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The Covid/Crypto Connection: The Grim Saga of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Browstone Institute | November 18, 2022

A series of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried about climate change, supports every manner of justice (racial, social, environmental) except that which is coming for him, and shells out millions to worthy charities associated with the left. He also bought plenty of access and protection in D.C., enough to make his shady company the toast of the town.

As part of the mix, there is this thing called pandemic planning. We should know what that is by now: it means you can’t be in charge of your life because there are bad viruses out there. As bizarre as it seems, and for reasons that are still not entirely clear, favoring lockdowns, masks, and vaccine passports became part of the woke ideological stew.

This is particularly strange because covid restrictions have been proven, over and over, to harm all the groups about whom woke ideology claims to care so deeply. That includes even animal rights: who can forget the Danish mink slaughter of 2020?

Regardless, it’s just true. Masking became a symbol of being a good person, same as vaccinating, veganism, and flying into fits at the drop of a hat over climate change. None of this has much if anything to do with science or reality. It’s all tribal symbolism in the name of group political solidarity. And FTX was pretty good at it, throwing around hundreds of millions to prove the company’s loyalty to all the right causes.

Among them included the pandemic-planning racket. That’s right: there were deep connections between FTX and Covid that have been cultivated for two years. Let’s have a look.

Earlier this year, the New York Times trumpeted a study that showed no benefit at all to the use of Ivermectin. It was supposed to be definitive. The study was funded by FTX. Why? Why was a crypto exchange so interested in the debunking of repurposed drugs in order to drive governments and people into the use of patented pharmaceuticals, even those like Ramdesivir that didn’t actually work? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Regardless, the study and especially the conclusions turned out to be bogus. David Henderson and Charles Hooper further point out an interesting fact: “Some of the researchers involved in the TOGETHER trial had performed paid services for Pfizer, Merck, Regeneron, and AstraZeneca, all companies involved in developing COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines that nominally compete with ivermectin.”

For some reason, SBF just knew that he was supposed to oppose repurposed drugs, though he knew nothing about the subject at all. He was glad to fund a poor study to make it true and the New York Times played its assigned role in the whole performance.

It was just the start. A soft-peddling Washington Post investigation found that Sam and his brother Gabe, who ran a hastily founded Covid nonprofit, “have spent at least $70 million since October 2021 on research projects, campaign donations and other initiatives intended to improve biosecurity and prevent the next pandemic.”

I can do no better than to quote the Washington Post:

The shock waves from FTX’s free fall have rippled across the public health world, where numerous leaders in pandemic-preparedness had received funds from FTX funders or were seeking donations.

In other words, the “public health world” wanted more chances to say: “Give me money so I can keep advocating to lock more people down!” Alas, the collapse of the exchange, which reportedly holds a mere 0.001% of the assets it once claimed to have, makes that impossible.

Among the organizations most affected is Guarding Against Pandemics, the advocacy group headed by Gabe that took out millions in ads to back the Biden administration’s push for $30 billion in funding. As Influence Watch notes: “Guarding Against Pandemics is a left-leaning advocacy group created in 2020 to support legislation that increases government investment in pandemic prevention plans.”

Truly it gets worse:

FTX-backed projects ranged from $12 million to champion a California ballot initiative to strengthen public health programs and detect emerging virus threats (amid lackluster support, the measure was punted to 2024), to investing more than $11 million on the unsuccessful congressional primary campaign of an Oregon biosecurity expert, and even a $150,000 grant to help Moncef Slaoui, scientific adviser for the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine accelerator, write his memoir.

Leaders of the FTX Future Fund, a spinoff foundation that committed more than $25 million to preventing bio-risks, resigned in an open letter last Thursday, acknowledging that some donations from the organization are on hold.

And worse:

The FTX Future Fund’s commitments included $10 million to HelixNano, a biotech start-up seeking to develop a next-generation coronavirus vaccine; $250,000 to a University of Ottawa scientist researching how to eradicate viruses from plastic surfaces; and $175,000 to support a recent law school graduate’s job at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Overall, the Future Fund was a force for good,” said Tom Inglesby, who leads the Johns Hopkins center, lamenting the fund’s collapse. “The work they were doing was really trying to get people to think long-term … to build pandemic preparedness, to diminish the risks of biological threats.”

More:

Guarding Against Pandemics spent more than $1 million on lobbying Capitol Hill and the White House over the past year, hired at least 26 lobbyists to advocate for a still-pending bipartisan pandemic plan in Congress and other issues, and ran advertisements backing legislation that included pandemic-preparedness funding. Protect Our Future, a political action committee backed by the Bankman-Fried brothers, spent about $28 million this congressional cycle on Democratic candidates “who will be champions for pandemic prevention,” according to the group’s webpage.

I think you get the idea. This is all a racket. FTX, founded in 2019 following Biden’s announcement of his bid for the presidency, by the son of the co-founder of a major Democrat Party political action committee called Mind the Gap, was nothing but a magic-bean Ponzi scheme. It seized on the lockdowns for political, media, and academic cover. Its economic rationale was as nonexistent as its books. The first auditor to have a look has written:

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

It was the worst example of a phony perpetual-motion machine: a token to back a company that itself was backed by the token, which in turn was backed by nothing but political fashion and woke ideology that roped in Larry David, Tom Brady,  Katy Perry, Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton to provide a cloak of legitimacy.

Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas April 2022

And you can’t make this stuff up anymore: FTX had a close relationship with the World Economic Forum and was the favored crypto exchange of the Ukrainian government. It looks for all the world like the money-laundering operation of the Democratic National Committee and the entire lockdown lobby.

I will tell you what infuriates me about these billions in fake money and deep corruptions of politics and science. For years now, my anti-lockdown friends have been hounded for being funded by supposed dark money that simply doesn’t exist. Many brave scientists, journalists, attorneys, and others gave up great careers to stand for principle, exposing the damage caused by the lockdowns, and this is how they have been treated: smeared and displaced.

Brownstone has adopted as many in this diaspora as possible for fellowships as far as the resources (real ones, contributed by caring individuals) can go. But we cannot come anywhere near what is necessary for justice, much less compete with the 8-digit funding regime of the other side.

The Great Barrington Declaration was signed at the offices of the American Institute for Economic Research, which, apparently, six years prior had received a long-spent $60,000 grant from the Koch Foundation, and thus became a “Koch-funded libertarian think tank” which supposedly discredited the GBD, even though none of the authors received a dime.

This gibberish and slander has gone on for years – at the urging of government officials! – and Brownstone itself faces much of the same nonsense, with every manner of fantasy about our supposed power, money, and influence swarming the darker realms of the social-media dudgeons. In fact, the actual Koch Foundation (probably unbeknownst to its founder) was funding the pro-lockdown work of Neil Ferguson, whose ridiculous modeling terrified the world into denying human rights to billions of people the world over.

