Deception « Aletho News

CNN’s US Intel Source Just Admitted That Everything Zelensky Says Is Propaganda

By Andrew Korybko | One World Press | April 20, 2022

Ukrainian President Zelensky has been accused by his many critics across the world of spewing propaganda in every one of his many appearances, yet up until CNN’s surprising publication of an article on Tuesday, the US-led West condemned any such suspicions as so-called “Russian propaganda”. The “politically correct” narrative has suddenly changed, however, due to that outlet’s piece titled “What happens to weapons sent to Ukraine? The US doesn’t really know”. Partway through the text, CNN reported the following about US suspicions that Ukraine isn’t telling the whole truth about anything:

“’It’s a war — everything they do and say publicly is designed to help them win the war. Every public statement is an information operation, every interview, every Zelensky appearance broadcast is an information operation,’ said another source familiar with western intelligence. ‘It doesn’t mean they’re wrong to do it in any way.’”

This jaw-dropping disclosure amounts to a complete reversal of the prior narrative whereby it’s no longer so-called “Russian propaganda” to accuse Zelensky of spewing propaganda but is now reportedly the unofficial position of none other than the US government itself. Not only that, but this is supposedly something that should even be praised, not condemned. That new narrative builds upon the one introduced by NBC News earlier this month when it quoted unnamed US spies who openly admitted to waging information warfare against Russia, including through the spread of fake news speculation.

All of this might understandably be too much for the average Western information consumer to process, which is why the purpose of this piece is to explain the emerging cognitive warfare trend that’s on display in this context. The US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) is clearly on the defensive after it became impossible to deny that Zelensky is spewing propaganda in literally every one of his many appearances according to CNN’s own US intel source on the matter. Doubling down on the false narrative that he’s an “innocent truth-teller” is counterproductive since folks don’t trust him anymore.

For that reason, the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) felt compelled to enact a drastic change in the official narrative by allowing some of these shadowy officials to anonymously speak to CNN in order to recalibrate their perception management operations. Instead of desperately clinging to their discredited narrative, they sought to radically change it through the so-called “limited hangout” tactic of admitting something unsavory (in this case that all the Ukrainian leader does is spew propaganda) but then spinning it into something positive.

By giving some credence to the suspicions of their increasingly skeptical audience who’ve largely realized by now that Zelensky can’t be trusted after he’s gone so overboard with his rhetoric during his many appearances as of late, they hope to strategically disarm their target by getting their guard down so that they swallow the second part of the “deep state’s” amended narrative related to why “it doesn’t mean that [he’s] wrong to do it in any way.” This conforms to the trend first introduced by NBC News whereby Americans are now supposed to expect propaganda in the media, not condemn it.

The unofficial acknowledgement of “deep state” meddling in the US media from NBC News’ sources and the praise that CNN’s intel source just lavished upon Zelensky for the lies that this individual candidly admitted he spews during all of his appearances are meant to precondition the targeted Western audience into appreciating that which they’d otherwise have condemned as contrary to their country’s values, especially that which concerns the supposed integrity of their media. That said integrity has long been gone, however, which is why it was way overdue for the “deep state” to finally flip the narrative.

Observers should remember that this is only being done because the population at large is awakening to how maliciously they’ve been misled by the so-called “fourth estate” through its collusion with the “deep state” and foreign officials like Zelensky, whose words they hitherto passed off as truth without any second thought and condemned those who questioned him as “Russian propagandists”. Big data analytics have evolved to the point where “deep state” structures can very easily assess the pulse of their targeted audience and thus get a sense of their true sentiments towards whatever it might be.

Considering the radical revision of the official narrative that just took place in less than a few weeks’ time through NBC News and CNN’s seemingly coordinated “revelations” about media meddling, it can confidently be concluded that this was done in response to the “deep state” realizing that it absolutely had to undertake this course of action lest its targeted audience soon lose all trust in its media proxies. For that reason, this should be seen as an unprecedentedly desperate move that has no precedent in American history, which speaks to the population’s similarly unprecedented distrust of the media.

April 20, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment

Russia accuses OSCE of ‘spying’ for Ukraine

Samizdat | April 20, 2022

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) collaborated with the Ukrainian government in its fight against the Donbass republics and tried to cover up offences by Ukrainian nationalist forces, Russia’s deputy representative to the UN told a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday.

The accusations came as Dmitry Polyansky blasted Western powers, saying they were being hypocritical regarding the security crisis in Ukraine. The US and its allies pursue their own selfish interests rather than the interests of the Ukrainian people, when they fan hostilities in the east European country, the diplomat said.

“We obtained the latest proof of how dirty your tricks are in building a ‘rules-based order’ when we discovered proof that the OSCE special monitoring mission in Ukraine simply spied for Kiev instead of recording violations of the ceasefire,” he claimed. The official said Russia was collecting more evidence to make the case against the monitors.

Polyansky made more allegations as he brought up the seizure of official OSCE vehicles by Ukrainian nationalist troops in the city of Mariupol. He said there were reports that eight cars, some of them armored, were taken by the Ukrainians at gun point. One of them was later filmed with clear signs of use in battle. Similar reports came from other places in eastern Ukraine, he said.

“The OSCE leadership was aware of the problem, but they chose to hush up this fact as long as it could,” the Russian official claimed.

He added that such discoveries “undermined trust in international organizations where Western officials play a dominant role.” This lack of trust makes Moscow question any calls for a humanitarian ceasefire in Ukraine coming from the West, the official said.

“In practice, [the calls] demonstrated a desire to give Kiev nationalists and radicals a pause to regroup, receive new shipments of drones, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, and stage more inhumane provocations to spread lies about the actions of Russian soldiers,” Polyansky said.

Russia will differentiate between “pseudo-peacemaking” and genuine attempts to “help Ukraine take the long-necessary right decisions,” he said.

The OSCE was invited to Ukraine to monitor the situation in the country in March 2014, shortly after an armed coup in Kiev triggered a spike in tensions in the east. The Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) became a crucial tool in observing a truce between government forces and rebels, which was listed as the first part of the roadmap to peace set in the so-called Minsk agreements. OSCE monitors patrolled the disengagement line to check whether deployments of forces by the warring parties complied with the deal and to report any violations of the ceasefire.

The field mission was the biggest in the organization’s history, with as many as 814 international and 477 national staff involved and over 2,400 daily reports produced in eight years.

The mission’s mandate expired on March 31, with Russia opposing its extension. Moscow accused the OSCE of pushing Russian representatives out of the SMM even as the number of observers was increasing.

As he explained the country’s decision to withdraw its participation and funding, the Russian representative at the organization, Aleksandr Lukashevich accused the OSCE of taking Kiev’s side in treating the two Donbass republics as “a territory under control of some terrorists,” and virtually refusing to coordinate with them.

Last week, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics decided to ban OSCE monitors on their respective territories starting April 30. Both are investigating allegations of espionage by members of the mission. The government in Lugansk reported arresting two OSCE employees suspected of treason. Russia is conducting its own criminal investigation of the espionage claims.

April 20, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception | OSCE, Russia, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Kramatorsk train station attack: The key to finding the perpetrator lies in this overlooked detail

Kiev and its Western backers immediately blamed Russia for the incident, but a proper investigation is likely to disagree

By Scott Ritter | April 19, 2022

In a conflict where accusations of wrongdoing fly back and forth between Russia and Ukraine on a daily basis, when it comes to the missile attack on the Kramatorsk train station that occurred at 10:30am on April 8, 2022, both sides are in rare agreement–the missile used was a Tochka-U, a Soviet-era weapon known in the West by its NATO reporting name as the SS-21 Scarab, and in the former Soviet republics that use the weapon by its GRAU designation, 9K79.

Beyond that one technical piece of information, however, any semblance of unanimity regarding the narrative surrounding how that missile came to strike a bustling railway station, killing and wounding dozens of civilians desperately trying to evacuate from eastern Ukraine in anticipation of a large-scale Russian offensive, collapses, with each side blaming the other. Making this tragedy even more bizarre, the Russian words Za Detei–“for the children”–had been hand-painted on the missile in white.

The Tochka made its appearance in the Soviet military in 1975. A single-stage, solid-fuel tactical ballistic missile, the Tochka was assembled at the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant before being delivered to the Soviet Army, where it was further disseminated to the various units equipped with the system. An improved version of the Tochka, known as the Tochka-U (Uluchshenny, or “improved”) was introduced in 1989; the improvements included increased range and accuracy.

The Tochka-U operates as a simple inertially-guided ballistic missile. Simply put, the operators, working from a known location, orient the launcher in the direction of their target, and then calculate the distance between the point of launch and point of impact. The solid-fuel engine of the Tochka-U burns for 28 seconds, meaning that the range of the missile isn’t determined by engine burn-time alone, but rather the angle that the missile was launched–the more vertical the missile at time of launch, the shorter its range will be.

Because the missile burns to depletion, once the engine shuts down, the missile will cease its pure ballistic trajectory, and instead assume a near-vertical posture as it heads toward its target. The warhead is released at a designated point above the target. In the case of the Kramatorsk attack, the Tochka-U was equipped with the 9N123K cluster warhead, containing fifty submunitions, each of which has the effect of a single hand grenade in terms of explosive and lethal impact.

The flight characteristics of the Tochka-U result in a debris pattern which has the cluster munitions impacting on the ground first, followed by the depleted booster, which hits the earth some distance behind the impact of the warhead. This creates a tell-tale signature, so to speak, of the direction from where the missile was launched, which can be crudely calculated by shooting a reverse azimuth from the point of impact of the warhead through the booster.

It is this physical reality which provides the first real clue as to who fired the Tochka-U that hit Kramatorsk. The relationship of the booster when it came to earth, when assessed to the impact zone of the cluster munitions, provides a reverse azimuth which, even when factoring in a generous margin of error for potential drift, points to territory that was under the excusive control of the Ukrainian government, which means that there is little doubt that the missile that struck the Kramatorsk train station was fired by a launcher under the operational control of the 19th Missile Brigade, Ukraine’s only Tochka-U-equipped unit. More specifically, a forensic evaluation of the missile debris clearly shows that it was launched by the 19th Ukrainian Missile Brigade, based near Dobropolia, some 45 kilometers from Kramatorsk.

The 19th Missile Brigade is considered a strategic asset, meaning that it responds directly to the orders of the Ukrainian Ground Forces Command. In short, if the missile was, as it appears, fired by the 19th Missile Brigade, it was doing so based on orders given from high up the chain of command. The launch was no accident.

For its part, the Ukrainian government has attempted to flip the script, blaming Russia for an attack using a missile which Russia is on record as having retired from service in 2019. To back up this assertion, the Ukrainian government has noted that Tochka-U launchers were seen participating in joint military training exercises involving Russian and Belarus forces on Belarusian soil in February 2022, on the eve of Russia’s special military operation commencing against Ukraine.

This was according to Ambassador Evgeny Tsimbaliuk, the Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the International Organizations in Vienna, while addressing a special meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council about the attack.

The US backed up the Ukrainian allegation, with its Department of Defense announcing during a closed-door briefing to journalists that Russia had at first announced the missile strike against Kramatorsk, only to retract it once the announcement about civilian casualties was made.

The problem with both the Kiev and Washington claims is that neither is backed up by anything that remotely resembles solid evidence. The television images referred-to by the Ukrainians showed Belarusian Tochka-U launchers, not Russian ones, and the “claims” cited by the US referred to the private Telegram accounts of persons having no affiliation with the Russian government or military.

There is no question that both Russia and the US are sitting on de facto proof of where the Tochka missile was fired. The US has deployed in the region a variety of intelligence-collection platforms which would have detected the location of the missile at the time of launch, and would also have tracked the ballistic trajectory of the missile as it flew toward its target. Likewise, Russia has deployed numerous advanced surface-to-air missile defense systems, including the advanced S-400, which would have tracked the flight of the missile from launch to impact.

The fact that the US has not declassified this data to replicate a Cuban missile crisis-like moment at the UN to demonstrate to the world the scope and scale of a Russan lie strongly suggests that the Russians are not, in fact, lying. Moreover, Russia’s failure to do the same to reinforce its contention that Ukraine fired the missile points to the reality that any Russian radar is operating as part of an active military action zone, and as such Russia would be loath to publish data that could provide Ukraine with a tactical edge on the battlefield.

There is, however, one piece of evidence which proves without a doubt who owned the Tochka-U missile in question that was fired on Kramatorsk, the release of which would not compromise the security interests of the providing nation. Painted onto the booster of the missile, in black, is a unique serial number assigned to the Tochka-U at the time of production (in the Cyrillic alphabet, Ш91579, or Sh91579 in the Latin alphabet.) This serial number was assigned to it at the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant and represents the unique identifying mark for the missile that follows it through its military life cycle.

The use of the production serial number as a unique identifier has been used by the United Nations in Iraq as part of a series of intrusive forensic investigations into the accounting of Iraq’s SCUD missile inventory. The UN used these numbers to track the arrival of Soviet-made SCUD missiles into Iraq, and to account for their final disposition, whether it be through unilateral destruction at the hands of the Iraqis, during training, during maintenance, or during combat operations. The procedures used by the Iraqis for tracking and accounting for its SCUD missiles was derived from official Soviet procedures for the same, and therefore mirror those used by the Ukrainian government.

The serial number of the Tochka-U shows that it was produced in 1991, during the time of Soviet authority. At that time, when a Tochka-U was fully assembled at the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant, it belonged to the Ministry of Defense Industry. The missile would be shipped by rail from the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant to a receiving point, where the Soviet military would take possession of the missile and formally absorb it into its inventory. Each missile is accompanied by a document known as a “passport,” which records every transaction associated with the missile in question. The missile would either be assigned to an operational unit or to a storage unit–again, details that would be recorded in the missile passport.

Each missile had a life span of ten years, after which the manufacturer’s warranty, so to speak, was no longer valid. That meant that a missile produced in 1991 would, under normal circumstances, be retired by 2001. However, the Russian military has often extended the operational lifetime of missiles such as the Tochka-U by implementing inspection procedures designed to extend the lifecycle of the missile. Each such inspection would be recorded in the passport, as would all operational deployments or field exercises where the missile was subjected to handling and movement.

Before a missile is fired, it is formally removed from the owning unit’s inventory, and orders are issued authorizing its use by the Ukrainian General Staff which include the serial number in question. When the missile is launched, the missile passport is closed out, and included with the other paperwork associated with the expenditure of the missile. The missile serial number is recorded at each step.

The Russian military should have in its archives documentation which lists the Tochka-U missiles officially turned over to Ukraine when the Soviet Union collapsed. Likewise, the Ukrainian military should have documents which record the missiles being absorbed into the Ukrainian armed forces. In either case, there exists undisputed records of ownership. Russia could end the discussion of who owned the missile in question simply by providing document-based evidence proving missile ownership (i.e., the transfer of ownership from the Soviet Union to Ukraine.) Likewise, Ukraine could do the same simply by providing a copy of the documentation surrounding its receipt of all Tochka-U missiles from Soviet authority, thereby enabling–if the Ukrainian version is to be believed–that it never possessed the missile in question.

Ukraine’s embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky has declared that the missile strike on Kramatorsk “must be one of the charges at the tribunal” he envisages at the International Criminal Court. “Like the massacre in Bucha, like many other Russian war crimes.”

Zelensky might want to be careful about what he wishes for. Any serious investigation into the Kramatorsk train station bombing will include an inquiry into the missile involved, and questions of ownership in which the missile serial number inscribed on the booster will play a leading role. If this is indeed the case–and the available evidence strongly suggests that it is–then it will be Zelensky and his leadership on the docket for the crime of slaughtering the very civilians whose lives he claims to be protecting.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

April 19, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ukraine | Leave a comment

Thinking Harder About False Flags and Other Fables

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 19, 2022

The White House plan to destroy Russia by calling President Vladimir Putin names proceeds apace. Apparently, the man whom President Joe Biden has called a “thug,” “killer,” and “war criminal” is now also charged with carrying out a “genocide” and, according to CIA Director William Burns, he may in “despair” over his apparently stalled invasion, be contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Meanwhile over at the Pentagon, positively aglow with the largest “defense” budget since Vietnam, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley is advising that the war started in Ukraine will require building still more US military bases in Europe to confront Putin.

