This is another site some may have heard of if one has ever entered the conspiracy theorist rabbit hole. It is a Canadian website known as GlobalResearch (GR) and is very influential, with many of their articles being reprinted on other similar sites and being proliferated at a vast rate on social media. The site’s reach is extensive, with the site’s “About” page noting that, “[the site] includes more than 50,000 articles and news reports” and has created a separate French language website in addition to pages that house Spanish, Portuguese, German, Arabic, Italian, Serbian, and “Chinese” languages (the “Chijnese” is most likely a typo of “Chinese”, but is somewhat concerning as it is on a very important page).
However, the site is a melting pot of various theories. These conspiracies are vast and prolific (from 9/11 to genocide denial to blatant anti-Semitism) and will be discussed in depth as we go into the source. As well, the site exercises a great amount of energy in appearing to be legitimate, having a professional website that is crafted in a similar style to other, reputable think tanks like Brookings or RAND Corp.
In my own master’s courses, I have seen people use this site as a legitimate source for their arguments. However, the site’s content is extremely misleading, incredibly biased and full of content that is almost unashamedly advertising themselves as engaging in information warfare.
An Overview of GlobalResearch
According to GlobalResearch’s about page, they were founded on 09 September 2001 and quickly became, “a major news source of the New World Order and Washington’s “war on terrorism” with a focus of, “publish[ing] news articles, commentary, background research, and analysis on a broad range of issues, focusing on social, political, economic, cultural, strategic, and environmental issues”. However, NewsGuard Technologies, in their own analysis of GR, found evidence of articles being published as early as 29 August 2001.
As mentioned previously, the site has a large following and the ability to reach a wide amount of people; one article published by the site discussing the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack in Syria in April of 2017, “was shared more than 6,000 times,” while the site “claims to have more than 2.7 million unique visitors a month”. Their YouTube page, known as GlobalResearchTV, has roughly 35,400 subscribers and over 4.6 million views. Having that kind of reach online is massive and extremely powerful. The site’s ability to reach the masses is no laughing matter. The site is largely the brainchild of Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa and someone who we will get more into as we progress on.
The Problems with GlobalResearch
Starting with the site’s content, there is an extreme amount of stories that exhibit praise for dictatorial and totalitarian regimes, a distaste of the Western powers (U.S. and UK notably, but also Israel, France, Germany) and International organizations (like the European Union, United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, etc.), and beliefs that major and significant events in world politics and international relations are fake or simply untrue. Below is a short listing of such articles;
Naturally, these are only a few examples and there are thousands, of more examples showcasing what types of ideas and theories are promulgated on the site. It should also come as no surprise that many of these theories and allegations are completely against what is commonly believed in academia and what forensic and all other evidence indicates about an event. Let us take the first five of these examples listed and see what holds up to scrutiny and what does not.
The first article makes the claims that the WHO and the UN are giving children in Africa vaccines mixed with an HCG antigen to sterilize them. This article is not an original GR article, having been reprinted with permission from another source (as is the case with a lot of material on the site), yet much of the story is false.
Snopes performs a great write up of the article’s events, describing how a group of Catholic bishops in Kenya put out a press release about the incident which was then picked up by anti-abortion, pro-Catholic activists and medical practitioners which provided most of the story’s meat. Commenting on the incident, the Kenyan Ministry of Health’s head of immunization, a Dr. Collins Tabu:
“said women immunized under the program in recent years subsequently conceived,” with one of the main sponsors of this theory, a doctor at a hospital in Nairobi, responding, “If this is intended to inoculate children in the womb, why give it to girls starting at 15 years? You cannot get married till you are 18”…His statement about the timing of vaccinations in respect to the earliest age women can marry in Kenya is a good illustration of fallacious thinking — since the vaccine is given in a five-shot series, beginning administration three years prior to marrying age makes more sense than exposing women who are married but not yet immunized to losing children to tetanus”.
The article also noted that, the laboratory where the doctors’ group which sent the vaccines for tests and found HCG, lacked the capability to, “[make] an accurate analysis of that nature…In December 2016, a company that had been involved in efforts to test the tetanus vaccine — Agriq-Quest — was audited by both the Kenya Accreditation Service (KENAS) and the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC). That audit resulted in Agri-Quest [sic] losing its laboratory accreditation” while a former employee at the company, “who is well-acquainted with lab procedures…claimed that the lab lacked capacity to carry out the tests it was handling for its clients”. So, really, GR is utilizing the results provided by a less than reputable or competent laboratory and fallacious views to make an argument about vaccines.
The second article claims that vaccines cause autism. Now, I am not intending for this to turn into a debate about vaccination. However, I feel it is important to note that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has discussed this issue at length and found that there is zero links between vaccines and autism and that the ingredients within vaccines do not cause autism, with scientific backing from nine CDC commissioned studies (between 2003 and 2020), in addition to other studies from various reputable sources including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the United States Public Health Service, and the National Academy of Medicine and peer-reviewed scientific journals like The Journal of the American Medical Association, Vaccine, and The New England Journal of Medicine. This does not acknowledge the other hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed material, official studies conducted by individual academic, public health, and national/international health and medical institutions.
Now, while the article details that there are studies by the University of Pittsburgh that prove, “the effects of vaccination on the neurodevelopment of baby macaque monkeys”, the source provided does not mention “Pittsburgh” nor “macaque monkeys” not once in the article. As well, the woman who wrote the linked article which provides the basis for GlobalResearch’s claims, Gayle DeLong, is not exactly the most reputable source. she does have a PhD, but in economics and finance, not a life science. DeLong has been active in the anti-vaxx community, writing papers that have been widely discredited for, “poor study design, clear lack of some very basic background knowledge about her study subject, and biased presentation” and “poor methodology and wild conclusions”. Another cited source mentions a DOJ report, however, the source linked does not once mention the U.S. Department of Justice nor the DOJ.
Furthermore, the article also cites a commonly cited source in the anti-vaxx community, titled, the “Scientific Review of Vaccine Safety Datalink Information”. However, as Forbes points out:
“Conference abstracts and the accompanying data are almost always preliminary. In fact, the likelihood that conference material and what finally appears in a peer-reviewed journal will differ is quite high. Much conference material appears never appears in a full, peer-reviewed article at all because completion of the study yields much-dreaded “negative results”…[quoting one of the original researchers an speakers at the event] “The CDC screening study of thimerosal-containing vaccines was perceived at first as a positive study that found an association between thimerosal and some neurodevelopmental outcomes. This was the perception both independent scientists and antivaccine lobbyists had at the conclusion of the first phase of the study. It was foreseen from the very start that any positive outcome would lead to a second phase. Because the findings of the first phase were not replicated in the second phase, the perception of the study changed from a positive to a neutral study. Surprisingly, however, the study is being interpreted now as negative by many, including the antivaccine lobbyists. The article does not state that we found evidence against an association, as a negative study would. It does state, on the contrary, that additional study is recommended, which is the conclusion to which a neutral study must come”.
Naturally, there is much more that is problematic with the article, however, this can be found through one’s own research provided anyone desires.
As for the article about the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the article asks a lot in the way of questions, but provides no solid, definitive evidence backing their claims. Even when the article claims that a police officer was not shot and killed on the ground, in spite of video and eyewitness evidence to the contrary, the author provides no links to any material to back up their claims. To put it simply, the site poses a lot of questions in the still early days of a tragedy when information is still being pieced together and released and jumps to conclusions.
