Pentagon exploits post 9/11 laws to wage ‘secret wars’ worldwide: Report
The Cradle | November 9, 2022
A report released last week by the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice details how the US Department of Defense (DoD) has been allowed to covertly deploy troops and wage secret wars over the past two decades in dozens of countries across the globe.
Among the nations in West Asia affected by these so-called ‘security cooperation authorities’ are Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen; however, they also include many African and Latin American nations.
Known as ‘security cooperation authorities,’ they were passed by the US Congress in the years following the 11 September attacks, and are a continuation of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a piece of legislation that has been stretched by four successive governments.
According to the report, the AUMF covers “a broad assortment of terrorist groups, the full list of which the executive branch long withheld from Congress and still withholds from the public.”
Following in this tradition, the ‘security cooperation authorities’ being abused by the Pentagon are Section 333 and Section 127e of Title 10 of the United States Code (USC).
Section 333 authorizes the US army to “train and equip foreign forces anywhere in the world,” while Section 127e authorizes the Pentagon to “provide support to foreign forces, paramilitaries, and private individuals who are in turn supporting US counterterrorism operations,” with a spending limit of $100,000,000 per fiscal year.
However, thanks to the vague definition of ‘support’ and ‘training’ in the text of these laws, both Section 333 and Section 127e programs have been abused to target “adversarial” groups under a strained interpretation of constitutional self-defense; they have also allowed the US army to develop and control proxy forces that fight on behalf of – and sometimes alongside – their own.
As a result of this, in dozens of countries, these programs have been used as a springboard for hostilities, with the Pentagon often declining to inform Congress or the US public about their secret operations under the reasoning that the incidents are “too minor to trigger statutory reporting requirements.”
“Researchers and reporters uncovered Section 127e programs not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Cameroon, Egypt, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen,” the report highlights.
Researchers also point out that defense authorities “have given little indication of how [they] interpret Section 333 and 127e.”
Even more concerning, and ignoring the damage caused by these ‘anti-terror’ laws, the US Congress recently expanded the Pentagon’s security cooperation authorities, particularly with Section 1202 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Section 1202 allows the US army to allow “irregular warfare operations” against “rogue states” like Iran or North Korea, or “near-peers,” like Russia and China.
The report comes at a time when the US army and its proxy militias are accused of illegally occupying vast regions of Syria and Yemen, looting oil from the war-torn countries, just over a year after their brutal occupation of Afghanistan ended. Moreover, a former US official on Tuesday revealed that anti-Iran militias are being armed in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR), where both the CIA and the Mossad are known to operate.
Good News on Omicron Outcomes from Prison
Captive Environment Allows Real Look at Risk for Hospitalization and Death
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | November 8, 2022
Prisoners and staff are a prototypical congregate group amenable to epidemiologic study and in the setting of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, ideal for study of the patterns of spread and risk for serious outcomes.
Throughout the pandemic, review and interpretation of peer-reviewed manuscripts in widely read journals has required careful review of data in supplementary tables. The conclusions by the authors in many papers must be ignored given the heavy bias for all journals to “promote” mass vaccination. For example, thus far, there has not been a single paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that has concluded COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, or not indicated, or do not have a favorable risk to benefit ratio.
Prior to COVID-19 for any new therapy or surgery, there are always divergent views where some papers conclude an intervention is beneficial and others do not. Disagreement is normal in medicine. The pervasive heavy-handed government intelligence community and public health agency operations have biased the medical journals to publish a one-sided story on COVID-19 vaccination. The paper by Chin et al, in the New England Journal of Medicine is a perfect example.[i] They studied 59,794 residents and 16,572 staff, using data collected from December 24, 2021, through April 14, 2022. Buried in the supplemental tables are important data on the real risk of hospitalization and death with the Omicron variant in prisoners characterized by whether they had prior COVID-19 and how many doses of a vaccine they had received.

Chin ET, Leidner D, Lamson L, Lucas K, Studdert DM, Goldhaber-Fiebert JD, Andrews JR, Salomon JA. Protection against Omicron from Vaccination and Previous Infection in a Prison System. N Engl J Med. 2022 Oct 26. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2207082. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36286260. Supplemental Tables.
As shown, there is a negligible risk of hospitalization and death with Omicron infection. Specifically, there were zero deaths in the unvaccinated. To demonstrate how far off-base authors and editors are on interpretation, take a look at the paper’s conclusions:
“Our findings in two high-risk populations suggest that mRNA vaccination and previous infection were effective against omicron infection, with lower estimates among those infected before the period of delta predominance. Three vaccine doses offered significantly more protection than two doses, including among previously infected persons.”
My conclusions are considering natural immunity status, COVID-19 vaccination provided no meaningful protection against hospitalization and death with Omicron. Based on these data, a rational prison physician or health administrator would conclude that bivalent boosters for Omicron are not clinically indicated nor medically necessary. So next time you see headlines regarding a journal article, look for a second opinion from “Courageous Discourse” or other reliable stacks and sources of analysis.
[i] Chin ET, Leidner D, Lamson L, Lucas K, Studdert DM, Goldhaber-Fiebert JD, Andrews JR, Salomon JA. Protection against Omicron from Vaccination and Previous Infection in a Prison System. N Engl J Med. 2022 Oct 26. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2207082. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36286260.
STOP the Infanticide! 5,000% Increase in Fetal Deaths Following COVID-19 Vaccines!
The U.S. Government’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) was updated today, and there are now 4,534 fetal deaths recorded in VAERS following COVID-19 vaccines given to pregnant and child-bearing women. (Source.)
And these recorded fetal deaths are but a fraction of the real number of unborn children who have died since the COVID-19 experimental vaccines were given emergency use authorization, as a previous report published for Department of Health and Human Services stated that fewer than 1% of all vaccine adverse events are actually reported to VAERS. (Source.)
Three of these fetal deaths have followed the new Bivalent COVID-19 booster shots from Pfizer and Moderna, including a 26-year-old woman from Arizona who developed breast cancer following the vaccine, and chose to have chemotherapy and terminate the life of her unborn child.
VAERS ID: 2447825: Began noting a breast lump 9/2021 Biopsied ER/PR + HER 2- breast cancer MRI 3/17/2022 with hepatic mets multiple small pulmonary mets also noted. Liver biopsy 4/1/22 consistent with metastatic breast cancer. Noted to be pregnant when she went for port-a-cath.
Choose to terminate pregnancy 3/31/22 to allow for complete chemo. ACT 4/5/22-7/23/22 . PET noted resolved axillary nodules and pulmonary nodules, Liver mets responding but still with activity. Sarted Lupron and anastrozole 8/10/22, Kisqoli addes 8/23/22.
I am not saying MRNA vaccines caused this but I have seen way more and way younger breast cancer in this remote population in than in a very long career.
We have had 18 new cancers since the vaccines only 1 was unvaccinated. This is the youngest ever. (Source.)
By way of contrast, for the 30 years prior to the emergency use authorization of the COVID-19 vaccines, there were 2,245 reported cases of fetal deaths following all FDA-approved vaccines, or about 75 fetal deaths per year. (Source.)
Taking the total fetal deaths following COVID-19 vaccines for the year 2021, 3,774 fetal deaths (source), that is an increase of 4,943% over the yearly average of fetal deaths following all FDA-approved vaccines for the previous 30 years.
Besides these government statistics from VAERS, medical professionals are corroborating this evidence of infanticide by COVID-19 vaccines based on the increase they are seeing in fetal deaths and stillborn babies following the roll outs of the COVID-19 vaccines.
An alleged leaked email from a “managing nurse” from a hospital in Fresno, California, states that there has been an increase in stillbirths following the COVID-19 vaccines, and that this trend is expected to continue according to Epoch Times.
This follows a report we recently published by Dr. John Campbell regarding the increase in neonatal deaths in Scotland.
And that follows another report we published last month (October, 2022) from Dr. James Thorp, a board certified OBGYN and Maternal Fetal Medicine Physician with over 43 years of obstetrical experience, who was interviewed by Dr. Drew Pensky and stated that in the past two years since the mRNA COVID vaccines were introduced, he has seen an “off-the-charts” rise in sudden fetal death and adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as fetal malformation and even fetal cardiac arrest, among his patients.
Pfizer to fast-track more vaccines for pregnant moms, despite mounting evidence rushed COVID shots harmed babies
The Defender | November 9, 2022
On Nov. 1, Pfizer issued a press release about an investigational vaccine for pregnant women the company said will protect babies from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Not coincidentally, RSV is the latest viral bugaboo to hit the headlines, with frantic news accounts of “overwhelmed” hospitals sounding eerily reminiscent of the early coronavirus fear-mongering.
Buoyed by the successful global marketing of its COVID-19 jabs — an estimated 49% of pregnant women worldwide reportedly views the vaccines favorably and almost 1 in 4 pregnant women in the U.S. took them — Pfizer is hoping to hit another home run with the RSV vaccine.
The vaccine maker said it intends to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval by the end of the year.
The FDA, meanwhile, has been busy handing out “Breakthrough Therapy” designations to Pfizer as if they were papal dispensations, signaling a regulatory willingness to speed up approval not only for Pfizer’s RSV vaccine but also for a maternal Group B Streptococcus (GBS) vaccine the company is developing.
To this expedient end, the FDA allowed Pfizer to “stop the [RSV] study short,” halting enrollment at about 7,400 participants — though the trial was supposed to involve 10,000 pregnant women.
Researchers devoted to vaccine orthodoxy pay lip service to the need for an extra-high evidentiary bar for pregnancy vaccines — stating that such vaccines should not only prove they reduce illness, with minimal reactogenicity in the woman, the fetus and the neonate, but should also “demonstrate safety or lack of evidence of harm.”
However, those turn out to be empty words.
In fact, the influenza and Tdap (tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis) vaccines that public health agencies have long recommended for pregnant women never underwent any clinical trial safety testing in that population, and the FDA never licensed those vaccines specifically for pregnant women.
Moreover, flu shots and Tdap shots have never even resulted in any statistically significant reduction in the outcomes they are supposed to address.
With the advent of Emergency Use Authorization COVID-19 vaccines, the FDA, Pfizer and other manufacturers barely made any pretense of assessing maternal safety, and likely “colluded together to conceal damaging data” about high rates of fetal death.
Other researchers, however — and even vaccine insiders — began to speak out in 2021.
For example, Canadian researchers writing in late 2021 worried that many of the systemic reactions commonly reported after COVID-19 vaccination might be “sufficient to affect fetal/neonatal development.”
Those authors included vaccinologist Byram Bridle, Ph.D., who earlier in 2021 characterized the COVID-19 vaccines’ disturbing biodistribution and accumulation in vital organs as “a big mistake,” and neurology professor Dr. Steven Pelech, who expressed repeated concerns about myocarditis and the vaccines’ risks to young people.
Now, as horrified pregnant women who took the COVID-19 jabs experience skyrocketing miscarriages, stillbirths and fetal malformations, they are wondering why regulators issued no warnings.
But as Pfizer’s exuberant RSV press release and the FDA’s complacent endorsement of clinical trial shortcuts suggest, vaccine makers and regulators not only intend to ignore or bulldoze even the most outsized safety signals but are clearly positioning themselves to go after pregnant women in an even bigger way.
‘Quibbles’ and questions
The details provided — or omitted — about Pfizer’s RSV clinical trial exemplify manufacturers’ and regulators’ cavalier approach toward pregnant women.
Commenting on Pfizer’s announcement, family physician Dr. Buzz Hollander — who clarified that he is predisposed to celebrate the new RSV vaccine offering — nonetheless noted a number of serious criticisms:
- Pfizer released “just a press release” but no data, making it “impossible to pick [the vaccine’s declared efficacy] apart.”
- Pfizer offered no explanation as to how it defined “severe” disease, its primary endpoint.
- A year into the trial, Pfizer fishily altered an important endpoint, defying a fundamental clinical trial design principle that “involves setting out in advance the endpoints that will be assessed.”
- In Hollander’s words, Pfizer “switched their secondary (critical!) endpoint of RSV hospitalizations to 360 days from 180 days… and then inspired my suspicion by not reporting any hospitalization data, interim or otherwise, in their breathless press release.”
- Researchers have published only one small safety study for the RSV shot, about which Hollander said: “I quibble with studies finding >40% of placebo participants reporting systemic symptoms; when queried enticingly enough, half of us might recall a headache or some fatigue the day after our placebo shot, and that can bury a difference in real adverse reactions compared to the vaccine group.”
- Curtailing study enrollment was unwise, Hollander said, because “bigger is better when it comes to … finding safety signals.”
- Earlier this year, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) “stopped cold” a three-times-bigger trial of a similar RSV vaccine for pregnant women after detecting a safety signal, yet there has been no discussion as to why Pfizer’s maternal RSV vaccine is “fine” while GSK’s was deemed “untouchable.”
Hollander’s modest conclusion: “We should have all learned by now that even the appearance of cutting corners in the vaccine approval process will carry its own unknown costs.”
Readers reacting to Hollander’s post were less circumspect. One acerbically remarked, “The problem here is Pfizer. They’ve paid billions in fines for shady practices and data manipulation. And that was before the Covid vaccines (for which they’re indemnified).”
Another reader expressed his reservations even more succinctly: “Trust Pfizer numbers? You must be joking.”
Adverse pregnancy outcomes after COVID vaccination — no joke
As Pfizer, with the FDA’s help, tees itself up to “dominat[e] the maternal RSV vaccine market,” OB-GYNs on the front lines of maternal care are stepping forth to sound the alarm about the COVID-19 shots’ infanticidal fallout.
Dr. Kimberly Biss recently tweeted, “Since the vaccine rollout started, we have seen in our practice a decrease in new OB numbers, which would be infertility, by about 50%; we’ve also seen an increase in miscarriage rate by about 50%, and … probably about a 25% increase in abnormal pap smears as well as cervical malignancies.”
Similarly, Dr. James Thorp, in multiple interviews, described an “off-the-charts” rise in sudden fetal death and other adverse outcomes, including fetal malformation and fetal cardiac arrest.
Asked to comment on information recently leaked from a California hospital, Thorp characterized the uptick in fetal deaths — from under 6 per 1,000 in 2020 to more than 29 per 1,000 following the rollout of COVID-19 injections — as being “way way beyond” what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordinarily would consider a safety signal.
Thorp published a preprint in September (along with co-authors who include Children’s Health Defense’s Megan Redshaw) describing “significantly more frequent” pregnancy-related adverse events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, after COVID-19 shots than in the aftermath of flu shots — which themselves are far from benign.
Cataloging significant increases in “miscarriage, fetal chromosomal abnormalities, fetal malformation, fetal cystic hygroma, fetal cardiac disorders, fetal arrhythmia, fetal cardiac arrest, fetal vascular mal-perfusion, fetal growth abnormalities, fetal abnormal surveillance, fetal placental thrombosis, low amniotic fluid, and fetal death/stillbirth” and also menstrual abnormalities, Thorp and co-authors called for a “worldwide moratorium on the use of COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy.”
For children who survive, Thorp suggested they may suffer from lifelong “vaccine-induced acquired immune deficiency syndrome.”
In Scotland, meanwhile, the government ordered an investigation into the “spike in newborn baby deaths” in 2021 and 2022, an increase “larger than expected from chance alone.”
Even in a gerrymandered study clearly designed to exonerate the COVID-19 shots during pregnancy — focusing on immediate reactions after a first or second dose and hampered by “limited perinatal outcome assessment” — researchers found that 4.4-7.5% of pregnant women reported obstetrical symptoms.
Careless and worse
As Substack writer Etana Hecht wrote last May, “The topic of pregnant and nursing moms getting vaccinated under encouragement and coercion is painful,” particularly once one becomes aware of “how carelessly the most precious among us are being treated.”
That carelessness is evident as we witness some of the same players involved in the COVID-19 vaccine fiasco now circling back around to help build the case for Pfizer’s RSV vaccine.
That includes figures such as Dr. Robert Frenck, the Pfizer-beholden principal investigator of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital clinical trial that tested the company’s COVID-19 shot in children. Frenck reported 12-year-old Maddie de Garay’s serious vaccine injuries to the FDA as a mere “stomachache.”
Graphs clearly show that none of the vaccines pushed on pregnant women are safe for babies or moms — but given that from one-fourth to one-half of pregnant women acquiesce to getting them, those who know the truth need to work even harder to get the word out.
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.
Effects on mother and child that bear out Mike Yeadon’s warnings
By Neville Hodgkinson | TCW Defending Freedom | November 7, 2022
A British scientist with 32 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry warned right at the start of the Covid vaccine rollout that under no circumstances should the gene-based, mRNA jab be given to women of child-bearing age without studies to confirm it was safe.
Dr Mike Yeadon, former vice president for research at Pfizer, one of the manufacturers of the experimental mRNA products, filed a petition with the European Medicines Agency on December, 1, 2020, urging that even testing the jab on human volunteers was unethical without significant safety concerns being taken into account.
One of these was a similarity between virus proteins targeted by the proposed vaccinations and a protein (syncitin) essential for forming the placenta in pregnancy. If antibodies produced by the jab also acted against those proteins, the petition said, ‘it would result in vaccinated women essentially becoming infertile’.
Co-signed by Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, a leading German physician, the document also warned that the vaccine trials were much too short to flag up late adverse effects. It added that the design was such that the trials could not show whether the product worked either in stopping a person from becoming infected, or from infecting others.
Subsequently, Yeadon became one of the first scientists to highlight evidence from a previously confidential Pfizer study showing that the vaccine products do not stay at the injection site but become widely distributed throughout the body, including the ovaries.
In view of the toxic nature of the ‘spike’ protein that the jab manufactures (summarised here), Yeadon warned in August, 2021: ‘My assumption at the moment is that these vaccines are concentrating in the ovaries of every female who has been given them. We don’t know what that will do, but it cannot be benign and it could be seriously harmful.’
It is now widely acknowledged that the jab neither protects against infection nor transmission, as Yeadon and Wodarg spelled out in their petition. If their knowledge had been sought at the outset of the Covid crisis the UK alone could have been spared the £500billion lockdown bill, with enormous associated social damage.
But what about the fertility warnings? Despite his years of experience at the top of his field, Yeadon has been vilified for speaking out. Is he really no more than ‘a hero of Covid conspiracy theorists’, as the Times described him?
Birth rates have fallen significantly in many countries, including the UK, in the wake of the vaccine rollouts. Various reasons for the fall have been suggested – usually excluding the jab.
Yet Dr James Thorp, a 68-year-old American physician who has practised obstetrics for more than 42 years and sees thousands of high-risk pregnant patients each year, has observed many complications attributable to the jabs, including foetal death and miscarriage. ‘What I’ve seen in the last two years is unprecedented,’ he says.
With help from several colleagues, he compared rates of adverse events following the Covid jabs with those reported post-flu vaccination in women of reproductive age. The focus was on events related to pregnancy and menstruation, using data from the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
A preprint of their findings published on September 28 shows a thousand-fold increase in menstrual abnormalities after the Covid jab, and significant increases in miscarriage, foetal malformation, growth abnormalities, cardiac disorders, foetal death and stillbirth.
Thorp has also highlighted risks to newborn babies taking milk from their vaccinated mothers. One study found mRNA from the jab in five out of 11 lactating women who had received the vaccination within six months of their delivery.
Last month, in a wide-ranging review in the US-based Epoch Times of these and other findings, US microbiologist and biomedical scientist Dr Sean Lin revealed that Thorp ‘has seen at least three newborns, completely healthy at the time of their birth, who passed away after being breastfed by their recently vaccinated mothers’. This suggested the vaccine components can not only accumulate in the ovaries but can also be passed on to infants via breastfeeding, he wrote.
He added that details of animal experiments performed before the jabs were authorised, recently obtained under freedom of information legislation, showed that mRNA and spike protein can travel through all barriers in a mother rat to enter its foetus. The rats themselves experienced toxicity during gestation, with some becoming infertile and losing the use of their hind legs.
Calling for an end to all Covid shots for pregnant women until long-term safety data become available, Lin writes: ‘The medical field and health agencies should still adhere to the fundamental ethical principle of ‘Do No Harms’.’
A hospital memo leaked to the Epoch Times by a nurse in Fresno, California, revealed how the hospital is experiencing a dramatic rise in the number of stillbirth cases, now upwards of 22 a month compared with an average of one to two every three months previously. This massive increase seems to align with similar evidence from across the country showing a potential rise in problems with fertility, miscarriages and foetal development, the newspaper reported.
Could the vaccine have contributed to a ‘very unusual’ spike in deaths among newborn babies now being investigated in Scotland?
In the UK, one and a half million Yellow Card reports of suspected adverse reactions to the vaccines include 821 miscarriages and 58,171 reproductive/breast disorders.
With tens of millions of doses administered, those numbers have still not persuaded regulators that there is a problem, although real-world adverse effects can be at least ten times higher than those reported. ‘Our advice remains that the Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective during pregnancy and breastfeeding,’ the Medicines and Health products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) reaffirmed in September.
A review last month in the journal Vaccine declared that based on studies published so far ‘there is no scientific proof’ of any association between the jabs and impaired fertility in either men or women.
It depends on what is meant by ‘scientific proof’. If scientists do not ask the right questions, they can avoid receiving unwelcome answers. Those who drove the vaccine rollout are choosing not to see the thousands of reported disorders as related to the jabs, despite the record numbers, and clearly demonstrated mechanisms of harm.
It took a mathematician/businessman, for example, to point out evidence of a dose-response relationship between the jabs and infant deaths, with significantly more deaths reported when the higher-dose Moderna jab is used during pregnancy than with the Pfizer product.
Igor Chudov, who highlighted this phenomenon using US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) figures, says the Moderna product is associated with nearly twice as many neonatal deaths as the Pfizer vaccine, and 42 per cent more miscarriages.
In the light of these data, he asks: ‘How can Covid vaccine given during pregnancy be safe, and NOT affect infant deaths? How come nobody at the CDC asked this question? How come our media is silent on this?’
It is as though there are parallel universes: one occupied by those who can see no harm, and the other by doctors and scientists who insist a grave situation is staring us in the face.
The latter include three American medical whistle-blowers who found a 2021 rise of nearly 300 per cent in miscarriages among women serving in the US Army compared with the previous five years. There was no increase in 2020, when Covid arrived.
Doctors calling for a halt to Covid vaccination for pregnant women often meet abuse and censorship.
In October 2021, obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Christiane Northrup told the Epoch Times: ‘Women are having bleedings. The doctors in our area are doing hysterectomies in young women, like 30-somethings. They said “Oh, it’s not unusual”. Let me tell you, as a board-certified gynaecologist, that’s very unusual. Women’s periods are messed up all over the place . . . I’ve had a huge Facebook group of thousands of women talking about this situation that was removed.’
What of Yeadon’s worry that an immune reaction to the spike protein might block pregnancy?
A small study from Singapore, in 15 women, reported that none had developed anti-syncitin antibodies after the jab, but Yeadon says the actual data showed a clear increase, arbitrarily ruled as insignificant by the researchers.
‘It looked like someone had tried to dismiss our concerns by testing for evidence of the particular problem we’d warned about. Unfortunately, all they did is to reinforce our concerns.
‘We’d envisioned the risk that, in responding to the synthetic piece of virus spike protein, women’s immune systems would also make an immune response to their own placental protein. That’s exactly what was reported in the pre-print paper.
‘Based on this concern alone, all these experimental products as a class should have been completely contraindicated in women younger than menopause.’
He insists that a series of toxicology issues meant ‘adverse impacts on conception and ability to sustain a pregnancy were foreseeable from the start . . . There was and still is no data package supporting safety in pregnancy, or prior to conception.’
Jen Psaki says censorship deposition would be “burdensome” for her family life and new MSNBC gig
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | November 6, 2022
Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary, and Department of Justice (DOJ) are fighting a subpoena requiring her to testify in the lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general – alleging that the Biden administration colluded with social media platforms to censor certain viewpoints on the pandemic.
The motion to quash the subpoena was filed in a federal court in Virginia. It argues that the deposition would be “extremely burdensome” for Psaki, who is preparing to be the host of a new show on MSNBC.
We obtained a copy of the motion for you here.
“Among other things, I understand that I would need to devote several days preparing for the deposition, as well as attending the deposition itself, and that would be highly disruptive to both my work and my family,” Psaki wrote in the request.
Psaki has in the past admitted that the Biden administration was flagging people’s speech to social media platforms.
The DOJ argued that Psaki’s deposition would result in a debate over executive privilege considering she was a top adviser to President Joe Biden.
The DOJ lawyer said: “If permitted to proceed, the deposition of Ms. Psaki would inevitably set the Executive and Judicial Branches ‘on a collision course’ through adjudications of executive privilege, thrusting the court into ‘the awkward position of evaluating the Executive’s claims of confidentiality and autonomy,’ and ‘difficult questions of separation of powers and checks and balances’ would quickly be pushed to the fore.”
“Plaintiffs have not identified any evidence showing or even suggesting that Ms. Psaki ever communicated with any social-media company in her capacity as Press Secretary about misinformation, much less that she ‘exercised coercive power’ to compel a social-media company to take any action,” the DOJ added.
Other defendants that have tried to use a similar “burdensome” defense have already been shut down by District Judge Terry Doughty who said, “The Court finds that both the public interest and the interest of the other parties in preserving free speech significantly outweighs the inconvenience the three deponents will have in preparing for and giving their depositions.”
Another Extraordinary Murder in Washington D.C.
Mary Mahoney was allegedly the victim of a botched robbery in the Georgetown Starbucks

Mary Mahoney, murdered on July 7, 1997
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 6, 2022
When Seth Rich was murdered in Washington D.C. on July 10, 2016, the Metropolitan Police Department immediately proposed that it was a “botched robbery.” The case reminded me of the murder of Mary Mahoney in a Georgetown Starbucks on July 7, 1997.
Mary Mahoney was an intern in Bill Clinton’s White House during his first term. She then got a job working as a manager of Starbucks in Georgetown, which was frequented by many notable figures in the Washington political establishment. Her murder (along with her two coworkers) was the first triple murder in the neighborhood’s history. Prior to the crime, not a single homicide had been committed in Georgetown for eighteen months.
Robbery appeared an unlikely motive, as none of the day’s cash proceeds had been taken from the store. Mahoney’s murder occurred during the same period that Newsweek reporter Mike Isikoff was investigating allegations that President Clinton had sexually harassed White House employees—an investigation that would ultimately lead him to Monica Lewinsky. Attorneys for Paula Jones were also seeking corroborating cases of Clinton’s sexual harassment of young women.
A year after the murder occurred, the police received a tip to examine a man named Carl D. Cooper from a woman who had just watched an America’s Most Wanted episode on the triple homicide. For several months, investigators found no evidence linking Cooper to the crime. Then another informant came forth—a former drug addict named Eric Butera, who was himself later murdered in “a robbery gone wrong.”
Based on information gleaned from Butera’s associates, Carl Cooper was arrested. After a grueling four-day interrogation, Cooper confessed, stating that the triple homicide was a “botched robbery” (which just happened to be the official working hypothesis). While held at gunpoint, Mary, refused to give Cooper the keys to the safe—a heroic act to save her 50 billion market cap employer from losing a few thousand dollars. Because Mary refused to give Cooper the keys, he shot her five times, including a shot to the back of the head. He then shot her two coworkers, and then left the store without taking a dime.
Cooper was convicted on the grounds of his confession to the Metropolitan Police. However, in a subsequent interview with an FBI investigator, Cooper recanted his confession. Although the FBI investigator unequivocally stated this in his testimony, the court concluded that Cooper’s initial confession was sufficient for his conviction. Cooper was initially represented by a court-appointed attorney, but after his trial began, his court-appointed attorney was joined by the prominent Washington D.C. defender, Francis D. Carter, who initially represented Monica Lewinsky when Monica stated her willingness to remain silent about her affair with Clinton. Carter drafted an affidavit for Monica in which she stated that she had NOT had an affair with the president. Carter was forced to withdraw this affidavit after Monica made statements to Lynda Tripp (equipped with a secret recording device) confirming her affair with Clinton.
That Carter joined the Carl Cooper defense team strikes me as very peculiar, especially given that Carter did not change the defense strategy. I wonder if Carter’s primarily job was—under cover of client-attorney confidentiality—to deliver a message to Carter pertaining to his sentencing prospects and what he might reasonably expect for his wife (to whom he was apparently very attached) if he stuck with his confession.
Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno initially sought the death penalty for Cooper— the first death-penalty matter brought to trial in the District in nearly 30 years, but federal prosecutors later withdrew this request. To date, no evidence has been found linking Cooper to the triple homicide.
In a related case, the District of Columbia was successfully sued for the wrongful death of Metropolitan Police informant, Eric Butera, as the jury concluded the police had been negligent in protecting him during an undercover operation to obtain more information about the Starbucks triple slaying. The woman who gave the initial tip to America’s Most Wanted later publicly accused the police of refusing to protect her and fell under suspicion for being motivated primarily by the reward money offered by the show.
Since the murders occurred, the crime has been the subject of extensive media coverage, several documentary television features, and hundreds of online commentators. Conventional newspaper coverage of the crimes—primarily conducted by the Washington Post and the Washington Times—consisted entirely of straightforward reporting of information provided by police and judicial officers.
Given the controversial nature of the police investigation and judicial proceedings against the man who was charged for committing the crime, it is surprising how little the mainstream media questioned official accounts. Likewise, the TV documentaries simply presented narratives provided by law officers as though they contained nothing that was questionable. This is particularly notable given that substantial details of the official narrative, provided by the same investigating officers, are represented differently in different documentaries. Moreover, some of officers’ statements in the documentaries pertaining to Starbucks procedures and security protocols are NOT consistent with what a veteran Starbucks manager told me.
I would like to interview Carl D. Cooper in prison, but I cannot find him in the federal prison system. Though I have not had the time and resources to dig deep into this component of the story, my preliminary research suggests that his whereabouts in the federal prison system have been concealed.
In 2016, the lead homicide detective in the Mary Mahoney case — Detective James Trainium — published a book titled How the Police Generate False Confessions. It’s a detailed examination of how the police obtain false confessions, and the author is clearly writing from personal experience.
An Extraordinary Unsolved Murder in Washington D.C.
In the matter of SETH RICH, the FBI asks for 66 years to release his laptop contents Nov 5 DNC Staffer Seth Rich, murdered on July 10, 2016

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 5, 2022
“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.” —James Madison
As an investigative author I’ve often dealt with the extreme frustration of making federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and state Open Records Act requests. So often, it seems that federal and state agencies don’t want to release the information, delay in responding, and then cite multiple exceptions to the law in order to justify keeping the information secret.
I therefore felt sympathy for my fellow Texan, Brian Huddleston, when I saw the recent Epoch Times report that his FOIA request for the information found on Seth Rich’s laptop is being thwarted by the FBI, which asked the judge who ruled in Huddleston’s favor to grant the Bureau 66 years to fulfill the request.
Readers of this Substack may find the FBI’s request reminiscent of the FDA’s request for 55 years to release COVID-19 vaccine data. Given the unfortunate reality of human mortality, one wonders what public interest will be served 55 or 66 years from now, apart from satisfying the curiosity of historians who aren’t yet born.
The murder of Seth Rich—in the middle of one of the most brutal presidential election years in history—has always struck me as an example of the authorities NOT investigating a matter of public interest. The mainstream media and half the country were so blinded by partisan passions that they couldn’t see the grounds for suspecting that the young man’s murder was politically motivated. Just a few hours after the incident occurred—before there was any time to perform an investigation—the Metropolitan Police Department announced that the murder appeared to be a “botched robbery.”
Since Seth Rich was murdered on July 10, 2016—12 days before Wikileaks published embarrassing DNC e-mails—there has been much speculation that he could have been the source because he was upset about how the DNC had treated Bernie Sanders. A good investigator wouldn’t speculate about the crime, but he would certainly notice that, statistically speaking, the murder is extraordinary.
Seth Rich was shot in the back near his apartment building, and though he was carrying a valuable watch, wallet, and cell phone, these were not taken by the assailant. Perhaps it was a botched robbery, as the Metropolitan Police Department quickly announced, but shooting a guy in the back without taking his valuables is not typical of armed robbery. Other robberies in the same neighborhood around the same time followed the conventional pattern of the assailant threatening the victim and demanding his or her valuables instead of opening fire on the victim.
In the year 2016, there were 135 homicides in Washington D.C., which has a resident population of 672,000, which comes to approximately one murder per 5000 residents— a dramatic decline from the city’s murder rate in the early nineties. Incidentally, the Metropolitan Police conducted an analysis of homicide for the years 1998-2000—after homicide rates had dropped significantly—and concluded that the primary motives were
1) Argument/conflict
2). Drug related
3). Revenge/retaliation
4). Robbery
5). Gang related.
During this period, homicides were not equally distributed throughout the city, but were concentrated in particular neighborhoods. 92% of the victims were African Americans 3.2% were Hispanic and 3.2% were white. Though one must consider the possibility that homicide trends in DC have changed since 2000 (apart from merely decreasing in numbers) it’s notable that, of the currently unsolved homicides in Washington DC in the year 2016, Seth Rich is the only white victim in a city that is now 44% white.
Julian Assange has always insisted the DNC e-mails were leaked and not hacked. Former NSA technical director William Binney has also insisted that if the DNC e-mails were hacked, it would be child’s play for the NSA to establish the precise routing of the hack, which indicates that the e-mails were more likely leaked by an insider.
Regarding motive, a good investigator would consider the hypothesis that Seth Rich was murdered NOT in retaliation, but to eliminate him as a witness that the DNC e-mails were leaked by an insider and not hacked by Russians. Almost immediately after the embarrassing e-mails were published, the DNC vehemently proclaimed it was Russian hackers who were responsible, though no evidence has been presented to support this accusation.
Regarding the assailant: A good investigator would consider the hypothesis that he was contracted to murder Rich but knew nothing about his target or the motive for killing him. This hypothesis is consistent with Rich being murdered as he approached the entrance to his home—that is, the contract killer was provided only with the address and a photograph of his target.
Another notable aspect of this crime has been the extremely emotional tone of press reporting from the same reporters who so passionately embraced the Russian meddling story. The mere suggestion that Seth Rich’s murder was politically motivated prompted these same people to angrily denounce this (perfectly reasonable hypothesis) as “wild, right wing conspiracy theory” and to demand that reporters cease and desist from exploring this hypothesis.
And yet, given that the crime remains unsolved, why not explore this hypothesis?
How the US regime attempts to control public perception of its aid to Ukraine
By Scott Ritter | RT | November 5, 2022
NBC News has reported that, according to four people familiar with the incident, a phone call between US President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky, turned testy after the Ukrainian leader pressed Biden for more assistance.
On June 15, Biden called Zelensky to inform him of the recent release of some $1 billion in assistance (this included the drawdown of arms and equipment from US Department of Defense inventories valued at $350 million, and $650 million in additional assistance under the department’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative). This type of person-to-person communication had become commonplace since Russia’s decision to send troops into Ukraine in February 2022, with Biden informing Zelensky of each major assistance allocation in a program that had, as of June 15, seen the dispatch of some $5.6 billion in American military aid.
This time, however, rather than thank the US president, as had been the previous practice, Zelensky proceeded to ask for more assistance, citing specific requests for equipment that had not been included in the June allocation of aid. At this point, NBC’s sources say, Biden lost his temper. “The American people were being quite generous, and his administration and the US military were working hard to help Ukraine, he said, raising his voice, and Zelensky could show a little more gratitude,” the NBC story reports.
According to NBC, the source of Biden’s anger went beyond the lack of gratitude shown by Zelensky (NBC reports that the two leaders have since warmed to one another), but rather the growing realization on the part of the Biden White House that support for the blank check being written for Ukraine’s war effort is waning among members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. With the Republicans expected to retake control of the House of Representatives and positioned to do the same in the Senate in the upcoming mid-term elections, the Biden administration appears poised to try to squeeze out another $40-60 billion in aid during the lame duck session between the election and when the present term of Congress expires next January. It is expected that this new aid package will be challenged by the Republicans, who will seek to have its consideration postponed until the new Republican-controlled Congress is sworn in.
Shortly before NBC News broke the story of the contentious Biden-Zelensky phone call, The New Yorker ran a glowing review of the state of US-Ukrainian military cooperation. Entitled ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine, the piece, authored by Joshua Yaffa, a contributing writer for the magazine, provides an expansive and yet intimate look at the complex interaction between the US and Ukraine about not only the provision of military equipment, but also the active cooperation between US and Ukrainian military and intelligence officials concerning the actual conduct of the conflict, including the provision of targeting data in support of US-provided artillery systems such as the M777 howitzer and the HIMARS multiple rocket launch system.
Its two main messages can be summarized as follows: first, American weapons are helping Ukraine stand up to Russia and showing the world Putin can be defeated, and second, the US is taking every care not to cross any lines that would escalate the conflict into a direct confrontation with Moscow.
Yaffa is an accomplished writer on Russian affairs. His most recent book, ‘Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia’, has won several prizes, and he has published numerous articles in The New Yorker about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But even this extensive journalistic record doesn’t prepare one for the scope and scale of the sources Yaffa was able to draw upon in writing his most recent article. It is a ‘who’s who’ of US and Ukrainian officialdom, both named and unnamed, all of whom are well positioned to provide Yaffa with the kind of inside information that makes his article so attractive, both from an informational aspect, and readability.
On the Ukrainian side, Yaffa interviewed Aleksey Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister; Mikhail Podoliak, a top adviser to Zelensky; Aleksey Danilov, Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council; and “a senior Ukrainian military official” close to the commander in chief of the military, Valery Zaluzhny. Ukrainian officials habitually interact with Western journalists as part of their effort to shape the narrative about the ongoing conflict with Russia. The surprise isn’t that Yaffa was able to interview these individuals, but rather what they were willing to open up about – the hitherto obscure details of the sensitive cooperation between the US and Ukraine in the actual conduct of the conflict.
The US is very controlling about the release of information about classified cooperation with other nations. This reticence to be transparent extends not only to the US officials involved, but also to the foreign nationals participating in the secret work. In short, there is no way the three Ukrainians would have agreed to sit down and talk to Yaffa about these issues unless their participation had been green-lighted by the Biden administration beforehand.
The extent to which the Biden administration was behind the decision to cooperate with Yaffa on this story becomes clear upon closer examination of the anonymous sources drawn upon for the article. “A Biden administration official involved in Ukraine policy”; “a senior official at the Defense Department”; “a person familiar with Biden White House discussions of Ukraine”; “an administration official”; “a senior US official”; “a US military official” close to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley; “a senior Biden administration official”; and “a senior US intelligence official.”
Numerous other sources, both named and unnamed, were also interviewed by Yaffa.
Anyone with any experience with sensitive national security activities knows that there are two hard-fast truths when it comes to such activities – they are highly classified and compartmentalized, and any unauthorized release of information pertaining to such activities is a serious violation of the law, subject to prosecution and imprisonment for anyone caught leaking such information to the press.
Accordingly, either every source cited by Yaffa had been simultaneously overcome with a Lemming-like desire to jump off a figurative cliff, risking losing their careers and going to prison in order to help the young New Yorker contributing writer pull off the scoop of a lifetime, or the Yaffa article was part and parcel of a Biden administration information operation designed to inject a positive narrative about US-Ukrainian military relations into the mainstream discussion on Ukraine in a concerted effort to shape public perception in the lead-up to the mid-term elections.
My money is on the latter.
Good journalism is all about ‘bottom-up’ reporting, where a reporter conceives a story and then runs it to the ground by seeking out interviews with relevant sources. Stenography is about having a story spoon fed to you by sources for the purpose of serving an agenda that has nothing to do with the pursuit of fact-based truth, but rather shaping public opinion about a matter of importance.
Yaffa’s ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine’ is a clever piece of government-dictated stenography disguised as journalism and should be treated as such by all who read it.







