Hey you guys, Scott here.
It's fundraising time again at the Libertarian Institute.
And I say again very loosely because we haven't even held a fund drive since the summer of 2019.
And the reason for that is because you guys were so generous in the great book and institute fundraiser of summer 19 that I felt terrible coming back to you again until the book was finished.
But now the book is finished, and the Institute is out of money.
And I got to be able to pay my guys and pay my vendors and keep this thing going.
So I need help from you.
It's myself, the legendary Sheldon Richman, the firebrand Pete Quinonez, the brilliant Kyle Anzalone, who also works for antiwar.com.
And of course, we got Keith Knight, Tommy Salmons, Patrick McFarlane, and all your great podcast hosts there, plus all the best writers in the libertarian movement.
And very proud about the six books that we've published so far.
Three of mine, two of Sheldon's and one posthumous book of the great William Norman Grigg.
And we've got more great book projects coming up this year.
We're going to publish one by the great Brad Hoff about Syria, and Richard Booth, the best journalist in America on the Oklahoma City bombing, is writing a book all about it for the Libertarian Institute as well.
And not only that, but now that enough already is done, we're going to try to make part of this fun drive an effort to raise money to buy extra copies of wholesale books so that we can send these to, I don't know, the few best congressmen and their staff, the best people in media, all the middle-ranked newspapers.
And you know, a stash, I like to send five or ten books to all the best peace groups so they have them for all their people and whatever.
Of course the advantage of publishing these books at the Libertarian Institute is we get to do them however we want, but the disadvantage is we don't have a big marketing team and a big budget.
And that's where you guys come in.
We need your help to promote this book in a very grassroots way from the ground up, and we need your support so that we can buy wholesale copies to send out to the people who need to get their eyes on it.
So check out Libertarian Institute dot org slash donate.
We've got all kinds of great kickbacks for you there for your donors.
We've got lifetime subscriptions to Listen and Think Audio.
We've got copper, Ron Paul coins, and all kinds of great stuff there.
So check it all out at Libertarian Institute dot org slash donate, and thank you all very much.
Okay guys, on the line, I've got Max Blumenthal, and of course he runs the Grey Zone Project, greyzone.com, and he wrote Goliath about Israel and the 51 Day War about the Gaza Massacre, and speaking of which, he co-produced this movie with Dan Cohen called Killing Gaza.
That's at killinggaza.com.
You really got to see it.
I really mean that.
Jake, it's not very long.
I think it costs three bucks.
It's totally worth your time and effort to see, and we're about to talk about that a little bit here in a second.
And then, of course, he wrote The Management of Savagery, the great book about the war on terrorism as well, and man, he's got news.
Where's my goddang Blumenthal section of tabs here in my pile of tabs?
Check this one out, guys.
Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK foreign office funded programs to weaken Russia.
Complete documents revealed.
This is blockbuster stuff here, and there's more than that, too.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Max?
Pretty good.
Good to be back on the show.
Good.
Good to have you here.
And by the way, I knew this was coming, and it happened today for the first time that my book, my new book, Enough Already, was favorably compared to yours, The Management of Savagery, and I took that as high praise, and I do think they're a lot alike.
I hope you don't blame me.
It's an honor.
I guess it means I got to pay closer attention to yours to see what I should aspire to do.
Yeah.
Your book's a hell of a thing, man.
It's really great.
Well, I listen to your interviews on the regular, and you're one of the most informed people out there.
I haven't had a chance to complete a Scott Horton book, but I haven't had a chance to complete many books these days.
It's just really hard to read and keep up with all the editing and writing I have to do.
Believe me, I know it.
I feel exactly the same way.
But I'll tell you what I do.
I'm still working my way through the Afghanistan book.
I think I got to go back and check my emails, but I think I have your address there somewhere.
I'll send you a new one here.
I've owed a lot of books to a lot of donors, so that's first, but now they're going out to friends.
I guess this weekend is going to be the big project, so I'll try to get that taken care of.
I did send one to Aaron already.
But anyways, that's Aaron Maté, the great partner over there at thegrayzone.com.
Definitely.
Did I just say grayzone?
It's thegrayzone.com, everybody.
Yeah, you can call it grayzone, the grayzone, whatever.
It was originally the Gray Zone Project because it was just a little kind of ...
It was contingent.
It started at Alternet, right?
Yeah.
It started at Alternet, just a little section there, and now it's not a project.
It's like a fact on the ground.
It's like we just negotiated under cover of the peace process to establish a new fact on the ground, and now it's there, and it's tormenting a lot of people.
A lot of people are mad at Aaron Maté this week over Navalny.
A lot of people are mad at me over these documents.
A lot of people are mad at Ben Norton over exposing this phony Ecuadorian opposition figure.
And you and Gareth over the Uyghurs.
Yeah, then we got that.
The China Watcher crowd's upset with us, and then Ania Parampil has gotten the US ambassador, virtual ambassador to Venezuela's panties in a bunch, so I think we're doing pretty well right now.
So we're just a gray zone.
We're no longer a project.
Hell yeah, man.
Facts on the ground.
I like that.
Good stuff.
And let's start with a little bit of Israel-Palestine stuff here before we do this gigantic Russia story.
