Washington ‘hunts’ Russian citizens in third countries – Moscow
RT | December 19, 2021
Moscow has condemned the extradition of a Russian IT firm owner from Switzerland to the US. His lawyer said Washington wants to tie the man to alleged meddling by Moscow in the 2016 American presidential election.
The extradition of businessman Vladislav Klyushin is “another episode of Washington’s continuing ‘hunt’ for Russian nationals in third countries,” the Russian Embassy in Switzerland, told TASS on Sunday.
Spokesperson Vladimir Khokhlov said Moscow was “deeply disappointed” by the decision of a Swiss court to reject Klyushin’s appeal to block his extradition on Friday. The man was handed over to American police officers in Zurich on Saturday, who escorted him on a flight, according to Switzerland’s Federal Office of Justice.
The software developed by Klyushin’s media monitoring and analytics company, M13, is used by Russian state agencies, including the federal government and Presidential Executive Office, according to the firm’s website. The businessman was detained by Swiss police in March during a family skiing trip, his lawyer, Oliver Ciric, told the media.
Swiss justice officials said the US accused Klyushin of insider trading that involved “tens of millions of dollars.”
Ciric believes the persecution of the businessman is politically motivated, and that he will face “inhuman and degrading treatment” when extradited to the US.
He told The Times in September that the charges of insider trading were being used as a pretext to transport Klyushin to the US. The lawyer said his client would likely be charged with heading an alleged Russian covert operation to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election and hack the server of the Democratic Party.
In the same interview, Ciric claimed that Klyushin had access to “certain security information” related to the Russian government, and rebuffed recruitment attempts by US and British intelligence agents in the past.
The lawyer said that Klyushin’s criminal case file has been sealed by a Massachusetts court, which is “quite unusual” for financial charges that are typically publicized by a US financial regulator.
US officials accused the Kremlin of seeking to influence the vote and hacking the server of the Democratic National Committee and an email account of John Podesta, who led Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump. Russia consistently denied these allegations. Klyushin has denied any involvement in insider trading and hacking.
A week of life under the Ministry of Fear. This time, we locked ourselves down.
By Laura Dodsworth | December 18, 2021
Last Sunday evening, Boris Johnson interrupted the nation’s TV viewing with an announcement about the new Covid-19 variant. “Fighting Omicron is the most important thing we can do,” he said. It’s early days, and in the absence of clinical data or indeed any rise in hospitalisations and deaths, it remains to be seen if this is true.
We were left in no doubt about how to fight – get boosted. In retrospect, the triadic structure of previous press briefings (“Hands, Face, Space” and “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives”) was the ultimate in sophistication compared to the frequent repetition of “boosted” (eight times), “booster” (eight times) and “vaccination” (four times) in one short speech.
This past week exemplifies nearly two years of life under the “Ministry of Fear”, as Sir Desmond Swayne MP termed it. Amid a Tory rebellion, he delivered a tirade in the House of Commons on the day that MPs voted on Covid Passes, the expansion of mask mandates and compulsory jabs for NHS workers. He accused the UK government of “twisting the fear lever” and unleashing “the dogs of war”.
He is not alone. Andrew Bridgen MP said that, in his opinion, “the most dangerous epidemic sweeping the world and sweeping our country is an epidemic of fear”. I agree Pandemics come and eventually go, but our basic psychology is here to stay. The UK government has relied upon the use of fear, nudges, behavioural science techniques and propaganda to subliminally encourage people to comply with the regulations, as I set out in my book A State of Fear: how the UK government weaponised fear in the Covid-19 pandemic.
These techniques work so well that, this time, we have essentially locked ourselves down. Without so much as a new law, statutory instrument, or prime ministerial request, Nativity plays, office Christmas parties and pub bookings are cancelled. Stocks of lateral flow test ran dry. People queued for eight hours for their boosters. The media enthusiastically obliged with a new “tidal wave” of articles and programmes prophesying catastrophic cases and demonising the “selfish” unjabbed. Journalists asked for more restrictions, sooner.
I spoke to Swayne who told me he believes the fear is driven very much by the doom-mongering scientists on SAGE and Independent SAGE whose worst case scenarios necessitate action, and then “the media hams it up”.
One of the government’s early concerns was that some people actually understood that the risk from Covid-19 to their demographic is low, hence fear was leveraged to ensure everyone feel at risk so that they would follow the rules. Similarly, last Sunday, Johnson acknowledged that “some people” would believe Omicron to be less severe than previous variants – and at this point there is little clinical data to prove Omicron will be more serious or able to evade our natural immunity and vaccine-derived antibodies – but he warned “scientists cannot say that Omicron is less severe”. Essentially we were told to ignore the lack of scientific evidence and instead embrace fear and follow instructions.
So, how to convince us of a threat, before the threat has actually manifested? By using the same methods they have honed throughout the pandemic, including the use of big scary numbers, advertising, subtle messaging, alarmist language and the most punitive fines since the Dark Ages.
I dedicated a chapter of my book to the metrics of fear – daily death tolls, the reproduction number, cases and worst case modelling. This week’s numbers have crumbled like icing sugar.
Sajid Javid estimated that there were 200,000 infections, which appears to have been a back of the envelope calculation, based upon assumptions and extrapolations. Dominic Raab said there were 250 people in hospital with Omicron, when there were 10. Dr Jenny Harries, head of the UKHSA, warned the Omicron variant is “probably the most significant threat” of the pandemic and we should expect a “staggering” growth rate, but her dire warning was juxtaposed with acknowledging it’s too early a stage to be clear about the clinical severity.
These speed-generated pessimistic numbers and contradictions give the rational mind whiplash and leave you vulnerable to fear. As Swayne put it, “It’s designed to make your flesh creep. Even if you then ameliorate it, the first scary bit is out there.”
To lay the groundwork, masks were re-introduced as a “softening up exercise for Plan B,” according to a government advisor who sits on a government Covid taskforce. He anonymously confided that, “Masks are a behavioural psychology policy. We need to stop pretending that it’s about public health. Nudge is a big thing in government.” Masks turn us into walking billboards advertising danger.
I have already argued that the whole point of the Winter Plan was Plan B and Covid Passes. The government has not provided convincing scientific evidence for vaccine passports, but they are widely understood to be a ‘tool’ to drive take-up. Now, fines of up to £10,000 can be imposed for falsifying Covid Passports – a life-destroying amount designed to strike fear into your heart.
The advisor shared internal documents with me that show Covid Passes were ready to go in early November. Worryingly, they also show that government is also working with analysts to see whether “mandatory vaccination would hit the right target or not”.
The government has launched new advertising campaigns. One TV advertisement, intended to encourage ventilation has frightened children. One father wrote to tell he had complained to his MP and the Advertising Standards Authority because the “sinister black mist” snaking out of people’s mouths terrified his four and six year old in the ad break of a Christmas film. His daughter had nightmares and was still crying about “germs” the next day. He is angry about the “intentionally fear-inducing piece of Gov media forced in their face”.
Martin Kemp played the part of Santa Claus preparing for Christmas by getting his booster jab in a government advertisement. Santa has a long history of being enlisted for propaganda purposes from Soviet space missions to selling World War Two US government bonds. Even Tesco got in on the act this year in their festive ad, making Santa brandish a Covid Pass QR code to enter the country. However, this badly misjudged public mood and #BoycottTesco trended on Twitter.
Press and social media ads have returned to the red and yellow ‘danger’ style chevons, although they feature smiling younger people presumably boosted against Omicron. The “O” in boosted is golden and enlarged, presumably to echo “O-micron” and also evoke the circle of protection Johnson wants the booster to deliver. The people are surrounded with a warming Ready Brek-style glow.
I warned in The Telegraph in October that I would not be surprised to see ministers on television, urging us to follow restrictions in order or to “save Christmas”, once again. I’ll be on Santa’s ‘Nice List’ for getting that right.
Some polls are used as both a nudge and a spoiler of public policy. When you see a result such as 76% of Britons want to see the return of compulsory face masks in shops and on public transport (Yougov) you are meant to identify with the group and imagine yourself in the majority – “ah yes, that is what I think too!” The poll was also a signal to seed the idea of the ensuing policy change. This mutually influential relationship between polls and policy is especially clear in the case of questions such as “If someone has had two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, but it has been over six months since their second dose, would you consider that person to be ‘fully vaccinated’?” (also Yougov) which should have nothing to do with public opinion.
Polls don’t always go the ‘right way’ though. Good Morning Britain ran a Twitter poll which asked “With Omicrom cases doubling every two days, is it time to make vaccines mandatory?” After 89% of 44,533 respondents voted no, the Twitter poll was pulled. Presumably it was not the answer that GMB wanted and, curtain pulled back, they knew that we knew it.
There is less fear in the air this time despite the “tidal wave” of fear-mongering. Redfield and Wilton Strategies latest research into public attitudes found that 81% of people plan to have a normal Christmas and New Year and feelings of safety in public have only marginally declined. Once you have seen the nudges you cannot un-see them, and fear cannot be sustained indefinitely.
When the government resorts to fear and hyperbole to gain compliance, it shows what they think of us. We are emotionally kettled rather than treated as responsible individuals with agency. As a Nudge Unit report said, we have a “powerful tendency to conform” and the government relentlessly exploits this human feature. I suspect that this time, the government is keen to address concerns that it has not acted swiftly enough in the past, and believes the strong warnings are in our best interests. Perhaps Ministers are themselves in thrall to the anxiety-inducing steep-lined graphs.
10 Downing Street released a nugget sized version of Johnson’s Omicron announcement on Youtube, with a tight crop and dramatic music. The selected few dramatic sentences could have been borrowed from a disaster genre ‘B’ movie. I’m not sure if Youtube comments are more or less valid than Yougov, but they are certainly revealingly scathing about “fear inducing language”, “Orwellian passports” and NHS queues.
I think there is a sense that people will do quite a lot to have a normal Christmas and get life back to normal, but fear of Covid and trust in the messaging are running out, just like those lateral flow tests.
Omicron scare tactics
By Joel S Hirschhorn | December 17, 2021
What is the public to believe about omicron variant? The usual nutty pro-vaccine media are making a lot of fear-mongering noise about omicron.
Here are some things to keep in mind.
A very new medical research article provided compelling information that COVID vaccines are not effective against omicron. The article concluded: “The Omicron variant presents a serious threat to many existing COVID-19 vaccines and therapies.” The only data coming out is on the ineffectiveness of the vaccines. There are no data on whether ivermectin and natural immunity are equally ineffective.
This too was said: “The scientific community has chased after SARS-CoV-2 variants for a year. As more and more of them appeared, our interventions directed to the spike became increasingly ineffective. The Omicron variant has now put an exclamation mark on this point.”
Here is a really important point to keep in mind. Omicron may look like it has high transmissibility, but this may have much more to do with the ineffectiveness of vaccines than with the intrinsic nature of this variant!
See my previous article on omicron that showed research indicating intrinsic low transmissibility relative to delta, and similar to other variants:
Consider these relevant omicron facts.
In South Africa, with only 26% vaccinated, despite omicron, not only has there been no surge in COVID deaths, they are the lowest they’ve been in 18 months. This, after more than three weeks into omicron in South Africa. If screams about a surge were accurate, it would have started by now. And doctors there say the omicron cases are far less severe than presumably delta.
Fewer than 1 in 50 people with confirmed omicron cases are being hospitalized in South Africa – which suggests that the actual hospitalization to infection rate is far lower still. Why? Because so many people with omicron have such mild cases they don’t bother getting tested.
South African scientists announced the discovery of the Omicron variant on November 25. Since then, the country has had more than 230,000 Covid-19 cases, but just 377 deaths. And as of this writing, none of those deaths are confirmed to have resulted from Omicron.
The UK as of now has reported 1 (1!) omicron death, and it was “with” the virus, not necessarily from it. If there have been deaths globally from omicron, they have not been reported
When you read about mounting COVID cases in the US just remember that there normally has been a winter surge in cases. Cases can also be easily manipulated by public health agencies by running PCR tests at high cycles, creating false positive. Keep your attention on deaths in people where there has been gene sequencing to confirm omicron. Ugly and corrupt political forces controlling public health agencies have every reason to create a surge in cases so that fear can be maintained and the public made receptive to getting vaccine and booster shots.
Be patient, do not go crazy over omicron. Keep doing the many good things to maintain a healthy immune system, such as taking vitamins D and C, zinc and quercetin.
Plus, a new medical research article on ivermectin concluded that it really is very effective as a prophylactic, a genuine alternative to COVID vaccines.
Meet Ghislaine: Daddy’s Girl
BY WHITNEY WEBB |
UNLIMITED HANGOUT| DECEMBER 16, 2021
Absent from mainstream discourse on Ghislaine Maxwell’s ongoing trial is any mention of the ties, not only of herself, but her family, to Israeli intelligence. Those ties, forged by Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell, are critical to understanding Ghislaine’s history and her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual blackmail and trafficking network.
The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, the alleged madam of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual blackmail and sex trafficking network, has attracted considerable mainstream and independent media attention, though not as much as one might expect given the level of media attention that surrounded Epstein’s 2019 arrest and death or given the public interest in the Epstein/Maxwell scandal and its broader implications.
Unsurprisingly, the broader implications of the Epstein/Maxwell scandal have been largely, if not entirely absent, from mainstream media (and some independent media) coverage of Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial as well as absent from the case itself. For example, despite physical evidence of sexual blackmail stored at Epstein’s residences being shown by the prosecution (with the names of those incriminated being notably redacted), the prosecution chose not to mention even the potential role of blackmail in Ghislaine Maxwell’s activities and motives as it related to her involvement in sex trafficking activities alongside Jeffrey Epstein. Not only that, but the names of Ghislaine’s close contacts and even some of her defense witnesses, along with considerable information about her role in Epstein’s network that is very much in the public interest, is due to be filed under seal and forever hidden from the public, either due to “deals” made between the prosecution and the defense in this case or due to rulings from the judge overseeing the case.
Going hand in hand with the blackmail angle of this case is the specter of Ghislaine Maxwell’s family ties to intelligence agencies, as well as the intelligence ties of Jeffrey Epstein himself. Given that blackmail, particularly sexual blackmail, has been used by intelligence agencies – particularly in the US and Israel – since the 1940s and beyond, it is deeply troubling that neither the blackmail or intelligence angle has played any role in the prosecution’s case or in the mainstream media’s coverage of the trial.
To remedy this lack of coverage, Unlimited Hangout is publishing a 2-part investigative report entitled “Meet Ghislaine”, which is adapted from this author’s upcoming book on the subject. This investigation will detail key aspects of Ghislaine Maxwell’s links to intelligence agencies and sexual blackmail activities that are relevant to the case against her and perhaps explain the silence from the prosecution and their interest in sealing potentially incriminating evidence against Ghislaine from public scrutiny. Part 1 of this article will focus on Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell, a “larger than life” figure who straddled the worlds of both business and espionage and whose daughters inherited different aspects of his espionage contacts and activities as well as his influence empire following his 1991 death.
The Making of a Maxwell
To understand Ghilaine Maxwell’s history, one must start with a hard look at the rise of her father, Robert Maxwell. Born in what is now part of Ukraine, “Robert Maxwell” was the last in a series of names he used, with Abraham Hoch, Jan Ludvick, and Leslie Du Marier among his earlier aliases. The name Robert Maxwell emerged at the behest of one of his superiors in the British military. Maxwell had joined the British military during World War II, having left the village of his birth prior to the war, when the Third Reich began its expansion. Maxwell’s parents and his siblings are believed to have died in the Holocaust.
Robert and Betty Maxwell pose at their 1945 wedding; Source
Robert Maxwell was involved with the British intelligence service MI6 during the war and, after the war, was befriended by Count Frederich vanden Huevel, who had worked closely with Allen Dulles during the war. Dulles went on to be the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and, during the war, was busy running interference for prominent Nazis and actively undermining FDR’s “total surrender” policy for senior Nazi leadership.
The chaos of postwar Europe allowed Maxwell to plant the seeds for what would become his future media empire. Thanks to his contacts with Allied Forces in postwar Berlin, he was able to acquire the publishing rights for prominent European scientific journals and, in 1948, those interests were folded into the British publishing company Butterworth, which had long-standing ties to British intelligence. In the early 1950s, the company was renamed Pergamon Press, and this company became the cornerstone of Maxwell’s media empire.
Pergamon’s access to prominent academics, scientists, and government not only led to Maxwell acquiring great wealth but also attracted the interest of various intelligence agencies— British, Russian, and Israeli among them—all of which attempted to recruit Maxwell as an asset or as a spy. When MI6 attempted to recruit Maxwell for the service, it concluded, after conducting an extensive background check, that Maxwell was a “Zionist—loyal only to Israel.” His subsequent relationship with MI6 was choppy and largely opportunistic on both sides, with Maxwell later laying some of the blame for his financial troubles on MI6’s alleged attempts to “subvert” him.
Maxwell was not officially recruited to work for Israeli intelligence until 1961, but his critical role in securing weapons and airplane parts for the 1948 war that created the state of Israel suggests a strong relationship with prominent politicians and military figures in the nation from its beginning, as this was certainly the case with other prominent businessmen who had helped arm Zionist paramilitaries before and during 1948. In the early 1960s, Maxwell was formally approached by Israeli intelligence to make use of his access to the variety of prominent businessman and world leaders that he had cultivated while growing his media empire.
A few years after being officially recruited as an asset of Israeli intelligence, Maxwell ran for public office, becoming a member of the British Parliament for the Labour Party in 1964. His bid for re-election failed, which left him out of office by 1970. Around that same time, he also lost control of Pergamon Press, though he reacquired it a few years later.
Having nearly lost everything, Maxwell devoted his time to consolidating control over his ever-growing web of interlocking companies, trusts, and foundations that now encompassed much more than media concerns, while also developing his ties to prominent politicians, businessmen, and their fixers, a group that Maxwell proudly referred to as his “sources.” Among these early “sources” were soon-to-be UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher; Israel’s biggest arms dealer and one of its powerful oligarchs, Saul Eisenberg; financial behemoths such as Edmund Safra; and master manipulators such as Henry Kissinger. Another early “source” was George H. W. Bush, who was then part of the Nixon administration and soon served as CIA director before becoming Reagan’s vice president and then US president himself.
Maxwell’s sources and influence extended well beyond the West, with many of his most prominent contacts found in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. He had cozy relationships with dictators, intelligence officials, and even organized crime lords such as Semion Mogilevich, sometimes referred to as the “boss of the bosses” of the Russian mafia. It was none other than Robert Maxwell who orchestrated the entry of Mogilevich-connected companies into the United States, a move that was accomplished after Maxwell successfully lobbied the state of Israel to grant Mogilevich and his associates Israeli passports, thereby allowing them easier access to US financial institutions.
The expansion of Maxwell’s prominent contacts paralleled the growth of his media empire. By 1980, he had acquired the British Printing Corporation, which he renamed the Maxwell Communication Corporation. Just a few years later, he bought the Mirror Group, publisher of the British tabloid the Daily Mirror. This was followed by his acquisition of US publishers Prentice Hall and MacMillan and later the New York Daily News. Much of the money Maxwell used to acquire the Mirror Group and several of these other companies came from financial backers of Israeli intelligence. Money “borrowed” from Maxwell-owned media outlets such as the Mirror Group and its pension fund was used to finance Mossad activities in Europe and elsewhere; then, the funds were restored before the absence was noticed by company employees not privy to these operations. Maxwell later derailed this well-oiled system by dipping into these same funds to finance his own ostentatious and salacious habits.
Robert Maxwell poses with the first edition of “The European” newspaper he founded in 1990; Source
During this period, Maxwell’s ties to Israeli intelligence deepened in other ways, particularly during the time when Yitzhak Shamir was prime minister. Shamir, previously a leader of the Zionist terrorist group known as Lehi or the Stern Gang, deeply loathed the United States, a sentiment he confided to Maxwell during one of Maxwell’s visits to Israel. Shamir told Maxwell that he blamed the Americans for the Holocaust because of US failure to support the transfer of European Jews to Palestine prior to the war. Shamir’s views on the US likely informed Israel’s more aggressive espionage targeting the US that emerged during this time and in which Maxwell prominently figured.
Maxwell and the PROMIS Affair
Maxwell’s prominent roles in the PROMIS software scandal and the Iran-Contra affair during the 1980s were facilitated by his purchase of numerous Israeli companies, several of which were either fronts or “providers of services” for Israeli intelligence. The most notable of these was Scitex, where Yitzhak Shamir’s son Nachum was a major executive throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and Degem, a computer company with a large presence in Central and South America as well as Africa.
Even before Maxwell’s purchase of Degem, it had been used by Mossad as a cover for agents, and particularly assassins, who would use its offices as a cover before conducting kidnappings and murders of individuals linked to groups with ties to or sympathies for Israel’s enemies, particularly the PLO. Some of the most notable events occurred in Africa, where Mossad assassins used Degem as cover to launch killings of members of the African National Congress. In Latin America, Degem was also used as cover for the Mossad to infiltrate terrorist and nacroterrorist organizations such as Peru’s Sendero Luminoso (known in English as the Shining Path) and Colombia’s National Liberation Army or ELN.
After Maxwell’s purchase of Degem, it served as the main vehicle through which Israel conducted what was arguably its most brazen and successful espionage operation of the era—the bugging and then mass marketing of the stolen software program known as PROMIS.
Rafi Eitan, the notorious Israeli spymaster who served as Jonathan Pollard’s handler and who played a key role in the creation of the Talpiot program, was serving as the head of the (now defunct) Israeli intelligence service known as Lekem when he heard of a revolutionary new software program being used by the US Department of Justice. The program was known as the Prosecutors Information Management System, better known by its acronym PROMIS.
Rafi Eitan with Israeli politician Ariel Sharon in 1987; Source
Eitan had learned of PROMIS from Earl Brian, a longtime associate of Ronald Reagan who had previously worked for the CIA. PROMIS is often considered to be the forerunner of the PRISM software used by US and allied spy agencies today and was developed by former NSA official Bill Hamilton. Hamilton had leased the software to the US Department of Justice through his company, Inslaw Inc., in 1982.
Eitan and Brian hatched a plan to install a “trapdoor” into the software and then sell PROMIS throughout the world, providing Israel with invaluable intelligence on the operations of its enemies and allies while also netting Eitan and Brian massive profits. According to the testimony of former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, Brian provided a copy of PROMIS to Israeli military intelligence, which contacted an Israeli American programmer living in California. That programmer then planted a trapdoor or back door into the software.
Once the back door was installed, Brian attempted to use his company Hadron Inc. to market the bugged PROMIS software around the world. Having been unsuccessful at trying to buy out Inslaw, Brian turned to his close friend Attorney General Ed Meese, whose Justice Department abruptly refused to make payments to Inslaw that were stipulated by contract, essentially using the software for free. Hamilton and Inslaw claimed that this was theft. Some have speculated that Meese’s role in that decision was shaped not only by his friendship with Brian but also by the fact that his wife was a major investor in Brian’s business ventures.
Meese’s actions forced Inslaw into bankruptcy, and Inslaw subsequently sued the Justice Department, with the court finding that the Meese-led department “took, converted, [and] stole” the software through “trickery, fraud and deceit.” Meanwhile, with Inslaw seemingly out of the way, Brian sold the bugged software to Jordan’s intelligence service, which was a major boon for Israel, and to a handful of private companies. Eitan, nevertheless, was unsatisfied with Brian’s progress and quickly turned to the person he thought could most effectively sell PROMIS to governments of interest all over the world—Robert Maxwell.
