based story and give the narrative priority.

But, let’s give Scott Shane’s 2018 Pulitzer another whirl, shall we? In the end, and to Shane’s chagrin, DNI James Clapper’s candid admission the only proof he had of Russian influence on the 2016 election was Hillary Clinton (HRC) losing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. “It stretches credulity to conclude that Russian activity didn’t swing voter decisions.”

Scott Shane won Pultizer Prizes for two consecutive years, 2017-18. It’s quite an honor, very prestigious. But, my question is how that is possible if he relied on Crowdstrike’s information that was debunked by Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty?

Now, for the Pulitzer Prize, your work was judged by 17 judges. In 2018, there were three or four from the NYT and one from the Washington Post. Both papers push the same narrative.

What are my qualifications to answer NYT Pulitzer Prize winner Scott Shane and his light on facts, heavy on narrative fictions?

My credentials are a little different. For 2017-2018, a few article series I wrote on how privatized Intelligence was taking shape and the problems with it taking preeminence over government agencies was listed #2 for both years by Project Censored. The other side to that was how privatized Intel was using these tools on the public at will, out of spite, and for money. The first-place story was one that was never written at all.

Project Censored’s list shows stories with the greatest national impact that are under-reported, pushed own or censored outright.

Stretched across thirty campuses, the initial round of judging is between over 200 news stories that go through five rounds of judging before making the top 25.  Faculty and students vet each candidate story in terms of its importance, timeliness, quality of sources, and corporate news coverage. If it fails on any one of these criteria, the story is not included. 

Once Project Censored receives the candidate story, we undertake a second round of judgment, using the same criteria and updating the review to include any subsequent, competing corporate cove In early spring, we present all VINs in the current cycle to the faculty and students at all of our affiliate campuses, and to our national and international panel of judges, who cast votes to winnow the candidate stories from several hundred to 25. 

Once the Top 25 list has been determined, Project Censored student interns begin another intensive review of each story using LexisNexis and ProQuest databases. Additional faculty and students contribute to this final stage of review.

The Top 25 finalists are then sent to our panel of judges, who vote to rank them in numerical order. At the same time, these experts—including media studies professors, professional journalists, and a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, among others—offer their insights on the stories’ strengths and weaknesses.

Thus, by the time a story appears in the pages of Censored, it has undergone at least five distinct rounds of review and evaluation. – Project Censored

.

I’ve opened up a type of story that generally doesn’t get told until at least 20 years later. My articles are fact dense. This is part 10 in series that is the first time in journalism I’m aware of an IO coup or Intel Community crimes were opened up at the beginning of the stream, not forensically, after the fact. Most of the actors and actions were accounted for as they occurred.

The publications I write for seem to have a much higher standard of fact grading than the NYT is on this particular story and wouldn’t accept less than extremely dense sourcing from me. The stakes are too high. Some of the editors are even adversarial and had to be convinced beyond a shadow this was happening.

In 2005, at the beginning of Hurricane Katrina, I designed a methodology that would close the levees in New Orleans in less than a week. I contacted the USACE (United States Army Corps of Engineers) at the Pentagon which was where they were trying to get their heads around the stopping damage from happening and not losing the city.

I explained the plan to Colonel Paul Tan, who became my liaison. There were five plans on the table from five different national size contractors. When they heard mine, it became clear it was the only option.

Only one company in the world had the equipment to do this. I contacted the vice president of Erickson Aircrane and convinced him of why it could be done with his equipment. Great people at Ericson. They broke contract with the state of Washington and moved $30,000,000 worth of gear and support to Alabama to stage from. The base problem was you couldn’t get a barge in because the water was too shallow. You couldn’t do the work from dry ground so a crane couldn’t get in.

We could do it from the air successfully by reversing some the normal steps to account for head pressure on the water flow. The other side of that is understanding both the logistics and developing a schedule of procedures that was bulletproof.

Scott, pull the FOIA. My name and our company are prominent in the discussions and minutes early on from the Pentagon decisions.

The commander on the ground in New Orleans had the final word and decided to stay with the sandbags.

After it was over, we, Erickson Aircraft and our company were supposed to demonstrate the methodology for Michael Chertoff and FEMA as a next-gen option. He never set up a schedule.

Erickson’s vice president at the time, Lonny Alaramos, didn’t sign on to the plan for profit. He did it because so many people needed help and an entire city was being destroyed.

In 2011, the Fukashima meltdowns happened. I designed a methodology I gave to a nuclear operator for a bid on the Fukashima project to cut radiation exposure. It went into one of the unsuccessful remediation bids at the time. I used to have locked high rad clearance and about five years before my wife designed the protocol to keep reactors and pools safe during refueling that started to be used internationally. Non-Orthodox Means and Methods to achieve Radiation barriers and establish minimum of ALARA

If you want to have an interesting conversation, I can talk you through a remediation plan for the site at Fukashima I never bothered to publish. The graft and criminality was already apparent with the energy company.

Why add this to the conversation at all? I don’t generally talk about experiences like this because for most people, it’s too esoteric and outside their experience.

What these events show is the ability to go into large unknown situations under stress and not only grasp them fast but create forward-thinking solutions very quickly.

What Scott Shane was especially interested in was whether or not I was shaping Russia and Ukraine policy from Lugansk People’s Republic in Donbass. Topping it off, he asked a couple of times whether or not the President of the United States was getting his information about the DNC hack directly or indirectly from me. And whether or not I was comfortable with that.

Scott Shane-I’m especially wondering where President Trump got his info on this before he first discussed it publicly in April 2017:

Scott Shane– I’ve seen this piece of yours and wondered if there are other items from you or others that might have influenced the president

Scott Shane-Would it worry you if you thought President Trump was getting some of his thinking on this from your writings, presumably secondhand?

I wrote about the rise of unqualified starting Intel guys a few years back. The 2017 ODNI report was stuffed with them including Crowdstrike’s Alperovitch who was its centerpiece. Many of the superstars of the Intel Community sadly lack even reasonable experience or training in the field.

Yet, it is their expertise you want the President of the United States to continue to base decisions on? The unfiltered, non-fact graded political and income inspired reports they send regularly to Congressmen, agencies, and companies are what is destroying diplomacy and peace in the world. Here are some of your great Intel guys, once the trappings are laid bare ever since the Clinton administration pushed this mess into being.

US intelligence agencies built their methodologies on the methods and help of an out of work web-designer, a pornographer suffering from toxic black-mold induced delusions, a gift shop employee, a stay at home dad whose last job was selling underwear, and a man that heard coded intel messages in fax transmission beeps. Unfortunately, this isn’t a joke.-

Why Vault 7 Tools Used by Private Contractors Shows US Intel Needs a Ground-Up Rebuild Intel and News Building

This is what passes for advanced trainers in the Intel field in the Western world today for OSINT and online Intel gathering. This! This is what trains the entire ODNI and all the agencies including the FBI, CIA, and NIA.

If you ask if I was comfortable with a President of the United States getting actionable Intelligence or evidence from one of these people, their companies or associates? Nope. No. Never.

2 “Open-Source” Intelligence Secrets Sold to Highest Bidders

Early on, Eliason reported, the private contractors who pioneered open-source intelligence realized that they could circulate (or even sell) the information that they gathered before the agency for which they worked had reviewed and classified it. In this way, “no one broke any laws,” Eliason wrote because the information “shifted hands” before it was sent to an agency and classified. [For one account of how early open-source intelligence contractors worked, see Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “Private Jihad,” New Yorker, May 29, 2006.]

This loophole created what Eliason described as a “private pipeline of information” that intelligence contractors could use to their advantage. Members of Congress, governors, news outlets, and others often wanted the same “intel” that the CIA had, and, Eliason wrote, open-source intelligence contractors “got paid to deliver Intel for groups looking for specific insights” into creating or influencing government policy. 

As a result of these changes, according to Eliason’s second article, “People with no security clearances and radical political agendas have state sized cyber tools at their disposal,” which they can use “for their own political agendas, private business, and personal vendettas.”

Although WikiLeaks’s Vault 7 exposé received considerable corporate news coverage, these reports failed to address Eliason’s analysis of the flaws in open-source intelligence and private contractors. A notable exception to this was a March 2017 Washington Post editorial by Tim Shorrock. Noting that WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange had said the CIA “lost control of its entire cyberweapons arsenal,” Shorrock’s editorial reviewed the findings from his previous reports for the Nation and concluded that overreliance on private intelligence contractors was “a liability built into our system that intelligence officials have long known about and done nothing to correct.”

You asked if I was comfortable if he was getting his actionable Intel from me? Nope. No. Never. YOU shouldn’t be either.

The real question Mr. Shane is whether or not you feel comfortable that these unqualified people have been influencing and appearing in the PDB unedited since Bill Clinton was in office. Do you?

Is this a practice you would stop?

The Intel community is gearing up with 4-5 million new hires off the street. Software jockeying has hit a new low. They will influence the PDB. Are you comfortable?

Here’s the caveat. If you were earning your Pulitzers, you would have picked up on it.

I write facts. Facts are funny like science experiments. They can be reproduced by different people because they don’t change. Facts are documentable. Facts are what should be in the US President’s Daily Brief (PDB).

I am quite comfortable with all of my articles being fact-checked, fact graded, certified, scrubbed of politics, and used to decide foreign or domestic policy inside the. In fact, I recommend it.

As far as investigating and apprehending criminals, @scottshane should look at local and federal law. That is a law-enforcement issue. Not his, not mine. Exposing the people, groups, and NGOs so as to draw attention to their crimes is the job of a journalist.

Just so you know, Intel decisions and policy based on my writing is catching on a little in the EU. At least parts of this series have been distributed to every EU ministry and official. The damage these particular cyber terrorists and seditionists have done isn’t welcome with open arms anymore. Like every other terrorist act by a national on foreign soil, it’s a matter of time before they bring it home like Bellingcat’s Aric Toler is now.

NYT Scott Shane interview

Shane, Scott Hi George — I’m trying to track the Trump CrowdStrike-Ukraine theory back in time and I see you have labored in this field for years. Would you have time for a call, or just for an email exchange? I probably have until tomorrow.

I’m especially wondering where President Trump got his info on this before he first discussed it publicly in April 2017:

https://apnews.com/c810d7de280a47e88848b0ac74690c83

I’ve seen this piece of yours and wondered if there are other items from you or others that might have influenced the president: https://washingtonsblog.com/2017/01/crowdstrikes-russian-hacking-story-fell-apart-say-hello-fancy-bear-2.html

George Eliason– Hi Scott, I can give some basic answers but I really don’t know what President Trump thinks about. I must have lost my invitation to that BBQ.

What I would like to do is reverse the order of your questions because it makes the most sense.

Scott Shane– I’d like to hear your views now, and whether they’ve changed. Would it worry you if you thought President Trump was getting some of his thinking on this from your writings, presumably secondhand?

George Eliason-The only US President I know for sure was influenced directly by what I write is former US President Barrack Obama. He unequivocally modified foreign policy regarding Ukraine because of what I write.

I started writing articles detailing what was happening in Kiev +political background on January 2014. In March 2014, I was the only English speaking journo getting published in the west at all from Donbass.

On March 6, 2014, Obama signed an Executive Order that made even American journalists sanctionable who challenged the newly installed coup group V. Nuland bought cookies for.

Obama, the self-proclaimed “Killa” already demonstrated a willingness to drone strike Americans based on accusations. No investigation. No trial. Just drone em.

If he signed that executive order and I was the only American in the region. 2+2 invariably has the same result. If he didn’t know I was there or what I was writing, there was no need to formulate said executive order.

Scott Shane– George — Thanks for the reply. I understands that you don’t personally know the president. But you have been a significant voice for the view that Trump is voicing — that the official version of the 2016 hack is false ands that Ukrainian hackers were responsible. For instance you published this a few months before the president first talked about ties between CrowdStrike and Ukraine:

https://washingtonsblog.com/2017/01/crowdstrikes-russian-hacking-story-fell-apart-say-hello-fancy-bear-2.html

George Eliason-Crowdstrike and Ukrainian Intel are working hand in glove. This is a sad fact proven by others including Jeff Carr. If the key components to the hack are in the hand of only 2 parties, it is simply making a determination of liability to the event.

What’s more important is determining Crowdstrike’s liability in the Intel Community coup attempt that’s being reported in mainstream media by journalists like Tucker Carlson, Sheryll Atkinson, and even former Congressman Ron Paul.

The New York Times, your own paper, broke stories about the problem as they forecast it, almost 20 years ago along with News Week and a slew of other MSM publications.

The story of corruption and the possible criminal actions of the newly privatized deep state was updated 15 years ago by your publication and a lot of others.

Around 2007, RJ Hillhouse had enough respect that the DNI answered her charges publically.

Tim Shorrock detailed this magnificently in 2015. The top end of a private deep state replaced the Intel Agency heads in the hierarchy. In 2017, the ODNI and FBI bowed to Crowdstrike and refused to do their job which was to investigate a supposed criminal act.

I detailed this Intel Community coup so closely I was able to list milestones. I suggest you look closely.

• https://thesaker.is/the-terrorists-among-us-the-coup-against-the-presidency/
• https://thesaker.is/the-terrorists-among-us9hillary-clintons-democratic-coup-against-the-presidency/

The set up to the Ukraine whistleblower story is from a cookie-cutter formula given by the people at Rand that wrote the instruction manual for Next Generation Regime change.

What I feel is irrelevant. What you feel is irrelevant. Once the proof is there, and it is, do you protect the Office of the Presidency and the Republic itself? Or not?

My position is this. If former President Barrack Obama was somehow caught in this position, as much as I hate him, I would defend him and his presidency.

This is the same Barrack Obama that ordered drone strikes on Americans based on the people working with Crowdstrike today. Why are they all tied into Ukrainian Intelligence and the hackers?

Great journalists like Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett are going across warzones reporting. Should they have to worry that their work crosses some private companies narrative and could get them killed by supposedly friendly agencies?

Look at the current series I am writing, the same Intel Community Icon that reported to Congress that US drone strikes on an Americans was successful. In it, you’ll find a screenshot of Aaron Weisburd and Elliot Higgins of Bellingcat concluding Beeley’s reporting must not be allowed to make it into the President’s Daily Briefing.

As a journalist, you should angry for them.

George Eliason-Here’s the rub. In 2016, before anyone looked seriously at Donald Trump as “Putin’s guy,” Bernie Sanders was labeled “Putin’s guy.” The same exact method I’ve described being used now was used on Sanders. This means unless everyone that gives a damn about the country stops and takes a real look, Sanders should go play golf instead. He won’t make it out of the primary.

Sanders won. Sanders won. Sanders won. Sanders was…irrelevant.

This is the deeper part of the Crowdstrike crime story. This is. No candidate has a shot in hell of getting through the Democratic primary unless they are signed on to this mess.

Let’s be clear. My politics don’t matter. But for the sake of the argument, I am a conservative who writes for progressive and centrist publications.

I look at someone like Rob Kall of OpEdNews and wish he ran for Congress despite not agreeing with every position. He’d be great. Washington of Washington’s blog has been a heroic voice and will be glad the New York Times recognizes their work.

Some of the better geopolitical analysis is coming from The Saker blog. There are many good alternative news sources across the spectrum and they all matter.

Scott Shane- If Dimitri Alperovitch is working for Ukrainian Intelligence and is providing intelligence to 17 US Intelligence Agencies is it a conflict of interest?

Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years. Using facts accepted by leaders on both sides of the conflict, the main proof Crowdstrike shows for evidence doesn’t just unravel, it falls apart. Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Are they using Crowdstrike to carry this out?

Scott Shane- Also, it would be helpful to know a bit more about you — where you grew up, education, how you landed in Ukraine, what work you’ve done there, who pays you now? Have you ever been paid by an army of the Russian state or Russian media, or DPR or LPR?  Or have you always been expressing independent views?

George Eliason-Sure. As you can see in the multiple screenshots above, the same Intel community guys that want to stop some of the world’s best women reporters at any cost, have spent 5 years trying to find me.

So with that in mind, right now the world seems to trust them. I’ve been very clear they need to be investigated and jailed. I remind them this on a regular basis.

But, what do they think of me when you get past the IO. I’m not associated with Russia or Russian media.

George Eliason-I am an American. What do you need to know about me? I am one of the few people to turn down the Carnegie Hero Award. I jumped into a flood that took down 8 bridges and failed to save a woman and her granddaughter.

It broke me for a long time. For the last 5 years, I’ve been writing about Ukraine, Donbass, and the IO, this has been out of pocket other than a camera I crowdfunded.

LNR wasn’t sure I existed until a year ago. I volunteered to monitor the elections here. The only contact I have with Russia is an occasional interview with the Russian Federation’s Permanent Deputy Representative to the UN, Dimitry Polanskiy.

As far as the Russian Army, in 5 years, I’ve yet to come across them. I did a cross-region check in 2014 specifically to ferret them out because western media insisted they were here. I documented the passports and did weapons checks. Weapons all have a manufacture date. The newest weapon was I think, 1967. The oldest rifle was 1919. No Russian army was here to pay anyone.

Lastly, what do I do for work? Today, I’m in between gigs. If you know someone in need of a decent researcher or investigative journalist send them my way.

Scott Shane Addenda questions

George, Plan right now is to cite you and quote you in the piece.

Scott Shane– Question: Obviously there has been much discussion of CrowdStrike and Ukraine, including by you. But some of what Trump said is hard to trace. Do you believe that “a very rich Ukrainian” owns CrowdStrike? Do you believe the hacked DNC servers are hidden in Ukraine? If not, do you have any idea where he’s getting that?

George Eliason-

Scott,

A rich Ukrainian owning Crowdstrike would be a new one on me. That’s not something I’d write without clean lines all the way through the research. The next question isn’t something you asked the other day. Great question and probably the only one I’m not willing to answer at the moment.

