Pro-Israel news outlets ran ‘deepfake’ op-eds in ‘new disinformation frontier’
MEMO | July 20, 2020
Pro-Israel news agencies have run “deepfake” op-eds, in what is said to be “a new disinformation frontier”. Details of the “hyper-realistic forgery” were uncovered by a Reuters report this week, which uncovered the mystery around the identity of Oliver Taylor.
Taylor has been writing for a number of well-known publications, including Israel National News, the Jerusalem Post, and the Times of Israel. However, his article in the US Jewish newspaper the Algemeiner, which accused a London based academic Mazen Masri and his wife, Palestinian rights campaigner Ryvka Barnard, of being “known terrorist sympathizers”, exposed his true identity.
Mystified by Taylor’s accusation, Masri and Barnard alerted Reuters to their suspicion over the anti-Palestinian writer. The senior lecturer in law said when he pulled up Taylor’s profile photo, he couldn’t put his finger on it, but he explained that something about the young man’s face “seemed off”.
It seems as though Masri had drawn the ire of Taylor over his work in late 2018 when the lecturer helped launch a lawsuit against the Israeli surveillance company NSO on behalf of alleged Mexican victims of the company’s phone hacking technology. The spyware company has been accused of being “deeply involved” in carrying out mobile phone hacks of 1,400 of its users.
Taylor’s identity was finally uncovered. Rather than being a real person, Taylor appears to be a “deepfake”, or a hyper-realistic forgery, created in part to criticise Mazen. Reuters interviewed six experts who conclude that it had the characteristics of forgery that would not be detectable to the naked eye.
In their report raising concerns over “the marriage of deepfakes and disinformation”, the Reuters report warned deepfakes like Taylor are “dangerous” because they undermined public discourse.
Taylor is just one of several deepfakes. Earlier this month, the Daily Beast, reported that 46 conservative news outlets, including some reporting on the Jewish community, were duped into publishing Middle East “hot takes” by 19 non-existent authors as part of a massive propaganda campaign that appears to have started in July 2019.
Only a few of the news outlets covering Israel are said to have removed articles that later turned out to be deepfakes.
Spanish Politics Jolted by Claims of Government Spying
By Cain Burdeau – Courthouse News – July 14, 2020
Spain was rocked Tuesday by allegations that the government may have hacked a smartphone used by the pro-independence president of the Catalan parliament and spied on him and others during a tense period in the run-up to a politically explosive trial against Catalan leaders.
Allegations that the Spanish state may have used an Israeli company’s hacking spyware to target Roger Torrent, the speaker and president of Catalonia’s regional parliament, were revealed in a joint investigation by the newspapers El País and The Guardian.
The domestic espionage claims open a new chapter in an emotional and epochal fight in Spain over the future of Catalonia and its capital Barcelona. About half of Catalonia’s population wants to secede from Spain. An unauthorized independence referendum in 2017 led to massive protests, police violence, the arrests of Catalan politicians and the criminal conviction of pro-independence leaders last October.
The newspaper reports about the hacking of Torrent’s phone sprang from a wide-ranging probe by digital experts at a Canadian university into allegations that authoritarian governments around the world have abused technology developed by Israeli hacker-for-hire firm NSO Group and taken control of cellphones to spy on dissidents, journalists, lawyers, activists, human rights advocates and opposition politicians. NSO is fighting numerous lawsuits in the United States and elsewhere against it over its spying program called Pegasus.
NSO claims no responsibility for how its Pegasus spyware is used by governments and says it only sells the spyware to governments to help them fight crime and terrorism. The Pegasus program can take control of a phone, its cameras and microphones, and mine the user’s personal data.
Spanish authorities denied any knowledge of the alleged spying on Torrent.
Andrew Dowling, an expert on Spanish politics and history at Cardiff University, said the allegations against Spanish authorities appear solid.
“In one sense it is not that surprising at all,” he said in an email to Courthouse News. It appears, he said, that “sectors of the Spanish security services act autonomously and are not fully subject to democratic control.”
Torrent called on the Spanish state to investigate the claims. He said he was unsure who was behind the hacking but he suspects state actors carried out the surveillance without judicial authority.
“The espionage I have been subjected to violates my right to privacy, the right to secrecy of communications and the right to be able to develop a political project without illegitimate interference,” Torrent said on Tuesday in a statement to media at the Catalan parliament. “It is inappropriate in a democracy that state apparatuses illegally spy on political opponents.”
He charged that the evidence confirms the Spanish state is seeking to use illegal means to squash Catalonia’s drive for independence.
“This is the first time, therefore, that what many of us already knew and have been denouncing for a long time has been conclusively proven: espionage against political opponents is practiced in Spain,” he said.
He said he was told about the alleged hacking by newspaper reporters and that he feared his smartphone’s camera and microphone were remotely turned on to spy on him. He said the Pegasus program allowed hackers to listen to all his conversations on the phone and those that took place while the phone was close at hand. He said conversations he had with politicians, trade union members, economic leaders and international representatives had been put at risk.
“This type of software is intended for use in investigating complex and serious crimes, such as terrorism or drug trafficking,” Torrent said. He said watchdogs, including United Nations Rapporteur on freedom of expression David Kaye and Amnesty International, have warned that governments in Morocco, Mexico and Saudi Arabia have abused the Pegasus software to spy on opponents.
“Now,” he said, “we know that this practice has also occurred in Spain.”
He said Catalan authorities will “take all political and legal action” to “get to the bottom of the matter.”
The hacking of Torrent’s phone was confirmed by Citizen Lab, a center that researches digital threats, the newspapers reported. Citizen Lab is working with the social media platform WhatsApp to find improper hacking that took place around the world in April and May 2019 by exploiting a previous weakness in WhatsApp. The lab is based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
Besides Torrent, a former Catalan parliamentarian, Anna Gabriel, and pro-Catalan activist Jordi Domingo also were hacked, according to the newspapers. Gabriel fled Spain after the Spanish state cracked down on the Catalan independence drive in 2017 and she remains in exile in Switzerland. Other Catalan politicians, most notably former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont, also fled Spain to avoid arrest. Puigdemont is a member of the European Parliament and condemned the alleged domestic espionage on Tuesday.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, said on Twitter that there is a “troubling sign of a pattern of political hacking in Spain.”
The newspaper reports said WhatsApp believes the hacking took place between April and May 2019 and involved 1,400 of its users around the world. Until now, European governments had not been linked to the hacking attack.
WhatsApp is suing the NSO Group in the U.S. and charges that the Pegasus program was used to hack more than 100 journalists, human rights activists, diplomats and government officials in various countries around the world. The Pegasus program has been linked to surveillance of associates of slain Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Citizen Lab says Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and India have been linked to abusive use of the spyware to target civil society.
Citizen Lab says the software is among the world’s most sophisticated commercial spyware and can be deceptively placed on phones without a user’s knowledge or permission. Once the software infects a phone, hackers can obtain a person’s private data, including passwords, contact lists, calendar events, text messages, and live voice calls, Citizen Lab says. Hackers can also turn on the phone’s camera and microphone to monitor activity in the phone’s vicinity and track someone’s movements through GPS, the group says.
On Monday, NSO won a case in an Israeli court brought by Amnesty International seeking to stop the company from selling its software around the world.
Spanish authorities said they were not behind the hacking of Torrent’s phone.
The newspapers said the National Intelligence Center, Spain’s domestic and foreign intelligence service, issued a statement saying it acts “in full accordance with the legal system” and that its work is overseen by Spain’s Supreme Court.
Socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez also issued a statement saying his “government has no evidence” that Torrent was hacked, according to the newspapers. The hacking allegations have the potential to sour relations between Sanchez and Catalan politicians upon whose cooperation he depends in the Spanish parliament.
The hacking allegedly took place while Sanchez was prime minister and may erode trust in the Socialist leader’s promises to open dialogue with the Catalan separatists to find a political solution to demands for Catalan independence.
Torrent called on Sanchez to live up to his pledges, he is leading a progressive government in coalition with the far-left Podemos party.