Sure.
There was a tweet that you tweeted that said that you testified to the ICC.
Is that right?
Regarding the information that you and Dan Cohen documented in your documentary, Killing Gaza?
Well, I wish, and if there were any contact between us and them, I would keep it secret because it would taint their investigation because we're blacklisted and blackballed in the US.
Well, I misread something along those lines.
What did it say?
What I said was that I think that our film Killing Gaza, which you mentioned in the beginning or in the intro, should be a guide or a roadmap because we documented so many obvious war crimes committed by Israel in its 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip, and they're just there on camera.
It was really the first time that Israel carried out one of these carpet bombing style assaults and close quarters urban warfare invasions of Gaza where there was international media on the ground, where local media really had their, not only their camera crews, but widely available cell phone cameras and people who were just in the rubble were filming with their own cameras.
The evidence is really clear and we pulled it together along with testimony that really isn't featured anywhere else from the bereaved family members of people who were just slaughtered by Israeli forces in targeted fashion.
So I think it's a great roadmap.
And I did testify at the Russell Tribunal, which is a sort of people's tribunal that took place in Brussels and there was a subsequent event at the EU Parliament.
This was kind of an attempt at kick-starting the kind of investigation that the ICC is now launching.
Well, you know what, I don't like all this world government stuff, but the ICC looking at the Israelis, I don't know, man, I kind of think somebody's got to.
It's sort of like in the United States of America, it's supposed to be our job to make sure that torturers and war criminals inside our government face courtrooms and prisons.
And it should be the responsibility of the Israelis to hold their government to account.
And yet they shirk that responsibility.
And so somebody's got to do it, right?
Well, I prefer a multilateral organization doing it or investigating crimes than the United States playing the role of world government or world cop.
I mean, at least here you have judges from around the world, including Fatou Bensouda, who represent historically colonized people and are more aligned with the majority of the world than someone who is a complete tool of the United States.
And you can see what the U.S. is doing with these multilateral organizations, like the OPCW, for example, along with the UK and other, what you would call allies, which are actually just sort of U.S. proxies or vassals where they're just corrupting the organizations, tainting them and trying to get control of them.
The ICC is one of the few organizations that's still able to demonstrate some independence.
And in the past I used to joke, you know, the ICC is the ACC.
It's just the African criminal court, because all they would do is take these tin pot African warlords and put them on trial.
It was the easiest thing to do.
They had no one to defend them, no allies, and they would never go after the gigantic war criminals that were just staring us in the face that we were funding with our tax dollars.
So I don't know, I don't actually have great hope for this investigation.
I think there are so many ways that the U.S. and Israel can contaminate it, stall, prevent it from taking place.
But at the same time, there's nothing they can do to stop it because they're not signatories to the Rome Statute.
Yeah, it'll be very interesting to see how this plays out.
And I noted that part of it was, there's a guy, you may be more familiar with him than I am, Remy Brulin, I think is his name.
He seems to be a real expert on Mossad history and this kind of stuff.
But he was saying that, you know, the ICC mandate from the beginning was, well, we're going to look at Israel and we're going to look at Palestinian armed groups, possibly if only to preempt the argument that, boo-hoo, you're singling out poor Israel here.
And then they said, no, that's still unfair because if you investigate both, the truth is going to make Israel look worse.
And so in effect, you're singling out Israel anyway by having this thing at all, which seems pretty unfair since it just happens to be that those are the facts on the ground, as you might say, as you showed.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, it was clearly a one-sided slaughter with respect to the targeting of civilians.
And we point out in the documentary, and I also write extensively in my book, The 51 Day War, which is about this assault on Gaza.
And it was a war though.
I mean, there was resistance by the armed factions in the Gaza Strip, but when they were able to penetrate Israeli territory, and this is the first time this has happened since the 1950s, armed faction, the Al-Qassam Brigades, tunneled into Israeli territory under the border wall and got into an Israeli military base and killed several Israeli soldiers in close combat.
That Israeli military base was connected to a kibbutz or a Jewish community called Nahal Az.
And if those fighters had wanted to get in there and start slaughtering civilians, they could have easily done that.
They had just broken through the one line of defense, completely surprised them.
But instead, they just went back into their tunnel.
They took a Tavor rifle from the Israeli soldiers and decided that, well, it wasn't a decision on the fly.
They were commanded to not attack civilians and all the Israeli casualties, nearly all of them, except for a stray mortar or two, were soldiers who were killed fighting inside the Gaza Strip, who were killed by resistance factions.
So definitely, when they probe both sides, they might have to slap Hamas on the wrist for firing rockets.
But their rockets have actually acquired new targeting capacity.
There was one point where a rocket reached Tel Aviv, and it was targeting an area called Hakiriya.
That's the base of the Mossad and the Israeli military.
It's basically like the Pentagon.
And what they chose to do in Israel is put their Pentagon in the middle of a civilian commercial neighborhood that's densely populated in North Tel Aviv.
I would go hang out there just because ...
Not at the office building, but nearby just to have meetings.
Actually, there's a cafe there called ...
