Paul Rigby

Or: How to get on in British journalism…

Another sure route:

One of British journalism’s finest hours in the field of JFK studies was the responsibility of the late John Diamond. As he was to relate in an April 1994 piece for The Mail on Sunday’s Night and Day supplement, when “Oliver Stone’s movie ‘JFK’ first appeared, I sat in a viewing theatre with the director and talked to him about it.” Diamond’s initial verdict? “I came back convinced that Stone had it right: Kennedy was killed by gangsters hired by the CIA to stop him pulling out of Vietnam. It made perfect sense.” So what happened to Diamond’s favourable review of Stone’s “JFK”? “I wrote a piece for this very paper to that effect – and had it thrown back in my face.” Was Diamond appalled by this censorship? Not a bit of it. British journalists are, after all, nothing if not pragmatic: “I went away and did a little research.”

By happy coincidence, you understand, this research revealed to Diamond that his first response to Stone’s film was nonsense; and resulted in a piece called “Plotgate,” which was, amazingly, published, and from which I take his quotes. Why was “Plotgate” published? Because that alleged “little research” had caused him to conclude that “Yes, Stone’s theory made sense, but so did a hundred other theories. On balance, therefore” – wait for it, wait for it – “the one which must make the most perfect sense is that Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone nutter with a gun, killed him.” Now there’s a specimen of logic fit for a connoisseur.

The challenge confronting Diamond, an impeccably pleasant and liberal soul by all accounts, was how to transform the base metal of cowardly conformity into the bankable gold of a lucrative Sunday supplement commission. Easy – play the anti-semitic card.

“Plotgate” offered ploddingly jokey summations of the ten conspiracies thought most likely by Diamond to lend themselves to ridicule – and, of course, earn him a commission. At number ten, he offered the following: “The mass media is run by Jewish liberals, which is why you have, until now, never read any of this stuff.” It was under this title that he introduced his apologia for his well-rewarded volte-face on Stone’s film. Cowardice, we were to believe, was really its exact opposite, courage: “I’ll hold my hands up to this one. I am a Jewish liberal waiting for my papers to come through from the World Zionist Conspiracy HQ in Hollywood so that I too can help in the cover-up…Lone nutters, you see, tend to influence history rather more than organised cabals of rich Jewish-Jesuit-Masons.” What heroism, what insight.

A proper journalist, one capable of actual research, might well have looked at the name of the producer of Stone’s JFK, and shared that research with his, or her, readers. Not because Jews do control the media, or anything so crass, never mind untrue, but because Arnon Milchan had long been identified as an arms-dealing propagandist for Israel and South Africa, and his role in the making of Stone’s “JFK” begged important questions. But Diamond wasn’t a proper journalist; and the paper he produced “Plotgate” for was no more a paper of honest journalism than Pravda under Stalin.

"Plotgate," The Mail on Sunday, Night and Day, 17 April 1994, pp.20-21.

Politics

Spies and their lies

David Rose

Published 27 September 2007

British intelligence has long used clandestine "deniable briefings" to release information real and false to tame hacks including David Rose...

My secret life began, as if scripted by P G Wodehouse, with an invitation to tea at the Ritz.

The call came at the end of the first week of May 1992. I was the Observer's home affairs correspondent, and at the other end of the line was a man we shall call Tom Bourgeois, special assistant to "C", Sir Colin McColl, the then chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. SIS (or MI6, as it is more widely known) was "reaching out" to selected members of the media, Bourgeois explained, and over lunch a few days earlier with McColl, my editor, Donald Trelford, had suggested that I was a reliable chap - not the sort, even years later, to betray a confidence by printing an MI6 man's real name.

Would I like an informal, off-the-record chat? You bet I would. "I make no apologies for the cliché," Bourgeois said, "since we do need a way to spot each other. I will be in the lobby, with a rolled-up copy of the Times."

Surely a rolled up copy of The Guardian or The Observer? Anyway, what follows should in no way be misconstrued as remotely connected with any suggestion of spook outreach or information flow. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances. At all.

Francis Wheen, “finds the missing link in JFK’s assassination...Where’s Wally?” The Observer, Life section, 4 December 1994, p.6:

Who killed President Kennedy? Thirty-one years on, and after at least 100 books on the subject, we are still waiting for a conclusive answer. Two weeks ago, however, a young arts impresario named Giri Tharmananthar told me that he had cracked the case. In a converted warehouse near King’s Cross station in north London, he was presenting ‘the first ever public showing in the UK of leaked video footage of the Kennedy assassination’. The video, he boasted, ‘reveals without doubt that the driver of Kennedy’s car turns and shoots the fatal blow. Explaining why Mrs. Kennedy launched herself out of the rear of the car...’

Alas, the revelations and explanations did not quite live up to their billing. The ‘leaked video footage’, which turned out to be an image from the famous Zapruder film, was so blurred that one could scarcely see the driver, let alone alone witness him swivelling on his seat to take a pot-shot at the president. Still, Tharmananthar’s cunning stunt achieved its main purpose, by luring customers in to see a play that he was promoting in the same warehouse.

More than 30 years after the event, the shooting of President Kennedy still ‘has legs’, as they say in Hollywood. Look at the cover headline on the December issue of Vanity Fair: ‘JFK CASE REOPENED. New evidence on the death of a President. Oddly enough, the driver of the presidential car doesn’t earn a mention in the magazine’s 21-page article, but plenty of other suspects are rounded up – the Mafia, the KGB, the CIA, the FBI, and, for good measure, Fidel Castro.

Trying to find the logic of this investigation is like playing an exhaustive and exhausting game of consequences. The mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, for instance, used to know a corrupt lawyer who was ‘linked to’ a crime operation run by the New Orleans mobster Carlos Marcello. One of Marcello’s oldest friends was Nofio Pecora, who, three weeks before the assassination, was telephoned by Jack Ruby who later shot Oswald dead in the Dallas police headquarters. What does it all add up to? Search me. But Vanity Fair feels sure that it must mean something.

‘Only connect’ is the conspiracy theorists’ guiding principle. Back in the 1960s, some of them even found a sinister synchronicity between JFK’s death and the assassination of President Lincoln 100 years earlier; both men were shot in the head, on a Friday, in the presence of their wives; their alleged murderers were both killed before coming to trial; both Lincoln and Kennedy were succeeded by Southern Democrats called Johnson. Like Casaubon, who thought that a lifetime of research would eventually yield up ‘the Key to All Mythologies’, assassination buffs are convinced that by doggedly collating every scrap of fact or speculation they will one day solve the mystery of who did what in Dallas on 22 November 1963.

‘When you have eliminated the impossible,’ Sherlock Holms used to remind Dr Watson, ‘whatever remains,however improbable, must be the truth.’ But the whole point of conspiracy theory is that nothing is impossible. What remains is everything, and so everything must be true: Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon, aided by four monkeys with typewriters; John Major is really an alien invader from the planet Vulcan. Like most journalists, I am often contacted by people who assure me they are being persecuted by a cabal led by the Lord Chancellor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Special Branch and the Princess of Wales; many of them also believe that MI5 has planted tiny transmitters in their skulls. ‘I’m not paranoid, you know,’ they say – and their menacing manner makes it clear that disagreement would be inadvisable.

In his excellent study of The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Professor Richard Hofstadter suggested that the paranoia of the conspiracy theorist isn’t necessarily a psychological abnormality. ‘I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but burrowing a clinical term for other purposes,’ he explained. ‘I use the term much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and expressing oneself.’ Just so. The amateur detectives and freelance obsessives who devote their lives to the JFK saga are not fruitcakes – well, not all of them. They are artists, and the canvas they have painted is as vast and teeming as a crowd scene from Where’s Wally?.

Consider the following facts. One of President Kennedy’s lovers, Mariella Novotny, was a protégé of Stephen Ward, the man who introduced John Profumo to Christine Keeler. Profumo was a minister in the government of Harold Macmillan. Macmillan’s wife, Dorothy, was the lover of Lord Boothby, who was an associate of the Kray twins. Another chum of the Krays was the Labour MP Tom Driberg, who wrote an authorised biography of the KGB agent Guy Burgess. Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet diplomat who had an affair with Christine Keeler, was also a KGB man. Between 1959 and 1962, Lee Harvey Oswald lived in Moscow, where it has been reported, he was recruited by the KGB.

Only connect? We’ve hardly started. Another of Kennedy’s alleged mistresses, the actress Suzy Chang, was a friend of Lord Snowdon – who in turn was an old friend of Jeremy Thorpe. The scandal which forced Thorpe to resign as leader of the Liberal Party was, according to Harold Wilson, orchestrated by the South African intelligence service BOSS. Wilson also believed that he himself was the victim of a plot by both BOSS and MI5 to smear him as a KGB agent. And he may have been right: in September 1963 the Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn told John McCone, the director of the CIA, that Wilson was working for the Russians. McCone owed his job at the CIA to...John F. Kennedy.

Sooner or later, if the conspiracy artists stick to their task, the picture will include almost every crime or scandal of the 20th century. You want to prove a ‘connection’ between the Kennedy assassination and the Nazis. No problem. One of the earliest revisionist studies of JFK’s murder, Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, had a preface written by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. This is the same Trevor-Roper who, some years later, verified the bogus Hitler diaries on behalf of Times Newspapers. Before the Second World War, the Times was an advocate of appeasement. So was the American ambassador in London – a certain Joseph Kennedy, father of you-know-who...

Yes, yes, you will say, but where’s Wally? Where’s the smoking gun? Nobody has yet spotted it; and nobody ever will.

Not if The Guardian and The Observer can help it.

Western Media Fabrications regarding the Tibet Riots

Fake Videotape used by CNN by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, April 16, 2008

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8697

I hadn't bothered to look into all this hitherto, other than privately musing that it had that particular and recognizable media odour to it that suggested a government driven disinfo campaign.

Wonder what is behind it all? Why such pressure is being applied?

Neutralising China's opposition would seem to be an essential prelude to attack on Iran, King Bush II's swan-song.

Paul

In more than a decade working for the BBC, I soon discovered that a series could be called "Conspiracies" but it would only be broadcast if it debunked "conspiracy theories". Programmes attempting to prove that a conspiracy theory was true would simply not be commissioned (unless it was a tiny & meaningless conspiracy, along the lines of a politician cheating on their expenses...)

John Crawley, “Obituary: Donald Milner – Scoop by serendipity,” The Guardian, 3 February 1994, p.13:

“Donald Milner, who has died aged 71, was one of the old school of BBC radio journalists…While covering the civil war in the Congo from 1961, he got what he called his ‘scoop by serendipity’. Aiming to go to Elisabethville, capital of the rebel state of Katanga, he missed his plane, flew to Nairobi, thence to Ndola on Katanga’s border – where he was the only correspondent on the spot to report the death in a plane crash of Dag Hammarskjold, UN Secretary-General. This was a reverberating story, since Hammarskjold was on a peace-making visit to President Tshombe in Katanga, and suspicions of sabotage were reported (though discredited).”

Richard Norton-Taylor, “First for MI6 as former senior agent goes public,” The Guardian, 20 November 1963:

“Baroness Park, a member of the Thatcher Foundation and former BBC governor, has been authorised by MI6 to appear in a BBC Panorama programme on the agency’s activities…Lady Park was MI6’s agent in the former Belgian Congo during the independence crisis when the CIA plotted to kill the country’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba…She was one of the BBC governors who suppressed a programme on Zircon, Britain’s first spy satellite, in 1987. The programme was broadcast, without cuts, a year later.”

John Sweeney, “There is nothing like a dame, sings spook,” The Observer, 21 November 1993:

“Dame Daphne..dwells a little on her time as ‘our woman in Hanoi’ in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam war. Despite repeated promises to the contrary by then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Dame Daphne passed on information to the Americans: ‘The way I was helping them was..to give them an idea of the climate, the personalities, of the general operational situation. Not intelligence…”

Western Media Fabrications regarding the Tibet Riots

Fake Videotape used by CNN by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, April 16, 2008

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8697

So, let me see if I have this element of the anti-alterationist story straight: UPI had footage of the actual shooting of President Kennedy but withheld news of its existence from the FBI, the very organisation assigned the lead role in the official investigation, for a period of, what, two to three weeks?

