Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

This is who they are: Biden’s Syria strike is a stark reminder it’s American Empire that’s back

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | February 27, 2021

Only someone who hasn’t been paying attention could have been surprised by the US airstrike on Syria, now that an establishment committed to a globalist Empire rather than a constitutional republic is back in charge in Washington.

Democrats love proclaiming one can’t “turn back the clock,” usually to argue against even attempting to undo whatever domestic policies they’ve rammed through when in power. Yet everything about the Joe Biden administration has been about just that: erasing the past four years of Donald Trump and picking up where Barack Obama left off.

Trump also bombed Syria, mind you – launching cruise missiles on two occasions, spurred by spurious reports of “chemical attacks” – as well as the “Iranian-backed militias” in Iraq. Just over a year ago, he ordered the drone assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani outside the Baghdad airport.

However, he was denounced at the time by congressional Democrats, Biden himself, and his now-spokeswoman Jen Psaki, as well as nearly all US media outlets – the same ones now praising Biden’s bombardment. It’s literally different when they do it, the narrative goes.

That may seem baffling. After all, the American Empire isn’t a partisan thing. The Obamas, Bidens and Clintons have eagerly been on board as much as the Bushes and the Cheneys. That is, until Trump came along and mocked the “endless wars,” spoke of “America first” and rejected the pompous platitudes used to sell overseas imperialism to the rapidly declining American heartland.

For that ‘crime’ he was denounced and rejected by the US establishment, which has repeatedly demonstrated it doesn’t give a damn for the little guy in “flyover country” but prefers the globalist agendas of coastal elites and the military-industrial complex.

One can’t blame Americans for not remembering that the only time Congress overrode Trump’s veto was to keep troops overseas forever, when the media they rely on for their opinions, feelings and values hardly bothered to mention that bit. Make no mistake, though, endless foreign wars is what Biden meant when he said last week that “America is back” and promised a crusade on behalf of “democracy,” whatever that may be.

Also back is the manufacturing of consent. When Trump bombed someone, he just tweeted about it. The “new” administration acts just like the ones of yore, first leaking the talking points to the media. Instead of Trump’s “cowboy” language, Biden’s people use carefully selected propaganda terms, such as “defensive precision strike” and “proportionate military response” that “aims to de-escalate” the situation. The media dutifully follow along, stenographers all.

This kind of smoke-and-mirrors perception management is how war has become normalized for Americans. Trump’s rejection of it – whatever his motivation – is one of the reasons he was so hated by the establishment. Biden was sold to the American people as a return to normal – and for the establishment, this is precisely what “normal” looks like.

This normalization of behavior that ought to be illegal, immoral and unacceptable is, frankly, quietly horrifying. Almost no one seems to care that the US has no legal right to be in Syria, or bomb Syria, or even keep troops in Iraq anymore.

Legal concerns? How quaint. The US bombing whomever, whenever and wherever has become the “dog bites man” of the old journalism joke – that’s not news, editors would say, come to me when “man bites dog.”

Instead, we have otherwise serious people dispassionately describing the strike as “solid persuasion” and noting – correctly – that it “probably doesn’t matter” who gets attacked.

There is another disturbing dimension to the “Obama restoration” the US establishment is so bent on effecting. It was the Obama-Biden administration that backed “moderate rebels” – many of whom turned out to be Al-Qaeda affiliates – in Syria in hopes of regime change in Damascus, kicking off a war there almost ten years ago.

Trump focused instead on defeating Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists, letting the same people who lied to him about troop numbers deceive him about abandoning (but not really) the regime change agenda.

If someone with a solid predictive record who claims to have sources within the Biden-Harris administration is to be believed, they want Syrian President Bashar Assad “gone by any means necessary and have no concern for the consequences.”

After all, those consequences are almost always borne by the foreigners that get bombed and the ‘flyover’ Americans who end up in the military – including the very same “underprivileged communities” the Democrats claim to be so concerned about – and not the powerful.

This obviously leaves those Americans who hoped for $2,000 stimulus checks, universal healthcare or higher minimum wage – those who believed the “that’s not who we are” Obama-era hype about empathy and decency – holding the empty bag and scratching their heads.

Which is why perception managers will no doubt feed them another manufactured outrage as a distraction, any moment now. Because that is who they are. Always have been.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator 

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, War Crimes | , | 5 Comments

Ten Fatal Errors: Scientists Attack Paper That Established Global PCR Driven Lockdown

By Celia Farber | Uncover DC | December 3, 2020

War has broken out in the scientific literature that strikes at the existential core of Covid-19 and its proposed causative virus.

At the heart of the controversy lies the fact that the creators of the most commonly used test, the RT-PCR, published instructions for how to test for SARS-CoV-2 “without having virus material available,” in their own words, relying instead on the Chinese scientists’ genetic sequence published on the internet.

The paper “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time PCR” was published 24 hours after it was submitted to Eurosurveillance, clearly evading peer review. Its lead authors were Christian Drosten and Victor Corman, which is how it took on the title  “Corman-Drosten paper.” It provided the “recipe,” or work flow for the Covid-19 diagnostic test, quickly applied all over the world, after it was accepted as the standard of testing by the WHO.

German scientist Christian Drosten was also a co-discoverer of the SARS-associated coronavirus, and developed a test for it in 2003. Drosten, who heads the Charite Institute of Virology in Berlin, and a team of fellow scientists in Europe and Hong Kong, moved very quickly, as soon as cases of the illness were being reported out of Wuhan in December of 2019. They submitted the paper on Jan. 21, it was published in Eurosurveillance on Jan. 23, and was immediately accepted as the standard of testing internationally, by the WHO, which began sending test kits to affected regions.

In the harrowing months that followed, amid lockdowns, economic collapse, school closures and widespread panic, few were aware of the immense problems with the paper, which tragically offered a testing method that would yield between 80 and 97 percent false positive results, due to a non existent gold standard which would be the virus itself.

It all came to a head on Nov. 30, when the Corman-Drosten foundation paper was challenged by 22 international scientists who wrote a letter demanding the paper’s retraction, along with an extensive critique citing 10 errors in the paper it deemed “fatal.”