It's sponsored or owned by the Zionist Organization of America, which is now this right wing organization controlled by Sheldon Adelson.
But it used to be kind of mainstream.
Anyway, they own this cafe there, and I'd go in there.
It's so cheap, and it's pretty good Mediterranean food.
And there'd just be officers of the Shabak, of the Shin Bet, just sitting in there.
And military officers among the people.
And they always say, the Israelis always say, the Palestinians, they put their military installations among their people, and they use the people as human shields.
And here you see, these are people who are combatants, who are honeycombed deliberately among the people.
So a rocket targeted Hakiriya, and Netanyahu was currently in a meeting there, and he actually had to flee into a bomb shelter at that point.
So even the rockets were targeted at military areas.
But in Israel, it's hard to differentiate between military and civilian.
And then you also just have like half the population walking around in army uniforms with their weapons.
So all of this will come out if the investigation takes place, but it's going to be years.
And the US and Israel are already doing everything they can to sabotage it.
I mean, remember, Mike Pompeo applied sanctions to Bensouda and the ICC jurists over Afghanistan, and the Biden administration hasn't lifted those sanctions.
If anything, it's going to use them as leverage against this investigation.
You know, I think it's worthy of note about this particular massacre that we're discussing here before we move on, that I think this was the first time, I'm not sure exactly what had happened on the slaughter before that, but I think 2014 was the one where Gaza under attack, the hashtag on Twitter, and then I guess also on Facebook, really took off.
And it was the first time that you had a substantial portion of the American population actually able to see the so called Israel-Palestine conflict from the other side's point of view that TV would never show.
And then it was the first time, therefore, that the polls showed that the people of America thought that the Palestinians were the victims and the Israelis were the aggressors in the thing.
Which is pretty much unimaginable for someone who grew up in the era of Rather, Jennings and Brokaw, and, you know, the years since then.
It really was, and I guess, I don't know what would happen right now if there was a full scale attack on Gaza in that sense, if they would just ban the hashtag and just shadow ban everyone and just crush the thing.
But at that time, Twitter was really used to break through the wall of the information blackout there.
And then it was just obvious, all the, you know, Hasbara spin in the world couldn't do a thing about the truth that was coming through to, you know, everybody's desk.
Yeah, and this was a real turning point in the mainstreaming of Palestine solidarity for sure.
And the sheer viciousness and sadism of Israel was undeniable.
It really broke liberal Zionism as a framework for understanding the crisis of Israel, Palestine, especially- What does that mean?
What does liberal Zionism mean?
Yeah, and what does it mean that it broke it?
Well, it broke it, the idea that Israel, you know, ultimately wants peace and it's just defending itself and that there can be a two state solution and that Israel can be negotiated with, that it is just besieged by terrorists.
And once that ends and there's negotiations, then they're willing to withdraw the settlements and so on.
I mean, it's this fantastical idea of the possibility of a liberal democratic Israel that exists beside a Palestinian state that was just broken when you saw Israel targeting family homes again and again and again, just shooting people on camera who were not even armed and just reducing entire cities to rubble, bombing apartment buildings.
That was the, at the end of the 51 day war, what Israel did was they started targeting these large apartment blocks in the middle of Gaza city, which were home to middle class people who were mostly affiliated with the Palestinian Authority, who were the partners for peace supposedly.
And they targeted them as a way of telling them, we can get you, we will get you next if you go along with this Hamas campaign of resistance.
It was just pretty obvious Israel has what we always knew to be an exterminationist or eliminationist mentality towards the Palestinians and that it didn't actually, there was no intention to negotiate a peace with them, was to impose a peace on them by completely destroying them as a national question, by answering the national question with force.
So I mean, there was nothing liberal Zionists could say.
They wanted to come out and support Israel.
They always support Israel when it's involved in a conflict in the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli liberal Zionists, Amos Oz, David Grossman, these characters, they always supported Israel and at this point there was nothing they could say.
It was just too brutal.
And that same went for J Street and the American liberal Zionist organizations.
So it ended the argument and then Netanyahu's popularity grew in Israel.
We saw right wing mobs assault these scattered protests of Israeli Jews who would come out and protest the war and hold up photographs of the victims who were killed in their homes.
I witnessed it in Tel Aviv and Netanyahu subsequently reelected.
The Likud party controls Israel.
What is left of Israel for a liberal Zionist to believe in?
Absolutely nothing.
I think the tragedy, I mean, and this is kind of maybe not exactly on topic, but for me the tragedy was that all of these giant mobilizations in the US against the assault on Gaza, I mean, you saw a hundred thousand people marching in Chicago.
I spoke to a rally in San Francisco before I headed to Gaza to cover the war and there were about six or 7,000 people in downtown San Francisco and all of that energy seemed to be shattered by 2016 by the Syria regime change crowd, really split the movement.
And I haven't seen it recover again.
To me it hasn't recovered since.
And I've witnessed a kind of deflation of energy on campus where between 2014 and 2015 there were so many divestment drives on campuses.
It just doesn't seem to be happening the way it used to.
And I really think the deliberate deployment of Syria as a kind of counterinsurgency weapon to weaken Palestine solidarity in the West has been really successful for the pro-Israel crowd.
And they're also using identity politics and the anti-Semitism canard all they can, but they don't have the liberal Zionist argument that Israel wants peace or that Israel's a victim of suicide bombing anymore.
So they're using much more cynical tactics.
Yeah.
Hey, y'all check it out.
The Libertarian Institute, that's me and my friends, have published three great books this year.
First is No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg.
He was the best one of us.
Now he's gone, but this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom.
I know you'll love it.
Then there's Coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richman.
It's a collection of 40 important essays he's written over the years about the truth behind the Israel-Palestine conflict.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
And last but not least is The Great Ron Paul, The Scott Horton Show Interviews, 2004-2019.of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state, and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
Find them all at libertarianinstitute.org slash books.
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And thanks.
Alright, well, listen, there's so much to this next story, we've got to change gears to it now.
But I like this segue.
It's begging to be brought up first here.
These materials may have been obtained through hacking.
How about, you know, hey white kids, don't listen to this rap album pasted right on the front cover of Straight Outta Compton or Easy Does It.
So you must have got 10 million extra clicks based on their sort of quarter-assed censoring of this very powerful story.
So talk about the Twitter saga first here.
And sorry non-Twitter people, but this is kind of important, you know?
Yeah, no, you're not far off with the 10 million clicks.
I mean, we might get a million clicks on this story.
This is our most heavily trafficked story ever at the Gray Zone.
It nearly crashed our site.
And it's because, like you said, there are these, you know, William Bennett, C. Dolores Tucker labeling campaign that Twitter imposed on us where they created their own unique label for the story, which drove interest and traffic to it the same way that explicit lyrics labels on Too Short albums and the Ghetto Boys albums drove white kids from the suburbs to listen to them.
Why do you think I know every word of those albums to this day?
Exactly.
I mean, it's like, it's the Sammy's dot of the, you know, the angst-ridden suburban kid.
And so basically Twitter put the Sammy's dot label on my story, the label read, these materials may have been obtained through hacking.
And all you had to do was take the link of the story and paste it on Twitter and you could put a photo of anything you wanted next to the link.
So people would put like a photo of Alvin and the Chipmunks having sex or like Spongebob smoking weed.
And you know, the, and then the below the photo would read these materials may have been obtained through hacking.
So it became the ultimate meme for like gamers and mischievous zoomers.
And by the end of the day, uh, like basically 10 or 12 hours after the label first appeared, the piece was getting shared like five to 10 times per minute because of these memes.
And the next day it was out of control.
And the media that covers social media and Silicon Valley was forced to report on it, which meant that mainstream sites were linking to my story, driving further traffic.
And that wound up really damaging the brand of the media organizations that I exposed in the story because people were inadvertently drawn to the content and to the fact that someone had just simply told the truth about mainstream media and was being soft censored for it.
So all of these ideologically unmoored youth were seeing that.
And if they knew about what was happening to Julian Assange, I think they'd be even more shocked.
It was a, it was just a fantastic moment.
One of the high points of my journalistic career, I'd say.
Yeah.
That's a lot of fun.
Seriously, too.
Not just the whole, hey kids, don't listen to this Ice-T album thing, but also these materials are apparently primary source materials straight out of the vaults of some intelligence agency.
So whatever you do, don't look at those.
In other words, this has to be right.
We're vouching for Max Blumenthal's sources here, man.
Yep.
Yep.
They basically confirm the authenticity of the documents.
And it really speaks to the mentality of the people in the national security state who are managing social media now from behind the scenes and how out of touch they are.
The gulf between them and the general Twitter user public is enormous.
They seem to think that if they use that word hacking, that it would turn people away from the story, that they'd be afraid.
And what they even did was to apply a sort of second step for people who wanted to retweet or like the story, where you had to basically sign off on a form that you still agreed to retweet the story, even though it was hacked material.
And it was basically like the way that that form that appeared on people's screens was interpreted by the common rebellious Twitter user is, do you want to give the finger to Panzer Daddy?
And they were like, yes, yes, this is so satisfying.
But what a lot of people found was that when they liked the story, I mean, I got hundreds of messages about this, that their browser crashed, particularly on cell phones.
And that was unusual.
Well, so you know what?
I mean, if you really got that many messages about that, you need to partner up with a serious ass computer genius to get to the bottom of that.
Is that a thing that they can really do?
Sabotage somebody's like button to crash everybody's browser?
Apparently so.
People recorded their screens showing their browser crashing.
I retweeted some of them, but many people recorded their screens and showed it to me and tweeted it at me.
I saw a couple of those.
That's really something.
Man.
Yeah.
I don't know if it was deliberate or it was because there was too much code.
I don't know anything about tech, so.
Yeah.
Correlation and causation can be tricky, but that's sure interesting, I'll tell you that.
All right.
So now let's talk about this headline.
As you said, they drove all this traffic and bet they wish they hadn't because the first word in the thing is Reuters and the rest of it gets worse from there about their corruption and cooperation with other media organizations and Bellingcat, which you can define for us if you'd like, with the government of Great Britain, their foreign office in a program to quote unquote weaken Russia, according to these primary sources that the Twitter gods have vouched for for us here.
