 and we are back on the backstory and blasting out on the radio in the Empire of Lies on 105.5 FM and AM 1390 in Washington DC. Join now by the great Joe Lauria. Joe how you doing? I'm finally how you're doing? Doing great and really pleased to have you with us. We were just talking with Alkiller one of our callers about the rumors about Xi Jinping. They're saying that there's been a military coup. Now as one of the great Indian news publishers, when you hear stuff like this, how do you approach because obviously if there's a military coup, it's a big story. But when you hear about a story like this, how do you approach it, Joe? First of all, where is this coming from? From social media? I mean, I've seen these tweets. I saw someone at Newsweek, a reporter who apparently won a Pulitzer Prize and some other big awards from mainstream media was tweeting it out, but then had to and said it was a rumor and then had to pull it back later. So I mean, I would ignore this story completely. I don't know where the origin of it is. But I think if this, we just have to wait to see if something like this is true and we will see pictures from Beijing, we will hear people from there. I mean, it is not a completely closed society. We're not talking exactly about North Korea here. So if something like that happened, we wouldn't know it. And it's rubbish. It's rubbish. I wouldn't, I'd spend five seconds talking about it, frankly, Lee. No, no, that sums up what I think. But I, you know, I almost think people learning what your approach to something like this is you come into it skeptically, right? Yes, I would call, you know, I mean, normally I would call someone at the Chinese government in the embassy here in Washington or at the UN, but not in this case because they would laugh at us and they would never say what was true, not anyway. So yes, absolutely skeptical on every story you approach. You must. That's a bedrock of journalism that's, we don't see a lot of anymore, especially when it comes to US officials unnamed, pushing some classified information leaking it to push American agenda, which is what the mainstream media does, unfortunately. No, and that's, and it's gone into, I would say overdrive in the past six, eight months since Russia began the special manager operation. I've really never seen it as bad of blatant lies over and over and over again, but they never it's wartime, Lee, and both other side lies and puts out nonsense. And so we we seem in the United States to think that we've got this free objective and serious professional press so that it's shocking when you know that they're just regurgitating things that are coming from Ukrainian officials, the US officials, unnamed, just go back to any war, First World War, the Germans were eating babies in Belgium. And we've got a long history of this. Yeah. So that's what they were reporting then. So now we're hearing stuff that you cannot verify, especially what's going on on the ground. This is whatever either side says, I definitely do not accept at first glance. If both sides are saying the same thing happened, then that's when you can pretty much assume that it's true. But if they don't, you just can't decide necessarily, unless you're there on the ground, yourself observing it. And there are very few war correspondents on the ground, especially from the West. And I'm certainly not there. Now, Joe, lawyer, I pointed out that you're one of the premier publishers in independent actual independent media at consortium nose and founder of Robert Perry is a mistake you think for people to assume that news coverage used to be better. I think in some ways it used to be better. But I think in a lot of ways, this news coverage for decades has been a pile of lies. You agree? There's a lot. There's a lot of deception going on. Yes. I don't think the press has ever been what some people may have thought it was never close to perfect. However, there have been some fundamental changes. Let's look at television news from ago to YouTube and look up the first ever broadcast of CNN. You could see it. It's there the whole couple of hours of it. It's extraordinary. Interviews with the president is investigative reports 10 minutes long on a faulty fuel gauge on an on airlines. They gave news. They did investigations. They show that you could do journalism on TV. What happened? Fox News really changed the game because they made an openly, openly partial partisan broadcast for the Republicans, and they killed CNN and MSNBC, which just had started some time after that. They killed him in the ratings. That's the name of the game, obviously. So what did you see? Gradually, CNN and MSNBC have turned into just a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party. So you've lost any kind of television news and what you've got a talk show hosts, not news anchors, not news presenters as you once did. People who like Walter Cronkite, for example, had a background in print journalism, newspapers or wire services. That's where those guys came from. Now they're movie stars. It's all about the personality of the presenter in each show, and they're saying the same garbage and it's a talk show. So there's no more TV news. In terms of newspaper journalism, there were some in New York City, there were 12 newspapers at one time, eight dailies when I was born. So it is down to three, essentially, now. Two tabloids in the New York Times. There's been a consolidation of ownership. And we've also seen, of course, from the 50s, the CIA without question infiltrating newsrooms to control what's going on. And now it seems like they don't even need to do that because CIA officials are actually former and national security officials are on TV right now. So they are directly involved in promulgating what used to be just whispered in the years of reporters that go around themselves on TV to push this stuff. So there's no question that there's been a