How the FBI Hacked Twitter: The answer begins with Russiagate

Lee Smith

Tablet Magazine | January 05, 2023

AFTER journalist Matt Taibbi published the first batch of internal Twitter documents known as the Twitter files, he tweeted that the company’s deputy general counsel, James Baker, was vetting them.

“The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter files’ surprised everyone involved,” Taibbi wrote. That apparently included even Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, who added that Baker may have deleted some of the files he was supposed to be reviewing.

Baker had been the top lawyer at the FBI when it interfered in the 2016 presidential election. News that he might have been burying evidence of the spy service’s use of a social media company to interfere with the 2020 election, is rightly setting off alarm bells.

New York Times, Guardian And 3 More Media Outlets Call To End Prosecution Of Assange: Publishing Is Not A Crime

Countercurrents | November 29, 2022

 “The U.S. government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets,” the editors of the Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El Pais wrote in a joint letter published Monday.

The letter was signed by Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and the editors and publishers of the Guardian (Britain), Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El Pais (Spain).

In a joint letter, the news organizations warned that the indictment of Julian Assange “sets a dangerous precedent” that could chill reporting about matters of national security.

“Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists,” the letter said. “If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.”

CIA Agent Reveals How They Plant Lies In News Media

The Jimmy Dore Show

Why does the Western Narrative sound so stupid and unrealistic?

Detlef Romatzki

The Saker Blog | November 08, 2022

The question of why the Western Punters seem to make such ridiculous statements, and seem to be totally misinformed, has come up in numerous discussion about the Western Leaders and commentators.

Let me try to present a theory in order to make some sense.

In a recent article by Larry Johnson, dated 23 November, “De-Constructing Western Delusions on Ukraine and Russia”, Larry quotes the comments of an unknown Western Commentator. However, Larry refuses to mention who it was for the sake of not embarrassing that person any more than necessary.

You can read the article here

Well, he should have, but that is not the point. But some context would have helped a lot. The rest of the article is basically on how Larry debunks this narrative and I am not going to discuss it.

One has to asks oneself why are these commentators spewing this nonsense when we in the more “enlightened group”, being more open minded and alleged to know the truth, know so much better and claim we live in the real world?

A possible answer is presented in the following arguments made.

Was Marilyn Monroe a communist?

IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM | October 19, 2022

At first sight the title’s question seems ridiculous: What does a Hollywood bombshell with a “ditzy blonde” persona have to do with communist ideology? But sixty years since her death, a controversial Netflix movie (“Blonde”) based on her life raises, once again, the issue of Marilyn Monroe’s socio-political views which the U.S. cinema industry fears to address.

Was Marilyn Monroe a communist-sympathizer? Did she have any close ties with Communist Party members? What were her views on the Soviet Union, on Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the People’s Republic of China? There isn’t a straightforward answer to these questions. Back in 2012, files that document the FBI’s close scrutiny on Monroe were released. 

Land of False Idols: Ben Bradlee’s Not Such ‘A Good Life’

James DiEugenio

Consortium News | March 10, 2015

When Ben Bradlee died last Oct. 21 at age 93, his widow Sally Quinn and his protegé Bob Woodward dutifully made the media rounds. They both lavishly praised his long tenure as executive editor of the Washington Post, which was predictable, since it was Bradlee who first hired Quinn at the Post (before marrying her) and Bradlee was influential in hiring Woodward, who then received much support from Bradlee.

The Post treated Bradlee’s death something like the passing of a former president, putting the story on the front page, above the fold, accompanied by a huge close-up picture of the man despite the fact that Bradlee had stepped down from the editor’s position more than two decades prior and although the Post had passed from the Graham family, which had hired Bradlee as editor and made him rich, to Internet entrepreneur Jeff Bezos who bought the paper in 2013.

Predictably, all of the above and more was quite flattering about Bradlee and his career in the newspaper business. The Post, which has fallen on hard times of late, wanted to remind its readers of a bygone age when the paper had much more cachet and influence than it does today (as did the rest of the mainstream media).

Land of False Idols: Ben Bradlee’s Not Such ‘A Good Life’ (Part 2)

James DiEugenio

Consortium News | October 05, 2022

Ben Bradlee’s journalistic reputation is defined in the public’s mind by his role as the Washington Post’s gutsy executive editor during the Watergate scandal and especially by Jason Robards’s dramatic portrayal of him in the movie, “All the President’s Men.” Bradlee’s role in Richard Nixon’s political demise and his famous friendship with John F. Kennedy created an image of Bradlee as an icon of the “liberal media,” but those chapters of his life are misleading and miss the point of who Ben Bradlee really was and what his legacy truly is.

As we saw in Part One, Bradlee came from the American ruling elite and operated within a social framework that involved close personal relationships with leading figures in the U.S. government and its intelligence community, including CIA rising star Richard Helms who had been Bradlee’s friend since childhood.

SILENCING THE LAMBS. HOW PROPAGANDA WORKS

John Pilger

In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer.

She told me that the ‘patriotic messages’ of her films were dependent not on ‘orders from above’ but on what she called the ‘submissive void’ of the German public.

Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked.  ‘Yes, especially them,’ she said.

I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.

OF MSM: BBC and a queen

A Journal of People report

The BBC has disabled comments under a tweet celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s “longstanding relationship” with Africa after the post drew public outrage, with people calling the tribute a “rebranding of colonialism.”
The post in question was published on Twitter by the BBC’s African arm on Thursday in the wake of the long-serving monarch’s death, and featured a four-and-a-half-minute video celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s relations with Africa and its leaders throughout her 70-year reign.
However, a number of people took issue with the post, stating that the BBC was trying to “rebrand colonialism” by sugarcoating Britain’s rule over Africa, which continued into the late 20th century. In 1980, Zimbabwe became the last African nation to gain independence from the UK.

OF MSM: Google & Facebook

A Journal of People report

Reports regularly expose the mainstream media (MSM) Following are two reports:

Israeli military contract. Google employees protest.

Google employees protesting the company’s Project Nimbus contract with Amazon Web Services and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have gone public with a week of protest actions set to culminate in a multi-city demonstration headlined No Tech for Apartheid.

A multiethnic, multireligious group of Googlers calling themselves Jewish Diaspora in Tech hopes to pressure the tech giant into dropping the mammoth $1.2 billion contract on moral grounds, arguing that by allowing Israel access to its most sophisticated machine learning and AI technology, Google is enabling heinous crimes against the occupied Palestinian population.