The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) recently acknowledged the practice of hiring journalists vetted by MI5, the UK intelligence agency, to keep out the "subversives".

The CIA is believed to have driven American investigative reporter Gary Webb to suicide after he exposed the agency's use of drug deals to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

American researcher Joseph Overton has described a spectrum from "more free" to "less free", known as the Overton Window, with regard to the US government intervention in the media.

Here's how American philosopher Noam Chomsky has explained the US establishment's media management strategy:  “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

It seems that "free speech" in the West is really not so free.

Courtesy David Icke

MI5 Vetting of BBC Staff:

The BBC recently acknowledged its long relationship with the British security establishment that started in 1933. When questions were asked about it, the BBC policy was to "keep head down and stonewall all questions".

Vetting by the MI5 applied to  all new BBC staff except "personnel such as charwomen". Since the start of the policy, journalists were always subject to vetting, but a "review in 1983 resulted in about 2,000 posts being removed from the list - including some junior editorial jobs - bringing the total number down to 3,705".

When asked whether any staff are vetted these days, a BBC spokesperson responded:"We do not comment on security issue".

CIA and Media:

In the course of investigating US CIA's support of Contra rebels in Nicaragua,  American journalist Gary Webb discovered a drug connection. He found that the CIA was trafficking drugs sold in poor African American neighborhoods to fund Contra rebels war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government in 1980s. Webb published his findings in a 3-part report "The Dark Alliance" carried by his employer San Jose Mercury News.

Webb's report provoked outrage among African Americans for the harm it did by promoting drug addiction in their poor neighborhoods. It became a public relations nightmare for the CIA.

The CIA responded to the crisis by using what Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer described as “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists.”  The CIA top brass was overjoyed to see the nation's largest newspapers destroy the reputation of Gary Webb that eventually led to his suicide.

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, famous for his reporting on Watergate along with Bob Woodward, investigated CIA's use of the American media and wrote a piece describing "How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up". Here's what he said:

"Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Associated Press (AP),  United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune".

Overton Window:

American researcher Joseph P. Overton said that ideas may range a spectrum from "more free" to "less free" with regard to government intervention.  The mainstream media, particularly commercial media, tend to limit the public discourse within the range they define as permissible at any given time. This is done by designing editorial policies.

The Overton window is not static. It is guided by what is seen as vital national interest by the US national security establishment as we saw during the Cold War and subsequently in the "war on terror".

Social Media:

Social media have created new media management challenges for the western security establishment as we saw with Brexit and Trump victory in 2016. It's created an outrage that is likely to result in new social media regulations unless the likes of Facebook and Twitter agree to self-censorship.

There's so much pressure on major social media platforms that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was forced to acknowledge regulation as "inevitable".

"The internet is growing in importance around the world in people's lives and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation," said Zuckerberg to a US Congress committee at a recent hearing.

The western security establishment will now make sure that the new social media platforms are tamed to stay within the "Overton Window" just like the legacy electronic and print media.

Summary:

Recent BBC acknowledgement of its staff vetting by British secret service and revelations of CIA's role in American media management have confirmed what American academic Noam Chomsky has been saying for a while:  “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."  There are now moves afoot to tame the new social media platform to stay within the "spectrum of acceptable opinion".

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

South Asia Investor Review

Is Money Free Speech?

Social Media Promote Tribalism

Social Media: Blessing or Curse For Pakistan?

Planted Stories in Media

Indian BJP Troll Farm

Kulbhushan Jadhav Caught in Balochistan

The Story of Pakistan's M8 Motorway

Pakistan-China-Russia vs India-Japan-US

Riaz Haq's Youtube Channel

Views: 454

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 28, 2018 at 10:40am

BBC News - The story barely reported by #Indian #media. Deeply engrained bias towards the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (#BJP) within many of #India's leading media groups

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44280188#

It is a potential scandal that claims to strike at a key pillar of Indian democracy - the freedom of the press - yet it is barely being reported in the Indian media.