decline in journalistic standards on TV and in the press. There are fewer jobs and they are openly now pushing a government position where they did it more covertly before. But it was never great. I'll put it that way. Now, Joe, people talk about the Uniparty, and they say that on issues of foreign policy, the Democrats and Republicans are basically the same. But do you think there's also a unit narrative, a narrative that everyone goes along with as beyond ideology and gets into some of this? How important do you think people talk about the World Economic Forum? Do you think they're under something or do you think they're crazy conspiracy theorists? Joe Lawyer? Well, just in general, I would say that there's no question there's one narrative that's enforced about foreign affairs on international policy. Domestically, there are differences, I think, between the two parties. But on foreign affairs, they're indistinguishable from one another. And it's an agenda that pushes the US interests abroad. That's what not what journalism should be doing. You should be reporting what's happening in the conflict between nations, which is incredibly dramatic and important to report by giving both sides of the story to try to get the point of view of all the players, whether one of them is Iran or North Korea, try to find out what's going to make the US just one of the players. But of course, the way it's news is presented to us about international affairs. It's the US is the good guy. It's that kindergartenish and certain countries who are not with the US are the bad guys. I'm not going to go with the World Economic Forum because it's not something that I have dealt very deeply into, but I don't trust them. I mean, this is a very important meeting in Davos, for example, every year, and other things happen throughout the year, and these are very powerful people who compare notes. And there's no question that they probably agree on things, whether they could implement that through the media, through their government is another matter. But if they don't to be trusted, that's for sure. I'll say that about the WES. Joe, you talk a lot about US homogenity. Did I get that right? I think so. Okay, I think so. It's a tough word for me, but homogenity. Yeah. Can you talk about ways in which this world that the US has run has not worked out well for the US? We talk about the US running everything and global homogenity, but do you think that's worked out well for the US or badly for the people of the United States? For the people of the United States, it's worked out terribly. For the rulers, for the economic and political interests of very powerful people, it has up until now worked out pretty well. That's why they're doing it. They're not doing it because they're interested in the well-being of the American people or the European people or any people, the Ukrainian people. They don't care about this. From their actions, you can tell this. So what is happening now, of course, is what they've done in terms of the economic warfare against Russia is certainly backfired, particularly in Europe. It is not brought down the Russian economy. It's threatening the European economy and to a lesser extent the American one. And this is something extraordinary. Is this what they want? They had to know this could happen, or they didn't. I mean, we never know exactly the level of intelligence, the amount of thought, or gaming theory that they went through to see, well, what could happen? Somebody had to know that this could be one of the results, that the sanctions against Russia could backfire on the West, which is what they have done. But as I argued in a piece that I wrote on February 4th in consortium news, that's 20 days before the Russian invasion, that the US was setting, the US wanted this invasion. They needed Russia to invade because otherwise they couldn't launch the economic war. The information war and the proxy war against Russia was whose aim is to bring down the Russian government. We've heard that directly from Biden now, from Lloyd Austin to weaken Russia. There's no down on my mind. And I thought I was really smart during that 20 days before the invasion. But now we just republished a piece from John Pilger, who wrote, if Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, meaning the people of Donbass, his preordained pariah war will justify a NATO-run guerrilla war that's likely to spill into Russia itself. So even Pilger, back eight years ago, saw where this was headed, that this would be a US, mostly the responsibility of the US, to push Russia as far as they did until they could not take any more and they actually invaded. And again, that's what the US wanted. But I want to add this right now, that I think the time for responsibility, the time for who's right and who's wrong in Ukraine, is over. We've got to end this war. It has gotten way too dangerous now. We can have that argument later. We've got two powers facing off now. And if Russia interprets an attack on these new republics, that they're going to new provinces of Ukraine that they will absorb into Russia very soon, if they interpret that as an attack on the Russian Federation to rise into the level where we could see a nuclear exchange, we've got to stop this immediately. And normally, you need an outside power to come in, a neutral power to say, okay, guys, stop it. And that would be the UN. And unfortunately, throughout the long history of the UN, and I covered UN headquarters for 25 years, as you know, Lee for the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal and a bunch of other newspapers, the Secretary General of the UN, the only one who ever did something like that was Dag Hammershowell, the second Secretary General who stood up to both the Soviet Union and the United States and made himself an impartial arbiter affairs. And guess what happened to him? He was most likely assassinated when his