Titled “External peer review of the RTPCR test to detect SARS-Cov-2 Reveals 10 Major Flaws At The Molecular and Methodological Level: Consequences For False-Positive Results,” the paper’s lead author is Dr. Pieter Borger, an expert on the molecular biology of gene expression. Several other esteemed names are associated with the paper including Dr. Michael Yeadon, former VP of Pfizer and outspoken critic of much of the so-called science beneath the WHO’s global lockdown, masking, and school shut-down measures.

I reached one of the authors, Dr. Kevin Corbett, at his home in London. He spoke simply and with controlled apoplexy. He confirmed and cast additional light on the shocking fact that the paper was written in the absence of a viral isolate, among many other problems.

“Every scientific rationale for the development of that test has been totally destroyed by this paper. It’s like Hiroshima/Nagasaki to the Covid test,” he said. “When Drosten developed the test, China hadn’t given them a viral isolate. They developed the test from a sequence in a gene bank. Do you see? China gave them a genetic sequence with no corresponding viral isolate. They had a code, but no body for the code. No viral morphology.”

I asked him to define “viral morphology” for the layperson.

“In the fish market,” he said, “it’s like giving you a few bones and saying that’s your fish. It could be any fish. Not even a skeleton. Here’s a few fragments of bones. That’s your fish. Listen, the Corman/Drosten paper, there’s nothing from a patient in it. It’s all from gene banks. and the bits of the virus sequence that weren’t there they made up. They synthetically created them to fill in the blanks. That’s what genetics is; it’s a code. So its ABBBCCDDD and you’re missing some what you think is EEE so you put it in. It’s all synthetic. You just manufacture the bits that are missing. This is the end result of the geneticization of virology. This is basically a computer virus.”

In an interview posted on his Twitter feed, Dr. Pieter Borger said, “The virus wasn’t in Europe and the paper was already finished.”  He said these facts “should have been on television long ago. I explained it on LinkedIn, but you get banned if you do.” Regarding PCR he said, “You are not detecting a virus.”

“Once I heard a good comparison,” he continued. “If you go to a junkyard and you find a wheel or a hubcap from a Mercedes, and a steering wheel of a Mercedes, can you infer that you are in a Mercedes garage at that moment? If you only see those two parts? No, you can’t. You don’t know anything about it… you only know you have a steering wheel, you can find those things everywhere. In every junkyard you can find them.” He describes the RT PCR tests as having “no relevance for the diagnosis whatsoever.”

German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich who is central to a growing group of lawyers, scientists, politicians, and even secret pharmaceutical whistleblowers, said in an interview, “We believe that in order to make this house of cards collapse, we have to attack the PCR test. The fact is, there are no asymptomatic infections.”

This seemingly radical claim was bolstered by a paper out of Wuhan of all places, published by Nature.com, which found no “viable virus” in PCR positive cases.

“The screening of the 9,865,404 participants without a history of COVID-19 found no newly confirmed COVID-19 cases, and identified 300 asymptomatic positive cases with a detection rate of 0.303 (95 % CI 0.270–0.339)/10,000. … A total of 1174 close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases were traced, and they all tested negative for the COVID-19. … Of the 34,424 participants with a history of COVID-19, 107 tested positive again, giving a repositive rate of 0.310% (95% CI 0.423–0.574%.) Virus cultures were negative for all asymptomatic positive and repositive cases, indicating no “viable virus” in positive cases detected in this study.”

Dr. Corbett, a Ph.D., and retired RN elaborated: “There are 10 fatal errors in this Drosten test paper. Public Health England is a co-author on it. All the public health authorities across the EU have co-authored this paper. But here is the bottom line: There was no viral isolate to validate what they were doing. The PCR products of the amplification didn’t correspond to any viral isolate at that time. I call it ‘donut ring science.’ There is nothing at the center of it. It’s all about code, genetics, nothing to do with reality, or the actual person, the patient.”

I read him some of the critiques from the other side, that say it’s been isolated “all over the world.”

“Yes, there have since been papers saying they’ve produced viral isolates. But there are no controls for them. The CDC produced a paper in July, I think it was, where they said: ‘Here’s the viral isolate.’ Do you know what they did? They swabbed one person. One person, who’d been to China and had cold symptoms. One person. And they assumed he had it to begin with. So it’s all full of holes, the whole thing.”

One of their 10 challenges is the stunning fact that EuroSurveillance published the paper 24 hours after it was submitted back in January. “Twenty-four hours,” Dr. Corbett said incredulously. “That never happens. It takes months to get a review done. They turned this around in 24 hours. It was waved through, it was not peer-reviewed. There’s no standard operational procedure for this test. There’s major and minor concerns about this paper and we go through it all here. it should be retracted. If they retract it, it means the whole thing falls to bits. The whole edifice collapses. It’s a house of cards built on sand and we’ve just moved the sand.”

The authors of the Drosten paper, for their part, were dismissive on social media. One of them, Marion Koopman, referred to the Borger et al critique as “ongoing nonsense.” Drosten himself launched ad-hominem attacks at some of the authors via Twitter.

Koopman tweeted: “The labs on this paper all had worked with SARS, had samples from SARS patients in their freezers. So that made it possible to do a first check of how this would work. A valid choice in an emerging disease outbreak, where you are in the blind phase.”

At press time, Eurosurveillance at least did acknowledge to the paper’s authors that they had received it and were reviewing it. When asked on Twitter if there had been a response, lead author Peter Borger replied that the response among scientists had been overwhelming in its support.

From his home in Germany, Reiner Fuellmich said, “The reason why I decided to speak out is that I didn’t want these crazy people who are pulling the strings behind the scenes to rule the world. I had no idea when I came out with my first video that these people and their corporations were such a powerful block. We are up against some really powerful and devious and bad, evil people. But they’re not a united front. We on the good side so to speak, I am firmly convinced that we have the better people, who know much more not just intellectually. The thing is . . . we’re humans, and they’re not.”

Celia Farber is half-Swedish and being raised there, she knows socialism from the inside. She has contributed to the Epoch Times, Harper’s, Esquire, Rolling Stone and more. She left the legacy media, never to return. She is the recipient of the Semmelweis International Society Clean Hands Award For Investigative Journalism. She is the author of Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS, and the editor of The Truth Barrier, an investigative and literary website. She co-hosts The Whistleblower Newsroom with Kristina Borjesson on PRN, Fridays at 10 a.m.

