Did US raise a false flag on Nord Stream blasts?
BY BRADLEY K. MARTIN | ASIA TIMES | MARCH 9, 2023
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said an odd thing on March 7 when TASS asked him to compare his version of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline explosions (US Navy divers did it, he had reported February 8) with a newly released version from the New York Times and German media that points to non-governmental Ukrainians as culprits.
“I don’t want to get into it,” Hersh replied to the Russian wire service. “You should decide for yourself. It’s up to you.” The TASS reporter persisted, asking if Hersh thought the New York Times account had come in response to Hersh’s own investigation. He gave the same reply, saying people should come to their own conclusions.
That was pretty clever. Read both versions and you may conclude that they could fit together to point to a plausible account of how, as war raged over Ukraine, three pipelines supplying Germany’s gas supply from Russia were blown up before Vladimir Putin could use their existence to try to lure Germany out of the pro-Ukraine camp. Before the war, over half of Germany’s gas imports came from Russia.
Assemble a whole from the two versions and you might come up with this: On US President Joe Biden’s orders, US government covert types put together and with Norwegian help carried out the operation (that’s Hersh’s story); to avoid detection, they left some clues pointing elsewhere, to Ukrainians or “pro-Ukrainians” – the main clue mentioned so far being that the yacht from which the divers worked could be traced back to a yacht-rental company in Poland, a company owned by Ukrainians.
The German media account
What you might end up suspecting is a false flag.
Die Zeit, a leading German newspaper that is part of a media investigative consortium that talked with officials in several countries to put together its narrative, acknowledges the possibility thusly: “Even if traces lead to Ukraine, the investigators have not yet been able to find out who commissioned the suspected group of perpetrators. In international security circles, it is not ruled out that it could also be a false flag operation.”
The paper hastens to add that investigators “have apparently not found evidence that confirms such a scenario.” But “the nationalities of the perpetrators are apparently unclear” since they used “professionally forged passports.”
Die Zeit narrows the gang down to “a team of six people. It is said to have been five men and one woman.” Functionally, they were “a captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor.”
Like the New York Times, the German media outlets suggest that the demolition crew consisted of Ukrainian civilians from a non-governmental “commando” force opposed to the Russian invasion.
There’s no point in asking for a smoking gun at this point. His critics point out that Hersh – who has acknowledged he opposed NATO expansion into the former Soviet Union and who is not known to be a fan of allied efforts to help Ukraine fight the war – based his own account on a single unnamed US government source. Likewise, the German media organizations that make up the investigative consortium name no sources.
Die Zeit reports that “a Western secret service is said to have sent a tip to European partner services in the autumn, shortly after the destruction,” talking about Ukrainian commando responsibility for the destruction. “After that, there are said to have been further intelligence indications that a pro-Ukrainian group could be responsible.”
A Kremlin spokesperson on March 8 was having none of it, telling journalists that “Western media reports which exonerate NATO state actors from involvement in the explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines have the hallmarks of a synchronized misinformation campaign.”
The Hersh version
Hersh’s version is that US Navy divers, “operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.”
Remarkable for its detail, the Hersh account claims that “Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back-and-forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.”
The debate and preparations proceeded from December 2021 when Russia was marshaling its troops, preparing to strike Ukraine from Belarus and Crimea, Hersh writes. “As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia,” he notes.
The interagency task force thus assembled “was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation,” Hersh writes.
“‘It would be a goat fuck,’ the agency was told. Throughout ‘all of this scheming,’ the source said, ‘some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”’
“Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to [national security adviser Jake] Sullivan’s interagency group: ‘We have a way to blow up the pipelines.’ What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, ‘If Russia invades … there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’”
Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland gave a similar warning, Hersh says, and lower-ranking officials were concerned by what they viewed as their seniors’ indiscretion.
The operation was headquartered in Norway, whose navy, Hersh says,
was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta-class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
As cover, Hersh writes, the Americans had Sixth Fleet planners add to the annual naval maneuvers, already scheduled for that time and place, a research and development exercise involving “NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them… The C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22.”
After a decent interval of three months,
on September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission…
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House – but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution… No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
Fact-checkers and Hersh
Critics found what they said were some errors in Hersh’s version. Here is Wikipedia on that:
Hersh wrote that NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg had been cooperating with US intelligence services since the Vietnam War and has been cleared ever since. At the time the Vietnam War ended, Stoltenberg was 16 years old, and he had participated during the peak of the Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Norway. In 1985, Stoltenberg was part of the Workers’ Youth League in Norway, when the Labor Party was working to withdraw Norway from NATO.
Hersh’s article said the US divers who planted the explosives had operated from a Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper. The Norwegian Defence Forces said no Norwegian Alta-class mine sweepers had participated in BALTOPS 22 and were not in the vicinity of the explosions during the exercise.
Regarding Hersh’s allegations against the Norwegian P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane, Lieutenant Colonel Vegard Norstad Finberg of the Norwegian armed forces said the Norwegian P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane is a brand new plane that has never been in an operational operation, and has only flown test flights in Norwegian airspace, and has never been over the Baltic Sea…
In the German Bundestag, members of parliament from the government disputed Hersh’s credibility and urged that public discussion of the topic be minimized for security reasons; opposition members of parliament from AfD and Die Linke initiated a parliamentary debate on February 10 about Hersh’s allegations, with Die Linke MP Sevim Dağdelen arguing that the government seemed uninterested in clarifying the truth about the bombings.
If the divers’ platform wasn’t an Alta-class minesweeper, then was it a yacht rented from a Ukrainian-owned company in Poland – the vessel the German media/European intel account mentions?
The German account tells us that the saboteurs on their rented yacht proceeded to the dive location on September 6, 2022, from the German Baltic Sea port of Rostock after loading their equipment aboard there from a delivery truck. Rostok’s a long day’s sail (325 nautical miles) from Gdynia, the major Polish port on the Baltic (in case that’s where, in Poland, the Ukrainian-owned yacht rental company is situated).
The New York Times
Disclaimer here: In my 54 years in the news business, I have generally avoided asking spooks for help. I have nothing against them and realize they are colleagues of sorts, but I can recall only a couple of cases when I sought their help. They have their jobs and I have mine. I certainly don’t rush to get their version of events whenever something happens. I assume their version is whatever their agencies have told them should be their version so I prefer to spend my time getting my own version from more direct sources.
That may help to explain why the New York Times piece bothers me. The reporters – maybe the spooks are their beat and they have to get along, or else? – seem overeager to peddle Washington’s version:
Ukraine and its allies have been seen by some officials as having the most logical potential motive to attack the pipelines. They have opposed the project for years, calling it a national security threat because it would allow Russia to sell gas more easily to Europe.
I’d advise checking your wallet if you hear from your pipe-smoking spook source that “officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals or some combination of the two. US officials said no American or British nationals were involved.”
