Did US raise a false flag on Nord Stream blasts?
BY BRADLEY K. MARTIN | ASIA TIMES | MARCH 9, 2023
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said an odd thing on March 7 when TASS asked him to compare his version of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline explosions (US Navy divers did it, he had reported February 8) with a newly released version from the New York Times and German media that points to non-governmental Ukrainians as culprits.
“I don’t want to get into it,” Hersh replied to the Russian wire service. “You should decide for yourself. It’s up to you.” The TASS reporter persisted, asking if Hersh thought the New York Times account had come in response to Hersh’s own investigation. He gave the same reply, saying people should come to their own conclusions.
That was pretty clever. Read both versions and you may conclude that they could fit together to point to a plausible account of how, as war raged over Ukraine, three pipelines supplying Germany’s gas supply from Russia were blown up before Vladimir Putin could use their existence to try to lure Germany out of the pro-Ukraine camp. Before the war, over half of Germany’s gas imports came from Russia.
Assemble a whole from the two versions and you might come up with this: On US President Joe Biden’s orders, US government covert types put together and with Norwegian help carried out the operation (that’s Hersh’s story); to avoid detection, they left some clues pointing elsewhere, to Ukrainians or “pro-Ukrainians” – the main clue mentioned so far being that the yacht from which the divers worked could be traced back to a yacht-rental company in Poland, a company owned by Ukrainians.
The German media account
What you might end up suspecting is a false flag.
Die Zeit, a leading German newspaper that is part of a media investigative consortium that talked with officials in several countries to put together its narrative, acknowledges the possibility thusly: “Even if traces lead to Ukraine, the investigators have not yet been able to find out who commissioned the suspected group of perpetrators. In international security circles, it is not ruled out that it could also be a false flag operation.”
The paper hastens to add that investigators “have apparently not found evidence that confirms such a scenario.” But “the nationalities of the perpetrators are apparently unclear” since they used “professionally forged passports.”
Die Zeit narrows the gang down to “a team of six people. It is said to have been five men and one woman.” Functionally, they were “a captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor.”
Like the New York Times, the German media outlets suggest that the demolition crew consisted of Ukrainian civilians from a non-governmental “commando” force opposed to the Russian invasion.
There’s no point in asking for a smoking gun at this point. His critics point out that Hersh – who has acknowledged he opposed NATO expansion into the former Soviet Union and who is not known to be a fan of allied efforts to help Ukraine fight the war – based his own account on a single unnamed US government source. Likewise, the German media organizations that make up the investigative consortium name no sources.
Die Zeit reports that “a Western secret service is said to have sent a tip to European partner services in the autumn, shortly after the destruction,” talking about Ukrainian commando responsibility for the destruction. “After that, there are said to have been further intelligence indications that a pro-Ukrainian group could be responsible.”
A Kremlin spokesperson on March 8 was having none of it, telling journalists that “Western media reports which exonerate NATO state actors from involvement in the explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines have the hallmarks of a synchronized misinformation campaign.”
The Hersh version
Hersh’s version is that US Navy divers, “operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.”
Remarkable for its detail, the Hersh account claims that “Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back-and-forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.”
The debate and preparations proceeded from December 2021 when Russia was marshaling its troops, preparing to strike Ukraine from Belarus and Crimea, Hersh writes. “As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia,” he notes.
The interagency task force thus assembled “was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation,” Hersh writes.
“‘It would be a goat fuck,’ the agency was told. Throughout ‘all of this scheming,’ the source said, ‘some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”’
“Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to [national security adviser Jake] Sullivan’s interagency group: ‘We have a way to blow up the pipelines.’ What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, ‘If Russia invades … there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’”
Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland gave a similar warning, Hersh says, and lower-ranking officials were concerned by what they viewed as their seniors’ indiscretion.
The operation was headquartered in Norway, whose navy, Hersh says,
was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta-class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.
As cover, Hersh writes, the Americans had Sixth Fleet planners add to the annual naval maneuvers, already scheduled for that time and place, a research and development exercise involving “NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them… The C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22.”
After a decent interval of three months,
on September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission…
In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House – but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution… No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.
Fact-checkers and Hersh
Critics found what they said were some errors in Hersh’s version. Here is Wikipedia on that:
Hersh wrote that NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg had been cooperating with US intelligence services since the Vietnam War and has been cleared ever since. At the time the Vietnam War ended, Stoltenberg was 16 years old, and he had participated during the peak of the Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Norway. In 1985, Stoltenberg was part of the Workers’ Youth League in Norway, when the Labor Party was working to withdraw Norway from NATO.
Hersh’s article said the US divers who planted the explosives had operated from a Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper. The Norwegian Defence Forces said no Norwegian Alta-class mine sweepers had participated in BALTOPS 22 and were not in the vicinity of the explosions during the exercise.
Regarding Hersh’s allegations against the Norwegian P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane, Lieutenant Colonel Vegard Norstad Finberg of the Norwegian armed forces said the Norwegian P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane is a brand new plane that has never been in an operational operation, and has only flown test flights in Norwegian airspace, and has never been over the Baltic Sea…
In the German Bundestag, members of parliament from the government disputed Hersh’s credibility and urged that public discussion of the topic be minimized for security reasons; opposition members of parliament from AfD and Die Linke initiated a parliamentary debate on February 10 about Hersh’s allegations, with Die Linke MP Sevim Dağdelen arguing that the government seemed uninterested in clarifying the truth about the bombings.
If the divers’ platform wasn’t an Alta-class minesweeper, then was it a yacht rented from a Ukrainian-owned company in Poland – the vessel the German media/European intel account mentions?
The German account tells us that the saboteurs on their rented yacht proceeded to the dive location on September 6, 2022, from the German Baltic Sea port of Rostock after loading their equipment aboard there from a delivery truck. Rostok’s a long day’s sail (325 nautical miles) from Gdynia, the major Polish port on the Baltic (in case that’s where, in Poland, the Ukrainian-owned yacht rental company is situated).
The New York Times
Disclaimer here: In my 54 years in the news business, I have generally avoided asking spooks for help. I have nothing against them and realize they are colleagues of sorts, but I can recall only a couple of cases when I sought their help. They have their jobs and I have mine. I certainly don’t rush to get their version of events whenever something happens. I assume their version is whatever their agencies have told them should be their version so I prefer to spend my time getting my own version from more direct sources.
That may help to explain why the New York Times piece bothers me. The reporters – maybe the spooks are their beat and they have to get along, or else? – seem overeager to peddle Washington’s version:
Ukraine and its allies have been seen by some officials as having the most logical potential motive to attack the pipelines. They have opposed the project for years, calling it a national security threat because it would allow Russia to sell gas more easily to Europe.
I’d advise checking your wallet if you hear from your pipe-smoking spook source that “officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals or some combination of the two. US officials said no American or British nationals were involved.”
Would you credit “US officials who have reviewed the new intelligence” and who say that “the explosives were most likely planted with the help of experienced divers who did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services”?
After all that Seymour Hersh has told you?
Well, at least they have a policy at the New York Times permitting them to emulate Seymour Hersh (born 1937, a real veteran with a record) and stick to anonymous sources:
Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
Whew. What a relief.
Bradley K Martin is a veteran foreign correspondent.
The US military plans to use deep fakes and take over appliances for propaganda
By Rachel Marsden | RT | March 9, 2023
Can you create cutting edge “deep fake” videos, spy on people using household appliances, and make massive data dragnets? If so, the Pentagon wants to hear from you so it can amp up its manipulation efforts.
US Special Operations Command (US SOCOM) has issued proposal requests for a whole host of dodgy services, according to new documents obtained by The Intercept.
Specifically, the Pentagon is looking for “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (IoT) devices in order to collect data and information from local populaces to enable a breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received.”
For what purpose? “This would enable MISO [Military Information Support Operations] to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by the local populace in relevant peer/near peer environments,” according to the document.
Despite publicly obsessing over others’ foreign interference and propaganda, Washington is now openly admitting that it is actively seeking these new technologies for its own “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” You know, exactly the same kind of thing, over which it drums up fear as a threat to freedom and democracy among the general public.
Earlier this year, a Washington-based advisory firm OODA published a report warning that Chinese-made household items could not only be spying on you, but basically fronting for the Chinese government. The report’s author called for the British government to act on claims that Chinese-made Internet of Things appliances, and even car components, can collect and transmit data through cellular 5G networks to Chinese companies, which could then be ordered to pass it on to the government. The story was hysterically splashed across British media.