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Aletho News | 8 Comments

‘Slow’ Atlantic Ocean may cause climate chaos–Or There Again Maybe Not!

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 27, 2021

image

The Atlantic current system which maintains mild weather in Europe is at its weakest in over a millennium, most likely because of climate change, scientists have found.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is part of a system of ocean currents which acts as a conveyor belt to move water around the Earth, redistributing heat and acting as a key link in maintaining the world’s climate.

It began a serious slowdown around 1850 and is now at its lowest point in 1,000 years, according to a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience.

It is not certain what the impact of further weakening will be on weather patterns, but scientists believe it could bring more heatwaves in Europe, and sea level rise on the east coast of the US.

The impact of changing water temperatures is also potentially devastating for some marine life, with the slowdown already linked to lower cod numbers off Maine.

Some evidence suggests there could be a ‘tipping point’ sometime after 2100 when the system collapses, which could cause intense winter storms in Europe and a significant cooling effect across the northern hemisphere that would not be offset by global

Co-author Dr David Thornalley, from University College London said: “This study shows the increasing evidence in support of the modern Atlantic Ocean undergoing unprecedented changes in comparison to the last millennium, and in some cases longer.”

Scientists from Ireland, Britain and Germany looked at 11 different sources of data, including tree rings, ocean sediment and corals.

The AMOC has only been directly measured since 2004, leaving scientists to rely on indirect measurements such as these to monitor historic change, which produce imprecise results.

Dr Laura Jackson, a Met Office scientist specialising in AMOC who was not involved in the study, said there were “still uncertainties associated with using these indirect observations.”

But the paper adds to previous research that found a weakening of the AMOC, with one study suggesting there has been a 15 per cent decrease since the mid-century. – Telegraph

In other words they only have data since 2004, and are relying highly unreliable proxies further back Translation – Junk Science!

Meanwhile, another finds exactly the opposite:

image

image

https://os.copernicus.org/articles/17/285/2021/

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 2 Comments

World Economic Forum – “Lockdowns Improving Cities Around The World.”

By Richie Allen | February 27, 2021

The World Economic Forum (WEF) Tweeted yesterday that “Lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world.” The tweet was accompanied by a video showing deserted streets, empty factories and grounded planes. It’s not very subtle.

The WEF’s rather blunt point is that air pollution and Co2 emissions are down due to lockdowns. Further into the video, the viewer is shown packed motorways and a caption that reads; “the drop (in traffic) won’t slow climate change unless we lock in emissions cuts.” Like I said, not very subtle. The WEF is saying that lockdowns are good for the environment.

Talk Radio breakfast presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer wasn’t amused. She tweeted;

“The WEF are stark raving insane if they think lockdowns are quietly improving our cities. Genuinely scary.”

The barrister Francis Hoar tweeted;

Isn’t it lovely to see all these quiet, dead cities, closed factories and grounded aircraft. Take this as a warning that if lockdowns are accepted in any circumstance, they will be imposed for climate reasons before long. Lockdowns should be prohibited in any circumstances.”

I said on The Richie Allen Show last summer, that lockdown type restrictions to tackle climate change are an inevitability. Last year, World Economic Founder Klaus Schwab declared that the pandemic was a; “narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world and our economic and social foundations.”

Every single one of us needs to acquaint ourselves with Klaus Schwab, The Great Reset and The Fourth industrial Revolution. Writing in The Sociable, journalist Tim Hinchcliffe had this to say about Schwab and The WEF:

Prior to this year, implementing worldwide lockdowns that destroy businesses, wreck the economy, and leave people destitute and stripped of their constitutional rights while trying to enact invasive contact tracing, immunity passports, and otherwise massive bio-electronic surveillance apparatuses would never have been accepted by the citizens of a free society.

But the coronavirus pandemic has opened a “narrow window” for a “golden opportunity,” and once this crisis is over, the Davos club fears that the window may be shut forever.

Tyranny arrives in subtle stages. It’s slow at first, but before you realize it even exists, it has already won. That is what I see happening with the unholy merger of “the great reset” with “the new normal.”

Those who pull the strings have been begging for a global crisis to unleash their worldwide restructuring of society and the economy.

For more on The Great Reset, .listen to The Richie Allen Show Monday – Thursday from 5 pm – 7 pm.

February 27, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | 1 Comment

DEAR IRISH PEOPLE, IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP

Computing Forever | February 23, 2021

Subscribe to Way of the World on Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/OfuiQUsplm1H/
Subscribe to Millennial Woes on Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/OUbfw7ulVP2n/

Musings from Dystopia on Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/hybM74uIHJKf/
Musings from Dystopia on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@ComputingForever:9/Musings-From-the-dystopia-Broadband-High:4

Support my work here: https://computingforever.com/donate/
Support my work on Subscribe Star: https://www.subscribestar.com/dave-cullen
Follow me on Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/hybM74uIHJKf/
PayPal Donations Welcome. Click here: http://goo.gl/NSdOvK

http://www.computingforever.com

KEEP UP ON SOCIAL MEDIA:
Gab: https://gab.ai/DaveCullen
Subscribe on Gab TV: https://tv.gab.com/channel/DaveCullen

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Looking into Palantir: Activists want NHS to come clean about secretive deal with data-mining company

RT | February 26, 2021

Under a deal negotiated in secret with the British government, shady data firm Palantir will continue to manage NHS data for two years. Activists calling for transparency have now brought the NHS to court.

When the British government unveiled its ‘Covid-19 data store’ last March, controversial “spy tech” firm Palantir was given control of the data collected from the public, which included sensitive data such as patients’ ages, addresses, health conditions, treatments, and whether they smoke or drink, among other private information. Awarded the contract for a nominal fee of £1 ($1.40), Palantir was only supposed to hold this data until the end of the coronavirus pandemic, but was awarded a second £23 million contract in December, ensuring the data-gathering project will continue until at least December 2022.

The government’s data store – used to inform its pandemic response – was criticized last March for its reliance on US tech firms, like Microsoft, Amazon, and the aforementioned Palantir, to handle Britons’ data. According to an NHS impact assessment, Palantir processes data that includes details on patients’ sex lives, political views, and religious beliefs.

The government inked the deal behind closed doors, and large sections of the contract are redacted – including sections laying out who has access to patient data, how it will be used, and with which third parties it will be shared. Readable in the contract is a line stating that after the coronavirus pandemic subsides, the database may be repurposed for “general business-as-usual monitoring.”

Activists with OpenDemocracy and lawyers with Foxglove Legal this week sued the NHS, claiming that the renewed deal with Palantir warranted a fresh impact assessment and demanding public consultation over the deal, which was awarded without the usual tender process.

As news of the lawsuit broke on Wednesday, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism also revealed that Palantir executives had been lobbying the NHS for access to patient data since summer 2019, six months before the coronavirus first cropped up in China. According to emails seen by the bureau, Palantir’s UK boss, Louis Mosley, hosted a meal attended by Lord David Prior, chair of NHS England, in July. In the days afterwards, Prior thanked Mosley for supplying him with “watermelon cocktails,” and asked him to get in touch with ideas to help the NHS “structure and curate our data.”

In the months afterwards, Palantir offered demonstrations of its services to Prior and his colleagues at its San Francisco offices, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In October 2019, NHS bosses reportedly met with representatives of Microsoft, Amazon, and vaccine manufacturer AstraZeneca to discuss the creation of a “single, national, standardised, event-based longitudinal record for 65 million citizens,” which would be built in the following two years and contain medical and genetic records of every single UK resident. Palantir was said not to be present at the meeting, but Mosley reportedly told Prior shortly afterwards that he had a “very positive meeting” with a top NHS official in private.

Like the mythical seeing-stone it’s named after, Palantir is a company shrouded in secrecy. Launched by billionaire Peter Thiel, Palantir received start-up funding from the CIA and counts multiple US government agencies, law enforcement departments, and military branches among its clients. Its true number of employees is unknown, and former workers are reportedly often forbidden from talking to the media.

Its software has been used by police departments to profile likely offenders and predict future crime, by the military to predict roadside bombings in Middle Eastern war zones, and by immigration authorities to help track, apprehend, and deport illegal immigrants – a partnership it has tried to keep under wraps before.

With both Palantir and the NHS seemingly keen on continuing their partnership, Foxglove director Cori Crider told the BBC that her aim is to prevent the government using “the pandemic as an excuse to embed major tech firms like Palantir in the NHS without consulting the public.”

“The datastore is the largest pool of patient data in UK history. It’s one thing to set it up on an emergency basis, it’s a different kettle of fish to give a tech firm like Palantir a permanent role in NHS infrastructure,” she added.

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

California Bill Would Fine Retailers That Keep Boys and Girls’ Toys and Clothing in Separate Sections

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | February 25, 2021

A new bill proposed in California would fine retailers, including online stores, that continue to display boys and girls’ toys and clothing in separate sections.

Introduced by Democrats Evan Low and Cristina Garcia in the California state legislature, the bill would require retailers to display the “majority” of the items in unisex sections.

The legislation would also forbid signs that indicate whether the toys and clothing are intended for boys or girls.

Websites would also be made to show all the items on a single page entitled “kids,” “unisex” or “gender neutral,” something that would cause practical confusion even outside of the political intentions of the bill.

Retailers with over 500 employees would be hit with an initial $1,000 fine for non-compliance.

“There are clear political and social motivations behind this bill, namely to use the state to compel “inclusivity” and encourage the “self-expression” of disordered inclinations at a very young age. It’s despicable,” commented Evan James.

As we highlighted earlier, a new Gallup poll found that when it comes to Generation Z, one in six now identify as some form of LGBT.

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | 1 Comment

Western Powers Can Save Iran Nuclear Deal – By Honoring It

Strategic Culture Foundation | February 26, 2021

The international signatories to the nuclear accord with Iran have now a three-month window to salvage that landmark deal. The onus is on the United States to return to the Joint Comprehension Plan of Action (JCPOA) – as the accord is formally titled. Washington must do this unconditionally, beginning with lifting its economic sanctions from Iran. The European states have a duty to advocate Washington to meet its obligations. And all of the Western powers have a duty to honor a treaty which bears their signatures. Castigating Iran for alleged breaches is a cowardly distraction from the real problem.

This week Iran averted a further serious breakdown in the JCPOA after negotiating an interim inspection compromise with the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran has suspended so-called short-notice inspections at nuclear and military sites for three months, but will continue recording video footage at the sites which it will then provide to the IAEA for monitoring and verification purposes as required under the JCPOA. If, however, the United States does not cancel its sanctions on Iran by this period then the surveillance videos will be destroyed, and one can assume that the JCPOA will be finally doomed.

Let’s recap on how we arrived at this impasse. The JCPOA was signed in July 2015 by the United States, Britain, France, Germany (the E3), Russia, China and Iran. It was subsequently ratified by the UN Security Council. The accord took several years of painstaking negotiations to complete and was widely seen as a landmark in diplomacy and an important achievement towards improving peace and security in the Middle East – Israel’s continued possession of nuclear weapons notwithstanding.

In exchange for Iran taking the unprecedented step of severely curtailing its civilian nuclear program (a program it is entitled to pursue as a signatory of the 1970 Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty), the other international powers were mandated to cancel a raft of Western and UN sanctions imposed on Iran.

Then Donald Trump got elected as US president in 2016 and set about sabotaging the JCPOA which he disparaged as the “worst deal ever”. Trump walked the US away from the accord unilaterally in May 2018 and promptly re-imposed crippling sanctions on Iran. This was part of a “maximum pressure” policy of aggression towards Iran by the Trump administration which was rationalized by citing baseless allegations that the Iranians were secretly building nuclear weapons and conducting malign operations in the region.

Not only that but the Trump administration threatened all other signatories to the JCPOA with extraterritorial “secondary sanctions” if they continued doing business with Iran. Russia and China have ignored those American threats, but lamentably the European Union has feebly caved in to Washington’s demands. Billions of euro-worth of investment and trade deals with Iran were scrapped by the Europeans in deference to Washington’s bullying diktat. In effect, as far as relations between Iran and the Western powers are concerned the JCPOA has delivered nothing of benefit to the Iranian people despite Tehran’s erstwhile full compliance with the accord.

The combination of the United States unilaterally abrogating an international treaty, and the Europeans complying with unlawful punitive measures against Iran, then resulted in Tehran taking subsequent steps to gradually wind down – but not revoking – its commitments to the JCPOA. Those steps include surpassing limits on enrichment of uranium and stockpiles of the enriched nuclear material. Iran is within its right to carry out these “remedial actions” under the provisions of the JCPOA if other signatories do not meet their obligations. And the US and EU have clearly not met their obligations.

The latest suspension by Iran of inspections from the IAEA must be seen in the wider context of responding to the Western powers reneging on the implementation of an international treaty to which they are signatories.

Newly inaugurated President Joe Biden has stated his intention to return the United States to the JCPOA. Biden has also dismissed the “maximum pressure” policy of his predecessor as a failure.

However, the Biden administration is insisting that it is Iran which must first return to full compliance with the nuclear accord.

It is somewhat disconcerting that the European trio of Britain, France and Germany issued a joint statement this week censoring Iran for halting inspections from the IAEA. The E3 urged Iran to resume “full compliance” of the JCPOA.

The Europeans would have more credibility and authority if they showed some backbone in censoring the United States for its egregious failure to honor the nuclear accord. The Europeans say little if nothing when it comes to holding the US to account. It is the Europeans who have aided and abetted Washington in its backsliding and abuse of sanctions.

Russia and China have, however, rightly kept the focus on the priority thing to do, which is for the US to return immediately and unconditionally to abiding by the JCPOA, including lifting all sanctions from Iran.

At a time of global pandemic and particular hardship for Iran it is morally imperative for the United States to end its unlawful and barbaric sanctions regime. The only way to build trust is for the Biden administration to reverse the violations. If the United States does not take the morally and legally honorable steps then the suspicion of an ulterior agenda will be fatal for resolving the impasse. The Biden team talks about “lengthening and strengthening” the accord. It sounds suspiciously like Washington is trying to extricate further concessions from Iran beyond the concessions that it had originally agreed to when the JCPOA was signed in 2015. Is the Biden administration pandering to its regional allies Israel and Saudi Arabia who are implacably opposed to the accord? Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken have both stated publicly that this US administration will consult closely with Israel on all regional policies.

It is being reported that Europe is trying to facilitate “informal” talks between Iran and the United States. There should be no need for such cloak and dagger shenanigans. The Western powers can salvage the nuclear deal in a much more straightforward way – by honoring it.

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , , | 1 Comment

Russian Foreign Ministry: Twitter no longer independent social media, but a tool of ‘digital diktat’ under control of West

By Jonny Tickle | RT | February 26, 2021

Twitter is rapidly changing from an independent platform into a tool of Western countries to impose a dictatorship over the internet. That’s according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, following a recent ban of Russian accounts.

Speaking on Friday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova blasted the US tech giant for removing 100 accounts allegedly linked to the Kremlin. On Tuesday, the site’s owners announced that 69 were deleted for “undermining faith in the NATO alliance,” with a further 31 banned for “targeting the United States and European Union.”

“We once again can’t help but notice that Twitter is rapidly degenerating from an independent discussion platform into a tool of global digital diktat in the hands of the Western establishment,” she told journalists, noting that accounts from NATO members haven’t been victims of similar operations.

“Assumptions and unproven insinuations were once again presented as justifications,” she continued. “The reasoning in Twitter’s own report is absurd: the accounts allegedly broadcast messages related to the Russian government, undermined trust in NATO, and influenced the United States and the EU.”

In her opinion, the blocks were “arbitrary” and “illegal,” based on “opaque criteria.”

Following the ban, Russian regulator Roskomnadzor wrote to Twitter to demand a list of the blocked accounts and justifications for why Twitter blocked them.

On the same day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested the creation of national and international rules to regulate social networks to avoid censorship.

“We are increasingly concerned about the non-transparent policies of social media platforms, which, at their discretion, prohibit or censor user content, openly manipulating public opinion,” he said.

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , , | 1 Comment

US Bombs Syria And Ridiculously Claims Self Defense

By Caitlin Johnstone | February 26, 2021

On orders of [proclaimed] President Biden, the United States has launched an airstrike on a facility in Syria. As of this writing the exact number of killed and injured is unknown, with early reports claiming “a handful” of people were killed.

Rather than doing anything remotely resembling journalism, the western mass media have opted instead to uncritically repeat what they’ve been told about the airstrike by US officials, which is the same as just publishing Pentagon press releases.

Here’s this from The Washington Post:

The Biden administration conducted an airstrike against alleged Iranian-linked fighters in Syria on Thursday, signaling its intent to push back against violence believed to be sponsored by Tehran.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the attack, the first action ordered by the Biden administration to push back against alleged Iranian-linked violence in Iraq and Syria, on a border control point in eastern Syria was “authorized in response to recent attacks against American and coalition personnel in Iraq, and to ongoing threats.”

He said the facilities were used by Iranian-linked militias including Kaitib Hezbollah and Kaitib Sayyid al-Shuhada.

The operation follows the latest serious attack on U.S. locations in Iraq that American officials have attributed to Iranian-linked groups operating in Iraq and Syria. Earlier this month, a rocket attack in northern Iraq killed a contractor working with the U.S. military and injured a U.S. service member there.

So we are being told that the United States launched an airstrike on Syria, a nation it invaded and is illegally occupying, because of attacks on “US locations” in Iraq, another nation the US invaded and is illegally occupying. This attack is justified on the basis that the Iraqi fighters were “Iranian-linked”, a claim that is both entirely without evidence and irrelevant to the justification of deadly military force. And this is somehow being framed in mainstream news publications as a defensive operation.

This is Defense Department stenography. The US military is an invading force in both Syria and Iraq; it is impossible for its actions in either of those countries to be defensive. It is always necessarily the aggressor. It’s the people trying to eject them who are acting defensively. The deaths of US troops and contractors in those countries can only be blamed on the powerful people who sent them there.

