By Frida Berrigan, April 4, 2019
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/04/nuclear-weapons-ruined-my-life/
Frida, whose name means peace, writes:
As someone deeply embedded in a life of anti-nuclear resistance, I know the only way to get rid of these weapons is to never stop thinking about them.
By Annie Machon, former MI5 intelligence officer
http://samadamsaward.ch/2018/11/former-mi6-spy-versus-wikileaks-editor-first-amendment-rights/
(A DIRECTLY Russia-gate-related article from the Sam Adams Associates website [[ http://samadamsaward.ch ]] by Annie Machon, one of SAAII’s most experienced and active members.)
While it is all too easy to become frustrated and annoyed by what passes for news in the legacy media these days, this article in the Daily Mail [[ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6088015/Ex-British-spy-trump-dossier-wins-legal-battle.html ]] did arouse my particular ire early one morning – and in this instance no particular blame attaches to the newspaper, it is simply reporting some unpalatable facts.
The gist of it is that former British MI6 intelligence officer and current mercenary spy-for-hire, Christopher Steele, author of the discredited “Dirty Dossier” about Donald Trump, has been accorded First Amendment rights in a court case in the USA.
You might wonder why this article caused me so much spluttering annoyance over my breakfast? Steele’s treatment is in marked contrast to that accorded to Wikileaks publisher and editor in chief, Julian Assange, and the hypocrisy is breathtaking. Allow me to expound.
Christopher Steele is a British intelligence officer of pretty much my vintage. According to what is available publicly, he worked for MI6, the British overseas intelligence gathering agency, for 22 years, serving in Russian in the early 90s and in Paris at the end of that decade – around the time that MI5 whistleblower, David Shayler, was imprisoned in that city pending a failed extradition case to the UK. It is probable that Steele would have been monitoring us then.
After being outed as an MI6 officer in 1999 by his former colleague, Richard Tomlinson, he was pretty much desk-bound in London until he resigned in 2009 to set up, in the inimitable way of so many former spooks, a private consultancy that can provide plausibly deniable services to corporations and perhaps their former employers.
Steele established just such a mercenary spy outfit, Orbis Business Intelligence, with another ex-colleague Chris Burrows in 2009. Orbis made its name in exposing corruption at the heart of FIFA in 2015 and was thereafter approached as an out-sourced partner by Fusion GPS – the company initially hired to dig dirt on presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 by one of his Republican rivals and which then went on to dig up dirt on behalf of Hilary Clinton’s DNC.
The result is what has become known as the “Dirty Dossier”, a grubby collection of prurient gossip with no real evidence or properly sourced information. As a former MI6 intelligence officer, Steele should be hanging his head in shame at such a shoddy and embarrassingly half-baked report.
On a slightly tangential note, there has been some speculation, suppressed in the UK at least via the D Notice censorship system, that MI6 agent and Russian traitor Sergei Skripal, the victim of the alleged Novichok poisoning in the UK earlier this year, remained in contact with his handler Pablo Miller, who also is reported to work for Orbis Business Intelligence. If this were indeed the case, then it would be a logical assumption that Orbis, via Miller, might well have used Skripal as one of its “reliable sources” for the Dossier.
Despite all this, Steele has won a legal case in the USA, where he had been sued by three Russian oligarchs who claimed that the Dirty Dossier traduced their reputations. And he won on the basis that his report was protected by First Amendment rights under the constitution of the USA, which guarantees US citizens the right to freedom of expression. Despite the fact that Steele is British:
“But Judge Anthony Epstein disagreed, writing in his judgment that “advocacy on issues of public interest has the capacity to inform public debate, and thereby furthers the purposes of the First Amendment, regardless of the citizenship or residency of the speakers”.”
This is the nub of the issue: Steele, a former official UK intelligence officer and current mercenary spy-for-hire, is granted legal protection by the American courts for digging up and subsequently leaking what appears to be controversial and defamatory information about the current President as well as various Russians, all paid for by Trump’s political opponents. And Steele is given the full protection of the US legal system.
On the other hand we have an award-winning journalist and publisher, Julian Assange, whose organisation Wikileaks has never been found to report anything factually incorrect in over 10 years, being told that if he were to be extradited from his current political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to face the full wrath of a vengeful American establishment, he is not entitled to claim protection of the First Amendment because his is an Australian citizen not an American.
It has been an open secret for years that the US government has installed a secret Grand Jury in Virginia (the home of the CIA) to investigate Assange and bring him to “justice” for publishing embarrassing US government documents as well as evidence of war crimes. There have been calls from US politicians for the death sentence, life in prison without parole, and even assassination. The US has been scrabbling around for years to try to find any charge it could potentially throw at him – hell, it will probably make up a new law just for him, so desperate as it is to make an example of him.
However, the fake “Russiagate” narrative gave the US deep state an additional spur – against all evidence and Assange’s own statements – it alleges that “Russia” hacked the DNC and Podesta emails and Assange was the conduit to make them public. This is seen as a win-win for the US establishment, apparently if erroneously proving that Russia hacked the US presidential election and confirming that Assange runs an “non-state hostile intelligence agency”, according to current CIA Director, Mike Pompeo
Except he does not. He is an editor running a high-tech publishing outfit that has caused embarrassment to governments and corporations around the world, not just America. If he can be prosecuted for publishing information very much in the public interest, then all the legacy media feeding off the Wikileaks hydrant of information are equally vulnerable.
