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Insight? No, the Sunday Times falls for US Covid propaganda

By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | June 21, 2023

In simpler times, a dichotomy was understood to exist whereby our newspapers of record printed The Truth while those on the other side regurgitated state propaganda. It is of course a conceit, as the complicity of our mass media in pushing the party line on Covid-19 over the last three years demonstrates, but it’s one of which all journalists, and especially those in the business of conducting investigations, should be ever mindful or they risk being bamboozled.

On June 10, a headline in the Sunday Times promised to inform its readers ‘What really went on inside the Wuhan Lab weeks before Covid erupted’. The lengthy story was by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott, editor and deputy editor of ‘the renowned Insight investigative team’.

Insight said they had ‘reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators – including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare – who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak’.

The facts presented by the Insight team are accurate as far as they go: the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) received funding in 2009 from the US non-profit organisation EcoHealth Alliance and was collecting bat coronaviruses to identify pandemic potential viruses as part of a programme called PREDICT. https://p2.predict.global/ WIV received more money from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) via EcoHealth Alliance in 2014 to continue its bat coronavirus research. The American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) refused to fund an EcoHealth Alliance proposal called DEFUSE in 2018, part of which proposed genetically engineering bat coronaviruses to see if they could be made more infectious to humans by adding what is called a ‘furin cleavage’ gene.

What the Sunday Times does not make clear is that the PREDICT programme in which EcoHealth Alliance was a partner was launched by the US government Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2009. It continued work started by the US military in the early 1960s to support military preparedness by identifying infectious diseases which might trouble US forces abroad. Under PREDICT this research was in effect rebranded as civilian work by identifying pandemic potential viruses which threatened to jump from animals to humans. To use the terminology of the Cold War, EcoHealth Alliance was acting as a ‘cut-out’ – a front – for the CIA-linked USAID. Nor does the Sunday Times make clear that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), then headed by Dr Anthony Fauci, funded the DEFUSE programme rejected by DARPA, or that Dr Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina and WIV collaborator, who they note had himself been mixing genes from different pathogens to make chimeric viruses, wrote the gain-of-function section of the proposal.

If the meaning of ‘insight’ is to gain an accurate and a deep understanding of something, these details are more than incidental. Deep understanding requires sceptical interrogation of both the source material and the purpose behind the production of material such as ‘previously confidential reports’. It is here that things start to go awry for the Sunday Times.

Most quotes in the story are attributed to anonymous US ‘sources’ linked to a 2020 US State Department investigation into Covid-19’s origins. The reader is expected to accept their credibility at face value because they come from ‘our’ side. The only two on-record sources linked to the investigation are scientists Dr Richard Ebright, a longstanding critic of gain-of-function research, and Dr Steven Quay, the CEO of a biotechnology company.

It’s unclear who else the Sunday Times interviewed but amongst those involved in the State Department investigation was David Asher of the Hudson Institute, which is the ‘fiscal sponsor’ of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense established by Dr Robert Kadlec in 2014 when he was a mere lobbyist for the vaccine manufacturer Emergent Biosolutions. Kadlec is the principal architect of 21st century US biosecurity policy. The Commission produced the draft blueprint for Kadlec’s revamped National Biodefense Policy which was adopted by President Trump in 2018. 

The investigation was set up when the State Department was led by the China hawk, Mike Pompeo, who favoured a more robust foreign policy which treated China as a dangerous strategic competitor for global hegemony. His department began exploring an alternative explanation for the emergence of Covid-19 from the natural spillover notoriously articulated in the 2020 ‘proximal origin’ paper. The far-from-disinterested parties, Dr Anthony Fauci, Sir Jeremy Farrar, then director of the UK Wellcome Trust and now WHO chief scientist, Dr Ralph Baric and Dr Peter Daszak, the chief executive of Ecohealth Alliance, were all involved in an email chain with the authors discussing the natural spillover framing in advance of the paper’s publication. 

In January 2021, days before the end of Donald Trump’s Presidency, Secretary of State Pompeo issued a press release ‘sharing new information concerning the activities inside China’s government laboratories in 2019’  and demanding the World Health Organization investigate the origins of Covid-19 which he was suggesting arose from Chinese military bioweapon research at the WIV.

The US ‘had reason to believe’, said Pompeo, that several WIV researchers became sick in the autumn of 2019 and had ‘symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses’. He then said the WIV was studying RaTG13, the bat coronavirus which was most similar to SARS-CoV-2, while conducting possible ‘gain-of-function’ experiments to enhance transmissibility or lethality. Pompeo omitted to mention that the US government had outsourced all this bat-related research to WIV before sensationally claiming that WIV, despite claiming to be a civilian research institution, had secret links to the Chinese military and had been doing research for them since 2017. He accused China of behaving irresponsibly by withholding ‘vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus, and the next one’.

The State Department investigation Pompeo initiated didn’t die with the Trump administration. The work was continued by someone the Sunday Times article mentions in passing as responsible for the US vaccine development programme, Dr Robert Kadlec.

After his tenure as Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response ended, Dr Bob was hired once again by his old friend Senator Richard Burr to work for the GOP minority on the Senate HELP Committee. Burr had in fact recommended Kadlec to President Trump for the role of Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), an office within Health and Human Services, the pulpit from which he was finally able to fulfil his ambitions for his vaccine ‘Manhattan Project’.

Kadlec’s account ‘Muddy Waters: The origins of Covid-19 report’ was published in April 2023. It is straight out of the playbook of Britain’s favourite fictional civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby, who pithily observed: ‘Clarification is not to clarify things. It’s to put oneself in the clear.’

The report, co-authored by Dr Bob Foster, a former chief scientist for Medical Systems Integration at Fort Detrick, the US Army Medical Research Centre, runs to 300 pages and contains 1,570 citations. Kadlec, who was once a weapons inspector deployed to Iraq to find non-existent biological weapons of mass destruction, is up to his old tricks again. The thesis put forward is the long version of the January 15, 2021, Pompeo press release. They contend that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in the autumn of 2019, that it had leaked from the WIV lab and that because a People’s Liberation Army vaccine specialist, Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist, filed a patent for a vaccine in February 2020, China must have known about the leak in November. They deduce from all this that China’s military was secretly working with the WIV to develop simultaneously a bioweapon and a vaccine.

For all the material they say they reviewed, the Sunday Times writers unquestioningly retell the account given in Muddy Waters: ‘The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the (corona)viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.’

It’s beyond the scope of a brief article to rebut the entire document, but let me give you the flavour of it using two pieces of evidence put forward in the Muddy Waters report.

According to the report: ‘On November 25, 2019, a 25-year-old Welsh teacher in Wuhan fell ill with flu-like symptoms. The teacher developed pneumonia on December 6, 2019 and was hospitalised. On January 16, 2020, the hospital informed the teacher by letter that he had been infected by the novel coronavirus.’

The citation for this is a March 4 2020 Daily Mail interview with the teacher, Connor Reed, who lived to tell the tale. When he felt ill, Reed took a taxi to Zhongnan University Hospital because he wanted to see a British doctor and ‘there are plenty of foreign doctors there, studying’. He was diagnosed with pneumonia and sent home that evening with antibiotics which he says he didn’t take, preferring instead to use Tiger Balm. It’s a far cry from most people’s understanding of ‘hospitalised’.

The evidence for a lab leak is just as dodgy. The Sunday Times reported that the investigators believed that researchers working in the WIV coronavirus lab became sick in the second week of November. They say an investigator told them: ‘We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory of Dr Shi. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.’

The citation in Muddy Waters for the story about the sick WIV researchers leads to Josh Rogin, foreign policy reporter for the Washington Post, who says that his information came from secret intelligence gathered by the US Government.

Current discussions of Covid’s origin proffer two explanations: a bioweapon accidentally released from an unsafe laboratory versus a naturally occurring spillover from animal to humans. Neither explanation can account for why Moderna, a company with close links to the US government which has been generously funded by the US government agencies DARPA and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), began making contractual preparations for its coronavirus vaccine in May 2019 when it asked Merck to give up the exclusivity provision in its 2015 Master Collaboration Agreement with respect to a ‘specific set of respiratory infections’. Nor can it account for the fact that Moderna’s prototype coronavirus vaccine was sent to Baric for animal testing on December 16, 2019, two weeks before the Chinese reported a ‘pneumonia of unknown origin’. The binary nature of the origin discussions obscures other possibilities, such as the one suggested by the Iranians in March 2020 and thereafter ignored, that Covid-19 was an American bioweapon, a scenario under which it’s plausible that the researchers at WIV were intentionally set up to take the blame.

As for the Sunday Times, on this occasion it has conveyed no insight, only American propaganda designed to muddy the waters, not clarify them.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

How Elites Weaponised the ‘Precautionary Principle’ Against an Unsuspecting Public

BY DR GARY SIDLEY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 22, 2023

In everyday life, it only makes sense to initiate a new action if we are reasonably confident it will not result in more harms than benefits. The importance of this notion is amplified manyfold when it is powerful actors – politicians and their public health experts – forcing the change on their citizens. The precautionary principle (PP) in its original form endorsed this important rule and complemented the Hippocratic oath of our medical doctors to ‘first do no harm’. Yet throughout the Covid event we have witnessed a total disregard for this principle with the imposition of a series of non-evidenced restrictions, driven more by ideology than science, where the resulting collateral damage has dwarfed any benefits. One stark example – the focus of this article – has been the forced masking of people in community settings, a practice that continues in many areas of healthcare today.

The precautionary principle initially emerged in the 1970s primarily in response to growing concerns about industrial pollution from toxic chemicals. The central premise was a reasonable one: in situations of uncertainty, innovation – such as the introduction of a novel process or intervention – should only proceed if there was no reasonable likelihood of serious unforeseen harms. In effect, in situations where traditional science had not yet investigated the potential for collateral damage from a new way of doing things, the PP put the burden of proof on the innovators to demonstrate that their novel project would not cause harm. If applied to the specific issue of mass-masking during the Covid era, the experts at SAGE (and all the other multi-disciplinary groups, such as the Royal Society, Independent SAGE and DELVE, who pushed for legislation to compel us all to cover our faces) should have produced persuasive evidence that masks do no harm before making their recommendations.

Instead, those pushing the pro-mask narrative often resorted to tropes and appeals to common sense: “It’s only a mask”; “It’s not much to ask, a small inconvenience”; “If it helps a little at the margins, it’s worth it”; “What harm can it do?”

In early summer 2020, our public health experts would have recognised the validity of two assertions. First, that the scientific evidence that masks significantly reduce viral transmission was – at best – weak and contradictory. Second, that the mass-masking of healthy people across the Western world had never before been undertaken and, therefore, the potential unintended harms of such a policy were largely unknown. Under these circumstances, the original PP would have emphatically advised, “when in doubt, do nothing“: do not encourage or recommend the wearing of masks, and – most definitely – do not even contemplate mandating them.

If only, if only.

If only our public health experts had heeded this sensible precautionary message:

  • We would not have stunted the social and emotional development of countless numbers of our young children, many being rendered unable to recognise facial expressions;
  • We would not have contributed to the inflated levels of fear in the population, fear that discouraged hospital attendances, exacerbated loneliness, and thereby increased the number of non-Covid excess deaths;
  • We would not have re-traumatised many victims of historical physical and sexual abuse, for whom the sight and feel of masks triggered disturbing flashbacks;
  • We would not have excluded the hard-of-hearing (one in six of the population) from full social engagement with their fellow humans;
  • We would not have polluted our environment with swathes of non-recyclable plastic and contaminated our waterways with potentially poisonous chemicals.

So why did Professor Chris Whitty (the Chief Medical Officer) and his band of academic advisors disregard the precautionary principle?

Paradoxically, the experts who pushed the pro-mask narrative often deployed a corrupted version of the PP to justify their stance. Over the past three decades, the PP concept has evolved – some might suggest it has been hijacked – and is now commonly taken to mean something very different. The re-writing of the PP gained impetus in 1992 at a United Nations General Assembly meeting where global leaders asserted (Principle 15) that: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” Further re-interpretations of the PP followed, culminating in the European Commission, in 2022, espousing the benefits of adopting the “Innovation Principle” in which “the regulatory framework supports and enables the implementation of new out-of-the-box solutions to societal problems”. This revision of the original PP has – inevitably – encroached into the public health sphere, where large pharmaceutical companies welcome the freedom to deliver their ‘innovative’ new drugs to the general population unencumbered by a pre-requisite to demonstrate that their products will lead to more benefits than harms.

The major consequence of this corruption of the PP is this: if powerful, state-funded world ‘experts’ assert that we are facing an existential threat – be it from climate change, environmental pollution or a novel virus – their recommended interventions should be implemented unless opponents of the proposed actions can prove that the likely collateral damage will significantly outweigh the claimed positive outcomes. The burden of proof no longer resides with the innovators. World governments can now impose top-down restrictions on their citizens and (so long as they claim to be acting for ‘the greater good’ or be doing the ‘socially responsible’ thing) the onus is on others to prove beyond doubt that their policies are counterproductive.

Throughout the Covid event those experts beseeching us all to wear face coverings have often relied, to various degrees, upon this warped version of the PP to support their stance. Arguably the most extreme example of an ideologically-driven imposition is pro-mask crusader Professor Trish Greenhalgh, who not only pre-emptively assumes no harms of mass-masking, but also believes that the search for evidence may be “the enemy of good policy”.

So rather than the obligation to carry out a thorough cost-benefit analysis prior to compelling us all to wear masks in community settings, our paternalistic policymakers were – with the help of the corrupted precautionary principle – allowed to fob us off with dubious claims of an existential threat, appeals to altruism and meaningless platitudes like “it’s better to be safe than sorry”.

Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and a co-founder of Smile Free, a campaign group opposed to mask mandates.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

IRS Whistleblowers Release New Bombshell Evidence Against Bidens, DOJ & AG Garland

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | June 22, 2023

Several bombshells dropped by two IRS whistleblowers on Thursday reveal, among other things, that Joe Biden’s DOJ buried evidence of Hunter Biden’s tax crimes – and stopped US Attorney David Weiss from bringing charges against Hunter in two different jurisdictions last year.

According to Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), Weiss sought to be appointed as a special counsel in the case last year but was denied as well.

What’s more, the IRS sought felony charges against Hunter, send their recommendations to the Biden DOJ, and they ‘came out as two misdemeanors,’ Byron York tweets.

According to the whistleblowers, one of whom is Gary Shipley – who came forward weeks ago to reveal his identity, the IRS was notified of potential evidence “in the guest house of former Vice President Biden,” but were rebuffed by US Attorney Lesley Wolf, who said there was “no way,” as search warrant “would ever get approved.”

“Whistleblowers describe how the Biden Justice Department intervened and overstepped in a campaign to protect the son of Joe Biden by delaying, divulging, and denying an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes,” said Smith in a statement. “The testimony shows tactics used by the Justice Department to delay the investigation long enough to reach the statute of limitations, evidence they divulged sensitive actions by the investigative team to Biden’s attorneys, and denied requests by the U.S. Attorney to bring charges against Biden.”

During seven hours of testimony before the Ways and Means Committee, Shipley and the other whistleblower’s testimony implicates both AG Merrick Garland and IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel for lying to Congress about political interference in the Biden probe.

“Whistleblower One’s story was corroborated by Whistleblower Two,” said Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK).

“One individual came forward and laid out the full case of what’s going on. The second individual, through his attorney, asked Ways and Means to contact him and ask for testimony. So we didn’t seek these, they sought us,” added Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC).

As Techno Fog notes via The Reactionary;

With the rejection from the DC US Attorney, the team sought the approval to bring tax charges for years 2016-2019 in the Central District of California. Shapley concluded that “the Central District of California declined to allow charges to be brought there.”

The rejection to bring charges in DC and California stands in stark contrast to the testimony of Attorney General Garland, who in March of 2023 stated that US Attorney Weiss had the full authority to “bring cases in other jurisdictions.” Garland also said that he personally would ensure that Weiss could “carry out his investigation and that he [would] be able to run it.” Both those statements now appear to be false. (Your humble author thinks the Republicans knew Garland was making misrepresentations at the time.)

…

Preferential treatment of Hunter Biden might be an understatement. In reality, it was sabotage, the affirmative effort to decline investigative steps and deny prosecutors the ability to bring charges. The DOJ’s conduct included:

 “included slow-walking investigative steps, not allowing enforcement actions to be executed, limiting investigators’ line of questioning for witnesses, misleading investigators on charging authority, delaying any and all actions months before elections.”

Prosecutors even wanted to remove Hunter Biden’s name from electronic search warrants and document requests, even though this could cause investigators to not get certain evidence.

Joe Biden was in the room

In another piece of evidence presented on Thursday, Hunter Biden can be seen in a message to Chinese business associate, Henry Zhao, demanding that they send money as promised.

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” wrote Hunter via WhatsApp on July 30, 2017. “Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight.“

Hunter then warned that “if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.“ … Full article

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | | Leave a comment

Pentagon ‘Calls the Tune’ in US’ China Policy as Bomber Flight Follows Blinken’s Beijing Visit

Sputnik – June 19, 2023

The US Air Force has dispatched several B-52H Stratofortress bombers to Abdulrachman Saleh Air Force Base in Indonesia from their bases in North Dakota. The bombers are joining US Pacific Air Forces and Indonesian Air Force aircraft in the Cope West exercise, a bilateral air drill, before returning to the US in the coming days.

The B-52 has been in service with the US Air Force since the 1950s, when it was introduced to haul large numbers of nuclear and conventional bombs to its targets. They were used with devastating effect during the Vietnam War, although it only dropped conventional bombs. The US retains a handful of the massive aircraft to use as “missile trucks” and to intimidate “hostile” nations.

The drills come just days after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a visit to Beijing to meet with senior Chinese diplomatic leaders, including President Xi Jinping. The two sides reaffirmed their desire to avoid a new cold war and claimed they do not seek the other’s overthrow or to supplant their positions on the international stage.

Experts told Sputnik that this kind of contradictory messaging is all too common from the West, especially the United States, where war and intimidation have always been the primary tools of diplomacy.

James Bradley, China expert, historian and author of the “The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia,” told Sputnik on Thursday that whatever rhetoric the US says at the moment, its long-term strategic concern in East Asia has always been controlling and containing China.

“The US Navy was surveying islands near China as early as the 1850s,” he noted, adding that “1898 saw America grabbing the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii to construct a sluice for the riches of China to flow to the US. Since 1945, the United States has been trying to contain China. The State Department can talk about dialogue, but the former War Department – currently called the Defense Department – calls the tune.”

In fact, Bradley noted that when journalist John Pilger asked him in 2016 if the US was already at war with China, “I answered yes.” That was even before the official US strategic shift toward “great power competition” that came in 2018.

“Economic war, cyber war, propaganda war. The business of China is business, and the business of America is war,” Bradley told Sputnik.

Jeff J. Brown, author of The China Trilogy, editor at China Rising Radio Sinoland and co-founder and curator of the Bioweapon Truth Commission, told Sputnik that such disjointedness between diplomatic rhetoric and military activity is typical of Western nations, where “in general, politics is individual and self-aggrandizing.”

“It is not unusual for the US Department of State, Department of Defense, the White House and Congresspersons to have conflicting and confusing messages, since each has their own agendas to push,”he said. “Not only are we seeing the Blinken-Indonesia white-hat black-hat routine, but at the same time, Joe Biden just called Chinese President Xi a ‘dictator!’”

“In the West in general, politics is individual and self-aggrandizing, so none of this is surprising that the left hand doesn’t care what the right hand is doing. In China, the government practices Marxist democratic centralism: argue and debate beforehand, but then publicly speak and act in one, unified voice,” Brown noted.

As to why Indonesia would agree to host US strategic bombers amid its attempts to stay neutral on the Washington-Beijing rivalry, Brown noted that the forces in power in Jakarta came to power in a US-sponsored pressure of pro-Chinese forces.

“We cannot forget that today’s Indonesia was born in the US genocide of millions of communists, socialists, leftists and liberals in 1965-66, to depose non-aligned President Sukarno for <…> General Suharto. Since then, the US military naturally pulls a lot of strings with the Indonesian army. We see the same situation in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Independent-minded presidents, prime ministers and legislatures are always confronted by the Western imperial toolbox: blackmail, bribery, extortion, false flags and fake news,” he explained.

“This is why we can see executives and legislatures cooperating with anti-imperial countries like China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela, while their militaries work with NATO.”

The author predicted that while the US would likely continue to pressure Jakarta to avoid buying advanced military hardware from China or Russia using “negative, reactionary diplomacy,” the inevitable decline of the West and rising of the developing world means its ability to do so is only going to diminish in the future.

“With the West’s continuing decline and the rise of BRICS and SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization], Indonesia may want to reorder those Su-35s,” Brown said, referring to a 2018 deal with Russia that the US blocked.

“It might work this go-around. In the meantime, the US will continue to use Western imperialism’s negative, reactionary diplomacy, by heavily playing the Taiwan separatist card, pushing NATO in Japan <…>, patching together hind-end groupings like the Quad and AUKUS, and sanctioning everything that moves,” he added.

“This, while China has masterfully united East and Southeast Asia into the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) free trade agreement, totally outclassing the US’ inchoate, anti-China Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It’s so much easier to say ‘yes’ to mutually respectful, win-win cooperation.”

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

Poland denies US media claims about Nord Stream

RT | June 22, 2023

A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report on Poland’s alleged role in the Nord Stream gas pipelines blasts last September is “completely untrue,” the Polish National Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement to the country’s daily Rzeczpospolita on Thursday.

Citing German investigators, the US media outlet claimed in early June that the EU nation supposedly served as an operational base for the suspects that might be behind the Russian natural gas pipeline sabotage. A Polish source familiar with the investigation told the paper that Berlin allegedly knew very little about some of the suspects and might be following the wrong track entirely.

Warsaw has launched its own probe into last September’s incident, alongside Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, the prosecutor’s office told the Polish outlet. The data gathered by Polish officials contradicts the claims made by the WSJ, it added.

“The statement that ‘Poland was a logistics hub for the operation of blowing up Nord Stream’ is completely untrue and is not supported by the evidence of the investigation,” the prosecutor’s office said.

The WSJ reported that a yacht called the ‘Andromeda’ – which was chartered by a Ukrainian-owned, Warsaw-based travel agency and moored at a Polish port – had been sailing around each of the locations where the explosions later occurred.

The Polish prosecutor’s office said there was “no direct evidence” of the yacht’s or its crew’s involvement in the blasts. ‘Andromeda’ arrived in Poland from a small German port called Wiek with six people on board. It moored in one of the Polish ports for 12 hours before leaving the nation’s territorial waters, according to the prosecutors.

“The findings of the investigation show that, during the stay of the yacht in a Polish port, no items were loaded onboard, and the crew of the yacht was inspected by the Polish Border Guard,” the prosecutor’s office said. The vessel’s crew had Bulgarian passports, which appeared authentic, according to the officials. None of the crew members were banned from entering the Schengen area either, they added.

“There is no evidence that would indicate the participation of Polish citizens in blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline,” the prosecutor’s office concluded.

A source familiar with the Polish probe also told Rzeczpospolita that German investigators had contacted Polish officials in mid-May and requested information under the European Investigation Order. The Germans asked many questions about ‘Andromeda’ and its crew, including “many trivial facts,” the source said, adding that they apparently had no knowledge of them. Berlin was also not willing to share its own findings on the issue, the source added.

Rzeczpospolita’s source also questioned the yacht’s role in the sabotage operation by claiming that it could not be used to transport enough explosives to relevant locations and deliver them to the undersea pipelines. No equipment that could facilitate that was found onboard, they added.

Rzeczpospolita also reported that Polish officials had not ruled out the possibility that the yacht might have been used as a distraction from the very onset and its purpose was to put the entire investigation on the wrong track.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | , , | 1 Comment

CIA Vet Warns US Intel Agencies ‘Will Do Everything’ to Help Dems in 2024 Race

By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 22.06.2023

Former Special Counsel John Durham offered his first public testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday regarding the details of his report into the FBI’s handling of allegations of collusion between ex-President Donald Trump and Russia. The day before, Durham testified behind closed doors to the US House Intelligence Committee.

While it is not completely clear whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation knew from the outset that dug-up “information on Trump” had been paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, there is “no excuse for their having learned that and, nevertheless, proceeded with the investigation,” former CIA station chief Philip Giraldi told Sputnik.

“There might have been personal malice involved in going after Trump, but that has not been clearly demonstrated,” the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest added, referencing the FBI’s investigation into the alleged Trump-Russia “collusion”.

Former Special Counsel John Durham paid his second visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to face the House Judiciary Committee over the details of his May report, released after almost a four-year-long investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation codenamed, Crossfire Hurricane. Durham had found that the agency had been “seriously deficient,” relying on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” when probing the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s alleged ties to “Russia.”

“One has to assume that the Bureau felt it had a great deal invested in maintaining Democratic Party control of the presidency and that there were concerns that Trump would upset the arrangements made under [Barack] Obama,” Giraldi said.

The Durham report had also exposed the Democratic establishment’s anti-Trump narrative, and the role of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in spawning and then pushing the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

During his probe, the special counsel charged and convicted FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who admitted to doctoring an email to state that Trump aide Carter Page had never been a CIA asset (which was not true) in order to push ahead with surveilling the former Trump campaign adviser. Durham also brought charges against Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann and Brookings Institution scholar Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI. Danchenko has served as the main ‘subsource’ for ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the author of the now infamous Steele dossier. It had been funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) through the law firm Perkins Coie, which Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann worked for at the time.

The claims the “dirty” dossier contained were used by the FBI in a series of clandestine preliminary probes against Trump starting from 2016. John Durham, as part of his investigation, found that Steele’s source, Danchenko, when questioned by the FBI was unable to confirm any of the assumptions.

‘Acting on Behalf of the Deep State’

As the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign sought to use fabricated information from the Steele dossier to smear Donald Trump and some of his advisors, similar tactics were wielded in the 2020 elections, Philip Giraldi previously underscored. After the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees found that senior Biden campaign officials colluded with the CIA to falsely discredit Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” as “Russian disinformation”, Giraldi pointed out that former acting CIA Director Michael Morell had drafted the notorious letter, titled “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden emails.” It was signed by 51 former intelligence officials including CIA Directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and Mike Hayden, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former Director of National Intelligence and James Clapper. The letter claimed that the data on Hunter’s hard drive “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

“The CIA did not ‘approve’ of the letter from the 51 former national security officials. My understanding is that it was submitted to them because the Agency exercises ‘prepublication review’ over all articles and books written by former undercover officers to block the publication of any national secrets. In this case, as I understand it, they confirmed that the letter contained no classified information. The letter itself was largely the product of collaboration by Tony Blinken and Michael Morell, both Democratic Party loyalists who expected to benefit personally,” Giraldi emphasized.

The 51 ex-spies’ opinion was quickly disseminated by the US mainstream press, while the Hunter Biden laptop story, shedding light on the Biden family’s questionable business dealings, was suppressed by both Big Media and Big Tech.

“Morell, Blinken and associates should have known that they were acting on behalf of the deep state and were in fact damaging US democracy such as it is! When the national security agencies go after candidates it is in fact the death of government of and by the people,” Giraldi remarked.

Ahead of John Durham’s testimony on June 21, Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) underscored in his opening statement that the hearing was tasked to provide more “detail and add more color” to the findings of the May report.

“Seven years of attacking Trump is scary enough… What’s more frightening is that any one of us could be next,” Jordan emphasized.

A number of Republicans echoed John Durham’s calls for reforming the FBI, underscoring that the agency, had become “politicized” and “weaponized”, and had carried out a “politically motivated” investigation of Donald Trump.

Looking ahead at the next election cycle, where both Biden and Trump are gearing up to vie for another Oval Office stint, Philip Giraldi concluded:

“For 2024, I expect that the agencies will do everything they can to help Biden or whoever replaces him from the Democratic Party but they will be a lot more careful about how they do it than they were in 2020.”

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Russophobia | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Why China ignores the US

By Fernando Gaillardo – New Eastern Outlook – 22.06.2023

Beijing rejected Washington’s offer to conduct negotiations between Ministers of Defense on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue Summit against the background of mutual misunderstanding.

The Singapore Security Summit for many years has served as a neutral forum for discussing controversies in the Asia-Pacific region, where even outspoken opponents can meet and clarify their mutual grievances without sacrificing credibility. This is why the PRC’s refusal to hold a meeting between Li Shangfu and Lloyd Austin has attracted increased global attention.

The formal reason for rejecting the request was that the Chinese Ministers of Defense was under US sanctions. Li Shangfu previously supervised the revamp of the PLA and promoted the purchase of Russian Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 air defense systems, which angered the Trump administration at the time.

Beijing’s neat diplomatic move is a camouflage for Washington’s complete disregard for China’s foreign policy approaches and interests, including a hint of encroachment on sovereignty. US Air Force conducts about 1,000 surveillance missions per year near China’s maritime borders, while checking the readiness of Chinese air defense forces. The Navy also seeks to come up big in its area of responsibility by regularly sending ships to areas contested by China. Remarkably, even during the persistent attempts of the State Department to organize a meeting at the forum, the ships coming from the US to Japan for exercises could not resist and circled around Taiwan, just in case.

The problem of the island that does not recognize Beijing’s authority is most revealing. Technically, the fact that Taiwan is part of the PRC was stated in The Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between China and USA, 1979, and then in the 1982 Communiqué, which reaffirmed the provisions of the previous document. The duplication was necessary because after the establishment of diplomatic relations with the PRC, the United States passed a separate law that allowed to continue to pour weapons into Taiwan and justifying its military presence without recognizing it as a state.

Washington constantly broadcasts an interest in reducing tensions or even “resetting” relations, but is it worth trusting a partner that is constantly looking for loopholes to avoid even documented agreements? Given the recent demarches, Beijing has decided that there is nothing to talk about with the United States.

A few days after the event, the US media reported that the ministers did meet and, allegedly, discussed pressing issues, but there was no coverage of the event by officials of either country. According to “eyewitnesses” the ministers, in fact, crossed paths between venues and simply exchanged pleasantries, as required by protocol. It all sounds like a wounded hegemon is trying to make up for the reputational costs.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | 1 Comment

The ramifications of EU efforts to isolate China

Press TV – June 22, 2023

The European Commission is proposing a €10 billion fund to develop strategic technologies in order to become less dependent on high tech imports from China.

It also wants to block EU nations from dealing with China when it comes to so called sensitive technologies. The claim is that it’s to reduce risk.

It would appear that positive ties being advanced outside of the West’s control are putting Washington and Brussels on edge.

Trade between the EU and China is worth an incredible 2.3 billion euro per day. Some analysts believe the US is trying to scupper this vital economic link.

During recent European Parliament debates, lawmakers have heavily criticized the EU’s policy towards Russia and China.

The fallout from energy sanctions against Moscow is severely harming EU citizens and businesses.

At a time of dire economic pressures, the European Commission wants to prioritize the government in Kyiv.

Analysts say vested interests in the United States are benefiting most from deteriorating EU-Russia and EU-China relations.

EU leaders are due to hold a summit at the end of next week to discuss the Commission’s trade proposals.

It’s already clear there are major concerns in member states because current arrangements with China are so lucrative.

It is reported that some EU countries believe the European Commission is overstepping the mark.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

EU Transfers to Ukraine Another $1.6Bln in Financial Assistance – Von der Leyen

Sputnik – 22.06.2023

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday the European Union have transferred to Ukraine another 1.5 billion euros ($1.6 billion) in financial assistance to support its infrastructure.

“Today we disburse another €1.5 bn for Ukraine in macro-financial assistance. We help keep Ukraine’s services and infrastructure afloat in its brave fight for freedom,” von der Leyen tweeted.

She also promised to give Kiev more money, recalling the recently announced 50 billion euros of four-year financial reserves for Ukraine.

The head of the commission reiterated the EU was willing to provide Kiev with “long haul” support.

Earlier, the European Commission has reviewed the draft EU budget for the 2024-2027 period and asked member states to increase it by 66 billion euros ($72 billion), mostly to fund assistance for Ukraine.

Western countries have supplied Ukraine with military aid since the start of hostilities in February 2022. The support evolved from lighter artillery munitions and training in 2022 to heavier weapons, including tanks, later that year and in 2023.

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Latest news ‘from the front’

By Gilbert Doctorow | June 22, 2023

This morning’s edition of the news and discussion program Sixty Minutes on Russian state television opened with the now traditional montage of excerpts from U.S. television reporting on transgender  issues. Today this was the latest court decisions on state legislation banning sex change operations in children. That sort of material is now the daily filler on Russian news, providing a nice distraction from the misery of war and a clear demonstration of what degenerates the Americans have become.

However, this distraction was cut short and ten minutes into the program we were shown live images of the ongoing meeting of the RF Security Council chaired by Vladimir Putin. The meeting was virtual not in-person. The President was seated at his desk in his Kremlin office with the other participants shown on television monitors. We caught the moment when Defense Minister Shoigu was reporting to Putin on the summary results of the fighting since the start of the Ukrainian counter-offensive at the start of the month: 246 Ukrainian tanks, including13 German Leopards, have been destroyed and a bit more than 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. Yes, killed. In addition there must be the injured.

This, of course, was the part of the session fit for public dissemination. What really brought the Council together today was something else: to consider Russia’s response to latest developments in the war zone, namely the Ukrainians’ destruction yesterday of several bridges connecting the Kherson oblast under Russian control to the Crimea. It has already been determined that the attackers used the British supplied cruise missiles Storm Shadow. This looks very much like the tripwire that Shoigu had in mind a couple of days ago when he said that Russia will bomb the decision making center in Kiev if its territory is attacked. So we may well expect something to happen now.

Then there was surely another issue on the table arising from developments described in a 5-minute report by a journalist with the German Bild magazine which the Russians put up on the screen. His televised report was devoted to the consequences of the explosion at the Kakhovka dam and the emptying of the vast reservoir behind it, which, per the journalist was, as measured in square kilometers, larger than the Berlin metropolitan area.

After opening his remarks with the Hail Mary assertion that the Russians were responsible for this disaster, he went on to describe very persuasively why the emptying of the reservoir now serves Ukrainian military interests perfectly. Most of the land which had been under water is now dry and can very likely support tanks. In the new conditions, the distance separating Ukrainian and Russian forces in the Kakhovka area has been reduced to zero from what had been a body of water varying from 5 to 31 kilometers in width. Moreover, the length of this new stretch of the front is up to 200 km. And in this new front line, the Russians have no defensive mine fields, tank traps, hidden artillery or well engineered trenches that have been so murderous to the attacking Ukrainian army in the Southern Donetsk and Zaporozhie fronts.

This has to be one of the main “surprises” that the Ukrainian command had in mind as it looks for new ways to achieve a breakthrough. But, this potentially dramatic change is not necessarily what it seems: this is not some German move around the Maginot line that left the French with no response. Russia has the means to respond, but that takes us back to point one: to finish off the regime in Kiev now and not wait further.

Finally, within the broadcast of Sixty Minutes, the leader of a Chechen unit active in the Donbas who appears rather frequently on the program gave his assessment of the personnel and equipment losses on Ukrainian fighting potential. As he noted, the loss of tanks and artillery pieces means that the best trained Ukrainian fighters are now dead. To put an infantry soldier on the front lines, you hand him a Kalashnikov and push him out on the field. But the tank commanders and artillery men are the top soldiers who have undergone long training and war experience. Their loss is irreplaceable and explains the heavy infantry losses comprising most of the 13,000 dead, new recruits who were sent to their deaths as cannon fodder.

The two o’clock feature news program on Channel One provided additional video excerpts from the morning’s RF Security Council meeting, in particular the report to Putin by Nikolai Patrushev, the Secretary of the Council. His discussion of Ukrainian equipment destroyed was far more detailed, listing the numbers of armored personnel carriers,  artillery pieces and rapid fire rocket launchers, helicopters, drones and much more. The conclusion was that most of the equipment that has been supplied to Ukraine over the past months is now destroyed. That takes in both US and European manufactured equipment as well as Soviet equipment donated by former Warsaw Pact countries. Ukraine is now living hand to mouth on fighting material coming in from the West.

The two o’clock news also devoted special attention to the commemorative events going on today in Moscow and in cities and towns across Russia to mark the 82nd anniversary of the German invasion that brought the USSR into WWII. We were shown video recordings of candle lightings where tens of thousands of lights were laid out to form powerful images of remembrance. All of this comes in the midst of what is seen as a new struggle to crush Nazism in Europe as did their parents and grandparents in the Great Patriotic War.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | 1 Comment

US should pay the bill for devastation in Ukraine – Russian envoy

RT | June 22, 2023

The Ukraine conflict was instigated by the US and other Western countries, and as such it is up to Washington to pay for the reconstruction of the ravaged nation, Russia’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, claimed on Wednesday.

Antonov was asked to comment on a statement by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who, while speaking at a Ukraine reconstruction conference in London, claimed that “Russia will eventually bear the cost” of restoring the country.

The Russian diplomat pushed back against Blinken’s remarks, saying the conflict between Moscow and Kiev was “the result of years of deliberate efforts by the United States to create a hotbed of tensions at our borders, to turn Ukraine into ‘anti-Russia,’” which involved a Western-backed coup in the Ukrainian capital in 2014.

Antonov claimed that the US was actively fanning hostilities by pumping Kiev with weapons, while nipping any peace initiatives in the bud. “This means that the administration is fully responsible for what is happening in Ukraine. That’s why it is up to the United States to rebuild the country,” he stated.

He went on to state that while it is possible to restore houses destroyed by American weapons, it will be much more difficult to erase the humanitarian consequences of the conflict.

“How will… Washington evaluate the lives of innocent people? How is the United States going to settle accounts with the Ukrainians, whom they are driving into reckless frontal assaults in today’s so-called counter-offensive?” the envoy asked.

While Western countries have pledged billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance to Ukraine, some of Kiev backers have also called for the seizure of Russian assets that were frozen after the start of the Ukraine conflict, to be used for reconstruction. While legal hurdles have so far prevented this from happening, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has described the initiative as “pure banditry.”

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

BlackRock Recruiter Claims Senators Can Be ‘Bought’ For $10k, War ‘Good For Business’

BY TYLER DURDEN | ZERO HEDGE | JUNE 20, 2023

The undercover chaps and lasses at James O’Keefe’s new undercover media venture have done it again – this time tricking a BlackRock recruiter into making several damning admissions.

In a series of covertly-recorded meetings, recruiter Serge Varlay describes how BlackRock – the world’s largest asset manager – is able to “run the world,” and that it’s easier to pull off shenanigans when “people aren’t thinking about it.”

According to Varlay, US Senators can be ‘bought’ for as little as $10k.

“The senators… are f***ing cheap – you got 10 grand, you can buy a senator,” he remarked.

You can take this big f*** ton of money and buy people, I work for a company called BlackRock… It’s not who is the president, it’s who is controlling the wallet of the president. You could buy your candidates. First, there is the senators these guys are fuckin cheap. Got 10 grand you can buy a senator I’ll give you 500k right now. It doesn’t matter who wins they’re in my pocket. –OMG

Blackrock is also apparently loving the war in Ukraine, which Varley described as “real fuckin’ good for business.”

Ukraine is good for business, you know that right? Russia blows up Ukraine’s grain silos and the price of wheat is going to go mad up. The Ukrainian economy is the wheat market. The price of bread goes up, this is fantastic if you’re trading. Volatility creates opportunity for profit…

According to Varley, it’s “exciting when shit goes wrong.”

“So what are you gonna do if you’re a trading firm? The moment that news hits, within a millisecond, you’re going to pump trades into whoever the wheat suppliers are. Into their stocks. Within an hour or two that stick goes f*cking up and then you sell and you just make, I don’t know, however many mil,” he continued. “The Ukrainian economy is tied very largely to the wheat market, global wheat market, prices of bread, you know, literally everything goes up and down. This is fantastic if you’re trading.

“Volatility creates opportunity to make profit. War is real fucking good for business.”

Watch:

As the Post Millennial notes, Varley also described himself as a person who “decide[s] people’s fates.”

“Every f*cking day, I literally decide how somebody’s life is going to be shaped,” he said. “I’m not actually a finance guy, I just know what happens because I’m recruiting people who do these things.”

More via the PM:

Varlay said these banks run the world because “you acquire stuff. You diversify, you acquire, you keep acquiring. You spend whatever you make in acquiring more. And at a certain point, your risk level is super low. Imagine you’ve invested in 10 different industries, from food to drinks to technology. If one of them fails it doesn’t matter, you have nine others to back you up.”

Varlay said that once “you own a little bit of everything… you can take this big f*ck-ton of money and then you can start to buy people.”

June 22, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Video | | 1 Comment