Curious.

In addition, no one at WNEW-TV bothered to mention it to the FBI, nor any viewer.

Curiouser, and curiouser.

It gets stranger.

Here’s an extract from David R. Wrone’s The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination (University Press of Kansas, 2003), pp.150-152:

“At nine o’clock on the morning of November 25, 1963, three days after the murder of President Kennedy – but early on the first working day after the murder – Walter Bent, sales service manager of the Eastman Kodak Company, the same firm that had developed Zapruder’s film, telephoned the Dallas FBI office and spoke to FBI special agent Milton L. Newsom (41). His company had just received film from Charles Bronson to be developed. In his package Bronson had included a note advising Kodak that the film may be of the assassin as he fired the shots. Would the FBI, said Bent, be interested in viewing the film? (42)

Newsom’s memorandum of the conversation reads as follows:

Mr. WALTER BENT, Sales Service Manager, Eastman Kodak Company, Processing Division, 3131 Manor Way, telephone FL 7-4654, Dallas, telephonically advised his company had received two rolls of 8 milimeter [sic] Kodachrome and one roll of 35 milimeter [sic] film in a package from Mr. CHARLES BRONSON, Chief Engineer, Zarel Mfg. Company, 9230 Denton Drive, Dallas, Texas.

Mr. BRONSON enclosed a letter with his film, stating that the film had been taken at the instant President KENNEDY was assassinated. BRONSON also advised in the letter that from the position he was stationed when he took the film, he feels quite certain the Texas School Book Depository Building was clearly photographed and he feels that the window from which the shots were fired will be depicted on the film. He stated for this reason he believes he may have a picture of the assassin, as he fired the shots.

Mr. BENT stated Mr. BRONSON’s letter indicated he desired to be cooperative regarding the film with proper authorities and BENT is of the opinion that BRONSON will have no objection to turning the film over to proper authorities in the event it is of value to the investigation.

Mr. BENT stated that he would make arrangements with Mr. BRONSON to view the film at the Kodak Processing Centre and would arrange this so that FBI agents could be present and at the same time interview BRONSON concerning his film of the scene.

Mr. BENT assured his full cooperation regarding all film received of a like nature that may possibly be connected with this matter and arrangements were made with him to immediately notify SA NEWSOM of any film of possible value.

The Eastman Kodak Processing Service Division receives all color film made by 8 milimeter [sic] Kodachrome in this area and also most other film for the area is processed by this division. Mr. BENT explained that his employees have not worked since Saturday and they are due back to work at 11:30 P.M., 11/25/63. When processing of recent film orders begins, he expects other films taken at the approximate time of President’s assassination.

He said that BRONSON’s film should be processed and ready for viewing by 3:00 P.M. He was told that SA NEWSOM would meet him at that time (43).

Bent then phoned Bronson and set up a meeting at the Kodak plant for 3:00 P.M.

At 3:00 Special Agents Milton Newsom and Emory Norton appeared at the plant and together with Bronson watched the films (44). Afterwards they did not ask for copies. When they returned to their office, they wrote up a memorandum on the films...

Notes:

(41) See Trask, Pictures of the Pain; George Lardner Jr., “Film in JFK Assassination Reissued,” Washington Post, November 11, 1978; “New Clue in JFK Slaying,” San Francisco Bulletin, November 26, 1978; Wendell Rawls Jr., “New Film Suggests an Oswald Cohort,” New York Times, November 27, 1978; Earl Golz, “JFK Film May Record Two Gunmen,” Dallas Morning News, November 26, 1978.

(42) FBI Agent Milton Newsom to SAC, 11/25/63, serial 62-109060-456.

(43) Ibid.

(44) Trask, Pictures of the Pain, 278-304, is a history of the film.

According to Richard Trask’s Pictures of the Pain (p.205), citing Maurice Schonfeld’s July-August 1975 Columbia Journalism Review piece, “The Shadow of a Gunman,” Muchmore’s film was developed at the same “Eastman Kodak in Dallas” on the same day as Bronson’s – but entirely unbeknownst, it seems, to Mr. Bent, either at 9am, when he rang the FBI, or at 3pm, when he met with the Bureau’s Newsom and Norton.

So if I ask Paul to document a claim that he provided no evidence for it’s “provocation”?

Len,

I've emailed Langley and if you'll just be a little pat...

No need.

According to the email that's just arrived, CIA and its porter service at Vauxhall Cross applied for the gagging order to protect an on-going operation involving...

George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians.

Well, that settles it.

Paul

Mr. Shaneyfelt.

Our first knowledge of this came as a result of a review of the book "Four Days" which covers the assassination period, in which representatives of the FBI noted a colored picture taken from a motion picture film that did not match either the Nix film or the Zapruder film.

Once we established that, then we investigated and learned that it was made by Mrs. Mary Muchmore, and was at that time in the possession of United Press International in New York,

http://www.jfk-assassination.de/warren/wch/vol5/page140.php

So, let me see if I have this element of the anti-alterationist story straight: UPI had footage of the actual shooting of President Kennedy but withheld news of its existence from the FBI, the very organisation assigned the lead role in the official investigation, for a period of, what, two to three weeks?

Curious.

In addition, no one at WNEW-TV bothered to mention it to the FBI, nor any viewer.

Curiouser, and curiouser.

Broadcasting magazine “reviewed” – more accurately, recorded the bald facts of Four Days' publication and contents – in its “Book Notes” section, 16 December 1963, p.102:

”Four Days – The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy,” United Press International-American Heritage Magazine. $2-2.95. 144 pp.

A day-by-day account of the events surrounding President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas and Washington, the book contains 116 black and white pictures, 15 color photos and a 16-page appendix that includes official eulogies and excerpts from some of the late President’s major addresses.

Radio, television and newspaper subscribers to UPI are eligible to sell the book to the public for a recommended price of $2. A bookstore edition will be sold by Simon & Schuster for $2.95.

No great mystery. At one time - circa 1989 - the accused appears to have worked for CIA-MI6; and at a time when so much CIA-MI6 effort is going into the Tibetan project, we really couldn't have an open trial which, potentially at least, threatened to expose the extent of CIA-MI6 support for protests and terrrorism in China...

The text below is buttressed by a number of photos, maps, and links that considerably enhance the piece and reward a visit. Click on the link to see them:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8673

China and America: The Tibet Human Rights PsyOp

By Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, April 13, 2008

The human rights issue has become the centerfold of media disinformation.

China is no model of human rights but neither are the US and its indefectible British ally, responsible for extensive war crimes and human rights violations in Iraq and around the World. The US and its allies, which uphold the practice of torture, political assassinations and the establishment of secret detention camps, continue to be presented to public opinion as a model of Western democracy to be emulated by developing countries, in contrast to Russia, Iran, North Korea and the People's Republic of China.

Human Rights "Double Standards"

While China's alleged human rights violations in relation to Tibet are highlighted, the recent wave of killings in Iraq and Palestine are not mentioned. The Western media has barely acknowledged the Fifth "anniversary" of Iraq's "Liberation" and the balance sheet of the US sponsored killings and atrocities perpetrated against an entire population, in the name of a "global war on terrorism".

There are more than 1.2 million Iraqi civilian deaths, 3 million wounded. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) indicates a figure of 2.2 million Iraqi refugees who have fled their country and 2.4 million "internally displaced persons":

"Iraq’s population at the time of the US invasion in March 2003 was roughly 27 million, and today it is approximately 23 million. Elementary arithmetic indicates that currently over half the population of Iraq are either refugees, in need of emergency aid, wounded, or dead." (Dahr Jamail, Global Research, December 2007)

The Geopolitical Chessboard

There are deep-seated geopolitical objectives behind the campaign against the Chinese leadership.

US-NATO-Israeli war plans in relation to Iran are at an advanced state of readiness. China has economic ties as well as a far-reaching bilateral military cooperation agreement with Iran. Moreover, China is also an ally of Russia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the context of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Since 2005, Iran has an observer member status within the SCO.

In turn, the SCO has ties to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), an overlapping military cooperation agreement between Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan.

In October of last year the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) signed a Memorandum of Understanding, laying the foundations for military cooperation between the two organizations. This SCO-CSTO agreement, barely mentioned by the Western media, involves the creation of a full-fledged military alliance between China, Russia and the member states of SCO/CSTO. It is worth noting that the SCTO and the SCO held joint military exercises in 2006, which coincided with those conducted by Iran. (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, Russia and Central Asian Allies Conduct War Games in Response to US Threats, Global Research, August 2006)

In the context of US war plans directed against Iran, the US is also intent upon weakening Iran's allies, namely Russia and China. In the case of China, Washington is seaking to disrupt Beijing's bilateral ties with Tehran as well as Iran's rapprochement with the SCO, which has its headquarters in Beijing.

China is an ally of Iran. Washington's intention is to use Beijing's alleged human rights violations as a pretext to target China, an ally of Iran.

In this regard, a military operation directed against Iran can only succeed if the structure of military alliances which link Iran to China and Russia is disrupted. This is something which German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck understood in relation to the structure of competing military alliances prevalent prior to World War I. The Triple Alliance was an agreement between Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy formed in 1882. The Triple Alliance ultimately came to an end in 1914, when Italy withdrew from the Triple Alliance and declared its neutrality, leading to the outbreak of World War I.

Encircling China

With the exception of its Northern frontier which borders on the Russian Federation, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, China is surrounded by US military bases.

The Eurasian Corridor

Since the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the US has a military presence on China's Western frontier, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.S. is intent upon establishing permanent military bases in Afghanistan, which occupies a strategic position bordering on the former Soviet republics, China and Iran.

Moreover, the US and NATO have also established since 1996, military ties with several former Soviet republics under GUUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Moldava). In the post 9/11 era, Washington has used the pretext of the "global war against terrorism" to further develop a U.S. military presence in GUUAM countries. Uzbekistan withdrew from GUUAM in 2002.(The organization is now referred to as GUAM).

China has oil interests in Eurasia as well as in sub-Saharan Africa, which encroach upon Anglo-American oil interests.

What is at stake is the geopolitical control over the Eurasian corridor.

In March 1999, the U.S. Congress adopted the Silk Road Strategy Act, which defined America’s broad economic and strategic interests in a region extending from the Eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia. The Silk Road Strategy (SRS) outlines a framework for the development of America’s business empire along an extensive geographical corridor.

The successful implementation of the SRS requires the concurrent "militarization" of the entire Eurasian corridor as a means to securing control over extensive oil and gas reserves, as well as "protecting" pipeline routes and trading corridors. This militarization is largely directed against China, Russia and Iran.

The militarization of the South China Sea and of the Taiwan Straits is also an integral part of this strategy which, in the post 9/11 era, consists in deploying "on several fronts".

Moreover, China remains in the post-Cold War era a target for a first strike nuclear attack by the US.

In the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), China and Russia are identified along with a list of "rogue States" as potential targets for a pre-emptive nuclear attack by the US. China is listed in the NPR as "a country that could be involved in an immediate or potential contingency". Specifically, the Nuclear Posture Review lists a military confrontation over the status of Taiwan as one of the scenarios that could lead Washington to use nuclear weapons against China.

China has been encircled: The U.S. military is present in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straights, in the Korean Peninsula and the Sea of Japan, as well as in the heartland of Central Asia and on the Western border of China’s Xinjiang-Uigur autonomous region. Moreover, as part of the encirclement of China, "Japan has gradually been amalgamating and harmonizing its military policies with those of the U.S. and NATO." (See Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Global Military Alliance: Encircling Russia and China, Global Research, 10 May 2007)

Weakening China from within: Covert Support to Secessionist Movements

Consistent with its policy of weakening and ultimately fracturing the People's Republic of China, Washington supports secessionist movements both in Tibet as wall as in the Xinjiang-Uigur autonomous region which borders onto North Eastern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In Xinjiang-Uigur, Pakistani intelligence (ISI), acting in liaison with the CIA, supports several Islamist organizations. The latter include the Islamic Reformist Party, the East Turkestan National Unity Alliance, the Uigur Liberation Organization and the Central Asian Uigur Jihad Party. Several of these Islamic organizations have received support and training from Al Qaeda, which is a US sponsored intelligence asset. The declared objective of these Chinese-based Islamic organizations is the "establishment of an Islamic caliphate in the region" (For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, America's War on Terrorism, Global Research, Montreal, 2005, Chapter 2).

The caliphate would integrate Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan (West Turkestan) and the Uigur autonomous region of China (East Turkestan) into a single political entity.

The "caliphate project" encroaches upon Chinese territorial sovereignty. Supported by various Wahabi "foundations" from the Gulf States, secessionism on China’s Western frontier is, once again, consistent with U.S. strategic interests in Central Asia. Meanwhile, a powerful U.S.-based lobby is channeling support to separatist forces in Tibet.

By tacitly promoting the secession of the Xinjiang-Uigur region (using Pakistan’s ISI as a "go-between"), Washington is attempting to trigger a broader process of political destabilization and fracturing of the People’s Republic of China. In addition to these various covert operations, the U.S. has established military bases in Afghanistan and in several of the former Soviet republics, directly on China’s Western border.

The militarization of the South China Sea and of the Taiwan Straits is also an integral part of this strategy.(Ibid)

The Lhasa Riots

The violent riots in Tibet's capital in mid-March were a carefully staged event. In their immediate aftermath, a media disinformation campaign supported by political by Western leaders directed against China was launched.

There are indications that US intelligence played a behind the scenes role in what several observers have described as a carefully premeditated operation.(See our analysis below).

The Lhasa event in mid-March was not a spontaneous "peaceful" protest movement as described by the Western media The riots involving a gang of mobsters were premeditated. They had been carefully planned. Tibetan activists in India associated with the Dalai Lama's government in exile "hinted they were indeed expecting the disturbances. But they refuse to elaborate how they knew or who their collaborators were" (Guerilla News)

The images do not suggest a mass protest rally but rather a rampage led by a few hundred individuals. Buddhist monks were involved in the rampage. According to China Daily (March 31, 2008), the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) based in India, considered by China as a "hard-line organization" affiliated to the Dalai Lama, was also behind the violence. The TYC's training camps are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). (See the text of the Congressional Hearings regarding NED support to the TYC)

CLICK TO VIEW VIDEO OF LHASA RIOTS

Video footage confirms that civilians were stoned, beaten and in some cases killed. Most of the victims were Han Chinese. At least ten people were burned to death as a result of acts of arson, according to statements of the Tibet government. These statements were confirmed by several eyewitness reports. According to a China Daily report:

"five shop assistants at a clothing store were burnt to death before they had any chance to escape. A 1.7-meter-tall man named Zuo Yuancun was torched down to chunks of horrid flesh and skeletons. A migrant worker had his liver stabbed and bled by mobsters. A woman was beaten hard by the attackers and had her ear sliced off." (People's Daily, March 22, 2008)

Meanwhile, the Western media casually described the looting and arson as a "peaceful demonstration" which the Chinese authorities suppressed with the use of force. There are no accurate reports (from Chinese and Western news sources) on the nature of the Chinese police operation launched to repress the riots. Western press reports point to the deployment of more than 1000 soldiers and police in the Tibetan capital.

Businesses, schools were attacked, cars were set on fire. According to Chinese reports, there are 22 dead and 623 injured. "Rioters set fire at more than 300 locations, mostly private houses, stores and schools, and smashed vehicles and damaged public facilities."

The planning of the riots was coordinated with the media disinformation campaign, which accused the Chinese authorities of having instigated the looting and arson. The Dalai Lama accused Beijing of "disguising its troops as monks" to give the impression that Buddhist monks were behind the riots. The claims were based on a four year old photograph of soldiers dressing up as monks in a theatrical stage performance (See South China Morning Post, 4 April 2008).

The mainland newspaper {People's Daily] said the security forces quelling riots in Lhasa could not possibly have been wearing the uniforms shown in the photograph because they were summer uniforms, unsuitable for the cold March weather.

It also said the PAP had changed to new uniforms in 2005, which feature shoulder emblems. The armed officers shown in the photograph were in old-style uniforms which had been phased out after 2005. ... Xinhua said the photograph was taken during a performance years ago, when soldiers borrowed robes from monks before performing on stage. (Ibid)

The Dalai Lama's claim that the Chinese authorities had instigated the riots, quoted in the Western media, is supported by a statement of a former Communist Party official Mr. Ruan Ming who "claims the CCP carefully staged the incidents in Tibet in order to force the Dalai Lama to resign and to justify future repression of the Tibetans. Mr. Ruan Ming was a speechwriter for former CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang." (quoted in The Epoch Times)

2003 photograph used by the media to accuse China of having deliberately instigated the riots.

"This [2003] photo was apparently made when soldiers were ordered to put on

robes to play as actors in a movie."

See http://buddhism.kalachakranet.org/chinese-...riots-tibet.htm

The Role of US Intelligence

The organization of the Lhasa riots are part of a consistent pattern. They constitute an attempt to trigger ethnic conflict in China. They serve US foreign policy interests.

To what extent has US intelligence played an undercover role in the current wave of protests regarding Tibet?

Given the covert nature of intelligence operations, there is no tangible evidence of direct CIA involvement. However, there are various Tibetan organizations linked to the Tibet "government in exile" which are known to be supported by the CIA and/or by the CIA's civilian front organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The CIA's involvement in channeling covert support to the Tibetan secessionist movement goes back to the mid-1950s. The Dalai Lama was on the CIA's payroll from the late 1950s until 1974:

The CIA conducted a large scale covert action campaign against the communist Chinese in Tibet starting in 1956. This led to a disastrous bloody uprising in 1959, leaving tens of thousands of Tibetans dead, while the Dalai Lama and about 100,000 followers were forced to flee across the treacherous Himalayan passes to India and Nepal.

The CIA established a secret military training camp for the Dalai Lama's resistance fighters at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado, in the US. The Tibetan guerrillas were trained and equipped by the CIA for guerrilla warfare and sabotage operations against the communist Chinese.

The US-trained guerrillas regularly carried out raids into Tibet, on occasions led by CIA-contract mercenaries and supported by CIA planes. The initial training program ended in December 1961, though the camp in Colorado appears to have remained open until at least 1966.

The CIA Tibetan Task Force created by Roger E McCarthy, alongside the Tibetan guerrilla army, continued the operation codenamed "ST CIRCUS" to harass the Chinese occupation forces for another 15 years until 1974, when officially sanctioned involvement ceased.

McCarthy, who also served as head of the Tibet Task Force at the height of its activities from 1959 until 1961, later went on to run similar operations in Vietnam and Laos.

By the mid-1960s, the CIA had switched its strategy from parachuting guerrilla fighters and intelligence agents into Tibet to establishing the Chusi Gangdruk, a guerrilla army of some 2,000 ethnic Khamba fighters at bases such as Mustang in Nepal.

This base was only closed down in 1974 by the Nepalese government after being put under tremendous pressure by Beijing.

After the Indo-China War of 1962, the CIA developed a close relationship with the Indian intelligence services in both training and supplying agents in Tibet." (Richard Bennett, Tibet, the 'great game' and the CIA, Global Research, March 2008)

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which channels financial support to pro-US opposition groups around the World has played a significant role in triggering "velvet revolutions" which serve Washington's geopolitical and economic interests.

The NED, although not formally part of the CIA, performs an important intelligence function within the arena of civilian political parties and NGOs. It was created in 1983, when the CIA was being accused of covertly bribing politicians and setting up phony civil society front organizations. According to Allen Weinstein, who was responsible for setting up the NED during the Reagan Administration: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." ('Washington Post', Sept. 21, 1991).

The NED provided funds to the "civil society" organizations in Venezuela, which initiated an attempted coup against President Hugo Chavez. In Haiti, the NED supported the opposition groups behind the armed insurrection which contributed to unseating President Bertrand Aristide in February 2004. The coup d' Etat in Haiti was the result of a carefully staged military-intelligence operation. (See Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Haiti, Global Research, February 2004)

The NED funds a number of Tibet organizations both within China and abroad. The most prominent pro-Dalai Lama Tibet independence organization funded by the NED is the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), founded in Washington in 1988. The ICT has offices in Washington, Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. Distinct from other NED funded Tibet organizations, the ICT has a close cozy and " overlapping" relationship with the NED and the US State Department::

Some of ICT’s directors are also integral members of the ‘democracy promoting’ establishment, and include Bette Bao Lord (who is the chair of Freedom House, and a director of Freedom Forum), Gare A. Smith (who has previously served as principal deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor), Julia Taft (who is a former director of the NED, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues, has worked for USAID, and has also served as the President and CEO of InterAction), and finally, Mark Handelman (who is also a director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, an organization whose work is ideologically linked to the NED’s longstanding interventions in Haiti).

The ICT’s board of advisors also presents two individuals who are closely linked to the NED, Harry Wu, and Qiang Xiao (who is the former executive director of the NED-funded Human Rights in China).

Like their board of directors, ICT’s international council of advisors includes many ‘democratic’ notables like Vaclav Havel, Fang Lizhi (who in 1995 – at least – was a board member of Human Rights in China), Jose Ramos-Horta (who serves on the international advisory board for the Democracy Coalition Project), Kerry Kennedy (who is a director of the NED-funded China Information Center), Vytautas Landsbergis (who is an international patron of the British-based neoconservative Henry Jackson Society – see Clark, 2005), and until her recent death, the “mid-wife of the neocons” Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (who was also linked to ‘democratic’ groups like Freedom House and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies). (Michael Barker, "Democratic Imperialism": Tibet, China, and the National Endowment for Democracy Global Research, August 13, 2007)

Other NED funded Tibet organizations include the Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) referred to earlier. The SFT was founded in 1994 in New York City "as a project of US Tibet Committee and the NED-financed International Campaign for Tibet (ICT). The SFT is most known for unfurling a 450 foot banner atop the Great Wall in China; calling for a free Tibet." (F. William Engdahl, Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China, Global Research, April 2008).

The SFT together with five other Tibet organizations proclaimed last January "the start of a 'Tibetan people's uprising" ... and co-founded a temporary office in charge of coordination and financing." ( Ibid)

"The NED also funds the Tibet Multimedia Center for “information dissemination that addresses the struggle for human rights and democracy in Tibet,” also based in Dharamsala. And the NED finances the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.(Ibid)

There is a division of tasks between the CIA and the NED. While the CIA provides covert support to armed paramilitary rebel groups and terrorist organizations, the NED finances "civilian" political parties and non governmental organizations with a view to instating American "democracy" around the World.

The NED constitutes, so to speak, the CIA's "civilian arm". CIA-NED interventions in different part of the World are characterized by a consistent pattern, which is applied in numerous countries.

PsyOp: Discrediting the Chinese Leadership

The short-term objective is to discredit the Chinese leadership in the months leading up to the Beijing Olympic games, while also using the Tibet campaign to divert public opinion from Middle East war and the war crimes committed by the US, NATO and Israel.

China's alleged human rights violations are highlighted as a distraction, to provide a human face to the US led war in the Middle East. Moreover, US sponsored war plans directed against Iran are barely acknowledged by the Western media. Moreover, with Tibet making the headlines, the real humanitarian crisis in the Middle East is not front page news.

More generally, the issue of human rights is distorted: realities are turned upside down, the extensive crimes committed by the US and its coalition partners are either concealed or justified as a means to protecting society against terrorists.

A "double standards" in the assessment of human rights violations has been instated. In the Middle East, the killing of civilians is categorized as collateral damage. It is justified as part of the "global war on terrorism". The victims are said to be responsible for their own deaths.

The Olympic Torch

Carefully timed demonstrations on China's human rights violations in Western capitals have been set in motion.

A partial boycott of the Olympic games seems to be underway. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner (a strong protagonist of US interests who has a relationship to the Bilderbergs), has called for a boycott of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Kouchner said the idea should be discussed at a meeting of EU foreign ministers

The Olympic torch was lit at a ceremony in Greece, which was disrupted by "pro-Tibet activists". The event was sponsored by "Reporters Without Borders", an organization known to have links to US intelligence. (See, Diana Barahona, Reporters Without Borders Unmasked, May 2005). "Reporters Without Borders" also receives support for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The Olympic Torch is symbolic. The Psychological operation (PsyOp) consists in targeting the Olympic torch in the months leading up the Beijing Olympic games.

At each phase of this process, the Chinese leadership is denigrated by the Western media.

Global Economic Implications

The Tibet campaign directed against the Chinese leadership could backlash.

We are at the crossroads of the most serious economic and financial crisis of modern history. The unfolding economic crisis bears a direct relationship to the US sponsored military adventure in the Middle East and Central Asia.

China play a strategic role with regard to US military expansionism. So far it has not exercised it Veto power in the United Nations Security Council in relation to the several US sponsored UNSC resolutions directed Iran.

China also plays a central role in the global economy and financial system.

Resulting from an accumulated trade surplus with the US, China's now holds 1.5 trillion dollars worth of US debt instruments (including US Treasury bills). It has the ability to significantly disrupt international currency markets. The US dollar would plunge to even lower levels, were China to sell off its dollar denominated debt holdings.(For further details see: F. William Engdahl, op cit)

Moreover, China is the largest producer of a wide range of manufactured goods which constitute, for the West, a significant share of monthly household consumption. Western retail giants rely on the continued and uninterrupted flow of cheap labor industrial commodities from China.

For the Western countries, China's insertion into the structures of global trade, investment, finance and intellectual property rights under the World Trade Organization (WTO) is absolutely crucial. Were Beijing to decide to curtail its "Made in China" manufacturing exports to the US, America's fragile and declining manufacturing base would not be able to fill the gap, at least in the short run.

Moreover, the US and its coalition partners including the UK, Germany, France and Japan have important investment interests in China. In 2001, the US and China signed a bilateral trading agreement prior to the accession of China to the WTO. This agreement allows US investors, including the major Wall Street financial institutions, to position themselves in Shanghai's financial and trading system as well as in China's domestic banking market.

While China is, in some regards, the West's "cheap labor industrial colony", China's relationship to the global trading system is by no means cast in steel.

China's relationship to global capitalism has its roots in the "Open Door Policy" initially formulated in 1979. (Michel Chossudovsky, Towards Capitalist Restoration. Chinese Socialism after Mao, Macmillian, London, 1986, chapters 7 and 8)

Since the 1980s, China has become the main supplier of industrial goods to Western markets. Any threat against China and/or military venture directed against China's Eurasian allies including Iran could potentially disrupt China's extensive trade in manufactured goods. China's export oriented industrial base is the source of tremendous wealth formation in the advanced capitalist economies. Where does the wealth of the Walton family, owners of WalMart, originate? WalMart does produce anything. It imports cheap labor commodities "Made in China" and resells them in the US retail market at up to ten times their factory price.

This process of "import led development" has allowed the Western "industrialised" countries to close down a large part of their manufacturing outlets. In turn, China's industrial sweat shops serve to generate multibillion dollar profits for Western corporations, including the retail giants, which purchase and/or outsource their production to China.

Any threat of a military nature directed against China could have devastating economic consequences, far beyond the familiar upward spiral in the price of crude oil.

"The first film showing the assassination of President Kennedy was telecast in New York on November 26. It was a UPI Newsfilm exclusive It was serviced to UPI Newsfilm subscribers the world over.”

Here's UPI, courtesy of US News & World Report, seeking to rebind the fraying threads in mid-December 1963. Did all of the interpretation contained within really come from just the Muchmore and Nix films?

“As Warren Inquiry Starts – Latest on the Assassination,” U.S. News & World Report, 30 December 1963, pp.29-30:

“News films of the shooting remove any doubt about the actual sequence of shots.

United Press International, on December 16, gave this account of what happened in and around the Kennedy car, based on a study of UPI news film:

‘Here comes the shiny blue Lincoln, closely followed by the ‘Queen Mary,’ the limousine carrying Secret Service agents.

The first shot. Mrs Kennedy, smiling and waving in her bright pink suit and bright pink pillbox hat, abruptly leans toward her husband, seated on her right in the back seat.

Another shot. Governor John B. Connally…is hit. He raises up and falls toward Mrs Connally. She is facing the First Lady. Mrs Connally leans toward the Governor.

Clint Hill, a Secret Service man on the left running board of the ‘Queen Mary,’ sees it. He is running ahead. The ‘Queen Mary’ almost hits him as he cuts in front.

The third shot. The President’s head snaps to the left. His hair flies up. Mrs Kennedy leans closer toward him. Her right arm swings protectively around him.

Hill is at the rear of the car now, clutching. His groping left foot misses the foothold built into the rear of the limousine. He slips and is running behind the car, clinging to it. Four, five, six great steps, he hopes to keep up as the car picks up speed with a rush.

Mrs Kennedy wheels to her right.

She sees Hill is not aboard. Mrs Kennedy’s arm lifts from around her husband. She spins up and out, onto the trunk. She is on all fours, right hand out to Hill.

Their arms link. He is on the trunk now. The car is speeding off, pressing both of them back. He is on the trunk now and is pressing her back to the seat.’”

"The first film showing the assassination of President Kennedy was telecast in New York on November 26. It was a UPI Newsfilm exclusive It was serviced to UPI Newsfilm subscribers the world over.”

A quick survey of the few Brit newspapers I own from 27/28 Nov 1963 has so far failed to disclose any mention of the Muchmore film being shown on UK TV. This strikes me as odd because there is at least one reference to a film shot in the immediate aftermath. Surely a film of the actual shooting was more noteworthy?

The inevitable question: Has anyone any evidence that it was shown elsewhere on the planet on 26/27 November? Or in the days following?

And if so, how come the FBI wasn't aware of it and had to discover the existence of the film from the publication of a book in mid-December 1963?

Puzzling. Or perhaps not.

Paul

No great mystery. At one time - circa 1989 - the accused appears to have worked for CIA-MI6; and at a time when so much CIA-MI6 effort is going into the Tibetan project, we really couldn't have an open trial which, potentially at least, threatened to expose the extent of CIA-MI6 support for protests and terrrorism in China...

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8656

Is the CIA behind the China-bashing Olympics protests?

By Larry Chin

Global Research, April 11, 2008

Around the world, Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games has become the target of unprecedented, well-orchestrated and extremely hostile mass protests.

Meanwhile, geostrategic realities, and historical and current parapolitical fact, suggest that the protesters and passionate activists (in time-honored form) have once again become the willing dupes, propaganda shills, and street bullies for “causes” created, fronted, and pushed by Anglo-American intelligence agencies (CIA, British intelligence, etc.) that continue to target a government (this time Beijing), in a host of long-term subversion and sabotage plans.

Tibet: imperial pawn

Behind the powerful din created by the popular and celebrity-embraced “Save Tibet,” campaign is the fact that the CIA is behind the Tibet independence movement.

According to many reports, the Dalai Lama himself may be a long-time CIA asset. See The Role of the CIA behind the Dalai Lama's holy cloak and The Tibet Card.

In addition to being geostrategically situated, Tibet is also rich with oil and gas, and minerals -- and this is just part of the larger superpower warfare between the US and China. See Tibet, the "great game", and the CIA.

The legions of pro-Tibet activists also seem largely unaware of the historical fact that the “holy land of compassion” has been a CIA pawn since the end of World War II. The infamous Tolstoi Mission sent CIA operatives into Tibet, with plans to establish it as a US military base, from which the US could control the entire Asian region. This activity flourished under the US-supported, opium-banked Nationalist Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-Shek.

When the Communists rose to power, the CIA trained Tibetans in guerrilla tactics to use against the regime in Peking, and thousands of Tibetans lost their lives in these battles. Who benefited? Who really gave the orders then -- and who is driving the agenda now?

There is little doubt that Anglo-American interests continue to use Tibet, exploit the image of Tibet as a holy place under siege, and bamboozle naïve (and well-heeled) outside activists with slick marketing, in order to undermine Beijing.

Denunciations of Beijing’s brutal crackdowns do not take into account the covert operations and outside infiltrations that triggered the crackdowns in the first place.

Outside forces behind Falun Gong

On the surface, and to uncritical eyes, practitioners of the practice of Falun Gong, a school of Chinese qi gong, are the innocent victims of horrific suppression by Beijing. In a situation parallel to the crackdowns in Tibet, it is also a fact that Falun Gong has been the recipient of years of vicious crackdowns and human rights atrocities across China.

But just as is the case with Tibet, there is more to the Falun Gong case than simple persecution. Outside political forces and corporate interests can be found pushing Falun Gong into increasingly political activities, including well-funded, well-organized, and ubiquitous worldwide protests against the Chinese Communist Party.

Among the foreign (predominantly Western) Friends of Falun Gong, we find the likes of Mark Palmer of Freedom House. Freedom House is a quasi-intelligence front created by the CIA-connected Open Society Institute of elite George Soros. In addition to Palmer, Freedom House has counted among its top management the former CIA Director James Woolsey, neocons Bernie Aronson and Diana Negroponte, super elite Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, Clinton Commerce Secretary Stuart Eizenstat, and the late Congressman Tom Lantos and his wife.

Freedom House is backed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which former CIA agent Philip Agee, and many others have amply documented, is a US intelligence apparatus that has been a driving force behind opposition forces (“democracy revolutions”) in many countries.

As pointed out by William Blum in his book, Rogue State, the CIA has created a host of “Trojan horses” such as the NED specifically to subvert foreign countries, under the guise of humanitarianism:

“The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of the negative revelations about the CIA, in the second half of the 1970s . . . The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.

“It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations and of cynicism.

“The National Endowment for Democracy was set up to 'support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts' . . . In actuality, every penny of its funding comes from the federal government . . . NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (non-governmental organization). The NED is a 'GO.'

“In a multitude of ways, the NED meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries . . . In short, NED’s programs are in sync with the basic needs and objectives of the New World Order’s economic globalization, just as the programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US foreign policy.

“The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what it does supporting democracy. The governments and movements whom the NED targets call it destabilization.”

An analysis conducted in 1999 (during the Clinton administration) offers a glimpse of the NED’s role behind a long list of “democracy” fronts -- including Tibet independence and Falun Gong. Just imagine what this list looks like today, in a time of war, spearheaded by the Bush-Cheney milieu.

For legitimate reasons, Beijing clearly suspects US and CIA involvement behind Falun Gong. Denunciations of human rights offenses committed against Falun Gong, however legitimate, are one-sided if they do not also take into account the funding and co-opting of the group by outside political forces.

Manipulation behind Darfur

Similar to the “Save Tibet” movement, the “Save Darfur”/“Stop Darfur Genocide” movement has become a worldwide cause celebre, embraced and trumpeted by a host of Hollywood celebrities and headline-loving political bigwigs, and aggressive activists. While this cause is continuously promoted by propaganda, and one-sided “Hotel Rwanda” type fare, the real geostrategic game being played in Africa is being largely ignored.

China and the US are just one of many nations whose political and corporate interests are battling over which controls the energy spoils in Darfur, and the entire horn of Africa.

It is not just China doing business there. In fact, the Western oil companies have engaged in far more aggressive activities, for many years more.

Darfur is brimming with covert operations, and Anglo-American military-intelligence involvement behind tribal warfare, elections, cross-border military skirmishes, and massacres is undeniable.

In other words, there is a “great game” being played in Africa, just as there is one being played around Tibet. Through propaganda, China is being made into the single arch-villain.

Off-target passions, easily manipulated

Virtually every government on the planet is guilty of human rights abuses, and these abuses deserve to be exposed and protested. But to simplemindedly (and, with more than a little racism thrown in) protest China, based on human rights “causes” created, manipulated, and co-opted by Anglo-American intelligence propaganda is to fall directly into the hands of the exponentially greater violators of human rights all over the world: the United States and its allies.

Indeed, activists and protesters all over the world must ask themselves whose side they are really on, and to whose orders are they marching? The vast majority of both pro- and anti-Chinese protesters fail to acknowledge the complexities underlying their pet causes, or the corruption poisoning the situation from every side.

Far from actually alleviating any suffering in Darfur, Tibet or within China itself, activists are being guided into deepening the suffering; assisting the Anglo-American empire’s own plans to destabilize and conquer (energy-rich and strategically situated) Africa and (energy-rich and strategically situated) Tibet, and politically hamper Beijing.

China is the target of long-term US military and political aggression. A full-blown superpower conflict is underway. China is being simultaneously used as the labor engine for the world’s capitalist economy, while being geostrategically and militarily encircled. China is also in the process of being financially seized and gutted by the World Trade Organization. Every move made by the Beijing government, particularly for its own stakes in oil and gas, have been violently contested by the Western powers.

China’s attempted rise to the world stage, out of decades of isolation, is headed off by rapacious US-led machinations. Today’s anti-Chinese Olympics protests are simply the latest manifestation.

It is no surprise that US presidential aspirants Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have jumped on the anti-Chinese Olympic boycott bandwagon, joining the worldwide anti-China propaganda noise. It is now politically expedient for all of the presidential nominees, as well as the Bush-Cheney administration, to hammer at Beijing, without bothering to mention the true complexities of US-China politics.

It is tragically ironic that the predominantly Western/developed market-based “Save Tibet” and “Save Darfur” activists and anti-China protesters have done relatively little, if anything to “save themselves.”

Compared to the militant zeal expended against China, relatively little passion or outrage has been aimed at the Bush-Cheney administration. These “activists” would rather focus on “saving those poor Tibetans and Africans,” even as their own human rights, liberties, material assets and well being have been systematically ripped away, by an openly criminal administration that (with the help of a corrupt Supreme Court, Congress, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, etc.) enjoys absolute unchecked power.

The “Save Tibet,” “Save Darfur,” and “Help Falun Gong” movements are as deceptive as the “war on terrorism.” The “causes” are controlled by Anglo-American intelligence apparatuses and/or co-opted by them, in order to provide the masses with the propaganda justification for wars and intervention, and resource conquest.

The CIA’s “mighty Wurlitzer” has never been more deafening, and the masses are dancing to its tune.

The Guardian-BBC nexus in defence of the Warren Report

Or: How to get on in British journalism…

Case 1: Mark Lawson, one-time Guardian columnist, now BBC TV and radio critical arbiter:

Lawson arrived at the Grauniad as a fully paid-up member of the CIA-serving fiction service. In June 1995, Picador published his alternative history satire, Edelweiss, which posited JFK’s survival of the Dallas visit thanks to the death by chicken-bone of would-be assassin Oswald; and his second-term turn, in no particular order, to the German-American Bund, Father Coughlin, and the National Gentile League in a desperate attempt to shore up domestic support for his pre-emptive nuclear strike on Vietnam and the forced sterilisation of non-Catholics.

The ex-President, driven into mittel European exile by a coalition of concerned patriots led by a reluctant Allen Welch Dulles, is compelled to pass along a reverse “Rat Line” disguised, among other things, as a singing nun, chiefly to escape the attentions of Fraser, that rarest of American things, a genuine lone-nut bent on avenging JFK’s genocidal south-east Asian assault. Kennedy takes refuge in the Vatican, where he is given a face change, speech therapy and a new career – as a French ventriloquist, Pierre Latrine – before becoming the victim, during the “events” of May 1968, of a Paris diplomatic protection team’s Citroen as its occupants desperately hunt Fraser.

Lawson’s mastery of detail particularly impressed one Hugo Barnacle, who reviewed the book – subsequently turned into a film starring Christopher Plummer as Von Trapp Deux, veteran Nazi-hunter, and the man who thwarts Fraser’s best shot at revenge – in The Independent, Lawson’s employer prior to his departure for the more BBC-rich pastures of Farringdon Road:

”…much of the writing is remarkably careless. On page 65, we are told the flaky Fraser is obsessed with time, but not “time in the sense of clocks – the police who bring him in will note that he does not even wear a wrist-watch.” Cut to the chase on page 275, and as the cops close in on him, ‘The suspect looks at his watch…picks up his bag and turns right, walking fast…’

One of the cops, hurt in an explosion, doesn’t want to miss the arrest and keeps his arm across the bloodstain on his jacket, so his partner ‘will not see that he is injured’. This is odd, because four pages earlier his partner has seen the blood and told him, ‘You’ve been hit.’ The two cops, Jean-Paul et Sebastian, conduct philosophical dialogues throughout the book; on page 46 Lawson makes the classic error of forgetting which character is speaking, and Jean-Paul answers his own Foucaltian gambit with a nonchalant Derridarian put-down,”

“Whatever happened to JFK?,” The Independent, Weekend section, 24 June 1995, p.7

Earlier, Barnacle had skewered the central political lie at the fiction’s heart:

The central premise, that Kennedy would have made as big a mess of Vietnam as Johnson did, is a piece of received wisdom that no longer has much ironic bite and never did have much foundation: just before he died, JFK announced his intention to quit Vietnam and began ordering home the troops.

If we live long enough, we might, just might, see a serious piece in the Guardian acknowledging precisely both long-obvious facts.

Paul stop your envy or our Extra-Loyal ... it is clearly another case of Big-Tent-Envy!

Sussed. I am ashamed. Hand me a tent-peg at once. Oh to be able to micturate out, and not in...

The Guardian-BBC nexus in defence of the Warren Report

Or: How to get on in British journalism…

Case 1: Mark Lawson, one-time Guardian columnist, now BBC TV and radio critical arbiter:

Mark Lawson, “Stranger than fact,” The Guardian, 4 April 1998, p.21:

On 15 November 2003, Lawson the crazed obsessive returned to give the presidential corpse another good kicking in a column entitled “Still Crazy about JFK” (p.23), in which readers were treated to sound reasons to thank the powers-that-be for his premature demise:

But the most obvious outcome of that Dallas day – or at least the Warren Commission’s attempt to explain it – is a general tendency to distrust the official version and assume the worst, which now keeps even radio phone-ins in the UK supplied with callers who insist that Princess Diana and Dr David Kelly were murdered.

If Jack had survived, Oswald and/or anon’s bullets, he would have been 86 today. Except that there would be no such birthday because we now know that he carried an assassin inside his own body: his failing kidneys. It is even possible that he might have died of natural causes during a second term.

Perhaps a transplant or newer steroids would have saved his life, but they would have ruined his reputation. Though Oliver Stone insists that Kennedy would have saved America from Vietnam, it’s hard to see how he would have resisted the visceral anti-communism of the military.

A politician whose appeal so depended on promise and possibility could only have lived out a long disappointment. If he had survived, he would surely have ended up telling a priest through the confessional mesh or over the tennis net that he now often considered suicide.

Charming.

Sorry. Just processing the rationality.

Apology declined. You're manifestly as guilty as sin of refusing to be guided by your "liberal" elders and betters. Shame on you. Have you no room for Hofstadter in your heart? Or Chomsky?

I don't know, where will it all end? In an informed populace making up their own minds? The very thought!

Paul

"and the ease with which public figures escape scandals. "

Hard to say: is he talking about Cynthia McKinney or Eliot Spitzer?

Nat, you've still not got the hang of this conformity business. I hereby sentence you to a life-time's subscription to The Nation. Condign, I know, as punishments go, but you did ask for it.

Paul

The Guardian-BBC nexus in defence of the Warren Report

Or: How to get on in British journalism…

Case 1: Mark Lawson, one-time Guardian columnist, now BBC TV and radio critical arbiter:

Case 2:

Mark Lawson’s bizarre “continuum theory” had precedent. On 13 March 1996, the Old Harrovian biographer of Karl Marx (and BBC radio regular), Francis Wheen, treated Grauniad readers to an equally impressive Grand Unified Theory of career-advancement in a Wheen’s World column modestly entitled: “A theory to end all theories,” G2, p.4. Read on, and weep, most likely with laughter:

Alarming news: the Americans may be losing their appetite for conspiracy theories. Oliver Stone’s film, Nixon, which alleges that Tricky Dicky and the FBI boss J Edgar Hoover were accessories to the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, was a box-office flop in the United States. A new book from the investigative reporter Dan E Moldea, hitherto something of a hero to conspiracy buffs, concludes that Bobby Kennedy was actually killed by Sirhan Sirhan, acting alone, as the authorities have maintained all along. Meanwhile, the Conspiracy Museum in Dallas, Texas, has offered a $1 million reward for the “real killers” of President Kennedy to come forward; but there are few takers, according to the museum’s manager, Ron Rice. “Believe it or not, we haven’t had any crank calls,” he tells me. We were bracing ourselves for people to say, ‘I did it, send me the cheque,’ but no one has.

In his brilliant study, The Paranoid Style In American Politics, Professor Richard Hofstadter argues that the paranoia of the conspiracy theorist isn’t a psychological abnormality of the sort that Nicholas Soames has diagnosed in the Princess of Wales. “I use the term,” he explained, “much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.” The freelance obsessives who devote their lives to the JFK saga are not fruitcakes – well, not all of them. They are artists, working on a vast canvas which can never be completed.

Rice, for instance, is convinced that the assassination of President Kennedy (not to mention Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King) was organised by some of the most prominent figures in America. “Allen Dulles of the CIA chose the city, J Edgar Hoover set up Oswald as the patsy, Carlos Marcello of the Mafia got the guns, the Texan billionaire H L Hunt financed it, and LBJ covered the whole thing up. At least, that’s my theory. I’m writing a book about.”

Tommy Bowden, the director of the Conspiracy Museum, goes further, claiming that the gang which bumped off the Kennedys also arranged the death of Mary-Jo Kepechne (to keep Edward Kennedy out of the White House) and the shooting down of the Korean Airlines flight 007 (to keep the Cold War going). Just as Casaubon thought he could find the key to all mythologies if only he persevered, so the serious conspiracy-artists hope that by collating enough names and places they will eventually produce a grand unifying theory which explains every crime and scandal of the 20th century.

It is easy to mock these amateur sleuths. (“People want us to have an exhibit on ‘Is Elvis really alive?’ but we don’t have the money to cover everything,” Rice admits sadly.) Nevertheless, they do at least adhere to that essential rule for any diligent truth-seeker, “only connect”. The alternative is a variation on Margaret Thatcher’s old line about there being no such thing as society, only individual men and women and their families; there is no such thing as a conspiracy, only lone gunmen and cock-up merchants.

Elvis may not be alive, but Richard Nixon did indeed try to conceal the truth about Watergate, and Ronald Reagan did trade arms for hostages. Anyone who doubts that conspiracies exist should be forced to read the Scott report – and should then send a small donation to the Conspiracy Museum, to save an endangered species from extinction.

One sees at once why Wheen was considered sound BBC material.

From William Blum's book Killing Hope.

I had entirely forgotten Blum's chapter - thanks for the reminder; and taking the trouble to render it so instantly accessible.

Paul

The Guardian-BBC nexus in defence of the Warren Report

Or: How to get on in British journalism…

Case 1: Mark Lawson, one-time Guardian columnist, now BBC TV and radio critical arbiter:

Mark Lawson, “Stranger than fact,” The Guardian, 4 April 1998, p.21:

As I was walking out of Broadcasting House this week…The second objection is that the great curse of journalism in recent years had been the audience’s increasing refusal to accept any story at face value: to treat every assertion of fact as opinion or irony or obfuscation. This willingness explains both the rise of conspiracy theories and the ease with which public figures escape scandals. What has caused this is the increasing pollution of the fact-pool through rumour and invention…

Pollution of “the fact-pool” – a sort of intellectual soup, I imagine, comprised entirely of Dullesian factoids – soon gave way to something all together.…weirder:

Mark Lawson, “Honestly, there are no conspiracies,” The Guardian, G2, 1 October 1998, p.8:

After spending $40 million and four years on proving that adulterers lie about their actions, the US government has now devoted six years and $8 million to declaring that President Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Although both conclusions are probably true, it’s clear that the public hoped for more original thinking from both the Starr Report and the 290-page Assassination Records Review Board report published yesterday. On a dollar-per-insight basis, the government is being short-changed in these expensive investigations.

The re-examination of the Kennedy assassination – which included the release of 60,000 documents declared secret in 1963 – was prompted by the American public’s widespread rejection of the view that Oswald acted alone or, in the more extreme revisionism, that he was involved at all. As conspiracy culture has escalated in America – fuelled by Watergate, religious neurosis, the approach of the millennium and intrigue-ridden TV series and movies – the average citizen was more likely to believe that JFK was killed because he was about to go public on the cover-up over the landing of extra-terrestrials in New Mexico in 1947.

The problem is that, as anyone could have told the ARRB six years ago, no conspiracy theorist will ever accept the assurances of the government over what happened that November in Dallas. It’s like expecting a vegetarian to be converted by a butcher. Government to conspiracy theorists: we’ve checked everything and it was definitely Oswald alone! Conspiracy theorists to government: yeah, like, sure.

Yet, exciting as conspiracy theories are, I’m increasingly coming round to the continuum theory of history: the which in which events, when viewed from a distance, can be seen to hold accidental but fascinating patterns. There’s a good example in Michael Frayn’s current play Copenhagen, which suggests that, had Hitler not forced brilliant Jewish scientists to flee, he might have built the atom bomb and won the war. Thus his motivating hatred disadvantaged him: not conspiracy, but continuum. Another example is that Richard Nixon, future bogeyman of US politics, happened to be in Dallas on the day that Kennedy was shot. This detail excites the suspicious but is better seen as a case of history’s way with jokey footnotes.

The Lewinsky scandal contains a classic instance of the continuum theory. In November 1995, the Republican leadership in Congress engineered a complete shutdown of the federal government operations as part of their budget dispute with President Clinton. This tactic badly backfired when the electorate sided with the president against Congress. Republican leader New Gingrich’s attempt to bring down Clinton through the shutdown is now taught on politics courses as an example of terrible miscalculation.

And yet. And yet. In his video evidence to the Starr enquiry, Clinton explained that, during the federal government shutdown, most of his staff were prevented from entering the White House: the workforce shrank from 430 to 90. However, interns, because they were unpaid, were allowed to continue working and were reassigned to more important duties. Intern Lewinsky was placed close to the Oval Office and it was there, in November 1995, that she became close to the president.

So Gingrich’s attempt to entrap the president through a shutdown turns out to have worked, although not in the manner intended. Therefore it is the Starr Report rather than the ARRB which turns out to contain the best rebuke to the plotters. Continuum is so often the true story.

George Bush has used a charm offensive during the current NATO summit in Bucharest to gain approval for the missile defence deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic, it appears.

If it wasn't so serious it would be very funny. NATO (read the US) signing up former Warsaw Pact members. But NATO's original target was communism via the USSR. Now the big threats are supposedly Iran and North Korea (read Iran). And 'terrist threats' (insert any name the US wishes to mention).

It's perfect. The little fish each get a bag of lollies and the US makes billions through another masterpiece of weapons technology marketing. It's clear the US, as it stands today, needs war, or the threat of war, in order to survive. It needs to start a war, cause a war, fund a war and or supply arms for war. America is structurally incapable of participating in an environment of substantive global peace. WW2 ended 63 years ago but the US has never stopped fighting wars and it seems it never will, until its inevitable demise, which will probably take a good chunk of modern civilisation with it.

To paraphrase King Bush I, "America's example is the one to which the world expires."

Paul

I posted this on May 5, 2005. Perhaps it will help:

Re: George Polk case

It has never come up as a topic of research for me to investigate. A couple of names/thoughts that come up are of interest. William Donovan, former leader of the OSS who was brushed aside in the development of the new National Security Council structure of 1948 got involved, why?

"Polk had been critical not only of the Greek government but also of the newly released Truman Doctrine which made defeating the Communists in Greece a priority. In an article published in Harper's in December 1947, Polk called the $300 million in aid to Greece "a poor investment." Most importantly, Polk claimed, the money was being terribly misused. Indeed, immediately before his murder, Polk, in an interview with Constantine Tsaldaris, the head of the Royalist Party, threatened to expose Tsaldaris' illegal bank accounts in the United States. Polk's widow, Rea Polk, later claimed: "I am surprised he lived for three days after that interview." Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives

The highlighted portion could attach to Walker's position in the Pentagon where he was "running the Greek desk." The Tuman doctrine was not without its critics in 1948 (Amoung whom were Donovan supporters and "left leaning" groups). Any revelations about how "intelligence funds" were being laundered during this early period of operations by the NSC could have been objectionable and perhaps even considered a threat to national security.

Interesting groups of people we deal with.

Jim Root

Jim,

Can you expand upon the internal divisions among US policy makers with respect to Greece in 1948? And what were the divisions of responsibility within the CIA's apparat in Greece at the time of Polk's death?

Paul

In my best Michael Holding rasta accent:

"The batsman's Holding, the bowler's Willey..."

"And now Len Colby emerges from the pavillion".

Light refreshment, anyone?

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8626

Media Disinformation and the BBC

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, April 10, 2008

At a time of growing public disenchantment with the major media, millions now rely on alternate sources. Many online and print ones are credible. One of the world's most relied on is not - the BBC. It's an imperial tool, as corrupted as its dominant counterparts, been around longer than all of them, now in it for profit, and it's vital that people know who BBC represents and what it delivers.

It was close but not quite the world's first broadcaster. Other European nations claim the distinction along with KDKA Pittsburgh as the oldest US one. BBC's web site states: "The British Broadcasting Company Ltd (its original name) was formed in October 1922....and began broadcasting on November 14....By 1925 the BBC could be heard throughout most of the UK. (Its) biggest influence....was its general manager, John Reith (who) envisioned an independent British broadcaster able to educate, inform and entertain the whole nation, free from political interference and commercial pressure."

That's what BBC says. Here's a different view from Media Lens. It's an independent "UK-based media-watch project....offer(ing) authoritative criticism" reflecting "reality" that's free from the corrupting influence of media corporations and the governments they support.

Its creators and editors (Davids Cromwell and Edwards) ask: "Can the BBC tell the truth....when its senior managers are appointed by the government" and will be fired if they step out of line and become too critical. It notes that nothing "fundamentally changed since BBC founder Lord Reith wrote the establishment: 'They know they can trust us not to be really impartial.' " He didn't disappoint, nor have his successors like current Director-General and Chairman of the Executive Board Mark Thompson along with Michael Lyons, Chairman, BBC Trust that replaced the Board of Governors on January 1, 2007 and oversees BBC operations.

On January 1, 1927, BBC was granted a Royal Charter, made a state-owned and funded corporation, still pretends to be quasi-autonomous, and changed its name to its present one - The British Broadcasting Corporation. Its first Charter ran for 10 years, succeeding ones were renewed for equal fixed length periods, BBC is in its ninth Charter period, and is perhaps more dominant, pervasive and corrupted than ever in an age of marketplace everything and space-age technology with which to operate.

It's now the world's largest broadcaster, has about 28,000 UK employees and a vast number of worldwide correspondents and support staff nearly everywhere or close enough to get there for breaking news. It's government-funded from revenues UK residents pay monthly to operate their television receivers - currently around 22 US dollars, and it also has other growing income sources from its worldwide commercial operations supplementing its noncommercial ones at home.

Most important is how BBC functions, who it serves, and Media Lens' editors explain it best and keep at it with regular updates. They argue that the entire mass media, including BBC, function as a "propaganda system for elite interests." It's especially true for topics mattering most - war and peace, "vast corporate criminality," US-UK duplicity, and "threats to the very existence of human life." They're systematically "distorted, suppressed, marginalized or ignored" in a decades-long public trust betrayal by an organization claiming "honesty, integrity (is) what the BBC stands for (and it's) free from political influence and commercial pressure."

In fact, BBC abandoned those notions straight away, and a glaring example came during the 1926 General Strike. Its web site says it stood up against Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill who "urged the government to take over the BBC, but (general manager) Reith persuaded Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that this would be against the national interest" it was sworn to serve.

Media Lens forthrightly corrects the record. Reith never embraced the public trust. He used BBC for propaganda, operated it as a strikebreaker, secretly wrote anti-union speeches for the Tories, and refused to give air time to worker representatives. It got BBC labeled the "British Falsehood Corporation," and proved from inception it was a reliable business and government partner. It still is, of course, more than ever.

Consider BBC's role during WW II when it became a de facto government agency, and throughout its existence job applicants have been vetted to be sure what side they're on. Noted UK journalist John Pilger explains that independent-minded ones "were refused BBC posts (and still are) because they were not considered safe."

Only "reliable" ones reported on the 1982 Falklands war, for example, that Margaret Thatcher staged to boost her low approval rating and improve her reelection chances. Leaked information later showed BBC executives ordered news coverage focused "primarily (on) government statements of policy" and to avoid impartiality considered "an unnecessary irritation."

This has been BBC practice since inception - steadfastly pro-government and pro-business with UK residents getting no public service back for their automatic monthly billings to turn on their TVs - sort of like force-fed cable TV, whether or not they want it.

Back on BBC's web site, it recounts its history by decades from the 1920s to the new millennium when post-9/11 controversies surfaced. BBC only cites one of them rather pathetically. This critique gives examples of its duplicity across the world.

Misreporting on Iraq - Deception over Truth

The controversy BBC mentioned was the so-called Hutton Inquiry into the death of Ministry of Defense weapons expert Dr. David Kelly. On July 18, 2003, reports were he committed suicide, but they were dubious at best. Here how BBC explained it: "a bitter row with Government" emerged after a "Today programme suggested that the Government 'sexed up' the case for war with Iraq in a dossier of evidence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (BBC governors) backed the report, rejecting (PM) Tony Blair's (demands) for a retraction."

"The row escalated over the following weeks when editorial flaws became evident." Then came Kelly's "suicide." It made daily headlines because he was the source of the BBC report. "The Hutton Inquiry followed, and on January 28, 2004 chairman Gavyn Davies resigned when Lord Hutton's findings were published. The following day the remaining governors accepted the resignation of Director-General Greg Dyke."

True to form, BBC suppressed the truth, so here's what we know. David Kelly, as an insider, accused authorities of faking a claim of Iraq WMDs that could be unleashed in 45 minutes with devastating effects. He then mysteriously turned up dead (three days after appearing before a televised government committee) to assure he'd tell no more tales with potentially smoking-gun evidence for proof. He apparently had plenty.

What BBC and the Blair government suppressed, a Kelly Investigation Group (KIG) examined and revealed. Consider these facts:

-- Kelly's death was pronounced suicide without an autopsy;

-- Lord Hutton was aging and never before chaired a public inquiry, let alone one this sensitive making daily headlines;

-- no formal inquest was ordered and was subsumed into the Hutton Inquiry;

-- evidence showed Kelly's body was moved twice;

-- a supposed knife, bottle of water, glasses, and cap reported by later witnesses weren't seen by the first ones who found Kelly;

-- hemorrhaging from a left wrist arterial wound was ruled the cause of death, but there was little blood to substantiate it; other suspicious findings also suggested a thorough independent investigation was warranted.

In fact, evidence became clear that the real agenda was cover-up. Key witnesses weren't called to testify. An anesthesiologist specialist read two KIG accounts (of known facts) about Kelly's death and concluded that "the whole 'suicide' story (was) phony in the extreme....He was clearly murdered." Another surgeon confirmed that Kelly couldn't have died of hemorrhage as reported. It's impossible to bleed to death from that kind of arterial severing.

Three other doctors also examined evidence, commented, and concluded that Kelly didn't commit suicide. The doctors and KIG then wrote an 11 page letter to the Coroner, cited their concerns in detail, and got no response. In a follow-up phone call, the Coroner said that he saw the police report and felt everything was in order.

In the meantime, the Hutton report came out and was leaked a day early to defuse a possible murder angle. Concurrently, the Coroner refused to reopen the investigation, the Hutton Inquiry was bogus, it never proved suicide and, in fact, was commissioned to suppress Blair government lies, whitewash the whole affair, and end it with considerable BBC help.

In this instance, things didn't play out as BBC planned, thanks to correspondent Andrew Gilligan. On May 29, 2003, he delivered what became known as his "6:07 AM dispatch" and said his source (David Kelly) alleged that the government "sexed up" the September dossier with the 45 minute WMD claim knowing it was false. He was immediately reigned in on subsequent accounts, but the damage was done, and Gilligan upped the stakes in a June 1 Mail on Sunday article.

In it, he quoted Kelly blaming Alastair Campbell (Blair government's 1997 - 2003 Director of Communications and Strategy) for embellishing the dossier to provide cause for war against Iraq. The fat was now in the fire with Kelly through Gilligan accusing the Blair government of lying and BBC having to find an out and get back to business as usual.

It wouldn't be simple with an exposed Campbell diary entry revealing he intended to go after Gilligan and apparently Kelly and do whatever it took to nail them. It all played out for days with Campbell demanding an apology and retraction, BBC wanting it to go away, Kelly's July death, and other Blair allies defending the government with threats about reviewing BBC's Charter until it ended predictably and disgracefully.

BBC cut a deal. Saying they resigned in late January 2004, it fired Gilligan along with Chairman Gavyn Davies and Director-General Greg Dyke. Even they weren't immune to dismissal at a time of an "aberrant" report that later proved true. For BBC, it was back to business as usual under new management supporting two illegal wars showing no signs of ending or BBC reporting truthfully about them.

From the start, it championed Tony Blair's "moral case for war," was a complicit cheerleader for it with the rest of the media, and found no fault with Washington and London's blaming Iraq's regime for what it didn't cause or could do nothing to prevent. Instead, round the clock propaganda ignored the facts and barely hinted at western responsibility for the most appalling crimes of war and against humanity that continue every day.

It's the way BBC reports on everything. Fiction substitutes for fact, news is carefully filtered, wars of aggression are called liberating ones, yet consider what former BBC political editor Andrew Marr wrote in his 2004 book on British journalism: Those in the trade "are employed to be studiously neutral, expressing little emotion and certainly no opinion; millions of people would say that news is the conveying of fact, and nothing more."

Even worse (and most humiliating) was his on-air 2003 post-Iraq invasion comment that he'd like to erase: "I don't think anybody (can dispute) Tony Blair. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both these points he has been proved conclusively right. (Even) his critics (must) acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result."

So much for truth and accuracy and a free and impartial BBC. It continues to call a puppet prime minister legitimate; an occupied country liberated; a pillaged free market paradise "democracy;" with millions dead, displaced and immiserated unreported like it never happened.

Supporting Aggression in Afghanistan

BBC was no better on Afghanistan and considered the war largely over when Kabul fell on November 13, 2001. The bombing continues, but it was yesterday's news, and only Taliban "crimes" matter. Unmentioned was how John Pilger portrayed the country in his newest book "Freedom Next Time." He called it more like a "moonscape" than a functioning nation and likely more abused and long-suffering than any other.

Contrast that description with BBC's reporting that Afghanistan is now free from "fear, uncertainty and chaos" because the US and UK "act(ed) benignly; (their) humanitarian military assault is beneficial (but those) meddlesome (Taliban) are trying (to) undermin(e) our good work." Unreported is what really lay behind the 9/11 attack and the price Afghans and Iraqis keep paying for it.

BBC's Disturbing Balkan Wars Reporting

BBC's shame is endless, and consider how it reported on the 1990s Balkan wars that evoked popular support on the right and left. Slobadon Milosevic was unfairly vilified for the West's destruction of Yugoslavia. Things culminated disgracefully with a 1999 seventy-eight day NATO assault on Serbia. Its pretext was protecting Kosovo's Albanian population, but its real aim was quite different - removing a head of state obstacle to controlling Central Europe, then advancing east to confront a few others.

Milosevic was arrested in April 2001, abducted from his home, shipped off to The Hague, hung out to dry when he got there, then silenced to prevent what he knew from coming out that would explain the conflict's real aim and who the real criminals were.

The war's pretext was a ruse, Kosovo is a Serbian province but in 1999 was stripped away. Ever since, it's been a US-NATO occupied colony, denied its sovereignty, and run by three successive puppet prime ministers with known ties to organized crime and drugs trafficking. It's also home to one of America's largest military bases, Camp Bondsteel, and it's no exaggeration saying the territory is more military base than a functioning political entity.

Then on February 17, 2008, during a special parliamentary session, Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence. It violated international law but got something more important - complicit western backing (outweighing a one-third EU nation block opposition). It also got one-sided BBC support. Its reporting took great care to ignore an illegal act, leave unmentioned that Kosovo is part of Serbia, or explain the UN's (1999) Security Council Resolution 1244. It recognizes the "sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" and only permits Kosovo's self-government as a Serbian province. No longer with plenty of BBC help making it possible.

Targeting Hugo Chavez and Assailing His Democratic Credentials

BBC misreports everywhere at one time or other, depending on breaking world events and the way power elitists view them. Consider Venezuela and how BBC reported on Chavez's most dramatic two days in office and events preceding them. Its April 12, 2002 account disdained the truth and headlined "Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez (was) forced to resign by the country's military. (His) three years in power (ended) after a three-day general strike....in which 11 people died....more than 80 others (were) injured," and BBC suggested Chavez loyalists killed them. It reported "snipers opened fire on a crowd of more than 150,000 (and it) triggered a rebellion by the country's military."

During anti-Chavez demonstrations, "Mr. Chavez appeared on the state-run television denouncing the protest, (then BBC falsely reported corporate TV channels it called independent ones) were taken off the air by order of the government. (High-ranking) military officers rebell(ed) against Mr. Chavez. (He) finally quit after overnight talks with a delegation of generals at the Miraflores presidential palace."

"BBC's Adam Easton, in Caracas at the time, says there are noisy celebrations on the streets, (and former army general) Guaicaipuro Lameda said Mr. Chavez's administration had been condemned because it began arming citizens' committees (and) these armed groups....fired at opposition protesters."

In another report, BBC was jubilant in quoting Venezuela's corporate press. They welcomed Chavez's ouster and called him an "autocrat," "incompetent" and a "coward." They accused him of "order(ing) his sharpshooters to open fire on innocent people (and) betray(ing his) country."

BBC went along without a hint of dissent or a word of the truth, but where was BBC when a popular uprising and military support restored Chavez to office two days later? It quietly announced a "chastened....Chavez return(ed) to office after the collapse of the interim government....and pledged to make necessary changes." In spite of vilifying him in the coup's run-up, cheerleading it when it happened and calling it a resignation, BBC put on a brave face. It had to be painful saying: "The UK welcomed Mr. Chavez's return to power, saying that any change of government should be achieved by democratic means."

It's hard imagining Caracas correspondents Greg Morsbach and James Ingham see it that way. Morsbach called the country a "left-wing haven" on the occasion of 100,000 people taking part in the 2006 World Social Forum in the capital. He said the city is "used to staging big events (opposing) 'neo-liberal' economic policies," then couldn't resist taking aim at Chavez. "Five hundred metres away from the (downtown) Hilton," Morsbach noted, "homeless people scavenge in dustbins for what little food they can find." He then quoted a man named Carlos "who spent the last three years sleeping rough on the streets" and felt Bolivarianism did nothing for him.

It's done plenty for Venezuelans but Morsbach won't report it. Under Chavez, social advances have been remarkable and consider two among many. According to Venezuela's National Statistics Institute (INE), the country's poverty rate (before Chavez) in 1997 was 60.94%. It dropped sharply under Bolarvarianism to a low of 45.38% in 2001, rose to 62.09% after the crippling 2002-03 oil management lockout, and then plummeted to a low of around 27% at year end 2007. In addition, unemployment dropped from 15% in 1997 to INE's reported 6.2% in December 2007.

Morsbach also omitted how Chavez is tackling homelessness. He's reducing it with programs like communal housing, drug treatment and providing modest stipends for the needy. His goal - "for there (not) to be a single child in the streets....not a single beggar in the street." It's working through Mission Negra Hipolita that guides the homeless to shelters and rehab centers. They provide medical and psychological care and pay homeless in them a modest amount in return for community service. No mention either compares Venezuela under Chavez to America under George Bush (and likely Britain under anyone) where no homeless programs exist, the problem is increasing, nothing is being done about it, and the topic is taboo in the media.

Instead in a BBC profile, Chavez is called "increasingly autocratic, revolutionary (and) combative." He's a man who's "alienated and alarmed the country's traditional political elite, as well as several foreign governments," (and he) court(s) controversy (by) making high-profile visits to Cuba and Iraq" and more. He "allegedly flirt(s) with leftist rebels in Colombia and mak(es) a huge territorial claim on Guyana."

The account then implies Chavez is to blame for "relations with Washington reach(ing) a new low (because he) accused (the Bush administration) of fighting terror with terror" post-9/11, and in a September 2006 UN General Assembly speech called the president "the devil."

Chavez's December 2007 constitutional reform referendum was also covered. It was defeated, the profile suggested controversial elements in it, but omitted explaining its objective - to deepen and broaden Venezuelan democracy, more greatly empower the people, provide them more social services, and make government more accountable to its citizens. Instead, BBC highlighted White House spokeswoman Dana Perino saying: Venezuelans "spoke their minds, and they voted against the reforms that Hugo Chavez had recommended and I think that bodes well for the country's future and freedom and liberty."

In another piece, Inghram took aim at the country's "whirlwind of nationalisations, and threats to private companies (are) changing Venezuela's economic climate and threaten to widen a tense social divide." It's part of Chavez's "campaign to turn Venezuela into a socialist state" with suggestive innuendoes about what that implies, omitting its achievements, and reporting nothing about how business in the country is booming or that Chavez's approach is pragmatic.

Instead, Inghram cites his critics saying "his plan is all about power" (and) bring(ing) no benefit to the nation" in lieu of letting business run it as their private fiefdom. It's how they've always done it, Venezuelans were deeply impoverished as a result, and BBC loves taking aim at a leader who wants to change things for the better and is succeeding.

It refers to his "stepp(ing) up his radical revolution since being re-elected in December 2006." Venezuela is "very divided" and its president "far too powerful (and) can rule by decree" - with no explanation of Venezuela's Enabling Law, his limited authority under it, its expiration after 18 months, and that Venezuela's (pre-Bolivarian) 1961 constitution gave comparable powers to four of the country's past presidents.

BBC further assailed Chavez's refusal to review one of RCTV's operating licenses and accused him of limiting free expression. Unreported was the broadcaster's tainted record, its lack of ethics or professional standards, and its lawless behavior. Specifically omitted was its leading role in instigating and supporting the aborted April 2002 coup and its subsequent complicity in the 2002-03 oil-management lockout and multi-billion dollar sabotage against state oil company PDVSA.

Despite it, RCTV got a minor slap on the wrist, lost only its VHF license, and it still operates freely on Venezuelan cable and satellite. Yet, if an American broadcaster was as lawless, it would be banned from operating, and its management (under US law) could be prosecuted for sedition or treason for instigating and aiding a coup d'etat against a sitting president. BBC ignored RCTV's offense, assailed Hugo Chavez unjustifiably, and reported in its usual deferential to power way.

It falsely stated RCTV's license wasn't renewed because "it supported opposition candidates (and said) hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Caracas....some to celebrate, others to protest." Unexplained was that pro-government supporters way outnumbered opponents, it's the same every time, and they gather spontaneously for every public Chavez address. Also ignored is that opposition demonstrations are usually small and staged-for-media events so BBC and anti-Chavistas in the press can call them huge and a sign Chavez's support is waning. As BBC put it this time: The situation "highlight(s), once again, how deeply divided Venezuela is" under its "controversial" president - who's popular support is so considerable BBC won't report it.

BBC's War Against Mugabe

On April 4, The New York Times correspondent Michael Wines wrote what BBC often reports: "New Signs of Mugabe Crackdown in Zimbabwe." It highlighted "police raids....against the main opposition party, foreign journalists (and) rais(ed) the specter of a broad crackdown (to keep) the country's imperiled leaders in power."

Below is what BBC reported the same day in one of its continuing inflammatory accounts in the wake of Zimbabwe's March 29 presidential and parliamentary elections. It pitted the country's African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) President Robert Mugage against two opponents - the misnamed Movement for Democratic Change's (MDC) Morgan Tsvangirai (a western recruited stooge) and independent candidate Simba Makoni.

In its role as an unabashed Tsvangirai cheerleader, BBC headlined: "Mugabe's ZANU-PF prepares for battle" after its parliamentary defeat - MDC winning 99 seats; ZANU-PF 97 (including an uncontested one); a breakaway MDC faction 10 seats and an independent, one, in Zimbabwe's 210 constituencies with only 206 seats being contested; ZANU didn't contest one seat, and three MDC candidates died in the run-up to the poll.

Results for the 60 (largely ceremonial) Senate seats were announced April 5 with ZANU-PF winning 30 and the combined opposition gaining the same number. In addition, ZANU-PF announced 16 parliamentary seats are being contested and ordered recounts for them that could change the electoral balance. Mugabe is also challenging the presidential tally, asked the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to delay releasing it and wants it retabulated because of what he calls "errors and miscalculations."

MDC officials called the move illegal, BBC seems eager to agree, and then went on the attack the way it always does against independent black republics. It can't tolerate them, but it's especially hostile to Zimbabwe. It's the former Rhodesia that British-born South African businessman, politician and De Beers chief Cecil Rhodes founded shortly after Britain invaded in 1893 and conquered Matabeleland. UK soldiers and volunteers were given 6000 (stolen) acres of land and within a year controlled the area's 10,000 most fertile square miles through a white supremacist land grab. They went further as well, confiscated cattle, and coerced the native Ndebele people into forced labor. Brits also exploited the Shonas, they rebelled, and a year later were crushed at the cost of 8000 African lives.

Decades of exploitation followed, a 1961 constitution was drafted to keep whites in power, Rhodesia declared its independence in 1965, but Britain intervened to protect white privilege. UN sanctions and guerrilla war followed, Southern Rhodesia declared itself a republic in 1970, then became the independent nation of Zimbabwe (the former Southern Rhodesia, then just Rhodesia in 1964) in April 1980 after 1979 elections created independent Zimbabwe Rhodesia.

Robert Mugabe was elected president, won overwhelmingly, remained the country's leader for 28 years, and at age 84 ran again for another term on March 29. He's called outspoken, controversial, and polarizing but for millions in Zimbabwe (and in Africa) he's a hero of his nation's liberation struggle against white supremacist rule.

America, Britain and other colonial powers, however, don't view him that way, and therein lies today's conflict. A racist UK can't tolerate an independent black republic and uses its state-owned BBC to vilify Mugabe and target him for regime change in a pattern all too familiar.

In a close March 29 election, vote-rigging is suspected, results days later weren't announced, and BBC accused ZANU-PF of knowing and concealing them as well as governing dictatorially. With no official totals, it stated "Mugabe....failed to pass the 50% barrier needed to avoid a second-round run-off." It's now been announced, by law must be held within 21 days of March 29 (by or before April 19), but AP reports "diplomats in Harare (the capital) and at the UN said Mugabe (wants) a 90 day delay to give security forces time to clamp down."

BBC expects trouble, appears trying to incite it, and denounces Mugabe loyalists as hard-line, militant and known for their violence. In battle mode, correspondent Grant Ferret from Johannesburg (BBC's banned from Zimbabwe because of its anti-Mugabe reporting) states: "Intimidation is....likely to be part of the second round. Offices used by the opposition were ransacked on Thursday night (April 3) (and) two foreign nationals (were) detained (for) violating the country's media laws." An NGO worker "promoting democracy" was also detained.

Correspondent Ian Pannell joins the assault. He stresses a crumbling economy, out-of-control inflation, people unable to cope and talking everywhere about "a struggle to make ends meet." They "spend hours queuing at the bank or waiting in line at a bakery where lines stretch around the corners. Many shops have as many empty shelves as full ones," Zimbabweans are suffering, and "80% of the workforce" has no regular job. People survive anyway they can, there's "a thriving black market," overseas remittances help, but "fields (are) without crops, shops without goods, petrol stations....low or empty, women at the side of the road begging for food, traders desperate for customers and hard currency."

There's no denying Zimbabwe is under duress, but BBC won't explain why. It never reported that ever since Mugabe's ZANU-PF ended white supremacist rule, he's been vilified for being independent, redistributing white-owned farms, mostly (but not entirely) staying out of the IMF's clutches, and waging a valiant struggle to prevent a return to an exploited past.

Doing it hasn't been easy, however. It's meant getting little or no outside aid, bending the rules, restraining civil liberties, banning hostile journalism like BBC's, but up to now (most often) holding reasonably free and fair elections and winning every time. Despite Zimbabwe's problems, Mugabe's popular support has been strong, especially from the country's war veterans who didn't fight for freedom to hand it back to new colonial masters.

But it looks like that's where Zimbabwe is heading. The March 29 election showed weakness. The opposition made it close and forced a runoff (unless a retabulated count shows otherwise). It controls the parliament (barring a retallied change) and has strong western support that smells blood. Behind the scenes, regime change is planned and this time may succeed. An 84 year old Mugabe's time may be passing - if not now, soon.

Zimbabwe's economy has collapsed, drought problems have been severe, food and fuel shortages are acute, 83% of the population lives on less than $2 a day, half the people are malnourished, more than 10% of children die before age five, and the country's HIV/AIDS rate is the fourth highest in the world. In addition, average life expectancy plunged to 37.3 years, inflation is out of control, conditions are disastrous, and it was mostly engineered by 2002 western-imposed sanctions.

Fifteen EU member states and Australia support them plus America after passage of the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 (ZIDERA). Its effect has been devastating on an already weakened economy. It cut off the country's access to foreign capital and credit, denied its efforts to reschedule debt, froze financial and other assets of ZANU-PF officials and companies linked to them, and effectively brought the economy to its knees.

ZIDERA states that economic and other sanctions will be enforced until the US president certifies that the "rule of law has been restored in Zimbabwe, including respect for ownership and title to property....and an end to lawlessness." Unmentioned is the Act's real purpose - restoring white supremacist rule, exploiting the black majority and doing to Zimbabwe what's happening throughout Africa and in nearly all other developing states.

If Mugabe goes, the IMF can swoop in with a promised $2 billion (renewable) aid package for a new MDC government with the usual strings attached - sweeping structural adjustments, privatizing everything, ending social services, mandating mass layoffs, crushing small local businesses, escalating poverty, and returning the country to its colonial past under new millennium management under a black stooge of a president to make it all look legitimate.

BBC has a role in this, and it's been at it for decades. It's waged a multi-year anti-Mugabe jihad and seems now to be going for broke. For days, broadcasts practically scream regime change. Reports are inflammatory, visibly one-sided, with correspondents saying (MDC's) Tsvangirai won, election results are being withheld, no runoff is necessary, and when it's held Mugabe will use violence to retain power.

On April 5, BBC quoted Tsvangirai accusing Mugabe of "preparing to go to war against the country's people (and) deploying troops and armed militias to intimidate voters ahead of a possible runoff....thousands of army recruits are being recruited, militants are being rehabilitated and some few claiming to be war veterans are already on the warpath."

Tsvangirai wants the courts to force officials to release the results, Zimbabwe's High Court is hearing MDC's petition, but earlier it was claimed "armed police prevented MDC lawyers" from petitioning the Court to get them. BBC quoted one of them saying "police had threatened to shoot them," then quoted Tsvangirai again saying Zimbabwe's central bank was printing money for bribes and government-financed violence and intimidation campaigns.

BBC also suggests that international intervention is needed "to prevent violence if a second round is held (because) violence and intimidation (have) been characteristic of past (Zimbabwe) elections." It quotes another MDC spokesman saying ZANU-PF will "use a runoff to exact revenge....it's a strategy for retribution."

Its correspondent Peter Biles reports "the ruling party remains divided....many (want) a change of leadership, and believe under Mr. Mugabe, Zimbabwe has no future." BBC hammers at this daily in a full-court press to force out Mugabe either willingly or with outside intervention, and now is the time.

A broadcaster is supposed to be neutral, fair and balanced and BBC states "Honesty and integrity (is) what (it) stands for." BBC is dedicated to "educate (and) inform, free from political interference and commercial pressure."

The US-based Society of Professional Journalists states in its Preamble that it's the "duty of the journalist (to seek) truth and provid(e) a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. (They must) strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility....Seek truth and report it....honestly, fairly, courageously."

In serving power against the public interest for 86 years, BBC fails on all counts.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM - 1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...va&aid=8566

Reporters in New York city started a fundraising project to send an independent investigation committee to Greece, and from this effort the newsmen's commission was formed. Members included Ernest Hemingway, William Polk (George Polk's brother), William Price (Polk's cousin) and Homer Brigart. This was soon however eclipsed in media coverage by the Lippman Committee, comprised mostly of Washington journalists with Walter Lippman as chairman (hence the name), and James Reston of the New York Times.

I.F. Stone’s Weekly, 25 April 1953, (Vol. 1, No. 15), p.3:

Ghost Walks in Greece

Readers of the Daily Compass may recall a series of columns I wrote last summer attacking as whitewash the belated report turned in on the George Polk murder by the newspaperman’s committee of which Walter Lippmann was chairman and for which Major General William Donovan of the OSS was chief investigator. That report took at face value the “confession” of the Greek newspaperman, Gregory Staktopolous, who said the CBS correspondent was killed by Communists on his way to interview the rebel leader, Markos. Why Communists should have killed a reporter sympathetic to their own cause and critical of the Greek government was never explained.

It would be more logical for supporters of the Greek government to kill Polk. This is the logic the government avoided by the “confession” of Staktopolous. That the government made a deal for that confession is indicated by new revelations from Greece. The Athens newspaper Apoyevmatini last week disclosed that Staktopolous, sentenced to life imprisonment for complicity in the Polk murder, is not in jail but held in the headquarters of the Salonika security police, given special treatments and even allowed to walk about the streets.

Two days later the Associated Press man in Athens filed a despatch beginning, “Athens, April 15 – Gregory Staktopolous stepped into jail last night for the first time since he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1949 as an accomplice in the slaying of George Polk…” Few papers ran the dispatch. None queried Athens for more details. What’s a little murder and a frame-up among friends?

Anyone got a contact who could obtain Stone's Compass series on Polk's assassination? My attempt to get hold of it went belly up when a disturbingly principled academic declined a brown envelope containing "9-11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA" dollars. What is the world coming to.