The Grayzone

The eruption of national protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd have shed new light on Israel’s training of local police officers across the country.

100 members of the 800-strong Minneapolis police department were trained at a conference in Israel in 2012. That means at least one of every eight members the city’s force has been influenced by the methods of an occupying apartheid entity.

The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal produced one of the first comprehensive surveys of Israeli training of US local and federal law enforcement officials in the following article originally published in 2011.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/09/occupation-occupy-israel-us-police/

The sentencing of the final four from the Venezuelan Embassy Protection Collective marked another defeat for Juan Guaidó and his DC-based coup administration.

Prior to handing it down, however, an Obama-appointed judge delivered an unhinged law-and-order tirade denigrating the defendants.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/03/venezuelan-embassy-protection-collective-wins-legal-victory-in-face-of-hostile-obama-appointed-judge-govt-prosecution/

In response to a massive uprising in May 2020 against racism, police brutality, and US state violence, Wells Fargo bank-backed activist DeRay Mckesson launched “8 Can’t Wait.”

This campaign is being heavily criticized by grassroots activists, who have called it the status quo’s milquetoast response to protesters’ demands to defund US police departments and a corporate-sponsored attempt to “derail the movement.”

The Grayzone is thus republishing this 2016 report investigating Mckesson’s origins in the corporate education privatization movement

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/07/deray-mckesson-tfa-corporate-school-privatization/

Top leaders of Venezuela's US-backed right-wing opposition are trying to blame The Grayzone and President Nicolás Maduro for the protests across the US.

Why? Because of Max Blumenthal's t-shirt

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/02/top-venezuelan-opposition-leaders-blame-the-grayzone-and-nicolas-maduro-for-us-uprising-against-police-brutality/

EXCLUSIVE: Photographs surreptitiously taken inside a British courtroom and provided to The Grayzone show a visibly disoriented Julian Assange confined to a glass cage and unable to communicate with his lawyers.

Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann was guaranteed more rights in court than Julian Assange.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/29/british-court-assanges-physical-deterioration/

From The Grayzone vault: The record of a pro-Trump Minneapolis police leader defending the killers of George Floyd reveals a past marred in accusations of racist violence, including charges from fellow police officers that he once wore a “white power” badge on his motorcycle jacket.

This report from our 2016 archives details a long history of racist brutality by the Minneapolis Police Department and the presence of a “white power” biker club within its ranks. Minneapolis Police Officer’s Federation leader Lt. Bob Kroll is one among many members of the club, called City Heat.

Following the videotaped killing of Floyd, Kroll – who has been implicated in a long string of violent abuses and publicly endorsed Donald Trump – stated, “Now is not the time rush to judgement and immediately condemn our officers.”

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/29/minneapolis-police-george-floyds-white-power-biker-gang/

How many dead Yemenis does it take to equal one Washington Post contributor?

The War Nerd dissects reporting on Saudi Arabia to show how the corporate media cares much more about Jamal Khashoggi than a quarter of a million Yemenis killed in a Western-backed war

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/25/media-saudi-arabia-yemen-khashoggi-war-nerd/

There is a shocking update in this massive corruption scandal: A US judge just approved moving forward with the liquidation of Venezuela's most valuable foreign asset, Citgo, which is worth billions of dollars.

Venezuela's real, elected government used this publicly owned company to fund social programs for the Venezuelan people. But the Trump administration illegally stole Citgo in order to fund the coup gang of Juan Guaidó.

Now a US judge is going to sell Citgo off to oil corporations, and then use that money to pay a Canadian mining company. Other US oil corporations will take some of the money as well.

This is textbook vulture capitalism. These corporate vultures are going to work together to pick apart their prey -- and the Venezuelan people are the ones who suffer greatly because of it.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/09/03/the-citgo-conspiracy-opposition-figures-accuse-guaido-officials-of-scam-to-liquidate-venezuelas-most-prized-international-asset/

The Intercept published a Russiagate story that landed Reality Winner in prison, burning its third source. That article was co-authored by Richard Esposito, an embedded police reporter who is now the NYPD's top spokesperson.

We investigate the shocking scandal here:

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/20/the-intercept-reality-winner-richard-esposito-nypd/

This exclusive report by Max Blumenthal is huge:

It shows how the CIA spied on Julian Assange 24/7 when he was in Ecuador's embassy in London, by using the security firm UC Global, run by former Spanish special forces officer David Morales.

Morales was charged by a Spanish High Court in October 2019 with violating the privacy of Assange and abusing the publisher’s attorney-client privileges, as well as money laundering and bribery. The documents revealed in court, which were primarily backups from company computers, exposed the disturbing reality of his activities on “the dark side.”

Obtained by media outlets including The Grayzone, the UC Global files detail an elaborate and apparently illegal US surveillance operation in which the security firm spied on Assange, his legal team, his American friends, US journalists, and an American member of Congress who had been allegedly dispatched to the Ecuadorian embassy by President Donald Trump. Even the Ecuadorian diplomats whom UC Global was hired to protect were targeted by the spy ring.

The ongoing investigation detailed black operations ranging from snooping on the Wikileaks founder’s private conversations to fishing a diaper from an embassy trash can in order to determine if the feces inside it belonged to his son.

According to witness statements obtained by The Grayzone, weeks after Morales proposed breaking into the office of Assange’s lead counsel, the office was burglarized. The witnesses also detailed a proposal to kidnap or poison Assange. A police raid at the home of Morales netted two handguns with their serial numbers filed off, along with stacks of cash.

One source close to the investigation told The Grayzone that an Ecuadorian official was robbed at gunpoint while carrying private information pertaining to a plan to secure diplomatic immunity for Assange.

Throughout the black operations campaign, US intelligence appears to have worked through billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands, a company that had previously served as an alleged front for a CIA blackmail operation several years earlier. The operations formally began once Adelson’s hand-picked presidential candidate, Donald Trump, entered the White House in January 2017.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/14/american-sheldon-adelsons-us-spy-julian-assange/

The #RaniaAndAnyaShow is live on YouTube right now, discussing the attempted mercenary invasion of Venezuela, conspiracies about China and Covid-19, and the aftermath of the US-backed military coup against Bolivia's democratically elected government, with journalist Wyatt Reed, who was on the ground in Bolivia reporting on the violent repression.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLUFVknskjM

Crowdstrike, the firm behind the Russian email hacking allegation at the core of Russiagate, makes a bombshell admission: “We did not have concrete evidence.”

In newly released Congressional testimony, Crowdstrike president Shawn Henry said that “we did not have concrete evidence” that alleged Russian hackers actually took the emails from DNC servers. “There’s circumstantial evidence, but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated,” Henry said.

Aaron Maté breaks down Henry’s testimony and why it adds new doubt about the core allegation at the heart of Russiagate.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/11/bombshell-crowdstrike-admits-no-evidence-russia-stole-emails-from-dnc-server/

The leaked contract between US coup puppet Juan Guaidó and the Silvercorp USA mercenary firm closely resembles the bounty the DEA placed on the head of actual President Nicolás Maduro and members of his inner circle this March.

The deal also tacitly authorizes the elimination of working-class Venezuelans in proposed death squad activities.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/10/guaido-mercenary-contract-venezuelas-maduro-us-bounty-death-squad/

Current and former staff members of the OPCW have denounced the organization’s IIT report alleging Syrian government sarin use at Ltamenah, criticizing its reliance on rumor, hearsay, “scientifically flawed” claims and the influence of unqualified, secret “experts” aligned with the Western-backed opposition.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/28/opcw-insiders-ltamenah-chemical-weapons-report/

The new coronavirus stimulus bill includes $250 million for the State Department to implement “economic, security, and stabilization” activities.

Max Blumenthal looks at how these State Dept/USAID operations triggered a polio outbreak in Pakistan and Syria.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/16/coronavirus-stimulus-state-usaid-polio-syria/

Nicaragua’s right-wing opposition is waging an information warfare campaign to undermine the elected Sandinista government, spreading fake news on coronavirus, while the state takes a balanced approach with close attention to the working class and poor.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/13/regime-change-coronavirus-nicaragua/

Human Rights Watch, the leading so-called rights organization in the US, has actively lobbied for Washington to impose suffocating sanctions on leftist governments in Latin America. The group has even praised the Trump administration for ramping up its regime-change measures.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/08/billionaire-human-rights-watch-sanctions-nicaragua-venezuela/

Responsibility for pandemic preparation was privatized under the Obama and Trump administrations. It’s time to face down the national security state that wasted trillions on imperial wars and abandoned Americans to fight coronavirus alone.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/30/coronavirus-privatization-pandemic-national-security/

OAS head Luis Almagro’s new term promises more corruption, cronyism and coup-plotting.

Read the shocking history of the most incompetent, unethical and imperial-minded Secretary General in the history of the Organization of American States:

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/23/oas-luis-almagros-corruption-cronyism-coup-plotting/

Promising to “smash” Venezuela’s government during a “maximum pressure March,” Trump has imposed crushing sanctions that force Venezuela to spend three times as much as non-sanctioned countries on coronavirus testing kits.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/17/us-sanctions-venezuelas-health-sector-coronavirus/