I’d like to take the content of the interview and publish whole after you publish. I don’t see any problems with that, do you?

best

George

End Interview

Let’s talk about the servers. Donald Trump mentioned servers in his phone call to Zelenskiy.

If it concerns Crowdstrike, how many servers would the US president be interested in? When he left office, Petr Poroshenko tore out the only server room in Ukraine secure enough to hold those servers.

Petr Poroshenko said he had to take the servers, they didn’t belong to him. Maybe someone should dust off their Pulitzer and go ask him instead of asking me.

 

The Terrorists Among US8- Trump Whistle Blower & the ODNI FBI CIA DOD NATO-COE

September 26, 2019

by George Eliason special correspondent of the Saker blog in Novorussia

Let’s explore the top of the chain in the Information Operation and Intel community coup against the presidency. The same private contractors responsible for the 2014 coup in Ukraine brought it home to the US in time to get involved in the election. Losing that bid, they have been working to alter the fabric of the country forever. No one likes to lose.

Enough information has come in about the whistleblower what group is a secondary source to determine who the primary sources of information against President Donald Trump is.

At the bottom of this article you’ll find the names of people overseeing the primary sources and why they were found so easily. If you have followed parts 1-7 in this series, you’ll walk away feeling like I somehow scripted the Trump-Zelenskiy whistleblower narrative.

The bigger questions of why is all this happening right now need to be answered. If you haven’t read The Terrorists Among US – The Coup Against the Presidency I suggest you start there because it shows a blow by blow of the coup in progress up to this point.

So, what if US Intel capabilities were under the control of a few extremely rich families that served their own political goals and those of their clientele? I’m seriously suggesting and going to prove that at the agency level, the US government no longer controls its own spies.

When we look at the concept of terrorists among the US, the ultimate betrayal is from people whose families became enriched because they positioned themselves as the first line of defense protecting the American way of life.

They were able to replace the work they did leading government agencies after they left with the work they were doing in the private sector. This is because they led all the agencies out of the post 9/11 world into a digital age no one knew anything about.

They are the same group hiring over 4 million people to work in the Intel, Information Operation, hacking, boots on the ground, and media, to change the world to their liking and that of their clients.

When that reality sinks in, remember, the US already has the entire digital world in net so tight that nothing slips by. Those 4 million undertrained people are for the benefit of the contractors described below.

The people leading these companies can’t make money in a normal world where diplomacy and mutual respect are the coin of the realm. Their profits and egos only exist where chaos and uncertainty reign. Even today it’s estimated that more than 70% of Intel workers are not government employees. This is what created the problem of privatized terrorism that exists today.

In a 2007 Washington Post OpEd entitled “The Value of Private Spies”, DNI McConnell conceded there was a huge danger in using private companies for intelligence and direct action work. Because of this he claimed “Our workforce has recovered to the point that we can begin to shed some contract personnel or shift them away from core mission areas, and the CIA is leading the way in this,” the ODNI stated.”

In 2007, CBS noted Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) lawyers revealed at a conference in May that contractors make up 51 percent of the staff in DIA offices. At the CIA, the situation is similar. Between 50 and 60 percent of the workforce of the CIA’s most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of human intelligence, is composed of employees of for-profit corporations.

After 9/11 the U.S. government shortened the learning curve by hiring contractors in droves. According to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org in 2007 America’s spy network would soon resemble NASA’s mission control room in Houston.

“Most people, when they see that room, think they’re looking at a bunch of NASA people,” Pike notes. “But it’s 90 percent contractors.”

As discussed in US Intelligence Poses a Threat to the World, as early as 2004, more than 50% of Intel services were manned by private contractors. By, 2007, 70 percent of the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) unit is staffed by contractors, known as ‘green badgers.

Private Intel contractors trained the agency starting after 9/11. Soon it became the contractors that had the oversight. Managers left government service to work for private contractors and came back under lucrative corporate contracts.

Effective control, support, and management functions are in the hands of people that care more about a bottom line, politics, and a business forecast model.

The line between inherently governmental work and private contracting was smashed. While the lawman tries to bring the criminal in for justice, the bounty hunter brings back a body so he can be paid.

The New York Times headlined Private Surveillance Is a Lethal Weapon Anybody Can Buy Is it too late to rein it in? By Sharon WeinbergerJuly 19, 2019

The real 1% are Cyber

In a 2015 article at The Nation titled “How Private Contractors Have Created a Shadow NSA,” Tim Shorrock describes what he calls “the cyberintelligence ruling class.”

“Over the last 15 years, thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly for-profit,” Shorrock wrote.

Many of the principal figures come from America’s wealthiest families. Although the wealthiest have always had a lead in filling policy and cabinet positions, this time the public service aspect is missing.

 Shorrock goes on to detail how the same 1% Americans claim to be fighting is the cyberintelligence elite that controls the media.  Mathew Olsen is an example as the former National Counterterrorism Center director and current IronNet Corp. president. He joined ABC as a commentator. He goes further and shows how this is the rule and not the exception.

This is going on all across media channels. Every network has their own cyberintelligence “expert” to explain complicated topics, but their conflicts of interest almost always remain hidden.”

War and peace is no longer in the hands of governments. Until governments push back, your sons and daughters die grossly and openly for the highest paying lobbyist or business.

Michael Chertoff from 2005-2009 ran the massive Department of Homeland Security, where he was criticized for exempting the DHS from following laws on everything from the environment to religious freedom. A report issued by the Congressional Research Service said at the time that the delegation of unchecked powers to Chertoff was unprecedented. He was also known for railing against international law, warning that treaties such as the Geneva Conventions were placing undue constraints on U.S. actions abroad. As a long-time insider – in both the public and private sector – he is one of the top figures in the U.S. intelligence-security complex.

Private sector services mirror what they do for government including Intel-for-Hire, espionage, information operations, direct action, and state-sized propaganda operations. This is work that the government has stated on many occasions needs to remain with the agencies that can be held responsible to the public – and not to private companies that aren’t. .- From Mint News “How Intel for Hire Undermines US Intelligence

Intel Community Betrayal at Every Level

When we look at the Intel community as a whole and the agencies under the ODNI, how are we not betrayed? While there are real public servants in the Intelligence services, the trend is toward criminality and the leadership that deceived the public and violated their oaths of office.

As an example, DNI James Clapper’s admission the only proof he had of Russian influence on the 2016 election was Hillary Clinton (HRC) losing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. “It stretches credulity to conclude that Russian activity didn’t swing voter decisions.”

That’s it that’s all. It would have been better if there was collusion if there was a Russian hack. Instead, it was part of an Information Operation that US Intelligence agency heads were in on.

The Information Operation (IO) detailed in the last installment is the single largest example of this known today. If you want to know what collusion is, start there.

Private contractors and political activists have taken it upon themselves to change the government in the United States of America. The private contractors are in the Intelligence field and work both for the government and the conspirators trying to overthrow the type of government the United States currently has.

How else can the existence of the IO coup be explained? The most extensive regime change operation by private contractors is going on in the US for 3 years and the ODNI, CIA, FBI, DOD, NSA, with budgets bigger than the next largest countries militaries, can’t find it or figure out what happened?

What is billed as the crime of the century is swept under the rug as far as investigations go? The DNC hack and Russian influence game tore at the fabric of the country. Is it because former FBI head Robert Mueller’s protégé started the newest dilettante mega-corporation in the spy game? Shawn Henry’s Crowdstrike just happened to be in a position to fabricate extensive and childish fables about the DNC, Podesta, and RNC hacks.

Remember, before it was Ruskies, according to Crowdstrike, it was Bernie Sanders stepping on HRC servers.

Let’s reverse the angle and expose the criminals.

If those crimes did happen under their watch Comey, Clapper and company should have been fired for incompetence because of all the information available to them at the time.

When did an actual crime occur according to ODNI agencies about the 2016 election? The crime occurred in December 2018 when the agency heads figured out their welcome was worn out with the incoming administration.

The above named were already working for the privatized 1% while still on government payrolls. They may not have gotten paid but they turned around and towed the narrative from that period forward. The wiretaps at Trump towers are ample proof of this.

Because HRC lost an election in states that had swing populations of bloc voters that hate HRC, the Russians did it, Mr. Clapper?

Reality dictates Clapper along with Comey, McCabe, Page, and company was willfully part of a conspiracy paid for by the lobbyist groups working to benefit a politician and supported by a foreign country (Ukraine) to overthrow the 2016 US elections. This started during the primaries and continued in the background throughout the election.

When this didn’t work out, the plan switched gears and became a full-court press to discredit and overthrow the presidency itself. Now keep in mind the infrastructure for the coup was put in place before Donald Trump declared his candidacy. It is a coup against the presidency.

The private Intel corporations that brought us the failed Hamilton 68 Russian catcher (courtesy of Michael Chertoff) and other media information war games are the only game in town for the likes of James Clapper, meaning there has to be some kind of lucrative life for a master spy.

The ODNI under Clapper and FBI leadership under Comey went all in for the conspiracy to overthrow the presidency after November 2016.

Why this happened and how this happened is the most dangerous game on the planet today. With the background articles 1-7 of the series in place, the explanation of why they did it became a matter of understanding process and people.

Like Joel Harding, they wanted more action but by playing the private spy game they didn’t have to color inside the lines anymore. Private Intel, IO, Espionage, and boots on the ground companies paint the lines as they go and pay for the lines to be moved as needed.

Those in the agencies or companies that went along with this because it was their job or worse, knowing they could make money lying to the press, public, and the in the PDB, must be investigated and dealt with in the harshest terms.

The reason is simple. You are the game they play. There aren’t enough bad guy countries on ten planet earths to support the game or generate the revenues consistently. That’s on September 26, 2019.

The agencies tasked with spying, IO, Infowar, Cyberwar, war, diplomacy, etc are all beyond compromised. Add in the almost complete ownership of media by stakeholders in these companies and you have a recipe for the end of everything we know.

Right now, they are keen on overthrowing the presidency. If successful, it won’t matter which party is seated in the Oval Office. Just take a position they don’t like.

Right now, they are set on controlling public opinion and political ideology. Most of the people gravitating into these fields in the private sector are politically and emotionally undeveloped. They understand the violence they are willing to bring the populace and the rush it gives them.

War and Peace

While all this is going on, at the same time, the agencies staffed with the same contractors are delivering intelligence that is supposed to be filtered. A neutral report is supposed to be written by the agency in charge before it is delivered into the presidential daily briefing (PDB). The PDB is the most important document produced because of its impact on the world daily.

From the PDB, the president of the United States decides:

•           Who is the enemy?

•           Who is friendly (or are there really any friends out there)?

•           Who is a danger and how?

•           Why are they a danger?

•           What is their motivation?

•           What steps will the US need to take to stop them, turn them in a different direction, or make peace with them?

What happens when the PDB is written by agency personnel or private contractors that want to destroy or embarrass the United States or the sitting president?

How bad does your politics have to be to be OK with starting wars for the sake of your undeveloped ego? It’s going on as we speak.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the reported incidents of NSA employees’ violations of the law are likely “the tip of the iceberg” of lax data safeguards. The laws guiding the NSA’s spying authority in the first place are a bigger issue, he said. “If you only focus on instances in which the NSA violated those laws, you’re missing the forest for the trees,” Jaffer said. “The bigger concern is not with willful violations of the law but rather with what the law itself allows.”

The US government must bring these services back in house. The stakes are too high for the entire world not to. Americans are first on the plate for private Intel today. If you don’t think so, disagree with one of them.

Whistle Blowing Ukrainians

In what turns out to be one of the most fortuitous events in recent history, Donald Trump’s whistleblower source is in Ukraine. The whistleblower, according to a Ukrainian SBU source is Ukrainian. Lightning has struck again in the same spot for the thousandth time.

The same Ukrainian Intel and hacking groups are at it again.

According to the Hill, A whistleblower complaint released by the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday alleges that President Trump sought to enlist Ukraine’s help in the 2020 election by mounting a corruption investigation against former Vice President Joe Biden.

The declassified version of the whistleblower complaint details the government insider’s worries about Trump’s contacts with Ukraine’s leader, revelations of which on Tuesday triggered a formal impeachment inquiry against the president.

Now that we have the charge in place, the actual phone call showed…Ukraine’s Zelenskiy is about to have difficult days in Kiev with the nationalists there. US President Trump had a phone call and made no threats or conveyed anything to intimidate Zelenskiy.

September 24, 2019 MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE GENERAL COUNSEL OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Rather, the complaint arises out of a confidential diplomatic communication between the

President and a foreign leader that the intelligence-community complainant received secondhand…An “employee of an element of the intelligence community” (or an

intelligence-community contractor)…

The complainant describes a hearsay report that the President, who is not a member of the intelligence community, abused his authority or acted

unlawfully in connection with foreign diplomacy.

According to the New York Times– The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity.

The man has since returned to the C.I.A., the people said. Little else is known about him. His complaint made public Thursday suggested he was an analyst by training and made clear he was steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law.

The C.I.A. officer did not work on the communications team that handles calls with foreign leaders, according to the people familiar with his identity. He learned about Mr. Trump’s conduct “in the course of official interagency business,” according to the complaint, which was dotted with footnotes about machinations in Kiev and reinforced with public comments by senior Ukrainian officials.

What seems to be the common denominators pertinent to the larger story? We have a lone gun Intel guy working on his own listening to rumors spun by whom?

It seems he was talking to Ukrainians in Kiev. There are a lot of Ukrainians in Kiev and quite a few in the Ukrainian government.

What we need to do to find the original source of the rumor is answer a couple simple questions.

Who in Kiev wants to destroy US President Donald Trump as a favor to Democratic Party allies they work with?

Who in Kiev wants to destroy newly elected president of Ukraine Zelenskiy?

Who in Kiev has the Intel capabilities and sophistication to listen in on government phone calls?

Those questions narrow the field down considerably. There is the opportunity aspect to consider with this too. How many people can listen in on a phone call with a foreign leader?

Lucky for us there is an international Information Operation (IO) going on to unseat US President Trump. This simplifies the field and cuts it down to anyone in Milestone March 1, 2014 from the Coup Against the President article.

That narrows it down to a small handful of disgruntled ultra-nationalist Ukrainians. To get to the absolute right person all that needs to happen is to extradite InformNapalm publisher Roman Burko, Deputy Information Minister Dimitri Zolotukin, and Christina Dobrovolska who supervise them. Christina left the operation 2 months ago but she has a lot of insight and likes visiting the USA.

Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat can be taken into custody as a material witness because of the vast amount of work his firm does the Ukrainian hacker Intel groups in Ukraine and Syria.

Aric Toler is in the US and will definitely provide useful insight although he’s a little timid around the most likely candidate for this, a hacker that goes by @UCA_ruhate_.

RUH8 or UCA_ruhate_  has been very vocal about his disdain for Zelenskiy and wants to hurt his presidency. These groups are familiar with how the US Congress works because they already have testimony on the Congressional record. Refer to Benchmark DNC Hacks

Alexandra Chalupa has a lot of experience with the same Intel groups. She used them to do OppoResearch for the 2016 election as shown in Milestone June 2016.

I’m sure with this caliber of help, all the information needed will come out.

The next thing to look at is who’s pushing the defense fund page for the unknown informer? It is the Ukrainian Diaspora Democratic party HRC advisor @AdamParkhomenko among other Diaspora members.

Adam worked with the Ukrainian hacker Intel groups at team Hillary and the Atlantic Council digital Sherlock program. His stint with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian hackers made memories to last a lifetime.

In the interest of justice for people of all political stripes and a return to sanity, the Intel community monster needs to be put in a glass cage isolated from society. Criminals among them have to be prosecuted.

9/11: the deep state false flag that keeps on condoning Western terrorism at home and around the world

September 20, 2019

By: Jeff J. Brown for The Saker Blog

11 September 2019

Crosslinked with:

https://youtu.be/8k6jjP1Ez0E

https://soundcloud.com/44-days/911-the-deep-state-false-flag-that-keeps-on-condoning-western-terrorism-at-home-and-around-the-world

Pictured above: In 2010, I saw this 23-second clip of the 52-story World Trade Center 7 collapsing and was gob smacked. As a certified science teacher with a good knowledge of physics, I could tell it was brought down by controlled demolition, with thermite cuts seen and heard on the face of the building, during its six-second freefall – saying to myself, “What the fugg?”. Unlike Harry Potter, you can’t suspend universal laws of physics. It was the beginning of my long and painful journey into the dark, evil heart of Western empire. As much as the bitter truth hurts, I’ve never looked back.

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do. – Bertrand Russell

In Book #2 of The China Trilogy, China Rising, I completely destroyed the official story about what happened on September 11, 2001. I am a certified science teacher and understand physics well. In 2010, after seeing the above clip of the 52-story WTC 7 coming down in free fall by controlled demolition, it was like becoming an actor in a Sherlock Holmes murder thriller. When one alibi is destroyed, the whole caper eventually gets exposed to the white light of truth. Unfortunately in this case, the culprits have not been brought to justice – yet.

After years of research and thousands of hours of investigation, I discovered just how evil and psychopathic Western elites really are, in their lust for power, property, capital and resources. To those ends, they pummel world citizens into fearful sheeple, with an endless cascade of false flag “terrorism” and “mass shootings”. No one wants to admit the bitter truth, but I refuse to live the rest of my life as a brainwashed, heavily-in-debt, super-consuming, useful idiot. We only get one chance on this planet and since 2010, my head has been held high.

