Years ago, Citizen Investigative Journalist George Webb told of the victimized Haiti connection to “Rat Lines” of illicit trade (child sex trafficking, human organ transplants, slavery, dark weapons, precious metals, uranium, and more) that involved the Clintons, John McCain, and many others whose names are recognized in every day parlance.
In reviewing the explosive information that Webb brought to light beginning in November 2016, I am absolutely blown away to recall that what he reported then ties with what is being made public now.
Did George Webb’s investigation get the credit or notice that it deserved? No.
Yet much of what he reported on was ground already tilled by Seymour Hersch who told Webb to get beyond his computer keyboard and wear out his shoe leather to get the enormous story in its entirety, advice Webb took to heart. He’s been wearing out shoe leather every day for more than five years since. (More on that below.)
It all ties together, and when all is laid bare for the world to see, many will “not be able to handle the truth.” We swamp is thick and crawling with slime. The horrible truth is seeping out into the MAGA-sphere. Brian Cates posted (on Telegram) this morning about the involvement of McCain, Lindsay Graham and Klobuchar’s criminal involvement in Ukraine. Something Webb told us about then.
Here’s what Cates posted that reminds me of the reports contained in those Hot Pink Binders, which I’ll share with you in the days ahead.
👆👆👆Here’s McCain, Graham, Klobuchar and US Ambassador Marie Yanovich in 2016 showing how really REALLY worried they are that the Ukrainian forces had not crushed the Donbass region yet and brought it back under the control of the Kyiv puppet government they’d installed in 2014. They are frustrated that in 2 years of fighting this is still going on.
McCain, Graham, Klobuchar and Yanovich frantically set this trip to Ukraine up in December of 2016. That’s when the video above of them exhorting and encouraging the Ukraine military to take the fight to Putin was made. In December of 2016. What had JUST HAPPENED THE PREVIOUS MONTH that explains the barely disguised fear you are seeing on display? Why was it so VERY IMPORTANT to Graham and McCain and Klobuchar and Yanovich that the Ukraine military move QUICKLY and get control of the Donbass region back and weaken Putin in Eastern Ukraine?
Fun fact: after getting back from this panic trip to Ukraine in December of 2016, McCain finally hands off that copy of the Steele Dossier to FBI Director James Comey.
To get us started — meet George Webb’s “mentor,” Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour “Sy” Hersch .
Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.
It doesn’t take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist”.
He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.
Don’t even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends “so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would” – or the death of Osama bin Laden. “Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true,” he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011 [see footnote].
Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an “independent” Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. “The Pakistanis put out a report, don’t get me going on it. Let’s put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It’s a bullshit report,” he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.
The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.
“It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama],” he declares in an interview with the Guardian.
“It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn’t happen any more. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.
He isn’t even sure if the recent revelations about the depth and breadth of surveillance by the National Security Agency will have a lasting effect.
Snowden changed the debate on surveillance
He is certain that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “changed the whole nature of the debate” about surveillance. Hersh says he and other journalists had written about surveillance, but Snowden was significant because he provided documentary evidence – although he is sceptical about whether the revelations will change the US government’s policy.
“Duncan Campbell [the British investigative journalist who broke the Zircon cover-up story], James Bamford [US journalist] and Julian Assange and me and the New Yorker, we’ve all written the notion there’s constant surveillance, but he [Snowden] produced a document and that changed the whole nature of the debate, it’s real now,” Hersh says.
“Editors love documents. Chicken-shit editors who wouldn’t touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game,” he adds, before qualifying his remarks.
“But I don’t know if it’s going to mean anything in the long [run] because the polls I see in America – the president can still say to voters ‘al-Qaida, al-Qaida’ and the public will vote two to one for this kind of surveillance, which is so idiotic,” he says.
Holding court to a packed audience at City University in London’s summer school on investigative journalism, 76-year-old Hersh is on full throttle, a whirlwind of amazing stories of how journalism used to be; how he exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, how he got the Abu Ghraib pictures of American soldiers brutalising Iraqi prisoners, and what he thinks of Edward Snowden.
Hope of redemption
Despite his concern about the timidity of journalism he believes the trade still offers hope of redemption.
“I have this sort of heuristic view that journalism, we possibly offer hope because the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more than ever … Not that journalism is always wonderful, it’s not, but at least we offer some way out, some integrity.”
His story of how he uncovered the My Lai atrocity is one of old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism and doggedness. Back in 1969, he got a tip about a 26-year-old platoon leader, William Calley, who had been charged by the army with alleged mass murder.
Instead of picking up the phone to a press officer, he got into his car and started looking for him in the army camp of Fort Benning in Georgia, where he heard he had been detained. From door to door he searched the vast compound, sometimes blagging his way, marching up to the reception, slamming his fist on the table and shouting: “Sergeant, I want Calley out now.”
Eventually his efforts paid off with his first story appearing in the St Louis Post-Despatch, which was then syndicated across America and eventually earned him the Pulitzer Prize. “I did five stories. I charged $100 for the first, by the end the [London] Times were paying $5,000.”
He was hired by the New York Times to follow up the Watergate scandal and ended up hounding Nixon over Cambodia. Almost 30 years later, Hersh made global headlines all over again with his exposure of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Put in the hours
For students of journalism his message is put the miles and the hours in. He knew about Abu Ghraib five months before he could write about it, having been tipped off by a senior Iraqi army officer who risked his own life by coming out of Baghdad to Damascus to tell him how prisoners had been writing to their families asking them to come and kill them because they had been “despoiled”.
“I went five months looking for a document, because without a document, there’s nothing there, it doesn’t go anywhere.”
Hersh returns to US president Barack Obama. He has said before that the confidence of the US press to challenge the US government collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.
“Do you think Obama’s been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What’s going on [with journalists]?” he asks.
He says investigative journalism in the US is being killed by the crisis of confidence, lack of resources and a misguided notion of what the job entails.
“Too much of it seems to me is looking for prizes. It’s journalism looking for the Pulitzer Prize,” he adds. “It’s a packaged journalism, so you pick a target like – I don’t mean to diminish because anyone who does it works hard – but are railway crossings safe and stuff like that, that’s a serious issue but there are other issues too.
“Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren’t we doing more? How does he justify it? What’s the intelligence? Why don’t we find out how good or bad this policy is? Why do newspapers constantly cite the two or three groups that monitor drone killings. Why don’t we do our own work?
“Our job is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here’s a debate’ our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who’s right and who’s wrong about issues. That doesn’t happen enough. It costs money, it costs time, it jeopardises, it raises risks. There are some people – the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it’s like you don’t dare be an outsider any more.”
He says in some ways President George Bush’s administration was easier to write about. “The Bush era, I felt it was much easier to be critical than it is [of] Obama. Much more difficult in the Obama era,” he said.
Asked what the solution is Hersh warms to his theme that most editors are pusillanimous and should be fired.
“I’ll tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can’t control,” he says. I saw it in the New York Times, I see people who get promoted are the ones on the desk who are more amenable to the publisher and what the senior editors want and the trouble makers don’t get promoted. Start promoting better people who look you in the eye and say ‘I don’t care what you say’.
Nor does he understand why the Washington Post held back on the Snowden files until it learned the Guardian was about to publish.
If Hersh was in charge of US Media Inc, his scorched earth policy wouldn’t stop with newspapers.
“I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let’s start all over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won’t like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing,” he says.
Hersh is currently on a break from reporting, working on a book which undoubtedly will make for uncomfortable reading for both Bush and Obama.
“The republic’s in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple.” And he implores journalists to do something about it.
This article was amended on 1 October 2013. The original text stated that Hersh sold a story about the My Lai massacre to the New York Times for $5,000 when in fact it was the Times of London. Hersh has pointed out that he was in no way suggesting that Osama bin Laden was not killed in Pakistan, as reported, upon the president’s authority: he was saying that it was in the aftermath that the lying began. Finally, the interview took place in the month of July, 2013.
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OK, got that? Now… Here are some things to remember as we plow through the swamp:
(From George Webb’s reports, November 2016)
“Haiti has been the test lab for the pharmaceutical industry”
• George goes into specifics about his speculations on Haiti, esp. in the South
• Compares these little cabals and their operations as ‘little movies’, at a glance easy to prove
• If you want to stop another coup, organ trafficking, release at least the metadata of the 650k emails (on Hillary’s and Huma’s computers/servers)
• This 5 yr thing (((FBI says they need 5 yrs to process the emails))) is getting more laughable by the day
• We have probable cause. This is not a fishing expedition. Robert Boyce, NYC detective has told us crimes have been committed
- Follow the money, arms and oil
- Arms deals for US Generals, Oil deals for Senators
- Petraeus’ Odyssey in Libya, Syria, Turkey, Greece
- Use of toxic gas on people to clear area for pipelines
- Hillary authorized sarin gas for rebels
- Haiti earthquake: Oil and gold
- Haiti was template for Libya and Syria topple
- Sex Trafficking
- FBI using deep dive surveil to extort bribes for Clinton Foundation
- Social justice to cover for oil pipelines and construction
- Lockheed to NATO to orphanages to White Helmet wisking
- Russian plane shutdown – Morrell again
- Hannukah/Christmas – consolidate contracts, Petrofac
- Hillary’s F35 investment man: Lockheed Bridgewater HSBC
- NATO, OPFOR, IHRC and Eric Braverman
- Whose missing 302s? Who to subpoena?
- Bridgewater ->NATO ->Libya Hedge Fund ->Texas
- ISIS chemical weapons stores found in Aleppo
- Disrupting with ISIS, Sarin gas, Hoping NATO bombing “order”
- What should Trump do? Oil and Arms
- Neil Brown, Marc Turi, Fast & Furious
- FBI and Army of Northern Virginia
- Justice v Social Justice, Braverman or Brown -> Clinton Foundation shadow White House?
- Do pipeline planners know how land is cleared? (gassed)
- Middle East Contractors ->CFR ->World Bank
- Working theory to Chains of Evidence – How to go to court
MUCH MORE TO COME
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