#hersh gp

[arunswild]

I don't really know what to say. This morning I got the news that six of the hostages were found dead, recently shot. I know the family of one of them, and they are the bravest and most resilient people I know. They gave me, and, well, everyone hope that their son would be back. I fully believed he would. Everyone did. I guess we just expected him to turn up one day at synagogue after all this time.

There are a few thoughts going through my head right now. Most of them start with the word "why", like,

Why did a 23 year old spend 11 out of the 12 months of his 23rd year in a tunnel?

Why do baby-murdering, hostage-taking, house-burning militias live two hours away from my house?

and

Why do I, an 18 year old, fresh out of highschool, know three dead people, ranging in ages from 19 to 32?

Some of them start with the words "what", like

What are they going to do now?

What awful, awful heartbreak am I going to hear about next?

and

What the fuck?

[girlactionfigure]

🔅Wed night  - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

❗️INJURED IN THE ARAMSHA ATTACK.. increases to 18, soldiers, 6 serious.  Also of note, there was no alarm, and no interception attempt?

⚠️IRAN EVACUATES FACILITIES IN SYRIA.. Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah have reduced the presence of their senior officers in Syria, and evacuated various facilities.

⚠️TRAVEL TO IRAN SUSPENDED.. The German airline Lufthansa extends the suspension of its flights to Tehran until April 30.

⚠️UNIFIL HIDES.. All UNIFIL forces in Lebanese territory entered shelters.  It is possible that this indicates a broad attack that will be carried out in southern Lebanon.

⚠️GPS JAMMING LEBANON.. Lebanese residents report disruption of GPS devices, TV and satellite channels and cellular communications in Tzur and the south.

▪️GAZA - NUSIRAT.. a week of activity in the center of the Gaza Strip in Nusirat. IDF fighters successfully destroyed an underground tunnel that crossed the Gaza River, another 5 underground combat complexes, and 2 rocket production sites. In addition, the extension of the Netzer corridor to the south was successfully completed. And dozens of terrorists were eliminated.

▪️TIME MOST INFLUENTIAL.. Rachel Goldberg Polin, the mother of Hersh Shacht, who was kidnapped in Gaza, was included in the list of "100 influential people" by Time magazine.

▪️ECONOMY - SHEKEL.. with tensions in Israel, the shekel has lost a bit of value, now at 3.78 to $1. 

▪️ECONOMY - CEO PAY.. highest paid public CEO in Israel, CEO of Teva pharmaceuticals.   He makes $8 million per month, or NIS 30 million per month.

[mariacallous]

Before he was kidnapped, Hersh Goldberg-Polin was a big reader. He would absorb himself in different types of books at different times, according to his father, Jonathan Polin. For a while, he was obsessed with biographies of presidents. There was a period he read exclusively about the Holocaust. Lately, he’s been reading books that, Polin says, reflect his son’s curiosity about the world. Right now, the tome by his bed is The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. For 21 days, it has sat there untouched, as his family waits for Goldberg-Polin to come home.

Polin’s nightmare started on October 7, a date now etched into the Israeli psyche, when Hamas gunmen forced their way through the Gaza border wall, killing entire families, destroying border towns, and kidnapping men, women, and children. Polin was at his local synagogue when the air raid sirens went off. By the time he got home around 9 am, his wife Rachel Goldberg showed him two WhatsApp messages she’d received from their 23-year-old son an hour earlier. “We had back-to-back messages sent to us by Hersh at 8:11 am,” Polin told WIRED. “The first one said, ‘I love you.’ The second one said, ‘I'm sorry.’” They’d seen Goldberg-Polin, a dual Israeli-American citizen, the night before. The family thought he was going camping with a friend. But they soon realized he’d spent the night at the Supernova trance music festival, now known as the place where 260 people were murdered. Many others were taken back to Gaza as hostages.

Polin has spent the past three weeks sifting through photos and videos on social media, trying to piece together what happened to his son after he sent those early morning messages. The day of the attack was well documented, with both victims and perpetrators posting footage online. But most of it was filmed inside Israel. Fewer families have seen videos showing their loved ones inside Gaza. For many, the trail ends at the border, leaving families to look for other signs, such as phone location signals, to try to confirm that their loved ones are among the 224 people now believed to be held hostage.

Polin says the Israeli authorities confirmed the last signal they detected from his son’s phone was on the Gaza side of the border. “When you're living the awful life that we're living today, you have to look for hope and optimism anywhere you can get it,” he says. “So having a phone identification come in from Gaza is something that gave us a small dose of—I don’t know what the word is, not strength, not optimism, it’s hope—hope that he is with his phone and that he is alive.”

Phone pings can help triangulate a device, a method that approximates location based on the signal a phone sends to nearby cell phone towers when the device makes phone calls, sends messages, or accesses the internet. A person doesn’t have to be actively using their phone for it to send these signals. As long as the device is still on, apps working in the background can also create a “ping” that indicates location according to Scott Greene, a digital forensics expert. In terms of finding where a device is, triangulation is “pretty darn reliable,” he says.

When Israeli officials do not provide families with triangulation data from cell phone towers, families have been trying to track down phones themselves, using the find-my-phone features offered by iPhones and Androids. If family members know, or can guess, a loved one’s password, they can use the feature to ask the device to report back its location. “As long as the phone is on and has a signal, then the GPS will be received by the cell phone device,” he adds. “You can say ‘Where's my device?’ And it will tell you.”

But phone pings are not conclusive proof of life. Phones can be separated from their owners, or they can, rarely, provide faulty data. WIRED has spoken to one person, who declined to comment for this article, whose relative’s phone was traced by the authorities to Gaza, only for their body to later be identified inside Israel.

Others have not found the answers they’re looking for. Inbar Haiman, 27, was also at the Supernova music festival when Hamas attacked. She is, her boyfriend Noam Alon says, “a true artist … a magical girl … everything I ever wanted.” Like Polin, Alon has spent the past two weeks trying to piece together what happened to her.

So far, he knows that the last text message she sent was at 7:30 am, warning a friend to find somewhere to hide. Two other festivalgoers, who were with Haiman when they were trying to outrun gunmen chasing them, told him what happened next. “She froze, she was so panicked, she started to cry, and she couldn't run anymore,” Alon recounts. “In that moment, a motorbike with two terrorists came, and they took her.” Friends later sent Alon a video they found on Telegram. From that footage, he could identify Haiman being dragged across the field. There is blood on her face. She appears unconscious. But he recognized her by the distinctive leggings she was wearing that day.

The gap in information is what happened next and where Haiman is now. Alon believes she is in Gaza. But for confirmation, like many others, he turned to her mobile for clues. “We tried to locate her phone,” he says, adding that they used her Android’s Find My Device feature. “Perhaps it is in Gaza. But the last signal was in the area we know she was kidnapped from.”

Where families have struggled to trace their loved ones’ phones, many of Israel’s cyber experts have volunteered to help. NSO Group and Candiru, two surveillance companies blacklisted by the US, have been asked to upgrade their spyware capabilities to help find hostages, according to a report by Bloomberg.

“We were also trying, when we didn't think it's damaging, to assist families to track down phones,” says Omri Segev Moyal, CEO of Israeli cybersecurity firm Profero, adding that this is an activity he and his colleagues do in a personal capacity, not as representatives of the company. He declines to comment on whether they have tracked anyone’s phone to Gaza. Instead, he says, he has helped relatives locate their loved ones’ bodies or find people who were still in hiding. “It's not something that only we are doing,” he says. “I bet everyone with knowledge of mobile devices is trying to help.”

Volunteer cyber experts are not forthcoming about how exactly they are accessing phones’ locations, in case they give details away to the people holding the hostages. Karine Nahon, a professor of information science at Israel’s Reichman University, started a civilian war room of cyber experts to try to locate missing people in the hours after the October 7 attack. The team—which started at 450 people and has now downsized to less than 50 as the number of unsolved cases has shrunk—used a series of algorithms to try to match missing people’s faces, voices, and clothing in the huge amounts of social media content posted to online platforms. “We also use location technologies, but unfortunately I can't speak about it more,” Nahon says.

Families of Israel’s missing aren’t interested in the exact techniques that decipher where their loved ones are or how they are brought home. “I want to see every hostage brought back to their families alive,” says Goldberg-Polin’s father. “That's the goal. The means to get there is something I don't really weigh in on. That’s other people's jobs.”

Polin, at least, has now found further evidence that his son crossed the border. A video, shared with his parents on October 16 by CNN journalist Anderson Cooper, shows Goldberg-Polin being forced at gunpoint into a truck. He is missing his left hand and part of his arm. After speaking to eyewitnesses, Polin believes this was the result of a grenade blast.

“It's every parent's worst nightmare to see a video of their child bloodied, with a limb missing, being put onto a pickup truck of terrorists,” says Polin. But he is encouraged to see that, in the video, Goldberg-Polin is walking on his own. “He looks, given the circumstances, to be somewhat composed. And I'm encouraged that with his weak hand he pulled himself onto the truck. So those things—that composure and that sign of some strength—gave me a sense of strength myself, that he's got fortitude and strength and perseverance. And maybe he can fight his way through this.”

[figureskatingfanblog]

According to Phil Hersh, the GP assignments will be delayed a couple more weeks. Originally, he said they were expected on the 30th.

[gaiuspublius]

Rogue intelligence agencies, executive assassination, and more.

GP

[projectrepublic-blog]

Russian Collusion? Take A Look At What Went On During Obama’s Terms

Claudia Rosett, an award-winning journalist who worked for the Wall Street Journal for 17 years and known for her groundbreaking reporting on UN corruption, picks through the nuances of despots and dictators around the world.  Rosett sat down with The Daily Caller and said the message from the 2016 election had nothing to do with Russia, but everything to do with shrinking paychecks, vanishing jobs and over-regulation.     Seymour Hersh: Deep State Created Russia Collusion Story (Leaked Audio)     The Democrats’ rhetoric about #Trump’s supposed Russian collusion does not match the degree of enthusiasm and flexibility that former President Barack Obama  actually displayed  to Russia for his entire two terms, Rosett says in this video interview.  She cites: when Obama was caught on a hot mic  promising flexibility  to Vladimir Putin, shelving missile defense for Europe in a phony “reset” with our dangerous adversary, inadequate pursuit of Edward Snowden who is still hiding in Russia, the imaginary “red line” with Syria that opened the door to Russia being emboldened in the Middle East, the Iran deal that advantaged Russia and their allies on the world scene and the weak response of the U.S. when Russia annexed Crimea, which belonged to Ukraine.     The Real Russian Collusion – Inside the Obama-Clinton Russian Uranium Scandal     As for the unusual  degree of unmasking ��of political adversaries caught in foreign intelligence intercepts in the final year of Obama’s tenure by someone like the former ambassador to the UN,  Samantha Power , Rosett is suspicious and poking around.  The breach of privacy and criminal leaking that appears to have happened with a potential abuse of power needs greater public exposure, she believes.  She says Fusion GPS, the shady group of former journalists who were for sale in currying the unverified “Russian dossier” of Donald #Trump is, to her, a “sad icon of what is happening in journalism today.” They are “guns for hire” and it is a sad use of talent, she thinks. Someone should do a page one story on who Fusion GPS is and what they do.     Democrats Still Can’t Explain ‘Circumstantial Evidence Of Collusion’ Between Trump Campaign And Russia even…     Journalism, sloppy with anonymous leaks and poor editing, is going through creative destruction with a big market shake out based on technology, she says. Her advice to young aspiring journalists is to use shoe leather and actual meetings to get the story, rather than becoming dependent on what you find on the internet.  Russia is a real dangerous, expansionist, predatory threat, she says, with “its weapons, annexation of territory, holding joint military maneuvers with China, support for Iran, its weapon sales to the Middle East, its bombing runs in Syria.” As someone who worked in Moscow, Russia’s not the kind of “weaponized for domestic politics threat” you hear on the nightly news right now,” she explains.  Rosett worries most right now about North Korea’s unpredictable missile launches. Sanctions on  North Korea are not working  and the only solution to the growing crisis of their missiles is to get rid of the regime with the minimal risk of casualties, she says.     Fusion GPS Gave Russian Lawyer Dirt on Clinton to offer Don Jr.     One of her many accomplishments was exposing massive corruption at the United Nations with the Oil for Food program, which she talks about in this video. Her work at the U.N. has given her the impression that the U.N. is “Animal Farm” for the planet. She calls climate change a “good scam” picking winners and losers and making some people very rich while trying to lock up America’s energy market with ideological terrorism.      And who could forget this gem:      The post  Russian Collusion? Take A Look At What Went On During Obama’s Terms  appeared first on  Project Republic | Headlines, News, Politics .

  #SJW #Conservative #LIbrals #Congress #MAGA #House #White #Liberal

[thewebofslime]

The “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” plot against President Donald Trump is now exposed for the world to see, with special counsel Robert Mueller coming up empty in his quest to pin Trump with Russian collusion or obstruction of justice. We have explosive information about this scheme, including the involvement of former president Barack Obama, Obama intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper, failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok, the Fusion GPS set-up agent Natalia Veselnitskaya, and even foreign leaders including Angela Merkel. This article will firmly demonstrate the following: Hillary Clinton’s campaign used the Christopher Steele dossier before their involvement was covered up Senior Obama administration officials secretly plotted to involve senators in the “Russia” conspiracy James Clapper tried to use the “Russia” narrative to get the Supreme Court to invalidate Trump’s presidency Natalia Veselnitskaya was a Fusion GPS set-up agent who worked out of an Obama official’s office in D.C. Peter Strzok ran point on destroying General Flynn and covering up for Hillary Clinton Barack Obama used foreign powers to keep the scheme going, even after he left the Oval Office to President Trump HILLARY Used The Dossier During Her Campaign advertisement - story continues below Trending: EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: Shep Smith Accuser Says Fox News Host Sexually Attacked Him, Kept Going After He Tried To Push Him Off The Hillary Clinton campaign issued a press release on September 24, 2016 promoting information from the Christopher Steele dossier. That press release has almost completely been scrubbed from the Internet, but is preserved in at least one tweet and in an Internet archive sponsored by The American Presidency Project. The Clinton campaign, which funded the debunked dossier in an effort to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil Trump Tower, actively promoted a “Bombshell Report About Trump Aide’s Chilling Ties To Kremlin.” The Trump aide with the purported Kremlin ties was Carter Page. The “bombshell report” was a Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff headlined “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Rep. Devin Nunes’ intelligence memo makes clear that Isikoff’s article, which was promoted by the Clinton campaign, used Christopher Steele as its source and was used to help obtain the FISA warrant. The FISA warrant application falsely states that Steele did not leak information to Yahoo News. advertisement - story continues below “We’ve never seen anything like this in American politics,” Hillary for America says in its statement, which called the information in Isikoff’s article “chilling.” Clinton adviser Adam Parkhomenko tweeted out the statement: Screenshot OBAMA Officials Plotted To Get Senators Involved In The Plot In The Hours Before President Trump Took Office Newly released emails show the Obama administration scrambling to create the “Russia” scandal within 24 hours of President Donald Trump taking the oath of office in January 2017. The desperation of the Obama administration is evident in the emails, in which the Obama team tries to involve Democratic senators Warner and Cardin and Republican senator Corker in the plot. Close observers know that the Operation Crossfire Hurricane strategy surfaced during the 2016 presidential election and continued well into Trump’s presidency, with General Michael Flynn getting snared in a Peter Strzok/Sally Yates ambush play in the early days of the Trump White House. Now, Team Obama’s documented effort to cook up the Russia story before Trump’s inauguration emboldens a narrative already proved by text messages (presented below) involving Obama official James Clapper: the Obama people actually thought they could stop Trump from getting sworn in. Judicial Watch, which obtained the emails in a Freedom of Information Act case, reports: “In a Thursday, January 5, 2017, email chain then-State Department Congressional Advisor Hera Abassi indicates that then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland’s bureau was attempting to get Russian investigation related documents to the office of Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) office as quickly as possible. (In June 2016 Nuland permitted a meeting between Steele and the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome. Nuland told CBS News that the State Department knew about the Steele dossier by July 2016.) In the email, with the subject line “For Immediate Review – Call Sheet for S Call with Senator Warner,” Abassi writes: “I told Cardin’s folks … that the process is long. Can we ensure that there are no holdups on our end?” Minutes later, Abassi confirms that Nuland was fully aware of the information that the State Department was providing to members of Congress alleging Russia interference information: advertisement - story continues below “This is definitely on EUR A/S radar!” Leaving no doubt that the State Department officials knew they were transmitting classified information, in a Wednesday, January 18, 2017, email with the subject line “Cables/M,” Former Foreign Service Officer Kerem Bilge writes to State Department Congressional advisor Hilary Johnson and others: “Highest class is SECRET/NOFORN.” Johnson replies: “FYI – so we can keep the SECRET/NOFORN header, and should declassify it 25 years from tomorrow. “I forwarded the fully cleared version to the two of you on the high side [Editor’s Note: “high side” is State Department term for high security classification system], but let me know if there’s anything else you need from me on this. “Note: we’ll need to make sure there is someone in Senate security tomorrow who can accept these.” On Wednesday, January 18, 2017, Johnson confirms that classified documents were sent to Senator Corker in addition to Senator Cardin. “Flagging that I sent you a high side request for clearance of the draft transmittal letter to send documents to Senators Corker and Cardin.” Additionally, involved in providing classified information to members of the Senate was Naz Durakoglu, Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs. In an email dated Thursday, January 19, 2017, with the subject line “Signed, sealed, delivered” Durakoglu apparently confirms that Obama State Department officials were eager to provide the classified material before Trump was sworn into office: “We made the deadline!” Durakoglu states [Emphasis added] “Thank you everyone for what was truly a Department-wide effort!” President Trump was inaugurated less than 24 hours later. In a Wednesday, January 18, 2017 email, Naz Durakoglu signed off on the document transmittal letter on behalf of her bureau. This letter accompanied “the documents to Senator Corker and Cardin” In a Thursday, January 19, 2017 email, Durakoglu appears to confirm that she is who carried the documents from the State Department to Capitol Hill. She states, “I will be carrying over the cables to the Hill.'” Judicial Watch passage ends Multiple elements of the Obama machine were working overtime on their Russian cooking in the immediate lead-up to President Donald Trump’s historic inauguration. CLAPPER Tried To Use ‘Russia’ To Get The Supreme Court To Block Trump’s Presidency Obama administration Director of National Intelligence James Clapper held a meeting in his last days in office to discuss the idea of going to a Supreme Court justice to block President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to a high-level member of the intelligence community who spoke with a Big League Politics source. Clapper discussed blocking the inauguration on the grounds that Trump was an illegitimate president due to alleged Russian interference in the election, according to the sources. It is not known whether Clapper ever actually convened a meeting with a Supreme Court justice to discuss the Russia case, or whether he simply discussed the idea of doing so. By the time Trump entered office on January 20, the Russia narrative was already underway. A high-level member of the intelligence community who witnessed the meeting said that Clapper discussed going to one of three female Supreme Court justices to make the case that alleged Russian interference could invalidate Trump’s claim to the presidency. Here’s a text the witness sent to BLP’s source: Here’s another text the witness sent to BLP’s source around the same time, describing how the Deep State was making General Michael Flynn a “rising target” for his alleged involvement with Russians, and stating that House Speaker Paul Ryan is a “wild card” in the Deep State wars. Big League Politics recently reported on an audiotape in which Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh admitted that slain DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source for Wikileaks’ release of DNC emails in 2016, not a Russian hack. Hersh also said that Clapper and Obama administration CIA director John Brennan helped to create the Russia narrative against Trump. So, how did the conspirators do it? They used a set-up agent named Natalia Veselnitskaya, the fabled “Russian lawyer.” NATALIA: The Conspirators Got Her In, Then Locked Her Out, of The Country The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, then led by anti-President Trump activist Preet Bharara, played a key role in getting Natalia Veselnitskaya into the country in 2015-2016 on special Obama administration passes. Now, fired U.S. Attorney Bharara’s former office has charged Veselnitskaya with obstruction of justice in an unrelated case. They did this to force Natalia to remain in Russia and not come back to the United States to testify, according to high-level FBI sources. Why? Because Natalia has made it clear that she knows Glenn Simpson — the Fusion GPS head she had dinner with the night before and and the night after her Trump Tower set-up meeting — and she has said that her Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. Robert Mueller, Bharara, and the anti-Trump conspirators want to focus on Michael Cohen as a witness and block out any witnesses that would unravel their entire invented narrative — like Natalia, the spy who was used to set up the phony meeting that led to the fraudulent FISA warrants on the Trump team. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that Veseltnitskaya gained parole into the United States during the Obama administration due to a DHS decision made “in concurrence with the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Southern District of New York,” then headed by Preet Bharara. But the very people who wanted to get Natalia in now very much want to keep her out. advertisement - story continues below Natalia Veselnitskaya was charged with obstruction of justice Tuesday to prevent her from coming back to the United States to testify in the Robert Mueller-related cases because her statements have already contradicted Mueller’s narrative, according to high-level FBI sources. Veselnitskaya, who is now in Russia, was charged for making a “misleading declaration” in a civil money-laundering case. Veselnitskaya’s indictment was filed in federal court in Manhattan and unsealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, formerly led by anti-Trump activist Preet Bharara and still dominated by his underlings. Now Veselnitskaya can’t return to the United States to contradict the Michael Cohen-focused case, because she would be arrested upon her arrival in this country. So what could Veselnitskaya spill if she testified? For one thing, Fusion GPS has tried to claim no knowledge of Veselnitskaya’s Trump Tower meeting, despite the fact that Veselnitskaya had dinner with Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson the night before the meeting and also the night after the meeting. Veselnitskaya’s appearance on Fox News, in which she discussed her relationship with Glenn Simpson, did not sit well with the Operation Crossfire Hurricane conspirators. Particularly her quote, “But my meeting was not at all connected with Mrs. Hillary Clinton.” Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney who signed the Veselnitskaya indictment, was recused from the Michael Cohen case by Department of Justice officials working under Rod Rosenstein. Berman is identified in the press as a Trump appointee but he is actually a Jeff Sessions appointee. Here is what an FBI insider recently told us, prior to Mueller officially coming up empty-handed: “Mueller’s team of partisans has a problem. They want to get Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner so they are working hard to prove that Jr and Kushner lied about the June 9th 2016 Trump Tower meeting. The Special Counsel has their version (Fusion GPS’ version) of what happened in the meeting but Veselnitskaya and Manafort’s versions don’t support their version. They tried to squeeze Manafort into reciting their version but in the end he resisted. So they claimed to the Judge that Manafort lied in his proffer to them. Veselnitskaya already met with Senate investigators and gave testimony about the meeting. This testimony doesn’t fall in line with the Special Counsel’s version so they have to discredit her and keep her from coming to the U.S. for any future hearings hence the strange indictment today by holdovers of Preet Bharara. The Trump Tower meeting, facilitated by Fusion GPS and debriefed by Fusion GPS, was an original attempt to get candidate Trump to make commitments to Russia regarding the subversion of the Magnitsky Act. This was the original purpose of the entrapment but candidate Trump didn’t fall for it. So they didn’t want a good set-up to go to waste. Veselnitskaya only mentioned dirt on Hillary as a rouse to get the Trump campaign to meet with her regarding the Magnitsky scheme. Fusion GPS, Brennan and Comey were trying to set Trump up to commit a serious crime related to Russia but they were unsuccessful. After Trump was elected they dug through all of their attempts to find something useful and realized they could spin several setup meetings with Trump Campaign officials as somehow being related to hacked emails. This is proven by the fact that all the meetings were conducted by people associated with the CIA (Halper and Mifsud) and the FBI (Fusion GPS and Henry Greenburg). It is also proven by the fact that the FISA warrants obtained by the FBI never had any mention of Hacked emails.” FBI source’s statement concludes Roger Stone was also targeted by one of these set-up plays. Stone’s lawyer Grant Smith wrote the following in a letter to Rep. Devin Nunes: “By way of example, as you know, back in June I sent this Committee a letter regarding a longtime FBI informant named Gennadiy Vasilievich Vostretsov who, under the alias “Henry Greenberg”, was sent to approach my client in May 2016 with claims of having access to information that could impact the election. Mr. Stone not only immediately and forcefully declined to participate in anything this FBI informant was proposing, but never saw or spoke to the informant again. Mr. Stone believes it highly likely that Mr. Vostretsov/Greenberg’s status as an FBI informant was not “former”, and that Vostretsov/Greenberg was, in fact, actively working on behalf of the FBI at the time of their meeting, acting upon a calculated effort to entrap Mr. Stone and, further, to infiltrate and compromise the Trump effort. Notably, Vostretsov was admitted to the country nine separate times on an FBI Informant’s visa.” My reporting on Natalia and the Fusion GPS plot against President Trump has changed the face of the news cycle: The Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who set up Don Trump Jr. for a meeting in Trump Tower as part of a Fusion GPS plot was operating out of the Washington offices of Cozen O’Connor, a law firm run by an anti-Trump former Obama administration official whose super PAC donated to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential election. Veselnitskaya’s work from the Cozen O’Connor office provides more evidence of a Democrat and establishment Republican effort to set up the Trump campaign for a future Russian collusion case. Veselnitskaya was allowed into the United States by the Obama Department of Justice while the former Obama official who runs Cozen O’Connor publicly warned then-candidate Trump that if he became president he would be investigated by the DOJ for contacts with foreign leaders. Veselnitskaya reportedly had dinner meetings with Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson the day before she met in Trump Tower and also the day after she went inside Trump Tower. Big League Politics has confirmed that a Cozen O’Connor partner who lives in the same apartment building as James Comey’s friend Daniel Richman — who leaked classified information to the press on Comey’s behalf — spoke with Richman during the period that Comey and the Fusion GPS team were trying to obtain FISA warrants on Trump Tower. Let’s break down the facts of an Obama administration official’s involvement in the Trump Tower plot: advertisement - story continues below Russian and U.S. citizen Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet military veteran, was present at Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Don Jr. in Trump Tower after leading a lobbying push supposedly to repeal the Magnitsky Act. Akhmestshin is believed by insiders to be linked to Russian government intelligence, a fact that the Washington Post seized on when reporting that he met with Don Jr. and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower. A nonprofit group focused on promoting Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya’s cause to lawmakers actually hired Cozen O’Connor, which the law firm confirms. The Washington Post reported (emphasis added): “In the spring of 2016, as the presidential race was heating up, Akhmetshin and lobbyists he hired sought meetings on Capitol Hill to make their case against the sanctions law. Akhmetshin hired former Democratic congressman Ron Dellums, along with a team of lobbyists from the law firm of Cozen O’Connor. Steve Pruitt, a business colleague speaking on Dellums’s behalf, said his involvement was brief and ended when he determined that Congress was unlikely to change the law. In June, after visiting Trump Tower in New York, Veselnitskaya came to Washington to lend a hand in the lobbying effort. She attended a meeting of the team at the downtown offices of Cozen O’Connor, where she spoke at length in Russian about the issues but confused many in the room, who had not been told previously about her involvement, according to several participants.” Washington Post passage ends Cozen O’Connor managing partner Howard Schweitzer is listed here on a DOJ form from an investigation into the breaking of lobbying laws by Russians trying to repeal the Magnitsky Act — which was just a front to get Russians in the room with Don Jr. We know now that Natalia Veselnitskaya was actually operating out of the Cozen O’Connor offices. Schweitzer worked as general counsel for the Export-Import Bank under George W. Bush and was chief operating officer of the TARP bailout program under both Bush and Obama from 2008-2009. “In October 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson appointed Howard as the first COO of TARP. In this position, Howard led program execution and built the TARP infrastructure. He served as a key point person regarding the financial crisis through the presidential transition and continued to serve as TARP COO under Secretary Timothy Geithner until August 2009,” reads Schweitzer’s Cozen O’Connor bio. “He served as chief operating officer of the TARP in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations,” reads Schweitzer’s bio for a Politico piece he wrote in August 2016 headlined “7 Reasons Why Trump Would Hate Being President.” Schweitzer’s virulently anti-Trump piece for Politico tries to make the case that Trump was “sabotaging his own bid for the White House.” Schweitzer said that if Trump became president then “He’ll be investigated to death” by Congress and the Justice Department for his business dealings and “relationships with foreign leaders.” The narrative was being set. The Philadelphia-based Cozen O’Connor law firm also has a political action committee that donated to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, in addition to Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Martin O’Malley. In the 2018 election cycle, the Cozen O’Connor PAC donated more money to Hillary Clinton’s dormant campaign. I found the Obama Officials Office That SPY Natalia Worked Out of https://t.co/fWPfw2tU0u — Patrick Howley (@howleyreports) December 19, 2018 Here is Veselnitskaya seated behind Obama ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul at a June 2016 congressional hearing focused on Russia. Cozen O’Connor’s connections to the anti-Trump “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” plot are wide-ranging, and show up in unexpected places. James Comey’s friend, Columbia University professor Daniel Richman, leaked classified information that Comey gave him. During this leaking period, Richman was apartment-building neighbors with a partner at the Cozen O’Connor law firm that strategized with Fusion GPS operative Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian plant who set up Don Jr. in Trump Tower. Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, led by Glenn Simpson, were part of John Brennan and Peter Strzok’s CIA-led “Operation Crossfire Hurricane” plot aimed at President Donald Trump and the Trump campaign. “Yes, he is my neighbor,” Amy Wenzel, a partner at Cozen O’Connor, confirmed in a phone conversation with Big League Politics, confirming that they spoke. They live near each other in a Brooklyn high-rise. The Washington Post’s release of Trump Tower documents shows the crowd surrounding non-sexual honeypot Natalia Veselnitskaya. The crowd of conspirators knew they were damaging Trump by setting up the meeting. The Post confirms British-citizen music promoter Rob Goldstone’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he described the conspirators’ push to get the meeting despite the fact that they knew it would create trouble for the Trump campaign. The Post reports: ���Rob Goldstone told the committee that his client, the Russian pop star and developer Emin Agalarov, had insisted he help set up the meeting between President Trump’s son and the lawyer during the campaign to pass along material on Clinton, overriding Goldstone’s own warnings that the meeting would be a bad idea. “He said, ‘it doesn’t matter. You just have to get the meeting,’ ” Goldstone, a British citizen, testified. The intensity with which Agalarov and his father, the billionaire Aras Agalarov, sought the Trump Tower meeting, which has become a key point of scrutiny for congressional inquiries and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, was revealed in more than 2,500 pages of congressional testimony and exhibits released by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning.” Washington Post passage ends Natalia Veselnitskaya is also inextricably linked to the case against Paul Manafort. The Russian attorney partner of Paul Manafort who was named as a defendant in Robert Mueller charges is also linked to the Russian spy Natalia Vesenilskaya, who attended a meeting with Don Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower. According to Mueller’s charges, Manafort’s Russian partner Konstantin Kilimnik tried to intimidate or coerce witnesses in Manafort’s upcoming money laundering trial. That put Konstantin Kilimnik at the center of the Mueller effort to find obstruction of justice in Trump-World. So who is Konstantine Kilimnik? It turns out that Kilimnik is linked to Veselnitskaya, the Fusion GPS agent, according to Senate documents. Here is how ProPublica described Kilimnik: “Konstantin Kilimnik: Manafort, who worked for the pro-Russian party in Ukraine before running Trump’s campaign, had an employee in Kiev named Konstantin Kilimnik who U.S. and Ukrainian authorities have suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence, according to Politico. Kilimnik served in the Russian army and learned English at a school that experts say often trains spies. Kilimnik denied being a spy to The Washington Post. Manafort had dinner with Kilimnik last August in New York, just before he was forced out of the Trump campaign amid growing questions about his work in the Ukraine, the Post reported.” Documents reveal Kilimnik’s ties to Veselniskaya. Let’s take a look at United States Senate Judiciary Committee documents questioning Veselniskaya in October. Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Veselniskaya if she knew a handful of characters believed to be conspirators in the case. Grassley and Feinstein specifically asked Veselnitskaya if she knew Konstantin Kilimnik. Here is page 4 of the documents, naming Kilimnik: Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee as senator from Alabama. Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Don Jr. in Trump Tower provided some of the basis for warrants to surveil Trump Tower and for other FBI surveillance measures on the Trump campaign. The fact that Veselnitskaya, a lawyer herself, was in the meeting with Trump Jr. and Kushner opened the president’s son and son-in-law up to being qualified as “target associations” for law enforcement under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, passed during the Bush administration. Veselniskaya’s link to suspected conspirator Kilimnik is now coming under scrutiny. Peter Strzok, meanwhile, is firmly established as the go-to guy who ran point on the entire operation. PETER STRZOK, POINT MAN Both John Brennan and James Comey used Peter Strzok to damage President Donald Trump. Strzok is the disgraced FBI agent and fired Robert Mueller team member whose text messages with mistress Lisa Page form the biggest scandal in FBI history. The lovers conspired to illegally bring down Trump, all while the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign. Strzok interviewed Hillary Clinton without putting her under oath, and granted immunity to Cheryl Mills and Clinton’s other associates right before he flew to London to meet with Christopher Steele to work on the anti-Trump dossier, which was sponsored by the Clinton-funded firm Fusion GPS. That dossier was used to fraudulently obtain FISA warrants to surveil Trump Tower. Barack Obama read bits of the dossier in his daily presidential briefings, courtesy of Brennan. Fusion GPS, meanwhile, sent operatives into Trump Tower to entrap Don Jr. and Jared Kushner in a meeting with planted Russians. When it was time for the conspirators to focus on Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, Strzok was there to run information about the adviser to the Australians. When it was time to take out Trump’s national security adviser General Michael Flynn, Strzok was there to stage an “ambush” interrogation of Flynn without Flynn’s lawyer present. Let’s walk through Strzok’s amazing Zelig-like role in every facet of Operation Crossfire Hurricane: Brennan hired Strzok to write the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January 2017. Big League Politics This was an official document used to spur on the Robert Mueller investigation. But the document did not actually find any evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, it merely said that Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump and that Russia “developed a clear preference for Trump.” The Christopher Steele dossier was added as an “appendix” to the ICA report, even though Brennan lied and told Congress that it was never used. Comey Sent Strzok To London To Meet With The Australians About George Papadopoulos BLP George Papadopoulos was surveilled in real time by the FBI. Who set him up? Peter Strzok, whose meeting with the Australian ambassador in London provided key basis for the creation of Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to none other than the New York Times. Tyler Durden Explains: “The FBI sent counterintelligence agents, one of whom was Peter Strzok, to London in the summer of 2016 to meet with Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, to describe his meeting with Trump campaign advisor, George Papadopoulos. The meeting with Downer was described as “highly unusual,” and “helped provide the foundation for a case that, a year ago Thursday, became the special counsel investigation.” The FBI kept details of the operation secret from most of the DOJ – with “only about five Justice Department officials” aware of the full scope of the case.” Strzok Cleared Hillary Clinton Right Before He Left For London Big League Politics called attention in July 2017 to the fact that Strzok was serving on the Mueller team after personally overseeing the Hillary Clinton email investigation at the FBI and personally conducting the interview with Hillary Clinton that was not under oath and which led to no incarceration for the Democrat candidate. Strzok also withheld information about the Hillary case from Congress according to this text: With the pressure on, Strzok’s wife Melissa Hodgman, Associate Director of the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is scrubbing her Obama and Clinton links. Hodgman was promoted by Obama just two weeks before FBI director James Comey re-opened the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal in 2016, leading political insiders to suspect that Hodgman might have been involved in the federal government’s cover-up. Some of the Liked pages on her Facebook account on December 3 included “Thank You Obama” and “We Voted For Hillary.” Strzok Sets Up Flynn On January 24, 2017, Peter Strzok interviewed General Michael Flynn inside the White House alongside another agent. Flynn’s lawyer was not present. Flynn apparently did not tell the White House about his meeting. Guess who did? Sally Yates, the anti-Trump deputy attorney general whose underling told the FBI to shut down the Clinton Foundation case. Yates informed the White House on January 26 that Flynn met with the FBI. That was the beginning of the end for the original Trump White House. Strzok was close personal friends with the foreign intelligence judge Rudolph Contreras who accepted General Flynn’s guilty plea. Contreras recused himself after he already accepted Flynn’s guilty plea. Strzok and Page detailed their plan to meet with Contreras in a July 25, 2016 series of texts: PAGE: “Rudy is on the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court]! Did you know that? Just appointed two months ago.” STRZOK: “I did. I need to get together with him.” PAGE: “said he’d gotten on a month or two ago at a graduation party we were both at.” Strzok and Page’s Texts Revealed Their Anti-Trump Plot It is well known that Strzok and Page discussed their anti-Trump conspiracy many thousands of times over text messages that have been mostly released. The lovers’ repeated references to “CF” refer to “Crossfire.” Here are Hot Air’s favorites: “Strzok: God Hillary should win. 100,000,000-0. Strzok: Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support… Strzok: I am riled up. Trump is a f***ing idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer.” Brennan Plotted For Years To Get Trump, Starting with a Fly-By-Night Operation in Reno A whistleblower case currently in federal court in Washington, D.C. stands to bring out incredible allegations of John Brennan and James Clapper’s moves against Trump, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and the former presiding judge of the FISA court Reggie Walton. Real estate mogul Timothy Blixseth admitted that he saw records from CIA and NSA whistleblower Dennis Montgomery proving that Clapper and Obama CIA director John Brennan oversaw repeated spying on the phone calls of President Donald Trump and millions of other private American citizens, including Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and FISA court judge Reggie Walton. Fired former FBI director James Comey received evidence from the whistleblower’s lawyer but sat on it. LISTEN TO THE BLIXSETH TAPE RIGHT HERE In an audiotaped interview — conducted before Trump ever ran for president — Blixseth spoke to former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and detective Mike Zullo. The audio was released in connection with a civil contempt case that the Department of Justice filed against Arpaio. The audio of this conversation appears to only be preserved in one location on the Internet, on a whistleblower Soundcloud page. “This guy showed me 900 million phone calls. And I see myself in there. I see people I know. I see Donald Trump in there a zillion times, and Bloomberg is in there,” Blixseth said on the tape, referring to information that Montgomery allegedly showed him. “He’s a very genius computer guy,” Blixseth said of Montgomery. “What they did is, they were actually working for the CIA. And they mask it as — I’m sure you’ll remember this — the contracts with the CIA, of which I had many copies, said that they were decoding Al-Jazeera television, said that there was broadcast embedded, remember that? Owned by Gore? Al Gore’s got part of it now. But it was all bullshit. That was bullshit. That was a front by the CIA. And this guy [Montgomery] worked for Brennan and Clapper. Those were the two guys running it,” Timothy Blixseth told Arpaio and Zullo on the tape. “He started out in 2004 with another partner in Reno, Nevada, called eTreppid. They collected about $40 million from the CIA. Top security clearance. All kinds of letters…In 2006 they started a new company that [my ex-wife] owns, and they started doing the same business for the government. What it really turns out they were doing is they were hacking into all of America. Big League Politics called the listed number for eTreppid Technologies, but we were told that Montgomery no longer works there. “That company closed down years ago, sir,” a representative said of eTreppid Technologies. When asked what the company is called now, the representative said, “I’m sorry, I can’t discuss any more with you.” Blixseth claimed in his conversation with Zullo and Arpaio that Brennan and Clapper were running the operation. “Everything they said they didn’t do, that Brennan said recently, mainly Clapper. It’s all bullshit. And I’ve got it right here,” Blixseth said. On the explosive tapes, Blixseth walks Arpaio and Zullo through the details of the program on a computer screen. At one point, the three begin pulling up specific names of targeted individuals. “You know who that guy is? That’s the head of the FISA court they hacked into, Reggie Walton,” Blixseth tells the investigators. “John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, was hacked,” Blixseth tells Arpaio and Zullo. Insiders have always been skeptical of Roberts’ motives for siding with President Obama on Obamacare. On August 4, 2005, Matt Drudge reported: “The NEW YORK TIMES is looking into the adoption records of the children of Supreme Court Nominee John G. Roberts, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. The TIMES has investigative reporter Glen Justice hot on the case to investigate the status of adoption records of Judge Roberts’ two young children, Josie age 5 and Jack age 4, a top source reveals. Judge Roberts and his wife Jane adopted the children when they each were infants. Both children were adopted from Latin America. A TIMES insider claims the look into the adoption papers are part of the paper’s “standard background check.” Bill Borders, NYT senior editor, explains: “Our reporters made initial inquiries about the adoptions, as they did about many other aspects of his background. They did so with great care, understanding the sensitivity of the issue.” OBAMA Kept The Scheme Going Overseas House lawmakers are zeroing in on a meeting that German chancellor Angela Merkel held with President Obama at a key moment as one of the FISA warrants against Trump was set to expire. Lawmakers are aware of the role of foreign governments in collaborating with U.S. intelligence agencies in the Trump investigation as recently as 2017. Germany provided information beginning in 2015 to aide British spies and the Obama administration in compiling the Christopher Steele “dossier.” Obama had been called out by the Drudge Report for visiting foreign leaders in Europe in the spring of 2017 right before President Trump visited those leaders in Europe. It turns out that one of those Obama meetings is now under scrutiny on Capitol Hill. Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein gave a redacted document to Rep. Devin Nunes, showing two major redactions about the creation of the Trump “Dossier” and the launch of FISA warrants and Robert Mueller’s investigation during the 2016 campaign. The redactions were: “the name of a country and the name of a foreign agent who supplied information.” Now we know: the country is Germany and the foreign agent was either Angela Merkel or someone who worked for Angela Merkel in foreign intelligence. The redacted sections will be referencing one of the European countries and agents that share SIGINT (signal intelligence) to US Intelligence,” says Chuck Marler, a longtime agent of the FBI Special Surveillance Group under Robert Mueller, who is an official whistleblower in this case. SIGINT countries were involved in sharing information that helped the Christopher Steele dossier to come together. The Guardian reported in an amazingly under-covered article: “Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said.” So Germany helped build the dossier. When does Merkel re-emerge in this picture? “Fast forward to April/May 2017, roughly the same time the fourth and final FISA warrant was running out (because the Carter Page story was determined false). Rosenstein and McCabe were in desperate need of renewed help from intelligence to keep the Russian Collusion narrative alive,” Marler reports. “Well they weren’t going to get help from the CIA because Pompeo was now CIA Director and wouldn’t help with a faux collusion narrative. In comes Obama to the rescue. He meets with Merkel in private (the US no longer monitored her communications because of the previous mishap) to beg for some more Sigint information to keep the collusion narrative alive. Conveniently he meets her hours prior to Trump’s meeting and his stay in her heavily monitored territory.” Here’s an article from The Independent describing how President Trump visited Brussels the same day Angela Merkel met with Obama in Berlin: “Barack Obama is to visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin on his first trip to Europe since leaving office. The former US President will travel to Germany for the launch of a summer of special events to mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant church. He will arrive in Germany on the same day as his successor Donald Trump is due in Brussels for a meeting with other NATO leaders – the first scheduled foreign visit for the President since taking office. Mr Obama is due to give a speech in the German capital and take part in a discussion on democracy with Ms Merkel, who he once called his “closest ally.'”

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Note From Media Lens This is a slightly amended version of the foreword to the new Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz – How The Corporate Media Distort Reality, published today by Pluto Press. Warm thanks to John Pilger for contributing this superb piece to our book. ***** The death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was “a trailblazer for independent journalism”, wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common. Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven. Driven from the “mainstream”, Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism’s veneration of “approved opinions” while “unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality.” Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship. This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new “groupthink”, as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies. Witness the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the willful abandonment by the “MeToo” zealots of our oldest freedom, presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of a warning of world war. With many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the “mainstream”, a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism. Sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.org, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.com are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life in the fearful “democracies” regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle. In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens — remarkable partly because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, the Guardian, Channel 4 News. Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they ask a journalist why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths. The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species. I would say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the media’s power. What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards was a teacher, David Cromwell is a former scientist. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism — a term rarely used; let’s call it true objectivity — is a bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches. I think their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just published book, Propaganda Blitz, in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do. Take the chapter, Dismantling the National Health Service, in which Edwards and Cromwell describe the critical part played by journalists in the crisis facing Britain’s pioneering health service. The NHS crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as “austerity”, with its deceitful, weasel language of “efficiency savings” (the BBC term for slashing public expenditure) and “hard choices” (the willful destruction of the premises of civilised life in modern Britain). “Austerity” is an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed by its crooked banks, not its people. The resources that would comfortably fund the National Health Service have been stolen in broad daylight by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes. Using a vocabulary of corporate euphemisms, the publicly-funded Health Service is being deliberately run down by free market fanatics, to justify its selling-off. The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn may appear to oppose this, but does it? The answer is very likely no. Little of any of this is alluded to in the media, let alone explained. Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece. Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to “providing a breadth of view” and to properly inform the public of “matters of public policy”, the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation’s most cherished institutions. A BBC headline said: “Bill which gives power to GPs passes.” This was pure state propaganda. There is a striking similarity with the BBC’s coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed. A study by Cardiff University, Wales, found that the BBC reflected the government line “overwhelmingly” while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation’s much-vaunted “principle” of impartiality was never a consideration. One of the most telling chapters in Propaganda Blitz describes the smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political mavericks and whistleblowers. The Guardian’s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing. Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to the Guardian, was abandoned when he was no longer useful. He was then subjected to a vituperative – and cowardly — onslaught of a kind I have rarely known. With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”. The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, “I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd.” Moore, who describes herself as a feminist, later complained that, after attacking Assange, she had suffered “vile abuse”. Edwards and Cromwell wrote to her: “That’s a real shame, sorry to hear that. But how would you describe calling someone ‘the most massive turd’? Vile abuse?” Moore replied that no, she would not, adding, “I would advise you to stop being so bloody patronising.” Her former Guardian colleague James Ball wrote, “It’s difficult to imagine what Ecuador’s London embassy smells like more than five and a half years after Julian Assange moved in.” Such slow-witted viciousness appeared in a newspaper described by its editor, Katharine Viner, as “thoughtful and progressive”. What is the root of this vindictiveness? Is it jealousy, a perverse recognition that Assange has achieved more journalistic firsts than his snipers can claim in a lifetime? Is it that he refuses to be “one of us” and shames those who have long sold out the independence of journalism? Journalism students should study this to understand that the source of “fake news” is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo. “[It is] an age in which people yearn for new ideas and fresh alternatives,” wrote Katharine Viner. Her political writer Jonathan Freedland dismissed the yearning of young people who supported the modest policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as “a form of narcissism”. “How did this man ….,” brayed the Guardian’s Zoe Williams, “get on the ballot in the first place?” A choir of the paper’s precocious windbags joined in, thereafter queuing to fall on their blunt swords when Corbyn came close to winning the 2017 general election in spite of the media. Complex stories are reported to a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission: Brexit, Venezuela, Russia, Syria. On Syria, only the investigations of a group of independent journalists have countered this, revealing the network of Anglo-American backing of jihadists in Syria, including those related to ISIS. Supported by a “psyops” campaign funded by the British Foreign Office and the US Agency of International Aid, the aim is to hoodwink the Western public and speed the overthrow of the government in Damascus, regardless of the medieval alternative and the risk of war with Russia. The Syria Campaign, set up by a New York PR agency, Purpose, funds a group known as the White Helmets, who claim falsely to be “Syria Civil Defence” and are seen uncritically on TV news and social media, apparently rescuing the victims of bombing, which they film and edit themselves, though viewers are unlikely to be told this. George Clooney is a fan. The White Helmets are appendages to the jihadists with whom they share addresses. Their media-smart uniforms and equipment are supplied by their Western paymasters. That their exploits are not questioned by major news organisations is an indication of how deep the influence of state-backed PR now runs in the media. As Robert Fisk noted recently, no “mainstream” reporter reports Syria, from Syria. In what is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as “propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government”. This abuse was published without permitting a single correction, let alone a right-of-reply. The Guardian Comment page was blocked, as Edwards and Cromwell document. I saw the list of questions Solon sent to Beeley, which reads like a McCarthyite charge sheet — “Have you ever been invited to North Korea?” So much of the mainstream has descended to this level. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is the “perception”. When he was US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared what he called “a war of perception… conducted continuously using the news media”. What really mattered was not the facts but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home. Nothing has changed. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerised the German public. She told me the “messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above”, but on the “submissive void” of an uninformed public. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she said. “Propaganda always wins, if you allow it.” http://clubof.info/

[figureskatingfanblog]

According to Phil Hersh, he’s hearing that GP selections will be next Friday (meaning we might not get them publicly until the Monday after), and that Cup of China spot may be going to GB, and still hearing that the Rostelecom Cup spot is going to Finland.

Not confirmed, so take from it what you will.