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‘US to send Soviet missiles to Ukraine’

Samizdat | March 22, 2022

The US is planning to deliver to Ukraine medium anti-aircraft systems taken from its own stockpile of Soviet military hardware, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing unnamed US officials.

The anti-aircraft systems were obtained through a clandestine program to study them and teach American troops how to counter them. Ukrainian forces are trained in the use of these systems, which they have operated for decades.

At least some of the supplies will be withdrawn from the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, officials told the newspaper, adding that C-17 Globemaster cargo planes recently flew to a nearby airfield in Huntsville.

Washington “is hoping that the provision of additional air defenses will enable Ukraine to create a de facto no-fly zone,” the newspaper said. NATO members have repeatedly rebuffed Kiev’s call to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, stating that it would draw them directly into the hostilities and could lead to a world war.

The list of equipment slated for delivery does not include the S-300 long-range missiles, the report said. The US reportedly purchased at least one such battery from Belarus in the 1990s in a clandestine operation. But Washington plans to supply shorter-range 9K33 Osa systems, according to WSJ sources.

Last Wednesday, CNN’s Jim Sciutto reported that the US and NATO allies were going to send to Ukraine an array of Soviet air defense systems with capabilities better than the shoulder-launched Stinger missiles delivered in the hundreds in the weeks before the Russian attack.

He was referring to a potential deal with Slovakia, which later confirmed it was willing to share its own S-300 systems with Ukraine. Slovakia’s defense minister, Jaroslav Nad, told a news conference on Thursday that he discussed the plan with his visiting US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, and that his country wanted to receive “a proper replacement” first.

The Russian military reported destroying multiple Ukrainian S-300 batteries over the nearly month-long attack. One of the stated goals of the Russian incursion is to demilitarize Ukraine and ensure that it will not pose any threat to the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, which Moscow recognized as independent states prior to the attack.

Moscow has warned that it will consider convoys delivering arms to Ukraine as legitimate targets for its armed forces. The WSJ didn’t explain the proposed logistics of the delivery of the US-owned anti-aircraft systems.

March 22, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Does Nato want peace in Ukraine? It doesn’t sound like it

By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | March 22, 2022

Is there a path to peace in Ukraine?  That’s the title of an article published on The American Conservative website two weeks ago that has only just crossed my desk.

Douglas MacGregor, a retired US Army colonel, a senior fellow with The American Conservative, and former adviser to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, asked the question. In the two since then, matters in Ukraine have become even more desperate and the need for a path to peace ever more urgent.

Casualties are in the thousands, while millions have fled the country seeking refuge abroad. At the time of writing, the deadline given by Russia’s Ministry of Defence for the embattled city of Mariupol to surrender has been rejected, with Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk saying there can be ‘no question’ of capitulation.

However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to be pressing for a negotiated end to Russia’s invasion while at the same time ramping up the rhetoric by drawing links between Putin’s ‘final solution’ for Ukraine and the Nazi extermination of the Jews. This last he voiced in his challenge Israel over its failure to impose sanctions on Russia.

Meanwhile, there is no sign of a US initiative to help negotiate a ceasefire – which is the path to peace that MacGregor says Joe Biden should follow, although the president’s words and actions thus far ‘have rendered this practically impossible’.

Fomenting violence in Ukraine against Russia – which is pretty much how MacGregor describes current US policy – is not the way to go, he believes.  It is he says, and as we can already see, dangerous to Europe and to the larger world.

He says both realism and restraint are lacking. Even if on a tactical level the performance of Russian forces has been uneven, that perceived failure has had ‘no discernible impact on the operational level of war, where they continue to pursue, encircle, isolate and destroy Ukrainian ground forces’, MacGregor asserts.

The end of this tragedy, he writes, is not in doubt. Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine will be annihilated or captured.

His words have fallen on stony ground. On Sunday, Biden’s ambassador to the United Nations warned that there was little immediate hope of a negotiated end to the war.

Ahead of a crucial Nato summit in Europe this Thursday that his President is due to attend, his words confirm MacGregor’s view that ‘the Washington elite remains committed to any course of action that promises to prolong the conflict and kill more Ukrainians’.

He says: ‘No one inside the Biden Administration or in the Senate seems remotely interested in crafting a ceasefire, let alone developing the basis for a potential solution that will save lives and halt the destruction.’

Yet, this is not without historic precedent, as per the several examples of US negotiated peace deals he sets out in his article – which you can read in full here. 

Without a properly negotiated ceasefire of the order MacGregor advocates, food supply chains in Ukraine risk final collapse and a ‘wave of collateral hunger’ around the world as a result of the carnage in Ukraine is predicted.

This warning comes from the World Food Programme – whose concern is not limited to besieged cities such as Mariupol, where food and water supplies are running out and relief convoys are unable to enter the city.

The WFP, which buys nearly half its wheat supplies from Ukraine, cites the worrying impact of the crisis on food security globally ‘especially on hunger hotspots.’ 

Whether Thursday’s Nato summit has included this aspect of the crisis on its agenda, I do not know. However, it has been reported that the gathering will be used ‘to look at strengthening the bloc’s own deterrence and defence, immediately and in the long term, to deal with the now openly confrontational Russian president Vladimir Putin’.

According to Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, the summit is intended not just to show support for Ukraine, but also ‘our readiness to protect and defend all Nato allies’. By sending that message, he says, ‘we are preventing an escalation of the conflict to a full-fledged war between Nato and Russia’.

This does not sound much like a path to a negotiated peace.

March 22, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Clueless CDC Admits They Never Suspected Waning Vaccines

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | March 21, 2022

March 3, 2022, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky answered questions in front of medical students at her alma mater, Washington University. This is an excerpt of the 45-minute presentation,1 during which Walensky made several statements about the public health response to COVID-19 in the past two years, admitting the CDC had relied heavily on vaccines, that she’d learned of the 95% efficacy from CNN and was not told the shots would lose effectiveness.