Would you credit “US officials who have reviewed the new intelligence” and who say that “the explosives were most likely planted with the help of experienced divers who did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services”?
After all that Seymour Hersh has told you?
Well, at least they have a policy at the New York Times permitting them to emulate Seymour Hersh (born 1937, a real veteran with a record) and stick to anonymous sources:
Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
Whew. What a relief.
Bradley K Martin is a veteran foreign correspondent.
The US military plans to use deep fakes and take over appliances for propaganda
By Rachel Marsden | RT | March 9, 2023
Can you create cutting edge “deep fake” videos, spy on people using household appliances, and make massive data dragnets? If so, the Pentagon wants to hear from you so it can amp up its manipulation efforts.
US Special Operations Command (US SOCOM) has issued proposal requests for a whole host of dodgy services, according to new documents obtained by The Intercept.
Specifically, the Pentagon is looking for “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (IoT) devices in order to collect data and information from local populaces to enable a breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received.”
For what purpose? “This would enable MISO [Military Information Support Operations] to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by the local populace in relevant peer/near peer environments,” according to the document.
Despite publicly obsessing over others’ foreign interference and propaganda, Washington is now openly admitting that it is actively seeking these new technologies for its own “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” You know, exactly the same kind of thing, over which it drums up fear as a threat to freedom and democracy among the general public.
Earlier this year, a Washington-based advisory firm OODA published a report warning that Chinese-made household items could not only be spying on you, but basically fronting for the Chinese government. The report’s author called for the British government to act on claims that Chinese-made Internet of Things appliances, and even car components, can collect and transmit data through cellular 5G networks to Chinese companies, which could then be ordered to pass it on to the government. The story was hysterically splashed across British media.
OODA describes itself as a “global strategic advisory firm with deep DNA in global security, technology and intelligence issues.” The genetics run deep, indeed: straight to the Pentagon and Western intelligence communities where its executives, experts and advisers have past or current working relationships.
So now it looks like calls to ban Chinese household appliances for their spying potential have turned into Washington wanting to get in on the action by obtaining the best possible front row seat as you stand in front of your refrigerator at midnight, chugging chocolate milk straight from the carton.
The Pentagon also wants to be able to create “deep fake” videos that can realistically portray fake events as real, in an attempt to manipulate the target viewer(s). Or, as the Pentagon puts it, to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels in relevant peer/near peer environments.” It’s hard to imagine a more glaring example of actual fake news, yet the Pentagon wants to produce it in the way that Netflix makes movies and TV shows.
Finally, the Pentagon says that they want to get their hands on “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations and messages in relevant peer/near peer environments.”
Some might be tempted to just shrug this off as conventional practice because, when the military is tracking down bad guys, they’re obviously going to want to use every possible tool available at their disposal – and constantly seek to expand that tool box. But recent evidence suggests that military-grade collection and subversion tools targeting online and conventional information platforms have largely been turned on the average citizen for the purpose of protecting the establishment and its various narratives from dissent rather than for reasons of national security.
Last December, for example, Twitter CEO Elon Musk worked with a journalist to reveal the collusion between US government authorities and the social media platform to manipulate and censor public debate over the Covid-19 pandemic. According to internal Twitter documents, one of the first meetings that the Biden Administration requested with Twitter executives was on the topic of Covid vaccines and specific high-profile accounts that deviated from the official narrative. According to the journalist, David Zweig, “Twitter did suppress views – many from doctors and scientific experts – that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.” He added that, “With Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas,” and cited examples of various experts, including prominent epidemiologists, whose views were censored as a result of being qualified by the Twitter staff as Covid “misinformation.”
Earlier this year, a British whistleblower also revealed that critics of Covid-19-related lockdowns and vaccine mandates – including prominent journalists and politicians – were monitored by the UK army’s information warfare brigade. The 77th Brigade, created in 2015 and described by the media at the time as composed of “warriors who don’t just carry weapons, but who are also skilled in using social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and the dark arts of ‘psyops’”.
The Canadian military was also caught using propaganda techniques honed on the battlefield in Afghanistan to shape the Covid debate by boosting the government’s narrative and attempting to head off any civil unrest over the harsh mandates.
The Pentagon’s latest wish list raises concerns that these tools will also be deployed on average Americans or Westerners for purposes of control and manipulation. Last September, the Pentagon vowed to review its secret psyops, but only after public outrage when a group of researchers suggested collusion between US government entities and American online platforms like Twitter and Facebook to control online narratives with fake accounts. Was the lesson learned to stop deploying psyops on average citizens? Or was it just to do a better job of keeping it secret?
Not that there’s any shortage of Western establishment cheerleaders demanding even more psychological manipulation efforts by the US government, if only to counter “disinformation” from foreign adversaries.
It seems that we’ve now come to the point where sticking it to Russia and China means actively cheerleading the increasingly militarized efforts by our self-styled defenders of freedom and democracy to brainwash their own people.
In Nord Stream attack, US officials use proxy media to blame proxy Ukraine
One month after Seymour Hersh reported that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, US regime finds a scapegoat in Ukraine and stenographers in the NYT.
By Aaron Maté | March 8, 2023
Nearly six months after the Nord Stream pipelines exploded and one month after Seymour Hersh reported that the Biden administration was responsible, US officials have unveiled their defense. According to the New York Times, anonymous government sources claim that “newly collected intelligence” now “suggests” that the Nord Stream bomber was in fact a “pro-Ukrainian group.”
The only confirmed “intelligence” about this supposed “group” is that US officials have none to offer about them.
“U.S. officials said there was much they did not know about the perpetrators and their affiliations,” The Times reports. The supposed “newly collected” information “does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” Despite knowing nothing about them, the Times’ sources nonetheless speculate that “the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two.” They also leave open “the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.” (emphasis added)
When no evidence is produced, anything is of course “possible.” But the Times’ sources are oddly certain on one critical matter: “U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.” Also, there is “no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.”
Despite failing to obtain any concrete information about the perpetrators, the Times nonetheless declares that the US cover story planted in their pages “amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.”
It is unclear why the Times has deemed their evidence-free “lead” to be “significant”, and not, by contrast, the Hersh story that came four weeks earlier. Not only does Hersh’s reporting predate the Times’, but his story contained extensive detail about how the US planned and executed the Nord Stream explosions.
Tellingly, the Times distorts the basis for Hersh’s reporting. “In making his case,” the Times claims, Hersh merely “cited” President Biden’s “preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.” In falsely suggesting that he relied solely on public statements, the Times completely omits that Hersh in fact cited a well-placed source.
By contrast, the Times has no information about its newfound perpetrators or about any other aspect of its “significant” lead.
“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” The Times states. Accordingly, US officials admit that “there are no firm conclusions” to be drawn, and that there are “enormous gaps in what U.S. spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired.” For that apparent reason, “U.S. officials who have been briefed on the intelligence are divided about how much weight to put on the new information.” The Times, by contrast, apparently feels no such evidentiary burden.
