Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/17/22 Max Blumenthal on Paul Mason and British Intelligence’s Crusade Against Independent Journalism

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

Scott interviews Max Blumenthal about what’s been happening between Paul Mason and The Grayzone. Mason is a British Trotskyist turned Neocon who never stopped identifying with the left. He has built up a reputation in British media as a leftist while building relationships with British intelligence officials. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mason decided to wage an all-out war on any media establishments that showed even a hint of skepticism towards the pro-NATO narrative of the war. The Grayzone, where Blumenthal works, was able to obtain emails revealing Masons coordinating with British officials as he planned his offensive against the publication. Scott and Blumenthal also discuss MI6’s involvement with Brexit and the situation with Julian Assange. Discussed on the show: “Paul Mason’s covert intelligence-linked plot to destroy The Grayzone exposed” (Grayzone) Director and writer of “Killing Gaza,” Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project and the author Goliath, Republican Gomorrah and The 51 Day War. Follow him on Twitter @MaxBlumenthal. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. 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 than 5,500 interviews since 2004. 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 show you guys on the line i got max bloomenthal from the gray zone that's the gray zone dot com and of course he wrote goliath about israel and the 51 day war about their 2014 slaughter in gazaa

and have I ever mentioned to you guys that he co-directed and produced this great documentary with Dan Cohen called Killing Gaza? It'll knock your socks off. I'm telling you, man, you got to watch that thing. And he does all kinds of great journalism. I think I left off a book there. I'm sorry. But the gray zone, that's where you can find the bulk of what's going on here. Welcome back. How are you doing, Max? Good. What book did I forget? I forgot a book.

Probably my first book, Republican Gomorrah, about... No, I thought there was one after that. The 51 Day War, Goliath, the Management of Savagery. The Management of Savagery, that's the one I forgot. The one that's exactly like Bulls-Aren. I mean, enough already, only was written by you instead of by me. But otherwise, it's the same book. It's great.

Yeah, I was going to do a book about contemporary Israel called Kill, Pray, Hate. but instead I did that one. Oh, that's good. No, it's absolutely excellent. And people tell me, have you ever read the management of savagery? It's just like enough already. And I'm like, hell, yeah.

I'll take that as a compliment. It definitely has some, it definitely hits on a lot of themes that you have in your work on Afghanistan because the narrative begins in Afghanistan, in 1979, and you know what happens next. Yep. And in fact, it's great because, well, I don't want to ruin it for anyone, but you just focus a little bit more on the happenings in Saudi Arabia in 79, which is one area I gloss over when I'm doing the revolution in Iran and the Iran-Iraq war in Afghanistan. But you talk about what was also going on there with the rise, the early rise of the fundamentalist. There's all kinds of great stuff in that book, everybody. You've got to read it. The management of savagery, which comes from, you know, no, ISIS doctrine, but of course, they're nothing but the sock puppets of the Western

Intelligence agencies. Ain't that so a lot of the time there, Max? Yep. The true managers. We were watching ISIS advance, as John Kerry said. They were just watching, like, spectators. We thought we could manage. That was actually the quote, right?

We thought we could manage. That should be your sequel book, would be the managers of savagery. Yeah, you know, I was thinking, well, I would be doing. a book called The Management of Reality about the disinformation racket, disinformation incorporated, but I'm too busy doing weekly dispatches to build the material for that book, which is kind of what we're going to talk about today. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's another aspect of modern warfare and we're the targets.

Yeah, well, so, and let's talk about that now. Kit Clarenberg is the one who wrote the article, but I know the boss. I'm just going to talk to you. Leat emails expose Paul Mason's collusion with secret British intelligence agent. And I'm not sure how well that headline explains what it is that we're looking at here. First of all, who in the hell is Paul Mason, Max? I would assume if most of your listeners are not British leftists, that they don't really have that much familiarity. I got to tell you, some of my listeners are

British leftists. What's up, guys? But go ahead. They would probably know him better than me. I actually met him once at the Russell Tribunal, which was a People's Tribunal on Israel's assault on Gaza in 2014. And I, you know, later wrote a book, subsequently wrote a book about my coverage. And, you know, Paul Mason was there as the only representative of mainstream media. And, of course, he kind of both sides to his presentation. It was a pretty lame presentation, but we were told to be gracious or grateful that someone from Channel 4 in the UK was willing to grace us with his presence and lend legitimacy to what we were doing.

And now I realize or wonder if he was actually just infiltrating to supply information back to the security services. Jeez, what makes you say that? Well, first of all. Paul Mason is probably one of the five most influential or well-known British leftists in the media, positioned himself as the voice of Jeremy Corbyn during Corbyn's campaign for labor leadership, advised Corbyn through his shadow secretary, John McDonnell. Prior to that, he was a big cheerleader for Ceresa in Greece and against the austerity,

In support of the rebellion against the austerity imposed on Greece by the EU, he was also a tech reporter who fantasizes about smartphones and other Fourth Industrial Revolution devices and innovations bringing about a kind of popular revolution from below. And in that in his student days, he was associated with the radical Trotskyist group. But today he's a prominent columnist, a gatekeeper of the British left, and there's always been an element to his writing and his public statements that has been tinged with neoconservatism. He represents the classic trajectory of Trotskyist to Neocon, but he still insists on a place at the left-wing table for himself. So Ukraine comes on, you know, is on the map in a way it hasn't been before since February 24th with the Russian invasion. Paul Mason goes bonkers and begins this public campaign of just assaulting, trying to discredit any leftist who opposes shipping massive amounts of weapons to Ukraine, particularly in the UK.

but he started targeting us and I'm sorry my correction here too I didn't realize I had this tab open but I'd missed I got a lot of tabs here Max Paul Mason's covert

intelligence linked plot to destroy the gray zone exposed so I was halfway through that by a guy confused with the other article but both of them are at the grayzone.com of course yes go to the grayzone.com

you'll easily find both of them alright so now what happens somebody hacked this guy's emails and turn them over to you. Is that correct? Well, I don't know. I don't know how the emails were obtained. And let me just say first that Mason began targeting us in public. He called for state action against the gray zone because of our opinions, because he didn't like our opinions. He called for a state crackdown in a column in the new statesman around like March, sorry, May 24th, late last month. We subsequently,

were able to view emails. We got them from an anonymous source. I don't know how the source obtained them. I have no involvement or knowledge of that whatsoever. Mason called it a Russian hack and dump operation. And the emails are real. They're 100% real. And they show that Mason has been plotting in secret with two spooks. One is an intelligence contractor who runs a private firm called valent projects that we've previously written about. He was, you know, astroturfing YouTube projects that were funded by the Royal Institute, which is itself a state-funded institution. His name is Amil Khan. He was heavily involved in the Syrian Dirty War. He was doing the work of setting up astro-turfed media operations inside Syria to support the so-called rebels, which include, of course, Syria's various

Al-Qaeda affiliates. And he somehow got in touch with Mason. And so our first article really focuses on that, that he and Paul Mason did two key things or plan two key lines of attack. The first was an anti-grey zone summit that they would hold at the offices of valent projects according to the emails that we viewed and reproduced in the article, and they were going to convene everyone who they could, who had security state connections who hated us, and that includes Bellingat, which Paul Mason revealingly referred to in one email as intelligence by proxy.

Oh, you know, Belencat, not to get too off track here, but Bellingat, they're one of the most lauded Western media organizations. They present themselves as an open source intelligence group. They were brought in to, you know, do the attribution for all of the supposed chemical attacks in Syria

for the Screepal poisoning. They're, Bucha massacre. whenever there's an attribution needed, the intelligence services aren't going to come out and just say, well, we believe this, or this is the case. We have high probability. It's better to get a bunch of data-centric nerds who seem to be organic and authentic and are specialists in Google Earth to do that attribution because nobody trusts the CIA. And these guys are funded by the U.S. government through the national endowment for democracy, the regime change arm of the U.S. government and the British foreign office. So they wanted to convene them, get them in there. And somehow they were going to plot some government takedown of the gray zone. Mason became obviously obsessed with us. He believed that we were at the center of this powerful disinformation network. And he wanted to first get a sense of our methods. When it's obvious what

our methods are, like here's one of my methods. I'm talking to Scott Horton. I, you know, peck away. at a laptop writing articles. I tweet. I read books. But he seemed to think that we were like some covert Russian disinformation operation. Then he wants, he's obsessed with our funding. He believes that, you know, we're a vehicle for the Kremlin. And so he wanted to get the British government to launch an investigation. It was a pretty kooky plan that got exposed because for the first time, we got the proof that the security state and its assets are plotting against us. That the second key thing in our first article is that Paul Mason conceived this, what he called a mind map of the UK left and its danger to society. This is a guy, remember, who poses as a

leftist, as a man of the left and claims to lead trade unions. He led a major, or what he, you know, he led a few hundred people through the streets of London in May in support of military intervention in Ukraine and these were like trade unions and leftists and so on. So Mason's map shows you what a snitch he is. Because on the left side of his map, it's got all these crisscrossed arrows. It's completely bonkers. On the left side, it's the Russian and Chinese state, you know, the official enemies. And then it starts moving right and you got like Code Pink in there, Medea Benjamin, the Morning Star, which is Britain's oldest paper. It's a socialist newspaper. and then all these people that are connected to Jeremy Corbyn.

