Managed ‘leak’ targets Western foes, soft peddles right-wingers and American lackeys

The world has experienced leaks like the so-called “Panama Papers” before. A consortium of global corporate media entities are cherry-picking information from a purported leak of 11 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The list was obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), an NGO financially supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Central Intelligence Agency-directed U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The corporate media is playing up the connections of various off-shore tax-dodging contrivances and money laundering vehicles to a collection of world leaders. Instead of focusing on leaders who have direct connections to money laundering and tax evasion, the ICIJ, as is their usual method, is drawing “guilt by association” links to specific leaders. Not surprisingly, the chief target is Soros’s and the CIA’s number one foe—Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Rather than concentrate on direct links to such neoconservative darlings as Argentina’s new fascist-friendly president and Barack Obama’s best new friend Mauricio Macri, the ICIJ and its corporate journalists pals are claiming that the Panama Papers actually indict Putin because one of his old friends from St. Petersburg, cellist Sergei Rodulgin, is named in the leaked documents as a client of Mossack Fonseca. CBS News, the BBC, Newsweek, and other outlets led their reports on the Panama Papers by naming the culprits as “Putin and other world leaders.” No mention was made of Rodulgin because, as Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov maintained, the chief target of the “Putinophobic” ICIJ, Soros, and USAID was Putin and not friends from his past. Peskov also rightly stated that ICIJ has links to the U.S. government.

And, of course, the ICIJ, Soros, and USAID could not help themselves from linking, again indirectly, Mossack Fonseca to the impeachment charges against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and the investigation of her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Also hyped by ICIJ and their co-conspirators Soros and USAID are fuzzy indirect links to Syrian President Bashar al Assad and the late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in the Panama Papers.

The Panama Papers leak is reminiscent of the whistleblowing by Swiss UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld on the tax evasion facilitated by UBS and LGT Group of Liechtenstein. Although 19,000 U.S. citizens were identified as being involved by Birkenfeld, the U.S. Department of Justice never prosecuted the large numbers of U.S. political leaders who were alleged clients of UBS’s and LGT Group’s tax evasion contrivances. It was far better for the FBI and Justice to keep such information in their back pockets in order to keep wayward U.S. senators and representatives, as well as Cabinet members and governors in line. When a Luxembourg entity called Clearstream saw its clients identified in a leaked spreadsheet document, French intelligence doctored the documents as a way to later show it was a fake. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was on the bona fide list, was able to avoid prosecution. Sarkozy had friends in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Although the Islamic State-supporting King Salman of Saudi Arabia and neocon and Zionist favorite Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, both U.S. allies, are directly named in the documents, none of the corporate media outlets are referring to them in their news leads. The ICIJ is infamous for such stories. They excel in advocacy journalism and ensure that they award each other journalistic honors for shoddy and incomplete pieces of journalism like the Panama Papers revelations. And curiously absent from the ICIJ’s “scoop” are the names of U.S. political leaders. And the ICIJ, Soros, and USAID would actually have us believe that the bribery, extortion, and kickback operations of the Clinton Foundation are nowhere to be found in 11 million documents on global money laundering?

Of course, we have seen such cherry picking before. When WikiLeaks first began leaking to the corporate media classified State Department cables, absent were those from the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv that were critical of Israel. Reason? There were credible press reports, including one from the Arabic language Al Haqiqa website that Israel’s Mossad arranged a handsome monetary payoff for WikiLeaks’s founder Julian Assange in Switzerland.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

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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).