Nothing new to see the Pacific West Coast tech companies have become part of the hegemon’s empire building and overseas warfare. I have written about Omidyar’s role in funding NGOs taking part on the Kiev coup d’état in Feb. 2014.
○ Confirmed: Omidyar’s NGOs Clearly Partner in Regime Change – March 2, 2014
US/British technology was used by autocratic regimes in the MENAT states to track down opponents and rebellious groups. In a similar manner, the Google conglomerate and social media functioned in the Arab Uprising and Syia civil strife to overthrow the autocratic regimes. Business working both sides must be a profitable, notwithstanding questions about ethics and morals or international law.
I had questioned why GG and Marcy Wheeler joined The Intercept enterprise based on Freedom of the Press?
○ Embarrassment to GG, MW of The Intercept: Omidyar Co-funded Ukraine Revolt – March 1, 2014
○ Glenn Greenwald, A New Journalistic Venture – Oct. 16, 2013
Recently more questions have been asked about Omidyar, The Intercept and ownership of the WikiLeaks stash of leaked documents. The article in the Mint Press is based on the account from a whistleblower …
FBI Whistleblower on Pierre Omidyar and His Campaign to Neuter Wikileaks
WikiLeaks, the transparency organization known for publishing leaked documents that threaten the powerful, finds itself under pressure like never before, as does its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange. Now, the fight to silence Wikileaks is not only being waged by powerful government figures but also by the media, including outlets and organizations that have styled themselves as working to protect whistleblowers.
As this three-part series seeks to show, these outlets and organizations are being stealthily guided by the hands of special interests, not the public interest they claim to serve. Part I focuses on the Freedom of the Press Foundation, The Intercept, and the oligarch who has strongly influenced both organizations in his long-standing fight to silence WikiLeaks.
More below the fold …
Mid-November, 2017 – The Daily Beast ran an exclusive report detailing how the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) was set to break ties with WikiLeaks amidst concerns among the foundation’s board, which includes such well-known figures as Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, John Cusack and Glenn Greenwald, among others.
…
Pierre Omidyar, prior to the founding of The Intercept, was known not for any commitment to journalism or free speech but rather for his connections to the U.S. government and his role in the financial blockade of WikiLeaks that began in 2010.
Indeed, publicly available records reveal Omidyar’s close connections to the U.S. political establishment. For example, Omidyar made more visits to the Obama White House between 2009 and 2013 than did Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. He has also donated $30 million to the Clinton global initiative. He directly co-invested with the State Department, funding groups – some of them overtly fascist – that worked to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014. He continues to fund USAID, particularly its overseas program aimed at “advancing U.S. national security interests” abroad.
Omidyar has a vested interest in advancing the interests of the U.S. political establishment for a variety of reasons. Sibel Edmonds, who was among the first to note Omidyar’s background upon The Intercept’s founding, noted that the PayPal executive “has been in bed with the CIA and NSA” and even the Department of Defense — further noting that the Snowden documents that The Intercept, and thus Omidyar, controls “contain information about PayPal’s direct partnership not only with the Treasury Department but also the CIA.”
Edmonds further stated that Greenwald had confirmed Omidyar’s long-running partnership with the CIA and other government agencies on Twitter during a heated exchange between the two in 2013.
○ USAID: Partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship Initiative
This Billionaire Really Likes Glenn Greenwald | Buzzfeed – Oct. 16, 2013 |
Pierre Omidyar, the multi-billionaire founder of eBay, has shown a lot of interest on social media in the last few months in Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who is leaving The Guardian after a series of scoops exposing large-scale domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency.
Greenwald told BuzzFeed that he is leaving The Guardian to start a “momentous new venture.” He declined to discuss who would be funding the new outlet but said it would be “very well-funded” and “very substantial.”
Pierre Omidyar co-funded Ukraine revolution groups with US government, documents show
In the latest startling revelation, Pando.com has published documents implicating the Omidyar Network in the funding of the current Ukrainian protest movement. The Omidyar Network is the NGO of billionaire Ebay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, who recently set up “First Look” as an outlet for (among others) Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras to selectively publish some of the Snowden document archive, 99% of which continues to be withheld from the public.
○ The World According to Dutch FM Halbe Zijlstra
○ Dutch Fake News, Warmongering, Anti-Russia Propaganda
My recent post about CIA asset Saakashvili, former president of Georgia, fromer Governor of Odessa, fugitive from justice and presently stateless. Saahashvili has been accepted in The Netherlands on a immigration permit meant for “family reunification.” What a farce from the Dutch government …
In the Netherlands, Saakashvili vows to ‘continue fight’
Saakashvili …
○ Breaking News: Saakashvili arrested in Kyiv, deported to Poland
History …
○ President of Georgia – Rose Revolution for “Democracy”
○ Poodle of John McCain and his crony Scheunemann
No, the Russians didn’t start the war in Georgia in 2008 …
○ Georgian Attack Killed 1,600 S Ossetians
○ Alliance with Israel and its mercenaries
○ Citizenship of Ukraine in one-day and Governor of Odessa
○ Fighting corruption alongside Yulia Marushevska, the Angel of the Maidan
○ Quits as governor – loses Ukrainian citizenship
○ Seeks enty to the Netherlands based on “family reunion”
Soon ….
Role of Georgian mercenaries in the Maidan sniper attack – 20th Feb. 2014
Further reading, a doctor’s thesis by David Faris at the University of Pennsylvania (2010) …
○ Revolutions Without Revolutionaries? SocialMedia Networks and Regime Response in Egypt [large pdf]
One of the last releases from WikiLeaks save for the Vault8 papers …
○ Dutch Hackers Infiltrated Kremlin’s Cozy Bear in 2014
Ignoring the funding of The Intecept has always been foolish. But the same is true of any publication. As such, critical reading and thinking it the ‘secret sauce’ to suss out the truth, including relevance, of any report or article. Chomsky does that by reading the NYTimes, and therefore, others have no excuse for not doing the same.
Omidyar promised that he would be hands off wrt The Intercept, but as everyone should know, direct interference at the level of what gets published is but one way to shape what appears. Wheeler didn’t stay there for long (don’t know what the story is and don’t care because I’ve never been impressed with her work). GG is who he’s always been — a libertarian (kneejerk IMO) lean. That’s what attracted Omidyar to him and also why Snowden sought out GG.
Journalists (and wannabe journalists) want and need to get paid. The steno journalists don’t have to concern themselves with being compromised because they are like-minded with those that fund publications. Almost all of those with intellectual and ethical integrity will be compromised. The questions are to what extent and how consciously. I never forget any of that when reading GG.
Personally I assign a heavy weight to big and meaningful clunkers by journalists. Risen — Wen Ho Lee and his acceptance (personal self-censorship) of the NYTimes censorship of the USG spying on Americans. (He had other choices.) With that lens one can detect the shabbiness of his work — his uncritical approach to Nat-Sec info that comes his way (not that he ever gets much anyway). (He wasn’t alone in picking up that there were Nat-Sec community disputes over WMD. At that time, I knew of that and never read Risen or anyone that was quoting him.)
All of them are down on Assange because he publishes original source documents. That subverts the role of journalists to be the intermediaries that are supposed to be the go-to resource for whistleblowers and tipsters and that then can select and highlight what works for the narrative they want to write. What would 99%+ of journalists have done in 2016 if they had been handed the DNC/Podesta emails? Little to nothing and held them for a book to be published after the election.
OTOH Wikileaks’ document dumps leave much to be desired. Primarily because they are far too voluminous and often require some technical expertise to interpret. The Snowden files far exceeded the capacity of three news organizations (in part because they were too cheap to pay for the resources required to absorb all of it). And to be fair, Snowden didn’t grasp but a small portion of what he had. This is very different from the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg and Russo had not only read and understood everything in it, but also had been participants in the some of the events and the writing of it.
The three moguls — Omidyar, Bezos, and Thiel — don’t need to collaborate to get on the same page. However, they aren’t identical triplets and their personal agendas and how to skin a cat does vary. Omidyar is a bit more all over the place and less revealing than the other two, but all of them seek to change the world to their personal liking and advantage.
As of this moment, GG is more hit than miss, but that may flip tomorrow. Robert Parry will be sorely missed by those that appreciate facts and logic, but it’s a total mystery to me why he gave Graham Fuller a platform. McGovern and Binney are worthwhile contributors to Consortium News. The addition of Caitlyn Johnson, a strong thinker, is a good move (but she too has had a minor clunker that concerns me). Reliable, currently are Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal (fingers crossed that he doesn’t go coo-coo as Sid has). The burn-out rate (and/or financial pressures) among younger journalists with the right stuff (including quality writing) is high. It’s really difficult to carve out a beat and work it through thick and thin for decades, such as Hersh and Pilger. Live well by being a hack is too attractive.
Like I said yesterday, who has the goods on the Trump Empire …
○ Mueller subpoenas Trump Organization for documents related to Russia – report
So easy to encapsulate the little man in the White House!
The dismissal of Rex Tillerson is another loss to diplomacy as Trump now is run by a military-intelligence cabinet of advisors and “experts”. Who has the goods on the corruption of the Trump and Kushner Empire? Indeed!
Iran be warned, in May Trump will stand down on the multilateral nuclear deal with your nation.