Greg Palast: Working Class ''Protector'' Tied to Mossad, Israel lobby, ''Liberal CIA'', Rockefeller NGOs, Mont Pelerin Society, and Weathermen
Contents
This page is a subsection of ISGP's article Cult of National Security Trolls: Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM. As that article details, shows like Coast to Coast AM promote virtually nothing but very organized and systematic disinformation.
January 22, 2012; March 15, 2014; August 29, 2016.
- Greg Palast biography: born in 1952. Jewish family and apparently a nephew of notorious Mossad chief David Kimche. Sister Geri Palast today is a major Israel activist who works together with AIPAC.
Greg and his sister had a poor background, but apparently were great students. His sister graduated from Stanford University. Palast went to UCLA Berkeley and the University of Chicago.
While at UCLA Berkeley, Greg was a poetry student of Allen Ginsberg, a close friend of Harvard's LSD guru Timothy Leary, whose group was also backed by the elite Mellon/Hitchcock family and had other establishment ties. Interestingly, it was Ginsberg who recommended to Palast that he should become a journalist instead of a poet.
Soon after it was a member of the student-terrorist group Weather Underground who convinced Palast to go and study at the Rockefeller's University of Chicago so that he could ''infiltrate'' the right and expose them from the inside. That's interesting, because in September 1970 it was the Weather Underground that helped Timothy Leary - in his career apparently repeatedly aided by an elite ''liberal CIA'' network - escape from jail.
At the University of Chicago, Palast became a student of Milton Friedman and George Stigler, co-founders of the elite Mont Pelerin Society (Stigler was president 1976-1978). He graduated with an MBA.
After graduation, Palast became an anti-corruption researchers for labor unions and other groups. Broke through with his 2004 book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which largely dealt with voter fraud in the United States by the conservative Bush family. The title was derived from Philip Stern's 1988 book The Best Congress Money Can Buy. The Stern Family Fund was a major "liberal CIA" financier of left-wing activism along with Soros and Rockefeller, but it is unknown if he put money into the pockets of Palast.
Most certainly Palast is part of the progressive "new left" movement financed by George Soros, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Ford Foundation, Tides Foundation, etc. He popularity on Democracy Now!, his Palast Investigative Fund having been financed through the Tides Foundation, and his work for The Guardian and The Observer all point in this direction. This entire elite network of foundations has been concerned with countering any possible voter fraud by conservatives, so Palast's work would be much appreciated.
Another major expose of Palast was his expose of World Bank and IMF policy to force third world countries in privatizing and selling off all their national assets. In this effort Palast received crucial support from Joseph Stiglitz, a major Rockefeller economist at the super-elite Peterson Institute of International Economics who also has been working closely with George Soros.
Freelancer for "liberal CIA" magazine Rolling Stone since 2008. Since 2013 a columnist at Truthdig, a "liberal CIA" website that has received over $200,000 from the Tides Foundation.
Background sources: Allen Ginsberg, Bush voter fraud research, etc.
- Coast to Coast AM biography: "Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance studying under Milton Friedman and free-tarde luminaries, Palast went on to challenge their vision of a New Global Order, working for the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers' coalition in Latin America and consumer and environmental groups worldwide.
As an investigator for the Chugach Natives of Alaska, he uncovered the oil company frauds which led to the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. His racketeering probe of a nuclear plant operator led to one of the largest jury judgments in US history.
In 1998 Palast went undercover for Britain's Observer, working his way inside the prime minister's inner circle and busted open Tony Blair's biggest scandal, "Lobbygate," chosen by Palast's press colleagues in the UK as ''Story of the Year.'' As the Chicago Tribune said, became a ''fanatic about documents'' - especially those marked ''secret and confidential'' from the locked file cabinets of the FBI, the World Bank, the US State Department and other closed-door operations of government and industry, which regularly find their way into Palast's hands.
The inside information he obtained on Rev. Pat Robertson won him a nomination as Britain's top business journalist." - palastinvestigativefund.org/?about: "The best investigative journalism in America. True American heroes." - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Our work has been featured on the PBS program Now, on BBC Television and Democracy Now!, in Harpers, Rolling Stone, The Guardian and In These Times and worldwide."The links mean these publications are featured in ISGP's "liberal CIA" article because they are backed by major liberal foundations as Rockefeller, Ford, Soros, MacArthur and others. - June 2011, Current Biography on Greg Palast, pp. 73-80: "According to Palast, the profit-driven American media cannot afford to publish what he writes, because his words are likely to antagonize the corporations that generate advertising revenue. Only a few articles by Palast have appeared in U.S. print publications, among them ["liberal CIA" outlets] the Nation, Harper's, In These Times, the Progressive, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone.) ...
Palast's work has been praised by environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; Joseph E. Stiglitz... Michael Moore; and the cognitive scientist and activist Noam Chomsky. His detractors include Kathleen Harris, Florida's secretary of state in 2000, who, as widely quoted on the Web, has described him as "twisted" and "maniacal," and people who, believing that the U.S.'s so-called war on terror was designed to indulge Israel and American Jewish organizations, have accused Palast of being an apologist for Israel and Zionism. ...
The only son of Gilbert L. and Gladys (Kaufman) Palast, Gregory Allyn Palast was born on June 26, 1952. He has one sister, Geri Palast, a lawyer [and Israel activist along with a former AIPAC senior], who served as assistant secretary of labor for congressional and intergovernmental affairs during during the presidency of Bill Clinton...
At Berkely Palast met a member of the radical political group the Weathermen, who encouraged him to familiarize himself with right-wing politics and learn about the ''ruling elite'' from ''the inside.'' Spurred by that advice, Palast applied successfully to the University of Chicago, in Illinois, where he studied economics; one of his professors was Milton Friedman..." - Gregpalast.com/a-determined-voice-lost-in-the-wilderness-of-us-mass-media/ (December 7, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle, 'A Determined Voice Lost in the Wilderness'): "Greg Palast may be the only journalist with a New York office who works, as he says, ''in journalistic exile.'' There, with a team of a half-dozen researchers largely supported by $50 donations from readers, Palast ferrets out documents and smoking-gun-toting insiders from Washington to Ecuador and uses them to gird his bitingly sardonic investigative essays that most American mainstream outlets won't touch. Why? Palast figures it's because he mercilessly attacks the status quo. He was one of the first to write about the manipulation of voter files in the 2000 election, and he used a combination of unnamed sources, leaked documents and gumshoe reporting to critique the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina.
While he's long been a critic of the Republican Party, he's only somewhat kinder to liberals such as Sen. Hillary Clinton (''What do you really know about her views?'') and MoveOn.org (''Their idea is, if we have enough cocktail parties and put enough ads in the New York Times, we win. We may not have influenced any elections, but hell, we feel terrific about ourselves.'')
Or maybe mainstream outlets have avoided him because, as he puts it, ''I'm an expensive guy to have around.'' He estimates that it cost ''over a million dollars'' to lawyer the two books that hit the New York Times best-seller list, the latest of which was ''Armed Madhouse...'' [2007] ...
Other than ["liberal CIA" outlet] Harper's magazine and liberal online outlets, the best place to find the work of the 55-year-old married father of two is on BBC.com or his own site, www.gregpalast.com. ...
Palast is the working-class kid with a University of Chicago MBA. He never studied journalism; he was more fond of the informal writing education he received from hanging out with Charles Budowski in Hollywood. He wanted to become a poet, until Allen Ginsberg read some of his work and told him, ''You'd be a great journalist.''
He reads little mainstream press other than the Wall Street Journal (''which is extraordinarily important'') and the New York Times (''to know what I'm supposed to know'').
Palast says his desire to expose class-warfare stories is rooted in his upbringing in the ''ass-end of Los Angeles,'' a neighborhood wedged between a power plant and a dump. Kids in the neighborhood had two choices, he said: go to Vietnam or work in the auto plant. ''We were the losers,'' he said. He was saved from the war by a favorable draft number.
''A lot of people didn't make it out . Because I made it out, and my sister (Geri, a former Clinton administration assistant secretary of labor) made it out, I feel I have this obligation to tell these stories on behalf of all those people who didn't make it out.''
After graduate school at the University of Chicago )where he studied under free-market economic guru Milton Friedman - ''an evil brilliant mind'' who ''taught me to be skeptical of liberal nostrums''), Palast became an investigator [of liberal causes]..." - May 15, 2006, Democracy Now!, 'Greg Palast on His New Book ''Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08...'': "GREG PALAST: That's back to the Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', my old [poetry] teacher. He said, ''The soul should not die ungodly in an armed madhouse.'' ...