The article on Srebrenica is written by the person who is the only major source for the claims that the massacre was a hoax and was, “filled by a limited number of corpses from both sides, the consequence of heated battle and combat and not the result of a premeditated plan of genocide” before pointing out that Croatian forces committed genocide against the Serbs, engaging in a whataboutism type logical fallacy.
First, the person who wrote the article is Carlos Martins Branco (his name is spelled differently in the article’s content and in the heading), a member of the UN military observer team in Bosnia and a former Portuguese military officer, who has written a book on his views and experiences in the Eastern European nation. However, Branco seems to forget that, after the Bosniaks had tried to find safety with Dutch UN Peacekeepers in the nearby town of Potočari, soldiers under Gen. Ratko Mladić’s command, “[led] a column of more than 10,000 Bosniak men set off from Srebrenica through dense forest in an attempt to reach safety.
Beginning the following morning, Bosnian Serb officers used UN equipment and made false promises of security to encourage the men to surrender; thousands gave themselves up or were captured, and many were subsequently executed… Some killings occurred on the evening of July 12, but mass evacuations of mostly blindfolded Bosniak males to execution sites began in earnest on the evening of July 13”. The source previously listed also notes that most of those killed were bound and gagged (and this is confirmed through independent truth commission exhumations at graves), so these are hardly victims of a large scale battle of military conflict; as well, nearly every one of those killed in the massacre were Bosniaks and nearly all of those who perpetrated the act were Serbs, further lending credence to the idea that it was an ethnically motivated and organized genocide. Even more damning, the National Assembly of Republic Srpska, in 2004, “acknowledged that Bosnian Serb forces killed thousands of Bosniaks from the eastern Bosnian town in July 1995, and said the executions represented a serious violation of humanitarian law”; however, when a new, more politically conservative regime took hold, the report was annulled.
Finally, the allegation that the CIA assisted in the creation of al-Qaeda and ISIL is a long speculated one and one the article engages in, quoting (actually, engaging in plagiarism as the author (Garikai Chengu) does not list the source from which they obtain this information, in fact listing no sources whatsoever in the article) former Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Robin Cook, who states, “the CIA gave birth to Osama Bin Laden and breastfed his organization during the 1980’s…Al Qaeda, which literally means an abbreviation of “the database” in Arabic, was originally the computer database of the thousands of Islamist extremists, who were trained by the CIA and funded by the Saudis, in order to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan,” while also claiming that Obama assisted in the funding of ISIS to further achieve foreign policy goals in the Middle East.
First, many journalists who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, have studied al-Qaeda for decades and are experts in the field of terrorism and international relations, seemingly deny that the CIA gave money or aided bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, or future al-Qaeda mujahidin units.
Peter Bergen, a longtime CNN journalist and national security analyst and a professor of the practice at Arizona State, has said, “the notion that Osama bin Laden once worked for the CIA is “simply a folk myth” and that there’s no shred of evidence to support such theories”. Bergen reiterates this in his book Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden, interviewing five separate people (the CIA’s Chief of Station for Pakistan Milt Bearden, journalists Peter Jouvenal and John Simpson, NSC official Vincent Cannistraro, and Pakistani intelligence’s Afghan operations commander Mohammad Yousaf) who all, independently, claimed that the CIA never directly aided bin Laden and that many of those who later worked in al-Qaeda were vehemently opposed to the Americans and Westerners in general, and that those people never would have accepted money from groups allying themselves with the West.
Steve Coll, noted writer for The New Yorker magazine and now the Dean for the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, has also commented on this issue in his own book (and fantastic history of Afghanistan), Ghost Wars, writing, “Bin Laden moved within Saudi intelligence’s compartmented operations, outside of CIA eyesight. CIA archives contain no record of any direct contact between a CIA officer and bin Laden during the 1980’s. CIA officers delivering sworn testimony before Congress in 2002 asserted there were no such contacts, and so did multiple CIA officers and U.S. officials in interviews. The CIA became aware of bin Laden’s work with Afghan rebels in Pakistan and Afghanistan later in the 1980s but did not meet with him even then, according to these record searches and interviews”.
These claims that the CIA did not aid future al-Qaeda units or bin Laden’s unit of mujahedeen fighters are not purely from Western or government sources either. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second in command of al-Qaeda until bin Laden’s death in 2011, also wrote in his 2001 book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner:
“While the United States backed Pakistan and the mujahidin factions with money and equipment, the young Arab mujahidin’s relationship with the United States was totally different…The financing of the activities of the Arab mujahidin in Afghanistan came from aid sent to Afghanistan by popular organizations. It was substantial aid… The Arab mujahidin did not confine themselves to financing their own jihad but also carried Muslim donations to the Afghan mujahidin themselves”.
Osama bin Laden himself also stated in an interview with Peter Arnett, “the credit [for the collapse of the Soviet Union] goes to God and the mujahidin in Afghanistan”. One of the Afghan Arab organizers during the war (and son-in-law of founding al-Qaeda member Abdullah Azzam), Abdullah Anas, also confirmed this in an interview with the French television program Zone Interdite, saying, “If you say there was a relationship in the sense that the CIA used to meet with Arabs, discuss with them, prepare plans with them, and to fight with them — it never happened”.
These statements from former mujahidin fighters are more convincing, in my view, than from any former CIA, Pakistani, and White House foreign policy and national security figures. They have a clear opportunity to expose U.S. covert action and undermine the official narrative of what the U.S. is saying; if a significant enemy (al-Zawahiri and bin Laden in this instance) has the opportunity to undermine their adversary (the United States government in this case), why wouldn’t they engage in hurting their adversary and still gain substantial amounts of recruits through such efforts?
Now, on the subject of ISIS, the article claims that the extremely poor decision undertaken by Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) during the 2003 occupation of Iraq can be classified ISIS as being “American-backed”. This is hardly the case as there is no evidence to support the idea that the U.S. intended to disband the Iraqi Armed Forces and keep Ba’athist Party members out of public office with the desire to create an insurgency. The author is ignoring the evidence and misconstruing incompetence and hubris with deliberate action. As well, the author then attempts to link Obama and the U.S. government to ISIS by stating, “after 2010, the group rebranded and refocused its efforts on Syria…[Obama and the U.S. government decided] to take the risk of arming Islamist rebels in Syria, because Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, is a key Russian ally. Rather embarrassingly, many of these Syrian rebels have now turned out to be ISIS thugs, who are openly brandishing American-made M16 assault rifles” before expanding that ISIS is being utilized by America to “attack its enemies in the Middle East, to serve as a pretext for U.S. military intervention abroad, and at home to foment a manufactured domestic threat”.
Naturally, these are serious claims and accusations and, again, his argument is automatically suspicious as there are no citations or in-text links to anything backing up his thought process or argument. However, the claim that ISIS has American weapons is accurate, albeit quite distorted. The Hill reported:
“Weapons the United States originally supplied to Syrian rebels have ended up in the hands of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)…A 200-paged report by Conflict Armament Research analyzed more than 40,000 weapons retrieved from ISIS in the past three years, finding cases in which the weapons were originally supplied by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Libya… The United States, under former President Obama, had provided rebel factions fighting the Assad regime with weapons through a covert CIA program…That program, differed from the Pentagon’s train and equip program, which was focused solely on fighting ISIS”.
Concurrently, Newsweek expanded on the situation, describing:
“[the U.S. supplied Syrian rebels and quite possibly broke terms of sale and export for weaponry] By purchasing “large numbers” of European arms and ammunition and then diverting them to nonstate actors in Syria without notifying the sellers…In Syria’s conflict, the U.S. had been supplying arms to insurgents opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since at least 2012 and, when ISIS began rapidly seizing territory in 2013 and 2014, many U.S.-armed rebel groups were either defeated by the incoming militants or joined them. ISIS reportedly received most of its initial supplies by overtaking Russia-backed Syrian and U.S.-backed Iraqi military positions, but later vastly received a massive boost from the U.S.’s effort to overthrow Assad. As ISIS began to take nearly half the country, the U.S. continued to train and equip Syrian rebels, using local allies like Jordan and Turkey as intermediaries. In its report, Conflict Armaments Group included dozens of photographs of EU-manufactured weapons believed to have been procured by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, shipped to Syrian rebels and later obtained by ISIS, which moved them between Iraq and Syria”.
So, as one can see, the U.S. did provide weaponry to Syrian rebels, but these Syrian rebels did not turn out to be ISIS members; that is a poor reading of the situation. Nor did the U.S. intend for the weapons to be given over to ISIS, the intent was to have these weapons be utilized to attack against al-Assad and ISIS themselves. Overall, this is a poor reading of such an important situation and an integral point to his argument.
As well, Snopes ran a piece on this exact issue of Obama aiding ISIS units, finding such an accusation “false”. In their conclusion, they write:
“According to multiple reports by reputable news organizations, the CIA (under the Obama administration) carried out a covert program of training and arming Syrian rebels to fight against the Assad regime. That’s largely what the program achieved, too; but as a result of greed and corruption, some of the weapons supplied to the rebels were sold on to the black market, and some of those ended up in the hands of IS fighters. One could conduct a reasonable debate about the Obama administration’s overall management of the program, its efforts to vet the intermediaries involved, or prevent foreseeable theft or smuggling of the weapons, and so on. But one cannot, based on the facts available, claim that Obama “ordered the CIA to train IS.” He didn’t. Moreover, we know for a fact that he implemented a program that set out to do just the opposite — training and equipping Syrian rebels to fight and destroy IS”.
Finally, on a smaller note, the GlobalResearch article has an interesting quote by former Lieutenant General William Odom, in which the author writes, “The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, General William Odom recently remarked, “by any measure the U.S. has long used terrorism. In 1978-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the U.S. would be in violation”.
Despite my best efforts, I was unable to find the original source of this quote. After spending quite some time searching through news articles featuring Odom, including testimony given by him, the only source I could find of Odom saying this was the same article posted on Counterpunch in addition to articles from less than reputable news agencies. As well, GlobalResearch’s article was first published in 2014, yet Odom died in 2008. If he was quoted in 2008, that hardly makes his remark a recent one. In addition to that, his obituary in that article does not mention any such remark listed in the article. In short, after a lengthy search, I was unable to find the original source of such a quote nor any other reputable, undeniable news organization, official government testimony, or otherwise paper/blog post/official type of writing by Odom in which he states those exact words.
With these stories, what we see are a desire to give in to stories and reports that are anti-Western and paint the West or authority in a bad light. While this is not a bad thing for an organization to do, it is obvious that these articles lack the facts behind them to support the thesis. This site is also marketing itself as a think tank, “a group of experts brought together to develop ideas and give advice on a particular subject”. The people featured in these articles are utilizing poor sourcing, making wild claims (sometimes without proper citations in accordance with academic or journalistic agencies) on very little or no evidence, occasionally engage in plagiarism, and extrapolate from real facts to form conclusions that are poor. I would argue that a site which engages in this type of reporting and makes these conclusions about significant world events is not a panel of experts.
As well, the site seemingly loves anyone who is anti-Western or who the West seems to dislike or take issues with (some of you may have noticed this with a few of the articles previously mentioned). The site has run various articles that are very supportive of despotic and totalitarian regimes, most of which have committed abuses through their extensive internal security units, engaged in large scale criminal activity abroad, have extensive corruption with the public and private sector, and have a wide variety of issues, including being condemned by non-governmental institutions like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Some of these articles also engage in light genocide/war crimes denial and are highly uncritical and purely full of praise of various figures that are largely repudiated by various respectable institutions of varying different political and IR theory leanings. Below are hyperlinked a few of the following such articles;
Bashar al-Assad: The Democratically Elected President of Syria (al-Assad won 88.7 percent of the vote, which was only conducted in government controlled areas and in spite of the fact that a civil war was ongoing)
Fidel Castro Ruz. His Legacy Will Live Forever. Truth as A Revolutionary Instrument (laudatory piece on Fidel Castro that mentions “media disinformation…to undermine civil and social progress, not to mention the smear campaign directed against the Cuban revolution” (untrue by the way, many in America and the press lauded Castro’s revolution, likening it to America’s own revolution against the British), while doing little to mention Cuba’s abuses)
No Chemical Attacks in Syria. Misleading Public Opinion. Blaming Bashar al-Assad. The Media’s “Humanitarian” Pro-War Narrative (only one among a vast amount of additional articles proclaiming that al-Assad did not commit war crimes using chemical weapons (including a four part defense of Assad and trying to cast doubt on the allegations of chemical attacks) despite the fact that a 2019 study found that 98% of chemical weapons attacks in Syria can be attributed to Assad)
North Korea, a Land of Human Achievement, Love and Joy (extremely laudatory piece on North Korea, ignoring the many brutalities of life inside the country)
Why Is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe not a Hero? (neglects to state the nature of Mugabe’s military crackdown in the 1980’s or how, “In 2008, following his first-round ballot loss to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) candidate Morgan Tsvangirai, the army unleashed a wave of violence in which more than 300 people were killed and thousands injured or tortured on suspicion of having voted for the opposition. The response saw opposition MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrawing from the second round of voting”)
Libya: From Africa’s Richest State Under Gaddafi, to Failed State After NATO Intervention (rather sycophantic piece on Muammar al-Gaddafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, which, again, does not describe his many abuses of power or the brutality of his regime)
The History of Cambodia: Pol Pot Revisited (to quote directly from the source hyperlinked, “The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life…The Cambodians I spoke to pooh-poohed the dreadful stories of Communist Holocaust as a Western invention…Cambodia under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write. As for the mass killing, they are just horror stories…Surely, the victorious peasants shot marauders and spies, but many more died of American planted mines and during the subsequent Vietnamese takeover”; I don’t have to tell you that this analysis goes against what the vast majority of historians and academics say on this incident, with Encylcopædia Britannica saying, “…under the leadership of Pol Pot, the government caused the deaths of more than one million people from forced labour, starvation, disease, torture, or execution while carrying out a program of radical social and agricultural reforms” in addition to respected journalists (who were in Cambodia at the time) and independent researchers like Philip Short and Matthew White both describing what can only be called a genocide)
Vladimir Putin was Never Head of the KGB, Nor Did He Order the Hacking of the DNC (the article begins with the writer criticizing Obama for calling Putin the head of the KGB (though pointing out that Putin was, for a year, head of the FSB, one of two immediate precursors to the KGB (in addition to being in the KGB Reserves while they transformed into the FSB)) before trying to claim that Putin did not order the hacking of the DNC, in spite of the abundant amount of evidence found by Russian journalists, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and U.S. journalists)
Anarchy in Eritrea’s Capital Asmara: Regime Change Riots or Fake News Fabrication (the article linked defends the actions of Eritrea’s dictator in spite of videographic evidence complete with gunshots (the article posits the theory that the gunshots are blanks or rubber bullets or are not even being fired by government soldiers – in spite of the fact that Eritrean citizens cannot own bullets or firearms, something that I would expect a person writing an article to know if going to make such a claim); the article also claims that the globe’s perception of the president of Eritrea, Isaias Afwerki, as a dictator is untrue despite international NGO human rights organizations saying otherwise)
These articles are very concerning. First, most of them approve of regimes that are known to be despotic and totalitarian, that have committed massive abuses that are shocking, abhorrent, and run contrary to the regimes and governmental systems the leaders of said nations are claiming to be. As well, looking at GR’s articles in the same lens as one would view a think tank, does this type of work seem to be representative of an unbiased, scholarly resource? I would argue, with content like this being promulgated that runs contrary to what academia and official government sources (from the regimes themselves in some cases) say about incidences, that GR is not at all a respectable source nor is providing their readers with an unbiased or unfiltered view of historical or current events.