In fact, much of her presentation is riddled with statements that likely revealed more than she intended. She might not have realized the presentation was being taped or thought a taped presentation in front of medical students wouldn’t be found. Or maybe, the CDC simply doesn’t care that what they say in 2022 is the same information that caused many to be censored or maligned in 2020 and 2021.

It would be an interesting test to repeat her statements on social media today to see if the information would be tagged as misinformation or disinformation now that the CDC has publicly recognized what scientists have been saying for years.

Walensky Admits Her Source Was CNN

Walensky was invited to speak to the medical students at Washington University as the 2022 Gerald Medoff Visiting Professor in the Department of Medicine. During the interview conducted by Dr. William G. Powderly, co-director of the Division of Infectious Diseases, she was asked what the CDC got right and how that might affect the response to future pandemics. Three minutes into her answer, she said:2

“Where could we have improved? Well, you know, I think … I can tell you where I was when the CNN feed came that it was 95% effective, um, the vaccine. So many of us wanted it to be helpful. Many of us wanted to say, “OK, this is our ticket out.” Right? Now we’re done.”

This may be a mind-blowing admission — that the head of the CDC’s information came from a CNN news report and not from Pfizer. It turns out the CNN report was a regurgitated Pfizer press release. Investigative journalist Paul Thacker, writing in The Disinformation Chronicle, discusses the timeline of events that led to Walensky believing the Pfizer vaccine was 95% effective.3

It is likely the CNN report Walensky is referring to was published November 18, 20204 by Maggie Fox and Amanda Sealy, who it appears did little to augment the story after pulling information from a Pfizer press release published the same day.5 What is remarkable, and unfortunate, is that a story in CNN influenced Walensky’s thinking about the vaccine and future guidance from the CDC.

It turns out it is even more deplorable since it wasn’t a story but a republished press release. Also interesting is that it took two CNN reporters to present one republished press release/story. As Thacker writes, “The Pfizer press release became CNN headline, became CDC pandemic policy.” Walensky went on to say during the interview:6

“So I think we had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism for some good things that came our way. I really do. I think all of us wanted this to be done. Nobody said waning, when you know, oh this vaccine is going to work. Oh well, maybe it’ll work — (laughs) it’ll wear off. Nobody said what if the next variant doesn’t, it doesn’t, it’s not as potent against the next variant.”

Thacker dug into the published transcript7 of a Pfizer earnings call held February 2, 2021, in which an analyst from global financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald asked four pointed questions.

  1. If the COVID vaccine becomes routine, how do you think governments and physicians will choose among these vaccines that have received emergency use authorization?
  2. And then how do you think about that 95% efficacy rate in light of mutations?
  3. And the last question is on your PCV20, if it’s approved, what do you expect the ACIP [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] recommendation to be your — what would you ideally like it to be?
  4. And do you think there will be any upgrade for those 65-plus due to the additional serotypes?

It seems interesting that the analyst from Cantor Fitzgerald understood enough to ask about whether the vaccine would be effective against a virus nearly every scientist in the world expected to mutate. And yet, Walensky did not consider the possibility,8 despite having been a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School with years of experience dealing with viruses.9

Where Does the COVID ‘Science’ Come From?

When asked about the ACIP recommendation, Pfizer responded, “And then to your question about ACIP. Of course, we’re working closely with the FDA for approval and with the CDC at the right moments in time to get the right recommendation.”10 Many believe that the “right recommendation” was not given, yet Pfizer likely got exactly what they wanted from the CDC.

Walensky has overruled or avoided asking the ACIP’s advice on COVID booster issues at least three times, according to a STAT News report.11 As Thacker writes, this sequence of events is:12

“… direct evidence of a corporation influencing federal policy by laundering their press release through media outlets like CNN. Further, republishing press releases seems a pervasive practice in how the media covers COVID-19 vaccines — meaning, they don’t do much reporting. This has been obvious since late 2020.”

Walensky’s presentation at Washington University was just days after it was revealed that Biden and the CDC are parroting talking points developed by the same firm that conducted polling for Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.13 The memo sent February 24, 2022, closely matches statements Biden used in the State of the Union Address.

In other words, it appears that at least some of the “science” driving public health policy for COVID-19 and destroying the economy is coming directly from Impact Research,14 who are “the proud pollsters for President Joe Biden” and whose marketing includes “electing Democrats in the toughest districts,” “electing presidents” and “crafting the most authentic and persuasive language for your communications.”

Two days after Walensky spoke at Washington University, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, wrote,15 “She’s right. Nobody could possibly have known variants might be a problem.” Under this, he posted a tweet dated January 20, 2021, in which he had posted, “Spoiler alert: the vaccines probably don’t work against at least one new variant and they’re going to want you to get vaccinated again next fall.”

By August, Twitter banned Berenson permanently for “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.”16 The tweet that put Twitter over the edge compared the vaccine to a “therapeutic “with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile.” He also questioned vaccine mandates.”

Data supporting limited efficacy17 and terrible side effects18,19 are not difficult to find. In fact, Walensky admitted the vaccine has limited efficacy to Washington University — will Twitter ban her?

Walensky Knows She’s Wrong for Half the Country

Midway through the interview, Powderly asked how Walensky balances the risks of infectious disease against the mental health and economic risks from decisions the CDC has made. Her response was telling:20

“This is such an important question. The easy answer is I know I’m going to be wrong for half the country (laugh) so now that I’ve accepted that um … some fraction of people will be unhappy.

We are looking under the lamppost of all the cases and all the deaths and there have been so many other things that we’re counting that don’t make the headlines — opioid deaths, mental health challenges, cancer screening. I’ve heard from colleagues of people who came in whose elective surgeries were deferred who now come in with metastatic disease.”

