Football is Fixed (the blog) is entering retirement due to:
i) the onset of a high level consultancy project,
ii) the forthcoming publication of a book detailing the demise of Glasgow Rangers, and
iii) the formation of the Football is Fixed hedge fund (FIFAss) in 2014 - details of the latter will be announced in this space on January 1st 2014.

But all of the inappropriate structures and abuses of power by a psychopathic elite that exist within football are also present, and often to a far greater degree, in more important areas of reality.

So, our final post is the statement made by our hero Bradley Manning before he was given a life sentence for speaking the truth to power...
... and to us.

The Army Court of Criminal Appeals refuses to make this statement public so we, via Alexa O'Brien, are making it available on their behalf as it should be assumed that they have nothing to hide.

Were it not for Ms O'Brien, an independent freelance journalist, Manning's voice would have been silenced. Working through the night, she transcribed and released his every word.

Thank you all very much for your interest in the Football is Fixed blog.
There is such a discrepancy between footballing neohyperrealities and the public perception thereof that we have been repeatedly able to arbitrage these two versions of reality to the benefit of both parties.

Before too long, Football is Fixed will be unilaterally seen as the prescient source of exposure of the rampant corruption that has completely demolished football at the highest levels - for example, one of the issues with undertaking consultancy work is that there are so few teams that we would be willing to work alongside due to the omnipresent criminalities that define the sport.

In the meantime, all 1200 posts from the last seven years will reappear online sometime soon.

WE ARE ALL BRADLEY MANNING.
____________________________________________________________________________________

For more information on the lack of public and press access to United States v. Pfc. Manning, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed a petition requesting the Army Court of Criminal Appeals (ACCA) "to order the Judge to grant the public and press access to the government's motion papers, the court's own orders, and transcripts of proceedings, none of which have been made public to date."
IMPORTANT UPDATE
The statement below was read by Private First Class Bradley E. Manning at the providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification under Article 92 with a substituted time frame for the offense, and nine specifications for lesser included offenses under Article 134. Below is a transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at the Article 39(a) session of United States v. Pfc. Bradley Manning on February 28, 2013 at Fort Meade, MD, USA and published on March 1, 2013. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications.
On March 11, 2013, Manning's providence inquiry statement was officially released. See below. On March 12, 2013, leaked audio of Manning reading his statement was published by The Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Judge Lind: Pfc. Manning you may read your statement.
Pfc. Bradley Manning: Yes, your Honor. I wrote this statement in the confinement facility. Start now. The following facts are provided in support of the providence inquiry for my court martial, United States v. Pfc. Bradley E. Manning.
Personal Facts.
I am a twenty-five year old Private First Class in the United States Army currently assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, HHC, US Army Garrison (USAG), Joint Base Myer, Henderson Hall, Fort Meyer, Virginia.
My [exodus?] assignment I was assigned to HHC, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, NY. My primary military occupational specialty or MOS is 35 Foxtrot intelligence analyst. I entered active duty status on 2 October 2007. I enlisted with the hope of obtaining both real world experience and earning benefits under the GI Bill for college opportunities.
Facts regarding my position as an intelligence analyst.
In order to enlist in the Army I took the Standard Armed Services Aptitude Battery or [ASVAB?]. My score on this battery was high enough for me to qualify for any enlisted MOS position. My recruiter informed me that I should select an MOS that complimented my interests outside the military. In response, I told him that I was interested in geopolitical matters and information technology. He suggested that I consider becoming an intelligence analyst.
After researching the intelligence analyst position, I agreed that this would be a good fit for me. In particular, I enjoyed the fact that an analyst could use information derived from a variety of sources to create work products that informed the command of its available choices for determining the best course of action or COA's. Although the MOS required working knowledge of computers, it primarily required me to consider how raw information can be combined with other available intelligence sources in order to create products that assisted the command in its situational awareness or SA.
I accessed that my natural interest in geopolitical affairs and my computer skills would make me an excellent intelligence analyst. After enlisting I reported to the Fort Meade military entrance processing station on 1 October 2007. I then traveled to and reported at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri on 2 October 2007 to begin basic combat training or BCT.
Once at Fort Leonard Wood I quickly realized that I was neither physically nor mentally prepared for the requirements of basic training. My BCT experience lasted six months instead of the normal ten weeks. Due to medical issues, I was placed on a hold status. A physical examination indicated that I sustained injuries to my right soldier and left foot.
Due to those injuries I was unable to continue 'basic'. During medical hold, I was informed that I may be out processed from the Army, however, I resisted being chaptered out because I felt that I could overcome my medical issues and continue to serve. On 2[8 or 20?] January 2008, I returned to basic combat training. This time I was better prepared and I completed training on 2 April 2008.
I then reported for the MOS specific Advanced Individual Training or AIT on 7 April 2008. AIT was an enjoyable experience for me. Unlike basic training where I felt different from the other soldiers, I fit in and did well. I preferred the mental challenges of reviewing a large amount of information from various sources and trying to create useful or actionable products. I especially enjoyed the practice of analysis through the use of computer applications and methods that I was familiar with.
I graduated from AIT on 16 August 2008 and reported to my first duty station, Fort Drum, NY on 28 August 2008. As an analyst, Significant Activities or SigActs were a frequent source of information for me to use in creating work products. I started working extensively with SigActs early after my arrival at Fort Drum. My computer background allowed me to use the tools of organic to the Distributed Common Ground System-Army or D6-A computers to create polished work products for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team chain of command.
The non-commissioned officer in charge, or NCOIC, of the S2 section, then Master Sergeant David P. Adkins recognized my skills and potential and tasked me to work on a tool abandoned by a previously assigned analyst, the incident tracker. The incident tracker was viewed as a back up to the Combined Information Data Network Exchange or CIDNE and as a unit, historical reference to work with.
In the months preceding my upcoming deployment, I worked on creating a new version of the incident tracker and used SigActs to populate it. The SigActs I used were from Afghanistan, because at the time our unit was scheduled to deploy to the Logar and Wardak Provinces of Afghanistan. Later my unit was reassigned to deploy to Eastern Baghdad, Iraq. At that point, I removed the Afghanistan SigActs and switched to Iraq SigActs.
As and analyst I viewed the SigActs as historical data. I believed this view is shared by other all-source analysts as well. SigActs give a first look impression of a specific or isolated event. This event can be an improvised explosive device attack or IED, small arms fire engagement or SAF, engagement with a hostile force, or any other event a specific unit documented and recorded in real time.
In my perspective the information contained within a single SigAct or group of SigActs is not very sensitive. The events encapsulated within most SigActs involve either enemy engagements or causalities. Most of this information is publicly reported by the public affairs office or PAO, embedded media pools, or host nation (HN) media.
As I started working with SigActs I felt they were similar to a daily journal or log that a person may keep. They capture what happens on a particular day in time. They are created immediately after the event, and are potentially updated over a period of hours until final version is published on the Combined Information Data Network Exchange. Each unit has its own Standard Operating Procedure or SOP for reporting and recording SigActs. The SOP may differ between reporting in a particular deployment and reporting in garrison.
In garrison, a SigAct normally involves personnel issues such as driving under the influence or DUI incidents or an automobile accident involving the death or serious injury of a soldier. The reports starts at the company level and goes up to the battalion, brigade, and even up to the division level.
In deployed environment a unit may observe or participate in an event and a platoon leader or platoon sergeant may report the event as a SigAct to the company headquarters and through the radio transmission operator or RTO. The commander or RTO will then forward the report to the battalion battle captain or battle non-commissioned officer or NCO. Once the battalion battle captain or battle NCO receives the report they will either (1) notify the battalion operations officer or S3; (2) conduct an action, such as launching a quick reaction force; or (3) record the event and report-- and further report it up the chain of command to the brigade.
The reporting of each event is done by radio or over the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network or SIPRNet, normally by an assigned soldier, usually junior enlisted E-4 and below. Once the SigAct is recorded, the SigAct is further sent up the chain of command. At each level, additional information can either be added or corrected as needed. Normally within 24 to 48 hours, the updating and reporting or a particular SigAct is complete. Eventually all reports and SigActs go through the chain of command from brigade to division and division to corps. At corps level the SigAct is finalized and [missed word].
The CIDNE system contains a database that is used by thousands of Department of Defense-- DoD personnel-- including soldiers, civilians, and contractors support. It was the United States Central Command or CENTCOM reporting tool for operational reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two separate but similar databases were maintained for each theater-- CIDNE-I for Iraq and CIDNE-A for Afghanistan. Each database encompasses over a hundred types of reports and other historical information for access. They contain millions of vetted and finalized directories including operational intelligence reporting.
CIDNE was created to collect and analyze battle-space data to provide daily operational and Intelligence Community (IC) reporting relevant to a commander's daily decision making process. The CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A databases contain reporting and analysis fields for multiple disciplines including Human Intelligence or HUMINT reports, Psychological Operations or PSYOP reports, Engagement reports, Counter Improvised Explosive Device or CIED reports, SigAct reports, Targeting reports, Social and Cultural reports, Civil Affairs reports, and Human Terrain reporting.
As an intelligence analyst, I had unlimited access to the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A databases and the information contained within them. Although each table within the database is important, I primarily dealt with HUMINT reports, SigAct reports, and Counter IED reports, because these reports were used to create a work product I was required to published as an analyst.
In working on an assignment I looked anywhere and everywhere for information. As an all-source analyst, this was something that was expected. The D6-A systems had databases built in, and I utilized them on a daily basis. This simply was-- the search tools available on the D6-A systems on SIPRNet such as Query Tree and the DoD and Intellink search engines.
Primarily, I utilized the CIDNE database using the historical and HUMINT reporting to conduct my analysis and provide a back up for my work product. I did statistical analysis on historical data including SigActs to back up analysis that were based on HUMINT reporting and produce charts, graphs, and tables. I also created maps and charts to conduct predictive analysis based on statistical trends. The SigAct reporting provided a reference point for what occurred and provided myself and other analysts with the information to conclude possible outcome.
Although SigAct reporting is sensitive at the time of their creation, their sensitivity normally dissipates within 48 to 72 hours as the information is either publicly released or the unit involved is no longer in the area and not in danger.
It is my understanding that the SigAct reports remain classified only because they are maintained within CIDNE-- because it is only accessible on SIPRnet. Everything on CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A to include SigAct reporting was treated as classified information.
Facts regarding the storage of SigAct Reports.
As part of my training at Fort Drum, I was instructed to ensure that I create back ups of my work product. The need to create back ups was particularly acute given the relative instability and reliability of the computer systems we used in the field during deployment. These computer systems included both organic and theater provided equipment (TPE) D6-A machines.
The organic D6-A machines we brought with us into the field on our deployment were Dell [missed word] laptops and the TPE D6-A machines were Alienware brand laptops. The [M90?] D6-A laptops were the preferred machine to use as they were slightly faster and had fewer problems with dust and temperature than the theater provided Alienware laptops. I used several D6-A machines during the deployment due to various technical problems with the laptops.
With these issues several analysts lost information, but I never lost information due to the multiple backups I created. I attempted to backup as much relevant information as possible. I would save the information so that I or another analyst could quickly access it whenever a machine crashed, SIPRnet connectivity was down, or I forgot where the data was stored.
When backing up information I would do one or all of the following things based on my training:
[(1)] Physical back up. I tried to keep physical back up copies of information on paper so that the information could be grabbed quickly. Also, it was easier to brief from hard copies of research and HUMINT reports.
(2) Local drive back up. I tried to sort out information I deemed relevant and keep complete copies of the information on each of the computers I used in the Temporary Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or T-SCIF, including my primary and secondary D6-A machines. This was stored under my user profile on the desktop.
[(3)] Shared drive backup. Each analyst had access to a 'T' drive-- what we called 'T' drive shared across the SIPRnet. It allowed others to access information that was stored on it. S6 operated the 'T' drive.
[(4)] Compact disk rewritable or CD-RW back up. For larger datasets I saved the information onto a re-writable disk, labeled the disks, and stored them in the conference room of the T-SCIF. This redundancy permitted us the ability to not worry about information loss. If the system crashed, I could easily pull the information from a my secondary computer, the 'T' drive, or one of the CD-RWs.
If another analyst wanted to access my data, but I was unavailable she could find my published products directory on the 'T' drive or on the CD-RWs. I sorted all of my products or research by date, time, and group; and updated the information on each of the storage methods to ensure that the latest information was available to them.
During the deployment I had several of the D6-A machines crash on me. Whenever one of the a computer crashed, I usually lost information but the redundancy method ensured my ability to quickly restore old backup data and add my current information to the machine when it was repaired or replaced.
I stored the backup CD-RW with larger datasets in the conference room of the T-SCIF or next to my workstation. I marked the CD-RWs based on the classification level and its content. Unclassified CD-RWs were only labeled with the content type and not marked with classification markings. Early on in the deployment, I only saved and stored the SigActs that were within or near our operational environment.
Later I thought it would be easier to just to save all of the SigActs onto a CD-RW. The process would not take very long to complete and so I downloaded the SigActs from CIDNE-I onto a CD-RW. After finishing with CIDNE-I, I did the same with CIDNE-A. By retrieving the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs I was able to retrieve the information whenever I needed it, and not rely upon the unreliable and slow SIPRnet connectivity needed to pull. Instead, I could just find the CD-RW and open up a pre-loaded spreadsheet.
This process began in late December 2009 and continued through early January 2010. I could quickly export one month of the SigAct data at a time and download in the background as I did other tasks.
The process took approximately a week for each table. After downloading the SigAct tables, I periodically updated them, by pulling only the most recent SigActs and simply copying them and pasting them into the database saved on the CD-RW. I never hid the fact that I had downloaded copies of both the SigAct tables from CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A. They were stored on appropriately labeled and marked CD-RWs, stored in the open.
I viewed the saved copies of the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables as being for both for my use and the use of anyone within the S2 section during the SIPRnet connectivity issues.
In addition to the SigAct tables, I had a large repository of HUMINT reports and Counter IED reports downloaded from CIDNE-I. These contained reports that were relevant to the area in and around our operational environment in Eastern Baghdad and the Diyala Province of Iraq.
In order to compress the data to fit onto a CD-RW, I used a compression algorithm called 'bzip2'. The program used to compress the data is called 'WinRAR'. WinRAR is an application that is free, and can be easily downloaded from the internet via the Non-Secure Internet Relay Protocol Network or NIPRnet. I downloaded WinRAR on NIPRnet and transferred it to the D6-A machine user profile desktop using a CD-RW. I did not try to hide the fact that I was downloading WinRAR onto my SIPRnet D6-A machine or computer.
With the assistance of the bzip2 compression algorithm using the WinRAR program, I was able to fit all of the SigActs onto a single CD-RW and relevant HUMINT and Counter IED reports onto a separate CD-RW.
Facts regarding my knowledge of the WikiLeaks Organization or WLO.
I first became vaguely aware of the WLO during my AIT at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, although I did not fully pay attention until the WLO released purported Short Messaging System or SMS messages from 11 September 2001 on 25 November 2009. At that time references to the release and the WLO website showed up in my daily Google news open source search for information related to US foreign policy.
The stories were about how WLO published about approximately 500,000 messages. I then reviewed the messages myself and realized that the posted messages were very likely real given the sheer volume and detail of the content.
After this, I began conducting research on WLO. I conducted searches on both NIPRnet and SIPRnet on WLO beginning in late November 2009 and early December 2009. At this time I also began to routinely monitor the WLO website. In response to one of my searches in December 2009, I found the United States Army Counter Intelligence Center or USACIC report on the WikiLeaks organization. After reviewing the report, I believed that this report was possibly the one that my AIT referenced in early 2008.
I may or may not have saved the report on my D6-A workstation. I know I reviewed the document on other occasions throughout early 2010, and saved it on both my primary and secondary laptops. After reviewing the report, I continued doing research on WLO. However, based upon my open-source collection, I discovered information that contradicted the 2008 USACIC report including information that indicated that similar to other press agencies, WLO seemed to be dedicated to exposing illegal activities and corruption.
WLO received numerous award and recognition for its reporting activities. Also, in reviewing the WLO website, I found information regarding US military SOPs for Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and information on the then outdated rules of engagement for ROE in Iraq for cross-border pursuits of former members of Saddam Hussein [missed word] government.
After seeing the information available on the WLO website, I continued following it and collecting open source information from it. During this time period, I followed several organizations and groups including wire press agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters and private intelligence agencies including Strategic Forecasting or Stratfor. This practice was something I was trained to do during AIT, and was something that good analysts were expected to do.
During the searches of WLO, I found several pieces of information that I found useful in my work product-- in my work as an analyst, specifically I recall WLO publishing documents related to weapons trafficking between two nations that affected my OP. I integrated this information into one or more of my work products.
In addition to visiting the WLO website, I began following WLO using Instant Relay Chat or IRC Client called 'XChat' sometime in early January 2010.
IRC is a protocol for real time internet communications by messaging and conferencing, colloquially referred to as chat rooms or chats. The IRC chat rooms are designed for group communication discussion forums. Each IRC chat room is called a channel-- similar to a television where you can tune in or follow a channel-- so long as it is open and does not require an invite.
Once you joining a specific IRC conversation, other users in the conversation can see that you have joined the room. On the Internet there are millions of different IRC channels across several services. Channel topics span a range of topics covering all kinds of interests and hobbies. The primary reason for following WLO on IRC was curiosity-- particularly in regards to how and why they obtained the SMS messages referenced above. I believed that collecting information on the WLO would assist me in this goal.
Initially I simply observed the IRC conversations. I wanted to know how the organization was structured, and how they obtained their data. The conversations I viewed were usually technical in nature but sometimes switched to a lively debate on issues the particular individual may have felt strongly about.
Over a period of time I became more involved in these discussions especially when conversations turned to geopolitical events and information technology topics, such as networking and encryption methods. Based on these observations, I would describe the WL organization as almost academic in nature. In addition to the WLO conversations, I participated in numerous other IRC channels across at least three different networks. The other IRC channels I participated in normally dealt with technical topics including with Linux and Berkley Secure Distribution BSD operating systems or OS's, networking, encryption algorithms and techniques, and other more political topics, such as politics and [missed word].
I normally engaged in multiple IRC conversations simultaneously-- mostly publicly, but often privately. The XChat client enabled me to manage these multiple conversations across different channels and servers. The screen for XChat was often busy, but its screens enabled me to see when something was interesting. I would then select the conversation and either observe or participate.
I really enjoyed the IRC conversations pertaining to and involving the WLO, however, at some point in late February or early March of 2010, the WLO IRC channel was no longer accessible. Instead, regular participants of this channel switched to using the Jabber server. Jabber is another internet communication [missed word] similar but more sophisticated than IRC.
The IRC and Jabber conversations, allowed me to feel connected to others even when alone. They helped me pass the time and keep motivated throughout the deployment.
Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the SigActs.
As indicated above I created copies of the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables as part of the process of backing up information. At the time I did so, I did not intend to use this information for any purpose other than for back up. However, I later decided to release this information publicly. At that time, I believe and still believe that these tables are two of the most significant documents of our time.
On 8 January 2010, I collected the CD-RW I stored in the conference room of the T-SCIF and placed it into the cargo pocket of my ACU or Army Combat Uniform. At the end of my shift, I took the CD-RW out of the T-SCIF and brought it to my Containerized Housing Unit of CHU. I copied the data onto my personal laptop. Later at the beginning of my shift, I returned the CD-RW back to the conference room of the T-SCIF. At the time I saved the SigActs to my laptop, I planned to take them with me on mid-tour leave and decide what to do with them.
At some point prior to my mid-tour leave, I transferred the information from my computer to a Secure Digital memory card from for my digital camera. The SD card for the camera also worked on my computer and allowed me to store the SigAct tables in a secure manner for transport.
I began mid-tour leave on 23 January 2010, flying from Atlanta, Georgia to Reagan National Airport in Virginia. I arrived at the home of my aunt, Debra M. Van Alstyne, in Potomac, Maryland and quickly got into contact with my then boyfriend, Tyler R. Watkins. Tyler, then a student at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and I made plans for me to visit him [the] Boston, Massachusetts area.
I was excited to see Tyler and planned on talking to Tyler about where our relationship was going and about my time in Iraq. However, when I arrived in the Boston area Tyler and I seemed to become distant. He did not seem very excited about my return from Iraq. I tried talking to him about our relationship but he refused to make any plans.
I also tried to raising the topic of releasing the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables to the public. I asked Tyler hypothetical questions about what he would do if he had documents that he thought the public needed access to. Tyler really didn't really have a specific answer for me. He tried to answer the questions and be supportive, but seemed confused by the question in this and its context.
I then tried to be more specific, but he asked too many questions. Rather than try to explain my dilemma, I decided to just to drop the conversation. After a few days in Waltham, I began to feel really bad feeling that I was over staying my welcome, and I returned to Maryland. I spent the remainder of my time on leave in the Washington, DC area.
During this time a blizzard bombarded the mid-atlantic, and I spent a significant period of time essentially stuck in my aunt's house in Maryland. I began to think about what I knew and the information I still had in my possession. For me, the SigActs represented the on the ground reality of both the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I felt that we were risking so much for people that seemed unwilling to cooperate with us, leading to frustration and anger on both sides. I began to become depressed with the situation that we found ourselves increasingly mired in year after year. The SigActs documented this in great detail and provide a context of what we were seeing on the ground.
In attempting to conduct counter-terrorism or CT and counter-insurgency COIN operations we became obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and not being suspicious of and avoiding cooperation with our Host Nation partners, and ignoring the second and third order effects of accomplishing short-term goals and missions. I believe that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A tables this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.
I also believed the detailed analysis of the data over a long period of time by different sectors of society might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to even to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the effected environment everyday.
At my aunt's house I debated what I should do with the SigActs-- in particular whether I should hold on to them-- or expose them through a press agency. At this point I decided that it made sense to try to expose the SigAct tables to an American newspaper. I first called my local newspaper, The Washington Post, and spoke with a woman saying that she was a reporter. I asked her if The Washington Post would be interested in receiving information that would have enormous value to the American public.
Although we spoke for about five minutes concerning the general nature of what I possessed, I do not believe she took me seriously. She informed me that The Washington Post would possibly be interested, but that such decisions were made only after seeing the information I was referring to and after consideration by the senior editors.
I then decided to contact the largest and most popular newspaper, The New York Times. I called the public editor number on The New York Times website. The phone rang and was answered by a machine. I went through the menu to the section for news tips. I was routed to an answering machine. I left a message stating I had access to information about Iraq and Afghanistan that I believed was very important. However, despite leaving my Skype phone number and personal email address, I never received a reply from The New York Times.
I also briefly considered dropping into the office for the Political Commentary blog, Politico, however the weather conditions during my leave hampered my efforts to travel. After these failed efforts I had ultimately decided to submit the materials to the WLO. I was not sure if the WLO would actually publish these the SigAct tables [missed a few words]. I was also concerned that they might not be noticed by the American media. However, based upon what I read about the WLO through my research described above, this seemed to be the best medium for publishing this information to the world within my reach.
At my aunt's house I joined in on an IRC conversation and stated I had information that needed to be shared with the world. I wrote that the information would help document the true cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the individuals in the IRC asked me to describe the information. However, before I could describe the information another individual pointed me to the link for the WLO website's online submission system. After ending my IRC connection, I considered my options one more time. Ultimately, I felt that the right thing to do was to release the SigActs.
On 3 February 2010, I visited the WLO website on my computer and clicked on the submit documents link. Next I found the submit your information online link and elected to submit the SigActs via the onion router or TOR anonymizing network by a special link. TOR is a system intended to provide anonymity online. The software routes internet traffic through a network of servers and other TOR clients in order to conceal the user's location and identity.
I was familiar with TOR and had it previously installed on a computer to anonymously monitor the social media websites of militia groups operating within central Iraq. I followed the prompts and attached the compressed data files of CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs. I attached a text file I drafted while preparing to provide the documents to The Washington Post. It provided rough guidelines saying 'It's already been sanitized of any source identifying information. You might need to sit on this information-- perhaps 90 to 100 days to figure out how best to release such a large amount of data and to protect its source. This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.'
After sending this, I left the SD card in a camera case at my aunt's house in the event I needed it again in the future. I returned from mid-tour leave on 11 February 2010. Although the information had not yet been publicly published by the WLO, I felt this sense of relief by them having it. I felt I had accomplished something that allowed me to have a clear conscience based upon what I had seen and read about and knew were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan everyday.
Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of 10 Reykjavik 13.
I first became aware of the diplomatic cables during my training period in AIT. I later learned about the Department of State or DoS Net-centric Diplomacy NCD portal from the 2/10 Brigade Combat Team S2, Captain Steven Lim. Captain Lim sent a section wide email to the other analysts and officers in late December 2009 containing the SIPRnet link to the portal along with the instructions to look at the cables contained within them and to incorporate them into our work product.
Shortly after this I also noticed the diplomatic cables were being reported to in products from the corps level US Forces Iraq or USF-I. Based upon Captain Lim's direction to become familiar with its contents, I read virtually every published cable concerning Iraq.
I also began scanning the database and reading other random cables that piqued my curiosity. It was around this time-- in early to mid-January of 2010, that I began searching the database for information on Iceland. I became interested in Iceland due to the IRC conversations I viewed in the WLO channel discussing an issue called Icesave. At this time I was not very familiar with the topic, but it seemed to be a big issue for those participating in the conversation. This is when I decided to investigate and conduct a few searches on Iceland and find out more.
At the time, I did not find anything discussing the Icesave issue either directly or indirectly. I then conducted an open source search for Icesave. I then learned that Iceland was involved in a dispute with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands concerning the financial collapse of one or more of Iceland's banks. According to open source reporting much of the public controversy involved the United Kingdom's use of anti-terrorism legislation against Iceland in order to freeze Icelandic access assets for payment of the guarantees for UK depositors that lost money.
Shortly after returning from mid-tour leave, I returned to the Net Centric Diplomacy portal to search for information on Iceland and Icesave as the topic had not abated on the WLO IRC channel. To my surprise, on 14 February 2010, I found the cable 10 Reykjavik 13, which referenced the Icesave issue directly.
The cable published on 13 January 2010 was just over two pages in length. I read the cable and quickly concluded that Iceland was essentially being bullied diplomatically by two larger European powers. It appeared to me that Iceland was out viable options and was coming to the US for assistance. Despite the quiet request for assistance, it did not appear that we were going to do anything.
From my perspective it appeared that we were not getting involved due to the lack of long term geopolitical benefit to do so. After digesting the contents of 10 Reykjavik 13 I debated on whether this was something I should send to the WLO. At this point the WLO had not published or acknowledged receipt of the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables. Despite not knowing that if the SigActs were a priority for the WLO, I decided the cable was something that would be important and I felt that I would I might be able to right a wrong by having them publish this document. I burned the information onto a CD-RW on 15 February 2010, took it to my CHU, and saved it onto my personal laptop.
I navigated to the WLO website via a TOR connection like before and uploaded the document via the secure form. Amazingly, when WLO published 10 Reykjavik 13 within hours, proving that the form worked and that they must have received the SigAct tables.
Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team or AW team video.
During the mid-February 2010 time frame the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division targeting analyst , then Specialist Jihrleah W. Showman and others discussed a video that Ms. Showman had found on the 'T' drive.
The video depicted several individuals being engaged by an aerial weapons team. At first I did not consider the video very special, as I have viewed countless other war porn type videos depicting combat. However, the recording of audio comments by the aerial weapons team crew and the second engagement in the video of an unarmed bongo truck troubled me.
As Showman and a few other analysts and officers in the T-SCIF commented on the video and debated whether the crew violated the rules of engagement or ROE in the second engagement, I shied away from this debate, instead conducting some research on the event. I wanted to learn what happened and whether there was any background to the events of the day that the event occurred, 12 July 2007.
Using Google I searched for the event by its date by its and general location. I found several news accounts involving two Reuters employees who were killed during the aerial weapon team engagement. Another story explained that Reuters had requested for a copy of the video under the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA. Reuters wanted to view the video in order to be able to understand what had happened and to improve their safety practices in combat zones. A spokesperson for Reuters was quoted saying that the video might help avoid the reoccurrence of the tragedy and believed there was a compelling need for the immediate release of the video.
Despite the submission of the FOIA request, the news account explained that CENTCOM replied to Reuters stating that they could not give a time frame for considering a FOIA request and that the video might no longer exist. Another story I found written a year later said that even though Reuters was still pursuing their request, they still did not receive a formal response or written determination in accordance with FOIA.
The fact neither CENTCOM or Multi National Forces Iraq or MNF-I would not voluntarily release the video troubled me further. It was clear to me that the event happened because the aerial weapons team mistakenly identified Reuters employees as a potential threat and that the people in the bongo truck were merely attempting to assist the wounded. The people in the van were not a threat but merely 'good samaritans'. The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have.
They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote "dead bastards" unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.
While saddened by the aerial weapons team crew's lack of concern about human life, I was disturbed by the response of the discovery of injured children at the scene. In the video, you can see that the bongo truck driving up to assist the wounded individual. In response the aerial weapons team crew-- as soon as the individuals are a threat, they repeatedly request for authorization to fire on the bongo truck and once granted they engage the vehicle at least six times.
Shortly after the second engagement, a mechanized infantry unit arrives at the scene. Within minutes, the aerial weapons team crew learns that children were in the van and despite the injuries the crew exhibits no remorse. Instead, they downplay the significance of their actions, saying quote "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kid's into a battle" unquote.
The aerial weapons team crew members sound like they lack sympathy for the children or the parents. Later in a particularly disturbing manner, the aerial weapons team crew verbalizes enjoyment at the sight of one of the ground vehicles driving over a body-- or one of the bodies. As I continued my research, I found an article discussing the book, The Good Soldiers, written by Washington Post writer David Finkel.
In Mr. Finkel book, he writes about the aerial weapons team attack. As, I read an online excerpt in Google Books, I followed Mr. Finkel's account of the event belonging to the video. I quickly realize that Mr. Finkel was quoting, I feel in verbatim, the audio communications of the aerial weapons team crew.
It is clear to me that Mr. Finkel obtained access and a copy of the video during his tenure as an embedded journalist. I was aghast at Mr. Finkel's portrayal of the incident. Reading his account, one would believe the engagement was somehow justified as 'payback' for an earlier attack that lead to the death of a soldier. Mr. Finkel ends his account of the engagement by discussing how a soldier finds an individual still alive from the attack. He writes that the soldier finds him and sees him gesture with his two forefingers together, a common method in the Middle East to communicate that they are friendly. However, instead of assisting him, the soldier makes an obscene gesture extending his middle finger.
The individual apparently dies shortly thereafter. Reading this, I can only think of how this person was simply trying to help others, and then he quickly finds he needs help as well. To make matter worse, in the last moments of his life, he continues to express his friendly gesture-- his friendly intent-- only to find himself receiving this well known gesture of unfriendliness. For me it's all a big mess, and I am left wondering what these things mean, and how it all fits together , and it burdens me emotionally.
I saved a copy of the video on my workstation. I searched for and found the rules of engagement, the rules of engagement annexes, and a flow chart from the 2007 time period-- as well as an unclassified Rules of Engagement smart card from 2006. On 15 February 2010 I burned these documents onto a CD-RW, the same time I burned the 10 Reykjavik 13 cable onto a CD-RW. At the time, I placed the video and rules for of engagement information onto my personal laptop in my CHU. I planned to keep this information there until I redeployed in Summer of 2010. I planned on providing this to the Reuters office in London to assist them in preventing events such as this in the future.
However, after the WLO published 10 Reykjavik 13 I altered my plans. I decided to provide the video and the rules of engagement to them so that Reuters would have this information before I re-deployed from Iraq. On about 21 February 2010, I as described above, I used the WLO submission form and uploaded the documents. The WLO released the video on 5 April 2010. After the release, I was concern about the impact of the video and how it would be received by the general public.
I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare. After the release I was encouraged by the response in the media and general public, who observed the aerial weapons team video. As I hoped, others were just as troubled-- if not more troubled that me by what they saw.
At this time, I began seeing reports claiming that the Department of Defense and CENTCOM could not confirm the authenticity of the video. Additionally, one of my supervisors, Captain Casey Fulton, stated her belief that the video was not authentic. In her response, I decided to ensure that the authenticity of the video would not be questioned in the future. On 25 February April 2010, I emailed Captain Fulton a link to the video that was on our 'T' drive, and a copy of the video published by WLO that was collected by the Open Source Center, so she could compare them herself.
Around this time frame, I burned a second CD-RW containing the aerial weapons team video. In order to made it appear authentic, I placed a classification sticker and wrote Reuters FOIA REQ on its face. I placed the CD-RW in one of my personal CD cases containing a set of 'Starting Out in Arabic' CD's. I planned on mailing out the CD-RW to Reuters after our I re-deployed , so they could have a copy that was unquestionably authentic.
Almost immediately after submitting the aerial weapons team video and the rules of engagement documents I notified the individuals in the WLO IRC to expect an important submission. I received a response from an individual going by the handle of 'ox''office'-- at first our conversations were general in nature, but over time as our conversations progressed, I accessed assessed this individual to be an important part of the WLO.
Due to the strict adherence of anonymity by the WLO, we never exchanged identifying information. However, I believe the individual was likely Mr. Julian Assange [he pronounced it with three syllables], Mr. Daniel Schmidt, or a proxy representative of Mr. Assange and Schmidt.
As the communications transferred from IRC to the Jabber client, I gave 'ox''office' and later 'pressassociation' the name of Nathaniel Frank in my address book, after the author of a book I read in 2009.
After a period of time, I developed what I felt was a friendly relationship with Nathaniel. Our mutual interest in information technology and politics made our conversations enjoyable. We engaged in conversation often. Sometimes as long as an hour or more. I often looked forward to my conversations with Nathaniel after work.
The anonymity that was provided by TOR and the Jabber client and the WLO's policy allowed me to feel I could just be myself, free of the concerns of social labeling and perceptions that are often placed upon me in real life. In real life, I lacked a closed friendship with the people I worked with in my section, the S2 section.
In my section, the S2 section and supported battalions and the 2nd Brigade Combat Team as a whole. For instance, I lacked close ties with my roommate to his discomfort regarding my perceived sexual orientation. Over the next few months, I stayed in frequent contact with Nathaniel. We conversed on nearly a daily basis and I felt that we were developing a friendship.
Conversations covered many topics and I enjoyed the ability to talk about pretty much everything anything, and not just the publications that the WLO was working on. In retrospect I realize that that these dynamics were artificial and were valued more by myself than Nathaniel. For me these conversations represented an opportunity to escape from the immense pressures and anxiety that I experienced and built up through out the deployment. It seems that as I tried harder to fit in at work, the more I seemed to alienate my peers and lose the respect, trust, and support I needed.
Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of documents related to the detainments by the Iraqi Federal Police or FP, and the Detainee Assessment Briefs, and the USACIC United States Army Counter Intelligence Center report.
On 27 February 2010, a report was received from a subordinate battalion. The report described an event in which the Federal Police or FP detained 15 individuals for printing anti-Iraqi literature. On 2 March 2010, I received instructions from an S3 section officer in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division Tactical Operation Center or TOC to investigate the matter, and figure out who these quote 'bad guys' unquote were and how significant this event was for the Federal Police.
Over the course of my research I found that none of the individuals had previous ties to anti-Iraqi actions or suspected terrorist militia groups. A few hours later, I received several photos from the scene-- from the subordinate battalion. They were accidentally sent to an officer on a different team on than the S2 section and she forwarded them to me.
These photos included picture of the individuals, pallets of unprinted paper and seized copies of the final printed material or the printed document; and a high resolution photo of the printed material itself. I printed up one [missed word] copy of a high resolution photo-- I laminated it for ease of use and transfer. I then walked to the TOC and delivered the laminated copy to our category two interpreter.
She reviewed the information and about a half an hour later delivered a rough written transcript in English to the S2 section. I read the transcript and followed up with her, asking her for her take on the content. She said it was easy for her to transcribe verbatim, since I blew up the photograph and laminated it. She said the general nature of the document was benign. The documentation, as I had sensed as well, was merely a scholarly critique of the then current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
It detailed corruption within the cabinet of al-Maliki's government and the financial impact of his corruption on the Iraqi people. After discovering this discrepancy between the Federal Police's report and the interpreter's transcript, I forwarded this discovery to the top OIC and the battle NCOIC. The top OIC and the overhearing battle captain informed me that they didn't need or want to know this information anymore. They told me to quote "drop it" unquote and to just assist them and the Federal Police in finding out, where more of these print shops creating quote "anti-Iraqi literature" unquote.
I couldn't believe what I heard and I returned to the T-SCIF and complained to the other analysts and my section NCOIC about what happened. Some were sympathetic, but no one wanted to do anything about it.
I am the type of person who likes to know how things work. And, as an analyst, this means I always want to figure out the truth. Unlike other analysts in my section or other sections within the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, I was not satisfied with just scratching the surface and producing canned or cookie cutter assessments. I wanted to know why something was the way it was, and what we could to correct or mitigate a situation.
I knew that if I continued to assist the Baghdad Federal Police in identifying the political opponents of Prime Minister al-Maliki, those people would be arrested and in the custody of the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police and very likely tortured and not seen again for a very long time-- if ever.
Instead of assisting the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police, I decided to take the information and expose it to the WLO, in the hope that before the upcoming 7 March 2010 election, they could generate some immediate press on the issue and prevent this unit of the Federal Police from continuing to crack down on political opponents of al-Maliki.
On 4 March 2010, I burned the report, the photos, the high resolution copy of the pamphlet, and the interpreter's hand written transcript onto a CD-RW. I took the CD-RW to my CHU and copied the data onto my personal computer. Unlike the times before, instead of uploading the information through the WLO website's submission form. I made a Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP connection to a file drop box operated by the WLO.
The drop box contained a folder that allowed me to upload directly into it. Saving files into this directory, allowed anyone with log in access to the server to view and download them. After uploading these files to the WLO, on 5 March 2010, I notified Nathaniel over Jabber. Although sympathetic, he said that the WLO needed more information to confirm the event in order for it to be published or to gain interest in the international media.
I attempted to provide the specifics, but to my disappointment, the WLO website chose not to publish this information. At the same time, I began sifting through information from the US Southern Command or SOUTHCOM and Joint Task Force Guantanamo, Cuba or JTF-GTMO. The thought occurred to me-- although unlikely, that I wouldn't be surprised if the individuals detainees detained by the Federal Police might be turned over back into US custody-- and ending up in the custody of Joint Task Force Guantanamo.
As I digested through the information on Joint Task Force Guantanamo, I quickly found the Detainee Assessment Briefs or DABs. I previously came across the documents before in 2009 but did not think much about them. However, this time I was more curious in during this search and I found them again.
The DABs were written in standard DoD memorandum format and addressed the commander US SOUTHCOM. Each memorandum gave basic and background information about a specific detainee held at some point by Joint Task Force Guantanamo. I have always been interested on the issue of the moral efficacy of our actions surrounding Joint Task Force Guantanamo. On the one hand, I have always understood the need to detain and interrogate individuals who might wish to harm the United States and our allies, however, I felt that's what we were trying to do at Joint Task Force Guantanamo.
However, the more I became educated on the topic, it seemed that we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely that we believed or knew to be innocent, low level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence and would be released if they were still held in theater.
I also recall that in early 2009 the, then newly elected president, Barack Obama, stated that he would close Joint Task Force Guantanamo, and that the facility compromised our standing over all, and diminished our quote 'moral authority' unquote.
After familiarizing myself with the Detainee Assessment Briefs, I agree. Reading through the Detainee Assessment Briefs, I noticed that they were not analytical products, instead they contained summaries of tear line versions of interim intelligence reports that were old or unclassified. None of the DABs contained the names of sources or quotes from tactical interrogation reports or TIR's. Since the DABs were being sent to the US SOUTHCOM commander, I assessed that they were intended to provide a very general background information on each of the detainees and not a detailed assessment.
In addition to the manner in which the DAB's were written, I recognized that they were at least several years old, and discussed detainees that were already released from Joint Task Force Guantanamo. Based on this, I determined that the DABs were not very important from either an intelligence or a national security standpoint. On 7 March 2010, during my Jabber conversation with Nathaniel, I asked him if he thought the DABs were of any use to anyone.
Nathaniel indicated, although he did not believe that they were of political significance, he did believe that they could be used to merge into the general historical account of what occurred at Joint Task Force Guantanamo. He also thought that the DAB's might be helpful to the legal counsel of those currently and previously held at JTF-GTMO.
After this discussion, I decided to download the data DABs. I used an application called Wget to download the DABs. I downloaded Wget off of the NIPRnet laptop in the T-SCIF, like other programs. I saved that onto a CD-RW, and placed the executable in my 'My Documents' directory on of my user profile, on the D6-A SIPRnet workstation.
On 7 March 2010, I took the list of links for the Detainee Assessment Briefs, and Wget downloaded them sequentially. I burned the data onto a CD-RW, and took it into my CHU, and copied them to my personal computer. On 8 March 2010, I combined the Detainee Assessment Briefs with the United States Army Counterintelligence Center report on the WLO, into a compressed [missed word] IP or zip file. Zip files contain multiple files which are compressed to reduce their size.
After creating the zip file, I uploaded the file onto their cloud drop box via Secure File Transfer Protocol. Once these were uploaded, I notified Nathaniel that the information was in the 'x' directory, which had been designated for my own use. Earlier that day, I downloaded the USACIC report on WLO.
As discussed about above, I previously reviewed the report on numerous occasions and although I saved the document onto the work station before, I could not locate it. After I found the document again, I downloaded it to my work station, and saved it onto the same CD-RW as the Detainee Assessment Briefs described above.
Although my access included a great deal of information, I decided I had nothing else to send to WLO after sending the Detainee Assessment Briefs and the USACIC report. Up to this point I had sent them the following: the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs tables; the Reykjavik 13 Department of State Cable; the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team video and the 2006-2007 rules of engagement documents; the SigAct report and supporting documents concerning the 15 individuals detained by the Baghdad Federal Police; the USSOUTHCOM and Joint Task Force Guantanamo Detainee Assessment Briefs; a USACIC report on the WikiLeaks organization website.
Over the next few weeks I did not send any additional information to the WLO. I continued to converse with Nathaniel over the Jabber client and in the WLO IRC channel. Although I stopped sending documents to WLO, no one associated with the WLO pressured me into giving more information. The decisions that I made to send documents and information to the WLO and the website were my own decisions, and I take full responsibility for my actions.
Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of other Government documents.
One 22 March 2010, I downloaded two documents. I found these documents over the course of my normal duties as an analyst. Based on my training and the guidance of my superiors, I look at as much information as possible.
Doing so provided me with the ability to make connections that others might miss. On several occasions during the month of March, I accessed information from a government entity. I read several documents from a section within this government entity. The content of two of these documents upset me greatly. I had difficulty believing what this section was doing.
On 22 March 2010, I downloaded the two documents that I found troubling. I compressed them into a zip file named blah.zip and burned them onto a CD-RW. I took the CD-RW to my CHU and saved the file to my personal computer.
I uploaded the information to the WLO website using the designated prompts.
Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the Net Centric Diplomacy Department of State cables.
In late March of 2010, I received a warning over Jabber from Nathaniel, that the WLO website would be publishing the aerial weapons team video. He indicated that the WLO would be very busy and the frequency and intensity of our Jabber conversations decrease significantly. During this time, I had nothing but work to distract me.
I read more of the diplomatic cables published on the Department of State Net Centric Diplomacy server. With my insatiable curiosity and interest in geopolitics I became fascinated with them. I read not only the cables on Iraq, but also about countries and events that I found interesting.
The more I read, the more I was fascinated with by the way that we dealt with other nations and organizations. I also began to think that the documented backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity that didn't seem characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world.
Up to this point, during the deployment, I had issues I struggled with and difficulty at work. Of the documents release, the cables were the only one I was not absolutely certain couldn't harm the United States. I conducted research on the cables published on the Net Centric Diplomacy, as well as how Department of State cables worked in general.
In particular, I wanted to know how each cable was published on SIRPnet via the Net Centric Diplomacy. As part of my open source research, I found a document published by the Department of State on its official website.
The document provided guidance on caption markings for individual cables and handling instructions for their distribution. I quickly learned the caption markings clearly detailed the sensitivity level of the Department of State cables. For example, NODIS or No Distribution was used for messages at the highest sensitivity and were only distributed to the authorized recipients.
The SIPDIS or SIPRnet distribution caption was applied only to recording of other information messages that were deemed appropriate for a release for a wide number of individuals. According to the Department of State guidance for a cable to have the SIPDIS [missed word] caption, it could not include other captions that were intended to limit distribution.
The SIPDIS caption was only for information that could only be shared with anyone with access to SIPRnet. I was aware that thousands of military personnel, DoD, Department of State, and other civilian agencies had easy access to the tables. The fact that the SIPDIS caption was only for wide distribution made sense to me, given that the vast majority of the Net Centric Diplomacy Cables were not classified.
The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion that this was the type of information that-- that this type of information should become public. I once read a and used a quote on open diplomacy written after the First World War and how the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other.
I thought these cables were a prime example of a need for a more open diplomacy. Given all of the Department of State cables information that I read, the fact that most of the cables were unclassified, and that all the cables have a SIPDIS caption, I believe that the public release of these cables would not damage the United States; however, I did believe that the cables might be embarrassing, since they represented very honest opinions and statements behind the backs of other nations and organizations.
In many ways these cables are a catalogue of cliques and gossip. I believed exposing this information might make some within the Department of State and other government entities unhappy. On 22 28 March 2010, I began downloading a copy of the SIPDIS cables using the program Wget, described above.
I used instances of the Wget application to download the Net Centric Diplomacy cables in the background. As I worked on my daily tasks, the Net Centric Diplomacy cables were downloaded from 28 March 2010 to 9 April 2010. After downloading the cables, I saved them onto a CD-RW.
These cables went from the earliest dates in Net Centric Diplomacy to 28 February 2010. I took the CD-RW to my CHU on 10 April 2010. I sorted the cables on my personal computer, compressed them using the bzip2 compression algorithm described above, and uploaded them to the WLO via designated drop box described above.
On 3 May 2010, I used Wget to download and update of the cables for the months of March 2010 and April 2010 and saved the information onto a zip file and burned it to a CD-RW. I then took the CD-RW to my CHU and saved those to my computer. I later found that the file was corrupted during the transfer. Although I intended to re-save another copy of these cables, I was removed from the T-SCIF on 8 May 2010 after an altercation.
Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of Garani, Farah Province Afghanistan 15-6 Investigation and Videos.
[NB Pfc. Manning plead 'not guilty' to the Specification 11, Charge II for the Garani Video as charged by the government, which alleged as November charge date. Read more here.]
In late March 2010, I discovered a US CENTCOM directly on a 2009 airstrike in Afghanistan. I was searching CENTCOM for information I could use as an analyst. As described above, this was something that myself and other analysts and officers did on a frequent basis. As I reviewed the documents I recalled the incident and what happened. The airstrike occurred in the Garani village in the Farah Province, Northwestern Afghanistan. It received worldwide press coverage during the time as it was reported that up to 100 to 150 Afghan civilians-- mostly women and children-- were accidentally killed during the airstrike.
After going through the report and the [missed word] annexes, I began to review the incident as being similar to the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team engagements in Iraq. However, this event was noticeably different in that it involved a significantly higher number of individuals, larger aircraft and much heavier munitions. Also, the conclusions of the report are even more disturbing than those of the July 2007 incident.
I did not see anything in the 15-6 report or its annexes that gave away sensitive information. Rather, the investigation and its conclusions helped explain how this incident occurred, and were-- what those involved should have done, and how to avoid an event like this from occurring again.
After investigating the report and its annexes, I downloaded the 15-6 investigation, PowerPoint presentations, and several other supporting documents to my D6-A workstation. I also downloaded three zip files containing the videos of the incident. I burned this information onto a CD-RW and transferred it to the personal computer in my CHU. I did later that day or the next day-- I uploaded the information to the WLO website this time using a new version of the WLO website submission form.
Unlike other times using the submission form above, I did not activate the TOR anonymizer.
Your Honor, this concludes my statement and facts for this providence inquiry.


Translations:

• German Translation of the Bradley Manning Statement by Christine Becker (GERMAN)
• Déclaration du Pfc. Bradley E. Manning devant la Commission d'enquête préparatoire by kitetoa (FRENCH)

__________
UPDATE: On March 11, 2013 Manning's statement was officially released. I corrected one phrase based on this release, namely "not being suspicious."
On March 2, 2013, I went through each line of the rush transcript published here on March 1 to check it for accuracy and inadvertent typos or misspellings.
Since multiple news outlets have printed the rush transcript that was originally published here; every single amendment made during this review-- including non-substantive typos-- are noted with a strike-through and/or highlighted.
When I first published the rush transcript of Manning's statement, I had noted under "Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team or AW team video" that the handle of the individual who Manning said he interacted with was 'office' and not 'ox'.
When Guardian journalist, Ed Pilkington, approached me to ask for permission to publish the rush transcript on the guardian.co.uk, we had a quick conversation concerning the fact that both he and a Wired journalist had noted the handle was 'ox' and not 'office'.
Because of the overriding need to publish Manning's statement as soon as possible, and my being back in Court at Fort Meade during our exchange after having worked through the night to get a rush transcript completed and published, I quickly deferred to consensus and amended 'office' to 'ox'.
After reviewing my rush transcript line-by-line, however, I stand by my original notation of the handle as 'office', and not 'ox'. I have amended the transcript above to reflect that determination.

"In effect, the English Premier League and the Scottish Premier League, via their respective control of the Football Association and the Scottish FA, are able to block all and any changes to the Laws of the Game with the support of just one other IFAB member." 

Yesterday, nicely buried away on a busy sporting Saturday, the International Football Association Board (IFAB) ruled out video technology in football until season 2018/19 at the earliest.
This is despite a very successful trial run by the Dutch FA (KNVB) at 24 Eredivisie matches last season and the support of Germany, the USA and certain elements at the FA in England.

The outcome simply means that we are guaranteed 3 and a half more years of rampant corruption without redress or regulation and we will argue that this decision is the death knell for the integrity (and success) of the game.
___________________________________________________________________________________

IFAB

IFAB is an anachronism. Composed of 4 members from the FA's of England, Scotland, the North of Ireland and Wales plus a further four individuals selected from the other 205 associations, the body behaves like an old City of London club. To discuss and decide upon proposed alterations to the Laws of the Game requires 75% agreement which, in effect, means that the United Kingdom controls the rules of global football.
Furthermore, since 2003, Angel Maria Villar Llona, the Spanish FIFA vice-President and Chairman of the Referees' Committee, has been involved in IFAB meetings. It is surely of relevance to the whole discussion that Javier Tebas, the Spanish La Liga president, believes that some bodies wish to hide the reality of matchfixing. Speaking last October, Tebas said: "... there are also some important institutions that want to hide the problem. Our integrity department in La Liga, for example, last weekend detected match-fixing activity in the third division. We detected the problem and communicated it to the responsible authority, but they chose to hide it, probably because they don't want to recognise that this problem exists, even in the lower division."

It is surely worthy of note that certain representatives (or a majority thereof) can block any change at any time to any private agenda.

Dutch Experiment and Institutional Response

The Dutch trial involved a video referee addressing match decisions at 24 top flight games in 2013/14. The results were hugely encouraging resulting in gross chameleon Sepp Blatter changing his mind to be in favour of video technology on the eve of the 2014 World Cup Finals.
A colleague in Holland has stated that the referral system could be implemented within 15 seconds and would have removed all controversy from the matches trialled. The match outcome was real.
Other sports also successfully implement video technology without the fabric of the competitive event being blown apart - tennis, rugby league, rugby union, horseracing, athletics, cricket etc.
So why not football?
Which members of IFAB voted against the proposal?
Who stands to lose and gain from the delay?

Well, this last question is a suitable starting point.
The entities that gain from lack of video technology are, in no particular order of merit - UEFA, FIFA, the Premier League, corrupt referees, corrupt bookmakers, insider gamblers, underground criminalised betting markets, global mafiosi groups, corrupt football agents, dodgy committee men...
... while the losers are the fans, the integrity of the game, those within the sport outside the corrupt inner loops and, interestingly, the broadcasters who overpay for tv rights (see below).

UEFA president, Michel Platini, performed a U-turn on video technology due to the European body utilising grey corruption via match officials to offset the criminalities of matchfixing operations targeting UEFA events, the power base of the allegedly disbanded G14 group, the successful marketing of tournament spectacles and the critical nature of television money.
The latter two points also apply to FIFA although the inaction at the global body is more closely linked to the interests of those involved in matchfixing.

The Specifics of the Integrity Issue in English Premier League

The Premier League (EPL) and Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) do not want video technology in English football. Furthermore, they do not support the elements of the FA that are calling for the implementation.The EPL have been undermining the role of the national association since inception and reached a nadir when buffoon Sir Dave Richards performed as Scudamore's rottweiler destabiliser at the FA.

PGMOB referees earn around two grand a week for officiating on matches that can have global betting turnover of £5bn. The core group of PGMOB comprises just 15 individuals who officiate at nearly 95% of EPL matches (including all the high betting volume tv events) and are frequently present as 4th officials at other games. This structure is primed for corruption.
Additionally, one individual who hides in the shadows selects referees for all EPL games. One man!

Former leading refs Graham Poll and Keith Hackett have lacerated the current standard of PGMOB refs with the latter wanting Mike Riley removed from leadership of body and 5 officials stood down.
Hackett stated: "If [a manager] is at the bottom of the league then his job is at risk. At this moment in time he [Riley] is more than bottom. I am seeing a regression. The performances of the referees are not acceptable. He must carry the responsibility."

