Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Сriminal roots of Kosovo further exposed by Thaçi’s indictment in The Hague

By Paul Antonopoulos | June 29, 2020

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić was due to meet Kosovo leader Hashim Thaçi on Saturday at the White House. This was at the behest of US envoy for Kosovo-Serbia negotiations, Richard Grenell, after his much-publicized success in organizing the meeting. However, his success was short lived after Thaçi became indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity on June 24 by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office.

The US meeting has been put on hold until further notice, but as Vučić revealed, the EU will take over discussions between Belgrade and Pristina at a later date. It appears that France and Germany specifically will spearhead these meeting with the French Embassy in Kosovo saying on Thursday that “France and Germany expect Dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia to resume soon. Together with Chancellor Merkel, President Macron remains ready to host a Summit in Paris.” German Ambassador to Kosovo Christian Heldt tweeted: “Our governments stand ready to be helpful with [a] proposed meeting in July.”

Due to prosecutors in The Hague indicting Thaçi’s alleged war crimes during the 1998-99 Kosovo war, Kosovo’s new prime minister, Avdullah Hoti, said he could not travel to Washington to conduct talks with Serbia.

“Thank you, Prime Minister Hoti. We understand your decision and we look forward to rescheduling the meeting soon,” Grenell wrote on Twitter.

US President Donald Trump was hoping for a foreign policy victory just before the upcoming elections, but rather, the Kosovo experiment created by Bill Clinton in the 1990’s is beginning to crack. Thaçi in 1993 became a prominent member of the “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA) and became responsible for the finances and armaments of the terrorist organization. The KLA financed its activities by turning Kosovo into a drug smuggling hub to distribute heroin and cocaine throughout Europe.

A 2008 report by German intelligence service BND accuses Thaçi of having deep involvement in organized crime, saying that “The key players (including Thaçi) are intimately involved in inter-linkages between politics, business, and organised crime structures in Kosovo,” and that Thaçi is leading a “criminal network operating throughout Kosovo.”

The charges laid against him by the prosecutor’s office in The Hague include murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture. He has also been accused of organ harvesting and drug trafficking by other reports and institutions. Although he has not been found guilty, it is well established that the KLA engaged in such activities, putting a mockery to the Albanian and Serbian Caucuses of US Congress suggestion in 2014 that Thaçi be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the Geneva School of Diplomacy giving him a Doctor Honoris Causa degree as a Doctor of International Relations, and the Montenegrin town of Ulcinj giving him the title of Honorary Citizen of Ulcinj.

Before the scheduled meeting, Vučić said that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov informed him about worrying information concerning various Western plans and ideas regarding the solution to the Kosovo crisis. Vučić pointed out that he exchanged opinions with Lavrov on a number of issues but that the key topic was the relationship between the two countries and Russia’s support for the integrity of Serbia and the situation in Kosovo.

“We received certain assessments from the Russian Federation […] which worried me. They concern various plans and ideas regarding the solution to the Kosovo crisis. I do not want to deceive anyone and hide from the public: obviously we are facing a difficult period, in which we will face great pressure to realize some plans that we did not officially or unofficially get, but based on the assessments of our Russian friends, it seems that we will have to be very careful in following every idea that is presented to us,” Vučić said at the press conference after their meeting.

Thanking Russia for supporting Serbia in the United Nations and in all international forums, Vučić said that it had been agreed that Serbia would consult with Russia on an almost daily basis, emphasizing that one thing was clear: “If at any time and in any place a solution is reached, any solution requires the consent of Russia. We do not want everyone else to be consulted without anyone asking Russia anything.”

He added that Russia supported the dialogue under the auspices of the EU, while Serbia is ready to listen to all other political actors and their ideas. He emphasized that Serbia will be able to protect its vital national interests, regardless of the price it will have to pay.

It begs the question whether the Trump administration now has the willingness to come up with a solution for Kosovo, especially as it is evident that the Albanians are connected with the Democrats in the U.S. and the criminal roots of Kosovo’s independence are being further exposed. The indictment against Thaçi is a major embarrassment for Washington as they have been the main backers of the illegal separation of Kosovo from Serbia. If Thaçi’s allegations are proven true by The Hague, it would mean Washington would have always known about the criminal activities of the KLA and the ongoing criminality in Kosovo’s government, but chose to ignore them to carve out a pro-US state from a pro-Russia Serbia.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

June 29, 2020 Posted by | Corruption | , | Leave a comment

Bolton’s Memoir Undercuts Hype as Impeachment’s Would-Be Star Witness

By Aaron Maté | Real Clear Investigations | June 23, 2020

In late January, John Bolton became the latest – and unlikeliest – official to enjoy a moment of Resistance glory. A New York Times report about Bolton’s forthcoming memoir fueled round-the-clock expectations that the former national security adviser would substantiate the core allegation at the heart of President Trump’s then-ongoing Senate impeachment trial – that the president tried to coerce Ukraine into opening an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden in a quid pro quo for military aid. Compelling his testimony was cast as a matter of national urgency. Bolton was never given the chance as Senate Republicans voted to block witnesses and acquit Trump on both impeachment counts.

In the publicity blitz for his new memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” Bolton has tried to keep the initial narrative alive. Speaking to ABC News, he claimed that Trump, at a meeting in August 2019, said he “wanted a probe of Joe Biden in exchange for delivering the security assistance.” That conversation, Bolton added, “was the crispest indication of the linkage. … The specificity of the linkage, I think, was unmistakable.”

His memoir, however, fails to substantiate that allegation.

In fact, Bolton offers new evidence that undermines it.

What he told Martha Raddatz is not what he writes in his book. Instead of a sharp demand of a quid pro quo, Bolton writes, Trump “said he wasn’t in favor of sending [Ukraine] anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to [Hillary] Clinton and Biden had been turned over.”

Bolton does not explain what he means by “materials” – and no interviewer has asked him to so far. RealClearInvestigations’ request to Bolton for comment, sent through a representative, was not immediately answered.

No Word on Burisma

Regardless, those were not at the heart of Trump’s impeachment. Trump was not impeached for trying to coerce Ukraine into handing over “Russia-investigation materials” to the U.S., but for allegedly trying to force Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to open a wholly separate investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, the gas company where Hunter was given a lucrative board seat while his father was running U.S. policy in Ukraine.

Yet Burisma is not even mentioned in Bolton’s book – and Hunter only in passing. This includes an acknowledgement that Bolton does not even remember if the younger Biden was actually discussed. At a May 8 meeting where Trump and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani discuss the latter’s “desire to meet with President-Elect Zelensky,” Bolton cannot recall if the purpose is “to discuss [Ukraine’s] investigation of either Hillary Clinton’s efforts to influence the 2016 campaign or something having to do with Hunter Biden and the 2020 election, or maybe both.”

Son gets job on energy company board after father backs violent coup

Bolton says his recollections are not precise because the Ukraine-related theories floating around the Trump administration “always seemed intermingled and confused, one reason I did not pay them much heed. Even after they became public, I could barely separate the strands of the multiple conspiracy theories at work.”

