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Wrong, NBC News, Climate Change Isn’t Causing Rising Coffee Prices, Production Is Increasing

By Anthony Watts | Climate Realism | December 16, 2024

NBC News recently published an article asserting that climate change is driving up coffee prices by adversely affecting production titled Your daily cup of coffee could get more expensive because of climate change. Production data proves this claim blatantly false.

NBC News writes:

The price of arabica coffee beans, the high-quality beans found in most restaurants and shops, spiked this month, recently jumping to $3.50 a pound. […]

And today, experts say, climate change is to blame.

“We’ve seen significant drought in some of the key coffee-growing areas in the world, places like Brazil, which is the largest coffee exporter in the world,” said David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University. […]

“We’re going to see these types of [climate] events just get more frequent into the future. And so we have to start taking this seriously and make investments in agricultural research and development to be able to mitigate and tackle the impacts of climate change on our agricultural production and agricultural system,” Ortega said.

“One impact of this is a rise in cost, which then gets translated to a rise in price for consumers,” he added.

NBC’s article attributes recent coffee price increases to climate change by pointing to specific weather events. This approach wrongly conflates short-term weather phenomena with long-term climate patterns. As discussed at Climate at a Glance, weather refers to short-term atmospheric conditions, while climate denotes long-term averages and trends. Attributing isolated weather events directly to climate change without considering broader climatic data is misleading and scientifically unsound, especially when long-term weather trends show no worsening conditions in coffee growing regions.

NBC’s story also ignores substantial data demonstrating that global coffee production has increased significantly over the past four decades, a fact that Climate Realism has addressed multiple times, highlighting the fact that coffee production has been resilient and even thriving despite concerns over climate change.

Repeated analyses show that both coffee and cocoa have set production records multiple times during the recent period of slight warming, contradicting assertions that climate change is driving price increases.

For example, global coffee production has seen substantial growth over the past 40 years, as data from U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reveals, with countries like Vietnam experiencing a more than 1,500 percent rise in production between 1992 and 2022. Vietnam is not alone. Almost every coffee growing region has experienced significant growth, as the graph below shows:

This upward trend underscores the adaptability and resilience of coffee cultivation practices, even amid the gradual warming experienced globally.

NBC’s portrayal of climate change as a primary driver of rising coffee prices reflects a bias by the media outlet toward blaming nearly every bad thing that occurs on climate change. NBC wrongly aggregates short-term weather events and long-term climate trends, and more importantly, ignores the fact that coffee production has increased significantly over recent decades, regularly setting records for production. Rather than looking at actual data, NBC News relied on “expert opinion” without any factual basis. Such sloppy reporting lacks due diligence and fails to provide a comprehensive view of the factors influencing coffee prices, including economic dynamics and agricultural practices. NBC News completely failed to consider these data and variables, instead resorting to a tired and worn-out false climate catastrophe narrative.

December 19, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

MSNBC Muslim anchors sidelined despite being Israeli apologists

By Mohammad Hashim | Press TV | October 14, 2023

In an interesting revelation, it has been reported on Saturday that three high-profile Muslim anchors of the American news television channel MSNBC, owned by NBC Universal, have been sidelined.

The Semafor report said Mehdi Hasan, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi have been “quietly taken out of the anchor’s chair” amid the Israeli regime’s no-holds-barred bombing of the besieged Gaza Strip.

The network reportedly did not air the Thursday night episode of The Mehdi Hasan Show on its streaming platform Peacock and also reversed its plan to replace Joy Reid with Mohyeldin this week for the channel’s 7 p.m. show.

The report, citing “two network sources with knowledge of the plans”, said Velshi will also be replaced by Alicia Menendez this weekend. Menendez hosts American Coices on Saturdays and Sundays.

Hasan is a British-American television journalist of Indian descent who has anchored the popular The Mehdi Hasan Show on Peacock since October 2020 and on MSNBC since February 2021.

Mohyeldin is an Egypt-born, New York-based journalist for NBC News and MSNBC who currently hosts the weekly prime-time show ‘Ayman’ on MSNBC.

Velshi is a US-based Canadian journalist, who has been reporting for NBC News since October 2016 and also serves as a news host for MSNBC channel.

NBC has termed the schedule changes as “coincidental,” refuting claims that the high-profile Muslim broadcasters are being snubbed amid the Israeli hostilities against Palestinians.

However, the Semafor report stressed that staff members at MSNBC have been “concerned by the moves”, feeling all three hosts have “some of the deepest knowledge of the conflict.”

It said the move to sideline the three anchors comes as the MSNBC network, which is aligned closely with the Democratic Party, has “swung into intense solidarity” with the Israeli regime.

“That shift has come with heated internal and external objections to anything that breaks with that solidarity, and has come with social media criticism of Hasan, Mohyeldin, and Velshi,” the report stated.

Following the Hamas operation, US politicians, including President Joe Biden, quickly jumped in defense of the occupying regime and peddled blatant lies about children beheaded and women raped.

Interestingly, the three MSNBC journalists, including Hasan, have been vocal against the operation launched by the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas on the occupied territories last week.

Hasan, who has a massive social media following and is known for his argumentative style of on-air debating, took to his X handle on October 8, a day after the Hamas operation, lecturing his 1.3 million followers on “morality” of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

“This conflict for me has always been about morality. Morally, you cannot justify the killing of Palestinian civilians, even if you say it’s fighting terrorism. But morally, you also cannot justify the killing of Israeli civilians, even if you say you’re fighting occupation,” he wrote.

It was a conscious and concerted attempt on the part of the British-American journalist to play both sides, to advocate the case of Palestinians, and also to be apologetic for the Israeli occupation.

He somehow tried to question the legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance group to launch the Al-Aqsa Storm operation even if they were occupied, subjugated, humiliated and mercilessly killed every day.

Hasan also fell for the hoax that hundreds of people were “massacred” at a music festival.

“Israel says 260 dead at music festival attacked by Hamas. I cannot imagine how horrific a massacre this must have been. 260 people gunned down. To put that in context, that’s the equivalent of more than five Pulse nightclub shootings. Heartbreaking,” he wrote on X.

It was part of the bigger misinformation campaign against the Palestinian resistance movement, which took the music festival participants as prisoners and treated them in a dignified manner as seen in videos circulating widely online.

To put his case as a neutral journalist who cares for Israelis, the MSNBC anchor reacted strangely to a photo of a demonstration by pro-Palestine activists outside the Israeli regime’s consulate in New York.

“These people are an embarrassment and their cheering is reprehensible,” Hasan wrote.

Mohyeldin, much like his MSNBC colleague, has been very consciously trying to appease his employers by being soft on the Israeli apartheid regime and amplifying voices against the resistance.

On October 8, a day after the Hamas operation, he shared a series of posts on X that were circulated to vilify the Gaza-based resistance group and to portray Israeli soldiers and settlers as victims.

He even shared an article that claimed Iran helped in plotting the attack on the Israeli regime.

