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Pentagon fails annual audit

RT | November 16, 2023

The US Defense Department has flunked its sixth annual independent audit, having failed to even provide auditors with enough financial data to complete their evaluation, a report released on Wednesday revealed.

The overall results of the audit – the sixth that the Pentagon has failed since it was required to begin auditing itself in 2018 – were a “disclaimer of opinion,” the worst of three possible grades and the same rating the department received last year. The result took into account 29 component audits, of which 18 were also flunked with disclaimers of opinion. Just seven components received “unqualified opinions,” the most desirable rating, while another one received a “qualified opinion.”

Pentagon Chief Financial Officer Michael McCord attempted to frame the audit results positively, stating in a press release accompanying the report that his department was “making progress toward the goal of a clean audit.”

McCord acknowledged in a call with reporters on Wednesday that the Pentagon had not expected to pass the audit, but insisted it was moving toward resolving its balance of funds with the Treasury Department. He also touted the use of automated programs for rote tasks, stating that “bots” had saved 600,000 hours of work between the Navy and Air Force alone, and claimed the Pentagon had done a detailed inventory of its stockpiles in the course of supplying billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine.

However, the Pentagon remains the only cabinet-level department never to have received a clean financial bill of health. With $3.8 trillion in assets, $4 trillion in liabilities, and little meaningful oversight, the potential for waste and fraud is immense, according to the Government Accountability Office, which has included the department’s business systems modernization and financial management initiatives on its “High Risk List” – a list of federal programs most susceptible to fraud, abuse, mismanagement, and waste – for nearly 30 years.

The Pentagon consumes more than half of the US discretionary budget, with most in Washington wary of cutting military spending lest they run afoul of the defense industry, a source of hefty donations to both sides of the political aisle, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks political contributions. Defense Department staff have admitted to “misplacing” trillions of dollars in transactions in accounting discrepancies that have never been resolved.

Efforts to rein in profligate defense spending in Congress have repeatedly failed. The Audit the Pentagon Act, which would penalize any department of the military that fails its annual audit by forcing it to forfeit 1% of its budget, was introduced again in the Senate last year after the Defense Department was unable to account for more than half of its assets. However, it never made it to the floor for a vote.

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Militarism | | Leave a comment

US-based NGO confirms running Russian opposition troll farm

RT | November 16, 2023

The Free Russia Foundation (FRF), a Washington-based NGO, has confirmed running a network of paid online commenters focused on influencing Russian current affairs and the Ukrainian crisis.

The pro-opposition troll farm was exposed in an explosive report published on Wednesday by SVTV, an online outlet created by Russian libertarian activist Mikhail Svetov. The report claimed, citing a trove of documents received from ex-employees of the network, that the FRF-payrolled troll farm has collaborated with FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation), founded by jailed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, and has also routinely targeted critics of FBK and the government alike.

The FRF confirmed on Thursday that the troll network actually exists. The NGO claimed the investigation by SVTV was “inaccurate on a large number of points” and strongly denied any links to Navalny’s FBK. The foundation also insisted the network has been never used to discredit “any opposition politicians, journalists, projects or groups.”

“We regret that certain so-called independent outlets allow themselves (by mistake or intentionally) to spread lies and put a large number of people at possible security risks,” the foundation said in a statement.

Earlier, FBK Director Ivan Zhdanov denied the anti-corruption foundation was associated with the troll network, vowing to prove this in court, if needed.

According to the SVTV report, the troll network has been outsourced by FRF to Reforum, a Lithuania-based non-profit, which hired contractors to perform “social media management consultations.” In reality, the “consultations” involved posting remarks under select online posts, using pre-approved talking points. The commenters, receiving €10 ($10) per hour on average, have been using fake profiles with photos of persons who had abandoned or lost their accounts, the report also claimed.

Online commenters apparently work from multiple offices in Vilnius, Lithuania and Tbilisi, Georgia. They have also reportedly taken to calling themselves “elves” who fight the “Russian trolls” and “orcs.”

The FRF described its troll network as a “strategic communications center,” created solely to “convey the truth about the Kremlin’s crimes and the consequences of the bloody war waged against Ukraine to their compatriots in Russia.” The network brings together “tens and hundreds of Russian activists, media and SMM professionals, working around the clock,” as well as “analysts” to study ways of waging “information war,” the NGO stated.

November 16, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Bunker Debunker: Did Israel Build Subterranean Fortress Under Gaza’s Biggest Hospital?

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 15.11.2023

Situated in Gaza City, the Dar Al-Shifa Hospital is the largest medical complex in the Gaza Strip, and has a 700-bed capacity. The IDF has targeted the complex repeatedly over the past week-and-a-half, alleging Hamas’ use of facilities located underneath as a fortified command center. Is there any truth to this story? Sputnik did some digging.

The Israel Defense Forces provided a worrisome explanation for its targeting of hospitals and ambulances in the Gaza Strip on Monday, publishing (and then deleting) an eyebrow-raising X post saying that “for Hamas, ambulances are used to transport its operatives and weapons to disguise them as civilians,” while “hospitals are in fact terrorist infrastructure.”

“This is against international law and turns them into legitimate military targets,” the IDF said.

In the days and weeks before and since, the al-Shifa hospital complex has come under repeated attack. On November 4, an air strike hit an ambulance near the hospital’s entrance, killing 15 people and injuring 60 others. The hospital was targeted a second time on November 6. Finally, on Wednesday, the IDF launched a ground raid inside the facility.

Before mounting its “precise and targeted operation,” the IDF alleged that Hamas had established a secret headquarters burrowed deep underneath the medical complex. In a statement, the military said it had “publicly warned time and again that Hamas’ continued military use of the Shifa Hospital jeopardizes its protected status under international law,” and lamented that the “relevant authorities in Gaza” ignored an IDF ultimatum to “cease” “all military activities within the hospital.”

Several weeks earlier, the IDF released a computer-animated video of a massive alleged underground tunnel and bunker complex it said was situated underneath the hospital complex, including conference rooms, arms and fuel caches and even a makeshift weapons factory. Israeli intelligence followed up by providing interrogation footage of a captured Hamas fighter admitting there was indeed a large underground hardened facility underneath al-Shifa used by the militant group. US intelligence, Pentagon and White House officials chimed in in support of Washington’s Israeli ally, alleging that Hamas has indeed been using tunnels underneath Al-Shifa for “command and control areas as well as weapons storage,” and that “newly declassified intelligence” indicates that the hospital is being used “to support their military operations.”

Hamas has dismissed the allegations, accusing the IDF of using the claims to justify its indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip.

Who Built the Facilities Underneath al-Shifa?

Starting out as an army barracks during the British Mandate for Palestine era, al-Shifa was turned into a hospital in 1946 during the closing years of Britain’s occupation, and expanded into an entire complex of medical facilities during Egypt’s administration of Gaza between 1953 and 1967. Seizing the Strip during the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel preserved and then expanded the hospital complex, and in the 1980s, with US financial backing, gave it a major overhaul, with Israeli architects Gershon Zippor, Teddy and Ben Kaplan and others tasked with creating its modern-day design, outlining a “Master Plan for the Year 2000” of modern, six-floor buildings spread across a 12.5-acre complex and equipped with what were at the time the latest medical innovations.

Along with the medical facilities, the project reportedly saw the construction of “a secure underground operating room and tunnel network” underneath the Hospital’s Building Number 2 in 1983, with a large “underground concrete floor” constructed underneath the facility during the same period. Other reports indicated that the hardened underground facilities were used to house the hospital’s laundry and “various administrative” offices.

Zippor, notably, had previous experience with underground military facilities, and between 1972 and 1976 engaged in the conversion of bunkers and trenches used during the Six-Day War into the Ammunition Hill Memorial Site and Museum in Jerusalem.

Hamas reportedly knew about the hospital complex’s hidden underground fortified areas, with a 2014 report in Ynet revealing that Zippor’s son, Barak, had mentioned that in the late 1980s, an Israeli contractor “hired Hamas as a security company” for the hospital.

As for the potential use of the underground facilities by Hamas after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, a 2009 report in Haaretz citing Palestinian sources indicated that the militant group’s leaders never hide in one place, but spread out and constantly change locations using an elaborate network of tunnels.

None of the Israeli reporting on the hospital complex’s construction shows photos of its reported fortified basement areas, and reporters covering Israeli attacks on or near the hospital during Israel’s wars with Hamas in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014 and 2023 have yet to present any direct proof of Hamas’ use of the underground facilities built by the Israelis.

“When it comes to the issue of the bunker or the tunnels underneath the Shifa Hospital, I think one of the reasons that Israel is…asserting this is because every time it has tried to make an assertion regarding Hamas’ operations, those assertions have consistently been debunked,” Sami Hamdi, political analyst and head of International Interest, a UK-based global risk and intelligence company, told Sputnik.

The IDF will undoubtedly hope to find evidence of Hamas using underground facilities and tunnels built in the 1980s as evidence to support its narrative about the Palestinian militant group’s use of civilian infrastructure and noncombatants as human shields, but it remains to be see whether Tel Aviv can actually sway public opinion in this manner, the political analyst believes.

“The point being, I think that when it comes to the Israelis pushing this narrative, it has less to do with the idea that Israel actually believes [it] and more about a desperate attempt to try to win back public opinion that it has emphatically lost as a result of the bombardment of social media videos showing the realities of the atrocities that are being committed in Gaza,” Hamdi said.

Mehmet Rakipoglu, a researcher at Dimensions for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, points to the irony of the IDF accusing Hamas of using bunkers and tunnels underneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure when Israel itself appears to have built the “secret shelter” under the Shifa hospital in the first place.

“It is obvious that Hamas did not use the hospital as a shield. Even though Israel tries to manipulate public opinion with amateur videos, the truth is clear,” Rakipoglu told Sputnik.

So far, “the places that Israel claims to be used by the ‘Hamas terrorist cells’ and as tunnels are spare water tanks,” the observer said, referring to social media posts mocking the IDF’s reported ‘proof’ of alleged militant tunnel networks in civilian areas which turn out to be mere water containers, heaters and septic tanks.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel kills elderly Palestinian after using him in propaganda about ‘safe corridor’

Israeli army soldier talking to Bashir Hajji, a 79-year-old resident of Gaza City [@MariamBarghouti/X]
MEMO | November 15, 2023

The Israeli army killed an elderly Palestinian after using him in a propaganda campaign promoting its “safe corridor” in Gaza, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has revealed. The organisation expressed its “outrage” on its website about Israel’s use of the man in an attempt to cover up its horrific crimes against displaced Palestinians fleeing Israeli violence in the northern Gaza Strip.

“The Israeli army released a photo of one of its soldiers talking to Bashir Hajji, a 79-year-old resident of Gaza City’s Zaytoun neighbourhood, as he travelled on Salah Al-Din Road, the main route to the southern Gaza Valley,” explained the organisation. “The soldier appears to be helping and protecting displaced Palestinian civilians.”

However, the elderly man’s granddaughter, Hala Hajji, told the Euro-Med Monitor team that her grandfather was “brutally executed while crossing the ‘safe corridor’ when members of the Israeli army deliberately shot him in the head and back.” She also confirmed that he is in the photo that was put out by Israel, “exposing the army’s dangerous practice of flagrantly fabricating stories.”

Euro-Med Monitor pointed out that it has documented dozens of cases of the Israeli army executing displaced Palestinians and, in some cases, bombing them. Those displaced were attempting to flee to the south of Wadi Gaza at the Israeli army’s request.

The organisation renewed its calls for the “UN and the International Criminal Court to open an urgent independent investigation into the crimes to which displaced Palestinians have been and are still being subjected to hold those who ordered such crimes accountable; and to achieve justice for the victims.”

Euro-Med Monitor is a non-profit human rights organisation. Seventy per cent of its staff and volunteers are victims of human rights violations. According to its website, it “advocates for the human rights of all persons across Europe and the MENA region, particularly those who live under occupation, in the throes of war or political unrest and/or have been displaced due to persecution or armed conflict.”

November 15, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

CDC Runs Two VAERS Systems — The Public Can Access Only One of Them

By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | November 14, 2023

When Dr. Robert Sullivan collapsed on his treadmill three weeks after his second COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021, he fell into a “nightmare” ordeal that he said exposed glaring deficiencies in the nation’s vaccine safety monitoring system.

Diagnosed with sudden onset pulmonary hypertension, the healthy and fit 49-year-old anesthesiologist from Maryland attempted to file a report through the government-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

But like others interviewed in a recent investigation by The BMJ, Sullivan hit barrier after barrier when trying to submit and update his report.

Almost three years later, still grappling with debilitating symptoms, Sullivan’s experience highlights the systemic problems with the U.S. adverse events monitoring system run jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

From doctors unable to file reports to disappearing data, limits on transparency and lack of resources to follow up on concerning vaccine reactions, experts warn VAERS is failing to detect critical safety signals.

According to one of those experts — VAERS researcher Albert Benavides, whose experience includes HMO claims auditing, data analytics and revenue cycle management — VAERS’ failure isn’t accidental.

“It is not broken,” Benavides wrote in his Substack coverage of The BMJ investigation. “VAERS runs cover for the big pharma cabal.”

‘They even delete legitimate reports’

Like others interviewed by The BMJ, Sullivan experienced limited follow-up after submitting his VAERS report. He received only a temporary report number months after his initial submission.

A physician named “Helen” (pseudonym) told The BMJ that fewer than 20% of concerning reports get follow-up, including many deaths she reported.

In consultation with Benavides, an audit by React19 found that 1 in 3 COVID-19 vaccine adverse events reports in VAERS were either not posted publicly or were deleted. React19 is a nonprofit that collects stories of people injured by the mRNA vaccines.

According to The BMJ, of those queried by React19, “22% had never been given a permanent VAERS ID number and 12% had disappeared from the system entirely.”

Benavides, who publishes the VAERSAware dashboards documenting many of the problems with VAERS, said there is even deeper dysfunction in the VAERS system — from inventing symptoms to deleting reports.

“VAERS does not publish all legitimate reports received,” Benavides told The Defender. “They throttle publication of reports. They even delete legitimate reports.”

For a system dependent on voluntary engagement, these restrictive policies keep critical data hidden, according to Benavides.

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contracted with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) to review the VAERS system. In 2010, HPHC filed its r report, which determined that 1 in 39 people experienced vaccine injuries and that only around 1% of vaccine-related injuries or deaths are ever reported to VAERS.

The CDC, which operates under HHS, scuttled the study, refused to take calls from the researchers and declined to upgrade the VAERS system when a new, much more effective system was developed.

‘Blind spots are self-created’

VAERS “collects reports of symptoms, diagnoses, hospital admissions, and deaths after vaccination for the purpose of capturing post-market safety signals,” according to The BMJ.

But the limited transparency of VAERS data presents barriers to proper analysis, according to The BMJ’s investigation and researchers like Benavides.

The public — including doctors and other report submitters — can access only incomplete initial reports, not updates with vital details.

This means outcomes like death are often excluded if the initial report was for an injury and a subsequent death report was filed.

“I made the false assumption that my conversation [with VAERS] would result in an adjustment to the publicly reported case,” Patrick Whelan, M.D., Ph.D., told The BMJ.

Whelan, a rheumatologist and researcher at the University of California Los Angeles, in 2022 filed a report of a cardiac arrest in a 7-year-old male patient after COVID-19 vaccination.

“I assumed that, since it was a catastrophic event, the safety committee would want to hear about it right away,” Whelan said. But nobody called him or requested an update after his submission.

“There was no mechanism for [updating] it,” Whelan told The BMJ. “The only option I had was to make a new VAERS report.” Without updates, the VAERS data showed that the boy was still hospitalized.

Whelan is one the authors of a recent critique of the Cochrane Review that concluded the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were not dangerous.

The problem with VAERS is not limited to a lack of adequate follow-up but to the incomplete and often inaccurate information found there.

“VAERS in effect allows typos, truncated lot #’s, UNK [unknown] ages, UNK vax dates, UNK death dates, etc. to pass through into publication,” Benavides said.

Benavides said specific data — including ethnicity, hospital names, attending physicians, submitter’s relationship to the patient, patient and submitter addresses, telephone numbers and emails — collected by VAERS are not published,

“Any blind spots are self-created, in my opinion,” he said.

Agencies maintain two separate VAERS databases — public gets to see only one

“There’s two parts to VAERS, the front end and back end,” stated Narayan Nair, division director for the FDA’s Division of Pharmacovigilance at a December 2022 meeting with advocates, according to The BMJ. “Anything from medical records by law can’t be posted on the public-facing system,” he said.

The BMJ investigation discovered that the FDA and CDC maintain two separate VAERS databases, one available to the public that contains only initial reports, and a private back-end system containing all of the updates and corrections.

“Anything derived from medical records by law” cannot be posted on the public-facing system, Nair told the advocates, according to The BMJ.

In an apparent contradiction to this claim, The BMJ noted the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), which collects post-marketing information on drug reactions, posts its updates publicly.

Sullivan, who met Nair years before COVID-19 and considers him a friend, told The Defender that if this “very bright, kind and caring person” could not fix VAERS, “I don’t think it’s fixable.”

CDC says it reviewed 20,000 reports of deaths — none were related to COVID shots

Withholding outcome data like deaths obscures critical safety signals, experts contend.

James Gill, a medical examiner, reported the death of a 15-year-old patient after vaccination, but the case was dismissed by the CDC despite autopsy evidence, according to the BMJ investigation.

Physician “Helen” told The BMJ that after filing reports on her medical patients, including six who had died, she received only a single request for medical records on the death and two for hospital-admitted patients.

The standard operating procedure for COVID-19 vaccine reports in VAERS, according to The BMJ, is for reports to be processed quickly and for “serious reports” to receive special review by CDC staff.

However, while some other countries have acknowledged the probable connection between the mRNA vaccines and death, the CDC, while claiming to have reviewed nearly 20,000 death reports, has yet to acknowledge a single death linked to the COVID-19 vaccines, The BMJ said.

Benavides provided The Defender examples of VAERS “deleting legitimate reports,” not just duplicates or false claims.

“VAERS even deleted dead Pfizer Trial patients,” he said, claiming that this report, for example, was not a “duplicate” and did not appear to be fake.

Benavides said:

“There are currently about 50 deaths that are not counted as deaths because the correct box is not checked off.

“There are thousands of reports and about 100 deaths in ‘UNKNOWN VAX TYPE’ in VAERS. Read the narrative to see these are clearly C19 jab-related deaths.

“There are over a thousand cardiac arrests where they are not marked as dead, and I question if they actually survived because there is no mention of ROSC [return of spontaneous circulation].”

“Why couldn’t VAERS populate the ages of these dead kids before publication?” Benavides said, pointing to this report on his website.

Physicians report only FDA-recognized adverse events

Ralph Edwards, former director of the Uppsala Monitoring Centre and until recently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, told The BMJ the regulators may be relying too heavily on past epidemiological data, especially for new types of adverse events. “If something hasn’t been heard of before, it tends to be ignored,” he said.

Without guidance to report potential risks, doctors also face barriers. “Physicians are only willing to talk about FDA-recognized vaccine adverse events,” stated physician “Helen” in a 2021 meeting between the FDA and physicians and advocates, according to The BMJ.

Svetlana Blitshteyn, a neurologist and researcher at the University at Buffalo, New York, told The BMJ if physicians are not educated to look for a specific condition, they’re unlikely to test for it or know how to treat it.

Sullivan told The Defender he believes his experience of developing pulmonary hypertension after taking the mRNA vaccine is one such safety signal the CDC and FDA are overlooking — a condition he believes many athletes have unknowingly developed.

Sullivan co-authored a paper of his and one other similar case of post-vaccine pulmonary hypertension. According to the paper:

“Pulmonary hypertension is a serious disease characterized by damage to lung vasculature and restricted blood flow through narrowed arteries from the right to left heart. The onset of symptoms is typically insidious, progressive and incurable, leading to right heart failure and premature death.”

“Athletes are canaries in the coal mine,” Sullivan told The Defender, speaking of the unusual numbers of athlete deaths since the rollout of the vaccine. Sullivan thinks that those with superior physical conditioning, like him, stand a better chance of survival with early detection.

However, he said, “Athletes will get echocardiography, and it will be essentially normal. The only way to tell for sure is to do a right-heart catheterization” that can identify the anomaly.

Sullivan believes the lives of many athletes could still be saved if the reporting system recognized and investigated the signal — and said he would be happy to join a project dedicated to this goal.

He also told The Defender he believes many of the sudden deaths reported in the 25- to 44-year-old age group are a result of this hidden condition.

‘The buck stops with the CDC for reforms’

Critics point to choices by the CDC as compounding VAERS’ passive design and understaffing issues.

Despite over 1.7 million reports since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, staffing was not boosted accordingly, according to statements the CDC made to The BMJ.

A Freedom of Information Act request by The BMJ revealed Pfizer has nearly 1,000 more full-time employees working on vaccine surveillance than the CDC. Records showed in 2021, Pfizer on-boarded 600 additional full-time employees to handle the volume of adverse reports and planned to hire 200 more.