Bolton’s words are also ambiguous. The fact that Trump allegedly “said he wasn’t in favor of sending [Ukraine] anything” is not an explicit linkage to military aid. And as for the “Russian-investigation materials,” Bolton does not specify what Trump was referring to. It seems likely Trump may have been referencing his reported theory that the Democratic National Committee server was somehow hacked with Ukrainian involvement.

Trump may also have been seeking information on the Ukrainians who openly admitted to interfering in the 2016 campaign with the aim of thwarting his candidacy, most notably by leaking allegations of illegal payments to Paul Manafort. It is highly plausible that these were Trump’s priorities. In his July 25 phone call with Zelensky, which sparked the whistleblower complaint behind Ukrainegate, Trump’s top issue – and the object of the “favor” he requested – was not the Bidens, but securing Zelensky’s assistance with the Justice Department’s ongoing review of how the Russia investigation began in 2016.

Whatever the case, for Bolton to write that Trump drew a link between these issues and the security aid – and not a link to a demand that Ukraine open an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma – contradicts the impeachment case that many expected him to validate.

Bolton, perhaps inadvertently, also lends credence to the Trump administration’s public defense of its freeze on security assistance to Ukraine, which Democrats cast as the linchpin of a politically motivated quid pro quo. In his July 25 call with Zelensky and subsequent public statements, Trump has said that he wanted NATO allies to spend more on Ukrainian military funding. Bolton recounts that on Aug. 30 – just days after an article in Politico made the aid freeze public, including to the Ukrainian government – Trump repeated his complaints about the U.S. burden, and proposed that NATO provide Ukraine with the security assistance instead of Washington:

Trump said, “I don’t give a shit about NATO. I am ready to say, ‘If you don’t pay, we won’t defend them.’ I want the three hundred million dollars [he meant two hundred fifty million dollars, one piece of the assistance earmarked for Ukraine] to be paid through NATO.” … He then said to Pence, “Call [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg and have him have NATO pay. Say ‘The President is for you, but the money should come from NATO,’” which still didn’t make any sense.

If Trump is freezing the military aid for the sole purpose of coercing a Ukrainian investigation, it would be incongruous for him to propose an outcome that delivers the money without the investigation he is supposedly trying to compel.

As a part of their impeachment case, Democrats argued that Trump released the aid to Ukraine only after getting caught through publicity surrounding the whistleblower complaint. Yet Bolton writes that after Ukraine conducted a successful prisoner swap with Russia on Sept. 7, “Trump had seemingly indicated” that the swap “might be enough to get him to release the security assistance.” The money was released four days later, on Sept. 11.

Says He Wanted Nothing to do With Ukraine

Bolton confirms national security aide Fiona Hill’s testimony that he told her he did not want to be “part of whatever drug deal Sondland and [White House Chief of Staff Mick] Mulvaney are cooking up.” But he offers context that makes that line far less explosive than it was initially received. Bolton was not referring to leveraging any military aid, but to Sondland’s attempt to push for a hasty meeting between Trump and Zelensky at the White House, where the “Giuliani issues” could be discussed before Ukraine’s parliamentary elections in July.

Bolton says he nixed the idea of a meeting because Trump had recently told him that “he didn’t want to have anything to do with Ukrainians of any stripe,” due to Ukrainian meddling against him in the 2016 campaign. Sondland, in Bolton’s view, was “freelancing.” According to Bolton, Trump had also “resolved the visit issue just before leaving for the United Kingdom in June,” by saying he would meet with Zelensky “not until the fall, the right outcome in my view.”

It is easy to forget why Bolton was initially cast as a savior figure in January by those hoping to remove Trump by impeachment. When news of his memoir emerged, 10 days after the Senate trial began, Democrats had failed to prove their case. Not a single witness in the House impeachment hearings had provided direct evidence of a quid pro quo. The only witness who even spoke to Trump about the Ukraine aid was the then-European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland. He  reiterated multiple times that “nobody told me directly that the aid was tied to anything,” and that such a linkage was only his “presumption” and “personal, you know, guess.”

Sondland’s testimony was even more damaging to the impeachment case because, according to the impeachment narrative, he was the Trump official who purportedly relayed the alleged quid pro quo to the Ukrainian side. But Sondland revealed that he had only told Zelensky aide Andriy Yermak, in “a very, very brief pull-aside conversation,” that “I didn’t know exactly why” the aid has been frozen, but that a demand to open investigations “could be a reason.”

For his part, Yermak has said he does not even remember discussing the frozen aid with Sondland. That highlighted another problem with the Democrats’ quid pro quo allegation: Not a single Ukrainian official substantiates it. In addition to Yermak, President Zelensky and Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko also said that they saw no tie between the frozen military funding and pressure to open investigations. Even Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a staunch impeachment advocate, corroborates them: When they met in early September, Murphy recalled, Zelensky “did not make any connection between the aid that had been cut off and the requests that he was getting from Giuliani.”

The Ukrainians’ claims make sense in light of the fact that they only learned of the aid freeze, along with the rest of the world, with the Politico article published August 28. That would have meant that the supposed quid pro quo demand was made to them only after the issue became a matter of public controversy. That scenario was always implausible on its face. And now Bolton’s memoir has failed to change the picture. Bolton seems to grasp this fact. “I think the House Democrats built a cliff, they threw themselves off of it,” he told Raddatz of ABC News. “And halfway down, they looked up and saw me, and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come along?”

June 24, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Mysterious Individual ‘Blocking Release of Docs That May Expose Epstein’s Rich & Powerful Friends’

Sputnik – 24.06.2020

Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex slave Virginia Roberts, now Giuffre, was previously embroiled in a prolonged legal battle with the financier’s close associate Ghislaine Maxwell that ended in 2017. However, a cache of documents in the case listing the names of the financier’s closest associates remains sealed.

An anonymous person dubbed “John Doe” is trying to prevent the release of documents related to the Roberts Giuffre-Maxwell defamation case, requested by attorney and former Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, the Daily Mail reported.

The protective order over the documents in the case was signed by now deceased New York Judge Robert Sweet, preventing the public release of the names of people closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein and potentially involved in his sex trafficking scandal.

Dershowitz, who was a friend of the convicted sexual offender, is now fighting a separate defamation case against Epstein’s alleged victim Virginia Giuffre launched in November 2019. He is calling for the protective order to be removed, arguing that the documents contain materials that could be crucial for his own defamation lawsuit.

On Tuesday, a number of attorneys involved in the case held a teleconference to debate whether the protective order can be loosened upon Dershowitz’s request. According to the Daily Mail, legal teams representing Giuffre, Maxwell, and a mysterious “John Doe” have strongly opposed the move.

The person’s attorneys, Nicholas Lewin and Paul Krieger, said in a letter to the court, that the protocol over the release of Giuffre-Maxwell case materials, which are expected to be unveiled on a “rolling basis”, should not be derailed.

“This marks Dershowitz’s second – or, by some measures, third – attempt to make an end-run around this Court’s carefully constructed unsealing protocol. Just as the Court denied Dershowitz’s prior attempts, it should deny this one”, the attorneys argued, a position that was shared by Maxwell’s and Giuffre’s legal teams.

The defamation lawsuit against Epstein’s alleged “madame” Ghislaine Maxwell was brought by Giuffre in September 2015 and eventually settled under seal two years later.