plane went down. The current Secretary General has completely destroyed any impartiality. He's totally taken the West Side 100% in this very complex conflict rather than being nuanced about it. So he has no role to play. And this is what I fear. This is really what I wanted to say on your program that I fear that without any role by an arbiter, we are just putting out everyone's lives is in the hands of the leaders of the United States and Russia right now basically. You could forget about NATO and Europe because they just pretty much do what the U.S. says. Although at the very beginning of this conflict, you did see Macron of France and Schultz of Germany going to Moscow to try to listen to what Putin was saying at least. And that's when Russia put forward those treaties, those draft treaties in December that had they been at least negotiated seriously, had Minsk been implemented about Donbass, giving it autonomy. Don't forget, Russia went eight years ignoring the Declaration of Independence of both those provinces in Ukraine and Donbass. They were pushing for the Minsk Accord. So for eight years, Russia was patient about this. And France and Germany, the leaders, they realized that Russia's security interests are important. Henry Kissinger has recognized that. But this group of neocons running the show right now in Washington with their allies like in the Green Party in Germany have really pushed this thing way too far. And I don't know where it's going to end. Nowhere does. And as I said, there's no one to step in who's impartial to try to stop this. And do you trust the U.S. people, Austin and so on, to not go nuclear? Up until now, I have thought the Pentagon was the only force that was saving us in the U.S. side because from the very beginning of this conflict, there were voices in the State Department, some in Congress who talked about a direct NATO or U.S. war against Russia. And this had to be avoided. Even Biden, to his credit, said we have to avoid that because that's World War III. He used that term early on in the spring. And the Pentagon, I still put my hopes that they will pull back and not allow this to happen. But of course, there's the other side. And I don't know what's going on in the Kremlin. And we, as I said, what we don't know now is are these new territories that are about to become, from Russia's point of view, part of the Russian Federation, if they're attacked, in what way will they be attacked? Could it trigger some nuclear use by Russia? I don't believe they put in threatened nuclear attack, as everyone in the West is saying, as Biden has said at the UN. I think this was a warning. And I think there's a difference between a threat and a warning. If you go up to an electric power station and there's a sign that says, warning, high voltage. It doesn't say threat, high voltage. There's a difference. That was a warning. And I hope that the warning is heard. But that would mean that the NATO and the West would have to start negotiating now and end this conflict with this territory most likely staying in the hands of Russia. Ukrainians are not going to accept that. NATO's not going to accept that. Certainly, Washington will not, because their aim is to drag this war out as long as possible to bleed and weaken Russia. Are they going to give up on that faced with nuclear attack? This is why the warning was given. And it was a warning given on February 24th in Putin's speech announcing the war when he said he reminded the world that they had nuclear weapons if anybody interferes. So that was also a warning that we have to take that warning seriously and not allow this war to continue another day. But I don't see it ending very soon. Do you, Lee? I don't see, I don't see where this is going at all. And I'm very worried about it because I used to think that the U.S. would not possibly go there. Now I think they might have no choice but to go there because the only way to get out of the trouble they created for the world economically may be to go to war. Does it make sense, Joe? Yeah, but not nuclear war. You know, if there were no nuclear weapons, there was no question there would have been a conventional war. NATO would have probably invaded Russia. There's somebody, Alberto Maravi, an Italian novelist from way back in the 60s and 70s, wrote a book about basically how nuclear weapons have saved the world from World War III. And it still is to this moment. Otherwise there would have been, without question, a conventional war right now between Russia and NATO. We have to avoid that. This never should have happened. The U.S. could have stopped this by agreeing to talk about those draft proposals, implementing Minsk. And that would have at least put a long break on this. There's no way Russia. And I do think that Putin has made revanchist statements in the past that Ukraine, parts of which were, of course, conquered by Catherine the Great. That's the Russian imperialism, by the way. There's nonsense about it on Russian. They're not an imperialist power in Ukraine. That happened in the 18th century. That was Russian imperialism. It was part of Russia until Khrushchev gave that to Ukraine in 1954. And those were all and still are Russian lands. And those people were attacked in Dumbass after the coup in 2014. And I think just given an opportunity for Putin to say, we're taking back those countries, those parts of Ukraine that were part of Russia for so long. That's not imperialism. Because imperialism, we go somewhere where you've never been before and they don't want you there. That's imperialism. They were there. The Russians have been there. And the people are welcome. Many of the Russian speakers are welcoming at least Russia. And they're going to vote for this referendum. I just want to clear that this is a, revanchism is different than imperialism. And it wouldn't have happened. It's not a cause of this war. It's a consequence of this