Yves here. Hopefully readers who understand Canada’s libel and defamation laws can pipe up. Presumably most of you already know about Consortium News’ libel suit. From its site :
Consortium News has sent libel notices to the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s version of the U.S. National Security Agency, and to a major Canadian television network, Global News, for a report that said Consortium News was “part of a cyber-influence campaign directed by Russia.”
Consortium News promoted a story that was widely picked up and deservedly embarrassing to Chyrstia Freeland, then Canada’s foreign minister, more recently its deputy prime minister. Freeland is of Ukrainian descent and is rabidly anti-Russian. She has falsely and knowingly depicted her family as victims of the Nazis who fled persecution, when her grandfather was a prominent Nazi propagandist operating out of Krakow.
Mind you, this is all factually accurate. But Consortium News may not be on solid ground in challenging the Canadian accounts of its story.
A Helmer describes, Consortium News may have badly undermined its position via its attribution. Helmer himself originated the story, as the Consortium News story linked to above acknowledges….but Consortium News didn’t in its piece on l’affaire Freeland a month later.
Instead, its story came from “journalist Arina Tsukanova exclusively for CN”. The problem is that no such person appears to exist; it looks to be a handle created by the Strategic Culture Foundation in Moscow. Helmer points out that there is speculation that the Strategic Culture Foundation gets funding from the Russian Orthodox Church; the Canadian government believes the Russian government supports it. Regardless, it appears to have an explicit mission of promoting Russian nationalism.
So Consortium News has undermined its case, perhaps fatally, by not making clear when it ran its Freeland piece that it was re-reporting Helmer’s work. Helmer is in hot water with the Russian government and was even barred from entering Russia at the time the Freeland story ran. Helmer also knew Freeland from his days at the Financial Times, when she was his editor for a bit. To put it politely, he found her to be ideological and sloppy. So it would be well nigh impossible to depict Consortium News as a Russian stooge for relying on Helmer. But apparently fabricated personas created by a shadowy Russian foundation?
I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, particularly since we were falsely smeared for being Russian stooges, apparently for sins like questioning rising inequality and other failings of our purported leaders. But if you are going to attack government officials even in a small country like Canada for misrepresentations about their backgrounds, as opposed to garden variety incompetence and mendacity, you need to have your ducks in a row. Going to court similarly requires you to be able to defend your bona fides. Consortium News looks to have set itself up to be vulnerable. I sincerely hope they prevail, but I would not bet on it.
By John Helmer, the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears
The truth is that Consortium News trusted a Russian entity named the Strategic Culture Foundation and a Ukrainian reporter called Arina Tsukanova for a story published on February 27, 2017, about Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather Mikhail Chomiak, a propagandist and spy for the German Army who advocated and assisted in the murder of the Jews, Poles and Russians during World War II, and took his reward by stealing Jewish property – publishing company, office, apartment, antique furniture, and limousine.
The story about Freeland and the ethnic cleansing of Ukraine on which Freeland agrees, still, with Chomiak, was the truth. It’s also a truth she tries to escape by blaming the Russian state or Kremlin propaganda for repeating. Repeating doesn’t turn the truth into a lie, though as Joseph Goebbels advised, repeating the lie helps.
The point isn’t that Freeland is culpable in her grandfather’s sins. Her sin is hiding them, and her reason for doing so. She agrees with Chomiak on turning Ukraine into the Greater Galicia it was Adolf Hitler’s objective to achieve between 1939 to 1945: that’s to say, cleanse the territory of Jews, Poles and Russians by killing them all. Chomiak succeeded with the first two; he was then employed by the US Army on the third. Freeland is keeping the plan in the family; they now have the Canadian government behind them. Demonizing Russians is part of the same plan as it was in Chomiak’s day.
The irony is that the Freeland-Chomiak story was plagiarized from an American reporter who first published the details on January 19, 2017. At the time, and still, he was banned from entering Russia by the Kremlin because, according to a senior official in Moscow, “he writes bad things about our country”; no western journalist has been banned for as long – since September 27, 2010. The reporter was me.
There’s another truth wrapped in an irony. Arina Tsukanova, the byline writer of the Strategic Culture Foundation story and the Consortium News story, cannot be found; isn’t known at the media of Kiev and Crimea where her published pieces claim she works; and doesn’t reply to emails and Facebook communications. She is a ghost—a byline invented by the Strategic Culture Foundation in Moscow.
The Galician state plan, the genocide which went with it, and the current campaign of lies against Russia didn’t start with Chomiak or end with Freeland. In Canada they have been continued by many officials; among them Lieutenant-General Paul Wynnyk, commander of the Canadian Army, then Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, 2016-2019, and now a minister in the Alberta provincial government; and Roman Waschuk, Canada’s ambassador to Kiev, 2014-2019; for their details, click.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the site of the German death camp whose liberation by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, is celebrated last week and this, was part of the Galician territory under German occupation. It was seventy kilometres west of Chomiak’s office in Cracow, within his killing range. Opponents and critics of the Galician plan, and researchers of the war crimes committed by Chomiak and others include many Canadians of Ukrainian origin, including John-Paul Himka, a professor of history now retired from the University of Alberta in Edmonton; he and they have been the target of ostracism and worse from the Ukrainian-Canadian community; read more.
According to Himka (right) there is “a blank spot in the collective memory of the Ukrainian diaspora”, and a “double standard in discussing war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Ukrainians as opposed to those perpetrated against Ukrainians. Memoirs and eyewitness accounts, for example, are considered untrustworthy evidence for the former, but trustworthy for the latter; that is, Jewish or Polish first-hand accounts of Ukrainian war crimes are dismissed as biased, while an important Ukrainian victimization narrative, the famine of 1932-33, has relied primarily on just such eyewitness accounts.”
The lying by the promoters of the Galician plan for Ukraine has been promoted by the Canadian mass media, almost without exception. They don’t respond to correction for the truth; click to follow their record.
With the collaboration of her former employer, the Financial Times, Freeland continues to lie by omission and commission, In the past weekend’s “Lunch with the FT”, Freeland was questioned by a reporter called Edward Luce. “I struggle to rustle up some professional scepticism,” he admitted towards the end of listening to Freeland. “I cannot help nodding in agreement.”
Luce also couldn’t help omitting the extent of the story of Freeland and Galicia. Instead, he repeated Freeland’s lie that her mother had been “born to Ukrainian refugees in a US displaced person’s camp in postwar Germany.” In fact, they weren’t refugees from Ukraine. They were Nazi war criminals on the run. The “camp” was a luxury Bavarian spa town, Bad Worishofen, which the US Army had taken over, in part to develop Ukrainian espionage and infiltration agents to run against the Soviet Union. Chomiak was an early recruit, switching his loyalty from the German Army to the US Army for money, and for the same murderous ideology.
The US Army, OSS and CIA files on Chomiak, dating from 1945 to at least 1948, are stored at the National Archives in Washington. No researcher has opened them yet. Recovering the full story of Chomiak started with Ukrainian and Canadian researchers working through Chomiak’s papers in Alberta, and with Polish police investigations in Warsaw; they were opened and reported here.
The Russian contribution to this research and reporting has been negligible. Ditto Consortium News (CN).
In an announcement last week, Joe Lauria, the editor of CN since founder Robert Parry died in 2018, said he had instructed Toronto lawyers to send libel notices to the Canadian signals intelligence agency, Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and to a local broadcaster called Global News. The notices asked for retractions and apologies.
Lauria said CN had been defamed for a publication in February 27, 2017, when Chomiak’s wartime record was reported for the first time. Except it wasn’t for the first time and the original CN article wasn’t quite what it purported to be.
The CSE had produced a secret analysis, Global News reported, on Russian info-war against Freeland. “Cyber influence activity to cause reputational damage” was the technical Canadian spy agency term quoted. “The Grandfather Nazi narrative” was another of the terms. The secret Canadian intelligence was: “In early spring 2017 and spring 2018, sources linked to Russia popularized MFA Freeland’s family history, very likely intended to cause personal reputational damage in order to discredit the Government of Canada’s ongoing diplomatic and military support of Ukraine, to delegitimize Canada’s decision to enact the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Offices Act, and the expulsion of several Russian diplomats.” The Global News report can be read here.
Sources linked to Russia were reportedly tracked down by CSE. “The first attack,” claimed Global News, citing the CSE report, “was a February 2017 report in the ‘online Consortium News’ followed ‘in quick succession’ by pro-Russian English language and Russian-language online media, the CSE report says.”
Lauria charged last week that this was libellous. Aside, he didn’t dispute Parry’s claims at the time that he had been first or that Freeland’s counter-attack with her Russia lie was aimed at Parry and CN. Here is Parry’s original publication, bylined Arina Tsukanova, and tagged “exclusive”.
According to CN’s original publication, Tsukanova “is a Russian Ukrainian journalist from Kiev currently living in Crimea. Before the Euromaidan she used to work for several Ukrainian newspapers, now closed.”
In the English language, Tsukanova’s stories started to appear in mid-2016 and then stopped in April 2017. When her story on the Freeland-Chomiak case appeared in CN, she had reported nothing on the idea, the topic, or the subject details before; there was no sequel or related report by her afterwards.
In the Russian language Tsukanova’s reporting record began on January 18, 2016, and is still current. Her two outlets are the Strategic Culture Foundation (FSK in Russian) and KM.ru, both in Moscow. The reports specialize on Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. She has reported only once on Freeland and Chomiak. The story which appeared in Russian on March 2, 2017, is not the same story as had appeared under her byline in CN three days earlier. The Russian version of the story has 23 paragraphs. The first 11 paragraphs of the CN story, a third of the publication, weren’t written by Tsukanova and do not appear in the Russian version. They were written by Parry; “I personally edited and fact-checked [it]”, Parry wrote later. It was Parry’s English version which was reprinted by Strategic Culture Foundation on March 2, 2017, and then Parry’s lone bylined story which ran in the same place on March 12, 2017.
“Knowing Bob as I did,” Lauria said last week, “I’m certain he would not have published the article if he knew any of it had been plagiarized. He must have not been aware of your earlier story as I wasn’t as I was preparing my story this week.” Lauria then compared what Tsukanova and Parry had written with two reports I had published five weeks earlier.
Source: http://johnhelmer.net// This story was followed by this one.
Lauria now says: “I carefully went through your two stories and compared it to Consortium News of Feb. 27, 2017. There is no doubt that it is based on your earlier story. That should have been mentioned in the Consortium article. I did not find whole sentences or paragraphs that were taken directly from your article. The fact remains that the story of Freeland’s grandfather is true and that cannot be disputed. I have updated the article I wrote on Tuesday to include this line in the body of the text: The story was first reported by John Helmer a month earlier…In her version, Tuskanova reported; and I put a note at the end of the story saying: This article has been updated to show that the story of Freeland’s grandfather was first reported by John Helmer.”
The revised version of the CN report looks like this. Lauria is making amends.
Parry, who can’t, made a habit of lifting material without giving credit and then promoting himself as the originator. In March 2015, for example, he produced a piece on Igor Kolomoisky, the Ukrainian oligarch; the Burisma scandal involving the Biden family, and Natalie Jaresko, the State Department official who became the Ukrainian minister of finance. Here’s Parry’s story.
This material started with two stories of mine which had appeared a month earlier. Parry helped himself to the topic and the material, but omitted to mention their origin. He also forgot that he had written to me to say: “John, thanks. Good piece.” Here is where Parry started and also here.
As for Parry’s reporting on Jaresko, which appeared on February 19, 2015 — — that started with a story I had published on Jaresko on December 3, 2014. After reworking the material and sources, Parry gave a mention of the origin in my work. He placed that at the 43rd paragraph of his 52-paragraph piece.
Lauria was asked to verify Parry’s source, Tsukanova. He says he wrote Tsukanova by email, but she hasn’t replied. Independently, checks of the Crimea and Kiev media last week reveal that she is not known to the press in either place where she claims to have worked for years. I attempted to contact her at her Facebook page; she did not reply. In the Facebook gallery of her photographs, there are none of Tsukanova on location acting as a journalist.
Left: the header for Arina Tsukanova’s story archive published by the Strategic Culture Foundation; source -- https://www.fondsk.ru/authors/Right: the only photograph of Tsukanova found on the Russian internet. This identifies Tsukanova, not only as journalist, but also as a “publicist”. Source: https://www.infox.ru/blog/168
Arina Tsukanova, according to this Facebook page.
On the evidence gathered to date, Tsukanova is a ghost – a byline invented by her Russian publishers for their purposes, but made to look credible for other purposes. Lauria refused to provide evidence of the original correspondence with Parry, the terms of exclusivity he reported with Tsukanova, or a record of payment for her article in 2017. He concludes: “I’m not anticipating any evidence [of her communication].”
Lauria also says that “not being able to reach her only proves that she’s not reachable… I do not think there is any evidence to say she is a ghost for someone else. It seems pure speculation at this point…In the end of the day, the story is true so does it really matter? A source or a sources’ [sic] motives become irrelevant if the information they provide is true.”
The problem for Lauria and CN is that if Tsukanova was an invention of the Strategic Culture Foundation in 2017 when Parry picked up the Freeland-Chomiak story, and if the Moscow entity was receiving money from Russian state media agencies, then the link between Parry and the Russian side was one which is an embarrassment now for CN in its claims against CSE and Global News.
Tsukanova may be a ghost; the Strategic Culture Foundation is not. It may be suspected in Ottawa of taking money from state organs; in Moscow it is suspected of taking money from the Russian Orthodox Church. But there is no evidence of either. What there is is a record of the foundation’s registration on February 21, 2005, at a room in the Polyanka district of Moscow. The president was listed as Yury Prokofiev; the general director, Vladimir Maksimenko. The “main activity” on the registration forms is “research and development in the field of social sciences and humanities”. Tax inspection is also confirmed, but no details of income or expenditures.
Left, Yury Prokofiev, founding president of the Strategic Culture Foundation in Moscow; right, Vladimir Maksimenko, the general director.
About Prokofiev, now about 81 years of age, there is a detailed history of his evolution from Communist Party apparatchik in 1990-91 to Orthodox Christian monarchist a decade later. The profile, with extensive quotes and references, was published by Valery Lebedev in March 2007; read the Russian here. Lebedev titles his story after the Russian story of the puppeteer Karabas Barabas, the villain in a Russian fairy tale. According to Lebedev’s account, the Strategic Culture Foundation was designed as a platform for the promotion of Russian nationalism. He doesn’t know where Prokofiev got his money to publish.
About Maksimenko, the Russian record indicates that he studied history to doctoral level at MGIMO and was (may still be) an employee of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His earlier academic publications were on the Maghreb (Arab North Africa); his later ones on Orthodox monarchism appear here. About both Prokofiev and Maksimenko, Lebedev says they have been shopping from one cause to another for years; he implies they have never managed to draw much money or audience.
Maksimenko does not reply to emails at the contact address given for the Strategic Culture Foundation. The foundation has published only one article by Maksimenko under his byline in English; it is about French politics. There is no article in English by Prokofiev in the archive.
With them Freeland shares the same combination of ethnic nationalism and God – in Freeland’s case, she told the FT, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
“I’m very patriotic,” Freeland told the FT. “’Be good Ukrainians, and by being good Ukrainians, you will be even better Canadians’,” Freeland recounts. ‘I happen to be Ukrainian-Canadian. When I moved to Toronto I had an instant community of Canadian-Ukrainians. There’s a culture there that my kids can immediately experience in Edmonton or Saskatoon…She then embarks on a passionate disquisition about the robustness of Ukraine’s democracy. An aide halts her to say they are late for another meeting a few blocks away.’”
Pricking Freeland’s vanity is a bigger job than the FT can handle; or Parry’s vanity for Lauria. The vanity of the Canadian espionage establishment will be safe in a Toronto court. But pricked the CSE file most certainly it is. That’s because the record of Canadian spying for influence over Russian journalism long precedes this affair.
It started, in fact, with a woman called Janice Cowan, a Canadian of English origin who was the wife of the Canadian military attaché in the Moscow embassy in the early 1990s. Cowan was trained to penetrate Russian media circles and report back to Ottawa. “It was a good time to be a spy”, Cowan wrote in a memoir she published called A Spy’s Wife; it was issued in 2006 by a Toronto publisher called James Lorimer with a grant from the Canadian Government. “Quality Canadian books you’ll want to read” is Lorimer’s motto – except that without cash from Ottawa, Lorimer might have judged that no one would have wanted to read about Cowan’s espionage. In Moscow she took diplomatic immunity from her husband; her spy cover was as an editor at the English language paper, The Moscow Tribune. (The competing English-language paper, The Moscow Times, had Cowan’s counterparts from the CIA.) Cowan’s targets for espionage included the son-in-law of Marshal Georgy Zhukov and me.
In its review of Cowan’s book, the Toronto Globe & Mail said: “Her account of her pre-assignment operational training, and of her various intelligence-gathering tours to Soviet hot spots is convincing. But what threatens to drop this otherwise charming little book into the trivia basket is Cowan’s incurable and self-confessed romanticism about intelligence.”
The files of the Communications Security Establishment must include Cowan’s reports; they remain classified even after she broke cover with her book. They can’t be mentioned now because that would reveal the topmost secret of all – that when it comes to info-war between Russia and Canada, penetration of the media, and what the CSE calls “cyber influence activity to cause reputational damage”, it was the Canadians who started against the Russians first.
It’s been catch-up, tit-for-tat, not to mention plagiarism, ever since.
34 comments
Comments are closed.
I’m so ashamed of this government. And the other day we welcomed the “Interim President” of Venezuela!
Truly the 51st state.
No, we’re (UK) the 51st state. We got here first. And these things matter. Canada is the 52nd. Well, possibly. I think Japan is actually the 52nd. Canada can be 53rd, if you like. Although Australians will need to correct me if that one’s already been nabbed by them.
Sixth territory is waiting to be claimed.
Australia? Merely a vassal state, Clive. Merely a vassal state – just like Japan.
LOL. We welcome you all to our ever expanding republic.
As for the above
And many past US journalists have been suspected–no wait proven–to have taken money and favors from the CIA. While Parry may have done wrong by not crediting Helmer and CN may not get the apology and retraction it seeks, surely the main point is that the story is true. If we were scoring this propaganda war over “fake news” according to truth then it’s likely that stories about the west coming out of Russia–fake byline or not–probably score better on the truth meter than stories about Russia found in our MSM. As they used to say in Soviet times, everything they told us about Russia was a lie and everything they told us about America was the truth.
i’m waiting for more evidence. i haven’t found the note from parry that helmer mentions, yet, for example.
More to the point, this is an interesting and unfortunate turn for this case. Dances with Bears is a site I forget to read regularly. It’s a shame that CN might be setting themselves up for embarassment vs the Canadian establishment.
I read all three among many others like TruthDig, Craig Murray, Jacobin Mag, Counterpunch, Antiwar, Der Spiegel, Intercept, MoA, Grayzone Project, Asia Times etc. etc. on a regular basis, and I do not care how Strategic Culture gets its funding as long as it does not turn it into an obvious or subtle propaganda outlet.
From what I see and read this is an aggregator – with editorials sometimes – and publishes or republishes a wide spectrum from left to right, like Zuesse, Cloughly, Lazare, Crook, Cunningham, Madsen, Bridge, Madsen, Luongo and also LaRouchians like Ehret. A fairly wide Range and therefore obviously quite balanced.
I cannot see any evidence in this range of different contributors to what Helmer describes:
Maybe that statement reflects more his troubles with Russian officials, also I do not know how Helmer claims on one hand he
is not allowed to enter the RF but states on the top of his articles: by John Helmer, Moscow – what is it now? Who is economical with the truth?
As to Consortium News – yes, they should have been more careful with checking their sources, but for me it is important as an expat Canadian that someone like Freeland is permitted to actually represent Canada, which just shows how pernicious the influence of right wing to Fascist Ukrainians is, especially in a province like Alberta stretching into Ottawa.
With all due respect, you are completely missing the point or choosing to misconstrue it.
The attacks in Canada on the Consortium News report are based on its reliance on Russian sources that are alleged to be connected to the Russian government. Strategic Culture Foundation promotes Russian nationalism and is so hidden about its funding sources that that charge will likely stick. That means that the Consortium News will have difficulty in court disproving that it was amplifying a Russian campaign, particularly if Helmer’s other contention is correct, that the supposed author isn’t bona fide.
I must also point out, without naming names (because I don’t want to waste time and energy documenting the point) that some of the authors from Strategic Culture Foundation that you mention approvingly are ones we would never link to, and are even loath to allow links to their works in comments because they have serious and regular problems with accuracy (either actual facts or greatly overstating the implications of their findings). And accordingly, we have not linked to Strategic Culture Foundation because it features too many dodgy writers and we do not want to lead readers to view it as a reliable source.
In addition, you promote the fiction that anyone in Russia must be an official stooge. Help me. Helmer is regularly writing pieces that embarrass the Russian government and its allies; he’s been barred entry as retribution. Had Consortium News written a piece that acknowledged Helmer as the source of the account, it would have been extremely difficult to depict them as manipulated by Russian government allies.
I agree that if they had simply cited Helmer in the first place they would have a lot better libel case. I also find it surprising that CN didn’t even seem aware of Helmer’s reporting on the subject. You’d think that the thorough fact checking of the piece prior to publication would have turned that up. Even without the citation though, it seems a quite a stretch to say that the entire CN organization is “part of a cyber-influence campaign directed by Russia.” That “part of” is what will cause problems for CN I suspect. Could be another argument trying to determine what the meaning of “is” is. Perhaps CN doesn’t even care of they win the case as long as the publicity lets it be more widely known that the facts of their story are accurate.
I also picked up the same thing Peter did though. I’d always assumed Helmer was resident in Russia based on his byline and was a little surprised to find out that he was barred from the country.
The maddening thing is the corporate media can misreport stories, and deliberately so, and continue to get away with it and they will tar and feather an alternative media outlet for a relatively minor mistake that doesn’t affect the true facts of the story at all. It would be nice if Helmer and CN could let bygones be bygones and cooperate here to get the facts out before people like Freeland who do play fast and loose with the truth are allowed to squash it and rise through the ranks even higher.
It’s actually worse than that. If you read Helmer’s piece (he’s often so deep into the weeds that readers can easily lose the plot), Robert Parry clearly lifted material from Helmer’s original piece.
Parry indisputably knew Helmer was the original source for the story but failed to credit him in his version, which creates a paper trail that they got the piece from the now-apparently-vanished Russian author. That sin will now bite them in court.
when did all this happen, exactly. wiki
Parry died on January 27, 2018, after suffering several strokes caused by undiagnosed pancreatic cancer that he had been unknowingly living with for the past 4–5 years.[16]
he was dying. i don’t know how severe the strokes were, but mental impairment can’t be ruled out, under the circumstances. how much was he still doing at consortium, and how much was done in his name?
Ive only been reading it for a couple years, but I always felt Strategic Culture Foundation has good articles from time to time. They’re anti-imperial for sure, and have an occasional weird take on history (the French Revolution was hijacked by the British Oligarchy, and that’s when it got bloody), but overall it doesn’t have that pure propaganda feel.
I guess that’s how they get ya, sneaky bastards.
I check it every day. Many of the writers whose articles are picked up do indeed have secure reputations and articles that are widely republished throughout the leftysphere. And isn’t that how the web works? The opposite version would be the NYT where all those Judy Millers reign but are supposed to have credibility because of their newspaper’s (onetime) exalted reputation. The journalistic world has changed.
Perhaps this is unwelcome but Chyrstia Freeland could become Canada’s next prime minister
“The point isn’t that Freeland is culpable in her grandfather’s sins. Her sin is hiding them, and her reason for doing so. She agrees with Chomiak on turning Ukraine into the Greater Galicia it was Adolf Hitler’s objective to achieve between 1939 to 1945: that’s to say, cleanse the territory of Jews, Poles and Russians by killing them all. Chomiak succeeded with the first two; he was then employed by the US Army on the third. Freeland is keeping the plan in the family; they now have the Canadian government behind them”
So Chrystia Freeland supports ethnic cleansing?
It appears that she does support it when perpetrated by her grandpa…
Ever think that the Consortium News trusted a Russian entity named the Strategic Culture Foundation and a Ukrainian reporter called Arina Tsukanova on purpose– KNOWING that they could be discredited? NOw the narrative can be changed and Allows them to cover up the truth — the big story is now not about Freeland knowing lying about her grandfather and his Nazi connections — but about a fake news outlet trying to defame her? This sounds more like what is really going on here — FYI when ever I see someone has been a Rhodes Scholar and they are in politics or media — it can only means one thing — they are LIARS.
when did parry ever do something like that? never as far as i know, and at any rate freeland’s past is too well known to make this plausible, whether cn wins the libel suit or not.
Posted this previously but somehow disappeared.
“The point isn’t that Freeland is culpable in her grandfather’s sins. Her sin is hiding them, and her reason for doing so. She agrees with Chomiak on turning Ukraine into the Greater Galicia it was Adolf Hitler’s objective to achieve between 1939 to 1945: that’s to say, cleanse the territory of Jews, Poles and Russians by killing them all. Chomiak succeeded with the first two; he was then employed by the US Army on the third. Freeland is keeping the plan in the family…”
This makes it sound like Freeland supports ethnic cleansing. Perhaps her denial of Chomiak’s anti-pole anti-semitic past is a politician wanting sanitize her history?
Consortium News may come a cropper for not practicing due diligence with their sources but they might have fun embarrassing Canadian outlets in court with quoting Canadian sources. The thing that bothers me is these ‘patriots’ like Chyrstia Freeland who are patriotic for another country but not where they live. You see the same in America with all those Cubans in Florida who have helped warp American foreign policy to Cuba for decade after decade.
With the Ukraine, it seems to be more intense. If you do not believe me, reflect on those Ukrainian-born people like the Vindman brothers who are at the heart of the impeachment campaign against Trump. And they are no the only ones. Think Marie Yovanovitch as another example. The Ukraine Diaspora in Canad is even more extensive and some 1,359,655 Canadians have Ukrainian ancestry. And that is how you get a Chyrstia Freeland who would literally accept a neo-nazi Ukraine with all that that implies-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Canadians
Hard to beat the Doukhobors for interesting Russian immigrants to Canada…
They utilized nude marches when protesting, you don’t see that very often~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doukhobors
It may help explain the bewildering popularity of the loathsome Freeland to point out that Canada has two quite distinct groups of “Ukrainian” emigrants. One of the largest is Galician, not really Ukrainian. In the midwest especially (for instance, Winnipeg) there is a Galician Ukrainian church. Other Ukrainians tend to be a distinct community. I’ve found quite a disparity in what each group thinks of Freeland.
“Loathsome” is a bit strong and creeps me out. No one ever wants to be called “loathsome.”
Well, you know, Freeland did quite a good job dealing with NAFTA 2, even if it wasn’t perfect. “Loathsome” travels a long ways these days.
My issue with all this is the copying and reprinting without attribution to original source. It seems many of our so-called “leftist” organs and web publishers are too ego-involved to stop promoting their own “originality”, the alternative being to cooperate and share sources and information while researching with their pooled abilities and assets. The infighting over bona-fides has always been detrimental to the achievement of goals which are (supposedly) shared and of common good for “the people”. So, why this??
I’m sure a well-researched and sourced piece or two, coupled with a strong demand and pressure on the National Archives to produce its information could well put both Canada and the US on a defensive to either deny access (a poor PR choice) or produce embarrassing content. This requires far less ego, it seems to me.
The reason I am particularly sympathetic to Helmer is we constantly have stories we broke picked up by the MSM with no credit. It’s infuriating.
NYT is good at that
John Helmer knows more about what is going on in Russia than any other
correspondent who writes in english. Originally from Australia, he went to grad school at Harvard and worked for the Carter White House under Brzezinski. He has lived in Moscow for over 30 years and reads/speaks Russian. He comprehends who the oligarchs and politicians are, and how their businesses and interests intersect and collide. He has lived in the mideast. He is a teller of truth, and that definitely includes MH17, the Skripals, the coup in Crimea, and the alleged gas poisonings in Syria.
I agree, Helmer is a great source, but his articles can be hard to get through. His knowledge is encyclopedic, but his focus is scattered. He tends to cram so much detail into each story that I lose track of [what originally appeared to be] the main point.
A word about Strategic Culture.
I read it every day in the hope that I will see an article by Alastair Crooke.
Crooke is a former UK diplo and MI6 spy. His expertise is the mideast, and he is probably the best informed english speaking person on this planet. E.g., knows more about Hezbollah
than any other writer. And he “tells it like it is”. He is not a gossiper of FUKUS imperialism.
I think Crooke publishes at Strategic Culture because he not welcome as contributor in “western” media. If you attempt to google his name for his latest article, you will not find it.
I have no real idea who supports the S C site, and I do not really care.
Leaving aside the bits about Helmer and attribution, this does raise an interesting point. Suppose I receive an explosive story about a high elected official from Fresno Dan, who claims to have received it directly from bare-chested Vladimir Putin via messages from the secret Kremlin antennae in his bunny slippers. But it turns out to be well-supported with evidence that is independently and easily verifiable (i.e., true).
Do I (a) publish the story; (b) credit Fresno Dan as the source; (c ) mention bare-chested Vladimir and the bunny slippers; or (d) any or all of the above?
It would seem rather silly not to publish if I think it’s important and the story checks out. But will the bit about Putin and the bunny slippers reduce my credibility if I mention it? And if I don’t, what if somebody else finds out and publishes that?
Technically the fact that the story is true does not preclude it from being part of an influence campaign on the part of Russia. There are a great many true stories out there and media have broad discretion over which ones they choose to give air time to. What if somebody alleges that Putin ordered the story shared because he wanted attention drawn to it in Western media?
As Yves notes, the fact that CN had a more credible source available for the story (Helmer) and chose not to cite him, which would have avoided most of these issues, would seem to be the own goal here.
It seems to me, aside from the non-attribution to Helmer’s prior articles, CN’s editor at that time, Parry, now deceased, that all media outlets, both main stream media and alternative media, have been subjected to influence campaigns from all sides whenever it concerns foreign policy. Sometimes this is very overt, sometimes very subtle. Who is to say, that John Helmer himself is not also influenced or unwittingly part of this campaign? Being a prior advisor to the Carter administration, then certainly he must been aware of Brzesinki’s foreign policy goals vis a vis Russia and Ukraine, published for all to see in 1997 in his Grand Chess Board. It certainly comes as a surprise to me that Helmer was denied entry into Russia, since his own site basically gives the impression that he is based in Moscow. A further search turned up a 2010 article in Rolling Stone:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-near-assassination-of-john-helmer-186493/
Why would the Australian Foreign Office inform Helmer directly that he was in danger unless they knew him via various channels? Australia’s government is part of the Five-Eyes. The world of intelligence/counter-intelligence is a very murky and all of us are subjected to influence campaigns all the time. Our own government is very active in all of this, and so are other governments, not to mention multinational corporations. Reading a variety of sources is important once you understand that in foreign affairs there is no black and white, only shades of grey. It is only through the relative openness of the internet that some American’s are finding out for the first time, that our government is NOT benign and the beacon of freedom most people thought it was, and sadly still do. This window is closing fast – all around us – while the theatre in Washington continues. At this point, the US is an empire in decline, but with a foreign policy establishment hell bent on maintaining world dominance via financial and military power.
Helmer does normally live in Moscow. I have no idea what his visa status is in Russia.
Who is to say, that John Helmer himself is not also influenced or unwittingly part of this campaign?
indeed.