War, Media Propaganda, and the Police State

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By James F. Tracy

The following essay is intended to provide a brief overview of topics addressed in a discussion graciously recorded by Julie Vivier at the offices of the Center for Research on Globalization in Montreal Canada on August 5, 2014.-JFT

Modern propaganda techniques utilized by the corporate state to enforce anti-democratic and destructive policies routinely entail the manufacture and manipulation of news events to mold public opinion and, as Edward Bernays put it, “engineer consent” toward certain ends.

Such events include not only overt political appeals, but also acts of seemingly spontaneous terrorism and militarism that traumatize the body politic into ultimately accepting false narratives as political and historical realities.

Western states’ development and utilization of propaganda closely parallels the steady decay of political enfranchisement and engagement throughout the twentieth century. Upon securing a second term in 1916, the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson plunged the United States into the most violent and homicidal war in human history. Wilson, a former Princeton University academician groomed for public office by Wall Street bankers, assembled a group of progressive-left journalists and publicists to “sell the war” to the American people.

George Creel, Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays and Harold Lasswell all played influential roles in the newly-formed Committee on Public Information, and would go on to be major figures in political thought, public relations, and psychological warfare research.

The sales effort was unparalleled in its scale and sophistication. The CPI was not only able to officially censor news and information, but essentially manufacture these as well. Acting in the role of a multifaceted advertising agency, Creel’s operation “examined the different ways that information flowed to the population and flooded these channels with pro-war material.”

The Committee’s domestic organ was comprised of 19 subdivisions, each devoted to a specific type of propaganda, one of which was a Division of News that distributed over 6,000 press releases and acted as the chief avenue for war-related information. On an average week, more than 20,000 newspaper columns carried data provided through CPI propaganda. The Division of Syndicated Features enlisted the help of popular novelists, short story writers, and essayists. These mainstream American authors presented the official line in a readily accessible form reaching twelve million people every month. Similar endeavors existed for cinema, impromptu soapbox oratory (Four Minute Men), and outright advertising at home and abroad.[1]

With the experiences and observations of these war marketers variously recounted and developed throughout the 1920s (Lippmann, Public Opinion, The Phantom Public, Bernays, Propaganda, Crystallizing Public Opinion, Creel, How We Advertised America, Lasswell, Propaganda and the World War), alongside the influence of their elite colleagues and associates, the young publicists’ optimism concerning popular democracy guided by informed opinion was sobered with the realization that public sentiment was actually far more susceptible to persuasion than had been previously understood. The proposed solutions to guarantee something akin to democracy in an increasingly confusing world lay in “objective” journalism guided by organized intelligence (Lippmann) and propaganda, or what Edward Bernays termed “public relations.”

The argument laid out in Lippmann’s Public Opinion was partly motivated by the US Senate’s rejection of membership in the League of Nations. An adviser to the Wilson administration, a central figure behind intelligence gathering that informed postwar geopolitical dynamics laid out at the Paris Peace Conference, and an early member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Lippmann increasingly viewed popular democracy as plagued by a hopelessly ill-informed public opinion incapable of comprehending the growing complexities of modern society. Only experts could be entrusted with assessing, understanding, and acting on the knowledge accorded through their respective professions and fields.

Along these lines, journalism should mimic the then-fledgling social sciences by pursuing objectivity and deferring to the compartmentalized expertise of established authority figures. News and information could similarly be analyzed, edited, and coordinated to ensure accuracy by journalists exercising similar technocratic methods. Although Lippmann does not exactly specify what body would oversee such a process of “organized intelligence,” his postwar activities and ties provides a clue.

Edward Bernays’ advocacy for public opinion management is much more practical and overt. Whereas Lippmann suggests a regimented democracy via technocratic news and information processing, Bernays stresses a privileged elite’s overt manipulation of how the populace interprets reality itself. Such manipulation necessitates contrived associations, figures and events that appear authentic and spontaneous. “Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval,” Bernays notes,

“and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public’s consent to a program or goal … We reject government authoritarianism or regimentation, but we are willing to be persuaded by the written or spoken word. The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.[2]

Bernays demonstrates an affinity with Lippmann’s notion of elite expediency when pursuing prerogatives and decision-making the public at large cannot be entrusted to interpret. In such instances,

democratic leaders must play their part in leading the public through the engineering of consent to socially constructive goals and values. This role naturally imposes upon them the obligation to use educational processes, as well as other available techniques, to bring about as complete an understanding as possible.[3]

Written in the early 1950s, these observations become especially apt in the latter half of the twentieth century, where the US is typically a major aggressor in foreign (and eventually domestic) affairs. Yet what does Bernays mean by, for example, “educational processes”? An indication may be found by noting his central role in the promotion of tobacco use, municipal water fluoridation, and the overthrow of the democratically-elected Arbenz regime in Guatemala.[4]

With the advent of the national security state in 1947, secret programs emerge where the people are as a matter of course intentionally left unaware of the state’s true rationales and objectives.

Indeed, a wealth of contemporary historical examples suggest how the “engineering of consent” is wholly calculating and anti-democratic, and where the crises requiring such drastic and immediate public relations and military measures are themselves the result of the same leadership’s policies and actions. The US economic provocation of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Tonkin Gulf incident precipitating US military occupation of Vietnam are obvious examples of such manufactured events.

Similar techniques are apparent in the major political assassinations of the 1960s, where to this day the public is prompted to partake in the false reality that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole culprit in the murder of President John F. Kennedy, much as Sirhan Sirhan was responsible for the death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

In fact, in each instance overwhelming evidence points to Central Intelligence Agency involvement in orchestrating the assassinations while training and presenting Oswald and Sirhan as the would-be assassins.

The US government’s assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., probably the most influential African American public persona of the twentieth century, is not even open to debate, having been soundly proven in a court of law.[5] Yet as with the Kennedys, it is a genuine public relations achievement that much of the American population is oblivious to the deeper dynamics of these political slayings that are routinely overlooked or inaccurately recounted in public discourse.

Along these lines, in the historical context of Operation Gladio, the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing, the events of September 11, 2001, the London 7/7/2005 bombings, and lesser episodes such as the “shoe” and “underwear” bombers, the engineering of consent has reached staggering new heights where state-orchestrated terrorism is used to mold public opinion toward acceptance of militarized policing operations, the continued erosion of civil liberties, and major sustained aggression against moderate Middle Eastern nations to cartelize scarce resources and politically reconfigure an entire region of the world.

Again, the public is essentially compelled to believe that political extremism of one form or another is the cause of each event, even in light of how the sophistication and scope of the Oklahoma City and 9/11 “attacks” suggest high-level forces at work. If one is to delve beneath the public relations narrative of each event, the recent Newtown massacre and Boston Marathon bombing likewise appear to have broader agendas where the public is again purposely misled.

Conventional journalists and academics are reluctant to publicly address such phenomena for fear of being called “conspiracy theorists.” In the case of academe this has severely curtailed serious and potentially crucial inquiry into such deep events and phenomena in lieu of what are often innocuous intellectual exchanges divorced from actually existing social and political realities that cry out for serious interrogation and critique.

The achievements of modern public relations are further evident in the Warren and 9/11 Commissions themselves, both of which have spun the fantastic myths of Allan Dulles and Peter Zelikow respectively, and that today maintain footholds in public discourse and consciousness.

Indeed, the “conspiracy theory” meme, a propaganda campaign waged by the CIA beginning in the mid-1960s to counter criticism of the Warren Commission report, is perhaps as little-known as Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program where hundreds of journalists and publishers actively devoted their services to spread Agency disinformation. The overall effect of these combined operations has been an immensely successful program continues to shape the contours of American political life and mediated reality.[6]

The present socio-political condition and suppression of popular democracy are triumphs of modern propaganda technique. So are they also manifest in the corporate state’s efforts to engineer public acquiescence toward such things as the colossal frauds of genetically modified organisms masquerading as “food,” toxic polypharmacy disguised as “medicine,” and the police state and “war on terror” seeking to preserve “national security.”

Notes

[1] Aaron Delwiche, “Propaganda: Wartime Propaganda: World War I, The Committee on Public Information,” accessed September 28, 2014 at http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/ww1.cpi.html; George Creel, How We Advertised America, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920. Available at http://archive.org/details/howweadvertameri00creerich

[2] Edward Bernays, Public Relations, Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952, 159-160.

[3] Ibid. 160.

[4] “You can get practically any ideas accepted,” Bernays reflected on the campaign to fluoridate New York City’s water supply. “If doctors are in favor, the public is willing to accept it, because a doctor is an authority to most people, regardless of how much he knows, or doesn’t know … By the law of averages, you can usually find an individual in any field who will be willing to accept new ideas, and the new ideas then infiltrate the others who haven’t accepted it. Christopher Bryson, The Fluoride Deception, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004, 159.

[5] William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, New York: Verso, 2003.

[6] James F. Tracy, “Conspiracy Theory: Foundations of a Weaponized Term,” Global Research, January 22, 2013.

BOSTON UPDATE: FBI War on Marathon Bombing Witnesses Continues

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By James Henry

Source: WhoWhatWhy

The Boston Marathon bombing is much more important than has been acknowledged, principally because it is the major domestic national security event since 9-11 and has played a major role in expanding the power of the security state. For that reason, WhoWhatWhy is continuing to investigate troubling aspects of this story and the establishment media treatment of it. So even as it slips from the headlines, we will be exploring new elements of the story regularly as the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev approaches.

***

Since the Boston Marathon bombing a year and a half ago, the FBI appears to be intimidating, harassing, and silencing friends and acquaintances of the Tsarnaev brothers. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers have noticed it too—they’re having trouble getting anyone to talk to them, recent court papers reveal.

In what WhoWhatWhy previously described as the FBI’s “war on witnesses”, the Bureau seems to be employing a scorched earth strategy of destroying anything that might be of use to the “enemy.”

On August 29, Tsarnaev’s lawyers filed a motion requesting a continuance for more time to prepare their defense, noting the fact that they were given only half the median preparation time that federal courts have allowed over the past decade for defendants on trial for their lives. (The judge did grant a two-month delay while refusing the defense request to move the trial out of Boston.)

The lawyers cited “outpaced requirements” in building a proper defense for their client: (1) the international nature of the investigation—including language and geographic barriers, (2) the large amount of evidence that has to be scrutinized, and most tellingly, (3) the climate of intimidation and fear created by the FBI’s investigative efforts since the bombing. They write:

Domestic defense mitigation investigation has been conducted amid a growing atmosphere of anxiety and agitation generated by highly-publicized arrests, indictments, prosecutions, deportations (and, in one instance, the FBI killing) of members of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s peer groups.

Most news reports brush over that last part. As if shooting to death an unarmed man involved in this case—as an FBI agent did to Tamerlan’s friend Ibragim Todashev—is not relevant to the difficulties the defense team has had in getting witnesses to talk to them. But even less extreme events are enough to silence potential witnesses, such as the mysterious closing of their bank accounts.

Prosecutors resisted this and an earlier attempt to have the trial delayed. The victims have a right to see justice done—swiftly, the thinking goes.

The victims and their families certainly deserve justice for this horrible atrocity. True justice should include a full accounting—something a hurried, one-sided investigation is not likely to produce. And of course Boston and the American public deserve, and need, the truth, whatever it may be.

Yet a close read of the motion document reveals FBI activities that seem more of an effort to conceal than to illuminate.

The FBI’s March to the Sea

Tsarnaev’s defense team makes reference to the most troubling—and most anxiety-producing—action by the FBI since the bombing: the shooting to death of Tamerlan’s friend, Todashev. (See our earlier story on the head-scratching circumstances surrounding that shooting, including the questionable history of the agent who pulled the trigger.)

Some of the FBI’s aggressive tactics described in the defense document look like outright intimidation. For instance, individuals “with lawful immigration status have been detained for hours and required to surrender their electronic devices upon re-entry to the United States.”

And take a look at this excerpt:

“The investigation has been further hampered by aggressive FBI follow-up tracking and questioning of potential witnesses, as well as by the unrelenting attention of the news media.”

It is one thing to be aggressively tracking and questioning individuals suspected of committing crimes, but to be doing this to presumably innocent witnesses reeks of intimidation. Witness intimidation is a tactic ordinarily associated with mafia or drug cartel defendants.

Notably, this “tracking” must have been brought to the attention of defense lawyers by witnesses themselves, indicating overt surveillance: “We’re watching you.”

Then, farther down in the document:

“These difficult circumstances are compounded by a continuing pattern of aggressive FBI re-interviewing of potential witnesses — on occasion within hours of an attempted contact by defense investigator [emphasis added].”

Within hours of an attempted contact by defense investigator? Is the defense team being watched too? (We reached out to Tsarnaev’s defense team hoping they could expand on that, but have not yet had a response.)

It wouldn’t be the first time the FBI was caught spying on defense lawyers in a high-profile terrorism case. Lawyers for accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed allege that the FBI has been surveilling them.

Whether legal counsel are being watched directly or simply getting caught up in the surveillance of Tsarnaev’s acquaintances, the effect is the same: the feds know who is talking to whom, and when.

That’s a Nice Immigration Status You Got There…

Witnesses who are not U.S. citizens—which describes the majority of Tsarnaev’s friends, family, and many in the local Muslim community—are particularly vulnerable to law enforcement manipulation. The threat of deportation is a clear and present danger to these individuals, “regardless of whether criminal charges are ever brought or proven against them,” Tsarnaev’s lawyers wrote.

Indeed, a handful of people loosely connected to the Tsarnaevs have already been deported, or had deportation proceedings initiated against them, despite having nothing to do with the Boston Marathon bombing. These include:

– Konstantin Morozov: friend of Tamerlan, arrested and jailed pending deportation reportedly after refusing to wear a wire for the FBI as the Bureau sought information on one of Tamerlan’s Chechen friends.

– Tatiana Gruzdeva: girlfriend of Ibragim Todashev, deported after speaking with Boston Magazine about the circumstances surrounding her boyfriend’s death.

– Ashurmamad Miraliev: friend of Ibragim Todashev, was reportedly denied a request for an attorney while interrogated by FBI for over six hours, and transferred to an immigration detention center where deportation proceedings were initiated.

– Khusen Taramov: friend of Ibragim Todashev, denied reentry to the United States after visiting Chechnya, despite having a Green Card.

Why hasn’t Boston’s “liberal” media made more noise about this? Arguably, the most newsworthy portion of Tsarnaev’s motion for continuance—potential witness intimidation—has been glossed over or ignored in most mainstream media accounts.

The Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations reached out to the media and the public to expose the intimidation and harassment of Todashev’s friends and associates—and got a fair amount press coverage by their local media. The same cannot be said for the Boston area press.

Have they, albeit indirectly, been intimidated, too? The Boston media has historically had a close relationship with law enforcement, and when it ever so slightly challenged the police, found its usual (and needed) sources shut down.

However, if ever there was a moment for the local press to do the right thing, this is surely it.

Saturday Matinee: Panther

Posted on August 30, 2014 by Reid Mukai

“Panther” (1995) is an excellent yet underrated historical drama directed by Mario Van Peebles and written by his father Melvin Van Peebles. The film traces the founding of the organization and backlash from the FBI’s COINTELPRO program. Unlike many historical dramas, Panther is engaging, entertaining, and stays close to historical facts. It also features excellent performances from a great cast including Kadeem Hardison, Bokeem Woodbine, Marcus Chong, Angela Bassett, Chris Rock, Joe Don Baker and M. Emmet Walsh.

James Tracy Answers Questions About Conspiracy Theories

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Jaime Ortega

Source: The Daily Journalist

James Tracy teaches courses at Florida Atlantic University examining the relationship between commercial and alternative news media and socio-political issues and events.

1. There is a certain danger in the way conspiracy theories have eroded social media, especially on such platforms as YouTube. Do people distrust mainstream television, radio, and print media?

First of all, we have to seriously think about what we mean by “conspiracy theories” before delving into such a discussion. What are the term’s origins? How and why is it used? Without nailing these things down at the outset any discussion of such communicative and sociopolitical dynamics tends toward the nonsensical and comes to eventually become absorbed in the discourse it is seeking the examine or critique.

A cursory look at reportage and commentary in major US news media from the late 1800s through the 1950s indicates that the term “conspiracy theory” is used sporadically in stories on criminal and court proceedings. In the late 1960s, however, there is a major spike in usage of the term, specifically in items discussing criticism of the Warren Commission Report—President Lyndon Johnson’s commission mandated to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. On January 4, 1967 the Central Intelligence Agency issued a memorandum that became known as Document 1035-960. The communique was directed at the Agency’s foreign bureaus recommending the deployment of the term by “media assets” to counter critics of the Warren Commission. The main strategy involved suggestion that such individuals and their inquiries were flawed by slipshod methods and ulterior motives. The then-foremost Warren Commission critic and JFK assassination researcher Mark Lane was even referenced in the document.

This document was indicative of an apparent strategy via press and public relations maneuvers to undermine New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s then-fledgling investigation of the assassination. 1035-960 explained quite rightly that the CIA had a substantial investment in the credibility of the Warren Report. Press reportage of Garrison’s ongoing probe revealed a heavy bias from the very outlets that had been long-compromised by Agency-friendly owners, editors, and reporters. These included NBC and CBS networks, in addition to Time and Newsweek magazines, where the disparaging coverage of Garrison and his inquiry reached truly farcical proportions.

Though he was repeatedly and vociferously decried as a “conspiracy theorist,” a corrupt and opportunistic politician, and even mentally deranged by such outlets, Garrison has been vindicated by the historical record. For example, we now know, through copious records released as a result of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, that the CIA was intimately involved in the assassination and cover-up, as were other US government agencies. Yet the same news media that denounced Garrison almost fifty years ago still tout the legitimacy of the Warren Commission Report.

Since the Garrison episode, but in an especially pronounced fashion over the past twenty years, the conspiracy theory label is routinely mobilized by major corporate media to denigrate honest and intelligent individuals who bring forth important questions on vital events and issues. Keep in mind that most major media still have often strong ties to the US intelligence and military communities. With this in mind, a rational citizenry has an obligation to scrutinize what is reported and analyzed in corporate media, and balance their observations and conclusions by considering reportage of foreign and independent alternative media. In this regard the Internet provides a wealth of opportunity. One needs only exercise the fundamental principles of logic to locate and assess quality information and research.

At the end of the day what we have in the “Conspiracy theory/ist” label is a psychological warfare weapon that has from the perspective of its creators been overwhelmingly effective. Here is a set of words that is used to threaten, discipline and punish the intellectual class—mainly journalists and academics—who might question or otherwise refuse to tow the party line. Using the term to designate pedestrian skeptics and researchers is redundant. After all, as Orwell said, “The proles don’t count.”

Thus, unless we forthrightly interrogate the phrase and its unfortunate history we will be prone to the same confusion and misdirection that its originators
intended.

2. We did a poll here at The Daily Journalist a few weeks back, and the results indicated that 60% of people believed there was US government involvement in the Boston Marathon bombings, in addition to the events of September 11. When people suspect their own government is involved on these attacks in US soil, what comes to mind?

It is cause for optimism because the US government was almost without question involved in the Boston Marathon bombing and the events of September 11, 2001. Major media were also complicit in wide-scale public acceptance of the official narrative put forth concerning each incident.

For example, with the Boston bombing the New York Times played a key role in persuading the nation’s professional class and intelligentsia that a terror drill using actors, complete with a multitude of gaffes and outright blunders, was genuine. In reality there were no severed limbs, no deaths, no injuries from shrapnel—only pyrotechnics and actors responding on cue. This is not only my view, but also that of multiple independent researchers and even former CIA officer Robert David Steele.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is well-known for entrapping and otherwise orchestrating such events to justify its own existence. With the Boston bombing there were numerous federal, state and local agencies involved in an exercise that had been taking place in the city annually over the past few years with a similar scenario. A plan for what would become the Boston Marathon bombing was authored by Director of Boston’s Emergency Medical Services Richard Serino in 2008. Serino was tapped by President Obama in 2009 to become Deputy Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and there are photos of him directing the aftermath of the April 15, 2013 “bombing.”

The public is being asked to believe that two Chechen immigrants expertly devised extremely sophisticated and deadly explosives with consumer fireworks, scrap metal and pressure cookers. No such refractory ordnance was found at the scene because no thorough forensic investigation ever took place. The entire affair was a photo shoot and an opportunity for federal authorities to gauge public response to a military-style lockdown in a major metropolitan region.

With such a transparently phony event being proffered as “real” one needs to ask what the other 40% in your poll are actually thinking. One can fool some of the people some of the time, and there’s still a significant portion of the population—including those who are highly educated, who can’t imagine it’s own government could be so corrupt. This is a testament to the continued effectiveness of our educational and media apparatuses, each of which emphasize an unhistorical worldview and unquestioning deference to authority figures.

3. Modern media seems to have commercialized and sold its soul to sponsors, and media giants that profit from investments. Is modern day news a fictional representation of reality? Are journalists allowed to do their job of investigating serious cases? Is there an agenda to not report on stories with higher impact?

If a news media outlet gets most of its revenue from advertising it is to a significant degree compromised. If its main revenue source is advertising and its owned by a transnational corporate conglomerate, “compromised” is not sufficiently powerful enough of a term to describe the given outlet’s probable journalistic vulnerabilities. It should be barred from tying the term “journalism” to any of its information-related activities.

When we use the term, “transnational corporate conglomerate,” which is often used to denote companies like News Corp and Viacom, we should include the US and British governments, each of which are in the practice of imperial expansion while either subsidizing or forthrightly funding news media. All such powerful entities understand the importance of concealing, disseminating, and using information to shape public opinion in ways that will be favorable to its corporate and policy interests. Walter Lippmann describes how this dynamic played out in World War One. Such powerful corporations and governments shouldn’t even be involved in journalism, unless of course they describe what they are doing in honest and appropriate terms, which is often, as your question suggests, entertainment and public relations masquerading as journalism.

The best journalism today is being produced by independent writers and news media. At present there is a renaissance taking place in this regard because of the internet. Corporate news media don’t want to invest the money in true journalism because for them it’s a net loss anyway they figure. If major outlets fund investigative journalistic ventures and there’s little impact on readership (and thus advertising/revenue) then there’s no return on investment. On the other hand, if such investigative work is genuine and worthwhile, it’s often delving into areas that reveal how political or economic power operate, which can bring complaints or retaliation from influential entities. Real investigative journalism from mainstream outlets has been subdued for decades because of this very dynamic.

4. It’s hard not to distrust the government in some cases. Take for example, the assassination of John F. Kennedy or CIA involvement in the Watergate scandal, to name a few. Has the government have to change its ways for people not to believe in conspiracies?

The US government doesn’t have to care a great deal about what the public thinks so long as it has major news media that’s committed to producing a steady stream of non-journalism and infotainment to distract the people from considering the things that really impact on their lives. Events such as 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing aren’t questioned by such media because those media are more or less part of the operations. As was the case almost 50 years ago with figures such as Mark Lane and Jim Garrison, those asking serious questions and conducting potentially meaningful research are dismissed within the parameters of permissible dissent as “conspiracy theorists,” at least long enough for a majority of the public to stop caring and forget.

What is somewhat new is how the government and psychiatry are now involved in psychologizing the practice or tendency of asking questions about or interrogating disputed events. In other words, certain interests want to deem “conspiracy theorizing” as mental illness, or otherwise associate it with aberrant and perhaps violent behavior. In other words, ponder ideas that certain forces deem beyond question and one runs the risk of being institutionalized, losing their job, and so on.

We saw this take place in the case of upstate New York school teacher Adam Heller, who, under the direction of the FBI, was involuntarily institutionalized and later fired from his tenured teaching position simply because of private exchanges where he discussed his views on the Sandy Hook massacre and probable government involvement in weather modification. We have to keep in mind that the punitive use of psychiatry to punish thought crimes was common practice in the darkest days of the Soviet Union. Now it’s emerging here. In this way, government is changing its ways in order to force its own versions of reality on the public.

5. Looking at this from a logical perspective, overall, is it harder to trust the government over the conspiracy theorist?

The US government is responsible for devising and publicizing some of the most outrageous conspiracy theories in modern history while it accuses independent journalists and authors of being conspiracy theorists. The major political assassinations of the 1960s (JFK, RFK, MLK) were all government operations, and “patsies” were produced with untenable scenarios accompanying the overall events. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, and the Boston Marathon bombing were all “false flag” terror events that were intentionally misrepresented to the American public. One need look no further than the plans for Operation Northwoods, or the attack on the USS Liberty, to develop a distinct understanding of how certain forces within government regard the public and those who fight their wars.

6. Conspiracy theories through the use of social media could cause irreparable effects on the future of mainstream news media because they report on stories, where journalists might not have done a good job or gone deep enough reporting. When there is distrust, what follows next for the future and credibility of most media outlets, particularly if people believe media such as YouTube?

Again, we need to be precise. YouTube is a medium with a multitude of “channels,” information, interpretations, and perspectives. Some are potentially reliable and others may be dubious. This is, again, where education and, more specifically, the ability to employ logic and reasoning come to the fore. How can we distinguish between good information and analysis versus that which is unhelpful or even purposefully misleading.

Many researchers who use YouTube or blogs are sincere in what they are seeking to do, which is relate ideas and information to broader public.

They may not be professionally-trained journalists, yet they are also subject to often profuse commentary and criticism from peers in a given research community examining a particular issue or event. This process of scrutiny frequently yields fruitful exchanges where new information and insights are collectively revealed. The participants may not have gone to graduate school to study politics or the media, and yet many of these exchanges are much more intense than that which takes place between a journalist and her editor as they vet a potential story. There’s something going on there. Of course, this assumes that those involved are serious in their participation, which is usually the case. This depends on the quality and sincerity of participants. The comments sections of many mainstream online news outlets can be bereft of serious exchanges.

In my view, certain YouTube channels or blogs are successful and worth checking out as forms of citizen journalism because they have something of substance along the lines described above to offer.

Mainstream commercial journalism has been challenged by counter forces since at least the early 1990s. An initial challenge came from Hollywood in Oliver Stone’s JFK film. That project incensed many establishment journalists and their institutions because it contested their fundamental investment and propagation of the flawed “lone gunman/magic bullet” explanation of the event ensconced in the Warren Report.

If truth be told, Stone’s screenplay is among the most accurate renderings of the Garrison investigation and the events surrounding the murder itself. This is because it was based on key works by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, journalist Jim Marrs, and Garrison himself. JFK was in retrospect the initial last rights of mainstream journalism proper, which sold its soul to protect John Kennedy’s executioners. The advent of the internet and Gary Webb’s brilliant exposé of the role played by the CIA in the crack cocaine epidemic vis-à-vis Webb’s excoriation by his own journalistic peers confirmed corporate journalism’s absolute demise.

7. Do conspiracy theorists have a solid opinion of the problems they observe when interpreting raw data, or is such data made to create propaganda to feed their belief systems?

There is sometimes an undue amount of paranoia among some conspiracy researchers that can contribute to flawed observations and analysis. Again, this is where one must use careful discretion to interpret between worthwhile information and evaluation versus misguided and poorly-conceived study.

Because conspiracy research communities have no institutional bearings or specific research theories and traditions, as do academic schools of thought that take the shape of “disciplines” or “fields” with often considerable organizational and financial resources, there is a tendency toward infighting and fractiousness. This is much more so the case than in academe where such disagreements, in the rare event they are exhibited, are often subsumed in other actions that enforce ideological conformity. These include the refusal by scholarly organizations and their publications to entertain countervailing analyses and, ultimately, the denial of employment, promotion, tenure, and meaningful professional relationships. Compulsory toleration of peers is entirely absent given the voluntary nature of conspiracy research collectives. At the same time, a critical sense that comes with researching government conspiracies, combined with known attempts by government to “cognitively infiltrate” such research communities, can sometimes lead to unwarranted suspicion of colleagues or public figures and their motives.

8. Since the rise of conspiracies is higher than ever before, and un-education accompanies this, how do you think it will affect the government’s relationship with its citizens, particularly if government credibility vanished? Could there be a future uprising of people who will oppose the government?

As my above responses suggest, I am unconvinced that interest or acceptance of “conspiracy theories” has any correlation with a lack of intelligence or education. In fact, some recent research suggests that entertaining conspiratorial explanations of reality—meaning that one does not take what their political leaders offer as explanations of policies or events—is likely indicative of a higher intelligence and simply good citizenship.

I’m not sure if there is any more credibility left for the government to lose, at least among those inclined to rebel in the first place. I think it’s important for us to keep in mind that the government is regarded by some as paternal or maternal protectors. President Franklin Roosevelt was emblematic of the welfare state—a savior of the common man—even though he further established the banking sector’s control over the country and laid the groundwork for the present technocracy. Since the Roosevelt administration and the aggressive expansion of the government in the post-World War Two era we have largely had a government by cult of personality. For example, Barack Obama is the equivalent of a rock star, nevermind his family’s ties to the intelligence community and otherwise opaque background. Like other recent presidents, his personality and charisma supersede public realization of the actual policies and trade deals he is enacting on the behalf of his sponsors—mostly powerful, anti-democratic interests.

As this response is written, the United States is arguably being undermined by the Obama administration’s politicization and exploitation of the nation’s immigration policies. The notion that such maneuvers will ultimately change the overall constitution of the American polity is subsumed by Obama’s simple rejoinder, “Let’s give these people a break.” Enough of the population is trusting enough of Obama to dismiss his critics. Many of those who know better are too afraid of either being called “racists” or “conspiracy theorists.” And so it goes.

The Untold Story Behind Why I Am a Narco News Journalist

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Bill Conroy

Source: Narco News

“Authenticity Is Not the Easiest Path … But It’s The Only Path That Leads Forward” — Al Giordano

Narco News on July 9 will celebrate its fourteenth anniversary at a bash in the Big Apple. For me, it also will be a tenth anniversary fiesta. I started reporting and writing for Narco News in 2004.

Until now, though, I have never been able to tell fully the story of why I hooked up with Al Giordano and Narco News in the first place, because I was employed by a company that I felt would not appreciate the story being told in real time, as it really happened.

Recently, I stepped down from my position as editor-in-chief for one of the business newspapers owned by that company, American City Business Journals, for reasons I outlined in a past story I penned for Narco News, which can be found here.

Given I no longer work for ACBJ, and am no longer dependent on a paycheck from them to help feed young children — since my four kids now ten years later are adults — I am finally at liberty to tell the story without fear of job-ending retaliation from an employer.

And it’s an important story, I feel, one that needs to be in the public record for journalists who might decide to pursue an authentic path and need to understand the consequences — and the far more substantial benefits.

It all started with a story about an FBI agent who went undercover, posing as a “businessman” in a successful effort to infiltrate Chinese crime syndicates. Those criminal organizations, as it turns out, can be a path into the highest reaches of government power. In this case, they gave the FBI spy access to China’s intelligence apparatus, allowing him to gather intel and cultivate human assets for U.S. intelligence agencies.

It was an extremely dangerous, deep-cover assignment for the FBI agent, named Lok Lau, who was required to exist inside the criminal underworld for years.

Once Lau had completed his mission, however, the US government ignored his resulting Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] and difficulty in re-entering normal society. Consequently, the FBI eventually fired Lau for poor performance, prompting him to file a lawsuit in federal court in California alleging wrongful termination and discrimination.

From a declaration filed by Lau in his civil rights case:

The assignment was extraordinarily dangerous and stressful. I was cut off from my family and friends, and the [FBI] “handlers” did not remain constant. I later learned I was not treated as other undercover agents were treated and should have been provided support, emotional, financial and human to ease my stress and anxiety. I was literally on guard 24 hours a day, and I knew my death could come at anytime. The outside world, including my family, knew nothing of what I did or how. In fact, even though I was an FBI Agent, my badge was kept at the field office and I could not even see it or my FBI credentials.

From an amicus curiae brief filed in Lau’s case:

… From a reading of the record, it is not difficult to discern that Lau was involved in espionage activities, kidnappings, trading in human slavery, illegal immigration, murder, torture, kidnapping, extortion, hostage taking and any number of other criminal activities that involved crimes against humanity, then and now, in his undercover work. Lau “penetrated” the Chinese Triads, the Tong and other Chinese Organized Crime Organizations that trade in all of these things as a way of life. There is no way that Lau could have performed his undercover so well that he received awards and other forms of recognition were that not so.

As part of that lawsuit, Lau put into the public record in 2003 certain pleadings that the US government — then controlled by President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft — deemed not fit for public consumption, because they revealed too much detail about Lau’s spying mission on China, which remains to this day a highly classified operation.

Unfortunately for me, I had already obtained and made public the details of Lau’s court pleadings in a newspaper article for the San Antonio Business Journal. The US government attorneys handling Lau’s lawsuit found out about my story, and what I knew, because I did the proper journalistic thing and called them for comment.

And so, on the Friday that my Texas-based newspaper was published (after going to press two days earlier, on Wednesday), the Assistant US Attorney defending the Department of Justice against Lau’s charges of discrimination and wrongful termination filed pleadings with a federal court in California asking the judge in the case to retroactively classify portions of Lau’s pleadings. The government attorney in her motion also asked the judge to order that all copies of those pleadings in existence be returned to the FBI — going so far as to demand that “an FBI computer specialist be permitted to remove the specific files containing classified information from [any] unauthorized computer.”

Needless to say, ACBJ (the parent company of my San Antonio newspaper) was not happy about that, since if the judge issued the requested order, then the government could have seized not only my computer, but also any computer in ACBJ’s 40-newspaper chain that they thought might be housing the documents — potentially shutting down the company for a time. That wouldn’t be good for business, nor is crossing the Department of Justice and FBI, in general, good for career security in corporate America, even in the journalism world.

So I was about to get thrown under the bus by my employer, and likely the Bush administration, as I saw it, and the lawyering around the matter behind the scenes led me to believe that would be the result as well.

So I turned to two people I respected to help me out: Gary Webb, author of the Dark Alliance newspaper series that exposed US-sponsored drug-trafficking; and Al Giordano, whose Narco News online investigative publication, then only a bit more than three years old, had exposed the executive of a major bank as a drug trafficker — and emerged victorious in the resulting legal challenge waged by his bank to suppress that information.

I figured these two authentic journalists — whom I had only to that point corresponded with via email (and an occasional phone call in Webb’s case) — would have a trick or two up their sleeves when confronted with a challenge from corrupt power.

And they did.

Each asked me to email to them the court pleadings the US government attorneys and FBI were seeking to classify and remove from my computer. At that point, the documents were still technically in the public record because the judge had not yet ruled on the DOJ attorney’s motion to classify and purge Lok Lau’s pleadings.

I complied with Webb and Giordano’s requests, and within hours of me sending them the court documents via email, the pleadings were spread around the world via the Internet.

As a result, the judge in the case, in an Oct. 15, 2003, ruling, determined that he did not have the power to seize all copies of Lok Lau’s pleadings existing outside of the “court’s possession” (which included the copies on my computers, and now thousands of computers worldwide). In other words, the judge knew, to paraphrase an old nursery rhyme, that “Humpty Dumpty had a great fall”, via the Internet, and his court did not have the power to put “Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

So, in the end, authentic journalism won — well, sort of that is.

After the dust had settled, I received word through my boss that ACBJ’s corporate brass wanted me to cease and desist all investigative reporting at the San Antonio Business Journal.

Following is an excerpt from an email I sent to Webb and Giordano in early December 2003 — a few weeks after publishing what turned out to be the final investigative story in the Business Journal on the Lok Lau case:

My corporate office in Charlotte came calling. They’ve shut me down — from the highest level of the company.

I’m to do no more investigative reporting on the feds. I can only speculate on the real reason, but the one put forward is that the stories aren’t business reporting, in essence. (This is curious as I’ve been writing these stories — Customs, FBI, DEA, Homeland Security — for 4 years now and have won numerous “that ‘a boy” awards, including two from my own company.)

… I suspect the recent Lau FBI spy stuff, and the threat to take our computers, put the corporate blue bloods over the top.

… I expect I’ll be down for a bit, but will resurface somehow, somewhere. So keep in touch.

As it turned out, I did find a loophole. I still had the option of pursuing stories on a freelance basis, something allowed for in company policy. But my investigative-reporting days for the San Antonio Business Journal were done — if I wanted to keep my job and feed my four kids, still all in grade school or high school at that point.

In response to my email, Webb wrote the following:

Fuck. I’m sorry. Wish I could say this is unheard of, but you and I both know it’s not. It’s sad that investigative journalism is the only field whose practitioners are routinely punished for doing their jobs too well. You, obviously, were doing it exceptionally well to draw the attentions of the pinheads in chief.

… Believe me, I know this doesn’t help much when something like this happens but there is a certain honor in being ordered not to write about something. It’s like a dueling scar or a Purple Heart. You’ve been wounded in combat. Many reporters go through an entire career without getting near enough to the power structure to get a scratch. (Plus, you got away with punching the feds in the eye for four years.)

… So you can’t write about this topic any longer (at least not while you’re at your current esteemed organ). Any orders against freelancing future fed whistleblower stories?

… It’s not the end of the world. Who knows, this might set you off on a trail you never would have gone down before. Happened to me.

Giordano, in an email response to me at the time, wrote the following:

Welcome to the club. You can wear that shutdown like a badge of pride… Like Jim Morrison who, after singing censored lyrics was told “You’ll never do the Ed Sullivan show again,” replied: “Man, I just DID the Ed Sullivan show!”

Authenticity is not the easiest path, Bill… but it’s the only path that leads forward. If I can help you in any way, and I’m sure Gary [Webb] feels the same way, let me know. Ya done good.

And so, that’s how I came to Narco News. Giordano opened that door for me some 10 years ago, and I continued to live a double life since that time — serving as editor of a conservative, even stuffy, business weekly during the day; and by night pursuing investigative reporting on the drug war, pro bono, for Narco News.

That double life ended this past May, when I stepped down from my editor position at the Business Journal.

With this story, comes the proof, including the US government’s motion and judge’s order, which I’m putting online for the first time for everyone to see.

Enjoy the reading, and if you’re in the neighborhood next week, make sure to stop by Narco News’ fourteenth anniversary celebration at MV Studios in Long Island City, Queens, on Wednesday, July 9, starting at 7 pm. Directions and other details can be found at this link to the Facebook page for the event.

Gary Webb (1953-2004), who’s David vs. Goliath story will be told in the major motion picture Killing the Messenger, played by Jeremy Renner this October, sadly, isn’t alive to attend. But Giordano will be there, I’ll be there, and more than a few of the younger journalists who have come out of the School of Authentic Journalism’s eleven sessions since 2003 will also be there. We all hope to meet you there, too.

Proof of Authenticity

• The US government’s motion that called for seizing Lau’s pleadings, which was broad enough to include my computer

• The judge’s ruling in response to the government’s motion

• FBI agent Lok Lau’s uncensored pleadings

• My San Antonio Business Journal series on Lok Lau

Lawyers, civil rights group claim government turning up the heat in Lau spy case

Media’s computers are on FBI’s radar screen in Lau spy case

Judge orders previously public court records sealed in case of former FBI agent

Former federal agents’ spy story opens Pandora’s box for FBI

• An investigative story advancing the Lok Lau saga further, written for the Asian Times by Gary Webb

The spy who was left out in the cold

Processing Distortion with Peter B. Collins: Big Data Shows Only 5% of FBI Domestic Terrorism Cases Are Untainted

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Peter B. Collins

Source: Boiling Frogs

Peter B. Collins Presents Attorney Stephen Downs

As a retired lawyer, Steve Downs volunteered to represent a local Muslim who was entrapped in an FBI sting. From that, he learned of other similar cases, and he co-founded Project Salam. Their new report, Inventing Terrorists: The Lawfare of Preemptive Prosecution, analyzes about 400 domestic terrorism prosecutions since 2001 and finds that 72% of the cases involved preemptive investigations that included paid informants and provocateurs who often supplied the idea and the means for plots that were then exposed to fawning media outlets. Another 22% of the cases involved minor, non-terrorist crimes that were manipulated and amplified by the FBI. The numbers show a clear pattern of abuse, mostly of Muslim suspects.

*Stephen Downs spent most of his career as an attorney for New York State’s judicial oversight commission. You can read the report and browse the database here

Listen to the Preview Clip Here

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/wp-content/uploads/PD.clip.0039.Downs.mp3

Who got to CNN? Network pulls scheduled interview with Donald Sterling’s beat-up mistress

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Daniel Hopsicker

Source: Mad Cow Morning News

Donald Sterling has unsavory links with the owner of the New York City boutique hotel where his former mistress was beaten up Sunday night.

Four developments during the past few days in New York City offer dramatic evidence that questions recently raised here (and elsewhere) about the links to organized crime of real estate mogul, sexual sleazeball, casual racist, and soon-to-to-ex LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling are both serious and well-founded.

The first thing that occurred has already received lots of coverage. The woman who blew the whistle on Sterling’s casual racism, his former mistress V Stiviano, was badly beaten Sunday night by two white thugs in hoodies at a swank boutique hotel in New York City.

The second development involves the venue where the beatdown occurred, whose significance remains largely unknown. The Hotel Gansevoort, outside whose doors Stiviano was assaulted, belongs to one William Achenbaum.

Until just three weeks before being busted, Hotelier Achenbaum had “owned”— as a straw front man for the CIA—a Gulfstream II luxury jet (N987SA) that was caught carrying 4 tons of cocaine in the Yucatan as part of the same operation.

During the time the two men controlled the plane, it made numerous trips to the U.S. base in Guantanamo, the McClatchy Newspapers group reported, flying extraordinary renditions for the CIA.

Achenbaum’s partner in the hotel, Arik Kislin of Long Island, whose family is repeatedly linked to the Russian Mob in published reports, also owned the Long Beach CA air charter company, Air Rutter Intern’l, offered the Gulfstream II for charter.

Unsavory links to the global drug trade

Are these facts at all relevant to the current tawdry Donald Sterling saga? Absolutely. Because Donald Sterling and William Achenbaum both share an unsavory link to an expatriate Saudi named Ramy El Batrawi, a longtime lieutenant of notorious CIA fixer Adnan Khashoggi.

El Batrawi and Achenbaum both owned airplanes used in a drug trafficking enterprise in Florida between 2005-2008 that top DEA officials in Miami called an out of control “rogue operation” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Tampa.

For his part, El Batrawi has made “fronting” for the CIA, with planes and even airlines, into a career. During Iran Contra, he posed as the owner and president of an airline in Miami called Jetborne that secretly flew Oliver North’s TOW missiles to the mullahs in Iran.

Later court testimony, during bankruptcy proceedings, revealed that Jetborne had all along been a CIA proprietary airline.

“Closest thing to a real scandal we’re like to see hereabouts, nowadays”

In July 2003, the drug trafficking operation that DEA officials say was being protected by federal agents in the Tampa ICE Office received a second DC-9 (N12ONE), “sold” or “transferred” or just ‘passed along” to the operation by Ramy El Batrawi.

The operation, called Operation Mayan Jaguar, would soon blow up into the closest thing to a real scandal that anyone is likely to see in America for a long time.

It resulted in the forced sale of America’s 4th largest bank, Wachovia, after that bank was discovered to be laundering drug money from Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel used to purchase a fleet of 50 American aircraft to be used as drug planes.

Links between recent owners of the two drug planes, first discovered during an examination of FAA registration records, suggested a long-running and continuing criminal conspiracy to engage in massive drug trafficking.

Before the Gulfstream II business was “parked” in the name of New York real estate developer Achenbaum and his partner Kislin with ties to the Russian Mob, the plane had passed through the hands of a secretive Midwestern media baron named Stephen Adams, also a Republican fund-raiser extraordinaire (he was one of the ‘elite’ Bush’s Rangers), who was personally buying over $1 million of billboard ads for George W. Bush for his 2000 Presidential election bid.

Scammers, fraudsters, grifters & bunco artists of the national security state

Adams had another business partner, Michael Farkas, whose company SkyWay owned a DC-9 (N900SA) which became the first drug plane the Tampa operation lost to a big bust in the Yucatan.

SkyWay, the company whose DC-9 was busted in April 2006 in the Yucatan with 5.5 tons of cocaine, for example, had been founded the year before by a slippery Miami attorney named Michael Farkas.

According to SEC filings, Stephen Adams and Michael Farkas jointly control Holiday RV Superstores, Inc., used by mastermind Adnan Khashoggi in the complicated securities fraud which stole as much as $300 million from investors and taxpayers.

Companies Farkas controlled, like Holiday RV and Imperial Credit, were full partners in the stock manipulation scheme, along with Stephen Adams’ company, which passed on the Gulfstream II luxury jet to William Achenbaum.

In an example of extremely sloppy tradecraft, Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s partners in the massive fraud were men who’d provided planes to the drug trafficking operation, making “plausible deniability” something of a sticky wicket.

“The complex sale of the Gulfstream II jet and its end in the Mexican jungle highlight the increasingly complicated illicit drug trade,” read the McClatchy Newspapers’ account on September 29, 2007.

From ‘whack-a-mole’ to ‘hide the pea,’ its still a sordid business

The ‘players” were an ecumenical cast of international characters: Republican fund-raiser Adams, Saudi arms dealer Khashoggi, oligarchs in the Russian Mob, elements of American military and civilian intelligence who populated the executive ranks at SkyWay, and a large but dirty San Diego defense contractor called Titan Corp. that would soon get even larger when it was merged into L3, one of today’s behemoth defense contractors.

What this means, should any courageous federal prosecutor take note, is that the drug plane’s rapid series of ownership changes are nothing more than sham transactions, part of the CIA’s traditionally sophisticated game of “hide the pea” designed to conceal the aircraft’s true owners. From what we’ve begun to learn of Sterling, he appears to fit right in.

Just knowing unsavory characters who are also acquainted is hardly a crime. What involvement does Donald Sterling have in the sordid business?

The answer comes several months after the SEC charges Ramy El-Batrawi and his boss Adnan Khashoggi, in April 2006, with masterminding a massive financial fraud that resulted in investor and taxpayer losses of more than $100 million (The figure later doubled.)

The two Saudis were the lead actors in a massive financial fraud that earned the name Stockwalk, that complemented the drug trafficking operation by using stock from the same companies—led by Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s company, GenesisIntermedia—that had been supplying drug planes.

The ‘other’ Donald issues a bizarre press release

Donald Sterling enters the action just as the two Saudis are being hammered by bad publicity from their recent indictment, which gets so bad that both men consider going on the lam to avoid the police. Khashoggi eventually will, living quite comfortably, according to a source in Palm Beach Florida, in a guest cottage on the grounds of Donald Trump’s Mar a Largo Mansion.

At this crucial moment Sterling steps in to help stem the tide of bad publicity swamping Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s efforts to move on to another scam. Sterling, of course, has considerable public relations clout. He regularly buys full-page ads touting his charitable achievements in the Los Angeles Times.

In early August Donald Sterling names Ramy El Batrawi the winner of Sterling’s non-existent “Humanitarian of the Year Award” for El Batrawi’s (also non-existent) efforts to solve the problem of the homeless on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

No one was more surprised at being named “Humanitarian of the Year” than Ramy El-Batrawi himself, judging by his reaction. He freely admits to the LA Times that he’s made no contribution of money or time to helping the homeless.

But it’s what happened in the aftermath of the Sterling mistress beat-down that provides the biggest shock.

Did CNN cave before the bell?

Sterling’s former mistress V Stiviano was in New York to appear in an hour-long interview scheduled with Anderson Cooper on CNN Monday night.

After the beating, her camp leaks to the press that Sterling’s former mistress “started getting death threats almost immediately after Sterling’s racist rants — which she recorded — were made public,” said a well-placed source to Radar Online, which was consistently out in front of the pack on the story.

“Most of the threats were made on social media, “the source continued, “and this is one of the reasons why she has scaled back her activity. It has been very scary for V, and she also hired a bodyguard.”

But plucky Ms V is undeterred, her attorney tells reporters late Sunday night. “Stiviano will still be on Anderson Cooper’s show Monday night. No one will intimidate her.”

Maybe no one will intimidate Stiviano. But somebody sure did get to CNN.

A story nobody is talking about…yet

Just hours before the scheduled sit-down, and with no explanation, CNN removed Anderson Cooper from the broadcast. Producers notified Stiviano that Cooper was unavailable, and that Chris Cuomo would now be conducting the interview.

Stiviano immediately backed out. Thanks but no thanks, the former mistress’ replied. Nothing against Cuomo, her attorney explained. “But Anderson had previously met with V and Donald Sterling several weeks ago when he flew out to Los Angeles. Her camp has a relationship with Anderson.”

Makes sense. What doesn’t make sense: Who kept Anderson Cooper from doing an interview he’d already prepared for? And why?

To put it bluntly: Who got to CNN?

Police Commissioner comes down with virulent case of hoof in mouth

What happened next, the 4^th development, is possibly the most revealing. On Monday night NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton weighs in with gratuitous comments about his feelings towards Sterling’s former mistress.

Asked about V Stiviano’s lawyer’s claim that she was punched out by a pair of N-word-spewing punks outside a Meatpacking District hot spot on Sunday night, Bratton said he wished Donald Sterling’s infamous ex had never shown up in the Big Apple.

“I wasn’t even aware she was in town,” he stated. “We would have hoped that she would stay on the West Coast.”

A follow-up question to Bratton I’d have loved to hear someone ask: “Commissioner Bratton, who do you mean by ‘we’?”

Up for the lead in “Vile little Man”

Don’t all victimized citizens deserve to be treated with respect by the police? Apparently, if you’ve offended someone as “connected” as Sterling, the answer is probably no.

Given Sterling’s unsavory links with William Achenbaum, owner of the New York City boutique hotel where V Stiviano was beaten up, makes Bratton’s comments seem particularly menacing and gratuitous.

The FBI has long touted its success in critically weakening the forces of organized crime through its efforts to break up the Mafia in New York City.

But they clearly remain powerful enough to pull strings at CNN.

Donald Sterling’s Secret History

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Daniel Hopsicker

Source: MadCow Morning News

Since his highly injudicious comments about Asian girlfriends, Magic Johnson and race almost a month ago, the name Donald T. Sterling, casual racist, parasitic landlord, and thoroughly-disgraced owner of the NBA’s L. A. Clippers, has been much in the news.

The more salacious elements are on the record. He ran newspaper ads for “hostesses” interested in meeting “celebrities and sports stars.” He hired a former model to be an assistant GM for the Clippers.

Yet only now are more serious questions beginning to be asked about some of the more improbable aspects of what might be called “The Donald Sterling Story.”

He’s the son of immigrant Jews from Russia, born in the same West-Side Chicago neighborhood that a generation earlier spawned Jacob Rubinstein, AKA Jack Ruby. He grew up in Southern California’s Boyle Heights in the 1940s, attending grade school, middle school, and high school in the same town lived in and controlled by notorious mobster Mickey Cohen.

His brother-in-law, a Beverly Hills attorney, was once involved in a heated Mob vs. Mob-type war over who “owned” a famous prize fighter. with boxing promoter (and convicted felon) Don King.

He’s a former “personal injury” attorney—often called “ambulance chasers”—who somehow parleyed a lifetime of “slip and falls” into a real estate empire worth an estimated $1.9 billion dollars.

Getting rich in the dark?

But he’s a funny kind of real estate mogul. His sister demands tenants pay their rent in untraceable cash. Some of his properties are still today registered in the name of a woman— his grandmother—who’s been dead for more than 30 years.

And despite being filthy rich, Sterling is nobody’s idea of a financial genius. When Sports Illustrated profiled him in 2000, they labeled him “a dismal failure” as a team owner. The low-budget Clippers regularly finished near the bottom of the league.

Perhaps more importantly, the magazine even calls his real estate acumen into question, devoting considerable space to describing the eerie silence inside the Louis B. Mayer Building, a seven-story, gilded and marble-lined LA landmark from Hollywood’s golden age built by the founder of MGM that Sterling uses as his headquarters. Except for Sterling’s own offices, the building was empty, the magazine reported.

Los Angeles magazine quotes the conventional wisdom: “He built his fortune by buying apartment buildings when the market was low, back in the ’60s and early ’70s, and then not selling them.”

Buy low. Sell high. Make $1.9 billion. Really?

Donald Sterling’s Secret History

Still, his enormous wealth remains essentially unquestioned. But that may be changing, however. A headline in USA TODAY issued a not-so-veiled threat: Go Now or Face Scrutiny.

“Reporters across the country have been combing through Sterling’s life and business,” the paper reported. “What else might they find? And who else could be caught up in it?”

The overwhelming question on everyone lips which is not yet being asked out loud— especially given the Sterling’s highly-litigious history —is this: If Donald Sterling isn’t a financial genius, how did he get so rich?

Is it really all his money? Or is Sterling “fronting” for some larger, unnamed organization? In a nutshell:Does Donald Sterling have ties to organized crime?

It may already too late for Donald Sterling to just slink away. Because the answer is “yes.”

The evidence in a moment. First, a little background: As Kennedy assassination researchers became only too well aware, when the Warren Commission dismissed Jack Ruby as a Mob “hanger-on” and “wannabe,” it prevented his true role as the Chicago Outfit’s representative in Dallas from being widely understood for almost 50 years later.

High Weirdness: America’s chief export

Donald Sterling’s rise to riches is at least a little reminiscent of the story once told about another personal injury attorney that proved to be a fairy tale under close scrutiny.

Remember Allen Glick? His story was partly fictionalized by Martin Scorsese in the movie Casino. Kevin Pollock played Glick, a lightly-regarded front man, to Robert DeNiro’s Lefty Rosenthal.

Back in the 1970’s, Allen Glick went from being an ambulance-chasing attorney in Kansas City to the grateful recipient of $87 million dollars worth of Teamster Pension Fund largesse, which he used to purchase four of Las Vegas’ biggest and most profitable casinos in the blink of an eye.

His rise to prominence aroused extreme suspicion in federal law enforcement. When Glick, to no one’s real surprise, was found to have been fronting for the Mob, the casinos real owners, who, adding insult to injury, were skimming at least $15 million off the take, Glick turned state’s evidence, and put some aging slabs of marbleized Kansas City beef in federal prison.

Today Allen Glick lives quietly in La Jolla, California, home of the legendary La Costa Resort, where Mobsters once rubbed elbows (and perhaps more?) with the FBI’s J Edgar Hoover. More recently La Jolla served as the headquarters of Argyll Equities and Argyll Biotechnology, two recent examples of the more buttoned-up Mob pump-and-dump-type enterprises which have in large measure supplanted the Mob’s old “run-and-shoot’ strategy.

And this is where the Donald Sterling story begins to partake of some of the High Weirdness that America has been known for since the days when Richard Nixon walked the Earth. Because, as it happens, Donald Sterling and Allen Glick have long been such good friends.

You can call me Al…

In fact, it was while in Glick’s company, at a birthday party in Las Vegas for their mutual friend Al Davis, the now-deceased owner of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders, that Sterling met Alexandra Castro, who became Sterling’s mistress before the advent of the recent one, who gleefully led him to ruin.

The N.F.L. was concerned about the decades-long business relationship between Davis, the Raiders’ managing general partner, and Glick, who newspapers coyly identified as “the former Las Vegas casino owner whom the Justice Department has identified as a ‘a straw party’’ for organized crime interests in Chicago.”

Davis and Glick were partners in an Oakland shopping center that they mortgaged through a loan from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ Central States pension fund.

Davis’ Mob ties, of course, had been the subject of conjecture for decades. But they were only investigated after he filed suit against the NFL to move his team from Oakland to Los Angeles, but the Federal judge in the anti-trust case ordered that there be no mention of Davis’ organized crime connections during the trial.

”The jury should not be asked to speculate on this highly prejudicial matter,” said United States District Court Judge Harry Pregerson.

Unusually, the Judge blamed the NFL for this state of affairs, implying the current situation was to the league’s benefit. “The evidence is clear that there has been a cabal among some past and present officials of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, some of its Strike Force offices, and the NFL, which, through its long-term sweetheart relationship with a variety of law-enforcement agencies, has been a direct beneficiary of this situation,” said the Judge. “This raises serious questions about possible conflicts of interest as well as activities that border on sheer political corruption.”

This all happened back in 1983. Judges don’t talk like that anymore.

2-line headline with not a single grain of truth

It was as if Madonna were being given a Life-Time Achievement Award from Focus on the Family.

The press release began: “Donald T. Sterling and friends honored Ramy El-Batrawi as the humanitarian of the year for his support of the homeless people of Los Angeles.”

A casual perusal of the headline turns up nothing that bears the faintest resemblance to the truth:

“Donald T. Sterling Homeless and Medical Center Honors Ramy El-Batrawi With Humanitarian of the Year Award for His Support of the Homeless People of Los Angeles.”

There was no “Donald T. Sterling Homeless and Medical Center,” back then, just for starters. Nor is there one today. No institution. No employees. No Board of Directors to mull over who to choose for next year’s award.

The “Donald T. Sterling Homeless and Medical Center” is just a lie someone invented, and then delivered—not verbally, where it could later be denied—but in a press release, a form explicitly designed for maximum visibility.

Sterling must have been acting with the sure knowledge that no one would ever call him on it; and with a rock-solid confident expectation that he was operating with total impunity.

Donald Sterling, Adnan Khashoggi, and Ramy El Batrawi

Ramy El Batrawi is a Saudi national who has been Saudi arms merchant and CIA fixer Adnan Khashoggi’s chief lieutenant in America from more than 30 years. More than once in the past decade, the two men have gone “on the lam” and become fugitives from justice at the same time to avoid arrest.

Back in the days of Iran Contra, El-Batrawi fronted for Khashoggi and posed as the owner and president of an airline in Miami, Jetborne, that flew Oliver North’s TOW missiles to the mullahs in Iran. Court testimony revealed that Jetborne was a CIA proprietary airline, helping to explain how Khashoggi and El Batrawi manage to repeatedly commit financial crimes with impunity.

Khashoggi and El Batrawi also have well-documented links—El Batrawi, for example, “owned” SkyWay’s second DC-9—to the drug trafficking ring operating in St. Petersburg Florida that DEA officials say was being protected by federal agents in the Tampa ICE Office.

Just as the drug trafficking operation out of St Petersburg got underway, in July 2003, ownership of the operation’s second DC-9 (N12ONE) was transferred to El Batrawi.

The airliner came via Finova Corp., which, as was discovered while researching “Barry & ‘the boys,’” is a CIA finance company that was the true owner of Southern Air Transport, Richard Secord’s re-supply cargo airline supplying the Contras with weapons… and the U.S. with cocaine, a fact revealed only much later, when no one was looking, during Southern Air Transport’s bankruptcy proceedings.

El Batrawi and Khashoggi were the lead actors in massive financial fraud which accompanied the drug trafficking. They engineered and ran what came to be called the Stockwalk scandal, which cost investors and U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. It led to what was, at the time, the largest brokerage failure in American history, a record that has been eclipsed many times since.

“Just three months after the company’s Initial Public Offering (IPO), the nearly $17 million raised in the offering was gone,” read one wire service story.

“The creative dealings of defendant El-Batrawi partly explains how this money disappeared so quickly,” reported the AP.

He’s no one’s idea of a prototypical Mobster. He doesn’t sound like he comes from Brooklyn. Nor does he have a colorful nickname. But, like Mobsters of old, Ramy El Batrawi operates with his boss Adnan Khashoggi’s carefully-purchased impunity. In that, he probably something of a poster boy for transnational organized crime in the 21st Century.

So, why was Donald Sterling honoring him as “Humanitarian of the Year?”

The answer was surprisingly simple. El-Batrawi and Khashoggi had just been charged by the SEC with massive financial fraud, and accused of basically stealing more than $100 million. (The figure would later double.)

And Donald Sterling was using his considerable public relations clout—he regularly bought full-page and double-truck spreads in the Los Angeles Times—to stem the tide of bad publicity swamping Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s efforts to move on to the next scam.

Asking if Sterling was doing it as a favor for an unnamed organization to which both he and the two Saudi men belonged is just speculation.

But what isn’t speculation is that Sterling clearly thought no one would notice. And until his recent difficulties thrust him into the harsh glare of a media spotlight, no one did.

The “Humanitarian of the Year Award” headline was a complete misnomer. It implied that the non-existent “Homeless and Medical Center” has given out “Humanitarian of the Year Awards” previously. They had not.

The Legendary Raw Deal

After Sterling announced his “homeless initiative” in a press release in full-page newspaper ads in the L.A. Times, it received widespread and skeptical coverage in the media in Los Angeles.

At the City Planning Department, no one had filed plans for the property. The Building and Safety Department said there were no demolition requests or building permits requested in conjunction with the project.

“Aside from these ads, no one has seen anything,” said Estela Lopez, the head of the Central City East Assn., a business advocacy group representing an area of downtown that includes skid row. “What’s the plan? Where’s the proposal?”

The real estate agent for the project said the Sterling family trust was in escrow on the property, purchasing it for a “significant discount” from the $12-million asking price. He would not elaborate.

Sterling’s strategy for real estate investment was to buy properties, hold on to them until the market moves into a hot cycle, then refinance and pour the equity into new acquisitions. Some downtown watchers wondered whether he wasn’t doing the same with the skid row property, waiting out a surge in property prices as downtown gentrifies.

Donald Sterling was exploiting homeless people—who do exist—to aggrandize himself and a select few of his cronies. The homeless got nothing. Not even a reach-around. It was the legendary raw deal.

Thoughts of the Humanitarian of the Year

Apparently no one was more surprised than Ramy El-Batrawi himself to have been chosen Humanitarian of the Year.

The Times dutifully sent out a reporter to ask some questions of the newly-minted Humanitarian of the Year. How had he demonstrated support for the homeless?

El Batrawi freely admitted he’d made no contribution of money or time to helping the homeless.

Another celebrity who seemed more than a little vague about the deal was singer Natalie Cole . She appeared with Ramy El Batrawi in one of Sterling’s full-page ads, where she was identified as a “leader” providing support for the homeless, and as a “special guest” at the dinner.

The event’s producer, Tami Bennett, said Cole was a big supporter of Sterling’s project, in part because she herself was once homeless. The next day, Cole’s publicist, sounding miffed, contacted the Times to say the singer was never homeless, was only “a recent acquaintance” of Sterling’s, and had merely told him she would attend his event.

The next day, the publicist phoned the Times reporter again, saying the singer was on “voice rest” and would not be attending the event at all.

A $270 million dollar blemish

he Times also coolly noted the current blemish on El-Batrawi’s record. “El-Batrawi was sued earlier this year by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which alleged that he and a partner, Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, orchestrated a $130-million scheme to manipulate the stock of a Van Nuys-based company,” reported the story.

“The manipulation, the SEC alleges, resulted in the largest bailout in the history of the Securities Investor Protection Corp.”

“In an interview with the Times, El-Batrawi said the federal charges were untrue and have nothing to do with his interest in helping Sterling launch his homeless center. The businessman said he has not donated money to the cause but has introduced Sterling to other potential donors.”

“I’m devoting a lot of my time, my efforts, in being available,” El Batrawi said. “I’m making introductions … trying to figure out the things he needs.”

It all sounded more than a little vague. What wasn’t vague, not at all, was the massive financial wreckage caused by the swindling Saudi financial fraudsters Khashoggi and El Batrawi, as a news account announcing the huge settlement one of the companies involved signed with the SEC in lieu of going to trial made clear.

“Deutsche Bank, the German financial services giant, will pay as much as $270 million to settle charges stemming in part from the fraud-induced failure of a Twin Cities brokerage subsidiary in 2001.”

“The complicated case involves a trade-clearing subsidiary of Minneapolis-based Stockwalk Group, and several other brokerages that became ensnarled in one of the securities industry’s biggest swindles in history, by a group that included fugitive Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.”

Paying $270 million to settle charges is a rough indication of how much real pain and human suffering the scam caused real people.

Whatever Ramy El Batrawi found to say in his acceptance speech at the semi-star-studded dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in West Hollywood is now lost to history, which is some consolation.

But there’s no consolation at all in the discovery of a tweet Ramy El Batrawi sent just two weeks ago to homegrown American financial pirate Carl Icahn,an icon of 1980’s greed as well as one of the original “barbarians at the gate.”

Tweeted El Batrawi @Carl_C_Icahn “hi Carl how are you its been a long time.”

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: FBI

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2-line headline with not a single grain of truth

Donald Sterling, Adnan Khashoggi, and Ramy El Batrawi

The Legendary Raw Deal

Thoughts of the Humanitarian of the Year

A $270 million dollar blemish