The West’s neocons had been howling for years for a new Pearl Harbor (Project for the New American Century – PNAC) to shock the people into accepting global warfare on resource rich countries across Asia, from North Korea in the East to Libya in the West. Remember full spectrum dominance and George W. Bush’s grotesque “Axis of Evil”? With 9/11, these elite perps got the cowed public’s carte blanche to massacre, starve and sanction countless millions, destroy and occupy countries of their choosing, in order to steal the locals’ resources, plunder public treasuries for trillions of dollars and euros, via inflated “security” and corrupt arms contracts. A quick look at today’s headlines and world map shows just how lethal 9/11 was and is for millions of dark-skinned, mostly Muslim innocents around the world.

George Orwell wrote that the fascism of empire overseas always comes back to the home countries, to keep the natives just as oppressed as the colonies. It’s the only way the capitalist class can keep on robbing the citizens blind, as they are slowly driven into poverty and despair. Thus, 9/11 gave the elites the perceived mandate to shred civil and legal rights across Eurangloland. Using 9/11 as a wrecking ball, the Patriot Act and successive National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAA) have suborned Western constitutions into hollow charades. Your governments can detain you, search you and your property, seize your property, torture, disappear and kill you, with the stroke of a pen and without a shred of evidence. You are just getting a taste of Western, dystopian, police state destitution and government orchestrated propaganda, fear and loathing. It is going to get much, much worse. Hats off to author Suzanne Collins for her Hunger Games books. Art imitating life. That’s exactly where Euranglolanders are heading. Welcome to Panem, bay-bee.

Cui bono 9/11? Not you, that’s for sure. If you still cling to the absurd conspiracy theory that a gaggle of amateur Arabs with box cutters shut down the U.S.’s entire North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), you are in the dwindling minority. Latest polls show that a majority of Americans think their government is hiding the truth about 9/11. Well, DUH!

Alea iacta est. The die is cast and unfortunately, much damage has already been done, both at home and abroad. But with eyes wide open, we can all hope for an eventual Nuremburg-style crimes-against-humanity court to seek necessary justice and cloture, then we can work towards a more noble future for all of humankind.

Quit being a dupe and a patsy. The truth shall set you free. With dignity and awareness, you can hold your head high.

Jeff J. Brown is the author of The China Trilogy (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/06/30/praise-for-the-china-trilogy-the-votes-are-in-it-r-o-c-k-s-what-are-you-waiting-for/), blogs and podcasts at www.chinarising.puntopress.com. His forthcoming book, Faster than a Speeding Bullet – the Chinese People’s Unstoppable Socialist Dream for Global Leadership into the 22^nd Century, will be released in December, 2020.

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The Dancing Israelis: FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks

September 10th, 2019

By Whitney Webb Whitney Webb 

NEW YORK — For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Shortly after 8:46 a.m. on the day of the attacks, just minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, five men — later revealed to be Israeli nationals — had positioned themselves in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers and “high fiving” each other. At least one eyewitness interviewed by the FBI had seen the Israelis’ van in the parking lot as early as 8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the attack. The story received coverage in U.S. mainstream media at the time but has since been largely forgotten.

The men — Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari — were subsequently apprehended by law enforcement and claimed to be Israeli tourists on a “working holiday” in the United States where they were employed by a moving company, Urban Moving Systems. Upon his arrest, Sivan Kurzberg told the arresting officer, “We are Israeli; we are not your problem. Your problems are our problems, The Palestinians are the problem.”

For years, the official story has been that these individuals, while they had engaged in “immature” behavior by celebrating and being “visibly happy” in their documenting of the attacks, had no prior knowledge of the attack. However, newly released FBI copies of the photos taken by the five Israelis strongly suggest that these individuals had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The copies of the photos were obtained via a FOIA request made by a private citizen.

A high-quality photo, top, shows the area the dancing Israelis were staged. Credit | Panamza

According to a former high-ranking American intelligence official who spoke to the Jewish Daily Forward in 2002, the FBI concluded in its investigation that the five Israelis arrested “were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, NJ, served as a front.” At least two of the men arrested were determined to have direct links to the Mossad after their names appeared in a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives. According to one of their lawyers, one of the men, Paul Kurzberg, had previously worked for the Mossad in another country prior to arriving in the United States. Another of those arrested, Oded Ellner, subsequently stated on Israeli TV that the five Israelis had been in New York at the time “to document the event,” meaning the attack on the World Trade Center.

The FOIA release of the photos is notable because responses to prior FOIA requests to the Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, had previously claimed that all of the photos taken by the Israeli nationals had been destroyed in January 2014. The photos themselves are heavily redacted, making it impossible to see the Israelis’ facial expressions. However, previously declassified yet heavily redacted FBI reports state that the Israelis are “visibly happy” in nearly every photo, even when the burning towers are in the background. The photos released are also not original copies and instead appear to be photocopies of photocopies of the original pictures. In addition, of the original 76 pictures developed by authorities from the camera in the Israelis’ possession, only 14 were released.

Based on the impressions of the French website Panamza and subsequently MintPress, three of these photos — despite the heavy redaction and poor quality — appear damning. Since 2001, even though the photos were never released until now, it had been known that one of the Israelis arrested — Sivan Kurzberg — was seen in a photo “holding a lighted lighter in the foreground, with the smoldering wreckage [of the twin towers] in the background,” according to Steven Noah Gordon, then-lawyer for the five Israelis, as cited in a New York Times report from November 2001.

The picture of Kurzberg with the lit lighter appears to be photo #5 in the new FOIA release. Yet, the picture released includes a visible date of September 10, 2001, the day before the attacks, as do two other photos — images #7 and #8 in the collection — whereas all other photos with dates show only the month and the year (9 ‘01). The FOIA release did not provide any information as to the apparent discrepancy in dates.

While this could be explained away as the camera in question being programmed with a slightly inaccurate date, that doesn’t seem to be the case for two reasons. First, only three out of the 14 pictures appear to carry that date and, second, previously declassified FBI reports report an eyewitness adamantly stating that Sivan Kurzberg had visited the Doric Apartments on September 10, 2001 at around 3 p.m. with at least one other man, with whom he was conversing in a foreign language, and had identified himself as a “construction worker” to a tenant (page 61 of declassified FBI report).

Sivan Kurzberg holds a lit lighter with the Manhattan skyline in the background. The date September 10, 2001 visible in the bottom right corner | Photo #5

In addition, the FBI report noted that a van from Urban Moving Systems, the company that employed the five Israelis at the time of their arrest, was present and was involved in moving a tenant out of the complex on September 10 and that the movers all had foreign accents. Thus, images 5, 7 and 8 may have been taken at the same complex a day before the attacks.

This raises two possibilities. First, that there are two images of Kurzberg with a lit lighter in front of the towers, one taken before the attack and one taken at the time of the attack, and that the FBI released only one of them. Second, that Kurzberg took the picture with the lighter only the day before the attack and his lawyer misrepresented the contents of the photo to the New York Times. Given that the background of the photo — particularly the state of the towers — is indiscernible in the recently released photo, it is difficult to determine which is the case.

One of the Israelis points to what is presumably the World Trade Center, in Manhattan on September 11, 2001 | Photo #2

However, other analysts have interpreted the photos quite differently. For instance, Ryan Dawson, formerly of Newsbud, cited the police report that details the clothing of some of the Israelis at the time of their arrest and used that to link identities to the redacted faces in the pictures. He believes that the Israeli holding the lighter is not Sivan Kurzberg, but his brother Paul. Meanwhile, the person who filed the FOIA request that resulted in the picture’s release, who wished to remain anonymous, thought that Omer Marmari was more likely to be the man with the lighter.

Both have stated that all pictures were likely to have been taken on the day of the attacks. One reason given for the appearance of the date of September 10, 2001 in only some of the photos is due to the heavy editing, which rendered it invisible in the remaining photos. Dawson asserted that the incorrect date was due to the Israelis’ panicking when they were pulled over and attempting to edit the date and hour on the camera upon the arrest in an effort to hide the evidence. Another explanation put forth is that it was the result of a camera configuration error.

Given the highly redacted and edited nature of the pictures, what is most notable of all is the fact of what is not seen (i.e. edited out) in the photos. Clearly, there was an interest in preventing the public from seeing the state of the towers at the time of the photos were taken and also in preventing the public from seeing the facial expressions of the Israelis, despite it being known from the FBI report that they are “visibly happy” and “jovial.” The state of the towers being edited out is particularly telling.

As to whether any of the Israelis knew of the attacks in advance, the relevant section of the FBI report that asks “1. Did the Israeli nationals have foreknowledge of the events at WTC and were they filming the events prior to and in anticipation of the explosion?” is notably redacted in its entirety, suggesting that the FBI did not determine the answer to that question to be an emphatic “no.”

 

One of the 9/11 loose-ends coverups?

If images 5 and 7 were indeed taken the day prior to the attack, the question then becomes why the FBI officially concluded that the arrested Israelis had no prior knowledge of the attacks? One report from ABC News dated June 2002 suggests that the Bush administration intervened in the investigation. That report states that “Israeli and U.S. government officials worked out a deal — and after 71 days, the five Israelis were taken out of jail, put on a plane, and deported back home [to Israel].” If the Bush administration had cut a deal with Israel’s government to cover up the incident, it certainly would not have been the first time a U.S. presidential administration had done so on Israel’s behalf.

Further evidence that higher-ups in the administration intervened is the fact that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft personally signed off on the detainees’ release. Upon his entering the private sector as a lobbyist and consultant in 2005, the Israeli government became one of Ashcroft’s first clients.

A cover-up certainly seems to have happened to some extent, between the destruction of records of the investigation and the fact that official conclusions of the investigation do not add up. In the latter case, the FBI  — in a file dated September 24, 2001– officially stated that they “determined that none of the Israelis were actively engaged in clandestine intelligence activities in the United States.” However, that conclusion was directly contradicted by U.S. officials a year later and by the fact that Israel’s own government subsequently acknowledged that the five Israelis had indeed been involved in “clandestine intelligence activities in the United States.”

In addition, the new FOIA release of the photos suggests that another FBI conclusion — that “none of the pictures developed from the film found inside the 35-mm camera depicted the twin towers prior to the attack” — was inaccurate. This may explain why the images released via the recent FOIA request were heavily edited leaving details in the background greatly obscured, making it impossible to determine whether the photos were taken prior to or during the attacks based solely on the state of the towers.

 

“Tourists” with cash-stuffed socks, box cutters, and explosives?

Beyond the photos and observed activities of the so-called “Dancing Israelis,” it is worth revisiting several other suspicious circumstances linked to their arrest that clearly show that the men in question were hardly the “tourists” they had claimed to be. One often cited example is the fact that one of the men, Oded Ellner, had a “white sock-like sack filled with $4,700 in cash,” as well as maps of the city with certain places highlighted, and box cutters. In addition, the van in which the Israelis were arrested was “oddly” lacking “equipment typically used in a moving company’s daily duties,” according to the FBI, and residue of explosives was found in the van.

Of the explosive residue, the declassified FBI report states:

A search of the van and individuals was conducted at the time of the vehicle stop. The vehicle was also searched by a trained bomb-sniffing dog which yielded a positive result for the presence of explosive traces. Swabs of the vehicle’s interior were taken, and those samples were sent to the FBI laboratory for further analysis. Final results are still pending.”

In total, the FBI reported that four items related to explosives were found in the ban and are labeled in the report as “Fabric Sample (Explosive Residue),” “Control Swabs – SA [ – ] Gloves,” “Control Swabs – (Bomb Suits),” and “Blanket Samples For Explosive Residue.” In addition, a VHS tape and some still photographs found in the van “were sent to Laboratory Examiner [ redacted ] (Explosives Unit).”

In addition to the strange nature of some of the Israelis’ possessions in the van and on their person, the company that employed them — Urban Moving Systems — was of special interest to the FBI, which concluded that the company was likely a “fraudulent operation.” Upon a search of the company’s premises, the FBI noted that “little evidence of a legitimate business operation was found.” The FBI report also noted that there were an “unusually large number of computers relative to the number of employees for such a fairly small business” and that “further investigation identified several pseudo-names or aliases associated with Urban Moving Systems and its operations.”

The FBI presence at the Urban Moving Systems search site drew the attention of the local media and was later reported on both television and in the local press. A former Urban Moving Systems employee later contacted the Newark Division with information indicating that he had quit his employment with Urban Moving Systems as a result of the high amount of anti-American sentiment present among Urban’s employees. The former employee stated that an Israeli employee of Urban had even once remarked, “Give us twenty years and we’ll take over your media and destroy your country” (page 37 of the FBI report).

The FBI returned to search the premises of Urban Moving Systems a month later, but by that time found:

The building and all of its contents had been abandoned by…the owner of Urban Moving Systems. This [was] apparently being done to avoid criminal prosecution after the 09/11/2001 arrest of five of his employees and subsequent seizure of his office computer systems by members of the FBI-NK on or around 09/13/2001.”

The company’s owner — Dominik Otto Suter, an Israeli citizen — had fled to Israel on September 14, 2001, two days after he had been questioned by the FBI. The FBI told ABC News that “Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation.” Surprisingly, since at least 2016, Suter has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works for a contractor for major tech companies like Google and Microsoft. According to the public records database Intelius, in 2006 and 2007 Suter also worked for a telecommunications company — Granite Telecommunications — that works for the U.S. military and several other U.S. government agencies.

In addition to Urban Moving Systems, another moving company, Classic International Movers, became of interest in connection with the investigation into the “Dancing Israelis,” which led to the arrest and detention of four Israeli nationals who worked for this separate moving company. The FBI’s Miami Division had alerted the Newark Division that Classic International Movers was believed to have been used by one of the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers before the attack, and one of the “Dancing Israelis” had the number for Classic International Movers written in a notebook that was seized at the time of his arrest. The report further states that one of the Israelis of Classic International Movers who was arrested “was visibly disturbed by the Agents’ questioning regarding his personal email account.”

 

A crowded dance floor

While the case of the “Dancing Israelis” has long been treated as an outlier in the aftermath of September 11, what is often overlooked is the fact that hundreds of Israeli nationals were arrested in the aftermath of the attacks.

According to a FOX News report from December 2001, 60 Israelis were apprehended or detained after September 11, with most deported, and a total of 140 Israelis were arrested and detained in all of 2001 by federal authorities. That report claimed that the arrests, ostensibly including the “Dancing Israelis,” were in relation to an investigation of “an organized [Israeli] intelligence gathering operation designed to ‘penetrate government facilities.’”

The report also added that most of those arrested, in addition to having served in the IDF, had “intelligence expertise” and worked for Israeli companies that specialized in wiretapping. Some of those detained were also active members of the Israeli military; and several detainees, including the “Dancing Israelis,” had failed polygraph tests when asked if they had been surveilling the U.S. government.

Watch | FOX News December 2001 report on Mossad spying prior to 9/11

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A key aspect of that report, compiled by journalist Carl Cameron, also states that federal investigators widely suspected that Israeli intelligence had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks. In the report, Cameron stated:

The Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are ‘tie-ins’ but when asked for details he flatly refused to describe them saying: ‘Evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about the evidence that has been gathered. It is classified information.’”

One exchange between Cameron and host Brit Hume included in the report is particularly telling:

HUME: “Carl, what about this question of advanced knowledge of what was going to happen on 9/11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?”

CAMERON: “Well it’s very explosive information obviously and there is a great deal of evidence that they say they have collected. None of it necessarily conclusive. It’s more when they put it all together a big question they say is, ‘How could they have not known?’ — almost a direct quote, Brit.”

However, it is essential to note that Israeli intelligence did attempt to warn the U.S. government at least twice beginning in August 2001 as did the intelligence agencies of many other countries, including France, the UK, Egypt, Russia and Jordan. Yet, no people connected to any other intelligence agency other than Israel were caught celebrating the attacks as they took place in the area nor were accused by mainstream media of operating a large spy ring within the U.S. at the time. One theory to explain this discrepancy is that the Mossad elements of which the “Dancing Israelis” and other alleged Israeli spies could have been part of a specific section of Israeli intelligence that were acting independently as a rogue agency. Such a possibility is not unusual given that divisions of or groups within the CIA have been known to “go rogue” on several occasions.

 

9/11 as a big — and acknowledged — Israeli win

If the “Dancing Israelis”, and more broadly the Mossad and the Israeli government, had foreknowledge of September 11, why would they remain silent and not attempt to warn the American government or public of the coming attacks? In the case of the “Dancing Israelis,” why would Israelis celebrate such an attack?

One of the detained “Dancing Israelis,” Omer Marmari, told police the following about why he viewed the September 11 attacks in a positive light:

Israel now has hope that the world will now understand us. Americans are naïve and America is easy to get inside. There are not a lot of checks in America. And now America will be tougher about who gets into their country.”

While Marmari’s statement may suggest one reason some of the “Dancing Israelis” were so “visibly happy” in their photographs, there are also other statements made by top Israeli politicians that suggest why the Israeli government and its intelligence agency declined to act on apparent foreknowledge of the attack.

When asked, on the day of the 9/11 attacks, how the attacks would affect American-Israeli relations, Benjamin Netanyahu — the current Israeli prime minister — told the New York Times that “It’s very good,” before quickly adding “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” He then predicted, much as Marmari had, that the attacks would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”

Netanyahu, in a candid conversation recorded in 2001, also echoed Marmari’s claim that Americans are naïve. In that recording, Netanyahu said:

I know what America is. America is something that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction. … They won’t get in our way. They won’t get in our way… 80 percent of the Americans support us. It’s absurd.”

In addition, also on the day of the September 11 attacks, Netanyahu — who at the time was not in political office — held a press conference in which he claimed that he had predicted the attacks on the World Trade Center by “militant Islam” in his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism. In that book, Netanyahu had posited that Iranian-linked “militants” would set off a nuclear bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center.

During his press conference on the day of the attacks, Netanyahu also asserted that the 9/11 attacks would be a turning point for America and compared them to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Netanyahu’s statement echoes the infamous line from the “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” document authored by the neoconservative think tank, the Project for a New Ameican Century (PNAC). That line reads. “Further, the process of transformation [towards a neo-Reaganite foreign policy and hyper-militarism], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Then again, years later In 2008, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported that Netanyahu had stated that the September 11 attacks had greatly benefited Israel. He was quoted as saying:

“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”

Indeed, it goes without saying that the aftermath of 9/11 — which involved the U.S. leading a destructive effort throughout the Middle East — has indeed benefited Israel. Many of the U.S.’ post-9/11 “nation-building” efforts have notably mirrored the policy paper “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” which was authored by American neoconservatives — PNAC members among them — for Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister.

That document calls for the creation of a “New Middle East” by, among other things, “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria” and “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” As is known now, both of those main objectives have since come to pass, each with strong Israeli involvement.

Update | This article was updated to include and accommodate alternative analyses of the newly released photos as well information on Israeli intelligence warnings to the U.S. prior to September 11, 2001 that came to the attention of MintPress after initial its publication.

Feature photo | Four of the Israeli nationals arrested for “puzzling behavior” during the September 11 attacks are seen casually posing together in front of the Manhattan skyline while the September 11 attacks were in progress | Photo #1

Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

Trump Refuses to Accuse “Israel” of Placing Spy Devices near WH

 

By Staff- Agencies

The US government has concluded within the past two years that “Israel” has been placing surveillance devices near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, DC, according to a US media outlet.

In contrast to other instances of foreign spying, however, US President Donald Trump’s administration has not rebuked “Israel”, and there were no consequences for the regime’s behavior, Politico reported on Thursday, citing three former senior US officials with knowledge of the matter.

The phone eavesdropping devices, called IMSI-catcher, or stingrays, are essentially a “fake” mobile towers used for intercepting mobile phone traffic and tracking location data of mobile phone users.

The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates – though it’s not clear whether the “Israeli” efforts were successful.

Trump is reputed to be lax in observing White House security protocols. POLITICO reported in May 2018 that the president often used an insufficiently secured cell phone to communicate with friends and confidants.

The New York Times subsequently reported in October 2018 that “Chinese spies are often listening” to Trump’s cell-phone calls, prompting the president to slam the story as “so incorrect I do not have time here to correct it.”

The report said that in May 2018, officials at the US Department of Homeland Security discovered evidence of the surveillance devices around the US capital, but weren’t able to attribute the devices to specific entities.

However, based on a detailed forensic analysis, the FBI and other intelligence agencies working on the case felt confident that “Israeli” agents had placed the devices, according to the report.

“Israeli” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office issued a statement on the report, calling the accusation “a blatant lie.”

A spokesperson for “Israel’s” embassy in Washington, Elad Strohmayer, also denied that Israel placed the devices. “These allegations are absolute nonsense. Israel doesn’t conduct espionage operations in the United States, period,” he said.

But former US officials with deep experience dealing with intelligence matters scoff at the “Israeli” claim.

One former senior intelligence official noted that after the FBI and other agencies concluded that the “Israelis” were most likely responsible for the devices, the Trump administration took no action to punish or even privately scold the “Israeli” government.

“The reaction … was very different than it would have been in the last administration,” this person said, adding, “With the current administration, there are a different set of calculations in regard to addressing this.”

The former senior intelligence official criticized how the administration handled the matter, remarking on the striking difference from past administrations, which likely would have at least issued a formal diplomatic reprimand to the foreign government condemning its actions.

“I’m not aware of any accountability at all,” said the former official.

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Gordon Thomas on Robert Maxwell/Mossad espionage project in the USA and beyond

SEPTEMBER 08, 2019 BY GILAD ATZMON

As time goes by it seems as if Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard was just the tip of the iceberg. America has been riddled and infiltrated by Israeli spies at the highest possible level for decades. You must listen to this interview with Gordon Thomas:

Watch the extended interview:

America’s Collapse: Asset Forfeiture

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Global Research, July 25, 2019

Readers aware that I, and Dmitry Orlov, have been chronicling America’s rapid decline ask me, “where did it all begin?”  To  answer that question would require a massive history such as Jacques Bazun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. All I can do for you is to show you recent evidence from our time.

Let’s begin an occasional series on the subject with asset forfeiture.  Asset forfeiture was one of those tactics that Sir Thomas More warned against in the play, “A Man for All Seasons.” Cutting down a protective feature of law in order to better chase after devils exposes the innocent to injustice along with the guilty.  The devil was the Mafia.  Asset forfeiture originated as a way to prevent gangsters from using their ill-gotten gains to hire better lawyers to defend them than the US Justice Department could hire to prosecute them.  In effect, gangsters were denied the use of their money in their defense. This was the beginning of an unconstitutional assault on private property and due process, but the judiciary, desiring that the Mafia be imprisoned, ignored their constitutional responsibility. The judges joined in the chase after devils.

A next step was to go further in the “war on drugs” and confiscate the property of those suspected of drug crimes.  The Comprehensive Forfeiture Act of 1984 declared forfeitable all real property, including any right, title or interest in anything associated in any way with the commission of a drug crime. 

As I have stressed and as legal scholars formerly stressed, the law unfolds to the limit of its logic.  Innocent people have had their cars confiscated because they picked up a hitch-hiker who was in possession of drugs discovered in a police stop.  Federal agents have confiscated real estate on the grounds of which they conducted a “drug sting.”  As one of the participants in the sting committed a crime, the property chosen for the sting can be confiscated on the grounds that the property  “facilitated a drug crime.”  Multimillionaire Donald Scott was shot dead by police in his home on his 200-acre estate in Malibu, California, because of a conspiracy to seize Mr. Scott’s home on the theory that there was “probable cause” to think that the heir to a vast European chemical and cosmetic fortune was growing marijuana somewhere on his estate (The Tyranny of Good Intentions, pp. 117-120).

“Cash Cops”: How Civil Forfeiture Enriched US Law Enforcement

Asset forfeiture soon jumped beyond drug crimes to all crimes.  A family lost their motel because a prostitute rented a room in which she conducted her business.  The motel had unknowingly “faciliated a crime.”  Asset forfeiture permits a person’s property to be confiscated even though the owner was not a participant in the crime and had no knowledge of the crime.

There have been vast numbers of innocent American tax-paying victims of police stealing their property under asset forfeiture law. Over the years I have reported cases, and Lawrence Stratton and I addressed police theft from the innocent public in The Tyranny of Good Intentions published in 2000 and a new edition in 2008.  The injustice done to so many Americans is one cost of asset forfeiture laws.  The criminalization of police departments is another cost.

Local TV stations in Tennessee, for example, have reported many instances of police from different local jurisdictions fighting over seizure rights on different stretches of Interstate 40.  The police stop cars with out-of-state tags, search the cars and passengers, and if they find cash in the amount of $100 or greater the police confiscate it on the grounds that the amount indicates the selling of drugs or the intended purchase of drugs. On other pretexts the police seize the cars leaving the family on foot in a strange land.

In The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Larry Stratton and I tell the story of Selena Washington who was stopped on I-95 in Florida on her way to purchase construction materials to repair her hurricane-damaged home. She doubted the building materials company would accept a large check from a black woman and had with her the insurance settlement of $19,000 in cash.  Police had set up roadblocks in order to rob people and confiscated her money without even taking her name. With the aid of an attorney and proof of insurance settlement, she was able to recover $15,000 or 79% of her money.  To get her money back, she had to agree that the police could keep $4,000.  I don’t know what the attorney’s fees were. Most likely, the bandit police prevented the full restoration of her home, just as when the police steal a person’s car they prevent the person from going to work and earning a living. Is the person still responsible for car payments when their car is stolen by police?

Clearly, neither the police nor the local governments that allegedly oversee the police are concerned  about the career-destroying impositions, along with the deaths, that they impose on the people who pay their salaries. Why do the idiot “law and order conservatives” romanticize the police?  How utterly stupid can a person be?

The Orlando Sentinel investigated police stops in Volusia County, Florida, and concluded that the police had used pretexts to confiscate tens of thousands of dollars from motorists.  Only four of the motorists managed to get all of their money back.

Despite massive police abuse, or is it merely enforcement, of forfeiture laws, the practice continues to expand.  The public acceptance of police as criminal organizations has resulted in new schemes for stealing people’s property.  Police stop motorists and on any number of pretexts impound their car. Impound and storage fees rapidly mount, making it impossible for anyone other than a well-to-do person to recover their car.  The cars are then sold to a contractor. The August 2019 issue of Car and Driver describes how this works in Chicago.  It is a tale of banditry.  And it goes on right in front of our eyes, and nothing is done about it.

When the police who are paid by the public to “serve and protect” instead rob and murder without accountibility, not even insouciant Americans can deny the devastating evidence of American legal, political and societal collapse.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Global Research, 2019

Did Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein Work for Mossad?

By Philip M. Giraldi

July 12, 2019 “Information Clearing House” –  The extent of Israeli spying directed against the United States is a huge story that is only rarely addressed in the mainstream media. The Jewish state regularly tops the list for ostensibly friendly countries that aggressively conduct espionage against the U.S. and Jewish American Jonathan Pollard, who was imprisoned in 1987 for spying for Israel, is now regarded as the most damaging spy in the history of the United States.

Last week I wrote about how Israeli spies operating more-or-less freely in the U.S. are rarely interfered with, much less arrested and prosecuted, because there is an unwillingness on the part of upper echelons of government to do so. I cited the case of Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood movie producer who had a secret life that included stealing restricted technology in the United States to enable development of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, something that was very much against U.S. interests. Milchan was involved in a number of other thefts as well as arms sales on behalf of the Jewish state, so much so that his work as a movie producer was actually reported to be less lucrative than his work as a spy and black-market arms merchant, for which he operated on a commission basis.

That Milchan has never been arrested by the United States government or even questioned about his illegal activity, which was well known to the authorities, is just one more manifestation of the effectiveness of Jewish power in Washington, but a far more compelling case involving possible espionage with major political manifestations has just re-surfaced. I am referring to Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire Wall Street “financier” who has been arrested and charged with operating a “vast” network of underage girls for sex, operating out of his mansions in New York City and Florida as well as his private island in the Caribbean, referred to by visitors as “Orgy Island.” Among other high-value associates, it is claimed that Epstein was particularly close to Bill Clinton, who flew dozens of times on Epstein’s private 727.

*(Alex Acosta (L) Jeffrey Epstein (R))

Epstein was arrested on July 8th after indictment by a federal grand jury in New York. It was more than a decade after Alexander Acosta, the top federal prosecutor in Miami, who is now President Trump’s secretary of labor, accepted a plea bargain involving similar allegations regarding pedophilia that was not shared with the accusers prior to being finalized in court. There were reportedly hundreds of victims, some 35 of whom were identified, but Acosta deliberately denied the two actual plaintiffs their day in court to testify before sentencing.

Acosta’s intervention meant that Epstein avoided both a public trial and a possible federal prison sentence, instead serving only 13 months of an 18-month sentence in the almost-no-security Palm Beach County Jail on charges of soliciting prostitution in Florida. While in custody, he was permitted to leave jail for sixteen hours six days a week to work in his office.

Epstein’s crimes were carried out in his $56 million Manhattan mansion and in his oceanside villa in Palm Beach Florida. Both residences were equipped with hidden cameras and microphones in the bedrooms, which Epstein reportedly used to record sexual encounters between his high-profile guests and his underage girls, many of whom came from poor backgrounds, who were recruited by procurers to engage in what was euphemistically described as “massages” for money. Epstein apparently hardly made any effort to conceal what he was up to: his airplane was called the “Lolita Express.”

The Democrats are calling for an investigation of the Epstein affair, as well as the resignation of Acosta, but they might well wind up regretting their demands. Trump, the real target of the Acosta fury, apparently did not know about the details of the plea bargain that ended the Epstein court case. Bill and Hillary Clinton were, however, very close associates of Epstein. Bill, who flew on the “Lolita Express” at least 26 times, could plausibly be implicated in the pedophilia given his track record and relative lack of conventional morals. On many of the trips, Bill refused Secret Service escorts, who would have been witnesses of any misbehavior. On one lengthy trip to Africa in 2002, Bill and Jeffrey were accompanied by accused pedophile actor Kevin Spacey and a number of young girls, scantily clad “employees” identified only as “massage.” Epstein was also a major contributor to the Clinton Foundation and was present at the wedding of Chelsea Clinton in 2010.

With an election year coming up, the Democrats would hardly want the public to be reminded of Bill’s exploits, but one has to wonder where and how deep the investigation might go. There is also a possible Donald Trump angle. Though Donald may not have been a frequent flyer on the “Lolita Express,” he certainly moved in the same circles as the Clintons and Epstein in New York and Palm Beach, plus he is by his own words roughly as amoral as Bill Clinton. In June 2016, one Katie Johnson filed lawsuit in New York claiming she had been repeatedly raped by Trump at an Epstein gathering in 1993 when she was 13 years old. In a 2002 New York Magazine interview Trump said  “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy… he’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Selective inquiries into wrongdoing to include intense finger pointing are the name of the game in Washington, and the affaire Epstein also has all the hallmarks of a major espionage case, possibly tied to Israel. Unless Epstein is an extremely sick pedophile who enjoys watching films of other men screwing twelve-year-old girls the whole filming procedure smacks of a sophisticated intelligence service compiling material to blackmail prominent politicians and other public figures. Those blackmailed would undoubtedly in most cases cooperate with the foreign government involved to avoid a major scandal. It is called recruiting “agents of influence.” That is how intelligence agencies work and it is what they do.

That Epstein was perceived as being intelligence-linked was made clear in Acosta’s comments when being cleared by the Trump transition team. He was asked “Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” … “Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had ‘been told’ to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ‘I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.’”

Questions about Epstein’s wealth also suggest a connection with a secretive government agency with deep pockets. The New York Times reports that “Exactly what his money management operation did was cloaked in secrecy, as were most of the names of whomever he did it for. He claimed to work for a number of billionaires, but the only known major client was Leslie Wexner, the billionaire founder of several retail chains, including The Limited.”

But whose intelligence service? CIA and the Russian FSB services are obvious candidates, but they would have no particular motive to acquire an agent like Epstein. That leaves Israel, which would have been eager to have a stable of high-level agents of influence in Europe and the United States. Epstein’s contact with the Israeli intelligence service may have plausibly come through his associations with Ghislaine Maxwell, who allegedly served as his key procurer of young girls. Ghislaine is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, who died or possibly was assassinated in mysterious circumstances in 1991. Maxwell was an Anglo-Jewish businessman, very cosmopolitan in profile, like Epstein, a multi-millionaire who was very controversial with what were regarded as ongoing ties to Mossad. After his death, he was given a state funeral by Israel in which six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence listened while Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogized: “He has done more for Israel than can today be said”

*(Trump  (left) with Robert Maxwell (right) at an event.)

Epstein kept a black book identifying many of his social contacts, which is now in the hands of investigators. It included fourteen personal phone numbers belonging to Donald Trump, including ex-wife Ivana, daughter Ivanka and current wife Melania. It also included Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, Tony Blair, Jon Huntsman, Senator Ted Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, David Koch, Ehud Barak, Alan Dershowitz, John Kerry, George Mitchell, David Rockefeller, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomfield, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Elizabeth, Saudi King Salman and Edward de Rothschild.

Mossad would have exploited Epstein’s contacts, arranging their cooperation by having Epstein wining and dining them while flying them off to exotic locations, providing them with women and entertainment. If they refused to cooperate, it would be time for blackmail, photos and videos of the sex with underage women.

It will be very interesting to see just how far and how deep the investigation into Epstein and his activities goes. One can expect that efforts will be made to protect top politicians like Clinton and Trump and to avoid any examination of a possible Israeli role. That is the normal practice, witness the 9/11 Report and the Mueller investigation, both of which eschewed any inquiry into what Israel might have been up to. But this time, if it was indeed an Israeli operation, it might prove difficult to cover up the story since the pedophile aspect of it has unleashed considerable public anger from all across the political spectrum. Senator Chuck Schumer, self-described as Israel’s “protector” in the Senate, is loudly calling for the resignation of Acosta. He just might change his tune if it turns out that Israel is a major part of the story.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.

*(Top image: Left photo: Jeffrey Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, with Donald and Melania Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2000. Right photo: Ghislaine Maxwell at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. Credit: Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)

This article was originally published by “American Herald Tribune “-

Do you agree or disagree? Post your comment here

==See Also==

Ann Coulter Thinks Epstein Had a “State Sponsor” & Was Running a “Blackmailing” Operation

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal has found its way into Israel’s elections

Sources:

http://empireexposed.blogspot.com/2018/02/chapter-14-jeffrey-epstein-scandal.html

https://gawker.com/5021581/teen-loving-epsteins-own-client

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_7912/

https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/wexner-leslie-h

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB894240270899870000

https://larouchepub.com/other/2001/2844mega_bios.html

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/bush-visit-may-boost-olmert/76303/

https://freepress.org/article/wexner-war

https://theconsciousresistance.com/2019/02/the-evidence-for-jeffrey-epsteins-mossad-connection/

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Related

• Epstein 007
• Don’t Say Epstein
• Is Dershowitz Still Free? Pap and Seder on Epstein/Dershowitz (must watch)

Young Democrats break America’s biggest taboo – criticism of israel (apartheid state)

Young Democrats break America’s biggest taboo – criticism of Israel

US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (R) listens to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a rally for H.R. 1, or the We The People Act, on the East Steps of the US Capitol on March 08, 2019 in Washington, DC. (AFP photo)

Young Democratic stars like Tulsi Gabbard, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have broken America’s biggest taboo – calling out Israel for its oppression of Palestinians – according to Eric S. Margolis, an American journalist and writer.

“Saying anything negative about Israel has long been the third rail of US politics and media. Israel is our nation’s most sacred cow. Any questioning of its behavior brings furious charges of anti-Semitism and professional oblivion,” Margolis wrote.

He added that a number of US senators and congressmen “lost their positions after rebuking Israel for its mistreatment of Palestinians or daring to suggest that Israel had far too much influence in the US.”

The analyst pointed out that “journalists were not even allowed to write there was an ‘Israel lobby.’”

“Now, young Democratic stars Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a feisty congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, have suddenly broken the taboo and said what dared not be said: there is too much rightwing Israeli influence and there must be justice for Palestine,” he wrote.

“Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have come to the defense of Ilhan Omar against the usual charges that she is anti-Semitic. So have black groups and smaller liberal Jewish groups,” he noted.

“The Democratic Party, that once received half its financial support from Jewish sources, is badly split over the Palestine crisis,” he revealed.

Omar, a newly elected Democrat Congresswoman from Minnesota, has sparked a firestorm on Capitol Hill over repeated criticisms of Israel and the powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington that exerts great influence in US politics.

The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed a resolution condemning bigotry and hate after backlash from a number of factions across the Democratic Party forced changes to a bill that originally focused on anti-Semitism and remarks about Israel by Omar, whose legitimate criticism of Israel has been deemed anti-Semitic by some colleagues and exposed deep fault lines among Democrats.

PressTV-Furious row erupts over anti-Semitism in US Democrats

A furious row over anti-Semitism erupted in the Democratic Party on Wednesday as its leadership attempted to pass a resolution seen as condemning language used by one of its own members.

House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled the resolution, which she called the “strongest possible opposition” to anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and white supremacist bigotry.

Omar joined the two other Muslims in Congress, Rashida Tlaib and Andre Carson, in praising the measure’s passage.

“It’s the first time we have voted on a resolution condemning Anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation’s history,” they said, noting the worrying rise of extremism in America.

The resolution was initially pushed by Zionist organizations and some Jewish members of Congress to rebuke Omar for condemning the Israel lobby, but there was a heated backlash from fellow Democrats who said she was being unfairly singled out by the leadership.

Some Democratic senators in the upper chamber of Congress, including three 2020 presidential candidates Sanders, Warren and Harris, expressed frustration that Omar faced an implicit rebuke, while racist statements by President Donald Trump and other Republicans go largely unchallenged

It Is israel (apartheid state), Not Russia, That Interferes in US Political Life

It Is Israel, Not Russia, That Interferes in US Political Life

Paul Craig Roberts — paulcraigroberts.org March 7, 2019

Who Does Congress Represent?

Ilhan Omar is a brave woman.  She has embarrassed the corrupt Democratic Party that, together with the Republicans and many evangelical Christians, have sold out America to Israel.

More and more people have come out in her defense, refusing to be silenced by the criminal state of Israel.  Dr. Paul Kindlon explains what is at stake.

He accuses Congress of Treason if Congress legislates at the Israel Lobby’s insistence the death of the First Amendment.  Enough members of the House and Senate have been purchased by the Israel Lobby that the traitors will sell out the US Constitution for Israel’s interests if they can get away with it.

I Accuse Congress of Treason

Dr. Paul Kindlon

Let us be clear…the U.S. Congressional vote condemning criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Semitism – if it passes – will be an act of treachery of historical proportions. Do not be fooled – this is a move by politicians in the pocket of a foreign power to make censorship legal, ending two-hundred plus years of freedom of speech in our country.

I accuse the Congressional representatives who will vote for this resolution of being un-American and of spitting in the face of the founding fathers. It will truly be a dark day in our nation’s history and those responsible will be condemned and held in utter contempt by posterity.

I accuse the Congressional members who vote for this resolution to be traitors to their country and heritage. Men and women who knowingly, willingly and perversely trample upon our sacred first amendment – that uniquely democratic principle that has inspired so many countries to emulate us in order to enjoy the freedom to speak openly and freely.

I accuse the mainstream, corporate, media of aiding and abetting this crime against American democracy. Of turning its back on professional standards and practice. Presenting straight-forward news and balanced reporting have been abandoned because it makes far less money than providing PR and low-level entertainment. It’s all about the Benjamins and humiliating subservience to a foreign government.

I accuse the mainstream media of going tabloid, desecrating the cherished values of past journalists who stood for honesty and objectivity. Journalists who questioned authority and who did not kow-tow to power the way modern day fake journalists do. Like those perfidious members of Congress with fingers poised over the Yea button, these so – called journalists are traitors, as well.

I also accuse the Israeli government of undermining American democracy and weakening our civic society. For it is Israel – not Russia – that has meddled in our political process through AIPAC for many years. By doing so, Israel has acted in a duplicitous manner violating the trust of Americans who have so generously aided Israel for decades. Millions have fretted over the possibility that one powerful member of our government may be working in the interests of a foreign power, not realizing that literally hundreds of key government officials have been putting the interests of Israel over and above the interests of America and its citizens and are preparing to do so again.

And finally…I accuse the American public of being too passive in the face of such treacherous behavior from politicians and journalists who are bringing America straight down into the muck and mire of lies, greed and hypocrisy. The situation is dire. We know who the guilty parties are among us. The question is: what shall be done to punish those who are venal mercenaries –those politicians and journalists who will sell out their own country for thirty pieces of silver?

https://russia-insider.com/en/i-accuse-congress-treason-if-they-vote-yea-anti-semitism-question/ri26488

See also:

Congress Criticizes Ihlan Omar but Remains Silent About Israel’s Violence Against Palestinians

The obsession with US Congresswoman Ihlan Omar’s criticism of Israeli influence over American politics really is unique. And what makes this debate genuinely immoral is that it focuses on Omar’s words but ignores the killing and oppression of Palestinian civilians by Israel.

The Minnesota Congresswoman has been pilloried over the past few weeks for criticising members of Congress who take money from pro-Israel Political Action Committees (PACs) in exchange for political support for Israeli policies. Omar has also highlighted the ugly tendency for many pro-Israel activists and politicians to have an apparently greater loyalty to Israel, a foreign country, than they do to the United States.

As a journalist for nearly half century, I know it is a reality that PACs donate millions to congressmen and women specifically to influence their votes. So why is Omar’s legitimate criticism of donations by supporters of a foreign country, Israel, denounced viciously by Republicans and Democrats alike as an “an anti-Semitic trope”? This is the quid-pro-quo: literally, “something for something”. Translated from Latin into US politics it comes up as, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.

As I have written before, pro-Israel activists and the Congressmen and women they “buy” with their PAC donations have weaponised anti-Semitism, turning it into a political bludgeon rather than trying to suppress the racist hatred of Jews, although Arabs are Semites, too, by the way.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190307-congress-criticises-ihlan-omars-words-but-remains-silent-about-israels-violence/

And this:

American Jews, including prominent figures like Naomi Klein, have signed an open letter in support of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

The letter states that she has been “falsely accused of antisemitism” and that there was nothing anti-Semitic about calling out the “noxious” role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in American politics.

It went on to say that “The pro-Israel lobby has played an outsized role in producing nearly unanimous congressional support for Israel.”

The letter finished by saying “We thank Ilhan Omar for having the bravery to shake up the congressional taboo against criticizing Israel. As Jews with a long tradition of social justice and anti-racism, AIPAC does not represent us.” and called on other Jews to sign the letter.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190306-in-open-letter-jewish-americans-come-out-in-support-of-ilhan-omar/

Source

israel (apartheid state) Lobby Rebuts Omar’s Claims About Its Immense Influence By Exerting Its Immense Influence

Israel Lobby Rebuts Omar’s Claims About Its Immense Influence

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

In response to criticisms made by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar that US political leaders have too much allegiance to Israel and its lobbying groups, House Democrats have put forward an entire House resolution in accordance with demands made by AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League.

“The backlash [over Omar’s comments] continued on Monday, as the Anti-Defamation League wrote a letter to Pelosi calling for a House resolution to specifically reject what the organization calls Omar’s ‘latest slur,’” Politico reports. “‘We urge you and your colleagues to send the unambiguous message that the United States Congress is no place for hate,’ the group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote in a letter.”

“The charge of dual loyalty not only raises the ominous specter of classic anti-Semitism, but it is also deeply insulting to the millions upon millions of patriotic Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, who stand by our democratic ally, Israel,” tweeted the Israel lobbying group AIPAC on Friday in response to Omar’s comments.

“I hope @AIPAC isn’t too angry that it took Democratic House leaders almost 48 whole hours to do what they’re told to condemn their own member and will instead be understanding that it was a weekend and that’s what caused the delay,” snarked journalist Glenn Greenwald in response to the news of the House resolution.

I hope @AIPAC isn’t too angry that it took Democratic House leaders almost 48 whole hours to do what they’re told to condem their own member and will instead be understanding that it was a weekend and that’s what caused the delay. They’re very sorry: pic.twitter.com/uPBnef7H1b

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 4, 2019

US politicians of all faiths and in both parties have indeed been falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to tell the freshman congresswoman that she is wrong and evil for suggesting that there is undue loyalty to Israel among US politicians.

“It is disturbing that Rep. Omar continues to perpetuate hurtful anti-Semitic stereotypes that misrepresent our Jewish community,” tweeted California Congressman Juan Vargas, who is not Jewish. “Additionally, questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable,” Vargas continued, inadvertently re-stating Omar’s original argument.

“But serious question: How is it anti-Semitic to question Christian Republican allegiance to Israel?” asked journalist Rania Khalek in response to the controversy. “Because it’s people like Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Marco Rubio who Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib were initially called anti-Semitic for challenging on loyalty to Israel.”

It is indeed interesting that the label “antisemitism” is being pinned on an argument directed at mostly non-Jewish lawmakers and not at Jews at all. It is also interesting that the House resolution’s current text twists that reality on its head by falsely implying that the comments were directed at Jewish politicians. The most Omar-specific parts of the resolution read as follows:

Whereas the definition further includes ‘‘accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations’’;

Whereas the myth of dual loyalty, including allegations that Jews should be suspected of being disloyal neighbors or citizens, has been used to marginalize and persecute the Jewish people for centuries for being a stateless minority;

Whereas accusing Jews of dual loyalty because they support Israel, whether out of a religious connection, a commitment to Jewish self-determination after millennia of persecution, or an appreciation for shared values and interests, suggests that Jews cannot be patriotic Americans and trusted neighbors, when Jews have served our Nation since its founding, whether in public life or military service;

Whereas accusations of dual loyalty generally have an insidious, bigoted history, including (1) the discriminatory internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II on the basis of race; (2) the Dreyfuss affair; when Alfred Dreyfuss, a Jewish French artillery captain was falsely convicted of passing secrets to Germany based on his Jewish background; (3) when the loyalty of President John F. Kennedy was questioned because of his Catholic faith; and (4) the post-9/11 conditions faced by Muslim-Americans in the United States, including unfounded, vicious attacks on and threats to Muslim-American Members of Congress;

NEW TEXT of resolution condemning anti-semitism in response to ⁦@IlhanMN⁩’s recent comments pic.twitter.com/OQ7P3lFADW

— Eliza Collins (@elizacollins1) March 4, 2019

Omar’s comments have nothing to do with Jews, Judaism or Jewishness, but with the geopolitical entanglements between the US and a nation which currently serves as an outpost for US military agendas in the Middle East. It’s a basic, unassailable fact that the agenda to maintain this relationship holds immense sway in America’s capitol, which is why the only arguments you see against it are fallacious, dishonest, irrelevant, or even prove it to be true.

“It is so disingenuous of some of these members of Congress who are lining up to condemn these questioning voices as if they have no campaign finance interest in the outcome,” former congressman Brian Baird told the New York Times today. “If one dares to criticize Israel or dares to criticize AIPAC, one gets branded anti-Semitic, and that’s a danger to a democratic republic.”

Ilhan Omar has sparked one of the most interesting conversations happening in America today, and the smear campaign against her has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism, but with silencing that conversation. The social engineers are not interested in fighting religious bigotry, they are interested in shutting her up.

In an increasingly neoliberalism-weary world, the old smear tactics of labeling a dissident voice a “communist” or a “socialist” don’t pack the kind of punching power they used to, so new ones are needed. The propagandists have been field testing them for a while now, and whenever a successful prototype rolls off the conveyor belt you quickly see it shipped around the world. Smears of Kremlin servitude found purchase in the US, and it wasn’t long before we saw the BBC posing an image of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn against the backdrop of the Kremlin wearing what was made to resemble a Soviet-era hat. Antisemitism smears found purchase against Corbyn in the UK, and it wasn’t long before we saw those same smear tactics used across the pond against Ilhan Omar. If an imperial smear field tests well in our new political climate, you can be certain you’ll see it used elsewhere within the empire before long.

It’s cool and a sign of a healthy media culture that I apparently put more effort into fact checking tweets about what having a fetish for mimes is called than highly paid pundits do before smearing politicians pic.twitter.com/REAGgEEIQH

— Chad Vigorous (@PrettyBadLefty) March 5, 2019

This bogus concern trolling about antisemitism has always been about smearing, and the smearing has always been about narrative control. If they can manipulate the public into distrusting someone who voices a dissenting narrative, they can keep that dissenting narrative from entering the bloodstream of mainstream consciousness. The need to keep a nuclear-armed branch of the US-centralized empire in the heart of the most crucial strategic location on earth is too important for our rulers to allow its fate to be left in the hands of the democratic process, so they control the narrative about it with extreme aggression and smear anyone who questions it. That’s all this has ever been.

Watching israel Own The U.S.

Watching Israel Own The U.S.

“The Israelis control the policy in the Congress and the Senate.” – Senator William Fulbright, 1973

Senator William Fulbright, 1973

“America is a thing you can move very easily.” – Benjamin Netanyahu, 2001

If you have half an hour to spare, you might want to watch the most “powerful” Democrat in the U.S. Senate, and the most “powerful” Democrat in the U.S. House Of Representatives begging (soliciting) for Zionist million$$ during a 2018 meeting of the Israeli-American Council (IAC). Quite a show. 

As it opens, multi-billionaire Haim Saban strides commandingly across the stage, his name emblazoned in immense letters behind the seating arrangement. Thereafter, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer appear and, despite hugs, quickly assume the submissive attitude of the supplicants that they are, respectfully attentive as the dominant Saban slouches casually. One needn’t be a sociologist to read the body language.

“You have to know that we have shared values about the Israel-U.S. relationship, and how important it is to reach every American, that we keep that as strong as possible, and that is the work of the Democrats and the Republicans”, Pelosi began. “Let me tell you about Israel in the heart”, she said as she described her father as a “Shabbat Goy”. And then: “If this Capital crumbles to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to and aid – I don’t even call it aid – our cooperation with Israel. That is fundamental to who we are.” She actually said that. It is difficult to know exactly what was intended by “we”, but it is certain that many Americans do not feel a part of it.

 Despite assurances from the U.S. legislators, Saban expressed distress that support for Israel is declining among America’s youth, and he turned to Schumer: “What can you do to address the problem?” Schumer, who admitted that he calls Saban weekly, then recites a list of pro-Israel U.S. laws for which Democrats are “virtually synonymous”, including the Taylor Force Act (HR 1164) that prohibits economic aid to the Palestinian Authority unless the PA essentially makes itself defenseless in the face of Israel’s expanding Occupation. Schumer also cites a letter, signed by all [!]100 U.S. Senators, to the U.N. Secretary General complaining of “anti-Israel bias in the U.N.” (Which is to say, from the Rest Of The World). Schumer suggests a pro-Israel campaign “aimed at the young”. Saban: “We’re going to educate the young people [to bring them] under the tent.” Although not discussed, the fact of the Boycott-Divest-Sanction Movement hangs in the air. The growing BDS Movement on U.S. campuses has Israel frightened enough that it has developed a sophisticated “malign campaign” against it. 

That Zionist interests and wealth have captured Congress is old news, but the performance of these two high-profile United States legislators, both of whom made clear that they had worked for Israel’s interests for thirty years, was a truly humiliating display of how grubby the American political system has become. Pelosi: “We have people very well placed who share our values in terms of Israel in heart and Israelness [sic] in spirit”, and she began to enumerate the well-placed, pro-Israeli heads of important congressional committees. “I believe the establishment of the State of Israel is the greatest political accomplishment of the 20^th Century”, she said. Saban seemed pleased. 

As for Schumer, he mentioned, as if it were a positive point, that a third of American “cyber security defense” is done by Israel. Not “shared”, but “done”. That naturally means that everything the U.S. Government knows about its citizens is known by Israeli intelligence, which may even be the first to “know”. And should one assume that Israel would eagerly share everything it discovers? All of this is beyond “ally” and way beyond mere “cooperation”.

When essentially the entire Congress – both chambers – has put itself in such thrall to the interests of a foreign nation, how is it possible to avoid seeing it as treasonous on a huge scale, and seemingly just taken for granted as the way things work now?

 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like the fuse of a powder keg that requires a balance of understanding and position. As is, Arabs and Muslims everywhere have watched for many decades the gross injustice heaped by Israel on the blameless people of Palestine, and their collective anger is a force behind much of the violence that wracks the world. That America is Israel’s most powerful and manipulable weapon, as indicated by the appalling one-sided stance of Pelosi-Schumer, and by their confirmation of “who we are”, is why the U.S. is a prime target everywhere for “terrorist” rage. 

Regime Change is Urgently Needed…in Washington

Regime Change is Urgently Needed…in Washington

Andre Vltchek

I am surprised that no one else is saying it, writing it, shouting it at each and every corner: It is not Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Iran that are in dire and crucial need of ‘regime change’. It is the United States of America, it is the entire European Union; in fact, the entire West.

And the situation is urgent.

The West has gone mad; it has gone so to speak, bananas; mental. And people there are too scared to even say it, to write about it.

One country after another is falling, being destroyed, antagonized, humiliated, impoverished. Entire continents are treated as if they were inhabited by irresponsible toddlers, who are being chased and disciplined by sadistic adults, with rulers and belts in their hands yelling with maniacal expressions on their faces: “Behave, do as we say, or else!”

It all would be truly comical, if it weren’t so depressing. But… nobody is laughing. People are shaking, sweating, crying, begging, puking, but they are not chuckling.

I see it everywhere where I work: in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

But why?

It is because North American and European countries are actually seriously delivering their ultimatum: you either obey us, and prostrate yourself in front of us, or we will break you, violate you, and if everything else fails, we will kill your leaders and all of those who are standing in our way.

This is not really funny, is it? Especially considering that it is being done to almost all the countries in what is called Latin America, to many African and Middle Eastern nations, and to various states on the Asian continent.

And it is all done ‘professionally’, with great sadistic craftsmanship and rituals. No one has yet withstood ‘regime change’ tactics, not even the once mighty Soviet Union, nor tremendous China, or proud and determined Afghanistan.

Cuba, Venezuela, DPRK and Syria may be the only countries that are still standing. They resisted and mobilized all their resources in order to survive; and they have survived, but at a tremendous price.

*

The victims keep crying. A few independent countries keep expressing their outrage. But so far, there is no grand coalition, which would be ready to fight and defend each other: “one for all, all for one”.

Until the recent ‘rebellion’ at the UN, no one has been openly and seriously suggesting that international law should apply to all nations of the world, equally.

People talk about ‘peace’. Many are begging the brigands to ‘to stop’, to ‘have mercy’, to show some compassion. But, neither Europe nor North America has ever shown any compassion, for long, terrible centuries. Look at the map of the beginning of the 20th century, for instance: the entire world was colonized, plundered and subjugated.

Now it is all moving in the same direction. If the West is not stopped, our planet may not survive at all. And let us be realistic: begging, logical arguments and goodwill will not stop Washington, Paris or London from plundering and enslaving.

Anyone who has at least some basic knowledge of world history knows that.

So why is the world still not forging some true resistance?

*

Is Venezuela going to be the last straw? And if not Venezuela, that is if Venezuela is allowed to fall, is it going to be Nicaragua, Cuba or Iran next? Is anything going to propel people into action?

Are we all just going to look passively how, the socialist Venezuela, a country which has already given so much to the world, Venezuela which managed to create beautiful visions and concepts for our humanity, is going to be burned to ashes, and then robbed of all of its dreams, its resources and of its freedom?

Are we all such cowards? Is this what we – human beings – have actually become; been reduced to? Cowards and cattle, selfish and submissive beings; slaves?

All this, simply because people are too scared to confront the empire? Because they prefer to hide and to pretend that what is so obvious, is actually not taking place?

Therefore, let me pronounce it, so at least my readers do not have that ‘luxury’ of claiming that they were not told:

This world is being brutalized and controlled by the fascist clique of Western nations. There is no ‘democracy’ left in this world, as there is near zero respect for international law in North American and European capitals. Colonialism has returned in full force. Western imperialism is now almost fully controlling the world.

And begging, trust me – begging and talking of peace is not going to help.

During WWII, fascism had to be stopped. If not, it was going to devour the entire planet. In the past, tens of millions have already died fighting for freedom and for our mankind. Yes, some nations tried to compromise and negotiate with Nazi Germany, but we all know where it all ended.

Now, the situation is the same. Or worse, perhaps much worse, because the West has nukes and a tremendous propaganda apparatus: it controls human brains all over the world with ‘mass media’, and ‘education’.

And because the citizens of the West are now much more brainwashed than the Germans and Italians were in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s; more brainwashed, more scared, submissive and more ‘disciplined’.

*

Look, seriously: are the people who are now writing those “peace essays”, in which they argue with the Western regime about who is right and who is wrong, seriously thinking that they are going to move people like Donald Trump, or Pompeo, or Abrams, or Rubio?

Do they believe that Washington is going to stop murdering millions of people all over the world? Or that the neo-colonialist plunder would stop, after the US Congress and Senate suddenly understands that it has been at the wrong side of history?

This is not some rhetorical question. I am serious: I demand answers!

Does ‘peace movement’ thinks that by amassing arguments it could stop Western expansionism? Yes or no?

Do they believe that Pompeo or Trump will suddenly hit their foreheads and exclaim: “You people are correct! We did not see this!” And call their troops, their thugs and mercenaries back?

If not, if this is not what peace movements believe would be done by North American and European leaders, then why all those thousands of wasted pages?

Would you go near a crocodile that is ready to devour an innocent child, and try to reason with it? Would you, seriously? Do you think it would stop, drop a few tears, wag its tail and leave?

*

Sometimes I tend to believe that ‘peace movements’ in the West are making things worse. They create false hopes, and they behave as if the empire is some entity that has a soul, and understands logic. They grossly underestimate the threat; the danger.

And they tend to analyze the Western threat from a Western perspective, using Western logic.

It somehow gets lost in interpretation that fascism, terror, and bestiality have to be confronted and fought.

One cannot negotiate with a group of countries which are already bathed in the blood of some 80% of the planet. If it was to happen, it would just be a mockery and it would simply humiliate everyone that is sincerely trying to stop the assassins.

*

Right now, Venezuela needs solidarity. It requires direct help, actions; not words. And so do many other countries.

Instead, it gets an endless avalanche of best wishes, as well as premature obituaries.

The Bolivarian Revolution has gotten plenty of colorful words. But what it urgently needs is volunteers, money, and internationalist brigades!

I know that billions of people all over the world are now cheering from their armchairs; in fact, doing absolutely nothing, while also spending zero. Their love for Venezuela is ‘platonic’.

I have just left Syria, where I was covering the Idlib war zone. There was not one single foreigner near me, during those days. Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Beeley usually work all over the toughest areas in Syria, but how many others do? And most of the time we work with near zero backing, just because we feel that it is our moral obligation to inform humanity.

I am wondering, how many foreigners are fighting for Venezuela, right now?

Who is going to face the Western spooks implanted into the Caracas and the Venezuelan borders with Colombia and Brazil? A few RT and TeleSur reporters, those true heroes, yes, but who else?

Only direct action can save Venezuela, and the world.

This is no time for debates.

This is worse, much worse than the late 1930’s.

The proverbial crocodile is here; its enormous ugly mouth open, ready to devour yet one more brilliant, proud country.

It is time to stick a big metal rod into its mouth. Now, immediately; before it gets too late.

Let us shout LONG LIVE VENEZUELA! But with our hands, muscles and purses, not just with our mouths.

And let us not be scared to declare: if anywhere, it is Washington where regime change is truly and urgently needed!

Israel lobby proves Ilhan Omar’s point

The best democracy money can buy. Pro-israel (apartheid state) Lobby Caught on Tape Boasting That Its Money Influences Washington

Pro-Israel Lobby Boasts That Its Money Influences Washington

 by Ryan Grim

Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., participated in a panel discussion, at the 2018 American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference, in Washington, D.C., on March 5, 2018. Photo: Cheriss May/Sipa via AP ImagesRep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., participated in a panel discussion, at the 2018 American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference, in Washington, D.C., on March 5, 2018. Photo: Cheriss May/Sipa via AP Images

Pro-Israel Lobby Caught on Tape Boasting That Its Money Influences Washington

February 11 2019, 11:31 p.m.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy

A debate about the power in Washington of the pro-Israel lobby is underway, after Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., responded sharply to reports that Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was targeting both Omar and fellow Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan.

Omar quoted rap lyrics — “It’s all about the Benjamins baby” — to suggest McCarthy’s move was driven by the lobby’s prolific spending. Asked specifically who she was referring to, Omar responded, “AIPAC!”

The debate over the influence of pro-Israel groups could be informed by an investigation by Al Jazeera, in which an undercover reporter infiltrated the Israel Project, a Washington-based group, and secretly recorded conversations about political strategy and influence over a six-month period in 2016. That investigation, however, was never aired by the network — suppressed by pressure from the pro-Israel lobby.

In November, Electronic Intifada obtained and published the four-part series, but it did so during the week of the midterm elections, and the documentary did not get a lot of attention then.

In it, leaders of the pro-Israel lobby speak openly about how they use money to influence the political process, in ways so blunt that if the comments were made by critics, they’d be charged with anti-Semitism.

“Congressmen and senators don’t do anything unless you pressure them.”

David Ochs, founder of HaLev, which helps send young people to American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference, described for the reporter how AIPAC and its donors organize fundraisers outside the official umbrella of the organization, so that the money doesn’t show up on disclosures as coming specifically from AIPAC. He describes one group that organizes fundraisers in both Washington and New York. “This is the biggest ad hoc political group, definitely the wealthiest, in D.C.,” Ochs says, adding that it has no official name, but is clearly tied to AIPAC. “It’s the AIPAC group. It makes a difference; it really, really does. It’s the best bang for your buck, and the networking is phenomenal.” (Ochs and AIPAC did not immediately return The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

Without spending money, Ochs argues, the pro-Israel lobby isn’t able to enact its agenda. “Congressmen and senators don’t do anything unless you pressure them. They kick the can down the road, unless you pressure them, and the only way to do that is with money,” he explains.

He describes a fundraiser for Anthony Brown, a Democrat running for Congress in Maryland, as typical. “So we want the Jewish community to go face to face in this small environment, 50, 30, 40 people, and say, ‘This is what’s important to us. We want to make sure that if we give you money, that you’re going to enforce the Iran deal.’ That way, when they need something from him or her, like the Iran deal, they can quickly mobilize and say look, we’ll give you 30 grand. They actually impact,” Ochs tells the reporter.

Such a claim is not so different from what Omar was describing, and for which she was roundly condemned. In the wake of Omar’s tweets, the Washington Post, for instance, reported, “The American Jewish Committee demanded an apology, calling her suggestion that AIPAC is paying American politicians for their support ‘demonstrably false and stunningly anti-Semitic.’” (On Monday, Omar apologized for her tweets, but insisted that AIPAC and other lobbyist groups are harmful to U.S. politics.)

In the censored documentary, Ochs went on to describe a fundraiser hosted by Jeff Talpins, a hedge fund giant, as similar as well. “In New York, with Jeff Talpins, we don’t ask a goddamn thing about the fucking Palestinians. You know why? ’Cause it’s a tiny issue. It’s a small, insignificant issue. The big issue is Iran. We want everything focused on Iran,” Ochs says. “What happens is Jeff meets with the congressman in the back room, tells them exactly what his goals are — and by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million — basically they hand him an envelope with 20 credit cards, and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit cards for a thousand dollars each.’”

Ochs explains that the club in New York required a minimum pledge of $10,000 to join and participate in such events. “It’s a minimum commitment. Some people give a lot more than that.”

AIPAC, on its own website, recruits members to join its “Congressional Club,” and commit to give at least $5,000 per election cycle.

Eric Gallagher, a top official at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015, tells the Al Jazeera reporter that AIPAC gets results. “Getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did,” he notes at one secretly recorded lunch. “Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress.”

The film, called “The Lobby,” was produced by Al Jazeera’s investigative unit, and features hidden-camera footage obtained by the reporter, who posed as a Jewish, pro-Israel activist from Britain who wanted to volunteer with the Israel Project

Outfitted with a luxury apartment in Dupont Circle, the reporter hosted multiple gatherings and otherwise socialized broadly within the pro-Israel community, winning the confidence of senior officials, who divulged insider details, many of which have been leaked and created international news.

A companion version of the film, which looked at the Israel lobby’s influence in the United Kingdom, did make it to air and was the subject of intense controversy. It exposed a plot by an Israeli embassy official in the United Kingdom to “take down” pro-Palestinian members of Parliament, leading to his resignation.

That film, however, included a snippet of footage from the United States. Officials here quickly realized that they, too, had been infiltrated. In the U.K., the Israel lobby lodged an official complaint claiming the series was anti-Semitic, but the U.K.’s communications agency rejected the claim, finding that “the allegations in the programme were not made on the grounds that any of the particular individuals concerned were Jewish and noted that no claims were made relating to their faith.”

Pro-Israel officials in the United States, rather than file an official complaint, exerted political pressure. A bipartisan group of 19 lawmakers wrote to the Justice Department requesting an investigation into “the full range of activities undertaken by Al Jazeera in the United States,” and suggesting that the organization be made to register as a foreign agent. Ultimately, Qatar bent to the pressure and killed the documentary.

How israel (apartheid state) lobby fakes campus anti-Semitism

How Israel lobby fakes campus anti-Semitism

On Saturday, RT aired the second part of a conversation between host Chris Hedges, journalist Max Blumenthal and me about the censored Al Jazeera film The Lobby – USA.

In part two – which you can watch above – we focus on how the film shows Israel lobby groups fabricating accusations of anti-Semitism on US college campuses in order to incite official crackdowns against Palestine solidarity activism.

I tell Hedges that “a lot of these fake anti-Semitism allegations are about trying to lay a factual basis to make federal civil rights complaints or lawsuits that can then be used to force university administrations to muzzle students and teachers.”

The Emergency Committee for Israel, an anti-Palestinian activist group, is also seen in the Al Jazeera film organizing a fake pro-Israel protest at the national conference of Students for Justice in Palestine, using paid fellows who are required to attend.

One of the participants describes it as “a chance to shout at Arabs.”

Blumenthal calls the astroturfed protest an indication of how the Israel lobby is “completely morally bankrupt” and “desperate” for the appearance that it has grassroots support.

Afraid of the base

We also discuss how the base of the Democratic Party – particularly supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders – is continuing to embrace the struggle for Palestinian rights.

“Something to watch is the role of Beto O’Rourke,” Blumenthal states. “He’s someone who the pro-Israel lobby has worked on for years and they will push him to drive a wedge in Bernie’s base, as the anti-Bernie progressive.”

Blumenthal adds that Israel supporters and centrist elites in the Democratic Party are “afraid not of Bernie per se but of his base.”

O’Rourke is seen as a rising star and possible presidential contender after he narrowly failed to defeat Senator Ted Cruz of Texas last November.

But while striking many progressive notes, O’Rourke has toed a staunchly pro-Israel line.

Part one of our conversation with Chris Hedges about The Lobby – USA was broadcast the previous week:

Censored and leaked

The Lobby–USA is an explosive undercover documentary produced by Al Jazeera’s investigative unit.

It exposes how US lobby groups – including the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Israel on Campus Coalition – work closely with the Israeli government to spy on, smear and sabotage American citizens who speak out for Palestinian rights.

But the four-part film never aired on Al Jazeera. After Israel lobby pressure on Qatar, which funds the news network, the documentary was censored.

Starting in August 2018, The Electronic Intifada and Blumenthal’s Grayzone Project began leaking excerpts from the film.

In November, The Electronic Intifada, along with the French publication Orient XXI and Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar, released the entire leaked film online.

You can watch in full episodes one and two, and three and four of The Lobby–USA – the film the Israel lobby did not want you to see.

The United States Is the Most Corrupt Country in the World

The United States Is the Most Corrupt Country in the World

by Juan Cole /

John M. Cropper / CC BY-NC 2.0

The United States fell six places to a ranking of only 22 in Transparency International’s list of countries by corruption. Under Donald Trump, America is not in the top 20 for fair dealing.

But as I have argued before, the United States is the most corrupt country in the world and should be ranked 194, not 22. What follows is a much-revised version of my popular list.

Transparency International

 

Obviously, the U.S. Departments of Justice and the Treasury would not give corporations impunity for obtaining contracts by bribery, and it is this sort of scrupulousness that the Transparency International list is rewarding. And Americans don’t have to bribe government officials, as is true in many countries (though, to be fair to the government officials, they typically demand bribes because their governments don’t pay them a living wage).

But in all sorts of ways, U.S. corruption is off the charts, and because the U.S. is still the No. 1 economy in the world by nominal gross domestic product, massive corruption here has a global impact.

Here are the top signs that the U.S. is the most corrupt country in the world:

1. The U.S. is so corrupt that our ruling Republican Party would even deny human-made climate change and adopt pro-carbon policies inexorably destined to wreck the planet earth, all to ensure a few extra years of profits for dirty coal companies and oil giants like ExxonMobil.

Americans are now finally waking up from the 30 years of mesmerized unreality into which Big Carbon and its willing henchmen in the U.S. government had cast them. But nothing of any significance is being done by the federal government on the climate emergency, and the real leaders are states like California. Americans do not realize how peculiar their climate dementia is. No government in Europe openly denies human-made climate change through the burning of fossil fuels and the lodging of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, however lackadaisical some of them are about addressing the problem.

The Chinese Communist Party is more realistic than the U.S. government, and is making a full-court press to move to green energy. Germany, the fourth-largest economy, has announced the end of coal. Britain gets a third of its electricity from wind, and coal provides only 2 percent of British electricity—an achievement of less than a decade.

Only the dodo birds of the sneakily misnamed Australian Liberal Party are still vehemently pro-coal and shrilly denying the plain science of greenhouse gases.

2. Our government is so corrupt that the Environmental Protection Agency has not only ceased protecting the environment, it has become a cheerleader for polluting industries, gutting any regulation that might stand in the way of making a little extra money at the expense of, like, killing people. Its current head is a former coal industry lobbyist! The EPA has decided to back coal plants and to remove the annoyance of government regulations interfering with their spewing mercury into the air. Mercury is a nerve poison, and it concentrates at the top of the food chain (i.e., in us). The Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland” was driven crazy by using his hands to put mercury on the brim of felt hats so as to straighten them. Continual exposure to mercury damages your neural system.