What I discovered that they're very unhappy about is a 323-page plan, which was written by big oil, which is the secret but official plan of the United States for Iraq's oil, written by the big oil companies out of the James Baker Institute in coordination with a secret committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. I know it sounds very conspiratorial, but this is exactly how they do it. It's quite wild. And it's all about a plan to control Iraq's oil and make sure that Iraq has a system, which, quote, ''enhances its relationship with OPEC.'' In other words, the whole idea is to maintain the power of OPEC, which means maintain the power of Saudi Arabia. ...
Plan B -- there are two plans. There was a neo-con plan, which was 101 pages long. Now, they actually did want to break up OPEC and destroy Saudi Arabia, but the Bush family was not going to let that happen, nor was big oil. And you will see behind this all: James Baker and, of course, Dick Cheney. ...
You'll see all the hugger muggers between Cheney, big oil, Rumsfeld, Jim Baker. Nowhere is there any discussion of George Bush. He was not in the picture. ... He's the president who's not there. ...
I [originally] came to the U.S. attention when I broke a story that before the 2000 election, Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris knocked off tens of thousands of black voters off the voter rolls of Florida, and this is what gave the election to George Bush in 2000. It was fixed by knocking off of these black voters. ...
Yeah, I broke this on the BBC, and to get in the United States, we got Michael Moore to put on a chicken suit and report it here as a joke."
Adventures with Rockefeller economist Joseph Stiglitz
- December 16, 1999, The Economist, 'The bumpy ride of Joe Stiglitz': "Much of Washington is celebrating the ''resignation'' of the World Bank's turbulent chief economist. Presumably, therefore, he was a good thing. ...
Mr Stiglitz had made a great nuisance of himself during his two years in the post, attracting attention with a series of speeches that rubbished the International Monetary Fund, especially for its policies in Russia and East Asia during the recent crises. That was bad enough, bearing in mind that the Fund and the Bank are supposedly sister institutions. But Mr Stiglitz also made time in his busy schedule to attack many of the bank's programmes and the think that lies behind them. In short, he cast himself as a scourge of the Washington establishment. By the end, his boss, the hitherto-supportive James Wolfensohn, had turned less warm. Did Mr Stiglitz do wrong? Policy advisers often have to decide whether to work quietly within the system, or to make a public fuss, causing external pressure to bear down upon it. ..
Mr Stiglitz certainly succeeded in stirring up debate. ... " - April 29, 2001, Greg Palast for The Guardian (later also on AlterNet), 'The Globalizer Who Came In From the Cold': "This was like a scene out of Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten.
And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy. Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent, the new world economic order was his theory come to life.
I "debriefed" Stiglitz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Instead of chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept exiled safely behind the blue police cordons ... The ultimate insider was now on the outside.
In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet retirement; US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told, demanded a public excommuncation for Stiglitz' having expressed his first mild dissent from globalization World Bank style. ...
Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive interviews for the Observer [elite "liberal CIA" history] and Newsnight about the real, often hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank and the bank's 51 per cent owner, the US Treasury. And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of documents marked "confidential", "restricted" and "not otherwise [to be] disclosed without World Bank authorization".
Stiglitz helped translate one, a "Country Assistance Strategy", from bureaucratese. There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bank's staff "investigation" consists of close inspection of a nation's five-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a "restructuring agreement" pre-drafted for his "voluntary" signature (I have a selection of these).
Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the exact same four-step program.
Step 1 is Privatization -- which Stiglitz said could more accurately be called "Briberization". ...
Step 2 of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is "Capital Market Liberalization". In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the "hot money" cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. ...
Step 3 [follows]: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and domestic gas. This leads, predictably, to Step 31/2: what Stiglitz calls "The IMF riot." ... This economic arson has its bright side -- for foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices. ...
Now we arrive at Step 4 of what the IMF and World Bank call their "poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. ...
"They don't care," said the professor of the corporations and bank ideologues he worked with, "if people live or die.""
Family of Mossad chief David Kimche
- October 23, 2013, Truthseeker (anti-Semitic source, but tough to dispute these claims), 'Greg Palast is related to Mossad Chief David Kimche': "I wrote an article about Greg Palast in August 2007 in which I revealed his Zionist roots from Poland and Chicago. Having looked a bit more into the Palast family history, I found that Greg Palast is closly related to David Kimche, the late Israeli spymaster and deputy director of the Mossad - Greg's father and David Kimche are first cousins. ...
To get Palast's side of the story I looked him up in the White Pages and called his number. A woman named Leni [von Eckardt] answered the phone. I told her I was working on an article about the relationship between Greg Palast and David Kimche, the famous chief of the Mossad. Leni was quick to confirm that they are related. She gave me Greg Palast's mobile number so I called him to ask about the details. He refused to answer any questions about his family relationship to David Kimche and pretended to be offended that I was asking such questions. ...
The relationship between Greg Palast and David Kimche is quite close and also explains Palast's close connection to Britain and the Zionist establishment of London. David Kimche was born in London on February 14, 1928. Kimche's mother was Polish-born Sara Palast, who married Moses Kimche from Grodno (then Poland). Sara was the daughter of Theodore Palast and Sonia Celmaister and had many siblings: Nathan, Norman, Dora, Max, and Morris. Sara's brother Morris (a.k.a. Moritz or Maurice, born in Poland, 1897) came to Chicago and listed Norman Palast of 1056 Oakley Blvd. as his nearest relative when he registered for World War I. Norman Palast is Greg Palast's paternal grandfather [and apparent brother of Sara Palast], i.e. the father of his father, Gilbert Leon Palast. The following documents indicate that Greg Palast's father, Gilbert, is a cousin of the former deputy director of the Mossad. ... " - June 2011, Current Biography on Greg Palast, pp. 73-80: "People who, believing that the U.S.'s so-called war on terror was designed to indulge Israel and American Jewish organizations, have accused Palast of being an apologist for Israel and Zionism. ...
The only son of Gilbert L. and Gladys (Kaufman) Palast, Gregory Allyn Palast was born on June 26, 1952. He has one sister, Geri Palast, a lawyer [and Israel activist along with a former AIPAC senior], who served as assistant secretary of labor for congressional and intergovernmental affairs during during the presidency of Bill Clinton..." - November 22, 2010, EastCoastMagazine.com, 'Passages: Gilbert Palast 1921-2010': "Gilbert L. "Gil" Palast, 89, died November 7th after an extended illness. Co-founder of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club ... is best remembered as a long-time political activist.
He is survived by his wife, Gladys, his son, Greg Palast... and his daughter, Geri Palast...
Gil Palast served in the U.S. Army during World War II in the Pacific theater of operations. ... On March 8, 1965, when U.S. Marines landed at Danang, Vietnam, Gil Palast believed that the Army he served in, which had once freed the oppressed, had now become the oppressors of impoverished people in Asia. So he gave his military medals to his son. ... Their [Gil and wife] activism continued late in life." - geni.com/people/Sara-Palast/6000000000886325825 (accessed: February 18, 2017): "Birthdate: January 9, 1886. Birthplace: Warsaw, Mazovia, Poland. Death: Died 1976 in Jerusalem. Wife of Mones (Manos) Kimche Mother of David Kimche; Jon (Jonas) Kimche; Ida Futorian; Frieda Assa-Kimche; Theodor (Teddy) Kimche and 4 others..."
- geni.com/people/David-Kimche/6000000000886325883 (accessed: February 18, 2017): "Birthdate: February 14, 1928. ... Death: Died March 8, 2010. Immediate Family: Son of Mones (Manos) Kimche and Sara Palast..."
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kimche (accessed: February 18, 2017): "David "Dave" Kimche (14 February 1928 – 8 March 2010) was an Israeli diplomat, deputy director of the Mossad, spymaster and journalist.[1] He is believed to have been the main contact between the United States and Iran during the Iran-Contra affair.[2] Kimche was president [until 2010 and founder in 1989] of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the steering committee of the International Alliance for Arab-Israel Peace. ...
His mother's maiden name given as Palast. [not mentioned in any of his obituaries]"
Geri Palast: Clinton staffer, Israel Action Network, "Liberal CIA"
- israelactionnetwork.org/aboutus/staff/ (accessed: December 16, 2015):"GERI PALAST: IAN's Managing Director, is responsible for overall IAN [Israel Action Network] operations and directs and supervises all IAN staff. She has extensive experience organizing and leading broad-based national grassroots and legislative issue campaigns. From 2000-2011, she founded and ran two NGOs on school finance reform to ensure adequate funding for poor children and justice system reform. From 1993-2000, she served as the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs during the Clinton Administration [under Robert Reich]. Previously, she served as the national Legislative and political Director of the Services Employees International Union (SEIU). She has served on numerous boards ... and taught at universities, ran three social justice NGOs and she is an attorney.
MAX CHAMOVITZ: IAN's Deputy Managing Director... At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Max served as Deputy Director of Defense and Strategic Issues where he was responsible for advocating numerous U.S.-Israel strategic cooperation projects to members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committee. ... " - dmiblog.com/archives/2004/09/geri_palast.html (accessed: December 16, 2015):"GERI PALAST: Most recently, Ms. Palast was Counsel to Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman LLP, directing the firm's program reaching out to institutional investors in areas of ligitation, policy, and public affairs. She is an attorney, a Root-Tilden Public Service Law Scholar from NYU School of Law, and an honors graduate of Stanford University."
- israelactionnetwork.org/aboutus/what-we-do/ (accessed: December 16, 2015): "Israel today faces an intensive and increasingly sophisticated assault on its very right to exist as a sovereign democratic Jewish state. For this reason, The Jewish Federation of North America (JFNA), in partnership with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), created the Israel Action Network, a strategic initiative intended to counter this onslaught of delegimitization."
- Geri Palast has been a long-time board member of the National Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMSP), which runs the liberal/Democrat propaganda site FollowTheMoney.org.
- 2006 annual report, National Institute on Money in State Politics, p. I, 15: "We gratefully acknowledge these major sources of funding: Carnegie Corporation ... Ford Foundation ... Joyce Foundation ... Open Society Institute ...Pew Charitable Trusts ... Rockefeller Brothers Fund ...
Board of Directors: ... Geri Palast..." - 2016 annual report, National Institute on Money in State Politics, pp. 16-17: "Brennan Center for Justice ... Center for Public Integrity ... International Monetary Fund ... People for the American Way ... Princeton University ...
Board of Directors: ... Secretary Geri D. Palast...
We gratefully accept the following foundations for grant support during the fiscal year July 1, 2015-June 30, 2016: Bauman Foundation. Carnegie Corporation ... Ford Foundation ... Hewlett Foundation. James Irvine Foundation. Knight Foundation. MacArthur Foundation. ... Open Society Foundations. Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Rockefeller Family Fund. ... Donor-Advised Fund."
- 2006 annual report, National Institute on Money in State Politics, p. I, 15: "We gratefully acknowledge these major sources of funding: Carnegie Corporation ... Ford Foundation ... Joyce Foundation ... Open Society Institute ...Pew Charitable Trusts ... Rockefeller Brothers Fund ...
- Geri Palast has been involved in the elite Committee for Economic Development (CED). The CED is discussed in ISGP's The Supranational Suspects Behind 9/11 article, because various elites relevant to the Bush election (Diebold) and the events of 9/11 were sitting on the board here (Condoleezza Rice mentor George Shultz; Donald Rumsfeld mentor Frank Carlucci; Joseph Kasputys, etc.):
- 2002, Committee on Economic Development (CED), Justice For Hire report, vi, p. 52: "Subcommittee on Judicial Selection: ... Co-Chairs: ... Roderick M. Hills... Ex-Officio Members: ... Patrick W. Gross ...
Guests: ... John Kowal... Open Society Institute. The Honorable Geri Palast, Executive Director, Justice at Stake Campaign...
CED Board of Trustees: ... John Brademas ... Frank Carlucci ... John Diebold ... Patrick W. Gross ... Joseph E. Kasputys ... George P. Shultz ... Clifton R. Wharton, Jr. ..."
- 2002, Committee on Economic Development (CED), Justice For Hire report, vi, p. 52: "Subcommittee on Judicial Selection: ... Co-Chairs: ... Roderick M. Hills... Ex-Officio Members: ... Patrick W. Gross ...
Palast Investigative Fund: Rockefeller-linked financing
- The Palast Investigative Fund has been backed by The Nation Institute, the Threshold Foundation (part of the Tides Foundation) and the obscure and Rockefeller-linked Sustainable Markets Foundation and is supported by other liberal elite elements:
- 2004 Tides Foundation grants list: "Palast Investigative Fund. $10,000.00. UNITED STATES. www.gregpalast.com."
- 2008 annual report, Threshold Foundation, p. 9: "Palast Investigative Fund / International Humanities Center Malibu, CA. www.palastinvestigativefund.org. Palast Investigative Fund works to uncover voter disenfranchisement in the United States, especially tactics used against voters of color. $35,000 — Palast Investigative Fund's New Attack on the Right to Vote in the USA."
- September 19, 2008, Greg Palast for ["liberal CIA"] Daily Kos, 'Steal Back Your Vote': "Even though I am not an American, I have been watching American politics closely, after 2000 ... and then 2004 especially. In my adventures trolling the web I came across Greg Palast, a long time activist and outspoken on the issues of voter roll purging and other voting irregularies. (Some of you may already know of his work). So, this just in today, if you'll follow me down the rabbit hole...
The email from Greg Palast: "RFK Jr., Rev. Jesse Jackson and Greg Palast - invite your group to co-sponsor Bobby Kennedy Jr., Rev. Jesse Jackson and I invite you to join us to co-sponsor our voter guide, "Steal Back Your Vote." ... It won't cost your group a dime - but it does require a commitment to get out the word to your members or audience on the practical ways to protect your ballot from the vote-rustlers.
You know Bobby's work. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blew the lid off the Theft of 2004 in his masterful Rolling Stone article. Many of you know me for my BBC television report that exposed Katherine Harris' "fake felon purge" of Black citizens in 2000. Now RFK Jr. and I have teamed up to investigate THE THEFT OF 2008. We can bring in your group for you gratis thanks the generosity of the Puffin Foundation, The Nation Institute, Threshold Foundation and the Palast Investigative Fund. Jim Hightower and Air America's Clout! have joined." - November 22, 2010, EastCoastMagazine.com, 'Passages: Gilbert Palast 1921-2010': "Donations may be made online at http://www.gregpalast.com/store/?gilpalastfund, or by sending a check payable to: "Sustainable Markets Foundation/PIF" and mailed to: Palast Investigative Fund, Greg Palast, PO Box 90, Greenport NY 11944."
- July 30, 2014, United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Minority Staff Report. 'The Chain of Environmental Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama's EPA', p. 57: "The New York-based Sustainable Markets Foundation (SMF) is another significant fiscal sponsor. Unlike Tides, Inc., it is a relatively unknown quantity. SMF only exists on paper and has zero public presence – no website, no Facebook page, no Twitter account, nothing. Accordingly, only an extensive review of its IRS Form - 990s can inform the public of its activities; however, this review was limited to 2010 and 2011 because SMF's IRS Form - 990 for 2012 is not public. Through meticulous research, the Committee identified Jay Halfon, previously discussed in this report, as the director and general counsel of SMF. The group was also the fiscal sponsor of the controversial 350.org. [368] Moreover, nearly all of the members of the Billionaire's Club donate to SMF, including Schmidt, Global Wallace Fund, RFF [Rockefeller Family Fund], RBF [Rockefeller Brothers Fund], Park [Foundation], Energy [Foundation], and Tides. The Committee also found that SMF is the fiscal sponsor to more groups than listed on its IRS Form - 990. Overall, the Committee determined that SMF fiscally sponsors at least the following groups: • Gas Free Seneca [369] • "Flowback Project" [370] • Frack Free Genesee [371] • Frack Action [372] • Coalition to Protect New York [373] • The Palast Investigative Fund [374].
9/11 Truth bashing; ridiculing WTC demolition after "research"
- May 31, 2007 upload to YouTube, 'Greg Palast On 9/11 Controlled Demolition', Greg Palast in an interview with Lenny Charles of INN World Report (Palast starts out looking quite uncomfortable, but soon, without Charles asking for any specifics starts countering all kinds of prominent red herrings):
"What I do have in Armed Madhouse is the 199I Document, which I had in my last book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. I can take the story further. What is that document? A document that we put on BBC television and this is not some crazy stuff from black helicopters. It is BBC television, which obtained it from unhappy FBI agents and we got confirmation from unhappy CIA agents and the Bush administration told the intelligence agencies: you may not investigate the Bin Laden family in the United States. They are running a suspected terrorist organization [but] it says, right on the document, they are not allowed to investigate. ...
I'm an investigative reporter. If I haven't investigated it [9/11, later contradicts himself], I can't report on it. Then I'm just giving you my goofball opinion. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a psysicist. I had an office in the World Trade Center, but that's all I can tell ya. ...
To me, I see [9/11] like everyone else. It looks to me like planes hit the building and my information doesn't comport with an idea like a controlled demolition. ... We have looked at that and I'm sorry if people are upset about this, but we spend a long time very, very seriously looking at [the evidence for controlled demolition]: that just didn't happen. ... We spent a long time very carefully looking at that [controlled demolition] and that just didn't happen. ...
That was put out by people: The tower didn't lean over. That is factually false. They did lean - and it's that simple. ...
And I haven't seen any engineer. It takes 2 years to wire a building for controlled demolition. That's an awful lot of people. You would have to snuff an awful lot of people. It's Occam's Razor. Look, if you're gonna take down the buildings, you're not gonna do it with dynamite. You know, it's just not gonna happen. When I say there's zero evidence, there's just stone cold nothing there.
Now, I'm sorry Lenny, that's all I can tell ya. ... We have to be very careful when we talk about 9/11 Truth, that we don't come up with these goofball theories that are so easily disprovable that they discredit questions raised about the administration. ...
Dr. [Steven] Jones, his last big theory was that Jesus met with the Mayans after the resurrection. He's a complete fruitcake and a complete utter fraud. Mr. Jones, come at me! ...
[Osama bin Laden does not sent me his letters, but] Karl Rove does. He sent them accidentally through his email. He misaddressed his little evil emails and I got 500 of them. I kid you not."
9/11: Palast and Joe Trento criticize Bush protecting Saudis
Note: Joe Trento, while very knowledgable and a great author, is a curious character and rather closely tied to the the CIA covert operations network. In other words, Greg Palast and Joe Trento working together on such a hyper-sensitive national security subject makes sense in term of controlled dissent.
- November 6, 2001, BBC, 'Has someone been sitting on the FBI?' (TV transcript):
"GREG PALAST: The CIA and Saudi Arabia, the Bushes and the Bin Ladens. Did their connections cause America to turn a blind eye to terrorism?
UNNAMED MAN: There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government.
JOE TRENTO, (AUTHOR, "SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA"): The sad thing is that thousands of Americans had to die needlessly.
PETER ELSNER: How can it be that the former President of the US and the current President of the US have business dealings with characters that need to be investigated?
PALAST: In the eight weeks since the attacks, over 1,000 suspects and potential witnesses have been detained. Yet, just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama Bin Laden's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House.
Their official line is that the Bin Ladens are above suspicion - apart from Osama, the black sheep, who they say hijacked the family name. That's fortunate for the Bush family and the Saudi royal household, whose links with the Bin Ladens could otherwise prove embarrassing. But Newsnight has obtained evidence that the FBI was on the trail of other members of the] Bin Laden family for links to terrorist organisations before and after September 11th.
This document is marked "Secret". Case ID - 199-Eye WF 213 589. 199 is FBI code for case type. 9 would be murder. 65 would be espionage. 199 means national security. WF indicates Washington field office special agents were investigating ABL - because of it's relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY - a suspected terrorist organisation. ABL is Abdullah Bin Laden, president and treasurer of WAMY.
This is the sleepy Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia where almost every home displays the Stars and Stripes. On this unremarkable street, at 3411 Silver Maple Place, we located the former home of Abdullah and another brother, Omar, also an FBI suspect. It's conveniently close to WAMY. The World Assembly of Muslim Youth is in this building, in a little room in the basement at 5613 Leesburg Pike. And here, just a couple blocks down the road at 5913 Leesburg, is where four of the hijackers that attacked New York and Washington are listed as having lived.
The US Treasury has not frozen WAMY's assets, and when we talked to them, they insisted they are a charity. Yet, just weeks ago, Pakistan expelled WAMY operatives. And India claimed that WAMY was funding an organisation linked to bombings in Kashmir. And the Philippines military has accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency. The FBI did look into WAMY, but, for some reason, agents were pulled off the trail.
TRENTO: The FBI wanted to investigate these guys. This is not something that they didn't want to do - they wanted to, they weren't permitted to.
PALAST: The secret file fell into the hands of national security expert, Joe Trento. The Washington spook-tracker has been looking into the FBI's allegations about WAMY.
TRENTO: They've had connections to Osama Bin Laden's people. They've had connections to Muslim cultural and financial aid groups that have terrorist connections. They fit the pattern of groups that the Saudi royal family and Saudi community of princes - the 20,000 princes - have funded who've engaged in terrorist activity.
Now, do I know that WAMY has done anything that's illegal? No, I don't know that. Do I know that as far back as 1996 the FBI was very concerned about this organisation? I do.
PALAST: Newsnight has uncovered a long history of shadowy connections between the State Department, the CIA and the Saudis. The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah is Michael Springman.
MICHAEL SPRINGMAN: In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there. I returned to the US, I complained to the State Dept here, to the General Accounting Office, to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and to the Inspector General's office. I was met with silence.
PALAST: By now, Bush Sr, once CIA director, was in the White House. Springman was shocked to find this wasn't visa fraud. Rather, State and CIA were playing "the Great Game".
SPRINGMAN: What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets.
The attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 did not shake the State Department's faith in the Saudis, nor did the attack on American barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later, in which 19 Americans died. FBI agents began to feel their investigation was being obstructed. Would you be surprised to find out that FBI agents are a bit frustrated that they can't be looking into some Saudi connections?
MICHAEL WILDES, ( LAWYER): I would never be surprised with that. They're cut off at the hip sometimes by supervisors or given shots that are being called from Washington at the highest levels.
PALAST: I showed lawyer Michael Wildes our FBI documents. One of the Khobar Towers bombers was represented by Wildes, who thought he had useful intelligence for the US. He also represents a Saudi diplomat who defected to the USA with 14,000 documents which Wildes claims implicates Saudi citizens in financing terrorism and more. Wildes met with FBI men who told him they were not permitted to read all the documents. Nevertheless, he tried to give them to the agents.
WILDES: "Take these with you. We're not going to charge for the copies. Keep them. Do something with them. Get some bad guys with them." They refused.
PALAST: In the hall of mirrors that is the US intelligence community, Wildes, a former US federal attorney, said the FBI field agents wanted the documents, but they were told to "see no evil."
WILDES: You see a difference between the rank-and-file counter-intelligence agents, who are regarded by some as the motor pool of the FBI, who drive following diplomats, and the people who are getting the shots called at the highest level of our government, who have a different agenda - it's unconscionable.
PALAST: State wanted to keep the pro-American Saudi royal family in control of the world's biggest oil spigot, even at the price of turning a blind eye to any terrorist connection so long as America was safe. In recent years, CIA operatives had other reasons for not exposing Saudi-backed suspects.
TRENTO: If you recruited somebody who is a member of a terrorist organisation, who happens to make his way here to the US, and even though you're not in touch with that person anymore but you have used him in the past, it would be unseemly if he were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA. What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials.
PALAST: Does the Bush family also have to worry about political blow-back? The younger Bush made his first million 20 years ago with an oil company partly funded by Salem Bin Laden's chief US representative. Young George also received fees as director of a subsidiary of Carlyle Corporation, a little known private company which has, in just a few years of its founding, become one of Americas biggest defence contractors. His father, Bush Senior, is also a paid advisor. And what became embarrassing was the revelation that the Bin Ladens held a stake in Carlyle, sold just after September 11.
ELSNER: You have a key relationship between the Saudis and the former President of the US who happens to be the father of the current President of the US. And you have all sorts of questions about where does policy begin and where does good business and good profits for the company, Carlyle, end?
PALAST: I received a phone call from a high-placed member of a US intelligence agency. He tells me that while there's always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it's gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to "back off" investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents. I'm told that since September 11th the policy has been reversed. FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our findings. A spokesman said: "There are lots of things that only the intelligence community knows and that no-one else ought to know. "
9/11: Osama bin Laden was a fan of Palast's work
- May 21, 2015, Greg Palast for the The Guardian, 'The US government told me Bin Laden read my book. But what is it not telling us?':
"Books discovered in the Pakistan home of Osama bin laden included Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. ... I already knew that Osama bin Laden read my book before the headlines this week -- but I'm still angry that he gave The Best democracy Money Can Buy only four-and-a-half stars on his Amazon review. ... It was actually quite embarrassing to learn that Bin Laden was reading my tome - and a few by my homie Noam Chomsky. ... Before I left to write for The Guardian and Observer, my office was in Tower 2 of the World Trade Center. ...
And what did Bin laden think of my investigation of the 9/11 attack? While working at Newsnight, a few weeks after the towers fell, a little birdie dropped off a 30-page memo marked "Secret," "eyes only" and "1-99I WF", which is code for "national security document". The document suggested that FBI agents were blocked from investigating the Bin laden family well before 11 September 2001. Calls to the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA and FBI insiders authenticated this bombshell of a devastating intelligence failure."