Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Sharyl Attkisson: Who Decides What News Is Fake News?
"Full Measure" host Sharyl Attkisson reports on efforts to improve "media literacy," and asks whether groups whose goal is to expose media bias have their own biases.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: We’ve entered a brave, new world in the information age where it can be tough to know what’s real. Now there are movements to help us sort through it all— to teach our kids media literacy, to "curate" our information, and cull out "fake news." Sounds like a good idea. After all, who doesn’t want their news straight up? But what if some of those efforts are actually attempts to control the narrative? Today’s cover story examines "The Curators."
In January, the website BuzzFeed had a bombshell: anonymous sources claimed President Trump instructed his attorney to lie to Congress. And that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had the goods. It wasn’t long before Mueller took an unusual step— publicly denying it.
President Trump: I think that the BuzzFeed piece was a disgrace to our country.
Jeffrey Toobin: The press screwed up and they should apologize and you know the media isn’t as great as it thinks it is. This is a bad day for the news media. I mean, let’s not kid ourselves.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: BuzzFeed stands by its report.
Whatever the case, it underscores how it’s getting harder to separate fact from fiction in the news. Now, there are unprecedented efforts by third parties— to curate information for you.
Some even want to give lessons to first graders on how to sort through fake news— between math and reading.
Person on street: I think children or young adults need to be informed about how to...
The Trump Dossier and the Poisoning of Sergei Skripal
Skripal was recruited in 1995 by Pablo Miller, a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, better known by the acronym "MI6") agent in Madrid. MI6 assigned Skripal his spy nickname: "Forthwith." After a successful espionage service under diplomatic cover in Madrid, Tallinn, and Warsaw, Miller retired and settled in the small town of Salisbury in the south of England, about 80 miles from London.
Skripal was at that time sitting in a Russian prison. In 2010, an exchange of spies took place in Vienna (Russia gave up four convicts for espionage, including Skripal, the United States ten.) Skripal accepted the offer of his former curator and settled near him in the same town of Salisbury.
What is missing in the Skripal poisoning case is the motive. If one looks at what happened superficially, there was basically no need for the intelligence services of Russia to kill Skripal. Yes, there is every reason to believe that after Putin came to power in 2000, Russia managed to eliminate objectionable former Russian citizens who moved to the U.K. at a speed of about one loud murder per year. However, all these killings have a clear motive: all the victims of the Kremlin were viewed as active opponents of Putin's regime.
However, Skripal was never an opponent of the Kremlin. On the contrary, he strongly supported the policies of President Putin, and, although he received a pension from the British government, he remains a citizen of Russia and does not hide his satisfaction with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea.
Skripal is a person of outstanding intelligence and analytical skills, fluent in several languages. However, he found himself having difficulty understanding the exact motives of the Kremlin. According to the doctors, after Skripal woke up (five weeks after the poisoning), he needed a "difficult psychological correction" to finally come to terms with the idea that his former colleagues from the GRU had attempted to assassinate him and his daughter.
Russia's participation in the poisoning looked irrational and illogical. Why did the Kremlin wait eight years after Skripal's pardon to deal with him? Skripal lived in Salisbury openly, under his own name, and there was no need to look for him. Why was it necessary to wait so long, and wait until his daughter suddenly came to him? Why break the centuries-old unwritten rules scrupulously followed by all the intelligence agencies of the world, which indicate that a spy exposed and pardoned by the head of the state is no longer dangerous? Why does Putin need all these problems just two weeks before the presidential elections in Russia? Why does Russia need all this headache just a few months before the World Cup?
The answer can be only one: the reason why the Kremlin had to deal with Skripal was much more serious than the World Cup and Putin's guaranteed re-election combined.
It had to be so serious that two GRU colonels — Alexander Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin — were sent to Salisbury (perhaps they also had accomplices). Mishkin is a military doctor who knew perfectly well that the A-234 substance given to him was a unitary (that is, ready-to-use) chemical weapon (as opposed to its binary version, better known as "Novichok").
At the time when Pablo Miller was recruiting spies for Great Britain, Christopher Steele was the head of MI6 in Moscow. After returning to London and retiring in 2009, Christopher Steele founded private intelligence corporation "Orbis Business Intelligence." Allegedly, Pablo Miller, a former recruiter, curator, and now one of Skripal's friends and neighbors, got a job at Orbis.
Therefore, when Christopher Steele received an order for fabrication of the "dossier" on Trump, the fate of an unsuspecting and innocent Skripal was sealed.
The story could have evolved quite differently if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 presidential election. Then there would be no investigation of the "Russian case" by the Mueller team, the White House, or the U.S. Congress. However, Trump won the election, and it became clear to the Kremlin that sooner or later, the investigation by the new White House administration would reveal the true role played by the Russian intelligence services in the 2016 presidential election, including the stuffing of compromising materials on Trump through Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Christopher Steele, being the head of the Russian Desk at MI6, was the personal curator of Alexander Litvinenko, and in 2006, he took an active part in the investigation of Litvinenko's poisoning with radioactive polonium-210 in London. In his investigation, Steele utilized all of his extensive contacts, including those among the Russian spy agencies.
Ten years later, in 2016, a retired Steele maintained contact with some "friendly" Moscow intelligence officers. These "friends" played with him in the dark and used him as the disinformation channel to spread the GRU's dossier on Trump. Through a chain of intermediaries (Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie), the dossier had reached Hillary Clinton, who was the main paymaster.
Why did Steele, with all of his experience, miss this obvious disinformation campaign in 2016?
Christopher Steele is known to be an extremely left-wing mind, and he quite aggressively tried to help his transatlantic ideological soulmate, Hillary Clinton, to win the presidential election.
Unlike the Litvinenko and FIFA cases, the order for dirt on Trump was unquestionably political. Steele understood that the choice of his company from a variety of other similar firms was based precisely on his ideological preferences. Therefore, Steele included in the "Russian dossier" not only obvious disinformation (for example, the "visit of Trump's lawyer Cohen to Prague"), but also many other vivid, unlikely, and highly desirable moments for the paymaster (for example, Trump's scene with prostitutes in Moscow hotel).
Why did Steele, well acquainted with the methods of Russian intelligence, allow the GRU to fool him this time? Steele had a sincere desire to believe that everything the "reliable Russian sources" had thrown at him was right.
In an attempt to monetize the dirty work, Steele was selling the "Russian dossier" not only to Hillary Clinton, but also to...
City of Worms murder: German girl wore hijab for her killer
More than 500 people participated in the funeral march on the weekend with flowers and candles for the 21-year-old Cynthia R. She was murdered in Worms by her migrant boyfriend Ahmed T (22) last week.
German tabloid Bild reported that friends of the family expressed their shock over her death. They said the relationship between Ahmed and Cynthia appeared to be going smoothly. “She wore hijab for Ahmed,” a friend of Cynthia’s father told Bild. “And she learned to speak Arabic out of love for him.”
When the two began their relationship four months ago, Ahmed T already knew that he was going to be deported. His asylum seeker application had been denied long ago.
So he tried to convince his new girlfriend to go with him to Tunisia. But friends of the family say that Cynthia declined his invitation.
Some speculate that because she did not want to move to Tunisia with him, she was killed. Last Monday an arrest warrant was issued for her boyfriend signalling a final deportation order. Less than 48 hours later, the situation between the two had escalated.
He stabbed the young woman by ramming a kitchen knife through her neck, her lungs, her hands and her back more than ten times.
Cynthia, a diligent nurse had been living with her parents, She had her own area upstairs with living room and bedroom. During the escalating dispute Ahmed stabbed the young woman with a long kitchen knife in her bed – on World Women’s Day.
Ahmed had registered himself under three different identities and had therefore cashed in three times on state benefits. Since his entry into Germany in October 2017, he has committed a long list of transgressions including “bodily injury, drugs, menace and coercion”. He also served a prison sentence for theft last October.
“She meant so much to me and I miss her a lot,” says her cousin Patrick Schopp. “I will keep her in my memory as this fun-loving person who never had anything bad to say about anyone and who was very helpful to everyone.”
Her uncle said: “She lived for her profession. Also wanted to study to become a midwife. She was happy, liked to celebrate. ”
The funeral march was not entirely peacful either. During a memorial service at the Liebfrauenkirche, where an ecumenical prayer was said for the 21-year-old woman, there was an incident.
About twenty people came running out of the church where a service had been scheduled in a panic. They were members of the funeral march who were at the church early.
They came out distraught, calling for the police and crying, because apparently someone had stood in front of the altar with arms stretched out, yelling “Allahu Akhbar” loudly, as well as other things that people could not understand, causing panic and fear.
The police apprehended the man a hundred meters down the road. He was...
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