Frank Snepp was a CIA agent who arrived in Vietnam in 1969 and stayed on until he was evacuated as Saigon fell in 1975. He spent a good deal of time working with the press while there and developed the ability to plant stories in major media outlets like the New York Times, the New Yorker, the LA Times, Chicago Daily News and others that supported the Agency’s goals.
He revealed how he did it in a book, Decent Interval, and in the above 1983 interview.
Does the CIA still do this? The interview doesn’t prove that they do. But why would they stop?
SILENT COUP: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard (2023)
Everybody knows that corporations influence and manipulate governments behind the scenes. In Silent Coup, two British journalists show ways in which corporations are actually replacing governments.
There are international corporate courts, whose decisions are binding on governments. The world is dotted with enclaves administered by corporations independent of any national laws. Even responsibility for public welfare and national defense is being handed over to corporations.
Few of these things are secret. They are just ignored. That is why the coup is a silent coup.
Corporate Courts
I first learned about international corporate courts when the Obama administration proposed the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, a free trade agreement binding all the important nations bordering the Pacific except China.
The problem with TTP agreement was in the fine print. Any time a TPP country’s government adopted a policy that impacted the profits of a foreign company, that company could go to a special arbitration board and demand compensation for lost profits.
Public outcry prevented U.S. ratification of that agreement, but then I learned that NAFTA also contained an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provision. In fact, the whole world is covered by a web of ISDS agreements.
They were the brainchild of a German banker called Hermann Abs who had headed Deutsche Bank. He helped finance the Nazi regime, although he did not belong to the Nazi party itself. He helped settle allied claims against Germany after the war. He was highly respected by bankers and industrialists, including in the USA.
In 1957, he made a speech in San Francisco to a group of bankers and industrialists from all over the world, calling for a “capitalist Magna Carta,” a system of international law that would protect global corporations from revolutionaries and nationalists.
He joined with a British Lord called Lord Shawcross to write a document called the Abs-Shawcross Draft Convention. It was taken up in the 1960s by the World Bank, which created the International Center for Dispute Settlement (ICDS) and pressured its clients to adopt ISDS rules.
Provost and Kennard came across the ICDS when they went to El Salvador, which was fighting a lawsuit brought by a Canadian-Australian company called OceanaGold, which demanded compensation for environmental regulations that prevent them from digging a gold mine.
I always enjoy reading Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Presidential campaigns. He is like a sane Hunter S. Thompson. Here is his latest on the Iowa caucus campaign.
The video version:-
The print version (which is much more enjoyable):-
THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD by Andrew Fowler (2011)
SECRET POWER: Wikileaks and Its Enemies by Stefania Maurizi, translated by Lesli Cavanaugh-Bardelli (2022)
I’ve read two more books about Julian Assange that I recommend.
Andrew Fowler, an Australian journalist, wrote about Assange at the height of his fame and success. He provides Assange’s back story and insights into his sometimes difficult character.
I never thought Assange’s personality traits mattered when it came to assessing the political impact and legal defense of his work. Also, he has been the target of systematic character assassination.
But he’s an interesting person, and Fowler’s warts-and-all portrait is a fair and balanced look at Assange, the man.
Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist who worked closely with Assange, took up the story where Fowler left off.
She puts him in the broader context of the struggle for transparency in government and privacy for the individual during the past decade. Assange isn’t the only person who’s been imprisoned for truth-telling.
If I had to recommend just one book about Assange, it would be Maurizi’s.
Assange was an original thinker and a brilliant programmer. In his 20s, he was a member of a hackers’ club called the International Subversives. Assange managed to hack into top-secret U.S. military sites, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration computers. On the day of a space launch in 1989, the computers NASA lit up with the words, YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN WANKED.
This was quite an achievement, inasmuch as the public Internet did not exist. Assange was arrested, tried and let off with a warning, inasmuch he hadn’t done any harm or made any money out of his prank.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a movement called the Cypherpunks, of which Assange was a part. Their dual objectives were complete privacy for the individual and complete transparency for governments and other systems of authority.
Wikileaks was the realization of that ideal. A whistle-blower could leave secret information with Wikileaks without anyone, including Wikileaks itself, knowing who they were. Wikileaks could then, after verifying the information, throw light onto hidden power.
Among Wikileaks’ early exploits were exposes of African dictators, the Church of Scientology, crooked Icelandic bankers and Sarah Palin’s private emails.
It’s interesting, for what it’s worth, that two of the world’s most important truth-tellers are a transgender woman, Chelsea Manning, and a gay man, Glenn Greenwald. But Manning, unlike Greenwald and the others, did not start out as a social activist. She was an ordinary person who was unwilling to be silent about atrocities.
Matt Taibbi went to London last Saturday to join protests on behalf of Julian Assange. Here is part of what he had to say:
Julian Assange became famous as we were creating a vast new government-within-a-government, a system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and drone assassination. Many of these things we know about only because of Wikileaks. Ostensibly, all this secrecy was needed to fight foreign terrorism.
The brutal irony now is the architects of that system no longer feel the need to hide their dirty tactics. My government, openly, wants to put this man in jail for 175 years, mostly for violations of the Espionage Act. These include crimes like “conspiracy to receive national defense information,” or “obtaining national defense information.”
What is “national defense information?” The answer is what makes this law so dangerous. It’s whatever they say it is. It’s any information they don’t want to get out. It doesn’t even have to be classified.
What is conspiracy to obtain such information? We have a word for that. It’s called journalism.
My government wants to put Julian Assange in jail for 175 years for practicing journalism. The government of this country, the U.K., is going to allow it to happen.
If they did this to Andrei Sakharov, or Nelson Mandela, every human rights organization in the world would be denouncing this as an intolerable outrage. Every NGO would be lining up to lend support. Every journalist would be penning editorials demanding his release.
But because our own governments are doing it, we get silence.
If you’re okay with this happening to one Julian Assange, you’d better be okay with it happening to many others. That’s why this moment is so important. If Assange is successfully extradited and convicted, it will take about ten minutes for it to happen again. From there this will become a common occurrence. There will be no demonstrations in parks, no more news stories. This will become a normal part of our lives.
THE TRIAL OF JULIAN ASSANGE: A Story of Persecution by Nils Melzer with Oliver Kobold (2021, 2022)
I do not intend to leave to our children a world where governments can disregard the rule of law with impunity and and where telling the truth has become a crime. ==Nils Melzer
Julian Assange, the founder and public face of Wikileaks, will soon be extradited to the United States to face charges of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. His alleged crime was to publish classified information, which revealed war crimes and other crimes by the U.S. government.
If the fate of previous truth-tellers is any guide, he is certain to be convicted and to spend the rest of his life under conditions similar to or worse than the convicted Russian truth-teller, Alexei Navalny, now endures.
I had long been aware that the charges against him were unjust, that earlier charges by the Swedish government were a frame-up and that the conditions under which he was being held amounted to torture.
But I did not understand the extent of the injustice, the frame-ups and the torture until I read Nils Melzer’s The Trial of Julian Assange.
Melzer is a recognized expert on international human rights law and a long-time investigator of human rights abuses for the International Committee of the Red Cross and other groups.
He was the United Nations rapporteur on torture from 2016 to 2022, which meant that he had a mandate from the UN Human Rights Council to investigate and report on any and all allegations of torture and mistreatment worldwide, based on his own judgment.
“In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution, I have never seen a group of democratic states ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonize and abuse a single individual for such a long time,” he wrote.
The case falls into my mandate in three different ways: First, Assange published proof of systematic torture. But instead of those responsible for the torture, it is Assange who is being persecuted. Second, he himself has been ill-treated to the point that he is now exhibiting symptoms of psychological torture. And third, he is to be extradited to a country that holds people like him in prison conditions that Amnesty International has described as torture. In summary: Julian Assange uncovered torture, has been tortured himself and could be tortured to death in the United States.
The UN definition of torture is the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain and suffering in order to achieve a specific purpose. It considers psychological torture to be real torture.
Psychological torture has four elements: intimation, isolation, arbitrariness and humiliation. It can result in mental breakdown or worse.
Observers say Assange shows the effects of psychological torture, caused by isolation and harassment from 2017 on in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he had sought political asylum, and by solitary confinement and worse harassment at Belmarsh prison, where he has been held during hearings for his unsuccessful appeal of an order of extradition to the United States.
U.S. special administrative measures for accused enemies of the state means Assange can expect more of the same, even while awaiting trial.
He is accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 (which incorporates the Defense Secrets Act of 1911). This legislation makes it a crime to disclose military information to those unauthorized to receive it or to obtain military-related information that could be used to the detriment of the United States.
Julian Assange obtained information he was unauthorized to receive and the disclosure of atrocities committed and covered up by U.S. forces most certainly damaged the reputation of the U.S. government.
The most noteworthy is the Collateral Murder video of 2010, based on the information leaked by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning.
This was footage from a helicopter gunship whose crew killed a group of innocent civilians, including two Reuters journalists. It also showed the killing of a passer-by who tried to render aid, and the wounding of his children. The official story had been that they were armed insurgents.
His only possible defense, as I see it, is to challenge the constitutionality of the Espionage Act. In the United States, unlike in the U.K. and Sweden, such a defense is legally possible, but I don’t think the odds are in his favor.
Under Presidents G.W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. government claimed the authority to launch undeclared wars, to assassinate perceived enemies, and to imprison and torture perceived enemies without trial. Any U.S. president, now and in the future, potentially has the power of a totalitarian dictator.
The only barrier is the force of public opinion, expressed in free elections. But if it is a crime to inform the public as to what is being done in its hame, there can be no informed public opinion.
That is why Nils Melzer’s detailed account of the persecution of Julian Assange is so important.
Alina Lipp, an independent journalist reporting from Donbass, has had her assets frozen and her father’s assets frozen by the German government as punishment for reporting on Ukrainian misdeeds in Donbass.
She said she has been that she is under a criminal investigation on charges that potentially could result in a three-year prison sentence. She said she was told her own testimony was not wanted.
The video above shows her telling her story. Notice the monument with the children’s toys around it. This is a monument to children killed as a result of Ukrainian bombardment of Donbass, with their names and ages.
Although the video was put up recently, it evidently was made last summer, because that was when she received the notification.
Alina Lipp, who’s 29, is the daughter of a Russian father and a German mother. She is a member of the Green Party and once hoped for a political career.
Lipp studied sustainable governance at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, focusing on environmental studies. She hoped for a political career as a member of the Greens party.
But after the change of government in Ukraine, she went in 2016 to see for herself what was going on. She said she found, among other things, that most of the residents of Crimea considered themselves Russians and were glad to be part of Russia.
I’m not sure of her exact comings and goings. She has evidently gone back and forth between Germany and Crimea, and Germany and Donbass, a number of times, and also spent time in Russia. Her dad has meanwhile moved to Crimea.
She set up her own Telegram channel to report from the region. She said she was the only German journalist reporting from the region.
Not only the German government, but also most of the German press condemned her reporting, she said, without anyone going to see for themselves.
She is being investigated by the Centre for Combating Internet Hate Crimes of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Lüneburg, Germany.
The Composite Eye newsletter reported she is formally charged with trying “to stir up a psychological climate, also among the population of the Federal Republic of Germany, to cause divisions in society and to destroy social cohesion due to at least distorted and sometimes false ideas.”
The prosecutor referred to Lipp’s statements on her Telegram channel, namely for saying the population of Donbass supported Russia’s “special operation,” and for speaking of a genocide in the Donbass region, where a civil war that has been ongoing for the past eight years.
Correctiv, a network of investigators, alleged that Lipp had ties with the Russian Foreign Ministry. But she rejects the accusation, saying she reports on what she sees.
The great investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, in recent years has been unable to get his writings published in mainstream publications in the United States or even in Europe.
In response, he has started his own Substack blog. His first offering is the result of his three-months investigation into the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. It turns out that it was the Central Intelligence Agency with the help of the Norwegian navy.
This was an act of war not only against Russia, but against Germany. The CIA officials understood the seriousness of what they were doing, but President Biden and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland insisted the project be carried through.
“I gotta admit the guy [Biden] has a pair of balls,” one of Hersh’s sources said. “He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
It’s a sad commentary that the New York Times, the Washington Post and the rest of the establishment press were so quick to accept the ridiculous claim that the Russians blew up their own pipeline, and it takes somebody like Hersh, who is 85, to do their job for them.
[Afterthought: It’s true that Seymour Hersh relies on anonymous sources – in this case, one anonymous source in particular – and you have take his word on trust. Yes, he could be wrong, but he has a track record of being right.]
[Afterthought 02/13/2022]. Mark Ames, interviewing Seymour Hersh on Radio War Nerd, pointed out that Hersh has always claimed to have multiple sources for all his reports, even though he doesn’t necessarily refer to them. Hersh replied that he won’t comment on his sources.
Radley Balko, a journalist and blogger who covers civil liberties and the criminal justice system, wrote a good post about the difference between the realities of crime in the United States and the way it is perceived.
He focused on the difference between crime in Oklahoma, where the violent crime rate is relative high, but concern is low, and New York, where it is the other way around
Comparing Oklahoma and New York violent crime rates
OK violent crime rate: 458 per 100K
NY violent crime rate: 364 per 100K
OK murder rate: 7.25
NY murder rate: 4.11
% of Oklahomans who say crime is most urgent issue: 5 %
% of New Yorkers: 28 %
Comparison of New York CIty and Oklahoma City
Violent crime:
NYC: 5.8 per 100K
OKC: 7.1 per 100K
Property crime:
NYC: 20.0 per 100K
OKC: 38.1 per 100K
Balko says Oklahoma City has a Republican mayor, and has long had law-and-order DAs
.
Shootings in New York City
Balko’s conclusion is that the rate of violent crime is often misunderstood by the public and that the causes of violent crime are not well understood by the supposed experts. Although there has been some increase in violent crime during the past coupe of years, it doesn’t follow a consistent pattern.
So think twice before voting for politicians because they promise to get tough on crime. They may be exaggerating the problem and they probably don’t know how.
CIRCLE IN THE DARKNESS: Memoir of a World-Watcher by Diana Johnstone (2020)
Diana Johnstone is an American journalist, a year or two older than me, who has spent most of her adult life reporting from Europe.
This memoir is a rich account of the past half-century of European history. Its over-arching themes are the erosion of the sovereignty of European nations and of the European left as fighters for peace and defenders of working people. Another is reality is rarely what the official sources say it is.
It also touches on her personal struggles and family life. She decided at an early stage in her career to choose freedom to write as she saw things over middle-class security.
I won’t try to summarize her work, which touches on many important events, but I’ll mention a few highlights.
∞∞∞
>> Johnstone was not a supporter of the European Union. It had been promoted as a way for European nations to unite and make Europe an independent power, setting standards for human rights, social welfare and the environment, which other nations would have to respect in order to engage with Europe or belong to it.
Maybe it was that way in the beginning, at least to a certain extent. But she pointed out that the proposed European Constitution of 2005, if you read the fine print of its more than 500 pages., committed its signers to supporting neoliberal economics and the NATO alliance.
It the principal objective of the Union was “a highly competitive market economy,” with business competition “undistorted” by state policy. Public services “of general economic interest” had to be open to competition, including international competition.
The Constitution specified a “common security and defense policy” in which”commitments and cooperation in this area shall be consistent with commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” It also stressed the need to defend against “terrorist attacks.”
It was put to a public vote in France and the Netherlands and rejected both times. It was revised in the form of the 2008 Lisbon Treaty, which was accepted by all the member governments except Ireland. The Irish put it up to a referendum, which was rejected in 2008.
After some minor concessions, the Irish were called on to vote again, and on Dec. 1, 2009, the new treaty became law. The principle is: Keep voting until you get it right.
I doubt if many of those who voted “yes” understood they were locking themselves into economic austerity and undeclared wars.
> Johnstone didn’t know what to make of the 1968 student uprising in Paris. It was inspired by privileged students’ desire to overthrow restraints on personal behavior (“it is forbidden to forbid”) and not by any program for improving the welfare of society.
FOOL’S CRUSADE: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions by Diana Johnstone (2002)
Diana Johnstone is an American journalist, slightly older than me, who has spent most of her adult life in Europe.
Fool’s Crusade is about the lies that justified NATO intervention in Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. I mostly accepted these lies at the time.
If I had read Johnstone’s book when it was published, I would have understood then a lot of things I have slowly came to understand over a period of years.
I did realize that Germany precipitated the crisis by prematurely recognizing Croatia and Slovenia as independent countries, and that Croatia’s Franjo Tudgman was as much of an authoritarian nationalist strongman as Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic was accused of being.
But I still accepted the propaganda line that Milosevic was engaging in ethnic cleansing in order to create a Greater Serbia. What he was actually trying to do was to hold together what was left of Yugoslavia and to protect Serbs stranded in other parts of the former Yugoslavoa.
Johnstone wrote that Milosovec could be criticized for his failures as a statesman, and that the Serbs were not guiltless. But neither he nor they were not carrying out a systematic program of “ethnic cleansing.” It was the Serbs, more than others, who were driven out of their ancestral homes.
She foresaw how U.S. intervention in Yugoslavia was to set a pattern for future interventions.
NATO was formed as a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union. But this set the precedent for NATO interventions against nations that were outside the NATO region and did not threaten NATO members.
The United States led the intervention without any strong commitment of “boots on the ground.” Instead the intervention consisted of indiscriminate bombings, use of proxy warriors and crippling economic sanctions.
The intervention was conducted without authorization of the United Nations. The bombings of civilian neighborhoods and infrastructure were in violation of international law.
The justification for the intervention was to defend human rights against an imagined Hitler-like foe, who was supposedly so evil that anything was justified to bring him down.
The intervention was led by self-identified liberals and supported nearly unanimously by the liberal press. The propaganda included false accusations of rape. Critics were accused of sympathizing with the supposedly fascist enemy.
No good came of it.
Johnstone’s book is a model of what journalism should be. She based her reporting on what she saw and on on-the-record interviews with named sources, plus her extensive background knowledge of the history and politics of the region. None of it was due to inside information that the reader has to take on trust.
The news that most Americans are getting about Ukraine is war propaganda. That doesn’t mean that it is all false. What it does mean is that it is next to impossible for the ordinary busy person to separate truth from falsehood. Patrick Lawrence, a respected retired foreign correspondent, gives examples.
Ten days into the Russian intervention, the propaganda coming out of Kiev was already so preposterous The New York Times felt compelled to publish a piece headlined, “In Ukraine’s Information War, a Blend of Fact and Fiction.” This was a baldly rendered apologia for the many “stories of questionable veracity,” as The Times put it, then in circulation. I do love The Times for its delicate phrasing when describing indelicate matters.
There was the “Ghost of Kiev” story, featuring an heroic fighter pilot who turned out to derive from a video game. There were the Snake Island heroes, 13 Ukrainian soldiers who held out to the death on some small speck in the Black Sea, except that it turned out they surrendered, though not before Zelensky awarded them posthumous medals of honor that were not posthumous.
After railing against disinformation for years, The Times wants us to know, disinformation is O.K. in Ukraine because the Ukrainians are our side and they are simply “boosting morale.”
We cannot say we weren’t warned. The Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island turn out now to be mere prelude, opening acts in the most extensive propaganda operation of the many I can recall.
There was the maternity ward the Russians supposedly bombed in Mariupol. And then the theater, and then the art school. All filled with huddling citizens the Russian air force cynically targeted because “this is genocide,” as the ever-intemperate Zelensky does not hesitate to assert.
All of this has been reported as fact in the Times and other major dailies and, of course, by the major broadcasters. There have been pictures. There have been videos, all very persuasive to the eye.
And then, as evidence mounts that these incidents were staged as propaganda to frame the Russians and draw NATO forces directly into the war, a silence worthy of a Catholic chapel descends. We read no more of the maternity ward that turned out to be an improvised Azov base, or the theater, where citizens were herded, photographed in raggedy blankets, and sent away. Ditto the art school: Nothing more on this since the initial reports began to collapse. No body counts, no mention of the fact that Russian jets did not fly over Mariupol on the days in question.
If you are Russian and read Tass and Pravda, my guess is that there are a lot of things you aren’t being told. My guess is that you need to check dissident and foreign sources to learn things that don’t fit the Russian government’s propaganda version of reality.
I know – I don’t have to guess- that if you are a US American and read the so-called “mainstream media,” there are a lot of things you aren’t being told. You need to check dissident and foreign sources to learn things that don’t fit the U.S. government’s propaganda version of reality.
Petal bombs
One of the things I wouldn’t know if I didn’t check alternative sources is that the Donbass is being sprinkled with “petal” or “butterfly” bombs, which are designed to injure and kill civilians.
Donetzk authorities say they are delivered via Hurricane MLRS rockets. Each rocket has 12 cluster munitions, each cluster has 26 bombs. Because of their shape, they float down without exploding and can land anywhere.
They are the size of a cigarette lighter and hard to see. If your car runs over one, you will lose a wheel—or worse. If you step on one, you will lose a foot—or worse.
I learned about this by reading an article by Eva Bartlett, an independent Canadian journalist. It first appeared on the RT News web site. Maybe you think that fact discredits her reporting. If you do, would you say the same thing about a Russian journalist quoted on BBC News or the Voice of America?
Bartlett is lucky. She hasn’t been charged with a crime, nor has her bank account been closed down. Not so Alina Lipp and Graham Phillips, two other independent journalists reporting from the Donbass.
Alexei Navalny, the brave Russian truth-teller, is in prison, but the work of his Anti-Corruption Foundation goes on. Its videos are great examples of investigative journalism, both in their detailed research and in their clear and interesting presentation.
Vladimir Putin and his inner circle are repeatedly exposed and mocked; I can understand why they hate the videos. I especially enjoy presentations by Maria Pevchikh, with her sarcastic smile and the way she rolls her eyes when she brings out one more example of extreme corruption and hypocrisy.
This latest video is about how Putin milked the Russian public sphere to provide millions of rubles in income for his ex-wife, Ludmilla, and her new husband—possibly out of affection, possibly to buy silence. It’s a bit long, but you can get a lot out of it just by watching the first 10 minutes and the last 10 minutes. It’s in Russian but with English subtitles.
Navalny left Russia for medical treatment after an attempt on his life, but voluntarily returned in order to show he was not intimidated. He was promptly arrested and sentenced to nine years in prison for allegedly embezzling money from his own foundation, and may get an additional 15 years for alleged extremism. Pevchikh and other members of his foundation are presumably operating from outside Russia.
It is hard to find information about Russia or the Russian invasion of Ukraine that’s not propaganda for one side or the other. The only way to get at a semblance of the truth is to look at the situation from multiple points of view.
Here are web sites I check regularly. If this is a topic of special concern to you, you may want to bookmark this page. Also, if there are good sources I’m missing, please tell me in the comments.
The Vineyard of the Saker. An eloquent Russian nationalist. A viewpoint that is important for Americans to understand, whether they agree with it or not.
Russian Dissent. A forum for Russians silenced in their own country.
There is nothing more potentially explosive that showing the struggling Russian common people the extreme wealth and luxury in which their rulers live.
Of course rankings change year-by-year, and Ukraine also has extremes of poverty, corruption and inequality. The point is that such conditions may become intolerable when Russians are asked to make more sacrifices for the sake of winning a war of choice led by their government.
Navalny started the FBK in 2011. In 2013, he was indicted and convicted of embezzlement from his own foundation and given a suspended sentence. Most human rights organizations regard the changes as bogus.
In 2020, he was poisoned and received treatment in Germany. The FBK produced a documentary showing the Russian government was behind the poisoning. He returned to Russia in January, 2021, and was arrested for parole violation. He was tried in March on additional charges of embezzlement and sentenced to nine years in prison. He is appealing that sentence.
Meanwhile the FBK had been shut down and some of its workers arrested on charges of extremism. But it is continuing to produce videos, most of them with English subtitles, evidently from outside Russia. The independent Meduza news service has relocated to Latvia and The Moscow Times to the Netherlands.
I worked on newspapers for 24 years, and I especially enjoy FBK videos as great examples of investigative reporting—the ingenuity with which the investigators track down the facts, their professionalism in document the facts, and the clarity and wit with which they present the facts.
PERVERSION OF JUSTICE: The Jeffrey Epstein Story by Julie K. Brown (2021)
Jeffrey Epstein was a rapist and a pimp. He sexually abused young girls and trafficked them out to be abused by others.
Yet for years he was shielded from criminal charges by his wealth and by his network of rich and powerful protectors.
We the public may never know the names of Epstein’s clients. But thanks to the reporting of Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, we do know some other things..
Her book, Perversion of Justice, touches on many aspects of the Epstein case, but the high points are how he used his wealth and connections to shield himself from prosecution for his crimes, and how he used seduction, blackmail and threats to trap young girls into sexual bondage.
She began her investigation in 2017 when Alex Acosta was nominated by President Trump to be Secretary of Labor. Back in 2008, when Acosta was U.S. attorney for southern Florida, he signed a non-prosecution agreement that allowed Epstein to get off with a wrist slap in return to pleading guilty to trafficking young girls.
The fact that Epstein was prosecuted at all was due to the dogged persistence of Palm Beach Chief of Police and Detective Joe Recarey (who is deceased). When they began to interview young girls victimized by Epstein, it seemed like an open-and-shut case, but they met resistance every step of the way.
Epstein was a social friend of the mayor of Palm Beach. He donated expensive equipment to the Palm Beach Police Department and created a scholarship fund for children of police. He was one of the leading members of the city’s social elite, and he was a lavish giver of gifts and donations to charity..
Epstein’s legal team consisted of Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and high-profile lawyer; Kenneth Starr, the former special prosecutor who brought about the impeachment of President Bill Clinton; and Jay Lefkowitz, a former senior adviser to both Presidents Bush.
He also hired a local lawyer, Jack Goldberger. That resulted in an aggressive prosecutor, Dahlia Weiss, being pushed off the case, because her husband was one of Goldberger’s law partners.
The defense team gathered information about the girls Epstein had seduced, often looking at their social media and visiting them at their homes, trying to paint them as the seducers or at least as willing.
One young woman phoned Recarey and told him Epstein’s investigators asked her about things that she had told him that she thought were confidential. How did the investigator get access to that information? she asked.
Reiter and Recarey got a search warrant for Epstein’s mansion, but when they got there, it had been stripped clean. Six computer hard drives had been removed. Video surveillance cameras had been disconnected and the video recordings and other electronic data removed. Nude photos of young girls that. had adorned the walls had been removed.
They never figured out who told Epstein of the warrant.
Palm Beach County prosecutor Barry Kirschner chose to take the case to a grand jury, although this wasn’t necessary. He also chose to prosecute only one case, although Recarey had collected information on 14.
When Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned, I didn’t know what to think. Not that I thought about it too deeply.
It seemed to me that if the Russian deep state had really wanted to kill him, they would have succeeded. Also, I was hung up on the definition of “novichok.” But most of all I didn’t pay attention because I was preoccupied with the lies of war hawks in the American deep state.
The video above shows detective work by Navalny, Maria Pevchikh and other Navalny supporters. It proves that the Russian government was behind Navalny’s poisoning. It is in Russian with English subtitles, and was released in June, 2021, but I only became aware of it a couple of days ago. I’m posting it on my blog by I suspect most Americans aren’t aware of it either.
Navalny fell sick on an airplane flight from Tomsk to Moscow on August 20, 2020. The plane was diverted to Omsk, where Navalny was rushed to a hospital for treatment. After two days, he was transported to Berlin for medical treatment.
Hospital patients in Russia, as in most countries, have the right to see their medical records, but the Omsk hospital refused to release Navalny’s. In November, two Navalny lawyers, Ivan Zhdanov and Vyacheslav Gimadi, bluffed their was into the Omsk records department and took unauthorized photographs of the records.
They indicated that a biochemical blood test showed that Navalny had a deficiency in cholinesterase, which is a neurotransmitter, and the presence of organophosphate agents, which are a cholinesterase inhibitor. In other words, Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent.
A month later, the Omsk hospital released what they said were Navalny’s medical records. All references to cholinesterase and organophosphates had been scrubbed.
Poisoning by nerve agent was confirmed by physicians in Germany and by a Russian physician. The German officials said it was a new type of nerve agent, deadly but slow-acting. Navalny would be dead if the pilot hadn’t diverted the plane and his supporters hadn’t got him moved to Germany.
Navalny’s clothes were confiscated by the Omsk hospital and never returned. Navalny tricked an FSB agent, Konstanin Kodryavstev, into confirming that his underpants were poisoned. Impersonating an FSB official, Navalny phoned Kodryavstev and debriefed him on how he obtained Navalny’s clothes from the local police, carefully cleansed the underpants of any chemical agent and returned them.
The poison probably was added to Navalny’s underwear in his hotel room in Tomsk. The room is under video surveillance, but no video footage of the room has been released. There’s more evidence in the video, but you get the idea.
After having proved his government. had tried to murder him, Navalny returned to Russia in August, 2021. To me, that was an incredibly brave thing to do. He was promptly arrested, and is in prison now.
President Biden is attempting to rally what he calls liberal democratic nations against autocratic China, Russia and Iran. But the Julian Assange case shows that liberalism is a sham in the USA and its vassal allies.
Assange in 2011
The USA under Obama, Trump and Biden has protected high-level officials who commit crimes and atrocities, while prosecuting persons such as Assange who reveal crimes and atrocities.
We got a reminder of this with the recent UK court decision to extradite Julian Assange for violation of the U.S. Espionage Act. The violation consisted of revealing killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. forces.
This is something that Woke Democratic and MAGA Republican leaders in the USA (though not necessarily all their followers) agree on, along with leaders of the UK, Australia, Sweden, Ecuador and other countries.
But if a government can commit crimes, and make it a crime to reveal those crimes, then what stands between the public and a would-be Hitler or Stalin? And how can any impartial observer take U.S. leaders seriously, when they claim to be defenders of democracy and freedom?
There Is No Liberal West by N.S. Lyons. I agree with Lyons’ eloquent defense of classic liberal principles against woke-ism, but notice that he does not mention people persecuted for truth-telling about militaristic governments and abusive corporations. Freedom is indivisible.
I’ve been vaccinated for Covid, I think vaccination is a good idea for most people, but I think it very strange that the Biden administration, the mainstream press and the public health establishment say you shouldn’t consider treatments for the disease.
Why not explore anything and everything that might work? Why limit yourself to just one thing?
The idea is that the general public is so stupid that if they think there is anything other than vaccination that is helpful in fighting the disease, they won’t get vaccinated. The problem with this is that if you blatantly treat people as if they are stupid, they will stop listening to you. Matt Taibbi had a good article about this on his Substack blog.
Everybody knows that corporations influence and manipulate governments behind the scenes. In Silent Coup, two British journalists show ways in which corporations are actually replacing governments.
Andrew Fowler, an Australian journalist, wrote about Assange at the height of his fame and success. He provides Assange’s back story and insights into his sometimes difficult character.
Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist who worked closely with Assange, took up the story where Fowler left off.
I had long been aware that the charges against him were unjust, that earlier charges by the Swedish government were a frame-up and that the conditions under which he was being held amounted to torture.
>> Johnstone was not a supporter of the European Union. It had been promoted as a way for European nations to unite and make Europe an independent power, setting standards for human rights, social welfare and the environment, which other nations would have to respect in order to engage with Europe or belong to it.
Fool’s Crusade is about the lies that justified NATO intervention in Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. I mostly accepted these lies at the time.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 