“A government that claims to be the most progressive in history cannot allow such practices to go unpunished,” Torrent said. “We cannot make it normal for there to be prospective wiretaps, to criminalize a peaceful and democratic movement.”
Dowling, the Cardiff University expert, doubted the Spanish state or European Union institutions will investigate the allegations.
“Spain has little tradition of independent investigation into political scandals, however deep,” he said. “The fact that it has had widespread European coverage will be embarrassing but I don’t perceive the EU intervening in what it will consider to be the internal affairs of the Spanish state.”
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
On Australia’s Potential Participation in the Malabar Exercise
By Vladimir Terehov – New Eastern Outlook – 20.07.2020
On July 10, a number of news agencies reported that India’s leadership is considering inviting Australia to participate in the international naval exercise Malabar, scheduled later this year. The report is noteworthy for a number of reasons, mainly from the perspective of assessing the state of affairs in the Indo-Pacific region. The changes that have taken place in this region are directly linked to the history of the Malabar exercises.
This was the name given to the first joint Indian-US Navy exercise to be conducted in decades, which took place in the Gulf of Bengal in 1992. This was a notable sign of the burgeoning transformation of the entire geopolitical map after the end Cold War. India, for one, was in a state of strategic solitude (because of the disappearance of its former ally, the USSR) in the face of the same foreign policy challenges from China and Pakistan.
Naturally, India’s leadership began to seek a new external “balancing force,” and Washington was willing to fill this role. The very fact that the Malabar 1992 exercise had taken place marked the start of a US-India rapprochement—something that had seemed unbelievable just a few years before. This process has been neither smooth nor easy and continues to this day.
The first sticking point on this path was India testing its own nuclear weapons in 1998. The termination of the Malabar exercise was just one amongst other “sanctions” against Delhi.
However, compared to the Cold War, Washington stayed displeased with India for quite a long time. The prospect of a new geopolitical opponent in the face of China, which was already obvious then, forced Washington to turn a blind eye to Delhi’s recent “nuclear debacles” and to resume developing relations with India. Since then, India itself sees the US as the potential balancing force for the rapidly developing China.
The starting point of the process was President Bill Clinton’s visit to India in March 2000. A year later, Washington made it clear that it was willing to recognize India as a de facto nuclear power and generally cooperate in the field of peaceful nuclear energy. This led to the US-India nuclear deal, signed in 2006 by President George W. Bush. In 2002, the annual Malabar exercise was resumed.
At the same time the idea of forming an “Asian NATO” (evidently based on anti-Chinese sentiments) was put on the table in Washington’s political circles. The core of the new NATO was to consist of the US, India, Japan and Australia. In 2007, at the ASEAN Regional Forum, US Defense Secretary R. Gates formulated a concept to create a so-called Quad comprising the above-mentioned countries.
The evidence of the potential participants of the proposed project taking this seriously was the participation of Japan and Australia (joined by Singapore) in the Malabar exercise held that year.
This was, however, the first and, for many years to come, the last of these exercises to be conducted in a quadrilateral format. However, the very idea of the Quad seemed to have been forgotten. Among other reasons, we note the internal unrest that struck Japan at that time, as well as a sharp change in the domestic political situation in Australia.
As for Japan, with the early (and rather scandalous) end of Shinzo Abe’s first term as prime minister in 2007, the country entered a period of annual changes of government. At such times, it is difficult to conduct any significant foreign policy actions. Japan’s partners (including the US) also had doubts about doing serious business with a country whose leaders were replacing each other so quickly.
The domestic political situation in Japan only stabilized after Abe’s triumphant return to the Prime Minister’s seat at the end of 2012. This dramatically boosted the country’s foreign policy activity. In the summer of 2014, the Japanese Navy took part in another Malabar exercise after a seven-year hiatus. For the first time, it was held not in the Bay of Bengal, but on the eastern coast of Japan.
Since then, the exercise has adopted a trilateral format, and Japanese ships head to the Indian Ocean to participate in it. However, this wasn’t the only occasion for the Japanese Navy to frequent the Indian Ocean.
Australia paused its participation in the Malabar exercise due to a bloc of left-centrist parties coming to power in 2007. Their foreign policy (along with certain ideological considerations) considered economic wellbeing its main priority. China had already begun to occupy the position of Australia’s leading trade and economic partner, and it seemed absolutely unnecessary for the latter to spoil relations with it because of some “solidarity with the democratic countries of the region.”
Its foreign policy preferences underwent dramatic changes again in 2013 with the return of the bloc of center-right parties, who then won again twice (in 2016 and 2019) in the parliamentary elections. For the center-right government, the aforementioned factor of solidarity, which Canberra still tires to demonstrate on various occasions, was quite significant. One of the examples of this solidarity, recently discussed in the New Eastern Outlook, was the question of the “culprit” of the SARS COV-2 pandemic, as well as Australia joining a Western propaganda campaign connected to events in Hong Kong.
From the moment it came to power, the center-right government renewed its interest in the Malabar exercise and repeatedly asked the Indian leadership to allow Australia’s participation. The latest such request took place in late April 2018. For quite understandable reasons, Delhi refused every time.
A positive answer would obviously indicate the Indian leadership’s departure from the strategy of keeping the country in a neutral position (which over time grows more and more relative) in the aggravating confrontation between the two leading world powers.
Despite all the difficulties in China-India relations, the leaders of both countries, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, have made efforts to keep their development in a positive and constructive direction in recent years. Two informal meetings between them were of particular importance in this regard. The first took place in Wuhan at the end of April 2018, and the second in the Indian resort town of Mamallapuram a year and a half later.
Something negative had to happen recently between China and India in order for the latter to start considering the possibility of Australia joining the Malabar exercise in Delhi, which is tied to the prospect of forming an anti-Chinese Quad. And there is no doubt about what this “something” was. It is connected with another escalation of the situation on one of the China-India (quasi) borders in the highlands of Ladakh. This happened on the night of June 16 and resulted in the largest collision between the border patrol units of both countries over the past 40 years.
There was another noteworthy event taking place between early May and June 16, namely the Australian-Indian virtual summit, attended by Prime Ministers Scott Morrison and Narendra Modi. The parties focused on cooperation defense and security in general.
Perhaps the June 16 incident in Ladakh was intended to serve as a warning to India in response to the outcome of this summit. This summit, in turn, could also be seen as a response to the aggravation of the situation in Ladakh that began back in May. Thus, a possible invitation extended to Australia to join the upcoming Malabar exercise could well be an answer to the “response” of June 16.
This raises the question of how far the spiral of mutual “responses” can reach. The fact that this question has been raised at all leads to some upsetting conclusions.
Hopefully, however, the “spirit of Wuhan” has not yet been completely eroded from the relationship between the two Asian powers, and even with the (possible) quadrilateral Malabar exercise, the idea of building an “Asian NATO” with India’s participation won’t develop further.
Kremlin pours cold water on anonymous Bloomberg claims about ‘elite’ Covid-19 vaccine
RT | July 20, 2020
President Vladimir Putin has not received the domestic coronavirus vaccine, according to spokesman Dmitry Peskov. The denial comes on the day anonymous claims emerged that the Russian elite has had access to it since April.
Speaking to reporters, Peskov explained that the president had not yet been administered the experimental drug, because it’s “not very good for the head of state to receive an uncertified vaccine.” He was diagnosed with Covid-19 himself in May, and also denied being vaccinated.
On Monday morning, Bloomberg claimed that “scores of members of Russia’s business and political elite have been given early access to an experimental vaccine against Covid-19,” claiming they included business executives, tycoons, and government officials. According to the outlet, the vaccine has been available for Russia’s wealthy elite since April, and has already been administered to “several hundred people.”
Bloomberg did not name any of its sources or provide any evidence, but stated that the vaccine had been received by the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Kirill Dmitriev, as well as senior managers at aluminum company Rusal and chemical producer PhosAgro. In mid-June, Dmitriev admitted that he had volunteered to take the drug.
According to the news agency, those who received the vaccine “are monitored, and their results logged by the institute.” The establishment in question is Moscow’s Gamalei Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology.
On June 16, the institute received approval from the Ministry of Health to begin testing an experimental coronavirus vaccine on humans. In conjunction with the Ministry of Defense, it completed the drug’s first trial stage, and on July 15, announced that no volunteers had experienced “serious side effects, health complaints, complications or adverse reactions.”
On Monday morning, a second group of trialists was discharged from the hospital, with the test results “unambiguously” showing “the development of an immune response in all volunteers.” This is the same vaccine that Bloomberg claims was administered to Russia’s elite.
Following Bloomberg’s allegations, the director of the Gamalei Institute, Alexander Ginzburg, denied any knowledge of “big or small” businessmen receiving the immunization, with Vadim Tarasov, director of the Institute of Translational Medicine and Biotechnology at Sechenov University, calling the reports “speculation.” Aleksey Kuznetsov, an assistant to Russia’s Minister of Health, also denied that the vaccine is in “civilian circulation.”
Trump’s Wrong: Biden Isn’t Brainwashed, He’s The Perfect Puppet!
By Andrew Korybko | One World | July 17, 2020
Brainwashed Or Brainless?
Trump claimed last week that Biden is “brainwashed” by the most radical members of his party, but he’s wrong since the opposition front-runner has been a puppet of them and the “deep state” from the very beginning. The Democrats’ candidate is visibly senile and incapable of thinking for himself, which is actually why he was chosen to represent them this November. Having no personal agency of his own, he’s destined to comply with the “deep state’s” foreign policy demands and the radical Democrats’ domestic ones in the event that he enters into office. This was the plan all along since it enables the party to bridge its intra-organizational ideological divide by presenting him as an Obama-like blank canvass upon which each faction can paint their political desires. If Trump wants to win re-election, then he must more confidently call Biden out as the “Manchurian Candidate” that he truly is, not just beat around the bush by playing the “brainwashed” card.
The Perfect Puppet
Members of the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) crave a Biden Presidency because it’ll allow them to reverse most, if not all, of Trump’s foreign policy decisions. The most relevant involve the so-called “trade war“, the Iran deal, and the Paris Agreement, the reversal of all three of which could greatly “reset” American foreign policy to its pre-Trump status quo of subordinating the US to globalist interests at the expense of national ones. Domestically, the leftist-racists of “Antifa” and the other radical political networks waging the ongoing Hybrid War of Terror on America would impose a “liberal” totalitarian dystopia on the rest of the country that would overthrow the American Revolution exactly as Trump warned during his recent speech at Mount Rushmore. The present statue-toppling spree is intended to rewrite history according to their ideological vision whereas disarming Americans and defunding the police will impose Democrat-controlled mob rule on its many cities directed against all of their ideological opponents.
A Personal Vendetta
This prediction is predicated on the fact that many “deep state” members have already endorsed Biden and the Democrats’ disparate factions are in the process of uniting under the so-called “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force“. Their “Manchurian Candidate” can barely mumble a sentence without gaffing, so bad is his late-stage senility, yet he’d be their puppet for publicly signing into force whatever decisions they foist upon him through his handlers and thus “legitimizing” them. Since he no longer has any real agency of his own, one could describe him as a “palace hostage”, though Trump was indeed correct in saying that he probably wouldn’t fight their agenda even if he disagreed with it, which the President doesn’t think that he does. Before his mental faculties began to fail him, Biden was obsessed with protecting his family’s reputation amid claims that he and his son were engaged in corrupt dealings in Ukraine, which is no longer a question after voice recordings to this effect emerged in May. He thus knew what he was getting into by allowing himself to be used by the “deep state”, which he willingly went along with in order to get back at Trump as part of his personal vendetta against him.
Bring Back The Old Trump!
The President must therefore return to his characteristic style of calling things out as he sees them no matter how crudely he tends to do so otherwise he risks demoralizing his base and losing the support of the so-called “Silent Majority”. On-the-fence voters and “moderate Democrats” alike might actually be attracted to Biden’s senility since it’s easy for them to imagine that he’ll do their political bidding based on some of the comparatively less radical statements that he read over the past couple of months from what many have mockingly claimed to be his basement, which stand in stark contrast to AOC, Ilham Omar, and Bernie Sanders‘ latest statements for example. They need to be made aware that Biden isn’t just “brainwashed”, but is a puppet of shadowy “deep state” forces and Democrat-controlled street thugs, so their belief that he’ll preside over “committee rule” of the country is sorely mistaken and driven solely by their personal hatred of Trump.
The Biden Coup
Trump already seems to be building upon former New Hampshire Governor Judd Gregg’s recent claim that Biden might be overthrown in a coup through the invocation of the 25th amendment if he’s elected, but the President must go even further than that by pointing out that the very election of Biden itself would be a coup since there’s no need for anyone to replace a puppet like him with someone else who would have even a bit more personal agency. The “committee rule” that Biden would be the figurehead of wouldn’t incorporate any “moderate” policies on either the foreign or domestic fronts since there doesn’t exist any “moderate” influence upon him behind the scenes. Rather, the party’s “moderates” are being manipulated into thinking otherwise based on their personal hatred for Trump and are therefore functioning as the coup plotter’s “useful idiots”. Revolutions have a tendency to “eat their own” and extinguish all “moderate” influences that helped bring them into force, meaning that the “moderate Democrats” would lose just as much as the “Trumpists” would.
Concluding Thoughts
Claiming that Biden is the victim of a brainwashing conspiracy isn’t going to win “moderate Democrats'” votes since Biden himself is the embodiment of the aforesaid conspiracy. Trump needs to directly call out Biden’s puppet status and double down on exposing the “deep state” and leftist-racist influences that are controlling him. Saying that he’s “brainwashed” only makes those already inclined to vote for him dream that some “moderate” force might “liberate his mind”. Trump knows very well that America’s in the midst of an ever-intensifying Hybrid War considering what he said at Mount Rushmore so he needs to present every single one of his words and actions as part of his hands-on leadership in doing everything that he can to help his country emerge victorious from this unconventional conflict. There are different political tactics that he’ll seek to employ throughout the course of this struggle such as making certain political and economic promises to appeal to the greatest number of voters possible, but the one thing that he mustn’t do at all costs is “go soft” and hold back out of fear that going all in against Biden will scare away “moderate Democrats”.
Andrew Korybko is an American political analyst.
The Evil, Immoral, Vicious, and Hypocritical Embargo Against Cuba
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | July 20, 2020
The banality of evil that characterizes the U.S. national security state is demonstrated perfectly by the continuation of its deadly economic embargo against Cuba, which has been ongoing for some 60 years.
What’s the point of the embargo? After all, the Pentagon’s, CIA’s, and NSA’s official enemy Fidel Castro died years ago. Why continue to intentionally inflict harm on the Cuban people?
And make no mistake about it: Inflicting harm on the Cuban people is the purpose of the embargo. Its aim is to impoverish or starve Cubans into ousting their post-Castro regime and installing another pro-U.S. right-wing brutal dictatorship similar to the one that Castro ousted from power in the Cuban revolution.
In fact, the first embargo that the U.S. implemented against Cuba was during the reign of the crooked, corrupt, and brutal pro-U.S. right-wing dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. That was an arms embargo. U.S. officials didn’t want weaponry imported into Cuba because that might enable the Cuban people to oppose Batista in a violent revolution.
During his reign, Batista partnered with the Mafia, the premier criminal organization that was smuggling drugs into the United States. As part of their partnership agreement, Batista let the Mafia operate gambling casinos in Cuba. As part of that cozy relationship, Batista would have his henchmen kidnap under-aged girls in Cuba and turn them over to the Mafia, which would then provide them as perks to the high-rollers in its casinos. That’s one of the things that brought on the Cuban Revolution.
That’s the guy that the U.S. national-security state was hell-bent on keeping in power. Thus, it should surprise no one that the CIA, like Batista, later entered into partnership with the Mafia, knowing full well that the Mafia was engaged in massive criminal activity. The purpose of the CIA-Mafia partnership was assassination. They were working together to assassinate Castro.
It stands to reason that the Mafia would try to assassinate Castro. It has lost all its casinos to Castro’s nationalization. And it was in the business of killing people.
But the U.S. government? In the business of murder? And in partnership with the biggest criminal organization in the world?
Don’t forget something important here: Castro, Cuba, and the Cuban people have never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. No invasion. No terrorist attacks. No assassinations.
In fact, it has always been the other way around. In the more than six decades of bad relations between Cuba and the U.S., it has always been the U.S. government that has been the aggressor. An invasion, terrorist attacks, assassination attempts, and the embargo, all on the part of the U.S. government.
U.S. national-security state officials always justified such actions under the notion that Cuba was the spearhead of a worldwide communist conspiracy to take over the United States, one that was supposedly based in Moscow. It was always a ridiculous notion but that was the mindset of CIA, NSA, and Pentagon officials during the Cold War — that Cuba’s communist regime posed a grave threat to U.S. “national security.”
But the Cold War ended more than 30 years ago. Do the CIA, NSA, and Pentagon still think that the United States is in danger of falling to the Cuban communists?
Of course not. Now, it’s just sheer viciousness. Now, it’s just a matter of doing everything possible to oust the current regime in Cuba from power and restoring a Batista-like dictatorship, one that will be loyal and deferential to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.
The viciousness is demonstrated by the fact that the embargo doesn’t just criminalize Americans who do business with Cuba. It also targets foreign companies who do so. If they are caught doing so, they are targeted for prosecution or economic banishment here in the United States. In the minds of U.S. officials, it’s more imperative than ever to squeeze as many Cubans as possible into death and suffering.
Needless to say, the embargo has made things significantly worse for the Cuban people during the COVID-19 crisis. That’s fine with U.S. officials. The more Cubans who die, the greater the chance of an internal regime-change operation.
Sure, there is no doubt that Cuba’s socialist economic system is a major factor in the economic suffering of the Cuban people. But there is also no doubt that the U.S. embargo has served as the other side of a vise that has squeezed the economic lifeblood out of the Cuban people.
A dark irony, of course, is that the embargo has enabled the U.S. government to wield and exercise the same type of economic control over the American people that the Cuban socialist regime exercises over the Cuban people. It’s called adopting socialism to oppose socialism.
When will the evil, immoral, vicious, and hypocritical U.S. embargo against Cuba be lifted? When a critical mass of the American people, including those who go to church every Sunday, have a crisis of conscience and demand that it be lifted.
Saudi Arabia: Ambitious Plans and Facts on the Ground
By Viktor Mikhin – New Eastern Outlook – 20.07.2020
Saudi Arabia has announced plans to implement an ambitious $800 billion initiative aimed at increasing the size of Riyadh in the next decade, and at transforming the capital into an economic, social and cultural hub in the Persian Gulf region.
The ambitious strategy was presented by Fahd Al-Rasheed, the President of the Royal Commission for Riyadh City, ahead of this year’s key high-level meetings between leaders of G20 and of the commission responsible for the urban, economic, social, and cultural development of the capital city of Saudi Arabia. “Riyadh is already a very important economic engine for the Kingdom, and although it’s already very successful, the plan now, under Vision 2030, is to actually take that way further, to double the population to 15 million people,” Fahd Al-Rasheed told Arab News. “We’ve already launched 18 megaprojects in the city, worth over SR1 trillion, over $250 billion, to both improve livability and deliver much higher economic growth so we can create jobs and double the population in 10 years. It’s a significant plan and the whole city is working to make sure this happens,” he added. In the next few years, 7 million trees will be planted in Riyadh, despite its arid climate, and once completed, King Salman Park is expected to be bigger than Hyde Park in London.
All of these plans sound really promising and it would be easy to share in the enthusiasm of our Saudi partners in the oil industry. Unfortunately, the current reality is not as rosy and “plots of the folk tales One Thousand and One Nights” often change to reflect the stark facts on the ground. Although Fahd Al-Rasheed talked about Saudi Vision 2030, few in the Kingdom appear to concern themselves with the strategy. And it is not that the Saudi leadership does not wish to transform the Kingdom into a heavenly place, but that they simply lack money for even the nation’s basic necessities and have to save money in every sphere. Hence, it is far more sensible to forget the unrealistic plans for the time being. Of course, it is pure joy to live and not to worry about a thing, but to do so a country needs to have a robust economy and high earnings, as it did earlier.
The poorly thought through and formulated oil strategy, which Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud has been trying to implement, has had a strong negative impact on all the oil producing nations, and especially on Saudi Arabia. As a result, the Saudi leadership was forced to come back down to Earth and start saving money in every possible sphere. So for now, Saudi Vision 2030 appears all but forgotten.
To cope with the hardship, Saudi Arabia tripled its value-added tax (VAT) rate starting on July 1, and suspended a cost of living allowance from June as part of cost-cutting programs to counter the severe economic impact of the Coronavirus pandemic and the sudden fall in oil prices. Approximately 1.5 million state employees are affected by the latter measure. The cost of living allowance was a monthly payment of 1,000 riyals ($267) introduced by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in 2018 “to help offset increased financial burdens, including VAT and a rise in the price of petrol”. The Kingdom’s “central bank foreign exchange reserves fell in March at their fastest rate in at least 20 years”, reaching their lowest levels since 2011, while Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit hit $9 billion in the first quarter of 2020 as oil revenues collapsed. The news outlet Middle East Eye reported that in January 2015, when Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud became king, the country’s “foreign reserves totaled $732 billion”. According to the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, these reserves had been diminished to $499 billion by December 2019, and they have since continued to decrease. The Kingdom has sustained considerable financial losses and damage to its reputation, because it was forced to temporarily suspend entry for foreigners for pilgrimage to the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Finance Mohammed Al-Jadaan ruefully said that “the global economic crisis associated with the Coronavirus pandemic” had led to three major shocks to the Saudi economy. The first was the unprecedented fall in oil prices “leading to a sharp decline in” the kingdom’s revenues. The second stemmed from “the preventive measures taken to curb the spread of Covid-19, leading to the suspension of many economic activities”, which in turn took a toll on non-oil revenues. The third shock was caused “by the rising expenditure on the health sector to deal with the rising number of Covid-19 patients”. “The challenges combined have led to a decline in government revenues and pressure on public finance to levels that are hard to counter without harming the kingdom’s macroeconomics and public finances in the medium and long term,” Mohammed Al-Jadaan said. “Therefore, a further reduction in expenditures is a must, along with measures to stabilize non-oil revenues,” added the Minister of Finance.
Incidentally, Mohammed Al-Jadaan appears to have forgotten to mention the vast sums of money the power-hungry Crown Prince has wasted. Seemingly on autopilot, he spent enormous amounts to oust the democratically elected President of Syria Bashar al-Assad. Even nowadays, Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud allegedly continues to provide financial support to militants occupying Syria’s Idlib Governorate, thus contributing to the delay in finding a resolution to the complex Syrian conflict. It was at the Crown Prince’s initiative that Saudi Arabia spearheaded a coalition that intervened in the civil war in the brotherly nation of Yemen, resulting in death and destruction in this impoverished nation. Such a military undertaking requires a considerable amount of money, something that the Kingdom’s budget is in dire need of. Even now, Riyadh continues to stoke tensions with Iran, seemingly failing to comprehend the simple fact that the West, while appearing to support Saudi Arabia, is actually following its favorite divide and conquer strategy and thus strengthening its position in this important region of the world. In addition, outdated US weapons are being sold for too high a price to the Kingdom. In fact, Saudi Arabia has accumulated more military equipment and arms than its army needs. And do Saudi “falcons” really expect to emerge victorious from a confrontation with Iran, while they continue to suffer defeats at the hands of poor Yemeni inhabitants, who are still mainly fighting with Soviet armaments? Plus another question arises: “Why did Saudi Arabia spoil its relationship with Qatar and impose tough sanctions (as Americans are prone to do) against this small nation?” It appears that the answer is “Just for the fun of it.”
Consequences of Crown Prince’s poorly thought through policies are being felt even today. In fact, there is still a risk of new tensions arising in the global oil market and further financial losses for everyone and especially the Kingdom. Media outlets and experts have been reporting about yet another rivalry on world markets. Saudi Arabia has threatened to sell its oil at a discount to undercut Nigeria and Angola for their non-compliance with production cuts, agreed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies. The tough stance taken by the Kingdom, with its world’s largest crude oil production capacity, may lead to yet another oil price war, which is bound to have serious consequences. “We know who your customers are,” Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Energy reportedly told the representatives of Nigeria and Angola, which count China and India as their biggest clients. However, India is still in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, hence its economy has not recovered as yet. Riyadh’s only hope is China, which receives unlimited supplies of cheap oil and gas from Russia via pipelines. It is quite clear that Moscow has no plans to reduce supplies of these fossil fuels in the current tough climate. The Saudi leadership, therefore, has no other choice but to stop and think long and hard before taking any rash decisions. The world has changed and Saudi Arabia is no longer the only leader on the global oil market.
Still, Riyadh’s officials are free to continue talking about their ambitious plans, but realizing them requires vast sums of money, which the Kingdom simply does not have in its budget at present. And without financial backing, all of these hopes and dreams are nothing more than a mirage in the Arabian Desert, which disappears as soon as one tries to take a closer look at it.
Victor Mikhin is a member-correspondent of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.
Precedents for Pizzagate
Marc Dutroux, Belgian pedophile, sadist, and serial killer with friends in high places
By Aedon Cassiel | Counter – Currents | December 23, 2016
To reiterate a point that should be clear to the more astute reader, my goal in this series (part 1, part 2) has not been to defend “Pizzagate” as such. My goal has been to defend the people who want to investigate it against specific accusations levied against them by people who think Pizzagate has revealed no intriguing information at all—for a specific reason, which I will be honing in and focusing on much more directly in this closing entry.
Whereas the mainstream critics of Pizzagate would have you believe that the dividing line is between paranoid conspiracy theorist followers of “fake news” and level-headed people who follow trustworthy news sources and rely on cold, hard reason to determine the truth, my goal has been to show that—whatever is or is not happening with Pizzagate itself—this framing of the issue is arrogant, insulting, and the product of extremely narrow tunnel vision.
When I have referred to what I see as the more compelling pieces of evidence uncovered by the crowd-sourced investigation into Pizzagate, my point has not been to use these to say “Pizzagate is true and every single person looking into it is a hero,” but to say “the people investigating it are not idiots, and the facts they’ve been uncovering are not all worthless. Reasonable people could very well look at this and think that it gives us reason to be concerned that there may be something behind it. And if the media is telling you only about the most bizarre, reaching accusations without telling you any of the more interesting points that have been uncovered (which it is), it is not doing its proper job.”
To those who think I am demonstrating an inclination towards conspiracy theories in this series, allow me to quote directly from the two previous essays:
The evidence [in Pizzagate] is of wildly varying levels of quality . . . [and much of it is] the pareidolia of “Jesus is appearing to me in my toast” . . . many of these claims arewild speculation over coincidences . . . Could [this evidence] have an innocent explanation? Sure, maybe. . . . some of the supposed “codewords” people have claimed to have identified in Pizzagate appear to be made up . . . Could all of this turn out to be nothing? Of course it could. . . . Have we identified [evidence of a high–level sex ring] here? Only time will tell. . . . Am I trying to make the argument that if one conspiracy theory is true, all the others must be, too? No . . .
Clearly, anyone who thinks my purpose in any of these essays has simply been to try to validate the truth of every conspiratorial speculation anyone has made around Pizzagate is not paying any attention to my actual words at all. They’ve completely missed the real point, and the problem is not that I haven’t expressed my argument clearly, because words can’t get much clearer than these.
However, I do want to dedicate this final entry to refining and adding bulk to a key step in the core of that argument: namely, the step that emphasizes that no matter how compelling any of the evidence that turns up in Pizzagate in particular may or may not be, we know that high-level sex abuse is in fact a thing that happens in the upper echelons of power, and we know that it gets covered up when it occurs, and we know that the media is often complicit in the cover-up as well. This is why I introduced my first entry to the series with a discussion of the Rotherham child abuse scandal, and the second entry to the series with a brief discussion of MK Ultra, a program that was publicly confirmed to have gone on for some twenty years and involved the highest halls of power subjecting innocent civilians and mentally disabled children to the worst kinds of psychological abuse and manipulation without consent before any public evidence ever even emerged. Part of the point in these examples is to demonstrate that the basic mistrust of our elites that people investigating Pizzagate are demonstrating is entirely justified by facts that are known.
Now, my other point in including these cases in the conversation is that there is a drastic difference between someone who believes he has reason to think something has happened that is unprecedented—say, that there are aliens in Area 51—and someone who believes he has reason to think something has happened that we know for a fact has happened, and that we know for a fact continues to happen, where—if they had found evidence of it happening, it would indeed look very much like what they’ve found.
Imagine you are walking down the street in a quiet small town, and a stranger tells you that the way someone has his handkerchief stuffed into his pocket is a sign that he’s just killed someone. But you investigate that individual, and it turns out that he’s entirely clean and that the handkerchief has a perfectly innocent explanation. You might have valid grounds to infer that the accuser could just be a paranoid schizophrenic who sees demonic symbolism everywhere, even when none exists.
But if a detective is working in a gang-infested area, and he has identified people using handkerchiefs to signify that they’ve just killed members of rival gangs, and he tells you that he thinks the way a certain individual has a handkerchief stuffed in his pocket might be evidence he’s just killed someone, then even if you investigate that individual and he turns out to be innocent, it would not be legitimate to suspect the detective of insanity just because he got it wrong. In fact, the reasoning he followed would be entirely legitimate, even though he turned out to be wrong in this particular case.
Why? Because he would know that there are in fact gangs operating in this area, and he would know that they have in fact used handkerchiefs to signal their recent killings, and he would know that if indeed this were someone committing an act that he knows has occurred before and that he knows in fact continues to occur, then this is exactly what the evidence for it would look like.
The point of this analogy is not to say that everyone looking at Pizzagate is just like a detective—but it is to say that the upper levels of our government are a gang-infested area. And that is why I have entered the arena, not to say “Pizzagate is obviously real!!!” but to say “The people investigating Pizzagate do not deserve to be treated like kooks. They do not deserve to be called idiots or paranoid freaks. Because in fact even if they are wrong, the instincts they are demonstrating are clearly instincts our political situation calls for in general whether something is happening in this particular instance or not.”
If any compelling evidence were to come out of Pizzagate—and, as I have said in this series, I do think at least some of it is—who would catch on and express concern about it first? The record very clearly shows that it would not be the mainstream media. As the first article made a clear effort to point out, it was the far-Right blogosphere that caught wind of the Rotherham scandal well before the mainstream media did; and during his time at the BBC, Mark Thompson was credibly accused of lying to cover up evidence of the Jimmy Savile sex scandal. Jimmy Savile managed to abuse hundreds of young children, and associates and friends were accused of acting in complicity with the rapes and even sentenced for raping the very same victims. And that same Mark Thompson who helped cover up the Savile scandal now runs the New York Times which was so quick to dismiss Pizzagate in its entirety as a hoax as well.
Liberal feminists claim to be concerned about “rape culture” (on which, see my essay on “Diversity & The Rape of Justice”), yet we have actual hard solid evidence here of a “child rape culture” within the upper echelons of power—which targets young boys at least as often as young girls—and their voices can barely be heard, even as they heap scorn upon the “conspiracy theorists” in cases like this one. Yet, the evidence they want us to believe holds true for rape across society in general as a whole (where, generally, it doesn’t) actually does hold for child rape in positions of power.
In what follows, I’m simply going to give overviews of some known, documented cases of this in haphazard order. I’m going to set my search bar in the right direction, spend an hour or two compiling sources that stand out to me, and list everything I find simply from looking around for a few minutes. So this won’t even be anywhere near the most compelling research on the topic that I could do. The brevity of these research methods should only serve to highlight even more clearly how pervasive this problem really is, if I can find this much with so little effort. It also underscores the irresponsibility and dishonesty of the mainstream media, who either have not done even cursory investigation or are simply shills trying to cover up the truth.
In 2011,
The OIG conducted an investigation concerning allegations that an AUSA [Assistant United States Attorney under Eric Holder] was using his government computer to view inappropriate material on his government computer. The investigation determined that the AUSA routinely viewed adult content during official duty hours, and that there was at least one image of child pornography recovered on the AUSA’s government computer. The AUSA acknowledged that he had spent a significant amount of time each day viewing pornography. The U.S. Attorney’s Office [Eric Holder] declined prosecution.
Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent a letter to Eric Holder asking why the lawyer was not punished, and why he remained on the taxpayer dime for at least two months after being caught. I was able to find a copy through the Internet Wayback machine.
In 2006, the DHS’s Department of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ran an internationally cooperative investigation into the purchase of subscriptions of child pornography online. Code-named Project Flicker, the investigation uncovered the identities of 30,000 child porn subscribers in 132 different nations. Some 250 of these identities belonged to civilian and military employees of the U.S. Defense Department, who gave their real names and purchased the porn with government .mil email addresses—some with the highest security clearances available. In response, the Pentagon’s Department of Criminal Investigative Services (DCIS) cross-referenced ICE’s list with current employment roles and began a series of prosecutions.
A DCIS report from July 2010 shows that 30 of these individuals were investigated, despite uncovering a new total of 264 Defense employees and contractors who had purchased child pornography online. 13 had Top Secret security clearance. 8 had NATO Secret security clearance. 42 had Secret security clearance. 4 had Interim Secret security clearance. A total of 76 individuals had Secret security clearance or higher.
Yet, the investigations were halted entirely after only some 50 total names were investigated at all, and just 10 were prosecuted. A full 212 of the individuals on ICE’s list were never even given the most cursory investigation at all. (Note: The number 5,200 keeps popping up in sources covering this—for instance, see here—and I’m not sure what that number is for: American subscribers? Pentagon email addresses that weren’t confirmed to have actually been used by Pentagon employees, but still may have been? I’ll leave it to anyone interested enough to pursue these individual leads to see if they can figure that out and get back to us.)
In 2011, the story resurfaced when Anderson Cooper covered it with (again) Senator Chuck Grassley on CNN. After this, the story appears to have sunk straight back down into the memory hole yet again. Neither Anderson Cooper nor CNN appear to have given a follow–up in the five years since the story of the failed investigation first aired—why not? And why wasn’t the first airing enough to lead to mass outrage and calls for action anyway? See here for another summary of the squashed investigation from 2014.
Here’s a headline from The Washington Times dated June 29, 1989: “Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush.” From the article:
A homosexual prostitution ring is under investigation by federal and District authorities and includes among its clients key officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations, military officers, congressional aides and U.S. and foreign businessmen with close social ties to Washington’s political elite, documents obtained by The Washington Times reveal. One of the ring’s high-profile clients was so well-connected, in fact, that he could arrange a middle-of-the-night tour of the White House for his friends on Sunday, July 3, of last year. Among the six persons on the extraordinary 1 a.m. tour were two male prostitutes.
Can anyone find a follow-up clarifying what happened as a result of that investigation? I can’t find one here either, though once again I’d appreciate if someone else was able to.
In the infamous Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal in Britain, we now know that Savile’s coworkers at the BBC knew that Savile was committing many of his sexual offenses right on BBC campuses. Paul Gamboccini, who worked next door to him, said “The expression which I came to associate with Savile’s sex partners was . . . the now politically incorrect ‘under-age subnormals’. He targeted the institutionalized, the hospitalized – and this was known. Why did Jimmy Savile go to hospitals? That’s where the patients were.”
Yet, the BBC’s official statement was that there was “no evidence” of misconduct, and they even dismissed claims that there was a cover-up. But now that Savile’s offenses have been confirmed, we know that indeed there was.
Significantly, victims claimed that Savile was not just an isolated abuser, but part of an organized—and Satanically-themed—ring.
And victims in the Jerry Sandusky case also claimed that Sandusky was not just an isolated abuser, but part of an organized ring, as well.
Come to think of it, it does make sense that if there were rings operating, they would have reason to designate “fallboys” to take the blame if enough evidence of abuse ever began to emerge (or perhaps they would end up choosing their fallboys in the moment, for whatever reason, to the same effect).
Many people refer to the so–called “Satanic Panic” from the late 80’s and early 90’s to claim that the probability of hysteria around false allegations is more likely, and an even greater threat to society, than actual ritualized sexual abuse. However, this appears to be rather convenient for actual pedophiles—because according to Kenneth Lanning, an FBI expert on both cult crime and child abuse, often child sex offenders “introduce occult into the abuse so the kids won’t be believed . . . That is their M.O. (mode of operation) . . . People are getting away with molesting children because we can’t prove there are satanic devil worshippers eating people. Pretty soon it becomes unprosecutable.”
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation gained prominence thanks in large part to the “Satanic Panic” (it’s members were even involved in the legal defense of individuals accused during the Satanic Panic). In 1993 Ralph Underwager, a key member of its “scientific advisory board”, was forced to resign after making the following statement in an interview with Paidika: The Journal of Pedophilia:
What I have been struck by as I have come to know more about and understand people who choose paedophilia is that they let themselves be too much defined by other people. That is usually an essentially negative definition. Paedophiles spend a lot of time and energy defending their choice. I don’t think that a paedophile needs to do that. Paedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose. They can say that what they want is to find the best way to love. I am also a theologian and as a theologian, I believe it is God’s will that there be closeness and intimacy, unity of the flesh, between people. A paedophile can say: “This closeness is possible for me within the choices that I’ve made.”
Paedophiles are too defensive. They go around saying, “You people out there are saying that what I choose is bad, that it’s no good. You’re putting me in prison, you’re doing all these terrible things to me. I have to define my love as being in some way or other illicit.” What I think is that paedophiles can make the assertion that the pursuit of intimacy and love is what they choose. With boldness, they can say, “I believe this is in fact part of God’s will.” They have the right to make these statements for themselves as personal choices. Now whether or not they can persuade other people they are right is another matter. (laughs)
Jennifer Freyd, daughter of the foundation’s founder Peter Freyd, continues to maintain that she was sexually abused by him, and has even published works on the topic of memories of child abuse herself. While the FMSF maintains that a full 65% of allegations of abuse are unsubstantiated, other research reported, for instance, in the Harvard Mental Health Letter finds that false abuse allegations by children “are rare, in the range of 2-8% of reported cases. False retractions of true complaints are far more common, especially when the victim is not sufficiently protected after disclosure and therefore succumbs to intimidation by the perpetrator or other family members who feel that they must preserve secrecy.”
And it bears remembering that not all accusations of institutionalized child sex abuse were bogus even during the very years of the “Satanic Panic” itself.
Throughout this series, I’ve mentioned the Franklin Scandal, at the center of which was Larry King—leader of the Black Republican Caucus, who sang the national anthem at the Republican convention in 1984, and worked heavily with a charity called Boys Town. I had planned to write a whole essay on this scandal, but having now read Nick Bryant’s book there is so much information that it’s hard to even fathom where to begin—and there’s a fine line between not giving enough compelling evidence and copying and pasting the entire book. So the best way to learn about this incident is to watch the Conspiracy of Silence documentary and then contact me at www.zombiemeditations.com if you need help obtaining a copy of Nick Bryant’s book.
The one most striking line of evidence in the case I will mention is this: the head of the investigative Franklin committee, Gary Carodori, was convinced that the victim’s allegations of rampant child abuse were true. You can see his interviews with the victims here. On the way to Chicago to reopen evidence, Carodori met an untimely death when his plane crashed, and his briefcase of evidence vanished without a trace. According to the Omaha World-Herald, investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the “scattered wreckage pattern . . . certainly demonstrates that [the plane] did break up in flight,” which in other words means that it didn’t fall apart on impact because of a crash—the plane crashed because it fell apart.
State Sen. Loran Schmit of Bellwood, chairman of the Franklin legislative committee, told The Associated Press in Lincoln that he had no doubt there were people who wanted to see Caradori dead.
“They got their wish,” he said. “. . . The question to be answered is whether it was a coincidence.”
