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Google “disinformation” and “election integrity” expert joins The White House

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | July 26, 2022

The long-since established “revolving door” scheme between the White House and Big Tech has continued with the appointment of former Google executive Camille Stewart Gloster as Deputy National Cyber Director with the Office of the National Cyber Director.

And before she joined Google, Gloster was already once working for the government – as a policy adviser in the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration.

The White House Office of the National Cyber Director has been operating for a year now, with Gloster slated to deal with workforce programs and security issues pertaining to supply chain; reports say that she will be joining other deputies in the Office who come from Microsoft, the CIA, and the National Security Council.

The practice of giving government jobs to former Big Tech execs, and of Big Tech employing former government officials is frowned upon as one way to establish an infrastructure of what critics fear can – and does – easily turn into “systemic collusion.”

Gloster, meanwhile, is known for her focus at Google, combating what the tech behemoth defines as misinformation on the Android platform – specifically, to “reduce the risk of user harm from misinformation.”

“She joins ONCD from Google, where she most recently served as Global Head of Product Security Strategy, and before that as Head of Security Policy and Election Integrity for Google Play and Android,” the announcement states.

Gloster has praised US and Chinese social media giants, favoring Twitter’s testing of “a community-based points system” to combat “misinformation” – a social credit style fact-checking system for politicians and public figures.

She also welcomed TikTok announcing new rules banning “harmful misinformation,” noting that it was good the super-popular video platform was aware that content posted there can influence political discourse.

Another way to influence political discourse, of course, is to arbitrarily declare content as misinformation and ban or downrank it, a method Big Tech has been employing in earnest over the past years.

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Hunter Biden Evidence Wrongly Labeled Disinformation by FBI: Whistleblower

By Oleg Burunov | Samizdat | July 26, 2022

While Hunter Biden was initially probed for his financial and business dealings in foreign countries during his father’s vice presidency, US prosecutors then significantly widened their scope to include Joe Biden’s son’s business associates, their related deals, and the purchase of at least one firearm.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley has demanded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) answer a DoJ whistleblower’s allegations that the FBI downplayed damning information about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Grassley is the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the FBI and the DoJ.

In letters to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, the senator revealed that a “highly credible” whistleblower had come forward alleging a widespread effort by some FBI officials to turn a blind eye to negative evidence on President Joe Biden’s son.

“The information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI’s receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI’s false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation,” the letter, in particular, reads.

Grassley insisted that in October 2020, one month before the US presidential election, “an avenue of derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed” by a senior FBI agent at the bureau’s Washington Field office.

The senator argued that the allegations obtained by his office “appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.”

According to the Senate Judiciary Committee member, “the volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter.”

DoJ’s Hunter Biden Probe Reportedly Reaches Critical Stage

His letter comes after CNN cited unnamed sources as saying last week that the federal probe into Hunter Biden had reached a “critical juncture” and investigators are weighing whether to charge the president’s son.

The sources told the broadcaster that prosecutors are now primarily focused on tax- and gun-related charges against POTUS’ son.

The firearm charge relates to at least one false statement made by Hunter in his procurement of a weapon. It is believed Biden’s son should have been prohibited from purchasing a firearm due to his self-professed struggles with drug addiction.

In recent months, prosecutors have discussed the matter with DoJ officials and investigators from both the FBI and Internal Revenue Service (IRS), according to the insiders.

The DoJ’s probe specifically looks into the contents of Hunter Biden’s so-called “laptop from Hell”, including compromising emails, naked photos and graphic videos that have been released since 2020, when the New York Post was the first to make public several emails from the device.

The laptop uncovered details about unseemly and potentially illegal activities by the president’s son, ranging from crack cocaine and alcohol-fueled parties with high-priced prostitutes to “business deals” involving the trading of cash for access to the elder Biden during his tenure as Barack Obama’s vice president.

Joe Biden has repeatedly dismissed any knowledge of his son’s business activities, and most news outlets and social media companies successfully shielded him from the laptop’s revelations ahead of the 2020 presidential election campaign, at which time the computer was dismissed as a “Russian disinformation operation.”

Earlier this year, the New York Times and The Washington Post changed course, confirming that the laptop was authentic and that the damning information contained within was real.

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

The All-American Lie Factory

Government and the media work together to promote war on Russia

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 26, 2022

This article is derived from a speech I made at the July 23rd Peace and Freedom Rally in Kingston New York

There are some things that I believe to be true about the anarchy that purports to be US foreign policy. First, and most important, I do not believe that any voter cast a ballot for Joe Biden because he or she wanted him to relentlessly pursue a needless conflict with Russia that could easily escalate into a nuclear war with unimaginable consequences for all parties. Biden has recently declared that the US will support Ukraine “until we win” and, as there are already tens of billions of dollars of weapons going to Ukraine plus American “advisers” on the ground, it constitutes a scenario in which American and Russian soldiers will soon likely be shooting at each other. The President of Serbia and columnists like Pat Buchanan and Tulsi Gabbard believe that we are already de facto in World War 3 and one has to wonder how the White House is getting away with ignoring the War Powers mandates in the US Constitution.

Second, I believe that the Russians approached the United States and its allies with some quite reasonable requests regarding their own national security given that a hostile military alliance was about to land on its doorsteps. The issues at stake were fully negotiable but the US refused to budge on anything and Russia felt compelled to take military action. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as a good war. I categorically reject anyone invading anyone else unless there is a dire and immediate threat, but the onus on how the Ukraine situation developed the way it did is on Washington.

Third, I believe that the US and British governments in particularly have been relentlessly lying to the people and that the media in most of west is party to the dissemination of the lies to sustain the war effort against Russia in Ukraine. The lies include both the genesis and progress of the war and there has also been a sustained effort to demonize President Vladimir Putin and anything Russian, including food, drinks, the Russian language and culture and even professional athletes. The latest victim is a Tchaikovsky symphony banned in Canada. Putin is being personally blamed for inflation, food shortages and energy problems which more properly are the fault of the Washington-led ill-thought-out reaction to him. There is considerable irony in the fact that Biden is giving Ukraine $1.7 billion for healthcare, while healthcare in the US is generally considered among the poorest in the developed world.

I believe that Russia is winning the war comfortably and Ukraine will be forced to give up territory while the American taxpayer gets the bill for the reckless spending policies, currently totaling more than $60 billion, while also looking forward to runaway inflation, energy shortages, and, in a worst-case scenario, a possible collapse of the dollar.

