Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

X ordered to turn over info on users who interacted with Trump

RT | November 30, 2023

Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, ordered X (formerly Twitter) to turn over account information on any users who interacted with the former president, according to a heavily redacted search warrant released by the US Department of Justice on Monday.

The warrant requests “all information from the ‘Connect’ or ‘Notifications’ tab for [Trump’s] account, including all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by the account, as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account (i.e. ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’).” This is in addition to Trump’s own search history, direct messages, a list of every user he “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked,” and “content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by the then-president from October 2020 to January 2021.

Even advertising information, topic preferences, communications with X’s support staff, and data that was deleted but remains available to the platform must be turned over to the prosecutor, according to the document.

“There is no benign or reasonable justification for that demand,” FBI whistleblower Steve Friend opined in a post on X on Tuesday. Many Trump supporters took to X to express their disdain for the order, denouncing Smith as an “enemy of the people” and calling on Congress to defund his investigation.

The Justice Department released the warrant and several other filings in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from media organizations objecting to the secrecy of the investigation. The existence of the warrant only became public in August with Trump’s indictment, even though Smith had ordered X to turn over the information in January, as the warrant included an order forbidding the company from informing Trump about the search.

While X initially refused to comply with the warrant due to the gag order, arguing it was a violation of the First Amendment, Smith countered that informing the ex-president would result in “statutorily cognizable harm,” resulting in “destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, or other serious jeopardy to an investigation or delaying of trial.” The platform ultimately agreed to release the data, but missed a court deadline, resulting in a $350,000 fine for contempt of court.

Trump was indicted in August on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiracy against rights related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. While the election-interference case is just one of many felony indictments filed against the Republican this year, he has recently inched ahead of incumbent Joe Biden in polls of likely 2024 voters.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Sometimes they really are out to get you

Gatito Bueno – bad cattitude – November 27, 2023

Well that sure does maybe explain why so much of this felt like a milspec psyop…

Jeez, can you imagine if they did something like this in the US?

Because this sure seems like waging info-war on your own people…

Yikes.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

First, Do Harm: A Sorry Tale in the Daily Mail

Dissenting Doctors Dishonourably Disparaged

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | November 29, 2023

The sordid state of the medical system here in the UK is laid bare in excruciating detail in a recent Daily Mail article which chooses to perpetuate myths and disinformation rather than engage in genuine reporting.

The story so far

Dr Sarah Myhill – a doctor now working as a naturopath – is being hounded by the General Medical Council (GMC) who have referred her to various hearings at the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS). Myhill’s alleged transgressions are outlined in great detail on the MPTS website, but the gist of the complaint seems to be that Myhill has had the temerity to highlight the benefits of low-cost treatments (such as Vitamin D) over expensive – and possibly harmful – pharmaceuticals.

This matter should hardly be controversial, even to the mainstream – after all, many will have heard or watched the various TV series such as ‘Dopesick’, ‘Painkiller’ or even the BBC recent Panorama expose ‘The Antidepressant Story’. In contrast to these expensive chemical compounds that have multiple adverse effects – both on individuals and society as a whole – stand inexpensive treatments and lifestyles that are as cheap as (and substantially healthier than) chips.

Consider the benefits of Vitamin D – the ‘sunshine vitamin’ – extolled in no lesser organ of public opinion than the Daily Mail itself, Mark Solomons reporting only a few weeks ago that “a third of Britons have Vitamin D deficiency due to spending too much time indoors, poor diet and failing to take supplements”.

What an opportunity to follow this excellent educational reporting with an additional piece that promotes healthy living and the perils of the over-promotion of ‘pill popping’.

Alas… ‘achievement not unlocked’. The headline alone is a classic of the disinformation genre, a masterclass in deceptive propagandisation comprising just 23 words (and a number):

Precisely why all Welsh doctors approaching retirement are deemed worthy of this drive-by assassination by headline is not fully clear – perhaps that is just the Daily Mail’s house style.  That aside, the following twin headline double-barrelled untruths deserve greater scrutiny:

  • Vitamins C & D are branded “other ‘potentially harmful’ substances”, which is of course entirely correct… but only in the sense that too much of almost anything is not only possibly harmful, but potentially lethal.  Water – that elixir of life, the molecule that makes up almost 60% of your bodyweight – can cause death not only by drowning, but also by overhydration: “After downing some six liters of water in three hours in the “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest, Jennifer Strange vomited, went home with a splitting headache, and died from so-called water intoxication”.  If Vitamins C & D are now ‘potentially harmful’ and result in witch-hunt reporting, can we expect the Daily Mail to refer itself for censure for calling for its readers to “drink plenty of fluids” without suitable caveats? In comparison to this – potentially lethal – advice from the Daily Mail, Dr Myhill has advocated taking a high dosage of Vitamin D but at a level no greater than a level that recent research has determined to be safe.
  • The ‘livestock dewormer’ in question is in fact Ivermectin, a very cheap and Nobel prize-winning antiviral drug. After a history of veterinary use, it was approved by the FDA for human use in 1996, has been on the World Health Organisation’s list of essential medicines since at least 2015 and was described in the Journal of Antibiotics in 2020 as an antiviral “wonder drug” that “is continuing to surprise and excite scientists, offering more and more promise to help improve global public health by treating a diverse range of diseases, with its unexpected potential as an antibacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer agent being particularly extraordinary… perhaps more than any other drug, ivermectin is a drug for the world’s poor. For most of this century, some 250 million people have been taking it annually to combat two of the world’s most devastating, disfiguring, debilitating and stigma-inducing diseases, Onchocerciasis [river blindness] and Lymphatic filariasis. Most of the recipients live in remote, rural, desperately under-resourced communities in developing countries and have virtually no access to even the most rudimentary of medical interventions. Moreover, all the treatments have been made available free of charge thanks to the unprecedented drug donation program”.