3. The U.S. government is so corrupt that it is winking at the murder by Saudi authorities of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, almost certainly at the order of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And the grounds which the president of the United States gave for his insouciance at the deployment of a bone saw on the hapless scribbler were that he did not want to endanger Saudi arms purchases from and investments in the United States. This response is the very definition of corruption. Saudi Arabia is bribing the U.S. government to ignore a vicious murder of a high-profile journalist whose children are American citizens and who wrote for the Washington paper of record. You can tell all this is corrupt by just imagining what the response would be in Washington if Iran were discovered carving up a dissident in a consulate with a bone saw.

4. The U.S. is so corrupt (audience: “How corrupt is it?”) that the Senate has allowed a bill to come to the floor, introduced by Marco “Benedict Arnold” Rubio, that approves of individual states excluding vendors and contractors who boycott Israel. Although Rubio, Gary Peters, Ron Wyden and other backers of the bill maintain that it does not affect freedom of speech, it actually guts freedom of speech. We university lecturers who speak on other campuses are considered contractors, and people will be prevented from giving talks at the University of Texas, for example, by such laws. The law is unconstitutional and will be struck down if the U.S. judiciary still has a modicum of integrity. But the law was passed in order to uphold the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank and the sentencing of Palestinians to being stateless and helpless and without rights. And it was worked up in the shadows in coordination with the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs (i.e., of propaganda), with the backing of pro-squatter fanatics such as sleazy casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has been accused of making his pile, in part, by bribing members of the Chinese Communist Party to let him open a lucrative casino in Macau. The senators have brought this bill to the floor, despite its being a poison pill for the U.S. Constitution, because they are in the back pocket of the Israel lobbies, which help fund their political campaigns. (I hasten to add that most American Jews do not approve of these shenanigans.)

In other words, the senators are acting this way because they are being bribed by a sliver of corrupt American businesspeople, who in turn are virulent partisans of a foreign state, or by U.S. evangelicals, who have an irrational hope that the final solution of the Palestinian problem will provoke the return of Christ. The important thing is that U.S. electoral politics is an elaborate system of bribery, for which even the Constitution itself is not sacrosanct.

5. A sure sign of corruption is an electoral outcome like that of 2016. An addled nonentity like Donald Trump got filthy rich via tax loopholes and predatory behavior in his casinos and other businesses, and then was permitted to buy the presidency with his own money. He was given billions of dollars in free campaign time every evening on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other channels that should have been more even-handed, because they were in search of advertising dollars and Trump was a good draw. Then, too, the way the Supreme Court got rid of campaign finance reform and allowed open, unlimited secret buying of elections is the height of corruption. The permitting of massive black money in our elections was taken advantage of by the Russian Federation, which, having hopelessly corrupted its own presidential elections, managed to further corrupt the American ones as well. Once ensconced in power, Trump Inc. has taken advantage of the power of White House to engage in a wide range of corrupt practices, including an attempt to sell visas to wealthy Chinese and the promotion of the Trump brand as part of diplomacy.

6. The rich are well-placed to bribe our politicians to reduce taxes on the rich. The Koch brothers and other megarich troglodytes explicitly told Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in 2017 that if the Republican Party, controlling all three branches of government, could not lower taxes on its main sponsors, there would be no billionaire backing of the party in the 2018 midterms. This threat of an electoral firing squad made the hundreds of bribe-takers in Congress sit up and take notice, and they duly gave away to the billionaire class $1.5 trillion in government services (that’s what federal taxes are, folks—services, such as roads, schools, health inspections, implementation of anti-pollution laws), things that everyone benefits from and that won’t be there any more. To the extent that the government will try to continue to provide those slashed services despite assessing no taxes on the people with the money to pay for them, it will run up an enormous budget deficit and weaken the dollar, which is a form of inflation in the imported-goods sector. Inflation hits the poor the worst. As it stands, 3 American billionaires are worth as much as the poorest 150 million Americans. That kind of wealth inequality hasn’t been seen in the U.S. since the age of the robber barons in the 19th century. Both eras are marked by extreme corruption.

7. One sign of American corruption is the rapidity with which American society has become more unequal since the 1980s Reagan destruction of the progressive income tax. The wealthier the top 1 percent is, the more politicians it can buy to gather up even more of the country’s wealth. In my lifetime, the top 1 percent has gone from holding 25 percent of the privately held wealth under President Eisenhower to over 38 percent today. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right that we need to much increase the top marginal tax rate, and we need to tax unearned income as well.

8. The U.S. military budget is bloated and enormous, bigger than the military budgets of the next 12 major states. What isn’t usually realized is that perhaps half of it is spent on outsourced services, not on the military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic scale. I’ve seen with my own eyes how officers in the military get out and then form companies to sell things to their former colleagues still on the inside. Precisely because it is a cesspool of large-scale corruption, Trump’s budget will throw over $100 billion extra taxpayer dollars at it.

9. The U.S. has a vast gulag of 2.2 million prisoners in jails and penitentiaries. There is an increasing tendency for prisons to be privatized, and this tendency is corrupting the system.  It is wrong for people to profit from putting and keeping human beings behind bars. This troubling trend is made all the more troubling by the move to give extra-long sentences for minor crimes, to deny parole and to imprison people for life for, for example, three small thefts.

10. Asset forfeiture in the “drug war” is corrupting police departments and the judiciary. Although some state legislatures are dialing this corrupt practice back, it is widespread and a danger to the Constitution.

So don’t tell the Global South how corrupt it is for taking a few petty bribes. Americans are not seen as corrupt because we only deal in the big denominations. Steal $2 trillion and you aren’t corrupt, you’re respectable.

Juan Cole / Informed Comment

Juan Cole

Contributor

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the proprietor of the Informed Comment e-zine. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in…

In this article:

Your Complete Guide to the N.Y. Times’ Support of U.S.-Backed Coups in Latin America

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro flashes victory signs, declaring he will prevail amid a “coup,” during a press conference at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, on Friday. (Ariana Cubillos / AP)

On Friday, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.

A survey of The New York Times archives shows the Times editorial board has supported 10 out of 12 American-backed coups in Latin America, with two editorials—those involving the 1983 Grenada invasion and the 2009 Honduras coup—ranging from ambiguous to reluctant opposition. The survey can be viewed here.

Covert involvement of the United States, by the CIA or other intelligence services, isn’t mentioned in any of the Times’ editorials on any of the coups. Absent an open, undeniable U.S. military invasion (as in the Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada), things seem to happen in Latin American countries entirely on their own, with outside forces rarely, if ever, mentioned in the Times. Obviously, there are limits to what is “provable” in the immediate aftermath of such events (covert intervention is, by definition, covert), but the idea that the U.S. or other imperial actors could have stirred the pot, funded a junta or run weapons in any of the conflicts under the table is never entertained.

More often than not, what one is left with, reading Times editorials on these coups, are racist, paternalistic “cycle of violence” cliches. <i>Sigh, it’s just the way of things Over There.</i> When reading these quotes, keep in mind the CIA supplied and funded the groups that ultimately killed these leaders:

• Brazil 1964: “They have, throughout their history, suffered from a lack of first class rulers.”
• Chile 1973: “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.”
• Argentina 1976: “It was typical of the cynicism with which many Argentines view their country’s politics that most people in Buenos Aires seemed more interested in a soccer telecast Tuesday night than in the ouster of President Isabel Martinez de Perlin by the armed forces. The script was familiar for this long‐anticipated coup.”

See, it didn’t matter! It’s worth pointing out the military junta put in power by the CIA-contrived coup killed 10,000 to 30,000 Argentines from 1976 to 1983.

There’s a familiar script: The CIA and its U.S. corporate partners come in, wage economic warfare, fund and arm the opposition, then the target of this operation is blamed. This, of course, isn’t to say there isn’t merit to some of the objections being raised by The New York Times—whether it be Chile in 1973 or Venezuela in 2019. But that’s not really the point. The reason the CIA and U.S. military and its corporate partisans historically target governments in Latin America is because those governments are hostile to U.S. capital and strategic interests, not because they are undemocratic. So while the points the Times makes about illiberalism may sometimes be true, they’re mostly a non sequitur when analyzing the reality of what’s unfolding.

Did Allende, as the Times alleged in 1973 when backing his violent overthrow, “persist in pushing a program of pervasive socialism” without a “popular mandate”? Did, as the Times alleged, Allende “pursue this goal by dubious means, including attempts to bypass both Congress and the courts”? Possibly. But Allende’s supposed authoritarianism isn’t why the CIA sought his ouster. It wasn’t his means of pursuing redistributive policies that offended the CIA and U.S. corporate partners; it was the redistributive policies themselves.

Hand-wringing over the anti-democratic nature of how Allende carried out his agenda without noting that it was the agenda itself—not the means by which it was carried out—that animated his opponents is butting into a conversation no one in power is really having. Why, historically, has The New York Times taken for granted the liberal pretexts for U.S. involvement, rather than analyzing whether there were possibly other, more cynical forces at work?

The answer is that rank ideology is baked into the premise. The idea that the U.S. is motivated by human rights and democracy is taken for granted by The New York Times editorial board and has been since its inception. This does all the heavy lifting without most people—even liberals vaguely skeptical of American motives in Latin America—noticing that a sleight of hand has taken place. “In recent decades,” a 2017 Times editorial scolding Russia asserted, “American presidents who took military action have been driven by the desire to promote freedom and democracy, sometimes with extraordinary results.” Oh, well, good then.

What should be a conversation about American military and its covert apparatus unduly meddling in other countries quickly becomes a referendum on the moral properties of those countries. Theoretically a good conversation to have (and one certainly ongoing among people and institutions in these countries), but absent a discussion of the merits of the initial axiom—that U.S. talking heads and the Washington national security apparatus have a birthright to determine which regimes are good and bad—it serves little practical purpose stateside beyond posturing. And often, as a practical matter, it works to cement the broader narrative justifying the meddling itself.

Do the U.S. and its allies have a moral or ethical right to determine the political future of Venezuela? This question is breezed past, and we move on to the question of how this self-evident authority is best exercised. This is the scope of debate in The New York Times—and among virtually all U.S. media outlets. To ante up in the poker game of Serious People Discussing Foreign Policy Seriously, one is obligated to register an Official Condemnation of the Official Bad Regime. This is so everyone knows you accept the core premises of U.S. regime change but oppose it on pragmatic or legalistic grounds. It’s a tedious, extortive exercise designed to shift the conversation away from the United States’ history of arbitrary and violent overthrows and into an exchange about how best to oppose the Official Bad Regime in question. U.S. liberals are to keep a real-time report card on these Official Bad Regimes, and if these regimes—due to an ill-defined rubric of un-democraticness and human rights—fall below a score of say, “60,” they become illegitimate and unworthy of defense as such.

While obviously not in Latin America, it’s also worth noting that the Times cheerled the CIA-sponsored coup against Iran’s President, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. Its editorial, written two days after his ouster, engaged in the Times’ patented combination of victim-blaming and “oh dear” bloviating:

• “The now-deposed Premier Mossadegh was flirting with Russia. He had won his phony plebiscite to dissolve the Majlis, or lower House of Parliament, with the aid of the Tudeh Communists.”
• “Mossadegh is out, a prisoner awaiting trial. It is a credit to the Shah, to whom he was so disloyal, and to Premier Zahedi, that this rabid, self-seeking nationalist would have been protected at a time when his life would not have been worth the wager of a plugged nickel.”
• “The Shah … deserves praise in this crisis. … He was always true to the parliamentary institutions of his country, he was a moderating influence in the wild fanaticism exhibited by the nationalists under Mossadegh, and he was socially progressive.”

Again, no mention of CIA involvement (which the agency now openly acknowledges), which the Times wouldn’t necessarily have had any way of knowing at the time. (This is part of the point of covert operations.) Mossadegh is summarily demonized, and it’s not until decades later the public learns of the extent of U.S. involvement. The Times even gets in an orientalist description of Iranians, implying why a strong Shah is necessary:

<blockquote>[The average Iranian] has nothing to lose. He is a man of infinite patience, of great charm and gentleness, but he is also—as we have been seeing—a volatile character, highly emotional, and violent when sufficiently aroused. </blockquote>

Needless to say, there are major difference between these cases: Mossadegh, Allende, Chavez and Maduro all lived in radically different times and championed different policies, with varying degrees of liberalism and corruption. But the one thing they all had in common is that the U.S. government, and a compliant U.S. media, decided they “needed to go” and did everything to achieve this end. The fundamental arrogance of this assumption, one would think, is what ought to be discussed in the U.S. media—as typified by the Times’ editorial board—but time and again, this assumption is either taken for granted or hand-waved away, and we all move on to how and when we can best overthrow the Bad Regime.

For those earnestly concerned about Maduro’s efforts to undermine the democratic institutions of Venezuela (he’s been accused of jailing opponents, stacking the courts and holding Potemkin elections), it’s worth pointing out that even when the liberal democratic properties of Venezuela were at their height in 2002 (they were internationally sanctioned and overseen by the Carter Center for years, and no serious observer considers Hugo Chavez’s rule illegitimate), the CIA still greenlit a military coup against Chavez, and the New York Times still profusely praised the act. As it wrote at the time:

<blockquote>With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona. </blockquote>

Chavez would soon be restored to power after millions took to the streets to protest his removal from office, but the question remains: If The New York Times was willing to ignore the undisputed will of the Venezuelan people in 2002, what makes anyone think the newspaper is earnestly concerned about it in 2019? Again, the thing that’s being objected to by the White House, the State Department and their U.S. imperial apparatchiks is the redistributive policies and opposition to the United States’ will, not the means by which they do so. Perhaps the Times and other U.S. media—living in the heart of, and presumably having influence over, this empire—could try centering this reality rather than, for the millionth time, adjudicating the moral properties of the countries subject to its violent, illegitimate whims

israel’s Story: Lies from Top to Bottom

Israel’s Story: Lies from Top to Bottom

By Philip Giraldi,

A study by a Toronto-based consulting and research company has revealed that over the past fifty years mainstream reporting about Israel has been distorted to portray the Jewish state in positive terms while ignoring the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The media study, based on a computer analysis of 50 years of data, found that major U.S. newspapers have provided consistently skewed, pro-Israel reporting on Israel-Palestine. The slanting in news coverage included subtle manipulations like using word associations favorable to Israel and derogatory to Palestinians as well as persistent publication of stories praising Israel while also avoiding reporting anything supportive of the dispossessed Arab point of view

The researchers from 416Labs were able to evaluate headlines and articles derived from five major U.S. newspapers: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal during the time period 1967 to 2017. June 1967 was selected as the starting point to include coverage of the Six Day War and its aftermath, when Israel attacked Jordan, Egypt and Syria to begin its military occupation of Palestinian territory on the West Bank and Gaza.

No one should be surprised by media bias in favor of Israel given the dominance of Jewish owners and editors in the major media, but the study just might have gone one step farther and noted, as did Congressman Paul Findley in his book They Dare to Speak Out back in 1985, that much of the bias stems from the overseas correspondents covering the Middle East for the U.S. and European media also being overwhelmingly Jewish. And a review of the Israel-philia might have gone back even further in time to the foundation of the state in 1948 to find similar favorable coverage.

Shaping the favorable perception of Israel has also involved the efforts of Zionist-dominated Hollywood movies and television to portray Jewish heroism while also at the same time ignoring the Zionist terrorism directed against both the indigenous Palestinian population and the British Mandate authorities prior to Israel’s statehood. The movie Exodus shaped many Americans’ perceptions of what had occurred in the Middle East, while the steady stream of films related to the so-called holocaust, which ignore the many problems with that standard narrative, perpetuate Jewish suffering and victimhood.

In truth, no one should believe any country’s creation narrative, which, since the time of Virgil’s Aeneid, has been intended to present an idealized portrait that is largely fact-free. Nationalists will inevitably distort the tale to reflect their own vision of what their homeland represents and how it came to be, but Israel’s story is unusual in that it is packed with lies from start to finish. Even before the creation of a Jewish state, Zionists encouraged Jewish emigration from Europe to the then Turkish-controlled Palestine. They coined the expression “a land without people for people without a land,” a flat out lie as Palestine was fully inhabited by Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arabs plus a small Jewish minority. This expression has been more recently replaced with another one, i.e. how Israel “made the desert bloom,” as if the land were not being cultivated before large numbers of Jews arrived, making it another lie. And it is, by the way, an expression favored by Zionist presidential aspirant Kamala Harris, a prime example of “progressive except for Israel.”

Israel was founded as a product of terrorism, some would say the “first modern” style terrorism, to include bombings of non-military targets and random massacres of civilians. In a notorious attack on the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, more than two hundred Palestinians may have been slaughtered by Jewish terrorists affiliated with the Irgun and Lehi groups. The exact count of the victims is unknown because a subsequent Zionist clean-up team systematically destroyed many of the bodies.

Understanding Jewish Power

Given the turmoil in Palestine and the agitation by British Jews, the U.K. was eager to cut its losses, and Harry Truman, a U.S. president who benefited from Jewish financial and political support in his reelection bid, was equally willing to support the creation of a Jewish state as a quid pro quo. Even though Jews were a distinct minority in the new Israel-Palestine, they obtained nearly half of the land in spite of the United Nations mandate that the rights of the indigenous population should not be compromised by the new arrivals.

But the new arrivals from Europe and America disagreed with that even-handed approach. They assassinated the U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, who had himself saved many Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, and started to attack their Arab neighbors, intentionally driving 700,000 from their homes and killing many in the process. By that act of terror and a subsequent war fought against its neighbors, Israel obtained more land before the green line was eventually established as part of a 1949 Armistice Agreement managed by the U.N. to divide Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, which were under the jurisdiction of Jordan and Egypt respectively.

And then there came the miraculous Six Day War of June 1967, regarding which glowing media accounts described how Israel was attacked by Jordan, Syria and Egypt simultaneously but fought back hard and won a decisive victory, occupying in the process the parts of Jerusalem it did not already control as well as the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza. The only problem with that story is that Israel started the war, attacking and destroying the Arab air forces without a declaration of war while their planes were on the ground. Denied air cover, the Arab ground forces could not win.

Israel also included in its Six Day War triumph the attempted sinking of the American intelligence gathering ship the U.S.S. Liberty, which was in international waters when it was attacked on June 8^th. Thirty-four crewmen were killed and 171 wounded in the only attack on a U.S. Naval vessel in peace time that was never fully investigated by the Pentagon due to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s unwillingness to offend American Jews. The Israelis and their apologists have claimed the attack was a case of either “fog of war” or “a mistake,” both of which were completely self-serving lies exposed by compelling National Security Agency collected evidence that has surfaced recently. And, by the way, the Israelis continue to receive military assistance from Washington in spite of the killing of American servicemembers, $3.8 billion per annum guaranteed for the next ten years plus special appropriations as needed.

Even when the Israelis are clearly telling lies, much of the media and chattering class has been willing to forgive them their trespasses no matter what they do or say. The whopper level lies about Israel are that it is a democracy and America’s best friend and ally. It is neither. It has more than 50 laws that discriminate against Arabs, is now self-defined as a “Jewish state,” and it has recently legalized banning non-Jews from residential areas and towns. It also occupies Palestinian territories where the original inhabitants have no rights but martial law. And the Jewish state has never been an American ally in practical terms as it is under no obligation to support Washington under any circumstances even though a U.S. Air Force general has declared that his troops are prepared to die for Israel.

Some other recent lies include the propagation of a narrative that the Palestinians do not exist as a people, that Palestine has never been a country and therefore should never become one, and that there is no peace in the Middle East because the Arabs have never accepted the generous offers made by the Israelis to settle problems with the Palestinians, who are, by the way, solely responsible for their unfortunate situation since the expanding Israeli settlements on their land are no obstacle to peace. All lies.

And another big lie concerns how Israel spies on the United States. Israel is the number one “friendly” country when it comes to stealing American secrets, both commercial and military. When Jonathan Pollard stole more U.S. classified information than any spy in history, Israel’s friends rushed to explain that it was all a mistake, that Pollard was just a one-off oddball. And the Israel government agreed to return what he had stolen but did not do so and instead used it to barter with America’s then enemy the Soviet Union in a deal to permit Jews to emigrate.

Another espionage related development which produced a whole battery of Israeli lies and evasions relates to 9/11, where Mossad almost certainly had at a minimum inside knowledge regarding what was about to occur through their illegal massive spying program inside the United States. Remember the cheering Israeli movers in New Jersey as the twin towers went down? Or the hundreds of “art students” selling their work all across the U.S., which was both a scam and part of an espionage network?

More recent lies include repeated assertions that the Iranians have a secret nuclear program, which will produce a bomb in “six months,” something Benjamin Netanyahu has been promising since 1993. And those wily Persians are also developing ballistic missiles that can be used to attack Europe and America, a particularly dangerous lie as it has been picked up and repeated ad nauseam by the buffoonish triumvirate in Washington consisting of Bolton, Pompeo and Pence, which passes for the deep thinking in U.S. foreign policy these days. That allegation could easily lead to United States involvement in a war fought for Israel that it might reasonably avoid as it is not threatened by Iran and has no vital interests supportive of going to war against it.

But the greatest lie of all is the current claim that anti-Semitism is surging all around the world, requiring still more protection of and deference to diaspora Jews as well as to the state of Israel. It is based on a fundamental lie, that criticism of Israel is ipso facto anti-Semitic and ignores the fact that the pushback is based overwhelmingly on how Israel and Netanyahu behave. Israel, whatever its pretensions, is a country and Judaism is a religion. It is in fact particularly dangerous, and damaging to the religion, to combine the two deliberately as is being done by Netanyahu and the many American Jews who are serial apologists for Israel.

Indeed, Israel and its partisans are now using lies to change the way the public views the issue of anti-Semitism and are willing to do so by legislating to enforce how people think, to include the use of legal sanctions consisting of fines and imprisonment to silence critics. If legislation currently in congress is ever implemented fully, it will be the death of freedom of speech in the U.S. That such nonsense has gained currency at all is due to the Israeli corruption of both America’s government and its news media, which is not a lie, but the absolute truth that you won’t find discussed anywhere in your newspaper or on television reporting.

This trend to criminalize criticism of Israel has led Jewish groups and some governments to work together to promulgate “hate crime” statutes and other legal barriers to protect the Israeli wrongdoing. But Israel is not and should not be protected against criticism. It is a country that behaves very badly, and, one might add, dangerously, not only to its neighbors but also to the world as it has the potential in its hands to escalate its involvement in Syria to initiate a nuclear conflagration between the U.S. and Russia. Israel’s lies should be recognized for what they are and it should be boycotted and sanctioned until it comes to its senses or, if it does not, it should be completely shunned.

This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research

AIPAC Is a Global Menace

AIPAC Is a Global Menace

by Stephen Lendman

AIPAC is the most prominent US Israeli lobby organization, supporting its apartheid rule, ignoring its high crimes, operating illegally as an unregistered foreign agent – promoting a sinister agenda.

Criticizing how it operates and the Israel is a sure-fire career-ender for US congressional members. The same goes for major media journalists.

AIPAC is a lying machine, pro-Israel propaganda its speciality, including in its so-called “Briefing Book,” a work of fiction, mythology about Israel, concealing its dark side.

Stating its policy agenda, AIPAC lied claiming “(t)he United States and Israel face unprecedented challenges in the Middle East” – invented ones only. 

Real ones don’t exist. The region is threatened by the US/Israeli hegemonic agenda, both countries nuclear armed and dangerous, seeking to achieve its aims by brute force.

Key AIPAC objectives include preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons it abhors and wants eliminated entirely, wanting pro-Western fascist tyranny replacing the Islamic Republic’s sovereign independence, opposing Palestinian self-determination, and assuring strong US support for its policies, among other aims.

It lied calling Israel “a paragon of peace and democracy.” Its agenda is polar opposite, waging undeclared war on Palestinians and neighboring Syria, its belligerence threatening the region.

Its hostility toward Hamas, Palestine’s legitimate government, Palestinian resistance groups, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Iran is unrelenting. 

It’s fundamentally opposed to democratic rights, equality for all, freedom of expression, and rights for women. AIPAC falsely claimed otherwise.

It lied claiming “Israel constantly struggled to survive” throughout its existence, “fac(ing) hostile neighbors with numerically superior armed forces and contended with the constant threat of terrorism.”

The Jewish state began developing nuclear weapons in the 1950s, maintaining arsenals of these WMDS, along with  banned chemical and biological weapons. It faced no threats since the October 1973 Yom Kippur war.

“Israel shares America’s commitment (against) democracy, liberty and civil rights,” not the other way around as AIPAC falsely claimed.

Its entire Briefing Book was an exercise in deception, burnishing its dubious credentials as a propaganda machine.

“Israel is a world leader” in high crimes of war, against humanity, and slow-motion genocide, a “leader” in regional aggression along with the US and NATO, a “leader” in wrong over right.

It’s polar opposite “a force for good in the world,” a notion it abhors. Its actions explain what AIPAC conceals, turning truth on its head, claiming “Israel has one of the most sophisticated humanitarian assistance programs in the world.” 

Its agenda features state terror, apartheid ruthlessness, settlement expansions on stolen land, mass imprisonments, looting of Palestinian resources, endless war on its people, along with regional wars against targeted countries.

It serves privileged Jews exclusively, exploiting others, Arab citizens worst of all – the same way ordinary people are exploited in America and other Western countries.

AIPAC wants even greater US funding than already, nearly all of it for its killing machine, none for peace, equity and justice, nothing for all its citizens equitably.

Republicans and undemocratic Dems hand Israel around $10 million a day, swindled from US taxpayers, more millions and other benefits on request, an endless wealth transfer, supporting apartheid rule and militarism maintaining it.

The Netanyahu regime supports ISIS and other regional terrorists, aiding White Helmets jihadists connected to them – complicit with the US, NATO, the Saudis and other despotic Arab regimes.

The US/Israeli special relationship is one of the world’s most sinister and destructive anywhere.

AIPAC lied claiming both countries “developed deep strategic ties to confront common threats and ensure the Jewish state’s security” – at a time neither country faces strategic or any other foreign threats.

They and their partnered countries support terrorism. They’re not “combating” it. Nor is Israel “a beacon of (regional) stability.” Indeed it’s an “ally upon which America can consistently depend” in its endless war on humanity AIPAC won’t ever address.

Like Israel and Trump regime hardliners, AIPAC pushes the Big Lie about Iran, falsely calling the country “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.”

It’s NOT “Israel’s and America’s greatest long-term threat in the Middle East” or anywhere else. It IS the region’s leading proponent of world peace and stability.

Its sovereign independence, the above reason, Iran’s support for Palestinian rights, and opposition to America’s destructive imperial agenda, are the reasons behind US hostility toward Iran – the Trump regime even more hostile than its predecessors.

No Iranian drive for nuclear weapons exist, no violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, no sponsorship of terrorism it’s involved in combatting, no fomenting of regional instability, no international illicit behavior, no contempt for human and civil rights the way the US and Israel operate.

US major media consistently fail to explain all of the above or tell readers and viewers that Iran hasn’t attacked another country in centuries, what the US, NATO, Israel, and their imperial partners do repeatedly.

AIPAC’s entire Briefing Book was an exercise in pro-Israel propaganda, a litany of Big Lies.

The organization supports endless wars, pushing the US to attack sovereign regional states standing in the way of Israel’s aim for regional hegemony.

Along with the Pentagon, NATO, and IDF, AIPAC threatens world peace, stability, and humanity’s survival.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net

AIPAC Takes Newly Elected Congress Members, CNN’s Setmayer on Propaganda Trips to israel (apartheid state)

Source

By Alison Weir | Information Clearing House | January 3, 2019

Newly elected Congressional Reps David Trone, Dan Crenshaw, Elaine Goodman Luria, Tim Burchett, Denver Riggleman, and Susie Lee on a December 2018 AIPAC trip to Israel. AIPAC’s educational arm spends about $10,000 a piece on these trips. By using a nonprofit entity, the Israel lobby gets around a U.S. law intended to prohibit Congressional junkets funded by lobbying groups.

The Israel lobby has been busy taking a wide variety of government officials and opinion makers on fully expense paid trips to Israel this month. The trips cost in the range of $10,000 per person.

Six newly elected House members are on a 5-day visit to Israel, a delegation of northern California “progressive leaders” are on a week-long trip, media commentator Tara Setmayer has just returned from such a trip, and a delegation of southern California progressive leaders returned from their trip earlier this month.

The House participants include liberals and conservatives, Jewish representatives and Christian fundamentalists, Trump supporters and Trump opponents: Tim Burchett (R-TN), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Susie Lee (D-NV), Elaine Goodman Luria (D-VA), Denver Riggleman (R-VA) and David Trone (D-MD).

The California participants are County Supervisors John Gioia and Joe Simian, California Democratic Party Executive Committee Member Andrea Beth Damsky, and unknown others. The delegations are named “Northern Pacific Progressive Leaders” and “Southern Pacific Progressive Leaders,” but no one will divulge the rosters.

The AIPAC loophole

The trips are organized and funded by the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), the nonprofit arm of the powerful Israel lobbying group AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). AIEF was founded in 1989 “to advance the purposes of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.”

AIPAC is widely believed to be the most powerful organization in the US lobbying Congress on behalf of a foreign country. An outgrowth of the 1939 organization “American Zionist Emergency Council,” AIPAC’s annual convention is attended by ambitious politicians from across the political spectrum (see this example; for more on AZEC, read my book on the history of the Israel lobby).

The goal of AIPAC – and of its trips – is to promote American support for Israel despite Israel’s violations of human rights, international law, U.S. law, and discrimination against Christians and others.

In particular, AIPAC is working to keep the over $10 million per day of American tax money going to Israel. While most Americans feel Israel already gets too much money, Congress is about to pass legislation that will increase the gift even further. This will be the largest military aid package in US history; it works out to about $23,000 for each Jewish Israeli family of four, or $7,230 per minute.

While an individual has recently been charged with acting as a foreign agent over her activities with Russia and the NRA, the Israel lobby has worked to influence U.S. policies on behalf of a foreign country for many years, with very few legal consequences. Even when top AIPAC officials were found to have handed over classified documents, the case was dropped (a Pentagon analyst was jailed for 12 years).

The trips to Israel used to be organized by AIPAC itself until Congress enacted legislation in 2007 intended to stop lobbying organizations from taking government officials on fully paid tours. However, the legislation contains a loophole (some call it the “AIPAC loophole“) that allows nonprofit groups to organize such trips, and AIEF officially took over the tours.

An $85 million operation, AIEF takes a wide array of American officials and opinion makers on the all the expense paid trips. It pays for their international flights, hotel accommodations, tourist excursions, meals, drinks, etc. In the past decade it has reportedly spent $12.9 million on bipartisan Congressional trips to Israel.

While some of the more savvy participants may be skeptical of an advocacy organization claiming to give them an unbiased, “educational” look at the region, they seem willing to go along. The Israel lobby is widely known to make or break careers.

Carefully Tailored Trips

The trips by AIEF and similar organizations are carefully tailored for each group. There are trips for military veterans, business leaders of all races and ethnicities, educators, athletes, students, individuals of every sexual and religious persuasion, and politicians at every level of office, from local to national.

The pro-Israel groups treat participants to a lavish tour replete with visits to historic sites, exciting night life, beaches, religious sites, official offices, border areas; whatever will appeal to the group members. LGBTQ advocates meet with gays, fundamentalist Christians are taken on carefully guided trips to Christian sites, military veterans meet with Israeli soldiers.

The meetings even include a few hand-picked “Palestinian representatives” and Druze Israelis, allowing the tours to be pitched as “educational” trips where participants allegedly see “all sides.” They are given inaccurate histories of the region and filtered information about the current situation. Not surprisingly, participants come back spouting the Israeli talking points they’ve been fed. (See some schedules and itineraries here.)

Whether or not they are taken in by the tour, it is likely that politicians understand the political calculus of allying with one of the most powerful lobbies in the U.S.

Most politicians and many others are acutely aware that this is a group that has the money and power to further their careers – or to impede them. As these extravagant trips exemplify, AIPAC and related groups possess hundreds of millions of dollars to devote to cultivating Congressional representatives and others.

Pro-Israel billionaires like Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, and Paul Singer donate massive quantities of money to promote Israel in the US. They and others fund numerous projects to inculcate pro-Israel beliefs in Americans. These trips are one of the ways they do it.

The new Congressional representatives and Setmayer have occasionally been tweeting about the trips. Below are a few examples:

Walking on a road where Jesus actually walked. Just incredible. #AIEF pic.twitter.com/2bDR72udOo

— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) December 12, 2018

 

We were invited to survey the Israeli border areas including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Then they took us to a military base to inspect the terror tunnels. Our return trip took us over Jerusalem, where we saw the security wall between the West Bank and Israel. #VA05 pic.twitter.com/DkZaOXejWr

— Denver Riggleman (@Denver4VA) December 12, 2018

 

One of the most intense experiences of my life was standing inside a bombed out former Syrian Army HQ, now on the Israeli side of the Golan Heights, just 150 yards from the Syrian border.That happened today. pic.twitter.com/9oSRW5VLqZ

— Tara Setmayer (@TaraSetmayer) December 7, 2018

 

CNN’s Setmayer & Marc Lamont Hill

Setmayer has also published a podcast about the trip that mentions her Jewish ancestry and repeats a number of Israel’s nonfactual talking points. In the podcast she shows little awareness of the situation in Gaza or the history of the region, despite – or perhaps because of – her “educational trip.”

Given that CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill, a tenured professor, was just fired by CNN for a UN speech in which he supported full Palestinian rights, it is perhaps not surprising that Setmayer sings Israel’s praises.

Numerous other pro-Israel groups also take Americans on guided tours to Israel, including the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange (a 2012 trip brought university presidents), Passages Israel, (backed by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer), the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of Northern California (JPAC), Birthright Israel, which targets Jewish students, and the American-Israel Friendship League, which has been operating since 1971 and largely targets young people. (Last year AIFL gave a special award to potential presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg. A fundraising video featured former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, Elie Wiesel, and others.)

Meanwhile, U.S. media regularly provide Israeli-centric reporting to Americans. For example, almost no news organizations have told Americans about the current legislation before Congress to give Israel a minimum of $38 billion over the next 10 years, currently being held up by Republican Senator Rand Paul.

Alternative trip to the region

Perhaps for the first time ever, a Congressional representative is openly challenging AIPAC over these trips. Newly elected Democrat Rashida Tlaib has announced that she will be organizing an alternative trip to the region.

A Palestinian American citizen of Detroit, Tlaib explained: “I don’t think AIPAC provides a real, fair lens into this issue. It’s one-sided. … [They] have these lavish trips to Israel, but they don’t show the side that I know is real, which is what’s happening to my grandmother and what’s happening to my family there.”

While most Americans desire fairness and would likely believe it reasonable for their representatives to either go on no lobby-funded trips, or go on trips by both sides, it is unclear how many politicians will be willing to do so. As Republican Congressman Paul Findley recorded in 1985, and many politicians from both parties have learned since, defying the Israel lobby can be political suicide.

But as increasing numbers of Americans learn the facts on Israel-Palestine, a few politicians now are taking on the Israel lobby, and winning. One of them, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), has already announced that she will not be joining the annual AIPAC trip for freshman Congressional reps.

Videos about Israel lobby trips

The videos below give a feel for these pro-Israel funded trips:

Passages is backed by hedge fund billionaire and Israel advocate Paul Singer. (More information about Singer is here.)

Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.