Salesman and Spy
Through Degem and other fronts, Maxwell marketed PROMIS so successfully that Israeli intelligence soon had access to the innermost workings of innumerable governments, corporations, banks, and intelligence services around the world. Many of Maxwell’s biggest successes came in selling PROMIS to dictators in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Following the sales, and after Maxwell collected a handsome paycheck, PROMIS, with its unparalleled ability to surveil anything from cash flows to human movement, was used by these governments to commit financial crimes with greater finesse and to hunt down and “disappear” dissidents.
In Latin America, Maxwell sold PROMIS to military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. It was used to facilitate the mass murder that characterized Operation Condor, as the friends and families of dissidents and so-called subversives were easily identified using PROMIS. PROMIS was so effective for this purpose that, just days after Maxwell sold the software to Guatemala, this US-backed dictatorship rounded up twenty thousand “subversives” who were never heard from again. Of course, thanks to the back door in PROMIS, Israeli intelligence knew the identities of Guatemala’s disappeared before the victims’ own families. Both the US and Israel were also intimately involved in the arming and training of many of the Latin American dictatorships that had been sold the bugged PROMIS software. It is worth noting that Israel’s government and military-industrial complex was simultaneously involved in selling arms to many of these same governments.
Though Israeli intelligence immediately found obvious uses for the steady stream of sensitive and classified information, their biggest prize was yet to come. Eitan soon tasked Maxwell with selling PROMIS to top secret US government labs in the Los Alamos complex, including Sandia National Laboratories, which was and is at the core of the US nuclear weapons system. In order to plot how he would accomplish such a feat, Maxwell met with none other than Henry Kissinger, who told him that he needed to enlist the services of Texas senator John Tower, who was then head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Kissinger has never been charged or even challenged for his role in facilitating a foreign-espionage operation targeting highly sensitive US national security information.
Maxell, using Mossad-derived money, paid Tower $200,000 for his services, which included opening doors — not just to the Los Alamos complex but also to the Reagan White House. PROMIS was then sold to the laboratories through a US-based company that Maxwell had purchased in 1981 and transformed into a front for Mossad. That company, called Information on Demand, was headed by Maxwell’s daughter Christine Maxwell beginning in 1985 until Robert’s death in 1991, during which period she helped sell the bugged PROMIS software to several Fortune 500 companies. Isabel Maxwell, sister to Ghislaine and Christine, would also work at the company before its closure in 1991.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Christine Maxwell teamed up with CIA official Alan Wade to market homeland-security software known as Chiliad to the US national security state, while Isabel would work closely at the intersection between Israeli intelligence and its private technology sector around that same period. Ghislaine, along with her two intelligence and technology-connected sisters, would hold a significant stake in a technology company that appears to be the actual origin of the Bill Gates-Jeffrey Epstein relationship, as explained in this Unlimited Hangout investigative report from May.
A few years after its acquisition by the Maxwells, Information on Demand was investigated by the FBI for its intelligence links beginning in 1983. However, that investigation was repeatedly shut down by higher-ups in the Meese-led Department of Justice, which, as previously mentioned, had been complicit in the whole sordid PROMIS affair. The investigation was shut down for good in 1985. The cover-up, oddly enough, continues today, with the FBI still refusing to release documents pertaining to Robert Maxwell and his role in the PROMIS scandal.
At the time, the halting of the FBI investigation green-lighted Information on Demand’s sale of PROMIS to Sandia National Laboratories, which provided Israeli intelligence with direct access to the core of the US nuclear weapons programs and nuclear weapons technology. This was a boon for Israel’s still-undeclared trove of nuclear missiles and warheads and helped ensure that Israel would remain the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, seen in the light of the PROMIS scandal and the Pollard spy affair, shows that it was largely accomplished through trickery, deception and espionage rather than Israeli technical or scientific prowess.
This same year, 1985, is also when the CIA finally caught up with their Israeli equivalent and created its own back door into PROMIS, which it sold mostly to allied intelligence services in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. It wasn’t nearly as successful as Maxwell, who sold an estimated $500 million in bugged PROMIS programs for Israel. The CIA, on the other hand, only sold around $90 million.
Heiress to an Espionage Empire
After Maxwell’s wild success in selling PROMIS on behalf of Israeli intelligence, he was recruited for another Israeli intelligence-driven operation—the Iran-Contra deal. It was through his Iran-Contra dealings that Robert Maxwell reportedly met Jeffery Epstein, whom he brought into the fold of Israeli intelligence that same year with the personal approval of the “higher ups” of Israeli military intelligence. The head of Israeli military intelligence at this time was Ehud Barak, who later come under fire for his well-documented and close ties to Epstein. The year 1985 was also the year when, conveniently enough, Epstein met Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner and became intimately involved with his finances and affairs after Wexner’s previous fixer, Arthur Shapiro, was shot in the face in broad daylight before he was set to testify to the IRS on matters related to Wexner’s finances. Wexner would go on to co-found the Mega Group in 1991, several prominent members of which have close ties to Israeli political and intelligence figures and/or US-based organized crime networks like the National Crime Syndicate.
Epstein’s entry into this world was facilitated through his romantic ties to Ghislaine Maxwell, which had allegedly preceded Robert Maxwell’s successful efforts to bring him into the fold of Israeli military intelligence. Epstein was only one of several boyfriends Ghislaine is said to have had in the 1980s, but Epstein was certainly the most similar in terms of both behavior and “talents” to her father.
Ghislaine Maxwell and her mother Betty pose next to a framed picture of Robert Maxwell in Jerusalem, November 1991; Source
Ghislaine’s other boyfriends during and prior to this period certainly deserve mention. One of the more interesting was an Italian aristocrat named Count Gianfranco Cicogna, whose grandfather was Mussolini’s finance minister and the last doge of Venice. Cicogna also had ties to both covert and overt power structures in Italy, particularly to the Vatican, the CIA’s presence in Italy, and to the Italian side of the National Crime Syndicate. The other half of that syndicate, of course, was the Jewish American mob with its ties to the Mega Group, itself deeply connected to the Epstein scandal and whose members were frequent business partners of Robert Maxwell. It’s worth noting that Gianfranco Cicogna met a grisly end in 2012 when the plane he was flying exploded in a giant fireball during an air show, a morbid spectacle that can surprisingly still be viewed on YouTube.
Ghislaine and Robert Maxwell also had odd ties to the Harvey Proctor scandal in the United Kingdom, whereby a tabloid of Robert Maxwell’s—with Maxwell’s full approval—ran a story claiming that efforts were being made to blackmail Robert Maxwell with information regarding Ghislaine’s alleged relationship with the future Duke of Rutland. Maxwell clearly wanted the information linking Ghislaine to the duke put out into the public sphere, but the story is odd for a few reasons. The motive of the blackmailer was ostensibly to prevent Maxwell-owned papers from covering the Harvey Proctor scandal. But the son of the duke who was allegedly involved with Ghislaine was also a close friend and later the employer of Harvey Proctor.
The appearance of Harvey Proctor, a Conservative member of Parliament, in this tabloid spectacle is interesting for a few reasons. In 1987, Proctor pleaded guilty to sexual indecency with two young men who were sixteen and nineteen at the time, and several witnesses interviewed in that investigation described him as having a sexual interest in “young boys.” Later, a controversial court case saw Proctor accused of having been involved with well-connected British pedophile and procurer of children Jimmy Savile; he was alleged to have been part a child sex abuse ring that was said to include former UK prime minister Ted Heath. Savile’s close relationship with Prince Charles of the British Royal family is well known and, as will be mentioned shortly, Ghislaine is alleged to have been cozy with the Royals before Prince Andrew’s frequent public appearances with Ghislaine and Epstein, beginning around the year 2000.
Of course, the Maxwell-owned papers, in covering the alleged efforts to blackmail Robert Maxwell, did not mention the “young boys” angle at all, instead focusing on claims that distracted from the then-credible accusations of pedophilia by claiming that Proctor was merely into “spanking” and was “whacky”, among other things. It is hard to know exactly what was going on in this particular incident, but the whole bizarre affair paints an interesting picture of Ghislaine’s social circle at the time.
In this same 1985 period, Ghislaine also became involved with “philanthropy” tied to her father’s business empire by hosting a “Disney day out for kids” and benefit dinner on behalf of the Mirror Group for the Save the Children NGO. Part of the event took place at the home of the Marquess and Lady of Bath, a gala that was attended by members of the British Royal family. It’s worth noting that the Marquess of Bath at the time was an odd person, having accumulated the largest collection of paintings made by Adolf Hitler and having said that Hitler had done “great things for his country.” The same evening that the Ghislaine-hosted bash concluded, the Marquess of Bath’s son was found hanging from a bedspread tied to an oak beam at the Bath Arms in what was labeled a suicide.
The attendance of Royals at this Ghislaine-hosted gala was not some lucky break for Ghislaine or her “philanthropic” efforts, as Ghislaine had already been close to the royals for years, with subsequent employees and victims of Ghislaine having personally seen pictures of her “growing up” with the royals, a relationship allegedly facilitated by the Maxwell family’s ties to the Rothschild banking family. Ghislaine was heard on more than one occasion as describing the wealthy and influential Rothschilds as her family’s “greatest protectors,” and they were also among Robert Maxwell’s most important bankers, who helped him finance the construction of his vast media empire and web of companies and untraceable trusts.
It was also during this period that Ghislaine learned some unusual skills, including how to pilot airplanes, helicopters, and submarines, and became fluent in several languages.
Then, abruptly in 1991, Ghislaine and her entire remaining family saw their fortunes shift dramatically—at least in public—with the death of Robert Maxwell, a death that most of the Maxwell family and most of his biographers regard as a murder, an act allegedly performed by the very intelligence agency that employed him.
According to journalist John Jackson, who was present when Ghislaine and her mother Betty boarded her father’s yacht shortly after his death, it was Ghislaine who “coolly walked into her late father’s office and shredded all incriminating documents on board.” Ghislaine denies the incident, though Jackson has never retracted the claim, which was reported in a 2007 article published in the Daily Mail. If Jackson is to believed, it was Ghislaine – out of all of Robert Maxwell’s children – who was most intimately aware of the incriminating secrets of her father’s financial empire and espionage activities.
As Part 2 of this series will show, the evidence points to this being the case, particularly with Ghislaine’s entry into New York’s elite social circles having been planned by her father before his 1991 death. Of course, those social connections in New York, as well as those in Europe and elsewhere, would prove instrumental in the operation and protection of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual trafficking and blackmail network. Ghislaine’s slippery behavior in the years that followed, including activities both related and unrelated to the sex trafficking of minors, show that Ghislaine inherited much more than her personality from her father as she, along with several of her siblings, played a key role in keeping alive various aspects of her father’s legacy, including his espionage activities.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
‘US is Utterly Dishonest’: Why Tehran Won’t Accept Partial Removal of Sanctions by Washington
By Ekaterina Blunova | Sputnik | December 16, 2021
Partial removal of sanctions by the US is not enough to facilitate the revival of the Iranian economy, hurt by the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” policies, say Iran affairs experts, adding that under the new government Tehran is set to protect the country’s national interests more determinedly.
The United States signalled on 14 December that it is fully prepared to lift those sanctions against Iran that are inconsistent with Washington commitments under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That “would allow Iran to receive the economic benefits of the deal,” remarked Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US ambassador to the United Nations, during a UN Security meeting.
For his part, Iran’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Majid Takht Ravanchi stressed that Washington should lift all sanctions slapped on Tehran and provide guarantees that it would not withdraw from the accords again and it would not abuse the procedures set out in the JCPOA and Resolution 2231.
‘All Anti-Iran Sanctions Have to be Lifted’
“The United States is being utterly dishonest,” says Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor at Tehran University, who was part of the Iranian delegation that helped to negotiate the 2015 nuclear deal. “All the sanctions are inconsistent with the 2015 nuclear deal. The maximum pressure campaign was targeting innocent women and children. It was an act of war and the objective was to force Iran to accept changes to the nuclear deal.”
The Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018 despite Tehran observing all the provisions of the nuclear accords. Subsequently, the US slapped sanctions on major spheres of the Iranian economy, including the country’s petroleum industry, under the so-called “maximum pressure” campaign.
“Through the maximum pressure campaign, the United States imposed sanctions under all sorts of different names: missile defence, terrorism, Iran’s regional allies, the nuclear programme, human rights and everything except global warming was included, when all of these sanctions had one objective, and that was to force Iran to appease the United States and the Europeans,” Marandi emphasises.
Although the White House changed the rhetoric, in reality, it is trying to cheat Iran and violate its commitments by lifting only those sanctions that were labelled under the nuclear programme, according to the academic.
Moreover, while “the US has a range of sanctions on Iran and President Biden has not removed any since coming to office,” notes Professor Shahram Akbarzadeh from Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.
Even though the partial removal of sanctions sounds like a positive sign, it will not make a big difference to Iran’s access to the global economy, according to Akbarzadeh. He explains that “many international corporations will continue to be reluctant to invest in Iran because of the extreme uncertainty surrounding the future of talks and the prospects of Iran’s entry into the international market.”
“The Iranian leadership is unlikely to see partial sanctions removal as enough to assuage their concerns,” Akbarzadeh believes. “It insists on an unconditional return to that deal, and Washington has been reluctant to ‘give-in’ to that demand.”
According to the professor, this dynamic may hinder the progress of the Vienna talks over the revival of the JCPOA.
Ebrahim Raisi gives a news conference after voting in the presidential election, at a polling station in the capital Tehran, on June 18, 2021. – Raisi on June 19 declared the winner of a presidential election, a widely anticipated result after many political heavyweights were barred from running. – Sputnik International, 1920, 21.06.2021
‘US is Not in Strong Position in Vienna Talks’
While the US is not present at the table in Vienna, American diplomats are taking part in indirect talks with their Iranian counterparts. Washington does not have an upper hand in the ongoing talks, according to Seyed Mohammad Marandi:
“The Iranians see that the United States has huge problems at home,” he notes. “Political, social and economic problems are causing major issues inside the United States. The United States is increasingly losing ground to a rising China and the re-emerging Russia, and Iran and its allies across the region are growing stronger and American allies are growing weaker.”
In response to Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the Islamic Republic started to gradually loosen the JCPOA restrictions on uranium enrichment starting from July 2019. “The Iranian peaceful nuclear programme is developing and it’s a leverage [in the talks],” according to the professor.
It’s the Americans who need the deal right now and the Iranians know that, Marandi notes, adding that Tehran will see “if the Americans will become reasonable enough to do what is good for themselves.”
At the same time, Washington and its European allies have apparently overlooked the damage their policies inflicted on the Iranian economy and the country’s population, the professor highlights, adding that “the issue of compensation is always on the table.”
The new Iranian government led by President Ebrahim Raisi has adopted a more robust approach in protecting Iranian national interests, according to Marandi. Even though the new Iranian government is critical of the JCPOA deal, it will not tear it apart, unlike the US government, but will observe its commitments. At the same time, Tehran will demand “that what has been signed, the JCPOA, be fully respected by the United States and the Europeans,” the professor underscored.
The Vienna negotiations between Iran and other signatories to the 2015 deal, including the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China resumed in December after a five-month hiatus caused by the election of a new government in Tehran.
At the beginning of this month, the White House voiced its dissatisfaction with proposals by the new Iranian government. According to European diplomats, Tehran has demanded changes to a set of compromises agreed upon a few months ago with the previous Iranian administration. The E3 group of Britain, France and Germany went so far as to accuse the Iranian leadership of “walking back almost all of the difficult compromises crafted after many months of hard work.”
Iran’s chief negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani tweeted on 14 December that the E3 and Washington “persist in their blame game habit, instead of real diplomacy”: “We proposed our ideas early, and worked constructively and flexibly to narrow gaps; diplomacy is a two-way street. If there’s a real will to remedy the culprit’s wrongdoing, the way for a quick good deal will be paved.”
For his part, Iran’s Permanent Representative to the UN Majid Takht Ravanchi told a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday that Iran does not impose any preconditions or new conditions in the negotiations to revive the JCPOA and only wishes to see the restoration of the initial terms of the nuclear accord.
“We call for the full, timely, unconditional and verifiable implementation of the JCPOA. No more, no less,” Ravanchi underscored.
The 5 signs you DON’T have “Omicron”… you have a cold & a PCR test
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | December 15, 2021
They are determined to make the “Omicron Variant” appear as frightening as possible, that means getting as many cases as possible, which means flipping all the way to the front of the Covid playbook.
Enter “The 5 Signs You May Have Omicron Covid”, an article in the Metro yesterday, and repeated in spirit across dozens of other outlets.
For those of you feeling morbidly curious, here are the five signs of Omicron:
- scratchy throat
- Fatigue
- mild muscle aches
- dry cough
- night sweats
The astute reader will no doubt pick up that these are the symptoms of every single one of the common cold viruses that infect millions of people all over the world every single year.
It’s just the old Simpsons joke about “mild hunger, occasional thirst and tiredness at night”, only they expect us to take it seriously.
The odds are you’ve experienced these symptoms at least once or twice in the last year or so. This does not mean you had Omicron. It does not mean Omicron even exists.
Rather, it’s just a ploy to get you to follow government guidance and, in the words of the article:
“order a free PCR test as soon as possible”.
The government site for ordering PCR tests has already shut down due to millions of requests. We have repeated, ad infinitum, that these tests are scientifically meaningless, and return huge numbers of false positives.
Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of PCR tests are being done on people with nothing but mild cold symptoms as we speak, and in these nasal swabs lies the incipient “Omicron wave”.
That is why Sajid Javid is going on TV saying he expects cases of Omicron to “dramatically increase” in the run-up to Christmas, because they are going to make it happen.
Then they’ll probably have the Prime Minister announce new restrictions… just after Parliament adjourns for the Christmas break, so they can’t be reviewed or voted on.
It’s the same old trick, again and again and again. Hopefully, people will stop falling for it soon.
RFK Jr. as America’s #1 HIV/AIDS Denier and the Sounds of Media Silence
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • DECEMBER 15, 2021
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s book attacking Anthony Fauci and the medical establishment has become a publishing sensation, spending more than a full week as the #1 Amazon bestseller and racking up over 2,600 reviews, 94% of them five-star.
Now after nearly a month of stunned silence, the American media is finally taking belated notice. This morning the Associated Press released a 4,000 word hit-piece harshly attacking the most prominent public figure in America’s much-vilified anti-vaxxing movement.
- How a Kennedy Built an Anti-Vaccine Juggernaut Amid COVID-19
Michelle R. Smith • The Associated Press • December 15, 2021 • 4,000 Words
A great deal of effort had obviously been invested in this attack, and the byline of the named author was shared by five additional AP writers and researchers, underscoring the journalistic resources devoted to damaging the reputation of an individual who has obviously made such powerful enemies. But in reading the article, the phrase that came to my mind was “the Sounds of Silence” or perhaps the famous Sherlockian clue of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark.”
Almost half of the entire book under attack—around 200 pages—is devoted to the presenting and promoting the astonishing claim that everything we have been told about HIV/AIDS for more than 35 years probably amounts to a hoax. As I wrote last week:
Yet according to the information provided in Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller, this well-known and solidly-established picture, which I had never seriously questioned, is almost entirely false and fraudulent, essentially amounting to a medical media hoax. Instead of being responsible for AIDS, the HIV virus is probably harmless and had nothing to do with the disease. But when individuals were found to be infected with HIV, they were subjected to the early, extremely lucrative AIDS drugs, which were actually lethal and often killed them. The earliest AIDS cases had mostly been caused by very heavy use of particular illegal drugs, and the HIV virus had been misdiagnosed as being responsible. But since Fauci and the profit-hungry drug companies soon built enormous empires upon that misdiagnosis, for more than 35 years they have fought very hard to maintain and protect it, exerting all their influence to suppress the truth in the media while destroying the careers of any honest researchers who challenged that fraud. Meanwhile, AIDS in Africa was something entirely different, probably caused mostly by malnutrition or other local conditions.
I found Kennedy’s account as shocking as anything I have ever encountered.
By any reasonable standard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has now established himself as America’s #1 “HIV/AIDS Denier,” and prior to the Covid outbreak, AIDS had probably spent almost four decades as the world’s highest-profile disease, reportedly absorbing some two trillion dollars in research and treatment costs. So for someone to essentially claim that the disease doesn’t actually exist would seem the height of utter lunacy, on a par with Flat Earthism. Yet not a single word of this astonishing situation appears in the long AP article, that attacks Kennedy on almost all other possible grounds, fair or unfair. Did all six of the AP writers and researchers somehow skip over those 200 pages in Kennedy’s bestseller?
That large team of AP journalists seems to have spent at least ten days working on their lengthy article, mining Kennedy’s record for almost everything controversial they could possibly find, even highlighting a photograph that merely shows him standing next to Trump allies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.
Surely these reporters consulted numerous leading figures in the medical establishment on the HIV/AIDS issue, yet not a single word on that incendiary topic was included in their 4,000 word denunciation.
Although ferocious attacks against Kennedy’s HIV/AIDS claims might naturally have been expected, perhaps certain aspects of the book caused the senior editors of the Associated Press to draw back and decide that discretion on this matter was the better part of valor. As I had explained:
However, the first endorsement on the back cover is from Prof. Luc Montagnier, the medical researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus in 1984, and he writes: “Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr. exposes the decades of lies.” Moreover, we are told that as far back as the San Francisco International AIDS Conference of June 1990, Montagnier had publicly declared “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.”
Perhaps this Nobel Laureate endorsed the book for other reasons and perhaps the meaning of his striking 1990 statement has been misconstrued. But surely the opinion of the researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus should not be totally ignored in assessing its possible role.
I went on to note:
And he was hardly alone. Kennedy explains that the following year, a top Harvard microbiologist organized a group containing some of the world’s most distinguished virologists and immunologists and they issued a public statement, endorsed by three additional science Nobel Laureates, that raised the same questions:
It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes a group of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis, to be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that the critical epidemiological studies be designed and undertaken.
As Kennedy tells the story, by that point AIDS researchers and the mainstream media were completely in thrall to the ocean of government funding and pharmaceutical advertising controlled by Fauci and his corporate allies, so these calls by eminent scientists were almost entirely ignored and unreported. According to one journalist, some two trillion dollars has been spent on HIV/AIDS research and treatment over the decades, and with so many research careers and personal livelihoods dependent upon what amounts to an “HIV/AIDS industrial-complex,” few have been willing to critically examine the basic foundations of that empire.
Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never given any thought to questioning AIDS orthodoxy. But discovering the longstanding scientific skepticism of so many knowledgeable experts, including four Nobel Laureates, one of them the actual discoverer of the HIV virus, has completely shifted my perspective. I cannot easily ignore or dismiss the theories Kennedy presents… And in basic fairness to the author, he himself also repeatedly emphasizes that he can “take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS” but is simply disturbed that Fauci has successfully used his government funding and media clout to suppress an ongoing and perfectly legitimate scientific debate. According to Kennedy, his book is intended “to give air and daylight to dissenting voices.”