What a heart-warming story! If only the Daily Mail had chosen to share this feel-good blockbuster with its readers. Many doctors chose to prescribe Ivermectin off-label, which is entirely normal behaviour (after all, repurposing a drug that already has a defined safety record is far less risky than rushing a new medicine – which by definition will not have a long track record – to market):

“There are clinical situations when the use of unlicensed medicines or use of medicines outside the terms of the licence (i.e. ‘off-label’) may be judged by the prescriber to be in the best interest of the patient on the basis of available evidence. Such practice is particularly common in certain areas of medicine: for instance, in paediatrics where difficulties in the development of age-appropriate formulations means that many medicines used in children are used off-label or are unlicensed“.

Who better to make these kinds of decisions than a patient’s doctor?

Many people will be aware of what happened next. Various shenanigans ensued resulting in Ivermectin being discredited. One of the most Kafkaesque situations was an FDA-orchestrated smear campaign that branded Ivermectin as ‘horse-paste’ and informed people that “you are not a horse”. Quite an eyebrow-raising stunt when you consider that Ivermectin is safe enough to feature on the CDC website with an oral dosage level that is declared safe for use in children over the weight of 15kg. The FDA was – quite rightly – subsequently eviscerated in a recent Fifth District court ruling:

“The Food and Drug Administration is not a physician, so it had no business cautioning people not to take Ivermectin”.

The ruling is worth reading in full.

Returning to the Daily Mail headline, we can summarise the situation as follows: authorities have censured a doctor who promoted (within their known safe usage parameters!) certain vitamins and antiviral treatments. Whether or not these treatments are effective or not is essentially irrelevant – they are safe, which is more can be said for any newly introduced pharmaceutical product with no long-term safety data attached.

Contrast the prescription of these safe treatments with said authorities’ recent (well, since late 2020) enthusiastic one-size-fits-all promotion of various injectable products that were claimed to be both ‘safe’ and ‘effective’.

There is, of course, a rational (if somewhat chilling) explanation as to why we find ourselves in this bizarre and counter-intuitive situation.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider what twisted circumstances can have arisen for the medical establishment to weaponise its disciplinary procedures, especially in the case of a doctor that has already attempted to take herself off the register. The GMC and the MPTS are only too aware that:

“suspension has a deterrent effect and can be used to send out a signal to the doctor, the profession and public about what is regarded as behaviour unbefitting a registered doctor.”

The action against Myhill seems overly vindictive and a waste of time, money and resources. The absurdity of proceedings has been inadvertently – and succinctly – summarised by the GMC’s KC, Tom Kark:

“The problem with the Myhill cases is that all the patients are improved and all refuse to give witness statements.”

But perhaps the intention is to come after other doctors that dare to speak out, and also to deter others from joining them in speaking truth to power.

The promotion of one-size-fits-all pharmaceutical interventions is clearly a profitable endeavour for various pharmaceutical companies and associated vested interests, but it is clearly not in the best interests of patients. Doctors promise to “first, do no harm”, and they – and all associated establishment regulators and other authorities – pay appropriate lip-service regarding patient autonomy, choice and informed consent as encapsulated in any (and one would hope all?) documented formulations of the Doctor-Patient relationship.

But the truth is starkly different. There are good doctors who are willing to put patients first, resist groupthink and stand up to bullying regulators. The hounding and demonisation of these doctors is an appalling and sinister crime. It happened before covid, it happened during covid, and it is happening now. It is sad to see spineless reporting by those in the mainstream media who (1) should know better and (2) have the resources to stand up to the drug pushers.

Perhaps the only answer is bottom-up resistance. If enough people resolve to ensure that justice is done, then complaining to the GMC might make a difference.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

‘If We Get Away With It, It’s Legal’: Documents Reveal New Details on U.S. Government’s ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | November 29, 2023

Government agencies, private-sector firms, academia and nonprofits were collaborating to combat alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation” as far back as 2017, according to new documents released Tuesday.

The “CTIL Files” — which refer to the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTI League, a key player in the so-called “Censorship-Industrial Complex” — are based on documents received from an unnamed but “highly credible” whistleblower, according to investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi, who released the files.

The new documents rival or exceed the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” in “scale and importance,” according to the journalists, two of whom — Shellenberger and Taibbi — were instrumental in releasing many of the “Twitter Files” that first called attention to the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

A comprehensive picture of the birth of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector

The documents, which the journalists detailed on Substack, center around the activities of the CTI League, which “officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”

According to the journalists, the CTI League documents “offer the missing link … to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files” and “offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector.”

“The whistleblower’s documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques,” the journalists wrote.

Documents in the “CTIL Files” show members of the CTI League, DHS officials and key figures from social media companies “all working closely together in the censorship process.”

This “public-private model” laid the groundwork for “anti-misinformation” and “anti-disinformation” campaigns launched by the U.S. and U.K. governments in 2020 and 2021, the journalists wrote, including attempts to circumvent First Amendment protections against government censorship of speech in the U.S.

Such tactics included “masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral,” they added.

The CTI League went still further though, the journalists wrote, engaging “in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote ‘counter-messaging,’ co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups.”

Such censorship lies at the heart of Missouri et al. v. Biden et al., a First Amendment censorship case where injunctions were issued against several federal agencies and government officials, barring them from communicating with social media companies regarding user content. The injunctions are now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Former British intelligence analyst charged with creating counter-disinformation project

The journalists wrote that while previous releases of the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” revealed “overwhelming evidence of government-sponsored censorship,” they had not revealed “where the idea for such mass censorship came from.”

The whistleblower alleged that a key figure in the CTI League, “a ‘former’ British intelligence analyst, was ‘in the room’ at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a ‘repeat of 2016.’”

By 2019, this analyst, Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, had “developed the sweeping censorship framework,” leading a team of U.S. and U.K. “military and intelligence contractors” who “co-led CTIL.” Previously, in 2018, Terp attended a 10-day military exercise organized by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, according to the journalists.

It was there that Terp met Pablo Breuer, a former U.S. Navy commander, who became a key figure in the CTI League. According to Wired, the two realized that misinformation “could be treated … as a cybersecurity problem.” This led to the development of CogSec, which soon housed the “MisinfoSec Working Group.”

“Terp’s plan, which she shared in presentations to information security and cybersecurity groups in 2019, was to create ‘Misinfosec communities’ that would include government,” the journalists wrote.

By spring 2020, it appears Terp achieved this plan, as the CTI League partnered with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has been implicated in prior releases of the “Twitter Files” for its role in the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

The MisinfoSec Working Group included Renee DiResta, a former CIA operative who worked for the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) — later renamed the Virality Project (VP). This group “created a censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT).”

According to the journalists, AMITT adapted “a cybersecurity framework developed by MITRE, a major defense and intelligence contractor that has an annual budget of $1 to $2 billion in government funding.” MITRE is a backer of the Vaccination Credential Initiative and the SMART Health Card — a digital “vaccine passport.”

Terp used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization (WHO) applied in “countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe.”

The same framework “has been formally adopted by the European Union and the United States as part of a ‘common standard for exchanging structured threat information on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference’” according to the journalists.

‘Can we get a troll on their bums?’

According to the journalists, MisinfoSec’s motivation for counter-misinformation was the “twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and the election of Trump.”

“There’s something off kilter with our information landscape,” Terp and other CTI League members wrote, according to documents.

“The usual useful idiots and fifth columnists — now augmented by automated bots, cyborgs and human trolls — are busily engineering public opinion, stoking up outrage, sowing doubt and chipping away at trust in our institutions. And now it’s our brains that are being hacked,” they added.

In spring 2020, the CTI League set its sights on COVID-19-related narratives, targeting users who engaged in messaging that ran contrary to official policy.

“CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as anti-lockdown narratives like ‘all jobs are essential,’ ‘we won’t stay home,’ and ‘open America now,’” the journalists wrote.

“CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also did research on individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags … and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios. The group also discussed requesting ‘takedowns’ and reporting website domains to registrars,” they added.

Regarding the “we won’t stay home” narrative, internal documents revealed by the whistleblower showed that CTI League members wrote, “Do we have enough to ask for the groups and/or accounts to be taken down or at a minimum reported and checked?” and “Can we get all troll on their bums if not?”

They also called posters circulating online promoting anti-lockdown posters “disinformation artifacts,” saying, “We should have seen this one coming” and asking “can we stop the spread, do we have enough evidence to stop superspreaders, and are there other things we can do (are there countermessagers we can ping etc).”

During CTI League brainstorming sessions to develop strategies for “counter-messaging for things like encouraging people to wear masks,” statements such as “Repetition is truth” were uttered by CTI League staff, the journalists noted.

The CTI League also sought to go “beyond simply urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to put individuals on blacklists.”

According to the journalists, “The AMITT framework calls for discrediting individuals as a necessary prerequisite of demanding censorship against them” and “trying to get banks to cut off financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events.”

As part of these efforts, even truthful information was targeted. In a 2019 podcast on “Disinformation, Cognitive Security, and Influence,” Terp admitted, “Most information is actually true … but set in the wrong context.”

“You’re not trying to get people to believe lies most of the time,” she said. “Most of the time, you’re trying to change their belief sets. And in fact, really deeper than that, you’re trying to change, to shift their internal narratives … the set of stories that are your baseline for your culture.”

Previous “Twitter Files” releases have revealed that true information was targeted for censorship by the U.S. government and social media platforms like Twitter if the information contradicted official policy regarding COVID-19 vaccines and restrictions.

‘Cognitive security’ a euphemism for censorship

In the same podcast, according to the journalists, Terp said, “Cognitive security is the thing you want to have. You want to protect that cognitive layer. It basically, it’s about pollution. Misinformation, disinformation is a form of pollution across the Internet.”

The journalists wrote, “A key component of Terp’s work through CTIL, MisinfoSec, and AMITT was to insert the concept of ‘cognitive security’ into the fields of cybersecurity and information security.”

Such “cognitive security” was seen as being threatened by the erosion of the mass media’s control on information and influence over public opinion.

Documents revealed by the whistleblower included a MisinfoSec report stating “For a long time, the ability to reach mass audiences belonged to the nation-state (e.g. in the USA via broadcast licensing through ABC, CBS and NBC).”

“Now, however, control of informational instruments has been allowed to devolve to large technology companies who have been blissfully complacent and complicit in facilitating access to the public for information operators at a fraction of what it would have cost them by other means,” the report said.

The same report also called for a form of “pre-bunking,” to “preemptively inoculate a vulnerable population against messaging,” suggesting that DHS-funded Information Sharing and Analysis Centers could be used to promote such pre-bunking.

‘If we get away with it, it’s legal’

Public-private partnerships were specifically sought out in an attempt to circumvent First Amendment free speech protections in the U.S., the documents revealed, even while Bloomberg, The Washington Post and Wired wrote glowing articles portraying the CTI League as a mere group of “volunteer” cybersecurity experts.

Yet, according to the journalists, “In just one month, from mid-March to mid-April [2020], the supposedly all-volunteer CTIL had grown to ‘1,400 vetted members in 76 countries’” and had “helped to take down 2,833 cybercriminal assets on the internet” including some which impersonated government organizations, the United Nations and WHO.

On the same 2019 podcast, according to the journalists, Breuer explained how the CTI League was getting around the First Amendment, by working to get “nontraditional partners into one room,” including “maybe somebody from one of the social media companies, maybe a few special forces operators, and some folks from Department of Homeland Security.”

Together, they would “talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way so that we can collaborate better, more freely and really start to change the way that we address some of these issues,” Breuer said.

Breuer even likened these tactics to those employed by the Chinese government, saying “If you talk to the average Chinese citizen, they absolutely believe that the Great Firewall of China is not there for censorship. They believe that it’s there because the Chinese Communist Party wants to protect the citizenry and they absolutely believe that’s a good thing.”

“If the US government tried to sell that narrative, we would absolutely lose our minds and say, ‘No, no, this is a violation of our First Amendment rights.’ So, the in-group and out-group messaging have to be often different,” he said.

The whistleblower told the journalists that CTI League leaders did not discuss their potential violation of the First Amendment.

“The ethos was that if we get away with it, it’s legal, and there were no First Amendment concerns because we have a ‘public-private partnership’ — that’s the word they used to disguise those concerns. ‘Private people can do things public servants can’t do, and public servants can provide the leadership and coordination,’” the whistleblower said.

According to the journalists, the authors of the MisinfoSec report also “advocated for police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship, across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved.”

The CTI League documents also suggest that the organization was involved in a form of domestic spying, with one document noting that while censorship activities abroad are “typically” performed by “the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense,” such efforts “against Americans” necessitate the use of private partners because the government lacks the “legal authority” to do so.

According to the whistleblower, CTI League members also went to great lengths to conceal their activities, with a CTI League handbook recommending the use of burner phones, online pseudonyms and the generation of fake AI faces. One document advised, “Lock your s**t down … your spy disguise.”

One suggested list of questions to be posed to prospective CTI League members proposed asking whether those individuals had ever “worked with influence operations (e.g. disinformation, hate speech, other digital harms etc) previously” and whether those efforts included “active measures” and “psyops” (psychological operations).

Indeed, according to the documents, several CTI League members had worked for the military or intelligence agencies, while according to the whistleblower, “roughly 12-20 active people involved in CTIL worked at the FBI or CISA” — even, for a time, displaying their agency seals alongside their names on the CTI League’s internal Slack channel.

Terp, for instance, previously designed machine learning algorithms and unmanned vehicle systems for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence.

According to the whistleblower, the CTI League sought “to become part of the federal government.”

Shellenberger, Taibbi to testify before Congress this week

According to the journalists, the FBI declined to comment, while CISA, Terp and other CTI League figures did not respond to requests for comment.

However, one CTI League member, Bonnie Smalley, did respond to the journalists’ request. She wrote, verbatim, “all i can comment on is that i joined cti league which is unaffiliated with any govt orgs because i wanted to combat the inject bleach nonsense online during covid. … i can assure you that we had nothing to do with the govt though.”

“CTIL appears to have generated publicity about itself in the Spring and Fall of 2020 for the same reason EIP did: to claim later that its work was all out in the open and that anybody who suggested it was secretive was engaging in a conspiracy theory,” the journalists wrote.

“But as internal messages have revealed, much of what EIP did was secret, as well as partisan, and demanding of censorship by social media platforms, contrary to its claims,” they said, adding that “EIP and VP, ostensibly, ended, but CTIL is apparently still active, based on the LinkedIn pages of its members.”

The journalists said the documents will be presented to Congressional investigators and made public, while protecting the identity of the whistleblower.

Shellenberger and Taibbi will testify at Thursday’s hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. They previously testified before the same committee in March.

On Tuesday, Taibbi appeared in a live YouTube webcast presenting some of the key revelations from the first release of the “CTIL Files.”

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

New Zealand Government will inform WHO it does not agree to International Health Regulations amendments

By Rhoda Wilson | The Exposé | November 28, 2023

The newly sworn-in New Zealand government intends not to be pushed around by UN resolutions or by the World Health Organisation anymore.

