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With a London court ruling that media activist Julian Assange must now return to Sweden toface charges of sex crimes, the WikiLeaks founder has made his last dance a Samba, outing Brazil's most trusted newscaster as what some local media are caling an informant, even suggesting the journalist in question was an agent of the CIA, in place to promote US policy and business deals.
According to a confidential state department cable published by Jornal do Brasil and other online media, the person of interest is William "Bill" Waack. The 59-year-old Waack moderated a crucial presidential debate in last year's election and has been an anchor with Globo TV.
Waack did a high profile interview with secretary of state Hillary Clinton that set the stage for president Barack Obama's 36-hour visit to Brazil and later helped facilitate the objectives of U.S. businesses and policymakers during the tour in March. The state department cablereveals that Waack told U.S. officials that Dilma is not the most qualified candidate and that she seems "incoherent," statements consistent with his subsequent efforts to characterize her as an unflattering candidate during the presidential campaign.
A heralded foreign correspondent for Globo in European capitals and war zones who came home to anchor the nation's top nightly news show, the image of Waack as the Walter Cronkite of Brazil does seem to match up with the job description of propaganda asset developed by the CIA's legendary global media strategist Cord Meyer that remains a staple of U.S. intelligence tradecraft, and that of some allies and competitors in Latin America and other seemingly soft power arenas.
Meyer joined the CIA after rooting out communists at the United World Federalist movement, an early globalist organization. His media playbook in Latin America was inherited by Tom Enders, who, like Meyer was a member of Yale's Scroll and Key secret society and served as assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs during the Reagan era, when Waack first showed up the diplomatic cocktail party circuit that includes journalists.
Over the past few years according to the Jornal do Brasil and other online sources Waack met on several occasions to share information with and receive guidance from the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, and Israeli government officials. Waack's pro-American views have been amped up in The American Interest, where he has chastised Brazil for its growing trade relationship with China.
Since it is common for diplomatic and secret services of G-20 nations to maintain relationships with media assets in which information and money often change hands -- and have those contacts go unnoticed -- outing Waack could be a swan song for Assange.
The WikiLeaks founder has been struggling to organize financial support for his project, the economic spirit of which in, his WikiPedia bio, he says is driven by American-style libertarianism. Supporters of his project on the left have always played down the contradiction between his libertarian views and their liberal politics which advocates an open internet. The BBC and other media indicate that WikiLeaks has stopped publishing classified information.
To roll back the drama of the urban myth that causes people to think all things WikiLeaksare secret, of the roughly 245,000 documents involved in Cablegate that form the brunt of the project 53% are unclassified, 40% classified as confidential in many instances just to protect US interest in the subject matter, and only 7% carry a secret classification.
The popular Swedish NGO known as the Pirate Party had been hosting WikiLeaks on their servers, but dropped Assange and publicly distanced themselves from him when it became evident that his legal problems were turning off their membership, jeopardizing efforts by umbrella organization Pirate Parties International to make the NGO a player in the retail politics of Brazil, which it views as a target of opportunity.
Ironically, Brazil's former president Lula, a frequent target of WikiLeaks critiques, offered support for Assange after he was arrested last December by British authorities. Retired Marine captain Daniel Ellsberg of "Pentagon Papers" fame also expressed solidarity with the WikiLeaks founder suggesting that Assange is a victim of the same repression he felt back in when he offended the likes of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger back in 1971.
But going back 40 years to Watergate also means going back to the legacy of Cord Meyer and James Angleton and domestic CIA spying, and the COINTELPRO FBI program that eroded citizen privacy. Today, however, Ellsberg is trumped by the political reality that none of the Watergate crimes that secretary of state Hillary Clinton helped prosecute when she worked with Sam Dash and Fred Thomson on the Senate Watergate committee would be considered criminal today under the Patriot Act.
In spite of efforts to sully Dilma's image in the media she is riding a 70 percent approval rating. She has also upped her game from soft power to political hardball suspending payments to NGOs of all stripes, who have received 13 billion reals (7.6 billion dollars) in government handouts over the last three years. The move amounts to the beginning of an NGO census that will review and reset relationships with the organizations, many of which have globalist agendas, like the nascent Pirate Party of Brazil, and view themselves outside the scope of Brazil's rule of law.
Because Waack is a media icon in Brazil his reputation is unlikely to be damaged by a WikiLeak. But the outing is a reminder to press freedom and open internet advocates of how U.S. public diplomacy folded into local media culture can construct political reality in emerging democracies that can change the outcome in the ballot box.
With humor and circumspection the WikiLeaks drama has taken on the dimensions of aMad Men- script featuring throwback chacracters not unlike the Cold War media elites and swinging parties in London that sparked the Profumo Affair and Moscow's literary circles where KGB media asset Victor Louis fed Kremlin propaganda to Fleet Street and American journals to offset what Cord Meyer and his minions were putting out, as Craig Whitney'sassessment of the Assange-like Louis in the New York Times reveals.
Now the great game has moved to Rio and the beat of the samba. With mid-term elections on the horizon and the influence of former president Lula sidetracked by treatment to palliate his larengyal cancer, Brazil's latest political carnival could find William Waack at the front of the parade.
Correction: This post originally connected William "Bill" Waack with SBT network and Silvio Santos and has since been corrected.
WikiLeaks is not changing anything about the way diplomatic communications are done. It changes the way diplomatic gossip is marketed and tweeted. Diplomacy is still war by other means. WikiLeaks is a product, like Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street that enables some to get out in front of the issues and frame them for the rest.
This points to the political reality that the methods of achieving a soft power world in a violent Southern Hemisphere posited by Trilatateral Commission front man Joe Nye at his Harvard think tank are losing traction and its time for a makeover in those quarters.
While Rockefeller interests had the scope to include Asia in the economic and political conversation when they crated the Trilateral Commission in 1973, because the Atlanticist Bilderbergers were unwilling to do this the inter-American system remains the preserve of Nelson Rockefeller's legacy. Globo is a jewel in the crown of that old system that has structural faults like Bretton Woods and the massive capital flight out of South America that it promotes. How and why WikiLeaks chose to deal on Waack instead of staying quiet is a side issue I merely picked up on looking at a bigger power game, the future of nations themselves.
I have read with even much greater interest the posting regarding William Waack, a renowned and respected Brazilian journalist. I thought your article does place a stain on his record and good reputation.
It has been a widespread practice for diplomats to speak with local experts - often journalists, university professors and governmental authorities - to get a better grasp on the country´s situation and provide their home offices with a clear picture of the issues of the day in order to position their country. This practice has been essential in order to avoid misperceptions that would derive from the fact that diplomats do not spend enough time to deepen their knowledge about the countries where they serve.
Now, to consider Mr. Waack as a spy who has been outed is a little too much. I myself have been mentioned in Wikileaks on the Honduras situation. Such contributions help foreign governments dealing with Brazil to get a better idea on the way we do things, the famous Brazilian way.
I do think Globo does have an important impact on public opinion. However, I did not notice any straightforward attempts to influence public opinion to support Serra. If that were the case, they did a lousy job, since Dilma Rousseff was the one who got elected.
Wikileaks has changed the way diplomatic communications are done. We should, however, be really careful on how we use such information, particularly when people may be affected by it.
Since Mr Waack did attend graducate school at the University of Mainz in West Germany at the height of the cold war and did write books that studied communism, he is someone who would be a person whose skillsets make him of interest to the nearby Bundeskrrminalamt in Wiesbaden, and Germany's old BND intelligence service, as well as the US agencies that maintain major operations just a half hour drive from where he went to univeristy. I did read the article in the American Interest, which I find US neoconservative-style palaver, that preaches to the choir of Fukuyama, Kristol and Zakyyaand that is my view. And the Wilwack in the comments below is not the real William Waack.
Also here is the link to the Waack article he claims that I did not read so readers can read it if they wish to do so. http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=973
And I misspelled the name of Fareed Zakaria. Sorry, Fareed. Its fixed now.
2 PEOPLE IN THE CONVERSATIONThe problem with your article is twofold: first off, you just 'forget' to mention that Jornal do Brasil and Record (the 'other media' you referred to) are long-standing competitors of Globo. Trying to cripple Mr. Waack's image seems to me, in this sense, a low political move against one of the most qualified Brazilian journalists who is (surprise, surprise!) a sharp critic of the current administration (then again, who isn't?).
Second: as a university professor, I got to know and talk to some state department officials (who are particularly interested in our country, as the British and the Chinese are). That doesn't make me a CIA agent or a pro-US activist. So the examples and analogies you make use of are simply beside the point.
But all in all this is just bad journalism. Your response to Mr. Waack's comment is something else. Your attempt to disqualify his arguments based on his level of English is ludicrous to say the least. Now you can tell the mother tongue of any individual based on the way s/he spells a word? Come on! And you should know it's just not right to compare a comment on a blog with an op-ed.
In any case, should you have read Mr. Waack's article in 'The American Interest' until the end, you would have been aware that, yes, he was educated in Europe -- which proves that you didn't even care to read the very sources you mention.
He writes that "Meyer joined the CIA after rooting out communists at the United World Federalist movement, an early globalist organization." I can only imagine Mr. Ehrmann's research was limited to John Birch Society or InfoWars-type websites for him to draw this conclusion about Meyer or the UWF. The United World Federalists was a vocally anti-communist and anti-fascist organization which continues to promote democratically accountable global governance and U.S. leadership in multilateral institutions as Citizens for Global Solutions. In mutual opposition, communist groups in the U.S. and abroad railed against UWF's proposals.
Meyer was elected president of the organization shortly after its founding in 1947, stepping aside only when he became convinced that the Soviet leadership would never consent to the international inspections which UWF advocated and which could have been instituted during America's nuclear monopoly. In contrast to what Erhmann writes, Meyer did successfully fight communist infiltration in the American Veterans Association, in which he was also a leading members, and where communist opposition to world federalism was vocal.
This clear confusion over the nature of UWF and Meyer's anti-communist efforts casts doubt on Ehrmann's other premises in this article.
As a tangential note here, this writer attended secondary school in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. During the McCarthy era a young man who was perhaps 11 or 12 years old with the last name of Walter would evangelize the merits of United World Federalism to members of Boy Scouts of America groups at schools and auditoriums of churchres and synagogues that supported scouting. I am not certain but it is possible, not probable, that the young Walter was the son of Paul Walter, who was president of the United World Federalists, after Meyer, and a prominent US Repubican connected with the Taft machine.http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/06/us/paul-w-walter-85-aide-to-taft-and-leader-in-efforts-for-peace.html If your intention is just to discredit me, perhaps it is best to review the main subject of the article, which is, after all, why I wrote it.
The English writing style of Wilwaack that one can view below is not consistent with the quality of English employed by William Waack in his article in the American Interest mentioned in my blog post, And Trilateral Commission member and former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brezinski sits on the board of directors of that publication and the standard of English he demands is somewhat different than what Wilwaack offers below. Moreover, the use of the word "mazazin" by Wilwaack is consistent with people that write in english as an other language with their first language being German, Dutch, Swedish or Swiss, among others, since that is how those languages spell what in English is magazine. The flow of the thought logic consistent with one of those languages as mother language as well. The Mr William Waack, mentioned in the stories in the Brazilian media, including Jornal do Brasil, is a Brazilian
2 PEOPLE IN THE CONVERSATIONAre you experiencing difficulties in trying to find what is reported about me, William Waack, in the Wikileaks materials? I´ll try to help yuu out. Use this search engine (there are severals, this one is very simple): http://cablesearch.org/ type my name there -- "waack" -- and see the returns. There are 3 of them. One is a conversation during a lunch with the US Consul General in São Paulo. The second one, the same. The third is a opinion of some American diplomat about a story I have published. How can you say I am " outed " as a mole? To have an idea about how well informe you are, I never worked for SBT or their organizations; I never moderated a presidencial debate. I never worked for any business organization other than press outlets. I never facilitated any business interests from whoever you may imagine. I meet scores of foreign diplomats as part of my profession. I´m proud to say that I´m the only Brazilian journalist who managed to arrange and conduct an interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran (shortly before I´ve interviewed Hillary). I did interview several foreign dignataries and not so dignataries in my long career. You know, Eric, what is the beauty of the internet? It is the fact that is so easy to catch someone doing wrongdoings like you. Am I wrong? Prove what you wrote.
I´m writing you to vehemently protest about the absurdities you have published. I challenge you to show your readers where in the 211 tousend Wikleaks telegramms is there any -- any -- reference describing, insinuating, saying, stating, declaring, informing, naming me as a " informant ", "source" or "even" contact of any American or any other government. You are giving publicity to a falsification. We are already taking legal steps against the people responsible for this. Should you have any sort of professional ethics, please try yourself to read the relevant telegrams and show me where are your assertiveness based upon. I respect any opinion you may have about my work, my opinions and so on. But I have no respect for people who simply do not attend to the facts. As for Wikileaks, if you would have done your homework, you would have found an article wrote by myself for the respected "Politica Externa" magazin, in which I defend strongly the site and its revelations. And I wrote that AFTER my name was first mentioned. I think your credibility it at risk -- not mine -- should you not be able to prove with the Wikileaks materials what you wrote.
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