Schmit, himself a pilot with 40 years’ flying experience, stopped short of saying he thought Caradori’s plane was sabotaged, but he added in an interview with AP :
“A small plane is the perfect thing to use to get at someone. . . . They tend to burn when they crash, and things get burned, destroyed, scattered. You don’t need a bomb. A fuel line could be tampered with. Any number of possibilities are there.”
. . . Scott Caradori of Ralston told the World-Herald that his brother was a careful flier of more than 15 years who would not take chances, especially with his son on board, and had never had a mishap.
He said he did not rule out sabotage, given the nature of his brother’s work with the Franklin committee. “Our family received numerous threats over that, telling him to back off,” he said . . .
John DeCamp is the man who appears along with the victims in the Conspiracy of Silence documentary. He’s the author of The Franklin Coverup, the most thorough book on the Franklin case to appear in print before Nick Bryant’s more recently published update. DeCamp is a former state Senator, listed as one of eight ‘outstanding’ Vietnam veterans (he helped Operation Baby Lift, which evacuated thousands of Vietnamese children from the war-torn area), and now in his work as a lawyer has, among other things, provided legal representation to the children in the Columbine shooting.
Though Jerry Sandusky’s criminal trial did not begin until 2012, John DeCamp began discussing how he was contacted by victims and was linking the figures involved in the Franklin case to the sex abuse happening at Penn State all the way back in 2004.
“I had done something back then [when I wrote the original book on Franklin] linking the football coach [Jerry Sandusky] with Franklin . . . [and] I got call after call after call from Pennsylvania . . .”
Nick Bryant can also be heard discussing the links between the Franklin and Penn State abuses here, here, here, here, and here (part 1, part 2).
Speaking of Sandusky, few people are aware that Sandusky was actually first charged with sexual abuse of a minor all the way back in 1998. The Centre County’s District Attorney Ray Gricar at first refused to press charges. In 2005, Gricar disappeared under bizarre circumstances. “. . . After telling his girlfriend he was going for a drive . . . His body was never found, only his abandoned car and his laptop which had been tossed in the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania without its hard drive.”
Then there’s the Dutroux Affair—a perfect example of the capacity of high–level pedophiles to destroy investigations by placing the right people in the right positions of power to protect themselves. In Belgium, a nation of just 10 million people, 350,000 people took to the streets in an event known as the White March to protest the handling of the case (in other words, that’s approximately 1 out of every 30 citizens of Belgium, including the elderly and children). Around 1995, multiple young girls began disappearing around the municipality of Bertrix. Headway in the investigation was finally made when a white van was reported that the police were able to trace back to Marc Dutroux. Marc Dutroux was a previously convicted pedophile who was released after serving just a third of his sentence despite the fact that his own mother had testified to the parole board that he would unquestionably offend again. Though unemployed and receiving welfare, Dutroux was able to live quite lavishly thanks to selling children—he owned seven homes, and used four of them as bases for kidnappings.
But the most disturbing part of this case isn’t even the offenses—it’s how deliberately inept the prosecution was. Police not only investigated Dutroux repeatedly without pressing charges, they even reported hearing voices —and accepted Dutroux’s story that the voices came from the street outside. They ignored a tip from an informant claiming Dutroux offered him thousands of dollars to participate in a kidnapping. They even sat on a video tape showing Dutroux building a makeshift dungeon in his basement, and could have saved the lives of the two girls who were then being tortured there had they acted on it.
Once the case was transferred from police to the courts, the initiative of lead prosecutor Jean-Marc Conorrette led to the rescue of two girls and the discovery of four bodies. Conorrette was inexplicably dumped from the case, and later broke down in tears in court describing the constant death threats he received while still on the case. Obviously there were other interested parties, some at least with influence in the government.
When a parliamentary panel revealed the names of 30 government officials who were complicit in hiding the misdeeds, none were punished. Nine police officers were eventually detained, but though a full 100 people in government, finance, and the media were accused of involvement, no one other than Dutroux ever made it to jail. (Edit 6:40PM EST 12/24: A friend with connections to intelligence agencies sent me a message in response to this article to tell me that this post is a solid summary of the amount of coverup involved in the Dutroux Affair, despite the overall conspiratorial leanings of the site itself. He also tells me that the case of Peter Scully is one that’s too little known that has well–documented evidence of institutional involvement and cover–up.)
In Italy, Alfredo Ormanni who led an investigation into child porn claimed that a “paedophile lobby that acts in broad daylight and probably with the support, which”—he politely added—he “could consider unwitting, of certain political parties” was actively disrupting the efforts of his investigation.
In 1987, allegations of abuse involving dozens of children surfaced at the Presidio military base in San Francisco. The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry analyzed the victims, and claimed that:
The severity of the trauma for children at the Presidio was immediately manifest in clear cut symptoms. Before the abuse was exposed, parents had already noticed the following changes in their children: vaginal discharge, genital soreness, rashes, fear of the dark, sleep disturbances, nightmares, sexually provocative language, and sexually inappropriate behavior. In addition, the children were exhibiting other radical changes in behavior, including temper outbursts, sudden mood shifts, and poor impulse control. All these behavioral symptoms are to be expected in preschool children who have been molested.
Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, who ended up at the center of the investigation, had previously appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to discuss his views on Satanism (Aquino founded a group called The Temple of Set). Records showed that the children were taken on unannounced trips outside the center.
One child positively identified Aquino and his wife, Lilith (known to the kids as ‘Mikey’ and ‘Shamby’), and was also able to identify the Aquinos’ private home and to describe with considerable accuracy the distinctively satanic interior décor of the house. The young witness claimed to have been photographed at the Aquinos’ home. On August 14, 1987, a search warrant was served on the house. Confiscated in the raid were numerous videotapes, photographs, photo albums, photographic negatives, cassette tapes, and name and address books. Also observed was what appeared to be a soundproof room.
Perhaps uncoincidentally, Cathy O’Brien—who claims to have been a victim of MK Ultra programming as a child, and who I mentioned in the second entry to the series—also claims Aquino was involved in her brainwashing. I have no idea whether O’Brien is a credible witness or not. But her allegations do line up with a striking amount of consistency with other evidence. Given Aquino’s known involvement in mind control programs—here is the full text of his “From PSYOP to Mind War”—this isn’t inherently implausible.
Nonetheless, the case was “quietly closed” after suspected offenders, including Aquino, were simply moved to different facilities
And yet again, the leads in these supposedly separate cases come full circle: Michael Aquino was also linked to the kidnapping of Johnny Gosch in the case of the Franklin scandal (according to an interview with the boy’s mother, Noreen Gosch).
I’m approaching 5,000 words now, so I’m just going to dump some of the other mainstream–media headlines I found here without further elaboration.
- In the UK, MP Tom Watson confronts PM Cameron in Parliament with evidence of an elite pedophile ring at high levels (Video of speech).
- British pedophile ring ‘protected by Parliament and Downing Street’ (Belfast Telegraph)
- Panic among UK leaders as high-level pedophile network is covered up: BBC Newsnight program suspended for naming senior Conservative pedophile (The Guardian)
- Wikileaks cables reveal DynCorp employees purchased child prostitutes in Afghanistan and the US State Department helped cover it up (Huffington Post)
- Savile ‘had accomplice who would supply girls to sex ring inside BBC’ (The Sun)
- Jimmy Savile is the Tip of the Iceberg (This one is a blog, but it references several worthwhile mainstream sources)
- France’s most notorious serial killer has claimed that he murdered at least one victim on the orders of highly placed personalities in Toulouse because of a blackmail threat linked to sadomasochistic orgies involving politicians, judges and police. (The Guardian)
- Tebbit hints at sex abuse cover-up as pressure over missing files intensifies (The Guardian)
- My Name Is Anneke Lucas and I Was a Sex Slave to Europe’s Elite at Age 6 (Global Citizen)
For more sources like these, there are collections here and here and here — I share these with the caveat, as always, that I don’t necessarily endorse everything there, but I have found plenty that is useful within them.
To repeat the conclusion I reached earlier: child sex abuse is, without question, a rampant, institutional, and high-level phenomena. It occurs on a large scale in the highest levels of power—in the fields of entertainment, government, and law enforcement—and members of these rings have been well-known to gain handles on the relevant positions of power to ensure their actions are successfully covered up. Whether anything unique or original comes out of Pizzagate or not, then, my take is that the basic spirit of concern and distrust towards the elite halls of power that Pizzagaters have demonstrated is their general disposition is still far closer to the spirit of the truth than the basic attitude of dismissiveness that such a thing could even occur being demonstrated by those who find it too quick and easy to dismiss all of Pizzagate in its entirety as nothing more than a hoax—and I would stand by this statement even if it turned out that the latter were right.
Given that we know how rampant the problem of institutionalized child sex abuse in upper levels of power really is, with mounds of unquestioned public evidence stretching back decades across the world, the amount of evidence it takes to justify suspicion of people in positions of power drops.
But some question whether it is even appropriate to use words like “evidence” when speaking of cases like these in reference to Pizzagate. The answer is yes. Logicians call cases like this “background evidence,” which means facts that raise the prior probability that a thing being alleged could happen, by showing that it does happen, and therefore increasing the plausibility—to whatever extent—that it could have happened in this particular case. If things like Pizzagate have already happened, then Pizzagate is at least possibly true as well. If something is actual, that proves that things like it are possible and thus cannot be simply dismissed as impossible or implausible.
It is important to understand that “evidence” is not the same thing as “proof.” For example, if we know that a man molested every child he had prior to this one, that doesn’t prove that he molested this one. But we would absolutely be interested in knowing that in a court of law, and specifically it would count as “background evidence” that raises the prior probability that the claim that he molested this child could be true.
To continue the example, here’s what background evidence does: if we know the man has molested all of his previous children, then we are justified to give increased weight to whatever direct evidence exists indicating he may have molested this one. If we know the man has never molested a previous child, then we are justified to give less weight to whatever direct evidence exists indicating he may have molested this one.
On the other hand, if we knew the child had a history of lying for various reasons, that wouldn’t prove they were lying for those reasons this time too, but it would count as “background evidence”: relatively speaking, it would cause us to give less evidentiary weight to the child’s statements alone, if those were all we had as evidence.
If the father also molested every child he had previously, those two pieces of background evidence might basically cancel out. But if we knew the father had never molested any previous child (background evidence), and we knew the child had a strong history of lying about similar claims (background evidence), then the two facts put together would suddenly become enough to make a pretty compelling legal argument all by themselves, even though they have nothing to do with the specific facts at stake in this specific case, and they do nothing to deductively refute whatever claims against the father the child might have made.
In the real world, we often don’t have access to the kind of information we would need to deductively prove or refute things one way or another, so background evidence is sometimes the only evidence we have to go on, and it is in fact defined as a form of evidence (again, in court, if you knew that the child had previously made very similar lies and that the father had never molested a previous child, you would submit that information to the court “as evidence”).
So, whether or not we know high-level sex rings exist, and whether or now we know that they get covered up, influences how we ought to evaluate the evidentiary relevance of things we do or do not know when it comes to Pizzagate in particular. You might find similarities between the way people respond, or in the particular people taking the effort to respond, to Pizzagate and the way coverups of other cases took place.
For instance, if someone we now know was very active in denying allegations about a case that later turned out to be true is doing the same in Pizzagate (and for instance, Mark Thompson of the BBC was credibly accused of helping cover up the Savile scandal, and now runs the NYT ), then we have evidence in the form of recognizing that what’s in front of us fits a certain pattern. Previous cases establish the “patterns” that take place when one thing or another happen, and therefore influence how we ought to interpret the patterns we see in front of us in a given case. If the patterns start to match, then that qualifies as evidence.
So, do high-level sex trafficking rings or organized forms of pedophilia exist in upper levels of government? How prevalent does it appear to be? As best we can tell, how many of them are there? How do things tend to go at first when they’re exposed? Can we confirm with prior evidence that they can be and are successfully covered up? All of this directly influences the likelihood that Pizzagate could be on to something. The more prevalent these things are, the less overwhelming the direct evidence needs to be to justify concern. The less prevalent they are, the more overwhelming it needs to be. Just like the history of how many previous children a man has molested influences how we evaluate the evidence at play when someone claims he’s molesting this one: if he’s never done anything of the sort, you’re going to need a lot of evidence before you take the accusation seriously. If you know that he’s even had a history of glancing at child porn, the more of that kind of background evidence you get, the less direct evidence you need to say that the accusation that he molested this child should be taken seriously.
Thus, to close, there are two responses we could take to someone who has latched on to a particular claim involving child sex abuse that turns out not to be accurate: First, we can call them paranoid idiots and move on with our day, conveniently forgetting about all of the rampant evil that does in fact exist, comforted by the fact that we could shut someone up for making us feel uncomfortable—because, after all, it turns out they actually were wrong about this particular claim. This appears to be the standard mainstream approach. Second, we can appreciate the basic human concern that motivates their interest in the subject and point them in the direction of better evidence for the very thing they’re ultimately concerned about, because the basic thing they are concerned about—institutionalized child sex abuse in upper reaches of power—absolutely is, in fact, real, whether they have the exact details right or not.
The dry intelligence of skeptics is utterly and entirely useless if it isn’t paired with a natural human drive to care. But the passion of the concerned just might be invaluable if only it can be paired with a more accurate picture of the facts. And this is the basic reason why some people have misread the intentions behind this series, even despite the clarity of my direct words stating that—again:
The evidence [in Pizzagate] is of wildly varying levels of quality . . . [and much of it is] the pareidolia of “Jesus is appearing to me in my toast” . . . many of these claims are wild speculation over coincidences . . . Could [this evidence] have an innocent explanation? Sure, maybe. . . . some of the supposed “codewords” people have claimed to have identified in Pizzagate appear to be made up . . . Could all of this turn out to be nothing? Of course it could. . . . Have we identified [evidence of a high–level sex ring] here? Only time will tell. . . . Am I trying to make the argument that if one conspiracy theory is true, all the others must be, too? No . . .
I have found it less important to address myself in tone to the dry intelligence of dispassionate skeptics than to the passion of the concerned, because theirs is the only energy that even expresses the desire to do something about what is, one way or another, a real, serious, and massive problem. Only for those who have it within them by nature to recognize that there are problems, untrustworthy elites, and a need to take some kind of action is there any purpose in discussing where to aim.
Additional “Pizzagate” videos by “Reality Calls” vlogger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA2BocJLGb8
https://realitycallsshow.com/banned-from-youtube-james-alefantis-instagram-account-images-pizzagate/
#PizzaGate Images BANNED From YouTube
Top Iranian Diplomat Discusses US Troop Pullout With Iraq’s PMF Chief
Sputnik – 19.07.2020
The Iranian foreign minister and the leader of Iraq’s Shiite-dominated Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) discussed the US troop pullout on Sunday.
Mohammad Javad Zarif is currently on a visit to Iraq, where has already held talks with the top leadership.
“Zarif and [Falih] Al-Fayyad, the head of Hashd al-Shaabi [PMF], discussed the legitimate decision of the government, people and parliament of Iraq on the need for American troops to withdraw from this country as well as other issues of mutual interest”, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said.
The sides also touched upon the circumstances of the US drone killing of top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani and deputy PMF head Abu Mahdi Muhandis.
Zarif’s visit to Baghdad coincided with a rocket attack on the Iraqi capital’s green zone, which houses heavily fortified government facilities and foreign diplomatic missions. A source in the Iraqi security services said that at least two rockets fell near the US embassy inside this zone.
The Iraqi parliament voted to expel all foreign troops from the country in January, shortly after a US precision strike killed Soleimani and Muhandis near Baghdad.
The United States held the two as well as Fayyad accountable for a 31 December attack against its embassy in Iraq, when protesters tried to storm the diplomatic mission’s gates following the funeral of the Kataib Hezbollah militiamen who were killed by the prior American drone strikes.
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From the Archives
Does Kevin Barrett Seek to “Absolve Islam of a Terrible Crime”?
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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