All this time – while every type of vicious propaganda was unleashed on the world – the pro-lockdown and pro-mandate lobby, including fake scientists and fake studies, were benefiting from millions and billions thrown around by operators of a Ponzi scheme based on cheating, fraud, and $15 billion in leveraged funds that didn’t exist while its principle actors were languishing in a drug-infested $40 million villa in the Bahamas even as they preened about the virtues of “effective altruism” and their pandemic-planning machinery that has now fallen apart.

Then the New York Times, instead of decrying this criminal conspiracy for what it is, writes puff pieces on the founder and how he let his quick-growing company grow too far, too fast, and now needs mainly rest, bless his heart.

The rest of us are left with the bill for this obvious scam that implausibly links crypto and Covid. But just as the money was based on nothing but puffed air, the damage they have wrought on the world is all too real: a lost generation of kids, declined lifespans, millions missing from the workforce, a calamitous fall in public health, millions of kids in poverty due to supply-chain breakages, 19 straight months of falling real incomes, historically high increases in debt, and a dramatic fall in human morale the world over.

So yes, we should all be furious and demand full accountability at the very least. Whatever the final truth, it is likely to be far worse than even the egregious facts listed above. It’s bad enough that lockdowns wrecked life and liberty. To discover that vast support for them was funded by fraud and fakery is a deeper level of corruption that not even the most cynical among us could have imagined.


Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.

November 18, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | 2 Comments

Republican US Congressman: Days of Endless Cash, Military Aid for Ukraine ‘Numbered’

Samizdat – 17.11.2022

WASHINGTON – US Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said the days of endless financial and security aid for Ukraine are numbered after the Republicans won a majority in the lower chamber of Congress.

“I’m here as a member of the House Armed Services Committee to say that the days of endless cash and military materiel to Ukraine are numbered,” Gaetz said on Thursday. “They’re numbered in the days that are required to act on Congresswoman [Marjorie Taylor] Greene’s well thought out resolution of inquiry and they are numbered when we get into the majority.”

Gaetz vowed not to vote for one more dollar or one more piece of military equipment for Ukraine. The congressman from Florida said the United States is far too entangled in the Ukraine conflict and has effectively extended it.

Gaetz also called on the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to declassify the Inspector General’s report on compliance with the existing regulations regarding the chain of custody of material going to Ukraine.

On Thursday, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said she is introducing legislation alongside other US House Republicans to audit funding provided to Ukraine. “We’re asking for everything to do with military, civilian and financial aid. We want it all,” she remarked at a conference.

Aside from Greene and Gaetz, House Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Matt Rosendale (R-MT) have co-signed the move to undertake audits of funds appropriated by Congress.

Green has stated that if the resolution is struck down, she intends to reintroduce the measure in the new year once the new Congress is brought in. “For next year, absolutely I’ll introduce this resolution again, but I’ll also be calling for a full audit. That’s what we want, we want to audit Ukraine,” she said.

November 18, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Militarism | , | 3 Comments

How are FTX crypto exchange, DNC corruption and ’Ukraine aid’ connected

By Drago Bosnic | November 18, 2022

On October 11, FTX Group, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, filed for bankruptcy in the United States. The company’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried resigned, leading to a mind-blowing collapse of one of the top entities in the cryptocurrency industry. The company said that Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, “will remain to assist in an orderly transition.” John J. Ray III, the lawyer who oversaw the liquidation of Enron, took his place. The fall of FTX sent shockwaves throughout the cryptocurrency market, as many became wary that a similar crash could happen to other companies in the industry. However, in the immediate aftermath of the crash, it became clear that there is an unexpected connection between FTX, the Democratic Party and the so-called “Ukraine aid, fueling speculation as to what might have caused the crash.

According to a report by The Epoch Times, back in March, the Kiev regime established a crypto donations website, allowing it to convert cryptocurrencies into fiat money that would then be deposited at the National Bank of Ukraine. The goal was to raise $200 million, of which $60 million was collected by October. The money was to be used to procure assets for the Neo-Nazi junta forces, including digital rifle scopes, medical supplies, field rations, fuel, military clothing, etc. The initiative, called “Aid for Ukraine,” gained the support of FTX, staking outfit Everstake, and the local Kuna exchange. It also has the direct support of the Kiev regime’s Ministry of Digital Transformation.

“At the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, FTX felt the need to provide assistance in any way it could. By setting up payment rails and facilitating the conversion of crypto donations into fiat currency, we have given the Central Bank of Ukraine the ability to deliver aid and resources to the people who need it most,” Sam Bankman-Fried said in a statement in March. “We are grateful for the opportunity to work with Sergey [Vasylchuk] and the Everstake team as they continue to work tirelessly in helping Ukrainians as they suffer from this conflict,” the former FTX CEO concluded.

The move seems to have become a perfect opportunity for the corrupt officials in both Washington DC and the Kiev regime to funnel much of the “Ukraine aid” funds back to the US. While it’s not entirely clear if reports that the Neo-Nazi junta officials ‘invested’ in FTX are accurate, there are credible issues regarding the possibility that the Kiev regime was using the funds donated through FTX to funnel money back to the DNC coffers. The fact that Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest Democratic Party donor in 2021-2022, donating nearly $40 million, makes this possibility even likelier.

The Epoch Times report further states that in the first half of 2022, the former FTX CEO donated $865,000 to the Democratic National Committee, $66,500 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and $250,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In addition, Sam Bankman-Fried made multiple visits to the White House, where he met with White House counselor Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, according to the visitors log. On May 13, he also met with Charlotte Butash, a policy adviser to the White House deputy chief of staff. Mark Wetjen, the head of policy and regulatory strategy at FTX, who served as a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) under former US President Barack Obama, also attended some of the meetings.

The connections between FTX, the Kiev regime and the DNC are quite clear and raise a lot of questions. Billionaire Elon Musk was also puzzled by the revelation. As one Twitter user aksed whether FTX was being used to launder money for the Democratic Party, Musk replied it was “a question worth asking.” On November 14, Alex Bornyakov, the Kiev regime’s Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, dismissed the claims, although he failed to explain how exactly they were a “false narrative”.

“A fundraising crypto foundation @_AidForUkraine used @FTX_Official to convert crypto donations into fiat in March,” Bornyakov tweeted. “Ukraine’s gov never invested any funds into FTX. The whole narrative that Ukraine allegedly invested in FTX, who donated money to Democrats is nonsense, frankly.”

However, Fox News political commentator Jesse Watters thinks the evidence, although not conclusive at the moment, cannot be ignored and that the DNC’s motives to send billions of dollars to the Kiev regime are not so altruistic after all.

“Democrats send money to Ukraine, Ukraine sends money to FTX, and FTX sends money to the Democrat’s campaigns. I don’t know if this is war profiteering or money laundering, I don’t even know, but it needs to be investigated.” Watters said.

Although cryptocurrency experts agree that the scheme most likely wasn’t the primary reason for the downfall of FTX, the consequences of the scandal cannot be ignored and will most likely cause further issues on cryptocurrency markets. It’s also yet another indicator of how corruption is hidden behind the “aid for Ukraine” narrative.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

November 18, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , , | 2 Comments

“Shared Values and Security Interests?”

Is that what the ‘wag the dog’ US relationship with Israel is all about?

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 15, 2022

Jonathan Greenblatt, the aggressive head of the Jewish advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently attacked some comments on the Israel relationship made by former President Donald Trump, who prefaced his remarks by accurately observing that “No President has done more for Israel than I have.” Greenblatt nevertheless complained in a tweet that “We don’t need the former president, who curries favor with extremists and antisemites, to lecture us about the US-Israel relationship. It is not about a quid pro quo; it rests on shared values and security interests. This ‘Jewsplaining’ is insulting and disgusting.”

Greenblatt’s perpetual whine is also “insulting and disgusting” but he possesses little in the way of introspection or restraint. He and his predecessors in the Jewish lobby have historically been largely successful in selling a load of self-serving nonsense about why the United States has become a client state that has its Middle Eastern foreign policy run out of Tel Aviv by a racist regime. US political and national security interests in the region have been subordinated to those of Israel. Washington provides political cover for anything Israel chooses to do and, the ultimate absurdity, the American taxpayer gifts a relatively wealthy Israel with $3 billion in “aid” per year plus other trade and co-production benefits.

To justify it all, phrases like “the only democracy in the Middle East” and “Israel has a right to defend itself” roll off the lips of a host of bought-and-paid-for congress critters like the chorus in a Greek tragedy every time the Israelis see fit to kill a few more Palestinians, Syrians or Iranians. Even killing American citizens like Rachel Corrie, 34 members of the crew of the USS Liberty and Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh does not draw any censure from Washington. Beyond that, Israel has recently convinced the US government to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which incorporates criticism of the Jewish state as ipso facto the mark of an anti-Semite. And going still further, twenty-six state governments have chosen to penalize their citizens who, in seeking benefits or a job at local level, refuse to sign or swear to a statement that they will not support any boycotts of Israel.

It is all about the dual loyalty that many Jews have as relates to Israel. Indeed, one might argue that folks like Greenblatt have something amounting to singular loyalty, and it is at least questionable whether any of that applies to the good old U S of A. Recently Greenblatt and his host of perpetual complainers have been riding hard the alleged surge in anti-Semitism, as defined by them to justify everything they and their Israeli brethren do. They know they can get away with saying and doing almost anything when it comes to Israel, to include the shamelessly hyped alleged sad plight of perpetual Jewish victims worldwide, even in the United States where they enjoy unparalleled and grossly disproportionate privilege, power, status and wealth. Jewish power driven by Jewish money dominates much political interaction while also driving the accompanying media narrative. And the Jewish/Israeli viewpoint defines what are acceptable viewpoints within academia while also shaping the product that comes out of the entertainment industry, as well as the decision making in many business and financial services sectors.

Israel is about to put together its most extreme right-wing government ever, headed for the third time by Benjamin Netanyahu and including probable cabinet level ministers who have been described as “terrorists,” “racists,” and even “fascists.” The pressure on the Palestinians will no doubt intensify with the objective of first fully establishing control on the ground before ethnically cleansing the Arabs to produce an overwhelmingly dominant Jewish state. Settlements will expand and new ones will be planted while armed settlers destroy the livelihoods of the remaining Palestinians, compelling them to flee. And there will also be pressure from Netanyahu to force the United States to take the offensive against Iran, up to and including a military first strike to destroy its fictional nuclear weapons program. President Joe Biden has already committed the United States to do something like that, promising that Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.

Articles in the Jewish media in particular but also in national publications like the New York Times and Washington Post suggest that many liberal Jews are concerned over the right-wing political shift in Israel, which might be described as being in the grip of “religious nationalism.” Diaspora Jews understand that it will become harder to defend the actions of the Jewish State and to sell the current “tie-that-binds” to both an American and international audience.

The perception that Israel, which in 2018 declared itself to be legally the nation state of the Jews with “exclusive right of self-determination,” is already an apartheid state that casually commits what many would describe as war crimes is growing and will almost certainly impact on the international acceptance of the Israelis. But in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and France in particular, such concerns might be considered overwrought as Jewish hard power and money have effectively bought into and even dominate some aspects of their respective political and economic systems. A clear majority of British Members of Parliament are members of various “Friends of Israel” associations and in the US both parties are heavily dependent on Jewish/Israeli donors for campaign funding and also to ensure a friendly media. Most congressmen have learned the lesson that criticizing Israel is a red line that must not be crossed if one wants to remain in office, so it is most likely that the US love affair with Israel will continue no matter what Netanyahu and company do.

One might reasonably consider two things when it comes to the lopsided Israel-US relationship. First, how accurate is the Greenblatt boast that it rests on “shared values and security interests?” And second, to what extent are ADL, not to mention groups like the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), actually acting as directed agents of the Israeli government and therefore subject to the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 which would open up their books to scrutiny and also require some transparency vis-à-vis their contacts with the Israeli Embassy and the country’s Foreign Ministry and intelligence and security agencies?

First of all, Greenblatt’s claim of shared values is completely a fraud unless one considers corrupt elections to protect the likes of Hunter Biden and Netanyahu, who has been accused of corruption in Israel which the election result will enable him to avoid. Israel is no democracy unless one considers that disenfranchising many of the potential voters in the area that you control is somehow “democratic.” The United States is meanwhile becoming more like Israel. It is turning into a managed democracy where the party in control uses that power to attack and delegitimize the opposition. This occurred in 2016 with Trump vs. Hillary and has been taking place since the 2020 election through Democratic Party apparatchik attempts to link the GOP to the post-electoral January claimed insurrection. Of course, Trump himself has unfortunately hurried this process along through his ill-advised attempts to focus his support among Republicans based on how enthusiastically they support his insinuations, which is at least tactically a bad move.

Security interests? I was in the CIA overseas at a post where we would receive much processed Israeli intelligence. Believe me, it nearly all related to making Muslims look bad. Any “threat” information that Israel is able to collect legitimately the United States NSA and other intelligence organizations are able to do as well or better. The United States could drop Israel as an intelligence partner tomorrow and it would not make any difference vis-a-vis US national security. Greenblatt is as usual blowing smoke to enhance the value of the bilateral relationship, such as it is. In reality it is a rip-off all to the advantage of Israel.

Finally, there is the issue of the Israel/Jewish lobby serving as an active agent for the Jewish State of Israel, which clearly it is and does do. After last week’s election, AIPAC boasted that a pac that it had set up had raised $17 million to defeat candidates critical of Israel, while also supporting those politicians who were friends, 95% of whom were elected. To pretend that the Lobby exists to provide some kind of perspective or balance in foreign policy is a case of who is kidding whom on the issue. As one of my agents in Turkey used to describe it, “It is as the hand fitting into the glove.” The Justice Department should move to investigate and, if necessary, indict all Jewish organizations that have sustained contact with the Israeli government as foreign agents, no exception. Yes, I know, it will never happen, particularly with Attorney General Merrick Garland nee Garfinkel in charge as he is too busy investigating Russia.

So here we go again. A new government alignment will soon be in place in Washington but nothing changes. Israel’s friends will be firmly in control until someone in power has the guts to go after all the Jewish organizations that are part of the so-called Israeli lobby. Make them register, find out where their money comes from and check out their close and continuing relationships with the Israeli government. And by the way, forget all about that “shared values” and “security interests” nonsense, it’s all a sham. I would like to invite Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden to travel with their families to the Israeli army occupied West Bank and live as Palestinians for a few weeks. They would get a good taste of Israeli “values.” And as for “security interests,” it’s all about Israeli perceptions, isn’t it? Genuine American interests in the Middle East region have long been ground down under the heel of Jewish power in the United States and people like Jonathan Greenblatt will continue to use their bully pulpit to make sure that critics of the process are effectively silenced.

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 councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

November 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Made in Britain: How London handpicks Iraqi leaders

An investigation into how the British government groomed young, impressionable Iraqis to serve as their political agents.

By Kit Klarenberg | The Cradle | November 15, 2022

Throughout the 20th century, it was frequently said by residents of West Asia, “lift up a mullah’s beard, and you’ll see the words ‘Made in England’ written underneath it.”

Such cynicism is understandable, given Britain’s history of covertly co-opting Imams and sheikhs to further its malign interests across the region.

Yet explosive leaked files reviewed by The Cradle show that this time-tested clandestine strategy hasn’t waned as the traditional role of religious teachers in West Asia is increasingly supplanted, or at least challenged, by politicians ostensibly elected by democratic vote.

Rather, it has evolved and been asserted in more modern forms, which are just as insidious, but may perhaps be even more effective in ensuring West Asian leaders at every level can be reliably depended upon to do London’s bidding.

Another youth initiative

The documents reviewed by The Cradle relate to a Foreign Office project in Baghdad, dubbed “Youth Political Leadership, “set to run for at least a year from August 2016. An accompanying “statement of requirements” not for public consumption laid out its objectives in stark detail. In brief, London sought to “identify young Iraqis…who will join the political establishment,” and train them in “values; representation; and political skills.”

This schooling would “ideally” be complete by Spring 2017, so “successful graduates” could “participate as candidates in the 2017 (or 2018, circumstances depending) local elections.” The desired end goal was that Iraq’s parliament and government alike would be “replenished with a professionalised and young class of political figures” who could be depended upon to serve London’s interests.

“The influx of these young Iraqis,” the statement explained, stood to “benefit” Britain, in particular by facilitating the spook-infested National Security Council’s strategy for Baghdad.

‘No functioning government’

Construction and management of the training program was outsourced to private contractors who were tasked with putting together a “comprehensive plan” for “gender diverse” Iraqis aged 27 or below with “a realistic prospect of entering the political sphere,” including a dedicated “curriculum” that would inculcate “professional ethics” and “hard political skills” in students, to ensure they could optimally “influence” voters.

Trainees were to be subject to intensive “monitoring and assessment” both during and after the course, with top performers whisked to London for a state-funded “study tour,” where they would be assigned “individual mentors” to “help support their career ambitions.”

Subsequently, a “graduate network” would be operated on- and offline in cooperation with the British embassy in Baghdad, to ensure “regular contact” between students and the Foreign Office – and thus MI6 – “through their political careers.”

Prospective candidates would be rigorously vetted before enrolment to ensure they had “an appropriate vision for Iraq,” with a “realistic” prospect of, and plan for, entering the political sphere upon graduation, such as “being chosen as a parliamentary advisor or selected to run as a provincial council member.”

These individuals would then be rigorously taught the Foreign Office’s approved curriculum, so as to instill them with “the right [emphasis added] technical knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours” in candidates.

“Practical training on how to function as a political representative,” such as “campaign work (e.g. canvassing, usage of social media),” and “the skills needed to collaboratively function as a member of the legislature,” would also be provided.

Adam Smith International

London’s call was answered by Adam Smith International (ASI). The company clearly grasped the urgency of the project. In detailed submissions to the Foreign Office, it noted that “recent events clearly indicate there is pressing need to address the failure of the Iraqi political establishment to provide an effective government,” making repeated reference to large-scale protests in Baghdad’s historic Tahrir Square, which occurred in July 2016.

Those incendiary scenes were part of several wide-ranging upheavals that unfolded across Iraq that year, spurred by anger over high-level corruption, and never-ending government gridlock.

Incidentally, these were themselves by-products of the byzantine political structure imposed upon Baghdad in the wake of the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Western occupation forces enforced strict ethnic, sectarian, and party quotas on every office of state, ensuring perpetual division, inertia, and gridlock – essentially an inability to address basic public needs.

In the ensuing power vacuum, sectarian groups rose to the fore as the primary means by which average citizens could pressure parliament into implementing vital reforms. This development was no doubt extremely unwelcome to London – after all, many of these movements were Shia-led, raising the obvious prospect of neighboring Iran’s influence increasing considerably within the country.

This concern is reflected in ASI’s submissions. In bemoaning “the absence of a functioning government,” and emphasizing the resultant need to identify and groom future leaders promptly, the company noted firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was a leading figure in the 2016 protest movement.

“Unless steps are taken to provide avenues for the next generation of Iraqis to enter the legislature, the existing political cadres will continue to dominate the scene, leading to rising frustration and increasing social unrest,” ASI cautioned. “Practical assistance and continuing career support has the potential to stymy the rising tide of frustration among the youth of Iraq in the short term.”

Meddling in Iraq’s internal affairs

In a perverse irony, ASI purportedly played a pivotal role in shaping Iraq’s unworkable political system from its initial stages, enforcing the precise construction which the Foreign Office became resolved to shatter.

In sections of the leaked files outlining its experience of working in Iraq, the company noted that since 2004, it had on behalf of the British government “[provided] assistance to centre of government institutions in Iraq,” including “[developing] key parts of the machinery of government.”

Its in-country team was even said to have “worked closely” with representatives of the Prime Minister’s and Deputy Prime Minister’s offices, granting them a “detailed understanding of the functioning of the Iraqi political system.”

“ASI will leverage the contacts and experience from this project to help facilitate the outreach among political parties,” the contractor pledged. Little did those who ASI previously installed and shored up in office know, that in assisting their Foreign Office friends identify recruits for the leadership training program, they were signing their own political death warrants.

A region-wide strategy

Evidently, the assorted individuals and organizations serving British interests in West Asia at any given time are highly expendable – and should the governance structure they’re drafted to run on London’s behalf perform poorly, or become difficult to effectively control, another must be constructed in its place, filled with all-new representatives in order to create the bogus impression of “change.”

All along, the Foreign Office’s hand in steering a government’s composition and policies, and picking its public faces, will remain hidden, obscured by layer-upon-layer of private contractors, and lofty rhetoric about progress and democracy.

The leaked files exposed here represent a particularly candid insight into how Britain pursues its imperial ambitions in the modern day – but just one. The Cradle has previously exposed a similar connivance in Lebanon, wherein London covertly recruited “agents of change” from among the country’s youth, teaching them how to “maximise their impact” and boost their “name recognition and credibility,” in order to eventually elevate them to parliament.

It stands to reason that Baghdad and Beirut are far from alone in this regard. As such, it behooves all residents of West Asia to ask themselves for whom their elected representatives are truly working, and what interests they ultimately serve.

November 15, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | 2 Comments

They Will Lock You Down Again

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | November 14, 2022

The lords of lockdown barely escaped their worst possible fate, namely that the topic would become the national and international source of scandal that it should be. And let’s add the vaccine mandates here too: even if such had been morally justified, which they were not, there is absolutely no practical reason for them at all.

To have imposed both of these within the course of one year – with zero evidence that they achieved anything for public health and vast amounts of unfolding evidence that they ruined life quality for countless millions – qualifies as a scandal for the ages. It was in the US but also in nearly every country in the world but a few.

Might that have huge political implications? One would suppose so. And yet today it appears that truth and justice are further off than ever. The most passionate of the anti-lockdown governors – those who never locked down or opened earlier than the rest of the country – won on their record. Most of the rest joined the entire political establishment in pretending that all of this is a non-issue. Tragically, this tactic seems to have worked better than it should have.

Meanwhile, a few points to consider:

The US government, through the Transportation Safety Administration, has signed yet another order extending the ban on unvaccinated international visitors until January 8, 2023. This means that no person who has managed to refuse the shot is allowed to come to the US for any reason. This is 30% of the world’s population, banned even to enter the US on their own dime. Something like this would have been inconceivably illiberal three years ago, and been a source of enormous controversy and outrage. Today, the extension hardly made the news.

The Biden administration has once again extended the Covid emergency declaration another 90 days, which continues to grant government vast powers without Congressional approval. Under a state of emergency, the Constitutional structure of the US is effectively suspended and the country remains on a wartime footing. This announcement was not controversial, and, like the above, it barely made the news.

Many colleges and universities, and also other schools and public agencies, continue to enforce the vaccine mandate even without any solid science behind the approval of the bivalent shots or any real rationale behind the push, given that most people have long ago been exposed and acquired natural immunity, and, moreover, it is very well established that the shots do not protect anyone from infection nor stop transmission. They just keep doing this anyway.

Masking is not in disrepute because we never really obtained anything like an honest admission of their failure to control the spread. Even today, there is a percentage of people out there permanently traumatized. On travels, I’m seeing perhaps 10-20% but in some Northeastern cities, regular wearing of masks is also very common. Once they became a symbol of political compliance and virtue, that sealed the deal and the culture was changed. Now we face the threat of mask mandates whenever government deems it necessary because the Transportation Safety Authority has been given the go-ahead by the courts.

The end of vaccine mandates in most areas of life, and hence also the drive for a passport to distinguish between clean and unclean people, is a good sign. But the infrastructure is still in place and becoming more sophisticated. It is hardly a final victory. It might only be a temporary respite, while all the ambitions are still extant.

More than that, the Biden administration (and all that it represents, including the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and everything else called the establishment) has its own pandemic plans in place. The idea is not to dial back the mandates or cool it on them. It’s the reverse: centralize all pandemic planning to make a South Dakota, Georgia, and Florida experience impossible the next time. Also, spend tens of billions in more money.

The principle seems to have emerged among the agencies, intellectuals, and politicians who did this. Whatever you do, never admit to having made any major mistakes. And never connect the economic, cultural, health, and educational disasters all around us to anything the govenrment did in 2020 or 2021! That would be nothing but a conspiracy theory.

The pandemic racket is so huge at this point that it is even embroiled in the FTX meltdown over the weekend. Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabe actually founded a nonprofit solely for the purpose of providing “support” for the $30 billion that the Biden administration has allocated to pandemic planning. The institution “Guarding Against Pandemics” is very obviously a honeypot for such funding, complete with on-the-record endorsements from many Democrat Party candidates who won election.

Meanwhile, yes, there have been many successful court challenges to many features of the pandemic response. But not enough. The main machinery that took away liberty and property in the name of virus control is still in place in all its essentials. The CDC to this day brags of its awesome quarantine powers that it can deploy any time government deems it necessary. Nothing about that has changed.

In the big picture and rendered in a philosophical sense, humanity seems to have lost its ability to learn from its own errors. Put in more gritty terms, too many people among ruling-class interests gained financially and in terms of the lust for power during the pandemic to prompt any serious rethinking and reform.

In any case, that rethinking and reform is now put off for another day. Anyone seriously concerned about the future of humanity and the civilizations it built must throw themselves into the long-term battle for truth and reason. That will require that we use every bit of what remains of free speech and what remains of the longing for integrity and accountability in public life. The group we have come to call “they” want a demoralized population and a silent public square.

We cannot allow that to happen.


Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

Did Federal Censors Swing the 2020 Election?

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | November 14, 2022

Did the Russiagate conspiracy entitle the federal government to censor Americans forever? Did federal shenanigans swing the 2020 election? A new report reveals how a new federal agency and federal grantees exploited a 2016 scam to launch the greatest covert censorship campaign in U.S. history.

In 2016, top FBI officials and the Obama administration fueled a conspiracy that the Trump presidential campaign was colluding with the Russian government. Numerous false FBI claims spurred a massive wiretapping operation approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The allegations led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who spent two years investigating before admitting that there was nothing to prosecute for his primary charge. But by that point, Trump had been irredeemably tainted and the Democrats had exploited the controversy to capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.

Thanks to Russiagate, Congress created a new federal agency in 2018—the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CISA was purportedly intended to fight foreign threats to election security and U.S. infrastructure. But the agency quickly shifted its target to American citizens. As a report last week from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) revealed, “Any U.S. citizen posting what DHS considered misinformation’ online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure.”

CISA and DHS realized that they could not directly muzzle Americans so they colluded with a number of federal grantees who comprised the Election Integrity Project, a coalition formed in mid-2020. The result was “censorship by proxy,” as law professor Jonathan Turley observed, bludgeoning social media companies into submission. The DHS-spurred crackdown in 2020 resulted in the suppression of “22 million tweets labeled ‘misinformation’ on Twitter” and “hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted” thanks to changes that would not have occurred without “‘huge regulatory pressure’ from government,” FFO reported.

Once the government claims a prerogative to censor “misinformation,” the definition of misinformation mushrooms to serve political purposes. The Election Integrity Partnership bragged about how social media posts were targeted that were merely purportedly guilty of offenses such as “exaggerate issue,” “misleading stats” and “out of context.” Many of those alleged factual infractions were piddling compared to the sweeping falsehoods continually uncorked by presidential candidates Trump and Biden.

Prior to the 2020 election, “the censorship focus was always and consistently foremost targeted at speech casting doubt on mail-in ballots,” FFO reported. Democrats exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to push through electoral changes that opened the floodgates to unverified mail-in ballots. Some states like Michigan sent absentee ballots to all voters, violating the Election Clause of the Constitution (which specifies that state legislatures make the rules for federal elections).

Election regimes that scrutinized mail-in ballots routinely had a high rejection rate.  New York City relied on mail-in ballots for a June 2020 primary that the New York Daily News derided as a “dumpster fire.” Up to 20% of ballots “were declared invalid before even being opened, based on mistakes with their exterior envelopes,” The Washington Post noted, thanks largely to missing postmarks or signatures. Trump claimed that the shift to mail-in ballots could result in “the most corrupt vote in our nation’s history.”

But federal string-pulling minimized controversies. FFO noted, “Pre-censoring U.S. citizen debate about mail-in ballots five months before an election has the impact of devastating the ability of concerned citizens to pressure their state representatives to take legal action on changing voting procedures.” Rather than the traditional scrutiny for mail-in ballots, many locales defaulted to accepting practically any piece of paper with a mark. Mail-in ballots determined the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump received more votes on Election Day but 43,000 mail-in ballots in three states sealed Biden’s victory—a minuscule portion of the tens of millions of mail-in votes he received.

In a July 28, 2020 article for the American Institute for Economic Research, I warned that the controversies over mail-in ballots could lead to “the death of political legitimacy…Deep State federal agencies are a Godzilla that have established their prerogative to undermine if not overturn election results.”

Until I read the new FFO report, I did not realize that “the biggest category for [2020] censorship was  ‘delegitimization’… defined to mean any speech that ‘casts doubt’ on any kind of election process, outcome or integrity issues [which] made all conservative and populist criticism of the administration of the election pre-banned at the narrative level, five months in advance of Election Day.” Damn, no wonder that article of mine got so little traction on Twitter and Facebook! “Delegitimization” resulted in “72% of its censorship tickets and targeted over 99% of the posts throttled by narrative during the 2020 election.”

The entire process looks like a Monty Python parody of democracy. As Mike Benz, the former State Department official who heads FFO, observed, “The same obscure DHS subagency tasked with election security also gained the power to censor any questions about election security.”

How much impact did federal censorship and suppression have on the most recent elections? The Election Integrity Project browbeat tech companies to accept “that social media posts about the 2022 elections be censorable under a low bar of simply ‘misleading,’” according to FFO. For the midterm elections, “the Election Integrity Project is tightly monitoring and working to censor ‘discussions surrounding the delays in counting ballots’ being ‘framed as fraud,’” FFO reported. Damned convenient considering the debacle in Arizona—which was foreseen if not foreordained. In a Washington speech just before the election, President Biden told listeners that “in some cases we won’t know the winner…until a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner.” Biden stressed that citizens must be “patient. That’s how this is supposed to work.”

But it never consistently worked that way before in American history. Arizona’s voting machines dismally failed on Election Day and Democrats are vehemently resisting a hand recount of all ballots.

The real goal is to control Americans’ minds—and not just on Election Day. Jen Easterly, the NSA honcho who Biden chose to run CISA, declared that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation… is incredibly important.” And the most important cognitive “fix” is to train Americans to never doubt Uncle Sam. In a March 2022 meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI official Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government,” The Intercept recently reported. The FBI has 80 agents on a task force to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”

“Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods. If the feds can censor most if not almost all of their online critics, their cons become almost irrefutable. Perhaps that is the only way that many federal policies can retain any shard of legitimacy. As Mike Benz warns, “DHS is carrying out an official state policy that if public trust is not earned, it must be installed.” That is a recipe for the death of democracy.

Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US aid to Ukraine ‘invested’ in crypto FTX scheme

Free West Media | November 14, 2022

The sudden collapse of a crypto exchange linked to the Democratic Party in the US, has revealed that FTX presently suffers from $10-$50 billion in liabilities and virtually no assets. And among those liabilities, are “investments” made by Ukraine’s leadership clique.

The company FTX, in its bankruptcy filing appears to have held tens-of-billions in American “military aid” to Ukraine. Instead of using the alleged funds to fight Russia, the money was ‘invested’ in the FTX Ponzi scheme.

From the bankruptcy filing it is clear that this money has now disappeared.

“Instead of using US military aid to fight Russia, Ukraine ‘invested’ part or all of it, into FTX, and right now, it looks like all the money’s gone,” said Hal Turner, a well-known American radio host.

The crypto money from unsuspecting clients was also used to fund the Democratic Party in the United States. More evidence has surfaced suggesting that the funds may have been stolen.

The CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, was one of the top donors to the Democrats, with only George Soros outperforming his largesse. Recently, he also shared a podium with inveterate globalists Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.

According to Turner, it seems that Ukraine was receiving money from the US, and then sent it to FTX, and FTX sent it to the same Democrats, who had originally voted to send it to Ukraine.  “At this hour, it appears to some observers to be pure, criminal, money-laundering, and a criminal conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws,” said Turner.

Reuters exclusively reported that the founder and CEO FTX transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to the trading company Alameda Research, which is run by his girlfriend Caroline Ellison.

Sam Bankman-Fried was born in 1992 on the campus of Stanford University into a family of academics. Born and raised to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in California, he is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School. His aunt Linda P. Fried is the current dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. His brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried, is a former Wall Street trader and the director of the non-profit Guarding Against Pandemics.

He was the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes in the 2021–2022 election cycle with total donations of $39,8 million, only behind Soros. Of this, $27 million was given to Protect our Future PAC, bankrolled by Bankman-Fried.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are currently looking into whether FTX.com mishandled customer funds. Bankman-Fried is also being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for potential violations of securities rules.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | 1 Comment

US wants to build military bases in Uruguay

By Ahmed Adel | November 7, 2022

A draft defence cooperation agreement between Washington and Montevideo, which could allow the installation of US military bases in Uruguay, is once again being considered in the Uruguayan Parliament. Allowing US military bases would effectively damage the sovereignty of Uruguay, a country which currently maintains good relations with both Russia and China.

Senator Gustavo Penadés for Uruguay’s ruling centre-right National Party claimed that the project only involves “some type of investment in construction” and not the permanent presence of US forces in Uruguayan territory. For his part, the president of the Uruguayan Defence Commission and of the opposition centre-left Broad Front, León Lev, admitted that the project is “ambiguous” and will instigate “profound discussion” in Parliament.

The project is defined as “a complementary agreement” for “reciprocal provision” of “logistical support, supplies and services.” It says that Uruguay and the US express their “desire to improve the interoperability, preparation and efficiency of their respective military forces through greater logistical cooperation.” In addition, the purpose of the agreement is to “facilitate logistical support” between the two countries during “combined exercises, training, displacements, stopovers, operations or other cooperative activities.”

Effectively, it is very clear that the bilateral agreement will in fact enable US actions more than anything else. For example, the supply of services that can be provided to each other in reality only benefits the US as Uruguay does not have the capacity to do military missions or operations in North America like the US does in South America. It cannot be overlooked that the initiative is from the US and is drafted in the terms that it proposed.

The project was first discussed in 2012, during the government of José Pepe Mujica, but it did not have the support of parliament. Today, just like in 2012, if the parliament authorises it, it would mean a loss of Uruguayan sovereignty over a part of its territory.

According to Senator Penadés, there is no possibility of US bases in Uruguay and he believes that this interpretation of the agreement is incorrect. The legislator claimed that it is a “standard agreement” like the ones that have been signed between the US and other countries on defence cooperation. When asked what the project refers to when it says “operations in bases [and the construction corresponding to that support],” Penadés said it is about the “infrastructure” that is built in “cooperation,” such as, according to him, hospitals.

For his part, Lev affirmed that the project is “ambiguous” and will provoke “very deep discussion” in parliament.

“As it is ambiguous, it is going to give rise to at least a very deep discussion, I have no doubt. This is not going to be voted on tables and this discussion is going to take many months, if not years. But one can never anticipate,” he said, adding: “There are two main laws for the Government, such as the organic law of the Armed Forces and the retirement law. Parliament is not in a position to quickly study this project.”

Lev pointed out that, in general, agreements with foreign countries take months or years to approve.

“An issue of this nature, with the ambiguities, especially with this potential base, is going to generate a deep debate. The Uruguayan government does not propose the agreement, it makes a scheme with the US and proposes what Washington aspires to. But in politics one should never rush. One has to carefully analyse and see the actions of the political system,” Lev said.

The underlying issue is that the Uruguayan military’s limited defence budget means that it is reliant on the generosity of donor nations. In one example, the US State Department GPOI funds contributed $36 million since 2008 in equipment, training, and construction for the Uruguayan Armed Forces. This is evidently a paltry amount, but in the context of the Uruguayan military, which has a total budget of $1.16 billion, it is significant.

It is recalled that Daniel Castillos, Uruguay’s Ambassador to Moscow, announced in April that his country does not support the economic sanctions on Russia.

“Despite the current situation and criticism regarding [Russia’s] special military operation [in Ukraine], Uruguay has not imposed and does not support any economic and financial sanctions against Russia… and maintains an interest in strengthening trade and maintaining good relations,” he said, adding that it was “necessary” to cooperate with Russia.

For the US, it is important that initiatives like the defence cooperation agreement are signed with Uruguay so that the country can be brought under its sphere of influence. Uruguay currently has friendly relations with the US, Russia and China, but Washington hopes to upset this balance by slowly influencing the country, beginning with military bases. For now, although the US undoubtedly has ambitions for military bases in Uruguay, it appears unlikely to happen in the short and medium term.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

November 7, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism | , , | 5 Comments

Another Extraordinary Murder in Washington D.C.

Mary Mahoney was allegedly the victim of a botched robbery in the Georgetown Starbucks

Mary Mahoney, murdered on July 7, 1997
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 6, 2022

When Seth Rich was murdered in Washington D.C. on July 10, 2016, the Metropolitan Police Department immediately proposed that it was a “botched robbery.” The case reminded me of the murder of Mary Mahoney in a Georgetown Starbucks on July 7, 1997.

Mary Mahoney was an intern in Bill Clinton’s White House during his first term. She then got a job working as a manager of Starbucks in Georgetown, which was frequented by many notable figures in the Washington political establishment. Her murder (along with her two coworkers) was the first triple murder in the neighborhood’s history. Prior to the crime, not a single homicide had been committed in Georgetown for eighteen months.

Robbery appeared an unlikely motive, as none of the day’s cash proceeds had been taken from the store. Mahoney’s murder occurred during the same period that Newsweek reporter Mike Isikoff was investigating allegations that President Clinton had sexually harassed White House employees—an investigation that would ultimately lead him to Monica Lewinsky. Attorneys for Paula Jones were also seeking corroborating cases of Clinton’s sexual harassment of young women.

A year after the murder occurred, the police received a tip to examine a man named Carl D. Cooper from a woman who had just watched an America’s Most Wanted episode on the triple homicide. For several months, investigators found no evidence linking Cooper to the crime. Then another informant came forth—a former drug addict named Eric Butera, who was himself later murdered in “a robbery gone wrong.”

Based on information gleaned from Butera’s associates, Carl Cooper was arrested. After a grueling four-day interrogation, Cooper confessed, stating that the triple homicide was a “botched robbery” (which just happened to be the official working hypothesis). While held at gunpoint, Mary, refused to give Cooper the keys to the safe—a heroic act to save her 50 billion market cap employer from losing a few thousand dollars. Because Mary refused to give Cooper the keys, he shot her five times, including a shot to the back of the head. He then shot her two coworkers, and then left the store without taking a dime.

Cooper was convicted on the grounds of his confession to the Metropolitan Police. However, in a subsequent interview with an FBI investigator, Cooper recanted his confession. Although the FBI investigator unequivocally stated this in his testimony, the court concluded that Cooper’s initial confession was sufficient for his conviction. Cooper was initially represented by a court-appointed attorney, but after his trial began, his court-appointed attorney was joined by the prominent Washington D.C. defender, Francis D. Carter, who initially represented Monica Lewinsky when Monica stated her willingness to remain silent about her affair with Clinton. Carter drafted an affidavit for Monica in which she stated that she had NOT had an affair with the president. Carter was forced to withdraw this affidavit after Monica made statements to Lynda Tripp (equipped with a secret recording device) confirming her affair with Clinton.

That Carter joined the Carl Cooper defense team strikes me as very peculiar, especially given that Carter did not change the defense strategy. I wonder if Carter’s primarily job was—under cover of client-attorney confidentiality—to deliver a message to Carter pertaining to his sentencing prospects and what he might reasonably expect for his wife (to whom he was apparently very attached) if he stuck with his confession.

Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno initially sought the death penalty for Cooper— the first death-penalty matter brought to trial in the District in nearly 30 years, but federal prosecutors later withdrew this request. To date, no evidence has been found linking Cooper to the triple homicide.

In a related case, the District of Columbia was successfully sued for the wrongful death of Metropolitan Police informant, Eric Butera, as the jury concluded the police had been negligent in protecting him during an undercover operation to obtain more information about the Starbucks triple slaying. The woman who gave the initial tip to America’s Most Wanted later publicly accused the police of refusing to protect her and fell under suspicion for being motivated primarily by the reward money offered by the show.

Since the murders occurred, the crime has been the subject of extensive media coverage, several documentary television features, and hundreds of online commentators. Conventional newspaper coverage of the crimes—primarily conducted by the Washington Post and the Washington Times—consisted entirely of straightforward reporting of information provided by police and judicial officers.

Given the controversial nature of the police investigation and judicial proceedings against the man who was charged for committing the crime, it is surprising how little the mainstream media questioned official accounts. Likewise, the TV documentaries simply presented narratives provided by law officers as though they contained nothing that was questionable. This is particularly notable given that substantial details of the official narrative, provided by the same investigating officers, are represented differently in different documentaries. Moreover, some of officers’ statements in the documentaries pertaining to Starbucks procedures and security protocols are NOT consistent with what a veteran Starbucks manager told me.

I would like to interview Carl D. Cooper in prison, but I cannot find him in the federal prison system. Though I have not had the time and resources to dig deep into this component of the story, my preliminary research suggests that his whereabouts in the federal prison system have been concealed.

In 2016, the lead homicide detective in the Mary Mahoney case — Detective James Trainium — published a book titled How the Police Generate False Confessions. It’s a detailed examination of how the police obtain false confessions, and the author is clearly writing from personal experience.

November 6, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

An Extraordinary Unsolved Murder in Washington D.C.

In the matter of SETH RICH, the FBI asks for 66 years to release his laptop contents Nov 5 DNC Staffer Seth Rich, murdered on July 10, 2016

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 5, 2022

“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.” —James Madison

As an investigative author I’ve often dealt with the extreme frustration of making federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and state Open Records Act requests. So often, it seems that federal and state agencies don’t want to release the information, delay in responding, and then cite multiple exceptions to the law in order to justify keeping the information secret.

I therefore felt sympathy for my fellow Texan, Brian Huddleston, when I saw the recent Epoch Times report that his FOIA request for the information found on Seth Rich’s laptop is being thwarted by the FBI, which asked the judge who ruled in Huddleston’s favor to grant the Bureau 66 years to fulfill the request.

Readers of this Substack may find the FBI’s request reminiscent of the FDA’s request for 55 years to release COVID-19 vaccine data. Given the unfortunate reality of human mortality, one wonders what public interest will be served 55 or 66 years from now, apart from satisfying the curiosity of historians who aren’t yet born.

The murder of Seth Rich—in the middle of one of the most brutal presidential election years in history—has always struck me as an example of the authorities NOT investigating a matter of public interest. The mainstream media and half the country were so blinded by partisan passions that they couldn’t see the grounds for suspecting that the young man’s murder was politically motivated. Just a few hours after the incident occurred—before there was any time to perform an investigation—the Metropolitan Police Department announced that the murder appeared to be a “botched robbery.”

Since Seth Rich was murdered on July 10, 2016—12 days before Wikileaks published embarrassing DNC e-mails—there has been much speculation that he could have been the source because he was upset about how the DNC had treated Bernie Sanders. A good investigator wouldn’t speculate about the crime, but he would certainly notice that, statistically speaking, the murder is extraordinary.

Seth Rich was shot in the back near his apartment building, and though he was carrying a valuable watch, wallet, and cell phone, these were not taken by the assailant. Perhaps it was a botched robbery, as the Metropolitan Police Department quickly announced, but shooting a guy in the back without taking his valuables is not typical of armed robbery. Other robberies in the same neighborhood around the same time followed the conventional pattern of the assailant threatening the victim and demanding his or her valuables instead of opening fire on the victim.

In the year 2016, there were 135 homicides in Washington D.C., which has a resident population of 672,000, which comes to approximately one murder per 5000 residents— a dramatic decline from the city’s murder rate in the early nineties. Incidentally, the Metropolitan Police conducted an analysis of homicide for the years 1998-2000—after homicide rates had dropped significantly—and concluded that the primary motives were

1) Argument/conflict

2). Drug related

3). Revenge/retaliation

4). Robbery

5). Gang related.

During this period, homicides were not equally distributed throughout the city, but were concentrated in particular neighborhoods. 92% of the victims were African Americans 3.2% were Hispanic and 3.2% were white. Though one must consider the possibility that homicide trends in DC have changed since 2000 (apart from merely decreasing in numbers) it’s notable that, of the currently unsolved homicides in Washington DC in the year 2016, Seth Rich is the only white victim in a city that is now 44% white.

Julian Assange has always insisted the DNC e-mails were leaked and not hacked. Former NSA technical director William Binney has also insisted that if the DNC e-mails were hacked, it would be child’s play for the NSA to establish the precise routing of the hack, which indicates that the e-mails were more likely leaked by an insider.

Regarding motive, a good investigator would consider the hypothesis that Seth Rich was murdered NOT in retaliation, but to eliminate him as a witness that the DNC e-mails were leaked by an insider and not hacked by Russians. Almost immediately after the embarrassing e-mails were published, the DNC vehemently proclaimed it was Russian hackers who were responsible, though no evidence has been presented to support this accusation.

Regarding the assailant: A good investigator would consider the hypothesis that he was contracted to murder Rich but knew nothing about his target or the motive for killing him. This hypothesis is consistent with Rich being murdered as he approached the entrance to his home—that is, the contract killer was provided only with the address and a photograph of his target.

Another notable aspect of this crime has been the extremely emotional tone of press reporting from the same reporters who so passionately embraced the Russian meddling story. The mere suggestion that Seth Rich’s murder was politically motivated prompted these same people to angrily denounce this (perfectly reasonable hypothesis) as “wild, right wing conspiracy theory” and to demand that reporters cease and desist from exploring this hypothesis.

And yet, given that the crime remains unsolved, why not explore this hypothesis?

November 6, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception | , , , | 13 Comments

Media identifies major beneficiary of Ukraine crisis

RT | November 5, 2022

Yahoo News has identified a major beneficiary of the Russia-Ukraine slugfest: the US military industrial complex, which is reaping a windfall even as the bloody conflict causes economic havoc, energy shortages and a looming food crisis around the world.

As the media outlet reported on Saturday, EU nations have committed to about $230 billion in new weapons purchases since the Russian military offensive against Kiev started in February. US defense contractors are poised to land the lion’s share of those orders, given their dominance as suppliers to European militaries, Yahoo added.

Many European nations turn to US arms makers for more than half of all their weapons purchases. Yahoo cited data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) to show examples of US dominance in European arsenals. For instance, US-made arms accounted for 95% of the weapons purchases by the Netherlands from 2017 to 2021. The ratios were 83% US weaponry for Norway, 77% for the UK, and 72% for Italy.

European weapons imports jumped 19% during the five-year period as then-President Donald Trump prodded his NATO allies to meet their obligations for defense spending. The Ukraine crisis is set to create an even bigger windfall, as President Joe Biden leads an international campaign to flood Ukraine with weapons and the conflict triggers accelerated steps by European nations to bolster their own defenses.

“This is certainly the biggest increase in defense spending in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform, told Yahoo. The crisis in Eastern Europe dispelled the notion that war on the continent is no longer possible, he added. “They’re waking up to the fact that not only is it very possible, but it is happening, and it’s happening not that many miles away from them.”

Since Biden took office in January 2021, European countries entered at least the initial stage of negotiations for $33 billion in arms purchases, including $21 billion since February, Yahoo said, citing figures from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

US defense contractors will also benefit from Washington’s massive military aid to Kiev, as the Pentagon races to replenish stocks of artillery pieces, rocket launchers and other weapons. Biden has set aside more than $65 billion in military and economic aid for Ukraine since the conflict began.

Russia has warned that the influx of Western weapons will prolong the crisis while making the US and other NATO members de facto participants.

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November 6, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism | , , | 9 Comments