Monday, 16 February 2026
The battle now is for freedom of information and Musk is the hero - but how long will he withstand pressure from the EU and Israel?
Whitney Webb on the CIA using under-age girls for blackmail
"Claims of Epstein’s links and his involvement in a sophisticated, well-funded sexual blackmail operation have, surprisingly, spurred few media outlets to examine the history of intelligence agencies both in the U.S. and abroad conducting similar sexual blackmail operations, many of which also involved underage prostitutes.
"In the U.S. alone, the CIA operated numerous sexual blackmail operations throughout the country, employing prostitutes to target foreign diplomats in what the Washington Post once nicknamed the CIA’s “love traps.” If one goes even farther back into the U.S. historical record it becomes apparent that these tactics and their use against powerful political and influential figures significantly predate the CIA and even its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In fact, they were pioneered years earlier by none other than the American Mafia."
CIA-MI6-Mossad is the international deep state - Epstein, Mandelson and McSweeney were closely involved - Jeremy Corbyn was 'regime changed'
The CIA, of course, attempted to undermine and regime change Donald Trump in his first administration.
The US organisation that does much of this work is NED. It was closely involved in the Ukrainian revolution in 2004 as well as the 2014 one and tried hard to overthrow Lukashenko in Belarus.
It's a pity that the CIA was not wound up as some Republicans proposed after the Cold War. A pity that Nato was not dissolved, for that matter.

The video is here.
I quote from Mr Benz.
'Today the the CIA, the Pentagon, USAD, the State Department are have been funding NOS's and civil society fronts to pick sides in the civil war between
the Republican party predominantly because of the MAGA populist side of the Republican party that is for prioritizing domestic affairs and limiting the international affairs budget. the warmongering, the USAID expenditures and the like. And that obviously runs straight against the interests of the US foreign policy establishment. And so what we saw today against the Republican party has been a
national security apparatus that appears to be anti-Republican, although it's really not. It's just picking sides in the Civil War. They would not be anti-Republican, for example, if Nikki Haley were the front runner or Mitt Romney or John McCain. They're simply picking sides in the Republican civil war the same way they would back a tribal guerrilla movement in Sudan over over a rival. And this is what was being done to the Democrat party in the 1960s and 70s.'
Sunday, 15 February 2026
Quotations
Raf Behr in an email to Guardian readers:
The MI6 run media shamelessly deceive
I first noticed with coverage of the "moderate rebels" in the Syrian war.
The Times and The Sunday Times Files expose his links to the Kremlin through ambassadors, oligarchs and intelligence officers — plus his attempts to meet Putin
Saturday, 14 February 2026
The Daily Telegraph stopped being a serious paper twenty years ago
In 2025 Declassified UK discovered that very senior Israeli officials, including the former chief of the IDF, held private meetings with powerful figures in the British media, including the BBC, Guardian, FT and Sky News to influence coverage of Gaza.
The Daily Telegraph was not invited because its editorial line was already so pro-Israeli that there wasn't any point.
How Epstein became a scandal. The media displayed a sublime lack of curiosity and still intend to suppress the most important things
Epstein avoided federal charges, which could have seen him face life in prison - and received a light sentence with "work release".
Nothing much happened though until 2015 when a journalist who liked conspiracy theories called Ben Swann used the Giuffre story as part of accusations about a paedophile ring of powerful men.
In 2016 American conservative conspiracy theorists were busy examining the revelation that Hillary Clinton, expected to be President, kept confidential emails on her private server.
On 4chan (a place where anyone can publish anything anonymously) paedophiles and Hillary's emails were conflated and the Pizzagate theory was born and ran wild.
At every point what was becoming the Epstein story was kept alive and transmitted by right-wingers, conspiracy theorists and the Russians, not the newspapers.
Much of the story is told very well here. It explains a lot about where we are, in a crisis of epistemology.
I am told that the files released so far are only 2% of whatever is coming.
The media struggles to maintain the status quo ante Trump and Epstein. I expected them to bury the Epstein story and they would have done so had it not been for Andrew Lownie and more importantly Congressman Thomas Massie.
The Epstein story wasn't broken by journalists but an anonymous person on 4chan and circulated on dodgy sites until it became the Pizzagate theory which everyone dismissed and finally we are where we are.
I hope trust in traditional media, who today tell us Epstein worked for Russia, is destroyed and faith in BigTech, self-made billionaires and modernity too.
Epstein implicates the greedy leaders of our brave new world.
If only the hereditary peers still sat in Parliament Britain at least would be able to turn to an older elite rooted in the land: somewhere people not anywhere people.
The Catholic Church, badly led though it is, is the institution that resisted Epstein and which he failed to subvert.
Norman Finkelstein also needs to be commended. He said Epstein and Dershowitz deserved to be throttled.
After Epstein, nothing can continue as before: Neither the post war ‘never again’ values – reflecting sentiment at the end of bloody wars – and the widespread yearning for a ‘fairer’ society; nor the bipolar economics of extreme disparities in wealth; nor trust – after the exposed venality, rotted institutions and perversions that the Epstein files have shown to be endemic amongst certain of the western élites.
How to speak of ‘values’ against this background?
At Davos, Mark Carney made clear that the ‘rules order’ was but a tawdry Potemkin façade that was thoroughly known as false, yet the façade was maintained. Why? Simply because the deceit was useful. The ‘exigency’ was the need to hide the system’s collapse into radical, anti-values nihilism. To hide the reality that the élite circles – around Epstein – operated beyond moral, legal or human limitations, to decide between peace and war, on the basis of their base appetites.
Hatred as a religious emotion
I feel like posting again something from a conversation I had with an Anglican clergyman.
His point about Islam now rings true to me.
Me: I have never felt the C of E is very religious.
Sebastian: I never did.
Me: Hatred of Catholicism is the only genuinely religious emotion the English ever experience, someone said
Sebastian: Now Islam of course
Friday, 13 February 2026
Francesca Albanese, a heroine of our times
She should have won the Nobel Peace Prize. She did not call Israel “the common enemy of humanity” but an increasing number of people do think it is.
The Daily Telegraph does not and with the other British Conservative newspapers is an unhesitating supporter of Netanyahu, whatever he might do.
The BBC and the left-wing papers criticise Israel a bit but follow the British government line.
The Daily Telegraph suggests to its readers that Epstein worked for Russia.
It published today a character assassination of Tucker Carlson who has started to be highly critical of Israel.
It has assured its readers every week for four years that the Russian economy is about to collapse.
It inflates the numbers murdered by Hamas on 7 October by three or four times, without proof accuses Hamas of rapes and falsely says they deliberately killed babies.
It rejoices that there is a warrant out for the arrest of Putin and is outraged that there is another one for Netanyahu.
It says the Russians kidnapped many Ukrainian children. I doubt this.
I could go on forever could I bring myself to read its foreign coverage.
Russian television and websites are banned for being propaganda. Journalists who criticised Ukraine or Israel get a visit from the police and are sometimes debanked as Francesca Albanese has been.
Why is this not reported in the media? - it's a huge story
An employee of Paragon Solutions shared a photograph of their Graphite spyware in action to her LinkedIn profile earlier this week. The post has since been deleted.