There's a simple reason for that: this alleged scandal involves many of the most powerful media institutions in the country.

A sting operation by a news organisation called Cobrapost claims to have revealed a deeply engrained bias towards the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) within many of India's leading media groups, as well as a willingness among some of the country's most senior media executives and journalists to take money in return for pushing a political agenda.

Cobrapost, a small but controversial outlet known for undercover stings, describes itself as a non-profit news organisation that believes too much journalism in India has been "trivialised". It has dubbed its story "Operation 136" - the figure is a reference to India's ranking in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index.

Their website says its recordings show that some of the country's leading news organisations are willing to "not only cause communal disharmony among citizens, but also tilt the electoral outcome in favour of a particular party"- and all in return for cash.

Undercover stings of this kind are notoriously unreliable. The footage can easily be taken out of context or edited to change the meaning of a conversation or misrepresent its real nature.

An undercover reporter from Cobrapost, Pushp Sharma, says he approached more than 25 of India's leading media organisations, offering them all a similar deal.

He claimed to represent a wealthy ashram - a Hindu monastery - which, he said, was willing to pay large amounts of money in the run up to next year's general election in an attempt to ensure the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, remains in power.

Mr Sharma says he outlined a three-stage strategy his paymasters wanted to bankroll.

First, he proposed the media organisations promote what he describes as "soft Hindutva" - the idea that Hindu faith and values are the defining ideology of India. He suggested this could involve promoting the sayings of Lord Krishna or retelling stories from the Bhagvad Gita, the epic poem that is one of the most holy texts of Hinduism.

The next stage would involve attacks on the BJP's political rivals, particularly Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the main opposition Congress Party.

Finally, the plan was to move on to promoting incendiary speeches from some of hard-line proponents of Hindutva, including some divisive radical Hindu figures.

The idea of this stage of the operation, Mr Sharma explained to some of the executives, was to polarise voters in the hope that the BJP would benefit at the ballot box.

'Viral videos and jingles'
Amongst the media groups Cobrapost says it approached were giants like Bennett Coleman, the media empire that owns The Times of India - the largest selling English language newspaper not just in India, but in the world.

It also targeted the The New Indian Express, another large English language newspaper, and the India Today Group, which owns one of the country's most popular television news channels.

Hindi language newspapers and regional media groups were also approached.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 19, 2019 at 6:35am

Pakistan challenges credibility of BBC report
Government demands apology, removal of story alleging rights abuses by army
Islamuddin Sajid |
19.06.2019

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/pakistan-challenges-credibili...

akistan filed formal complaints Tuesday over a report published this month by U.K. state broadcaster BBC documenting alleged human rights abuses in the country’s tribal areas. 

The Ministry of Information filed complaint letters with the British communications regulator and BBC raising questions over the authenticity of the story regarding Pakistan’s military. 

On June 2, the BBC published a report on its website titled "Uncovering Pakistan's secret human rights abuses" which said tens of thousands of people have been killed during Pakistan’s long battle with militants as part of the post -9/11 war on terror and that many of them were tortured and murdered by soldiers and insurgents in Waziristan, a tribal district in northwestern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.

"The story not only presented a fabricated theme but also violated journalistic ethos. The story also violates BBC's editorial policy by not incorporating the point of view of all stakeholders/citing credible sources/quoting authentic evidence etc.," the ministry said in its letter addressed to the BBC

It amounted to “indicting the State of Pakistan for so-called ‘secret human rights abuses’ without any cogent evidence”.

"The detailed analysis of its content reflects bias, spinning and angling of the facts. There are judgmental expressions in the story which are a clear violation of journalistic norms of impartiality and objectivity," said the ministry’s letter.

The government of Pakistan expects the matter to be looked into for appropriate action against the author and editorial board linked to the report.

Pakistan also demanded that the BBC remove the “defamatory and malicious” story and issue a clear-cut apology.

"We also expect the BBC authorities to ensure that in future, such fake stories specifically targeting Pakistan will not be disseminated," said the letter.

However, Pakistan also warned the BBC that Islamabad reserves the right to pursue all legal measures within the country and the United Kingdom if the BBC fails to retract the story and take action against its author.

A dossier accompanying the letter contained further analysis of the government’s complaints.

On June 4, Pakistan’s military also reacted to the BBC story.

"The story carries conjecturing implicating Pakistan’s Army without any proof,” Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), the media wing of Pakistan’s army, said in a statement.

"The story is a pack of lies and in violation of journalistic ethos," it added.

North Waziristan has been a battleground between the army and the Taliban since June 2014 following a full-scale military onslaught that has killed over 5,000 suspected militants, according to the military.

Over 700 soldiers have also lost their lives in landmine blasts and clashes with the Taliban during the period.

On March 28, the BBC apologized and agreed to pay damages to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko over an incorrect report claiming a payment was made to extend a meeting between Poroshenko and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 25, 2019 at 8:07am

The New York Times casually acknowledged that it sends major scoops to the US government before publication, to make sure “national security officials” have “no concerns.”
By Ben Norton

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/24/new-york-times-media-us-governme...

Indeed, the Times report on the escalating American cyber attacks against Russia is attributed to “current and former [US] government officials.” The scoop in fact came from these apparatchiks, not from a leak or the dogged investigation of an intrepid reporter.

‘Real’ journalists get approval from ‘national security’ officials
The neoliberal self-declared “Resistance” jumped on Trump’s reckless accusation of treason (the Democratic Coalition, which boasts, “We help run #TheResistance,” responded by calling Trump “Putin’s puppet”). The rest of the corporate media went wild.

But what was entirely overlooked was the most revealing thing in the New York Times’ statement: The newspaper of record was essentially admitting that it has a symbiotic relationship with the US government.

In fact, some prominent American pundits have gone so far as to insist that this symbiotic relationship is precisely what makes someone a journalist.

In May, neoconservative Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen — a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush — declared that WikiLeaks publisher and political prisoner Julian Assange is “not a journalist”; rather, he is a “spy” who “deserves prison.” (Thiessen also once called Assange “the devil.”)

What was the Post columnist’s rationale for revoking Assange’s journalistic credentials?

Unlike “reputable news organizations, Assange did not give the U.S. government an opportunity to review the classified information WikiLeaks was planning to release so they could raise national security objections,” Thiessen wrote. “So responsible journalists have nothing to fear.”

In other words, this former US government speechwriter turned corporate media pundit insists that collaborating with the government, and censoring your reporting to protect so-called “national security,” is definitionally what makes you a journalist.

This is the express ideology of the American commentariat.

NY Times editors ‘quite willing to cooperate with the government’
The symbiotic relationship between the US corporate media and the government has been known for some time. American intelligence agencies play the press like a musical instrument, using it it to selectively leak information at opportune moments to push US soft power and advance Washington’s interests.

But rarely is this symbiotic relationship so casually and publicly acknowledged.

In 2018, former New York Times reporter James Risen published a 15,000-word article in The Intercept providing further insight into how this unspoken alliance operates.

----------

Risen detailed how his editors had been “quite willing to cooperate with the government.” In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, “How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?”

There is an “informal arrangement” between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”

“At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations,” the former New York Times reported said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 3, 2019 at 9:50am

#India #Media Can’t Speak Truth to Power. Journalism is in trouble in “world’s largest democracy” #Modi #BJP #Hindutva #democracy #FreeSpeech – Foreign Policy

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/02/indias-media-cant-speak-truth-...

After an emphatic electoral victory in May, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces important challenges in his second term. Growth has slowed to a five-year low, with Modi’s own former top economic advisor publishing research in June that showed India’s GDP growth was likely overestimated by 2.5 percentage points. Unemployment is at its highest since the 1970s; hundreds of car dealerships have closed amid a shortage of liquidity in the country’s credit sector; and many promises from Modi’s first term remain unfulfilled, such as his proposals to launch sweeping infrastructure projects across the country.

But as Modi looks to address these issues, there’s one big problem for regular Indians: The media is no longer able to adequately hold the prime minister or his government to scrutiny. And in an era of fake news and low trust in the media, an enfeebled class of journalists could eventually lead to a weakening of the very democracy that defines modern India.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 3, 2019 at 9:54am

Modi government freezes ads placed in three Indian newspaper groups

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-media/modi-government-free...

India’s government has cut off advertisements to at least three major newspaper groups in a move that executives and an opposition leader said was likely retaliation for unfavorable reports.

Critics have said that freedom of the press has been under attack since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government first took office in 2014 and journalists have complained of intimidation for writing critical stories.

Now the big newspaper groups, which have a combined monthly readership of more than 26 million, say they are being starved of government ads worth millions of rupees that began even before Modi was elected to power last month with a landslide mandate.

“There is a freeze,” an executive at Bennett, Coleman & Co that controls the Times of India and The Economic Times, among the country’s biggest English-language newspapers, said. “Could be (because of) some reports they were unhappy with,” the executive said, seeking anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

Around 15% of the Times group’s advertising comes from the government, the executive said. The ads are mostly government tenders for contracts as well as publicizing government schemes.

The ABP Group, which publishes The Telegraph that has run reports questioning Modi’s record on everything from national security to unemployment, has seen a similar 15 percent drop in government advertisements for around six months, two company officials said.

“Once you don’t toe the government line in your editorial coverage and you write anything against the government, then obviously the only way they can penalize you (is) to choke your advertising supply,” the first ABP official said.

The second ABP official said that there had been no communication from the government, and the company was looking to other sources to plug the gap.

“Press freedom must be maintained and it will be maintained despite these things,” the official said. Both also sought anonymity.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 2, 2020 at 5:02pm

Press Is Not Free Anymore in #Modi's #India. #Delhi pressurizes advertisers and shuts down TV channels to control and shape information citizens get. Apologetic calls from #advertisers have become so common that #NDTV executives are no longer surprised. https://nyti.ms/39yl1d3

The Media One anchorman Vinesh Kunhiraman went on air as usual on March 6, ready to tell the station’s five million viewers in India’s Kerala State about the death anniversary of a beloved comedian and the latest news on the coronavirus pandemic.

Just a few minutes into the broadcast, he saw the managing editor rush to the studio floor, gesturing wildly. “I realized something was not right,” Mr. Kunhiraman recalled.

The station’s uplink suddenly went dead. Mr. Kunhiraman’s image dissolved into a blue screen. A bland message told viewers there was no signal. “We regret the inconvenience,” it said.

But this was no technical difficulty. The station had been cut off by an order from India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The government decided to block the channel for 48 hours because it had covered February’s biggest news story — the mob attacks on Muslims in New Delhi that flared into broader unrest — in a way that seemed “critical toward Delhi Police and R.S.S.,” the order said.

The R.S.S. is a Hindu-nationalist social movement with close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.

“It was shocking the central government took such a decision,” said R. Subhash, an editor at Media One. “It was an attack on the freedom of the press.”

India’s free press has played a crucial role in protecting this country’s democracy since its independence from Britain in 1947. But journalists here now feel under attack.

Since Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, they say, his government has tried to control the country’s news media, especially the airwaves, like no other prime minister in decades. Mr. Modi has shrewdly cultivated the media to build a cult of personality that portrays him as the nation’s selfless savior.

At the same time, senior government officials have pressed news outlets — berating editors, cutting off advertising, ordering tax investigations — to ignore the uglier side of his party’s campaign to transform India from a tolerant, religiously diverse country into an assertively Hindu one.

With the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Modi has gotten more blatant in his attempt to control coverage and, as with other difficult stories, some Indian news executives seem willing to go along.

Right before he announced the world’s largest coronavirus lockdown, on 1.3 billion people, Mr. Modi met with top news executives and urged them to publish “inspiring and positive stories” about the government’s efforts. Then, after the lockdown stranded half a million migrant workers, with some dying along the highways, his lawyers persuaded the Supreme Court this week to order all media to “publish the official version” of coronavirus developments, although outlets are still allowed to carry independent reporting.

------------

The shutdown of Media One and another Kerala television station, Asianet News, in March was a new twist. Both stations broadcast in Malayalam, a local language spoken by less than 3 percent of Indians. And both channels had aired witness accounts that echoed what many other outlets aired during the violence in Delhi: that the police had done little to stop Hindu mobs as they rampaged against Muslims.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 31, 2020 at 9:43am

Kishore Mahbubani, author of "Has China Won?":

US media is insular

Major American newspapers and TV channels reinforce each other in US distortions about the world

Last 200 years of western domination is an aberration in terms of the long human history of the world. It is coming to an end.

Many American intellectuals and policymakers don't seen to understand that China does not do this.

https://youtu.be/E_CwYCIqEgg

When it comes to analyzing political systems, American analysts tend to veer toward a black-and-white view of the world: open or closed society, democratic or totalitarian society, liberal or authoritarian. Yet, even as we move away from an aberrant two-hundred-year period of Western domination of world history, we are also moving away from a black-and-white world. Societies in different parts of the world, including in China and Islamic societies, are going to work toward a different balance between liberty and order, between freedom and control, between discord and harmony. The Chinese thinkers were also once convinced that the only way to succeed was for China to replicate Western societies. This is why, at the moment of greatest despair for Chinese society, in the 1920s, many Chinese intellectuals said (like the Japanese reformers in the Meiji Restoration) that the only path ahead for China was to copy the West in all dimensions. The Chinese historian Chow Tse-tsung documents: “Lu [Xun] declared that the Chinese should live for themselves instead of for their ancestors. To learn modern science and Western knowledge was more important than to recite the Confucian classics. […] Rather than worship Confucius and Kuan Kung one should worship Darwin and Ibsen. Rather than sacrifice to the God of Pestilence and the Five Classes of Spirits, one should worship Apollo. […] Lu [Xun] was sincere from his realistic and utilitarian point of view; if the new was more useful than the old, he asked, in effect, why should one bother whether it was Chinese or foreign?”* One hundred years later, China no longer lies prostrate. It has stood up and become self-confident. After all the recent travails in both Europe and America, few in China believe that China’s destiny in the twenty-first century is to mimic the West. Instead, they believe China should follow its own road.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 18, 2021 at 4:14pm

Noam Chomsky: "The primary element of social control is the strategy of distraction which is to divert public attention from important issues and changes determined by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information. distraction strategy is also essential to prevent the public interest in the essential knowledge in the area of the science, economics, psychology, neurobiology and cybernetics. “Maintaining public attention diverted away from the real social problems, captivated by matters of no real importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, no time to think, back to farm and other animals"(quote from text Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).

https://noam-chomsky.tumblr.com/post/13867896307/noam-chomsky-10-st...

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 25, 2021 at 9:17pm

How American Journalism Became A Mouthpiece Of The Deep State
The intelligence community uses the media to manipulate the American people and pressure elected politicians.


https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/spies-journalists-...



Reporters joke that the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions, say, “No comment,” and head to happy hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information. They meanwhile profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.
Leon Panetta, once director of CIA, explained bluntly that the agency influenced foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.” The CIA has been running such ops to influence foreign elections continuously since the end of WWII.

The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, operating the media outlet yourself. The problem is this is easily exposed, destroying credibility.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 31, 2021 at 7:20am

Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They're Agents of It
News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with spy agencies they once oversaw
Matt Taibbi May 11


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy


What a difference a decade makes.

Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released 75,000 secret U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan. The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel helped release the documents, which were devastating to America’s intelligence community and military, revealing systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an assassination squad, TF 373, whose existence the United States kept “protected” even from its allies.

The Afghan War logs came out at the beginning of a historic stretch of true oppositional journalism, when outlets like Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others partnered with sites like Wikileaks. Official secrets were exposed on a scale not seen since the Church Committee hearings of the seventies, as reporters pored through 250,000 American diplomatic cables, secret files about every detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and hundreds of thousands of additional documents about everything from the Iraq war to coverups of environmental catastrophes, among other things helping trigger the “Arab Spring.”

There was an attempt at a response — companies like Amazon, Master Card, Visa, and Paypal shut Wikileaks off, and the Pentagon flooded the site with a “denial of service” attack — but leaks continued. One person inspired by the revelations was former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who came forward to unveil an illegal domestic surveillance program, a story that won an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize for documentarian Laura Poitras and reporters Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill. By 2014, members of Congress in both parties were calling for the resignations of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom had been caught lying to congress.

The culmination of this period came when billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched The Intercept in February 2014. The outlet was devoted to sifting through Snowden’s archive of leaked secrets, and its first story described how the NSA and CIA frequently made errors using geolocation to identify and assassinate drone targets. A few months later, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted, “We kill people based on metadata.”

Fast forward seven years. Julian Assange is behind bars, and may die there. Snowden is in exile in Russia. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden have been rehabilitated and are all paid contributors to either MSNBC or CNN, part of a wave of intelligence officers who’ve flooded the airwaves and op-ed pages in recent years, including the FBI’s Asha Rangappa, Clint Watts, Josh Campbell, former counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, the CIA’s John Sipher, Phil Mudd, Ned Price, and many others.

Once again, Internet platforms, credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard, and payment processors like PayPal are working to help track down and/or block the activities of “extremists.” This time, they’re on the same side as the onetime press allies of Wikileaks and Snowden, who began a course reversal after the election of Donald Trump.

Those outlets first began steering attention away from intelligence abuses and toward bugbears like Trumpism, misinformation, and Russian meddling, then entered into partnerships with Langley-approved facsimiles of leak sites like Hamilton 68 , New Knowledge, and especially Bellingcat, a kind of reverse Wikileaks devoted to exposing the misdeeds of regimes in Russia, Syria, and Iran — less so the United States and its allies. The CIA’s former deputy chief of operations for Europe and Eurasia, Marc Polymeropolous, said of the group’s work, “I don’t want to be too dramatic, but we love this.”

Comment

You need to be a member of PakAlumni Worldwide: The Global Social Network to add comments!

Join PakAlumni Worldwide: The Global Social Network

Pre-Paid Legal


Twitter Feed

    follow me on Twitter

    Sponsored Links

    South Asia Investor Review
    Investor Information Blog

    Haq's Musings
    Riaz Haq's Current Affairs Blog

    Please Bookmark This Page!




    Blog Posts

    Biden's Gaza Ceasefire Veto Defies American Public Opinion

    Aaron Bushnell, an active serviceman in the United States Air Force, burned himself to death in front of the Israeli Embassy in protest against the US policy in Gaza. Before setting himself on fire in what he called an "extreme act of protest", he said he would "no longer be complicit in genocide". Polls show that the vast majority (63%) of Americans want an immediate end to the carnage being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.  …

    Continue

    Posted by Riaz Haq on February 27, 2024 at 5:30pm

    Pakistan Elections: Imran Khan's Supporters Skillfully Used Tech to Defy Powerful Military

    Independent candidates backed by the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) party emerged as the largest single block with 93 seats in the nation's parliament in the general elections held on February 8, 2024.  This feat was accomplished in spite of huge obstacles thrown in front of the PTI's top leader Imran Khan and his party leaders and supporters by Pakistan's powerful military…

    Continue

    Posted by Riaz Haq on February 16, 2024 at 9:22pm — 1 Comment

    © 2024   Created by Riaz Haq.   Powered by

    Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service