It is a mark of an intelligent man that he should have more doubts than answers. It is no accident, therefore, that Fernando Gabeira’s two best-selling books are titled as questions. While wise enough not to answer them, Gabeira has never been too cynical to stop asking. And he has gone wherever the questions took him. Yet on the wild ride through the hills and valleys of his quest, Gabeira has drawn a strange parabola for career. Once a symbol of the armed revolutionary left, the man now finds himself an involuntary darling of the right, though he never chose to be an emblem for either. Called many things throughout his political life — terrorist, kidnapper, faggot, pot-head, traitor — Gabeira has survived his detractors by remaining loyal to a single master: his thoughts.,

Known throughout the world as one of the people involved in the kidnapping of US Ambassador Charles Elbrick in 1969, Gabeira had not even come back from exile when he started showing signs of regret, however much he may dislike the word. “I don’t indulge in it, especially because life is full of new things and challenges — there isn’t enough time left for regret,” he told me during our two-hour-long interview. Yet he practically admits to it when describing Elbrick’s kidnapping as an error to Ragga magazine: “The armed struggle wasn’t the only and it was certainly not the best solution. We made a mistake.” In his more recent memoirs Where Is All That Now?, he is unambiguous: “It is a very grave thing for a person to kidnap another.” So grave, in fact, that Gabeira seems averse at using the word, often preferring the less encumbering action. He doesn’t belittle the reaction, though, imprinted on his character like a branding iron on skin. “My life would be marked by it.”

Those who admired Gabeira for his revolutionary zeal may be disappointed to know he has disavowed it almost completely. “The armed struggle is a mistake, in general, except in a very few, very special circumstances. Those were not the circumstances we had in Brazil,” he told me. But while he discards it as method, he also renounces communism as goal. In his two memoirs Gabeira intersperses the hard facts of his life with his suspicions about the left, his beliefs, himself. Perhaps mostly himself.

The mind, Gabeira seems to realise, is a mouldable mass explicating what it cannot explain, rationalising things it may not even agree with. But the intelligent mind also knows how to trick itself, sifting through books and treatises for the parts it already believes in, outsourcing its own validation. Gabeira knows enough to reject the idea that he was fooled. “I dreamed the wrong dream,” he would say many years later when quitting the Workers Party (PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores). If he was fooled, it was by no other than himself. This is where Gabeira is at his most candid in his memoirs, when he admits to being both the deceived and the deceiver.

Eliminating dissonant arguments from his head, Gabeira would read Sartre for the ideology, and Camus only for the literature. Sartre helped justify the obliteration of the individual in favour of the collective, and violence against the oppressed when the oppressed didn’t agree with what was decided in their name. But Gabeira doesn’t blame Sartre either. “I searched through existentialist writings for all that interested me. If they hadn’t existed, I would end up composing another amalgam, piecing together other influences, to justify the choices that would come.” But if he was good at selective processing, Gabeira is even better at recognising it. Tropicalismo, the Brazilian artistic movement that was a target of the ideological purists, was not one Gabeira had “the open spirit to understand”. The movement, which defiantly promoted an “anthropophagic” fusion of mixed influences, only interested him “as far as it repeated what I already believed.”

That self-convincing was rampant among communists. Gabeira remembers hearing slogans all the time. “We lost the battle but will win the war.” It was like succumbing to the tricks applied by organised religion. “We suffer on this earth, but the Kingdom of God will be ours,” he wrote. Uplifting catchphrases were repeated like martial music to keep soldiers in step. “‘Reality has again confirmed our predictions’; or ‘Socialism goes forward in the world while capitalism has no way out.’” Gabeira himself needed those self-help affirmations. “We needed to believe capitalism was collapsing in order to wake up early and indoctrinate blue-collar workers,” he says of his leafleting at factories.

In a way, Gabeira had already taken a major step away from his initial disinterest. At the beginning of his journalistic career, successful at a very early age, his salary was always rising and for that reason he “wasn’t sympathetic to strikes.” But his awakening came with a vengeance. He not only put himself in the shoes of the oppressed, but started to think on their behalf. Like many other communists, he decided to make a revolution for the workers, without the workers. It’s what he calls “the great illusion of that time — that the fight against the government could be waged independently from the people.”

The conceit of ersatz representation was often compounded by a forced romanticism. Gabeira would encounter it again almost two decades later, when he joined the Workers Party (PT) to run for governor of Rio de Janeiro. Some members objected to his name because “the candidate should be a worker.” Gabeira argued back that he was “an intellectual worker,” even though he was back from an exile where he was employed as a gardener at a cemetery, a metro driver, and a cleaner at hospitals. He saw more of that affectation amidst the resistance. “There were people who wanted to have sex with a blue-collar worker so they would link their convictions to amorous practice. Nothing personal in that: they wanted a blue-collar worker like one wants a blond, a brunet, an Asian.”

In a way, such fetish was crucial to keep the revolution going. Already exiled in Havana, after a day of studies Gabeira asks a comrade: “What if the working class is not what we think of it?” Bent over a book by Marx, his friend answers “I’ll commit suicide.” May 1st rallies in Rio would be missed by an “overwhelming majority of workers”, who preferred to go watch football at Maracana instead. But the problem was not only with the people, of course — it was with the movement. For one, communists acted like the capitalists they blamed for importing a foreign culture, by importing themselves a whole theory. Fighters tried and failed to emulate their success with Cuban campesinos on people of a completely different reality. “(Take) An indian chewing coca leaves and staring at the infinite for hours without saying a word,” Gabeira writes. “You can recite the three volumes of The Capital and he will continue to stare fixedly at a single point.”

Brazilian communists were trying to confine a whole multicultural country within a single stereotype, perpetuating the misconceptions. “Even tourists are surprised when they don’t see Brazilians wearing sombreros and a long moustache, holding our guitars and singing Curucucu Paloma.” But the typecast had more serious implications. Some communists, according to Gabeira, claimed “the coup d’état of 64 was the product of the union between latifundio owners and American imperialism,” but even historian Caio Prado refuted these ideas as “wrong, a mere carbon copy of European models, as there had never been feudalism in Brazil.” As it happens, Brazil communists were fighting American imperialism with a Russian blueprint. “Is the Soviet Union imperialist?” Gabeira asked. “What is imperialism after all? Wasn’t it defined by Lenin?”

But questions were not encouraged. “Thinking was dangerous, for we started to dispute the truth.” How to reconcile the fact that both “Che Guevara and Trotsky ordered the death of so many people”? Those things, he says, got lost in the romantic atmosphere, and were duly replaced with the eternal mantra: “Socialism will compensate each one according to his work; communism will compensate each one according to his necessities.”

Yet the main disagreement Gabeira had with communism seemed to go beyond, or rather beneath, pure ideology — it related to the body, or the existential conflict between the fight for the collective good and personal desires. That issue was so crucial it inspired the title of his first book. During the time before the kidnapping, Gabeira had a comrade called Dominguinho. He was a teenager who carried a gun and indoctrinating literature, yet knew nothing about girls, comic books or parties (the entertaining ones). One day, perplexed by that life so prematurely cast into a self-obliterating role, Gabeira asks “Why don’t you buy a sticker album, or find a girlfriend to caress on a garden bench?” Shocked at the moral decadence and anti-revolutionary thought, Dominguinho threw back a question that would become the name of Gabeira’s best-selling book, What is that, Comrade?, which in Portuguese sounds more like “what’s wrong with you, man?”

“Everything is politics, they were right,” Gabeira says. “But they could not capture the true dimensions of the politics of the body.” Biology, as a relevant factor in politics, has been widely ignored by all sides of the ideological spectrum. But with communists the self-imposed sacrifices were so rigid and demands so superhuman that, even without a god, it looked very much like a cult. On one hand, the ideology required a type of faith in the afterlife, as the main goal of communism would be fulfilled in the long term — so long indeed that by then most revolutionaries would be dead. Years later, in 1979, Gabeira was quoted on the cover of Lampiao, the first gay newspaper in Brazil, saying “We can’t wait 70 years for an orgasm.” http://www.grupodignidade.org.br/cedoc/lampiao/22%20-%20LAMPIAO%20DA%20ESQUINA%20EDICAO%2018%20-%20NOVEMBRO%201979.PDF Manuals dealing with torture also involved a lot of idealism, recommending that one “smile with disdain at the torturers.” Gabeira, himself tortured in jail, writes that “Whoever thinks he is capable of smiling with disdain at his torturers has a very poor knowledge of his limitations.” What he calls the “smashing of the individual” was applied with fervour and followed “an implacable logic”. A mere handwritten note to a friend was labelled as personal necessity, and if that risked security it was considered anti-revolutionary. Gabeira summarises what may be the major weakness of communism in two sentences: “On a collective level, the price (of the New Man) was repression and some firing squads. On the individual level, one needed only to kill a part of oneself.”

In The Triumph of Stupidity, Bertrand Russell wrote that “in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” And doubt, as the doubting know, is at once balm and affliction. Gabeira remembers when he was demonstrating at the rallies on the street in front of the newspaper where he worked, Jornal do Brasil, making speeches against the “bourgeoisie press”. “It was a weird sensation,” he wrote. “It felt like I was booing myself.” After the kidnapping, when he left his hideout for the first time to dye his hair, he explains that “the objective was to wear a disguise, but I felt identical to myself.”

Which self? , he might have asked.

Consistent in his uncertainty, at least post facto, Gabeira seemed to have had only a few encounters with equals. He mentions with fondness the then boyfriend of Very Magalhães (his future wife), someone he liked very much for his ability to mock himself. “With him it was possible to conjecture: what if this is all an illusion?” But while Gabeira’s mind was silently conflicted, his body became loud with action. And that action came back to haunt him dressed as remorse. After the kidnapping, a journalist friend was arrested and tortured because he was Gabeira’s guarantor on a credit card application. Another friend, Francisco, was implicated because a car still registered to his name was used in the crime, even though the man never took part in it. Francisco was exiled. “That’s one of the sadness I inherited from the action,” Gabeira says, “an exile shared by me, him and my guilt.”

Before guilt had come to visit, the enemy kept him company. After the kidnapping, hiding in complete silence to avoid alerting the neighbours, Gabeira spent several days in solitude. The only other creature around was a fly, which would show up at the coffee table. He named it Eduardo. At times he would think about killing it, but he never did as he knew “very well how we need an enemy at moments like that.” But it was in jail, perhaps, that Gabeira had the chance to see his enemy as up-close as a mirror.

At the precincts, interrogated and tortured, Gabeira saw a familiar type of conviction. “It is very possible that some begun by thinking they were torturing for a noble cause. But even these people, at the end, would realise that noble causes do not torture.”

They possibly don’t kidnap either, he may have conjectured. And it’s possible that he did. The account of his time in jail is a real tour-de-force, but not because Gabeira was tortured so gruesomely or because he was superhumanly stoic. What is remarkable is his lack of interest in proving anything, and the way he refuses to preach to the audience, turning down the chance to please either side of the deep-yet-shallow divide that split the world into Team Prisoners and Team Wardens. The blurring of his own black-and-white world is summarised in a short dialogue, when a policeman tries to strike conversation with the famous prisoner, telling him he had “a communist cousin in Goias.” Gabeira retorts saying he had “a cousin with tuberculosis in Minas.”

“I speak of torture like an artist, because I have no right to talk of it as someone who was majorly tortured. Sometimes my blood splattered on the wall [out of the IV in his penis]. Captain Romero would recoil in horror: “I am a torturer but not a doctor, I cannot stand this disgusting mess.” Gabeira was subjected to several sessions of electric shocks. “My reaction to the first electric shocks was that of a civilised man, I believe: I was perplexed to know such a thing existed. […] Seeing it was like watching kids pluck feathers off a bird. How was such thing possible among grownups?” Sometimes he’d come across torturers who would “work overtime with pleasure”, and they would attach the wires to different places in his body, without much purpose and “without even taking notes.” “I was revolted. The pain was horrible, but the hatred was even bigger.” But how did Gabeira fare under torture? There’s little reason to doubt his account, for it is unusual in its humility. “I saw in jail many [of the people tortured] not answering absolutely anything. Many would declare they were communists and had nothing else to say; others would hide in a vague ‘I don’t know’ and would never leave it. That was not my case, and I don’t think it will be in the future. I believe, sincerely, that it is a game, full of back-and-forth, full of small defeats and small victories. Many times I left the interrogation room defeated.”

There was verbal aggression too. Gabeira, who descends from Arab immigrants, had to hear Captain Thomas call him “Turk son of a bitch”. “I found that type of treatment strange, almost intimate in a way,” he writes. And intimate it possibly was. Gabeira would later learn that Captain Thomas was an Arab descendent himself, who insulted Gabeira in the best way he knew, with the same abuse he heard when it was his turn to be kicked. As Gabeira said somewhere else in his book, “The enemy, in some way, set the dimension of my own stature.”

The enemy, in another way, was also his friend. In the 16 years he spent as a deputy in congress, Gabeira was for a time a member of PT, the Workers Party he vilifies today. He travelled with then presidential candidate Lula in ’94 in one of the so called “Citizenship Caravans,” and defended Lula against condemnation from within his own party for Lula’s budding association with Jose Sarney — an accidental president and politico who ruled for decades over one of the poorest and most illiterate Brazilian states, a politician who somehow perfectly embodies all that is rotten in this country. Gabeira eventually left PT for good, as it never quite supported his fights: a democratic drug policy, end of the mandatory military service, environmental protection, minority rights, especially LGBT. As a quixotic, solitary member of the Green Party, he would sometimes be called to speak by the congress leader, who would say with some mockery that “You have a minute to defend the position of your bench.” Gabeira would double down and retort that, as a divided person, he would “authorise the bench to vote as it wishes.”

Less amusingly, Gabeira had to face Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing deputy hailing from the armed forces who would often ask from the dais that Gabeira be arrested for terrorism. Then one day Gabeira went up to Bolsonaro and asked to be warned in advance of his next outburst, just in case the congress guards took him seriously. Bolsonaro never asked for Gabeira’s arrest after that. Today, the two men metaphorically rub shoulders among the vociferous anti-government brigade. Both Bolsonaro and Gabeira have asked for Dilma Roussef’s impeachment, a political mechanism PT now calls a “coup” but once demanded when the president to be impeached was Collor de Mello. Now, it is PT and Collor who find themselves on the same side of Brazilian seizure-inducing political landscape.

In his decade and a half in congress, Gabeira has had his victories. Many of them could be considered Brazil’s victories. Gabeira was crucial in getting the congress to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. He was also fundamental in making the government sign the demarcation of 5% of Brazilian territory as protected area. He had an important part in the fall of corrupt politicians, staging protests in congress and making the fight public. Some of those politicians, for years maligned by PT and unwittingly playing the role of PT’s antithesis, are now back in power under PT’s imprimatur. But there appears to be one event that embarrasses Fernando Gabeira. And that is not the “bikini affair”, though it brought him much notoriety. (Gabeira had his photos splashed all over Brazilian media the day he appeared on a Rio beach wearing a crochet sunga. Confident, and yet again with nothing to prove, it turned out that the immodest male sunga was in fact a female bikini, which he borrowed from his cousin, journalist Leda Nagle.) What embarrassed him was something different. In what has been known as “the plane tickets scandal”, a group of congress members were found to be using their allotment of plane tickets for private purposes. The scandal broke but Gabeira’s name was not in it. He came forward, though, calling a journalist to reveal he had given one of his plane tickets to his daughter. He then apologised publicly, gave back the ticket money, and helped implement the rules that would spare the taxpayer millions in plane tickets for politicians in Brasilia. The fact that he was “ashamed for having made a mistake” says more about Gabeira than the mistake itself. The error was a small, negligible stain that became very visible on the translucent surface it tarnished. In Brazil and elsewhere, one could run for president on that stain and win. But Gabeira says he doesn’t want to get back into politics, and will confine his participation in public life to journalism.

In his weekly TV program on GloboNews Gabeira seems truly at home. Different than most journalists today, who go “investigate” a story whose headline they’ve already written, Gabeira searches small towns and the Brazilian countryside to find out what no one was even asking about. The stories are varied and unpredictable: the life of prostitutes; what is it like to be a transgender inside a male prison; the life of a man who is a writer but whose day job is to bury people in a cemetery. Letting the characters speak for themselves, guiding no one, Gabeira’s show may appear puerile or too simple for the untrained eye, but it is instead one of the most refreshing, unmediated journalism in Brazilian television these days. Elsewhere, however, Gabeira leaves little room for the unexpected. In weekly and fortnightly articles he writes for two of the best-selling Brazilian newspapers. His anti-government stance is hammered incessantly. Prolific, eloquent and with sophisticated prose, Gabeira has built a large captive audience for his opinion. But he may also have conversely become captive to that audience himself. His very memoirs are philosophical warnings on the black-and-white reduction of political discourse, even of his own. Alas, like most humans, Gabeira is expected to make other, fresh mistakes. Unlike most humans, though, he will probably be the first to admit it.

Below is an edited version of my two-hour long interview with Fernando Gabeira in May 2015.

When I came back to Brazil after years abroad, I thought I was going to find Collor and Sarney in jail*. (*Two former presidents, targeted by PT as some of the most corrupt politicians in Brazil] Not only they are free, they are part of the government. How do you explain this?

This question deserves no explanation, but the tone of condemnation you just gave. The truth is that PT decided to govern like the others before it and made a pact with the decadent elite. This alliance with the old colonels, which have always existed, not only were not dismantled but were amplified by PT.

Many PT sympathisers allege that this happened because our presidential system is set in such way that if there were no political alliances PT could not rule the country. It’s as if PT had to make a pact with the devil to be able to govern.

This is the excuse they also used to cover their corruption. Those who admit the corruption — privately, because publicly they don’t — they allege that corruption was necessary to develop their project. Those a bit more intellectually sophisticated say corruption is just a footnote, that what matters is the increased income of the poorer people, wealth distribution. But this project worked when there was a period of economic growth. Now that the crisis is here we know this is unsustainable, it was much more an electoral project of increasing income and consumption so that PT could keep itself in power.

But didn’t the income of the poor actually increase?

It did actually increase, but it was not PT that increased it, the economic conditions did. PT focused on consumption and ignored investment, development, rationality in public administration. It’s what we call the ‘flight of the chicken’. PT made spurious alliances with the decadent elite, it made a pact with corruption, it corrupted itself.

Was corruption a consequence or a project, an objective?

I don’t know if it was an objective. If it was, it must have been on a more unconscious level. On a conscious level it happened because it was necessary to do good for the people, and that good could only be done if they did evil. In a way, they reproduced a concept very common in the 20th century, that the end justifies the means.

So you believe there were good intentions at the core of PT.

That’s not exactly what I am saying. I am saying that the rational defence they make of the process is that they aim at doing good. But if emotionally or psychologically they actually intended to do good then it’s problematic because many of them have gotten rich. The increasing wealth of many of them means that they ultimately wanted their own good. They were well-intentioned in their discourse, though. […]

I worked with them thinking they represented a social democracy similar to the European social democracy […] but PT was different, they were more to the left. I thought the left was where we would anchor ecological ideas, libertarian ideas…

And do you think capitalism offers that, those progressive ideas?

I think comparing to socialist countries and with other modes of production, that’s where you got more personal freedom, freedom of expression, the free choice of your lifestyle.

Why are those values associated to a mode of production, to an economic system? […] What is your ideal model…

I don’t work with an ideal model anymore. I did it when I thought we could have the script of history. I work with a few principles. The first fundamental principle is democracy as the highest political system. The second is respect for human rights, something that should be fundamental but that unfortunately the left ignored. It dehumanised its adversaries, humans were only those on its side. See for example the opposition in Iran or in Cuba — they are not worthy of being defended [by the Brazilian left]. The other principles are wealth distribution and the preservation of the environment. Those are my four guiding principles.

And how has PT fared on those four principles?

From a democratic standpoint, very badly, because they have a recurrent desire to censor the media, they support dictatorial governments, like Cuba, they support repression of the media like it’s happening in Venezuela, they are not really with the democratic workforce.

But what about demonstrations in Brazil? Aren’t they a good sign that democracy is going very well?

No, the existence of popular demonstrations is just one side of the issue. I’m referring to the use of public money to influence the propaganda machine, on the internet, several things that are characteristic of authoritarian governments. Of course PT did not manage to end democracy in Brazil because they don’t have enough strength for that, they cannot do it. In human rights too PT managed to stigmatise human rights. Finally, as far as the environment goes, PT was never quite clear. They always had a rhetorical tendency that manifested itself at the beginning of their government, similar to eastern European communist countries, which is to prioritise economic growth regardless of how much devastation that will bring.

Was that what made you leave PT?

Well, this point was non-negotiable, that’s why I left PT at the beginning of their rule in 2003, for several reasons but also because they accepted that we import used tyres from Uruguay, which would only bring problems regarding safety, it would increase the number of used tyres discarded in the environment, the risk of dengue fever… they were getting favours from the industry to accept that deal… the rainforest was being devastated. But I think of all those points, the most serious is the democratic question. The Brazilian left has always been way too romantic and tolerant with the violence of the Cuban dictatorship. Homosexuals have been awfully repressed there, almost a whole generation of Cuban intellectuals was decimated, there are several books and personal testimonies about that. There has never been a condemnation of that, or the imprisonment of journalists […]. This blindness regarding leftwing dictatorships, always set on concentrating power, made me doubt they could be democratic partners.

You forgot to mention wealth distribution.

On the point of wealth distribution we are in agreement, but not on how to go about doing it. You cannot simply increase wealth to stimulate consumption without preparing society to produce more. This system is unsustainable, and it is ultimately guided by electoral reasons. This is not genuine wealth distribution. Take the ‘family aid’ (bolsa familia). They [PT] begun to depend on that more than the families themselves. Because that is how they win their elections. They never had the imagination to go beyond. People don’t want to simply get family aid — they also want to develop their potential, the talent that we have all been endowed with.

What about the use of public money to sponsor “cultural” projects that could be financed by companies? The other day I watched this movie called Praia do Futuro and it was sponsored by BNDES (the Brazilian development bank) and even the Ministry of Technology, Science and Innovation. I heard that only 95% of towns in Brazil have movie theatres. Isn’t that a way of actually concentrating wealth, rather than distributing it?

I think it’s important to recognise that the state has a role in stimulating culture… Today, there’s a discussion in Brazil on whether the state should or not sponsor well-known artists, people already consecrated by the industry. I don’t think so. However, there are situations in which the state helps well-known artists who don’t have the capacity to survive in this market but are very important for the country’s culture, like the Pina Bausch ballet. What happens here is that even culture is considered under political and ideological criteria, and becomes a permanent way of keeping friends, acquaintances and partisans active, producing things that sometimes have no… Public television in Brazil has 1% of the total audience. What is the point of maintaining a television that requires such a gigantic investment… you may say ‘but good television can educate, inform, show aspects not seen in commercial television.’ Ok, that may be, but if no one watches it, then you are throwing money away.

Is there someone in PT today who you think is doing good work?

No, not really, not that I know of. Of course there are sectors that function almost autonomously.

How about Renato Janine Ribeiro (the new education minister)?

I don’t know him well, I just know he used to criticise the government, now is in the government, but I don’t know him.

Mangabeira Unger?

I know him more or less but… he has a certain political innocence. I think he is an intellectual but politically he is a bit naive, but he is still the planner of the government, has always been. He is linked to the government as far as strategic planning goes. He is just a man who has some political ideas and decided to associate with PT and even the Universal Church [of the Kingdom of God] without any problems. I think he is a respected intellectual but from a political standpoint…

Is there someone that has left PT that you admire?

I don’t admire everyone who has left PT. [He agrees with me when I suggest the names of Helio Bicudo and Plinio de Arruda Sampaio as two of the most respectable politicians who have left PT]

Is there something markedly positive resulting from PT rule, something you may credit to them?

I think PT has brought the question of social policies to the centre of the political agenda. No one can escape that anymore, even if it has always existed, now no one can evade the topic. I think that is a great advancement, the fact that there is a preoccupation with a social agenda, a discussion about how to improve the conditions of the poorer population. PT did keep some policies that were implemented before. From a political standpoint there has been an awful degradation. PT not only associated with some decadent sectors of society but became decadent itself. From an economic angle, devastation was also huge. To give you an idea, the largest Brazilian company lost for six years and six months 17 million and a half reais per day, 929,000 per hour of losses.

You mean Petrobras?

Yes. It’s been a disastrous administration. So when a party positions itself before these two very grave accusations of corruption and incompetence, I think either it should reformulate itself radically or it will tend to disappear […] like the Italian communist party. PT is going through a crucial crisis. Despite PT’s sympathisers, I feel the process towards transparency today, the ‘car-wash operation’ that unveiled the scandal in Petrobras but also opened the way for the revelation of other scandals in the energy sector, pension funds. We are talking about numbers that would shock humanity. Petrobras has undergone corruption of 6 billion and 200 million reais. I don’t remember any corruption like this…

They say it started way before, many governments ago.

Yes, but I don’t remember anything like that. It’s within their government that this has been organised, politically organised. In the pension fund of the postal services you have a hole of 5 billion and 200 million reais.

When PT talks about wealth distribution, how can the banks have had the largest profit ever in the history of Brazil during PT’s government?

Actually, the term ‘wealth distribution’ is not the most adequate. They talk about the increased income among the poorer classes, because obviously the biggest increase [in wealth] was among the wealthiest, that was the largest increase in the period.

Do you know if there are media companies getting money from the government to support it?

No, I don’t think so, I don’t know, but I know the government has some money reserved for… there was a leak of an internal memo from the communications secretary in which they mention ‘friendly blogs’.

With that expression, friendly blogs?

Yes, they go after blogs that are paid by them, internet newspapers, sometimes internet bots, but the big media… I don’t think PT would have the conditions to change their position, I think it would be the embrace of death if an important Brazilian newspaper started to support PT after all. [inaudible. Gabeira then mentions how the government helps large media conglomerates] This is normally financed with projects by Banco do Brasil, government agencies etc.

I read on your blog that PT put a star [the party symbol] in the Planalto Palace.

That was Lula’s wife, she is the one who had it done. There was a very negative repercussion because the Planalto Palace is the seat of power, the symbol of Brazil not of a party. They have always confused the state with the party.

Are you in favour of public campaign financing?

I think perhaps the most correct system is the American one, you know, a combination of private and public financing. In my case, particularly, it was possible to have financing from individuals, a campaign mobilised by people who believe in your ideas.

Do you think the people who financed you believed in your ideas?

Yes, that was a presumed, not even my ideas but my standing. There was never an expectation of a quid-pro-quo but also there was never an expectation of power… only once did I almost won elections…

I find it difficult to imagine that an elected politician can get help a second term without paying back those who financed him previously. […]

Obama for example got so much private financing that he gave up receiving public financing. Some companies sometimes contribute because they want a better country and they themselves have no business with the government, you know, but there are also those who have business with the government and are the biggest financiers of those campaigns, like the large contractors.

You mean in Brazil?

In each country there’s a group.

Do you think you went from left to right? I read that you define yourself as leftwing.

The world has changed a lot. There are some positions in society that tend to be considered left positions, like preoccupation with retirement, public health services, public schools, rights of immigrants… there are a bunch of ideas that characterise the left… in the USA, democrats are not a leftwing party and republicans are not only a party of the right, they have individual values…

Libertarianism?

Exactly. So it’s very difficult today, after the cold war, after the division of the world between socialism and capitalism, and with so many new references that were not on the horizon of political scientists when they defined left and right after the French Revolution, that it’s very complicated today… For example, there are things today that mean you are leftwing if you support the Venezuelan government… but then, individual rights… I think there are times when a person must be free of these two paradigms and try think for himself, regardless whether he is momentarily considered to be left or right wing.

I would like to talk about that artificial division that you say PT is promoting: south against north, rich against poor, black against white.

I think this also came with culturalism. There has been a time in history in which the question of identity became a very important political question, especially because many people arrived in Europe and the US with a different culture. So they developed the idea of plurality and respect for different cultures, a fight that involved blacks, women, Turks, everyone claimed for an identity. The respect for that is something I find very interesting. When PT got to power it did not have a clear position about that, the party had not reflected on the topic, but it got the push from the gay movement and PT said ‘I will bring the gays along’. The problem is that the majority of the population is not gay, and it has some reservations that can only be overcome with time. You cannot apply a state policy similar to the policy of a movement, otherwise the people sending their kids to school will feel you are making an apology of homosexuality when in fact that’s not what you propose, because the state cannot make an apology…

Where is the government making this apology?

No, for example when you start teaching kids about homosexuality in schools, create text books and decide from the top to bring gay pride… I think most people would say ‘this was not mentioned in the syllable, we respect personal choices but want to discuss that in another manner within the schools….’. The state cannot behave like a movement.

Is the opposition worth what it’s fighting against?

No, I don’t believe it, the opposition has always been very feeble. I’ve always said the opposition in Brazil is no opposition. The true brave opposition against PT came from the people who left PT, or that founded PSOL [Socialism and Freedom Party]. This is the opposition with the spirit of opposition. PSDB and DEM are like government in exile, they were in power and then they were thrown in the opposition. Until they acquire, let’s say, an inspiration for the opposition, the gestures of the opposition, the attitudes, coherence of the opposition, they will have to go through a long period. They are getting better lately, but why? Because the correlation of forces is changing, people went to the streets and they [opposition parties] are feeling more secure. The problem is the following: they should have acted as opposition even when people were sleeping, because that was their task. They only came to embrace that type of main role when they realised the people were on the streets. But they are very feeble, you know, and did not present themselves as an alternative, so much so that in 2013 and part of 2015 the demonstrations were against all politicians, without necessarily considering the opposition worthy [of its name].

Would PSOL be this worthy opposition?

No, not PSOL, no, because in many cases it is not opposition, only in some matters like corruption. They supported PT on the second round of the elections, they are linked to PT, they are simply the PT that hasn’t yet succeeded. So much so that their vision on democracy is similar, they support the Cuban regime. Recently I read — I don’t know if that’s true — that Luciana Genro declared that if the North Korean government were so bad it wouldn’t be supported unanimously by its people.*

I read you referring to PT and its new iterations as PT of God, or PT Quadrangular. Sounded a bit like the People’s Front of Judea instead of the Judean People’s Front.

I was talking about PT wanting to re-read its bible and reinterpret it. PT had this a lot, about re-read Marxism and reinterpret it. The supposition that there is a right path written in a book, a path that you lost, I think that’s a religious way to face renewal. I am saying that it is possible to survive a book, something written, a couple of coordinates. Life is much richer, surprising [than that], there is no renewal that goes through the same bible.

Speaking of the confinement of ideas, you defend prostitutes and their right to work, when even some self-purported feminists are against it.

There is a law by me that provoked some debate and received criticism even from friends, feminist friends, who complained that prostitutes sell their bodies. To begin with, they do not sell the body, they rent it, there is a difference there, the prostitute is not a slave. It’s was during slavery when your body was sold. Other critics would say that it is impossible to regulate something that defends sex without love. I would answer that I, personally, think sex with love to be the best thing there is, as I love some specific, marvellous wines, but I will not go around forbidding people from drinking cheaper wine. Why must someone have sex only with love? Other people said my position ignored prostitutes as social victims, that they became prostitutes because they were pushed by destiny, that the main thing was not to regulate the profession but to take them away from that life. I answered that many are there because they chose to, because they want, they prefer it to other work. There is no point in rounding up these people and tell them now they must have a proper job.

I know intellectual work that is far more “prostituted” and genuinely harmful.

ACM Neto, who was then the rapporteur of the draft and today is the mayor of Salvador, he said the law was preposterous because it threatened the Brazilian family. I said not really, if you examine the work they do carefully, prostitutes in fact work to maintain their families, they are the bread-winners. There’s a town in Parana that is fully sustained by prostitutes, I can’t remember the name.

Do you have any idea about new ways to fight corruption in Brazil? What do you think of this project that wants to classify corruption as a heinous crime?

There is no doubt that corruption must entail harder penalties, especially corruption in the public health sector, because it clearly kills. But I don’t believe very much in adding an adjective to a crime. It reminds me of the trains in Italy, rapido, molto rapido, rapidissimo. It just didn’t work. It’s necessary to work preventively, and that is not related to moral guidance that says do this and don’t do that. The most important preventive work is to have transparency, complete vigilance etc. I think that we the available resources we can do intensive supervision. PT sometimes says that they are the ones who allowed many things to be revealed… there are no heroes in this process. But the internet had a crucial role to play.

I learned that BNDES [the national development bank] can refuse to disclose its loans…

It argues that those are under bank secrecy, but the congress has just approved a bill that BNDES must release the loan data, even from previous governments. We hope Dilma won’t veto it.

Can she veto it?

Yes, she has the right to veto and the congress has the right to reject her veto. What is happening now is that there will be a congress investigation on BNDES, and then we will examine the deals they made abroad following an ideological rationale, like the help to Cuba, to Venezuela. They [BNDES] put a billion dollars in the Venezuela metro, almost another billion dollars in the Cuban port. We are not retracting, what has been decided is decided, but we must see if they paid [the loans] or not, what were the conditions, interest rates. There are doubts relating to a company in Brazil that produces meat, Friboi, it’s omnipresent and this company gets financing from BNDES and simultaneously gives 250 million for PT’s campaign.

Did it give to the opposing candidate as well?

Yes, a little.

Not 250 million.

No. Another partner [of PT] getting public money is Odebrecht. Lula travels as a lobbyist for the company, he is paid per conference, he promises public works that BNDES finances and Odebrecht builds them and makes fortunes. But Lula is paid to speak at conferences. It’s the same thing done by Hillary Clinton, but a bit less subtle. And that too, once it’s public money, it is important that we know about it, that we have access to those numbers. I say that it’s crucial that we examine BNDES’ black box. So there is a bag for the poor [“family bag”, or bolsa familia, the monthly stipend paid to poor families] but there is also the Louis Vuitton bag.

* Luciana Genro’s website clarifies:

“There are people who will believe any silliness they read on the internet, and there are those who confuse jokes with real life. It turns out that a rightwing comedian invented a story about an alleged debate in which I would have manifested support to Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator. At the beginning I gave this story no importance, but when someone I know — a well-intentioned person — asked me if that was true, I realised one cannot let an idiotic joke go unanswered. The ones who do support the North Korean dictators are in PC do B [Communist Party of Brazil], the party of Jandira Feghalli, Manuela Davila, Aldo Rebelo. PSOL has nothing to do with that. Do not confuse me with those self-proclaimed ‘socialist’ experiments. ”

Na semana passada o escritor Salman Rushdie foi afinal calado. Mais de 30 anos depois da sentença de morte decretada pelo Aiatolá Khomeini, reforçada por um prêmio em dinheiro para quem se oferecesse como assassino, Rushdie foi esfaqueado em Nova York num palco onde iria dar uma palestra. Ali, num instituto que promove o saber e a troca do conhecimento, o autor por fim sentiu a censura na pele — e no pescoço, no abdômem, no rosto.

Na mesma semana, a primeira jornalista da América Latina a entrevistar Salman Rushdie com exclusividade também foi calada. Essa jornalista sou eu. Sem que fosse necessário o uso de uma faca, ou de um fatwa, minha língua foi cortada da forma mais asséptica possível, sem sujeira ou manchas de sangue, banida “permanentemente” da única plataforma social que uso para divulgar verdades suprimidas por duas razões nada jornalísticas: a falta de patrocínio e a ausência de estudos com comprovação financeira. Como vou mostrar mais à frente, ou na semana que vem, quem afirma que o que eu venho dizendo é verdade não sou eu — é o CDC, Centro de Controle e Prevenção de Doenças dos Estados Unidos, a revista Lancet, o NIH do Reino Unido.

A facada no escritor e meu banimento do Twitter só são diferentes na forma — a violência da motivação é a mesma. Ambos os fanáticos — tanto o religioso, como o ignorante que nunca leu um estudo científico na vida — baseiam sua certeza naquilo que sabem, ou que acreditam saber. Extremamente ignorantes, eles ignoram a própria ignorância, e se tornam fanáticos ao ter “certeza absoluta” de que o tudo que sabem é o tudo que existe. Mas esses dois tipos têm pelo menos mais uma coisa em comum, crucial para a formação do seu fanatismo: suas mentes são facilmente manipuláveis.

Já falei em outros artigos como é fácil o controle das mentes mais simplórias. Mas veja bem: quando digo “mentes simplórias”, não me refiro àquelas que não estudaram. Me refiro às mentes que o estudo formal não preparou para o pensamento crítico. Não é à toa que a maior resistência à inoculação inútil veio de dois extremos: das pessoas que não estudaram quase nada, e daquelas que estudaram muito além da média. Os que estudaram muito sabem como a ciência com fins lucrativos funciona. Os que estudaram pouco desenvolveram mecanismos para navegar no mundo sem se afogar, e com o tempo aprimoraram cálculos de risco-benefício que se tornaram quase intuitivos. O artigo “Americanos com PhD têm mais relutância em se vacinar contra a covid,” republicado pelo site MSN, foi retirado do ar, mas pode ser encontrado aqui, no archive.org.

Vou dar um exemplo exagerado, mas bem ilustrativo, de como o conhecimento pela metade é frequentemente um empecilho, mais do que uma ferramenta. Uma placa numa encruzilhada de uma estrada de terra e um trilho de trem diz “PARE.” A pessoa que sabe ler, mas é extremamente burra e decidiu por vez terceirizar seu pensamento, vai ficar parada até ler outra placa dizendo “Agora pode atravessar”. Já a pessoa que não tem conhecimento para entender o que diz a placa vai confiar nos próprios olhos e ouvidos, e vai parar só quando for necessário, e andar quando não houver risco. A pandemia nos mostrou com bastante clareza essa diferença abissal entre inteligência e esperteza, entre informação e discernimento.

Aqui, em A Obediência Contagiante e a Blusinha Que Mais Sai, eu falo sobre o sistema que faz pessoas transformarem seu gosto radicalmente de um ano para o outro com a adoção de qualquer coisa que for declarado “trendy”, ou “da moda.” A determinação do que é ou não “descolado” — em outras palavras, a indústria da moda — é uma aula para qualquer pessoa interessada na manipulação da mente humana. Se é possível determinar o “gosto” — uma predileção tão pessoal e intransferível — imagine o resto. Aqui , em O Controle da Mente e o X da Persuasão, eu mostro que quem pagou para acreditar em algo tem dificuldade em se saber enganado, e prefere nunca vir a descobrir que jogou dinheiro fora. Nesse caso, é possível ver uma audiência de centenas de pessoas acreditando no “truque” mais estúpido e pueril que já vi. Mas o “mágico” foi hagiografado pela revista New Yorker, e isso tem um peso incrível na mente mais simplória. Aqui, em A Unanimidade Inocente e a Orquestra Afinada, eu falo das diferentes camadas na “pirâmide do consenso,” e como a maioria dos enganados na base são pessoa inocentes que terceirizaram seu discernimento e decidiram se guiar por aqueles que consideram seus “superiores.” Aqui, em A Unanimidade Burra e o Controle Inteligente, eu falo do experimento de Asch, e de como mentes medianas obedecem ordens imorais sem qualquer questionamento, e mesmo sem o oferecimento de vantagem financeira ou a ameaça de chantagem. Essas mentes ingênuas, contudo, raramente são guiadas por pessoas desinteressadas. Quase sempre, o topo da pirâmide do Consenso Inc é povoada por gente muito bem paga para emitir sua “opinião.” E é disso que eu quero falar.

Um dos meus últimos tweets antes do banimento foi uma republicação que fiz de um tweet original do médico Ricardo Ariel Zimerman. Seu conteúdo deveria ser de conhecimento de todos os jornalistas, e certamente de todas as pessoas que se deixaram guiar pela opinão supostamente “sem fins lucrativos” dos divulgadores Atila Iamarino e Natalia Pasternak, para citar apenas dois dos mais famosos, os divulgadores da moda. O tweet de Zimerman mostra um documento sob o seguinte texto:

“Somente em 2021, Atila Iamarino recebeu 360.000 reais do Instituto Serrapilheira. Sim. Ele recebeu 30.000 reais por mês para servir de substrato “científico” para o lockdown, que custaria milhões de empregos.”

No documento, é possível ver que o Instituto Questão de Ciência, presidido pela influenciadora Natália Pasternak, recebeu em 2021 o valor de 500 mil reais do Instituto Serrapilheira. O comunicador Atila também recebeu dinheiro do mesmo instituto. Vale mencionar que Zimerman teve a dignidade, honestidade e transparência de incluir no tweet as arrobas dos perfis que mencionava, garantindo que as pessoas citadas fossem informadas do que ele estava dizendo. O tweet continua lá, em todo seu esplendor, sem qualquer resposta. Mas o que é o Instituto Serrapilheira, e quais interesses o sustenta?

Antes de continuar: se você acha que o lockdown foi declarado sem nenhuma intenção econômica, tenho péssimas notícias. O lockdown teve ao menos um propósito — ou um efeito — que ficou de fora das manchetes: a concentração de renda através do fechamento de milhões de negócios familiares e independentes, para a futura consolidação dessas empresas em monopólios que estão transformando o livre mercado em uma corporatocracia global nas mãos de meia dúzia de grupos financeiros. Traduzo aqui uma manchete e uma passagem que vão surpreender quem passou a pandemia com o cérebro hibernando:

CBS News, Março 2021:

“Bilionários ficaram 54% mais ricos durante a pandemia.” “Entre 18 de Março de 2020 e 2021, a riqueza nas mãos dos maiores bilionários do mundo pulou de 8,04 trilhões de dólares para 12,30 trilhões de dólares. […] O fundador da Amazon, Jeff Bezos, o homem mais rico do mundo, viu sua fortuna aumentar 57% para 178 bilhões de dólares.”

Aqui no Business Insider, o título é similar: “Bilionários fizeram 3,9 trilhões de dólares durante a pandemia.”

Pergunte-se: você acha que os maiores bancos de investimentos do mundo como Blackrock, Blackstone e Vanguard têm ações da vendinha do Seu Zé da Esquina, aquela em que seu Zé mandava o neto entregar compras a domicílio mas teve que fechar durante o lockdown? Para a sorte desses bancos, não, eles não tinham nenhuma ação do Seu Zé. Assim eles não só escaparam da tragédia econômica que se abateu sobre os que tinham muito pouco, mas se beneficiaram exatamente por estarem associados aos que já têm demais. Isso também não foi por acaso, porque os grandes vencedores nessa tragédia foram exatamente aqueles que definiram suas regras, e impuseram uma tragédia maior do que a provocada pelo próprio vírus. Aqui está um artigo no The Telegraph de 18 de agosto deste ano, baseado em dados oficiais do governo do Reino Unido, mostrando que os efeitos do lockdown estão matando mais do que o próprio SarsCov2. Supresa para ninguém que vem acompanhando as ideias de Michael Levitt — que não é nenhum Átila, e provavelmente nunca foi convidado a uma entrevista na Globo, laureado com nada menos que um Nobel. Neste artigo de dezembro de 2021 eu falo sobre Levitt e outros cientistas respeitáveis que foram completamente obliterados do debate, e que já previam o que estava por vir.

Assim, o lockdown que seria uma tragédia para alguns, foi uma bonança para outros, como a Amazon. E assim foi com todos os quase-monopólios, principalmente os controladores das redes sociais: Starbucks, Big Tech etc. Um dia, quando você leitor tiver tempo, procure entender por que razão a Amazon funcionando a pleno vapor durante a pandemia, mas outros negócios foram fechados por determinação oficial. Entenda também porque a mídia pode mandar todo mundo ficar em casa enquanto eles, agentes da corporatocracia, trabalhavam na missão de desinformar.

Voltando aos Donos do Mundo (BlackRock, BlackStone, Vanguard etc), alguns deles também são donos de uma empresa bastante conhecida dos brasileiros: o Banco Itaú, cujo nome é uma Apropriação Cultural do Bem, significando “pedra preta” ou “pedra dura” em Tupi-Guarani. Vanguard, Blackrock, Goldman Sachs são todos proprietários do Itaú em alguma medida. Por falar em Goldman Sachs, foi esse banco que em 2018 fez o relatório “A Revolução do Genoma.” Eu adoro esse relatório porque ele ensina aos seus clientes na indústria farmacêutica algo bastante óbvio para o Seu Zé da lojinha da esquina, que mal consegue ler um livro: curar pacientes não é “um bom modelo de negócios.”

É isso mesmo o que diz o relatório, sem nenhum embaraço: o melhor modelo de negócios na indústria farmacêutica é tratar, jamais curar, porque todo cliente curado é um cliente perdido. Por isso uma vacina que não funciona é muito mais lucrativa do que uma que funcione, e se torna uma mina de ouro para os investidores. É bastante simples a lógica aqui, mas pessoas letradas têm muita dificuldade em entender: quanto menos ela funciona, mais ela vende. Mas isso só funciona sob duas condições: 1) o vacinado tem que ser devidamente privado de informação, poder de decisão ou de discernimento; 2) O comprador tem que ser o governo.

Copio aqui um trecho do relatório do Goldman Sachs, citado num artigo sobre a obsolescência programada e o lucro magnífico que vem de produtos ruins que precisam ser substituídos com frequência. Esse lucro não se sustentaria por muito tempo num mercado livre com competição saudável, mas quando o comprador é o governo e o pagador é o contribuinte, ele se torna uma galinha dos ovos de ouro (ou uma Galinha dos Ovos de Aids, como conto aqui neste outro artigo sobre um investimento que recomendo a meus queridos leitores: um remédio para prevenir a AIDS que custa cerca de 2 mil dólares por mês, por paciente, por toda a vida. Esse remédio é tão forte que o paciente precisa ser monitorado regulamente para garantir que não desenvolveu problemas nos ossos nem falência hepática — uma vantagem extra, sem dúvida, com mais uma sub-indústria criada por um remédio específico. Quando eu crescer, vou fundar uma farmacêutica chamada Cornucópia™. Já tenho até slogan: Trate sua doença aqui e adquira outras sem pagar nada.

Vale a pena ler este meu artigo, ainda que seja eu mesma a recomendar, porque a eficácia desse remédio para AIDS é descrita pelo fabricante com uma frase que daria inveja aos piores (digo melhores) advogados do mundo. Vou até repetir a frase porque ela é uma obra-prima da não-afirmação, um virtuoso da engenharia verbal. O fabricante do remédio que supostamente previne a AIDS (mas que não diminuiu o índice de aidéticos nos EUA, que pena. Ou que bom, dependendo do ângulo) diz o seguinte: O Truvada “pode ajudar a diminuir as chances de se infectar pelo HIV”. Pegou? A honestidade aqui é louvável, não vou negar. A Gilead nunca diz “O Truvada impede o contágio do HIV.” Ela tampouco diz “O Truvada diminui o contágio do HIV.” Ela não diz nem mesmo “O Truvada diminui a chance de se contaminar com o HIV.” Não senhor. A frase é honesta até o talo: “O Truvada pode ajudar a diminuir as chances.” Quem, com o próprio dinheiro, iria apostar em algo tão incerto? Viu como é bom ter um comprador como o governo?

Voltando ao Goldman Sachs, seu relatório para executivos da indústria farmacêutica dizia o seguinte: “O potencial para vender curas com apenas uma injeção é um dos aspectos mais atraentes da terapia genética, da terapia celular de engenharia genética e da edição de genes. Contudo, tais tratamentos oferecem um cenário bastante diferente quando se considera arrecadação recorrente verso terapias crônicas [regulares],” disse Salvenn Richter. “Enquanto essa proposição [da cura com uma única injeção (one-shot cure)] traz valor enorme para os pacientes e para a sociedade, ela pode representar um desafio para os desenvolvedores de medicina genômica que procuram um rendimento sustentado.”

Agora vejam só a coincidência. O João Moreira Salles, do Itaú, é o fundador do Instituto Serrapilheira. Segundo a revista Forbes em 2017, Moreira Salles “doou” 350 milhões de reais para o instituto por puro amor à ciência, sem fins lucrativos. Mas veja que peculiar esse amor à ciência: o Serrapilheira de fato anuncia no seu website que “apoia as ciências naturais (ciências da vida, geociências, física, química); ciência da computação; matemática.” Como explicar então que essa mesma pessoa, Moreira Salles, esteja por trás da revista que publicou uma das “reportagens” de estupidez mais atroz já vista na história da humanidade, sem paralelo na sua estultice canalha, cujo título reproduzo aqui para o deleite dos masoquistas: “Risco de ser atingido por um raio é 13 vezes o de ter covid depois de se vacinar.” A reportagem ainda está no ar, e nunca foi alterada ou corrigida. É compreensível, claro: quem tem medo de ser acusado de fakenews com tanto dinheiro?

Não preciso lembrar ao leitor que Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren e até o CEO da Pfizer (pra ficar só em alguns famosos) foram todos contaminados com a covid depois da vacina. Repetindo: fakenews bem patrocinada é sempre bem-vinda. E vejam aqui que linda a veneração à Vacina de Ouro:

Quase todos aqui declaram estar contaminados, mas nenhum falha em agradecer à Vacina de Ouro. Taí um tipo de veneração cega que envergonharia o shiita mais fanático.

Voltando aos 13 raios, a “reportagem” assinada pelos gênios Amanda Gorziza, Pedro Siemsen, Fernanda Nunes e Renata Buono, foi publicada no dia 29 de abril de 2021, e este tipo de vergonha jamais é banida das redes sociais. Mentira patrocinada é sempre bem-vinda. Esta “reportagem” foi publicada na Piaui, revista fundada pelo mesmo “amante da ciência” que apoia a “matemática” e a “ciência da computação” através do Serrapilheira. O Serrapilheira, por sua vez, financiou o Atila, que por sua vez “projetou” que iriam morrer 3 milhões por covid no Brasil, e que elogiou efusivamente o lockdown na China. Atila se justificou dizendo que usou o Imperial College como fonte.Entendeu por que “ligar os pontos” tem sido a atividade mais vilipendiada do mundo? Por que é a ligação dos pontos que permite rastrear o caminho que leva a quem se beneficia de decisões políticas.

Por falar em Imperial College, outro dos meus tweets recentes mostra ao leitor quem financia essa instituição. Infelizmente o tweet não está mais disponível, já que minha conta está inacessível, mas entre as empresas farmacêuticas que patrocinam o instituto me lembro claramente da AstraZeneca. Por falar em AstraZeneca, você sabia que essa vacina recebeu registro emergencial ao redor do mundo, quase nunca um registro definitivo? Isso é informação da própria Astrazeneca . Aqui está uma lista de países que só concederam registro temporário, porque a Astrazeneca estava causando AVC, trombose, trombocitopenia, como informava em Maio de 2021 este comunicado oficial do governo do governo do Reino Unido exatamente o país de onde saiu a vacina.

Agora adivinha qual um dos únicos países do mundo que deu registro definitivo para esse produto ineficaz e inseguro. Vou dar uma chance. Começa com B e termina com il. Acertou, foi o Bostil. Infelizmente, o responsável por esse registro inexplicável não está aqui para dar explicações, já que em plena pandemia, no meio do resultado pífio apresentado pelos produtos que ele aprovou para serem comprados aos milhões com dinheiro público, o Gerente de Medicamentos da Anvisa Gustavo Mendes escafedeu-se para o outro lado do mundo, mais especificamente a Coréia do Sul.

Supensa em vários países, a Astrazeneca continua sendo aplicada no Brasil. Segundo a CNN Brasil em Julho de 2021, ela era a vacina mais aplicada no país. Mas enquanto no Brasil ela estava bombando, vários países europeus não só se negaram a dar o registro definitivo, mas suspenderam de vez o uso dessa vacina em Abril de 2021, como mostra a BBC. Como pode isso não ser manchete? Como pode uma mídia que odeia o presidente Jair Bolsonaro e atribui a ele tanta coisa, falhar exatamente na notícia bombástica cuja manchete poderia ser “Brasil aplica vacina suspensa em vários países”?

Aqui eu conto o caso de Bruno Graff, que foi vacinado com a Astrazeneca em agosto de 2021, quatro meses depois da sua suspensão ser conhecida. Aqui cabe a pergunta que não quer calar: suspensão conhecida por quem? Não pelo Bruno, nem pela mãe dele. Sabe por que? Porque eles estavam “bem informados” com as notícias da grande (pequena) mídia, e as poucas pessoas que se atreveram a divulgar essa suspensão foram censuradas nas redes sociais. O que me leva ao final deste artigo.

Tenho um outro fato que de certa forma me liga a Salman Rushdie. Muitos anos depois de entrevistá-lo, eu fui e ainda sou a única brasileira — na verdade, uma das poucas jornalistas do mundo inteiro — a ter apresentado os cartoons do Mohammad na minha entrada no Jornal do SBT, quando eu era correspondente no Líbano. É isso mesmo que você leu: enquanto quase todos os jornalistas do planeta se acovardaram e se recusaram a mostrar os desenhos do jornal dinamarquês Jyllands-Posten — desenhos que acabaram provocando a morte de dezenas de pessoas — eu, morando no Oriente Médio, fiz questão de tê-los mostrado na minha entrada em horário nobre, em rede nacional, no SBT — um canal que várias cidades do Bekaa no Líbano conseguiam acessar, como eu própria mostrei em outras reportagens. Menciono isso só para deixar claro a todos os banqueiros, canalhas e covardes que poucas coisas me intimidam, e o único método de tortura do qual tenho medo são as cócegas.

saad hariri EDITED INTERVIEW WITH INTRODUCTION 4,051 words

Interview with Saad Hariri on March 24th.


At only 36, Saad Rafiq Hariri is one of the richest men in the world –
and now a somewhat compulsory political leader. Succeeding his father,
Rafiq Hariri, the five-time Lebanese prime minister who was murdered
in February 2005, Saad Hariri woke up one day as the heir not only to
one of the world’s biggest fortunes, but to a political legacy — with
all the credits and debts that his father left. Unprepared for
public life — he admits that himself — Saad Hariri had to relinquish
an empire of companies in which he made the final decisions and
multiplied a fortune estimated in 8 billion dollars. Now, he has been
living a life that few would envy. Surrounded by bodyguards and a
security detail large enough even for Lebanese standards, he lives under
permanent threat. And the risk extends to his closest aids — one of
whom has not left the palace since August, when he received a warning
that sounded reliable enough. Three weeks ago, mortars were found
close to Hariri’s mansion (which, like others in Beirut, is a
monumental palace surrounded by destroyed houses and unfinished
buildings).

Three months after the death of his father, in an election round that
had a turnout of a meager 28%, Hariri was elected to
parliament and became
the leader of the largest parliamentary group, welded together by
their purported aversion to Syria’s power over Lebanon. Vested with
that sudden significance, Hariri often looks out of place. Notwithstanding the masbaha he often carries in his hand (the traditional rosary that elderly men use to occupy their hands and relax), Hariri is surrounded by men old enough
to be his father or grandfather, who continuously come in and out of
his private quarters. Yet despite the lack of privacy, he seems
unaffected. At the lunch to which this reporter was invited, as the
interview took longer than previously agreed, Hariri did not leave
room for ceremony: he would call everyone to the table and would deal
with politics right there, while bodyguards, assistants and other
small-rank employees would be watching TV in the same room, as if they
owned the house as much as Hariri himself. Introducing some waiters by
their name, he would insist that I tried the most varied dishes of
the Lebanese cuisine, cooked by the local chef. But, somewhat belying
the imaginary extra years acquired with the masbaha, Hariri chose a
hamburger with fries and ketchup. Throughout the interview, when not
fiddling with the rosary, Hariri would be holding the tape recorder.
His legs, which he would not stop shaking, were not a sign
of nervousness, he said — that was out of frustration for not being able
to do as much as he says he would like to.



DO YOU CONSIDER AT ALL, EVEN SLIGHTLY, THE POSSIBILITY THAT YOUR FATHER’S MURDER, AND THE OTHER ASSASSINATIONS, COULD HAVE BEEN DONE BY SOMEONE ELSE OTHER THAN SYRIA? WOULDN’T SYRIA BE SHOOTING ITSELF IN THE FOOT?

I don’t think so. If you look at the people who have been killed, they
are from the same line of politics, and the same idea of politics. I
believe that these crimes served a purpose, you know, killing Rafiq
Hariri, Gebran Tueni, Samir Kassir, Bassil Fleihan and George Hawy,
they served one same goal. When they killed Rafiq Hariri they killed
one of — the biggest politician in Lebanon. But killing all the
others was like killing the people who make the public opinion. Gebrah
Tueni was such an outspoken person, George Hawi, Samir Kassir,
everybody read what these guys wrote, and May Chidiac used to be on
television every day, she used to be listened to. What they tried to
do was to send a clear message to journalists, to freedom of speech,
that ‘this is not something that we will accept’, but the Lebanese
didn’t understand it and will keep on talking.

ARE YOU CONFIDENT THAT IN A COUPLE OF MONTHS THERE WILL BE PEOPLE INDICTED? I SUPPOSE YOU ARE WELL BRIEFED ABOUT THE UN REPORT.
No, I am not, actually I am the worst briefed, I don’t get involved, I
don’t talk to them, and they don’t talk to me.

SO YOU DON’T FEEL THAT YOU SHOULD BE ENTITLED TO SOME DIRECT INFORMATION?

I feel that I should be entitled and that I should know things, but I
have full confidence in them so I am not worried about the results or
what they are doing. I feel this is a team that is professional and
they would do everything possible at their hand, and they will try to
expose the criminals who killed Rafiq Hariri and the others.


CAN THE LOSS OF YOUR FATHER IN SUCH A TRAGIC MANNER MAKE YOU A BITTER PERSON?
No, I can never be bitter, I cannot hate. What I want is only justice,
and the reason why I want it is because if you don’t have justice then
you will have the law of the jungle to rule with, and this is the
problem that we have been suffering in Lebanon for the past 30 years.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, DO YOU THINK YOUR FATHER WAS ALWAYS TRYING TO PRESERVE THE RULE OF LAW, OR DID HE SOMETIMES BEND IT TO ACCOMMODATE PRIVATE INTERESTS AND THE SUPPOSED CONFESSIONAL BALANCE?

I think his end goal was the rule of law. And you have to understand
that Lebanon came out of a civil war that lasted for 17 years, and in
order to take a country from a civil war to a better world there is a
transition period, and this transition is not a year or two or three,
some countries took 5 years, 10 years, 15 years. But his end goal was
to take Lebanon to a place where the rule of law is the way to rule. I
think he believed that Lebanon should be the center of the Arab world
in freedom and the rule of law even. And you can’t build the country
or get to a point of economical success if you don’t have rule of law.
And this is all he wanted all the time.

DOES THAT INCLUDE IMPLEMENTING THE TAIF [the agreement that ended the war and established, among other things, the end of the armed
militias, the end of the Syrian occupation and the adoption of a
secular government]?

Of course. The Taif has been there for some many years and we were not
supposed to sit as Lebanese, as one people and talk to each other and
resolve our problems together, like this national dialogue people are
used to political instability and political differences, it is the
first time in the history of Lebanon that people sit together and talk
honestly. And about the problems that we never even thought we could
open to each other. And if get used to it, we can do a lot and we can
get a lot achieved.

ARE YOU TAKING IT TO THE ARAB SUMMIT?
Yes, because there are some issues that… we got the consensus that the
borders must be delimitated and demarked. if you talk the relationship
with Syria, this is something we all came with a consensus and said
‘yes, we want good relationship with Syria and we want embassies’,
something that we all decided as Lebanese. Now it needs to go to a
third place whre the relationship between the two countries need to be
bettered and I think we need an intermediate to help us as Lebanese.

MEDIATORS?
Yes, mediators.

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE FACT THAT YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT SYRIA’S OCCUPATION AND YET, CONDOLEEZZA RICE COMES HERE TO, IN A MOST CONDESCENDING MANNER, LITERALLY THANK LEBANON FOR ITS DEMOCRATIC EFFORTS, AS IF LEBANON OWED THE US GOOD BEHAVIOUR. ARE YOU TRANSFERRING THE SYRIAN
INFLUENCE TO THE AMERICANS?

No, you see, I think that there are some people who try to portray
that the Americans or other countries are trying to replace the Syrian
influence to another influence and I think the problem is that the
western influence, or what the West is trying to do in Lebanon, if you
look at it, what have they tried to do? Did they tell us ‘go and fight
Hezbollah, go and fight Syria?’. No, they said they are looking for
stability, they are looking to have the best for our economy, they are
looking to have the best for our security. What they have done is
served us actually, and they have helped us in ways that enabled us to
get our Lebanon back. This is Lebanon, Lebanon is for the Lebanese.
And no Lebanese wants any influence on Lebanon and the decisions we
make.

WHAT ABOUT 1559 [UN resolution that determines, among other things,
the disarming of Hezbollah] AND THE WEAPONS OF HEZBOLLAH?

This resolution was made because of Emile Lahoud, and Emile Lahoud was
voted in the parliament by pure pressure.

YOUR FATHER VOTED FOR HIM.
He voted for him because he had the best interest of Lebanon, it was
either vote for Emile Lahoud’s extension or have Lebanon destroyed.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, TO HAVE “LEBANON DESTROYED”? WHAT IF HARIRI HAD JUST TAKEN A STAND AND SAID “IT IS WRONG TO EXTEND THE MANDATE, AND I JUST WON’T VOTE FOR IT”? DO YOU THINK HE WOULD HAVE BEEN KILLED THEN?
He would have been killed and seen explosions in Solidere [the
downtown area rebuilt by the company founded by Rafiq Hariri] and
other places.


ON 1559, WHERE DO YOU STAND?
When you are a part of the United Nations, you must accept a
resolution as it is. You cannot accept just parts of a resolution. For
instance, the 425 is a resolution that was made for Lebanon, when
Israel occupied Lebanon in 1978 asking it to withdraw. So if you want
to be a part of the United Nations , and we want to be a part of the
club of nations in the world, then we have to accept any resolution
that comes out.


BUT HAVEN’T YOU SEEN ENOUGH EXAMPLES OF COUNTRIES THAT DO NOT COMPLY AT ALL WITH THE UN AND CONTINUE TO BENEFIT? INDIA HAS JUST SIGNED A NUCLEAR DEAL WITH AMERICA EVEN THOUGH THEY NEVER SUBSCRIBED TO THE NUCLEAR NON PROLIFERATION TREATY. ISRAEL KEEPS IGNORING RESOLUTIONS AND THEY CONTINUE TO BE THE BIGGEST FOREIGN RECIPIENTS OF AMERICAN AID.

We are a small nation, and they are big nations. You talk about India,
you have 1.1 billion people living there, and they have a thriving
economy. Lebanon is a small country. We have to accept these
resolutions. For instance, now on Lebanon we have had 1595, 1636,
1644. These resolutions were for the benefit of Lebanon. Look at what
they brought us: they brought us to the investigation of Rafic Hariri
killing; they led to full cooperation from Syria to the investigative
team, and 1644 allowed us to work on the issue of an international
tribunal. So these are three resolutions that were for the benefit of
Lebanon. And Lebanon has systematically demanded that Israel complies
with all the UN resolutions.


WHICH HASN’T MADE ANY DIFFERENCE, HAS IT?
Listen, listen, in politics, I believe, one day these resolutions will
become a necessity to Israel to implement. Nothing stays the same. In
history, nations that were extremely strong became weak, and nations
that were weak became strong. And we would lose our moral ground if we
don’t comply with the resolution while demanding that Israel complies
with theirs.


DO YOU CONTEMPLATE THE POSSIBILITY THAT HEZBOLLAH WILL ONE DAY WAKE UP WITHOUT ITS WEAPONS?
This is something that is interesting to me, because I believe that
Hezbollah is not in the hobby of killing. Hezbollah is a party that
presented a lot of martyrs to free the occupied lands of Lebanon. And
it was not only Hezbollah — the resistance started in 1978, when
Hezbollah didn’t exist. So we have a long history of resistance. I
think our main problem is not Hezbollah but the occupation of Israel
and what it is doing to Lebanon. We believe that eventually, and
Hezbollah believes it too, that one day we will be able to free all
our lands and we will be able to live in a peaceful way. What we need
to do is to find a way to protect Lebanon if things like this happen
again. And this is the main question mark we have at the National
Dialogue when we sit and talk [National Dialogue is a series of
debates among different religious groups gathered to decide on crucial
issues like Hezbollah’s weapons, the nationality of the Shebaa Farms
and the Palestinian refugees]. How do we protect Lebanon from the
Israeli occupation and atrocities committed against our country? I
believe that Hezbollah is a party that has done a lot for Lebanon and
it can do still a lot, and the more and more Hezbollah is getting into
politics, the more it will understand the Lebanese way of ruling
Lebanon.

WHAT ABOUT THE WEAPONS?
The weapons will be resolved. I don’t believe that Hezbollah is in the
habit of carrying weapons left, right and center. They believe in
Lebanon, they believe in the nation of Lebanon and that Lebanon has to
rule itself.

OK, BUT THE SHEBAA FARMS. LET US SUPPOSE THEY ARE SYRIAN.
But they are Syrian now, under the international law today, the Shebaa
are Syrian.

SO, IF THE SHEBAA FARMS ARE NOT LEBANESE, THEN TECHNICALLY LEBANON IS NOT OCCUPIED, RIGHT?
Technically, but in reality you have to understand these lands are
Lebanese. And we are not saying they are Lebanese because we want to
extend our war with Israel, but in reality these lands are owned by
Lebanese people, registered in Lebanon, not in Syria. So we have the
legal right over these lands. The problem is that, because Lebanon is
small, in the past it didn’t raise its voice to say ‘Israel is
occupying these lands’. In the past, even if we had talked, nobody
would have listened.

IF LEBANON IS STILL BEING OCCUPIED BY ISRAEL, IF SHEBAA ARE FINALLY RECOGNISED AS LEBANESE, WOULD YOU FIND IT LEGITIMATE, IN THAT CASE, THAT HEZBOLLAH CONTINUE HAVING WEAPONS?
In the UN charter any land that is occupied has the right to resist
it. What we are doing is perfectly legal, it is perfectly legal.

WHY WERE YOU CHOSEN TO SUCCEED YOUR FATHER, INSTEAD OF BAHAA, THE ELDEST SON?
Why? We agreed, together, the family, that they would give me this
nice job that I sit here at the risk that people will kill me.

WHY YOU?
Because the family sat together and decided who was going to do what

DO YOU THINK YOU WERE THE MOST PREPARED?
None of us were prepared.

AND WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU ABOUT THE POLITICS OF HEREDITARINESS? WHY DID YOU ACCEPT? YOU MAY EVEN END UP AS PRIME MINISTER.
I don’t want to be prime minister.

YOU DON’T? TRULY?
Truly. Because I have a better title.

WHICH IS?
Saad Rafiq Hariri.

AND WHAT CAN SAAD RAFIQ HARIRI DO FOR LEBANON?
What I am trying to do now. I am trying to give hope to the young guys
in Lebanon, that Lebanon is worth living for, that we could be united,
we could work out our problems with ourselves and give, you know, this
national feeling for Lebanon.

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE IN TOUCH WITH SOCIAL REALITY IN LEBANON? LET’S FORGET THE REGIONAL PROBLEMS FOR A MOMENT AND THE RELIGIOUS ISSUES. WHAT ABOUT THE PRICE OF FOOD, GASOLINE, SALARIES, SOCIAL SECURITY. CAN YOU REALLY GET OUT OF THIS IVORY TOWER AND SYMPATHISE WITH THE PEOPLE AND THEIR DAILY PROBLEMS?
I feel with what is happening and I wish I could do more. Believe me,
it is not an ivory tower, I am living in a prison. I don’t go out, I
don’t see anyone, I cannot do anything, I just sit here and meet
people day and night, and I try to meet as many people as I can.

ARE YOU LIVING ABROAD?
Abroad?

YES, YOU WERE LIVING IN FRANCE FOR A WHILE.
No, that was a while ago.

ARE YOU STAYING HERE FOR THE MOMENT?
I am staying here for a while.

HOW DO YOU FEEL KNOWING THAT YOUR LIFE IS IN DANGER?
Great. It is exciting.

YOU MEAN IT?
Oh yeah.

ADRENALINE BOOSTING?
Yes, like jumping with a bungee jump — you don’t know if the cord is
going to be cut off or not. [[he laughs]]


ARE YOU NEGLECTING YOUR COMPANIES? YOU ARE SAID TO BE A GREAT BUSINESSMAN.
That’s what they say.

I WONDER HOW MUCH BETTER YOU ARE A BUSINESSMAN THAN YOU CAN BE A POLITICIAN.
Definitely a better businessman.


DID YOU STOP LOOKING INTO YOUR COMPANIES?
I have my brothers, who are taking care of the business, and we talk a
lot. I am handing over what I was doing.

SO BASICALLY YOU ARE NOT TAKING ANY RESPONSIBILITY AS FAR AS YOUR BUSINESSES GO?
No, I am handing them over.

SO YOU ARE FULL TIME WITH POLITICS NOW?
Not now, but I will be.

NOT AS A PRIME MINISTER, THOUGH.
No.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT EXPATRIATES BEING ENTITLED TO VOTE?
I think that anything that can make people feel proud of being
Lebanese and connect them to Lebanon, should happen. I am with it.

BUT WOULDN’T THAT TILT THE CONFESSIONAL BALANCE?
It doesn’t tilt the balance. This is all nonsense. For me there is no
Christian and Muslim, I don’t believe it. And people who think like
this are sick.


[[[[abre]]]
WHAT ABOUT YOUR BUSINESSES IN BRAZIL?
I don’t have a business in brazil. My only business in brazil is to
get the Lebanese people in brasil to feel that they are connected with
Lebanon and I feel that the Lebanese who live in brasil are very
very lucky people, because actually the Brazilians took them as they
are, and considered them as Brazilians, but I believe that we should
do much more for them as a governemnent and try to connect them with
their country, because at the end of the day Lebanon is their home,
like brazil is, and Lebanon is a great country to be in. and one day
when they come here they will see what Lebanon went through and how
the Lebanese people were able to take the burden [???] from [meaning
to go from] the civil war to a place where all the arab world and all
the world are coming to.


DO YOU BELIEVE THAT LEBANON WILL EVER SIGN A PEACE DEAL WITH ISRAEL, LIKE JORDAN AND EGYPT?
You should ask uh… we believe that the Arab summit that happened in
Beirut had a very good proposal for Israel

OFFERING THEM THE CHANCE TO SIGN A PEACE TREATY WITH THE ARAB COUNTRIES IF THEY RETURN TO THE 67 BORDERS AND….
And we will be the last one to sign with Israel. We are a small
country and we believe that arabs should take this initiative, and
they have, and then have Israel sign, do something with the arabs. We
cannot do it by ourselves.


OK, LET ME SEE IF I GET IT RIGHT, IF ISRAEL WENT BACK TO THE 67
BORDERS AND STOPS OCCUPYING ARAB LAND, WOULD YOU SIGN A PEACE TREATY WITH ISRAEL, YOU WOULD BE WILLING
If the arabs sign, we sign. But we don’t sign if they don’t sign.

SO IT HAS TO BE A COLLECTIVE DECISION?
Yes.

THE MOHAMMED CARTOONS. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE ISSUE? WHERE DO YOU STAND ON THE ISSUE OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH?
Hum, tough question. I mean, to be so insensitive about Islam and draw
cartoons about Mohammed, who is the prophet that we in Islam look up
to and think of as our prophet. I think that there is a lot of
insensitivity in the way these cartoons were done. I believe that you
cannot touch people’s pride and belief the way they did. It is not
about freedom of speech, it has to do with provocation of a
civilization. And the problem is that if you provoke a religion…
Religion is one of the most extremely sensitive issue with people, and
if you are not sensitive to that, it will raise all the problems we
have seen.

DO YOU THINK THIS SENSITIVITY TOWARDS PEOPLE’S FEELINGS SHOULD BE IMPOSED BY LAW OR SHOULD BE A MATTER OF PERSONAL CHOICE?
I believe that like there are laws for anti-semitism and all that,
there should be laws to respect religion.

WHAT DO YOU THINK MAKES A STATESMAN?
A statesman?

YES. SOME PEOPLE SAY YOUR FATHER WAS A STATESMAN, I COULD HAVE OBJECTIONS TO THAT, AS I HAVE MY OWN IDEA OF WHAT A STATESMAN IS. WHAT IS YOUR IDEA OF A STATESMAN?
Why do you have objections to that?

I SAID ‘I COULD’. ONE DAY MAYBE I WILL LET YOU KNOW.
Tell me now.

OH I HAVE MANY. [[TAPE RECORDER IS SHUT OFF]]
I think a statesman is somebody people trust, people like. A statesman
takes position that benefits the country, and not for the sake of
politics.


THE 35 BILLION DOLLAR DEBT. HOW DO YOU ANSWER THE ACCUSATION THAT YOUR FATHER WAS THE MAIN PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR DEBT WORTH AROUND 180% OF THE GDP?

When you are coming out of a war and you see the devastation that
Lebanon was living in, and you want to attract people to come to
Lebanon, to bring back Lebanon to where it was, and to turn Lebanon
into the main base for the world to come to, specially after the
country was marked as a haven for terrorists and kidnappers and all of
that… What has been done since 1992 until today, if you look at the
reconstruction and the development of Lebanon, it is being quite
tremendous. At the same time you cannot ignore the fact that you came
out of a war. And coming out of a civil war means that at the
beginning you have an agreement to stop the war and start building the
government. And this is the transition you see. Part of the debt has
been to rebuild Lebanon. About 50% or 60% was to establish the
security forces. And part is to service the debt, and that is the
problem. If you didn’t do anything in Lebanon when my father came, the
debt today would be about 25 billion dollars.

WHOSE CALCULATION IS THAT?
Because if you had left the airport the way it was, the roads the way
they were, the infrastructure, the telephone, the electricity, the
water and everything that was done, Lebanon would have had a debt of 2
billion or 3 billion dollars. If you calculate, every five years it
would double. Plus the interest rate, plus you don’t have a GDP growth
in the country, you would have a debt of 25 billion dollars.

IS THAT CALCULATION SIGNED BY AN ECONOMIST?
You can ask any economist and they would tell you that if nothing had
been done then that would be the debt today. So you build a country
and now you need to fix it politically. And fixing it politically,
having political stability is what is going to take that debt out.
What we did in Paris 2, my father did in Paris 2 [the donor’s
conference that lent money to Lebanon], was to take the debt and bring
it down to where it should be. Unfortunately, we have president Lahoud
who puts every stick in the wheel of the economy. Now we are going to
Beirut 1 to reestablish, to reinvent the economy.

BEIRUT 1 IS THE NAME OF A NEW LOAN?
Beirut 1 is the donor’s conference that is going to help Lebanon, like Paris 2.

AND YOU WILL BE HEADING IT?
No, the prime minister will.

AND YOU REALLY DON’T WANT TO BE A PRIME MINISTER?
Definitely. Why should I be?

ARE YOU TIRED ALREADY?
No, I am not tired, I don’t think I am ready yet and there are better
people than me to do that.

DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU FELL WITH A PARACHUTE IN THIS SITUATION?
I didn’t fall with a parachute, I crash landed.

SO IF YOUR FATHER HAD NOT BEING KILLED, YOU WOULD NOT EVEN DREAM OF
ENTERING POLITICS?
Definitely not. I wouldn’t be here.

Artigo de Morena Duwe

Wed 18 Mar 2020 15.16 GMT

Daryl Davis é um músico — um pianista para ser exato. Ele já tocou com nomes como Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, BB King e até Bill Clinton. Fiel à música, mas não ao gênero, ele toca jazz, blues, rock’n’roll, country, boogie-woogie, swing, big band e muito mais. Qualquer que seja o estilo musical, Davis o toca, porque acredita que a música em todas as suas variações é um grande equalizador. Então, quando ele entrou no Silver Dollar Lounge em Frederick, Maryland, para um show country em uma noite fatídica em 1983, ser o único homem negro presente não o perturbou em nada.

Embora não tenha sido seu primeiro show country no Silver Dollar Lounge, foi o mais significativo. Depois que ele e sua banda terminaram o show, Davis foi abordado por um cliente que era cerca de 15 anos mais velho. Não é uma ocorrência incomum para um músico profissional. No entanto, enquanto elogiava Davis por sua atuação, o cliente do bar observou com franqueza que nunca tinha visto um homem negro que pudesse tocar como Jerry Lee Lewis.

Mais curioso do que ofendido, Davis usou esse encontro como uma oportunidade para um discurso amigável em vez de indignação. “Eu expliquei para aquele cara branco e mais velho que Jerry Lee Lewis foi influenciado pelos mesmos pianistas de boogie-woogie e blues que me influenciaram”, Davis diz com uma risada. “Ele não acreditou em mim. Então eu disse a ele que Jerry Lewis é um bom amigo meu e, bem, ele também não acreditou nisso, mas ficou fascinado. ”

“Então ele me convida para tomar um drinque com ele”, continua. “Eu não bebo, então eu tomei um copo de suco de cranberry e então ele pegou seu copo e me desejou saúde. Então ele disse: ‘Sabe, esta é a primeira vez que me sentei e bebi com uma pessoa negra’. Fiquei instantaneamente curioso e pensei: ‘O que está acontecendo aqui?’ Então perguntei por quê. Ele não respondeu a princípio, mas acabou admitindo que era membro da Ku Klux Klan. ”

Esta é uma história que Davis compartilha nos palcos das palestras e nas salas de aula — tanto nacional quanto globalmente. É uma anedota importante, pois marca um momento catalítico no qual a trajetória de Davis girou de músico a cruzado de relações raciais.

O que começou como um hobby gradualmente se transformou em uma vocação. À medida que sua carreira musical continuava a florescer, Davis também se envolveu em uma das coisas mais estranhas do mundo — encontrar-se com membros da KKK de várias categorias e participar dos chamados comícios de iluminação cruzada [cross lighting rallies]. Alguns desses homens da KKK tornaram-se amigos íntimos de Davis — inclusive o cliente do Silver Dollar mencionado há pouco — suas longas conversas desemaranhando um nó de ódio que havia se enrolado por décadas. Em muitos casos, esses diálogos civilizados os levaram a abandonar a organização, porque eles já não acreditavam mais em seus princípios.

Embora alguns digam que Davis converteu esses homens, ele prefere dizer que eles se converteram, e que ele apenas deu o ímpeto para que o fizessem. Nos últimos 30 anos, Davis se tornou um conhecedor do etos e da hierarquia da organização, o que o levou a se tornar o primeiro homem negro a escrever um livro sobre a KKK intitulado Relacionamentos Klan-Destinos: A Odisséia de um Homem Negro na Ku Klux Klan , que foi publicado em 1998.

A Ku Klux Klan foi formada em 1865 por um grupo de soldados confederados no final da guerra civil americana em uma tentativa de controlar os escravos recém-emancipados. Tendo visto várias iterações, o que permanece consistente em todos as assembléias do KKK é seu ódio às pessoas de cor, às vezes resultando em agressão e assassinato. Em 2018, 153 anos depois, um recorde de mais de 1.000 grupos de ódio — incluindo o KKK — foram documentados como ativos nos Estados Unidos pelo grupo de direitos civis Southern Poverty Law Center. “Nossa ideologia precisa acompanhar nossa tecnologia”, disse Davis recentemente como convidado no podcast Joe Rogan Experience.

Então, por que um músico de sucesso como Davis se reuniria de bom grado com membros do alto escalão do KKK em seu tempo livre? A jornada para essa resposta começa muito antes de seu show na Silver Dollar Klan em 1983.

“Em 1968, quando eu tinha 10 anos, tive um incidente racista”, lembra Davis com convicção, sua voz sonora e inabalável. “Eu estava no Cub Scouts e estávamos em um desfile quando as pessoas começaram a atirar pedras e coisas em mim. Não entendi por que as pessoas fariam isso e formulei uma pergunta: ‘Como você pode me odiar quando nem mesmo me conhece?’ ”

“A resposta sempre foi:‘ há algumas pessoas que são assim mesmo’”, acrescenta Davis. “Bem, isso não foi bom o suficiente para mim. O que significa “assim mesmo”? De onde é que isso veio? Você não nasceu ‘simplesmente assim. Eu estava curioso sobre o racismo desde então, mas mesmo assim, ninguém conseguia responder à pergunta. ”

Um dos primeiros e mais famosos encontros de Davis foi com o Grande Dragão [título hierárquico na KKK] Robert Kelly, que eventualmente se tornou o Mago Imperial de Maryland. Depois que sua secretária marcou uma reunião com Kelly sob o pretexto de incluí-lo em um livro sobre a KKK, Davis sabia que estava entrando em um novo território. Kelly não sabia que Davis era negro, então a grande revelação foi um choque. Depois de algumas horas de conversa tensa, os dois se separaram, mas seu relacionamento não terminou aí.

Eventualmente, Kelly começou a convidar Davis para sua casa e depois para os comícios da Klan nos quais cantos ritualísticos eram entoados, cruzes gigantes eram queimadas e cerveja e cachorro-quente eram servidos. Kelly compartilhou tudo com ele, incluindo os estereótipos profundamente raciais que ajudam a formar a base do ódio do Klan. Todo o tempo, Davis ouviu, fez perguntas, tomou notas e, por meio de suas ações, lentamente dissipou cada estereótipo, um por um. A cada conversa, a distância entre eles diminuía e eles iam se tornando amigos.

Finalmente, Kelly acabou saindo da Klan, encerrou sua filial e, como uma espécie de troféu, deu seu manto para Davis. Essa não foi a última túnica da Ku Klux Klan que Davis recebeu, nem foi o último Klansman com quem ele faria amizade.

“Eu ainda atuo às vezes e, embora prefira estar no palco tocando música alegre o tempo todo e vendo as pessoas dançarem do que falar sobre o KKK e os neonazistas”, Davis diz rindo, “Eu descobri que dar palestras e falar e educar as pessoas é muito mais importante e necessário hoje. ”

Davis viveu várias eras de ódio — desde o assassinato de Martin Luther King Jr em 1968 até o comício “Unite the Right” em Charlottesville, Virginia, em 2017. Embora ele tenha convencido centenas de supremacistas brancos a desradicalizar e se juntar à terra daqueles que amam, ele não nega que alguns estão além da salvação. No entanto, esse reconhecimento não impede a sua missão, pois continua a centrar-se naqueles que estão abertos à conversa, abertos ao discurso civilizado, abertos à amizade e, em última análise, abertos à mudança.

Mais recentemente, Davis fez parceria com a Minds.com, uma plataforma de rede social de código aberto que usa blockchain para recompensar a comunidade com tokens ERC20. Davis espera utilizar esta plataforma, fundada por Bill Ottman e John Ottman, para educar as pessoas sobre como conduzir o discurso civilizado. Além do mundo da supremacia branca, a ideia é ajudar os indivíduos a navegar por perspectivas opostas — seja em um protesto político, em uma sala de aula, nas redes sociais ou à mesa de jantar.

“As pessoas devem parar de se concentrar nos sintomas do ódio; isso é como colocar um band-aid no câncer”, diz Davis. “Temos que tratar isso na sua base — a ignorância. A cura para a ignorância é a educação. Se você acaba com a ignorância, não há a quem temer. Se não há a quem temer, não há a quem odiar. Se não há a quem odiar, não há nada ou ninguém para destruir.”

This article is a rather shoddy translation of the original article published here on Poder360, by Paula Schmitt

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about Event 201, a simulation in October 2019 about a worldwide coronavirus pandemic. The conference took place a few months before the official start of the covid-19 pandemic (declared by the World Health Organization as a “public health emergency of international concern” in January 2020, and as a pandemic proper in March 2020).

My narration of that sequence of events prompted an outraged message from an individual disturbed by such chronology: how do I dare make conspiratorial insinuations about an event planned by cautious professionals with such an acute prognosis? Before I continue, let me clarify something very slowly for the slowest: honest journalism has the professional obligation to disclose coincidences, even if it throws the journalist into the shallow, common and imbecilised ditch of “conspiracy theory”. In fact, even more so if that is the case, because it probably indicates that such coincidences are peculiar and harmonious enough to further a cohesive chronology.

We know that Event 201 was harmonious, because the pandemic started right after the conference. The official date given by the Chinese government as the first contamination by covid-19 is December 2019, but some Chinese doctors believe that the first case of the disease in China happened in November, as told in this article here. But things get even more interesting: according to the Wall Street Journal, the first case of covid-19 contamination may have happened even earlier, in October — just around the time of Event 201. Last week, the WSJ published an article under the title “Possible Early Covid-19 Cases in China Emerge During WHO Mission,” saying that there is “the possibility that Covid-19 was already spreading in China as far back as October 2019. ” If true, the harmony between Event 201 and the actual pandemic is even more explicit, because the two of them would have happened almost simultaneously. It would have been a case of literal co-incidence.

But was that pandemic simulation really peculiar? If such thing happens every year, for example, the conference is not so interesting, and a coincidence would be expected. Turning a regular event into a strepitous headline would be tantamount to publicizing with a lot of ballyhoo the fact that a clairvoyant predicted the pope’s death a month in advance, while at the same time ignoring all the other times the same clairvoyant made the same prediction and the Pope did not die. Here in this article I specifically mention this problem with some conspiracy theories: the way in which the absence of seemingly irrelevant information can give rise to faulty chronologies. The case I mention there is that of Tower 7, one of the 3 buildings that collapsed in the attacks of 9/11 but which, unlike the other two towers, was never hit by an airplane. The fire alarm did not work that day either, and that may seem peculiar, but if we know that the alarm had always failed, or had never worked, the fact is no longer significant. (I don’t know if that was the case, and there is no indication it was). That illustrates quite well what I’m talking about: the seemingly irrelevant context of non-events that gives the correct measure of relevance of the positive (existing) event that attracted our attention.

Just to make a better use of this digression: With the fall of Tower 7, the world lost one of the most forceful critics of the CIA, John O’Neill. He had been an FBI chief investigator and was dismissed when his criticism of the agency increased, particularly his denunciations of the way the CIA was being lenient with some terrorists under its watch — exactly the terrorists who would later be accused of committing the attacks of September 11. John O’Neill, already removed from the FBI, was in that tower that fell, despite never having been touched by a plane, under a fire that did not set off any alarm, in a job he had started just 3 weeks earlier at the invitation of the man who acquired the World Trade Center a few months prior to the attacks. This story became a book, The Looming Tower, which later became an HBO mini-series directed, among others, by documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney. I recommend it effusively.

Back to Event 201 and to wondering whether it was not only harmonious but also peculiar: according to the USA Today, Event 201 was the third pandemic simulation organized by the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins University since 2001, all of which were closed to the public. The latest exercise, the one in 2019, was the first one to invite members of the private sector (from airline executives to executives of pharmaceutical companies). In the same year, another simulation exercise took place from January to August. Organized by the American government, the Crimson Contagion had the participation of several government agencies and American states. In this exercise, the USA was victimised by a pandemic caused by a respiratory virus brought by tourists returning from China.

Boring conferences must be like a dime a dozen — they happen a lot. And a conference on a problem that has been feared for years, such as a viral pandemic, should happen even more frequently. But here’s another piece of news, less easy to dismiss as a coincidence, which you probably never saw in Brazilian newspapers but which should attract the attention of any journalist in the midst of such a devastating pandemic. In the words of this ABC News report, “As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.” This warning would have come from the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), the United States military and defense intelligence agency subordinated to the DIA (Defense and Intelligence Agency). “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” said one of the sources in the NCMI report. This report would have been passed on several times to the DIA, the Pentagon and the White House. The Pentagon, however, “issued a statement denying the “product/assessment” existed.” But the Times of Israel newspaper published an article in April 2020 saying that the Israeli TV Channel 12 broadcast the news that “the US intelligence community became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of that month and drew up a classified document.” According to the Times of Israel, “Information on the disease outbreak was not in the public domain at that stage — and was known only apparently to the Chinese government.” American intelligence would have decided “to update two allies with the classified document: NATO and Israel, specifically the IDF.”

Finally, I will finish today’s column with another beautiful set of coincidences. In 2014, then President Barack Obama’s government decided to cut the money allocated for gain-of-function experiments. As I’ve explained before, gain-of-function is a type of experiment in which viruses are modified, grafted with genes from other animals and/or human genes, or genes from “humanised animals” in order to make the virus more deadly, more malignant, more virulent, and thus allegedly anticipate the harm those viruses may cause to humans. The justification used for such experiments is that, by manipulating a virus and making it skip stages and evolutionary phases created in a laboratory, scientists could predict what would happen to that virus if it were left in nature under the authority of Time. For molecular biologist Richard Ebright, this type of forced intervention in nature under the excuse of understanding the enemy is like “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.”

The gain-of-function experiments in 2014 were under the command of Anthony Fauci. Fauci is the immunologist who has led the powerful National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the USA since 1984, an unusual longevity, possibly never seen in such an important position in any democratic country where governments can be alternated every 4 years. Fauci is treated by lesser journalists like God, and perhaps that is why he was able to carry out the experiments without any scrutiny by executing an administrative maneuver. He did that by outsourcing gain-of-function studies, hiring the NGO EcoHealth Alliance. This NGO is run by Peter Daszak, who in turn transferred the money and delegated the experiments to the laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city where covid-19 was first identified, and to where the same Daszak returned later, this time as a member of the WHO commission that went to investigate the origins of the pandemic in January 2021. Now that’s some coincidence.

According to the man who gave up his seat in Congress in favour of Greenwald’s husband, he never questioned how Glenn “meddles in the party (and the power of the money that buys candidacies)”

[This is a translation of a piece originally published on Poder360.]

On September 2nd, 2019, in an interview with the Roda Viva program, Glenn Greenwald sent a weakly encrypted message to the judges of the highest court of Brazilian justice:

“We’ve already said that we do not have, for example, documents about the supreme court judges and we will not publish anything nor any conversations between, for example, supreme court judges — we have already said that.”

Those words, largely ignored, should have made headlines in all the newspapers, because at that moment, in front of the cameras, Greenwald confesses that he is exercising the power to curse some and save others.

We know that this announced kindness towards members of the supreme court (STF) was Greenwald’s choice, rather than an absence of damaging material, because the Federal Attorney offices revealed that at least two of the12 supreme court judges were hacked: Gilmar Mendes and Alexandre Moraes.

It is therefore the 2nd part of the sentence that really matters, because it says more than Greenwald speaks. Why should some STF judges be reassured? What would they have to fear? And what did Greenwald gain in return for that silence? What criteria has Greenwald used to sentence some to the stake and spare others? Why was nothing said about Gilmar Mendes [a nemesis of the Car Wash anti-corruption investigation], while conversations by judge Luís Roberto Barroso [a sympathiser of the Car Wash investigation] were revealed without any crime having been identified? How can we be sure that what was omitted about Gilmar Mendes is irrelevant? What, after all, are Greenwald’s motivations?

Don’t get me wrong — I will never value intentions more than results. Those who read what I write know that I value the fruits of an action more than their motivations. The problem, however, is that we do not know what the fruits of this crime really are. As the saying goes, a thief who robs a thief should have a hundred years of relief — but what about a thief who spares a thief?

Thousands of private conversations have been stolen, 7 terabytes of information have been collected, hundreds of the highest authorities, the most powerful businessmen and the most relevant politicians have had their private messages rummaged through, and yet, defying all probabilities, nothing has showed up that could incriminate or embarrass Lula, PT, Dilma, Manuela D’Ávila, PSOL (the party to which Greenwald’s husband belongs); no friendly journalist was exposed, no bad joke was made by a party comrade, no slip-of-the-tongue used to embarrass an opponent was found to discredit a supporter of Lula. Such coincidences do not exist. [For those who are not in Brazil — the leaks published in newspapers got so low that even innane yet very private remarks were exposed, things that should never be used to condemn someone, like an off-colour joke made by a female supreme court judge. Those things, had they been published in America to discredit Donald Trump, would surely have merited Greenwald’s contempt and endless vituperation.]

For people like me who salivated waiting for revelations about Sergio Moro’s purported association with the CIA, or how he produced false testimonies or fabricated evidence, Vaza Jato was an anticlimax [Sergio Moro is the judge who sentenced Lula to prison]. I’m well aware of the shortcuts we sometimes take to complete a job, procedural deviations of a more logistical than deontological nature, means trying to justify the ends, things that Greenwald must understand better than anyone else — see the stolen material he has at hand.

[The next two paragraphs may be uninteresting to foreign readers. I will keep them in red so readers can skip them at will]

I can understand even that. A long time ago, in a very, very distant galaxy, I investigated and compiled figures that showed that the Brazilian politician most commonly associated with public security, Paulo Maluf, had done the worst government in the area of ​​security when compared to other governors on a few items I compared — vehicle purchase , guns, bulletproof vests; police salary etc. I also found testimonies from policemen saying they were ordered to avoid creating case files so as to tweak statistics.

I was dying to publish all that information, since Maluf was a candidate for the São Paulo government and had just hired William Bratton, the man who implemented the public security program in New York known as Zero Tolerance. In a way, it was as if Maluf had registered the program’s copyright in São Paulo. But my editor at the late Jornal da Tarde, Fernando Mitre, told me that the story would only come out if I got “the other side,” that is, if I got Maluf’s response to my allegations before publication. I had no doubt, then — I took the shortcut. I knew, from his record as a notorious scoundrel, that Maluf would just never accept to answer my questions and the story would perhaps be cancelled, or at least delayed. So I called Paulo Maluf’s advisor and said that I wanted to interview him about the Zero Tolerance program — something that I actually covered in my interview, but that was far from being the core issue. Maluf gladly accpeted the request to talk about what he wanted to talk about, only to end up having his first mandatory visit to a police station after he lost his composure while facing my questions. Unable to explain the figures I compiled, Maluf just resorted to saying his police was the most efficient, and that “when you call the police today, it just doesn’t come to your aid.” I dared him to prove that statement, and he made a phone call to the police, reporting a fake crime and thus committing a misdemeanor. And the police arrived in fewer than 8 minutes…

But back to Vaza Jato, how to condemn judge Sergio Moro for having apparently made the prosecutor’s life easier in his prosecution of Lula, without knowing how many times he may have done the opposite? Any intellectually honest person knows that it is only fair to judge Moro for having “facilitated” procedure for prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol if we know of all the other times he refused to do so, or if we know about all the times he “made it difficult” for the prosecutor, or even how many times he may have done the opposite: facilitated Lula’s defense. Is it likely that such things may have happened many times? I don’t know, and personally I don’t believe they have. But is it possible? Yes, they are not only possible, but The Intercept itself shows that it actually happened — even though the news outlet showed it sneakily, hidden in the middle of a bombastic headline story.

In the most recent revelation of the stolen messages, published by The Intercept, we learn that Justice Moro refused to allow the breach of fiscal and banking secrecy of Lula’s daughter-in-law, as had been requested by Car Wash. Moro reportedly refused the prosecutor’s request because “he did not see ‘sufficient cause’ for the measure against her.” That’s right, readers: we are facing a man biting a dog and yet this unusual, newsworthy fact did not make headlines. If journalism should focus on the unusual, and Moro’s attitude is so rare and unexpected because “he hates Lula so much,” why not make that refusal the title of the story? Wouldn’t that “detail” be more amazing, unexpected and thus newsworthy for the readers of The Intercept?

But who would be naive enough to believe the interest there was to do journalism? Such information was only present in the article because it served to corroborate the narrative summarized in the headline, otherwise we may have never known about that act by Moro, that Moro refused to accept a request that would harm the defense of former President Lula. And how many other times has such thing happened? How to know that such a case was rare or common without knowing all the messages, and not just what The Intercept wanted to show us?

We all know that it is not possible to prove a negative — in other words, the fact that something is not evident is not proof that it does not exist. And this is one of the biggest problems in leaving a 7 terabyte library in the hands of a single narrator who will choose, collect, discard and use whatever he thinks is best for the reconstruction of the story. Does anyone here believe that The Intercept has any intention of showing messages that contradict its reporting? Does anyone here imagine that The Intercept will publish conversations that contradict what it has made into its general theory — that the Car Wash investigation has been corrupted in its methods to punish an innocent politician? But what about the stolen billions that have already been physically returned to the public coffers? How did that money materialise? And what about conversations between Lula’s friends, relatives, lawyers — is there nothing ugly coming from the side Greenwald chose to spare, while he searched for the faintest sign of immorality on its opponent?

In this same Intercept article, which I use as an example simply because it’s the most recent, another incident goes unnoticed. But it makes clear the way The Intercept twists the truth and uses something that could be used as evidence of probity to smear the target of the week, the prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol. In that article, The Intercept shows Dallagnol supported none other than Mario Bonsaglia for the position of Attorney General: not only the candidate most voted for by the prosecutors, but one of the favorites on the left — and possibly Lula’s favourite as well. If this is the level of disreputable messages The Intercept could find about Dallagnol, one could only wonder how many of the messages omitted could legitimise Car Wash.

What is most striking in all of this is how this leak makes an involuntary ode to the absence of symmetry. What The Intercept did was to submit all those exposed people to an ethical and moral test that Greenwald would likely have failed, should he be tested on the same level of privacy. That is why he would never offer his own private communications to be examined: because he knows that no one — absolutely no one — could escape the guillotine of lack of context, and the microscopic examination of one’s private conversations. What would we find on Greenwald’s phone if we wanted to understand what Jean Wyllys meant when he said this: [Jean Wyllys is the man who was elected to congress but gave up his seat in favour of Greenwald’s husband just before the beginning of his term. Wyllys’ resignation is the only reason why David Miranda is in parliament, since he never got enough votes to get a seat.]

I’ll translate here the relevant part Jean Wyllys’ tweet:

“I never publicly questioned his [Greenwald’s] party interference (the power of the money that buys candidacies)”

If Wyllys, who is from the same party as Greenwald’s husband, manages to suggest in public that Greenwald buys candidacies — and Greenwald has enough money for that, not only from his salary but because The Intercept was financed with $ 250 million from billionaire Pierre Omidyar — what wouldn’t we find in his phone messages? How can Greenwald and The Intercept judge the news outlet The Antagonist’s behavior without revealing how The Intercept negotiate stories themselves; or how they got their exclusive interview with Lula; how they negotiated with the hackers to receive stolen material and maybe even the theft itself; and how they chose the journalists to whom they would grant the very limited right to go to The Intercept newsroom and check thousands and thousands of messages without being able to use any recording device or copying method, and without an internet connection? I asked in public to have this right in a tweet that I addressed to Leandro Demori, the editor of The Intercept who follows [followed] me on twitter and whom I follow.

To this day I am waiting for an answer.

It is true that several journalists were allowed to read — but not to copy or save — the messages they checked on the spot at The Intercept. But what if these journalists had the same kind of friendly relationship with their sources, as O Antagonista had with Dallagnol, and this was evidenced in some conversations? What if they did something even worse? Would they dare publish something that displeased The Intercept — the sole holder of the treasure that could be used to blackmail people and destroy families? Who can guarantee that those journalists have not been coerced into behaving, however silently that may have been done? If I show you that I know you cheat on your wife, will I need to ask you for a favour or will you just willingly offer me one? Does anyone think that only The Antagonist exchanged pleasantries with interviewees and sources?

If you believe that everything that hasn’t been shown doesn’t exist, and every journalist who hasn’t been publicly vilified in Vaza Jato is innocent of the same charges that Intercept used to destroy The Antagonist, I have a bridge to sell you — and a story to tell next week about the billionaire behind Greenwald and how he makes private information one of the sources of his wealth.

Paula Schmitt is a journalist, a writer, and has a master’s degree in political science and Middle Eastern studies from the American University of Beirut. She is the author of the fiction book “Eudemonia” and the nonfiction book “Spies”. She won the Bandeirantes Prize for Radiojournalism, was a correspondent in the Middle East for SBT and Radio France Internationale and was a political columnist for the newspapers Folha de S.Paulo and Estado de S.Paulo. She published reports and articles in Rolling Stone, Vogue Homem and 971mag, among other outlets. Paula writes weekly to Poder360, always on Thursdays

Summary: This is an article originally written in Portuguese for Poder360 about Glenn Greenwald’s association and possible complicity with a gang of embezzlers and swindlers who hacked 7 terabyte-worth of private communications between the most powerful people in Brazil: supreme court judges, politicians, journalists, celebrities, businessmen. According to the prosecution files, about 1,000 people were hacked. But only a tiny fraction of those conversations were released by The Intercept — and only those that embarrassed the “unfriendlies”. Greenwald accused his colleagues at The Intercept of censorship, and yet he managed to do exactly that, and more: he used an infinite source of smut and embarrassment (7 terabytes) to destroy enemies and preserve friends, like the worst blackmailer would do. It is a statistical impossibility that among 7 terabytes of stolen conversations there would be nothing damaging to politicians deemed friendly by Greenwald and The Intercept, but that is exactly what the leaks (don’t) reveal. That was gatekeeping on a massive, criminal scale. This article will also discuss the following coincidence: it was right around the time when the criminals had an unusual amount of money deposited in their bank accounts, that Greenwald chose to delete 27k messages from his twitter, all in one go (and thus, most likely, deleted through keywords — i found some of the keywords he may have chosen as filter.) That was not a deletion done on a whim. Greenwald clearly felt obliged to do this, and the reason we know it is because just a while before his mega-deletion, Greenwald publicly condemned Matt Yglesias for evading “accountability” by deleting his own tweets. The worst thing about Greenwald is not that he may want the election of Trump, but that he is a hypocrite when he accuses his colleagues of partiality. The stolen material selectively leaked by The Intercept about his enemies in Brazilian politics is the clearest and most undeniable expression of selectivity, bias and partiality. It is the exact opposite of what honest journalism would be. Not a single journalist sympathetic to Greenwald was exposed — but his critics were. Not a single politician who defended The Intercept was exposed — but those who criticised it were exposed for things as small as an off-colour joke, and were publicly humiliated. Greenwald knew exactly who to preserve, or warn, and he announced on national television: “We won’t publish anything nor any conversation between supreme court judges, we’ve already said that.” Not coincidentally, one of the supreme court judges who were hacked announced right off the bat that Greenwald would be exempted from not only prosecution, but investigation. That’s right: a Brazilian supreme court judge whose hacked messages were given (sold?) to Greenwald announced that Greenwald had nothing to worry. The “verification” of those conversations were done with the help of journalists, who were allowed to visit The Intercept and compare the hacked messages in which they featured with their own phone phone records. It’s worth mentioning that no journalist outside The Intercept was allowed to copy any part of the hacked material, even their own private communications hacked in the operation. It’s worth mentioning as well that some of those journalists may have seen conversations they’d rather have kept private. In that likely case, they probably became instant supporters of Greenwald, for they too were now black-mailable. It’s no wonder I am virtually the only journalist who wrote about this in Brazil — and The Intercept never accepted my request to check the stolen material. I am an award-winning journalist, the only woman in the West to have interviewed Hassan Nasrallah, winner of a national radiojournalism award, youngest political columnist in two major national newspapers and yet The Intercept did not accept my participation in checking the stolen material, even though i would be subject to the same limit imposed on all who visited The Intercept newsroom to check the booty: no phone or any recordable device allowed in the room. It’s not surprising that most of the media in Brazil had no qualms, criticism or questions of Greenwald’s method — with the exception of journalists from O Antagonista, public critics of Greenwald and The Intercept from the moment it was launched in Brazil. Not coincidentally, those are the only journalists whose embarrassing conversations were exposed by The Intercept.

N.B. Quotes kept within asterisks, instead of quotation marks, have been translated twice: once from the original English into Portuguese, and now back to English. I should have looked up the original quotes, which were all compiled and kept in the two computers I used to write this story. Both of them were hacked and made useless. So, in order to spare myself the unbearable task of going through Greenwald’s stuff again, I will just keep these passages in asterisks because in the process of reversing translation I may have rendered them non-verbatim (while still faithful to, or even the same as, the original).

**When I sat down with him, my number one priority, above all, was to try to understand what his real motives were.**

Glenn Greenwald, March 2015

That phrase was said by Glenn Greenwald in March 2015, in a lecture to the International Association of Privacy Professionals, about his first meeting with Edward Snowden, the subcontracted intelligence official who leaked millions of documents revealing American espionage of people and countries , private citizens and businesses.

Like that old Greenwald, I am also curious about the true motives of the criminals who hacked the private communications of hundreds of Brazilian authorities. According to the prosecutors of this case, at least 1,330 people have been attacked in this operation. The hacked material was given to Glenn Greenwald, who selectively published things that harmed his political enemies and spared those he sympathised with. To those who don’t know: Greenwald’s husband is a member of Congress for the self-proclaimed socialist party PSOL, and we know he spared comrades and politicians associated with Lula and Dilma because their names have been redacted. It’s worth noting that David Miranda, Greenwald’s husband, was never truly “elected” to Congress. He only took that seat because the man who had enough votes to get to Congress (Jean Wyllys) claims to have received enough death threats to make him flee the country. By resigning his seat, Wyllys relinquished it to the next candidate in the party ballot: David Miranda. Wyllys would later accuse Greenwald of using his money and power to “buy candidacies”. More on that later)]

Among the victims of this massive break-in are deputies, senators, judges, businessmen and journalists. Some of the victims are unknown to the public, and the way they are referred to or addressed (women nicknamed “whores”, for example) suggest the criminals who helped Greenwald were also targeting people they knew or had a relationship with.

Most of the targets in those 7 terabytes, however, were people whose public life could be destroyed by blackmail. In exchange for what? That we don’t know, but we do know those private messages could be used for coercion, something that a member of the gang made clear when he lamented in writing that the destruction of the stolen conversations would make the gang lose their “trump card.”

In the book I wrote about espionage for an English publisher, I explain how the underground world of espionage uses blackmail to “recruit” collaborators. The acronym MICE was created by intelligence services to explain the four most common reasons for transforming a citizen into a traitor: Money, Ideology, Coercion (blackmail) and Ego.

The most efficient of all, according to experts, is coercion. It is through blackmail that once independent people suddenly become slaves. The issue of privacy is so crucial to a healthy and free society that Greenwald himself raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling books and giving lectures defending that very right, as here, when he was chosen by Ted Talks to speak only and exclusively about this: Why Privacy Matters.

For people who may still think only those who commit crimes should be concerned with privacy, a basic exercise of imagination shows that we all have something we would like to hide from someone: a mother who tells her friend that she prefers one child over another; a husband who sends a message to a friend saying his sister-in-law is hot; a grandson who can no longer stand taking his grandparents to the mall; an employee who complains about the boss’s bad breath; an intimate photo; adultery; a dream. Greenwald explains this well in his participation in “The Munk Debate”, which ended up becoming a book.

**Imagine if you had to call an abortion clinic, or an HIV specialist, or an emergency room for suicide or drug addiction, or if you called repeatedly late at night someone who is not your spouse.**

For Greenwald, privacy is sacred, and should be accessed by few people, and only when the targets have been found guilty by the courts.

**It is legitimate to have punctual surveillance, focused on people who have been recognized by the court of law as really guilty of something wrong.**

In a debate with author Naomi Klein, Greenwald concedes there are risks to invasion of one’s privacy by hackers. “The dangers of having privacy eroded by the state certainly apply to having privacy eroded by these stateless actors who are hacking and publishing people’s private communications indiscriminately. That too kills privacy in a really profound way. And it’s hard to care about one but not the other.”

It is possible to glimpse, therefore, the extraordinary power of a gang of swindlers who had possession of 7 terabytes of communication from the most powerful and influential people in Brazil, from Jair Bolsonaro to the head of Congress David Alcolumbre, from Supreme Court judges like Gilmar Mendes to Alexandre de Moraes.

Worse yet, several of these targets were being monitored in real time as they sent messages and made political decisions. In some cases, the gang went even further and not only monitored live conversations, but got involved in them, falsely impersonating those they hacked. At one point, Walter Delgatti, the leader of the group, sends a message to Globo journalist Lauro Jardim as if the message had been sent by Congresswoman Joice Hasselmann.

“The government is already letting out that it considers the MPF [Attorney General’s office] as an enemy.”

It is worth asking here: what interest does a gang of fraudsters and embezzlers have in creating intrigue between the Attorney General and the president? How do these common criminals know the intricacies of Brazilian politics? Who would benefit from that false message? We don’t know who benefited, but we know who wrote the text: Luiz Molição, the hacker with whom Greenwald negotiated the leak of those 7 terabytes of conversations.

It must have been painful for fans of Greenwald to notice the distance between Snowden’s lofty goals and those of the Araraquara criminals. (Araraquara is the town where the gang leaders come from. They already had arrest warrants against them before they started the hacking operation.)

The gang’s motivation until then had been clearly financial. None of them seems to have any trace of ideological affinity, nobility of character or elevation of purpose. On the contrary, the criminals used to target unsuspecting random people, often the elderly, who were led to believe that Delgatti was the manager of their bank branch asking them to change their password: “It’s for your safety, ma’am,” Delgatti would say to any old lady who made the mistake of answering his call. Simple and gullible, these people lost their hard-earned money, which Delgatti proudly sported in pictures he posed with wads of hundred-dollar bills and guns. Here are some photos of the criminals, taken from the prosecutors’ files:

Delgatti was so well-known as a criminal that he had to use an accomplice to open a bank account on the accomplice’s name, as well as to rent a house and pay for electricity. This was necessary because since 2015 there was an arrest warrant against him. One of his partners handled R$ 893K in two bank accounts between August and December 2018. It was at that time, coincidentally, that Greenwald deleted in one go 27 thousand tweets from his public Twitter account.

It must not have been easy for Greenwald to make that decision — if not out of principle, at least out of shame — since just a month before he publicly humiliated journalist Matt Yglesias for doing exactly what he, Greenwald, would do a month later:

“That’s because you constantly and systematically delete your tweets like a coward so that you have no accountability for what you say,” he wrote on Twitter.

I went on a search for tweets that Greenwald wrote about the NSA, Snowden and Brazil. Greenwald had become a hero in Brazil when he showed the way the United States government had invaded phones of authorities, like Dilma, and of strategic public companies, like Petrobras.

My curiosity was piqued when I noticed that Greenwald started referring to Snowden’s leaks as “theft” shortly after the Vaza Jato publications [Vaza (leak) Jato is a play on Lava Jato (Car Wash), the judicial operation launched to indict and arrest Lula for corruption.] Until that moment, I don’t remember having ever seen Greenwald using that noun — theft — to describe what Snowden did, unless it was in quotes or in a sarcastic way.

To my surprise, however, of the hundreds of tweets written by Greenwald that I remember reading specifically about the NSA (National Security Agency) surveillance in Brazil, against Brazilian companies and authorities, there are only eight left. That’s right. Out of hundreds of tweets, only eight survived, and almost all of them before September 2018 were deleted (with the exception of two inconsequential tweets).

See here the search results in which the word NSA and any of the following words should appear: “Brazil”, “Brazil”, “brazilian”, “brazilians”, “brazilian”, “brazilians”, “brazilian”, “brazilian ”.

But how can I prove that tweets in which Greenwald spoke of the NSA and Brazil were deleted? Is easy. Just do the reverse search — tweets replying to Greenwald addressing the issue. Currently, almost all of them with those keywords in response to Greenwald are replying to deleted tweets: “This tweet is no longer available.” Doubt it? Check it yourself. Here is the result of one search that shows hundreds of tweets responding to something that Greenwald preferred to delete.

They will appear like this:

I found this coincidence very intriguing. When did Greenwald delete those tweets about the NSA and Brazil? Did they happen to be deleted along with the 27,000 deleted tweets around August 2018? If so, why at that time specifically? I am not going to go into the merits of what was revealed by Vaza Jato [it has its merits, because it showed, in the very least, a biased and incompetent judicial procedure, though apparently not a criminal one]. I am interested at the moment to know who is behind that mega hack, and which interests were decisive for the choice of what would and would not be disclosed by The Intercept.

I also want to know why a political party and a Supreme Court judge thought it best to consider Glenn Greenwald a person above suspicion, who should be exempted a priori from any investigation. [But I have an idea why. Here is an interview where Greenwald says that he will not be publishing any conversation between supreme court judges. Those guys may have sighed with relief hearing that.

https://twitter.com/schmittpaula/status/1172958511661232131 ]

We all know that condemning someone beforehand, without due legal process, is a tyrannical measure, typical of authoritarian governments. But exempting someone from being investigated for suspected involvement when a crime was clearly committed is just as authoritarian and arbitrary. No one should be above the law. There are several considerations to be made about the Vaza Jato hacking, and many are being solemnly ignored. This column, therefore, will continue next week — if I am not hacked, of course.

On the letter against Steven Pinker and the Tyranny of the Offended

(This is a translation of my Portuguese article, originally published on Poder360)

I regret to inform that this article will be, again, about identity politics, cancellation culture and the tyranny of the offended. It is about the creation of a “reformed society,” a new civilization that feigns to protect the neediest while it is being built, brick by brick, over the unstable foundations of the emotionally weak, where the prevailing logic is based on the reasoning of the most unbalanced, most childish and with the greatest amount of bad faith.

Do not think that I am happy to talk about this. For me, discussing identity is as absurd as debating pineapple on pizza — everyone has a taste, and each taste is subjective, personal and non-transferable. The problem, of course, is that we are on the verge of seeing pineapple on pizza mandated by law, and even I, who like that combination, will fight for the right not to eat it.

Note that the expression I coined is “tyranny of the offended,” not tyranny of the weak. This is a crucial point in understanding the situation. No participant in this collective hysteria intends to protect the weakest, but those who complain the most, those who shout the loudest, those who manage to mobilize the most people — in other words, those who have the most power. It is no coincidence that we do not see any protest or hashtag defending the poor, the elderly or children. But last week, lucidity had a small victory.

There are countless examples of cancellation, but the case I write about today stood out for targeting Steven Pinker, Harvard linguist, psychologist and author of several popular science bestsellers. Pinker was targeted not by a colleague, but by more than 600 of them. In a letter addressed to the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), “members of the language community” ask that Pinker be removed from the lists of “distinguished academics” and media experts. The letter demands that the LSA “distance itself” from Pinker because he would be at odds with its principles of “racial justice.”

The letter lists six situations that illustrate Pinker’s alleged racism. The examples are embarrassing, but revealing: they illustrate the dishonest selectivity of those who begin the kangaroo court with the verdict, retrospectively mining everything that can reinforce the conviction they already have. This becomes even easier, of course, when the author is prolific — the more books published, the higher the chance that something untoward will be found. As the phrase attributed to Cardinal Richelieu says, “Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him.” For linguists, this ploy must be even easier.

The first example of Pinker’s alleged racism was a 2015 tweet in which he said, “Data: the police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately.” The tweet linked to a New York Times article in which the author examines official statistics showing that, on the one hand, 31.8% of the people who were shot by the police were black. This is more than twice the proportion of blacks in the total population, 13.2%. But on the other hand, blacks also make up a larger share among those who are detained by the police (28.9% of detainees are black). For the author of the article, the same figures that reveal blacks suffer more violence from the police, compared to their share of the population, also reveal that they are arrested more often, and therefore are more likely to to have police encounters and thus suffer from police violence. [The question to be asked then would be: why are blacks arrested more often? The answer may be “because of racism in the police,” but it may also be because blacks in the United States commit more crimes. And if that is the answer, then the next question may be: why do they commit more crimes? Because they have lower wages, and a lower level of education, for example. And why do they have the lowest level of education and wages? Because of the political racism that confines blacks in areas with no school, no jobs, etc. This is just an imaginary exercise in search of answers — which needs to start with the right questions. For those interested, here’s a more recent article on this data. ]

Pinker’s sins were analyzed — and debunked — by Reason. I encourage everyone to read it to understand how far this collective psychopathy has come. But I want to talk about just one more of these examples to warn everyone about what may be on its way to Brazil, the country where even social sciences are imported, even if they do not suit our situation, or are much inferior to what we produce. I think it’s important to be prepared because politics and society have to be analyzed as a film, not a photo. If the static picture of the situation does not scare you, try to examine the progression of this film and predict where it is going. See what part of the film we were at when President Fernando Henrique Cardoso made the shameful gesture of officially complaining to FOX for a joke about Brazil in an episode of the Simpsons. See who took offense at those who refused to call Dilma presidenta, when we already have a word that encompasses all genders. See if these people demanding a gendered word were the same ones who refuse to accept the word actress, because “it diminishes women.”

In the USA, it is no longer necessary to see where the film is going, because the film is almost finishing. I’m no alarmist, even though at times I look like the illegitimate son of Cassandra and Poe’s raven, but the situation in the United States is frightening for anyone who is minimally honest and attentive — and here is Noam Chomsky and dozens of other thinkers proving my point.

They signed an open letter denouncing “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty” and condemning “calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.”

Until recently, very few on the left had the intelligence or courage to denounce what has been happening. The generalised silence of the Brazilian press is proof of this, with the honorable exception made by the press derogatorily classified as “right wing.” Who knows, maybe now, with Chomsky’s authorisation, the one who have been too cowardly will feel bold enough to open their mouth. But going back to diatribe against Pinker, in the fifth example of the letter he is accused of racism through a concept that should give shivers down the spine of any sensible person: a dystopian and Orwellian invention called dogwhistle.

According to the witch-hunting linguist-snitches who denounced Pinker to his association, Pinker used a trick in which he manages to be racist and announce that he is racist, but without letting his enemies notice. That’s where the expression “dogwhistle” comes from — like an ultrasonic whistle, only eugenicist cronies or dogs are able to get the message. Do you know those right-wingers on the verge of a schizophrenia attack who come out in search of “secret symbols” made by members of the Iluminatti revealed “secretly” on Instagram? So. In the leftist version, they are those guys full of energy and with lots of free time, who go around looking for a racist who can whistle and wink at his accomplices all at the same time. In Pinker’s case, his whistle would have been as follows: he used the expression “urban violence”, in a clear attempt to “send one message to an outgroup while at the same time sending a second (often taboo, controversial, or inflammatory) message to an ingroup” of fellow racists. “But how is the word urban racist?”, may ask an intelligent person. The linguists’ letter explains (and you would need to be a linguist to understand): “Urban,’ as a dogwhistle, signals covert and, crucially, deniable support of views that essentialize Black people as lesser-than, and, often, as criminals.” That’s it, folks: who needs visible racism when we have the invisible type to condemn? But the LSA, unlike academic institutions that succumbed to pressure from the salivating packs, did not think there was enough evidence against Pinker for his academic ostracism.

The thing about seeing racism where it is expected — or perhaps where it is desired — reminds me of the time on twitter when I mentioned that I trusted a journalist I know more than the Arab intellectual known as Angry Arab, who had lectured at the university where I did my master’s degree, AUB, in Lebanon. In a tweet, I told a person who was debating with me that the Angry Arab sobriquet was very appropriate. It is obvious that I was referring to the “angry” part of his pseudonym, but the idiotic Arabist, a certain Asa Winstanley, had no doubt about it: he called me a racist, since — he presumed — I could only be referring to a perceived Arab inferiority of the man, not to his state of mind. You can see who is prejudiced in this conversation.

But to end this article on a lighter note, and in with some enlightenment, here is a tweet from Marcellus Wiley, a former NFL player. Under the words “better wise up,” Wiley posted one of the simplest and profoundest syntheses I’ve ever seen:

“America is not divided by race, color, gender, or sexual orientation. America is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or sexual orientation.”

(This is an opinion article published originally on Poder360, a political newsletter based in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, headed by Fernando Rodrigues, of HSBC leaks fame. The original article is here, and it contains photos of the hackers who negotiated with Greenwald — often holding guns and thick wads of 100-dollar bills.)

“When I sat down with [Edward Snowden], my number one priority by far was to try and understand what his actual motive was.”

That was said by Glenn Greenwald in March 2015, in a
lecture to the International Association of Privacy Professionals, about his first meeting with Edward Snowden, the subcontracted CIA employee who leaked millions of documents revealing America’s surveillance of people and countries, private citizens and businesses. Like that Greenwald, I am also curious to know the true motives of the criminals who invaded the private communications of dozens, perhaps hundreds of Brazilian authorities. [Those men are criminals not because they hacked phone conversations, but because their activities consisted in swindling people of their bank account passwords. More ahead.] According to the prosecutors, at least 1,330 different people suffered attacks by those hackers. Among their targets were deputies, senators, judges, businessmen, journalists.

Some of the victims are people unknown to the public, women dubbed “puta”, which suggests criminal vendetta against people whom they know or even with whom they are related. The vast majority of targets, however, are people whose public life could be destroyed with blackmail. But blackmailed in exchange for what? No one seems to know the answer to that. What we do know is that the hacked messages had the power to coerce the victims, because a member of the group made it clear when he said that, if he had to destroy their cache of hacked communication, we would lose “all our strategic assets (trump cards).”


In the book I wrote about espionage for an English publisher I explain how this underground world uses blackmail to “recruit” agents. The acronym MICE was created by intelligence operators to explain the four most common ways an intelligence service can transform a citizen into a traitor: Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego. The most efficient of all, according to experts, is coercion. It is through blackmailing that people who were once free become enslaved. The issue of privacy is so crucial to a healthy and free society that Greenwald has made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling books and giving talks defending that very right, as here, where he was chosen by Ted
Talks to speak only and exclusively about this: Why Privacy Matters.

For those who still think that only people who commit crimes should be concerned with privacy, a basic exercise of imagination shows that we have,
all of us, something we would like to hide from someone else: a mother who says to a friend she sometimes prefers one child to the another; a husband who makes a joke about how hot his sister-in-law is; a grandson who can’t stand it anymore taking his grandparents to the mall; an employee who complains about the bad breath of his boss; an intimate photo; an adultery; a dream. Greenwald explains this well in his participation in The Munk Debate, which ended up becoming a book .

“Imagine if you were to call an abortion clinic, or an HIV specialist, or a drug addiction or suicide hotline, or if you were to call someone who wasn’t your spouse repeatedly late at night.”

For Greenwald, this privacy is sacred, and should be accessed by few people, and only when the targets have been found guilty by the courts of justice. “What is legitimate is to have targeted, focused surveillance on people who the courts have determined are actually guilty of some wrongdoing.”

In a debate with author Naomi Klein, Greenwald admits to her the risks
of privacy invaded by hackers. “All those discussions from 2013 about the dangers of having privacy eroded by the state certainly apply to having privacy eroded by these stateless actors who are hacking and publishing people’s private communications indiscriminately. That too kills privacy in a really profound way. And it’s hard to care about one but not the other.”


One can have an idea, therefore, of the extraordinary power in the hands of a gang of fraudsters who held 7 terabytes of communication from and to the most powerful and influential people in the country, from president Jair Bolsonaro to the head of senate Davi Alcolumbre, from Supreme Court judges like Gilmar Mendes to Alexandre de Moraes. Worse, several of these targets were being monitored by the hackers in real time, at the very moment they sent messages and made decisions. In some cases, the gang went further and not only monitored live conversations, but interfered in them. At a certain point, Walter Delgatti, the probable leader of the crime gang, sends a message to journalist Lauro Jardim as if the message had been sent by congresswoman Joice Hasselmann.


“The government is already letting out that it considers the office of the attorney general [public prosecutors] as an enemy.”

It is worth asking here: What interest does a band of fraudsters have in
creating intrigue between the office of federal prosecutors and the government? How do they know the intricacies of Brazilian politics? Who would benefit from that message?

We don’t know who benefited, but we know who wrote that text message: Luiz Molição, the hacker with whom Greenwald negotiated the leak of the hacked conversations.

For someone allegedly concerned about the “real motivation” behind
Edward Snowden’s leak, it must have been painful to contemplate the distance between Snowden’s purpose and the goals of the Araraquara gang. Clearly, until very recently the group’s motivation had been financial. Not one of them seems to have any trace of nobility of character or elevation of purpose, on the contrary — the group used the lowest type of fraud against unsuspecting people, often the elderly, who were led to believe that Delgatti
was their bank manager calling to ask them to change their password — “for your protection, m’am,” a phrase Delgatti repeated incessantly to whoever made the mistake of taking his call [often showing the phone number of the bank as the caller, a trick made possible by Voice Over IP calls]. Simple and credulous, those people lost a hard-earned money that Delgatti boasted in large wads of 100 dollar bills, often along with guns.

PHOTOS can be found in the prosecutor’s indictment piece, here:

Delgatti was well-known as a criminal. He was a fugitive with a prison warrant issued in 2015. He even had an associate whose name he used so as to be able to rent a house and pay utilities like electricity. That accomplice had had two bank accounts that handled the amount of almost a million reais (R$ 893,000) between August and December 2018. It was at that time, coincidentally, that Greenwald deleted 27,000 tweets from his public account on Twitter, as told in the New Yorker.

Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance

It must not have been easy for Greenwald to make the decision to delete his own tweets — if not for principle, at least out of shame —considering that just a month earlier he had publicly humiliated journalist Matt Yglesias for doing exactly what he, Greenwald, would do a month later:

“That’s because you constantly and systematically delete your tweets like a coward so that you have no accountability for what you say.”

I made a search for tweets that Greenwald wrote about the NSA, Snowden and Brazil. Greenwald became a hero in Brazil when he revealed the way the United States had hacked phones of Brazilian authorities, like Dilma, and public companies in strategic areas, such as Petrobras. My curiosity had piqued when I noticed that Greenwald started referring to the Snowden leaks as “theft,” right after the Vaza Jato publications [Vaza Jato — the selective leak of hacked conversation between Brazilian authorities, a cache held by The Intercept and only shared with journalists willing to visit The Intercept newsroom and use an airlocked computer]. Until then, I don’t remember having ever seen Greenwald using that verb (stealing) to describe
what Snowden did, unless it was within quotes or mentioned sarcastically.


To my surprise, however, of the hundreds of tweets written by Greenwald that I remember reading specifically about surveillance by the NSA (National Security Agency) in Brazil, and against companies and Brazilian authorities, only eight remain. That’s right. Of hundreds of tweets, only eight survived, and almost all of those written before September 2018 were deleted (with the exception of two inconsequential tweets).


See here the search results that should contain the word NSA and
any of the following words: Brazil Brasil brazilian
brazilians brasileiro brasileira brasileiros brasileiras


But how can I prove that tweets in which Greenwald spoke of the NSA and
from Brazil were deleted? It’s easy. Just do the reverse search with the same keywords — tweets addressed to Greenwald on the subject. Currently, almost all of those tweets responding to Greenwald are actually addressing tweets that have been deleted: “This tweet is no longer available.” Check it for yourself. Here is the result of the search with hundreds of tweets responding to something that Greenwald chose to delete.


I found this coincidence very intriguing. When did Greenwald
delete those tweets about NSA and Brazil? Were they by chance
deleted in the batch of 27 thousand tweets obliterated from sight around August 2018? If so, why at that time specifically? I will not get into the merits of what was revealed by Vaza Jato. I’m interested at the moment to know who was behind it, and what interests were decisive for the choice of what would and would not be disclosed. I also want to know why a political party and a Supreme Court judge thought it was a good idea to consider Glenn Greenwald a person above suspicion, who should be exempted a priori from any investigation. We all know that condemning someone beforehand, without due legal process, is a tyrannical measure, typical of authoritarian governments. But exempting someone from criminal liability when a crime has clearly been committed is as authoritarian and arbitrary. No one should be above the law. There are several considerations to be made about Vaza Jato, and many are being solemnly ignored. This column, therefore, will have a sequel next week — if I’m not hacked, of course.

Yvonne atravessa aquele curto infinito todas as manhãs enquanto dirige seu carro, sozinha, para uma área que grande parte dos cariocas passará uma vida sem visitar — uma favela, ou como é mais educadamente ou condescendentemente conhecida, uma comunidade. Para muitas pessoas de classe média no Rio, a favela é a realidade mais próxima e mais distante que existe. O recíproco é verdadeiro vindo da direção oposta: habitantes das favelas do Rio, embora fisicamente próximos de bairros ricos, estão tão longe dos serviços públicos mais básicos que eles se referem a lugares como Ipanema ou Copacabana não como “a praia”, mas como “asfalto” — uma palavra que simboliza a civilidade básica e a dignidade mínima dos serviços urbanos dos quais foram privados.

Uma breve visita a favelas do Rio revela a ausência daquilo que costumamos nem notar por considerar essencial: estradas pavimentadas, hidrantes, bueiros, água encanada, esgoto adequado, escolas, áreas esportivas e de entretenimento, fornecimento de gás de cozinha, eletricidade, correio. Alguns desses serviços existem, mas raramente são fornecidos pelo estado ou empresas de serviços públicos — um vácuo que é preenchido por gangues criminosas ou grupos de policiais ou ex-policiais foras-da-lei, conhecidos no Rio como “milicianos”. Eles cobram taxas mensais por “proteção” e determinam que coisas como gás de cozinha sempre sejam compradas do mesmo fornecedor. Em outras palavras, viver em uma favela significa viver com medo de criminosos e milicianos. Também significa ter medo até policial honesto e bem-intencionado.

No dia em que vim visitar o Uerê no Complexo da Maré, vi Yvonne tentando convencer uma menina de seis anos a aceitar uma pomada para suas feridas na boca. A garota não respondia a nenhuma de suas perguntas, nem mesmo abria a boca, como se dentro dela houvesse um soluço que ela tentava manter preso. Por longos segundos estavam ali apenas Yvonne e a garota, se olhando em silêncio, segurando as mãos uma da outra. A garota havia perdido a fala alguns dias antes, quando testemunhou sua tia sendo morta por uma “bala perdida” — uma causa mortis que se tornou tão carioca quanto o Cristo, que descreve alguém morto a tiros não por intenção, mas por má pontaria, inépcia, ou identificação incorreta, uma morte ainda mais obscena por ser o fruto da sorte, ou do azar que atinge aqueles que nasceram no lugar errado.

Pode-se argumentar que a pior coisa que acontece em uma favela não é a morte prematura, mas uma vida vivida com medo. Um cartaz gigante no telhado do Uerê mostra como a vida foi desvalorizada nessas terras, e como é fácil perdê-la. Ele informa aqueles que sobrevoam a área que o prédio é uma “escola, não atire”, uma mensagem certamente dirigida à polícia, o único lado dessa guerra urbana que possui helicópteros e atira do céu. É difícil entender como as crianças podem prosperar em tal ambiente, mas elas conseguem, e o Uerê e outras iniciativas não-governamentais têm sido cruciais para isso.

Yvonne Bezerra de Mello ficou conhecida em 1993 quando algumas das crianças sem-teto pra quem ela dava aulas — nas ruas, debaixo da ponte — se tornaram vítimas do notório Massacre da Candelária, o assassinato de oito crianças, algumas com 11 anos, cometido por um grupo criminoso que incluía membros das forças policiais. Anos depois Yvonne chegaria às manchetes novamente quando um dos sobreviventes daquele massacre, então já adulto, manteve vários passageiros de ônibus como reféns por horas, tudo transmitido ao vivo na TV, um evento destruidor de nervos que terminou com a morte do criminoso e de um dos seus reféns, ambos mortos pela polícia. A história do ônibus 174 foi contada em pelo menos um longa-metragem e um documentário.

Hoje, Yvonne tenta proporcionar às crianças algumas das condições necessárias para uma vida feliz que vão além da segurança e do esgoto: o conhecimento, a alimentação e o instrumento mais intangível e inestimável para a felicidade — a capacidade de sonhar. É por isso que o Uerê não só fornece três refeições saudáveis (e deliciosas) por dia para as quase 400 crianças matriculadas, de 6 a 18 anos, mas também proporciona outros elementos essenciais para mantê-las confiantes, orgulhosas e preparadas, como a capacidade de enunciar os pensamentos com eloquência, de tocar um instrumento, de conhecer as capitais do mundo, de falar uma língua estrangeira. Isso já foi feito pelo Uerê para 7 mil crianças até agora. Eu conheci um garoto de 15 anos que chegou ao Uerê anos atrás quase incapaz de dizer uma palavra em público. Agora ele toca o celo e carrega o orgulho de um garoto que sabe que tem talento — que teve a chance de provar que tem talento. Esse é outro direito recusado à maioria das pessoas nascidas em uma favela — a crença na mobilidade social, a esperança de que uma pessoa pode deixar esta vida em condição melhor do que entrou. Ver aquele menino com orgulho e autoconfiança é outro milagre realizado pelas Yvonnes deste mundo, que acreditam que todo mundo tem valor e alguma beleza para devolver a esta vida, assim como uma beleza para dela receber.

O Uerê vem se mantendo com a ajuda de algumas empresas, doadores privados e com a convicção contagiante de Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, que inventou o método pedagógico Uerê-Mello, escolhido pelo Unicef como um dos seis mais eficientes métodos em zonas de guerra. A mulher brasileira mais premiada — Yvonne me conta — luta constantemente para manter o Uerê funcionando, e o orçamento da escola está coberto apenas até o final de agosto. Isso é ainda mais preocupante porque o Uerê é um projeto — como a maioria dos bons projetos de educação — que pode economizar muito dinheiro para o contribuinte em custos com saúde, educação e segurança. Mais do que isso, escolas como Uerê — verdadeiros refúgios de tranquilidade e aprendizado no meio de uma das áreas mais violentas do Rio — às vezes são a única chance que essas crianças terão de uma infância enriquecedora e plenamente formativa.

Eu perguntei a crianças no Uerê, entre as idades de 12 e 15 anos, o que era bom e ruim em morar na Maré. Ficou difícil dizer sob qual classificação (boa ou ruim) algumas das coisas estavam listadas. Elas pareciam concordar que uma coisa ruim era o medo do “tráfico” (o tráfico de drogas), e como era difícil para as crianças irem de uma área até a outra, passando por territórios de diferentes gangues criminosas. A coisa boa, eles também pareciam concordar, era a “ausência de crime”. Parece uma dissociação intrigante para os visitantes de primeira viagem, mas não quando se lembra que muitos traficantes argumentam que não são ladrões e não estão roubando de ninguém, mas apenas cometendo um crime sem vítimas para preencher uma demanda. “Mas alguém entrou na mercearia no outro dia e roubou a mercadoria”, diz uma criança, mostrando que a ausência de crimes com vítimas não é absoluta. Daí outra criança esclarece, dando o desfecho da história: “Mas o ladrão foi pego e mataram uma semana depois”.

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