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Twitter’s ‘secret blacklists’ exposed

RT | December 8, 2022

Twitter has created a series of barriers and tools for moderators to prevent specific tweets and entire topics from trending, or limit the visibility of entire accounts, according to internal correspondence and interviews with multiple high-level sources within the company.

Despite repeated public assurances by top Twitter officials that the company does not “shadow ban” users, especially not “based on political viewpoints or ideology,” the practice actually existed under the euphemism of “visibility filtering,” according to journalist Bari Weiss, who published the second installment of the so-called ‘Twitter Files’ in a lengthy thread on Thursday night.

“Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee said, while another admitted that “normal people do not know how much we do.”

Twitter moderators have the power to add the user to categories such as “Trends Blacklist,” “Search Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify,” to limit the scope of a particular tweet or entire account’s discoverability – all without users’ knowledge or any warning.

However, above the common moderators was another “secret group” that handled issues concerning “high follower,” “controversial” and other notable users. Known as “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” the team included high-level executives such as former Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, the Global Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth and CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 1 Comment

Whitty and Vallance, the Pandemic Pinocchios

Sir Patrick Vallance is with Chris Whitty. Source: Sky News
By Serena Wylde | TCW Defending Freedom | December 6, 2022

In this dystopian era, honest scientists and physicians have become accustomed to having to painstakingly counter the fabrications and unsubstantiated claims made by ministers and health officials.

They have done this with cool logic and hard evidence. The Great Barrington Declaration put forth sensible analysis and advice, but politicians were far too excited by the fairground fortune-tellers at Gates-funded Imperial College with their box of toys designed to generate mass fear, to entertain logic.

So Chief Medical Officer Sir Chris Whitty, Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance and their merry crew at No. 10 set about suspending economic and social activity, destroying livelihoods and swamping the airwaves with ominous exhortations, thus succeeding in destabilising public wellbeing and preventing access to medical care.

This was unsurprising, because they had engaged armies of behavioural psychologists, paid for by taxpayers’ money, to imprison people’s minds in a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Indeed, behavioural psychologist David Charalambous and his team have discovered more than 200 different ways which were used to manipulate behaviour, and they suspect there are many more.

Now, with the predicted tidal wave of sickness and excess deaths resulting from their folly and the insidious ‘vaccines’ they so avidly pushed too voluminous to hide, Whitty and Vallance resort to contortions to distort reality.

‘Lockdowns were always a matter of the least bad option’, they assert in a ‘technical report’ on the challenges of the pandemic. Omitting the fact that they ignored all alternative sensible plans, they plead that letting the disease spread would also have had ‘major significant harmful effects’.

Making wild assertions unsubstantiated by a shred of evidence has become a regular feature of those drunk on power. It brings to mind another interesting observation made by David Charalambous, founder of Reaching People , namely that those who repeat propaganda from a podium end up more hypnotised than those the propaganda is aimed at.

Attributing a sudden increase in heart attacks and strokes, as well as the rapid development of previously unseen cancers and those that were in remission, to ‘reluctance’ to seek medical care during the lockdowns, is an audacious stab at explaining away the scale of vaccine injury that’s escalated in line with the volume and cumulative effect of multiple vaccinations.

But real-world evidence can’t be held back. In an article for The Defender entitled ‘Risk of dying from Covid was always “minuscule”, regardless of age’, Dr Joseph Mercola lists the risks of dying from Covid-19 by age group, based on published data from the Irish census bureau and the central statistics office for 2020 and 2021. 

For those under 70, the death rate was 0.14 per cent, for those under 50 it was 0.002 per cent, while under 25 the mortality rate was 0.00018 per cent, or a one in half a million risk of death. Set against this risk profile, we have copious data on the broad spectrum risks of the Covid-19 ‘vaccines’.

In a talk in November, cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra highlighted the original Pfizer trial data, saying: ‘One is more likely to suffer a serious adverse event, disability, hospitalisation, life-changing event from the “vaccines” than one was to be hospitalised with Covid (prior to the rollout)’. He added that at least one in 800 people will suffer a vaccine injury.

The Canadian physician Dr Charles Hoffe went public in April 2021 with his findings on the vaccinated. Alarmed at the amount of serious adverse events he was witnessing in his practice, he tested his patients at four to seven days after vaccination, and found that in a sample of several hundred cases, 62 per cent indicated the presence of micro clots. His open letter of April 5, 2021 to the British Columbia Ministry of Health can be seen here.

Cardiovascular and neurological damage is the most manifest, but the synthetic spike proteins which circulate in the bloodstream after vaccination clearly have the potential to harm any one of the body’s systems – including cardiovascular, neurological, immune, reproductive, digestive, endocrine, lymphatic and muscular-skeletal.

As the mRNA ‘vaccines’ introduce into the body’s cells a gene sequence which is a set of instructions to manufacture synthetic spike proteins, it stands to reason the body is being set up to attack itself, which is the very definition of an auto-immune condition.

In July of 2021, Professor Michael Palmer gave a video presentation of the pharmacokinetics and toxicity of mRNA injections as part of the Doctors for Covid Ethics symposium. It featured a study of how spike proteins gravitated in particularly high concentrations to the liver, spleen and ovaries.

In a later video, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi reported the autopsy findings of Covid-19 vaccination fatalities across a wide range of ages. He warned that depletion of the body’s natural defences could activate many agents which ordinarily lie dormant in the body, such as tuberculosis, as well as an eruption of cancer tumours whose cells are otherwise held in check by healthy immune systems.

American pathologist Dr Ryan Cole has flagged up an exponential increase in the incidence of cancer, as has a Danish oncologist specialising in breast cancer. Oncologist Professor Angus Dalgleish’s open letter to the British Medical Journal on his findings further confirms this phenomenon.

In an article in The Defender entitled ‘How Covid shots harm the immune system’, Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses her paper ‘Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations’ published in June in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology.

The paper was co-written by doctors Peter McCullough, Greg Nigh and Anthony Kyriakopoulos, and describes in detail the mechanisms whereby the Covid-19 injections suppress the innate immune system.

A campaign was launched to have the paper retracted, and the controversy led to the resignation of the editor of the journal. Efforts were made to discredit Seneff, and McCullough has since been stripped of his medical credentials. But the paper has not been retracted.

Smear campaigns and corruption won’t hold back the tide of data indefinitely. Chris Whitty’s rhetoric suggesting we are going to be living in a state of revolving pandemics needs to be dismantled outright, along with the biological weapons industry. All mRNA vaccines should be withdrawn, and the resources deployed in developing detoxification protocols for the vaccinated.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 1 Comment

Investigation launches into possible State Department funding of third parties to censor online speech

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | December 8, 2022

America First Legal (AFL) has announced that it has filed a total of nine Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that pertain to US State Department’s behavior in awarding grants and funding to outfits that are allegedly used as a way to “outsource” government censorship and disinformation.

The group suspects that the State Department used the Global Engagement Center (GEC) to fund “content moderation” groups, and had set aside $60 million for this purpose.

AFL says its FOIA requests aim to shed light on how in a number of cases the State Department pushed money to the likes of the Atlantic Council, Digital Public Square, Moonshot CVE, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which AFL says are “deeply involved” in moderation and censorship on internet platforms.

The obvious reason why this would be done would be for the government to find ways to circumvent  limitations it faces to itself, directly censor “unwanted” online content.

The latest requests are part of AFL’s ongoing investigations into how the US government engaged in its “misinformation and disinformation” campaign, dubbed here as Orwellian, including how it may have used its powers to influence major social media to act on its behalf.

This AFL effort includes a lawsuit filed recently to force the government to disclose any involvement by GEC in this suspected scheme in the period before the 2020 presidential elections.

See the lawsuits here and here.

AFL says that it recently learned, via State Department leaks, about a video game funded in this way to essentially indoctrinate youth against “populist news content,” while another government-financed game found its way to schools around the world, apparently as one way to influence elections in various countries.

Back in the US, AFL says it hopes that its efforts to obtain the records in question, should they succeed, will “help shed light on how these taxpayer funds and authorities are being weaponized against the American people and our civil liberties.”

AFL’s First Legal Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight Reed D. Rubinstein commented, among other things, that “politically partisan bureaucrats, almost always in concert with private companies, are running multiple propaganda campaigns and information actions to suppress First Amendment-protected speech and to control and shape what Americans hear and think.”

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 2 Comments

US military official targets mom over Facebook post that criticized school’s promotion of “polysexual” art

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 8, 2022

After a New Jersey mom took to  to criticize posters in the entrance to a local school that promoted various sexual preferences, a high-ranking United States (US) military official from a local Joint Base accused her of causing “safety concerns” and flagged her post to state and local law enforcement.

The story was first covered by Chaos and Control which documented mom and Board of Education (BOE) member Angela Reading sharing her concerns about the posters in a public Facebook group on November 22. Some of the posters that Reading criticized promoted sexual preferences such as “pansexual” and “polysexual” (terms that refer to a sexual attraction towards people regardless of their gender).

In her post, Reading said she was “livid” after her seven-year-old daughter read the posters while attending an elementary “Math Night” and asked Reading what “polysexual” means.

“Why are elementary schools promoting/allowing elementary KIDS to research topics of sexuality and create posters?” Reading wrote in the Facebook post. “This is not in the state elementary standards (law) nor in the BOE-approved curriculum. It’s perverse and should be illegal to expose my kids to sexual content. Look up the terms, and you will see they are sexual in nature.”

Reading added: “How can my young children be accepting of people ‘who are sexually attracted to multiple genders’? They don’t know what sex is! Are adults talking about their sexual life with my kids and looking for affirmation? Are there elementary students engaged in polyamorous or multi-gender sexual activity who need my kids to know about it and cheer them on? I am very confused and very angry.”

Then the military official got involved.

Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Shilling responded to Reading’s post by accusing her of causing “safety concerns for many families.

He added that the Joint Base (McGuire, Fort Dix, and Lakehurst) has had its Security Forces “working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to monitor the situation to ensure the continued safety of the entire community.”

Schilling subsequently changed the name on his Facebook account to “Chris Topher” and deleted his LinkedIn account.

In a statement to Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Joint Base confirmed that it had “notified local law enforcement about the social media exchange, which is common information-sharing practice among law enforcement entities.”

However, Carlson pointed out that “a military base is not a ‘law enforcement’ agency.”

He added: “The purpose of the military is to defend us from foreign enemies, not to police our Facebook posts.”

In an interview with Carlson, Reading said that shortly after Schilling had targeted her, the local police chief contacted the admin of the Facebook group and told her that the post “should come down.” Reading agreed to have the post taken down and then contacted the police chief directly to remind him of the .

“We shouldn’t be utilizing government resources and our positions to pressure individuals to take down Facebook posts,” Reading said.

Reading’s story is the latest of many examples of federal and local government departments potentially violating the First Amendment by flagging posts for censorship.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 4 Comments

Israel’s next Defense Minister is wanted on war crimes charges against Palestinians

MEMO | December 8, 2022

It has become almost certain that the new Israeli Minister of Defence will be retired General Yoav Gallant.

Gallant was elected to the Knesset in 2015, within the Kulanu Party led by former Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, but he defected from it and joined the Likud Party led by former and future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the eve of the 2019 Israeli elections.

Galant, who was a minister in Netanyahu’s second government in 2009, was a member of the Israeli cabinet for political and security affairs. He is a reserve general in the Israeli army, and previously served as commander of the southern region in the occupation army. He is wanted in several European countries on charges of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Galant, who has also served as Minister of Construction and Housing, had threatened to assassinate the head of the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, if the Al-Qassam Brigades and the resistance factions began a military escalation against the occupation army.

Speaking to Israel’s the MediaLine website, Galant said that if Israel loses the Negev, it will also lose Tel Aviv and Jerusalem later, and accused the Palestinians in the territories occupied in 1948 of committing criminal acts on a national basis. He claimed that “those who wanted to throw the Jewish people in the sea by using violence and war failed to implement their plans, but a group of them did not abandon their dreams, principles and ideas, and some ‘Israeli Arabs’ do not surrender or recognise the State of Israel, and they certainly do not accept the idea of having one sovereignty over this land, only the Zionist sovereignty.”

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Washington obstructs peace in Yemen as it profits from war: Ansarallah

The Cradle | December 8, 2022

The leader of Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance movement, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, accused the US of obstructing the path for a comprehensive peace process in Yemen, calling the western nation “the root of the problem.”

“[Ceasefire talks] are stalled because of the US, who are the root of the problem, as it benefits from the war and only wants a peace deal that benefits their interests, this type of peace means surrender to us,” Al-Houthi said during a televised speech on 7 December.

“The Americans, the Israelis, the British, and their regional puppets want Yemen to be occupied and submissive to them … The enemies want to set up their bases anywhere in Yemen, control its infrastructure and make the political field subject to their interests, to the extent that they choose who can be president or prime minister,” the resistance leader went on to add.

In April of this year, Riyadh strong-armed ousted Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to give up his powers to an unelected, Saudi-appointed presidential council, led by Rashad al-Alimi, who Ansarallah leaders christened “the man of America.”

During Wednesday’s speech, Al-Houthi also accused the US-backed coalition – headed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE – of plundering Yemen’s oil and gas resources in order to keep Yemenis living in misery, while “hundreds of billions go to US and European companies.”

Last year, Yemen’s Oil and Minerals Ministry estimated that the country’s oil and gas sector has lost around $45.5 billion in revenue since the start of the Saudi-led war. According to officials in Sanaa, the kingdom deprives Yemen of at least 75 percent of the state budget revenues.

Over the past year, a large number of Saudi and Emirati oil tankers have made their way to Yemeni ports in the provinces of Shabwa and Hadhramaut in order to seize millions of dollars worth of the country’s oil.

The Saudi-led coalition not only plunders Yemen’s oil and gas from the occupied regions – in coordination with US and French troops – but also often seizes UN-approved fuel shipments headed for the Ansarallah-controlled port of Hodeidah.

Moreover, thanks to the normalization agreement signed between Israel and the UAE, Tel Aviv has been deploying troops to the Arab world’s poorest nation.

“They do not want an army that protects the independence and sovereignty of Yemen, they only want groups of fighters under the command of Emirati and Saudi officers, who themselves are under the command of American, British, and Israeli officers,” Al-Houthi said about the increased presence of hegemonic powers in Yemen.

“We cannot accept for Yemen to be occupied, or for the Americans, British, Emiratis, and Saudis to come and set up bases wherever they want,” the resistance leader stressed, before adding that Yemen’s enemies want the country to join the group of Arab nations who have normalized ties with Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people and of several of Yemen’s allies in West Asia.

“Iran did not attack us. Rather, it declared solidarity with our people, a position distinct from all other countries … [The enemies] want us to be hostile to Hezbollah, which took a most honorable position with us. They want us to be hostile to the free people of Iraq who have done nothing against us,” Al-Houthi declared.

He went on to highlight that Sanaa will not be hostile to any Islamic country “for the sake of America and Israel … We are not like the Saudis, Emiratis, and Al-Khalifa in Bahrain, we do not receive directives from America.”

Al-Houthi finished his speech by hinting at the military response of Ansarallah and the Yemeni Armed Forces against any escalation, saying that “any next round of fighting will be greater than all previous ones.”

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We Must Not Forget the U.S. War on Afghanistan

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 8, 2022

When the Pentagon used NATO to provoke Russia  into invading Ukraine, it had to know that one of the great benefits to such an invasion would be that it would enrich U.S. weapons manufacturers, who, of course, are an important, integral, and loyal part of America’s national-security state form of governmental structure. 

And sure enough, those weapons manufacturers now have a lot to be grateful for. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, 

The world’s biggest arms makers are scaling up production of rocket launchers, tanks and ammunition as the industry shifts to meet what executives expect to be sustained demand triggered by the war in Ukraine.

The Pentagon has committed more than $17 billion in weapons and services to Ukraine, most of it drawn from existing stocks. It has also awarded about $3.4 billion in new contracts to replenish domestic and allies’ stocks.

The Pentagon knew that when it was forced to exit Afghanistan, where it had used a massive amount of weaponry for some twenty years to wreak death and destruction on that impoverished Third World country, its loyal army of arms manufacturers might begin to suffer. The crisis that the Pentagon has ginned up in Ukraine has clearly helped to alleviate that suffering. 

But the Russian invasion of Ukraine had another beneficiary — the Pentagon itself. That’s because before Americans had a real opportunity to focus on the Pentagon’s 20-year deadly and destructive debacle in Afghanistan, everyone began focusing exclusively on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Thanks to the crisis in Ukraine, the entire Afghanistan misadventure has been relegated to a memory black hole.

But we really still need to do some serious soul-searching, examination, and analysis of the Afghanistan debacle. We cannot let the Pentagon use the crisis that it has ginned up in Ukraine as a way to shift our attention away from what happened in Afghanistan. It would be a grave mistake to just “move on” from Afghanistan and permit the Pentagon to focus our attention exclusively on the evil Russians and their invasion of Ukraine.

It is important to focus on the Constitution, the document that President Biden and the Democrats and even some Republicans have suddenly discovered and begun revering. It requires a congressional declaration of war before a president can legally wage war. There was never a congressional declaration of war against Afghanistan. That made the Pentagon’s war against Afghanistan an illegal one under our form of constitutional government.

Equally important, if President George W. Bush had sought a declaration of war from Congress, it is a virtual certainty that he would not have been able to secure it. That’s because Bush would not have been able to provide any evidence whatsoever of Taliban complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Without any evidence of such complicity, it is difficult to imagine Congress issuing a declaration of war against Afghanistan, especially knowing that such a war would inevitably wreak massive death and destruction on that impoverished Third World country.

Bush claimed that his invasion of Afghanistan was morally justified under the principle of “self-defense.” But that claim necessarily depended on showing that the Taliban regime was involved in the 9/11 attacks. No such evidence existed, and Bush knew it. Thus, if he had gone to Congress and sought a declaration of war based on “self-defense,” he would have gone there empty-handed insofar as evidence is concerned.

In fact, if Bush really believed that the Taliban regime had attacked the United States, he would never have gone to the United Nations seeking its approval to defend itself by invading Afghanistan. No president would do that. 

What about the “harboring” charge? Bush claimed that his invasion of Afghanistan was morally justified because Afghanistan was “harboring” Osama bin Laden. Bush’s claim is without validity. To warrant a “harboring” charge, Bush would have to provide evidence that the Taliban regime had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and was knowingly conspiring with bin Laden to provide him a base to plan the attacks. Bush knew that he had no evidence to support such a charge.

What Bush actually meant by his “harboring” charge was that the Taliban was refusing to comply with Bush’s unconditional extradition demand for bin Laden. But under international law, the Taliban regime had every right to refuse Bush’s extradition demand. That’s because there was no extradition treaty between Afghanistan and the United States. When there is no extradition treaty between two nations, neither one is required to comply with an extradition demand from the other.

What about the claim that the 9/11 attacks were an “act of war” and, therefore, the United States had the legitimate authority to invade Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden, who was living in Afghanistan?

It was a bogus justification for invading Afghanistan. Under U.S. law, terrorism is a criminal offense, not an act of war. That’s why terrorism prosecutions are brought in U.S. District Courts. No nation has the legitimate authority to invade another nation to kill or capture a suspected criminal who is residing in that country.

One of the most notorious terrorists was a CIA man named Jose Posada Carriles. He is widely considered to be one of the people who brought down a Cuban airline with a bomb over Venezuelan skies. He later safely ensconced himself in the United States.

When Venezuela demanded Posada’s extradition, U.S. officials protected him by refusing to comply, notwithstanding the fact that there was an extradition treaty between Venezuela and the United States.

Would interventionists who supported the deadly and destructive invasion of Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden have supported a similar deadly and destructive Venezuelan invasion of the United States to kill or capture Posada? I think not.

Using NATO to gin up the crisis in Ukraine is bad enough. While U.S. arms manufacturers are clearly a beneficiary of that crisis, so is the Pentagon because it has caused people to forget what the Pentagon did to the people of Afghanistan and to just “move” on to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We must not let that happen, especially given the massive death and destruction that the Pentagon wreaked in its immoral and illegal war against an impoverished Third World country.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism | , | 1 Comment

Another Reichstag fire?

Free West Media | December 8, 2022

Drawing parallels between the latest operetta staged in Germany and Trump’s alleged capture of the Capitol in the United States quite clearly indicate who is behind the story of the “seizure of the Bundestag”.

In both these cases, these “conspiracies” were used to attack the opposition and political opponents. A “coup d’etat”, which was being prepared by far-right retirees was allegedly prevented. The conspirators hoped to return the constitutional order to the configuration of the Second Reich. To do this, it was planned to storm the Reichstag and the Bundestag, arrest deputies, create conditions for an uprising by cutting off electricity and overthrow the federal government by seizing power in the country. The conspirators had already appointed new ministers in their “shadow” cabinet.

One is of course also reminded of the very convenient arson attack on the Reichstag building in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler attributed the fire to Communist agitators and used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties, and pursue a timely “ruthless confrontation” with his adversaries.

In the days following the incident, major newspapers in the US and London were immediately sceptical of the good fortune of the Nazis in finding a communist scapegoat.

An old and trusted way of getting rid of opposition

The emergence of political opposition has regularly been prevented by secret service methods. As soon as people gather in a room or on the street to form an alternative to the ruling political forces, they are joined by paid agents whose task is to discredit or even ban the enterprise. In fact, paid agents often inspire the crime.

At the centre of the current conspiracy are Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss zu Köstritz, who owns the hunting lodge Waidmannsheil near Bad Lobenstein in Thuringia, and former AfD member of the Bundestag and judge at the Berlin Regional Court Birgit Malsack-Winkemann.

According to the responsible public prosecutor’s office, the two are leading heads of a Germany-wide network that planned an armed coup. On 7 December 2022, the Bild newspaper summed up the big blow of the valiant state organs against the right-wing threat:

“Since the early hours of the morning, officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and special units such as the GSG 9 and several SEK have been taking nationwide action against the so-called Reichsbürger scene. Under the code name Soko ‘Schatten’, some 3 000 forces are searching 137 properties belonging to 52 suspects. There are said to have been 25 arrests.”

Prince Heinrich works as a private financial consultant. He has repeatedly reminded his audiences that modern Germany is not a sovereign state and is under the control of the United States and the United Kingdom.

The princely house ruled the lands in Thuringia from the 12th century and the very name of the dynasty means “Russian”. The ancestor of the younger line of the dynasty was Henry I at the end of the 13th century, who married the granddaughter of Prince Daniel Romanovich.

Targeting the AfD

Among those arrested are several AfD members. If the secret services manages to frame the party sufficiently and the whole terror construct is not promptly exposed as absurd and collapses, nothing should now stand in the way of the AfD’s inclusion in the federal and state “reports on the protection of the constitution”.

In the digital age, the mere planning of an armed coup is easy to stage without risk of injury. There will certainly be a few old hunting rifles lying around in the prince’s castle, which should be enough to prove that he was “armed”. In small chat groups, by gathering a little rant here and a few swear words and curses there – a nefarious plan could be easily conjured up. It’s enough for searches, arrests and certainly a few convictions.

The last political party that could be “proven” to have had plans for a coup in Germany was the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), which was banned by the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court in 1952. Its chairman, Dr. Fritz Dorls, was an undercover agent of the Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution or secret service).

In order to ensure a smooth ban procedure, Dorls commissioned a secret service colleague to legally represent the party before the Federal Constitutional Court: Agent and lawyer Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer saw to it that the judicial farce ran smoothly.

Apparently, then as now, none of the responsible actors are remotely concerned about the rule of law.

Anyone who challenges the political class by successfully participating in elections is labelled an enemy of the constitution and targeted by the secret services. Yes, as we are witnessing these days, even voting has become quite dangerous.

Current events prove that Germany has not moved an inch in terms of democracy and the rule of law since the secret service banned the SRP in 1952. The irony is that the realisation of democracy in Germany thus remains a revolutionary challenge: an act of resistance that is not possible with, but only against the established ruling clique.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , | 1 Comment

Von der Leyen’s Special Tribunal As Fascist Theatre

By Christopher Black – New Eastern Outlook – 08.12.2022

On Wednesday November 30, Ursula Von der Leyen, the German president of the European Commission, stated that the European Union will set up a specialised tribunal, backed by the United Nations, to investigate and prosecute possible war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine. The French foreign ministry and Kiev regime echoed her remarks.

“We are ready to start working with the international community to get the broadest international support possible for this specialised court,” Von der Leyen said.

That this proposal is the opening scene in a staged drama for the entertainment and manipulation of the western public is apparent from the fact that there can be no “backing” of such a tribunal by the United Nations since only the Security Council has any possible jurisdiction to approve such a tribunal and clearly, both Russia, and China, which can expect the same treatment for itself from the West as Russia, will veto any motion in the Security Council to establish such a body.

If Von der Leyen is intending to rely on a vote in support by the UN General Assembly, then one wonders what her knowledge of the UN Charter is since the General Assembly votes have no legal force. But we can suppose that they may float such a proposal hoping the US and EU can coerce, bully and bribe a sufficient number of servile nations to give their stamp of approval so that they can claim they have the support of the “international community,” that is themselves and the nations under their sway.

The UN Charter does not provide any jurisdiction for the creation of quasi-judicial bodies under Chapter VII, which states that the only means permitted to be used against nations in violation of international law are military and economic, not judicial. The fact that the ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the ICTY and ICTR, were created is a sad testimony of how the UN system can be abused. The Security Council had no powers under the Charter to create them and acted outside its powers when it did so, or as lawyers like to say, it acted ultra vires of its powers.  That Russia did not veto the creation of these tribunals in the early 90’s can be explained by the fact that Russia had then a government that was weak and under the direct influence of the Americans and other NATO countries. It would never have allowed it if Presidents Putin or Medvedev had been in charge at the time.

The Chinese, however, realised the problem, expressing a willingness to vote for it only with the caveat that the adoption of the resolution should not prejudice China’s position on future resolutions on the subject. On 23 May 1993, when the UNSC was engaged in debate on Draft Resolution 827, which established the ICTY and adopted its statute, the Chinese representative explained his affirmative vote after the resolution was adopted by stating that China disputed the approach for the establishment of the tribunal by way of a UNSC resolution, rather than a treaty, with the latter route being the one China had preferred all along. He explained that, resembling a treaty, the statute should have been “negotiated and concluded by sovereign States and ratified by their national legislative organs. “Otherwise, its implementation would bring problems, unspecified, in both theory and practice.”

Secondly, the Chinese representative expressed the hope that this resolution would be a one-off exercise in setting up an ad hoc institution, and should not constitute a precedent. With that consideration in mind, Resolution 955, which approved the establishment of the second tribunal in 1994, for Rwanda, was obviously not agreeable to China as a repetition of the resolution-based approach, and China abstained in the voting on the resolution.

The fact that these tribunals were illegally created under the UN Charter and so in law do not exist was raised time and again by a number of defence lawyers representing accused at those tribunals. Of course, our arguments were dismissed out of hand and those of us that persisted were threatened with consequences. Nevertheless, as a matter of law the judgements and decisions of the ‘judges” of those tribunals are all invalid and have no force or effect.

And just as the Germans first proposed and pushed for the creation of the ICTY it is again the Germans who are pushing for the creation of another kangaroo court whose sole purposes will be to put out propaganda against Russia, to cover up their own war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine since 2014, and to attempt to justify their aggression against Russia and their support of fascists in Ukraine.

The idea for special war crimes tribunals originated with the United States Department of the Army in the early 1990’s, which alone should tell you something about its true purpose. The rhetoric used to justify such a body to the general public was of course heavily seasoned with concerns for “human rights” the “dignity of the individual”, “genocide” and “democracy,” just as it is now.

In order to accelerate the break up of Yugoslavia into quasi-independent colonies, principally of Germany and the United States, it was necessary to discredit their leaderships. An effective propaganda weapon in such an exercise is of course a tribunal with an international character which the public will accept as a neutral instrument of justice but which is controlled for political ends. NATO has the same objective with regards to Russia now.

Yugoslavia was the first experiment in using a quasi-judicial international body to attack the principle of sovereignty. And as the Americans have learned so well, the best way to get your domestic population behind you as you proceed to break another country, economically and militarily is to get them to hate those in power in that country. The Serb leadership was targeted, and transformed into caricatures of evil. There were comparisons to Adolf Hitler, a comparison used with surprising frequency by the United States against the long list of nations it has attacked in the last 50 years, though sometimes they are just labelled as common criminals, like Manuel Noriega, or mad, like Ghadaffi, if the leader or the country is too small to make the Hitler comparison stick. I think Saddam Hussein was the first to be compared to Hitler, and declared a common criminal and a madman all at the same time. We are hearing the same vile rhetoric about President Putin from western leaders and the mass media, which indicates what their ultimate objectives are.

Again, the European Union, Britain Canada and the USA are targeting another world leader, President Putin, and his government for the same reasons as they did President Milosevic, political ones. In this regard it is important to remember that in a statement to the Secretary-General of the United Nation, Mr. Boutros-boutros Ghali, on January 21, 1994, Antonio Cassese, the first President of the ICTY, made the Tribunal’s political character quite clear when he said in reference to the role of the Tribunal, “The political and diplomatic response (to the Balkans conflict) takes into account the exigencies and the tempo of the international community. The military response will come at the appropriate time.” In other words, the Tribunal is considered a political response. He went on to state, “Our tribunal will not be simply “window dressing” but a decisive step in the construction of a new world order.”

There you have it. Von Der Leyen on behalf of the EU and NATO is proposing the creation of another politically motivated kangaroo court, an illegal tribunal, without any jurisdiction, as part of the continuing US and NATO effort of establishing global hegemony, the construction of their new fascist world order, a tribunal to be used to fabricate indictments, conduct show trials, to propagandise against Russia, its leadership and people, while covering up and excusing their own crimes and justifying their aggression against Russia and the world. This use of what is nothing less than criminality to further more criminality is proof that the EU and NATO have openly adopted the techniques and ideology of fascism.

For once President Putin is “indicted” by this fake tribunal, there will be no possibility that any Western leader or government will be able to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the  military conflict with him or any other Russian leader “indicted” with him nor negotiate over Russia’s security concerns. As with President Milosevic, President Putin will be labelled a criminal, and all possibility of negotiation, whether with the USA or EU, on resolution of the military conflict will be permanently blocked. Their intention is to make negotiations a complete impossibility. This means that war will be the only avenue for the resolution of the strategic political issues at stake. This is, in fact, the position of the Kiev regime with their mantra, “No negotiations with a war criminal.” And now it is the position of the EU and NATO. It is clear what their intentions are.

In this regard, Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Russian State Duma stated on December 1,

“The French Foreign Ministry’s statements about the beginning of work with the European and Ukrainian partners for creating a special tribunal for investigating Russia’s actions in Ukraine have no legal basis; this idea has a rather political dimension, the chairman of the State Duma’s international affairs committee.’

“The French Foreign Ministry’s statements to the effect that work has begun on creating an international tribunal for Ukraine have no legal basis and are rather political. There is no legitimate basis for the creation of an ad hoc tribunal. Implementing such an initiative will be impossible without trampling international law underfoot,” Slutsky told the media.

He added, “Preventing the truth about the true background of the Ukrainian crisis from reaching the European and American audiences is a matter of survival for today’s Western politicians in power. Otherwise, their own voters will oust them,”

He rightly pointed out that if an international tribunal is to be created in earnest, “there should be Ukrainian war criminals and their patrons from Washington in the dock.”

“The United States and its NATO allies, since the Second World War, have bombed the territories of more than 20 sovereign states, interfering in their state system and their sovereignty. This is what should be condemned at last. Then there will be far fewer causes for the conflicts like the one in Ukraine,”

And he is right. Once again Russia and the world are up against fascism in all its ugly forms and the more that time passes, the uglier the actions become, and the uglier they become, the more dangerous. But in the West, we see little reaction to all of this. There are few protests on the streets and those only in some EU countries suffering the consequences of their illegal sanctions on Russia.

In the USA, UK, in Canada there are no protests of any real significance; a few individuals here, some there. But the masses go along with the propaganda they are fed every day, even clamouring to be fed even more of the poison that warps their minds and reduces them to compliant automatons; unaware of reality, unconscious of the supporting role they play in the fascist theatre that they are both actors in and spectators of. The West has sunk into darkness, and now, only from the East does light illuminate the world.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 1 Comment

Merkel’s ‘confession’ may be ground for tribunal – Moscow

RT | December 8, 2022

A confession by former German chancellor Angela Merkel regarding the true nature of the Minsk agreements – a roadmap for peace in Ukraine that was brokered by Berlin – could be used as evidence in a tribunal involving Western politicians responsible for provoking the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

The former German leader admitted in an interview with Die Zeit on Wednesday that the actual purpose of the Minsk agreements was to give Ukraine time to prepare for a military confrontation with Russia.

“They talk a lot about legal assessments of what is happening around Ukraine, certain tribunals and so on in all sorts of ways,” Zakharova said during a media briefing on Thursday. “But this is a specific reason for a tribunal.”

She claimed that Merkel’s comments were nothing short of the testimony of a person who had openly admitted that everything done between 2014 and 2015 was meant to “distract the international community from real issues, play for time, pump up the Kiev regime with weapons, and escalate the issue into a large-scale conflict,” Zakharova added.

She said Merkel’s statements “horrifyingly” reveal that the West uses “forgery as a method of action,” and resorts to “machinations, manipulation and all kinds of distortions of truth, law and rights imaginable.”

The spokeswoman claimed that the West had known well in 2015, when it spent hours negotiating the second part of the Minsk accords, that it would never even attempt to fulfill any part of the agreements and would instead pump weapons into Kiev.

“They did not feel sorry for anyone: women, children, the civilian population of Donbass or the whole of Ukraine. They needed a conflict and they were ready for it back then, in 2015,” Zakharova said.

Earlier this month, a number of Western officials called for the creation of a special UN-backed court to investigate alleged war crimes committed by Russia during its ongoing military campaign in Ukraine.

The Kremlin has said the West has no legal or moral right to set up any courts to investigate or prosecute Russia over the conflict, which Moscow claims was ultimately provoked by the US and its allies.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | 1 Comment

Russian soldiers detail brutal torture by Kiev’s forces

RT | December 7, 2022

Russian servicemen have alleged they endured brutal torture while being held captive by Kiev’s forces. The country’s Investigative Committee announced on Wednesday that it will be launching a criminal investigation into the abuse claims.

According to testimony published on the armed service’s official Telegram channel, Russian soldiers were subjected to merciless interrogations. One fighter alleged he was taken prisoner when he was already wounded, having had a bone in his right hand broken by a bullet. He claims that Ukrainian interrogators beat him with a shovel and with rebar, shot him in both feet, broke his jaw, several ribs and punctured his lungs.

Another soldier claimed his interrogation began with a knife stab to the leg, which caused severe bleeding that remained untreated. When his captors didn’t like his answers, they beat him with thumps and kicks, and then with a helmet or the with butt of a rifle, he alleged. After the interrogation ended, the soldier testified that he was held down by three men as a fourth cut off one of his fingers.

He also claims that he was forced to sign an agreement to cooperate with Ukrainian special services, under a threat of murder and harm to his loved ones.

The Investigative Committee has also stated that “the testimonies of Russian military personnel indicate that representatives of Ukraine are grossly violating the requirements of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which prohibit ill-treatment, torture and abuse.”

Investigators say they will continue to work with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Federal Security Service and Russia’s Defense Ministry to identify those responsible for the murder and torture of civilians and of captured Russian servicemen. The committee has vowed to record all evidence of brutal crimes committed by Kiev’s forces.

Оn Tuesday Moscow and Kiev conducted their latest prisoner exchange in the 60-60 format, where both sides released 60 captive soldiers who were considered to be in “mortal danger.” The released Russian servicemen have since been transported to Moscow to undergo treatment and rehabilitation, and to receive psychological and medical assistance.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

EU had better become more independent from US to overcome crisis

By Lucas Leiroz | December 8, 2022

As the security crisis and energy instability worsen in Europe, mainly in Germany, the unfeasibility of continuing the current European model of automatic alignment with American foreign policy becomes increasingly evident. American rivalry with Russia, passively embraced by European states, seriously violates EU’s interests and places the entire bloc under a serious threat.

Germany is the most economically important country for the EU and at the same time the most dependent on Russia. Without any energy sovereignty and dependent on the partnership with Moscow to supply its internal market, Berlin sought for decades to maintain pragmatic relations with Russia, capable of overcoming any political or ideological rivalries, aiming exclusively at the well-being of the German people and the local economy. But this stance has been completely abandoned.

During the early days of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, Germany was the first country to try to somehow resist American pressure for sanctions, at least as far as energy is concerned. But the Scholz government was absolutely unable to resist pressure from Washington and quickly “surrendered”, favoring the American anti-Russian strategy and harming German interests.

Obviously, without the energy to power its industry, the negative effects have already started to be seen in Germany, but the situation will only get worse as winter gets more severe in Europe. With high energy prices and no prospect of improvement in the short term, as well as under a strong crisis of legitimacy with constant mass protests, the country is truly immersed in a severe crisis which consequences spread beyond national borders, since, with the largest European economy weakened, the whole EU is affected.

However, energy and economy are just some of the problems facing Berlin. The German adherence to American sanctions was not the only anti-strategic attitude taken by the government, which also strived to become one of the biggest arms suppliers for the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, to the point of causing irreversible damage to domestic military reserves.

Before the Russian operation in Ukraine, military experts already frequently reported the obsolescence of the German military apparatus and its inability to defend the country, whose only hope in a possible conflict situation would be to rely exclusively on the “goodwill” of its NATO partners. Now, with Berlin sending its few weapons to Kiev and with an industry weakened by the energy crisis, unable to continue replenishing stocks, the situation is even more hopeless, placing Germany at a very serious level of subservience to the US.

In fact, on December 8, 2022, Olaf Scholz marks one year in the German government, and, as we can see, his administration so far has been a real disaster for the strategic interests of the German state and the entire EU. To sum it up, it is possible to say that his rise to power marked the decline of any German participation in the proposal of a “sovereign” Europe. Earlier, Angela Merkel was an active advocate of increasing the EU’s political autonomy, despite her close ties with the US. Merkel even became Emmanuel Macron’s main partner when the French president announced in his Sorbonne speech the project of achieving a “European sovereignty”.

As a politically stable and considered for years the “de facto” leader of the EU, Merkel tried to make Germany the economic pillar of a more independent Europe in relation to the US. Macron has emerged as an important ally, considering France’s military power – having even proposed the creation of a European army outside NATO. Thus, both countries together would have the conditions to lead a new shift in the bloc, making it a more “distant” ally of the US, defending its own interests without automatic alignment. But the fragility of the Scholz government prevented any process in this direction.

Scholz’s weakness and unpopularity caused his government to passively accept foreign impositions and escalate participation in the Ukrainian conflict, harming its own economy and people. More than that, Scholz passively accepted the humiliation imposed by the West in the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines. Several intelligence reports point to the involvement of the US, UK and Poland in the sabotage, and even so Germany remains inert and submissive.

These events hindered any idea about “European sovereignty”. Macron’s project for the continent has lost force and today France acts more independently. Germany was unable to play a leading role in managing a new future for the European bloc and has consolidated itself over the last twelve months as an American satellite state, also reflecting its subservience to other European states, economically weaker, which did not have any posture other than increasing the irrational automatic alignment with the US.

As a result, Europe loses the opportunity to become an independent bloc amidst the rise of a multipolar world. At some point in the near future, European leaders will try to reverse the mistakes that are being committed now, but they will find it much more difficult. Weakened, the US-led NATO will become more reactive and aggressive in the future, seeking to retain all zones of influence it still has. And, as Washington has already made clear with the Nord Stream attacks, sabotage and aggression are possible options for forcing Europe to maintain its submissive posture.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , | 2 Comments

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