Velsh, like the other two, has also used his social media platforms, including X, to make a case for himself as someone who despises the Palestinian resistance movement.

On October 10, he shared an article about Hamas, calling it an “important read to understand what you need to know about the group behind the deadly terror attack in Israel.”

He clearly sees the Hamas operation as a “terror attack”, not a legitimate military action against the occupying regime. He also conveniently dismissed the fact that the attack targeted occupiers.

On Saturday, he posted on X that he was leaving the occupied territories, adding to speculation that he has been sidelined from his job despite extra effort to take the hypocritical position on the conflict.

All three of them – Hasan, Mohyeldin and Velshi – despite trying to present themselves as “good boys” have received a bad report card from their bosses. That’s how much Americans value free speech.

Mohammad Hashim is a political and media analyst with a focus on West Asia.

October 14, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Investigation: At least 54 high-profile media personalities are connected to Soros-funded organizations

RT | January 20, 2023

Billionaire George Soros has links to dozens of prominent media figures in the US and beyond via organizations he funded, a conservative US watchdog claims.

In the last report of a three-part investigation, published on Tuesday, MRC Business examined the ties of the Budapest-born liberal mogul, coming to the conclusion that he “cemented himself as one of the most powerful influencers in global politics through his incredible influence in the media.”

MRC Business said that it had uncovered at least “54 major figures in journalism and activist media who are connected to Soros-funded organizations.” The list includes CNN’s chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour, NBC News anchor Lester Holt, and Cesar Conde, the NBCUniversal News Group chairman, who oversees the outlets NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC.

Many of the 54 individuals play prominent roles in institutions funded by Soros. For instance, Amanpour is a senior adviser at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which received $2.75 million from the mogul between 2018 and 2020, while Holt is listed as a board member in the same organization. Conde is a trustee at the Aspen Institute, which received over $1 million from the billionaire between 2016 and 2020.

According to MRC, in total Soros has funneled over $32 billion into his organizations in a bid “to spread his radical ‘open society’ agenda on abortion, Marxist economics, anti-Americanism, defunding the police, environmental extremism and LGBT fanaticism.” These efforts have paid off, allowing him to “help indoctrinate millions with his views on a day-to-day basis”, the group claims.

MRC has previously claimed that Soros has financial ties to at least 253 media organizations globally, funding them through his non-profit groups and enabling him to reach viewers and listeners in virtually every corner of the world.

Commenting on the report, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted on Thursday that such revelations could be compared to a “nuclear bombshell.” Should it be proven that the leading US media outlets “received money for adjusting their coverage, all US democracy could be wrapped up in their Constitution and thrown out into the garbage heap of history,” she said.

January 20, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , , , | 1 Comment

The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop — Falsely Called “Russian Disinformation” — is Authentic

By Glenn Greenwald | March 17, 2022

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation’s oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA’s all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

These “former intel officials” did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.” Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this “suspicion” based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were “Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.’s validly despised class of media employees.

Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation.”

This disinformation campaign about the Biden emails was then used by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post‘s Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter’s orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.

The archive’s authenticity, as I documented in a video report from September, was clear from the start. Indeed, as I described in that report, I staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic (The Intercept‘s former New York Times reporter James Risen was given the green light by these same editors to spread and endorse the CIA’s lie, as he insisted that the laptop should be ignored because “a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.”) I knew the archive was real because all the relevant journalistic metrics that one evaluates to verify large archives of this type — including the Snowden archive and the Brazil archive which I used to report a series of investigative exposés — left no doubt that it was genuine (that includes documented verification from third parties who were included in the email chains and who showed that the emails they had in their possession matched the ones in the archive word-for-word).

Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine — and there should have been none — were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which The New York Post relied were entirely authentic. Among other things, Schreckinger interviewed several people included in the email chains who provided confirmation that the emails in their possession matched the ones in the Post‘s archive word for word. He also obtained documents from the Swedish government that were identical to key documents in the archive. His own outlet, Politico, was one of the few to even acknowledge his book. While ignoring the fact that they were the first to spread the lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation,” Politico editors — under the headline “Double Trouble for Biden”— admitted that the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”

The vital revelations in Schreckinger’s book were almost completely ignored by the very same corporate media outlets that published the CIA’s now-debunked lies. They just pretended it never happened. Grappling with it would have forced them to acknowledge a fact quite devastating to whatever remaining credibility they have: namely, that they all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. With strength in numbers, and knowing that they speak only to and for liberals who are happy if they lie to help Democrats, they all joined hands in an implicit vow of silence and simply ignored the new proof in Schreckinger’s book that, in the days leading up to the 2020 election, they all endorsed a disinformation campaign.

It will now be much harder to avoid confronting the reality of what they did, though it is highly likely that they will continue to do so. This morning, The New York Times published an article about the broad, ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s international business and tax activities. Prior to the election, the Times, to their credit, was one of the few to apply skepticism to the CIA’s pre-election lie, noting on October 22 that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.” Because the activities of Hunter Biden now under FBI investigation directly pertain to the emails first revealed by The Post, the reporters needed to rely upon the laptop’s archive to amplify and inform their reporting. That, in turn, required The New York Times to verify the authenticity of this laptop and its origins — exactly what, according to their reporters, they successfully did:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

That this cache of emails was authentic was clear from the start. Any doubts were obliterated by publication of Schreckinger’s book six months ago. Now the Paper of Record itself explicitly states not only that the emails “were authenticated” but also that the original story from The Post about how they obtained these materials — they “come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop” — “appears” to be true.

What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post‘s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate. It means that Big Tech monopolies, along with Twitter, censored this story based on a lie from “the intelligence community.” It means that Facebook’s promise from its DNC operative that it would suppress discussion of the reporting in order to conduct a “fact-check” of these documents was a fraud because, if one had been conducted, that no fact-check was even published because, if an honest one had been conducted, it would have proven that Facebook’s censorship decree was based on a lie. It means that millions of Americans were denied the ability to hear about reporting on the candidate leading all polls to become the next president, and instead were subjected to a barrage of lies about the provenance (Russia did it ) and authenticity (disinformation! ) of these documents.

The objections to noting all of this today are drearily predictable. Reporting on Hunter Biden is irrelevant since he was not himself a candidate (what made the reporting relevant was what it revealed about the involvement of Joe Biden in these deals). Given the war in Ukraine, now is not the time to discuss all of this (despite the fact that they are usually ignored, there are always horrific wars being waged even if the victims are not as sympathetic as European Ukrainians and the perpetrators are the film’s Good Guys and not the Bad Guys). The real reason most liberals and their media allies do not want to hear about any of this is because they believe that the means they used (deliberately lying to the public with CIA disinformation) are justified by their noble ends (defeating Trump).

