NaPo : Wagging the dog whistle

National Post, flagship of the largest media conglomerate in Canadian history run by a foreign hedge fund, inhales a MEMRI *report* based on the online musings of four anonymous 'known' jihadi dudes titled :

"Pro-ISIS Activists React Joyously On Twitter To Canada's Elections"

Then they give it the fabulous new Trudeau-torqued headline you see at left.

NaPo tweets it. While your standard NaPo tweet gets around 1 to 15 retweets if they're lucky, this one gets 159.

VICE News follows suit with its own rewrite of the MEMRI report : 

"Canada Ran Away:' Jihadists Reportedly Rejoice Over Trudeau Victory"

as do others, and NaPo rewriter Bell retweets them too.  

"Disturbing but predictable" retweets the disturbing but predictable Jason Kenney.

btw None of them bothered to blur out the identities of the 'known' jihadi tweeters as I have done here. 

Is this a thing now?

It's fine now for the Minister of National Defence to promote tweets of 'known' jihadis if their messages can somehow be torqued to slag off on Trudeau?

Just as disturbing but predictable is the NaPo pipelining of MEMRI. Founded by a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence and the wife of a Dick Cheney advisor, MEMRI got a thorough thrashing from The Guardian over a decade ago in "Selective Memri" : "Investigates whether the 'independent' media institute that translates the Arabic newspapers is quite what it seems.".  

Right Web and SourceWatch provide background and a handy list of MEMRI's PNAC and NeoCon advisors and directors.

Hey kids, remember this bullshit NaPo front page, complete with Hungarian couple from 1944?

It was May 2006. NaPo torqued up another report they'd been pipelined from another outfit and later had to retract and apologize for it. 

But not before it had been republished around the world and Steve got a chance to refer back to it publicly : 

"We've seen a number of things from the Iranian regime that are along these lines .  It boggles the mind that any regime on the face of the Earth would want to do anything that could remind people of Nazi Germany."

So I'm just sitting NaPo's MEMRI presskit offering here while we wait to see if it gets the same overwrought reach-around treatment.

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Surveillance theatre

Given the sheer pointlessness of :
1) destroying the Guardian copy of Snowden hard drive data after being informed there were two other copies in existence elsewhere anyway, and 
2) detaining Greenwald's partner Miranda for 9 hours under a terrorism statute when they knew he isn't a terrorist
we are reliably inclined to view this as a clear intent to intimidate the Guardian and Greenwald, as well as any other media with the audacity not to equate journalism with terrorism. 

But there may be another possibility.

In this Guardian article published earlier this month based on Edward Snowden's cache of docs, we learned the USA has supplemented the GCHQ's budget to the tune of 

"£100m over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes" 

It contains a number of quotes from GCHQ officials wittering on about whether they were "seen to be pulling their weight" and doing enough to keep the NSA happy. The US is apparently pleased with the GCHQ's "selling point" as a "light oversight regime compared to the US", and also presumably with the UK's laws of prior restraint, not available in the US, to muzzle the British press. However the US had 

"raised a number of issues with regards to meeting NSA's minimum expectations". It said GCHQ "still remains short of the full NSA ask".

UK's biggest fear is that "US perceptions of the … partnership diminish, leading to loss of access, and/or reduction in investment … to the UK" 

GCHQ said that by 2013 it hoped to have "exploited to the full our unique selling points of geography, partnerships [and] the UK's legal regime" 

So as successful as the seemingly pointless tactics against Greenwald and the Guardian may yet prove to be as intimidation, it's possible the actual intent here was two acts of detain and destroy surveillance theatre designed to display GCHQ loyalty and usefulness to their heavy maintenance NSA investors. 
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"This is The Current" with another ad for the terrorism industry

Following his 30 hour journey back to Canada from Sudan on Saturday, Abousfian Abdelrazik did the last six hour journey from Pearson Airport to his home in Montreal by van because "federal officials barred him from the one-hour flight from Toronto". (h/t Dr.Dawg)
A one hour flight entirely within Canadian airspace.

CBC's The Current did not mention this in their segment on Abdelrazik this morning. However in their quest for fair and balanced reporting, they did follow up their interview with Abdelrazik's lawyer Yavar Hameed with one from media terrorism expert and torture advocate Neil Livingstone, introduced only as "Chairman and CEO of the security consulting firm Executive Action and the author of nine books on terrorism."

Mr. Livingstone explained that Abdelrazik was probably incriminated during the "extremely valuable" and "credible" testimony provided "under duress" by Abu Zubaydah and said that CSIS's "sister organizations in the US" have taken note that Canada is "not prepared to go to the mat for Abdelrazik".

From Mr. Livingstone's own description of his company Executive Action :

"Think of us as a McKinsey & Company with muscle, a private CIA and Defense Department available to address your most intractable problems and difficult challenges."

Indeed Executive Action boasts former CIA Director James Woolsey and former FBI Director William Sessions on its Senior Advisory Board and claims over 1300 media interviews on terrorism.
From Mr. Livingstone's own bio at Executive Action :

"He predicted the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center on CNBC six months before they occurred, said the terrorists would drop both towers, and that Osama bin Laden would be behind the attacks."

Mr. Livingstone also advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, where his company subsequently won several 'reconstruction' contracts, and is an advocate of destabilising Iran.
Last year in an article on counter-terrorism profiteering - "What did you do in Iran-Contra, Daddy?" - Larisa Alexandrovna traced Livingstone's career back to the Iran Contra affair and the push to establish an Iran-anthrax-al Qaeda link.

I don't expect The Current to have provided all this in their bio of Livingstone, but their propensity for reaching for the nearest rightwing US advocate for the terrorism industry without identifying him as such to comment on Canadian affairs continues to annoy.
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