The international press conference today hosted by Executive Intelligence Review gathered a powerful group of former military and intelligence professionals, political leaders and candidates, journalists and peace advocates from the U.S. and other countries, documenting the criminal and evil “hit list” compiled by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) and the “kill list” compiled by the Myrotvorets (Peacemaker) website in Ukraine, demanding that they be shut down and that all U.S. funding be immediately stopped.
Journalists who asked questions came from Germany, Russia, Serbia, Argentina, Mexico, U.S., and Romania. Other journalists monitored the event, and Consortium News live-streamed the full event, as did Peruvian media.
The four primary speakers, Col Richard Black (ret.), a former Marine and head of Criminal Law for the Army, as well as a former elected member of the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate; Scott Ritter, former Marine intelligence officer and Marine and UN weapons inspector in the Soviet Union and in Iraq; Ray McGovern, former CIA officer and cofounder of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS); and Diane Sare, an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate for the State of New York, were all among the 31 leaders and speakers at recent Schiller Institute conferences who were placed on the CCD hit list.
Colonel Black set the stage, expressing his patriotism and war experience, while asserting his total opposition to the wars in the Middle East and especially the NATO proxy war on Russia being fought in Ukraine, which “risks triggering a global nuclear war.” The CCD, he noted, had a parallel operation at the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S., the Disinformation Governance Board, whose director was the “outrageous narcissist Nina Jankowicz,” so outrageous that the popular outcry against her forced the closing of the Board, at least officially. But the U.S. government is also a leading funder of the CCD in Ukraine, and the fact that Jankowicz is a Ukrainian linguist would suggest that she is involved there. The purpose of these institutions is to “silence us.”
Colonel Black pointed to the attendance of representatives of the U.S. government and that of several European countries at a Sept. 1-2 meeting of the CCD, where it was repeated that those on the list were “information terrorists” who should be treated like any other terrorists, and as “war criminals.” He reported that it is unlawful for the U.S. government to fund other institutions, foreign or domestic, to do things which are illegal for them to do themselves. The fact that Darya Dugina was executed by a terrorist in Moscow and whose name was on the Myrotvorets list and was then crossed out with the word “liquidated” after she was assassinated on Aug. 20, demonstrates the seriousness of the matter. Congress, he said, must stop all funding to the CCD.
A short video by Dragana Trifkovic, a Serbian journalist, politician, and director of the Center for Geostrategic Studies who is also on the hit list, was shown. She said suppression of free speech is not “democratic,” but a reign of terror. Our role is to stop censorship or we may all end up in concentration camps, she warned.
Jens Jørgen Nielsen, a former Moscow correspondent for the major Danish daily Politiken, and author of several books about Russia, is one of three Danes on the hit list. He offered a short video denouncing the list, showing that one courageous member of Denmark’s Parliament had demanded a consultation with the Foreign Minister, challenging him to denounce the list and defend the right to freedom of speech for all Danish citizens, free of such threats. The Foreign Minister had no serious comment, refused to denounce the list, and only called for victory over Putin. “This is a scary thing,” he said. “Our rights are apparently not inalienable, as we believed.”
Scott Ritter described how he was attacked when, as a lead weapons inspector in Iraq, after he exposed the lie by Tony Blair and George Bush that there were WMD there, justifying the war. “If they had listened, we could have prevented that terrible war and those that followed, killing millions of Americans and civilians of the Mideast.” Now, being called a “Russian propagandist” by an organization sponsored by our government, “has a chilling effect. If you disagree, debate me, but don’t sentence me. Don’t mark me for death for telling the truth”—truth such as that this is a proxy war on Russia using Ukrainian bodies, or warning that the Russia sanctions would boomerang.
Ritter, a resident of New York State, continued: “You work for me, Senator Schumer (D-NY). We just killed a terrorist in Kabul. In Ellenville, New York, there is a center for Ukrainian followers of the Nazi leader in Ukraine during World War II, Stepan Bandera, who slaughtered thousands of Poles, Russians and Jews. They have a statue of Bandera and other Nazis. What might they do? They see U.S. support for the Azov Regiment in Ukraine as a green light to attack those on the list. Believe me, the threat of political violence in the U.S. is real.” He added that, with a good lawyer, stopping the U.S. funding of a foreign organization openly threatening the free speech and the physical safety of American patriots should be a slam dunk in court, if there were any honest judges left. Asked about the military situation on the ground in Ukraine, he asserted that the NATO forces are losing badly, while Russia is close to achieving its limited goal in Ukraine of protecting the citizens of the Donbas. He decried the massive loss of life, asserting that Ukraine has lost more lives in the past days than the U.S. lost in 20 years of its regime-change wars.
Italian trade union activist Alessia Ruggeri, also on the hit list, made a video greeting, saying that “it is democracy they are trying to destroy while using the name of democracy.”
Bradley Blankenship, who writes for Xinhua and RT, described himself as “the youngest person on the list,” adding that he has been attacked for what he writes in several parts of the world—in Syria, in Ecuador, and now in the Czech Republic, where he has been summoned to the Interior Ministry. He said he has become so disillusioned by the situation in his native U.S.A. that “I don’t feel like a patriot any longer.” He pointed out, however, that “70,000 people marched against the war in Prague last week.”
Diane Sare thanked Scott Ritter for his letter to Senator Schumer, whose seat she is trying to take in the November election, challenging Schumer’s “roundabout way of targetting his opponent”—namely her—by funding the CCD in Ukraine and setting her up for possible physical attack. She ridiculed the U.S. and European representatives claiming to defend “democracy” in Ukraine, where 13 opposition parties have been banned, Russian-language newspapers shut down, trade unions stripped of their rights, and anyone voting in a referendum is threatened with 13 years in prison. She particularly cited a Canadian who said, “Canada understands the threat of propaganda to the freedom of speech.” “It is astonishing,” she added, “that 77 years after defeating the Nazis, people don’t find a problem with siding with Nazis today. Why has the U.S. refused to vote in the UN to condemn the revival of Nazism?” Sare responded to Bradley Blankenship by saying that being a patriot doesn’t mean following bad government, but recognizing that the principles of the nation are under assault. “The most patriotic thing to do is to stop the perversion of our principles which have left us on the side of the Nazis.”
Geoff Young, who won the Democratic primary as the candidate for U.S. Congress in Kentucky’s 6th district, said Ukraine had not been a democracy since 2014 when the U.S. CIA, State Department and Pentagon overthrew the elected government, placing their puppets in power. That government proceeded to bombard their own citizens who had rejected the foreign coup, killing over 10,000 citizens in the Donbas, “three times more than the deaths on 9/11.”
Clifford Kiracofe, President of the Washington Institute for Peace and Development, provided a video making very clear that the government and the military in Ukraine were rife with self-confessed Nazis, noting that it was “Orwellian” that patriotic Americans were being targeted by fascists, with U.S. government support.
Ray McGovern noted that the sudden total denunciation and sanctioning of Russia by the Obama administration after that administration had run the 2014 coup, and blaming Russia for “annexing Crimea without provocation,” had prompted Vladimir Putin to say: “Americans appear to conduct experiments with people and nations as if they were rats, without understanding what they were doing.” The mantra today that the Russian military operation in Ukraine was “unprovoked” brings to mind Will Rogers, who said: “The problem is not what people know—it’s what people know that ain’t so.” He quoted the George Bush gaffe in Texas recently when he denounced the fact that: “One man, on his own, launched a brutal, destructive war in Iraq—I mean, Ukraine!” He added that Bush was never tried for his open support for genocidal wars based on lies, or for his promotion of torture.
David Pyne, Deputy Director of National Operations for the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a private grouping, said that he earned a place on the hit list by, first, offering a means to avoid war before February, suggesting a U.S. pledge that Ukraine would not join NATO; and, after the war started, proposing an agreement similar to the Minsk accord. His intention was to prevent a nuclear holocaust. He blasted Boris Johnson and Joe Biden for sabotaging the peace negotiations in April, and offered his thanks and support to EIR.
Kirk Wiebe, a former National Security Agency technical director who exposed the NSA sabotage of systems which could have stopped the 9/11 terrorists in favor of mass surveillance of Americans and others. Emphasized that we are all under attack, and that there must be no spectators, but a “full-court press” working with the Schiller Institute.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute, is number two on the hit list. She said that the Schiller conferences where 31 of the speakers were added to the hit list were not about Ukraine per se, but about how to avoid World War III, calling for a new architecture for global security and development for all. She stressed that political assassinations were always aimed at those challenging empire. The fact that the neo-liberal system is bankrupt, with economies in the West in free fall and famine sweeping the Global South, can only be resolved by the U.S. and Russia and China and others sitting down together. The West should join the new paradigm being forged by the BRICS, the SCO and others, not try to destroy them. She said that after the assassination of JFK, a deep pessimism took over the U.S., nearly as bad as Germany, which is “colony of the Empire.” If the U.S. would return to being the Beacon of Hope and Temple of Liberty, the world would admire it again.
Zepp-LaRouche described the EIR press conference as a “bombshell,” which will contribute substantially to exposing the approved “narrative” by western governments and media which has covered for this overtly fascist censorship and threats to free speech and the personal safety of leading Americans and international figures. Wide distribution of the event is essential if we are to succeed in creating a new security and development architecture for mankind.
September 9, 2022