Whatever else is true, both the CIA/media disinformation campaign in the weeks before the 2020 election and the resulting regime of brute censorship imposed by Big Tech are of historic significance. Democrats and their new allies in the establishment wing of the Republican Party may be more excited by war in Ukraine than the subversion of their own election by the unholy trinity of the intelligence community, the corporate press, and Big Tech. But today’s admission by The New York Times that this archive and the emails in them were real all along proves that a gigantic fraud was perpetrated by the country’s most powerful institutions. What matters far more than the interest level of various partisan factions is the core truths about U.S. democracy revealed by this tawdry spectacle.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

NBC accused of putting up ‘smokescreen’ for Biden by ‘debunking’ document nobody’s heard of

RT | October 30, 2020

NBC News had its reporters debunk a damaging document about the Bidens that few have heard of, yet it won’t investigate emails potentially implicating Joe Biden in foreign deals. Conservatives smelled a distraction campaign.

An “intelligence” document purportedly linking Biden and his son Hunter to the Chinese Communist Party was the work of a computer-generated fake researcher, NBC News reported on Thursday. According to the news outlet, the report’s author, ‘Martin Aspen,’ is a fabricated identity and his photograph is a ‘deepfake’ composite generated by artificial intelligence.

The document, published by blogger and professor Christopher Balding at the beginning of October, claims that Hunter Biden made deals in China beyond the alleged deals laid out in a recent New York Post expose. Hunter, according to the document, courted Chinese state money, and Chinese officials and businessmen were eager to hand over cash for the chance to court his father, who was then the vice president of the United States.

According to NBC, the document “went viral on the right-wing internet” and “laid the groundwork” for the right to “baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government.”

The only problem with that assertion is that few on the right have ever heard of this document, and it was never the basis of the ongoing Hunter Biden scandal in the first place.

Instead, the right has been focused on a tranche of Hunter Biden’s emails and texts released by the New York Post in mid-October. Allegedly sourced from Hunter’s own laptop by Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, the messages show Hunter attempting to trade access to his father with Ukranian energy tycoons and trying to set up business ventures in China to benefit his family, all while planning to kick a share of his foreign profits up to “the big guy” – which a former business partner of Hunter, Tony Bobulinski, has attested is the former vice president.

A media ‘smokescreen’

According to NBC, the Aspen document is “part of a wider effort to smear Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.” To paraphrase its report, if the document was faked, the entire Biden scandal is brought into disrepute.

Except the New York Post’s reporting is vouched for by Bobulinski and others who appeared to confirm the authenticity of the emails and texts, including pollster Frank Luntz, who didn’t deny that he had taken part in one of the email conversations. While it is unclear if any of the deals laid out in Hunter’s messages ever materialized, the Biden campaign has not denied the authenticity of the laptop contents, or accused Bobulinski of lying.

The media hasn’t pressed Biden on the emails, however. NBC did not report on Bobulinski’s claims, except to describe them as an effort to wrap Biden up in a “Pizzagate”-style conspiracy. The Washington Post first suggested the laptop leaks were a “Russian intelligence operation,” then told readers in a prominent op-ed to “treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation – even if they probably aren’t.”

The New York Times also tried to tie the laptop to Russia, and only changed its tack when the Director of National Intelligence last week said there was “no concrete evidence” of Russian involvement, a statement seconded by the FBI shortly afterwards. NPR went one further, flat out refusing to “waste the listeners’ and readers’ time” on the story, which the publicly-funded network called “pure distraction.”

Some conservatives speculated that with the “Russian disinformation” explanation failing, NBC was trying to deliberately conflate Aspen’s dodgy report with the New York Post’s leaks, in an effort to discredit the latter and protect Biden.

Alexa… what does political desperation look like?

— John Ziegler (@Zigmanfreud) October 30, 2020

NBC News is intentionally spreading disinformation to create a smokescreen around the verified information on Hunter Biden they want to ignore https://t.co/7SHxKihWu6

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) October 30, 2020

Although NBC found out that the report’s supposed author was a fake – a discovery confirmed by Balding himself, who claims ‘Martin Aspen’ was invented to hide the true author from Chinese authorities, the network did not disprove any of its contents. They remain unconfirmed and unverified, with mainstream media seemingly uninterested in following them up.

Much of the research into Biden’s alleged corruption has been carried out by independent journalists, against the wishes of the media at large. Glenn Greenwald, who helped publicize Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks in 2013, resigned on Thursday from The Intercept after the outlet he co-founded refused to publish a story critical of Biden.

“Journalists are desperate not to know,” he said, accusing major news outlets of making “little secret of their eagerness to help Biden win.”

October 30, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Tulsi Gabbard Slams “Neocon/Neolib Warmongers” After NBC Propaganda Exposed

By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 02/04/2019

Tulsi Gabbard lashed out at “neocon” and “neolib warmongers” after NBC News was exposed trying to smear her as a Kremlin stooge. The network was called out over the weekend for relying on a Democrat-run firm that created fake Russian twitter bots to stage a “false flag” campaign against Republic Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama special election – New Knowledge.

To justify its claim that Tulsi Gabbard is the Kremlin’s candidate, NBC writes:

“analysts at New Knowledge, the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election, told NBC News they’ve spotted ‘chatter’ related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns.”

Only to be called out hard by journalist Glenn Greenwald:

After Greenwald fingered NBC for relying on New Knowledge – run by Jonathan Morgan (who also developed the technology behind “Hamilton 68” Russian bot-tracking propaganda website that refuses to disclose its methods) – Gabbard chimed in, tweeting:

“@ggreenwald exposes that @NBC used journalistic fraud to discredit our campaign. But more important is their motive: “to smear any adversary of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party – whether on the left or the right – as a stooge or asset of the Kremlin.”

She later added:

“As commander-in-chief, I will work to end the new cold war, nuclear arms race and slide into nuclear war. That is why the neocon/neolib warmongers will do anything to stop me.

Disturbingly, the Senate Intelligence Committee has relied on a report by New Knowledge on Russian social media election interference, while the firm has created a “Hamilton 68” offshoot, “Disinfo2018” referenced in the NBC article, which claims that three of the top URLs propagated throughout social media by Kremlin bots were about Gabbard.

In short; NBC relied on a known propagandist who created a Russian bot “false flag” to meddle in an election, who claims to track pro-Kremlin Twitter activity, in order to smear Tulsi Gabbard as a Putin puppet.

It’s uncanny what lengths the establishment will go to in order to eliminate threats. For example, take a look at this Vanity Fair hit piece from Jan 30, which uses perhaps the most unflattering photo Gabbard has ever taken and starts off (emphasis not ours):

The presidential campaign of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the renegade Democrat known as much for her chummy relationship with Bashar al-Assad as for supporting Bernie Sanders, is beginning to resemble the candidate herself: confusing, disorganized, and, according to Politico, falling apart. –Vanity Fair

One question remains; will Gabbard become a Democrat puppet like Bernie Sanders if the DNC colludes with their chosen candidate to cheat against her?

February 4, 2019 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , | 4 Comments

As she enters White House race, demonization of ‘Kremlin’s crush’ Tulsi Gabbard goes full tilt

By Igor Ogorodnev | RT | February 3, 2019

The sky may have been clear in Hawaii when Tulsi Gabbard read her speech promising to fight “greed and corruption,” but she enters her bid under a cloud of negative media coverage and accusations of being Russia’s darling.

