Our Friday News Analysis | What the World Reads Now!

© Getty Images / cbies

How on earth did media freedom in the EU survive up to this point without the big-brained Brussels bureaucrats protecting it?

Does the average media consumer ever ask themselves, "Am I more or less informed now that the establishment claims to be working to protect me actively?" The list of websites that require a Virtual Private Network (VPN) pointed at a country outside the European Union has never been so long.

So pardon my skepticism over the notion that the same folks responsible for this information crackdown are positioning themselves as protectors of the free press, and persist unabated in multiplying their efforts.

EU officials are on the verge of approving a new "European Media Freedom Act," promoted as a new law to protect journalists, their freedom, and press pluralism. However, any thinking person might start by asking how exactly that squares with the bloc's top-down censorship of voices published on platforms that counter their establishment narratives, like RT. They cite the Ukraine conflict as justification but were looking for an excuse long beforehand. Rather than leave it to individual national media regulators to do their job and note any specific offenses or evidence, these big fans of free press and democracy at the EU blocked them unilaterally.

So, these same folks are now fine-tuning a law designed to "promote internal safeguards on editorial independence and media ownership transparency" – which the EU has never been too interested in fostering regarding the NGOs and press outlets it supports.

They also plan to introduce measures that protect journalists from spyware. But in even bringing spyware up, there's now a risk of official codification of its use by governments against journalists in some instances – something which has, until now, been frowned upon. Once again, as with "anti-Russian" sanctions and cutting off its own cheap Russian energy supply, the EU has found a way to stick it to itself and is on the verge of achieving precisely the opposite of its stated intentions.

Governments like France are now requesting specific, codified exemptions to the state use of surveillance software targeting journalists in cases where they might be dealing with sources or evidence involving "national security" offenses or other heavy crimes that risk bringing down governments like… music piracy. Right – because "national security" has never been abused as a pretext for Western authorities to protect their interests from dissent. And we're talking here about suspected crimes, so is a mere hunch enough to tap a journalist's phone?

The exemption request should also raise eyebrows about what these governments are already doing under the guise of national security to the point where they believe they're on the verge of losing something.

Various French journalists, for example, have taken issue in the past with being spied on by French intelligence or police. And to make it even easier, a French parliamentary commission voted recently to allow remote activation and geolocation of a target's tech devices.

Revelations about the use of Israeli Pegasus spyware by governments such as Morocco's to target French journalists raise other potential problems. For example, what power would the EU even have over foreign countries if, say, an EU member state decided to outsource surveillance to a non-bloc country – let alone ever know which state gave the order to do so?

Including any exemptions to spyware used by EU member states not only defeats the whole stated purpose of the legislation but also dramatically reduces the chances that sources will talk to or trust the press. It effectively turns every journalist into an inadvertent direct information pipeline to the authorities – which they may have been before. Still, now this new law confirms it, serving as a Vegas-style billboard for that fact.

Who in their right mind will call out wrongdoing by powerful state actors when the same state can theoretically evoke a murky pretext to neutralize the whistleblower and their story before it can damage the establishment? This seems to be another case of the EU proposing a media-related law under the pretext of protecting information and speech. In reality, the big beneficiary is the status quo.

It wouldn't be the first time, either. In 2018, the EU addressed the public demand for media control with a revised audiovisual media services directive. The main thrust was to reel in the digital online Wild West, bringing it under control of audiovisual regulation. It seemed innocent enough, right? Brussels took the collective public shrug as a sign of encouragement. Since then, several other measures have been introduced, all suggesting the protectionist role the EU has routinely attempted to convey to Europeans to justify its existence.

The Digital Services Act is supposed to "ensure a safe and accountable online environment," according to EU literature. When Twitter owner Elon Musk pulled the platform from the currently voluntary compliance with moderation and content control measures, EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton tweeted, "You can run, but you can't hide." Which doesn't sound controlling or the opposite of the kind of freedom that the EU constantly purports to defend.

According to the EU code, tech platforms like Twitter are connected with "fact-checkers, civil society, and third-party organizations with specific expertise on disinformation." In other words, they are avid gatekeepers of the establishment narrative. And on August 25th, adherence will no longer be voluntary.

The EU should consider getting out of the control freak business if it genuinely wants to help the European free press. Maybe then, journalists here in Europe trying our best to inform our audiences against information barriers created by Brussels won't have to redirect our internet connections to places like Vietnam, Mexico, Turkey, or Brazil to access information and sources the EU doesn't like.

Additional articles written by Rachel Marsden

Editor's Note | Rachel Marsden is an up-and-coming star in Journalism, like the American Pulitzer Prize recipient Seymour Hersh and Australian investigative journalist John Pilger.

What is the Side of the Story that is Not Yet Decisive? Edited by Abraham A. van Kempen.

THE ALTERNATIVE FACTS OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.

The Democratic Presidential candidate talks about his right-wing admirers, his distrust of scientists and the media, and his belief that the CIA was involved in JFK's death.

By David Remnick
The New Yorker Magazine
July 7, 2023

In November 2007, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, appeared on ABC News for one of those soft-focus get-to-know-the-candidate segments. After being at Harvard Law School for a while and feeling "comfortable" among his hyper-ambitious classmates, Obama admitted that he thought he might run for President someday. "Did you think to yourself, Barack, what kind of hubris is this?" the broadcaster Charlie Gibson said.

"I think if you don't have enough self-awareness to see the element of megalomania involved in thinking you can be President, then you probably shouldn't be President," Obama said. "There's a slight madness to thinking that you should be the leader of the free world."

I thought about that moment last week after finishing a lengthy interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Kennedy is running for President as a Democrat. He is polling between eight and twenty-one percent.

•

Kennedy has never run for public office, but at sixty-nine years old, he says he has "been involved in almost every Presidential election during the last sixty years."

•

Among the apparent parallels between Kennedy and Trump is their disdain for "élites," their suspicion of, in Trump's words, the "deep state," and their belief that traditional media and "cancel culture" threaten to silence them. With Kennedy, this is particularly curious. The Kennedys are the embodiment of dynastic power. Tens of thousands of books have been written about the family. It is impossible to imagine the tragedy and the privilege Kennedy experienced as a child and adolescent. His uncle was murdered when he was nine. His father was murdered when he was fourteen.

As a young man, he was kicked out of prep schools, got arrested for marijuana possession, was addicted to heroin, and still managed to graduate from Harvard. He now works as a lawyer, and his income last year was $7.8 million.

While Kennedy fashions himself as a warrior against the billionaire class, income inequality, and the corruption of institutions ranging from intelligence agencies to universities, he is a pure romantic about his family.

Camelot is his brand. As the polls indicate, the Kennedy name still carries weight among Democratic voters.

•

I'm finding it curious, and maybe even disturbing, that some of your early admirers include Trumpists like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone. Do you welcome that, or do you think maybe—just maybe—someone like that is delighted that a strong Democratic opponent will wound Joe Biden and, in the long run, help Donald Trump?

I'm trying to unite the country, David.

I'm not going to do what you do:
Pick out people and say they're evil; they should be canceled.
I'm a Democrat.
I know what my values are. I've always spoken to Republicans my entire life.

I was the only environmentalist who regularly went on Fox News while I was an environmental movement leader.

And, when Tucker Carlson recently did a special on endocrine disruptors, and the left condemned him, I thought that was wild. I think what we ought to be doing is inviting people into our tent without changing our values.

I don't change my values. I have the same values my father and uncle had and that I have harbored and fought for since I was a kid.

But that doesn't mean I'm unwilling to speak to people who don't share those values.
I think the kind of tribalism that you're advocating is poisonous to our country.

I think it's toxic. It's created a polarization, a division, in this country that is more dangerous than ever since the American Civil War.

Isn't there a difference between disagreement and—

What you're trying to get me to do now is to lash out against other Americans. And what I'm saying is: I disagree with what those people represent in many parts of their lives. I disagree with it, and I don't like it. But I'm still going to talk to them. I'm not going to cancel them.

I'm going to invite them into my tent.

