Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/28/24 Kit Klarenberg on the Effort to Censor Him and New Revelations about the Kosovo War

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

Kit Klarenberg joins the show to talk about two articles he recently wrote at the Grayzone. The first deals with his ridiculous Twitter ban. He and Scott discuss the details as well as the broader effort to censor dissident voices and real journalists. They then talk about an article Klarenberg wrote, reporting new details about the West’s role in the Kosovo War twenty-five years ago. Discussed on the show: “I was banned from Elon’s ‘free speech’ X app for offending power” (The Grayzone) “Kosovo War at 25: Blair’s secret invasion plot to ‘topple Milosevic’ revealed” (The Grayzone) Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more the 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show okay you guys on the line once again we've got the great journalist kit clarenberg from the gray zone welcome back to the show how you doing hey how's it going uh real good happy to have you on here um Listen, I want to talk all about this great Kosovo article here in a minute. First, I want to give you a chance to talk about what is going on over at Twitter.

And last I see here, you have this great article, in-depth article explaining from the 19th about how you got kicked right off of there. But I wonder if there's any developments or you're still banned from Twitter. And did they have any kind of excuse? Tell us the story. Well, I mean, I got mass reported by Zionist activists who, made all sorts of ludicrous claims that I was advocating violence and gang rape. I mean, this is what they do because they are liars and propagandists. So I was shunted off and I've been given conflicting guidance on whether I will be allowed back.

In a sense, I'm kind of enjoying not being on it because it means that I see less photos of dead Palestinian children on a daily basis. At the same time, I do miss the battle. And I think that it's really, it's particularly, I made this point in my op-ed, it's particularly disturbing because one of the methods by which Julian Assange was dehumanized and cut off from the outside world was the removal of this internet access in the Ecuadorian embassy. This resulted from a British intelligence black propaganda campaign that was concerned with framing him as a nefarious Russian agent who was leading a secret Kremlin effort to destabilise Spain by backing the Catalan independence referendum. And yeah, this was a

this was a very effective means of cutting him off on the outside world because this was a way of ostracising him. So when a year later the British police stormed into the embassy and dragged him out in the train class. He had been somewhat off the public radar for some time. And it's, yeah, I do worry whether this is a precursor to something deeper and darker. The Britain has just passed that the National Security Act. I've written about this for the grey zone. Truly terrifying bit of legislation, which is modelled on the US Espionarionage Act,

which, of course, Julian may well in mere weeks be. extradited to the U.S. to face charges under, despite the fact that he's not a U.S. citizen. Yeah, it creates all sorts of new criminal offenses, and several advocates of the law have explicitly stated that, quote, unquote, writers at fringe blogs, i.e., myself at the Greystone, could fall foul if we report on the wrong matters. Well, I was going to say there, you know, I think a lot of. of us are concerned about getting kicked off Twitter. I right now have quit it to get my book finished because, as you were alluding to there, what's going on in Palestine is just too much

and I don't have the time in the day. But I'm going back on there and that's not the same thing as being censored and kicked off there, which is a big concern. But I just wanted to point out that, you know, I'm not concerned about being Julian Assangeed, but it's, you know, it's not melodrama for you to say that that's a real concern. Because unlike me, everybody's favorite podcast host and radio show host here and book author, you do real hard hitting. I got secret documents journalism. And over there in the old world without the First Amendment. And so you really could be in trouble because this is the kind of reporting you do is, hey, everybody, look what I got a secret British government document usually that nobody's ever seen before, which is in fact

what we're going to be discussing about the Kosovo War 25 years ago here in a minute for one example. So people should know it's not the same as the rest of us worrying about being censored, which is already horrible. But getting in real trouble is, you know, the real trouble here and and it's so important that you are of course able to still do your journalism and get it out there where it matters and you know you talk in here about the like the suppression of your followers this was something that was the same for me for I think more than a year three quarters of a year or something I had a hard limit on my follower count and the number would go up and number goes back down and I know that you talk about how they were doing that to you

and right when you should really have been going viral. In fact, that was my thing, too, is it was the Yemen campaign, I'm pretty sure, is the one that got me in trouble at the beginning of 22, the summer of, no, I'm sorry, the summer of 21. But anyway, yeah, it is a hell of a thumb on the scale. If they can just pick and choose who's allowed to say things on Twitter there, just that part alone. And it's just, I mean, yes, as I mentioned, the Twitter files releases, which were hugely significant and, of course, got ignored or shot on by the establishment media, that it had one of the very interesting things that it stated that under the pre-Musk Twitter regime, Twitter engineers didn't need permission to censor and suppress accounts if they had less than 10,000 followers. Like I said, in the summer of 2022, when the grey zone was reporting on Paul Mason's League emails, which showed that he was targeting anti-war leftists for reputational and legal destruction and was cooked up a hairbrain scheme to try and expose the grey zone as secretly run by Russian and Chinese intelligence, we're not, but I would say that wouldn't I. Yeah, every single day, and I mean, I say that quite literally, my follow account would nearly. hit 10,000 and then it would crash back down by a few hundred. And it's happened day in and day

out and thought, I guess they just kind of gave up and they said that we can't stop this train. They were absolutely determined that people didn't see what I have to say. That's deeply disturbing. I do think in some ways that Twitter has improved under Musk, although I mean, that's not saying much. Although he does, yes, seem to have a particular what's the word, blind spot in his free speech crusade when it comes to Israel. And we know based on elite recording that the ADL, which has been working with Elon on censoring pro-Palestinian anti-Israel voices on the platform, that TikTok is seen as a huge threat by Zionist organization, because it means that, you know, younger generations are being exposed to the realities of Israeli occupation, and they're having

none of it. And so, I mean, this is why the US government is now moving to take full control of TikTok, because it's too dangerous. Now, you have to, that perception also applies to all other, to all forms of social media. And Facebook is as good as in. U.S. government control, because Zuckerberg or Zuckerschmark, as Trump hilariously called him the other day, is fully in bed with the security and intelligence services, and indeed it has a threat reduction center. That's a contradiction in terms of ever there was one, which is staffed by ex-Pentacon and CIA people. And it is so it is already in effect a wing of the US government. government. If Musk allows too much free speech on this platform, then he's probably going

to suffer the same fate as TikTok one way or another. Yeah, no. So one thing that has also really been of concern here is something that you alluded to at the beginning, which is there's no real way to appeal or talk to, I mean, whenever I emailed with them, I might as well be talking to an AI bot or something, right? There's no it's never clear. This is the offense, and then you can say, well, listen, but see, you're taking that wrong. All it means is this, and that's within the rules. And then they say, oh, okay, blah, blah, like a human conversation.

There is no human conversation. It's, sorry, there's a rule, and you tripped the rule, and we'll let you know, you know, you know, something. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly my experience. I've attempted to engage, I attempted to engage them initially, not least because they sent conflicting emails saying you'll be banned, unbanned after one month, you'll be unbanned after three months, and then all you get is the static of after careful review, yeah, right, that we've decided that yes, that it was a legitimate breach of the rules and therefore you won't be reinstated. I think that it's deliberately wearying, so people won't challenge these

decisions and I have very little faith that I'll be back after three months. There are several examples of people who allegedly got banned, well, in theory got banned to three months who were never allowed to come back. So in the meantime, I am using Telegram and Substack as my primary communication methods, or it's not the same thing. And I mentioned that my mental health is all the better for being off it. There are so, there are so many occasions over in the in recent weeks where I've just particularly around the anniversary of the bombing of Yugoslavia where I desperately wanted to be able to challenge fair face lies and propaganda and I've not been able to and I think that's precisely the point yeah that's exactly right

it's a purely dystopian thing it's like driving around Los Angeles it's not supposed to be this way. My God. So let's talk about, you know, how it is that you picked this fight. You mentioned it was Zionists that were going after you for condemning what was going on in Gaza. I mean, all I've ever seen of you on there, I had this exact same conversation with Alan McLeod a couple of months ago. All I've ever seen you write is journalism. Or, you know, certainly if it's stating your opinion on there. It's always a sober adult way of saying things. Not like me. I get cranky in a way that I think you're far more mature than I do. So I have a real hard time believing that you would have actually said anything that crossed the line. You're just saying you angered some

Zionists and they told on you and got you in trouble. Like this is kindergarten. Yeah. And it's just, but it's just what's remarkable as well as that they were in effect, there was, There's this one particular woman called Heidi Bachar, who is a very prominent, big-fisted supporter of Israel, who is still peddling nonsense about the Hamas having beheaded babies and all this other stuff. And she is quite clearly a – what's the term? It's quite clear that she's playing a lead role in getting pro-Palestinian voices booted off the platform.

And so she will highlight comments. or take them out of context or distort what people had said, and then this will lead to a pile on from all of her followers. And, yeah, there was this one of her confederates or accomplices openly stated that while he didn't usually believe that people should be physically beaten for just because of their political views, he advocated me being brutally assaulted every day on the basis of my opinions. They report to this tweet and it's still up there.

So that's an actual incitement to violence and indeed threat, which has gone unnoticed. And then yet I'm the one that gets removed. There is no justice. But I think that this is just more generally, it's worth bearing in mind that there is a math, a kind of protection racket type aspect for this, where it's like, you know, Mobsters don't need every single protection payment, but they know that if one person doesn't cough up, then that there is a huge risk that others might do the same. So, yeah, this is deliberately intended to have a chilling effect and to demonstrate to people. Yes, it's a free speech platform where you can say anything except there are caveats to that.

And it's, I know for a fact that there are some people who pull their punches, some activists and journalists and just, just average citizens that I know who are extremely careful about what they say on X and get more and more careful, the more bands there are. So, and the more blatant, the bias is. So, yeah, a chilling effect is hardwired into this. ultimate victim of the general public yeah well and it's worth noting that when musk bought the thing he made it a lot less worse and purged a lot of the government employees out of there and yet still it's a weird it's not exactly a monopoly but it's there's sort of a tri monopoly or some kind of thing quadronopoly on all this social media and you're either on reddit or you're on facebook or you're on Twitter and it's especially political Twitter is huge. It's as Romando admonished me for taking a break from it to finish writing my last book, this is the battlefield. You've got to be out there. This is

where the political fight is had. And so to be able to have, you know, him or any person on there, you know, in his employ, be able to put their thumb on the scale in this way against anyone without some kind of very clear violation of it seems as he said before the law right if you're threatening somebody or something you can't do that

but otherwise you know direct incitements to riot or something come on burn that building full of people down like you're the right sector something like that that's a violation but otherwise ain't this America or what and it is an American

company and so our free speech tradition ought to apply over there in the old world where things, you know, never were quite as clear about whose sovereignty comes first, the people or the state, you know? Yeah, well, I mean, that's a, living in a top-down monarchic system, of course, that people well understand that there are things that they can't say because we might, you know, offend royalty. But the, I mean, what's really worrying, and I've written about this for my personal website, is that there is a shadowy British Ministry of Defence One Body called the Defence and Security Media Advisory. Now, it issues what are known as D notices or a do not

publish notice. Now, this is very, very British in the sense that if, a story gets published or the committee thinks the story is about to be published that contains information the British government doesn't want in the public domain, they'll write to journalists and editors and say, please, could you seek our advice before publishing? Now, in theory, this is voluntary and advisory. So they can't legally gag reporters and dictate them what they can and can't report on. However, there are virtually no examples in history of of this system ever being broken. People always comply. So in 2013, when the Guardian started reporting on Edward Snowden's leaked NSA files, the DSMA committee duly wrote to the entirety

in the British media and said, don't go anywhere near this. And they didn't. So this is a story of like global significance that was picked up everywhere and it was ignored in Britain. Now, that is really, really quite disturbing. However, what's even more disturbing is the DSMA is now trying to bring US social media companies to heal. So they are engaged in lobbying efforts and they are also pressuring the British government to take regulatory action to force Facebook and Twitter and, yeah, like Reddit, I guess, as well. to sign up to the DSMA. So in the future, the DSMA can write to them and say, can you please remove all posts mentioning this?

Could you please use your algorithms to prevent people seeing this particular inconvenient proof or damaging expose? And yeah, or else, which is deeply disturbing. And so Britain's culture of censorship and state sequence which is the most advanced and pervasive in the Western world is now being globalized, courtesy of it. How do you like that?

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By way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton, dot org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free. Just sign up for the email list at the bottom of the page at scotthorton.org, or go to Scotthorton. Subscribe.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe

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um they don't want people here in the other side of the store so let's talk about how bill clinton and tony blair lied us into war 25 years ago bill clinton's big victory lap after his acquittal in the Senate and um they started this war and they lied like hell and you got this great new piece about it kosovo war at 25 blair's secret invasion plot to topple milosevic revealed and um of course they ended up getting them in a color code of revolution a little bit later on uh the next year but um so uh and and it's the anniversary uh this month i guess just a few days ago of the start of the war So we don't have that much time. I do have a hard break at the top of the hour.

I got to switch interviewees here. But can we at least just focus on how they lied us into war and then at least touch on this new revelation that you have secret documents that you are revealing here? Yeah, sure. I mean, I'm amazed, given how revealing these documents that British officials openly advocate committing war crimes and killing civilians.

because it's worth the pass. So in effect, it's towards the end of the 1990s, there a CIA and MI6 back terror group called the Kosovo Liberation Army, which was tied to Al Qaeda, financed by the drug trade organ army, started attempting to quote-unquote liberate Kosovo, i.e. purge it of all Slavs and Serbs, and they did so by, and they tried to bait Yugoslav authorities into aggressive crackdowns upon them and indeed the civilian population in order that a what was a counterinsurgency against the KLA could be presented in the Western media as a genocidal attack on the wider Albanian civilian population, which it wasn't. Now, in early 1999, January,

Yugoslav police engaged in a shootout with a large number of KLA fighters in a town known as Ratchak. And in the wake of this, it left a large number of KLA fighters dead. An individual called William Walker, who was the head of the OSCE, the Kosovo verification mission at the time, convened a press conference where he led journalists to a site where all of these people laid dead in civilian clothing. and claimed that this was a merciless, brutal, genocidal attack on innocent civilians, but in reality they were terrorized. So this manufactured public consent for bombing Yugoslavia in two months later, because it was claimed that it was necessary to prevent more Ratchacks from happening,

or the entire Albanian population being ethnically cleansed. They bombed Yugoslavia for 78 straight days, and they destroyed most of the country's independent industry. They deliberately bombed the, yes, the headquarters of RTRS, which is the Yugoslav State TV channel, which had been broadcasting, as you mentioned, it was a very brutal form of censorship, because RTRS had been broadcasting the intercepted audio of NATO pilots discussing targeting refugee convoys and bombing, you know,

across the Albanians who were fleeing the country upon the KLA's orders. And, yeah, there was the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was set up to just to prosecute serve officials, and there are numerous U.S. officials were on record of saying that NATO will not be held accountable for any crimes are committed, and the full, the total number of people killed by NATO bombing isn't clear. It could be into the thousands, and there were many children among them. So, yeah, it was a war based entirely on lies. It is still, to this day, held up as an example of successful, quote-unquote humanitarian intervention. But they are so, The Western powers are so determined that people don't know the truth of matters.

On the 25th anniversary at the UN Security Council, Russia and China moved to have a hearing on the bombing. The Serbian Prime Minister flew out to New York specifically to give an address to the UN. And Western powers torpedoed it. They prevented this from happening because I think that they it is key to understanding western hypocrisy because in effect the the the precedent set by Kosovo was that it was illegal i.e. did not have UN Security Council authorization but it was legitimate and then this precedent was used over and over again to justify destroying Libya destroying Syria and also gearing up for all out attack on Ukraine side in the proxy war that's currently ongoing and may start collapsing very soon.

But what I found in these documents is really interesting because there are multiple passages in which it is discussed how the bombing really frightened the Chinese and the Russians who were worried that it would be used as a precedent for doing the same again and again, quite reasonably and logically. And so the British were determined to allay these fears and reassure them that it won't be. And then, of course, they immediately did. So I think that we are kind of seeing the humanitarian intervention project or the lie unravel now today. this is what's what's happening in eastern Ukraine right now is a direct result in many ways of what

was inflicted on Yugoslavia 25 years ago yeah and of course Putin directly referred to bill clinton's precedent that said oh look i got the same excuses as you so i can violate the law and do whatever i want across whatever border i want and the first thing he did was bomb a tv station too which was a pretty obvious thing and antenna Anyway, so listen, you skipped, though, that they lied that there were 100,000 men and women and children missing and presumed murdered and mines full of them, you know, and mass graves, never happened. And they also lied about the conditions of the war. It came out in the middle of the war that, oh, yeah, we didn't tell you, but we demanded the right to occupy every square inch of Yugoslavia. and that was the

the deal killer and Milosevic actually was willing to negotiate on virtually every point which was the problem and so they had to add that appendix B that secret appendix B just to kill the deal that he was in the middle of accepting

so that they could have the war they wanted to have which makes them as bad as W. Bush or anybody Netanyahu yeah indeed indeed yeah you meant I'm sorry I did got so over that for the reasons of time. But yeah, I mean, the Rambia agreement, this was a, again, a publicity, which was concerned with giving the appearance that the quote, international community had exhausted all diplomatic means to prevent the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. It was always

intended to fail because they set completely ludicrous terms that no country would ever accept. And yes, it would not only grant NATO and its personnel freedom of movement, anywhere they liked in Yugoslavia, it would insulate them from prosecution for committing any crime. No government in the world would ever accept this, and US officials subsequently admitted that, yeah, the whole point was we knew that they wouldn't accept it. And we would deliberately set the bar to an insane level. And it's a, and it was framed as, you know, such as Milosevic's blood, such as Milosevic's unquenchonable bloodlust. He's refusing to negotiate because he wants to kill the Albanian so much.

It's just nonsense. But there we are. Yeah, as you say, this is being used as a precedent by the Russians for their war in Ukraine. And this has led quite amusingly to a lot of wittering in foreign policy circles and magazines about how Russia is, quote, unquote, abusing the precedent. Well, no, it's not abusing the precedent. using the exact same grounds that was used to criminally destroy Yugoslavia 25 years ago. Hey, Kit, let me clarify one thing I wanted to ask you. Did I hear you right?

You're mic isn't that great today, and I want to make sure I understood you right. Do you say that I was wrong about the they get to go wherever they want? Because I have the block quote here, but it might not mean what I think it means, But it does say here that they should, they and all their vehicles and vessels and so forth, shall have free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the Frye, including associated airspace and territorial waters. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It was, it was, they could go in. But I think there's as well, they said, if NATO feels the need to take over any facility, then Milosevic would have to accept that without, without argument. Right.

If they don't get the need to make any improvements, quote of quotes, such as Billing a bridge, say Yugoslavia would have to fit the bill. Ludacrous. Right. Okay. I'm sorry. I just wanted to make sure, because I thought you were saying that I had overstated it. So I just want to make sure that I wasn't overstating it. Yeah.

Yeah. No, no, no, no. I'm understating it, if anything. I see. I see. Okay. Just making sure about that. So listen, I mean, I am writing this book, and I've got probably 100 pages on Bosnia and Koso

So, uh, and you're in it repeatedly from all your great journalism, the Canadian documents that you revealed and all this other stuff. Um, and so I'll be anxious to find out what you think of it if I can ever get the thing done. Yeah. Well, no, I look forward to it. I know, I know that you will, Scott. I mean, you have done such great work on this and, uh, so I'm real grateful for that. I've really hoped that everyone will go over to the gray zone and, uh, look at this great piece. It's Kosovo war. at 25. Blair's secret invasion plot. Oh, and yeah, I mean, I'm sorry I didn't let you really elaborate too much about this, about how Blair is really trying to churn Bill Clinton into like, come on,

put your army in there, Bill, go, go. And I guess just things came up and prevented it from being able to go through. And then I guess finally, the Russians, well, they dropped Appendix B, and then they got Chan and Meriden to

twist Milosevic's arm there, to end is that basically right yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah god dang bill clinton man him and his old lady too all right listen uh uh thank you so much for doing the great work that you do uh i've learned so much from you and um i really appreciate your time on the show as always kit oh god bless you scott take care my friend and uh yeah keep up the fight right you guys that's kit clarenberg he's at the gray zone dot com with max and all of them this one is Kosovo War 25, Blair's secret invasion plot to topple Milosevic revealed. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.

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