TBR News April 9, 2016

Apr 09 2016

The Voice of the White House

         Washington, D.C. April 9, 2016: “The basic thrust of all news, domestic and foreign, is disillusionment rampant. Thieves, liars, murderers, religious and secular lunatics ranting on the street corners of the Internet and a general malaise that only seems to increase. The American political scene is redolent of a Third World Cannibal Carnival with all manner of strange creatures bellowing, leaping up and down and flapping their arms. Promises for anything and everything pour fourth and will soon be forgotten in the joys of bribery money and thoughts of moving to Aruba with their loot.

It should be noted that the taxpayers support these creatures just as they support the periodic American invasions of oil-rich countries to “reestablish true democracy” for their natural resources. The rampaging of the religious right has begun to fade and as the empire begins its decline, governmental control of its restive citizens begins to rise.”

 

Note: Readers with interesting information, questions or comments can contact us at: tbrnews@hotmail.com

 

 

Conversations with the Crow

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.           After Corson’s death, Trento and his Washington lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever

After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

Douglas had been in close contact with Crowley and had long phone conversations with him. He found this so interesting and informative that he taped and later transcribed them.

These conversations have been published in a book: ‘Conversations with the Crow” and this is an excerpt.

 

Conversation No. 14

Date: Friday, May 10, 1996

Commenced: 10:03 AM CST

Concluded:   10:21 AM CST

 

GD: Good morning, Mrs. Crowley. Is Robert available?

EC: Oh good morning, Gregory. Yes, he’s right here.

GD: Thank you.

RTC: Hello, Gregory. I’ve dug out quite a bit of material on the Kennedy business for you and once I get it collated, I’ll send it on.

GD: Any surprises there?

RTC: Wait until you’ve read it and I would prefer not to discuss this on the telephone. There are aspects of this that should be kept very private and, let me add, I would request that you not address this in print until after I am gone.

GD: Understood but that could be ten years from now.

RTC: Oh, I doubt that. I’m getting older by the day. I might hold out for a few more years but not much longer. Emily has been at me to have more X-rays because the last ones showed some spots on my lungs but I think that if it was cancer, I would be dead by now. After all, we took those some years ago.

GD: You smoke?

RTC: A small sinful pleasure but not as much. That and coffee kept me going and these get to be ingrained habits. At any rate, eventually I ought to have more tests but I really don’t worry too much about this.

GD: Just one brief question about Kennedy if it’s all right.

RTC: Ask me and I’ll make a judgment call.

GD: Was it Oswald?

RTC: No, he was a patsy. Had nothing to do with it and that answers that question. Now, on to other things if you don’t mind.

GD: Thank you and go ahead.

RTC: I was thinking about the Pollard business we talked about a few days ago. Looking over some of my files, I am certain you were accurate about tipping them off. There was an unspecified confidential source and I suppose if I had someone dig into it further, it would cinch it all up. We thought it was someone from the Israeli side with a guilty conscience.

GD: No, just a peeved WASP.

RTC: Of course, what was the worst aspect of this Pollard business is that the little traitor passed an enormous amount of very, very sensitive information to Israel, among which were reams of top level coded material. We found out later that all of this was sent to Russia, to the KGB and the GRU within hours of it getting to Tel Aviv.

GD: Did they work with the Russians?

RTC: No, some of the refuseniks that went to Israel were Soviet plants and they took with them enough information to convince the Israelis that they would be good agents. That’s the terrible thing about the Pollard matter, Gregory. It cost us millions upon millions to rework our codes but that only covered on-going matters. My God, the Soviets were reading all our top level messages. The damage that little shit caused is not to believe. Weinberger wanted to shoot him out of hand but that never happened. Pollard will never get out of prison alive. Did you know that the Israelis made him an honorary member of their Knesset and deposited large sums of money into a bank account they opened for him there?

GD: That’s a bit gross, isn’t it?

RTC: Figure it. And they have been bombarding Clinton to pardon him but that will never happen, even if his wife is Jewish. I don’t much care for Clinton but he is certainly a smart man. He moves with the tides, Gregory, and if he dared to pardon Pollard, there would be serious problems for him. It’s been said that if this looked like it might go through, the BoP people would have one of their convicts stick a knife into him while he was taking the air in the prison yard. I think he should be found hanging in his cell some morning and then we can pickle him, put him in a box and ship him off to Israel, collect.

GD: Frau Clinton is Jewish?

RTC: Family came from Lodz in Poland, went to Manchester in England, changed their names and some of them came over here. Her branch ended up in the cloth business in Chicago. They don’t talk about this but it’s something to consider. One thing I can say about the Clintons. They both are really too fond of women.

GD: When I lived in California, I had a friend in the state police in Sacramento and he was telling me that Hillary left law school at Yale and interned with Bob Treuhaft in Oakland. He’s a communist labor lawyer. His wife is Decca Mitford who wrote the book on funeral home ripoffs. Decca’s sister was Unity Mitford, who was one of Hitler’s lady friends. Anyway, he said that Hillary worked with the Black Panthers in Oakland and got involved with their descent on the legislators in Sacramento. They all had guns and everyone freaked out. Apparently, the police went around rounding them all up and they found Frau Clinton naked in bed with a black woman. It’s all in a report he copied. And he said that about a week after Clinton became President, the FBI swooped down and grabbed the original files on all of this.

RTC: Too bad there’s no copy.

GD: Oh, there is. I sent a copy of it around to the media but all I got was complete silence. But note that Herb Caen, a columnist for the Chronicle, wrote about this and I don’t think the FBI can do much about that. Of course, people forget very quickly, Robert. Cold beer in the fridge and a sports game on the tube and they’re contented. Consider the bulk of the public as if it were a hibernating bear in Alaska. Now if the far right and the far left stand in front of his den, screeching at each other and throwing dung and snowballs at each other, the bear is oblivious. But supposing they decide to move into the den and continue their petty squabbles. And if by accident, one of them managed to kick brother bear squarely in the balls, then we see something else. The bear awakes with a roar, promptly kills both of the invaders of his bedroom and goes back to sleep again. That, Robert, is what happens when the public is aroused and that is why politicians are careful to keep out of the bear’s den.

RTC: An interesting analogy.

GD: Revolutions don’t start overnight. The French Revolution had its roots in the determination of a burgeoning middle class to obtain equal rights along with the monarchy, the clergy and the nobility. Things got out of control and the mob woke up and wreaked bloody havoc on France for some time. Read Carlisle on this subject. Or read Eric Hoffer. I recommend The True Believer for a very penetrating analysis of mass movements and their fanatic adherents. We don’t have this problem here, at least now, but things change and if we don’t change with them, then there are problems.

RTC: I think the older we get, the less we welcome change.

GD: Routine can be comforting at that. But suppose some stuffy bureaucrat got up one morning, shoved the family cat into the microwave, turned it on, drove his van across the neighbor’s lawn and crushed the stone dwarves and then ran all the red lights on the way to the office? And when he got to his work pen, he set the contents of his desk on fire and ran around the office buck naked?

RTC: I have a feeling he would be locked up somewhere for some time. You have a very active imagination, Gregory, or did you do this?

GD: No but when I see the automatons on the road or marching in lockstep on the sidewalks of the financial district, such thoughts are not unnatural to me. I love to do the unexpected. I recall once when a friend’s father, who ran a local Penney store, gave me a half a dozen obsolete window dummies. My God, sir, did I have my fun. We took a little girl, cute thing with pigtails, cut a hole in her back and filled her insides with lots of raspberry Jello. Then we put a pinafore and a pair of nice shoes and socks on her, took her down to the SP tracks and set her up just this side of the railroad bridge. My Russian friend and I sat in the bushes and when the Del Monte Special, filled with the idle rich, came down the line doing 80, the headlights picked up the little darling on the tracks, illuminating her winsome form for the people stopped by the track gates. Horns blowing, howling drivers, panic and then when the train hit her squarely, a great fan of red Jello and papier-mâché body parts descended on the stopped cars. Now that was something to remember, Robert. Engineer slammed on the breaks, dropped sand, skidded with many sparks and blaring air horn into the local station and I will always remember the idle rich flying all over the interior of the illuminated club car. We got away with it but only barely. Booted police stamping all around our bushes, looking for the fiends. We didn’t do that one again but believe me, it was worth it.

RTC: (Laughter)

GD: I see you do have a sense of humor, Robert. There were other dummies to be put to good use. Sometime later I can give you more cheerful anecdotes to make your day.

RTC: I hope all of that is behind you, Gregory.

GD: Oh yes, long ago but not forgotten. By the way, speaking of things behind, can you give me one word that describes what happened when a very fat woman backed into a rotating airplane propeller?

RTC: Not offhand.

GD: Disaster.

RTC: Are you smoking something illegal?

GD: No, too much coffee and too many fond memories. Let me go back to the book and leave you thinking about the chaos inside the Embassy when you turn on your noise box.

RTC: That’s probably enough for now.

GD: ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ Robert, and I will talk to you later.

 

(Concluded at 10:21 AM CST)

 

 

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Crow-Gregory-Douglas-ebook/dp/B00GHMAQ5E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450147193&sr=8-1&keywords=conversations+with+the+crow#sthash.jWpLL7Wr.dpuf

 

 

Nuit debout protesters occupy French cities in revolutionary call for change

For more than a week, vast nocturnal gatherings have spread across France in a citizen-led movement that has rattled the government

April 8, 2016

by Angelique Chrisafis

The Guardian

Paris-As night fell over Paris, thousands of people sat cross-legged in the vast square at Place de la République, taking turns to pass round a microphone and denounce everything from the dominance of Google to tax evasion or inequality on housing estates.

The debating continued into the early hours of the morning, with soup and sandwiches on hand in the canteen tent and a protest choir singing revolutionary songs. A handful of protesters in tents then bedded down to “occupy” the square for the night before being asked to move on by police just before dawn. But the next morning they returned to set up their protest camp again.

For more than a week, these vast nocturnal protest gatherings – from parents with babies to students, workers, artists and pensioners – have spread across France, rising in number, and are beginning to panic the government.

Called Nuit debout, which loosely means “rise up at night”, the protest movement is increasingly being likened to the Occupy initiative that mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in 2011 or Spain’s Indignados.

Despite France’s long history of youth protest movements – from May 1968 to vast rallies against pension changes – Nuit debout, which has spread to cities such as Toulouse, Lyon and Nantes and even over the border to Brussels, is seen as a new phenomenon.

It began on 31 March with a night-time sit-in in Paris after the latest street demonstrations by students and unions critical of President François Hollande’s proposed changes to labour laws. But the movement and its radical nocturnal action had been dreamed up months earlier at a Paris meeting of leftwing activists.

“There were about 300 or 400 of us at a public meeting in February and we were wondering how can we really scare the government?. We had an idea: at the next big street protest, we simply wouldn’t go home,” said Michel, 60, a former delivery driver.

“On 31 March, at the time of the labour law protests, that’s what happened. There was torrential rain, but still everyone came back here to the square. Then at 9pm, the rain stopped and we stayed. We came back the next day and as we keep coming back every night, it has scared the government because it’s impossible to define.

“There’s something here that I’ve never seen before in France – all these people converge here each night of their own accord to talk and debate ideas – from housing to the universal wages, refugees, any topic they like. No one has told them to, no unions are pushing them on – they’re coming of their own accord.”

The idea emerged among activists linked to a leftwing revue and the team behind the hit documentary film Merci Patron!, which depicts a couple taking on France’s richest man, billionaire Bernard Arnault. But the movement gained its own momentum – not just because of the labour protests or in solidarity with the French Goodyear tyre plant workers who kidnapped their bosses in 2014. It has expanded to address a host of different grievances, including the state of emergency and security crackdown in response to last year’s terrorist attacks.

“The labour law was the final straw,” said Matthiew, 35, who was retraining to be a teacher after 10 years in the private sector, and had set up an impromptu revolutionary singing group at the square. “But it’s much bigger than that. This government, which is supposed to be socialist, has come up with a raft of things I don’t agree with, while failing to deal with the real problems like unemployment, climate change and a society heading for disaster.”

Many in the crowd said that after four years of Hollande’s Socialist party in power, they left felt betrayed and their anger was beginning to bubble over.

Jocelyn, 26, a former medical student acting as a press spokesman for the movement, said: “There are parallels with Occupy and Indignados. The idea is to let everyone speak out. People are really sick and tired and that feeling has been building for years. Everything Hollande once promised for the left but gave up on really gets me down. Personally, it’s the state of emergency, the new surveillance laws, the changes to the justice system and the security crackdown.”

The government and the Paris authorities are being cautious about the policing of the movement. An investigation is under way into the alleged assault by a police officer accused of hitting a student at a Paris high school last month during a demonstration against the labour overhaul.

The government is preparing possible concessions to students and youths to calm those expected to attend another such rally on Saturday.

Each night at Paris’s Place de la République, the “general assembly” begins at 6pm and the crowd discuss ideas. Hundreds of demonstrators communicate using coded hand gestures: wiggling their fingers above their heads to express agreement or crossing their wrists to disagree.

Various committees have sprung up to debate a new constitution, society, work, and how to occupy the square with more permanent wooden structures on a nightly basis. Whiteboards list the evening’s discussions and activities – from debates on economics to media training for the demonstrators. “No hatred, no arms, no violence,” was the credo described by the “action committee”.

“This must be a perfect mini-society,” a member of the gardening committee told the crowd. A poetry committee has been set up to document and create the movement’s slogans. “Every movement needs its artistic and literary element,” said the poet who proposed it.

Demonstrators regularly help other protest movements, such as a bank picket over revelations in the Panama Papers or a demonstration against migrant evictions in the north of Paris.

“Generation revolution”, was scrawled on the pavement. The concept behind the movement is a “convergence of struggles” with no one leader. There are no union banners or flags of specific groups decorating the protest in the square – a rarity in France.

Cécile, 22, a Paris law student at Thursday night’s general assembly, said: “I don’t agree with the state society is in today. To me, politics feels broken. This movement appeals in terms of citizen action. I come here after class and I intend to keep coming back. I hope it lasts.”

