Greg Palast's Blog, page 88
August 25, 2015
New Orleans: I’m not celebrating
By Greg Palast
This week, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, The Palast Investigative Fund is offering my film, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans as a FREE download. 
It wasn’t a natural disaster, it was a homicide. This is the story you’re not supposed to know. Get it, and pass on the link.
Screw the celebration. New Orleans hasn’t “come back.” That is, there are still the Bourbon Street bars serving “Hurricanes” to sloshed tourists and Mardi Gras when white Americans can catch trinkets from floats floating over the ghosts of the drowned.
New Orleans is back to 79% of its pre-flood population. Why am I not cheering? Because the original residents—that is, the majority of the pre-flood Black residents—are still wandering in America’s cruel economic desert.
And the pols of Louisiana love it. Louisiana had a Democratic governor. The purge of the voter rolls by flood has changed that forever.
Watch my film and meet Stephen Smith, who couldn’t swim, but floated on a mattress from rooftop to rooftop to save the lives of his neighbors. Smith brought them to a bridge over the rising waters. They waited for four days without food or water, as helicopters buzzed overhead. Undoubtedly, one was President Bush’s copter, heading to his self-congratulatory press conference.
Stephen saved a grandpa and his family. Almost. The grandfather gave his water bottle to his grandkids. Then the old man died of dehydration. Waiting.
Stephen returned to New Orleans, to kick around the rubble that was his home. He was bussed off to Texas—and now an immigrant has his job at the Marriott in the French Quarter. He was desperately trying to connect with his children, bussed to another state.
There are heroes in my film. In July 2005, Professor Ivor van Heerden of the Louisiana State University Hurricane center warned on British TV: “In one month, this city could be under water.” In one month, it was. For warning of the future – in fact, for calling the White House before the storm to warn them, van Heerden was fired.
He was fired because Chevron Corporation was deeply unhappy that Dr. Van Heerden fingered the culprit in the city’s drowning. It wasn’t Katrina, he explained, Katrina turned 35 miles east of the city. It was the oil industry—the killer drillers who, with greedy abandon, chopped and slashed away dozens of miles of Nature’s protective barrier of bayous which once kept the Gulf from entering the city.
And there’s Malik Rahim (pictured above), the African-American community leader, who seized and rebuilt housing over the objection of New Orleans’ landlords. He looked over the Lafitte Homes and other choice property that developers had long coveted. He told me, “They just wanted them poor niggers out of there.”
And they got what they wanted. New Orleans without the New Orleanians.
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Download Big Easy to Big Empty for FREE, or get the DVD with extras including my interview with Amy Goodman.
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits which includes a 48-page comic by Ted Rall, Palast's other bestsellers are The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic
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August 23, 2015
Get the Snowden Bio Today Because...
… we aren’t running out of oil, we’re running out of HEROISM. Ted Rall’s biography in cartoon form is a how-to book on how to make a hero—the creation of courage.
… because Rall, in full color, with humor and insight and facts you need to know, pulls down the pants of the spy-on-you state and exposes the pathetic, mean and dangerous.
... because Snowden, even before its release Tuesday, is already the #1 Graphic Biography. Get the book RIGHT NOW and Ted can hit the Times list—and that means Snowden’s face will be in every airport and newsstand — just like the NSA.
I need you to get the book now!
"Dramatic, Evocative, Important"
– Noam Chomsky
Order your copy on Amazon or B&N and help get the book on the bestseller list.
Or make a tax-deductible donation of $50 or more to get a signed copy of Snowden.
100% goes to support Ted’s work.
I’m proud that Ted Rall is a Journalism Fellow of the Palast Investigative Fund. As we’ve previously reported, Rall was fired last month by the LA Times because of pressure from the LAPD.
Many thanks to those of you who have supported him in this battle against censorship at its ugliest.
And no doubt, the LAPD will hate this book too. Snowden reveals the sinister connect between the NSA spys-gone-wild story and the militarization of local policing. — Greg P
Check out these pages from the book.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits which includes a 48-page comic by Ted Rall, Palast's other bestsellers are The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic
HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!
Follow Palast on Twitter | Like Palast on Facebook | Forward to a friend
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter | Podcasts
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August 5, 2015
Cops Gun Down un-Armed Journalist’s Career LA Times fires Ted Rall – evidence blows up in newspaper’s face
By Greg Palast | Reader Supported News
Ted Rall is a lying, fantasist scumbag.
Or maybe, just maybe, the LA Times,complicit with the Los Angeles police, have slandered and slimed America’s toughest critic of police violence.
The story: On July 27, the LA Times fired their long-time columnist and cartoonist Ted Rall for fabricating a story of police misconduct. The LA Times’ evidence? A tape recording provided by the LAPD. Problem was, the tape was muffled—possibly tampered with.
When audio experts cleaned the garbage interference on the tape—uh, oh!- the LAPD and LA Times accusations fell to pieces.
The details: On May 11, Ted Rall wrote his umpteenth column in the LA Times, LAPD's Crosswalk Crackdown: Don't Police Have Something Better to do? about gang violence: the gang is the LAPD. This was Rall’s lightest jab of all, a satirical remembrance of when, 14 years earlier, a cop put him in handcuffs for a simple jaywalking ticket.
Unbeknownst to Rall, the jaywalker-stalker cop had recorded this big bust. The LAPD dropped the tape on the Times.
Ted Rall’s new book-length comic, Snowden
will be released on August 25.
Pre-order it from Amazon, B&N & others and get him on the bestseller list – or make a tax-deductible donation and get a copy signed by Ted.
100% of the proceeds will go to Rall’s defense. Or lend you support by making a No Gift Donation.
(Rall is a Fellow of The Palast Investigative Fund)
The police source said the recording and other info proved Rall was lying. That the tape proved that Rall had never been handcuffed – nor, as Rall wrote in his column, was there a group of onlookers complaining about the cop’s over-kill.
In other words, ‘they’ said and the Times accepted, Rall just made up the whole handcuff-and-crowd thing to smear the LAPD. On that basis, LA Times editor Nick Goldberg printed and signed a big-splash editorial saying, in effect, Rall had committed the unpardonable sin of fabricating a story—and Rall was fired.
This, of course, would end Rall’s career as a syndicated newspaper columnist and cartoonist.
And I was going to have to fire Rall too. Rall is a journalism fellow of the Palast Investigative Fund, the not-for-profit foundation that backs our work. If the charges were true, I wouldn’t hesitate to fire Rall’s lying ass—but only after I break his pen and cut off his fingers.
I demanded a copy of the recording for our audio experts to review – and asked Rall to do the same.
Oh, mama! To my surprise – and Rall’s glee – the crowd that he had allegedly fantasized about suddenly came alive – with three women shouting, “Why’d you handcuff him?” and “Take off his handcuffs!”– the handcuffs that were supposedly fabricated by Rall. (One woman helpfully suggested to the officer, “Don’t forget to ride his ---hole!”)
Listen to it yourself, or read the true transcript. Check this against the LAPD’s incomplete transcript.
As an investigative reporter, I was astonished that the LA Times did not even bother to do an independent analysis of the tape. Rall told me that a Times reporter, Paul Pringle, told him the Times simply accepted the recording transcript as truthful because it came from the LAPD.
And the LAPD hates hates hates Rall.
I can’t blame them, given Rall’s reports and caustic drawings, the truth hurts. The LA police union wrote that it “applauds [the] LA Times firing of cartoonist Rall,” whose drawings drew blood from the police force infamous for its gang-style beating of the handcuffed Rodney King.
Rall said that reporter Pringle told him that, to bolster their case against Rall, the LAPD source said that the arresting cop, Will Durr, never used handcuffs in petty violation stops. However, by coincidence, a news report about that very same cop, Durr, handcuffing a driver on a routine traffic stop appeared in… The LA Times.
Oops!
My calls to the Times’ “investigative reporter” Pringle went unanswered. LA Times opinion editor Nicolas Goldberg, whom I know and have long respected, said he was not authorized not go on record to defend his paper. The smell of panic in the Times’ executive suite is getting stronger.
So I called the LAPD. Did they drop the garbled tape and false transcript on their critic? Oddly, spokesman Officer Mike Lopez, who knew the story well, could not confirm the LAPD was the source. Then, was it stolen from official police files?
Would the LAPD conduct an internal affairs investigation of the theft or mis-use of confidential police files?
Ironically, the LA Times is the biggest metropolitan daily in the USA with the guts to print Rall––and even pick up a Palast story or two. Clearly, the heat from The Heat is on. I really do hope that, in light of this new information, the paper will do the right thing and retract their statement.
Whatever the original justification for the Times’ printed attack, to let it stand uncorrected now, in light of the new uncontroverted evidence, would violate core standards of journalistic ethics.
As for the Palast Fund, with the evidence now in hand, we will fight this attack on our journalist.
And, if the Times won’t carry Rall’s reports, GregPalast.com will. Sign up here and get his reports and ‘toons free of charge.
The issue: Killing, not Jaywalking
Why am I supporting Rall? Because this is not about jaywalking. This is about killing. Police killings. And the ability of journalists to report just the facts, ma’am, free of fear of retribution by the police or media executives.
Rall’s career was gunned down by a phony transcript of a recording of a bust.
This follows close on the shooting death of an unarmed 29-year-old homeless veteran by an LAPD officer on the Venice Beach boardwalk. Brendon Glenn was known as a sometimes surly, but ultimately harmless, alcoholic. Near midnight on May 6, after he appeared to accost a local resident, two cops wrestled Glenn to the ground.
The original statement by the LA chief of police, Charlie Beck, stated that, “an altercation occurred between the two officers and the suspect. During that physical altercation, an officer-involved shooting occurred.” But security camera tape would later reveal that just wasn’t true.
In fact, film from a local store camera revealed that, for reasons unknown, one cop stepped away from his partner who had Glenn on the ground, then turned and fired two mortal shots into the homeless man.
An associate of the Palast investigations team, investigative reporter and former CBS news anchor Bree Walker, has been reviewing the case.
What Walker and every other newsperson has to worry about now is, will reporting the full story of police violence result in a slander and smear campaign against the investigating reporter?
The police believe they have silenced Rall, that his public pillorying by the Times “serves as an example” – a warning to troublesome journalists. Rall, to their dismay, is proving more of an example of undeterred courage.
We can only hope that, given the new evidence, the Times restores not just Rall’s reputation, but its own.
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits which includes a 48-page comic by Ted Rall, Palast's other bestsellers are The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic
HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund's store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!
Follow Palast on Twitter | Like Palast on Facebook | Forward to a friend
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter | Podcasts
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July 6, 2015
GREECE’D: We Voted ‘No’ to slavery, but ‘Yes’ to our chains
Greek journalist Michael Nevradakis and US investigative journalist Greg Palast have a different take on the Greek ‘No’ vote against Europe’s cruel austerity demands.
By Michael Nevradakis in Athens with Greg Palast in New York | Oped-News
We Greeks have voted ‘No’ to slavery – but ‘Yes’ to our chains.
Not surprisingly, by nearly two-to-one, Greeks have overwhelmingly rejected the cruel, economically bonkers “austerity” program required by the European Central Bank in return for an ECB loan to pay Greece’s creditors. In doing so, the Greek people overcame an unprecedented campaign of fear from the Greek and international media, the European Union (EU), and most of our political parties.
What’s simply whack-o is that, while voting “No” to austerity, many Greeks wish to remain shackled to the euro, the very cause of our miseries.
Resistance, not Crisis
Before we explain how the euro is the cause of this horror show, let’s clear up one thing right away. All week, worldwide media was filled with news of the Greek “crisis.” Yes, the economy stinks, with one in four Greeks unemployed. But two other euro nations, Spain and Cyprus, also are suffering this depression level of unemployment. Indeed, more than 11% of workers in seven euro nations, including Portugal and Italy, are out of work.
But unlike Greece, these other suffering nations have quietly acquiesced to their “austerity” punishments. Spaniards now accept that they are fated forevermore to be low-paid servants to beer-barfing British tourists. Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, who has enacted a draconian protest ban at home to keep his own suffering masses at bay, has joined in the jackal-pack rejecting anything but the harshest of austerity terms for Greece.
The difference between these quiescent nations and Greece is that the Greeks won’t take it anymore.
What the media calls the Greek “crisis” is, in fact, resistance.
Resistance to nowhere
But it’s a resistance whose leaders are leading them nowhere.
For decades, Greeks have suffered governments that are both corrupt and dishonest. The election of SYRIZA changed all that: the government is now merely dishonest.
Our new SYRIZA Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, correctly called the austerity plan “blackmail.” However, before Sunday’s vote, Tsipras told the nation a big fat fib. He said we could vote down the European Bank’s plan but keep the European Bank’s coin, the euro. How? Tsipras won’t say; it’s part of a policy ploy his outgoing finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls “creative ambiguity.” To translate: Creative ambiguity is Greek for “bullshit.”
Sorry, Alexis, if you want to use the Reich’s coin you have to accept the Reichsdiktat.
Not a coin, a virus
Tsipras’ claim that Greece can keep the euro while rejecting austerity is crazy-talk. The fact is that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Cruella De Vil of the Eurozone, will ignore the cries of the bleeding Greeks and demand we swallow austerity--or lose the euro.
But, so what if we lose the euro? The best thing that can happen to Greece, and should have happened long, long ago, is that Greece flee the Eurozone.
That’s because it is the euro itself that is the virus responsible for Greece’s economic ills.
Indeed, the sadistic commitment to “austerity” was minted into the coin’s very metal. We’re not guessing. One of us (Palast, an economist by training) has had long talks with the acknowledged “father” of the euro, Professor Robert Mundell. It’s important to mention the other little bastard spawned by the late Prof. Mundell: “supply-side” economics, otherwise known as “Reaganomics,” “Thatcherism” – or, simply “voodoo” economics.
The imposition of the euro had one true goal: To end the European welfare state.
For Mundell and the politicians who seized on his currency concept, the euro itself would be the vector infecting the European body politic with supply-side Reaganomics. Mundell saw a euro’d Europe as free of trade unions and government regulations; a Europe in which the votes of parliaments were meaningless. Each Eurozone nation, unable to control neither the value of its own currency, nor its own budget, nor its own fiscal policy, could only compete for business by slashing regulations and taxes. Mundell said, "[The euro] puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians… Without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business."
Here’s how it works. To join the Eurozone, nations must agree to keep their deficits to no more than 3% of GDP and total debt to no more than 60% of GDP. In a recession, that’s plain insane. By contrast, President Obama pulled the USA out of recession by increasing deficit spending to a staggering 9.8% of GDP, and he raised the nation’s debt to 101% from a pre-recession 62%. Republicans screamed, but it worked. The US has lower unemployment than any Eurozone nation.
As Obama scolded the European tormentors of Greece: “You cannot keep on squeezing countries that are in the midst of depression.” Cutting spending power only leads to less spending which leads to further cuts in spending power – a death spiral we see today in the Eurozone from Greece to Italy to Spain—but not in Germany.
“Not in Germany.” There’s the rub. Normally, a nation such as Greece can quickly recover from debt-induced recession by devaluing its currency. Greece would become a dirt cheap tourist destination once more and its lower-cost exports would zoom, instantly increasing competitiveness. And that’s what Germany can’t allow. Germany lured other European nations into the euro in order to keep them from undercutting Germany’s prices in export markets.
Restricted by the 3% deficit rule, the only recourse left for Eurozone debtors: pay the piper with “austerity” measures.
Tsipras in Wonderland
So therein lies the lie. Tsipras tells his fellow Greeks that we can live in a Looking Glass world, where we can have our euro and eat it too; that we can stay handcuffed to the euro but run free without austerity.
The nonsense continues: Following the announcement of the official results of the referendum on Sunday night, Tsipras tweeted that the Greek electorate voted for a "Europe of solidarity and democracy," while the now-resigned finance minister Varoufakis tweeted that "Greece's place in the Eurozone is non-negotiable," claiming that he would not allow the "only alternative," the old drachma trading alongside the euro.
SYRIZA's euro-fetish was already evident in its pre-referendum proposals to the IMF and European Bank, a 47-page document which included 8 billion euros in new austerity measures plus a new round of sell-offs of state industries, the maintenance of a primary surplus of 1% this year which would increase in the coming years, the increase of the retirement age to 67, and making permanent the previously "temporary" taxes upon an already overtaxed populace. In Tsipras’ own proposal, there was no word of a debt write-down or stoppage of payments, despite the fact that the government's own Debt Audit Commission announced on June 17 that the bulk of Greece's debt is illegal, “odious,” and should not be paid.
Instead, Tsipras has come out in support of the IMF's proposal for a mere 30% "debt haircut" and a 20-year grace period, effectively sweeping the problem under the rug. Greece is currently running a deficit, meaning that in order for the 1% surplus to be achieved, SYRIZA must cut, cut, cut. Exactly as Mundell and the supply-siders intended.
Death by “Reform”
Like Obama, Tsipras knows that cutting pensions, privatizing and closing industries, slashing wages – in other words, “austerity” -- or, to use the latest jargon, “reform” – is not just cruel, it’s plain stupid: it can only push a nation in recession into depression.
That’s not just theory. The Troika (the European Central Bank, IMF and European Commission) first imposed their vicious austerity measures on Greece in 2010. Greeks watched their annual salaries plummet to half of a German’s paycheck. Greece's supposedly generous pensions have been cut eight times during the crisis, while two-thirds of pensioners live below the poverty line. Everything from Greece's airports to harbors, the national lottery to prime publicly-owned real estate was sold off, while schools and hospitals were shuttered.
And, for the first time since World War II, widespread starvation had returned. 500,000 children in Greece are said to be malnourished. Students fainting from hunger in frigid schools which cannot afford heating oil is now a common phenomenon.
This cruel “belt tightening,” the Troika promised, would restore Greece’s economy by 2012 (and then 2013, 2014, and 2015). In reality, unemployment went from a terrible 12.5% in 2010 to a horrendous 25.6% today.
Now, the Troika demands more of the same, a continuation of this disastrous policy.
Crashing into Africa?
Meanwhile, following the referendum result which made him a hero, finance minister Varoufakis resigned. Ironically, while Varoufakis rubbed German officials the wrong way with his unorthodox style, he, too, maintained the pro-euro myth. Previous austerity measures continued under his watch. To please the mad austerity masters, he said he would "squeeze blood from a stone" to repay the IMF—which he did in May, when all remaining funds in the Greek Treasury were rounded up by presidential decree to make that month's IMF loan payment. Varoufakis was so wedded to the euro that he claimed that Greece would be unable to print its old currency, the drachma, because we destroyed our currency printing presses when we joined the euro. In fact, the government's banknote printing facility in Athens still operates, printing the 10-euro note.
Meanwhile, our future flees. A quarter million university graduates have abandoned our nation. They have no choice: unemployment for those under 25 has hit 48.6%.
I know that many Greeks, Cypriots, Italians and Portuguese all express a visceral fear of leaving the euro. Depending on which polls one chooses to believe, anywhere from a near-majority to an overwhelming majority of Greeks wish to remain in the euro at all costs. From the hysterical statements I heard from some Greeks that, “We cannot leave Europe!”, you’d think that dropping the euro will cause Greece to break off at the Albanian border and crash into Africa.
It would be refreshing to hear political leaders say the honest economic truth: “Workers of Europe unite! You have nothing to lose but the euro—and your chains.”
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Michael Nevradakis is host of Dialogos Radio in Athens.
The Greek edition of Greg Palast’s book, Vultures’ Picnic, will soon be released by Livanis Publishing.
July 2, 2015
Greece: What they don’t want you to know
From Greg Palast’s investigative reports for Greek and US news
Trojan Hearse: Greek Elections and the Euro Leper Colony
Europe is stunned, and bankers aghast, that the new party of the Left, Syriza, won Sunday's parliamentary elections in Greece.
Syriza won on the promise that it will cure Greece of leprosy.
Euro Krieg! Greece Surrenders to Germany 2013 Greg Palast Interviewed by Greek Radio
"To me, Greece is a crime scene," said Palast. "Greece is dying, and austerity is one of the things that killed it." He rebuked the recent proclamations made by Greek and EU officials deeming Greece an economic "success story," describing them as "nonsense."
Lazy Ouzo-Swilling, Olive-Pit Spitting Greeks - Or, How Goldman Sacked Greece
Here's what we're told: Greece's economy blew apart because a bunch of olive-spitting, ouzo-guzzling, lazy-ass Greeks refuse to put in a full day's work, retire while they're still teenagers, pocket pensions fit for a pasha; and they've gone on a social-services spending spree using borrowed money. Now that the bill has come due and the Greeks have to pay with higher taxes and cuts in their big fat welfare state, they run riot, screaming in the streets, busting windows and burning banks.
I don't buy it. I don't buy it because of the document in my hand marked, "RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION."
It wasn't too difficult picking out the Fat Bastard in the crowd of Russian models, craven moochers and media mavens. Besides, Fat Bastard and I were both desperate for coffee and heading for the same empty urn.
The Golden Dawn Murder Case - Larry Summers and the New Fascism
On September 18, hip-hop artist Pavlos Fyssas, a.k.a. Killah P, was stabbed outside a bar in Keratsini, Greece. Larry Summers has an air-tight alibi. But I don't believe it.
Vultures' Picnic - Chapter One: Goldfinger
Two weeks after the Deepwater Horizon caught fire and sank, Greece caught fire and sank. On May 5, 2010, I open up the Journal and I could puke. There was this photo of a man on fire, just a bunch of flames with a leg sticking out. Two others burnt with him on a pretty spring day in Athens.
The question is, Who did it?
The Golden Dawn Murder Case Larry Summers and the New Fascism
June 14, 2015
Ain't No Crime to Rhyme with Greg Palast
May 21, 2015
Osama bin Laden Read My Book That's what the government told us, but what is it NOT telling us?
By Greg Palast | The Guardian
Finding out that The Best Democracy Money Can Buy was on the Bin Laden bookshelf confirms my fears about America’s war on whistleblowers
I already knew that Osama bin Laden read my book before the headlines this week – but I’m still angry that he gave The Best Democracy Money Can Buy only four-and-a-half stars on his Amazon review. Obviously, something in the book pissed him off, because he never friended me on Facebook.
It was actually quite embarrassing to learn that Bin Laden was reading my tome – and a few by my homie Noam Chomsky. It’s embarrassing because it’s clear that Bin Laden was more well-read than our president of the time (though, in George W Bush’s defence, there’s much to be learned from My Pet Goat).
I do hope Osama made it to page 229. I talk about a guy who worked at my office, Clinton Davis. Before I left to write for the Guardian and Observer, my office was in Tower 2 of the World Trade Center. Davis, a cop, was safe at ground level, but he ran upstairs to save others – and disappeared, forever. Did Bin Laden get a little laugh out of that one? At least he got to know his victim’s name.
Get a signed copy of the book.
Osama wouldn't be caught dead without it!
And what did Bin Laden think of my investigation of the 9/11 attack? While working at Newsnight, a few weeks after the towers fell, a little birdie dropped off a 30-page memo marked “SECRET,” “eyes only” and “1-99I WF”, which is code for “national security document”. The document suggested that FBI agents were blocked from investigating the Bin Laden family well before 11 September 2001. Calls to the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA and FBI insiders authenticated this bombshell of a devastating intelligence failure.
No, the evidence did not show that President Bush knew about the 9/11 attack in advance. But here was something still quite damning: we learned that the Bush family connection to the Bin Laden family business might have been a shield against government probes. Did Bin Laden, reading that, make a note to himself to thank the Bushes for their unintended protection? I assumed the FBI would deny the authenticity of the document. Instead of denying that the Bin Laden investigation had been spiked, the FBI spokesman told Newsnight these chilling words: “There are a lot of things the intelligence community knows and other people ought not to know.”
Ought not to know? What else ought we not to know? What else is government hiding from us – and when will it kill us?
The US government has charged Edward Snowden with “willful communication of classified communications and intelligence information to an unauthorised person”. CIA agent Jeffrey A Sterling has just received a three-year sentence for passing information to a reporter. This suggests that, today, Newsnight’s releasing the FBI document would land me or my informants in the slammer.
Why? Is there really a fear that terrorists will read our information? Well, in my case at least, I know Bin Laden probably did in fact read secret national security documents – in my book. Did he learn some great state secret that would allow him to escape? Obviously not. Did Bin Laden learn the secret that our leaders are incompetent and craven and that our intelligence agencies are poisoned by commercial and political interests? I suspect he knew that already.
Finding that Bin Laden read my book, with its several chapters revealing state secrets, confirms for me that the new official war on whistleblowers and reporters is not about keeping information out of the hands of terrorists, but making sure that “the public ought not to know” where the fools at the helm are leading us.
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Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic.
Make a tax-deductible donation and keep our work alive..
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
May 20, 2015
Palast Book Found on Osama bin Laden's Shelf
Bin Laden read The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. No kidding.
Unfortunately, he only gave it 4 stars on Amazon.
See US releases more than 100 documents recovered from Osama bin Laden raid.
* * * * * *
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
Get a signed copy the book Osama bin Laden couldn't put down.
Make a tax-deductible donation and keep our work alive..
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
May 10, 2015
The Show Girls Club, Fairbanks, Alaska
Etok [1943-2015]
His "American" name was Charles Edwardsen Jr.
He died this week, whaling.
I didn’t have any trouble picking him out, even in the pumping lights of the Fairbanks strip club where we were supposed to meet: the leather-dark face, a wolverine pelt sewn into his parka collar with its vicious fangs still attached, and, around his neck, five huge claws of the last polar bear killed by his father. Eskimo bling.
While I’d heard that Eskimos kiss by rubbing noses, the look in Etok’s eyes suggested I wasn’t going to get the nose rub.
“Mr. Palast, we are the last of the Pleistocene people,” he told me. “It would be an honor to help you fuck up British Petroleum and fuck up your Queen, too.”
It was entirely appropriate for Etok, as a head of state, to address his concerns through me, a reporter for British government television, to his diplomatic equal, the Monarch of Windsor; though, as Etok would point out, his realm was larger than Britain, with more resources. And unlike England, Etok’s kingdom had never lost a war. I promised to carry his message back to Her Majesty.
Read his full story in Vultures' Picnic.
April 27, 2015
From the Epicenter - Langtang, Nepal
Langtang, Nepal. I’ve kept her photo near me for 25 years.
NYT - "Unlikely... the 600 residents of Langtang survived."
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