Wayne Madsen

Wayne Madsen (born April 25, 1954) is an American online investigative journalist, author and columnist specializing in intelligence and international affairs.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} He is the author of the blog Wayne Madsen Report.^[6] He has been described as a conspiracy theorist.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12][13]}

Background and early life

Madsen was born in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania on April 28, 1954 to an American mother and a Danish mariner. His grandmother, who emigrated to the U.S. with his father after World War II was Victoria Madsen, a Danish communist party official.^[14][15] In the 1950s Victoria Madsen was deported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Madsen attended the University of Mississippi where he joined the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps.^[16]

Career

U.S. Navy

Upon graduation from University of Mississippi, he joined the U.S. Navy. He was commissioned an ensign.

In early 1982 he was stationed at the classified Naval Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) station at Coos Head, which had an allowance of twelve officers, ninety-five enlisted and 15 civilians. He was later given a bad fitness report by his executive officer, Lt. Cmdr. Marney Finch who transferred him to Washington D.C. later that year.^[17]

In 1984, Madsen reports that he was loaned to the National Security Agency by the Navy.^[18] He resigned from the Navy in 1985 as a lieutenant, having been passed over for promotion. Madsen described himself as the "most senior lieutenant in the Navy".^[19]

Post-Navy career

Between 1985 and 1989 Madsen held a series of jobs, first working for RCA as a government consultant on contracts for the National Security Agency (NSA). Later he worked for the Navy's Naval Data Automation Command as a civilian employee. After this Madsen briefly established his own consulting firm, then worked for the National Bureau of Standards, and later for the State Department.^[18] In 1990 Madsen joined Computer Sciences Corporation, working there from 1990 until 1997,^[18] when he joined the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) as a senior fellow. In 1998, while at EPIC, Madsen was described by journalist Jason Vest in the Village Voice as one of the world's leading SIGINT and computer security experts,^[20] In late January 2005 Madsen left EPIC.^[18]

Blogging and journalism career

He has been described as an "odd individual" devoted to writing in an area that "teeters on a slippery slope, at the foot of which is the whole repository of Internet-perpetuated conspiracy theories" which leads to much of his writing being treated with skepticism.^[21] In 2005 Madsen began working as a free-lance journalist. He produces a blog called the Wayne Madsen Report. His articles have appeared in publications such as CorpWatch, CounterPunch, CovertAction Quarterly, In These Times, Multinational Monitor, The American Conservative, The Progressive and The Village Voice. His columns have appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Columbus Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald and the Sacramento Bee.^[16][22] He appeared on WETA-TVs "White House Chronicle" in January 2012.^[23] He is a frequent contributor to the Alex Jones show.^[24]

Guardian newspaper controversy

On June 30, 2013, The Observer, which is owned by The Guardian, in London published a front page story sourced from a blog in which Madsen had been interviewed regarding his views on claims by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, alleging connections between the National Security Agency and several European governments known as ECHELON.^[25][26] In the story, entitled, “Revealed: Secret European Deal to Hand Over Private Data to Americans,” Madsen claimed that several European governments were “colluding with the U.S. over the mass harvesting of personal communications data.” ^[27]

According to Michael Moynihan of the Daily Beast, shortly after going to press, "the Observer realized that the story's author, Jamie Doward, failed to conduct even the most perfunctory Google search on Madsen.^[28] The article was quickly removed from the parent (Guardian) newspaper's website pending an investigation, but not before the print edition had gone to press.^[29][30] Several journalists reporting on the incident described Madsen as a "conspiracy theorist."^{[31][9][8][32]} According to Forbes magazine, The Observer likely took the story down as it was concerned with the reliability of the source rather than the content as no matter how "left field" the source was, the story seems to be largely true and has been a matter of public record for some years.^[33]

Joshua Gillin of the Poynter Institute noted that the Guardian hadn't interviewed Madsen but had pulled the quotes from an online interview with Madsen and that Madsen's "declassified documents", upon which the story was based, were publicly available on the NSA website,^[34] According to Forbes, on June 30, 2013, the same day that the Observer both published and retracted the article, Reuters reported the same claims, but sourced from NSA documentation supplied by Edward Snowden to support his claims regarding the cyber-espionage programs Tempora and Prism.^[33][35]

On July 5, 2013 the Guardian responded to the controversy saying that " The documentary evidence for the story, which was based on a number of sources, was sound, but it was wrong to connect Wayne Madsen with this story in any way. For this reason, the original story was removed from the website, and the Observer splash was replaced."^[36]

Reporting and opinions

In 2002 he suggested to The Guardian newspaper that the United States Navy had aided in an attempted overthrow of Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez.^[37]

In 2003 he said that he had uncovered information in a classified congressional report that he claimed contained information linking the September 11 attacks to the government of Saudi Arabia and the Bush administration through financial transactions with the hijackers. The Saudi Foreign Minister demanded the report be declassified so it could respond, however, the Bush administration refused, claiming that to do so would compromise intelligence sources and methods.^[38] Later, in an interview for the Veterans Today website in 2010, he claimed that Mossad had been involved.^[39] Madsen has asserted in The Palestine Telegraph that hundreds of Iraqi scientists who had been assassinated or died in accidents after the invasion in 2003 were actually murdered by Mossad hit teams operating in Iraq.^[40] In 2005, he wrote that an unidentified former CIA agent claimed that the USS Cole was actually hit by a Popeye cruise missile launched from an Israeli Dolphin-class submarine.^[41]

On May 17, 2005, Madsen announced that America was secretly running the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) before a Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights hearing on the situation in the DRC. According to the news magazine New African, Madsens testimony "was so revealing that the mainstream Western media...have refused to print it."^[42]

In 2005 he said that the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, had pressured American politicians to stay away from protests against the Iraq War.^[43]

He has asserted that members of AIPAC and Israel's Mossad dominate CNN's management and urges his readers to boycott CNN and its advertisers until they are fired. He has begun a project to oppose Israel as a threat to world peace.^[44] Madsen has stated in an interview that "the Israeli lobby owns the Congress, media, Hollywood, Wall Street, both political parties and the White House".^[45][46]

In a 2008 ArabNews article, Madsen is quoted as suggesting that the criminal prosecution of New York State governor Eliot Spitzer was partly due to the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.^[47]

On June 9, 2008 he reported that unnamed "GOP dirty tricks operatives" had found a Kenyan birth certificate registering the birth of Barack Obama, Jr. on August 4, 1961. "However, the registration is a common practice in African countries whose citizens abroad have families with foreign nationals."^[48] This birth certificate was a cornerstone of the "Kenyan Born" subset of the birther conspiracy theories, and Madsen's article was cited in a Washington state petition challenging Obama's eligibility to serve.^[49] Madsen has also claimed that Obama is gay.^[50]

On April 25, 2009, Madsen reported that some unidentified UN World Health Organization officials and scientists believed the 2009 new H1N1 strain of swine flu virus appeared to be the product of U.S. military sponsored gene splicing, as opposed to natural processes.^[51][52] While it can not be ruled out that the virus was created in a research laboratory or vaccine factory, the most plausible explanation is that the virus is the result of modern farming techniques. New Scientist magazine cited the example of a H1N2 influenza pandemic in the 1990s that only affected pigs in the United Kingdom. This subtype of the H1N2 was also a reassortment (mix) of swine, human and avian strains.^[53]

In 2010, Madsen reported in the Pakistan Daily that unnamed sources suggested that the company formerly known as Blackwater, had been conducting false-flag operations in Pakistan that were blamed on the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.^[54]

Bibliography

• The Manufacturing of a President (Lulu 2012) ISBN 9781300011385
• Jaded Tasks—Brass Plates, Black Ops & Big Oil: The Blood Politics of Bush & Co. (TrineDay, 2006) ISBN 0-9752906-9-X
• America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II. Tempe, AZ: Dandelion Enterprises. 2003. p. 173. ISBN 978-1-893302-29-7. OCLC 55941597.  (with co-author John Stanton)
• Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and the Failed Search for bin Laden co-authored with Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie (Nation Books, 2002) ISBN 1-56025-414-9
• Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993–1999 (African Studies) (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999) ISBN 0-7734-8002-1
• Handbook of Personal Data Protection (New York: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 1992) (reference book on international data protection law) ISBN 1-56159-046-0

References

External links

• Wayne Madsen Report