What We Are Not Allowed to Say
By Christine E. Black | OffGuardian | December 3, 2023
Censorship imperils cultures and civilization. When governments and elites prohibit speaking or writing without threats, shaming, or epithets meant to shut down discussion, free thinking dies. People also die.
A censorship industrial complex grew around Covid hysteria, which began as a war on a virus. New full-blown wars, with guns, bombs, tanks, and planes, and thousands dead now explode around us as free speech is lost in wars’ rubble, and propaganda buries truths.
With money and massive influence, private for-profit industries like pharmaceutical companies, capture US agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, that then bolster industry profits rather than protect public health. Similarly, captured politicians help corporations profit from wars, as Marine Corp Brigadier General Smedley Butler notes in his book, War is a Racket and as Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 Farewell Address. Corporate and government elites get rich from wars based on lies, such as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – and they sit rich now in retirement.
What truths might we uncover, sifting through wars’ rubble? Children and young people didn’t need Covid shots as they were at little risk from serious illness from Covid, and some countries stopped recommending them. Yet, vaccines are a main source of revenue for pediatricians. A “pandemic of the unvaccinated” never happened though entertainers, highly paid media figures, and politicians viciously maligned those who waited or declined a Covid shot.
Most people contracted Covid anyway, whether they got multiple shots or not. Shots did not prevent transmission. Thousands of Covid vaccine-injured people have been bullied into silence and rendered invisible. These are all statements we have been forbidden from making in the last few years; those who dare utter them faced rancor or ridicule or worse.
Don’t talk about Covid shots, school and business closings, or the many beloved businesses and churches that closed for good because of bureaucratic mandates.
Don’t talk about vaccine injuries or deaths or children’s learning losses or epidemics of addictions; don’t talk about child and teen suicides.
Don’t talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s astute observations that Haiti and Nigeria had the some of the least restrictive Covid policies on earth, had about a one percent Covid vaccine rate, and have had some of the lowest Covid death rates in the world, observations noted in his book, Letter to Liberals.
Don’t talk about how Covid shots may cause Covid, or how Pfizer’s own product literature states that Covid is one of the side effects of the shot. When we talk about these topics, listeners often stiffen and bristle, their eyes may go blank as they dismiss us with pity or contempt before we even complete a spoken paragraph. Now, new disasters and traumas affect the world, and many insist we not talk about them to avoid snarling and insults or worse.
Violence and war exploded in the Middle East recently, and more unutterable statements come to mind. For instance, criticizing the policies of the Israeli government does not equal anti-Semitism. Great Britain, the same colonial power that colonized and divided the African continent and other countries like poker chips among winners, made The Balfour Declaration in 1917 that declared a “home for the Jews” in Palestine, where Palestinians already lived.
Was this presumptuous and elitist for the British to declare?
Is a single, open, and democratic state in Israel with equal rights for all the best solution to the conflicts and violence, as Israeli American writer, activist, and Israeli Defense Force veteran Miko Peled has stated? Peled is the son of an Israeli general and grandson of one of the signers of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. His father was an Israeli war hero turned peace maker. He changed his thinking on Israel; so did Miko Peled. Peled writes his story in his book, The General’s Son and shares his views in talks and interviews, such as this one on the Katie Halper program.
In spite of how propaganda bombards us, we may note as Miko Peled does, that Palestinians are not simply evil barbarians, beheading babies and raping women. Islam is not a religion of fanatics and terrorists, in Palestine, or anywhere else, as the media often portrays it. It is one of the world’s major religions. The word, Islam, means “submission to the will of God.” The Arabic word, “salaam” which means peace, is part of the common greeting among Muslims all over the world.
Spreading peace is a requirement of the faith. Similarly, sharing God’s peace is expected among Christians and Jews.
Christians have been criticized for their views on Israel. An older and much more well-read peace activist friend shared with me that some evangelical Christians who support Israel, stand with Israel, do so because they believe Israel is the final launching pad for the Rapture when Christians will be zapped up to Heaven, and Jewish people will be too if they convert to Christianity. Jewish people who do not will perish.
What do Jewish people think of this scenario? What if they do not want to “accept Jesus,” but simply wish to remain Jewish? It is confusing. Plenty of the world’s worst violence has been committed and continues in the name of or under the cover of religion.
Statements we are not supposed to make call us to make them now. Statements I make above could be wrong. Many may disagree with them. However, censorship kills with its shaming epithets meant to shut down discussion and thought, like the labels “anti-Semitic” or “conspiracy theorist,” “science denier” or “anti-Vaxxer.”
Censorship imperils us when we are forbidden to speak without threats and insults, such as when we were told, “You don’t care if others die of Covid” if we decided not to wear a mask or to move about freely in 2020 and 2021. Similarly, we were told, “You deserve to be excluded from society if you decline a vaccine” even when some of us had natural immunity or didn’t think we needed it. Even worse, some of us were told, “You deserve to die – or lose your job or friends or education — if you don’t comply.”
Many said such horrible things in the last few years.
Slogans and advertising language often replace free speech and obliterate open thought, as they did during the Covid period, as they do during all wars. Should we be wary of sloganeering and pre-packaged language like “wiped off the map,” “Israel’s 9-11,” “rid the world of evil,” “mushroom cloud,” “weapons of mass destruction,” “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” – sloganeering that stops empathy and reflection, closes debate, and whips populations into war frenzies? Should we question slogans and manipulative phrases?
What questions might we ask about slogans like Israel’s “right to exist”? What does that mean? After a suicide bomber killed his niece in Israel years ago, Miko Peled asked questions. He joined dialogue groups of Israelis and Palestinians and changed his thinking.
US military veteran suicides have been at epidemic levels after soldiers returned from multiple deployments in disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ignited by sloganeering after 9-11 and the launch of the so-called “war on terror,” which was to “rid the world of evil.” How might those veterans react now, hearing this same kind of language about “Israel’s 9-11”? This past week, I learned of another veteran who committed suicide.
Can we keep our minds opened, our hearts softened to alternative perspectives? During Covid lockdowns, rigid thinking and censorship caused the US to harm its own children relentlessly as their suicides, addictions, developmental delays, learning losses, and despair increased. Children around the world starved, were abused, exploited, and enslaved because of lockdown policies we were forbidden to question. Has an entire generation of young people been harmed?
Free societies do not ban statements and opinions. Free societies permit questions and debate. Statements above may be phrased as questions as well. For instance, do Covid shots work? Have they worked to stop transmission and illness and death? Was discussion of early Covid treatment suppressed, as Dr. Peter McCollough noted early in lockdowns? Are Covid vaccine-injured people silenced? Where may we find their stories?
Should western cultures have shut down in 2020 in an attempt to avoid a single pathogen? By what authority did bureaucrats suspend the US Constitution in 2020 and forbid assembly, speech, protest, group worship, and community gatherings? What were the harms? Who benefitted from lockdowns and Covid shots and how? How much money changed hands? Who wrote the checks and who got paid?