This being the case, surely he of all people requires the protection of the First Amendment in the USA? Otherwise the concept that free media can hold power to account is surely dead?
First published on RT Op-Ed on 24 August 2018.
By Ray McGovern, April 11, 2019
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/11/requiem-for-the-fourth-estate/
‘Who The Hell Was I Working With Then?’ Asks Russian President
https://politics.theonion.com/shocked-vladimir-putin-slowly-realizing-he-didn-t-consp-1833575011
MOSCOW—Saying that he had been “totally blindsided” by the revelations from the recently released findings of the Mueller investigation, a shocked Vladimir Putin reportedly came to the realization Tuesday that he didn’t conspire with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign after all. “What the hell? I worked so hard on this—if I wasn’t colluding with the Trump campaign, who the hell was I colluding with?” said the dumbfounded Russian president, growing increasingly angry as he scrolled through his email inbox and recounted his numerous efforts at covert communication with individuals who he had thought were high-ranking Trump officials, but now he suspected were bots or anonymous internet trolls.
“Man, it seemed so legit. I can’t believe I let myself get conned like this. I spent so much time emailing back and forth with DonaldTrump46@hotmail.com about compromising the democratic voting process, and now it turns out it was all fake? And we spent so much time gathering all that kompromat on the wrong people. Goddammit, I feel like I’ve wasted my life.” At press time, Putin was frantically double-checking that Russia had assisted in propping up a dictator in Syria and not some other country.
At the April 5 online vigil to demonstrate support for Julian Assange and to send up a loud international shout to discourage Ecuador and the UK from bowing to U.S. pressure to hand him over. Ray reviewed the bidding and provided informal commentary. The interviewers were Joe Lauria and Elizabeth Lea Vox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnwgQhBSEqI
Ray’s segment came at the start of the multi-hour vigil; his comments run for the first 16 minutes, after which he, Joe, and Elizabeth cross-talk until minute 33:25.
By Ray McGovern
Fulton Armstrong advises that La Jornada, one of Mexico’s leading national newspapers, has frontpaged a translation of VIPS’ Memorandum of April 4 to President Trump, urging caution regarding Venezuela.
Here is the link to the article in La Jornada:
https://www.jornada.com.mx/ultimas/2019/04/07/intervenir-en-venezuela-llevara-a-la-guerra-con-rusia-alertan-a-trump-9094.html
And the link to the earlier VIPS Memo is here:
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/04/vips-urge-trump-to-avoid-war-in-venezuela/)
Fulton Armstrong was principal drafter of the VIPS Memo; he been National Intelligence Officer for Latin America, and also National Security Council Director for Inter-American Affairs. La Jornada placed the VIPS Memo at the center of its front page today, Sunday, under the headline: Intervenir en Venezuela llevará a la guerra con Rusia, alertan a Trump (“Tump is warned that intervention in Venezuela could lead to war with Russia.”)
Here’s how La Jornada introduced its readers to VIPS, below which we offer an informal English translation:
El grupo Veteranos Profesionales de Inteligencia por la Cordura (VIPS, por sus silgas en inglés) advierte en el presente memorando al gobierno del presidente estadunidense Donald Trump que su intento de interferir en Venezuela puede acabar provocando una guerra entre Estados Unidos y Rusia. VIPS fue fundado en 2003 y su primera declaración, redactada en el mismo formato y enviado al entonces presidente estadunidense George W. Bush y su gobierno, fue una disertación para refutar los argumentos y distorsiones que utilizó dicha administración para justificar la invasión a Irak.
“The group Veteranos Profesionales de Inteligencia por la Cordura (VIPS, by its initials in English) warns in its current memorandum to the government of U.S. President Donald Trump that his attempt to intervene in Venezuela could end up provoking a war between the U.S. and Russia. VIPS was founded in 2003 and its first memorandum, written in the same format and sent to then-U.S. president George W. Bush and his government, was a commentary refuting the arguments and distortions which that administration used to justify the invasion of Iraq.”
The Spanish translation of the text of the Memo follows that lead-in.
A German translation is expected to be posted in a day or two on a prominent German website.
Any ideas as to how to circumvent the censors in the U.S.?
Ray discusses this and other Russia-gate issues on a panel at the Left Forum. He provides Russia-gate background and status as of a year ago — including a guess as to who was the actual “intruder” into DNC emails; the CIA’s “obfuscation” offensive cybertool leaked to WikiLeaks and published on March 31, 2017; and why you may not have heard about any of this.
June 2, 2018, 19 minutes (Ray’s remarks run from min. 6:30 to 25:35.)
https://youtu.be/OtaZC4E5oeE
Why the keffiyeh? Ray had been on a Veterans For Peace delegation to Palestine in February/March 2017; often chooses to wear the keffiyeh as sign of solidarity with the Palestinian people, whom Israel could not dehumanize without the support of U.S. tax dollars.
By Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
April 4, 2019
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/04/vips-urge-trump-to-avoid-war-in-venezuela/
By Phil Giraldi, April 4, 2019
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/04/what-monroe-doctrine.html
Remind every Marine you know — especially those who may now be headed south: Gen. Smedley Butler was awarded TWO Medals of Honor, when he — like Mad-Dog Mattis — apparently found it fun “to shoot people.” Then he (Butler, not Mattis) came to his senses and realized he was being used. Here’s Butler:
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher- ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.”
General Smedley Butler. USMC