war. The causes of this war, I put squarely on the West side. I know this makes me a Putin puppet. Well, go to hell. You know, I'm sorry. I was just saying to my friend today, because he was asking me about this. I said, he was who's responsible for the war? You know, the war is it Ukraine or Russia? I said, United States. No, I had to go into a whole explanation about what we did and NATO. Right. You know, but the whole, like I said, the whole thing, this is sham, this voting is a sham, is a preemptive strike because they know how this vote's going to go. You know, and they don't tell the people, if you watch the news, they don't tell the people the whole story about, you know, these are Russian speakers. These are basically Russians. They've been wanting to be a part of Russia. They don't talk about that on the news. They just tell you all, here's comes a fake vote and they're going to fake it. It's so stupid. What have you heard about the thousands of people who were killed since 2014 by a U.S.-backed coup government in Kiev against the people in the Donbass? I mean, it was not one word spoken at the UN Security Council meeting about that, except by Lavrov. So this is just airbrushed out of the story. And that's the way you control a story, but not by necessarily overtly lying, by cutting out an important context, which changes the entire narrative. And this is the one that the majority of people, and if you want to put forward causes of the war like historians did when they said that the Versailles Treaty, the onerous conditions on Germany led was one of the reasons leading to Nazis in World War II. Well, nobody accuses those historians of being pro-Nazis. But if you try to explain the causes of this war, then you're, of course, I'm just getting paid by the Kremlin. So it's just a very, very difficult environment to speak in and to argue in because there's such confusion purposely sown, mostly by the West here. And Joe, I put it on that at concerning news, you were carrying on the journalist's legacy of the great Robert Perry. Have you went back and watched the film Ukraine on Fire, featuring Robert Perry lately? Well, I saw the follow up feature in you, Lee, as well. Yes, I did. I saw both of them. Yes, when back a couple of months ago, when the crisis really turned hot, but I'd seen it originally too. And we had Igor on the director on our webcast, CN Live, for about $3, he spoke to us. Yeah. And Robert Perry in 2014, in 2015, was prescient on this. You've been, concerning news have been reporting the truth since well before the military operation went off. Is that right, Joe? That's, that's correct. As I pointed out, Pilger's piece was published in The Guardian, which we republished, yes, or over the weekend. But yes, Bob Perry wrote a story in 2014, saying, are ready for a nuclear war over Ukraine. And I frankly, when I saw that, I read it, I thought, well, maybe he's gone a little too far this this time. And he was completely on on the mark, wasn't he? Now I know he was right. But at the time, I thought it was exaggerated. It wasn't. Yes, Bob understood the key facts of Ukraine before a lot of people in the United States, certainly at that time, there wasn't as much alternative media. It was starting to pipe up much more now in the last eight years. But of course, we've been around since 1995. But Perry founded this thing, former AP investigative journalist. So Bob was way, way ahead of the game. And there were our reporting on Ukraine, then, and I have to say now, has been amongst the best you're going to find anywhere. That's unfortunate. I wish it was wider known. I agree though. I agree completely. Yes. And Joe, let me talk about this for a second. You're a great publisher and journalist with a lot of mainstream and independent journalists, credibility. Do you think, as I do, that the most important virtue for journalists these days is courage? It's not so much. It's not. The truth is actually not that hard to figure out. But reporting the truth requires, I think, a lot of courage and bravery to fight against the narrative and the attacks that come on people. What do you think, Joe? I do. It's not the same kind of courage as being a war correspondent, but it hasn't done us any favors. It hasn't done us any favors to report what we've had. Instead, it's brought PayPal to suspend us permanently so we can't raise money through PayPal and a news guard gave us the red letter because they say that we've published false information about Ukraine. I responded with a 9,000-word article that anyone could read in which I dissected everything that they said that we had said wrong. And I think I made the case that they, in fact, needed to correct their reporting on Ukraine. But of course, I didn't stop them. There are many difficulties to stick to what you think the facts are telling you, despite this outside noise. And of course, everyone knows what it could be like to be attacked by trolls and organize trolls on social media. I mean, I put that Pilger story on our Twitter page, and about 30 trolls came out immediately to attack him in the most vicious kind of way. It's ridiculous. It made me laugh, but that's out there. They're organized. They're ready to stop you. There are organizations like News Guard that want to damage your reputation with a red mark. There's PayPal that wants to damage you financially. We don't know where else this will lead. But yes, so that's the kind of courage. I think before people would say to me, oh, you have a lot of courage. I didn't believe them. But I think now, I mean, consortium news, I think now, back then it was just you're a Putin puppet, you're a Kremlin stuge, you're a Saddam apologist, when Bob wrote about things, why the evasion of repulsion have happened. So that was the level of attack then, which was pretty bad, but okay. And now it's- It was. Yeah, that still happens. But now it's, we've added organization like News Guard, giving people red marks. We have gotten out PayPal and we don't know what else is out there. We've got this kill list in Ukraine in which one of our writers, Scott Ritter, is on that list. Roger Waters, the rock musician, is on that list. So it's that the stakes are getting higher. So the courage has to get stronger. And in regards to that, do you have any opinion on Edward Snowden becoming a dual citizen of Russia in the US today? I know only that what, what took so long is that Snowden was not trying to become a Russian citizen. In fact, I think he was trying to avoid that because he knows that once he becomes one, a lot of people use that against him. What do you think, Joe? Oh, absolutely. He knew that that's what happened and it's happened and already, from what I understand, I read, I don't know how true it is, but I think he wanted a passport. He doesn't have his American passport. Do you remember it was canceled? That's how he wound up in Russia to begin with. He was on his way to somewhere in Latin America and the plane, probably Cuba, and the plane from Hong Kong stopped in Moscow and he was going to transfer to another plane. And when he landed, the Russian authorities swore that his passport that he presented was not valid. It had been canceled while he was in flight. So it's the American State Department that forced him into Russia to begin with. That has to be known. Now he wants to be able to travel. He has no passport. He'll have a Russian passport. He's got to be damn careful and I'm sure he's very well aware of this to wherever he goes because there are people out to get him. There's no question about that if he leaves Russia. And I don't know where he would go and certainly he'd probably be in disguise and I don't know where he's going to go, but he's certainly not coming back to the U.S. because he will be immediately put in jail and tried under the Espionage Act as they're trying to do to Julian Sange, who by the way helped him get out of Hong Kong. So I think this is all a practical thing for Snowden. I don't think he'd rather not have a Russian passport. It's the Americans again who forced him into Russia and I'm forcing him to get a Russian passport. What other passport would he get being living in Russia right now? Right. And you brought up a Sange and recently you co-hosted a Sange event in D.C. So talk about that a little bit and the upcoming October event for a Sange. Yeah, we were at the Cleveland Park Library in Washington and we had a live audience there and we also had guests online on our Zoom, on our webcasts through Zoom. And first time we ever did anything like that technically and it came off pretty much without a hitch. And it was the aim of this program was to give the basic issues about a Sange to debunk five myths about a Sange, being a rapist, not being a journalist, being a hacker, things of that sort. And also we brought on Daniel Ellsberg, of course, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower. James Goodell, who was the New York Times General Counsel during the Pentagon Papers case, both extremely worried about a Sange in the fate of the First Amendment because of what they're doing to Julian Assange, what they want to do, what they bring him here. We also had John Kiriako, a CIA whistleblower. We had two people who were charged under the Esplanade Act. Ellsberg and Kiriako, he was at the library with us. We had Chip Gibbons at the library. And we have Stefania Morizzi, an Italian journalist who spoke a lot about the rape, the false rape allegations. And Kathy Wogan, our executive producer of a webcast and who's written articles for us about the hacking allegations against a Sange, why they're false. So this was a basic exposition of the issues around a Sange intended for a general audience. 15,000 people were invited in a circular in that neighborhood around Cleveland Park in Northwest DC. And 40 people showed up. It's pretty sad. But we had over 4,000, close to 5,000 viewers so far online. But it's still, people are not wanting to open their minds about a Sange National Press Club, refuses to support him. Even though the committee protect journalists, reporters without borders, International Federation of Journalists, and numerous other press and human rights organizations are supporting Assange and calling on Biden to drop these charges, the press club in Washington, which I remember, refuses, even though they're very well aware of the case. Joe, we don't want to get into a fight with anyone because I don't want to. I'm ready. Go ahead. Are you suspicious of journalists who do not talk about Assange? Well, I think I know why they probably don't because they don't want to face the issues. Because if they did and they really studied it just a little bit, they realized what is going on and what's wrong with the prosecution of this journalist. And he is engaged in journalistic activity. It really doesn't matter whether we call him a journalist or not. His activity was journalistic. And that was what Bob Perry, our founder, wrote in December of 2010 that what Assange was doing was exactly what he did. And he is well known for breaking some of the biggest Iran-Contra stories for the Associated Press, including naming Oliver North and his role in that. So the article that was titled, we are all journalists are doing an Assange. So they don't want to look at it. They want to cling to the fact that Joe was a hacker. Yep. Joe, we're out of time, but it's truly an honor to have you on the show. Great parents, as usual. And please come back on sometime soon to talk about more stuff that's going on. A dose of truth from Joe Lawyer from Consortium News. Read that every day. And thanks so much to Carmine Savia for doing a great job as our guest co-host. And thanks so much to the great Ted Rawl. I got to buy some of this art soon at rll.com. We'll see you tomorrow, here on The Backstory.