are there enough dimwit billionaires to pick a jury of his "peers" from, do you reckon ?
-
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top of the heap to third world status in one generation
- Thread starter Gry
- Start date
been reading about that, Gry. nobody seems to know for sure if they were hacked, leaked, or faked. 
What the dirty cop that stole Epstein evidence, and took it to Russia does for a living now:
Ex-cop claims he has sex tape of Andrew filmed by Epstein stashed away
A FORMER US cop is at the centre of claims he is in possession of the sex tapes secretly recorded by depraved Jeffrey Epstein. Court papers released in New York this week alleged that the tycoon ha…
www.thesun.ie
American creating deep fakes targeting Harris works with Russian intel, documents show
Russian documents reviewed by The Post expose the workings of a Moscow network that has become a potent source of fake news targeting American voters.A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.
The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, the country’s military intelligence service. Some of the payments were made after fake news sites he created began to have difficulty accessing Western artificial intelligence systems this spring and he needed an AI generator — a tool that can be prompted to create text, photos and video.
Dougan’s liaison at the GRU is a senior figure in Russian military intelligence working under the cover name Yury Khoroshevsky, the documents show. The officer’s real name is Yury Khoroshenky, though he is only referred to as Khoroshevsky in the documents, and he serves in the GRU’s Unit 29155, which oversees sabotage, political interference operations and cyberwarfare targeting the West, according to two European security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
The more than 150 documents — which were shared with The Post to demonstrate the extent of Russian interference through Dougan and focus mostly on the period between March 2021 and August 2024 — for the first time expose some of the inner workings of a network that researchers and intelligence officials say has become the most potent source of fake news emanating from Russia and targeting American voters over the past year.
Disinformation researchers say Dougan’s network was probably behind a recent viral fake video smearing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, which U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday said was created by Russia. It received nearly 5 million views on X in less than 24 hours, Microsoft said.
Since September 2023, posts, articles and videos generated by Dougan and some of the Russians who work with him have garnered 64 million views, said McKenzie Sadeghi, who has closely followed Dougan’s sites and is a researcher at NewsGuard, a company that tracks disinformation online.
“Compared with other Russian disinformation campaigns, Dougan has a clear understanding of what would resonate with Western audiences and the political atmosphere, which I think has made this more effective,” Sadeghi said.
The documents show that Dougan is also subsidized and directed by a Moscow institute founded by Alexander Dugin, a far-right imperialist ideologue sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain” because of his influence on the revanchist thinking of the Russian president; Dugin’s ideas became a driving force behind Russia’s Ukraine invasion. One 2022 document shows that Dugin’s Eurasia movement, which promotes his theories of a Russian empire, “actively cooperates with the Russian Defense Ministry.”
Dougan’s contact at the Moscow institute, the Center for Geopolitical Expertise, is its head, Valery Korovin. According to Korovin’s social media page on the Russian version of Facebook, he was awarded a medal by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2023 for “services to the Fatherland” for “carrying out special tasks.” Korovin also works closely with Khoroshenky, who under his cover name serves as the institute’s deputy director, the documents show.
The documents show payments directly from Khoroshenky to Dougan’s bank account in Moscow starting in April 2022 and frequent meetings between Khoroshenky, Dougan and Korovin.
“We will not be beaten,” said Khoroshenky in one discussion with Korovin, the documents show, after a new server was launched this summer allowing Dougan to add to the myriad sites he’d already created and to restart one of the domains that had been blocked.
Dougan is responsible for content on dozens of fake news sites with names such as DC Weekly, Chicago Chronicle and Atlanta Observer, according to the documents and disinformation researchers. In the months that followed Dougan’s reboot with the GRU-facilitated new server and AI generator, the sites and fake news videos spread by Dougan and his associates have produced some of the most viral Russian disinformation targeting Harris, according to Microsoft and NewsGuard, including a deepfake audio issued in August that purported to show Barack Obama implying the Democrats ordered the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Most recently, Dougan was the initial source for a false claim behind the fake video that went viral alleging Walz abused a student at the high school where he taught, and NewsGuard believes his network may be behind its further dissemination. Eleven days before a video appeared with what NewsGuard says was probably an AI-generated persona claiming to be a former Walz student, Dougan appeared on a podcast making a similar but separate false claim, presenting an anonymous man claiming to be a former exchange student from Kazakhstan.