Minutes before, she was asked what she thought the next couple of years would look like. She started by saying, “So this is a safe space because every piece of advice I’ve gotten is don’t predict what’s going to happen.”21 The implication appears to be that she didn’t think what she said would be made public. She went on to predict that in the months ahead she believes:

“… [O]verall immunity is going to hold us in good stead. I don’t know whether we’re going to need another boost and I don’t know when and I don’t know what that’s going to look like but I do think ultimately we will have a good level of population immunity for variants that come our way … Ultimately we will have a coronavirus that will lead to death in some people every season, that we will tolerate in some way.”

This coronavirus that will lead to death every season sounds amazingly like seasonal flu. The final estimates by the CDC22 of the 2017-2018 flu season showed 41 million people were symptomatic with an estimated 18.9 million who received medical care, 710,572 who were hospitalized and 51,646 who died.

She also hinted that mask-wearing may be here to stay, saying, “I haven’t had a cold in a really long time, and I suspect we don’t miss those.”23 Yet, Walensky has also admitted that the CDC’s mask policy for public schools to reopen was influenced by teachers’ unions who were against in-person learning.

In other words, the guidelines for children to wear masks throughout their school day were not developed based on science but, rather, on “hearing firsthand from parents and teachers directly about their experiences and concerns.” and “superintendents, principals, civil rights groups, and all sorts of other folks.”24

Despite History, CDC Is Calling for Transparency

Anyone who has held an opinion that differs from the mainstream narrative has been censored, questioned and fake “fact-checked” so the debate over science would never see the light of day. Mainstream media outlets took up the banner, quashing any information that didn’t neatly fit the story.

If data might demonstrate that the vaccine was not functioning the way it was promised, then the CDC25 withheld the information and Health and Human Services26 stopped tracking hospital deaths related to COVID-19. But they haven’t been able to stop the data coming from Israel,27 the U.K,28 Germany29 and insurance companies.30

During Walensky’s appearance, she said she was “proud of our ability to get data out,”31 in reference to the vaccine. She indicated that they used a “pedal-to-the-metal”32 system to analyze and assimilate data that was published, on average, every 48 hours. Yet, her comments are in direct contradiction to a recent investigative report published in The New York Times33 that shows the CDC was not transparently publishing “large portions” of vaccine data.

In fact, Walensky has also publicly discredited the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is co-administered34 by the FDA and CDC. During her January 11, 2022, testimony before the Senate,35 Walensky clearly stated that any death after a vaccine could be reported to VAERS using the example of an individual who gets vaccinated, hit by a car and dies.

She implied without outright stating that this death would also be recorded in VAERS and logged as a death related to the vaccine. In other words, she skirted the issue without having to outright lie to the Senate.

Just days before she declared her pride in the CDC’s ability to publish accurate and informative data, The New York Times36 revealed that the FDA had been aware the COVID shots were only 12% effective in children under the age of 5. However, they withheld the information before a scheduled meeting on February 15, 2022, which was subsequently canceled. According to the Times :37

“Experts worried that the news would further dissuade hesitant parents from immunizing their children. Other studies have shown the vaccine was not powerfully protective against infection with the Omicron variant in adults, either.”

Will the Gaslighting Stop?

During the interview, Walensky alluded to people in the media who “reject evidence,” saying,38 “You know in the media now, there are a lot of people who are using their voice that may or may not be helpful for public health … then that decreases public health in general so our messaging I think we have to be clear about.”

The information that Walensky revealed during the interview makes you wonder about who’s making public health decisions and why. It’s difficult to imagine and scary to think that after two years, one of the largest and most powerful health care agencies in the U.S. is led by a director who is potentially uninformed, or worse, purposefully misleading the public.

In approximately 35 short minutes Walensky revealed much. While she characterizes those who reject her propaganda as “rejecting evidence” since scientific debate is no longer part of the scientific process according to the CDC, it’s interesting to note that she:

  • Admits learning about the Pfizer 95% efficacy — information which was then used to formulate CDC guidelines — from a CNN report,39 which was nothing more than a republished press release from Big Pharma.40
  • Believes the CDC is transparently publishing data in a “pedal-to-the-metal” scenario41 even though The New York Times uncovered evidence the CDC is withholding data.42
  • Believes that no one told her or the CDC that a virus may mutate and render the vaccine ineffective,43 yet a financial analyst was astute enough to ask the question.44
  • Isn’t sure if we will need another booster45 after Pfizer told the world last year that a fourth dose may be needed sooner than expected.46
  • Blames the “public” at large for believing “the science” is black and white despite her colleague, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who as director of the NIAID, has been the face of COVID-19 for the White House, claiming HE was the science.47 Walensky now admits: “I think the public heard that science is black and white, science is immediate … and the truth is, science is gray.”48

Sources and References

March 22, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

CHD Wins Federal District Court Injunction On DC’s Minor Consent for Vaccinations Act

Children’s Health Defense | March 21, 2022

Washington, DC – On March 18, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued an order granting a preliminary injunction to prohibit the mayor of the District of Columbia, the D.C. Department of Health and D.C. public schools from enforcing the D.C. Minor Consent for Vaccination Act of 2020 until further order of the court.

“This is a major legal victory for children, parental rights, and informed consent,” said Rolf Hazlehurst, senior staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense (CHD) who argued the case. “Government overreach such as this has dire implications for children’s health and the constitutional rights of citizens.”

The D.C. Minor Consent for Vaccination Act of 2020, allows children eleven years of age and older to consent to vaccinations without their parents’ knowledge or consent. The law specifically targets children whose parents have religious exemptions for their children. The D.C. Act contains several provisions designed to deceive parents and hide the fact that their children have been vaccinated against their parental judgment, authority or religious convictions.