Physician “Helen” in The BMJ article called for an end to the “negative feedback loop” whereby the FDA fails to list adverse reactions because passive surveillance systems like the FDA’s don’t display them, while at the same time, because of that lack of disclosure, “physicians are blinded to the adverse reactions in their patients, and thus aren’t reporting them.”

“The buck stops with the CDC for reforms needed to open up data,” Benavides told The Defender, adding several suggestions that could immediately improve VAERS:

“Revert back to pre-January 2011 when VAERS did append initial reports with follow-up data, including death. Take off the arbitrary 30-minute time limit to file a report before getting kicked off. Make the process easier to submit follow-up data.”

When asked why the incompetence of VAERS had been allowed to continue for so long, Sullivan told The Defender, “Because of the lack of product liability” for the vaccines “and the surge to defend economic interests.”

Sullivan said he’d like to see the following changes to the system:

  • Pharmaceutical advertising banned.
  • Pharmaceutical company revenues devoted to advertising instead be spent on R&D.
  • The tax money collected on pharma profits be directly sent to victim injury funds.

Yale cardiologist takes on study of COVID vaccine injuries

Benavides said he spoke with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) Monday and is also in discussion with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to address the concerns with VAERS, including the under-publishing of reports.

“That’s a long overdue prospect and it would be incredible to actually get some analysis by that committee,” he said.

Another bright spot comes from news reported in The BMJ’s investigation that Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and researcher at Yale University, has been recruiting members of React19 to study their vaccine injuries.

“We are working hard to understand the experience, clinical course, and potential mechanisms of the ailments reported by those who have had severe symptoms arise soon after the vaccination,” Krumholz told The BMJ.

Sullivan told The Defender that medical science is “just beginning to catalog the damage to the heart” from the vaccines but that “in order to treat something, you have to diagnose it” — and that, because of the shortcomings with VAERS, “we have yet to scratch the surface of that.”

Sullivan, now almost three years into his ordeal, is outliving his initial prognosis.

“I have a grim diagnosis hanging over me, but I’m optimistic because I’m still here,” he said. “I had something bad happen to me, but I’ve met so many amazing, wonderful people along the way who are just interested in truth.”

“I’m going to live the best and most productive life I can with the time I have left,” Sullivan said, helping others who “have this cloud hanging over their future.”


John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

November 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

EU retail giant explains ‘mislabelling’ Israeli products

RT | November 14, 2023

Lidl supermarkets have come under fire in France for allegedly trying to disguise the origin of products from Israel, local media reported over the weekend.

According to the reports, French netizens have spotted Lidl labeling Israeli avocados and pomegranates as being of African or even Spanish origin. A number of users posted photos featuring the products and their labels, both the original and those added by the store, on X (former Twitter) as proof of the misrepresentation, calling the situation “a scandal at Lidl.”

“The item is supposed to come from Morocco according to its label, but after examining it, it turns out that the real origin is Israel,” wrote one user.

“Same thing [happened to me] this morning at the Lidl in Vallauris – avocados from Morocco on the store label, and on the avocado, an Israeli label… I think there are plenty of stores doing this to sell their stocks,” another X user recounted. Similar discrepancies have also reportedly been sighted in Auchan and Carrefour stores.

Commenting on the reports, Schwarz Group, which owns Lidl stores, said that the supposedly intentional mislabeling was nothing more than “a display error, due to the fact that we regularly have avocados and pomegranates from different sources on the shelves.”

While some alleged instances of mislabeling predated the Israel-Hamas conflict, their number reportedly surged when the hostilities began in early October and calls from pro-Palestinian activists to boycott Israel-linked goods became more frequent. Some users believe that these calls prompted the stores to intentionally misrepresent products of Israeli origin so that customers would continue to buy them.

“In view of the recent events in the Middle East, we are dismayed by what is hap-pening [in our stores] and are observing the situation with great concern. Schwarz Group companies reject all forms of violence. Our thoughts are with the victims of the conflict,” the company’s press service told the news outlet.

According to the news outlet Actu Strasbourg, France’s Directorate General for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) has been aware of the complaints and is currently investigating the situation.

“These incidents were the subject of a small number of reports to our services, spread over several months. These, like any consumer report, are taken into account by DGCCRF investigators,” the organization told the news outlet.

November 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

The media’s Nord Stream lies just keep coming

Why do billionaires and governments scramble to control the media? Because the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.

BY JONATHAN COOK | NOVEMBER 14, 2023

Want to understand why the media we consume is either owned by billionaires or under the thumb of government? The latest developments in the story about who was behind the explosions that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines that brought Russian gas to Europe provide the answer.

Although largely forgotten now, the blasts in the Baltic Sea in September 2022 had huge and lasting repercussions. The explosion was an act both of unprecedented industrial sabotage and of unparalleled environmental terrorism, releasing untold quantities of the most potent of the greenhouse gases, methane, into the atmosphere.

The blowing up of the pipelines plunged Europe into a prolonged energy crisis, tipping its economies deeper into a recession from which they are yet to recover. Europe was forced to turn to the United States and buy much more expensive liquified gas. And one of the long-term effects will be to accelerate the de-industrialisation of Europe, especially Germany.

There can be almost no one in Europe who did not suffer personal financial harm, in most cases significant harm, from the explosions.

The question that needed urgently answering at the time of the blasts was one no media organisation was in a hurry to investigate: Who did it?

In unison, the media simply recited the White House’s extraordinary claim that Russia had sabotaged its own pipelines.

