Eric Zuesse
Here is a passage from the interview that Germany’s Das Bild published on 11 January 2016 of Russian President Vladimir Putin:
BILD: In your last interview with BILD, ten years ago, you said that Germany and Russia had never been as close as in 2005. What is left today of this special relationship?
Putin: The mutual sympathy of our peoples is and will remain the foundation of our relations.
BILD: And nothing has changed?
(Before speaking the next sentence, the President starts to sneer.)
Putin: Even with the help of anti-Russian propaganda in the mass media, Germany has not succeeded in damaging this sympathy…
BILD: Do you mean BILD?
Putin: I do not mean you personally. But of course Germany’s media are heavily influenced by the country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
BILD: That’s news to us.
It wasn’t news to Udo Ulfkotte, who had for decades been a very successful journalist in Germany, working for the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, and other leading media, but quit around 2010 and went public then about his having long secretly helped the CIA and worked for them as a regular propagandist against Russia. Ulfkotte said that this was the only way to get ahead in the ‘journalism’ profession.
He was heavily criticized, at the time, for having given an interview on 29 September 2014 with Russian Television. It can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp-Wh77wt1o
He talks there about his having been “non-official cover” paid by the CIA. That category is actually a CIA employee (“agent”) — even able to sue the CIA in federal court for wrongful termination. These “NOC” people have gone through extensive CIA training, but unlike official-cover employees, their contract doesn’t include protecting them if they get caught or publicly exposed — they are entirely on their own then. There are many different types of CIA employment contracts, some of which are for outsiders or “assets,” instead of for full-fledged employees.
The highly respected political and economic blogger who goes under the name of Tyler Durden, headlined on 9 October 2014, “German Journalist Blows Whistle On How The CIA Controls The Media”, and he explained that there was lots more evidence, from other leading journalists, confirming Ulfkotte’s allegations, just not quite so specific to the anti-Russia angle. It seems that the same propaganda operation of which Ulfkotte had once been a part, was now aiming to smear him by means of the operation’s other ‘journalists’, but Ulfkotte’s charges can hardly be denied — they’re an undeniable part of post WW II history, starting with the Cold War, and even written about by the retired journalist Carl Bernstein, and continuing right into our own time. In fact, the CIA had (and maybe still has) an entire operation codenamed “Mockingbird”, which has been proud of its success in controlling virtually all international ‘news’ ‘reporting’ in the United States, and, to a large extent, also in Europe (such as Ulfkotte).
There was even a case in which a soaring news-reporting star at CNN, who had already won three Emmy Awards, was fired and blacklisted for having reported that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were sending tanks and troops into Bahrain slaughtering peaceful Shiites who were demonstrating for equal rights with Bahrain’s Sunni minority, in that nation, where a sectarian fundamentalist-Sunni royal family rule the country. Unlike in Syria, where a non-sectarian and anti-fundamentalist Shiite leader, Bashar al-Assad, rules (and enjoys majority support even from his nation’s majority-Sunni public), and where the U.S. President, Barack Obama, had been planning Assad’s overthrow from the moment when Obama had become President in 2009, these demonstrators, in Bahrain, against Bahrain’s royal family, were actually spontaneous, and the United States and its Saudi royal family ally were determined to crush it. Supposedly — but not actually — the U.S. stands for democracy, not for dictatorship. But this CNN reporter simply refused to cover up and sugar-coat the ugly reality, that the U.S. were working with the Sauds, to crush incipient democracy in Bahrain. So, she was fired and blacklisted, for that. No matter how terrific a reporter she was, and even despite her being also the prettiest news reporter on television, and the one that her professional colleagues expected to have a stellar future, she couldn’t even get any job in the profession afterwards, because she had refused to deceive when and as required to, and that’s the cardinal sin in ‘journalism,’ in what American PR calls ‘the Free World’ — as if, after the end of communism in Russia, any basic sense still remains to that now-lying phrase, other than to serve as a basis for the secret war that the United States has continued against Russia after the end of communism there.
Could it really be that the ‘reporters’ for Bild didn’t know the score, as they were pretending?
To judge by their ‘reporting’, they knew it all too well. (They were so biased there as to ignore the underlying reality, such as Obama’s overthrow of the Russia-friendly democratically elected President of Ukraine in February 2014, and the newly installed regime’s ethnic-cleansing to get rid of the people in the area of Ukraine that had voted more than 90% for the man Obama’s operation overthrew.)
They knew the reality; only their readers didn’t — and, apparently, won’t.
Obama’s entire case against Russia, and especially his cases regarding Ukraine and regarding Syria, were lies, but they’re ceaselessly spread throughout the West, even by his successor, Donald Trump, who continues his foreign polices while condemning them. The lies are pervasive in U.S. federal politics. On 17 January 17 2016, at the final Democratic Party Presidential Campaign Debate before voting started in the Presidential primaries, even the least-hostile-to-Russia candidate in both of America’s political parties, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, started from the assumption of Obama’s lies being instead truths. For example, he said, referring to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “the secretary”: “And we all know, no argument, the secretary is absolutely right, Assad is a butcher of his own people, man using chemical weapons against his own people. This is beyond disgusting.” But, actually, Obama, and his then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the Saudi King, and President Erdogan of Turkey, and Emir Thani of Qatar, had organized that sarin gas attack so as to make it seem to have come from Assad’s forces, in order to provide an excuse for the U.S. to bomb Syria to remove Assad from power. An MIT study of the evidence concluded “The US Government’s Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.” (Their emphasis.) Is it possible that even Senator Sanders didn’t know this? Or was even he lying?
What kind of ‘democracy’ is the United States — or any country where the ‘journalists’ routinely and systematically lie in order to continue and spread the regime’s lies?
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.