Whitney Webb

Summarize Fact Check

In One Nation under Blackmail, volumes 1 and 2, she describes a collaboration between American and Israeli intelligence services on the one hand and the organized crime network known as the National Crime Syndicate (NCS). She argues that the intelligence services and NCS developed a system or tactic of sexual blackmail. A system or tactic that she, in turn, believes provides a background and context to the sex scandals surrounding Jeffrey Epstein. In addition to Jeffrey Epstein, she also touches on Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Les Wexner, Robert Maxwell and Alan Dershowitz, among others. She describes how these and other people are connected to Epstein, the CIA and the Mossad.^[27]

Her book also alleges that organized crime began dealing with government agencies, including the CIA, the Mossad and other military organizations, going back at least to World war II and continuing into the Cold War, the creation of Israel and more to this day. This includes deals with organized crime to release and deport convicted felons including Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky on the condition they help win World War II with help from Thomas E. Dewey who previously convicted some of these felons; however they allegedly continued to partly control organized crime from abroad. She also alleges that organized crime had ties to relatives or people with close ties to numerous other politicians going back to the Second World War or more recently including Franklin D. Roosevelt and current Governor of Illinois JB Pritzker.

She also claims numerous other officials were both subject to blackmail and victims of blackmail including Roy Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover, Clyde Tolson and Joseph McCarthy; and that despite their campaigns against homosexuals most if not all of these people might have had homosexual affairs, but one source from the CIA allegedly dismissed claims against Joseph McCarthy, instead claiming that he might have been compromised based on alleged attempts to molest underage girls. She also cites a source, Susan Kaufman who was married to Lewis Rosenstiel and she claimed that she saw Hoover wearing a dress, and that she had pictures of him in a dress and pictures of Hoover in the company of her husband’s organized crime associates; however none of these alleged pictures were made public and most researchers consider this unsubstantiated rumors. She claims that there were concerns about allegations about homosexuality might be used by Soviets to blackmail people, but that more often it was actually used by anti-Communists to blackmail people.

Reviewing both of Webb's volumes in the Fall 2023 issue of The Veteran, biannual publication of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, John Ketwig states that the author "has done an awe-inspiring job of researching the enormity of American history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the dirty underbelly of the American political and business activity across the planet, and the many personalities, foreign and domestic, who have played a part in these histories." Despite this, Ketwig does offer the critique that "sadly, sometimes, the editing does not equal the author's inspiration or knowledge."^[28]

In a July 30, 2019 article published in MintPress News titled "How a Small Group of Pro-Israel Activists Blacklisted MintPress on Wikipedia," Whitney Webb asserted that allies of Israel trained partisan defenders to create coverage favorable to Israel, and, when possible, ban Israel's critics, including MintPress News, from being considered and employed as a reliable source on Wikipedia. In the article, Webb contends that a majority of the editors that voted to ban MintPress News allegedly had a demonstrable pro-Israel bias.^[29] In an effort to corroborate her claims that Israel and/or its allies have been actively training editors, Webb's article mentions information from Haaretz,^[30] The Jerusalem Post,^[31] and The Electronic Intifada.^{[32][note 1]}

• The Serena Shim Award, an award for journalists who do not belong to the mainstream and which, in addition to Whitney Webb, has gone to Eva Bartlett, John Pilger and Max Blumenthal, among others.^[37]