A “hit piece” based on an “Oxford Study” on an obscure publication known as Veterans Today, was recently covered in America’s right-wing press. The publication, certainly obscure in all but military and intelligence circles was accused of being funded and run by Russia to influence America’s top generals and soften US policy in Syria and promote military cooperation with Russia.
What is not asked is who funded this “investigation?” A cursory examination quickly found that Google Jigsaw, the “regime change” arm of Google Corporation, a paramilitary defense group operating across the Middle East and Africa, backed the Oxford study.
Curiously, Veterans Today had “outed” Google Jigsaw or its precursor, “Google Idea Groups” as supplying weapons, intelligence and propaganda services to the terror groups ISIS and al Nusra/al Qaeda on behalf of clients in Israeli and Saudi intelligence. One of Veterans Today’s informants, Serena Shimm, a Detroit born journalist operating inside Turkey was murdered after the initial expose on Google Idea Groups was published.
Google Idea Group is, according to Veterans Today, a military front run by former White House National Security Council Clandestine Operations Chief Jared Cohen, an Israeli trained military planner. That has never been disputed. We begin.
The date is October 9, 2017. Oxford, in this case the Computational Media Project, along with publications like The Hill and the McClatchy papers, cite a study they say proves Veterans Today is a Russian propaganda front. We at Veterans Today, from this point on commonly referred to as “VT,” knew this was coming. We were prepared.
Everything about VT is wrong. “VT” or Veterans Today was begun in 2003, not 2013 and was begun by US Army Special Forces personnel as a private blog to discuss military issues otherwise “disallowed” by the Pentagon.
Adding to the initial group was a group that came over from AOL, who worked with the History Channel there. This group was led by Colonel David Hackworth, most decorated soldier in American history, a noted author and veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, fired by President Lyndon Johnson for saying the Vietnam War was unwinnable.
With Hackworth came Colonel Ted Guy, famed two-war fighter ace and former Vietnam War POW. Guy was Senator John McCain’s commanding officer while McCain was a POW. Colonel Guy called for the arrest of McCain for treason upon repatriation, presenting a detailed list of charges against the famed senator, accusing him of treason and collaboration, hundreds of counts, multiple witnesses.
Guy was ignored and McCain received a secret presidential pardon, something we have confirmed through multiple sources.
Even best selling author and former Vatican exorcist Malachi Martin spent his time at Veterans Today. His conspiracy theories have been fictionalized many times and can now be seen on the Fox Network in the 2nd season on “The Exorcist.”
Of the original group, only Gordon Duff, a former Marine who served as a combat veteran in Vietnam, has stayed on. He heads the Board of Directors that include senior military from several nations. Duff served as a corporal but “commands” a board filled with generals, a mix of military from Pakistan, Serbia, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Britain, Israel and a dozen nations. Behind this are, it is rumored, retired chiefs of a dozen intelligence agencies as well, that and a smattering of analysts, academics and, as VT gleefully agrees, “conspiracy nuts” as well.
As Duff has said in interviews, “without the conspiracy nuts, we wouldn’t have any readership numbers, it is our way of honoring Fox News and the new tabloids, after all doesn’t everyone love reading about two-headed alien babies from time to time?”
Truth is, however, most of VT is dry material, most of its academic papers eaten up by the Pentagon and Langley, quite often the only detailed and accurate information on Afghanistan or internal politics in Syria, Iraq or a dozen other nations. VT has managed to keep unpaid but quality writers “on the ground” in up to 3 dozen “hard to get into” nations, where all other sources, even the CIA, has failed.
Yes, that makes VT vital, makes them read at the Pentagon, and drives the evening phone calls VT regularly gets along with offers from organizations like America’s Defense Intelligence Agency to put the entire VT staff on the payroll. VT refused. They don’t accept even advertising, they don’t accept donations, they are self-funded, a model that has confused many.
Within VT is a background staff of high level defense executives, known well at the Pentagon, who are close to a number of Middle East and African governments. When the FBI needed help in Nigeria, they went to VT. Other agencies have gone to VT for help in the UAE, Qatar, Syria, Turkey, Kenya, Ghana, Libya, certainly Pakistan, this has been done time and time again.
The rumors that VT has stopped more than one world war, one tossed around too freely is quite probably true.
Behind it all, there are other anomalous things about VT. They don’t seem to have “politics.” Duff is a liberal democrat and Obama supporter. Others are centrists, a few from the far right. VT is multi-cultural with a strong smattering of Jews and Muslims, African Americans, women, if anything, VT is a last bastion of freedom of speech.
Another key issue about VT, as editor Jim Hanke, retired US Army intelligence officer and former G2 of 3rd Army, former attaché to Israel, so often says, “when are these guys going to start paying a salary?”
Hanke counts among his closest friends, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Also at VT is Jeff Smith, nuclear physicist and former investigator for the International Atomic Energy Agency. Smith’s stories of clandestine nuclear weapons trade, called “conspiracy theory” by Oxford, are backed up by US nuclear scientists and bevies of documents Smith has retained during his work for the UN, investigating nuclear weapons production facilities in such nations as Israel, Syria and Iran for over 20 years. Smith also claims to have investigated 9/11 as well, and has those documents with him to prove his claims.
Another VT board member is Gwyneth Todd, former advisor to President’s Clinton and Bush 43, member of the National Security Council. Both the Washington Post and ABC did features on Todd and attempts by the Bush White House to silence her, including kidnapping and assassination attempts.
Then there’s Lee Wanta, VT editor and former White House Intelligence Coordinator for President Reagan. A quick visit to the Reagan library will outline the hours those two spent together planning the downfall of the Soviet Union.
Getting to the real basis for VT and what they are doing is simple. Back in 2013 the editorial board discerned a need for reporting news from both Russian and Iranian media. This relationship went both ways, forming relationships but also publishing wide critiques of poor quality material and propaganda as well.
VT found news reported no place else but found something else. VT began to trace odd material in Press TV, the Moscow Times and other organizations, propaganda yes, but America propaganda. What VT found was a money trail from the CIA through contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, to launder phony journalists who had once worked for Radio Liberty and other American propaganda fronts. These writers and broadcasters, secretly employed by American intelligence agencies, were responsible for the “worst of the worst” of Russian and Iranian propaganda.
Further investigations found that it is the CIA itself that had “laundered” propaganda through “cut outs” in Russia and Iran, using American operatives inside major networks or websites like Breitbart and Newsmax, and then later setting up groups like the Oxford investigation to cover their tracks when caught.
VT’s experts do believe the 2016 election was rigged, they did the real legwork, inside Russia and Israel, in the Ukraine, in Serbia and Macedonia, where much of the clandestine work was done and only VT has “on the ground” assets. It wasn’t the Kremlin they found but rather Israeli intelligence and a 3rd party, organized crime groups made of former KGB and Mossad operatives working with, it seemed, groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Atlantic Council, the American Enterprise Institute and rogue groups from Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
If a minor publication could do this, could tie this all together neatly, what could a real organization like the FBI or CIA do? Then the other question was asked as well, do those organizations still exist or, as President Trump has alluded time and time again, are they, in fact, infiltrated themselves? If news is fake and the FBI fake and the CIA fake, as Trump has stated over and over, is he right?
VT very reluctantly says, “it seems so.” VT is not wild about much of what President Trump has done, how he handles diplomacy and what he says but notes that Trump knows when he is being lied to and the CIA and FBI have done little but lie to President Trump, particularly with the phony investigations that are attempting to tie the president and Russia to the rigged election.
As usual, VT will survive attacks by publications like The Hill, the Washington Post or Politico. With no advertisers and no paid “anyone” on staff, there is no vulnerability. What the Oxford group miserably failed at is looking at VT on the surface and VT under the surface.
Years ago, a popular film known as Fight Club told a story. You see, “fight club” was an organization where “underlings,” the waiters, the garbagemen, the people who do the real work got together. You see, without them, those who take out the trash, those who clean the messes, who fight the wars, there is no reality.
VT is like “fight club.” When heroin is loaded onto a plane by a former Navy SEAL working for a major corporation in a small airport near, lets’ just say Gwadar, a town in Pakistan, this SEAL may well be a close friend of Jim Dean or Gordon Duff or Mike Harris or Jim Hanke or someone else at VT. They might well take photos or video.
When Sarin gas shells are manufactured at a facility outside the airport at Tbilisi, Georgia and transported by Ukrainian security officers into Turkey and into Syria, friends of VT might well load the truck. They might even be driving the truck.
When then presidential candidate John McCain visited Syria and met with ISIS leader al Baghdadi, who do you think served them tea? Was it a VT friend? Did VT publish the photos? You can bet they did.
When a Supreme Court justice mysteriously died at a hunting club and 33 people walked past police who had turned their backs, 4 of them United States senators, did they miss that Hispanic gardener taking video through a hole torn in his hat? Where is that video now? Does it exist?
Taking the clock back, when Senator’s Ted Kennedy and Paul Sarbanes set up the banking organizations, in Astoria in Queens and in Manhattan, was it the Alpha Bank, to launder stolen Soviet billions through a bankrupt New York developer, now rumored to be President, what VT editor chaired that meeting?
Was a former Greek-American CIA director at the table with his two cousins, one former campaign finance director for Mike Dukakis? What are these photos worth, the meeting where the Russian mafia was created, where a real estate empire was underwritten?
These are the little things, the small things that the little people saw, people like Lee Wanta and his meetings with Osama bin Laden at the Metropolitan Club in Washington while the CIA was hunting bin Laden in Sudan and Afghanistan. Not only can we make the claim, we can tell you everyone in the room, give word for word on this and a dozen, a hundred, a thousand such talks.
One such incident involved a White House “czar” handing reams of nuclear secrets to a foreign leader. Not only was this witnessed, the FBI has video of the whole thing and was forced to silence it. How many nations now have nukes because of this? I can assure you, it is many more than you guess.
We can add more stories, as former comedian Jimmy Durante once said, “I’ve got a million of em.” How about this one? How many knew that South Africa built nukes and exploded one on September 22, 1979? They built 10 of them but, according to a former head of British intelligence, 3 of them were stolen.
All VT knows is this, the company that builds the containers and cradles for transporting nukes belongs to a VT contributor. He loaded the nukes on a ship in Durban those decades ago. That one of the South African nukes ended up in North Korea, taken there in a German built Dolphin submarine flagged to Israel is another story. You see, the US spy satellites can recognize a uranium signature, even from space, if, let us say, the refining of the Katanga ore was done at the Pelandaba facility in South Africa. Do I need to say more?
Oh heck, here’s another one, consider this one a “bonus track” like in the music business. How do you think ISIS got 12,000 oil trucks? That many never existed in the Middle East. Saddam’s oil smuggling trucks were small, 500 in number, and mostly scrap. A Houston based company that became famous for building American military bases, a company whose name begins with “B” bought up trucks from across the US and Canada. They shipped them out of Houston straight to Turkey and on to Iraq and Syria, sold to a company owned by relatives of well-known political leaders.
Later, Russian planes blew up these trucks, 12,000 of them, trucks that once plied America’s interstate highways. Ah, but enough cheap gossip.
What are we saying? There are conspiracy theories then there is reality. Governments don’t tell anything, the press learns nothing, nothing is printed, nothing admitted to and the popular narrative that goes from “fake news” to “fake history” is for public consumption only.
Oxford University or, were one to be honest, Google Jigsaw, will not silence VT. VT has a role, to operate as a safety valve, to build trust where none exists, to find those of wit and humor and character, even at rare times when such people enter the halls of power.
Why does a computer search engine company that makes money spreading malware and spying on email employ 20,000 armed mercenaries? Perhaps we can begin by finding someone of wit, someone in authority somewhere to ask that question. Until then we watch, we wait.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