 

The fallout from Panama Papers revelations so far, country by country

Russia claimed ‘Putinphobia’ was afoot, but Iceland’s PM was less cool under pressure – and David Cameron is still feeling the heat

April 8, 2016

by Luke Harding

The Guardian

Russia

What did we learn?

Vladimir Putin’s friend – a cellist called Sergei Roldugin – has secret offshore companies registered in his name worth many millions of dollars. Roldugin has said he is no businessman. But the Panama Papers reveal $2bn flowing from Russian state banks to offshore companies and a firm in the British Virgin Islands called Sandalwood Continental Ltd. The money is cycled back to Russia. Some $11m of it went to a ski resort outside St Petersburg called Igora, where in 2013 Putin’s younger daughter Katerina got married. The evidence suggests Roldugin is a proxy, with managers at Bank Rossiya in St Petersburg running his affairs. The US has designated Bank Rossiya a “crony bank” for top Kremlin bigwigs. It says its boss, Yuri Kovalchuk – another presidential buddy – is “essentially Putin’s personal banker”.

What happened next?

Mainstream TV and media are under the Kremlin’s thumb. Consequently, Russian citizens know little of the Panama Papers; the Putin story has been ignored. The president’s veteran spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, dismissed it as an example of “Putinphobia” and suggested that many of the investigative journalists involved were actually CIA spies. Peskov denied that his wife, Tatiana Navka, a former Olympic ice skater, had an offshore company. She did. On Monday the Guardian published an image of her passport, which features in the files. Three people demonstrated outside Russia’s Duma, or parliament, calling for Putin’s impeachment. They were arrested. On Thursday, Putin dismissed claims of corruption and said Roldugin had used his money to import musical instruments.

Azerbaijan

What did we learn?

Azerbaijan’s ruling first family, the Aliyevs, have a huge offshore business empire. It includes banking, telecoms, goldmines and London mansions. Among the Panama Papers is a Mossack Fonseca firm called Exaltation Ltd. It belongs to President Aliyev’s socialite daughters, Leyla and Arzu. It was set up in 2015 to hold UK property. The upmarket Knightsbridge solicitors who registered it, Child & Child, claimed wrongly that the two women had no political connections.

What happened next?

A small war. Fighting raged for four days between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region. Regime critics say the flare-up was designed to distract from the Panama Papers. Whether this is true or not, the country has a lousy human rights record. Azerbaijani authorities have shut down critical media organisations and jailed prominent journalists, bloggers, and freedom-of-expression advocates.

Iceland

What did we learn?

Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, and his wife, Anna Sigurlaug Pálsdóttir, had a secret British Virgin Islands firm. They set up Wintris Inc in 2007. Its purpose was to invest her share of the proceeds from the sale of her father’s car business. In 2009, Gunnlaugsson sold his 50% stake to his wife for a symbolic $1. At this point he was an MP. In 2013, he became prime minister for the centre-right Progressive Party. He failed to declare his offshore firm, perhaps hoping that its existence would stay hidden. Last month, Swedish journalists working on the Panama Papers ambushed Gunnlaugsson during a TV interview. He denied wrongdoing, but his face – alarm, confusion, hesitation – told its own sorry story. Edward Snowden tweeted this dramatic moment as a gif.

What happened next?

On Monday, 10,000 people – in a country of 330,000 – protested outside Iceland’s parliament in Reykjavik. They shouted slogans calling for Gunnlaugsson to quit. They banged drums, blew whistles, and waved bananas – a symbol suggesting the country that suffered a banking collapse in 2008 had turned into a banana republic. The next day, after a meeting with party colleagues, Gunnlaugsson resigned. Reluctantly, it appeared: his party said it was a temporary measure and that he might come back after a period of leave. Gunnlaugsson is the Panama Papers’ biggest casualty so far, and proof that democratic leaders have a tougher time than their authoritarian counterparts.

UK

What did we learn?

It was known that David Cameron’s late father, Ian, ran an investment fund called Blairmore Holdings Inc. The fund was based in the Bahamas and named after the family’s ancestral home in Aberdeenshire. It managed tens of millions of pounds on behalf of wealthy clients. The new facts, however, were piquant. In 30 years of trading, Blairmore did not pay any UK tax on its profits. Additionally, the fund’s directors went to extravagant lengths to give the impression that the company was based in the Caribbean. They hired 50 officers from the Bahamas, one of them a part-time bishop. (This was the late Solomon Humes, a lay bishop with the non-denominational Church of God of Prophecy.) The fund also used bearer shares, where the person who holds the physical share certificate is the company’s owner. Ironically enough, David Cameron outlawed bearer shares as PM, recognising that they could be used for money-laundering.

What happened next?

Downing Street initially said that Blairmore was a “private matter”. This line of defence swiftly crumbled when Cameron was grilled about Blairmore. Sky’s Faisal Islam asked if he had benefited in the past from the fund, or would do so in the future. The answer was a masterclass in how to stick to the simple present tense. Cameron said: “I have no shares, no offshore trusts, nothing like that.” No 10 issued a further statement which said that Samantha Cameron has a “small number of shares connected to her father’s land” on which she pays tax. Cameron, it seemed, was reluctant to acknowledge the obvious: that his father’s offshore fund had helped the family financially.

There were further damaging revelations. In 2008, Blairmore’s directors considered moving the fund to Bermuda or the Cayman Islands before deciding on Ireland. The FT revealed that Cameron had personally lobbied against EU plans to name the owners of offshore trusts. Then on Thursday came the bombshell. Cameron admitted to ITV’s Robert Peston that he and Samantha did own shares in Blairmore, sold for £31,500 just before he became prime minister in 2010.

China

What did we learn?

Like other ruling elites, many of China’s red aristocrats are offshore enthusiasts. Eight senior members of China’s Communist party used offshore companies, including the granddaughter of a top political leader. Jasmine Li was a student at Stanford University in the US in 2010 when two British Virgin Islands companies were registered in her name. Her grandfather, Jia Qinglin, was the country’s fourth most powerful figure. Others who feature in the Panama Papers are the brother-in-law of China’s president, Xi Jinping, and the son-in-law of Zhang Gaoli, a member of the politburo standing committee. China and Hong Kong were Mossack Fonseca’s biggest sources of business, we learned. Chinese clients were linked with 40,000 companies.

What happened next?

China’s reaction was predictable. Its censors blocked access to the Panama Papers revelations as they made headlines elsewhere. Searches returned no results. On Thursday, the Guardian’s website was blocked after its red nobility stories from the leaked files were published.

Zimbabwe

What did we learn?

Two alleged cronies of Robert Mugabe – an arms dealer and a mining tycoon – were able to keep their offshore companies despite being blacklisted by the EU.

What happened next?

Mugabe’s supporters pointed out that the offshore firms were not linked to the president; detractors said Mugabe may not have featured in this particular data dump, but had vast assets overseas.

Iran

What did we learn?

Mossack Fonseca acted for an Iranian state oil company, Petropars, which was blacklisted by the US. The firm was registered in the British Virgin Islands. The Panamanian law firm also serviced another Iranian outfit called Petrocom. Leaked emails suggested that its ultimate owner was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s former president.

What happened next?

Not much. The story was picked up by semi-official news agencies and covered extensively by the BBC’s Persian service. Only Iran’s elites got the news.

Australia

What did we learn?

Australia’s tax office was already embroiled in a major operation against suspected tax evaders. The Panama Papers revealed that many of them had offshore companies managed by Mossack Fonseca. They included Philip de Figueiredo, partner at an accounting firm based in the Channel Islands, who was jailed for two years for running a massive tax evasion scheme. Another partner, Philip Egglishaw, is under investigation, with an Interpol red notice issued for his arrest.

What happened next?

The tax office said it was investigating more than 800 wealthy clients of Mossack Fonseca. The figure included 120 people linked to an associate offshore provider in Hong Kong. The revelations caused widespread indignation. The Labor opposition said not enough had been done to tackle tax abuses by individuals. The government said it had introduced significant measures, adding: “Nothing makes Australians angrier than having to pay more tax because someone is avoiding tax.”

Panama

What did we learn?

The Panama Papers shone an uncomfortable light on the small Central American republic, home to 3.9 million people. That Panama is a tax haven was not news, but the country was revealed as a super-node through which the world’s illicit billions flow. Mossack Fonseca’s founders are a German, Jürgen Mossack, and a Panamanian, Ramón Fonseca. Fonseca is friends with Panama’s president, Juan Carlos Varela, and Mossack has advised the foreign ministry.

What happened next?

Faced with international embarrassment, Varela pledged to create an international panel. It would help improve transparency in the country’s offshore financial industry, he told the nation in a TV address. The law firm, meanwhile, denied wrongdoing. In a statement on its website, Mossack Fonseca said that over the past 40 years it had never been charged with criminal wrongdoing.

Pakistan

What did we learn?

A son of Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, owns four luxury flats in Park Lane in London. The properties are held via offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands set up by Mossack Fonseca. Sharif’s children raised a £7m loan from Deutsche Bank against this property empire.

What happened next?

The Sharifs – Nawaz, sons Hussain and Hassan and daughter, Mariam – denied wrongdoing. They said the flats belonged solely to Hussain and that all relevant taxes had been paid. On Tuesday Sharif said that a judicial commission led by a former supreme court judge would investigate what critics allege is the hiding of assets. The president said: “I want the nation to decide for themselves the reality behind these allegations which are being levelled for the last 25 years.”

Argentina

What did we learn?

The country’s rightwing president, Mauricio Macri, had links with an offshore company in the Bahamas. Macri was director of Fleg Trading between 1998 and 2009. He failed to list the company in his 2007 financial filing, when he became mayor of Buenos Aires. Nor did he mention it in his 2015 declaration when he became president, having campaigned on a platform of cleaning up political sleaze.

What happened next?

A federal prosecutor opened an investigation into the president’s financial dealings, and summoned Macri on Friday. The country’s tax authority and anti-corruption bureau gave evidence. Macri insisted he had done nothing wrong, telling the nation in a TV address: “I want to say one more time that I am very calm, I have complied with the law, I have told the truth and I have nothing to hide.” His office said he owned no shares in the offshore firm and had not derived any income from it. On Thursday night, thousands of demonstrators flooded the capital’s Plaza de Mayo demanding his resignation.

Syria

What did we learn?

Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of President Bashar al-Assad, had a string of offshore companies with Mossack Fonseca. So did his brother Hafez. Washington sanctioned Makhlouf in 2008, claiming that he helped the “public corruption of Syrian officials”. Leaked files show that the Panamanian law firm carried on working with the brothers as the war in Syria erupted, despite advice from its own compliance team.

What happened next?

Nothing as such. The Syrian regime is back on the front foot, having recaptured Palmyra with Russian military support.

 

Wells Fargo admits deception in $1.2 billion U.S. mortgage accord

April 9, 2016

by Jonathan Stempel

Reuters

Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N) admitted to deceiving the U.S. government into insuring thousands of risky mortgages, as it formally reached a record $1.2 billion settlement of a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit.

The settlement with Wells Fargo, the largest U.S. mortgage lender and third-largest U.S. bank by assets, was filed on Friday in Manhattan federal court. It also resolves claims against Kurt Lofrano, a former Wells Fargo vice president.

According to the settlement, Wells Fargo “admits, acknowledges, and accepts responsibility” for having from 2001 to 2008 falsely certified that many of its home loans qualified for Federal Housing Administration insurance.

The San Francisco-based lender also admitted to having from 2002 to 2010 failed to file timely reports on several thousand loans that had material defects or were badly underwritten, a process that Lofrano was responsible for supervising.

According to the Justice Department, the shortfalls led to substantial losses for taxpayers when the FHA was forced to pay insurance claims as defective loans soured.

Several lenders, including Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), Citigroup Inc (C.N), Deutsche Bank AG (DBKGn.DE) and JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), previously settled similar federal lawsuits.

But Wells Fargo held out, and its payment is the largest in FHA history over loan origination violations.

Friday’s settlement is a reproach for “years of reckless underwriting” at Wells Fargo, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan said in a statement.

“While Wells Fargo enjoyed huge profits from its FHA loan business, the government was left holding the bag when the bad loans went bust,” Bharara added.

The accord also resolved a probe by federal prosecutors in California of alleged false loan certifications by American Mortgage Network LLC, which Wells Fargo bought in 2009.

No one has been criminally charged in the probes, and the Justice Department reserved the right to pursue criminal charges if it wishes, according to the settlement.

Franklin Codel, president of Wells Fargo Home Lending, in a statement said the settlement “allows us to put the legal process behind us, and to focus our resources and energy on what we do best — serving the needs of the nation’s homeowners.”

Lewis Liman, a lawyer for Lofrano, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Wells Fargo on Feb. 3 said the settlement would reduce its previously reported 2015 profit by $134 million, to account for extra legal expenses.

The case is U.S. v. Wells Fargo Bank NA, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 12-07527.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel and Nate Raymond in New York; Editing by Dan Grebler)

 

Beauty Secrets of the Spies

CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

April 8, 2016

by Lee Fang

The Intercept

Skincential Sciences,a company with an innovative line of cosmetic products marketed as a way to erase blemishes and soften skin, has caught the attention of beauty bloggers on YouTube, Oprah’s lifestyle magazine, and celebrity skin care professionals. Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the firm has also attracted interest and funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The previously undisclosed relationship with the CIA might come as some surprise to a visitor to the website of Clearista, the main product line of Skincential Sciences, which boasts of a “formula so you can feel confident and beautiful in your skin’s most natural state.”

Though the public-facing side of the company touts a range of skin care products, Skincential Sciences developed a patented technology that removes a thin outer layer of the skin, revealing unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests, including DNA collection.

Skincential Science’s noninvasive procedure, described on the Clearista website as “painless,” is said to require only water, a special detergent, and a few brushes against the skin, making it a convenient option for restoring the glow of a youthful complexion — and a novel technique for gathering information about a person’s biochemistry.

In-Q-Tel, founded in 1999 by then-CIA Director George Tenet, identifies cutting-edge technology to support the mission of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and provides venture funding to help grow tech firms to develop those solutions.

“Our company is an outlier for In-Q-Tel,” Russ Lebovitz, the chief executive of Skincential Sciences, said during an interview with The Intercept. He conceded that the relationship might make for “an unusual and interesting story,” but said, “If there’s something beneath the surface, that’s not part of our relationship and I’m not directly aware. They’re interested here in something that can get easy access to biomarkers.”

Still, Lebovitz claimed he has limited knowledge of why In-Q-Tel selected his firm.

“I can’t tell you how everyone works with In-Q-Tel, but they are very interested in doing things that are pure science,” Lebovitz said. The CIA fund approached his company, telling him the fund shares an interest in looking at DNA extraction using the method pioneered by Skincential Sciences, according to Lebovitz.

Beyond that, Lebovitz said he was unsure of the intent of the CIA’s use of the technology, but the fund was “specifically interested in the diagnostics, detecting DNA from normal skin.” He added, “There’s no better identifier than DNA, and we know we can pull out DNA.”Perhaps law enforcement could use the biomarker extraction technique for crime scene identification or could conduct drug tests, Lebovitz suggested.

Carrie A. Sessine, the vice president for external affairs at In-Q-Tel, declined a media interview because “IQT does not participate in media interviews or opportunities.”

(Officials at the venture capital firm have, in fact, given interviews in the past.)

Though In-Q-Tel operates in the open, it has often kept key details of its activities out of public view, beyond required annual reports. After a SecureDrop source told The Intercept about a gathering in San Jose for In-Q-Tel executives and start-up companies backed by the fund, The Intercept attempted to attend, but was denied access.

Skincential Sciences was among several presenting companies.

The shroud of secrecy around In-Q-Tel belies a 17-year effort to build ties between the CIA and the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Gilman Louie, a video game executive known for publishing best-sellers such as Tetris, Falcon, and Civilization II, was brought on as the first chief executive of In-Q-Tel. The popular mapping tool Google Earth was created around technology developed by Keyhole Corp., an In-Q-Tel-backed company that was later acquired by Google.

Still, little is publicly revealed about the use of In-Q-Tel-backed ventures and their relevance to the goals of intelligence agencies. Many of the fund’s investments are not publicly revealed. The fund is reviewed by the CIA’s inspector general and reports directly to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which frequently conducts business through classified briefings.

David Petraeus, while serving as the director of the CIA in 2012, remarked, “Our partnership with In-Q-Tel is essential to helping identify and deliver groundbreaking technologies with mission-critical applications to the CIA and to our partner agencies.”

Despite the association with computer and satellite technology, In-Q-Tel also maintains a long-running interest in developing advanced genetic analysis, biological technologies for detection and diagnostics, as well as research into what is known as physiological intelligence, which, in a 2010 article, the fund described as “actionable information about human identity and experience that have always been of interest to the Intelligence Community.”

The article, which is no longer available on the fund’s website but is preserved by a cache hosted by the Internet Archive, argues that advances in medical research into biomarkers can be leveraged by intelligence agencies for a variety of uses, from airport security to next-generation identification tools.

A diagram in the article calls human skin the body’s largest organ and a “unique, underutilized source for sample collection.” The author, Dr. Kevin O’Connell, then a “senior solutions architect” with In-Q-Tel, notes, “The DNA contained in microorganisms in a person’s gut or on a person’s skin may contain sequences that indicate a particular geographical origin.”

In-Q-Tel has invested in several companies working in this realm, in addition to Skincential Sciences. In 2013, In-Q-Tel publicly announced a strategic partnership with Bio-NEMS, a firm that developed a semiconductor device used to analyze DNA for a variety of diagnostic and human identification applications. Claremont BioSolutions, a diagnostics firm, and Biomatrica, a firm that specializes in preparing biological samples for DNA testing, are also backed by In-Q-Tel.

Skincential Sciences did not start out as a beauty company. The firm was founded in 2010 as DX Biosciences, which was developed around a patent by a team of scientists including Dr. Samir Mitragotri of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Mitragotri has published research into the use of biomarkers as a “window to body’s health.”

The company gained early backing from Frontier, a venture capital company, among other investors.

While the technology has potential for a variety of medical diagnostics, including early melanoma detection, Lebovitz said the company quickly realized it had immediate value as a cosmetic. The application of the detergent developed by the firm could be used easily to diminish blemishes and dark patches on the skin. And unlike similar treatments at aesthetic spas, the technology developed by Dr. Mitragotri and his colleagues did not require acid or any discomfort.

In 2013, the firm relaunched and recapitalized as Skincential Sciences, with Clearista as its primary brand of beauty products.

Lebovitz says he intends to continue developing the technology so that it may be medically relevant, but he is also focusing on breaking into the multibillion-dollar skin care market. While Skincential has won measured success for its Clearista brand products by landing coverage on television and through social media, the company has not yet been able to compete with mainstream skin care companies.

Jamie Walsh, a blogger who runs Glam Latte, a beauty website, endorsed a Clearista product on her YouTube channel, noting that with only one application of the cream, her skin improved and was “glowing.” Walsh said Skincential Sciences sent her the product for a testimonial, and noted that like many independent brands, she did not know about the company’s funding.

Skincential hopes to license its product with a major distributor, or even one day become acquired by a larger beauty company. “We’ll take any of those,” said Lebovitz.

The chief executive noted that he is proud of the In-Q-Tel support, calling the fund “great partners.”

At the gathering in February for In-Q-Tel portfolio companies, Lebovitz joined a crowd that included a number of In-Q-Tel executives, along with senior members of the intelligence community. Presenting speakers included Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, and John Maeda, design partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a leading Silicon Valley investment firm.

“Not only was I the odd man out,” Lebovitz said, “but almost every woman at the conference wanted to come up to me to talk about skin care.”

Research: Margot Williams

 

The Revolt Against NATO

It’s a revolt against interventionism

April 8, 2016

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

It’s a revolt against interventionism

A recent report published in Foreign Policy magazine illustrates quite neatly how the anti-interventionist cause is making big gains – and how to effect real change in American foreign policy. The headline reads: “Senators Slam NATO ‘Free Riders’ in Closed Door Session With Secretary General,” and the story went on to relate how GOP Senators are suddenly complaining about how and why the burden of NATO falls largely on Uncle Sam’s sagging shoulders:

“For under an hour, senators grilled [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway, about why only five members of the 28-nation club spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, the official amount NATO recommends each nation to set aside. Some expressed particular dissatisfaction with Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world, which does not meet the 2 percent threshold.”

Although the article claimed that Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) “and other US officials” have “blasted” our feckless allies for years over this imbalance, this is the first time we’ve heard about it. Why is that? Well, it’s because the Republican frontrunner, one Donald J. Trump, is making an issue of it, and even suggesting that NATO, which he says is “obsolete,” is a relic of the cold war that ought to be entirely abandoned.

This has the foreign policy Establishment in a panic, with legions of “experts” rising up to denounce Trump’s heresy as misguided, absurd, and – of course! – “isolationist.” Yet the politicians can’t afford to be so dismissive: after all, they have to listen to their constituents, at least to some extent. And it’s quite telling what Sen. Corker – who has warned the “Never Trump” crowd to back off – had to say to Stoltenberg:

“I did mention to him that there’s a populism that is taking place within our country right now, both sides of the aisle. The American people know that we are a nation spending way beyond our means and when our European counterparts are not honoring their obligations as they should, at some point, there’s going to be a breaking point.”

Ah yes, the “breaking point” – we’ve been waiting for it for, lo these many years, and finally – finally! – it looks like it’s happening. And we owe it all to an unlikely figure, a New York real estate mogul who has never run for office and whose public persona is a cross between a reality TV star and P. T. Barnum. Nobody – including myself – predicted the effect he would have on the presidential race, and, more importantly, on the political discourse in this country. Due to Trump’s astounding rise, even the haughty mandarins in the US Senate are being forced to pay attention and give voice to their usually very muted criticism of an institution that is the linchpin of our internationalist foreign policy. As Foreign Policy puts it:

“Donald Trump has spent much of his campaign deriding NATO allies for ‘ripping off’ the American taxpayer and failing to contribute to the world’s most powerful military alliance. But on Wednesday, his fellow Republicans joined the chorus during a closed-door meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Capitol Hill, according to sources inside the room.”

Corker claims to have raised the issue “in Munich, I have expressed this in Davos, I have expressed this is every forum where Europeans are listening.” Now he is finally forced to express it in a forum where Americans are listening – and that is the key point.

Support for our interventionist foreign policy has never extended much beyond the Washington Beltway. It’s a common complaint among the wonkish “experts” who inhabit the thinktanks along the Potomac that the average American doesn’t have a passport, doesn’t care about what happens overseas unless it impacts him directly, and is basically one of those dreaded “isolationists.”

Yet they also reveled in the alleged ignorance of Joe Sixpack, who – up until this point – hasn’t had any way to protest the billions that flow overseas in the name of “national security” while our roads and bridges deteriorate and their tax burden gets heavier by the year. The bipartisan commitment to maintaining an overseas empire has always muted the voices of ordinary Americans, who would like nothing better than to mind their own business, and tend to reflexively oppose meddling in the affairs of other nations. The free-spending lobbyists over at Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, and the rest of the military-industrial complex were always far more persuasive than NATO’s occasional critics. That’s now changed, as the Foreign Policy writer explains to his elite audience:

“But what once was an esoteric concern confined to the halls of think tanks and embassies is now a red-hot campaign issue. Corker said Trump’s campaign rhetoric speaks to a concern he’s heard from his own Tennessee constituents, which he relayed to Stoltenberg.”

This illustrates the incalculable value of the Trump campaign for anti-interventionists: he has taken ideas about America’s role in the world once considered too “extreme” to be seriously considered and popularized them to the point where the politicians must respond. And by suggesting that maybe it’s time for NATO to go the way of the old Soviet Union – into the dustbin of history – Trump has forced them to move in his direction, while attempting to salvage what they can:

“Still, a number of senators in the room emphasized that their frustrations about burden-sharing within the NATO alliance did not mean they see eye-to-eye with Trump, who has called the alliance ‘obsolete’ and said it may have to dissolve.

“’I believe NATO’s an indispensable alliance,’ said Sen. Marco Rubio, who suspended his failed presidential campaign last month. ‘It certainly needs to be modernized but it has a real value to it.’”

“Failed” is a mild term indeed to describe Rubio’s fate: crushed by Trump in his home state of Florida, the Boy Wonder of the neocons had no choice but to drop out. The only victories he could point to were Minnesota (a caucus state) and the US colony of Puerto Rico. And he was the prime spokesman of the neoconservative internationalists, who abhor Trump’s “isolationism,” and are absolutely terrified that his anti-NATO stance will short-circuit their planned revival of the cold war with Russia. He wasn’t shy about attacking Trump’s call for America to come home – it was one of his main talking points – and the voters rejected him soundly and decisively. Ask the average American if they think NATO is “indispensable” and they’ll look at you as if you’ve gone mad, because the question that foreign policy mavens in the Beltway don’t care to ask (or answer) is: “Indispensable” to whom?

That Trump’s supporters are now loudly asking this question is what has the War Party so terrified that they will apparently stop at nothing in their campaign to steal the nomination – by hook or by crook – in a “contested” (i.e. rigged) convention. It isn’t only the enormous sums of money that are at stake here: the power and prestige of the entire foreign policy Establishment is at risk. Which is why the internationalists are desperate to save what they can from the wreckage of what used to be the bipartisan consensus:

“Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said that reasonable people can disagree about the contributions of NATO members, but Trump’s open speculation that the alliance may be worth leaving is far outside the mainstream. The United States has been a member of NATO since it was formed to counter the Soviet Union in 1949.“’I think it’s important to explain that Trump isn’t the tip of an iceberg,’ Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, told Foreign Policy. ‘He is a tiny isolated chunk of ice out in the ocean on this.’”

Since 2011, Sen. Murphy has received over $700,000 in campaign contributions from investment bankers – a category of donors that depends heavily on America’s willingness to defend their overseas investments, and that finances the huge arms deals NATO members (including the US) must make to “modernize” their arsenals. In Sen. Murphy, Goldman-Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and the rest of that gang are surely getting their money’s worth.

Murray Rothbard explained the key role played by the investment bankers in pushing for and maintaining our interventionist foreign policy. In his fascinating and detailed history of how the financial elites have dominated and shaped US foreign policy, Rothbard wrote:

“The great turning point of American foreign policy came in the early 1890s, during the second Cleveland administration. It was then that the United States turned sharply and permanently from a foreign policy of peace and nonintervention to an aggressive program of economic and political expansion abroad. At the heart of the new policy were America’s leading bankers, eager to use the country’s growing economic strength to subsidize and force-feed export markets and investment outlets that they would finance, as well as to guarantee Third World government bonds. The major focus of aggressive expansion in the 1890s was Latin America, and the principal enemy to be dislodged was Great Britain, which had dominated foreign investments in that vast region.”

Using the US military as their unofficial police force, the great financial combines – the Morgans, the Lehmans, the Rockefellers, et al – were the motor of American expansionism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their lobbyists and congressional spear-carriers in Washington created the vaunted postwar “architecture” of which NATO is the cornerstone, and that is now threatened by a populist-nationalist uprising. In seeking to head off and stifle this insurgency, Sen. Murphy, and his internationalist Republican co-thinkers in the “Never Trump” cabal, are simply defending their financial and personal interests. Yet there is every indication that they are vastly underestimating the challenge they face.

Murphy is quite wrong that “Trump isn’t the tip of an iceberg.” A huge glacier has been lurking beneath the waves of American politics for many years, and it hasn’t surfaced until now due to lack of a spokesman.

That avatar of populist discontent has now appeared in the person of Donald J. Trump, who is anything but “a tiny isolated chunk out in the ocean.” Millions of Americans support Trump precisely because he is willing to take on the sacred cow of NATO, and the Republican foreign policy dogma that led us into a disastrous war in Iraq.