That required an unprecedented suspension of disbelief. It meant that Moscow had chosen to strip itself both of the lucrative income stream the gas pipelines generated, and of the political and diplomatic leverage it enjoyed over European states from its control of their energy supplies. This was at a time, remember, when the Kremlin, embattled in its war in Ukraine, needed all the diplomatic influence it could muster.

The main culprit

The need to breathe credibility into the laughably improbable “Russia did it” story was so urgent at the time because there was was only one other serious culprit in the frame. No media outlet, of course, mentioned it.

The United States had both the motive and the means.

US officials from Biden down had repeatedly threatened that Washington would intervene to make sure the Nord Stream pipelines could not operate. The administration was expressly against European energy dependency on Russia. Another gain from the pipelines’ destruction was that a more economically vulnerable Europe would be forced to lean even more heavily on the US as a guarantor of its security, a useful chokehold on Europe when Washington was preparing for prolonged confrontations with both Russia and China.

As for the means, only a handful of states had the divers and technical resources enabling them to pull off the extremely difficult feat of successfully planting and detonating explosives on the sea floor undetected.

Had we known then what is gradually becoming clear now, even from establishment media reporting – that the US was, at the very least, intimately involved – there would have been uproar.

It would have been clear that the US was a rogue, terrorist state, that it was willing to burn its allies for geostrategic gain, and that there was no limit to the crimes it was prepared to commit.

Every time Europeans had to pay substantially more for their heating bills, or filling up their car, or paying for the weekly shop, they would have known that the cause was gangster-like criminality by the Biden administration.

Evidence ignored

Which is precisely why the establishment media were so very careful for the first months after the explosions not to implicate the Biden administration in any way, even if it meant ignoring the mass of evidence staring them in the face.

It is why they ignored the incendiary report by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh – who has broken some of the most important stories of the last half century – detailing exactly how the US carried out the operation. When his account was occasionally referenced by the media, it was solely to ridicule it.

It is why, when it became obvious that the “Russia did it” claim was unsupportable, the media literally jumped ship: credulously reporting that a small group of “maverick” Ukrainians – unknown to President Volodymyr Zelensky, of course – had rented a yacht and carried off one of the most daring and difficult deep-sea stunts ever recorded.

It is why, later, the media treated it as entirely unremarkable – and certainly not worthy of comment – that new evidence suggested the Biden administration was warned of this maverick Ukrainian operation against the whole of Europe. It apparently knew what was about to happen but did precisely nothing to stop it.

And it is why the latest reporting from the Washington Post changes the impossible-to-believe “maverick” Ukrainian operation into one that implicates the very top of the Ukrainian military. Still, the paper and the rest of the media steadfastly refuse to join the dots and follow the implications contained in their own reporting.

The central character in the new drama, Roman Chervinsky, belongs to Ukraine’s special operations forces. He supposedly oversaw the small, six-man team that rented a yacht and then carried out the James Bond-style attack.

The ingenuous Post claims that his training and operational experience meant he was “well suited to help carry out a covert mission meant to obscure Ukraine’s responsibility”. It lists his resistance activities against Russia. None indicate that he had the slightest experience allowing him to mastermind a highly challenging, extremely dangerous, technically complex attack deep in the waters of the Baltic Sea.

Prior knowledge

If the Ukrainian military really was behind the explosions – rather than the US – all the indications are that the Biden administration and Pentagon must have been intimately involved in the planning and execution.

Not least, it is extremely unlikely that the Ukrainian military had the technical capability to carry out by itself such an operation successfully and undiscovered.

And given that, even before the war, the Ukrainian military had fallen almost completely under US military operational control, the idea that Ukraine’s senior command would have been able to, or dared, execute this complex and risky venture without involving the US beggars belief.

Politically, it would have been quite extraordinary for Ukrainian leaders to imagine they could unilaterally decide to shut down energy supplies to Europe without consulting first with the US, especially when Ukraine’s entire war effort was being paid for and overseen by Washington and Europe.

And of course, Ukrainian leaders would have been only too aware that the US was bound to quickly work out who was behind the attack.

It would be telling indeed that, in such circumstances, the Biden administration would apparently choose to reward Ukraine with more money and arms for its act of industrial sabotage against Europe rather than punish it in any way.

It would be equally astonishing that the three states supposedly investigating the attack – Germany, Sweden and Denmark – would not also soon figure out for themselves that Ukraine was culpable. Why would they decide to cover up Ukraine’s attack on Europe’s economy rather than expose it – unless they were worried about upsetting the US?

And of course, there is the elephant in the room: the Washington Post’s earlier reporting indicated that the US had prior knowledge that Ukraine was planning the attack. That is even more likely if the pipeline blast was signed off by Ukrainian military commanders rather than a group of Ukrainian “mavericks”.

The Washington Post’s new story repeats the line that the Biden administration was forewarned of the attack. Now, however, the Post casually reports that, after expressing opposition, “US officials believed the attack had been called off. But it turned out only to have been postponed to three months later, using a different point of departure than originally planned”.

The Washington Post simply accepts the word of US officials that the most powerful country on the planet fell asleep at the wheel. The CIA and Biden administration apparently knew the Ukrainian military was keen to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines and plunge Europe into an energy crisis and economic recession. But US officials were blindsided when the same small Ukrainian operational team changed locations and timings.

On this account, US intelligence fell for the simplest of bait and switches when the stakes were about as high as could be imagined. And the Washington Post and other media outlets report all of this with a faux-seriousness.

Ukrainian fall guy

Either way, the US is deeply implicated in the attack on Europe’s energy infrastructure and the undermining of its economy.

Even if the establishment media reporting is right and Ukraine blew up Nord Stream, the Biden administration must have given the green light, overseen the operational planning and assisted in the implementation and subsequent cover-up.

Then again, if as seems far more likely, Hersh is right, then there was no middle man – the US carried out the attack on its own. It needed a fall guy. When Russia no longer fitted the bill, Ukraine became the sacrificial offering.

A year on, these muffled implications from the media’s own reporting barely raise an eyebrow.

The establishment media has played precisely the role expected of it: neutering public outrage. Its regimented acceptance of the initial, preposterous claim of Russian responsibility. Its drip-feed, uncritical reporting of other, equally improbable possibilities. Its studious refusal to join the all-too-visible dots. Its continuing incuriousness about its own story and what Ukraine’s involvement would entail.

The media has failed by every yardstick of what journalism is supposed to be there for, what it is supposed to do. And that is because the establishment media is not there to dig out the truth, it is not there to hold power to account. Ultimately, when the stakes are high – and they get no higher than the Nord Stream attack – it is there to spin narratives convenient to those in power, because the media itself is embedded in those same networks of power.

Why do billionaires rush to own media corporations, even when the outlets are loss-making? Why are governments so keen to let billionaires take charge of the chief means by which we gain information and communicate between ourselves. Because the power to tell stories, the power over our minds is the greatest power there is.

November 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

What does the WHO say about its power to enforce the Pandemic Treaty (and International Health Regulations)?

By MERYL NASS | NOVEMBER 12, 2023

Many people have insisted that the WHO could not make the US do anything. Let me remind those people that the US government under Biden is instrumental in pushing forward the WHO proposals, and so it will comply. Here is what the WHO says:

What is meant by a  ‘convention, agreement or other international instrument’?

Conventions, framework agreements and treaties are all examples of international instruments, which are legal agreements made between countries that are binding.  

Why did WHO’s Member States decide to create an accord for pandemic preparedness and response?

In light of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO’s 194 Member States established a process to draft and negotiate a new convention, agreement, or other international instrument (referred to in the rest of this FAQ, generally, as an “accord”) on pandemic preparedness and response. This was driven by the need to ensure communities, governments, and all sectors of society – within countries and globally – are better prepared and protected, in order to prevent and respond to future pandemics. The great loss of human life, disruption to households and societies at large, and impact on development are among the factors cited by governments to support the need for lasting action to prevent a repeat of such crises.

[Ho ho ho—Nass]

At the heart of the proposed accord is the need to ensure equity in both access to the tools needed to prevent pandemics (including technologies like vaccines, personal protective equipment, information and expertise) and access to health care for all people.

[If this were true, why do the treaty and amendments only discuss health “coverage” which means health insurance, rather than health care? The WHO knows the difference, but only demands “coverage”—a sop to the insurance industry.

Furthermore, the WHO demands censorship of information not in agreement with the WHO’s narratives, not free sharing of information—so much for information equity—and its so-called expertise was used to overdose hospitalized patients with HCQ without informed consent, when these unfortunates were enrolled in the WHO’s “SOLIDARITY” trial. Its expertise led to demanding that nations stop the use of HCQ and ivermectin for COVID and administer more shots. Who needs this expertise? —Nass]

Who else is involved in the process for the accord?

Besides WHO Member States, the process for developing a possible new accord is providing extensive opportunities for engagement with relevant stakeholders, including other United Nations system bodies, and a wide range of other non-State actors in official relations with the WHOto ensure robust and inclusive participation in the proceedings of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body. Furthermore, WHO is seeking complementary inputs through public hearings with stakeholders including: international organizations; civil society; the private sector; philanthropic organizations; scientific, medical, public policy and academic institutions and other entities with relevant knowledge, experience and/or expertise.

[In other words, Bill Gates, who was the largest funder of the WHO the year Trump defunded the organization, gets the lion’s share of input, while we peons get none. Trump then turned around and funded Gate’s’ charity GAVI with the money, and GAVI turned around and gave it back to the WHO. That was our money, by the way.—Nass]

—There is more of this nonsense on this webpage, but you can go look it up yourself if you have the stomach for it.—Meryl

November 12, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Jim Jordan Announces Investigation into DOJ For Spying on Congressional Staffers

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 7, 2023

Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, who serves as the House Judiciary Committee Chairman, has issued demands to five major tech companies. The prominent lawmaker insisted AT&T, Alphabet – the parent company for Google, Apple, Verizon, and T-Mobile, release information potentially exposing surveillance tactics endorsed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) against congressional representatives and their staff.

We obtained an example of the letters for you here.

The call for transparency comes on the heels of revelations that six-year-old subpoenas had facilitated the department’s breach of personal phone and email accounts for numerous lawmakers and their official aides.

The account framing the current plight was provided by Jordan, who propounded that the DOJ’s intervention strategically targeted the very congressional individuals scrutinizing the agency’s mishandling of the Russia collusion investigation.

Jordan’s theory postulates that such actions tampered with the squarely drawn lines of both the Constitution’s principle of separated powers and Congress’s independent oversight of federal agencies.

Conveying his objections through letters to the tech CEOs, Jordan stated: “The Justice Department’s efforts to obtain the private communications of congressional staffers, including staffers conducting oversight of the Department, is wholly unacceptable and offends fundamental separation of powers principles as well as Congress’s constitutional authority to conduct oversight of the Department. This revelation also follows news that the Department issued subpoenas to obtain the private emails and records of congressional staffers on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who were conducting oversight of the Justice Department’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

An additional point of contention for Jordan was the DOJ obtaining private emails and records from staffers with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who had been examining the Department’s Crossfire Hurricane” investigation. In Jordan’s view, “These revelations strongly suggest that the Justice Department weaponized its law-enforcement authority to spy on the entities seeking to hold it accountable.”

These troubling revelations expose a disturbing overreach of surveillance, a flagrant violation of privacy, and a stark shakeup of the checks-and-balances system, propelling the call for corporate accountability and congressional autonomy into the spotlight.

November 7, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | | Leave a comment

US House Panel Says Disinformation ‘Pseudo-Experts’ Targeted Political Speech Online

Sputnik – 07.11.2023

WASHINGTON – US government officials used a government-linked group of disinformation pseudo-experts to launder the censorship of political speech online, the US House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government said in an interim report.

The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) – a group of purported disinformation academics led by the Stanford Internet Observatory – worked with US government officials to monitor and censor online speech ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the report, released Monday, said.

“This interim staff report details the federal government’s heavy-handed involvement in the creation and operation of the EIP, which facilitated the censorship of Americans’ political speech in the weeks and months leading up to the 2020 election,” the report said. “This pressure was largely directed in a way that benefited one side of the political aisle: true information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as ‘misinformation’ while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors.”

The House Weaponization Subcommittee released the report in conjunction with the House Judiciary Committee.

The EIP worked with the US Department of Homeland Security and other US government agencies to bypass First Amendment protections for speech through the consortium of disinformation “pseudo-experts,” the report said.

The EIP was created at the request of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the report said. US government officials would submit misinformation reports to EIP analysts, who would then recommend censorship actions to tech companies, the report added.

An “untold number” of US citizens across the political spectrum were impacted by the censorship of true information, jokes and opinions, the report said.

The House committees’ investigations into the weaponization of the federal government and violations of civil liberties remain ongoing, the report said. There is “more to come,” Judiciary and Weaponization panel chair Jim Jordan also said in a statement via social media platform X.

The American people deserve to know whether they were targeted by the US government and affiliated disinformation pseudo-experts, Jordan added.

November 7, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Hamas calls for an international committee to inspect Gaza hospitals

Palestine Information Center – November 5, 2023

GAZA – The Hamas Movement called on the Secretary-General of the United Nations to form an international committee to visit Gaza hospitals and verify the Israeli false narrative about being used for resistance activities.

The Movement strongly condemned the Israeli army spokesman’s claims regarding Indonesian and Hamad hospitals in Gaza as media fabrications.

According to the Movement, the occupation is attempting to use the claim that Hamas constructed tunnels beneath the buildings as justification for its attacks on the Qatari and Indonesian hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip.

“This is just a lie to cover up the Israeli crimes committed against injured people and civilians.”

The Movement also confirmed that the Israeli allegation about a tunnel entrance under the Indonesian hospital is, in fact, a fuel store for the facility, while the alleged tunnel beneath Hamad Hospital is just a room for pumps and electricity generators.

Targeting more than 100 hospitals and medical centers and putting about 16 hospitals out of service refutes the Israeli army spokesman’s allegations.

Additionally, Hamas refuted Israeli claims that it is stealing fuel, an accusation that UNRWA has categorically refuted.

November 5, 2023 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

​​HHS SHIRKS ITS VACCINE SAFETY DUTIES FOR 34 YEARS AND REFUSES TO CHANGE

Informed Consent Action Network | November 3, 2023

Federal law requires HHS to send bi-annual reports to Congress detailing how it has made childhood vaccines safer. Yet, HHS has never filed a single report. ICAN’s attorneys have called HHS out on this multiple times, but it continues to shamelessly flout the law.

When Congress eliminated pharmaceutical companies’ liability for vaccines in 1986, it recognized that it eliminated the fear of losing money that drives companies to assure the safety of their products. Congress, therefore, made the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the parent department of the CDC and FDA, responsible for vaccine safety.

To assure HHS is actually performing this critical duty of assuring the safety of products injected into babies, the same 1986 law that eliminated pharmaceutical company liability also created a “task force” on safer childhood vaccines. This task force, made up of the heads of the NIH, FDA, and CDC, was supposed to make recommendations to the Secretary of HHS on how to make vaccines safer. And, as noted above, the law also required the Secretary of HHS to file a report with Congress every two years detailing its efforts to improve vaccine safety.

As many of you know, ICAN previously sued HHS for failing to file these reports with Congress and it admitted in 2018 that it never once filed a single required report with Congress. It also admitted that the task force had been disbanded in 1998!

After publicly shaming them for this misconduct, including in the Vaccine Safety Debate we had with HHS, you would think HHS would start filing bi-annual reports and the task force would start making recommendations. Sadly, our attorneys have confirmed neither has happened.

In response to ICAN checking in again in January 2023, HHS admitted that there are no still reports. Not one.

While HHS has a $2.95 trillion budget, it apparently doesn’t care about safer childhood vaccines—and never has. ICAN will continue to monitor the situation and share any important updates.

See below for more instances where ICAN has confronted health agencies over vaccine safety:

November 4, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment