Category Archives: corporate news

Big Government and Big Tech versus the Internet and everyone

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By Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Intrepid Report

Governments around the world began trying to bring the Internet under control as soon as they realized the danger to their power represented by unfettered public access to, and exchange of, information. From attempts to suppress strong encryption technology to the Communications Decency Act in the US and China’s “Great Firewall,” such efforts have generally proven ineffectual. But things are changing, and not for the better.

The European Parliament recently passed a “Copyright Directive” which, if implemented, will force Internet platforms to actively monitor user content instead of putting the burden of proving copyright infringement on those claiming such infringement. The directive also includes a “link tax” under which publishers will charge aggregation platforms for traditionally “fair use” excerpts.

The US government’s Committee on Foreign Investment is attempting to force the sale of Grindr, a gay dating app, over “national security” concerns. Grindr is owned by a Chinese company, Beijing Kunlun. CFIUS’s supposed fear is that the Chinese government will use information the app gathers to surveil or even blackmail users in sensitive political and military jobs.

Those are just two current examples of many.

Big Governments and Big Tech are engaged in a long-term mating dance.

Big Governments want to regulate Big Tech because that’s what governments do, and because, as with Willie Sutton and banks, Big Tech is where the Big Tax Money is.

Big Tech wants to be regulated by Big Governments because regulation makes it more difficult and expensive for new competitors to enter the market. Facebook doesn’t want someone else to make it the next MySpace. Google doesn’t want a fresh new face to send it the way of Yahoo.

It’s a mating dance with multiple suitors on all sides.

The US doesn’t like Grindr or Huawei, because FREEDUMB.

The Chinese don’t want uncensored Google or Twitter, because ORDER.

The EU is at least honest about being sexually indiscriminate: It freely admits that it just wants to rigorously screw everyone, everything, everywhere.

Big Tech wants to operate in all of these markets and it’s willing to buy every potential Big Government as many drinks as it takes to get them all into the sack.

Everybody wins, I guess. Except the public.

Governments and would-be monopolists are fragmenting what once advertised itself as a Global Information Superhighway into hundreds of gated streets.

Those streets are lined by neatly manicured lawns per the homeowners’ association’s rigorously enforced rules, and herbicide is sprayed on those lawns to kill off the values that made the Internet the social successor to the printing press and the economic successor to the Industrial Revolution.

As Stewart Brand wrote, “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. … That tension will not go away.”

Big Tech and Big Government are both coming down, increasingly effectively, on the side of “expensive” and on the side of Ford’s Model T philosophy (“you can have any color you want as long as it’s black”).

They’re killing the Internet. They’re killing the future. They’re killing us.

 

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism. He lives and works in north central Florida.

Did the NY Times Violate Its Own Code of Ethics to Feature Child of Venezuelan Coup Plotter?

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After the New York Times was slammed for obscuring comedian Joanna Hausmann’s family ties to the Guaido shadow regime, her coup-plotting father appeared online to defend her with a stream of insults.

By Anya Parampil

Source: The Grayzone

When the New York Times approached me seeking permission to use video I recorded of the Washington DC “Hands Off Venezuela” protest on March 16, I hoped that somebody at the paper was seeking to atone for the Gray Lady’s demonstrably one-sided coverage of the US coup attempt against the internationally recognized Maduro government. Maybe, just maybe, the editors had had a rare bout of self-reflection and decided to produce something that gave voice to the many Americans who rejected the Trump administration’s brazen regime change operation against Venezuela.

But on April 1, I woke up to learn that my footage had been used to demonize the protesters as useful idiots by a YouTube comedian born to one of the family dynasties of Venezuela’s opposition.

The comedian in question was Joanna Hausmann, and her appearance in the supposed newspaper of record was far from funny. How could the paper justify selecting Hausmann as an authoritative voice on the situation in Venezuela when she was so closely connected to central players in the Trump administration’s coup attempt? The answer is that it couldn’t, so it simply neglected to mention her glaring conflict of interest.

I took a deep dive into Hausmann’s family history in a March 10th article for MintPress, highlighting the role Joanna’s father, Ricardo Hausmann, played in the neoliberalization of Venezuela’s economy throughout the 1980s and ’90s as an academic and eventual member of the repressive Carlos Andrés Pérez administration.

The piece was inspired by Joanna Hausmann’s Youtube harangue, “What’s Happening in Venezuela.” Despite promising “a video dedicated to ‘just the facts,’” Hausmann failed to mention that her father was serving as a top advisor to Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó while she argued in support of his self-declared “presidency.”

Ricardo Hausmann’s function within the coup government crystalized shortly following the release of Joanna’s Youtube explainer, when Guaidó selected the Harvard professor to represent his shadow regime at the Inter-American Development Bank. The Times took no issue with the fact Hausmann’s family stood to benefit from the same coup she was urging viewers to support, and like Joanna herself, neglected to disclose this ostensibly relevant information.

The Times appeared to have underestimated the intelligence of its viewers, and was subsequently bombarded with criticism for its decision to obscure Hausmann’s background.

One reader who described himself as “a Venezuelan, [who agrees] with everything [Hausmann] has to say,” complained in the comments section of the Hausmann video that the omission amounted to “an ethical error,” arguing “it should be noted that her father has a lot to gain politically and professionally should regime change happen.” The comment forced a response from the segment’s executive producer, Adam Ellick, who claimed that, while the Times was “aware of her father’s biography before publication,” it opted not to acknowledge it because “Ms. Hausmann is an independent adult woman who has built a popular following on her own.”

Ellick’s response failed to satisfy the commenter, who emphasized that “the issue here isn’t one of independence, it’s one of shared outcomes.” According to Ellick’s logic, it would be journalistically ethical to ignore Ivanka Trump’s relation to the President on the basis she is “an independent adult woman” with a fashion line of her own. Does the Times actually think we are stupid?

The backlash against Joanna’s NYT debut grew so intense, it eventually compelled her father to respond to the controversy. Following the video’s release, I tweeted criticism of the paper for its failure to disclose that “Hausmann is the daughter of Guaidó advisor Ricardo Hausmann,” linking to my article which explained that he “was instrumental in neoliberalizing and destroying Venezuela’s economy in the 90s and wants to do it again.”

The factual statement apparently outraged Professor Hausmann, who charged that my “tweet surely deserves at least an honorary mention among the year’s most sexist comments,” adding, “since Joanna is my daughter, she is not entitled to her own opinion. She must be speaking on behalf of some male figure that tells her what to say. Seriously?”

Yes, seriously! Joanna does not appear to have her “own opinion” — she has precisely the same opinion as her father, who happens to be participating in the very coup for which she was advocating. Yet even if we accept the notion that Joanna formed opinions independent from her father’s influence, the Times still had an ethical obligation to disclose her family ties – especially considering that Professor Hausmann is not her only relative actively working to achieve regime change in Caracas.

Joanna’s mother, Ana Julia Jatar, has worked for the US-funded Súmate organization, which in 2004 tried and failed to oust President Hugo Chávez via popular referendum. As I reported for MintPress, Jatar hails from a political family herself.

Jatar’s father, Braulio Jatar Dotti, was once described by an independent Chilean news site “as having been ‘in charge of eliminating the leftist groups’ in Venezuela” in the 1960s, as the government sought to violently repress the armed Revolutionary Left Movement. Jatar Dotti even published a manual called, “Disabling the Extreme Left” in 1963. With her grandfather’s history in mind, it’s no wonder that Joanna now spends her time attacking the US left for organizing to oppose war on Venezuela. Apparently, the family that attacks the left and fails to overthrow governments together stays together.

While it is important to understand the full extent to which regime change and resentment of “the left” runs through Joanna Hausmann’s veins, her father’s participation in the current coup alone should have disqualified her to pose as a neutral voice on Venezuela. The Times’ decision to ignore her background is not only offensive to viewers, but may have also violated the paper’s own ethics code. According to that code, “staff members must be sensitive that perfectly proper political activity by their spouses, family or companions may nevertheless create conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflict.” The Hausmann scandal undeniably created such a scenario for the paper.

Joanna has largely kept quiet amid the deluge of criticism, and is quick to block those who question her. (She blocked me on Twitter after I noted her father’s prominent role in the Guaidó shadow regime.) Why a grown woman professing her total independence needed her father to come to her defense should be a mystery, as RT Español reporter Helena Villar observed.

One Twitter user named Vanessa Salas, who describes herself as “a personal friend” of Joanna, recommended that I “get to know” the comedian before making “unfounded statements.” Salas insistedthat her pal was “SMART, THOUGHTFUL, and FEARLESS.” Indeed, Joanna Hausmann was so fearless that she had to rely on her friends, family, and an army of trolls to deflect from her wanton journalistic malpractice.

Joanna did eventually muster up one non-answer to critics. When a Twitter user named @unnaband asked why she neglected to mention that her “father was personally appointed by the very opposition leader” she promoted in her video, the Youtube comedian hit back: “I am proud of my dad.”

He is surely proud of her too. And among the Times editors who presided over her ethically dubious video rant, there appears to be no shame.

 

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The Surrealism of the Information War

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By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

The flow of knowledge and information is commonly considered the main vector of humanity’s progress through history. One would think that in our era, which is rightly called the time of the information super-highway, the sheer mass of information available to all humans, anywhere at any given time, would have exponentially increased our understanding of our world and each other. This is, however, not the case. As a matter of fact, paradoxically, one can easily argue that an overload of information has made the majority of people not more but less knowledgeable, less critical, more isolated, and more alienated from themselves and each other. The control and manipulation of narrative in the era of the information war has created a universal malaise that reaches even basic human issues such as masculine-feminine identities.

Well-compensated propagandists package information and ideas like products for mass consumption. The advance of technology was supposed to free mankind; instead it has created invisible chains. The fact of being constantly wired is an assault on our free will and cognitive functions, which behavioral information warriors study and harvest, to put them in giant blenders where all comes out inoffensive and predictable. The goal is to turn the rich and diverse human experience into a tasteless and colorless intellectual mush, and then make it palatable with artificial additives. Foie gras is considered a French gastronomic delicacy. It is nevertheless a form of cultural perversity. In the process, the geese are force-fed, to provoke a cirrhosis of their liver. In many ways, the gatekeepers of mainstream information use the same force feeding technique with people’s brains.

Unless people tightly lock themselves mentally into the delusions of dogmas, either religious or ideological, and seek comfort in a universe of magical thinking, the truth is never an absolute. This being said, in order to allow an acceptable level of conviviality in human society, thinkers should seek truth in the subjective reality while knowing that the holy grail of pure truth is the ultimate lie. If one would be so naive or foolish enough to think he has found the absolute truth, looking at it would be like staring straight into the sun at midday, without shields and with eyes wide open, for a full hour. In the process, the believer of absolute truth would go blind.

For anyone who is neither blind nor fully color blind, the distinction between a red object and a green one is not only instantaneous but also unquestionable. The difference between green and red is not open to interpretation or debate. It is in the rare realm of tangible facts.

Staying in the field of the color spectrum: all hues of green in the natural world are a secondary color that can be obtained by mixing the primary colors yellow and blue. Green can be argued endlessly to contain more yellow than blue, or vice versa, as well as a fraction of black, white, or brown to alter the shades and tones. In nature or on an artist’s palette, there are countless shades of green and our perception of these shades, while it can be analyzed and quantified scientifically, is largely subjective.

Colors, just like words, have an emotional impact. Hospital walls and other medical facilities are often painted in light tones of greenish-blue, for their soothing effect on people. Bright red has the opposite impact. It is used to attract maximum attention either from traffic lights, bull fights or firetrucks. And so greens are the calming hues of nature and relaxation, whereas reds are synonymous with alarm, blood, excitement, and sometimes the anger and urgency of an adrenaline rush, as illustrated by the popular expression “seeing red.”

The near-infinite range of the color spectrum is similar to the countless narratives expressed by languages. In linguistics, words and their clumsy or astute associations are used to convey information or emotions. Like colors, words carry messages, fragments of information that impact people differently and cannot be objectively quantified. It’s all “in the eye of the beholder.”

One can make an analogy between the false notion of an absolute truth and the vanishing point in a perspective drawing. A vanishing point is an optical illusion, just like the concept of pure truth is a cognitive illusion. In our surreal predicament of fake-news for some, which are true-news for others, it is as if we have moved into an absurd and nightmarish three-dimensional drawing with a multitude of vanishing points designed by the generals of the global information wars.

The people who conduct the information war are numerous. They can be the global media moguls like Rupert Murdoch; the journalists employed by corporate entities or governments; the policymakers who build a considerable influence within countless so-called think-tanks; the elected politicians and their cohorts of advisers and lobbyists; the super-rich businessmen, philanthropists in their own eyes, such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Bob Mercer, George Soros and Pierre Omidyar, who want to impact world affairs; and even show-business celebrities. All have deep pockets and want maximum impact in the fight to shape the discourse and steer public opinion, often globally, in the directions that suit their specific needs.

Unless they are ideologues, the information warriors are mercenaries. Therefore it is money that shapes the global mainstream discourse in television, radio, newspapers and social media. Independent or dissident narratives are generally squashed by a lack of public exposure. The money talks and writes as the viewer-readers, hypnotized by a multitude of screens, become mere consumers to be sold, convinced, or subliminally seduced into a specific mindset. The job of the information warriors is to observe, condition, and predict behaviors. In this massive brainwash of the public, big money is at the same time the washing machine and laundry detergent.

Gates and Soros openly sponsor the prime fake-left publication, The Guardian; Bezos owns The Washington Post; and the Murdoch press empire’s crown jewel is Fox News. Other information warriors who claim to know the truth are on the fringe, at least in appearance. This is the case for media provocateur Alex Jones, who has claimed in court to be a performance artist, but who is nonetheless adulated by millions worldwide and treated like a Guru of truthful information. Jones runs, with his trademark manic energy, the raucous populist far-right conspiracy-theory laced Infowars. Mercer’s money gave birth to the populist far-right site Breitbart. Meanwhile Omidyar sponsors the soft-left, so-called progressive publication, The Intercept. All these lead information warriors want to take as many people as will follow them to their own vanishing points, on a journey towards their illusionary truth.

In their confusion and thirst for truth, people get caught like flies on tasty propaganda glue. The intricate labyrinths built by the information warriors prevent the real discourse, which should be about how to survive the imminent systemic collapse of global capitalism. It cannot be otherwise when global corporate imperialism itself controls the discourse worldwide. Hypnotized by a myriad of vanishing points, humans might be on a course to vanish.

Mueller Report Ends a Shameful Period for the Press

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By Chris Hedges

Source: Truthdig

The Mueller report’s categorical statement that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia ends one of the most shameful periods in modern American journalism, one that rivals the mindless cheerleading for the Iraq War by most of the press. It further erodes and may prove fatal to the credibility of a press that has steadfastly rendered most of the country invisible and functions as little more than an array of gossiping courtiers to the elites.

“ ‘[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,’ ” the report by special counsel Robert Mueller says, according to a direct quotation given in an official letter by U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

The charge that Russia stole the 2016 presidential election, that Vladimir Putin has secret “pee tapes” of Trump cavorting in a Moscow hotel with prostitutes or that Trump has been a longtime “Kremlin agent,” repeated by reporters whose work I admired in the past, is demagoguery as pernicious as the vile taunts and racist tropes that come out of the White House. The press endlessly repeated such allegations while ignoring the expanding social inequality and suffering of a country where half the population lives in poverty, as well as the collapse of our democratic institutions. These facts, not Russian manipulation, saw enraged American voters elect a demagogue who at least belittles the elites, including those in the press, who sold them out. The charge that Trump was a tool of Russia is entertaining. It attracts billions in advertising dollars. It allows the press to posture as a moral crusader. But over the past three years this obsession blotted out most of the real crimes committed by this administration and the reality most Americans endure.

The mainstream press, owned by the corporations that have extinguished the democratic state and are fleecing the public, as well as destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life, does not hold its employers to account. The empty chatter about Russia, including in The New York Times, exposes the bankruptcy of the U.S. media. MSNBC and CNN, which long ago abandoned journalism for entertainment, have breathlessly clogged the airwaves with ridiculous conspiracy theories and fantasies and used them to justify a faux crusade.

Don’t expect any of this to change. Rachael Maddow, like Jack Tapper or any other fatuous news celebrity, will not be held to account for slogging through this fiction night after night. Maddow will still collect her $10-million-a-year salary. And the handful of reporters who exhibited journalistic integrity—Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal and Katrina vanden Heuvel—will continue to remain on the margins of the media landscape. The press is an arm of the corporate-funded burlesque that has replaced the country’s political life and turned civic debate into a vast reality show.

The more the big news outlets try to spin this report, arguing that they need to see the full report rather than the attorney general’s summary, or that Jared Kushner sought to use the communications systems of Russian diplomats, the more credibility they will lose. And they do not have much credibility left. The lurid details of the president’s alleged sexual relations with a porn star and a Playboy bunny, and of “Russiagate,” have replaced journalism. These stories have nothing to do with the lives of most Americans. This descent into the inane and the tawdry gives immunity to Trump. In attacking the press he attacks an institution most Americans loath. And with good reason. The press, unwittingly, enhances a president it seeks to destroy. And its decline, accelerated by its collaboration with liberal Democratic elites who scapegoat Russia to avoid confronting their responsibility for trashing the country in the service of corporate oligarchs, will get worse. Little the press says about Trump will now be believed.

There was, of course, massive interference in our election by a foreign power—Israel. But try saying this naked truth out loud and you will suffer the character assassination, chanted by the unified chorus in the press and the political hierarchy of both parties, that was unleashed on Rep. Ilhan Omar. The engine driving our animosity toward Russia comes from the arms industry, which with the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border—despite assurances given upon the unification of Germany that this would not happen—is making billions of dollars selling weapons to countries in Eastern Europe. The situation is also exacerbating tensions between two of the world’s biggest nuclear powers. But this is just one more suppressed truth.

The Trump administration has carried out policies that, rather than serve Russian interests, have further antagonized our relationship with Moscow. It has imposed sanctions. It is openly attempting to overthrow the government of a country that Russia supports, Venezuela. It is attempting to block the sale of Russian natural gas to Europe. It has sold weapons to Ukraine, a foe of the Kremlin. It has armed insurgents in Syria and carried out airstrikes, even as Russian troops seek to prop up the Syrian regime. It has withdrawn from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. But facts matter little to Russian-conspiracy theorists.

It is not only Trump who has obliterated the line between fact and fiction. It is the press. It hyped and reported allegations it never investigated or confirmed. And by doing this, repeating failures of the kind that appeared in its coverage of the invasion of Iraq, it has committed suicide. A nation that lacks a functioning press becomes a tyranny. This is not Trump’s fault, but our own.

Mueller’s Sideshow Closes – But it has Served its Purpose

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in Washington, DC on April 14, 2004. Robert Mueller named special prosecutor for Russia probe, Washington DC, USA – 17 May 2017 (Rex Features via AP Images)

By Kit Knightly

Source: Off Guardian

To state my position clearly – I never believed, for a second, that the Mueller investigation would find any evidence of “Russian collusion”. And not simply because there isn’t any. I mean, let’s be honest, the powers that be “find evidence” of things that never happened all the time.

They “found” photos of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle, and they “found” Satam al-Suqami’s passport in the rubble of the World Trade Center. They produced “evidence” the Russians shot down MH17 and poisoned the Skripals. There is “evidence” Assad gassed his own people. There was “evidence” Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be here in 45 minutes. (Mueller himself testified to that).

The Deep State have made it more than clear that objective fact does not matter to them. When the CIA, the FBI or the Pentagon want the evidence, they invent find it.

No, I was sure they wouldn’t find Russian collusion, because they didn’t really want to.

Firstly, it’s dangerous. However mad many of the leaders of the US deep state are, there are some who recognise that going to war with Russia is a bad idea. Publicly stating that Russia performed a coup in your country could lead to an international incident, a civil war, or even a nuclear holocaust. That’s not good for business.

Secondly, it’s an admission of weakness. The bedrock of Imperial power has always been an unwillingness to admit its own limitations. Finding that Russia had installed Trump would be admitting to a major defeat. They can’t afford to lose that much face.

Thirdly, and most importantly, they can’t take down one of their own. Trump might be crude, unpredictable, politically incorrect and lacking class…but at the end of the day he’s a billionaire son of a millionaire. He has been mixing with the elites all his life. He’s one of them, and sending down a member of the in crowd for corruption (or anything else) sets too dangerous a precedent. Trump has to be exonerated, it’s simply a matter of the system’s immune response protecting itself. (Not to mention he’s been President of the United States for over two years now, you take him to trial and who knows what he might start saying).

No, Trump was never going to be charged, let alone convicted. Mueller’s investigation has ended the way it was always intended to end – with a whimper, not a bang.

Do NOT make the mistake of thinking this makes it a failure.

Think about how our reality has been shaped by this investigation.

One, it has established as a “certain fact” in the mainstream media, that “Russian interference” is a thing that happened, even though to this date there is NOT A SINGLE PIECE of publicly available evidence to support this. The often cited “Russian troll factory”, the Internet Research Agency, is a small viral marketing firm that published anti-Trump ads. The “experts” tracking Russian “influence operations” are small-time paranoiacs with nothing but homemade infographics to back up their theories. The “research fellows” of the Atlantic Council are reduced to pointing to real people – be they retirees from England or internationally renowned concert pianists – and claiming they are “Russian bots”, because they cannot find any real ones.

The idea that Russia “hacked” the election, or launched a “campaign in support of Trump” is not even close to being proven, but if we embrace the Mueller report, then we are tricked into accepting that version of reality.

Two, there is the very idea of “collusion”. “Collusion” has no meaning under US law. It simply is not a thing, and yet we’ve all been talking about it for years. Letting “collusion” stand as a concept is a big victory for the establishment. It has no meaning, which means it can have any meaning they want it to have. Tulsi Gabbard can have “colluded” with Assad or Modi by defending them on US TV. Jill Stein can commit “collusion” with Russia by attending a meeting. They have invented an imaginary crime, that can be used to tar anti-establishment figures whenever they want.

If we embrace the Mueller report, we hand the corporate media more power to smear any political candidate, independent journalist or an ordinary citizen.

Three, if we accept Mueller, then we accept the concomitant affirmation of the idea that US institutions are trustworthy, that the FBI is inherently honest, that “Gary Cooper types” like Robert Mueller are the beating heart of US democracy. The narrative is running now that an accusation was made, a special counsel investigated and got to the bottom of it.

If we embrace the Mueller report, we lend credibility to a US system that deserves none. We put our trust in a body that has betrayed the public trust a thousand different times, and we accept the lie that the system is working as intended.

Four, Mueller has been a tremendous distraction. Don’t underestimate the value of that. Most of you will be familiar with the Karl Rove quote: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”, but just as important is the less well-known end to that thought: “And while you’re studying that reality —judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”.

“Russiagate” has consumed hundreds of hours of television, thousands of column inches. It has cost millions and returned nothing but sound and fury. It’s a chew toy, a scratching post. Something to get our claws and teeth into while our owners are busy.

And how busy they have been.

Think about all the issues knocked off the front-pages by “Russiagate” rumours and totally fictitious “smoking guns”. Venezuela inches closer to destruction every day. France is a couple of street clashes away from a second 1789. Trump has slashed infrastructure and welfare budgets, and increased military spending. Again. While every anchor in the country was talking about “the walls closing in”, the US has pulled out of an arms treaty and announced they have already built the weapons that the treaty banned. While the media hammer out the propaganda message that Trump is in Putin’s pocket, the US deep state has been winding the Doomsday clock up to 1 minute before midnight.

Finally, much like the “antisemitism crisis” in the Labour party, “Russian collusion” now exists as a concept that keeps everyone in check. Trump now can’t afford to meet with Putin, not without a chorus of “AHA!” from the punditry. Other political figures, those on the actual fringe (not the fake Trump fringe), have even more to lose. There’s no doubt that “Russian collusion”, or the like, will be used to file down a crowded Democrat primary field. Gabbard, Sanders, maybe even Warren, will doubtless face charges of being “soft on Putin” in one form or other. These McCarthyite smears force the Overton window closed. They control what people feel comfortable saying, even thinking.

All in all, Mueller has been very, very useful to the status quo. He’s a controlled reaction, like in a nuclear power plant, keeping public anger available as an energy to harness, whilst making sure it never boils over into a chaotic meltdown.

There is an understandable feeling of glee throughout the alternative media, emotions are high and “We told you so” always feels good to say. Those of us who have been dismissed as bots, Putin-apologists, useful idiots and “Trumptards” have been officially vindicated.

…but do we want vindication from a corrupt establishment? Should we take any value at all in an admission of “truth” from institutions who been shown to hold the very concept of truth in contempt?

The Mueller distraction has run its course, to the only the end it was ever going to reach. The Liberal cheerleaders who thought that OrangeManBad would be dragged out of the White House in chains might be tearful and angry, and in some ways that feels like a victory, but it’s only on the surface. Maddow and Harding et al might be temporarily humiliated, but their bosses are perfectly fine.

Every step of the way Mueller has been an exercise in narrative control, and every step of the way it has worked. And it is still working now.

They have reinforced convenient myths, stoked controversies from non-stories. Put “evidence” out into the public domain that was nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

They have shown that they have total control over the vast majority of public discourse. They can set the agenda. They can dictate terms. They can invent concepts, scenarios, even entire events, and we’ll happily argue over the details of something that never even happened.

“We’re an Empire now, and we act we create reality”. When we accept the Mueller report we are letting them create reality, we shouldn’t be tempted down that path because it feels like we scored some points for the little guy. If we buy into the hype around the announcement, if we let the myth survive that the US government has any interest in objective truth, then we’re playing their game.

I called the Mueller report a sideshow, and that’s just what it is. A fixed ring-toss game, with prizes that seem attainable but are always kept just out of reach. Hustlers always let you win the first one, to make the game look fair. Don’t fall for it. Pick up your money and walk away from the table.

It might FEEL like the good guys won, but that’s only because they let us. Next time they might not. The only real way to win is not to play.

Lies America’s News-Media Tell

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Here are America’s recent targets for regime-change (against which have been used economic sanctions, invasion, and enormous destruction) — and all of them are nations that never invaded nor threatened to invade America:

Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2011-2018, Yemen 2015-now, Ukraine 2014, and Venezuela 2017-now.

Because all of these were and are aggressive wars by the US against nations that never invaded nor threatened to invade the US, they all ought to be subject to mega-criminal prosecutions as was done by the US, Britain, and USSR, against Germany at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II. That was merely victors’ ‘justice’, applied by the US, Britain and USSR, but this would instead be actual international justice, the first instance of such in all of world history. It’s desperately needed — especially now.

America’s Government and news-media were and are remarkably unanimous in saying that these invasions and coups are and were done in order to advance democracy and human rights in the given target-nation. However, what it actually brings and has brought, in each and every case, is, instead, massive bloodshed, death, poverty, destruction, and outpourings of refugees — and an increasingly dangerous world, the current world.

Is this lying, by the US and its allies, and their ‘news’-media, mere hypocrisy, or is it something even worse — far worse? In any case, only a fair and international juridical tribunal that’s controlled by no nation and by no alliance of nations can possibly deliver a credible verdict on this. And, so, such international criminal trials must be organized and carried out, or else even worse can be expected to occur. Impunity is desirable only by and for gangsters, and no land where it exists can reasonably be called “democratic.”

America’s news-media — especially the mainstream ones — not only cover-up important truths, but they routinely lie. Both the Democratic Party’s media and the Republican Party’s media report the same lies, which are the Government’s lies, on these international matters. These are lies on which there is bipartisan unity by the nation’s press (and by both political Parties), in order to deceive the public, into support for invading and occupying, or overthrowing via a coup or otherwise, some foreign government. Their target is always a government which America’s billionaires who control international corporations want to replace, and so the US regime unanimously lies against that targeted government, as being dangerous and evil, even though the given takeover-target has never invaded, nor threatened to invade, the United States — is no real national-security threat to the American people. Only on the basis of lies can that succeed. This is the main function of the press, in such countries: deceit, on those international matters.

In other words: the US Government is fascist, like the Axis powers were in World War II. This is worse than, for example, merely wasting billions of dollars on building a border-wall against Mexico in order to protect Americans, but it receives far less press-attention (perhaps because the press is so unanimous in endorsing and supporting these atrocities — and that’s yet further evidence of the American regime’s fascism). The press is owned by, and funded by ads, and donations from, America’s billionaires, the very same people who fund our politicians and who also own controlling interests in the weapons-firms such as Lockheed Martin, which can’t survive without these weapons-sales, and which therefore demand constant conquests, in order to create new markets for their wares, new “allied nations.”

So, naturally, America’s military is mainly the enforcement-arm of the billionaires who control US-based international corporations (especially the weapons-firms and the extractive firms such as mining and fuels, which corporations crave to control foreign natural resources), and those people also control America’s Government and press, and this produces the unanimity for these regime-change operations — which likewise fits the fascist model.

The US is clearly the world’s leading fascist nation, and there is no close second (and none of the nations that the US regime is trying to conquer is fascist at all). What Germany was under Hitler, the US is and has been at least since the time of US President Ronald Reagan. The US has been a dictatorship since at least 1981.

Coup or invasion (either form of aggression) is an international war-crime, but the deceit against America’s public usually succeeds, because the public trust especially the billionaire-controlled mainstream press, which is always leading these lies-for-conquest.

Furthermore, almost all of the ‘alternative news’ media are likewise owned by (and funded by ads or donations from) wealthy interests that participate in and benefit from this mass-deceit — from the stenographic ‘news’ reporting, the Government’s accusations against the particular target-nation that’s about to be (or has been) regime-changed.

For example, all of America’s ’news’-media were stenographically reporting the US Government’s many lies about ‘Saddam Hussein’s WMD’, in order to ‘justify’ America’s kicking out the UN’s weapons-inspectors and simply bombing Iraq and invading and militarily occupying, and basically destroying, that country (which had never invaded ours) in 2003. All of America’s ‘news’ media did the same, but especially all of the mainstream ones did, of both the right and the left, all the way from Fox News to the New York Times. They all were hiding the truth and lying to support an illegal invasion — an international war-crime under international law, and violation of the UN’s Charter. Did Americans stop buying those ‘news’papers and watching those ’news’ channels, and buying those ’news’ magazines, after the truth became reluctantly exposed (during 2002-2005) that those ‘WMD’ didn’t exist and no longer had existed after 1998? No, those same ‘news’-media still are successful. (They all ought to be long-since out-of-business, but such accountability doesn’t exist in the news-business. Not only does a major ‘news’-medium hide its own corruption and lying but it hides that of all other major ‘news’-media, because otherwise the entire ‘democratic’ system of control by the nation’s billionaires would simply collapse.)

America’s ‘news’-media report just as much false ‘news’ (not merely what they call “fake news,” but actually false ‘news’) today, as they did back then, because America’s ‘news’-media cover-up not only for themselves, but also for each other, since they all lie so routinely in order to ‘justify’ their Government’s aggressions, coups, military invasions, foreign mass-murders, etc., and those invasions and coups are part of the unspoken business-plan of them all, for growth or expansion of their global control.

These atrocities are all done for ‘national security’ reasons, and in order to ‘spread democracy’, and in order to ‘protect human rights around the world’ — and Americans continue to believe it, and to believe the regime, and to subscribe to those same mainstream (and hangers-on) ’news’-media. Accountability against lying doesn’t exist in a hyper-aggressive ‘democracy’, a would-be all-encompassing global empire, which America has certainly become.

Today, these ’news’-media hide that they’ve been lying when they report that Russia ‘hacked’ Hillary Clinton’s email and John Podesta’s computer. Just click onto that, right there, and you will immediately see the latest documentation that it’s all mere lies against Russia, which is the only nation that does actually possess the military wherewithal to stand up against the US regime (since it inherited the arsenal of the former Soviet Union when the Cold War ended in 1991 on their side — though that war secretly continued and still is continuing on the American side).

These fabrications could have many reasons, but perhaps the likeliest is in order to increase weapons-sales by Lockheed Martin and other US weapons-makers, all of which are 100% dependent upon their sales to the US Government and to its allied governments. (There are consequently interlocking directorates between the ‘news’-businesses and the armaments-firms, and the Wall Street banks, and the think tanks, etc.; and all of this is intensified by the revolving door between Government officials and the private sector, such as generals becoming directors of ‘defense’ firms.) But this fraud that ‘Russia hacked the election’ has been exposed before, though not with the same thoroughness as it is in that latest news-report, which comes from the “Sic Semper Tyrannus” blog. You might happen to think that it must be ‘fake news’, because it’s from a non-mainstream site? It comes from Bill Binney, who is the NSA whistleblower who was the NSA’s top signals-intelligence analyst before he quit in disgust at the Government’s lying. Of course, he had tried all the mainstream ‘news’-media as prospective outlets for this news-report, but they’re not interested in exposing the truth — because that would expose themselves to be liars. Once a major lie is told, and told repeatedly, by a major ‘news’-medium, exposing that lie would be exposing itself — and none do that.

They also hide that they’ve been lying to report that America was justified to bomb Syria on 11 April 2018, justified to do it in order to punish Syria’s Government for having perpetrated a chemical weapons attack on 7 April 2018 in the town of Douma — a chemical weapons attack that was actually fabricated by the US and its allies, and which US Government lie is still being protected (hidden from the public) by the US regime’s ’news’ media, which media, for example, fail to report that the OPCW did not find any such attack to have occurred:

“OPCW Issues Fact-Finding Mission Reports on Chemical Weapons Use Allegations in Douma, Syria in 2018 and in Al-Hamadaniya and Karm Al-Tarrab in 2016”

Friday, 06 July 2018

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — 6 July 2018 — The Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), issued an interim report on the FFM’s investigation to date regarding the allegations of chemical weapons use in Douma, Syria on 7 April 2018.

The FFM’s activities in Douma included on-site visits to collect environmental samples, interviews with witnesses, data collection. In a neighbouring country, the FFM team gathered or received biological and environmental samples, and conducted witness interviews.

OPCW designated labs conducted analysis of prioritised samples. The results show that no organophosphorous nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties. Along with explosive residues, various chlorinated organic chemicals were found in samples from two sites, for which there is full chain of custody. Work by the team to establish the significance of these results is on-going. The FFM team will continue its work to draw final conclusions.

If those “final conclusions” are ever made public by OPCW, will you trust your ’news’-media to report them honestly? And, if the conclusions never are published, will you think that the US regime and its ’news’-media are war-criminals there, just as they were in Iraq, and Syria, and Yemen, and Ukraine, and so many other countries?

According to Russian Television, or “RT” — which all major ’news’-media in the US and its allied regimes say is ‘untrustworthy’ — “Real ‘obscene masquerade’: How BBC depicted staged hospital scenes as proof of Douma chemical attack”. That op-ed by the great British investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley, who specializes in Syria, isn’t published by the BBC, or by ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, PBS, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, Guardian, or Washington Post. It’s too honest, for that. Could this be part of the reason that they call RT ‘fake news’? If so, maybe RT should replace them, at least for international reporting.

And, before that, there was the claimed 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack in the town of Ghouta by Syria’s Government, which was actually done by the US Government’s allies who were trying to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government — it’s what’s called a “false flag attack” — one that’s designed to be blamed against the other side, in order to serve as an ‘excuse’ to invade. The American Government and its ‘news’-media keep making suckers out of the American public this way, and yet the American public continue to subscribe to them — to pay their good money, for such evil propaganda. Apparently, nobody is even embarassed. It simply keeps happening, again and again.

Another recent example is the ‘democratic revolution’ in Ukraine in February 2014, which was actually a US coup that destroyed that country.

And the latest example is the US-and-Canada-led effort to impose a fascist regime in Venezuela.

Furthermore, as one of the perceptive reader-commenters to that latest Binney article on ‘Russiagate’ noted: “Craig Murray, in a very revealing but neglected interview with Scott Horton, said: ‘I should be plain that the Podesta emails and the DNC emails of course are two separate things and you shouldn’t conclude that both have the same source. But in both cases, we’re talking of a leak not a hack, in that the person who was responsible for getting the information out had legal access to that information.’” Murray, a whistleblower and former UK Ambassador, had been personally involved in that, by transferring a thumb-drive from the DNC whistleblower to Julian Assange, and he also said there, “If you are looking to the source of all this, you have to look to Americans,” and not at all to any Russians or other foreigners.

The comprehensiveness of the deceit by the US regime is beyond what the vast majority of Americans can even imagine to be the case. It is simply beyond the comprehension of most people. And that false ‘news’-reporting then becomes basic to, and enshrined in, false but best-selling ‘history’-books, so as to deepen, yet further, the deception of the public.

On Sunday, February 24th, the “Zero Hedge” independent news-site headlined “WaPo Quietly Deletes Branson’s Venezuela Concert From Article After ‘Fake’ Attendance Figures Exposed” and reported (and documented) that the British billionaire Richard Branson’s free pop-concert on Friday February 22 at the Venezuela-Colombia border in support of Washington’s attempted coup to overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected President had drawn less than 20,000 fans instead of what had been reported in the US regime’s Washington Post, which had reported that 200,000 attended, and that as soon as the US regime’s fraud was publicly exposed — which was done by means of a photo of the crowd which had been taken by Dan Cohen of Russia’s RT, plus careful independent calculations by the “Moon of Alabama” blogger — the US regime’s ‘news’paper retroactively removed their ‘news’-report’s crowd-size-estimate from the online version of their ‘news’-report. Of course, the ‘error’ had already been physically printed in that trashy ‘news’paper, which might (at its discretion) subsequently publish a printed correction, saying that they’d only been trying to fool their subscribers in order to assist propaganda supporting the US regime’s grab for control over Venezuela.

The problem isn’t ‘fake news’ from RT or from small online sites (such as all of the major media claim to be the case), but false ‘news’ from mainstream US (and allied) ‘news’ (propaganda) media. They’ve all got millions of victims’ blood on their hands, and they’re not even a bit ashamed of any of it — and of shifting the blame for it to the targeted nations.

PS: Max Blumenthal is an investigative journalist who formerly believed the lies from the (think tanks and other agencies of the) billionaires who finance the Democratic Party. He was the star journalist at one of the Democratic Party’s leading ‘alt-news’ propaganda-sites, AlterNet, until he lost his employment there after starting to expose the rot that he had previously been fooled into supporting. He increasingly moved away from liberalism to progressivism; and the Democratic National Committee doesn’t want any of that, except as window-dressing — and Blumenthal decided he could no longer do that. He became unemployed for a while and then established, along with another former AlterNet reporter “The GrayZone Project,” in order to continue being employed. Blumenthal recently issued a YouTube video in which he interviewed star Democratic Party Presidential aspirant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of Congress “Is the US Meddling in Venezuela? Max Blumenthal Asks US Congress Members.” As you can see there, all of them are either mildly or very supportive of Trump’s coup-attempt in Venezuela. Unfortunately, Blumenthal didn’t interview Tulsi Gabbard, who might possibly be an exception to the depressing rule that corruption reigns, and who recently announced her candidacy for the US Presidency. Nor did he interview Bernie Sanders, nor Sherrod Brown, nor Elizabeth Warren, all of whom likewise are competing for the progressives’ votes in the upcoming Democratic Party Presidential primaries. As for the other Democratic contenders, they’re competing to become instead the new Hillary Clinton — the American billionaires’ favorite. Instead, with Trump, we got in the 2016 Presidentials their second choice.

On February 18th, Blumenthal and a colleague, Alexander Rubinstein, headlined at one of the few sincere and honest US-based international-news sites, “Mint Press,” “Pierre Omidyar’s Funding of Pro-Regime-Change Networks and Partnerships with CIA Cutouts”, and they exposed Omidyar, the owner of a famous ‘news’ site that’s targeted at naive progressives, “The Intercept.” Whereas Mint Press is called ‘fake news’ by America’s billionaires’ ‘news’-media, The Intercept (which isn’t nearly as honest as Mint Press is) is not. The dictatorship’s aim is to crush the truth, and (like The Intercept does) they let in just enough of truth so as to keep hidden what’s most important to them to keep hidden from the public — things such as what Blumenthal and Rubinstein are now disclosing.

Everybody except America’s 585 billionaires should be reading sites such as the ones that publish Blumenthal and Rubinstein, and other honest investigative journalists (which are banned at all of the mainstream sites). Propaganda that poses as ‘news’ has to be crushed, in order for truth itself not to be crushed. But can their exposé of Omidyar win a top national journalism award without thereby bringing down the entire rotten and corrupt superstructure of lies? And that would also bring down the enormous international crimes this superstructure has supported and continues to support, such as Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2011-2018, Yemen 2015-now, Ukraine 2014, and Venezuela 2017-now.

If such news-reports cannot win top journalism prizes, then what hope is there, realistically, that things will ever be able to improve?

Only by removing the blinders from the public, can the public see the light and the actual truth, about the world in which they are living. That’s what is needed in order for democracy to be able to exist. What now exists is, instead, dictatorship. That’s the current reality. It includes the European Council, which is the unelected government of the EU, which clearly is a dictatorship (and this is true even if Brexit is wrong), and it also includes every other ally of the US regime. The EU was created by the US and its allies after WW II. It “always was a CIA project.” FDR was dead, and maybe whatever there had been of US democracy died along with him. The UN that exists is not the one that he had intended and so carefully planned. We’ve been living in a charade. It didn’t start in 1981. There is this, and there also is this. It’s FDR’s vision turned upside-down and inside-out. That’s the actual world of today. It’s based on lies.

Evidence Indicates Link Between North Korean Embassy Break-In And Christchurch Attacks

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Screenshot from video showing two men with baseball caps and assault rifles in Christchurch.

By William Craddick

Source: Disobedient Media

As the world reels from the tragic terrorist attack against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, much attention has been given to sensational information about the single named suspect, Brenton Tarrant. However, the hyperfocus on Tarrant distracts from the fact that the Australian national was arrested along with other suspects.

An investigation and analysis by Disobedient Media indicates that Tarrant and the group he worked with likely have professional military connections, are part of the same cell that perpetrated a February 22nd break-in of the North Korean embassy in Spain and potentially have intelligence ties to various agencies that cooperate under the UKUSA Agreement popularly known as Five Eyes (FVEY).

I. Signs Of Professional Military Connections

Despite the characterization of Tarrant in the media, he was no run-of-the-mill white supremacist. Images posted by Tarrant online just before the attack to a Twitter account which had been dormant until March 12 showed that he was in possession of high-capacity magazines and a semi-automatic assault rifle. The weapon and magazines would have been classified as either a “restricted weapon” or a “military-style-semi-automatic” (MSSA) under New Zealand law. A person who possesses or uses a firearm in New Zealand needs to hold a firearms license issued by police. Licenses normally last for ten years unless revoked. Foreign nationals may apply from overseas for a one year license based on their possession of an existing license in their home country.

Suspicions are inevitably raised over how exactly Tarrant and his alleged co-conspirators managed to stockpile the military-grade weapons and ammunition used in the attack in a country with comparatively strict gun laws. Tarrant, who supposedly began to radicalize starting in 2016 and was allegedly unemployed would have had his radical tendencies discovered with a proper background investigation. Police say that another suspect in the shooting was an individual who acquired the necessary Category A license and began to legally stockpile weapons used in the attack.

Additional reports have also established that Tarrant trained at the Bruce Rifle Club in Dunedin. Although the club’s website and YouTube channel have been scrubbed from the internet, an archive shows that it explicitly catered to users and collectors of military rifles.

The Australian also engaged in extensive travel abroad to a number of areas that should have raised red flags with intelligence services. Countries visited by Tarrant included Pakistan, North Korea, Turkey, parts of Africa, Portugal, Spain, France, Afghanistan and Xinjiang, China. The extensive travel and access to military grade firearms should have made detection by law enforcement and intelligence services nearly impossible to avoid.

II. Similarities Between Spain And New Zealand Operations

There are a number of analogous facts shared by the attack on the North Korean embassy in Spain and the terror event in Christchurch which suggest that the same team was involved in both incidents. In both cases the perpetrators showed that they were well versed in “breach and clear” tactics against buildings filled with people. In both cases the buildings were cleared efficiently and quickly even though the goal of the North Korean incident was focused on intelligence gathering as opposed to mass murder. Aerial analysis of the North Korean embassy in Spain, the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre show that all buildings are of similar size and each would have required the same know-how and training to breach.

In securing a getaway from the North Korean embassy, the attacking team of approximately ten individuals utilized two luxury vehicles. In the Christchurch attack, the suspects used two vehicles for transport in which live explosive devices were found. The similar number of vehicles used in both incidents points to a common number of participants.

III. In Both Attacks, Perpetuators Are Likely Military Cells

The groups involved in both the Spain embassy break-in and the Christchurch terror attacks appear to be military or paramilitary in nature. The March 13, 2019 exposé of the embassy break-in by El País directly cited sources involved with the investigation who stated that the attackers were likely a “military cell” with at least two members who were tied to the CIA. Sources such as the New York Post and Washington Post have both run stories attempting to attribute the break-in to a shadowy group of North Korean dissidents. But this explanation is unconvincing since this group would not not have the practical military know-how or muscle required to breach and clear the embassy in such an efficient manner.

Analysis of documentation of the Christchurch terror attack also indicates that the perpetrators were part of a military style cell. Although much has been made of Brenton Tarrant’s live-streamed attack, no other individuals were featured in the film. Video footage being distributed online shows two individuals carrying firearms during the attacks. Both are wearing baseball caps. This means that neither can be Tarrant, who was filming himself during the attack and wore a helmet with a mounted camera, not a hat.

Police speculated during the attacks that there were up to three suspects. But footage and photos that have emerged along with early reports of other suspected locations where incidents occurred indicates that the number of attackers was likely larger. One image shows a man with shaven head in military-style camouflage fatigues being detained by New Zealand police as the attack was contained and halted. Another video shows police standing around a suspect lying on the pavement. As the individual videoing the scene passes, officers roll the apparently lifeless man over onto his back, showing his arm flop as he moved. If the suspect had been alive then police would have restrained him with handcuffs before moving him. Authorities have made no announcement about casualties among the attackers.

There were also rumors of other incidents which suggest that the attack might have been larger than is being disclosed. Maori News noted reports that an additional shooting was ongoing at Christchurch Hospital. This went largely unacknowledged by the international media. In the aftermath of the attacks, police in Auckland, New Zealand also responded to a bomb scare at Auckland train station.

These facts all indicate that the Christchurch terror attacks were perpetrated by a larger group that would be similar in size to the one involved with the break-in at the North Korean embassy. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has expressed similar opinions, stating on March 15 that the attack was “no individual act” and that he was sending an official delegation to New Zealand to gather further information about the groups behind the attack. Turkish state-owned media source TRT World has cited anonymous officials who claimed that Tarrant entered the country “to carry out a terror attack and/ or an assassination.” Tarrant’s visits to Turkey occurred on March 17-20, and September 13, 2016. Erdoğan survived a coup attempt that began July 15, 2016.

It is also worth noting that the location of police stations in and around Christchurch shows that there were several just a few blocks away from the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre. This is about a seven to eight minute drive with normal traffic. But witness statements say that police took over 20 minutes to arrive at the scene (the police response time was actually an even longer 36 minutes). Ambulance services took over half an hour to arrive at the scene despite the fact that hospitals were in even closer proximity to the attack locations than police stations.

The failure of police to deploy with greater haste or intercept the attackers while they moved from their first target to the second raises serious questions about the reasons for inadequate law enforcement reactions. Normally an incident on such a scale would trigger an immediate lockdown of the affected city and a total isolation of the affected area.

If any attackers were not filming themselves, resupplying from their vehicles or firing on innocent civilians while driving in transit as Tarrant did it is likely that they would have been able to effect an escape.

IV. Potential Connection To Organizations Affiliated With FVEY

Many of the countries visited by Tarrant play host to the operations of agencies with connections to FVEY. FVEY members include the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. FVEY also have a number of Tier B nations who participate in “focused cooperation” on computer network exploitation, including Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungry, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey.

Outside of the UKUSA Agreement, FVEY members are known to cooperate with Tier B nations on their own. Great Britain has had a deep relationship with Spain since World War II, when Britain bought off the Spanish to remain neutral and then used the country as an escape route for downed Allied airmen. British agency GCHQ also collaborates independently with counterparts in Germany, France, Spain and Sweden. British-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal was also revealed to have been collaborating with Spanish intelligence officers in the years leading up to his poisoning in 2018.

Brenton Tarrant’s travels to Turkey, France, Spain and Portugal raise questions about potential connections to intelligence services who collaborate loosely under the FVEY intelligence sharing agreement. Additionally, his time spent in Pakistan, a country with a long history of deep CIA involvement creates an even stronger possibility that Tarrant might have had ties to military or intelligence organizations.

Since Tarrant had at least one New Zealander acting as an accomplice, it is possible that there may have been other New Zealand nationals associated with his group. Outside of their collaboration through the FVEY framework, New Zealand’s Special Air Service has been deployed to Afghanistan where they worked directly under the CIA at a base in Bamiyan province according to claims published in 2011.

If individuals who had a past or present affiliation with New Zealand’s intelligence or military services were involved with a military cell that participated in the embassy and Christchurch attacks, it would provide a potential explanation for the extraordinarily slow police response time which caused an increased number of casualties. It would also give context to reports that New Zealand police are refusing to provide footage of Brenton Tarrant’s attack to US authorities who are seeking it for training purposes.

V. Conclusion: Tragedy Exploited By Special Interests

Whether or not one believes that the Christchurch terror attacks have more to them than meets the eye, it is undeniable that the tragedy is now being exploited by various parties for personal gain. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has taken the opportunity to promote increased gun control with a total ban on semi-automatic weapons. Ardern formerly worked as a policy advisor to Tony Blair, who has himself been a willing collaborator with British intelligence services. Ardern has not yet commented on the fact that New Zealand security and emergency services caused the death toll to rise substantially higher than needed due to an incredibly slow response time.

In addition to the debate about gun control, pundits have begun to harass President Donald Trump, accusing him of having some kind of ideological connection to Brenton Tarrant due to the suspect’s fascist loyalties. These efforts only serve to intensify efforts to derail the ongoing crisis involving the Korean peace process.

With the operational similarities between the the Spanish embassy and Christchurch attacks in mind one cannot help but observe that global attention has been ripped away from potential peace talks between the US and North Korea. The gross showmanship of the Tarrant in broadcasting murders for the world to see was an intentional attempt to capture attention and shift global discussion by committing a heinous act of terror. As the Christchurch attacks unfolded, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui made an announcement blaming US administration officials for a breakdown in denuclearization talks and threatened to break off negotiations to resume testing. These comments were immediately highlighted by Russian news agency TASS and the international press. Other comments clarifying that personal relations between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump were still good and their chemistry “mysteriously wonderful” were almost totally ignored in coverage of the press conference.

The official facts of the Christchurch terror attacks will likely shift over time in the same way that official narratives fed to the public by federal investigators changed constantly in the aftermath of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. But the apparent military and intelligence connections of perpetrators in the attack, the discrepancies between the official reports about the size of the group of suspects and footage of the event as it unfolded and the operational similarities to the North Korean embassy incident will continue to erode confidence that the public is being given all the facts.

 

3/17/2019: This article was updated with new details regarding emerging facts and clarification about police response times. Unfortunately, the New Zealand government has engaged in unprecedented censorship of the event and videos of the incident have all been taken offline.

The New Zealand Psyop

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire\

Following the murder of fifty Muslims at a mosque in Christchurch New Zealand, the corporate media went into overdrive, describing the alleged shooter as a white supremacist Trump supporter.

This is clearly not the case. If we read a “manifesto” attributed to the accused shooter, Brenton Tarrant, we discover he followed the writing of Candace Owens, a “conservative” black woman, and predicts he will be set free like Nelson Mandela. 

Tarrant—if he is indeed the author of this professed manifesto—also criticized the leadership of President Trump and described himself as an “eco-fascist,” a socialist, a libertarian, an anarchist, and at the same time a follower of the Norwegian psychopath Anders Breivik, a self-described white nationalist. 

Despite these glaring incongruities, the agenda-driven corporate media has uniformly characterized the suspect as a white supremacist supporter of Donald Trump while either downplaying or ignoring the ideological contradictions and outright absurdity of Tarrant’s so-called manifesto. 

I believe this event is yet another psychological operation designed to 1) push anti-gun legislation (New Zealand wasted little time after the attack to call for confiscating the firearms of largely law-abiding individuals), 2) stoke and fan the flames of political division and portray “conservatives” as racist, misogynist, and fascist, and 3) conflate Trump (“Hitler”), the “Alt-Right,” and “conservatives” with “white nationalists” who are portrayed by an ideologically-driven media as the dangerous fellow travelers of psychotic murderers. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center set the tone while ignoring the massive contradictions that riddle the document, titled “The Great Replacement,” a title borrowed from the French writer Renaud Camus (“Le grand remplacement”). The book argues the French people and western civilization in Europe are being replaced by immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. According to the left-leaning controlled information site Wikipedia, Camus is a conspiracy theorist.

“The type of racist rhetoric found in the manifesto is promoted heavily by Americans with large platforms like Rep. Steve King of Iowa and Tucker Carlson of Fox News,” writes Michael Edison Hayden on the SPLC “Hatewatch” web page. 

It should come as no surprise the SPLC would use the attack and a screed supposedly connected to Tarrant as ammunition to unfairly characterize Carlson and King as white supremacists and therefore legitimize (in the minds of progressives) the attacks on them, in particular the Antifa attack on Carlson’s family. 

I believe the shooting and others in the recent past are part of a psychological campaign first to identify and demonize critics of the establishment and then exclude them from political participation and possibly impose more draconian measures. 

In addition, this will give the state an excuse to place further restrictions on free speech and access to social media. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc., have initiated (at the behest of the state) a purge of their platforms based on a “progressive” political litmus test. 

Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a former member of the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow, and who recently declared his intention to run for president, admitted there is no practical way to confiscate firearms owned by Americans, that number now totaling around 500,000,000 individual rifles and handguns. Instead, O’Rourke wants to circumvent the Bill of Rights and outlaw the sale of firearms, thus going the route New Zealand is now following. 

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way,” quipped the master socialist politician, Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

I believe many of these mass shootings, especially those committed by supposed white supremacists and nationalists (many are controlled assets; e.g. Hal Turner), are part of a psychological operation designed to destabilize both America and Europe on a number of fronts. 

From borders and mass migration to economic austerity and the slow-motion erosion of the middle class and the export of industry and wealth by international banks and transnational corporations, we are witnessing a massive plan to usher in a unified global economy with its requirement for totalitarian governance.

For global elites working behind the scenes the ultimate goal is total, unquestioned control,  consolidation of wealth, and the impoverishment of humanity resulting ultimately in a serious reduction in world population. 

Before this can occur, however, the political and intellectual playing field must be cleansed of all dissent. The only dissent tolerated will be that of token groups and individuals keeping alive the illusion that we live in a democracy.