The political elites in both major parties have been steering the country toward an iceberg that they have ignored at their peril. This is what has made the rise of Trump almost inevitable. And it’s significant that a great deal of his support comes from the Trumpian critique of our relations with the rest of the world: not only in regard to questions of war and peace and our alliances, but also our trade and immigration policies. I plan to deal with the trade issue in a future column, but for now I’ll just recall that infamous quote from an unnamed top aide to President George W. Bush (later identified as Karl Rove) cited by Ron Suskind in the New York Times Magazine during the Iraq war:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. … That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

“History’s actors” have led us to one disaster after another: they have impoverished a once wealthy nation, exhausting its resources in a futile crusade to remake the world and enrich the few at the expense of the many – leaving death and much destruction in their wake. And now the American people are rising up, and saying: “Enough!” No longer content to be left to just watch helplessly as the Karl Roves of this world wreak havoc on a global scale, ordinary people are waking up – and standing up.

If populism is anything it is an awakening – a move away from the traditional passivity of the ordinary citizen and toward an activist rebellion against the regnant elites. This is the essence of the Trump campaign, and it is having a salutary effect on the movement to fundamentally alter and reverse our interventionist foreign policy.

This is what Trump’s many critics – including many anti-interventionists, and certainly most libertarians – fail to understand. No one would be talking about the costs of NATO if Trump hadn’t challenged the conventional wisdom, made it a campaign issue, and put it front and center. And surely no one would’ve ever imagined the Republican frontrunner calling out the second Bush administration for lying us into the Iraq war and disdaining the Bushian mantra that “he kept us safe.” And in spite of his disgraceful pandering to AIPAC, Trump’s actual stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – that we have to be “evenhanded” – represents a total break with the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus that would’ve been inconceivable just a short while ago.

All of this represents a sea change in American politics, and in the way foreign policy is debated and shaped – and it is having its effect,, and will continue to reverberate for many years, no matter what the fate of Trump’s campaign.

Which brings me to my main point – which is that Trump, as a candidate, is entirely beside the point. What’s significant about his campaign is the tremendous response he has evoked from voters in every demographic, from coast to coast, even as he smashes every icon sacred to the globalist-interventionists in both parties. To ignore this is just sheer blindness – and to condemn it without deigning to acknowledge its many positive aspects is just plain stupid. Anti-interventionists who have been toiling in the vineyards for years trying to catch the attention of Americans should be jumping for joy that people are finally paying attention to the issues they care about. As Foreign Policy magazine put it:

“[F]or longtime NATO observers, the unusually high profile of NATO scrutiny is novel for any U.S. election cycle in recent memory.

“’NATO has never really gotten attention in presidential campaigns before this year’s with Trump,’ said Robbie Gramer, a NATO expert at the Atlantic Council. ‘The fact that the only attention it has received is through this light underscores how frustrated the US electorate is with its allies. And NATO really hasn’t found an effective way to combat this message.’”

The Atlantic Council – which has received money from “more than two dozen countries since 2008,” including from practically all our European allies – is one of NATO’s many lobbyists in Washington. Their shtick up until now has been to ignore ordinary Americans and make their appeal to the political class. They haven’t had to venture out beyond the Beltway to do this – and now that they’re forced to do so, they haven’t a clue as to how to go about doing it.

The American people – thanks to Trump – are finally seeing that our “allies” are freeloaders and that the vaunted “security architecture” the politicians and the foreign lobbyists have been building up over the years is an albatross hung around our necks. Critics of our interventionist foreign policy don’t have to support Donald Trump’s candidacy to acknowledge their debt to him. They may not like him, they may abhor his other views – on, say, immigration – but it’s vitally necessary for them to give him credit where and when it is due. Failure to do so will result in their complete irrelevance. It’s absolutely imperative we in the anti-interventionist movement reach out to the millions who will troop to the polls to vote for Trump, and the millions more who are rooting for him. And it’s impossible to do that by sitting around virtue-signaling to his critics.

The choice before us is this: anti-interventionists can either continue their traditional tactics of talking among themselves, or they can broaden their movement to include the many millions who are now beginning to question the wisdom of a foreign policy that puts America and Americans last. As far as I’m concerned, the choice we have to make is too obvious to require much comment beyond posing the question.

 

Media Unmoored from Facts

April 7, 2016

by Robert Perry

consortium

Exclusive: Mainstream U.S. journalism has completely lost its way, especially in dealing with foreign policy issues where bias now overwhelms any commitment to facts, a dangerous development, writes Robert Parry.

Several weeks ago, I received a phone call from legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh who had seen one of my recent stories about Syria and wanted to commiserate over the state of modern journalism. Hersh’s primary question regarding reporters and editors at major news outlets these days was: “Do they care what the facts are?”

Hersh noted that in the past – in the 1970s when he worked at The New York Times – even executive editor Abe Rosenthal, who was a hard-line cold warrior with strong ideological biases, still wanted to know what was really going on.

My experience was similar at The Associated Press. Among the older editors, there was still a pride in getting the facts right – and not getting misled by some politician or spun by some government flack.

That journalistic code, however, no longer exists – at least not on foreign policy and national security issues. The major newspapers and TV networks are staffed largely by careerists who uncritically accept what they are fed by U.S. government officials or what they get from think-tank experts who are essentially in the pay of special interests.

For a variety of reasons – from the draconian staff cuts among foreign correspondents to the career fear of challenging some widely held “group think” – many journalists have simply become stenographers, taking down what the Important People say is true, not necessarily what is true.

It’s especially easy to go with the flow when writing about some demonized foreign leader. Then, no editor apparently expects anything approaching balance or objectivity, supposedly key principles of journalism. Indeed, if a reporter gave one of these hated figures a fair shake, there might be grumblings about whether the reporter was a “fill-in-the-blank apologist.” The safe play is to pile on.

This dishonesty – or lack of any commitment to the truth – is even worse among editorialists and columnists. Having discovered that there was virtually no cost for being catastrophically wrong about the facts leading into the Iraq invasion in 2003, these writers must feel so immune from accountability that they can safely ignore reality.

But – for some of us old-timers – it’s still unnerving to read the work of these “highly respected” journalists who simply don’t care what the facts are.

For instance, the establishment media has been striking back ferociously against President Barack Obama’s apostasy in a series of interviews published in The Atlantic, in which he defends his decision not to bomb the Syrian government in reaction to a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013.

Though The Atlantic article was posted a month ago, the media fury is still resonating and reverberating around Official Washington, with Washington Post editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt penning the latest condemnation of Obama’s supposed fecklessness for not enforcing his “red line” on chemical-weapon use in Syria by bombing the Syrian military.

Remember that in 2002-03, Hiatt penned Post editorials that reported, as “flat fact,” that Iraq possessed hidden stockpiles of WMD – and he suffered not a whit for being horribly wrong. More than a dozen years later, Hiatt is still the Post’s editorial-page editor – one of the most influential jobs in American journalism.

On Thursday, Hiatt reported as flat fact that Syria’s “dictator, Bashar al-Assad, killed 1,400 or more people in a chemical gas attack,” a reference to the 2013 sarin atrocity. Hiatt then lashed out at President Obama for not punishing Assad and – even worse – for showing satisfaction over that restraint.

Citing The Atlantic interviews, Hiatt wrote that Obama “said he had been criticized because he refused to follow the ‘playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment,’ which would have counseled greater U.S. intervention.” Hiatt was clearly disgusted with Obama’s pusillanimous choice.

The No ‘Slam Dunk’ Warning

But what Hiatt and other neocon columnists consistently ignore from The Atlantic article is the disclosure that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper informed Obama that U.S. intelligence analysts doubted that Assad was responsible for the sarin attack.

Clapper even used the phrase “slam dunk,” which is associated with the infamous 2002 pledge from then-CIA Director George Tenet to President George W. Bush about how “slam dunk” easy it would be to make the case that Iraq was hiding WMD. More than a decade later, brandishing that disgraced phrase, Clapper told Obama that it was not a “slam dunk” that Assad was responsible for the sarin attack.

In other words, Obama’s decision not to bomb Assad’s military was driven, in part, by the intelligence community’s advice that he might end up bombing the wrong people. Since then, evidence has built up that radical jihadists opposed to Assad staged the sarin attack as a provocation to trick the U.S. military into entering the war on their side.

But those facts clearly are not convenient to Hiatt’s neocon goal – i.e., how to get the United States into another Mideast “regime change” war – so he simply expunges the “slam dunk” exchange between Clapper and Obama and inserts instead a made-up “fact,” the flat-fact certainty of Assad’s guilt.

Hiatt’s assertion of the death toll – as “1,400 or more people” – is also dubious. Doctors on the ground in Damascus placed the number of dead at several hundred. The 1,400 figure was essentially manufactured by the U.S. government using a dubious methodology of counting bodies shown on “social media,” failing to take into account the question of whether the victims died as a result of the Aug. 21, 2013 incident.

Relying on “social media” for evidence is a notoriously unreliable practice, since pretty much anyone can post anything on the Internet. And, in the case of Syria, there are plenty of interest groups that have a motive to misidentify or even fabricate images for the purpose of influencing public opinion and policy. There is also the Internet’s vulnerability as a devil’s playground for professional intelligence services.

But Hiatt is far from alone in lambasting Obama for failing to do what All the Smart People of Washington knew he should do: bomb, bomb, bomb Assad’s forces in Syria – even if that might have led to the collapse of the army and the takeover of Damascus by Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and/or the Islamic State.

Nationally syndicated columnist Richard Cohen, another Iraq War cheerleader who suffered not at all for that catastrophe, accused Obama of “hubris” for taking pride in his decision not to bomb Syria in 2013 and then supposedly basing his foreign policy on that inaction.

“In an odd way, Obama’s failure to intervene in Syria or to enforce his stated ‘red line’ there has become the rationale for an entire foreign policy doctrine – one based more on hubris than success,” wrote Cohen in a column on Tuesday.

Note how Cohen – like Hiatt – fails to mention the relevant fact that DNI Clapper warned the President that the intelligence community was unsure who had unleashed the sarin attack or whether Assad had, in fact, crossed the “red line.”

Cohen also embraces the conventional wisdom that Obama was mistaken not to have intervened in Syria, ignoring the fact that Obama did, in violation of international law, authorize arming and training of thousands of Syrian rebels to violently overthrow the Syrian government, with many of those weapons (and recruits) falling into the hands of terror groups, such as Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Climbing into Bed with Al Qaeda.”]

Neocon Ideologues

So, it appears that these well-regarded geniuses don’t appreciate the idea of ascertaining the facts before charging off to war. And there’s a reason for that: many are neocon ideologues who reached their conclusion about what needs to be done in the Middle East – eliminate governments that are troublesome to Israel – and thus they view information as just something to be manipulated to manipulate the public.

This thinking stems from the 1990s when neocons combined their recognition of America’s unmatched military capabilities – as displayed in the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91 and made even more unchallengeable with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991– with Israel’s annoyance over inconclusive negotiations with the Palestinians and security concerns over Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia.

The new solution to Israel’s political and security problems would be “regime change” in countries seen as aiding and abetting Israel’s enemies. The strategy came together among prominent U.S. neocons working on Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign for Israeli prime minister.

Rather than continuing those annoying negotiations with the Palestinians, Netanyahu’s neocon advisers — including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Mevray Wurmser — advocated a new approach, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”

The “clean break” sought “regime change” in countries supporting Israel’s close-in enemies, whether Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria under the Assad dynasty or Iran, a leading benefactor of Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Two years later, in 1998, the neocon Project for the New American Century called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. PNAC was founded by neocon luminaries William Kristol and Robert Kagan. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]

After George W. Bush became president and the 9/11 attacks left the American people lusting for revenge, the pathway was cleared for implementing the “regime change” agenda, with Iraq still at the top of the list although it had nothing to do with 9/11. Again, the last thing the neocons wanted was to inform the American people of the real facts about Iraq because that might have sunk the plans for this war of choice.

Thus, the American public was consistently misled by both the Bush administration and the neocon-dominated mainstream media. The Post’s Hiatt, for instance, was out there regularly reporting Iraq’s WMD threat as “flat fact.”

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and months of fruitless searching for the promised WMD caches, Hiatt finally acknowledged that the Post should have been more circumspect in its confident claims about the WMD. “If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction,” Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. “If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.” [CJR, March/April 2004]

Yet, Hiatt’s supposed remorse didn’t stop him and the Post editorial page from continuing its single-minded support for the Iraq War — and heaping abuse on war critics, such as former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson who challenged President Bush’s claims about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium from NIger.

The degree to which the neocons continue to dominate the major news outlets, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, is demonstrated by the lack of virtually any accountability on the journalists who misinformed their readers about an issue as consequential as the war in Iraq.

And, despite the disaster in Iraq, the neocons never cast aside their “clean break” playbook. After Iraq, the “regime change” strategy listed Syria next and then Iran. Although the neocons suffered a setback in 2008 with the election of Iraq War opponent Barack Obama, they never gave up their dreams.

The neocons worked through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Iraq War supporters who managed to survive and even move up through the government ranks despite Obama’s distaste for their military solutions.

While in office, Clinton sabotaged chances to get Iran to surrender much of its nuclear material – all the better to keep the “regime change” option in play – and she lobbied for a covert military intervention to oust Syria’s Assad. (She also tipped the balance in favor of another “regime change” war in Libya that has created one more failed state in the volatile region.)

But the most disturbing fact is that these war promoters – both in politics and the press – continue to be rewarded for their warmongering. Hiatt retains his gilded perch as the Post’s editorial-page editor (setting Official Washington’s agenda); Cohen remains one of America’s leading national columnists; and Hillary Clinton is favored to become the next President.

So, the answer to Sy Hersh’s question – “Do they care what the facts are?” – is, it appears, no. There is just too much money and power involved in influencing and controlling Washington and – through those levers of finance, diplomacy and war – controlling the world. When that’s at stake, real facts can become troublesome things. For the people who wield this influence and control, it is better for them to manufacture their own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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