Snowden’s documents now safely in the hands of the Omidyar Network

(WMR)—Ever since National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden first began releasing information and documents and PowerPoint slides amassed on thumb drives by him before he fled the United States for Hong Kong and Moscow, the information flow about NSA’s super-secret surveillance programs directed against U.S. citizens and foreigners alike has been plagued with redactions. These redactions have been engineered by agreements between newspaper, magazine, and TV network editors, publishers, and managers, on one hand, and NSA, British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron administration officials on the other.

Media executives, including Washington Post editor Martin Baron, New York Times editor Jill Abramson, and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, as well as those at Germany’s Der Spiegel, France’s Le Monde, and Brazil’s Globo TV, have acceded to demands by NSA and/or GCHQ to redact information from documents and slides, fail to provide full and readable copies of documents to readers, and act as virtual gatekeepers for the powers of surveillance around the world.

The recent announcement that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has hired Snowden reporter/confidante Glenn Greenwald to head up a new international news operation—one that will have an infusion of $25 million in cash from a philanthropic entity called the Omidyar Network—that will have bureaus in Washington, DC, New York, and Rio de Janeiro, appeared, at first, to be an effort to ensure the flow of unfettered information about NSA and other U.S. and allied surveillance program to the public. However, billionaires like Omidyar always have hidden agendas, no matter how much they insist their intentions are honorable and in the public interest.

When Army Private First Class Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning allegedly released over a quarter million State Department cables to WikiLeaks, headed up by media celebrity and intense egotist Julian Assange, the reading public did not get the whole unblemished story about the cables because Assange had cut deals with The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian to give the papers exclusivity rights. Immediately, the papers began cutting deals with the Obama administration to redact names and other critical information. As the actress who plays the girlfriend of Assange’s erstwhile and more level-headed collaborator, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, alias Daniel Schmitt, says in the recently-released movie The Fifth Estate, “Julian is a manipulative asshole.” No truer words have ever been presented on the big screen by Hollywood.

WikiLeaks also cherry-picked what cables to release to the press: those critical of Iran received top billing while those critical of Israeli policies never saw the light of day. We have largely seen the same scenario play out with the documents and slides Snowden provided to Greenwald. In fact, Greenwald’s marriage partner, David Miranda, saw his cache of documents seized upon his “in transit” detention at Heathrow Airport, while he was en route from Berlin to Brazil, by aggressive British law enforcement and intelligence agents. The Guardian’s Rusbridger destroyed hard drives containing Snowden’s material while under pressure from the British government.

It is shoddy journalism to cut deals with the devil, whether that devil is NSA, GCHQ, or slack-jawed and pasty-faced “gentlemen” from Britain’s Home Affairs Department.

It was apparent from the start that WikiLeaks’ supporters included a number of idealistic “do-gooder” types financially supported by the many and interwoven non-governmental organizations (NGOs) financed by hedge fund multi-billionaire George Soros. Whenever money pops out of the sky seemingly from nowhere, be sure to look for the flapping wings of the “angel of darkness” Soros flying overhead.

In 2008, Soros’s Economic Development Fund and the Omidyar Network, Inc., along with Eric Schmidt’s non-profit, Google.org (the for-profit side of which has its own signals intelligence activity designator (SIGAD) as a valued provider of intercepted data to NSA), teamed up to provide $17 million to fund small to medium sized companies in India. Of course, the money was to fund the creation of yet additional Indian companies to siphon off more jobs from the American high-tech sector. So much for the “good works” of Soros, Omidyar, and Schmidt.

Omidyar, who is worth an estimated $8.5 billion, which puts into some context the $25 million pocket change he is investing in Greenwald’s new operation, was born in Paris in 1967. His parents were well-off Iranians who moved to the United States.

Omidyar’s mother, Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali, is a well-known scholar and she and her wealthy son both serve on the board of the Roshan Foundation, which promotes Persian culture. Omidyar’s father was a well-known surgeon in Iran. It would have been surprising if Dr. Omidyar, who ended up as a top urologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and who also had a medical practice in Bethesda, had not encountered Obama White House policy czar Valerie Jarrett’s father, already a well-known pathologist and geneticist, when he worked in Iran in the early 1960s. Just as with Jarrett’s father’s work in Iran, relatively little is known about Dr. Omidyar’s activities in Iran. Some have suggested that Omidyar’s parents supported the government of Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadeq, ousted in a CIA-sanctioned coup in 1963. However, the Omidyars left Iran for Paris and Washington long after the Shah was installed into power by the boys at Langley.

Greenwald's new corporate pals. What could possibly go wrong?

Pierre Omidyar’s parents divorced while he was a child in the DC suburbs. Omidyar’s mother, more interestingly, was a top Farsi linguist who just happened to live in the Maryland suburbs of Washington during a time period when Farsi was of extreme importance to the NSA, especially given the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) oil embargo against the United States and the importance of Iranian oil shipments to the United States in the early 1970s.

It’s not only Omidyar’s NGO partners that are suspicious but his corporate ones as well. The Omidyar is an investor in a Waltham, Massachusetts firm called InnoCentive. The company, which markets crowd sourcing technology to “solve problems,” has among its investors IN-Q-TEL, the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital firm that brought forth companies like Palantir, which helped develop the very same metadata-mining program, PRISM, that caused Snowden to break ranks with NSA and reveal the agency’s nefarious deeds. Palantir was also part of the smearing efforts mainly directed against WikiLeaks by another U.S. government contractor, HB Gary Federal. Those smears by Pakantir were also directed against Greenwald because of his support for WikiLeaks. But that’s not all.

The connections between Omidyar and the U.S. surveillance structure do not end with IN-Q-TEL. One of the Omidyar Network’s other partners in promoting InnoCentive is Booz Allen Hamilton, the NSA contractor for whom Snowden worked at the NSA station in Hawaii when he made off with NSA’s “smoking gun” classified documents and slides.

And Snowden and Obama are not the only ones with connections in Hawaii. It turns out that Omidyar’s parents settled in Hawaii after living for a short time in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC before moving to Hawaii. Omidyar attended the elite private Punahou High School in Manoa for the eighth and ninth grades, having arrived at the school in 1979, the same year Obama graduated from the school. Omidyar’s wife, Pamela Wesley Omidyar, is a graduate of Hawaii’s I’olani school, another of Hawaii’s elite private secondary schools. Omidyar maintains a residence in the wealthy Kahala neighborhood of Honolulu.

Omidyar is interested in supporting Hawaiian culture. However, that ruse has been used by the Mormons for years to increase their influence not only in Hawaii but also in Pacific island nations of Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and the Cook Islands. Another cult that is active in Hawaii is the Bahais, which originated in Persia and now have their global headquarters in Haifa, Israel. The Bahais not only push the Polynesian culture theme in the same manner as the Mormons but even consider Mormon founder Joseph Smith to be a true seer of God. Some observers have pointed out that the Omidyars’ Roshan Foundation pushes Bahai-like principles. The Shah of Iran supported the Bahais to counter the influence of the Shi’a mullahs who ultimately overthrew him in 1979, the year the Omidyars moved to Hawaii from the Washington, DC area.

Iran has accused the Bahais of being involved in cyber-attacks on Iranian computer systems and networks, as well as working with the CIA-supported terrorist Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) guerrillas that have launched violent attacks inside Iran. With their headquarters in Haifa, the links between the Bahai organization and Mossad are well-known throughout the Middle East and South Asia.

Pierre Omidyar is now supporting a news organization that we’re told will expose the NSA surveillance information that has been suppressed, altered, or censored by newspapers and magazines. With Soros, IN-Q-TEL, and Booz Allen Hamilton as Mr. Omidyar’s business partners, we wish his and Greenwald’s new operation success but we don’t expect anything will change with the drip, drip, drip of sliced and diced NSA documents, first said to number 10,000, then increased to 20,000, then 58,000, and then “over 50,000″ on 60 gigabytes of thumb drives space. It is not the job of the Fourth Estate, forget Assange’s so-called “Fifth Estate” garbage, to make deals with the government or, through sources, with the competition. That is not true journalism but mere scheming. WMR has been asked what we would have done had we received a few thumb drives with 10,000 to over 50,000 NSA documents. They would have been released in full without redactions, possibly with the support of trusted parties with the necessary computer and server capacity like Cryptome.org. WMR would have taken its lumps as they came.

Color us not impressed with the Omidyar-Greenwald media venture. The landmines in that media landscape are very apparent.

[Note: WMR's editor has received many emails and calls urging this news website to make contact with the new global news organization being funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and to be headed up by the former Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald. Omidyar's links in Hawaii, some of which cross-connect to those of Barack Obama, are suspicious, even on the surface. WMR, from its inception, has prided itself on being fiercely independent. Multiple threats of law suits—all beaten—by some of the world's most influential oligarchs are a testament to our independence. Following the money leads one to the actual impetus behind start-up news organizations like the one being funded by Omidyar.]

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Copyright © 2013 WayneMadenReport.com

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).