“Phantom Parrot’ is an alarming film about a repressive UK law aimed at individuals the UK government doesn’t like because they support victims of repression by countries the UK does like. It was directed by Kate Stonehill and produced by Steven Lake and presented by The Double Exposure film festival in Washington in November.
I visited Russia twice, before and after the collapse of Communism and even attempted to learn Russian, not getting much beyond waiter and taxi talk, though I can pick up film and political speakers with the help of subtitles. So as an investigative reporter, not a film critic, to understand this film about a Russian editor who won a Nobel Prize, I sent a screening of this film to world-class Russia expert, Richard Sakwa. He is Emeritus Professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent (England). He was also the head of the University’s Politics and International Relations department, has lived and taught in Russia and has published sixteen books on Soviet, Russian and post-communist affairs.
Jan 25, 2024 – Lebanon’s Foreign Minister Abdallah BouHabib spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations Monday, Jan 22. I asked him why Arab countries are not acting to protect the Palestinians. He didn’t answer the question.
“All Static and Noise” is what its title says, lots of static and noise, not much clarity, an anti-China propaganda film about claimed repression of the Uyghurs, Muslims living in Xinjiang in the northwest of China.
Reading another of the “Kissinger the killer” stories, I came across a link in Rolling Stone to a piece I wrote in 1999 that revealed for the first time how Kissinger met with Pinochet and told him he though what he was doing was great to fight the Communists. I had discovered links to documents in the Ford Presidential Library and gotten them through a FOIA request.
Nov 2, 2023 – Today is the United Nations International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. A week ago, at the Council on Foreign Relations, I asked Suzanne Nossel, CEO* of PEN and a former State Department official, why she has not led a campaign to free Julian Assange, who I described as the world’s most famous journalist political prisoner, imprisoned by the U.S. and UK.
Oct 29, 2023 – I wrote about Israeli apartheid over 40 years ago. I visited Israel and the West Bank in 1981. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had just been assassinated, though my visit had been planned before that. First I went on a trip organized for journalists by the Israeli government. Then, believing I hadn’t been shown the full story, I went months later on my own. This is what I wrote for The Nation, prescient in the title, “The West Bank as Bantustan.”
Sept 28, 2023 – Lucy Komisar asks Irish PM Varadkar about Ireland as a tax haven to which American corporations transfer intellectual property so that Ireland helps them cheat the U.S. of taxes. He punts.
Sept 23, 2023 – My question to NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg at the Council on Foreign Relations meeting Thurs Sept 22 elicited his lies about NATO’s “not one inch East” agreement and the US-sponsored 2014 coup against elected head of Ukraine. I was stopped before talking about Ukraine shelling of Donbass from 2014 and Ukraine forces massed on Donbass border that provoked Russian to move troops in. Stoltenberg’s response is a defense of U.S. hegemony.
March 4, 2023 – Catherine Austin Fitts writes: “As soon as I learned Lucy had published a new investigation, I immediately asked her to join me on the Solari Report.”
” Lucy found a disturbing pattern. Americans buy an insurance policy. And then quietly, the company starts to move or lower the quality of its assets in a manner that impacts or threatens the value of our policy. Policyholders have no burglar alarm to warn there fundamental change in the deal – or the price at which the deal was made – and we need to pay attention.”
April 30, 2022 – April 30th is the 51st anniversary of the extraordinary 1971 Town Hall New York gathering of feminists (and a prominent antagonist). It was billed as a women’s liberation dialogue. D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hagedus filmed it and called their documentary “Town Bloody Hall,” after a comment by Germaine Greer.
April 23, 2022 – A story I wrote in 1966 was acknowledged this week at the unveiling of a plaque at Julius’ bar in Greenwich Village commemorating the day, April 21, 1966, when three members of the Mattachine Society challenged the New York State Liquor Authority’s rule banning homosexuals from bars.
Feb 21, 2022 – John Helmer, a journalist in Moscow since 1989, has published a brilliant comic graphic-text primer about Russia, its outside enemies and corrupt insiders. In just over 100 pages of comment and vivid cartoons you will learn the stories of the major deep state inventions of most of the last decade or so: faked stories about Navalny, the Skripals, the downing of the MH17 in Ukraine, media propagandists, esp Russophobes Anne Applebaum and Canadian deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland. Also Russian inside-dealing including Putin’s gifts to some bigtime oligarchs. No surprise that Helmer got a death threat after that one.
Oct 16, 2021 – “United States vs. Reality Winner” directed by Sonia Kennebeck is a fake documentary that opened the Double Exposure Film Festival October 13th. It is a deceptive and dishonest film that carefully avoids telling the true story of this phony “heroine” who leaked an unverified document that said the Kremlin hacked U.S. voting machines and was sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act.
April 18, 2021 – I met Bob Zellner in 1960 at the Shaw University, Raleigh NC, conference that founded SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the youth shock troops of the 1960s civil rights movement. This compelling docudrama, “Son of the South,” by Barry Alexander Brown, is based on Zellner’s 2008 memoir, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement.
Mar 19, 2021 – It is almost surreal that individuals have to negotiate on their own to get Covid shots, because this is a country where the government serves the medical industry instead of its citizens. That is why in the “we do what the drug companies tell us” America, we know that hundreds of thousands have died of the disease, because of a medical system skewed in favor of the rich.
Feb 21, 2021 – I wrote a story about how my Covid vaccine appointment with Mount Sinai was cancelled, and how I’d learned that Gov. Cuomo stopped deliveries to Mount Sinai because it had criticized him.
Feb 19, 2021 – I got a Covid vaccine yesterday at a center set up at the Ford Foundation on West 42nd Street in Manhattan. I went online Feb 17 and booked an appointment for the next day. Nyc.gov/vaccinefinder.
Oct 16, 2020- On The Backstory October 15th, I talked about the film “The Spider’s Web: Britain‘s Second Empire” about how in the 1960s the Brits took Swiss bank secrecy of the 1930s and expanded it to enable money-laundering by The City of London, the protected British banking cutout made independent from the government.
Sept 22, 2020 – This is how companies help propagandize a population for war. This sign is on a storage facility on the West Side Highway and 44th Street in NYC.
Aug 31, 2020 – Robin Des Lois, a French organization that works for the rights of prison inmates around the world, today sent a letter to President Trump asking him to drop charges against Julian Assange based on his revelations of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan.
Aug 21, 2020 – I‘m not an NPR listener, for reasons which will become clear, but I checked out its “fact check” of Joe Biden‘s nomination acceptance speech. Whew, many Pinocchios! On both sides.
July 21, 2020 – The association “Die Anstifter” awards the Stuttgart Peace Prize 2020 to the imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. It is endowed with 5000 euros (about $5800).
April 22, 2020 – Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a former CNBC TV host and registered Republican till a few years ago, is challenging Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress in the Democratic primary. She wants to abolish Medicare and Social Security, which will probably not endear her to a working-class district in Queens.
April 13, 2020 – I saw this post on a tweet, Thomas Merton on how good propaganda makes people think they made up their own minds. A Columbia Law prof, claiming the Russian government is targeting American voters with fake news and disinformation, turns out to be a victim of the propaganda he describes.
