Transpacific Decoupling on the Table?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA-LyAAA05A&ab_channel=RTAmerica

Lesbos refugee-camp blaze leaves 13,000 without shelter

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/10/mori-s10.html

By Robert Stevens
10 September 2020

A massive blaze has largely destroyed the Moria migrant camp. Located on the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos/Lesvos, the camp was the largest within the European Union. According to social media accounts, the fire broke out some time before midnight Tuesday.

Around 13,000 men, women and children have been left without accommodation, food, and drink. The detainees held there were forced to flee for their lives as multiple fires spread. No fatalities have been reported, but people are suffering from injuries due to smoke exposure.

On Wednesday night a second fire broke out in a part of the camp not burned in the first blaze, with Associated Press reporting it destroyed "the greater part of what was left and sending thousands more streaming out of the facility."

The “Moria Reception & Identification Centre” was established by the 2015-2019 pseudo-left Syriza government. Refugees and asylum seekers are held under intolerable conditions, pending deportation.

Twenty five firefighters with 10 engines arrived after some time, and spent hours trying to extinguish the fire. The Refugee aid group Stand By Me Lesvos reported that one of many calls from camp detainees to their partner groups included one terrified person asking, “Where is the police, where is the fire brigade, where is anyone? We are burning, our tents are burning. Everything is burning. We came here to burn to death. All is on fire.”

Lesbos is located just off the Turkish coast. In 2015-16, refugees arrived there in their thousands after fleeing war zones in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. InfoMigrants estimates that 70 percent of people in Moria are from Afghanistan, but migrants from more than 70 different countries live there.

The camp is a massively overcrowded. Moria detains 13,000 refugees in a camp built for 2,800 people. There are now more children held there—4,000—than the total number it was originally designed to hold.

Video footage showed terrified detainees fleeing for their lives. Many carried what possessions they had left in carrier bags and others in supermarket trolleys. Hundreds of refugees and migrants tried to sleep in the road and adjoining fields.

It is not clear how the blaze started. Last week, the first case of COVID-19 was detected in the camp. This spread rapidly in a few days to 15 cases and was at 35 cases by the time the fire broke out. Stand By Me Lesvos wrote, “After Corona spread and no proper measures were taken, residents were not well informed [and] a kind of uprising broke out…” Under conditions where basic hygiene cannot be maintained and it was impossible to implement social distancing due to overcrowding, a devastating outbreak was only a matter of time.

Greek news agency ANA reported that the fires started after some of the 35 affected families refused to move into isolation with their families. Given the hellish conditions that exist in the camp, one can only imagine how terrible being left to “self-isolate” for weeks must be. Indeed, many forced to live in Moria were glad to see it burnt to the ground, with videos showing migrants singing “Bye, bye Moria.”

Other sources, including refugees, said that the blaze may have been started by fascist forces. BBC journalist Parham Ghobadi tweeted two images of canisters that “refugees claim were used by ‘far-right Greeks’ to set #MoriaCamp on fire.” Another tweet read, “Several refugees told me they believe ‘far-right Greeks’ have set Moria refugee camp on fire after the rumors of the coronavirus spreading throughout the overcrowded facility.” InfoMigrants reported the social media comment of one detainee: “Fascists have set fire to Moria.”

Another possible cause was a wildfire produced by strong winds fanning two separate wildfires elsewhere on the island.

The first response of the New Democracy conservative government, as residents fled in the direction of the port town of Mytilene, was to send in riot police to set up a blockade to stop them making the journey. Some migrants fled into the surrounding hillside. After the second fire Wednesday, thousands of migrants seeking to get to Mytilini were met by riot police still blocking the road and whom fired tear gas at them.

The government set up a 3.5 mile cordon around the smoldering camp. This brutal response prevented aid organisations from gaining access. The Guardian reported that Annie Petros, head coordinator of the charity Becky’s Bathhouse, said she was “blocked by police from taking injured people to hospital as she drove them away from the fire."

Petros continued: “When we saw there was a fire we drove as fast as we could with water to the camp, intending to take sick people to hospital. I can’t describe properly the scene we saw. There were streams of people, thousands of them, walking away from the camp. They were totally silent, terrified and traumatised, walking through thick smoke and the awful smell of burning plastic.

“We picked up some pregnant women who needed urgent help and a teenage boy with a broken leg. When we neared the town of Mytilene there were riot police blocking the way to stop anyone reaching the town. I begged the police, but their commander wouldn’t let us through. We called an ambulance and it refused to come to the roadblock.”

Refugees4Refugees told the Guardian it could not find 30 missing children.

The Moria inferno was a disaster waiting to happen. The camp is routinely described as “hell on earth.” In 2019, Jean Ziegler of the committee of experts advising the UN Human Rights Council described it as “the recreation of a concentration camp on European soil.”

Describing conditions he encountered on a visit to the camp in May last year, Ziegler told the Teller Report website: “People live here like animals… Here 100 people have to share a shower and a toilet. It’s often clogged, filthy, faeces lying around. There is no hot water, no schools and just two doctors—for 5,000 people!”

While there were an estimated 13,000 in the camp as the blaze began, in January this year more than 20,000 people were being held there—six, rather than four-times, its designated capacity. A junior doctor from the UK’s National Health Service, Henry de Berker, told the Financial Times at the time that there were “more than 1,000 unaccompanied minors living in the camp… Disease spreads rapidly in such miserable conditions. Diarrhoea and vomiting can have fatal consequences for the physically weak.”

Moria is the brutal symbol of the “Fortress Europe” policies enacted by the European Union to keep out migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Tens of thousands have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean over the last decade. As a result of the dirty deal signed by the Syriza government with the EU and Turkey in 2015, the thousands who managed to make it to Greece have been forced into foul internment camps, as the authorities prepare to deport them.

In 2016, Moria was set ablaze. The WSWS reported: “Around 60 percent of the camp was destroyed, including 50 large sleeping tents, three containers as well as clothing supplies. Two separate fires also broke out in the surrounding area, laying waste to nearly four acres of land containing olive trees adjacent to the camp.”

In September last year, the WSWS reported that “after months of protests and repression by riot police, two fires broke out." It continued: "One was contained but the other quickly spread, with large sections of the camp engulfed in flames.” The fire took the lives of a woman and a child. The previous month, the government stepped up its attack on migrants, with riot police brutally attacking a protest of around 50 child asylum seekers at Moria.

In March this year another fire broke out at Moria claiming the life of a six-year-old girl. The fire continued to burn for an hour due to the closeness of the containers used as living quarters. The WSWS warned that the spread of the coronavirus on Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Kos would mean Moria and other camps being quickly “transformed into death camps.”

The victims of the fire face only further misery. Instead of being provided with secure, safe and decent accommodation and treated humanely, the Greek daily Kathemerini reported that they “will be temporarily housed in a ferry boat, two navy ships and tents, Migration Minister Notis Mitarakis told a press conference on Wednesday.”

Dispatches from Latin America: Brazil, Colombia and Mexico

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z39KQ0fh_DY&ab_channel=TheIntercept

The plot against America and the world: How the US government and the media suppressed the truth about the COVID-19 pandemic

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/10/pers-s10.html



10 September 2020

On Wednesday, senior Washington Post reporter and establishment insider Bob Woodward released recordings of telephone calls with US President Donald Trump, making clear that the White House, despite its public efforts to downplay the threat of COVID-19, was fully aware in January of the massive danger posed by the deadly new disease.

The tapes establish that the Trump administration lied to the public about the threat while it deliberately implemented a policy that has led to the deaths of nearly 200,000 people.

During the critical period of January through March, when timely actions, similar to those taken in China, would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States and internationally, the White House made a cold-blooded decision to lie to the public, in an unprecedented crime.

This was a plot against the people of America and the world.

On February 7, Trump told Woodward he had just had a conversation with Chinese President Xi Xinping, who had provided the American president with a clear and blunt assessment of the dangers posed by the pandemic. “This is deadly stuff,” Trump said. “It’s also more deadly than… even your strenuous flus… this is five percent [case fatality rate] versus one percent and less than one percent.”