As well, another aspect of one’s credibility is examining the associations that an agency has with other authors, think tanks, media agencies, and governmental agencies. This is important as it can provide a view into the think tank’s own political affiliations, the types of people they chose to join forces with, as well as the kind of viewpoints the site will provide and the readers that will be attracted to the site. Now, as you may probably be able to tell, the writing base is not exactly a team of expert writers or respectable writers who get the facts of a situation correct, have views that are backed up by forensic and historiographic evidence and are instead a collection of writers that have dishonest and questionable histories. The following are a selection of the many, many writers that are featured on the site;
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts (Robert is, at first glance, a seemingly respectable source, having a doctorate in economics and being a former Asst. Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy for two years under Ronald Reagan; however his writings are concerning. As for a few examples, Roberts has claimed that, “All evidence [surrounding the assassination of JFK] pointed to a plot by the Joint Chiefs, CIA, and Secret Service whose right-wing leaders had concluded that President was too “soft on communism”…” which goes against the vast, vast majority of what the forensic, eyewitness, and documentary evidence indicates about the assassination (and probably best examined by Vincent Bugliosi’s text on the subject) in addition to publishing a theory that the Charlie Hebdo shootings are a false flag, has shown support for holocaust denier David Irving and said, “No German plans, or orders from Hitler, or from Himmler or anyone else have ever been found for an organized holocaust by gas and cremation of Jews… The “death camps” were in fact work camps. Auschwitz, for example, today a Holocaust museum, was the site of Germany’s essential artificial rubber factory” which outright denies one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century and goes against, again, all of the evidence we have about the Holocaust (including those from Nazi German sources). Roberts is also a frequent poster to RT, the state-sponsored news agency for the Russian Federation)
Israel Shamir (Shamir is the writer of the article previously mentioned discussing Pol Pot in which he effectively denies a genocide occurring in the Southeast Asian country; he is more well known for his denial of the Jewish Holocaust, conducted under the Nazi German regime from, roughly 1941 to 1945, vocally supporting David Irving’s views and writing in a 2005 book that Jews control the global media and the international Jewish conspiracy (reminiscent of the early 20th century conspiracy, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). He also was a speaker at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust” which basically was a conference meant to support the idea that the Holocaust never occurred of which notorious Klan member and American Neo-Nazi David Duke was in attendance. He has also been published and featured on RT)
Webster Griffin Tarpley (A prominent conspiracy theorist, he has claimed that 9/11 was an American false flag, Pearl Harbor was a false flag, Edward Snowden is a triple agent, and Anders Behring Brevik [the 2011 right-winger who killed 69 people in Norway] was a NATO ploy (also similarly claiming that Italian PM Aldo Moro was killed on NATO orders). Most of these being purely theories, with Tarpley utilizing either already discredited or distorted evidence; an example of this distortion of evidence can be seen upon reviewing the book he co-wrote titled George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (for Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review, itself a very uncredible source) in which one professional reviewer said, “[the biography] is a mélange of fact and distortion, written in a highly suppositional style that makes numerous leaps of logic and asserts connections where there is no real evidence to support it, at other times omitting exculpatory or contrary information that reveals a more complete picture… there are nuggets of fact woven into their text that are substantiated and which deserve proper consideration”)
Matt Agorist (Co-founder and editor of The Free Thought Project, an Anarcho-Capitalist news site which has many failed fact checks and frequently distorts their articles while having sensationalized headlines and articles)
James Corbett (The founder of the right-wing The Corbett Report, Corbett has published works on how 9/11, global warming, and Chemtrails are conspiracies, hitting many of the main conspiracies. He has also hosted the site’s founder, Michel Chossudovsky, on his podcast multiple times)
Gary Null (Null is a well-known pusher of a lot of pseudoscience material and has made some very concerning claims including denying HIV/AIDS, claiming vaccines cause autism, and fluoride is toxic, most often through the cherry-picking of evidence and outright accusing the media and other doctors and scientists of being in the pocket of “Big Pharma”. As well, the veracity of his doctoral degree is subject to scrutiny and his degree is not in a life science, but interdisciplinary studies and the conditions in which he was awarded his higher level degree are suspicious)
Zero Hedge (References the entire site as the author (probably to lend GlobalResearch more credibility as every article on Zero Hedge has the name “Tyler Durden” attached to it with no transparency as to who is writing it), which is known for publishing pro-Russia and Putin content, strange and concerning ties (via their founder) to Bulgaria and Russia, and the pushing of theories surrounding both Coronavirus and the MH17 shoot down in the Ukraine, though most believe the economic factor of fake news to be the inciting factor rather than legitimate disinformation)
Paul Antonopoulos (Antonopoulos was previously the Deputy Editor of Al-Masdar News, a news agency with a Middle Eastern focus, before he was removed from his position after having been found to have posted racist comments on the explicitly Neo-Nazi forum known as Stormfront. Prior to this, Al-Masdar has been known for pushing articles that are pro-al Assad and supportive of Bashar al-Assad’s rule which started the allegations that the Syrian chemical attacks on 04 April 2017 were false flags and other national security advocacy groups have found that the website is the primary sourceof Syrian propaganda directed against the U.S. As well, Antonopoulos has been a frequent guest on RT)
Alex Jones (Probably one of the more well-known conspiracy theorists in the modern day, he has made numerous outlandish and completely ridiculous allegations via his site InfoWars, including one prominent one alleging that the Sandy Hook shooting victims were “crisis actors” as well as claiming that the U.S. government planned the 1995 OK City bombing and are lying about the moon landing. In court transcripts, he agreed with his attorney’s claim that he “was playing a character”, seemingly showing that he is only involved in the show and making such claims because he sees the value in it. The former Washington bureau chief for InfoWars, Jerome Corsi, also has written articles on the site)
Lucas Koerner (A contributor to Venezuelanalysis, a Chavista website, was criticized in a NACLA article for, “…[his] willingness to repeatedly, grossly, and at times seemingly deliberately misrepresent[ing], and even fabricat[ing], others’ words”. He also calls himself a journalist despite having harassed bystanders and bit a police officer while protesting in Jerusalem, something that no journalist with respect for the profession would or should engage in, even if not acting in an official capacity as a journalist. He has also been a guest on RT.)
As stated previously, there are more examples of authors on the site who have poor track records in terms of discussing and writing within their own fields of alleged expertise, be they history, economics, intelligence work, or government. One can see through this assembled bunch of authors that these are not the most reputable figures nor are they accurate in their writings or activities. As another, smaller, example of the types of writers GR has write works for the site, take. As well, there is another concerning fact that many of these authors have either reprinted, been guests of, or contributed to RT, the state run news agency of the Russian Federation. As well, some of these authors (like Matt Agorist and Alex Jones) have been heavily involved in disinformation campaigns within the United States, either consciously or subconsciously supporting conspiracy theories that have originated in Russia or by Russians. The associations GR has made are highly concerning due to the content of their writings outside of the site and, due to their lack of understanding what they write about in GR articles and elsewhere, I would not categorize them as experts and argue that they should not be given a platform on a site that calls itself a think tank.
Another problem with GR articles is often the usage of clickbait type headlines. This is problematic clickbait is deliberately designed to entice a person into clicking on the site and the article due to a headline that is poorly worded or constructed, usually with the intent to further traffic through the site and get a higher rating or more revenue due to clicks; either way, the repeated use of such a tactic is dishonest and indicative of a site engaging in fake news. Below are a few examples of how GR does this (with some of the content and headlines being astounding as well);
For the reasons mentioned above, this practice is dishonest and misleading, as well as has the ability to spread disinformation and falsities (the GMF article is a prime example). However, as we will get into momentarily, this type of clickbait on a news site may be exactly how Chossudovsky and GR want to go about their business.
Finally, on a more recent note, the site has heavily been engaged in putting out disinformation about the Coronavirus. This reached a high in February when the Deputy Director-General of the Information Department for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a tweet repeating, “a false conspiracy theory that the novel coronavirus did not originate in Wuhan, China, but in the United States…the tweet linked to a story on conspiracy theory site Global Research that falsely claimed the novel coronavirus originated in the US. Experts at the World Health Organization have concluded the disease first appeared in the Chinese province of Hubei”. While the most prolific example of GR’s effect on spreading mis and dis-information, there are hundreds of other articles all written on Coronavirus that are just as damaging to the health, safety, and security of millions of people around the globe.
The Man Behind the Site
Those who run and operate sites reporting the news or becoming engaged in discussions about politics, economics, and history is an important factor as it helps in determining the site’s political leanings, transparency, and overall credibility. Thankfully, there is a lot of information about GR’s founder available. The founder of the site, as previously mentioned, is a man named Professor Michel Chossudovsky, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Ottawa in Canada.
Michel Chossudovsky was born to Evgeny Chossudovsky, the son of “an affluent Jewish merchant family in Rostov-on-Don near the Sea of Azov [which was] displaced by the civil war that followed the 1917 Russian Revolution and by the first World War,” who studied in Great Britain and eventually worked at the United Nations Secretariat, a primary organ of the United Nations itself. The article notes that, “All his life [Evgeny] Chossudovsky retained a patriotic attachment to Russia…[and] contributed to… Le Monde Diplomatique”. A 1972 article published in the New York Times, discussing a statement Chossudovsky Senior made in regards to a new phase of “bilateral and multilateral cooperation” between the Soviets and the West was seen as “[speaking] for the Kremlin and that his article is intended to be read here as a major statement of Soviet policy, though unofficial”.
Both of these desires (a deep adoration of Russia and a fancy for more questionable academic journals) seems to have been passed onto his son.
Michel described his life, his background, and economic theories in a 1995 Ottawa Citizen article. He was born and raised in Geneva, Switzerland and became an economist like his father, becoming a professor at “the University of Ottawa in 1968 [and was] a young visiting professor at the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile” where he experienced firsthand Augusto Pinochet’s initiated measures in Chile. The article describes Chossudovsky as:
“[documenting] the purposeful impoverishment of people in dozens of countries. His latest book, the Globalization of Poverty, contains case studies of the collapse of economies and social structures in Somalia, Rwanda, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Peru, Russia and the former Yugoslavia. In some of these countries, IMF/World Bank intervention preceded violent conflict. He refers often to “the hidden agenda” of the big banking and financial organizations. They orchestrate collapses, he says, by demanding payment of debt service charges and then lending money to cover the charges but only on condition the recipient country impose such measures as austerity, privatization and currency devaluation. The impact is usually destructive: mass shutdowns, huge unemployment, a wipeout of savings and pensions and purchasing power, a loss of social services”
while the article also noting that, in terms of “description over prescription” he is much stronger.
According to a separate Ottawa Citizen article from August of 2005:
“Mr. Chossudovsky has produced research that keeps him on the margins of mainstream academia, but wins praise from anti-establishment intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. While he is rarely quoted in the mainstream academic journals, Mr. Chossudovsky is a popular figure among anti-globalization activists, and is widely quoted in newspapers. He writes regularly for the French language monthly Le Monde Diplomatique and his books, published by a small printing house in Britain, have been translated into 11 languages…even sympathetic colleagues familiar with his work admit they are uncomfortable with many of his ideas. “Among people who work on terrorism, there is not much that resembles his work,” said Michael Dartnell, a political scientist at York University. “The thing that disturbs me about what he’s doing is there is a conspiratorial element to it. And I can’t prove or disprove it.” Nonetheless, added Mr. Dartnell, Mr. Chossudovsky’s ideas reflect a public sentiment that is suspicious of the motives of the government. “He wants, probably for very sincere reasons, to formulate a substantive critique of what the U.S. government is doing. I’m just not really that clear that he’s successful in doing that”.
In 2006, according to The Walrus, “the now defunct Western Standard [interestingly, a right-wing publication] listed him [Chossudovsky] as one of Canada’s “nuttiest professors”.
As far as Chossudovsky’s writing goes, he certainly subscribes to periodicals/magazines and newspapers that are not the most reputable in academia. He has written often for both the previously mentioned Le Monde Diplomatique and the now defunct journal Covert Action Quarterly, both more leftist and socialist aligned literary bodies. Now, before getting into some of Chossudovsky’s academic works, it must be pointed out that both of these bodies have been involved in information warfare on the encouragement of the Soviet KGB.
Much of this was detailed in Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin’s monumental and seemingly best history of the Soviet security agency titled The Sword and the Shield (in addition to the follow up book, The World Was Going Our Way; as for the authors’ qualifications, Mitrokhin was the longtime senior archivist for the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch before defecting with a trove of copied classified documents while Andrew is a professor of history at Cambridge and the former Official Historian of MI5).
To start, Le Monde Diplomatique is a subsidiary of Le Monde, a French daily newspaper. Andrew and Mitrokhin write:
“KGB files, however, provide some support for the charges of pro-Soviet bias made by Le Monde’s critics [Le Monde Diplomatique is a subsidiary of Le Monde]. Mitrokhin’s brief notes on KGB contacts with Le Monde identify two senior journalists and several contributors who were used, in most cases doubtless unwittingly, to disseminate KGB disinformation. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the Paris residency claimed to have influenced Le Monde articles on, inter alia, US policy in Iran, Latin America, the US bicentennial, the dangers of American influence in Europe, the threat of a supranational Europe, US plans for the neutron bomb, causes of East-West tension, and the war in Afghanistan [Soviet-Afghan War]…Le Monde’s susceptibility to KGB disinformation probably derived chiefly from naivety about Soviet intelligence operations”.
With the journal/magazine known as Covert Action Quarterly, one of the main founders was a man named Philip Agee, a former CIA officer who defected to the Cubans with many documents (some of which led to the killings of CIA officers abroad). While Agee, throughout his life, claimed that he was never a stooge of any foreign intelligence agency, “Filesnoted by Mitrokhin claim that the Bulletin [Covert Action Quarterly was first called the Covert Action Information Bulletin] was founded “on the initiative of the KGB” and that the group running it…was “put together” by FCD Directorate K (counterintelligence)…There is no evidence in Mitrokhin’s notes that any member of the [group], apart from Agee, was conscious of the role of the DGI [Cuban intelligence] or KGB”. Now this is important as it shows Chossudovsky has been involved, albeit unknowingly, in disinformation operations before, which we will go into more in a moment.
However, in those articles written by Chossudovsky for these groups, they have been quite (as Dartnell put it) conspiratorial. In a 1996 article for the Covert Action Bulletin, the professor tries to make the argument that, “the press and politicians alike portray Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia as a noble, if agonizingly belated, response to an outbreak of ethnic massacres and human rights violations…But following a pattern set early on, Western public opinion has been misled…The strategic interests of Germany and the US in laying the groundwork for the disintegration of Yugoslavia go unmentioned…through their domination of the global financial system, the Western powers, in pursuit of national and collective strategic interests, helped bring the Yugoslav economy to its knees and stirred its simmering ethnic and social conflicts”.
Basically, Chossudovsky is claiming that ethnic and nationalist sentiments in the Yugoslav territories were not a major factor in the wars that occurred in the 1990’s, with Western power economic intervention being key in the disintegration and the ensuing intervention being over debt repayment. Chossudovsky is ignoring the fact that, since 1946, Yugoslavia was a collection of varying ethnicities, including “Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Slovenes, and others,” who were only pacified due to Josip Tito’s ruling style. Despite this pacification, “Muslims formed the largest single component of the Bosnian population…the Serb and Croat populations [in Bosnia] fell in absolute terms as many Serbs and Croats emigrated. In the 1991 census Muslims made up more than two-fifths of the Bosnian population, while Serbs made up slightly less than one-third and Croats one-sixth”.
As well, with Tito’s death in 1980 and the decline of the Yugoslavian economy (which began with Tito’s“overexpansionary economic policies”), “public dissatisfaction with the political system [was rampant]. That attitude, together with the manipulation of nationalist feelings by politicians, destabilized Yugoslav politics”.
Misha Glenny, who wrote one of the best histories of the Yugoslav wars and covered the fighting as it occurred, stated:
“The frightening complexity of Yugoslavia’s ethnic composition, which had been largely forgotten over forty years, began to reveal itself. By 1989, powerful nationalist sentiment was stirring throughout the Yugoslav republics. In part, this was a nervous reaction to the centrifugal forces throbbing vigorously inside the Serbian vortex. But it also reflected the strength of regional and nationalist forces throughout Eastern Europe as one-party rule began to break down. In Yugoslavia, the revival of violent, intolerant nationalism had begun before the collapse of communism had been perfected elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Without question, it was Milošević who had willfully allowed the genie out of the bottle, knowing that the consequences might be dramatic and even bloody”.
As well, if Chossudovsky is claiming that the U.S. government explicitly planned to stir up nationalist conflict and result in destabilize the countries economically, then surely their own internal memorandum would reflect this. However, it does not. In National Security Decision Directive 133, written 14 March 1984, the White House enunciates:
“United States Policy toward Yugoslavia, an independent, economically viable, stable, and militarily capable Yugoslavia serves Western interests…The severe financial situation facing Yugoslavia could pose a serious threat to Yugoslavia’s ability to maintain these policies which best serve our interests. We must work closely with our Allies and other major industrial democracies in supporting Yugoslavia’s determination to remain an independent and viable force on the Warsaw Pact’s southern flank…The U.S. will continue its close cooperation with other friendly countries to support Yugoslavia’s efforts to overcome financial difficulties…U.S. policy will be to promote the trend toward an effective, market-oriented Yugoslav economic structure”.
Nothing in this mentions a desire to incite ethnic tensions nor to destabilize the economic structure; it is possible that the economic structure did make matters worse in the country, but there is no intent to perform such action embedded within this high-level directive.
In this, Chossudovsky is denying the years of pent-up and pacified hostility to the other and ethno-nationalist sentiment as being a factor in any sort of military or internal conflict which denies what history tells us from this brutal series of wars. Certainly economics played a role in the Yugoslav Wars and the U.S. and the West had national/international interests in the country, but there was no intent by the U.S. government nor the West to incite an ethnic conflict nor invade the Yugoslavia because of failure to pay one’s debts.
Chssudovsky is also a published author, have written a book in the early 2000s (which is also for sale on GlobalResearch), simply titled America’s “War on Terrorism”. The book’s Amazon description enlightens the reader as to the content, “the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration”.
As previously mentioned, the link between the CIA and al-Qaeda has been categorically denied (and, based on all available information, nonexistent) by both members of the U.S. government, independent and on the ground journalists, high-level al-Qaeda officials, and from mujahidin fighters close to bin Laden and other units. At another point in the book, Chossudovsky alleges, “the US could have ordered, with no problem, his arrest and extradition on several occasions prior to the September 11 attacks. Two months before the September 11 attacks bin Laden, America’s “Most Wanted Fugitive”, was in the American Hospital in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) receiving treatment for a chronic kidney infection”. The American Hospital in Dubai denied that bin Laden stayed there or met with the CIA (and the New York Times article in which this ran four years prior to the publication of Chossudovsky’s book also noted that the conservative Parisian newspaper in which this was published “offered no independent confirmation for its story”).
Snopes too examined the claim. While they rated it “Undetermined”, they did note, “Osama bin Laden himself, in a November 2001 interview with a Pakistani newspaper, denied reports he had been hospitalized in Dubai for kidney treatment and said “My kidneys are all right”. Again, we have the subject of the rumors and allegations denying them; he has a clear opportunity to disgrace the U.S. government and take action against them in the public sphere (forcing the CIA to waste time and resources fighting a theory than putting effort into their manhunt), yet chooses not to.
One reason why this book is significant is that it was found in bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound when he was killed in 2011. Vox noted that the book, amongst a few others listed, “embrace conspiracies that include the Illuminati or diminish bin Laden’s own role in the 9/11 attacks”.
First, a person who engages (even a few pages into) an over 300-page book while utilizing intelligence and information that is known to be faulty or at least has a few holes is quite unfair to the reader. Chossudovsky does provide a source in an appendix at the back of chapter one that contains the source, yet neglects The New York Times report and Osama’s own admission. This kind of omittance of key evidence contrary to one’s point is very poor on Chossudovsky’s party; it is his duty, both as an author and as an academic, to include items contrary to his own thinking and, if needed, disprove them. If he has a hypothesis, then he must prove it through the usage of utilizing evidence that supports his own point, but also taking conflicting evidence and interpreting it within proper academic boundaries, not blatantly disregarding them for whatever reasons he holds.
There is a lot more in Chossudovsky’s book that I could go through and analyze and prove faulty or negligent in terms of researching, exercising diligence, and being fair to the reader, however, I will reserve that for a separate post provided anyone desires that I analyze his book.
What we see with Chossudovsky is that he is not a credible person. He has made some wild claims in his writing and has exercised poor judgment in writing his own texts. He has ignored evidence contrary to his own point, made illogical jumps towards conclusions, and has allied himself with less than reputable figures (both in his own academic career and in his career as a moderator of the site). As we will progress on, we will see more of Chossudovsky’s incredibility and a lack of responsibility for the actions that people on the site of his creation have taken.
The anti-Semitic writings of GR
The article in which Chossudovsky’s own academic standing is discussed first predominantly focuses on GlobalResearch and is discussing the allegation that the site is anti-Semitic.
They write:
“A Jewish group has filed a complaint to the University of Ottawa against one of its professors after the discovery of content on his website that blames Jews for terrorist attacks on the United States, and claims the numbers who died at Auschwitz are exaggerated. The website…also reprints articles from other writers that accuse Jews of controlling the U.S. media and masterminding the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001…[and] singles out a discussion forum, moderated by Mr. Chossudovsky, that features a subject heading called “Some Articles On The Truth of the Holocaust.” The messages have titles such as “Jewish Lies of Omission (about the ‘Holocaust’),” “Jewish Hate Responsible For Largest Mass Killing at Dachau,” and “Did Jews Frame the Arabs for 9/11?” Another posting suggests the number of Jews who died at Auschwitz during the Second World War is inflated. None of the postings is written by Mr. Chossudovsky himself”.
This content is certainly serious, especially for an agency that is titling itself as a think tank as this is in no way content that is accurate or true, but is blatantly false, very disrespectful to both the forensic, physical, and legal evidence surrounding the Jewish Holocaust and the Final Solution conducted throughout Nazi Germany and the surrounding, occupied territories. As well, the fact that Chossudovsky’s father, grandparents, and close relatives were persecuted while in Nazi-occupied France (with his uncle Moses being killed at the death camps in Auschwitz) makes his involvement in this even more unsettling and quite insulting to their memory.
Now Chossudovsky:
“said the offending messages were removed from the forum after he was made aware of them by the Citizen. But as of late yesterday [19 August 2005], some of the postings remained on the site. A discussion thread about 9/11, contained a message that casts doubt on the Auschwitz death count. Other postings under a forum on globalization have titles such as, “The Hilarious Auschwitz Story” and “The Holy Co$t Lie is Finished.” Mr. Chossudovsky indicated that despite monitoring the forum “periodically”, he did not know about the inflammatory messages, even though they had been posted since March…[he stated] “I’m the first person to withdraw any kind of hate material directed against the Jewish people.”
He went on to defend the reprinted articles that have also sparked complaints, saying they are legitimate commentary representing views that are “anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic”.
First, Chossudovsky’s claim he moderates the site “periodically” is actually one that can be proven. The article mentions the comments and articles were posted in March of 2005 and the article itself was written in August of 2005, with said comments being left up as of 19 August 2005. Now, looking at Chossudovsky’s article postings in 2005, beginning 17 March and ending on 24 July, he posted nine articles to the site. Surely, someone who is actively posting that much and has at least been involved in the site would see such content.
Basically, there are two ways his actions can be interpreted; either (A) he is a poor moderator and does not know what content is posted on the site or (B) he saw such content posted and did nothing to stop it, either because he agreed with the aspect of free speech or agrees with such language. Regardless, whatever the motivations are, the fact that such hateful (and historically inaccurate) speech is allowed up on a site that brands and markets oneself as a think tank comprised of experts is detestable.
As well, examining the site’s activities and rhetoric on Jews and the Jewish Holocaust since 2005, it is apparent that the site has done nothing to try and stifle anti-Semitic articles or articles that border that legitimate criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism. Below are a few such examples;
While these articles may not seem explicitly anti-Semitic, the content of these articles are very supportive of an International Jewish Conspiracy, the idea of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy that goes back all the way to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a known and blatantly false document that essentially claims that Jews are infiltrating all aspects of society, politics, economics, and government to advance an agenda at total control. These articles (all published in 2014, 2010, and 2013 respectively) show that and can have a very serious effect upon the reader. As well, having these types of articles, that are more vehemently against Israel and engage in this type of support can result in the reader base becoming comprised of people who are anti-Semitic.
In short, I don’t believe that Chossudovsky is an anti-Semite or believes that the Holocaust was a faked event. However, his website needs to do a better job at determining what type of content is available and how the site can aid in the fostering of a hostile reader base or a reader base that is skewed towards the more conspiratorial of society. Yet, perhaps this is Chossudovsky’s goal, after all, his own colleagues have said there is a conspiratorial bend to his theories and writings.
A Connection to Russia?
Now, this may not come as a surprise to you, but GlobalResearch has actually become the target of a NATO investigation concerning allegations of Information Warfare (IW). A Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, has covered this masterfully in their article on the text.
They write:
“what once appeared to be a relatively harmless online refuge for conspiracy theorists is now seen by NATO’s information warfare specialists as a link in a concerted effort to undermine the credibility of mainstream Western media – as well as the North American and European public’s trust in government and public institutions… Global Research is viewed by NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence – or StratCom – as playing a key accelerant role in helping popularize articles with little basis in fact that also happen to fit the narratives being pushed by the Kremlin, in particular, and the Assad regime”.
Speaking to one member of StratCom’s IW team, they said that it is the consensus of StratCom that GR does engage in such action, but, as of that date, the Centre had no evidence of the site being connected to any government body. The article continues in their discussion of GlobalResearch, examining the founder and their activities, including speaking to Chossudovsky’s lawyer who denies the site is, “affiliated with governmental organizations or benefits from their support,” and to Chossudovsky himself who, when asked if the site was aligned towards a pro-Russia stance, said, “”Not on that topic,” he said, insisting “it would not be appropriate” without explaining further. He then said he had an appointment and had to go”.
Despite this denial, the article continued exploring the site and making the case for the allegation that GR is a weapon of Russia in some way, shape, or form. In discussing GR’s reach, the authors note:
“Global Research has developed unusual reach for a site that specializes in conspiracy-heavy anti-Western articles on international relations. It uses that reach to push not only its own opinion pieces, but “news” reports from little-known websites that regularly carry dubious or false information. At times, the site’s regular variety of international-affairs stories is replaced with a flurry of items that bolster dubious reportage with a series of opinion pieces, promoted on social media and retweeted and shared by active bots…Its online content and its amplification on social media form the core of its activities”.
They then take a single case as a study; examining the 04 April chemical attack on Khan Shaykhun. They write:
“[GlobalResearch] was among the first to carry a story that claimed the Syrian regime was innocent of the attack and that terrorists hoping to lure the United States into the war against Mr. al-Assad were to blame…The article first appeared in al-Masdar News, a pro-Assad website that appears to be run from Beirut. It was written by Paul Antonopoulos, who now writes for the pro-Russia Fort Russ news portal. But after globalresearch.ca republished the same article word for word, it rippled out widely through the internet… The al-Masdar article repeated the Syrian government’s claim that it has no chemical weapons. It suggested “terrorist forces have once again created a false flag scenario,” asserting the casualties could not have been caused by sarin gas, as was believed, because photographs showed rescue workers without gloves near the bodies of the victims, and that “local sources” said the bodies were those of people kidnapped by al-Qaeda a week earlier. Alternatively, it stated, the deaths might have been the result of the Syrian air force bombing a warehouse where the local al-Qaeda affiliate had been manufacturing chemical weapons. The latter is the version of events the Kremlin has been advancing”.
They then quote Janis Sarts, the StratCom director, who believes wholeheartedly that GR has been active in publishing disinformation, “by giving pro-Russia and pro-Assad stories a wider audience and a veneer of credibility by publishing them through an authoritative-sounding Canadian source. He said it would be “very difficult” for larger news organizations such as Russian and Iranian state news agencies to pick up an article from an obscure source such as al-Masdar, but when it is circulated through Global Research, “then they say, ‘Oh! In the West they’re saying this!”.
The Globe and Mail article interviews a young intern who worked at the company for a time as an editorial assistant before becoming a paid employee where he wrote stories for the site. Quoting him, the authors write:
“He said the site has revenue from ads and believed it may also benefit financially from cross-posting content from other sites, but he did not know. The site’s web traffic helps it earn revenue from display ads through online ad resellers… Mr. Kress said he thought Mr. Chossudovsky believed in his site’s mission, but he clearly liked it when Global Research content went viral. “He asked me to clickbait,” Mr. Kress said. The young editorial assistant used the internet to put together a piece that claimed the Rockefeller Foundation had patented the Zika virus – when, in fact, researchers for the foundation had merely deposited a strain of the virus with an organization that preserves micro-organisms for research. But Mr. Kress’s piece “blew up the internet,” in his words, spreading around a series of sites, including InfoWars. “It was just something I did, kind of like, in my room at 1 a.m., because I noticed something on some other – I checked the Zika virus website and just kind of copy-pasted what I saw there and put quotes and linked my article to it. And basically, yeah, it worked. But he liked that. And I didn’t really like it – deep down”.
As we can see, through this eyewitness account, it is apparent that Chossudovsky enjoys the clickbait type of articles and sees their appeal, either for extensive spread or increased revenue. The benefit from cross-posting content from other sites has been shown before with other fake news organization and it is reasonable to believe that GR may take in revenue from making those linkages.
However, what the article primarily describes is the site engaging in information warfare, that much is abundantly clear, yet it refrains from coming to the conclusion that the site is working on behalf of the Russian government. However, other developments come to that conclusion.
In August of 2020, the U.S. Department of State released a special report titled “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem” which dedicates a whole section to GlobalResearch. They write:
“[GlobalResearch] has become deeply enmeshed in Russia’s broader disinformation and propaganda ecosystem. Its large roster of fringe authors and conspiracy theorists serves as a talent pool for the Russian and Chinese websites with which Global Research has partnered since the early 2010s…Global Research published or republished seven authors attributed by Facebook to be false online personas created by The Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, popularly known as the GRU…Altogether, these seven GRU personas are responsible for 108 articles that appear on Global Research’s website”
Independent analysts and researchers from notable national security think tanks, like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have also commented that “[GlobalResearch] is part of a larger effort to sow disarray and distrust within Western democracies…[Russia was] so successful in 2016, I’m sure they’ll try the same thing again in 2020 and this website is part of that effort”.
Final Conclusions
In my own view, based upon what I have seen and found, I think there is enough evidence to say that GlobalResearch, at the very least, is unknowingly engaging in a disinformation operation coordinated by the Russians.
However, the potentiality for the site to be a knowing participant in a Russian disinformation operation cannot be wholly discarded. The site’s founder has ties to RT, PressTV (Iranian state-sponsored television), and Sputnik, all news agencies that are known to take an anti-Western view and push conspiracies that are blatantly to further their own means (and ones that are known to have originated in troll farms or with accounts that have been linked to the Russian government and individual intelligence operatives). Other contributors to the site (including those previously mentioned and analyzed) have reposted RT and Sputnik articles onto their own platforms and have been featured in articles, done podcasts with RT, and written articles for the Russian news agency. In terms of authors who are actively (or formerly) reporting for RT and post on GlobalResearch, we can find an abundant amount;
Eric Draitser (Op-Ed columnist for RT)
Andrew Korybko (Sputnik reporter)
RT again
Pepe Escobar (analyst for RT, PressTV, and Sputnik)
Andre Vltchek (writer for RT, PressTV, China Radio International, People’s Daily, China Daily (last three all Chinese state run), and Telesur (Venezuelan government sponsored media))
The amount of authors who frequent GR and who are affiliated with RT, Sputnik, and Russian media enterprises is extremely worrying from my point of view. The fact that the site also has deep ties to other state-sponsored news agencies (from China, Venezuela, Syria, and Iran – all locations where human rights are consistently and repeatedly violated on a large scale) is very interesting too. The site seems to hold a disdain for Western media, alleging that they as a whole (includes such least biased and pro-science news agencies as Reuters, United Press International, Federation of American Scientists, and Mayo Clinic) are supportive of every U.S. and Western initiative and cannot adequately report on any situation due to their own biases and “being in the pocket of the government”. However, when one is so deeply tied to such groups as RT, SANA, and PressTV (all state-owned and inherently incapable of going against what the government in power is saying), it becomes rather hypocritical to try and call USAToday or AmericanScientist biased or being too enmeshed with the government. Based on the affiliations alone, it seems like GlobalResearch could be classified as a mini state news agency for any world leader or government that harbors resentment towards the West or the U.S.
As well, this would not be the first time Chossudovsky would be an unknowing participant in a disinformation operation. He has before been associated and published by two magazines/journals (the Covert Action Quarterly and Le Monde Diplomatique) with ties to Russian intelligence and, through Soviet files, shown to be engaged in IW tactics. Now, obviously, Chossudovsky could not have known that he was involved in such an operation as the evidence does not support such a claim, yet it makes sense why the Russians would reach out to him. They would know he aligns with some of the views the Russian government holds about the U.S. (widely anti-Western, anti-U.S. government), has published articles that the Russian/Soviet government was previously involved with in an operation that is explicitly about deception and misinformation, has created a website that goes against anything the U.S. government and any Western media organization says, and has a large following.
What most likely occurred is that the website, probably sometime prior to 2014, caught the eye of an analyst or operative in Russia who alerted their superiors who then began a mission to intervene in the workings of the site, having their journalists explicitly post to the site. Now, this is not to say that GR was a bastion of constructive or accurate thought prior to 2014, they had severe problems that would still have them be classified as a pseudoscience and conspiracist source, but my point is that the site most likely was not begun as a Russian disinformation procedure, but became that gradually due to the site’s affiliations, stories run, and overall moderating.
In short, I believe that Chossudovsky and GlobalResearch are conscious participants in a ploy by the Russian government (and potentially other governments like Syria, China, and Iran) to spread disinformation, cause a panic, and overall succeed in their goals of sowing discontent in the U.S. and Western populace. I believe that GR gradually became a tool of Russian intelligence operations as time progressed and are now subconsciously performing such actions. Despite this, GR was still a very poorly run and center of Conspiracy prone and hateful content prior to becoming influenced by Russian and fellow totalitarian state networks. Even if GlobalResearch managed to rid itself of Russian influence and become back to what they were prior to whenever the Russians became involved in the site’s operations, there would still be a lot of content that points to the site not being a think tank in any way, shape, or form nor an accurate or fair representation of how history, economics, government, science, or current events should be explored.
Regardless of how one measures GR (if one thinks they are more heavily involved in Russian disinformation operations or if they are merely being utilized as a pawn by the Russian government or another foreign actor), they still are an extremely poor source to utilize.
Previously, I mentioned a 2005 Ottawa Citizen article which discussed Chossudovsky and GR’s anti-Semitic writings and how a Jewish group on the University of Ottawa campus complained about the action. One of the students who headed the group and was studying International Relations, was quoted as worrying about the impact of such a site on the future academics studying at universities around the globe, saying, “Students will come here looking for research information on the topic. I know as a globalization student, I’m often looking for different sites that can help me find articles and relevant information. And for students who aren’t educated about the Holocaust, they could look at this information and say, “This is the truth”.
This highlights the biggest problem with GlobalResearch and the real and serious threat that disinformation and the deliberate proliferation of conspiracies in lieu of all available evidence can have upon the conduct of academics and the conduct of society.
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