In sum, US officials have “much they did not know about the perpetrators” – i.e. everything; “enormous gaps” in their awareness of how the (unknown) “pro-Ukraine group” purportedly carried out a deep-sea bombing; uncertainty over “how much weight to put on” their “intelligence”; and even “no firm conclusions” to offer. Moreover, all of this supposed US “intelligence” happens to have been “newly collected” — after one of the most accomplished journalists in history published a detailed report on how US intelligence plotted and conducted the bombing.
Given the absence of evidence and curious timing, a reasonable conclusion is not that a Ukrainian “proxy force” was the culprit, but that the US is now using its Ukrainian proxy as a scapegoat.
As the standard bearer of establishment US media, the Times’ “reporting” is perfectly in character. Days after the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Times noted that “much of the speculation about responsibility has focused on Russia” – just as US officials would certainly hope. The narrative was echoed by former CIA Director John Brennan, who opined that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” in the Nord Stream attack. Citing anonymous “Western intelligence officials”, CNN claimed that “European security officials observed Russian Navy ships in vicinity of Nord Stream pipeline leaks,” thus casting “further suspicion on Russia,” which is seen by “European and US officials as the only actor in the region believed to have both the capability and motivation to deliberately damage the pipelines.”
With the story that Russia blew up its own pipelines no longer tenable, the Times’ new narrative asks us to believe that some unnamed “pro-Ukraine group”, which “did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services” somehow managed to obtain the unique capability to plant multiple explosives on a heavily sealed pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
That narrative is already being laundered through the German media. Hours after the Times story broke, the German outlet Die Zeit came out with a story, sourced to German officials, that claims the bombing operation was carried out by a group of six people, including just “two divers.” These supposed perpetrators, we are told, arrived at the crime scene via a yacht “apparently owned by two Ukrainians” that departed Germany. How a yacht managed to carry the equipment and explosives needed for the operation is left unexplained.
The saboteurs somehow possessed the capability to carry out a deep-sea bombing, but not the awareness to properly clean up their floating crime scene. According to Die Zeit, the boat was “returned to the owner in an uncleaned condition,” which allowed “investigators” to discover “traces of explosives on the table in the cabin.” Should this lean “pro-Ukraine” crack team of naval commandos conduct another act of deep-sea sabotage, they will only need to hire a cleaning professional to get away with it.
As for motivation, we are somehow also asked to forget that Biden administration officials not only expressed the motivation, but the post-facto satisfaction. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” senior US official Victoria Nuland vowed in January 2022. President Biden added the following month that “if Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken greeted the news as a “tremendous strategic opportunity.” Just days before Hersh’s story was published, Nuland informed Congress that both she and the White House are “very gratified” that Nord Stream is “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
Not only are global audiences asked to ignore the public statements of Biden administration principals, but their blanket refusal to answer any questions. This was put on display in Washington this past weekend, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid Biden a White House visit. Unlike Scholz’s last DC trip, there was no joint news conference. This was understandable: the last time they appeared together, Biden blurted out that he would “bring an end” to Nord Stream, leaving Scholz to stand next to him in awkward silence. This time around, the two briefly sat before a group of reporters who were quickly shooed out of the room, much to Biden’s apparent glee.
Inadvertently, the Times’ account exposes new holes in the failed attempts to refute Hersh’s story.
Members of the NATO state-funded website Bellingcat, falsely presented to NATO state audiences as an independent investigative outlet, have attempted to cast doubt on Hersh’s claims by arguing that open-source tracking at the time of the bombing fails to detect the vessels he reported on. But as the Times story notes, investigators are seeking information about ships “whose location transponders were not on or were not working when they passed through the area, possibly to cloak their movements.” Hersh has made this same point in interviews, noting that when Biden flew into Poland before his visit to Kiev last month, his “plane switched off its transponder” to avoid detection, as the Associated Press reported. Unfortunately for self-styled digital sherlocks, major international crimes – particularly those involving intelligence agencies – cannot be solved from their laptops.
Hersh was also pilloried for citing a single anonymous source. The Times’ story, by contrast, relies on multiple anonymous sources, who, unlike Hersh, have no tangible information to offer. After ignoring Hersh’s story for a full month, the Times’ news section was forced to acknowledge it for the first time. And the best that its anonymous sources could come up with is not only an evidence-free, caveat-filled narrative, but a story that does not challenge a single aspect of Hersh’s detailed account.
In another contrast, Hersh is one of the most accomplished and impactful journalists in the history of the profession. Two of the journalists on the Times story, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, have bylined multiple stories that spread demonstrable falsehoods sourced to anonymous US officials.
In the summer of 2020, Barnes and Goldman were among the Times journalists who laundered CIA disinformation that Russia was paying bounties for dead US troops in Afghanistan. When the Biden administration was forced to acknowledge that the allegation was baseless, the Times tried to water down its initial claims in an attempt to save face.
In January, Barnes co-wrote a Times story which claimed, citing unnamed “U.S. officials” more than a dozen times, that “Russian military intelligence officers” were behind “a recent letter bomb campaign in Spain whose most prominent targets were the prime minister, the defense minister and foreign diplomats.” But days later, as the Washington Post reported, Spanish authorities arrested “a 74-year-old Spaniard who opposed his country’s support for Ukraine but appears to have acted alone.” (Moon of Alabama is one the few voices to have called out the Times’ fraudulent reporting).
That same month, Goldman shared a byline, alongside fellow “Russian bounties” stenographer Charlie Savage, on a Times story which argued that Special Counsel John Durham has “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” even though Durham’s findings have yet to be released. As I reported for Real Clear Investigations, the Times made its case by omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts – as is the norm for establishment media coverage of Russiagate.
The US officials behind the Times’ latest Nord Stream tale presumably believe that they have offered the best counter to Hersh that they could. That it is devoid of concrete information, and written by Times staffers with a track record of parroting US intelligence-furnished propaganda, ultimately has the opposite effect.
The Times’ narrative can only be seen as further confirmation that Hersh found the Nord Stream bomber in Washington. That explains why anonymous US officials are now using proxies in establishment media to scapegoat their proxy in Ukraine.
Watch or listen to my recent interview with Seymour Hersh here.
Colonel McGregor: ‘Russia is crushing the Kiev regime’
By Drago Bosnic | March 9, 2023
Colonel Douglas McGregor doesn’t need a lot of introduction to people aware of the current geopolitical situation, as his actions, integrity and wisdom speak for themselves. Unfortunately, such cadres are now almost entirely absent from Washington DC, particularly the Pentagon. They have been replaced by a plethora of post-Cold War neoconservatives and neoliberals intended on not just maintaining the so-called Pax Americana, but also extending it to essentially every corner of the planet. In his latest interview with “Real America’s” Dan Ball, Colonel McGregor gave an assessment of the current state of the Kiev regime forces, as well as their prospects in the coming weeks and months.
After the anchor gave a brief breakdown of the disastrous state of the United States under the troubled Biden administration, he touched on the subject of ever-escalating military “aid” the Washington DC has been sending to the embattled Neo-Nazi junta in hopes of stopping Russia from finally inflicting a crushing defeat on them. He pointed out that the US Congress just approved its latest “aid” package worth $400 million, pushing the publicly revealed amount to $32 billion of US taxpayer dollars for Washington DC’s favorite puppet regime, out of the $113 billion approved thus far, “with no end in sight”, as he correctly noted.
Dan Ball then assessed the meeting between Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, signaling the symbolic end of the very last remnants of Berlin’s sovereignty as Germany pledged to send more weapons and funds for the Neo-Nazi junta, despite the tremendous problems this is causing on the home front. Ball also pointed out the glaring hypocrisy of the political West, as NATO is publicly bragging about its involvement with the Kiev regime, including the massive weapons shipments and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets, while openly threatening China in case it sends armaments to Russia.
Aside from the fact that Beijing never made such statements, nor is there any indicator that Moscow is desperate to get help from China, it’s quite obvious the US has completely lost touch with what actual diplomacy is. The anchor also questioned the impact of the “aid” the Neo-Nazi junta is getting, but warned that it’s certainly “drawing down our existing weapons stock, which puts America in a bad spot, kind of like Biden draining our emergency oil reserves”. The last line refers to Joe Biden’s unrelenting squandering of America’s SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve), which has been actively (ab)used for nearly a year now, despite the fact it was founded for emergencies such as nationwide natural disasters or major wars.
After touching on the topic of sending F-16 fighter jets, the question even the Pentagon is “stingy and unsure” about, Dan Ball introduced Colonel Douglas McGregor, who immediately pointed out the staggering losses of the Kiev regime forces, “now approaching 200,000”. According to McGregor, this was largely due to the Neo-Nazi junta’s disastrous decision to defend Bakhmut (Artyomovsk), with the Russian military using the opportunity to “apply all of their rockets, missiles, artillery fire against concentrations of Ukrainian infantry, inflicting enormous casualties”. He also stated the city is going to fall anyway, making the deaths of thousands of forcibly conscripted Ukrainians all the more pointless.
McGregor also touched upon the increasingly strained relationship between the Kiev regime frontman Volodymyr Zelensky and his General Staff which is rightfully furious at him for not listening to their assessment it would’ve been better to leave the city and set up a new defense line further to the west. The colonel warned that the junta has expended most of its reserves, both in terms of equipment and manpower, while its “best soldiers are dead, so it’s now shoving boys, old men, women into the breach”. He further added that Zelensky is essentially admitting defeat and taunting the political West, specifically the US, to “come here and win the war for us,” otherwise, “it’s over”.
Once again, the anchor Dan Ball mentioned the fighter jets and how the US has essentially lied it wouldn’t provide specific weapons systems, such as advanced missiles or tanks, all of which have been delivered in the meantime (or are about to). Ball warned that the same is true for F-16s, adding that “there’s now a bipartisan push in the Congress to send the jets”, but also stated that it would take at least a year to train pilots, “prolonging the killing in Ukraine”.
Colonel McGregor responded that the US doesn’t have a military strategy, but only a media one to convince everyone that the Neo-Nazi junta is supposedly winning. As the number of those who believe this narrative has dwindled to almost nothing and as the losses are piling up, the Kiev regime is forced to use contractors, the vast majority of whom are NATO personnel, meaning that if F-16s were to be sent, they would require American/NATO pilots to fly them. McGregor warned that “this is now a slow slide into [global] war that many people have really worried about for a long time” and that the US is faced with either admitting failure or pushing for a direct confrontation with Russia.
Ball and McGregor then discussed the issue of an escalating disinformation campaign in the US media, with the colonel pointing out that Washington DC has been doing this for decades, particularly in cases when any given administration was trying to not only justify, but also praise the US aggression against the world, specifically mentioning Bosnia, Iraq and the NATO-occupied Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohia. However, McGregor stated that the media are now forced to admit that “the weight of Russian manpower, as well as their military power in general, is crushing Ukrainians”.
He added that the message to the viewers is that “no amount of Ukrainian valor is going to stand up to [Russian] firepower” and people need to read between the lines and that “the message is – Ukraine can’t win”. The colonel further pointed out the Biden administration is certainly aware of this, with the recent Blinken-Lavrov meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in India perfectly illustrating it. McGregor thinks that “our threats don’t ring with much credibility” and that this behavior “puts everything at risk, including the United States“. However, the Biden administration is worried about its political future, so it’s refusing to admit the reality and finally come to an agreement that would take Russia’s security concerns into account.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Telegraph Journalist Calls For Matt Hancock Arrest
By Richie Allen | March 8, 2023
The Telegraph columnist Alison Pearson has called for former health secretary Matt Hancock to be arrested for wilful misconduct in public office.
Writing in today’s paper Pearson summarises the revelations contained in Hancock’s WhatsApp messages, which were leaked to The Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott.
Hancock handed more than 100,000 messages to Oakeshott when she wrote his lockdown memoir.
They revealed how Hancock gleefully plotted to “frighten the pants off everyone” to ensure lockdown compliance.
Hancock mooted using Covid variants to scare people into changing their behaviour. He supported blackmailing lockdown sceptic MP’s into keeping quiet.
One MP (James Daly, Bury) was told that if he didn’t shut up, his constituency wouldn’t receive funding for a disability hub.
Hancock repeatedly lied about the pressure Covid was exerting on the NHS. He briefed daily that hospitals were collapsing under the weight of Covid cases. The leaked messages reveal that in fact he knew from day one that there was no likelihood of hospital capacity running out.
He even offered beds to French and Italian Covid patients.
The leaks clearly demonstrate that Hancock was lying through his teeth day in, day out.
Has he broken the law? Alison Pearson thinks he just might have.
She concludes her excellent piece in today’s Telegraph, saying:
Are there grounds for a prosecution of the former minister for misconduct in a public office? Did Matt Hancock “wilfully misconduct himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification”?
Some families of care-home residents are preparing a private prosecution against Hancock, I know. The Crown Prosecution Service must then decide if it is in the public interest to proceed. The Lockdown Files should provide critical evidence.
With the third anniversary of lockdown looming, the Rights for Residents campaign asked their members to post a picture of their loved one in happier times, along with the three words that best describe them. Before, that is, those elderly ladies and gentlemen were locked away with no interaction with a close relative or friend.
They were consigned to a living death that was designed by our mad Covid masters to “save lives”. What could ever have justified such a crime against humanity?
Now, that’s what I call an Urgent Question.
The Vaccine Was “95% Effective” How?
By Robert Blumen | Brownstone Institute | March 8, 2023
The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and Maori chiefs was a landmark event in the history of New Zealand. Drafted in English, a Maori translation was prepared, ostensibly to ensure that Maori could have an accurate understanding of the terms. In retrospect, it is less clear that a meeting of the minds was intended:
The English and Māori texts differ. As some words in the English treaty did not translate directly into the written Māori language of the time, the Māori text is not a literal translation of the English text. It has been claimed that Henry Williams, the missionary entrusted with translating the treaty from English, was fluent in Māori and that far from being a poor translator he had in fact carefully crafted both versions to make each palatable to both parties without either noticing inherent contradictions.
“The covid vaccine is 95% effective” is a contemporary Treaty of Waitangi. The original is in the language of clinical trials. It was never translated. The public interpreted this phrase in their native language, normal English. What Pfizer said and what the public heard were quite different. The public would have been far more skeptical of these products had the clinical trial results been translated into normal English.
What we need is a proper translation and an explanation of how miscommunication happened.
The Injections Did Not Stop Infection
By now, everyone knows that the Pfizer and Moderna products did not stop people from getting Covid. Covid disease has mowed a wide strip through the double and triple-masked talking heads who told everyone that the shots would make them immune.
What is less well known is that:
- The products were never expected to stop infection or transmission.
- The clinical trials did not test for their ability to do so.
A clinical trial is designed to test a drug for effectiveness, which is strictly defined by one or more endpoints. An endpoint is a measurable outcome that can be assessed for each participant. With that in mind, prevention of infection was not an endpoint of the BioNTech/Pfizer injection clinical trials. And, this was known in 2020 before the products were approved for emergency use and distributed to the public starting in 2021.
In this New England Journal of Medicine research summary, Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine, under Limitations and Remaining Questions, we find that “whether the vaccine protects against asymptomatic infection and transmission to unvaccinated persons” remains unanswered by the clinical trial.
What did the clinical trial test for, if not the ability of the mRNA vaccine to stop transmission and/or infection? The trial was designed to test the ability of the injections to prevent “symptomatic Covid 19 cases” defined as one or more of a number symptoms and a positive test (see page 7 of the supplementary appendix for details).
@pfizer tweeted in Jan 2021 that stopping transmission was their “highest priority”. Their product does not do that, nor did the tweet make a claim that it did so. But it was their highest priority nonetheless. That, and getting as many people injected as possible.
Failure to Prevent Infection Was Known Before the Rollout
In October 2022, a Pfizer executive testified to an EU body that Pfizer had not tested the ability of the vaccine to stop transmission. This story was shocking to some and generated accusations that Pfizer had lied about the capabilities of the shots. But this information had been available since the trial results were released early in 2021. Pfizer had already been criticized for this.
Dr William A Haseltine PhD, wrote in Forbes in September 2020:
What would a normal vaccine trial look like?
One of the more immediate questions a trial needs to answer is whether a vaccine prevents infection. If someone takes this vaccine, are they far less likely to become infected with the virus? These trials all clearly focus on eliminating symptoms of Covid-19, and not infections themselves. Asymptomatic infection is listed as a secondary objective in these trials when they should be of critical importance.
On October 21, 2020 the editor of the BMJ (British Medical Journal) Peter Doshi asked:
Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us
Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”
Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either. None of the trials currently underway are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus….
Is It Even a Vaccine?
A vaccine that prevents infection is known as “neutralizing” or “sterilizing”. I am a software engineer with no training in medicine, pharmacology or clinical trials. I consider myself a good barometer of what the average untrained person would think about such things. Prior to 2021 I had thought that immunity was a necessary condition for a drug to earn the title of “vaccine”. If anyone had asked me, I would have told them that the Covid injections were a treatment, not a vaccine.
The Wikipedia article about vaccines (Mar 5 2023) aligns with my untrained understanding:
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. … A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body’s immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and to further recognize and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future.
Cornell Law provides the following legal definition of vaccine, sourcing 26 USC § 4132(a)(2), which is consistent with the above:
The term “vaccine” means any substance designed to be administered to a human being for the prevention of 1 or more diseases.
The definition published by the CDC prior to 2021 said much the same. But the CDC website changed the definition on or after August 2021. The older version found on the internet archive is here (emphasis added):
Immunity: Protection from an infectious disease. If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected.
Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.
Here is the new version (emphasis added):
Vaccine: A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.
The earlier pair of definitions is quite easy to understand. The latter, much more difficult. What exactly is a “preparation”? Does a vaccine stimulate the body or only prepare the body? What is or is not a vaccine according to the new definition?
While the CDC may think that they can change the meanings of words whenever they like, public memory retains the original meaning. The assumption of immunity permeates almost all non-expert level discussion of vaccines. A web search for “why are vaccines good” shows results that assume or imply immunity.
Even the CDC did not finish the job of memory-holing the old language. On the very same CDC website, under 5 Reasons It Is Important for Adults to Get Vaccinated, we read “By getting vaccinated, you can protect yourself and also avoid spreading preventable diseases to other people in your community.” And then, “Vaccines Can Prevent Serious Illness”.
The timing of the CDC’s edit suggests to me that prior to 2021, the CDC had the same understanding of vaccines as I do. I believe that they wanted a new definition because they knew that the products being developed at warp speed were not vaccines in the original sense of the word. And it was important that those products be called “vaccines” for reasons that I will explain later. This incident brings to mind a meme that I no longer have a link to. captioned: “We changed what ‘definition’ means so you can’t say that we redefined anything.”
What Does “95% Effective” Mean?
The “95% effective” message was repeated in nearly all reporting on the clinical trials. But the question, “effective at doing what?” was rarely asked. To answer this requires walking down the links of a chain of terminology from the world of clinical trials.
The first link in the chain is “risk”. Risk is the probability of a bad outcome. These are assumed to happen randomly within a group. A clinical trial must define in advance the bad outcomes that the drug intends to avoid. The next link is “endpoint”. Each distinct bad outcome is an “endpoint”. The trial compares the endpoints between a control group who did not take the drug and a test group, who did.
The purpose of a clinical trial is to determine the ability of a drug to reduce risk. A drug that reduces risk is “effective”. There are two ways of quantifying risk reduction. From the NIH glossary:
Absolute risk reduction (ARR) or risk difference
the difference in the incidence of poor outcomes between the intervention group of a study and the control group. For example, if 20 per cent of people die in the intervention group and 30 per cent in the control group, the ARR is 10 per cent (30–20 per cent).
the rate (risk) of poor outcomes in the intervention group divided by the rate of poor outcomes in the control group. For example, if the rate of poor outcomes is 20 per cent in the intervention group and 30 per cent in the control group, the relative risk is 0.67 (20 per cent divided by 30 per cent).
The difference between the ARR and RR (also known as “RRR”, to align with ARR) is in the denominator. The ARR divides by the number of participants in one of the groups. The RRR divides by the number of people with bad outcomes in the control group – a necessarily much smaller number.
The ARR is the number most relevant for a drug – such as the Pfizer injections – that was to be given to everyone. But the RRR is the preferred method of presentation for pharma when they want to exaggerate the effectiveness of a drug because it will always be a much larger number. Would you take a drug that could reduce the incidence of a rare disease by 50%? From 10 per 1 million to 5 per 1 million is an 50% RRR and an 0.0005% ARR.
The 95% figure cited for the covid injections is the relative risk. The absolute risk reduction was 0.84%. In a slide deck from the Canadian Covid Care Alliance (CCCA), slide 11 shows how the 91% was achieved (it is 91%, not 95%, because the it refers to an earlier version of the study):
The research paper COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and effectiveness—the elephant (not) in the room puts the ARR in the 1% range. The CCCA slide deck gives an ARR of 0.84%, though it is not clear how they reached this number, based on the other numbers in their slides.
A clinical trial finding of a 1% ARR means that 99% of the people who take the drug either did not experience the condition that the drug treats, or they did experience it, but were not helped by the drug. The 1% both had the condition and were helped by the drug. Another way of saying this is the Number Needed to Treat (NNT). NNT is the reciprocal of the ARR and is the number of people who must take the drug to help one person reach the endpoint. An ARR of 1% corresponds to an NNT of 100 people.
We can now answer the question of the meaning of vaccine effectiveness. The endpoint of the trial was a severe confirmed case of covid at least 7 days after the second dose. This endpoint requires the participant in the trial to have covid symptoms and a positive covid test. “95% effective” means that 95% of the patients who had Covid symptoms and a positive test were in the control group. Five percent were in the test group.
Here’s what “95% effective” did not mean: if you take the shots, then you will have a 95% lower chance of getting covid. But that is how most people understood it because that is what the words mean in normal English.
Then the Lying Started
Once the public had their hopes raised by the false translation of the “95% effective” message, the pandemic-industrial-complex went into high gear to amplify it. They stated the incorrect message loudly, frequently, and as if it were fact. The injections would – with 100% certainty (perhaps 200%) – protect you from infection. Many of the people who said this were doctors or scientific researchers who must have understood how to interpret clinical trials.
Here are some choice quotes that did not age well:
- “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.” Joe Biden, CNN Town Hall July 2021
- “Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person. A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else,” she added with a shrug. “It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people. [Vaccines] will get us to the end of this.” – Rachel Maddow, March 2021
- “When people are vaccinated they can feel safe that they won’t get infected, whether they’re outdoors or indoors.” – Dr. Anthony Fauci, May 2021 (outdoors: seriously?)
- “Vaccination against COVID-19 prevents breakthrough infections, Stanford researchers find.” – Stanford Medicine, July 2021
- Vaccinated people become “dead ends” for the virus – Anthony Fauci, May 2021
Demonizing the Unvaxxed
The public has consistently over-estimated the infection fatality rate of Covid. Some even believed the fatality rate to be above 10%. They believed that we were in great danger. They also believed that the “95% effective” vaccine would bring the pandemic to a quick end, once everyone had taken it. Anyone who refused to do so was therefore risking not only their own life, but everybody else’s as well.
Dr Anthony Fauci estimated herd immunity would emerge when around 60% of the population had taken the vaccine … or perhaps 70, 80, no wait … 85%. Or maybe 100% (which would include large numbers who already had natural immunity). Bill Gates extended that to everyone on earth.
The narrative then turned to demonization of those who refused to submit to vaccine coercion. The selfish anti-social behavior of the anti-vaxxers with their stubborn attachment to “free dumb” that was keeping everyone locked indoors and forcing us all to wear diapers on our faces. Yale University behavioral researchers tested messaging strategies to determine whether shame, embarrassment or fear was most effective.
President Biden said that we the nation was experiencing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Later, Biden ominoulsy warned the unvaccinated that he had been waiting a long time for them to get injected, but “our patience is wearing thin”. In December of 2021 the White House issued a cheery year end greeting to the vaccinated. The unvaccinated, on the other hand, were “looking at a winter of severe illness and death.” Merry Christmas.
Even South Park, which I consider a reliable source of contrarian political opinion, ran a storyline set in the year 2050 in which every single character had to be vaccinated for the 30-year pandemic to end. This episode featured one lone holdout who would not get vaccinated due to a crustacean allergy i.e. for “shellfish reasons”. This gag took aim at people who considered the vaccine to be a violation of body autonomy, and those who objected to components used in its development for religious reasons, thereby scoring a “two for one”.
Volumes can, and will, be written about the intense onslaught of propaganda aimed at getting two needles in every deltoid. I will provide one more example that represents no more than the median level of insanity; plenty of people called for the same or worse. @ClayTravis, in February 2023, tweeted the results of a Rasmussen poll from 2022:
Last January 60% of Democrats wanted to lock everyone who didn’t get the covid shot in their houses. Over 40% of Democrats wanted those who rejected the covid shot sent to quarantine camps. Over 40% also wanted anyone who criticized the covid shot fined & imprisoned. Over a quarter wanted those who didn’t get the covid shot to have their kids seized.
While there were many agendas driving the madness, the Treaty of Waitangi effect was a critical part in carrying it out. If the message had been that “everyone is going to get exposed to covid – injected or not”, then it could not have happened. The misunderstanding convinced the public that mass vaccination would stop the pandemic; and that the holdouts were prolonging it. Without this belief, none of the coercion made any sense: employment mandates, school mandates, quarantine camps, or vaccine passports. As the hysteria fades, the last remaining mandates are being dropped as the reality sinks in that the shots do not stop the spread.
Welcome to Waitangi World. I hope that you have a pleasant stay.
Robert Blumen is a software engineer and podcast host who writes occasionally about political and economic issues.
‘We Just Showed the Truth’: Russian Pranksters Vovan and Lexus React to YouTube Ban
Sputnik – 06.03.2023
One of the pranksters, Alexey Stolyarov (Lexus), said he does not believe that their videos on YouTube violated the digital platform’s guidelines, suggesting instead that the “truth” the prankster duo shared “probably was not convenient for western officials.”
Western Big Tech has once again demonstrated just how much it “cares” about freedom of speech as video-hosting platform YouTube, which is owned by Google, banned the channel of Russian prankster duo Vovan & Lexus over alleged violation of community guidelines.
During an interview with Sputnik, one of the pranksters, Alexey Stolyarov (Lexus), pointed out that the ban came shortly after they pranked William Hague, the UK’s former foreign secretary.
“We got a letter that we have broken the rules of YouTube because of the prank with the ex-Foreign Secretary William Hague,” Stolyarov said. “And they wrote that they had to remove it, but probably after 2 hours they removed the whole channel without explanation.”
He noted that this is far from the first time their channel has been blocked on YouTube, and that the last time they got banned, the British government and the UK Ministry of Defense actually sent a letter to the video hosting’s management, naming the pranksters as “real threats to the UK national security.”
“This time we have pranked ex-Foreign Secretary William Hague. It was in all Russian media, but it wasn’t in the UK media. Because since the last prank call with the defense secretary, they noted in the letter that other contributors of information have already agreed not to spread our pranks,” he said. “At first, YouTube kept silent for about three days. And then they blocked us.”
The prankster also expressed his skepticism about allegations of their pranks violating YouTube’s community guidelines.
“We just spread the statements of their western officials. It’s not our words. It’s their words,” he said, referring to the admissions those officials made during prank calls with Vovan and Lexus. “We just showed the truth and this probably was not convenient for western officials.”
Stolyarov added that they have already moved to platforms such as RuTube, Telegram and VK, over which Western governments and tech corporations hold no sway.
“It’s good that it works in Russia and nobody could ban it because of political reasons but also we have a reserve channel on the Reddit platform. It’s also available in the West.” Stolyarov a.k.a. Lexus remarked.
Vovan and Lexus have gained considerable fame in recent years as they prank a number of prominent western politicians, including current UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, tricking them into making rather frank admissions about poignant geopolitical matters.
The Strange Case of Jacob Anthony Chansley
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | March 8, 2023
On January 9, 2021, Jacob Anthony Chansley was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona for allegedly committing the following offenses:
Civil Disorder; Obstruction of an Official Proceeding; Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building; Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building; Violent Entry and Disorderly Conduct in a Capitol Building; Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building.
If the unarmed Chansley (known in the mainstream media as the “QAnon Shaman”) indeed committed these offenses, why was he escorted around the Capitol Building by armed police officers, at one point standing in the midst of NINE of them? If the strangely-clad young man bearing an American flag was trespassing and behaving in a “violent, disorderly, and disruptive” way, why didn’t the officers arrest him on the spot?
In reviewing the strange case of Jacob Anthony Chansley, the American people should consider that this country has a longstanding tradition of civil disobedience. In its relationship with the citizenry, the United States government has always had to contend with the somewhat awkward fact that the Republic was founded by men who, legally speaking, committed treason. Thomas Jefferson justified their conduct as follows:
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Jefferson’s sentiments sound good and reasonable to a citizenry animated with classical liberal principles of government, but they are problematic for men in power who have little patience or tolerance for pesky dissenters like Jacob Anthony Chansley.
While the surveillance tape shows that many of the January 6, 2021 protestors did indeed commit acts of violence and vandalism, where is the evidence that Jacob Anthony Chansley was one of them?
As Tucker Carlson points out (starting at 2:50 on the tape) multiple cameras from multiple angles show that he is completely unarmed, calmly walking around carrying an American flag in his left hand and a bullhorn in his right.
Since November 17, 2021, Chansley has been serving his sentence of 41 months in prison. Does he really deserve this severe punishment?
Mainstream media pundits have made him—presumably because of his visually arresting and outlandish costume—the face of what it has characterized as an insurrection, but what kind of insurrectionist shows up with no weapons or incendiary devices?
People who identify themselves a Democrats and despisers of Donald Trump will doubtless claim that by posing this question, I am expressing my own partisan political sympathies and attachments. I am NOT.
I write this post out of concern that those who are currently holding power (and their propagandists in the media) can no longer be trusted to tell us the truth about ANYTHING, whether it be the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the purported safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, the war in Ukraine, the events that transpired in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, or anything else of importance.
January 6 committee should be ‘tried for treason’ – Trump
RT | March 8, 2023
Former president Donald Trump has declared that the Democrat-led panel formed to investigate the January 6, 2021, riot on Capitol Hill should be “tried for fraud and treason.” The committee portrayed the riot as a “violent insurrection,” while video footage released by House Republicans showed more orderly scenes inside the Capitol.
“The Unselect Committee of political hacks and thugs has been totally discredited,” Trump declared on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, repeating a label he has often used to describe the House committee formed to investigate the riot.
“They knowingly refused to show the videos that mattered,” Trump continued. “They should be tried for fraud and treason, and those imprisoned and being persecuted should be exonerated and released, now!”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy recently shared more than 40,000 hours of security camera footage with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who aired a selection of clips on Tuesday night. The clips show Capitol Police peacefully escorting a number of Trump supporters through the Capitol building during the riot, including so-called ‘Qanon Shaman’ Jacob Chansley, while suggesting that a man called Ray Epps – who some Trump supporters allege was a federal agent tasked with inciting violence against police officers – lied about leaving the Capitol before violence broke out.
The committee’s final report, on the other hand, declared the riot a “violent insurrection” aimed at “overthrowing our democracy.” The committee recommended in December that Trump be criminally charged with inciting an insurrection attempt, obstructing Congress, and conspiring to defraud the United States, arguing that a speech he gave to the crowd before the riot had instigated the riot.
Trump, who is running for office again in 2024, has not been criminally charged, but faces numerous civil lawsuits over his alleged role in fomenting the riot. More than 100 police officers say they were injured on the day, while four Trump supporters died. Two died of natural causes and one of an accidental overdose, while Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt was shot by a Capitol Police officer near the entrance to the House chamber.
In an earlier Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump said that the footage shown by Carlson “sheds an entirely different light on what actually happened” on January 6, 2021. Carlson said that while there were some “hooligans” in the crowd that day, the majority of so-called “insurrectionists” were “sightseers.”
Out of more than 950 people charged in connection with the riot, 351 have been sentenced and 192 incarcerated. Around three quarters of those who pleaded guilty did so to misdemeanor offenses, according to the Department of Justice.
British SAS Soldiers Posing as Arms Dealers Scour World for Shells for Ukraine
By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 08.03.2023
Ukraine has run through its stockpiles of arms and ammunition — inherited from the Soviet Union in 1991 — along with weapons supplied by its NATO backers since Russia launched its military operation to defend the Donbass republics.
A team of SAS commandoes are reportedly scouring the world for stocks of Russian-calibre artillery shells to refill Ukraine’s depleted arsenals.
A British daily newspaper reported that a dozen special forces troopers have been travelling across Africa, the Middle East and Asia along with intelligence agents and Foreign Office officials.
The group, posing as arms dealers, carry “substantial amounts of cash” to buy up stocks of 122mm-calibre shells — fired by many of the artillery pieces Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union — on the spot.
“Our people have sources all over the world who will know if there is any ammo available and who to contact to strike a deal,” one military source said. “It is not always easy — it has been a scramble with many dead ends — but there have also been successes.”
The team have already journeyed to Angola, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam. But this week sources claimed a deal was struck on a stockpile in an unnamed European country.
