| China Detains High-Profile Australian Citizen and State TV Anchor Under Mysterious CircumstancesPosted: 31 Aug 2020 09:53 AM PDTIn another huge shot across the bow in the ongoing tit-for-tat media and journalism ban between China and the West, a high-profile Australian television anchor has been detained by authorities in Beijing.Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne confirmed Monday that Cheng Lei, who it turns out is a veteran news anchor for the Chinese government’s English news channel, CGTN, is being prevented from returning to her home country. She’s been detained and placed in secured isolation for an indeterminate amount of time.“The Australian Government has been informed that an Australian citizen, Ms Cheng Lei, has been detained in China,” the Australian government statement said. “Formal notification was received on 14th of August from Chinese authorities of her detention,” it continued, though news of her detention is only now being reported via Australia’s ABC.“Australian officials had an initial consular visit with Ms Cheng at a detention facility via video link on 27th of August and will continue to provide assistance and support to her and her family,” it continued.It was friends and colleagues who first noticed she was “missing” as she didn’t return messages over a period of weeks. She also hadn’t appeared on her most recent show, CGTN’s Global Business, after long being one of its premier hosts.Strongly suggesting that Lei could actually be under suspicion of spying or passing sensitive information to the Australian government, or other serious breach of her work for state-run CGTN, her employment profile page detailing eight years of accomplishments for CGTN has been taken down and all videos of her previous stories have been scrubbed.Australian media says she hasn’t been charged, yet has been detained under a draconian Chinese law allowing security services to detain and question a suspect for up to six months with no access to a lawyer or outside communications.It comes as tensions between Canberra and Beijing escalate primarily over the recently enacted Hong Kong national security law, which resulted in Australia suspending its extradition treaty with Hong Kong, after which China vowed retaliation.Sad news. Cheng lei well known and liked in Australian circles in Beijing. Her arrest has shocked Australians in the city https://t.co/4cwCb4iqqY— Glenda Korporaal (@GlendaKorporaal) August 31, 2020Chinese authorities have indicated she’s currently held in “residential surveillance at a designated location”, ABC notes.Another Australian citizen and news correspondent, Yang Hengjun, had previously been detained January 2019, and has reportedly yet to be provided access to his lawyers.Republished from ZeroHedge.com with permissionThe post China Detains High-Profile Australian Citizen and State TV Anchor Under Mysterious Circumstances appeared first on We Are Change. |
| Director of National Intelligence Coordinating With John Durham to Declassify Trump-Russia Collusion DocsPosted: 30 Aug 2020 05:12 PM PDTJohn Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that he has been coordinating with US attorney John Durham and plans to soon declassify more documents related to the Trump-Russia probe.“I pledged to a bipartisan group of senators that I would look at all of the underlying intelligence surrounding the intelligence community’s assessment of Russia’s interference and this idea of Trump-Russia collusion, but I’m not going to prejudice John Durham’s work in connection with that, so we’ve had to coordinate with his office about the timing of that. But I’m optimistic that I’ll be declassifying additional documents soon.”As a reminder, Durham, the US attorney for Connecticut, is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into several aspects of the Obama administration’s surveillance activities against Trump associates. Ratcliffe went on, referring to Durham’s review of the investigation:“He’s looking at the same documents that I am,”“He’s not sharing his findings or the work that he’s doing. But I’m coordinating with him to make sure that he has the intelligence documents that he needs to do his work. And what I don’t want to do is declassify something that might prejudice his work. So we’re going to have to coordinate as we go forward with the completion of his work with my ability to declassify documents.”Additionally, Ratcliffe, said Sunday he has filed multiple “crimes reports” regarding alleged leaks of classified information to the media.“When I become aware of intelligence community information that is disclosed unlawfully, I do what’s called a crimes report. I’ve done that now on a number of occasions, and so those investigations are moving forward.”He said that the leaks were “for political purposes” to create what he said is a false narrative “that somehow Russia is a greater national security threat than China.”As Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross notes, Ratcliffe’s decision to limit election-related intelligence briefings prompted outrage from Democrats who say that he is withholding information about Russian meddling to provide political cover for President Donald Trump.Watch the full interview here:Republished from ZeroHedge.com with permissionThe post Director of National Intelligence Coordinating With John Durham to Declassify Trump-Russia Collusion Docs appeared first on We Are Change. |
| Dem Convention Made No Mention of Russiagate or Impeachment, Because Those Were Fake ThingsPosted: 30 Aug 2020 03:41 PM PDTThe only interesting thing about either of the conventions held by America’s two mainstream political parties this month was not anything that was said by the interminable parade of vapid speakers, but rather what those speakers did not say.Despite their dominating mainstream news cycles for years on end, at no time during the four-day Democratic National Convention was the word “impeachment” ever uttered, nor was any mention made of the Mueller investigation into allegations of collusion between Trump and the Russian government.Politico reports:Eight months after Democrats mounted a historic effort to remove Donald Trump from office, not a single speaker uttered the word “impeachment” during their four-day convention.…For Democrats to completely omit impeachment from their convention was once unthinkable. Democrats had mounted a case that Trump had abused his power to blackmail Ukraine into investigating his political adversaries, including Biden. And they made an existential argument that without removing him from office, Trump’s behavior would get worse and democracy itself would be at risk.…Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia — which Democrats once thought could topple Trump for obstruction of justice — also went unmentioned, even as it was a defining feature of Trump’s nearly four years in office.At DNC, “the word ‘impeachment’ [was] entirely left out over the course of the 4-night event. Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia… also went unmentioned, even as it was a defining feature of Trump’s nearly 4 years in office.” ?https://t.co/Dgt9WQ3LeA pic.twitter.com/q8EvEthwZq— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) August 28, 2020“The fact that Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to even mention Russiagate or Ukrainegate (the first-ever sequel to a flop?) at their convention should maybe hasten some reflection for those who made these issues the ‘defining feature of Trump’s nearly four years in office,’” quipped incisive Russiagate skeptic Aaron Maté of the omission on Twitter.“Next on Unsolved Mysteries: Democrats and media allies accused Donald Trump of being a Russian agent for four years,” Maté added. “They chanted ‘All Roads Lead to Putin’ and ‘The Walls Are Closing In.’ But at their political convention, they forgot all about it. Did Russia give them amnesia?”“I personally feel like if the President of the US seeking re-election is beholden to and controlled by an adversarial foreign power, the opposition party should find a few seconds to squeeze in a mention of it if, you know, it wasn’t utter bullshit,” tweeted The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald.And, of course, it was utter bullshit. And that is indeed why the Democrats saw no need to mention it at their own four-day convention despite dominating news cycles with it for years. Russiagate and Ukrainegate were never the cataclysmic scandals that the Democrats and their allied media factions portrayed them as. They weren’t even actually about getting rid of Trump.In an extremely strange and confounding development, the Democrats *never once* mentioned what this NYT columnist calls “the biggest lie in American politics” at their Convention.In fairness, they only had 4 full nights so maybe they couldn’t squeeze in any mention of it. https://t.co/TMJkoiX199 pic.twitter.com/BvYjH4VZTc— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 28, 2020Anyone with an ear to the ground knew that Russiagate would fizzle, and anyone capable of counting Senate seats knew impeachment would fail to remove Trump. The drivers of these attention-monopolizing narratives knew this also.If there’d been any solid evidence to find that the Kremlin was blackmailing Trump, or that his campaign had conspired with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election, the US intelligence community would have found some of it and leaked it to The Washington Post long before Trump took office. The Russiagate narrative has been completely dismantled from the very beginning by journalists like the late Robert Parry, and then Maté after Parry’s death. There was never any real evidence for it, and the people pushing Russiagate from the beginning knew there was never any real evidence for it.All you really need to know about Russiagate was that it was started by unsubstantiated claims by the US intelligence community, and in the end it facilitated pre-existing plans by the US intelligence community. Everything else in between those two points is just empty narrative fluff.In 2017 Parry documented how the original assessment that Russia meddled in the US election in the first place was put forward without proof by just a couple dozen officers from three intelligence agencies hand-picked by the perjurer and notoriously Russophobic then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Maté has documented that this allegation remains just as suspicious and porous as the day it was first made. Despite having sweeping investigative powers Mueller indicted not one single American for conspiracy with the Russian government. The recent evidence-free Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report did nothing to change the flimsy nature of the entire Russiagate narrative.So the whole thing has been plainly bogus from the beginning, with the foundation laid by secretive and unaccountable intelligence agencies who have an extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing. And it just so happens to have paved the way for operations against a longtime geostrategic foe that were being unfolded well before Trump’s arrival in the White House.This is an excerpt from an article by legendary Australian journalist John Pilger from March 2016:In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.Ukraine — once part of the Soviet Union — has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia — the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.This was all happening during the Obama administration. But he was still more doveish than the spooks and cold warriors who drive US foreign policy would prefer, resisting for example loud calls from the warmongers to arm Ukraine against Moscow and forcibly install a no-fly zone in Russia’s ally Syria.The heir apparent to Obama’s throne, Hillary Clinton, did not suffer from such peacenik scruples. She’d already been making people on both sides of the aisle nervous with her anti-Russia hawkishness, and supported both arming Ukraine and installing a no-fly zone in Syria.So these escalations were already underway, and more were being prepared for.Then what happened? Somehow a political neophyte who’d been talking about making nice with Russia got in instead.We suddenly found ourselves bombarded with narratives from the US intelligence community and its mass media stenographers about Russian election meddling and Trump playing some mysterious role in it. These narratives were pushed with steadily increasing frequency and shrillness, with the help of a humiliated Democratic Party that stood everything to gain by participating, until those of us who expressed any skepticism of them at all were being accused on a daily basis by MSM-brainwashed dupes of running psyops for the Russian government.We were never at any time presented with any proof of these claims which rose anywhere near the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world, but we were hammered with them anyway, day in and day out, year after year.This ended up putting a lot of political pressure on Trump to keep existing sanctions and military tensions with Russia, and he ended up adding dozens more new cold war escalations including further sanctions, shredded nuclear treaties, NATO expansionism and more. He even armed Ukraine due to these pressures, just like the anointed queen was scheduled to do.For years, neocons and arms industry darlings like @RepAdamSchiff have sought to re-arm Ukraine and escalate the conflict in Donbas. By stirring up Russiagate, they finally got their deadly deal. My latest: https://t.co/pyJB4btOSk— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 8, 2018The cold warriors wanted their escalations, and they got them. From beginning to the end, that’s all this was ever about. They pushed the narratives, the media joined in because it was great for ratings, and the Democrats joined in because it took the focus off their 2016 scandals and gave them a kayfabe phantom to punch instead of pushing for actual progressive changes.And now the slow motion third world war between the US-centralized power alliance and the loose collective of unabsorbed governments is right on schedule, with Biden all set and ready to carry the omnicidal torch forward. The 2016 scandals are well enough forgotten, no progressive changes have been made, and there is no need to talk about Russiagate or impeachment at the Democratic National Convention.Because everyone already got what they wanted. Everyone except ordinary people, of course.Republished from CaitlinJohnstone.com with permissionThe post Dem Convention Made No Mention of Russiagate or Impeachment, Because Those Were Fake Things appeared first on We Are Change. |