Why are Palestinians fighting? How do we end the violence and build peace? Should the US fund violence in Israel the ways it does? What has life been like in Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine for the last few decades? Could lockdowns have made life there worse?
Israel has been criticized as one of the most repressive countries in the world for Covid restrictions and Covid shot mandates. Protesting Covid policies is a privilege Palestinians in Gaza would not have had. They have lacked basic medicines, clean water, and schools free of bombings for years.
Was the Balfour Declaration a good idea? Conservative Jewish Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, speaking at a Let the Quran Speak conference, supports Palestinians and criticizes leaders of the state of Israel on religious grounds.
Documentary films like Occupation 101 and Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land provoked my thinking when I helped organize public showings of them while working with peace groups. We led discussions of these films along with War Made Easy, a film based on Norman Solomon’s book by the same name, and The Ground Truth, a film about the horrific effects on the eight-ten percent of the population, sent on multiple deployments to fights those wars.
In the last few years, the same US government that sent military members to fight and die in catastrophic wars forced Covid shots on them until refusers struck down the unlawful mandates.
Stories from outsiders and whistleblowers may teach us, stories from former insiders in the military, in industry, in governments. Soldiers sent to fight disastrous wars may have lost limbs or memory or cognitive function from IEDs. They learned and changed and spoke – what we were not allowed to say.
Describing this latest violence as “Israel’s 9-11” is especially dangerous as we recall the unfathomable destruction and carnage that such language unleashed on the world more than twenty years ago with the launch of the so-called “war on terror”.
What did we learn? Outsiders and independent thinkers — who have said what was forbidden — have often changed history. From the so-called “war on terror,” the war on a virus, the current war in Israel and Palestine, perhaps they will now.
Christine E. Black‘s poetry has been published in Antietam Review, 13th Moon, American Journal of Poetry, New Millennium Writings, Nimrod International, Red Rock Review, The Virginia Journal of Education, Friends Journal, The Veteran, Sojourners Magazine, Iris Magazine, English Journal, Amethyst Review, St. Katherine Review, Dappled Things and other publications.
Citizen Inquiry Report Blasts Canadian Government Response to COVID
‘We Cannot Allow This to Happen to Our Children and Grandchildren’
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | December 1, 2023
After months of hearings in nearly every province, Canada’s National Citizens Inquiry (NCI) on Tuesday released its final 643-page report on the country’s COVID-19 response, addressing the societal impacts of lockdowns, school closures, mask and vaccine mandates and other measures.
The report, compiled by four independent commissioners, included nearly 5,000 additional pages of testimony from hundreds of people who experienced adverse vaccine reactions, destruction of their livelihoods and education, diminished mental health, damaged reputations, professional discipline and/or censorship, according to True North.
The report contained over 80 pages of recommendations for lawmakers, public institutions and citizens, and called for the establishment of a National Crisis Oversight Council that would serve as an “independent, multidisciplinary body tasked with monitoring, policing and investigating government actions during crises,” including pandemics.
In an online press conference announcing the report, NCI commissioners and others discussed the division and suffering the pandemic measures caused, the failure of institutions to serve citizens and the overreach of government authority that violated rights and freedoms.
They emphasized the importance of unity, open dialogue, accountability and active democratic participation to heal as a nation.
In his opening comments, NCI Commissioner Ken Drysdale, an expert in forensic engineering and investigations, said, “Our lips may be bloodied, and we may be shamed. But we cannot turn away from the horrors of the past three years. We cannot allow this to happen to our children and grandchildren.”
Commissioner Bernard Massie, Ph.D., author of 138 peer-reviewed papers and owner of 12 patents, said, “One of the greatest dangers to democracy is the tyranny of the majority that has forgotten the primordial importance of truth and liberty grounded in the individual responsibility that cannot and should not be outsourced to the administrative state.”
NCI administrator Ches Crosbie, former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Newfoundland and Labrador, called out Health Canada for approving the COVID-19 vaccines without determining they were safe and effective.
“The expression ‘safe and effective’ is a marketing slogan and a deceptive one,” Crosbie said, adding, “Beyond dispute is that [the] vaccines are adulterated … by the presence of foreign DNA fragments and a sequence from a monkey virus called SV40, suspected of causing cancer.”
Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., co-director of CORRELATION Research in the Public Interest in Canada, told The Defender the NCI report “is a masterful in-depth examination of the COVID response in Canada and the world.”
“Through hundreds of testimonies and thousands of exhibits, the picture that emerges could not be more clear,” he said, adding:
“The entire COVID campaign — from CIA–military planning, to initial Wuhan false flag, to the WHO [World Health Organization] declaration of a ‘pandemic,’ to medical institutional responses, to general lockdowns and impositions on personal behavior, to unprecedented censorship and media alignment, to mandatory vaccination accompanied by dismissals from workplaces, to delicensing medical and legal professionals, to completely biased court rulings, to covering up vaccine harm and deaths, to egregious isolation and mistreatment of vulnerable populations, to shredding of constitutional protections, to criminalizing dissent and demonstrations, to locking away political prisoners, and on and on, in a total blanket of actual totalitarianism in Canada and many countries — has been an outright unjustified vicious assault against people, freedom and democracy.”
A citizen-organized, citizen-run, citizen-funded initiative
The NCI — “funded and staffed by volunteers who believe in a better Canada,” said Crosbie — was established in response to the government’s actions during the COVID-19 pandemic and because “no Canadian government has shown an appetite for a fulsome review of the measures implemented,” according to the report.
Hearings took place over 24 days between March and May in eight cities, from British Columbia to Nova Scotia. More than 300 sworn testimonies from both experts and citizens were collected.
NCI heard expert testimony from doctors, scientists, lawyers, economists, teachers, psychologists, morticians, risk management analysts and experts in public policy, emergency management, occupational health and safety, aviation safety, pharmacy, policing and journalism, according to True North.
Among the 147 experts testifying were Rancourt, known for his analysis of all-cause mortality during the pandemic; Dr. Peter McCullough; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya; Dr. Jessica Rose; Dr. Didier Raoult, the French doctor who promoted early treatment with hydroxychloroquine at the beginning of the pandemic; Dr. Sabine Hazan; Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research ; Catherine Austin Fitts; James Corbett; Dr. William Makis; Dr. Charles Hoffe; Edward Dowd; J. Jay Couey, Ph.D., staff scientist for Children’s Health Defense; Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute; Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation; and Dr. Jordan Peterson.
The commissioners invited testimony from representatives of all provincial/territorial and federal levels of government across Canada — including “sixty-three members of government, regulators, and authorities” — but none accepted or testified.
However, NCI was able to obtain records of government positions from court proceedings, policy statements, press conferences and other evidence of their actions, and incorporate these into their hearings and findings.
NCI considered testimony on pharmaceutical interventions (use of drugs, vaccines and other treatments) and non-pharmaceutical interventions (masking, lockdowns, closures of public facilities and quarantines), and analyzed their impacts in the following categories:
- Social — including restricted public meetings, movement and ability to interact and meet with other people.
- Civil — the abridgment of rights and freedoms, the imposition of restrictions and forced mandates, assessed at the personal, institutional and organizational levels.
- Economic — the shutdown of businesses and the characterization of “nonessential” businesses, restrictions to employment and overall impacts.
- Health — forced medical procedures, lack of access to patients due to mandates, doctors treating virtually; injuries resulting from forced medical procedures and isolation.
“These testimonies provide irrefutable evidence that an unprecedented assault has been waged against the citizens of Canada. Not since World War II has the nation experienced such a devastating attack on its people,” Drysdale told True North.
Commissioner Janice Kaikkonen, an educator and public policy researcher, said at the press conference that her experience with NCI had been “quite the journey,” and that “the picture being painted was much deeper, all more devastating and divisive, and the response from our public institutions on every Canadian far more destructive” than she expected.
Kaikkonen said society still needs to address “the impact on … children of being isolated from their friends and their social networks and their structures being taken from them.”
“The juncture Canadians face in moving forward must include exposing the forces that willingly subscribed to destroying our beloved country from the inside out,” she said.
Breakdown of legal system
NCI heard extensive evidence that Canadian courts failed to uphold the rule of law during the pandemic, leading to “a breakdown in confidence and an erosion of trust in a Canadian legal system,” according to the report.
None of the legal experts who testified or consulted with NCI reported success in any court across the country against the measures or mandates.
Similar to the U.S., the Canadian system of government is comprised of executive, legislative and judicial branches. However, during the pandemic, “much of the rule-making power in Canada coalesced into the executive, which resulted in unelected public health offices across the country ruling as petty tyrants, without accountability or oversight,” the report stated.
The report attributed this in part to the “overgrowth of the administrative state,” resulting in “Canadian courts … pay[ing] more and more deference to the powers of unelected administrative bodies,” leading to “a perfect storm” where unelected officials who are “not subject to oversight through an election” have “powers over Canadians” that are “largely unchallengeable in court.”
The most obvious example of administrative overreach — enforced by professional bodies that regulate various health professions — was the public health orders, the report stated, which “subvert[ed] rights on the premise of ‘protecting the greater good.’”
Commissioner Heather DiGregorio, senior partner in an Alberta law firm, said during Tuesday’s press conference that her position as a lawyer made her pay particular attention to the testimony about the Canadian legal system, the Canadian Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“By guaranteeing that the government cannot tread on my neighbor’s rights, we guarantee our own,” she said. “This is never more important than when things are difficult in times of fear and uncertainty.”
The evidence gathered from the NCI hearings “all points one way: to a significant breakdown of Canadian institutions,” DiGregorio said.
She cited such undesirable pandemic outcomes: “The division of our society. Neighbors pitted against neighbors. Families torn apart. Individuals suffering grievous injuries that their own doctors won’t acknowledge. Feelings of isolation. Depression. Suicides. Pain and grief.”
“Canadians have been left with a feeling that there is no person to protect them from government overreach,” the report stated. “This is worrisome evidence of a breakdown of the rule of law.”
Despite the grievous lapses in the legal system during the pandemic, DeGregorio said, “Seeing the strength of ordinary Canadians, even in the darkest times of their lives, gave me renewed hope.”
Proposals, outlook going forward
In addition to the establishment of a National Crisis Oversight Council — which the report said should include enforceable subpoena powers — the NCI report called for a full judicial investigation of the COVID-19 vaccination authorization process in Canada, leaving open the possibility of criminal liability under existing Canadian law.
It also called for an in-depth review of how Canadian courts handled all pandemic-related cases to “rebuild public confidence in the justice system.”
Citing the need to ensure “proper checks and balances,” the report recommended examining and reforming the extent of executive authority during emergencies and establishing laws that require administrative bodies “to demonstrate their expertise and rationale for decisions, particularly when those decisions infringe on individual rights.”
Regarding healthcare, the report called for establishing a clear framework for oversight of public health authorities’ decision-making processes during emergencies, and an “independent, multidisciplinary inquiry into the governance of professional colleges, especially those governing medical professionals,” to ensure transparency, accountability and adherence to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
During the press conference, DiGregorio called for “accountability for the actions of others,” but said we also need to “look at our own actions and take accountability for the part that each of us have played.”
Kaikkonen called for “Each and every one of us saying we’ve had enough, this is not going to happen again, and we’re going to stand with people who say no, who have that strength,” and with “people who are being shamed publicly or abused or trodden over.”
Voicing his hopes for the report, Drysdale said, “In the end, it is not the report itself that wields the power of transformation. … It remains just a tool, lying dormant on a shelf … until thousands or millions of people choose to wield that tool.”
Massie said it’s going to take time before things change, but that “it’s not going to take the majority of people to wake up to make a difference. … You just need a critical mass of people … to move [on the] political front, provincial, federal, [and in] court.”
Rancourt told The Defender :
“Canadians may have produced the most comprehensive report, which is an historic landmark. Now, will there be accountability? To what degree, and what form will it take?
“Every citizen’s awakening is one unit of the needed accounting, and this report has been a process that catalyzed more awareness.”
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Vaccination rates fall… ‘Quick, let’s vaccinate more people!’
A shallow, disingenuous report from the Grattan Institute.
By Richard Kelly| The view from down here | November 27, 2023
The Grattan (‘We change the nation – for good’) Institute, has released a shallow, disingenuous report calling for the government to spend lots of money, because vaccination rates are not high enough, according to them.
Not once in this report is any consideration given to the personal needs or wishes of individual Australian patients who are the ultimate targets of the recommendations. The recommendations focus solely on getting more people vaccinated, for more illness or conditions, more often.
The report’s authors are either ignorant of, or wilfully blind to, the concept of free will. So much of the language and framing of the report bends in this direction, with many examples where ‘the government’ is exhorted to take this or that action in order to bring about a behaviour change in people which results in more ‘jabs’. Even the use of the term ‘jabs’ is a sneering shorthand and betrays a desire to normalise through colloquialism the idea of blindly accepting participation in a clinical trial of a novel gene-based therapy.
The overview sets the scene. There is no evidence that the authors feel any compunction about using manipulative techniques, like bald assertions, emotional blackmail and appeals to authority:
Each year, vaccines save thousands of lives and prevent countless sick days. But millions of older Australians at high risk of serious illness are missing out.
Then the good cop routine, with a side of gaslighting:
The pandemic has left many of us sick of vaccination, confused about which jabs we need, misled by misinformation, or complacent about the risks of not being vaccinated.
Sick ‘of’ vaccination, or sick from vaccination? Now it’s our fault, because we’re ‘confused’, or ‘misled’ or ‘complacent’.
COVID vaccination rates have plunged. At the start of winter 2023, 2.5 million people over 65 weren’t up-to-date with their vaccinations – two million more than a year earlier.
Again, our fault for not being ‘up-to-date’ – a term which is imbued with more rigour than it deserves.
The tone-deaf nature of this kind of language is astonishing. But the report isn’t really addressed to those who are not ‘up-to-date’. It’s a rent-seeking sales pitch to those who hold the treasury purse strings. Nothing more. Here is a list of the demands for taxpayer money that appear throughout the report.
- Supporting GP clinics, pharmacies, and aged care providers to improve, with $10 million a year, for five years. (p4)
- Piloting Community Health Workers across six PHNs, with $750,000 a year, for five years. (p4)
- States should develop tailored local initiatives with communities that face the biggest barriers to vaccination. Federal and state governments should contribute equally to $20 million a year, for five years. (p4)
- Funding for Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation vaccination programs should be increased by $10 million a year. (p4)
- A budget of $22 million for two years (for a new Australian Centre for Disease Control – Ed.) should be used to raise adult vaccine awareness and acceptance, and to re-set the adult vaccine narrative. (p29)
- Across the PHNs and the states, our total proposed funding is $150 million over five years, for improving access to mainstream services and for tailored initiatives to reach persistently low-vaccination communities.
- We therefore recommend a budget of $3 million per campaign-month for COVID and flu, for three months in each of two years, because the campaign has to reach a wider and potentially less-engaged audience than for childhood vaccines. (p54)
- To raise awareness of shingles and pneumococcal vaccines, we recommend a budget of $2 million for two years’ worth of a two-month campaigns, equivalent to twice the spending per month on adolescent vaccines, to target a broader audience that is not easily reached through school-based vaccination programs. (p54)
Apart from the funding recommendations, the language is the thing that betrays the authors’ utilitarian view of humans, as if we are so many cattle to be herded through the crush with ever-increasing, and frankly unregulated, frequency. To wit:
The federal government should introduce vaccination ‘surges’, resetting community attitudes and making seasonal vaccination easier by:
- Making vaccination intervals flexible for high-risk people, so more people are eligible for vaccination during surges.
What? Just tinker with the intervals so that it doesn’t matter when you get your next shot? They have dropped all pretence to there being some sort of valid reason for a given interval. The underlying motive could not be clearer – more shots for the sake of more shots, and more money, of course.
Only the most fleeting acknowledgement of the intrusions into our personal lives finds its way into this report. Lamenting the drop in vaccination rate, the authors write:
In December 2021, more than nine in 10 high-risk adults had been vaccinated for COVID in the previous six months. At that time, a range of vaccine mandates and restrictions were in place. By the end of February 2023, the share of high-risk people who were vaccinated in the last six months had crashed to below one in 10 (Figure 2.2).
To borrow from Saint Greta, “How dare they!” Blithely dismissing lockdowns and the devastation they inflicted on personal wellbeing, livelihood, and lives, and the outright coercion to give up bodily autonomy on pain of keeping your job, as “a range of vaccine mandates and restrictions” is insulting in the extreme. But they still hold out hope that we can be made to suffer like that again:
It is probably unrealistic to hope to repeat the high vaccination rates achieved during the worst of the pandemic. Those levels of vaccination were supported by vaccine mandates and unprecedented public health restrictions, and came in the context of surges of hospitalisations and deaths from COVID, and constant media coverage.
“Supported by vaccine mandates” is so disingenuous. It implies that mandates were a good thing. Mandates were a bad thing, and people have voted with their feet ever since they were lifted.
In their search for the mystifying reasons why people have shunned the wonder products that are so safe and effective, the authors propose a few reasons:
There are many reasons people don’t get vaccinated. Barriers can be trivial (forgetfulness), logistical (convenience), financial (not being paid for any time off work from side-effects), or even ideological (misinformation and conspiracy theories).
But they leave out a couple of big ones. How about prudence, for a start? Why accept a rushed experimental drug when there are no long term studies, by definition? For another, why trust a TGA which is funded 96% by industry?
This is a bureaucrat’s report lobbying for a bureaucratic gravy train. The patient is nowhere to be seen or heard in the entire 58 pages. New administrative organs are proposed. Experts will be required. New agreements between federal and state governments are demanded. Millions of taxpayer dollars will be needed.
The Agreement should also establish a Vaccine Implementation Committee, to coordinate effort, troubleshoot problems, and evaluate progress. This committee should be made up of experts, and representatives from federal and state governments and the Australian Centre for Disease Control (ACDC). (p24)
For bureaucrats, ‘targets’ are the stuff of dreams. Wet dreams in this case. They want to measure everything, and reward those who hit the targets. Conflict of interest, anyone? Get more vaccinations done in pharmacies? Sure – but who is better placed to advise a patient of risks and benefits?
Pharmacy vaccination should be continued, with red tape removed
The federal government has recently committed to four years of funding support for pharmacists who deliver free COVID and NIP vaccines to eligible people.
This makes it much easier to organise adult vaccines, increasing the number of locations where people can get vaccines by about 60 per cent. Increasing the pool of vaccinators also means people can more easily get vaccinated by someone who speaks their language, or who (sic) they already trust. By the end of 2022 nearly half of all COVID vaccinations were delivered in pharmacies. (p30)
The word ‘adverse’ appears only 4 times in the whole report. The most glaring example here:
Public insurance could cover other vaccination costs
Although vaccines on the National Immunisation Program are free up-front, people might worry about the cost of adverse reactions.
The government should evaluate whether Australia needs a vaccine injury compensation scheme, like 24 other countries already have. These schemes help cover costs if someone has a moderate or severe reaction to a vaccine. (p30)
No – the cost is not what people worry about. It’s the pain, disability, and death that people worry about.
I could go on about this report. But I think you get the drift.
Trump can be sued for Capitol riot, court rules
RT | December 1, 2023
Former US President Donald Trump is not immune from being sued over his alleged role in instigating the January 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill, an appeals court in Washington DC ruled on Friday. Democrats and Capitol Police officers took legal action against Trump in the wake of the violent protest.
In a unanimous verdict, the court rejected Trump’s argument that “presidential immunity” forbids him from being held liable for the events of that day, which took place while he was still in power. In a speech to his supporters before the riot, Trump told them to “fight like hell” against his election loss, but to do so “peacefully and patriotically.”
In the ruling, Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote that the president “does not spend every minute of every day exercising official responsibilities,” and “when he acts in an unofficial, private capacity, he is subject to civil suits like any private citizen.”
A trio of lawsuits brought by Democratic lawmakers and US Capitol Police officers allege that Trump’s ‘fight like hell’ speech encouraged the mob to storm the Capitol, and should pay damages. Two officers injured during the riot are seeking a minimum of $75,000 from the former president.
Four people died during the protest, all of them Trump supporters. One woman, an Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt, was shot dead by a Capitol Police officer near the entrance to the House chamber.
The court’s decision paves the way for these lawsuits to go ahead, and could also influence the outcome of a criminal case brought against the former president by Special Counsel Jack Smith. In August, Smith charged Trump with conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights, making the same argument that Trump’s speech provoked the storming of the Capitol.
Trump’s lawyers have argued that speeches on “election integrity” are “at the heart of his official responsibilities as president,” and are therefore protected from legal consequences. Trump himself has dismissed Smith’s case as a “pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Trump is currently the frontrunner to take the Republican Party’s nomination for next year’s election. However, the former president faces multiple legal obstacles. Smith is overseeing two criminal cases against Trump, the second concerning his alleged mishandling of classified documents.
In addition to the three civil suits concerning the Capitol riot, Trump is being sued by New York Attorney General Letitia James for allegedly inflating the worth of his business empire, and faces charges in Georgia for allegedly trying to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Finally, Trump is being tried in New York for his alleged misreporting of “hush-money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump insists that all of the cases against him are part of the same overarching, Democrat-led plot to sideline Biden’s leading opponent ahead of the 2024 election.
Ireland’s Educator Minister says Ireland will introduce a “legally binding” statutory online code for “disinformation” removal
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 30, 2023
Simon Harris, Ireland’s Education Minister, has raised alarms about what he suggests is the rampant spread of “disinformation” on social media, describing it as a significant threat to democracy.
His concerns mirror those of Tánaiste Micheál Martin, particularly in light of the recent Dublin riots, where social media has been blamed for spreading “hate,” a notion that the government in Ireland is using as an excuse to call for more censorship online.
The riots, characterized by violence and destruction, followed a stabbing by an immigrant citizen outside a north city center school, injuring three children and a woman.
Harris, in his statement, specifically criticized Elon Musk’s X for its failure to censor certain speech.
On RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Harris expressed his full agreement with the Tánaiste.
“I think there is a very serious issue, not just in this country, but in western democracies now in relation to social media platforms, which I use, which I appreciate and which have great value – but also when wrongly used having an ability to spread disinformation and undermine democracy,” Harris said.
According to The Journal, he said that by early next year “there will be a ‘legally binding’ statutory online code in relation to the removal of information that is deemed to be disinformation.”
As many politicians often do, Harris attempted to suggest that he supports free speech while calling for the censorship of “disinformation.”
From the report:
“The Minister said he would ‘absolutely defend’ the right to free speech, adding ‘it’s the cornerstone of all democracy.’
“What we’re talking about here is the spread of disinformation and the spread of hatred. And I simply wouldn’t be, nor would I wish to, but I wouldn’t be allowed to in this studio. The social media platform is a form of media, it is a media platform and therefore I think there are real legitimate questions around the rules that apply online,” he said.
X ordered to turn over info on users who interacted with Trump
RT | November 30, 2023
Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, ordered X (formerly Twitter) to turn over account information on any users who interacted with the former president, according to a heavily redacted search warrant released by the US Department of Justice on Monday.
The warrant requests “all information from the ‘Connect’ or ‘Notifications’ tab for [Trump’s] account, including all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by the account, as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account (i.e. ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’).” This is in addition to Trump’s own search history, direct messages, a list of every user he “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked,” and “content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by the then-president from October 2020 to January 2021.
Even advertising information, topic preferences, communications with X’s support staff, and data that was deleted but remains available to the platform must be turned over to the prosecutor, according to the document.
“There is no benign or reasonable justification for that demand,” FBI whistleblower Steve Friend opined in a post on X on Tuesday. Many Trump supporters took to X to express their disdain for the order, denouncing Smith as an “enemy of the people” and calling on Congress to defund his investigation.
The Justice Department released the warrant and several other filings in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from media organizations objecting to the secrecy of the investigation. The existence of the warrant only became public in August with Trump’s indictment, even though Smith had ordered X to turn over the information in January, as the warrant included an order forbidding the company from informing Trump about the search.
While X initially refused to comply with the warrant due to the gag order, arguing it was a violation of the First Amendment, Smith countered that informing the ex-president would result in “statutorily cognizable harm,” resulting in “destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, or other serious jeopardy to an investigation or delaying of trial.” The platform ultimately agreed to release the data, but missed a court deadline, resulting in a $350,000 fine for contempt of court.
Trump was indicted in August on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiracy against rights related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. While the election-interference case is just one of many felony indictments filed against the Republican this year, he has recently inched ahead of incumbent Joe Biden in polls of likely 2024 voters.
Sometimes they really are out to get you
Gatito Bueno – bad cattitude – November 27, 2023
Well that sure does maybe explain why so much of this felt like a milspec psyop…
Jeez, can you imagine if they did something like this in the US?
Because this sure seems like waging info-war on your own people…
Yikes.
First, Do Harm: A Sorry Tale in the Daily Mail
Dissenting Doctors Dishonourably Disparaged
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | November 29, 2023
The sordid state of the medical system here in the UK is laid bare in excruciating detail in a recent Daily Mail article which chooses to perpetuate myths and disinformation rather than engage in genuine reporting.
The story so far
Dr Sarah Myhill – a doctor now working as a naturopath – is being hounded by the General Medical Council (GMC) who have referred her to various hearings at the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS). Myhill’s alleged transgressions are outlined in great detail on the MPTS website, but the gist of the complaint seems to be that Myhill has had the temerity to highlight the benefits of low-cost treatments (such as Vitamin D) over expensive – and possibly harmful – pharmaceuticals.
This matter should hardly be controversial, even to the mainstream – after all, many will have heard or watched the various TV series such as ‘Dopesick’, ‘Painkiller’ or even the BBC recent Panorama expose ‘The Antidepressant Story’. In contrast to these expensive chemical compounds that have multiple adverse effects – both on individuals and society as a whole – stand inexpensive treatments and lifestyles that are as cheap as (and substantially healthier than) chips.
Consider the benefits of Vitamin D – the ‘sunshine vitamin’ – extolled in no lesser organ of public opinion than the Daily Mail itself, Mark Solomons reporting only a few weeks ago that “a third of Britons have Vitamin D deficiency due to spending too much time indoors, poor diet and failing to take supplements”.
What an opportunity to follow this excellent educational reporting with an additional piece that promotes healthy living and the perils of the over-promotion of ‘pill popping’.
Alas… ‘achievement not unlocked’. The headline alone is a classic of the disinformation genre, a masterclass in deceptive propagandisation comprising just 23 words (and a number):
Precisely why all Welsh doctors approaching retirement are deemed worthy of this drive-by assassination by headline is not fully clear – perhaps that is just the Daily Mail’s house style. That aside, the following twin headline double-barrelled untruths deserve greater scrutiny:
- Vitamins C & D are branded “other ‘potentially harmful’ substances”, which is of course entirely correct… but only in the sense that too much of almost anything is not only possibly harmful, but potentially lethal. Water – that elixir of life, the molecule that makes up almost 60% of your bodyweight – can cause death not only by drowning, but also by overhydration: “After downing some six liters of water in three hours in the “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest, Jennifer Strange vomited, went home with a splitting headache, and died from so-called water intoxication”. If Vitamins C & D are now ‘potentially harmful’ and result in witch-hunt reporting, can we expect the Daily Mail to refer itself for censure for calling for its readers to “drink plenty of fluids” without suitable caveats? In comparison to this – potentially lethal – advice from the Daily Mail, Dr Myhill has advocated taking a high dosage of Vitamin D but at a level no greater than a level that recent research has determined to be safe.
- The ‘livestock dewormer’ in question is in fact Ivermectin, a very cheap and Nobel prize-winning antiviral drug. After a history of veterinary use, it was approved by the FDA for human use in 1996, has been on the World Health Organisation’s list of essential medicines since at least 2015 and was described in the Journal of Antibiotics in 2020 as an antiviral “wonder drug” that “is continuing to surprise and excite scientists, offering more and more promise to help improve global public health by treating a diverse range of diseases, with its unexpected potential as an antibacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer agent being particularly extraordinary… perhaps more than any other drug, ivermectin is a drug for the world’s poor. For most of this century, some 250 million people have been taking it annually to combat two of the world’s most devastating, disfiguring, debilitating and stigma-inducing diseases, Onchocerciasis [river blindness] and Lymphatic filariasis. Most of the recipients live in remote, rural, desperately under-resourced communities in developing countries and have virtually no access to even the most rudimentary of medical interventions. Moreover, all the treatments have been made available free of charge thanks to the unprecedented drug donation program”.
What a heart-warming story! If only the Daily Mail had chosen to share this feel-good blockbuster with its readers. Many doctors chose to prescribe Ivermectin off-label, which is entirely normal behaviour (after all, repurposing a drug that already has a defined safety record is far less risky than rushing a new medicine – which by definition will not have a long track record – to market):
“There are clinical situations when the use of unlicensed medicines or use of medicines outside the terms of the licence (i.e. ‘off-label’) may be judged by the prescriber to be in the best interest of the patient on the basis of available evidence. Such practice is particularly common in certain areas of medicine: for instance, in paediatrics where difficulties in the development of age-appropriate formulations means that many medicines used in children are used off-label or are unlicensed“.
Who better to make these kinds of decisions than a patient’s doctor?
Many people will be aware of what happened next. Various shenanigans ensued resulting in Ivermectin being discredited. One of the most Kafkaesque situations was an FDA-orchestrated smear campaign that branded Ivermectin as ‘horse-paste’ and informed people that “you are not a horse”. Quite an eyebrow-raising stunt when you consider that Ivermectin is safe enough to feature on the CDC website with an oral dosage level that is declared safe for use in children over the weight of 15kg. The FDA was – quite rightly – subsequently eviscerated in a recent Fifth District court ruling:
“The Food and Drug Administration is not a physician, so it had no business cautioning people not to take Ivermectin”.
The ruling is worth reading in full.
Returning to the Daily Mail headline, we can summarise the situation as follows: authorities have censured a doctor who promoted (within their known safe usage parameters!) certain vitamins and antiviral treatments. Whether or not these treatments are effective or not is essentially irrelevant – they are safe, which is more can be said for any newly introduced pharmaceutical product with no long-term safety data attached.
Contrast the prescription of these safe treatments with said authorities’ recent (well, since late 2020) enthusiastic one-size-fits-all promotion of various injectable products that were claimed to be both ‘safe’ and ‘effective’.
There is, of course, a rational (if somewhat chilling) explanation as to why we find ourselves in this bizarre and counter-intuitive situation.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider what twisted circumstances can have arisen for the medical establishment to weaponise its disciplinary procedures, especially in the case of a doctor that has already attempted to take herself off the register. The GMC and the MPTS are only too aware that:
“suspension has a deterrent effect and can be used to send out a signal to the doctor, the profession and public about what is regarded as behaviour unbefitting a registered doctor.”
The action against Myhill seems overly vindictive and a waste of time, money and resources. The absurdity of proceedings has been inadvertently – and succinctly – summarised by the GMC’s KC, Tom Kark:
“The problem with the Myhill cases is that all the patients are improved and all refuse to give witness statements.”
But perhaps the intention is to come after other doctors that dare to speak out, and also to deter others from joining them in speaking truth to power.
The promotion of one-size-fits-all pharmaceutical interventions is clearly a profitable endeavour for various pharmaceutical companies and associated vested interests, but it is clearly not in the best interests of patients. Doctors promise to “first, do no harm”, and they – and all associated establishment regulators and other authorities – pay appropriate lip-service regarding patient autonomy, choice and informed consent as encapsulated in any (and one would hope all?) documented formulations of the Doctor-Patient relationship.
But the truth is starkly different. There are good doctors who are willing to put patients first, resist groupthink and stand up to bullying regulators. The hounding and demonisation of these doctors is an appalling and sinister crime. It happened before covid, it happened during covid, and it is happening now. It is sad to see spineless reporting by those in the mainstream media who (1) should know better and (2) have the resources to stand up to the drug pushers.
Perhaps the only answer is bottom-up resistance. If enough people resolve to ensure that justice is done, then complaining to the GMC might make a difference.
‘If We Get Away With It, It’s Legal’: Documents Reveal New Details on U.S. Government’s ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | November 29, 2023
Government agencies, private-sector firms, academia and nonprofits were collaborating to combat alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation” as far back as 2017, according to new documents released Tuesday.
The “CTIL Files” — which refer to the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTI League, a key player in the so-called “Censorship-Industrial Complex” — are based on documents received from an unnamed but “highly credible” whistleblower, according to investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi, who released the files.
The new documents rival or exceed the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” in “scale and importance,” according to the journalists, two of whom — Shellenberger and Taibbi — were instrumental in releasing many of the “Twitter Files” that first called attention to the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
A comprehensive picture of the birth of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector
The documents, which the journalists detailed on Substack, center around the activities of the CTI League, which “officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”
According to the journalists, the CTI League documents “offer the missing link … to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files” and “offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector.”
“The whistleblower’s documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques,” the journalists wrote.
Documents in the “CTIL Files” show members of the CTI League, DHS officials and key figures from social media companies “all working closely together in the censorship process.”
This “public-private model” laid the groundwork for “anti-misinformation” and “anti-disinformation” campaigns launched by the U.S. and U.K. governments in 2020 and 2021, the journalists wrote, including attempts to circumvent First Amendment protections against government censorship of speech in the U.S.
Such tactics included “masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral,” they added.
The CTI League went still further though, the journalists wrote, engaging “in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote ‘counter-messaging,’ co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups.”
Such censorship lies at the heart of Missouri et al. v. Biden et al., a First Amendment censorship case where injunctions were issued against several federal agencies and government officials, barring them from communicating with social media companies regarding user content. The injunctions are now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Former British intelligence analyst charged with creating counter-disinformation project
The journalists wrote that while previous releases of the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” revealed “overwhelming evidence of government-sponsored censorship,” they had not revealed “where the idea for such mass censorship came from.”
The whistleblower alleged that a key figure in the CTI League, “a ‘former’ British intelligence analyst, was ‘in the room’ at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a ‘repeat of 2016.’”
By 2019, this analyst, Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, had “developed the sweeping censorship framework,” leading a team of U.S. and U.K. “military and intelligence contractors” who “co-led CTIL.” Previously, in 2018, Terp attended a 10-day military exercise organized by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, according to the journalists.
It was there that Terp met Pablo Breuer, a former U.S. Navy commander, who became a key figure in the CTI League. According to Wired, the two realized that misinformation “could be treated … as a cybersecurity problem.” This led to the development of CogSec, which soon housed the “MisinfoSec Working Group.”
“Terp’s plan, which she shared in presentations to information security and cybersecurity groups in 2019, was to create ‘Misinfosec communities’ that would include government,” the journalists wrote.
By spring 2020, it appears Terp achieved this plan, as the CTI League partnered with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has been implicated in prior releases of the “Twitter Files” for its role in the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
The MisinfoSec Working Group included Renee DiResta, a former CIA operative who worked for the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) — later renamed the Virality Project (VP). This group “created a censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT).”
According to the journalists, AMITT adapted “a cybersecurity framework developed by MITRE, a major defense and intelligence contractor that has an annual budget of $1 to $2 billion in government funding.” MITRE is a backer of the Vaccination Credential Initiative and the SMART Health Card — a digital “vaccine passport.”
Terp used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization (WHO) applied in “countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe.”
The same framework “has been formally adopted by the European Union and the United States as part of a ‘common standard for exchanging structured threat information on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference’” according to the journalists.
‘Can we get a troll on their bums?’
According to the journalists, MisinfoSec’s motivation for counter-misinformation was the “twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and the election of Trump.”
“There’s something off kilter with our information landscape,” Terp and other CTI League members wrote, according to documents.
“The usual useful idiots and fifth columnists — now augmented by automated bots, cyborgs and human trolls — are busily engineering public opinion, stoking up outrage, sowing doubt and chipping away at trust in our institutions. And now it’s our brains that are being hacked,” they added.
In spring 2020, the CTI League set its sights on COVID-19-related narratives, targeting users who engaged in messaging that ran contrary to official policy.
“CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as anti-lockdown narratives like ‘all jobs are essential,’ ‘we won’t stay home,’ and ‘open America now,’” the journalists wrote.
“CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also did research on individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags … and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios. The group also discussed requesting ‘takedowns’ and reporting website domains to registrars,” they added.
Regarding the “we won’t stay home” narrative, internal documents revealed by the whistleblower showed that CTI League members wrote, “Do we have enough to ask for the groups and/or accounts to be taken down or at a minimum reported and checked?” and “Can we get all troll on their bums if not?”
They also called posters circulating online promoting anti-lockdown posters “disinformation artifacts,” saying, “We should have seen this one coming” and asking “can we stop the spread, do we have enough evidence to stop superspreaders, and are there other things we can do (are there countermessagers we can ping etc).”
During CTI League brainstorming sessions to develop strategies for “counter-messaging for things like encouraging people to wear masks,” statements such as “Repetition is truth” were uttered by CTI League staff, the journalists noted.
The CTI League also sought to go “beyond simply urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to put individuals on blacklists.”
According to the journalists, “The AMITT framework calls for discrediting individuals as a necessary prerequisite of demanding censorship against them” and “trying to get banks to cut off financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events.”
As part of these efforts, even truthful information was targeted. In a 2019 podcast on “Disinformation, Cognitive Security, and Influence,” Terp admitted, “Most information is actually true … but set in the wrong context.”
“You’re not trying to get people to believe lies most of the time,” she said. “Most of the time, you’re trying to change their belief sets. And in fact, really deeper than that, you’re trying to change, to shift their internal narratives … the set of stories that are your baseline for your culture.”
Previous “Twitter Files” releases have revealed that true information was targeted for censorship by the U.S. government and social media platforms like Twitter if the information contradicted official policy regarding COVID-19 vaccines and restrictions.
‘Cognitive security’ a euphemism for censorship
In the same podcast, according to the journalists, Terp said, “Cognitive security is the thing you want to have. You want to protect that cognitive layer. It basically, it’s about pollution. Misinformation, disinformation is a form of pollution across the Internet.”
The journalists wrote, “A key component of Terp’s work through CTIL, MisinfoSec, and AMITT was to insert the concept of ‘cognitive security’ into the fields of cybersecurity and information security.”
Such “cognitive security” was seen as being threatened by the erosion of the mass media’s control on information and influence over public opinion.
Documents revealed by the whistleblower included a MisinfoSec report stating “For a long time, the ability to reach mass audiences belonged to the nation-state (e.g. in the USA via broadcast licensing through ABC, CBS and NBC).”
“Now, however, control of informational instruments has been allowed to devolve to large technology companies who have been blissfully complacent and complicit in facilitating access to the public for information operators at a fraction of what it would have cost them by other means,” the report said.
The same report also called for a form of “pre-bunking,” to “preemptively inoculate a vulnerable population against messaging,” suggesting that DHS-funded Information Sharing and Analysis Centers could be used to promote such pre-bunking.
‘If we get away with it, it’s legal’
Public-private partnerships were specifically sought out in an attempt to circumvent First Amendment free speech protections in the U.S., the documents revealed, even while Bloomberg, The Washington Post and Wired wrote glowing articles portraying the CTI League as a mere group of “volunteer” cybersecurity experts.
Yet, according to the journalists, “In just one month, from mid-March to mid-April [2020], the supposedly all-volunteer CTIL had grown to ‘1,400 vetted members in 76 countries’” and had “helped to take down 2,833 cybercriminal assets on the internet” including some which impersonated government organizations, the United Nations and WHO.
On the same 2019 podcast, according to the journalists, Breuer explained how the CTI League was getting around the First Amendment, by working to get “nontraditional partners into one room,” including “maybe somebody from one of the social media companies, maybe a few special forces operators, and some folks from Department of Homeland Security.”
Together, they would “talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way so that we can collaborate better, more freely and really start to change the way that we address some of these issues,” Breuer said.
Breuer even likened these tactics to those employed by the Chinese government, saying “If you talk to the average Chinese citizen, they absolutely believe that the Great Firewall of China is not there for censorship. They believe that it’s there because the Chinese Communist Party wants to protect the citizenry and they absolutely believe that’s a good thing.”
“If the US government tried to sell that narrative, we would absolutely lose our minds and say, ‘No, no, this is a violation of our First Amendment rights.’ So, the in-group and out-group messaging have to be often different,” he said.
The whistleblower told the journalists that CTI League leaders did not discuss their potential violation of the First Amendment.
“The ethos was that if we get away with it, it’s legal, and there were no First Amendment concerns because we have a ‘public-private partnership’ — that’s the word they used to disguise those concerns. ‘Private people can do things public servants can’t do, and public servants can provide the leadership and coordination,’” the whistleblower said.
According to the journalists, the authors of the MisinfoSec report also “advocated for police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship, across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved.”
The CTI League documents also suggest that the organization was involved in a form of domestic spying, with one document noting that while censorship activities abroad are “typically” performed by “the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense,” such efforts “against Americans” necessitate the use of private partners because the government lacks the “legal authority” to do so.
According to the whistleblower, CTI League members also went to great lengths to conceal their activities, with a CTI League handbook recommending the use of burner phones, online pseudonyms and the generation of fake AI faces. One document advised, “Lock your s**t down … your spy disguise.”
One suggested list of questions to be posed to prospective CTI League members proposed asking whether those individuals had ever “worked with influence operations (e.g. disinformation, hate speech, other digital harms etc) previously” and whether those efforts included “active measures” and “psyops” (psychological operations).
Indeed, according to the documents, several CTI League members had worked for the military or intelligence agencies, while according to the whistleblower, “roughly 12-20 active people involved in CTIL worked at the FBI or CISA” — even, for a time, displaying their agency seals alongside their names on the CTI League’s internal Slack channel.
Terp, for instance, previously designed machine learning algorithms and unmanned vehicle systems for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence.
According to the whistleblower, the CTI League sought “to become part of the federal government.”
Shellenberger, Taibbi to testify before Congress this week
According to the journalists, the FBI declined to comment, while CISA, Terp and other CTI League figures did not respond to requests for comment.
However, one CTI League member, Bonnie Smalley, did respond to the journalists’ request. She wrote, verbatim, “all i can comment on is that i joined cti league which is unaffiliated with any govt orgs because i wanted to combat the inject bleach nonsense online during covid. … i can assure you that we had nothing to do with the govt though.”
“CTIL appears to have generated publicity about itself in the Spring and Fall of 2020 for the same reason EIP did: to claim later that its work was all out in the open and that anybody who suggested it was secretive was engaging in a conspiracy theory,” the journalists wrote.
“But as internal messages have revealed, much of what EIP did was secret, as well as partisan, and demanding of censorship by social media platforms, contrary to its claims,” they said, adding that “EIP and VP, ostensibly, ended, but CTIL is apparently still active, based on the LinkedIn pages of its members.”
The journalists said the documents will be presented to Congressional investigators and made public, while protecting the identity of the whistleblower.
Shellenberger and Taibbi will testify at Thursday’s hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. They previously testified before the same committee in March.
On Tuesday, Taibbi appeared in a live YouTube webcast presenting some of the key revelations from the first release of the “CTIL Files.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
New Zealand Government will inform WHO it does not agree to International Health Regulations amendments
By Rhoda Wilson | The Exposé | November 28, 2023
The newly sworn-in New Zealand government intends not to be pushed around by UN resolutions or by the World Health Organisation anymore.
According to a coalition agreement with New Zealand First, the new government will undertake a “National Interest Test” before accepting any agreements from the United Nations or the World Health Organisation’s proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations.
To this aim, the New Zealand Cabinet must “reserve against” proposed amendments to International Health Regulations by 1 December 2023.
On Friday, centre-right National signed coalition agreements with libertarian ACT New Zealand and populist New Zealand First allowing the three parties to form a government, bringing an end to six years of left-wing governments in New Zealand.
Yesterday, New Zealand Governor General Cindy Kiro, who represents British monarch King Charles III as head of state, swore National Party leader Christopher Luxon in as New Zealand’s 42nd prime minister along with ministers of his cabinet at Government House in Wellington. Parliament is expected to sit next week and begin working on new policies.
On the day they were signed, Friday, the incoming government released its coalition agreements which outlined a number of policy plans. You can read the coalition agreement between the New Zealand National Party and ACT New Zealand HERE, and between New Zealand National Party and New Zealand First HERE.
According to the coalition agreement with New Zealand First, one of the most urgent issues the new government must address is that the Cabinet will tell officials not to agree to any policy changes suggested by the World Health Organisation (“WHO”). The coalition agreement states:
Strengthening Democracy and Freedoms
Ensure a ‘National Interest Test’ is undertaken before New Zealand accepts any agreements from the UN and its agencies that limit national decision-making and reconfirm that New Zealand’s domestic law holds primacy over any international agreements.
As part of the above, by 1 December 2023 reserve against proposed amendments to WHO health regulations to allow the incoming government to consider these against a “National Interest Test.”
Coalition Agreement between the National Party and the New Zealand First Party
Ontario Cop Appeals Conviction For Freedom Convoy Donation
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 29, 2023
Constable Michael Brisco, a highly respected officer of the Windsor Police Service, found his professional reputation threatened for making an online donation to a protest in support of civil liberties.
Armed with no previous disciplinary records, Brisco has been thrust into a legal tussle over his $50 donation to the Ottawa Freedom Convoy’s peaceful protest via GiveSendGo on February 8, 2022.
Get the background on this case here.
Importantly, this occurred within the permissible boundaries set by an Ontario Superior Court Judge, allowing people to participate in the protest in Ottawa, provided their advocacy did not include honking. Brisco, who chose to fund the peaceful protest anonymously and not in his capacity as a police officer, now finds his actions punished.
The crux of this issue surfaced when the GiveSendGo donor list was compromised and fell into the possession of the Ontario Provincial Police Service.
Brisco’s name was flagged in the data breach and subsequently forwarded to the Windsor Police Service, gently illustrating the porous safety afforded by digital privacy. Brisco now stands accused of what the Windsor Police Service deems “discreditable conduct.”
Brisco’s legal team maintains their client’s donation was not evidence of his support for the Ambassador Bridge blockade in Windsor, Ontario. They argue the prosecution’s attempts to link Brisco’s anonymous contribution with allegedly unlawful protests was threadbare, relying solely on newspaper commentaries by several officials, including Ontario’s premier and the prime minister. Specifically, no video, photograph, or indisputable evidence supports the accusations against Brisco.
Get more information on this case at the Justice Center For Constitutional Freedoms.
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Book Review
Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | February 27, 2013
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony. … continue
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- Spain orders reopening of Tehran embassy, condemns Israel’s carpet bombing of Lebanon
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- The ‘Opposition Party’ Has Done Nothing to Stop the Iran War and Much to Goad Trump Into Continuing It
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- Amnesty: Urgent – Protect Lebanese civilians from brutal escalation in Israeli attacks
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- Hundreds of Gaza Amputees Stranded in Legal Limbo
- The gallows law: Israel moves toward executing Palestinian children
- Tucker Carlson: The Path to Peace requires ending ‘special alliance’ with Israel
- This is ceasefire? Israel’s biggest massacre yet in Lebanon, another journalist killed in Gaza – Daily Update
- Tucker Carlson on Israel: This Is the Behavior of an Ally? Really?
- Gazans face a triple crisis: severe shortages of water and bread, healthcare in tatters
- NY Times reports how Netanyahu took the US into Iran War
- No Tricks Zone
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
- New Study Finds Warming Saves Lives…Cold Temperatures 12 Times More Deadly Than Excess Heat
- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
- New Study: CO2 Is ‘Effectively Negligible’ As An Explanatory Climate Change Factor Since 2000
- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
- New Research: South Australia’s Mid-Holocene Sea Surface Temperatures Were 4°C Warmer Than Today
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