Other Kremlin-directed efforts to sway the U.S. presidential election have included the Doppelgänger campaign run by Kremlin political strategists recently targeted by the Department of Justice for its cloning of legitimate news outlets including Fox News and The Washington Post — a Russian operation that had been previously reported on by The Post. The Justice Department has also accused RT, the Russian state media outlet, of funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to American social media influencers to parrot Kremlin talking points.
In a telephone interview with The Post, Dougan denied being behind sites such as DC Weekly, and he said he didn’t know Korovin or Khoroshenky or have any connections with Russian military intelligence or the Russian government.
Dougan insisted he operated independently and said “no one sends me money for anything.” He later claimed he worked as an IT consultant for an American company, and said the documents The Post referred to must have been fabricated.
“I will tell you hypothetically, if they were my sites,” he said, “then I am merely fighting fire with fire because the West is f------ lying about everything that’s happening. They are lying about everything.”
Korovin said he was an academic who was interested only in thoughts, ideas and philosophy, adding that the claims related to the documents appear to represent “a collection of accidentally combined moments of information taken from who knows where, most of which seem absurd and ridiculous,” and many of which he said he was “hearing for the first time.”
Dugin said “any suggestion about our supposed affiliation with the GRU or to any attempts to manipulate foreign journalists or influence the political landscape in the U.S. are completely unjustified.” He said his Eurasian movement did not participate in any official partnerships with Russian government organizations, including the Defense Ministry.
Khoroshenky did not respond to requests for comment.
Outlandish claims
Dougan’s use of websites to attack perceived enemies stretches back to his time in law enforcement in the United States. He said he clashed with people in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office after he said he’d complained about abuses by a sergeant in his unit who boasted on Facebook about beating people he arrested.Dougan had worked at the sheriff’s office in Palm Beach from 2005 to 2008 but faced over 11 internal affairs investigations before he left, according to The Palm Beach Post. A jury also awarded a fellow Palm Beach sheriff’s deputy $275,000 after it found that Dougan had pepper-sprayed and arrested the officer without cause. Dougan claimed the internal affairs investigations were a result of his whistleblowing over the sergeant’s alleged assaults.
After Dougan resigned his post in Palm Beach, he moved to Maine, where he was soon was dismissed from a police department there over alleged sexual harassment complaints, officials in Maine said.
In the Marine Corps, he also had a checkered career. Dougan served from May 1996 to July 1998, an abbreviated stint as most Marines serve at least four years. He also left as a lance corporal, a rank most Marines attain after just a few months, and he never deployed, according to the Pentagon, which wouldn’t characterize his discharge status, citing privacy concerns. Dougan’s rank as he was discharged and the date at which he became a lance corporal, in April 1998, nearly two years into his time in uniform, are “indicative of the fact that the character of his service was incongruent with the Marine Corps’ expectations and standards,” said Yvonne Carlock, a service spokeswoman.
After returning to Florida from Maine, Dougan created PBSOTalk, a site he said he intended as a place to air complaints by other deputies about the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office but which soon became home to corruption allegations and smears involving his former superiors.
In 2016, Dougan posted confidential data about thousands of police officers, federal agents and judges on PBSOTalk, prompting the FBI and local police to search Dougan’s home. The next year, he was indicted on 21 state charges of extortion and wiretapping.
By then he had fled to Moscow, a city he said he had visited several times before after establishing an online relationship with a Russian woman. It’s not clear how Dougan first came to the attention of Russia’s propagandists, but some of the skills he homed in Florida are a hallmark of his work in Moscow, researchers say — using an online authentic gloss to make outlandish claims.
As early as June 2019 — more than two years before the invasion of Ukraine — Korovin had proposed in a letter to Russia’s Ministry of Defense that his center organize “an internet war against the U.S. on its territory.”
“The possibilities posed by internet wars really are limitless, and only with their help can we assert complete strategic parity with our geopolitical opponents,” Korovin wrote in the letter, which was part of the trove of documents reviewed by The Post. Dugin, the Russian ideologue who is Korovin’s boss, had earlier called for “geopolitical war with America … to weaken, demoralize, deceive and, in the end, beat our opponent to the maximum,” the documents show.
Dozens of the documents show that Korovin’s center has worked closely with a string of “independent” foreign journalists who have wound up in Moscow, and it paid some of them, including Dougan. In March 2021, Korovin said he and Dougan were “one team” and that Korovin would provide as much support as possible, one of the documents shows. All the while, Khoroshenky sent instructions to Korovin outlining tasks for Dougan and other reporters’ coverage of the war in Ukraine. In one example, Khoroshenky demanded the journalists, including Dougan, publish “within one hour” reports stating that Russian troops had killed foreign mercenaries in Ukraine, the documents show. “Then we will give bonuses to everyone,” he said.
Korovin and the GRU’s Khoroshenky ostensibly supported Dougan as he sought to parlay the political asylum he won in Russia in 2017 into Russian citizenship, while pointing out that since he was wanted in the United States, Dougan had few other options, the documents show. The process continued until summer 2023, when Dougan finally obtained citizenship; at one point a frustrated Dougan said he was on the verge of going to the Chinese embassy to seek Beijing’s support, the documents show.
“The time comes when it’s enough,” Dougan said, according to one document.
By then, Dougan felt he had established his worth. Before the Russian invasion, he had traveled to Ukraine and posted a video on YouTube that the United States was running bioweapons labs there, a false claim that Russia used as one of the pretexts for its war.
As Russian forces foundered in the first weeks of the invasion, Dougan told Korovin he felt he would be of greater assistance using his background in the Marines to train Russian troops. Korovin told him he would achieve more in securing “our victory” by promoting his fake biolabs report, the documents show.
That summer, Dougan traveled to Azovstal, the vast Ukrainian steel plant in Mariupol that was the scene of heavy Russian bombardment. Dougan produced a 30-minute report from the ruins as a foreign correspondent for “One America News,” the American far-right TV network. In the report, Dougan alleged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was to blame for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, saying “he betrayed his country for his U.S. masters.” Dougan suggested the death and destruction in the city was caused entirely by Ukrainian troops, without mentioning the relentless Russian bombing, or even its invasion of Ukraine. OAN ran a headline with his piece saying the Western media was covering up atrocities by Ukrainian troops against civilians.
A spokesperson for One America News said Dougan only appeared on the network once and was not paid for the report, adding that the network has since cut all ties with him.
His co-reporter on the trip was Daria Dugina, Dugin’s daughter, who claimed Ukrainians were “carpet-bombing their own people.” A few months later, Dugina was killed in a car bomb just outside Moscow. Dougan told The Post that Dugina was a “wonderful lady” while he agreed with many of the points made by her father about the necessity for a multipolar world in which the United States would not “dictate everything to everyone.”
By mid-2023, Dougan was generating material for the DC Weekly site, boasting to Korovin that it was already garnering hundreds of thousands of views every month, the documents show. He explained he was using artificial intelligence to populate the site with Russian news articles translated into English and to emphasize a tone critical of NATO and the U.S. government.
The quality is “superlative,” Dougan said.
In October 2023, he garnered his first viral hit: an article on DC Weekly alleging that Zelensky’s wife, Olena Zelenska, had spent $1.1 million in Cartier during an official visit to New York. He bragged to Korovin that the story had wide pickup. The article had cited a fake video interview with an alleged former employee of the Cartier shop who weeks later was identified as a St. Petersburg student and beauty salon manager. Another early fake article traced to Dougan said that Zelensky has used U.S. aid to buy two luxury yachts. The false claim was cited by several senior Republicans as a reason to halt funding for Ukraine.
But Dougan’s success also brought growing scrutiny. Researchers at Clemson University traced DC Weekly’s IP address back to other domains that it said were affiliated with Dougan, while disinformation researchers at Microsoft and NewsGuard were soon highlighting the links too.
By spring of this year, several of Dougan’s fake news sites were experiencing technical difficulties. One domain, the Chicago Chronicle, was blocked, and Dougan had to find a new domain for DC Weekly. Dougan began advocating with Korovin for funding to build a powerful new server that would generate its own AI content, ending dependence on Western technology.
Dougan “is experienced in the technical details of information technology and knows that the more his infrastructure and content is produced in-house, the less likely that he’ll be detected conducting his operations or restricted from using outside services,” said Clint Watts, head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.
The new server led to an explosion of new output and an increase in the number of sites, while Dougan also began registering some new domains in Iceland to further conceal his fingerprints, Newsguard’s Sadeghi said. At the same time, audience reach grew dramatically from 37.7 million in May to 64 million by October, Sadeghi said. “The substantial increase in the network’s views and narratives shows that despite being repeatedly exposed and reported on, the falsehoods have continued to reach a large audience,” she said.
For now, Dougan and his associates appear to be focused on smearing Harris. But concerns are growing that they could soon switch to producing deepfakes that question the integrity of the U.S. election.
“If they shift from trying to influence the outcome of the election to interfering in the conduct of the election, this would be very concerning as Election Day nears,” Watts said.
Dan Lamothe and Cate Brown contributed to this report.
Last edited:
If We Don’t Break the Cycle, a 'Trump' Will Always Lurk in the Shadows
As long as dark money, lies, and hate dominate politics, the next Trump is inevitable…
hartmannreport.com
he's not the first, just the worst...so far. it's a good thing he's a moron...
Trump’s Backdoor to the White House
Republicans are gaming the system for a second Trump term—here’s how they plan to pull it off...
hartmannreport.com
Catch and Kill Journalism - by Mr. Fish
And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.
The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination. At least 128 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992.
Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.
Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza. Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.
The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera.
“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel's onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”
The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media dwarfs anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63 were killed in Vietnam. But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted.
Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.
Representative James P. McGovern and 64 House members sent a letter to President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for the United States to push for Israel to allow unimpeded access for U.S. and international journalists. In July, over 70 media and civil society organizations signed an open letter calling on Israel to permit foreign reporters into Gaza.
Israel has not budged. Its ban on international journalists in Gaza remains in place. Its genocide grinds forward. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed and wounded daily. During October, Israel killed at least 770 Palestinians in northern Gaza. Israel spins out its lies and fabrications, from Hamas using Palestinians as human shields, to mass rape and beheaded babies, to a captive press that slavishly amplifies them. By the time the lies are exposed, often weeks or months later, the media cycle has moved on and few notice.
Israel’s wholesale censorship and assassination of journalists will have ominous consequences. It further erodes what few protections we once had as war correspondents. It sends an unequivocal message to any government, despot or dictator that seeks to mask its crimes. It heralds, like the genocide itself, a new world order, where mass murder is normalized, totalitarian censorship is permissible and journalists who try and expose the truth have very short life expectancies.
Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press.
Those who wage war, any war, seek to shape public opinion. They court the reporters they can domesticate, the ones who prostrate themselves before generals and, although they do not openly admit it, seek to stay as far away from combat as possible. These are the “good” journalists. They like to “play” at being a soldier. They enthusiastically assist in disseminating propaganda in the guise of reporting. They want to do their part for the war effort, to be part of the club. Sadly, they constitute the majority of the media in the wars I covered.
All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.
These domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon — “terrorists,” “peace process,” “two state solution” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
The New York Times, The Intercept writes, “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”
“The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine ‘except in very rare cases’ and to steer clear of the term ‘refugee camps’ to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars,” The Intercept notes. “The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.”
“There is no battle between power and the media,” Fisk noted. “Through language, we have become them.”
Retired general David Petraeus, one of the authors of the 2006 U.S. Counterinsurgency Manual used by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, argues that persuading the public that you are winning — even if, as in Afghanistan, you are trapped in a quagmire — is more important than military superiority. The domesticated media is vital in perpetrating this deception.
Then there are the real journalists. They shine a light into the machinery of power. They tell the truth, for as the poet Seamus Heaney said, “There's such a thing as truth and it can be told.” They make public the cruelty, mendacity and criminality of the powerful. They expose the collaboration of the domesticated media.
To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years. WikiLeaks published a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document where British government officials equated investigative journalists with terrorists. The animosity is not new. What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.
Israel has not defeated Hamas. It has not defeated Hezbollah. It will not defeat Iran. But it must convince its own public, and the rest of the world, it is winning. Censorship and the silencing of journalists who expose Israel’s war crimes and the suffering Israel inflicts on civilians is an Israeli priority.
It would be reassuring to call Israel an outlier, a nation that did not share our values, a nation that we support in spite of its atrocities. But of course, Israel is an extension of ourselves.
As the playwright Harold Pinter said:
The most important impediment to Israel’s mass hypnosis are the Palestinian journalists in Gaza. This is why the kill rate is so high. It is why U.S. officials say nothing. They, too, hate real journalists. They, too, demand reporters domesticate themselves to scurry like rats from one choreographed press event to the next.
The U.S. government says and does nothing to protect the press because it endorses Israel’s campaign against the media, as it endorses Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Journalists, along with the Palestinians, are to be extinguished.
chrishedges.substack.com
Share
Israel’s War on Journalism
There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas. They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors. Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.
The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination. At least 128 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992.
Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.
Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza. Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.
The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera.
“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel's onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”
The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media dwarfs anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63 were killed in Vietnam. But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted.
Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.
Representative James P. McGovern and 64 House members sent a letter to President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for the United States to push for Israel to allow unimpeded access for U.S. and international journalists. In July, over 70 media and civil society organizations signed an open letter calling on Israel to permit foreign reporters into Gaza.
Israel has not budged. Its ban on international journalists in Gaza remains in place. Its genocide grinds forward. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed and wounded daily. During October, Israel killed at least 770 Palestinians in northern Gaza. Israel spins out its lies and fabrications, from Hamas using Palestinians as human shields, to mass rape and beheaded babies, to a captive press that slavishly amplifies them. By the time the lies are exposed, often weeks or months later, the media cycle has moved on and few notice.
Israel’s wholesale censorship and assassination of journalists will have ominous consequences. It further erodes what few protections we once had as war correspondents. It sends an unequivocal message to any government, despot or dictator that seeks to mask its crimes. It heralds, like the genocide itself, a new world order, where mass murder is normalized, totalitarian censorship is permissible and journalists who try and expose the truth have very short life expectancies.
Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press.
Those who wage war, any war, seek to shape public opinion. They court the reporters they can domesticate, the ones who prostrate themselves before generals and, although they do not openly admit it, seek to stay as far away from combat as possible. These are the “good” journalists. They like to “play” at being a soldier. They enthusiastically assist in disseminating propaganda in the guise of reporting. They want to do their part for the war effort, to be part of the club. Sadly, they constitute the majority of the media in the wars I covered.
All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.
These domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon — “terrorists,” “peace process,” “two state solution” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
The New York Times, The Intercept writes, “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”
“The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine ‘except in very rare cases’ and to steer clear of the term ‘refugee camps’ to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars,” The Intercept notes. “The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.”
“There is no battle between power and the media,” Fisk noted. “Through language, we have become them.”
Retired general David Petraeus, one of the authors of the 2006 U.S. Counterinsurgency Manual used by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, argues that persuading the public that you are winning — even if, as in Afghanistan, you are trapped in a quagmire — is more important than military superiority. The domesticated media is vital in perpetrating this deception.
Then there are the real journalists. They shine a light into the machinery of power. They tell the truth, for as the poet Seamus Heaney said, “There's such a thing as truth and it can be told.” They make public the cruelty, mendacity and criminality of the powerful. They expose the collaboration of the domesticated media.
To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years. WikiLeaks published a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document where British government officials equated investigative journalists with terrorists. The animosity is not new. What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.
Israel has not defeated Hamas. It has not defeated Hezbollah. It will not defeat Iran. But it must convince its own public, and the rest of the world, it is winning. Censorship and the silencing of journalists who expose Israel’s war crimes and the suffering Israel inflicts on civilians is an Israeli priority.
It would be reassuring to call Israel an outlier, a nation that did not share our values, a nation that we support in spite of its atrocities. But of course, Israel is an extension of ourselves.
As the playwright Harold Pinter said:
In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
The most important impediment to Israel’s mass hypnosis are the Palestinian journalists in Gaza. This is why the kill rate is so high. It is why U.S. officials say nothing. They, too, hate real journalists. They, too, demand reporters domesticate themselves to scurry like rats from one choreographed press event to the next.
The U.S. government says and does nothing to protect the press because it endorses Israel’s campaign against the media, as it endorses Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Journalists, along with the Palestinians, are to be extinguished.
Israel’s War on Journalism
Israel’s genocide includes the most draconian censorship and intentional murder of journalists since the creation of the modern war correspondent. The consequences will be catastrophic.
chrishedges.substack.com
Share
moose eater
Well-known member
The Incomprehensible Scale of Trump’s Deportation Plans
Trump has vowed to launch a mass operation that could involve a force larger than the U.S. Army—and he promises that it will be a “bloody story.”
newrepublic.com
Porky82
Well-known member
A real journalist in Israel. Bit old but still true. No wonder the Palestinians kidnapped a few of em!Catch and Kill Journalism - by Mr. Fish
Israel’s War on Journalism
There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas. They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors. Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.
And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.
The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination. At least 128 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992.
Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.
Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza. Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.
The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera.
“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel's onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”
The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media dwarfs anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63 were killed in Vietnam. But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted.
Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.
Representative James P. McGovern and 64 House members sent a letter to President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for the United States to push for Israel to allow unimpeded access for U.S. and international journalists. In July, over 70 media and civil society organizations signed an open letter calling on Israel to permit foreign reporters into Gaza.
Israel has not budged. Its ban on international journalists in Gaza remains in place. Its genocide grinds forward. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed and wounded daily. During October, Israel killed at least 770 Palestinians in northern Gaza. Israel spins out its lies and fabrications, from Hamas using Palestinians as human shields, to mass rape and beheaded babies, to a captive press that slavishly amplifies them. By the time the lies are exposed, often weeks or months later, the media cycle has moved on and few notice.
Israel’s wholesale censorship and assassination of journalists will have ominous consequences. It further erodes what few protections we once had as war correspondents. It sends an unequivocal message to any government, despot or dictator that seeks to mask its crimes. It heralds, like the genocide itself, a new world order, where mass murder is normalized, totalitarian censorship is permissible and journalists who try and expose the truth have very short life expectancies.
Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press.
Those who wage war, any war, seek to shape public opinion. They court the reporters they can domesticate, the ones who prostrate themselves before generals and, although they do not openly admit it, seek to stay as far away from combat as possible. These are the “good” journalists. They like to “play” at being a soldier. They enthusiastically assist in disseminating propaganda in the guise of reporting. They want to do their part for the war effort, to be part of the club. Sadly, they constitute the majority of the media in the wars I covered.
All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.
These domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon — “terrorists,” “peace process,” “two state solution” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
The New York Times, The Intercept writes, “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”
“The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine ‘except in very rare cases’ and to steer clear of the term ‘refugee camps’ to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars,” The Intercept notes. “The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.”
“There is no battle between power and the media,” Fisk noted. “Through language, we have become them.”
Retired general David Petraeus, one of the authors of the 2006 U.S. Counterinsurgency Manual used by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, argues that persuading the public that you are winning — even if, as in Afghanistan, you are trapped in a quagmire — is more important than military superiority. The domesticated media is vital in perpetrating this deception.
Then there are the real journalists. They shine a light into the machinery of power. They tell the truth, for as the poet Seamus Heaney said, “There's such a thing as truth and it can be told.” They make public the cruelty, mendacity and criminality of the powerful. They expose the collaboration of the domesticated media.
To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years. WikiLeaks published a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document where British government officials equated investigative journalists with terrorists. The animosity is not new. What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.
Israel has not defeated Hamas. It has not defeated Hezbollah. It will not defeat Iran. But it must convince its own public, and the rest of the world, it is winning. Censorship and the silencing of journalists who expose Israel’s war crimes and the suffering Israel inflicts on civilians is an Israeli priority.
It would be reassuring to call Israel an outlier, a nation that did not share our values, a nation that we support in spite of its atrocities. But of course, Israel is an extension of ourselves.
As the playwright Harold Pinter said:
In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
The most important impediment to Israel’s mass hypnosis are the Palestinian journalists in Gaza. This is why the kill rate is so high. It is why U.S. officials say nothing. They, too, hate real journalists. They, too, demand reporters domesticate themselves to scurry like rats from one choreographed press event to the next.
The U.S. government says and does nothing to protect the press because it endorses Israel’s campaign against the media, as it endorses Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Journalists, along with the Palestinians, are to be extinguished.
Israel’s War on Journalism
Israel’s genocide includes the most draconian censorship and intentional murder of journalists since the creation of the modern war correspondent. The consequences will be catastrophic.
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Key Points
Elon Musk wears a black “Make America Great Again” cap while attending a campaign rally with Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump at the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5, 2024.
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Elon Musk must attend an emergency court hearing in Philadelphia on Thursday morning to address a bid by the city’s top prosecutor to stop the Tesla CEO and his political action committee from continuing to award $1 million prizes to registered voters in the swing state of Pennsylvania, a judge ordered Wednesday.
Also on Wednesday, attorneys for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner revealed in a court filing that his lawsuit against Musk, who is an ally of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and the America PAC had “triggered an avalanche of [social media] posts from Musk’s followers,” many of whom “made antisemitic attacks on Krasner.”
After Krasner filed his suit Monday, Musk in a post on his social media site X noted his agreement with a user’s claim that the district attorney knows the $1 million daily giveaway is “not illegal but wants a leftist judge to stop it before Election Day,” the lawyers for the DA wrote.
Krasner’s lawyers asked Judge Angelo Foglietta to order enhanced security for the hearing — originally scheduled for Friday morning — noting that one X account had posted the prosecutor’s home address and wrote, “Krasner loves visitors. Mask up and leave all cellphones at home.”
The attorneys also asked Foglietta for an order that “requires attendance of all of the parties, i.e., DA Krasner, a representative of America PAC and Mr. Musk.”
Hours after that filing, Foglietta moved up the hearing to be held in City Hall one a day, to Thursday morning.
“All parties must be present at the time of the hearing,” Foglietta wrote in the order in Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas.
Krasner’s lawsuit accuses Musk and America PAC of operating an illegal lottery and trying to influence voters in the presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Trump.
Musk and attorneys for him and his PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
In his lawsuit, Krasner’s lawyers wrote that the lottery was “deceptive,” to consumers since America PAC had not published clear lottery rules, or said how it would protect participants’ personal information.
The suit also argues that although “Musk says that a winner’s selection is ‘random,’ that appears false because multiple winners that have been selected are individuals who have shown up at Trump rallies in Pennsylvania.”
The posts on X containing information about Krasner’s address had been removed from the platform as of Wednesday afternoon.
hen asked about the removal of the posts, without a suspension of the user’s account, X referred CNBC to its policy regarding sharing personal information on the platform.
Elon Musk ordered to attend $1 million voter lottery suit hearing in Philadelphia court
Published Wed, Oct 30 20246:35 PM EDT Updated 2 Hours AgoKey Points
- Elon Musk must attend an emergency court hearing in Philadelphia on Thursday to address a bid by the city’s top prosecutor to stop the Tesla CEO and his political action committee from continuing to award $1 million prizes to registered voters in the swing state of Pennsylvania.
- Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner revealed his lawsuit against Musk and the America PAC “triggered an avalanche of [social media] posts from Musk’s followers,” many of whom “made antisemitic attacks on Krasner.”
- Krasner’s lawsuit accuses Musk and the PAC of operating an illegal lottery and trying to influence voters in the presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Elon Musk wears a black “Make America Great Again” cap while attending a campaign rally with Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump at the Butler Farm Show fairgrounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5, 2024.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images
Elon Musk must attend an emergency court hearing in Philadelphia on Thursday morning to address a bid by the city’s top prosecutor to stop the Tesla CEO and his political action committee from continuing to award $1 million prizes to registered voters in the swing state of Pennsylvania, a judge ordered Wednesday.
Also on Wednesday, attorneys for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner revealed in a court filing that his lawsuit against Musk, who is an ally of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and the America PAC had “triggered an avalanche of [social media] posts from Musk’s followers,” many of whom “made antisemitic attacks on Krasner.”
After Krasner filed his suit Monday, Musk in a post on his social media site X noted his agreement with a user’s claim that the district attorney knows the $1 million daily giveaway is “not illegal but wants a leftist judge to stop it before Election Day,” the lawyers for the DA wrote.
Krasner’s lawyers asked Judge Angelo Foglietta to order enhanced security for the hearing — originally scheduled for Friday morning — noting that one X account had posted the prosecutor’s home address and wrote, “Krasner loves visitors. Mask up and leave all cellphones at home.”
The attorneys also asked Foglietta for an order that “requires attendance of all of the parties, i.e., DA Krasner, a representative of America PAC and Mr. Musk.”
Hours after that filing, Foglietta moved up the hearing to be held in City Hall one a day, to Thursday morning.
“All parties must be present at the time of the hearing,” Foglietta wrote in the order in Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas.
Krasner’s lawsuit accuses Musk and America PAC of operating an illegal lottery and trying to influence voters in the presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Trump.
Musk and attorneys for him and his PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
In his lawsuit, Krasner’s lawyers wrote that the lottery was “deceptive,” to consumers since America PAC had not published clear lottery rules, or said how it would protect participants’ personal information.
The suit also argues that although “Musk says that a winner’s selection is ‘random,’ that appears false because multiple winners that have been selected are individuals who have shown up at Trump rallies in Pennsylvania.”
The posts on X containing information about Krasner’s address had been removed from the platform as of Wednesday afternoon.
hen asked about the removal of the posts, without a suspension of the user’s account, X referred CNBC to its policy regarding sharing personal information on the platform.
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Dark fiction ?
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GenghisKush
Well-known member
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