All of the above and the politics behind it has led me to believe that the United States, assisted by some of its allies, has become addicted to war as an excuse for domestic failures as well as a replacement for diplomacy to settle international disputes. The White House hypocritically describes its role as “global leadership” or maintaining a “rules based international order” or even defending “democracy against authoritarianism.” But at the same time the Biden Administration has just completed a fiasco evacuation that ended a twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan. Not having learned anything from Afghanistan, there are now US troops illegally present in Syria and Iraq and Washington is conniving to attack Iran over false claims made by Israel that the Iranians are developing a nuclear weapon. Neither Syria nor Iraq nor Iran in any way threaten the United States, just as the Russians did not threaten Americans prior to a regime change intervention in Ukraine starting in 2014, when the US arranged the overthrow of a government that was friendly to Moscow. The US has also begun to energize NATO to start looking at steps to take to confront the alleged Chinese threat.

The toll coming from constant warfare and fearmongering has also enabled a steady erosion of the liberties that Americans once enjoyed, including free speech and freedom to associate. I would like to discuss what the ordinary concerned citizen can do to cut through all the lies surrounding what is currently taking place, which might well be described as the most aggressive propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, far more extensive than the lying and dissimulation by the White House and Pentagon officials that preceded the disastrous Iraq war. It is an information plus propaganda war that sustains the actual fighting on the ground, and it is in some senses far more dangerous as it seeks to involve more countries in the carnage while also creating a global threat perception that will be used to justify further military interventions.

Part of the problem is that the US government is awash with bad information that it does not know how to manage so it makes it hard to identify anything that might actually be true. Back in my time as an intelligence officer operating overseas, there were a number of short cuts that were used to categorize and evaluate information. For example, if one were hanging out in a local bar and overheard two apparent government officials discussing something of interest that might be happening in the next week, one might report it to Washington with a source description FNU/LNU, which stood for “first name unknown” and “last name unknown.” In other words, it was unverifiable hearsay coming from two individuals who could not be identified. As such it was pretty much worthless, but it clogged up the system and invited speculation.

My personal favorite, however, was the more precise source descriptions developed by military intelligence using an alphabet letter followed by a number in a sequence running from A-1 to F-6. At the top of an intelligence report there would be an assessment of the source, or agent. A-1 meant a piece of information that was both credible and had been confirmed by other sources and that was also produced by an agent that had actual access to the information in question. At the other end of the scale, an F-6 was information that was dubious produced by a source that appeared to have no actual access to the information.

By that standard, we Americans have been fed a lot of largely fabricated F-6 “fake information” coming from both the government and the media to justify the Ukraine disaster. Here is how you can spot it. If it is a newspaper or magazine article skim all the way down the text until you reach a point towards the end where the sourcing of the information is generally hidden. If it is attributed to a named individual who indeed indisputably had direct access to the information it would at least suggest that the reporting contains a kernel of truth. But that is almost never the case, and one normally sees the source described as an “anonymous source” or a “government official” or even, in many cases, there is no source attribution at all. That generally means that the information conveyed in the reporting is completely unreliable and should be considered the product of a fabricator or a government and media propaganda mill. When a story is written by a journalist who claims to be on the scene it is also important to check out whether he or she is actually on site or working from a pool operating safely in Poland to produce the reporting. Yahoo News takes the prize in spreading propaganda as it currently reproduces press releases originating with the Ukrainian government and posts them as if they are unbiased reporting on what is taking place on the ground.

Another trick to making fake news look real is to route it through a third country. When I was in Turkey we in CIA never placed a story in the media there directly. Instead, a journalist on our payroll in France would do the story and the Turkish media would pick it up, believing that because it had appeared in Paris it must be true even though it was not. Currently, I have noted that a lot of apparently MI-6 produced fake stories on Ukraine have been appearing in the British media, most notably the Telegraph and Guardian. They are then replayed in the US media and elsewhere to validate stories that are essentially fabricated.

Television and radio media is even worse than print media as it almost never identifies the sources for the stories that it carries. So my advice is to be skeptical of what you read or hear regarding wars and rumors of wars. The war party is bipartisan in the United States and it is just itching to seize the opportunity to get a new venture going, and they are oblivious to the fact that they might in the process be about to destroy the world as we know it. We must expose their lies and unite and fight to make sure that they can’t get away with it!

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Katyusha rockets hit Emirati-owned gas complex in Iraqi Kurdistan

Press TV – July 26, 2022

A number of Katyusha rockets have struck a gas complex in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, in the latest attack to target the facility owned by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) energy firm Dana Gas.

“It is still not yet clear if there was any damage” in the Monday evening attack on the Khor Mor complex, said Ramak Ramadan, district chief of Chamchamal where the facility is located.

The gas complex lies between the northern Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Sulaimaniyah, in a region administered by Kurdish authorities.

No individual or group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack.

Sadiq Mohammed, an official from the adjacent Qadr Qaram district, said in a statement to the Kurdish-language Kurdistan 24 television news network that the attack was carried out using three Katyusha rockets, without causing any casualties.

Other reports said five rockets were used in the attack.

Earlier in June, the Emirati-owned facility was targeted three separate times by rockets that did not cause casualties or damage. No one claimed responsibility for those attacks either.

A Katyusha rocket on June 25 targeted the Khor Mor gas complex.

“The rocket hit around 500 meters outside the complex,” a local official said at the time. There was no immediate claim for the attack.

Katyusha rocket attacks hit the same facility on June 22 and June 17, also without causing casualties or damage.

Energy infrastructure elsewhere in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region has also come under attack in recent months.

Rockets struck the Kawergost refinery, northwest of the regional capital of Erbil, in April and May.

The assaults have come amid a simmering oil dispute between Kurdistan and the federal government in Baghdad.

The Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have been in a long-standing dispute over Baghdad’s share of Kurdish petrol, with the Iraqi government demanding full control of the region’s crude for years.

Under a deal between the two sides, the Kurdish region delivers 250,000 of its more than 400,000 barrels of daily oil output to Baghdad, in return for its share of the federal budget.

Over the past years, multiple reports have revealed that Iraqi Kurdistan is secretly selling oil to Israel at heavily discounted prices and that more than two-thirds of the occupying regime’s oil has been imported from the Kurdistan Regional Government.

London-based Al-Araby Al-Jadeed newspaper said in a report in March 2019 that Israel was buying significant amounts of Iraqi oil from certain parties and “mafias” in the Kurdistan region for prices as low as $16 or $17 dollars.

British daily the Financial Times had earlier reported that Israel had obtained 75 percent of its oil supplies from Iraqi Kurdistan.

Kurdistan’s secret dealings with Israel, which also include the region’s reported cooperation with the Israeli spy agency Mossad, come as Iraq’s parliament has recently passed a law making it illegal for the country to ever normalize its relations with the Tel Aviv regime.

The passage of the law cemented the Arab country’s invariable and age-old policy of refusing to recognize the occupying regime.

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

Black Sea and three musketeers

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | JULY 26, 2022 

As the conflict in Ukraine slouches toward Odessa, the war gets elevated to the sphere of a romantic adventure. If Alexander Dumas was alive, the idea might have struck him to write a sequel to his Three Musketeers, the historical novel written in 1844, which has heroic, chivalrous swordsmen who fight for justice, highlighting the absurdities of the Ancient Régime in a setting when the debate in France between republicans and monarchists was still fierce. 

The absurdity of raking up a non-existent controversy over the Russian missile strike on Odessa on Friday casts Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the second time in a lead role with three swashbuckling musketeers —  US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell. 

The first time was when Zelensky acted in a Russian musical film based on Dumas’ novel, with three beautiful Soviet actresses — Anna Ardova, Ruslana Pysanka and Alyona Sviridova — as musketeers, which was released in Moscow on New Year’s Eve in 2004.  

Coming back to time present, on Friday, it was a controversy waiting to happen when Russia fired four high precision Kalibr missiles and destroyed Ukrainian military infrastructure in Odessa Port just a day after the Russia-Ukraine grain deal was signed in Istanbul, which provides for the resumption of grain exports from the region. 

Zelensky promptly shouted that the missile strike was a “barbaric” act. And  Blinken came on the line to level charges against Russia; Guterres jumped into the fray “unequivocally” condemning the Russian strike; and, Borrell lazily wrote on Tweeter that the missile strike was “particularly reprehensible & again demonstrates Russia’s total disregard for international law & commitments.” 

As for the Russians, well, they slept over it — that is, until Sunday, when late in the afternoon, the Defence Ministry in Moscow inserted two tersely-worded sentences into its customary daily bulletin on the day’s operations in Ukraine:  

“Attack launched by high-precision long-range sea-based missiles has resulted in the elimination of Ukrainian military ship and a depot of Harpoon anti-ship missiles delivered by USA to the Kiev regime in the seaport of Odessa. The list of neutralised targets also includes the production facilities of an entity specialised in repairing and modernising the fleet of Ukrainian Navy.” 

Zelensky soon issued a clarification that the implementation of the grain deal from Odessa Port was not in doubt. Apparently, he hadn’t coordinated with the three musketeers sitting elsewhere who reacted prematurely. Blinken probably did the logical thing by distracting attention from the corruption concerns being revived in the Beltway regarding America’s gravy train to Ukraine. 

Fundamentally, the grain deal is an eyesore for the Biden administration, which in the first instance never expected an agreement could be negotiated that requires great flexibility on the Russian military’s side. Even more galling is that the deal is turning out to be a political victory for Russia. 

Moscow is getting good publicity over its pragmatism to lift its naval blockade for addressing the global food crisis. But  what is not obvious to most people is that the grain deal is also a back-to-back deal which commits the UN to get the restrictions being put by the EU and the US on Russia’s grain and fertiliser exports lifted. 

Besides, apart from the big income out of grain and fertiliser exports, there is that unquantifiable goodwill that Moscow earns from so many countries which critically depend on Russian wheat, especially in West Asia and Africa. Evidently, the itch to spoil the party in Moscow was found irresistible by Blinken & Co.  

Enter Sergey Lavrov. From Oyo, Republic of the Congo, deep in the heart of Africa, where he was travelling to follow up on the grain deal — Russia is the number 1 grain supplier to Africa — Foreign Minister Lavrov sensed immense potentials in the emergent situation. Lavrov made three points while flying out of Oyo in the direction of Kampala: 

  • The grain deal contains nothing “to bar us from continuing the special military operation and hit military infrastructure and other military targets. And the United Nations secretariat representatives… confirmed this interpretation of the documents yesterday.” (Guterres was apparently unaware.) 
  • The missile strike was aimed at “a separate part of the Odessa port, the so-called military part” and, therefore, “there are no obstacles for shipping grain to contractors under the Istanbul agreements and we have created none.” (Indeed, Zelensky himself is acknowledging it.) 
  • The missile strike was aimed at the depot where the Pentagon’s Harpoon anti-ship missiles were stored. “These missiles were delivered to pose threats to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Now, they pose no threats.”

What Lavrov didn’t say but would have implied is that the Odessa war theatre has now become “kinetic” and Friday’s attack sets a precedent. The missile strike underscores that Moscow likely anticipated Pentagon’s antics to use the grain deal to shield its deployment of advanced Harpoon missiles in Odessa Port. 

Curiously, off Bulgaria, next door to Odessa, on July 14-25, the US took part in a multinational maritime exercise, Breeze 2022,  involving 24 warships, cutters, auxiliary vessels, five planes, and four helicopters manned by 1,390 naval personnel from eleven NATO member countries!  

The controversy over the missile strike highlights that Russia’s special military operations in Ukraine will remain incomplete and inconclusive until Moscow altogether cuts off the US’ and NATO’s access to Odessa Port and cripples the alliance’s capability in the Black Sea. Obviously, that’s still some way off. 

Meanwhile, the great game is accelerating in the Black Sea with Blinken doubling down to woo Azerbaijan. He spoke with President Aliyev on Monday to press Washington’s pending offer “in helping facilitate the opening of regional transportation and communication linkages.” Azerbaijan is the chosen bridgehead for NATO in southern Caucasus. (See my blog Ukraine’s Great Game surfaces in Transcaucasia.)

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Romania and US to Hold Military Drills Near Ukrainian Border

Samizdat – 26.07.2022

CHISINAU – US troops stationed in Romania and the Romanian army will hold a joint demonstration exercise and an exhibition of military equipment at a location 125 miles south of the Ukrainian border on July 30, the Romanian defense ministry said on Tuesday.

“Members of the 2nd brigade of the combat group of the 101st US Airborne Division, stationed in Romania in accordance with the decisions of the Madrid Summit, will conduct demonstration exercises together with the soldiers of the 9th mechanized brigade ‘Marasesti,'” the ministry’s statement read.

The drills will take place at the Mihail Kogalniceanu military base in southeastern Romania, situated 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the border with Ukraine. Romania Chief of General Staff Daniel Petrescu and 101st US Airborne Division commander Joseph McGee will be present at the exercise.

Additionally, an exhibition of equipment will be organized, which will feature attack helicopters, tanks, armored amphibious transporters and artillery and anti-aircraft artillery machines, as well as special engineering and first aid equipment.

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

What Hath God Wrought (The Media Matrix — Part 2)

Corbett • 07/25/2022

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It’s difficult for us to appreciate just how incredible it was for those who first witnessed communication from a distance with a disembodied electric ghost. In fact, it was almost impossible for people to understand this type of communication in anything but spiritual terms. Even the word “medium” evokes the specter of contact with the spirit world. . . .

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TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m James Corbett of The Corbett Report, and I’m not here right now. . . . I mean, there. With you.

Confused? Well, take a look at this . . .

[Steps aside to reveal James in screen] See? But, in truth, I’m not here either. What you are watching are the ghostly reflections of someone far away. I am not in the room with you, but you can see me. You can hear me. You might not think much about this, but . . . [Snaps fingers, revealing green screen set in studio] . . . it is one of the wonders of our era, and it has shaped the world in ways we can barely comprehend.

VOICEOVER: Media. It surrounds us. We live our lives in it and through it. We structure our lives around it. But it wasn’t always this way. So how did we get here? And where is the media technology that increasingly governs our lives taking us? This is the story of The Media Matrix.

PART 2 – WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT

There’s a story about the famous Battle of Waterloo in 1815 that is not usually included in the history textbooks.

The story is that John Roworth—a trusted employee of Nathan Rothschild, the English heir of the infamous Rothschild banking family—was at the battlefield that day and, when the battle was decided and it was apparent that Napoleon had been defeated, he raced off on horseback, bearing the news across the English channel. The messenger arrived at his employers’s London office a full 24 hours before the official government courier and Rothschild, always looking for a way to turn a profit, decided to use the news to his advantage. He made a show of selling his shares at the London Stock Exchange and the public, believing the famed stockbroker had received word that Napoleon had won the battle, began selling as well. The stock market plummeted and Rothschild secretly bought up the shares at rock-bottom prices. By the time the news finally reached Londoners that Wellington—not Napoleon—was the victor at Waterloo, the coup was complete: Nathan Rothschild was the richest man in the realm.

This story, like so many historical adventure yarns, has been much decorated in the retelling: John Roworth was not at Waterloo, for one thing, and there was no great market sell-off in the hours before the official news of the battle reached London. But the central part of the tale is true: Nathan Rothschild did receive early news of Napoleon’s defeat and he did “do well” by that information, as Roworth admitted in a letter the month after the incident.

But whatever this story tells us about the world of finance, it tells us something more fundamental about something far more important: power. Knowledge is power, and, as we saw in Part 1 of this series, Gutenberg had brought that power to the masses. With the printing press, knowledge could be copied and spread to the far corners of the globe faster and easier and cheaper than it ever had before . . .

. . . but it still had to be carried. On horseback, on foot, by train, by carrier pigeon. Information was still a physical thing and even the news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo had to be physically transported from one place to another. But did it have to be this way? What if information could be communicated directly by electric current and sent across wires or through the air at the speed of light?

Enter Samuel Morse.

Morse was not a scientist or an experimenter, but a painter. He claimed that the idea for sending messages through electrical wires came to him in a flash of genius on a lengthy ship journey from Europe to America in 1832, and thus that he deserved credit as the sole inventor of the telegraph.

In reality, research along these lines had been going on for nearly a century. The idea of sending electrical messages through wires was first proposed in Scots Magazine in 1753 and it was demonstrated numerous times over the years—most memorably by Francisco Salvá, who in 1795 connected wires to human test subjects, assigned each of them a letter, and instructed them to shout their letter out when they received a shock.

Ignorant of this history, Morse had to rely on real scientists and inventors for his important breakthroughs. Like Professor Leonard Gale, who helped develop the technique of using relays to help the messages travel further than a few hundred yards. And Alfred Vail, a bright young machinist whose improvements to Morse’s crude prototype brought the idea into reality. Many even contend that it was Vail, not Morse, who invented the system of dots and dashes that we know as Morse Code.

Nonetheless, history is written by the winners, and Morse proved to be the winner. Getting the credit, the glory and, more to the point, the patent for the telegraph, Morse received a congressional appropriation of $30,000 to build the first telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore in 1844. He sent the first official telegraph message from the US Capitol to Alfred Vail at a railroad station in Baltimore. The message had been selected by Anne Ellsworth, the daughter of the Patent Commissioner with whom Morse was lodging while he was stationed in Washington. She chose a passage from the Bible fitting of the momentous occasion: “What hath God wrought!”

The passage, from the book of Numbers, is one of praise—rejoicing at the wonders that God had wrought for Israel—and ends with an exclamation mark. But the telegraph message didn’t contain punctuation, and so the press misreported the phrase with a question mark at the end: “What hath God wrought?” The medium had already begun to change the message.

It’s difficult for us to appreciate just how incredible it was for those who first witnessed communication from a distance with a disembodied electric ghost. In fact, it was almost impossible for people to understand this type of communication in anything but spiritual terms. Even the word “medium” evokes the specter of contact with the spirit world.

When the radio was introduced to Saudi Arabia, the country’s conservative Islamic clerics declared it “the devil hiding in a box” and demanded that King Abdulaziz ban the infernal contraption. The king saw the potential use of the radio for the development of the country, but, relying on the clerics for support, he couldn’t outright reject their council.

Instead, the crafty monarch proposed a test: the radio would be brought before him the next day and he would listen to it himself. If what the clerics said was true, then he would ban the devil’s device and behead those responsible for bringing it into the country.

The next day, the radio was brought before the king at the appointed time. But the king had secretly arranged with the radio engineers to make sure the Quran was being read at the hour of the test. Sure enough, when he switched it on and passages from the Quran were heard.

“Can it be that the devil is saying the Quran?” he asked. “Or is it perhaps true that this is not an evil box?” The clerics conceded defeat and the radio was allowed into Saudi Arabia.

We may laugh, but the Saudis were not the first or the last to mistake media technology for devilry. In 1449, Johann Fust—the scion of a wealthy and powerful family in Mainz—lent Gutenberg an enormous sum of money to start producing his famed Bible and confiscated the books from the printer when he couldn’t afford to repay the loan. When Fust later appeared on the streets of Paris, selling multiple copies of Gutenberg’s Bible, the bewildered Parisians—who had never seen printed books before and so couldn’t imagine how so many strangely identical copies of a manuscript could be produced so quickly—arrested him for witchcraft.

The essence of the mass media—its ability to project the voices of people who aren’t there using electronic gadgets and wireless networks—is the essence of magic, bringing to life the scrying mirrors and palantirs of lore. But is this media technology a dark art, or can its powers be used for good?

As the new medium of commercial radio rose in the early decades of the 20th century, listeners had cause to side with the Saudi clerics in their determination that it was, in fact, a devil in a box. Listeners like those who tuned into a strange news report on the Columbia Broadcasting System on the evening of Sunday, October 30, 1938.

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pierson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell’s observation, and describes the phenomenon as (quote) like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun (unquote). We now return you to the music of Ramón Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated in downtown New York.

SOURCE: Orson Welles War Of The Worlds 10/30/1938

Of course, this wasn’t a news broadcast at all. It was the infamous “Halloween Scare,” Orson Wells’ radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, which infamously caused panic among some members of the listening audience who were flipping through the dial and mistook the dramatized news “interruptions” for actual reports of a Martian invasion.

It’s become fashionable in recent years to downplay the incident as a myth. There was no real scare, only a few dimwits who got frightened. The newspapers—looking for any excuse to belittle radio, its fast-rising competition for the public’s attention and corporate advertising dollars—ginned up the story and sold the public on a panic that never was.

But there was something to the Halloween Scare. The City Manager of Trenton, New Jersey—mentioned by name in the broadcast—even wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to demand an immediate investigation into the stunt. In response, a team of researchers fanned out, collecting information, conducting interviews and studying reports about the panic to better understand what had happened and what could be learned about this new medium’s ability to influence the public.

The team was from the Princeton Radio Project—a research group founded with a two-year, $67,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study the effect of radio through the lens of social psychology. The team was led by Hadley Cantril, the old Dartmouth College roommate of Nelson Rockefeller who had written in 1935 that “[r]adio is an altogether novel medium of communication, preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men.”

Cantril’s report on Wells’ Halloween broadcast, The Invasion from Mars, concluded that such a large-scale media-induced frenzy could happen again “and even on a much more extensive scale.” This was important information for the funders of the Princeton Radio Project; their next major research project was a study of how radio could be used for spreading war propaganda, an increasingly important subject as the world slipped into the maw of World War II.

The question of electronic media’s ability to influence the public became even more important as the radio revolution of the early twentieth century flowed into the television revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Television had actually been ready to roll out as a commercial medium in the 1930s, but the Depression and then the war delayed the mass production of television sets. The first mass-produced commercial television hit the market in 1946, and it soon became one of the most quickly adopted technologies in history to that point, finding its way into the majority of American homes within a decade.

Strangely, as sociologist Robert Putnam documented in his 2000 bestseller, Bowling Alone, the era of television adoption precisely coincides with a severe drop-off in civic engagement among the American public. Could there be a relation? If so, what could it be?

One intriguing possibility comes from research conducted by Herbert Krugman in 1969. Krugman—who would go on to become manager of public opinion research at General Electric in the 1970s—was interested to discover what happens physiologically in the brain of a person watching TV. He taped a single electrode to the back of his test subject’s head and ran the wire to a Grass Model 7 Polygraph, which in turn interfaced with a Honeywell 7600 computer and a CAT 400B computer. He turned on the TV and began monitoring the brain waves of his subject. He found through repeated testing that “within about thirty seconds, the brain-waves switched from predominantly beta waves, indicating alert and conscious attention, to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention: the state of aimless fantasy and daydreaming below the threshold of consciousness.”

Krugman’s initial findings were confirmed by more extensive and accurate testing: TV rapidly induces an alpha-state consciousness in its viewers, putting them in a daydream state that leaves them less actively focused on their activities and more receptive to suggestion. This dream state combines with the nature of the medium itself to create a perfect tool for disengaging the viewers intellectually, removing them from active participation in their environment and substituting real experience with the simulacrum of experience.

In a word, TV hypnotizes its viewers.

NEIL POSTMAN: To begin with, television is essentially non-linguistic. It presents information mostly in visual images. Although human speech is heard on television and sometimes assumes importance, people mostly watch television. And what they watch are rapidly changing visual images, as many as 1200 different shots every hour. The average length of a shot on network television is 3.5 seconds. The average in a commercial is 2.5 seconds.

Now, this requires very little analytic decoding. In America, television watching is almost wholly a matter of what we would call pattern recognition. What I’m saying here is that the symbolic form of television—its form—does not require any special instruction or learning.

In America, television viewing begins at about the age of 18 months and by 36 months, children begin to understand and respond to television’s imagery. They have favorite characters, sing jingles they hear and ask for products they see advertised.

There’s no need for any preparation or prerequisite training for watching television. It needs no analog to the McGuffey Reader. Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills and that is why there is no such thing as remedial television watching.

SOURCE: 2001 | Fredonia Alum Neil Postman On Childhood

As we have seen, it was only a matter of years from the advent of commercial radio as a medium of communication until monopolistic financial interests were funding studies to determine how best to use it to mould the public consciousness. And, it seems, the television—with its brain wave-altering, hypnosis-inducing, cognitive impairment abilities—was designed from the very get-go to be a weapon of control deployed against the viewing public.

But if these media are weapons, if they are being used to direct and shape the public’s attention and, ultimately, their thoughts, it begs some questions: Who is wielding these weapons? And for what purpose?

This is no secret conspiracy. The answer is not difficult to find. TimeWarner and Disney and Comcast NBC Universal and News Corp and Sony and Universal Music Group and the handful of other companies that have consolidated control over the “mediaopoly” of the electronic media are the ones wielding the media weapon. Their boards of directors are public information. Their major shareholders are well known. A tight-knit network of wealthy and powerful people control what is broadcast by the corporate media, and, by extension, wield the media weapon to shape society in their interest.

In Part 1 of this series, we noted how technological advancements in the printing press and the development of new business models for the publishing industry had taken Gutenberg’s revolutionary technology out of the hands of the public and put it into the hands of the few rich industrialists with the capital to afford their own newspaper or book publisher. The Gutenberg conspiracy had led, seemingly inevitably, to the Morgan conspiracy. But that process didn’t end with the electrification of the media; it accelerated.

By the end of the twentieth century, a handful of media companies controlled the vast majority of what Americans read, saw and heard. That this situation was used to control what the public thought about important topics is, by now, obvious to all.

NEWSCASTERS: The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories — stories that simply aren’t true — without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.

SOURCE: Sinclair Broadcasting Under Fire for “Fake News” Script

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, this media oligopoly had cemented its control over the public mind. Combined, newspapers, television, movies and radio had the ability to direct people’s thoughts on any given topic, or even what they thought about. The zenith of that era was reached on September 11, 2001, when billions across the globe watched the dramatic events of 9/11 play out on their television screens like a big-budget Hollywood production.

But the media was not done evolving. Technologies were already being rolled out that would once again change the public’s relationship to the media. Technologies that would once again leave people questioning whether the media was a devil hiding in a box, wondering whether this new media was a tool of empowerment or control, and asking the question: What hath God wrought?

The Media Matrix

Part 2: What Hath God Wrought

Transcript and links: corbettreport.com/media

Next week: Into the Metaverse

July 26, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

New bill aims to make digital ID pervasive in the United States

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | July 25, 2022

Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) has reintroduced the “Improving Digital Identity Act,” a bipartisan bill that would increase the federal government’s involvement in the digital identity ecosystem. The bill is set to be approved by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The bill seeks to require the federal government to use its authority to help citizens “prove who they are online” through the provision of optional ID validation services, which “augment private sector digital identity and authentication solutions.”

The bill would also require the creation of a task force on digital identity and a grant program at the DHS to support the development of interoperable identity verification systems at the local and state levels.

Expressing her support for the bill, Committee Chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) said, “a secure digital identity infrastructure is an essential foundation to American economic and national security.”

However, the committee’s ranking Republican Rep. James Comer (R-KY) opposed the grant program provision in the bill and the timeline of the bill (the task force has three years to release a final report.)

“Improved and expanded digital identity technologies may well play an important role in reducing fraud, but this bill would only give the appearance of action,” he said.

A similar bill was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Krysten Sinema (D-AZ).

In a press release, Lummis said that “it doesn’t make sense that Americans have to constantly overshare sensitive identity information with government agencies and businesses, which are honeypots all too often targeted by hackers and identity thieves.”

The bill in the Senate has a few differences from the original one introduced in the House. The one in the Senate insists that access to digital ID verification should be equitable.

“The effectiveness of existing government digital identity approaches presents causes for concern, particularly with the use of facial recognition technology in federal, state and local government contacts with private sector companies,” said Maloney.

July 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

The WEF wants to end private car ownership

By Keeane Bexte | The Counter Signal | July 25, 2022

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is calling for the end of private car ownership in the name of saving the world from climate change by reducing the need for green tech resources.

“We need a clean energy revolution, and we need it now,” the WEF begins its article.

According to the WEF, critical metals, such as cobalt, lithium, and nickel — all of which are used in “clean energy technologies” — are in short supply. And while the WEF says recycling old tech that uses these metals could lessen the impact of shortages, it’s simply not enough.

“The complication is that we do not currently have enough metals in circulation, and even with recycling taken into consideration, mineral production is still forecasted to increase by nearly 500%. So how should we proceed?” the WEF asks.

Top of the list of solutions for how the WEF thinks we should proceed is to “Go from owning to using.”

Sound familiar?

“Be honest,” the WEF continues, “you likely have at least one old mobile phone tucked in the bottom of a drawer. Possibly an unused hard drive taking up space too. You aren’t alone. The average car or van in England is driven just 4% of the time… This is not at all resource efficient. More sharing can reduce ownership of idle equipment and thus material usage. Car sharing platforms such as Getaround and BlueSG have already seized that opportunity to offer vehicles where you pay per hour used.”

The WEF adds that people should not only give up their ownership of everything from cars to smartphones but that technologies and civilization need to be redesigned to facilitate this transition.

“To enable a broader transition from ownership to usership, the way we design things and systems need to change too… A design process that focuses on fulfilling the underlying need instead of designing for product purchasing is fundamental to this transition. This is the mindset needed to redesign cities to reduce private vehicles and other usages.”

Of course, transitioning from people owning things to essentially just renting them won’t be easy. The WEF acknowledges this but says it’s totally worth it. Just trust them.

July 25, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

Children Don’t Need COVID Vaccines, Canadian and Australian Groups Tell Public Health Officials

By Julie Comber, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 25, 2022

Groups in Canada and Australia are urging public health officials to reconsider rolling out COVID-19 vaccines for young children, following the authorization earlier this month in both countries of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 6 months to 5 years.

The Australian Vaccine-risks Network (AVN) on July 19 sent an open letter to Dr. Brendan Murphy, secretary of Australia’s Department of Health and Aged Care, voting members of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation and members of parliament threatening to “move forward with preparations for seeking the intervention of the Federal Court of Australia” if officials don’t respond.

The Canadian COVID Care Alliance (CCCA) on July 14 published an open letter to Canadian health officials stating their members would “be happy to meet you to discuss findings documented in this letter in greater detail.”

Both letters emphasized three arguments against authorizing the mRNA shots in young children and babies:

  1. Children don’t need COVID-19 vaccination because they are at extremely low risk of COVID-19.
  2. In any case, the mRNA shots don’t work well.
  3. The potential harm from the mRNA shots outweighs the benefits for young children.

Both letters also referenced the June 30 open letter to U.K. health officials from more than 70 physicians and scientists warning against vaccinating younger children against COVID-19.

The U.K. letter, written in response to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in mid-June of the Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shots for children as young as 6 months, urged U.K. health officials to not “make the same mistake” the FDA made.

All three letters referenced Søren Brostrøm, director of the Danish Health and Medicines Authority, who in June said, “We did not get much out of having children vaccinated against coronavirus last year.”

Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration on July 18 provisionally approved a pediatric dose of Moderna’s Spikevax COVID-19 shot for children ages 6 months to 5 years old. Rollout of the vaccines is contingent on input from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation.

A few days earlier, on July 14, Health Canada authorized the use of Spikevax for children 6 months to 5 years of age. According to the statement, “As a result of this authorization, approximately 1.7 million children are now eligible for vaccination against COVID-19.”

Risks ‘far outweigh’ benefits for children

The 11-page CCCA letter contains 117 references and six pages of figures and graphs to support the group’s argument that “the data shows that, in the Omicron era, when population-based immunity is widespread, the risks associated with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines far outweigh the benefits in children.”

The authors of the CCCA letter criticized the FDA, stating, “no gold standard, placebo-controlled disease endpoint trials, large enough [with at least 800,000 participants] to categorically establish the clinical safety and long-term efficacy of the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccinations in children 12- to 15-years-old, 5- to 11-years-old, 2- to 4-years-old, and 6-months-old to 23-months-old have been undertaken.”

Instead, the EUA for Pfizer was “based on the preliminary results of four very small immuno-bridging trials, enrolling fewer than 3,000 participants each.”

The CCCA letter presented data from the Canadian province of Ontario, which “reported a negative dose-response effect for the COVID-19 vaccinations [original emphasis].”

The letter continued:

“In other words, the proportion of cases of COVID-19 were highest among those who had been ‘boosted,’ lower among the ‘fully inoculated’ and least among the ‘not fully inoculated’ (which includes the ‘uninoculated’).”

The authors presented graphs from the Public Health Ontario website, noting a similar pattern was observed in the 12- to 17-year-olds and the 5- to 11-year-old age groups.

“Additionally, a greater proportion of ‘boosted’ Ontarians have died, revealing that the vaccinations may be associated with serious secondary effects.”

The CCCA letter concludes:

“We trust that our research has provided you with evidence needed to adjust Canadian health policy to protect our children from undue harm. We would be happy to meet you to discuss findings documented in this letter in greater detail.”

‘Huge gap’ in Pfizer’s vaccine trial documentation

According to the authors of the AVN letter, the Pfizer documentation presented to the FDA had huge gaps in the evidence provided.

For example, the letter stated:

“The protocol was changed mid-trial. The original two-dose schedule exhibited poor immunogenicity with efficacy far below the required standard. A third dose was added by which time many of the original placebo recipients had been vaccinated.”

The AVN letter argued the Moderna shot for young children fails to meet Australia’s regulatory requirements to be granted “provisional determination” (similar to EUA in the U.S.) under regulation 10L(1)(a) of the Therapeutic Goods Regulations.

To receive provisional determination, there must be “an indication of the medicine is the treatment, prevention or diagnosis of a life-threatening or seriously debilitating condition,” the letter stated.

The authors said Australia’s health department and TGA did not “show any data or science to support a conclusion that COVID-19, and particularly the Omicron variant now widespread across Australia, is ‘life-threatening’ to infants aged 6 months up through 4 years, nor indeed that infants 6 months up through 4 years suffer ‘seriously debilitating’ symptoms when infected with COVID-19.”

The authors also addressed the issue of manipulative strategies used to promote COVID-19 vaccination of children, and said pushing unnecessary and novel mRNA-based vaccines onto young children risks undermining parental confidence in routine immunization programs.

Julie Comber is a freelance science reporter for The Defender.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

July 25, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Lockdowns causing Hepatitis in Children

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | July 25, 2022

So they think they have found the likely cause of the mystery hepatitis outbreak in children. And surprise surprise, the cause was… Lockdowns.

A report by the BBC (which heavily promoted lockdowns) said “two teams of researchers, from London and Glasgow, say infants exposed later than normal – because of Covid restrictions – missed out on some early immunity to: adenovirus, which normally causes colds and stomach upsets and adeno-associated virus two, which normally causes no illness and requires a coinfecting “helper” virus – such as adenovirus – to replicate.”

Covid or vaccines were ruled out as a cause but I guess there is still the theory of shedding. Whilst children of this age were not vaccinated, some have speculated that spike protein shedding from vaccinated parents may have been the cause. There has been no evidence either way to support this however.

I would prefer to stick with what we do know and that is that lockdowns are extremely damaging. The report says that experts are hopeful cases are becoming fewer but are still on the alert for new ones. Great, if new cases disappear but “experts” got us into this mess in the first place.

The BBC article says more than 1,000 children (many under five) have been affected and focusses on one child who needed an urgent liver transplant. Fortunately, he is recovering but he has needed a liver transplant and will need to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of his life. Moreover, his Mum ended up in intensive care after she was going to donate part of her liver but ended up reacting to the drugs.

The Mum is quoted as saying “There is something really heartbreaking about that because you go along following the rules, do what you are supposed to do to protect people that are vulnerable and then, in some horrible roundabout way, your own child has become more vulnerable because you did what you were supposed to do.”

In a highly complex society, every tiny change can have massive consequences. Especially with things that we don’t fully understand, such as viruses, even if we like to pretend we do. Not only did “experts” not consider the unintended consequences that could and would occur due to lockdowns (publicly at least) but they actively supressed any discussion on the topic. The mainstream media was complicit by again not allowing these discussions to take place. They should hang their heads in shame and ensure it never happens again.

July 25, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Time for Palestine to claim its stolen gas

Hezbollah threatened Israel with war if Lebanon is not allowed to exploit its share in the Karish gas field. Palestinian resistance may do the same over the “stolen gas” off Gaza.

By Yousef Fares | The Cradle | July 22 2022

The maritime border dispute between Lebanon and Israel over ​​the Karish gas field is reminiscent of the stolen gas fields in Palestine’s Gaza Strip. With the naked eye, Gazans can only stand by and watch the Occupation’s gas drilling platforms a few kilometers off their own coast.

This situation could change though, and may depend on the way in which the resistance in Lebanon handles the conflict over Karish.

That scenario may encourage the Palestinian resistance to follow their northern neighbor’s example in threatening to target Israeli platforms if Palestinians are denied their rights to the “Gaza Marine” field.

So long as Palestinians are deprived of basic living condition rights (electricity, fuel, food and medicine shortages) by their Israeli occupiers, they would be foolhardy to ignore the game-changing potential of gas extraction off their own coastline.

However, Lebanon’s current dispute is not the only issue that has led to the Palestinian claim resurfacing. Indeed, there are other factors related to the energy crisis, and it involves the Europeans.

Not Israel’s gas to export

On 15 June, it was announced in Cairo that a memorandum of understanding (MoU) had been signed to export Israeli (stolen Palestinian) gas to the European Union (EU) through Egypt.

The MoU, which Israel and the EU described as a “historic agreement,” extends over three years and is automatically renewable for two further years. It includes transporting gas from Israel to liquefaction stations in Egypt (Idku and Damietta in the north), then shipping it to Europe, which imported 155 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas from Russia last year.

In light of the EU’s faltering standoff with Moscow over Ukraine, Europe is seeking – among other sources – “Israeli gas” to compensate for about 10 percent of this amount, while Israel for its part is eager to increase its production of natural gas to 40 bcm (billion cubic meters) annually.

Experts estimate that most of this quantity will come from Palestinian gas extracted from “Gaza Marine 1” which is adjacent to the Strip, and “Marine 2” which is located within the maritime border area between Gaza and Israel.

Not the PA’s right 

Understandably, news of the MoU angered the Palestinian resistance, especially since the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah did not take any practical steps to demand Palestinian rights in this matter.

Informed, anonymous sources have told The Cradle that the EU has bought the silence of the PA by giving it a 4 percent share of the value of the extracted gas, while most of the agreements signed between Ramallah and the extraction companies, in the past two decades, stipulated a ratio ranging from 10 percent to 27.5 percent.

There are also accusations that the PA will only collect some taxes on monthly production, in addition to accelerating EU aid to the Palestinians.

On 12 June, the European Commission approved a new aid package for the Palestinians worth 224.8 million euros, as a ‘bribe’ for the PA, with a verbal pledge to support Palestinian rights and confront Israeli policies that undermine the two-state solution, particularly in Jerusalem.

The EU also pledged to press for the allocation of part of the extracted gas for Palestinians at preferential prices in order to operate the power plants in Gaza and Jenin.

In return for these gestures, the PA committed to the charter of the “Eastern Mediterranean Gas Countries,” and will not object to any steps in the region’s energy file, specifically with regard to the start of exploration and extraction of natural gas from the Gaza Marine field and the Rantis field west of Ramallah. The PA further agreed not to raise the issue of Palestinian rights to energy in the areas under its “control.”

In this context, Israel tried to indirectly buy the restraint of the resistance in the Gaza Strip by increasing work permits for Palestinians in the occupied territories to 20,000.

Gaza’s gas

Located in Palestinian territorial waters 36 km west of the Strip in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Gaza Marine gas field was first discovered around 1999 by British Gas who were contracted to develop it.

Despite its discovery, gas has not been extracted from the area despite the PA’s conclusion of several agreements with foreign companies, which were aborted because Israel refused to allow the operations to proceed.

Significantly, the Gaza Marine includes approximately 8 adjacent fields and is estimated to contain 12 trillion cubic meters of gas, at an attractive depth that makes the cost of extraction low.

Pirates of the Mediterranean

Israel controls the gas fields in Palestinian waters in the north of the Gaza Strip and in the eastern Mediterranean, including the so-called Yam Tethys fields, which were proven to be Palestinian property according to maps submitted by the state of Palestine to the United Nations.

In 2019, an investigation conducted by Al-Jazeera showed that Israel drained the “Mari B” gas field in the Gaza Sea (it contained enough gas for the Strip for 15 years). An investigation by Middle East Eye concluded that the Palestinians could claim 6,600 square kilometers of marine area, five times the area they now own.

Lebanon and the Gaza Strip face similar economic difficulties brought about through different foreign tools of economic besiegement. In the case of Gaza, the blockade is direct, as Israel controls the factors impacting their standard of living and welfare. As for Lebanon, it faces US sanctions and diktats that have contributed to the country’s economic meltdown.

The way in which Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah manages the Karish field file will be interesting as it is likely to influence how the Palestinian resistance choose to go about protecting and reclaiming their rights.

With gas revenues estimated at $4.5 billion annually, Ramallah’s budget – which in 2021 was set at $5.6 billion, of which $3.9 billion was provided by internal revenues – could achieve self-sufficiency. Additionally, these resources could provide a radical solution to the fuel and electricity crises in the Strip.

A meeting of minds in Beirut

Informed sources have told The Cradle they have credible reason to believe the Palestinian resistance factions will take advantage of the battle that Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has threatened to ignite if Israel continues to ignore Lebanon’s right to its gas fields. Nasrallah has set a deadline – the start of September – for this access to be provided.

The sources also say that Hamas’ Political Bureau Chief Ismail Haniyeh discussed the gas file with Nasrallah during their meeting in Beirut on 23 June, and suggested that the resistance in Gaza would likely participate in any future war, especially in the face of Israel’s continued theft and deprivation of natural resources.

Haniyeh spoke of “Lebanon’s right to extract gas from its maritime borders, and to stop Israeli piracy.”

However, there are calculations which must be taken into account before the Palestinian resistance gets involved in any war. This is related to the scale of the hypothetical war and the Israeli reaction to it, as well as to the logistical capabilities of the resistance at the naval level.

Yet it is the Palestinian silence on both the official and resistance level which has angered Lebanese authorities. The Director General of Lebanon’s General Security, Major General Abbas Ibrahim, demanded that Palestinians take a coherent political stance towards what “Lebanon is negotiating regarding the gas that is in the Palestinian waters occupied by Israel.”

A military response

However, well-informed sources in the Palestinian resistance tell The Cradle that their factions have now placed the military option relating to Gaza Marine on the table, triggered by the signing of the tripartite gas agreement (between Egypt, Israel and the EU) in June.

Political analyst Ismail Muhammad believes that the Haniyeh-Nasrallah meeting resulted in a preliminary agreement, which could be implemented at the military level if necessary.

Speaking to The Cradle, Muhammad explained that “the resistance cannot miss such regional circumstances to remind of its right to Palestinian gas which has been stolen before its eyes. Just as Lebanon’s economic future depends on the extraction and sale of gas, Palestine in general, and Gaza in particular, needs such income to end the economic dependence on occupation and to liberate its political decision-making.”

Muhammad refers to the expected strategic results of any victory in the battle over the Karish and Gaza Marine fields, not just the potential economic outcomes. Extracting the right to one’s energy resources, whether by military force or by an agreement, effectively ends the Israeli-US economic blockade in both Gaza and Lebanon.

This presents “a victory for the resistance, which increases its political influence and reduces the influence of external dictates,” he added.

“This is a major battle. Winning it against the Israeli-American-Arab alliance will change the future of the region.”

Expected scenarios

There is near unanimity that there is as much a chance of a gradual military escalation as there is of reaching a fair solution to the Karish field dilemma. There are three scenarios for the role of the Palestinian resistance in the event that Hezbollah is forced to resort to force:

First, that Hezbollah initiate a gradual escalation using a qualitative weapon to strike the British/Greek drilling ship in Karish. This will deprive all parties of benefiting from the field, and return the gas file to square one.

On the other hand, Israel absorbs the blow and responds in a limited manner that does not lead to an all-out war. In this case, it is expected that the resistance in Gaza will maintain its readiness without providing guarantees of non-interference, which means that Israel will have to occupy thousands of its soldiers, along with a few squadrons of its aircraft and at least a tank battalion, to contain any reaction in Gaza.

Second, that Israel ignore Nasrallah’s threats to strike the gas platforms in “Karish and beyond Karish,” which effectively means to paralyze the entire Israeli energy sector by expanding the range of targets to include the fields of Athens, Tanin, Dolphin, Leviathan, Dalit and Aphrodite.

These fields represent the cornerstone of the energy sector, on which Israel relies to secure its gas and oil needs and provide it with financial revenues. The fields located off the shores of occupied Ashkelon and Gaza, such as Kirin, Nawa and Marin Bay – about 190 km from Gaza – also fall within the scope of Nasrallah’s “beyond Karish” equation.

Sources in the Palestinian resistance who spoke to The Cradle suggest that this scenario means a comprehensive regional war. In this case, their decision would be to “directly participate” in such a war. Although their logistical capabilities do not allow for “accurate point” hits to the gas rigs, the fire intensity provided by the suicide drones and missiles will put these fields out of action.

One source points to the Palestinian resistance’s success in targeting the Tamar natural gas field off the shores of Ashkelon and the Eilat-Ashkelon gas pipeline, which was hit by about twenty missiles, during Operation Sayf Al-Quds (Sword of Jerusalem) in May 2021.

“Israel will not be able to launch a large-scale operation against the Strip. It will not venture into an irregular war on two fronts at the same time, especially since the priority is for the Lebanese front, where there is a huge stockpile of weapons and advanced capabilities. Most probably, it will be satisfied with conventional air strikes against civilian and military targets in Gaza,” he says.

Third, the resistance also takes into account the scenario of a comprehensive war in which all the components of the Resistance Axis can participate; in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

In such a conflict, the Palestinian resistance will spare no effort in igniting all the fronts, in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, and even in the 1948 occupied territories, as it will be an opportunity to change the “map of the region” and hit a “historic blow to the entire Zionist project,” even though the current international circumstances make such scenario unlikely to happen.

Palestinian pragmatism

It is evident that the resistance in Gaza views the gas crisis between Lebanon and Israel as an opportunity that must be exploited to demand legitimate Palestinian rights. The continuation of difficult living conditions in the Gaza Strip in particular, hostage to conditional Israeli facilities, is something worth sacrificing to change.

Therefore, Gaza’s participation in a war between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel stems from the existence of a common interest, and not just a mutual foe.

July 25, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

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