At first glance Gabbard would seem almost too perfect for the Democratic candidate to face Trump in 2020: a 37-year-old part-Samoan woman, who previously broke off a promising career in local politics to volunteer for combat zone service in Iraq, and is unfailingly popular with voters on her home island.

“What our country needs now more than ever is the spirit of Aloha. That spirit of respect and love for one another and for our country,” she said in a launch speech that the 2008 Barack Obama, himself, might have found too idealistically bland.

Hours earlier, in a two-author NBC investigation an entirely different picture had been painted of the “controversial” Gabbard – the centerpoint of “the first stirrings of an upcoming Russian campaign” in which the Kremlin “propaganda machine” would seek to inject pro-Russian positions into the Democratic Party’s discussions and debates with help from “inauthentic accounts.”

I’m Not With Her

To understand why Gabbard is not treated as a customary feel-good story of a woman breaking multiple glass ceilings, but as a tool of the Kremlin, several pages of her biography need to be revisited.

The first, her resignation from the senior post of Vice President of the Democratic National Committee in protest at the lack of scheduled debates between frontrunner Hillary Clinton and the rising Bernie Sanders, whom she subsequently went on to endorse.

The second, a now-famous meeting with Bashar Assad in 2017, and Gabbard’s insistence that Washington should not engage in “regime change” or sponsorship of radical militant organizations in Syria or anywhere else.

Those two incidents alone have pitted Gabbard against two major establishment forces, and that is before one gets into the details of her socialist-tinged platform from healthcare for all to anti-Wall Street policy proposals. Or her support of stronger border control, which puts her at odds with her party’s official position.

Friendly fire

None of Gabbard’s stances are beyond debate, but she may not even get as far as debating them in public with the other Democrat nominees, if her campaign is dead on arrival. And the media hasn’t been her friend.

All candidates face scrutiny and an airing of their skeletons, but not only has she received less airtime than fellow relative novices Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, but the overall coverage of Gabbard has been uncharacteristically toxic, perhaps comparable only to the Democratic ostracism of Howard Schultz, following the former Starbucks CEO’s unbidden decision to enter the race.

The favored genre has been the expose.

In the past month alone: CNN has dug up Gabbard’s activism and comments, some dating back to the late 1990s, when she was a teenager, against same-sex marriage, for a campaign backed by her legislator father. The Intercept has accused her of associating with Hindu Nationalists, while the Daily Beast has published an article under the title ‘Horseshoe theory: Why Conservative Media and the Far Right Love Tulsi Gabbard for President’, in which it was emphasized that the “enigmatic” Gabbard had “earned substantial praise” from, among others, white nationalist David Duke. Huffington Post accused her of hypocrisy for accepting money from arms manufacturers in the past, even though she never concealed that fact, and is in reality one of just several members of the House who explicitly refuse campaign donations.

Politico published a detailed dissection of her campaign being “in disarray” based on detailed unattributed revelations from the inside, while Daily Kos, the Democrat politics blog, has already endorsed her rival for the 2020 Congress run, which equates to the real election in a district where the Democrats have never lost against the GOP.

‘Defended’ her in an article – how dare they?

On Friday, came NBC’s coup de grace.

“An NBC News analysis of the main English-language news sites employed by Russia in its 2016 election meddling shows Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who is set to make her formal announcement Saturday, has become a favorite of the sites Moscow used when it interfered in 2016,” wrote the authors, one of whom Ben Popken, concluded that the Kremlin “has a crush” on Gabbard when he posted his article to Twitter.

The “analysis” – which appears to have been a name search – found that 20 articles have been published on Gabbard by RT (is it 21 now?), Sputnik and Russia Insider, twice as many as Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. And not just that, but in these articles Gabbard was not mentioned “perfunctorily” but “celebrated” and “defended” despite her “lack of voter recognition.”

Even supposing that all that is correct, does RT have to cover Joe Biden every time it mentions Tulsi Gabbard? Elizabeth Warren? Julian Castro? Should CNN stop putting Kamala Harris in almost every piece about the race? As a non-US news outlet is RT allowed to find her non-interventionist views more interesting for its international audience than those of a status quo Democratic runner? What about as an alternative media outlet? Should covering a candidate who “lacks voter recognition” be considered suspicious? How much of this is sufficient to justify accusations of meddling and being branded a “Russian troll” and presumably sanctioned? Does all of this apply when the US media writes about Juan Guaido in Venezuela?

But wait, there are also “experts who track inauthentic social media accounts” who back this up.

“A few of our analysts saw some chatter on 8chan saying she was a good ‘divider’ candidate to amplify,” New Knowledge’s director of research Renee DiResta told NBC. 8chan? Chatter? Also New Knowledge? The establishment Democrat tech outfit that has just been caught planting and creating fake Russian bots in the Alabama election as part of a false flag operation. They are your experts, NBC?

Even much of Dem-voting Twitter was appalled at such a ham-fisted smear job.

Incompetent, threat or victim of smear campaign?

The media are now fulfilling their own prophecies, as they publish pieces about the “rocky” or “chaotic” start to Gabbard’s campaign. As she keeps going on the defensive – apologizing for the gay marriage remarks, standing firm on Assad meeting – the Hawaiian representative may survive or wilt.

But two questions remain: Is Gabbard just a stumbling novice with odd views, or is the media trying to systematically bury her, as opposed to informing their readers, all because she presents a threat to accepted positions? And secondly, is it doing so at the behest of and with help from a network of influence, be it DNC operatives, or Washington insiders? If the answer to the first question is “the latter” or to the second is “yes,” perhaps instead of spending so much time on our website, investigative reporters should have a look at the provenance and motivations behind some of their own coverage.

February 3, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | 13 Comments

Revolving Door: How Security Clearances Perpetuate Top-Level Corruption in the United States

By Philip M. GIRALDI | Strategic Culture Foundation | 02.08.2018

President Donald Trump is threatening to take away the security clearances of a number of former senior intelligence and security officers who have been extremely critical of him. Most Americans were unaware that any ex-officials continued to hold clearances after they retired and the controversy has inevitably raised the question why that should be so. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer.

A security clearance is granted to a person but it is also linked to “need to know” in terms of what kind of information should or could be accessed, which means that when you are no longer working as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency you don’t necessarily need to know anything about China’s spying on the United States. Or do you? If you transition into a directorship or staff position of a major intelligence or security contractor, which many retirees do, you might need to retain the qualification for your job, which makes the clearance an essential component in the notorious revolving door whereby government officials transit to the private sector and then directly lobby their former colleagues to keep the flow of cash coming.

At top levels among the beltway bandit companies, where little work is actually done, some make the case that you have to remain “well informed” to function properly. The fact is that many top-level bureaucrats do retain their clearances for those nebulous reasons and also sometimes as a courtesy. Some have even received regular briefings from the CIA and the office of the Director of National intelligence even though they hold no government positions. A few very senior ex-officials have also been recalled by congress or the White House to provide testimony on particular areas of expertise or on past operations, which can legitimately require a clearance, though in such cases one can be granted on a temporary basis to cover a specific issue.

The problem arises when former officials use their clearances as bona fides to enhance their marketability for non-clearance jobs in the media or corporate world, particularly when those individuals are criticizing current government policies and behaving in a partisan fashion regarding specific candidates for office. Donald Trump was especially assailed by former officials John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Michael Morell before the 2016 election, all of whom continue to attack him currently, most particularly for the recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During the 2016 campaign, Morell, who openly supported Hillary Clinton and is the designated intelligence on-air contributor for CBS news, deliberately linked the fact that he was ex-CIA Acting Director to his assertion that Trump was somehow an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation” to establish his credibility. That type of activity should be considered abusive and an exploitation of one’s former office.

Morell left CIA in June 2013 and by November was a senior counselor with Beacon Global Strategies. According to the firm’s website, Beacon Global Strategies is a government and private sector consulting group that specializes in matters of international policy, foreign affairs, national defense, cyber, intelligence, and homeland security. Morell may know little about those issues as they have evolved in the past five years, but citing his clearance gives him credibility for knowledge that he might not really possess and also gives him direct access to former colleagues that he can lobby to obtain government contracts.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, who famously voted for the Communist Party candidate for US president in 1976, has also profited greatly from his government service, becoming rich from his board memberships. He sits on the board of directors of SecureAuth + CORE Security and also on the board of The Analysis Corporation. More important in terms of his public profile, he is the “Intelligence Consultant” for NBC News and MSNBC and appears regularly.

Last week Senator Rand Paul met with President Trump and recommended that Brennan’s security clearance be revoked. He argued that Brennan, Trump’s most aggressive critic, has been using his credentials to provide credibility when he calls meeting with Russia’s president “treasonous” and describes the president as “wholly in the pocket of Putin.” Clearance holders also more generally use their privileged access to “secret information” to leverage speaking and television network pundit fees. In other words, Brennan and the others are using their security clearances to enhance their incomes, monetizing their access to classified information to enhance their value.

It is by no means clear whether Trump will revoke the clearances of Clapper, Brennan, Morell and Hayden. As he is the legal source of all government clearances he has the power to do so. An equitable solution on the clearance issue more generally speaking would be to cancel all security clearances on the day when one leaves government service unless there is a direct and immediate transition to a private sector position that absolutely requires such a qualification. That would be fair to lower level employees seeking a second source of income and it would also eliminate many of those who are merely cashing in on their presumed access. As it is a rational solution it is very unlikely that it will be entertained by either the White House or by Congress.

August 2, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

How the Media Wove a Narrative of North Korean Nuclear Deception

By Gareth Porter | 38 North | July 26, 2018

Since the June 12 Singapore Summit between US President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the US media has woven a misleading narrative that both past and post-summit North Korean actions indicate an intent to deceive the US about its willingness to denuclearize. The so-called intelligence that formed the basis of these stories was fed to reporters by individuals within the administration pushing their own agenda.

The Case of the Secret Uranium Enrichment Sites

In late June and early July, a series of press stories portrayed a North Korean policy of deceiving the United States by keeping what were said to be undeclared uranium enrichment sites secret from the United States. The stories were published just as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was preparing for the first meetings with North Korean officials to begin implementing the Singapore Summit Declaration.

The first such story appeared on NBC News on June 29, which reported:

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months—and that Kim Jong Un may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions in nuclear talks with the Trump administration.

NBC News reporters quoted one official as saying, “There is absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the U.S.” They further reported that the intelligence assessment “concludes that there is more than one secret site” for enrichment.

The story was highly problematic because it reported the alleged conclusion of the intelligence report as a fact, even though it admitted that NBC reporters had not seen or been briefed in detail on any part of the intelligence assessment in question, but had relied entirely on general statements by unnamed officials. Furthermore, none of the officials on whom they relied were identified as members of the intelligence community.

Significantly, the story did not indicate whether the assessment was endorsed by the entire US intelligence community or, as turned out to be the case, only one element of it. Normal journalistic practice would have made clear that NBC was passing on an unconfirmed conclusion the accuracy of which they were unable to verify. Instead, the NBC reporters played up the alleged conclusion as unambiguous evidence that US intelligence believed the North Koreans intended to deceive the United States by maintaining secret enrichment facilities under a future agreement with the United States.

The Washington Post published a report by national security and intelligence reporters Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick the day after the NBC story that paralleled its main thrust and cited the same unnamed intelligence sources that were cited in the NBC story. But the Post also revealed that the intelligence assessment in question had come from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is generally recognized as an outlier within the intelligence community on most assessments of adversary capabilities and intentions. A former senior intelligence official with extensive experience dealing with DIA assessments explained in an interview with this writer that the DIA “would tend to put a worse-case spin” on any analysis of North Korean intentions.

That makes it all the more important to know whether the rest of the intelligence community agrees with the reported assessment of North Korean intentions. Nakashima and Warrick seemed to suggest that there is no doubt in the intelligence community that the North Koreans “have operated a secret underground enrichment site known as Kangsong,” and they linked to an earlier Post report on that alleged secret enrichment site published May 25.

That earlier Post story quoted a former senior US official as saying that intelligence agencies had “long suspected the existence of such a facility” and believed there were “probably” others as well. But a PowerPoint on the Kangsong issue by David Albright, the founder and CEO of the Institute for Science and International Security, makes it clear that US intelligence lacks hard evidence to support such suspicions. Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, revealed that the original allegation of the secret enrichment plant had come from a North Korean defector who said he had “worked near the site,” clearly implying that he had inferred the purpose of the site without having been inside it.

More importantly, according to Albright, “we have not located this site,” meaning that the US intelligence community still did not have a specific location for the suspected plant eight years after the defector was obviously asked to provide it. Albright further disclosed that some US intelligence analysts and senior officials of at least one foreign government have challenged the belief that the building in question was an enrichment site, because, “some aspects of the building are not consistent with a centrifuge plant.” And he recalled that other alleged covert enrichment facilities had been suggested to his organization, but that he viewed them as “less credible than the information about Kangsong.”

The intelligence community appears to have even less basis for claiming a secret North Korean nuclear site—much less multiple secret sites—today than it did when the US government charged that North Korea had a secret nuclear facility in mid-1998. That was when the Clinton administration informed congressional leaders and the South Korean government privately that US intelligence analysts were convinced that a site with tunnels carved into a mountain at Kumchang-ri was intended to house a new reactor and plutonium reprocessing center, based on satellite photographs and other intelligence.

After months of negotiations, the North finally agreed to US on-site inspections in June 1999 and again in May 2000. The result of those two inspections was that the US government was compelled to acknowledge that the purpose of the tunnel complex at Kumchang-ri had been to vent fumes from an underground uranium milling plant.

At least the intelligence community had identified a specific site in 1998 that it regarded with suspicion, which is not the case today. Nevertheless, a group of officials is promoting the idea that North Korea is planning to keep such sites secret under a negotiated agreement. The timing of the leaked intelligence assessment that prompted these stories suggested that someone in the Trump administration was seeking to sway the White House to adopt the tougher US stance in Pompeo’s trip to Pyongyang in early July. Albright appeared to be referring to that effort when he told the Post that intelligence assessment came just when “there’s a worry that the Trump administration may go soft, and accept a deal that focuses on Yongbyon and forgets about these other sites.”

National security adviser John Bolton had been reported as pushing for a hard line in diplomatic talks with North Korea that would threaten their viability. These reports raise the obvious possibility that the officials who conveyed the alleged intelligence conclusion were part of a political effort coordinated with him.

Hyping Yongbyon Improvements to Discredit Diplomacy

During the same time period as the reporting on alleged secret sites, NBC News, CNN and the Wall Street Journal all reported on North Korea making rapid upgrades to its nuclear weapons complex at Yongbyon and expanding its missile production program—all at the very moment when Trump and Kim were agreeing on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula at their Singapore Summit.

In each case, the reports cited analyses of commercial satellite imagery from independent analysts, including contributors to 38 North. But they all employed a common device to create a false narrative about the negotiations with North Korea: by misrepresenting the diplomatic context in which the satellite images were collected, they drew political conclusions about North Korean strategy that were unwarranted.

The series of stories involved more than a mere misunderstanding of the raw information being reported. They all denigrated the idea of negotiating with North Korea on the grounds that it cannot be trusted. The NBC News and CNN stories on improvements at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center cited the analysis of satellite images published by 38 North on June 26. And they were all slanted to lead readers to conclude that the improvements in question signified a nefarious intention by North Korea to deceive the Trump administration.

The headline of the June 27 NBC News story asked, “If North Korea is denuclearizing, why is it expanding a nuclear research center?” And it warned that North Korea “continues to make improvements to a major nuclear facility, raising questions about President Donald Trump’s claim that Kim Jong Un has agreed to disarm, independent experts tell NBC News.”

CNN’s story about the same images declared that there were “troubling signs” that North Korea was making “improvements” or “upgrades” at a “rapid pace” to its nuclear facilities, some of which it said were carried out after the Trump-Kim summit. It cited one facility that had produced plutonium in the past that had been upgraded, despite Kim’s alleged promise to Trump to draw down his nuclear arsenal.

Both the NBC and CBS stories were misrepresenting the significance of the improvements described in the 38 North analysis. They either ignored or sought to discredit the carefully-worded caveat in that assessment, which cautioned that the continued work at the Yongbyon facility “should not be seen as having any relationship to North Korea’s pledge to denuclearize.”

The analysis was referring to the fact that the Singapore Summit’s joint statement did not commit North Korea to immediately halt its activities in their nuclear and missile programs and therefore the improvements at Yongbyon had no bearing on whether Pyongyang would agree to denuclearization. Indeed, during the negotiation of US-Soviet and US-Russian arms control agreements, both sides continued to build weapons until the agreement was completed. It should not have come as a surprise, therefore, that work at Yongbyon was continuing.

NBC News deliberately ignored these crucial contextual facts and instead selectively reported statements from other analysts dismissing the notion that North Korea would ever denuclearize and would continue to try to deceive the US about its true intentions.

On July 1, a few days after those stories appeared, the Wall Street Journal headlined, “New satellite imagery indicates Pyongyang is pushing ahead with weapons programs even as it pursues dialogue with Washington.” The lead paragraph called it a “major expansion of a key missile-manufacturing plant.”

The images of a North Korean solid-fuel missile manufacturing facility at Hamhung showed that new buildings had been added to the facility beginning in the early spring, after Kim Jong Un had called for more production of solid-fuel rocket engines and warhead tips last August. The exterior construction of some buildings was completed “around the time” of the Trump-Kim summit meeting, according to the analysts at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. The Center’s David Schmerler told the Journal, “The expansion of production infrastructure for North Korea’s solid missile infrastructure probably suggests that Kim Jong Un does not intend to abandon his nuclear and missile programs.”

The improvements in North Korea’s infrastructure for missile parts manufacturing documented by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, which began well before the summit, are hardly evidence against North Korea’s willingness to negotiate a comprehensive agreement with the United States. Like any country dealing with a serious military threat from an adversary, North Korea is both hedging against the real possibility of talks failing and signaling that it is not unilaterally surrendering. The United States is doing the same thing, albeit in different ways.

Conclusion

Major media reporting on what is alleged to be intelligence and photographic evidence that North Korea intends to deceive the United States in negotiations on denuclearization has been extraordinarily misleading. It has blithely ignored serious issues surrounding the alleged intelligence conclusions and suggested that North Korea has demonstrated bad faith by failing to halt all nuclear and missile-related activities.

Recent stories do not reflect actual evidence of covert facilities, but rather deep suspicions of North Korean intentions within the intelligence community that have been fed to the media by individuals within the administration who are unhappy with the direction of the president’s North Korea policy following the Singapore Summit. And breathless reports on improvements in North Korean nuclear and missile facilities ignore the distinction between a summit statement and a final deal with North Korea. They have thus obscured the reality that the fate of the negotiations depends not only North Korean policy but on the willingness of the United States to make changes in its policy toward the DPRK and the Korean Peninsula that past administrations have all been reluctant to make.

These stories also underscore a broader problem with media coverage of the US-North Korean negotiations: a strong underlying bias toward the view that it is futile to negotiate with North Korea. The latest stories have constructed a dark narrative of North Korean deception that is not based on verified facts. If this narrative is not rebutted or corrected, it could shift public opinion—which has been overwhelmingly favorable to negotiations with North Korea—against such a policy.

July 28, 2018 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Neocon Bret Stephens Wants Syria’s Assad Assassinated

By Michael S. Rozeff | Lew Rockwell | May 1, 2018

Bret Stephens is a political commentator who works for The New York Times and NBC News. Stephens was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post between 2002 and 2004.

His Jewish identity is mentioned hand-in-hand with his political orientation by The Times of Israel : “In criticizing Trump even after his electoral victory, Stephens joins other leading Jewish conservative voices, including Brooks, Jennifer Rubin and William Kristol.” His Jewish identity is pertinent because he is known as a neocon and a strong supporter of Israel. The one seems to reinforce the other. Furthermore, his position on Iraq was criminal and disastrous and now he’s advocating a position on Syria that would also be criminal and disastrous. We should be extremely skeptical of the objectivity of someone like him who comes across as a shill for Israel and the Empire all-in-one.