The court order states that the parents “have shown they are likely to succeed on the merits because the District’s law requires providers to hide children’s vaccination status from parents who invoke their religious exemption rights…”

The D.C. Minor Consent Act requires health care providers to falsify records by leaving the child’s school vaccination records “blank.” The doctors may bill the parents’ insurance companies for the vaccines administered to the children against the parents’ written directive. However, to deceive the parents, insurance companies may not send the parents an Explanation of Benefits (EOB).

CHD and Parental Rights Foundation filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking a court order to declare the D.C. Minor Consent for Vaccinations Amendment Act of 2020 unconstitutional. Plaintiffs, (Booth, et al.) are four parents of minor children who attend public school in Washington, D.C. Oral arguments were heard on March 3, 2022.

In the opinion issued on Friday, March 18, the court found the parents likely to succeed on the merits in their arguments that the D.C. Act is unconstitutional for two reasons. First, the D.C. Act is preempted by federal law because it directly contradicts the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. The D.C. Act also violates the right to free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Hazlehurst argued that the District has created a “pressure-cooker environment, enticing and psychologically manipulating [minor children] to defy their parents and take vaccinations against their parents’ will.”

The Plaintiffs overcame a high legal hurdle that “threatened injury must be certainly impending” as established by the U.S. Supreme Court precedent  Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l., in part by the use of a drawing entitled “Peer Pressure,” drawn by one of the plaintiff’s children. The drawing depicts the dilemma children face at school when they do not want to get the COVID vaccine or have been advised by their parents not to take the shot.

“This preliminary injunction is part of ongoing litigation in an extremely important national precedent-setting case,” said Hazlehurst. “The rights of parents to decide what is best for their children’s health is at stake. Government can’t be allowed to make such decisions for minor children.”

Two similar but separate lawsuits, Booth (argued  by CHD/Parental Rights Foundation) and Mazer (supported by Informed Consent Action Network), were filed against the D.C. Minor Consent Act. In both Booth and Mazer, the court ruled the plaintiffs have “standing” based on preemption because the D.C. Minor Consent Act conflicts with Congress’ National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. In CHD’s  Booth case, the court made the additional finding that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits that the D.C. Minor Consent Act violates the free exercise of religion clause in the First Amendment of the Constitution.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden stated, “Removing the law would revert the District to the standard age of consent of 18.” Although the case is not yet final, the preliminary injunction reverts D.C. to the standard age of consent of 18.

###

Children’s Health Defense is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Its mission is to end childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures, hold those responsible accountable, and establish safeguards to prevent future harm. For more information, visit ChildrensHealthDefense.org.

CHD Links:

a) 1 of 38-page document- PI Memo Opinion DC Minor Case:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/PI-memo-opinion-DC-minor-case.pdf

b) 1 of 2-page document- Booth Preliminary Injunction Order:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Booth-Preliminary-Injunction-Order.pdf

c) 1 of 88-page document- #31 Amended Complaint:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/31-AMENDED-COMPLAINT-against-All-Defendants-filed-by-SHANITA-WILLIAMS-SHAMEKA-WILLIAMS-VICTOR-M.-BOOTH-JANE-HELLEWELL.-AttachmentsHazlehurst-Rolf.pdf

d) 1 of 131-page document- #31 Appendix:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/31-1-Appendix.pdf

e) DC Plaintiff Drawing (Exhibit 11 & timestamp included):
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Exhibit-11-DC-plaintiff-drawing-.png

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

FBI Invites Public In On Its Forfeiture Racket, Promises Them A Cut Of The Take

By Tim Cushing – techdirt – March 16, 2022 

There aren’t many ways to make something as objectively awful as civil asset forfeiture worse, but the FBI has found a way to do it. As it stands now, forfeiture allows law enforcement to take cash and property from people under the (unproven) theory that it was illegally obtained. The rest of the process does nothing to prove the theory. The burden of proof is often shifted to people who had their stuff taken by law enforcement and the process of seeking the return of property is so expensive and counterintuitive, most people just take the L and move on.

The FBI wants to make asset forfeiture even shittier. It’s rolling out what appears to be a pilot program in Charlotte, North Carolina — supposedly a major hub on the East Coast drug distribution chain. Behold these (also unproven) claims the FBI has deployed to justify its new forfeiture ride-along program.

The FBI Charlotte Field Office is offering cash rewards for tips that help agents intercept drug trafficking shipments through Charlotte. With multiple interstates running directly through the Queen City, the route is appealing to traffickers who deliver their products and transfer the cash proceeds up and down the East Coast. While law enforcement agencies are effective at intercepting many of the shipments, the FBI recognizes the value the public can offer to our investigations.

Did you get that? Multiple interstates leading to a large city is all the “evidence” the FBI needs to call literally any city with a network of accessible roads a hotspot for drug trafficking activity. Everything is a hub and every road is an artery. That’s how the interstate highway system works. And because it works, every road must be a drug trafficking route and every city must be simultaneously a source for drug distributors and the home to thousands of drug customers.

All of North Carolina is suspect, according to the FBI. To clean up this southeastern drug paradise, the FBI is asking the public to contribute to its government theft program.

If a drug/cash shipment is successfully seized, the tipster could receive up to 25% of the seized money. FBI Charlotte will use the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Program to pay tipsters. Currently, the new program is only active in the Charlotte metro area with plans to expand across North Carolina in the future.

The FBI has set up an SMS accessible tip line in addition to its normal field office phone numbers. Tipsters who know where some drug cash might be found can directly profit from providing information that points agents in the direction of seizable property.

Unlike other tip lines with reward offers like CrimeStoppers, there’s no need to wait around to see if the tip results in arrests or convictions. The civil asset forfeiture process doesn’t require arrests and convictions, only nebulous accusations about the cash itself, which is named as the “defendant” in forfeiture proceedings as though it committed criminal acts all by itself.