The Corbinites are at the center. And Jeremy Corbyn is at the very molten center of this core of evil that Paul Mason conceives when he was presenting himself as, you know, Corbin's guy. It actually looks like he was some kind of mole who is trying to guide Corbyn in a pro-war direction. Now, if you continue to the right on the map past Jeremy Corbyn, you start to get to these constituencies of labor, the Muslim community, he identifies the Muslim community, the young network left, Scottish nationalists and the black community as key demographics that are corrupted by the UK left on behalf of Russia and China. And so what you have is a pure document

of the McCarthyite mind of someone who has security state connections. And we have, When we released this, I mean, it was an earthquake. It set off an earthquake in the UK left and in the UK media as a whole. Like I just noticed on my Twitter account, like all these mainstream blue check British reporters started following me. And zero of them reported on the story. But everyone in the UK left was talking about it because they were targeted, including like the soft left, like Novara media. They're like the British version of Jacobin. So Mason was exposed.

But our second part, I think, is arguably not. not even arguably, it's beyond debate. It's more damning and more disturbing because you have Paul Mason communicating, and this is like a huge credit. I got to give huge credit here to Kit Clarenberg, who shared a byline with me on the first one and authored the second piece because Kit figured out that one of these people that Mason was emailing with, whose email just began with the letters AP was Andy Price, one of the more nefarious figures in the British Foreign Office and also one of the more secret figures. His position was completely secret until 2018, until he was exposed, and I'll get into that later. But Andy Price headed up something

called the Counter disinformation and Media Development Unit in the Foreign Office, which very clearly resembles an MI6 operation, operates largely in secret to set up media operations, anti-Russian media operations on Russia's frontiers and even inside Russia. And also to attack bad actors, what they call bad actors, which could range from the gray zone to RT. We have one email where Andy Price is actually bragging about getting Russian stuff, in his words, off YouTube, bragging about going to YouTube to a liaison and telling him or her what to remove. So that's the kind of power he has. It looks like Price's, Andy Price, has moved on to something else that's similar called the Counter-Disinformation Unit in the National Security Council.

But all these details are like probably irrelevant to most listeners. What's important is that Mason and Price were plotting together to not just target us, but to target consortium news. at one point, Andy Price even reached out across the Atlantic to the then Minister of Truth at the Department of Homeland Security, Nina Jankowitz, who is his counterpart, and said, what's the deal with consortium news? Are they like a Russian Kremlin vehicle? And Nina Jankowitz actually said to him, according to his account, no, they're just useful idiots. And he said, I'm not so sure, meaning we should continue to target, you know, the outlet of the late great Robert Perry. And like we all don't know who Joe Loria is.

The former Wall Street Journal reporter for 20 years or give me a break. I mean, this is just, it's sheer madness because anyone who disagrees with Paul Mason on Ukraine, in his mind, is a Kremlin asset and needs to be targeted. And he's trying to make that happen through the security state. He's a security state collaborator. So we're seeing in real, almost in real time. I mean, these are pretty recent emails how this campaign was developing, and it looks like, you know, for now we stopped it in its tracks. He was wanting to go after Black Alliance for Peace, which is an anti-imperialist black American group. He wanted to go after a reporter in Bolivia who only covers Bolivia at a outlet that's based in the, it's based in the,

Cochabamba region of Bolivia. I've actually been by their offices, and they're supported by the coca growers unions, and they support Avo Morales, and he wanted to target their lead English-language correspondent Ali Vargas. He was just going so deep into the, down the rabbit hole, and writing dispatches about various leftist conferences. He attended a conference in Madrid, where he celebrated the fact that they weren't able to convince the Spanish government not to ship weapons to Ukraine. And he was covering the conference like a snitch, which is why I made that comment at the beginning about when I met Mason.

Now I wonder what he was doing there. He also claimed credit in an email to his possible security state handler, Andy Price, about playing a part in Finland's application to NATO because he was able to lobby the leftist politicians and parties in the governing coalition to stay in the coalition despite the NATO application and said that he's working with his security contacts in Finland. And I mean, we'll talk about it later, but I just want to make sure it's kind of on the agenda for our discussion. When Aaron Mate and I had a discussion just like this, a live stream, it was immediately taken down.

off you've taken off YouTube on the grounds of bullying and harassment in total violation of YouTube's terms of use and policies i mean we were just talking about a public figure and we've never had anything taken out we've been threatened with a strike and it suggests to us that mason just called in andy price from the counter disinformation unit and he told you to get rid of this uh so a cover up is taking place bullying too i mean imagine having to exchange your entire dignity to sick YouTube on Max Blumenthal that's messed up

he's bullying me the guy said when he called 911 right well they're bullying us they're he's calling in the state to bully and harass us and he says so in these emails and so that shows you

how fair YouTube is the funny thing is I actually protested when they took us down I appealed and then they restored the video and sent me an email apologizing to me and then 20 minutes later it was taken down again for bullying and harassment permanently man all right well more and more there's alternatives like odyssey and rumble and things so we got to break that youtube monopoly man i went on rock finn because you can't talk about

any of the restrictions the failed covid restrictions except as well-intentioned technical solutions so i went on rock fin to do a series of interviews on that because we would have gotten yanked from youtube and now you know i'm doing i'm hosting material that we've always done at the gray zone for years on youtube at rock fin exclusively because of the censorship regime yeah yeah it's getting crazy out there man sure but at the same time i mean i don't know what the hell uh twitter guy has in mind with his new web five this that but the spirit of it is we got a completely decentralized control over social networks so that people just can't do this to us anymore the way the purges go on at twitter and youtube and facebook and the rest it sucks everybody hates it except the people actually doing

it but the masses of people can see how completely unfair it is yeah and the algorithm is targeting us as well. So most of us who are targeted by Paul Mason, just who shared the opinion that we should not have sent $40 billion to Ukraine, which all goes back into the pockets of military contractors and the Beltway bandits, we're all suppressed by the algorithm, but we're not even told what the algorithm is. It's not public. So it's just another knife in the back of democracy because that's the only place whether you're right wing or left wing it's really the only public commons and the right wingers know i mean this is just an observation i've been making recently the right wingers know that twitter is a place that's kind of controlled by liberals

and that's why it's so important for them to be on there because they can't you can't just go on gab or one of these right wing sites or whatever trump set up or whatever that that shady guy that Bannon works with who runs Getter set up where it's just a bunch of right wingers in an echo chamber so the agenda is to turn Twitter into kind of a liberal echo chamber and what I get now on my feed because of the algorithm is an echo chamber so that I don't I follow people of all political stripes including you know mainstream liberals right wingers I follow a few neocon accounts for fun they never come up in my feed anymore. Twitter aims to kind of keep us all in our echo chambers talking to

ideological soulmates so there isn't any actual debate and so that we don't wind up holding the more powerful elements accountable. Yep, that makes sense too. And, you know, that was one of the reasons when I quit Facebook, Cold Turkey, when they changed their algorithms, I went to Twitter and I was like, great, they just show me the latest thing next. That's cool. Yeah, yep. But those days are over. All right. Now, so get back to the story here about this guy. So he's not necessarily

a cop, right? He's just an informant but he's a powerful guy from Channel 4 in Britain. And now talk a little bit more about the emails where he's, in other words, do they ever succeed in setting up this thing that he was daydreaming about

where we're going to have a Shell Corporation inside a Shell Corporation that sets about to do all this targeting of you and these other groups? Right. That's that's the other important aspect of the story. And we should probably set the stage for that by talking about the Integrity Initiative. I don't know if we, did we ever do an interview on that back in 2018? I don't think so. Okay, well, I think some people would be familiar with the Integrity Initiative. This is something that, this is how Andy Price from the UK Foreign Office. got exposed back in 2018 because he was presiding over this funding it through the foreign office and it was basically a propaganda mill designed to jack up the UK military budget by stirring public hysteria about Russia and it operated under the watch of former military

intelligence officers and military personnel who incorporated cells of journalists, they called them clusters of journalists and influencers from Eastern Europe, including in Ukraine, to the UK, and they also had a U.S. cluster. And their emails were exposed. We were among the first to report on it at the gray zone. And along with Muhammad El Mazi, who's a reporter in London, well, we sent Muhammad to the front organization for the Integrity Initiative, which was a think tank called the Institute of Statecraft. And this is the crazy part. Their real office was at Two Temple Row in London, which is one of the most exclusive locations. And it's basically like a city within a city. But its official address was an abandoned mill in like Fife, England, in a small

town. So Chris Williamson, who is a leftist MP at the time, he actually went to the fake address to show that it was just an abandoned mill. Muhammad went to the office, found the directors of the Integrity Initiative inside the think tank front organization, and their cover was blown, along with the cover of all the people in these clusters you know one of you might recognize as an apple bomb from the washington post hardcore neocon uh bill browder is listed in there peter pomerance of another kind of russian exile neocon type i mean on and on uh nina jankowitz was even associated with this initiative it's pretty significant um you know they were hold they were holding like conferences and it's the

under legitimate cover, but the whole thing was a military intelligence operation. And so that's how this whole thing functions. And the UK intelligence is a specialist. It functions through intelligence cutouts, third parties. And so Mason and Andy Price in these emails are calling for a new integrity initiative in the emails that we've exposed. And they're calling it, Price wants to call it the International Information Brigade And Mason says, yeah, we've got to work through cutouts.

He calls it like a Russian nesting doll strategy where there's a public front that looks legitimate. But inside the inner Russian doll is Paul Mason and a bunch of committed individuals who are spooks. And he wants to use this to wage war on dissenting voices inside the UK by setting up something called Putin proxy watch. It would be kind of like the Canary Mission website that's been set up for a Palestine Solidarity activist where they're dossiers and they're named and shamed and you know, people are called in to attack them. He also wants to bring in what he calls info war experts to dramatize and sensationalize Russian atrocities by using pixelated footage, as well as even using prisoners of war confessions, which is off limits in journalism.

He wants to play dirty. He even wants to suspend UK libel law to make it easier to smear his targets. I mean, he specifically calls for that. So this is, I hope, something people start to better understand who are, are. are not just in alternative media, but those who haven't been yet co-opted in mainstream media need to see that this is happening right in front of their faces. Yeah, it's pretty severe.

It's the kind of thing that a lot of times you might speculate about what is the form of this beast and how it operates with all their sock puppets and all their narrative building and then, wow, get a mother load like this. Oh, here's exactly how it works. Which raises the question then, Max, what's his response been since you came out with all this i mean if you want to good laugh go to paul mason's twitter account and just read the replies to anything he tweets he just blocked me um so i've been

deprived of fun but he's just getting hammered he's getting ratioed by people in the u k because he's pretending that this isn't happening and going on and writing articles about, you know, labor unions and, you know, the Tories being bad, and people are reminding him that he is a scab, that he is a security state collaborator who's been caught red-handed. And so his reputation has been completely eviscerated among the U.K. left. He also was running for parliament. He had declared a campaign for parliament on the labor ticket, and he has been deselected by the committee in the district where he wanted to run. I think that's a direct result of our reporting. So there's been some accountability

there. But his response has been to kind of just pretend it's not happening because he shares the British elite sense of inviability and entitlement that he doesn't even have to answer for this except for one medium post he wrote where he just said this is a Russian hack and dump. And he said he's notified the authorities. So he called the cops on us. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at the Hempspot.com. The Hemp spot specializes in Delta 8 tetrahydro-canabinol instead of Delta 9, so they can send it straight to you anywhere in America.

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and the writer of Poor Things Comes The Roses starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. Yeah, well, now, for the record, and I kind of already brought this up and you answered it, but do you have any? indication that this came from the Russians at all? No, I don't, but I don't have any indication. It didn't. I mean, it's within the realm of possibility. It's also within the realm of possibility that it could have been leaked by someone.

Because we don't know the source. And if I did know the source and I knew who it was, I would still protect the source. But what we decided was that the identity of the source was not as important as the importance of the emails because they expose a titanic assault on democracy and on the public itself, including innocent people who are activists, parliamentarians, journalists, a covert state assault. And so we decided that it was super important that this see the light of day and that this campaign be stopped

and the people behind it be held accountable. So, Max, tell me about this piece by your co-author here that is on a sort of different subject. Operation Surprise, leaked emails, exposed secret intelligence coup to install Boris Johnson. And this is the,

The MI6 working on the side of Brexit in favor of the alliance with America over the EU. Is that right? Yep. Yeah, I mean, as you well know, there are different factions within the intelligence services that align with different parties. I mean, the Democratic faction that targeted Trump, I mean, I think they were a dominant faction. but here you have a kind of a Tory conservative faction within the UK intelligence services and I guess what could be broadly called the deep state mostly people who no one has ever heard of including Brits

who are pulling the strings of Boris Johnson's government including of Preeti Patel, the home secretary who just ruled to extradite Julian Assange today. And they formed this kind of cabal to, and what they wanted to do is subvert Brexit in order to extract or extricate the UK from the Brussels-based security commitments and architecture in order to deepen the ties between Washington and London, to make London more Washington-centric. And meetings actually took place between one of the leaders of this cabal. Completely unknown figure, I'd never heard of him before, but he wields enormous power as these emails show. His name is Gwithian Prins. He's a professor emeritus at

London School of Economics, and he's served in the National Security Council in previous administrations. And his other key collaborators, Richard Deerlove, who was the MI6 director during the Iraq War, who helped sell the lie about WMD and Al-Qaeda and Saddam. I mean, and once an MI6 spook, always an MI6 spook, they're, they even hosted meetings with Henry Kissinger to discuss how to leverage Brexit to deepen the security ties between London and Washington. So what they did, isn't that interesting that Kissinger would be advising them to break up the EU? Well, I don't know. Or at least for their part. We don't know it.

We know, all we know from these emails is that, Prince went to Washington to meet with Kissinger Associates about what he was doing. And what they were doing at the time was trying to take out Theresa May because her Checkers speech revealed kind of a soft Brexit approach and that they wanted a hard Brexit. They wanted it to be immediate. And they planted a mole within the civil service who began spiriting classified documents about May's plans to the British press under a pseudonym

and they waged an all-out attack on Theresa May that was pretty, it seemed to have been pretty successful. And you had this guy Prince giving orders to dear love. Yep. This is go and kill her now, he says, politically speaking, right? That's a figure of speech, apparently, but pretty brutal, right? Yeah.

when he would kill her now and what he's sending dear love is a classified document in violation of the official secrets act that evelyn far who is another Brexit activist associated with this cabal had stolen essentially from the civil service and from teresa may's campaign so they want to use her talking points to kill her now and this was a deep bit The campaign they ran in the media was deeply damaging to May. And Boris Johnson was installed. And from day one, they were advising Boris Johnson. They were meeting with him.

Remember, these are people, almost no one in the UK was aware of. They were advising Priti Patel. They were feeding her talking points on denying refugee status to Ukrainians, for example, because they might be Russians in disguise who will launch a chemical attack on British soil. Pretty Patel actually said that after Gwitian Prince fed her, the talking point. We have the email and we have, we release the talking points. We expose that.

And by the way, I, sorry, give me just one sec, Max. I just want to correct. Just as long as I'm quoting crazy things, let me get the quote exactly right here. It's quote, now kill her and it is Prince

talking to dear love. So I got that out of order because I didn't have it right in front of me. But anyway, I just want to make sure that I got that correct finally here. Go ahead. yeah it's not kill her now it's kill her at some point and it referring to no it's still now it's just he says now first instead of kill her now it's now kill her and it he adds yeah i mean they're this is treason they're straight up committing treason they're trying to overthrow government in secret in violation of british law and we exposed it i mean this is this story

and the Mason story are two of the biggest UK politics stories of the year that Mason story is one of the biggest media scandals of in years

in my opinion and you know I think a lot more of a scandal than Dave Weigel are retweeting a joke but that's so much easier Max

you know yeah of course that's what you're up against there is gossip doesn't take any effort at all I think a D-Notice has been put on these stories. D-Notice is a defense notice that is essentially a ban on any media reporting or mentioning any of this.

And it's imposed by a defense committee consisting of security officials and media operatives, you know, people from British mainstream media. And they determine when a D-Notice needs to be. imposed because the story threatens national security. And one justification for a denotus would be that it exposes intelligence assets, their names. So I think the British press is not allowed to cover this. And so we are getting some days 100,000 hits on our site.

Everybody in the UK is reading this. Well, you know, I hope that the suppression helps you actually. you know, in that explicit lyrics label sort of a sense that... Yeah. Because it is, as you said, it's so explosive. And the guy's goofy chart there lists so many different

factions who now have a stake in defending themselves from being associated with whatever he's trying to set up here. Exactly. Or his accusations. So, it sounds like it'll boil for a little while at least and maybe

breakthrough. It's sort of like that you've baldy thing where they're like well this is going to go away like no no it's not that's a lot of sets of parents who have a real grudge about that 80 minute delay here pal and that's not going away this isn't exactly a massacre but in its own sense it's a huge scandal uh to have a so-called journalist trying to work with the state to destroy other journalists in this way it's just crazy it's the kind of thing again like you would speculate about and then you're oh here's all the emails demonstrating it pretty amazing to see and seems like they would use a more secure form of communication but i guess not yeah the the most outrageous acts and incidents are just immediately

swept under the rug that's what the lesson of yvall day is it's just obvious what happened there It's so outrageous. It's one of the most outrageous acts of criminal negligence I've witnessed, and there's an obvious momentum within official circles to kind of move on or misdirect public rage into idiotic solutions like one single entrance and exit and cops at the doors. And then with this story, what they want to do is just silo us. As long as it doesn't break out of the gray zone and maybe a few soft left publications, then they can just keep moving on with business as usual. And that means security state targeting of leftists, anti-war voices as Kremlin assets, pure McCarthyism. I mean, this is McCarthyism on steroids. And with, you know, in the original

McCarthy era, there were public hearings. You could see people being humiliated and smeared on your black and white TV and that made it possible for a have you no shame moment but here that this is all happening in the shadows and through media assets posing as organic reporters

so there's no there's no Murrow moment right yeah exactly right or there's a million of them but they just go by you know because there's no nobody's transfixed by it it's not a watershed

it's just another thing um yeah man um i'll tell you what i was gonna paraphrase something smart that katy johnstone wrote but now i can't remember what it was um it was great though but i yeah no she has a lost my short-term memory she's a talent for kind of she's a talent for squeezing out the meaning in complex pieces yeah exactly right um anyway you know what uh we're a little bit over time but you mentioned it I'm going to interview Kevin Gostela here in half an hour, but I wonder if you can give a word about Julian Assange, because I think you probably have a pretty good guess of what people need to know that they might not understand about that case and how important it is. Well, it's directly related to everything we've been talking about, about the intelligence services pulling the strings of the state in subverting democracy and attacking. independent media. So here we have the most severe attack on journalism of our lifetimes,

the most severe attack on freedom of the press and free speech. And the decision was just handed down by Preeti Patel, who we were just talking about. She's Boris Johnson's home secretary and was formerly a board member at the Henry Jackson Society, which is a neo-conservative think tank in the UK, kind of their version of the American Enterprise Institute, that invade against Julian Assange while supporting every war and every dirty war that the UK waged along with the US. And she sat on the board alongside Lady Arbuthanat, Arbottano, I can't pronounce her name. It's one of those uppity British names, English names. She ruled on three hearings relating to Assange's extradition. No, sorry, her husband was a Henry Jackson Society board member.

The reason I'm going into such detail is to illustrate how deeply embedded and influential the security state has been in guiding this entire prosecution. And I was one of the first journalists, if not the first journalist, to expose how the CIA subverted the Ecuadorian security services that were supposed to watch over Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, took over the cameras, spied on him, targeted his associates spied on them, probably broke into the office of his lawyer, and plotted to poison or kidnap him. I exposed this through leaked documents from a court case in Madrid, where the CIA contractor, UC Global, was, its founder was standing trial for fraud, robbery, and I think attempted murder. Mike Pompeo was actually been called to testify in that case because he presided over this entire operation. Of course, the Biden Department of Justice refuses to cooperate. They're flagrantly refusing a request from the

Spanish government through its national court to participate. And what can Spain do? There are just, there are lackey. So now Assange will be sent to the government that plotted to kill him and will be in its hands. He'll probably be handcuffed and put on the kind of flight that, you know, people like Abu Zubaita were renditioned on, treated like a terrorist or what Joe Biden called a digital terrorist, and the slow process of killing him in a prison cell through deprivation and psychological torture will continue just a few minutes from the White House and from where I live. And so I predicted this at a rally in front of the Justice Department that he would be extradited.

And I just said that this is not just the capital of an imperial country. It's our community. And we just have to come out as a community and show our support for him and his family and demand his freedom and really make this an uncomfortable process for the security state, his persecutors in the security state. I hope people can can really show up for him in this country. That's that's pretty much the only thing we have the power to do is that rally at 5 p.m. Today in front of the Justice Department, it's an emergency rally, but I hope they grow larger. And I hope there's, you know, people, you know, start to talk about this. Man, it's just meaningful that there's nothing like espionage involved in his case at all other than it's the

ridiculous false accusation against him, but that's all they've got. Because otherwise, publishing journalism is not against the law in the United States. Yeah, you should read my piece where I explain how the secret indictment was authored in the district court in Northern Virginia in Alexandria. The day after the CIA, through its kind of its contractor at the embassy, learned that there was a plan to break Assange out of the embassy and get him into friendly territory. So obviously, the indictment was just cooked, and they'd already, they already had it ready. And the Espionage Act indictment's key source is a hacker from Iceland and Siggy Thorterson, who was a child molester, a pedophile who was trying to negotiate a,

way out of his prosecution by snitching on Assange. And he said that he made up his testimony in order to save his own hide. And who helped him do that? It was Attorney General Bill Barr. The key witness was a child molester trying to save his hide by lying about Assange. The whole indictment is bogus. I interviewed the Icelandic reporters who broke that story too, by the way. Oh, that's great. story on the record here i'm gonna listen to that you know i was just thinking and i think i read somewhere and i got kevin coming up i don't know the details maybe you know but it seems like i think there's one more appeal after this um so i don't know there's two appeals okay there's

still a couple it's not all the way over yet but you know when you talk about you know him actually being extradited here i'm picturing him you know in shackles in his orange jumpsuit like he did anything wrong and it seems like like, you know, the silver lining in that absolute horrid abuse of justice and persecution of a journalistic hero like that is that it's going to be so plain for all to see, you know? It's kind of like the difference between Yuvalde and Waco. There's actually a couple more kids killed in Yuvalde, and they weren't directly killed by the police, but might as well have been, because they're holding other people back and all of that.

but in Waco you got those flames that you'll never forget and you've all the kind of just got this building that's kind of hard to remember exactly what it looks like you know something like that but Assange in chains with his wrist shackled at his waist and all of this when wait what did he do again Bradley Manning gave him a bunch of documents showing how crooked and ugly America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were and that's why you're treating him like this like he's Hannibal

elector and all of this. I think it just, not that it's worth it, not that I would sacrifice him or his liberty for this, but I'm just saying it really will go to demonstrate just how brutal that this regime is. In a way, like here's pictures of these guys of Guantanamo Bay, only this guy, you know, he doesn't look like an Afghan goat herder that Americans can dismiss so easily, you know? And it's just, and they don't have anything on them. They don't even have anything to accuse him of. I saw a guy today on Twitter said, well, he's everybody knows he's the agent of the Russians.

But man, you can't even argue that. You can claim that on Twitter, but you don't have a case. There's no case there even to argue. I mean, they have nothing. There's not. There's not. And the media could get him out

in a heartbeat if they started just pounding this story and exposing all the lies. The New York, so the New York Times was a approached about some aspects of the story that I wrote exposing the CIA plot against Assange. And they were not interested. They're just like, go away. They were almost contemptuous when it was brought to them, when they were presented with certain documents.

Of course. Well, look, that weasel Charlie Savage wrote a whole something or other. I'm sorry, I didn't follow up on it. But I saw the headline was about. His whole thing, it may have even been a book or a monograph or something about why Julian Assange is not a journalist and doesn't count and we shouldn't stick up for him. So, yeah. Mr. Russia Bounty's hoax came up with that one. Or at least, I guess, I can report to you the fact that there's a rumor that I thought I remembered that. And that's good enough for the top of the front page. I mean, it's why it's just, they're just such detestable people.

They identify with their sources. And they essentially are, I mean, as the Paul Mason piece shows, they're not just like in communication with sources for stories, they're collaborating with them. Ellen Nakashima from The Washington Post, she's the top national security reporter. She went to visit Assange. I'm not sure why, because she never, I don't think she ever published an interview with him. But when she went into the embassy, like everyone who visited Assange, she had her devices. hacked into by the security that had been subverted by the CIA. They were basically told to take everyone's name, open their devices, go through their contacts,

and try to determine if they have any connection to the Russians. So, of course, nothing happened with her devices, like, but they did go into them, and they did invade her privacy, and she knew it. I have a photo of her phone opened by CIA asset. This came out in the Madrid case. So what did Ellen Nakashima do? Absolutely nothing. Nothing.

I mean, imagine if Putin's FSB did that to a Washington Post reporter. It would be front page, but they cannot say anything because they're biting the hand that feeds them, the CIA. Yep. It's just the same as regulatory capture in any industry, you know, the way they feed off each other and get intertwined with each other. and all the incentives of their cooperation completely outweigh anybody's duty to the truth or the public or any ridiculous thing like that. Yeah, so I have a rare opportunity coming up in about a week. I somehow got invited to this conference in Toronto that's like one of these phony TED talk tech conferences. There's all kinds of money behind it.

And every mainstream hack is going to be there like Michael Isick. off, Betsy Reed from the Intercept, the vice people, ABC News. There are all these media panels about disinformation and just complete hackery. And they invited me and Aaron Mante. We get 20 minutes on stage. Both you together or one after the other or what? Together and 20 minutes, we can't do much in 20 minutes, but we're going to. Yeah, you can't do. You and Aaron Mottese are as hell can wreck them in 20 minutes, dude. so yeah we're going to try to bring the noise and i'm going to be in the same space as all these reporters so i'm going to ask them about asanj and why they just don't say shit

man uh the list of things that they lied about that i know that the two of you can recite off at the top of your head to their faces there i mean you want to talk about misinformation i just i'm picturing you like a lawnmower with the you just pull the string and it roars to life and go for it, man. That's going to be awesome, dude. I can't wait to see the video of that. God, damn. If, let's see if I make it, man. Like, when is this? It seems, it's on the 22nd. Yeah. Yeah, man. Um, right on. They booked me, they booked me a hotel and like, it seems like it's going to happen. So, uh, we're making some progress, you know? Great. I'm debating And Kathy Young, who's now writing for Bill Crystal at the bulwark at Porkfest, we're going to debate about whether America should be backing Ukraine in the war. I believe that's a debate, but we're going to have it.

That's going to be another slaughterhouse. I'll see how I'm going to be. Who will be the last Ukrainian to die? Have you ever seen Max? And I know this is not exactly your cup of tea, but it's close. have you ever seen the footage of Peter Schiff at the Mortgage Bankers Association meeting in 2006 when he tells them

that oh man it's a bubble and you better get out of it now and they all just laugh in his face and won't listen to him and this became like the ultimate told you so kind of thing right like I think that's what you and Aaron have right here it's like Kathy Young is one thing

but you got you're up against 50 Kathy Young's one big thing, including Isikov, who wrote the book about Russian Kate and all of this? Like, oh man, I almost feel sorry for them. And the opportunity here, I mean, it's already predetermined like Calvinism. This is

already a done deal, how bad you guys are going to slaughter them. I'm really excited for this. This is going to be great. I'm sure you'll pay them the exact proper amount of respect that they are due. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a new poll out. I don't start

remember who took the poll. Sixty-five percent of journalists think that the media is doing a very good job of telling the truth and supporting democracy. And about 30 percent of the American public believes that. And that just perfectly illustrates the gulf between this elite insular culture of what Curtis Mayfield would have called educated fools from uneducated schools. between them and the public which they fear and despise and see as all a bunch of potential insurrectionists. Hey, this is the key to Trump's victory was more than any other thing, is he said, the reason the media hates me is because they hate you and I like you and that's what they hate about

me and you know it and people were like, you know what, that sounds right. And that's what Bernie refused to do following, because he was surrounded by a little media opportunist like Matt does. Yeah. Bernie didn't have it. That's what the people want is a full-on nuclear assault on the media. And as I am like a self-hating member of the media. I'm a laptop class trader. So I'm going to give it to him in Toronto.

Yeah, man. That's going to be great. All right, listen, we better wrap this up. I got to go. but thank you so much for your time and good luck to you and congratulations on being targeted by these goons you know that that means you're doing great work thanks thanks looking forward to your debate with the omidy r funded bulwark yeah we'll see how it goes man um have a good good talking to you take care all right you guys max blumenthal he's at the gray zone dot com

the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.