Germany To Censor Press, Social Media and Internet Ahead of Elections

By Graham Vanbergen – It must be obvious to anyone watching political events across the Western world that the media is in big trouble. The availability of multimedia news platforms has accelerated a decline in the 21st century of traditional newspapers and even television news, a fact that is not new. The emergence of full blown state censorship in a modern democracy because of the change in news delivery is.

The demise of the mainstream media has of course been exacerbated by a lack of public trust in journalism and news outlets with only about one third of the public trusting it in America. With 18-49 years olds trust falling even further with barely a quarter accepting mainstream media as a source of reliable information, the story is pretty much the same in Britain and Europe more widely.

In America, Clinton’s loss at the ballot box ended with the establishment finger firmly pointed to Russia that somehow it put its “finger on the scale” to help Trump become triumphant. This has ended with public trust falling even further as the cold-war bogeyman is not new either.

However, what we are now witnessing is the very same strategy in Germany by Chancellor Merkel, who, fighting for her rapidly declining popularity is already adopting the Obama strategy by blaming Putin and Russian agents for what will be inevitable losses at the upcoming election in September 2017. Merkel suffered a sobering defeat in regional elections in her constituency of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, with her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) coming third behind the Social Democrats (SPD) and the rightwing populists Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) a few months back.

The consequence is that Merkel wants full censorship of not just the press but bloggers as well. In addition, Merkel’s government is now quite clearly taking absolute control of the public narrative. Journalists are told what to write, newspapers told what to print.

Political scientists and German journalist Udo Ulfkotte admitted that he repeatedly had to cooperate with the CIA and German intelligence agencies and was forced to put his name under biased publications under the threat of being fired. In several media interviews, Ulfkotte revealed how German journalists and politicians are recruited as CIA assets to write stories that were aimed at serving the geopolitical interests of Washington, and not the interests of the German people. It all sounds like some sort of excitable fictional novel.

CIA and FBI agents “urgently withdrawn” from Ukraine

source: fort-russ.com
American intelligence officers stationed at the General Prosecutor and SBU buildings in Kiev have urgently left Ukraine. This was reported by former Verkhovna Rada deputy Igor Markov live on the Russian debate-show “The Meeting Place.”

According to Markov, this is evidence that the US is “slyly withdrawing” from Ukraine.

“A week ago, all the FBI representatives based at the General Prosecutor and the CIA officers stationed in the SBU were urgently redeployed to Romania and Czech Republic. For security forces, this is a clear signal that the US is slyly withdrawing from Ukraine. Only analysts remain, all operative agents have left,” Markov stated. 

CIA Ties to Hollywood on Verge of Being Exposed

(ANTIMEDIA) An amendment added to Congress’ annual intelligence spending bill may help the public gain a better idea of the U.S. government’s relationship with Hollywood.

According to VICE News, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC), included an amendment to S. 3017 that would require the Director of National Intelligence to submit reports detailing the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agencies and Hollywood. It would also require 15 other agencies to disclose the nature of their relationships with the film industry. These reports would have to be presented annually to congressional oversight committees.

Between 2006 and 2011, VICE reported, the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) had a role in at least 22 of the U.S. entertainment industry’s projects. Some of the productions listed by VICE included the films Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, television shows like Top Chef and Covert Affairs, and documentaries such as the History channel’s Air America and the BBC’s The Secret War on Terror. The book, The Devil’s Light, also had the help of the CIA.

Some of the most controversial findings regarding the relationship between OPA officials and Hollywood insiders were tied to the blockbuster, Zero Dark Thirty.

According to the redacted and previously classified December 2012 CIA report released by Judicial Watch, the CIA granted “‘secret level’ access to the makers of the movie Zero Dark Thirty.” According to VICE, “filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal showered CIA officers involved in the operation with gifts and received unprecedented access, which included the disclosure of classified information to Bigelow and Boal by CIA director Leon Panetta.”

While these revealing facts shocked the world at the time of their release, the relationship between the CIA and the entertainment industry actually dates back to the 1950s.

According to an interview with Public Radio International, Tricia Jenkins, author of The CIA in Hollywood, says that the CIA “developed a think tank to fight communist ideology, which negotiated the rights to George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ – getting a talking pig on the screen 20 years before ‘Charlotte’s Web.’” The agency pressed for “line changes in 1950s scripts to make black characters more dignified, and white characters more tolerant” in order to promote “an attractive image of America to a world picking sides in the Cold War.”

In 1996, PRI reports, the CIA employed a Hollywood liaison. Chase Brandon was the cousin of actor Tommy Lee Jones, a relationship that lent the agency a great number of valuable Hollywood connections. After Brandon was brought on, Jenkins explains, the portrayal of the CIA changed:

“Before the 1990s, in films like ‘Three Days of the Condor’, the CIA was portrayed as evil, amoral assassins, or sometimes buffoons, like Max on the TV show ‘Get Smart’.”

Dying 78 Year Old CIA Agent Admits To Killing Marilyn Monroe

When people are on their deathbed, they have nothing to lose and nothing to gain. One of the most awe inspiring stories from the entertainment industry is that of Marilyn Monroe and the 78 year old retired CIA officer, Norman Hodges, who made some of the most ground breaking confessions ever noted from an ex CIA officer.

In amongst his many confessions, he admits to being a group member of five CIA agents, whose sole task was to carry out assassinations. He also admits one of his assassinations

being none other than Glamour icon, Marilyn Monroe, who was killed not just because of her ties with John F Kennedy, but also because she slept with Fidel Castro, ultimately making her a massive national security risk.

Hodges says he has no regrets.

He claims he carried out 37 assassinations for the US Government between 1959 and 1972 including Marilyn Monroe.

Hodges had worked for the CIA.

Hodges was a CIA officer for 41 years working as an operative amongst top level security clearances, he claims he was employed as a hit-man by the organisation, his duty was to assassinate individuals who posed a threat to the security of the United States of America.

He was trained as a sniper and a martial arts expert, but also trained in other methods ranging from taking people out with poisons to using explosives.

Despite his old age, Hodges has managed to recall each of the assassinations he committed for the CIA. He goes on to admit that the murders were carried out on American soil and by the orders of his then commanding officer, Major James “Jimmy” Hayworth.

He also claims the timeline for the assassinations were between August 1959 and March 1972, when the “the CIA had its own agenda”. Furthermore, he admits that he was part of an operation team of five members, who were taking orders to carry out the assassinations. Their victims were from all walks of life ranging from journalists, union leaders, political activists, artists and scientists – all of which were killed because their radical ideas posed a threat to the interests of the United States.

Hodges admits that Marilyn Monroe was the only woman he had ever assassinated, a unique target at the time. He claims she had become a significant “threat for the security of the country” and had to be eliminated.

“We had evidence that Marilyn Monroe had not only slept with Kennedy, but also with Fidel Castro” says M. Hodges. “My commanding officer, Jimmy Hayworth, told me that she had to die, and that it had to look like a suicide or an overdose. I had never killed a woman before, but I obeyed orders… I did it for America! She could have transmitted strategic information to the communists, and we couldn’t allow that! She had to die! I just did what I had to do!”

read more…

Israeli spy Pollard released after 30 years in US jail

Jewish American spy Jonathan Pollard was released from a US prison Friday after serving nearly 30 years for passing American secrets to Israel, in a move welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The decades-long punishment has been deemed disproportionate by the Jewish state, where Pollard is seen by some as a national hero.

Netanyahu, who has long pressed for Pollard’s release, said Friday that “after three long and difficult decades Jonathan is at last reunited with his family.”

“The people of Israel welcome the release of Jonathan Pollard,” he said.

The sentence has been a major bone of contention between Israel and the United States, with successive US presidents beginning with Ronald Reagan through Barack Obama refusing Pollard’s early release.

“As someone who raised Jonathan’s case for years with successive American presidents, I had long hoped this day would come,” Netanyahu said.

The 61-year-old was set free before dawn from a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, his main supporters’ group in Israel said. But he is barred from leaving the United States for five years.

A US court jailed Pollard, a Stanford University graduate and former US Navy intelligence analyst, for life in 1987 after he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to deliver national defense information to a foreign government.

Pollard’s release on parole comes almost 30 years to the day of his arrest on November 21, 1985.

Perception of Pollard, who was granted Israeli citizenship in 1995, has evolved there over the years, with rightwing activists seeking to turn him into an icon.

In the United States, however, Pentagon and CIA officials are still reeling with anger from the classified defense documents that Pollard leaked.

In a sign of the case’s sensitivity, Netanyahu had asked his ministers to refrain from claiming a victory upon Pollard’s release, according to local media.

Pollard’s lawyers have shown similar discretion in recent days, refusing to give details of the prisoner’s plans once he is freed.

However they have said that he has given assurances that he has a job and a place to live in the New York area.

Meet Allen Dulles: Fascist Spymaster

Prison Planet.com » Exclusive: Jeb Bush Linked to Cartel Money Laundering While Serving CIA

While Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, glossed over his AWOL status with the Texas Air National Guard, Jeb does not have a military record to defend but he does have a CIA employment record to fess up to.

Jeb’s early work in Venezuela and south Florida is much more troubling than Dubya pretending to be on active duty in Texas while he was actually off in Alabama helping a GOP U.S. Senate campaign and getting sloppy drunk in redneck bars. Jeb should fully explain his relationship with Alberto Duque, a Colombian national who laundered drug money for the Medellin and Cali narco-cartels and Nicaraguan contras while serving as owner of City National Bank of Miami and president of the General Coffee Company of Colombia.

Apparently, there was more than coffee arriving in sacks of coffee coming into Miami from Colombia. Duque financed a $30 million real estate development project run by Jeb Bush.

In 1983, Duque was convicted for fraud and sent to federal prison. Duque hired a Bush family CIA crony to serve as City National Bank’s president.

He was Don Beazley, who previously worked for the CIA’s Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. Before it collapsed, Nugan Hand was responsible for laundering money from the CIA’s Golden Triangle opium and heroin smuggling operations from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and paying off U.S. surrogates in Asia, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Park Chung Hee in South Korea, and various Thai generals.

In return for CIA money gifts, Marcos ordered his Energy Minister, Geronimo Velasco, to have the Philippines National Oil Corporation enter into business relationships with three Bush family-owned businesses: Zapata Petroleum Corporation, Zapata Offshore Company, and Overbey Oil Development Corporation. The three Bush firms were also linked to various CIA activities, including the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

Jeb Bush’s Texas Commerce Bank was also the bank used by the Zapata companies. Velasco died of a sudden heart attack in San Francisco in 2007. Velasco’s Republic Glass Corporation became a holding company that owned a number of British Virgin Islands-based subsidiaries.

Beazley had also been president of Great American Bank of Miami. The bank was indicted for drug money laundering in 1982. Beazley also negotiated the sale of Second National Bank of Homestead, a subsidiary of Great American, to Nugan Hand. It was in this environment of interconnected CIA money laundering banks that Jeb Bush found himself and his real estate business immersed in the 1980s.

via Prison Planet.com » Exclusive: Jeb Bush Linked to Cartel Money Laundering While Serving CIA.

Interview 595 – Sibel Edmonds on NATO, Terrorism, 9/11 and Drug Running : The Corbett Report

In this ground-breaking interview, famed FBI whistleblower and Boiling Frogs Post founder Sibel Edmonds lays out the thread connecting NATO’s Gladio operations to Turkish paramilitaries and ultra-nationalists, and how the operation continues through cooperation with terrorists and the Islamization of Central Asia and the Caucasus. From Abdullah Çatlı’s remarkable life (and death) to the rise of Fethullah Gulen’s $25 billion (CIA-supported) Islamic network to the NATO takeover of the Afghan poppy crop in the wake of 9/11, you won’t want to miss a moment of this riveting conversation.

via Interview 595 – Sibel Edmonds on NATO, Terrorism, 9/11 and Drug Running : The Corbett Report.

Earth Heal – Brazil Is Unplugging From U.S. Internet

Brazil was not bluffing last year, when it said that it wanted to disconnect from the United States-controlled internet due to the NSA’s obscenely invasive surveillance tactics. The country is about to stretch a cable from the northern city of Fortaleza all the way to Portugal, and they’ve vowed not to use a single U.S. vendor to do it.

At first glance, Brazil’s plan to disconnect from the U.S. internet just seemed silly. The country was not happy when news emerged that the NSA’s tentacles stretched all the way down to Brazil. And the country was especially not happy when news emerged that the NSA had been spying on the Brazilian government’s email for years. But really, what are you gonna do?

Brazil made a bunch of bold promises, ranging in severity from forcing companies like Facebook and Google to move their servers inside Brazilian borders, to building a new all-Brazilian email system—which they’ve already done. But the first actionable opportunity the country was presented with is this transatlantic cable, which had been in the works since 2012 but is only just now seeing construction begin. And with news that the cable plan will not include American vendors, it looks like Brazil is serious; it’s investing $185 million on the cable project alone. And not a penny of that sum will go to an American company.

The implications of Brazil distancing itself from the US internet are huge. It’s not necessarily a big deal politically, but the economic consequences could be tremendously destructive. Brazil has the seventh largest economy in the world, and it continues to grow. So when Brazil finally does divorce Uncle Sam—assuming things continue at this rate—a huge number of contracts between American companies and Brazil will simply disappear. On the whole, researchers estimate that the United States could lose about $35 billion due to security fears. That’s a lot of money.

via Earth Heal – Brazil Is Unplugging From U.S. Internet.

The Hidden Story of How America and Britain Overthrew the Government of Their ‘Ally’ Australia | Alternet

October 23, 2014 |

Across the political and media elite in Australia, a silence has descended on the memory of the great, reforming prime minister Gough Whitlam, who has died. His achievements are recognised, if grudgingly, his mistakes noted in false sorrow. But a critical reason for his extraordinary political demise will, they hope, be buried with him.

Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years, 1972-75. An American commentator wrote that no country had “reversed its posture in international affairs so totally without going through a domestic revolution”. Whitlam ended his nation’s colonial servility. He abolished Royal patronage, moved Australia towards the Non-Aligned Movement, supported “zones of peace” and opposed nuclear weapons testing.

Although not regarded as on the left of the Labor Party, Whitlam was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride and propriety. He believed that a foreign power should not control his country’s resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to “buy back the farm”. In drafting the first Aboriginal lands rights legislation, his government raised the ghost of the greatest land grab in human history, Britain’s colonisation of Australia, and the question of who owned the island-continent’s vast natural wealth.

Latin Americans will recognise the audacity and danger of this “breaking free” in a country whose establishment was welded to great, external power. Australians had served every British imperial adventure since the Boxer rebellion was crushed in China. In the 1960s, Australia pleaded to join the US in its invasion of Vietnam, then provided “black teams” to be run by the CIA. US diplomatic cables published last year by WikiLeaks disclose the names of leading figures in both main parties, including a future prime minister and foreign minister, as Washington’s informants during the Whitlam years.

via The Hidden Story of How America and Britain Overthrew the Government of Their ‘Ally’ Australia | Alternet.