Staging Ferguson, a covert op, and Al Sharpton
Jon Rappoport
by Jon Rappoport
November 21, 2014
This first part of this article was inspired by, and derives directly from, Joe Quixote’s excellent Infowars piece, “Ferguson—Race-baiting for Political Power and Profit.”
Start with this. Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin.
Two deaths. Two killings.
With remarkable speed, as soon as the deaths occurred, they became national issues.
Incidents of police brutality across America are an ongoing fact of life, including brutality against young black men, but these two deaths were selected for special quick attention.
No doubt about it.
Media blew up. The Justice Dept. and the White House moved in right away.
There was no way to walk back those events and diminish their effect on the public.
The waves of emotion grew higher.
Black vs. white.
However, the curious thing was, in both cases the initial reports morphed into…doubt.
You can say the doubts were justified, or you can say they weren’t. Regardless, the media raised them. Police raised them.
Clear-cut cases of murder became self-defense. Maybe. Not sure. Could be.
Doubt.
Which produced even greater turmoil, accusation, and black-white conflict.
And set the stage for an “upcoming evidentiary finding.” A vital element of the covert op.
That put everyone on edge.
What would be the outcome?
Who would lie and who would tell the truth?
How much violence would break out once the result was announced?
If the Martin and Brown cases had been “natural events,” there was every chance the facts in the cases would be clear from the outset. Yes, it was unjustified murder. Or no, it was justified self-defense. And then the whole situation and its attendant emotions would have diminished.
But that’s not what occurred.
Media and the executive arm of government “just happened” to fasten on two cases where the facts were murky. Or could be presented as murky.
Exacerbating the tension.
“The race hustlers choose fact patterns like this because they know each side feels justified in its interpretation of events. Each side wonders how the other could be so blind. It must be because they don’t care, or they’re evil. Michael Brown’s death presents a perfect fact pattern to sow distrust and hatred. Never let a good crisis go to waste.” (Joe Quixote, Infowars, “Ferguson—Race-baiting for Political Power and Profit.”)
In recent years, who is the White House/Justice Dept. private citizen on the scene in these cases? Who is the prime number-one stirrer of the pot?
Al Sharpton.
Many things can be said about the man, but one thing is: he has worked for the FBI. You know, the agency that has run many operations against black leaders—and thereby fomented black-white conflict. Example: Martin Luther King.
Read what the FBI secretly had to say about a particularly “dangerous” Black Panther, Larry Pinkney and why they ACTUALLY targeted him:
“[Black Panther Larry] Pinkney is potentially dangerous due to his demonstrated ability to unify black and white. [Get it?] His associates are Negro, White and Chinese. Special attention is being given to neutralizing him. The areas of sex and drugs appear to be the most effective ones to utilize. His habits in these areas are unknown, but are being monitored with this objective.” (Infowars, Nov. 21, 2014. “Special Report: FBI Attacks Black Panther For NOT Being Racist!” This information, from the FBI’s file on Pinkney, was obtained through William Mandel’s FOIA request.)
Al Sharpton went to work undercover for the FBI, after walking into a videotaped cocaine sting, where boxing promoter Don King was present. HBO played the tape years ago on its program Real Sports.
The usual account, moving forward, was: Sharpton was assigned a confidential informant number, CI-7, and spied on members of the Genovese crime family for his FBI handlers.
However, there is another aspect of the story. It illustrates that Sharpton has had a penchant for playing ball with all sorts of backers—even when their motives are anti-black.
And why might that be important? Because the current standoff in Ferguson isn’t being staged to benefit black people.
Let’s travel back to 2004. Reporter Doug Ireland, who has written for The Nation, TomPaine.com, In These Times, and LA Weekly, went deeper in evaluating Sharpton’s motives and allies.
February 21, 2004, “Rev. Al Sharpton: FBI Informant-Roger Stone’s Bitch,” originally published in LA Weekly and at webstonne.com, and then Conspiracy Planet:
“Sharpton…has now been exposed as a cat’s-paw for the National Republican Party.
“Rev. Al has a long and sordid history of posing as the champion of the have-nots, while renting himself out to the greedy have-everythings, which predates his ’04 GOP-funded [!] presidential campaign. In 1986, he endorsed N.Y. Senator Al D’Amato for re-election — although D’Amato, a conservative Republican pit bull, was anathema to more issues-attuned black leaders.
“In 1994, he helped dampen down the black vote for [Democrat] Governor Mario Cuomo by making a media-hyped appearance with successful conservative Republican candidate George Pataki just days before the election. In the 2001 New York mayoral campaign, he connived with GOP billionaire Michael Bloomberg in the defeat of the Democratic candidate, Mark Green.
“But Sharpton has not limited himself simply to supporting candidates considered by most to be inimical to the interests of the impoverished black community.
“A 1988 investigation by the Long Island daily Newsday revealed that Sharpton, who denounces African-American leaders who disagree with him as ‘yellow n*****s,’ had been a longtime FBI informant in a scheme to entrap black leaders and personalities on drug-related matters, even going so far as to wear a wire to record their conversations for the feds.
“How did the FBI turn Sharpton into their bitch?
“Why, they caught Rev. Al up to his hairdo in a drug-money Laundromat in which Don King, the much-indicted boxing promoter and a longtime pal of Sharpton’s, was a central figure. What’s more, the drug deal was an FBI sting — and the feds had it all on videotape, too.
“Just two years ago, Bryant Gumbel — the second most popular black on television next to Oprah — aired on his HBO Real Sports show an FBI videotape of Sharpton discussing laundering money from a South American drug dealer via King with Michael ‘Sonny’ Franzese, a former Colombo family captain.
“Sharpton was going to arrange a meeting with King and the coke peddler to set up the deal. But the ‘South American’ was an FBI agent, Franzese had already been turned by the feds into an informant and Sharpton fell right into their trap.
“Sharpton became a sting artist for the feds when he was himself stung. After the tape aired, Sharpton announced he was going to sue HBO for a billion bucks. Nothing has been heard of the lawsuit since then.
“Now, in his current presidential campaign [2004], Sharpton has been revealed as a wholly owned Republican subsidiary. Sharpton has been used by Republican operatives to discredit real contenders for the Democratic nomination. And the more prominent a place on the Democratic stage Sharpton can command, all the way to Boston, the more the Republicans can use the wisecracking but polarizing preacher-without-a-church as a bogeyman to frighten moderate voters away from the Democratic ticket.
“That’s the story behind the blockbuster report in the February 5 Village Voice, the L.A. Weekly’s sister paper in which veteran Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett and his team unveiled the malevolent forces keeping Sharpton’s campaign alive: ‘Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George Bush president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Rev. Al Sharpton.’
“Who is Roger Stone? A slash-and-burn Republican black-bag election tamperer and consultant…Stone first made news in the Nixon Watergate scandal, when it was revealed that the 19-year-old apprentice McCarthyite had infiltrated George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign as part of CREEP’s sabotage plan.
“A few other highlights of Stone’s career as the boastful black prince of Republican sleaze: Stone helped Ollie North raise money for the Nicaraguan contras, and was a close associate of the notorious Lee Atwater (the GOP hit man who created the race-baiting Willie Horton TV spots for Bush 1988 presidential campaign).
“The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin in his excellent book, Too Close To Call, about the 2000 Florida election — details how Stone was summoned by Bush recount chief James Baker to disrupt the vote counting (Stone and his Cuban wife, Nydia, organized a screaming mob of Miami Cubans outside the headquarters of the canvassing board — Stone directed the mob by walkie-talkie from across the street — and intimidated the board into ending the count).
“On the stump, Rev. Al has frequently denounced the theft of the presidential election in Florida — which depended in large measure on invalidating black votes.
“For example, he told a Democratic National Committee meeting last October that ‘We are witnessing a nonmilitary civil war; it started with the recount in Florida.’ So, hopping into bed with Stone might strike many African-Americans as ‘ungodly’ hypocrisy. But the tale gets worse.
“When Sharpton launched a vicious attack on [Democrat] Howard Dean for his supposed ‘anti-black agenda,’ the man behind the curtain was Stone, who crowed to The New York Times that he ‘helped set the tone and direction’ of the blast at Dean, while the research for it was provided by the man Stone had installed as Sharpton’s campaign manager, Charles Halloran, one of a half-dozen top aides to Sharpton who worked for Stone in previous campaigns.
“A member of Stone’s stable who stays at Stone’s Central Park South apartment in New York while working for Sharpton, Halloran — just before taking over the Sharpton campaign — had been managing the parliamentary campaign for one of Stone’s numerous foreign clients: the United Bermuda Party, a white-led party trying to oust the resort island’s first black government.
“Since Rev. Al’s presidential campaign [2004] is really all about trying to succeed Jesse Jackson as America’s premier black political leader, the installation of Halloran is thus an odd choice indeed, one that can be explained only by Sharpton’s dependence on the money funneled into his campaign by Stone. (Halloran’s wife works for the infamous Carlyle Group, the military-industrial-complex giant of which Bush was a longtime officer.)
“Stone has acknowledged that he ‘helped Sharpton’ meet the 20-state, $5,000-contribution threshold required for federal matching funds….
“…Sharpton’s almost penniless campaign has been sustained only by money given or raised by [Republican] Stone or by Stone-arranged credit with consultants — without which the campaign would collapse. The [Village] Voice alleges that Stone loaned some $270,000 to Sharpton laundered through Rev. Al’s National Action Network (NAN), and that Stone rang up $18,000 on his credit card for Sharpton’s campaign-travel and other expenses.
“In the wake of these revelations, the Federal Election Commission is about to consider [2004] whether the Sharpton campaign expenses picked up by NAN with the money provided by Stone, and other unpaid-for campaign services provided by Stone and his chums, constitute illegal campaign contributions, according to The New York Times.
“The Stone revelations show that Rev. Al’s presidential campaign is nothing more than another scam he’s running on black Americans, one designed to undermine the movement to defeat George Bush. Fortunately, black voters aren’t as gullible as the cynical Sharpton thinks they are — they know an unprincipled huckster when they see one.
“Which is why Sharpton — despite the help from his GOP bedmates on which his campaign depends — has been rejected by significant majorities of African-Americans this year at the polls.”
(Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator whose articles appear regularly in The Nation, Tom Paine.com, and In These Times among many others. This article first appeared in the LA Weekly.)
Unfortunately, Sharpton, with lots of help from Barack Obama, has rehabbed his image and inserted himself, with significant effect, into the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown ops. From which no good thing is going to transpire, for black or white or brown or yellow or red people.
What is going on in Ferguson, and what went on in the Trayvon Martin case, are a lot deeper than they seem.
Ops within ops. Setting faction against faction. Race against race.
How far back do we need to go? The Clinton years and the Bush years and the Obama years are replete with major crimes that needed to be covered up.
What better way to achieve this end than to set race against race, distracting and frightening the population in the process, while further reducing the power of the people to take effective action against their political and economic bosses.
And to put the cherry on the cake, by the terms of these psyops every black person is supposed to side with “all black people,” and every white person is supposed to side with “all white people.”
That is a formula for doom.
It tries to makes the free and independent individual extinct.
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com.