So the total silence of the article does certainly raise certain obvious suspicions. As I previously wrote:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a top figure in America’s much-vilified anti-vaxx movement and his book is becoming a major element of that cause. His strident attacks against pharmaceutical companies, medical orthodoxy, and Fauci have earned him numerous, powerful enemies. If his AIDS claims were really as ridiculous as they might seem, would they not have already become a lightning rod for attacks against him? Suppose that his anti-vaxx tome had devoted 200 pages to arguing that our world was secretly controlled by invisible 12-foot-tall Reptilians from another dimension. Surely Kennedy’s enemies would have unleashed a huge storm of media ridicule against him for that lunacy, thereby discrediting his critique of vaccination campaigns. Yet instead complete silence has greeted his AIDS claims, raising questions in my mind of whether the medical establishment suspects that it has a great deal to hide and that many of Kennedy’s accusations might be correct.
As an outside observer with no special expertise in these areas of medicine, I was impressed by much of the material that Kennedy marshaled in support of his unorthodox views on vaccines and Covid treatments, but found that the evidence he provided on HIV and AIDS was vastly more comprehensive and persuasive, while being backed by far more authoritative experts. But if as he argues, the truth about HIV and AIDS has been successfully suppressed for decades by the entire medical industry, we must necessarily become very suspicious about other medical claims, including those regarding Covid and vaccinations.
Unless the medical and media establishments swiftly and forthrightly challenges Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the issue of HIV/AIDS, any fair-minded observers must necessarily conclude they recognize that he is substantially correct. And if he is correct about AIDS, any shreds of remaining credibility in our public health authorities will surely be destroyed, while the longstanding theories of Berkeley Prof. Peter Duesberg will have been vindicated:
- The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition
Peter Duesberg, Claus Koehnlein, and David Rasnick • Journal of Bioscience • June 2003 • 24,000 Words
So as some have suggested, HIV/AIDS might very well become the Achilles’ Heel of our corrupt and incompetent medical establishment.
UK approves vaccine passes and mandatory jabs for healthcare workers
OffGuardian | December 15, 2021
Last night the UK Parliament voted through a bill forcing NHS workers to either get vaccinated or lose their jobs, as well bringing in “vaccine passports” for some events and venues.
Over 70,000 NHS workers are officially counted as “unvaccinated”, if you trust government numbers. Considering the NHS employs well over a million people, I wouldn’t be surprised if that number were actually much higher.
If just half of the unvaccinated workers resign it could put a lot of pressure on the always-over-burdened healthcare system.
The government wouldn’t mind that, of course, because it will make it easier to claim the NHS is being “overwhelmed” with Covid patients, and this will be blamed on the unvaccinated and used to justify further mandates and coercion.
Any deaths resulting from the under-staffed health system can be PCR tested and added to the “died with Covid” tally.
It’s a win-win.
The vaccine passport element of the bill is likewise concerning, even if it currently only applies to nightclubs and venues with a capacity of more than 10,000. That’s the thin edge of a rapidly-expanding wedge.
An interesting aspect of the vote was that it passed entirely thanks to the Labour party. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer announced on Tuesday, in a bizarre-looking televised speech, that his party would support the government.
As a result all but eight “opposition” MPs voted with the government, whilst Tory rebel votes counted an even 100. If Labour had opposed the bill, it would not have passed.
Jeremy Corbyn, now an independent, voted against the government and emerged from his Covid hibernation to (finally) make a statement.
Much too little, and far too late, but it does illustrate why they needed to get rid of him in December 2019, just before the Covid roll-out, and why they so obviously rigged that election.
If he, as leader of the opposition, had been offering even this small amount of resistance from the beginning, the Covid narrative would never have made it this far.
Labour voting with the government, without even asking for concessions on sick pay or pay rises for NHS workers, is a sign that a changing of the guard may be on the horizon, with Keir Starmer being groomed to be the next PM, perhaps in the very near future.
That would explain the sudden emergence of the Christmas party scandal, which had further fuel added to its fire just today by yet another leak.
That, combined with the massive rebellion by his own MPs, is a massive knock on his authority.
Official polls, always a tool for controlling opinion rather than a scale for measuring it, are already putting Starmer 13 points ahead as the nations “most capable Prime Minister”.
Don’t be surprised if there are calls for another election, probably sometime soon. And they won’t be rigging this one for Boris.
Forget China, was it CEPI’s bio-spooks who locked down the West?
By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | December 15, 2021
IT is nearly two years since the world turned upside down and a sequence of unprecedented lockdowns and quarantines in the name of public health and safety were imposed across the West.
The narrative of the still unfolding story of Covid-19 is familiar to all of us, with China the chief bogeyman of the tale. But is that right?
In this drama has something really important been overlooked? Namely, the role of a powerful, self-appointed supranational organisation, set up 2017, called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
Members of CEPI’s board and scientific advisory committee have been, and still are, key actors in global and national responses to the Covid-19 virus. Its mission? To ‘create a world in which epidemics are no longer a threat to humanity’.
At the start of 2020, all eyes were glued on China. The communist government had dutifully notified the World Health Organisation (WHO) on New Year’s Eve 2019 of its concerns over a small cluster of cases of ‘pneumonia of unknown origin’.
Three weeks later, when the death toll stood at 17, the CCP was sufficiently alarmed to order the home confinement of nearly 12 million mostly healthy people who were unfortunate enough to reside in the outbreak city, Wuhan.
Having fingered as the culprit a relative of the SARS virus that claimed 774 victims in 2003, the Chinese determination to contain the self-evidently nastier 2019 co-variant at all costs was made plain to the world.
The scenes broadcast out of China nightly on the TV news were surreal, but strangely familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with vintage sci-fi. A nightmare amalgamation of The Andromeda Strain and The Hamburg Syndrome was unfolding in real life, right before our eyes.
Here, a man falling down dead in the street. There, men in white hazmat suits walking through empty Chinese thoroughfares equipped with Ghostbuster-esque backpacks blowing smoke in a desperate attempt to fumigate the invisible peril out of existence.
Knowing that the Queen’s own men at the Porton Down chemical and biological defence establishment long ago discovered that fresh air and sunlight, two commodities already in short supply in Chinese cities, are the most potent of disinfectants, it seemed a strangely futile spectacle. What on Earth were they trying to do? Death apparently lurked around every corner.
As the Wuhan lockdown was being imposed on January 23, 2020, the global elite were busy congregating at their annual networking fest, the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland (where CEPI had been founded three years earlier by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust global charity organisation, and the World Economic Forum).
Next day, a little-noticed press conference was convened in Davos to discuss the SARS-like, closely-related, but definitely novel, SARS Wuhan coronavirus.
Appearing in front of about 30 reporters were Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust and board member of CEPI; Richard Hatchett, chief executive of CEPI, and Stephane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, one of three companies being funded to develop a coronavirus vaccine. A Chinese reporter asked the panel if there was any historical precedent for the lockdown.
Hatchett said: ‘One thing that is important to understand, is that when you don’t have treatments and you don’t have vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions are literally the only thing that you have, and it’s a combination of isolation, containment, infection prevention and control and then these social distancing interventions.
‘There is historical precedent for their use. We looked intensively and did an historical analysis of the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in US cities in 1918 and what we found was that cities that introduced multiple interventions, early in an epidemic, had much better outcomes.
‘The challenge of course is that it is very difficult to sustain these interventions, as they impose enormous cost and they also can produce enormous anxiety among the affected population.’
The ‘we’ Hatchett was referring to was the US Department of Homeland Security where, as an official, he had helped develop the US pandemic preparedness plan in 2005 and 2006 during the H5N1 avian influenza outbreak, which Farrar had discovered in Vietnam.
Hatchett continued: ‘At that time, we looked at how could you have those interventions implemented in a way that maximised their benefit and minimised the cost and we developed an approach that we called “community mitigation” interventions and CDC (the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) published guidance on this several years ago.
‘There is a literature which I would certainly encourage Chinese authorities to review and certainly I would be happy to talk to them about that, although that’s not my current job.’
There was no need to encourage the Chinese authorities to review the literature. CEPI already had a man in Beijing, Dr George Gao, the director of China’s Centre for Disease Control, but also member of the CEPI scientific advisory panel. The community mitigation approach the Chinese adopted in Wuhan was straight out of the 2006 US Homeland Security pandemic playbook.
Gao, like Farrar, completed his PhD at Oxford University before conducting post-doctoral work under Sir John Bell, the controversial Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, holder of several extranumerary positions and multiple interests, not least as chair of the global health scientific advisory board of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
An expert on coronaviruses, Gao served on CEPI’s first scientific advisory committee in 2016 and was a player in Event 201, the pandemic simulation hosted in October 2019 by the World Economic Forum, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health – discussed here by Robert F Kennedy Jr.
In all probability, Gao is the old friend Farrar was referring to when he said on Desert Island Discs that he had had a phone call on December 31, 2019 – the day the Chinese authorities reported the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak to the WHO – to alert him that China would release the genome of the new virus on January 10. As things stood on New Year’s Eve, the virus had yet to cause any deaths, although it was making a few people very ill.
By January 17, another CEPI scientific adviser, Dr Christian Drosten, had conveniently developed a PCR test from the genetic sequence posted online by the Chinese, which the WHO advised laboratories could be used as a diagnostic test for Covid-19.
This was almost two months before the WHO declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Following a visit to Wuhan by the WHO in February 2020, led by its assistant director-general Dr Bruce Aylward, the world was being encouraged to adopt what were now being called Chinese measures.
‘China didn’t approach this new virus with an old strategy for one disease or another disease,’ said Aylward. ‘It developed its own approach to a new disease and extraordinarily has turned around this disease with strategies most of the world didn’t think would work.’
The Chinese government, with its own Big Brother infrastructure, had its own reasons for going along with that. But the response plan is in reality far more complex, and has a much darker background in the West.
The Yellow Brick Road that passes through CEPI and Beijing leads right back to the US Department of Homeland Security, and its 1998 Pentagon strategy paper.
The response plan is in reality an American scheme, with its origins more than decade and a half earlier and against a backdrop of bioterrorism concerns. Uncle Sam is the wizard behind the curtain, not acting in the West’s interests at all.
Is Vaccine Effectiveness Against Death Mostly a Statistical Illusion?
By Will Jones | The Daily Sceptic | December 12, 2021
One of the big challenges in analysing the data on Covid has been definitions. What is a Covid death, what is a Covid case or infection? What the data appears to say can change radically depending on the definitions adopted.
This has been a particular issue with vaccination, as vaccination status is subject to a variety of conflicting definitions. In particular, when does someone count as vaccinated? Is it as soon as they have the needle in their arm, or do they remain ‘unvaccinated’ after that for a period of time, say seven, 14 or 21 days?
For instance, the recent ICNARC report stated the number of ICU admissions by vaccination status. But it also clarified that ‘unvaccinated’ includes those who received a jab less than 14 days prior to testing positive. This means that some (an unknown number) who were counted as unvaccinated had in fact received a dose.
This may be more than just a minor problem. For one thing, there is now a lot of evidence that people are more vulnerable to infection in the days following their jab, likely due to temporary immune suppression. This means a significant proportion of the vaccinated who are susceptible to infection with the current dominant variant are infected in the immediate post-jab period when in many studies and reports they don’t count as vaccinated. This creates a ‘survivorship bias‘ in the remaining vaccinated group that exaggerates vaccine efficacy. For instance, in a study of the U.S. nursing home population published in NEJM, once the post-jab period was included – when the vaccinated experienced higher incidence than the unvaccinated – the overall proportion of vaccinated and unvaccinated groups testing positive was the same at 6.8%. This makes it essential that all the data is presented, including for past-jab periods, and definitions are clear.
A similar problem occurs with the classification of deaths as vaccinated and unvaccinated. New analysis led by Norman Fenton, Professor in Risk Information Management, and Martin Neil, Professor in Computer Science and Statistics, both at Queen Mary, University of London, has highlighted a strange anomaly in the ONS deaths data that may be indicative of a deeper problem. They noticed that if non-Covid deaths in the unvaccinated were plotted against time over the course of the vaccine rollout then a strange spike appeared during the rollout in which the mortality rate among the unvaccinated shot up to well above the background level. The same thing happened with the non-Covid mortality rate in the single-dosed as second doses were rolled out, and the phenomenon was repeated in each age group as vaccines were administered.
Since there is no obvious reason that vaccination should impact on non-Covid mortality in this way, Prof Fenton, Prof Neil and team argue that this is evidence of a problem in the way the data is recorded or defined. In particular, if it is assumed that the unvaccinated in fact continue to die of non-Covid causes at the background rate and that the additional non-Covid deaths above that are deaths that are actually in the vaccinated but have been misclassified (owing, say, to not counting those who die within 14 days of their jab) then, they argue, a more realistic pattern emerges (see below).
In each age group there is now a spike in non-Covid deaths in the vaccinated right at the start of the rollout, which the team argue makes sense as vaccination was prioritised for the most vulnerable who are more likely to die of any cause. Indeed, it was confusing in the original data that this initial spike was absent and the vaccinated died of non-Covid causes at a lower rate than the unvaccinated despite the most vulnerable being prioritised for vaccination.
The team discovered a different problem when they looked at Covid deaths by vaccination status. Here, the vaccines appear to be highly efficacious, but there is an anomaly that may again be indicative of deeper problems in the data.
Again a spike appears in the unvaccinated mortality rate where there is none in the vaccinated. Fair enough, you might think, as the vaccines are protecting the vaccinated. However, it’s important to remember that the vaccines are not expected to work until 21 days after the first jab, yet here we have a spike in unvaccinated Covid mortality in the middle of the rollout before most of the vaccines should take effect – referring to figure 17 above we can see that the vaccine rollout in the age group peaked in week five, around the same time as the mortality rate in the unvaccinated peaked (week six), which all seems much too early.
Prof Fenton, Prof Neil and team suggest that the problem here may be in the denominator, that is to say, in how many people are supposed to be in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations when calculating the mortality rate each week. It’s important to realise that the populations here are changing fast as tens of thousands of people get vaccinated each week. Using the right figure for the right week therefore makes a big difference to the mortality rate reported. Could this anomalous spike in unvaccinated Covid deaths be an artefact of this kind of problem?
Professor Fenton thinks so. He and his team suggest that the problem may be that the relevant denominator or number of people vaccinated for each week is not how many are vaccinated in the week a person dies but in the week they were infected, which is around three weeks earlier on average. What happens if the denominators are shifted by three weeks to allow for this? (Prof Fenton demonstrates the effect of shifting denominators in a short video of a hypothetical example here.)
The effect is remarkable, as shown below (note the change of scale on the y-axis).
Shifting the population denominator estimates by three weeks means that the number of vaccinated for calculating the vaccinated mortality rate becomes much smaller, making the mortality rate much higher, while the denominator for the unvaccinated becomes much larger, making the mortality rate much lower. This massively reduces the mortality rate in the unvaccinated to low levels – to under five deaths per 100,000 people throughout the period, rather than as many as 125 per 100,000 in week six previously. Instead, a mortality spike appears in the vaccinated at the start of the vaccine rollout (though note that the scale is smaller so it only reaches 30 per 100,000 people), which makes some sense as the vulnerable were prioritised for vaccination and at this point the population of vaccinated was small, so contained a high proportion of vulnerable people. Prof Fenton and team remark that it also tallies with what we know of the increased vulnerability of the recently-vaccinated to infection, as noted above.
The shift in population estimates also greatly reduces the implied effectiveness of the vaccines in the autumn wave, where the lines are now much closer to one another, which is in line with findings from Sweden and elsewhere as vaccine efficacy wanes. Prof Fenton and team suggest that once you take into account the initial spike in the vaccinated, then this new analysis suggests there is “no reliable evidence that the vaccines reduce all-cause mortality”.
So is this what’s going on? There are certainly anomalies that need to be explained, and the analysis by Professor Fenton, Professor Neil and team makes a lot of sense. It deserves to be taken seriously by the ONS and UKHSA.
Stop Press: Watch Prof Fenton discussing his team’s findings with Maajid Nawaz on LBC radio.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
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