‘Forever war’ returns: Biden’s Pentagon team puts the military-industrial complex back in command
RT | November 14, 2020
Despite campaign-trail overtures to progressives, a Joe Biden presidency seems to spell a return to normalcy in the most time-honored American way: by placing the military-industrial complex in charge of the country’s defense.
Joe Biden’s campaign message focused almost entirely on Donald Trump, and on Biden’s supposed ability to “unify” a polarized electorate and “restore the soul of America.” Since he claimed victory last week, Biden’s prospective administration has begun to take shape, and the reality behind the rhetoric has started to emerge.
On matters of defense, restoring America’s “soul” apparently means placing weapons manufacturers back in charge of the Pentagon.
Biden announced his Department of Defense landing team on Tuesday. Of these 23 policy experts, one third have taken funding from arms manufacturers, according to a report published this week by Antiwar.com.
A knot of hawks
Leading the team is Kathleen Hicks, an undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, and an employee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank funded by a host of NATO governments, oil firms, and weapons makers Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Atomics. The latter firm produces the Predator drones used by the Obama administration to kill hundreds of civilians in at least four Middle-Eastern countries.
Hicks was a vocal opponent of President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw a number of US troops from Germany, claiming in August that such a move “benefits our adversaries.”
Two other members of Biden’s Pentagon team, Andrew Hunter and Melissa Dalton, work for CSIS and served under Obama in the Defense Department.
Also on the team are Susanna Blume and Ely Ratner, who work for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Another hawkish think-tank, CNAS is funded by Google, Facebook, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. Three more team members – Stacie Pettyjohn, Christine Wormuth and Terri Tanielian – were most recently employed by the RAND corporation, which draws funding from the US military, NATO, several Gulf states, and hundreds of state and corporate sources.
Michele Flournoy is widely tipped to lead the Pentagon under Biden. Flournoy would be the first woman in history to head the Defense Department, but her appointment would only be revolutionary on the surface. Flournoy is the co-founder of CNAS, and served in the Pentagon under Obama and Bill Clinton. As under secretary of defense for policy under Obama, Flournoy helped craft the 2010 troop surge in Afghanistan, a deployment of 100,000 US troops that led to a doubling in American deaths and made little measurable progress toward ending the war.
‘Forever war’ returns
President Trump, who campaigned on stopping the US’ “forever wars” in the Middle East and remains the first US president in 40 years not to start a new conflict, has nevertheless also staffed the Pentagon with hawkish officials. Recently ousted Defense Secretary Mark Esper was a top lobbyist for Raytheon, while his predecessor, Patrick Shanahan, worked for Boeing. Trump’s appointment this week of National Counterterrorism Center Director Christopher Miller as acting secretary of defense, coupled with combat veteran Col. Douglas MacGregor as senior adviser, looked set to buck that trend, given MacGregor’s vocal opposition to America’s Middle Eastern wars.
Yet Miller and MacGregor may not be in office for long, if Trump’s legal challenges against Biden’s apparent victory fail. Should that happen, Biden’s progressive voters may be in for a rude reawakening when the former vice president returns to the White House.
Many of these progressives were supporters of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries, while others likely held their nose and voted for Biden out of opposition to Trump. Reps. Barbara Lee (California) and Mark Pocan (Wisconsin), two notable progressives, wrote to Biden on Tuesday asking him not to nominate a defense secretary linked to the weapons industry.
Lee and Pocan cited President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address, in which he warned of the “disastrous rise” of the “military-industrial complex.”
Given Biden’s fondness for Flournoy, whom he tapped in 2016 to head the Pentagon under a potential Hillary Clinton administration, the former vice president appears unconcerned about curtailing the influence of the armaments industry.
The industry apparently roots for Joe, too. As Donald Trump surged ahead of Biden on election night, stocks in Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and the Carlyle Group all plummeted. Only when counting in swing states stopped and resumed, giving Biden the advantage, did they climb again.
It’s probably fine that all the big arms contractor stocks plummeted when it looked like Trump won but then skyrocketed once it became clear Biden would be the one to take office. pic.twitter.com/CKEZNS53Gx
— Hillary Fan (@HillaryFan420) November 7, 2020
Should a Biden administration make good on running mate Kamala Harris’ post-election promise to return to regime-change operations in Syria, these firms and their supporters in the Pentagon stand to make a killing.
However, anti-war leftists, progressives, and Bernie Sanders supporters may soon realize that voting for a Democrat who supported the Iraq War, instead of a Republican who called it “the worst single mistake ever made in the history of our country,” might just benefit the military-industrial complex more than the “soul of America.”
NicaNotes: More Money for Coup Groups from US Agency for International Development
By Nan McCurdy | November 12, 2020
Organizations that led the coup attempt in 2018 against the constitutional government of President Daniel Ortega, continue to receive foreign funding from the United States and some European countries. The latest information on USAID funding of the US-directed opposition was made available by journalist William Grigsby on Radio La Primerísima’s Sin Fronteras Magazine.
USAID fiscal year 2021 (Oct. 1, 2020-Sept. 30, 2021) foreign assistance includes “funds to support the restoration of democracy and human rights in the region.” This document shows funding of US$13.4 million dollars bringing USAID funding of the Nicaraguan opposition since 2017 to US$102.27 million.
Just the wealthy Chamorro family – Juan Sebastian, Cristiana and Carlos Fernando – received US$3.87 million. The Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation managed by Christiana Chamorro received the largest amount, US$1.6 million for the rest of 2020 and 2021. Through this foundation, the US finances some twenty-five media and TV and radio shows including La Prensa and Channel 10 known for their vociferous anti-Sandinismo. Juan Sebastian Chamorro, whose NGO is FUNIDES, receives US$1.37 million. Carlos Fernando Chamorro with his media empire Grupo Cinco, which includes Confidencial, receives US$901,471.
William Grigsby in his Nov. 10 article said that “the abuse, hypocrisy and lack of democracy of the Chamorro family was once again exposed with the release of a series of documents proving that they receive funding from the United States and other European governments to illegally enrich themselves and cause disorder in Nicaragua.”
The latest documents and screenshots here show the amount of money given to the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation from 2014 to 2020 – US$4.39 million. If you add in the latest donation of US$1.6, the total is US$5.99– or almost six million dollars just for the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation.
The Chamorro gang is the darling of the Yankees
The amount of money to finance coup activities through media has increased considerably in the last two years to the Chamorro Foundation which focuses on disinformation through online, print, radio and television. In 2020 and 2021 the amount given to them was US$2.59 million.
This funding is part of the US orchestrated plan called RAIN to destabilize and if possible overthrow the Nicaraguan government leaked from the US embassy in Managua in July and includes a USAID contract to hire a company to head up the destabilization plan. While the document, Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua, tries to portray its intentions as democratic, it is a disturbing example of US intervention in another nation’s internal affairs.
There is also a substantial amount of funding for organizations that work on the Caribbean Coast. US$1.7 million was given recently to three organizations: the Foundation for the Autonomy and Development of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (FADCANIC) received US$457,759; the Nidia White Women’s Movement Association has a budget of half a million dollars from the US for the period 2020-2021 and the Association for the Development of the Atlantic Coast has a similar budget of US$785,341 for its political activities in 2020-2021. This is particularly interesting as The Oakland Institute received nearly a million dollars in 2018 for their work including the disinformation campaign to attempt to damage Nicaragua’s environmental reputation on the Caribbean Coast.
Organizations that continue to receive USAID financing for their electoral destabilization activities are: Grupo Ética y Transparencia, which has a grant of US$1 million for the election year of 2021 and Hagamos Democracia, which has a grant of US$1.1 million. Both organizations have worked in opposition to the Sandinista party, at least in the last four elections. Movimiento Por Nicaragua, the NGO of Violeta Granera, is receiving US$601,124.
The so-called Permanent Commission of Human Rights headed by the Marcos Carmona (accused of criminal activities) received US$825,671; the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights (ANDPH) headed by Alvaro Leiva received US$701,032. The board of directors of ANDPH denounced Leiva for stealing nearly half a million dollars and accused him of inflating the number of deaths during the 2018 coup attempt as a tactic to get more US funding.
The United States government portrays this aid as supporting democracy but it is targeted against one side in the political arena of a foreign country and would never be allowed in the US. Why should it be allowed in any other country?
Who Chooses the Official, Governmentally-Approved “Health Experts”?
By Prof. Bill Willers | Global Research | November 12, 2020
“My budget [is] highly earmarked, so it is driven by what I call donor interests.” –Margaret Chan, Director General of the World Health Organization, 2014
“For the world at large, normalcy only returns when we’ve largely vaccinated the entire global population.” –Bill Gates, April, 2020
You have to hand it to governmental health experts: All are uniformly “on message”. Meanwhile, abundant medical expertise from around the world at odds with official messaging is rendered invisible. The Great Barrington Declaration, so critical of governmentally-imposed lockdown strategy (and associated policies, e.g., public masking, quarantine, etc.), has, since October 5, 2020, been signed (as I write) by more than 45,000 medical scientists and practitioners worldwide. But mainstream media figures, savvy to the perks of power, know better than to report this. It’s worthy of note that the founders of the Declaration go to pains to declare their detachment from financial gain, perhaps to stand out against prominent governmental experts with ties to the pharmaceutical industry (e.g. here, here, here).
There are also America’s Frontline Doctors, the many dissenting scientists being discovered by journalists (here, here, here, and just the other day still more here and here), and plenty of others too, trying to be recognized above the din of officialdom, only to be forced to the outer margins of the Internet, where only a small fraction of the public bothers to seek them out. Relatively speaking, it’s lonely out there. Only a select set of officially approved voices conforming to a tightly-controlled narrative are allowed space in mainstream media, and therefore in the larger public mind. By what process, one wants to know, do specific individuals become the “health experts” for government and media?
The World Health Organization (WHO) is the global authority to which the medical institutions of nations look for leadership. WHO opinion and policy informs the NIH, CDC, schools of public health and medical societies in the US and their counterparts in countries all over the world. Visualized as a pyramid, WHO is the apex. Information from there descends through national organizations, schools and institutions to regional and local authorities. Gates and the pharmaceutical industry weave strategy at the apex, with industrial and political players making their impacts all the way down to the base of the pyramid where one finds hordes of frightened, masked citizens.
In this light, consider Margaret Chan’s introductory quote (above) regarding donor impact on WHO policy. Now, scroll down this 2017 list of contributors to the WHO that shows the United States as top contributor at ~$401Million.
But forget that sum, because President Trump thereafter stopped US contributions. That so, further scrolling down reveals that the major contributor is not a nation but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at ~$325Million, seconded by GAVI, the vaccine alliance (itself heavily funded by Gates), at ~$133Million.
The top donors to the WHO are not countries, as is widely believed, but private interests. In fact, in recent decades, private donations to the WHO have continued to grow relative to national contributions, so that by 2017, their total had passed the 50% mark. And the pharmaceutical industry, the vaccine aspect in particular, is primary.
As one peruses the backgrounds of the the government’s (and media’s) chosen health experts, as opposed to the wealth of medical expertise resisting the lockdown and its isolating mandates, there seems within the former a high frequency not only of governmental bureaucrats but also of ties to schools of public health, and therefore to the many connected interests of those schools. Put another way, the commercial involvements of public health schools move quickly and unavoidably into a political realm that a critical eye might conclude is inappropriate for a medical school per se. Considering the inevitable conflicts of interest characteristic of corporate involvement, shouldn’t there be a solid wall of separation between medical schools and schools of public health?
A way to understand what is encompassed within “public health” is to read the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, rated tops in the nation and named for its billionaire donor: “We implement large-scale solutions”, which includes development of “programs” and “interventions” in disaster response, refugee health, evaluation of health insurance programs, human rights and sustainable practice. The site links to Bloomberg’s “Centers and Institutes” which include the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health and four others that are specific to vaccine development, production, education and access. Bloomberg School’s joining with the World Economic Forum and the Gates Foundation to host Event201, that foretold Covid19 Pandemic five months before the real thing hit, shows the School to be a global power player, and other schools of public health are certainly similarly oriented.
In 2005, in my home state, the School of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin in Madison underwent a change to become the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. The expanded mission to include public health was, as stated, to emphasize community health needs. A strict focus on medicine, on the one hand, and the vastly expanded array of considerations innate to “public health”, on the other hand, thereby became integrated into a single unit. In Wisconsin, two voices from within that school have been dominant in messaging with regard to the Covid19 Pandemic and how it should be handled, with the result that the Governor instigated a severe lockdown strategy that included a statewide masking mandate.
While it would be natural for a political leader to rely on medical advice, what is problematic is the unanimity of designated experts nation-wide in their conformity to a specific Covid19 policy that is, on many levels, dubious or downright false. For example, the two accepted experts in Wisconsin, cited above, have insisted that scientific evidence has established that public masking is a powerful means of preventing viral transmission, this mirroring the position of the Director of the CDC who told a Senate Committee that masks are more protective than vaccines. This claim is absolutely and demonstrably false. No scientific evidence has shown anything of the sort. A “smoking gun” in the masking issue is the fact that perhaps the finest meta-analysis of public masking, published in 2016 and titled “Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review”, was suddenly taken down as “no longer relevant in the current climate”. (Fortunately, it was saved at the Wayback site). What stands out is that the “current climate” referred to has nothing to do with weather. Rather, it mirrors a global project the details of which are hidden to the extent possible.
There is growing awareness that pre-Covid19 life will never return, and that masking, social distancing, and the like, will become normal aspects of daily life, for we — particularly the youngest among us — have been persuaded by officially-designated health experts to see our fellow humans as toxic and threatening. Indeed, Klaus Schwab, guiding light of the Big Reset, confirms the loss forever of life before Covid19, as he and his colleagues of the World Economic Forum put components of their new world order into place.
Putting the pieces together, one recognizes a global medical bureaucracy from the WHO on down, in concert with schools of public health and the pharmaceutical industry, combined into a politically powerful triumvirate dedicated to goals most certainly linked to those of the World Economic Forum, with which Bloomberg School collaborates. The selection process within this triumvirate designates its experts for governmental and academic advancement, and for public display by mainstream media, this to the exclusion of dissenters. The apparatus for social control now being put into place is to involve an unimaginably profitable vaccine-based medical authority touted by certified “health experts” and governmental enforcers, all of whom will assure the public that they “have the science”. There will be discovery of new pathogens threatening epidemic and pandemic waves, complete with spikes and hotspots. One foresees populations nurtured in fear, herded into groupthink and longing for salvation through vaccination.
***
Copyright © Prof. Bill Willers, Global Research, 2020
US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media
By Whitney Webb |
Unlimited Hangout| November 11, 2020
In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.
A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.
Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.
Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end.
Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing and for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children (among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company’s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for product safety who covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects.
Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.
UK Intelligence’s New Cyberwar Targeting “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda”
On Monday, the UK newspaper The Times reported that the UK’s GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so. In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in “information warfare,” to launch an online campaign to counter “deceptive narratives” about Covid-19 vaccine candidates.
The newly announced GCHQ “cyber war” will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda” but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.” The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance (US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such “propaganda” sites hosted within their borders.
The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.
It seems that, from the perspective of the UK national-security state, those who question corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and its possible impact on the leading experimental Covid-19 vaccine candidates (all of which use experimental vaccine technologies that have never before been approved for human use) should be targeted with tools originally designed to combat terrorist propaganda.
While The Times asserted that the effort would target content “that originated only from state adversaries” and would not target the sites of “ordinary citizens,” the newspaper suggested that the effort would rely on the US government for determining whether or not a site is part of a “foreign disinformation” operation.
This is highly troubling given that the US recently seized the domains of many sites, including the American Herald Tribune, which it erroneously labeled as “Iranian propaganda,” despite its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The US government made this claim about the American Herald Tribune after the cybersecurity firm FireEye, a US government contractor, stated that it had “moderate confidence” that the site had been “founded in Iran.”
In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it plans to target are “linked to Moscow” gives further cause for concern given that the UK government was caught funding the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled critics of the UK government’s actions as well as its narratives with respect to the Syria conflict as being related to “Russian disinformation” campaigns.
Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor, or perhaps even an allied media organization such as Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab that a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the main government sources for The Times article bluntly stated that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyber war will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.
This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.
Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that “anti-vaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization as promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.
Similarly, a think tank tied to US intelligence—whose GCHQ equivalent, the National Security Agency, will take part in the newly announced “cyber war”—argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the US ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”
InfraGard, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector,” warned in the paper published last June that “the US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with ‘social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns’ orchestrated by the Russian government,” as cited by The Guardian. The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent “anti-vaxxers” are aligned “with other conspiracy movements including the far right . . . and social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns by many foreign and domestic actors. Included among these actors is the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government–aligned organization.”
An article published just last month by the Washington Post argued that “vaccine hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,” which the FBI named a potential domestic terror threat last year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying “The US anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it’s going toward more-extremist tendencies.”
Simone Warstat attends a rally against a legislative bill to make it more difficult for parents to opt out for non-medical reasons to immunize their children, June 7, 2020, in Denver Colorado.
It is worth pointing out that many so-called “anti-vaxxers” are actually critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-vaccine” misleading. Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making Covid-19 vaccines donate heavily to politicians in both countries and have been involved in numerous safety scandals, using state intelligence agencies to wage cyber war against sites that investigate such concerns is not only troubling for the future of journalism but it suggests that the UK is taking a dangerous leap toward becoming a country that uses its state powers to treat the enemies of corporations as enemies of the state.
The CIA-Backed Firm “Weaponizing Truth” with AI
In early October, the US Air Force and US Special Operations Command announced that they had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the US-based “machine intelligence” company Primer. Per the press release, “Primer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation [emphasis added]. Primer will also enhance its natural language processing platform to automatically analyze tactical events to provide commanders with unprecedented insight as events unfold in near real-time.”
According to Primer, the company “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data,” and their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” In other words, Primer is developing an algorithm that would allow the national-security state to outsource many military and intelligence analyst positions to AI. In fact, the company openly admits this, stating that their current effort “will automate the work typically done by dozens of analysts in a security operations center to ingest all of the data relevant to an event as it happens and funnel it into a unified user interface.”
Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of “truth,” as defined by the state. Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track “insurgency” in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.”
In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley then wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not” as established by intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.”
Notably, on November 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to target “anti-vaccine propaganda,” the US website NextGov reported that Primer’s Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to “Covid-19 related disinformation.” According to Primer’s director of science, John Bohannon, “Primer will be integrating bot detection, synthetic text detection and unstructured textual claims analysis capabilities into our existing artificial intelligence platform currently in use with DOD. . . . This will create the first unified mission-ready platform to effectively counter Covid-19-related disinformation in near-real time.”
Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told NextGov that Primer’s new Covid-19–focused effort “automatically classifies documents into one of 10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID” on areas such as “business, science and technology, employment, the global economy, and elections.” The final product is expected to be delivered to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.
Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the national-security state it is designed to protect by “weaponizing truth.” Primer proudly promotes itself as having more than 15 percent of its staff hailing from the US intelligence community or military. The director of the company’s National Security Group is Brian Raymond, a former CIA intelligence officer who served as the Director for Iraq on the US National Security Council after leaving the agency.
The company also recently added several prominent national-security officials to its board including:
- Gen. Raymond Thomas (ret.), who led the command of all US and NATO Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and is the former commander of both US Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
- Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson (ret.), the former deputy chief of staff for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance who led the Air Force’s intelligence and cyber forces. She also personally developed “strategic partnerships” between the Air Force and Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM in order “to accelerate the Air Force’s digital transformation.”
- Brett McGurk, one of the “chief architects” of the Iraq War “surge,” alongside the notorious Kagan family, as NSC Director for Iraq, and then as special assistant to the president and senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration. Under Obama and during part of the Trump administration, McGurk was the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the State Department, helping to manage the “dirty war” waged by the US, the UK, and other allies against Syria.
In addition to those recent board hires, Primer brought on Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as a strategic adviser. Gordon previously “drove partnerships within the US Intelligence Community and provided advice to the National Security Council in her role as deputy director of national intelligence” and had a twenty-seven-year career at the CIA. The deep links are unsurprising, given that Primer is financially backed by the CIA’s venture-capital arm In-Q-Tel and the venture-capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Bloomberg Beta.
Operation Warp Speed’s Disinformation Blitzkrieg
The rapid increase in interest by the US and UK national-security states toward Covid-19 “disinformation,” particularly as it relates to upcoming Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, is intimately related to the media-engagement strategy of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed.
Officially a “public-private partnership,” Operation Warp Speed, which has the goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by next January, is dominated by the US military and also involves several US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as intelligence-linked tech giants Google, Oracle, and Palantir. Several reports published in The Last American Vagabond by this author and journalist Derrick Broze have revealed the extreme secrecy of the operation, its numerous conflicts of interest, and its deep ties to Silicon Valley and Orwellian technocratic initiatives.
Warp Speed’s official guidance discusses at length its phased plan for engaging the public and addressing issues of “vaccine hesitancy.” According to the Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners—especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”
The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework for its communications effort. The third pillar of that strategy is entitled “Stop Myths” and has as a main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”
Though that particular Warp Speed document is short on specifics, the CDC’s Covid-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook contains additional information. It states that Operation Warp Speed will “engage and use a wide range of partners, collaborations, and communication and news media channels to achieve communication goals, understanding that channel preferences and credible sources vary among audiences and people at higher risk for severe illness and critical populations, and channels vary in their capacity to achieve different communication objectives.” It states that it will focus its efforts in this regard on “traditional media channels” (print, radio, and TV) as well as “digital media” (internet, social media, and text messaging).
The CDC document further reveals that the “public messaging” campaign to “promote vaccine uptake” and address “vaccine hesitancy” is divided into four phases and adds that the overall communication strategy of Warp Speed “should be timely and applicable for the current phase of the Covid-19 Vaccination program.”
Those phases are:
- Before a vaccine is available
- The vaccine is available in limited supply for certain populations of early focus
- The vaccine is increasingly available for other critical populations and the general public
- The vaccine is widely available
Given that the Covid-19 vaccine candidate produced by Pfizer is expected to be approved by the end of November, it appears that the US national-security state, which is essentially running Operation Warp Speed, along with “trusted messengers” in mass media, is preparing to enter the second phase of its communications strategy, one in which news organizations and journalists who raise legitimate concerns about Warp Speed will be de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.
Russiagate disciple Michael McFaul upset that Putin hasn’t congratulated Biden for presumed election win
RT | November 8, 2020
Former US envoy to Russia Michael McFaul is unhappy that Moscow hasn’t declared Joe Biden the election winner without official results, apparently tossing aside years of hysteria about Kremlin “meddling” in US internal affairs.
McFaul, who became one of the most outspoken proponents of the debunked theory that Moscow “colluded” with the Trump campaign in 2016, expressed his disappointment on Twitter that Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet to offer his congratulations to the Democratic nominee, who declared himself president-elect on Saturday.
“Has Putin joined the chorus of world leaders in congratulating Biden yet? I haven’t see (sic) the statement. Do post if its (sic) out,” he wrote.
Over the past four years, McFaul has rarely passed up an opportunity to suggest that Moscow is somehow exerting shadowy influence over Washington. Now he is apparently disappointed that the Kremlin hasn’t chosen sides in a contested election. Several states are still counting votes, and recounts and lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign could make declaring a clear victor in the contest premature.
Biden claimed victory after media outlets projected that he would win Pennsylvania, overcoming Donald Trump’s previous considerable lead in the state. The Republican president has refused to concede.
Earlier in the day, Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama became the first world leader to offer his congratulations to the former vice president, expressing hope that Biden would help the world navigate a “climate emergency.”
By Saturday evening, governments from around the world issued statements recognizing Biden as the president-elect. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was “looking forward” to working with Biden, while UK leader Boris Johnson said he was eager to begin cooperation with the Democrat’s new administration, a sentiment that was echoed by many European heads-of-state. All members of the Group of 7 (G7) economic organization have issued congratulatory messages to Biden.
Although it’s true that Putin has yet to recognize Biden’s projected win, he’s not alone. Chinese President Xi Jinping has said nothing on the subject, along with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In fact, some world leaders have even hinted that they don’t recognize Biden’s victory. Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa on Wednesday declared Trump the victor, and then issued a follow-up statement insisting that the election should not be called until the courts rule on the matter. He wasn’t the only world leader to express unwillingness to recognize a winner in the contest. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Saturday that he wanted to wait for legal challenges to finish before assuming a clear victor.
Similarly, Polish President Andrzej Duda congratulated Biden for running a “successful presidential campaign,” adding that his nation was waiting to see who would be declared the official president-elect by the Electoral College.
Pennsylvania postal worker goes public with allegations in Project Veritas report: postmaster ordered backdating of ballots
RT | November 6, 2020
A US Postal Service employee has gone public to Project Veritas with allegations that the Erie, Pennsylvania, postmaster ordered mail-in ballots that came in after Election Day to be backdated to Nov. 3 to make them appear legal.
The alleged whistleblower, Richard Hopkins, said he overheard Postmaster Robert Weisenbach Jr. speaking to another employee Thursday about ballots that were supposed to be backdated. According to Hopkins, Weisenbach said most of the ballots that arrived on Wednesday, the day after the election, had been backdated to Tuesday, but one ballot had been mistakenly stamped with the accurate date, Nov. 4.
US law requires that mail-in ballots be postmarked by Election Day to be considered valid and counted. As of election night, President Donald Trump held substantial leads over Democrat rival Joe Biden in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. But those leads were wiped out as election officials counted troves of mail-in ballots in the ensuing three days, putting Biden on track to win the election if the vote counts held up in court. Trump has vowed to launch wide-ranging legal proceedings, alleging irregularities within the vote counting process, claiming that if only “legal votes” were counted, he would’ve sailed to victory.
Hopkins is the “anonymous whistleblower” from Project Veritas’ earlier video released on Thursday night. In the video, Hopkins alleged that the postmaster ordered late ballots to be backdated. Weisenbach denied the allegation, dismissing the claim as “untrue,” but hung up on Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, providing no further comment as to the reported incident.
Hopkins said postal inspectors contacted him Friday and said that he had been implicated as the anonymous tipster. He said the inspectors wanted to get his side of the story to start an investigation, so he told them about what he’d seen and heard.
The Erie story followed other Project Veritas reports this week alleging mishandling of ballots in two other key states. Just as in the Pennsylvania case, a US Postal Service “whistleblower” in Michigan on Wednesday claimed that an employee was ordered to separate late ballots from regular mail so they could be stamped by hand with Tuesday’s date. In Nevada, a postal worker appeared to have agreed to give a bundle of unused ballots that had been sent to incorrect addresses to an undercover reporter.
We Are Pawns In A Bigger Game Than We Realize
By Chris Martenson | PeakProsperity | October 30, 2020
“I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others… Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”
~ Sherlock Holmes – The Adventures of Silver Blaze
Is it possible to make sense out of nonsense?
So much these days is an incoherent mess. It’s complete nonsense.
Page 1 excitedly beams about a glorious rebound in GDP. Yay economic growth!
Page 2 worryingly notes the near complete failure of Siberian arctic ice to reform during October and that hurricane Zeta (so many storms this year we’re now into the Greek alphabet!) has made punishing landfall.
Each is a narrative. Each has its own inner logic.
But they simply do not have any external coherence to each other. It’s nonsensical to be excited about rising economic growth while also concerned that each new unit of growth takes the planet further past a critical red line.
These narratives are incompatible. So which one should we pick?
Well, in the end, reality always has the final say. As Guy McPherson states: Nature bats last.
So better we choose to follow the narrative that hews closest to what reality actually is, vs what we desperately want it to be.
‘They’ Don’t Care About Us
While issues like climate change and economic growth may be difficult to fully grasp and unravel, direct threats to our lives &/or livelihoods are much more concrete and something we can react to and resist.
Such immediate and direct threats are now fully in play and, once again, they’re accompanied by narratives that are completely at odds with each other. I’m speaking of Covid and the ways in which our national and global managers are choosing to respond (or not).
It’s a truly incoherent mess about which both social media and the increasingly irrelevant media are working quite hard to misinform us.
The mainstream narrative about Covid-19, in the West, is this:
- It’s a quite deadly and novel disease
- There are no effective treatments
- Sadly, no double-blind placebo controlled trials exist to support some of the wild claims out there about various off-patent, cheap and widely available supplements and drugs
- Health authorities care about saving lives
- They care so much, in fact, that along with politicians they’ve decided to entirely shut down economies
- There’s a huge second wave rampaging across the US and Europe and there’s nothing we can do to limit it except shut down businesses and people’s ability to travel and gather
- You need to fear this virus and its associated disease
- All we can do is wait for a vaccine
The alternative narrative, one that I’ve uncovered after 9 months of almost daily research and reporting, is this:
- It’s not an especially dangerous disease and it’s certainly not novel
- There is a huge assortment of very effective, cheap and widely-available preventatives and treatments including (but not limited to)
- Vitamin D
- Ivermectin
- Hydroxychloroquine
- Zinc
- Selenium
- Famotidine (Pepcid)
- Melatonin
- Use of a combination of these mostly OTC supplements could reasonably be expected to drop the severity of illness and the already low mortality rate by 90% or (probably) more
- Western health authorities have shown either zero interest in the results of studies mainly conducted in poorer nations on these combination therapies or…
- They have actively run studies designed to fail so that these cheap, effective therapies could be dismissed or…
- Set up proper studies but which started late, have immensely long study periods and most likely won’t be done before a vaccine is hastily rushed through development.
By the way – every single one of my assertions and claims is backed by links and supporting documentation from scientific and clinical trials and studies. I am not conjecturing here; I am recounting the summary of ten months’ worth of inquiry.
The conclusion I draw from my narrative (vs. theirs) is that we can no longer assume that the public health or saving lives has anything to do with explaining or understanding the actions of these health “managers” (I cannot bring myself to use the word authorities).
After we eliminate the impossible – which is that somehow these massive, well-funded bodies have missed month after month of accumulating evidence in support of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, NAC, zinc, selenium and doxycycline/azithromycin – what remains must be the truth.
As improbable as it seems, the only conclusion we’re left with is that the machinery of politics, money and corporate psychopathy is suppressing life saving treatments because these managers have other priorities besides public health and saving lives.
This is a terribly difficult conclusion, because it means suspending so much that we hold dear. Things like the notion that people are basically good. The idea that the government generally means well. The thought that somehow when the chips are down and a crisis is afoot, good will emerge and triumph over evil.
I’m sorry to say, the exact opposite of all of that has emerged as true.
Medical doctors in the UK NHS system purposely used toxic doses of hydroxychloroquine far too late in the disease cycle to be of any help simply to ‘make a point’ about hydroxychloroquine. They rather desperately wanted that drug to fail, so they made it fail.
After deliberately setting their trial up for failure, they concluded: “Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help, and it even makes things worse.”
Note that in order to be able to make this claim, they had to be willing to cause harm — even to let people die. What kind of health official does that?
Not one who actually has compassion, a heart, or functioning level of sympathy. It’s an awful conclusion but it’s what remains after we eliminate the impossible.
Getting Past The Emotional Toll
Science has proven that cheap, safe and significantly protective compounds exist to limit both Covid-related death and disease severity.
Yet all of the main so-called health authorities in the major western countries are nearly completely ignoring, if not outright banning, these safe, cheap and effective compounds.
This is crazy-making for independent observers like me (and you) because the data is so clear. It’s irrefutable at this point. These medicines and treatments not only work, but work really, really well.
However most people will be unable to absorb the data, let alone move beyond it to wrestle with the implications. Why? Because such data is belief-shattering. Absorbing this information is not an intellectual process; it’s an emotional one.
I don’t know why human nature decided to invest so much in developing a tight wall around the belief systems that control our actions and thoughts. But it has.
I’m sure there was some powerful evolutionary advantage. One that’s now being hijacked daily by social media AI programs to nudge us in desired directions. One that’s being leveraged by shabby politicians, hucksters, fake gurus, and con men to steer advantage away from the populace and towards themselves.
The neural wiring of beliefs is what it is. We have to recognize that and move on.
Some people will be much faster in their adjustment process than others.
To move past the deeply troubling information laid out before us requires us to be willing to endure a bit of turbulence. It’s the only way.
For you to navigate these troubling times safely and successfully, you’ll need to see as clearly as possible the true nature of the game actually being played. To see what the rules really are – not what you’ve been told they are, or what you wish or hope they are.
The Manipulation Underway
The data above strongly supports the conclusion that our national health managers don’t actually care about public health generally or your health specifically.
If indeed true, then the beliefs preventing most people from accepting this likely include:
- Wanting to believe that people are good (a biggie for most people)
- Trust and faith in the medical system (really big)
- Faith in authority (ginormous)
There are many other operative belief systems I could also list. But this is sufficient to get the ball rolling.
Picking just one, how hard would it be for someone to let go of, say, trust in the medical system?
That would be pretty hard in most cases.
First not trusting the medical system might mean having to wonder if a loved one might have died unnecessarily while being treated. Or realizing that you’re now going to have to research the living daylights out of every medical decision before agreeing to it. Or worrying that your medications might be more harmful to you over the long haul than helpful (which is true in many more cases than most appreciate). It might mean having your personal heroes dinged by suspicion — perhaps even your father or mother who worked in the medical profession. It would definitely require a complete reorientation away from being able to trust anything you read in a newspaper, or see on TV, about new pharmaceutical “breakthroughs”.
Trust, which is safe and warm and comforting, then turns into skepticism; which is lonelier and insists upon active mental involvement.
But, as always, hard work comes with benefits — with a healthy level of skepticism and involvement, the families of those recruited into the deadly UK RECOVERY trial could have looked at the proposed doses of HCQ (2,400 mg on day one! Toxic!) and said, “Not now, not ever!” and maybe have saved the life of their loved one.
Look at that tangled mess of undesirables that comes with unpacking that one belief: regret, uncertainty, shame, doubt, fallen idols, and vastly more additional effort. Are all up for grabs when we decide to look carefully at the actions of our national health managers during Covid.
Which is why most people simply choose not to look. It’s too hard.
I get it. I have a lot of compassion for why people choose not to go down that path. It can get unpleasant in a hurry.
But, just like choosing to ignore a nagging chest pain, turning away in denial has its own consequences.
The Coming ‘Great Reset’
My coverage of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) and Covid-19 (the associated disease) has led me to uncover some things that have made me deeply uncomfortable about our global and national ‘managers’. Shameful things, really. Scary things in their implications for what we might reasonably expect (or not expect, more accurately) from the future.
Once we get past the shock of seeing just how patently corrupt they’ve been, we have to ask both What’s next? and What should I do?
After all, you live in a system whose managers are either too dumb to understand the Vitamin D data (very unlikely) or have decided that they’d rather not promote it to the general populace for some reason. It’s a ridiculously safe vitamin with almost zero downside and virtually unlimited upside.
Either they’re colossally dumb, or this is a calculated decision. They’re not dumb. So we have to ask: What’s the calculation being performed here? It’s not public safety. It’s not your personal health. So… What is it?
This is our line of questioning and observation. It’s like the short story by Arthur Conan Doyle in Silver Blaze that many of us informally know as “the case of the dog that didn’t bark”. As the story goes, because of a missing clue – a dog who remained silent as a murder was committed – this conclusion could be drawn: the dog was already familiar with the killer!
The silence around Vitamin D alone is extremely telling. It is the pharmacological dog that did not bark.
One true inference suggests others. Here, too, we can deduce from the near total silence around Vitamin D that the health managers would prefer not to talk about it. They don’t want people to know. That much is painfully clear.
Such lack of promotion (let alone appropriate study) of safe, effective treatments is a thread that, if tugged, can unravel the whole rug. The silence tells us everything we need to know.
Do they want people to suffer and die? I don’t know. My belief systems certainly hope not. Perhaps the death and suffering are merely collateral damage as they pursue a different goal — money, power, politics? Simply the depressing result of a contentious election year? More than that?
We’ve now reached the jumping off point where we may well find out just how far down the rabbit hole goes.
A massive grab for tighter control over the global populace is now being fast-tracked at the highest levels. Have you heard of the Great Reset yet?
If not, you soon will.
In Part 2: The Coming ‘Great Reset’ we lay out everything we know so far about the multinational proposal to transform nearly every aspect of global industry, commerce, trade, and social structure.
If you read on, be ready and willing to let go of cherished beliefs and to suspend what you know to be true. Because none of us has that in hand. It’s going to be a wild ride from here.
Something very big is afoot and I suspect that Covid-19 is merely an excuse providing cover for a much bigger power grab over the world’s wealth and peoples.
Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).
New study shows low-carb diets would save BILLIONS currently wasted on drugs. But will Big Pharma allow it?
By Dr Malcomb Kendrick | November 3, 2020
If you want to avoid dying of COVID19, one of the most important things you can do, if you are overweight, is to shed the pounds
‘…. in the first meta-analysis of its kind, published on 26 August in Obesity Reviews, an international team of researchers pooled data from scores of peer-reviewed papers capturing 399,000 patients. They found that people with obesity who contracted SARS-CoV-2 were 113% more likely than people of healthy weight to land in the hospital, 74% more likely to be admitted to an ICU, and 48% more likely to die.’ 1
Why? Well, the ‘why’ centres around the damaging effect of raised blood glucose on endothelial cells and… it gets complicated.
For now, though, the most important thing is not to understand the complex metabolic and physiological pathways involved, it is simply to help people to lose weight, and this is where Dr David Unwin comes in.
For years now he has believed, as I do, that the main driver of weight gain, leading on to type 2 (T2) diabetes, is a high carbohydrate diet.
This, of course, is the exact opposite of what we have been told for decades by the ‘experts’ who demonise fat and promote carbohydrates. We have the ‘eat-well’ plate, and the ‘food pyramid’, and hundreds of thousands of dieticians around the world, all promoting carbohydrates as the ‘healthy’ option.
Dutifully following this advice, the entire population of the western world has become fatter, and fatter… and fatter. By the way, this is not a coincidence; it is cause and effect.
Getting back to Dr Unwin, years ago he despaired of ever getting any of his patients to lose weight. It was so disheartening that he furtively studied his pension plan, and dreamed of retirement, so fed up was he becoming. Then one day a patient came in who had lost a lot of weight and kept it off.
At first this woman was reluctant to say how she had done it, as she feared the inevitable criticism. In the end, she told Dr Unwin that she had lost weight, and kept it off, by eating a low carbohydrate diet. In Dr Unwin’s own words:
‘A few years ago, I was interested to find out how a patient had improved her diabetic control. She confessed she had ignored my advice and learnt a much better way to look after herself, from the internet. I suppressed my wounded pride and looked at the Low Carb Forum on Diabetes.co.uk There were thousands of type two diabetics on there ignoring their doctors – and getting great results (now that is just not allowed).’ 2
Yes, Dr Unwin did not criticize, instead he was intrigued. Could this possibly be true? It went against everything he had been told about healthy eating, and weight loss, and T2 diabetes. Fat has twice the calories, per gram, as carbohydrates and suchlike. Eating fat, he believed, makes you fat, and then you develop diabetes, and heart disease.
Dr Unwin did more research, then he made the decision to work with patients, mainly those with diabetes, to see if a low carbohydrate diet could be beneficial. Lo and behold, it was … very beneficial. It was like a miracle cure.
In 2014 he published a paper on his results on a small number of patients.
‘Low carbohydrate diet to achieve weight loss and improve HbA1c in type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes: experience from one general practice.’
‘It was observed that a low carbohydrate diet achieved substantial weight loss in all patients and brought about normalisation of blood glucose control in 16 out of 18 patients. At the same time, plasma lipid profiles improved, and BP fell allowing discontinuation of antihypertensive therapy in some individuals…
Conclusions Based on our work so far, we can understand the reasons for the internet enthusiasm for a low carbohydrate diet; the majority of patients lose weight rapidly and fairly easily; predictably the HbA1c levels are not far behind. Cholesterol levels, liver enzymes and BP levels all improved. This approach is simple to implement and much appreciated by people with diabetes.’ 3
Now, he has published results of a much larger study, on nearly two hundred patients over a six-year period. It is called. ‘Insights from a general practice service evaluation supporting a lower carbohydrate diet in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and prediabetes’ Published in BMJ nutrition 4.
Here are the main findings, which I nicked directly from the press release:
- 46% drug-free T2 diabetes remission
- Significant improvements in weight, blood pressure and lipid profiles
- 93% remission of prediabetes
- £50,885 annual saving on the Norwood GP practice NHS diabetes drug budget
- If every GP practice in England spent the same on drugs for diabetes per patient as Norwood the NHS could save £277 million!
- Older patients can do as well as younger ones with a low carb approach.
- The participants who started with the worst blood sugars saw the greatest improvements in diabetic control
- Four individuals came off insulin altogether
- Total weight loss for the 199 participants was 1.6 metric tons!
This paper will be attacked, of course. There are massive financial interests involved here. As stated, if every GP practice in the UK used the low carb approach, the NHS could save £277 million (~$350m) in drug costs. Scaled up to the US, with much higher drugs costs, one could be looking at around $2Bn/year. Around the world, who knows, but vast sums of money.
So, you can imagine the joy that this paper will be met with in pharmaceutical company boardrooms around the world. The words ‘lead’ and ‘balloon’, spring to mind. Equally the massive low-fat, high carb food manufacturers will be throwing their hands up in horror – ‘my bonus, my bonus… nooooo.’ You can take your low carb yoghurts and….
As for the rest of us. I can assure you that Dr David Unwin has only ever been interested in one thing. Working out how to help people lose weight and control their diabetes. He has achieved this.
Will his research now be taken up by the authorities around the world? Will we move away from promoting a high carbohydrate diet? You have to be joking. There is far too much money to be lost by companies who exert tight control over the world of medical research, and whose lobbyists swarm around the politicians in rich countries.
Which is a damn shame, because more than ever in this endless COVID19 pandemic, obesity represents a health crisis. This paper, and the tireless work by Dr David Unwin, clearly tells us what we need to do, now, urgently. His approach won’t work instantly, and it won’t work for everyone – nothing ever does. However, it represents hope. It could save hundreds and thousands of lives. Better than any vaccine?
Thank you, once again, Dr Unwin. A man who I think of as a friend. Your research should be shouted from the rooftops. I can only do my bit.
1: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/why-covid-19-more-deadly-people-obesity-even-if-theyre-young
4: https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/02/bmjnph-2020-000072
Israel Wins U.S. Election
Congress and White House work together to reward the Jewish state
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • November 3, 2020
The U.S. election will end today, more or less, and we Americans will suffer another four years of putting up with serial nonsense out of a White House and Congress that could care less about us no matter who is elected. Whether the party where everything changes or the party where everything remains the same wins the inevitable result will be further aggrandizement of authoritarian power combined with increased distancing of government from the people who are ruled.
Amidst all the gloom, however, there is one great success story. That is the tale of how Israel and its friends in politics and financial circles have been able to screw every possible advantage out of both major parties simultaneously and apparently effortlessly. Israel might be the true undisputed winner in the 2020 election even though it was not on the ballot and was hardly mentioned at all during the campaign.
Jewish billionaires with close ties to Israel have been courted by the two major parties, both to come up with contributions and to urge their friends in the oligarch club and media to also respond favorably. The Democrats’ largest single donor is entertainment mogul Haim Saban while the Republicans rely on casino multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson. It is estimated that 60% of the political contributions for the Democrats comes from Jewish sources and Saban is the single largest contributor. He is also an Israeli holding dual citizenship. Adelson, who may also hold dual citizenship and is married to an Israeli, is the major supporter of the Republicans, having coughed up more than $100 million in recent elections.
Both Saban and Adelson have not been shy about supporting Israel as their first priority. Saban is on record as supporting Joe Biden “because of his track record on supporting Israel and its alliance with the United States.” Adelson, who was drafted into the U.S. Army in the 1950s, has said that he would much rather have served in the Israel Defense Force. Saban and Adelson are joined in their love fest with Israel by a number of Israel-firsters in Congress and the Administration, all eager to shower unlimited political support, money and weapons on the Jewish state.
In the latest manifestation of noblesse oblige, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper stopped off in Israel last week to present his counterparts with a significant bit of assistance, all funded by the American taxpayer, of course. According to sources in Washington and Jerusalem, the U.S. “will grant Israel direct access to highly classified satellites such as the missile detection birds known as SBIRS and ensure Israel gets critical defense platforms in a very short time by using production slots planned for the U.S armed forces.” Israel will also be given “deeper access to the core avionic systems” of the new F-35 fighter that it has been obtaining from Washington.
The claimed rationale for the upgrade is the Congressionally mandated requirement for the U.S. to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” in light of the impending sale of the F-35 to Arab states that have recently established diplomatic relations with Israel. At the time, Israeli sources were suggesting that the Jewish state might need $8 billion in new military hardware upgrades to maintain its advantage over its neighbors. It is presumed that the American taxpayer will foot the bill, even though there is a serious financial crisis going on in the U.S.
The satellite detection system operates from aerial platforms that are deployed on helicopters. The astute reader will notice that no U.S. security interest is involved in the latest giveaway to Israel. On the contrary, Israel will be receiving material from “production slots planned for the U.S. armed forces,” reducing America’s own ability to detect incoming missiles. And there will also be considerable damage to American defense interests in that Israel will inevitably steal the advanced F-35 technology that they will be given access to, re-engineer it for their own defense industries and sell it to clients in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They have done so before, selling U.S. developed missile technology to China.
Congress is also doing its bit. A bill, the so-called “U.S.-Israel Common Defense Authorization Act,” is making its way through the House of Representatives and will authorize the provision of U.S. manufactured bunker buster bombs to Israel. As the bombs would only be useful in Israel’s neighborhood to bomb hardened sites in Iran, the message being sent is obvious. The Massive Ordnance Penetrator weighs 30,000 pounds and is capable of destroying targets located deep underground. Oddly, Israel doesn’t have a plane capable of carrying that weight so the presumption is that the White House will also have to provide the bomber. The bill is co-sponsored by two leading Israel firsters in Congress Democrat Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Republican Brian Mast of Florida.
Israel is also seeking an upgrade of some of its other fighter aircraft. It reportedly has approached the Pentagon seeking to buy the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, a single-seat, twin-engine, all-weather stealth tactical fighter aircraft that was originally developed for the United States Air Force (USAF). Its stealth capability, top speed, maneuverability combined with advanced air-to-air and air-to-ground weapon systems, makes it the best air superiority fighter in the world.
Unfortunately for Israel, the F-22 is not currently available and is only operated by the USAF. Current U.S. federal law prohibits the export of the plane to anyone to protect its top secret advanced stealth technology as well as a number of advances in weaponry and situational awareness. But if deference to Israel’s wishes is anything to go by, one might safely bet that the Jewish state will have received approval to acquire the plane by inauguration day in January. And it is a safe bet that Israeli defense contractors will have reverse engineered the stealth and other features soon thereafter.
The U.S. government has been pandering to Israel in other ways, to include labeling, and sanctioning, prominent human rights groups that have criticized the Jewish state as anti-Semitic. It has also strengthened existing sanctions against Iranian financial institutions, reportedly in an attempt to make it more difficult for a President Biden to reinstate the suspended Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that sought to monitor the Iranian nuclear program. The sanctions come on top of other moves to destroy the Iranian economy, to include “… that the U.S., along with Israel, has in recent months carried out sabotage attacks inside Iran, destroying power plants, aluminum and chemical factories, a medical clinic and 7 ships at the port of Bushehr…”
Other recent developments favoring Israel include Congress’s legislating Israeli government veto authority over U.S. sales of weapons to any other Middle Eastern nation. The bill is called “Guaranteeing Israel’s QME [Qualitative Military Edge] Act of 2020” (H.R. 8494). There has also been the expansion by Executive Order of U.S. funded illegal West Bank Jewish settlements’ science development projects that will eventually compete with American companies.
In truth, the United States has become Israel’s bitch and there is hardly a politician or journalist who has the courage to say so. Congress and the media have been so corrupted by money emanating from the Israeli lobby that they cannot do enough to satisfy America’s rulers in Jerusalem. And for those who do not succumb to the money there is always intimidation, career-ending weaponized accusations of holocaust-denial and anti-Semitism. It is all designed to produce one result: whoever wins in American elections doesn’t matter as long as Israel gets what it wants. And it almost always gets what it wants.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Congress cranks out legislation for Israel: The details
By Kathryn Shihadah | If Americans Knew | October 31, 2020
Since Israel’s founding in 1948, it has received (adjusting for inflation) more than $252.7 billion from the U.S. – an amount that the majority of Americans consider excessive. In spite of its consistent, long, documented history of frequent human rights violations (often not reported in US media) and discrimination, Congress seeks to reward Israel and chastise Israel’s victim (read more about aid to Israel here and here).
The sheer quantity – and expense – of the advocacy work that our Congress has done on behalf of this pariah state are staggering: consider the hours spent in meetings, negotiation, research, and floor debates, the trips and calls to Israel, to name a few.
And while only a handful of the almost one hundred proposed bills will become law, our legislators will have spent their time (and our money) on them, instead of addressing American needs and concerns – especially in this time of pandemic, economic crisis, and civil unrest. Plus, the legislation that is enacted inevitably cost Americans taxpayers massive amount of money.
Skim the partial list below to get a taste of what our legislators have been doing in the last two years on behalf of Israel; for more detail, please read this, this, and this – commentary on the legislation we have provided throughout the congressional session.
Another useful tool is the congressional scoreboards created by If Americans Knew. These track all Israel-related legislation and who supported it in the current session.
LEGISLATION FOR MORE WEAPONS TO ISRAEL
A study of military aid to Israel uncovers a bottomless pit that only starts with $3.3 billion per year (recently changed from a “maximum” to a “minimum” amount of assistance), guaranteed for the next ten years. Another $500 million is immediately added each year, specifically for Israel’s Iron Dome, a massive (and expensive) anti-missile defense weapon.
On top of this, some bills expend an additional $9 million per day on behalf of Israel, making the combined total $19 million per day on behalf of Israel (and this estimate may be low).
Iron Dome battery in Ashkelon, April 2011 (Flickr)
Iron Dome is used to counter small projectiles shot from Gaza, the main form of resistance coming from Palestinians in the Strip. Rockets from Gaza have killed a total of 30 Israelis in the past twenty years, while Israeli airstrikes again Gaza have killed thousands of Palestinians.
S.3176 and H.R.1837 lay out the basic premise for the $3.3 billion a year. In addition, the legislation would give the President authority to provide Israel with unlimited weaponry and assistance if “needed” without prior authorization from Congress.
These bills also lay the groundwork for millions in new funding for various additional programs benefiting Israel (which will be discussed below). (Read more about some unscrupulous Congressional actions related to S.3176.)
These bills defy the Leahy Laws, which clearly state that, “when credible evidence of human rights violations exists, US aid must stop.” (For more on the Leahy Laws, read this.)
Other military aid bills include S.4049, S.4474, H.R.8494, S.Res.669, H.R.7617, H.R.7608, and H.R.1795.
LEGISLATION ON US COLLABORATION WITH ISRAEL
Collaboration with Israel (i.e. entangling us with a foreign pariah country) is a recurring theme in Congress. Below are several examples among many.
H.R.1459 endorses collaboration in security and law enforcement training between the US and Israel to “promote security against terrorism, peaceful resolutions to community disputes, and the protection of spaces for civil society.”
American law enforcement personnel have received training from Israel for years – in spite of the brutality of its military and police.
S.3775 seeks, in the words of Foundation for Defense of Democracies (recognized as an arm of the Israel lobby) reports that this bill seeks to create a “permanent and dedicated forum” for “[sharing] intelligence-informed military capabilities.”
H.R.2488 and S.2309 and H.R.7148 seeks to bring the US and Israel together to collaborate on cybersecurity and defense technology, in spite of Israel’s history of spying on the US, infringing on the decisions of our President, and attacking an American Naval ship.
S.4228 stresses binational collaboration between the US and “Middle Eastern countries, such as Israel” in developing hydropower technology – adding an irrelevant caveat that prioritizes countries with trade relationships with Israel.
H.R.7613 would set aside money for many American projects, including hurricane preparedness, clean energy. Inexplicably, it includes millions for a “US-Israel Cooperative Energy Center.”
S.3722 and H.R.6829 authorize funding for the US to collaborate with Israel in the development of health technologies, including COVID-19. Ironically, Israel has shut down or destroyed a number of Palestinian COVID clinics in recent months.
S.4537, a pandemic economic recovery bill, includes sections on safely returning Americans to work; job creation; retirement security; safely returning kids to school; COVID cures and treatment; and miscellaneous. Israel is embedded in this bill too. Under “COVID cures and treatment,” the bill proposes $12 million over a three-year period to collaborate with Israel (a tiny country funded by American taxpayers) vis-a-vis the coronavirus.
H.R.5063 is legislation seeking to increase US-Israel collaboration on anti-drone weapons – specifically for use against Iran. (Israel has been targeting Iran for decades.) The bill would bankroll Israel’s already lucrative development of cyberweapons, which would then be tested on Palestinians and sold around the world – including to human rights violators and enemies of the U.S.
S.4522 seeks to authorize “such sums as are necessary” for a US-Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund. (Some Americans might wish this money to instead go to struggling American farmers.)
H.R.5605 proposes funding for a US-Israel PTSD Collaborative Research Program. If Americans Knew and B’Tselem are among many organizations that have reported on Israel’s victim-blaming and whitewashing of Palestinian suffering and extensive PTSD.
Vox reports that between 2005 and 2014, 23 out of every 24 conflict-related deaths have been Palestinian. Tragically, Palestinians’ experiences would provide a more abundant field for PTSD research than Israelis’. 54% of Gazan children who experienced heavy bombardment in the 2014 Israeli incursion known as Operation Protective Edge, suffer from severe PTSD. (Fyi – Vastly more Palestinians are killed than Israelis.)
In case some potential areas of collaboration had been overlooked in all of these bills, Res.324 “Recognizing the importance of the US-Israel economic relationship,” makes a blanket statement “encouraging new areas of cooperation” (and US money funneled to Israel).
LEGISLATION ON ANTI-SEMITISM AND HOLOCAUST EDUCATION
S.852, H.R.4009, H.R.221, H.Res.72, H.Res.241, S.Res.189, H.Res.183, H.R.943, S.2085, H.Res.782, and H.Res.837 cover various angles of an important topic: anti-Semitism. The issue turns a corner in each of these bills when they improperly equate anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel (an Israeli official once explained that the antisemitism accusation is a “trick” to cover up Israeli crimes.) The US staunchly defends Israel against all reproof, whether from the UN, journalists, or private citizens (see BDS, below). (For more, read this, this, this, and this.)
LEGISLATION DEMONIZING ISRAEL’S ENEMIES, CONGRATULATING ITS “FRIENDS”
S.2132 is designed to put Palestine in an impossible situation: choosing between financial solvency and international legitimacy. The bill would make the Palestinian government liable in potentially devastating lawsuits – unless it stops its quest for justice and recognition in the world (read about the bill here).
International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Netherlands
S.Res. 570 opposes the possible prosecution by the International Criminal Court of both Americans and Israelis validly accused of war crimes. Instead of calling for due process, the bill calls for impunity and considers the ICC a foe. (One of the few bills not on behalf of Israel, H.Res.855 points out that the US has never become a member of the ICC, and encourages it to do so.)
H.R.28 seeks to withhold aid from any country that disagrees with the US at the United Nations – referring specifically to the official American position of defending Israel’s atrocities.
H.Res.727 affirms US support for Israel’s “right to defend itself from terrorist attacks” and condemns Hamas rockets (without condemning Israel for the violence that brought on resistance).
In the year before the resolution was introduced, four Israelis had been killed by rockets from Gaza; Israeli snipers and airstrikes had in the same period killed over 150 Gazans.
H.R.2343, the so-called “Peace and Tolerance in Palestinian Education Act,” addresses the alleged failure of the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA to keep Palestinian textbooks free from incitement or intolerance toward Israeli Jews.
These allegations have persisted for years thanks to a faux, pro-Israel “peace” organization called the “Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace” (more info here). In fact, the opposite is true: Israeli textbooks consistently “marginalize Palestinians, legitimize Israeli military action and reinforce Jewish-Israeli territorial identity.”
H.R.1850, S.2680, H.R.4411, and H.Res.1131 all address the issue of terrorism – a word that means different things to different groups. What Israel considers terrorism is, to Palestinians, resistance against illegal occupation; what Israel considers military action, Palestinians see as state terrorism – consider this and this.
The most basic fact that these bills ignore is that while Israel’s 53-year occupation of Palestinian territories violates international law, resistance against that occupation is a protected right. (They also ignore the way the state of Israel was established.)
The charge of Palestinian “terrorism” is problematic to say the least, given the relative impotence of Palestinian weapons and the low number of Israeli victims, vs. Israel’s advanced military and the high number of Palestinian victims it creates (read more about terrorism here and about Israel’s actions here).
Israel has been named an exporter of terrorism, as reported by Amnesty International. Two of its first prime ministers had led terrorist groups.
Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reports that, between 2000 and 2019, Palestinian militants killed a total of 301 Israeli civilians, while Israeli security forces killed over 5,200 Palestinians who were not involved in hostilities.
S.4482 seeks to police the Arab world, hunting down governments that punish their citizens who engage in personal relationships with Israelis. While the US wants to scold Arab countries for resentment toward Israel, it allows Israel to attack its Palestinian neighbors and violate their human rights daily.
H.R.7850 seeks to police Iran and the resistance groups that it may support. The bill is part of the ongoing effort by Israel and its partisans to target Iran (read more about Iran here and here).
S.Res.709, S.Res.713, H.Res.1110 declare that the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the State of Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are historic achievements, and encourage other Arab countries to follow suit, ignoring the issue of justice for Palestinians.
The normalization of relations with Arab countries gives Israel a veneer of legitimacy while giving them access to US-made weapons – and giving the US and Israel access to Arab money.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was jubilant: “Everyone can see the fruits of this peace accord. The UAE committed to bringing massive investments to Israel, hundreds of millions of shekels. It’s already happening and it will happen even more..”
More treaties are expected, bought and paid for by the US.
H.Res.138, H.Res.258, and S.Res.121also celebrate improving Arab-Israel relations.
MISCELLANEOUS PRO ISRAEL LEGISLATION
H.R.3723 addresses the issue of aiding drought-stricken areas of the US, and prioritizes projects that have worked with international partners “such as the state of Israel.”
There is great irony in the idea of Israeli experts assisting with water projects in the US: is simple: Israel provides plenteous water to its Jewish residents for free (including the 600,000 that live illegally on Palestinian land), but is perpetrating a water catastrophe in the Palestinian territories – refusing to provide water to some areas, selling it at exorbitant prices to others. In Gaza, water is “scarce and mostly unfit for human use.”
In several pieces of legislation – including H.Res.326, H.Res. 518, S.Res.234, and S.567 – Congress attempts to impose decisions about land in Middle East countries (some of the decisions contravene international law).
H.R.5595, S.Res.120, H.R.336, H.Res.314, H.Res.348, and H.Res.246 seek to extinguish the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement, which puts nonviolent pressure on Israel to obey international law. BDS patterns itself after the movement that aided in ending apartheid in South Africa, and “upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.” Much has been written about BDS (for example, read this and this).
S.Res.745 and H.Res.1173 honor “the life, legacy, and example of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the 25th anniversary of his death” – a man whose life’s work has been whitewashed to erase atrocities against the Palestinian people.
H.R.7900 addresses the issue of organ donation in the US, and gives a shout-out to Israel for its “exemplary” program – although Spain’s is considered the best in the world, and Israel made improvements only to reform its reputation as a favorite destination for illegal organ trafficking.
S.3409 and H.R.6392, S.919, H.R.914, H.R.336, H.Res.12, S.Res.153, and H.Res.310 propose various other perks for Israel.
LEGISLATION THAT APPEARS TO BE PRO-PALESTINE, BUT ISN’T
S.Res.171 seeks to restore economic aid to the Palestinians without bringing an end to the programs that caused Palestinians to be in need of aid – thus enabling Israel to continue unchecked in its oppression.
H.R.3104 promotes “joint economic development and finance ventures between Palestinian entrepreneurs and companies and those in the US and Israel.” Rep. Chris Coons, one of the bill’s sponsors, explained, “job creation is the best way to turn people away from violence” – implying that unarmed Palestinians are the violent party, and that employment – not freedom or self-determination – is the solution.
PALESTINIAN RIGHTS RECOGNIZED
H.R.8050 would prohibit the US government from recognizing Israel’s claim of sovereignty over parts of the West Bank, or assisting Israel with those efforts – because it violates international law. The international community, many Israelis, and many staunch Israel partisans, agree.
H.R.2407 seeks to protect Palestinian children from incarceration and torture by Israel using US aid money. It seeks not to end the practice, but only American complicity in it. (Read more about the bill here.) Although its language is mild and pro-child, the bill has been attacked aggressively by pro-Israel groups.
H.Res.496, the only pro-boycott bill, supports the right of Americans to take part in a political practice long used by Americans across the political spectrum. The bill does not mention Israel or Palestine – yet it has been denounced as “anti-Semitic.”
If Americans Knew has checked every legislator’s voting record on every Israel-related bill since January 2019, and reported them for your information. We hope you will make your voice heard in this election – and throughout the next congressional session – to bring accountability to our government vis-a-vis Israel, and to Israel vis-a-vis Palestine.
To see how Senators have been voting view this detailed Scoreboard.
Kathryn Shihadah is staff writer for If Americans Knew. She also writes for MintPress News and blogs at Palestine Home.
Mysterious Hillary Emailgate Whistleblower & FBI’s Apparent Decades-Long Cover-Up Ploy
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 30.10.2020
The Hunter Biden scandal recently propelled by the Trump campaign has much in common with the controversy surrounding the Clintons, Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel says, shedding light on a story of a mysterious high-profile whistleblower who was apparently ignored by the FBI in 2016.
Days before The New York Post dropped a bomb on the Bidens alleging that the Democratic presidential contender and his son were involved into a “pay-to-play” scheme, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson and Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel published two separate stories about a neglected State Department whistleblower who informed the FBI about the potential harm to US national interests posed by Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified data in January 2016.
High-Profile Whistleblower’s Report Overlooked by Comey
The whistleblower’s letter dated 10 January 2016 was sent to then-FBI chief Jim Comey. It detailed how the ex-secretary of state used her unclassified server system to conduct government business, thus exposing US secret intelligence information, and suggested that her entourage and other government officials were aware of that the entire time.
In addition to this, the whistleblower, who, according to the document, had served in the Armed Forces and the Department of State for many years, provided specific recommendations as to who the bureau needed to interview in order to get further evidence and expressed willingness to testify before the agency officials having “certain TS/SCI clearances.”
After sending the letter on 10 January, the individual in question personally visited the FBI’s premises in Washington on 27 January 2016 to find out whether the exposé reached its destination and provided his credentials to intelligence officers.
An FBI report describing this visit was written only a month later, on 22 February 2016, with copies sent to FBI agents Jonathan Moffa and Peter Strzok. The rest is history: on 5 July 2016 then FBI Director James Comey announced that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case against Hillary Clinton for the emails.
Judging from the whistleblower’s credentials, knowledge of the matter and the provided evidence, his letter was worth examination and required certain investigative activities, argued CIA veteran Johnson and Wall Street analyst Ortel in their op-eds.
“Failure by Comey to even interact with the whistleblower in January 2016 stands in stark contrast to anti Trump efforts launched by the FBI before, during and after the 2016 election”, says Charles Ortel. “Moreover, decisions to let Hillary Clinton and others off for mishandling classified information also appear deeply suspicious.”It appears strange that the bureau declined to learn more from the whistleblower given that it had started investigating the Clinton email server on 10 July 2015, according to the analyst.
“Then, when the determined whistleblower followed up by visiting the FBI Washington Field Office later in January 2016, why did it take so long to write an internal FBI report explaining what happened and what the concerns were?” asks Ortel. “More recently, did US Attorney John Huber examine the whistleblower materials? If not, why not? And, is John Durham evaluating all relevant records? I certainly hope so.”
Whistleblowers Apparently Ignored or Intimidated
Apart from investigating the Clinton email case, Jim Comey also started to look into the Clinton Foundation in January 2016, exactly when the whistleblower filed his complaint, the Wall Street analyst notes.
According to Ortel, who has been conducting a private investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud, the charity supposedly worked as a vehicle in the Clintons’ “pay-to-play” operations with foreign governments. Hillary’s unsecured email server potentially could be used to conduct this business while avoiding the Freedom of Information Act provisions since the FOIA requires the full or partial disclosure of the United States government’s documents upon request.
The FBI has an almost two-decade record of overlooking the Clintons’ questionable activities and their charity’s messy financial documentation under former FBI directors Robert Mueller (2001 – 2013) and Jim Comey (2013 – 2017) and later on, according to the analyst.
The aforementioned State Department whistleblower was not the only one who has stepped forward to report the Clintons to the US authorities.
In June 2018, FBI whistleblower Nate Cain delivered 450 pages of documents concerning Hillary Clinton’s supposed role in the Uranium One deal to Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz. In November 2018, 16 FBI agents stormed Cain’s Maryland home, ignoring his argument about whistleblower protection and accused him of possessing “stolen federal property”.
How High Political Offices Were ‘Monetised’
The FBI’s alleged cover-up of political power clans’ questionable activities has not been limited to the Clintons and apparently involved the Department of Justice as well, Ortel believes.
“Going all the way back to 1992, the Clintons and their backers seem to have monetised high political offices to enrich themselves”, he suggests. “Along the way, it seems likely that national security was compromised, and that other dynastic political families emulated the Clintons. The evolution of unregulated globalism and coordinated lowering of benchmark interest rates from 1988 forward created too many opportunities for oligarchs of all nationalities to exploit under-paid but powerful politicians, investigators, judges, and influence shapers.”
The recent scandal surrounding the Bidens’ alleged quid-pro-quo schemes involving foreign businessmen and officials has also triggered public debate over what some see as the FBI’s inaction. Bombshell emails released by The New York Post came from the so-called “hard drive from hell”, a copy of the one allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The FBI has acknowledged that it has had possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop for quite a while. It still remains unclear whether the “damning” messages, emails and photos circulated by The Post came from the original hard drive. If they did, the bureau’s silence appears suspicious, according to the analyst.
“If President Trump wins re-election – a strong likelihood at this moment – Durham’s major challenge will be to break the will of co-conspirators to fight at trials, rather than to negotiate guilty plea agreements”, Ortel deems. “The public record strongly suggests that many once-powerful politicians and bureaucrats committed serious crimes. Managing through this will require airing lots of “dirty laundry”. I hope President Trump and his team take the courageous decision to release information that implicates these traitors and details their crimes, little of which may shock thinking members of the electorate.”
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NATO Sanctions and the Coming Global Diesel Fuel Disaster
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 11.04.2022
Amid the ongoing global inflation crisis, NATO heads of state and mainstream media repeat a mantra that high energy prices are a direct result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine since end of February. The reality is that it is the western sanctions that are responsible. Those sanctions including cutting SWIFT interbank access for key Russian banks and some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed, are hardly having an impact on the military actions in Ukraine. What many overlook is the fact that they are increasingly impacting the economies of the West, especially the EU and USA. A closer look at the state of the global supply of diesel fuel is alarming. But Western sanctions planners at the US Treasury and the EU know fully well what they are doing. And it bodes ill for the world economy.
While most of us rarely think about diesel fuel as anything other than a pollutant, in fact it is essential to the entire world economy in a way few energy sources are. The director general of Fuels Europe, part of the European Petroleum Refiners Association, stated recently, “… there is a clear link between diesel and GDP, because almost everything that goes into and out of a factory goes using diesel.” … continue
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