Quick Take: The “Epstein Client List” is not what it seems
OffGuardian | December 21, 2023
On Monday a New York Judge Loretta Preska ruled that the infamous “Epstein Client List” must be released “in full” in January 2024.
The 51-page ruling has caused a stir, but what is it really going to tell us?
Is it going to reveal anything of his ties to US and Israeli intelligence?
Highly improbable.
Is it going to tell us anything about his supposed “suicide”?
Of course not.
The judge even walked back the “in full” part before the end of her ruling, giving anyone on the list until January 1st to petition to have themselves removed:
Anyone on the list has until 1 January to appeal to have their name removed.
We don’t know who’s going to be on the “full” list when it’s released (except Prince Andrew, and you already know what we think about him) but there’s no reason at all to trust it.
As we speak the contents of this “full list” are probably subject to feverish behind the scenes campaigning. PR firms, agents, lobbyists all jockeying to have their clients removed and their enemies added. Those in control are likely busy extorting favours from anyone who doesn’t want to be a last minute addition.
Because that’s always been the major point of the “client list”. Since the revelation that it existed, the “Client List” has been a potential threat hanging over the head of every politician, celebrity or high profile business owner.
“Step out of line, and we might just discover you’re on the list and start leaking that little tidbit all over the place”.
The persons concerned don’t need to have EVER actually been on the list for this to work.
Hell, there doesn’t even need to be a list for this to work. Not a real solid hard copy compiled by Epstein anyhow. Just a spreadsheet on a computer somewhere, updated as necessary with the names of those deemed needful.
Consider, for a moment just how strange it is that we even know the “Epstein client list” exists, and indeed that that’s what it’s called.
Consider how strange it is that we were ever told who went to what island how many times.
Now the judge has made a ruling (hooray! the system works! ) and we’ll likely be presented with nothing but a list of disposable names – the old, the dead, the already discredited and/or recently stepped out of line.
What relationship, if any, it has to Epstein’s real associates or anything else real world will remain unknowable and largely irrelevant to everyone selling and consuming it.
How Twitter Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online Propaganda Campaign
Documents and emails from Twitter detail the extensive secret assistance the social media platform gave to CENTCOM’s influence operations
BY LEE FANG | DECEMBER 20, 2023
One year ago, I published my first investigation based on documents I obtained through the “Twitter Files.” I visited the San Francisco office of the social media company several times and took many notes. Below, I am republishing my initial investigation, which explores the secret assistance that Twitter gave to the Pentagon to assist with a fake account network used to manipulate Arabic-language communities in the Middle East. Twitter claimed that it shut down all state-backed influence operations, yet gave special tools to the U.S. military for its propaganda network.
TWITTER EXECUTIVES HAVE claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform.
Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.
The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts — a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed. Though Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. Some remain active.
The revelations are buried in the archives of Twitter’s emails and internal tools, to which The Intercept was granted access for a brief period last week alongside a handful of other writers and reporters. Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the billionaire started giving access to company documents, saying in a Twitter Space that “the general idea is to surface anything bad Twitter has done in the past.” The files, which included records generated under Musk’s ownership, provide unprecedented, if incomplete, insight into decision-making within a major social media company.
Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information; rather, for three days last week, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive. I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done to protect privacy, not Twitter.
THE DIRECT ASSISTANCE Twitter provided to the Pentagon goes back at least five years.
On July 26, 2017, Nathaniel Kahler, at the time an official working with U.S. Central Command — also known as CENTCOM, a division of the Defense Department — emailed a Twitter representative with the company’s public policy team, with a request to approve the verification of one account and “whitelist” a list of Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.”
“We’ve got some accounts that are not indexing on hashtags — perhaps they were flagged as bots,” wrote Kahler. “A few of these had built a real following and we hope to salvage.” Kahler added that he was happy to provide more paperwork from his office or SOCOM, the acronym for the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Twitter at the time had built out an expanded abuse detection system aimed in part toward flagging malicious activity related to the Islamic State and other terror organizations operating in the Middle East. As an indirect consequence of these efforts, one former Twitter employee explained, accounts controlled by the military that were frequently engaging with extremist groups were being automatically flagged as spam. The former employee, who was involved with the whitelisting of CENTCOM accounts, spoke under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
In his email, Kahler sent a spreadsheet with 52 accounts. He asked for priority service for six of the accounts, including @yemencurrent, an account used to broadcast announcements about U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. Around the same time, @yemencurrent, which has since been deleted, had emphasized that U.S. drone strikes were “accurate” and killed terrorists, not civilians, and promoted the U.S. and Saudi-backed assault on Houthi rebels in that country.
Other accounts on the list were focused on promoting U.S.-supported militias in Syria and anti-Iran messages in Iraq. One account discussed legal issues in Kuwait. Though many accounts remained focused on one topic area, others moved from topic to topic. For instance, @dala2el, one of the CENTCOM accounts, shifted from messaging around drone strikes in Yemen in 2017 to Syrian government-focused communications last year.
On the same day that CENTCOM sent its request, members of Twitter’s site integrity team went into an internal company system used for managing the reach of various users and applied a special exemption tag to the accounts, internal logs show.
One engineer, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that he had never seen this type of tag before, but upon close inspection, said that the effect of the “whitelist” tag essentially gave the accounts the privileges of Twitter verification without a visible blue check. Twitter verification would have bestowed a number of advantages, such as invulnerability to algorithmic bots that flag accounts for spam or abuse, as well as other strikes that lead to decreased visibility or suspension.
KAHLER TOLD TWITTER that the accounts would all be “USG-attributed, Arabic-language accounts tweeting on relevant security issues.” That promise fell short, as many of the accounts subsequently deleted disclosures of affiliation with the U.S. government.
The Internet Archive does not preserve the full history of every account, but we identified several accounts that initially listed themselves as U.S. government accounts in their bios, but, after being whitelisted, shed any disclosure that they were affiliated with the military and posed as ordinary users.
This appears to align with a major report published in August by online security researchers affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reported on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a state-backed information operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, a practice also known as “deep fakes.”
The researchers connected these accounts with a vast online ecosystem that included “fake news” websites, meme accounts on Telegram and Facebook, and online personalities that echoed Pentagon messages often without disclosure of affiliation with the U.S. military. Some of the accounts accuse Iran of “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” while others promoted allegations that Iran was harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.
The Stanford report did not definitively tie the sham accounts to CENTCOM or provide a complete list of Twitter accounts. But the emails I obtained show that the creation of at least one of these accounts was directly affiliated with the Pentagon.
One of the accounts that Kahler asked to have whitelisted, @mktashif, was identified by the researchers as appearing to use a deep-fake photo to obscure its real identity. Initially, according to the Wayback Machine, @mktashif did disclose that it was a U.S. government account affiliated with CENTCOM, but at some point, this disclosure was deleted and the account’s photo was changed to the one Stanford identified as a deep fake. The new Twitter bio claimed that the account was an unbiased source of opinion and information, and, roughly translated from Arabic, “dedicated to serving Iraqis and Arabs.” The account, before it was suspended last year, routinely tweeted messages denouncing Iran and other U.S. adversaries, including Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Another CENTCOM account, @althughur, which posts anti-Iran and anti-ISIS content focused on an Iraqi audience, changed its Twitter bio from a CENTCOM affiliation to an Arabic phrase that simply reads “Euphrates pulse.”
The former Twitter employee told me that they were surprised to learn of the Defense Department’s shifting tactics. “It sounds like DOD was doing something shady and definitely not in line with what they had presented to us at the time,” they said.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s deeply concerning if the Pentagon is working to shape public opinion about our military’s role abroad and even worse if private companies are helping to conceal it,” said Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, a nonprofit that works toward diplomatic solutions to foreign conflicts.
“Congress and social media companies should investigate and take action to ensure that, at the very least, our citizens are fully informed when their tax money is being spent on putting a positive spin on our endless wars,” Sperling added.
FOR MANY YEARS, Twitter has pledged to shut down all state-backed disinformation and propaganda efforts, never making an explicit exception for the U.S. In 2020, Twitter spokesperson Nick Pickles, in a testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, said that the company was taking aggressive efforts to shut down “coordinated platform manipulation efforts” attributed to government agencies.
“Combatting attempts to interfere in conversations on Twitter remains a top priority for the company, and we continue to invest heavily in our detection, disruption, and transparency efforts related to state-backed information operations. Our goal is to remove bad-faith actors and to advance public understanding of these critical topics,” said Pickles.
In 2018, for instance, Twitter announced the mass suspension of accounts tied to Russian government-linked propaganda efforts. Two years later, the company boasted of shutting down almost 1,000 accounts for association with the Thai military. But rules on platform manipulation, it appears, have not been applied to American military efforts.
The emails obtained by The Intercept show that not only did Twitter whitelist these accounts in 2017 explicitly at the behest of the military, but also that high-level officials at the company discussed the accounts as potentially problematic in the following years.
In the summer of 2020, officials from Facebook reportedly identified fake accounts attributed to CENTCOM’s influence operation on its platform and warned the Pentagon that if Silicon Valley could easily out these accounts as inauthentic, so could foreign adversaries, according to a September report in the Washington Post.
Twitter emails show that during that time in 2020, Facebook and Twitter executives were invited by the Pentagon’s top attorneys to attend classified briefings in a sensitive compartmented information facility, also known as a SCIF, used for highly sensitive meetings.
“Facebook have had a series of 1:1 conversations between their senior legal leadership and DOD’s [general counsel] re: inauthentic activity,” wrote Yoel Roth, then the head of trust and safety at Twitter. “Per FB,” continued Roth, “DOD have indicated a strong desire to work with us to remove the activity — but are now refusing to discuss additional details or steps outside of a classified conversation.”
Stacia Cardille, then an attorney with Twitter, noted in an email to her colleagues that the Pentagon may want to retroactively classify its social media activities “to obfuscate their activity in this space, and that this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment.”
Jim Baker, then the deputy general counsel of Twitter, in the same thread, wrote that the Pentagon appeared to have used “poor tradecraft” in setting up various Twitter accounts, sought to potentially cover its tracks, and was likely seeking a strategy for avoiding public knowledge that the accounts are “linked to each other or to DoD or the USG.” Baker speculated that in the meeting the “DoD might want to give us a timetable for shutting them down in a more prolonged way that will not compromise any ongoing operations or reveal their connections to DoD.”
What was discussed at the classified meetings — which ultimately did take place, according to the Post — was not included in the Twitter emails provided to The Intercept, but many of the fake accounts remained active for at least another year. Some of the accounts on the CENTCOM list remain active even now — like this one, which includes affiliation with CENTCOM, and this one, which does not — while many were swept off the platform in a mass suspension on May 16.
In a separate email sent in May 2020, Lisa Roman, then a vice president of the company in charge of global public policy, emailed William S. Castle, a Pentagon attorney, along with Roth, with an additional list of Defense Department Twitter accounts. “The first tab lists those accounts previously provided to us and the second, associated accounts that Twitter has discovered,” wrote Roman. It’s not clear from this single email what Roman is requesting – she references a phone call preceding the email — but she notes that the second tab of accounts — the ones that had not been explicitly provided to Twitter by the Pentagon — “may violate our Rules.” The attachment included a batch of accounts tweeting in Russian and Arabic about human rights violations committed by ISIS. Many accounts in both tabs were not openly identified as affiliated with the U.S. government.
Twitter executives remained aware of the Defense Department’s special status. This past January, a Twitter executive recirculated the CENTCOM list of Twitter accounts originally whitelisted in 2017. The email simply read “FYI” and was directed to several Twitter officials, including Patrick Conlon, a former Defense Department intelligence analyst then working on the site integrity unit as Twitter’s global threat intelligence lead. Internal records also showed that the accounts that remained from Kahler’s original list are still whitelisted.
Following the mass suspension of many of the accounts this past May, Twitter’s team worked to limit blowback from its involvement in the campaign.
Shortly before publication of the Washington Post story in September, Katie Rosborough, then a communications specialist at Twitter, wrote to alert Twitter lawyers and lobbyists about the upcoming piece. “It’s a story that’s mostly focused on DoD and Facebook; however, there will be a couple lines that reference us alongside Facebook in that we reached out to them [DoD] for a meeting. We don’t think they’ll tie it to anything Mudge-related or name any Twitter employees. We declined to comment,” she wrote. (Mudge is a reference to Peiter Zatko, a Twitter whistleblower who filed a complaint with federal authorities in July, alleging lax security measures and penetration of the company by foreign agents.)
After the Washington Post’s story published, the Twitter team congratulated one another because the story minimized Twitter’s role in the CENTCOM psyop campaign. Instead, the story largely revolved around the Pentagon’s decision to begin a review of its clandestine psychological operations on social media.
“Thanks for doing all that you could to manage this one,” wrote Rebecca Hahn, another former Twitter communications official. “It didn’t seem to get too much traction beyond verge, cnn and wapo editors promoting.”
CENTCOM did not initially provide comment to The Intercept. Following publication of this story, CENTCOM’s media desk referred The Intercept to Brigadier Gen. Pat Ryder’s comments in a September briefing, in which he said that the Pentagon had requested “a review of Department of Defense military information support activities, which is simply meant to be an opportunity for us to assess the current work that’s being done in this arena, and really shouldn’t be interpreted as anything beyond that.”
THE U.S. MILITARY and intelligence community have long pursued a strategy of fabricated online personas and third parties to amplify certain narratives in foreign countries, the idea being that an authentic-looking Persian-language news portal or a local Afghan woman would have greater organic influence than an official Pentagon press release.
Military online propaganda efforts have largely been governed by a 2006 memorandum. The memo notes that the Defense Department’s internet activities should “openly acknowledge U.S. involvement” except in cases when a “Combatant Commander believes that it will not be possible due to operational considerations.” This method of nondisclosure, the memo states, is only authorized for operations in the “Global War on Terrorism, or when specified in other Secretary of Defense execute orders.”
In 2019, lawmakers passed a measure known as Section 1631, a reference to a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, further legally affirming clandestine psychological operations by the military in a bid to counter online disinformation campaigns by Russia, China, and other foreign adversaries.
In 2008, the U.S. Special Operations Command opened a request for a service to provide “web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S. Government goals and objectives.” The contract referred to the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, an effort to create online news sites designed to win hearts and minds in the battle to counter Russian influence in Central Asia and global Islamic terrorism. The contract was initially carried out by General Dynamics Information Technology, a subsidiary of the defense contractor General Dynamics, in connection with CENTCOM communication offices in the Washington, D.C., area and in Tampa, Florida.
A program known as “WebOps,” run by a defense contractor known as Colsa Corp., was used to create fictitious online identities designed to counter online recruitment efforts by ISIS and other terrorist networks.
I spoke to a former employee of a contractor — on the condition of anonymity for legal protection — engaged in these online propaganda networks for the Trans-Regional Web Initiative. He described a loose newsroom-style operation, employing former journalists, operating out of a generic suburban office building.
“Generally what happens, at the time when I was there, CENTCOM will develop a list of messaging points that they want us to focus on,” said the contractor. “Basically, they would, we want you to focus on say, counterterrorism and a general framework that we want to talk about.”
From there, he said, supervisors would help craft content that was distributed through a network of CENTCOM-controlled websites and social media accounts. As the contractors created content to support narratives from military command, they were instructed to tag each content item with a specific military objective. Generally, the contractor said, the news items he created were technically factual but always crafted in a way that closely reflected the Pentagon’s goals.
“We had some pressure from CENTCOM to push stories,” he added, while noting that he worked at the sites years ago, before the transition to more covert operations. At the time, “we weren’t doing any of that black-hat stuff.”
The hidden toll: Is Israel downplaying soldiers’ deaths?
By William Van Wagenen | The Cradle | December 19, 2023
“How many Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza?”
This is a persistent question that many are asking as the Israeli military’s ground campaign in the bombed and besieged enclave nears its second month.
If the army is suffering relatively low losses while inflicting massive Palestinian civilian casualties, this suggests Israel is well on its way to achieving its clear objective of eliminating Hamas, but also its unspoken goals: conquer Gaza, ethnically cleanse its 2.3 million residents, and rebuild the Gush Katif settlement bloc.
But if the occupation army is indeed suffering huge losses, this suggests the Israeli military and political leadership may need to soon end their genocidal campaign prematurely, while citing exaggerated external pressure from the White House as the pretext.
Secrecy surrounding Israeli losses
Israel’s military claimed on 17 December that 121 soldiers had been killed since its delayed ground campaign began on 27 October, when tanks and infantry began to push into Gaza’s cities and refugee camps.
But determining the true number of Israeli soldier casualties has always been notoriously difficult, as Israel’s military goes to great lengths to cover up its combat losses. A recent battle between Hamas and Israel’s vaunted Golani Brigade exemplifies this secrecy.
“We are heading to the most difficult and deepest place with a large number of enemy fighters,” boasted Israeli Lt. Col. Tomer Grinberg, commander of the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion, shortly before leading his troops on a ground operation in the legendary Shujaiyya (which aptly means “courageous”) neighborhood in northern Gaza.
He then added, “I promise you a resounding victory.”
But Grinberg is now dead.
According to Israeli sources, Grinberg was killed during the 12 December operation, along with nine other Golani soldiers, in an ambush by Hamas fighters.
After four of the brigade’s soldiers were injured in a firefight, others sought to rescue them amid fears they may be dragged into a tunnel. The second group was also hit by explosives, as was a third group that also tried to evacuate the wounded.
After the battle, Hamas issued a statement warning:
“The longer you stay there, the greater the bill of your deaths and losses will be, and you will emerge from it carrying the tail of disappointment and loss, God willing.”
Resistance claims higher soldier toll
But there is compelling reason to believe the number of soldiers killed alongside Grinberg in Shujaiyya is much higher than the nine announced by the army.
Security expert and retired Israeli Colonel Miri Eisin told CNN that the 12 December attack was particularly painful because so many of the dead were high-ranking officers:
“We’re hurting today… It’s always hard when soldiers are killed, but when it’s this level of command, it hits you in the gut. These are commanders that commanded hundreds of soldiers.”
This led one former US soldier to ask on X whether Israel was hiding the true number of soldiers killed in the ambush. “Where are all the privates, and the corporals, and the lower enlisted?”
Hamas, through its armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, provides an answer.
Regarding the events on 12 December, the Qassam Brigades reported killing 11 soldiers in Shujaiyya, including members of a rescue team, in an apparent reference to the deaths acknowledged by the Israeli army.
But according to Qassam, on the same day, its fighters also killed or injured 10 soldiers east of the city of Khan Yunis, killed or injured another 20 soldiers barricaded inside a building in the Sheikh Radwan area of Gaza City, and killed another 15 soldiers who attacked them in their make-shift base at the Abu Rashid Pool.
Censorship on the press and hospitals
Despite claiming to be “the only democracy in the Middle East,” Tel Aviv maintains a tight grip on information related to military casualties through the use of military censors, controlling what the press can publish concerning national security issues, including injuries and deaths of soldiers.
“The human losses announced by the security establishment are usually binding on hundreds of media institutions, and these are allowed to work basically according to this rule. The death toll always comes from one source, and no one questions it,” Hassan Abdo, The Cradle’s Palestine Correspondent, reported earlier this year.
Abdo attributes this to preserving the image of the invincible Israeli soldier “who does not fall victim to a weak, primitive opponent.”
This is “one of the main pillars of the Zionist project based on the tripartite of security, immigration, and settlement,” he added.
As The Cradle noted, even before the outbreak of war on 7 October, Israeli soldiers have had a strange tendency to die in “accidents” during periods of heightened conflict with the Palestinian resistance, including in car accidents, plane crashes, suicides, gas leaks, and even falling from balconies.
But this invincible image was shattered with the operation Al-Aqsa Flood, when Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups broke out of the Gaza Strip to attack the Israeli military bases and settlements (kibbutzim) enforcing the brutal 17-year siege on the tiny and impoverished enclave.
During Al-Aqsa Flood, Hamas killed 41 soldiers from Grinberg’s Golani battalion alone, in major battles at the Re’im and Nahal Oz military bases.
Hezbollah’s estimates and questions from within
Israel claims Hamas carried out a massacre at the Nova music festival, just a few kilometers from the Re’im base, but a major battle took place there as well. At Nova, 58 Israeli police were killed, including from elite combat counter-terror units of the Border Police, known as Yamam, who were the first to respond to the attack.
According to an Israeli police investigation regarding events at Nova, had there not been a substantial police deployment at Yad Mordechai, some 30 kilometers further north, “the terrorists would have been on their way to … Tel Aviv in 40 minutes.”
It, therefore, becomes more imperative than ever for the occupation state to hide the extent of its losses, both in the battle against the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and in the north in the battle with Hezbollah, to reestablish and maintain the myth of an overwhelmingly powerful military presence in the region.
Anecdotal evidence and estimates from Hezbollah suggest that the official count of 115 Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting in Gaza and near the Lebanese border following 7 October is likely much lower than the true figure. Reports from different sources indicate a significant discrepancy, with instances of mass casualties not officially acknowledged.
The Lebanese resistance movement estimates its attacks on settlements and military bases in northern-occupied Palestine have killed at least 35 Israeli soldiers and injured 172.
After just the first week of fighting in Gaza, the death toll, as announced by the Israeli army from fighting there, had reached 19. Among them were nine soldiers killed in just one attack. Hamas struck the “Namer” armored personnel carrier transporting the soldiers to the battle with an anti-tank missile.
Seven of the dead soldiers were 20 years old or younger, which seems to confirm the perception that Israel is sending inexperienced fighters into combat against Hamas’ battle-hardened fighters motivated by a cause, resistance to occupation, they firmly believe in.
But the occupation army spokesperson’s unit quickly learned not to announce the mass killing of soldiers of this sort.
Baruch Rosenblum, an Israeli rabbi, recalled a story from a senior officer in the army from the second week of the Gaza ground campaign. The officer explained that most of the fighting takes place at night, and that in just one operation, Hamas had killed 36 soldiers.
The rabbi explained that Hamas had attacked a convoy of three Namer armored vehicles, each carrying 12 soldiers, setting them ablaze. The army command watched via drone live feed as the soldiers abandoned the vehicles and Hamas eliminated them all with anti-tank weapons.
The senior officer chose not to disclose his name to the rabbi “to avoid arrest for revealing state secrets,” and the incident was never announced by the army or reported in the Israeli press.
On 18 November, in the third week of the ground operation, David Oren Baruch, the director of Mount Herzl Military Cemetery, provided another anecdote suggesting a soldier death toll much larger than what was publicly known.
He revealed that “We are now going through a period where every hour there is a funeral, every hour and a half a funeral.”
“I was asked to open a large number of graves. Only in the Mount Herzl cemetery did we bury 50 soldiers in 48 hours,” Baruch explained further.
Military control of the narrative
The Israeli military’s reluctance to disclose the number of wounded soldiers further adds to suspicions of underreporting.
Unlike in past wars, the Israeli military had refused to make any statement about the number of wounded in Gaza. This finally changed on 10 December, just before Haaretz planned to publish its report on the number of soldier casualties based instead on hospital sources.
Haaretz noted “a considerable and unexplained gap between the data reported by the military and that from the hospitals.” The hospital data the outlet obtained showed the number of wounded soldiers was “twice as high as the army’s numbers.”
The Israeli newspaper also highlighted the military’s tight control over the data reported by the hospitals themselves, explaining that members of the army spokesperson’s unit “are in the hospitals around the clock. Every press release regarding wounded soldiers and replies to media queries must receive their approval.”
Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth similarly reported on 9 December that, “Every day, about 60 new wounded are received only by the rehabilitation department” and that “the cumulative numbers since October 7 are astronomical: More than 2,000 soldiers, policemen and other members of the security forces have been officially recognized as disabled.”
“We have never been through anything even similar to this,” explained Limor Luria, head of the rehabilitation department at the Ministry of Defense.
“More than 58 percent of the wounded who are taken in by us have severe injuries of arms and legs, including those that require amputations. About 12 percent are internal injuries – spleen, kidney, tearing of internal organs. There are also head and eye injuries.”
In addition to thousands of horrific physical injuries, Israel is also facing “a tsunami of trauma,” the paper added. “I sat with a fighter who took three bullets. A physically torn person, a very serious injury,” Luria added, “but his main struggle is with the sights he saw.”
One injured soldier, Elisha Madan, recounted to a crowd how his fellow soldiers were killed in front of his eyes. “I came back from the dead alone. My entire squad died, and I was on the verge of death. I survived thanks to your prayers,” Madan said while seated in his wheelchair.
‘All warfare is based on deception’ – Sun Tzu
Since 7 October, the Israeli military leadership has reported falsehoods about almost every facet of that day’s events, and the war that followed.
They lied about Hamas beheading babies, they covered up burning alive their own soldiers and civilians with Apache helicopter and tank fire, and they continue to lie about pretending to care about the safety of Palestinian civilians, who they have mercilessly bombed for months with only the slightest pretext of targeting Hamas fighters and infrastructure.
As a result, while it is impossible to know the true numbers of Israeli soldiers killed in battle against the Palestinian resistance, there is ample reason to question the veracity of the information provided by the US-backed occupation army.
Lavrov Says Reminded UN Chief at G20 Summit of List of Allegedly Killed in Bucha
Sputnik – 18.12.2023
MOSCOW – Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday he had reminded UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the G20 summit in September that Moscow was still waiting for the publication of the list of those allegedly killed in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.
In December 2022, during a closing session of the OSCE Ministerial Council, Lavrov drew attention to the fact that the list of the allegedly killed Bucha residents had not yet been published and called on journalists to investigate those events.
“I saw him [Guterres] later at the G20 summit in India this fall. We had a talk. I reminded him of my request. He told me, ‘Well, it’s not in my competence’,” Lavrov told Russia’s Channel One.
The top Russian diplomat replied that the Bucha incident had become a central one in the war unleashed against Russia and “in the series of unprecedented sanctions that anyone has ever imposed against anyone.” The incident raises massive suspicions as the UN refuses to publish the list of the alleged victims, Lavrov added.
“He [Guterres] says, ‘I want to help. I would think of something’,” the Russian foreign minister stated.
In April 2022, the Russian Defense Ministry said that photo and video materials published by Kiev, which testify to crimes allegedly committed by the Russian military in Bucha in the Kiev Region, were another “Ukrainian provocation.” The ministry stressed that during the time the city was under Russian control, no local residents had been subjected to violent actions.
In late October 2023, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said at a briefing that he had no information on why Kiev had not yet provided Moscow with the list of the alleged victims in Bucha. After Dujarric was asked why the UN would not send a special mission to Bucha to collect data and obtain the list of the alleged victims, the spokesman said there were a number of missions that had already gone there.
NATO troops directly involved in Ukraine conflict – Russia
RT | December 19, 2023
Several NATO member states have boots on the ground in the Ukraine conflict, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has claimed. He alleged that Western military personnel are operating certain weapons systems, and that hundreds of satellites belonging to the US-led military bloc are providing Kiev with surveillance.
Speaking at a meeting of Defense Ministry officials on Tuesday, where President Vladimir Putin was also present, Shoigu stated that “NATO service members are directly operating air defense systems, tactical ballistic missiles, and multiple launch rocket systems” in Ukraine. He cited radio intercepts featuring English and Polish speakers. According to the minister, Western officers are also playing an active role in preparing Ukrainian military operations as well as training troops, both in their home countries and in Ukraine.
Russian officials have repeatedly warned that ever-deepening Western involvement in the conflict unnecessarily increases the chances of a direct military confrontation between NATO and Moscow.
The Russian defense chief went on to claim that more than 5,000 foreign fighters have been killed since hostilities broke out in February 2022, with 1,427 Polish, 466 US, and 344 UK nationals among them.
“Working in the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ interest are 410 NATO military and dual-purpose space devices,” Shoigu estimated.
He also lauded Russia’s defense industry for ramping up production in the past 18 months and helping prevent ammunition shortages on the front lines. “Despite the sanctions, we are manufacturing more high-tech weaponry than NATO countries,” Shoigu continued.
The minister concluded by stating that “as of today, the Russian army is the best-prepared and most combat-ready in the world, armed with cutting-edge weapons tested in combat.”
Putin insisted at the same meeting that the West’s efforts to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia have failed.
Speaking to the Ukrainian branch of US state-run broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) on Friday, Kiev’s former ambassador to the UK, Vadim Prystaiko, claimed that Britain is developing plans to potentially deploy troops to Ukraine.
The diplomat, who was fired after criticizing Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, went on to suggest that while Western officials will deny any such plans, foreign deployments are still possible under certain circumstances.
UK Health Security Agency boss criticised for tropical disease claims
Net Zero Watch | December 18, 2023
London – A leading expert in mosquito-borne diseases is fiercely critical of Professor Dame Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency, calling her recent pronouncements on mosquito-transmitted diseases “entirely fictional” and “shameless”.
Professor Harries was quoted in the media as saying that rising temperatures will make such diseases common in the UK by 2040 because the Asian Tiger Mosquito – which can transmit dengue, chikungunya, zika, yellow fever and other viral diseases – will become established throughout Britain. Dengue will eventually become endemic in London, it is claimed.
But Professor Paul Reiter, retired professor of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and a leading specialist in this field, has ridiculed her claims:
“The natural range of the Tiger mosquito, an Asian species, extends from the tropics to regions where mean January temperatures are around minus ten degrees Celsius. Northern strains are able to survive because in late summer, as days grow shorter, the eggs they lay are dormant and remain unhatched until spring arrives”.
Since the late 1970s, there has been rapid global spread of the Tiger mosquito, to the United States, Latin America, Europe and several African countries, probably mainly via the global trade in used tyres. Professor Reiter says that it is beyond doubt that this has nothing to do with temperature.
Professor Reiter has also lambasted fearmongering about the return of malaria, noting that this was once a major cause of death in many parts of England, even during the period that climatologists call the Little Ice Age:
“Shakespeare mentions malaria – “the ague” – thirteen times, so it was clearly once common here. The disease began to decline – for a multitude of reasons – in the mid-nineteenth century, despite the upward trend in global temperatures.”
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
“This is not the first time we have seen the Civil Service misleading the public in this way. Science is being misused to generate fear and to “nudge” us in a desired direction. This kind of shameful disinformation brings the Civil Service into disrepute.”
Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Or Intentional Fraud?
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | December 14, 2023
It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud? (The third possibility — reasonable, good faith advocacy — can generally be ruled out in the first few nanoseconds.). As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, I suppose it would be better to be merely incompetent. However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author could be so stupid as to actually believe what he or she is saying.
So let’s apply this inquiry to a piece that has come to my attention in the past few days.
From euronews.green we have a piece from November 12 with the headline “Powered by wind and water: The Canary Island proving it is possible to run on renewables.” The byline is Lauren Crosby Mendicott. Ms. Mendicott announces the exciting news that one of Spain’s Canary Islands, El Hierro, has recently reported that it ran its electricity system entirely on wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. Excerpt:
The smallest of the Canary Islands has achieved a record of only using wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. . . . [T]he 1.1 million-year-old volcanic island is on route to being 100 per cent energy self-sufficient through clean, renewable sources. Its 10,000 inhabitants and local government are equally committed to the sustainability of the island.
Wow, that’s great! But OK Lauren, tell us more. If the system ran on just wind and water power for 28 days, what happened on days 29, 30, 31 and thereafter? Can we expect that with just a few tweaks the system can get to running 365 days a year on its wind/water system without fossil fuel backup? Or is it in fact nowhere close to that goal? Unfortunately you will not find any information on those subjects in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.
As readers here know, I have been somewhat focused on the El Hierro project for several years, because it is the closest thing in the world to an attempt to build a demonstration project to show that wind power combined with energy storage can create a fully-functioning electricity grid without fossil fuel backup. I have had numerous pieces over the years dealing with the results of the El Hierro project, most recently this one on September 30, 2023. My conclusion from the data available at that time:
The Gorona del Viento project (wind turbines and a pumped storage reservoir) on El Hierro Island off Spain fails worse and worse every year.
The El Hierro system has wind turbines and energy storage from a pumped hydro system with nameplate capacity seemingly well in excess of peak electricity usage on the island. So theoretically they should have no problem getting all of their electricity from the wind/storage system — right? And yet, when you look at their annual data, somehow they only seem to average about 50% of annual electricity from the wind/storage system. Sometimes it gets to 70% or so for a few months, but then at other times it drops back to as little as around 30%. When I visited the Gorona del Viento website back in September, I found data for what it claimed as hours of operation on “100% renewable” generation for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 — and nothing thereafter. For some reason, they had stopped reporting these data after 2020. The numbers were 2300 hours in 2018, 1905 in 2019, and 1293 in 2020 — a rather precipitous ongoing decline. Given that there are 8760 hours in a non-leap year (24 x 365 — likely beyond Ms. Mendicott’s math skills) these numbers represent shockingly small percentages of the annual operation of the system, declining from 26.3% in 2018 to only 14.7% in 2020 (a leap year with 8784 hours).
Going back to the Gorona del Viento web site today, I find the same figure of 1293 hours of “100% renewable” generation for 2020, and no subsequent data. Maybe those data are lurking somewhere in the Spanish-language portions of the site where I can’t find them. But somehow I think that if they had some great news to report on that subject, it would be front and center.
El Hierro is blessed with a rare near-perfect site for a pumped-storage hydro facility, with a volcano rising nearly straight up from the sea and a big crater on the top to store the water. Here is a picture of the shoreline, with the mountain rising nearly perpendicular out of the water:
And yet, despite having such a rare near-perfect site for a large pumped hydro storage facility, the El Hierro system does not have nearly the energy storage needed to provide full-time electricity from the wind/storage system. It would need to multiply its storage capacity by at least an order of magnitude to come close to 100% electricity from this system. Meanwhile, most of its electricity comes from a backup diesel generator — a fact nowhere mentioned in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.
So, is the piece mere incompetence, or intentional fraud? Several factors would seem to give strong support to the inference of intentional fraud — failure to mention the diesel backup at all; failure to mention the number of hours in each recent year where the diesel backup had to be called into activity to keep the lights on, and whether that number of hours was trending up or down; failure even to consider how much energy storage would be needed to enable the system to operate full time without the diesel backup, and whether there are any plans to provide that amount of storage or at what cost. Is it possible that someone could write a piece on this subject without even being aware of these issues? You be the judge!
Canada Reports 300% Increase in ‘Unspecified Causes’ of Death, Sparking Calls for Investigation
By Mike Capuzzo | The Defender | December 13, 2023
As life expectancy plummets in Canada, a new government report claims “unspecified causes” have become the fifth leading cause of death in the country after cancer, heart disease, COVID-19 and accidents.
According to the Statistics Canada report, “unspecified causes” in 2022 passed strokes, aneurysms, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, asthma, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, Alzheimer’s and suicide as causes of death.
Statistics Canada, also known as StatCan, released the report on Nov. 27 in The Daily, the agency’s online news bulletin.
The report generated a slew of nearly identical headlines — provided by Canada’s national news service — in Canada’s leading newspapers along the lines of this one in the Toronto Sun : “Life expectancy for Canadians fell for third straight year in 2022, StatCan says,” followed by the subhead: “More people died of COVID-19 in 2022 than in any other year since the pandemic began, report says.”
Andre Picard, health columnist at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Canada’s newspaper of record, called the life expectancy drop — to 81.3 years in 2022 from 82.3 years in 2019 — “a big deal.”
“It’s only the second time this sharp a drop has happened in Canada in the past century,” Picard said. “In fact, life expectancy has been climbing steadily for decades: 71 in 1960, 75 in 1980, 79 in 2000 and 82.3 in 2019.”
COVID-19 deaths in Canada decreased to 14,466 in 2021 from 16,313 in 2020, the report shows. Canada is on track for about 7,000 COVID-19 deaths in 2023, Picard said.
COVID-19 deaths can’t account for Canada’s 7.3 % increase in total deaths in 2022 compared with 2021 — or for the country’s 17% increase in total deaths over the historic norm of 2019, or the historic drop in life expectancy in Canada and worldwide, Picard said.
Like many mainstream journalists and public health officials in the U.S. examining the U.S. drop in life expectancy, Picard blamed chronic diseases, drug overdoses, opioid deaths, smoking, unhealthy diets and “indifference” for the decline in Canada. “There are virtually no mitigation measures like masking any more, and vaccination rates have fallen sharply,” he wrote.
But Drs. Pierre Kory and Peter McCullough told The Defender they believe the most important and startling fact contained in the report is the 300% increase from 2019 to 2022 in “unspecified causes” of death in Canada.
McCullough, a highly published cardiologist who developed a widely used early treatment protocol for COVID-19, said the dramatic rise in deaths from “unspecified causes” in Canada represents a seismic and disturbing shift in Western medicine.
“Prior to the pandemic, death in Western countries was well understood,” McCullough said, with 40% due to known cardiovascular, 40% due to terminal neoplastic disease (cancer) and 20% due to other known causes such as homicide, suicide, drug overdoses and accidents.”
He added:
“Since the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccines, we have witnessed unprecedented deaths without antecedent disease. A large autopsy series published by Hulscher et al, found that 73.9% of the deaths after COVID-19 vaccination were due to problems caused by the shots.”
McCullough cited the hundreds of studies examining post-vaccine, spike-protein-related injuries and deaths and the millions of deaths and injuries reported by citizens in the U.S. and Europe to their governments following mRNA vaccination.
“All deaths should be categorized according to the doses and dates of COVID-19 vaccination,” McCullough said. “Unless proven otherwise, ‘unspecified death’ should be attributed to a fatal COVID-19 vaccine injury syndrome,” McCullough said.
Kory, the former University of Wisconsin professor of medicine and president of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, told The Defender the evidence is overwhelming that the COVID-19 mRNA shots caused more deaths and injuries across the Western world than any prior drug or vaccine in history.
“The answer as to why ‘unspecified causes’ are now a leading cause of death is plain and simple,” Kory said. “That cause is the one medical intervention that the world’s governments and media have championed since the start [of the pandemic]. … The mRNA platform technology is and has been a colossal failure in both efficacy and safety.”
Kory and journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer on Tuesday published an opinion piece in The Hill calling on governments and public health officials to study and address the problem of a global historic rise in mortality thus far not recognized by officials and not reported by mainstream journalists.
On Dec. 13, the essay was trending as the first or second most popular story on The Hill’s website, which claims 32.5 million monthly unique visitors.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert Califf on Nov. 30 published an extraordinary thread of posts on X (formerly Twitter) calling for a society-wide “all hands on deck” approach to solve the problem of the “catastrophic” decline in U.S. life expectancy.
“JAMA Internal Medicine published earlier this month that our overall life expectancy has dropped to 76 years, and remarkably, that male life expectancy in the U.S. has dropped to 73 years,” Califf wrote.
But Kory said the FDA commissioner’s post, “which hit on smoking, diet, chronic illness and healthcare, ignored the obvious: People are dying in abnormally high numbers even now and long since COVID waned. Yet public health agencies and medical societies are silent.”
The FDA and mainstream media are ignoring the fact that life insurers have been “sounding the alarm over these unexpected or, ‘excess,’ deaths, which claimed 158,000 more Americans in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same period in 2019,” Kory wrote.
“That exceeds America’s combined losses [wounded?] from every war since Vietnam. Congress should urgently work with insurance experts to investigate this troubling trend.”
Amy Kelly, COO of DailyClout and the program director of the Pfizer Documents Analysis Project, said that for an autopsy to reach a proper diagnosis of an mRNA-vaccine-caused death, “histopathological examination of tissues from all over the body is necessary. Most of the time, even if an autopsy is performed, the histopathological examination of tissues is not.”
She cited an interview with Dr. Arne Burkhardt, who describes the types of testing the coroners must perform but seldom do.
Dr. Robert Chandler, a Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon who taught at the University of Southern California medical school, identified “entire new disease categories” he calls “CoVax Diseases” in his study of Pfizer’s 450,000 pages of COVID-19 vaccine documents, documents the FDA was forced to release via a court order, Kelly said.
“It makes sense that the unspecified causes of death have increased so much,” Kelly said. “When a patient dies with either multiple diseases all at one time or with a previously unseen disease state, both of which happen with ‘CoVax Diseases’ Dr. Chandler has identified, I would imagine many doctors and/or coroners don’t know how to categorize those causes of death. That would lead to ‘cause unknown’ categorization of deaths.”
According to Naomi Wolf, author of “Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age,” “In the preindustrial world, people died mysteriously. But in the modern Western world, there are no mystery deaths. Every death has a death certificate which by law must identify a cause of death.”
“A minor rise in unattributed deaths is a problem that needs investigation,” Wolf said. “A major rise, such as you’ve identified, does not indicate a mass mystery to doctors and coroners, but rather it is evidence of a problem with state record-keeping — some bureaucratic malfeasance at a grand scale.”
Mike Capuzzo is a reporter for The Defender. He is a former prize-winning reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald, a science writer, and a regional magazine founding editor and publisher who has won more than 200 journalism awards as a writer, editor and publisher.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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From the Archives
The New Baghdad Pact
By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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