Arms factories in both Bulgaria and Romania still produce Soviet-era arms and ammunition.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently begged his Western backers for more artillery, on top of his demands for fighter jets. “Artillery is the number one thing that we need. Both systems and ammunition — shells in large amounts,” he said.
US Army General Christopher Cavoli, the NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, has said the Ukrainian army fires around 100,000 shells per month compared to 600,000 from the Russian side — as Russian forces encircle the key city of Artemovsk (Bakhmut).
The reputed mission follows a failed attempt in the summer of 2022 to buy tens of thousands of rounds of 122mm ammunition from Pakistan, which has remained neutral in the conflict between Ukraine — with its NATO allies — and Russia.
The report claimed 40,000 shells were flown by RAF transport planes from Pakistan’s Nur Khan Air Base to Romania’s Cluj International Airport for delivery to a local arms dealer acting as a middleman.
However, none of those rounds made it to Ukraine. Unconfirmed rumours of quality control issues were superseded by Islamabad’s denial last month that it had allowed any ammunition to be transferred to the conflict zone.
“The reporting about supply of defence items by Pakistan to Ukraine is not accurate,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said on February 16.
“Pakistan maintains a policy of non-interference in military conflicts. Pakistan only exports defence stores to other states based on strong End Use and none re-transfer assurances,” Baloch stressed. “And this is the case of Pakistan’s position in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.”
The Russian imperial army adopted the 122mm (4.8-inch) artillery calibre before the First World War. It remained in service after the 1917 revolution and throughout the Soviet era with the Red Army, and is still used by the modern Russian army and those of other former Soviet republics and Warsaw Treaty member states.
Before Russia launched its military operation, the Ukrainian army reportedly possessed around 440 122mm-calibre D-30 towed howitzers and 600 2S1 ‘Gvozdika’ (carnation), the armored self-propelled versions of the same gun — although most were in long-term storage at the time.
Daily reports by the Russian Ministry of Defence have reported the destruction at least 146 D-30s and 99 Gvozdikas since the start of the demilitarization operation.
The coming spring offensives in Ukraine
BY STEPHEN BRYEN | ASIA TIMES | MARCH 8, 2023
As it looks now, there are two potential spring offensives in Ukraine. Either of these offensives would be laden with significant risks for both sides. Predicting the outcome is difficult because outside players may intervene, especially US and NATO forces.
The first offensive is fairly well known. It is the spring offensive being organized by the Russian army. Considerable preparations have been made over many months. The Russians have honed their tactics, brought in new offensive weapons and replaced equipment so far lost in the war, especially tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.
One report suggests that Russian production of tanks, including T-90s and T-14 Armtas, is running at a high level. Manufacturing of other weapons, especially ammunition of all types, also appears to have been accelerated.
What isn’t known is how the Russians will use the large force they have assembled, numbering between 200,000 to 300,000. One theory is they will move out from the south and east in a wide encirclement trying to trap Ukrainian forces.
Another is that they will use the encirclement to tie down the Ukrainians while making a dash for Kyiv from three sides (south, east and north). This may be their best bet, but it is questionable whether they have the manpower to do the job, or enough mobility to escape Ukrainian counterattacks.
The other spring offensive is the one that Ukraine is preparing for in earnest. This offensive probably has been planned in the Pentagon rather than in Kyiv.
NATO is rapidly bolstering its forces. This past Saturday the US-flagged vehicle carrier Liberty Pride sailed into the port of Alexandroupolis, Greece, carrying military equipment destined for NATO forces.
The US-flagged vehicle carrier Liberty Pride. Photo: Ships Nostalgia
How many other US ships are in the ocean at the moment or arriving at other ports, isn’t yet known. But what is known is that NATO is girding itself for a spillover, once the Ukrainian offensive gets underway.
The main focus of the Ukrainian spring offensive likely is an assault on Crimea and on Russian forces in the south. The objective is to cut them off (Kherson area across to Zaphorizia) and systematically destroy them, followed by a big push into Crimea.
The US is supplying a huge amount of war materiel for this assault. It includes bridging equipment that can support German-origin Leopard II tanks, which weigh more than 62 tons (roughly the same as the phantom M1 Abrams tanks that won’t arrive until next year, if ever).
Ukraine will have its hands full in such an operation and is dependent on US intelligence and, very likely, US airpower. There is not enough time to train Ukrainian pilots on F-16s, and there are not any spare up-to-date F-16s to throw into the battle – unless, of course, US fighter squadrons are in the mix.
One can expect that US aircraft will be painted over with Ukrainian insignia and flown by US or NATO pilots. These planes will operate as standoff assets, firing long-range air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons.
By staying wide of Russian air defense systems, but protected by what remains of Ukrainian air defenses, the F-16s could target Russian armor, command centers, troop formations, caravans, jammers and air defense radars.
The Ukrainian offensive also is likely to appear to the Russians as a casus belli involving NATO direct participation. How Russia might respond to a direct challenge is hard to say. The most likely Russian response could be to attack stockpiles and massing areas in Poland and Romania – and, almost certainly, airfields supporting the war.
Russian strategists have the opinion that Polish forces might also move into Ukraine, perhaps taking Lviv (Lvov) or other prizes, hedging that the Ukrainian offensive might fail or that the Russians are successful in toppling Kyiv’s government.
If these prognostications on the two spring offensives are anywhere near correct – and there is plenty of evidence suggesting both offensives are being prepared – then Europe is on the brink of a great catastrophe.
Stephen Bryen is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute.
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Blog Roll
Aletho News- Dockworkers launch global strike against Israeli and US military shipments
- Europe facing gas price shock – Gazprom chief
- Ukraine continues recruiting people with disabilities
- Weaponized Journalism: 2021 Sayer Ji Interview with NPR
- Beyond Netanyahu: what Israel’s election means for Palestinians
- Lithuania plans universal conscription
- Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News
- Financial Times rejects Nordic demands to correct Putin call story – media
- The Case for Less Unity in Europe
- Ukraine expands minority rights under EU pressure – but Russians remain excluded
- If Americans Knew
- Genocidal intent behind Hebron assault, rights group says
- This week, Israel killed 8-year-old who survived bombing that wiped out her family
- DAILY UPDATE: Latest essential news on Palestine, Israel, & region
- Israeli soldier poses at damaged Lebanon church, sparking anger
- New Report. Manufacturing the Great Replacement: Is Israel behind one of the largest racist influence campaigns ever documented?
- ‘Arab voice doesn’t count’: Jewish Israeli blocs reject Palestinian support
- Whether Bibi Stays or Goes, the ‘Special Relationship’ Must End
- AIPAC Isn’t Retreating. Here’s How It’s Already Shaping the Next Congress.
- With ‘Largest Coordinated Port Action Ever,’ Dockworkers in 22 Countries Strike Against Gaza Genocide
- US midterms: Five days left – who leads in the polls as Trump, Obama rally
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
