That same old American institution called the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) who supports regime change and wars across the world has a board member who wrote an opinion piece for The Hill, a liberal online news organization on the relevance of the rules-based order and how much the world needs it. Harley Lippman, a board member for USAID wrote about how the rules-based order (New World Order) will continue despite the challenges of a multipolar world and the peace dividends it has brought to the table thus far. Lippman’s claims about where the rules-based order stands in this new world of geopolitics is propaganda at its best, so you might already know where this article is going since the liberal media is absolutely pro-establishment and pro-war.
Lippman wrote an opinion piece called ‘The rules-based order will endure, despite ‘shifting sands’ based on Russia and China’s achievements that includes establishing a diplomatic solution between Iran and Saudi Arabia and bringing back Syria into the fold with the rest of the Middle East which is a big deal, but to Lippman, it “rings hollow”, its insincere:
Russia and China recently have attempted to act as chief mediators on the international stage. Russia reportedly facilitated meetings between Saudi Arabia and Syria to restore ties and reopen their respective consular services, and China played peacemaker between Saudi Arabia and Iran. More recently, Saudi Arabia’s Cabinet approved a decision to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a dialogue partner. The SCO was created to counter U.S. economic hegemony and includes longtime adversaries and partners of our country. These recent developments have been described by some as evidence of the decline of the U.S.-led rules-based order.
Despite the clamoring of pundits to bemoan America’s decline, Moscow and Beijing’s attempts at diplomatic relevance ring hollow as the U.S. shores up the post-World War II international order by reinvigorating existing strategic alliances that underpin various security architectures
Lippman says that the US-led rules-based order is in decline but at the same time, it is working on replenishing its old alliances as a counterweight to Russia and China even though they were able to forge a peaceful solution among nations who were at odds against each other at one time or another. However, Russia and China are trying to establish real peaceful solutions among nations and that should be welcomed by the international community. Lippman says that “the U.S. values its alliance with Japan and South Korea in the Asia-Pacific to serve as a counterweight to an increasingly belligerent China.” A belligerent China? How many military bases does the US have around the world? In fact, how many of these bases surround China? China’s peace initiatives should be welcomed at all costs. Bringing peace is a good thing while the US and its Western allies (and Israel) has brought endless wars and chaos on almost every continent on the planet, in fact the US war machine has killed more than 20 million people since World War II. In other words, when Lippman says that the US “values” its alliance with Japan and South Korea, he is talking about the continuation of selling them military hardware and keeping the same US bases in place to counter China’s growing influence in the region so that the US war machine can keep antagonizing China in the South Pacific sea at all costs even if it means starting a war.
Lippman also takes aim at Russia, “Correspondingly, America’s role in NATO is pivotal to the West’s efforts to face off an aggressive Russia that threatens the security of Europe and the Balkans.” Seriously? Wasn’t Ukraine’s continuous bombardment of the Eastern Donbass region for more than 8 years killing at least 8,000 Ukrainian people who spoke Russian an aggressive action that was and still is supported by the US-NATO alliance?
The US has used its alliances to counter Russia and China as part of the old rules-based order strategy of divide and conquer in Asia and Eastern Europe. In other words, he wants Washington to keep the same policies of funding and arming one-side against another to advance the US war machine and continue the rules-based order to establish their Great Reset agenda.
Concerning the Middle East, Russia and China also have a wide range of interests with Iran, therefore that arrangement angers the US political establishment and their bosses who are based in Israel, and that’s the other problem for Lippman:
In contrast to America’s values-based approach to allies and partners, engagement with Russia and China offers only a transactional and interest-based relationship that rests on economic ties both countries share equally with such aggressors as Iran and Iran’s proxies
Russia and China’s strategic partnership with Iran, Syria and now Saudi Arabia bypasses US interests in the region so for most of the people in the Middle East, it’s a new development that is welcomed in a region that has only experienced regime change and endless wars that the US and its closest ally, Israel sponsored and at times participated in since the end of World War II:
Riyadh’s decision to restore diplomatic relations with Tehran via China is an attempt to reduce regional tensions with an aggressive neighbor committed to militant Islam and regional hegemony. In the near term, Tehran will likely seek to avoid actions that threaten this new relationship. However, absent an Iranian decision to radically redefine its foreign policy and abolish the Revolutionary Guards, this rapprochement is likely to collapse in the wake of fresh Iranian violence
First, let me start by saying that Iran is not looking to expand into a hegemonic footprint in the Middle East, it is Israel who is looking to expand its territorial ambitions by hoping to destroy all its Arab neighbors’ piece by piece and carry-out Oded Yinon’s plan or what is known as the “Greater Israel” project. Rabbi Fischmann, a member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine testified to the U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry on July 9th, 1947, said that “the Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.” But Iran is the aggressor? The rules-based order will continue if the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) focuses on its security commitments according to Lippman:
America’s security commitment to the region must be paramount. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) remains the foundation of the region’s security architecture that protects trade and energy arteries critical to global economic stability. The Biden administration should ensure that CENTCOM remains well-resourced and focused on building regional partnerships. Furthermore, economic ties must be strengthened. American firms view the region with enthusiasm. The Biden administration must be more vocal in its support for trade and expedite approvals for technology sharing on 5G and 6G communications, green energy, and space. Furthermore, increased cabinet-level visits to the region would demonstrate the U.S.’s commitment to the region. While this will not offset the inevitable commercial relationships between the Gulf States and China, it will assert America’s ability to compete in this strategic region
Using the Sunni-Shiite argument is propaganda to further instigate that there is a sectarian divide in the Arab world for thousands of years’, and the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran and because of that, the US security structure under CENTCOM will remain in place since the US and Saudi Arabia has a long-standing relationship. China’s peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia is what he calls “cosmetic”, and that China has no place for its peace initiative in the Middle East:
Despite the region’s “shifting sands” of ever-changing relationships, the Sunni-Shiite tensions are over a thousand years old and Iran’s advancement toward nuclear status has every U.S. partner in the Middle East on alert. The traditional security architecture underpinned by U.S.-Saudi strategic ties will remain intact. As a result, future Chinese transactional neutrality is likely to be cosmetic, devoid of any significant strategic substance.
The U.S. and its allies can best sustain the rules-based order established after WWII through robust engagement with allies and partners in which we show that we understand and support their core economic and security interests in the same way that we expect they will do the same for American interests
Tell that to the families of the 20 million people that US and its NATO allies killed since the end of World War II. The old rules-based order has collapsed in the face of a new multipolar world, as for Harley Lippman’s vision for the US and its globalist cabal to continue its hegemonic agenda in this new world of ours, is just wishful thinking.
So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.
Many of the people in charge of moderating content at Facebook have been recruited from the government, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.
In January 1977, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein’s 25,000-word article was published in Rolling Stone, detailing the close relationship between the CIA and the press.
The program was known as Operation Mockingbird and involved the CIA paying hundreds of journalists to write fake stories and spread propaganda instead of real news.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that Facebook’s values are based on the American tradition of free expression. Yet, censorship on social media has gone mainstream as part of the campaign to control what you see online, and therefore what you think and how you perceive reality.
In an official Facebook video, a Meta employee identified as “Aaron” states that he’s the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook,” deciding “what is acceptable and what is not.” These gatekeepers effectively dictate what the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see when they’re scrolling their feeds.
“It is here where decisions about what content is allowed, what will be promoted and who or what will be suppressed are made. These decisions affect what news and information billions of people across the world see every day.
“Therefore, those in charge of the algorithms hold far more power and influence over the public sphere than even editors at the largest news outlets.”
But according to Macleod’s MintPress investigation, many of the people in charge of moderating content at Facebook have been recruited from the government, including the Central Intelligence Agency, FBI and DOD, to the extent that, he says, “some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.”
‘Aaron is CIA’
Facebook employee Aaron, featured in their marketing video, formerly worked for the CIA, up until July 2019, though this isn’t disclosed by Facebook. According to Macleod:
“In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA.
“For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, ‘wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,’ especially on ‘the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,’ his LinkedIn profile reads.
“None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.”
Meta is teeming with ex-government agents
Berman is not the only ex-CIA agent working at Facebook — far from it. So many ex-government workers are now employed by Facebook that it’s difficult to view Meta as a private company instead of a government partner, intent on silencing anyone who speaks out against the official narrative.
Deborah Berman, a trust and safety project manager for Meta, was an intelligence analyst at the CIA for 10 years.
Bryan Weisbard, now a director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta, worked as a CIA intelligence officer from 2006 to 2010 before becoming a diplomat.
While at the CIA, his job involved leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns.”
Cameron Harris, a trust and safety project manager at Meta, was a CIA analyst until 2019.
Former members of other government agencies are also common at Meta. Macleod revealed:
Emily Vacher, who Facebook/Meta recruited to be a director of trust and safety, worked at the FBI from 2001 to 2011, becoming a supervisory special agent.
Mike Bradow, employed as a misinformation policy manager at Meta since 2020, worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2010 to 2020.
“USAID is a U.S. government-funded influence organization which has bankrolled or stage managed multiple regime change operations abroad, including in Venezuela in 2002, Cuba in 2021, and ongoing attempts in Nicaragua,” Macleod noted.
Neil Potts, Facebook’s vice president of trust and safety, is a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine Corps.
Sherif Kamal, trust and safety program manager at Meta, worked as a program manager at the Pentagon until 2020.
Joey Chan, trust and safety program manager at Meta, worked as a commanding officer for the U.S. Army until 2021, where he oversaw more than 100 troops in the Asia Pacific region.
Ex-intelligence officers in control of what you see
Meta is appearing increasingly like another branch of government put in place to mold the views of society, as with a workforce composed of ex-intelligence agents, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to remain impartial.
Macleod wrote:
“Hiring so many ex-U.S. state officials to run Facebook’s most politically sensitive operations raises troubling questions about the company’s impartiality and its proximity to government power.
“Meta is so full of national security state agents that at some point, it almost becomes more difficult to find individuals in trust and safety who were not formerly agents of the state.
“Despite its efforts to brand itself as a progressive, ‘woke’ organization, the Central Intelligence Agency remains deeply controversial.
“It has been charged with overthrowing or attempting to overthrow numerous foreign governments (some of them democratically elected), helping prominent Nazis escape punishment after World War Two, funnelling large quantities of drugs and weapons around the world, penetrating domestic media outlets, routinely spreading false information and operating a global network of ‘black sites’ where prisoners are repeatedly tortured.
“Therefore, critics argue that putting operatives from this organization in control of our news feeds is deeply inappropriate.”
CIA history of control and corruption
For instance, U.S. intelligence agencies kept watch on Ukrainian nationalist organizations as a source of counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Declassified CIA documents show close ties between U.S. intelligence and Ukrainian nationalists since 1946.
After WWII, Stepan Bandera, the leader of the most radical section of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was founded in 1929 and had the ultimate goal of creating an ethnically pure, independent Ukraine, and other Ukrainian Nazi leaders fled to Europe, and the CIA helped protect them.
The CIA later informed the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it had concealed Bandera and other Ukrainians from the Soviets.
While the Nuremberg trials brought justice to the leaders of fascist Germany, “the Ukrainian Nazis were spared the same fate, and some were even granted indulgences by the CIA.”
According to the film “Ukraine on Fire,” “By 1951, the Agency [CIA] excused the illegal activities of OUN’s security branch in the name of Cold War necessity.”
In another disturbing example, one of the first scientists assigned to Fort Detrick’s secret biological warfare laboratory during WWII was bioweapons expert Frank Olson. In 1953, Olson died after plummeting to the ground from a high-rise hotel room window in Manhattan.
Days earlier, he had been secretly drugged by the CIA, which claimed Olson’s death was a suicide. Decades later, however, it was revealed that Olson didn’t jump from the window — he was deliberately murdered after the CIA became concerned that he might reveal disturbing top-secret operations.
This includes the CIA’s top-secret MK-Ultra project, which engaged in mind control experiments, human torture and other medical studies, including how much LSD it would take to “shatter the mind and blast away consciousness.”
Bernstein described full-time CIA agents who worked as journalists and more than 400 U.S. journalists who secretly carried out assignments for the CIA over a 25-year period.
The program was known as Operation Mockingbird and involved the CIA paying journalists to write fake stories and spread propaganda instead of real news. Activist Post added:
“Implementing a fact-checking solution that is a centralized mechanism powered by journalists they could easily control is certainly the CIA’s … dream, as a CIA director was once quoted stating that once the public’s perception is confused about what is real and what is propaganda then their mission would be complete.
“Now you might think the CIA owning journalists is conspiratorial, but it happened with MKultra’s Operation Mockingbird.”
As further noted by Monthly Review, the situation has only gotten worse, as evidenced by the steady stream of ex-CIA agents now heading up policy and content moderation at Facebook. “The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media,” the news outlet noted, adding:
“Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world.
“Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.”
Social media infiltrated by government agencies
To be clear, it’s not only Facebook that’s relying on former CIA agents to decide what you can see. Other social media giants are similarly affected, employing individuals from a multitude of government agencies.
“In previous investigations,” Macleod wrote, “this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council.”
However, he says, “the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks.”
What does this mean for the information you see on a daily basis, assuming you’re one of the billions who take a peek or two at Facebook during the day? Macleod explained:
“The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platform is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what we do not see online — and all with essentially no public oversight.
“In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington. They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability.
“The U.S. government does not need to directly tell Facebook what policies to enact. This is because the people in decision-making positions are inordinately those who rose through the ranks of the national security state beforehand, meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s.
“And if Facebook does not play ball, quiet threats about regulation or breaking up the company’s enormous monopoly can also achieve the desired outcomes.”
New leaked documents show Reuters’ and the BBC’s involvement in covert UK FCO programs to effect “attitudinal change” and “weaken the Russian state’s influence,” alongside intel contractors and Bellingcat.
The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have sponsored Reuters and the BBC to conduct a series of covert programs aimed at promoting regime change inside Russia and undermining its government across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to a series of leaked documents.
The leaked materials show the Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action participating in a covert information warfare campaign aimed at countering Russia. Working through a shadowy department within the UK FCO known as the Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD), the media organizations operated alongside a collection of intelligence contractors in a secret entity known simply as “the Consortium.”
Through training programs of Russian journalists overseen by Reuters, the British Foreign Office sought to produce an “attitudinal change in the participants,” promoting a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”
“These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using,” Chris Williamson, a former UK Labour MP who attempted to apply public scrutiny to the CDMD’s covert activities and was stonewalled on national security grounds, told The Grayzone.
“The BBC and Reuters portray themselves as an unimpeachable, impartial, and authoritative source of world news,” Williamson continued, “but both are now hugely compromised by these disclosures. Double standards like this just bring establishment politicians and corporate media hacks into further disrepute.”
Thomson Reuters Foundation spokesperson Jenny Vereker implicitly confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents in an emailed response to questions from The Grayzone. However, she contended, “The inference that the Thomson Reuters Foundation was engaged in ‘secret activities’ is inaccurate and misrepresents our work in the public interest. We have for decades openly supported a free press and have worked to help journalists globally to develop the skills needed to report with independence.”
The tranche of leaked files closely resemble UK FCO-related documented released between 2018 and 2020 by a hacking collective calling itself Anonymous. The same source has claimed credit for obtaining the latest round of documents.
The new leaks illustrate in alarming detail how Reuters and the BBC – two of the largest and most distinguished news organizations in the world – attempted to answer the British foreign ministry’s call for help in improving its “ability to respond and to promote our message across Russia,” and to “counter the Russian government’s narrative.” Among the UK FCO’s stated goals, according to the director of the CDMD, was to “weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbours.”
Reuters and the BBC solicited multimillion-dollar contracts to advance the British state’s interventionist aims, promising to cultivate Russian journalists through FCO-funded tours and training sessions, establish influence networks in and around Russia, and promote pro-NATO narratives in Russian-speaking regions.
In several proposals to the British Foreign Office, Reuters boasted of a global influence network of 15,000 journalists and staff, including 400 inside Russia.
The UK FCO projects were carried out covertly, and in partnership with purportedly independent, high-profile online media outfits including Bellingcat, Meduza, and the Pussy Riot-founded Mediazona. Bellingcat’s participation apparently included a UK FCO intervention in North Macedonia’s 2019 elections on behalf of the pro-NATO candidate.
The intelligence contractors that oversaw that operation, the Zinc Network, boasted of establishing “a network of YouTubers in Russia and Central Asia” while “supporting participants [to] make and receive international payments without being registered as external sources of funding.” The firm also touted its ability to “activate a range of content” to support anti-government protests inside Russia.
The new documents provide critical background on the role of NATO member states like the UK in influencing the color revolution-style protests waged in Belarus in 2020, and raise unsettling questions about the intrigue and unrest surrounding jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny.
Further, the materials cast serious doubt on the independence of two of the world’s largest and most prestigious media organizations, revealing Reuters and the BBC as apparent intelligence cut-outs feasting at the trough of a British national security state that their news operations are increasingly averse to scrutinizing.
Reuters solicits secret British Foreign Office contract to infiltrate Russian media
A series of official documents declassified in January 2020 revealed that Reuters was secretly funded by the British government throughout the 1960s and 1970s to assist an anti-Soviet propaganda organization run by the MI6 intelligence agency. The UK government used the BBC as a pass-through to conceal payments to the news group.
The revelation prompted a Reuters spokesman to declare that “the arrangement in 1969 [with the MI6] was not in keeping with our Trust Principles and we would not do this today.”
The Trust Principles outline a mission of “preserving [Reuters’] independence, integrity, and freedom from bias in the gathering and dissemination of information and news.”
In its own statement of values, the BBC proclaims, “Trust is the foundation of the BBC. We’re independent, impartial and honest.”
However, the newly leaked documents analyzed by The Grayzone appear to reveal that both Reuters and the BBC are engaged yet again in a non-transparent relationship with the UK’s foreign ministry to counter and undermine Russia.
In 2017, the non-profit arm of the Reuters media empire, the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF), delivered a formal tender offering to “enter into a Contract with the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, as represented by the British Embassy Moscow, for the provision of a project ‘Capacity Building in Russian Media.’” The letter was signed by Reuters CEO Monique Ville on July 31, 2017.
Reuters’ tender was a response to a call for bids by the FCO, which sought help in implementing “a programme of themed tours to the UK by Russian journalists and online influencers.”
Working through the British Embassy in Moscow, the FCO sought to produce an “attitudinal change in the participants,” promoting a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”
In 2019, the FCO put forward a similar initiative, this time articulating a more aggressive plan to “counter the Russian government’s narrative and domination of the media and information space.” In effect, the British government was seeking to infiltrate Russian media and propagate its own narrative through an influence network of Russian journalists trained in the UK.
Reuters responded to both calls by the FCO with detailed tenders. In its first bid, the media giant boasted of establishing a global network of 15,000 journalists and bloggers through “capacity building interventions.” In Russia, it claimed at least 400 journalists had been cultivated through its training programs.
Reuters claimed to have performed 10 previous training tours for 80 Russian journalists on behalf of the British embassy in Moscow. It proposed eight more, promising to promote “UK cultural and political values” and “create a network of journalists across Russia” bonded together by a shared “interest in British affairs.”
Reuters’ tender highlighted the institutional prejudices and interventionist agenda that underlined its training programs. Detailing a series of UK FCO-funded programs dedicated to “countering Russian state-funded propaganda,” Reuters conflated Russian government narratives with extremism. Ironically, it referred to its own efforts at weakening them as “unbiased journalism.”
At the same time, Reuters appeared to recognize that its covert collaboration with the British Embassy in Moscow was highly provocative and potentially destructive to diplomatic relations. Recounting a UK FCO-funded tour it ran for Russian journalists in the midst of the Sergei Skripal affair, after the British government accused Moscow of poisoning a turncoat Russian intelligence officer who spied for Britain, the tender stated, “[Thomson Reuters Foundation] was in constant communication with the British Embassy in Moscow, to assess levels of risk, including reputational risk to the embassy.”
The mention by Reuters of the Belarusian TV Station Belsat, and its particular relevance “to the UK Government Strategy’s capacity to detect and counter the spread of Russian information” was notable. While describing itself as “the first independent television channel in Belarus,” Belsat is, as the Reuters tender makes clear, a vehicle of NATO influence.
Based in Poland and funded by the Polish Foreign Ministry and other EU governments, Belsat played an influential role in promoting the color revolution-style protests that erupted in May 2020 to demand the ouster of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Ultimately, Reuters’ bid appears to have been successful, as it received a July 2019 contract with the FCO’s Conflict, Stability & Security Fund (CSSF). But neither entity seemed to want the public to know about their collaboration on a project designed to counter Russia. The contract was marked “Strictly Confidential.”
“Weaken the Russian state’s influence”
The programs exposed through the latest leak of documents operate under the auspices of a shadowy division of the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office called Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD). Led by an intelligence operative named Andy Pryce, the program has shrouded in secrecy.
Indeed, the British government has denied freedom of information requests about the division’s budget and stonewalled members of parliament like Chris Williamson who sought data about its budget and agenda, citing national security to block their demands for information.
“When I tried to probe further,” former MP Williamson told The Grayzone, “ministers refused to let me have access to any documents or correspondence relating to this organization’s activities. I was told that releasing this information could ‘disrupt and undermine the program’s effectiveness.’”
During a meeting convened in London on June 26, 2018, Pryce outlined a new FCO program “to weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbors.” He solicited a consortium of firms to assist the British state in establishing new and seemingly independent media outlets to counter Russian government-backed media in Moscow’s immediate sphere of influence, and to amplify the messaging of NATO-aligned governments.
Justified on the basis of Russia’s supposed intention to “sow disunity and course[sic] disruption to democratic processes,” the campaign Pryce laid out was more aggressive and far-reaching than anything Russia has been caught doing in the West.
Pryce emphasized that secrecy was of the essence, warning that “some grantees will not wish to be linked to the FCO.”
A year later, the FCO’s CDMD division outlined a program to run through 2022 at a cost of $8.3 million to the British taxpayer. It aimed to establish new outlets and support preexisting media operations “to counter Russia’s efforts to sow disunity” and “increase resilience to hostile Kremlin messaging in the Baltic states.”
Thus the British government set out with an array of intelligence contractors to dominate Baltic media with pro-NATO messaging – and perhaps sow some disunity of its own.
As seen below, the BBC placed an apparently successful bid to participate in the covert Baltic program through its non-profit arm, known as BBC Media Action.
The BBC also proposed to participate in a separate UK FCO media propaganda program in Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. It named Reuters and a now-defunct intelligence contractor called Aktis Strategy, which participated in previous FCO CDMD programs, as key allies in its consortium.
The BBC identified local partners like Hromadske, a Kiev-based broadcast network born in the midst of the so-called Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that relied on ultra-nationalist muscle to remove an elected president and install a pro-NATO regime. Hromadske materialized almost overnight with seed money and logistical support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and billionaire media mogul Pierre Omidyar’s Network Fund.
BBC Media Action proposed working through Aktis to cultivate and grow pro-NATO media in conflict areas like the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where a proxy war has raged since 2014 between the Western-backed Ukrainian military and pro-Russian separatists. It was textbook information warfare, weaponizing broadcast media to turn the tide of battle in a protracted, grinding conflict.
The UK FCO propaganda campaign warned that “Kremlin-affiliated structures” could undermine the project if it was exposed. For a media organization that claims to place trust at the heart of its charter of values, the BBC was certainly operating under a high degree of secrecy.
The UK FCO’s meddling in Eastern Europe and the Baltics created a feeding frenzy among contractors seeking to provide “capacity building” and media development assistance on Russia’s periphery. Among the bidders were Reuters and veteran FCO contractors that had participated in an array of information warfare campaigns from Syria to the British home front.
The Consortium
Among the intelligence contractors bidding to participate in the UK FCO-funded Consortium were the Zinc Network and Albany Communications. As journalist Kit Klarenberg noted in a February 18 report on the recent FCO leaks, these firms “boast staff possessed of [security] clearances, individuals who previously served at the highest levels of government, the military and security services. They furthermore have extensive experience in conducting information warfare operations on London’s behalf the world over.”
Previously known as Breakthrough, Zinc has contracted for the UK Home Office to covertly implement media projects propagandizing British Muslims under the auspices of the Prevent de-radicalization initiative. In Australia, Zinc was caught running a clandestine program to promote support for government policies among Muslims.
Ben Norton reported for The Grayzone on Albany’s record of “secur[ing] the participation of an extensive local network of over 55 stringers, reporters and videographers” to influence media narratives and advance Western regime-change goals in Syria, while conducting public relations services on behalf of extremist Syrian militias funded by NATO member states and Gulf monarchies to destabilize the country.
In its bid for the UK FCO media program in the Baltic region, Albany proposed a series of satirical “interactive games” like “Putin Bingo” to encourage opposition to the Russian government and exploit “frustrations experienced by Russians in the EU.”
Albany pitched a Latvia-based outlet called Meduza as “a leading proponent of these games.” A top website among Russian opposition supporters, Meduza has received financial support from the Swedish government and several billionaire-backed pro-NATO foundations.
As a UK FCO contractor, the Zinc Network said it was “delivering audience segmentation and targeting support” not only to Meduza, but also to Mediazona, a supposedly independent media venture founded by two members of the anti-Kremlin performance art group Pussy Riot.
One of Mediazona’s founders, Nadya Tolokonnikova, shared a stage with former US President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Foundation’s 2015 conference. The following year, Tolokonnikova trashed now-imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, claiming, “He’s connected with the Russian government, and I feel that he’s proud of it.”
Besides delivering “targeting support” for “independent” outlets pushing the right line against the Kremlin, Zinc proposed leveraging UK FCO funding into a program of direct payments and gaming Google search results in their favor. The intelligence cut-out was explicit about its desire to reduce the search visibility of the Russian government-backed broadcaster RT.com.
The UK covertly funded and managed a network of Russian YouTubers and “activated” anti-government protest content
In a document marked “private and confidential,” Zinc revealed the Consortium’s role in setting up a “YouTuber network” in Russia and Central Asia designed to propagate the message of the UK and its NATO allies.
According to Zinc, the Consortium was “supporting participants mak[ing] and receiv[ing] international payments without being registered as external sources of funding,” presumably to circumvent Russian registration requirements for foreign-funded media outfits.
Zinc also helped the YouTube influencers “develop editorial strategies to deliver key messages” while working “to keep their involvement confidential.” And it carried out its entire program of covert propaganda in the name of “promoting media integrity and democratic values.”
Perhaps the most prominent Russian YouTube influencer is Alexei Navalny, a previously marginal nationalist opposition figure who was nominated for a Nobel Prize after becoming the target of a high-profile poisoning incident that brought relations between Russia and the West to its post-Cold War nadir.
The Russian government’s sentencing of Navalny to a 2.5-year prison term for evading parole has inspired a new wave of anti-government protests. Back in 2018, Navalny personally co-sponsored national demonstrations against the banning of the encrypted messaging app Telegram.
In its bid for a UK FCO contract, Zinc revealed that it played a behind-the-scenes role “to activate a range of content within 12 hours of the recent telegram protests.” Whether those activities involved Navalny or his immediate network was unclear, but the private disclosure by Zinc appeared confirm that British intelligence played a role in amplifying the 2018 protests.
Russian intelligence services have released sting video footage showing Vladimir Ashurkov, the executive director of Navalny’s FBK anti-corruption organization, meeting in 2013 with a suspected British MI6 agent named James William Thomas Ford, who was operating out of the British embassy in Moscow. During the rendezvous, Ashurkov can be heard asking for 10 to 20 million dollars to generate “quite a different picture” of the political landscape.
In 2018, Ashurkov’s name appeared in leaked documents exposing a covert, UK FCO influence network called the Integrity Initiative. As The Grayzone reported, the Integrity Initiative operated behind the cover of a think tank called the Institute for Statecraft, which concealed its own location through a fake office in Scotland.
Run by a group of military intelligence officers, the secret propaganda group worked through clusters of media and political influencers to escalate tensions between the West and Russia. Listed among the London cluster of anti-Russian influencers was Ashurkov.
The Integrity Initiative’s military directors outlined their agenda in stark, unequivocal terms. As the leaked memo below illustrates, they aimed to exploit the media, think tanks and their influence network to stir up as much hysteria about Russia’s supposedly malign influence as possible. Since they embarked on their covert campaign, nearly all their wishes have come true.
Bellingcat joins the Zinc Network, allegedly meddles in Moldova’s elections
After Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, he collaborated with the UK-based “open source” journalism outfit Bellingcat to pin the crime on Russia’s FSB intelligence services. Though it is well established that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government entity that supports regime-change operations around the globe, the fact has never appeared in the reams of fawning profiles that corporate media outlets, including Reuters, have published about the organization.
Bellingcat’s role as a partner in the Zinc Network’s UK FCO-funded EXPOSE Consortium may add an additional layer of suspicion about the outlet’s claim to independence.
Indeed, Bellingcat was listed in leaked 2018 documents as a key member of Zinc’s “Network of NGOs.” Among the members in the network was the Institute for Statecraft, the front for the Integrity Initiative.
Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has vehemently denied accepting funding from the UK FCO or collaborating with it. But after Zinc documents leaked in early 2019, Higgins disclosed that some version of the Zinc proposal had received the green light from the Foreign Office.
Christian Triebbert, a Bellingcat staff member who was named as a potential trainer by the Zinc documents, and who now heads the New York Times’ video investigations unit, claimed the program consisted of benign workshops on “digital research and verification skills.”
What he and Higgins did not mention, however, was that Bellingcat had apparently been dispatched by the Zinc Network to “respond” to the 2019 parliamentary elections in North Macedonia. Stakes were high as the elections were likely to determine whether the tiny country would enter NATO and join the EU. The pro-NATO candidate triumphed, and not without a little help from the British Foreign Office and its allies.
According to the Zinc proposal, Bellingcat provided training to the Most Network, a Macedonian media outlet. It was joined by DFR Lab, a project of the NATO- and US government-funded Atlantic Council in Washington, DC.
After apparently participating in the covert UK FCO-funded intervention in North Macedonia, Bellingcat published an article ahead of the country’s 2020 parliamentary elections entitled, “Russia’s interference in North Macedonia.”
Several Zinc Network documents list Reuters as a member of the UK FCO-funded Consortium media intervention in the Baltic states.
Asked by The Grayzone how Reuters’ participation in UK FCO-funded programs aimed at countering Russia conformed to the news organization’s Trust Principles, spokesperson Jenny Vereker stated, “This funding supports our independent work to assist journalists and journalism all over the world, as part of our mission to strengthen a free and vibrant global media ecosystem to support a plurality of voices and preserve the flow of accurate and independent information. This is because accurate and balanced news coverage is a crucial pillar of any free, fair and informed society.”
In recent years, the BBC and Reuters have played an increasingly aggressive part in demonizing the governments of countries where London and Washington are seeking regime change. Meanwhile, high-profile online investigative outlets like Bellingcat have sprouted up seemingly overnight to assist these efforts.
With the release of the UK FCO documents, questions must be raised about whether these esteemed news organizations are truly the independent and ethical journalistic entities they claim to be. While they hammer away at “authoritarian” states and malign Russian activities, they have little to say about the machinations of the powerful Western governments in their immediate midst. Perhaps they are reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them.
Despite its failings at home, the United States intervenes in countries across multiple continents seeking to control their governments and resources.
This week, we look at the US’ latest efforts in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia to undermine their independence and force them to serve the interests of the US government and transnational corporations.
In all three countries, the US has displayed a lack of understanding of the people and their support for their revolutionary processes, and as a result, is failing. As US empire fades, so might the Monroe Doctrine come to an end.
Sandanista- FSLN rally in Nicaragua
Nicaragua: USAID Multi-Year Destabilization Plan Exposed
A US Agency for International Development (USAID) document revealed by reporter William Grigsby describes covert plans to overthrow the democratically-elected Nicaraguan government in the next two years. USAID seeks to hire mercenaries “to take charge of the plan . . . to disrupt public order and carry out other [violent] actions before, during, and/or after the 2021 elections.”
USAID is creating Responsive Assistance In Nicaragua (RAIN), allotting $540,000 in grants to remove the Sandinista government in what it calls “Nicaragua’s transition to democracy.” Daniel Ortega won the 2016 election with 72 percent of the vote in what election observers from the Organization of American States (OAS), a US tool, described as taking “place in a calm, smooth and pacific manner, with no large incidents.”
Brian Willson, who has opposed US efforts to dominate Nicaragua since the 1980s Contra war, concludes the US realizes Ortega will win the 2021 election. In fact, this week, a poll showed support for Ortega’s party, FSLN, at 50% and for the opposition at 10%. One of USAID plans, as they tried in Venezuela in 2018, is for the opposition to boycott the election since they know they will lose, then call it illegitimate and create a political and economic crisis.
The real goal is not a democracy but domination so US transnational corporations can profit from the second poorest country in the hemisphere by putting in place a neoliberal economy to privatize public services, cut social services, and purge all traces of the Sandinistas. USAID also plans to “reestablish” the police and military to enforce their rule. Another goal is to stop Nicaragua from being the “threat of a good example” for its economic growth, reduction of inequality, poverty, illiteracy and crime.
John Perry writes about “US interference in Nicaragua, going back at least as far as William Walker’s assault on its capital and usurpation of the presidency in 1856.” Since the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, the US has sought to take back control of Nicaragua.
USAID and its National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have been funding the opposition. NED financed 54 projects from 2014-17 to lay the groundwork for a 2018 coup attempt, which also involved USAID. Wiston Lopez writes the US has provided “more than 31 million dollars between the end of 2017 and May 1, 2020.” When the attempted coup in 2018 failed, the US also put in place illegal unilateral coercive measures, known as economic sanctions, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, to try to weaken the country.
The USAID’s RAIN program outlines the usual regime change steps; e.g., remake the police and military as enforcers of the new neoliberal order, move “quickly to dismantle parallel institutions”; i.e., the Sandinista Front, the Sandinista Youth, and other grassroots institutions, and implement “transitional justice measures”; i.e., the prosecution of current government officials and movement leaders.
A new area of attack is a disinformation campaign against Nicaragua’s handling of COVID-19. The opposition misrepresents the government’s response and puts forward false death statistics in an attempt to create chaos. As Wiston López points out, “Since March the US-directed opposition has focused 95% of their actions on attempting to discredit Nicaragua’s prevention, contention, and Covid treatment. However, this only had some success in the international media and is now backfiring since Nicaragua is the country with one of the lowest mortality rates in the continent.”
The US media fails to report on the success of Nicaragua in combating the virus using a community-based health system. Nicaragua has been building its health system for the last 12 years and took rapid action to prepare for the virus. Nicaragua did not impose a lock down because it is a poor country where 80 percent of people are in the informal economy and 40 percent live in rural areas. People must work in order to eat.
Stephen Sefton puts the failure of the United States so far in context. At its root, the US does not understand the people of Nicaragua, their history of fighting US domination, and their ability to overcome right-wing puppets. It also misunderstands what the Sandinista government is doing to better the lives of the people in every sector of the economy. Sefton concludes, “The US government has failed notoriously to meet the needs of its own people during the current pandemic but can still find money to try and destroy a small country whose success makes US social, economic and environmental policy look arbitrary, negligent and criminal.”
Nicolas Maduro kicks out Donald Trump (Photo by Ben Norton
Venezuela: Bipartisan Failed Regime Change
Ever since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, successive US administrations have tried and failed to dominate Venezuela. The bipartisan nature of this policy was on display on August 4, when Elliot Abrams, the notorious coup-monger for multiple presidents, testified in Congress. Not a single Senator criticized the attempt to illegally overthrow a democratically-elected government.
Abrams was criticized by both Democrats and Republicans for his inability to remove President Maduro from power. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) was most open about the coup attempt describing it as “a case study in diplomatic malpractice” and claiming Trump botched a winning play in a comedy of errors that strengthened Maduro. After the hearing, Murphy posted a series of Tweets admitting the coup and how it could have been done better.
A clip from Murphy’s embarrassing comments was shared widely including by the Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza. When Vijay Prashad asked Arreaza his reaction, he described the US openly admitting crimes and said the “confessions” of Murphy, Gen. John Kelly, John Bolton, and Elliot Abrams “are priceless evidence for the complaint we raised at the International Criminal Court.”
Elliot Abrams announced the US will be starting a media war against Venezuela. The reality is the US has been conducting a media war against Venezuela for more than 20 years.
Venezuela is moving ahead with elections for the National Assembly on December 6, 2020. Unlike 2018, more parties are agreeing to participate including the larger Democratic Action and Justice First parties, as well as a new Communist Party alliance and the hard-right Popular Will party, which was US puppet Juan Guaidó’s former party. There will be 105 political parties contesting for 277 National Assembly seats, 110 more than the current term. Venezuela uses a combination of majority winners and proportional representation. Venezuela also requires half the candidates to be female, and they use electronic voting confirmed by paper ballots with a public citizen audit on Election Day.
Juan Guaidó and others allied with the United States said they would boycott the election. Guaidó cannot risk running because he is likely to be defeated. The US is encouraging a boycott and then will claim the election was not legitimate as it did in the last presidential election. After December, Guaidó will not hold any elected office making his fraudulent claim to the presidency even weaker.
Bolivians protest the postponement of the election
Bolivia: US Dictator Fears Democratic Vote
On November 12 2019, a US-backed coup in Bolivia removed President Evo Morales who had just won re-election. The self-proclaimed President Jeanine Añez, a right-wing Christian, leads a de facto government involved in massacres, persecution and imprisonment of political leaders. It is destroying the social and economic model and achievements of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS Party) led by Morales.
Many have called this a lithium coup because the element is plentiful in Bolivia and critical for batteries. This was made evident when Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, said on Twitter “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” Tesla would benefit from cheap and plentiful lithium for electric car batteries.
The people of Bolivia are struggling to restore democracy. The fraudulent report by the OAS led to a three-week conflict between right-wing Bolivians protesting alleged fraud and pro-government, mostly indigenous, demonstrators defending Morales. The military and police sided with the right-wing coup. The coup government threatened legislators and their families while repressing the people. There were racist attacks against the majority Indigenous population and the Wiphala, the indigenous flag, was burned in the streets. When she took power, Áñez, surrounded by right-wing legislators, held up a large leather bible and declared, “The Bible has returned to the palace.”
The US recognized the coup government, similar to its recognition of the failed coup leader, Juan Guaidó in Venezuela. Añez claimed she’d be transitory until the next election, but at the direction of the US, she is putting in place deep roots and has delayed elections.
The repression has galvanized the MAS party, as well as peasant unions and grassroots organizations who continue their struggle to restore Bolivian democracy. The pressure led to elections being scheduled. Initially, Áñez said she would not run but reversed herself and is now a candidate while she is trying to outlaw the MAS party and its candidates.
Elections were scheduled for May 3, but have been postponed twice allegedly due to the pandemic, but really because this is an ongoing coup.
It is true that the COVID-19 pandemic is hitting Bolivia hard with horror stories about people unable to get medical treatment. Immediately after the coup, the Añez government expelled the Cuban doctors. The coup-government is unable to manage the health system. Corruption is rampant in the purchase of medical equipment. The health ministry has had three ministers during the crisis. The situation is dire with overcrowded hospitals, lack of basic supplies, and corpses in the streets and in their homes with nowhere to be buried.
The coup-government is using the virus to try to delay elections because polls show the MAS candidate, Luis Arce, is far ahead and likely to win in the first round of elections with Áñez coming in a distant third. Áñez has sought to prosecute Arce to keep him from running, so far unsuccessfully. On July 6, the Attorney General of Bolivia charged Evo Morales with terrorism and financing of terrorism from exile and is seeking preventive detention.
Since mid-July, thousands of Bolivians have been protesting the postponement of elections. They are holding sustained protests throughout the country and blocking many roads. Indigenous and peasant groups, agricultural groups, along with women and unions are joining together calling for elections. Morales, Arce, and the MAS Party have denounced the delay.
The United States is trying to make Latin America its backyard forever. We know about the hard resistance of the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua. The struggle of our peoples is very important. The United States wants to divide us in order to plunder our natural resources. The peoples no longer accept domination and plunder. The United States is in decline, and yet it lashes out.
The US is weakening as a global power and its failures in Latin America are both a symptom of this and are causing further decline. The US’ violations of international law are obvious and are being challenged. But the US is an empire and it will not give up the Monroe Doctrine easily.
As citizens of Empire, we have a particular responsibility to demand the US stop its sanctions and illegal interference in Latin America and elsewhere around the world. In this time of multiple global crises, we must demand the US become a cooperative member of the world community and work peacefully to address the pandemic, recession and climate crisis.
Structures to do this exist to help with this such as the global ceasefire and the Paris Climate agreement. And on the anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, we must add the Nuclear Ban Treaty as another effort the US must join.
A refugee family hold numbered placards as they pose for a photo during a census conducted by the Thai authorities at Mae La refugee camp in 2014. Photo: Reuters
A biometric identification program backed by the ID2020 alliance will see its new “digital id” program rolled out for refugee newborns in close coordination with a charity tied to Wall Street and prominent Western politicians whose workers have been accused of sexually exploiting refugee children.
iRespond, an international non-profit organization that is “dedicated to using biometrics to improve lives through digital identity,” has begun piloting a new biometric program for newborns among the predominately Karen refugee population along the Myanmar-Thailand border, a program it soon hopes to “quickly deploy” at a greater scale and make available to the general global population. The pilot program is being conducted as part of the controversial ID2020 alliance, backed by Microsoft, the GAVI vaccine alliance and the Rockefeller Foundation, and with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a non-profit organization deeply tied to the Western political elite and Wall Street with a controversial track record of silencing numerous sex abuse and fraud allegations.
The new program, an extension of iRespond’s “voluntary” biometric identification program in the Mae La refugee camp, “will create a record of a birth, attested by a trusted clinic, with a goal of changing the life trajectory for the participants.” Through the program, “a guardianship relationship between the newborn and the mother is established and linked to digital and high security physical identity documents.”
However, iRespond’s CEO, Scott Reid, told Biometric Update that these credentials do “not carry the same weight as a true birth certificate,” but asserts that the organization’s biometric “birth attestation” program “could leapfrog the traditional barriers to establishing identity.” Despite the fact that iRespond’s quasi-birth certificates would seemingly serve little purpose in areas where actual birth certificates are readily available, the organization notes that “once the pilot is completed, iRespond is ready to quickly deploy the solution at scale” for mass use around the globe. “Product development” on adapting their platform for newborns began earlier this year and Reid notes that having an iRespond-provided biometric “birth attestation” will enable “access to vital services such as healthcare, social protection, education and banking.”
The pilot program is being conducted at the Mae Tao clinic, which is largely funded bythe CIA cut-out USAID as well as the governments of Germany and Taiwan, the Open Society Foundations and the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The IRC is very active in the day-to-day functions of the clinic (financed by a USAID-funded project) and it is also intimately involved in iRespond’s digital identity program, including its new pilot program for newborns and its earlier efforts to supply Mae La’s residents with biometric identity.
Food or Sovereignty
iRespond’s work in Mae La in conjunction with IRC was first announced by the ID2020 alliance in September 2018. The ID2020-funded pilot program, the announcement states, was to be “led by Alliance partner iRespond and will be conducted in close partnership with the International Rescue Committee (IRC).” It aims to provide biometric identities to the approximately 35,000 individuals inhabiting the area, with the newer program aiming to ensure that babies born in the community are also made participants by default upon birth. It notes specifically that “the pilot will offer blockchain-based digital identification, linked to individual users through iris recognition, for refugees accessing the IRC’s services in the Mae La Camp in Thailand.” Having a “digital identity” would allow refugees “to access improved, consistent healthcare within the camp” with plans for the same system to eventually “electronically document both educational attainment and professional skills to aid with employment opportunities.”
A year later, the program, featured in a lengthy profile in Newsweek, was revealed to be “just the first step in an effort that aims to equip the camp’s entire refugee population with secure and portable “digital wallets” that will hold not just their medical records but also educational and vocational credentials, camp work histories and myriad other records,” ostensibly including financial activity. This is particularly likely given that iRespond is partnered with Mastercard, another ID2020 partner that is closely allied with the company, Trust Stamp, a biometric identity platform that also doubles as a vaccine record and payment system. In addition, IRC’s strategic plans for Mae La through 2020 include “expand[ing] micro-enterprise development and village savings and loans associations,” such as those offered by ID2020 partner Kiva, among others, who link biometric identity to the receipt of loans.
iRespond’s system, not unlike Trust Stamp’s, is also slated to serve as a vaccine record. Larry Dohr, iRespond’s head of Southeast Asia operations, told Reuters in April that “a biometric ID system can keep a record of such people [who have previously tested positive for Covid-19] and those getting the vaccine.” Dohr added that “we can biometrically identify the individual and tie them to the test results, as well as to a high security document. The person then has ‘non-refutable’ proof that they have immunity due to antibodies in their system.” Dohr then refers to such “proof” as a “very valuable credential.”
Notably, in press releases and news reports, iRespond executives emphasize how their biometric identity system, based on iris scans and powered by Microsoft, will “protect privacy” and allow “control and ownership of identity data belong to the holder.” However, the Mae La project does not offer this degree of control and ownership, with Newsweek noting that“Eventually, [iRespond and their collaborators] aim to offer the refugees a level of fine-grained control over what pieces of personal information are shared with others.” In other words, such control over their personal information has not yet been made available to them, despite the public portrayal that this functionality is a base component of iRespond’s system.
What is particularly noteworthy about iRespond’s and IRC’s digital identity efforts is that, while it is a “voluntary” program, destitute refugees wishing to access healthcare and other services IRC provides in the area, including access to clean water, must have their irises scanned in order to reap those benefits. It is highly unlikely that such individuals are not only uninformed about any potential risks of providing their biometrics for use in a pilot program, but are not in a stable enough state to make an informed decision on the matter, as their precarious position would see them choose urgent healthcare needs, etc. over privacy. It increasingly seems that Mae La was chosen as the pilot project because its residents were highly unlikely to decline participation, especially when healthcare access and other basic needs provided by IRC are dangled as carrots on a stick and only accessible upon participation in iRespond’s biometric identity program.
This program is remarkably similar to the World Food Programme’s recently implemented “Building Blocks” initiative, which is funded by the US, German, Dutch and Luxembourgian governments. Building Blocks uses a blockchain-based biometric identity system “to expand refugees’ choices in how they access and spend their cash assistance” in Syrian refugee camps within Jordan. Now, “over 100,000 people living in the camps can purchase groceries by scanning an iris at checkout” as part of the checkout. Those who do not participate are unable to access their WFP “cash benefits” since they are available exclusively through this biometric system, leaving refugees the choice between surrendering their biometric data and food.
Equally noteworthy is the fact that those financially supporting the Mae La project and similar projects, particularly the ID2020 alliance, are “hopeful” that iRespond’s efforts in Mae La will some day be rolled out on a global scale. Indeed,Newsweek noted that “many of the funders [of the Mae La project]—part of what’s known as the ID2020 alliance, which includes Accenture, Microsoft and the Rockefeller Foundation—hope the Mae La project could eventually serve as a blueprint for the world’s millions of stateless people, as well as citizens of developed nations and everyone else.”
Biometric Enclosure
According to iRespond’s rather spartan website, their biometric identity platform “primarily relies on iris biometrics, the best modality after DNA for accuracy and reliability.” It further describes its platform as follows:
“When a new participant is enrolled, an encrypted biometric template is created from their iris scan and a randomly assigned 12-digit number is drawn from a pool of 90 billion numbers. On subsequent visits, the identity of the participant is verified when their template is matched and the system returns the original 12-digit unique identifier.”
iRespond’s platform also “easily integrates into healthcare, humanitarian aid, research, and human-rights applications,” and it has been used to grant refugees and other vulnerable populations access to food, healthcare, and other forms of aid provided by foreign NGOs operating in these areas. It has also been used to keep track of participants in clinical drug trials. iRespond’s platform in the latter case was used by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in conjunction with Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (both are iRespond partners), to track participants in clinical HIV treatment trials in Senegal as well as an additional Johns Hopkins study in South Africa. It has also been used to track recipients of the controversial HPV vaccine in Sierra Leone, where it was used “to track patients who have not completed their vaccination series.”
It is also being used among “vulnerable groups” in Myanmar by the NGO Population Services International (PSI) to “track demographics and the timing of positive HIV tests.” By analyzing these details, “we uncover which groups are most vulnerable to becoming infected,” according to PSI’s country representative for Myanmar.
The non-profit’s platform is powered by its main tech partner and another ID2020 member, Microsoft. iRespond’s platform “couldn’t exist without the cloud,” according to its CEO Scott Reid, and Microsoft supplies iRespond with a $60,000 grant to its Azure cloud system, allowing the organization to use it free of charge. In addition, Microsoft donated 39 tablets to iRespond that are used by the organization in the various places it operates “to enable flexibility in the field.” “The number of people we have helped has rapidly gone from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands, and we look forward to soon working on behalf of many millions of people. These Microsoft tools are helping to make it possible,” iRespond’s Larry Dohr stated in a Microsoft profile.
Eric Rasmussen, iRespond’s president and chairman of the board, is a particularly interesting character who has been quite frank about the rationale behind the creation of iRespond. “When you understand who someone is, you understand what they’re entitled to, whether that’s national citizenship, international refugee support, or simply food distributions,” Rasmussen told Microsoft last year.
In addition to his key role at iRespond, Rasmussen is a professor at the Google-backed “Singularity University” as well as chairman of the board at InSTEDD, a “global NGO specializing humanitarian informatics, particularly around health in resource-poor economies” that is partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the CDC, Google and UNICEF. In addition, Rasmussen is also the CEO of a “profit-for-purpose” company called Infinitum Humanitarian Systems (IHS). IHS works closely with USAID and the State Department as well as U.S. military intelligence agencies and intelligence/defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Prior to his roles at iRespond, IHS and InSTEDD, Rasmussen was the Principal Investigator in humanitarian informatics for the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and made multiple war time deployments to Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Charity” of the Predator Class
More troubling than the background and associations of iRespond are those of their partner in the recently announced newborn biometric identification initiative, the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The IRC describes themselves as responding “to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and help[ing] people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover and gain control of their future.”
Despite the IRC framing itself as a “humanitarian” venture, its board is stuffed with a sordid mix of Wall Street criminals and war criminals. For example, its board is co-chaired by Timothy Geithner, former Treasury Secretary during the 2008 financial crisis bail-outs and current President of Wall Street titan Warburg-Pincus, and Susan Susman, an Executive Vice President at Pfizer. Its board of advisers includes war criminals Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright as well as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Also present are current and former leaders and top executives at McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Kroll Associates (“the CIA of Wall Street”), PepsiCo, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the World Bank. Another advisor is former chairman and CEO of AIG Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, a name that will likely be familiar to those who have researched the September 11th attacks and Wall Street financial crimes in general.
Since 2013, the IRC has been led by David Miliband, the Tony Blair “protégé” who Bill Clinton once called “one of the ablest, most creative public servants of our time” and who worked closely with then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while serving as the U.K.’s Foreign Secretary. So close was Miliband to the Clintons, that he was being considered for a “top U.S. government job” if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election.
In the years since joining the IRC, Miliband’s salary as the group’s president has ballooned to nearly a million dollars annually (up from approximately $240,000 when he arrived at the organization in 2013). In addition, the group has been mired in scandal since Miliband became its president. For instance, it was revealed in 2018 that IRC was one of several U.K.-based charities where “workers [were] alleged to be in sexually exploitative relationships with refugee children” including through “sex-for-food scandals” where “sexual abuse was so endemic that the only way for many refugee families to survive was to allow a teenage girl to be exploited.” Reports further alleged that IRC and other charities named in the report, including Save the Children, had known of the egregious abuse for years prior to the allegations being made public and chose not to act.
That year, it was also found that the IRC had “silenced 37 sex abuse, fraud and bribery allegations,” resulting in the U.K. government, which had previously funneled millions to the organization, cutting off its funding entirely. Despite the troubling revelations, no IRC workers accused of wrong-doing were ever prosecuted.
Given the fact that the IRC’s board and presidency is stuffed with professional exploiters, from Wall Street to the public sector, it is hardly surprising that this “charity” would be caught doing the same under the guise of providing “aid” to the world’s most vulnerable populations, who they apparently view as easy prey.
Foxes in the Hen House
In the several media profiles of the iRespond-IRC biometric identity effort, the initiative is described as helping to prevent the exploitation of the world’s most vulnerable, particularly forced labor and sex trafficking. However, if that really were the case, why is this program being executed by iRespond, whose president and chairman has close ties to the U.S. military and intelligence communities, and the IRC, backed by a legion of war criminals and financial predators?
The U.S. military, a close partner of iRespond’s Eric Rasmussen, is notorious for its role in the trafficking of personsfor forced labor, while many of its key contractors – like DynCorp — have been the subject of numerous scandalsregarding the sexual abuse or sex trafficking of war-torn or otherwise vulnerable populations. On the other hand, the IRC’s mix of backers like Madeleine Albright, infamous for her comment on the murder by sanctions of half a million Iraqi children being “worth it,” and Henry Kissinger, notorious for his words about using food as a weapon to force populations into subservience and to reduce third-world populations, is equally anathema to the publicly professed purpose of the iRespond-IRC biometric identification program.
Not unlike the “sex-for-food” scandal in which IRC was once embroiled, this new initiative is placing refugees in the position of taking part in a massive technocratic experiment if they wish to eat or access other basic services. Though certainly not as egregious as a sex crime, it is nonetheless another means of exploiting the world’s most vulnerable populations under the guise of “helping” them, when those really being aided are the technocratic elite who aim to take this biometric identification program global in short order.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and has $46.8 billion in assets (December 2018). It is the largest charitable foundation in the world and distributes more aid for global health than any government. One of the foundation’s stated goals is to globally enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty.
The Gates Foundation is a major funder of the CGIAR system (formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) — a global partnership whose stated aim is to strive for a food-secured future. Its research is aimed at reducing rural poverty, increasing food security, improving human health and nutrition and ensuring sustainable management of natural resources.
In 2016, the Gates Foundation was accused of dangerously and unaccountably distorting the direction of international development. The charges were laid out in a report by Global Justice Now: ‘Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?‘ According to the report, the foundation’s strategy is based on deepening the role of multinational companies in the Global South.
On release of the report, Polly Jones, the head of campaigns and policy at Global Justice Now, said:
The Gates Foundation has rapidly become the most influential actor in the world of global health and agricultural policies, but there’s no oversight or accountability in how that influence is managed.
She added that this concentration of power and influence is even more problematic when you consider that the philanthropic vision of the Gates Foundation seems to be largely based on the values of ‘corporate America’:
The foundation is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But these are all potentially exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating.
The report’s author, Mark Curtis, outlines the foundation’s promotion of industrial agriculture across Africa, which would undermine existing sustainable, small-scale farming that is providing the vast majority of food across the continent.
Curtis describes how the foundation is working with US agri-commodity trader Cargill in an $8 million project to “develop the soya value chain” in southern Africa. Cargill is the biggest global player in the production of and trade in soya with heavy investments in South America where GM soya monocrops (and associated agrochemicals) have displaced rural populations and caused health problems and environmental damage.
According to Curtis, the Gates-funded project will likely enable Cargill to capture a hitherto untapped African soya market and eventually introduce GM soya onto the continent. The Gates foundation is also supporting projects involving other chemical and seed corporations, including DuPont, Syngenta and Bayer. It is effectively promoting a model of industrial agriculture, the increasing use of agrochemicals and patented seeds, the privatisation of extension services and a very large focus on genetically modified crops.
What the Gates Foundation is doing is part of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) initiative, which is based on the premise that hunger and malnutrition in Africa are mainly the result of a lack of technology and functioning markets. Curtis says AGRA has been intervening directly in the formulation of African governments’ agricultural policies on issues like seeds and land, opening up African markets to US agribusiness.
More than 80% of Africa’s seed supply comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. But AGRA is promoting the commercial production of seed and is thus supporting the introduction of commercial (chemical-dependent) seed systems, which risk enabling a few large companies to control seed research and development, production and distribution.
The report notes that over the past two decades a long and slow process of national seed law reviews, sponsored by USAID and the G8 along with Bill Gates and others, has opened the door to multinational corporations’ involvement in seed production, including the acquisition of every sizeable seed enterprise on the African continent.
Gates, pesticides and global health
The Gates Foundation is also very active in the area of health, which is ironic given its promotion of industrial agriculture and its reliance on health-damaging agrochemicals. This is something that has not been lost on environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason.
Mason notes that the Gates Foundation is a heavy pusher of agrochemicals and patented seeds. She adds that the Gates Foundation is also reported to be collaborating in Bayer’s promotion of “new chemical approaches” and “biological crop protection” (i.e. encouraging agrochemical sales and GM crops) in the Global South.
After having read the recent ‘A Future for the World’s Children? A WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission’, Mason noticed that pesticides were conspicuous by their absence and therefore decided to write to Professor Anthony Costello, director of the UCL Institute for Global Health, who is the lead author of the report.
In her open 19-page letter, ‘Why Don’t Pesticides Feature in the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission?’, she notes in the Costello-led report that there is much talk about greater regulation of marketing of tobacco, alcohol, formula milk and sugar-sweetened beverages but no mention of pesticides.
But perhaps this should come as little surprise: some 42 authors’ names are attached to the report and Mason says that in one way or another via the organisations they belong to, many (if not most) have received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation is a prominent funder of the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Gates has been the largest or second largest contributor to the WHO’s budget in recent years. His foundation provided 11% of the WHO’s entire budget in 2015, which is 14 times greater than the UK government’s contribution.
Perhaps this sheds some light on to why a major report on child health would omit the effects of pesticides. Mason implies this is a serious omission given what the UN expert on toxics Baskut Tuncak said in a November 2017 article in the Guardian:
Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides. It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds. Many governments insist that our standards of protection from these pesticides are strong enough. But as a scientist and a lawyer who specialises in chemicals and their potential impact on people’s fundamental rights, I beg to differ. Last month it was revealed that in recommending that glyphosate – the world’s most widely-used pesticide – was safe, the EU’s food safety watchdog copied and pasted pages of a report directly from Monsanto, the pesticide’s manufacturer. Revelations like these are simply shocking.
Mason notes that in February 2020, Tuncak rejected the idea that the risks posed by highly hazardous pesticides could be managed safely. He told Unearthed (GreenPeace UK’s journalism website) that there is nothing sustainable about the widespread use of highly hazardous pesticides for agriculture. Whether they poison workers, extinguish biodiversity, persist in the environment or accumulate in a mother’s breast milk, Tuncak argued that these are unsustainable, cannot be used safely and should have been phased out of use long ago.
In his 2017 article, he stated:
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most ratified international human rights treaty in the world (only the US is not a party), makes it clear that states have an explicit obligation to protect children from exposure to toxic chemicals, from contaminated food and polluted water, and to ensure that every child can realise their right to the highest attainable standard of health. These and many other rights of the child are abused by the current pesticide regime. These chemicals are everywhere and they are invisible.
Tuncak added that paediatricians have referred to childhood exposure to pesticides as creating a “silent pandemic” of disease and disability. He noted that exposure in pregnancy and childhood is linked to birth defects, diabetes, and cancer and stated that children are particularly vulnerable to these toxic chemicals: increasing evidence shows that even at ‘low’ doses of childhood exposure, irreversible health impacts can result.
He concluded that the overwhelming reliance of regulators on industry-funded studies, the exclusion of independent science from assessments and the confidentiality of studies relied upon by authorities must change.
However, it seems that the profits of agrochemical manufacturers trump the rights of children and the public at large: a joint investigation by Unearthed and the NGO Public Eye has found the world’s five biggest pesticide manufacturers are making more than a third of their income from leading products, chemicals that pose serious hazards to human health and the environment.
Mason refers to an analysis of a huge database of 2018’s top-selling ‘crop protection products’ which revealed the world’s leading agrochemical companies made more than 35% of their sales from pesticides classed as “highly hazardous” to people, animals or ecosystems. The investigation identified billions of dollars of income for agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta from chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure.
This investigation is based on an analysis of a huge dataset of pesticide sales from the agribusiness intelligence company Phillips McDougall. This firm conducts detailed market research all over the world and sells databases and intelligence to pesticide companies. The data covers around 40% of the $57.6bn global market for agricultural pesticides in 2018. It focuses on 43 countries, which between them represent more than 90% of the global pesticide market by value.
While Bill Gates promotes a chemical-intensive model of agriculture that dovetails with the needs and value chains of agri-food conglomerates, Mason outlines the spiraling rates of disease in the UK and the US and lays the blame at the door of the agrochemical corporations that Gates has opted to get into bed with. She focuses on the impact of glyphosate-based herbicides as well as the cocktail of chemicals sprayed on crops.
Mason has discussed the health-related impacts of glyphosate in numerous previous reports and in her open letter to Costello again refers to peer-reviewed studies and official statistics which indicate that glyphosate affects the gut microbiome and is responsible for a global metabolic health crisis provoked by an obesity epidemic. Moreover, she presents evidence that glyphosate causes epigenetic changes in humans and animals – diseases skip a generation then appear.
However, the mainstream narrative is to blame individuals for their ailments and conditions which are said to result from ‘lifestyle choices’. Yet Monsanto’s German owner Bayer has confirmed that more than 42,700 people have filed suits against Monsanto alleging that exposure to Roundup herbicide caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto covered up the risks.
Mason says that each year there are steady increases in the numbers of new cancers and increases in deaths from the same cancers, with no treatments making any difference to the numbers; at the same time, she argues, these treatments maximise the bottom line of the drug companies while the impacts of agrochemicals remains conspicuously absent from the disease narrative.
She states that we are exposed to a lifetime’s exposure to thousands of synthetic chemicals that contaminate the blood and urine of nearly every person tested – “a global mass poisoning.”
Gates Foundation in perspective
As part of its hegemonic strategy, the Gates Foundation says it wants to ensure global food security and optimise health and nutrition.
However, Rosemary Mason alludes to the fact that the Gates Foundation seems happy to ignore the deleterious health impacts of agrochemicals while promoting the interests of the firms that produce them, but it facilitates many health programmes that help boost the bottom line of drug companies. Health and health programmes seem only to be defined with certain parameters which facilitate the selling of the products of the major pharmaceutical companies which the foundation partners with. Indeed, researcher Jacob Levich argues that the Gates Foundation not merely facilitates unethical low-cost clinical trials (with often devastating effects for participants) in the Global South but also assists in the creating new markets for the “dubious” products of pharmaceuticals corporations.
As for food security, the foundation would do better by supporting agroecological (agrochemical-free) approaches to agriculture, which various high-level UN reports have advocated for ensuring equitable global food security. But this would leave smallholder agriculture both intact and independent from Western agro-capital, something which runs counter to the underlying aims of the corporations that the foundation supports – dispossession and market dependency.
And these aims have been part of a decades-long strategy where we have seen the strengthening of an emerging global food regime based on agro-export mono-cropping linked to sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. The outcomes have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the consolidation of Western agri-food oligopolies and the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.
While Bill Gates is busy supporting the consolidation of Western agro-capital in Africa under the guise of ensuring ‘food security’, it is very convenient for him to ignore the fact that at the time of decolonisation in the 1960s Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter with exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. The continent now imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. More generally, developing countries produced a billion-dollar yearly surplus in the 1970s but by 2004 were importing US$ 11 billion a year.
The Gates Foundation promotes a (heavily subsidised and inefficient – certainly when the externalised health, social and environment costs are factored in) corporate-industrial farming system and the strengthening of a global neoliberal, fossil-fuel-dependent food regime that by its very nature fuels and thrives on, among other things, unjust trade policies, population displacement and land dispossession (something which the Gates Foundation once called for but euphemistically termed “land mobility”), commodity monocropping, soil and environmental degradation, illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, pollution and the eradication of biodiversity.
At the same time, the foundation is helping powerful corporate interests to appropriate and commodify knowledge. For instance, since 2003, CGIAR (mentioned at the start of this article) and its 15 centres have received more than $720 million from the Gates Foundation. In a June 2016 article in The Asian Age, Vandana Shiva says the centres are accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations, facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through IP laws and seed regulations.
Besides taking control of the seeds of farmers in CGIAR seed banks, Shiva adds that the Gates Foundation (along with the Rockefeller Foundation) is investing heavily in collecting seeds from across the world and storing them in a facility in Svalbard in the Arctic — the ‘doomsday vault’.
The foundation is also funding Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global initiative to take patents on the seed collections through genomic mapping. Seven million crop accessions are in public seed banks.
Shiva says that DivSeek could allow five corporations to own this diversity and argues:
Today, biopiracy is carried out through the convergence of information technology and biotechnology. It is done by taking patents by ‘mapping’ genomes and genome sequences… DivSeek is a global project launched in 2015 to map the genetic data of the peasant diversity of seeds held in gene banks. It robs the peasants of their seeds and knowledge, it robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, its evolutionary history, its link to the soil and reduces it to ‘code’. It is an extractive project to ‘mine’ the data in the seed to ‘censor’ out the commons.
She notes that the peasants who evolved this diversity have no place in DivSeek — their knowledge is being mined and not recognised, honoured or conserved: an enclosure of the genetic commons.
This process is the very foundation of capitalism – appropriation of the commons (seeds, water, knowledge, land, etc.), which are then made artificially scarce and transformed into marketable commodities.
The Gates Foundation talks about health but facilitates the roll-out of a toxic form of agriculture whose agrochemicals cause immense damage. It talks of alleviating poverty and malnutrition and tackling food insecurity but it bolsters an inherently unjust global food regime which is responsible for perpetuating food insecurity, population displacement, land dispossession, privatisation of the commons and neoliberal policies that remove support from the vulnerable and marginalised, while providing lavish subsidies to corporations.
The Gates Foundation is part of the problem, not the solution. To more fully appreciate this, let us turn to a February 2020 article in the journal Globalizations. Its author, Ashok Kumbamu, argues that the ultimate aim of promoting new technologies – whether GM seeds, agrochemicals or commodified knowledge — on a colossal scale is to make agricultural inputs and outputs essential commodities, create dependency and bring all farming operations into the capitalist fold.
To properly understand Bill Gates’s ‘philanthropy’ is not to take stated goals and objectives at face value but to regard his ideology as an attempt to manufacture consent and prevent and marginalise more radical agrarian change that would challenge prevailing power structures and act as impediments to capitalist interests. The foundation’s activities must be located within the hegemonic and dispossessive strategies of imperialism: displacement of the peasantry and subjugating those who remain in agriculture to the needs of global distribution and supply chains dominated by the Western agri-food conglomerates whose interests the Gates Foundation facilitates and legitimises.
In painting critical reporting on the Iowa caucuses debacle as a Russian plot, a Western government-backed information warfare shop smeared The Grayzone and independent reporter Jordan Chariton, falsely claiming both are “state-backed media accounts.”
The Alliance for Securing Democracy, an online censorship initiative of the Western government-funded German Marshall Project, falsely and hypocritically characterized The Grayzone and independent journalist Jordan Chariton as “state-backed media,” smearing them for their factual reporting on the shadowy network behind the controversial app that undermined the integrity of the Iowa caucuses.
The Grayzone has exposed the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) in a series of investigative reports as a neo-McCarthyite outfit prone to spreading disinformation, staffed by counter-terror cranks and national security hustlers.
The ASD’s parent organization also happens to be bankrolled by the US government, numerous European governments, and the European Union, at the tune of millions of dollars — making these false accusations against The Grayzone and Jordan Chariton actual state-backed smears.
Chariton, who founded the independent progressive news outlet Status Coup, hit back at the ASD’s outrageous claims. “The days of faux democracy gladiators defaming journalists – whose factual work they seek to discredit – as part of a Kremlin syndicate are over. It’s time to fight back,” he told The Grayzone.
On February 10, the ASD published a dubious analysis of a supposed Russian effort to spread conspiracies and disinformation around the Iowa caucuses. It honed in on the Russian-funded Sputnik News and three shows broadcast by RT. Those programs included “Going Underground,” which is hosted by British journalist Afshin Rattansi.
The post continued: “In addition, all the most popular tweets about Iowa retweeted in this time period by at least one monitored account pushed a narrative that the Democratic National Committee and/or the Democratic establishment more broadly seeks to undermine Sanders via nefarious means. Monitored accounts ‘Redacted Tonight’ (@redactedtonight) and ‘Watching the Hawks’ (@watchinghawks) are the primary accounts engaging directly with this material.”
On Twitter, state-backed media accounts spread various conspiracy theories about the Iowa caucus, many of which claimed the DNC, news media, and other candidates used “dirty tricks” to steal the victory from Sen. Bernie Sanders. pic.twitter.com/mQJcbaGKzd
— Alliance for Securing Democracy (@SecureDemocracy) February 11, 2020
On Twitter, state-backed media accounts spread various conspiracy theories about the Iowa caucus, many of which claimed the DNC, news media, and other candidates used “dirty tricks” to steal the victory from Sen. Bernie Sanders.
On Twitter, state-backed media accounts spread various conspiracy theories about the Iowa caucus, many of which claimed the DNC, news media, and other candidates used “dirty tricks” to steal the victory from Sen. Bernie Sanders. pic.twitter.com/mQJcbaGKzd
— Alliance for Securing Democracy (@SecureDemocracy) February 11, 2020
“Watching the Hawks” is hosted by American journalist and son of former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, Tyrel Ventura. “Redacted Tonight” is a political satire show hosted by American comedian Lee Camp. Camp opens each show by welcoming his live studio audience to “the comedy show where Americans in America covering American news are called foreign agents.”
The social media managers for both “Watching the Hawks” and “Redacted Tonight” are US citizens.
Nonetheless, the retweeting by these shows of factual reporting by The Grayzone and Jordan Chariton set off national security alarm bells among the disinformation warriors of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
The Grayzone article that the ASD took issue with exposed the role of pro-Israel billiionaire Seth Klarman in pouring his money into the Super PAC behind the faulty Iowa vote results app, while at the same time donating directly to candidate Pete Buttigieg – the candidate who benefited the most from the sabotage of the caucus results.
The Klarman Family Foundation also happens to be a major funder of the ASD.
On Twitter, the ASD muddled the distinction between The Grayzone, Chariton, and the RT-sponsored Twitter accounts that retweeted them. The outfit claimed that “state-backed media accounts spread various conspiracy theories about the Iowa caucuses, many of which claimed the DNC, news media, and other candidates used “dirty tricks” to steal the victory from Sen. Bernie Sanders.” Attached to the tweet was a screenshot of tweets by The Grayzone and Chariton, making no mention of either “Watching the Hawks” or “Redacted Tonight.”
The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal responded to the smear with indignation: “Neither Jordan Chariton nor The Grayzone are state-backed media, unlike your fiscal parent. And our reporting is 100% factual, unlike yours,” Blumenthal wrote on Twitter. “We are currently exploring options for holding your McCarthyite operation fully accountable for spreading malicious disinformation.”
After enduring a withering barrage of online criticism for its malicious falsehood, the ASD issued a weasely “clarifying point.”
The Alliance for securing media citations and grants from oligarchs
The Alliance for Securing Democracy is the most prominent of an array of information warfare initiatives that exploited public hysteria over supposed Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections.
The group’s Hamilton 68 Dashboard claimed to have tracked 600 Twitter accounts supposedly “linked to Russian influence operations.” In the mainstream press, that dubious claim was stretched even further as the dashboard was touted as a tool for keeping tabs on “Russian bots.”
Among the widely cited claims of Russian covert influence campaigns was the #taketheknee trend inspired by blacklisted NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s high-profile protest of police brutality. The ASD’s cynical accusation, that a domestic protest movement against racism was being manipulated by the Kremlin, was reported uncritically by the New York Times.
As @BenjaminNorton reported, Alliance for Securing Democracy is co-directed by neocon Jamie Fly, who currently serves as the president and CEO of the US government's media propaganda arm, RFE/RL.
The ASD has even claimed that Stars and Stripes, a military publication operated out of the Department of Defense, was an outlet “relevant to Russian messaging themes.” It has made similar accusations against The Intercept.
Oddly enough, the sole proprietor of The Intercept is billionaire Pierre Omidyar, whose Democracy Fund is a major financial backer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
Aside from Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, the ASD is backed by Craig Newmark, the namesake of Craigslist, and the Klarman Family Foundation. As The Grayzone recently reported, Seth Klarman is a major funder of pro-settler Israel lobby organizations. He is also a prominent debt vulture strangling Puerto Rico with austerity. And, again, Klarman is a top donor to Buttigieg, the self-declared winner of the Iowa caucuses.
Ascertaining a full picture of just who is backing the ASD is not possible, however, as the organization’s public list of funders “does not include any donors who do not wish to disclose their charitable giving.”
But besides the centrist billionaires that fund it, the group’s fiscal parent rakes in money from Western governments, including the US State Department.
Meet the real state-backed disinfo shop
While the Alliance for Securing Democracy claims to be independently funded, it shares major backers with the German Marshall Fund (GMF), including the Sandler Foundation.
Likewise, Omidyar’s Democracy Fund gave somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million to the GMF, while Klarman Family Foundation chipped in between $250,000 and $499,999.
According to the ASD website, the group is “housed at the German Marshall Fund.”
Unlike The Grayzone and Jordan Chariton, the GMF is a state-backed entity that faithfully pursues the agenda of its government funders.
In the 2019 fiscal year, the German Marshall Fund received $1 million or more from both the German and Swedish foreign offices, at least $1 million from the US State Department, and $1 million or more from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a primary arm of the US government for fomenting regime change abroad.
The European Commission — which is the executive branch of the European Union — supported the German Marshall Fund to the tune of between $500,000 and $999,999.
The German Marshall Fund is a state-funded propaganda org that works with Facebook censor pages is complaining about what exactly? Oh that’s right! China! https://t.co/aY2M5qwZBs
Additional supporters of the German Marshall Fund include branches of the German and US government, anti-communist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, NATO, internet giants like Google, the European Parliament, oil companies like Exxon, big agro companies like Bayer, large banks, and an array of global arms dealers such as Raytheon and Boeing.
The Theranos nanotainer of Russiagate online initiatives
The Alliance for Security Democracy’s bogus dashboard was undoubtedly the most-cited authority on Russian bot activity in the media. But its credibility suffered a major blow following a series of revealing remarks by founder Clint Watts, who confessed to Buzzfeed, “We don’t even think [all the accounts we monitor are] all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.”
Having banked his credibility on fighting the supposedly pernicious presence of Russian bots, Watts went on to concede, “I’m not convinced on this bot thing.”
The ASD’s faulty methodology was developed by J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan. The latter was involved in orchestrating a false flag influence campaign targeting Alabama’s Senate elections, and was banned from Facebook after it was exposed. New York Times reporter Scott Shane, who reported on the disinformation campaign, was also responsible for hyping up the ASD’s supposed findings on the “take the knee” hashtag.
But among the ASD’s cadre of national security hacks, Clint Watts is perhaps the most shameless hustler. As The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal previously reported, “Watts appears to speak no Russian, has no record of reporting or scholarship from inside Russia, and has produced little to no work of any discernible academic value on Russian affairs.”
In his published work, Watts has not only called for the US to “befriend” the “al-Qaeda linked group” Ahrar al-Sham; he also urged Washington to support “jihadi[s]” in order to deliver “payback” to Russia.
In testimony to Congress in 2017, Watts claimed Russia organized a massive bot attack on his Twitter account after his article urging support for al-Qaeda was published. The tale was not just hyperbole; it appeared to have been a fabrication. He also regaled Congress with a story about RT’s and Sputnik’s coverage of a stand-off at Turkey’s Incirlik Airbase that was completely false.
Clint Watts has admitted to running an influence operation for 15 years aimed at improving approval for US foreign policy in the Middle East, which he has said “had almost no success,” and came at a cost of “billions a year in tax dollars.”
While he hypes his work for the FBI, where he spent at most one year, Watts has spent much of his career at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a hardline neoconservative think tank founded by an open white supremacist.
And left unmentioned in Watts’ bio is his affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency: the Agency has published an article he co-authored with former CIA director and current CNN contributor John Brennan.
Besides producing dubious analysis, Clint Watts has exhibited a tendency for paranoid Cold War fantasies. In 2017, he warned an audience that Russia was “trying to knock us down and take us over,” then claimed that his colleagues had seen their computers “burned up by malware” after they criticized Russia.
In response to supposed Russian meddling, Watts has called for interfering in Russia’s elections, “but do[ing] it in line with the founding principles of democracy and America.”
He has also called for a government-imposed censorship campaign inside the United States, demanding it “quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”
Even as the Alliance for Securing Democracy was exposed by The Grayzone and others as the Russiagate version of the phony Theranos nanotainer – with Clint Watts playing the Cold Warrior analog to Elizabeth Holmes – the state-backed neo-McCarthyite operation has forged ahead, rebranding its dashboard as “Hamilton 2.0” and rolling out an “Authoritarian Interference Tracker.”
Currently, the ASD is hyping up claims by NATO vassal state Estonia about Russian interference in their country, according to its “Authoritarian Interference Tracker.” Coincidentally, former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves sits on ASD’s advisory council.
He is joined on the ASD board by Michael Chertoff, the notoriously self-dealing former Department of Homeland Security chief; and by John Podesta, who workshopped ways to “stick the knife” into Bernie Sanders while leading Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. Podesta was recently nominated to the 2020 Democratic Convention Rules Committee.
Also on the ASD advisory council is neoconservative extraordinaire turned liberal media’s favorite Never-Trumper Bill Kristol, who is widely acknowledged as the leading media and think tank influencer behind the US invasion of Iraq. Kristol has called for a deep state coup to depose Trump, and is rolling out a wave of ads to undermine Bernie Sanders.
Former CIA director Michael Morell, who offered unsolicited advice on killing Russians and Iranians in Syria during a televised interview, and the obsessively anti-Russian former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul also occupy seats on the council.
While the ASD couches its work as an attempt to counter Russian disinformation, a clear pattern has emerged of efforts to suppress domestic reporting in the US that doesn’t conform to the imperial foreign policy consensus.
As The Grayzone previously reported, senior German Marshall Fund fellow and neocon movement veteran Jamie Fly appeared to take credit for a purge of popular Facebook accounts of alternative media outlets including The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block. He promised it was “just the beginning.”
Now, the Alliance for Securing Democracy has trained its guns on The Grayzone. And with its latest falsehood, this malign organization has targeted an independent journalistic organization that has done more than any other to hold it accountable.
Venezuela lies abound. Both the USG (United States Government) and its lapdog MSM (Mainstream Media) have been going into overdrive, exaggerating or just plain lying about the state of affairs in Venezuela. Truth is always a casualty of war, and it’s also a casualty of pre-war, as the NWO prepares the ground for military intervention by demonization and propaganda. Here are 8 lies about Venezuela which are being used to justify yet another coup in a long, long history of US coups in foreign lands.
Venezuela Lies #1: The Venezuelan People Have No Food and the Shelves Are Bare
In these videos (here and here) on the ground in Caracas, Max Blumenthal exposed one of the lies about Venezuela that is constantly repeated, i.e. that the people have no food and the supermarket shelves are bare.
Venezuela Lies #2: The US Only Wants to Send Aid
If by “aid” you mean “weapons and barbed wire for radical opposition forces,” then yes, the US only wants to send aid. However, if by “aid” you mean actual medicine, then no. This VenezuelaAnalysis report quotes a NYT reporter and USAID itself. They either don’t have medicine as part of the inventory or state outright that there was no medicine:
“According to New York Times reporter Anatoly Kurmanaev, the trucks that the opposition tried to force across the border contained “no medicine” at all, with reports that a “small” amount of medicine was being stockpiled in Cucuta not confirmed by USAID. Initial inventories from USAID made no mention of medicine, listing only basic food and personal hygiene products amongst the “aid”.”
The Venezuelan Government is accepting aid from Russia and other countries it can trust, just not the US, since US “aid” may just “accidentally” happen to contain weapons for anti-Maduro agitators (or, as the Spanish say, compradores). Hmm, wonder how those arms got in the food truck?
As I covered in the article NGOs: Choice Tool of Subversion for the New World Order, NGOs have become a weaponized tool of soft power through which the NWO expands its empire – meddling, destabilizing, toppling and installing, all the while using the NGO as a humanitarian pretext. USAID is just another in a long-line of NGOs loyal to the US Government and NWO, willing to put a nice PR happy face on their agenda of subversion.
Venezuela Lies #3: Juan Guaido Has Legitimacy in Declaring Himself President
As I covered in my previous article Is This the Most Blatant US Coup Ever?, Juan Guaido is a US-CIA stooge through and through. He’s an agent-provocateur “opposition leader” who has been carefully groomed to play his role in the coup. His claim to be interim president of Venezuela under Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution is, legally, utter nonsense, since Maduro has not abandoned the presidency and Maduro held free, open and fair elections as adjudged by outside independent parties.
Venezuela Lies #4: Many Countries Support Guaido
The US claims many nations and groups support its efforts to topple Maduro and install Guaido. In reality, these countries are basically vassal states or other nations controlled by the US that don’t want to upset the apple cart. Notice the strategy of the US: try to co-opt the United Nations HRC (Human Right Council) into following US coup efforts, and try to strong-arm groups like the OAS (Organization of American States) and the Lima Group into betraying their brother nation Venezuela.
The US tried this same trick with the Syrian War by creating and controlling a group called “Friends of Syria.” Here is what Venezuela’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador Jorge Valero said:
“the self-proclaimed “Lima Group” is a cartel made up of satellite governments of the imperial government to break Latin American and Caribbean unity, and, due to the failure of using the Ministry of the Colonies, which is the OAS to isolate Venezuela in this organization. The empire and its minions couldn’t approve Article 20 of Inter-American Democratic Charter of the Permanent Council of the OAS and resort to the United Nations Security Council, where they also failed. The creation of puppet governments by the US is not new.”
Venezuela Lies #5: The US Cares about the Venezuelan People (Just Like It Cares about the Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian and Iranian People)
The NWO uses the US to bring all nations into its fold, but it like to do so with the veneer of democracy so as to gain more public support and engender less resistance. Subversion, NGO soft power and covert operations are more palatable than overt control and boot-in-the-face oppression. In this vein, the USG likes to pretend it truly cares and has deep compassion for the people of nations like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and any other place it plans to subvert, invade or bomb … even though it has never professed such care in the past and will probably never again profess it in the future once its new puppet leader is installed.
Just look at the kind of lies, hypocrisy and nonsense Pence and a “deeply concerned” Pompeo tweeted about Iran when the USG set it sights on igniting a coup there in 2018:
Venezuela Lies #6: Venezuela is Only in the Condition It is Because of Chavez, Maduro and Socialism (They’re the Bad Guys)
Nothing is black and white. It is possible to look at the unfolding Venezuelan crisis and acknowledge that Maduro has mismanaged things while at the same time seeing the gross foreign interference he and his government have been subjected to. As I covered in other articles such as Venezuelan Economic Crisis: The Real Cause is Not Socialism, US-NWO foreign meddling is by far the biggest factor here. For instance, did you know that Bank of England has effectively stolen USD$1.2 billion from Venezuela by toeing the NWO line and blocking Venezuela from accessing it? Did you know that the US has effectively stolen USD$11 billion from Venezuela by freezing its US accounts? How is a small nation supposed to function as normal when such massive amounts are stolen from it?
Venezuela Lies #7: Yes, the US Has Toppled Governments Worldwide, But “This Time It’s Different”
Once you study enough history, you begin to see the lies of tyrants and empires. The lie remains the same. The US wants Venezuela’s gold and mineral reserves. It’s only 5 days from the US, whereas the Middle East is around 20 days from the US and in a very volatile part of the world. There is also the strategic acquisition of the mineral coltan. They also want to teach the successive government to Hugo Chavez a lesson after he thumbed his nose at the US-NWO Empire. This isn’t any different from other subversions and invasions. It fits the pattern exactly.
Venezuela Lies #8: It’s a “Grassroots Uprising” against a “Brutal Dictator”
This entire coup has been planned, orchestrated and executed from Washington. Period. There is no “grassroots uprising.” Ever wondered why Assad and Maduro are “brutal dictators” but bin Salman, El Sisi and other US-CIA stooges are not? It’s all about branding the enemy, marketing foreign interference and controlling perception. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy and vice versa. Al-Qaeda is bad and now Al-Qaeda is good. Were we fighting Eastasia or was it Eurasia?
Who is the brutal dictator? Who is imposing economic warfare and deprivation, starvation and misery by sanction? Who is fomenting regime change on innocent nations? Who is funding and supporting terrorists to topple any government they don’t like?
Final Thoughts: The US vs. Russia/China Proxy War Continues
Both Russia and China have invested a lot in Venezuela, including actual investments in their oil, military assistance and financial loans. They are not about to let the US get away with this – even if Venezuela is in the USA’s backyard, geographically speaking. The Monroe Doctrine, which started out in the 1800s as a policy by which the US would protect fellow American nations from European invasion, has now been turned on its head. Raving warmonger John Bolton recently mentioned the term as yet another excuse for the US to dominate whomever it wants on the 2 American continents. However, despite all the Venezuela lies emanating from Washington DC and the MSM, Venezuela is going to be a tough nut to crack, and many American and Westerners are already aware of the propaganda being used to foment war.
After the Crash 