According to a coalition agreement with New Zealand First, the new government will undertake a “National Interest Test” before accepting any agreements from the United Nations or the World Health Organisation’s proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations.

To this aim, the New Zealand Cabinet must “reserve against” proposed amendments to International Health Regulations by 1 December 2023.

On Friday, centre-right National signed coalition agreements with libertarian ACT New Zealand and populist New Zealand First allowing the three parties to form a government, bringing an end to six years of left-wing governments in New Zealand.

Yesterday, New Zealand Governor General Cindy Kiro, who represents British monarch King Charles III as head of state, swore National Party leader Christopher Luxon in as New Zealand’s 42nd prime minister along with ministers of his cabinet at Government House in Wellington. Parliament is expected to sit next week and begin working on new policies.

On the day they were signed, Friday, the incoming government released its coalition agreements which outlined a number of policy plans.  You can read the coalition agreement between the New Zealand National Party and ACT New Zealand HERE, and between New Zealand National Party and New Zealand First HERE.

According to the coalition agreement with New Zealand First, one of the most urgent issues the new government must address is that the Cabinet will tell officials not to agree to any policy changes suggested by the World Health Organisation (“WHO”). The coalition agreement states:

Strengthening Democracy and Freedoms

Ensure a ‘National Interest Test’ is undertaken before New Zealand accepts any agreements from the UN and its agencies that limit national decision-making and reconfirm that New Zealand’s domestic law holds primacy over any international agreements.

As part of the above, by 1 December 2023 reserve against proposed amendments to WHO health regulations to allow the incoming government to consider these against a “National Interest Test.”

Coalition Agreement between the National Party and the New Zealand First Party

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Father of British student killed by Israel urges Tel Aviv to change ‘inhuman’ military tactics

Tom Hurndall was volunteering at a refugee camp in Gaza when he was shot by an Israeli sniper in the Gaza Strip in 2003.
Press TV – November 29, 2023

Father of a British student killed by Israeli soldiers has urged the occupying regime to change its “unethical and inhuman” military tactics, warning Tel Aviv that it will lose support from the West by continuing such policies.

Anthony Hurndall, whose 22-year-old son was killed by Israeli snipers in 2004, denounced Israel’s “fundamentally unethical and inhuman attitudes,” in an interview with The Times published on Wednesday.

Tom Hurndall, who was a photography student, a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and an activist against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in the Gaza Strip in April 2003 and lost his life in January 2004 after spending some nine months in a coma.

He was shot when he was assisting Palestinian children caught in the crossfire in the impoverished Palestinian enclave.

Soroka Hospital’s medical staff initially claimed that the critical injuries to his head were caused by a baseball bat but an investigation later revealed that the staff had removed bullet fragments from Tom’s brain before making up the baseball bat story.

When the fabricated account was refuted, Tel Aviv claimed that the young photographer was allegedly carrying a weapon and was a gunman.

“The investigation further revealed that, as standard practice,” the Israeli military “routinely falsely misrepresent civilians and children as militants, or as armed, and fabricate accounts of events as a pretext for their killing,” Hurndall, who is director of the Center for Justice, told The Times.

“These claims appear similar to the claims that” the Israeli military is “currently making to justify their bombing, missile and other attacks on civilian targets and hospitals in Gaza. It was the view of those in diplomatic circles, expressed to us at the time, that” the Israeli military “appeared to consider themselves immune from accountability and free to misrepresent innocent civilians as legitimate military targets and to target them, as a form of intimidation or collective punishment,” he added.

Hurndall denounced the narrative portrayed by the media and the governments in the West as “one-sided” that ignores the facts.

“If Israel does not change fundamentally unethical and inhuman attitudes and policies and stop committing war crimes, it will build up even greater resistance from the Palestinian people and lose the sympathy and support of the West,” he stressed.

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.

According to the Gaza-based health ministry, over 15,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, were killed in Israeli strikes, during the 49 days of war. Many more dead are feared to be under the rubble.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

How do Palestinians in the West Bank view the truce and the prisoner exchange deal?

Palestinians stage a demonstration on International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in Ramallah, West Bank on November 29, 2023 [İssam Rimawi/Anadolu Agency]
By Fareed Taamallah | MEMO | November 30, 2023

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are following the truce in Gaza with great interest and hope. This is due primarily to their wish to help stop the destruction and genocide against their fellow Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. They feel powerless to get humanitarian aid and medicine into the besieged territory, and the hope is that the truce turns into a long and sustained ceasefire.

Despite its importance, there are other dimensions to the truce that are equally important. The truce represents a halt, even if only temporary, of the occupation army achieving what it wants by force, namely the destruction of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement; the destruction of the Gaza Strip; and the recovery of Israeli captives held by Hamas.

There were more than 5,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons before 7 October. A further 3,300 have been detained since then, including 170 since the truce came into force. Six have been killed in prison by the brutal Israeli prison system since 7 October. Around 1,000 Palestinian prisoners are serving life sentences and hundreds have spent decades behind bars. The Palestinian Authority has been unable to free them through political agreements and negotiations, and they are not expected to be released without a prisoner exchange deal.

Palestinians believe that women and children held by Israel who are from the West Bank and Jerusalem and were freed under the current exchange deal are evidence of the unity of the Palestinian people and their struggle against the occupation in Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. If the reports are true about the possibility of including for the first time Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship, this will carry a symbolism no less important than the above.

There are mixed feelings of joy at the liberation of our women and children, and extreme sadness at the blood price that Palestinians, specifically the people of Gaza, are paying for their freedom. These mixed emotions are with us in the West Bank every night as we await the release of a new batch of detainees. We all know that we want to defy the ban imposed by Israel on any celebrations of their release. The desire to challenge the occupation thus joins the other emotions.

The issue of prisoners held by Israel is a central and emotional issue for the Palestinians; it is an issue in every Palestinian home, because there is hardly any Palestinian family without one or more of its members having tasted the bitterness of captivity and the brutality of arrest. The release of prisoners has great popular support, and this is understood by Hamas as it strives to make freedom a reality. The people of the West Bank view with pride the ability of the resistance not only to thwart Israel’s deterrence policy, but also to impose conditions in exchange for a truce. This is seen as a victory, even if small and temporary, in exchange for the massive destruction and killing in the Gaza Strip. It confirms the unity of the fate of Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip which the Israeli occupation has been trying to tear apart for decades.

Palestinians and the rest of the world can see evidence of the humane treatment provided by the resistance in Gaza to the Israeli prisoners, and compare it with the evidence of Israeli oppression, beatings and torture meted out to Palestinians held by the apartheid state. Freed Palestinians tell of harassment and deprivation of basic rights alongside the beating of Palestinian prisoners, including children and women.

Many are surprised to learn that Israel imprisons Palestinian children. I was one of those minors detained by Israel. In 1991, I was arrested and tortured by the Israeli security services and interrogated in prison in very bad conditions. Children and women are often held for many years and in many cases without charges or trial and in difficult conditions. It is only after Israelis have been captured that the world has started to talk about them.

We Palestinians in the West Bank understand, of course, that the temporary truce will not lead to an end to the killing and arrest of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories. Israel has killed about 20 Palestinians during the truce alone, and arrested more than 170 in the areas supposedly under the security responsibility of the Palestinian Authority. The PA has peace agreements and security coordination with Israel that are supposed to stop such daily killings. The number arrested in the West Bank, by the way, almost matches the number of Palestinians freed so far under the truce deal.

Israel works to undermine the PA and any ambitions for Palestinian unity between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The authority has not succeeded in negotiations to stop settlement activity and has been unable, despite its international connections, to prevent the ongoing killing of Palestinians on a daily basis. For ten years, the PA has not been able to free any Palestinian prisoner through negotiations with Israel, even though President Mahmoud Abbas stated more than once his firm position that, “There will be no peace as long as there is a single prisoner behind bars.”

The last prisoner exchange took place in 2011 in the so-called Gilad Shalit deal, which stipulated the release of more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Hamas releasing the captured Israeli soldier. A large number of them included those whom Israel had refused to release as a gesture of good faith with the PA before, on the pretext that they all had “blood on their hands”.

Intentionally or not, the message that Israel sends to the Palestinians is that it does not give anything away for free, or as a “gesture of good faith”. It is clear that the only way to liberate Palestinian prisoners is solely through exchange deals between the resistance and the occupation state.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

‘Israel destroyed Central Archives of Gaza City’: Head of Gaza Municipality

MEMO | November 29, 2023

The head of Gaza Municipality said, Wednesday, that Israel destroyed the “Central Archives” which contained thousands of historical documents dating more than 150 years, Anadolu Agency reports.

“Targeting the Central Archives poses a great danger to the city, as it contains thousands of historically valuable documents for the community” Yahya Al-Sarraj told Anadolu.

He pointed out that “these documents … represent an integral part of our history and culture.”

“The Central Archives contains plans for ancient buildings of historical value and documents in the handwriting of well-known national figures,” he said.

“These documents, dating back a long time, were burned, turning them into ashes, erasing a large part of our Palestinian memory” he noted.

Al-Sarraj said: “The Occupation targeted many buildings, including large and monumental cultural centres, as well as public parks belonging to the municipality.”

“Targeting included the Rashad Al-Shawwa Historical Cultural Centre, a very important centre that includes a theatre and a central library, which was targeted without any justification

“The Israeli Occupation also targeted the Palestinian Legislative Council and the memorial monument in the Memorial Park for the (Al-Jundi Al-Majhool) Unknown Soldier,” he said.

Al-Sarraj said “the attempt by the Occupation to destroy everything beautiful, to erase Palestinian memory, and to impose a policy of obscuring the people, making Palestinian cities uninhabitable.”

As part of the targeting of the Palestinian people and everything related to their values, heritage, culture and identity, Israel targeted memorials in several governorates since the start of its war early last month, including the Memorial of the Martyrs of the Marmara Ship in Gaza Port, the memorial of late journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the Jenin Refugee Camp and the memorial of late President Yasser Arafat in Tulkarm, in the West Bank.

The main library in the Gaza Strip also did not escape the Israeli war machine, which bombed it during raids that targeted Gaza City since the outbreak of the war on 7 October.

The library, known as the Public Offices Building, is the largest in the Strip, containing historical documents and books.

According to statements made, Tuesday, by the spokesperson for the Gaza City Municipality, Hosni Muhanna, residents of the city consider it the memory of the country and its present.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | 1 Comment

NATO Chief Puts Hypocrisy on Full Display

By Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute | November 29, 2023

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg put NATO’s hypocrisy on display while talking to reporters ahead of the meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on November 28.

Asked by a reporter about American and European struggles to continue providing Ukraine with weapons and ammunition, Stoltenberg replied, “It’s our obligation to ensure that we provide Ukraine with the weapons they need. Because it will be a tragedy for Ukrainians if President Putin wins.”

The tragedy for Ukrainians has already happened. Their infrastructure and economy are destroyed, their population is dispersed, their relatives are dead or injured and their land is lost. The greater tragedy to come is not the war ending, but the war continuing. In the first weeks of the war, Ukrainians could have kept almost all of their land and lost almost none of their lives for a promise not to join NATO. The political West ordered them to walk away from the negotiating table and onto the battlefield. They promised them—directly or indirectly—as much military and financial support as it takes for as long as it takes. Nearly two years later, Ukraine will likely have to make the same promise, but they have lost that land and they have lost those lives.

Russia brought tragedy to Ukraine; the United States, United Kingdom, and their NATO allies bloated and magnified that tragedy. The tragedy now would not be ending the war even if it means “Putin wins.” The tragedy now is that NATO is willing to continue feeding a war that they know Ukraine can’t win. “When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces.” Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny has said that the war has reached a “stalemate” that over time can only favor Russia.

The tragedy for Ukrainians would not be negotiating an end to the war, it would be NATO exercising the “obligation” to continue the war.

Stoltenberg gave a second reason for continuing to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need; so that Ukrainians can go on dying for NATO goals and NATO security. If the war ends now, “it will be dangerous for us,” Stoltenberg said. The United States “will continue to provide support” to Ukraine “because it is in the security interest of the United States to do so.” NATO must “stay the course” because “[t]his is about also about our security interests.”

Stoltenberg knows this war is not being fought because Russia wanted to conquer other territory; Stoltenberg knows this war is being fought because Russia wanted to defend its territory. This war did not happen because Russia was a threat to NATO territory, it happened because NATO was a threat to Russian territory. How do we know that Stoltenberg knows this? Because he said so.

Putin “sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg said on September 7, 2023. “That… was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine.” He then said that when “we didn’t sign that… he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

“President Putin,” Stoltenberg concluded, “invaded a European country to prevent more NATO.”

Stoltenberg has publicly stated his awareness that this war was fought, not over American or NATO security concerns, but over Russian security concerns.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also recently said that the United States must go on supporting Ukraine or Russia would win and steamroll on over the Baltic countries, Poland, and beyond. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov mocked Austin, saying, “This comes from a man who holds a high-ranking position and cannot but receive expert views… and who cannot but understand what is going on in Ukraine and that Russia has never had and can never have any aggressive or expansionist plans.”

Ukraine’s chief negotiator in the Belarus and Istanbul talks with Russia has also recently said that stopping NATO from expanding to Ukraine and Russia’s borders was the “key point” for Russia and that “[e]verything else was simply rhetoric and political ‘seasoning.’”

Stoltenberg says that if Russia is allowed to win “the message to all authoritarian leaders—not only in Moscow, but also in Beijing—is that when they violate international law, when they invade another country when they use force, they get what they want. So this is about the whole idea of a rules-based international order, where territorial borders are respected.”

Stoltenberg transitions from “international law” to “rules-based order” because his case cannot be made without hypocrisy on the former. International law applies equally to everybody. But the United States or NATO have frequently invaded other countries by force and disrespected their territorial borders: Panama, Grenada, Libya, Kosovo, Iraq and Syria. Before Ukraine, modern Russia had not. But the rules-based order, unlike international law, allows Stoltenberg to make the case that Russia has violated the rules but the U.S. and NATO have not because the rules are made up as you go along so that the United States is always within them and Russia is always without. Under the unwritten rules-based order, rules are applied when they benefit the U.S. while the U.S. is exempt when they don’t.

American and NATO support for Ukraine may be about U.S. insistence on enforcing the rules-based system, but the United States is not an enforcer of international law.

Stoltenberg’s third reason for continuing to press the war in Ukraine is read right off the U.S. script; “… we need to continue to support them also knowing that the stronger Ukraine is on the battlefield, the stronger the handle will be on the negotiating table.” That point has passed. Ukraine is in a weaker position on the battlefield than they were before the counteroffensive. Russia is winning the war of land, the war of attrition on weapons, the war of attrition on lives, and the technological war. Ukraine had a better seat at the negotiating table in the first weeks after the invasion when the political West ordered them to stop negotiating. They were in a better position a year ago when they recaptured areas of Kherson before the counteroffensive. Far from strengthening Ukraine’s position on the battlefield or at the negotiating table, supporting the continuation of the war seems to be putting Ukraine in a weaker and weaker position. The terms that will be offered Ukraine today are likely much worse than the terms they were offered at the start of the war. And they will likely be worse tomorrow.

Stoltenberg says that “if you want a negotiated, peaceful solution, which ensures that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent nation, then the best way to get there is to continue to provide military support to Ukraine.” But it is not war that will guarantee Ukraine sovereignty. As Lavrov recently pointed out, Russia recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine based on a declaration of independence and a constitution that declared Ukraine’s neutrality and non-membership in NATO, and Russia will continue to when those conditions are reinstated. The best way to ensure Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty is not to help it fight for the right to be in NATO but to encourage it to promise not to join NATO.

Finally, Stoltenberg put NATO’s hypocrisy on display not only by what he said, but by what he did not say. If the words that Stoltenberg said were meant to rally Western ears, the words he did not say will be the loudest in Ukrainian ears. Though Ukraine is fighting, in part, for the right to be in NATO, that is the one thing that Stoltenberg, hypocritically, did not offer Ukraine. The “Allies have stated again and again the last time at the NATO Summit with all the leaders present in Vilnius” that they will “provide support to Ukraine,” that they “will step up” their support for Ukraine, that they will “help them… to modernize their army” and that they will “ensure full interoperability between the Ukrainian forces and the NATO forces.” The one thing Stoltenberg did not say that NATO has offered Ukraine is membership in NATO.

Ukraine should fight to defend NATO’s insistence on the right of a country to choose its own alliances and to join NATO without being offered membership in NATO. That is the final hypocrisy put on full display in Stoltenberg’s comments to reporters.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Russia: US played ‘destructive role’ in escalating Israeli war in Gaza

Press TV – November 29, 2023

Russia says the United States has escalated the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas by playing a “destructive role.”

Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Chumakov made the comment during a speech he delivered to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. He denounced Washington’s policies in West Asia.

“The policies of the US which meant that it kept turning a blind eye to the ongoing Israeli settlement construction in the occupied [Palestinian] territories and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, have played a destructive role in the current escalation,” he said.

According to Gaza government health officials, over 15,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children, were killed by Israeli aggression during the 49 days of war. Many more are feared to be buried under the rubble.

“As a result, we are now witnessing a conflict of unprecedented scope, which may spread to the entire Middle East,” Chumakov warned.

Washington has supported Tel Aviv’s relentless attacks on the Palestinian territory as an instance of “self-defense,” and has provided the regime with thousands of arms consignments since the onset of the war.

A four-day Qatari-brokered ceasefire between Tel Aviv and Hamas went into effect on Friday and was extended for two more days on Monday following mediation from Egypt and Qatar.

So far, under the truce deal, Hamas freed 69 hostages in return for 150 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

US fully responsible for situation in Gaza: Moscow

On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the US is fully responsible for the current situation in the war-ravaged Palestinian enclave, stressing that Washington’s policies have served as the primary sources of tension in the conflict zone.

“The entire current collapse on the territory [of the Gaza Strip], where a colossal tragedy related to the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation has unfolded, is completely and fully the responsibility of the United States, or, rather, I should say, [due to] the irresponsibility [of the US]. It is only they [who are responsible],” she said during an interview with the Sputnik radio station.

The Gaza health ministry says the Israeli regime keeps denying hospitals fuel for their generators in violation of the truce. The Israeli onslaught on Gaza has brought almost all vital infrastructure in the besieged strip to a standstill.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , | 1 Comment

German president ignored on arrival in Qatar

RT | November 30, 2023

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was kept waiting for almost 30 minutes in a plane passenger exit in the searing heat of Doha on Wednesday, before Qatari Foreign Minister Soltan bin Saad Al-Muraikhi finally arrived to receive him, German media have reported.

State outlet Deutsche Welle (DW), accompanying Steinmeier’s delegation, said the official preparations for the president’s arrival in Qatar had appeared to be in place. The red carpet had been rolled out and the guard of honor was ready, but no official was there to welcome the German president as he stood, arms folded, at the top of the ramp. Despite the delay, Steinmeier’s meeting with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani later proceeded according to schedule, DW reported.

Steinmeier was in the Middle Eastern state to discuss efforts to release the remaining German hostages being held by Hamas, following the Palestinian militant group’s attack on Israel on October 7.

Several German nationals were among the more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas during its assault, which killed more 1,200 people.

Berlin has repeatedly stated that it supports Israel’s right to self-defense amid its devastating response in Gaza, which has claimed more than 16,000 Palestinian lives, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.

DW suggested that “Wednesday’s apparent snub” could lead some to wonder if it was a response to statements by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in October.

“We do not accept support for terror,” Baerbock told the ZDF channel, arguing that countries such as Qatar “have a special responsibility to put an end to this terrorism.”

Qatar hosts the office of the Hamas political wing. Its proximity to the Palestinian militant group has made Doha a key figure in the negotiations between Israel and Hamas over the release of hostages.

On Tuesday, CIA Director William Burns and the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, David Barnea, visited Qatar to hold talks with Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani about the extension of a ceasefire in Gaza, as well as the ongoing hostage negotiations.

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Changing History to Control You

Climate Realism by Paul Burgess | November 28, 2023

The climate alarmists state that there was no Little Ice Age, No Medieval Warm Period or even Roman Warm Period. Not just these 1000 year cycles do not exists but we are now in the hottest time in the last 120,000 years and its all our fault! That is their incredible stance because ,if any of those periods are true and warmed, then warming like we have experienced since the industrial revolution is normal… that cannot be allowed to happen. This video explores the just how history has to be changed to fit their narrative. These videos below are worth watching as they all link together to give the big picture.

Layman’s guide to the hockey stick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvntS…

When History Matters with Climate Alarmism https://studio.youtube.com/video/q3My…

1066 A Climate Change Lesson https://youtu.be/DCC_ZGfdG8g?si=I3HkE…

November 30, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment