Tucker Carlson said on Tuesday that US spies had monitored him while he was in Russia earlier this month, and leaked to a ‘friendly’ outlet that he had met with Edward Snowden. This is despite the American journalist’s claim that he had tried to keep his meeting with the NSA whistleblower a secret.

Carlson went to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin. During his eight days in Moscow, he also met with Snowden – and US spies found out about it, he told podcaser Lex Fridman in the course of a three-hour conversation.

“I was being intensely surveilled by the US government,” Carlson told Fridman, noting that US spies had thwarted his plans to interview Putin in 2021 and that he received confirmation that he was being intensely monitored ahead of his Moscow trip. “Then, I’m over there, and of course I want to see Snowden, whom I admire.”

Snowden allegedly accepted Carlson’s invitation to have dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel, but declined the interview as well as a photo request, saying that it would be better to tell no one.

“I didn’t tell anybody,” Carlson told Fridman, however the meeting was leaked. “Semafor runs this piece – reporting information they got from the US intel agencies, leaking against me, using my money, in my name, in a supposedly free country – they run this piece saying I met with Snowden, like it was a crime or something.”

“If you have a media establishment that acts as employees of the national security state, you don’t have a free country. And that’s where we are,” Carlson added.

Carlson revealed that he did not fear getting arrested in Russia at any point, but was warned by his lawyers that the US might arrest him depending on the content of the Putin interview.

“I felt not one twinge of concern for the 8 days that I was there,” he told Fridman about being in Moscow.

Before he left for Russia, his team of attorneys counseled him to “not do this… A lot will depend on the questions you ask of Putin. If you’re seen as too nice to him you could be arrested when you come back,”Carlson quoted the lead lawyer as saying, to which he said he replied, “You’re describing a fascist country, OK?”

In 2013, Snowden revealed that the NSA was systematically engaged in mass illegal spying on American citizens. Fearing for his safety, he fled to Hong Kong with the intent to reach Ecuador, which did not have an extradition treaty with the US, but was stopped during a layover in Moscow after Washington canceled his passport. Russia ended up granting him asylum and reportedly, eventual citizenship.

One of the founders of Semafor, the outlet to which Carlson claims US spies leaked his dinner with Snowden, is Ben Smith, a former editor-in-chief of the now defunct BuzzFeed newsroom. In 2017, Smith notoriously published the ‘Steele Dossier,’ a sham document leaked by US spies to discredit incoming President Donald Trump.

In 2013, Snowden revealed that the NSA was systematically engaged in mass illegal spying on American citizens. Fearing for his safety, he fled to Hong Kong with the intent to reach Ecuador, which did not have an extradition treaty with the US, but was stopped during a layover in Moscow after Washington canceled his passport. Russia ended up granting him asylum and reportedly, eventual citizenship.

One of the founders of Semafor, the outlet to which Carlson claims US spies leaked his dinner with Snowden, is Ben Smith, a former editor-in-chief of the now defunct BuzzFeed newsroom. In 2017, Smith notoriously published the ‘Steele Dossier,’ a sham document leaked by US spies to discredit incoming President Donald Trump.

https://www.rt.com/news/593283-tucker-carlson-snowden-spying/

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HAS RUTH ANDERSON CENSORED INDEX ON CENSORSHIP?

The CEO of a leading free expression group has a history of working for the Israel lobby. Now, Index on Censorship has little to say about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

BY HAMZA ALI SHAH

Last month, the lobby group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) conducted a “solidarity mission” to Israel.

The day after announcing the visit, South Africa presented its case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accusing Israel of a genocide against the people of Gaza.

Over the next 24 hours, 112 Palestinians were murdered in Gaza, taking the death toll to over 23,400.

The LFI delegation was pictured with Israeli president Isaac Herzog, whose incendiary language was singled out by the ICJ as evidence of incitement to genocide.

But also striking was the presence in the delegation of former Labour MP and now member of the House of Lords, Baroness Ruth Anderson. She has since 2020 been the CEO of Index on Censorship, a body in Britain that campaigns for free expression worldwide.

That a group priding itself on free speech has a chief visiting Israel as it commits genocide should arouse bewilderment.

This is especially since Israel is committing a vicious attack on the truth in Gaza: At least 83 journalists have been murdered as the enclave is turned into a graveyard for journalists.

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has been raging for over four months and the territory has become the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. 

Index has published a handful of articles on Gaza. A Declassified review of its outputs indicates a downplaying of the extent of the crisis at the hands of Israel.  

One recent article covered Palestinian journalist Wael al-Dahdouh and the wider plight of journalists in Gaza. It included the harrowing statistic of the number of slain journalists. 

However, the article added the common Israeli army rebuttal that it does not deliberately target journalists. It also included the unfounded claim that many journalists murdered are militant fighters, and failed to mention that killing journalists constitutes a war crime.

Another article from November 2023, written by Index’s editor, focuses on free expression in the “Israel-Hamas conflict” and zeroed in on the atrocities. 

Victims of the Hamas attacks of 7 October, it read, were “murdered” in what the author unambiguously calls a “massacre”. By contrast, Israel’s response caused the “death” of Palestinians.

Declassified could find no mention on Index’s website of the word “genocide” referring to Gaza or coverage of South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide.

This is in contrast to its reporting on China. In 2021, for example, Index published an article following the Uyghur Tribunal in London that ruled the Chinese government is guilty of genocide.

Index has consistently thrown light on prisoners held in grim conditions in countries like Belarus, Iran and Saudi Arabia. But Declassified could find no recent mention of the oppression and mistreatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. 

This has become a major issue in the current war. An additional 6,000Palestinians from the West Bank have been detained by Israeli forces since 7 October. 

Palestinian prisoners and detainees arrested in Gaza have been subjected to systematic torture, abuse and humiliation from food and sleep depravation, to electric shocks and rape threats. Many are known to have died from enduring these conditions.

Index has posted more tweets mentioning Russia since 7 October than mentioning Israel or Gaza.

The group runs five campaigns on areas such as China, Belarus and the UK Royals but has not begun a campaign on Israel/Gaza. 

Index has shown it can be categorical in its coverage and pay attention to detail. During the height of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, in the space of just one week between March and April 2022, three separate articles were published spelling out the predicament of journalists. 

One was a first-hand recounting of a Ukrainian journalist’s treatment at the hands of Russian occupiers while another was an explicit call to end the beatings and abductions of journalists in Ukrainian territories attacked by Russia.

The third was a fierce denunciation of “mobsters in the Kremlin” and their brutal actions towards “brave truth-tellers”. These unambiguous calls stand in contrast to much more nuanced positioning concerning Israel’s brutality in Gaza.

Index has paid some attention to the culture of censorship in the post 7 October climate across Europe. But notably missing has been reference to the crackdown culture in the UK, where demonstrations calling for a ceasefire have routinely been branded as violent and antisemitic. 

An article published in November by Index covered the suppression of free speech amid an “authoritarian turn” in Germany and the attempt to stamp out pro-Palestine activism. 

It noted Germany’s condemnation of the movement to impose sanctions on Israel and questioned attempts to use accusations of antisemitism to delegitimise boycotts and nonviolent methods of economically isolating Israel. 

In Britain, however, the government is operating on the same political wavelength. Earlier this year, deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden pledged to deliver the government’s anti-sanctions bill – which is directed at supporters of sanctions on Israel – at an event at the Jewish Leadership Council. Ruth Anderson was in attendance as a speaker.

In 2022, days after Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered by an Israeli sniper, Anderson wrote an article on Index’s site about the matter. Neither Israel nor the Israeli army were mentioned.

Index’s website describes the CEO as a passionate campaigner and makes reference to her anti-racist history. Anderson’s history indeed encompasses advocacy; overwhelmingly for organisations sympathetic to Israel.

While MP for Stoke on Trent between 2015 and 2019, Anderson was a member of Labour Friends of Israel and was elected as parliamentary chair of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) in April 2019. 

JLM’s senior staff have had links to the Israeli embassy. The group recently demanded the suspension of Labour MP Kate Osamor for suggesting Israel’s brutality in Gaza amounts to a genocide. 

The post, an attempt to suppress criticism of Israel and perhaps flying in the face of the purpose of Index on Censorship, was retweeted by Anderson.

Before entering Westminster, Anderson was from 2005-07 the director of public affairs and campaigns at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). The group says it aims “to increase understanding of Israel and the Middle East in the UK”.

Formed in 2001, BICOM received significant logistical assistance from the highest level of Israel’s interior ministry in its primary years, according to sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris.

Author Hil Aked, in a new book on the Israel Lobby, notes that in 2006, BICOM had achieved unprecedented access to the BBC to brief the corporation’s staff for flagship programmes like Hardtalk and Newsnight.

A leaked email in 2011 revealed how major broadcasters like Sky News opted for a particular “narrative” on Israel after being approached by BICOM.

BICOM works behind the scenes to cultivate elite opinion on Israel. Its former head of the Israel office, Jonathan Cummings, wrote at length about the importance of using delegations of British journalists to Israel to build relationships of influence with the “elite opinion makers” in the UK.

This, he added, would help Israel “create barriers to delegitimization”.

BICOM’s first funder was property billionaire Poju Zabludowicz who inherited his wealth from his father who made a fortune manufacturing arms in Israel.

Records show that Zabludowicz’s lucrative real estate company Tamares Real Estates Investments Ltd made a donation of £5,000 in June 2015 to Ruth Anderson, just as she embarked on her political journey.

Zabludowicz is also the beneficiary of investments in the Occupied Palestinian territories, including in an illegal Israeli settlement. By 2010, as a former chairman of BICOM, he had donated over £2m to the organisation in just three years.

Ruth Anderson also previously worked at the Community Security Trust, a charity that protects British Jews from anti-semitism, in the capacity of anti-racism campaigner. 

The organisation’s co-founder, Gerald Ronson, has close links with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the group has previously been praised by MPs for its efforts in countering the sanctions movement against Israel.

Anderson’s history of working for pro-Israel organisations which help shape the discourse on Israel in a favourable way perhaps sits oddly with her current directorship of a group promoting free expression. 

The outfit’s restrained coverage of Israel’s intensifying slaughter of Palestinians should alarm all those who advocate for free speech.

Anderson, who has announced she is stepping down as Index’s CEO later this year, was made an Honorary Captain in the Royal Naval Reserve in 2022.

A 2009 document published by WikiLeaks referred to Anderson, then using her name Smeeth, as a “strictly protect” informant for the US embassy.

Previous Declassified research has shown that between 2016-21, Index received more than £600,000 from the National Endowment Democracy (NED), a “democracy promotion” organisation established in the 1980s and funded by the US Congress. 

According to the New York Times, the NED was established “to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] has done surreptitiously for decades”. 

Declassified contacted Index on Censorship and inquired about these points, but representatives did not comment.

https://www.declassifieduk.org/has-ruth-anderson-censored-index-on-censorship/

On Tuesday, a court in Moscow sentenced Oleg Orlov, co-founder and co-chair of the human rights organization Memorial, to two and a half years in prison. The 70-year-old had been charged with "repeatedly discrediting" the Russian military after writing an article criticizing Russia's invasion of Ukraine and labeling President Vladimir Putin's regime as "fascist."

Orlov's wife, Tatiana Kasatkina, was present at the verdict's announcement. The two had jointly built up the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization in the 1980s. Russian authorities have been clamping down on the entity's work for years, and in 2021, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the outright liquidation of International Memorial and the Memorial Human Rights Center, the two branches of the organization.

Despite this, the activists and campaigners involved have carried on their fight, and on Tuesday, Kasatkina confirmed that they would continue to do so. "We will live, and we hope that what is happening right now will be over soon, and that Oleg and many others are released ahead of time," she told reporters in front of the courthouse.

She also said that she believed the court had rushed the case in order to announce the verdict before the upcoming presidential elections in March.

https://www.dw.com/en/human-rights-in-russia-what-follows-oleg-orlovs-sentence/a-68409835

IT IS A SHAME... BUT SOMETIMES ONE SHOULD CONSIDER THE INFLUENCE OF ELEVATED IDEALS WHICH DO NOTHING TO SOLVE HARD CORE SITUATIONS. THE USA HAVE MADE NO BONES ABOUT DESTROYING RUSSIA AND HAVING GREAT IDEALS OF FREEDOM DO THE BIDDING OF NATO AGAINST RUSSIA... PUTIN IS NOT A FASCIST, JUST A REALIST WHO UNDERSTANDS AND PROTECTS THE SURVIVAL OF RUSSIA.

WHILE THE RUSSIANS EXPOSE THE GERMAN PLOT TO DESTROY THE CRIMEAN BRIGE, THERE IS NO DENIAL PRESENTED IN DW ON THIS SUBJECT. THE LEAD STORY IN DW IS THE BURIAL OF NAVALNY, WHO LIKE OLEG ORLOV WAS A "TRAITOR" TO RUSSIA. WE KNOW THAT NAVALNY WAS A CIA ASSET, A FULL-BLOWN WHITE SUPREMACIST — A NAZI.... NOT A GOOD LOOK, BUT THE WESTERN MEDIA WILL CARRY ON MILKING ITS OWN DISINFORMATION UNTIL UKRAINE CAPITULATES WHICH ACCORDING TO RELIABLE SOURCES WILL BE BY SEPTEMBER 2024, AFTER SUFFERING DEFEATS AFTER DEFEAT5 FROM MAY OF THAT YEAR...

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   by Jonathan Turley

We have been discussing the alarming shift in higher education in favor of censorship and speech regulations. These voices have been amplified on media platforms like MSNBC which has championed efforts to censor people and groups on social media and other forums. The most recent example is the interview of University of Michigan Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade by Rachel Maddow. In the interview, McQuade explains how the First Amendment is the “Achilles Heel” of the United States and why the public needs to embrace greater limitations on free speech.

Professor McQuade has published a book entitled Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. Despite my strong disagreements with her views on free speech, I am sure that it will be an important contribution to this debate. My forthcoming book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage, takes a diametrically opposed view on the meaning and history of free speech in America.

In the interview, McQuade recognizes the importance of free speech while emphasizing its dangers.

“Actually, Rachel, I think we’re more susceptible to it than other countries, and that’s because some of our greatest strengths can also be our Achilles Heel. So, for example, our deep commitment to free speech in our First Amendment. It is a cherished right. It’s an important right in democracy, and nobody wants to get rid of it, but it makes us vulnerable to claims [that] anything we want to do related to speech is censorship.”

Well, the question is what “we want to do related to speech.” If it involves blacklisting, throttling, deplatforming, and bans, it most certainly does raise questions of censorship. Free speech is now portrayed as an existential threat to the country as opposed to the very thing that defines us as a free people.

McQuade captures the theoretical divide over free speech, though she is clearly voicing a view that is increasingly popular among law professors. She advances views of free speech that I have discussed in prior academic writings and the new book as “functionalist.” These views allow for greater trade offs between free speech and overriding social or political priorities.

For some of us, free speech is a human right. In that sense, I am undeniably a free speech dinosaur who believes that the solution for bad speech is better speech. Rather than continue down the slippery slope of censorship under the guise of disinformation, we can allow citizens to reach their own conclusions in an open and robust debate.

The alternative is often to use transparently biased judgments over what is “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” (MDM). The government has used this rationale to coordinate censorship in what it has called the “MDM space.”

For example, within DHS, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” I testified earlier on this effort.

McQuade’s book will certainly add to the scholarship in this area. However, her view is painfully familiar for many of us in academia.

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/msnbc-legal-analyst-free-speech-could-be-americas-achilles-heel/

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Multiple Facebook users have reported being banned, or having their posts censored, after sharing an investigation by The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg into CIA and MI6 involvement in the creation of ISIS. Readers who post links to the piece on the social network find themselves frozen out of their accounts, on the apparent grounds that Facebook has classified Klarenberg as a “dangerous individual.”

“I just shared this article from @Kit Klarenberg on Facebook and the post was immediately deleted,” wrote Ricky Hale, the founder of popular independent left-wing outlet Council Estate Media.

In a Substack article published April 5, Hale wrote that “the page was hit with restrictions and I was told I had shared a post from a dangerous individual or organisation.”

Hale was only able to regain control of his Facebook page, which boasts over 44,000 fans, by removing administrative privileges from the user who shared it — which happens to be himself.

Other restrictions imposed due to sharing Klarenberg’s work have not been lifted, and may well never be. Hale says he has been blocked from changing the page’s name, inviting people to join the page, or creating new Facebook groups. “Given Facebook had already reduced my page’s visibility for another absurd violation, I’m assuming my posts are going to be invisible,” Hale lamented. “This means a Facebook page with 44,000 users has been rendered useless because of state censorship that’s been outsourced to big tech. This is not how a free society operates.”

It was not the first time that Facebook censored one of its users for posting Klarenberg’s article. Hours beforehand, another social media user revealed the piece had been removed from her Facebook timeline mere “seconds” after it was posted.

That a social media network has labeled Klarenberg a “dangerous individual” and is suppressing attempts to publicize his investigative journalism comes as little surprise. Klarenberg was previously banned from X, Elon Musk’s “free speech app,” for offending the sensibilities of Zionist users. And in Facebook’s case, the company’s Global Threat Intelligence division is staffed by former spies for the CIA, Pentagon, and NSA.

Though little information on the division can be found online, it is known to be led by Ben Nimmo, a former NATO propagandist and alumnus of Integrity Initiative — a secret British Foreign Office information warfare operation itself staffed by military intelligence veterans. Frances Haugen, the now-forgotten Facebook “whistleblower” who lambasted her employers before Congress for failing to provide enough “content moderation” towards foreign “disinformation” threats, also hailed from Global Threat Intelligence.

Other senior positions in Global Threat Intelligence are reportedly occupied by David Agranovich, ex-Pentagon analyst and intelligence director for the White House National Security Council; Nathaniel Gleicher, former Council cybersecurity chief and Justice Department senior counsel for computer crime and intellectual property; and Mike Torrey, who previously worked as an NSA and CIA cyber analyst.

Agranovich and Torrey were key authors of Facebook’s State of Influence Operations 2017-2020, a report which alleged that China, Iran and Russia sought to weaponize the social network for malign purposes. The paper omitted any mention of Western cyber warfare operations known to target social media, such as the British Army’s 77th Brigade and the Pentagon’s psychological warfare division. But recent reporting indicates those were precisely the government-backed groups most likely to target Western social media users. 

In 2022, the Department of Defense was forced to conduct what mainstream media described as a “sweeping audit” of its “clandestine psychological operations” after the Pentagon was busted running a network of fake profiles to push propaganda online about Russia, China, and Iran.

Facebook’s Global Threat Intelligence unit first detected the US military’s malign activities, but instead of penalizing them, Facebook warned the Pentagon to better conceal its psychological operations, lest they be discovered by others. In September 2022, the Washington Post reported that “officers at Facebook and Twitter contacted the Pentagon to raise concerns about the phony accounts they were having to remove, suspicious they were associated with the military.”

The outlet wrote that in the previous months, Global Threat Intelligence’s Agranovich spoke to the Pentagon’s Christopher C. Miller, then assistant director for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict, which oversees influence operations policy. Agranovich had reportedly warned his counterpart that “if Facebook could sniff them out, so could US adversaries.” A source with knowledge of the matter told the newspaper, “his point was: ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem.’”

For Klarenberg, however, Facebook would extend no such charity, or even offer an explanation for classifying an investigative journalist as a national security threat.

https://thegrayzone.com/2024/04/17/facebook-kit-klarenberg-dangerous/

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