These words were in flagrant contradiction to the statements Trump made in public over the following weeks and months, in which he equated the pandemic with the seasonal flu, promised it would “disappear,” and claimed that cases were “going down.”

Eschewing the antiscientific demagogy of his public statements, Trump demonstrated a clear and precise understanding of the spread of the disease in his discussion with Woodward. “It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch,” Trump said, an appraisal fully in line with the current scientific consensus.

On January 28, according to Woodward's account, Trump was told by his national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, “This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency... This is going to be the roughest thing you face."

Woodward occupies a unique position in American journalism, having been associated with the exposure of the Watergate conspiracy that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Since then, Woodward has made a career of using his virtually unlimited access to the upper echelons of the state to publish insider accounts of the White House under multiple administrations. The Trump tapes were made as part of interviews conducted for the publication of Woodward’s new book on the Trump White House.

The fact that Woodward, who made his career publishing the results of the Washington Post's Watergate investigation day by day as it was occurring, withheld information that could have saved tens of thousands of lives, makes him, for all intents and purposes, an accessory to the crime committed by the White House.

If Woodward has released these tapes now, after concealing them for six months, it is because the crisis over the upcoming election has massively exacerbated divisions within the state. But in choosing to release this information, Trump’s factional opponents have implicated themselves as accomplices in a massive cover-up.

Trump and his cabinet would not have been the only ones to receive intelligence briefings on the pandemic. It is well known that high-ranking senators and members of the House of Representatives of both parties regularly receive briefings from the US intelligence agencies, and former presidents continue to receive access to intelligence information. These briefings, through the “anonymous sources” so often cited by the New York Times and Washington Post, would have become known to the editors of the leading US newspapers.

Moreover, it is inconceivable that Woodward, having in his possession tapes that would have meant life or death for tens of thousands of people, would not have discussed them with his colleagues at the Post and other major news outlets.

In other words, Trump was not the only party to this conspiracy. The tapes constitute direct evidence that the media was aware of the dangers but refused to alert the American people.

The questions fundamental to the Watergate scandal, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” have become expanded to “What did the government, Congress and the media know, and when did they know it?”

In a subsequent call on March 19, Trump explained to Woodward why he was seeking to downplay the danger of the disease. He said, “I always wanted to play it down... I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

What “panic” was Trump speaking about? He was primarily concerned with containing a stock market selloff before the bailout of Wall Street had been prepared. Furthermore, with workers in factories increasingly uneasy about the spread of the disease, he was afraid of mass working class walkouts, such as those that ultimately led to the closure of the US auto plants in March.

Instead of alerting the public to what it knew in January, the government set to work preparing for an eruption of the pandemic, not through measures to contain the disease, but through the largest bailout of major corporations in world history, which was prepared in silence, with the public unaware.

When it became clear that lockdowns were unavoidable after the markets went into freefall in February and March, the government was ready with a $6 trillion bailout, passed in record time. Then, with the bailout secured, it began the campaign to herd millions of workers into the factories and children into the schools.

The recordings of Trump’s conversations with Woodward are a striking confirmation of the Socialist Equality Party’s assessment, which explained in a statement published August 1 that the US government made a deliberate effort to suppress information about the pandemic:


Clearly, the United States government and its intelligence-gathering agencies understood by the first days of 2020—and, in all likelihood, by the second half of December—that the world stood on the very brink of a health care disaster.

Referring to the period between December and March, we wrote:


The Trump administration and congressional leaders of both capitalist parties—acting on the instructions of the corporate-financial elite—made the socially catastrophic decisions that prioritized the rescue of the banks, large corporations and powerful Wall Street investors, over preventing the spread of the pandemic and saving lives.

The statement continued:


Despite the extreme health danger posed by the spread of the pandemic, the ruling class was virtually exclusively concentrated on the economic impact of a pandemic, that is, how the disease would impact the stock market and the personal wealth of the richest one to five percent of society. The capitalist oligarchy feared, first of all, that unambiguous public acknowledgement of the danger would lead to a financial panic, causing the markets “to teeter and perhaps fall precipitously.”

If Trump’s statements had been made public earlier, tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. Medical experts, including those within the Trump administration itself, have blamed the massive resurgence of the pandemic in the United States on the merely partial implementation of lockdowns and their premature lifting. The release of these tapes earlier could have contributed to public demand for stricter lockdowns, saving countless lives.

Why, then, did Woodward wait to make the tapes public until lockdowns had been lifted in every state, workers herded into workplaces, and schools reopened?

The explanation given by Woodward himself, that he wanted to “check out” the story, cannot be taken seriously. He had tapes of the president admitting to deceiving the public. There was nothing to “check out.”

There is another answer: that Woodward wanted to make more money while allowing tens of thousands of people to die by releasing the tapes closer to the publication date of his book. But this mercenary rationalization cannot explain the cover-up. No, the timing of Woodward’s disclosures was a matter of state policy. A staple of the media establishment for decades, Woodward’s reporting relies on a web of access and influence. His revelations are discussed, vetted and planned.

With as many as 5,000 people dying each day in March, it is inconceivable that he kept the tapes a secret to himself. He would have discussed them at least with others at the Washington Post, and the revelations were likely known high up in the New York Times editorial board and among ranking members of the Democratic Party.

Why would these figures not have encouraged Woodward to publish the tapes earlier? If, as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden now claims, the Democrats had been calling for a vigorous public health response to the pandemic, would the revelations not have strengthened their hand in the fight to contain the disease?

The truth is, if the tapes were not released it is because the Democrats did not want them released. Rhetoric aside, the Democrats have pursued a response to the pandemic largely indistinguishable from that of Trump.

While Trump was actively denying the threat of the pandemic, the Democrats merely kept silent. For an entire month, between January 29 and February 29, as the pandemic was taking hold in the United States, the New York Times did not publish a single editorial on the subject. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, following a January 24 briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee, sold between $1.5 million and $6 million in stock ahead of the market crash, but did not alert the public to the threat.

Under conditions where the New York Times editors, with their “anonymous sources,” likely knew the contents of the intelligence briefings given to the White House and the Senate, as well as, in all likelihood, the existence of Woodward’s tapes, they allowed writers such as Thomas Friedman to publicly advocate for a policy of letting the pandemic run rampant on the basis of “herd immunity.”

Declaring that Americans were “tired” and “weary” of lockdowns, despite polls showing the contrary, the Post and the Times promoted far-right demonstrations, some openly displaying swastikas, as legitimate expressions of the population’s desire to end the lockdowns.

When the White House declared that it would be up to the governors to determine when states would reopen, every state in the union lifted its lockdown, with some Democratic states not even waiting for the reduction in cases mandated by the Centers for Disease Control’s reopening guidelines.

The Democrats, just like Trump, speak for a ruling class that has been totally indifferent to the loss of life caused by the pandemic, concerned exclusively about its impact on the stock portfolios of the superrich.

Is it any coincidence, then, that Woodward’s employer, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has seen his wealth nearly double over the past year, becoming the first human being with a net worth of over $200 billion?

If Woodward’s tapes have come out now, it is because of the conflict that has erupted within the ruling class over the election. But whatever the motivations of Trump’s factional opponents, the tapes incriminate them no less than Trump.

Nothing the government and major media outlets say can be believed. If they hid these tapes, they can lie about anything. The urgent question that must now be raised is: What else is being concealed from the American people? No doubt, the media and the state are now in possession of information that, if released to the public, would immediately halt the reopening of schools and workplaces.

While the Post and the Times worked to cover up the conspiracy that unfolded this year, the World Socialist Web Site sought to expose it. It is no surprise that the campaign to downplay the pandemic has occurred at the same time as the efforts to censor the WSWS have intensified.

What is slowly unraveling is a conspiracy, orchestrated at the highest levels of the state and the capitalist oligarchy, to sacrifice human lives for profit. Trump, in all of his lies and criminality, was carrying out this class policy.

Trump is complicit in the deaths of 200,000 human beings. But so too are his co-conspirators in the media and political establishment. The death toll from the pandemic is a social crime for which the entire capitalist order is responsible.




Bryan Dyne and Andre Damon

U.S. govt-linked PR firm ran fake news networks for right-wing Latin American regimes

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/06/cls-strategies-facebook-propaganda-venezuela-bolivia/

A Washington, DC-based PR firm linked to the US government and Democratic Party, CLS Strategies, ran a fake news network on Facebook and Instagram, spreading propaganda for Bolivia’s coup regime and the right-wing opposition in Venezuela and Mexico.
By Ben Norton

Amajor US PR firm located just a few blocks from the White House has been caught running an industrial grade propaganda operation on social media. The information warfare blitzkrieg relied on fake accounts and pages to spread disinformation on behalf of right-wing, US-backed governments in Latin America, while deploying covert propaganda to destabilize the leftist governments in Venezuela and Mexico.

The company behind the campaign, CLS Strategies, signed a contract to represent Bolivia’s far-right junta and provide “strategic communications counsel” in the lead-up to that country’s ostensible election. After coming to power through a US-backed military coup in November 2019, the Bolivian regime has delayed the election numerous times on specious grounds.

CLS Strategies also used its network of fake accounts and pages to push propaganda on behalf of Venezuela’s right-wing opposition and the US-backed parallel coup regime of Juan Guaidó.

Some of the CLS-run Facebook and Instagram profiles even posed as disgruntled Venezuelan soldiers, and called on members of the armed forces to rebel against their socialist government. Other pages claimed to be run by disaffected former supporters of leftist leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.

The DC-based company similarly filled social media with disinformation demonizing Mexico’s left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his party Morena, who have been under increasing attack by right-wing oligarch forces.

On Facebook, the PR firm spent a staggering $3.6 million on ads to promote this propaganda.

CLS Strategies has close links to the US government. The firm employs former government officials like Mark Feierstein, who oversaw Latin America policy for the Obama White House. Feierstein also served as coordinator of Latin America activities for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a regime-change arm that has been used as a front for covert CIA operations and spearheaded the Trump administration’s coup attempts in Venezuela.

Another CLS senior advisor, David Romley, worked as a Pentagon spokesman, press attaché to the secretary of defense, and public affairs officer for the US Marine Corps. Before moving to CLS, Romley also served as vice president for communications at the German Marshall Fund, a prominent Cold War-era think tank funded by the US government and NATO that has been integral in pushing the new cold war on Russia and China.

A co-founder of CLS, Peter Schechter, was also the founding director of the Latin America center at the major Washington think tank the Atlantic Council, which is funded by the US and UK governments and European Union and acts as a de facto organ of the NATO military alliance.

Grayzone contributor Alex Rubinstein exposed Schechter’s unsavory career as a Washington insider, revealing how CLS Strategies has worked on behalf of numerous right-wing Latin America leaders whose neoliberal policies spawned migration crises. As Rubinstein reported, Schechter opened a progressive “Resistance”-themed restaurant in downtown Washington, DC called Immigrant Food, forging partnerships with immigrant rights NGOs.

Schechter’s former clients at CLS include the Colombian ex-President Álvaro Uribe, who oversaw death squad massacres and is being investigated by his country’s supreme court for involvement in crimes against humanity, along with Mexico’s ex-President Enrique Peña Nieto, who is connected to drug cartels and major corruption scandals.

A decade before it was hired by Bolivia’s coup regime, CLS Strategies signed a contract to represent another conservative dictatorial regime, this time in Honduras, after it took power in a US government-backed military coup in 2009.

On its website, CLS boasts of having lobbied for more than a dozen foreign governments and having “managed campaigns and advised public officials on six continents.”

According to the PR firm’s own public listings, as well as Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings reviewed by The Grayzone, CLS Strategies has worked for right-wing political forces from Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Honduras, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Peru, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, and Venezuela, as well as the World Bank and large corporations.




Another CLS Strategies partner, Juan Cortiñas, boasted on the firm’s website that he has represented top right-wing leaders and major corporations in Latin America, including the Venezuelan opposition. Cortiñas previously worked as the press secretary for neoconservative Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a key figure in Florida’s anti-Cuba lobby.

Since the fake news ring was exposed, however, CLS Strategies has edited its website to scrub some of these compromising materials, removing the bios of associates like Feierstein and Cortiñas.

This controversy underscores how US PR firms, elite Washington insiders, and foreign opposition groups work in tandem to promote right-wing regimes in Latin America while astroturfing opposition to democratically elected left-wing governments.

Given the extensive links CLS has to the Democratic Party, this scheme also highlights the bipartisan consensus around regime change and support for corrupt neoliberal leaders linked to death squads and drug trafficking.

Further, the scandal shows how foreign policy apparatchiks in Washington do exactly what they accuse Russia of doing: meddle in foreign elections to try to install their preferred candidates in power.
Facebook deletes CLS Strategies fake news ring

The Grayzone has reported on social media corporations’ US government-backed censorship of independent media outlets and voices critical of US foreign policy. Virtually all of Facebook’s purges of alleged fake accounts have targeted foreign governments and firms in other countries. The CLS Strategies fake news ring is apparently the first time Facebook has ever taken down a US-based operation.

Facebook published a press release on September 1 acknowledging that it had removed a network of 55 fake accounts and 42 pages, along with 36 Instagram profiles, “for violating our policy against​​ foreign interference​, which is​​ coordinated inauthentic behavior​ on behalf of a foreign entity.”

An accompanying report (PDF) released by Facebook acknowledged that these fake accounts portrayed themselves “as independent news entities, civic organizations and political fan Pages,” while some “posed as locals in countries they targeted” and “impersonated political parties.”

The social media giant said the network “posted content in support of the political opposition in Venezuela and the interim government in Bolivia, and criticism of Morena, a political party in Mexico.” It identified the network as being connected to the PR firm CLS Strategies.

Facebook shared the information about this fake news ring with Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, which analyzed the materials and published a report on September 4 (PDF), showing how CLS Strategies created 17 Facebook pages to promote the Venezuelan opposition, along with 11 for the Bolivian coup regime.

A total of 509,000 unique accounts followed one or more of these propaganda pages on Facebook. Some pages were huge, with as many as 163,000 followers, while others had very few subscribers.

The Bolivia pages spread Spanish-language propaganda promoting coup leader Jeanine Áñez, a right-wing extremist from a fringe party that got just 4 percent of the vote in the November election but who was recognized by the United States as the country’s supposed interim president.

The Stanford report noted that the “Venezuela-focused assets supported and promoted Venezuelan opposition leaders but changed in tone in 2020, reflecting factional divides in the opposition and a turn away from opposition president Juan Guaidó.”

Most of these propaganda pages were run out of the United States, although some operatives in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru were involved.

In response to Facebook removing its propaganda network, CLS Strategies published the following statement on its website:


We take very seriously the issues raised by Facebook and others regarding CLS’ past advertising in Latin America. We are conducting an internal investigation aided by the law firm Latham and Watkins to examine these issues. This will also determine steps necessary to ensure future work of CLS meets the highest standards of transparency and advertising platforms, which is what clients expect from us. While this investigation is ongoing, the head of our Latin American practice will be on administrative leave. Importantly, our past client work in Latin America, including opposition to oppressive regimes, was not conducted on behalf of foreign entities – the work was funded and directed by clients inside each country. This makes CLS’s work very different from the foreign influence activities reported by Facebook, and any characterization of CLS’ work in the countries at issue as “foreign” is wrong.
US infowarriors pose as Venezuelan soldiers and call for rebellion

The majority of the Facebook pages in this CLS Strategies-led fake news ring published boilerplate conservative propaganda, with names like “Undone with Socialism” and “Die Oppression – Free Venezuela.”

But some of the accounts were more sophisticated disinformation operations, targeting disaffected leftists and even falsely posing as Venezuelan soldiers.




One CLS-run page, titled “Chavista FAN,” posed as a member of the Venezuelan military who had supported late socialist President Hugo Chávez but lost faith in current President Nicolás Maduro.

This was echoed by another Facebook page, “Liberatory Soldiers,” which falsely claimed to consist of members of the armed forces seeking to oust Maduro.

The “Chavista FAN” page included a profile photo of an anonymous soldier proudly identifying as a supporter of Venezuela’s leftist Chavista movement. FAN is a play of words using the English word fan, which is common in Spanish, while also referencing Venezuela’s military, the Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana, or FANB (but by removing the B, which references the left-wing nationalist Bolivarian movement popularized by Chávez).

In one particularly insidious post disclosed by Facebook, the CLS Strategies-run account clearly claims to be operated by members of the Venezuelan armed forces. While making no mention of the suffocating US sanctions and embargo that have devastated Venezuela’s health sector and economy and prevented the government from buying medical equipment and medicine, the Chavista FAN page wrote, “After years of looting, the health sector is in shambles. Are we in the FANB (Venezuelan military) going to continue protecting the lie at the expense of the public?”

The use of “vamos” in the post (“are we going to”) expressly includes the publisher in the collective we, as a putative member of the Venezuelan armed forces.



Chavista FAN was targeted at patriotic leftist Venezuelans, but simultaneously spread disinformation on behalf of US-recognized coup leader Juan Guaidó.

Another post released in the report showed that the page pressured Venezuelan soldiers to rise up against their government, by reassuring them that Guaidó had offered “amnesty.” The post also implored soldiers to stop blocking the entrance of supposed “humanitarian aid” that Washington was using as a weapon in its coup attempt.



A similar Facebook page overseen by the DC-based PR firm was devoted specifically to supporting Venezuela’s US government-funded far-right opposition leader María Corina Machado, a close ally of neoconservative Senator Marco Rubio who has openly, repeatedly called for the US military to invade her country.
DC PR firm spreads right-wing propaganda by posing as disgruntled leftists

CLS Strategies’ Bolivia propaganda was similar to its disinformation campaign against Venezuela. The firm created Facebook pages promoting the coup leader Jeanine Áñez with titles like “Everyone with Áñez.”

The PR firm also set up a page called “Camacho Lovers Santa Cruz,” devoted to the far-right goon squad leader, Luis Fernando Camacho, a businessman from Bolivia’s wealthiest city who started his political career in a neo-fascist Christian paramilitary group founded by former Nazi collaborators.

Another page targeted Bolivian women specifically. With the name “Free Bolivian Women,” this Facebook profile posted propaganda attempting to link elected former President Evo Morales and his allies to organized crime, a common yet baseless talking point of the right-wing opposition.






Some of the CLS Strategies propaganda relied on more devious techniques. A Facebook page the company oversaw was called “MAS for Bolivia,” and sought to drive a wedge in between Bolivians who had previously voted for the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party and the former President Evo Morales, who was overthrown in the 2019 coup.

On Instagram, the CLS disinformation campaign was similarly duplicitous. In addition to running parallel accounts with some of the same names as the Facebook pages, CLS created profiles posing as disenchanted supporters of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro.

One Instagram account was titled “Maduro Style,” and included as its bio, “Maduro, motherland, and death.” Another Instagram profile was named “A True Madurista,” or a true supporter of Maduro. (“Madurista” is however not a term used by actual leftists in Venezuela; it is mostly an insult used by the opposition to attack President Maduro and his supporters.)

An even more dishonest Instagram account overseen by the US PR firm was called “VTV Journalists.” This page posed as former insiders from Venezuela’s state broadcaster VTV, falsely claiming to be an “account of journalists fired from VTV in a humiliating way, but with good contacts inside.”




These pages show how Washington-based CLS infowarriors posed as Venezuelan critical Chavistas and disgruntled Bolivian leftists to attract progressives who had supported Chávez, Maduro, and Morales, but to mislead them and warp their views by exposing them to opposition disinformation.

Conservatives already supported these right-wing opposition forces in Venezuela and Bolivia, so the PR firm was clearly seeking to mislead and propagandize left-wing sympathizers.
CLS Strategies signs PR contract with Bolivia’s coup regime

After overthrowing Bolivia’s democratically elected President Evo Morales in a US-backed military coup on November 10, 2019, the new junta immediately sought out public relations flacks in Washington help whitewash its image.

Almost exactly a month later, on December 11, 2019, CLS Strategies registered under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as a lobbyist for the Bolivian coup regime.

The firm signed a 90-day contract, at a neat $90,000, agreeing to “provide strategic communications counsel,” which included “creating and distributing communications materials, interfacing with the media, and providing communications services as directed by the Plurinational State of Bolivia.”

This contract did not include CLS Strategies’ work on behalf of the Venezuelan opposition. It is not clear where the firm got the $3.6 million it spent on Facebook ads.





As part of its contract with the Bolivian coup regime, CLS Strategies also helped coordinate meetings between top US government officials and the Bolivian junta’s far-right minister of government, Arturo Murillo, according to another FARA document.

Murillo is an extremist who pledged to “hunt” left-wing leaders from Evo Morales’ MAS party like “animals,” and even went so far as to falsely claim that indigenous protesters massacred by the coup regime had actually shot themselves and then blamed it on the junta.

When he visited Washington in December 2019, CLS Strategies organized in-person meetings between Murillo and Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rick Scott, along with staffers from the National Security Council, State Department, USAID, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and House Foreign Affairs Committee.







CLS also successfully scheduled meetings between the extremist Bolivian minister and Luis Almagro, the hardline right-wing leader of the Organization of American States (OAS), which played a key role in the coup, as well as with the head of the OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.




The PR firm then helped plan an event with Murillo at the corporate lobby group the Council of the Americas / Americas Society.

CLS Strategies also coordinated interviews with Murillo for CNN en Español and the major Spanish news agency EFE.

On behalf of the coup regime, CLS likewise contacted the offices of Senator Tim Kaine and House Representatives Eliot Engel, Albio Sires, Mario Diaz-Balart, and Francis Rooney, along with the the prominent DC think tank the Inter-American Dialogue, which hosted an event with Bolivian fascist coup leader Luis Fernando Camacho.



The agreement that CLS Strategies signed with the Bolivian was personally signed by partner Brian Berry, who boasts of having worked for an array of large corporate clients.

At the same time, CLS Strategies Managing Director William Moore also registered with FARA to represent the Bolivian coup regime.

FARA requires registrants to disclose if they have made any political contributions in the past 60 days. Moore revealed that he had donated to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign exactly one week before. (This was months before the start of the Democratic presidential primaries.)
William Moore was identified in the Stanford Internet Observatory report as one of the CLS employees who operated the fake news campaign on Facebook.

CLS Strategies removed Moore’s bio from its website, apparently in response to the revelation of its involvement in the Facebook fake news scandal. Moore also took down his LinkedIn profile.

But a cached version of Moore’s CLS page is available, indicating that it was only recently scrubbed. There, Moore boasts that “he applies his professional experience in Latin America to serve private and public sector clients across the region and in the practice areas of public affairs, crisis communications, and political strategy.”

Moore’s bio adds, “Prior to joining CLS, William cut his teeth at a strategic communications and public affairs agency in Bogota, through which he worked with a government ministry.” He also represented numerous multinational corporations, helping them as they “expanded operations in Colombia.”






When CLS Strategies Managing Director William Moore and partner Brian Berry registered to lobby on behalf of the Bolivian coup regime, they were joined by another colleague: Juan Cortiñas Garcia.

Cortiñas and Moore reportedly led CLS Strategies’ work for the Bolivian junta.

As with Moore’s profile, Cortiñas’ bio was removed from the CLS Strategies website, as the firm has apparently tried to scrub its involvement in the scandal. Coriñas also took down his LinkedIn profile, which he had linked to in his CLS bio.

But in its report on the CLS fake news ring, Stanford University linked to an archived version of Juan Cortiñas’ professional profile. In this bio, he boasts of having “worked with some of the leading political leaders in Latin America such as former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Argentine Congressman Sergio Massa and the Venezuelan opposition, helping with political communications, campaign strategy and developing digital-based campaigns.”

Cortiñas, who also served as the press secretary for hard-line Florida Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, added that he has “counseled some of the largest companies in Latin America,” and boasted of “helping a Fortune 500 company overcome a reputational crisis that spread across the front pages of newspapers in Mexico.”






FARA registration files reviewed by The Grayzone show that Juan Cortiñas has registered to work on behalf of numerous foreign governments, including Aruba, Bolivia, the right-wing administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico, and the coup regime in Honduras.
CLS Strategies signs PR contract with Honduras’ coup regime

Ten years before the United States backed a right-wing military coup in Bolivia, Washington did the same in the Central American nation of Honduras.

On June 28, 2009, the Honduran military overthrew the country’s democratically elected left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya, and physically removed him from the country.

Zelaya told The Grayzone in Honduras, in an interview on the 10th anniversary of the coup, that the US government had threatened him because of his close political and economic relations with socialist President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

In the wake of the putsch, the new unelected right-wing regime in Honduras searched for publicists in DC. It found a loyal ally in a firm called Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates, which would go on to rebrand as CLS Strategies in 2014.

In September 2009, Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates filed FARA paperwork acknowledging that it had signed a four-month contract for the Honduran coup regime, at the cost of $292,000, not including tens of thousands more in additional expenses.






At the time, the senior vice president of Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates was Juan Cortiñas Garcia, who would go on to represent the Bolivian coup regime a decade later.

Cortiñas said in his FARA registration that his job was to “provide public relations counsel and services to the government of Honduras in their efforts to communicate with policy markers or opinion leaders, their staff, the news media and other related third parties.”

In the years following the coup, Honduras became the murder capital of the planet, with some of the highest levels of inequality of any country. The violence and widespread corruption fueled a massive refugee crisis on the southern US border.

The subsequent dictatorial leader of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, or “JOH,” is intimately linked to the drug trade; his brother Tony Hernández was convicted of trafficking nearly 200,000 kilograms (440,000 pounds) of cocaine and machine guns.

A US district court even stated that infamous Mexican drug lord El Chapo Guzmán gave JOH a $1 million bribe to help him rig Honduras’ 2013 elections.
CLS Strategies signs PR contract with corrupt Colombian President Uribe

The Honduran coup regime is by no means the only connection between CLS Strategies and corrupt, drug-linked Latin American leaders. The shadowy PR firm has also worked with a notorious demagogue who may have the dubious honor of being the most corrupt and violent president in modern Colombian history.

On its website, CLS boasts of having represented both the government of Colombia and the presidential campaign of far-right former leader Álvaro Uribe. Uribe is infamous for working closely with drug cartels and death squads.

In August, Colombia’s Supreme Court put Uribe under house arrest, accusing him of bribery and officially investigating his involvement in paramilitary massacres of human rights activists, which it emphasized are crimes against humanity.
The US government has long known that Uribe is deeply involved with Colombian drug cartels and far-right paramilitary groups. Declassified cables from the 1990s show that the US State Department was well aware of his criminal ties, but Washington still strongly supported his rise to power.

A ranch owned by Uribe and his family members was used as the base of a death squad. But this has not stopped the Trump administration from pressuring the Colombian justice system to release Uribe and end its investigation into his crimes.
CLS Strategies signs PR contract with corrupt Mexican President Peña Nieto

In addition to representing the drug-linked Honduran coup regime and death squad aficionado Álvaro Uribe, Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates also worked for the transition team of Mexico’s notoriously corrupt President Enrique Peña Nieto.

Peña Nieto allegedly won the presidential election on July 1, 2012. Just five days later, on July 6, he signed a contract with Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates.

The PR firm agreed, for a monthly fee of $50,000, to “provide communications counsel and assistance to the transition team including dissemination of news/announcements from the transition team.”

Once again, CLS consultant Juan Cortiñas Garcia registered with FARA to represent Peña Nieto, pledging to work on “Public relations, communications and media relations related to election/presidential transition” and “Potential distribution of materials or information to U.S. media, policymakers or third parties.”

CLS Strategies’ involvement with Peña Nieto during this transition period is especially controversial, because he was credibly accused of rigging the 2012 election. It appears the firm was hired to try to deal with these very serious, substantiated accusations.

Then-presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who came in second place (and now serves as the president of Mexico), immediately cast doubt on the 2012 election results. López Obrador gathered evidence showing how Peña Nieto’s neoliberal party PRI bribed voters, buying huge sums of votes.

In 2016, these accusations were confirmed by a prominent Colombian hacker named Andrés Sepúlveda. Sepúlveda, who is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for spying on Colombian officials, told Bloomberg that he was given a budget of $600,000 to assemble a team of hackers to rig the 2012 Mexican presidential election. Bloomberg reported that he and his fellow hackers “stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory.”






The corruption scandals involving Enrique Peña Nieto grow larger by the year.

In 2019, it was reported that Peña Nieto had accepted a $100 million bribe from the drug kingpin El Chapo, according to a witness at the drug trafficker’s trial.

Then in August 2020, the former head of Mexico’s state oil company, Pemex, revealed how the Peña Nieto administration had overseen a massive bribery scheme to push through the government’s neoliberal economic policies.

Peña Nieto had campaigned on a promise of “energy reform” — that is to say, privatization of Mexico’s oil industry, which had been controlled by the state practically since the revolution. To push through these unpopular neoliberal policies, Peña Nieto took millions of dollars of bribes from the Brazilian corporation Odebrecht, which were rewarded with lucrative government contracts.

Peña Nieto then apparently used that dirty money to buy political support inside Mexico. Leaked videos show that the Peña Nieto administration handed out cash in transparent plastic bags to get the votes needed to pass the privatization policies.

CLS Strategies’ work for this cartoonishly corrupt Mexican president was particularly noteworthy because, according to Facebook, the firm went on to create fake accounts to spread propaganda against Mexico’s current President López Obrador, or AMLO, a left-wing nationalist.

The Grayzone has reported on the escalating campaign by right-wing oligarchs to overthrow AMLO, and the opposition’s links to the United States.
CLS Strategies’ deep ties to the US government

CLS Strategies boasts on its website that it has a “team of veteran political operatives, former journalists and corporate communications experts” who are employed as “strategists, counselors and problem solvers.” Among those veteran political operatives are some prominent former US government officials.

A senior advisor to CLS is Mark Feierstein, a longtime Democratic Party operative who has spent decades overseeing regime-change policies in Latin America.






Feierstein played a key role in the Obama administration’s foreign policy team as the president’s top advisor on Latin America, and served as senior director for Western hemisphere affairs on the National Security Council.

While working in the Obama administration, Feierstein helped oversee a 2012 soft coup against elected left-wing President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, as first reported by Spanish researcher Julián Macías Tovar.




In his CLS Strategies professional bio, Mark Feierstein boasted that he “also oversaw the United States Agency for International Development’s programming in the Americas as assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, a Senate-confirmed position, and later took on a global portfolio as USAID’s deputy administrator for two years.”

USAID is a regime-change arm of the US government, and has been used to support coup attempts against leftist governments in Latin America.

Feierstein’s CLS profile also trumpeted that he “was a principal strategist for winning national campaigns in Austria, Bolivia, El Salvador, and Honduras, and designed communications strategies for major multinational companies, including Boeing, BP and Monsanto.”




Feierstein previously served in the Bill Clinton administration, and advised the US ambassador to the OAS. He also worked at another US government regime-change entity, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his CLS bio, Feierstein boasted that he spent his time at the NDI helping the right-wing Nicaraguan opposition challenge the Sandinista government.

Feierstein is also a close associate and friend of US regime-change operative Roger Noriega, a neoconservative Washington insider who crafted Latin America policy in the George W. Bush administration’s State Department and Ronald Reagan’s USAID, where Noriega oversaw support for far-right Contra death squads in Nicaragua.




Mark Feierstein’s political background was included in a bio he had on the CLS Strategies website. But the PR firm removed Feierstein’s page, apparently in response to the backlash over its fake news ring. Feierstein’s significant role in CLS drew the attention of the Bolivian media.

Another senior advisor for the influential firm is David Romley, who previously filled senior positions in the Department of Defense.

In his official CLS bio, Romley boasts:


“David served 20 years in the United States Marine Corps as a public affairs officer where he was a press attaché to the Secretary of Defense and a Pentagon spokesman. While there, he developed the department’s response to interagency communication efforts following the capture of Saddam Hussein and during operation Phantom Fury, the battle for Fallajuh, Iraq. He was senior Marine spokesman during combat operations in Afghanistan for General Jim Mattis and Task Force-58, and in Iraq he authored the combined Marine Corps and British Royal Commando communications plan to integrate more than 340 news media representatives into combat operations. As Director of Community Relations for the United States Marine Corps he established its trademark and license office and created the Corps’ signature public outreach and community relations campaign, Marine Week.”





After leaving the US military, Romley went on to serve as vice president for communications at the Washington, DC-based German Marshall Fund, a hawkish think tank created during the first cold war to turn up the heat on the former Soviet Union. Flush with funding from the US and German governments, NATO, European Union, and Western weapons corporations, the German Marshall Fund has in the Trump era become a major home for neoconservative operatives.

The German Marshall Fund sponsors a neo-McCarthyite organization called the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which has worked to fuel the new cold war on Russia and China. Its slogan is, “Putin knocked. We answered.” And the outfit devotes an increasing amount of resources to attacking independent Western journalists who report critically on US foreign policy.

After leaving the German Marshall Fund, CLS senior advisor David Romley found cushy positions at other bellicose DC think tanks, including the neoconservative Hudson Institute and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), which was closely linked to the Obama administration and was used to fill his State Department and Pentagon with experienced hawks.

But Feierstein and Romely are by no means the only powerful figures involved with CLS Strategies. The PR firm is also deeply tied to the Washington juggernaut the Atlantic Council, NATO’s de facto think tank.

This is ironic, given that Facebook — which took down the CLS fake news ring on its platform — is itself a major financial sponsor of the Atlantic Council. Other donors to the think tank include the governments of the United States, Britain, and the United Arab Emirates, NATO, and the European Union, along with corporate arms manufacturers and fossil fuel companies.

Before rebranding as CLS Strategies in 2014, the PR firm was called Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates. The S in CLS comes from its co-founder Peter Schechter.

Schechter is one of the most influential operatives in Washington, DC working on Latin America related issues, and has extensive experience representing powerful right-wing heads of state.

In 2013, Schechter was the founding director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, which has pushed a hawkish line against the leftist governments in the region, advancing the interests of right-wing regimes and pushing neoliberal economic policies.






In 2017, Schechter left the Atlantic Council to found Altamar, a political communications consulting firm that has been hired by Colombia’s former right-wing President Juan Manuel Santos and Peru’s former neoliberal President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who was forced to resign during impeachment proceedings over major corruption charges.

As The Grayzone contributor Alexander Rubinstein reported, Schechter went on to co-found a DC restaurant in 2019, called Immigrant Food. Located blocks from the White House, Immigrant Food sought to capitalize on liberal opposition to President Donald Trump and his xenophobic rhetoric.
CLS Strategies and neoconservative Democratic Party operatives

Given CLS Strategies’ extensive work with right-wing Latin American leaders, it might seem as though the influential PR firm would be affiliated with the Republican Party, a traditional bastion of antipathy toward socialist governments across the Global South. But in reality it emerged from the heart of the Democratic Party.

Like Mark Feierstein and Peter Schechter, fellow CLS Strategies co-founder Robert “Bob” Chlopak has deep ties to the Democratic Party. Before creating the PR firm in the 1990s, Chlopak served as the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the deputy director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where he boasts on his CLS profile that “he recruited candidates, mobilized grassroots support and raised campaign funds for tight races in helping to elect a Democratic majority.”






A review of individual contributions by CLS Strategies employees filed with the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) shows that the majority of candidates supported are mainstream Democrats.

Joe Biden is particularly popular among CLS Strategies staff. Co-founder Robert Chlopak donated $1,000 to Biden in March 2020, while fellow co-founder Peter Schechter donated the maximum $2,800 to Biden in April.


Schechter has poured tens of thousands of dollars into supporting the campaigns of right-wing Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Kirsten Gillibrand.

Chlopak, too, has donated many thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates over the years. He is a Democratic Party stalwart.

While lobbying for right-wing leaders in Bolivia, Honduras, and Mexico, CLS Latin America specialist Juan Cortiñas has donated to both Democrats and Cuban-American Republicans like Marco Rubio and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

If Joe Biden wins the 2020 presidential election, CLS senior advisor Mark Feierstein is likely to play a major role in the Democratic administration’s Latin America policy.




As one organ of the blob of Beltway think tanks and contractors that prop up and profit from the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, CLS Strategies is hardly unique in its willingness to lobby for right-wing Latin American regimes, or in its zeal to destroy their leftist competitors.

Washington, DC is a base for propaganda schemes like the kind that CLS ran. But it is rare that they are exposed to the public in such a clear and comprehensive fashion.

The scandal only further illustrates the extent to which Washington sets the standard for the online disinformation campaigns it accuses its own enemies of deploying.

IN NAVALNY POISONING, RUSH TO JUDGMENT THREATENS NEW RUSSIA-NATO CRISIS

AARON MATÉ

SEPTEMBER 6, 2020



https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/06/in-navalny-poisoning-rush-to-judgment-threatens-new-russia-nato-crisis/
Veteran Russia correspondent Fred Weir on the Navalny poisoning and the Western media’s dysfunctional coverage of allegations against Moscow.



Claims that Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny has been poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok are threatening a new standoff between Russia and NATO states, with calls for punitive measures against Moscow, including cancelling the Nordstream 2 German-Russia pipeline.

Navalny’s opposition activism is “marginal in Russian politics — it’s not currently a threat to the Kremlin,” says Fred Weir, a veteran Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. “Navalny is little more than a nuisance [to the Kremlin]. And I can’t believe that Putin would rocket him to the top of the world political agenda through a botched attempt to assassinate him, or even an effective one. It just does not make sense to me.”

Weir also discusses the flaws of Russia coverage in Western media, including the recent case where Russians were accused of staging a fake left-wing website to deceive U.S. audiences.

Guest: Fred Weir, veteran Moscow correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.





TRANSCRIPT

AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback, I’m Aaron Maté.

Joining me from Moscow is Fred Weir, veteran correspondent covering Russia for The Christian Science Monitor. Fred, welcome to Pushback.

FRED WEIR: Pleasure to be here.

AARON MATÉ: The poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the German government says that they found Novichok in his system. Now a lot of pressure on the Russian government to come up with an explanation, [and] to investigate. What are your thoughts on what we know so far?

FRED WEIR: Well, we don’t know very much. I mean, I think people should understand that Russia is a big, sprawling country. It’s got many, many intersecting elites which Putin has managed fairly effectively over the past 20 years, but he doesn’t control everything, And so, when you have a character like Navalny, who is part of the extra parliamentary opposition, he’s kind of like, say, the Communist Party would be in the United States. Or something like that. He’s definitely on the margins. But Russia, being the type of opaque and certainly rigid, centralized state that it is, the authorities consider him to be a threat. And he’s a fairly talented politician. He has got a lot of enemies, I mean, within the Russian elite, within Russia. What happened to him is scary and horrifying, but it’s kind of hard to see it having been ordered by Putin.

First of all, I’m pretty sure that Russian secret services—and I’m posing this as a question, not as a polemic—but Russian secret services, I think, I’m guessing, know how to kill efficiently and without creating a really loud, scandalous trail leading to themselves. And the use of anything by the name “Novichok” does plant a flag that says, “Russian secret services,” “Kremlin.”

And the fact is that we’ve had a string of poisonings over the past, you know, 15 years or so. Scary, mysterious and disturbing poisonings. But for the most part—and, again, I’m not making light of this or, you know, trying to minimize it—but for the most part the victims have survived. That again doesn’t suggest the ruthless agents of the Kremlin eliminating their political opponents. You had the case of Alexander Litvinenko in London, who was infamously poisoned with polonium, a radioactive agent, and he died. But since then you have Vladimir Kara-Murza, a veteran critic of the Kremlin who’s been poisoned twice and survived both—and returned to his former dissident activities. You have one of the founders of Pussy Riot, Pyotr Verzilov, who was apparently poisoned two years ago and medevacked out to Germany to the same hospital that Navalny is in now. He survived and has returned to Russia, and is still in his, you know, involved in all his activities. And now you have the case of the Skripals in Salisbury. And now you have this Navalny incident, and you just … I mean, it just raises a lot of questions.

They’re simple narratives, and everybody is jumping into line and saying, “See? The Kremlin. Novichok.” And it’s really hard to address that if you are, like, a correspondent in Russia and your job is to try to figure out exactly what’s happening in this complicated place where so much is opaque to you. It’s hard not to, you know, jump into your combat gear and get with the narrative. But, in a sense, Putin does own it. This is his country. He’s the president. And, in my opinion, he’s not doing enough to investigate these cases. But, on the other hand, it really doesn’t make sense or compute that he would be ordering these poisonings.

First of all, they’re, for the most part, unsuccessful, as I said. And secondly, they do him more harm personally. They are more of a danger and a humiliation to Putin, in, like, Navalny in his present state is really an embarrassment to Russia and to Putin. And much more so than Navalny walking around, getting with his regular daily activities as he was when this happened. So, it’s a mystery to me, and I really wish there were answers. And I’m sure that some of them could be provided by the Russian government and security services if they were more forthcoming.

AARON MATÉ: Let me ask you, Fred, the way that Navalny is described in US media as a Russian opposition leader, is that how he’s viewed inside of Russia? Because I’ve heard Russians say that he’s actually more of an anti- … and a very effective anti-corruption activist.

FRED WEIR: Well, he’s an anti-Kremlin activist. He is not a liberal or a Democrat. People seem to project that upon him, but he is nothing like that. But he is a very effective opposition politician.

His following in Russia is not that large, but it is enthusiastic and loyal, and his anti-corruption activities are one of the ways in which he does express his opposition very effectively. He does these Youtube videos; perhaps you’ve seen some in which he lampoons and lambastes the corruption of high officials. And it’s not that hard to do in Russia. We have a regime here where the oligarchy is intertwined within officialdom, and what Navalny can do quite effectively is show how supposed civil servants are living far beyond their declared means. And, of course, the Russian population hates that, and so it’s one of the ways he gets at Putin and at the Russian elite writ larger. They get shown up for the hypocrites and corrupt bastards that they are. And so, that’s one thing he does effectively.

Another thing he’s been doing is pushing this tactical voting thing, and I know that requires some explanation to Westerners who don’t think that any kind of voting takes place in Russia. But there is a systemic opposition. It includes things like the Communist Party, the Fair Russia Party, which is sort of social democratic, the so-called Liberal Democratic Party which is ultra-nationalist. But they are real parties, and they have real critiques of the Kremlin. They’re not looking to overthrow the system, but they are looking to get a bigger share of the pie politically.

And so the elections are sort of real to that extent, that those … that spectrum of parties takes place, and Navalny has been going around getting … encouraging people to vote against the United Russia Party, which is the pro-Kremlin party, by voting for anybody else who looks strong. A communist, a nationalist; anybody but United Russia. And that proved to be very effective in Moscow last year, last September. And he was doing that in Siberia. And so that may very well have felt like a threat to the United Russia Party, which is sort of like a trade union of officials and big businessmen. And he may have, you know, attracted enemies that way.

So, but it’s not … it’s marginal in Russian politics. It’s not currently a threat to the Kremlin. Navalny is little more than a nuisance, and I can’t believe that Putin would rocket him to the top of the world political agenda through a botched attempt to assassinate him or even an effective one. It just does not make sense to me. But I haven’t got a coherent alternative explanation for it.

AARON MATÉ: You mentioned earlier how the reasons why this might actually hurt Putin. One of them now is you have the German opposition party … parties inside the German opposition who are calling on Angela Merkel to cancel this proposed Russia-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Can you talk about what an important project that is for Putin, and what this might mean if the poisoning of Navalny ends up canceling that project?

FRED WEIR: Yeah, well, you have … you know how the media and the elite in the United States are given to conspiracy theories, rather a lot lately? And in Russia the conspiracy theory du jour is that the Navalny poisoning was kind of staged by Western interests, precisely to promote the sabotaging of Nord Stream 2. Nord Stream 2 … and there’s this southern one, TurkStream, that goes to Southern Europe via Turkey, are the big effort by Gazprom, Russia’s giant natural gas monopoly, to circumvent Ukraine and Poland and countries that have been, from Russian establishment point of view, troublesome over the past couple of decades, and to deliver the gas directly. Nord Stream 2 is the second half of one that’s already been completed, Nord Stream 1, which has been delivering gas for about six or seven years now to Germany. Nord Stream 2 will double the volume. And so, it’s a huge thing. It’s almost finished. And it involves not just Russia’s Gazprom but several huge European mega corporations. They’re all involved, and they have a huge stake in it.

So, the United States, which doesn’t have much economic stake in relations with Russia at all, has been pushing sanctions not just against Russia and Gazprom but against Western companies, European companies that are involved with building Nord Stream 2. And they’ve, I think, I mean, it’s coming down to the wire. The pipeline is almost finished. Last fall the latest round of US Congress sanctions forced the European company that was building it—they had a special, you know, pipeline-laying ship—they had to withdraw that from the project. But the Russians have a replacement, which seems to be immune to sanctions, ready to go.

So, it is a tense … a really, really tense race to see whether the Russians can finish it or not. And so, the Russian conspiracy theory about Navalny, it makes that kind of superficial sense that many conspiracy theories do. It’s who would, if they ask, who would benefit from this? And obviously this real spike in tensions between Germany and Russia, and a lot of pressure now for Germany to cancel Nord Stream 2, would, you know, you can connect those thoughts. But that’s the level at which this discussion is taking place, that’s for sure.

AARON MATÉ: Well, it’s interesting to consider that in light of the dominant American conspiracy theory of the last four years, which is that Vladimir Putin controls Donald Trump. And that has meant, I think, in the US media, largely ignoring the case of the Nord Stream 2, where it’s Donald Trump and his administration that are leading the charge to cancel the Nord Stream 2, and are even trying to impose sanctions on Europe over it in a bid to undermine it. But that has been largely ignored, or one of the many stories largely ignored, because I think it undermines the dominant conspiracy theory that so many people in the media and political class here have latched onto.

And on this front, I want to ask you: you are a veteran correspondent in Russia. You come from the US or Canada? I don’t remember.

FRED WEIR: I’m Canadian.

AARON MATÉ: You’re Canadian. So, what is it like for you as a Westerner living inside of Russia, knowing it very well and looking at just for the last four years, the way Russia and Vladimir Putin have been discussed in the West as this evil genius who can install a president, get people to protest against each other in the streets, can basically, you know, do anything he wants, according to the narrative that we get?

FRED WEIR: Yeah, I should tell you that most Russians laugh their heads off when this idea is explained to them, that Putin is manipulating US politics. Because he, I mean, he’s popular in Russia in the sense that people see no alternative to him. And the past 20 years, it has to be said, have not been bad years in Russia, compared to the rest of Russian history; they’ve been rather good years, and people value stability. But they don’t particularly love Putin. And they certainly don’t worship him as a guy who can, you know, control stuff. He can’t. I mean, it’s visible that he can’t even fix who is going to be governor at Khabarovsk this summer. And so, that notion of the all-powerful Putin really does excite a lot of derision among Russians. And I don’t know, myself. I mean, I have no better idea what Russian secret services get up to than you know what the CIA is doing on any given day, or any average Russian or American knows that stuff.

But it is a staple of Soviet and Russian political culture that authorities always blame foreigners when things go wrong. They’re always in there, they still do it. Not to the extent that the Soviet officialdom did, but they always introduce the foreign hand and the secret foreign manipulations that are going on, and they always have their security chiefs standing behind them nodding solemnly, “Yes, yes, we know this is happening.” And it’s my experience that Russians are completely immune to that. They … it just rolls off their backs like water off a duck because they’ve just been exposed to so much of explanations about things whenever there are protests in the street, or Chernobyl happens, or anything like that. It’s always the foreign hand that is invoked. So, Russians tend to ignore that. Maybe you Americans have just been getting a big dose of it for the first time. Because I myself am amazed at how seriously so many Americans seem to take the idea that Putin can choose an American president by, you know, posting fake ads on Facebook. Like, it just … it seems, I mean, to me, absurd. And Russians just don’t get it at all.

But you know, I just … as a foreign journalist in Russia, this is what you’re asking me. So, I’m regarded as an American journalist because I work for The Christian Science Monitor. I traveled around Russia. I find people are extremely hospitable and friendly. They laugh at the idea. I can remember being on TV in Voronezh about a year ago when the State Duma, the parliament, was trying … was talking about debating … declaring all American journalists to be foreign agents, because the United States had just declared RT to be a foreign agent in, you know, in violation … forced to register under FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act]. And the moderator of the program I was on was just laughing his head off at this. He’s saying, “How does it feel to be a foreign agent?” and laughing.

So, it’s quite a different atmosphere for me. I just don’t have any of that trouble with ordinary Russians, and I don’t really have much, you know, contact with officialdom anyway. But I don’t get interfered with. And all I can say is that I would really hate to be a Russian journalist in the United States right now, with the atmosphere that one, you know, senses about people having contacts with Russians and the contamination that Russians bring. It reminds me of the Soviet Union. But here in Russia at least—and you can ask other journalists—but I feel totally comfortable here. I have not had problems in years. It’s been like 17 years since I was even detained by the security police for any reason. And even then, it was not a big deal. It’s a brief encounter. So, I’m just surprised at how things go and how much the United States seems to be adopting things that I regard as features of Soviet political culture.

AARON MATÉ: Well, I think propaganda aimed at domestic US audiences is a very long-standing thing. Aim to sow fear of other countries, blame them for our problems and justify increased militarism towards them, which I think is very much a dominant factor in the case of US propaganda against Russia. And it’s just amazing how successful it’s been, despite the fact that even if we accepted everything Russia is accused of here in the US as being correct, so it’s stealing some emails and putting out some silly memes on social media, that even if we accept that all that is true, that that is still presented to us as this seismic threat that is literally compared by US politicians to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

FRED WEIR: Yeah, I think one of the things about that, if you take this latest, I guess, retread of this Russiagate thing, where Facebook has banned a supposedly Russian news site, and the reason I personally got involved in it because Facebook censored a post of mine about it, and I got quite upset about this.

AARON MATÉ: Just to explain this quickly, Fred. So, this is a website called PeaceData. And a firm called Graphika, which works closely with NATO-tied groups, NATO-funded groups, came out and said that this website, PeaceData, was posing as a progressive website, [but] really was run by people who are associated with the Internet Research Agency, which is this troll farm that was indicted for putting up some memes during the 2016 US presidential election.

FRED WEIR: Yes. And I had never heard of this PeaceData website before. Perhaps it’s a real thing, and perhaps Yevgeny Prigozhin, the guy who funded the Internet Research Agency, is doing that. But if you go to that website, which is what I was trying to encourage my Facebook friends to do, just go have a look at the content on it, and then try to describe what you think is the threat. Because it’s basically opinion and it was … and it’s basically mostly written by American journalists who are of a leftist orientation, and they’re commenting on … and it’s rather a wide spectrum of comment on American politics. Now, I really don’t know why Prigozhin or Russians would be doing that. But you’ve got RT, you’ve got Sputnik, you’ve got various Russian media outreach things. Propaganda, if you like. They do do that. There’s just no question about it. But what are we afraid of?

Just go and look at it. Go, you know, access RT. They have an American version; they have a British version. Look at their content, and please, somebody, get back to me and tell me what is it about it that scares you? I mean, I grew up in the Cold War. I grew up in Canada. But Canada in those days was a very self-confident society. You could step into a communist bookstore, buy a Soviet propaganda pamphlet, and nobody would say anything about that. It was perfectly obvi … I went to university. We had all kinds of different groups flogging their different pamphlets in the main lobby every day.

[Now,] you cannot have any kind of argument. It seems like all that’s closing down, and instead of having this open marketplace of ideas where we’re all perfectly confident that we’re okay and we can … the average citizen can make up their own mind, sort their way through different opinions, we’re frightened [now] that they might hear something from Russia. It’s really quite bizarre, and it is in some ways the opposite of the Cold War times when it was the Soviet authorities who were terrified of, you know, foreign broadcast organizations, foreign books getting in and reaching average Soviet citizens. But today, the main Russian state news agency, RIA Novosti, actually has a very popular website. It’s called inoSMI, which every day translates … does good full translations of media articles from the Western press and publishes them. It’s one of the most popular web news sites in Russia. So, I don’t know. There’s so many ironies, so many levels of irony, and I guess there is an information war going on. But it seems like the Russian government, for all of its deficiencies, trusts their own citizens more to, like, to view various kinds of content these days than US authorities do.

AARON MATÉ: Let me ask you finally about Navalny. There’s got to be some way for an independent testing here. Have there been any calls inside Russia for his lab test to go to some neutral scientific body? Because you had the hospital in Russia that tested him that did not find Novichok. And then he goes to Germany; there is Novichok there. Have there been any calls for, somehow, his samples to be taken to some kind of neutral body, for there to be a test done there?

FRED WEIR: I don’t know if there are any neutral bodies. But what I thought at the time of the Skripal affair in Britain was that a lot of answers might be, like, forced into the open. If the British had shared their data with the Russians, that there’d been some kind of, you know, dialogue that was at least semi-open, it simply would have forced the two sides to get off their closed narratives and, at least, just invent something new. It would have been good. And it would be good here, too, if you could get Russian doctors from Tomsk there to meet with their German counterparts and share their data in some form that would become semi-open.

Because otherwise what we’re getting—and we’ve seen it already several times, this is being recycled—but you get entrenched narratives. People believe a certain chain of events. It doesn’t matter how flimsy and fact-free that is. It is impossible to penetrate. And on one side, it’s Putin is the dictator who is murdering his opponents, he’s using the most advanced deadly nerve agents and his ruthless agents are killing people, and they’re just lying about it. And on the other side, and I know this about Russians, they increasingly think that Western media is lying. And, I mean, even liberal Russians who used to be pretty pro-Western, people look at things that are being written and shake their heads and think, no, that does not make sense to us. And increasingly Russians are getting their backs up and seeing it as anti-Russian propaganda; things are being made up in order to slander us. And there is no daylight between those two positions. You just can’t reconcile them, and without some kind of dialogue taking place, they’re just gonna get harder and harder and it’s gonna get worse and worse. But I see no hope on either side, frankly, that you could bridge these two narratives.

AARON MATÉ: Why do you see no hope?

FRED WEIR: Why? Well, I mean, you see how things are going, and I can say that the Russian side, which is the side I cover, is quite intransigent. They could do, like, for instance, they could announce an investigation into this Navalny affair. They could do much more, even. I mean, their position is unless the Germans provide us with proof of poisoning, then we don’t have any grounds to start a criminal investigation. And that, you know, you could say that that’s reasonable, but if they were to go an extra mile, like, try to reach out with information, maybe more about these family of chemicals in its history that are called Novichok, maybe if they were to make some more efforts with the Russian media to go and look at things, talk.

I don’t know, they could do more. But it would be on the basis of goodwill, on the basis of believing that if they did this, that Westerners would listen to them. And I don’t think that we’re at that place anymore. We were 15 years ago. There was an awful lot of goodwill in Russia toward the West, and 20 years ago polls showed that most Russians were actually very pro-American. And now the polls … those polls are upside down. Most Russians are very suspicious and hostile toward the United States, and it’s because of the way they have experienced these events in the past couple of decades. And I think the same is true in the West, that attitudes toward Russia have hardened. Nobody thinks that you should do anything based on goodwill toward Russia. In fact, they need to be punished harder. I think that’s a general view, certainly in the political classes. So, no, I can’t see hope.

AARON MATÉ: Well, it’s an ominous place to leave it, but we’ll have to leave it there for now. And I look forward to having you back on, Fred, to discuss.

FRED WEIR: Sure. Happy to do it.

AARON MATÉ: Fred Weir, Russia correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, speaking to us from Moscow. Thanks very much.

Remembering activist Kevin Zeese

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7JBUWsnQwM