OODA describes itself as a “global strategic advisory firm with deep DNA in global security, technology and intelligence issues.” The genetics run deep, indeed: straight to the Pentagon and Western intelligence communities where its executives, experts and advisers have past or current working relationships.
So now it looks like calls to ban Chinese household appliances for their spying potential have turned into Washington wanting to get in on the action by obtaining the best possible front row seat as you stand in front of your refrigerator at midnight, chugging chocolate milk straight from the carton.
The Pentagon also wants to be able to create “deep fake” videos that can realistically portray fake events as real, in an attempt to manipulate the target viewer(s). Or, as the Pentagon puts it, to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels in relevant peer/near peer environments.” It’s hard to imagine a more glaring example of actual fake news, yet the Pentagon wants to produce it in the way that Netflix makes movies and TV shows.
Finally, the Pentagon says that they want to get their hands on “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations and messages in relevant peer/near peer environments.”
Some might be tempted to just shrug this off as conventional practice because, when the military is tracking down bad guys, they’re obviously going to want to use every possible tool available at their disposal – and constantly seek to expand that tool box. But recent evidence suggests that military-grade collection and subversion tools targeting online and conventional information platforms have largely been turned on the average citizen for the purpose of protecting the establishment and its various narratives from dissent rather than for reasons of national security.
Last December, for example, Twitter CEO Elon Musk worked with a journalist to reveal the collusion between US government authorities and the social media platform to manipulate and censor public debate over the Covid-19 pandemic. According to internal Twitter documents, one of the first meetings that the Biden Administration requested with Twitter executives was on the topic of Covid vaccines and specific high-profile accounts that deviated from the official narrative. According to the journalist, David Zweig, “Twitter did suppress views – many from doctors and scientific experts – that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.” He added that, “With Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas,” and cited examples of various experts, including prominent epidemiologists, whose views were censored as a result of being qualified by the Twitter staff as Covid “misinformation.”
Earlier this year, a British whistleblower also revealed that critics of Covid-19-related lockdowns and vaccine mandates – including prominent journalists and politicians – were monitored by the UK army’s information warfare brigade. The 77th Brigade, created in 2015 and described by the media at the time as composed of “warriors who don’t just carry weapons, but who are also skilled in using social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and the dark arts of ‘psyops’”.
The Canadian military was also caught using propaganda techniques honed on the battlefield in Afghanistan to shape the Covid debate by boosting the government’s narrative and attempting to head off any civil unrest over the harsh mandates.
The Pentagon’s latest wish list raises concerns that these tools will also be deployed on average Americans or Westerners for purposes of control and manipulation. Last September, the Pentagon vowed to review its secret psyops, but only after public outrage when a group of researchers suggested collusion between US government entities and American online platforms like Twitter and Facebook to control online narratives with fake accounts. Was the lesson learned to stop deploying psyops on average citizens? Or was it just to do a better job of keeping it secret?
Not that there’s any shortage of Western establishment cheerleaders demanding even more psychological manipulation efforts by the US government, if only to counter “disinformation” from foreign adversaries.
It seems that we’ve now come to the point where sticking it to Russia and China means actively cheerleading the increasingly militarized efforts by our self-styled defenders of freedom and democracy to brainwash their own people.
In Nord Stream attack, US officials use proxy media to blame proxy Ukraine
One month after Seymour Hersh reported that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, US regime finds a scapegoat in Ukraine and stenographers in the NYT.
By Aaron Maté | March 8, 2023
Nearly six months after the Nord Stream pipelines exploded and one month after Seymour Hersh reported that the Biden administration was responsible, US officials have unveiled their defense. According to the New York Times, anonymous government sources claim that “newly collected intelligence” now “suggests” that the Nord Stream bomber was in fact a “pro-Ukrainian group.”
The only confirmed “intelligence” about this supposed “group” is that US officials have none to offer about them.
“U.S. officials said there was much they did not know about the perpetrators and their affiliations,” The Times reports. The supposed “newly collected” information “does not specify the members of the group, or who directed or paid for the operation.” Despite knowing nothing about them, the Times’ sources nonetheless speculate that “the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two.” They also leave open “the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.” (emphasis added)
When no evidence is produced, anything is of course “possible.” But the Times’ sources are oddly certain on one critical matter: “U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.” Also, there is “no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.”
Despite failing to obtain any concrete information about the perpetrators, the Times nonetheless declares that the US cover story planted in their pages “amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.”
It is unclear why the Times has deemed their evidence-free “lead” to be “significant”, and not, by contrast, the Hersh story that came four weeks earlier. Not only does Hersh’s reporting predate the Times’, but his story contained extensive detail about how the US planned and executed the Nord Stream explosions.
Tellingly, the Times distorts the basis for Hersh’s reporting. “In making his case,” the Times claims, Hersh merely “cited” President Biden’s “preinvasion threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream 2, and similar statements by other senior U.S. officials.” In falsely suggesting that he relied solely on public statements, the Times completely omits that Hersh in fact cited a well-placed source.
By contrast, the Times has no information about its newfound perpetrators or about any other aspect of its “significant” lead.
“U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains,” The Times states. Accordingly, US officials admit that “there are no firm conclusions” to be drawn, and that there are “enormous gaps in what U.S. spy agencies and their European partners knew about what transpired.” For that apparent reason, “U.S. officials who have been briefed on the intelligence are divided about how much weight to put on the new information.” The Times, by contrast, apparently feels no such evidentiary burden.
In sum, US officials have “much they did not know about the perpetrators” – i.e. everything; “enormous gaps” in their awareness of how the (unknown) “pro-Ukraine group” purportedly carried out a deep-sea bombing; uncertainty over “how much weight to put on” their “intelligence”; and even “no firm conclusions” to offer. Moreover, all of this supposed US “intelligence” happens to have been “newly collected” — after one of the most accomplished journalists in history published a detailed report on how US intelligence plotted and conducted the bombing.
Given the absence of evidence and curious timing, a reasonable conclusion is not that a Ukrainian “proxy force” was the culprit, but that the US is now using its Ukrainian proxy as a scapegoat.
As the standard bearer of establishment US media, the Times’ “reporting” is perfectly in character. Days after the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, the Times noted that “much of the speculation about responsibility has focused on Russia” – just as US officials would certainly hope. The narrative was echoed by former CIA Director John Brennan, who opined that “Russia certainly is the most likely suspect,” in the Nord Stream attack. Citing anonymous “Western intelligence officials”, CNN claimed that “European security officials observed Russian Navy ships in vicinity of Nord Stream pipeline leaks,” thus casting “further suspicion on Russia,” which is seen by “European and US officials as the only actor in the region believed to have both the capability and motivation to deliberately damage the pipelines.”
With the story that Russia blew up its own pipelines no longer tenable, the Times’ new narrative asks us to believe that some unnamed “pro-Ukraine group”, which “did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services” somehow managed to obtain the unique capability to plant multiple explosives on a heavily sealed pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
That narrative is already being laundered through the German media. Hours after the Times story broke, the German outlet Die Zeit came out with a story, sourced to German officials, that claims the bombing operation was carried out by a group of six people, including just “two divers.” These supposed perpetrators, we are told, arrived at the crime scene via a yacht “apparently owned by two Ukrainians” that departed Germany. How a yacht managed to carry the equipment and explosives needed for the operation is left unexplained.
The saboteurs somehow possessed the capability to carry out a deep-sea bombing, but not the awareness to properly clean up their floating crime scene. According to Die Zeit, the boat was “returned to the owner in an uncleaned condition,” which allowed “investigators” to discover “traces of explosives on the table in the cabin.” Should this lean “pro-Ukraine” crack team of naval commandos conduct another act of deep-sea sabotage, they will only need to hire a cleaning professional to get away with it.
As for motivation, we are somehow also asked to forget that Biden administration officials not only expressed the motivation, but the post-facto satisfaction. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” senior US official Victoria Nuland vowed in January 2022. President Biden added the following month that “if Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” After the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken greeted the news as a “tremendous strategic opportunity.” Just days before Hersh’s story was published, Nuland informed Congress that both she and the White House are “very gratified” that Nord Stream is “a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
Not only are global audiences asked to ignore the public statements of Biden administration principals, but their blanket refusal to answer any questions. This was put on display in Washington this past weekend, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid Biden a White House visit. Unlike Scholz’s last DC trip, there was no joint news conference. This was understandable: the last time they appeared together, Biden blurted out that he would “bring an end” to Nord Stream, leaving Scholz to stand next to him in awkward silence. This time around, the two briefly sat before a group of reporters who were quickly shooed out of the room, much to Biden’s apparent glee.
Inadvertently, the Times’ account exposes new holes in the failed attempts to refute Hersh’s story.
Members of the NATO state-funded website Bellingcat, falsely presented to NATO state audiences as an independent investigative outlet, have attempted to cast doubt on Hersh’s claims by arguing that open-source tracking at the time of the bombing fails to detect the vessels he reported on. But as the Times story notes, investigators are seeking information about ships “whose location transponders were not on or were not working when they passed through the area, possibly to cloak their movements.” Hersh has made this same point in interviews, noting that when Biden flew into Poland before his visit to Kiev last month, his “plane switched off its transponder” to avoid detection, as the Associated Press reported. Unfortunately for self-styled digital sherlocks, major international crimes – particularly those involving intelligence agencies – cannot be solved from their laptops.
Hersh was also pilloried for citing a single anonymous source. The Times’ story, by contrast, relies on multiple anonymous sources, who, unlike Hersh, have no tangible information to offer. After ignoring Hersh’s story for a full month, the Times’ news section was forced to acknowledge it for the first time. And the best that its anonymous sources could come up with is not only an evidence-free, caveat-filled narrative, but a story that does not challenge a single aspect of Hersh’s detailed account.
In another contrast, Hersh is one of the most accomplished and impactful journalists in the history of the profession. Two of the journalists on the Times story, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman, have bylined multiple stories that spread demonstrable falsehoods sourced to anonymous US officials.
In the summer of 2020, Barnes and Goldman were among the Times journalists who laundered CIA disinformation that Russia was paying bounties for dead US troops in Afghanistan. When the Biden administration was forced to acknowledge that the allegation was baseless, the Times tried to water down its initial claims in an attempt to save face.
In January, Barnes co-wrote a Times story which claimed, citing unnamed “U.S. officials” more than a dozen times, that “Russian military intelligence officers” were behind “a recent letter bomb campaign in Spain whose most prominent targets were the prime minister, the defense minister and foreign diplomats.” But days later, as the Washington Post reported, Spanish authorities arrested “a 74-year-old Spaniard who opposed his country’s support for Ukraine but appears to have acted alone.” (Moon of Alabama is one the few voices to have called out the Times’ fraudulent reporting).
That same month, Goldman shared a byline, alongside fellow “Russian bounties” stenographer Charlie Savage, on a Times story which argued that Special Counsel John Durham has “failed to find wrongdoing in the origins of the Russia inquiry,” even though Durham’s findings have yet to be released. As I reported for Real Clear Investigations, the Times made its case by omitting countervailing information and distorting the available facts – as is the norm for establishment media coverage of Russiagate.
The US officials behind the Times’ latest Nord Stream tale presumably believe that they have offered the best counter to Hersh that they could. That it is devoid of concrete information, and written by Times staffers with a track record of parroting US intelligence-furnished propaganda, ultimately has the opposite effect.
The Times’ narrative can only be seen as further confirmation that Hersh found the Nord Stream bomber in Washington. That explains why anonymous US officials are now using proxies in establishment media to scapegoat their proxy in Ukraine.
Watch or listen to my recent interview with Seymour Hersh here.
Telegraph Journalist Calls For Matt Hancock Arrest
By Richie Allen | March 8, 2023
The Telegraph columnist Alison Pearson has called for former health secretary Matt Hancock to be arrested for wilful misconduct in public office.
Writing in today’s paper Pearson summarises the revelations contained in Hancock’s WhatsApp messages, which were leaked to The Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott.
Hancock handed more than 100,000 messages to Oakeshott when she wrote his lockdown memoir.
They revealed how Hancock gleefully plotted to “frighten the pants off everyone” to ensure lockdown compliance.
Hancock mooted using Covid variants to scare people into changing their behaviour. He supported blackmailing lockdown sceptic MP’s into keeping quiet.
One MP (James Daly, Bury) was told that if he didn’t shut up, his constituency wouldn’t receive funding for a disability hub.
Hancock repeatedly lied about the pressure Covid was exerting on the NHS. He briefed daily that hospitals were collapsing under the weight of Covid cases. The leaked messages reveal that in fact he knew from day one that there was no likelihood of hospital capacity running out.
He even offered beds to French and Italian Covid patients.
The leaks clearly demonstrate that Hancock was lying through his teeth day in, day out.
Has he broken the law? Alison Pearson thinks he just might have.
She concludes her excellent piece in today’s Telegraph, saying:
Are there grounds for a prosecution of the former minister for misconduct in a public office? Did Matt Hancock “wilfully misconduct himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification”?
Some families of care-home residents are preparing a private prosecution against Hancock, I know. The Crown Prosecution Service must then decide if it is in the public interest to proceed. The Lockdown Files should provide critical evidence.
With the third anniversary of lockdown looming, the Rights for Residents campaign asked their members to post a picture of their loved one in happier times, along with the three words that best describe them. Before, that is, those elderly ladies and gentlemen were locked away with no interaction with a close relative or friend.
They were consigned to a living death that was designed by our mad Covid masters to “save lives”. What could ever have justified such a crime against humanity?
Now, that’s what I call an Urgent Question.
The Vaccine Was “95% Effective” How?
By Robert Blumen | Brownstone Institute | March 8, 2023
The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and Maori chiefs was a landmark event in the history of New Zealand. Drafted in English, a Maori translation was prepared, ostensibly to ensure that Maori could have an accurate understanding of the terms. In retrospect, it is less clear that a meeting of the minds was intended:
The English and Māori texts differ. As some words in the English treaty did not translate directly into the written Māori language of the time, the Māori text is not a literal translation of the English text. It has been claimed that Henry Williams, the missionary entrusted with translating the treaty from English, was fluent in Māori and that far from being a poor translator he had in fact carefully crafted both versions to make each palatable to both parties without either noticing inherent contradictions.
“The covid vaccine is 95% effective” is a contemporary Treaty of Waitangi. The original is in the language of clinical trials. It was never translated. The public interpreted this phrase in their native language, normal English. What Pfizer said and what the public heard were quite different. The public would have been far more skeptical of these products had the clinical trial results been translated into normal English.
What we need is a proper translation and an explanation of how miscommunication happened.
The Injections Did Not Stop Infection
By now, everyone knows that the Pfizer and Moderna products did not stop people from getting Covid. Covid disease has mowed a wide strip through the double and triple-masked talking heads who told everyone that the shots would make them immune.
What is less well known is that:
- The products were never expected to stop infection or transmission.
- The clinical trials did not test for their ability to do so.
A clinical trial is designed to test a drug for effectiveness, which is strictly defined by one or more endpoints. An endpoint is a measurable outcome that can be assessed for each participant. With that in mind, prevention of infection was not an endpoint of the BioNTech/Pfizer injection clinical trials. And, this was known in 2020 before the products were approved for emergency use and distributed to the public starting in 2021.
In this New England Journal of Medicine research summary, Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine, under Limitations and Remaining Questions, we find that “whether the vaccine protects against asymptomatic infection and transmission to unvaccinated persons” remains unanswered by the clinical trial.
What did the clinical trial test for, if not the ability of the mRNA vaccine to stop transmission and/or infection? The trial was designed to test the ability of the injections to prevent “symptomatic Covid 19 cases” defined as one or more of a number symptoms and a positive test (see page 7 of the supplementary appendix for details).
@pfizer tweeted in Jan 2021 that stopping transmission was their “highest priority”. Their product does not do that, nor did the tweet make a claim that it did so. But it was their highest priority nonetheless. That, and getting as many people injected as possible.
Failure to Prevent Infection Was Known Before the Rollout
In October 2022, a Pfizer executive testified to an EU body that Pfizer had not tested the ability of the vaccine to stop transmission. This story was shocking to some and generated accusations that Pfizer had lied about the capabilities of the shots. But this information had been available since the trial results were released early in 2021. Pfizer had already been criticized for this.
Dr William A Haseltine PhD, wrote in Forbes in September 2020:
What would a normal vaccine trial look like?
One of the more immediate questions a trial needs to answer is whether a vaccine prevents infection. If someone takes this vaccine, are they far less likely to become infected with the virus? These trials all clearly focus on eliminating symptoms of Covid-19, and not infections themselves. Asymptomatic infection is listed as a secondary objective in these trials when they should be of critical importance.
On October 21, 2020 the editor of the BMJ (British Medical Journal) Peter Doshi asked:
Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us
Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”
Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either. None of the trials currently underway are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus….
Is It Even a Vaccine?
A vaccine that prevents infection is known as “neutralizing” or “sterilizing”. I am a software engineer with no training in medicine, pharmacology or clinical trials. I consider myself a good barometer of what the average untrained person would think about such things. Prior to 2021 I had thought that immunity was a necessary condition for a drug to earn the title of “vaccine”. If anyone had asked me, I would have told them that the Covid injections were a treatment, not a vaccine.
The Wikipedia article about vaccines (Mar 5 2023) aligns with my untrained understanding:
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. … A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body’s immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and to further recognize and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future.
Cornell Law provides the following legal definition of vaccine, sourcing 26 USC § 4132(a)(2), which is consistent with the above:
The term “vaccine” means any substance designed to be administered to a human being for the prevention of 1 or more diseases.
The definition published by the CDC prior to 2021 said much the same. But the CDC website changed the definition on or after August 2021. The older version found on the internet archive is here (emphasis added):
Immunity: Protection from an infectious disease. If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected.
Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.
Here is the new version (emphasis added):
Vaccine: A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.
The earlier pair of definitions is quite easy to understand. The latter, much more difficult. What exactly is a “preparation”? Does a vaccine stimulate the body or only prepare the body? What is or is not a vaccine according to the new definition?
While the CDC may think that they can change the meanings of words whenever they like, public memory retains the original meaning. The assumption of immunity permeates almost all non-expert level discussion of vaccines. A web search for “why are vaccines good” shows results that assume or imply immunity.
Even the CDC did not finish the job of memory-holing the old language. On the very same CDC website, under 5 Reasons It Is Important for Adults to Get Vaccinated, we read “By getting vaccinated, you can protect yourself and also avoid spreading preventable diseases to other people in your community.” And then, “Vaccines Can Prevent Serious Illness”.
The timing of the CDC’s edit suggests to me that prior to 2021, the CDC had the same understanding of vaccines as I do. I believe that they wanted a new definition because they knew that the products being developed at warp speed were not vaccines in the original sense of the word. And it was important that those products be called “vaccines” for reasons that I will explain later. This incident brings to mind a meme that I no longer have a link to. captioned: “We changed what ‘definition’ means so you can’t say that we redefined anything.”
What Does “95% Effective” Mean?
The “95% effective” message was repeated in nearly all reporting on the clinical trials. But the question, “effective at doing what?” was rarely asked. To answer this requires walking down the links of a chain of terminology from the world of clinical trials.
The first link in the chain is “risk”. Risk is the probability of a bad outcome. These are assumed to happen randomly within a group. A clinical trial must define in advance the bad outcomes that the drug intends to avoid. The next link is “endpoint”. Each distinct bad outcome is an “endpoint”. The trial compares the endpoints between a control group who did not take the drug and a test group, who did.
The purpose of a clinical trial is to determine the ability of a drug to reduce risk. A drug that reduces risk is “effective”. There are two ways of quantifying risk reduction. From the NIH glossary:
Absolute risk reduction (ARR) or risk difference
the difference in the incidence of poor outcomes between the intervention group of a study and the control group. For example, if 20 per cent of people die in the intervention group and 30 per cent in the control group, the ARR is 10 per cent (30–20 per cent).
the rate (risk) of poor outcomes in the intervention group divided by the rate of poor outcomes in the control group. For example, if the rate of poor outcomes is 20 per cent in the intervention group and 30 per cent in the control group, the relative risk is 0.67 (20 per cent divided by 30 per cent).
The difference between the ARR and RR (also known as “RRR”, to align with ARR) is in the denominator. The ARR divides by the number of participants in one of the groups. The RRR divides by the number of people with bad outcomes in the control group – a necessarily much smaller number.
The ARR is the number most relevant for a drug – such as the Pfizer injections – that was to be given to everyone. But the RRR is the preferred method of presentation for pharma when they want to exaggerate the effectiveness of a drug because it will always be a much larger number. Would you take a drug that could reduce the incidence of a rare disease by 50%? From 10 per 1 million to 5 per 1 million is an 50% RRR and an 0.0005% ARR.
The 95% figure cited for the covid injections is the relative risk. The absolute risk reduction was 0.84%. In a slide deck from the Canadian Covid Care Alliance (CCCA), slide 11 shows how the 91% was achieved (it is 91%, not 95%, because the it refers to an earlier version of the study):
The research paper COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and effectiveness—the elephant (not) in the room puts the ARR in the 1% range. The CCCA slide deck gives an ARR of 0.84%, though it is not clear how they reached this number, based on the other numbers in their slides.
A clinical trial finding of a 1% ARR means that 99% of the people who take the drug either did not experience the condition that the drug treats, or they did experience it, but were not helped by the drug. The 1% both had the condition and were helped by the drug. Another way of saying this is the Number Needed to Treat (NNT). NNT is the reciprocal of the ARR and is the number of people who must take the drug to help one person reach the endpoint. An ARR of 1% corresponds to an NNT of 100 people.
We can now answer the question of the meaning of vaccine effectiveness. The endpoint of the trial was a severe confirmed case of covid at least 7 days after the second dose. This endpoint requires the participant in the trial to have covid symptoms and a positive covid test. “95% effective” means that 95% of the patients who had Covid symptoms and a positive test were in the control group. Five percent were in the test group.
Here’s what “95% effective” did not mean: if you take the shots, then you will have a 95% lower chance of getting covid. But that is how most people understood it because that is what the words mean in normal English.
Then the Lying Started
Once the public had their hopes raised by the false translation of the “95% effective” message, the pandemic-industrial-complex went into high gear to amplify it. They stated the incorrect message loudly, frequently, and as if it were fact. The injections would – with 100% certainty (perhaps 200%) – protect you from infection. Many of the people who said this were doctors or scientific researchers who must have understood how to interpret clinical trials.
Here are some choice quotes that did not age well:
- “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.” Joe Biden, CNN Town Hall July 2021
- “Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person. A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else,” she added with a shrug. “It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people. [Vaccines] will get us to the end of this.” – Rachel Maddow, March 2021
- “When people are vaccinated they can feel safe that they won’t get infected, whether they’re outdoors or indoors.” – Dr. Anthony Fauci, May 2021 (outdoors: seriously?)
- “Vaccination against COVID-19 prevents breakthrough infections, Stanford researchers find.” – Stanford Medicine, July 2021
- Vaccinated people become “dead ends” for the virus – Anthony Fauci, May 2021
Demonizing the Unvaxxed
The public has consistently over-estimated the infection fatality rate of Covid. Some even believed the fatality rate to be above 10%. They believed that we were in great danger. They also believed that the “95% effective” vaccine would bring the pandemic to a quick end, once everyone had taken it. Anyone who refused to do so was therefore risking not only their own life, but everybody else’s as well.
Dr Anthony Fauci estimated herd immunity would emerge when around 60% of the population had taken the vaccine … or perhaps 70, 80, no wait … 85%. Or maybe 100% (which would include large numbers who already had natural immunity). Bill Gates extended that to everyone on earth.
The narrative then turned to demonization of those who refused to submit to vaccine coercion. The selfish anti-social behavior of the anti-vaxxers with their stubborn attachment to “free dumb” that was keeping everyone locked indoors and forcing us all to wear diapers on our faces. Yale University behavioral researchers tested messaging strategies to determine whether shame, embarrassment or fear was most effective.
President Biden said that we the nation was experiencing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Later, Biden ominoulsy warned the unvaccinated that he had been waiting a long time for them to get injected, but “our patience is wearing thin”. In December of 2021 the White House issued a cheery year end greeting to the vaccinated. The unvaccinated, on the other hand, were “looking at a winter of severe illness and death.” Merry Christmas.
Even South Park, which I consider a reliable source of contrarian political opinion, ran a storyline set in the year 2050 in which every single character had to be vaccinated for the 30-year pandemic to end. This episode featured one lone holdout who would not get vaccinated due to a crustacean allergy i.e. for “shellfish reasons”. This gag took aim at people who considered the vaccine to be a violation of body autonomy, and those who objected to components used in its development for religious reasons, thereby scoring a “two for one”.
Volumes can, and will, be written about the intense onslaught of propaganda aimed at getting two needles in every deltoid. I will provide one more example that represents no more than the median level of insanity; plenty of people called for the same or worse. @ClayTravis, in February 2023, tweeted the results of a Rasmussen poll from 2022:
Last January 60% of Democrats wanted to lock everyone who didn’t get the covid shot in their houses. Over 40% of Democrats wanted those who rejected the covid shot sent to quarantine camps. Over 40% also wanted anyone who criticized the covid shot fined & imprisoned. Over a quarter wanted those who didn’t get the covid shot to have their kids seized.
While there were many agendas driving the madness, the Treaty of Waitangi effect was a critical part in carrying it out. If the message had been that “everyone is going to get exposed to covid – injected or not”, then it could not have happened. The misunderstanding convinced the public that mass vaccination would stop the pandemic; and that the holdouts were prolonging it. Without this belief, none of the coercion made any sense: employment mandates, school mandates, quarantine camps, or vaccine passports. As the hysteria fades, the last remaining mandates are being dropped as the reality sinks in that the shots do not stop the spread.
Welcome to Waitangi World. I hope that you have a pleasant stay.
Robert Blumen is a software engineer and podcast host who writes occasionally about political and economic issues.
British SAS Soldiers Posing as Arms Dealers Scour World for Shells for Ukraine
By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 08.03.2023
Ukraine has run through its stockpiles of arms and ammunition — inherited from the Soviet Union in 1991 — along with weapons supplied by its NATO backers since Russia launched its military operation to defend the Donbass republics.
A team of SAS commandoes are reportedly scouring the world for stocks of Russian-calibre artillery shells to refill Ukraine’s depleted arsenals.
A British daily newspaper reported that a dozen special forces troopers have been travelling across Africa, the Middle East and Asia along with intelligence agents and Foreign Office officials.
The group, posing as arms dealers, carry “substantial amounts of cash” to buy up stocks of 122mm-calibre shells — fired by many of the artillery pieces Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union — on the spot.
“Our people have sources all over the world who will know if there is any ammo available and who to contact to strike a deal,” one military source said. “It is not always easy — it has been a scramble with many dead ends — but there have also been successes.”
The team have already journeyed to Angola, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam. But this week sources claimed a deal was struck on a stockpile in an unnamed European country.
Arms factories in both Bulgaria and Romania still produce Soviet-era arms and ammunition.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently begged his Western backers for more artillery, on top of his demands for fighter jets. “Artillery is the number one thing that we need. Both systems and ammunition — shells in large amounts,” he said.
US Army General Christopher Cavoli, the NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, has said the Ukrainian army fires around 100,000 shells per month compared to 600,000 from the Russian side — as Russian forces encircle the key city of Artemovsk (Bakhmut).
The reputed mission follows a failed attempt in the summer of 2022 to buy tens of thousands of rounds of 122mm ammunition from Pakistan, which has remained neutral in the conflict between Ukraine — with its NATO allies — and Russia.
The report claimed 40,000 shells were flown by RAF transport planes from Pakistan’s Nur Khan Air Base to Romania’s Cluj International Airport for delivery to a local arms dealer acting as a middleman.
However, none of those rounds made it to Ukraine. Unconfirmed rumours of quality control issues were superseded by Islamabad’s denial last month that it had allowed any ammunition to be transferred to the conflict zone.
“The reporting about supply of defence items by Pakistan to Ukraine is not accurate,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said on February 16.
“Pakistan maintains a policy of non-interference in military conflicts. Pakistan only exports defence stores to other states based on strong End Use and none re-transfer assurances,” Baloch stressed. “And this is the case of Pakistan’s position in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.”
The Russian imperial army adopted the 122mm (4.8-inch) artillery calibre before the First World War. It remained in service after the 1917 revolution and throughout the Soviet era with the Red Army, and is still used by the modern Russian army and those of other former Soviet republics and Warsaw Treaty member states.
Before Russia launched its military operation, the Ukrainian army reportedly possessed around 440 122mm-calibre D-30 towed howitzers and 600 2S1 ‘Gvozdika’ (carnation), the armored self-propelled versions of the same gun — although most were in long-term storage at the time.
Daily reports by the Russian Ministry of Defence have reported the destruction at least 146 D-30s and 99 Gvozdikas since the start of the demilitarization operation.
It’s Zugzwang for Biden in Ukraine
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MARCH 8, 2023
There is a cardinal difference between the Washington Post report of June 18, 1972 by Alfred Lewis breaking the news of the Watergate burglary and the sensational claim by the New York Times on Tuesday — per a CNN report — that “intelligence suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group” sabotaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
The WaPo reported on Watergate several months after Richard Nixon’s thumping victory for a second term as president, while the Times’ claim has been advanced even before Joe Biden has announced his candidacy for the November 2024 election.
A common thread, though, could be that while the Lewis story was followed up a day later by two young Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Times report also hopes to be a developing story but with a contrarian purpose.
If Watergate wiretapping forced Nixon to resign eventually, the big question is whether the Nord Stream sabotage will also be the undoing of the Biden presidency?
These are early days. But the reverberations of the Times’ claim are already being felt in Europe — Ukraine and Germany — although the report was carefully worded to keep Ukrainian leaders outside its purview.
But the bottom line is the caveat that the Times report was not made with high confidence and is apparently not the predominant view of the US intelligence community, and that the Biden Administration has not yet identified a culprit for the attack — succinctly put, this isn’t necessarily the last word on the subject!
That’s smart thinking — with an eye on Seymour Hersh, perhaps? Meanwhile, Ukraine has flatly denied involvement and German media reports stressed that there’s no proof that Ukrainian authorities ordered the attack or were involved in it. Evidently, Kiev and Berlin (and Washington) prioritise that the business of war must continue as before. And neither is in a position to hit back in defence.
But Moscow is plainly derisive. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told RIA Novosti, “Clearly, the authors of the terrorist attack want to distract attention. Obviously, this is a coordinated stuffing in the media.”
Indeed, when asked about the Times report, the highly opinionated US National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, John Kirby referred questions to investigating European authorities and excused himself saying he was “not going to get ahead of that investigative work.” Kirby played it safe.
So, as Lenin would have asked: ‘Who stands to gain?’ To be sure, what we have here is a high level leak planted in the Times by the US intelligence, which is non-attributable but probably serves as kite flying to see how far it will travel, especially in Europe, or, equally, it could just be, as Peskov put it, the stuff of an “obvious misinformation campaign coordinated by the media.”
Either way, someone high up in the Biden Administration is playing for high stakes. This is taking place at a time when Biden himself has been implicated by Seymour Hersh for ordering the destruction of Nord Stream — an act of international terrorism — and of course Biden is yet to announce his candidacy for the 2024 election.
As things stand, candidate Biden will not want the Nord Stream scandal to be another Albatross around his neck. The point is, if he stands for election, which he likely intends to, Biden can be sure that the scandalous Ukraine stories concerning him and his son Hunter Biden, dating back to his time as vice-president, will roar back to centrestage.
The questioning that the US ambassador to Estonia Senator George Kent was subjected to by Senator Tom Cruz at the hearings on his appointment in Tallinn in December suggested that the Republicans have a lot of dope on Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine and are waiting for the right moment to strike.
Kent, a career diplomat and former deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs with three stints in Kiev — the second time as DCM from 2015 to 2018 and the third as Charge d’Affaires a.i, in 2021 during Biden presidency— is in Senator Cruz’s crosshairs.
Last week, again, Sen. Cruz returned to the topic. This time around, he tore into attorney general Merrick Garland accusing the Justice Department of leaking uncontrollably in a calibrated bid to save Biden’s reputation.
Conceivably, the implication by the Times report that a “pro-Ukrainian group” may have been behind the Nord Stream attack can be seen as a veiled threat to the powers that be in Kiev to understand which side of their bread is buttered if push comes to the shove.
So far, Zelensky has played ball. Biden is bending over backward to appease Zelensky, if the manner in which the move to sack the Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, a close ally of the president, was summarily shelved is any indication.
The western media was copiously reporting on a purge under way in Kiev but when the trail came to Reznikov and Zelensky dug in, the US inspectors deputed from Washington to investigate the corruption scandal in the defence ministry simply disappeared.
Indeed, Biden must willy-nilly remain in power beyond 2024 or else he becomes extremely vulnerable. Therefore, Biden desperately needs a second term. He cannot be too sure even if some other Democratic candidate wins in 2024. God forbid, if the Republicans seize the presidency, Biden and his family members will be fighting with their backs against the wall.
But there is also the flip side. Biden’s candidacy will bring Nord Stream, Hunter Biden, Ukraine war, et al, to the centre stage of the election campaign. Is it worth the risk?
Frankly, it is a ‘zugzwang’ for Biden. It is his turn to move, but all of his moves are so bad that having to move can lose the game — and in chess, there is nothing like “pass,” either.
The sabotage of the Nord Stream forms part of the Ukraine issue. Whoever destroyed that pipeline did it with the intention to eliminate any residual prospect left of a revival of the post-cold war Russian-German alliance in Europe built around the two countries’ energy cooperation and interdependency.
The Biden team in sheer naïveté thought that sabotage of the Nord Stream would be a geopolitical masterstroke to humiliate Germany and make it a vassal state, destroy all bridges leading from Russia to Europe, and consolidate the US’ transatlantic leadership. They overlooked, out of sheer hubris, that it still remained a cowardly criminal act.
To compound matters, the war in Ukraine flowed out of Biden’s decision to destroy the Nord Stream (which, according to Hersh, dated back to September 2021.) Today, Biden cannot easily end his war as he is also beholden to Zelensky (who knows far too much about Hunter Biden’s escapades in Kiev.)
Will Biden Administration succeed in hushing up the Nord Stream scandal? Hersh is sure to revisit the topic. Biden cannot walk away from the crime now. But it doesn’t cease to be a crime.
Biden’s remaining option may be to announce he’s going to contest the 2024 election because Build Back Better Framework is still a work in progress.
Ukraine responds to Nord Stream claims
RT | March 8, 2023
Kiev had nothing to do with the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, the Ukrainian defense minister has said in response to media reports blaming last September’s explosions in the Baltic Sea on a “pro-Ukraine” group.
“For me, it’s a little bit strange story,” Aleksey Reznikov replied when asked about the issue after his arrival at an informal meeting of EU defense ministers in Stockholm on Wednesday.
“This story has nothing [to do] with us,” he said, expressing confidence that “the investigation [by] the official authorities will describe every detail” of what had happened.
The claims of Ukrainian involvement in the sabotage are “like a complement for our special forces, but this is not our activity,” the minister added.
Journalists asked Reznikov if he was concerned that the latest media reports could lead to a reduction in EU support for Kiev amid the conflict with Moscow. “No, I’m not concerned. Everything would be OK,” he said.
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported, citing US officials and unspecified new intelligence, that a “pro-Ukrainian group” may have been behind the September attack that disabled the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which were built to deliver Russian gas to Europe via Germany. The US paper’s anonymous sources stressed that “no American or British nationals were involved” in the sabotage.
A few hours later, several German outlets claimed the country’s investigators looking into the Nord Stream blasts had found that a yacht reportedly used in the attack belonged to a Polish-based firm, owned by two Ukrainians.
Kremlin press-secretary Dmitry Peskov described the reports in the US and German media as “a coordinated media hoax campaign,” aimed at diverting attention from the actual “masterminds” of the sabotage.
Last month, veteran American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released a bombshell report blaming Washington for destroying the Nord Stream pipelines. According to an informed source who talked to Hersh, explosives were planted on the pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of a NATO exercise, and detonated remotely two months later. The White House has denied the report by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
Kremlin: New Reports on Nord Stream Attacks Are Part of a Coordinated Disinformation Campaign
Sputnik – 08.03.2023
Media reports about the attacks on Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines are part of a coordinated spread of disinformation and an attempt to divert attention from the real perpetrators, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Sputnik on Wednesday.
“Obviously, the authors of the terrorist attack want to divert attention. This is obviously a coordinated spread of disinformation in the media,” Peskov said, commenting on the Western media reports.
He said the Kremlin wonders how US officials that media reports cite can assume anything about the attacks without an investigation.
Peskov also called for a transparent investigation into the Nord Stream attacks; one where Russia would be a participant in the probe.
“We are still prevented from taking part in the investigation. Only a few days ago, we received relevant notes from Denmark and Sweden. This is not just strange, it has scent of a heinous crime. At a minimum, Nord Stream shareholders and the UN should demand an urgent transparent investigation with the participation of those who can shed light on the matter,” the Kremlin spokesman underscored.
A US newspaper earlier cited American officials as saying that new intelligence suggested a “pro-Ukrainian group” had carried out the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines. A few hours later, a German newspaper reported that the investigators had identified the vessel used to carry out the attack on the pipelines.
The developments come about a week after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Sputnik that Moscow would do its utmost to make the Nord Stream probe happen.
“You remember how the West reacted to the investigation into Nord Stream published by Seymour Hersh – their nervous reaction. They started saying it’s nonsense and that they were not even going to discuss it. I think this makes everything clear. But we will do our best to make this investigation happen, we will not allow them to just sweep it all under the rug,” Lavrov stressed.
This followed Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzia saying that Russia’s Western partners on the UN Security Council were not demonstrating any desire to cooperate in an independent investigation to verify a report that presented significant details that the US was behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.
The investigative report was published by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who revealed that US Navy divers had planted explosives to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines during NATO’s Baltops exercises in the summer of 2022. Norway activated the bombs three months later at the behest of US President Joe Biden, the journalist wrote, citing insiders.
In September 2022, underwater blasts occurred at three of the four strings of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 underwater pipelines, built to carry a combined 110 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Europe annually. Germany, Denmark, and Sweden launched separate investigations into the incident, while Russia wasn’t given access to their probes.
Dr. Kirk Moore Insists He Did NOT Sell Fake COVID-19 Vaccine Cards
Utah doctor claims federal indictment contains fundamental falsehood
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | March 7, 2023
A week ago I reported the story of Dr. Kirk Moore—a plastic surgeon who was recently indicted by a federal grand jury in Utah for conspiracy to defraud the US; conspiracy to convert, sell, convey, and dispose of government property; and conversion, sale, conveyance, and disposal of government property and aiding and abetting.
The government’s indictment and mainstream media are highlighting the assertion that Dr. Moore and his colleagues received $50 per procedure in which they disposed of a COVID-19 vaccine dose instead of injecting it into the patient, and then issued a fake vaccine card to the patient. This is deemed to prove that Dr. Moore—a plastic surgeon by trade—”benefitted” from his actions.
I initially assumed the federal investigators and prosecutors involved in the case must have found evidence to support their assertion in the indictment that Dr. Moore had “benefitted” from these transactions—that is, that HE received all or part of the $50 per procedure.
However, shortly after I posted my essay, I was contacted by people familiar with the matter who claimed that the indictment’s assertion is false. To check their assurance, I contacted Dr. Moore and conducted a long interview with him.
Dr. Moore insists that never received a single dollar for administering early treatments to COVID-19 patients or for issuing COVID-19 vaccine cards to patients who feared the mRNA gene transfer injections are not safe. A plastic surgeon by trade, he insists he administered early treatment and issued the cards solely as a charitable endeavor—that is, to help the sick stay out of hospital and to help his fellow citizens who were mandated to receive the injections in order to retain their student and job positions.
In other words, according to Dr. Moore, the federal indictment’s assertion that HE benefitted from the $50 per procedure is FALSE. Because most patients expressed their desire to pay him at least some fee for his invaluable service, he adopted the practice of instructing each to make a $50 donation to a medical freedom charity from which he received no funds. He assumed that keeping this practice strictly charitable would protect him from the charge that he received financial benefits for his actions. He claims the evidence presented in his forthcoming trial will prove that he received no benefit.
An especially intriguing detail he related in my interview is the strange fact that—though he knew he was under investigation because HHS and DHS agents visited him at his office and served him a search warrant to seize his cell phone—he was NOT subsequently served with notice that a federal prosecutor had impanelled a grand jury and secured an indictment.
He only learned about this alarming action in a press report, from which he also learned the date and time of his arraignment.
We encourage our Substack readers to learn more about Dr. Moore’s case by visiting his website: https://www.standformoore.com
CDC’s Attempt Get Mainstream Media to Spread False Information
CDC Falsely Claims To Major Media Outlet That the 7.7% Medical Care Figure Was Wrong!
By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | March 6, 2023
After ICAN obtained the v-safe data and published to the world that 7.7% of v-safe users sought medical care (and that the CDC hid this number from the public for two years), Reuters reached out to my firm stating it had received comment from the CDC regarding this figure.
Incredibly, CDC told Reuters that the 7.7% figure was grossly inflated because it claimed there were 10 million records in v-safe, not 10 million users. Here is the exact email I received from Reuters:
“CDC says v-safe has 10 million records, not 10 million users, and that one person could submit multiple records of seeking medical care for the same adverse event. Which makes the 7.7% statistic problematic… Is that something ICAN was aware of or able to adjust for?”
Based on the CDC’s claim, the major news outlet asked if ICAN would be modifying its claim of 7.7%. But it was the CDC’s claim that was categorically false!
ICAN was correct: there were 10 million v-safe users, not 10 million records; and the 7.7% also did not double-count because it was the number of unique v-users who submitted one or more reports of seeking medical care.
The CDC was plainly pushing the major news to declare ICAN’s claim false and, hence, characterize it as misinformation.
Had Reuters just accepted the CDC’s claim, as typically occurs, it likely would have published a story declaring ICAN’s 7.7% figure to be false information.
Luckily, to its credit and because one of its reporters proceeded objectively and with integrity, this news outlet did not just take the CDC’s word for its claim. It actually gave us an opportunity to respond to this claim. (Albeit not by asking if ICAN believed it was wrong but by asking if it would adjust the figure it published.)
CDC Proven Wrong
Showing that the CDC was wrong was simple. All we had to do was use the CDC’s own data it provided to ICAN!
The data the CDC provided to ICAN clearly and without any doubt showed that ICAN was using the precise and correct number of v-safe users and the number of unique v-safe users who reported needing medical care. Meaning, the 7.7% was absolutely accurate – without any doubt.
We sent this proof and asked Reuters to please ask that CDC substantiate with actual proof, not just conclusory assertions, how ICAN was supposedly wrong and spreading misinformation. And again, to Reuter’s credit, because it demanded proof from the CDC, the CDC eventually relented!
The CDC finally conceded that v-safe did in fact have approximately 10 million users and, hence, the 7.7% figure of those who reported seeking medical care was accurate.
With that, I expected that interaction would be one heck of a story in and of itself! I foresaw a Reuters story that disclosed this CDC behavior – here was the CDC trying to get a major news outlet to publish false information! It was trying to get it to write that the 7.7% figure was incorrect.
That should have been its own major story. And although Reuters did publish a story about v-safe, thus far, these behind-the-scenes communications have not been published. I expect they never will, other than in this article.
CDC Asks Reuters to Ask ICAN for a Copy of CDC’s V-Safe Data
It gets even worse. Making plain that the CDC officials communicating with Reuters were not concerned about the facts, and instead were focused solely on pushing their “safe and effective” mantra which is typically not questioned, they further revealed the agency’s disfunction: the CDC officials asked Reuters if it could get a copy of the v-safe data from ICAN and send it back to the CDC representatives Reuters were dealing with so they can review that data. If that sounds nutty, it is because it is.
Just so you don’t think you misread the foregoing, let me repeat: CDC asked Reuters to get the v-safe data that CDC had given to ICAN days before, and then send that data back to the CDC to review.
You can’t make this stuff up. Mind you, the data had already all been made public on ICAN’s website.
What this shows is that these CDC officials were driving forward to push a major news outlet to claim to the world that ICAN’s claim of 7.7% was false without actually looking at the data to assure their claim was accurate. It also shows an incredible level of disfunction at the CDC; instead of getting the data internally, they had to ask a news outlet to get its own data produced to ICAN to then send it back to CDC.
And these are the folk that have effectively dictated what level of civil and individual rights most Americans would have over the last three years!
CDC Seeks to Deceive Again
When the foregoing gambit by the CDC did not work, it had a new gambit. It tried to get Reuters to publish that the 7.7% figure was misleading by claiming to Reuters that “[i]n the first week after vaccination, reports of seeking any medical care … range from 1-3% (depending on vaccine, age group and dose).”
But as we explained to Reuters, even this is not true. For example, 3.36% of those younger than 3 years old reported receiving medical care within one week of receiving the Moderna vaccine.
Even if all combinations of vaccine, age group, and dose resulted in between 1% to 3% of infants, children, or adults seeking medical care within one week, that is not necessarily an insignificant figure! Why is this somehow comforting? Especially in the context of vaccinating the entire country.
And why should the reports of medical care on days 14 or 21 or 28 be ignored? Is it because the CDC thought it was not relevant information? And, if so, why in the world ask v-safe users to submit this information on these days? Or is it because the CDC did not like what the numbers showed? I will let you be the judge.
As noted above, and a sad irony, when medical care is sought during the first seven days, the CDC presumably attributes that to expected reactogenicity and tells the public to not be concerned. And if it occurs beyond seven days, it pretends as if that data does not exist – even though harms from COVID-19 vaccines, as the CDC well knows, can occur well after the first seven days, as discussed in depth in part 7 of this v-safe substack series.
Also, here, we are talking about a novel medical product, hence heightening the need for assessing its long-term safety – certainly beyond 7 days post-vaccination.
This shows how the sausage is made in mainstream media. But for the actual tenacity – I would even say courageous – pushback from a Reuters reporter, the story around ICAN’s v-safe claims could have ended very differently.
The real story I can only imagine this reporter would have liked to publish, the one I told above, however, would no doubt be a step too far for Reuters as an organization – at least for now, until brave journalists become the typical journalist.
How Could Western Intelligence Have Got It Wrong, Again? They Didn’t. They Had Other Purposes
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 6, 2023
Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA analyst, writes “I no longer hold clearances and have not had access to the classified intelligence assessments. However, I have heard that the finished intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers continues to declare that Russia is on the ropes – and their economy is crumbling. Also, analysts insist that the Ukrainians are beating the Russians”.
Johnson responds that – lacking valid human sources – “western agencies are almost wholly dependent today on ‘liaison reporting’” (i.e., from ‘friendly’ foreign intelligence services), without doing ‘due diligence’ by cross-checking discrepancies with other reporting.
In practice, this largely means western reporting simply replicates Kiev’s PR line. But there does occur a huge problem when marrying Kiev’s output (as Johnson says) to UK reports – for ‘corroboration’.
The reality is UK reporting itself is also based on what Ukraine is saying. This is known as false collateral – i.e., when that which is used for corroboration and validation actually derives from the same single source. It becomes – deliberately – a propaganda multiplier.
In plain words however, all these points are ‘red herrings’. Bluntly, so-called western ‘Intelligence’ is no longer the sincere attempt to understand a complex reality, but rather, it has become the tool to falsify a nuanced reality in order to attempt to manipulate the Russian psyche towards a collective defeatism (in respect not just to the Ukraine, but to the idea that Russia should remain as a sovereign whole).
And – to the extent that ‘lies’ are fabricated to accustom the Russian public to inevitable defeat – the obverse edge clearly is intended to train the western public towards the ‘groupthink’ that victory is inevitable. And that Russia is an ‘unreformed evil Empire’ which threatens all Europe.
This is no accident. It is highly purposeful. It is behavioural psychology at work. The ‘head-spinning’ disorientation created throughout the Covid pandemic; the constant rain of ‘data-driven’ model analysis, the labelling of anything critical of the ‘uniform messaging’ as anti-social disinformation – enabled western governments to persuade their citizens that ‘lockdown’ was the only rational answer to the virus. It was not true (as we now know), but the ‘pilot’ behavioural nudge-psychology trial worked better – better even than its own architects had imagined.
Professor of Clinical Psychology, Mattias Desmet, has explained that mass disorientation does not form in a vacuum. It arises, throughout history, from a collective psychosis that has followed a predictable script:
Just as with lockdown, governments have used behavioural psychology to instil fear and isolation to mass large groups of people into herds, where toxic sneering at any contrariness cold-shoulders all critical thinking or analysis. It is more comfortable being inside the herd, than out.
The dominant characteristic here is remaining loyal to the group – even when the policy is working badly and its consequences disturb the conscience of members. Loyalty to the group becomes the highest form of morality. That loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues, questioning weak arguments, or calling a halt to wishful thinking.
The ‘Groupthink’ allows some self-imagined reality to detach; to drift further and further from any connection to reality, and then to transit into delusion – always drawing on like-minded peer cheerleaders for its validation and extended radicalisation.
So, it’s ‘goodbye’ to traditional Intelligence! And ‘welcome’ to western Intelligence 101: Geo-Politics no longer revolves around a grasp on Reality. It is about the installation of ideological pseudo-realism – which is the universal installation of a singular groupthink, such that everyone lives passively by it, until it is far too late to change course.
Superficially, this may seem clever new psyops – even ‘cool’. It is not. It is dangerous. By deliberately working on deeply ingrained fears and trauma (i.e. the Great Patriotic War for Russians (WW2)), it awakens a type of multi-generational existential plight within the collective unconscious – that of total annihilation – which is a danger that America has never faced, and towards which there is zero American empathetic understanding.
Perhaps, by resurrecting long, collective memories of plague in European countries (such as Italy) western governments have found that they were able to mobilise their citizens around a policy of coercion, that otherwise ran wholly against their own interests. But nations have their own distinct myths and civilisational mores.
If that were the purpose (to acclimatise Russians to defeat and ultimate Balkanisation), Western propaganda has not only failed, but it has achieved the converse. Russians have coalesced closely together against an existential western threat – and are prepared to ‘go to the wall’, if necessary, in defeating it. (Let those implications sink in.)
On the other hand, falsely promoting a picture of inevitable success for the West inevitably has raised expectations of a political outcome that is not only not feasible, but which recedes further into the far horizon, as these fantastical claims of Russian setbacks persuade European leaders that Russia can accept an outcome in line with their constructed false reality.
Another ‘own goal’: The West now faces the task of de-fusing the landmine of their own electorate’s conviction of a Ukraine ‘win’, and of Russian humiliation and decomposition. There will be anger and further distrust for the Élites in the West to follow. Existential risk ensues when people believe nothing the élites say.
Plainly put, this resort to clever ‘nudge theories’ has succeeded only in toxifying the prospect for political discourse. Neither the U.S. nor Russia can now move directly to pure political discourse :
Firstly, the parties inevitably must come to some tacit psychological assimilation of two quite dis-connected realities, now hyped into palpable, vital beings through these psychological ‘Intelligence’ techniques. There will be no acceptance by either side of the validity or moral rightness of the Other Reality’s, yet its emotive contents must be acknowledged psychically – together with the traumas underlying them – if politics is to be unlocked.
In short, this western exaggerated psyops perversely is likely to lengthen the war until facts-on-the ground finally grind the contrasting expectations closer to what may be the ‘new possible’. Ultimately, when perceived realities cannot be ‘matched’ and nuanced, war rubs one or the other into more emollient form.
The degeneracy in western intelligence did not start with the recent collective ‘excitement’ at the possibilities of ‘nudge-psychology’. The first steps in this direction began with a shift in ethos reaching back to the Clinton/Thatcher era in which the intelligence services were ‘neo-liberalised’.
No longer was the role of ‘devil’s advocate’ – of bringing ‘bad news’ (i.e. hard-edged Realism) to the relevant political leadership valued; instead what was inserted was a radical shift towards ‘Business School’ practice of services being tasked with ‘adding value’ to existing government policies, and (even) of creating ‘a market’ system in Intelligence!
The politician-managers demanded ‘good news’. And to make ‘it stick’, funding was tied to the ‘value added’ – with administrators skilled at managing bureaucracy moved into leadership jobs. It marked the end to classical Intelligence – which always was an art, rather than science.
In short, it was the outset to fixing the intelligence around policies (to add value), rather than the traditional function of shaping policies to sound analysis.
In the U.S., the politicisation of intelligence reached its apex with Dick Cheney’s initiation of a Team ‘B’ intelligence unit reporting personally to him. It was intended to furnish the anti-intelligence to combat the intelligence service output. Of course, the Team ‘B’ initiative shook confidence amongst the analysts, and by-passed the work of the traditional cadre – just as Cheney had intended. (He had a war (the Iraq war) to justify).
But there were separately other structural shifts. Firstly, by 2000, woke narcissism had begun to eclipse strategic thought –creating its own novel groupthink. The West just could not shake off the sense of itself at the centre of the Universe (albeit no longer in a racial sense, but via its awakening to ‘victim politics’ – requiring endless redress and reparations – and such woke values serendipitously seemed to anoint the West with a renewed global ‘moral primacy’).
In a parallel shift, U.S. neo-cons piggy-backed on this new woke universalism to cement the meme of ‘Empire matters primordially’. The unspoken corollary to this, of course, is that original values of the American Republic or of Europe, cannot be re-conceived and brought forward into the present, as long as ‘liberal’ Empire groupthink configures them as a threat to western security. This conundrum and struggle lies at the heart of U.S. politics today.
Yet the question remains just how can the intelligence being supplied to U.S. policymakers insist that Russia is imploding economically, and that Ukraine is winning – against what can be easily observed facts on the ground?
Well, no problem; Washington think-tanks have big, big finance from the Military Industrial World, with the preponderance of these funds going to the neo-cons – and their insistence that Russia is a small ‘gas-station’ posing as a state, and not a power to be taken seriously.
Neo-con claws tear at anyone gain-saying their ‘line’ – and think-tanks employ an army of ‘analysts’ to turn out ‘academic’ reports suggesting that Russia’s industry – to the extent it exists at all – is imploding. Since last March, western military and economic experts have been regularly-as-clockwork, predicting that Russia has run out of missiles, drones, tanks and artillery shells – and is expending its manpower throwing human-waves of untrained troops upon the Ukrainian siege lines.
The logic is plain, but again flawed. If a combined NATO struggles to supply artillery shells, Russia with the economy the size of a small EU state (logically) must be worse off. And if only we (the U.S.) threaten China hard enough against supplying Russia, then the latter will ultimately run out of munitions – and NATO supported Ukraine ‘will win’.
The logic then is that a war prolonged (until the money runs out) must deliver a Russia bereft of munitions, and NATO-supplied Ukraine ‘wins’.
This framing is entirely wrong because of conceptual differences: Russian history is one of Total War that is fought in a long, ‘all-out’, uncompromising engagement against an overwhelming peer force. But inherent to this idea, is its all-important grounding in the conviction that such wars are fought over the course of years, with their outcomes conditioned by the capacity to surge military production.
Conceptually, the U.S. shifted in the 1980s away from its post-war military-industrial paradigm, to off-shore manufacturing to Asia and to ‘just-in-time’ supply lines. Effectively, the U.S. (and the West) shifted in the opposite direction to ‘surge capacity’, whereas Russia did not: It kept alive the notion of sustainment which had contributed to saving Russia during the Great Patriotic War.
So, western intelligence services again got it wrong; they misread the reality? No, they didn’t get it ‘wrong’. Their purpose was different.
The few who got it right were mercilessly caricatured as stooges to make them seem absurd. And Intelligence 101 was re-conceived as the purposeful denialism of all off-Team thinking, whilst the majority of western citizens would live passively in the embrace the groupthink – until too late for them to awaken, and to change the dangerous course on which their societies were embarked.
Unverified Ukrainian reports (liaison reporting) served up to western leaders therefore is not a ‘glitch’ – it is a ‘feature’ of the new Intelligence 101 paradigm intended to confuse and dull its electorate.
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New Book
Trans agenda is ‘normalization of sadism’ – US author
RT | September 23, 2026
The US Democratic Party has embraced a transgender agenda that amounts to “the normalization of sadism,” author A.J. Rice has said, warning that radical trans policies would return if the party is allowed to regain power.
Speaking to RT’s America First host Scotty Nell Hughes about his new book, ‘The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity’, Rice argued that activists have gained significant influence in schools, medicine, and corporate America while people who questioned the agenda have faced pressure to stay silent.
The author described the “trans mafia” as the sprawling network of people and institutions that have helped the movement gain influence. He singled out parts of academia, wealthy backers, and corporations, and stated that providers of transition-related treatment also have a financial incentive to keep young people in their care indefinitely.
Rice argued that the consequences of these policies ultimately fall on children who are being drawn toward gender-affirming medical treatments and on girls who are expected to share locker rooms or compete in sports with biological males.
He noted that while voters rejected the Democrats’ approach to gender in 2024, the party, which has been “captured by madness,” has since only doubled down and is seeking what is effectively “the normalization of sadism.” … Full report
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