Breaking News: New York Times Comes to the Defense of Julian Assange

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ecological murder •

Facsimile of Guardian (UK) story on the campaign to free Julian Assange from further government persecution. What prompted the change? With an utterly corrupt press we can't just accept these folks suddenly had an attack of decency and professionalism.

Breaking News

Breaking News: New York Times Comes to the Defense of Julian Assange

Through a joint letter published on Monday, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pais asked the United States to drop the Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange because it undermines press freedom.

Twelve years ago, those American and European media released excerpts of the revelations obtained in 250,000 documents, which were leaked to WikiLeaks by the then American soldier Chelsea Manning. Following that leak, Washington began proceedings to indict Assange under legislation designed to put World War I spies on trial.

“Publishing is not a crime,” said those outlets, emphasizing that Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the U.S. First Amendment.

“Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists… If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker,” the letter stated.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Major-Outlets-Call-on-the-US-to-Drop-Charges-Against-Assange-20221128-0009.html?utm_source=planisys&utm_medium=NewsletterIngles&utm_campaign=NewsletterIngles&utm_content=14 

This is an amazing development.  Assange has already been imprisoned without trial and conviction for a decade.  All the while not a peep in his defense from the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel.  Both the New York Times and The Guardian wrote in support of charges against Assange. Why did it take media a decade to realize that to arrest journalists as spies for doing their jobs is a threat to all journalism?  The Guardian actually turned against Assange after publishing some of the material that had been leaked to Assange.

I just checked the BBC and CNN, and there is no mention of this development.  Will the five newspapers follow up with attacks on the US government’s phony case against Assange?  Will the New York Times and The Guardian show their readers the case against the tyrannical US government?

Here is the full statement by the five newspapers:  https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/28/media-groups-urge-us-drop-julian-assange-charges


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Paul Craig Roberts is an independent commentator on current political affairs, and former economic adviser and academic with numerous essays and books to his credit.


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The Long String of U.S./UK/EU Lies Against Russia

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Eric Zuesse

The Long String of U.S./UK/EU Lies Against Russia
By Eric Zuesse


This article and its linked-to documentation will expose so many lies from the U.S.-and-allied Governments and their ‘news’-media and hired academics, as to get almost any reader’s head spinning; but, if so, then that will be the case ONLY because their lies are so profuse as to virtually drown out truth regarding geostrategic and international-relations (or “foreign affairs”) matters. These are the types of issues regarding which truthful reporting and analysis are almost non-existent, because billionaires (who control these countries) tend to care far more about such international matters than about purely domestic matters (such as ‘racial relations’, ‘gay rights’, ‘abortion’, etc.), which dominate domestic politics because (unlike billionaires), most people DON’T control international mega-corporations, and are therefore NOT interested in extending an empire. Imperialism is the game in The West, and only the aristocracy (the billionaires) can play it. And they have the media by which to do it — with constant lies.

So: here goes the truth-cleansing away of these overwhelmingly dominant lies in The West:  


The original, 2012, anti-Russian sanctions were based upon lies by Bill Browder saying that his ‘lawyer’ (who was no lawyer but instead his accountant and bookkeeper) was tortured to death by Russian police, to silence that ‘whistleblower’, who was trying to expose Russian corruption — and all clauses in that accusation were actually lies and have subsequently been proven to have been lies (but the resultant “Magnitsky Act” U.S./UK and EU sanctions against Russia still stand, as if those sanctions had instead been based upon truths — and this further confirms the U.S-and-allied regimes’ evilness and utter unconcern about truthfulness).

The subsequent anti-Russian sanctions were based upon actions that Russia had taken to protect Russia from U.S.-and-allied aggression, in response to America’s February 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President and replaced him by a U.S.-selected racist-fascist or nazi and entirely illegal (and provably so) intensely Russia-hating Ukrainian regime, ruling now a mere 300 miles away from The Kremlin in Moscow — an enormous national-security threat posed by the U.S. regime to blitz-nuke Russia’s central command if Ukraine becomes allowed into NATO. U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2014 coup that grabbed control over Ukraine was the turning-point toward WW III, and Russia has since been acting accordingly, to avoid being checkmated by U.S. missiles becoming posted only 5 minutes missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, refused to allow Soviet missiles to become posted in Cuba 1,113 miles away from hitting Washington DC; Putin in 2022 refused to allow the U.S. regime to post its missiles 317 miles away from The Kremlin.

On 7 October 2019, I headlined “Update on the MH17 Case” and documented that the Dutch court that was dealing with the case of the downing of the MH17 Malaysian passenger-plane over the war-zone in Ukraine was refusing to allow evidence that Russia and also the Donbass republics and also the Malaysian Government wanted to submit, including the black boxes and satellite data, but were considering ONLY evidence that was submitted by the Dutch prosecutors against Russia — all of which was of low quality and far inferior to the ‘evidence’ that was being offered to the court. 

Furthermore:

As I reported back on 24 August 2014, a secret agreement had been signed on August 8th between Netherlands, Ukraine, Belgium, and Australia, that Ukraine would have veto-power over any finding that their official “Joint Investigation Team” (“JIT”) would issue regarding the shoot-down of the MH17. Malaysia was excluded from the Team, but was finally admitted, after agreeing to their secret terms — including not to blame Ukraine.

On 17 November 2022, the Dutch court convicted in absentia three Russians on the basis of the Dutch Government’s allowed evidence. Donbass-Insider’s Christelle Néant headlined that day, “VERDICT IN THE MH17 CRASH CASE – SHOW TRIAL AND PARODY OF JUSTICE”, and John Helmer (a longstanding American journalist in Moscow) bannered “MH17 COURT APPLIES DUTCH LAW OF FINGER-POINTING — GUILT BY ASSOCIATION IF THE PERPETRATOR IS RUSSIAN, INNOCENCE BY ASSOCIATION IF PROSECUTOR IS DUTCH OR UKRAINIAN”. Both reports documented the blatant fraudulence of the Dutch Government’s ‘trial’ ‘findings.’

As I noted in my “Update” article:

President Obama not only perpetrated the February 2014 bloody coup in Ukraine which he had started by no later than 2011 to plan and placed into operation on 1 March 2013 inside the U.S. Embassy in Kiev (months before the democratically elected Ukrainian President whom he was to overthrow decided for Ukraine not to accept the EU’s offer of membership), but Obama and his NATO were so determined to reverse the coup’s resulting breakaway, from Ukraine, of Ukraine’s two most anti-nazi districts, Crimea and Donetsk, that Obama and his NATO then set up the shoot-down of the MH17 airliner by Obama’s newly-installed nazi Ukrainian government, with the objective being to promptly blame it against Russia. Obama was, at that time, in early July 2014, desperate for there to be a pretext on which the European Union would join the U.S. in greatly hiking sanctions against Russia regarding Ukraine. What the most-recent information will show is this: Obama and his NATO were intending to use this false accusation against Russia as a pretext not only to hike anti-Russia sanctions but ultimately to invade both Donetsk and Crimea and risk WW III in order to coerce those two regions back again into Ukraine — now to become (like the rest of Ukraine) under the control of the U.S. regime. The reasons why that plan failed (was aborted) were, first, that Malaysia’s Government held in international law the unchallengeable right of ownership over the airliner’s black boxes; and, second, that there was especially one member of NATO, Angela Merkel, who refused to risk WW III and to join into Obama’s extremely psychopathic scheme, since it risked the whole world over his determination to grab the entirety of Ukraine. Obama always refused to proceed forward with a geostrategic plan if it was strongly opposed by at least one core ally — in this particular instance, he knew enough not to drive Germany to abandon NATO and to ally with Russia (especially since Russia itself was his actual target in his coup to take over Ukraine). By declining to move forward without Merkel, all of those immediate risks to the world were avoided. Furthermore, Malaysia’s holding the black boxes was especially a problem for Obama and NATO, because any preparation for a U.S.-NATO invasion of Donbass and Crimea would spark Malaysia to go public with what it already knew about the U.S.-NATO lies regarding the MH17 incident. Obama possessed no ability to prevent that response from Malaysia. Not only Germany, but also Malaysia, possessed power in this situation, and Obama, fortunately, yielded to it. 

This long string of U.S.-and-allied lies against Russia should also provide its readers access to the proofs that the following pre-packaged and endlessly repeated U.S.-and-allied propaganda-phrases against Russia are likewise false — lies:

“Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine”

“Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine”

“unprovoked war in Ukraine”

“Russian aggression against Ukraine”

The U.S.-and-allied regimes display a contempt of their own ‘citizens’ (or “subjects”) by lying to us constantly, in order to pump up still further the international sales-volumes of America’s international mega-corporations such as Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil. The aristocracies are playing a dangerous game, with everyone’s lives. (The British aristocracy has long called it “The Great Game”; or, now, “the Anglosphere alliances”; but, really, it’s Rhodesism, which started in 1877 and pits U.S. and UK against Europe and especially against Russia, so that the UK/U.S. “Special Relationship” will ultimately control the entire world. UK/U.S. target all of Europe to be their colonies, to exploit. And their plan seems to be succeeding, though UK itself might become destroyed by it. U.S. is the UK empire’s life-preserver, but that life-preserver might ultimately turn out to be made of lead.)


About the author
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.


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Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Much Riskier Targets

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the establishment media is an enabler of endless wars and illegitimate oligarchic power


 on THE ELON MUSK ODYSSEY


 

Although it’s too soon to be sure, the early signs are not looking good for Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, thereby demonstrating once again how easily the concentrated power of the media can destroy those whom it turns against.

The South African-born Tech entrepreneur entered the fray having several seemingly huge advantages. He already ranked as the wealthiest person in the world by a considerable margin. His Tesla Motor Company, constituting the bulk of his fortune, pioneered the electric vehicles that have become a major status symbol of affluent liberals, and despite a considerable decline in its stock, was still comparable in value to the combined total of the world’s next half-dozen automobile manufacturers. He simultaneously served as CEO of SpaceX, America’s best hope for continued domination of space, and its associated Starlink satellite network had recently proven itself a huge factor in modern warfare. Musk was not only lauded as an enormous technological hero, but he had also accumulated considerable media influence of his own, with his 118 million followers on Twitter probably giving him the reach of a major television celebrity or even an entire broadcast network.

Indeed, Twitter had become so important to him that earlier this year he boldly offered to buy the struggling social media giant and take it private. A decade ago, a leading Twitter executive had memorably described his company as representing “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” and Musk seemingly intended to roll back the mounting tide of censorship and restore it to that position.

For generations “free speech” had been one of the most universally cherished American values, but after Donald Trump used the power of his free speech on Twitter to unexpectedly win the White House, those prevailing sentiments very rapidly changed, and the need to exclude “fake news” and suppress “hate speech” became the accepted priority of all right-thinking individuals obedient to the narrative of the mainstream media. Beginning with a few extreme cases here and there, the resulting Twitter purges grew exponentially, until by early 2020 these had finally claimed the sitting President of the United States; and powerful elements of American society were very concerned that Musk might try to reverse that process. So his takeover of Twitter, substantially funded from his own pocket, was viewed by many as a horrifying and potentially dangerous threat to American values, with Musk himself increasingly portrayed as a Bond-style super-villain by the buzzing media beehive, an interloper whose nefarious plans had to be frustrated at all costs.

Twitter had already been losing money and the $14 billion in debt Musk took on to help fund his purchase made the situation far worse. Once the media painted him as a dangerous bad-thinker and Twitter suddenly became “controversial” his timorous advertisers—who provided nearly all of its existing revenue—began dropping away, with each public desertion being loudly broadcast by the hostile media megaphone.

All of these major blows came despite Musk’s partial reversal of his self-proclaimed “free speech absolutism,” as he promised to maintain many of Twitter’s existing restrictions and except for a certain former President only reinstated the most milquetoast of purged Tweeters. Musk’s U-turn immediately drew angry denunciations from some of the same individuals who had previously championed his takeover.

When expenses rise and revenue falls, financial problems result, and journalists reported that Musk had privately warned of the risk of bankruptcy as he prepared his drastic cuts to Twitter’s bloated workforce. Meanwhile, most of the company’s previous senior executives were fired or quit.

Earlier this month, Musk had intentionally slashed Twitter’s headcount by 50%, but on Thursday his media critics gleefully reported that one-third of his remaining staff had suddenly quit, with many of his crucial software engineering teams having almost totally disappeared. The front-page headline in the hostile New York Times was “Twitter Teeters on the Edge” and it darkly suggested that the company might be entering a software death-spiral, hardly encouraging news for the remaining corporate advertisers who were so necessary for its survival. I’ve never much used Twitter myself, but if I’d invested years of my time and effort in building up millions of followers, I’d be feeling pretty worried right now.

Perhaps Musk will once again ultimately triumph against the odds, and successfully create the universal WeChat-type service he has envisioned. But right now, I think it much more likely that the seemingly fragile social media giant will continue to decline then ultimately wind up in different hands. And if our media can so quickly and easily crush the aspirations of the wealthiest man in the world, perhaps costing him and his financial backers the $44 billion they had invested, who in the future would dare risk another such challenge?

 

Perhaps by coincidence, a somewhat similar controversy had recently played out in the case of a different high-profile individual, the billionaire black rapper and fashion designer Kanye West. Although I’d previously had only the vaguest impression of him, he was apparently a towering international celebrity, as well as being among the wealthiest black Americans who had ever lived, while having tens of millions of followers on Twitter and other networks.

Apparently for some reason or other, he became angry and agitated over what he saw as the overwhelming Jewish influence in the worlds of business and media, and began loudly saying so in various venues and on his social networks. As might be expected, the media reaction was swift and devastating, portraying him as a moral leper, and thereby forcing most of his business partners to cut their ties, often at enormous financial cost. Apparently 25% of the profits of footware giant Adidas came from West’s line of sneakers, but they abandoned the longtime deal at a total cost of almost $650 million when their media masters proclaimed it as a fundamental issue of morality. At the other end of the spectrum, Goodwill Industries announced that they would no longer offer their impoverished clientele the donated cast-offs associated with such a vile anti-Semite. The rapper’s longtime bank even closed his accounts and would no longer provide a haven for his money.

The immediate result of all these coordinated blows was that the bulk of West’s large fortune suddenly evaporated, while his (Jewish) personal trainer publicly declaredthat if he continued his bad behavior the erstwhile billionaire might end up spending the rest of his life heavily drugged and imprisoned in a mental institution. Almost none of his fellow black celebrities rallied to his side, or if they did, I didn’t hear about it. The story soon dropped from the media, perhaps permanently taking with it the once-iconic global black celebrity.

West’s high-profile transgressions had put our ideological watchmen on full alert and this probably accounted for the new controversy that soon engulfed black basketball star Kyrie Irving, who ran into a media buzz-saw for merely Tweeting out a link to an Afrocentric documentary available on Amazon. The controversial claims made in that video riled up the ADL, and Irving quickly offered public apologies and a payment of $500,000 to salvage his sports career. But that tentative deal unraveled due to his subsequent impolitic remarks, and he was suspended from basketball, while his personal line of sneakers was cancelled by Nike. Yet another abject lesson proving that even the highest and the mightiest should think twice before exercising their right to free speech. The media creates reality and if they decide to declare you a target, you quickly become a human pin-cushion.

Back in the 1990s, Bill Gates was much in the news, with his $100 billion fortune then ranking him as the wealthiest man in the world, a position he had held for so many years that it seemed permanent. His Windows operating system enjoyed a near-monopoly on all personal computers, so his products controlled the technological infrastructure of every country, just as every writer and every financier depended upon his ubiquitous Word and Excel programs. Given such potent assets, he was sometimes half-jokingly described as the most powerful person in the world, having clout that dwarfed that of any President or Pope.

While I did not necessarily dispute such an appraisal, I would always point out the severe limitations of his position. I proposed a thought-experiment in which the Monarch of Microsoft carelessly uttered some highly untoward views on any one of a number of sufficiently touchy subjects. For all his money and influence, he probably would have been quickly annihilated, fried to a crisp by a concentrated media blast and then overwhelmed by the massive wave of public revulsion that it generated, quite possibly losing his company and much of his gigantic fortune in the process. Bill Gates might have been powerful, but the media could have destroyed him at a stroke, snuffing him out like a candle in a gale-force wind. The current fates of Elon Musk, Kanye West, and others suggest that I was probably correct.

 

The ADL seems to have played a central role in all these current controversies discussed above, with Musk quickly bowing to its authority and soliciting its advice, while the organization led the successful attacks on West and Irving. Such developments were hardly surprising given its notorious reputation, but the ADL’s reaction to my own past activities had followed a strikingly different trajectory. As I wrote four years ago:

In our modern era, there are surely few organizations that so terrify powerful Americans as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, a central organ of the organized Jewish community.

Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the most profitable in world history, yet the ADL and its allies destroyed his career, and he eventually donated millions of dollars to Jewish groups in desperate hopes of regaining some of his public standing. When the ADL criticized a cartoon that had appeared in one of his newspapers, media titan Rupert Murdoch provided his personal apology to that organization, and the editors of The Economist quickly retracted a different cartoon once it came under ADL fire. Billionaire Tom Perkins, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was forced to issue a heartfelt apology after coming under ADL criticism for his choice of words in a Wall Street Journal column. These were all proud, powerful individuals, and they must have deeply resented being forced to seek such abject public forgiveness, but they did so nonetheless. The total list of ADL supplicants over the years is a very long one.

Given the fearsome reputation of the ADL and its notorious hair-trigger activists, there was a widespread belief that my small webzine would be completely annihilated when I first launched my recent series of controversial articles in early June by praising the works of historian David Irving, a figure long demonized by the ADL. Yet absolutely nothing happened.

During the next three months my subsequent articles directly challenged nearly every hot-button issue normally so fiercely defended by the ADL and its lackeys, so much so that a friendly journalist soon described me as the “Kamikaze from California.” Yet despite my 90,000 words of text and the 13,000 comments I had attracted, the continuing silence of the ADL was absolutely deafening. Meanwhile, my articles were read more than half a million times…

When divine wrath fails to smite the heretic and terrifying enforcers of official dogma seem to have suddenly lost their taste for battle, others gradually begin to take notice and may grow emboldened. Eventually leading pro-Russian and Libertarian websites such as Russia Insiderand LewRockwell began republishing some of my most controversial American Pravda articles, thus bringing my factual claims to the attention of broader audiences. After the conclusion of my series, I began directly ridiculing my strangely timorous ADL opponents, publishing a short column entitled “Has the ADL Gone Into Hiding?”which led the redoubtable Paul Craig Roberts to describe me as “the bravest man I know.”

Apparently the combination of all these factors at long last grew too worrisome for the ADL, and stirring from their secret hiding place, its activists have now finally released a short and rather milquetoast response to my material, one which hardly much impresses me. A few days ago, they Tweeted out their column, together with a photo of their new nemesis.

 

Those were the opening paragraphs of my response to that foolhardly ADL attack, which had provided me an excellent opportunity to publish a lengthy article recounting the extremely sordid history of that powerful organization. My piece presented many important facts previously only little known and drew considerable interest, eventually being read nearly 50,000 times:

After that initial exchange, the ADL apparently reconsidered its media strategy and concluded that discretion was the better part of valor, slinking back into hiding. Indeed, the highly counter-productive consequences of any challenge either to myself or to my publication became so obvious that they seem to have issued a general edict, forbidding any mention whatsoever in all the media outlets under their editorial influence. Their leadership rightly realized that although we might suffer from their attacks, by drawing much greater attention to our information, such actions might prove severely damaging or even fatal to their long-term interests.

The reality of this presumably ADL-enforced media blockade became apparent in 2020, when the SPLC and its journalistic allies launched a ferocious wave of coordinated attacks aimed at forcing the resignation of Stephen Miller, perhaps the most hated member of the Trump Administration, a drive that came just a few months before the presidential election. The central charge against Miller was that in his private emails he had promoted several controversial posts by blogger Steve Sailer, all of which had originally been published on our website.

Such attacks typically rely upon guilt by association, and the Sailer pieces in question had run on the same page as articles promoting Holocaust Denial and various other exceptionally controversial topics, so the connection was irrefutable. And if those other issues had been publicly linked to Miller, his political fall would have become certain. But the lengthy research report denouncing Miller and the pieces he had endorsed scrupulously avoided any mention of our website or the vastly more controversial material it contained, and as a consequence Miller managed to survive. Apparently maintaining the prohibition against any hint of our existence was far more important than claiming the political scalp of a top Trump advisor. To the ADL and its allies, we constituted a terrifying Lord Voldemort, and merely mentioning our name might result in their destruction.

 As the heavy blows suffered by Musk, West, and others have demonstrated, the media has enormous potential striking power, but creating an outlet that can effectively wield it is far from an easy task, and merely providing heavy resources may be insufficient.

I recently noted the interesting coincidence that our own publication had been launched almost simultaneously with the Intercept, sponsored by Tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Lavishly funded and staffed by a crew of all-stars led by renowned investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept seemed certain to transform journalism, but despite the $200 million it has absorbed since 2013, the results have been less than impressive. Indeed, these days our own webzine attracts roughly comparable monthly traffic along with almost twice as much readership time, despite our having suffered under the handicap of total deplatforming by Facebook and deranking by Google.

The obvious reason for such a striking mismatch between inputs and outputs is that so much of the Intercept‘s content during the Trump Era and afterwards became almost indistinguishable from what was found on so many other websites, a situation very different from the uniqueness of what we offer.

Over the years, visitors have regularly told me that they are aware of no other publication anywhere on the Internet that provides convenient access to such a wide range of ultra-controversial material across so many different subjects, nor many websites that allow such lightly-moderated discussions in its comment-threads. So perhaps this makes us the rightful heir to the mantle of “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

Obviously, such an approach has its pluses and minuses, and I personally find a great deal of the material we publish both distasteful and wrong-headed, a failing even more common in the regular flood of the often vituperative comments. But from the beginning, the Mission Statement of this alternative media publication had envisioned that situation, and our primary role has been to serve as a content-distribution channel and commenting platform.

Furthermore, a major reason for launching the publication had been to provide a convenient venue for my own future writings, and in that regard I’ve been very satisfied with the body of work I’ve now produced, mostly over the last four or five years.

Highly controversial material, no matter how persuasive or well-documented, almost inevitably requires considerable time to achieve any broader impact. Next week will mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of my own “Myth of American Meritocracy” article, and the legal challenges it inspired to discriminatory admissions practices at our elite universities have only just now finally reached the Supreme Court, which as a result may soon strike down a half-century of Constitutional support for racial preferences, as I discussed in a recent review article:

 

Seen in this light, I’m hardly surprised that the far more recent elements of my American Pravda series have not yet produced much visible public impact, though given their exceptionally controversial nature, I suspect they have been quietly discussed in various quarters, as suggested by the millions of total pageviews they have accumulated.

Taken as a whole, the series is intended to provide a historical counter-narrative to the major events of the last 100 years, one that vastly differs from what is presented in our standard textbooks or mainstream media outlets, and it does so mostly in a sequence of self-contained, bite-size chunks that can easily be individually digested.

Over the last few years, these articles have attracted tens of thousands of comments, many of them quite substantial and fiercely critical, but after carefully considering the arguments made and the evidence presented, I still feel reasonably sure that perhaps 99% of my published analysis is correct, at least to within the limits of confidence that I had originally expressed. But even if only 10% of my conclusions were correct and 90% were totally mistaken, the impact upon our established understanding of the modern world would still be revolutionary. I’m much less certain when or if such unorthodox perspectives will become generally accepted, but that might eventually happen.

It’s always encouraging to discover that others may sometimes see things in the same way. I was recently contacted by a longtime reader of this website, someone with a strong academic background who later became quite financially successful. Although he’d previously read many of my individual articles when these had appeared over the last few years, once he sat down and devoured the total contents of my six American Pravda print collections, he found the combined impact extremely compelling, and he contacted me, wondering how he could assist the project. After a little discussion, he decided to become a financial sponsor of the website, providing an initial payment of $100,000, with his identity to be kept strictly confidential until he might want it disclosed.

From its inception, I’ve funded the website almost entirely on my own, so his sponsorship was very welcome, especially since it represented hard evidence that others had a high regard for the material we have presented.

Additional financial sponsors would also be very much appreciated, and they should regard any assistance they provide as constituting media venture capital. Their confidential involvement would allow them to support a potentially crucial project with little if any downside risk if certain topics remain controversial and forbidden, but which would provide them with enormous potential credit if the political and ideological winds change. Moreover, any such financial outlays would be merely a tiny sliver of the $200 million spent to fund the Intercept, let alone the tens of billions of dollars now invested in Twitter.

Anyone so interested in becoming a financial sponsor of our publication can contact me at Ron(at)unz(dot)com, while for the more paranoid individuals, I also now have a protonmail account RonUnz(at)protonmail(dot)com, though I seldom use it for anything.

As a perfect example of the upside potential of what I am describing, I still find it quite astonishing that for the last thirty months there has been strong even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid outbreak was the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), which has also cost the lives of well over a million Americans, but that virtually no one else anywhere on the Internet has been willing to point to that obvious scenario. Perhaps this climate of total avoidance will continue indefinitely, but if the story does eventually come out it would surely rival the two world wars as among the most significant occurrences in all of human history.

Meanwhile, my efforts on that score continue. My Covid/Biowarfare EBook has been downloaded over 13,000 times and my individual articles have accumulated more than 900,000 pageviews on the Internet, while three of my video podcast interviews from earlier this year have reached nearly 2.3 million views on Rumble, each probably more popular than 99.99% than the other videos on that platform.

Kevin Barrett, FFWN • February 16, 2022 • 15m

Video Link

Geopolitics & Empire • February 1, 2022 • 75m • SoundCloud Audio

Video Link

Red Ice TV • February 3, 2022 • 130m

Video Link.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RON UNZ is the founding editor of the UNZ REVIEW, whose unusual editorial features are amply explained in this very article.


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Journalistic Responsibility Vanishes When Reporting On US-Targeted Nations

Be sure to distribute this article as widely as possible. Pushing back against the Big Lie is really up to you.


Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST


Newsweek's antics are unfortunately typical of the dishonest behaviour of the Western press.

Listen to a reading of this article:

Two false news reports have gone viral in recent hours due to sloppy sourcing and journalistic malpractice. As usual they both featured bogus claims about US-targeted nations, in this case Russia and Iran.

An article in Responsible Statecraft titled “How a lightly-sourced AP story almost set off World War III” details how the propaganda multiplier news agency published a one-source, one-sentence report claiming that Russia had launched a deadly missile strike at NATO member Poland, despite evidence having already come to light by that point that the missile had probably come from Ukraine. This set off calls for the implementation of a NATO Article 5 response, meaning hot warfare between NATO and Russia in retaliation for a Russian attack on one of the alliance members.

Mainstream news reports circulated the narrative that Poland had been struck by a “Russian-made” missile, which is at best a highly misleading framing of the fact that the inadvertent strike came from a Soviet-era surface-to-air missile system still used by Ukraine, a former Soviet state. Headlines from the largest and most influential US news outlets like The New York TimesCNN and NBC all repeated the misleading “Russian-made” framing, as did AP’s own correction to its false report that Poland was struck by Russia.

All current evidence indicates that Poland was accidentally hit by one of those missiles while Ukraine was defending itself from Russian missile strikes. President Biden has said it’s “unlikely” that the missile which killed two Poles came from Russia, while Polish president Andrzej Duda and NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg both said it looks like it was an accidental strike from Ukrainian air defenses. Russia says its own missile strikes have been no closer than 35 km from the Polish border.

The only party still adamantly insisting that the strike did come from Russia is Ukraine, leading an exasperated diplomat from a NATO country to anonymously tell Financial Times: “This is getting ridiculous. The Ukrainians are destroying [our] confidence in them. Nobody is blaming Ukraine and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”

It is very sleazy for AP to continue to protect the anonymity of the US official who fed them a lie of such immense significance and potential consequence. They should tell the world who it was who initiated that lie so we can demand explanations and accountability.

Another false story that went extremely viral was one that Newsweek has been forced to extensively revise and correct that was initially titled “Iran Votes to Execute Protesters, Says Rebels Need ‘Hard Lesson’,” but is now titled “Iran Parliament Chants ‘Death to Seditionists’ in Protest Punishment Call.” The latest correction notice now reads, “This article and headline were updated to remove the reference to the Iranian Parliament voting for death sentences. A majority of the parliament supported a letter to the judiciary calling for harsh punishments of protesters, which could include the death penalty.

Moon of Alabama explains how the Newsweek piece was the springboard that launched the viral false claim that the Iranian government had just sentenced 15,000 protesters to death, which was circulated by countless politicians, pundits and celebrities throughout social media. This claim has been debunked by mainstream outlets like NBC News, who explains that “There has been no evidence that 15,000 protesters have been sentenced to death. Two protesters had been sentenced to death as of Tuesday, although they can appeal, according to state news agencies.”

An article by The Cradle titled “Fact check – Iran has not sentenced ‘15,000’ protesters to death” explains that the Iranian parliament actually just signed a letter urging the Iranian judiciary to issue harsher sentences upon protesters who’ve been demonstrating against Tehran. Those sentences can include the death penalty as noted above, but up to this point have more often entailed prison sentences of five to ten years. (bold italic, ours)

The Cradle also notes that even the “15,000” figure is suspect, as its sole source is an American organization funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy:

Further muddying the waters, the figure of 15,000 protesters detained by Iranian authorities originates from the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).

US-based HRANA is the media arm of the Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI), a group that receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – a CIA soft power front that has for decades funded regime-change efforts across the globe.

Indeed, it’s public knowledge that NED is funded directly by the US government, and that according to its own cofounder was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. It’s possible that the 15,000 figure could be more or less accurate, and it’s possible that a great many more Iranian protesters will be sentenced to death for their actions, but reporting such possibilities as a currently established fact is plainly journalistic malpractice.

In April of this year Newsweek published an article titled “Russians Raped 11-Year-Old Boy, Forced Mom to Watch: Ukraine Official.” In May of this year Newsweek published an article titled “Ukraine Official Fired Over Handling of Russian Sexual Assault Claims.” It was the same official. Newsweek made no mention of the fact that its source for its sexual assault story had just been fired for disseminating unevidenced claims about sexual assault. To this day its April report contains no updates or corrections.

Contrast this complete dereliction of journalistic responsibility with Newsweek’s extreme caution when one of its reporters tried to report on the OPCW scandal which disrupted the US government narrative about an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government. Reporter Tareq Haddad was forbidden by his superiors to write about the many leaks coming out exposing malfeasance in the Douma investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, on the basis that NED-funded Bellingcat had disputed the leaks and that other respectable outlets had not reported on them.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has published numerous articles documenting what Adam Johnson calls the North Korea Law of Journalism, which holds that “editorial standards are inversely proportional to a country’s enemy status.” In other words, the more disfavorably a foreign government is viewed by the US empire, the lower the editorial standards for reporting claims about them. (1) Because Russia and Iran are both viewed as enemies of Washington, western news media often feel comfortable just publishing any old claim about them as fact regardless of sourcing or evidence.

We saw this highlighted during the insanity of Russiagate, where mainstream news outlet after mainstream news outlet was caught publishing unevidenced conspiratorial hogwash that it was often (though not even always) forced to retract. This was possible because when it comes to implicating Russia the evidentiary standards for reporting on something are much lower than they would be for implicating a government that is held in favor by the US.

And this is the case because the western mainstream media are the propaganda services of the US-centralized empire. They do not exist to tell people the truth, they exist to manipulate the public into hating the official enemies of the empire and into consenting to foreign policy agendas that they would not otherwise consent to.

Imperial propagandists lower their editorial standards when reporting on official enemies not because they are bad at their job, but because they are very good at their job. It’s just that their job isn’t what we’ve been told.

Notes

(1) The problem goes wider and much deeper than that. The US corporate media , and western media in general, routinely apply the same shoddy and partisan standards to any topic of any importance, domestic or foreign, deemed threatening to the corporate status quo, the rule of billionaires (capitalism). [P. Greanville]


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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone


Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 
 

 


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MUST WATCH VIDEO: The calm before the storm in Ukraine (with Col. Douglas Macgregor)

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DEFEAT CAPITALISM AND ITS DEADLY SPAWN, IMPERIALISM
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Dateline: Nov 15, 2022


Douglas Macgregor
A distinguished military officer and an honest thinker that commands attention, Col. Douglas Macgregor is an example of rectitude to fellow officers and above all a patriot who is trying to avoid a global catastrophe by speaking the truth. (
United States and worldwide Geopolitics analysis. Russia Ukraine conflict latest news update with Colonel Douglas Macgregor. Interview with Professor Glenn Diesen (University of South-Eastern Norway - USN), recorded the day before publishing.)

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Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a senior fellow with The American Conservative, the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, a decorated combat veteran, and the author of five books.


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NOTE: ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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