It is unclear who exactly in the band of rogues surrounding Biden is most responsible for the rhetorical flourishes and hyperbole, though one might assume that it is in a fact a group effort by a chorus of mental midgets, most of whom were inherited from the beatified Barack Obama’s Administration. Only Hillary is missing. But at the same time, one must wonder how if all the sobriquets inevitably fail to bring down Putin what plan B might be. After all, as Russia is a significant country possessing a ballistic and submarine launched nuclear missile capability that could destroy the United States, there will have to be some way to dialogue with the Kremlin after the Ukraine fiasco has ended. Calling foreign heads of state criminals and mass murderers is not the best way to restore a satisfactory level of mutual respect that will permit discussion regarding issues of mutual concern, like war and peace.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is being heavily coached by neocon handlers to push the right buttons to appeal to international sentiment in favor of his country. He has been very successful at being alarming about the Russian threat coupled with his demands for more and better weapons. Two expressions that have come to the surface recently to further blacken Vladimir Putin have centered around the concern that the Russians will employ what is referred to as a false flag deception or use chemical weapons in such a fashion, possibly against themselves, so as to justify broadening their invasion. Indeed, the two can be used together. A false flag essentially involves an assailant or a contact pretending to represent something apart from their or his/her genuine identify in an attempt to deceive the targeted individual. False flags are used extensively in intelligence operations and also in military operations where an attempt is being made to hide the true attribution of an act of war.

In my own experience as a CIA operations officer, I once “developed” a relationship with a Libyan intelligence officer using the false identity of an Italian businessman. The Libyan was amenable to an information sharing relationship with an Italian to line his own pockets, but would have balked at the treasonous implications of having a connection with an American. Libya was, not so long ago, a colony of Italy and my contact spoke decent Italian. That was a classic false flag operation conducted to carry out espionage against a foreign target.

A more recent instance of what might be regarded as a false flag with much more lethal consequences was when President Donald Trump attacked a Syrian airbase with 59 cruise missiles in the wake of an almost certainly fabricated report that President Bashar al-Assad’s army had used chemical weapons in an attack on Khan Shaykhun in 2017. Independent investigators subsequently determined that the anti-regime terrorists who were occupying the city at the time had themselves staged the attack and deliberately set it up and blamed it on the Syrian government to produce an expected US response, which was forthcoming as Trump responded to the news headlines and did not bother to order anyone to check the reliability of his intelligence sources before ordering “bombs away.” Fortunately, the evidence that it had likely been a false flag carried out by allies of Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) soon surfaced and there were no additional American attacks.

The latest recriminations hurled at Putin have included his alleged massacre of possibly hundreds of civilians at Bucha as well as the killing of over 50 civilians at the Kramatorsk Train station on April 8th, which almost immediately raised suspicion about a possible false flag. Starting with motive, it made no sense for Russia to either massacre civilians or attack a non-military target like a transportation hub, which would produce a large number of casualties, as it would give NATO and the US a wedge issue to increase pressure on Russia and its soldiers while also turning world opinion against Moscow. In that sense, both the claimed massacre and the attack succeeded as they were both immediately linked to Russia by hostile media.

But that is where the stories began to unravel. Russian soldiers left the town of Bucha on March 30^th. Two days later, Bucha was occupied by the Ukrainian Azov Brigade with the objective of finding and removing ‘traitors’. The Azov Brigade has been plausibly described as extremely nationalist and even as neo-Nazi. On April 2/3 the first video was published that showed freshly killed men laying on the streets of Bucha, several of them displaying white arm bands that were presumably used for signaling to departing Russian forces that they were “friendlies.” The “west” and Ukrainian officials immediately called those dead the result of “Russian atrocities.”

Azov has reportedly shot men “fleeing” the combat zones as “traitors” and pledged no surrender to or collaboration with the Russians. It has credibly been responsible for atrocities committed against Russian ethnic Ukrainian citizens in the past. Going back to motive, it was definitely in the Ukrainian interest to kill a couple hundred of its own civilians to further demonize Putin and bring about a western direct military intervention, which is what Zelensky and his neocon advisers have been attempting to do. So, was it a false flag attack in which Ukrainian soldiers deliberately killed Ukrainian citizens so the deaths could be blamed on Russia?

And it also turned out that the missile used in the Kramatorsk Train station attack was of a type found in the Ukrainian arsenal, not that of Russia. A video report by Italy’s LA7 video channel was made by one of their teams inside Ukraine. They were one of first Western news teams to arrive at the alleged bombing site in Kramatorsk. At the time of the attack, numerous Ukrainian citizens were evacuating the city due to its proximity to fighting with Russian forces. Kramatorsk is the temporary seat of the administration of the Donetsk region because the city of Donetsk is in the hands of Russian affiliated Donbass militias and is not under the control of the Kiev based Ukrainian authorities.

The Italian film clip shows close-ups of the remains of the projectile that hit the building, which reveals that the serial number is that of the Tochka-U vehicle launched ballistic missile, which Kiev claimed was Russian, is actually far more plausibly Ukrainian. The clearly visible missile’s serial number appears as (Φ91579), and a comparison, admittedly made by Russian analysts, indicates that the missile belongs to the same series of weapons that have been fired against targets in the regions in the Donbass that are seeking union with Russia. They have been used against “Khartszsk in 04.09.2014 (rocket number ‘Φ15622’) and Tshevsky in 02.02.2015 (Rocket No. ‘Φ91565’), Lugvinova in 13.02.2015 (Missiles No. ‘Φ91566, Φ915527, Φ915328’), Perdiansk in 19.03.2022 (rocket no. ‘Φ915611’), and Militobol on 17.03.2022 (rocket no. ‘Φ915516’).” Furthermore, the missile in question is, according to the Kremlin, still in the Ukrainian arms inventory but considered obsolete by the Russian military.

But let’s think this through a little deeper. If the Russians truly want to blame the Ukrainians for killing other Ukrainians what better way to do it than to fake a missile launch using ordnance that is in operational use with the Ukrainian Army? There exist what are claimed to be eyewitness accounts of Russian troops using the Tochka inside Ukraine, though they come through Ukrainian controlled sources, but the Kremlin very likely has some Tochkas sitting around in various arsenals even if they are no longer suitable for front line use. And the serial numbers, which are painted on or appear on attached labels, can be changed.

The fundamental problem is not the possible use of a false flag in what is already a war between two neighboring states. It should be expected, when convenient for either side. The complication is that actually authenticable information about what is taking place is rare and the two sides are both lying and spinning like crazy to convince an international audience as well as their own citizenry of a “truth” which is actually often closer to fiction. As has long been recognized, the first victim of a war is the truth.

So forget about false flags and other tactical contrivances as well as the lies coming out of Washington and Western Europe. The sad part is that the focus on possible atrocities has reversed what the United States and the west should be doing, i.e. creating an environment where there can be a ceasefire leading to genuine negotiations that can bring about a status quo acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine. Instead, Washington and its allies seem intent on funneling ever more weapons into Ukraine based on a steady stream of questionable accounts of Russian war crimes, a guarantee that the fighting will go on for many more months, if not longer.

Witness for example the line being promoted by the notorious retired US Army Colonel Alexander Vindman, formerly of the US National Security Council but Ukrainian-Jewish born and an enthusiastic advocate of war with Russia. He argues based on the claimed Russian crimes that “Despite what people like Tucker Carlson tell you, there are not two sides to the story of Russia’s war on Ukraine. It IS a story of good and evil. All you have to do is look at the massacre of civilians in Bucha, the missile strike on Kramatorsk railway station, or the countless other atrocities being committed by Russian forces across Ukraine to see it clearly.”

Vindman’s thinking comes out of the neocon playbook of a proper role of the United States as the rule maker for the entire world without any accountability for its own action. He can easily be dismissed as little more than a partisan prepared to go with any half-truth as long as it denigrates Russia. Whatever one feels about “gallant little Ukraine” versus the Russian bear, this kind of advocacy by someone wrapping himself in the Ukrainian flag provides no real rationale for the United States to get involved in a war in which it has no real interest and which will almost certainly turn out badly for all involved. Unfortunately, Vindman is not the only public figure who suffers from precisely the same tunnel vision.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

April 19, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Militarism | CIA, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment

Few Doctors Telling Truth About COVID Vaccines

By Joel S. Hirschhorn | April 19, 2022

Nearly all physicians work for corporations that require them to take COVID vaccine shots. Most will be reluctant to tell their patients about their vaccine doubts. Also, most do not have the time to study the medical literature about the many negative aspects of the vaccines. Now comes a survey with some interesting findings.

Levels of vaccine hesitancy among physicians seem higher than expected, with 1 in 10 primary care doctors not believing that vaccines are safe, according to a new survey.

Among 625 physicians, 10.1% did not agree that vaccines were safe; 9.3% did not agree that vaccines were effective; and 8.3% did not agree that they were important, Timothy Callaghan, PhD, of Texas A&M School of Public Health in College Station, and colleagues reported online in Vaccine.

The high proportion of hesitancy among primary care doctors “was certainly a surprise for us,” Callaghan said. “We thought it might be a very small proportion of physicians who hold hesitancy about vaccines given that we have lots of evidence of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. [Talk about bias!] However, once we dug into the data, we found that concerns about vaccines in general were far more widespread in the physician population than we might have expected.”

Confidence in vaccines among physicians was still higher than in the general public, as were rates of COVID-19 vaccination, with only 5.2% still unvaccinated at the end of the survey in May 2021. But high levels of vaccine uptake among doctors could have more to do with employer regulations or perceived risks of their workplace environment, Callaghan said.

The research project was inspired by Callaghan’s own experience with one of his doctors who was not vaccinated and tried to dissuade Callaghan from COVID vaccination. Few of us have had that experience!

“It wasn’t my primary care physician, but another one of my doctors realized that I studied issues related to vaccine hesitancy, and over the course of multiple visits, tried to convince me that COVID-19 vaccines weren’t safe and weren’t worth it,” Callaghan said. “It made me question whether this was a one-off, or if we have an actual issue on our hands.”

Callaghan and colleagues conducted their survey from May 14 to May 25, 2021 among 625 physicians in family medicine, internal medicine, or general practice. They were asked how strongly they agreed with questions about safety, effectiveness, and importance of vaccines, among other factors.

Only 67.4% strongly agreed that vaccines are safe, just 75% strongly agreed they are effective, and only 76% strongly agreed they’re important, the researchers found. Good, but not good enough.

“As surprised as we were about the 1-in-10 piece, we were equally if not more surprised by the proportion of physicians strongly agreeing that vaccines in general are safe,” Callaghan said, anticipating that it would have been far higher. Guess there are doctors who see the truth.

In further analyses, Callaghan and colleagues found that higher levels of political conservatism were negatively and significantly associated with agreeing that vaccines are safe. In other words, the more conservative docs saw the truth. They also found those who had COVID-19 were significantly less likely to believe that vaccines are safe.

The team saw similar results for belief in vaccine effectiveness: physicians who were more liberal were more likely to strongly agree that vaccines are effective compared with those who were more conservative.

“Conservatives (in the public) with vaccine hesitancy, served by physicians who share their political views, may therefore miss out on opportunities to be presented with information about the benefits of vaccination; especially in rural areas where both hesitancy and self-identification with right-leaning political views are particularly high,” the researchers wrote. More pro-vaccine bias.

While political affiliation did appear to play some role in beliefs, Callaghan noted a wider problem that might be at play. “There’s not that much training on vaccines and vaccinology … in medical school,” he said. “Most medical students aren’t exposed to in-depth discussions of virology to have those strong opinions.”

“And given the clouded information environment that surrounded COVID-19 in particular, and increasingly, vaccines in general, it remains possible that [physicians] are just relying on what they’re hearing in the news and the misinformation that’s out there, as opposed to best scientific evidence,” he said. The bigger truth is that most docs do not spend time examining medical research data.

The survey also asked specifically about confidence in COVID-19 vaccines and found physician confidence split by vaccine type. While 68.7% were very confident in the safety of the Moderna vaccine and 72.7% were very confident in the safety of the Pfizer vaccine, only 32.1% were very confident in the safety of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn, author of Pandemic Blunder and many articles and podcasts on the pandemic, worked on health issues for decades, and his Pandemic Blunder Newsletter is on Substack. As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine. As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects; he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings and authored hundreds of articles and op-ed articles in major newspapers. He has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.

April 19, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine | Leave a comment

Drifting Mines Found in the Black Sea May be No Coincidence

By Vladimir Odintsov – New Eastern Outlook – 19.04.2022

Official representatives of Russia’s and Turkey’s Ministries of Defense keep talking about the continued threat of drifting Ukrainian mines which had been torn from their anchors.

Turkish National Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said that due to the continued threat of drifting mines, Turkey has raised the readiness level of de-mining units and other related services, as well as the alert and mobilization status. At the same time, the minister emphasized that it was impossible to determine the number of drifting mines in the Black Sea. “We have great capabilities to resolve this problem. We quickly mobilized them, raised the alert status of diving teams and drones. We are continuously monitoring the situation. As soon as we receive any alert notification, our units quickly take the necessary measures,” Akar said.

To date, three mines have been deactivated in the Bosporus shelf area. Some suspect that other drifting mines can be found in that district, but it is impossible to confirm this, Akar stressed. “What we are going to do about that is to remain vigilant,” he said. The Turkish minister explained that after the mines are detected, they are delivered to a safe zone and neutralized without harm to anybody.

On March 29, Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson of the UN’s Secretary-General said that reports about drifting mines in the Black Sea raise concerns in the organization. He also said that the presence of mines can badly affect international shipping. In particular, he noted that the Black Sea region is important for the export of food from Russia and Ukraine.

For security reasons, all types of fishing in the Black Sea, in the area between Bulgaria and Kefken have been suspended since March 26. This restriction applies to the night period especially. The Turkish Navy have warned shippers to be more careful when entering the Black Sea and to watch for drifting mines. The warning was distributed after on March 19, the Federal Security Service of Russia reported that the Ukrainian Naval Forces had installed minefields at the approaches to the ports of Odessa, Ochakov, Chernomorsk and Yuzhny. Because of rope breakages caused by wind and sea currents, mines can move freely in the western part of the Black Sea. There have been reports that, in Odessa, several hundreds of anchor mines installed by the Kiev authorities along the coastal line were blown off by the storm and went “free sailing” to the Black Sea (and further on, possibly, through the Turkish Straits to the Mediterranean Sea), posing a threat for any marine vessel. According to the clarification in the official document published by Life.ru, there were some 420 anchor-mines and anchor-river-mines, which were installed by the Ukrainian Navy.

Turkey is conducting an investigation in connection with drifting mines detected in the Black Sea. One of the explanations for the presence of the mines in the sea along the coast of Turkey is a form of pressure by NATO. In particular, as Turkey suggested, it is not a coincidence that drifting mines appeared in the Black Sea. Mr. Akar believes that this is a way they use to gain admission to the Black Sea waters for NATO warships. “We have a suspicion about the deliberate presence of mines. Perhaps they were a part of some plan aimed at putting us under pressure to have Turkey admit the NATO minesweepers through the straits into the Black Sea. But we are committed to the Montreux Convention and will not admit their warships into the Black Sea,” the minister said.

Previously, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that Turkey would close the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits for any warships in connection with Russia’s special operation aimed at denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine. As you know, in accordance with the Montreux Convention, the only exceptions are ships going to home ports.

The Montreux Convention was adopted in 1936. It allows merchant ships to freely pass these straits both in peacetime and in wartime, however, the duration of the period when warships belonging to non-Black Sea states can stay in the Black Sea waters is limited to three weeks. In emergency situations, Ankara may prohibit or restrict the passage of warships through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. “Turkey will adhere to the Montreux Convention and will not allow the warships of any country to enter the Black Sea,” Hulusi Akar said.

The Turkish Defense Minister admitted that some parties deliberately put pressure on Ankara and are “planting” mines along Turkey’s shores to make the country agree to let the NATO ships into the Black Sea. This explanation about the presence of mines found along Turkey’s coast line was given by the Turkish Defense Minister during a conversation with the leaders of the ruling Justice and Development Party.

According to Gercek Gundem, retired Rear Admiral of the Turkish Navy Jihad Aichi recently said that drifting mines that appeared in the Bosporus Strait could lead to a major disaster. “Necessary security measures have been taken. However, they cannot guarantee a 100% security. If any of those mines gets into the Bosporus Strait, it will kill a lot of people,” Jihad Aichi stressed. According to him, there are no doubts that it was Ukraine who allowed the drifting mines to appear in the Black Sea. “Why should Russia put obstacles for its own trade by installing mines in the Black Sea? Russia uses the Black Sea waters for transportation of crude oil, energy carriers, grain, and other exported and imported goods,” he said.

He also mentioned that 2.5% of crude oil is supplied to the outside world through the Turkish straits, and therefore the current situation is critical for many countries.

Due to increased warfare risks in the Black Sea, the cost of oil transportation has gone up dramatically. The price for insurance for oil tankers is higher today than the freight costs. Thus, the cost of chartering a Suezmax class tanker with a capacity of 1 million barrels for transporting oil from the Black Sea to Italy costs $3.5 million, while insurance costs have increased to $5 million. According to Bloomberg, due to warfare risks, which also include drifting Ukrainian mines, insurers demand to pay 10% of the cost of the vessel’s hull. As several market participants told Bloomberg, this is called a “warfare risks premium,” which before Russia started its special operation in Ukraine had been almost zero. This situation has particularly affected companies exporting oil from Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan through Black Sea ports to Novorossiysk or Supsa. This fact is an evidence that Russia is apparently not involved in the incident, and is not interested in the presence of drifting mines in the Black Sea. Unlike Ukraine.

April 19, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | Russia, Turkey, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Does Covid-19 Contain Genetic Sequences From Snake Venom?

By Guy Hatchard | April 14, 2022

An article in Scientific American back in January 2020 reported:

“Snakes—the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra—may be the original source of the newly discovered coronavirus that has triggered an outbreak of a deadly infectious respiratory illness in China this winter.”

The article originated from a Chinese authored paper published in the Journal of Medical Virology on 22 January 2020 entitled Cross-species transmission of the newly identified coronavirus 2019-nCoV and said:

“Our findings suggest that 2019-nCoV has most similar genetic information with bat coronavirus and most similar codon usage bias with snake.“

The essence of the article was the supposition that Covid-19 made its way from snakes to bats and then to the Wuhan wet market, expressed as follows:

“An origin-unknown homologous recombination may have occurred within the spike glycoprotein of the 2019-nCoV… The squared euclidean distance indicates that the 2019-nCoV and snakes from China have the highest similarity in synonymous codon usage bias compared to those of bat, bird, Marmota, human, Manis, and hedgehog”

This idea subsequently gained little traction, because of the improbability of such a train of interspecies transfer, and because public discussion of its conclusions was vigorously suppressed by fact checkers.

The suggestion of the authors to do more research disappeared from view. It has been largely forgotten until now.

Were Some of These Recombined Genetic Sequences From Snakes?

Recent discussion of the origin of the Covid-19 spike protein has suggested that it could be the result of recombinant techniques in the laboratory which joined a number of genetic sequences together as part of research to develop deadly pathogens, and then investigate possible cures.

A paper published in F1000Research entitled “Toxin-like peptides in plasma, urine, and faecal samples from COVID-19 patients” in April 2020 concluded that:

“The presence of toxin-like peptides… suggests a possible association between COVID-19 disease and the release in the body of (oligo-)peptides almost identical to toxic components of venoms from animals…. The presence of these peptides opens new scenarios on the aetiology of the COVID-19 clinical symptoms observed up to now, including neurological manifestations.”

What are Some of the Neurological Effects of Snake Venom?

A study published in 2002 entitled “Cardiac Involvement in Snake Bite” reports:

“Myocardial involvement is seen on occasions and may rarely contribute to morbidity and mortality. ECG changes are usually transient but when persistent they are attributed to direct myocardial damage due to the toxin.”

Other reported neurological effects of snake bite include:

pro and anticoagulant activity leading to ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke,
muscle paralysis through inhibition of neuromuscular transmission leading to respiratory failure.

All of these neurological, thrombotic, and cardiac effects are similar to reported adverse effects of both Covid infection and mRNA vaccination.

Is Covid-19 a Recombination of a Virus and a Toxin?

mRNA vaccines specifically train the human physiology to produce the suspect spike protein. Did this expose vaccine recipients to a toxin? It appears this might be the case.

In which case, the essential design of the mRNA vaccine would have been a grave error. It was training the physiology to produce a toxin.

These discussions are speculative. We now know that early genetic sequences of Covid-19 appear to have been suppressed by NIH on the instructions of the Wuhan Virology Lab.

Was the genetic similarity between snake genetics and Covid-19 too explosive to admit, whether they came from snakes or not? Certainly, this possibility should have been investigated vigorously.

It might have led to an understanding of the origins of Covid, but more importantly, it might have led to more effective treatments for Covid.

It might also have shed light on the source of the wide range of neurotoxic effects of both Covid and mRNA vaccination.

Whatever the eventual conclusion of further investigative research: biotechnology experimentation to research and develop pathogens and toxins must stop now. It amounts to a ticking time bomb.

April 16, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, NIH | Leave a comment

The worst of Covid advertising

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | April 16, 2022

Advertising / propaganda played a massive part in keeping citizens compliant and afraid. Quite frankly, advertising companies should feel ashamed with the amount of societal manipulation they caused in exchange for government coin.

Early on in the pandemic, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the UK called for an increase in the perceived threat of Covid by using hard-hitting emotional messages. However, it has since been revealed that government contracts and messages were in place weeks before lockdowns were even suggested.

These adverts were produced in collaboration with behavioural scientists, trying to nudge people to do what they wanted using tactics that operate below the level of awareness.

The UK spent over £240 million on these adverts in 2020 and up to £320 million in 2021. Obscene amounts of money. To put this in context, the government spent £46 million on advertising “Get Ready for Brexit” in 2019, the biggest spend since the second world war.

I have posted some of the worst images from the UK below. They made people feel guilty, ashamed, worried that they would kill people and angry against those who did not precisely follow the rules.

April 16, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

The Face Mask Cult

The Daily Sceptic | April 13, 2022

There follows a post by Hector Drummond, a former academic who worked in risk, who says when he came to research his new book The Face Mask Cult on the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19 the evidence was threadbare.

In 2021 I decided to write an FAQ on all aspects of Covid, lockdowns and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). I started with face masks, as they seemed to be the easiest issue to deal with, thinking that the whole mask situation could be summed up in five to six pages. After a few days work I had twenty pages of text, and another twenty pages of reminder notes on further aspects of face masks that I needed to consider and research. Those notes ballooned out in the next few weeks, and I realised that the use of face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 was a far bigger topic than I had appreciated, and would require substantial amounts of writing, and months of research and literature-reading.

It took until the next year before I decided I’d written enough on the topic. I had read an enormous number of scientific papers and other articles on masks, and gone through some of them with a fine-tooth comb (see Part 3 of the book, for instance). I had spent considerable time analysing, synthesising and rewriting, and my short FAQ article had become a comprehensive 400-page book that tackled all aspects of the issue, as well as a unique resource with its extensive scientific literature review section.

In all my researches I failed to come across very much in the way of convincing evidence that masks work. The papers that were supposed to show that they did all turned out to be poor pieces of science. None were randomly-controlled peer-reviewed trials. Some were observational studies, with inadequate controls for dealing with the possibility of faulty or biased recollection. Some were ‘modelling’ studies, in which a computer program was used to ‘model’ the effect of face masks on disease spread. Modelling studies are generally hopeless at providing any confirming evidence for the effectiveness of face masks as they require the modellers to make assumptions about how effective the masks are when writing their programs. Some were mannequin studies, in which a dummy in a lab with artificial breathing functions, rather than a real person in the real world, was used. Some were simply tests of the porosity of various materials in regard to salt aerosols.

Most studies ignored the issue of face mask gaps, despite it being well-known in the field that gaps around the sides of masks will let such large amounts of virions in and out that any effect that the masks do have will be completely negated. (This is why medical institutions require ‘fit tests’ for masks – not that fit tests are very reliable, as I explain in the book.)

Even these dubious studies that claimed to show an effect for masks didn’t show much of an effect. The less wild ones would typically claim that the cloth masks would stop 5% to 15% of virions, but they never presented any reason to believe the further claim that was often made that this would cause a 5% to 15% reduction in cases, or a 5% to 15% reduction in deaths. The closest such studies got to doing so was when an author would occasionally speculate, in an airy fashion, that if the disease in question’s R₀ rate happened to be close to 1.0, then maybe widespread mask use (assuming masks had some small effect) would be enough to push the R₀ rate below 1.0, in which case the disease would die out, although of course even if all their assumptions were true and masks did push the disease’s R₀ rate below 1.0 it doesn’t follow that the disease would die out anytime soon. It could well be that the disease’s R₀ rate would quickly come back over 1.0 again as soon as we stop masking, and so in order to stop the disease spreading again we would have to wear masks for years on end, or even indefinitely.

But what about all those government reports written by distinguished scientists assuring us that there were now truckloads of research proving that masks work? This is perhaps the most shocking part of the whole face mask con. The 2020 DELVE report and its updates, the 2020 Royal Society report, and the 2022 Department for Education’s Evidence Summary were disgraceful pieces of misinformation, as I show in detail in the book. Even more shocking, perhaps, is the fact that there have been so many acts of wrongdoing in the last two years that the scientific butchery committed in these reports is completely unknown to the general public. The fact, for instance, that the Royal Society’s report relied heavily upon a low-grade Chinese study, written in Chinese only, and published in an obscure Chinese journal, which reported fantastically unrealistic results, is never even going to briefly flit through the mind of the average person, because the average person will never come across any reference to this shameful affair in the mainstream media.

I felt vindicated as I put the finishing touches to the book when several prominent advocates of masks, such as Trish Greenhalgh, Jeremy Howard and many others, started to admit that cloth masks were useless. Not that they wanted us to stop wearing masks – they now wanted us to move onto medical-grade respirator masks, like N95s and FFP2s, as Germany required. Needless to say, these mask fanatics didn’t bother to mention that Germany’s stringent mask policy has been a complete failure.

The book I finished up with is a serious corrective to the endless propaganda we have been fed about masks. It lays out the case against masks in detail, considers the harms done by mask-wearing (harms which are usually ignored by scientists and governments), closely examines many claims made about masks by both sides, and backs it all up with an enormous number of references to the scientific literature. Whenever anyone who wants you to wear a mask says, “Follow the Science”, just show them this book and say, “I already did”.

You can buy the book here in paperback and on Kindle.

April 15, 2022 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 | Leave a comment

The question MSM should be asking about Partygate

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | April 14, 2022

Partygate, as the name suggests, concerns parties and in particular parties in Downing Street during lockdowns. For those who don’t know no. 10 Downing Street is where the current Prime Minister works and resides, in this case, Boris Johnson. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, lives and works next door at number 11. Number 10 may look small from the outside but actually comprises of more than 100 rooms.

From March 2020, the UK had a number of lockdowns and until recently some form of restrictions in place. As with most countries, many of these restrictions included who you could and couldn’t visit or numbers of people allowed indoors or outdoors.

It has since transpired that whilst authoring and implementing all of these draconian rules, along with the harsh penalties if the rules were broken, Boris, his wife Carrie, Rishi and other staff at Downing Street had at least 12 parties. At least 50 penalty notices are being handed out to Boris, Carrie, Rishi and others.

The MSM is focussing on Boris breaking the rules and lying when asked if he had broken them. However, the question they should be asking is:

Why was the government desperately trying to scare the public about Covid when they themselves weren’t scared in the slightest?

Were they so stressed and tired of it all that they were happy to risk their lives just to have a few parties or did they know, the whole time, that Covid would mainly kill the elderly and vulnerable so they themselves were perfectly safe. Or perhaps they knew of the potential dangers a lab made virus could pose but had access to an already prepared inhibitor which targeted the spike protein?

If the correct answer is that they knew Covid was not as deadly as being made out, then the MSM should be investigating why they continued to scare the public. Where did the idea come from? Why was it pushed so hard if they knew it was rubbish? Why was no cost/benefit analysis undertaken and if it was why did they continue to destroy the economy?

Another anomaly, which verges into conspiracy theory territory, is why was Boris Johnson partying after he came out of intensive care less than a month previously? Surely you would take it easy for a while after such a big scare? Even if Boris wasn’t bothered, staff would have been shell shocked and scared for their own safety? Politicians and Journalists voiced rumours at the time but they were quickly retracted.

Come on MSM, step up and ask the correct questions.

April 14, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception | Covid-19, UK | Leave a comment

6 Double Standards Public Health Officials Used to Justify COVID Vaccines

Madhava Setty, M.D. | The Defender | April 13, 2022

We are not only in an epidemiological crisis, we also are in an epistemological crisis. How do we know what we know? What differentiates opinion from a justified belief?

For nearly two years, the public has been inundated by a sophisticated messaging campaign that urges us to “trust the science.”

But how can a non-scientist know what the science is really saying?

Legacy media sources offer us an easy solution: “Trust us.”

Legions of so-called “independent” fact-checking sites that serve to eliminate any wayward thinking keep those with a modicum of skepticism in line.

“Research” has been redefined to mean browsing Wikipedia citations.

Rather than being considered for their merit, dissenting opinions are more easily dismissed as misinformation by labeling their source as untrustworthy.

How do we know these sources are untrustworthy? They must be if they offer a dissenting opinion!

This form of circular reasoning is the central axiom of all dogmatic systems of thought. Breaking the spell of dogmatic thinking is not easy, but it is possible.

In this article I describe six examples of double standards medical authorities have used to create the illusion their COVID-19 narrative is logical and sensible.

This illusion has been used with devastating effect to raise vaccine compliance.

Rather than citing scientific publications or expert opinions that conflict with our medical authorities’ narrative — information that will be categorically dismissed because it appears on The Defender — I will instead demonstrate how, from the beginning, the official narrative has been inconsistent, hypocritical and/or contradictory.

1. COVID deaths are ‘presumed,’ but vaccine deaths must be ‘proven’

As of April 8, VAERS included 26,699 reports of deaths following COVID vaccines.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially acknowledges only nine of these.

In order to establish causality, the CDC requires autopsies to rule out any possible etiology of death before the agency will place culpability on the vaccine.

But the CDC uses a very different standard when it comes to identifying people who died from COVID.

The 986,000 COVID deaths reported by the CDC here are, as footnote [1] indicates, “Deaths with confirmed or presumed [emphasis added] COVID-19.”

If a person dies with a positive PCR test or is presumed to have COVID, the CDC will count that as COVID-19 death.

Note that in the CDC’s definition, a COVID fatality does not mean the person died from the disease, only with the disease.

Why is an autopsy required to establish a COVID vaccine death but not to establish a COVID death?

Conversely, why is recent exposure to SARS-CoV-2 prior to a death sufficient to establish causality — but recent exposure to a vaccine considered coincidental?

2. CDC uses VAERS data to investigate myocarditis yet claims VAERS data on vaccine deaths is unreliable

On June 23, 2021, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met to assess the risk of peri/myocarditis following COVID vaccination, especially in young males.

This was the key slide in this presentation:

The observed risk of myocarditis is 219 in about 4.3 million second doses of COVID vaccine in males 18 to 24 years old.

The CDC is fine with using VAERS data to assess risk of myocarditis following vaccination — yet the agency rejects all but nine of the 26,699 reports of deaths following the vaccines.

Why does the CDC trust the peri/myocarditis data in VAERS but not the data on deaths?

One reason may be because the onset of myocarditis symptoms is closely tied to the time of vaccination.

In other words, because this condition closely follows inoculation the two events are highly correlated and suggestive of causation.

For example, here is another slide from the same presentation:

The majority of cases of vaccine-induced peri/myocarditis suffered symptoms within the first few days after injection. As explained above, this is highly suggestive of a causative effect of the vaccine.

A recent study in The Lancet included a similar graph, taken directly from VAERS, on deaths following vaccination:

Once again, the event (death) closely follows vaccination in the majority of cases.

As we regard the two graphs above we should acknowledge that the temporal relationship between the injection and the adverse event is suggestive of causation but does not stand as proof of such.

However, it is also important to note that if the vaccination caused the deaths, that is exactly what the plot would look like.

It should be clear that the CDC has no justification for dismissing VAERS deaths if the agency is willing to accept reports of myo/pericarditis from the very same reporting system.

3. CDC pushes ‘relative risk’ for determining vaccine efficacy, but uses ‘absolute risk’ to downplay risk of adverse events

In Pfizer’s Phase 3 trial, nine times more placebo recipients developed severe COVID than those vaccinated during the short period of observation. This constitutes a relative risk reduction of 90%.

This seemed an encouraging finding and was used as a major talking point to compel the public to accept this experimental therapy despite the absence of any long-term data.

However, the risk of a trial participant contracting severe COVID (Table S5) was 1 in 21,314 (0.0047%) if they were vaccinated.

If they received the placebo, the risk was still only 9 in 21,259 (0.0423%).

The vaccine reduced the absolute risk of contracting severe disease by 0.038%.

Mainstream media and the CDC never mentioned the minuscule reduction in absolute risk of contracting severe COVID by getting inoculated.

Moreover, with 0.6% of vaccine recipients in the trial suffering a serious vaccine injury (one that results in death, medical or surgical intervention, hospitalization or an impending threat to life), approximately 16 serious adverse events will result for every serious case of COVID prevented by vaccination.

However, when it comes to risk of myo/pericarditis, the CDC states, “Myocarditis and pericarditis have rarely been reported, especially in adolescents and young adult males within several days after COVID-19 vaccination.”

The CDC further states, “While absolute risk remains small, the risk for myocarditis is higher for males ages 12 to 39 years…”

In other words, the risk of adverse events is being considered in absolute terms, not relative.

The CDC presentation slide above (Table 1) indicates the relative risk of contracting myo/pericarditis in males 18 to 24 is 27 to more than 200 times higher than expected in (unvaccinated) young men that age.

When assuaging the public’s fear around vaccine-induced myocarditis, the CDC finds it useful to cite absolute risk — yet when promoting the efficacy of the vaccine, the CDC emphasizes relative risks.

This double standard has been quietly and masterfully employed to reduce vaccine hesitancy and encourage compliance.

4. FDA requires randomized control studies for early treatment medications — but not for boosters

The CDC reports that as of April 8, 98.3 million Americans had received a COVID booster.

On March 29, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a second booster for the immunocompromised and adults over age 50.

These authorizations were made not because of solid evidence the boosters are effective but rather to remedy the fact that the primary vaccine series has been widely shown to have waning efficacy within a few months.

As reported by The Defender, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s vaccine division, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, admitted the fourth booster dose approved last week was a “stopgap measure” — in other words, a temporary measure to be implemented until a proper solution may be found in the future.

Despite the lack of solid evidence, the FDA continues to recommend and authorize boosters.

Yet when it comes to early treatment options, the agency holds medicines — including those the agency has already licensed and approved for other uses — to a different standard.

In this CNN interview from August 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warns people not to take ivermectin for COVID because “there is no clinical evidence that this works.”

With regard to hydroxychloroquine, Fauci said, “We know that every single good study — and by good study, I mean randomized control study in which the data are firm and believable — has s shown that hydroxychloroquine is not effective in the treatment of Covid-19”, as reported by the BBC on July 29, 2020.

Where, then, are the randomized control studies in which the data are firm and believable that show boosters are effective at preventing COVID?

There aren’t any. None have been done.

As of today, the FDA still refuses to authorize the use of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID despite hundreds of studies that demonstrate significant benefits (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) in prevention as well as early and late treatment.

The double standard here is blatant. There are no randomized control studies that show boosters are effective in preventing COVID.

Nevertheless, these experimental therapies have the FDA’s blessing while inexpensive, highly effective safe and proven medicines are ignored despite the enormous evidence that supports their use.

5. FDA uses immunobridging to justify Pfizer shots for young kids, but rejects antibodies as indicative of immune protection from COVID

Immunobridging is a method of inferring a vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing disease by assessing its ability to elicit an immune response through the measurement of biochemical markers, typically antibody levels.

The FDA asserts the presence of SARS-COV-2 antibodies is not necessarily indicative of immune protection from COVID.

Moreover, the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biologics Product Advisory Committee reached a consensus last week that antibody levels cannot be used as a correlate for vaccine effectiveness.

Their decision is consistent with the CDC’s executive summary of a science brief released on October 29, 2021:

“Data are presently insufficient to determine an antibody titer threshold that indicates when an individual is protected from infection.”

Nevertheless, the FDA used immunobridging as a means to justify authorization of the Pfizer vaccine to children ages 5 to 11, as explained in The Defender here and here.

Because there were no deaths or serious cases of COVID in the pediatric trial, the FDA chose to reject its own position (and that of its advisory committee) regarding antibody titers as a correlate for vaccine efficacy.

6. Causation must be proven for vaccine injuries, but correlation suffices for proving vaccine efficacy

When it comes to vaccine injuries the public is often reminded that correlation does not equal causation.

In other words, just because an injury was preceded by inoculation doesn’t mean the vaccine caused the injury.

But what constitutes causation in medicine? A mechanism of action needs to be identified and pathological studies must confirm this mechanism while eliminating other potential causative factors. Causation can be proven only on a case-by-case basis.

Proving causation requires an enormous burden of proof in medicine.

For example, does smoking cause lung cancer? The answer is yes, it can. That doesn’t mean that it will.

However, when it comes to the benefit of medical intervention, such as a vaccine, causation does not have to be established. Correlation suffices.

In the COVID vaccine trials, fewer vaccinated people contracted COVID than unvaccinated ones. Yet there were those who received the vaccine who contracted the disease anyway.

To be fair, this is how all new medical interventions are evaluated. The benefit doesn’t have to be caused by the vaccine in the strictest sense, there just has to be a correlation between vaccination and a relative protective effect.

The more often this happens, the more confident we can be that the outcome wasn’t simply a coincidence.

Likewise, when it comes to assessing the harm of medical intervention, the most sensible outcome to consider is mortality. After all, what would be the point of introducing a vaccine that prevented some deaths while causing more?

Nevertheless, this is, in fact, what we have done with the Pfizer product. The interim results from the Phase 3 trial demonstrated that all-cause mortality in the vaccinated cohort was higher than in the placebo.

This glaring problem gets brushed aside because there were two deaths from COVID in the placebo arm versus just one in the vaccinated cohort, allowing the vaccine manufacturer to claim a 50% efficacy in preventing this outcome.

However, if we attribute a protective benefit to the vaccine in preventing this one fatality, we must also conclude that the vaccine was responsible for the extra death when considering mortality from all causes.

Doing otherwise would be applying yet another double standard.

How the pandemic could have played out differently

To summarize how devastating the use of these double standards in crafting the “safe and effective” narrative was, let’s look at how different the situation would be if we had adopted the opposite standard:

There would have been an extremely low number of deaths from COVID. Very few, if any, autopsies have definitively confirmed that a fatality was caused by SARS-CoV-2. If confirmation by autopsy is the standard, there have been essentially zero deaths from COVID during the pandemic.
On the other hand, if we presume the deaths registered in VAERS are in fact vaccine-induced fatalities — similar to how the CDC presumed many deaths from COVID — we can affirm there have been more than 26,000 vaccine deaths.
Using absolute risk reduction as a measure of efficacy, vaccines would have been widely rejected as ineffective, providing only a 0.038% risk reduction for contracting severe COVID.
Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would have been readily available for people who got COVID. And for those who got the vaccine but got COVID anyway, these medicines would have been a great alternative to boosters, which wouldn’t have been approved due to the lack of a single randomized control study proving they work.
No children between the ages of 5 and 11 would have received this risky, experimental vaccine as it wouldn’t have been authorized for this age group — because Pfizer’s pediatric trials did not demonstrate any meaningful outcomes in children ages 5 to 11.
The Pfizer vaccine would no longer be in use because interim data demonstrated that all-cause mortality is higher in the vaccinated.

Madhava Setty, M.D. is senior science editor for The Defender.

April 14, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA | Leave a comment

Leaked files expose Britain’s covert infiltration of Palestinian refugee camps

By Kit Klarenberg | The Cradle | April 13 2022

In February, Lebanese journalist Mohammed Shoaib was arrested on suspicion of collusion with Israel’s Mossad spy agency. The writer who worked for Al-Jaras, confessed that the notorious spy agency secretly paid him to author “dozens” of anti-Hezbollah articles, receiving a paltry $30 to $70 per article.

In particular, Shoaib was tasked with writing hit jobs on the “Iranian occupation” of Lebanon, and falsely linking Hezbollah with the August 2020 Beirut port blast, drug trafficking, and murder of political activists.

It is also alleged that Mossad specifically requested his work incite hostility towards Palestinian refugees in the country who number almost 300,000. In all, Lebanon hosts more than 1.7 million refugees and has the largest per capita population of refugees in the world.

Roughly half inhabit camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), where they endure abysmal living conditions, overcrowding, poverty, unemployment, lack of access to justice, and other unspeakable hardships. The 11-year, foreign-backed crisis in neighboring Syria has also prompted Palestinian refugees there – and Syrian citizens – to seek sanctuary in Lebanon.

Given Israel’s track record of multifaceted crimes against the Palestinian people, that they are targeting an already vulnerable refugee population for propaganda purposes is hardly surprising. Nonetheless, Israel is not the only hostile foreign country resorting to these tactics.

Leaked files reviewed by The Cradle reveal the British Foreign Office has for many years secretly meddled in Lebanon’s refugee camps, courtesy of ARK, a shadowy intelligence cutout run by probable MI6 operative Alistair Harris. London’s agenda is rather different than Tel Aviv’s, however – it seeks to subtly stir up revolutionary fervor, and exploit them as unwitting foot soldiers in its ongoing clandestine war against Lebanon’s ruling elite.

‘Community Engagement’

The documents indicate ARK has been operating in all 12 camps since 2009, implementing British-funded “programming” of various kinds. This experience has granted the company “granular understanding” of their internal political, economic, ideological, religious and practical dynamics, and led to the establishment of a “diverse delivery team” and array of “local contacts” with “access throughout all camps and gatherings,” meaning community-level discussions and activities of residents can be spied upon and influenced.

This intimate, insidious insight is reinforced by “daily monitoring of neighborhood-level WhatsApp groups,” with “any new information, such as affiliation between a local group and a faction, or conflict between factions” documented by ARK’s in-house “stakeholder tracker.”

Typically, ARK has engaged in small-scale initiatives in the camps, including the restoration of streets and cemeteries, recycling initiatives, assisting in the launch of small businesses, providing income to disadvantaged and disabled residents, creating nurseries and daycare centers, and even launching a community hub, Sawa Coffeeshop. It serves to this day as “a popular place for youth to gather and promote civic engagement in their community and a shared Palestinian identity that bridges factional differences.”

In submissions to the Foreign Office dating to May 2019, ARK proposed ramping up these activities significantly. It pledged to create “Community Leadership Committees” in each camp, composed of hand-picked “stakeholders” – including NGOs, youth activists, women’s organizations, and representatives of neighborhood armed groups – to identify “quick impact projects” that could be implemented therein. These projects aim to “counter threats to social stability in the camps, create or improve livelihood opportunities, and provide better access to services.”

A social media platform created by ARK, Nastopia – which boasted 20,000 “highly invested” followers on Facebook at the time, a figure that has almost doubled since – was forecast to be fundamental to these efforts.

The page, run by a 24-strong team of ARK-trained “youth reporters”, would be used to recruit local participants, increase awareness and demand for “community engagement and improved conditions” among camp residents. Other activities include the promotion of Foreign Office-financed projects and to publicize “success stories” generated by them, while “promoting Palestinian culture and a sense of belonging, and tackling social injustice.”

Nastopia was “already [an] effective voice for connecting Palestinian communities, particularly youth” by that point. ARK cited a recent “Camps Films Festival” organized by the platform, covered by Al-Jazeera, which showcased “films portraying life in the camps and what it means to be Palestinian,” and in the process provided “positive examples of a shared identity.”

All along, the Nastopia page was to be monitored with “community feedback” on the assorted initiatives gauged to identify areas in which these activities “could be adapted to maximize impact.” Specialist training provided to its staff meant the platform could also serve “as a forum for online and offline discussion about social injustices [and] virtual space to talk about topics considered taboo in the camps,” allowing ARK to burrow even deeper inside the heads of refugees.

‘Active Citizenship’

If the obvious surveillance and manipulation dimensions of ARK’s project weren’t troubling enough, it takes on an acutely sinister character when one considers a key objective of “highlighting successful initiatives” in the camps was to “[enhance] the audience’s confidence in their own ability to contribute to social change.”

A Foreign Office-commissioned Target Audience Analysis conducted by ARK in March 2019 sought to pinpoint a segment of Lebanon’s population that could be mobilized to “affect positive social change,” and methods by which tensions between sectarian communities could be reduced, in order to unify them in opposition to the country’s ruling elite. Reading between the lines, it gives every appearance of a blueprint for the overthrow of the Lebanese government.

An ideal audience was duly identified, representing 12 percent of the population, who disavowed violence but did not reject “other forms of contentious politics,” and could be “influenced” to engage in “behaviors leading to positive social change,” such as protests and community initiatives.

The only questions for ARK were: “What might be done to enable other Lebanese to have similar confidence in their potential to contribute to positive social change?” and “how might this segment of the population … be grown to include a larger fraction of the public?”

The answer, ARK proposed, was to both covertly and overtly promote the message that “change is possible and ordinary citizens have a role to play in achieving change,” by way of propaganda campaigns and civil society initiatives “[highlighting] where change has been achieved or where threats to Lebanon’s stability have been countered.” This would demonstrate to the country’s diverse population that “barriers” to reform can be overcome, by taking matters into their own hands.

Providing evidence of “responsive government at local levels” was crucial for reinforcing “principles of active citizenship” among Lebanon’s population – and the analysis specifically cited Syrians and Palestinians, who are mostly Sunni Muslims, as representing an “important part” of the country’s demography, to be motivated in this manner.

In other words, Foreign Office activities in the refugee camps form just one fragment of a wider, clandestine, multi-channel assault on public perceptions in Lebanon that Britain has been waging against its democratically-elected government.

A mobilized force

One can judge these efforts by their fruits. In October 2019, seven months after ARK’s Target Audience Analysis was supplied to the Foreign Office, large-scale protests engulfed the streets of Beirut, which have ebbed and flowed ever since, and generated enormous amounts of western media coverage along the way.

The extent to which ARK’s Foreign Office-funded meddling in Lebanon influenced this incendiary unrest may never be fully quantifiable, but it may be significant that in July that year, thousands of refugees across several camps began demonstrating in unison, demanding the government immediately reform employment laws barring them as “foreign workers” from numerous professions.

This turmoil was arguably the spark that ignited the entire “October Revolution” – and in one of its Foreign Office submissions, ARK refers to how it “takes pride” in ensuring refugees recruited to its illicit schemes receive “annual leave, sick leave, and health insurance,” despite this not being “legally necessary” due to local legislation “discriminating against Palestinians.”

Who benefits?

The influence of ARK on Lebanon’s impending general election in May, the country’s first since the riots began, is even more unambiguous. Several news outlets have hailed the unprecedentedly high profusion of young candidates vying for office – 80 in total, many of them women.

A clandestine Foreign Office project influenced by the aforementioned Target Audience Analysis sought to enlist Lebanese youth as “agents of change”, fostering among them a culture of active political participation, in order that they could better “hold political institutions and individuals accountable,” and increase “electoral participation” in favor of opposition parties.

Under its auspices, ARK convened “boot camps” in “priority areas” of Lebanon, cultivated “a national group capable of pushing for greater change” composed of young women, and created social media assets and youth-focused websites featuring political interviews, question-and-answer sessions, coverage of boot camp meetings, “calls to action,” and “humorous messaging campaigns.” Activity on these assets was scheduled to ramp up ahead of the 2022 elections.

Clearly, irrespective of the outcome of the Lebanon May elections, the ultimate victors won’t be the parties and candidates that secure office, or the average Lebanese citizens who elected them, but Britain – for whatever form the next government takes, one way or another, it will serve London’s financial, ideological, military, and political interests.

April 14, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception | Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, UK | Leave a comment

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