The media is now speculating that the anonymous individual involved in the case could be a public figure who is not willing to be associated with the Epstein scandal. The disgraced financier died in his prison cell in August 2019, while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges following accusations by several women, including Virginia Roberts Giuffre. Throughout his business career, Epstein was associated with a number of powerful figures, including Hillary and Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Donald Trump, and many others. Roberts Giuffre claims that she was sex-trafficked to some of them, including British Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz, accusations both men have strongly denied.

June 24, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | Leave a comment

Ukrainian MP reveals new ‘Biden-Poroshenko’ tapes, claims VP’s son was paid ‘protection money’ by Burisma

RT | June 23, 2020

More tapes of what appear to be Joe Biden’s phone calls with the former president of Ukraine have surfaced, along with documents showing how much his son Hunter was paid by Burisma, a gas company desperate to avoid prosecution.

Ledgers show payments of $3.4 million from Burisma to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, the company co-founded by Hunter Biden, for “consulting services,” former prosecutor Konstantin Kulyk and Ukrainian MP Andrii Derkach revealed on Monday in Kiev.

Kulyk added that these services clearly amounted to “political protection of Burisma” and its owner Mykola Zlochevsky by US vice president at the time, Joe Biden.

Kulyk also told reporters that his office had evidence of Burisma’s lawyers offering $50 million to the government to make the case against the company and its founder go away – and not $6 million as was reported earlier.

The reason Burisma’s activities stood out from the white noise of general corruption in Ukraine following the US-backed coup in 2014 is that Zlochevsky sought to shield himself from scrutiny by hiring Hunter Biden as a board member, for a reported salary of $50,000 a month. Biden had no qualifications for the job, other than father being the top US official in charge of Ukraine.

Last month, Derkach released a batch of audio recordings of what sounded like Biden and then-President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, discussing everything from sacking a prosecutor looking into Burisma to what Kiev needed to do to qualify for an IMF bailout loan. He revealed more tapes on Monday.

The new recordings show ‘Biden’ micro-managing Ukraine’s internal affairs, asking ‘Poroshenko’ for a “favor,” discussing personnel appointments in the prosecutor-general’s office, assuring Poroshenko the FBI is not looking into claims of a Ukrainian MP who blew the whistle on massive corruption and vote-buying schemes, and so on.

The recordings have not been authenticated and Derkach himself was careful to say the voices “sound like” Poroshenko and Biden. He has turned the materials over to the prosecutor-general’s office, which is reportedly looking into charges of treason and abuse of power against the former president.

Poroshenko’s corruption and Hunter Biden’s job have had a major impact on US politics. Last year, Democrats accused President Donald Trump of soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election by bringing up Burisma on a phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky and threatening to withhold US military aid to Kiev. The House of Representatives actually impeached Trump on those charges, though he was acquitted in the Senate.

One of the witnesses in the process was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs George Kent. On Monday, Derkach named Kent as the liaison between Biden and Poroshenko, used to keep them informed of any developments regarding Burisma.

Poroshenko responded to the revelations by claiming they were a “fabrication” by Russia as “part of a large-scale hybrid war” intended to “undermine the Ukrainian-American strategic partnership that underlies the international coalition in support for Ukraine.”

He said the same exact thing about last month’s revelations, though on that occasion he also accused someone from Zelensky’s office of handing over “raw materials” to investigative journalists who then gave the recordings to Derkach.

June 23, 2020 Posted by | Corruption | , , | Leave a comment

“Deadly” Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat Covid 19: How the World’s Top Medical Journals, The Lancet and NEJM, Were Cynically Exploited by Big Pharma

By Elizabeth Woodworth | Global Research | June 14, 2020

Abstract and Background

A publishing scandal recently erupted around the use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat Covid 19. It is also known as quinine and chloroquine, and is on the WHO list of essential medicines.[i]

The bark of the South American quina-quina tree has been used to treat malaria for 400 years.[ii] Quinine, a generic drug costing pennies a dose, is available for purchase online. In rare cases it can cause dizziness and irregular heartbeat.[iii]

In late May, 2020, The Lancet published a four-author study claiming that HCQ used in hospitals to treat Covid-19 had been shown conclusively to be a hazard for heart death. The data allegedly covered 96,000 patients in 671 hospitals on six continents.[iv]

After the article had spent 13 days in the headlines, dogged by scientific objections, three of the authors retracted it on June 5.[v]

Meanwhile, during an expert closed-door meeting leaked May 24 in France, The Lancet and NEJM editors explained how financially powerful pharmaceutical players were “criminally” corrupting medical science to advance their interests.

*

On May 22, 2020, the time-honoured Lancet [vi]– one of the world’s two top medical journals – published the stunning claim that 671 hospitals on six continents were reporting life-threatening heart rhythms in patients taking hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for Covid-19.

The headlines that followed were breath-taking.

Although wider access to the drug had recently been urged in a petition signed by nearly 500,000 French doctors and citizens,[vii] WHO and other agencies responded to the article by immediately suspending the clinical trials that may have cleared it for use.

North American headlines did not mention that HCQ has been on the WHO list of essential drugs since the list began in 1977. Nor did they mention an investigative report on the bad press that hydroxychloroquine had been getting prior to May 22, and how financial interests had been intersecting with medicine to favour Gilead’s new, more expensive drug, Remdesivir.[viii]

The statistics behind the headlines

As a Canadian health sciences librarian who delivered statistics to a large public health agency for 25 years, I sensed almost immediately that the article had to be flawed.

Why? Because health statistics are developed for different purposes and in different contexts, causing them to exist in isolated data “stovepipes.”[ix] Many health databases, even within a single region or country, are not standardized and are thus virtually useless for comparative research.

How, I wondered, could 671 hospitals worldwide, including Asia and Africa, report comparable treatment outcomes for 96,000 Covid patients? And so quickly?

The Lancet is strong in public health and surely suspected this. Its award-winning editor-in-chief, Dr. Richard Horton, has been in his job since 1995.[x]

So how could the damning HCQ claims have been accepted?  Here is what I discovered.

The honour system in medical publishing

To some extent, authors submitting articles to medical journals are on the honour system, in which cited databases are trusted by the editors, yet are available for inspection if questioned.[xi]

On May 28, an open letter from 200 scientists to the authors and The Lancet requested details of the data and an independent audit. The letter was “signed by clinicians, medical researchers, statisticians, and ethicists from across the world.”[xii]

The authors declined to supply the data, or even the hospital names. Meanwhile, investigative analysis was showing the statistics to be deeply flawed.[xiii][xiv]

If this were not enough, the lead author was found to be in a conflict of interest with HCQ’s rival drug, Remdesivir:

“Dr. Mandeep Mehra, the lead co-author is a director at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, which is credited with funding the study. Dr. Mehra and The Lancet failed to disclose that Brigham Hospital has a partnership with Gilead and is currently conducting two trials testing Remdesivir, the prime competitor of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19, the focus of the study.”[xv]

In view of the foregoing, the article was retracted by three of its authors on June 5.

How did this fraud get past The Lancet reviewers in the first place?