The US is just taking it as a given that it has de facto jurisdiction over the nations of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and that any attempt to interfere in its authority in the region is an unprovoked attack which must be defended against. This is completely backwards and illegitimate. Only through the most perversely warped American supremacist reality tunnels can it look valid to dictate the affairs of sovereign nations on the other side of the planet and respond with violence if anyone in those nations tries to eject them.

It’s illegitimate for the US to be in the Middle East at all. It’s illegitimate for the US to claim to be acting defensively in nations it invaded. It’s illegitimate for the US to act like Iranian-backed fighters aren’t allowed to be in Syria, where they are fighting alongside the Syrian government against ISIS and other extremist militias with the permission of Damascus. It is illegitimate for the US to claim the fighters attacking US personnel in Iraq are controlled by Iran when Iraqis have every reason to want the US out of their country themselves.

Even the official narrative reveals itself as illegitimate from within its own worldview. CNN reports that the site of the airstrike “was not specifically tied to the rocket attacks” in Iraq, and a Reuters/AP report says “Biden administration officials condemned the February 15 rocket attack near the city of Irbil in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish-run region, but as recently as this week officials indicated they had not determined for certain who carried it out.”

This is all so very typical of the American supremacist worldview that is being aggressively shoved down our throats by all western mainstream news media. The US can bomb who it likes, whenever it likes, and when it does it is only ever doing so in self defense, because the entire planet is the property of Washington, DC. It can seize control of entire clusters of nations, and if any of those nations resist in any way they are invading America’s sovereignty.

It’s like if you broke into your neighbor’s house to rob him, killed him when he tried to stop you, and then claimed self defense because you consider his home your property. Only in the American exceptionalist alternate universe is this considered normal and acceptable.

This sort of nonsense is why it’s so important to prioritize opposition to western imperialism. World warmongering and domination is the front upon which all the most egregious evils inflicted by the powerful take place, and it plays such a crucial role in upholding the power structures we are up against. Without endless war, the oligarchic empire which is the cause of so much of our suffering cannot function, and must give way to something else. If you’re looking to throw sand in the gears of the machine, anti-imperialism is your most efficacious path toward that end, and should therefore be your priority.

In America especially it is important to oppose war and imperialism, because an entire empire depends on keeping the locals too poor and propagandized to force their nation’s resources to go to their own wellbeing. As long as the United States functions as the hub of a globe-spanning power structure, all the progressive agendas that are being sought by what passes for the US left these days will be denied them. Opposing warmongering must come first.

Standing against imperialism and American supremacism cuts directly to the heart of our difficulties in this world, which is why so much energy goes into keeping us focused on identity politics and vapid energy sucks which inconvenience the powerful in no way whatsoever. If you want to out-wrestle a crocodile, you must bind shut its mouth. If you want to take down a globe-spanning empire, you must take out its weapons. Opposing warmongering and killing public trust in the propaganda used to justify it is the best way to do this.

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , | 4 Comments

Illinois’ Latest Use Of Taxpayer Money As Political Club

By Mark Glennon – Wirepoints – February 25, 2021

Illinois Treasurer Michael Frerichs and a group of 29 other state financial officials recently sent letters to six of the nation’s largest private sector money managers in a transparently partisan attempt to bully them out of supporting Republicans.

The effort is a misuse of the power that adheres to managing billions of dollars of taxpayer money and sets a dangerous precedent that might well invite retaliation in the same form by Republicans holding similar offices or from a Republican successor to Frerichs. It’s an attempt by incumbent officeholders to control much of the money that controls politics.

Unfortunately, the effort got no scrutiny and only a few news articles in the national media, including these in The Washington Post and Bloomberg.


Treasurer Michael Frerichs

Frerichs oversees the investment of some $35 billion of Illinoisan’s money. Together with the other treasurers, public fiduciaries and pension trustees who signed the letter, over a trillion dollars of public money is represented.

Their letter went in substantially identical form, one of which is here, to BlackRock Inc., Vanguard Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Fidelity Investments, State Street Corp. and Bank of New York Mellon Corp.

The letter purports to be mainly about transparency and political contributions to members of Congress who voted against certification of election results that came in from the states. On January 6, 147 Congressional Republicans voted against certification, which was well over half of the Republican members of Congress.

That, the letter says, made its writers worried about returns on their investments. “A functioning democracy is foundational to a stable economy,” the letter says, “and we rely on economic and political stability in order to generate consistent investment returns on behalf of our beneficiaries.”

Nothing political at all, the officials are claiming, they are just doing their best to maximize financial returns.

Take a closer look to see if that’s believable.

One implicit threat about contributions to those candidates is clear in the first sentence of the letters. “[With] assets under management of over $1 trillion,” Frerichs and the others wrote, “we are frequently asked to evaluate asset allocations to asset managers.”

And they ask in the letter, “Will [you] forswear corporate political spending (direct or indirect) to the 147 members of Congress who voted to overturn the results of a free and fair democratic election on January 6th, 2021?”

In other words, change your political contributions or, well, they didn’t need to spell it out.

There’s much more to it. The letters are a broad attempt to bully the money managers into partisan changes in their political activity.

You can’t even get past the letterhead, shown here, to see that broader, partisan agenda. It’s brazen, carrying the names of Service Employees International Union and Majority Action.

It’s so brazen you have to wonder what they were thinking.

SEIU is one of the largest public unions in the nation and huge Democratic benefactor. It is listed among Frerichs’ ten biggest campaign contributors in 2018, the last time he ran.

Majority Action, which spearheaded the effort behind the letter, is a progressive outfit focused on publicly shaming corporations into supporting like-minded causes, particularly on global warming.

Why are SEIU and Majority Action on the letterhead if not to signal general support for them as well?

As you would expect, it’s an entirely partisan group that signed the letter. Every one of the elected officials who signed it are Democrats. And each of the unelected officials who signed it are, from all I could find, active progressives and presumably also Democrats.

Are the letter writers sincere when claiming they are only concerned about their investment returns and election certification?

Objections to presidential vote certifications are not uncommon. Democrats have objected to all three certifications of Republican wins since 2000 – Donald Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004. When Sen. Barbara Boxer objected to certification of Bush’s Ohio certification in 2004, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said on the Senate floor, “I thank her for doing that because it gives members an opportunity once again on a bipartisan basis to look at a challenge that we face not just in the last election in one State but in many States.”

Durbin’s point was fair, and Democrats had every right to make those objections. The letter writers undoubtedly didn’t object, nor are we aware of any objections they had to any of countless elected officials who stood silent and sometimes encouraged the political violence we saw over the summer.

There’s another oddity about the letter. Among its signers is Aaron Ammons as trustee of SURS, one of Illinois’ pensions, the State University Retirement System.

SURS, like most Illinois pensions, is among the walking dead in actuarial terms, being only 39% funded. Does anybody really think that saving democracy from insurrectionists is what SURS trustees should be focused on?


SURS Trustee Aaron Amons

Ammons, too, is a progressive Democrat. He’s a former chapter president of SEIU. Appointed by Gov. JB Pritzker, he was elected Champaign County Clerk in 2018 and co-founded the Champaign Urbana Citizens for Peace & Justice. He is married to Democratic State Representative Carol Ammons.

The letter isn’t entirely focused on campaign contributions to those who voted against the vote certification. It addresses campaign donations in general and asks what broader reforms the letter’s recipients will undertake to rigorously reassess their “corporate political spending and evaluate whether payments serve to advance the company’s business objectives and a stable democracy.”

But that’s an entirely political judgement that neither Frerichs, Ammons nor the other signers are charged with imposing. Even if they are sincere in their claims about what’s good for rates of return in the long run, suffice it to say that opinions vary.

Those broader topics and questions belie the letter’s real purpose, which is to tell the big money folks to toe the party line — or else. From the letterhead down, its recipients would be fools to miss that full message. It’s not about maximizing returns, it’s about telling them where to use their financial clout politically.

We are fortunate that, at least so far, public officials with different political views than the letter writers haven’t tried the same tactic. They well might, as might a Republican successor to Frerichs.

A bad precedent has been set. Money, unfortunately, already controls much of government. But if this precedent is followed, we would have incumbent politicians effectively controlling much of the money that controls politics, pushing and pulling in different directions.

The letter is the most recent on a list of ways Frerichs has misused the public’s money for partisan purposes. Those stories and some on Frerichs’ other doings are in our articles linked below.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption | , | Leave a comment

In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says

By Aaron Maté | RealClearInvestigations | February 25, 2021

After four years of railing against “deep state” actors who, he said, tried to undermine his presidency, Donald Trump relented to US intelligence leaders in his final days in office, allowing them to block the release of critical material in the Russia investigation, according to a former senior congressional investigator who later joined the Trump administration.

Kash Patel, whose work on the House Intelligence Committee helped unearth US intelligence malpractice during the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe, said he does not know why Trump did not force the release of documents that would expose further wrongdoing. But he said senior intelligence officials “continuously impeded” their release – usually by slow-walking their reviews of the material. Patel said Trump’s CIA Director, Gina Haspel, was instrumental in blocking one of the most critical documents, he said.

Patel, who has seen the Russia probe’s underlying intelligence and co-wrote critical reports that have yet to be declassified, said new disclosures would expose additional misconduct and evidentiary holes in the CIA and FBI’s work.

“I think there were people within the IC [Intelligence Community], at the heads of certain intelligence agencies, who did not want their tradecraft called out, even though it was during a former administration, because it doesn’t look good on the agency itself,” Patel told RealClearInvestigations in his first in-depth interview since leaving government at the end of Trump’s term last month, having served in several intelligence and defense roles (full interview here).

Trump did not respond to requests seeking comment sent to intermediaries.

Although a Department of Justice inspector general’s report in December 2019 exposed significant intelligence failings and malpractice, Patel said more damning information is still being kept under wraps. And despite an ongoing investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the conduct of the officials who carried out the Trump-Russia inquiry, it is unclear if key documents will ever see the light of day.

Patel did not suggest that a game-changing smoking gun is being kept from the public. Core intelligence failures have been exposed – especially regarding the FBI’s reliance on Christopher Steele’s now debunked dossier to secure FISA warrants used to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But he said the withheld material would reveal more misconduct as well as major problems with the CIA’s assessment that Russia, on Vladimir Putin’s orders, ordered a sweeping and systematic interference 2016 campaign to elect Trump. Patel was cautious about going into detail on any sensitive information that has not yet been declassified.

‘Continuously Impeded’ in Public Disclosure

Patel’s work on the House Intelligence Committee, under the leadership of its former Republican chairman, Devin Nunes, is widely credited with exposing the FBI’s reliance on Steele and misrepresentations to the FISA court. Yet congressional Democrats and major media outlets portrayed him as a behind-the-scenes saboteur who sought to “discredit” the Russia investigation.

The media vitriol unnerved Patel, who had previously served as a national security official in the Obama-era Justice Department and Pentagon – a tenure that exceeds his time working under Trump. Patel says that ensuring public disclosure of critical information in such a consequential national security investigation motivated him to take the job in the first place.

“The agreement I made with Devin, I said, ‘Okay, I don’t really want to go to the Hill, but I’ll do the job on one basis: accountability and disclosure,” Patel said. “Everything we find, I don’t care if it’s good or bad or whatever, from your political perspective, we put it out.’ So the American public can just read it themselves, with a few protections here and there for some certain national security measures, but those are minimal redactions.”

That task proved difficult. The House Intelligence Committee’s disclosure efforts, Patel said, “were continuously impeded by members of the intelligence community themselves, with the same singular epithets that you’re going to harm sources and methods. … And I just highlight that because, we didn’t lose a single source. We didn’t lose a single relationship, and no one died by the public disclosures we made because we did it in a systematic and professional fashion.”

“But each time we forced them to produce [documents],” Patel added, “it only showed their coverup and embarrassment.” These key revelations he helped expose include Justice official Bruce Ohr’s admission that he acted as a liaison to Steele even after the FBI officially terminated him; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s false statements about leaks related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation; and the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier to spy on Page. “There is actually a law that prevents the FBI and DOJ from failing to disclose material to a court just to hide an embarrassment or mistake, and it came up during our investigation. It helped us compel disclosure.”

Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment’ 

For Patel, a key document that remains hidden from the public is the full report he helped prepare and which Trump chose not to declassify after pressure from the intelligence community: The House Intelligence Committee report about the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).

The ICA is a foundational Russiagate document. Released just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, it asserted that Russia waged an interference campaign to help defeat Hillary Clinton. Despite widespread media accounts that the ICA reflected the consensus view of all 17 US intelligence agencies, it was a rushed job completed in a few weeks by a small group of CIA analysts led by then-CIA Director John Brennan, who merely consulted with FBI and NSA counterparts. The NSA even dissented from a key judgment that Russia and Putin specifically aimed to help install Trump, expressing only “moderate confidence.”

The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”

Along with that March 2018 report, Patel and his intelligence committee colleagues produced a still-classified document that fleshed out the ICA’s “tradecraft failings” in greater detail.

“We went and looked at it [the ICA], and looked at the underlying evidence and cables, and talked to the people who did it,” Patel says. According to Patel, the ICA’s flaws begin with the unprecedentedly short window of time in which it was produced during the final days of the Obama White House. “In two to three weeks, you can’t have a comprehensive investigation of anything, in terms of interference and cybersecurity matters.”

Patel said that still classified information undermines another key claim – that Russia ordered a cyber-hacking campaign to help Trump. The March 2018 House report noted that the ICA’s judgments, “particularly on the cyber intrusion sections, employed appropriate caveats on sources and identified assumptions,” but those were drowned out by partisan insistence that Russia was the culprit.

Constrained from discussing the material, Patel said its release “would lend a lot of credence to” skepticism about the Mueller report’s claim that Russia waged a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign to install Trump.

That skepticism was bolstered in July 2019 when the Mueller team was reprimanded by a US District judge for falsely suggesting in its final report that a Russian social media firm acted in concert with the Kremlin. (Mueller’s prosecutors later dropped the case against the outfit.)

“We had multiple versions, with redactions, at different levels of classifications we were willing to release,” Patel said. “But that was unfortunately the one report, which speaks directly to [an absence of concrete evidence] that’s still sitting in a safe, classified. And unfortunately, the American public – unless Biden acts – won’t see it.”

Confirming earlier media reports from late last year, Patel says it was Trump’s CIA Director Gina Haspel who personally thwarted the House report’s release. The report sits in a safe at CIA headquarters in Langley. “The CIA has possession of it, and POTUS chose not to put it out,” Patel says. He does not know why.

‘Outrageous’ Reliance on CrowdStrike

Another key set of documents that the public has yet to see are reports by Democratic National Committee cyber-contractor CrowdStrike – reports the FBI relied on to accuse Russia of hacking the DNC. The FBI bowed to the DNC’s refusal to hand over its servers for analysis, a decision that Patel finds “outrageous.”

“The FBI, who are the experts in looking at servers and exploiting this information so that the intelligence community can digest it and understand what happened, did not have access to the DNC servers in their entirety,” Patel said. “For some outrageous reason the FBI agreed to having CrowdStrike be the referee as to what it could and could not exploit, and could and could not look at.”

According Patel, Crowdstrike CEO Shawn Henry, a former top FBI official under Mueller, “totally took advantage of the situation to the unfortunate shortcoming of the American public.”

CrowdStrike’s credibility suffered a major blow in May 2020 with the disclosure of an explosive admission from Henry that had been kept under wraps for nearly three years. In December 2017 testimony before the House Intel Committee showed he had acknowledged that his firm “did not have concrete evidence” that Russian hackers removed any data, including private emails, from the DNC servers.

“We wanted those depositions declassified immediately after we took them,” Patel recalled. But the committee was “thwarted,” he says, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Dan Coats, and later by Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff once Democrats took control of Congress in January 2018. According to Patel, Schiff “didn’t want some of these transcripts to come out. And that was just extremely frustrating.” Working with Coats’ successor, Richard Grenell, Patel ultimately forced the release of the Henry transcript and dozens of others last year.

Still classified, however, are the full CrowdStrike reports relied on by the FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Patel said their release would underscore Henry’s admission while raising new questions about why the government used reports from DNC contractors – the other being Fusion GPS’ Steele dossier – for a consequential national security case involving a rival Republican campaign.

Doubting Reliability of CIA’s Kremlin Mole

The CIA relied on another questionable source for its assertion that Putin personally ordered and orchestrated an interference campaign to elect Trump: a purported mole inside the Kremlin. The mole has been outed as Oleg Smolenkov, a mid-level Kremlin official who fled Russia in 2017 for the United States where he lives under his own name. According to the New York Times, some CIA officials harbored doubts about Smolenkov’s “trustworthiness.”

Patel said he could not comment on whether he believes Smolenkov relayed credible information to the CIA. “I’m sort of in a bind on this one, still, with all the classified information I looked at, and the declassifications we’ve requested, but have not yet been granted.”

Patel did suggest, however, that those who have raised skepticism about the CIA’s reliance on Smolenkov are “rightly” trying to “get to the bottom” of the story. “But until that ICA product that we created, and some of the other documents are finally revealed – if I start talking about them, then I’m probably going to get the FBI knocking at my door.”

Will Key Documents Be Released?

On his last full day in office, President Trump ordered the declassification of an additional binder of material from the FBI’s initial Trump-Russia probe, Crossfire Hurricane. A source familiar with the documents covered under the declassification order confirmed to RealClearInvestigations that it does not contain the House committee’s assessment of the January 2017 that Patel wants released. Nor does it contain any of the CrowdStrike reports used by the FBI.

In addition to those closely guarded documents, Patel thinks that there is even more to learn about the fraudulent surveillance warrants on Carter Page. The public should see “the entire subject portion” of the final Carter Page FISA warrant, Patel said, as well as “the underlying source verification reporting” in which the FBI tried to justify it, despite relying on the Steele dossier. By reading what the FBI “used to prop up that FISA, the American public can see what a bunch of malarkey it was that they were relying on,” Patel added. “The American public needs to know about and read for themselves and make their own determination as to why their government allowed this to happen. Knowingly.

“And that’s not castigating an entire agency. We’re not disparaging the entire FBI because of Peter Strzok [the FBI agent dismissed, in part, because of anti-Trump bias] and his crew of miscreants. Same thing goes for the intelligence community. If they did some shoddy tradecraft, the American public has a right to know about it in an investigation involving the presidential election.”

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Russophobia | , , | 2 Comments

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »