The Web censors emerge in force By Wayne Madsen Report

 The Web censors emerge in force 

By Wayne Madsen Report

Facebook, which was partly seeded in funds from the Central Intelligence Agency's IN-Q-TEL venture capital firm as a method to collect personal information, has announced it is partnering with several "independent" fact checkers to combat the dissemination of "fake news" from the Internet on social media. This is a major step by the government, in concert with the information technology industry, in censoring information on the Web itself.

Facebook's partners in identifying "fake news" with a goal of identifying it as such and downgrading its ability to be widely re-posted represent a panoply of media operations with embedded political biases.

Facebook is partnering with the Poynter Institute of St. Petersburg, Florida, along with Factcheck.org, an operation of the Annenberg Public Policy Center that investigates political claims; Politifact, another political claim fact checker that is run by The Tampa Bay Times, owned by the Poynter Institute; the Associated Press; ABC News; and, perhaps, the worst example of a hopelessly biased fact checking operation, Snopes.com.

In this editor's new book, "The Almost Classified Guide to CIA Front Companies, Proprietaries, and Contractor," Snopes.com is identified as a notorious CIA propaganda partner. The Washington Post is also partnering with Facebook in its anti-"fake news" campaign  even though the paper, owned by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, recently listed 200 websites that it claimed were lackeys for distributing "Russian propaganda." Although a dozen or so websites listed were bona fide fake news sites, the vast majority were legitimate web-based news originators, disseminators, and aggregators. After the Post refused to identify the players at the list producer -- a website called PropOrNot.com that has links to the CIA and George Soros -- the Post issued a half-hearted retraction of the story originally written by Carl Timberg, the son of Robert Timberg, the Annapolis classmate and friend of Arizona Senator John McCain. And there are no greater phony in American politics today than McCain, the "singing canary" of Hanoi and infamous fire starter of the USS Forrestal.

The Facebook model would not be so dangerous if it were to only identify fake news sites, of which there are far too many. But its program delves into the area of acting as a self-appointed web news editorial operation that seeks to call into question any news story not approved by the Poynter Institute's partners.

The Poynter Institute runs an international fact checking network called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) that not only identifies bogus news websites but also takes it upon itself to criticize news stories for lack of sources political and "biases." Of course, the Poynter network runs counter to two journalistic traditions: news stories based on strict confidentiality -- the Drew Pearson/Jack Anderson model -- and opinion columns based on not-for-attribution interviews.



WMR has had its own bitter experience with the blatant bias and censorship tactics of the Poynter Institute. In June 2013, a group of Twitter account holders based out of the National Security Affairs department of the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island waged a Twitter and media campaign against this editor's interview by The Sunday Observer. The interview provided details on the National Security Agency's Third Party signals intelligence partners in Europe and their mutual intelligence sharing agreements.

After the interview appeared on the front page of the paper, Naval War College professor John Schindler, who claims to have worked in both the NSA's counter-intelligence and signals intelligence operations branches -- a claim highly disputed by senior NSA officials with whom WMR spoke -- was quoted in various media outlets, including BusinessInsider.com, the Poynter Institute, and others as stating this editor was "batshit crazy." Schindler was identified as a professor at the Naval War College, giving his personal attacks more gravitas than they might have otherwise warranted. Subsequently, Schindler was terminated by the college after this editor brought to its attention Schindler's "sexting" of an unsolicited photograph of his penis to a female. The Poynter Institute demonstrated a crass disregard for journalistic integrity in its "hit piece" report on this editor written by staffer John Gillen, whose normal beat included the US Central and Special Operations Commands in Tampa. For the Poynter Institute to play such a major role in Facebook's fact checking of news sites is laughable on its face.

Snopes.com waged a similar diatribe against WMR in its report on Lee Harvey Oswald's quite probable association with Rafael Cruz in New Orleans in August 1963. Snopes wrote the following: "In April 2016, the notoriously unreliable conspiratorial 'Wayne Madsen Report' (WMR) published an article (in their typical 'just asking questions' style (i.e., making wild accusations acceptable by framing them as questions rather than statements) positing a link between the father of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz and the JFK assassination." The piece was written by Snopes's co-founder David Mikkelson, who has failed to answer questions about his site's funding, merely claiming the privately-held company was originally a "mom and pop" operation.

Mikkelson and his Canadian citizen wife subsequently divorced but Snopes managed to expand its operations. This self-described small-scale operation based in Agoura Hills, California is able to maintain a staff of employees, including Kim Lacapria, formerly of Inquistr, owned by Daniel Treisman, an Israeli businessman. Although Inquistr has published propaganda and bogus news stories it did not show up on PropOrNot's list of fake news and Russian propaganda sites because Inquistr limits its fake news and propaganda to the Israeli and Zionist variety. It is more than clear what lies behind the current effort to censor the Internet and label uncomfortable news stories as false. Track Zuckerberg, David Mikkelson, George Soros, Carl Timberg, and others, and you will likely eventually end up at the front door of the fraudulent "master list keeper" of Dixie, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its founders Morris Dees and Joseph Levin.

This censorship of the web was predicted by WMR in January 2014. We reported on control of information on the Internet being the top item of discussion at the 2014 World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland: "With the impending demise of World Wide Web 'net neutrality,' which has afforded equal access for website operators to the Internet, the one percent of billionaire investors are busy positioning themselves to take over total control of news reporting on the Internet."

The future is now: planned Internet censorship previewed by U.S. visa rejections.

With more and more indications coming from the Obama administration that it is planning to limit freedom of speech and expression on the Internet -- particularly with the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, who advocates censorship and web site disruption -- a blueprint for what is to come can be seen in the government's banning of certain foreigners from entering the United States for political reasons.

In his book, "Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge," Sunstein writes: "Every day, like-minded people can and do sort themselves into echo chambers of their own design, leading to wild errors, undue confidence, and unjustified extremism." Sunstein complements the web site, the Volokh Conspiracy, which has attacked WMR's editor, as a "conservative-leaning" web site that is an example of "civility, intelligence, and over-all high quality." The Volokh Conspiracy, is, in fact, a neoconservative propaganda outlet that now enjoys a fan who also happens to be the White House "information czar." This is what Volokh parroted about this editor's reporting: "Think twice when you're the only guy in the world with an amazing insight. Or, as they say, They all laughed at Columbus. But they also all laughed at Bozo the Clown." What else can you say about an Information Czar that credits such a web site? Of course, Sunstein works for the first teleprompter elected President of the United States and its avatar, a well-spoken push button-operated human named Barack Obama.

Perhaps the bext example of what Sunstein and his friends have in store for the Internet is found by the decisions of the State Department in who they ban from receiving U.S. visas to travel to the United States and why the individuals are banned.

Perhaps the most well-known person who has been refused entry to the United States merely because of his religion is Yusuf Islam, who is better known as Cat Stevens. Stevens adopted his new name when he converted to Islam. Islam's name is on a U.S. watch lost and he has been banned from entering the United States because of his advocacy for Muslims around the world. A prominent Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss national, also saw his U.S. visa revoked after he was due to take up a professorship at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution.

However, it is not only Muslims who have been seen their U.S. visas lifted for political reasons. The politically-outspoken British rapper, M. I. A., also known as Maya Arulpragasam, a British-born Tamil whose parents were born in Sri Lanka, also ended up on a U.S. "terrorist watch list" in 2007. Her crime was that her father was a member of a Tamil pro-independence movement, the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS), that was linked by the United States to the Tamil Tigers, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that saw its members and other Tamils massacred last year by the Sri Lankan military with the assistance of the United States and Israel.

But M. I. A. committed another crime in the eyes of the United States. Her song's lyrics supported the struggles of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Tamils in Sri Lanka. In her song "Sunshowers" M.I.A. sings, "like PLO/we don't surrend-o."

The United States contended that M.I.A.'s appearance with a tiger in the above music video was an endorsement of the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. But when the U.S. government comes up with a cockamamie conspiracy theory -- it results in drastic actions being taken.

Under Sunstein and the coming Internet censorship regime, supporters of the Palestinians and Tamils will be the first to feel the heat. Arulpragasam's views of the U.S. "global war on terror" would also not find a happy home in Sunstein's world view. She has been quoted as saying: "No one was singing about a million people dying in Iraq and us [Britain and America] fucking up and Saddam (Hussein) being hanged." Ironically, Arulparagasm is married to a member of the Zionist Bronfman whiskey family of Canada, although her husband goes by the name of Ben Brewer.

2007 also saw another pop star banned from the United States. Lilly Allen, who was to have filmed a music video with rapper Kanye West, who attacked George W. Bush over his handling of the Katrina disaster, was refused entry into the United States. Allen, a British national, was hauled into an interrogation room at Los Angeles International Airport after a flight from Australia and informed her work visa was not longer valid.

In Sunstein's "brave new Internet world," if you are a Palestinian or Tamil activist, an uppity African American rapper, or a Muslim who refuses to be pigeon-holed as a terrorist, watch out because Sunstein will be watching out for you.

Freedom of the Press in the U.S. is 'Lip Service' as opposed to 'de Facto U.S. Policy'

05/26/2009 by Gabriel Voiles

Reporting that "the Obama administration has recently paid a lot of lip service to freedom of the press, particularly around the case of Iranian-American journalist Roxanna Saberi, who was released May 11 from an Iranian prison," Jeremy Scahill asks (Rebel Reports, 5/26/09) the simple question, "If Iran Freed Roxanna Saberi, Why Won't the U.S. Release Journalist Ibrahim Jassam?"

Part of the answer might lie in a media environment heeding former Col. Ralph Peters' recent "essay for a leading neocon group calling for future U.S. military attacks on media outlets and journalists" along with "censorship" and "news blackouts."

Of course, Scahill is savvy enough to point out that "what Col. Peters is advocating is not new"--"It is already a de facto U.S. policy to target journalists":

The U.S. has consistently attacked journalists and media organizations in modern wars. In the 1999 US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, General Wesley Clark, then the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, ordered an airstrike on Radio Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers, including make-up artists and technical staff, an action Amnesty International labeled a “war crime.” Richard Holbrooke, who is currently Obama’s point man on Afghanistan and Pakistan, praised that bombing at the time.

The U.S. bombed Al Jazeera in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, attacked it multiple times in the 2003 Iraq invasion, and killed Jazeera correspondent Tarek Ayoub. On April 8, 2003, a U.S. Abrams tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, home and office to more than 100 unembedded international journalists operating in Baghdad at the time. The shell smashed into the fifteenth-floor Reuters office, killing two cameramen, Reuters' Taras Protsyuk and José Couso of Spain's Telecinco....

Last week, a Spanish judge reinstated charges against three U.S. soldiers in Couso’s killing, citing new evidence, including eyewitness testimony contradicting official U.S. claims that soldiers were responding to enemy fire from the hotel. One year ago, former Army Sergeant Adrienne Kinne told Democracy Now! she saw the Palestine Hotel on a military target list and said she frequently intercepted calls from journalists staying there.

All of which makes it less than surprising that, as Scahill tells us, "the U.S. military continues to hold journalists as prisoners without charges or rights in...Iraq. Ibrahim Jassam, a cameraman and photographer for Reuters has been a U.S. prisoner in Iraq since last September despite an Iraqi court's order last year that he be freed." See the FAIR Press Release: "Is Killing Part of Pentagon Press Policy?" (4/10/03)