The answer emerges from what has remained an obscure French interview, although it has been quoted in the alternative media.[xvi]

On May 24, a closed-door Chatham House expert meeting about Covid included the editors-in-chief of The Lancet and the NEJM. Comments regarding the article were leaked to the French press by a well-known health figure, Dr. Philippe Douste-Blazy,[xvii] who felt compelled to blow the whistle.

His resulting BFM TV interview was posted to YouTube with English subtitles on May 31,[xviii] but it was not picked up by the English-speaking media.

These were The Lancet editor Dr. Richard Horton’s words, as reported by Dr. Douste-Blazy:

“If this continues, we are not going to be able to publish any more clinical research data because pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful today, and are able to use such methodologies as to have us accept papers which are apparently methodologically perfect, but which, in reality, manage to conclude what they want to conclude.” [xix]

Doust-Blazy made his own comments on Horton’s words:

“I never thought the boss of The Lancet could say that. And the boss of the New England Journal of Medicine too. He even said it was ‘criminal’. The word was used by them.”[xx]

The final words in Doust-Blazy’s interview were:

“When there is an outbreak like Covid, in reality, there are people like us – doctors – who see mortality and suffering. And there are people who see dollars. That’s it.”[xxi]

The scientific process of building a trustworthy knowledge base is one of the foundations of our civilization. Violating this process is a crime against both truth and humanity.

Evidently the North American media does not consider this extraordinary crime to be worth reporting.

Notes

[i] World Health Organization. “World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines, 21st ed.”, WHO, 2019, pp. 24, 25, 53 (https://www.who.int/medicines/publications/essentialmedicines/en/).

[ii] Jane Achan, et al., “Quinine, an old anti-malarial drug in a modern world: role in the treatment of malaria,” Malaria Journal,  24 May 2011 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3121651/).

[iii] WebMD, “Quinine Sulfate” (https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-869/quinine-oral/details).

[iv] The Lancet, “RETRACTED: Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis, by Mandeep R. Mehra et al,” Lancet, 5 June 2010 (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31180-6/fulltext).

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Famous weekly British medical journal, founded in 1823.

[vii] Lee Mclaughlan, “Covid-19 France: petition for wider chloroquine access,” 6 April 2020 (https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Time-wasted-over-use-of-choroquine-coronavirus-drug-says-petition-by-former-French-health-minister).

[viii] Sharyl Attkisson, “Hydroxychloroquine,” Full Measure, 18 May 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB-_SV-y11Y). Attkisson is a five-time Emmy Award winner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharyl_Attkisson).

[ix] See “Stovepiping,” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stovepiping) (accessed June 12, 2020).

[x] Dr. Horton’s career, professionalism, and awards are shown at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Horton_(editor)(accessed June 12, 2020).

[xi] The Lancet and NEJM editors could not be expected to comb through data from 671 hospitals to verify their accuracy – especially when submitted by four doctors.

[xii] The full-text letter and signatories appear  at https://zenodo.org/record/3862789#.XuQiNmYTGhM

[xiii] Melissa Davey, “Questions raised over hydroxychloroquine study which caused WHO to halt trials for Covid-19,” The Guardian, 28 May 2020 (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/may/28/questions-raised-over-hydroxychloroquine-study-which-caused-who-to-halt-trials-for-covid-19).

[xiv] Melissa Davey et al, “Surgisphere: governments and WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from tiny US company,” The Guardian, 3 June 2020 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine).

[xv] 1. Alliance for Human Research Protection, “The Lancet Published a Fraudulent Covid-19 Study,” 2 June 2020 (https://ahrp.org/the-lancet-published-a-fraudulent-study-editor-calls-it-department-of-error/).

  1. Brigham Health, “Two Remdesivir Clinical Trials Underway at Brigham and Women’s Hospital,” 30 March 2020 (https://www.brighamhealthonamission.org/2020/03/26/two-remdesivir-clinical-trials-underway-at-brigham-and-womens-hospital/).

[xvi] Vera Sharav, “Editors of The Lancetand the New England Journal of Medicine: Pharmaceutical Companies are so Financially Powerful They Pressure us to Accept Papers,” Health Impact News, 5 June 2020

(https://healthimpactnews.com/2020/editors-of-the-lancet-and-the-new-england-journal-of-medicine-pharmaceutical-companies-are-so-financially-powerful-they-pressure-us-to-accept-papers/).

[xvii] Dr. Philippe Douste-Blazy, MD, is a cardiologist, former French Health Minister; 2017 candidate for Director at WHO; and former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.  See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Douste-Blazy.

[xviii] “(Eng Subs) Hydroxychloroquine Lancet Study: Former France Health Minister blows the whistle,” BFM TV, 31 May 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=ZYgiCALEdpE&feature=emb_logo).

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] Ibid.

[xxi] Ibid.

Copyright © Elizabeth Woodworth, Global Research, 2020

June 23, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Media Blackout: The Federal Court Case To End Water Fluoridation!

Spiro Skouras | June 14, 2020

As we are inundated with headlines about violent riots and looting being passed off as mostly peaceful protests, or how the dreaded virus continues to spread in communities around the world. There is another story taking place which directly effects hundreds of millions of people globally that is being blacked out by the mainstream corporate media.

Unlike the aforementioned crisis’ which are being sited as the justification for the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. This public health crisis actually has a rather simple solution. To end water fluoridation by no longer adding the toxic substance to the nations water supply.

You would think this would be a straightforward process considering the mountains of studies which conclude fluoride is a harmful neurotoxin attributed to lower IQ’s and ADHD. Unfortunately government regulatory agencies have been not only defending this practice for generations, they champion the forced medication as a great achievement in medical history.

Right now, in perhaps one of the most important trials of our time. The Fluoride Action Network is taking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head on in an unprecedented court case that could lead to the end of water fluoridation in the US and possibly worldwide as other nations would likely follow suit.

In this interview, Spiro is joined by Dr. Paul Connett of the Fluoride Action Network to discuss the current court case against EPA and water fluoridation as the first week of the trial has come to an end and the second, possibly final week is about to begin.

Fluoride Action Network http://fluoridealert.org

Link & Times To Watch The Trial Live http://fluoridealert.org/issues/tsca-…

Spiro’s Interview with Dr. Paul Connett & his Son, Attorney Michael Connett https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQAjW…

June 22, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , | Leave a comment

Financial Conflicts & the Retracted COVID Research

Lead author, paid by drug companies, gives the all-clear to products those companies sell. World’s leading medical journal fails transparency test.

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | June 22, 2020

Mandeep Mehra is a professor at Harvard Medical School, and the medical director of a Boston hospital department. That city being a coronavirus hotspot, life hasn’t been normal there for some time.

He’s also the lead author of two COVID-19 research papers that were retracted shortly after being published in prestigious medical journals. Lancet boss Richard Horton calls the one published in his journal a “monumental fraud.”

The other, which has received less attention, appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Titled Cardiovascular Disease, Drug Therapy, and Mortality in Covid-19, it runs to seven pages and was retracted because its authors now admit the data on which it relies cannot be validated.

During this pandemic, physicians have been desperate for information to help guide their decisions. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the NEJM, recently explained to the New York Times,

I’m an infectious disease doctor, I treat Covid-19 patients. I’ve been in the hospital recently treating patients, and we have no idea what to do. I’m the primary driver at the journal of saying, ‘We have to get data out there that people can use.’ [bold added]

Many hypotheses have been advanced. Many questions remain unanswered. For example, there’s uncertainty about whether some widely prescribed medications might be complicating the picture. Are people who take high blood pressure pills – ACE inhibitors and ARBs (angiotensin receptor blockers) – at higher risk? Should they switch to alternatives until the pandemic is over (see here, here, and here)?

Similarly, should people on cholesterol-lowering statins follow advice published in the British Medical Journal and stop taking these drugs if they develop a serious case of COVID-19? Statins are, after all, prescribed for preventative purposes, to help avert heart problems longer term.

Mehra’s paper claimed to have examined patient records from three continents and to have found no evidence that any of these drugs increase the death rate of those who had heart issues prior to the coronavirus. Indeed, it declares that “the use of ACE inhibitors, and the use of statins were associated with a better chance of survival” in women.

But even if this data was 100% reliable, there would still be two enormous problems with this research:

#1: The lead author has financial ties to companies that sell those drugs.

#2: Neither the authors nor the journal informed us of this salient fact up front, in a transparent manner.

The paper reports, on page 1, that the research was “Funded by the William Harvey Distinguished Chair in Advanced Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.”

Mehra’s Harvard e-mail address also appears on page 1. Readers are told that’s where reprint requests should be addressed (reprints are frequently distributed to third party doctors by drug companies as marketing material, and can be a considerable source of revenue for medical journals).

At the very end of the paper, on page 7, in fine print, we’re reminded that the research was supported by the William Harvey Distinguished Chair. Only then are we advised that “Disclosure forms by the authors are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.”

One must go to the trouble of tracking down the online version of the paper, and downloading that separate 16-page PDF, to discover the lead author has a serious conflict of interest. There, on page 12, we read:

Dr. Mehra reports personal fees from Abbott, personal fees from Medtronic, personal fees from Janssen, personal fees from Mesoblast , personal fees from Baim Institute for Clinical Research, personal fees from Portola, personal fees from Bayer, personal fees from Triple Gene, personal fees from Leviticus, personal fees from NupulseCV, personal fees from FineHeart, other from Riovant, outside the submitted work;. [sic, bold added]

Abbott Laboratories sells statins and ACE inhibitors. The company is described as a “top key player,” a “major giant,” and a “leading player” in those global marketplaces.

Likewise, Bayer AG is a major global player in the ARB market.

So a lead author who has financial relationships with two companies that sell certain classes of drugs took the time, during a pandemic, to give those drugs an all-clear.

On it’s website, the New England Journal of Medicine calls itself “the world’s leading medical journal.” Why did it choose to bury this vital piece of information?

June 22, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Retracted Papers Written by Journal VIP

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | June 17, 2020

The lead author of two retracted COVID-19 papers is editor-in-chief of an Elsevier medical journal.

Earlier this month, two high-profile research papers were retracted on the same day. One, published in The Lancet, had concluded that coronavirus patients treated with malaria drugs were more likely to die. Published on May 22, it was officially withdrawn 13 days later.

Another, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found no evidence that widely prescribed medications increase the death rate of hospitalized COVID-19 patients with pre-existing heart problems.

The lead author in both instances was Mandeep Mehra, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the person in charge of the Heart and Vascular Center at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The second listed author was Sapan Desai. An online bio describes him as an “internationally-recognized double board certified vascular surgeon.” Desai is the founder of Surgisphere Corporation, a data analytics firm which claimed to have acquired 96,000 highly-detailed electronic medical records of COVID-19 patients from 671 hospitals on six continents.

The Lancet paper’s dramatic findings interrupted drug trials and changed government policy in multiple countries. It also increased the anxiety of coronavirus patients who’d been participating in those trials.

But six days after the paper appeared, more than 100 “clinicians, medical researchers, statisticians, and ethicists” addressed an open letter to the authors, and to Lancet editor-in-chief Richard Horton, questioning the integrity of the cited data.

Why were the hospitals which supplied this data not identified? Why weren’t standard statistical practices employed? Why no ethics review? Why didn’t the paper invite other researchers to examine for themselves the underlying data and computer code?

According to these experts, the medication dose sizes discussed were odd, drug ratios sounded “implausible,” the Australian data was obviously erroneous, and the African data seemed “unlikely.”

Yet none of The Lancet‘s peer-reviewers apparently noticed. “In the interests of transparency,” said the signatories of the open letter, “we also ask The Lancet to make openly available the peer review comments that led to this manuscript to be accepted for publication [sic].”

An article in the New York Times says these events “have alarmed scientists worldwide who fear that the rush for research on the coronavirus has overwhelmed the peer review process.” Lancet editor Horton, it reports, now describes the retracted paper as a “fabrication” and “a monumental fraud.”

A headline in the UK Guardian says The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How, asks the article that follows,

did a paper of such consequence get discarded like a used tissue by some of its authors only days after publication? If the authors don’t trust it now, how did it get published in the first place?…the sad truth is peer review in its entirety is struggling…

Neither of those articles mentioned an astonishing fact. Lead author Mehra is himself the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation. Part of Elsevier’s scholarly publishing empire, this monthly journal hires editors for five-year terms. Mehra’s second term is coming to end, and last year the search for a replacement began.

As the posted job description explains, the editor-in-chief is responsible for overseeing the peer review of papers submitted to that journal. He or she is constantly evaluating research, sorting solid science from weak science. The new editor-in-chief, we’re told, must have “a demonstrated understanding of statistics and statistical methods.”

So how could a man who has spent the past 10 years in such a role have authored this pair of retracted papers? How could anyone with any statistical sophistication have taken such dodgy data at face value?

“No matter which way you examine the data, use of these [malaria] drug regimens did not help,” Mehra declared in a press release when The Lancet paper was published. But it now appears he didn’t directly examine the data at all. On the day the paper was retracted, he explained in a subsequent statement:

Dr. Desai, who served as a co-author and whose team maintained this observational database, conducted various analyses. As first author, these were provided to me, and on the basis of these analyses, we published two peer-reviewed papers…

In other words, this longtime editor-in-chief took someone else’s word for it. He failed to ask elementary questions. He took it on faith that the analyses had been properly conducted. Mehra continued:

It is now clear to me that in my hope to contribute this research during a time of great need, I did not do enough to ensure that the data source was appropriate for this use. For that, and for all the disruptions – both directly and indirectly – I am truly sorry.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the vaunted peer review system in action. Naive trust. Blind faith. By Mehra. By The Lancet. By the New England Journal of Medicine. Even when real lives, right now, hang in the balance.

Four years ago, I authored a report demonstrating that peer review is merely a sniff test. Typically performed by unpaid volunteers, it’s based on wholly subjective criteria, and is highly influenced by the pre-existing beliefs of those doing the reviewing. My report contains this paragraph:

In 2014, Science announced measures to provide deeper scrutiny of statistical claims in the research it publishes. John Ioannidis, the author of a seminal 2005 paper asserting that most published research findings are false, called this announcement “long overdue”. In his opinion, statistical review has become more important than traditional peer review for a “majority of scientific papers”.

In many places, statistical review still doesn’t occur. Even in our current situation, when COVID-19 research has the power to halt drug trials and change history, the vetting process at medical journals is a joke.

June 21, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

COVID-19 Cold War: Will the 2nd Wave Come from Vaccine Trials?

By Dady Chery | teleSUR | June 18, 2020

If the English-language press had done its job, and not parroted press releases that promote vaccination as the only escape from the social isolation we’ve endured the last three months, the public would be asking many questions about the ongoing protests and their relation to the logistics of vaccine trials. To test a vaccine, typically a pharmaceutical company recruits healthy volunteers for several phases of a clinical trial with a defined endpoint.

I have previously noted that an FDA “fast-track” designation has essentially accorded a carte blanche to a set of vaccines that are financed by CEPI, an alliance of Bill Gates with the six biggest pharmaceutical companies, and in many cases also by the U.S. Homeland Security and Department of Defense concerns BARDA and DARPA.

In the fast-track system, a pharmaceutical company hardly examines the results of a phase one trial before moving on to phases two and three, even though phase one is supposed to identify the best dose for safety on a small group of 15 to 50 healthy volunteers, and phase 2/3 is supposed to follow up with a test of efficacy and an expansion of the test for safety to a larger group. For any vaccine worth its name, the endpoint is a dose that is not only safe in the short and long term but also protects the volunteers from the infectious agent.

Yes, this does imply that the volunteers get exposed to the infectious agent as part of the trial, even though I would challenge you to find this fact being spelled out anywhere in the news. Since the volunteers are typically young and healthy, the expectation for a vaccine candidate against COVID-19 is that, if it fails, as most vaccine candidates do, the volunteers will not become deathly ill on exposure to the virus but will merely turn into asymptomatic carriers. Enter the WHO, which declares on June 8, 2020, without any obvious prompting, that asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 appears to be “very rare.” The WHO “doth protest too much, methinks.” This is much too convenient a discovery right now.

The WHO statement contradicts numerous observations and at least one recent review of the coronavirus literature. The review states that “asymptomatic persons seem to account for approximately 40 to 45 percent of SARS-CoV-2 infections, and they can transmit the virus to others for an extended period, perhaps longer than 14 days.” It is actually 21 days but never mind all that. The WHO has found another paper, not yet in the press, that says what it likes. A CDC-approved vaccine typically guarantees over US$1 billion in profit for its manufacturer. When it comes to that kind of money, it appears that any report may be concocted. One important reason for the WHO to make this declaration is probably to absolve from liability the manufacturers that are, as I write this article, injecting their potential vaccines into volunteers and then exposing them to SARS-CoV-2, without any provision whatsoever for a quarantine period or the facilities for one.

Some manufacturers might pretend that their endpoint is a demonstration that the volunteers have produced “neutralizing antibodies” against the virus, as determined from assays of their serum in test tubes. If so, then people are being deceived, and the supposed vaccines may offer no protection at all in a real encounter with a virus. In vitro results quite often do not hold up to their promise. After all, every drug that has failed in animal and human trials would not have been tried if it had not first worked in vitro.

The three major potential anti-COVID-19 vaccines that are in the run right now and zipping right along to phase two or three, are arguably Moderna’s mRNA-1273, Astra Zeneca’s AZD1222 (previously ChAdOx1 nCoV-19), and Sinopharm’s BBIBP-CorV.

Moderna’s project is a much-touted mRNA vaccine, for which a phase one trial began in mid-March with 45 human volunteers, and a phase two trial with 600 volunteers was approved a mere six weeks after the start of phase one. The company enjoys US$483 million from BARDA, an apparent blank check from CEPI to get its drug to phase two, plus funds from DARPA and Anthony Fauci’s NIAID. During the phase one trial, three healthy volunteers who received 250 micrograms of mRNA-1273 developed “grade three adverse effects,” meaning that they became so sick that they could not function for one day or more. One 29-year-old man vomited, fainted, and developed a more than 103 F fever that lasted about five hours. The phase two trial will presumably use 50 or 250 micrograms of mRNA-1273. It gives little confidence to know that Moderna’s top executives have cashed out US$89 million of their shares of stock as its value has climbed from US$20 in early January to US$87 on May 22. Currently, the public is being prepared for a flare-up of COVID-19 in Seattle and Atlanta, presumably because of massive anti-racism Black Lives Matter protests. No one is asking about the Moderna vaccine trials in Seattle and Atlanta that have potentially created many asymptomatic carriers of SARS-CoV-2.

Astra Zeneca has developed its potential vaccine, called AZD1222, together with the University of Oxford, although the company controls about eight percent of Moderna’s stock. Astra Zeneca got a whopping US$1.2 billion from BARDA on May 21, 2020, and is a darling of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which has promised to deliver hundreds of millions of doses of a supposedly efficacious vaccine to Americans by January 2021. Their immunization approach is to administer an injection of 50 billion particles of a chimpanzee adenovirus that has been engineered to make the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. In an initial animal study, five out of six supposedly immunized monkeys developed COVID-19 symptoms: specifically, they became infectious, with viral RNA in their nasal passages, after they were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 four weeks “post-vaccination.” Such results would normally kill a project, but not for Astra Zeneca. They spun their damning results by boasting that their injections had prevented illness because the monkeys did not get pneumonia. They are plowing through a 1,000-volunteer phase one study in southern England that started on April 23 and pushing phase 2/3 trials with more than 10,000 volunteers. Interestingly, about 10,000 protesters marched through Brighton, on the southern coast of England, on June 13 in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Might we expect a COVID-19 surge there too?

Last but not least is Sinopharm, a Chinese State project that involves the China National Pharmaceutical Group, together with the Beijing Institute of Biological Products, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and other major health concerns based in Beijing. Sinopharm has been secretive about its plans and merely announced that it was working on a potential vaccine based on the inactivated virus, with promising results in animals and “early human tests” underway. But the group just published a paper in the journal Cell that describes the animal studies. Their potential vaccine is called BBIBP-CorV, and some aspects of it should have raised more questions with Cell. For example, the same dosage is reported to work on mice, rats, rabbits, and monkeys. Sinopharm also claims to have observed no Antibody-Dependent Enhancement of disease (ADE). In other words, it is among the first to assert that the supposedly immunized animals did not become gravely ill – worse than the controls — after they were exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Considering that ADE has routinely been observed in laboratories that have attempted to vaccinate animals against coronaviruses, the paper should have explained how Sinopharm met this challenge. Coincidentally, Beijing has so far had a surge of about 80 new COVID-19 cases. Chinese health authorities are mandating extreme lockdown and blaming the cases on the Xinfadi market, the city’s largest wholesale food market. Conveniently, all the tests of recent visitors to the market have turned up positive, though this is actually an impossibility.

We have been promised a second wave of COVID-19, and we will surely get one. I propose that it will not happen because of the popular uprisings, winter cold, or any of the other hypotheses that have been put forward to prepare us for it. Instead, it will probably be due to the free circulation of tens of thousands of volunteers from various failed vaccine trials. In the U.S., China, and several Western countries, pharmaceutical concerns are becoming an arm of the military-industrial complex. In the West, the main motivation is a desire for a piece of the large pie of military budget. In China, it is an aspiration for greater prestige in the world and conquest of the hearts and minds of citizens of other countries, particularly the global south. The supposedly greater race consciousness that has erupted from the Black Lives Matter protests could soon turn into a racist call for the mandatory vaccination of mostly black and brown low-wage workers, for their own good. Racism is alive and well, and the Vaccine Cold War is on. What we are experiencing is analogous to the fallout from the atmospheric nuclear tests of the first Cold War. We are being played like fish near a hook.

Dr. Dady Chery is an Associate Professor of Biology, Co-Editor-In-Chief of News Junkie Post, and the author of We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti’s Struggle Against Occupation.

June 19, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Hungary’s NGOs will have to disclose foreign funds despite EU top court’s ruling: Orban

RT | June 19, 2020

Civil organizations involved in Hungarian politics will still have to disclose their foreign donors, PM Viktor Orban said on Friday. He made the statement after the European Union’s top court said Hungary’s stance on overseas funding violated EU law.

The Hungarian legislation was part of measures against what the government sees as unfair foreign influence, linked to its disagreements with US billionaire George Soros, who was born in Budapest.

On Friday, reacting to the ruling of the Court of Justice of the EU for the first time, Orban said Hungary would respect the decision about the funding of NGOs but transparency rules would continue to apply.

“All Hungarians will know about every and each forint worth of funding sent here from abroad for political purposes,” the PM told state radio.

June 19, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Epstein Case: Documentaries Won’t Touch Tales of Intel Ties

By Elizabeth Vos | Consortium News | June 17, 2020

Investigation Discovery premiered  a three-hour special, “Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?” on May 31, the first segment in a three-part series, that  focused on Epstein’s August 2019 death in federal custody. The series addresses Epstein’s alleged co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, his links with billionaire Leslie Wexner, founder of the Victoria Secrets clothing line, and others, as well as the non-prosecution deal he was given.

The special followed on the heels of Netflix’s release of “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich,” a mini-series that draws on a book of the same name by James Patterson.

Promotional material for “Who Killed Jeffery Epstein?” promises that: “… exclusive interviews and in-depth investigations reveal new clues about his seedy underworld, privileged life and controversial death. The three-hour special looks to answer the questions surrounding the death of this enigmatic figure.” Netflix billed its series this way: “Stories from survivors fuel this docuseries examining how convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein used his wealth and power to carry out his abuses.”

Neither documentary however deals at all with Epstein’s suspected ties to the world of intelligence.

Absent from both are Maxwell’s reported links to Israeli intelligence through her father, Robert Maxwell, former owner of The New York Daily News and The Mirror newspaper in London. Maxwell essentially received a state funeral in Israel and was buried on the Mount of Olives after he mysteriously fell off his yacht in 1991 in the Atlantic Ocean.

In an interview with Consortium News, former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe said Epstein did not work with Mossad. “Military intelligence was who he was working with,” said Ben-Menashe. “Big difference,” he said. “He never worked with Mossad, and Robert Maxwell never did, either. It was military intelligence.”

Ben-Menashe claimed Robert Maxwell was Epstein’s “tie over. Robert Maxwell was the conduit. The financial conduit.”

In “Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” a book published in December, Ben-Menashe is quoted as saying he worked with Robert Maxwell who introduced his daughter and Epstein to Israeli intelligence, after which they engaged in a blackmail operation for Israel. “[Epstein] was taking photos of politicians f**king fourteen-year-old girls — if you want to get it straight. They [Epstein and Maxwell] would just blackmail people, they would just blackmail people like that,” he says in the book.

Ben-Menashe also claims that Robert Maxwell had attempted to blackmail Mossad. “He really lost his compass once he started playing these games with people,” he told Consortium News.

Prince Andrew

About a week after both documentaries premiered, the U.S. Department of Justice approached the U.K.’s Home Office requesting that Prince Andrew answer questions in the U.K. over his links to Epstein, The Mirror reported.  If he refuses, the paper said, U.S. prosecutors would ask that he be brought to a British court to respond to their questions. Andrew’s lawyers say he three times agreed to be questioned by U.S. authorities, but it is not known if Andrew attached conditions, such as immunity.

Both documentaries mention Prince Andrew in the context of allegations about him from one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre. But neither film goes into much detail about Andrew’s role in the Epstein operation, which Ben-Menashe said, was to lure powerful men into Epstein’s orbit.

“One of the things that are really key to this is that he [Epstein] befriended a very useful idiot called Prince Andrew,” Ben-Menashe told CN. “Now what really happened was that this Prince Andrew, with nothing to do, was having fun with this, and Prince Andrew brings in the fancy people, invites them to play golf with him, and then takes them out for fun. Then Epstein shows up, and these people are basically blackmailed.”

“The only person that can talk, that probably knows quite a bit, is the great prince,” Ben-Menashe said. “He was with him [Epstein] all the time. I really don’t know what his future is going to be like, either.”

Since a number of influential figures were named in a lawsuit filed by Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell the day before Epstein was found dead in his federal prison cell in New York, Ben-Menashe said: “I’m starting to think that lawsuit was his death sentence, because people didn’t want to be named. That’s my guess, it’s just a guess. Obviously, somebody decided that he had to go.”

Epstein’s death was ruled a “suicide” by New York’s chief medical examiner. A pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother said it was homicide.

An Angry Call

Just before Ben-Menashe spoke to Consortium News on Monday, he said he had received an angry telephone call from Israel’s Channel 13 television station.

“They called me, and they went wild: ‘What, you believe Israel would use little girls? You are saying that? You are insulting the nation, you are making us anathema around the world.’ I said, ‘The truth is the truth.’ And Jeffrey Epstein’s story is something that nobody wanted to hear. He was working with the Israelis, he was working with Maxwell,” Ben-Menashe said.

He added: “It’s a very bad story, and I can see why the Israelis are so concerned about it. I believe [Channel 13] were expressing anger, and I believe this was a message. I don’t like messages like that… it has to do with the timing and these stories coming out about Epstein. They [Israel] are starting to become anathema to the world, this adds to it — the Epstein story.”

Victims’ Voices

The Netflix and Investigation Discovery productions allow survivors to recount their experiences in interviews as well as taped police recordings and focus on the sweetheart plea deal provided to Epstein by former Trump Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta during Acosta’s tenure as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

Each series outlines Epstein’s relationships with Wexner, Maxwell, and a variety of elite figures. Investigation Discovery focuses on the controversy surrounding Epstein’s death while Netflix’s “Filthy Rich” examines the second attempt to prosecute Epstein in the context of the Me Too movement.

The Netflix series describes the initial investigation of Epstein as it shifted from the state to the federal level, and airs allegations that Florida  journalists covering the story were threatened. Netflix also interviews psychologist Dr. Kathryn Stamoulis, a specialist in adolescent sexuality, who gives a description of Epstein’s targeting and grooming of young girls. Epstein survivor Giuffre later describes in the film being groomed to tolerate exploitation and sex trafficking as part of a “deranged family.”

The final section of the fourth episode in Netflix’s miniseries includes a survivor stating that this was not simply an Epstein operation, but an “international sex trafficking ring that reached all over the world.” Epstein is described as a “very small piece in a huge network.” But the documentary goes no further than that.

As in the Belgian Dutroux case, victims alleged that multiple abusers acted in concert with each other, using blackmail to keep each other in line. In both instances, authorities and the media portrayed the abuse as chiefly the product of an aberrant lone predator.

“This wouldn’t be the only time this happened, but this guy got way over his head,” Ben-Menashe told Consortium News. “He probably was blackmailing too many people, too many powerful people. And then, this is a story the Israelis wouldn’t want to come out, anyway.”

Thriving in Murky Waters

Another angle the documentaries did not approach was the environment in which Epstein thrived like an algae bloom in stagnant water, that is, within a long history of child trafficking rings linked with intelligence agencies, often with the aim of gathering blackmail material. It was within this reality that Epstein appeared to be rendered untouchable.

Omitting the intelligence aspect of Epstein’s history allows the Establishment media to portray his case as a mysterious and unsolvable aberration, rather than perhaps a continuation of business-as-usual amongst those in power.

The glaring refusal to address Epstein’s intelligence involvement becomes clear when Investigation Discovery and Netflix’s programs discuss the role of Acosta in securing Epstein’s “sweetheart” plea deal, but do not reference Acosta’s widely reported explanation as to why Acosta agreed to the deal. As reported by The Daily Beast, Acosta claimed that he cut the non-prosecution deal because he had been told that “Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”

Independent journalist Whitney Webb has reported on Epstein’s many ties with intelligence, telling  CNLive! in August last year that there is evidence this included with the CIA.

Webb spoke about  Iran-Contra links to Epstein via his and billionaire Wexner’s efforts to relocate Southern Air Transport (formerly the CIA’s Air America) from Florida to Ohio: “What’s significant here is that out of all the airlines in the United States, Wexner and Epstein choose the airline, the only airline that is outed, publicly known at the time, to be a CIA cut-out. Out of all the airlines that exist, that’s the one they go for,” she said.

Webb also cited reporting by Nigel Rosser, a British journalist, who wrote in the Evening Standard in 2001 that Epstein claimed he worked for the CIA in the 1990s.

Lip Service

Investigation Discovery and Netflix give lip service to Wexner’s ties with Epstein, omitting that Wexner gave Epstein the largest private residence in New York City — essentially for free. Investigation Discovery does not mention that the residence was extensively wired with surveillance equipment, per Webb and The New York Times.

“James Patterson, before writing his book on Epstein, ‘Filthy Rich,’ on which this documentary [by Netflix] is based, wrote a novel [‘The President is Missing’] with Bill Clinton , who is of course quite close to the Epstein scandal, so that definitely, in my opinion, raises some eyebrows,” Webb told Consortium News.

“I think that one of the goals of this [Netflix] documentary is to basically imply that Epstein was the head of the operation and that now that he is dead, all of that activity has ceased,” Webb said. “If they had actually bothered to explore the intelligence angle, in some of the more obvious facts about the case, like Leslie Wexner’s role, for example, it becomes clear that Epstein was really just more of a manager of this type of operation, [and] that these activities continue.”

Webb said a main reason for avoiding discussion of the intelligence angle is that mention of state sponsorship would lead to calls for accountability and open inquiry into a history of sexual blackmail by intelligence agencies. “So if they had given even superficial treatment of those ties, it would have exposed threads that if anyone had bothered to pull on a little bit, would start to unravel a lot of things that obviously these powerful people and institutions don’t want exposed,” Webb said.

More than nine months since Epstein’s death, no alleged Epstein co-conspirator has been arrested or charged with a crime despite reports of an active criminal investigation of Maxwell (who has disappeared), and multiple failed attempts of alleged Epstein victims to serve her with civil suits.

“The criminal case against him, and all the evidence that was gathered against him as part of that, will never be made public unless someone else is charged,” said Webb. “So, the fact that they’re not charging anyone else is quite telling, and the fact that the mainstream media isn’t pushing back against that, I think is telling as well.”

The omissions of major aspects of the Epstein case by the media, specifically its links with the intelligence community, seems to be yet another example of a buffer between justice and those responsible for rendering Epstein untouchable.

Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter and co-host of CN Live. 

June 19, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Film Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Cut Overseas Police Training Programs

Photograph Source: Lorie Shaull from St Paul, United States – CC BY-SA 2.0
By Jeremy Kuzmarov | CounterPunch | June 15, 2020

The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has ignited protests across the United States and calls to demilitarize and defund the police.

A similar demand should be made to cut overseas police training programs including in Afghanistan.

The U.S. government has long adopted overseas police training as a cornerstone of nation building and counterinsurgency programs.

The idea is that American police will instill professional and democratic standards, including a respect for civil liberties among foreign counterparts and help stabilize violence prone countries.

The Floyd killing has exposed, however, that American police lack professional and humane standards and need to be retrained and reformed. They are ill suited to improve other countries’ police.

In Afghanistan, where the U.S. has spent an estimated $87 billion dollars over nineteen years training security forces, the police are notorious for corruption, sectarianism, incompetence and brutality.

In an interview quoted in the Afghanistan Papers, Thomas Johnson, a Navy official who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Kandahar province, said that Afghans viewed the police as predatory bandits, calling them “the most hated institution” in Afghanistan.

This latter outcome resulted in part from the militarized tactics promoted by American advisers and their importation of police technologies which could be used for repressive ends.

In Honduras, where the U.S. expanded police aid following a 2009 coup d’états that ousted the mildly progressive José Manuel Zelaya, American trained units have been implicated in torture and drug related corruption, and carried out predawn raids of activists involved in protesting contested elections.

These units were trained under an initiative promoted by President Obama and extended by Trump that provided hundreds of millions of dollars for law enforcement training and assistance, mostly under the War on Drugs.

In the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration created the United States Agency for International Development’s infamous Office of Public Safety (OPS), to modernize the police forces in countries considered vulnerable to communist subversion.

Headed by CIA agent Byron Engle, who combined a deep commitment to civilian police work with an appreciation for the darker areas of political police intelligence, the OPS initially employed liberal reformers.

As political policing gained primacy, however, OPS agents became contemptuous of human rights and imported policing technologies that were used to hunt down dissidents and violently quell protests.

Charles Maechling Jr., staff director of the Special Group on Counterinsurgency under Kennedy, acknowledged that in failing to “insist on even rudimentary standards of criminal justice and civil rights, the United States provided regimes having only a façade of constitutional safeguards with up-dated law enforcement machinery readily adaptable to political intimidation and state terrorism. Record keeping in particular was immediately put to use tracking down student radicals and union organizers.”

By 1973, the OPS was abolished by Congress because of its connection to torture carried out by U.S. trained police forces in South Vietnam and Brazil.

Many OPS veterans subsequently returned to work for police forces back in the U.S., where some continued to promote tactics that encouraged police abuse, including in the suppression of urban riots.

Unfortunately, there is a long pattern of abuse in American police forces, that overseas police programs have helped to compound.

As momentum grows for a transformation of the police, activists should be demanding an end to the practice of exporting police repression and a change to the American approach towards foreign policy more broadly.

Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).

June 15, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »