In Part 1 of this article The WINDS focused on Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's "farewell address" to the American people in which he broadsided the Clinton Administration with a biting summary of his observations while assigned to The London Telegraph's Washington bureau.
This section details the content of a telephone interview with Mr. Evans-Pritchard. The WINDS contacted the British journalist and author at his London office. One receives the unmistakable impression from Evans-Pritchard's articles that he actually expected more of this country--a higher moral/political standard--than he had witnessed. That expectation also seems inextricably coupled with amazement and surprise at what is really happening here.
"I had spent some time there, in the 80's," Evans-Pritchard began, "before I went there for The Telegraph. I was there in Washington for three years and eighteen months earlier in Texas. At that time I'd pretty much assumed that the government was sort of telling the truth about things. And that was probably rather naive. I just imagined that the Justice Department and the FBI and such, behaved themselves with integrity. I didn't really challenge that basic assumption.
"Over the years writing about not just America, but Latin America--I was there for many years and a lot of that dealt with American foreign policy--I tended to take the American line on things. So when I was in Latin America and many people were criticizing American policy, I was very supportive of the American position. I just took a lot of things on faith, and what I learned on this last assignment is that I have been rather naive."
The WINDS: Had things just changed or had you really been naive all along?
Evans-Pritchard: "I think it was a combination of the two. I think I had just been naive about how power works. There's another thing at work here, that being that this is a genuinely corrupt and deviant administration--in my opinion. I wasn't prejudiced against Clinton, as I said in that piece ["Good-bye, Good Riddance"], in fact, I had been quite charmed by him at first."
The WINDS: Do you think the Clinton Administration is actually more corrupt or just more open about what they do, i.e., not as covert about things as other administrations?
Evans-Pritchard: "I think it goes further and is more pervasive. If you look at the Iran/Contra thing, that was pretty serious, really. But at least it had to do with foreign policy and national security. At least there was some kind of rationale. You could see that they had in their own minds some kind of justification for it.
"The kind of corruption we're dealing with here is just flat out venality--without any kind of moral justification whatever and it has crept into every area of public life. That, I think, is a change. But I don't think it is because one party took over from another party. I think it has been a process of deterioration in every industrialized democracy in the world--whether it's Japan, France, Italy--they've all gone through this after the end of the Cold War.
"Two things happened:
"A. There's just been a general collapse of moral standards in every country--probably to do with television and money and all manner of things.
"B. You have the end of the Cold War and people's willingness to tolerate corrupt governments just evaporated overnight.
"We just saw the whole ruling class in Japan, Italy, and others, just being driven from power--a massive sort of outpouring of public anger. We've seen some of this in America too. It's been getting worse and getting worse and then it just sort of snapped.
"But Clinton is just somewhat the end of the line for all of this. He brings to a head all of those trends that are happening in the culture. He is the incarnate figure of it all. He represents the ultimate deterioration of standards and integrity."
The WINDS asked the British journalist how he viewed the public statement by the former New York Times Chief of Staff, John Swinton on the whoredom of the press. [2]
Evans-Pritchard: "That's a pretty grim assessment. The thing is it's not quite as bad as that--and therefore it's worse, because much of the time descent is tolerated which creates the illusion that it is always tolerated. But at crucial moments it is not. That's how it works. I've seen a great deal of that in the Washington press corps. There are things that they instinctively know to avoid.
"The Clinton scandals have been like that; I think the [Vince] Foster case was like that; the Mena [Arkansas] thing was like that. Those and the Oklahoma bombing have all been examples of this."
Evans-Pritchard's observations when former FBI Director William Sessions was "roasted on the Washington spit" as he put it, was that the barbecue had been prepared for some time in advance because of the Clinton Administration's desire to get rid of him.
"When it happened it just sort of passed without notice. The press didn't even question that this was an odd thing to do--to fire an FBI director in the middle of his term. This has never happened before in the history of the country. But by then, there had been so much underhanded conduct typical of the Washington way of dealing with anybody who's a problem.
"What the press didn't do was to stand back and put this into perspective and say, 'Look what has happened here? They're getting rid of the director of the FBI. You're not supposed to do that.' In fact it should be done with congressional assent but there was not a peep from Congress either.
"I don't really accept that America has a functioning two-party system. I don't want to sound Marxist about it, but I really do think it's a one-party establishment. This is the point that [Noam] Chomsky has been making from the Left--that this is a single-party state with two faces. I don't agree with him about everything, but I do about that."
Mr. Evans-Pritchard compared this nation's "two-party system" with the Greens and the Blues of the Byzantine era of the Roman Empire. "Who can figure out which is which and who stands for what? They're just two factions bidding for power. They take each other's clothes, masquerade under each other's ideology. In the post-Cold War I don't see any coherent difference between the Democrats and Republicans except on certain social issues.
"What happens with the press is that they get subsumed into this club. They get invited to barbecues on Saturday afternoon with the director of the FBI--and by then they're compromised. Nobody has to buy them off or anything like that. They come to absorb the outlook of the political establishment and they lose their independent, contrarian judgment. It happens by osmosis--they just assimilate their perspectives and points of view. You become friends with all these people and you become to think like them. They intermarry, literally. They are parents to each other's children, etc."
The WINDS: The press is often referred to as the "Fourth Estate," implying that it is a propaganda arm of the other three--Executive, Legislative and Judicial. How do you view that assessment?
Evans-Pritchard: "I think it has happened. I think it is inherent--it tends to happen in every country. It happens in different ways. Right now I think you've got a particularly co-opted press--by international standards. In Britain, even though the libel laws are tougher, there is much more lively pursuit of corruption. There's a much broader range of opinion expressed."
The WINDS: Do you print the truth as you see it or do you feel pressure to print the truth as your employer sees it?
Evans-Pritchard: "Well, we've been having this big debate over here about Rupert Murdock and the Asia editor on The Times being resigned because Asia policy was being mucked around with by Murdock to protect his satellite interests in China. They're having a big row over here about this whole issue--propriatorial interference."
The WINDS: Do you experience that?
Evans-Pritchard: "Everybody does. Nobody ever has to say anything for you to be aware of it. You just know where the boundaries are--and the boundaries move so you have to keep thinking where they might be. You just know. You know the way people behave and way people talk to you in the morning. But I would say that it doesn't compare to anything that I've observed in the way that, say, The Washington Post works, for example, or The New York Times--the big American papers. I think that those constraints are very, very serious."
Mr. Evans-Pritchard told The WINDS that there are many instances of which he is personally aware when the major papers would "spike" a story for reasons that were obviously vapid and without substance. "There've been any number of cases I've written about where stories are spiked....For example, they [The Washington Post] spiked the Roger Morris, Sally Dentin story [3] for the 'Outlook' section of the paper which was prepared and ready to go on Mena. I think that they were disingenuous about it. They said, 'Well, it wasn't very good anyway--and it was all staff'--and that wasn't true. They had the whole thing ready to go. They had the pages laid out, they had the illustrations done, the story was vetted [checked out line-by-line by Post lawyers for accuracy]--everything was set to go. It was half the inside of the Outlook section of The Post and it was just pulled. Somebody made an executive decision from the very top level of The Washington Post that 'this can't go in.'
"There have been a number of instances of that. The point I want to make is that you have the illusion of this huge diversified press in America, but it's actually a very, very steep pyramid. The major national news stories are controlled by a tiny group of people. And if you're talking about Whitewater or anything like that, it's really only six or seven people because the networks don't do the right stuff. They take it from The New York Times or The Washington Post. Essentially, the agenda is set by this very small group."
It should be noted here that Mr. Evans-Pritchard's description of the pyramid is realistically a perfect description of an absolute dictatorship--a dictatorship that is, by necessity, either invisible or creatively camouflaged. It is well known that if one controls information flow, they also control the financial direction of a nation. If one controls the financial direction of a nation, one controls the nation. The media is a power the globalists dare not not control (double negative intended).
"If you look at the way a story has been covered--like the Vince Foster story," Evans-Pritchard continues, "--when you've been involved in it for a long time and you've seen what they've written and you know what the relationships are, you can see what's happened. Three or four people who could have given that story any legitimacy early on, basically were persuaded not to write about it or persuaded to take a certain course of action.
"Now how those strings are pulled, I don't know. Michael Isakoff [of Newsweek] has been crucial in this and I think he shills for the FBI--I've always felt that. The FBI covered up that death from the beginning. He's been absolutely crucial in presenting a certain line on this and, basically, dismissing any suggestions that there's something wrong with the Foster case--just dismissing them out of hand. And nobody's going to challenge Isakoff on this. They see him as the guru who knows it all. In this case it's a pyramid of one.
"In Washington people have a beat--they cover the Justice Department, the FBI and whatever--and that's all they do. As a result, they develop a relationship with these people on a daily basis, they have to do their daily news feed, they have to maintain daily relationships. For that reason they censor themselves.
"One of the oldest rules on a scandal investigation is that you must have a totally new team on it--not the people who normally cover the White House or, in our case here, Ten Downing Street in Britain. You must have a totally outside team on it who don't have any of those relationships which can screw things up. And the problem in America is that you always use the same guys to do the scandal investigations as you do who cover the regular beats"--those who go to dinner, the reporter added, with the very people they're investigating. It doesn't work", he said.
"It's no fluke that the Watergate story was broken by two people who were not part of the White House press corps. They were rookies on the Metro Desk and totally outside that system. I don't think it could ever have been broken by the White House press corps. They are structurally incapable of doing so."
How do publications like The WINDS fit into this globalist view of a controlled, obsequious press? The art of journalism is, without challenge, the most potent force on earth for shaping the opinion of the human mind. It can only come as a logical conclusion that this potent force would be suborned for the purposes of those who are intent upon total control of the "masses". In their attempt--and success--at this goal they have ingeniously created publications that present a great illusion of diversity--even appearing to directly oppose or contradict each other. In the foregoing, it can be abundantly seen that there "is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press...." [2]
"One of the things I did recognize on coming back to the United States from being in Latin America for many years were certain patterns being replicated--particularly in the state governments in the South--that they were not that different from what I had encountered in Latin America. That is, in terms of basically a one-party system--a co-opted judiciary, co-opted police to be used for political purposes, etc.
"I really felt that very strongly in Arkansas. I could smell it the moment I first set foot there--so to speak--it just smelled of Central America to me. Just the way people reacted--the way they responded. That really stunned me. The more I got into this the more I began to realized that political to-and-fro--the public debate in Washington--is just ethereal, utterly detached from the reality of what's really going on at ground level."
There is a Scriptural maxim that says, "by beholding you become changed." That is an inescapable law of humanity. This country created a training curriculum and has used it to educate authoritarian Latin American government leaders for years on methods to control their citizens by the use of absolute political and police domination supplemented by a healthy dose of terror and torture. Is it not reasonable that if this country's leaders have convinced themselves that such methods are effective elsewhere, that the logical conclusion should be that they could be profitably applied domestically? They assimilate to themselves the very training and attitudes they create for others. [1] In its attempt to shape the Central American nations into an image of Washington's choosing, the United States has apparently become infected, as it were, with the political DNA of the very ones they sought to change and has, according to Evans-Pritchard, become a clone of them.
Of one thing it may be concluded: there are no accidents in this grandiose political arena. Everything is meticulously sculpted and scripted. Of another thing one may be certain: whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap, and America has prepared for itself a great and terrible harvest--and the media will bear a very large responsibility for maintaining and, indeed, creating the facade of lies and disinformation.
For those who believe that this magic land cannot be touched, domestically, by such as the genocidal horrors of Rowanda and the Balkins; who think that holocausts happen only "over there"; that death camps are for foreigners in foreign lands; that only those men, women and children of other nations can be fried by nuclear weapons--the Scriptures have something to say:
"Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand...for the prince of this world [Satan, the Prince of Darkness] cometh..." Matthew 26:45, John 14:30.
REFERENCES:
1. "U.S. Gets Blood on its Beak", former twelve-term Republican Congressman, George Hansen falsely convicted and tortured.
2. John Swinton, former Chief of Staff at The New York Times, was asked to give a toast before the prestigious New York Press Club in 1953. Swinton was admiringly called "the dean of his profession" by other newsmen. He made this candid confession:
There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
3.* "About 'The Crimes of Mena'", an article by Sally Denton and Roger Morris on the spiking of their story by The Washington Post.
Transcript of a Phoenix talk-radio interview with Sally Denton and Roger Morris
* The WINDS does not endorse this particular reference for accuracy or authenticity.
Written 4/01/98