Strong criticism of his position on Syria appears in an article by Robert Rabil dated yesterday that quotes him as follows: “U.S. should target Assad and his senior lieutenants directly in a decapitation strike, just as the U.S. attempted in Iraq in 2003, and against Osama bin Laden in 2011… if we [Americans] are serious about confronting Iran, Syria remains the most important battlefield.” What may result from such an aggression and war crime as decapitating Syria? I quote the article:

“It is mind boggling that someone as astute as Stephens would call for the decapitation of the regime in the same way U.S. had done in Iraq without providing an alternative to the regime. No less significant, does ‘our’ seriousness about confronting Iran require decapitating the Syrian regime? Is punishing the Syrian regime a pretext to confront Iran? This is a dangerous and flawed logic divorced from the harsh reality of the Levant. How could anyone invoke what the U.S. attempted in Iraq without admitting and internalizing the staggering human and financial cost the U.S. has paid? Has the notion of what may happen the day after the decapitation strike and confronting Iran crossed Stephens’ mind, or of those echoing him?

“Undoubtedly, Syria will further descend into anarchy and wretchedness, leading up to regional and international strife. A decapitating strike against the Syrian regime and/or an open confrontation with Iran in Syria would most likely put Moscow and Washington on a path of armed conflict. Russia made its position clear that it will respond to any game changing attack on Syria…

“Most importantly, is it in the national interest of Washington to risk a war over Syria, and by extension Iran, with Moscow after what United States has gone through in Iraq and Afghanistan with little to show for the enormous sacrifices Americans have made?”

Stephens was born in New York City in 1973. Stephens is said to be “brilliant”. He has several awards, indicating he’s a smart fellow, but being smart doesn’t make you wise, right or someone whose ideas should be followed. He strongly endorsed the war on Iraq:

“Stephens was a ‘prominent voice’ among the media advocates for the start of the 2003 Iraq War, for instance writing in a 2002 column that, unless checked, Iraq was likely to become the first nuclear power in the Arab world. Although the weapons of mass destruction used as a casus belli were never shown to exist, Stephens continued to insist as late as 2013 that the Bush administration had ‘solid evidence’ for going to war. Stephens has also argued strongly against the Iran nuclear deal and its preliminary agreements, arguing that they were a worse bargain even than the 1938 Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany.”

Stephens’ advice on Syria is easily as criminal as his advice on Iraq. Keeping the covenant with Iran is productive of peace. Breaking it is productive of war.

The neocon world view fails to recognize the the tremendous injuries the U.S. is inflicting on peoples in other lands. It fails to recognize either their property rights or rights to self-determination. The neocons fail to recognize the long-term ill-will and retaliation that the U.S. is producing. The neocons naively and wrongly think that democracy is a wonderful institution, that the U.S. has a right to overthrow regimes and set up democratic governments. They wrongly think that they are capable of building states when they are not. The neocons fail to recognize the military capabilities, including the nuclear weapons, of other powers. The neocons overestimate the efficacy of the U.S. military. The Jewish neocons are influenced strongly by Israeli right-wingers, and they are not of a mind to devise peaceful solutions to the nagging problems associated with Israel. The neocons do not comprehend that the world can progress peacefully and without a dominant superpower attempting to impose its standards and form of government. The neocons fail to recognize the faults of the U.S. government. The neocons ignore the inflation of the domestic police state as a feature of the Empire, just as they ignore the mounting U.S. debt. The neocons fail to see or appreciate other peoples as persons, instead viewing them as pieces they can move on a world chess board.

Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail] is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.

May 1, 2018 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Taking the World to the Brink

By Rick Sterling | Consortium News | April 10, 2018

Western neoconservatives and hawks are driving the international situation to increasing tension and danger. Not content with the destruction of Iraq and Libya based on false claims, they are now pressing for a direct US attack on Syria.

As a dangerous prelude, Israeli jets flying over Lebanese airspace fired missiles against the T4/Tiyas Airbase west of Palmyra following reports on Sunday of a chemical weapons attack in Douma, a suburb of Damascus under rebel control.

As reported at Tass, the Chief of Russia’s General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, predicted the alleged use of chemicals almost a month ago. The report from March 13 says, “Russia has hard facts about preparations for staging the use of chemical weapons against civilians by the government forces. After the provocation, the US plans to accuse Syria’s government forces of using chemical weapons … furnish the so-called ‘evidence’ … and Washington plans to deliver a missile and bomb strike against Damascus’ government districts.”

Gerasimov noted that Russian military advisors are staying in the Syrian Defense Ministry’s facilities in Damascus and “in the event of a threat to our military servicemen’s lives, Russia’s Armed Forces will take retaliatory measures to target both the missiles and their delivery vehicles.”

The situation is clearly fraught with the risk of sliding into international conflict between the two biggest nuclear weapons powers with all that that implies. Civilization itself is being put in peril so that the West can continue supporting sectarian armed groups seeking to overthrow the Assad government, in violation of international law and the UN Charter.

The most powerful country in the world is now led by a real estate, hotel and entertainment mogul without political experience. Behind the scenes, there is an entrenched foreign policy establishment determined to maintain and reclaim U.S. unilateral “leadership” of the world. American leaders fear that the U.S. is losing influence, prestige and power around the world. Israel and Saudi Arabia are seeing their designs on regional dominance failing.

East Ghouta, Damascus

East Ghouta is a district of farms and towns on the north-east outskirts of Damascus. For the past six years, various armed factions controlled the area. On a nearly daily basis, they launched mortar and hell cannon missile attacks into Damascus, and have killed thousands of civilians. This author personally witnessed two such mortar attacks in April 2014.

By the end of March most of East Ghouta had been retaken by the government. With the peaceful evacuation of armed militants, civilians flooded into the humanitarian corridors and then government camps for the displaced. The campaign was proceeding quickly with minimal loss of life as the Russian Reconciliation officers negotiated agreements which allowed the militants to keep small weapons and be transported to Idlib in the north.

Journalist Vanessa Beeley documented the situation including the happiness and relief of many civilians as they finally made it to safety. One described the feeling as “like being reborn”. Robert Fisk of Britain’s Independent newspaper was on site and reported what he saw first hand in stories titled Watching on as Islamist fighters are evacuated from war-torn Eastern Ghouta and Western howls of outrage over the Ghouta siege ring hollow.

As reported at the Russian Reconciliation Centre, by the end of March, 105,857 civilians had moved into government controlled areas while 13,793 militants, plus 23,433 family members had been transported north. Those who wanted to stay, including former fighters, were welcomed. They could rejoin Syrian society with the same rights and obligations as other Syrians.

The last remaining opposition stronghold was the town of Douma, controlled by the Saudi-funded Jaish al Islam. Negotiations were prolonged because Jaish al Islam did not want to go to Idlib, which is dominated by another militant opposition group, Jabhat al Nusra also known as Hayat Tahrir al Sham. It is the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

The Chemical Incident

On Saturday, April 7, video and stories claiming a chemical weapons attack in Douma were broadcast. The video showed dozens of dead children. On Sunday the story grabbed western mainstream media headlines. U.S. President Trump quickly came to a conclusion: “President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay”.