And the reaction to criticism of referees is Stalinist. Most managers (with honourable exceptions of Jose Mourinho and Steve Bruce) have learnt that it is preferable not to articulate concerns over refereeing integrity as the body politic merely dumps more negative controversy on managers who step out of the Stalin line.
Chelsea would have won the EPL last season if it had not been for the ludicrous spectacles at Villa Park and at home to Sunderland. The abuses have continued on into 2014/15 with even the most anti-Mourinho clone perceiving the injustices perpetrated against the London team.

The Stalinism continues with media silence, no interviews, hush money paid at end of referee's careers, no public ratings from internal assessments and generally no punishment for miscreants.
Additionally, since the beginning of season 2013/14, all match officials have been miked up to a secretive network which we will term the EPL Match Centre. All kick offs are coincident and referees are aided (or abetted) by other officials with access to tv replays. This results in numerous match decisions being delayed while a decision is made.

Three points.
Firstly, this is illegal under the Laws of the Game.
Secondly, to what template are the decisions being made if made under such secrecy?
Thirdly, the outcome is disastrous for the brand. The EPL is descending into fraudulent farce.

In a desperate attempt to keep fans on message, the mainstream media entirely ignores matchfixing in England despite journalists getting some of their leaks/stories from individuals who are orchestrating the matchfixing.
The tv pundits are worse!
Lee Dixon, Mark Lawrensen and Robbie Savage work for bookmakers, Danny Murphy is close to a matchfixing agent, Michael Owen used to be bookie for the England team (linked to Goldchip private bookmakers), Steve McManaman was a business associate of money laundering fraudster Carson Yeung and David James is, well, David James.

Impact of IFAB Decision on EPL Broadcasting Deals

The EPL tv deal for 2016/19 realised £5.1bn for British rights but as lawyer Daniel Geey points out the global broadcasting rights could be worth another £8bn.

These figures represent a financial market bubble - Sky is paying £11m per match in this window.
The price is being ratcheted up via the antisocial auction strategies of Sky Sports and BT Sports as they outbid one another to mutual oblivion. The inevitable increase in subscription prices will undermine the business model - in a 4 week window in January, BT Sport offered just one EPL game (Hull v Newcastle). This is absolutely not value for money particularly in a time of austerity.

Bubbles are dangerous when they form in an instant - so Manchester United received less (£60.8m) for winning EPL in 2012/13 than Cardiff City got for being relegated the following season (£62.1m).
Bubbles are even more dangerous when future rights' issues are being bid on the back of an already inflated bubble - a double bubble means double trouble.

As the performance of EPL teams in Champions League and Europa League shows, the bloated brand is bigger than the fundamental value by some marked distance.

Furthermore, the matchfixing in the EPL is the elephant in the room. When we speak to managers, chief execs, agents, administrators, the discussion always centres around matchfixing. The reality is bound to break at some point and then the value of the brand plummets as the IPL cricket monstrosity discovered.
And this is before one even considers the impact of the eventual European Super League for the G14+.

Conclusion

Who voted against video technology at IFAB meeting?
Why?

An interesting impact of the Dutch experiment last season was that the volatility of outcome would have diminished markedly if the video ref had been able to overrule the match referee. Think about that. The price set by the global marketplace on a game is more accurate once integrity is reintroduced via taking power away from the referee. We are preparing a research paper on this point as it is significant.

Meanwhile Jérôme Valcke, FIFA's secretary general, blurts "Is there a risk the referee will not be as strong as he is today?"

You know what, mate, nobody cares about a referee's sense of personal power.
What we demand is integrity in the sport we love.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2015

Follow us on Twitter @FootballisFixed

Thomas Piketty: "... wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labour. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future. The consequences for the long-term dynamics of wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale."

While virtually all advocacy, transparency and tax avoidance entities focus on offshore financial centres, money laundering and current abuses of the template of capital, the real wealth inequalities exist on the basis of old money and all those forgotten crimes.
For privately educated individuals enhancing their existences via private income in their non-meritocratic NGOs, the critical nature of historical wealth and inheritance is carefully ignored.

Josiah Wedgwood: " Political democracies that don't democratise their economic systems are inherently unstable."

Ponzi Capitalism

Capitalism has been a Ponzi scheme throughout its history - political scientists from Marx to Piketty have understood this fact.

Since 1700, the average annual rate of growth of the global economy has been 0.8%...
... and the average annual demographic growth in global population has been 0.8%.

Growth in income is expected to fall further throughout the 21st Century as the birth rate declines in lockstep across the world whilst, in parallel, systemic issues relating to planetary climatic stability move into primary focus.

The Ponzi scheme is running towards its precipitous conclusion and all that remains is the opportunity for imposition of redistributive policies to prevent the same fools from performing the same self-harming in a world of post-capitalist bliss.

There is only one solution to the first stage of the deconstruction of late capitalism - a markedly progressive tax on the largest fortunes worldwide (targeting both capital and income) to both prevent inheritance trumping meritocracy and to enforce an efficient use of capital for global rather than proprietary benefit.
Additionally, with such a progressive tax in place, the incentive to amass huge fortunes in the first place would be undermined.

Taxing Capital Progressively

Piketty: "... most countries' taxes have (or will soon) become regressive at the top of the income hierarchy. For example, a detailed study of French taxes in 2010, which looked at all forms of taxation, found that the overall rate of taxation... broke down as follows. The bottom 50% of the income distribution pay a rate of 40-45%; the next 40% pay 45-50%; but the top 5% and even more the top 1% pay lower rates, with the top 0.1% paying only 35%."

The annual global returns on capital are conservatively estimated at 5-6% while income growth is expected to struggle above zero this century.
Piketty: "Note, too, that inequality of income from capital may be greater than inequality of capital itself, if individuals with large fortunes somehow manage to obtain a higher return than those with modest to middling fortunes... Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (the fortunes accumulated in the past) predominate over savings (wealth accumulated in the present)."

"... the ideal policy for avoiding an endless inegalitarian spiral and regaining control over the dynamics of accumulation would be a progressive global tax on capital. Such a tax would also have another virtue: it would expose wealth to democratic scrutiny, which is a necessary condition for effective regulation of the banking system and international capital flows."

"There are two distinct justifications of a capital tax; a contributive justification and an incentive justification... The primary purpose of the capital tax is not to finance the social state but to regulate capitalism."

The conventional focus on taxing income and targeting money laundering is merely a part of the jigsaw of fiscal justice - much more importantly, capital needs to be progressively taxed to avoid the inefficient use of such capital, the excessive returns generated by such non-meritocratic wealth and an end to austerity-based matrices of social injustice.

The most farcical argument against progressive income and capital taxes is that the elite would simply move to more tax-friendly locations. With global tax co-operation and an end to the opacity of offshore financial centres, there would moreover be nowhere left to slink off to.
Anyway - Piketty: "The idea that all US executives would immediately flee to Canada and Mexico and nobody with the competence or motivation to run the economy would remain is not only contradicted by historical experience and by all the firm level data at our disposal; it is also devoid of common sense."

Income Inequality - The Root Of All Financial Crises

National wealth has become markedly privatised in the last four decades.

Furthermore, as Piketty states, "... given the fact that the share of the upper decile in US national income has peaked twice in the past century, once in 1928 (on the eve of the Depression of 1929) and again in 2007 (on the eve of the recession of 2008, the question [does increasing inequality cause financial crisis?] is difficult to avoid."

Currently in the US, incomes are as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere anytime - the top 1% gain 35% of income while the bottom 50% of population earn just 25%.

Piketty: "Effective tax rates (expressed as a percentage of economic income) are extremely low at the top of the wealth hierarchy, which is problematic, since it accentuates the explosive dynamics of wealth inequality, especially when larger fortunes are able to garner larger returns... The goal is first to stop the indefinite increase in the inequality of wealth, and second to impose effective regulation on the financial and banking system to avoid crises."

There are only three tools for getting rid of the current levels of debt in the developed nations - taxes on capital, inflation and austerity.
Austerity isn't a prerequisite, it is an option.

The privatisation of wealth in the last 40 years has seen huge rewards for "super-managers" - such rewards are not commensurate with performance.
Piketty: "... there is no statistically significant relationship between the decrease in top marginal tax rates and the rate of productivity growth in the developed countries since 1980. Concretely, the crucial fact is that the rate of per capita GDP growth has been almost exactly the same in all the rich countries since 1980. In contrast to what many people in Britain and the United States believe, the true figures on growth ... show that Britain and the United States have not grown any more rapidly since 1980 than Germany, France, Japan, Denmark or Sweden."

Of course, the mainstream media, governments and the financial system en masse don't want any focus on private wealth with their collective attempts to get us to pay attention to immediate income rather than long-term capital wealth. But their myopia is complete in that all Ponzi's possess the seeds of their own destruction.
Piketty: "... capitalists do indeed dig their own grave: either they tear each other apart in a desperate attempt to combat the falling rate of profit..., or they force labour to accept a smaller and smaller share of national income, which ultimately leads to a proletarian revolution and general expropriation. In any event capital is undermined by its internal contradictions."
Stiglitz has made a similar point.

Meanwhile, in a parallel sociopathic world, George Osborne increased the inheritance tax threshold this month.

Piketty: "To regulate the globalised patrimonial capitalism of the twenty-first century, rethinking the twentieth-century fiscal and social model and adapting it to today's world will not be enough. To be sure, appropriate updating of the last century's social-democratic and fiscal-liberal program is essential... But if democracy is to regain control the globalised financial capitalism of this century, it must also invent new tools, adapted to today's challenges. The ideal tool would be a progressive global tax on capital, coupled with a very high level of international financial transparency. Such a tax would provide a way to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral and to control the worrisome dynamics of global capital concentration."

Av total net wealth of people in #UK is £147,000. Look at the #EBT totalisations for those associated with RFC plc. https://t.co/ytyATOkkNd

— FOOTBALL is FIXED (@footballisfixed) November 21, 2015

Look what somebody has just posted through my Tor...
__________________________________________________________________________________

Below are details of the illegal inducements (EBTs) used by Rangers Football Club plc to gain unfair advantage in Scottish football.

It would be interesting to know how much it would cost Celtic (due to retrospective bonus payments) if stolen trophies were returned to their rightful owners.

This will surely impact upon the club's strategy with regard to...
 ...#StripTheTitles
___________________________________________________________________________________

The Rangers Football Club plc

List of Regulation 80 Determinations and Class 1 NI Decisions issued on 28.02.08
Regulation 80 Determination // Section 8 Decision

2001/02 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 // 2001/02 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07

Graeme Souness The Rangers Football Club plc 20,000.00 (01/02) // 5,950.00 (01/02)
Walter Smith The Rangers Football Club plc 53,333.20 (02/03) // 15,733.29 (02/03)
Christian Nerlinger The Rangers Football Club plc
Barry Ferguson The Rangers Football Club plc 333,333.60 (01/02) 74,666.80 (03/04) 120,000.00 (04/05) 307,333.20 (05/06) 122,000.00 (06/07) // 99,166.74 (01/02) 25,760.04 (03/04) 41,400.00 (04/05) 106,029.95 (05/06) 42,090.00 (06/07)
Michael Ball The Rangers Football Club plc 233,333.20 (01/02) 233,333.60 (02/03) 233,333.60 (03/04) 233,333.60 (04/05) 18,266.80 (05/06) // 69,416.62 (01/02) 68,833.41 (02/03) 80,500.09 (03/04) 80,500.09 (04/05) 6,302.04 (05/06)
Martin Bain The Rangers Football Club plc 10,000.00 (01/02) 8,666.80 (02/03) 24,000.00 (03/04) 60,666.80 (04/05) 66,666.80 (05/06) // 2,975.00 (01/02) 2,556.70 (02/03) 8,280.00 (03/04) 20,930.04 (04/05) 23,000.04 (05/06)
Nick Peel The Rangers Football Club plc 10,000.00 (01/02) 5,600.00 (02/03) 26,666.80 (03/04) 18,666.80 (04/05) // 2,975.00 (01/02) 1,652.00 (02/03) 9,200.04 (03/04) 6,440.04 (04/05)
Claudio Paul Caniggia The Rangers Football Club plc
Craig Andrew Moore The Rangers Football Club plc
Neil Doherty McCann The Rangers Football Club plc 166,666.40 (01/02) 166,666.40 (02/03) 333,333.20 (03/04) // 49,583.25 (01/02) 49,166.58 (02/03) 114,995.95 (03/04)
Shota Averladze The Rangers Football Club plc 186,666.40 (01/02) 93,333.20 (02/03) 186,666.40 (03/04) 279,999.60 (04/05) // 55,533.25 (01/02) 27,533.29 (02/03) 64,399.90 (03/04) 96,599.86 (04/05)
Arthur Numan The Rangers Football Club plc 250,000.00 (02/03) 90,000.00 (03/04) // 73,750.00 (02/03) 31,050.00 (03/04)
Lorenzo Amoruso The Rangers Football Club plc 200,000.00 (01/02) 126,000.00 (02/03) 100,000.00 (03/04) // 59,500.00 (01/02) 37,170.00 (02/03) 34,500.00 (03/04)
Russell Latapy The Rangers Football Club plc 121,666.40 (02/03) 68,333.20 (03/04) // 35,891.58 (02/03) 23,574.95 (03/04)
Robert Campbell Ogilvie The Rangers Football Club plc 3,333.20 (01/02) 3,333.20 (02/03) 3,333.20 (03/04) 53,333.20 (05/06) // 991.62 (01/02) 983.29 (02/03) 1,149.95 (03/04) 18,399.95 (05/06)
Stefan Klos The Rangers Football Club plc 83,333.20 (01/02) 83,333.20 (02/03) 166,666.40 (03/04) 483,333.20 (04/05) 263,333.20 (05/06) // 24,791.62 (01/02) 24,583.29 (02/03) 57,499.90 (03/04) 166,749.95 (04/05) 90,849.95 (05/06)
Alex McLeish The Rangers Football Club plc 100,000.00 (02/03) 240,000.40 (03/04) 160,000.00 (04/05) 242,000.00 (05/06) 460,000.00 (06/07) // 29,500.00 (02/03) 82,800.13 (03/04) 55,200.00 (04/05) 83,490.00 (05/06) 158,700.00 (06/07)

Annual Totals 
1,246,666.00 (01/02) 1,245,266.00 (02/03) 1,547,000.00 (03/04) 1,356,000.00 (04/05) 950,933.20 (05/06) 582,000.00 (06/07) // 370,883.10 (01/02) 367,353.43 (02/03) 533,710.95 (03/04) 467,819.98 (04/05) 328,071.93 (05/06) 200,790.00 (06/07)
___________________________________________________________________________________

List of Regulation 80 Determinations and Class 1 NI Decisions issued on 07.03.08
Employee Company Regulation 80 // Determination Section 8 Decision

2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 // 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06

Kevin Muscat The Rangers Football Club plc 53,333.20 (02/03) 358,800.00 (03/04) 152,800.00 (04/05) 152,800.00 (05/06) // 15,733.29 (02/03) 123,786.00 (03/04) 52,716.00 (04/05) 52,716.00 (05/06)
Mikel Arteta The Rangers Football Club plc 142,504.00 (02/03) 470,980.80 (03/04) // 42,045.76 (02/03) 162,488.37 (03/04)
Dick Advocaat The Rangers Football Club plc 513,433.20 (02/03) // 151,462.79 (02/03)
Billy Dodds The Rangers Football Club plc 126,666.80 (02/03) // 37,366.70 (02/03)
Andre Kanchelskis The Rangers Football Club plc 96,666.80 (02/03) // 28,516.70 (02/03)
Tore Andre Flo The Rangers Football Club plc 533,333.20 (02/03) 166,666.80 (03/04) 166,666.80 (04/05)// 157,333.29 (02/03) 57,500.04 (03/04) 57,500.04 (04/05)
John Greig The Rangers Football Club plc 6,666.80 (02/03) 6,666.80 (03/04) 6,666.80 (04/05) 6,666.80 (05/06) // 1,966.70 (02/03) 2,300.04 (03/04) 2,300.04 (04/05) 2,300.04 (05/06)
Bert Van Lingen The Rangers Football Club plc 43,333.20 (02/03) // 12,783.29 (02/03)
Ronald de Boer The Rangers Football Club plc 403,490.00 (03/04) 418,609.20 (04/05) 244,884.80 (05/06) // 119,029.55 (03/04) 144,420.17 (04/05) 84,485.25 (04/05)

Annual Totals 
1,515,937.20 (02/03) 1,406,604.40 (03/04) 744,742.80 (04/05) 404,351.60 (05/06) // 566,238.07 (02/03) 490,494.62 (03/04) 197,001.33 (04/05) 55,016.04 (05/06)
___________________________________________________________________________________

List of Regulation 80 Determinations and Class 1 NI Decisions issued on 14.03.08
Employee Company Regulation 80 // Determination Section 8 Decision

2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 // 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07

Bert Konterman The Rangers Football Club plc 200,000.00 (03/04) // 69,000.00 (03/04)
Andy Watson The Rangers Football Club plc 13,333.20 (02/03) 16,666.80 (03/04) 33,333.60 (04/05) 65,000.00 (05/06) 40,000.00 (06/07) // 3,933.29 (02/03) 5,750.04 (03/04) 11,500.09 (04/05) 22,425.00 (05/06) 13,800.00 (06/07)
Jan Wouters The Rangers Football Club plc 75,000.00 (03/04) 33,333.60 (04/05) 65,000.00 (05/06) // 25,785.00 (03/04) 11,500.09 (04/05) 22,425.00 (05/06)
Michael Mols The Rangers Football Club plc 68,000.00 (03/04) 105,333.20 (04/05) // 23,460.00 (03/04) 36,339.95 (04/05)
Andrew Dickson The Rangers Football Club plc 5,333.20 (03/04) // 1,839.95 (03/04)
Peter Lovenkrands The Rangers Football Club plc 124,000.00 (03/04) 172,000.00 (04/05) 211,333.20 (05/06) // 42,780.00 (03/04) 59,340.00 (04/05) 72,909.95 (05/06)
Emerson Costa The Rangers Football Club plc 156,000.00 (03/04) 418,000.00 (04/05) // 53,820.00 (03/04) 144,210.00 (04/05)
Nuno Cappucho The Rangers Football Club plc 313,333.60 (04/05) 133,333.20 (05/06) // 108,100.09 (04/05) 45,999.95 (05/06)
Dan Eggen The Rangers Football Club plc 22,666.80 (03/04) 22,666.80 (04/05) // 6,686.70 (02/03) 7,820.04 (03/04)
Jerome Bonnisel The Rangers Football Club plc 62,000.00 (03/04) // 21,390.00 (03/04)
Steven Thomson The Rangers Football Club plc 86,666.40 (03/04) 129,999.60 (04/05) 106,666.40 (05/06) // 29,899.90 (03/04) 44,849.86 (04/05) 36,799.90 (05/06)

Annual Totals 
13,333.20 (02/03) 616,333.20 (03/04) 1,228,000.40 (04/05) 581,332.80 (05/06) 40,000.00 (06/07) // 10,619.99 (02/03) 212,544.93 (03/04) 415,840.08 (04/05) 200,559.80 (05/06) 13,800.00 (06/07)
__________________________________________________________________________________

List of Regulation 80 Determinations and Class 1 NI Decisions issued on 31.03.08
Employee Company Regulation 80 // Determination Section 8 Decision

2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 // 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06

Jean Alain Boumsong The Rangers Football Club plc 133,333.20 (03/04) 286,666.80 (04/05) // 45,999.95 (03/04) 98,900.04 (04/05)
Egil Ostenstad The Rangers Football Club plc 246,666.80 (03/04) // 85,100.46 (03/04)
Paolo Vanoli The Rangers Football Club plc 394,666.80 (04/05) // 136,160.04 (04/05)
Zurab Khizanshvilli The Rangers Football Club plc 63,333.20 (03/04) 120,000.00 (04/05) 86,666.40 (05/06) // 21,849.95 (03/04) 41,400.00 (04/05) 29,899.90 (05/06)
Nacho Novo The Rangers Football Club plc 110,933.20 (04/05) 167,600.00 (05/06) // 38,271.95 (04/05) 57,822.00 (05/06)
Iain McGuiness The Rangers Football Club plc 6,666.40 (04/05) 10,266.40 (05/06) // 2,299.90 (04/05) 3,541.90 (05/06)
Tommy McLean The Rangers Football Club plc 8,000.00 (04/05) 16,666.40 (05/06) // 2,760.00 (04/05) 5,749.90 (05/06)
Gavin Rae The Rangers Football Club plc 19,000.00 (03/04) 32,333.20 (04/05) 60,000.00 (05/06) // 6,555.00 (03/04) 11,154.95 (04/05) 20,700.00 (05/06)
Jesper Christiansen The Rangers Football Club plc 213,333.20 (03/04) // 73,599.95 (03/04)

Annual Totals 
675,666.40 (03/04) 959,266.40 (04/05) 341,199.20 (05/06) // 159,505.36 (03/04) 404,546.83 (04/05) 117,713.70 (05/06)
___________________________________________________________________________________

List of Regulation 80 Determinations and Class 1 NI Decisions issued on 25.04.08
Employee Company Regulation 80 // Determination Section 8 Decision

2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 // 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07

Bob Malcolm The Rangers Football Club plc 43,333.20 (05/06) // 14,949.95 (05/06)
Chris Burke The Rangers Football Club plc 36,666.80 (05/06) // 12,650.04 (05/06)
Alan Hutton The Rangers Football Club plc 14,666.80 (05/06) // 5,060.04 (05/06)
Steven Smith The Rangers Football Club plc 5,000.00 (05/06) // 1,725.00 (05/06)
Kris Boyd The Rangers Football Club plc 10,000.00 (05/06) // 3,450.00 (05/06)
Fernando Ricksen The Rangers Football Club plc 80,000.00 (05/06) 98,000.00 (06/07) // 27,600.00 (05/06) 33,810.00 (06/07)
Sotirios Kyrgiakos The Rangers Football Club plc 50,000.00 (04/05) 158,800.00 (05/06) 146,000.00 (06/07) // 17,250.00 (04/05) 54,786.00 (05/06) 50,370.00 (06/07)
Gregory Vignal The Rangers Football Club plc 62,000.00 (04/05) 53,332.00 (05/06) // 21,390.00 (04/05) 18,399.95 (05/06)
Alex Rae The Rangers Football Club plc 66,000.00 (04/05) 227,333.20 (05/06) 86,000.00 (06/07) // 22,770.00 (04/05) 78,429.95 (05/06) 29,670.00 (06/07)
Dragan Mladenovich The Rangers Football Club plc 83,333.20 (04/05) 250,159.20 (05/06) // 28,749.95 (04/05) 86,304.92 (05/06)
Marvin Andrews The Rangers Football Club plc 50,133.60 (04/05) 119,066.80 (05/06) // 17,296.09 (04/05) 41,078.04 (05/06)
Dado Prso The Rangers Football Club plc 374,000.00 (04/05) 480,666.80 (05/06) // 129,030.00 (04/05) 165,830.04 (05/06)
Ronald Waterreus The Rangers Football Club plc 222,000.00 (05/06) 118,000.00 (06/07) // 76,590.00 (05/06) 40,710.00 (06/07)
Ian Murray The Rangers Football Club plc 63,333.20 (05/06) // 21,849.95 (05/06)
George Adams The Rangers Football Club plc 10,000.00 (05/06) // 3,450.00 (05/06)
Jose Pierre FanFan The Rangers Football Club plc 258,333.20 (05/06) 80,000.00 (06/07) // 89,124.95 (05/06) 27,600.00 (06/07)
Brahim Hemdani The Rangers Football Club plc 145,000.00 (05/06) 140,666.80 (06/07) // 50,025.00 (05/06) 48,530.04 (06/07)
Maurice Ross The Rangers Football Club plc 80,000.00 (05/06) // 27,600.00 (05/06)
Thomas Buffell The Rangers Football Club plc 268,333.20 (05/06) 110,000.00 (06/07) // 92,574.95 (05/06) 37,950.00 (06/07)

Annual Totals 
685,466.80 (04/05) 2,526,024.40 (05/06) 778,666.80 (06/07) // 236,486.04 (04/05) 871,478.78 (05/06) 268,640.04 (06/07)
___________________________________________________________________________________

List of Regulation 80 Determinations and Class 1 NI Decisions issued on 03.03.09
Employee Company Regulation 80 // Determination Section 8 Decision

2006/07 2007/08 // 2006/07 2007/08

Nacho Novo The Rangers Football Club plc 99,466.40 (06/07) 147,303.60 (07/08) // 85,135.65 (07/08)
Brahim Hemdani The Rangers Football Club plc 132,666.80 (06/07) 282,666.80 (07/08) // 143,290.90 (07/08)
Dado Prso The Rangers Football Club plc 416,666.80 (06/07) 42,666.80 (07/08) // 158,470.09 (07/08)
Barry Ferguson The Rangers Football Club plc 244,000.00 (06/07) 366,666.80 (07/08) // 210,680.04 (07/08)
Carlos Cuellar The Rangers Football Club plc 83,333.20 (07/08) // 28,749.95 (07/08)
Daniel Cousin The Rangers Football Club plc 176,666.40 (07/08) // 60,949.90 (07/08)
Libor Sionko The Rangers Football Club plc 86,666.80 (06/07) // 29,900.04 (06/07)
Gavin Rae The Rangers Football Club plc 74,000.00 (07/08) // 25,530.00 (07/08)
Olivier Bernard The Rangers Football Club plc 149,333.20 (06/07) // 51,519.95 (06/07)
Thomas Buffell The Rangers Football Club plc 110,000.00 (06/07) 110,000.00 (07/08) // 75,900.00 (07/08)
Julien Rodrigues The Rangers Football Club plc 52,666.80 (06/07) // 18,170.04 (07/08)
Stephen Wiertelak The Rangers Football Club plc 18,850.00 (06/07) // 6,503.25 (07/08)
Kris Boyd The Rangers Football Club plc 16,666.80 (06/07) 33,333.60 (07/08) // 17,250.00 (07/08)
Yves Colleau The Rangers Football Club plc 70,800.00 (06/07) // 24,426.00 (06/07)
David Jolliffe The Rangers Football Club plc 90,000.00 (06/07) // 31,050.00 (06/07)
Paul Le Guen The Rangers Football Club plc 13,433.20 (06/07) // 4,634.45 (06/07)
Joel Le Hir The Rangers Football Club plc 18,850.40 (06/07) // 6,503.25 (06/07)
Marvin Andrews The Rangers Football Club plc 41,533.20 (06/07) // 14,328.95 (06/07)
Ronald Waterreus The Rangers Football Club plc 118,000.00 (06/07) // 40,710.00 (06/07)
Bob Malcolm The Rangers Football Club plc 40,000.00 (06/07) // 13,800.00 (06/07)
Fernando Ricksen The Rangers Football Club plc 157,333.20 (06/07) // 54,279.95 (06/07)
Dragan Mladenovic The Rangers Football Club plc 166,666.80 (06/07) // 57,500.04 (06/07)
Stefan Klos The Rangers Football Club plc 606,666.80 (06/07) // 209,300.00 (06/07)
Jan Wouters The Rangers Football Club plc 16,666.80 (06/07) // 5,750.04 (06/07)
Jose Pierre FanFan The Rangers Football Club plc 480,000.00 (06/07) // 165,600.00 (06/07)
George Adams The Rangers Football Club plc 10,000.00 (06/07) // 3,450.00 (06/07)

Annual Totals 
3,156,934.00 (06/07) 1,316,637.20 (07/08) // 712,752.71 (06/07) 830,629.82 (07/08)
__________________________________________________________________________________

List of Regulation 80 Determinations and Class 1 NI Decisions issued on 15 March 2010
Employee Company Regulation 80 // Determination Section 8 Decision

2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09 // 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07 2007/08 2008/09

Christian Nerlinger The Rangers Football Club plc 433,333.33 (04/05) // 149,500.00 (04/05)
Craig Moore The Rangers Football Club plc 178,000.00 (04/05) // 61,410.00 (04/05)
David Jolliffe The Rangers Football Club plc 13,333.33 (04/05) 16,666.67 (05/06) // 10,350.00 (05/06)
Andrew Dickson The Rangers Football Club plc 10,000.00 (05/06) // 3,450.00 (05/06)
Julien Rodriguez The Rangers Football Club plc 136,666.67 (05/06) 236,000.00 (06/07) // 128,570.00 (06/07)
Federico Nieto The Rangers Football Club plc 16,333.33 (06/07) // 5,635.00 (06/07)
Alex McLeish The Rangers Football Club plc 1,333.33 (06/07) // 460.00 (06/07)
Steven Thompson The Rangers Football Club plc 26,666.67 (06/07) // 9,200.00 (06/07)
Peter Lovenkrands The Rangers Football Club plc 94,000.00 (06/07) // 32,430.00 (06/07)
Gavin Rae The Rangers Football Club plc 65,333.33 (06/07) // 22,540.00 (06/07)
Kris Boyd The Rangers Football Club plc 16,666.67 (06/07) 33,333.33 (08/09) // 17,250.00 (08/09)
Paul Le Guen The Rangers Football Club plc 234,900.00 (06/07) // 81,040.50 (06/07)
Yves Colleau The Rangers Football Club plc 22,833.33 (06/07) // 7,877.50 (06/07)
Libor Sionko The Rangers Football Club plc 32,000.00 (06/07) // 11,040.00 (06/07)
Thomas Buffell The Rangers Football Club plc 110,000.00 (07/08) 110,000.00 (08/09) // 75,900.00 (08/09)
Alan Hutton The Rangers Football Club plc 114,000.00 (07/08) 114,000.00 (08/09) // 78,660.00 (08/09)
Barry Ferguson The Rangers Football Club plc 340,000.00 (08/09) // 117,300.00 (08/09)
Nacho Novo The Rangers Football Club plc 127,183.33 (08/09) // 43,878.25 (08/09)
Brahim Hemdani The Rangers Football Club plc 242,666.67 (08/09) // 83,720.00 (08/09)
Daniel Cousin The Rangers Football Club plc 49,200.00 (08/09) // 16,974.00 (08/09)
Carlos Cuellar The Rangers Football Club plc 83,333.33 (08/09) // 28,750.00 (08/09)
Pedro Mendes The Rangers Football Club plc 240,000.00 (08/09) // 82,800.00 (08/09)
Steve Davis The Rangers Football Club plc 206,666.67 (08/09) // 71,300.00 (08/09)
Sasa Papac The Rangers Football Club plc 48,666.67 (08/09) // 16,790.00 (08/09)

Annual Totals 
624,666.66 (04/05) 179,666.67 (05/06) 729,733.33 (06/07) 224,000.00 (07/08) 1,595,050.00 (08/09) // 210,910.00 (04/05) 19,435.00 (05/06) 293,158.00 (06/07) Zero (07/08) 633,322.25 (08/09)
___________________________________________________________________________________

REGULATION 80 DETERMINATION OVERALL TOTAL - £27,271,478.66

SECTION 8 DECISION OVERALL TOTAL - £9,189,322.78
___________________________________________________________________________________

© Football is Fixed 2006-2015

"Whistleblowers are outliers of probability, and if they are to be effective as a political force, it’s critical that they maximize the amount of public good produced from scarce seed."
_________________________________________________________________________________

"I've been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by revealing secret truths.

One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.

But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn’t have to wait 40 years to witness other citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971; Chelsea Manning provided the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the Cablegate materials to WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now here we are in 2016, and another person of courage and conscience has made available the set of extraordinary documents that are published in The Assassination Complex, the new book out today by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. (The documents were originally published last October 15 in The Drone Papers.)

We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience. And this temporal compression has a significance beyond the immediate headlines; it permits the people of this country to learn about critical government actions, not as part of the historical record but in a way that allows direct action through voting — in other words, in a way that  empowers an informed citizenry to defend the democracy that “state secrets” are nominally intended to support. When I see individuals who are able to bring information forward, it gives me hope that we won’t always be required to curtail the illegal activities of our government as if it were a constant task, to uproot official lawbreaking as routinely as we mow the grass. (Interestingly enough, that is how some have begun to describe remote killing operations, as “cutting the grass.”)

A single act of whistleblowing doesn’t change the reality that there are significant portions of the government that operate below the waterline, beneath the visibility of the public. Those secret activities will continue, despite reforms. But those who perform these actions now have to live with the fear that if they engage in activities contrary to the spirit of society — if even a single citizen is catalyzed to halt the machinery of that injustice — they might still be held to account. The thread by which good governance hangs is this equality before the law, for the only fear of the man who turns the gears is that he may find himself upon them.

Hope lies beyond, when we move from extraordinary acts of revelation to a collective culture of accountability within the intelligence community. Here we will have taken a meaningful step toward solving a problem that has existed for as long as our government.


Not all leaks are alike, nor are their makers. Gen. David Petraeus, for instance, provided his illicit lover and favorable biographer information so secret it defied classification, including the names of covert operatives and the president’s private thoughts on matters of strategic concern. Petraeus was not charged with a felony, as the Justice Department had initially recommended, but was instead permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Had an enlisted soldier of modest rank pulled out a stack of highly classified notebooks and handed them to his girlfriend to secure so much as a smile, he’d be looking at many decades in prison, not a pile of character references from a Who’s Who of the Deep State.

There are authorized leaks and also permitted disclosures. It is rare for senior administration officials to explicitly ask a subordinate to leak a CIA officer’s name to retaliate against her husband, as appears to have been the case with Valerie Plame. It is equally rare for a month to go by in which some senior official does not disclose some protected information that is beneficial to the political efforts of the parties but clearly “damaging to national security” under the definitions of our law.

This dynamic can be seen quite clearly in the al Qaeda “conference call of doom” story, in which intelligence officials, likely seeking to inflate the threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, revealed to a neoconservative website extraordinarily detailed accounts of specific communications they had intercepted, including locations of the participating parties and the precise contents of the discussions. If the officials’ claims were to be believed, they irrevocably burned an extraordinary means of learning the precise plans and intentions of terrorist leadership for the sake of a short-lived political advantage in a news cycle. Not a single person seems to have been so much as disciplined as a result of the story that cost us the ability to listen to the alleged al Qaeda hotline.


If harmfulness and authorization make no difference, what explains the distinction between the permissible and the impermissible disclosure?

The answer is control. A leak is acceptable if it’s not seen as a threat, as a challenge to the prerogatives of the institution. But if all of the disparate components of the institution — not just its head but its hands and feet, every part of its body — must be assumed to have the same power to discuss matters of concern, that is an existential threat to the modern political monopoly of information control, particularly if we’re talking about disclosures of serious wrongdoing, fraudulent activity, unlawful activities. If you can’t guarantee that you alone can exploit the flow of controlled information, then the aggregation of all the world’s unmentionables — including your own — begins to look more like a liability than an asset.


Truly unauthorized disclosures are necessarily an act of resistance — that is, if they’re not done simply for press consumption, to fluff up the public appearance or reputation of an institution. However, that doesn’t mean they all come from the lowest working level. Sometimes the individuals who step forward happen to be near the pinnacle of power. Ellsberg was in the top tier; he was briefing the secretary of defense. You can’t get much higher, unless you are the secretary of defense, and the incentives simply aren’t there for such a high-ranking official to be involved in public interest disclosures because that person already wields the influence to change the policy directly.

At the other end of the spectrum is Manning, a junior enlisted soldier, who was much nearer to the bottom of the hierarchy. I was midway in the professional career path. I sat down at the table with the chief information officer of the CIA, and I was briefing him and his chief technology officer when they were publicly making statements like “We try to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” and everybody still thought that was a cute business slogan. Meanwhile I was designing the systems they would use to do precisely that. I wasn’t briefing the policy side, the secretary of defense, but I was briefing the operations side, the National Security Agency’s director of technology. Official wrongdoing can catalyze all levels of insiders to reveal information, even at great risk to themselves, so long as they can be convinced that it is necessary to do so.

Reaching those individuals, helping them realize that their first allegiance as a public servant is to the public rather than to the government, is the challenge. That’s a significant shift in cultural thinking for a government worker today.

I’ve argued that whistleblowers are elected by circumstance. It’s not a virtue of who you are or your background. It’s a question of what you are exposed to, what you witness. At that point the question becomes Do you honestly believe that you have the capability to remediate the problem, to influence policy? I would not encourage individuals to reveal information, even about wrongdoing, if they do not believe they can be effective in doing so, because the right moment can be as rare as the will to act.

This is simply a pragmatic, strategic consideration. Whistleblowers are outliers of probability, and if they are to be effective as a political force, it’s critical that they maximize the amount of public good produced from scarce seed. When I was making my decision, I came to understand how one strategic consideration, such as waiting until the month before a domestic election, could become overwhelmed by another, such as the moral imperative to provide an opportunity to arrest a global trend that had already gone too far. I was focused on what I saw and on my sense of overwhelming disenfranchisement that the government, in which I had believed for my entire life, was engaged in such an extraordinary act of deception.

At the heart of this evolution is that whistleblowing is a radicalizing event — and by “radical” I don’t mean “extreme”; I mean it in the traditional sense of radix, the root of the issue. At some point you recognize that you can’t just move a few letters around on a page and hope for the best. You can’t simply report this problem to your supervisor, as I tried to do, because inevitably supervisors get nervous. They think about the structural risk to their career. They’re concerned about rocking the boat and “getting a reputation.” The incentives aren’t there to produce meaningful reform. Fundamentally, in an open society, change has to flow from the bottom to the top.

As someone who works in the intelligence community, you’ve given up a lot to do this work. You’ve happily committed yourself to tyrannical restrictions. You voluntarily undergo polygraphs; you tell the government everything about your life. You waive a lot of rights because you believe the fundamental goodness of your mission justifies the sacrifice of even the sacred. It’s a just cause.

And when you’re confronted with evidence — not in an edge case, not in a peculiarity, but as a core consequence of the program — that the government is subverting the Constitution and violating the ideals you so fervently believe in, you have to make a decision. When you see that the program or policy is inconsistent with the oaths and obligations that you’ve sworn to your society and yourself, then that oath and that obligation cannot be reconciled with the program. To which do you owe a greater loyalty?

One of the extraordinary things about the revelations of the past several years, and their accelerating pace, is that they have occurred in the context of the United States as the “uncontested hyperpower.” We now have the largest unchallenged military machine in the history of the world, and it’s backed by a political system that is increasingly willing to authorize any use of force in response to practically any justification. In today’s context that justification is terrorism, but not necessarily because our leaders are particularly concerned about terrorism in itself or because they think it’s an existential threat to society. They recognize that even if we had a 9/11 attack every year, we would still be losing more people to car accidents and heart disease, and we don’t see the same expenditure of resources to respond to those more significant threats.

What it really comes down to is the political reality that we have a political class that feels it must inoculate itself against allegations of weakness. Our politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism — of the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously — than they are of the crime itself.

As a result we have arrived at this unmatched capability, unrestrained by policy. We have become reliant upon what was intended to be the limitation of last resort: the courts. Judges, realizing that their decisions are suddenly charged with much greater political importance and impact than was originally intended, have gone to great lengths in the post-9/11 period to avoid reviewing the laws or the operations of the executive in the national security context and setting restrictive precedents that, even if entirely proper, would impose limits on government for decades or more. That means the most powerful institution that humanity has ever witnessed has also become the least restrained. Yet that same institution was never designed to operate in such a manner, having instead been explicitly founded on the principle of checks and balances. Our founding impulse was to say, “Though we are mighty, we are voluntarily restrained.”


When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath — not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there’s this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you’re asked to participate in.
These disclosures about the Obama administration’s killing program reveal that there’s a part of the American character that is deeply concerned with the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of power. And there is no greater or clearer manifestation of unchecked power than assuming for oneself the authority to execute an individual outside of a battlefield context and without the involvement of any sort of judicial process.

Traditionally, in the context of military affairs, we’ve always understood that lethal force in battle could not be subjected to ex ante judicial constraints. When armies are shooting at each other, there’s no room for a judge on that battlefield. But now the government has decided — without the public’s participation, without our knowledge and consent — that the battlefield is everywhere. Individuals who don’t represent an imminent threat in any meaningful sense of those words are redefined, through the subversion of language, to meet that definition.

Inevitably that conceptual subversion finds its way home, along with the technology that enables officials to promote comfortable illusions about surgical killing and nonintrusive surveillance. Take, for instance, the Holy Grail of drone persistence, a capability that the United States has been pursuing forever. The goal is to deploy solar-powered drones that can loiter in the air for weeks without coming down. Once you can do that, and you put any typical signals collection device on the bottom of it to monitor, unblinkingly, the emanations of, for example, the different network addresses of every laptop, smartphone, and iPod, you know not just where a particular device is in what city, but you know what apartment each device lives in, where it goes at any particular time, and by what route. Once you know the devices, you know their owners. When you start doing this over several cities, you’re tracking the movements not just of individuals but of whole populations.

By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they’re in our pockets. It sounds like fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level it’s so trivial to implement that I cannot imagine a future in which it won’t be attempted. It will be limited to the war zones at first, in accordance with our customs, but surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.

Here we see the double edge of our uniquely American brand of nationalism. We are raised to be exceptionalists, to think we are the better nation with the manifest destiny to rule. The danger is that some people will actually believe this claim, and some of those will expect the manifestation of our national identity, that is, our government, to comport itself accordingly.

Unrestrained power may be many things, but it’s not American. It is in this sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and lifts the lamp, inheriting the legacy of a line of Americans that begins with Paul Revere.

The individuals who make these disclosures feel so strongly about what they have seen that they’re willing to risk their lives and their freedom. They know that we, the people, are ultimately the strongest and most reliable check on the power of government. The insiders at the highest levels of government have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources, tremendous access to influence, and a monopoly on violence, but in the final calculus there is but one figure that matters: the individual citizen.

And there are more of us than there are of them.

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s Emily Bell spoke to Edward Snowden over a secure channel about his experiences working with journalists and his perspective on the shifting media world. This is an excerpt of that conversation, conducted in December 2015. It will appear in a forthcoming book: Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State, which will be released by Columbia University Press in 2016.

Emily Bell: Can you tell us about your interactions with journalists and the press?

Edward Snowden: One of the most challenging things about the changing nature of the public’s relationship to media and the government’s relationship to media is that media has never been stronger than it is now. At the same time, the press is less willing to use that sort of power and influence because of its increasing commercialization. There was this tradition that the media culture we had inherited from early broadcasts was intended to be a public service. Increasingly we’ve lost that, not simply in fact, but in ideal, particularly due to the 24-hour news cycle.

We see this routinely even at organizations like The New York Times. The Intercept recently published The Drone Papers, which was an extraordinary act of public service on the part of a whistleblower within the government to get the public information that’s absolutely vital about things that we should have known more than a decade ago. These are things that we really need to know to be able to analyze and assess policies. But this was denied to us, so we get one journalistic institution that breaks the story, they manage to get the information out there. But the majors—specifically The New York Times—don’t actually run the story, they ignore it completely. This was so extraordinary that the public editor, Margaret Sullivan, had to get involved to investigate why they suppressed such a newsworthy story. It’s a credit to the Times that they have a public editor, but it’s frightening that there’s such a clear need for one.

In the UK, when The Guardian was breaking the NSA story, we saw that if there is a competitive role in the media environment, if there’s money on the line, reputation, potential awards, anything that has material value that would benefit the competition, even if it would simultaneously benefit the public, the institutions are becoming less willing to serve the public to the detriment of themselves. This is typically exercised through the editors. This is something that maybe always existed, but we don’t remember it as always existing. Culturally, we don’t like to think of it as having always existed. There are things that we need to know, things that are valuable for us, but we are not allowed to know, because The Telegraph or the Times or any other paper in London decides that because this is somebody else’s exclusive, we’re not going to report it. Instead, we’ll try to “counter-narrative” it. We’ll simply go to the government and ask them to make any statement at all, and we will unquestioningly write it down and publish it, because that’s content that’s exclusive to us. Regardless of the fact that it’s much less valuable, much less substantial than actual documented facts that we can base policy discussions on. We’ve seemingly entered a world where editors are making decisions about what stories to run based on if it’ll give oxygen to a competitor, rather than if it’s news.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, because while I do interact with media, I’m an outsider. You know media. As somebody who has worked in these cultures, do you see the same thing? Sort of the Fox News effect, where facts matter less?


Bell: It’s a fascinating question. When you look at Donald Trump, there’s a problem when you have a press which finds it important to report what has happened, without a prism of some sort of evaluation on it. That’s the Trump problem, right? He says thousands of Muslims were celebrating in the streets of New Jersey after 9/11 and it’s demonstrably not true. It’s not even a quantification issue, it’s just not true. Yet, it dominates the news cycle, and he dominates the TV, and you see nothing changing in the polls—or, rather, him becoming more popular.

There are two things I think here, one of which is not new. I completely agree with you about how the economic dynamics have actually produced, bad journalism. One of the interesting things which I think is hopeful about American journalism is that within the last 10 years there’s been a break between this relationship, which is the free market, which says you can’t do good journalism unless you make a profit, into intellectually understanding that really good journalism not only sometimes won’t make a profit, but is almost never going to be anything other than unprofitable.

I think your acts and disclosures are really interesting in that it’s a really expensive story to do, and it is not the kind of story that advertisers want to stand next to. Actually people didn’t want to pay to read them. Post hoc they’ll say, we like The Guardian; we’re going to support their work. So I agree with you that there’s been a disjuncture between facts and how they are projected. I would like to think it’s going to get better.

You’re on Twitter now. You’re becoming a much more rounded out public persona, and lots of people have seen Citizenfour. You’ve gone from being this source persona, to being more actively engaged with Freedom of the Press Foundation, and also having your own publishing stream through a social media company. The press no longer has to be the aperture for you. How do you see that?

Snowden: Today, you have people directly reaching an audience through tools like Twitter, and I have about 1.7 million followers right now (this number reflects the number of Twitter followers Snowden had in December 2015). These are people, theoretically, that you can reach, that you can send a message to. Whether it’s a hundred people or a million people, individuals can build audiences to speak with directly. This is actually one of the ways that you’ve seen new media actors, and actually malicious actors, exploit what are perceived as new vulnerabilities in media control of the narrative, for example Donald Trump.

At the same time these strategies still don’t work […] for changing views and persuading people on a larger scope. Now this same thing applies to me. The director of the FBI can make a false statement, or some kind of misleading claim in congressional testimony. I can fact-check and I can say this is inaccurate. Unless some entity with a larger audience, for example, an established institution of journalism, sees that themselves, the value of these sorts of statements is still fairly minimal. They are following these new streams of information, then reporting out on those streams. This is why I think we see such a large interplay and valuable interactions that are emerging from these new media self-publication Twitter-type services and the generation of stories and the journalist user base of Twitter.

If you look at the membership of Twitter in terms of the influence and impact that people have, there are a lot of celebrities out there on Twitter, but really they’re just trying to maintain an image, promote a band, be topical, remind people that they exist. They’re not typically effecting any change, or having any kind of influence, other than the directly commercial one.

Bell: Let’s think about it in terms of your role in changing the world, which is presenting these new facts. There was a section of the technology press and the intelligence press who, at the time of the leaks, said we already know this, except it’s hidden in plain sight. Yet, a year after you made the disclosures, there was a broad shift of public perception about surveillance technologies. That may recede, and probably post-Paris, it is receding a little bit. Are you frustrated that there isn’t more long-term impact? Do you feel the world has not changed quickly enough?

Snowden: I actually don’t feel that. I’m really optimistic about how things have gone, and I’m staggered by how much more impact there’s been as a result of these revelations than I initially presumed. I’m famous for telling Alan Rusbridger that it would be a three-day story. You’re sort of alluding to this idea that people don’t really care, or that nothing has really changed. We’ve heard this in a number of different ways, but I think it actually has changed in a substantial way.

Now when we talk about the technical press, or the national security press, and you say, this is nothing new, we knew about this, a lot of this comes down to prestige, to the same kind of signaling where they have to indicate we have expertise, we knew this was going on. In many cases they actually did not. The difference is, they knew the capabilities existed.

This is, I think, what underlies why the leaks had such an impact. Some people say stories about the mass collection of internet records and metadata were published in 2006. There was a warrantless wiretapping story in The New York Times as well. Why didn’t they have the same sort of transformative impact? This is because there’s a fundamental difference when it comes down to the actionability of information between knowledge of capability, the allegation that the capability could be used, and the fact that it is being used. Now what happened in 2013 is we transformed the public debate from allegation to fact. The distance between allegation and fact, at times, makes all the difference in the world.

That, for me, is what defines the best kind of journalism. This is one of the things that is really underappreciated about what happened in 2013. A lot of people laud me as the sole actor, like I’m this amazing figure who did this. I personally see myself as having a quite minor role. I was the mechanism of revelation for a very narrow topic of governments. It’s not really about surveillance, it’s about what the public understands—how much control the public has over the programs and policies of its governments. If we don’t know what our government really does, if we don’t know the powers that authorities are claiming for themselves, or arrogating to themselves, in secret, we can’t really be said to be holding the leash of government at all.

One of the things that’s really missed is the fact that as valuable and important as the reporting that came out of the primary archive of material has been, there’s an extraordinarily large, and also very valuable amount of disclosure that was actually forced from the government, because they were so back-footed by the aggressive nature of the reporting. There were stories being reported that showed how they had abused these capabilities, how intrusive they were, the fact that they had broken the law in many cases, or had violated the Constitution.

When the government is shown in a most public way, particularly for a president who campaigned on the idea of curtailing this sort of activity, to have continued those policies, in many cases expanded them in ways contrary to what the public would expect, they have to come up with some defense. So in the first weeks, we got rhetorical defenses where they went, nobody’s listening to your phone calls. That wasn’t really compelling. Then they went, “It’s just metadata.” Actually that worked for quite some time, even though it’s not true. By adding complexity, they reduced participation. It is still difficult for the average person in the street to understand that metadata, in many cases, is actually more revealing and more dangerous than the content of your phone calls. But stories kept coming. Then they went, well alright, even if it is “just metadata,” it’s still unconstitutional activity, so how do we justify it? Then they go—well they are lawful in this context, or that context.

They suddenly needed to make a case for lawfulness, and that meant the government had to disclose court orders that the journalists themselves did not have access to, that I did not have access to, that no one in the NSA at all had access to, because they were bounded in a completely different agency, in the Department of Justice.

This, again, is where you’re moving from suspicion, from allegation, to factualizing things. Now of course, because these are political responses, each of them was intentionally misleading. The government wants to show itself in the best possible light. But even self-interested disclosures can still be valuable, so long as they’re based on facts. They’re filling in a piece of the puzzle, which may provide the final string that another journalist, working independently somewhere else, may need. It unlocks that page of the book, fills in the page they didn’t have, and that completes the story. I think that is something that has not been appreciated, and it was driven entirely by journalists doing follow-up.

There’s another idea that you mentioned: that I’m more engaged with the press than I was previously. This is very true. I quite openly in 2013 took the position that this is not about me, I don’t want to be the face of the argument. I said that I don’t want to correct the record of government officials, even though I could, even though I knew they were making misleading statements. We’re seeing in the current electoral circus that whatever someone says becomes the story, becomes the claim, becomes the allegation. It gets into credibility politics where they’re going, oh, you know, well, Donald Trump said it, it can’t be true. All of the terrible things he says put aside, there’s always the possibility that he does say something that is true. But, because it’s coming from him, it will be analyzed and assessed in a different light. Now that’s not to say that it shouldn’t be, but it was my opinion that there was no question that I was going to be subject to a demonization campaign. They actually recorded me on camera saying this before I revealed my identity. I predicted they were going to charge me under the Espionage Act, I predicted they were going to say I helped terrorists, blood on my hands, all of that stuff. It did come to pass. This was not a staggering work of genius on my part, it’s just common sense, this is how it always works in the case of prominent whistleblowers. It was because of this that we needed other voices, we needed the media to make the argument.

Because of the nature of the abuse of classification authorities in the United States, there is no one that’s ever held a security clearance who’s actually able to make these arguments. Modern media institutions prefer never to use their institutional voice to factualize a claim in a reported story, they want to point to somebody else. They want to say this expert said, or this official said, and keep themselves out of it. But in my mind, journalism must recognize that sometimes it takes the institutional weight to assess the claims that are publicly available, and to make a determination on that basis, then put the argument forth to whoever the person under suspicion is at the time, for example, the government in this case, and go—look, all of the evidence says you were doing this. You say that’s not the case, but why should we believe you? Is there any reason that we should not say this?

This is something that institutions today are loath to do because it’s regarded as advocacy. They don’t want to be in the position of having to referee what is and is not fact. Instead they want to play these “both sides games” where they say, instead we’ll just print allegations, we’ll print claims from both sides, we’ll print their demonstrations of evidence, but we won’t actually involve ourselves in it.

Because of this, I went the first six months without giving an interview. It wasn’t until December 2013 that I gave my first interview to Barton Gellman of TheWashington Post. In this intervening period my hope was that some other individual would come forth on the political side, and would become the face of this movement. But more directly I thought it would inspire some reflection in the media institutions to think about what their role was. I think they did a fairly good job, particularly for it being unprecedented, particularly for it being a segment in which the press has been, at least in the last 15 years, extremely reluctant to express any kind of skepticism regarding government claims at all. If it involved the word “terrorism,” these were facts that wouldn’t be challenged. If the government said, look, this is secret for a reason, this is classified for a reason, journalists would leave it at that. Again, this isn’t to beat up on The New York Times, but when we look at the warrantless wiretapping story that was ready to be published in October of an election year, that [election] was decided by the smallest margin in a presidential election, at least in modern history. It’s hard to believe that had that story been published, it would not have changed the course of that election.

Bell: Former Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson has said her paper definitely made mistakes, “I wish we had not withheld stories.” What you’re saying certainly resonates with what I know and understand of the recent history of the US press, which is that national security concerns post-9/11 really did alter the relationship of reporting, particularly with administration and authority in this country. What we know about drone programs comes from reporting, some of it comes from the story which The Intercept got hold of, and Jeremy Scahill’s reporting on it, which has been incredibly important. But a great deal of it has also come from the ground level. The fact that we were aware at all that drones were blowing up villages, killing civilians, crossing borders where they were not supposed to be really comes from people who would report from the ground.

Something interesting has definitely happened in the last three years, which makes me think about what you are telling us about how the NSA operates. We’re seeing a much closer relationship now between journalism and technology and mass communication technology than we’ve ever seen before. People are now completely reliant on Facebook. Some of that is a commercial movement in the US, but you also have activists and journalists being regularly tortured or killed in, say, Bangladesh, where it’s really impossible to operate a free press, but they are using these tools. It is almost like the American public media now is Facebook. I wonder how you think about this? It’s such a recent development.

Snowden: One of the biggest issues is that we have many more publishers competing for a finite, shrinking amount of attention span that’s available. This is why we have the rise of these sort of hybrid publications, like a BuzzFeed, that create just an enormous amount of trash and cruft. They’re doing AB testing and using scientific principles. Their content is specifically engineered to be more attention getting, even though they have no public value at all. They have no news value at all. Like here’s 10 pictures of kittens that are so adorable. But then they develop a news line within the institution, and the idea is that they can drive traffic with this one line of stories, theoretically, and then get people to go over onto the other side.

Someone’s going to exploit this; if it’s not going to be BuzzFeed, it’s going to be somebody else. This isn’t a criticism of any particular model, but the idea here is that the first click, that first link is actually consuming attention. The more we read about a certain thing, that’s actually reshaping our brains. Everything that we interact with, it has an impact on us, it has an influence, it leaves memories, ideas, sort of memetic expressions that we then carry around with us that shape what we look for in the future, and that are directing our development.

Bell: Yes, well that’s the coming singularity between the creation of journalism and large-scale technology platforms, which are not intrinsically journalistic. In other words, they don’t have a primary purpose.

Snowden: They don’t have a journalistic role, it’s a reportorial role.

Bell: Well, it’s a commercial role, right? So when you came to Glenn and The Guardian, there wasn’t a hesitation in knowing the primary role of the organization is to get that story to the outside world as securely and quickly as possible, avoiding prior restraint, protecting a source.

Is source protection even possible now? You were extremely prescient in thinking there’s no point in protecting yourself.

Snowden: I have an unfair advantage.

Bell: You do, but still, that’s a big change from 20 years ago.

Snowden: This is something that we saw contemporary examples of in the public record in 2013. It was the James Rosen case where we saw the Department of Justice, and government more broadly, was abusing its powers to demand blanket records of email and call data, and the AP case where phone records for calls that were made from the bureaus of journalism were seized.

That by itself is suddenly chilling, because the traditional work of journalism, the traditional culture, where the journalist would just call their contact and say, hey, let’s talk, suddenly becomes incriminating. But more seriously, if the individual in question, the government employee who is working with a journalist to report some issue of public interest, if this individual has gone so far to commit an act of journalism, suddenly they can be discovered trivially if they’re not aware of this.

I didn’t have that insight at the time I was trying to come forward because I had no relationship with journalists. I had never talked to a journalist in any substantive capacity. So, instead I simply thought about the adversarial relationship that I had inherited from my work as an intelligence officer, working for the CIA and the NSA. Everything is a secret and you’ve got two different kinds of cover. You’ve got cover for status, which is: You’re overseas, you’re living as a diplomat because you have to explain why you’re there. You can’t just say, oh, yeah, I work for the CIA. But you also have a different kind of cover which is what’s called cover for action. Where you’re not going to live in the region for a long time, you may just be in a building and you have to explain why you’re walking through there, you need some kind of pretext. This kind of trade-craft unfortunately is becoming more necessary in the reportorial process. Journalists need to know this, sources need to know this. At any given time, if you were pulled over by a police officer and they want to search your phone or something like that, you might need to explain the presence of an application. This is particularly true if you’re in a country like Bangladesh. I have heard that they’re now looking for the presence of VPN [virtual private network software] for avoiding censorship locks and being able to access uncontrolled news networks as evidence of opposition, allegiance, that could get you in real trouble in these areas of the world.

At the time of the leaks I was simply thinking, alright the government—and this isn’t a single government now—we’re actually talking about the Five Eyes intelligence alliance [the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Canada] forming a pan-continental super-state in this context of sharing, they’re going to lose their minds over this. Some institutions in, for example, the UK, can levy D notices, they can say, look, you can’t publish that, or you should not publish that. In the United States it’s not actually certain that the government would not try to exercise prior restraint in slightly different ways, or that they wouldn’t charge journalists as accomplices in some kind of criminality to interfere with the reporting without actually going after the institutions themselves, single out individuals. We have seen this in court documents before. This was the James Rosen case, where the DOJ had named him as sort of an accessory—they said he was a co-conspirator. So the idea I thought about here was that we need institutions working beyond borders in multiple jurisdictions simply to complicate it legally to the point that the journalists could play games, legally and journalistically more effectively and more quickly than the government could play legalistic games to interfere with them.

Bell: Right, but that’s kind of what happened with the reporting of the story.

Snowden: And in ways that I didn’t even predict, because who could imagine the way a story like that would actually get out of hand and go even further: Glenn Greenwald living in Brazil, writing for a US institution for that branch, but headquartered in the UK, TheWashington Post providing the institutional clout and saying, look, this is a real story, these aren’t just crazy leftists arguing about this, and Der Spiegel in Germany with Laura [Poitras]. It simply represented a system that I did not believe could be overcome before the story could be put out. By the time the government could get their ducks in a row and try to interfere with it, that would itself become the story.

Bell: You’re actually giving a sophisticated analysis of much of what’s happened to both reporting practice and media structures. As you say, you had no prior interactions with journalists. I think one of the reasons the press warmed to you was because you put faith in journalists, weirdly. You went in thinking I think I can trust these people, not just with your life, but with a huge responsibility. Then you spent an enormous amount of time, particularly with Glenn, Laura, and Ewen [MacAskill] in those hotel rooms. What was that reverse frisking process like as you were getting to know them? My experience is as people get closer to the press, they often like it less. Why would you trust journalists?

Snowden: This gets into the larger question—how did you feel about journalists, what was the process of becoming acquainted with them? There’s both a political response and a practical response. Specifically about Glenn, I believe very strongly that there’s no more important quality for a journalist than independence. That’s independence of perspective, and particularly skepticism of claims. The more powerful the institution, the more skeptical one should be. There’s an argument that was put forth by an earlier journalist, I.F. Stone: “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” In my experience, this is absolutely a fact. I’ve met with Daniel Ellsberg and spoken about this, and it comports with his experience as well. He would be briefing the Secretary of Defense on the airplane, and then when the Secretary of Defense would disembark right down the eight steps of the plane and shake hands with the press, he would say something that he knew was absolutely false and was completely contrary to what they had just said in the meeting [inside the place] because that was his role. That was his job, his duty, his responsibility as a member of that institution.

Now Glenn Greenwald, if we think about him as an archetype, really represents the purest form of that. I would argue that despite the failings of any journalist in one way or another, if they have that independence of perspective, they have the greatest capacity for reporting that a journalist can attain. Ultimately, no matter how brilliant you are, no matter how charismatic you are, no matter how perfect or absolute your sourcing is, or your access, if you simply take the claims of institutions that have the most privilege that they must protect, at face value, and you’re willing to sort of repeat them, all of those other things that are working in your favor in the final calculus amount to nothing because you’re missing the fundamentals.

There was the broader question of what it’s like working with these journalists and going through that process. There is the argument that I was naïve. In fact, that’s one of the most common criticisms about me today—that I am too naïve, that I have too much faith in the government, that I have too much faith in the press. I don’t see that as a weakness. I am naïve, but I think that idealism is critical to achieving change, ultimately not of policy, but of culture, right? Because we can change this or that law, we can change this or that policy or program, but at the end of the day, it’s the values of the people in these institutions that are producing these policies or programs. It’s the values of the people who are sitting at the desk with the blank page in Microsoft Office, or whatever journalists are using now.

Bell: I hope they’re not using Microsoft Office, but you never know.

Snowden: They have the blank page …

Bell: They have the blank page, exactly.

Snowden: In their content management system, or whatever. How is that individual going to approach this collection of facts in the next week, in the next month, in the next year, in the next decade? What will the professor in the journalism school say in their lecture that will impart these values, again, sort of memetically into the next cohort of reporters? If we do not win on that, we have lost comprehensively. More fundamentally, people say, why did you trust the press, given their failures? Given the fact that I was, in fact, quite famous for criticizing the press.

Bell: If they had done their job, you would be at home now.

Snowden: Yeah, I would still be living quite comfortably in Hawaii.

Bell: Which is not so bad, when you put it that way.

Snowden: People ask how could you do this, why would you do this? How could you trust a journalist that you knew had no training at all in operational security to keep your identity safe because if they screw up, you’re going to jail. The answer was that that was actually what I was expecting. I never expected to make it out of Hawaii. I was going to try my best, but my ultimate goal was simply to get this information back in the hands of the public. I felt that the only way that could be done meaningfully was through the press. If we can’t have faith in the press, if we can’t sort of take that leap of faith and either be served well by them, or underserved and have the press fail, we’ve already lost. You cannot have an open society without open communication. Ultimately, the test of open communication is a free press. If they can’t look for information, if they can’t contest the government’s control of information, and ultimately print information—not just about government, but also about corporate interests, that has a deleterious impact on the preferences of power, on the prerogatives of power. You may have something, but I would argue it’s not the traditional American democracy that I believed in.

So the idea here was that I could take these risks because I already expected to bear the costs. I expected the end of the road was a cliff. This is actually illustrated quite well in Citizenfour because it shows that there was absolutely no plan at all for the day after.

The planning to get to the point of working with the journalists, of transmitting this information, of explaining, contextualizing—it was obsessively detailed, because it had to be. Beyond that, the risks were my own. They weren’t for the journalists. They could do everything else. That was by design as well, because if the journalists had done anything shady—for example, if I had stayed in place at the NSA as a source and they had asked me for this document, and that document, it could have undermined the independence, the credibility of the process, and actually brought risks upon them that could have led to new constraints upon journalism.

Bell: So nothing you experienced in the room with the team, or what happened after, made you question or reevaluate journalism?

Snowden: I didn’t say that. Actually working more closely with the journalists has radically reshaped my understanding of journalism, and that continues through to today. I think you would agree that anybody who’s worked in the news industry, either directly or even peripherally, has seen journalists—or, more directly, editors—who are terrified, who hold back a story, who don’t want to publish a detail, who want to wait for the lawyers, who are concerned with liability.

You also have journalists who go out on their own and they publish details which actually are damaging, directly to personal safety. There were details published by at least one of the journalists that were discussing communication methods that I was still actively using, that previously had been secret. But the journalists didn’t even forewarn me, so suddenly I had to change all of my methods on the fly. Which worked out OK because I had the capabilities to do that, but dangerous.

Bell: When did that happen?

Snowden: This was at the height of public interest, basically. The idea here is that a journalist ultimately, and particularly a certain class of journalist, they don’t owe any allegiance to their source, right? They don’t write the story in line with what the sources desires, they don’t go about their publication schedule to benefit, or to detriment, in theory, the source at all. There are strong arguments that that’s the way it should be: public knowledge of the truth is more important than the risks that knowledge creates for a few. But at the same time, when a journalist is reporting on something like a classified program implicating one of the government’s sources, you see an incredibly high standard of care applied to make sure they can’t be blamed if something goes wrong down the road after publication. The journalists will go, well we’ll hold back this detail from that story reporting on classified documents, because if we name this government official it might expose them to some harm, or it might get this program shut down, or even if it might cause them to have to rearrange the deck chairs in the operations in some far away country.

That’s just being careful, right? But ask yourself—should journalists be just as careful when the one facing the blowback of a particular detail is their own source? In my experience, the answer does not seem to be as obvious as you might expect.

Bell: Do you foresee a world where someone won’t have to be a whistleblower in order to reveal the kinds of documents that you revealed? What kinds of internal mechanisms would that require on behalf of the government? What would that look like in the future?

Snowden: That’s a really interesting philosophical question. It doesn’t come down to technical mechanisms, that comes down to culture. We’ve seen in the EU a number of reports from parliamentary bodies, from the Council of Europe, that said we need to protect whistleblowers, in particular national security whistleblowers. In the national context no country really wants to pass a law that allows individuals rightly, or wrongly, to embarrass the government. But can we provide an international framework for this? One would argue, particularly when espionage laws are being used to prosecute people, they already exist. That’s why espionage, for example, is considered a political offense, because it’s just a political crime, as they say. That’s a fairly weak defense, or fairly weak justification, for not reforming whistleblower laws. Particularly when, throughout Western Europe they’re going, yeah, we like this guy, he did a good thing. But if he shows up on the doorstep we’re going to ship him back immediately, regardless of whether it’s unlawful, just because the US is going to retaliate against us. It’s extraordinary that the top members of German government have said this on the record—that it’s realpolitik; it’s about power, rather than principle.

Now how we can fix this? I think a lot of it comes down to culture, and we need a press that’s more willing and actually eager to criticize government than they are today. Even though we’ve got a number of good institutions that do that, or that want to do that, it needs a uniform culture. The only counterargument the government has made against national security whistleblowing, and many other things that embarrassed them in the past, is that well, it could cause some risk, we could go dark, they could have blood on their hands.

Why do they have different ground rules in the context of national security journalism?

We see that not just in the United States, but in France, Germany, the UK, in every Western country, and of course, in every more authoritarian country by comparison they are embracing the idea of state secrets, of classifications, or saying, you can’t know this, you can’t know that.

We call ourselves private citizens, and we refer to elected representatives as public officials, because we’re supposed to know everything about them and their activities. At the same time, they’re supposed to know nothing about us, because they wield all the power, and we hold all of the vulnerability. Yet increasingly, that’s becoming inverted, where they are the private officials, and we are the public citizens. We’re increasingly monitored and tracked and reported, quantified and known and influenced, at the same time that they’re getting themselves off and becoming less reachable and also less accountable.

Bell: But Ed, when you talk about this in those terms, you make it sound as though you see this as a progression. Certainly there was a sharp increase, as you demonstrated, in overreach of oversight post-9/11. Is it a continuum?

It felt from the outside as though America, post-9/11, for understandable reasons, it was almost like a sort of national psychosis. If you grew up in Europe, there were regular terrorist acts in almost every country after the Second World War, though not on the same scale, until there was a brief, five-year period of respite, weirdly running up to about 2001. Then the nature of the terrorism changed. To some extent, that narrative is predictable. You talk about it as an ever increasing problem. With the Freedom Act in 2015, the press identified this as a significant moment where the temperature had changed. You don’t sound like you really think that. You sound as though you think that this public/private secrecy, spying, is an increasing continuum. So how does that change? Particularly in the current political climate where post-Paris and other terrorist attacks we’ve already seen arguments for breaking encryption.

Snowden: I don’t think they are actually contradictory views to hold. I think what we’re talking about are the natural inclinations of power and vice, what we can do to restrain it, to maintain a free society. So when we think about where things have gone in the USA Freedom Act, and when we look back at the 1970s, it was even worse in terms of the level of comfort that the government had that it could engage in abuses and get away with them. One of the most important legacies of 2013 is not anything that was necessarily published, but it was the impact of the publication on the culture of government. It was a confirmation coming quite quickly in the wake of the WikiLeaks stories, which were equally important in this regard. That said, secrecy will not hold forever. If you authorize a policy that is clearly contrary to law, you will eventually have to explain that.

The question is, can you keep it under wraps long enough to get out of the administration, and hopefully for it to be out of the egregious sort of thing where you’ll lose an election as a result. We see the delta between the periods of time that successive administrations can keep a secret is actually diminishing—the secrets are becoming public at an accelerated pace. This is a beneficial thing. This is the same in the context of terrorism.

There is an interesting idea—when you were saying it’s sort of weird that the US has what you described as a collective psychosis in the wake of 9/11 given that European countries have been facing terrorist attacks routinely. The US had actually been facing the same thing, and actually one would argue, experienced similarly high-impact attacks, for example, the Oklahoma City bombing, where a Federal building was destroyed by a single individual or one actor.

Bell: What do you think about the relationship between governments asking Facebook and other communications platforms to help fight ISIS?

Snowden: Should we basically deputize companies to become the policy enforcers of the world? When you put it in that context suddenly it becomes clear that this is not really a good idea, particularly because terrorism does not have a strong definition that’s internationally recognized. If Facebook says, we will take down any post from anybody who the government says is a terrorist, as long as it comes from this government, suddenly they have to do that for the other government. The Chinese allegations of who is and who is not a terrorist are going to look radically different than what the FBI’s are going to be. But if the companies try to be selective about them, say, well, we’re only going to do this for one government, they immediately lose access to the markets of the other ones. So that doesn’t work, and that’s not a position companies want to be in.

However, even if they could do this, there are already policies in place for them to do that. If Facebook gets a notification that says this is a terrorist thing, they take it down. It’s not like this is a particularly difficult or burdensome review when it comes to violence.

The distinction is the government is trying to say, now we want them to start cracking down on radical speech. Should private companies be who we as society are reliant upon to bound the limits of public conversations? And this goes beyond borders now. I think that’s an extraordinarily dangerous precedent to be embracing, and, in turn, irresponsible for American leaders to be championing.

The real solutions here are much more likely to be in terms of entirely new institutions that bound the way law enforcement works, moving us away from the point of military conflict, secret conflict, and into simply public policing.


There’s no reason why we could not have an international counter-terrorism force that actually has universal jurisdiction. I mean universal in terms of fact, as opposed to actual law.

One of our lawyers, David McNeight, has died...

... he was both a top notch patent lawyer and a generalist and specialist genius.

As well as working with Football is Fixed, David had recently reached agreement with the UK government over proprietary carbon capture anti-climate change technologies that will keep CO2 levels below 450 ppm beyond 2050: "Looks like I shall have achieved my major goal, which is ensuring that my grandkids  -  everybody's grandkids  -  can still breath in 2050".

A tremendous legacy.
Just think about that - achieving such a milestone to the benefit of all humanity and the planetary ecosystem less than a month before popping off.

On a personal level, I also collaborated with David on theoretical cosmology. I will continue to work on his thesis that our universe is simply the three-dimensional surface of a four-sphere and seek to integrate with current multiverse theory.

David had the talent to create matrices where everybody won and where order smothered chaos.
He thrived on finding the soft underbelly of power in David vs Goliath battles.

His strategic plays were/are impeccable.

Forever grateful David - it takes a particular class of establishment lawyer to work with whistleblowing hackers.
We have a much better standard of opponent nowadays.
And, most important, we are untouchable - our destiny lies totally in our own hands.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2017

On October 16th, Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered as a result of her investigative journalism revealing that Malta had evolved into a mafia state https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/.

Known as the "one-woman Wikileaks", Caruana Galizia had tirelessly exposed corruption on the crime island for three decades, and she continued her work after receiving the first threats on her life in 1996. Two weeks prior to her death, Caruana Galizia had filed a complaint to police after receiving further threats to her safety.

Daphne was that most-feared creature of our contemporary world of corruption, a solitary decider.

Her final blog entry read: "There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate."

Her death changes everything.
Her life was not for nothing.

There are currently three primary leads in the investigation into the assassination of Caruana Galizia:

* Her final investigative project addressed a diesel smuggling operation between Libya and Italy orchestrated by Sicilian mafia. By personnel and evidence, this illicit trade is linked to former Maltese international footballer Darren Debono.

* A cigarette smuggling cartel based in Cyprus and Malta linked to senior Maltese politicians and businessmen that leaves many unanswered questions.

* The  'Ndrangheta had a number of their betting licenses revoked in Malta after Caruana Galizia's exposure of the infiltration of  the Maltese gambling sector by Italian mafia.

Both the Sicilian mafia and the 'Ndrangheta are known for exhibiting their cowardice via massive car bombings - think Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in the former and see recent Maltese history for the latter.

In this post we are specifically going to focus on the third of these options as members of our extended network worked on the meta-analysis of bookmaker-based corruption in Malta.
However, it should be noted that numerous politicians, businessmen, mafia operatives, tax evaders and money launderers wanted this whistleblower dead and some threads of our narrative will expose such individuals for the financial terrorists that they are.
_________________________________________________________________________________


Daphne Caruana Galizia was one of the lead journalists analysing the Panama Papers which revealed extensive offshore tax evasion by our global elite at just one offshore operation Mossack Fonseca. Among those exposed were numerous senior figures in Maltese business and politics including prime minister Joseph Muscat, his chief of staff Keith Schembri and former health and energy minister Konrad Mizzi. For example, Muscat's wife is the beneficial owner of a company in Panama and large sums of money were moved between there and the Aliyev proto-fascist state of Azerbaijan while senior members of the Labour Party had money hidden through a web of companies in Panama and trusts in New Zealand.
Caruana Galizia's final blog post focused on Schembri and the former leader of the opposition Simon Busuttil.

These leaders are responsible for the development of these gruesome conditions.

Sueddeutsche Zeitung: "Multinational companies are passing on profits to their Maltese subsidiaries, which then pretend to be doing business on the island. But in fact, all they do there is pay less tax ('letterbox companies'). According to calculations by the newspaper Malta Today, those European member states in which the profits were really generated lose 3.5 to 4 billion euros a year in taxes because of this system... Unconditional discretion and sedated bureaucracy: that is what protects the very special holiday paradises like Malta."

Malign and criminal interests have turned Malta into a mafia state...
... a mafia state tax haven within the EU.
It is a strange state of affairs when the EU offers subsidies to a member state which deprives other member states of tax revenues.
Much Italian mafia activity relating to money laundering has been exported to the island in recent years following numerous crackdowns by the authorities in Italy. There have been 15 mafia style assassinations and car bombings in the last decade prior to Caruana Galizia's murder.

The Maltese government has offered a one million euro reward and full protection for anybody with information regarding this murder although why any sane human being would trust the words of these state charlatans is another matter entirely. Matthew Caruana Galizia (one of Daphne's three sons) doesn't trust the police to properly investigate her death stating "... there has been a takedown of the rule of law here. There has been a capture of the state by corrupt and criminal corporations. The institutions do not work. There is a climate of impunity." Another son Paul adds that "if the government doesn't want to be investigated, it won't be investigated." The family have called for the resignations of the Prime Minister, the Senior Police Commissioner and the Attorney General.

Julian Assange and David Thake have also set up rewards for information leading to a conviction.
Island locations have become the crime centres of choice for global mafia networks and corruption merchants. Whether it is bookmakers in Singapore, Gibraltar, Isle of Man etc, or tax evasion in Jersey, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Isles etc, or the development of mafia client states in Cyprus and Malta etc, the island with its defined boundaries geographically, legally and financially is the ideal locus.

Aside from the heinous nature of this crime, Caruana Galizia's death should also serve as a warning to what is happening in numerous other EU countries where mafia are influencing the state.
In Sicily, Nino di Matteo has unearthed collusion between the Cosa Nostra and deep levels of the Italian state and, as a consequence, is under armed protection 24/7 as Tito Riina has announced a death sentence from the safety of his jail cell. Meanwhile Roberto Saviano, who spent a decade investigating Italian mafia, claims that the UK is the most corrupt country in the world. According to Saviano, the financial services industry in the City of London facilitates the system that backs up this claim and Football is Fixed's evidences of Deep State influenced systemic corruption in British football shares exactly the same template of corruption as that in the Square Mile of misery.

The mafia never kills non-mafiosi just for vendetta. There is always another aim - to eliminate a person who has discovered something that must not be discovered. When a mafia infects a state, it is still the state that orders the murders. But the mafia, above all, is an entity that wishes to exhibit power in place of the state.

A quote that we have utilised before from Sicilian magistrate Nino di Matteo sums up the situation: "We live in a mafia state - a state that, in order to preserve the status quo, has to remove whistleblowers who want justice. We want to know the reason for the silence of the mainstream media - why are they frightened to the degree they become accomplices in (and beneficiaries of) the corruption? We must rebel against this system and this mafia method."
_________________________________________________________________________________



Malta has a population of 437,000 (smaller than the city of Stoke) and yet has over 500 betting operations housed on the island. The betting sector is worth 1.2 billion euros and represents 12% of GDP. Malta was the first country in Europe to ease the entry process for online gambling firms in 2004. According to Europol, the 'Ndrangheta uses this online betting hub for large scale money laundering related to their domination of the global cocaine trade (the 'Ndrangheta makes an estimated 26.4 billion euros from cocaine annually).
Caruana Galizia: "Money launderers are being forced out of Italy's gaming market because regulation there has become so tight in the fight against organised crime."

In June 2017, as a result of research by Caruana Galizia, 1128Bet had their license suspended due to Italian mafia infiltration.
Previously, several members of the 'Ndrangheta were arrested in Malta in 2015 and extradited to Italy because they were caught laundering money through remote gaming companies.
Betuniq and BetSolution4U had their licenses suspended on July 22nd 2015 having been undertaking money laundering in Malta for four years. But these suspensions were only due to the actions of Italian police and not any Maltese authority. Two billion euros of assets were seized from the 'Ndrangheta.
In transcripts of telephone conversations between two Camorra clans, Bastian Dalli (the criminal brother of former Malta Cabinet Minister and European Commissioner John Dalli) is described as "the brother of the Maltese Prime Minister" and is named as the Camorra contact for Malta - "he is the one you should contact to set up a gaming company in Malta for money laundering purposes". In Italy, 1500 betting shops, 82 online gambling sites, 60 other companies and quantities of real estate were seized as evidence of this mafia-led tax evasion.
John Dalli's henchman Iosif Galea, a former employee of the Lotteries and Gaming Authority (a precursor to the Malta Gaming Authority) was the key official for BetSolutions4U. When this scandal broke he left the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) for a comfortable position within government.
A regulator was responsible for the corruption rather than working against it.

In November 2009, Italian police were closing in on Bet1128 in the UK. This company was owned by ParadiseBet. The family of Vito Martiradonna, who was convicted of being affiliated to Sacra Corona Unita in 2007, had hidden assets by taking advantage of Malta's lax online gambling regulations. ParadiseBet successfully sold 1128Bet and 11 other assets to Malta-based CenturionBet for 10 million pounds - a figure that does not appear anywhere in ParadiseBet's accounts. Michele Martiradonna was the main shareholder in ParadiseBet and the sale of the assets left nothing in the UK for the police to seize (https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/04191516/officers).

Research by the Organised Crime and Corruption Research Project (OCCRP) showed that the Martiradonna family were linked to CenturionBet (and other related betting companies operating from the same Maltese address). CenturionBet's ownership moved repeatedly between different British Virgin Isles companies with the stated beneficial owner being Antonio Buontempo (a former employee of ParadiseBet).
In the summer of 2017, the licenses of CenturionBet and 1128Bet were finally suspended by the entirely inadequate MGA. Operation 'Jonny', an Italian anti-mafia sting carried out in May 2017, linked CenturionBet to the 'Ndrangheta who earned 1.3 million pounds over 18 months after the betting company allowed access to its systems to Kroton Games (another 'Ndrangheta company) who successfully laundered huge amounts of money via the structure.
Bet1128 were a rogue company from their formation in 2008 and the strategy from day one was money laundering and the refusal to honour winning wagers by punters (https://www.sportsbookreview.com/search/?q=bet1128 and https://www.sbo.net/scam-sportsbooks/bet1128-paradise-bet/).

The laissez faire approach of the MGA has attracted all the usual major European betting firms to the island including Ladbrokes and Betfair. A SIGMA (Summit in I-Gaming in Malta) press release in 2014 gushed over the "... strategic confluence of financial, legal, technological and cultural factors which successive administrations moulded over the years, and which ultimately tipped the odds in favour of gaming companies deciding to locate here [in Malta]".
_________________________________________________________________________________



Time to focus a little bit more on Keith Schembri, the chief of staff to PM Joseph Muscat. Schembri's remote gaming interests allowed him to channel gaming profits into secret companies in tax havens.

In April 2016, the Australian Financial Review focused on Schembri's links with gaming companies (as well as his involvement in Camorra and Cosa Nostra-backed recycling and waste management in India and Dubai - a favoured money laundering structure). Schembri completed a full house by the benefits he gained from 'Ndrangheta control of betting on the island.

A chief of staff in any government should not engage in business interests at all let alone interests linked to all three primary Italian mafia entities.

Daphne Caruana Galizia's exposure of Schembri was backed up by the Financial Investigation and Analysis Unit (FIAU), a Maltese government agency, which as a result of this support was left without a director for seven months hence halting all money laundering investigations against senior members of both the main political parties on the island. Under its previous director, Manfred Galdes, the FIAU had closely investigated Schembri and his secret offshore dealings in the British Virgin Isles, Gibraltar, Cyprus and Panama, and bank accounts in other territories. The illicit trusts were used, among other things, to launder money received as kickbacks from Russian mafia to gain Maltese passports (at a cost of 650,000 euros fee to Maltese government plus 150,000 euros invested in government bonds and purchase of a property of minimum value 350,000 euros).
After Galdes resigned, purely by chance so did the Police Commissioner, the latter being replaced by a Muscat ally, Lawrence Cutajar.
Caruana Galizia: "... the chances that the police will do their duty in acting on the investigation results presented to them by the FIAU recede even further. At this point, it is safe to assume that there is a very high risk of the FIAU investigation report into the Prime Minister's chief of staff and Minister Konrad Mizzi, that is in the possession of the Police Commissioner, being destroyed or otherwise disposed of."
It should be noted that the FIAU is an investigatory body with no power to prosecute and is chaired by the Attorney General "who is in a conflicting position in his role as legal counsel to the government" which is under investigation. Whitewash.
_________________________________________________________________________________



Claudio Antonelli and Gianluigi Nuzzi from their book 'Blood Ties: The Calabrian Mafia' interviewed former 'Ndrangheta member Pasquale Barreca about collusion between the Camorra, 'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra and the state: "... the most important point remains the union between the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta and the Sicilian mafia in sending out these signals [requesting dialogue with the state]. through interlocutors, including members of state organs, it is certainly possible to create the necessary mediation... In my day Cosa Nostra had far more power at the political level, without a doubt. Today that's no longer the case. The Calabrian bosses have found a way into the organs of government... the 'Ndrangheta has penetrated deep into the social, and even more the political, fabric, by consolidating the economic power it has gained."

Italian anti-mafia investigators are in Malta helping to uncover the truth behind the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia and organised crime links between Malta, Italy and, potentially, Libya are being explored. The online gambling, cigarette smuggling and illicit diesel rackets are the primary focuses of investigation.

Former Maltese international footballer Darren Debono (who played 52 times for his country) was arrested on Lampedusa relating to the diesel smuggling operation the day after Daphne Caruana Galizia's murder after having his phone tapped for two years by Italian authorities (http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/news/national/81734/italian_authorities_tapped_darren_debonos_phone_for_two_years_before_arrest#.Wfh3MFu0PIU) and (https://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20171022/local/anti-mafia-squad-in-malta-italian-senator-excluded-from-delegation.660993).

Debono played against England in a fixed Friendly International in 2000 (an England squad including Michael Owen, Steve McManaman, Robbie Fowler, Martin Keown, Phil and Gary Neville, and managed by Kevin Keegan). England won 2-1 in a non-trying event with keeper Richard Wright giving away two penalties. Wright is represented, unsurprisingly, by the Stellar Agency.

The other avenue for the police relates to Silvio Debono (centre of the back row in the above photo) and the following three posts from Caruana Galizia's 'Running Commentary' blog give some cryptic background to this particular piece of Maltese corruption
a) https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/03/breakingsilvio-debono-panama-papers-company-investigation-maltas-tax-authorities/
b) https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/03/wouldnt-bother-libel-suits-lou-hardrock-silvio-think-cigarettes-cyprus/
c) https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/03/politicians-need-read/
_________________________________________________________________________________



Daphne Caruana Galizia had proof that political, business and criminal elites are one and the same entity in much the same way as Football is Fixed would describe the systemic template undermining and corrupting British football - there are very senior members of government, rogue Deep State operators, mafia groups, tarnished or coerced individuals, certain businesses using mafia methods to garner market (and corruption) control, all interacting in an environment where the mainstream media actually helps to orchestrate the scam.

And all of these corrupted structures feed through to the sport itself.

Take Juventus.

On September 25th, Juventus club president Andrea Agnelli was banned for one year for selling tickets to hard-core ultras and admitted meeting Rocco Dominello (an 'Ndrangheta mafia man who has now been jailed for eight years). The revenue streams arising from the scalping of tickets went straight into Calabrian mafia coffers - the president of the Serie A champions profited a mafia entity.
Less than a month later, Juventus were proud to announce a regional sponsorship deal with SE Asian online betting firm F66.com.
And all this after the incredibly suspicious betting patterns linked to Juve's alleged underperformance in the Champions League Final against Real Madrid.

Or take ################ an English team who, already under external rogue ownership, were sold to a Chinese entity operating through Malta with no company website and seemingly no history for any of the individuals involved. And, interestingly, the UK broadsheet that reported these links altered the article with no addenda at the conclusion - the paper withdrew the news and turned it into fake.
Why would a UK establishment newspaper do this thing?

Or take the fixed Malta versus England friendly.

These holistic structures are becoming a geopolitical football norm - the Albanian mafia influencing Austrian football (according to our research and in the opinion of a senior former FIFA man), Russians controlling the football in Cyprus and a whole array of bookmakers scrambling for the ultimate control of markets via rogue referees and players around the continent.

Football club owners.
Rogue footballers.
Mafia entities..
Money laundering.
Matchfixing events.
Online betting companies.
Links between Malta, Gibraltar, Italy and the UK.

Football.
Mafia.
Betting.

Alain Badiou: "For as Saint-Just asks: 'What do those who want neither Virtue nor Terror want?' His answer is well known: they want corruption."

The gambling and money laundering matrices of the UK and Malta want Terror and Corruption.

May the astonishing Daphne Caruana Galizia rest in a deserved peace and may her murderer(s) be brought to swift justice.

If her killer(s) have not been arrested by the time our forthcoming book is published, 25% of all profits will be added to Julian Assange's fund.
_________________________________________________________________

© Football is Fixed 2006-2017
________________________________________________________________________________________

If #LeicesterCity hadn't teamed up with #TeamSky medics & #Mapei💉

If #LeicesterCity hadn't been helped by #PGMOB officials

In 2015/16, Arsene Wenger would have won the #PremierLeague title which, with 3 x #FACup's in 4 years, would make him a hero.https://t.co/WegzTfso5l

— FOOTBALL is FIXED (@footballisfixed) April 29, 2018

Plus ça change, plus c'est pas la même chose.

There are few islets of integrity left in the ocean of omerta that is the Premier League and one of these rocky outcrops will disappear beneath the tsunami of corruption at the conclusion of this season when Arsene Wenger leaves Arsenal.

Historically.
Arsenal have not orchestrated any of the wide range of matchfixing matrices utilised by other EPL teams to enhance earnings away from taxing eyes.
Arsenal have avoided overly close ties with the bookmaking industry and have not allowed criminalised football agents to take control of the club.
Arsenal instead employed marginal gains years before the Team Sky cycling team pushed such nudge edge beyond legal boundaries and when other EPL teams were medieval in their strategic sophistication.

As Arsenal were a talented and largely legitimate team and because Wenger refused to allow betting markets to influence match outcomes, the club and the manager were ostracised by the murkier areas of the industry sector.
The mainstream media have systemically slaughtered Wenger at any opportunity.
And not just some mainstream media but all.

We quote an investigative journalist from a UK national broadsheet:

Anonymised MSM journalist:

"UK Football journalists prefer (a) not to rock the boat (b) not to bite the hand that feeds them, and (c) like to make damn sure they are all telling the same story... Like royal reporters, they work as a pack and their aim is to promote the product."

— FOOTBALL is FIXED (@footballisfixed) February 22, 2018

Roy Hodgson officially assumed duty as the new English national team manager on May 14th last year despite only having won one trophy in 23 years - the Danish Superliga title with FC Copenhagen.

To celebrate this bizarre choice, we reprint an earlier article that questions the integrity of Our Great Leader.
_________________________________________________________________________________

A Drama in Four Acts based around a football match between Fulham and Wigan Athletic

CHARACTERS

ROY HODGSON, currently manager of the England National Football Team. At the time of the play, he was manager of Fulham FC.Represented by Base Soccer Agents. 

ANDY JOHNSON,currently a striker at Queens Park Rangers FC. At the time of the action, he was a forward at Fulham FC. A client of Base Soccer Agents.

BOBBY ZAMORA, now employed at Queens Park Rangers FC. When the play is set, he was a striker at Fulham FC. A client of Base Soccer Agents.

BASE SOCCER AGENTS, representing Paul Konchesky of Fulham and Emerson Boyce of Wigan Athletic from the match in addition to the three individuals above.

JOHN COLQUHOUN, Fulham FC club agent at the time of the play and responsible for numerous signings involved in the match. Co-owner of Key Sports Management.

CHRIS KIRKLAND, currently goalkeeper at Sheffield Wednesday. Represented by John Colquhoun/ Key SportsManagement and Wigan Athletic goalkeeper at the time the play is set.

WASSERMANMEDIA GROUP, representing Fulham/Wigan Athletic players from the match - Danny Murphy, Emile Heskey and Simon Davies.

STELLAR FOOTBALL LTD, agents representing Lee Cattermole (Wigan at time of the action) and Aaron Hughes of Fulham FC.

ENGLAND FOOTBALL SQUAD FOR EURO 2012, 23 members featuring 6 players from Stellar Football Ltd, 2 from Key Sports Management, 4 individuals from Wasserman Media Group and 2 from Base Soccer Agents. Managed by Roy Hodgson (from Base Soccer Agents).

MICHEL PLATINI, President of UEFA, a man who has identified match-fixing as the biggest danger to the future of football. 

ROB WAINWRIGHT, Director of Europol.

The action takes place at Craven Cottage, London on or around Wednesday 29th October 2008 and features an English Premier League football match between Fulham and Wigan Athletic, and at Wembley in May and June 2012.



ACT ONE

Craven Cottage in late October 2008.

Andy Johnson has been signed by Roy Hodgson/ John Colquhounfor £10 million but hasn't scored a goal in over 6 months since joining Fulham.

Together with fellow striker Bobby Zamora, also signed by Roy Hodgson/ John Colquhoun, the two forwards had only scored one goal between them in 15 matches in the 2008/09 season.

Questions were being asked in the media about the poor returns for the financial outlay.

Roy Hodgson and at least 10 of the players on the pitch at the start of the match were represented by either Base Soccer Agents, Wasserman Media Partners, Key Sports Management or Stellar Football Ltd.

In the hour leading up to the kick off, we registered suspicious insider betting patterns on the match between Fulham and Wigan Athletic.
The outcome was in the market prior to the match.


ACT TWO

Craven Cottage on the evening of Wednesday 29th October 2008.


Seven Months Since His Last Goal But Andy Johnson Knew That He Was Going To Score Against Wigan Athletic. How?

Fulham won the match 2-0.

Andy Johnson scored both goals.

Fulham only had two shots on target.

Comments on the performance of Wigan goalkeeper Chris Kirkland by an analyst: "Made no attempt with first goal scored from 1 metre - foolishly committed himself before displaying revealing body language in his remonstrations with the assistant referee. Looks like a startled rabbit caught in the headlights. Stood claiming for a goalkick while an attack continued with a goal only prevented by the intervention of Figueroa. Looks wired. Mis-timed run from goal to address through ball; defender has to clear putting Fulham on the attack. In the Second Half, poor clearances, seemingly deliberate uncertainty whenever the ball was in the area, a clearance straight to the opposition, before once again committing himself to allow the second goal, after failing to give a call to his defenders. Appeared to make his body area as small as possible for the second goal."

After Johnson scored his first goal, he lifted his shirt to reveal a '100 League Goals' vest-top, as, despite not having registered since March, this was his 100th career goal.

Being a midweek match, the affair ended only 40 minutes before the BBC Match of the Day programme featuring all of the midweek games.

After the highlights of the Fulham match, Johnson was interviewed.

When asked about the vest-top, he gushed words to the effect that: "Some lads at the club told me to get it done this week when they knew I was going to score tonight."

On returning to the studio, Alan Hansen had a look of horror on his face.
For fully two minutes, he and Gary Lineker attempted to explain how a forward was prescient enough to be so certain of scoring in the match that a '100 League Goals' top was created when he hadn't scored a goal in nearly 7 months.


ACT THREE

Wembley on 16th May 2012.


The England squad for the Euro 2012 Finals in Poland/ Ukraine announced by the new England manager, Roy Hodgson.

Alongside the obvious key selections, there are a number of surprising/ very surprising players in the squad: Jack Butland (Stellar Football Ltd), Martin Kelly (Stellar Football Ltd), Phil Jones (Key Sports Management), Jordan Henderson (Wasserman Media Group- although he seemingly oscillates between WMG and Key Sports), Phil Jagielka (Stellar Football Ltd), Ashley Young (Base Soccer Agents), Scott Parker (Wasserman Media Group), Theo Walcott (Key Sports Management), Joleon Lescott (Wasserman Media Group).

In total, 14 players out of the 23 member squad are represented by just four firms of football agents and Steven Gerrard (Wassermann Media Group) and Jordan Henderson are respectively the England team and Under-21 captains. John Colquhoun/ Key Sports Management only have four English players of any note on their books - Walcott and Jones are in the full squad while Ryan Bertrand and Josh McEachran are in the Under-21's.

English players in the EPL are represented by over 30 firms of agents (ignoring the family linkage ones).
It is statisticallyhighly unlikely that the England Euro 2012 squad was so unbalanced by accident.

Roy Hodgson: "I have chosen players... on what I have seen in the Premier League over the last couple of years."


ACT FOUR

The Epilogue.

We would like to put forward a number of questions regarding the above.

• Is it conceivable that Roy Hodgson/ John Colquhoun knew nothing about the fixing of the match between Fulham and Wigan in the 2008/09 season (Colquhoun bets professionally on football matches)? 
• They need not have gained financially by betting on the event to be outside the law - Antonio Conte (the Juventus manager) was banned for 10 months (later reduced to four) for simply being aware of two fixed matches when he was manager of Siena in Serie B. Conte was accused of not passing on knowledge of the match fixing in these games. Burkino Faso manager Paul Put is banned for life from Belgian football for match-fixing in 2007 at Lierse.
• Is it conceivable that Roy Hodgson chose his Euro 2012 squad on a meritocratic basis when ALL the questionable selections AND over 60% of the squad AND the captain were represented by Base, Wasserman, Key Sports or Stellar?
• Does Roy Hodgson receive any 'rewards' for the inflation in player value created through these obtuse selections? Birmingham City turned down a Southampton bid of £6 million for Jack Butland earlier in the season - prior to his inclusion in the Euro 2012 squad, he was valued at £200,000.

• Do Key Sports Management, Wasserman Media Group, Stellar Football Ltd and the Base Soccer Agents operate as a form of inner circle or fragmented cartel? 
• If so, shouldn't the Premier League be taking a forensic interest in events where such agencies have potentially match-controlling influences like the match above...
• ... or, say, the Merseyside derby - Carragher, Johnson, Kelly, Gerrard, Henderson, Shelvey, Wisdom, Howard, Baines, Hibbert, Jagielka, Distin, Osman and Naismith are all represented by Base, Wasserman or Stellar. No potential confusions of focus for these 14 players then! And players are with an agent for life while, in general, playing for numerous clubs.

• So, who gains most from these structures? Who has the most value-added? What on earth does it mean for the future of the beautiful game in England? What about the players who are out of the cartel?

If the selection of players for the England national team is not a meritocratic process then many talented players are unable to break through and gain proper recognition and remuneration due to potentially cartelised behaviour.

Non-meritocratic structures mean England continue to fail in tournaments so that some individuals might enhance their bank balances. 

If games are fixed then fans, bettors, television companies, peripheral bookmakers and relegated teams are suffering from fraudulent events and might seek recompense in a court of law.

If bookmakers don't expose the insider trading and choose to trade this knowledge elsewhere for financial gain, what is left of integrity at the top of the English game? 

And if Roy Hodgson/ John Colquhoun had any inkling that the Fulham/ Wigan Athletic match (or indeed any other match) was fixed, should they not be banned for non-disclosure? 

Rob Wainwright: "Given the scale of corruption involved, it would be naive and complacent to think that the criminal conspiracy does not affect the English game."

Michel Platini: "If tomorrow, we go watch a game already knowing the outcome, football is dead."


© Football is Fixed 2006-2013

       
                                 Fan Power - The Muckers' Decapitation Of The Oystons


Introduction

On Saturday, nearly 16,000 Blackpool fans (the largest home attendance in 40 years) attended the post-Oyston celebration match against Southend United.
The fact that the Mighty Pool equalised via an own goal with the last touch of the match in the 96th minute only added to the theatre.

Following a four year boycott of home games (and any other matches where proceeds might find their way into the grubby pockets of the rapist and the clown), the campaign by the Muckers' Supporters Group (in particular) and, to a lesser extent, the Tangerine Knights and the Blackpool Supporters' Trust has reclaimed control of the football club for the town of Blackpool.

We are mighty again.

This fan campaign trails a strategy for all other clubs being abused by psychopathic owners e.g. Brighton & Hove Albion, Coventry City, Leyton Orient, Charlton Athletic, Brentford, Blackburn Rovers, Port Vale, Stoke City, Bolton Wanderers, Glasgow Celtic, Leicester City, AFC Bournemouth etc etc.

I'm attending a game today where the result hardly matters...
... we've already won.

We've already beaten the odious Oystons.
We have our club back.

A 4 year campaign by @MuckersThe, @KnightTangerine& @BlackpoolST shows the way for fans of other clubs.#BlackpoolAreBack#UTMPhttps://t.co/eJOk7jZ9FL

— FOOTBALL is FIXED (@footballisfixed) March 9, 2019

The holistic is one of systemic corruption, matchfixing syndicates, mafia agents and criminal owners versus the fans of the clubs that have been stolen by underworld entities.

Blackpool FC

               Flares and pitch invasions are illegal but, then again, so is rape and matchfixing

For the uninitiated, here are just four personal reasons (out of the multitudes) that it was an imperative to remove the Oyston family from Blackpool FC.

1) The last game that my father attended was the fixed Second Division Play-Off Semi Final versus Bradford City in 1996. Blackpool led 2-0 from the away leg and given that the club had/have the best head-to-head Play-Off/Final record of any English club, a place at Wembley awaited.
In stepped the Oystons, the match was fixed, Bradford won 3-0. The outcome was known in the betting markets pre-match.
Manager Sam Allardyce was complicit in this corruption as the Oystons were not willing to invest in promotion as the rapist was about to get sent down for a six year sentence.
Several players are said to have bet against their own club on hearing of the fix.
That is what corruption does - it converts professional players into acquiescent operatives.

Of course, this was only the beginning of Allardyce's matchfixing career.
https://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2014/01/fixed-match-crying-child-english.html

2) The construction of the Oystons' coffins began in earnest after they began suing fans - one individual was even served court papers at a family funeral.
The car number plate, the pitiful attempts at power play, the tennis rackets, the fucking £75K bison, the decision to call a lifelong fan a "massive retard"...
But the fans are the club...
... not the rapist nor the clown.

#NAPM - Not A Penny More.

3) A close friend █████ used to be a model at Owen Oyston's Model Team Agency in Manchester. On the night of his rape conviction, we went out to celebrate and she described the humiliations and abuses at the hands of our particularly depraved estate agent.
█████ is a tough woman - the father of her first child was █████ (Manchester's most notorious drug baron of the time). She was linked to Moss Side and Cheetham Hill gangs. She didn't buckle easily. But Owen Oyston almost broke her spirit.
She waits still to spit on his grave.

4) The Football is Fixed Network undertake high level consultancies throughout the football industry. We have worked with two G14 teams plus leading teams in Italy, Poland, Scotland, Greece and Romania.
We achieve improvements of between 5 and 20 points per season for teams by addressing and undermining corruptions perpetrated against their interests.
When Blackpool FC were promoted to the Premier League in 2010, we approached Karl Oyston offering a free consultancy (our rates at the time were £250K per annum). This was a considerable gesture based on my lifelong support of the club.
He refused to even meet with us.

Apparently we were good enough for Bayern Munich...
... but not for Blackpool.

We would have kept Blackpool up.
Karl Oyston is a fool.

Other Football Clubs

Of the numerous other British clubs saddled with inappropriate owners, we have chosen to focus on two - Glasgow Celtic and Brighton & Hove Albion.

1) Glasgow Celtic's majority shareholder is a bookmaker Dermot Desmond. He owns ~3% of Ladbrokes but made his mark with betting exchange Betdaq.

We have been provided with evidences that Mr Desmond would place largely erroneous trades on Celtic games with Betdaq in order to confuse the global markets for externalised proprietary trading.
The Celtic hierarchy was/is accepting of this template.

For example, the 4-0 defeat to Hearts in December 2017 that ended the 69 game unbeaten run and the 4-1 defeat at Legia Warszawa in the Champions League 2014/15 Qualifiers were both heavily insider traded by █████, █████ and █████.

Senior club representatives and agents bet against their own team.
https://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2014/07/insider-trading-is-not-match-fixing.html

It was also the unofficial Celtic club agent John Colquhoun who orchestrated the move to Leicester City by Brendan Rodgers to the detriment of the club and the supporters.
https://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-draining-of-football-leaks.html

All of these individuals put their own financial interests far ahead of any loyalty to the club - the club is just a vehicle for their neoliberal wealth creation.

Peter Lawwell, the Celtic chief executive, is not interested in the culture of the club as money and power are his sole targets. This puts him at odds with the Celtic fanbase who are proud of their Irish Rebel heritage. The Green Brigade repeatedly confront the blinkered Lawwell with spectacular displays targeting his inappropriate power...
... there are many positive similarities between the Muckers' and the Green Brigade (although not politically, of course!).


                                                               Lizard And Chips

2) Brighton & Hove Albion are owned by professional poker player Tony Bloom.

Mr Bloom also 'owns' one of the larger betting syndicates on the planet - Starlizard.

Bookmakers and professional gamblers should never be allowed to have any involvement with football clubs and certainly shouldn't be allowed to run them.
Consequently, 90% of Brighton's matches have been matchfixing events this season with the Lizard trading against his own club on numerous occasions.

This puts the Lizard in opposition to Brighton fans, a situation he attempts to remedy by enhanced reputation management, pseudo-charitable work and the paying off of people who know where the bodies are buried.
Brighton & Hove Albion have been involved in systemic matchfixing since the promotion season from the Championship.
https://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2019/03/lizards-lacertae-liverpool.html

Direct Action



                                      Direct Action Got Owen Oyston Out Of Our Club

Power is abusive. Power will never give an inch unless you demand it with great assertion.
This means moving into the area of grey market activities (as the only way to address the black market is from the adjacency of the grey).
All psychopaths are incredibly fearful. That is their fatal flaw. They run scared. They are unable to react to real strength of purpose whether that emanates from Wikileaks, the Courage Foundation, the Green Brigade, the Muckers' or Football is Fixed.

Direct action, a willingness to violence if required, aggressive hacking, verbal terrorism and a mockery of fake power - these are the routes to positive change in football.

So, under normal circumstances, the EFL would impose a 12 point deduction on Blackpool as a punishment for going into receivership.

Shaun Harvey (the immensely dubious CEO of the Football League) is soon to retire and has bought a house in Lytham St Annes. While consuming in his new local pub, the Muckers' paid him a visit to explain why it would be a much better move from his perspective to forgo this 12 point punishment in this case as the club are blameless - the menacing Muckers' delivered a message of malicious mockery. Harvey exhibited cowardice.

This means Blackpool are fighting for a Play-Off place rather than against relegation.

Football is Fixed do not see how this huge result could have been achieved by the more conventional methods of the Blackpool Supporters' Trust (BST).
Yet, in the Blackpool FC programme for the Southend United match, there is a full page advertorial for the BST (the matchball sponsor) and not once in their blurb do the BST see fit to mention the other groups who worked alongside them in this battle.

There are no robust rules nor regulations in football.
Everything is arbitrary.
Fake.
It is evidently unjust that Blackpool FC could have been further punished for the actions of the Odious Oystons.
But 5th Estate and direct action fan groups impose a reality on this fake hyperreality - Jean Baudrillard must be giggling in his grave!

Reclaiming Our Sport

With a new board in place and new routes ahead, the club need to proactively seek grey market behaviour and knowledge.
Football in England is systemically corrupted at Premier League and Championship levels and Blackpool need to prepare strategically for a near future of dealing with the criminalised PGMOB, the omnipresence of doping, insider trading and matchfixing, rogue agents affecting their clients' performances to suit their own betting agendas, crooked agents utilising third party ownership and multiple intermediaries to bleed money from the sport on all transactions...

The key strategic template for Blackpool FC is to create a unified foundation.
This needs to involve the new club hierarchy, the BST, the Muckers' and Tangerine Knights as well as the entire fanbase (including the 'Mushrooms'*) and businesses and media in the town.
Blackpool is one of the poorest boroughs in the country and the football club is a beacon of hope in an austerity town.

A unified front with grey market inputs will always overcome the fragmented cartel of football corruption.
This corruption is illegitimate.
The criminals are fucked and they know they're fucked, but they rush towards the rapidly approaching precipice grabbing as much money as possible en route. For them, sustainable strategies are out of the window. It is every man for themselves in a chaotic disaster capitalism template. They share no loyalty to associated mafiosi. Their weakness is palpable.


                                                         Fuck Off The Oystons

Conclusion

Football is Fixed are no longer able to work directly with clubs. This is primarily because of our association with the Infamous Wu Shu Hackers who enable our fraud forensics and our ability to open betting markets in order to expose matchfixing etc. This is grey market behaviour of questionable legality, apparently, but we are ever ready to test this out in a court of law as we continue to surf the zeitgeist of corruption.

Consequently, ever since our work at FC Bayern, we have always operated as a leech consultancy, attaching ourselves to third party entities linked to the club that employs us.
It is not about money to our network, it is about integrity.
We were approached by █████ from Manchester United three weeks ago and we mocked and walked away. We will only work on legitimate projects.

https://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2015/08/leech-consultancy-twilight-zone.html

Less powerful football clubs need entities like Football is Fixed, the Green Brigade and the Muckers'.

It is strategic flare, personal bravery and risk taking to a confident agenda that opens new opportunities and routes to footballing success. And money doesn't come into it. We all devote huge percentages of our time to altruistic improvements to integrity in sport and yet we are viewed (even by those on the same side as us) as being beyond the pale, just a little bit too dodgy.

But the 'Mushrooms' supported Oyston's oligarchy for four years...
... and that is a whole different fucking level of dodgy!

Meanwhile the Muckers' undertake charity bike rides from the Eiffel Tower to the Blackpool Tower in aid of Lancashire MIND, StreetLife, The Next Chapter & Frontline Children.
They make 12 points for the club via physical assertion.
They faced down Oyston psychopathy face-to-face.
Oh, and they batter PNE!

But I know who I'd rather have in my club.

This is it lads and lasses! Yes we must be mad but Eiffel Tower to Blackpool Tower is up and running so please get behind us for all these good causes👍 follow the link below and please wish us good luck, we will need it https://t.co/2M66LL45HT  Barclays match every £ btw😊 pic.twitter.com/j2DFf4qL05

— TheMuckers (@MuckersThe) December 11, 2018

_________________________________________________________________________________

* The 'Mushrooms' are the fans who continued to attend Bloomfied Road during the NAPM picket.
These 'Mushrooms' are not Fun Guys but we forgive and forget and move forward as Sandgronians together.

If you have any information to contribute to Football is Fixed, please contact Ojo del Toro in complete confidence via Direct Message @footballisfixed. You can do so anonymously, but if you use your real name you can rest assured that this website operates a blanket policy of non-disclosure and does not cooperate with requests for details from the authorities or individuals.

                                                     Does David Skip With The Mafia?
                                                
Those behind the appointment of David Skipwith Pemsel to the throne of chief executive of the Premier League are attempting to paint a public portrait of a man who exhibits heightened integrity.

We oppose that narrative.

Here we put together a list of twenty pertinent questions to ask of Integrity Man regarding the Premier League template of systemic corruption that he not only inherits but also helped to enable.

In our humble opinion, Integrity Man is not a Fit and Proper Person to run the Premier League.

****************************************************************************************************************

Question One:

On the systemic corruption & matchfixing template currently controlling the Premier League

Since Scudamore scooted off with his £5 million facilitation bonus, a systemic corruption and matchfixing template has been implanted on the Premier League. The lack of any effective oversight (the reason Richard Masters failed to be considered for the permanent CEO role apparently) has produced extensive issues of integrity-lite games.

Around two-thirds of Premier League matches are known to have been insider trading and/or matchfixing events in the post-Scudamore window.

Integrity Man, will any strategies be developed to prevent future occurrences of this systemic matchfixing and will any action be taken against those individuals within your orbit who have orchestrated this gross conversion of the soul of football for criminalised private wealth creation?

Or, Integrity Man, is everything black market, grey market or white seen as a valid revenue stream for a Premier League under your stewardship?

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Question Two:

On the illicit linkages between the Guardian newspaper and certain football agents during Skipwith's period as chief executive of Guardian Media Group

The Guardian stands out in one way from other mainstream sports media - the control of output by rogue agents. It began a decade ago with John Colquhoun and Key Sports Management clients like Theo Walcott receiving extensive advertorial coverage in the periods leading up to new contract negotiations with Arsenal FC. But, during Skipwith's window of control of the newspaper, the situation has become ludicrous infecting not only allegedly factual articles but also match reports - the reality of games being rewritten for future agent gains.

The nadir of unjournalism was reached when Unique Sports Management was formed by   █████ █████ and entire campaigns of promotional disinformation were perpetrated repeatedly - the campaign to inflate the value of Wilfried Zaha in the summer of 2019 was as manipulative as it was unsuccessful. The Guardian repeatedly priced a player at up to £100 million when neutral arbiters were valuing at £40 million. That £60 million profit, if it had been successful, would have been a tidy £9 million bonus for the agent with trickledown for 'associates'.

Integrity Man, we have had it suggested to us by interested parties that the Guardian Media Group has inappropriately close linkages with Unique Sports Management - please say it ain't so IntegrityMan, because surely that couldn't be appropriate, could it?

And, Integrity Man, how will this alleged association impact upon your role of CEO of the EPL?
Will Mr Colquhoun remain a puppet-master?

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Question Three:

On the deliberate use of a fake news lead story at the Guardian in November 2018 in an attempt to influence a legal ruling about to be made regarding the extradition to the US of Julian Assange

The fake Manafort/Assange headline has been shown to be a fabrication see - The Wikileaks' Thread - The Futures Of Julian Assange And Journalism Are Inextricably Linked - and yet editor Kath Viner hasn't apologised nor removed the invented content from Guardian servers. To maliciously interfere in such an important judicial case for the future of real journalism to the detriment of the profession that creates a newspaper suggests that Integrity Man is not interested in real journalism nor real judicial process.

Thomas Scripps has shown (see the 'Wikileaks' link above) that the Guardian is a willing mouthpiece for the intelligence community presumably being rewarded for their acquiescence to deep state agendas e.g. the persecution of a journalist who exposed US & UK war crimes.

The Guardian fall to fake began in earnest when Viner and Pemsel took the reins. The entire culture of the newspaper altered with overheads slashed and 'intriguing' new forms of (sometimes highly questionable, or even illicit) revenue streams created.

Even former editor Alan Rusbridger markedly disagrees with the new regime stencilling the Guardian to the detriment of journalism - see US Efforts To Jail Assange For Espionage Are A Grave Threat To A Free Media.

The Guardian is no longer a newspaper of consequence due to Integrity Man's neoliberal agendas and █████ strategies.

Integrity Man, will you be employing similarly skewed strategies at the Premier League and, if so, may we assume that the fans matter not one fucking jot?

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Question Four:

On the offshore underground entity that is the Scott Trust and examples of the Guardian business model under Skipwith's stewardship where fake news influenced sporting realities to private agendas

The entire Guardian edifice exists under the Scott Trust.
This is a very secretive entity.
This is not a good thing - there must be a declaration of the real ownership of a newspaper (just like there needs to be with a footballer).
In both cases hidden ownership creates corruption.

Under Skipwith, the Guardian repeatedly explored regime change, orchestrating fake realities to achieve integrated commercial gains.

Take the removal of Mark Sampson from the post of manager of England Women's team.
The whole process was a Guardian coup.
Agencies e.g. Tongue Tied (linked to █████ █████) formed a network to share disinformation on Sampson and inflated promotion of Eni Aluko (soon to be appointed a Guardian'journalist') and, even though nothing was proven against Sampson, the coup was successful when the FA found a historical reason to remove him.
The parallel campaign to bring in Phil Neville was also a Guardian hidden agenda and the manner in which the paper dealt with "Neville's battering the missus" comment was a triumph of edited bias.

Meanwhile, four members of the England Lionesses are represented by an agent who is a known mafia man (having been convicted in Italy) and who has a global ban on intermediary activities.
Surprisingly, the Guardian doesn't publish this information in their comic as it doesn't fit with the spectacularly fake narrative.

Or take the equivalent bifurcation between the Guardian campaign against Jose Mourinho and all things Gestifute in comparison to the fairy tales created for managers linked to Mr Colquhoun - Roy Hodgson, Brendan Rodgers, Steve McClaren etc etc. And Mr Colquhoun was amply rewarded when Manchester United and Mourinho parted company when the incoming manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer thought it wise to further extend the contract of the inept Phil Jones.

So, Integrity Man, we guess that you approved these campaigns at the newspaper where you are chief executive. How will this impact on your new role as an independent non-biased overseer of the English top league?

And, are mafia agents okay? Is regime change based on fallacy a prerequisite for all of your strategies? And why is the Scott Trust so hidden? What do they have to hide?

Why is everything so murky around you, Integrity Man?

N.B. The Guardian, we have been informed, now want Phil Neville sacked as there is a new more malleable persona on hand for managing the Lionesses, but I guess you are more than aware of that, Integrity Man?

************************************************************************

Question Five:

On the weaponisation of identity politics to aid corruption and control of markets - transfer and betting

The business model developed by Skipwith at the Guardian is allegedly inspirational...
... but it is only inspirational in that short-termist sort of way so beloved of disaster capitalists and fascistic neoliberals like Skipwith and Colquhoun.

Punters pay to keep the Guardian afloat because the paper panders to their identity politics while pretending that it is a force for good in the wider world.
Once this pretence fails, there is nothing left - just a bubble and a lot of befuddled liberals wondering where there feelgood pseudo-reality has gone.

The Guardian has no value because it is nothing.
It is a vacuum.
Or, if it is anything, it is a collection of white and grey market strategies (directly linked to the black) that create profits behind a front of fake media - just like the carpet shops that were fronts for cocaine importation in the UK before the Albanian Shqiptare mafia took control of the trade outside of Merseyside.

We live in a narcissistic world and Skipwith's entire strategy is based on selling a lie while telling readers that they are amazing.
Short-termism is a disease and not a fault that will sit well in oversight of the Premier League.

Integrity Man, under your control of the Guardian, why has the paper developed a business model akin to the Albanian mafia? Is that what football can expect from the Premier League under your tutelage in future - a fake front hiding lucrative corruption?

We are taking the piss here with this question, Integrity Man, because we know you know that we know you know the answer.

************************************************************************

Question Six:

On the very specific issue of matchfixing and insider trading that has reached epidemic proportions in the Premier League

The problem with mafia templates is that once they are firmly ensconced in the landscape, they are largely immovable other than by other mafia entities moving onto their patch.
And once established there can be only limited policing and the reactive construction of any regulatory barriers (suitably loopholed for future corruptions, of course).

In allowing this period of cowboy free market matchfixing in the post-Scudamore era, the Premier League (under the interim board) has given mafia absolute control of the English game.

The sport has become theatre, but a dark underground theatre where outcomes of games are set to investments made on those results.

Of course, Integrity Man, you will have garnered most of this sort of stuff from Mr Colquhoun but how on earth do you intend to rid the Premier League of mafia influences?
In fact, do you intend to rid the Premier League of mafia influences.?...
... therein lies the rub.

************************************************************************

Question Seven:

On venture capitalism

Mirabile dictu, although not as fucked up as private equity, venture capitalists are still a wunch of bankers.

And they live in a world of make-believe according to the Economist whose view is that venture capitalists are unable to perceive the value of their investments due to a lack of perspective even though they cast themselves, in their egotistically bubbled infallibility, as the ultimate arbiters of value.

"... it is good to see public investors shouting when an entrepreneur, for all his chutzpah, has no clothes."

A primary problem with both private equity and venture capital is short-termism.
Aside from enlightened strategic investors like Munger and Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, the short-term is the beam of focus for the vast majority of the institutional investors.

Now short-termism works on matters like fixing a football match or inflating a transfer fee (or an initial public offering) or sacking lots of people, stripping out the value but persuading a few fuckwits that the emperor is really wearing clothes while running his newspaper; but optimising business strategies for the immediate term means, by choice, that there's a lack of positive correlation between current actions and longer term strategies and development.

And then chaos reigns...
... eventually.

In businesses like the Premier League where image is everything, this lack of strategic planning will be its downfall - when the degree of matchfixing and insider trading plus the extent to which certain media and institutions are involved in these criminalities breaks through into the zeitgeist of public opinion, the ability to sell Zaha for a few quid more will be freakily pointless.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, Integrity Man, but we will soon be able to see that you stand there stark bollock naked.

Integrity Man, how do you intend to develop real sustainable strategy within your myopic short-termism?

Or, Integrity Man, is it the case that you have no intention of anything other than grabbing as much booty as possible and then doing a runner with your chums once all the value has been sucked out of English football?

And football will be left to function like that Sport of Kings horseracing - as a betting medium for insiders, patsies and crooks?

************************************************************************

Question Eight:

On 'Football Leaks' and the commercialisation of crime

Although the Guardian largely sat on the sidelines in the latter phases of the utilisation of the criminal entity'Football Leaks', that was only because the Football is Fixed Network had exposed that John Colquhoun was the wee man behind this farce. This prevented the paper taking ownership of the story which ended up being doled out by Der Spiegel.

Rui Pinto is a blackmailer who was coerced to act as a fall guy for the physical theft of documents to the benefit of a cartel of UK soccer agents and to the detriment of Gestifute and Doyen Sports.

Mr Colquhoun has a bit of a fetish for secrecy - he was also behind the 'Secret Footballer' nonsense at the Guardian and used scores of different aliases in contacts with members of the Football is Fixed Network - the man has a complication of personality disorders underpinning his psychopathy.

The irony is that the illegality of Third Party Ownership (TPO) was allegedly the campaigning reason why the Guardian initially promoted the 'Football Leaks' releases and yet TPO is widespread now across the English game.

The commercial reasons the Guardian got involved relate to external battles over turf and complex contractual interplays allowing profit to be internalised in secret.
Is this how venture capital now works, Integrity Man?

So.
Integrity Man.
Any chance of following through and addressing TPO in the Premier League or under the control of UK agents in other leagues?

I could give you a bunch of names.

************************************************************************

Question Nine:

On the Professional Game Match Officials Board and systemic matchfixing

The PGMOB refereeing body is a corrupt Stalinist entity that is rotten to the core - over 90% of the systemic matchfixing in the Premier League has the PGMOB at its roots. Mike Riley, the alleged controller of this criminal grouping, should be sacked with immediate effect. The Select Group of referees should be disbanded because the shit has truly risen to the top. There should be a far wider network of officials (including from other countries) and no officials should get more than a handful of games per season.

The creation of an elite group of referees hasn't worked.
It has produced a small grouping who have been incorporated into a mafia.

The Premier League has the most compromised grouping of match officials of any of the other major leagues.

Integrity Man, we understand that some of your mates are well rewarded by the illicit structures of the PGMOB but what are you going to do now you are CEO regarding referee-based corruption in the EPL?

Are you going to do something positive for football or just regard referee matchfixing as a necessary input to betting market control and hence valid for the profit margins?

************************************************************************

Question Ten:

On VAR and mafia influence of match decisions

In all other leagues, VAR has been a success yet in the Premier League it has been made a tool of the corruption rather than an enhancer of integrity. Obviously, the PGMOB entity is a problem here but the technology implementation and corruption of personnel are where the real matchfixing loci reside.

See - The VAR Room - The Twilight Zone Where All Future Matchfixing Will Be Orchestrated

The Premier League and the PGMOB are flouting the IFAB rules on the use of video technology. Originally the PGMOB planned not to have pitchside monitors at all and, when forced to employ them, they simply instructed the referees never to use them.

The EPL version of VAR is opaque and primed for matchfixing.
This situation isn't helped by Neil Swarbrick being Head of VAR at the PGMOB which, given his relationship with matchfixing agent John Colquhoun, is surely problematical.

Integrity Man, why can't we have a version of VAR that promotes integrity and improves the sport? Why do we have a version that increases matchfixing and insider trading? Will VAR just be another illicit input to your revenue streams?

************************************************************************

Question Eleven:

On the issues of corruption in the English Championship and the lower leagues

Although Skipwith's territory is to be the Premier League, inevitably the culture developed at the top table influences developments further down.
The Championship already functions like a very very very corrupt casino and is obviously ripe for a Premier League takeover.

But as profit never trickles down in neoliberal structures, the lower leagues only have two routes to sustainability - a sugar daddy (often laundering ill-gotten gains) or matchfixing.
Or both.

When Bury FC were driven to extinction while two of the three richest teams in the world sit in the same locale, the Economist commented that there is no hope for lower league clubs to breakeven as the clubs are not sustainable and there are no redistributive networks - the lower tier clubs know that survival depends on fighting in every available market (illicit or not).

So you get outfits like Billericay or AFC Wimbledon who would appear to primarily function as gambling stables teams.

Integrity Man, I'm sure you don't give a flying fuck, but will you take any measures at all that are progressive and allow poorer brethren to exist as community football teams without bookmakers taking control?

************************************************************************

Question Twelve:

On systemic corruption and matchfixing underpinning the 2019/20 season and comparisons with a broadly equivalent template throughout the post-Scudamore window

None of our offices in England, Geece or Romania bother subscribing to live Premier League footage anymore - the interest resides elsewhere in the hierarchical global markets.
Life is short and there is not enough time to spend a couple of hours watching a boiler room scam of an agreed result where Liverpool defeat Brighton & Hove Albion (but absolutely only by one goal).

In Skipwith's world, everybody wins...
... apart from fans, media out of the loop, the gamblers being exploited and the integrity of the game.

Of course, the Football is Fixed Network pay others to watch the matches on our behalf as the visuals are immensely revealing in football compared to other very fixed sports like horseracing or snooker or cricket.

When Joe Hart was on one, fans knew it.
When Mike Dean is fluttering around, we know the score.
When a high percentage of the mistakes that lead to goals are made by clients of a small number of agents or players who are third party owned, the analyst knows that the fixing is systemic.

Fake commentary inputs can only disguise these crimes for a while and the corrupt implementation of VAR will eventually result in the refereeing body being fully exposed as a criminalised body that it has been since Riley took over.

Last season, the EPL was systemically fixed.
So is this season.
And this season the corruption template is more extensive and more robust.

Liverpool were always going to win the Premier League in 2019/20 because when you accumulate all the legal marginal gains and sum them with the bigger body of illegal ones, you gain success.
Like with Team Sky in le Tour de France, the titles are gained but they are tainted and temporary as in the end, all corruption will be Lance Armstronged.

Integrity Man, what are your views of criminalised marginal gains?

************************************************************************

Question Thirteen:

On the very central role of mafia in all aspects of the Premier League

"I am told that myself and my network should be careful as we are being spied upon. 'Don't trust anyone, not even your colleagues', they say. Then there are the threats, the pitiful hacking and murder attempts that are aimed to act as a Chinese water torture - drip, drip, drip..."

"A whistleblower is killed slowly, day after day, before bombs explode or cars are crushed. The mafia never kills non-mafiosi just for vendetta. There is always another reason - to eliminate a person who has discovered something that must not be discovered."

"Who are these men of the state who, by negotiating with mafia, have allowed them to take control of football. The state doesn't want whistleblowers investigating their crimes. They hate us.  But the state plays a dangerous game - when a mafia infects a state, it is a cancer and a mafia state is always the creation."

"We now live in a mafia state - a state that, in order to preserve the status quo, has to remove whistleblowers who want justice. Why is the state so weak that it becomes an accomplice in systemic crime?"

"We must rebel against this system and this mafia method."

Like Nino Di Matteo, Daphne Caruana Galizia, Julian Assange, Jan Kuciak and Victoria Marinova, the Football is Fixed Network stand up against this mafia method...
... but, in future, we do so entirely from the underground.

Integrity Man, just fuck right off.
No questions asked.

************************************************************************

Question Fourteen:

On the helicopter occurrence that killed Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha a year ago

In three weeks time it will have been a year since the helicopter incident that killed Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha and four others after the fixed BT Sport-covered match between Leicester City and West Ham United refereed by Michael Oliver.

Two key aspects stand out over this event.

Firstly, having spoken with pilots, aircraft engineers, the intelligence community contacts in our network and military specialists, there is widespread incredulity at the official story that there were issues with the helicopter and that these deaths were an accident - and one of these individuals has worked with Jim Swire on the Lockerbie bombing and previously designed aircraft engines for Rolls Royce so we are not talking conspiracy theory here.

Secondly, the betting market control of Leicester City games had been coordinated since 2015/16 by a small cartel until just prior to the fatal match against West Ham United when the entire market infrastructure fell to bits. Considering the sheer volume traded on Leicester City matches, the loss of market control was a major financial hit. The Football is Fixed Network believe that the warfare over betting market control was a contributory input to this affair.

Integrity Man, it would help if the report into the aircrash might happen this side of Armageddon. But will you undertake to explore the other narratives regarding this dreadful crash? And, after Emiliano Sala's fatal plane crash related to illicit intermediaries and half-cocked regulations, will you endeavour to move football away from these concentric mafia circles and return the sport to its rightful place in society?

And, Integrity Man, the Guardian newspaper and John Colquhoun worked very closely on the regime change at Leicester City where Claude Puel was given agent-led player underperformance so that Brendan Rodgers could be stolen from Celtic. As the betting markets linked to Leicester City have continued to be "interesting" post-coup and given your fortuitous links, perhaps you could try and solve how the outcomes of the Foxes games are always known pre-match?
Could you do that for football, Integrity Man?

************************************************************************

Question Fifteen:

On the extensive corruption in the transfer market, the increasing presence of third party ownership, the creation of new agencies for specific purposes and how hidden ownership of players solicits matchfixing

As we touched on above, Third Party Ownership (TPO) is a real issue.

Markets depend on efficiency - the belief that all information is reflected in a price.
This is not the case in a corrupt market.

If Liverpool are definitely going to beat Brighton & Hove Albion by one goal to nil then there are a whole load of markets that should be priced as certainties.

Similarly, but to a different template, with the transfer market.

Skipwith's paper repeatedly shows how to inflate the transfer fees of clients from Key Sports Management, Base Agency, Unique Sports Management and Stellar by using newspaper output.
The transfer market is hence made inefficient for proprietary benefit.

But these two corruption templates merge with TPO.

When the ownership of a player is invisible then we have a problem.
The vast majority of TPO players engage in matchfixing on behalf of their 'owners'...
... who are, of course, invisible.

So, when █████ █████ lets in the goal, we know it is an 'error created by the market' but we don't know who is profiting to what degree or in which offshore centre or mafia state the money will eventually be laundered.

TPO is akin to tax evasion - it is underground, non-democratic and destroys whatever it was leeched from - a country, a business, a league, a club, a sport...

Integrity Man, we understand that you developed a real interest in the area of TPO when theGuardian was avidly promoting Jadon Sancho after he had been stolen from Manchester City and prior to his new representation by the Elite Project Group.

So, Integrity Man, as CEO of the EPL will you say no to TPO?

************************************************************************

Question Sixteen:

On the issue of club owners who are neither fit nor proper

A club only has as much integrity as its owner.

There is both an absence of any meaningful Fit & Proper Person Test (FPPT) for club custodians in the Premier League and there is an equivalent absence of any obstructive regulation between a club owner and a variety of corruptions.

Matchfixing is a given if the club owner is a bookmaker or a high stakes professional gambler who runs a betting consortium for other Premier League entities, for example.

If there are no FPPTs then the efficiency of  the transfer market becomes distorted by private concerns (with appropriate media backing of the sort Slipwith's newspaper provides), and the result is backhanders and kickbacks as agents and owners lubricate revenue flows accordingly - as a Blackpool FC fan it was disappointing to hear that such practices are already surfacing at the Seasiders post-Oyston.

Many of these corruptions lead to money laundering and offshore activities that privatise the status of the game into criminalised tax evasion spheres.

Integrity Man, unless gambling interests are removed from Premier League football, the game is up.

If club owners engage in insider trading and offering brokerage facilities for other insider traders then there are numerous occasions where the financial requirements of the owner are at odds with the fan.
You have dealt closely (yet obviously unknowingly) with individuals who are involved in systemic matchfixing so it would be facile for you to create an overview of how to address rogue owners undertaking matchfixing.

The question is, Integrity Man, will you fucking well do it?

************************************************************************

Question Seventeen:

On the widespread prevalence of doping in the EPL

In the football season after Skipwith became chief executive of theOrwellian, Leicester City robbed the Premier League title via extensive doping (Dr Mark Bonar, MAPEI, Team Sky-influenced) and the most biased refereeing that our analysts have witnessed in any major football league as far back as our records go - see The End Of Play (Extra Time).

UK Anti Doping is pro-doping...
... or, rather, pro-looking the other way while doping becomes systemic.

Insiders like doping because it rigs markets unbeknown to non-insiders.
Football teams like doping as it provides a competitive advantage.
Media like doping as it enhances the action if players are running around like headless chickens.
And big pharma likes doping because it creates markets for their illicit products - remember Bayer Leverkusen and the Champions League Final year.

But doping is anti-sporting.
In the last round of Champions League group games, Slavia Prague (by no means a young side) covered 128 kilometres in their game while Paris St Germain ran just 105 kilometres in their match - that equivalenced to every one of the outfield Slavia players covering 22 metres more every minute than PSG ones.
How?
Perhaps CITIC or Sonobo (Slavia's owners) know?

Doping is rampant in the Premier Leaguetoo and is accepted as a legitimate form of advantage by the powers-that-be because doping is highly regressive - it is the richest teams that have bespoke doping, not Buxton Town.

For a start, Integrity Man, perhaps you could explain why the player and team yardage covered figures for the Premier League are regarded as a trade secret with none of the media sharing this data with their audience or readership?
Why can't we see the variation in yardage covered by Jamie Vardy over a season?

You're not going to bother doing anything to stop doping either, are you Integrity Man?

************************************************************************

Question Eighteen:

On the state

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Football is Fixed Network - Check Bucuresti Server

"The state, any state, allows corruption to proceed if the internal gross profits related to the corruption exceeds the losses to the Treasury" - that was the holistic advice of my late lawyer David McNeight when we confronted George Osborne (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) over his knowledge of corruption in British football and those weird little payments to Chinese entities. It remains a minor source of joy and comfort that our network helped this unpleasant little man out of politics.

So, take horseracing - when we approached British Horserace Betting Levy Board chief executive Rodney Brack with evidence of corruption in British racing in the mid-nineties, it was made very clear to us that the state profited from gambling and that it would not be in our interests to continue our research.

The same variety of implied threats followed our disclosures about Osborne.

Given Skipwith's close ties with the intelligence community while at the Guardian, we make the assumption that Integrity Man is acceptable to the state.

Integrity Man, on the whole would you agree that mafia state structures are anti-democratic and strip any vestige of essence from any reality? And, Integrity Man, if football is to be slaughtered on the altar of underworld profits can we at least have a government anti-corruption entity that maintains some semblance of sporting competition among the mafia strategies?

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Question Nineteen:

On this particular match structure - where exactly does integrity reside in this EPL match, Mr Integrity Man?

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Football is Fixed Network - Check Bucuresti Server

Anyway, further to redacted above, here is the initial article: see - Happy Anniversary To Roy Hodgson
And note that this match occurred a decade ago this month.

Corruption is deep-rooted in the Premier League.
And yet not once in the last ten years has the Guardian gone anywhere near disclosing these massive corruptions of which the paper has ended up being a corrupted part.

Integrity Man must be proud of his work.
David Skipwith Pemsel is exactly what the Premier League doesn't need.

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Question Twenty:

On the robustness of the mafia template

Thanks to the exertions of █████ █████, we now have a firm foundation and baseline for future systemic football corruptions in the Premier League.

Even if the momentum existed in Skipwith's nature, it is very difficult to pull football back from the brink of obsolescence at EPL-level.

There exists a robust mafia infrastructure in place.

At the Guardian, intentionally or by extreme fluke, Mr Integrity skipped with the mafia.

Let us hope that that particular addiction is satiated by the time he shadows the Premier League.

But will it be so, Integrity Man?
We guess not.

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________________________________________________________________________

"All you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth" - Greta Thunberg

A poem read by an Icelandic school pupil to the disappeared glacier Okjokull...

"Ok, the burdened glacier/ which at last had had enough/ of acts of terror from men who do not know/ how to have both profits and morals"
_______________________________________________________________________________

The Football is Fixed Network is unique.
We are in a niche of one.
We have no competitors.
_______________________________________________________________________________

If you have any information to contribute to Football is Fixed, please contact Ojo del Toro in complete confidence via Direct Message @footballisfixed. You can do so anonymously, but if you use your real name you can rest assured that this website operates a blanket policy of non-disclosure and does not cooperate with requests for details from the authorities or individuals.

1. How the Football is Fixed Network have compressed the insider trading on matchfixing linked to Brighton and Hove Albion and Leicester City.

2. The Colquhoun Recordings - Entirely transferred to Dropbox. Ready to go.

3. The Guardian newspaper and Unique Sports Management agents (see 2).

4. The full extent of the fixture bias is only surface-skimmed in the latest primary level linear analytics from MCFC over xmas fixtures - a cynic might suggest that research and knowledge is withheld from oversight of the upper hierarchies.

The EPL fixture list is marginally gained and iceberged for optimisation of bias.

5. Using enhanced machine learning AI to crumple cryptography; how to analyse aliases (and just one known password) for all entity passwords - a paper by █████ █████

6. And a big Football is Fixed welcome to referees █████, █████, █████, █████, █████.

7. War criminal Alastair Campbell to be given role at EPL under Skipwith? - what we've been told....

8. Sheffield United, Key Sports Management, the 'aborted takeovers' of Oxford United and Northampton Town and stuff like that...

9. Deliberate abuse of VAR by sub-standard match officials continues this weekend - Michael Oliver is VAR official for both televised games on Saturday. The only other occasion anywhere in football where a VAR official has controlled two tv games in one day was when Oliver oversaw Southampton v Man Utd and Burnley v Liverpool earlier this season.

Oliver is fake and the PGMOB is criminalised - on both dates, the entire afternoon of matches has been ruined by a crazy array of mad match decisions orchestrated by VAR.

Is this to be a future feature of the spectacle?

VAR works..
... the PGMOB doesn't.

10. Strategy Plays A Head (Sick)

For Network Access - See New Kerkyra Server


_______________________________________________________________________________

The Football is Fixed Network is unique.
We are in a niche of one.
We have no competitors.
_______________________________________________________________________________

If you have any information to contribute to Football is Fixed, please contact Ojo del Toro in complete confidence via Direct Message @footballisfixed. You can do so anonymously, but if you use your real name you can rest assured that this website operates a blanket policy of non-disclosure and does not cooperate with requests for details from the authorities or individuals.

"There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate".

Daphne Caruana Galizia's last tweet before she was murdered in a car bomb by mafia state operatives in Malta - it is worthy of note that much of the corruption underpinning UK football also cesspits in Malta - the crime island.

1. We expose the 'relationship' between Celtic chief executive Peter Lawwell and Gavin Fleig (Director of Talent Management and Development at Manchester City) and their private meetings and the resultant leakages to John Colquhoun.

2. Tomorrow it will be a year since the death murder of Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha in a helicopter crash after the fixed EPL game between Leicester City and West Ham United.

How nice for the club to celebrate this anniversary with last night's heavily fixed Southampton 0 Leicester City 9 farce where former Colquhoun client Ryan Bertrand was sent off in the 12th minute by a Mike Dean VAR incursion..

The questions remain -

a) Who disconnected the helicopter pedal mechanism or, alternatively, how did the pedal mechanism disconnect itself?

b) Why were betting market makers who had been running Leicester City matches since prior to the EPL title season suddenly cut out of match control just prior to the crash?

c) How significant is it that █████ based bookmaker █████ regained control of Leicester events in the immediate aftermath of the murder only to relinquish when investigations circled?

d) On the Kerkyra server we include evidences regarding the Brendan Rodgers/John Colquhoun coup of stealing the former from Celtic.

And why do Celtic supporters put up with former player Colquhoun raping the club for illicit profits?

and

e) most pertinently, Who Killed Cock Robin?

3. The █████ █████ papers are also now available in Kerkyra where we detail the increasingly inappropriate links between corruption in the UK and Bundesliga in Germany (with particular focus on █████ and the matchfixing of Champions League and Europa League matches).

For Network Access - See New Kerkyra Server

_______________________________________________________________________________

The Football is Fixed Network is unique.
We are in a niche of one.
We have no competitors.
_______________________________________________________________________________

If you have any information to contribute to Football is Fixed, please contact Ojo del Toro in complete confidence via Direct Message @footballisfixed. You can do so anonymously, but if you use your real name you can rest assured that this website operates a blanket policy of non-disclosure and does not cooperate with requests for details from the authorities or individuals.

Mike Dean refereed the fixed televised match between Sheffield United and Arsenal on October 21st.

Out of the next 10 matches on the following weekend, Dean was VAR official in two televised matches Southampton v Leicester (early VAR red card) and LiverpoolvTottenham (late match-winning VAR penalty) while also refereeing a match between Watford and Bournemouth where the outcome was known pre-match.

Today, Dean is VAR official for both televised matches - Bournemouth v Manchester United and Watford v Chelsea.

So by the end of today, Dean will have been in a key influencing refereeing position in 5 out of the last 8 televised matches.

Furthermore, on two other occasions this season the PGMOB controllers have positioned one man (Michael Oliver in both cases) on both of the Saturday televised games only to find that the VAR decisions in the 15:00 kick offs possessed intriguing correlations - it is felt within our network that Oliver was VAR official for the day on each occasion.

This accumulation of control will mean that Dean will either have been in the Stockley Park VAR hub or the referee on the field of play in 12 of the last 19 games Premier League matches.

Mike Dean has previously been banned from officiating over his proximity to bookmakers and tipping services.

No other league allows this.

Mike Dean is rogue.

The Premier League is rogue.

_______________________________________________________________________________

The Football is Fixed Network is unique.
We are in a niche of one.
We have no competitors.
_______________________________________________________________________________

If you have any information to contribute to Football is Fixed, please contact Ojo del Toro in complete confidence via Direct Message @footballisfixed. You can do so anonymously, but if you use your real name you can rest assured that this website operates a blanket policy of non-disclosure and does not cooperate with requests for details from the authorities or individuals.

On 11/11, the Football is Fixed Network will be 13 years old

Four Three Meetings and a Funeral

As part of the celebrations we're sharing this weekend's internal EPL Newsletter - each member of the Network contributes an overview of developments in their focus league and we share real-time analytics and inside information on football matches in those leagues too (we are not able to share these latter analytics, obviously)

FIF EPL Newsletter 8/11

1. VAR

After the Football Supporters' Association (FSA), and, separately, the southern and northern teams in the EPL met with Mike Riley to discuss correlations between PGMOB decision-making (including VAR) and betting patterns, presumably, there was a dearth of comment in the msm until, voila, the Telegraph tell us that Lee Mason made an 'error'VARing Brighton a fake victory against Everton. The markets were expecting an 'error' in Brighton vs Everton so this arbitrary selection of fake is evidently an attempt to deflect from the systemic corruption underpinning EPL.

As we have pointed out elsewhere, Riley met with Pep Guardiola and was shown 20 incorrect PGMOB decisions against Manchester City. Riley agreed that all were wrong calls. But where's the redress?

More importantly, where is the regulatory monitoring of the betting markets?
And why do bookmakers seek out insider trading if not to facilitate corruption?

The application of VAR by EPL& PGMOB has destroyed integrity of the English game just so some underworld shysters can make a mint.

They are taking the piss.


2. Sack Neil Swarbrick

Corrupt former referee Neil Swarbrick is John Colquhoun's place man as Head of VAR at PGMOB.

Swarbrick bears much responsibility for the farcical rule-bending, fake implementation, systemic corruptions and integrity violations that have been the hallmark of the introduction of VAR into the EPL.

It has not been such a shitfuckery freak show anywhere else.

Sack Swarbrick.
Sack Riley.


3. Liverpool vs Manchester City

Not a title-decider because the title is already decided but interesting for an array of reasons anyway.

When the Times newspaper released their exclusive that Liverpool had illegally accessed Manchester City systems seeking player performance and other proprietary data, there was a complete absence of comment from most msm. Liverpool had to pay City £1 million in settlement (without admitting liability, of course).

This is a major news story. Why no ongoing discussions? The msm is captured.

There is a continuing leak out of Manchester City and, as we exclusively exposed last season (all these exclusive articles are currently archived), there is a considerable edifice behind Liverpool FC including other teams, match officials, medical performance people and agents.

Wonder what Brendan Rodgers makes of all this?


4. Coleen Rooney 9 Rebekah Vardy 0

Military intelligence operators have rated Coleen Rooney's slaughtering of what was left of the character of Ms Vardy as "awesome counterintelligence" - the playing out of a creative strategy over time while managing an extensive fanbase while Ms Muggins walked right into it, was totally "awesome counterintelligence."

We have offered Coleen a job!

Funnier still are Rebekah's claims that she was hacked and we are supposed to believe that she has called in IT specialists to fudge her bitch.

Meanwhile, Brendan Rodgers this week announced some fake reason why Jamie Vardy turned down Arsenal...
... except that he didn't - Arsenal were never interested.
Wenger told us.

Just another Key Sports Management/ John Colquhoun Fake News Alert.

And talking of which...


5. Ralf Rangnick, Doping, Bayern Munich, Red Bull, Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp & Marc Kosicke

We disclosed on Twitter before the Champions League games this week that the four teams who had covered the greatest distance in the first stage of the groups were:

1. Slavia Prague (co-owned by Chinese government and Sinobo)
2. Bayer Leverkusen (backed by Bayer Pharmaceutical)
3. RB Leipzig&
4. Red Bull Salzburg (part of the Red Bull fizz).

And in this week's matches...

Slavia drew in Barcelona, Leverkusen beat Atletico Madrid, RB Leipzig won in Zenit St Petersburg and Red Bull Leipzig drew in Napoli.
Slavia covered 14 kilometres more than Barcelona!

How do these teams cover such excessive distances?
Where is WADA?

Ralf Rangnick is Head of Sports & Development at Red Bull.
He is loved by corrupt people at the Guardian newspaper.

This week Bayern Munich turned down an approach from Marc Kosicke (Rangnick's agent) to try and get Rangnick short-listed for the Bayern manager's post. We have been told that Rangnick isn't wanted as the Red Bull style of sport does not fit with FC Bayern.

The Guardian, who are keen to get Rangnick into the EPL, ran a headline claiming the exact opposite - that Rangnick had turned down Bayern.

Fake again.

Marc Kosicke also represents Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp - a man who understands doping in all its guises.

We tell you, folks, Football is Fixed.


6. Lionesses, Mafia & the Mainstream Media

Two years ago, a member of Football is Fixed was approached by Luke Heighton, an investigative journalist from the Telegraph.

In his attempt to seduce us, he provided an exclusive that four members of the England Lionesses were represented by an agent who is banned worldwide from all football activities after having been exposed as a mafia man when in control of AC Monza in Italy.

The Telegraph editor refused to run the story as the Lionesses were a feelgood narrative to be promoted.

As with the Allardyce exposes (also squashed from full impact by the Telegraph) and like the Dr Mark Bonar Leicester City doping exclusive at the Times, these stories have to be terminated. This type of news cannot be known.

Just like the systemic matchfixing.

Still...
... good to know that there are a variety of mafia entities hovering around the Lionesses as they take on Germany at the Food Mall today.


7. Roy Hodgson & Crystal Palace

The fact that apartheid-sanction busting money head thug Roy Hodgson is still in work is indicative of the state of the English game...
... he should have been sacked after we exposed the fixed EPL match between Fulham (where Hodgson managed) and Wigan 10 years ago last week - see  Happy Anniversary to Roy Hodgson

I received threats from John Colquhoun over exposing this Fulham v Wigan fix.

But given that a legacy is being cooked up for the man, why do we have to put up with such excessive PGMOB bias in favour of Crystal Palace?

Palace were the most favoured team in the EPL in 2017/18, the 4th most favoured last season and the most favoured again this season...
... except that this year Palace are receiving the most bias of any team in the top four European leagues.

Penalty for Palace has become a sub-section of the PGMOB.


8. Even Worse Than Palace Is The Current Brighton & Hove Albion Regime

Several members of our Network have been approached by former employees of Brighton & Hove Albion since we revealed systemic matchfixing of games involving club owner Tony Bloom and the perverse role played by his Starlizard betting unit.

Ground staff are taking the club to court. Other former staff are considering their options.

We helped Gus Poyet with his grievances and his successful court case against Bloom's mode of business and we always try to aid integrity in the psycho-world of the EPL.

It's good to talk.

And best of luck with all that reputation management, Mr Bloom...

_______________________________________________________________________________

The Football is Fixed Network is unique.
We are in a niche of one.
We have no competitors.
_______________________________________________________________________________

If you have any information to contribute to Football is Fixed, please contact Ojo del Toro in complete confidence via Direct Message @footballisfixed. You can do so anonymously, but if you use your real name you can rest assured that this website operates a blanket policy of non-disclosure and does not cooperate with requests for details from the authorities or individuals.

                                   Fans in the olden days: "The league table never lies."
                                   Fans in 2019: "The league table never tells the truth."

Introduction

At the biannual Premier League meeting this week, the multi-millionaires and billionaires whose wealth derives from sucking all the value and integrity out of top tier football will vote themselves good marks for their role with corrupting VAR in the systemic matchfixing that has become the foundation of the self-styled "world's greatest league".

This self-assessment is fake beyond belief.

When Serie A introduced VAR, refereeing errors that changed the match outcomes happened only once in 20 matches as opposed to every third game prior to video technology.

The Premier League/PGMOB version of VAR has deteriorated an already corrupted infrastructure still further...
... 2019/20 is the most corrupt EPL season yet thanks to the deliberate abuse of VAR.


And this is also the first Premier League meeting since Integrity Man was installed as chief executive...
... Integrity Man is neither fit nor proper - see here  20 Questions For Integrity Man


Those behind these nonsenses have enough critical mass control at both IFAB and the Premier League to prevent changes to the way VAR is being deviated for their private enhancement.

And it does work for them.

It works for them with insider trading the corruption in the betting markets.
And it ruins the integrity of the competition to their proprietary benefit.

This season, without rogue decision-making by the PGMOB officials, Manchester United would be in 17th place on 10 points with Crystal Palace bottom on 6...
... instead they sit 7th and 12th respectively (which is great for Hodgson's legacy and the puppet-masters behind Solskjaer and for those who insider trade on their games).

Meanwhile the whole league's reputation lies in tatters as Manchester City should be just 2 points behind Liverpool - see  EXCLUSIVE: Lizards, Lacertae & Liverpool

_________________________________________________________________


Archive & History

We wish to make some comments and ask some questions.
But we don't wish to cover old ground.
So at the conclusion of this article are 20 historical Football is Fixed articles relating to VAR and the PGMOB.

And here is a link to our overview of VAR and corruption at the PGMOB:

The VAR Room - The Twilight Zone Where All Future Premier League And FA Cup Matchfixing Will Be Orchestrated
__________________________________________________________________

Some Comments

1. The mainstream media repeatedly report that VAR isn't working or is failing in some manner.
It does work.
It works well.
The failure lies with the PGMOB match officials who are implementing these fake decisions.
This is ruination by human, not machine - but a bad workman always blames his tools.
And, with perspective, the PGMOB is full of tools.

2. Sack the PGMOB's chief executive Mike Riley and Neil Swarbrick (the Head of VAR).
The criminalisation of the Premier League has accelerated under Riley's lack of stewardship while Swarbrick has compromising links that should not be allowed in such a position.

3. When an entity becomes suddenly chaotic, fraud forensics demands that we determine who (within the game) is benefiting from these orchestrated catastrophics.
And.
We find.
Everybody is losing aside from some corrupt match officials, some insider traders, certain other market making professionals and the captured media and institutions whose head-burying enables this systemic matchfixing.

Outside of the sport the only winners are mafia.

4. For Thursday's meeting, the Premier League/PGMOB are going for the Ukrainian-Trumpian "everything is fine, nothing to see here" strategy of defence and have even allowed a confession of a mistake in VAR with Brighton's winning goal versus Everton.
That 'error' wasn't to do with the needs of those behind select betting patterns then?

Yet we report elsewhere on the 20 key match decisions that Mike Riley admitted to Pep Guardiola that the PGMOB had got wrong to Manchester City's detriment.

These 'mistakes' (sic) with VAR are systemic not specific.

5. The PGMOB insists on referees signing NDAs in return for hush money on retirement - only Mark Halsey has refused the offer.

Yet BT Sport, due to their dovetailed linking to the PGMOB, allows compromised former referees to defend the present day corruptions.

It's an Orwellian loop of corruption is BT Sport...
... and the PGMOB would not allow referee exposure if it didn't suit their purposes.
__________________________________________________________________

Some Questions

1. Why are the fake match decisions (made both as referee and VAR) by a certain inner very Select Group of PGMOB officials correlated with the requirements of certain betting market professionals?

2. Does this happen by magic?

3. Of the 55 live televised matches (the matches with the largest global betting volumes), 47 have been VAR-officiated by a small inner group of just 9 match officials. Why?

4. The PGMOB only agreed to bring in the pitchside tv monitors when Football is Fixed pointed out their requirement under IFAB rules. Why are these monitors now ignored? Why the lip service to rules to suit the internal Stockley Park template?

5. At one window this season, Mike Dean was either referee or in the Stockley Park VAR hub for a run of 12 out of 19 Premier League games.

How did that happen?

Mike Dean has form.
Lots of it.

On two other occasions, Michael Oliver was referee for both the 12:30 GMT BT Sport fraud and the 17;30 Sky one, and, on each occasion the 15:00 EPL kick offs were rife with refereeing roguery.
Why are these structures allowed?

Nobody else runs their league like this, so why the EPL?

6. And, finally, why did an entity linked to mobsters change their name from PGMOB to PGMOL just at the very moment those mobsters took control?

__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________

Archive

We have been considerably ahead of the curve on video technology and corruption at the PGMOB.

For over a decade we have been campaigning for the introduction of technology to undermine this corruption...
... instead the Premier League and PGMOB have conspired to create a version of VAR that appears to have been developed for maximum financial gains by the matchfixing mafia who are destroying the game.

Here are a couple of tweets that remain relevant and links to an archive of 20 articles covering VAR and the PGMOB.


Appendix

On January 27th 2018 after the matchfixing of a game between Liverpool and West Bromwich Albion, we tweeted:

VAR will not reduce matchfixing without: 1) managerial reviews of decisions (as in tennis & cricket) & 2) referee & VAR on open microphone so we can hear how the decision is reached (as in rugby & cricket). Otherwise it is a scam - an attempt to validate the corruption.

And at the beginning of this season, we posted on Twitter:

The #PremierLeague version of VAR is primed for corruption. The whole process is murky. #EPL#VAR is already enhancing matchfixing & increasing the number of fake outcomes. We expect this to continue... ... particularly with former rogue ref Neil Swarbrick as Head of VAR.

Twenty Historical Football is Fixed articles on PGMOB refereeing body and video technology/VAR:

Mike Dean On The Scene... 2/11/19 

20 Questions For Integrity Man 5/10/19

The VAR Room - The Twilight ZoneWhere All Future Premier League And FA Cup Matchfixing Will Be Orchestrated 18/5/19 

PGMOB - Please Get Money Off Bookmakers - A Thread 2/2/19

Robust Video Technology Is Needed To Save Football From The Mafia 8/1/18

The Men Who Sold The World 12/1/16

Stickybeaking The Standover Man 10/1/16

Football For Rent  24/6/15

The IFAB Four 1/3/15

How To Solve Matchfixing Once And For All 13/12/13

Mark Halsey - A Referee Of Integrity? 17/9/13

Goal-Line Technology Is Not Enough 21/4/13

What An Incredible Fluke XXXIX 17/4/12

Peter Walton Is A Red Bastard 1/2/12

Grim, Grimmer, Grimmest 18/9/09

Manipulated Markets And Mashing It Up In The Moss 24/8/09

How The Rules Corrupt The Laws 21/7/09

Hawkeye Or Howard Webb? Integrity Or █████? 28/11/08

Monitor Market Manipulation Not Mickey Mouse 16/11/08

Your Daily Dose Of Corruption 28/10/08

________________________________________________________________________

The Football is Fixed Network is unique.
We are in a niche of one.
We have no competitors.
________________________________________________________________________

If you have any information to contribute to Football is Fixed, please contact Ojo del Toro in complete confidence via Direct Message @footballisfixed. You can do so anonymously, but if you use your real name you can rest assured that this website operates a blanket policy of non-disclosure and does not cooperate with requests for details from the authorities or individuals.

This week a reserve team player who has played barely 90 minutes for his club this season and who hadn't played for his country for thirteen months achieved wall-to-wall mainstream media coverage over an incident as inconsequential as you might wish to create, so minor that even his own club and international team-mates say that this is commonplace in football and should be kept within the squad circle and not aired publicly.

But aired publicly it was, ad fucking nauseum.

Joe Gomez, the player in question is represented by John Colquhoun's Key Sports Management.
Mr Colquhoun has issues with Raheem Sterling from the Aidy Ward era - Sterling faced down Colly Boy's weird business strategies and hasn't been forgiven.

So a no-brainer for Colquhoun...

But.

Why did Gareth Southgate make this minor spat public?
Who else influenced that choice?
When did Southgate make the decision that Gomez would play a part in the game - prior to the inflated spectacle or because of it?
Did any money change hands between any agent and any other representative relating to this peripheral news?

And, no doubt, in a world of pseudo-fake, Joe Gomez will be worth more in the transfer market because of this charade.

Peripheral stories to sell papers and secure profits...

Southgate's squad selection is biased tilted owned impacted by a small grouping of agents with 6 of the current England squad being represented by Stellar, for example (including all three goalkeepers - Stellar also represent 1st choice Scottish keeper and 1st and 2nd choice Welsh which might be a problem if either of the owners were professional gamblers, which, of course, they are).

Not so long ago, Colquhoun also represented all three England squad goalkeepers (under McClaren), and that ended badly with Wally-with-the-Brolly-gate and Scott Carson's mistake.

And this ownership of England squad players by a small fragmented cartel of agents is consolidated by hidden representation.

There is an invisible market in football which is never addressed in the mainstream media...
... it is the underground market where agents and intermediaries trade players between their agencies like pieces of meat with multiple and third party ownership being the norm in this infrastructure.

New agencies are established and the key players like Colquhoun are now known to be behind tens of different firms in partial or complete ownership (or other suitable linkage).

The opacity regarding ownership of players needs to be addressed.
Mind you the opacity relating to club owners needs sorting too.
And referee selection.
And doping.
And insider trading.
And matchfixing.

And the British sports media is nothing if not opaque.

Anyway.
That's an aside.

The key question here remains...

... How Many People Own A Slice Of The Southgate Pizza?
________________________________________________________________________

The Football is Fixed Network is unique.
We are in a niche of one.
We have no competitors.
________________________________________________________________________

If you have any information to contribute to Football is Fixed, please contact Ojo del Toro in complete confidence via Direct Message @footballisfixed. You can do so anonymously, but if you use your real name you can rest assured that this website operates a blanket policy of non-disclosure and does not cooperate with requests for details from the authorities or individuals.

Happy to improve my VAR overruled goals record today again 💯 damn this thing gonna kill me bro 😂😂😂 #cursedpic.twitter.com/pLSjYkLp5Z

— Raheem Sterling (@sterling7) November 23, 2019

This was the weekend when VAR was supposed to be used professionally and with integrity by the pgMOBsters who officiate our Premier League games.

Mike "Kipper" Riley, the CEO of the pgMOB, told us improvements were about to happen.
Neil "Kickback" Swarbrick, the Head of VAR, praised himself and predicted a 9/10 just around the corner.

And instead we got...
Fake VAR in favour of Liverpool, denying Palace a point.
Fake VAR removing Raheem Sterling's goal for Manchester City.
A whole collection of fake nonsense against Arsenal by Attwell of the pgMOB.
Mike Dean with his own take on reality in Brighton vs Leicester.
Bizarre interpretations of the rules by Hooper & Mason at Bournemouth vs Wolves.

In Italy's Serie A after the introduction of VAR, just one in every 20 matches had the result altered due to refereeing errors.

In the Premier League this season, nearly 30% of games have had referee/VAR-error induced fake outcomes.

When any of our network undertake consultancy work at clubs we always introduce the concept of the Real League Table - adjusted for the inputs of fake officials.

It used to offer competitive advantage but most clubs do it now - Bournemouth, for example, use it to determine the 'real' quality of the opposition as opposed to the version offered by the 'actual' league table.
It helps with tactics and strategy.

Let's see the Real League Table after 128 games (a third of the season):

1. Manchester City 13-31
2. Liverpool 13-31
3. Chelsea 13-26
4. Arsenal 13-26
5. Leicester 13-24
6. Burnley 13-21
7. Wolverhampton 13-21
8. Sheffield United 12-18
9. West Ham United 13-18
10. Tottenham 13-17
11. Bournemouth 13-17
12. Brighton 13-15
13. Everton 13-15
14. Newcastle 12-15
15. Aston Villa 12-11
16. Norwich 13-11
17. Manchester United 12-10
18. Southampton 13-10
19. Watford 13-9
20. Crystal Palace 13-7

In the top four European leagues, no leading team had been targeted as heavily as Manchester City...
... and none has been so favoured as Crystal Palace.

The League Table Always Lies.

There should be serious questions in the media about Solskjaer and Hodgson rather than the focus on pseudo-journalism elsewhere.

Riley & Swarbrick should be sacked and the police called in.

But the Premier League systemic corruption template is on borrowed time now that Arsene Wenger's new role at FIFA gives him oversight of IFAB and the rules of the game.

Kipper Riley is to meet Wenger soon and schadenfreude will be on the menu both for the stolen EPL title in 2015/16 and for all of the matchfixing against Arsenal while Wenger lit up the English game.
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