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Ukraine to hike transit fees for Russian oil to EU – Transneft

RT | December 27, 2022

Ukraine will raise transit fees for Russian oil running via the Druzhba pipeline through its territory to the EU on January 1, Russian oil exporter Transneft announced on its website on Monday.

It is expected that Kiev will increase tariffs for transporting crude to Hungary and Slovakia by €2.10 per ton to €13.60 ($13.90), bringing the total hike to 18.3%.

In November, Bloomberg reported that Ukraine was mulling a tariff hike on Russian oil transit starting next year, citing a letter from Ukrtransnafta, the operator of Ukraine’s oil pipeline network. The Ukrainian operator had attributed the need for the price hike to the “continued destruction of Ukrainian energy infrastructure” which had resulted in “a significant shortage of electricity, an increase in its costs, a shortage of fuel, and spare parts.”

Transneft spokesman Igor Demin confirmed to the Russian media that the company had received the letter and was studying it.

Ukrainian oil transit fees have already been raised twice this year. The last hike in April reportedly brought the total increase to 51% on an annual basis.

Druzhba, one of the longest pipeline networks in the world, carries crude some 4,000 km from Russia to refineries in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Is Trump Tucker Carlson’s JFK Assassination Source?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 27, 2022

On December 15, 2022, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson delivered a monologue stating his conviction that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The presentation was remarkable given that that sort of thing is never found in the mainstream media. As most everyone knows, the mainstream media avoids the Kennedy assassination like the plague. 

Carlson’s presentation motivated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to issue the following highly dangerous tweet: “The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered. @TuckerCarlson.”

Carlson made his presentation in the context of the CIA’s continued steadfast refusal to disclose thousands of its assassination-related records to the American people, along with President Biden’s decision to go along with the CIA’s decision. These are records that the CIA was mandated to release to the American people by the JFK Records Act, which was enacted in 1992 — thirty years ago! 

As I have long maintained, there is only one reason for the CIA’s continued secrecy. Those thousands of records contain pieces of incriminating circumstantial evidence that further establish criminal culpability on the part of the CIA in the assassination of President Kennedy. Obviously, the CIA has concluded that it simply cannot afford to permit the American people, especially assassination researchers, to view those records. Better to have the American people believing that the records are incriminating rather than letting them know that they are incriminating. 

On November 8, 2022 — approximately one month before the Carlson presentation — Gerald Celente conducted an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano, a former judicial analyst for Fox News. In that interview, Napolitano recounted a conversation with President Trump, with whom he was friends. In that interview, the pertinent part of which you can view here, Napolitano stated: 

I once had a conversation … with President Trump when he was in the White House. He used to call me all the time. And we talked about everything under the sun. I said, “Are you going to release those documents or not?” And he said to me, “If you saw what I saw, you wouldn’t release them.”

In his presentation, Carlson stated the following:

In 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. That act mandated full disclosure of all documents by 2017, 54 years after JFK was killed. The last administration promised to comply fully with that law. But under intense pressure from CIA Director Mike Pompeo, withheld, in the end, thousands of pages of CIA documents.

Today, this afternoon, the Biden administration did exactly the same thing. That would be thousands of pages of documents after nearly 60 years, after the death of every single person involved. But we still can’t see them. Clearly, it’s not to protect any person. They’re all dead. It’s to protect an institution. But why?

Well, today we decided to find out. We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President?” And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.” (Emphasis added.)

Is Trump Carlson’s source? It would make sense that he is. After all, just a little more than a month ago, Trump told Napolitano that he had seen the CIA’s still-secret records. He also implied to Napolitano that the still-secret records contain explosive information of an incriminating nature. What else could he have meant when he said, “If you saw what I saw, you wouldn’t release them”?

It also stands to reason that Carlson would have known about the Napolitano interview, given Napolitano’s longtime relationship with Fox News. It also stands to reason that Carlson would have reached out to Trump and that Trump would have talked to him, given Trump’s longtime close relationship with Fox News. 

But whether Trump is Carlson’s source or not, the obvious question arises: Why didn’t Trump order the release of those long-secret records of the CIA? Why did he, like Biden, participate in the CIA’s assassination cover-up by authorizing the CIA to continue keeping its half-century-old records secret? Indeed, why doesn’t Trump, a recently announced candidate for president, go public right now with what he saw in those records? 

One possibility is that the CIA “Hoovered” Trump into continuing to keep the CIA’s decades-old assassination-related records secret. By “Hoovered” I am referring to J. Edgar Hoover, who was a serial blackmailer when he was serving as FBI director. Hoover would acquire personal information about people with the aim of blackmailing them into bending them to his will. If they complied, he would keep the information secret. If they refused to comply with Hoover’s will, he would release the information through trusted assets in the mainstream press.

My hunch is that that is what happened with Trump. After all, when the deadline for release was coming due, Trump publicly announced that he intended to order the release of the CIA’s assassination-related records. Then, just before the deadline came due, however, the CIA somehow prevailed on Trump to suddenly change his mind and instead to grant the CIA’s demand to extend the time for secrecy. 

In the final analysis though, the CIA’s steadfast refusal to disclose those thousands of assassination-related records is, largely, irrelevant. As I have maintained over the years, once it was established beyond a reasonable doubt that the national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy on Kennedy’s body, the gig was up. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. None! No one has ever come up with an innocent explanation for the fraudulent autopsy, and no one ever will. A fraudulent autopsy necessarily means criminal culpability in the assassination itself. See my article “Why the JFK Assassination Should Matter to Everyone.” Also see my books  The Kennedy Autopsy, The Kennedy Autopsy 2, Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, and, most recently, An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, 

The CIA’s continued steadfast refusal to release the thousands of remaining assassination-related records tends to confirm what Trump told Napolitano. But those records would simply add additional evidence to what the fraudulent autopsy has already established: that the November 22, 1963, assassination was a regime-change operation intended to protect “national security” from a president who was determined to lead America in a direction different from the direction that the Pentagon and the CIA were determined to lead America.

NOTE: Credit is given to Charles Burris, who first raised the possibility that Trump is Carlson’s source in the following article at LewRockwell.com: “Will Tucker Carlson Reveal The High Level Source Which Confirmed That The Deep State Murdered JFK In A Regime Change Coup d’état?

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , | 11 Comments

Every social media company censoring for government – Elon Musk

RT | December 27, 2022

All social media platforms work with the US government to censor content, Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed on Tuesday. Documents released by Musk following his purchase of Twitter showed that the platform colluded with the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other government agencies to suppress information on elections, Ukraine, and Covid-19.

“*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” Musk tweeted, adding that “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”

Musk was referring to internal Twitter communications published by journalist Matt Taibbi, which suggested that the platform’s senior executives held regular meetings with members of the FBI and CIA, during which the agencies gave them lists of “hundreds of problem accounts” to suspend in the runup to the 2020 election.

In addition to Twitter, the government was in contact “with virtually every major tech firm,” Taibbi claimed. “These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest.” CIA agents “nearly always” sat in on meetings of these firms with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Taibbi claimed, explaining that although this task force was convened to fight alleged election interference by foreign states, it made “mountains of domestic moderation requests.”

A lawsuit filed earlier this year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that officials from no fewer than 12 government agencies met weekly with representatives of Twitter, Facebook, and other Big Tech firms in 2020 to decide which narratives and users to censor, with topics ranging from alleged election interference to Covid-19.

A self-described “free speech absolutist,” Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October. He has since released batches of documents shedding light on the platform’s previously opaque censorship policies. Published by several independent journalists, these document dumps have shown how Twitter suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden’s election campaign, colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.

The FBI said last week that correspondence between its agents and Twitter staff “show nothing more than examples of our tradition [of] longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.”

The White House has refused to answer allegations that the FBI directed Twitter to censor information damaging to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Biden pledged to end the war in Yemen, but is doing the opposite

By Robert Inlakesh | RT | December 27, 2022

Two weeks into his term, US President Joe Biden claimed that he would seek a negotiated peace in Yemen, thus shunning Saudi Arabia. Now he is performing a 180-degree pivot. With such arbitrary foreign policy positions the US is causing instability and weakening its own hand.

On December 13, US Senator Bernie Sanders decided to withdraw a War Powers Resolution on ending US support for Saudi offensive efforts in the war in Yemen. Sanders was supposed to put the resolution to a vote, believing it would have passed. However, owing to pressure mounted against him from the White House, he decided to retreat. Instead, the progressive American senator claimed that he was informed that the Biden administration would “continue working” with his office on ending the conflict.

As revealed by The Intercept, which obtained the key talking points distributed by the White House against the resolution, the Biden administration communicated its position that such a resolution would be counterproductive and further exacerbate the crisis in Yemen. However, the ‘Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’ says that Sanders’ decision to withdraw the resolution “may embolden the many members of Washington’s foreign policy elite who would like to ensure that the president’s capability to unilaterally wage war remains unchallenged by Congress’s constitutional prerogative over matters of war and peace.”

The biggest problem here for the US government is that the War Powers Resolution essentially aims to force Biden to implement most of the policies that he himself outlined in February of 2021. Despite Biden having announced that the US was halting all “relevant arms sales” to the Saudi-led coalition – which has been at war with Yemen’s Ansarallah, known commonly as the Houthis, since 2015 – this policy position has never been put into practice.

During his 2020 campaign, Biden claimed that he would make longtime American ally Saudi Arabia a global “pariah.” Yet, when it began to sink in that the powerful oil-producing state was a necessary partner in the Middle East, a realization that came months into the West’s sanctions campaign aimed at Russia, the Biden administration quickly decided to change its stance. In July, the president decided to go on a foreign visit to Saudi Arabia, while in the days prior he entered into discussions about beginning to supply the Saudis with offensive weapons again; the framing of this was a little disingenuous because the weapons sales freeze of February 2021 had effectively been ended by April of the same year anyway. Both of these moves came as a clear attempt to get Saudi Arabia to raise oil-production levels, a goal that failed as the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, refused to pander to the US president.

Since then, the US government approved a potential multibillion-dollar deal with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and in August the Biden administration granted the Saudi Crown Prince immunity from a civil lawsuit over his role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden was reportedly humiliated earlier this year after allegedly bringing up the Khashoggi killing to the Crown Prince, who fired back by citing the Israeli killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, asking why Jamal Khashoggi mattered more. Notably, the US head of state failed a number of times to even pronounce Shireen Abu Akleh’s name correctly when delivering a speech beside Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas just days earlier and did not bring the killing up to Israeli representatives.

The White House insinuated, in its opposition to Senator Bernie Sanders’ resolution on Yemen, that it had a hand in the six-month long ceasefire between the two primary opposing sides in the war. The reality was that it was the United Nations that brokered the ceasefire, which ended on October 2. In the eyes of Ansarallah, the US government is the primary obstacle to peace in Yemen; Abd al-Wahhab al-Mahbashi, a senior member of Ansarallah, recently warned that “the presence of US troops in the Bab al-Mandab and off the coast of Yemen poses a serious threat to maritime navigation.” In fact, Ansarallah views the conflict as a war on behalf of the US, with Saudi Arabia acting as its proxy, a view held by millions in the region.

The day following Sanders’ withdrawal of his War Powers Resolution, two fuel shipments, carrying tons of diesel, were seized by the Saudi-led coalition and prevented from reaching Yemen. The blockade of Yemen is one of the major factors contributing to the resurgence of tensions – Ansarallah accuses Riyadh and Abu Dhabi of stealing the nation’s oil resources and depriving native Yemenis. In addition to this, when the US is clearly attempting to cozy up to Saudi Arabia, this signals to the leadership of Ansarallah that the Biden administration is favoring Riyadh in the conflict.

The Biden administration has so far proven ineffective at bringing the Saudis under its wing in the way it had hoped, indicating that its foreign policy tactics have proven ineffective at best. The reason for this failure likely comes down to the way the current government has dealt not only with Saudi Arabia, but with all the states of the Arabian Peninsula in addition to Iran. The US has shown that it cannot be trusted to keep its word, as was proven by its Iran nuclear deal blunder. More importantly, Saudi Arabia understands that, when it comes to security, Washington is not the most important player anymore. Instead of following the Biden administration into a dangerous anti-Iran coalition, the Saudis would be a lot smarter to engage diplomatically with Tehran, a step that would be especially helpful when it comes to regional security.

For Washington, meanwhile, an escalation in Yemen at this point would prove advantageous, for it could end up pushing Saudi Arabia closer to it, as the latter needs US help to maintain its war effort, although there is a chance that large-scale ballistic and cruise missile strikes against Saudi Arabia’s vital infrastructure could cause the Kingdom to go straight to the negotiating table. Regardless of how things go, it is clear that US influence in the Arabian Peninsula is rapidly declining and part of its legacy will be this brutal war that has cost upwards of 400,000 lives and that the Biden administration has refused to end.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | 4 Comments

FBI COINTELPRO Is Back, And Worse Than Ever

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | December 27, 2022

Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech. The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved of, including parody accounts. The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other social media companies.

Thus far, most of the American corporate media has ignored or downplayed the story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a non-issue (or a cause for quiet celebration). At this point, it is difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total ignorance of American history.

The history of the FBI provides the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”

While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther King Jr. and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution. Almost any black organization could be targeted for illegal wiretaps. One black leader was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of firearms by members for their self-protection.” At that time, some southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking blacks who stood up for their civil rights.

The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.). Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of the US were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded and one was killed, and in which the US headquarters was bombed, the FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the Counterintelligence Program.” The FBI office bragged shortly thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego… it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this [FBI] program.”

The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants served as “listening posts” “to identify extremists passing through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstore’s “clientele”). The informants’ reports were stockpiled in the FBI’s Racial Intelligence Unit. The FBI also created a national “Rabble Rouser” Index, a “major intelligence program… to identify ‘demagogues.’”

The FBI targeted the women’s liberation movement, resulting in “intensive reporting on the identities and opinions of women who attended” women’s lib meetings. One FBI informant reported to headquarters of a meeting in New York: “Each woman at this meeting stated why she had come to the meeting and how she felt oppressed, sexually or otherwise… They are mostly against marriage, children, and other states of oppression caused by men.” Women’s lib informants were instructed to “go to meetings, write up reports… to try to identify the background of every person there… [and] who they were sleeping with.” The Senate report noted that “the intensive FBI investigation of the Women’s Liberation Movement was predicated on the theory that the activities of women in that Movement might lead to demonstrations and violence.”

The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of its “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal.” Some FBI agents may have viewed dissident speech or protests as a “gateway drug” to blowing up the Washington Monument. The Senate report noted that the clearest FBI COINTELPRO constitutional violations consisted of “targeting speakers, teachers, writers or publications, and meetings or peaceful demonstrations… The cases include attempts (sometimes successful) to get university and high school teachers fired… to prevent the distribution of books, newspapers, or periodicals; to disrupt peaceful demonstrations, including… most of the large antiwar marches.”

The FBI especially loathed any opposition to the Vietnam War. The bureau ordered field offices in 1968 to gather information illustrating the “scurrilous and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits, and living conditions representative of New Left adherents.” FBI agents were told: “Every avenue of possible embarrassment must be vigorously and enthusiastically explored. It cannot be expected that information of this type will be easily obtained, and an imaginative approach by your personnel is imperative to its success.” One FBI internal newsletter encouraged agents to conduct more interviews with antiwar activists “for plenty of reasons, chief of which are it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

An FBI memo warned that “the anarchist activities of a few can paralyze institutions of learning, [conscription] induction centers, cripple traffic, and tie the arms of law enforcement officials, all to the detriment of our society.” The FBI declared: “The New Left has on many occasions viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director [J. Edgar Hoover] and the Bureau in an attempt to hamper our investigation of it and to drive us off the college campuses.”

Other federal agencies also trampled citizens’ privacy, rights, and lives during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The IRS used COINTELPRO leads to launch audits against thousands of suspected political enemies of the Nixon administration. The U.S. Army set up its own surveillance program, creating files on 100,000 Americans and targeting domestic organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom, the John Birch Society, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith. Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston, testifying to Congress in 1973, lamented the FBI’s tendency “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.”

Throughout the COINTELPRO era, presidents, congressmen, and other high-ranking federal officials assured Americans that the federal government was obeying the law and upholding the Constitution. It took a burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania to break the biggest scandal in the history of federal law enforcement. After hundreds of pages of confidential records were commandeered, the “Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI” began passing out the incriminating documents to the media. The shocking material sparked congressional and news investigations that eventually (temporarily) shattered the FBI’s legendary ability to control its own image.

The Senate report on COINTELPRO concluded: “Only a combination of legislative prohibition and Departmental control can guarantee that COINTELPRO will not happen again.” But the Ford administration derailed legislative reforms by promising an administrative fix. In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft threw out many of those reforms as part of “a concerted effort to free the [FBI] field agents… from the bureaucratic, organizational, and operational restrictions” imposed after their prior abuses. Ashcroft declared: “In its 94-year history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been… the tireless protector of civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans.” The same tripe has been uttered by many Democrats and liberals in the last five years.

The FBI’s latest war on wrong-thinking Americans took off after the FBI helped fabricate the narrative that the Russian government conspired with the Trump presidential campaign to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The 1976 Senate report noted that COINTELPRO’s origins “are rooted in the Bureau’s jurisdiction to investigate hostile foreign intelligence activities on American soil” and that the FBI used the “techniques of wartime.” William Sullivan, former assistant to the FBI director, declared, “No holds were barred…We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents… [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate.” Senate investigators warned in 1976 that the “FBI intelligence system developed to a point where no one inside or outside the bureau was willing or able to tell the difference between legitimate national security or law enforcement information and purely political intelligence.”

In our time, FBI officials pressured Twitter to suppress Americans based on false claims of fighting foreign influence. The same pretext was used by the Department of Homeland Security to massively suppress Americans’ criticism of election procedures (especially mail-in ballots) for the 2020 presidential election.

One of the biggest “misses” in the media coverage of the Twitter Files is the stunning failure of Congress to expose the abuses that Elon Musk is revealing. A few months ago, FBI director Christopher Wray, facing vigorous questioning from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and others, walked out of a Senate oversight hearing claiming that he had an urgent appointment he must keep. It was later revealed that Wray’s “appointment” was hopping on an FBI jet for a family vacation. Congress punished the FBI with a $570 million budget increase, plowing $11.3 billion into its coffers in the coming year.

Is Congress terrified of the FBI nowadays like congressmen were in the COINTELPRO era? In 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs revealed the shameless kowtowing on Capitol Hill: “Our very fear of speaking out [against the FBI]… has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny… Our society cannot survive a planned and programmed fear of its own government bureaus and agencies.” Boggs vindicated a 1924 American Civil Liberties Union warning that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character.” (The Louisiana congressman died a year later in an apparent plane crash.)

But old quotes provide no protection against new depredations. The Twitter Files prove that G-men have been off the leash for years. We still have no idea how far the FBI and other federal agencies have gone to suppress our freedom of speech. Until federal abuses are fully exposed, Americans would be damn fools to believe their constitutional rights are safe.

Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Russophobia | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Iran, Syria, Yemen: Twitter’s collaboration with the US military in information warfare

The damning exposure of collusion between the Pentagon and Twitter raises further suspicions about Washington’s ongoing online operations in West Asia

By Kit Klarenberg | The Cradle | December 27, 2022

The Cradle has previously deconstructed the Pentagon’s online bot and troll operations targeting Iran. These wide-ranging efforts, over many years, sought to destabilize the Iranian government by disseminating and inciting negative sentiment against it, on a variety of social media platforms.

Their exposure led to the White House demanding an internal audit of all Department of Defense (DoD) “psychological operations online.” Ostensibly, this was triggered by high-level concerns that Washington’s “moral high ground” was potentially compromised by the “manipulation of audiences overseas.”

The audit was revealed in a Washington Post article, the details of which pointed to a very different rationale. One passage noted that representatives of Facebook and Twitter directly informed the Pentagon, repeatedly, over several years, that its psychological warfare efforts on their platforms had been detected and identified as such.

Weaponizing social media

Frustratingly, the focus wasn’t even that these operations were being conducted in the first place, but that the Pentagon got busted doing so.

For example, Facebook’s Director of Global Threat Disruption, David Agranovich, who spent six years at the Pentagon before serving as the US National Security Council’s Director for Intelligence, reportedly reached out to the DoD in the summer of 2020, warning his former colleagues that “if Facebook could sniff them out, so could US adversaries.”

“His point was, ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem,’” an individual “familiar with the conversation” told the Washington Post.

The obvious takeout from this excerpt – unnoticed by any mainstream journalist at the time – was that Facebook and Twitter staffers actively welcome their platforms being weaponized in information warfare campaigns, as long as it’s the US intelligence community doing it, and they don’t get caught in flagrante.

Moreover, in the event they are compromised, those same social network luminaries readily provide intimate insight on how US spooks can improve their operational security, and better conceal their activities from foreign enemies. Unmentioned is that these “foes” include tens of millions of ordinary people who are the ultimate target of such malign initiatives, of which residents of West Asia are preponderant victims.

‘Whitelisting’

Internal emails and documents from Twitter, published by journalist Lee Fang, have now confirmed that Twitter executives not only approved of the Pentagon’s network of troll and bot accounts, but also provided significant internal protection for them through “whitelisting.”

This practice allowed these ‘superpower accounts’ to operate with impunity, despite breaking numerous platform rules and behaving egregiously. The “whitelist” status also effectively granted these accounts the algorithmic and amplificatory privileges of Twitter verification without a “blue check.”

As The Cradle previously reported, these accounts over many years sought to influence perceptions and behavior across West Asia, in particular Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. In many cases, users had “deepfake” profile photos – mocked up pictures of realistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence.

Target: West Asia

In respect to Twitter-enabled activities against Tehran, multiple different personae were formed to attack the Iranian government from different ideological and political positions. These were not your standard ‘opposition’ accounts – the ops were more sophisticated. Some posed as ultra-conservative Shia Muslims critical of the administration’s “liberal” policies; others as progressive radicals condemning the extent of the Republic’s enforcement of Islamic code.

Many users amplified Washington’s disinformation, disseminated by US government-funded Voice of America’s Farsi-language service, among a myriad of other US funded and directed propaganda platforms. All along, Twitter higher-ups were aware of these accounts, but did not shut them down and even protected them.

The impact of the collaboration between Twitter and the Pentagon on the tweets that users around the world saw and did not see is unknown, but likely significant. Twitter staff were aware of what they were doing.

For example, in July 2017, an official from the Pentagon’s central command for West Asia and North Africa (CENTCOM) emailed the social media network to request the “blue check” verification of one account and the “whitelisting” of 52 accounts that “we use to amplify certain messages.”

The official was concerned that some of these accounts, “a few” of which “had built a real following,” were no longer “indexing on hashtags.” He moreover requested “priority service” for several accounts, including the since-deleted @YemenCurrent, which broadcast announcements about US drone strikes in Yemen. The account emphasized how “accurate” these attacks were; that they only killed dangerous terrorists, never civilians – a hallmark of US drone war propaganda.

Of course, US drone strikes are anything but precise. In fact, declassified Pentagon documents indicate there was “an institutional acceptance of an inevitable collateral toll,” and that innocent people were killed indiscriminately.

In 2014, it was calculated that, in attempting to slay 41 specific, named individuals, Washington had murdered 1,147 people, among them many children – a rate of 28 deaths for every person targeted.

‘Misleading, deceptive, and spammy’

In June 2020, Twitter spokesperson Nick Pickles testified to the US House Intelligence Committee on the company’s determined efforts to end any and all “coordinated platform manipulation efforts” on the part of hostile enemy states, stating these efforts were his employer’s “top priority.”

“Our goal is to remove bad faith actors and to advance public understanding of these critical topics. Twitter defines state-backed information operations as coordinated platform manipulation efforts that can be attributed with a high degree of confidence to state-affiliated actors,” he declared.

“State-backed information operations are typically associated with misleading, deceptive, and spammy behavior. These behaviors differentiate coordinated manipulative behavior from legitimate speech on behalf of individuals and political parties.”

The following month, however, Twitter executives were invited by the Pentagon to attend classified briefings in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) to discuss the defense of the Pentagon’s “coordinated and manipulative” social media activities.

Then-Twitter lawyer Stacia Cardille noted in an internal email the Pentagon may be seeking to retroactively classify its malign online activities “to obfuscate their activity in this space, and this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment.”

Jim Baker, then-deputy general counsel of Twitter and an FBI veteran, subsequently noted that the DoD had employed “poor tradecraft” in setting up numerous Twitter accounts, and was now covering its tracks in order to prevent anyone finding out multiple users “are linked to each other” or to the US government, one way or another.

“DoD might want to give us a timetable for shutting them down in a more prolonged way that will not compromise any ongoing operations or reveal their connections to DoD,” he speculated.

Free speech absolutism

So it was the compromised accounts that were permitted to stay active, spreading disinformation and distorting the public mind all the while. Some even remain extant to this day.

To say the least, Twitter executives were well-aware that their eager and enthusiastic support of Pentagon psyops would not be received well if publicized. Shortly before the September Washington Post report on the DoD’s audit of these efforts, Twitter lawyers and lobbyists were alerted by a company communications executive about the forthcoming exposé.

After the Post story was published, Twitter staffers congratulated themselves and each other over how effectively the company concealed its role in covering up CENTCOM’s deeds, with one communications official thanking a welter of executives “for doing all that you could to manage this one,” noting with relief the story “didn’t seem to get too much traction.”

Were it not for the series of #TwitterFiles disclosures since Elon Musk controversially took over the company, these dark, shameful secrets would likely have remained buried forever. The full extent of the company’s mephitic collusion with US intelligence agencies, and the comparable, simultaneous collaboration of every major social network, must now be told in full.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Iran arrests agents linked to British intelligence

By Lucas Leiroz | December 27, 2022

Since the beginning of the mass protests in Iran, many suspicions have arisen that this could be another attempt of color revolution. In fact, the existence of foreign agents interested in promoting a regime change operation in the country seems increasingly clear. Recently, Iranian authorities arrested subversive agents linked to British intelligence. The case shows once again that the demonstrations are not really focused on guaranteeing women’s rights, but on attacking the West’s geopolitical enemies.

Members of the Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) announced on December 25th the arrest of seven leaders of a dissident group involved in the protests that have hit the country in recent months. According to the Guard authorities the criminals were involved with British intelligence agencies, and supposedly interested in destabilizing the Iranian political situation, making a regime change operation possible.

Although the arrest has happened now, when the suspects were finally identified and located, the investigation about the dissident group they were part of is old. The organization is called “Zagros” and would be, according to Iranian intelligence, creating a wide network of “counterrevolutionary elements” inside and outside Iran – receiving support from the British in order to foment social chaos in the Persian country. The seven leaders were found in Kerman province, where they were in constant contact with foreign agents. According to the Iranian police, the British agents have also been identified.

“An organized group called Zagros, which was led by agents from the UK and created a team of active counterrevolutionary elements inside and outside the country to lead subversive activities, especially during recent protests, has been identified as a result of a successful operation”, the Guard’s spokespeople informed Iranian media in a statement.

As well known, Iran has been the target of a drastic mutiny since September. Apparently, the reason for the start of the protests would be the alleged “murder” of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died when she was in the custody of the Iranian police after being detained for breaking some Islamic moral norms.

Iranian authorities have denied any involvement in Amini’s death, stating that the woman died of natural causes while in custody. In fact, images taken by prison cameras show that Amini was fine, healthy and without any injuries until minutes before she died, which contradicts the Western narrative that she was tortured and beaten to death.

However, even so, mass protests erupted across the country, leading to utter chaos. Quickly, the demonstrations ceased to be peaceful, and the protesters adopted extremely violent methods, resorting to acts of vandalism, sacrilege and beatings. Mosques were destroyed, religious leaders attacked, and government facilities vandalized. Later, the violence escalated to the open use of firearms by the protesters, who murdered several police officers in the streets of the country. Between late October and early November there were also two terrorist attacks, with attackers bombing civilian and military facilities.

The government implemented some counterterrorism measures to neutralize the rebellion. Several protesters were arrested, and investigations gradually progressed to find possible signs of connections between the protesters and foreign groups. Since the beginning of the unrest, the Iranian authorities made it clear that they suspected the existence of an intelligence operation to incite chaos and start a color revolution. The suspicions were corroborated by several geopolitical experts around the world. Now, with the arrest of these Iranian agents at the service of British intelligence, the veracity of suspicions of foreign involvement is even more evident.

Indeed, Iran, regardless of any criticisms that may be made about the local government, is a revolutionary regime safeguarded by broad popular support. Even during the recent demonstrations, there was a great movement of response from the masses supporting the Shia theocracy, who also took to the streets to fight the dissidents. Also, despite maintaining strict moral rules in respect of the traditional Islamic religion, the country has a progressive stance towards women, having high rates of female representation in universities and in high level jobs.

This makes it at least difficult to believe that protests of this magnitude could have developed “naturally” in the country, without incitement to riot by destabilizing groups. What is happening in Iran is something very similar to what happened in several emerging countries during the 2010s, when mass demonstrations evolved into armed clashes and civil wars, resulting in regime change attempts in enemy nations of the West.

But Iran has managed the situation well and seems to have avoided the possibility of a civil war.

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

You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | 1 Comment

Steve Kirsch interview with UK cardiologist Aseem Malhotra

stkirsch – December 21, 2022

My 80-minute interview with famous UK cardiologist Aseem Malhotra. He went from pro-vax to anti-vax. He noted that “No cardiologist that you know of is getting any more COVID jabs. That’s information that’s been shared with me since my publication.” Guess what? The mainstream UK press is NOT covering that.

In one year, the UK has gone from nearly all the UK cardiologists getting jabbed to all of them refusing to get any more. That’s a pretty dramatic shift in opinion in 1 year. The narrative cannot be maintained much longer. How many years will it be before the mainstream media reports this?

We covered a lot of ground in the 80 minute interview which I recorded using Squadcast.fm for crystal clarity of the video, then I imported into Davinci Resolve to assemble the two videos and normalize the sound levels.

Topics covered (but not in this order):

  • WHO says that patients should be fully informed of side effects but for the vaccine the rule doesn’t apply
  • Is there a scientific reason that vaccines should have liability protection? What happened when India refused to offer it? [Kudos to India for being smarter than the rest of the world health authorities ]
  • When does the nonsense stop in the UK?
  • Will anyone debate you? Why do they all refuse?
  • Is the vaccine helpful for anyone?
  • C, D, Zinc + nasal rinses: far better than vaccines for COVID?
  • 8% needed to seek medical attention after the vax (per v-safe, rasmussen, and my surveys). Is that “safe”? Or ridiculously unsafe? What should it be?
  • How many red-pilled cardiologists are there in the UK? It went from 5% against to 100% against in just one year!
  • What are the death and disability rates from the vax?
  • Is there enough evidence now to stop the vaccines? So why aren’t they?
  • Does the vax do anything good? or is it all net bad?
  • Did the press cover your paper? WTF?!!? Why not? They covered all your other papers!
  • You got the vax. Have you screened yourself for subclinical myocarditis?
  • How confident are you that your dad died suddenly due to the vaccine?
  • Nobody wanted to see the Israeli safety data. Ever heard of that before?
  • What do you think of the embalmer clots?
  • How are they trying to discredit you? Have people accused you of being a grifter? motivations?
  • Has anyone published a rebuttal to your paper? With the entire world against you (at least publicly), it seems odd nobody is challenging your papers on COVID.

Aseem’s patreon account has various levels if you would like to support his work.

December 27, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked (1989 article)

Kind of like the “Winter of Illness and Death”

By Igor Chudov | December 26, 2022

Let’s appreciate how lucky we all are:

  1. We are having a great holiday season.
  2. We did not die last year in the “Winter of Illness and Death for the Unvaccinated.”
  3. We did not die of overheating, starvation, dust bowl, and massive ocean flooding that was supposed to kill or displace us by 2019.

Let’s talk about the last point: a 1989 AP article explains that the UN predicted a global climate disaster that was supposed to happen within 30 years, so by 2019.

The article is terrifying to read. Actual quotes:

  • Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
  • Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees.”
  • Ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations.
  • The most conservative scientific estimate is that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.

You may be relieved to find out that the actual temperature change between 1989 and 2021, if you believe the official temperature numbers, is 0.85-0.27 degrees, or 0.58 degrees.

The 1989 UNEP report deals with degrees in CELSIUS, as does the chart above.

What about the global sea level that was supposed to inundate entire countries and turn people into eco-refugees? The NOAA ocean level chart helps us see what happened since 1989:

Instead of 3 feet, the sea level rose by 3 inches!

Some of my critically-thinking readers may ask: what if the dire prediction failed to materialize because of a success in curbing CO2 emissions? The helpful official carbon dioxide chart shows a continued rise of CO2 — so there was no real curbing of emissions.

But Climate Change is Real Now!

This RECENT photo illustrates that climate change is real and threatening. Please find the difference between these two pictures!

In the 2022 report, like the UN 30 years ago, the WEF is also warning us that in 30 years, we will have to deal with 200 million climate refugees:

Climate change is causing heart attacks in 2022!

I totally believe in all this! How can the WEF be wrong?

December 26, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | 6 Comments

Twitter Files describe Covid censorship campaign

RT | December 26, 2022

The latest batch of Twitter documents released by CEO Elon Musk show how the platform censored posts about Covid-19 that didn’t align with the White House’s message. Qualified doctors and epidemiologists were suppressed and banned at the direct request of the Biden administration, the documents suggest.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations pushed Twitter to moderate coronavirus-related content, journalist David Zweig reported on Monday, citing the company’s internal communications. While Trump’s team wanted to tamp down rumors of grocery-store shortages to combat panic-buying, Biden switched focus to “misinformation” about vaccines once his team took over in January 2021.

According to files seen by Zweig, Biden’s staff directly pressured Twitter to ban “high-profile anti-vaxxer accounts,” including that of former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who has persistently claimed that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits. Twitter complied and suspended Berenson in July 2021, but Twitter employees said afterwards that “the Biden team” was still “not satisfied” with the platform’s censorship efforts, and angrily demanded that it “de-platform several accounts.”

Twitter placed a warning label on the account of a Harvard epidemiologist who argued that “those with prior natural infection” do not need to be vaccinated, and flagged as “misleading” tweets that cited the Biden administration’s own data on Covid death rates. It used a combination of AI “bots” and contracted moderators in foreign countries to make these decisions.

A physician was flagged for sharing the results of a peer-reviewed study linking vaccination with cardiac arrests in young people, while another doctor was permanently suspended for referring to a published study suggesting that vaccination temporarily impairs male patients’ sperm count.

“Dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information,” Zweig tweeted.

When former President Donald Trump urged his followers not to “be afraid of Covid” following his own recovery from the illness, Twitter’s senior moderators debated taking action against the tweet, before concluding that Trump’s “optimistic” assessment did not count as misinformation.

Since purchasing Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has released batches of documents shedding light on the platform’s previously opaque censorship policies. Published by several independent journalists, these document dumps have shown how Twitter suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden’s election campaign, colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.

December 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

IRGC arrests seven riot leaders linked with UK intelligence services

The Cradle | December 26, 2022

Seven individuals active during the recent riots in Iran’s Kerman Province with ties to the United Kingdom were detained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on 25 December, Tasnim news agency reported.

According to information released on 26 December by the IRGC’s Tharallah base in the Kerman Province of central Iran, seven individuals of a network with ties to UK intelligence services were detained. Those arrested had allegedly been leading riots and were in charge of recent disturbances in the area.

The network, which went by the name “Zagros,” collected anti-revolutionary agents from inside and outside the nation to carry out plots against the Islamic Republic in an attempt to destablize the government, particularly during the most recent unrest, IRNA reported.

According to the information released by the IRGC’s Tharallah base, among those detained were dual nationals who had been trying to flee the country.

The British foreign ministry stated that it was requesting more information from Iranian officials in response to claims that dual citizens of Iran and the United Kingdom had been detained there.

On 1 December, the head of the IRGC’S Basij forces was quoted as saying that the ‘enemies’ of the Islamic Republic have been using “hybrid warfare” against the country throughout the recent unrest, and that 47 foreign intelligence agencies are involved.

Last month, a number of French intelligence agents were also detained in Iran in relation to the unrest gripping the country, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi told state TV on 16 November.

“People of other nationalities were arrested in the riots, some of whom played a big role. There were elements from the French intelligence agency and they will be dealt with according to the law,” Vahidi said.

The interior minister did not specify the number of agents detained nor where they were discovered.

Several Mossad agents have also been arrested in Iran over recent months, who were allegedly planning to carry out sabotage operations and assassinations targeting security personnel.

On 22 December, Iran’s security forces identified and arrested members of four Mossad-affiliated operational teams, according to a statement disclosed by Tehran’s Intelligence Ministry.

The statement elaborated on how the Israeli intelligence agency planned to exploit Iran’s current instability in recent weeks, which began due to nationwide riots instigated by the alleged murder of Mahsa Amini while in the custody of Iran’s Gasht-e-Ershad, also known as the morality police.

The Intelligence Ministry further added that it obtained “clues” about a Mossad ringleader based in Europe, disclosing that information regarding the investigation will be revealed upon completion.

A few days prior, in a similar incident, the Intelligence Ministry disclosed that it arrested several members of the Mossad group who were allegedly planning to sabotage Tehran’s defense industry.

December 26, 2022 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , , , | 1 Comment

Russia ready to resume gas supplies to EU – official

RT | December 26, 2022

Moscow is ready to restart supplies of natural gas to the EU via the Yamal-Europe Pipeline, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak said on Monday. He noted that shipments through the route were halted for political reasons.

According to the official, the EU remains a relevant market for Russia, which is able to resume supplies to a region suffering from a gas shortage.

“For example, the Yamal-Europe Pipeline, which was shut down for political reasons, remains unused,” Novak said.

Gas supplies via the pipeline, which usually flow westward, have been mostly reversed since Poland terminated a supply contract with Russia ahead of its end-2022 expiry date, after rejecting Moscow’s demand for ruble payments. The Polish leg of the route is currently being used to pump stored gas from Germany.

In response to Warsaw’s move, Russian state-run energy giant Gazprom cut off supplies, saying it could no longer send gas via Poland, while Moscow imposed sanctions against the firm that owns the Polish section of the Yamal-Europe pipeline.

Although Russian gas deliveries to the EU via the Nord Stream and Yamal-Europe pipelines have been halted, Russian gas is still being supplied to certain European buyers via a transit line through Ukraine and the TurkStream pipeline through Türkiye.

Despite the persisting problems, Novak says he still sees the EU as a viable market for Russia.

“Today we can confidently say that there is a stable demand for our gas. Therefore, we continue to consider Europe as a potential market for our products. It is clear that a large-scale campaign was launched against us, which ended with acts of sabotage against the Nord Stream pipelines,” he said.

The market for liquefied natural gas (LNG) also remains open, according to Novak, who noted that Russian LNG supplies to the EU are expected to grow to 21 billion cubic meters by the end of the year.

December 26, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

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