And while it might be tempting to flood the tip line with bogus reports, keep in mind making false statements to federal agents is a federal crime, one that can lead to real, in-fucking-federal-prison sentences. It isn’t like filling out a false police report, which may lead to little more than a few months of probation and local cops treating future reports as highly suspect. Federal crimes are no joke and the FBI loves to catch people lying because it allows the DOJ to add to its prosecutorial wins even when agents are unable to find evidence of any actual criminal activity.

The hard rule (DON’T!) about talking to federal agents without a lawyer present applies here as well. Think about it. You provide a tip, thinking you’re doing a good deed by sending agents to seize the ill-gotten gains of an alleged criminal enterprise. But if any entity is capable of ensuring no good deed goes unpunished, it’s the FBI.

Agents may decide the submitted tip indicates the tipster is involved in drug trafficking or, at the very least, may be able to provide even more tips on criminal activity. This may lead to some in-person “interviews” with agents who — as noted above — can always accuse a tipster of lying if they believe they’re not being fully honest about their relationship to the seized cash or the people who formerly possessed it. They may also attempt to pressure a tipster into becoming a federal snitch and make their lives miserable if they refuse to play ball.

No good can come of this. No good comes from civil asset forfeiture and this invitation for the public to skim the federal government’s take makes it much, much worse. If the FBI’s going to be this stupid, it’s time for federal lawmakers to take this abusable revenue stream away from it by requiring forfeitures to be tied to convictions.

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption | , , | Leave a comment

Bavarian Public Radio realises Ukrainians are uninterested in vaccination, and wary of the vaccinators

Ukrainian refugees in Nürnberg
eugyppius – March 21, 2022

Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Public Radio) notices that Ukrainian refugees are overwhelmingly unvaccinated:

Only about a third of Ukrainians have been vaccinated against Corona, in part with vaccines that are unapproved in the EU. The low vaccination rate could cause problems in the refugee centres. The city of Nürnberg, for example, has set up three gymnasiums to accommodate 600 people, where many must share a small space. …

Anyone who wants to can receive a vaccination a few hundred metres away … free of charge for Ukrainian refugees.

“Unfortunately, we’re finding that the refugees aren’t exactly snatching the vaccines out of our hands,” says Nürnberg Mayor Marcus König.

“Many new arrivals are very worried about ‘forced vaccinations’,” adds Thomas Jung, Mayor of Fürth. He says you have to approach the topic with sensitivity. …

It’s been months of overt coercion to accept vaccination from politicians and the press here in the Federal Republic of Germany. Months of social exclusion and jeopardised careers and all the rest of it. Nobody has given the slightest thought to “sensitivity.” Why are they now at pains to accommodate the feelings of Ukrainians?

Jung explains that city officials pressed a Ukrainian doctor into service, to begin delicately preaching the Gospel of Vaccination to refugees last Friday. It’s rare, because the West is so totalising, but every now and then you get an idea of what it must be like to look into this funhouse from the outside. You flee a war-zone and end up sleeping on the floor of some repurposed gym, while the locals scheme madly about how to inject you with their latest mRNA tech.

Dear Ukrainians: You’re entirely right to be terrified of forced vaccination. We are too.

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Important Message for Journalists Covering the Ukraine Conflict

By Dr Vernon Coleman | 21st Century Wire | March 21, 2022

Town Halls all over the UK are flying the Ukraine flag, as mainstream journalists encourage everyone to think about the war in Ukraine.

Looking at the news you’d think that Ukraine was the only trouble spot in the world.

But you’d be wrong.

Here are some facts that no other journalist in the UK appears to know.

Fact 1

According to the United Nations, the number of civilian deaths in Ukraine is 760. According to the Ukraine President, the number of soldiers who have died in Ukraine is 1,300.

Fact 2

According to the United Nations, the seven-year-old war in Yemen had killed an estimated 377,000 people by the end of 2021 – and is now killing more people than the fighting in Ukraine. The Yemen war has been described as the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. The Saudis have interfered in what was basically a civil war.

Fact 3

The war in Syria has now been going on for ten years and the number of people killed is believed to be 610,000

Why isn’t your town hall flying flags in support of the people of Yemen and Syria?

The answer, of course, is that the invasion of Ukraine was organised and manipulated by the conspirators in the West to help push the energy and food shortages required for the Great Reset and the New World Order that they have planned for us.

I am banned from Twitter, Facebook and so on, and so I am not allowed to share this information on social media.

So, I’d be grateful if readers would share this information on their social media channels.

Maybe a mainstream journalist will read it.

And wonder what the hell is going on.

***
Vernon Coleman’s book Endgame explains our past, our present and our future in 281 pages. Endgame is available as a paperback, a hardback and an eBook.

Read more of Vernon Coleman’s writings at www.vernoncoleman.org

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

UKRAINE: The Syria Playbook Redux

Yes, the playbook for Syria is now being used for Ukraine. But is it Russia’s or America’s?

By Peter Ford | 21st Century Wire | March 21, 2022

The Russians in attacking Ukraine are taking leaves out of their Syrian playbook, so we are being constantly told. But the American origin of this term gives us a clue as to what is really going on.

The chemical weapons play

One of the plays being used is apparently the brandishing of chemical weapons. It’s important to recall what actually happened in Syria in this regard.

The first alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria occurred in the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus in 2013. After a vote in the British Parliament scuppered a Western plan to bomb Syria in retaliation, the Russians, not the West, took active steps to remove Syria’s stocks of chemical weapons, shepherding Syria through a process of dismantling all its stocks under international supervision and verification (compare and contrast US research collaboration with Ukraine in biolabs so sensitive that records had to be destroyed before the Russians arrived).

Claims nevertheless continued to be made, never verified in situ by independent parties, that Syria was using chemical weapons.

In April 2018 reports emerged from Douma on the outskirts of Damascus that Syria had used chlorine gas in a particularly egregious attack on civilians. Without waiting even the 48 hours needed for international inspectors to arrive, the US, UK and France launched punitive bombing raids on Syria. Subsequently, inspectors found evidence at the scene consistent with a false flag operation. That evidence was doctored at headquarters in The Hague under intense pressure from the US and UK. The real lesson from the incident – that fraudsters were at work – was thus never learned and a spurious version of the truth prevailed.

What really happened, many experts believe, was that jihadi groups affiliated with Al Qaida yet supported by Western powers fabricated the incident (it wasn’t difficult with Western intelligence agencies and gullible Western media eager to pin blame on Assad) in order to provide a pretext for the West to enter the war and turn back the tide against Assad.

These are but two among other similar incidences talking place over the course of the conflict. 

Rewriting history

Scroll forward four years. Russia, we are being repeatedly told, is preparing to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine while pre-emptively covering itself by predicting use of a false flag.

In Syria, Assad was winning and had no need to use chemical weapons. It would have been crazy to do so, when it was the only thing that could make the West bomb him. In Ukraine, Putin similarly has no need to do the one thing which would likely lead to direct NATO intervention. No matter, the authorised version of the history of the Syrian conflict holds that abetted by Russia, Syria used chemical weapons, and so today Russia must be poised to do the same in Ukraine.

‘History is written by the victors’, Churchill is supposed to have said. With Syria, given the West’s control of the narrative via its monopoly hold over international media, history is written by the losers.

Constant parallels are being drawn with Syria in the Ukraine context. But they are the wrong parallels, and the wrong lessons are being drawn from the Syrian ordeal.

The Russian version of the playbook, according to the West

According to the Western narrative, enunciated by officials and echoed by reporters who seem to see it as their job to act like government press officers or cheerleaders, the Russian playbook in Syria is now being applied wholesale to Ukraine. Its chapters comprise of indiscriminate shelling, carpet bombing of cities, targeting of civilians in their homes, hospitals, schools and shelters, sieges of major towns, prevention of civilians from leaving through humanitarian corridors, commission of many other brutal war crimes, and using false flag accusations.

This indeed is how the Western media portrayed the Syrian conflict and are now doing the same for Ukrainian conflict. But the picture presented distorts some key facts and obscures others.

Airbrushing

It almost totally airbrushes out the jihadist opposition to Assad, just as the Ukrainian Nazis are being airbrushed out of the picture in Ukraine. The Syrian jihadists used human shields as a consistent strategy. ‘Collateral damage’, an Americanism we learnt to use in America’s war on Vietnam, becomes inevitable under such circumstances. Countless civilians died as US-led forces levelled most of Raqqa before driving ISIS out of it. Dead bodies were still being retrieved from the rubble of Raqqa two years later. Is this the playbook we are talking about here, the one the Coalition used against ISIS?

The same techniques of using human shields deployed  by jihadists are now being used in Ukraine. How many people are aware that Mariupol, where this is happening most, is where the extreme nationalist Azov brigade have barracks, and that they have reportedly been firing from civilian buildings and preventing civilians from leaving?

Similarly, who knew that jihadists in East Aleppo were constantly shelling civilian areas in government-held Western Aleppo? Or that the amount of destruction in Aleppo was nothing like what was is being assumed, or that the ‘genocide’ (that other overworked term) of a quarter of a million foretold by the professional hysterics of the UN for East Aleppo turned into the bussing out of a few thousand fighters, who surrendered and were taken with their families to other jihadi-controlled areas?

If anything, the lesson from Syria was that the Russians sometimes showed more restraint than their hosts. Russia forced the Syrian government, eager to recover East Aleppo, to delay operations while abortive parleys took place and the jihadists won more time to entrench their positions. Russia also forced the Syrian government to accept indulgent terms for the surrender of jihadists in the South, allowing fighters to keep small arms and creating no-go areas for government forces. Those familiar with these facts will not be surprised to learn that according to the UN civilian deaths in Ukraine so far are numbered in hundreds rather than the many thousands claimed by propagandists.

The Western playbook

None of this is to condone all Russian actions, but in order to avoid repeating in Ukraine the mistakes the West made in Syria – it is important to see things as they really are. And in the Western playbook there were many mistakes.

The worst was to supply jihadist groups with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of arms and equipment, which only served to inflame the situation, abet terrorism and prolong Syria’s agony. How much of the arms now being funnelled into Ukraine will end up in the Nazi battalions and later in the Middle East? Will the arms really hasten the end of violence or prolong it?

A second leaf from the Western playbook for Syria now being used in spades a propos of Ukraine is sanctions. Cruel, far-reaching sanctions in Syria have totally failed in their stated aim of ‘changing Assad’s behaviour’ (our wicked adversaries have ‘behaviour’, our virtuous selves have ‘policies’) while immiserating the Syrian people. Sanctions on Russia are plainly doing more harm to the world economy than they are to Russia, and cannot possibly change Russia’s ‘behaviour’ in the short term. And is ‘crippling Russia’, with its echoes of German reparations post World War I, anyway really such a great idea?

That other favourite staple of the US playbook, regime change, as attempted with Syria – after stellar accomplishments  in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, was precisely what brought about today’s crisis in Ukraine, for it was the US-backed removal of an elected President of Ukraine in 2014 which precipitated the chain of events leading to the present conflict.

The Western playbook provides that foreign leaders who refuse to bend the knee should always be portrayed as crazed and brutal. They always need arraigning before an International Criminal Court, the jurisdiction of which the US denies for itself, to the extent of sanctioning a prosecutor who dares to pursue a US client state. This personalisation and demonisation obviates any risk that policy makers might have to face up to the reality that other countries have legitimate concerns too. In the court of Western public opinion the Great Powers have ensured a hanging jury for Assad, and now Putin.

The page in the US playbook to which administrations are most attached, however, the gift which keeps on giving, is the accusation against target nations that they are using or planning to use chemical weapons. Has the world forgotten the non-existent Iraqi WMD? The watertight intelligence? The 45 minutes for rockets to reach British bases in Cyprus? How the US can have recourse to a similar ploy today, claiming Russia is planning something nefarious, without being hooted at in derision is merely testimony to the extent to which mainstream media has prostrated itself before power. The most far-fetched claims can be made without a shred of media scrutiny.

That US Secretary of State Antony Blinken could repeatedly make the ‘chemical weapons’ claim is deeply disturbing.

If this is not the US laying the groundwork for a false flag incident involving chemical weapons, or perhaps the bioweapons the US is accused of developing in Ukraine, it certainly looks like it.

If that is the case it is no longer playbooks we may be dealing with, it’s the Book of Lamentations.

***

Author Peter Ford is a global affairs analyst, and the former British Ambassador to Syria (2003-2006) and Bahrain (1999-2002).

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | March 21, 2022

My new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story has now gone live on Amazon. I am confident that you all will enjoy reading this book. I have been working on it since last summer. I consider it the best work I’ve done in the 32-year history of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

People sometimes ask me what relevance the Kennedy assassination has to our lives today. My new book answers that question completely. It shows how the assassination bears a direct relationship to the foreign-policy crises that confront our nation today and, equally important, what we need to do to extricate ourselves from these crises.

My book revolves around a book entitled Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, which was written in 2016 by Alexandra Zapruder, the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, the man who filmed the assassination of President Kennedy on his personal home movie camera. 

As I state in the Introduction to my book, which you can read here, I figured that Alexandra’s book would be an interesting personal account of how Abraham Zapruder and his family dealt with the film. I quickly learned that her book was much more than that. 

When I read that there was a 50-year-long taboo within the Zapruder family against discussing the film, I was hooked. That’s because I knew that almost always there are dark secrets behind family taboos. Violating such a taboo is not an easy thing to do, which is what Alexandra was doing by deciding to write her book. As I point out in my Introduction, in her book she herself acknowledged the danger that she might encounter things that she might not want to write about. 

After embarking on her quest to discover the reasons for the family taboo, Alexandra came up with two explanations. The first one is that her grandfather was conflicted over having received so much money for his film, which in today’s dollars was about $1.3 million. The other one is that he was extremely grief-stricken over having witnessed and filmed the president’s assassination.

Neither of those two explanations involves a dark secret and, with all due respect, they are both nonsensical justifications for a decades-long family taboo. After all, throughout the weekend of the assassination, Abraham Zapruder was doing everything he could to get top-dollar for his film, something he would be unlikely to do if he was feeling so guilty about it. Moreover, if the guilt feelings arose after he struck the financial deal for the sale of his film, he could have waived the installments of money from the sale of his film, which were being sent to him annually, which he did not do.

Moreover, any trauma that Zapruder may have suffered from witnessing the assassination obviously did not interfere with his spending the entire weekend of the assassination doing everything he could to get as much money as he could for his film. 

Zapruder died in 1970. If the two justifications for the family taboo (which Alexandra denies was a “taboo” but instead was what she calls a “code” or “culture” within the family) were valid, why would the family taboo against discussing the film extend for decades after Zapruder’s death? 

After reading Alexandra Zapruder’s book, I decided to figure out the Zapruder film mystery. I spent last summer doing precisely that. Once I figured it out, I began writing my book. Since then, I’ve been working days, nights, and weekends to complete it. I even took a week-long vacation on a farm in southwestern Virginia over Labor Day to write the first eight chapters (the book ended up with 23 chapters).

Like I say, I believe you’re going to like this book and that you’re going to find that it is an important contribution toward understanding not just the Kennedy assassination but, more important, toward seeing where we are as a country today and what we need to do to get things back on the right track — toward restoring a society based on liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.

Again, the book is An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. It’s $9.95 for the Kindle version and $14.95 for the print version. You can buy it here.

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

11,000 Americans call for boycott of General Mills over its East Jerusalem factory

MEMO | March 21, 2022

Over 11,000 Americans signed a petition demanding General Mills shut down its Pillsbury factory in the illegal Atarot settlement, which is built on occupied Palestinian land.

The petition said, “The U.N. has named General Mills as one of the 112 businesses violating international humanitarian and human rights law by operating in occupied Palestinian territories.”

“It’s Pillsbury factory in the Atarot Industrial Zone, an illegal Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, has displaced, exploited, stifled, and otherwise harmed local Palestinian lives, livelihoods, and land,” added the petition.

The petition said that General Mills “profits off of apartheid and is complicit in Israel’s occupation and annexation of the West Bank.”

The signatories demanded that General Mills shut down its factory in occupied East Jerusalem, stressing their commitment to boycotting Pillsbury products until this demand is met.

News of this comes as at least seven Palestinians were arrested by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank today, including a 62-year-old.

Local sources said occupation forces arrested at least seven Palestinians, including 62-year-old Hamas official Shaker Amara from the Aqabat Jabr camp in Jericho, as well as released prisoners and other citizens.

The sources noted that the occupation forces also arrested municipal elections candidate from Al-Bireh, Islam Al-Taweel, head of the Al-Bireh Brings us Together list, researcher and released prisoner Emad Abu Awwad from Al-Bireh, released prisoner Nael Abu Asal, Omar Abu Jenadi from Jericho, Muath Abu Tarboush from Al-Ezza camp north of Bethlehem, and Mahdi Zakarneh and Rami Yaseen from Jenin.

Hamas leader Amara is a former prisoner, arrested more than 13 times by the occupation, and each time held under administrative detention – without charge or trial.

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russia bans Facebook and Instagram

Samizdat | March 21, 2022

A Moscow court on Monday banned Facebook and Instagram in Russia as extremist organizations, after the platforms’ owner, US-tech giant Meta, allowed online hate speech against the country’s nationals. The judge had rejected the request by Meta’s lawyers to stop or delay the proceedings against the social media giant.

The case correspondence, which was read out in court, suggested that Instagram had ignored around 4,600 demands to remove false content about Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, and 1,800 demands to delete calls for illegal protest.

The Federal Security Service (FSB) has fully backed the ban on Meta, with the agency’s representative saying in court that the tech giant’s actions “were aimed against Russia and its armed forces.” He called on the judge to outlaw the US company and to “immediately” implement this decision.

The prosecutor acknowledged in court that there were technical means for users to bypass the ban in case it’s introduced and still access Facebook and Instagram. However, he assured that Russians “won’t be held liable for simply using Meta’s products.”

Russia’s Prosecutor General had filed a legal complaint demanding that Meta’s platforms be outlawed and the company itself designated an extremist organization in Russia, after Instagram and Facebook said they would allow hate speech and calls for violence against Russian nationals amid Moscow’s ongoing military operation in Ukraine. The US firm later clarified that the deviation from its rules was temporary and implemented only on Ukrainian territory, so that the locals could vent their anger over the conflict.

The development prompted Russia to block Instagram, which had 80 million users in the country. Facebook had been made inaccessible earlier, in response to the platform’s clampdown on the accounts of the Russian media.

The lawsuit isn’t aiming to restrict WhatsApp, due to it being simply a communication tool.

During the hearings on Monday, Meta’s lawyers asked the judge to drop or to postpone the proceedings. They argued that the lawsuit shouldn’t be handled by a Russian court as Meta is registered in the US and because of this fact the proceedings should be transferred to America. The defense also complained that it wasn’t given enough time to properly prepare for the case, which was filed just over a week ago. The defense insisted that Meta has “changed its policy after public discussions and now declares that Russophobia and calls for violence against Russian citizens are unacceptable.”

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

How long can US politicians and media continue to play ‘double act’?

Global Times | March 21, 2022

Recently, over the Ukraine crisis, Washington and the US media have been playing a “double act” again. After repeatedly failing to force China into their game, they have started talking up “exclusive reports,” quoting “anonymous US officials” and fabricating many scenarios related to the situation in Ukraine.

For example, they claimed that Beijing had some level of direct knowledge about Russia’s military operations against Ukraine but asked Russia to delay them until after the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. In addition, they alleged that Russia asked China for military and economic aid and further argued that China has “expressed some openness to providing such aid to Russia.”

The above lies are well concocted, but without any evidence. Certainly, the problem of no evidence may be a bit of overthinking, because when does Washington need to provide evidence to smear others? Isn’t it always following the logic of “if I say so, it has to be so?” If you must ask for any “evidence,” it will again hold up a tiny vial of white powder, or produce a video of the White Helmets being instructed to pose…

The Global Times has recently learned from multiple sources that the “anonymous US officials” quoted in the two New York Times reports that were throwing mud at China on Ukraine came from the National Security Council (NSC) of the White House. In the recent series of disinformation, the White House and the US media repeatedly staged a “double act” with obvious intentions. On the one hand, they must distort China’s just position and smear China internationally, creating momentum for its strategic suppression of China. On the other hand, they intend to drive a wedge between China and Russia in an attempt to “kill two birds with one stone” and ease the pressure of the US’ “two-front war.”

Of course, what’s behind it is Washington’s hegemony and ambition. Kurt Campbell, the NSC’s Indo-Pacific policy coordinator, “took the initiative” to say at the end of February that the US will keep its focus on the “Indo-Pacific region” despite the Ukraine crisis. In order to maintain the US’ hegemonic self-interests, fabricating lies has become a “necessary means” for Washington. In the words of Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, “The US, as usual, lies to try to achieve its political goals.”

Last year, several “anonymous US officials” have told the media either “the Chinese military has three times rejected requests for calls from the US defense secretary,” “researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick and sought hospital care before COVID-19 outbreak disclosed,” or “China has no intention of engaging in serious or substantive talks with the US.” All of these have later been proven to be utter disinformation, which only serves as “cannonballs” for attacking China.

When looking back at his past as CIA director, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo once said publicly, “We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses.” So how does the US lie and deceive people? It is easier for Washington and the US media to quote “anonymous officials” to spread lies as shocking “exclusive news.” The cooperation between US propaganda machines and diplomatic and intelligence services has greatly increased the deceptiveness of those lies. Moreover, the US’ alliance system and hegemony in public opinion can make sure that even though Washington is a habitual liar, it can obtain a certain amount of assentation and support. This has become the bases for the US to play politics as it wants.

While US media maliciously falsifies the truth, Washington deliberately pretends to know nothing. These two to some extent have even formed an integral production, supply and distribution chain of fake news. This is unprofessional, immoral, and irresponsible, and will only further discredit the US in front of the world. As some comments pointed out, whenever people see the news reports that include sentences like “anonymous officials revealed…” and “US intelligence agencies claimed…,” they should in their minds replace everything in those sentences with “They may be lying.”

Therefore, unsurprisingly, as Washington is changing its foreign strategy to “great power competition,” it will use its hegemony in public opinion and media to spread false information and launch a “public opinion warfare.” Of course, we can also be sure that such a “double act” will sooner or later fail to work as the deficit in the US’ account of credibility rises.

Right now, when the military conflict in Ukraine is getting increasingly serious under Washington’s provocation, and when the energy and refugee crises become more and more severe in Europe, the US’ smear campaign will only unmask it as the initiator. More and more people will see the true face of the US – an “empire of lies.”

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

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