This is the kind of story that, as I was telling the people earlier today, that if you put the shoe on the other foot for a minute, Rachel Maddow would have a stroke over this.
This is the accusations about Russiagate pale in comparison to what you have reported here, Max, I think.
Right.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
First of all, there are hundreds of documents.
There were hundreds of files that are primary documents in this batch of leaks.
And there have been previous batches from the same self-styled hacking collective, which calls itself Anonymous, like so many other hacking collectives.
They put these out publicly on their own site, which the URL isn't well known.
And it wasn't made exclusive to me.
I don't have any relationship with whoever got these documents.
But I'm just a journalist who is familiar with the material, familiar with the story.
We've been reporting on previous leaks from this same collective since early 2019.
And even going to the source, we had a reporter, Mohamed El-Mazi, go to the actual location of the Integrity Initiative, which was exposed through previous leaks in the heart of London at Two Temple Place, which is an extremely posh location.
And it was hiding behind a fake think tank called the Institute for Statecraft, which had a fake dummy location in Fife, Scotland, which turned out to be an abandoned paper mill.
Mohamed found their real offices.
And this was a troll farm funded by the British Foreign Office to basically organize clusters of journalists and politicians to, in their own words, according to one of their own documents, which was kind of a blueprint for their agenda, make British and European influencers and elites see the big picture about Russia being a major national security threat, thereby creating this new Cold War atmosphere that would ramp up military budgets and intelligence spending and so on.
This think tank, this troll farm was run by military intelligence officers.
And as I said, it was covert, just like everything else we've been learning from these leaks.
And it's been funded by British taxpayers.
So we've been covering this for years.
And so I understood these materials pretty well, and I was able to synthesize them and put something together in a matter of days.
But there were hundreds of documents.
There's still more to know about this.
And basically what this batch of documents relates to is a program that the British Foreign Office has been organizing since about 2017 to, as you said, to weaken Russia, but it's really to weaken Russian media and to weaken the hold of Russian state media and narratives that support the Russian national interest on the Russian speaking population in Russia's near abroad, in the Baltic, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.
And there are also documents that refer to programs to infiltrate Russia itself, established networks of YouTube influencers and Russian journalists who support the overall goal of regime change, of toppling Vladimir Putin and replacing him with someone like Navalny or someone like Boris Yeltsin, who are basically weak in the Russian state.
That's really what this is about.
So I focused on the role of two of the largest media organizations in the world in participating in this program, which is being run through a shadowy program within the British Foreign Office called the Counter Disinformation and Media Development Program.
And those two media organizations are Reuters and the BBC.
Reuters, you know, kind of can pass without a lot of attention if you're mostly absorbing media online or through social media.
You live in Austin, Texas?
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, most of the...
So what is the paper there?
The Statesman?
Yeah.
So the Statesman, I mean, it's drawing a lot of its coverage.
It doesn't have a foreign bureau like the New York Times or Washington Post do.
So it's drawing a lot of its coverage from Reuters abroad, Reuters AFP.
So Reuters actually has a huge influence on the way that Americans view the world.
And the BBC is also one of the most respected media organizations in the US, although you and I know that it's clearly a propaganda arm of Western empire.
And they're going nuts on China right now, just pumping out the Cold War propaganda.
These organizations have charitable arms.
Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable nonprofit arm of Reuters, and it raises a lot of money there.
And BBC Media Action does as well.
And they also have these kind of trust principles on their websites or mission statements where they pledge editorial integrity, and they assure their readers that they are independent and objective.
But what we see here is the British Foreign Office, through a shadowy program that's been covered up, and members of parliament like Chris Williamson, who've tried to get details about it and what its budget is, have been stonewalled on national security grounds, has been putting out solicitations for programs to build capacity in Russian language media, to get the British Foreign Office's message out, to weaken Russian media, to infiltrate Russia, and so on, what I just explained.
And what I found were these long bids that were placed by BBC Media Action and Thomson Reuters Foundation to participate in these programs.
And Reuters, in its detailed bid, they were written much better than the BBC's, they boasted of previous programs funded by the British Foreign Office to train Russian journalists to take them on UK FCO-funded trips to London, and to produce, in their words, attitudinal change to make them pro-NATO and pro-British, and then to network them into a pre-existing influence network of journalists within Russia.
So Reuters is participating in information warfare against a country that its journalists cover.
It's referring to its own journalists and journalists it's trained as basically intelligence agents or assets of the British state, and it is working to advance regime change through its charitable arm.
Just to clarify that last little point there, and this is all just fascinating, but it's not just like a subset of this one project that they're doing over there at Thomson Reuters.
Their regular reporters on the foundation side, they consider them all essentially just assets of the Foreign Office, if not MI6, I guess.
Is that right?
Well, what they're trying to do is get the contract, and they do get the contract.
I embedded the contracts, and it's notable that the contracts are marked private and confidential.
They obviously don't want the public to know about this, but they, in their bids, are saying, we have 15,000 staff members.
We are the largest media organization on earth, and our journalists, they refer to them as kind of influence agents, and not just journalists.
They're offering- How refreshingly honest.
Yeah.
I mean, they're kind of offering them up, offering their services up to a wing of the British government, which is saying, we want to infiltrate Russia.
We want to weaken and contain Russia, and the BBC is doing the same.
I think the most shocking BBC document I found was where they offered to go into the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine, which is a conflict zone where a pro-Russian separatist, but really a Russian-speaking population that doesn't want to be part of the pro-NATO, ultra-nationalist Ukraine that's seeking to basically remove Russian as an official language, and demonize the Russian-speaking population, where they've been fighting a civil war that's really become a proxy war.
The US military, British and Canadian militaries are backing up the Ukrainian military in this grinding endless conflict.
What you would think a media organization would do that's reporting on the conflict would be to report on how painful the war is to both sides, and to show the human toll of it on both sides.
There has been a terrible war in Eastern Ukraine in the last decade.
Yeah, and it's just day after day artillery exchanges.
People on the front lines never know if they're going to make it through the day or not.
A shell will just fall.
I remember reading a headline two years ago, a shell just fell in a family festival on the Ukrainian side, and it just goes on and on.
The US, from the Trump to Biden administrations, wants to keep it going, and so does Raytheon.
In any case, the BBC, through its supposed charitable arm, is proposing to go in and conduct information warfare on behalf of the pro-NATO side.
It says, we are going to train and covertly fund media organizations to counter pro-Russian media in the Donbass.
To me, that's just such a textbook violation of journalistic ethics, where the journalist actually becomes a combatant.
This isn't just a lone journalist.
It's the institution itself.
Yes, they are doing everything that the West accuses Russia of doing, meddling in politics, information warfare, deception, covertly recruiting assets from the target population.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I mean, this is just one batch of documents.
From what you know here, Max, how many Russian journalists were suborned into this thing, whether newly trained or journalists who were already journalists who got recruited into this?
Do you know?
Is it in there?
Writers said 400, but by this point, I would assume it's more.
I think one of the most interesting documents relating to the training of ...
Well, here they say, to date, the Thomson Reuters Foundation has engaged over 15,000 journalists and bloggers from around the world in capacity building interventions.
They call them interventions.
In Russia, Reuters claims to have performed 10 previous training tours funded by the British Foreign Office for 80 Russian journalists on behalf of the British Embassy in Moscow.
And it proposed eight more to create a network of journalists across Russia bonded together by a shared interest in British affairs.
Again, this is all secret.
This is not ...
I mean, you can go on- In other words, they admitted the truth there that it would have never come out that way in public.
Yeah.
I mean, you can find, if you look up workshops of Russian journalists, you can see that Thomson Reuters is hosting them, but the funding and participation of the British Embassy in Moscow is secret.
Yeah.
And a lot of expertise would come from Reuters.
Here's how to report it, and here's how we make sure that the Brits are always the good guys in every story, et cetera, right?
They already do that anyway.
It's also that British media is fair and balanced.
British media is advanced, it's superior, and you are fighting against these primitive extremists.
They even refer to Russian state media in one document as a form of extremism, and they call their work counter-extremism.
Their Russian press tour became a real problem after the Sergei Skripal affair, when this turncoat, retired Russian agent who went over to the British side was mysteriously poisoned.
And they talked about delivering at pace in changing environment in one document, which was how they can deliver these training programs in a politically sensitive environment, where they had brought over a bunch of journalists from Russia, and they said that the Thomson Reuters Foundation was in constant communication with the British embassy in Moscow to assess levels of risk, including reputational risk to the embassy.
This is what they're promising that they'll do to the British foreign office if anything takes place again, a future poisoning, perhaps of an opposition leader in Russia, someone like, I don't know, Alexei Navalny.
It's eerie, but it's also suggestive of the level of surreptitiousness that all of these programs are enveloped in.
Man.
And then, so I saw a whole thingamajig on the internet doing just a little bit of research there about Navalny, about how he'd been recruited into this Yale program of young international scholars or whatever kind of thing that- Yeah, Maurice Greenberg.
I'm sorry?
It's the Maurice Greenberg program, named after a longtime CIA asset who founded AIG, which- Really?
Destroyed the American economy.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's funny how small the world is sometimes.
And now, so this guy Navalny is, they say he's a liberal Democrat and also an unreformed right-wing nationalist who's now in jail.
And speaking of him, what's Bellingcat, Max?
Good question.
I mean, that's the million dollar question, because they pose as an independent investigative and open source media organization.
And they're sold and marketed to the Western public through award ceremonies and puff pieces as the gold standard of open source investigative journalists, digital sleuths who are taking on powerful autocrats by simply using Google Earth and other public source tools to show how they're committing chemical attacks against their own people and poisoning their dissidents.
But there's another side to Bellingcat, which is not so open source and clearly intertwined with the programs that we've been discussing and with the British and U.S. deep state.
Yeah.
Well, and then they've admitted that from time to time.
And I guess at some points they can't deny, right?
That they take money directly from, I guess, the foreign ministry.
They don't admit from intelligence agencies, but they have- I mean, all I can tell you is that the Bellingcat crowd, which basically operates like a troll farm online, they constantly claim with zero evidence, because it's completely false, that the gray zone is this Russian influence operation.
And that I went to RT's 10th anniversary and was recruited by Putin to start the gray zone, which is just, they have no evidence for it and they never will because no such thing ever took place.
Meanwhile, they are substantially funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a literal CIA cutout created under the watch of Bill Casey in the Reagan era to do what the CIA used to do covertly in the open, which is paying civil society groups and media organizations to destabilize countries where the U.S. seeks regime change.
And Bellingcat is one of those key organizations that the NED is funding.
And over the years, Elliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, has denied being supported by the British Foreign Office.
But now we see that that's just a straight up lie through these documents.
So this was notable as, well, maybe only as an asterisk of the Trump years, that he added two countries to NATO, Montenegro and, I guess, Northern Macedonia, which is different from other Macedonia.
And boy, are they jealous of each other's names and hate each other over it.
But anyway, and then this was what they were involved in, what, just blasting the media down there with propaganda about the opposition in the race or something?
I don't actually know what they did, but we have a pretty clear indication through a document that was submitted to the British Foreign Office by a contractor, basically a British intelligence contractor called the Zinc Network.
The Zinc Network has been involved in a number of scandals in the UK for conducting covert propaganda on behalf of the British Home Office targeting Muslims through various de-radicalization programs.
And they would create TV shows and all sorts of programming that Muslims or whoever the audience was led to believe were just independent and organic.
But in fact, it was, this is British state propaganda, it's very sinister.
But the Zinc Network has been especially active in these British Foreign Office programs abroad, targeting countries in Russia's near abroad, trying to bring them into the NATO fray, trying to produce attitudinal changes among the Russian speaking population.
And in 2018, some documents were leaked in, I guess, December 2018, showing that the Zinc Network had created a consortium, a network of NGOs, and proposed to the UK Foreign Office that they would work together to advance the empire's interests, essentially.
These included Bellingcat, along with the Digital Forensic Research Lab, which works out of the Atlantic Council, and they're one of the Facebook censors that's censoring material on Facebook.
And the Institute for Statecraft, which I mentioned before, was the front for the integrity initiative, Troll Farm.
And after the leak of these documents, Elliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, kind of had to come out and get out ahead of the story and say, well, I'm happy to be glad to get things rolling with this partnership, which was apparently called the Open Information Partnership with the Zinc Network.
But there was more to it.
In these documents, this is a previous batch of documents, several Bellingcat staffers were named as trainers for this program.
Christian Trebert, who's now the head of the New York Times Video Investigations Unit, and Arik Toller, who is one of the founders of Bellingcat, along with Higgins.
And they said that we're just doing workshops on digital research and verification skills.
We're not really doing anything that's malicious.
We're just teaching people how to use open source investigative tools.
Well, in fact, they were going into foreign countries and meddling in their political systems according to this one document I found, which is titled ...
It's a Zinc Network document.
It's entitled, A Redeploying Staff to Respond to the 2019 North Macedonia Elections.
So just finding this document reminded me that there was a country called North Macedonia.
I was like, I totally forgot.
The foreign office identified North Macedonia as a priority country early on in the project.
Why?
Because they were having an election in 2019, which would pretty much determine if they were going to orient themselves towards the EU and NATO, and a pro-NATO candidate was running against a Russian-oriented candidate.
So they want the pro-NATO candidate to win.
So Zinc identified a large media outlet within the country called The Most Network and deployed a team which included blah, blah, blah, all these trainers.
Over two weeks, our team and consortium partners, including DFR Lab and Bellingcat, provided cybersecurity training, mentoring, open source investigation, media ethics.
Basically Bellingcat was brought in by the British Foreign Office through an intelligence contractor to train media and help swing an election to the pro-NATO candidate, according to this document.
Now, can you imagine if the Chinese foreign ministry reached out to the gray zone and said, we've got a special election coming up in Texas, and it's going to determine whether the Texas governor is going to be soft on China or not.
So we need you to go in and train.
We've identified a large media network that is sympathetic, and we need you to go train them.
And if that got out, we're going to pay for you to go down there.
We're paying for your hotel.
We're giving you fees and everything, and we're running it through an intelligence cut out to give us cover.
If that got out there and was publicized, it would be on the cover of the New York Times.
It would be a nonstop freak out on Rachel Maddow, but we would be prosecuted.
I would be in a Supermax facility in Colorado if that took place.
But this is the kind of activity that Bellingcat's engaging in, and ironically publishing pieces on their website about Russia's interference in North Macedonia, while they themselves are interfering in North Macedonia on behalf of the British state, according to this document.
And they're being celebrated as this great, independent, plucky, adversarial media organization.
This isn't what journalists do.
And the whole time as all this is happening is while they're in the middle of claiming that the Russians elected Trump, the Russians rigged Brexit, the Russians rigged the European parliamentary elections, the Russians intervened in where, Denmark, France, and Germany in their local elections, none of which held up.
All of which had a story that came out six weeks later saying, yeah, well, turns out there wasn't anything there really.
Yeah.
This is all happening as Theresa May was blaming Russia for attacking the UK with chemical weapons.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
And it really raises questions about all of these episodes, because they seem to take place at such key moments, and are so damaging to what seems to be the Kremlin's agenda.
I mean, the Skripal poisoning happened right ahead of Putin's charm offensive ahead of the World Cup.
And then you have Navalny's poisoning, which happens in the middle of, and he's taken to Germany, right as the Nord Stream pipeline connecting Russia and Germany, not just physically through a gas pipeline, but politically is about to be completed.
And these incidents are, the Skripal incident is certainly referred to in all of these leaked documents by delighted military intelligence officers who see it as an opportunity to make the British public and British politicians see the big picture.
But then you have the Navalny situation, where Navalny is, I mean, he's known in the US by idiots, like the former CIA director, John Brennan, as a Russian opposition leader.
They think he's really popular, and that he's going to someday lead Russia, and that the people really want him.
He consistently polls at like two to 5%.
He couldn't really get elected the dog catcher.
Most of his fans are like urban, middle class, kind of like youthful yuppies.
And John Brennan tweeted, he basically repurposed the lyrics to Imagine by John Lennon.
And it was like, imagine a world where Navalny is the president of Russia, then we will be living in peace.
And I mean, where Navalny gains his kind of cred from in Russia and his popularity, to the extent that he is popular, is as a YouTube influencer.
He does these YouTube investigations, which are really pretty creative.
And there's a lot of corruption to go around in Russia.
They mostly focus on the corruption of people around the Kremlin, and they go viral.
And they're increasingly sophisticated.
I mean, his last one, which was kind of suspect to me, I don't know if it was correct, but it was about Putin's palace, that there was this multi-billion dollar palace being built for Putin, which might have actually just been a hotel being built by a oligarch who's close to the Kremlin.
But it featured 3D graphics, and I mean, it didn't seem like this was just one guy sitting in a room making videos like Navalny's old videos.
This was really sophisticated stuff.
And I found a document within this batch that I think emanates from the Zink network.
Yeah, it's a Zink document.
And it's part of a bid for British Foreign Office contract, where Zink reveals that it was playing a behind the scenes role to, first of all, activate a range of content within 12 hours of the recent Telegram protests.
Those were major protests in 2018 that were co-sponsored by Navalny.
So they're basically revealing that they're participating in helping to amplify protests to destabilize Russia, protests overseen by Navalny.
But then there's another document from the Zink network in one of the bids to the British Foreign Office about how it's helping YouTube influencers in Russia develop editorial strategies to deliver key messages, while working to keep the involvement of the British Foreign Office confidential.
And they're carrying out this entire program of covert propaganda in the name of, in their words, promoting media integrity and democratic values.
But I mean, this raises questions about Navalny.
Was he one of these YouTube influencers?
Everything he's doing fits to a T, what the Zink network describes here, including his editorial focus on corruption.
And we saw- He's been doing this since what, like the Bush years, right?
When was that Yale thing?
The Yale thing was like 2002.
That's when he first- Oh, that was very early Bush years then.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's when he started kicking off the color revolutions.
And so Navalny was in the program early.
But we recently saw the head of Navalny's anti-corruption foundation, someone named Vladimir Ashurkov, who is an exile, now lives in the UK.
He was named as part of the British cluster in the integrity initiative documents.
This covert UK foreign office funded troll farm.
So it's pretty obvious that Navalny's involved in one way or another.
And the Russian FSB, the intelligence services of Russia, ran a video sting on Ashurkov.
I think it was 2012 or 2013.
And they showed him meeting for lunch with a British MI6 officer who was operating under diplomatic cover out of the British embassy in Moscow, the same embassy that coordinates with Reuters and BBC.
And during lunch, Ashurkov asks this agent for 10 to $20 million.
And he said, if you gave us that money, you would see a real change on the streets.
His name is James William Thomas Ford, this British agent.
It was 2013.
And yeah, Ashurkov said there would be quite a different picture of the political landscape.
Ironically, Ford doesn't authorize the money, but he said, we can route you to a program we run with Transparency International, which is another one of these fake independent NGOs that focuses on anti-corruption.
But this sounds like a pretty corrupt arrangement.
But the point is, Ashurkov has been filmed basically panhandling for millions of dollars from British intelligence to destabilize Russia.
He's named in the Integrity Initiative documents as part of this cluster alongside Bill Browder and Ed Lucas and Peter Pomerantsev and all of these familiar anti-Russian faces or anti-Kremlin faces.
So it's pretty obvious what's been going on with Navalny.
Putin and his inner circle have actually come out this year and openly identified Navalny as a CIA asset.
They had never done that before, or an MI6 asset.
And these documents seem to support that analysis.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know how conclusive it is, but sure seems like it anyway.
And it's certainly a reasonable question.
I don't know how anyone inside Russia would take him seriously once he's got the taint of CIA stink on him.
But you know how that goes.
And I'm sorry that we can't continue this because I'm actually five minutes late for my next one here, Max.
But you know what?
That's okay, because we just leave them wanting more.
This thing is like 7,000 or 10,000 words or something, everybody.
Go and look at it.
It's really an important one.
I hope you share it too.
Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK foreign office funded program to weaken Russia, leaked docs reveal by Max Blumenthal at thegrayzone.com.
Thanks again.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, www.mywar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
