Greg Palast

Greg Palast       (journalist)
Born	Gregory Allyn Palast 1952-06-26 Los Angeles, California
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Relatives	David Kimche
A BBC reporter and journalist who, while good on certain subjects, has been termed as a gatekeeper for a vociferous defense of the official narrative about 9/11.

Greg Palast is a BBC reporter and journalist who, while excellent on corporate malfeasance, vulture funds and election fraud, has supported the official narrative as regards the events of September 11, 2001 and certain other narratives.

9-11 opinions

When questioned about 9/11, he first claimed that he had no relevant expertise, but then emphatically proclaimed that he and his BBC team had found “zero evidence” and "ruled out” any possibility of 9/11 “controlled demolition", asserting that it “just didn’t happen”. He termed describes Steven E. Jones a "complete and utter fraud", but later apologized, announcing his intention "to remove myself from the debate entirely".

While stating that he didn't look into the collapse of the world trade center, he stated "controlled demolition I can rule out... it takes two years to wire a building for controlled demolition".

Christopher Bollyn termed Palast "notorious for ignoring the most obvious evidence of Israeli involvement in 9-11 - or the war in Iraq. He even went so far to say that there is no evidence of controlled demolition or explosives at the World Trade Center".

Family

Bollyn claimed in 2013 that the late "Israeli spymaster and Mossad chief David Kimche" was a first cousin of Greg Palast.

Selected stories

Presidential elections

Palast's investigation into the Bush family fortunes for his column in The Observer led him to uncover a connection to a company called ChoicePoint. In an October 2008 interview Palast said that before the 2000 Election ChoicePoint "was purging the voter rolls of Florida under a contract with a lady named Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State. They won a contract, a bid contract with the state, with the highest bid."

After subsequently noticing a large proportion of African-American voters were claiming their names had disappeared from voter rolls in Florida in the 2000 election, Palast launched a full-scale investigation into voter fraud, the results of which were broadcast in the UK by the BBC on their Newsnight show prior to the 2004 Election. Palast claimed to have obtained computer discs from Katherine Harris' office, which contained caging lists of "voters matched by race and tagged as felons."

Palast appeared in the 2003 documentary film, Florida Fights Back! Resisting the Stolen Election, along with Vincent Bugliosi, former Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney and author of The Betrayal of America. Palast also appeared in the 2004 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which focuses on the hidden mechanics of the media.

In May 2007, Palast said he'd received 500 emails that former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove exchanged through an account supplied by the Republican National Committee. Palast says the emails show a plan to target likely Democratic voters with extra scrutiny over their home addresses, and he also believes Rove's plan was a factor in the firing of U.S. Attorneys.

After Palast was invited by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to appear on his Air America talk show to discuss, among other things, election fraud, the pair teamed up to find out if democracy was in a better state in 2008. In their report, which was published in October 2008 in Rolling Stone, they concluded that the 2008 election had already been stolen. "If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering", Palast and Kennedy summarized.

To combat the extensive acts of voter suppression that Palast and Kennedy uncovered, the duo launched a campaign called Steal Back Your Vote, which features a website and free downloadable voter guide / adult comic book.

Long Island Lighting Company

In 1988, Palast directed a U.S. civil racketeering investigation into the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station project, under construction by Stone & Webster and Long Island Lighting Company. A jury awarded the plaintiffs US$4.8 billion; however, New York's federal judge Jack B. Weinstein, reversed the verdict, and the case was later settled for $400 million. The racketeering charges stemmed from an accusation that LILCO filed false documents in order to secure rate increases. LILCO sought a dismissal of these charges on the grounds that Suffolk County lacked authority under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and that the allegations of a history of racketeering did not qualify as a continuing criminal enterprise.

Exxon Valdez

Palast has also taken issue with the official story behind the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, claiming the sobriety of the Valdez's captain was not an issue in the accident. According to Palast, the main cause of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 was not human error, but an Exxon decision not to use the ship's radar in order to save money. The Raytheon Raycas radar system would not have detected Bligh Reef itself - as radar, unlike sonar, is incapable of detecting submerged objects. The radar system would have detected the radar reflector, placed on the next rock inland from Bligh Reef for the purpose of keeping vessels on course via radar.

Palast points out that the original owners of the land, the local Alaska Natives tribe, took only one dollar in payment for the land with a promise not to pollute it and spoil their fishing and seal hunting grounds.

UK "LobbyGate" Scandal

In 1998, working as an undercover reporter for The Observer, Palast, posing as a US businessman with ties to Enron, caught on tape two Labour party insiders, Derek Draper and Jonathan Mendelsohn, boasting about how they could sell access to government ministers, obtain advance copies of sensitive reports, and create tax breaks for their clients.

Draper denied the allegations. At Prime Minister's Question Time July 8, 1998 British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that all the specific claims had been investigated and found groundless: "every allegation made in The Observer has been investigated and found to be untrue".

Vulture funds

Starting in 2007 Palast published a series of investigations on what aid groups and investors call "vulture funds". A vulture fund is a private equity or hedge fund where companies or people buy the debt of a poor country and litigate to recover the funds, often at the expense of aid and debt relief. Prime Minister Gordon Brown commented on the practices saying "We particularly condemn the perversity where Vulture Funds purchase debt at a reduced price and make a profit from suing the debtor country to recover the full amount owed - a morally outrageous outcome".

In 2014 Palast detailed the workings of vulture funds during the crisis of the American automotive industry:

Singer, through a brilliantly complex financial manoeuvre, took control of Delphi Automotive, the sole supplier of most of the auto parts needed by General Motors and Chrysler. Both auto firms were already in bankruptcy.

Singer and co-investors demanded the US Treasury pay them billions, including $350m (£200m) in cash immediately, or – as the Singer consortium threatened – "we'll shut you down". They would cut off GM's parts. Literally.

GM and Chrysler, with no more than a couple of days' worth of parts to hand, would have shut down, permanently forced into liquidation.

Obama's negotiator, Treasury deputy Steven Rattner, called the vulture funds' demand "extortion" ... Ultimately, the US Treasury quietly paid the Singer consortium a cool $12.9bn in cash and subsidies from the US Treasury's auto bailout fund.

Singer responded to Obama's largesse by quickly shutting down 25 of Delphi's 29 US auto parts plants, shifting 25,000 jobs to Asia. Singer's Elliott Management pocketed $1.29bn of which Singer personally garnered the lion's share.

—Palast 2014

Interstate Crosscheck

Palast has conducted a multi-year investigation into Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach's Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program (commonly referred to as "Crosscheck"). The program utilizes states' voter registration lists to match possible "double voters," using their first and last names and the last four digits of their Social Security number. In 2014, Palast investigated Crosscheck for Al Jazeera America, finding that the program was inherently biased toward removing minority voters from states' voter rolls. In 2016, he followed up with a documentary film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, along with an article ("The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters") for Rolling Stone magazine.

Newsnight

Since 2000, Greg Palast has made more than a dozen films for the BBC programme Newsnight with the Investigations Producer Meirion Jones, which have been broadcast in the UK and worldwide. In addition to the films on US elections they have investigated oil companies, the Iraq War, the attempted coup against Hugo Chávez, and the vulture funds which target the poorest countries.

'Crawl back under your rock, Mr Palast!'

After Palast wrote an article stating that Uk activist and politician George Galloway had personally benefited financially from the campaign against sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, Galloway responded by claiming "Palast conflates meetings, truths and half-truths, statements taken out of context to produce a toxic smear which would be actionable in the country he claims to work in, my country," finishing with the words "Crawl back under your rock, Mr Palast!"

 

Documents by Greg Palast

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
Document:In Venezuela, White Supremacy Is a Key Driver of the Coup	Article	7 February 2019	Venezuela Hugo Chávez Donald Trump Nicolás Maduro Juan Guaidó Mestizo "White Supremacy" Pedro Carmona	Four centuries of White Supremacy in Venezuela by those who identify their ancestors as European came to an end with the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, who won with the overwhelming support of the Mestizo majority. This turn away from White Supremacy continues under Nicolás Maduro, Chavez’s chosen successor, who was re-elected in 2018 for a second six-year term.
Document:Reagan - Killer, Coward, Con-man	obituary	17 March 2011	Ronald Reagan

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