There has been no objective investigation. The media claims are based on statements and videos from members of the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) and the White Helmets. Both organizations receive significant funding from the US government and are not neutral as aid organizations should be. They both call for Western intervention in Syria.

Chemical weapons have emerged as the quick and easy justification for aggression. One year ago, in April 2017, it was the incident at Khan Shaykoun. That resulted in a US attack on a Syrian air base just days later. As reported here by Consortium News‘ late founder, Robert Parry, the subsequent investigation discovered that dozens of victims had shown up in hospitals in diverse locations and up to 100 kms away from the scene of the crime before the event happened. Indicative of apparent bias by the investigators, this red flag pointing to fraud was not probed further. If it was just a few victims or just one location, it might be a mistake in time record-keeping. However in this case there were dozens of discrepancies in multiple locations, clearly raising the possibility of fraud.

Now we have the incident in Douma. The armed opposition is in retreat. They are losing the war and are desperate. They have tried since 2012 to pressure the U.S. and NATO to intervene directly on their side. The rebels have access to chemical weapons in East Ghouta and they have a motive. They also have thousands of prisoners. This group put hundreds of prisoners, primarily women and children, in cages on the streets of Douma.

Who Benefits?

The timing of the chemical weapons incidents is also noteworthy. As documented here, one year ago on March 30, 2017, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said U.S. policy was no longer focused on getting Assad out. Five days later the chemical incident at Khan Sheikhoun happened, followed quickly by blaming the Syrian government without evidence, then the U.S. attack on a Syrian air base and a then restoration of the demand that “Assad must go.”

On March 29 this year, Trump said that U.S. forces will withdraw from Syria “very soon.” This was followed by outcries from the media and political establishment. Once again, following Saturday’s incident, the U.S. is again threatening to intervene. The chemical weapons incidents have consistently resulted in the reversal of a proposed change in hostility toward Syria.

Neoconservatives and the supporters of ‘regime change’ foreign policy have various theories why the Assad government would perpetrate a chemical weapons attack. Senator John McCain says the Syrian President was “emboldened” by Trump’s call to withdraw. Juan Cole, an academic who promoted the assaults on Libya in 2011, has a different theory. He says “Chemical weapons are used by desperate regimes that are either outnumbered by the enemy or are reluctant to take casualties in their militaries. Barrel-bombing Douma with chem seems to have appealed to the regime as a tactic for this reason. It had potential of frightening the Douma population into deserting the Army of Islam.”

In contrast with his theory, chemical weapons were used extensively by the U.S. in Vietnam and Iraq when they were far from desperate. As evidenced in the flow of civilians into government held areas, most of the civilian population are happy to get away from the sectarian and violent Army of Islam (“Jaish al Islam”). Cole seems to be basing his theories on inaccurate western media coverage just as he did regarding Libya where sensational claims about a looming massacre in Benghazi were later shown to be fraudulent.

It’s clear who benefits from sensational media coverage about a chemical weapons incident: those who seek to want the U.S. to intervene militarily. Every time there is an incident, and well before an investigation has even begun, it is seized on by governments and organizations who’ve sought regime change in Syria since the start of the war, and perhaps even earlier.

Manipulating Public Opinion

NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel, exposed as part of hoax

The manipulation of western opinion about the Syrian conflict using fake events is not theory; it has been proven. A good example is the fake kidnapping of NBC reporter Richard Engel in December 2012. Engel and his media team were reportedly kidnapped and threatened with death by “shabiha” supporters of the Syrian president. After days in captivity the American team was supposedly rescued by Free Syrian Army “rebels” after a shootout. In 2015 it was confirmed this was a hoax perpetrated by the FSA and their American supporters. The entire charade was carried out by the “rebels”. The goal was to demonize the Assad government and its supporters, and to romanticize and increase support for the armed opposition. Neither Engel nor NBC confessed to the reality until it was about to be exposed years later, pointing to duplicity and collusion in the deception.

Four and half years ago, on August 21, 2013, the most famous chemical weapons incident occurred. The Syrian government was immediately accused of launching a sarin attack which killed hundreds of children and civilians. Over the next six months investigations were carried out. The conclusions of Seymour Hersh, Parry and the research site whoghouta.com concluded that the attack was almost certainly not from the government but actually from one of the ‘rebel’ factions with support from Turkish intelligence services. Two Turkish parliamentary deputies held a press conference and publicly revealed some of the evidence. The intent then, as now, was to provide justification and provocation for the US and NATO to bomb Syrian government installations.

The Drums are Pounding

Today there is the imminent possibility of a major attack based on the allegations of a clearly biased source, with international law and legal due process tossed aside. Why is violence being threatened before there is a serious, independent investigation of the chemical incident? If the accusations against Syria are true, why not let it be investigated, especially now that the area was liberated on Monday and safe access can be provided?

The drums of war are pounding. After over one year of incessant Russia bashing and disinformation, is the public ready to go to war with Russia over Syria? Neoconservative hawks and their Israeli and Saudi allies do not seem alarmed by this prospect. Their plans and predictions for Iraq, Libya and Yemen were delusional fantasies with the price paid in blood by the people of those countries and in treasure by Americans as well. Sadly, there has not been any accountability for the media and political establishment that promoted and launched those wars. Now they want to escalate the aggression by attacking Syria, causing vastly more blood to flow and risking confrontation with a country which can fight back.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be contacted at [email protected]

April 10, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

Russia Denies Reports About Blocking Signals From US Drones in Syria

Sputnik – April 10, 2018

The Russian military has been scrambling some US military drones performing in Syria, seriously disrupting American military operations, the channel NBC announced, citing anonymous US officials.

According to US officials, the Russians had started blocking some smaller US drones several weeks ago after a “series of alleged chemical weapons attacks on civilians in Eastern Ghouta.” The NBC network’s sources stated that the Russian military was concerned that the US military would take revenge for the attacks and began jamming the GPS systems of the drones operating in the area.

“GPS receivers in most drones can be fairly easily jammed,” Dr. Todd Humphreys, the director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin said.

The Defense Department cannot with certainty state whether the jamming is the cause of the drones crashing, according to the operational security.

“The US military maintains sufficient countermeasures and protections to ensure the safety of our manned and unmanned aircraft, our forces and the missions they support,” said Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon.

Deputy Chairman of the Russian Federation Council Committee on Defense and Security Yevgeny Serebrennikov has denied reports that Russia has blocked signals of US drones in Syria.

“This is more fake information from American media, which appears so often in recent times. Russia has repeatedly said that its actions, including in Syria, are made only in accordance with international treaties, such actions could not really have taken place,” Serebrennikov said.

US-Russia Standoff

The announcement has been made following an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria’s Douma, a number of countries, including the US, jumped at the chance to blame Damascus for the incident.

Last week, the US Treasury Department added another 38 Russian entrepreneurs, senior officials and companies to its sanctions list in response to Russia’s alleged “malign activity” worldwide.

READ MORE:

Reports of ‘Chemical Attacks’ in Syria Used to ‘Justify External Intervention’

April 10, 2018 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 1 Comment

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