If I can get them to support a vision of the idealistic America that I believe in—the same America that my father and my uncle believed in:

an America without censorship;
an America that fights for our Constitution;
An America that is a moral authority around the world that projects economic power around the globe rather than military violence—

if I can get people to support that,
I don't care if they're Republican or Independent or what they are.

These are democratic values.

At what point do you say, with respect, that this is not about "tribalism" or "cancellation" or the terms that you're using, but just an insistence on a certain level of decency and principle? Somebody like Alex Jones comes forward, and he has nice things to say to you. When do you say, "You know what, Alex Jones, with all due respect, I don't want your support"?

I'm not a cancel-culture guy.

That's not cancel culture. That's a principled insistence that he's a bridge too far.

Suppose you're just saying you will dismiss certain people because this human being is so irredeemable that I will exclude them from any future activity on the planet. In that case, I don't think that's consistent with my spiritual beliefs. It's not compatible with my political philosophy.

I believe that we should invite our enemies into the tent with us
to the extent that they want to break bread with us,
that they may want to endorse some of the values that we hold dear.

•

Kennedy seemed to be talking about Steve Bannon or Alex Jones and himself. "I believe in redemption," he said. "I got an opportunity for redemption in my own life, and plenty of people had good excuses to write me off forever."

Tell me about your sense of redemption. I think you're probably referring to problems with addiction.

I was a heroin addict for fourteen years. I'm lucky to be alive. People have plenty of reason to write me off forever because of how I conducted my life during those fourteen years. And, when I was at Riverkeeper, I made a point of hiring people who were felons, who were convicted, who had served their time in prison. And that divided the organization. I believe in redemption. I don't think we can dismiss human beings, no matter what they did earlier on in their lives.

Everybody gets another chance. And what Jesus said is,
Not only do you give them seven chances,
but you give them seven times seven opportunities.

•

You suffered something that I think is just beyond imagination. When you were a small child, your uncle, the President of the United States, was murdered in full view of the world. Five years later, your father, competing for the Democratic nomination for President, was murdered in full view of the world. I can't quite imagine what effect that would have on a human being, a child who's just growing up, and to live that life in the full view of the world. Later, you saw both assassinations as conspiracies with the CIA behind them. I want to know why you believe that when most do not and how that has shaped your thinking for the rest of your life.

Are you saying that most Americans do not believe President Kennedy's assassination was a conspiracy?

I want to know why you believe it. What leads you to believe it?

Nobody who has looked at my uncle's murder seriously believes that the Warren Commission was correct. I'm a trial lawyer. I've tried hundreds of cases.

I can guarantee you, looking at this case, that I could prove that the CIA caused my uncle's death. I have enough evidence, without any depositions, to prove that my uncle's death resulted from a conspiracy. And that the CIA was involved—not only in the original plot but in the sixty-year coverup—and continues to maintain the coverup.

What was the CIA's motivation?

They were angry at my uncle. Their initial anger came when he failed to invade the Bay of Pigs and provide air cover for [Cuban opponents of Fidel Castro], which they consider a betrayal. They had trained those men. Those men were dying on the beach. At that point, they believed that my uncle was a traitor to the United States. When my uncle and my father halted the raids on Cuba after the missile crisis, they agreed, as part of their agreement with Khrushchev during the missile crisis, to end the attacks from Miami by Alpha 66 and the other groups that were going into Cuba to halt them . . .

•

Kennedy believes the evidence of CIA involvement in "perpetrating my uncle's death is overwhelming. The evidence of CIA involvement with my father's death is circumstantial but highly suggestive." Talking about the murder of his father, Kennedy referred to a second gunman, stray bullets, and a mob lawyer whose body was later found "chopped up in a hundred pieces in an oil drum." Kennedy visited Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of murdering his father, in prison and supported his release.

I asked Kennedy if it was possible that his distrust of American institutions—regulatory agencies, the intelligence agencies, the medical establishment, the "mainstream media," and more—was rooted in his view of the assassinations. "Not at all," he said. It was only in the past decade or so, he said, that his interest was sparked by reading "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters" by James W. Douglass, which Oliver Stone has called "the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance."

•

Now, we were talking about President Biden before. First, just a short yes or no answer: Did you vote for him in the last election?

Yes, I did.

So what about the Biden Presidency, which came out of the Trump Presidency, obviously, so severely disappoints you that it causes you to run for President?

No. 1, the policies on the war.

I think it's self-evident that this has little to do with protecting the Ukraine.
It's more to do with the neocon ambition of deposing Vladimir Putin,
which I think is problematic.
I think regime change is always problematic but in a country with nuclear weapons? I would characterize it as close to insane.
And it's clear from President Biden's direct statements
that that is why he believes we should be in Ukraine.

So, if you were President now, would you withdraw military aid to Ukraine?

I would end the war. I would negotiate peace.

And what would that peace look like?

Well, you never know that until you negotiate.

Would you allow a peace that allowed much of eastern Ukraine and Crimea to remain in Russian hands?

I don't know what I would negotiate. I know the Russians had come to two different peace agreements, which were eminently reasonable. And so I don't—

What I'm asking is: what would be a reasonable peace?

Well, you know what? The answer to that question is strategic ambiguity. If I intend to be President of the United States, I won't tell my adversary my final negotiating position.

What about the voter?

I'm not going to—I'm going to negotiate. You negotiate a treaty.

During a political campaign [in 1968], your father said precisely what he would've done vis-à-vis the United States and Vietnam. As did Eugene McCarthy. [Both Kennedy and McCarthy said they wanted an end to the war in Vietnam.] Why is it unreasonable for you to—

I'm telling you exactly what I would do. I consider the terms of the Minsk Accords fair. And that's what Russia already offered to sign.

Now, you know, we have worsened our position in the debate clearly through these ill-advised policies of encouraging war, of refusing to negotiate, of refusing to even talk to our adversaries.

And my uncle, President Kennedy, repeatedly told the country, You've got to put yourself into your adversary's shoes. And he did that with Khrushchev. He put a hotline in our home in Massachusetts and the White House to pick up the phone and call Moscow because he was scared of provoking a nuclear response.

And today, Russia has more nuclear weapons than we do. We are toying with Armageddon here.

•

At a town hall recently, you said you were "proud" that Donald Trump likes you. Why is that? Donald Trump—I think you've criticized him in the past. Maybe we can agree that he threatens democratic norms and the rule of law. Why would you be proud that he likes you?

I'd be proud if President Biden liked me and—

They're pretty different figures, no?

Well, President Biden has also acted against our Constitution in many, many areas.
This is the first Administration in our history that has colluded with the press to censor Americans, including me, directly out of the White House.
And my purpose, my intention—

Read more: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Candidate for President of the United States

FEAR AND LOATHING ON AIR FORCE ONE

Biden’s anxieties over the Ukraine War and the election in 2024 come into view

BY Seymour Hersh
13 July 2023

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shakes hands with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, next to, from left to right, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, NL Prime Minister Mark Rutte, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, US President Joe Biden, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the NATO Summit on July 12 in Vilnius, Lithuania. / Photo by Paul Ellis, Pool/Getty Images.

Let’s start with a silly fear but one that does signal the Democratic Party’s growing sense of panic about the 2024 Presidential election. It was expressed to me by someone with excellent party credentials: that Trump could be the Republican nominee and would select Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his running mate. The strange duo will then sweep to a massive victory over a stumbling Joe Biden and take down many of the party’s House and Senate candidates.

As for tangible signs of acute Democratic anxiety: Joe Biden got what he needed before the NATO summit this week by somehow turning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inside out and getting him to rebuff Vladimir Putin by announcing that he would support NATO membership for Sweden. The public story for Biden’s face-saving coup was about agreeing to sell American F-16 fighter bombers to Turkey.

I have been told a different, secret story about Erdogan’s turnabout: Biden promised that a much-needed $11-13 billion line of credit would be extended to Turkey by the International Monetary Fund. “Biden had to have a victory, and Turkey is in acute financial stress,” an official with direct knowledge of the transaction told me. Turkey lost 100,000 people in the earthquake last February and has four million buildings to rebuild. “What could be better than Erdogan”—under Biden's tutelage, the official asked, “finally having seen the light and realizing he is better off with NATO and Western Europe?”

According to the New York Times, reporters were told that Biden called Erdogan while flying to Europe on Sunday. Biden’s coup, the Times reported, would enable him to say that Putin got “exactly what he did not want: an expanded, more direct NATO alliance.”

There was no mention of bribery.

A June analysis by Brad W. Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations, “Turkey’s Increasing Balance Sheet Risks,” said it all in the first two sentences—Erdogan won re-election and “now has to find a way to avoid what appears to be an imminent financial crisis.” The critical fact, Setser writes, is that Turkey “is on the edge of truly running out of usable foreign exchange reserves—and facing a choice between selling its gold, an avoidable default, or swallowing the bitter pill of a complete policy reversal and possibly an IMF program.”

Another critical element of Turkey's complicated economic issues is that Turkey’s banks have lent so much money to the nation’s central bank that “they cannot honor their domestic dollar deposits, should Turks ever ask for the funds back.”

The irony for Russia, and a reason for much anger in the Kremlin, Setser notes, is the rumor that Putin has been providing Russian gas to Erdogan on credit and not demanding that the state gas importer pay up. Putin’s generosity has flowed as Ergodan has been selling drones to Ukraine for use in its war against Russia. Turkey has also permitted Ukraine to ship its crops through the Black Sea.

All of this European political and economic double-dealing
was done openly and in plain sight.

Duplicity comes much differently in the United States.

Careful readers of the Washington Post and the New York Times can sense that the current Ukraine counter-offensive is going badly because stories about its progress, or lack thereof, have mostly disappeared from their front pages in recent weeks.

Last week Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, called in a few journalists to insist that Putin’s squabble with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner militia, was an armed mutiny that showed weakness in the Russian’s leader command and control of his military.

There’s simply no evidence for such assertions.

If anything, I was later told by those with access to current intelligence that Putin emerged more potent than ever after the Prigozhin implosion, which led to the absorption of many of his mercenaries into the Russian army.

Sullivan also took issue with the notion—he did not say where it originated—that the Biden administration was paralyzed by the threat of a Russian nuclear attack and would not fully support Ukraine.

He said such views were “nonsense,” citing Biden’s recent controversial decision to provide cluster bombs to the Ukraine military. He suggested that the anti-personnel weapons—each bomb can spread hundreds of bomblets—could give Ukraine an edge in the war and prompt Putin to deploy nuclear weapons.

               “It is a real threat,” Sullivan said, of a nuclear bomb.

               “And it does evolve with changing conditions on the ground.”

The only good news about such primitive and circular thinking, I have been told, is the impossibility at this point of any significant Ukraine success.

               “Biden’s principal issue in the war is that he’s screwed,” the informed official told me. “We didn’t give Ukraine cluster bombs earlier in the war, but we’re giving them cluster bombs now because that’s all we got left in the cupboard.

Aren’t these the bombs that are banned all over the world because they kill kids?

But the Ukrainians tell us they are not planning to drop them on civilians. And then, the administration claims that the Russians used them first in the war, which is just a lie.

               “In any case,” the official said, “cluster bombs have zero chance of changing the course of the war.” He said the real worry will come later this summer, perhaps as early as August, when the Russians, having easily weathered the Ukraine assault, will counter-strike with a major offensive. “What happens then?

               The US has painted itself in a corner by calling for NATO to do something. “Will NATO respond by sending the brigades now training in Poland and Romania on an airborne assault?” We knew more about the German army in Normandy in World War II than the Russian army in Ukraine.”

I have been told of other signs of internal stress inside the Biden administration.

Undersecretary of State for Policy Victoria Nuland has been “blocked” —a word used by one Democratic Party insider—from being promoted to replace the much respected Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman.

Nuland’s anti-Russian politics and rhetoric match the tone and point of view of Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken. And a newcomer to the upper reaches of the American intelligence community—CIA director Bill Burns—trumpeted his love for Biden and his intense dislike of all things Russian, including Putin, in a speech on 1 July 2023 in England.

Burns, a long-time diplomat who served as ambassador to Russia under George W. Bush as well as deputy secretary of state under Obama, had won the respect of a hard core of CIA officers and agents for his discrete handling of the nine-month planning and execution of the covert operation, approved by Biden, to destroy the Nord Steam I and II pipelines running from Russia to Germany.

He was the liaison between the intelligence team operating out of Norway and the Oval Office. When asked how much he needed to know, he accepted the CIA’s “very little” answer with aplomb.

Burns was also known for his warning, published in a memoir after his retirement as ambassador, that continued expansion of NATO to the east—NATO is now on the verge of totally covering Russia’s western border—would inevitably lead to conflict.

It was this nuance—the notion that Putin could be pushed only so far—that Burns recounted in the UK. “One thing I have learned,” he said, “is that it is always a mistake to underestimate Putin’s fixation on controlling Ukraine and its choices, without which he believes it is impossible for Russia to be a major power or him to be a great Russian leader. …

               Putin’s war already has been a strategic failure for Russia—its military weaknesses laid bare; its economy badly damaged for years to come; its future as a junior partner and economic colony of China being shaped by Putin’s mistakes; its revanchist ambitions blunted by a NATO which has only grown bigger and stronger.”

Biden, who is not revered throughout the CIA, as many presidents have not been, was cited repeatedly during his speech. The highly respected intelligence official explained Burns’s glowing words by telling me cryptically that all was in flux throughout the Biden national security bureaucracy. “Yes. Yes,” he said in a message. “Big shuffle. Big power struggle. Biden is oblivious. All the ants are fighting for the crumbs of a dying administration. They have advised all the professionals inside to shelter in place. Wait and see the color of the smoke from the Vatican Chancellery. Explain Burns’ Kool-Aid remarks in the UK.”

I was told that Burns’s speech was essentially a job application for secretary of state in a future government or perhaps in the one at hand. “He was showing his competence and his experience,” the official said, “He realized that he was going down the grain, professionally, while at the Agency.

He was awful”—that is, inexperienced—“but he realized it was not going well with the boys, and then he did right.” The critical issue for Burns, I was told, as some in the CIA saw it, was ambition. “Once you are a secretary of state, the world is your oyster.”

The official remarked that “running the CIA is not that much.” He cited the example of Stansfield Turner, a retired Navy admiral appointed CIA director 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. Turner and Carter had been midshipmen together at the US Naval Academy. After his retirement, Turner ended up giving speeches on ocean cruises.

Editorial | It Profits to Pull Wool Over Mindless Sheep to Follow Other Mindless Sheep.

Only fools – mindless sheep who follow other mindless sheep –
believe in Volodymyr Oleksandrovytsj Zelensky's (his real name is Vladimir Zelensky) authenticity in appealing to the NATO Top to slide Ukraine into
becoming a bona fide NATO Member State without the usual vetting and due diligence.

Why did President Zelensky go through so much trouble?

It’s theater.
The President of Ukraine had to go through the motions
to prove to the people of Ukraine that he genuinely cared for Ukraine
and that the EU-US/NATO Axis had dropped him like a hot potato.

Mr. Zelensky wasn’t born yesterday.
He is no dummy.
He is a lawyer, an actor, and a head of state.
He knows NATO does not want nuclear craters in their backyards, and neither does the President.

How did he become the President of Ukraine?
If the people of Ukraine support him,
why did he outlaw the Ukrainian Underground – the Opposition –
and imprison the dissidents, including journalists and the clergy.
What does he NOT want the Ukrainian people to know?

I miss good journalism. 

_________________________

Related Articles Recently Posted on www.buildingthebridgefoundation.com:

Our Friday News Analysis | 'Our Friday News Analysis | How Do You Love Your Enemies? Have None! (Part 12),' 7 July 2023.

Our Wednesday News Analysis | 'Dispelling the myths about Palestinian refugees — in Jenin and beyond,' 12 July 2023.

The Evangelical Pope| 'In Prayer It's Not Us Versus Them, It's We …' 10 July 2023.

_________________________

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of the Building the Bridge Foundation, The Hague.