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Google To Start Running “Prebunk” Ads and Quizzing YouTube Viewers To Fight So-Called “Misinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 20, 2024

Prebunking – until relatively recently it was just one of the fringe concepts in the relentless “war on misinformation industrial complex.”

A short way to describe it is as a dystopian version of debunking false or incorrect information. But here the idea is to stop users (“help them identify”) unwanted content, before they can even see it.

A short way to describe what’s wrong with the “war on misinformation” is that it all too easily turns into a smokescreen for plain censorship of lawful and factually correct speech.

And now, prebunking is moving from ideations pushed by murky “fact-checking” and similar outfits, to the very top of the mainstream – Google.

The company that in effect controls the search market and some of the largest social platforms in the world (outside China) has announced that its latest anti-misinformation campaign will incorporate prebunking.

No doubt with an eye on the US election later in the year, Google’s attention is now on Europe, specifically the EU ahead of the European Parliament vote in June.

Google is acting in unison with the EU and its Digital Services Act which require tech giants to act on whatever is chosen to be considered “misinformation” and suppress it. Much of this is (at least they say so) driven by “Russia Scare,” and so both Google’s Jigsaw unit and the EU are talking about “democracy at risk.”

As for Google’s version of “prebunking,” it, at least in Europe, comes in the form of animated ads, reports say. They will play not only on YouTube but also other platforms like TikTok, and target Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland – the EU countries with the largest number of voters.

Jigsaw says prebunking bypasses “polarized debates” and “works equally effectively across the political spectrum.”

User experience may suffer at the expense of this “pre-reeducation.”

“Viewers watching the ads on YouTube will be asked to fill in a short multiple-choice questionnaire, designed to gauge what they have learned about misinformation,” Reuters describes Google’s prebunking technique.

These days, agencies like Reuters describe Jigsaw as an internal Google unit “which operates to tackle threats to societies.”

How noble of Jigsaw, and obliging towards Google of Reuters – but in 2016, reports were still talking about Jigsaw as rather what it really is – a rebrand of Google Ideas.

And, The Guardian explained at the time, this was “the web giant’s controversial diplomatic arm, founded in 2010 and headed by ex-US State Department policy wonk Jared Cohen,” adding – “Jigsaw’s stated mission is to use technology to tackle geopolitics.”

(Geo)politics may these days have been rebranded as “misinformation.”

But otherwise, little has changed.

February 21, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Mike Benz: “What I’m describing is military rule, It’s the inversion of democracy.”

Tucker Carlson interview with former State Dept. official Mike Benz

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | FEBRUARY 19, 2024

Tucker Carlson just interviewed former State Department official, Mike Benz, about how the National Security State—originally conceived to protect the American homeland from foreign adversaries—has increasingly directed its attention to controlling the American people. Its primary instrument is censorship.

This is the exact opposite of what our Founding Fathers conceived for the USA. As James Madison wrote in an August 4, 1822 letter:

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. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Mike Benz has apparently spent years carefully studying the National Security State. His presentation of what is going on in the United States is extraordinarily erudite and organized, and it is corroborated by multiple reliable sources. As I have endeavored to point out on this Substack, the COVID-19 pandemic response is just one of many public policy programs that are being directed by the same unelected Deep State actors.

Benz highlights the relationship between the pandemic response and the key role of mail ballots in the 2020 presidential election. He also points out that the same censorship apparatus that controlled information about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines also preemptively suppressed critics of how the 2020 election was handled.

His conclusion is that our National Security State does not acknowledge the validity of the will of the people. The unelected officials running our country do NOT respect popular government and the popular information that is the lifeblood of popular government.

I strongly recommend watching the entire interview.

February 19, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

State Department Threatens Congress Over Censorship Programs

A year after its censorship programs were exposed, the GEC still insists the public has no right to know how it’s spending taxpayer money

By Matt Taibbi | Racket News | February 17, 2024

The State Department is so unhappy a newspaper published details about where it’s been spending your taxes, it’s threatened to only show a congressional committee its records in camera until it gets a “better understanding of how the Committee will utilize this sensitive information.” Essentially, Tony Blinken is threatening to take his transparency ball home unless details about what censorship programs he’s sponsoring stop appearing in papers like the Washington Examiner:

The State Department tells Congress, which controls its funding, that it will only disclose where it spent our money “in camera”

A year ago the Examiner published “Disinformation, Inc.”, a series by investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky describing how the State Department was backing a UK-based agency that creates digital blacklists for disfavored media outlets. Your taxes helped fund the Global Disinformation Index, or GDI, which proudly touts among its services an Orwellian horror called the Dynamic Exclusion List, a digital time-out corner where at least 2,000 websites were put on blast as unsuitable for advertising, “thus disrupting the ad-funded disinformation business model.”

The culprit was the Global Engagement Center, a little-known State Department entity created in Barack Obama’s last year in office and a surprise focus of Twitter Files reporting. The GEC grew out of a counter-terrorism agency called the CSCC and has a mission to “counter” any messaging, foreign or domestic as it turns out, that they see as “undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States.” The GEC-funded GDI rated ten conservative sites as most “risky” and put the Examiner on its “exclusion” list, while its ten sites rated at the “lowest level of disinformation” included Buzzfeed, which famously published the Steele Dossier knowing it contained errors and is now out of business.

In an effort to find out what other ventures GEC was funding — an absurd 36 of 39 2018 contractors were redacted even in an Inspector General’s report — the House Small Business Committee wrote the State Department last June asking for basic information about where the public’s money was being spent. State and GEC stalled until December 3 of last year, when it finally produced a partial list of recipients. Although House Republicans asked for an “unredacted list of all GEC grant recipients and associated award numbers” from 2019 through the current year, the list the Committee received was missing “dozens” of contractors, including some listed on USASpending.com.

The Examiner and Kaminsky subsequently wrote an article slamming GEC for sending “incomplete” records of the censorship investigation, in the process including links to a “snippet” of the GEC’s contractors:

In response to the outrage of this disclosure, the State Department sent its letter threatening in camera sessions until it gets a better “understanding” of how the Committee will use its “sensitive” information. That’s Beltway-ese for “We wouldn’t mind knowing the Examiner’s sources.”

About that: the State letter wrote that the Examiner’s records were “reportedly obtained from the Committee,” and included a footnote and a link to a Kaminsky story, implying that the Examiner reported that it got the records from the Committee. But the paper said nothing about the source of the documents, which as anyone who’s ever covered these types of stories knows, could have come from any number of places. It’s a small but revealing detail about current petulance levels at State.

“Anti-disinformation” work is not exactly hypersonic missile construction. There’s no legitimate reason for it to be kept from the public, especially since it’s increasingly clear its programs target American media companies and American media consumers, seemingly in violation of the State Department’s mission. The requested information is also not classified, making the delays and tantrums more ridiculous.

There are simply too many agencies that have adopted the attitude that the entire federal government is one giant intelligence service, entitled to secret budgeting and an oversight-free existence. They need pushback on this score and have at last started to get it. Thanks in significant part to the Examiner as well as lawsuits by The Federalist, Daily Wireand Consortium News, the latest National Defense Authorization Act included for the first time a provision banning the Pentagon from using “any advertiser for recruitment that uses biased censorship entities like NewsGuard and GDI,” as a congressional spokesperson put it in December. We’ll see how it pans out, but congress withholding money for domestic spy programs is at least a possible solution, now in play.

Perhaps it’s time for the State Department to receive a similar wake-up call. If GEC wants to put conditions on disclosure, can we put conditions on paying taxes?

February 18, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Musk agrees Ukraine conflict is ‘war of lies’

RT | February 18, 2024

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has seemingly agreed with American investor David Sacks, who believes that the Ukraine conflict will end in a heavy defeat for Kiev, but that the West will try to spin the narrative in a way to sweep the truth under the rug.

On Sunday, Sacks published a post on X entitled “A war of lies,” arguing that the Ukraine conflict is based on falsehoods and deceit about “how it started, how it’s going, and how it will end.”

The entrepreneur stated that citizens of Western countries are being told that “Ukraine is winning when in fact it is losing” while being lied to that Kiev’s main problem is a lack of US funding, while in reality it is the “fact the West can’t produce enough ammunition.”

According to Sacks, the deceit does not end there. “We are told that there is no opportunity to make peace when in fact we have rejected multiple opportunities for a negotiated settlement,” he said. He added that Western leaders are also lying by insisting that the longer Kiev fights, the better terms it will get, when in fact the opposite is true.

Those distortions are prolonging the conflict, which will result in Ukraine trying to mobilize more people to be fed into the “meat grinder,” leading to surging public discontent and the collapse of the Ukrainian government, the businessman predicted.

“When the war is finally lost, when the whole country lays in smoldering ruins on a funeral pyre of their own making, the liars will say: ‘Well we tried.'”

Even then, Sacks concluded, those who lied about Ukraine would blame their misfortunes on a pro-Russian “fifth column… who stabbed the Ukrainians in the back.”

Responding to the lengthy article, Musk appeared to agree, calling it “accurate.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow and Kiev were close to settling the conflict in the spring of 2022, with Ukraine’s neutrality being one of the main items on the agenda. However, according to the Kremlin, the process was derailed by then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who convinced Kiev to keep fighting. The Russian leadership has said the door remains open to engagement with Ukraine.

Last month, in the aftermath of Kiev’s botched counteroffensive, Putin also warned that if Ukraine continued on the same political course, the country’s statehood could suffer a “very serious blow.”

February 18, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

The Attack on Pearl Harbor Was No Surprise (Part III)

Tales of the American Empire | February 15, 2024

The first two segments of this series provide evidence that the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor was no surprise. They are found in the playlist linked below that includes other videos about President Franklin Roosevelt’s plot. Here is other interesting information about the Pearl Harbor attack that is rarely mentioned.

_____________________________________________________

Related Tales:

“The Attack on Pearl Harbor”; https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

“Walter at Pearl Harbor”; Richard Foley; Unz.com; September 11, 2023; https://www.unz.com/article/walter-at…

“Patrol Wing TWO Action Report for the Pearl Harbor Attack”; US Navy; December 20, 1941; https://www.history.navy.mil/research…

“Pearl Harbor: A Midget Sub in the Picture?”; Naval History Magazine; US Naval Institute; December 2004; https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-…

“The Forgotten Casualties of Pearl Harbor – Inside the Accidental Bombardment of Honolulu on Dec. 7, 1941”; Simon Webb; Military History Now; April 26, 2020; https://militaryhistorynow.com/2020/0…

“The Big Secret of Pearl Harbor”; Admiral Robert Theobald; U.S. News & World Report; April 2, 1954; https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/…

February 17, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Russian Space Nukes and Navalny’s Death… U.S. Psyops Go Ballistic

Strategic Culture Foundation | February 16, 2024

The claims about Russian space-based nuclear weapons unraveled to become a joke. Fortunately, the death of Western-sponsored dissident Alexei Navalny then occurred to enable Western media to go into a frenzy of anti-Russia headlines.

First up was the scaremongering story about Russia allegedly developing a space-based nuclear weapon. Initially, it was dramatically trialed as posing a serious national security threat to the United States. Despite the sensational reporting, the story quickly became a laughingstock. Even some U.S. lawmakers dismissed it as “bullshit” and a blatant attempt by the Biden White House and intelligence agencies to push Congress into passing a new mega military aid bill for Ukraine worth $61 billion.

We’ll get to the Navalny story in a moment. But let’s just first parse the orchestration of the alleged Russian space nukes.

The drama began on Wednesday when Mike Turner, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (a dodgy source if ever there was one), made public appeals to President Joe Biden to declassify intelligence on “a serious threat to national security”. Turner is a Republican member of the House of Representatives but he is a close ally of the Democrat White House in terms of keenly supporting military aid to Ukraine. The latest bill passed the upper chamber of the U.S. Senate the day before, February 13, but it is unlikely to be approved by the House where many Republican lawmakers are staunchly opposed to it.

Accompanying the “concerns” of the intel committee chairman Turner,  media outlets then vented anonymous US intelligence sources “revealing” that the national security threat was from Russian nuclear weapons allegedly under development for destroying American communication satellites in space. The White House then “confirmed” the intel the next day, February 15. It was a flagrant put-up job. But the Biden administration sought to tamp down any public panic by saying that the threat was not imminent and the alleged Russian satellite-killing weapon had not been deployed in orbit, nor would there be any danger to Earth. (So, what was all the fuss about?)

Ironically, derisive comments from incredulous U.S. lawmakers were also echoed by the Kremlin. The latter’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov made a similar assessment that the Biden administration was playing tricks to push through the military funding package for Ukraine.

That bill has been delayed since the end of last year. The Biden administration has been cajoling Congress for months to vote it through. After the Senate finally passed the bill this week, President Biden put pressure on the House, saying that “history is watching you”. The bill has been exalted as having existential importance in defeating “Russian aggression” in Ukraine. The U.S. media have claimed (preposterously) that if the military aid is not supplied then Ukraine’s defeat could result in American troops being deployed to prevent Russian rampaging across Europe.

The American public, as with the European public, has become increasingly skeptical about the relentless funneling of taxpayer funds and weapons to Ukraine. Many citizens in the West – a majority, according to polls – have become critical of fueling a bloody war for the dubious cause of “defending democracy” in a regime dominated by NeoNazis. At a time of deep social and economic hardship in the U.S. and Europe, the Western public is rightly disdainful of hundreds of billions of dollars and euros being wasted on death and destruction and also being siphoned off by a corrupt cabal in Kiev.

The $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine is just the latest tranche that Washington is seeking to throw at the black hole of its proxy war against Russia – a war that is really all about defeating Russia as a geopolitical obstacle to U.S. hegemony. Another driver is the massive profits that taxpayers are subsidizing the military-industrial complex at the rotten heart of Western capitalism.

There’s a huge lot at stake with the failure of the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine. The Kiev regime is facing a collapse in the face of a superior Russian military.

That’s why the passing of the latest bill by Congress has taken on such an imperative importance – for the warmongers.

To get this bill into law, the U.S. deep state rulers and the pliant Biden White House along with the media-intelligence establishment sought to demonize Russia with a desperate story about alleged nuclear weapons for outer space. Oh, those dastardly Ruskies!

But as noted above the space nukes scar-story turned into farce. It was too obvious that the public was being manipulated, or gaslighted as one US lawmaker put it. When a psyops fails, the blowback is dangerous for the authors because of the damaging revelation and contempt it engenders. The Biden administration was open to ridicule.

There are several telltale signs that the story was total hogwash from the outset. Bruce Gagnon, U.S.-based coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, said the claims are absurd. In an email exchange with the Strategic Culture Foundation for this editorial, Gagnon said Russia has already developed formidable non-nuclear kinetic weapons to destroy satellites if it wanted to. He also remarked that the United States possesses anti-satellite weapons (ASATs).

In other words, there is no need for Russia to develop a risky nuclear weapon to knock out satellites. The nuclear details flagged up in US media this week are a gratuitous embellishment designed to alarm the public and to demonize Russia as an evil rogue state.

Russia is a co-signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty as are the United States, China, and over 120 other nations.

Bruce Gagnon commented: “I believe the Russians have a long history of generally honoring treaties while the U.S. does not. And remember that Russia and China every year for at least the last 20-30 years go to the UN and introduce a new treaty called Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) to ban all weapons that fall outside of the 1967 treaty. The U.S. always refuses, saying there is no need for a new treaty.”

Apart from the paramount issue of getting additional funding for the proxy war in Ukraine, another timing issue is the aftermath of the blockbuster interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin by American journalist Tucker Carlson. Since the interview was aired last Thursday,  February 8, it has broken all records for public audiences around the world. It has garnered over 300 million views, and counting.

The one-on-one interview was seen as a breakthrough world exclusive, an informative platform for Putin to comprehensively give Russia’s point of view on the whole Ukraine conflict, and more. The Russian leader was seen by American and European audiences as reasonable, intelligent, articulate, and convincing. The Western propaganda caricature of Putin was dispelled and for a rare moment, the Western public was persuasively informed of the bigger causes of the conflict in Ukraine. That is, how the U.S.-led NATO axis had instigated the war by fomenting an anti-Russian regime dominated by NeoNazis. The impact of the interview dealt a devastating blow to the Western narrative of “Russian aggression” and “evil Putin”.

Plausibly, the U.S. warmongering establishment was incensed by this exposé.

Hence, to wrest back control of the narrative and corral the Western public, the space-based nukes scare-story was unleashed. Unfortunately, that psyop attempt failed to gain traction and indeed was fast descending into a farce.

Next up, luckily, came the news of Navalny’s death. Western media immediately blared headlines and comments that he had been killed by the “Putin regime”.

Navalny was serving 19 years in prison on multiple corruption convictions. He died Friday apparently from a blood clot. The 47-year-old was a broken and forgotten figure facing a futile existence, having been used and abandoned by Western intelligence handlers as a cut-out dissident figure. His future looked bleak. Who knows at this stage what caused his death? He was last seen by his lawyer during a prison meeting this week two days before his passing. Did his lawyer pass something to Navalny? Was the washed-up Western asset offered a deal for his family’s benefit if he agreed to one last, ultimate psyop on behalf of Western handlers? Taking his own life? His death in prison has certainly provided the Western media with a bonanza opportunity to change the narrative and precipitate an avalanche of Russophobia, just as required.

As for the far-fetched Russian space nukes and the death of Navalny, the criminologist’s question of Who Gains? and the factor of timing are often reliable indicators.

February 17, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Death of Aleksei Navalny: The Brits did it!

By Gilbert Doctorow | February 16, 2024

It is remarkable how an invitation to do a live television interview can change your schedule and concentrate your mind.

This afternoon I got a WhatsApp message from TRT, Turkey’s premier English language international broadcaster with whom I had done several interviews a year ago, followed by many months of silence. That is not unusual. Broadcasters rotate experts in and rotate experts out at their pleasure.

The invitation today was to speak about breaking news, the reported death in a remote Yamalo-Nenets prison colony of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny at age 47. A glance at the latest online edition of The Financial Times confirmed that Navalny had indeed died and set out the comments of leading Western statesmen condemning what they considered to be the latest murder by Vladimir Putin of prominent activists who oppose his rule. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, European Council President Charles Michel and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were among those who already had spoken before microphones and were reading from the same anti-Putin script.

In short, what happened in the West this afternoon was a new campaign to vilify Vladimir Putin on the world stage based on a death which was, if I may quote former British PM Theresa May, ‘highly likely’ to have been perpetrated by British Intelligence for this very purpose.

In all of the false flag operations that have been directed by the West against Russia over the past decade or more, I have argued that the old Roman investigative principle of cui bono militated against the Kremlin having been involved in any way. So it is today: why would Putin want to murder Navalny, when the man is now largely forgotten within Russia. Navalny is yesterday’s news and his ‘anti-corruption’ campaign is irrelevant to Russians in the midst of an existential struggle with the Collective West that is being fought on the territory of Ukraine? However, the murder of Navalny clearly serves the interests of that same Collective West as an intended antidote to the major Soft Power coup of the Carlson Tucker interview with Vladimir Putin just a week ago and perhaps even more important, to the follow-up Tucker News Briefs showing his visits to the Kievskaya Metro Station and to an Auchan supermarket in downtown Moscow. This was not Gilbert Doctorow publishing his travel notes of visits to St Petersburg markets and reaching 10,000 readers; it was Tucker Carlson, with a regular U.S. audience of 40 million or more for his every broadcast, and a peak of one billion views for the recent interview.

Let us go beyond the cui bono argumentation to circumstantial evidence that is damning for the Brits. As the Americans like to say, there are ‘fingerprints’ of the Brits all over this death of Navalny.

A fair number of the poisonings and other assorted deaths of people who could be said were ‘inconvenient’ to the Kremlin happened in the U.K., after all. That is where Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch who opposed Putin tooth and nail, was ‘suicided’ and it occurred in 2013 at his London estate when it was widely rumored he was looking for forgiveness for his treachery and was preparing to return to Mother Russia with a trove of documents. Earlier still, the U.K. is where the Berezovsky employee Alexander Litvinenko met his death in 2006 from polonium poisoning in a very British cuppa tea.

However, more recently there were incidents in the U.K. which bear directly on the fate of Navalny, and their timing is very relevant. I am thinking about the Novichok poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Skripal in Salisbury at the start of March 2018, ahead of the 18 March presidential elections in Russia that year, when Putin was making his return to power following the interregnum when Dmitry Medvedev was president.

Hmm. A terrible attack on a Putin enemy in 2018 just weeks before a Russian presidential election. Hmm, again: the date of Putin’s next election happens to be 15-17 March.

The Skripal poisoning was shouted to the skies by the British political establishment. Can you just imagine, they said, that Putin is carrying out revenge murders on British soil! Of course, today, everyone has forgotten about the Skripals, who seem somehow to have survived the Novichok attack which is always fatal and to have been given new identities if they were not simply dumped by MI6 into shallow graves somewhere.

But the Novichok that the Russians were said to have invented also was in production in a chemical weapons facility located not far from Salisbury. Another detail that Western media chose to ignore.

Novichok just happens to be the poison that was allegedly used against Aleksei Navalny back in August 2020 while he was on the stump in provincial Russia working up the population to oppose the oligarchs and crooks who, he said, were running the country. Like the Skripals, Navalny miraculously survived his poisoning by Novichok. He was flown to Germany, where Angela Merkel extended a warm welcome to him and where, during his months long convalescence he oversaw the production by German crews of faked video exposés showing palaces on the Black Sea that were supposedly built for Putin.

Russian doctors at the prison colony were said to have spent half an hour today trying to revive Navalny, but in vain. He is just one more case of collateral damage in the British secret war on Russia

Time was, in the days of Tony Blair, we spoke of the British as the ‘lap dogs’ of Bush. Today it would be more appropriate to say that the British have become the Hound of the Baskervilles, ahead of and likely outside the control of Washington.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

February 16, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Why Israel’s war on UNRWA is so sinister

By William Van Wagenen | The Cradle | February 16, 2024

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is facing the gravest existential crisis in its 74-year history, as funding cuts by several western countries come on top of ongoing atrocities perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.

The UN agency is unique in being the only one dedicated to a specific group of refugees in specific areas, and the only relief organization that operates a full-fledged educational system. UNRWA is also the only organization mandated to work in Gaza and distribute aid to the two million people currently trapped and starved in the besieged enclave.

To compound these challenges, the occupation wants to see it dismantled.

UNRWA must be destroyed

In January, Israel alleged that Palestinian members of UNRWA’s staff participated in the resistance’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, leading the US and 18 other nations to swiftly suspend funding for the organization. 

The suspensions were met with shock, as UNRWA plays a key role in providing food and medicine to starving Gazans struggling to survive Israel’s siege and bombardment of the coastal enclave.

However, Israel’s allegations are not based on any evidence. They are instead part of a classified plan prepared in advance by Israel’s foreign ministry to destroy UNRWA. It believes that UNRWA “works against Israel’s interests” by perpetuating the dream of the right of return of Palestinian refugees and the idea of armed struggle against occupation.

The foreign ministry plan leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 on 28 December, set out a three-stage process to eliminate UNRWA in Gaza, using the Hamas-led resistance operation as a pretext:

First, prepare a case alleging UNRWA’s cooperation with Hamas; second, reduce UNRWA’s field of activity and find replacement service providers; and third, transfer UNRWA’s responsibilities to another entity.

Channel 12 noted that Israel wants to move slowly, given that the US government sees UNRWA as crucial to humanitarian efforts in Gaza. The foreign ministry is seeking to gradually build the case for ousting the organization as part of the discussions on “the day after” the war – should Hamas be dismantled.

A sequence of events

According to a report by The New York Times, the “sequence of events” that led the US to suspend UNRWA funding began on 18 January when Amir Weissbrod, a deputy director general at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, met with Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA in Tel Aviv. 

Weissbrod showed Lazzarini a dossier from Israeli intelligence claiming that 12 UNRWA employees had participated in the 7 October attacks. 

After the meeting in Israel, Lazzarini made no effort to confirm the validity of the claims. Instead, he flew to New York to meet with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and immediately began firing the employees, a UN official said.

The Guardian reported that Lazzarini was later asked in a press conference if he had looked into whether there was any evidence for the allegations presented to him by Weissbrod. 

“No,” Lazzarini replied, “the investigation is going on now.”

Lazzarini said he made the “exceptional, swift decision” due to “the explosive nature of the claims,” rather than any evidence. 

Lazzarini said he did not even read the dossier himself because it was in Hebrew. Instead, Weissbrod “was reading this and translating for me,” he said.

How did the US know?

The same New York Times report notes that UNRWA informed US officials about the allegations on 24 January. Just two days later, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the suspension of funding to UNRWA. 

Shockingly, the State Department made the announcement amid reports that Gaza was on the brink of famine, and despite acknowledging that “UNRWA plays a critical role in providing lifesaving assistance to Palestinians, including essential food, medicine, shelter.”

Like Lazzarini, Blinken made the decision without seeking any evidence from Israel, but solely based on the supposedly serious nature of the allegations alone. Blinken justified his decision to suspend aid to starving Palestinians by saying, “We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves. But they are highly, highly credible.”

In a seemingly coordinated effort, other countries – including Germany, Britain, and Australia – swiftly followed suit. Even Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged suspending aid without first receiving any evidence from Israel or even asking Lazzarini to share any evidence he might have.

The funding crisis escalated to such an extent that Juliette Touma, the UNRWA director of communications, said that after “decades of working together,” in “just over 24 hours, nine of our donors suspended funding to UNRWA.”

Another dodgy dossier

As criticism of the aid suspensions mounted, Israeli foreign ministry officials released a dossier to several foreign news organizations.

But after seeing the dossier, both the Financial Times and the UK’s Channel 4 reported that it provided “no evidence” for the claims.

Former UNRWA head Chris Gunness compared it to the “dodgy dossier” used by Tony Blair to take Britain to war in Iraq.

“There is no actual evidence. There are accusations,” Gunness concluded.

Lior Haiat, a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry, tried to justify its refusal to provide any actual evidence by claiming, “the very nature of the allegations makes it impossible for Israel to share all the evidence it has with UNRWA.”

“They think that we can give them intelligence information, knowing that some of their employees work for Hamas? Are you serious?” he asked.

But Israeli propagandist and spokesperson Eylon Levy declined to say if Israel had provided evidence even to the US and UK governments. “I’m not personally aware of what material may have been passed on between our intelligence agencies,” he stated to Channel 4 when pressed for proof of the claims.

Links to Hamas?

The Israeli foreign ministry continued to implement the three-step leaked plan to destroy UNRWA by making additional allegations of UNRWA’s cooperation with Hamas.

On 29 January, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported claims based on Israeli intelligence that “1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza has links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups.”

The article also provided no evidence, citing only Israeli intelligence, and was co-written by Carrie Keller-Lynn, an American who volunteered for the Israeli military and has a personal relationship with an Israeli army spokesperson. 

Even if true, the allegations are meaningless. Hamas is the governing party in Gaza, making it self-evident that many UNRWA employees would be sympathetic or have family ties to the resistance movement. 

Similarly, it would be unsurprising if an employee of an Israeli NGO or aid group was sympathetic to the Israeli army or had family members in the ruling Likud party.

As Haaretz noted, UNRWA employees in the West Bank and other countries where the organization operates are usually more aligned with whatever Palestinian faction is dominant in that area.

‘We could not verify this’

The Israeli foreign ministry’s plan to paint UNRWA as linked to Hamas soon continued with new and bizarre allegations that Hamas had placed a massive data center directly underneath the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza. 

The Times of Israel claimed that the data center was “built precisely under the location where Israel would not consider looking initially, let alone target in an airstrike.”

But Israel has been bombing UNRWA schools and other UN facilities for decades, including when large numbers of civilians have been sheltering in them. No Hamas leader would imagine this would provide it any protection.

But as OSINT analyst Michael Kobs has shown, the alleged data center the Israeli army showed to foreign journalists was not under the UNRWA headquarters. 

Kobs also notes that when Tageschau journalist Sophie van der Tann was taken through a tunnel to see the alleged data center, she stated, “We could not verify” it was under the UNRWA headquarters.

Erasing the right of return 

But why is Israel determined to destroy UNRWA?

One reason is Israel’s ongoing effort to slowly starve Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.

At the beginning of the war on 7 October, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant notoriously ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, saying, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” The late January campaign to suspend UNRWA funding then came at a time when “famine” was already “around the corner” in Gaza, according to UN Emergency Relief Chief Martin Griffiths. Israeli officials knew that suspending funding for UNRWA at this time would only bring famine closer. One Israeli military official acknowledged to the WSJ on 13 February that “Without UNRWA, there is no humanitarian aid in Gaza.”

But there is another reason Israel wants to destroy UNRWA, which predates the current war. 

Palestinian political analyst and researcher Hanin Abou Salem explained that Israel wants to dismantle UNRWA because it transmits refugee status from generation to generation, which keeps the right of return for Palestinian refugees alive and “ensures that their hopes for returning to their ancestral homeland do not perish with the death of the original 1948 refugees.”

If UNRWA is dismantled and replaced by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), as Israel hopes, this will guarantee that Palestinians can only be resettled in third countries and never return to the homes and lands from which Israel forcibly expelled their grandparents during the Nakba.

In 2017, Israel launched a propaganda campaign against UNRWA and succeeded in convincing the Trump administration to cut around $300 million in funding to the organization the following year, only for the Biden administration to restore $235 million in 2021. 

Destroying an idea

But with the start of the war on 7 October, Israel feels it has a second chance, not only to destroy the right of return, but also the “idea” of armed struggle to achieve it. 

Noga Arbell, a researcher at the right-wing Kohelet Forum, recently explained that UNRWA needs to be “annihilated” because it is the “source of the idea.” 

“It gives birth to more and more terrorists in all kinds of ways. UNRWA needs to be wiped out immediately – now – or Israel will miss the window of opportunity.”

UNRWA allegedly ‘gives birth to terrorists’ through its 706 schools, where some 543,075 Palestine refugee children receive free basic education. 

In Gaza, UNRWA uses Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks and supplements these with its own materials. Israel has long been irked that these textbooks include lessons on the life of one of the most famous symbols of Palestinian armed resistance, an 18-year-old young woman and Palestinian refugee born in Lebanon, Dalal al-Mughrabi.

In 1978, Mughrabi led a group of Palestinian guerrillas from PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party to carry out an operation in Israel. 

According to the Israeli version of events, Mughrabi “led one of the deadliest suicide attacks in Israel’s history,” by hijacking a bus and taking its passengers hostage on the highway between Haifa and Tel Aviv. During the operation, the bus exploded, and “38 Israelis were murdered, including 13 children.”

Israel claims that UNRWA is, therefore, teaching “mass murder” by using PA books that encourage everyone to be like Mughrabi.

However, Palestinians claim that Israeli forces killed the hostages. 

You can kill a revolutionary, but not the revolution 

According to a 2008 report in the Guardian, Mughrabi and the Palestinian guerillas intended to attack the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv and hijacked two buses carrying civilians on the coastal road near Haifa. Along the way, they engaged in an intense 15-hour gun battle with Israeli forces.

Palestinians maintain the bus exploded, killing the guerillas and hostages, after it was fired on from the air by Israeli helicopters or elite Israel commandos, in a possible early instance of the mass Hannibal Directive.

Israeli forces implemented the Hannibal Directive on 7 October, killing large numbers of their own civilians – and burning many of them alive – using attack helicopters, tanks, and drones, while blaming all these deaths on Hamas. 

Even if Israel succeeds in executing its plan to destroy UNRWA, while starving and bombing tens of thousands to death in Gaza, it will not be able to erase the spirit of Dalal al-Mughrabi and the thousands of martyrs like her who have sacrificed themselves for the freedom of Palestinians.

Within 24 hours of the unsubstantiated accusations against UNRWA, the US, the UK, and 14 other nations suspended funding to the organization the Wall Street Journal described as the “main pillar of operations to move food aid, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies into Gaza.”

The abruptness of these cuts was particularly jolting in light of the looming threat of famine, as highlighted by Griffiths, who warned that Gaza was on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

These drastic measures were instigated by allegations based on a dubious six-page dossier, arguably part of a meticulously crafted plan orchestrated by Israel’s foreign ministry, aimed at dismantling the humanitarian and educational infrastructure serving internally displaced Palestinians. 

This concerted effort to undermine UNRWA is nothing short of a calculated strategy to exert control over the narrative surrounding Palestinian refugees and to once again reshape the demographics in Palestine. 

February 16, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Elderly Palestinian woman refutes Israeli claim they provided her aid

MEMO | February 16, 2024

An elderly Palestinian woman, Umm Muhammad Musmah, has categorically refuted the Israeli army’s propaganda that soldiers had found her last month while shackled inside a building and provided her with medical aid, Anadolu news agency reported.

Umm Muhammad. who is currently receiving treatment in the Gaza European Hospital in the city of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, told the agency that it was the Israeli army soldiers who had detained her, handcuffed and beaten her then filmed her for propaganda purposes.

She said she was chained and kept outdoors in the cold weather and deprived of food throughout her detention which lasted for nearly two weeks.

Recounting the harsh experience, Umm Muhammad said: “I was arrested [by occupation forces] with many citizens from the Ma’an area, east of the city of Khan Yunis, and [the soldiers] tied my hands, while the weather was very cold. I tried to untie myself, but could not.”

“I was left without food, and was beaten during the arrest,” she added.

In a post published on X on 26 January, the Israeli occupation army added a video of the elderly Palestinian woman being carried on an ambulance stretcher, accompanied by Israeli soldiers.

Israeli army spokesman, Avichay Adraee, claimed that an Israeli army’s drone had located the woman while combing an area in Gaza after she had taken shelter in the building while her hands were shackled and she was suffering from bad health.

“While providing medical care to her, the elderly woman told the force that all her family members had fled to the south, and that Hamas saboteurs arrived at her house wearing military uniforms and handcuffed her two days ago and ordered her to say that our soldiers did that,” he claimed, adding that the Israeli forces provided medical treatment to the elderly woman and released her later.

Israeli forces have repeatedly published claims which have later been disproven. Including claiming it didn’t bomb Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on 17 October 2023 and kill 500 Palestinians in Gaza.

Over the past few months, Palestinians have been released from Israeli captivity and left to make their own way to shelters or to find their families in Gaza. The detainees have shown signs of torture and pictures from their detention show them being humiliated and degraded, stripped of their clothes and left outside in the winter cold.

Just this week, a detained Palestinian civilian was sent into Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis with his wrists tied together and ordered to tell those taking shelter in the hospital to evacuate it. He was then killed by sniper fire, while three Palestinians who were heeding his advice and who tried to travel through the designated evacuation route were all killed.

February 16, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Rational Policy Over Panic

An Awkward Problem

BY REPPARE | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | FEBRUARY 15, 2024

The world of international public health is in a precarious position. Current policy, resources, personal careers, and the very credibility of major organizations are aligned with the recent statement from the World Health Organization (WHO) that:

Epidemics and pandemics of infectious diseases are occurring more often, and spreading faster and further than ever, in many different regions of the world.

Focus has shifted from the highest burden diseases, and the community-based empowerment required to tackle them, to preventing, identifying, and mitigating diseases that are rare and/or of relatively low burden, or even hypothetical. Namely, a new focus on sudden outbreaks of infectious disease or, in their more spectacular rendering, ‘pandemics.’

The challenge with this approach is that a thorough review of the evidence base underpinning the WHO’s agenda, and that of partners including the World Bank and G20, demonstrates that the above statement is inconsistent with available data. The largest database on which these agencies rely, the GIDEON database, actually shows quite a contrary trajectory. The burden of outbreaks, and therefore risk, is shown to be reducing. By implication, the largest investments in the history of international public health appear to be based on misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misrepresentation of key evidence.

Weighing Truth and Opportunity

Public health policy must always address threats in context. Every intervention involves a trade-off in terms of financial, social, and clinical risk. The WHO defines health in terms of physical, mental, and social well-being, and an intervention in one of these areas can impact all three. This is why public health agencies must consider all aspects of direct cost, opportunity cost, and risk when formulating policy. It is why communities and individuals must have adequate information to make decisions in their own cultural, social, and ecological context.

To make sure policy assumptions and evidence is sufficient, it is therefore imperative to include broad information from multiple sources. Reliance on epithets, dogma, deplatforming, and censorship are therefore intrinsically dangerous. This is all, of course, meant to be coded into the normative principles of decolonization, human rights, and equity on which the WHO’s constitution is based.

So, back to the precarious position in which the WHO and the international public health community find themselves. They have staked their reputation and political standing on being the center of a centralized approach to save the global populace from urgent, impending, and recurrent emergencies; an existential threat to humanity as the G20 tells us. An objective analysis reveals that these emergencies are rarely likely to reach a level that justifies the diversion of serious resources from endemic and chronic diseases that do actually maim and kill at scale (see chart below).

Admitting such a reality, after touting the inevitability of disaster so loudly, would risk career prospects, derision, and diminished ability to monetize the post-Covid moment. Yet, to ignore wider considerations in global public health and the evidence that informs those considerations would require abandonment of basic principles and ethics. A dilemma that calls for honesty, introspection, and strength.

Major causes of death by disease globally, in 2019. Global Burden of Disease data, presented at https://ourworldindata.org/.

What the Data Actually Shows

REPPARE’s analysis of the evidence behind the WHO, World Bank, and G20 documents promoting the pandemic preparedness agenda show that recorded outbreaks, both arising within human populations and as ‘spillover’ of pathogens from animals, have increased in the decades before the year 2000, with burden now declining (graphic below).

However, it is inevitable that reporting of such outbreaks will be influenced by changes in both the capacity and incentive to report. These include the development of, and increasing access to, major diagnostic platforms including PCR and point-of-care antigen and serology tests, as well as improvements in communication infrastructure. Fifty years ago, many pathogens now readily identifiable could simply not be detected, or the diseases they cause be distinguished from clinically similar conditions. It is remarkable that this would be overlooked or downplayed by major health agencies, but this is, unexpectedly, the case.

Extract from Fig. 2 of Morand and Walther (2020-23), showing marked recent reductions in outbreak and disease numbers in GIDEON database.

The development of improved diagnostic technologies not only impacts reporting rates but has obvious implications for understanding the term ‘emerging infectious disease’ (EID). This frequently used term suggests that new threats are constantly emerging, such as the Nipah virus outbreaks of the past 25 years. However, while some pathogens have newly entered human populations, such as new influenza variants, HIV and the SARS-1 virus, others such as Nipah virus were simply not detectable without recent technological advances as they cause non-specific illnesses. We are now better at finding them, which puts us immediately in a better, safer position.

Crucially, actual mortality from these acute outbreaks has remained low for a century in contrast to other current health burdens. The much-quoted analysis of Bernstein et al. (2022) suggesting millions of outbreak deaths per year includes pre-antibiotic era Spanish flu and the multi-decade HIV event, averaging it across today’s population size.

However, as their own dataset shows, nothing like the Spanish flu has occurred in terms of mortality in the past century. As most Spanish flu deaths were due to secondary infection, and we now have modern antibiotics, it also provides a poor model for future outbreaks. With HIV and influenza excluded, pre-Covid acute outbreak mortality underlying current pandemic messaging is under 30 thousand people, globally, over the past couple of decades. Tuberculosis alone kills over 3,500 per day.

Covid-19 has, of course, intervened. It fits with difficulty into the main pandemic narrative for a number of reasons. First, its origin remains controversial, but appears likely to involve non-natural influences. While laboratory escapes can and (inevitably) will occur, the surveillance and response being proposed here is targeted at outbreaks of natural origin. Second, Covid-19 mortality occurred mainly in the elderly with significant comorbidities, meaning actual impact on overall life expectancy was far less than the raw reported mortality figures suggest (this also complicates attribution). If considered of natural origin, it appears as an outlier rather than part of a trend in the datasets on which the WHO, the World Bank, and G20 rely.

Time to Pause, Think, and Employ Common Sense

The evidence, assessed objectively, paints a picture of an increasing ability to identify and report outbreaks up to the decade 2000 to 2010 (which explains increases in frequency), followed by a reduction in burden consistent with an increasing ability to successfully address these relatively low-burden events through current public health mechanisms (which explains a lowering trajectory in mortality). This fits well with what one would intuitively expect. Namely, modern technologies and improving health systems, medicines, and economies have improved pathogen detection and reduced illness. There is much to suggest that this trend will continue.

In this context, the analyses of the WHO, the World Bank, and the G20 are disappointing in terms of scholarship and balance. A critic could reasonably suggest that a desire to address a perceived threat is driving a particularly gloomy analysis, rather than analysis objectively aiming to determine the extent of the threat. Such an approach seems unlikely to address the needs of public health.

To be clear, disease outbreaks harm people and shorten lives and must be addressed. And there are of course improvements that should and could be made to address this risk appropriately. In common with most aspects of medicine and science, this is best achieved on the basis of well-compiled evidence and scholarly analysis rather than allowing predetermined assumptions to drive outcomes.

By making claims contrary to the data, international health agencies are misleading governments of Member States down an unevidenced path with correspondingly high estimated cost and diverted political capital. This currently stands at $31.1 billion annually not including One Health measures and surge funding and at least 5 new global instruments; or about 10 times the WHO’s current annual budget. The urgency involved in the pandemic preparedness agenda is either contrary to evidence or poorly supported by it.

In view of their influence, international health agencies have a particular responsibility to ensure their policies are well-grounded in data and objective analysis. Moreover, governments have a responsibility to take the time, and effort, to ensure that their populations are well-served. It is hoped that the evaluation in the REPPARE report Rational Policy Over Panic will contribute to this effort.


REPPARE

REPPARE (REevaluating the Pandemic Preparedness And REsponse agenda) involves a multidisciplinary team convened by the University of Leeds, and led by two principal investigators.

Garrett W. Brown

Garrett Wallace Brown is Chair of Global Health Policy at the University of Leeds. He is Co-Lead of the Global Health Research Unit and will be the Director of a new WHO Collaboration Centre for Health Systems and Health Security. His research focuses on global health governance, health financing, health system strengthening, health equity, and estimating the costs and funding feasibility of pandemic preparedness and response. He has conducted policy and research collaborations in global health for over 25 years and has worked with NGOs, governments in Africa, the DHSC, the FCDO, the UK Cabinet Office, WHO, G7, and G20.

David Bell

David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modeling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, and worked on infectious diseases and coordinated malaria diagnostics strategy at the World Health Organization. He has worked for 20 years in biotech and international public health, with over 120 research publications. David is based in Texas, USA.

February 15, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Epstein victims sue FBI

RT | February 15, 2024

A dozen victims of Jeffrey Epstein have sued the FBI, alleging that the agency failed to properly investigate the notorious sex offender. They claim that the FBI sat on reports about Epstein’s activities for two decades, allowing the victims to be “trafficked, abused, raped, tortured and threatened.”

The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in New York on Wednesday by 12 women, all of whom are referred to in the document as anonymous Jane Does.

“For over two decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation permitted Jeffrey Epstein to sex traffic and sexually abuse scores of children and young women by failing to do the job the American people expected of it,” the complaint alleges. “As a result of the continued failures of the FBI, Jane Does 1-12 bring this lawsuit to get to the bottom – once and for all – of the FBI’s role in Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking ring.”

According to the lawsuit, the FBI began receiving tips, reports, and complaints about Epstein’s alleged trafficking and abuse of minors in 1996, but failed to open a case or share this information with other law enforcement agencies. The FBI eventually opened a case in 2006, two years before Epstein pleaded guilty to a child prostitution charge in Florida.

A controversial plea deal saw Epstein register as a sex offender and serve 13 months on supervised release in lieu of a possible life sentence. Despite the fact that he had been convicted for one offense and dodged a litany of other sex-trafficking charges, the FBI continued to ignore tips that flowed in over the next decade, the lawsuit claims.

“As a direct and proximate cause of the FBI’s negligence, plaintiffs would not have been continued to be sex trafficked, abused, raped, tortured and threatened,” the complaint said.

Epstein was eventually arrested in 2019 and charged with the trafficking of dozens of minors. He died awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail cell a month later, with his death officially ruled a suicide. Epstein’s girlfriend and “madam,” Ghislaine Maxwell, was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for child sex trafficking in 2022.

According to testimony from victims, Epstein and Maxwell recruited girls to perform sexual acts on themselves and their rich and powerful associates, and instructed these girls to recruit additional victims. Among the powerful men accused of abusing the girls was Britain’s Prince Andrew, who settled out of court with an accuser in 2022.

The plaintiffs behind the latest lawsuit are seeking an unspecified amount in compensation and damages from the US government.

The FBI has already been accused of negligence in its handling of the Epstein case. In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in December, agency Director Christopher Wray was asked why the FBI didn’t do more to stop the notorious pedophile. Wray promised to conduct an internal investigation to “figure out if there is more information we can provide.”

February 15, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

US spies behind ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy – report

US President Barack Obama and CIA Director John Brennan, December 14, 2012 in Washington, DC. ©  Pete Souza / The White House via Getty Images
RT | February 14, 2024

The US intelligence community inappropriately used foreign allies to target Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign to set up the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy ahead of the 2016 election, according to a trio of investigative journalists.

Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag – of ‘Twitter Files’ fame – published the first part of an investigation on Tuesday, in which they claim the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ were operationalized against Trump staffers, citing anonymous sources close to the House Intelligence Committee.

According to their report, President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had sent America’s partners – the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – a list of 26 Trump associates to target with data collection, misinformation and manipulation.

The Russiagate conspiracy involved multiple failures across western media networks to critically assess US intelligence claims that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. A 2018 Pulitzer prize was awarded to Washington Post and New York Times journalists for their reporting on what was later to exposed as a false story.

“They were making contacts and bumping Trump people going back to March 2016,” said a committee source. “They were sending people around the UK, Australia, Italy — the Mossad in Italy. MI6 was working at an intelligence school they had set up,” the journalists claim.

Officially, the FBI only started looking into the Trump campaign that summer, after an Australian diplomat reportedly overheard an aide mention Russia. If confirmed, these findings would demonstrate that the US intelligence community had worked for months before that to set up just such a pretext.

In a statement to the investigative journalists, the FBI said it had made “missteps” in the 2016 and 2017 investigation of the Trump campaign, but has since implemented reforms to prevent it from happening again.

“The allegations that GCHQ was asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense,” a spokesman for the British surveillance agency said. “They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.” Shellenberger, Taibbi and Gutentag said they had never asked the GCHQ about “wiretapping.”

According to Shellenberger, there is a “10-inch binder” containing previously unknown documents about the intelligence community’s surveillance of the Trump campaign. The 45th US president had ordered these documents declassified, but they went missing instead. In a Fox News appearance on Tuesday evening, Shellenberger suggested the FBI’s August 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort may have been related to the missing binder.

After the US intelligence community created a pretext for investigating Trump for ‘ties to Russia,’ they spied on his campaign – and then his presidency – using a falsely obtained FISA warrant. The warrant was based on the ‘Steele dossier,’ a file compiled by a British spy in the pay of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, through several intermediaries. The FBI knew the dossier was false as early as January 2017, but continued using the FISA warrant for almost a year thereafter.

The FBI lawyer who altered evidence to obtain the warrant, Kevin Clinesmith, ended up sentenced to probation and his law license has since been restored.

February 14, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment